Get set for a gourmet extravaganza when Tasting Australia is held in South Australia from April 26 to May 3.

The program was launched last week and once again it looks set to retain its spot as one of Australia’s premier food and wine festivals. (If you asked festival director Ian Parmenter, he’d say the premier food and wine festival).

As well as more than 80 public events across Adelaide and regional South Australia, the festival always includes an extensive program for visiting food and wine media.

I’ve been fortunate to have attended almost every festival since its inception in 1997, and have always found it to be not only a great networking event, but also an opportunity to discover more about our wonderful produce and talented chefs.

Parmenter and South Australian chef Simon Bryant cooked up a storm in the Adelaide Central Market to celebrate the launch of the program.

Among the highlights: the hugely successful Celebrity Cooking program and Feast For The Senses continue, Word of Mouth will be extended, Out to Lunch offers an opportunity to dine with celebrity chefs, and there’ll be a greater focus on the arts and youth this time around.

Activities include cookery demonstrations, hands-on cooking classes, gala dinners and intimate lunches and dinners in some of South Australia’s most scenic locations.

Feast for the Senses, to be held in Elder Park on the weekend of April 28-29, is the biggest public event, attracting tens of thousands of food, wine and beer lovers.

The festival brings together chefs from around the world and some of the biggest names in the Australian food industry. International guests this year include Mark Hix, Richard Fox, Rachel Allen and Martin Bosley.

Among the Aussie line-up are George Calombaris, Matt Moran, Guy Grossi, Pete Evans, Stephanie Alexander, Justin North, Miguel Maestre, Adrian Richardson, Philippe Mouchel, Jeremy Strode, Matthew Kemp, Paul Mercurio, Matt Stone, Anna Gare, Maeve O’Meara, Simon Bryant, Maggie Beer, Mark McNamara, Andre Ursini and Poh Ling Yeow.

A flagship event this year is the Best of British Dinner on Monday, April 30, at the Intercontinental Hotel, Adelaide.

It will bring together leading British and Australian chefs, with proceeds from ticket sales going towards sending Australian athletes to the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Bookings for all events: www.tasting-australia.com.au

Me standing in the chilly waters of Coffin Bay during Tasting Australia 2010. I'm tucking into an oyster harvested fresh from the sea - a wow moment.

How good is this platter of luscious summer fruit prepared by Maurie? All ingredients were bought at the Capital Region Farmers Market in Canberra (apart from the mint, which came from our garden).

This gorgeous honeycomb is from Honey Delight, produced in Canberra by Carmen and Todd Brown. It’s so very apt for a Valentine’s Day post, given that the word honey is a common term of endearment. And honey is such a seductive food – sweet and golden, a nectar transformed by bees in a miracle of nature.

Honey is widely used in many cuisines not only because it tastes great but also because of its nutritional and medicinal properties. ‘Active Honey’ is one that is active against bacteria, but as anyone who regularly buys it knows, honey with antibacterial properties doesn’t come cheap.

The Browns looked at all the manuka honey being brought into Australia from New Zealand and realised that the same species of tree, Leptospermum scoparium, was growing locally.

After extensive testing, they produced their first Active Honey late last year, and the good news is that it is a very keenly priced $20 for 500 grams.

As far as I know, Honey Delight is the only 15+ honey produced in the Canberra region (or at least, that is labelled as such). It’s another great example of a small regional producer doing something wonderfully innovative.

Carmen Pearce-Brown comes from a family of four generations of beekeepers who have been making honey since 1928, originally in north-west NSW.

Currently studying for her Masters degree at ANU, she became interested in therapeutic honey while doing a thesis on “how to keep well”.

It led her to wonder if the tea tree growing locally – from the same species as the New Zealand manuka – had the same antibacterial properties as the New Zealand product.

Testing by the University of NSW confirmed that their honey had the requisite antibacterial properties for a 15+ rating.

