Barbados 2012
Barbados 2012, a set on Flickr.
Memories from a visit to my former home.
Monmouthshire: the foodie’s paradise (via monmouthshirecc)
A bit of a reblog. But it’s about food and where a live. Two things I love. So there.
via monmouthshirecc
Restaurant/hotel review: “The Drawing Room”, Powys
We stayed here recently and I though it might be worth sharing our experiences.
More a restaurant with rooms or a boutique hotel, the owners of The Drawing Room set very high standards of presentation, decor, comfort and cooking, without being stuffy or overly formal. If you are staying in the area and can afford it, I’d recommend this over one of the larger hotels in Builth or Llandrindod Wells, particularly if you like elegance and peace and quiet.
The rooms are decorated in pastel shades with hand-made wallpapers and furniture in keeping with the archtiectural era of the house. Sumptuously thick materials suggest no expense was spared in getting the curtains and bedcovers right. There were more pillows and cushions than I could imagine using. Bad luck meant we weren’t able to get one of the larger rooms, but ours did not feel cramped.
As for the food, starters of a sort of crab timballe and a seafood meunière were competent and tasty while not dramatically good. The main courses delivered on their promise though. I had a Tournedos of Welsh Beef with caramelized Shallot “Tarte Tatin”, Potato and Root Vegetable Pavé, Horseradish and Parsley Cream and Beef Jus with Oxtail while Mrs Monnowman had a haunch of venison with sweet potato and asparagus. Both were very good, though of the two I was glad I had gone for the beef: the shallot tarte tatin was a revelation.
Cappuccino Mousse was a very grown up (read: “not too sweet”) dessert for Mrs M. while I went for the Toasted Pine Nut & Honey Tart with poached Figs and “Glaslyn” Estate Wild Flower Honey Ice-cream: a delightful combination of flavours and textures.
The passion of the proprietor chef for good, local ingredients, sympathetically cooked, is obvious in the richness of flavours delivered without the food becoming over-contrived in that fashionably- Michelin-starred way.
Only quibbles were the request in the literature not to drink your own alcohol in the rooms (you are asked to buy their -very expensive- stuff); we could easily hear our neighbours in the adjacent room; and the hostess, when serving food, said “thank you” too often!
But these are minor niggles. We really enjoyed our stay and the food was very good: recommended.
Restaurant review: Dragon’s Den Thai & Chinese, Monmouth.
The sort of situation that must present itself to millions on a Saturday night befell our household last night: too tired to cook, too tired to go and buy some food to cook. The obvious answer was a takeaway delivered to our home.
Monmouth has many restaurants, most of them in Indian/Bangladeshi. Indeed, I’ve wondered, every time a new Indian restaurant opens in the town why the owner believes there’s room for just one more Indian restaurant serving the same mid-range Indian food. When I asked one once, he told me, with a big grin, “because we are the best!”.
Anyway, Indian was not on the agenda because there was a new place in town selling Thai and Chinese food from the premises in St. Mary’s Street vacated by the Malt House. I had heard on the grapevine that the food at The Dragon’s Den was “bland” and not recommended. This concern was put to the back of my mind as I picked up the phone to make my order from the leaflet that promised “upmarket” Thai and Chinese cooking.
Achieving payment over the phone in advance seemed overly complicated as I was asked to give my order, then wait for a call back, at which point I could give my card number. The call duly came and I was told the food would leave the restaurant forty minutes later. That was fine.
The food arrived on time and we arranged the lavish spread that was Set Menu A at £16.95 per person. This worked out at much better value than selecting dishes I actually wanted individually, but at about £8.00 for each smallish takeaway container this would been unaffordable.
The grapevine was right.
The starter was a “Thai Platter”- “A selection of Thai starters”. This was a collection of deep-fried items that lacked variety in taste and texture: a spring roll, a wonton, prawn toast and a pureed chicken dumpling that had the texture and taste of a Chicken McNugget.
The main courses were disappointing too. The stir-fried pork, chicken curry and chicken with vegetables all lacked those essentials of Thai cooking: a contrast of flavours and texture that surprise the palate. There was not much evidence of Thai Basil leaves or garnish to give any visual appeal. OK, fair enough, it is difficult to make a plastic container visually appealing, but here they hadn’t even tried. There was just no finesse.
Now to be fair, getting a take-away means we weren’t able to sample the ambience and service offered by eating in the restaurant itself; and the food was by no means inedible.
Certainly serious money seems to have been spent on refurbishing the premises. It may be disloyal to a new business in Monmouth not to be nice about it, but it must stand on the quality of its product. On that basis, I’m afraid I can’t, at the moment recommend the Dragon’s Den’s takeaway experience. Let’s hope the quality will improve as the business gets into its stride. Monmouth needs some good Thai cuisine to balance the surfeit of Indian and Chinese outlets. Monmouthshire is foodie territory and the punters expect better!
Recipe: My favourite comfort food: Chicken Liver Risotto
This is a meal I make when I need comfort food. It’s not an authentic Italian-style risotto as it uses Basmati rice and the aim is not to produce the creamy nursery food dish that is the mark of a real risotto. So if that bothers you, call it “Rice and Chicken Livers”. If you use frozen ready chopped garlic and blitz the onion in the blender, it can be produced within 40 minutes on a weeknight while listening to The Archers on BBC Radio 4. Adjust proportions of rice to chicken livers as you like; just keep the ratio of rice to stock 1 to 1.
