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Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Beet and Ginger Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
Sunday, October 15, 2017
New Zealand
Restaurant Cookbook Penguin NZ
RRP $50.00
‘I love fresh and seasonal food, am partial to a crisp
gin and tonic, and love nothing more than going out for dinner, whether it’s a
fancy
restaurant, a cheap noodle joint, or to someone else’s
house.’ Delaney Mes
Who
better, then, to scout the country from north to south and everywhere in
between, to come up with a list of restaurants that she knows can be relied on
for a great evening out.
Although she studied law at university, food and good
coffee has always been at the centre of Delaney Mes’s life. In fact, she even
started writing her popular Heartbreak Pie food blog to help mend her broken
heart.
Mes, without a doubt, lives and breathes food. She’s
the first to say she talks and thinks about it all the time. Today, warm and personable Mes has left law behind, and she’s become a familiar name on our food scene. She writes for various publications, is often on the radio talking about food and has run events for people.
Now she toasts our flourishing and exciting restaurant industry with her gorgeous new book, New Zealand Restaurant Cookbook.
A follow-up of sorts to Penguin’s bestselling New
Zealand Café Cookbook, winery restaurants, breweries, neighbourhood bistros
and fine dining establishments all make an appearance, with recipes that draw
from a broad range of cooking styles and international cuisines.
A celebration of New Zealand’s diverse and thriving
dining scene, the New Zealand Restaurant Cookbook is an indispensable
companion. As well as introducing new and iconic restaurants throughout the
country, the book highlights some of the most popular dishes from their menus
for readers to recreate at home.
As with any list, conversations often centre around who doesn’t make the
cut, and Mes is the first to admit that narrowing the selection down to just -
50 was a near impossible task because there are so many great places to eat
these days.
She’s keen to make it clear that this is not a list of the top 50
restaurants in the country. There are plenty of those sorts of lists that are
published regularly. Rather, hers is a representative list of 50 restaurants that she feels consistently deliver the whole package required to make an evening special. To her mind, a great meal doesn’t just mean what’s served up on the plate. It’s the total experience that makes an evening out a memorable one. Yes, it’s certainly about the food, but it’s also just as much about the PEOPLE, service, and the décor.
In an industry where a restaurant’s survival is at the mercy of an often
fickle consumer, all of the restaurants in Mes’s book enjoy loyal followings
because they offer the whole package.
Collectively, Mes believes the restaurants she has chosen also reflect
what people are looking for from a quality, local dining experience. Paddock to
plate is not just a food trend, says Mes. She believes it’s become much bigger
than that. It’s a way of eating for everyone. Provenance and authenticity has
become hugely important. People want to know where the food has come from, and
they expect it to reflect the local community. Or, as with the family-run
Gemmayze Street, the menu and décor strongly reflect the family’s Lebanese
roots.
People also want beautiful, fresh, seasonal produce, and many of the
restaurants either have their own kitchen gardens or have excellent local
suppliers and, in some cases, foragers, to ensure they have the very best
available produce on their menu. Many restaurants have also invested in unique
and distinctive interiors to create a sense of place.
Mes says defining what a restaurant is these days can be challenging, as
many cafés have become all-day eateries and day-time cafés transform at night
into amazing places for dinner. Her selection reflects this trend.
Vineyard and winery restaurants, which attract tourists, play a larger
role in promoting New Zealand to the world.
Each of the restaurateurs in the book, she feels, bring something fresh
and unique ‘to the table’.
Mes says she hopes people will love the book as much as she loved
working on it, because it ‘showcases the best of what New Zealand food has to
offer’.
New Zealand Restaurant Cookbook is a gorgeous snapshot of what dining in New Zealand is like at the
moment, and is the perfect accompaniment to your next foodie foray.
DELANEY MES has been a judge
of the Metro Restaurant of the Year Award as well as the Metro Café of the Year
and Best Bars issues. She has a weekly column writing recipes for the Herald on
Sunday. Delaney’s love of food and travel has taken her around New Zealand and
overseas, from visiting farmer’s markets in Christchurch to trying the best tea
in Sri Lanka to sampling street food in Tokyo, and everything in between. She
shares her food and travel writing on her website delaneymes.com, which has an
enthusiastic following.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Take a bao
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Gourmet Traveller
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 Rhubarb-strawberry milk bun pudding
Bright red, jammy fruit is topped with sweet balls of dough that do an excellent job of mopping up the bubbling juices below. Be generous with the cream.
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Sunday, September 10, 2017
The Nourished Baby
The Nourished Baby
by Dr Julie Bhosale
Bateman $39.99
This takes place
against an increasingly frightening global picture of children’s health. Across
both developed and developing countries, childhood obesity continues to soar,
along with iron deficiency, and the beginning signs for type 2 diabetes and
heart disease. In New Zealand, one in three children is either overweight or
obese.
While undertaking research for her
doctoral thesis at AUT, Dr Julie Bhosale saw this with her own eyes. She
measured children who, at the age of 10, were overweight and had high blood
pressure. ‘The fact that a child just a few years older than my elder son had
one of the biggest red flags for a heart attack before they were even in
high-school was hard for me to comprehend,’ says Julie.
