Drinks
4 Hour Roast Beef with Red Wine Sauce
05 Nov 2008 02:19 PM
Yesterday I cooked for some good
friends of mine and since I’m not working right now I had the time
for slow roast beef. In all honesty, dinner didn’t quite pull
together as planned for a number of reasons but mostly because I’d
had a fair bit of red wine by the end of the roasting time. Have
you ever tried to make pasta drunk? It took all day to get rid of
the flour from the kitchen today. Still, it was tasty.
It’s a fairly straight forward recipe and really takes no time at all tocook prepare, especially if you buy pre-made pasta.
The red wine sauce needs thickening after cooking which I didn’t
do, I’ve also reduced the quantity of liquid in the recipe below to
aide that. Please don’t forget or skip the pancetta, it made what
would otherwise be a pretty plain sauce.
It’s a fairly straight forward recipe and really takes no time at all to
4 Hour Roast Beef Rump in Red Wine
Sauce
|
Coffee + Martini Glass = Freaking Awesome
18 May 2008 10:53 PM
When I get run into the ground at my
day job I try and get away for the weekend to relax and unwind and
this weekend saw me wing it to Melbourne and
land at the Sofitel. I've written before about
my less than five-star experiences in Brisbane with the Accor owned
company but the Melbourne version has a much better track record.
The rooms are well fitted out, complete with dvd players, surround
sound and an iPod connection controlled by the touch-screen remote
next to the bed and then there is the club lounge which is in a
world of it's own. How many hotels have a fireplace on the 35th
floor?
On the nights I was there the lounge was mostly quiet, perfect for
a book and a gin and tonic and enjoying the open bar and evening
canapés or the sweeter petit fours of an evening with a hot
chocolate. Some company would have been nice too.
Sofitel Melbourne Club
Lounge
Breakfast is a hybrid buffet and à la
carte, having scrambled eggs, bacon fruit and cereal on the bar and
a slightly changing menu of a 'big breakfast', eggs benedict etc.
I'd highly recommend the ricotta hotcakes.
Pine Nut and Honey Ricotta Hotcakes @
Sofitel Club Lounge, Melbourne
Those of you who know me, and those of you that finish reading this
sentence know that I love coffee. Most of you even know that I like
*ahem* a drink or two. So when I hit the Atrium Bar at the
Sofitel
Melbourne the night I landed I started to relax, To understand
the atmosphere in this bar you need to appreciate the layout of the
Sofitel Melbourne. Even though the reception is based on the lower
floors the hotel itself does not start until the 35th floor,
perched on top of an office tower. This is where you'll find the
Atrium Bar and it's skylight another 15 floors
above.
Atrium Bar @ Sofitel
Melbourne
I went through a couple of drinks,
starting with a fig and scotch martini that was nice except I'm not
the biggest fan of scotch - the figs almost made up for it. I ended
up with heaven in a glass with an espresso martini. Goddamn it was
good, heck, it even had crema thick and frothy enough to hold up
whole beans... It wasn't like any of the other espresso martini's
I've had before, this had a dash of frangelico in it I think.
I think I've found a reason to dust off my own martini
glasses.
Espresso Martini - Sofitel
Melbourne
Moving into Red Wine Season with Chorizo, Lentils and Donna Hay
20 Apr 2008 08:21 PM
Taking another queue from
Donna Hay this week I picked out her Chorizo and Lentil umm,
stew? It seemed a pretty simple recipe and it was but at the same
time I don't think there was a lot of accuracy in the Donna Hay
test kitchen the day they wrote that one. The lentils had to simmer
for almost an hour instead of 25 minutes. I haven't cooked with
lentils very often but I've heard that salt can retard the cooking
process, stopping them from softening. I used salt reduced chicken
stock and didn't add any salt opposed to what the recipe said but
they still stayed firmer than I had hoped and given the extra
cooking time the colour from the celery had drained out and wasn't
any where near as vivid as in the picture in the magazine. It also
seemed to make four good sized serves instead of the 2 it was meant
to make. It's a simple recipe, give it a go sometime.
