Turning Japanese - Global Wanderings in My Kitchen

I visited Japan a few times years ago, and really loved how they did Sukiyaki, Teppanyaki & Yakitori. I'd travelled there several times with my husband, David, and once on business. I persuaded our Japanese minder for the business trip to drop the fancy hotel restaurants and instead suggested that we head out on a crawl of Kyoto's Yakitori & Sushi bars. My Australian travelling mates loved it.

Although I love cooking, Japanese is not my specialty at home - David & our daughter, Kat, do most of the Japanese. In fact Sukiyaki became one of David's signature dishes, along with Gado Gado & Saganaki. He's relying mostly on memory of Sukiyaki restaurant dishes from his two visits to Japan with a bit of help from the Complete Asian Cookbook.

We loved going to the Japanese Teppanyaki restaurant in Surfer's Paradise on Queensland's Gold Coast. And of course in Wollongong, there's the Fuji Yama Tepan Restaurant, the ever popular Roppongi (bookings essential) and more recently Moon's in the northern suburb of Woonona.

Kat, has been studying Japanese for about 6 years & acquired a taste for Japanese food, especially Sushi & Sushi Train restaurants. She's often helped out at the Japanese food stall at her school's annual Great Fete. 

When not nibbling on Pocky, Kat often snacks on Nori (dried seaweed sheets) and suddenly we find there's none left for the Sushi ! 

Fortunately David is also a Sushi-maker, with a Sushi mat & all the ingredients - now available from all our local supermarkets - so he teams up with Kat for Sushi-making, for those "bring a plate" functions.

Last year Kat spent a few weeks in Japan on a school excursion, which included a Japanese cooking lesson where they learnt how to make Okonomiyaki - Japanese Pancakes. We are also expecting to host a Japanese exchange student in March 2010 - so we may learn more about Japanese foods.

Recently @mqtodd tweeted about a great blog post on Japanese food : 10 Cool Japanese Foods. My favourite Japanese Food Blog would have to be Shiuoka Gourmet - the cycling gourmet - here's my fav post - and I really love his Bento Box postings too.

But of course there are now others blogging about Japanese food in the English language : 

• About Food by a Japanese Seattlelite
• Adventures in Bento Making
• Gaijin Gourmet
• Japanese Home Cooking Shizu
• Japan Food Addict
• Japan Navigator
• Just Bento
• Just Hungry
• Kyoto Japanese Cooking Class
• Mrs Donabe's Rustic Japanese Kitchen
• Naoko's Cooking Japanese Style
• She, The Epicurious

I actually only have one Japanese cookery book - plus my copy of the Complete Asian Cookbook does have a reasonable Japanese section. Fortunately I have collected many cuttings from magazines, all now carefully filed in the Japanese section of my Asian folders :

• Chicken Yakitori
• Curries - Japan style
• Donburi
• Gyoza
• Hotpot - Japan style
• Miso Soup
• Okonomiyaki - Japanese Pancakes
• Ponzu Chicken
• Rice based dishes with chicken or vegetarian
• Salads - Japan style
• Sukiyaki
• Sushi & Temaki
• Soba & Udon Noodles
• Tempura
• Teppanyaki
• Teriyaki Beef, Chicken, Fish, Pork, Prawns  etc etc
• Tonkatsu

And of course Taste, my fav Australian foodie site, features an extensive Japanese collection

Wandering Egyptian Spice Bazaar in Istanbul

We found amazing Turkish Delight and Spices at the Egyptian Spice Bazaar in Istanbul.

See the full gallery on Posterous

A Tess Mallos Slow Food Easter Weekend - Garithes and Pastitio

I love the Easter holiday long weekend in Australia - cool weather kicking in and the chance to do some slow food without the pressures of the usual weekends.

Good Friday had kicked off with my Significant Other doing his speciality Garithes (Prawns) me Feta (& Tomatoes) from Tess Mallos's legendary Greek Cookbook - see Big Oven - Garithes Yiouvetsi blog post - for close approximation - based on Tess Mallos Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook - I am not sure why she gave the recipes different names. I am a great fan of Tess Mallos and have her Cooking  Moroccan book in addition to these Greek & Middle Eastern cookbooks.

In fact Garithes me Feta, aka Garithes Yiouvetsi, is not really a slow food item - but is so very yum. David drew his inspiration from Yorgies where we first enjoyed Garithes. Yorgies was a ( long since departed) restaurant in the village of Coledale in Wollongong's north  - where the hugely popular Chedo's (Mediterranean - Croatian influences) is located (Chedo is the husband of TV reporter Stella Lauri who can be seen doing maitre d'  & waiting at tables after she's driven back from the Sydney TV studios !)

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For our family Easter Sunday Night Dinner I had planned Prosciutto, Basil & Boconncini Bites as starters - to be followed by Tuscan Bean Soup with Crusty Cob Bread from one of our local Thirroul Vietnamese Bakeries.

As mains I settled on Pastitio from Tess Mallos's Greek Cookbook - which is quite similar to the Rick Stein version used by Almost Bourdain in her recent blog post. This is one of my favourite foodie blogs & I like her foodie pics - a blogger's beautiful pics. It's nevertheless probably a little more stylish than the home foodie blogs over at Jamie Oliver's web page - which have an honesty about them. In fact I think that's great when you consider Jamie's Ministry of Food campaign to get folks back to home cooking.

On Sunday nights I usually do Mains & Nan brings along a dessert - this Sunday she also brought along one of our nephews - who was at a loose end with the rest of his family interstate or overseas.

I quickly discovered that the Prosciutto, Basil & Boconncini Bites (from Australian Gourmet Traveller - Feb 2001) were going to be Greek Style with Haloumi when Saffron's, our local Deli in Thirroul, had already run out of baby Bocconcini. Fortunately I had Haloumi in the fridge. These Bites are so easy - take a strip of prosciutto and place a small piece of Baby Boconcini or Haloumi on it - follow with a basil leaf (our's are fresh from our garden) - then a quarter of artichoke heart. Roll up and secure with toothpick. I did about a dozen and let them sit in the fridge until later (Pic 3). They can be grilled - but I was going to bake them (on a baking tray lined with baking paper) along with the Pastitio - checking every 3 to 4 minutes and turning a couple of times. They need to be warmed through - but I don't like them crispy.

Having done the Bites I moved onto the Tuscan Bean Soup - from the Oz Family Circle Magazine - a few years back. Such a shame that one of the older Oz foodie mags, FC,  is no longer available as a monthly mag - but sometimes there are still special winter & Christmas editions.

So I started chopping 2 onions, 1 carrot, 2 celery sticks & 2 zucchini. Heating 2 tablespoons of Olive Oil ( I used less than the 3 specified) and sauteing all the veges, except the zucchini, along with 2 bay leaves from the small bay tree in a pot outside our backdoor, as well as some shakes of dried sage- for about 5 to 10 minutes. Finally throwing in the chopped zucchinis as well as a 400g can of diced Tomatoes along with a drained & rinsed can each of Borlotti Beans & Cannellini Beans (400g each) (Pic 1). Then simmering for about 20-30 minutes. (Pics 2 & 3). Should be served with shaved parmesan.

I then started on the Pastitio from the Tess Mallos legendary Greek Cookbook. I had cheated & done a huge batch of meat sauce a couple of days earlier - reserving some for tonight's Pastitio. Likewise with the macaroni. So it was fairly easy to assemble the pasta & meat sauce layers - although I had to separate the individual pieces of cooked macaroni that always seem to clump together when you store them in the fridge. Pastitio is similar to Lasagne - however the Bechamel Sauce is a lot lighter - as it doesn't have the cheese like in Lasagne. With the Bechamel almost done I discovered that I should have added 1/2 cup to the meat sauce before I had topped it with the second of the pasta layers - oops - too late. So I just poured the Bechamel over the pasta - hoping for the best (Pic 2). 