Your child does
not have to be one of those statistics, though, as the first year of life
offers a unique window in which the foods your babies start on lay down their
nutritional and metabolic blueprint.
‘The importance
of establishing healthy habits in the first 12 months of a baby’s life cannot
be stressed enough. How our babies are nourished with food, sleep and movement
during this time sets them up for life. To me, true nourishment is the
interplay of these cornerstones of food, sleep and movement, along with a sense
of purpose (which tends to come slightly later in life),’ explains Julie.
While these key
foundations of wellbeing are discussed in The
Nourished Baby, the book’s primary focus is the food we feed our babies in
that first year.
‘Food is
medicine. The nutrients from natural, wholefoods have been carefully designed
by Mother Nature to provide what we need to not only sustain life, but to
thrive — without the presence of the lifestyle diseases we see today,’ says
Julie.
The Nourished Baby is heavily evidence-based and draws on a
lot of research, but Julie’s aim has been to make the contents as
reader-friendly, simple and accessible as possible.
Julie is also
willing to tackle the big issues facing families today, including misleading labelling
and marketing employed by some baby-food manufacturers. ‘I know the impact that
first foods have on a baby and their health, and am frustrated at baby-food
companies promoting their products as “healthy” homemade food. When I conducted
my own research on products in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, the results
were a huge surprise — in short, I’m check-mate on this billion-dollar
industry.’
Today, Dr Julie
Bhosale is an internationally-renowned family wellbeing and nutrition expert,
author and speaker, whose 2015 viral postpartum body blog has been read by
millions around the globe. She has been on national television, demanding for
women to be supported in their choice of how they feed their babies.
In 2015, Julie also
completed her doctoral thesis, gave birth to her second son and released her
first cookbook, Healthy, Easy Dinners for
Busy Mums. She helps mums and families all over the world, touring both
locally and overseas. She is lecturer at AUT and an active researcher, and is
involved in numerous projects affecting family wellbeing and wider communities.
Dr Julie Bhosale
is real and authentic in exploring the challenges we face as parents. A lover
of coffee and chocolate, she knows the world is not perfect, nor that what you
see in the highlight reels on social media are necessarily representative of
everyday family life. You can trust her advice is practical, realistic and at
the same time providing much-needed guidance for our families to flourish.The Fearless Kitchen
The Fearless Kitchen
by Vanessa Baxter
Bateman RRP $39.99
Vanessa Baxter is a Ronald McDonald House Ambassador, an
active supporter of KOTO Charities,
which help educate street kids in all areas of hospitality, and has recently
been involved with Bridge the Gap, teaching youth in New Zealand prisons how to
cook. In
all of these endeavours, she is driven by her passion for cooking.
‘Going into the Child Services centre in New Zealand took me
back to a visit to a similar institution in Melbourne when I was studying psychology
and criminology,’ says Vanessa.
‘The kids are in care,
but they are in locked care. This is not a holiday camp, this is an
institution. It is grey, it is plain, it is sparse. It was exactly as I
remembered from 1987. My heart broke.
‘When we started to create food, it was
slow to start, but the eating was fun. The kids were smiling. They found it
hard to wait. Their tummies were too empty and needed filling. They had tried
to share, and take turns and be patient — it hadn’t been easy. But we got there,’
says Vanessa.
Vanessa believes
that barriers are broken when young people and adults cook together. Walls come
down, children are so focused on the cooking on hand that they start to open up
and relax and talk freely. Vanessa’s new cookbook The Fearless Kitchen encourages parents to bring their children
into the kitchen and bond through cooking together.
‘Food is an
experience and a way to broaden horizons. My recipes are appropriate for the
whole family. I believe in expanding kids’ palates and pushing their boundaries
in a safe, encouraging and non-judgmental way through involving them in the
process of cooking,’ says Vanessa.
The Fearless Kitchen is wider than that, though: the
preparing and sharing of food is a communal experience. The recipes here are
designed to bring family, friends and flatmates together to have fun in making
and then eating them.
Vanessa had a
totally different experience cooking on the reality TV programme MasterChef in 2013 where she was
scrutinised, and criticised, both professionally and personally, but she turned
her experience into a positive one and created her company The Fearless Kitchen
where she hosts cooking classes for corporations and children, all with the
same goal — to break barriers.
The Fearless Kitchen features recipes from the variety of
countries Vanessa has travelled to, but the place that stole her heart was
South East Asia, where the flavours still find their way into her dishes,
peeking up to remind her of her colourful life as a nomad.
From Indonesian
Soto Ayam, to Calzone Pizza Pockets, Crispy Pork Dumplings and Blackberry and
Dark Chocolate Cheesecake, The Fearless
Kitchen is full of fresh, seasonal and delicious recipes designed for the
family to make together.
‘Food is fuel, but
food is so much more than that. It is about community and family. It is about
bringing people together, about engagement, chatter, laughter. It is about the
teaching of patience and manners. Food will be with us forever —embrace it.’ —
Vanessa Baxter
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