Eating My Words: Ewan McDonald

WE CHATTED on the boat to Waiheke, as you do, if you’ve ever done it. The boat to Waiheke, that is. Matt from the Westmere organic butchery told us how the TV crew had visited their shop over the weekend and filmed everything from the freezers to the calendars. He’d made the star of the show, Herman the Chef, put on one of those funny hats that butchers wear because the Health and Safety regulations make them do it. “You’re not allowed to let your hair get in the meat,” he’d told Herman.

This was funny because Herman is somewhere north of 60, has slightly less hair than Rodney Hide, and can have even less of a sense of humour than Gordon Ramsay.

Matt also told us that several contestants had been in the shop that morning, had wanted to buy lamb racks, and had tried to beat him down on the price. We thought that must be the budget kicking in, because Tom from the Fish Market had a similar experience, though not with lamb racks.

One of the Waiheke tourist operators met us at the ferry and took us up to Cable Bay Winery on a minibus, which – I must be fair here – was in slightly better condition than some of the minibuses that we used to get around Turkey last year.

We sat on the terrace at Cable Bay and learned the first rule of reality TV. There is a lot of sitting around, waiting for things to happen. We sat around and waited for things to happen.

Fortunately one of the staff from the winery took pity on us. “Would you like to see the winelist?” she asked. We would, but only in a professional capacity. I skimmed the list and mentioned the prospect of the winery’s very fine rose to Matt and Tom, and we thought it would be good to test our professional capacities. It was a hot afternoon, after all.

The next lesson in making a TV show was that there are a huge number of people involved, and what appears to be real and spontaneous and unrehearsed requires a reasonable degree of spontaneity and rehearsal on behalf of those people who are waiting to be involved.

Andy from the winery restaurant joined us. I thought filming Andy’s lunchtime would have made an even better reality TV cooking show. He runs one of the best sited restaurants in New Zealand. It is designer cool. It looks down the vines, through the valley to the harbour, past several hundred thousand dollars of kinetic sculpture, across the Hauraki Gulf, past Rangitoto and the Eastern Beaches, to the Skytower and downtown Auckland. The food isn’t at all bad and the wine is extremely drinkable. Especially that rose. On a hot afternoon.

Except that this afternoon they have placed half a dozen chef’s stations down the sweeping garden overlooking the harbour. Each of which has a dead-set flash barbecue, lamb racks etc for the cooking of. And tables with six place-settings each. And about, oh, 40 film crew. While Andy and his staff were serving 265 lunch guests. They expect 50 or so at a Wednesday lunch. If Andy was ever so mildly fraught, he covered it well. We sympathised. In fact, Tom and Matt and I were so sympathetic that we asked the waitress to get the bottle of rose out of the fridge so we could sympathise some more.

Then we had to be coached in how to walk across the entrance to the winery, to stand, and to say our names. You may laugh: you have never been on reality TV. This took several goes. Or takes, as we call them in the business.

Herman made small talk with each of us. We were filmed trying to make small talk back to Herman. Herman is very big in the Netherlands. He is as big as Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay, and Nigella Lawson combined, and that is not a visual picture that I care to conjure up, and nor should you. We learned that you should not try to be funnier than Herman.

We were taken to the furthest of the five tables and told what would happen next. The maitre d’ half of the couple would come out, explain what the chef half of the couple was cooking, and “sell” us the meal and its wine. We would do this five times.

At the end of the exercise, we would have five choices of a meal; we would have to pick one but we weren’t allowed to tell the other judges which. We would be taken off to a quiet corner, asked on camera which meal or table we’d selected, and be asked to explain why.

For the couples, the killer blow would be that we’d all go back at Table 1, where Herman would ask which judges had chosen that meal … and so on, all the way through to Table 5.

