aussie preparation

We have a wine dinner scheduled this coming Monday featuring wines from the McWilliams winery in Australia.  The event is also going to be attended by Peter Howard, who was called the Emeril Lagasse of Australia in our email introduction to him.

This dinner has been coming together in a rather backwards fashion.  We are used to operating in a certain order, but our method this time was forced to be a menu writing, then being asked to pair the wines, then finally receiving the wines (well, almost all of them).  This is a truly backwards direction to prepare for a wine dinner, but we rolled with it.  Most of the wines are easily compatible to the courses we wrote.  There are some nice wines on the higher end Coonawarra label (or Icon).  Obviously, a couple of dynamic Shiraz's, and a bottle of Cabernet which we haven't even opened yet.

The food end was handled a little differently as well.  We received some recipes from Peter Howard through emails although we were not sure how involved he was supposed to be in the dinner.  Most of these recipes are basic or are the kinds you'd find in the weekly food section of the newspaper.  Without knowing how to procede, we took some of the basic ideas and threw some of our own tricks on top of them... of course, twisting up some of them and being corny as we usually are (tasmanian devilled eggs... just couldn't resist that one!)

Australian food is something that none of us in our kitchen are familiar with, and even after a fair amount of researching we were still in the dark except for a few key flavors and ingredients.

I was able to procure some dried eucalyptus leaves from Le Sanctuaire.  They smell like a cross between laurel and mint... but they are dried so that affects the aroma also.  We plan to steep them in an oil although the bag of leaves is rather sizeable, so we will probably end up putting them in other applications as well.

I have really wanted to get a jump on some of this prep (it's a large list) before today, but my focus has been pushed towards banquet operations as well as the restaurant and delegating a small army of cooks.  That is very time and energy absorbing.  We just lost one of our best kitchen team members who is moving back to Minnesota to make the intelligent move of getting out of the hotel/restaurant kitchen and into the food science lab.  We completely support this career shift.  She is very young and still has an opportunity to have a normal life... unlike the rest of us.  I guess there are worse things to be stuck with.