Duncan

Was at a press event today with a chef/contestant and one of the food stylists from the show who ruefully confirmed that Gary will indeed win, by royal command, as predicted by Popbitch (and our own ChampagneSadie) over a month a ago. Makes you wonder why they bother really. ← Perhaps they bother because not everyone believes every rumour they hear? FYI, Gary lost his heat despite having two dishes the judges thought were outstanding, Atul goes through to the final: he may not have hit quite the same heights, but the judges reckoned he did better all round.

No, although a reasonable alternative is to tell her where she is taking you and follow it up with regular reminders. I think Judy knows she's taking me to l'Ortolan for my birthday to sample the chef's table there, although I must check though that she's remembered to sort out a taxi. Meanwhile, I'm getting solid nudges in return for her birthday treat.

A bit of an urban myth. True the first low quality supermarket type pizzas were deep fried, but never battered. (maybe only as a one off joke) The curious thing is that the people who deep fried these pizzas were of Italian decent. Work that one out !!! ← Not an urban myth at all: they were definitely battered and on at least one occasion included the plastic wrapping. Specifically it was a chip shop in Brechin where we used to stop off when returning from school trips down south. I'm not telling you something which happened to a friend of a friend: it happened to me.

I have fond memories of pizza straight from the freezer into the batter and then the hot oil. They didn't even take it out of its plastic bag first.

eh... though I live in the commonwealth - I don't understand the tea thing. It makes less sense to me than the supper thing. shouldn't tea be ... well.. a cuppa tea? ← No, tea is a meal less substantial than dinner, possibly involving a hot dish, but also sandwiches and cakes and of course tea to drink. Usually served in the afternoon or evening. I think that generally those people who eat their main meal in the middle of the day might have tea in the evening, whereas those who have the main meal in the evening have lunch in the middle of the day. In either case the main meal is dinner whether eaten in the middle of the day or in the evening. The normal sequence of meals is therefore: breakfast, elevenses, then either lunch followed by dinner or dinner followed by tea and then supper.

Supper in my vocabulary is something different than tea or dinner. supper noun 1 an evening meal, especially a light one. 2 a late-night snack that usually consists of a drink, eg tea, cocoa, etc and toast, biscuits, etc that is taken just before bedtime and in addition to the main evening meal. supperless adj. ETYMOLOGY: 13c: from French soper supper. I would use the word in the context of the second dictionary definition (from Chambers): it is an additional snack that you have just before bedtime. The fact that it comes from 13th century French probably indicates you are right though that it comes from the same stable that led us to call our meat mutton, pork and beef (13c French) rather than using the animal names lamb, hog or cow (from Anglo Saxon). (Ok, so it doesn't quite hold for lamb these days and Chambers just says pig comes from 13c pigge which isn't terribly helpful).

You mean Stanton St. John to the east of Oxford. Is there anywhere he hasn't just bought?

No, and I thought the olives were very nice. I can't say I noticed how the beer was stored, but it is listed by CAMRA so it can't be that bad and google turns up other web opinions such as Hidden away on a single track road behind the main village, it serves Brakspear's beers straight from the wood. I think we are both agreed that the menu could benefit from being shorter. But that is the point: it is a restaurant more than a pub, and they do take advantage of local supplies to produce some great dishes which are far more interesting than boring 'grilled first-class chicken'. It isn't a really great restaurant but it has a great rustic character. I'm afraid I don't know whether they do a top class steak: there is steak on the menu, but that isn't something I would usually choose (and I suspect a 1lb rib steak may be a touch over the top). I'm sure you've described your bad experience accurately (and I do generally weight reviews where things weren't perfect as very useful, especially if it gives you some idea how the staff can handle complaints), but I've written what I believe to be an accurate balanced report of our visit. That's all I can do.

