Tuesday 19 August 2014

Weird stuff I've found in European airports

I've been looking through the photos from my recent summer holibobs and I came across a two gems that I had snapped ages ago from a couple of unnamed, unknown and unloved airports across the continent. I thought what better way to enjoy the wonderful Euro-cuisine than to share with you lovely people.

First, what happens when you want the best of both bread and pretzel worlds? 




That's right, at these times only a Brezel-Snack will do! Unpleasantly chewy lab grown carb product? Sweaty, limp and tasteless cheese? Outrageously expensive? Check, check and check. This is one vending machine snack (with advertised 'handmade quality') which I shall not be looking forward to invading our shores.

But what do you wash a Brezel-Snack down with? Well, look no further than this generic, own brand orange coke concoction. The harshness of the synthetic citrus flavouring cut through the ridiculous amount of processed sugar like a hidden cardamom pod in a bowl of ice cream.



Mmmm, tasty. Makes you really jealous of my jet-set lifestyle doesn't it?

Sunday 17 August 2014

Ben Tunnicliffe at the Tolcarne Inn - Newlyn

Before testing our mettle on the French coast, Mrs P, The Child and I were in the depths of Cornwall with family. While many lunches and lovely treats were had, the most amusing of which happened in a tiny shop hidden on a back street that proported to be:



I later learned that this claim related to the bakery chain rather than the shop itself which I will admit left me slightly disappointed. But one of the main attractions was visiting the Tolcarne Inn in Newlyn. Mrs P and I managed to find a unsuspecting family member to look after The Child for the evening and off we went to try and find this pub.



From the outside, this seems like a perfectly normal boozer - but don't let that fool you. It is stood not 200 yards from the best fish market in the South. 90% of what is landed goes straight off to London and the quality is superb. Inside, the space is small, with less than 20 covers, but perfectly formed. Certainly informal (the waiting staff had to shoo how a local cat a couple of times), the place won me over straight away. The menu was short, with only five starters, mains and puddings to choose from but there was something in there for those of us who pride quality over quantity.



Starting with scallops and lentils for Mrs P, these were nice and big. Full of taste and the creamy sauce was fab. Neither of us were sure about the lentils as they didn't seem to bring anything to the plate apart from a little grittyness.


I went for the crab cakes which were good. Perhaps a little bland if I'm being uber critical, needing more crabiness to really stand out. The avocado dip though was really good, a perfect balance.

For mains, I had monkfish with crab risotto:




Which was all the crab that the starter was missing. This dish had everything, and I enjoyed every, single, fork-licking moment. The fennel was a great accompaniment and a vegetable which I vowed to feature more heavily on my plate at home. Mrs P, in a shocking break from tradition, had a mahoosive rib-eye steak:



Which looked an absolute fright but tasted beautiful. She ordered a side of chips which were the size of potato based medieval clubs and I'm ashamed to say we left most of them.

We shared a pud between us and what you can see here:



Is what's left of the lightest toffee sponge cake you will ever taste. It sent Mrs P over all unnecessary and she had to go for a lie down afterwards. The quality of this sponge was sublime and required us to say so to the waiter. He seemed pleased and said he would pass the feedback on.

In conclusion, If you are in Newlyn please go and support the Tolcarne Inn. Ben is a former Michelin starred chef and while the food here isn't up to that standard, I hope that isn't where he wants to take it. It's a work in progress, of that there can be no doubt and there is no mistaking the talent in this kitchen but by creaming off the quality of ingredients that are on his doorstep there is very little Mr Tunnicliffe can do wrong.

Oh, and he did me a great favour by recommending a couple of butchers for my sister-in-laws birthday BBQ which I catered for a couple of days later. So if you are reading this - the meat and fish went down an absolute treat, thanks very much.

www.tolcarneinn.co.uk/

Noirmoutier-en-l'Île - France

I'm afraid to say that I have recently been very slack in updating this blog recently. The end of the School term, coupled with various business trips and a summer holiday all combined to demand more of my time than one laptop could handle. But having now completed all of the above, I am back to the day job and after filing* five hundred odd emails I can find a few spare moments to update you all** on my culinary exploits over the last few weeks.

I have many tales to tell, but here I will concentrate on my recent time in France. On a French campsite to be exact, wherein I discovered that modern tents, while quick and simple to erect, do tend to suffer somewhat when confronted by the arse-end of hurricane Bertha. Seriously, if it wasn't for the fridge we had hired from reception, we would have unexpectedly gate crashed the Dutch tent next door. As it was I was re-pegging several times a night, and our very kind neighbours also did it for us when they saw we were a gnats chuff away from taking an impromptu wind surfing lesson in our pyjamas. 

Anyway, this is just a mix of all the food related stuff I snapped over there; there seem to be three things this island is famous for: salt, mussels and oysters. I bought a bag of salt from the salt pans, (a kilo for 95p), I ate an awful lot of these:



Mostly very small and packed with the flavour of holidays by the beach, but the oysters...





I thought I had struck gold with these beauties in the supermarket, what's that? €5.75 per kilogram? An entire box for eleven Euros? Umm, yes please, load me up for two, but then. Then, on an early morning stroll to the patisserie to get Mrs P her regular morning sugar high, I saw this:


I returned that same evening and dined on twelve of the freshest, slimiest little buggers that ever slid down my throat with a squeeze of lemon and splash of tobasco. The fella runs a shack at the bottom of his garden with his wife and mother-in-law, freshly collecting then dishing out those bad boys to anyone who happens to be passing at the right time. The most expensive of his offer was twelve for five Euro. At home, you would be lucky to get an empty shell for that cash.


A beer my delightful camping companions bought for me. It tasted like... lager.

We also visited a creperie, which we intended to only supply us with a snack to keep the hunger pangs at bay while we found yet more mollusc related foodstuffs, but actually, this kept three of us going for hours:



This first is a savoury one filled with cheese and salty ham (everything was salty here, we were by the sea and next door to a bloody salt pan for goodness sake). It was a mammoth undertaking, I think it was the cheese that did it for us and it was just so heavy - delicious but serious fromage territory. The sweet was much better with a nice salty (again) caramel sauce. The French crepe is really a thing of beauty and we had several on our trip, this being the poshest but I can just go with one rolled up in a bit of tin foil out of the back of a street van. Lovely stuff.


This was the two Michelin starred restaurant that we found but didn't go into with our shorts, flipflops and overwhelmingly English accents. I'm sure it's very nice though.




This is what we actually ended up eating that night and I honestly don't think I had ever eaten so much shellfish in my life. A whole crab, whelks, oysters (of course), mussels, winckles, cockles etc etc. I was stuffed to the max after - a steal at twenty eight quid. Also pictured is the terrine that The Child ordered. Nice and roughly textured, a bit salty (of course) but it went down well, unlike the cornichons. But I was more than happy to help with those.



Finally this is a shot of a sausage that we cooked up on the beach. It was labelled as 'Toulouse flavour'. Now, I'm not too sure what Toulouse is supposed to taste like but these sausages were great; meaty, well textured with a big whack of pepper into the bargain. Sausage, a bit of baguette and some tommy sauce meant all was right with the world - well until the hurricane hit that is...



*and by 'filing', I of course mean deleting.

** Haha