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.
