Beautiful Berowra Waters Inn

Approaching by boat -

Berowra Waters Inn from the water

 

It was my birthday yesterday, and my lovely husband decided to treat me to a long lunch at the Berowra Waters Inn. This destination restaurant has been on my must do list as it was closed for a while there, reopening with a new chef Brian Geraghty (ex Quay, Bilson's) and so I was thrilled to finally get the chance to enjoy their food and the gorgeous riverfront setting on my birthday. The restaurant is set amongst bushland on the Hawkesbury River, a one and a half hour drive from Sydney. The venue itself is only accessible by boat or seaplane - so if, like us, you have neither of these forms of transportation - you take advantage of the restaurant's private boat, that picks you up downriver at an agreed time, and ferries you back when your meal is over.

 

The short boat trip up to the restaurant is really gorgeous and sets the tone for the whole Berowra Waters Inn experience. The winter sun reflected off the water and river birds flew along the edges of the trees as we approached the inn to disembark at the private wharf. From the moment you step on the boat you feel as if you are destined for something special.

 

 

The Dining Room

 

After a warm welcome from the staff, who meet you at the wharf, you are ushered up the stairs to the simple, light filled dining room. The design makes the most of the river view, with floor to ceiling windows that let you watch wildlife and riverboats as you enjoy your meal. I think lunchtime really is a great time to visit Berowra Waters Inn, giving you the maximum opportunity to enjoy the stunning setting.

 

The menu is a degustation style, and diners choose from either four or seven courses, with or without matching wines. We opted for seven courses, and went for wine by the glass - I always find the matching wine option too much if I am having lots of courses, and would rather consult the Sommelier for a couple of recommendations instead. We started off with a glass of luscious Gosset Champagne (well, it was my birthday!) and settled down to an afternoon of some really beautiful dishes.

 

A very pretty looking amuse bouche of apple and aromatic cheese, and a velvety chicken liver parfait in a crispy tuille began our meal. Incredibly delicious, with such rich flavours and interesting textures. Definitely a winner.

 

Amuse Bouche -

Cheese "Apple" & Chicken Liver Parfait

 

I was really excited to see scallops on the menu, being one of my very favourite kinds of seafood. This dish was light and luscious, with beautifully pickled discs of root vegetables which worked so well with the rest of the ingredients. A great start to lunch.

 

 

Scallop, Horseradish Cream, Rye & Root Vegetables

The next seafood dish of confit ocean trout was soft, buttery and delicious - the addition of crispy dashi wafers made this dish such a delight to eat.

Confit Ocean Trout, Smoked Milk, Dashi & Lemon

 

A beautifully cooked, gelatinous and glazed piece of pork belly was the centerpiece for the next dish, with a reduction of honey mead (yum!) and paired with green tomato and sweet Moreton Bay bug meat. A crunchy rye crumb gave this dish lots of textural interest. Really loved this one.

Pork Belly, Honey Bug, Mead & Green Tomato

 

An indulgent combination of fish, prawns, pine nuts and winter truffles gave the next dish a very rich and indulgent feel. Sitting there, enjoying winter truffles, drinking good wine and looking out over the Hawkesbury, I must admit I felt very spoilt indeed!

Whitefish, Broccoli Veloute, Karid Prawn, Pinenut

& Winter Truffle

 

A meaty, savoury course of slow cooked Kobe brisket, leek and stinging nettle was full of rich winter flavours, without being overpowering. The caramelised leek was a delicious sweet accompaniment to the robust flavour of the beef.

Slow Cooked Kobe Brisket of Beef

Braised Leek, Stinging Nettle

 

The cheese course was one of my favourite dishes of the day. A light as air blue cheese parfait in a crispy shell, creamy red onion sorbet and fresh, shaved walnuts. A knockout combination and so beautiful on the plate. 

Blue Cheese Cigar, Red Onion Sorbet,

Shaved Walnut & Celery

 

A surprise pre-dessert of pannacotta and tangy, fresh raspberry was a great transition into the final dessert course. 

