I really enjoyed reading this article about what food celebrities ejoyed at this year’s Oscars! As you can get a few of the recipes online, I might even try to cook some! Read through the article and see if you can complete the gaps with the missing words; although there are some difficult phrases in the article, you should be able to understand the general meaning. This is excellent practice as you will not always understand every word you read. If you want to know more about the delicious menu for the event, click here:
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Guess who’s coming to dinner? Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Brad Pitt and George Clooney… without even mentioning the rest of Hollywood’s _1_, those names would be enough to send many a chef, amateur or professional, in to a meltdown.
But it will be the 18th year Austrian-American culinary darling Wolfgang Puck has catered for such film luminaries at the annual post-Academy Awards dinner, the Governor’s Ball.
If I was cooking for Clooney et al, I would stick to my tried and true formal dinner menu _2_ which hark back to my Pacific fusion cuisine roots. Scallops on a cauliflower purée, NZ lamb and potato roti, pavlova with a berry coulis… things I know I can cook and could ramp up a notch for celebrity guests with some careful food styling and haute cuisine inspiration. Oh, the pressure!
But Wolfgang Puck has done formal sit-down dinners for the previous 17 Governor’s Ball meals, and says this year, “we really wanted just to have fun”.
“Normally it’s very uptight, a black-tie dinner, the biggest night of the year in Hollywood, and the only thing missing is the British royals,” he says.
So what’s he cooking? Like me, he too is going for a “greatest hits” menu – but from a more informal realm of cooking - comfy classics including pizza, macaroni and cheese, spring rolls and sushi. At this year’s ball, the dining _3_ is going to be much more relaxed, with guests able to eat wherever they choose to stand or sit, or “hang out”.
They are foods you or I could make at home for our friends and family while watching the awards. And as Wolfgang has helpfully placed some of the recipes online – you really can..) But would you _4_ chicken pot pie to Brad Pitt?
“It’s going to be delicious, instead of one big plate of meat or fish, you can eat three or four small ones, and you will be pretty _5_,” he says. “I think people at home, they can do all these recipes, like the chicken pot pie, which can be made in advance. Things like that are easier to do, precook them, or make pizzas,” Wolfgang recommends.
As I'm motivated by a very sweet _6_, the dessert menu sounds worth attempting at home– especially the raspberry rose éclairs, 'red hot' macaroons and these cute brown sugar lemon meringue cones. Wolfgang says the dessert pièce de resistance, is a “3D chocolate Oscar” Austrian Black Forest torte, served with gold 3D glasses.
You might think that it would take many months to _7_ for an event like this. But in fact it’s a relatively short lead-in time for Wolfgang Puck’s team. He says: “We start planning about six weeks in advance. Then, we prepared a _8_ for the Ball committee at the end of January. We do a little practice - it is one thing to cook it, another thing to cook it for 1500.”
Now choose the correct missing word to complete the text above:
