Category: Delicious

Avatar Clompotition time

Gather round, gather round everyone. It’s time for a fun competition that we can all take part in. Grab your friends, grab your relatives, even grab your doggo! Come one and all to start the new year the right way.

The right way being… over two weeks after it’s already started. Yes, I’m finally awake again and can form sentences that moderately make sense some of the time (and that’s all you can hope for when you’re me).

When I was at me mum’s house over Christmas, she had started the usual clear out of cupboards and tidying but sadly more pressing matters got in the way. She has a habit of forgetting about and then not using things before their sell-by date. These then get pushed near the back of the cupboard and are usually removed around December. Occasionally things get pushed to the very VERY back and are lost to time and space. How big are these cupboards? Not very, although you’d think they were the size of the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford when we move to the next part.

I fished out a couple of food items that were well past their best. Using state-of-the-art technology, I have removed the date and it’s up to YOU to guess when it expired. You get one point for the month and one point for the year. If you get both right you’ll receive a bonus point meaning there are three points up for grab each time. There are four games to play over the next four months and with minimal participation (for some of us, wink wink) you could win a superb prize (to be chosen at a later date, and not an imaginary prize like those jelly babies Christopher was jabbering about some months back).

First up – Mint and dark chocolate fondant thins from Sainsburgers. Choose your month and year, gentlemen.

Avatar The Shoe and the Bin

Welcome to the Shoe and the Bin, Carnforth’s leading example of prime pub bistro patisserie and winner of four ‘Confusing pub but great grub’ awards since 2015.

We pride ourselves on the concoction of food available from our three leading chefs participating in everything from Chinese to Thai to Brazilian and traditional English fare. If you’re after something in particular we can guarantee that we will have cooked it at least once in our 35 years of trading.

With the Christmas period approaching, it would be best to book a table now, even if you don’t need it. We get fully booked within a few hours of December and we would hate for you to miss out on all the fun. Chef Boswick is cooking up a storm with his mango and hazelnut chutney stuffing balls and chef Annalise can’t wait for you to try her steaming mincemeat gravy cake trays.

This is but a small sample menu of the delights that you can expect to see over the festive period, subject to availability and whether or not we can be bothered to dust off the extra kitchen equipment required to make it.

December Menu

Starters

  • Home cured tin roof salmon, horseradish cauliflower umbrellas, picked Gorbachev, snout oil (GF)
  • Mixed balcony terrine, feta mousse sharks, disgusting leek with a fresh jus (V, GF?)
  • Smoked bollok baraccas, sauce uncommon gribble, apple underarm spin, sourdough shat (DF)
  • Cajun pork snubbles, caramelised orange dandruff, picked mooli, fractured booli (GF, possibly DF)
  • Singing mackerel herblets, bromance potato salad, “laughing” croutons, citrus gel, Tale of Two Cities
  • Seasonal salad, seasonal purée, seasonable backwash, seasonal roasted barley with a seasonal fresh jus (VG, yes, very good)

Mains

  • Acrid cod, saffron undercarriage, stained broccoli, split butter opera fund (GF…)
  • Hasty beef feather blade, caramelised fondant jacket, mash ‘n’ a half, wander carrot, criminal leek, red wine jus (GF?)
  • Ravished sea bream, blimey purée, dilapidated Jersey royals, curious tenderstem with nutty forecast fennel slaw
  • Tempura eagle tofu, distinct absence of potato, pak choi, pineapple choi, Chris Choi, waffle and spring onion salsa
  • “Bing Bling” chicken breast, telephone purée, hot potato mingers, creamed dialect, with a fresh jus (GF!)
  • Paranoid risotto, herb space, toucan cheese (V)

Desserts

  • Unruly salted caramel chocolate and leisure centre tart, mango flange
  • Brigadier red wine poached pear, flaked docile crumb, arresting cream, taxi home (GF)
  • Angry lemon posset, chuckle crumbles, raspberry mullet
  • Mincemeat gravy cake tray, meringue parapets, upskill crust, shot of Pepto-Bismol
  • Chocolate mousse, tear-stained cinnamon dome, passionfruit bookmark with a banana bichon frise sauce
  • Vanilla crème brûlée, black olive amaretto, with a daunting fresh jus (GF)

The Shoe and the Bin: come for the food, stay for the food.

Avatar Greasy spoon restaurant review

This weekend, we decided to finally visit Café Zeynep, five minutes away from home, that has been open for a year without us even looking inside. It’s the latest creation from daring café owner Zeynep, who has been frying pork products and cooking eggs five different ways for twenty years in other nearby parts of Hampshire; now her extraordinary vision has been set free in this bold new cafeteria experience. From the moment we stepped inside, the all-Turkish staff and fully brown leather furniture set the perfect tone for a memorable fry-up.

Since it was breakfast time, we both opted for breakfast. I chose Zeynep’s Big Breakfast, while my partner went for the Mediterranean Breakfast. The Big Breakfast had local butcher’s sausages infused with well-seasoned porky notes that elevated each bite. The hash browns had real crunch while the egg yolks were runny. It was clear that the chef had taken care to source high-quality beans. My partner’s fried halloumi was perfectly cooked, a delightful contrast to the spicy Turkish sausage. The accompanying toast added a refreshing crunch that brightened the dish.

To drink, I selected the White Americano, while my partner indulged in the Mars milkshake. The coffee was a revelation — smooth and well-rounded, it was served in a mug of plain brown ceramic and garnished with semi-skimmed milk. The flavours melded beautifully, with bitter Arabica bringing out the sweetness of the thick-cut bacon as I swilled down my fried feast. My partner’s shake was equally impressive, sweet but not overpowering; we suspect the Snickers milkshake would offer a more rounded palate.

