Jane Ferrari (photo courtesy of Yalumba Wine Company)

You’d have to say the judges got it right when they named Jane Ferrari Wine Communicator of the Year. The award, announced by the Wine Communicators of Australia in February, couldn’t have gone to a more deserving person. If you’ve ever seen Jane work the floor at a wine dinner, you’ll know what I mean.

Put simply, this girl’s a professional who has people eating out of her hand as she regales them with stories about her travels, Australian wine and especially about Yalumba, the company she works for. (She might even throw in some commentary about football and country music too.)

Everyone loves her and that was obvious at the Royal Canberra Golf Club’s Yalumba wine dinner as we sipped our way through some beautiful Viognier (Eden Valley & The Virgilius), the up and coming Vermentino (Y Series) and classics such as The Menzies and The Signature.

Jane is a winemaker herself, although these days she spends more time talking about wine than making it. And when Jane says The Signature 2006 is the best since 1996, who are we to argue?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, for the wine was a backdrop for some pretty amazing cooking by Royal Canberra Golf Club chef Neil Abrahams.

The club holds regular wine dinners and they’re obviously a great opportunity for the kitchen team to spread their wings and do some really exciting food.

The 5-course menu had some very exciting elements such as a piece of pork belly enclosed in a crispy fried prawn. It sounds odd but worked surprisingly well, with the prawn complemented by a terrine of lobster and ocean trout, crab quenelles and a dollop of beetroot and passionfruit jam.

This last addition was an inspired one and drew a lot of compliments from diners. Neil, I want the recipe!

It was clear from the seamless wine and food matches that the chef had tasted the wines before deciding on his menu. The beetroot and passionfruit jam, for example, was included because its fruity character complemented the fruity Viognier. It also added some acid to offset the richly flavoured seafood.

The Cigar Cabernet Sauvignon was described by Jane as Yalumba’s “stealth weapon … to introduce people to what Coonawarra can do”. It was paired with a deliciously sweet tender cutlet of goat, baked figs, and a confit of goat shoulder and truffle pie. Another winner.

Neil thought The Signature Cabernet Shiraz and the Hand Picked Shiraz Viognier screamed out for beef, and because he wanted something a bit gamey, went for oyster blade, which he slow-roasted for two hours at 58 degrees C. Yum, yum and yum.

With flavours of lemon and quince, the dessert was titled “Autumn Delicia”, the latter a Spanish word for “delight”. That it was, and indeed the whole meal was one to savour.

Put the Royal Canberra Golf Club’s upcoming wine dinners in your diary. The next is a St Hallett wine and truffle dinner on June 15, at which senior winemaker Stuart Blackwell will be the guest speaker. Surely one not to be missed.

Contact:  +61 2 6282 7000 or  www.royalcanberra.com.au

To see the Yalumba menu in full, click here

The last of our summer basil needed using before the frost got to it and so this dish was born.

It’s not really a biscuit as it is slightly spongy in texture, but I’m not sure what else you would call it. I was quite generous with the spoonfuls on the baking tray and one single biscuit ended up being a perfect size for an appetizer.

What to top it with? I had the last few scoops of Frugii’s Bloody Mary sorbet in the freezer, and inspired (very vaguely) by Movida’s anchovy on crouton with smoked tomato sorbet, I placed a couple of anchovies on top of each biscuit, a few strips of roast capsicum and finally a dollop of the Bloody Mary sorbet.

Frugii makes amazing icecream as anyone who has tasted John Marshall’s superb products at the Capital Region Farmers Market will tell you. Yes, his Bloody Mary sorbet does contain Vodka and it has a real kick to it!

It complemented the salty anchovy and the cheesy biscuit perfectly, and won rave reviews from my taste testers.

Play around with your own combinations and let me know what works for you.

Related post: John Marshall: Frugii Icecream

BASIL AND PARMESAN BISCUITS
2 cups plain flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
4 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped
3 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
1 ½ cups plain yoghurt
½ cup milk
1 tablespoon olive oil
Parmesan cheese to sprinkle on top

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.
In a bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking powder, bicarb soda, basil and cheese.  In another bowl, combine yoghurt, milk and oil.
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir till the mixture just comes together.
Put small spoonfuls on a baking tray (allowing room for the biscuits to expand) and sprinkle generously with remaining Parmesan cheese.
Bake for about 15 minutes or until nicely golden.
Top with one or two anchovies and a scoop of Bloody Mary sorbet on each biscuit.

Pete Evans

Greg Pieper

There could be worse ways to spend a winter’s evening in the mountains than having dinner cooked for you by Pete Evans. The chef, cookbook author and judge on Channel Seven’s My Kitchen Rules will host a dinner at Lake Crackenback Resort & Spa on July 7.

He’ll work alongside the executive chef of the resort’s Cuisine Restaurant, Greg Pieper, whose previous restaurant, Bamboo, in northern NSW went to three chef’s hats in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide.

The menu for the Lake Crackenback dinner will feature Snowy Mountains produce matched by Voyager Estate (Margaret River) wines. It begins with canapés of pork cheek with scallop and apple, sweet corn soup with local yabbies, and smoked local rainbow trout salad on crispy wontons, matched with 2011 Chenin Blanc.

