Festival dish is cooking for a cause

Visa Wellington On a Plate participant Jacob Brown is cooking for a special cause this year.

Throughout the festival, The Larder eatery owner and chef will serve up his Dine Wellington Festival Dish Cassoulet in a CAN.

It’s a traditional French dish, a rich, slow-cooked casserole containing duck, pork, saucisson (sausage) and haricot beans, combined with both fresh and tinned ingredients. Best of all, $5 from each dish ordered will be donated to Wellington’s Women’s Refuge.

‘‘While it is always fun to be part of Wellington On a Plate and to cook for ourselves and our customers, to cook for a purpose is even better,’’ says Jacob.

The idea for the ‘‘can dinner’’ came from some negative publicity that Women’s Refuge received last year.

‘‘Any food donation is always appreciated, but if people are donating food items it would be great if they could donate a can that is a ‘meal’, like soup or spaghetti, rather than an ingredient like chickpeas for example,’’ says Jacob.

Open for lunches only during VWOAP, diners will find Jacob’s dish full of meaty goodness.

‘‘It’s a slow braised dish of pork shoulder, toulouse pork sausage and confit duck, it’s all cooked really slowly with white beans, a little bit of tomato and lots of herbs and stock, and then it forms a crust on the top – it is a really good dish.’’

Meanwhile, the newest addition to South Coast eateries, The Botanist in Lyall Bay, will dish up its vegan version of the classic Sunday roast throughout VWOAP.

Its Dine Wellington Festival Dish entry is listed as a plantbased roast dinner with ‘‘chicken’’ and mushroom ballotine, Yorkshire pudding, gravy and chestnut pure´e with rosemary and maple-roasted vegetables.

Lydia Suggate, who owns The Botanist with sister Maria, says the team arrived at the Sunday roast decision after agreeing the idea of bringing people together over a classic roast meal was a very New Zealand thing to do.

‘‘It’s that whole Sunday roast, family and friends coming together, a celebration in its own right,’’ says Lydia.

The challenging part was making it vegan, recreating those comforting wintery satisfying flavours, she says.

‘‘A lot of the reason people choose to go vegan is because they feel strongly about the environment and animal welfare, so for us offering this classic comfort food, with its focus on bringing people together seemed like a nice way for vegans to be able to enjoy something they have missed out on, and for meat eaters to try something a bit different and see how it compares.

‘‘The gravy on the dish is truly something amazing, and the ‘chicken’ has been a good challenge for the chefs!’’

While this is The Botanist’s second year with VWOAP, Lydia has been involved from the start through other cafes, bars and restaurants.

‘‘I always enjoy the creative process involved, the tweaking to get that wow factor, and the chefs get to experiment and do something interesting in what would normally be a quieter time of year.’’

There are a total of 99 Dine Wellington menus available during this year’s VWOAP, and the public can rate every menu’s Festival Dish they try at VisaWOAP.com by August 26.

These ratings will help determine the five Dine Wellington Best Dish finalists, to be judged the week following. The overall winner will be announced at the awards night on September 3.