lapin d'or

If you want to prebook seats for the theatre or cinema you pay in full in advance, why should restaurants be expected to offer free reservations? I dispare of people who don't show up or cancel at far to short notice. This must drive some very talented chefs and restaurant owners to just shut up shop, you cannot make a living on noshows. I wonder if the UK is particularly bad for folks booking and not turning up, we generally do not seem to have enough respect for reastaurant staff. Lapin

I really think you should talk to the restaurant, you might not enjoy the meal if you do just turn up and they are not very happy that she chooses not to eat anything (and does not expect to pay anything either?). Lapin

I have had a copy for a few days now and there are a lot of recipes in that I want to try. So far I have just made the brownie. I would say it is not the best book for starting out, others such as Grewelling, Wybauw and Notter have far more detailed instructions on working with chocolate. I bought the book because I have tried some Willaim Curley chocolates and thought they were very clever. The book gives recipes for flavours that are sold in the shop. Flavours I want to try are things like apricot and wasabi, lemongrass and ginger, rosemary and olive oil. There is a fair amount of patisserie in the book too, not just chocolates.

The Real Foodstore in Exeter has an instore bakery where they use traditional methods. You can also get quite good bread from the Chandos deli but I don't know where they source it from. The farmers market is on a Thursday if you are looking for local food.

I would guess I use the site at least once a week and look at the newly indexed books regularly to see what is being added. I was delighted to see the online recipes from epicurious going on. Perhaps because I live in a rural location and only ever shop once a week at the most, the shopping list facility is not a deal breaker for me. I would say one of my delights in this site is that I can quickly find interesting recipes for which I already have the ingredients. I am only ever cooking for 2 so most times I can find enough of what I need. It is certainly helping me to make better use of my books. The Eat Your Books team seem very responsive to feedback/error reports so that is all very positive. Lapin

For Irish food I would look at Irish Traditional Cooking by Darina Allen and frankly anything by Darina Allen who runs the Ballymaloe cookery school in Ireland and their web site has a lot of fun information on it. For middle eastern / african I have a lot of good books by Arto der Haroutunian For Afghan try a Pinch of Salt by Rahima Amini Beatrice Ojakangas is good on Scandinavian Austrian Cooking by Gretel Beer is comprehensive Everybody Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook by Ruth Van Waerebeek covers a lot of Belgian home cooking. Just a few more ideas, Lapin

In addition to looking at the equipment available from Vantage House you might also look at keylink and the home chocolate factory. I bought both my Mol d'Art melters from HB ingredients but their equipment range is quite limited. I started with the 3kg (round bowl) Mol d'Art melter and later bought the larger one to make working with larger figure moulds more practical. They hold temper well but you need to manage the way the chocolate can gradually thicken up, so as mentioned above, use a heat gun regularly to keep it fluid. My biggest problem with working from a home kitchen in the England (Devon) is managing the room temperature and the especially the humidity. I hope that helps, lapin

Lewtrenchard Manor (sample menus )are still doing an excellent value 3 course, £19, mid week lunch menu. The cooking stood out far above anything we have had locally (North Devon) in the last few months. The Agaric in Ashburton also served us an excellent meal this week. Staff were extremely helpful and the food was creative but really well balanced and cooked to perfection. We were there on a Thursday night and they were fully booked. If you go to Ashburton do stop and try Ella's Artisan Bread, the sourdough breads are excellent and the lemon tart was a match for anything I have tried in Paris. The selection of breads and cakes seems to vary by day.

I have seen these clips for sale but have never bought them as my only double moulds are the seafruits ones which I just slap together and hope for the best. lapin

Tofu, perhaps I just don't know how to cook it but it has always seemed totally yuk and pointless. Semolina pudding as served at school is another texture horror I cannot forgive. Lapin

oops edited post as I just posted same info as dhardy123. I'm looking forward to the Notter book too.