It could be that five of us would choose, say, Table 2. Which would mean that four couples were left high and dry. Or that two would pick, say, Table 1, and then the last four couples would sweat on the idea that there’d be no one left to sit at their table … and all of this, remember, while the cameras were running and their dreams of a year’s working holiday in New Zealand, and the fantasy of emigrating here permanently, were evaporating faster than my sunblock.

MATT from the organic butchery had done his job very well. Three of the five chefs decided to prepare lamb dishes. One, bravely, was going to cook a seafood extravaganza of which the star would be abalone … sorry, paua fritters. The last had devised a snapper and salad dish.

We were walked through the tables, through the dishes. We made our choices – no conferring – and went, one by one, to tell Herman about them.

I went for Table 3. Why? “Herman, the first thing we eat with is our eyes. The table was stunning.” They had dressed it with white gladioli, the maitre d’ had carefully and clearly described a dish of red snapper in a coconut crust; curry-infused rice; watermelon, tomato and cucumber salad with warm flat green beans. Most of the produce had come from the surrounding water or land. The wine match was Cable Bay’s viognier. For a hot summer lunch (in reality, as opposed to reality TV, it was now approaching 5pm and we hadn’t eaten anything other than rose), I was sold.

The five judges, and Herman, went back to Table 1 to start that segment that you will know from every reality TV show that you’ve ever watched, even though you pretend to your mates at work or the cafe that you never sit through that rubbish. “Now judges, who chose Table 1?” And so on. And on.

And the strangest thing happened. It wasn’t planned, or cooked up, or rehearsed. Andy chose Table 1. Tom from the fish market chose Table 2, the seafood extravanganza. Ewan, the words guy, chose Table 3 because he liked the presentation and the fact that the meal sounded exciting and different and right for the occasion. Wouter from the posh hotel in Queenstown chose Table 4 because he thought that, of all the couples, if he had to hire one tomorrow, they had done the best job in selling him the food and wine. And Matt, from the organic butchery, chose Table 5 because they were cooking his lamb and they were doing it in an interesting way, with pomegranate and rosemary.

WE ATE our meals in splendid isolation. As splendid as isolation can be, when sitting at a six-seater table, in front of a plush wine estate, with one’s personal waiter and chef, 30 or 40 TV crew hovering around, and a very large camera in front of one’s mouth. Every sip, every nibble, recorded.

With Herman’s offsider, Mr Reimers, who doesn’t have a first name but does like playing golf and was looking forward to getting to Queenstown, poking a microphone in the general direction of one’s moush and asking what one thought of the dish.

Darned fine, actually. Light and fresh and fish and fruit and sweet and sour and just the thing for a Kiwi summer afternoon that had not quite faded, but was sliding over the horizon into evening by the time I ate it.

Herman had his Gordon face on, not his Jamie one, when he asked me what I thought of the dish. Or rather, he told me what he thought. “It was a mess,” he said. “There were too many flavours. The warm beans were just thrown on top of the salad.”

He must have been looking for a sound bite. He got one. “Oh, you Europeans,” I replied. “You’re so old-fashioned. You have to understand you’re on our side of the world now. We don’t have a problem putting fruit and vegetables on one plate. The colours, the taste, the texture … It was an excellent meal.”

But I hadn’t mislaid all my critical faculties in hot sunshine and rapidly warming viognier, pointing out that the coconut was in serious danger of overpowering the gently cooked snapper, which should have been allowed to speak for itself. Like Herman, I could be a mixture of Jamie and Gordon – kindly and crusty.

And that was my 15 minutes of fame. Though, when they’ve edited it, it’ll probably be 45 seconds.

Eating my words: Ewan McDonald

SIMON and Ross and that other bloke? Small time. The biggest name in reality TV – okay, the slightly smaller world of reality food TV in New Zealand is … ahem. Pause for modest cough and look down, blush … Me. Well, me and Matt from the Westmere Organic Butchery and Tom from the Auckland Seafood Market and Andy from the Cable Bay Winery and Wouter from the Sofitel in Queenstown.

