Root beer and fried chicken and waffles

I’m always on the lookout for interesting matches with alcohol-free drinks and this just inched it over a really good cider pairing at the Hang Fire Southern Kitchen yesterday.

The girls at Hang Fire were the winners of the street food category in last year's BBC Food & Farming awards and have since powered ahead, publishing a book (The Hang Fire Cookbook) and opening their own restaurant in Barry on the outskirts of Cardiff where they serve their outrageously good southern states-style barbecue food (of which more to come).

Both drinks came from fellow BBC Food awards winners: the root beer from Square Root Soda Works in Hackney which won the drinks award last year for its handmade sodas, is what used to be called sasparilla - a slightly medicinal tasting sweetish cola-style drink made from sasparilla root, burdock and licorice. Not usually my kind of thing but it was absolutely spot on with my dish of deep-fried wood-smoked chicken (whoa!) with waffles, creamy black and white pepper gravy and sweet potato fries.

The other terrific match was the ‘frickles (aka’ deep-fried pickles. NB this place is not a temple to clean eating!) and another Beeb award-winner, Andy Hallet’s rich flavourful Hallets Real Cider. Honestly, if you pop in just for that it’s worth the detour.

Manzanilla sherry and sushi

Sushi is possibly not the first kind of food you’d think of pairing with wine but turns out it’s surprisingly good with sherry.

Not the sweet treacley kind your nan used to keep in the dining room cupboard obviously but a fresh, tangy manzanilla served cold from the fridge as I discovered this weekend when I tried a number of experimental sherry pairings on a group of friends.

The sherry concerned was a Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla which normally sells for about £6-7 a half bottle but which is on offer at the time of writing at £6 for 50cl in Sainsbury’s. Fino sherry, being quite similar in flavour to sake, would obviously work too.

Given how easy it is to buy sushi off the shelf these days it would make a super-easy treat of a midweek supper. All you have to do is keep a bottle of manzanilla in the fridge which isn’t too much of a hardship ....

If this appeals to you see this list of other drink pairings with sushi

When you can pair asparagus with red wine

The idea of partnering asparagus with wine is contentious enough but red wine? Surely that won’t work?

Well, it so happens it does as I managed to prove at an event called the Great British Asparagus Feast in Bristol last week when I picked the pairings for a menu that had been devised by three of the city’s top chefs.

The main course was a whole roast, brined chicken on a bed of wild garlic served with chargrilled asparagus cooked with sautéed girolles (wild mushrooms) and dukkah (a middle-eastern style topping of chopped hazelnuts and sesame seeds) from Josh Eggleton of The Pony & Trap.

I’d paired the 2014 Tyrrell’s ‘Old Winery’ Pinot Noir from south-east Australia with it in the hope that it would go with the chargrilled asparagus and mushrooms and it really worked - largely because it was quite a dark-fruited style of pinot rather than a light, raspberry-scented one. You can buy it from independent wine merchants including Dennhöfer Wines and Richard Granger Wines for between £10-12 which is excellent value for money for a pinot.

The other matches were a Gavi di Gavi with a dish of asparagus, hand-rolled cavatelli, slow-cooked egg and goats cheese from Adelina Yard which I picked to reflect the Italian influence of the dish and a lovely lush white Chateauneuf-du-Pape ‘Les Hauts de Barville’ 2014 from Maison Brotte with a dish of asparagus, with white and brown crab meat, saffron and lovage from Wallfish Bistro.

We finished with a cheese course rather than a dessert - Caerphilly with pickled asparagus with which I paired a medium-dry cider - Charmer from Somerset producer Orchard Pig. (Well, the dinner did take place in the West Country!).

Oh, and we kicked off with a sparkling wine called Castlebrook Brut which came from one of the asparagus producers, Wye Valley which you can actually buy in selected branches of Marks & Spencer (and from their website)

The wines were sourced from Stewart Wines who supply Yurt Lush who hosted the dinner.

Roast kid and dry Mavrodaphne

As it was my first Easter in Greece - which was celebrated a month later than that of the western Christian church this year - what could I focus on but what to drink with a Greek Easter lunch?

The centrepiece is a whole roast lamb or kid on a spit - in the case of the family I was staying with, kid. It’s simply seasoned with pepper, plenty of salt, stuffed with herbs such as thyme and rosemary then cooked slowly over the coals for 2 1/2-3 hours. The tastiest bits are the bits you pick with your fingers off the carcass and the kokoretsi - the offal, which is wrapped in the intestines and also roasted over the fire. That may, I realise, put off the more squeamish among you but it is truly delicious.

You could drink a white with this - the Greeks drink more white wine than red but the return of meat to the menu after lent calls for a bit more of a celebration. In our case that took the form of a magnum of the 2013 vintage of Gentilini’s Eclipse, an exotically fragrant dry mavrodaphne that was predictably great with the lamb but also particularly good with the more gamey flavour of the offal. If you're a Bandol fan you'd love it.

Other Greek reds such as agiorgitiko and xinomavro would obviously be good too, depending on where you are in Greece. This is definitely an occasion to drink local.

I was invited to spend Easter with Petros Markantonatos and Marianna Kosmetatos of Gentilini