At this point I decided that we really needed a tossed salad - so sweetly asked David would he mind throwing one together - his are usually better than mine anyway. I handed him a couple of fresh basil leaves from our vegie garden. The salad smelled so good (Pic 4), and included black olives from the tree in our front garden which we had home pickled. 

We gobbled up the Prosciutto Basil & Haloumi Bites & loved the Tuscan Bean Soup - always a favourite - although as usual it really tasted better the next day - note to self - do this a day or two in advance next time.

Then a longish break before the Pastitio was ready (Pic 5) - you have to leave it for 5-10 minutes before cutting & serving - the same as you do with Quiche & Lasagne. I served it at the table with the tossed salad as my tiny kitchen had filled up with the dishwasher already running - and so I was running out of space to plate up. The Red Wine ? Tatler's Archie's Paddock Shiraz (Pic 6) that I had picked up on a recent trip to the Hunter with the nephew's parents - it really complemented the Pastitio. Seconds of Pastitio were served up & the tossed salad demolished.

Another long break.

Nan had brought along Passionfruit Slice - similar to the version in www.Taste.com.au - but without passionfruit in the top layer. Nan had nearly given up on finding her recipe so we nearly had passionfruit iced cupcakes. Anyway the Passionfruit Slice was so yum - I have never seen it disappear so quickly (Pic 7 - half demolished !) Then a phone call from London from another of Nan's grandchildren - a wonderful way to finish the evening.

hmm - and everyone just too full to eat the mini Turkish Delight Easter Eggs I had put aside for later on !

 

Knowledge Capture in the Kitchen Clouds

 

Are you one of those foodies who collects recipes from everywhere ? Magazines ? Family members ? Friends ? Foodie web sites & blogs ?

That's me. I pile them and then periodically file them, plus cull a few.

In particular I've made the effort to collect family favourites for my daughter, Kat, from my Mother (Nan) & my Mother-in-law (Nanna). I gave them each one of those dinky A5 "My Favourite Recipe" folders, which came with preprinted cards to be filled in. Nanna busily typed away on the supplied cards using her trusty older manual typewriter. Luckily so, as Nanna has become very frail, hard of hearing and now lives in another state.  How easy it is to lose family favourites in such circumstances. We also nearly lost Nan before her family favourites were collected - in the end I hand wrote many of them myself, while Nan spent months recovering in hospital from lifesaving cardiovascular surgery.

And my sister-in-law, the Apprentice Chef's Mother, was stunned to find out that I had some of the treasured family favourites "captured" from Nanna, in a little A5 "My Favourite Recipe" folder. So I was able to photocopy & pass them on. I've even put a couple on Facebook to share with the widely scattered family.

Over the years the Apprentice's Chef's Mother & I learned that Nanna's tablespoon equals 2 metric 20ml sized tablespoons & her dessert spoon equals 1 metric 20mil sized tablespoon. So, along the way, we both experienced a few very runny disasters with Nanna's usually superb Mango Cream Tart due to our adding insufficient gelatine. But we followed the recipe - we wailed. That was before we did some knowledge sharing & jointly figured out how to convert Nanna's quantities to standard Australian metric's. Disasters ceased.

With so many foodie web sites and blogs, we are now very blessed with the technology to do knowledge sharing in the kitchen, compared with the old days of laboriously handwriting onto scraps of paper or in exercise books. My daughter, Kat, keeps muttering that my own collection of older handwritten items in their foolscap sized exercise book are at risk of fading away. Dropping hints that the contents need to be transferred to one of our pc's & maybe even online - perhaps on one of those nice foodie Cloud apps - so helpful. OK - I've made a start at Taste.com where you can your create own online recipe book - but I've usually been too busy to make much progress. Like Mother like Daughter perhaps ? 

