This is the second dinner that hasn’t been based on a theme ingredient but rather on a feeling or concept – love. Love comes in different forms and can be expressed in different ways, lending itself to all sorts of different dishes. In the end we all chose dishes that we love, dishes that seduce or dishes that simply included a most harmonious marriage on the plate. There may not have been much cohesion between each course, but in the end, we loved it.

Cinnamon and nutmeg spiced vodka mixed with Maxwell Liqueur Mead, served rimmed with rose petal sugar and a blushing pear

Foie gras, bacon and caramelised truffled apple on potato blini

Entree: Fair maiden's friend
Prosciutto-lipped figs with mint cream and herbe à la belle fille
Domaine de Rimauresq Cotes de Provence Blanc 2007
85 % Rolle, Ugni Blanc 15 % - Lovely vibrant fresh fruit aromas mixed with honeysuckle and a light grassiness. On the palate fresh again with sweet/herbal fruit. Quite delicious.

Soup: Mother's Big Bowl of Shut the F%#k Up
Fresh corn chowder
2006 Petaluma Viognier Adelaide Hills

Main: Duck & Pinot Noir - a marriage made in heaven
Domaine Harmand Geoffroy Mazis Chambertin Grand Cru 1999
Weingut J.B. Becker Rheingau Spätburgunder Wallufer Walkenburg 2002

Dessert: Coeur a la Creme
Chateau Coutet Barsac Grand Cru Sauternes 1971

Petits Fours
Turkish Passion, Sexual Chocolate, Strawberry bites, Salted Canadian Nuts


The cocktail was based on an ancient Roman recipe - an aphrodisiac recipe, in fact, sourced from the 1950s tongue-in-cheek collection 'Aphrodite in the kitchen'. Vodka had a few drops of potent oleoresins (cinnamon and nutmeg) added to it and was mixed with mead liqueur (honey of course being one of the first 'aphrodisiacs'). Dried rose petals crushed with sugar made for a subtly aromatic rim and the addition of the tiny cocktail pear inspired the name: Eden, because even though we think of that fell fruit to be an apple, it may well have been a pear, a pomegranate or an orange. Or a fig. Lending weight to the concept of innocence lost was the sheer potency of the cocktail. Perhaps that's what was really served in the garden of Eden: a bloody great big cocktail - now that makes more sense. Who can't be tempted after one of those?

The amuse bouche was born of a love of many things: bacon (in this case leatherwood honey-cured and smoked Boks bacon from Tasmania), potatoes in the form of a crunchy rosti blini, a touch of sweetness in truffled, caramelised apples and a love of decadence in a grilled melty piece of foie gras. It was truly meant to be a seductive mix of salty, sweet, rich and earthy flavours with a crisp textural base to really tease the tongue and the palate – foreplay in the true sense of the word. The inspiration came from the book Seduced by Bacon by US writer Joanna Pruess.

The potato rosti base was made by grating gorgeous Dutch cream potatoes that had come straight out of the ground the week before and to the table via the Bass Strait...another lovely piece of produce from our Tasmanian neighbours. Mixed with a little grated apple, onion, parsley and egg, they were shaped to the size of a cookie. What with their decaent topping, this amuse needed to be small - 2 bites at best. Gala apples were caramelised in balsamic, veal demi glace and white truffle honey from Italy and set aside to top the dish. The foie gras (not the fresh stuff unfortuntely, thanks to Australia's rather archaic importation laws) was from providore Simon Johnson. Once the rosti was grilled and crispy, it was topped with a lightly grilled peice of foie, a strip of crispy Boks bacon, a lick of the sweet apples and a drizzle of the truffled jus and sen straight to the table. Foreplay got everyone aroused for the entree...