Yoghurt Pannacotta with Raspberry Foam

 

The finale was a hazelnut and mandarin dessert that was just beautiful - the toasty, almost marshmallow texture of hazelnut parfait with milk sorbet and a punchy, citrus mandarin gel. Really delicious and a great way to end the meal.

 

Hazelnut Parfait, Mandarin Gel & Milk Sorbet

 

Well..... almost the end of meal. The coffee is seriously good (funnily enough, the blend is from The Grounds Roasters in Alexandria, just around the corner from where we live) and some lovely sweet morsels to enjoy with it.

 

 

Grounds Roasters Coffee

Apple Cakes & Rose, Lime & Chocolate Macarons.

 

So, the verdict on Berowra Waters Inn? Just beautiful. Definitely one of the best meals we have ever eaten in Australia and in such a stunning setting. We both agreed we would visit again and check out the menu when the season changes. It really was a special way to spend my birthday.

 

If you wanted to enjoy the food and wine and not drive home, there is riverside accommodation nearby, or you could always stay on a Hawkesbury houseboat overnight. Now that would be really something special!

The sunlight over the Hawkesbury,

as we were leaving in the afternoon

 

 

For more information on reservations and how to get there, check out the Berowra Waters Inn website: http://www.berowrawatersinn.com/  or call them on (02) 9456 1027

 

******

 

 

A farewell to 2010

Happy New Year everyone! Hope that you all got to farewell 2010 in whatever way made you happiest and that there was some good food and celebratory drinks thrown in for good measure. I had a fantastic New Year's Eve, deciding against the big party/crowd vibe and going for something a bit quieter and definitely tastier! We headed off to one of my very favourite Sydney restaurants - Restaurant Atelier - for a special NYE degustation menu.

We enjoyed Chef Darren Templeman's superb food, teamed with some pretty awesome wine selections. Being regular diners at Atelier over the years, I have got to know the staff as well as the Chef pretty well, and it is always lovely when you can walk into a place and feel so at home. They get to know what you like and they deliver it in spades. Last night when we arrived, we were warmly greeted by the lovely front of House Manager/ Sommelier/ Head Waiter Bernadette who advised us that she had reserved our favourite table for the occasion. It is just this kind of attention to detail and personal touches that make a visit to Atelier an absolute delight every time.

We kicked off our New Year celebrations with a glass of fine French champagne from Devaux -  a NV Devaux Blanc de Nouirs from Bar-Sur-Seine. Nothing says celebration like champagne and it was the perfect way to start ours!

Then, over the following hours we feasted on this stunning menu:

Alaskan Snow Crab & Mango Salad with a Spiced Mango Chilli Salsa, Unpasteurised Ocean Trout Roe & Baby Coriander

Served with Black Caviar on a Mother of Pearl spoon

Wine: 2009 Ocean Eight Pinot Gris, Mornington Peninsular, VIC

Twice-Cooked Boneless Poussin filled with Foie Gras &
Herb Mousse, Soy Bean Puree,
Yellow Oyster Mushroom Salad, Jus Gras

Wine: 2010 Massena Roussanne, Barossa Valley, SA

Roasted NZ Pure Angus Fillet with Confit carrot Puree, Fresh Peas 'Paysanne', King Brown Mushroom & Sweet Bread Croquettes

Wine: 2007 Mon Redon Rouge, Cotes du Rhone, France

Cheese plate: Ashgrove Cheddar (Aust)
Dolce Latte Gorgonzola (Italy)

Cremeaux (France)

Strawberry Jelly with Strawberry Espuma

Tropical Fruit Souffle, Ginger & Lime Leaf Milkshake, Coconut Sorbet

Wine: 2007 Grande Maison 'Cuvee des Anges', Monbazillac, France



What a wonderful way to see off the end of the year - and what a year it was! Thinking back over my culinary experiences alone, it was full of so many adventures and new tastes. For starters, it was the year that I fulfilled a long held dream to study cooking in Paris. May 2010 saw me happily ensconced in a kitchen in Montmartre, aproned up and learning from Master French Chef Pino Ficara. I walked out of there with a whole new enthiusiasm for food and for fresh produce, some new skills to add to my repitoire , including the ins and outs of cheesemaking, how to make creme patissiere and some of the finer points of French butchery! A truly life changing experience. Check my entries in May to read all about my culinary adventures in France.