The Browns sell their Honey Delight products every Saturday morning at the Capital Region Farmers Market, where their customers are keen to hear about the benefits of eating honey.

“We find people are very interested in how honey helps keep them healthy – they ask about the sugar content, the amount of antioxidants in honey, how local honey helps reduce hay fever, and which honey is best for you,” Carmen said.

“Food scientists around the world are uncovering the secrets of honey nutrition, and that means our understanding of how honey helps keep us healthy has come a long way. Having an affordable active honey can take us all in the direction to staying well and feeling more vibrant.”

“We are very excited to have a regionally produced honey that has such important properties. It brings this incredible honey into a price bracket that doesn’t include transport across the Tasman Sea, and the costs associated with import, and that’s going to be good for many people,” she said.

More on Honey Delight: www.bizzylizzysgoodthings.com; Honey Delight’s Facebook page.

If I were to check into one hotel in the world to celebrate Valentine’s Day, it would be the Four Seasons Hotel in Singapore.

Apart from the fact that it is a lovely hotel with an understated elegance, it has set aside a “Couples Floor” with various romantic indulgences for those who are in the flush of love (or for those who want to re-ignite the spark).

Just a block or so from the hustle and bustle of Orchard Road, the Four Seasons is a quiet haven, with spacious guest rooms and marble bathrooms, great dining facilities, a spa and fitness club, pools and tennis courts (including, quite remarkably, a couple of air-conditioned indoor courts).

The hotel has the feel of a private club, with classic furnishings and beautiful artworks and antiques, many of them from the owner’s private collection.

Take the lift to the adults-only 11^th floor and you’ll find yourself in a luxurious cocoon with the promise of no housekeeping doorbell until 12.01pm.

As someone who has been woken more than enough times by enthusiastic housekeepers after forgetting to put out the Do Not Disturb sign, that’s a promise that definitely appeals!

The treats start as soon as you alight from the lift, with fruit and chocolates on the lift landing, and mood lighting in the hallway.

Once inside our room, we found plenty of special touches to sweeten the mood – some luxurious, such as curtains operated from the bedside console, a fabulous sound system piped through to the bathroom, and the ability to plug our iPad straight into the big flat-screen TV.

Others were more whimsical, such as a book of love poems by the bed; colourful jars filled with marshmallows, M & Ms, cookies and jelly beans; and a box containing 101 romance ideas … “dress up and go on a date together, wink at each other from across the room when attending a group function, hire a photographer to take couples photos of you around Singapore”… you get the picture.

Hell, there were even some red and yellow cards that you could flash if you felt your partner was spending too much time on their iPhone. Not that we had to resort to using them, of course.

Guests staying on the Couples Floor are assigned an “Experiental Assistant” to “pamper you with bespoke services” before, during and after your visit. They pledge to get to know your preferences within two hours of arrival, so that they can ply you with inside knowledge of Singapore and organize whatever indulgences you might want to take advantage of.

These range from a butler-drawn bath to in-room massages and breakfast in bed. We had a city to explore so took advantage only of the Lazy Lovers breakfast (Bircher muesli, berries with cream, scrambled eggs on an English muffin with blue cheese).

Nevertheless, we were showered with lots of attention including delicious chilled mango juices on arrival and loads of good advice on dining out.

Some of the options from the bath butler sounded positively divine: the Lycheetini, for example, allows you to soak in lychee milk and orchid petals while sipping a martini with berries.

I drew my own bath but, hey, there were beautiful L’Occitane products to play with, a gorgeous orchid by the bathtub and a CD of Essential Love Songs playing on the sound system. No complaints from me.

Even the spare roll of toilet paper was in a pretty embroidered bag.

Dressed in the fluffy robes provided, we found much to fuel our passion. The bowl of fruit contained what is quite possibly the biggest and certainly one of the juiciest mangoes I have ever had, and there was a tray of strawberries and blueberries on skewers with little pots of chocolate, cream and brown sugar for dipping them in, along with beautiful embossed white linen serviettes. Glass mugs and a dainty glass teapot were provided so that we could pour our own rose tea.