Chorizo and Green
Lentils
Chorizo and Lentils
1 Onion, diced
2 Chorizo, diced
4 Sticks of celery, diced
6 Sprigs of thyme
2 Cups of green lentils
1L of chicken stock
Salt and Pepper
2T of red wine vinegar (I subbed balsamic)
Fry the onion and chorizo together until the sausage is crispy on
medium heat, around 8 minutes.
Add the celery, thyme, fry for another 5 minutes.
Add the lentils and stock and simmer for 25 minutes until the
lentils are soft (mine took almost an hour).
Stir through the vinegar and serve. I had some toast with mine to
soak up the juices.
Saying all that though, it was really quite tasty, even given my
blocked nose from my cold. Perhaps the surprisingly good cheap
bottle of wine helped? I picked up a bottle of Cono Sur
Organic Cabernet Sauvignon direct from the Colchagua
Valley in Chile. It was the smoothest Cab Sav I've had in
years. Aged in French Oak it has fantastic cherry, strawberry
raspberry and vanilla flavours and for $12 a bottle, how can you
complain? I'm going to pick up another dozen bottles when I
can.
Cono Sur Organic Cab Sav
Thyme² & the Cuvee Bar @ the Sofitel Brisbane
17 Feb 2008 12:20 AM
The star rating system for hotels
doesn’t tell you how good a hotel is, just what it offers and the
Sofitel Brisbane is a 5-Star example of it. As I said, they come
down to what a hotel offers, is there a hairdryer in the bathroom?
Is there an iron the cupboard? How about a gym and pool? The
Sofitel gets its 5-star rating because it’s got more than one
restaurant/bar but they only have to have them, they don’t need to
be any good.
Let’s start with the Cuvee Bar. Every bar everywhere has an unwritten etiquette to follow and it’s always different but not unreasonable and usually boils down to how the manager of the establishment likes his or her staff to act, and that’s it – it’s a guide for the staff, not the patrons. May be it was me, I made the place look untidy or something, but if a customer wants to order a drink from the bar here, they’re promptly dismissed and told to take a seat before an order will be taken. Even if I try making an order I’m still told to take a seat for the waiter to come and take my order. It’s down right rude and even worse; the wait-staff aren’t very knowledgeable with their drinks unlike the bartender I had questions for who told me to go and sit down. Is your apple martini sour or sweet? Could I get a twist of lime instead of lemon? Would you mind not straining the ice from my cocktail? Every question the wait-staff gets that look puppies do when you poke your tongue out at them. Once they scamper off to ask the bartender, they come back and you have a follow-up question. The routine continues until you give up and say “I’ll just have a gin and tonic then” or your presented with a drink you didn’t want and it takes you a few sips to realise that the inept wait-staff have bought you the another table’s drinks; and their bill!
When you finally get your order, the way you want it, it’ll be easier to pay cash than try and charge the drinks to your room. I know it wasn’t this guys first time charging drinks to a room, he’d served me before, but from my seat you could tell he was struggling.
Thyme² is mainly setup for a buffet or as the Sofitelians like to call it, an ‘interactive experience'. I’ve mentioned before that the breakfasts there are great, for $30, serving you everything you’d want in a breakfast. The dinners seem to be the same. Miles and I didn’t have the buffet dinner when we were there, we did see it though. Couples with children, like seagulls taking turns ferrying overflowing plates of oysters, prawns and everything else they could scavenge back to their offspring. For $80 a head (wine not included) if you’ve got the mentality to eat your monies worth its probably good value but we felt like something smaller, so we went for the ala carte menu.
