One of the world's great sharing meals, Paella. Plop the pan in the middle of the table and have at it.

Ingredients

200g Saffron Rice 1 tspn Garlic, crushed Handful Chorizo, sliced 3 Prawns 5 Scallops 3 Mussels Handful Spanish Onion Handful Tomato, Diced ½ Soft Shell Crab, beer battered, cooked White Wine to Deglaze Parsley

Method

1. Get pan hot, throw in garlic and chorizo and begin to caramelize 2. Once caramelized, deglaze with wine, throw in prawns, scallops, onion 3. Once cooked throw in rice and heat through 4. Plate up, Garnish w/ diced tomato, beer battered soft shell crab and parsley.

Don't let the prawn on the barbie cliche spook you. This is as contempo as you care, but why would you? Just enjoy.

Ingredients

24 large raw king prawns, peeled and deveined, tails left intact 185ml Asian marinade (see below) Green salad, to serve Asian Marinade: 70ml grapeseed oil 1 tb sesame oil 1 cm piece ginger, finely chopped 1 garlic clove, crushed 1 tb oyster sauce 2 tb kecap manis 1 tb fish sauce Red chilli, finely chopped, to taste (optional) Makes 1 cup.

Method

Asian Marinade: Put the grapeseed and sesame oils, ginger, garlic, oyster sauce, kecap manis, fish sauce and chilli into a bowl. Stir to combine and use as required. Asian marinade can be stored, covered, in the refrigerator for up to 2 days. Prawns: Place the prawns in the Asian marinade for 1 minute before cooking, then chargrill on a preheated barbeque

Chardonnay sits on the fence of many a wine enthusiast. Versatile, kind in nature and oh so compliant, however for most it's still dressed in attire that's so distinctly... 90s. Shoulder pads, overalls and bike shorts saw this particular version of white wine with such a wooded vengeance, we were practically asking the chefs to take the butter out of the meals to make way for it. Thankfully however, times are a changin'. Underneath all that 90s getup reveals elegance and sophistication and Australia is doing its bit to make Chardy interesting again.

What a decade the 90s was! A quick poll in the office had my colleagues recalling happy pants, grunge, MC Hammer, 90210, mobile phones, the twilight of the Hawke/Keating era, Monica Lewinsky and of course... Chardonnay. It’s important to note that Chardonnay was here well before the 90s but this was the decade it was introduced to us, the masses, in two very distinct phases – wooded and unwooded. The wooded era came to us in the early 90s when many of the larger companies were serving up Chardonnay so cloaked in oak flavour and so oily in texture that the variety itself was lost in the noise. I kept hearing descriptors like ‘coconut and vanilla’ to describe the nose and ‘sweet’ to describe the taste. This was a time where we got to learn more about the application of oak in all its forms (chips and barrels) and residual sugar added in spoonfuls. Inevitably the overcorrection came where suddenly producers were scrambling to unleash their unwooded