HALE AND HEARTY

Novelty cakes

2011-04-26T20:13:00.014+01:00

Or rather, cakes have become less of a novelty. I have now completed the beginner and intermediate courses in cake decoration at Trafford College, run by Pauline and Rachel of PR Design A Cake. It's been running since January, it's cost me £400 (so far - the advanced course starts in May) and it's been fascinating. I've met some lovely people, including Sarah Taylor of Taylor Made Cupcakes, who is shit hot and puts us all to shame every week.

So far I have made and decorated: a Christmas cake (Rachel didn't like the Ice, Ice, Baby pun and I don't blame her), a Hello Kitty plaque, marzipan fruits, cupcakes (iced with buttercream made with margarine, as disgusting as it sounds), a pierrot face, a basket filled with flowers, an icing greetings card with flowers poking out, a razz-whore 'ballerina' cake with an air of the Jordans thanks to the use of lustre dust and a race track cake complete with a Michelin man overlooking proceedings.

In my own time, I've done a giant cupcake (from royal wedding cake-maker Fiona Cairns' pretty if flawed book Bake and Decorate), a double-decker first birthday cake for Franklin and his friends, a tower of 100 cupcakes for a baptism, and a bunnies in bed cake for my sister, who shares my memories of the one mum made for us.

Today, I didn't really work. I made a big panda cake instead. Unbelieveably, I'm still quite enjoying myself. Roll on Advanced Cake Icing and Decorating.

Cicchetti: small but acceptably formed

2011-01-27T13:46:00.012Z

Since Frank's arrival I have come to understand the wonders of small things. This bodes well for Cicchetti, which is not small, but serves little dishes.

Outpourings of wonder have accompanied a rash of recent openings (mainly in London, but also, briefly by the looks of it, in Plymouth) in the style of the Venetian bacaro. They serve small sharing plates, Italian tapas if you will, and Manchester's very own version is owned and run by the recession-bucking, celeb-wooing, slightly swaggering Italian chain, San Carlo. It's in House of Fraser, near the handbags.

As Cicchetti's man in charge recently told Matt White and his Gourmet Night on BBC Radio Manchester (on which I will appear on Thursday, discussing cookbooks), they've spent a fortune on it. Presumably deliberately, the grey-and-white marble and long bar gives it an air of old-fashioned, Seventies-style sexiness, and the coffee machine looks like a motorbike. And the other identifying mark? It's packed, pretty much all the time.

A friend had predicted (though not to my face, the scoundrel) that I wouldn't like it, citing terrible service. The floor staff are fine, if a bit dazed looking; the managers are filthy rude. But when the thrill of having someone's back turned to you pales, there's an unwieldy but possibility-laden menu to read. Some dishes come from the deli-style display of meats, salads and bits and pieces at the front, there's bruschetta, meat, pasta and gnocchi to contend with, and there's a bit of gueridon theatre in the form of steak or tuna tartare prepared at the table.

It wasn't a great show - the waiter doing the steak-seasoning was a beginner, being instructed by a distracted senior person, neither of them keen to engage - but it involved my lovely cheffy friend Deanna Thomas's favourite bit of lunch, a smoky-hot tomato sauce made with the spicy sausage nduja. The deep-fried squid could have been crisper and the slow-cooked short ribs considerably less sweet, but I will brook no argument about the magnificence of gnocchi, even very average gnocchi, served double-cheesy with a gorgonzola sauce and in a Parmesan basket (what did I say about the Seventies?). Marinated vegetables, including some very good grilled aubergine slices, weren't bad either. At £15 a head (no booze, just fizzy water), it was an acceptable, accessible - by which I mean cheapish - lunch.

Nevertheless, my friend was right. Despite the buzz and the extreme cheese, I didn't like it very much. Unless you are a person known to the establishment, you are likely to feel as welcome in Cicchetti as a passenger does on a bus. They're not really that bothered whether you're on board or not, because they'd be doing the route anyway. What's the Italian for 'small shrug'?

In conversation: Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson

2010-09-01T08:46:00.007+01:00

Last night at the Lowry hotel was an unusually rock'n'roll proposition, with Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson (who are friends) on stage to discuss fast food, bone marrow and the democratisation of fine dining. The hook was Bourdain's new book Medium Raw and the event was organised by Manchester Food and Drink Festival. After a long lunch at the Mark Addy with the chefs, festival director Phil Jones was irretrievably drunk, leaving it to compere Mark Garner to keep control.

Bourdain is a brilliant quote machine, and by the time he's finished his UK junket you might have heard his talkytalk more than once, but live, it was good stuff. He describes his transition from grunt cook to the 'celebrity chef author scam business' as both weird and ludicrously fantastic. 'I don't think writing is good for anybody,' he said, dapper in cowboy boots. 'They're nasty, angry people. But I don'tmiss the [kitchen] work.' As the father of a three-year-old, he's had to confront the childish longing for the consistency and security of fast food. 'How do we break their evil grip on our children? A person might suggest that Ronald McDonald has been implicated in the disappearance of a number of small children.'

He also brought news of how New York restaurants are adapting to the challenges of recession. 'Overnight, people lost fortunes, and the cost of ingredients has skyrocketed. That changed the game. Restaurants have become much nicer and cut out all of the bullshit. They have to be pleasant when you call for a table. And it has forced chefs to move in a direction they wanted to move in anyway, cooking more shin and head and less filet mignon. Fine dining should be fun. If you're dressing up for your waiter, something is really wrong.'

Henderson was brought on for the traditional hero-worship from Bourdain, who describes himself as 'still a fanboy' in awe of the chefs he's now mates with. 'You have to understand,' he said, turning earnestly to Fergus, 'the effect of the book [Nose to Tail Eating] on the food world was electric. Rich people are now paying for food that poor people used to have to eat. And you'll never get away from the fucking bone marrow dish. It'll be on your headstone.'

When it came to questions, it was clear how much of an inspiration both Bourdain and Henderson are to the industry -one 'F'n'B guy' in the crowd maintained that there are chefs who read Kitchen Confidential daily, and general warmth for Henderson was maintained even after he explained that dog isn't nice to eat because it congeals really quickly. The reason dog was brought into it? Manners. Bourdain says, 'I'm a good guest. If you offer me something [even a platter of puppy heads] I'm going to be appreciative.'

Can you smell bacon?

2010-08-31T08:26:00.006+01:00

I have a feeling Tim spent most of our visit to the Wirral Food and Drink Festival with one eye on the police on duty, hoping they'd stand next to Shaw Meats so he could do his bacon joke. That didn't happen, but our utility room does smell of bacon, because we've hung a hunk of their Cumbrian pancetta above the washing machine so that the air can get to it. It beats Fairy.

The Wirral fest, held at Claremont Farm, has been going for five years, and it's grown hugely since the first one, where I mumbled my way through a talk about what it's like to be a restaurant critic (answer: fattening). I know the farm well because it's where chef and good egg Brian Mellor has his cookery school, and Andrew Pimbley, the famously fanciable farmer, has kindly contributed to more asparagus features than I care to remember. This year there were two demo stages, a loud folk band and a huge beer tent as well around 100 exhibitors. What was very noticeable was - and this might sound a bit off - the crowd. At a lot of these things there are just hands blindly grabbing the samples and disappearing without so much as a by-your-leave. People are rude, they don't buy much and they don't even seem to particularlylike food. Here, everyone was asking questions, tasting with interest, giving it a bit of the old please and thank you and, crucially, putting their hands in their pockets.

We came away with a haul including but not limited to chicken liver pate from Katie's Proper Pate, some Wirral watercress, lovely organic vine tomatoes, a couple of steak burgers, strawberries, kippers straight from the on-site mini smoker, a great loaf of sourdough from this lot and sweetcorn from the inimitable Vorn the Corn, who laughs fruitily when he hands a cob over to the ladies, growling, "I thought size didn't matter?". And, of course, the pancetta, which you can smell before you see.

Field of dreams

2010-08-05T14:29:00.001+01:00

If your dreams involve raspberry sponge with white chocolate icing and pink wafer roses, that is. And whose don't?

Gregg Wallace: what a pudding

2010-08-04T13:47:00.007+01:00

Gregg Wallace was to be heard giving Libby Purves plenty of sugary love on Radio 4's Midweek last Wednesday, which coincided with the thump of a new book, Gregg's Favourite Puddings, on the Hale and Hearty doormat. The baldy one is much associated with dessert, and the new collection contains 106 recipes for them, with cheery intros from the man himself.

Judging by the small print, it would be doing Gregg a kindness to describe the recipes as his. Some of the recipes in Gregg's Favourite Puddings have appeared before in other books published by Hamlyn, and since Wallace's other books are about veg and published by Mitchell Beazley (same publishing group, different imprint), I'm thinking he didn't spend hours slaving over rather housewifely recipes for strawberry crumble flan or chocolate roulade. I looked into the author absence issue for Fire & Knives recently, so I know what goes on, and I'm not entirely comfortable with it.

Nevertheless, we had friends staying, I had a new baking book, and the rest was inevitable. After a just-serviceable foray into 'his' take on the famous Portuguese custard tarts, I was looking for something more reliable from the book. On page 44, of the New York cheesecake, Gregg observes "I just can't help myself. Every time I see one I think of tall buildings and hum Gershwin." I couldn't help myself either. It's a simple recipe which uses a kilo of cream cheese and plenty of sour cream, but which is, unsettlingly, stabilised with flour. I expected its presence to be horribly obvious, but what we got was a decent texture and rich-but-clean, slightly lemony flavour. Without the involvement of a bain marie the cheesecake developed a deep three-crevasse split which looked like a T and gave Tim the right to demand the first slice. He needn't have rushed in: since the recipe serves 10, we'll be singing Gershwin every time we open the fridge.

Also...cakes again

2010-07-28T10:44:00.008+01:00

It will not come as a surprise that I have been making more cakes. My friend's daughter Nancy is being christened at the weekend and the little lady and her mum Liz came round to pick their favourites from trial batches of lemon, raspberry and white chocolate, coconut and vanilla cupcakes to be served at the do. The recipes are all from the Primrose Bakery cookbook and, mercifully, they all work. Raspberry and white chocolate, with a spoonful of jam slipped into the cake under icing that's a cross between vanilla buttercream and white chocolate ganache, won the day. The ones in the picture look at bit playschool, but once I've applied 25 pairs of icing feet, some pink wafer roses and pearly pink sugar spheres to Saturday's lot, they're going to be pretty impressive.

The tapas revolution

2010-07-28T10:30:00.001+01:00

The north west is in the grip of a hosepipe ban, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been pissing it down. Spaniards Omar Allibhoy and Danni Sancho (Omar is head chef at El Pirata De Tapas in Westbourne Grove, Danni an ex-colleague and friend) got the soggy end of the stick last week as their 'tapas revolution', in which they travel a T drawn on the UK map cooking tapas for anyone who asks, began.

They're travelling on motorbikes (one of which has now been stolen) but it had been so wet in Liverpool that they had had to join their camera crew in their motor home. They were soaking wet, already heartily sick of camping, and late. Nevertheless, they manfully cooked a tapas feast in our kitchen, dispensing chorizo tips to our guests Bryony and Ric, and by proxy the camera, along the way. And that was before they'd put their tent up.

I had elected to stay out of shot, so I had to wait until filming had finished to try the sangria, melon with ham, potatoes with alioi and white asparagus, garlicky fried mushrooms and pinxitos of bread topped with Manchego and Murcia al Vino from Delifonseca, membrillo and walnuts. But I did get a sneaky mouthful of Omar's quick Spanish fry-up, featuring chorizo, prawns and a slightly agitated egg, and decided we'll be replicating it at our brunchy leisure, although sadly we'll have to do the washing up rather than leaving it to a couple of visiting Spaniards.

Before the boys arrived I was sceptical about a tapas revolution and suspected whole thing might be more to do with Omar's Che-like looks than a need to educate the eating public. It's not as if tapas is unknown; most people even realise that what La Tasca does isn't it. But Omar and Danni came to us fresh from cooking outside Anfield, where a succession of the mad and foolish had refused their food. One woman explained that she went to Spain every year, but preferred to eat egg and chips while in residence. Perhaps those who lurk around the Kop in the middle of a workday aren't the best sample, but at the risk of sounding like Rick Stein just after he's checked out of a chain hotel in Woking, what is wrong with people?

NB: Will the revolution be televised? Potentially. They just have to sell the finished travelogue to a broadcaster.

Post 82: In which my patience wears thin

2010-06-13T19:55:00.016+01:00

I have had it up to here - here, I tell you - with the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The recipes are rubbish. It formed part of my Christmas cookbook haul because I find that there's something seductive about American-style baking (except the recipes that start with a box of 'yellow cake mix'), and the black bottom cupcakes, with spoonfuls of vanilla cheesecake filling baked into chocolate sponge, looked irresistible. We're a long way from the Hummingbird shops, so it's a case of BIY: bake it yourself.

If only it was that simple. I got a bit bored of the baby biscuits and have been making cupcakes for the new mums in our group. Just because something is deeply unfashionable does not mean it is unpopular. I've followed Hummingbird recipes for Nutella cupcakes, plain chocolate ones, the black bottoms and the marshmallow variant in the picture. It's vanilla sponge with a dollop of molten marshmallow in the middle and pink ones folded into the icing on top. The white things are a pair of baby feet rendered in icing. Tim says it looks like a baby has been lost in an avalanche, which is apparently 'not a bad thing.' I hope he never takes Frank snowboarding.

The recipes don't work. There are notes intended to make sure you're using the right size cases, but the cupcake batches make six, not the advertised 12, and take twice as long again as in the recipe to bake. They go stale quickly and develop sticky tops if they're not iced. The icing quantities make far too much for one batch. The peanut butter cookie recipe, although delicious, produced 36 rather than 24 biscuits, and that's not allowing for the dough I may have nibbled during the process. It's almost as bad as the first Ottolenghi book, but without the sumac and the misplaced admiration for what is basically contemporary rice salad.

I know from my work with the Guild of Food Writers that it's not a great time for the people who write the books. Budgets often don't allow for proper recipe testing and things are scaled down without much care. Books are riddled with mistakes. I'm more and more convinced that the best recipe sources, apart from people you know, are Olive, Good Food and Good Housekeeping magazines. They have the facilities to test things properly, often several times, and they would never offer a recipe that calls for 250g of peanut butter when any fule knos that standard jars hold 227g. Yes, Tarek Malouf and the Hummingbird Bakers, I'm looking at you.

Torteology

2010-06-07T11:26:00.009+01:00

MasterChef: The Professionals has won a Bafta. John Torode, never deemed quite professional enough to join in, must be seething. But on to more pressing matters. Who in their right mind would bake a British strawberry? Orlando Murrin, the former editor of BBC Good Food and himself once a MasterChef semi-finalist, is who. It turns out I would too.

I got home from the shops yesterday with a punnet of strawberries (only one of which had grown a fluffy beard to conceal a huge, sinister cavity) and an urge to bake. A giant strawberry shortcake wasn't quite right because there are only two of us on solids at H'n'H Towers and we wouldn't have eaten it before the cream made everything soggy. The normal plan - leafing through the 23 baking books stacked in the kitchen - didn't yield anything promising. So I turned to the interwebs, and specifically Orlando Murrin's strawberry and cinnamon torte.

