Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of inviting out a customer to a restaurant just outside Grenoble. The customer is mainly based in France and Italy with outposts in the UK and India. One third of the diners originated from Sicily (both companies) and the rest were a mixture of French, British, American, "other Italian" and Indian.

One of the Sicilian customers is based in Grenoble and she recommended the restaurant, la Corne d'Or, just ouside Grenoble roughly a 15 min taxi ride from the city centre. In November after dark it is hard to assess the view but with floor to ceiling glass there was a wonderful view over the city from high up on the hillside.

Like many French restaurants there were a number of set multi-course menus as well as an à la carte menu. The menus are available, in French, on the website but despite normally being able to read a French menu I found many of the expressions specialised and hard to follow. Some of the waiters spoke English and could explain almost everything. Although I grabbed a copy of the English menu I failed to take it with me so sorry for seriously deminished information . I also left my digital camera at home!

There were three set menus and I went for the middle one 'Menu Capucins'

Since I left the English language menu copy at the restaurant let's go through the items based on the website:

1. Quelques mises en bouche

(something to take in the gob - OK, just joking! That was too literal.)

There were 3 small tasters. One was a spoon of absolutely delectable snail, the other was a paste of something pink we did not identify (definitely not salmon, maybe red pepper and cream???) and the third whipped yogurt

2. Le foie gras de canard :
cuit en terrine et poudré de piment doux, en émulsion avec un jus de cèpes au café, façon cappucino, une truffe glacée, foie gras et cacao amer

Foie gras is something I try roughly every 2-3 years. I do not find the way it is prepared (force feeding of ducks or geese) to be ethical, but the taste (and cholesterol) is phenomenal. I have decided that I will delay my routine blood test when I get home.

This course was very unusual in that there was the usual "terrine" foie gras and both cappucino style foie gras and foie gras ice cream. As I write this it sounds completely daft but it worked really well.

3. Une noix de coquille Saint-Jacques rôtie, cèpe caramélisé, haricots de Pimpol et crème de chataîgne

This course was one really tasty scallop with ceps, haricot beans and cream. At this point our Sicilian guests started to feel uncomfortable with the tiny dishes we were eating. After all in Sicily if this was a starter you would get a plateful of scallops and would skip some of the other poncey dishes!

4. Le filet de rouget braisé au jus d'algues, dès de légumes infusés au Géranium Rosa, roquette et trompettes de mort

This was for me the scary item on the menu. Red mullet is fine but "death trumpets" (trompettes de mort)? Anyway it tasted great and I am still alive to blog; I do not have the English translation for the mushrooms. The Sicilians lamented the tiny amound of red mullet.

5. Le dos de cerf cuit au four au Serpolet de montagne, beignets de Tussilage et chanterelles, écrasée de topinambours

Sorry, my limited French does not allow me to translate this properly. Indeed I do not believe the above faithfully describes what we ate! We certainly had back of venison and it came with a number of mashes and chanterelle mushrooms. One I am sure - based on colour and taste - was quince. BTW, where is quince grown in the UK now? My grandparents talked about growing quince but I do not recall them using it, my mother in law regularly served boiled quince with meat dishes. There also was another sweet mash, if sweet potatoes then white ones, sorry I never figured that out! I think what we got differed from the menu description.

6. Les fromages de nos montagnes, servis avec quelques confitures

This caused major confusion. The chinese waitress offered "fresh" or "dry" cheese and non-French speakers were confused. The fraiche version was served with raspberry puree and was a fromage fraiche dessert while the "dry" was the normal French cheese selection. The cheese trolley was great in choice but I could not understand why I had to stand up and look across the table to choose there was certainly a cleverer way to serve the table with the trolley.

7. Un millefeuille de fruits des Bois, crème légère à la Badiane, une mousse glacée à la Framboise sur un macaron au persil plat, un moelleux au chocolat noir, crème glacée aux marrons

By this stage I was close to my limit (apart from coffee and a calvados). The dessert was excellent in taste but I could not finish the chocolate dish.

48 € boissons non comprises

This price was amazing value for money for just the food given the obviously labour intensive preparation.

Formule n°2 : 67 € tout compris
Apéritif : cocktail Velours de pêche
Vin blanc : Viognier (vin de pays des Portes de Méditerranée)
Vin rouge : Côtes du Rhône
Café

What was amazing value for money was that you could pay for drinks chosen by the restaurant - which really worked well with the food - within a fixed budget. I do not know what wines we finally had but it was a good selection that matched the dishes well.