However there is also the nagging question - you could invest a lot of time setting up online repositories of family favourites & other saved for future culinary experiments - but how can you be sure that they won't disappear without warning - poof ? Especially as Taste.com does seem to have set up a regular recipe deletions initiative - find out more here

Like when my carefully saved SAI Global favourites list, with associated "what's changed" email updates, underwent a massive bi-section. They changed their business model - after 6 years previously with no changes. Another victim of the Global Financial Crisis in fact. Now my list of favourites was too long for their new model - so they arbitrarily chopped it in two for me - before I could choose which sublists should sit where. Much muttering and hours rearranging online.....

Interestingly a recent New Scientist article, provocatively headlined "Digital Doomsday",  questioned the limited longevity of electronic media and basically pointed back to keeping paper records as being more likely to resist the vagaries of ageing. Huh ? Heresy ?  "A century or so after a major catastrophe, little of the digital age will remain beyond what's written on paper.... "Even the worst kind of paper can last more than 100 years," says Season Tse, who works on paper conservation at the Canadian Conservation Institute. The oldest surviving "book" printed on paper dates from AD 868, he says. It was found in a cave in north-west China in 1907."

Hence you keep hard copies as backups - and the kitchen library grows and grows.

 

 

 

Saik Chrouk Ch'ranouitk - Kat's Khmer Kitchen inspired Knowledge Sharing

The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon was my first big cookbook purchase - made while I still at Uni - just. The Australasian Institute of Mining & Metallurgy awarded me with a cheque for topping the class in my second last year of my Metallurgy Degree - but it was not presented until I was writing my thesis in my final year. Too late to spend on textbooks.

So I indulged myself and lashed out on Charmaine Solomon's 500 + page culinary encyclopaedic work. A big step up from the ubiquitous little high school textbook aka the Commonsense Cookbook.

What I loved about the Complete Asian Cookbook, was the way Charmaine Solomon shared her knowledge - not just on how to cook the food - but also how to serve, what utensils to use and where to buy unusual ingredients. But more than that - I loved the stories she shared in introducing each chapter on the different countries & regions covered. It made it all seem more real.

My favourite pages, in the Indian section especially, are easily identified by their stains and splashmarks - with handwritten comments indicating likes or dislikes - successes or DNCA (do not cook again). There was the time I smoked out the whole block of units with chili fumes when experimenting on Szechwan Chicken (p393) without an exhaust range hood.

We'd travelled to Angkor Wat - Siem Reap in Cambodia, so it was inevitable that my then 13 year old daughter, Kat, would choose a Khmer dish for a school Technology & Design assessment task encompassing cooking "something" with noodles. While the Indian-Pakistan & Chinese chapters in the old faithful "Encyclopaedia" were huge at nearly 100 pages each, the section on Cambodia and Laos was too slender. Dismissed too were the magazines I'd brought back from Cambodia, just in case, for a future school assignment. And there aren't too many Cambodian foodie blogs, other than Phenonmenon. The Cambodian section of my Asian clippings folder consisted of just 2 dishes : Beef Salad and Nhoam Moan Chicken Salad. Nothing at Taste.com either. So past all of these, and to the Net to find something suitable : settling on "Saik Chrouk Ch'ranouitk" aka Khmer Coconut Pork Skewers.

Kat was adventurous even then, in her approach to cooking and she's fiercely independent. Nevertheless I was called on periodically and a whole lot of knowledge sharing took place in our tiny kitchen that night eg how to timetable, adapting from grilling to stir fry-simmer etc.

All served on the requisite bed of noodles & finished with coriander leaves. It looked and tasted great - although be warned - it's heavy on garlic !

Kat learnt some Asian cuisine from me & I learnt from her, that we can't dictate to Gen Y how & what resources should be used, plus it's okay to innovate beyond prescriptive guidelines, if that makes sense. That applies inside and outside the kitchen. 

A metaphor for knowledge sharing, experimenting & innovation between the generations ?