The entree of local pork belly with black vinegar caramel will be matched with 2011 Semillon Sauvignon Blanc, while the main course of Steamed barramundi on a sweet potato puree with lime and coconut sauce will be matched with 2008 Chardonnay. Dessert is a chocolate biscuit pudding with avocado ice cream and honeycomb, and there are vegetarian options.

Lake Crackenback Resort & Spa, on the border of the Kosciuszko National Park, has rooms ranging from overwater lake view apartments to mountain view chalets. Accommodation is from $167.50 pp per night including hot breakfasts, for a minimum two-night stay.

The dinner costs $140 pp. Bookings:  +61 2 6451 3000 or www.lakecrackenback.com.au

The Celebrity Chef event is part of Mountains of Events, a year-round program featuring everything from music and physical challenges to good food and wine. www.snowymountains.com.au/mountainsofevents

Enchanting Borneo. By David Bowden. Published by John Beaufoy Publishing, UK, 2011.

I first visited Borneo earlier this year and if I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t have David Bowden’s Enchanting Borneo before I went. If I had, I might have been less ambitious about trying to see the place in five days.

Bowden’s book has brought home to me what a treasure house Borneo is – rich in wildlife, natural beauty, history and cultural experiences. The world’s third largest island (after Greenland and New Guinea, and excluding the Australian continent), Borneo is home to the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, the independent Sultanate of Brunei and the Indonesian state of Kalimantan.

This 80-page book is the first in a series of pictorial travel guides that also includes titles on Cambodia, Laos, The Philippines and Thailand. As well as providing a brief visitor’s guide, the book is brimming with enticing photos, many of them taken by the author himself.

Bowden is an Aussie who has been in Asia for more years than he cares to remember. A resident of Kuala Lumpur, where he works as a freelance photojournalist, he first visited Borneo as a consultant to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

He has returned numerous times to write and photograph Borneo for regional publications, and not surprisingly, has fallen in love with it.

Described by Charles Darwin as “one great luxuriant hothouse made by nature for herself”, the island is rich in fauna and flora, including more than 600 bird species, and a diversity of mammals and marine life.

My trip, unfortunately, was one of those where we were trying to squeeze several destinations into just a few weeks. Nevertheless, even getting just a taste of Borneo was exciting.

I was thrilled to see the strange-looking Proboscis Monkey in the wild, was captivated by the antics of Orang-Utans at Shangri-La’s Rasa Ria resort, and had the rare privilege of seeing the mighty Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower. It was a case of ticking a lot of things off the bucket list at once.

We trekked in the foothills of South-East Asia’s tallest mountain and had to calm our nerves after tackling the rope walk in the rainforest canopy near Mount Kinabalu.

Yet, as this colourful book makes clear, there was so much more we could have done, from exploring the world’s largest cave in Sarawak’s Mulu National Park to visiting oil-rich Brunei and becoming acquainted with some of the many tribal communities.

But then, you always need a reason to go back.

If you’d like to buy the book, you can do so through the following sites. The links will take you directly to Enchanting Borneo:

It might sound trite but you can feel the love that goes into the pastries and macarons made by Dream Cuisine.

Mother and son team, Marilyn Chalkley and Owen Saddler, use organic milk and whole flour, free-range eggs, farmhouse cream and fresh fruit to make their products. There are simply no compromises.

You only have to taste their superb macarons and other goodies to know that this is a labour of love.

The pair set up their business in February 2010 and quickly became a huge hit at the Capital Region Farmers Market and Old Bus Depot Markets in Canberra.

The macarons are also sold to some of Canberra’s leading cafés.

The range is unbelievably delicious with flavours including Passionfruit, “Tiger” (dark chocolate and orange), Coffee, Hazelnut, Cherry and Chocolate, Lavender & Honey, Raspberry, Double Chocolate, Strawberry & Champagne, and one of my favourites, Chai.

Their Pistachio and Lime macaron won a silver medal in the 2012 Sydney Fine Food Show. It was one of the first macarons they developed using nuts other than almonds, and fresh fruit in the middle. It’s since become one of their most popular macarons and rightly so, for it has a lovely balance of sweet and tart.

Their biggest selling macaron is – need I say? – Salted Caramel. It is made with fleur de sel from Guerande in France and is simply divine. Macarons aren’t everything though, and they also do a lovely lime tart, Danish pastries and other patisserie items.

In April this year they opened a small shop and café in Fyshwick, and while it’s in a rather odd location, tucked in between industrial businesses, it’s quickly become a destination in itself.

They are doing pizza by the slice for the café, using a quality tomato sauce (naturally). Their coffee is roasted by Alchemy in Sydney.

While you are waiting to be served, you can look through the window to the kitchen behind and know that everything is being made fresh by this talented duo.

Dream Cuisine
9/18 Whyalla St,
Fyshwick
Canberra ACT

+61 2 6162 2021

Open Monday to Friday 6.30am to 4pm, Saturday 9am till 2pm.

www.dreamcuisine.net.au