Ratings:

- Overall food
8/10 I would recomment this unreservedly

- Wine
8/10 They were well-chosen varied and went very well with the courses. We had just the right amount for the food.

- Service
6/10 the service was not bad but patchy in quality.

- Value for money
9/10 for the quality we had this was first class value for money and I recommend this restaurant based on this experience. Obviously a lot of effort and skill was required for the preparation.

Like the Sicilians, who longed for a smaller number of larger portions, this is not the sort of thing I would even attempt to prepare or to book for myself. My cooking is 10 times simpler. Nevertheless it was a masterpiece and good value for money (when on company expenses).

When I was a student in Glasgow I tried asian food for the first time; being brought up in a white family in the 1960s and 1970s meant that I was used to bland food. The University was close to a street with Pakistani and Indian restaurants. A favourite among students was "pakoras" - either as a starter, if you could afford to eat out, or for many students as a snack after the bars closed. The pakoras were fritters made of gram flour, onions and potatoes (sometimes with peas thrown in too). Down South I have not found the same offering, onion bhajis taste similar but have no potatoes and the starters described as 'pakoras' were different.

A Sikh friend of mine showed me how to make pakoras and I have occasionally made them from my time in Glasgow onwards. He also taught me how to make chappatis but unfortunately that skill has falled by the wayside.

A couple of years ago my wife and I were trying some recipes from a Mediterranean cookbook. We tried courgette fritters - shredded courgette fried in a batter made from cream, eggs and plain flour. I was disappointed with the result and it occured to me to do courgette pakoras instead.

Serves 4 (if this is a substantial part of your meal) or 6+ as a starter

-Pakoras
Roughly 500 g courgettes (courgettes vary a lot in size but this is roughly 2 medium ones)
One medium onion
Roughly 500 g gram flour (this is for budgeting purposes not to be weighed out due to "mixing cement" method)
1 tsp chilli powder
salt

- Dip Sauce
200 ml natural yogurt
1 dollup tomato ketchup
1 tsp chilli powder

Method

1. Shred the courgettes using the coarsest wheel on a food processor or on a mandolin. Chop the onion.
2. Put the shredded courgettes and onion in a bowl and sprinkle salt over the vegetables

 

 

5. Meanwhile heat a deep fat fryer to about 175 Celsius.

6. Repeat again until the mixture is a very thick paste.

7. Use a spoon and spatula to pick up the mixture and drop it into the hot oil. The thick paste will drop into the oil in large dollups. Use a slotted spoon to break up any large dollups (ideally pakoras are not thicker than 5 cm). Fry until brown. With my deep fat fryer I need to do about 3 batches with this recipe.

8. Take the yogurt, tomato ketchup and chilli powder and mix in a small bowl.

 

NOTE: The way pakoras fry depends on the amount of water in the batter. That is why it is made "like cement" rather than measuring out a particular amount of each ingredient. I normally find that enough water is drawn out of the vegetables and that no extra water needs to be added. If there is too much water the pakora dollups split into lots of little bits when they hit the oil. If there is too little water then the pakoras tend to taste stodgy. Add water if the mixture appears to be too dry but do so sparingly.

So before returning to austerity for the run up to Christmas, I succumbed to the idea of making a rich cream-based desert last night.

Serves 4-6 (4 works after a light main course)

50 g almonds
50 g pinhead oatmeal
50 g soft brown sugar
300 ml double cream
3 dsp amaretto

Method

1. Heat a heavy frying pan on a medium heat
2. Chop the almonds finely and add to the pan with the oatmeal and soft brown sugar
3. Mix the ingredients well with a spatula and keep stirring

 

4. Ensure that the temperature is just high enough to melt the sugar. If you move the spatula across the pan (photo) you see that at the edges the sugar is just molten. If the sugar starts to smoke the temperature is too high, if the sugar does not start to melt the temperature is too low.
5. Keep stirring until there are no visibile sugar grains. The oatmeal and chopped almonds should now be caramelised.
6. Whisk the double cream adding the amaretto one dessert spoon at a time. Stop when it is getting thicker. Avoid whisking too long as it will become buttery.
7. Divide 2/3 of the caramelised oatmeal and almonds among the serving glasses.
8. Serve the amaretto cream into the glasses.
8. Add the remaining caramelised mix on the top.