The idea of putting strawberries with cinnamon, let alone blasting away their freshness in the oven, sounds, as we used to say at school, absolutely hanging. In fact, it works really well here, and the cake is a piece of the proverbial. You whizz ground almonds, butter, eggs, flour and sugar in the food processor with a teaspoon of cinnamon, spread half in a cake tin (the mixture looks a bit scanty, but there's just enough), add sliced strawberries and cover with the other half. An hour later, you've got an extraordinarily light cake with an appealing rubbly top and a jammy seam in the middle.

Eaten with a whipped-together combination of double cream and Greek yoghurt, using a cake fork, it feels thrillingly European, like The Wolseley did before it boarded the hell-bound handcart. It is - and stop me if this sounds a bit 50 ways with mince - pretty versatile; you could stick any fruit in the middle, except bananas. Bananas are strictly for putting in the bin.

Showing a bit of leg

2010-05-29T12:49:00.000+01:00

Baby Frank doesn't mean to be demanding, but his needs are such that it's a very long time since we've been able to commit our culinary misdeeds to blogpaper.

We've done the crimes (Dan Lepard's whoopie pies, a black tie dinner halfway up a mountain, fun with Heston'n'Delia and much, much more) but appear to have lost the time down the back of the nappy drawer.

Anyway, I can just about remember the last proper roast we had in our old house (we've moved a couple of streets over, but we're keeping it Hale) and it was a corker.

Despite a lack of sunlight in the old yard, Mum has very kindly persisted in potting up herbs for us, and the ones which have survived made their way into the classic buttery Ballymaloe herb stuffing which, although supposed to be for turkey, works wonders on supermarket pork (don't shoot me, it's outdoor reared).

Tim cut slits into a bit of boned leg, applied plenty of the stuffing (herbs, white breadcrumbs and onions fried in lots of butter), rolled it up, trussed with string and bunged it in the oven.

A couple of hours later, we enjoyed it between the piercing cries of the new and totally fabulous junior Bowden.

Mind you, we should have taken the string off first.

'Happy birthday from the team'

2010-04-26T20:51:00.002+01:00

I received a birthday greeting from The Hale Grill – the nearest outpost of the Blackhouse steak and seafood mini-chain – this morning. Checking back I see it landed in my inbox at 10.01am.

This was unusual for two reasons: 1) I'm not easily given to surrendering personal data, however benign the harvesting, and 2) it's not my birthday. 'Did you really think we'd forget?' asks the first line of the e-mail, to which I can only respond: 'I don't know, but you did – my birthday was nearly three weeks ago.'

Which presents me with a quandary. I'm more than happy to offer a home to a medium-rare sirloin; in fact, I remember joining the Blackhouse 'e-mail club' with the specific intention of receiving offers like this ('Since it's your birthday, we want you to enjoy a complimentary main course when you bring a friend to dine with us!'). But, of course, it's not my birthday.

For once, the small print offers a get-out. The voucher is valid until May 26, making my precise birth date irrelevant. Which, I guess, is how it should be: after all, what's a few weeks between friends?

Baby vigil essentials

2010-04-17T12:06:00.002+01:00

Sleeping baby, sneaky biscuits

2010-04-14T14:13:00.002+01:00

If there's one thing I've learned during the four weeks of Franklin's life so far, it's that if fate offers you a spare half hour of silence, you've got to take it. So, while he was asleep today, his little arms curling like a drowsy octopus at a disco, I made some biscuits.

Rather than being any biscuits, these are baby biscuits. I've been getting together with a few other mums from antenatal classes and have recently noticed, through my fug of tiredness, that when your baby is born, the other women give you stuff. It's a proper thing: I've received very welcome little parcels contining scratch mitts, bibs, socks, a babygro and matching comedy hat, not to mention - a definite vote-winner, this - bath oil and Mini Eggs. So now I must reciprocate, and I will be giving baby biscuits.

The Americans call babygros onesies, but they shall be forgiven because they also make something called a Cookie Cutter Texture Set: Baby Onesie. This little miracle has been imported from the US of A by my local cake shop and is a rare find that includes a babygro-shaped cookie cutter and three thin plastic 'texture mats' which produce babygro patterns when you roll icing over them. Using a reliable sugar cookie recipe from Peggy Porschen and a few windows of baby sleep-based opportunity, I now have gifts to take to the next coffee morning.

Giant prawn

2010-04-02T10:59:00.004+01:00

Last November Hale and Hearty bumped into Jamie Oliver on holiday. If we'd known about this at the time, we'd have had a word. Full story here.

My kind of food book

2010-03-26T23:04:00.006Z

This stood out among the stacks of hardbacks currently dominating the front room (see Wednesday's post). If you can't read the small type in the photo, it's 'a guide to the edible plants of Britain'. I didn't need to do much actual foraging to get my hands on it; it arrived via DHL this morning. But I picked it up at three and have barely set it down since.

True, it's too heavy for a day out in the backpack – and in any case, the black and white pics aren't the greatest aid to identification. But there's plenty to admire about Miles Irving's book.

It's crisply ordered, by subdivisions of the plant kingdom (so no longer must enthusiasts of the dicotyledon plough aimlessly through a text in pursuit of their quarry). The practicalities you need – where to forage and when, and advice on those plants that might, in fact, kill you – are well presented. The trivia is fascinating. And, every few pages, a chef pitches in with a relevant recipe.

But what I like about it most is its inclusivity. I'm surrounded by glossy titles as I write this; as you'd expect, there are a fair few on the Hale and Hearty bookshelves, too. But there are only four or five cookbooks I use regularly. They don't tend to demand one-off, hard-to-find fresh ingredients that have no second life in the store cupboard, and (a pet hate, this) the methods don't require me to have the product of another recipe – for, say, a complex mussaman curry paste – in reserve. But finding and picking wild plants? Anyone can do it.

And they do. In his foreword, Mark Hix recalls going out to pick blackberries for his grandmother's pies. We all have memories like that. One of mine is eating beech nuts on country walks with my dad; one day I'll do the same with baby Frank. Irving's guide applies this sentiment to the broadest canvas. It's inspirational, rather than wishy-washy aspirational. The Ebury Press RRP is £30, but needless to say it's discounted here.

Feed me now

2010-03-24T18:45:00.007Z

The parlour chez Hale and Hearty is a little cluttered right now, and it's not entirely due to the recent arrival of baby Frank. Emma is coordinating this year's Guild Of Food Writers awards, which means she receives a copy of the relevant materials for every entry – including the submissions for the three best book categories.

It's a weighty survey of the good, the bad and – despite the best efforts of the airbrushers – the ugly of culinary publishing from 2009. And, two days after the first courier arrived, it's taking over the floor. Frank's carry cot is in danger of being walled in.

That's not to say he wouldn't appreciate the sentiment behind some of the titles in his infant eyeline – not least the latest from perma-grinning Aussie Bill Granger, five down from the top. I guess sometimes we can all get on board with that one. Me? I've got an eye on Laura Mason's Good Old-Fashioned Roasts. Even Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights can't compete with that.

Abode with me, and other stories

2010-03-05T18:55:00.006Z

The baby is due on Sunday, so I've been doing my own personal variant on nesting. This involves waddling about doing all the food-based activities I can, just in case the little fella doesn't like going to restaurants.

Yesterday began with a vigorous judging session for the Northern Hospitality Awards, in the company of guidemeister Peter Harden, chef John Benson-Smith and Peter Banks, the MD at Rudding Park. There tends to be something refreshingly no-nonsense about panels that comprise chefs as well as industry observers, and we exchanged a few low-level profanities as we worked our way through a huge pile of entrants for our allocated award. I emitted a swear when Mr H aired his theory about cooking in the east of the country being far superior to cooking in the west, but I quite enjoyed his unique calling card - he gives copies of Harden's away instead of business cards - and his use of the term 'old cove'.

Then, in case they call off the Amazing Graze offer between now and June and mindful of the fact that the Chester hotel opens soon, it was straight to Abode for the twelve quid lunch, beloved of anyone who has a pulse, a palate and pockets with averagely deep bottoms. The things we expected to be good - the excellent bread basket, the food generally and the fish in particular - still are. Chef Ian Matfin is very good at what he does, and the slow-poached salmon with watercress puree and chopped duck egg was really lovely, a sophisticated but not clever-clever take on an egg and cress sandwich - and I say that as someone who hates an egg and cress sandwich almost as much as she hates a banana. Mum's guinea fowl dish was pretty strong too, as was a simple boudin of chicken served with a herb puree and a couple of wild mushrooms.

But. I don't mind the restaurant being in the basement, I don't mind the crappy, cheap looking logo that cunningly combines an M with an @ symbol (Michael Caines at Abode, innit?), but I do mind the service. For a team that have been in place long enough for me to recognise most of them, they're still, with one or two exceptions, incredibly stilted and cackhanded and seem hidebound by procedure ("two for lunch and you haven't booked? Let me check with chef despite the fact that the restaurant is almost empty") while not able to follow basic bits of it, like having someone at the desk. Grrr.

A few hours' break and it was on to Dilli. I have always held its Ayurvedic principles, or perhaps the way various PRs have gone on about them, against it, but I bloody love its potato cakes, with their herby green insides and swirly dressings of tamarind, chilli and yoghurt. We also had an extraordinarily light spinach curry, some seafood in a rich, yellow coconutty sauce, and a classy variation on a lamb bhuna. You can see the kitchen from a few of the seats, and I began to feel that with naan like theirs, I could happily go into labour without another dinner. Then I remembered that there are a few other places I want to get done before Sunday, baby permitting. Watch this space for either outcome, kids.

Glamour Puds

2010-02-25T16:11:00.010Z

I must admit that despite a deep interest in puds and a shallower interest in glamour, Glamour Puds had passed me by until this afternoon. The first series of pastry chef Eric Lanlard's Channel 4 cake show is stripped across this week at 2.55pm, with the second one scheduled to start on Monday. It has thoroughly daytime production values but has brought him a modicum of attention, and in an interview in today's Times he ponders the British fondness for style over substance in the celebration cake stakes.

Lanlard is, of course, a major proponent of that style, filling bespoke celebrity orders as well as selling handmade cakes to less well-known Londoners. His trademark dessert tower, beloved of brides who wish to give their guests a nice pudding rather than a finger of fruity misery, is much copied. He's got chops when it comes to sugarwork as well, although that's much less fashionable than whipping out a sheet of cocoa butter transfers.

The show I caught while on sofa duty, dedicated to wedding cakes, exposed the difficulties of demonstrating a real skill on telly without turning your audience off. Raymond Blanc's Kitchen Secrets has solved the problem by getting RB to call for his assistant whenever anything too involved or unsexy is required: whole chunks of the recipes are missed out, and we're directed online to finish the job. It's shameless, but then we don't expect RB to toil over stock or parfait or rouille in real life, anyway.

Lanlard's approach is slightly different and, due to the constraints of the format, a bit half-arsed. He'll show you how much hoo-ha is involved in certain aspects of preparation – before you get past first base on his mini lemon cheesecakes, you'll need moulds and acetate strips, and he's at least honest about the fact that stacked cakes require dowelling rods for structural support, and for that, of course, you also need a hacksaw – but then goes all coy about how to make decorative white chocolate fans. There's vague talk about equipment being readily available, but no advice about how, if you're going to stick marzipan to a cake with apricot jam, you need to sieve it first.

The C4 food website doesn't really succeed in filling in the gaps, so the blushing bride seeking inspiration for her wedding cake is in receipt of some seriously mixed messages. Is the dream pearl-encrusted cake achieveable? Yes, but probably only by Eric.

Welcome to Burritoville

2010-02-17T16:03:00.004Z

Actually, no. Manchester is about as far from being a hotbed of quality burritos as it's possible to be, but we're making progress. At the hairdresser's the other day (a while ago, in fact – thanks for keeping us offline for seven days, BT) there was an upset in the usual information exchange. Normally, the lady who cuts my hair tells me how she's getting on with her new boobs (she's disappointed by her recent augmentation because they don't look fake enough) and I recommend restaurants she might like to take them out to. Everyone's happy.

This time, she had a suggestion for me: Pancho's Burritos. It's a little stall that has recently opened in the food bit of the Arndale market, our own North West nod towards the food-cart culture that's supplying the hungry of other cities with spicy street snacks galore. The hairdressers of the Northern Quarter prefer it to Barburrito, and I've got a lot of time for the lunch preferences of people who are on their feet all day.

Pancho, if it was he, made me a stormingly large foil-wrapped pork burrito stuffed with everything and a little bit of spicy sauce. I should have asked him to hold the iceberg lettuce – that cold, crisp, throat-grabbing watery greenness reminds me of bad packed-lunch sandwiches and misery – but otherwise it was a decent effort, hot and fresh, and far preferable to those Ditsch soft pretzels you see people clutching as they wander around the Arndale.

Perhaps even better than the pork juices dribbling down my arm is the other stuff Pancho's sells. They've got a brilliant selection of all things spicy, including alternative brands of smoked paprika (it transpires that La Chinata, pictured above, is not the only fruit), chipotles in adobo, tomatillos, green sauce, red sauce and loads of different dried chillies, plus corn tortillas and masa.

A few years ago, as a test for a Mexican cookbook I'd been sent, I struggled to get any of this stuff in Manchester, and the big spicy dinner we held was lacking as a result. I think I ended up buying bits and bobs in America and concealing them in my luggage, in case another Mexican cookbook landed on the doorstep. I will fear leaky bottles of hot sauce no longer. Pancho's is here.

Expressing disappointment

2010-02-08T14:59:00.007Z

This is not just any tagliolini fungi. It's Francesco Mazzei's tagliolini fungi for Pizza Express. I've got a lot of time for Mazzei and his Liverpool Street restaurant, L'Anima. Just after it opened I went with my friend Suz and, although we stuck out like sore and slightly shabby thumbs among the cityish clientele, we were treated with exceedingly good grace. Apart from one oversalted pasta dish, the meal was brilliant, and the chef-patron subsequently proved to be a generous interviewee at the last minute, when he could – and many would – have just told me to bugger off.

Mazzei follows Theo Randall into the guest chef slot at Pizza Express, and at the beginning of February his dishes were launched at a party at the chain's Soho restaurant. Unable to waddle that far, I tried his pasta dish – there are also pizzas and starters – at Pizza Express in Hale over the weekend. Away from the bright lights of Greek Street, it wasn't, frankly, that hot.

There was a decent quota of chunky mushrooms and the promised whiff of truffle, but the portion was exceedingly mean for £9.45, and it had been flashed under the grill, leaving some strands in an advanced state of burny mortis, crisp, black and crunchy. I understand that the launch went well enough, but there are 372 restaurants in the PE chain; the dishes will have been designed for easy and effective roll-out, and if Mazzei was hoping to show off his wares further afield, he's been let down by the fellas in the stripy tops.

Ice, ice baby

2010-02-03T08:38:00.006Z

I didn't sleep much last night. It's the excitement. Sometime today, the delivery men from Currys (who, if they are anything like their in-store counterparts, will be nice but stink of fags) are coming. They will bring with them my ticket to culinary freedom. I cannot wait.

I've long been equipped with pestle and mortar, good knives and the best plug-in items that messrs Kenwood and Magimix can provide. But, since leaving home for Manchester in the late nineties, I have never had access to a proper freezer. Those crappy ice-making drawers at the top of normal fridges have been my lot in life; the one we have now is capable of keeping a tub of Cherry Garcia frozen yoghurt solid for about 36 hours, which creates occasional, intense bouts of ice cream frenzy, followed by long fallow periods.

The decidedly mid-range fridge freezer we chose at the weekend is ostensibly because of the baby. I'll be able to freeze little cubes of carrot puree, refrigerate his milk, and get to things without bending down because, well, I can't. There's also a theory that women should spend their maternity leave cooking, labelling and freezing big batches of nutritious meals for the weeks after birth, because otherwise they will end up living on Cheestrings and their beloveds will leave them.

That's all very well, but at the moment I can only see frozen fun and frolics. An ice-frosted bottle of gin with ice cubes rattling alongside. Chicken bones frozen until there's enough to make stock, rather than chucked heartlessly away. Blackberries picked down near the Priory. Blobs of biscuit dough ready to bake at will. Orange sorbet frozen in the hollowed-out shells for when my sister comes round and we remember holidays in France. Ice cream that can be eaten, rather than drunk, after two days at Hale and Hearty towers! Excuse me. I've just got to look out of the window and see if the men from Currys are coming.

Ken Hom's hot wok

2010-01-29T11:09:00.006Z

In Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires, she describes taking a whirlwind, whiskey-fuelled tour of Flushing's Chinese restaurants with Ken Hom. Before reading it, I thought of him mainly in connection with the garlicky pages of our copy of Foolproof Chinese Cookery (the spicy chicken with peanuts is a favourite, although it demands a lot of chopping). Afterwards, I realised how much he knows, how long he's been at it, and that he shares the excitement about finding the good stuff that's common to most food people.

I was surprised to see him on the list of guest chefs for this year's Obsession festival at Northcote – the restaurant he consults for is in Bangkok and he lives between there and France, neither of which is handy for the Ribble Valley. Apparently, Atul Kochar was instrumental in setting up last night's event, and on screens in the dining room we watched Hom, 60, darting about the Northcote kitchen with a glass of white in his hand, tasting, plating and overseeing the service of his five-course menu.

Highlights were Vietnamese rice paper-wrapped spring rolls, served with crisp iceberg lettuce and leaves of basil, coriander and mint to form a fresh outer layer, and a poky dipping sauce with lots of lime. I don't generally see a recipe for a simple square of pale steamed fish and think 'yum', so the steamed turbot with ginger and spring onions and a soy and sesame dressing was an unusual treat, and pud – warm slices of perfect mango with basil leaves and vanilla ice cream – was great too. This being Northcote, the whole lot was bookended with excellent warm bread, a cheese course and coffee with tiny, very loveable Eccles cakes, and served with warm professionalism and humour.

The company was great, too; a communal table included Sam Allardyce and his wife (he likes elvers, she finds octopus freaky), Angela Hartnett (hates Tesco, loves Steven Gerrard), William Hunter (grows an awful lot of carrots) and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines. A Czech child refugee and one of Winton's children, she's past 80, full of life and devoted to helping young Czechs who work in hospitality find their feet over here. She's also better with a knife and fork than chopsticks, which made me feel a lot better about my own ineptitude.

Get Fraiche

2010-01-26T09:27:00.008Z

Last night, a bit of Wirral glamour came to Manchester in the shape of Marc Wilkinson and a selection of culinary toys including a smoke gun. It was the first Harvey Nichols guest-cheffery occasion that I can remember, and like a small-town theatre in summer, the bar and brasserie had gone dark in order to focus the collective mind on the matter in hand: 40 Mancunian covers, keen to taste Marc's food without trekking to Oxton for it.

As I breakfast contemplatively on the herby caramelised pecans boxed up for the ladies to take away after dinner, I can report that all went well. There was a jovial, slightly excitable atmosphere – by its nature, it's not often that the HN dining room is full of customers whose main interest is in the food – and Gemma Perry, Marc's right-hand girl, ran an unflustered service.

For £90 with plenty of matching wine (£65 for me, the poor non-boozer), we had a dinner that I'd rank, if I was the Hornby sort, somewhere in Per Se's slipstream but far above our recent sortie to Mr Underhill's in Ludlow, which has held a star for years, and probably over Purnell's, Juniper old and new and Simpsons as well. Highlights included the novelty of a dish of smoking olives with a plume that rose when the lid was lifted ("They taste," said Tim, "like they've just come out of a house fire"), and an extraordinarily tender loin of rabbit swapped in for the foie gras course in case baby H'n'H, now 34 weeks and kicking like a mentalist, was adversely affected by all that vitamin A. There was also a revelatory pairing of sweetly seared scallop – not pictured, that's another one of his scallop dishes – and fresh, clean pineapple puree.

Wilkinson does like to fiddle, but he gets the balance right, and the processes he puts ingredients through serve to clarify the flavours: my melon and almond soup came with little barrels of melon stuck with slivered almonds, like tiny fruit and nut angels, and the almonds themselves were ridiculously...almondy. The verjus drizzlings with a piece of seared sea bass and aubergine yoghurt shook the whole thing awake, although I will admit that I thought it was tamarind for a while, and I hadn't even had a drink.

Things slowed down marginally towards the end, and I decided that I would willingly have sacrificed one of the dessert courses in order to leave while I was still awake. Then Tim asked me whether I would have missed the chilled, fizzy grapes, the lemongrass pannacotta with the sour cherry foam, or the deconstructed Sachertorte with the shot glass of apricot sorbet and warm, mouth-filling chocolate moussey stuff. I didn't have an answer for that.

Heart of darkness

2010-01-25T09:23:00.009Z

I'm working on a story about making home-made sweets as a Valentine's gift. It's not Treadstone, or even Sugarhorse, but yesterday I decided to do a spot of deep background research and make some chocolate-covered honeycomb, aka cinder toffee, aka Crunchie.

One of my interviewees for the piece is Chantelle Nicholson, sous chef at Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley and co-author of Nutmeg & Custard, Wareing's rather lovely book. There's a whole chapter dedicated to home-made sweets and, before I start blithely advising readers to create one of the most dangerous situations known to the home cook (all it takes is someone to come along and stick their finger in that tempting molten sugar), I wanted to walk a mile in the sweetmaker's shoes (which are, sadly, usually dirty Crocs).

Nicholson had told me that the honeycomb was a piece of the proverbial, and she was almost right. You add three tablespoons of honey and one of golden syrup to 150g of sugar, stir until the crystals dissolve, and add two teaspoons of bicarb. Then it explodes into sweet, amber-coloured foam, which you steer into the waiting lined tray. 15 minutes and a dip in chocolate later, you've got that Friday feeling.

Except. As you can see from the picture, in which my first attempt looks considerably darker than the second, I burnt it. It started boiling before the sugar had dissolved, and by the time I got it out of the hot pan, it was smoking. You can see the dark seam of burniness running through the middle, and although the texture is great, Tim rightly observed that it tastes of petrol. It's not the love token I was aiming for.

It had also filled the house with the smell of burnt honey. In my excitement about finding a purpose for some of the stash kindly sent by a man from Rowse last year after we discussed the plight of the honey bee, I had forgotten that we both hate the actual taste. It's all floral and pervasive, and brings to mind a 23-year-old with a beret and a book sweetening her tea in an ostentatious manner here.

For the next lot I subbed in all golden syrup for the honey, used caster sugar to encourage melting and boiled it briefly. The result wasn't as spectacular – the burnt stuff had formed a much more voluminous foam, presumably because the base liquid was thinner and lighter to start with – but as you can see (it's on top of the stack), it looks like proper honeycomb. Sweet.

Gordon's prawns

2010-01-18T18:38:00.003Z

Gordon Ramsay's F Word? These days, that would be frequently – as in 'frequently on telly, with diminishing returns'. He's back on Channel 4 tonight with Gordon's Great Escape, a culinary jaunt around India that at least promises to be more about food than celebrity fluff. Never mind the annus horribilis or that lost Michelin star: we'll tune in to see him make 'real deal versions of Britain's favourite dishes', if only to shake the taste of BBC 2's own Monday night offering, the tin-scraping Delia Through The Decades.

Hale and Hearty didn't get a preview copy of Ramsay's show, but we have cooked the Bengali prawn curry recipe he supposedly picked up on his travels. It's pretty good, too, from the rather austere, blend-your-own aromatic paste that only reveals its full character in the final minutes on the hob, to the relative luxury of marinated king prawns (I can't imagine Ramsay commanding his brigade to 'bulk it out with a bag of cheap tiddlers', but that's exactly what we did).

Is it authentic? It certainly has the subtlety– and seafood bias – you might expect from Bengali cooking. Resist the temptation to ramp up the seasoning and you'll have a healthy, warming bowlful with enough well-delineated flavours to make it interesting, if not particularly fun; you suspect most consumers of those aforementioned favourite dishes would demand something richer next to it on the curry-house table. As an appetiser for the show, though, it bodes well.

Spangle dangle: stars in the north

2010-01-17T10:09:00.007Z

The Michelin results have been 'leaked' once more, and it's a case of something and nothing for the mighty north. Some things remain, comfortingly, the same: Fraiche has kept its star, Anthony's lack of Michelin status continues as a source of ire, Birmingham stays high-profile and ex-Alty man Paul Kitching has picked up a plaque for his Edinburgh restaurant, 21212. Northcote is still the most convenient option for the man standing in the middle of Manchester, thinking "where can I get me some star-studded snacks?".

Of course, the London news, especially the loss of a oner for Ramsay at Claridge's and the new three for Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, is big. But what strikes me is the lack of interest in the only 'rising two star' award in the UK, given to Simon Radley, the funny-looking fella on the right of our picture, who's been cooking at the Chester Grosvenor since I was a bairn.

'Rising' awards are difficult. They mean that the chef is tipped for the stars proper next year, but they're pretty unpopular among the recipients, hard to explain in print, and perhaps suggest that Michelin haven't got the prairie oysters to just sod it and give them the stars. Nevertheless, Simon Radley's new status is pretty interesting. I've been a couple of times and liked it, but I'm curious to know, after all this time, what he's done this year that he didn't do last. I think more of my fellow foodlers would also be curious, if only they knew or cared where nobbins it is.

The other award-winning place now on the H'n'H list is The Alderley Restaurant at the Alderley Edge Hotel. Footballers love it, we liked it when we went a few years ago at the height of the asparagus season, and now the AA has declared its affection: it was one of 12 places given three AA rosettes in this year's round. Caterer rightly describes this as shifting it into the big league, and it's pootling distance from Hale, so I'll be looking out my snootiest facial expression for a trip to the Edge.

I am the egg man: chocolate fondant

2010-01-10T12:48:00.035Z

Last night I made a batch of chocolate fondant (or 'the perfect chocolate fondant', to use the headline in Olive). I did so wearing this rather fetching new apron. It's illustrated with cartoon eggs, which chimes nicely with the pivotal role played by our ovoid friends in this classic dessert. That's me, buttering the moulds.

The recipe came from jowly restaurateur and Civilian Masterchef judge John Torode, and is on the long list of indulgent treats favoured by his televisual partner in crime, Gregg Wallace (who appears to believe it should be pronounced, loudly, 'fondont'). It's also regularly attempted by contestants, with wildly mixed results: the eggy mix must be prepared and cooked with precision if you are to avoid either raw flavours or a bone-dry core.

I've never made it before, and don't know how closely this recipe follows classic iterations. One Torodian touch is the addition of white chocolate for texture (we used Milkybar Buttons instead of the suggested Green & Black's). He also recommends metal pudding moulds (for improved heat conduction). Purists will tell you hand-beating achieves better results, but trust me: you'll need an electric whisk for the all-important mixing of eggs and sugar over a pan of simmering water.

And the result? One of mine is pictured right: rich, nicely gooey and perfect with a dollop of decent ice cream. You wouldn't want to make them every night – each pot clocks in at more than 500 calories, for a start – but the page has been torn from the mag and added to the recipe file. In Masterchef parlance, compliments don't get better than that.

Snow cake

2010-01-06T16:45:00.003Z

Last year Hale and Hearty considered the purpose of a plastic cake decoration styled as a naked female torso. A solution has now presented itself.

Baking in a winter wonderland

2010-01-05T20:40:00.004Z

Cranberry and orange cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. The recipe is from a pre-Christmas acquisition, the Primrose Bakery cookbook. Happy new year!

Marc Wilkinson comes to civilisation

2009-12-15T14:29:00.015Z

I haven't got much against the Wirral, except that depending on which bit of it you're going to, it can take ages to get there. A recent visit to Heswall involved two trains and two buses and took two-and-a-half hours – no wonder that, against all the odds and a bump that gets in the way of what my instructor calls 'peep and creep', I'm trying to learn to drive.

One of the nicest things about the peninsula, apart from my mate Liz and her lovely baby daughter Nancy, is Marc Wilkinson's restaurant, Fraiche, in Oxton. He works alone, very hard, and his food is great: inventive without being stupid. His Michelin star, awarded last year after a frustrating wait, is well deserved.

After being clouted (accidentally) in the heed by a pensioner on the bus, my day has improved considerably with the news that Marc will be plying his craft in Manchester for one night only. Harvey Nichols have just sent news that he'll be cooking a 40-cover dinner in their restaurant on January 25, showing off dishes from his signature menu, which is the one between entry level and 'hold on lads, I'm going mental'. Five courses with matching wines, water, coffee and service is £90, which is perfectly reasonable for a taste of Fraiche without the tear-stained Merseyrail ticket and 40-minute delay at Chester, where they have helpfully demolished the ladies' loos on platform 7.

It should be the most confident, interesting food that's been served at Harvey Nichols for a while, and hopefully he'll be bringing Gemma, his young and extremely capable front of house, to oversee service. And it's a Monday night, so there should be plenty of off-duty chefs in attendance. That could make for extra sport, especially if they get drunk and start throwing stuff at me. It's always a risk.

Kitchen W8

2009-12-11T16:51:00.009Z

There's nothing like gastric distress to ruin a girl's birthday weekend in the big smoke, but before things went bad we did at least get a few proper dinners in. Chief among them was Kitchen W8, Philip Howard's relatively new venture just off Kensington High Street. Howard has two Michelin stars at The Square, has faithfully cooked at Nigel Haworth's Northcote food festival every year since it began, and has talked openly about overcoming his addictions to drugs and booze, which has nothing to do with anything but makes me suspect that he's a good egg.

He's not on the hobs at Kitchen W8 – head chef is his former sous, Mark Kempson – but between them they've mustered enough humour and lateral chefly thinking to take the blander edges off a sleek, mushroom-coloured dining room. Dishes from The Square have been transferred and tweaked, and between them they've turned game into a hot dog, made a girly fish dish into something obscenely, satisfyingly luxurious, and upended the ubiquitous lemon tart so that creme fraiche, usually the accompaniment, becomes the star of the show.

If ever a dish was designed to catch the eyes of food geeks and restaurant critics, it's the starter of game consomme with bacon cream and a small game hot dog. It's like the protein in two services (suckling pig and a sausage roll, p'raps) at Hibiscus: ignoring it would be unnatural. The hot dog, in a brioche bun with a seam of home-made brown sauce, was neither here nor there, but the mug of soup was like a wet, hot, immaculately clarified country house. It tasted of leather, cigars, mahogany and tweed, and the bacon cream benefited hugely from being proper cream rather than wishy foam. A little arrangement of 'thinly sliced' smoked eel with grilled mackerel really had been through the mandolin. The paper-thin approach makes for effective flavour delivery, but the slices were slightly weighed down by hefty chunks of yellow beetroot, some of which retained too much rootiness.

