Sunday 20 March 2011

River Cottage Weekend

For Christmas my lovely wife brought me a present (and her) of going down to Devon for the weekend and having a four course meal at River Cottage. I was excited - I've read all the books, watched all the programmes now I was going to get to eat there!
The whole weekend was just perfect, the B&B was lovely in a Victorian mansion with a 4 poster bed, at the B&B we met another lovely couple staying there who were going to the meal as well.
I got to go to Axminster tool shop (my favorite shop in the world) and the river cottage canteen during the day as well as a wonder round Lyme Regis trying to find fossils on the beach.
The meal that night at River Cottage HQ was amazing. To start with we had four different canopies, each lovely, before we were seated down two long tables. This created a really nice atmosphere as people weren't just in their little groups. Gill the chef came out and explained what we were to be eating and a little about where the food had come from.
Our courses were:
-Ham hock terrine with sour dough and piccalilli (I don't normally like piccalilli but this was lovely)
- Stinging nettle soup with a poached egg
- Black bream with Jerusalem artichokes and home made chorizo
- hot carrot cake muffing with panocotta

There wasn't a single course I'd change, it all tasted great and the portions weren't too small!

I didn't take any pictures inside but I got one of their meat curing area as we were waiting for the tractor to take us back to the car park.




Monday 14 March 2011

Onions in!

I've finally managed to get all of my onions in, leaving enough room in the allum bed for my leeks when I get round to planting them! This Sunday the ground worked perfectly and you only had to tap the clods with a spade and it fell into the idea seed bed. My rows of shallots and onions looked as happy as little bulbs could!
We also had a big push on weeding, trying to get rid of the grass that's springing up everywhere, I think we might bark the fruit area to stop this and make it easier to maintain.We moved a couple of raised beds as well to give a larger seating area by the shed and it meant digging about 20 kg of parsnips up. I've never seen my wife make so much soup!