Some links: School lunch menu Crooked Billet offers a lesson in dinners

Rather than hijack the Hotel du Vin and Bistro← thread any further, I'm starting a new thread for good places to eat in or near South Oxfordshire which might not quite warrant a thread entirely to themselves. First up, The Crooked Billet in Stoke Rowe. I didn't feel I could fully respond to Muichoi's criticisms in that other thread, after all it had been a while since we'd been to the Crooked Billet, and maybe the quality had slipped, so in the spirirt of investigative journalism, or maybe just hunger, we set off yesterday evening to check it out. Just finding the Crooked Billet gives you a sense of satisfaction. It is down a small track which so obviously leads nowhere that you begin to doubt the sign that led you off the main road. The pub itself seems strangely lost in a timewarp. The tables and chairs are as rickety as in any pub, but where is the bar? Supposedly although it has been a pub for hundreds of years, they just never got around to adding a bar. Most of the business these days is based on the restaurant (although the menu calls itself a 'bar menu'), and the emphasis for drinking is on the wine list rather than the short selection of beers (Brakspear's bitter and some bottles). The wine itself is everywhere, distributed on racks and selves around the walls and filling the fireplaces. For some reason which escapes me there was also a large basket filled with old corks. We went for a Crozes Hermitage which was nice enough, although perhaps a bit lighter than I expected. The menu is a single sheet of photocopied A3, hand written and frequently updated, with roughly 15 choices each for the starters and main courses. The big question of course is whether the wide choice makes the quality suffer: from our visit not obviously, although you are left wondering whether a shorter menu might allow the chef to scale greater heights. Another quirk is that bread (with olives and hummus) is an optional extra, although at 95p a head, not one that will break the bank. The pub also does the lunches for the local primary school, and profits from the bread are used to supplement the school meal budget. For starters Judy went for a salad of rabbit liver an kidneys with black pudding. The green part of the salad contained an interesting selection of leaves (wild garlic and pea shoots being prominent, also some flowers which might have been garlic but tasted more oniony to me). She let me taste one of the cute little kidneys the size of marbles: it tasted of kidney. My choice for starter was the local carpaccio of water buffalo, from the village buffalo farm with a rocket salad and parmesan wafer. The meat was meltingly soft and very tasty, the salad and wafer were good too, although not as interesting a collection of greens as on the other plate. For main course I went for a selection of local game (rabbit, pigeon breast, venison and a muntjac sausage) with creamed cabbage and chestnuts. Judy had a stew of oxtail with shin of beef. Both were good, although Judy thought the caul round the shin crepinette was a bit chewier than it should have been. I wondered a bit about how seasonal the game was: we are less than a week past the end of the venison season so that is probably alright, and muntjac doesn't have a statutory season, but we are well into what is recommended as a close season for them. Maybe the sausage had been frozen, or maybe not. Either way it tasted good. For pudding, we had Sticky toffee pudding with clotted cream, and Raspberry Cranachan with ice cream made from local buffalo's milk and the pub's own beehives. When leaving you can continue round the same track which loops back to the main road, but if (like mine) your car has a low ground clearance beware of the central ridge and the scary scraping sound from the underside of the car. Also a few miles further on we had to come to a halt for a muntjac pottering about aimlessly in the middle of the road, oblivious to the culinary tendencies of local chefs.

The menu looks nice. The website sucks though: it is all flash, and there isn't any way I could see of going back anywhere, so you click down to menus/wine, then to get back to menus you have to start again from the top of the site. It is the same for every bit of the site: never any way to go back and take a different route without starting all over again.

Tsk, he is from Meath like myself. We tend to get in a huff when Dubs claims Meath people for themselves. I missed the start of tonights episode but I believe he said that his family is from the North. They are obviously using the same system on the TV show that we use to select people for our national football team. ← Yes, I shouldn't have said 'home town', birthplace is more accurate. He seems to claim Athboy as his home town. Is he saying Meath is in the North (which may be true, but it still wasn't in Northern Ireland last time I looked), or did his ancestors come from Northern Ireland? It still sounds like the 'make it up as you go along' system to me. Oh well, at least the food looks better this week. I was interested to see that Corrigan seems to have shifted his position regarding farmed salmon: on Full on Food he there was one programme where they sent him to look at an organic salmon farm as (if I remember correctly) he said he only used wild salmon and had never found farmed salmon worth eating. On that program his conclusion was that that organic salmon was actually alright. Now on this program he is saying he would much rather eat organic farmed salmon than empty the rivers of the last wild salmon. I wonder whether that really was a direct result of the FoF programme?

Northern Ireland this week, Paul Rankin against Richard Corrigan. When did Corrigan's home town of Dublin become part of Northern Ireland? At least there's a lot less sniping and no goat's cheese so far.