Howard seems to like putting cheese in odd places (see the passion fruit and lime mess with Brillat-Savarin cream), and halibut with a Beaufort crust is a Square classic. Here, and I'm sure there, the crust is a fine, elegant affair the colour of pale gold, and the accompaniments, a sweep of cauliflower puree and buttery 'melted' onions, are brutally rich; on a plate of beiges and yellows, I missed greenery. Ox tongue with shallot puree and a foie gras baked potato reflected the incipient trend for posh spud stuffings, and reflected it well.

A visit to Lutyens a couple of weeks ago confirmed that while restaurants are still happy to serve chocolate fondants, they're reluctant to admit it. So while theirs, when it's on, is called hot chocolate cake, Kitchen W8's is known as a warm bitter chocolate pudding. It is extraordinarily good, but of more interest is the caramelised creme fraiche tart. Wobbly and sweetly farmyardy, the creme fraiche takes the place of a lemon tart filling, while the lemon curd, in a blob and an ice cream, is relegated to the sidelines. It's a quiet joke which works extremely well.

We were in and out for under ninety quid, especially sweet since we'd been at the River Café the night before, and, as is customary, paid the bill in a manner best described as half willing, half wincing. It's nice to know that, should you wish, it's cheaper to be cossetted in Kensington than mildly patronised in a barn in Hammersmith.

Chef's hat

2009-12-07T18:50:00.009Z

I took this picture (click to enlarge) in Hyde Park this morning, on the path out of Winter Wonderland. It's a rather chilly-looking Heston Blumenthal, preparing to do some filming. If you could pan around to the right, you'd see a camera crew, several runners and a not particularly effective canopy; to the left, the shadow of the 'Bavarian village' and a not particularly festive ghost train. Anyway, it was just starting to rain, so we didn't hang about. Stay tuned, as they used to say...

The apples of our eyes

2009-12-04T13:13:00.001Z

At the weekend (a long time ago now, but that’s the way it wiggles) we drove out to proper Cheshire – as opposed to our little fringe – to have lunch at Cabbage Hall. Robert Kisby has been at the posh pub since March and has eradicated most remaining traces of former owner Francis Carroll’s horribly flamboyant interior.

Lunch was fine rather than world-beating. Our winter warmer platter, a big plate with its indentations filled with Kisby’s takes on chicken kiev, Lancashire hotpot and the like, looked a bit like yesterday’s man, and if the cottage pie-stuffed jacket potatoes had been made that morning then I’m a pickled cabbage.

We did, however, make a worthwhile discovery, and all thanks to me being off the booze. The barman brought us each a bottle of crisp, tart-and-sweet Cox’s Orange Pippin apple juice from nearby Willington Fruit Farm, and as we sat mulling over its deliciousness offered directions to the farm shop near Kelsall. Obediently, we went.

Willington Fruit Farm has a farm shop in the old-fashioned sense, a world away from the sexy (if you like marmalade) sheen of nearby The Hollies and its caravan site and extra barn stuffed full of Christmas gifts. It’s basically a cold shed full - and I mean full – of apples. They grow, pick and sell or juice a huge range here, and I thought immediately of my friend Rosemary Moon. I had never really understood her obsession with our native apples until we saw, spread before us like Yeats’s dreams, Chiver’s Delight and Belle de Boskoop, Melrose, Holstein Cox and Egremont Russet.

Sod’s law, of course, meant that I was about to come away for a week working in that London and couldn’t, in good conscience, buy any. We did pick up six bottles of gorgeous juice, though (£2.15 for a big bottle, as opposed to £2.50 at Hollies). One of them is from a dessert apple called Katy, a cross between James Grieve and Worcester Pearmain which apparently has a slightly acid and refreshing flavour. That one is earmarked as a Christmas gift for our friends Helen and Adam and their daughter Katy. Luckily their tiddler, Jacob, is too young to be upset about his lack of fruity namesake.

Life of pie

2009-11-28T11:18:00.006Z

I've just written a piece about mince pies, and as soon as I'd filed it, I had the urge to make some. It's too early, of course – this kind of caper should be saved for December – but the giant jar of mincemeat Tim brought back from Saino's should last all the way through to Christmas. The ones above are ready for their sugar sprinkles. I've just eaten the 'and', and I must say that using lard in the pastry is a masterstroke. Delia's masterstroke.

A work of tart

2009-11-22T14:46:00.012Z

Sue Lawrence is regarded as a bit of a goddess round our house. She was a Masterchef winner in the Loyd Grossman era and went on to write several straightforward, spirited cookery books including one about her native Scotland and my favourite, Sue Lawrence’s Book of Baking. She’s a member of the Guild of Food Writers, as am I, and although our paths have never crossed I am told that she is a) lovely, and b) very slender for a woman who writes such brilliant cake recipes.

On Saturday night we had our friends Bryony and Ric round for dinner. Nice to see them and all that, but basically it was an excuse for me to cook two recipes that I’ve had my eye on for some time. One of them is Tamasin Day-Lewis’s chicken Savoyarde, a creamy, tarragon-scented gratin that Hale and Hearty will no doubt revisit soon – it was delicious. The other one is Sue Lawrence’s chocolate-crusted lemon tart.

I’m usually unappealingly smug in the kitchen. Things don’t often go far wrong and if they do, I know how to fix them. Not on Saturday. Baby hormones have made me clumsy and short-tempered and I was miles behind. The tart caused trouble because I was too cack-handed to get the bloody thing in the oven without the filling overflowing the boundary of the friable chocolate crust and pouring out onto the baking sheet. So it was not perfect, but it was still good.

The tart is made with a chocolate pastry comprising plain flour, butter, equal quantities of cocoa powder and golden icing sugar, and an egg yolk. This could be a nightmare to work with, but the protracted resting time advised in the recipe – three hours minimum – took the edge off. After baking it blind, you sprinkle the hot pastry case with a generous amount of finely grated chocolate, so that it melts and forms a smooth’n’sultry layer on the pastry. Then it’s in with the filling – lemon zest and juice, eggs, sugar and double cream. Of course, I didn’t have time to let the case cool a bit before pouring the filling in, so the pouring disturbed the chocolate and bits of it floated to the surface. Then it all leaked. I was furious with myself, but surprisingly it lifted out of the tin like a dream and the recommended dusting of icing sugar hid the rest of my blushes.

As you can see from the picture, there’s a clear seam of gooey chocolate between the pastry (biscuity, although not quite pâte sucrée biscuity) and the lemon filling, and that’s what makes it a winner. Tim described it as refined and dignified, what with all the lemon and dark chocolate, and it did have a bit of the ‘Ambassador, you are spoiling us’ about it. The Scottish ambassador for cakes, that is.

Come fly with me

2009-11-16T15:22:00.015Z

Could you use some exotic booze? (And, really, who couldn't – we could only rustle up an M&S champers bottle and some old Absolut for the picture accompanying this post). Well, hold on to your hat. According to this Caterer story, Manchester Airport plans to restyle a decommissioned Terminal 1 control tower as a bar.

And not just any bar, either. "We're hoping this becomes a venue to rival some of the city centre's most sophisticated venues," says the airport's commercial director. "Our intention is to produce an experience that far exceeds all current expectations of a great bar."

An admirable ambition, but a tall order – even if you sidestep the question of what exactly qualifies as a sophisticated venue. Manchester has some skyline bars already, of course: Cloud 23 in Beetham Tower and The Modern at Urbis, coincidentally home to some tasty golden-age-of-air-travel graphic design. Both have that must-visit quality that doesn't necessarily translate into atmosphere or repeat custom. And airport catering? Rare is the table that hasn't left Hale and Hearty with the urge for a fistful of reds from the in-flight service.

Still, the airport project has USPs. Like, say, it's in an airport control tower. You can expect the 360-degree panoramas that are – I'm assuming – handy for air traffic control. Then there's the rural setting, albeit relative in the context of an international travel hub. It's also not a strictly airside concern. Get the right operator and the Cheshire fringe could have a new favourite watering hole.

Sinatra, of course, would have had you straight through check-in and non-stop to Mumbai. But then, he also thought you might enjoy a one-man band in 'llama land', so the sensible money's on waiting to see what happens next. If it opens, I'll certainly go.

Starry, starry nights, part two: Per Se

2009-11-14T10:50:00.022Z

We booked our New York trip in a bit of a hurry, and as I excitedly outlined our eating plans to my friend Clarissa Hyman, her brow darkened with worry. Not only were we planning to visit Per Se, but we were excited about it. This, she suggested, may not be wise.

Clarissa is a great cook, a brilliant writer (a view confirmed by her two Glenfiddich wins) and a sharp, experienced assessor of all restaurants great and small. Not long after Per Se opened, she went. Reader, she hated it. Small portions, stiff and stuffy service, huge prices, and full-length mirrors in the loos offset so that you could almost, but not quite, watch yourself wee. Some good dishes, some misguided. From what I've read in Phoebe Damrosch's book about working there, Service Included, Clarissa is not the only one who resented the formality and awkwardness of the early days.

As we discovered on Monday night, Per Se retains the loo mirrors and the big (though still mighty good value) bills, but it has plenty of charm too. The room, high up at the Time Warner Centre, has great views of the city and the park – you can almost look Christopher Columbus (statue edition) in the eye – and there isn't really a bad table. It's all flickering firelight and glowing bronze floors and nice men pouring Champagne; as soon as Tim got up for the loo, the maitre d' came over to keep me company, revealing that, despite his Italian heritage, he has an aunt and uncle who run a pub in Droylsden. Someone else spotted us looking enviously at the truffle box (they're shaved, suitably generously, over risotto for a $150 supplement) and beckoned the bearer over so that we could have a sniff.

Staff loveliness and views aside, what did we get for our $275 per head (service included)? A whole lot of tasty is what. Thomas Keller's nine-course American-French tasting menu was riddled with the good stuff, starting with the famous salmon cornets and a fabulous truffle custard hidden in an eggshell and topped with Marmitey black truffle ragout, and butter-rich rolls the exact shape of a bum. I was totally convinced by the pro-potato statement made in a salad of different coloured ones, cold, sliced and served with an egg mayonnaise and little pickled onions. Even the frisee garnish was there for a reason, and that is rare indeed.

The lobster course, a huge hunk butter-poached and served with a creamy lemon dressing, ribbons of radishes and a silky cabbage puree (I know. Cabbage!) was another topper, and enough to make the chef who cooked my lobster at Jean Georges weep with shame. Tim was horrified by the cheese course, a slice of ragingly creamy goats' cheese with pickled mushrooms (he hates good cheese and vinegar), but I thought it was great. And I will never know how to say 'mignardises' correctly, but I do know that even after nine courses, plus canapes, there's always room for a salted caramel truffle plucked from a custom-made, triple-decker silver trinket box.

I won't go on. It was forking brilliant, the best meal we've had since last year's absolute stunner at Nicolas Le Bec in Lyon, and worth three Michelin stars whether they be European or American. When I saw Clarissa recently at Booths supermarket's lovely food shop and restaurant in Kendal, I said as much. She was surprised but, I think, delighted.

I am the egg man (limited edition)

2009-11-13T11:46:00.006Z

Here's how to do scrambled eggs: mix in some black truffle and serve with garlicky Lyonnaise potatoes and a croissant. You'll pay $14 for it at New York's esteemed Brasserie (add $5 for a side order of streaky bacon, plus $3.50 for coffee... maybe another $8 for fruit... then tax and tip), so it's not cheap. But it is delicious.

Brasserie's a characterful place, all told. It's 50 this year, with Sunday brunch big on English teas and family gatherings. The latter pack out a basement space decorated like a cross between a Prague subway station and the set of The F Word, with chairs that would fit right in at Manchester's old Simply Heathcotes.

Speaking of which, Paul Heathcote's Spanish restaurant, Grado, used to do a moreish truffly scrambled egg. Unless I'm missing something on the menus online, it isn't there any more. An incentive, if ever there was one, to try something similar at home.

Cafe Metro: UK update

2009-11-11T17:49:00.011Z

You'll recall Hale and Hearty recently blogged about the number of outlets bent on putting the Metro into metropolis, but here's an example closer to home.

While we naturally take all due care not to imply any resemblance between this panini, sandwich and refillable hot beverage joint – on Moss Lane in Altrincham, opposite the ramp down to the station – and newspapers living or dead is anything other than coincidental, that font does look mighty familiar.

Starry, starry nights, part one: Jean Georges

2009-11-08T15:12:00.002Z

I took part in a rigorous fine-dining press trip in Las Vegas earlier this year and, when all the truffles and gold-dusted Rice Krispies were said and done, I began to suspect that an American Michelin star is not quite the same as a European one. The big star places were nice and all that, but they weren't up there with Lyon's Bocuse (three) or Nicolas Le Bec (two, and so exciting and wonderful that it's become our benchmark for posh eating). Now we're in New York, we're putting that theory to the test. What do you mean, we should be saving for the baby's shoes? He won't be able to walk for months.

Jean Georges, the three-star restaurant which sits at the base of a gilded Trump building off Columbus Circle, is a constant at the top of the New York must-eat lists. I have no idea how you pronounce Vongterinchen, the surname of the JG in question, who has a string of places across the city, but luckily we didn't have to say it. We just had to go and eat the tea.

It's a small room and we were expecting it to be ragingly formal, but the number of people in there on a Saturday night - some dressed as Germanophile 1970s mobsters - took the edge off. The prix fixe (which is not the pov option, just the alternative to the full-on tasting) is $98 for four courses plus bells and whistles, including a visit from the mournful man who extracts a long marshmallow from a jar and solemnly cuts it with silver scissors.

And the food? It wasn't that exciting, frankly. Highlights were the turbot with Chateau Chalon sauce, which was heady and rich, and Tim's lamb (pictured), which had an utterly delicious sticky, shiny chilli crust. We weren't sold on the idea of the desserts, which are all 'tastings' on various themes, with four mini dishes, but they turned out to be the highlight. We swerved the spice one and the autumn one, and went for 'chocolate' and 'apple'. A chocolate fondant ('FONDONT!') was marvellous and Tim was impressed by a feather-light mini apple tart and a white chocolate and caramel apple dome.

Low points were a noodling combination of halibut with a huge amount of chilli foam, cucumber ribbons and soft creamed potatoes; the potatoes belonged on a French plate and everything else on an Asian one. My lobster with basil and spaetzle, the crazy German short pasta, was... nice. The chocolate plate also held the real aberration of the meal, a minty mouthwash-flavour bowl of green goo, with chocolate vermicelli that looked like little brown worms and were all texture, no flavour.

Until we get back from Per Se on Monday night, we won't know quite where Jean Georges sits. I'm not sure it's three stars worth of delicious, but it certainly beats my plans for next Saturday, when I'll be queueing for the swine flu vaccine at the doc's. You can bet they won't have a man with silver scissors.

Seafood wearing hats

2009-11-07T22:36:00.003Z

One summer in Coney Island, my friend Louis and I paid 50 cents a go to view such quaint sideshow delights as the two-headed baby (actually a poorly rendered plastic infant in a large bell jar). That famous stretch of Brooklyn beachfront - faded glamour in the best possible way - is pretty much closed for business come November, lending a stroll in the late autumn sun an additional melancholy that, say, Weston-super-Mare will never have, with or without its burnt-down pier.

It's a treasure trove of crumbling Americana that would offer riches to even the world's worst photographer. One pleasing quirk I had never noticed, however, was the wearing of hats by the assorted clams, shrimp and crabs that adorn Coney Island's many boardwalk food stalls (you should head straight here, by the way, and skip the overrated hot dogs at Nathan's).

