A little less conversation, a little more eating

Inspiration: Good Food and Wine Show

Created: Mon 16 Jun 2003 23:34

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A week ago, Jud, Lara, Paul, Alice and I attended the annual Good Food and Wine show. Again, everyone's favourite English chef (let's face it, he's better than Jamie Oliver!), Ainsley Harriot, was there to cook - this time around it was low fat meals in minutes. Ainsley figures that fat tastes great, so, if you want to cook delicious meals without much fat, you need to replace the fat with big flavours - low fat does not have to mean bland. I must admit, those meals looked yummo - and his blend of dancing, cooking, and fun is inspiring.

After watching Ainsley, we pretended that we were classy by attending a wine tasting. We listened somewhat patiently as the three wine-obsessed guys at the front talked about how drinking wine starts with sight - looking at the colour of the wine, and the way that the light refracts when it hits the liquid. And that, after that, you need to smell the wine, by swirling the glass, to ensure that the surface area is maximised (making the smell as strong as possible). Only after this should you be ready to taste it, and tasting doesn't just involve throwing the glass back and swallowing - oh no! I must admit that after listening to all this for a good fifteen minutes, and still not actually having any wine hit my lips, I got a little impatient, and may just have taken a sly sip whilst I thought no-one was watching.

My pick of the show in terms of creative ideas with food would have to be the Culinary Wizardry stall, who had chocolate shaped as smallgoods - there was white chocolate cheese, dark chocolate salami, or perhaps some milk chocolate kabana would be more to your liking. These products reminded me of the fabulous book that I got for my birthday; from which I made the chocolate mice.

One of my other favourites was the Haigh's Chocolates stall (believe it or not, I'm actually not really a chocoholic). A gorgeous lady named Evelyn sat for the whole day and hand rolled chocolates, and I could have stood and watched her for hours, because I was fascinated by the process. The way it's done is similar to the old-skool method of making boiled lollies (another thing I love watching - down at Chadstone at the Suga store, or even at the confectioners at Sovereign Hill).

I finished off the day by grabbing myself a big cup of yoghurt (yogg-urt, certainly not yoe-gurt - yes, I'm talking to you Lara) with berries and passionfruit - muuuuch better than chocolate! It was absolutely as delicious as it looked - and not even Paul, who continually mentioned the fact that my stomach was currently filled with a jumbled-up mix of salsa, tea, chocolate, wine, chips, chilli, nuts, fruit, rice, and more, could put me off.

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