Le Manoir courses with cheeky Adam, the tutor with sass

There were so many course to choose from and if you look on the website you will see a range of new ones including BBQs, cooking with children, macaroons, the choice is amazing.  I would die and go to heaven if I could do the canape course bearing in mind my two favourite food groups were champagne and canapés.  Now I have given up drinking to raise money for West Berkshire Mencap but can still eat my bodyweight in canapés.

  All info can be found here http://www.belmond.com/le-manoir-aux-quat-saisons-oxfordshire/cookery_courses

Below are some of the highlights and at the end I will give you just a few of the wonderful tips but not all because to get them you need to do the course.  I was lucky enough to win the course from @Country and Town Magazine, a wonderful and inspirational read.

This is the poor lady paired up with a one handed blogger that just wanted to take photos.  Luckily she was a great cook.

this was the braised squid with chorizo.  There are two ways to cook squid, flash fry or slow braise which I had never done before.  There were about a dozen ingredients plus some herbs and spices but the whole thing was really easy to do. Tip from Adam, don’t bother de pipping tomatoes when you are cooking at home, he doesn’t!  In fact I cant be sure he skinned them either, this is my sort of cooking!  I am not saying I don’t love my family and friends but they can eat tomato pips or pay to go to a restaurant of great quality, taking me obviously.

      If only my good was set out for me like this EVERY time I cooked, it makes life so much easier and the quality of the food is really good

        Ballotine of poached salmon; dill cucumber, cauliflower florets and horseradish sauce (except we used wasabi)

Again such a simple dish to make and looked so classy, al of these dishes are given options to make little changes off the dish or garnish according to what you have in the cupboard or fancy.  You also get advice on what you can prep in advance so that if you are having a dinner party you can be the cool serene hostess instead of the sweaty panicking scary hostess.

Just an example of the beautiful products around the kitchen

so proud of my chefs jacket which I get to keep by the way

There are well placed screens around the kitchen so that you can catch all the detail.  There Adam has rolled a small bit of pastry into cling film and is pressing the edges of the tart into the sides

How perfect is that, I haven’t done pastry for years

My long suffering friend was allowed to make a peach tart instead of a cherry tart

Ok because of my broken wrist Adam had to roll my pastry but I am sure I could have done it 🙂

Coincidentally a great demo of all Raymond Blancs wonderful books, most of which I have

Half time biscuits, guess how many were left at the end of the break 🙂

        Salt baked leg of lamb with salsa

This was delicious and quirky.  There is something primeval about blowtorching the lamb then covering it in a saltcrust which keeps the moisture in.  The salsa verde was a huge punch of flavour that gave the tender lamb balls, culinarily speaking.

           Another pic of me with my chefs jacket, did I say how much I loved it.

I so wish I had room for this ham hock terrine with soused vegetables but I will definitely be making it.  Adam says a ham hock is less that £3 and if you pressure cook it (another Adam tip, pressure cooking improves favour and you can buy a pressure cooker from Raymond Blancs products)  There are gelatine options but I would go for pigs head or trotters.  The soused vegetables were fresh and sharp and perfect.

Ok now you get some tips for free

Blanch basil before making it into pesto

drain bitterness from parsley by blanching it

Stock – half roasted and half not roasted chicken wings and use for everything, stock is a carrer for most sauces

Think outside the box

taste taste taste taste taste taste

Adam was brilliant, entertaining, matter of fact and inspiring, well worth doing his course.

And try these courses – they are amazing and if someone wants to sponsor me to do the canapé one I will come and do canapés for them

La Primavera Hungerford

Well did you know there was a wonderful Italian restaurant in Hungerford with its own pizza oven?  It is at the bottom of Hungerford High Street and is so lovely inside, open fires, lots of little rooms, delightful staff and magnificent food.

A picture of the inside, very well set out with open fires, secluded corners, very welcoming, clean and well decorated.

One of the clientele, there was an interesting mix of people who appeared to be locals and diners who had driven there just for the food.  Always a good sign in my thinking.

A slightly blurred picture of my dining partner, Rachel, who isn’t really blurred although you would be forgiven for thinking that if you listen to the radio interview where I am trying to make sense of our conversation which is made totally in food stuffed laugh talk.  Translating this is a true skill and does show how good the food was that neither of us could bear to waste a breath on talking when we could be eating.

