A bit of a reblog. But it’s about food and where a live. Two things I love. So there.
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Tag Archives: food
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.
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
Headless Chicken
Watching The River Cottage Treatment on TV this week reminded me of a memorable episode in my early childhood in the Caribbean. The programme concerned the attempts by Hugh Fearnley Eatitall (as he is known in our household) to persuade a group of people who had hitherto only eaten cheap, intensively reared chicken to commit to eating chicken that had been reared more humanely. Part of it involved participating in the slaughter of a chicken that they had got to know over the week. It provoked shock and tears.
When I was about five, our family spent a few years in Antigua. Our neighbours, locals, not ex-pats like us, kept chickens. I used to play with the children of the family and went to their house on Thursday nights to watch “Scooby Doo”: a rare treat as we didn’t have a TV. So when, one afternoon, I was invited over by the eldest son of the family, it didn’t strike me as anything unusual. Until, that is, instead of playing hide and seek with him and his sisters, he told me that we were going to kill a chicken.
The only details I remember of what happened next were that he asked me to hold a chicken, which I did. He then produced a machete and briskly cut its head off. To my open-mouthed amazement, instead of dropping dead on the ground, the chicken ran off, sans head in ever-decreasing circles around the yard, eventually flopping lifelessly in the dust. I don’t recall being traumatised or upset in any way, just amazed, as though this were a magic trick the machete-wielding neighbour’s son had performed.
Monnow Man 