Amaretto costs about £8 a bottle locally. Last time I went to Germany on business the identical product cost €4/bottle!

I am afraid this is a calorie bomb! Not one to have too often (assuming you like it).

I managed to lose 6 kg between the beginning of September and beginning of November. Am now regressing...

Life's Lessons has an interesting post on Ancient Greek food in Sicily. I only know SE Sicily based on two business trips but was aware that it used to be Greek - there are Greek temples in Siracusa and also Archimedes lived there.

When I was there I was impressed by the quality and good value of the food there. This was especially true of seafood and vegetables.

                
I just looked up a photo (sorry not very well lit) I took of a lunch buffet from an inexpensive hotel near Noto. Aubergines were served in 3 different ways (grilled, marinated and deep-fried breaded) and the octopus salad was very delicate.

Seafood was outstanding and the pasta dishes always seemed to include it. In one restaurant I had fish carpaccio (slices of 3 different fish about 1 mm thick in lemon juice). The pan-fried blackened sea bass was amazing. Unfortunately I did not have my camera with me that evening.

With all the concerns about kids getting obese through eating too much junk food, it is timely that Ofcom is proposing to restrict advertising of foods with high fat, sugar & salt during children's programmes. So the food industry finds this OTT and is in shock while health bodies feel that the measure is merely pussyfooting. So it is probably the usual attempt by the Government to sit on the fence and to offend nobody but to please nobody either.

It is ironic that this is happening when Burger King asks "are you man enough" for their burgers. So manhood is all about enough fat, sugar and salt? ...and is supermanhood when you manage to look like a spacehopper? If you have not seen the add yet you can click here.

As a father of three teenage boys I hope (and believe) that they will ignore this drivel, but find it sad that some marketing types think up this sort of stuff for young males. At least UK ads have not yet sunk to the level of the level of Arizona's Heart Attack Grill which again uses the "...are you man enough?" theme!

In today's news media there is a quite a bit about the excessive amount of packaging that is offered with food and especially 'fresh' vegetables. This simply creates garbage that is often disposed on landfill sites. Today Britain is way behind most of the rest of Europe in recycling plastics. Yesterday Ben Bradshaw, the environment minister, urged shoppers to leave excess packaging at the supermarket checkout. See for example the Guardian report. I quote a few paragraphs below:

Down with plastics! I try to take reusable canvas shopping bags to the supermarket. When I do use free plastic bags they get reused as binliners in my kitchen.

A day after eating at the Three Horseshoes we went out to the Marquis of Lorne Inn across the valley in Nettlecombe. This was a bigger pub with a bar and restaurant at least twice as big. There seemed to be real wooden beams and the decor matched the timbers of the restaurant well. The restaurant was very busy and service was fine.

Two good pub restaurants in one little valley was not bad.

My wife and I do not know Dorset that well and in June spontaneously took our tent down to West Bay. We loved the coast there and found the sandstone landscape around Bridport very interesting. This weekend we returned to do walking on the Dorset Coast Path and decided to book into a little inn in Powerstock. Powerstock is a tiny village northeast of Bridport and reached only by single track lanes with very few passing places.

BTW, the Three Horseshoes accomodation was in my view about average for the price range. The breakfast included a delicious, very coarse home-made marmalade, good strong coffee and nice wholemeal bread. We tried the cooked breakfast and that was the only disappointment of the stay. It tasted as if it was fried in old oil from the deep fat fryer, the streaky bacon was also thick, very fatty and too lightly cooked for my taste.

On Tuesday I travelled the 200 km from Helsinki to Tampere. Since my colleague had a last minute change of plan and could not drive me I ended up taking an InterCity train. The trains are taller and wider than in the UK and it was very comfortable in the upper deck with a great view over the countryside.

The photo shows the train after arriving at Tampere station.

Not many relatives of mine like black pudding - I am the exception. Until I first went to Tampere I always thought that black pudding was a solely British and Irish thing. I have eaten it as part of an English/Irish/Scottish breakfast in hotels and when I lived in Scotland the fish and chip shops offered "a black pudding supper" which is deep-fried battered black pudding with chips. On the East side of Scotland there is also white pudding which has no blood, and tastes of oatmeal, sage and (very slightly) pork.

