Saturday Kitchen NYD

(by susie)

If you happened to be out of bed early enough on New Year’s Day, you may have caught the first Saturday Kitchen of 2011.

It was a great start to the year for me as I received some of the best comments to date about my SK wine choices.

I have to admit I was nursing a slightly sore head, for which I blame my little sister entirely.  She runs the sensational Michelin-starred Star Inn at Harome and we joined her for New Year’s Eve dinner – which necessarily involved an awful lot of fine food and wine.

So the fact my SK wines were greeted with such enthusiasm certainly helped to ease the pain.

Italian maestro, Gennaro Contaldo, rustled up a beautiful plate of mussels in a fresh tomato sauce with home-made tagliatelle. My choice of Tesco Finest* Gavi 2009 (£7.49) was declared a ‘bit of a bargain’ by James Martin, while Gennaro added with Italian feeling ‘it’s so good’.

Paul Rankin is undoubtedly one of the most wine-savvy chefs Peter and I have been lucky enough to work with and he made the following comments: ‘It’s beautiful; it’s both got the richness to suit the pasta and the mussels, but it’s got that freshness which suits the tomato beautifully.’

When it came to Paul’s Game Pie with red cabbage and green peppercorn sauce I actually wanted to kiss the television he was so complimentary.

‘She’s so on the money with her wine choices’ and ‘it’s suiting everything, absolutely fantastic’ were both music to my ears.

I had chosen Sainsburys Taste The Difference Barossa Shiraz 2009 (£7.99) and guest Alex Jones was also a fan stating, ‘I mean for £8 I think that’s brillliant’.  Gennaro stuck to his brief but generous assessments, saying simply ‘it’s the best’.

And however sore my head was it felt a lot better after all that.

Happy New Year one and all!

If you missed the programme you can catch it on BBC iplayer for another couple of days with the wine bits at 0:18:40 and 0:54:48.