Suzi Edwards

i posted my recipe for chocolate amaretto truffel cake in a thread entitled something like "suggestions for barbeque deserts" it takes about 10 minutes to make and got me a proposal of marriage (which i sadly declined) strongly recommended :-)

this little deli seems to have the whole range. i haven't been able to get past the spiced coffee since trying it...

i just wanted to share a new find, it's hill station ice cream. the cinnamon is good (better flavour than the cinnamon ice cream at RHR), but the spiced coffee is probably the most amazing ice cream i've ever eaten. given that i spend my weekends making my own it almost makes me cry to say this...i am already working on my own interpretation of it. i've only seen it in one place, the italian deli on cross street in islington. run, run there now. (and no, i don't work for them)

i think they're called ortolan, i remember reading stuff about it on here but i'm so technically challenged i can't do the "click on here and here's the thread" thing. did they really show that on tv? i thought it was illegal as the birds are endangered?

now i'm finally back in england, i just wanted to say THANK YOU SO MUCH for the pig pickin'. saturday was fab; the collard greens, those spicy mushrooms and, of course, the pig. it was completely delicious, i didn't realise that pork could taste so good. well worth travelling over 3,500 miles for! and the people, thank you all so much for making jack and i so welcome, especially mike, blondie and "the deans". jack took me to harris tweeter and wholefoods on sunday morning (who said romance was dead?) so i'll report back on that once i've settled back in (and once my cats have got over my return and stop walking on the keyboard)

Jackal has a good idea, but I don't have a webcam. Does an attendee have one to bring? I'll set it up on my laptop if needed... i have a web cam..i'll pack it tonight. i am now so excited about this...today is going too, too slowly. my flight leaves london at 10:00 tomorrow, then we have dinner in dc that night and drive down to raleigh via williamsberg. we arrive late on friday night so we might be about then, but i am planning to try and let jack have a break. he's doing a lot of driving this trip :-)

i'll give you dale winton, the hamiltons and jordan for a decent chilli-dog.

my immediate thought was bodeans - as they seem to make great provisions for children. there are lots of comments about it on here, but i am not sure it's the type of food you might be looking for. not having children i don't think i can be any more help :-)

dare i ask what happened?

can someone give me lessons in what to order please? that sounds so much nicer than my choices from the same menu. grrrr.

i had them at Almeida in Islington about 6 weeks ago. I think they were about £6:00 from the a la carte menu. their number is 020 7354 4777.

i did.... see, i'm a good girl, i am :-)

i'm not sure this will have quite the same effect with a "jones the bootmaker" bag. :-) went to the cigar divan in the end. very gentleman's club feel to it. cocktails were ok and the olives horrible.

no, neither saw nor smelled them. we had a not very good table though, slightly way from the body of the restaurant.

Well, not wishing to re-run an old Italian food thread but are adventure and surprises what people are looking for from an Italian restaurant? I don't think so. i just mean i want more than i get when i cook at home.... metrogusto in islington seems to manage adventurous italian food and valvona & crolla in edinburgh had better ingredients.

no-one's posted about this resturant for a while.....so here goes. it was first visit to locando locatelli and i had very high hopes. i cook a lot of italian food at home so i was really looking forward to trying "high end" italian and seeing what makes sardines with panzanella worth 16 GBP. the answer is nothing, really. while i left feeling that i had eaten some quite good food, i felt the 80GBP per head price tag was steep. and we only had one bottle of wine from the cheaper end of a long and expensive list. we would have drank more, but the meal never really settled into a pattern and we were both rushed and ignored in equal parts. to give you an idea, we were there for 3 hours, had starters, pasta, mains and then just coffee. i think our main problem stemmed from the fact that we asked to order our third course once we'd eaten our pasta and ended up with an almost hour long wait. we ate: squid, followed by tagilatelle with kid ragout (pasta too al dente for my taste) and sardines with panzanella and beef carpaccio, spaghetti with octopus (a buxom wench of a pasta dish that i wish i'd ordered) and pidgeon with lentils. coffee came with 2 chocolate truffles and perfect macarons. there was nothing here that i can't cook at home, apart from the macarons, which frustrated me. that said, i have an annoying habit of ordering the wrong thing. i'd probably go back, but really left feeling that i would have liked a few more surprises and a bit more adventure (from myself and the kitchen) one final note, they did have spaghetti with white truffles as a starter and announced the price (45GBP) are truffles that much more expensive this year?

tony and andy know about the rigours of heels...the hotel bar is a great idea, thank you. i had kind of missed that the resturant was a hotel resturant. boo to me.

fantastic idea gareth, but you and i have very different ideas about what's close :-) i think this is because you're not wearing 4 inch heels. any other ideas?

hey, any ideas of nice bars near to locanda locatelli where a lovely girl (me) could wait for someone for a while without being hit on? our table's booked for 7:15 and i'm at a loose end for an hour or so beforehand. don't really want to roam the streets and i don't really know that part of town.

ate here last night and i'm still not sure i quite get it, but it was enjoyable enough. what i like most is the way that everyone seems to be having fun, there's something very unenglish about the way people seem to really wave their arms and share food here which is nice given the nature of the menu. it was really busy so i started by reserving a couple of eccles cakes and a glass of fino :-) starters were thin flank with green sauce (we asked for some horseradish as well), snails with bacon and the table next to us kindly (and completely randomly) gave us some of their rolled pigs spleen. the snails for, for me, the stand out dish, completing changing my view of snails. fab. from my small taste of the spleen i also wished we'd ordered a full portion of that... for mains we all went for the grouse. at £25 a pop we thought it really expensive, but all wanted to try it. it came served with watercress, bread sauce and a (very hard) crouton with pate. i drew the short straw of the grouse world as mine wasn't as well cooked as the others and i strugged with it. luckily this meant i had room for eccles cake, lancashire cheese and a flash back to the egullet dinner at st john. all in all, i think we should have diversified on the mains but this is a great place to eat with friends.

i would second the RHR option if you're looking for exceptional food and a calm atmosphere. i had my "best meal ever" here, for what it's worth.

i think this topic should be at the top of this forum to drive us all into a pig pickin frenzy.... we booked our flights from london this morning and i am now deeply excited. the only thing to do now is buy mrs varmint's biscuits....

cool. i did especially enjoy the pickle. the tomato salad from the exceptionally cold salad bar bit was horrible though. i might have the ox tongue next time, that looked really wibbly and tender.

Having never had an "authentic" salf beef sandwich (ie in the US) I was wondering if anyone could tell me how authentic the sandwich bar in Selfridges is. There was a very long queue....but that's not always a sign of quality ;-)

Does anyone have any ideas about what to do with kiwi fruit? My organic box scheme delivers them every week, we never eat them and now i have 20. I have tried juicing them (which was ok, quite refreshing with sparkling mineral water added....but it means the juicer is a nightmare to clean. So, any ideas for uses for them?