As the knitting monk said, "This is becoming a habit"

Today is Monday. And Monday means lunch. Preferably by the seaside and in a nice restaurant.
And so it is. This time in The Place, Camber Sands. Again. This is becoming a bit predicatable. Anyway through November they have a two-for-one offer on week-day lunchtime dining, two courses minimum, and I can resist anything except temptation, especially when on special offer.
To summarise what we ate, we started with "Red chicory, pear, rocket, and kentish cob nut salad with crumbled stilton" and "Baked ‘stonegate’ goat’s cheese served on sourdough with tomato, rocket & pumpkin seed salad". Despite living in Kent, to my shame I'd never eaten cobnuts. In fact I've never been much a nut eater at all, but recently, what with the walnuts and now this, I can feel a change in the air - maybe it's the season.
For mains we both went for the "‘Olde sussex’ cheddar rarebit on a root vegetable rosti served with red onion marmalade & a mixed leaf salad" which had a well balanced mustard flavour to the rarebit on a soft creamy rosti of carrot, parsnip and potato.
Pushing the 2-for-1 offer to it's maximum advantage, we went for dessert. By now we could see the sunlight breaking through the dark clouds to the west, opening up a possiblity of walk on the beach after lunch to counteract the effects of dessert. "Baked pumpkin cheesecake served with thick local cream" for me, "Bramley apple and cinnamon crumble tart with blackberry ice cream" for Penjamin. Maybe it was the surfit of pumpkins at the previous days pumpkin fair that had weighted my expectation, but the cheescake was a pleasantly suprisingly light concoction.
With water, wine, bread, olives, coffee; £40. Utter bargain. Just trying to work out how we can get back there again before the end of November. Just hope the weather and light can work the same magic turnaround as it did today. By 4pm we were walking over sand dunes freshly cleared by the ealier rain, the pink sunlight coming in at a low angle under the breaking clouds to the west, thrown up against the still black wall of cloud to the east. The beach featured few people and as a many dogs. What little evidence of human presence had been there earlier was washed out on the rain-dappled sand and the light. The previous days turning back of the clocks may have marked a transition from the end of summer into deep autumn, and the turning had cut the time available to us here by an hour, but with days like this, you don't begrudge the slide into winter.

Restauranting yet again...

Today is Sunday. And Sunday means lunch, preferably by the seaside in a nice restaurant.
And so it is. This time in 152 in Aldeburgh. We were visiting friends who have recently re-located to rural Suffolk, the lucky sods. Last time we visited we went for lunch here and it seemed too good a chance to not repeat it.
It's the sort of up-market eatery that could become formulaic if you eat out too much. Wooden floorboards, Farrow & Ball colours, white linen - sound familiar? Still being by the sea side you get a different feel and smell for the place, the latter being of the fish and chip shops up and down the street that pollute the air.
We hadn't booked but it didn't matter as they were full. Bugger. But a table was available in 15 minutes and they had free tables outside with a sea view (but a chippy odour) where menus could be perused and wine drank. Ian suggested a bottle of Rosé, which given the unseasonably warm October weather was a brillianty unseasonable idea I wouldn't have considered. This one was pretty darn good. It was called La Serre Rose de Syrah Vin de Pays d'Oc 2004, imported by Bibendum Wines. (It's interesting to see the mark up restaurants make on wine - £3.78 at Bibendum to £12+ on the wine list.)
Our table eventually became available as our food was waiting (we'd ordered while enjoying the sun outside). The choices were typical of this sort of place; a soup, goats cheese salad, etc. all served with rocket salad and balsamic dressing. Penjamin had a leek tart to start and I had the goats cheese, a good rindless cheese with not too much acidity; I'd guess quite a young cheese. I had a "red wine risotto with tarragon crème fraiche and root vegetable crisps" as a main and I think Penjamin did too. The food fitted it's description, it was tasty where tasty was expected, warming where warming was needed, etc. where etc. was needed. The root vegetable crisps were good. Occasionally I've had a bag of these from the not-so-supermarket in place of crisps as a nod to healthy virtue, but they always taste like cardboard. But these, freshly fried strips of carrot, parnsip and something else were light, crispy and er... vegetably.
Skipping puds (we'd attacked Ella's chips as she showed little interest in them), the bill was £70 -something including wine and water. Service was slick but not oily. Recommended but then I knew that as we'd been before.