2010 was also the year that I enjoyed what is probably the best meal I have eaten in my life so far - I finally got to experience the genius of Tetsuya Wakuda's amazing talents in the kitchen. What a memorable experience that was - made even more exciting by the appearence of the man himself during the final dessert course. (For a review of my experience at Tetsuya's, see my Enrty on November 25)

This year was a big year for travel - I visited 7 countries all up and everywhere there was amazing food. I ate fried crickets and grilled river snake on a stick in Cambodia, sat in the dirt on the side of the road eating delectable caramelised pork in Saigon, ate chilli for breakfast and real Korean Bulgolgi in Seoul, drank cocktails from teapots in an Alice in Wonderland themed bar and devoured beautiful jade green New Zealand mussels in Wellington, sipped whisky on the banks of Loch Ness as I enjoyed the finest Scottish seafood, delighted in raspberries warm from the sun on the steps of Sacre Coeur and Confit of Duck, raw milk cheese and Cafe au lait in Paris and ate the best kebab in the world in Stoke Newington, London. There were just so many special food moments this year and so many of them were the result of my travels. I am very grateful to have had such wonderful opportunities this year.

I would like to thank all of you who have visited Gourmet Goddess this year, and who have offered feedback and comments, cooked my recipes, sent me jokes, shared your own cooking adventures and have generally encouraged me all the way. I have really enjoyed putting my love of food and all things culinary out there, and I have been blown away by the number of visitors to my site from all around the world - more than 20,000 to date. Thank you for sharing Gourmet Goddess with me, you make it all such a pleasure.

Can't wait to see what 2011 will bring!

Love to you all

Toni XXXX
AKA The Gourmet Goddess

******

Paris Cooking School

Hi everyone - well this weary traveller is back from a month away, still a bit jetlagged and adjusting to having to get up for work every morning and be back in the real world again. I had a fantastic time away, and over the next few weeks you will be seeing and hearing a little of some of the food experiences I had in my travels. I have returned home with a whole swag of inspiration and ideas for dishes, as well as some new skills (I now know how to butcher a whole rabbit!) and some great kitchen hints and techniques. My trip took me to London, Inverness, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Paris - all very different places with different produce and different food traditions. But I thought I would begin with an account of my cooking school experience in Paris.

Starting the day with a cafe au lait before heading to cooking school

I woke really early on my second day in Paris very excited that I was heading for cooking school that morning. Students had all been instructed to meet outside the Jules Joffrin train station where we would meet our instructor, Chef Pino Ficara. We would then walk to the nearby market to purchase our fresh ingredients and then up the hill to the school itself for class.

Our first market stop was a fromagerie (cheese shop) where Pino gave us a lesson in the various kinds of cheesemaking techniques which had us all spellbound. Cheesemaking is such a scientific and magical process and many recipies and ways of working have been around for literally hundreds, if not thousands of years. I learned about how the fromageries were set up, in order to have the cheese at it's best, and also to prevent the stinky cheeses from cross contaminating the more delicate ones- a lot of the cheeses are not refrigerated and virtually all of the cheese is made with raw milk. In Australia, it is illegal to sell raw milk products (an exception was only recently made that allowed 2 kinds of Roquefort to be imported, but our laws are ridiculously antiquated) so I was so excited at the prospect of having a raw milk cheese fest.

