Witty, informative and tasty as a ma’a fucker – The boy

Apologies for the lack of posting yesterday. I was being fed and wined at Elements Cafe in Lyall Bay for the boys Xmas function.

The event is called ‘What’s Cooking?’ and is held a couple of times a month. It’s a relaxed cooking class where the owner of the restaurant, Scott (who is a chef) demonstrates the cooking and feeds us immediately after with dishes prepared in the kitchen (here’s one I prepared earlier!). While we are waiting for the food to arrive the wine speaker Drew tells us about the wine match for the meal.
It’s all done with a large amount of wit and humour, Drew is American and Scott is Australian so there are a lot of digs at their own cultures and comparisons made to the Kiwi culture, it’s highly instructional at the same time.

Scott offers to unveil any cooking secrets we want to know.

He wants cooking to be fun and easy, and tries to make us see that it doesn’t have to be as hard as it sounds in the recipes. “Blanche means plunge into hot water and refresh means plunge into cold water”!

The main course was pork belly, I don’t eat pork so some beautiful gurnard fish was prepared for me along with the jersey benne potatoes and asparagus (Scott raved about Jersey Benne potatoes, it’s something all of you who live outside of New Zealand are missing out on!). The fish was especially delicious. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. The wine match with this meal was a red, I don’t drink red wine but Drew was still very fun to listen to. He is REALLY into wine, he taught me that Malbec, a type of wine I’ve never heard of is “sexy”.

Desert was a meringue with cream, strawberries, and sugar syrup. It was so delicious! Even the boy liked it and he’s not a big fan of sweets. Some of the other guys in our group loved the meringue so much they stole the demo meringue off the table and scoffed it without knowing how old it was.

The wine match was a Coney “Ragtime” Riesling. It was delicious! Highly drinkable, and I don’t usually like wine.

In all it was a great night. I didn’t know what to expect when we went in but I was very impressed by everything including the decor.

Be sure to check out Elements Cafe next time you’re in Lyall Bay.