You won’t find us on the covers of the glossy mags or the gossip pages of the Sunday papers or the recipe pages in the food sections. But the five of us held the future of five Dutch couples in our hands – or our knives and forks – on a hot summer’s afternoon at a Waiheke winery.

It started about six weeks ago when an email dropped into my inbox from a very nice chap called Wibke at Tourism NZ.

Wibke was co-ordinating an arrangement between our tourist promotion folk and Endemol, the hugely successful Netherlands machine that creates reality TV programmes like Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here! , and approximately 7000 similar concepts that I’ve never seen but you may have.

Wibke had asked around and a woman who I’d worked with about 30 years ago on another planet (Hamilton) had suggested a bloke called Ewan who might be able to suggest some people in the cuisine trade around Auckland, or have some ideas about food and wine.

I do have many ideas about food. I also have many ideas about wine. So, when the Dutch end of the arrangement flew to New Zealand a couple of months ago to do a recce (see, one afternoon and I know all the terms), we had a pleasant chat in a flash hotel about Kiwi cuisine and wine and places to film the contestants cooking NZ-style meals and who would make good judges.

Jo from Tourism NZ’s London office, came with them, and we briefed the Hollandaise about Kiwi cuisine: sausage rolls, shepherd’s pie, shrimp cocktails, roast leg of lamb, pikelets, scones with jam and cream.

We spoke about the bespoke food shops in Auckland where the contestants might buy ingredients for the meal they’d have to cook on camera. And then Jo shouted a round of drinks. Mac’s Gold, I said. The Dutch – four of ‘em – went for mineral waters. Which is not what you’d expect from television folk, if you believe the gossip pages and glossy mags.

I should tell you what this show was to be about. I’ve pointed out it was a Dutch reality TV show. And I mean Dutch. Not English. I have a handle on French, a smattering of Italian, and a morsel of Turkish, but slap a Dutch menu in front of me and I’d starve. Not to mention the winelist. What’s Dutch for chianti?

It was to be called – and for the next few paragraphs I am quoting from the official Tourism NZ official here – Herman’s Kookieland. The translation supplied was “Herman goes to New Zealand” but I suspect they might have been taking the proverbial, or whatever they call that in Amsterdam.

“Herman Den Blijker is described as a mixture of the hardness of Gordon Ramsey, the kindness of Jamie Oliver – but with the knowledge of a real head chef. He has been a judge on a programme similar to Hell’s Kitchen in the Netherlands , and is a regular face on tv – as the main personality on nine different tv series since between 2006 and 2010. He also has authored several cook books, and has two restaurants in Rotterdam.”

For this show, “More and more Dutchmen and women are playing with the idea of leaving Holland behind for a completely different life somewhere abroad. Among them are many people that dream of living and working in New Zealand .

“Herman den Blijker and hotelier Mr. Reimers meet up with 10 such enthusiastic persons (5 chefs and 5 maitres) and gives them some mouth-watering news: he’s found a beautiful hotel that looks for a chef and a maitre at a wonderful location in New Zealand , the country so many people want to emigrate to. The candidates that show the most talent apart, but also as a team will win the jobs.

“For the contestants the trip will be a tough and intense battle, full of twists and turns but also a journey of culinary discovery, with produce and recipes unique to New Zealand tried and tested along the way.

“The couples/persons compete against one another in a series of different tasks. They’re tested on all aspects of the business, from cooking ability to business instinct, teamwork, customer knowledge and hospitality. They get to know this beautiful, but to them unfamiliar, country. And we’ll be testing them on their ability to make themselves at home here, to adapt to the local customs.”

The winners, of course, get the green cards, or whatever we call them here.

You can see the attraction for our tourism folk. Money couldn’t buy several weeks of exposure for our food, wine, adventure and luxury tourism industries on primetime TV in Europe. Especially our money, against the euro.