A tiny sample of the huge selection of cheeses I came across in the fromagerie

And a fest it was. I tasted no less than 15 kinds of cheese (there must have been a couple of hundred in the shop) - all hand made - some made by monks, some aged in caves, some preserved in straw, cheese soaked in wine or basted in beer, cheese from cow milk, sheep milk and goat milk, bright yellow hard cheese and creamy milky white cheese, cheese that tasted of clean air and pure milk, cheese that was sticky and deliciously foetid, cheese covered in ash or studded with wild herbs and lavender,tangy and crumbly cheese, velvety white goat cheese so delicious it made your eyes roll back in your head! The shop itself was so beautifully set up. The aproned staff expertly cut and lovingly wrapped our selections and we headed to our next stop - the charcuterie (butcher)

Some of the poultry and game on sale at the charcuterie

If you are squeamish about raw meat or you are only used to buying your meat wrapped in sanitised plastic packets, then you might have been a bit freaked out on entering the butcher shop. Much of the meat such as poultry and games is sold in one piece, with head, feet/ claws all still attatched. Not only are these used for stock, but they also allow you to ensure that the meat is fresh. The selection available was so exciting - including pheasant, squab pigeon,quail, duck, about 7 or 8 varieties of chicken, venison, rabbits and hares. I love game and particularly rabbit so I was thrilled when it was decided that we would cook rabbit that day. We bought two whole rabbits (skinned, but with the head and all left on, as well as the liver - we had plans for that) which were wrapped up by the butcher in brown paper and string and we headed down the street to the fishmonger.

Oysters and fresh live crustaceans for sale at the local fishmonger

The selection of fish, and particularly shellfish was spectacular - so many varieties of oysters! (they are never pre opened, they are sold closed or you can get the fishmonger to shuck them for you), mussels and clams, periwinkles, live crabs of all kinds, langoustines, prawns and lobsters - also smoked fish, snails and fresh kelp. The first thing that strikes you is that the fish doesn't smell fishy - it is SO fresh that it just smells like seawater. Everything looked so superb - we chose two large silvery bream that we planned on turning into a starter for our menu.

Delicious berries, destined for our kitchen

Pretty fresh radishes and onions at the greengrocer

Next stop, the vegetable market- a riot of brightly coloured reds, greens,oranges. Tight bunches of scarlet radishes, bundles of emerald green and creamy white asparagus, all kinds of herbs displayed in large wicker baskets big enough to put your washing in - and the berries! That luscious aroma of fresh strawberries again, cherries, melons... Everything looked so abundant and beautiful. We decided on what we wanted to serve with our dishes and came away with bunches of sweet smelling herbs, celery root (celeriac), wild asparagus (which I had never seen - delicate, with thin stalks and small pretty tapered ends), endive (witlof), fresh carrots, eschallots, garlic, a punnet or two of ruby coloured raspberries and some sweet smelling strawberries.

Gorgeous fresh artichokes for sale

Final stop on the way back to school was an artisan bread maker (who Chef said is quite mad and obsessed with perfection - but makes the best bread in Paris - using a centuries old woodfired oven, grinding his own flour with a stone grinder and keeping his sourdough culture literally locked in the basment because he is scared someone will steal it!) The bread! Oh.....the bread! The best I have ever eaten in my life. We chose bagettes, walnut bread, and a fruity rye loaf that we planned to serve with our cheeses. We munched on still warm bagettes happily as we walked up the hill to school in the sunshine.

Fresh bread from the artisan bakery - baked 4 times a day

The class was amazing and I learned so much - so many great tips and techniques as well as learning more about the actual chemistry of what happens to ingredients when you combine them or treat them in a particular way. It was also SO much fun. I learned to make proper creme patissiere (the beautiful custard that goes into choux puffs or tarts, and also butchered my first whole rabbit, which was like conducting surgery. In Australia they never have the feet or head left on!) I was in culinary heaven as we put our menu together - a starter of oven roasted bream filllets baked on a thick bed of fresh herbs and served with creamed celeriac, the main course of braised rabbit with sauteed endive, wild asparagus, carrots and eschallot confit and a dessert of a strawberry and raspberry tart, with an almond pastry base and vanilla creme patissiere. We also enjoyed a superb cheese platter between main course and dessert and lots of lovely french wine to wash it all down with. An unforgettable experience.