I was wondering if you have been able to double check the temperature of the pool of chocolate against a thermometr so you are sure the machine is giving you good temperature information? And also when you decide to pull out the seed chocolate and check for temper has the main pool of chocolate had time to start developing enough good crystals. The seed chocolate is just that, it starts the development of the right crystals but even at the right temperature you may need to wait and just keep the chocolate stirring for a while for the whole pool of chocolate to get seeded enough. Then if it starts to get over crystallised you need to melt a few out. I have often read that to temper an amount less than 1kg is not so easy and it looks like you are working with a bit less than that but that advice may just apply to tempering 'manually'. Hope that helps, I have not used a table top temperer so no direct experience to call on. Lapin

I have had some really excellent 70% bars from SOMA who are based in Toronto and also really enjoyed Coppeneur Chuao 70%. I am indebted to work colleagues for bringing these back from their travels, the bars I can source locally are rather poor . Lapin

There are a handful of chocolate spread recipes in Jean-Pierre Wybauw's new book which use a range of different ingredients. The simplest is based on hazelnut puree, powdered sugar, dark chocolate and coconut fat. But he asks that the mixture is conched to get fine particles which could be difficult. Liquid honey, sunflower oil, coconut fat, glycerine, sorbitol and condensed milk also appear in the recipes and would all make the product more fluid. I was a bit put off by how small the amount of chocolate was to the added sugars and fats. Lapin

I received my copy this morning via HB Ingredients, my chocolate supplier and they are charging UK £42 with a 3% discount if ordered online but their minimum order for free delivery is £200. For once I had my timing right and needed to order my chocolate for christmas so getting up to the free delivery total was possible. The book has a lot of reference/technical information with the first 67 pages written on technical aspects of sugars, emulsifiers, spoilage of products and approaches to balancing ganache recipes. Then the recipes which are divided into 2 major sections: Fat Based and Fat & Water Based. 'Fat Based' overs chocolate spreads and nut pastes, so now I can make my own nutella! 'Fat & Water' is sub divided into Truffle shells, Cutting Pralines, Moulded Pralines and Other Techniques. There are some beautiful ideas for decorating your chocolates often as using ordinary kitchen equipment such as crinkle vegetable cutters, straws, cooling racks and also lots of elegant piping. Some of the recipe 'flavours' look familiar (but reworked to get better shelf life)and he does in places cross reference his other books which could be a bit frustrating if you do not have them. He seems to be adding salt more often too. I rarely add any additional salt to my ganaches but I do usually work with salted butter. Maltodextrin is also used quite a lot as well as sorbitol and glycerol. Looking forward to getting started on this book. Lapin

That would explain why my chocolate wholesaler (UK) now has it as available on their website; they sell a lot of Callebaut chocolate so presumably have been sent a suply of the books. Their price is also less than the one currently on Amazon UK. Lapin

Amazon UK is showing the publication date as 20th December which seems a very odd date to release a book so I wonder if this was just a case of adding another couple of months to the original UK date until something more accurate was announced.

Freshly made toast Vanilla and most of the ones already mentioned, especially freshly baked bread

As far as I am aware that is the price including delivery. I have bought their sample bread boxes a few times now as I think the bread is excellent. I do not have a decent local baker so mail order is my best option. The range for online sales seem to have expanded recently so you can now stock up on your favourite loaf. I make a lot of bread myself but cannot match the depth of flavour these guys do. The bread has always arrived beautifully packaged with notes about each loaf. Lapin

Well its not just the spelling of key words, some things have completely different names (courgette, rocket, aubergine, swede all come to mind as well as very different names for cuts of meat). My search for honey cake did not pull up the recipe I knew was in my Claudia Roden book of Jewish food because in the US version it is called lekach and I would never have thought to search for it by that name (until now)! But I love the sight and the advanced search allows for quite clever combinations of search terms. Lapin

I have most of my cookbooks held on the 'library thing' database and was able to export all the ISBNs and just import them in batches of 500 at a time to EYB. Really impressed. Minor drawback is that most of my books are UK published editions and it looks like the US edition is the most likely to be indexed.

Love the chickens Richard, What breed is the silver/grey one? Lapin

I guess Padstow can get very busy which might be 'grim' for some folks but there is plenty of good food to be had without going into one of Rick Stein's many places. From Bude I think you will have quite long drive to get to the better places to eat. I wish I could offer you a list of local gems as Bude is not far from where I live but I have not found any yet. We always head to Padstow! (Book ahead for Margot's, it would be a shame not to go) Lapin

I have only seen this in the UK sold in 1kg packs, with courier charges on top. I am guessing that is too much? Lapin

These 2 web sites are very good for info & recipes: simply vietnamese Rasa Malaysia I have learnt a huge amount from the Rasa Malaysia website on Asian food generally, the link above should take you to the Vietnamese recipes but there are many more asian countries covered. I also have the Best of Nicole Routhier book and this has a nice selection of recipes to get started on. Lapin