Were we in England, we would have to assume someone has taken the sartorial standard set by Homepride's Fred - faithful servant of the bowler since 1965 - and gone one grander. As we're not, we'll look no further than the topper, if not the cane and monocle, of a certain Mr Peanut.

I am the egg man (calorific uncertainty mix)

2009-11-07T13:27:00.002Z

The celebratory rough-and-tumble of the New York Yankees' ticker-tape parade called for a robust breakfast. (What do you mean, you didn't hear about that? They won the World Series - everyone had a stake in it.) Before finding a suitable spot 20-odd rows back on Broadway we dropped in at the Europa Cafe on Water Street. Emma had a yoghurt parfait ($3.25) and I ordered Breakfast Special #1 ($4.69).

What you see - other than a couple of rounds of foil-wrapped buttered toast, just out of shot - is what you get: bacon, two eggs your way and breakfast potatoes, fried with peppers and onion. What's interesting is the calorie count. Everything at Europa is given one, and this particular special clocks in at 520-820 calories. It's the eggs that do it: lose the yolks and don't add oil to what's left and you'll be getting near that lower limit. But really, where's the fun in an egg-white omelette?

Jamie Oliver: an Essexman in New York

2009-11-06T21:41:00.010Z

I've been leaving the holiday blogs to Tim because, frankly, it's all I can do to stay awake enough for basic conversation, let alone typing. But something so unlikely happened today that I have returned, briefly, to the typeface. Relish it, people.

As a restaurant critic I have a childish fondness for seeking out the new. I've put that into practice over here despite the fact that pretty much every restaurant they've got is new to me. So we went for lunch at The Breslin, a new venture from British-born chef April Bloomfield, who co-owns the Michelin-starred gastropub The Spotted Pig. It's part of the almost comically cool Ace Hotel (pictured, plus stranger hailing taxi), styled pubbily with tartan overtones and a bit of shabby chic. You'd know you weren't in England, it's very dark, and you can't tell the staff from the civilians, but there's something very satisfying about the whole business.

We'd just ordered lunch when Jamie Oliver came in. He's apparently working on a primetime eight-part American show which weaves his campaigny threads into one rich, slightly bolshy tapestry. He knows April and needed a kitchen to film in. What are the chances? Small, I tell ye. Anyway, he sat a foot along the banquette with his people and his big hat, trying dishes and explaining that the UK doesn't really have Iron Chef, while we had lunch.

It's a raw, rich, meaty menu and for me, the options were limited - everything seemed to involve goats' cheese, mayo made with raw eggs, and tantalisingly rare meat. I was pleasantly surprised by what I had dismissed as the ladies' option, to be served with a glass of fruit juice and a smirk. Sea bass with wilted, caramelised treviso and a punch-packing anchovy sauce was done well and, as they say on the Food Network, 'flavorful'.

Tim's lamb burger with cumin mayo and thrice-cooked chips (stolen, we heard the boss confide in Jamie, from the Hinds Head. No surprises there) worked very well as a kind of Middle Eastern slant on a Western classic. To finish, we shared an Eton mess quite unlike any we'd had before in that, being a whole meringue with a drizzle of lemony cream and a sprinkling of crunchy pistachios, it was categorically not an Eton mess. Good, though.

As we left, we noticed a huge SUV parked on one side of the road, and a sporty, sheeny pale blue scooter on the other. I imagine his Joliver a bit like David Cameron, wheeling along carefree while a big car follows with all the necessary equipment. But we'll never know - unless he turns up at dinner time, too.

Simple things, done well

2009-11-06T13:55:00.002Z

There's an art to doing simple things well. Last night we went to Les Halles (see previous post) and, reasoning that a much-respected brasserie should be able to do justice to brasserie classics, ordered some. I had the steak frites (pictured) and creme brulee. See these on the menu of many UK restaurants and I'm not sure what is more off-putting: their familiarity as dishes, or the familiarity of the pitfalls in their execution. At Les Halles they were pretty much faultless.

The meal put me in mind of something William Grimes, former restaurant critic of the New York Times, said recently. He's just published a book, Appetite City, documenting the history of NYC's dining scene, and we heard him talk about it at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Grimes would be the first to admit you can't fully explore the subject in just one volume: New York's food culture, from the first immigrant markets to today's highly evolved triumphs, is a genre in itself.

That doesn't mean he can't follow a clear thread of his own, of course, and Grimes's is straightforward: New York is the restaurant capital of the world because, weighing up quantity and quality, it offers the finest examples of global cuisine found anywhere outside their country of origin. Typically this means simple things, done well - which is, after all, what most of us are hoping to achieve every time we get out the pans. We have some high-end reservations of our own lined up this weekend, but so far the basics have been hard to beat.

The other Hale and Hearty

2009-11-05T23:56:00.002Z

Naturally, readers of this blog have excellent taste: chances are you have the site bookmarked to make it easy to check for updates. But imagine, if you will, the nightmare scenario. You're away from your regular computer, and our address momentarily escapes you. A quick Googling is called for - at which point your top hit may well be for a chain of New York soup shops.

The branch in the picture is a couple of blocks north of here on Lexington Avenue and, in fairness, the menu looks pretty good. From a British perspective, it's certainly more interesting than the Pret A Manger on the same block, with the tomato Cheddar soup a top-seller (I have my eye on the Senegalese chicken with peanuts).

Further consideration will have to wait, though. Earlier today we emerged from a subway station to find ourselves outside Anthony Bourdain's brasserie, Les Halles, and it turned out they had a table for later tonight. He probably won't be on the hobs, of course, but - new wild game menu notwithstanding - the promise of 'American beef, French style' is all but impossible to resist.

(American TV postscript: Saw a billboard today for a new Steven Seagal show, Lawman, which will follow the erstwhile action hero as he carries out his real-world duties as a deputy sheriff. It starts on A&E next month and, if it ever makes it to the UK, is surely unmissable)

Lawn in the USA

2009-11-05T13:49:00.005Z

The lobby of our hotel, where I'm writing this, is known as The Living Room. Last night it hosted an extended cocktail hour as Andrew Butler - him out of Hercules And Love Affair - played vintage disco; right now, it's filling up with suits taking advantage of the free wi-fi and plentiful green apples. The small tables double as chess and backgammon boards, restrained deep house skitters away on the PA and a couple of walls are backdrops for what in the rave days we called 'visuals'. It's not yet 9am.

If all that sounds painfully hip, relax: in the best NYC tradition, it's pulled back from the abyss by an unselfconscious and decidedly mixed clientele. That, and the indoor lawns. Grass is a big theme at the W, from the palm-sized glass cubes on those tables to the mini batting track opposite the lifts. That's it in the picture; Mario, the guy with the electric clippers, is charged with trimming it each morning. The longer you're here, the more of it you see: today there are half a dozen oblong blocks of turf on reception, and a couple of waist-high planters out the front.

If it's not quite Central Park by stealth, it's still more entertaining than American TV, which by and large remains rubbish. Other than the good stuff we know about back home (HBO, FX, some of the comedy), the most beguiling channel is BBC America, a not entirely seamless blend of last season's British prime-time (Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, Graham Norton, Robin Hood), dial-a-psychic adverts and lots and lots of Matt Frei. There, as among the suits in The Living Room, much talk this week has been of Michael Bloomberg winning a third term as New York mayor. City redevelopment will be a priority, apparently. Back on a green tip, he could do a lot worse than extend the excellent High Line project.

Cafe Metro: Eat well, live well!

2009-11-04T22:11:00.004Z

Visit any English-speaking major city and it's unlikely to be long before you're confronted with a multiplicity of metro-themed branding. Shops, services, commuter newspapers... you know the drill. New York is no exception. Our first morning here even offered some Metro Drugs; not something you would associate with my old beat (it was actually a pharmacy). Before we stumbled across that, though, there was this breakfast spot two blocks north of our hotel.

It maybe goes without saying that there's a Cafe Metro - or Metro Cafe, I don't have the data to hand - next to the Metrolink line on Manchester's High Street. As far as I recall that one doesn't sell syrup-heavy stacks of waffles, or favour the gratuitous excitement of an exclamation mark in an up-and-at-'em slogan, but it does do pretty decent fry-ups.

We took a different tack this morning: a Metro espresso and cinnamon Danish on the hoof, followed by good eggs benedict at Markt, an airy Belgian-themed place on Avenue Of The Americas. Lunch involved an opportunistic drop-in at Goodburger, back over on Lexington Avenue. They do, well, good burgers - very good, in fact. And there's an echo of Greater Manchester here, too: if you ask us, that branding is pure Mr Scruff.

I am the egg man (Aldo Buzzi remix)

2009-11-02T10:15:00.004Z

One perk of working from home is the opportunity to cook your own breakfast at a sociable hour – in my case, one that might more properly be described as brunch-time. Eggs – they make you strong, apparently – have been a fixture, so I was pleased to stumble across a new but essentially foolproof recipe in an old review paperback.

Despite endorsements from David Furnish and Simon Cowell, Mr Jones' Rules (a how-to guide 'for the modern man' from the suitably ovoid headspace of GQ editor Dylan Jones) is an amusing and not particularly smug or prissy read. The section on food and drink is home to some pleasingly eccentric finds, among them a fried egg recipe from a treatise on cooking by the late Italian polymath Aldo Buzzi.

Like so many great recipes, it's the finer details that make it. You must crack the egg into a cup, then add the white to a pan on a low heat. Season this, then add the yolk carefully to its centre. When it's almost cooked, add a lid to the pan and lightly firm the top of the yolk. Transfer the result to a warm plate.

Jones adds a few tips of his own. Toast should be served on the side, rather than under the egg; use a duck egg (bigger, if surprisingly hard to come by given Hale and Hearty has rolling countryside south to Stoke and west to Chester); only cook one of them.

You're a modern man, remember, so there's a beer in it for you, too. In keeping with the Italian theme, I'd suggest the elegant attire and gluggable heft (6.6%) of Peroni's Gran Reserva. After that, you'll probably be ready to forget the work and take up another of Jones's serving suggestions, watching sport on TV. Just don't blame me if Sky Sports News fails to sustain the glamour of la dolce vita.

Saf: please 'cheese' me

2009-11-01T17:50:00.014Z

My friend Lindsay has suddenly become a very tough woman to please, dinner-wise. She's always been prone to the odd bout of smoothie-making, but this time she's gone into hardcore detox mode. She's been feeling a bit rough recently, which she puts down to eating crap, drinking too much, and occasionally buying an Upper Crust baguette to eat on the train home from work, and then lying about it. According to her new tough-love regime, she can now effectively only eat raw vegetables. So when I met her for dinner in London last week, there was only one place for it: Saf.

Saf opened a while ago in Shoreditch, so all the London critics have been and gone and left it for the proper people. I can see why they like it; it's long and dim and quietly stylish, with a pretty garden, or at least the illusion of it, visible through floor-to-ceiling windows at the back. The staff don't all know which table is which, but they're willing.

The menu is all vegan and 50 per cent raw which, when you think about it, means not many carbs either (bread, rice and potatoes need cooking, of course). There's soy milk in the coffee, a lot of cashews pounded into 'cheese', and not nearly as much tofu as you might imagine. There are a lot of facsimile items (nut ricotta, vegetable noodles, parsnip rice). Anything that's been cooked is marked with an asterisk. Danger! Warm food! We kept getting whiffs of the Thai green curry, which is cooked and smelt fabulous, but seemed a bit like cheating.

By the time we'd all assembled there was only time for one course. Lindsay had the pad thai, which uses ribbons of courgette and carrot instead of noodles and a drizzle of chipotle sauce for flavour. Cold, of course, as was Natalie's lasagne, a very pretty stack of various pulverised vegetable pastes and layers, served on a nails-down-the-blackboard slate. Good, with individual flavours on show, but oddly heavy.

I had a long, elegant tasting plate, with two kinds of the fabled cashew cheese, with olives and sun-dried tomatoes, with flaxseed crackers to spread them on with satisfactory results. Little beetroot parcels stuffed with cashew ricotta (pictured above, courtesy of Saf) were lovely, as were the soy-spiked seeds and nuts. Vegetable maki, stuffed with parsnip chipped into rice-like bits, tasted too much like parsnips. Dolmas, which they forgot to put on and arrived later, after enquiries, were stuffed with cauliflower rice and flavoured so heavily with cinnamon they reminded me of American apple pie.

How much did we like it? Just enough. It meant we could have an interesting dinner together like normal people, despite what Lindsay is doing to herself, and I like to think of London's vegans being able to do the same. I'm just starting to feel the baby move, like little bubbles popping, and he was fizzing away happily in appreciation of such a healthy dinner. Although if he's his mother's son, he would have been equally delighted by a bag of Cadbury's caramel Nibbles.

To the USA...

2009-10-29T17:30:00.012Z

I've embarked on a dig through some old cassettes in the basement, the latest fruit of which is Leonard Cohen's 1997 album The Future. The CD's down there somewhere, too, but the relative inconvenience of tape – no simple track-skipping here – means I'm listening to the whole thing for the first time in years. Currently playing is one of its key tracks, Democracy, in which the Canadian posits the emergence of a new order in typically deadpan fashion. Democracy is coming to the USA, he sings, 'on a visionary flood of alcohol'.

Substitute 'large aeroplane' for 'visionary flood of alcohol' and 'Hale and Hearty' for 'democracy' and you have a fairly accurate picture of our movements next month, when tools will be downed for a final trip to New York before the baby comes. Among the manifold attractions will be fine restaurants and, if not a biblical tide's worth of booze, a renewed chance to enjoy some decent American brews that usually only make it across the Atlantic in a crate.

It's reasonably easy to order something reliable from Chicago's Goose Island or NYC's own Brooklyn Brewery in a British bar; pick your spot and you'll also find bottles from some of the 1,000-odd small breweries that have set up in the US in the past 30 years. By happy coincidence, however, our local shop sells six-bottle carriers of the one I'll be drinking on the first night. Happy, and bizarre, given the brewery's size: I can't remember ever seeing its beers in a supermarket or off-licence.

There really is nothing to dislike about a proper pint of Samuel Adams' Boston Lager, unless you're the kind of old colonialist who takes exception to the product of one of our finest exported processes taking its name from an architect of the American revolution (which seems unlikely). Full-bodied and richly malty, it's a long way from the bland fizz of the multinational big-hitters. I'd like to think it's what Barack Obama had in mind when he floated a bit of 'bar-stool diplomacy' at the White House this summer. What Len would make of that is anyone's guess.

Book: Easy Tasty Italian by Laura Santtini

2009-10-26T20:51:00.007Z

Laura Santtini's first book, Easy Tasty Italian, has been the subject of much excitable foodie chatter of late. That's partly because her PR is the Twitter-friendly, proactive Sarah Canet, and partly because when a chef is blonde, smiley and had just launched a range of edible glitter products at Selfridges, she's likely to get some attention.

It was by neither of these routes that I came across a copy of the book. I'm staying with my friends Natalie and Tom this week. They've just moved into a new house a Rohan jacket's throw from Epping Forest, and Tom had bought Nat a copy as a little new-home love token. He's a football journalist, nothing to do with the thrilling world of food media and its zeitgeists, but picked the book up because it looked unusual and contained the recipe for Alfredo sauce, a key component of many of his favourite meals.

To make Laura Santtini's Alfredo sauce, the cook (that's Nat) must heat 300ml of double cream with a whole packet of unsalted butter, stir in the cheese, and add nutmeg and another 100ml of cream. Last night we had it with grilled chicken, mash and green beans, and Nat added mushrooms and peas to the sauce to create the illusion of added vitamins. She's got a marvellous palate, the sauce was a triumph, and it went impressively solid in the fridge.