You can tell head chef Marshall Orton has planned for 90% of his clientelé to take the buffet option; it sure looked like they did. I only saw two other tables out of the full restaurant ordering off the menu and a queue for the seafood. The menu is short and has fairly simple dishes from and nothing you wouldn’t expect to see at a pub with the obligatory pad thai, t-bone with chips, fish (roast snapper) and a tandori chicken. It all seemed fairly pedestrian with only Miles’s meal served with any restaurant flare and by that I mean everything was stacked on top of each other. The current menu can be found on the website.
One nice touch was the appetizer that was served to us, a small ball of duck confit and orange marmalade served on a bed of lettuce. It tasted quite bland an uninteresting, but as it turns out they forgot the orange marmalade on ours. This wasn’t the only thing that was missing from the dishes we were served either. I ended up ordering the t-bone with “a roast tomato ragu and a creamy pepper sauce served with shoestring french fries”. The roast tomato ragu at least had tomato in it but it was just roughly diced fresh tomato in a warmed up pasta sauce – there was no way these tomatoes could have ever seen the inside of an oven; there wasn’t even the slightest hint of caramlisation any good roasted tomato has. The fries seemed to be of the McCain variety, either deep fried at too low a temperature or were left to defrost and get laden with water leaving them soggy. The pepper jus that was served was honestly very nice, rich thick and concentrated with steak, balsamic vinegar and rosemary flavours and would have gone very well with the roasted tomato ragu, if it had had roast tomato in it. Note that I said it was a pepper jus and not a creamy pepper sauce? Guess what was missing. I find it difficult to believe that a restaurant of this size and supposed calibre can deliver very basic dishes so far removed from the menu.
Miles also had the beef. A 120 day grain fed Darling Downs beef filet served with Parisian style butter on green beans and a potato cake. It was well presented, stacked a good six inches high with the same jus that accompanied my steak, minus the pepper, drizzled around the side. The report on it was generally positive, although the potato was a little under done.
To counter balance the average food were some excellent wines, chosen by the Sommelier, Toby Graham, to fill out the wine list. For the main I chose an ‘04 Wantirna Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot (List Price $112, Store Price $60-$70). The wine itself is quite nice and is more complex than you’d expect from just a Cab Sav Merlot, and that’s probably because there’s actually some Cab Franc and Petit Verdot in the bottle too. Overall, the wine has a nice blackcurrant to mulberry flavour with the classic merlot dusty finish. If you’re looking for it in a store, Wantirna Estate is the one with the Michael Leunig cartoons on the labels.
When it came to dessert, I wanted a bottle of something else to go with our Lenôtre Frambrosier’s so I asked Toby for a recommendation. There was the obligatory Noble One, but I thought that the overpowering honey in it would kill the delicate raspberries and cream in the dessert, Toby agreed and recommended the 2005 Grande Maison Semillon Sauvignon Blanc Muscadelle from Monbazillac in France (List Price, $51/375mL, Store price $30/375mL). I found that it had soft hay-like flavour, not grassy at all, it was drier and warm but with a definite floral sweetness that worked well with the dessert.
The Sofitel, being owned by the French Accor group have enlisted, under license, Lenôtre to provide desserts and cakes for its hotels, they look stunning, particularly the signature Frambrosier, which looks like a giant pink lamington topped with fresh raspberries and a raspberry sugar swirl. Within the gayest dessert of all time are layers of sponge cake with a raspberry centre, covered in cream and then a pink coconut (I think it’s pink coconut anyway). Given that it’s a sponge cake with cream and a raspberry centre I was expecting something more like a molleaux which is an individual cake that has a liquid sauce centre that spills out across the plate when you cut into it. The frambrosier certainly had the potential for it. I’m still not sure if what we got was meant to be a molleaux because they were half frozen. The bottom and centre were practically solid with the top had just started to soften. I don’t know if you’ve ever frozen cream but it doesn’t work – large ice crystals form and when you cut into it, it splinters apart. At the very least, these desserts should be served only slightly chilled to show their true potential, and meet their hype.