German Blutwurst has a very different texture as it does not include oatmeal. I tried it a few times but must admit I was not keen on it. I was therefore suprised on my first trip to Tampere a decade ago that the hotels included black pudding (the Finns call it "black sausage") that was remarkably like the Scottish one. I have never seen it on offer anywhere else in Finland and the folks in Tampere are very proud of it. Since the Scots helped kick off the industrial revolution in Tampere in the early 1800s could there be a connection?

The rather poor photo shows my selection from the breakfast buffet. The "black sausage" is oatmeal-based and does not have the slightly greasy taste of the Spanish morcilla that I have tried in tapas bars. People seem to eat it with a sweet sauce of berries which the hotel translated into English as "lingonberries". I have never heard that word used in English and the berries seem identical to what the Germans call Preiselbeeren.

Well, I am finally catching up with real time. I arrived in Helsinki a few hours ago and am staying at a downtown SAS Radisson Hotel. It is a very pleasant cold outside - assuming you are well enough dressed - at least minus 8 Celsius and due to drop to minus 11. This is the cold I enjoy; dry, crisp underfoot and cold enought to kill off a lot of the germs; not like an unhealthy UK damp winter when it infrequently freezes.

My economy class flight with Finnair included an above-average meal (speaking of European flights generally and Finnair in particular) but I was still a bit peckish after checking in. In the Nordic countries it is usually easy to find brilliant hering and salmon. I ordered three starters:
1. Picked Baltic herring with juniper berries
2. Smokes salmon with aquavit
3. Sliced cold reindeer
4. Mixture of Finnish breads and crispbreads.

It was delicious but with drinks came to €40! Pickled herring is good on an arc from Denmark to Russia - and probably best in Sweden - there is also a company in Orkney who does it but I have not tried their product yet. The same countries are usually good for any form or smoked salmon or Gravadlax. The brown breads had varying amounts of rye and different seeds and went very well with the fish. Beer and aquavit were the perfect drinks to go with these starters. BTW, the classic Finnish crispbread is dark brown with a carraway taste - I remember my parents buying it a lot in the 1970s but it seems to be less frequently for sale in the UK now.

A blog must report disasters as well as successes and I have to report on Saturday's stovie disaster.

I think if I try this again I will resort to a more normal fishcake route with mashed potatoes - they should at least bind together better. I have enjoyed Mark Hix's Independent series a lot but this was not a highlight for me. BTW his recipe for "Fillet of Venison with Haggis and Bashed Neeps" looked a lot more interesting than the stovies but in my town it is not that easy to buy either venison or haggis!

I am catching up with last week....

For the second half of the working week I was on a business trip to Munich. Our office is on the East side near the ICM conference centre on a fairly boring industrial estate. I am normally booked into the InnSide hotel which is 200 metres from my office but not much good if you want to enjoy the centre of Munich.

Having said that, the restaurant is surprisingly good. Normally hotel food in Europe is about 30% more expensive and 30% worse in quality than going out to a local restaurant. With UK hotels the ratios can be even worse value for money!

I had a really great (8/10) Wiener Schnitzel. It was served piping hot, with the breadcrumbs almost crisp (...well maybe I cannot find a better word), saute potatoes and a good salad. Also there were Preiselbeeren which are sometimes translated on menus as "cranberries" but despite a similar taste are not the same. Preiselbeeren have roughly half the diameter of cranberries and in my view taste slightly better. I do not have my European plant book with me unfortunately to see if there is a better translation. I thought cranberries were native to North America.

Last but not least there was a very good dunkles Weißbier to wash it down with!

Despite being a pretty lousy location if you want to do signseeing, I can - unusually - recommend the hotel restaurant which is of good quality and reasonable price if you ever attend an ICM located tradeshow. There is a great salad bar with a good tomato/mozzarella salad and smoked salmon. Both the cooked  and the cold breakfast buffets are great.

This week I was on a business trip to Munich and my family tell me I should have watched the programme on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's burger boot camp. The Daily Mail is not my favourite newspaper but my wife pointed out an article about that programme in today's Mail weekend magazine.

This fat and salt must be killing the fast food addicts in this country. Much as I deplore the quality of much of the cheap "fresh" food sold in our supermarkets people are better off cooking with any sort of fresh ingredients than eating high fat, high salt, high E-number junk food.