Benny Roff's Borsch, Vodka and Tears (Hardie Grant Books), is the drink and food book from the eponymous Melbourne bar and restaurant. Subtitled "Food to drink with", it is as much about vodka as recipes for the Polish and other eastern European dishes they serve.
This tasting turned up some expensive but delicious chardonnays, the best having a few years bottle age. Cellaring is always worthwhile with a carefully made chardonnay as they develop wonderful tertiary characters undreamed of in a simpler, younger wine.
Gewurztraminer has a similar rich, mouthfilling intensity to pinot gris but generally has more character. It goes particularly well with Asian food and especially dishes flavoured with ginger. Some of the bigger, drier ones are versatile with a range of dishes.
Rosés, well chilled, are ideal for summer. Make the most of them while the good weather lasts.
Rosé is the ultimate summer wine, light-hearted, charming to look at in the glass, and easy with salads and light summer food.
There's something frivolous about rosés - their varying shades of pink, hints of red berries, often slight sweetness and crisp finishes make them ideal with lunch or a light evening meal.
A refreshing, mouthfilling rosé is the quintessential summer wine - pretty, lively and often frivolous.
Beet leaves beaut greens
The pinot noir glut, due to oversupply, high prices and the recession, may be difficult for producers, but it means consumers can sometimes find good, drinkable pinot at affordable prices, like the Mt Hector in this tasting.
From a tropical grass to a rare luxury spice to a food that sustained the poor, sugar has made some people rich while others have been exploited. Charmian Smith looks at the bittersweet history of sugar.
Sugar makes food and drinks taste good and it gives us energy. But can you have too much of a good thing, asks Charmian Smith?
English is full of sugary terms of endearment - honey, sweetheart, sugar, sweetie - that indicate how deeply ingrained is our liking for sweetness. Sugary things are promised as a treat or reward, but they can also make us feel guilty - how many sweet desserts are described as decadent, wicked or sinful? It's not surprising there are so many conflicting messages about sweet things when you consider the tensions behind the scenes. Charmian Smith takes a peek behind the current sugar debate and finds a cautionary tale.
Omega-3 is one of today's nutritional buzz words, touted as good for all manner of ills. Charmian Smith takes a closer look at this essential fatty acid, sorts through the hype and gets back to basics.
Jessica Godfrey's straightforward How to make really good coffee (Random House and Caffe L'Affare, spiral bound, $27.99) briefly covers general information about coffee, roasting, blending and storing but goes into detail about espresso and recipes for various types of coffee - ristretto, long black, latte, cappuccino, flat white and others.
Matani and Michelle Schaaf, from Tonga, show how to make 'ota ika, Tongan-style raw fish.
There's a huge variety of fish species in our waters, but we are so used to blue cod and sole fillets that we often don't explore some of the other types that are sometimes available.
Languorous summer picnics call for roses - light, simple wines with hints of red fruits and mostly slightly sweet.
A serious sparkling rose like the new Quartz Reef, on the other hand, can be seductively delicious to linger over at any time.
Several influential wine journalists from Asia were guests at the Central Otago Pinot Noir Celebration held in Queenstown recently, among them Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW, of Singapore, Tomoko Ebisawa, of Japan, and Jeanie Cho Lee MW, of Hong Kong.
There are many styles of pinot gris, from those lush with tropical fruit and the heat of high alcohol, to tighter, drier styles that are better with food, and even toasty, oaky wines that have been barrel fermented and left on lees that give complexity and creamy nuttiness.
Flavours of home is a series of recipes from around the world cooked by people at home in Otago. This week Jeyn Ganesan, from Malaysia, shows us how to make her family's favourite Indian-style mutton curry.
Roses tend to be summer wines, lovely when chilled and enjoyed with lunch on a sunny day, or with a light meal on a warm evening.