This was my starter of garlic bread with mozzarella and was totally garlicky and delicious.  It was seriously garlicky but in a very good way, it shouted its flavour rather than whispered it, we are not talking gentle tones or notes we are talking about the best garlic bread ever screaming ‘eat me, eat me”.  It could be used as a form of contraception, in fact why not buy some to take away and give it to your naughty teenage children while they are off school.

Rachel’s calamari fritti, deep fried calamari with rocket and lemon aioli.  Perfectly cooked calamari, tender squid with a crisp coating served with a lovely sauce which provided more garlic.  We were going to be smelt long before we were seen for the next few days.

I don’t think this photo does Rachel’s calzone justice.  It was massive, like a giant pasty but made with the lightest dough and an incredible range of fillings which included a range of italian meats and cheeses.  Delving in was like diving for treasure, ooh what would come out next on Rachel’s fork to face the world for a millisecond before diving into different depths.

My main dish was superb, grilled rack of lamb cooked exactly in the way I asked for, rare.  This was served with sauteed new potatoes and braised red cabbage and a scrummy red wine jus.  This dish is the kind of thing I dream of every time I go on holiday to Thailand.  I have no idea why but to me it is perfection.  I love the meat when it is cooked perfectly like this, I love it if I am in a place where I feel able to pick all the meat off the bones and get every last morsel of juice off the plate.

There were specials on offer and dishes like stone baked sea bass and chicken al mattone with a beetroot salsa verde.  There was also a wide range of pizzas from the pizza oven which I should have got a picture of.  The pizza that the calzone was made of was perfect so I would be very happy to get any of their pizzas although they also do a great range of pasta  including a very tempting lobster tortelloni.

This was my pannacotta, isnt it cute with its tuile curl and range of fruits and sauces dotted around the outside, tasted great too.

Rachel had ice cream which she said was good but I liked mine more, mwahahaha

Rachel’s coffee, I don’t drink coffee or tea but just liked the stripe.  Simple to please me!

Yes La Primavera is a great place to go to, the food was great, the service was lovely and the surroundings were beautiful.  Weekday lunchtimes you will find a decent two course meal offered for £9.95

I didn’t pay for my food and these opinions are my own.

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San Carlos, Bristol

I was in Bristol on Sunday getting ready for an awayday on the Monday. This gave me the chance to meet up with my daughter Rachel who is studying for her Masters in journalism at uni (if studying also means staying up every night, eating and drinking well and generally jamming around having a good time). I had been recommended San Carlos by the owner of The Newbury Pub so we tried it for it’s starters.

The place looked very glamorous, tarnished only slightly by the many pictures of ‘celebrities’ that covered most free wall space. Several had extremely large bits, more bovine looking than some cows I have seen. I would imagine it is often very busy but we were lucky enough to go on a Sunday evening so it was quiet. On each table was a bowl of very large juicy olives, a whole lemon and whole tomato (?!).

This was an interesting mix of starters. Firstly there were barbecue short ribs in a special San Carlo sauce which seemed a bit odd to have on a very Italian menu, particularly as, whilst the ribs were meaty and tasty, they seemed to be linked to Italy via China, stopping only to pick up a bit of a price tag. The Frittura di Pesce Porto Fino was basically crumbed and fried calamari, prawns, scallops and scampi served with two sauces, tartare or sweet chilli. The fish was all fresh and tasty but a bit samey as they had experienced a family dip. Maybe if the prawns had been naked or wrapped in filo it would have been more exciting. Also the sweet chilli sauce was a bit of a cop out and tasted like it had been shaken out of a bottle. We got bored half way through. The squid was tender, the scallops very fresh but all a bit dull.

The moules mariniere were average. The mussels were small and waiting for their parents to arrive and the cream sauce certainly was that. Cream. We couldnt taste any wine, garlic or onion to the extent that we couldn’t mop up the juice, an unheard of for the hogginess that is me. I also don’t appreciate having to debeard probably a fifth of them myself.

The trio di Bruschette boded well. There was one topped with tomato, one with peppers and one with a spicy sausage and mozzarella. I liked the tomato one but with both that and the pepper one the toppings were very cold, even room temperature would have been better. The nicest one was the spicy sausage and mozzarella one, I could have had more than the one. The bruschette were crisp and warm and the toppings were refreshing although cold, the tomato one had red onion in it, the sausage one had a nice kick of chilli and a light coating of mozzarella.

Ambience was great, the service was wonderful, very entertaining waiters, tap water was given on request although no butter with the bread. I would definitely return though, maybe make some different choices.