Events

San Remo Diamonds Dinner

- Alex Leave a comment

Australia VS New Zealand
photo by Stanley Yeo

Disclaimer:  I attended the dinner as a guest of San Remo.

Last night, San Remo, one of the major sponsors of the Diamonds, Australia’s national netball team, hosted a dinner in the ballroom at St Mark’s College.  This was in honour of the Wednesday night Diamonds’ match against New Zealand in the current test series.

In addition to lots of sporty types, including the very tall Diamonds themselves, the winners of San Remo’s recent Diamond Dinner were in attendance, as were eight bloggers*, including me, from around Australia.

The evening began with drinks and canapés on the lawn outside Downer House. Despite weather in Adelaide being spectacular over the weekend, yesterday wasn’t quite so warm so we moved up to the ballroom quite quickly. I was sitting next to Diamond Laura Geitz and Stephanie Greene, the CEO of Netball SA. For someone whose PE reports used to read “Alexandra tries hard” this was pretty scary stuff! But thankfully most of the talk during the evening was on the food. Naturally, pasta was dominant!

The menu had been put together by Adam Swanson and had a very personal, family focus for him. The dishes were all ones he’d grown up eating and even the bread and incredible olives that were on the table were a family affair.

We started with a prawn cocktail served with angel hair pasta. This was a bit different because the pasta was served cold. I know that if I tried to serve cold pasta like it would stick together in one pasta like lump, but Swanson had no such problems. For main course, we had a choice of barramundi with pea and dill risoni or pork and veal polpette with ragu and bucatini. I chose the polpette (Adam’s nonna’s recipe) – this was quite possibly the largest plate of pasta I’ve ever seen! I made sure I ate my way through the tasty meatballs but was, unfortunately, defeated by rather a lot of the pasta.

Dessert was a perfect foil to the rich main course – a simple plate of fresh fruit served with blood orange gelato and almond bread. Now I’d describe myself as someone who really doesn’t like orange so this is something I’d never order, left to my own devices. But the blood orange gelato was amazing – tart, creamy and sitting perhaps more on the lemon end of the citrus scale than orange – and sat really well with the strawberries, blueberries, pineapple, rockmelon and watermelon. I would have been quite happy just having the gelato!

The evening wrapped up quite early – the Diamonds had only just flown in from Perth and have a big day of preparation today before their match tomorrow night. And I just needed to go home and snooze of that huge plate of pasta …

*The bloggers were: Lucy from Diminishing Lucy, Kelly from Be a Fun Mum, Sarah from Ah the Possibilities, Emily from Fuss Free Cooking, Catherine from Adventures with Kids, Cheri from Ms Critique, and, last but not least, Debbie from Adelaide’s own d bites.

Sapporo Beer Launch

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Disclaimer: I was a guest at the launch party.

Last Thursday night, Coopers held the Adelaide launch of its new beer, Sapporo.  Wait, nothing new about Sapporo, right?  It’s a Japanese beer first brewed in 1876 so why the launch?  Because Sapporo is now being brewed, under licence, right here in South Australia by Coopers.

To celebrate this, beer lovers from across Adelaide gathered at the Robin Hood in Norwood to sample the ‘new’ beer and snack on some very tasty Japanese inspired treats.  The pub’s beer garden was decked out with a Sapporo theme, including a wall made up of Sapporo maneki neko (the Japanese beckoning cats).  Unsurprisingly there was no shortage of Sapporo, but there were other drinks on offer – even to the extent of beer themed cocktails!  The finger food was all Japanese – including huge newspaper cones of tempura, crab and noodle cakes and prawns served with a coconut rice.

Dr Tim Cooper welcomed us all and, in launching the beer, told us a little about how it all came about.  If you’re keen on beer you’ll know that one of the most important factors in a beer’s taste is the water used in brewing it.  This is one of the reasons that, very often, a beer brewed under licence doesn’t taste quite as good as the ‘real thing’.  Dr Cooper said that a lot of research (and no doubt beer tasting!) had gone into ensuring that the locally brewed Sapporo tastes as good as the Japanese original.  Mr Owata, from Sapporo Breweries, also spoke, encouraging us all to have a good time and “drink lots of Sapporo beer”.

And I’m sure with the hot Australian summer being just around the corner that won’t be a problem!

Cabernet Day

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photo thanks to the Great Wine Adventure

date: Thurs 1 Sept 2011

You may remember that late last year I attended the launch of the Qwoff Boys’ Great South Australian Wine Adventure. It’s obviously been a successful year for Justin & Andre because the wine adventure has gone national … that’s right, it’s now the Great Wine Adventure.

They used Cabernet Day (1 Sept, didn’t you know?) as the launch day and a party was duly held at Qwoff HQ. To drink, Cabernets and to eat, Burger Theory burgers. The Spring weather meant it was even mild enough to spend time outside!

The range of Cabernets out for tasting was really impressive (I think I heard the number 200 bandied about) and Riedel Australia supplied Cabernet Vinum glasses for us all to get the most out of the experience.

I tasted 10 wines – taking the opportunity to sample wines I’d heard of but not had the chance to try. It’s unsurprising, to me, that the wines I rated most highly typically had some age on them, such as the Zema Estate Family Selection 2005, the Reschke Empyrean 2004 and the Jim Barry Benbournie 2004. Unfortunately, you do also rather pay for that bit of age on your bottle of Cabernet …

However, it wasn’t all silly priced wines. The very last wine I tried (at the suggestion of someone else, so I wasn’t the only one enjoying it!) was the Oliver’s Taranga 2009 Cabernet – which you can pick up at the cellar door only for around $30*. This wine more than held its own against company that was often both illustrious and considerably more expensive.

As always, a fab evening, with lovely wines and a great opportunity to catch up with quite a few Adelaide twitter buddies!

* This coming Sunday (18 Sept) Oliver’s Taranga hosts the Sagrantino Sessions, complete with wood oven pizzas and the opportunity to taste more than just the Cabernet.  Get yourself down to McLaren Vale!