Restauranting again...

Tunbridge Wells has a limited number of restaurants that can be regarded as top tier, namely three. One of them, Hotel du Vin, I've been to 2 or 3 times. Another, Signor Franco's (they don't appear to have a website), I've visited once. I won't pass comment on either here as I haven't eaten in them for over a year. The third is Thackeray's and until now I'd never visited it. But tonight that changed.
One of our supplier's was visiting T/Wells and offered to take us out to dinner along with some mutual friends. Now we didn't suggest Thackeray's - the mutual friend did, honest. I wouldn't dare presume to suggest the most expensive restaurant in town as a destination.
So what was it like? In a word; sumptuous. In two words; very sumptuous. In three... oh you get the idea. We met initially in the small upstairs bar area. Lit by huge church candles in storm lanterns and decorated with gold leaf (there are pictures on the web site) it had a dark, almost gothic feel. And served a good G&T as well, though not as good as one I recall from Hotel du Vin, but that might have been the occasion more than anything.
They've got a separate, short, small (A5 format) vegetarian menu that you have to ask for. This struck me as odd - why not include it in the larger (A4) main menu? It left the vegetarians feeling like poor relations and a "special" case. At least they catered for vegetarians, not something you'd get from a French restaurant on it's home turf, certainly one of this calibre.
"So what was the food like?" I hear you cry. It was good. Pricey, but not much by modern standards. Starters around £5, mains £10-15. Some great tasting little between-course tasting dishes. The dining room is the current en-vogue simple design of floorboards, Farrow & Ball colours, white linen, etc. The tableware looked like something from the 1980's though; very large square plates, drizzles of this and sprigs of that. Tasted good though. Penjamin had a tomato rissoto which was very well balanced and I had something else. House wine was good and plentiful, thanks to our hosts repeated ordering. Service was slick, even if the poor girl couldn't quite remember what the tasting dishes were.
So would I go back, especially if paying myself? A tentative "yes". I would go for the atmosphere and the presentation and the whole experience. I wouldn't go purely for the food, but then eating out isn't just about the food, is it?

The vegetarian travellers guide to France

The vegetarian travelling in France is well advised to return across the border by whichever means they entered France as soon as possible, or be prepared to face long distances of many hundreds of kilometres between cold plates of tofu and beansprouts, broken only by the holy trinity of French rural vegetarian fare, this being the pizza, the crepe and the salad chevre chaud (which Penjamin ordered several times, as when done well she argued, can be the best meal in the world).
Vegetarian fare in France can sometimes be found in the larger cities and is still resolutely stuck in the 1970s where one can enjoy raw grated sandals served on hand crotched plates dyed with the owners own urine. A country that has more cheeses than ladies razors seems completly unable to do anything with them beyond the aforementioned trinity of dishes.
Outside of the cities in the provinical areas, the French have managed to discover a form of ham that would appear to be vegetarian by the way it is included in salads as speck. The bountiful range of produce available in the country is only to be used as a supporting dish for the local delicacy of meat based products.
Much is made of the regional specialities of the regions, the produit de terroir. This is why if one place serves a local delicacy, they all do. And they don't serve anything else. In Sarlat for instance, they specialise in stuffing geese until their livers explode into the ready waiting canning factories, a technique for creating food that could only have come about in some unfathomable way. And so every shop and every restaurant serves foie gras. Cold, hot, fired, battered and topped with a whelk, it's all you can find there. And hardly any of the restaurants looked that busy. If someone had a good idea to try something different, I'd guess they'd all be doing it inside twelve months, following each other like lemmings - though don't mention that to them, they'll put them on the menu.