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Global Wanderings in My Kitchen Learning Lab

The brother-in-law, @llocklee, refers to me as the Librarian - and I guess I do like to collect / organise information for fast finding & later re-use. That includes my foodie interests. The books are all catalogued in LibraryThing and the cuttings piled, then filed in bulging folders.

It's something I inherited from my mother - she tells me that she was forced to give up Asian food when pregnant with me - but ever afterward she has enjoyed experimenting. I remember her favourites seemed to be the 1960's Flemings supermarket magazines & the 1950's Aerophos cookbook (both of these early Australian foodie ref's were surprisingly international in coverage compared with the Commonsense Cookery Book & can still be picked up on Ebay from time to time). She also did traditional Aussie style including a mean Devilled Sausages, that I'd almost forgotten until I came across the remarkably similar 'Mrs Adams's Savoury Sausages' in Kylie Kwong's "Recipes & Stories" (p 40). Coincidentally amazing is that Mum is a Mrs Adams too.

I can't say that Mum specifically taught me how to cook, rather, I absorbed from her the enjoyment of  experimenting with new ideas. Now in her 70's, she's still experimenting with newly discovered surprises, brought over for our regular Sunday night family dinners. I do the mains & Mum does the desserts plus "sweet treats" for the week, for my teen, Kat.

And of course Mum also has numerous cookbooks, folders & cuttings stashed around her home. I sometimes say that Mum was born before her time - with the now exploding global foodie scene. Last weekend we took her to the Mecca Bah in Canberra after the twilight viewing of the Masterpieces from Paris Exhibition at the NGA. Tonight it's Nam's Vietnamese in Wollongong (one of the many Vietnamese), after the Wharf Theatre Revue's "Pennies from Kevin".

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A few of my favourite foodie websites :

• Mag & Newspaper foodie sites 
  • Taste.com - drawn from a number of Australian foodie Mags - even has my Masaman Chicken Pide - hot & spicy !
  • AWW Food / Cuisine.com.au / HomeLife / Australian Gourmet Traveller
  • BHG Oz / BHG USA
• TV foodie sites
  • ABC - Poh's Kitchen -  Secret Recipes - Surfing the Menu 
  • TEN - Ready Steady Cook 
  • LifeStyle Channel
  • SBS - Food
• Eating Out in Wollongong  - The Eating Out Map - Thirroul Seaside Art Festival (always yummy food) - (more than food ...  What's Up Wollongong / Viva La Gong / Shoalhaven Wine Trail / Southern Highlands Wineries )
• Maggie Beer / Donna Hay / Ben O'Donoghue / Curtis Stone / Elise Pascoe / Mietta's
• All Recipes / Good Recipes / My Recipes  / Recipezaar / WorldWide Gourmet / Korean Kitchen / Sydney Markets
• Cupcakes - AWW Food /Taste.com / All Recipes  / Recipezaar / Cupcakes.com / WhiteWings / Family Circle (USA)
• Supermarket foodie sites : Coles on Line / Woolworths / IGA
• Sold in Australia - Food product sites : Ayam / Barilla / Bega Cheese / Betty Crocker / BKK / Cadbury's / Capilano / Chang's / Cheesematters / CSR / Dairy Farmers / Devondale / Fonterra / Goodman Fielder / Gourmet Garden / Greens / Hakubaku Noodles / Keens / Kellogs / Kikkomans /  King Island Dairy /  Kraft / Lee Kum Kee / Market Fresh / Massel / MasterFoods / McCormicks / McKenzies / Nestle / Oriental (Obento) / Pandaroo / Pataks / Pauls / Philadelphia /  Queen Essences / Red Meat - The Main Meal / Riviana / Sanitarium / Sharwoods / Simply Great Meals / SPC Ardmona / Spice Bazaar / Sunbeam / Sunrice / The Butchers Voice / The Malaya / Vegeta / Western Star Butter / Whitewings / Yeo's