Tonight, we will have it with spaghetti and salad, and because Tim regards pasta and strong cheese as The Food Of The Devil, I intend to relish every mouthful. Buon Alfredo, as I'm sure Alfie's mother said when he was young and wont to experiment with butter and cream*.

*Apparently the Alfredo comes from a Roman restaurant called Alfredo alla Scrofa, which means 'at the sow's', but let that not detain us.

Taps me up

2009-10-24T11:35:00.006+01:00

Taps, the new bar at the Great Northern, doesn't give much away. Certainly not beer; you pour your own from the taps that are installed at each table, and with pricing done by tenths of a pint, an amateurish pour is money down the foamy drain.

The food offer is a bit of a mystery, too. In a big brown bar off Peter Street, clean in a corporate way with a wipe-clean A3-size menu, it's not immediately apparent whether an inventive selection is going to be the result of a quick flick through the Brakes catalogue, or some thoughtful home-cooking.

The first indicator that we might be in for a nice surprise came when I asked if they had any preg-safe factory-made mayo, all pasteurised and flavourless but perfectly adequate for chip-dipping. The answer was no – it's all made in house, from fresh eggs. Good Lord.

The beers supplied vary from table to table – a hen party near us had Duvel and Vedett flowing freely – and Tim poured both Amstel and a lambic which smelt, tasted and looked exactly like cherryade and was clearly there For The Ladies. It's difficult to leave the shiny, shiny beer levers alone when they're right in front of you, which is presumably why the concept of Taps, which started off in Leicester, has proved lucrative enough to extend to Manchester. There's table service for other drinks and bottled beers from a long list, but it is not a concept that has been thoroughly grasped. Our empties were ignored every time someone dropped by with cutlery, or my glasses of lime and soda, each more thrilling than the last.

It feels odd to be eating good, fairly interesting food in such a bland and beery environment, but eat it we did. From the tapas-cum-starter list, the mini venison Wellington (pictured), with a fat chunk of foie gras tucked inside, was cooked rare and came with mustardy devilled mushrooms. Soft shell crab, in a coconuty crumb, was good with a herb salad even if the fearsomely garlicky mayo didn't really match.

Tim's ribeye steak (it's the weekend, right, you can't have something interesting every day of the week) was decent enough, and a kilo pot of mussels with white wine and cream, although a bit shoddy on the debearding front, did the job nicely. It reminded me of moule frites at the Hopleaf, a proper beer-loving pub in a suburb of Chicago, where we were very glad that our friends Abra and Erik had made us take ID. At the ripe combined age of 66, we weren't going to be allowed in without it. Now that's something that wouldn't happen on Peter Street.

Slattery will get you nowhere

2009-10-18T14:50:00.018+01:00

As soon as my mum walked into Slattery in Whitefield, she sniffed the air, noted the cakes, and observed quite rightly that it's a bit like a Mancunian Bettys. They're both family-run patissier and confectioners with a nice line in tea shops, and what Bettys have done for tea and coffee, Slattery have done for extravagant hand-decorated wedding cakes. The Scousers, including the Rooneys, love it.

As long as the trams are down, north Manchester remains hard to reach. After a rare vehicular visit to Bury to pick up some pre-loved baby gear from a friend whose eeny weeny bundle of biddable has grown with terrifying speed into a bright, lively six-year-old, I twisted mum's driving arm and we sped down Bury New Road in search of a nice quaint lunch.

We didn't get it. In principle and in practice, I have always been a Slattery fan – I love the idea of an independent cake'n'choc emporium and took a fabulous chocolate course there a few years back – but I'm sad to report that, compared to how it was in its prime, the upstairs tea room falls short.

Away from the pretty art deco table lamps, which distract the eye momentarily, the walls are shabby and scuffed, and a yellow 'mind the wet floors' sign had been left beyond its usefulness on a bone-dry floor. Our drinks arrived after our food, there was nowhere to put mum's tea strainer (I KNOW, the hardship), the chocolate discs served with tea were bashed about. My plate was dirty round the edges and a glass and teapot bore the scars of a losing battle with the dishwasher.

We had bagels, mine an American job stuffed with pastrami, cheese, pickles and tomatoes. Nice idea, but it was soggy on the bottom, and someone had applied a massive gob of mayo to the hole, so that it oozed through as I bravely attempted to lift it to my mouth. Service was polite but lacklustre.

Like the Bettys cafes, the Slattery tea room is regarded by its many customers as a massive treat. It was packed and buzzing, and people were still waiting for a table as we left. Madness.

Kitchen essentials

2009-10-17T10:18:00.005+01:00

No.2: The Magimix Compact 3 Automatic 100 Multi Cuve

Product placement comes early to the BBC

2009-10-15T08:21:00.007+01:00

It's true that the tyre lads do a prestigious line in restaurant and hotel guides, but last night's Masterchef: The Professionals took the product placement a bit far. In an episode during which hangdog Ludo and sad-face Matt went their mournful ways about Jason Atherton's kitchen, Michelin was mentioned a total of 28 times in 43 minutes. Other guides are, as they say, available.

In other news, Gregg Wallace revealed a rather inconvenient aversion. 'I find raw apple not unpleasant but strange,' he said of Ludo's apple salad. Seeing as Gregg's main foodie qualification is that he's a greengrocer, we suggest he gets this seen to sharpish. In the meantime, Gregg, don't go near the fruit bowl.

Manchester Food and Drink Festival Awards

2009-10-13T00:02:00.019+01:00

Lord, but the roads are quick at night. Mere minutes after leaving the Palace Hotel and the Manchester Food and Drink Festival awards dinner, I'm back at my desk with disappointment dwelling in my heart.

Despite the apparent best efforts of everyone at the Festival, the food and service at the Palace were absolutely shocking. If that's what they do to impress Manchester's hospitality high fliers - not to mention the Hairy Bikers - I dread to think what's on the menu at the annual industry bash for, say, the people who make plastic, or sell air conditioning.

Nevertheless, some joy was available. As ever, I was on the judging panel for the awards and although not all my first choices picked up gongs, it's lovely to see some hard graft, clever thinking and good cooking being rewarded. And the winners are:

Retail outlet: Barbakan, Chorlton
Healthy and sustainable: Gabriel's Kitchen
Coffee bar and casual dining: Folk, West Didsbury
Family friendly: Dough (presented, masterfully, to strains of Kylie and Robbie's Kids)
Wine list: Gaucho (presented by Corrie's Anthony Cotton, who said "I'm going to burp, sorry. After one bottle, they all taste the f*cking same")
Bar: Apotheca
Pub: The Lass O'Gowrie
Newcomer: Damson, Heaton Moor
Chef: Ian Matfin, Abode
Restaurant: The Modern

Henrietta Green, who was sitting next to me, rather sweetly enquired who Noddy Holder was when he took the stage to give the lifetime achievement award to George Bergier. Quite rightly, the silver charmer got a standing ovation as he extolled the virtues of education, service and product knowledge. Perhaps he could take The Palace in hand.

Brimful of Asher

2009-10-10T13:41:00.007+01:00

I am currently hunkered down under the twin weight of tonsilitis and a nasty cold - that's what you get for spending a couple of days in London - but back in the halcyon days when eating didn't feel like swallowing knives, I was a judge at Jane Asher's Home Baker of the Year competition.

I'd previously interviewed Asher (pictured left in hat) about the competition at her Chelsea cake shop. It's surprisingly small and un-fancy, although presumably the va-va-voom factor increases when Nigella Lawson, apparently a regular customer, drops by for some wafer roses.

To enter the competition, amateur bakers submit their cake recipes and the top five are selected to take part in a live bake-off, held this year at Poggenpohl's super-smooth Deansgate showroom. The top prize is £25,000 worth of Poggy kitchen, and it's a nice thought that at least one of them will be going to someone who cooks in the oven rather than using it to store their cashmere jumpers. So it was no surprise to find that competition was fierce, although it was a shame that one of the disappointed runners-up circulated afterwards, bitterly suggesting that there had been a coup.

In fact, there was nothing of the sort. The judges - including Jane, Andrew Nutter, telly lady Lucy Meacock, Karen Barnes of Good Housekeeping, Lucy of Lucy Cooks and me - gathered around the cakes, ate them, and decided which one we liked best. A fruity Bakewell tart and a really good carrot cake were both lovely but flawed in some way, so after much deliberation we chose Helen Roscoe's Lancashire Belles, choux puffs filled with home-made parkin ice cream and drizzled with chocolate. The choux, ice cream and other frills were all very nice, but it was the parkin - gingery and oaty and fabulous - that clinched it.

Two more things that are fabulous: Andrew Nutter's chef's jacket, which is appliqued with blue diamante, and Boots' packs of 30 nasal strips. Drugs are limited when you're pregnant, so thank God for the glamour of the anti-cold sticking plaster.

I can't go back to Sainsbury now...

2009-10-07T18:52:00.009+01:00

Wide aisles, fruity beers and – bit of a clincher, this – a new deal to feed four for a tenner. But what would John Shuttleworth say?

Let us now hail... Culinary alcohol

2009-10-05T19:37:00.014+01:00

Here's a sight to gladden the heart – or possibly stop it. This is one of the well-stocked ingredients shelves at Cocoadance, the Peak District chocolate-maker featured in a recent Hale and Hearty post.

There wasn't time to talk drink then, perhaps because I wasn't doing the writing. But Cocoadance returned to mind after a weekend celebration that involved, among other things, a skittles marathon, some old-school desserts, this marvellous cake and much West Country beer. Chocolate and what might generously be called the more refined tipples didn't get a look in, which is probably par for a birthday bash in honour of two merry widowers with a combined age of 150.

It wasn't always this way. Samuel Pepys was apparently as devoted to the restorative powers of drinking chocolate – at the height of its imperial period as medicinal marvel – as he was to the transformative powers of drinking colossal quantities of what might generously be called port. The best part of two centuries passed before Fry's sold the first bar, at which point finding a preservative became paramount. And so began the journey that brought booze to soft centres.

Most of the bottles in Cocoadance's stash contain culinary alcohol. These are super-proof bottles of popular brands, prized for their familiar taste and practical potency, plus the odd wildcard: that Lajita is a hefty mezcal, complete with worm.

The daddy of the set, though, is the plastic pot far right. It might look like something sold alongside the charcoal briquettes on a petrol station forecourt, but this is Etilfrutto: a formulation supplied by industry wholesalers Keylink. It's flavourless, it's colourless, and it's 80% ABV. Not one for the vicar, then, but more than enough to get a chocaholics' party started. Even if you are better off with the finest ale known to man.

Riemenschneider: 'Too many balls'

2009-10-02T13:58:00.011+01:00

Michael Riemenschneider. Pic: Martin O'Neill

When Michael Riemenschneider arrived at Juniper in Altrincham, some people were excited. When it closed not long afterwards, some people were not surprised. But rumours of the fain-daining chef's return to God's own region have been swirling thickly, and it has been confirmed that he's now in charge of the food at all three of Contessa's Wirral hotels, with Scouse wedding favourite the Hillbark, near Frankby, his focus.

The hotel's restaurant, The Yellow Room, is being refurbished, and soon anyone who liked Mr R's langoustines with pearl barley at Juniper will probably find them on the menu down Frankby way; he's bringing his signature dishes with him. Meanwhile, he has an explanation for his swift departure from Altrincham. "It's a fair criticism to say I took too much on," he says. "We created a real impact on the table but I was juggling too many balls."

If the Hale and Hearty piggybank will stretch to it, we'll be on the Wirral – oh joy! – before long to see what the crack is now he's put the balls down.

Man cake: DONE!

2009-10-02T11:14:00.010+01:00

We've had babycakes, now it's time for mancakes. Tim's dad is celebrating his 70th birthday tomorrow night and this cake is what 80 of his nearest and dearest will be nibbling at one of North Somerset's premier village sports clubs, with a pint of Butcombe on the side.

It's much easier to produce something pretty and cute for a christening or girl's birthday than it is to come up with a manly cake which doesn't rely on a comedy golf theme, so I went for simple and colourful. Even this required a visit to our local cake decorating shop for supplies, and apart from eating the sponge offcuts slathered with raspberry jam, this might be my favourite part of the process.

Sugarcraft shops, where they bake on site and decorate behind the counter as well as selling bits of specialist kit, have a lovely sweet smell and a language all their own. You can have a half-hour conversation about guide sticks, edible glue, drums and dowels, and charmingly, everything still seems to be calculated in inches.The staff tend to be highly skilled and very helpful, and if they're not, you just go somewhere else next time. I could have spent hours looking through the spools of ribbon and little pots of glitter, but I had a cake to make.

If you have a fancy for cake fiddlings but don't know where to start, have a look at Peggy Porschen's website and her first book, Pretty Party Cakes (the new one, Cake Chic, isn't nearly as good). Her designs are ridiculously chic and accomplished, so much so that I've never attempted more than a few of her decorated cookies. But her recipes and quantities for good base cakes and instructions on filling, stacking and icing are immensely useful, right down to the boring stuff like covering the cake board (which I didn't do properly for this one. Fule!).

PP, as I like to think of her, has also let me into one of the professional cake decorator's biggest secrets. Even under a thick mantle of icing, there's no way a sponge cake is going to stay fresh and moist for the many hours between baking, filling, decorating, transportation and the big do. The solution is to give the sponge a liberal soaking with sugar syrup, flavoured with vanilla, lemon or booze, before you put it all together. It's this discovery that means I'll be able to hang around at the party rather than scampering off, shamefaced, while everyone wonders why that nice-looking cake tastes like sawdust.

Parental advisory: explicit cake

2009-10-01T11:50:00.005+01:00

There's a celebratory cake to be made by tomorrow afternoon, and the Hale and Hearty baking drawers have been turned out in preparation.

The hunt for decorative inspiration is weirdly addictive: visit the website of a random cake-maker and, as the old Black Flag track so memorably put it, let your fingers do the walking.

But there is intrigue closer to home. Such as, what kind of cake is it that requires a topless female figurine with luxuriant strawberry-blonde hair and moveable arms?

I am the egg man (deluxe edition)

2009-09-29T14:07:00.015+01:00

This minimalist egg cup-cum-toast rack – a recent gift – is about as sophisticated as my breakfast gets, unless a) I'm in a hotel, or b) someone's making hotcakes, the recipe for which is available strictly on dead-tree media and sadly unlinkable.

Still, it's a substantial step forward from what until recently was a breakfast policy of 'no breakfast'.

AA Hospitality Awards 2009-2010

2009-09-28T23:25:00.011+01:00

I'm just back from the AA's big annual awards bash at the Park Lane Hilton, and it's been a fascinating few hours in the company of - or at least in the same room as - some of the nation's finest hob-hoggers. From my seat at table 42, I could see Glynn Purnell, Tom Aikens, Simon Radley, Richard Corrigan, Helene Darroze, Marcus Wareing, Shaun Hill, John Burton-Race, Claude Bosi and Sat Bains, and that was without turning round. Aiden Byrne, from round our way in Lymm, had picked up his three-rosette plate for The Church Green earlier, but told me that his new project, The White House in Prestbury, will now be delayed until 2010.