Figs eternally crop up on aphrodisiac menus - and often with the soft, sweet and salty wrap of prosiutto. Texturally an entree of salad with the yielding qualities of ripe, plump figs, slippery rockmelon, smooth soft prosciutto and unctuous cream screams sex. Additionally the heady aromas of salt, musk and sweet ram that concept home. Perhaps artfully arranging the prosciutto 'lips' around a blooming open flower of fig may not have been necessary at all in encouraging lustful thoughts... in any case guests were handed around a finger bowl and cutlery was eschewed so that fingers pulled apart the salad to tip back into open mouths and fingers were sucked with pleasure. Mint and lemon infused whipped cream kept the salad from becoming too cloying and bitter, musky rue (herbe de la belle fille) garnished. Rue was used in the Middle Ages as an abortionist's herb - hence the name 'pretty woman's friend).

There's something very maternal about corn, especially when it's soup. Its very essence is giving, generous and nourishing. Despite the undeservedly bad rap corn has had of late, thanks to Pollan et al, the variety used for culinary purposes, sweet corn, has very little to do with No. 2 Field Corn other than sharing the same botanical name, Zea Mays. The beauty of sweet corn is its rawness. To grow it any other way than organic is completely missing the point, since the best way to eat it is raw, straight off the stalk and still warm from the sun.

If I stretch the truth I could say preparation for this started in October, in my vegetable patch. I planted three types of heirloom corn but, by the time this dinner rolled around they'd been consigned to the compost heap thanks to Sydney's on-again-off-again summer weather. So for this I used a beautiful locally grown varigated corn from Galuzzo's in Glebe. This became a thick, rich corn chowder with onions, garlic, arbol chilis and cream before being served in small bowls with a thin sliver of lardo tucked as'under, and a drizzle of EVO.

That shut everybody up.


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Petits fours can be a confusing course, and since these had only been prepared once before we felt the need to raise the bar, so other more talented petits four chefs out there could wow us later. But what would eight stuffed-to-the-hilt diners want to eat, after seven sensual courses, and still feel inspired about love (unless that love is rolling around uncontrollably?).

So we thought about all the cliche love bites - chocolate dipped strawberries, cherry filled chocolates, champagne, caviar, figs, fish blah blah - and you know what lit up first in our minds? All these embodiments of love, as it were, were either feminine or about birth! Where was the manlove in this? Did that kind of love not count??

Love-related petits fours then, in a classic sense, serve the heterodoxy. It's all about man and woman, or women and ripeness. Or man and ... you get it. For that reason, at this table of enlightened minds in the heart of Sydney's gay ghetto, we decided on a flight of fancy - and a plate of bites which paid homage to both manlove and reproductive love.

Some of them were easy. Find me a gay man who doesn't love Turkish men and I'll show you a straight man trying to justify his Kylie collection. Combine passionfruit, which have been juicy and delicious this season with Turkish delight and you have a winner. The fact it was gelled in the microwave made it all the more gay in our books since that's the perfect place to reheat Lean Cuisine.

Originally, the Salted Canadian Nuts were meant to be toffee-dipped tomatoes. Love apple and all that, but updated to an Age of Aids edition where the apple now wears a toffee condom. Of course, they didn't work as a sweet course at all, so we substituted tiny, sweet senorita bananas for them and they worked a treat - and looked far more phallic to boot. Naturally, by the time the dinner came around our local fruitshop was out of stock. And so were all the fruitshops in a 10km radius. So this morphed into pecans, coated in toffee and dusted with smoked salt. We added a healthy dash of maple syrup to turn the pecans into Canadians, and immediately remembered one of our favourite things: salty Canadian nuts. Ah, memories.

No petit fours plate is complete without some sort of chocolate, but rather than some fancy filled chocolate, we opted for a simple truffle scented with kirsch. No real craziness here. I'm sure if there was some way we could have made these gay we would have, but was it worth messing with a classic? Methinks not.

And finally, we decided chocolate dipped strawberries would have to feature: they're the familiar touch stone you need to have at any love dinner to signal that this was a plate of petits fours, even if only one of them actually looked like a petit four. So we presented them high on a pedestal of spun isomalt, which holds its shape better than sugar and is more resistant to humidity. And we added a good sprinkle of pasilla chilli for that extra bite love can have. Then we dipped them twice, since you can never only go one round.

If that isn't the essence of manlove, I don't know what is.