I was involved in the first episode, an overview of Auckland and its food, and wine, and gourmet shops. The couples were given a couple of days, an envelope of cash, and several likely addresses. They could go to this fruit and vege place, or that seafood market, or an organic butchery. They had to buy the ingredients in Auckland one morning and cook their Kiwi-style meal for the five judges on 0Waiheke that afternoon.

It was supposed to be a gentle warm-up. Not an Elimination Challenge. No one would be voted off the island (neither Waiheke, nor the North Island). That would start on the next day, and Carly from Tourism NZ would have to ferry the first losers from the Coromandel to Auckland Airport. Two hours in a very small car with a lot of gear that they would have been expecting, or at the very least hoping, to use over the ensuing (or, as it would unfold, not ensuing) four weeks.

Which is what brought me, and Matt, and Tom, and Wouter, and Carly, and Wibke, to the Waiheke ferry dock on a Wednesday afternoon. Carly had made a sign which said, “Dutch Reality TV Show, Meet Here”, to avoid that embarrassing moment when people who’ve never met one another are milling around on a wharf looking for people they’ve only spoken to on email and don’t have a clue what they look like or how to contact them.

Unless they have one another’s cellphone numbers and txt the person standing right next to them. Which is when I discovered that Wibke is not a boy’s name.

TO BE CONTINUED

Ewan McDonald: Eating My Words

KICK BACK for the latest ramblings. If you’re struggling to connect with the writer’s trail of thoughts, a decent Chianti should help connect the dots. It’s what fuels the whole shooting-match. Locked, loaded, ready? Here we go.

First to Spain, or more correctly Catalunya, where Ferran Adrià, celebrated for turtledove with blackberry caviar and duck foie gras candies, has decided to permanently close his famously experimental elBulli restaurant.

The palace of deconstructed degustation holds three Michelin stars and has been Restaurant magazine’s top of the pots for four years. You’re probably too late to phone for a table: elBulli will open for six months this year and next, closing in December 2011, and the ballot of 2 million wannabe diners for this year’s 8000 lucky dinners has been drawn.

The great chef’s reasons seem as whimsical as his food. Last month he told an international culinary conference that he would shut the doors temporarily in 2012 and 2013 due to the difficulties of working 15 hours a day (and, presumably, not being able to charge 15% surcharge on public holidays).

Now he says it’s because he and his business partner, Juli Soler, have been losing $NZ975,000 a year on the restaurant and cooking workshop in Barcelona. He plans to establish a new culinary academy and to fund scholarships.

Foams, schmoams. I wouldn’t mind having a chat with Adria – preferably over a 30-course dinner with accompanying Catalan wines and cheeses, preferably not deconstructed – because I have an idea about where he went wrong.

“So, Ferran … you don’t mind if I call you Ferry, do you? … you’re not a cook, you’re an artist, right? Like Picasso, like Dali.

“So why did you change a perfectly good name, El Bulli, to elBulli, a couple of years back? Sounds like PostBank or KiwiRail. Has it all been downhill from there?”

“And the cookbook. You held hands with a supermarket chain and did a cook-at-home book with store-bought chicken, mayo and potato chips? Just a tad Jamie Oliver, Ferry.”

MOVING ON … Britwell Salome, home to 200 people in the Chiltern Hills near Oxford, looks rather like the sort of English chocolate-box village that should feature in one of those gentle Sunday-night thrillers like The Midsomer Murders, possibly because it does. Over the past few weeks it’s become the setting for another, peculiarly English, mystery.

For Britwell Salome’s other claim to fame is its Michelin-star gastro-pub, The Goose. It was just another village pub 10 years ago, until Chris Barber, former chef to the Prince of Wales, bought it and decided to try serving something more than pies and mushy peas. Barber moved on and his young sous-chef Michael North took over. He was awarded the gold star five years ago, on his 26th birthday.