Lunch, the river, the walnuts...

Having exhausted the vegetarian options in the surrounding area, Penjamin suggested a picnic as a way of avoiding starvation. So a spot by the Dordogne, some cheese and bread, some wine, the October sunshine and we were as happy as a duck in a puddle.
Afterwards we stopped to buy walnuts from a farm on the side of the road. 7kgs later we left, pondering what to do with so many walnuts. I think I'll be looking up recipes for walnut breads and would warmly welcome suggestions from our loyal reader, assuming she's (a) not on holiday and (b) not allergic to walnuts.

Monpazier

Today was market day in another bastide town, Monpazier. Market day here is held in the town square with its galleried walks around all four sides, like most villages in the area. Every day of the week there is a market to be found within a few miles radius.
Deciding to eat out for lunch, we'd spotted a restaurant earlier that had a vegetarian menu. Grasping this rare chance in France, we sat down for lunch and after the customary long wait, the waiter approached our table. (Maybe that's why they're called waiters?) Penjamin, excersing her grasp of the language enquired after the vegetarian menu displayed on the board the waiter had earlier placed in the street. "Non." The menu was for the evening only, and the lunch time menu was none of the options on the board he'd placed out, they were held on a small blackboard propped against a table leg. Behind a dog. Why-oh-why-oh-why?! (Pourquoi-oh-pourquoi....) Don't vegetarians eat lunch? Do they only come out at night like some tofu-fuelled vampires? The place had recognised the existence of vegetarians, in itself a rairty in France, but then dismissed them as quickly as a farmer downs his breakfast pastis. Je désespère.

Déjeuner

Chevre, olives, fried potatoes, green lentils braised in red wine, bread, salad. Hmmm....

Sunday morning, brings the dawn in....

Like the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, my Sunday mornings are fuelled by freaky mushrooms, although these are the ceps I mentioned yesterday rather than Psilocybin, served with scrambled eggs (with some chopped dried chilli added), on toasted sourdough.
Then to Issegeac for the Sunday morning market. An old bastide town, it's centre would be difficult to walk through on an empty day, given the narrow streets, but on a Sunday, the town is given over to a market, a real market. With vegetables. And fruit. And bread. Not for this place a market selling out-of-date alcopops to underage chavs and mirrors with pictures of Elvis printed on them. It was heaving, much like any sane persons response to the Elvis mirror. And overrun with British. In the car parks around the town, UK plated BMWs mingled with rusty 2CVs and the voices ordering the market goods were as often Henry's as Henri's. Still you can't blame them. If you're in the area, what else are you going to do on a Sunday morning in the Dordogne?

En Français...

I'm in France for a weeks holiday and market chasing. I'm going to try and blog as much as I can here.
First up, a quick stop at a small supermarket to get some basics. It's late on a Saturday after a 600 mile drive through rain so heavy that you needed full speed wipers and a prayer to get past the HGV's on the autoroute, so I make no excuse for using a supermarket. Somehow the smaller supermarkets here don't leave you with the same feelings of dirt that they do in the UK, or the sense of being ripped off that you get in small convenience stores. When was the last time you saw fresh cep mushrooms in a Spar or Londis?!
A quick trip round the aisles and we've got some beer, salad, tomatoes and a couple of passable loaves of bread. And the aforementioned ceps. Why can't we get these in the UK? They're native to most of northern Europe; in Italy they're porcini or "little pigs" and in Britain they're known as "Penny Buns" - it's not often you get those words together is it? Anyway they're for breakfast tomorrow.
Tonight it's a quick pasta dish. Diced aubergine, onion and peppers, fried, thrown into some cooked pasta with some homemade pesto we'd brought, made from some surplus basil.