The highlight of Thyme² has got to be Toby Graham’s wine list and the quite knowledgeable service he provides. Toby has been studying and working with wines for over 15 years and answered all of our questions quickly and with confidence, not only suggesting wines but explaining why he’d suggested them which for mark-ups like these is great because he can help narrow down the choices for you – sure all sommeliers should do this, it’s their job, but Toby does it well.
Let’s start with the Cuvee Bar. Every bar everywhere has an unwritten etiquette to follow and it’s always different but not unreasonable and usually boils down to how the manager of the establishment likes his or her staff to act, and that’s it – it’s a guide for the staff, not the patrons. May be it was me, I made the place look untidy or something, but if a customer wants to order a drink from the bar here, they’re promptly dismissed and told to take a seat before an order will be taken. Even if I try making an order I’m still told to take a seat for the waiter to come and take my order. It’s down right rude and even worse; the wait-staff aren’t very knowledgeable with their drinks unlike the bartender I had questions for who told me to go and sit down. Is your apple martini sour or sweet? Could I get a twist of lime instead of lemon? Would you mind not straining the ice from my cocktail? Every question the wait-staff gets that look puppies do when you poke your tongue out at them. Once they scamper off to ask the bartender, they come back and you have a follow-up question. The routine continues until you give up and say “I’ll just have a gin and tonic then” or your presented with a drink you didn’t want and it takes you a few sips to realise that the inept wait-staff have bought you the another table’s drinks; and their bill!
When you finally get your order, the way you want it, it’ll be easier to pay cash than try and charge the drinks to your room. I know it wasn’t this guys first time charging drinks to a room, he’d served me before, but from my seat you could tell he was struggling.
Thyme² is mainly setup for a buffet or as the Sofitelians like to call it, an ‘interactive experience'. I’ve mentioned before that the breakfasts there are great, for $30, serving you everything you’d want in a breakfast. The dinners seem to be the same. Miles and I didn’t have the buffet dinner when we were there, we did see it though. Couples with children, like seagulls taking turns ferrying overflowing plates of oysters, prawns and everything else they could scavenge back to their offspring. For $80 a head (wine not included) if you’ve got the mentality to eat your monies worth its probably good value but we felt like something smaller, so we went for the ala carte menu.
You can tell head chef Marshall Orton has planned for 90% of his clientelé to take the buffet option; it sure looked like they did. I only saw two other tables out of the full restaurant ordering off the menu and a queue for the seafood. The menu is short and has fairly simple dishes from and nothing you wouldn’t expect to see at a pub with the obligatory pad thai, t-bone with chips, fish (roast snapper) and a tandori chicken. It all seemed fairly pedestrian with only Miles’s meal served with any restaurant flare and by that I mean everything was stacked on top of each other. The current menu can be found on the website.
One nice touch was the appetizer that was served to us, a small ball of duck confit and orange marmalade served on a bed of lettuce. It tasted quite bland an uninteresting, but as it turns out they forgot the orange marmalade on ours. This wasn’t the only thing that was missing from the dishes we were served either. I ended up ordering the t-bone with “a roast tomato ragu and a creamy pepper sauce served with shoestring french fries”. The roast tomato ragu at least had tomato in it but it was just roughly diced fresh tomato in a warmed up pasta sauce – there was no way these tomatoes could have ever seen the inside of an oven; there wasn’t even the slightest hint of caramlisation any good roasted tomato has. The fries seemed to be of the McCain variety, either deep fried at too low a temperature or were left to defrost and get laden with water leaving them soggy. The pepper jus that was served was honestly very nice, rich thick and concentrated with steak, balsamic vinegar and rosemary flavours and would have gone very well with the roasted tomato ragu, if it had had roast tomato in it. Note that I said it was a pepper jus and not a creamy pepper sauce? Guess what was missing. I find it difficult to believe that a restaurant of this size and supposed calibre can deliver very basic dishes so far removed from the menu.
