There's plenty to feel jolly about this June: in Joburg, Le Canard hosts an evening of fine food and rare wine; Salt Restaurant in Cape Town hosts a series of winter gourmet evenings; and in Robertson there's a wacky celebration of wine this weekend! Enjoy.
	Nominate your favourite steakhouse for Eat Out Best Of Steakhouses
	Fine food and vintage wine at Le Canard
	Winter gourmet evenings at Salt Restaurant
	It's Wacky Wine-time this weekend!
Warm up with these winter specials at a restaurant near you: Garden Route: fu.shi, Plettenberg Bay Dish, Knysna Johannesburg: The Bull Run Karma Winelands: Cognito, Stellenbosch Henri's, Somerset-West Pretoria: Brasserie de Paris Cape Town: Jardine Myoga (pic) Click here for even more winter specials >>

Friday 9am: My week of… Cooking with celebrity chef Skye Gyngell

I received the list of ingredients I was to source ‚ – handwritten and by fax (in true chef style) ‚ – at 5:30pm. Where was I going to find fresh bay leaves, Marsala dessert wine and fresh snoek in time for the photo shoot early the next day? 

Chef and award-winning cookbook author Skye Gynell adores organic, seasonal, perfectly ripe ingredients and I wanted to get the best possible produce so that I could show her how beautiful our local ingredients are. As head chef at Petersham Nurseries Café in Surrey in the UK, Skye composes menus daily using fresh produce.

All ended well; I managed to wake the butcher for two legs of lamb and picked up bunches of fresh bay leaves from Jenny Morris at 7am, while my husband raced to the harbour to get the first catch of snoek.

Great ingredients are the starting point of any great meal, and increasingly restaurants are growing their own. Hotel Izulu on the KwaZulu-Natal North Coast has the crème de la crème of organic gardens, and Bushmanskloof in Ceres has a manicured mini-orchard to complement plantings of artichoke, baby marrow and rows and rows of baby lettuce. I must mention Steve Botha, the Magic Herbs man from Porterville, who supplies most of the Western Cape restaurants with their tomatillos, fresh turmeric and candied baby beets.

Skye and I roasted lamb together, baked a snoek and ate sticky, boozy, fragrant pears with spoonfuls of vanilla and crème fraîche. We also caused a small explosion in the oven when (we think) the Marsala that the pears were soaking in caused some kind of vacuum. The oven door blew open and a flame shot out! We both professed to having never seen that before.

Skye oohed and aahed at the quality of our local ingredients as she sipped a cup of rooibos tea ‚ – which she loved, and tried to see how many packs she could fit into her bag to take home. Look out for the whole story in Woolworths Taste magazine's August issue.

Happy eating!
Abigail