Self-confessed seafood novice Kerri Jackson expands her palate and culinary skills with a gourmet cooking weekend.
KEY POINTS:
Swallowing a raw oyster at 10.30 on a Saturday morning, after a few too many wines the night before, in itself probably deserves some kind of medal. Given it was, in fact, my first oyster ever - that medal should be gold and, possibly, even sparkly.
And so
began the two-day culinary adventure that was the Stamford Gourmet Cooking Weekend in Auckland. Each of the weekends will have a different theme and itinerary. The inaugural weekend, at which I found myself that hazy Saturday morning, focused on seafood. Though seafood and I have never been the best of friends, I was keen to seize the chance to expand my palate as well as my cooking skills.
Given the theme, it made sense the first stop this weekend was to be the brilliant, bustling Auckland Fish Market, down at Auckland's Viaduct Harbour.
Even if fish never passes your lips, this is a fascinating place to visit.
It always seems to be humming with people - particularly on a Saturday morning - and is stocked with a huge range of top quality fish and shellfish.
But this morning, for us, is a school day, and we take our seats in the Fish Market's state-of-the-art kitchen auditorium where chef Petra Geraets demonstrates the cooking of three different dishes - mussel and gurnard ravioli with burnt basil butter, oysters with yum yum sauce and marinated wakami, and Thai pipi, cockle and mussel lemongrass and coconut broth.
Once she's done, it's our turn. We move into the cooking school's equally impressive classroom and divide into pairs to cook the menu ourselves, before sitting down to taste our varying degrees of success.
After that triumphant lunch it was back to the Stamford Plaza where Chris Telford of wine wholesaler Pernod Ricard presented a fascinating, comprehensive and practical lesson in matching wine and food. A dabble of salt here, a sip of sauvignon blanc; here's a smidgen of cream cheese, now a sip of pinot noir... Wine/food matching is a vast and complicated topic - or it seems so to a novice like me, but by the end of the class I was definitely feeling a confidence far beyond the usual "red with the beef" - although that might have been the wine. After the matching class it was off for a change of clothes and a cleansing of the palate in preparation for the stunning seven-course degustation dinner, led by Stamford executive chef Lance Beamiss.
In keeping with the theme of the weekend, the dinner was largely seafood based - but after raw oysters for breakfast this was a delicious cinch.
The dinner is also a great time to get to know your course-mates a little better, beyond the morning's setting fire to things at the fish market cooking school or puzzling over our wine-tasting palates. The weekend I attended, my fellow cooks were a great bunch from all sorts of backgrounds, with varied cooking skills and from all over the country, with one thing in common - a passion for good food and great cooking.
After a strong coffee in the Stamford restaurant on Sunday morning, to help recover from a dinner that went long into the night, the focus was paella - proper paella made by, and to the strictly traditional specifications of Spaniard Joaquim Gines, owner of Barcelona Spanish delicatessen.
While we nibbled tapas and drank wine, Gines prepared the spectacular looking rice dish - as he puzzled over its New Zealand variations, which are often too tomato-y and too much like risotto. True paella, he says, should contain chicken, rabbit and snails - the latter, he insists make all the difference to the flavour.
No snails today, but his creation is spectacular, filled with mussels, prawns and chicken and topped with lemons.
As we sit down to this delicious lunch, with the added entertainment of flamenco dancers, I ponder the fact that I've eaten more seafood this weekend than possibly the rest of my life put together. I'm not the only one. It turns out that many of the guests at this seafood gourmet weekend are not "fruit of the sea" fans either.
Some of us have changed our minds, some of us haven't, but we've had fun and ultimately we're leaving a little wiser, and possibly a little wider.
- Detours, HoS