Throughout our meal, the service was attentive without being intrusive. Our server was knowledgeable about the menu and offered great recommendations for wine pairings, which we ignored because we were having breakfast.

Overall, Café Zeynep exceeded our expectations. The atmosphere, impeccable service, and feeling of extraordinary fullness stayed with us for the rest of the day. It’s basically next door and we’ve never been. We are idiots for not trying it sooner. Next time I’m going to have a go on their brunch menu.

★★★★☆

Avatar The jelly baby quiz

Would you like to win a massive prize? Of course you would.

And would you still like to win that massive prize if it was actually not very massive and was just a fairly large pack of jelly babies? Well, yes, obviously; if anything that would be even better. Everyone likes jelly babies. You are now, understandably, physically clawing at the screen in an attempt to take part. Don’t worry. I will explain how it works.

How it works

The prize is a fairly large pack of jelly babies. The winner gets not just the jelly babies but also the opportunity to specify the brand. Are you a Bassetts fan or a Haribo acolyte? All tastes are catered for here. To win it, you just need to achieve the highest score in the jelly baby quiz, which is a quiz about jelly and babies.

Good luck! It’s time for the questions.

The questions

  1. Jelly is made using which animal product?
  2. Babies are born without which bones?
  3. In a classic red-yellow-green multicoloured jelly scenario, what flavour is the green one?
  4. To the nearest 400, how many babies were born in the UK in 2023?
  5. Which is the correct part of a jelly baby to eat first?

Get your answers in now. One of you lucky entrants will win this not-very-massive massive prize.

Good luck again! And now, in addition, good bye.

Avatar Bit of a fail

I had big plans, huge plans. These plans were colossal and they were monstrous.

If you tried to eat them then you’d either break your jaw trying to fit them in your mouth or you’d have to stop maybe halfway through because you couldn’t have anymore, you were stuffed to the max. They were gigantic.

My marvellous post will have to wait for another time. Until then, feast your eyes on this quiche that my brother served us the last time we were in Leeds. He kept bigging it up (no pun intended), saying how epic it was, how it dwarfed a regular sized quiche and…

Well, it is slightly larger than your average quiche and that’s about it. When you compare it to the Duplo brick though it looks humongous.

Avatar Seeds

Kate has been very much getting into gardening lately, and in particular, growing vegetables. Our back garden is on its way to becoming a vegetable garden. Last year we had home grown tomatoes, potatoes, rocket and carrots, and this year we’re being even more adventurous.

Since all this stuff is being grown from seeds, I am enjoying discovering that mundane vegetables have impossibly exciting names for their varieties.

Some tell you where it’s from, like our spring onions, which are White Lisbon, or the Brussels sprouts which are Evesham Special. Others tell you what the cultivator was hoping for, like Elegance salad leaves or Sparkler radishes or our yellow courgettes, which are called Gold Rush. I see what you did there.

We’ve got some flowers with descriptive names too; our sunflowers have been set up for greatness with the name Titan while the dahlias are Showpiece. We have high hopes for them both.

I don’t know what to expect from our aubergines now I know they are called Jewel Jet F1. But I am a big fan of the classical names. Our spinach is Apollo, and we have two varieties of parsnips, one called Palace and the other called Gladiator. I have checked the packet and Gladiator parsnips are a “vigorous hybrid” with “large, canker-resistant roots”. Just like real gladiators were.

Thrilled and exhilerated by all these names, I then turn to the packet of beetroot seeds, and see that they are Mixed. It had to end somewhere.

Avatar Quince

A long time ago, Ian had a mild obsession with the letter Q, and specifically the way that the letter Q is little used and frequently overlooked. His short-lived website in the early 2000s had an entire page celebrating it.

If you were looking for the fruit equivalent of the letter Q – something obscure, overlooked, probably not very useful – then you need look no further than the quince. It even has a name beginning with a Q.

For reasons known only to themselves, the people who renovated our house about 15 years ago decided that the back garden needed a quince tree. Now, every autumn, we receive a harvest of quinces, which are all ready all at once and so have to be either used or thrown away within a very short period.

A big bowl of quinces

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do with quinces. They were very popular hundreds of years ago, when modern fruits like apples, oranges and bananas had yet to arrive in England. If you were, say, Henry VIII, you would have eaten a lot of quince because there wouldn’t have been much else around. Today you probably wouldn’t bother and they are one of the most useless fruit trees you could possibly plant. (The other fairly useless old-fashioned fruit is a damson, and they planted one of those in our back garden too. This year, for the first time, we got one single damson fruit off it.)

If you’ve never encountered a quince before, here are the essentials:

  • Looks a bit like a big cooking apple, with yellowy green skin
  • Absolutely inedible unless cooked, ideally for quite a long time
  • Flesh is white when raw but turns bright pink when cooked
  • Texture is grainy, like a pear, but even grainier than that
  • Flavour is quite mild, a bit appley, and a bit peary

The list of things you can do with a quince is not very long. You can use it as a substitute anywhere you would cook an apple – so you can use one instead of an apple in a pie or a crumble, but you have to cook it first. You can bake one into a cake if you have one of a very small number of cake recipes that call for one, but you have to cook it first. Or you can boil it down over the course of about a month to make quince jelly, which is quite nice with cheese. Failing that you can leave it in the kitchen while you try to work out what to do with it all, until a time when it goes off, at which point you can put it on the compost heap.

This is the last year that we will be cooking a small amount of quince and throwing the rest on the compost heap, since the tree has now been cut down. Farewell, tree – and thanks for all the quince.