Fast-forward to this year’s Michelin announcements in January, and The Goose – now with 27-year-old Ryan Simpson in the kitchen – retained its ranking. For a whole three weeks: he and his brigade downed pinnies when the current owner, Paul Castle, told him his food was “too poncey”.

Castle said the restaurant wasn’t viable, and instead of muntjac roasted in hay it needed to serve food that local people wanted. “Pub grub.”

Simpson’s cooking “is fantastic but he should go back to Paris and play at cooking there. All I wanted was to be a local good food place. Ryan never even had steak on the menu. In a farming area, people want a hearty meal … I know what the locals want.”

Simpson replied, “He’s painting me as a pretentious chef who threw his toys out of the pram. That’s not true, I understand the business side, we had built a reputation and I wasn’t going to do burgers and baguettes.”

So what was on the menu at this village pub?

From the entrees:

Slow-poached Britwell hen’s egg with smoked pork belly, chicory, mustard $17.95

Pan-seared Lyme Bay scallops, with veal sweetbreads, butternut and date chutney, sherry vinegar jus, $29.15

From the mains:

Roast saddle of Yattendon Sika deer with spinach, potato, chanterelle mushrooms, huntsman’s sauce, $48.25

Angus beef fillet steak with chunky chips, sprout tops, spiced carrot $51.50

Dessert, madame?

Chocolate and olive oil truffle with banana, salted caramel and balsamic ripple ice cream

Carrot and cardamom panna cotta with carrot carpaccio, blood orange

$15.50 each.

See, despite what mine host says, Sir could have had his steak and chips, washed down with a decent claret. So what if it cost over fifty quid? Have you got any idea what it costs to fill the Range Rover these days?

