Sundays
Sunday's, a family day that has turned into a day to cook, laugh and create together. We love to spark creativity in Marlowe and try to teach her that creativity has no bounds.
One thing we do is create food challenges, kind of like Master Chef in a way, we set ingredients challenges, full noise make the weirdest flavour pizza challenge (this has ended with us eating fairy bread and ham pizza for dinner) and test new strange combos like fried chicken and ice cream sandwiches.
Its fun and often ends in chaos, a food fight and a very hypo barky wee puppy. We have also started to use this time to bring my old restaurant recipes back to life. Opening my dropbox a few weeks ago and scrolling through 100's of recipes that I have used in restaurants in France, Australia, Canada and here at home in Auckland made me a little sad to think they are just gathering digital dust.
So we thought why not cook them together, bring the memories back to life? As a chef I always dreamed of being able to serve my food on plates that really made sense to the story of the dish, not a mass produced plate with no heart and story behind it. For the first recipe, I had the perfect plate in mind, one with a story that worked in harmony with the recipe.
We woke early and hit the markets, gathered fresh shiitake, line caught snapper, cauliflower from my dad's garden, chives from ours and some corn we froze from summer. The recipe is one I cooked a lot in France and also in New Zealand at The Tasting Shed, it is simple and absolutely delicious.
On our last camping trip up North, we gathered white/golden sand from the banks of the east coast. I have been using this to make up my own blend of clay we call sandstone. The clay holds memories of camping trips as a family, the texture showcases the beauty of the east coast and the form/design of the plate is simple and natural. This felt like the perfect combo, a plate made with sand from the beaches the fish was caught from, it just made sense. After shooting this recipe, we decided to name this plate Plat Du Jour. I love strange and unique names, names that make you wonder, but the name Plat Du Jour, for me, made sense, this was a recipe that started in France and truly came to life here in New Zealand.
I'm excited to bring my old recipes back to life, to share them with my family and also with you. Let us know in the comments below if you would like the recipe
