Perfect for a light and fresh Summer meal - grab your favorite riesling, sit outside and enjoy...

Ingredients

Serves 4 ½ whole size 14 chicken 1 knob ginger 3 chillies 1 stick lemon grass ¼ bunch coriander including roots ¼ bunch Vietnamese mint 1 head garlic 100ml Fish sauce 75g pale palm sugar 2 limes juiced 4 tbsp crispy shallots 2 tsp Sesame seeds ¼ small Chinese cabbage 1 small carrot ½ red onion 1 cup super fresh bean sprouts ½ cup green mango or paw paw Casava or sesame crackers

Method

Place the chicken in a large pot and cover with water, add a few coriander roots, knob of ginger sliced, crushed lemon grass and a few cloves of garlic. Bring to a simmer and cook for 30 minutes, cool and reserve the stock. Make the dressing with the fish sauce, 100ml of water, lime juice, palm sugar, 1 chilli and 1 clove of garlic. Blitz in a liquidizer and reserve. Shred the Chinese cabbage, carrot and onion

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