Another strange turn in the weather has left me confused. Do I have something light and summery, or something warm and comforting? I think this braised dish manages to bridge the gap between the two.

The recipe comes my current favourite cook book. Trout fillets (or in my case, salmon, because I couldn’t get trout when I decided to make this) are wrapped in sorrel leaves and flavoured with a mixture of diced tomatoes, capers, anchovies, thinly sliced lemon and chopped herbs. In the oven, these ingredients melt and meld with the fish, infusing it with a beautiful flavour. Extra flavour also comes in the form of the sauce of equal parts olive oil and Noilly Prat vermouth, in which the fish is braised. The crowning glory is a piece of fish crackling, made from the skin off the fillet. The recipe tells you to deep fry it, but I got a really delicious result just from baking it at the same temperature as the fish parcels. After that, all you need are a few small potatoes to mop the remaining sauce up with. Utterly delicious… The only thing that’s stopping me from making this dish again, is having to wait for my sorrel plant to recover before raiding it for leaves once more!

They say sequels are never as good as the original. But I think this particular sequel is going to be a runaway success. For the next two days, food bloggers around the world will be gathered around the proverbial campfire at Chez Pim, drumming up support for Menu for Hope III, in an effort to raise funds for the United Nations World Food Program. Last year, a whopping US$17,000 was donated to help earthquake victims.

This year, for a measly US$10 per raffle ticket you stand a chance of winning many fabulous donated prizes. My contribution is a mystery box. It’s a ‘boite a biscuits’; a cute french biscuit tin, purchased from the Bay Tree in Woollahra. The tin alone is worth AU$45, and I will be filling it with as many mystery ingredients as can fit into the box. Items will be mostly biscuit related, and will include things like my favourite tea, etc. The code for this prize is AP36, which you will need to specify on the donation form when you make your donation. Donate today, and make a biscuit happy!

But if a surprise box doesn’t really float your boat, there are tons of other prizes you could try to win instead. So go on, check out the list of prizes available, and you have until the 22nd of December to make a donation or two! (For more information on how to make a donation, check out Chez Pim or Grab Your Fork, where Helen is hosting the Asia Pacific section of this fundraiser).

A visit to Bentley Restaurant & Bar has been on the cards for a long time now. A chance encounter with a day off mid-week, finally enabled the impossible. Down busy Crown Street we go, envying all the Surry Hillers, their plethora of decent restaurants at every corner. Bentley is no exception.

For me, the strength of this place is in their tapas menu. It features a decent selection of well-priced dishes (starting from $3.50) that are interesting both in presentation and taste. First up, two lollipop-looking things; actually white anchovies on a stick, coated in pistachio praline. Sweet, salty, vinegary, crunchy, delicious! We also had gazpacho 3 ways : tomato, dill and almond milk. All 3 had a well balanced flavour with a slight vinegary kick that was very pleasant and refreshing. The crispy fried chicken with aioli, which looked like dregs from the bottom of a packet of salt ‘n’ vinegar chips, tasted so moreish I want to lick the plate. Not pictured but also sampled, was a main dish of slow-roasted pork loin with kohlrabi and crackling.

The best of the two desserts we tried, was the chocolate ‘aero’ – a bar of bubbly chocolate topped with tiny flakes of salt, served with apricot sorbet, foam and sweet basil puree. The mast on top of the sorbet was an apricot wafer; a bit like a thin roll-up. It’s not as pretty as the cherries with smoked vanilla ice-cream, peanuts and cumin, but there was something delightful about that textural aerated chocolate. The first spoonful makes you think it’s cakey, but then it dissolves in your mouth like chocolate would. I kept taking tiny spoonfuls of it to try to describe it, then suddenly, together with the not-too-sweet sorbet, it was all gone.

One thing to note, what with the hardwood floors and bare walls, Bentley is incredibly noisy. Not in the kids-these-days/no-pianos-after-11pm type of way, but loud enough to make it hard to hear your dining companion, who is only sitting centimetres away from you. Give me two tin cans and a piece of string, and I’ll be back in a frilly dress, with a cocktail in one hand, to try more of that wonderful tapas. (And it’s not the dress that would be made of tin and string, of course!)

Bentley Restaurant & Bar
320 Crown Street
Surry Hills 2010