Serves Two.
Ingredients
400g fresh chicken livers (preferably free range), cleaned of any green-looking bits and chopped in half
1 large mug full of basmati rice (definitely not ordinary long grain rice)
1 fat garlic clove, chopped finely
1 onion, chopped finely
200 dry cure smoked bacon lardons
2 large mugs of hot chicken or duck stock
1 Bay leaf
Small handful each of finely chopped fresh sage and oregano/marjoram or whatever herbs you fancy (tarragon works well too)
Small handful of roughly chopped flat leaf parsley
Half glass of white wine or dry sherry
Freshly ground black pepper
1 glug of olive oil or a dollop of goose fat
A shake or two of Barbados hot pepper sauce or Tabasco.
Method
In a suitably-sized heavy-based pan that that has a tight fitting lid: Gently fry the bacon, onion and garlic in the olive oil/goose fat until beginning to turn golden. Throw in the livers, give them a stir, then put in the rice. Stir again so the rice is coated with oil, then add the bay leaf, herbs, pepper sauce/Tabasco, wine/sherry and a generous grind of black pepper. Stir, then add the stock. Stir again and reduce to the lowest heat you can, cover tightly with the lid, then wait until the rice has softened and absorbed all the stock. If it threatens to dry out, add a little more stock or wine. It should take no more than 15 minutes. Check seasoning, adding salt if necessary and stir in the parsley. Serve in a bowl to your grateful spouse first then scoff the rest yourself.
A Boudin Noir
I have bought a boudin noir from the Trealy Farm stall at the Monmouth Farmers’ market. Now what do I do with it?
Let’s eat happy chickens
I’m not one for causes and campaigns generally, but this is something I’m happy to endorse.
YouTube – Hugh makes personal appeal
Technorati Tags: food, chicken, video
Dinner in Oxford, the Kabbalah Denudata and a walk
On Saturday, K and I were invited to dinner at a college in Oxford. Good company and fascinating surroundings made for a really enjoyable evening. For the record, the menu was:
Potage d’Hiver au Gingembre
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Sorbet au Champagne
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Noisettes d’Agneau
Pommes de Terres Nouvelles
Carottes
Tomates Farcies
Asperges
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Eton Mess
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Diable à Cheval
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Dessert, Café et Chocolats
The meal was served, by candlight in the old library of the college, a narrow two-storey wood panelled room, filled, of course with books. With champagne aperitifs, white and red wine, followed by port, it was a sumptuous affair. We fairly rolled back to our rooms afterwards. Between courses I browsed the shelves stuffed with vast, old leather-bound volumes, among which I was excited to find an orginal edition of Johnson’s Dictionary and an edition of the occult classic Kabbalah Denudata. What was that doing there and who had been reading it?
Today we went as far north along the west bank of the Wye as we could with a toddler (Little A.) in a push-chair. That was about an hour each way and we crossed the border into England. Trees are beginning to turn colour but the rolling, Arcadian landscape was still mostly a rich green.
Hopefully this week we will have our offer accepted on a semi-detached 1970′s house in the suburb of Wyesham on the east bank of the Wye, overlooking Monmouth. The neighbourhood is fairly suburban, but has a nice enough feel to it and importantly, is around the corner from the bungalow for which Mum has just made a successful bid.
Good dining in Monmouthshire
Ate dinner at “The Bell” at Skenfrith with friends from London on Saturday to celebrate K.’s birthday. To call it a “gastropub” seems a little unfair as it has a standard of cooking that would not be out of place in the best of London’s restaurants. All the better then that it is a fifteen minute drive from Monmouth and set in beautiful countryside. The ambiance is classy but not stuffy or pretentious and this seventeenth century coaching inn is obviously run by people who know – and care about – high quality local food. There’s even a blackboard with the names of the local suppliers so you know who provided that venison/guinea foul/sea bass etc.
I had been wondering where the upmarket restaurants were in Monmouth. Seemingly none. Odd, when it’s obvious that there are plenty of upmarket people around with the money and tastes to support them.
Real meat, Spam and Jung
To continue yesterday’s food theme, I found The Real Meat Company after they got an airing on BBC2 last night. They offer meat which has been reared humanely and is properly hung and probably tastes a lot better. When I’m back in the earning way, I’m tempted to celebrate by ordering something nice from them.
Lycos Europe has launched a screensaver called “Make Love Not Spam” which sends traffic to the websites advertised in the junk email we all get. The idea is that the spammers’ bandwidth bills go up as the websites respond to the fake traffic. Yes, we all want to hit back at the spammers, but is it legal and does it only generate more bandwidth, slowing down the net for everyone?
If you are in a profound mood, Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 series on the history of ideas was good this morning. It was about Jung, the famous and influential Swiss psychologist who had a famous spat with Freud. He rocked the psychoanalytical boat by suggesting that sex wasn’t behind absolutely everything and believed that the natural outcome of therapy was a spiritual worldview, contrasting with the Freudian perspective which saw a materialist/rationalist worldview as the ultimate outcome of successful psychotherapy. He also influenced some of the thinking behind the New Age movement and created a branch of psychotherapy, to the extent that if you meet a shrink at a party, your opening gambit can be “Are you a Jungian or a Freudian?” And did you know, he wrote a book on flying saucers? Oh yes.
Anyway, listen to the programme again here or download it in MP3 format and burn it to a CD for your in-car listening pleasure.
Monnowman's Flickr Photos
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