Hat-tips: The Times, The Guardian

Eating My Words: Ewan McDonald

THEY gave it to the world. Possibly. And now they want it back. Definitely.
It’s the world’s best-known Italian dish, named after a town where it’s never served, and it travels under a French name.
“Travels” is the right word: if there’s one recipe for it, there are a million, just about none of them written down (though you’ll find four options later, and you might like to email yours to us). Every boy who’s ever picked up a frypan in a flat from Invercargill to Townsville, from Hamilton to Perth, has his own individual, never-fail, Friday-night formula for the perfect version.
Which is possibly why, according to The Times of London’s man in Rome, Italy has “begun a campaign to defend the reputation of one of its most famous but most widely abused exports”.
We are not talking about Ferraris or fashion or footballers here. Nor prosciutto or parmigiano or the Pope. Nor even chianti. We are chewing the fat about Spagbol. Spaghetti Bolognaise, as it’s best known, though that’s the Frenchified name. Spaghetti alla Bolognese as it will likely appear on the menu at your local pizza & pasta joint.
According to Richard Owen’s report, Coldiretti – the Italian farmers’ union – feels that when people around the world believe they are eating spaghetti bolognese, they are actually forking up “improbable concoctions” of tomato paste from a jar with a “remarkable variety” of ingredients, from meatballs or turkey to mortadella.
Which translates, if we’re still talking about Friday night in a flat in Hamilton, as luncheon sausage. Washed down with Waikato Green, probably, unless there just happens to be a brunello in the fridge.
Anyway, at the weekend, some 440 chefs in Italian restaurants in 50 countries from Malaysia to Turkey, Saudi Arabia to China made the authentic dish with instructions laid down in a recipe patented by the Bologna Chamber of Commerce in 1982.
Because they were being authentic, they served ragu – bolognese sauce if you must – with tagliatelle, not spaghetti, conforming to a 1972 “authentic recipe” which lays down that the flat egg noodles must be precisely 8mm wide.
Mario Caramella, of the Bali Hyatt Hotel in Indonesia and head of the Virtual Association of Italian Chefs, said: “If there is one dish in the Italian repertoire which is cooked worst than most, it is traditional bolognese sauce.”
Alessandro Circiello, of the Italian Federation of Chefs, cooks in Modena, near Bologna. “It is always the great classic recipes that are most mangled,” he told Milan’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. Too many cooks outside Italy tend to “throw a lot of cream and butter into dishes to cover up hidden blemishes”.
Perish the thought. Remind me not to invite Alessandro around for my infamous lemon and asparagus risotto.
This being Italy, of course, that’s when the arguments started.
Owen goes on to report Gianluigi Veronesi, a food writer, saying the world festival of bolognese sauce was too late “because frankly, they don’t even make it properly in Bologna any more”.
Ouch! That hurt. For Bologna is nicknamed “La grassa” – Fat City – because of the locals’ love of food and the quality of its ingredients and cuisine. It’s generally regarded as the capital of Cucina Italia. Unless, of course, you or your mother or your father’s grandfather came from Milano or Firenze or Napoli or Roma or Palermo, in which case Milano or Firenze or Napoli or Roma or …
The “traditional” 1982-registered recipe demands only beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, tomato paste, meat stock, red wine, and either milk or cream. Even in Fat City, though, cooks have been known to use chopped pork, chicken or goose liver, prosciutto, mortadella, or porcini to enrich the sauce. Which is not, come to think of it, too far removed from the old Hamilton flat trick of dumping a can of mushrooms into the mix. Sorry, ragu.
And forget the Velluto Rosso. Traditionally white wine, not red, is used.
The reason that Spaghetti alla Bolognese never existed in Bologna is because the Bolognese (the people, not the dish), as mentioned earlier, serve the sauce with freshly made tagliatelle and their green lasagne. It was invented as a dash, not a full dish, of beef-mince sauce to go with those pastas. Spaghetti is a durum wheat pasta from Naples, ideal for that city’s ragu – a meat-flavoured, thick tomato sauce that clings much better to the thinner, slippery noodles.
Still, it’s the local variations of Spagbol that are rocking all over the world and – with almost al dente timing – a survey released on just about the same day as the great Bolognese meltdown revealed that the most common dish cooked by British mums was … oh, you guessed.
Merchant Gourmet’s survey found the average UK mother relies on just nine different meals to feed her family. Hectic modern-day lifestyles, fussy children and spouses who work long hours have all contributed to a lack of experimentation in planning a family meal. The survey also found that dinner time takes the average mother 35 minutes from start to finish, and four in 10 mothers play it safe by choosing meals they know their family like.
The top dinners? 1 Spaghetti Bolognaise, 2 Roast dinner, 3 Shepherd’s pie, 4 Pasta dish, 5 Meat and two veg, 6 Pizza, 7 Casserole/stew, 8 Sausages and chips/mash 9 Indian/curry.
Spagbol, pasta and pizza – that’s three out of nine for the Italians. Perhaps they should be proud, not precious, about their contributions to the world’s dinner tables. As we used to say in the flat in Hamilton on Friday nights, like it or lump it.

Spaghetti Bolognese – four ways

1 Like nonna used to make
Serves 4
300g minced best beef
150g bacon
50g yellow carrots
50g stick of celery
30g onion
5 tablespoons tomato sauce, or 20g tomato concentrate.
Half glass dry white wine
Cup of milk
A little stock
Chop bacon and fry gently with the chopped carrots, celery and onion. Add meat, wine and stock until they sizzle, then add tomato sauce and simmer for two hours, adding milk gradually during cooking, and season to taste.