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And some of my favourite foodie blogs (in no particular order ...  )  

• From Australia  
  • Raspberri Cupcakes - so good - I RSS blog posts to Googlereader
  • One Green Acre
  • Australia Entertains
  • Cookbook Maniac
  • No More Cookbooks
  • Kulinarya Cooking Club - Sydney Based Filipino Foodie Bloggers : Kat /  Olive / Caroline / Peach / Cusinera / Asha / Malou / Cherrie / Trisha / Trissa
  • Tummy Rumble aka @Reemski's  I am obsessed with food - check out her bookshelf
  • The Food Zeitgeist - I love their list of Australian foodie blogs
  • Thoughts from Becca - Inside Cuisine
  • The Journal of a Girl Who Loves Food
  • Illawarra Food
  • Jenius
  • Not Quite Nigella
  • Tuscan Blog
  • A Delicious Year
  • 100 Miles of Food in the Hunter Valley
  • Life 's A Feast
  • The Informal Foodie
  • Abstract Gourmet
  • Pilu At Freshwater
  • Exclusively Food
  • At My Table
  • I Eat Therefore I Am
  • Lib.er.tine
  • Limes & Lycopene
  • Souvlaki for the Soul
  • The Food Blog
  • Foodtrail
  • Luke Nguyen's Vietnam & Mouthful from SBS 
  • Vanilla Slice (unrelated - pics from Ouyen's Great Australian Vanilla Slice Triumph) 
  • The Cookbook

• Beyond Australia  
  • Foodblogs - aggregates heaps of foodie blogs latest updates
  • HomeMades - "across the ditch"  by an Indonesian born Kiwi
  • Gusty Gourmet - another Kiwi foodie blog from "across the ditch"
  • A Slice of Cherry Pie - UK - listed in world's 50 best foodie blogs
  • Mainly Sweet - Delicious Delicious Delicious / DayDreamer Desserts
  • Frances Mayes' Journal / Parla Food - fr another Italian based American
  • Binnurs Turkish Cookbook / Turkish Cuisine
  • Pizza Goon
  • Phnomenon - from Cambodia
  • LaoCook - a Laotian based in Spain
  • Malaysia Best
  • Basta Masarup - from a Filippina in the US (& more from Philippines )
  • East Meets West - Singapore
  • Fuschia Dunlop
  • Greens and Chocolate
  • Food.People.Want
  • She, the Epicurious Girl - from Japan / Shizuoka Gourmet - cycling gourmet from Japan - I also RSS to Google Reader
  • My Korean Kitchen / Korean Food Recipes / Maangchi / Korean Food
  • The Spice Spoon - from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran & beyond
  • And Now for Something Completely Delicious
  • Salt Shaker - from Argentina
  • Refrigerator Soup Dot Com aka life is short - let's eat
  • Sailu's- simple Indian cooking with a focus on Andhra
  • The Wednesday Chef - fr New York - also listed in world's 50 best foodie blogs
  • Crocktease 
  • The Urban Spork
  • Cooking for Engineers - so very very different 

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These lists are eclectic - like my cook book collection at LibraryThing & even more so, my folders.

Serendipity - Storytelling of Wine and War - Le Maitre de Maison de Sa Cave a Sa Table

It was @Reemski who triggered it - not the Wine and War - but finally got me underway to list my family's library collections on LibraryThing. 

 And inevitably revealed, the books that I always meant to read, continually bobbing up and down in the overladen bookcases around our home.

Thus in the early weeks of 2010, and 70 years after the Axis invasion of France, I finally began to read "Wine & War" (E-Reader excerpt) an alternate view of WWII through the eyes of winelovers, Don & Petie Kladstrup. As described by The Wine Doctor, their book is a series of stories of survival under Occupation as told by many of the wine making families of France. It is these stories that predominate over the often awful military details described elsewhere. And also because of these unusual circumstances one man was able to gather the stories of wine and food of regional France.