If you're after the full round-up of gongs, you're best off with Caterer, but from 20 awards, the highlights were a nice spread of out-of-London winners and Raymond Blanc's acceptance of his lifetime achievement award. We were treated to archive film showing off Blanc's luxuriant haircuts past, before halfway through a humble, earnest speech, a tired and emotional John Burton Race leapt onto the stage. I thought it was going to go a bit Kanye West, but the white-haired kitchen lothario kept it to, "He's the most fantastic bloody cook we've got. I love him!" before bounding off.

Other winners, who received an air kiss from host Natasha Kaplinsky, resplendent in cerise, included Sat Bains for his new ranking of five AA rosettes, Marcus Wareing, a very popular winner of the Chefs' Chef award, and Richard Corrigan, whose Mayfair restaurant was chosen as AA Restaurant of the Year London. Predictably, though, given that the audience was largely men of a certain age, the biggest whoop whoop went to Glynn Purnell. Apart from being a figure of merriment and delight in the industry and winner of AA Restaurant of the Year England, he took it upon himself to kiss and squeeze Kappers with the enthusiasm of a sailor home on shore leave.

Monday nights, when many restaurants close, are a fine time for this kind of event, but the tiredness was showing for chefs who may normally be snoozing on their night off. Poor Helene Darroze looked thoroughly exhausted and made her excuses soon after the lovely people from The Connaught, whose table I was on, picked up their award for Hotel of the Year London. And as I passed Angela Hartnett on the way out, she could be heard to respond to the suggestion of further drinks and dancing with, "Christ, no. It's Monday night!" A woman after my own heart. And so to bed.

Cake introspection

2009-09-28T10:58:00.007+01:00

It's not an attractive habit, but once I've fed people, I tend to mull over the success or failure of the snacks provided. If I've used a new recipe, then so much the mullier. The weekend's get-together of university friends, which featured a bit'o'lunch, is ripe for consideration.

Helen, Liz, Natalie, Lindsay, Rachel, Kelly and I lived in the same Manchester halls of residence, Owens Park, and more than ten years on we still get together a few times a year. There's a wise head for every problem and it's a set of friendships which I value hugely, so I aim to provide an acceptable level of cake when they come to Hale and Hearty towers.

With Lindsay in LA and Kelly delayed, there were five round the table for Jill Dupleix's grilled tomato soup and bread from Barnby's in Hale, plus ham and some truly horrible pickled onion cheese that I got from Sainsbury's for a story. I didn't make them eat it.

For the three pregnant ladies, we followed it up with the babycakes pictured below, the only drawback being that the Jelly Belly beans which are an appropriately pale pink are the bubblegum ones. There were also some oaty flapjacks. The real challenge, though, was the production of a low-fat cake.

Helen's off the bad fats for a while on doctor's orders, and after rifling through my books I found an apricot and hazelnut cake in Annie Bell's Gorgeous Cakes (there are some similar ones here). It involves dried apricots, spices, ground hazelnuts, six eggs and no flour or fat, and the lift is supposed to come from folding the whisked egg whites into the base mixture just before it hits the heat.

In the book, it looks elegant. In reality, it looks like a cowpat – a low-fat cowpat, mind. But if you close your eyes and think of pretty things, it tastes delicious: damp, slightly spiced with cardamom and cinnamon, fruity but not wildly apricoty. And because everyone else was busy with the babycakes, there was plenty for Helen to take home.

FACT: some cafes are better than others

2009-09-28T09:45:00.009+01:00

After a hard day's Scouse shopping yesterday (I'm going to the AA Hospitality Awards tonight. I don't have a black tie, so the least I can do is find some shoes that match my frock), I was greatly looking forward to the crown of the week. My friend Carmel has been living in Sydney for three years and she's back on a whirlwind tour of Europe. In Australia, when she isn't eating lovely breakfasts or running on the cliffs at sunset, she's a film festival kingpin, and her nothern England tour culminated in attendance at FACT's Abandon Normal Devices film festival.

It seemed only right, not to mention convenient, that we should conduct the reunion in the FACT cafe. Even on a dull Sunday it's got what they call a good 'vibe', all laptops and big wodges of cake, so I hate to reveal that it is really Not Much Cop. Service is excruciating – our fella avoided eye contact until he'd finished fiddling about with his trolley, gave me the wrong drink, forgot to charge Carmel for hers and generally made me ashamed to be British.

My sausage and chutney sandwich (I always go for the classy option) also contained thick slices of cheese and, even more of a surprise, a small chunk of chargrilled chicken which tumbled unbidden from the bready depths. We didn't risk coffee – after Carmel's three years in a city where it's a matter of considerable pride, ordering a cup in a food operation where pride is scant is really not wise. Nice films, shame about the caff.

And while we're talking FACTs, let me share this: according to OK!, not only does England cricketer James Anderson live in an 'exquisite home' in Hale, Cheshire, but Freddie Flintoff lives round the corner. I'd like to know their chosen venue when, as James informs us, they meet up and go for dinner. Surely not Piccolino?

Pitter patter patisserie

2009-09-26T11:53:00.009+01:00

We've got the babycakes, now all we need is the babies

Kitchen essentials

2009-09-25T15:16:00.007+01:00

No.1: The Kenwood Chef

Curry in a box, for the box

2009-09-25T15:00:00.012+01:00

Generous screenings of Masterchef: The Professionals mean there is barely time to cobble dinner together in time to throw it at Gregg 'pudding face' Wallace and his nonsensical talk of citrus lemon and deep rhubarb.

Nonetheless, we persevere.

This week's duff-looking curry comes courtesy of Michelle Hart, a Manchester PR who persuaded Danny Moore of Intafood to send me something nice in the post. Now, freebies or no freebies, H'n'H does not endorse rubbish names, and Intafood is most definitely one of those. But they have had a good idea which is especially useful if you live in the land that integration forgot. Away from the urban whirl, we're no more likely to be able to score lime leaves than a bag of brown, so Intafood's Thai green curry recipe pack (£2.99 inc postage) is a marvel.

You get a pack of little sachets containing green curry paste, fish sauce, palm sugar, Thai holy basil and lime leaves, and a shopping list for bits like coconut milk, aubergine and whatever protein you fancy. Follow the instructions on the back, adding the contents to the pan in order, and you end up with a curry that has the correct tangy whiff of fish sauce, lime and unswept streets which Tim recognises from past Thai holidays.

The greens won't like it – there are too many bits of plastic – but we did, especially because, unlike a lot of off-the-shelf curry action, it has a bit of poke to it. The Inta dudes also do packs for teriyaki, Sechuan and other dishes, and they all include at least one ingredient that's hard to find. It's a business plan with a natural end, of course – it wasn't too long ago that coconut milk was a mystery to most supermarkets, and baby, just look at us now – but for the moment, it's not a bad idea.

Think global, act local

2009-09-24T15:12:00.009+01:00

It is, apparently, "the last bargain left on Earth". But whether or not the current deal at Joanne's (£2 for a meat and potato pie with chips) lives up to the billing, this Altrincham chippy merits a visit.

Having occupied the same site on the corner of Borough and Massey Roads since 1901, its hours are unfashionably traditional – lunchtimes only Monday to Friday, plus a short evening service on Friday itself – and its fare deviates little from the classic model.

Vimto is touted in the other window, but not in the cutesy off-the-peg style of a thousand theme pubs. Partly concealed, the impression is that these banners remain simply because no one has seen fit to remove them when there's serious frying to be done. And Joanne's serves up pretty good stuff, too.

Those opening times mean it helps if you're a schoolkid, work locally or otherwise spend your days in or around the terraces near Stamford Park. But when did a properly good deal ever come without a bit of effort?

Scone me: the search for the perfect cream tea

2009-09-23T18:46:00.007+01:00

I occasionally think that, at 30, I may be spiritually more suited to middle age. This happens especially when I am assessing the quality of a scone, or pointedly barking ‘thank you’ at a shop assistant who has failed to meet the minimum qualifying standards of politeness.

The first episode in what I’m sure will be an extremely pleasurable occasional series allowed me to do both. The teenagers behind the tea counter at Altrincham Garden Centre are unfailingly sullen, but the scones they push over the counter with a grunt and a scowl are home made and often still warm. So it was that, looking out over the sheds and planters of the nursery, we conducted Hale and Hearty’s first Cream Tea Appraisal.

It was my friend Bryony who first alerted me to the notion that we may have an award-winning scone on the doorstep (she lives in Sale). Since then, it has become our Sunday afternoon refuge of choice, and we have tackled many thorny issues – work, mainly, leavened by the occasional family trauma – in the garden centre's conservatory. We may be sporting decorating trousers and greasy hair (it’s the weekend, innit?) but by virtue of our relative youth, it’s the one place we still look pretty dashing.

The cream tea, £2.69 for a scone the size of a man’s fist, a pot of Rodda’s, a jar of good jam and tea, has always been rather good. It’s the kind of sod’s law that afflicted my Metro column that as soon as I rock up with my review head on, everything turns to shit.

The fruit scone was overbaked, dark and far too crusty, and the plain one, though light enough inside, lacked the kind of scone magic conjured at The Wolseley (although I have heard bad things about it recently), the Ballymaloe House cafe, and – very occasionally – in my own kitchen via Delia and some rare good luck. As the Apprentice voiceover man would say, Emma’s search for a good scone continues. And if I get to the south west before the baby’s born, it’s going into overdrive. Who could deny a pregnant woman a cream tea or three?

Let us now hail... Port

2009-09-19T13:12:00.018+01:00

Yesterday I finished a bottle of port acquired in the run-up to last Christmas. While the second part of that sentence isn't unusual, it strikes me the first probably is.

Port's one of those fringe-interest festive accoutrements that, like those peculiar dials of candied orange and lemon segments, tends to find its way into the trolley on an 11th-hour trip through the supermarket. That's not to deny its healthy year-round fanbase, of course – merely to pinpoint its place in the average 21st-century household.

Here, the bottle is normally a few inches down by home time on New Year's Eve. Otherwise it's untouched. Jokes about gout and the singer from Keane may follow. But here I am, staring at the label and wondering when it would be politic to line up my next fix.

It probably helps that this particular port arrived as part of a wine case won in a Guild of Food Writers raffle. So it is – was – a good one. That's it in the DIY pack shot at the top of this post: a Fonseca Terra Prima, non-vintage but made from organic grapes grown in Portugal's famous Douro Valley.

As you'd expect from a fruit-based alcoholic drink fortified to 20% ABV, it's full-bodied and warming. But there's a moreish, mellow spiciness to the blackcurranty flavours here that had previously eluded me. The bottle looks great, too – and that proper stopper beats a cork every time.

Perhaps it's something to do with the context; the absence of an already alcohol-soaked seasonal binge. Perhaps it's because there's been very little red wine in the house. I'll settle for saying that any recommendations for my next bottle will be well received.

Oil be back

2009-09-18T09:30:00.007+01:00

The house of H'n'H is riddled with extra virgin olive oil after a taste test which was in the paper bit of the Guardian, but too flimsy to go online, a couple of days ago. We've got some in the cupboard, some on the spice shelf (which is feeling a bit sticky after an apple sauce fermentation incident) and the overflow in the wine rack. Even in my pregnancy-enforced sober state, it looks very exciting until you get closer and realise that the lovely bottles are not the habitat of fine wine. It reminds me of the much-bandied notion that when wine writers call in to see other wine writers, they take a bottle of interesting oil. Killjoys.

Even after donating some to my sister's new home food fund (she moves in today), much oil remains. This means that for once, I won't feel horribly profligate doing what I was taught to do at cookery school at Ballymaloe, which is to fry everything (everything suitable, that is: not porridge) in extra virgin olive oil.

In my tiny mind, I know that the heat destroys the delicate flavours of, say, Castillo de Canena's banana-inflected First Early Royal (pretentious, olive oil?) but I can't shake the memory of the marvellous, headstrong, slightly crazy Darina Allen, a whirlwind in class and out of it, insisting that the only olive oil used for cooking on her premises would be extra virgin.

She wouldn't use it anywhere the strong flavour might cause havoc - in the mayo we made over and over again, for example - but three years on the smell of a pan of warming olive oil, perhaps ready to fry the onions for Diana Henry's chicken with chorizo and rice (you'll have to buy the book) takes me back to the Ballymaloe school kitchens. As they say about things far more dramatic than three months piddling around cooking in the company of pleasant but overprivileged teenagers, it was the best of times and the worst of times. And it certainly was oily.

A farewell to Floyd

2009-09-15T21:09:00.012+01:00

It's been a long day of collecting tributes to Keith Floyd, who died yesterday, for Word of Mouth. So much so that, while listening to everybody else's recollections of him, I hadn't processed my own reaction until we sat down for what is known in Hale as tea.

Of course, the only way to celebrate a departed chef is to cook one of his recipes. In need of comfort, we rejected the gumbo-ridden pages of Floyd's American Pie, one of my favourite charity shop purchases, for his nice, safe chicken korma. Made with whole spices, softly fried onions, thick yoghurt and a whole lotta ghee, it's a good one, although as you can see from the picture, it doesn't look as nice as it tastes.

In 2007, I went on a cookery course hosted by Floyd and his wife Tess (they split not long afterwards) at Linthwaite House hotel in the Lake District. It was designed to make the most of his ebullient personality, and it was clear from the excitement among the attendees, mainly middle-aged couples, that the most prized experience was not the cookery lesson but sitting down for dinner with him the night before class. He didn't disappoint, and artfully aired some eye-watering industry gossip and a few less-than-PC anecdotes before leaving us with a fair few bottles and his encouragement to enjoy them.

The next day, he rolled through a handful of classic French dishes, including a rich langoustine soup, and exhorted us not to be hogtied by the need for precision and measurements. Though he waggled a glass of red because it was expected, whisky was his preferred tipple. During a mid-morning fag break he asked me, in a theatrical whisper, to be a good girl and take his glass back to the bar before anyone spotted it. I did as I was told. No one could refuse Keith Floyd.

No TV masterclass

2009-09-15T08:51:00.004+01:00

Something is missing from BBC 2's latest cookery contest, and not just John Torode. The second series of Masterchef: The Professionals started last night, and for the most part fun was not on the menu. If that half-baked metaphor – and that one, and this next one – is past its sell-by-date, that's only fitting: this is seen-it-before-only-better TV.

Admittedly my tolerance for Masterchef, if not that of all at Hale and Hearty, is largely dictated by novelty. Its very availability as something to watch in January saw me through the early stages of 2009's amateur effort, even if the final phase sprawled interminably. But at least eventual winner Mat Follas, he of the intriguing eyebrows and oft-referenced family, was on the requisite reality-show journey. Here, the contestants cook for a living. And it's boring to watch.

Pairing Michel Roux Jr with Gregg Wallace doesn't help. In such globally respected company, the veg man's bulk seems inversely proportional to his judicial heft; the sense that he's taking his cues from Roux difficult to shake. He also talks far less entertaining rubbish than before. There will be no parties in his mouth here, let alone figurative baths in chocolate pots.

Roux's profile means he doesn't cast judgment until the final cook-off, so early rounds are co-hosted with brittle efficiency by his sous chef, Monica Galetti: sadly no TV natural, even if she has grasped the shouty-talking-head thing. Michel doesn't shout, of course; it's unbecoming. But the puffed cheeks and calm tones as last night's intake did bad things to bream are no substitute for the once endlessly quotable Gregg'n'John show.

Yes, there is peril in Masterchef: The Professionals. It's hard to see what any of the contestants really stand to gain by taking part, particularly set against the very real risk of ridicule on both sides of the pass back home (pity the head chef who flunked last night's spatchcock and lemon curd tasks). But equally, it's hard to care about them. Gregg's aspirational questions – 'How far do you think you can go in this competition?' – are especially pointless when put to the pros. Why, actually, are they here? And, more pertinently, why are we?