2 Marcella Hazan’s version
Serves 4 to 6
1 tbsp vegetable oil
4 tbsp butter, divided
1/2 cup chopped onion
2/3 cup chopped celery
2/3 cup chopped carrot
¾ – lb ground beef chuck
Salt
Fresh ground black pepper
1 cup whole milk
Whole nutmeg
Cup dry white wine
1 1/2 cups canned Italian plum tomatoes, torn into pieces, with juice
1 1/4- 1 ½ lbs pasta (preferably spaghetti), cooked and drained
Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese at the table
Put oil, three tablespoons of butter and the chopped onion in a heavy 3.3-litre (6-pint) pot and turn heat to medium. Cook and stir onion until it has become translucent, then add chopped celery and carrot. Cook for about two minutes, stirring vegetables to coat well.
Add the ground beef, a large pinch of salt and a few grindings of pepper. Crumble meat with a fork, stir well and cook until beef has lost its raw, red colour.
Add milk and let simmer gently, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. Add a tiny grating, about an eighth of a teaspoon, of fresh nutmeg and stir.
Add wine and let it simmer until it has evaporated. Add tomatoes and stir thoroughly to coat all ingredients well. When tomatoes begin to bubble, turn heat down so that sauce cooks at the laziest of simmers, with just an intermittent bubble breaking through the surface. Cook, uncovered, for three hours or more, stirring from time to time. While sauce is cooking, you are likely to find that it will begin to dry out and the fat will separate from the meat. To keep it from sticking, add half a cup of water as necessary. At the end of cooking, however, the water should be completely evaporated and the fat should separate from the sauce. Taste and correct for salt.
Add remaining tablespoon of butter to the hot pasta and toss with the sauce. Serve with freshly grated parmesan on the side.
From Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan

3 Elizabeth David’s version
Serves 6
225g lean minced beef
115g chicken livers
85g uncooked ham (both fat and lean)
1 carrot
1 onion
1 small piece of celery
3 tsp concentrated tomato puree
1 glass white wine
2 wine glasses stock or water
Butter
Salt and pepper
Nutmeg
Cut the bacon or ham into very small pieces and brown them gently in a small saucepan in about 15g of butter. Add the onion, the carrot and the celery, all finely chopped. When they have browned, put in the raw minced beef, and then turn it over and over so that it all browns evenly. Add the chopped chicken livers, and after two or three minutes the tomato puree, and then the white wine. Season with salt (taking into account the relative saltiness of the ham or bacon), pepper, and a scraping of nutmeg, and add the meat stock or water.
Cover the pan and simmer the sauce very gently for 30-40 minutes. Some cooks in Bologna add a cupful of cream or milk to the sauce, which makes it smoother. Another traditional variation is the addition of the ovarine or unlaid eggs which are found inside the hen, especially in the spring when the hens are laying. They are added at the same time as the chicken livers and form small golden globules when the sauce is finished. When the ragu is to be served with spaghetti or tagliatelle, mix it with the hot pasta in a heated dish so that the pasta is thoroughly impregnated with the sauce, and add a generous piece of butter before serving. Hand the grated cheese round separately.
From Italian Food by Elizabeth David

4 Heston Blumenthal’s Bolognese Sauce
Serves 4
50ml groundnut (peanut) oil
50g unsalted butter
100g onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and minced
1 star anise
150g carrot, finely chopped
4 sticks celery, peeled (with a peeler) and finely chopped
300g best-quality minced beef, not too lean (a mix of beef, veal and/or pork could also be used)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
150ml whole milk
Nutmeg (whole, for grating)
150ml dry white wine
375g tinned tomatoes, with juice
500g dried tagliatelle
Preheat the oven to its lowest setting (110C/ 225F). Put the oil and butter in a large casserole with a lid and add the onion, garlic and star anise.
Cook over a low heat for 30 minutes. Add the chopped carrots and continue cooking for another 20 minutes, then add the celery and cook for a further couple of minutes. Tip in the mince and press down on it gently, so it is integrated into the vegetables, and cook.
Generously season the meat mixture and add the milk. Grate over some nutmeg and cook gently for at least 30 minutes, until the milk has just about disappeared.
Add the white wine and tomatoes, stir through, then place in the oven, with the lid of the casserole slightly ajar. Cook for at least six hours. It probably won’t be necessary, but if the meat starts to look dry, add a drop of water.
After cooking, some fat will have split and risen to the surface, but don’t worry about that. When the sauce has finished cooking, it should be rich and moist.
Check for seasoning -be generous with the freshly ground black pepper. Serve with the pasta, cooked according to packet instructions, and some freshly grated parmigiano.