The story starts in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps and just across the river from Salzburg, where I had first heard of its Eagles Nest during a trip to Austria in late 1981. We had peered up at it - barely visible so high was it - as our Guide told us of its history as Hitler's fortress. Really ...  just an interesting aside from our skiing holiday in the area near St Johann's am Pillersee in the Austrian Alps. WWII seemed so long ago to us back then, in our twenties, and yet in1981 these events at Berchtesgaden had occurred less than 40 years earlier.

The Kladstrups tell of the vast quantities of French Champagne and wine plundered & railed to Berchtesgaden, despite the efforts of many French to secret as much as possible away behind fake walls in their cellars.

In the opening page the Kladstrups describe the uncovering of half a million bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Mouton Rothschild & many other vintages recovered from Berchtesgaden in 1944 by Sergeant Bernard de Nonancourt & others in the French Army. And there were many, many other items stashed there - thus in reading "Wine & War", I began to appreciate Berchtesgaden's significance.

In fact it was the stories in "Wine & War", that made understanding life under the Occupation a closer reality. In movies we often see occcupied Paris, but less of the countryside, such as the Great Wine Regions of France. In "Wine & War" the family stories tell of yet another war after so many ... of taking the longer term view ...  of preserving the family's wine heritage & economy to be ready in the years after the  conflict ended. And also to comprehend the creation of a "borderless" Europe -  what would be later called the European Union - to avoid such wars in the future.

Memorable  stories for me were those of members of French wine families in POW camps - such as Gaston Huet of the Loire who organized the great wine tasting party on January 24 1943, the feast day of St Vincent - patron saint French winemakers - but in the end had to be spread over several days to accommodate 4000 prisoners.The plan was for 700 bottles of wine to "be obtained to enable each prisoner just one glass of wine. The organising committee was composed of representatives from each of France's wine regions "- an indication of the geographic spread of the POW population. Many of the prisoners did not come from wine backgrounds, and so Huet generously shared his knowledge of wine regions, wines & their characteristics, so that the rare experience could fully savoured.

Huet recalled years later "I don't know what we would have done without that party. It gave us something to hold on to. It gave us a reason to get up in the morning to get through each day. Talking about wine and sharing it  made all of us feel closer to home, and more alive."

In fact it was years later when the Kladstrups went to interview Gaston Huet about his opposition to the French Government bringing the TGV railroad through the vineyards, that the whole story of wine in France during the war began to unfold.

Equally evocative - Roger Ribaud also in a POW camp - 'Christmas 1940 "On this Noel of 1940, I have begun to write a little book in an effort to dispel some of the sadness that we are living with and share some of the hopes we cling to in our captivity, of returning to our homes and loved ones and the values we hold most dear" ... Ribaud began to make a list of French wines, every wine he could think of: some he had tasted, others he hoped to taste. He sorted them by region : Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, Alsace, the Loire. He classified them according to their finesse, body and bouquet. '

It would become a book entitled Le Maitre de Maison de Sa Cave a Sa Table - The Head of the Household from His Cellar to His Table  - this is a memoir of great food and wine and how they can brought into perfect harmony" - google it and you will still find reference to this great work -with copies sometimes still available.

Writing on whatever scraps of paper he could scavenge made "long cold lonely days seem shorter"... and Ribaud "asked other POW's about their favourite wine and food combinations , what grapes grow best in their regions  and how they prepared certain foods  ... over time he compiled a huge core of information and knowledge, not only about the famous wines but about small country ones barely known outside their villages...... 

"After the war, his book was published to great acclaim and hailed as one of the first books that paid serious attention to regional wines and food .... Roger Ribaud sent a copy to each of his fellow prisoners of war 'I hope this will ease the pain of imprisonment and yet be a souvenir of our friendship and the years we shared together'."

Roger Ribaud stressed that one did not have to be an expert to know about these things, that most of this could be learned by reading, tasting and talking to others ..."

True knowledge sharing ! And in the most unexpected situations ...