Here is what I cooked that day:

A starter of herb baked bream, celeriac puree and mache

Braised saddle of rabbit with wild asparagus, confit eschallots and witlof

Fresh fruit tart with almond pastry and creme patissiere

Because it doesn't get dark until 10pm, I decided to jump on a boat after class and cruise the Seine, enjoying the warm weather and that beautiful golden evening sunshine that turns everything buttery yellow. I cruised past the palaces, the tower, the Louvre - along the embankments where people were enjoying a glass of wine or lying on the grass. I felt so lucky to be there and to have had such a wonderful day. When I eventually made it back to Montmartre, I decided that I would have a picnic on my balcony for dinner, (I had eaten a lot during the day so I didn't want a big restaurant dinner) so I simply bought a small bagette (warm from the oven - they bake 4 times a day here!) ,a small piece of succulent cooked duck (in Paris butchers sometimes sell meat they cook on the premises), some raspberries and a little pot of creme freche to dip them in and ate them on my very Parisian wrought iron Juliet balcony overlooking the street as the sun went down. What a great day.

Chef Pino Ficara and I in the Montmartre kitchen

I have fallen completely and utterly in love with Paris - can you blame me??? I am already planning an extended return trip in 2011. In the meantime, I plan to hone my new skills and appreciation for French food in my own kitchen. Bon appetit!

*****

Quote of the day.....

Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized.

- Andre Simon

Spaghetti Vongole

My plan for dinner tonight was to cook some fish, but when I went down to my local fishmonger to choose something, I noticed that he had lovely fresh looking Vongole (Clams) in stock, so I decided to ditch the fish idea and to cook one of my all time favourite pasta dishes - Spaghetti Vongole. This dish is very fast to cook - pretty much as long as it takes to boil the pasta - and has a delicious flavour with few ingredients. I have eaten versions of Spaghetti Vongole that use cream in the sauce - I prefer to omit the cream and just use a little salted butter at the end. The dish is lighter and the butter and juices from the clams gives enough richness to the sauce for my taste. Of course, If you do enjoy something a bit richer, then by all means add some cream to your sauce.

This wonderful dish is not a cook ahead and reheat type of recipe - It is at it's best served right away, so have everyone at the table, ready to eat when you put the pasta on to boil. Even though it is very simple, I think this makes a really lovely dinner party dish if you are pressed for time. A few glasses of red wine, some crusty bread and a platter of fragrant and glistening Spaghetti Vongole and you have a perfect Italian meal that looks great.

Tonight's recipe serves two - buon appetito!!

Spaghetti Vongole

You will need: 500g Vongole (Clams) in the shell, A splash of olive oil, 2 cloves chopped garlic, 1 teaspoon sliced chilli (more if you like it a bit spicy) 1 cup white wine (tonight I used a Hunter Valley Semillon), 1 tablespoon salted butter (you can use more or less, whatever suits your taste), A big handful chopped Italian parsley, spaghetti, salt and pepper. Parmesan to serve.

Method: Put your pasta water on to boil, ensuring that you add a good pinch of salt. Once it comes to the boil, add your spaghetti. Keep an eye on the pasta and give it a stir now and then. You want it to be al dente - not overcooked.

Now to the sauce - add a generous splash of olive oil to a pan and add the chilli and garlic. Let it cook for a minute or two - you do not want it to brown. Pour in the wine to deglaze the pan. Let it come to a simmer. Add the clams and stir well. Put the lid on the pan and let the clams cook for about a minute. Be sure to disgard any that do not open.

Add the butter, then the drained, cooked pasta. Season well and stir through the parsley.
Serve right away with freshly grated parmesan.

*

Quote of the day.......

"I never taste the wine first in restaurants,

- I just ask the waiter to pour."

Nigella Lawson