Ewan McDonald
“THANK YOU for calling. Your call is important to us. However, the restaurant is closed until January 14 …” Can’t count how many times I’ve heard that message in the past week or so. Sometimes it’s different: sometimes it’s January 18. Or so.
Which is all very well, and no one can blame restaurants for turning off the ovens and shutting the doors at this time of year. Face it, most Kiwis are at the beach, or the tennis, or on the deck, around the barbecue. Salad days, fresh-caught fish nights.
But when your Nearest and Dearest’s birthday falls in the first week of January, how do you mark that special occasion? Especially when Jude shares the Big Day – not that it was a Specially Big Day this year – with her best friend, Janet. Two headaches for the price of … well, none, if we couldn’t find a place that would be open for a meal and a couple of celebratory glasses.
Of course, someone with slightly more memory cells than me would have found a way around this by now. Another Significant Other’s birthday landed at New Year. Same problem, though tougher times mean many fine-dining restaurants have changed the arrangements of earlier years and open in the Christmas-New Year week.
Note “fine-dining”, for that was the problem for the four of us. Plenty of eateries are open in January but – no disrespect – somehow we couldn’t see ourselves truly enjoying intimate conversation and gourmet degustation at Lone Star. We wanted a sophisticated evening, and a platter of Redneck Ribs and four mugs of Bud wouldn’t cut it.
Janet and I went to and fro, then fro and to, but nothing seemed to work. On the night before, I made the call: “You guys be at our place at 6. It’s a surprise.”
Which it was, and there were plenty of compliments for my four-course birthday dinner, for which I am truly thankful and not a little surprised. It was simple: just an hour with my old mate Google to find the recipes; leaving work an hour or two early – hey, not a lot happens in the news business during January – to cut, toss and fix Bellinis and Caprese crackers for the toast; chicken, pomegranate and walnut salad for the starter; baked snapper with ginger and mandarin sauce, Jersey bennes for the main; a dessert of Amaretto-soused blueberries with yoghurt.
This evening was, if you will, the private party. Being women, and therefore more (insert your own adjective here: you won’t catch this middle-aged male falling into that trap), Jude and Janet came up with a unique way of celebrating their shared occasion some years ago.
About a week before, they email friends to invite them on a Gourmet Picnic and Tramp. Or maybe it’s a Gourmet Tramp and Picnic. Whatever, the venue is their much loved Waitakere Ranges. So everyone who’s around Auckland, and feeling slightly active, meets at the Hardware Café – world-famous in Titirangi – at 10am on the given Saturday. Or 11. Or so.
There’s usually around 20 or 30 starters. The oldest has been Jude’s mother, Joan, then 82. There are always one or two babies in backpacks. Well, frontpacks: the backpacks are for food. At least three dogs tag along, or run in front.
We hike through bush, ford streams, wade pools, pull ourselves up banks by the odd vine for an hour or two until we reach a broad, flat, rock platform between two waterfalls tumbling into natural swimming-pools. They’re freezing, even in high summer. This spot does have an official name but we call it “the Goddess Pools”.
By now it’s lunchtime and we’ve built up 20 or 30 healthy appetites. Everyone unstraps their packs for the reveal: out tumble breads, cheeses, pates, pies, salads, cold dishes, fruits and more. Tea or juice for the toast, though someone has been known to heft a bottle of bubbly through the jungle if either of the organisers is marking a Major Number that year.
Then we turn for home. It’s only a couple of hours’ more walking, a couple more swims and – right at the end, just to burn off those recently acquired kilojoules – 350 steps cut into the hillside before we reach the carpark.
Bush and birdsong, friends and food, in a primal scene. We’ve eaten in (apologies to Douglas Adams) The Restaurant at the Beginning of the Universe. And it’s open all year.