Cocoadance: still feeling Peaky

2009-09-13T17:38:00.009+01:00

Much as I love the Peak District, traipsing over the Cat and Fiddle pass in the name of research has become rather old cat. The deadline for my book chapter about the food of the area looms early next week, though, so barring last-minute dashes to oatcake makers, I won't be back for a while. As finales go, yesterday's visit to Castleton chocolatiers Cocoadance was pretty tasty.

David Golubows and Bridget Joyce run their business from a National Trust farmhouse under Mam Tor, halfway up the old, precarious road to Manchester. They've been making chocolates for about 15 years and they understand the industry, and their customers, well. Several of their truffles, including one which includes a generous splash of Thornbridge Brewery's bestselling pale ale, have won Great Taste Awards, but they also do a nice line in safe, friendly moulded shapes made with creamy Belgian couverture.

There are exceptions to the old cliche that food people are nice people, but not in Castleton. Bridget and David are open and patient, and their Chocolate Experience workshops, held in their mini production facility, offer a rundown of chocolate history followed by a chance to get extremely sticky while wearing very camp cloth hats.

When we arrived with five other students, they'd already done the hard work: vats of tempered dark, milk and white chocolate stood ready for dipping, piping and moulding, with a selection of liquorice allsorts, strawberries, fudge chunks, marshmallows and other sweet bits ready for making into our own chocs. Inspired by a recent visit by a hen party, David demonstrated how to make bondage jelly babies, but we stuck to – what else? – a graffiti-style Hale and Hearty plaque, plain chocolate fish studded with crystallised ginger and rough-looking but delicious milk chocolate truffles.

I'm working on a feature about Chocolate Week (October 12-18) at the moment, and there's a lot of very posh chocolate in the house, as well as the slightly cock-eyed stuff made from good-quality but easy-to-like milk choc we brought home over the hills yesterday. I've also got a copy of world-beating chocolatier Paul A Young's new book, Adventures With Chocolate, in which he lovingly recalls ripping the paper off a classic box of Thorntons. If he's got room for both delicate 66% Caribbean dark and sweet Belgian milk in his life, then so have I.

Out now: tasty produce from Stately

2009-09-11T10:00:00.003+01:00

Stately Homes Of England have recorded a new EP – and what's more, it's out now. Five fresh slices of aural goodness remixed from the eponymous Stately debut double, the cunningly titled Remixed is available as a free download here. Suffice it to say that tempos are generally raised and it's all rather jolly. If you would like a dubbed cassette with hand-drawn sleeve to a design of your choosing, you can make arrangements via the website. Or you can burn your own CD. Why not try your hand at a lathe cut?

Leah's Pantry: exceedingly good cupcakes

2009-09-09T16:44:00.015+01:00

I went back to the Peaks - or just over the hill near Macclesfield - today for a lesson in cupcakery with Leah Stevenson. The making and eating of these little fellas is not the fashionable pursuit it once was, and not everyone can handle a gobful of buttercream. Nevertheless, the revival means that there's now lots of sparkly decorations even in Alty's shops, and I can't argue with that.

There are a few cupcake purveyors within range of Hale and Hearty, including Katja's Kupcakes at Alderley Edge (I hate the extra K, but she's whizzy with the buttercream, as seen here) and Chorlton's Sweet Tooth Cupcakery, which is up for an award at this year's Manchester Food and Drink Festival.

Leah does sell her cakes around and about, but for £45 you can go up to her beautifully-appointed kitchen near Rainow and learn how to make excellent cupcake bases (we did chocolate brownie, raspberry and white chocolate, blackberry and almond and lemon), decorate them and toddle off home with a smart box of different cakes with which to impress your nearest and dearest. Leah also has a very steady hand, and I found that if you ask her nicely she'll ice the name of your new blog onto a trio of cakes.

I'm a cack-handed but geekily keen sugarcrafter, and though I enjoyed the chance to hone skills like the making of sugar roses, for me the valuable part of the day was getting ideas for a forthcoming 'do' chez H'n'H. When you make cakes, you become part of all sorts of celebrations. A few years ago, I made a cake for my friend Liz's hen party. It was all sugarpaste L plates and cunningly crafted appendages, and though we were all too drunk to appreciate the soft, fudgy high-cocoa sponge, we found the fondant knobs quite amusing.

In a couple of weeks, Liz and the girls are coming for the weekend. Three of us, including Liz, are pregnant, and to celebrate I'll be making afternoon tea with a much purer theme. Apparently you can do quite a good baby's footprint using jelly beans and writing icing. I can't wait to give it a go. The only question is whether to buy blue or pink jelly beans; in this instance, I think yellow would be a cop-out.

An Apple a day... every day

2009-09-09T09:42:00.017+01:00

Cross purpose: A rare break between photo-ops in Abbey Road, July 2009

The Beatles were never really a rock band, whatever today's video game release and its attendant hoo-ha might have you believe. I'm with the late Ian Macdonald on the Fabs' attempts to rock out. He nails Helter Skelter in Revolution In The Head, his essential chronicle of their music and times: Macca makes for an unconvincing bellower as the band slog through 'the requisite bulldozer design but on a Dinky Toy scale'. There's no question Macdonald loved The Beatles; he simply accepted their limitations.

It's that human fallibility – that The Beatles were 'just four lads from Liverpool', if you draw your sentiment from the mawkish end of the pond – that makes their achievements all the more remarkable. And by setting the Rock Band TV ad in Abbey Road, the makers of the Rock Band TV ad have got something right. There's no Beatles landmark – no British pop landmark, really – like it.

Sure, The National Trust will take you for a nose around John and Paul's childhood homes. You can pose with the statues in Liverpool's 'Cavern quarter', but the original venue is long gone. There are city tours and museums. It's just all so, well, laid on. The closest counterpart to Abbey Road in the north-west isn't on Merseyside at all, but in Salford, where the Lads' Club is an enduring destination for Smiths fans bent on recreating the inner sleeve of The Queen Is Dead.

If Abbey Road is inevitably far busier, the appeal is the same. The dense graffiti on the walls outside the recording studios is testament to that: from dawn to dusk, you'll often see groups waiting for their go on the zebra crossing. But hold the traffic for a few minutes, and you get to be a Beatle. Apple Corps doesn't get to control this part of the band's legacy. In Abbey Road, every day is Beatles day. The studios even operate a webcam.

If The Beatles had stuck to the original plan and given the album the almost parodically rocktastic title Everest, it would all have been very different. But they were barely talking by then, and a trip to the Himalayas seemed a continent or two too far. Too bad for the tradesmen and couriers who navigate this particular stretch of St John's Wood.

I am the egg man

2009-09-08T12:21:00.010+01:00

The Good Food Guide 2010: Go The North!

2009-09-08T09:20:00.020+01:00

The Which? Good Food Guide 2010 is officially published today, and although I must admit to a little light bias, I think it's a bit of a triumph both for the book, which is clearer and more comprehensive than it has been, and for the north.

It's a delight to look through the newly-expanded list of top 50 restaurants and see new entries for Ramsons, The Yorke Arms, Purnell's and my favourite, Fraiche (careful in the picture there Marc, those wafers look a bit sharp) alongside the bankers such as L'Enclume, Antony's and the reliable but oft-overlooked Simon Radley at the Chester Grosvenor.

The purest foodling joy comes, though, from seeing Da Piero, an Italian restaurant in Irby on the Wirral, pick up the award for Best Newcomer. It's a husband-and-wife operation in the middle of nowhere, and the interior scheme is more auntie's sitting room than slick modernity, but the food (home-cooked Italian, definitely no red sauce) and the welcome are second to none. Oh bloody hell. I might cry a bit.

Bake ye well

2009-09-07T11:00:00.004+01:00

I'm writing a chapter of a new guide to Britain, to be published by the people behind the much-excerpted Wild Swimming. Unless there was a posh picnic waiting for me on the far shore of a heated and filtered loch, I would not contemplate swimming in untamed waterways. Happily this book is about food.

Because I used to look after Peak District Life magazine's (very polite) food coverage, I've been assigned the book's Peaks chapter, and I spent Saturday roaming Bakewell and the Hope Valley with my friend Bryony. She drives a car that's already buggered, so she doesn't mind careening down unmade tracks in pursuit of farm-made ice cream, but the real aim of our nice day out was the purchase of as many Bakewell puddings as we could carry.

Dos Hermanos's Simon Majumdar recently trotted north to uncover the mysteries of the Bakewell pudding, and he relates its history here, but suffice to say that in the town it's named after, Mr Kipling's finest do not cut the mustard. Their shortcrust pastry, thick white icing, glace cherry and cakey frangipane are unfamiliar to the bakers of Bakewell, whose pudding is a plainer, uglier affair. It's a shallow round of flaky pastry spread with jam and topped with a kind of sweet, opaque almond custard baked to the colour of eighties Ronseal, and it is the one thing that, judging by the bakery queues, you must not leave Bakewell without.

They can be bought from four major sources in the town: the Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop, the Bakewell Pudding Parlour, Bloomers bakery and the unhelpfully named Bakewell Tart. All bag up the eggy frisbees in brown paper for takeaway, and if you leave them wrapped for too long, the butter from the pastry spreads and stains. Best to stick them into a low oven to warm through at the earliest possible opportunity. Cut with care - these mothers are flaky - and eat with cream.

A weekend taste test revealed the Old Original's pudding as by far the best, with crisp pastry, just enough jam and a filling with a natural, not synthetic, almond flavour; perfect post-Sunday lunch or, indeed, for Sunday lunch. Food tourism isn't as big as it could be in the Peaks, despite the handsome scenery and some very decent products, and it was gladdening to see all the shops doing a brisk trade in puddings. After all that sweet nutty jamminess, we needed something savoury for tea. Ken Hom's fragrant five spice spare ribs were just the ticket, although Chilli Heatwave Doritos make an acceptable substitute.

'Freshly made just for you'

2009-09-06T12:20:00.016+01:00

OK, that's probably not true. But sunny Sundays will always mean sundaes at Hale and Hearty. This snap was taken at Lymm's annual rushbearing festival – an event with roots in the medieval practice of parading bullrushes to the parish church for use as a kind of analogue-age carpeting.

Today, of course, this requires a police escort along the A56, traffic snaking back while morris men throw shapes to The Floral Dance. But it also brings the dust-covers off ice-cream vans. This year's parade will be chiefly remembered for our first double 99 of an unimpressive summer: super soft, certainly, and with the addition of raspberry sauce, unarguably twin-flavoured.

It's hard to tell which tradition needs protecting most. While the rushes are now purely symbolic, these evocatively decorated rigs and their distinctive smell – created by a second motor powering the soft-ice machine – are becoming a lesser-spotted species. Ben & Jerry's Phish Food might alliterate, but it sure doesn't chime.

Jill Dupleix is a genius

2009-09-04T19:56:00.008+01:00

I've got too much respect for Jill Dupleix and her book royalties to reproduce her recipe for tamarind fish curry here, but let me say that it is a fine dish indeed. Tim regards it as 'fiddly' because there's some grinding of spices involved, but with cumin, coriander, ginger, garlic, turmeric, coconut milk and a big dollop of sweet-sour tamarind paste (which is much sharper ready-made from a pot than reconstituted from one of the dry blocks of fruit and seeds), it's got the lot.

With some Saino's basics salmon (yes, I know, but it's sustainable, a bargain, and the Hale fish man is too 'eccentric' to mingle with unless we need some really special stuff) and a load of ripped-up coriander, it's lovely for spooning up in front of the telly. It's from Dupleix's last but one book, Good Cooking: The New Essentials, which is packed with other gems including pork chops with a maple syrup glaze and chive brot, rye bread spread with cream cheese and dipped into finely-snipped chives, which looks like a croquet lawn-made-canape.

I highly recommend both book and curry, and now she and king Durack have moved to Australia and there'll be less of their lovely writing about, Good Cooking has a bit of extra savour. And if you're looking at the rice in the picture and thinking it looks a bit overcooked, you're right.

Sitcoms as sandwich shops: an occasional series

2009-09-03T17:51:00.013+01:00

Catering in the terminus leaves plenty to be desired and, well, you can't get a train to Hale there. But Victoria station – the Manchester one – has its charms. The intricately paned exterior canopies are a treat, and then there's this place.

A yellowing sign in the window informs us that it doesn't sell cigarettes or phone cards but, as the vacant glass chiller makes clear, it doesn't sell anything else these days, either: another prime site going begging at the Urbis end of town.

Make your own TV chef

2009-09-03T08:16:00.022+01:00

The Hairy

Bikers: Small

screen, big

appetite

I got a call yesterday from a development producer from a well-known broadcasting corporation. In one breath, she offered me the kind of power I have only ever imagined. We’re looking for new food talent, she said. Can you suggest anybody? Let it be known: I am a kingmaker.

I imagine that this kind of sweeping-under-the-stairs goes on every six months or so, but it’s the first time I’ve been involved in the process. The producers are based in far-off Brizzle, and it’s gratifying that once they’ve exhausted their stock of bright young Londoners, they’re keen to look, as Mike Neville so gently used to do, north.

The criteria for this low-key talent search run thus. Ideally, the chosen cook will be ‘brand new’, which means they haven’t done any telly, at all, before. They’ll be young, but not BBC3 young (which is lucky, as the only youths I know are the Skins who live two doors down, and they’re always stoned). They will be down to earth, which is a polite way of saying that one Valentine Warner is enough.

When I work in the screening room at Radio Times (a little cubby with three desks, lights that dim automatically, and excellent gossip), the TV editor thoughtfully puts the odd bit of food telly aside for me to preview. Specialist subject and all that, and while I’m watching The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain, I can’t be irritating my colleagues by weeping over a fly-on-the-wall doc set in a teenage cancer ward. So recently I’ve enjoyed the sunshine food, if not the slightly forced demeanour, of Levi Roots’ Caribbean Food Made Easy, and narrowly missed out on Nigel Slater’s Simple Suppers, which starts on Wednesday and can only, like everything the quiet Observer cook-hero does, be a good thing.

Not all food telly works, and not all food characters work on screen, but I had a handful of suggestions. Canadian Jennifer Klinec, who runs cookery school Eat Drink Talk in Clerkenwell, is knowledgeable, striking and animated, and the viewers don’t need to know how scarily exacting she is to work for (I did two shifts as her assistant, one involving leaky croissants, and was never asked back). Abdulla Naseem, known as Naz, is a Maldivian chef cooking extremely good Italian food at Ramsons in Ramsbottom, where the dynamics of owner Chris Johnson’s team are fascinating to behold. Lisa Allen, the award-winning chef at Northcote in Lancashire, could easily follow her boss Nigel Haworth onto the small screen.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that a handful of young, vital, talented food people will make it ahead of a dollybird or boy with a tenuous link to cooking and a ‘passion’ for whatever foodie subject the primetime, daytime or digital audience hasn’t yet been exposed to. But for a brief moment, it felt like they just might. And yes, I did ask the nice lady to keep me in mind when casting food critics. When Kate Spicer frowns her last, that slot on MasterChef is MINE!

Come Together

2009-09-02T21:26:00.010+01:00

Latest phase of the Beatles reissue programme. £28 ONO.

Archived links to Emma's work

2009-09-01T14:55:00.004+01:00

Links to older examples of Emma's will be archived here.