Miles also had the beef. A 120 day grain fed Darling Downs beef filet served with Parisian style butter on green beans and a potato cake. It was well presented, stacked a good six inches high with the same jus that accompanied my steak, minus the pepper, drizzled around the side. The report on it was generally positive, although the potato was a little under done.
To counter balance the average food were some excellent wines, chosen by the Sommelier, Toby Graham, to fill out the wine list. For the main I chose an ‘04 Wantirna Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot (List Price $112, Store Price $60-$70). The wine itself is quite nice and is more complex than you’d expect from just a Cab Sav Merlot, and that’s probably because there’s actually some Cab Franc and Petit Verdot in the bottle too. Overall, the wine has a nice blackcurrant to mulberry flavour with the classic merlot dusty finish. If you’re looking for it in a store, Wantirna Estate is the one with the Michael Leunig cartoons on the labels.
When it came to dessert, I wanted a bottle of something else to go with our Lenôtre Frambrosier’s so I asked Toby for a recommendation. There was the obligatory Noble One, but I thought that the overpowering honey in it would kill the delicate raspberries and cream in the dessert, Toby agreed and recommended the 2005 Grande Maison Semillon Sauvignon Blanc Muscadelle from Monbazillac in France (List Price, $51/375mL, Store price $30/375mL). I found that it had soft hay-like flavour, not grassy at all, it was drier and warm but with a definite floral sweetness that worked well with the dessert.
The Sofitel, being owned by the French Accor group have enlisted, under license, Lenôtre to provide desserts and cakes for its hotels, they look stunning, particularly the signature Frambrosier, which looks like a giant pink lamington topped with fresh raspberries and a raspberry sugar swirl. Within the gayest dessert of all time are layers of sponge cake with a raspberry centre, covered in cream and then a pink coconut (I think it’s pink coconut anyway). Given that it’s a sponge cake with cream and a raspberry centre I was expecting something more like a molleaux which is an individual cake that has a liquid sauce centre that spills out across the plate when you cut into it. The frambrosier certainly had the potential for it. I’m still not sure if what we got was meant to be a molleaux because they were half frozen. The bottom and centre were practically solid with the top had just started to soften. I don’t know if you’ve ever frozen cream but it doesn’t work – large ice crystals form and when you cut into it, it splinters apart. At the very least, these desserts should be served only slightly chilled to show their true potential, and meet their hype.
The highlight of Thyme² has got to be Toby Graham’s wine list and the quite knowledgeable service he provides. Toby has been studying and working with wines for over 15 years and answered all of our questions quickly and with confidence, not only suggesting wines but explaining why he’d suggested them which for mark-ups like these is great because he can help narrow down the choices for you – sure all sommeliers should do this, it’s their job, but Toby does it well.
Kangarila Road Zinfandel
26 Jan 2008 01:37 AM
Zinfandel is a less common varietal of
wine in Australia having originated in the USA where most of our
wines have an origin in Europe. To me it has the flavours of a good
Shiraz with black-current and some spicy notes like cinnamon and
clove but the wine can still maintain a lightness like a Pinot
because of the grape's high sugar content. That's probably got
something to do with this particular Zinfandel having come from the
McLaren Vale which is typically
hot and dry compared to the cooler and wetter conditions in the
Barossa Valley. A
Zinfandel from the Barossa (not that I think they produce Zinfandel
there because it isn't it's native conditions) would have an even
lighter flavour, not as much black-current and more raspberry. It's
in the $30-$50 range, so it's a little pricey but for those of you
who don't like the big alcohol punch of a Shiraz but want the
black-current flavours you really should give it a try. I had it
with a bbq t-bone and a blue cheese sauce so it can stand up to
some strong flavours in your food and would go equally as well with
roasted red meat or almost any meat that's been grilled. Keep in
mind however, even though it doesn't have a heavy flavour, it's
still got a heavy alcohol content. This one was 15%