We could have borrowed from a selection of romantic DVDs for free. There is also a pillow concierge service but we were more than happy with the feather-soft pillows and doona provided, enjoying a long lie-in and checking out just before the housekeeper had a chance to ring the doorbell.

Fact file:

Four Seasons Hotel Singapore, 190 Orchard Boulevard, Singapore.
Tel: +65 6734 1110
www.fourseasons.com/singapore

Every four years, there are the Olympic Games, the Paralympics and the Winter Olympics, but you might be surprised to know that there is also a Culinary Olympics. What’s more, it’s taken just as seriously, right down to the competitors marching into the stadium in their national teams.

The world’s largest professional competition for chefs and pâtissiers, the event is organised by the World Association of Chefs’ Societies, which represents more than 10 million chefs worldwide.

This year’s event will be held in Erfurt, Germany, from October 6 to 9. The Culinary Olympics have gained a reputation for setting trends and benchmarks, and to take out a medal in the competition is a very high honour.

Australia has a good track record in the competition, with both the junior and senior teams finishing in the top 10 in the world in the 22nd Culinary Olympics in 2008. The junior team came sixth with a gold and a silver medal, while the senior team finished ninth with two gold, one silver and a bronze.

Can this year’s Australian team top that? They’re certainly giving it their best shot, and after tasting the results of their second practice run, I think they’ll do a great job of defending our culinary reputation.

I was a guest of the National Press Club, which hosted Monday night’s dinner where Shane Keighley (Qld, Captain), Shannon Kellam (Qld), Steve Clarke (WA), Jennie Key (SA), Royston Clark (WA), Patrick Carlin (WA), Matt McBain (Vic, pastry team), Dan Hurley (ACT) and Che Tam Nguyen (WA) prepared the three-course menu they plan to do in Germany.

They had spent the previous two days prepping at the National Convention Centre, whose executive chef, Mike Scheumann, is president of the ACT chapter of the Australian Culinary Federation.

The dinner was organised by the Federation to raise much-needed funds to send the team to Germany, as well as gain valuable feedback.

The three courses were incredibly intricate so it’s almost impossible to describe them without listing a huge number of ingredients, but here’s a summary of what we enjoyed:

Entrée: Lemon sole soufflé, kipfler potato and fennel pollen crisp, apple cured and smoked Tasmanian salmon (out of this world delicious!) and cucumber terrine.

Main dish: Dorper lamb loin wrapped in pancetta, milk-poached kidney, gremolata-crusted sweetbread, wild mushroom polenta, beetroot glazed shallot. (Beautifully matched with Serafino 2009 Shiraz from McLaren Vale.)

Dessert: Chocolate and raspberry bar, chocolate pudding, strawberry macaron (filled with strawberry gelato, a nice twist) and other yummy morsels.

According to team manager Patrick O’Brien, the team members were being assessed on Monday night as only six would be able to compete in the hot kitchen team in Germany, and they were looking for the “best fit”.

The selection process is, understandably, rigorous as the chefs will work in a five metre by four metre space, with just five hours to prepare a three-course meal for 110 people, as well as a buffet table displaying their work.

Other team members will have duties in the cold table team. All up, a total of 21 people will be going to Germany, with a full complement of senior, junior and pastry teams.

It’s a huge job raising sponsorship as the expense of getting three teams to Germany is enormous. According to the president of the Australian Culinary Federation, Peter Wright, they are about a quarter of the way towards their goal.

I’m sure they’d appreciate any extra help so do contact the Australian Culinary Foundation if you’d like to get involved.

Peter Wright has a broad vision of where he’d like to take the Culinary Federation. “One of our big goals is to drive the future of Australian culinary arts,” he said.

“We have a shortage of chefs in this country; what we’re trying to do is give these chefs an avenue to stay in the industry so they’ll be the leaders of the future.”