There was one point he got absolutely right though, and I think that explains also why he could never win it. JBR said he wasn't doing a la carte restaurant food---he was doing dishes to be served up for a dinner of 350 people. I think he really hit the nail on the head there. The chef who wins this is probably going to be the one who tones down their dishes the least. Whether or not they can then produce dishes of a similar calibre at the final event will be a completely different kettle of fish. The judges, I think, preferred JBR's main course and dessert, whereas they were unimpressed by his starter and fish course. If his fish course had been better he might have won this round, but he obviously decided that serving a decent hot fish course to several hundred people would be unfeasible. I wonder what happens once they have the initial rounds out of the way? Are the same judges supposed to judge the same menus a second time, or are the chefs supposed to produce something different? If it was up to me I'd make them serve up their menus to a school of 700 kids (350 per chef) and the winner is the one with the fewest leftovers. Ok, so maybe the queen ends up with turkey twizzlers but she would be guaranteed popular British food.

I got the impression that JBR was suffering from a heavy cold (certainly he sounded that way), perhaps that was why his starter was described as too heavy on the garlic. But has nobody told him that Her Majesty doesn't eat garlic?

The April issue of WFI magazine has a good bit about l'Enclume in its 'Critic v Owner' column. Richard Johnson and Simon Rogan sharing the 20 course menu. There's a very interesting comment from Simon Rogan, that he hasn't actually eaten his complete menu in the restaurant before: You can read the complete article on the Waitrose website (but you don't as many pretty pictures in the online version).

If I'm tasting a wine in a restaurant then my immediate reaction is either generally either 'it's fine', or 'I'm not sure' and if I'm not sure then it probably means it's corked. In one restaurant I remember when I expressed uncertainty over a Chablis the waiter immediately offered to fetch a replacement ("we've had a few bad bottles of that one"), I couldn't have definitely said it was corked, but the replacement was in a different class. Of course sometimes it is completely obvious or occasionally you might even hope for the waiter to check the wine first. I'd like to point at that while the supermarket in question wasn't interested in checking our claim that the wine was faulty (probably assuming 'the customer is always right'), what they did do (after first asking whether we wanted a refund or a replacement, and then I think going off to check with someone else) was decide that in such circumstances their policy was to both refund AND replace, so that's one pat on the back for Waitrose.

That was a nailbiting final. The judges had to choose between raw partridge, raw venison and overcooked duck. Sadly, Dean and Daksha both blew it and the judges went for Peter.

The view from Les Floret is beautiful, but if you have the time it's worth keeping on up the road past Les Florets for another mile or so: keep right at the col, and continue on until you get to a small picnic site on the right hand side of the road[*]. There's a footpath (signposted for the viewpoint) leading steeply up from the picnic site for about 100m and you'll come out on a small platform on top of the cliffs above Gigondas. The view is pretty amazing. [*] I use the term road loosely: it is unsurfaced and pretty rough in places.

Another place you might want to consider is Kazbar on the Cowley Road. Its a tapas bar, with helpful friendly staff (at least they were when I went there). There's a bit of a review and description of some of the vegan options at The Vegan Guide to Oxford.

You're doing Kobe style long pig as well?

We went only last month, and now you're telling me we've got to go back again for a completely different menu? Seriously though, its great to see that somewhere with a menu as complex as this really can ring the changes instead of keeping to pretty much the same menu with minor variations for years on end.

Maybe it's a Bray thing: on our first visit to the Fat Duck there was a 1-year old in our party and the staff gave her a tour of the kitchen and then took her round all the other tables in the restaurant for good measure.

That's why they keep telling you to visit the website, although they don't seem to have updated it for program three yet. What you cook them in for (according to the website) 3 rather than 4 hours: And it is 20g almonds to 200g of butter (which also has garlic, shallots, mushrooms, mustard, salt, parsley and parma ham). The recipe I followed for the chocolate chantilly asked for equal weights of chocolate and water, and that one is easy enough to reproduce entirely from watching it on tv (although I think when he did it on Richard and Judy it lacked the obfuscation that Full on Food achieves).

Quite so. There is a pig farm near us which is not organic, but does make a point of raising the pigs free from antibiotics. Apparently one of their children was allergic to antibiotics so they starting producing suitable pork and found a ready market. Organic or not is not nearly as important as how well the animals are treated. That's odd, when I made his Chocolate Chantilly recipe some time ago it was perfectly stable (and delicious). I wonder what I did wrong The main difference in the taste is that it is much more intense than a typical mousse. You start with a good chocolate and then don't dilute the flavour with cream, sugar, eggs or anything except a bit of water. And alchemy, or maybe even some chemistry, meeting kids at play in the kitchen is exactly where it should be. If you can't have fun with your food what else is there?