Claire
Fried Fish and Johny Cakes
Tracey comes to Suffolk (again, again)
I love you Tracey - I buy the Independent on Saturday just for you. Now I've got that out of the way let's see where she went. This time she came to eat in Beccles, at Upstairs at Baileys, and gave it four stars (out of five) for the food. With lots of seafood, stews and casseroles and chefs brought over from Barcelona to cook it all. Haven't been there yet but will be going there very soon - when I've remembered where Beccles is.
Oxtail and Johny Cakes
Can you do a thirty mile food challenge?
Grow local, buy local, eat local. The thirty mile food challenge is encouraging us to 'consume only food and drink grown, raised, caught, produced and/or processed within a 30-mile radius of wherever you live throughout September 2013. The 30 miles is ‘as the crow flies’...that’s a pretty big area: in fact it gives you nearly 3,000 square miles to choose from!'
We don't have to go that far... I was trying to run over a muntjac down my road for nearly two years.
Le Pop Up - Les Pictures
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It was hardwork over that fire - one minute burning your eye lashes, next minute only just hot enough. But the Junior Johny Cakes' Caribbean experience came to the fore as they stoked it just right, and Inspector x's menu was the best some of the guests had ever tasted, expertly delivered by her hand-picked team of family waiters. And it was a perfect summer evening to be in the woods - so warm and still that even the candles stayed alight all night.
Our August Dish of the Day - Lottie and her Magnificent Malteser Birthday Cake
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An abundance of cherries ...
...at a secret location near suffolkfoodie hq, but you can only pick the ones that hang over the road or you will get into trouble!
And you thought cooking for six was hard work...
You can't get any more money through the lottery Local Food Grants but there are lots of interesting food projects going on around the country that are not food banks giving away pot noodles and instant mashed potato. There's a community vineyard, primary school allotments, a food circus and have a look at the size of the saucepans they have in Manchester in their Feeding 5000 project.
Giles and suffolkfoodie go out for lunch
Imagine our surprise when we went for lunch yesterday at Tom's new restaurant 'Picture' because Tracey reviewed it in the paper on Saturday and I remembered I hadn't been there to see what he is doing after Arbutus (and of course because he was in BSE at the Angel before that) and Giles Coren was there having lunch too! What a buzz! Does this mean that here at simple old suffolkfoodie we are going to places WITH the critics?
Anyhoo, enough about us, look at the food! £15 for a three course lunch with two choices, with free bread and the kind of service we should be expecting everywhere. Our water was replaced three times - as we drank it - without any fuss or hovering, and it was tap water which wasn't charged for either. We had a carafe of house white which was a lovely fruity Chardonnay. I had the plum tomatoes with goats curd salad dressed with merlot vinegar as a starter, the other choice being potato and fennel soup with smoked bacon and parsley. Followed by courgette and oregano risotto with grilled artichoke while the others had Elwy Valley lamb breast, with coco beans and cavalo nero, and for dessert I had marscapone and vanilla yoghurt with redcurrants glistening like rubies on the top, or there was chocolate mousse with scottish raspberries and honeycomb. Yum Yum Yum.
Nice sunny place, wonderful food, great hosts, not very busy on Saturdays (at the moment...) and only 90 minutes from Suffolk - take note - people-who-charge-£15-for-crap-burgers. And Giles Coren is much younger in real life than he looks in the paper - you will have to take my word for it, he left before we could get a picture of what he was eating.
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The £250k burger is making me want to vomit...
... all the things those Google billionaires could sponsor and they choose a stem-cell burger.