I took out the family for dinner on Saturday night. We decided to revisit the Regent Meadery, Chapel Street, Penzance.

In the first week of April 1982, a friend and I walked a segment of the South Cornwall Coast Path from the Lizard peninsular to Penzance. We had started from Falmouth in great weather, but the final segment was in incessant rain. Having found a cheap B&B for the night we then went out for dinner and ended up at the Regent Meadery. It is in a basement and I recall eating 'chicken in the rough'. The reason I recall the date so well was that we found out that the Falkland Islands had been invaded and that Britain was going to war with Argentina - it seemed so unreal.

I went there again in 1999 this time with my family and found that it served well-priced straightforward food. The kids liked the dungeon-like atmosphere of the basement. The food was simple, well-prepared and reasonably priced. A year ago we went with another family there. The place was completely packed out but we were not disappointed. Service was friendly and the food was worth waiting for. I recall a really good rack of ribs and some of us liked the fish very much.

On Saturday everything looked the same when we went in although the restaurant was surprisingly half empty. The menu appeared to be the same although I was conscious of piped music. Perhaps this was to drown out the noisy bar above, but I only recalled hearing other voices last year. The waitress was chaotic - said that it was her second night - and appeared not to have been trained.

Food was disappointing. Starters were not bad - deep fried prawns seemed tasty and the garlic bread was fine (though the waitress apologised it was burnt!). The salad bar was dark and most of the bowls were empty; it's fine to have a dark restaurant but you need to see what is going on your plate! The fish bites were undercooked - the breadcrumbs not attaining a golden colour - and the chips were similarly pale. The racks of ribs were tender but while a year ago the marinade was glazed on, they seemed to be served with what was more like a gravy.

Overall, disappointing especially given value for money the previous year. I did not think it was worth £15/head. We were puzzled. Was there a change of owner? Didn't seem like it given that the menu and decor were unchanged. New manager or chef? Maybe. Shame that the standards have dropped and it seems to be reflected in the number of diners too.

My family are camping in West Cornwall and I joined them for a long weekend. It was mainly a sodden time though ironically the weather has cleared on my return journey.

In the campsite shop there was a lot of locally sourced produce. I found an interesting looking sausage in the fridge that was described as "hog's pudding". It was 3-4 cm thick and 275 g so quite a bit more than the typical banger. It reminded me of scottish white pudding but the ingredients were quite different; 70% pork and no oatmeal. Apparently it is boiled before refridgeration and should be cut into 1 cm slices and fried - much as you would do black or white pudding for breakfast. It contained "spices, herbs & chilli" on the ingredient list.

We tried it for breakfast this morning and its mild spicey taste was a real hit. Even Mrs Oregano who is not a sausage fan liked it. I have never seen or heard the expression "hogs pudding" before. I assume it is something very local to West Cornwall.

From time to time I have roasted onions. This has usually been to accompany a roast beef or lamb dinner. I have sometimes roasted onions in the skin or peeled. Either way I have been impressed how a sweet oniony juice comes out during the roasting. With a light roasting it is potentially recoverable. With a longer roast it just burns to the pan.

I somehow think that this delicate juice should be preserved. Any ideas? Suggestions most welcome!

When I lived in Germany I enjoyed what used to be called "Yugoslav restaurants" before the tragic breakup of that country. Today they are doubtless divided into equally good Croat, Dalmatian, Bosnian and Serb restaurants. One thing I used to enjoy was Ajvar (pronounced "aye-var") which is basically a purée of aubergine and red peppers as a side dish to balkan meat courses.

I have no idea if my Ajvar is that authentic, but having found a very tired looking aubergine in my kitchen tonight, I am reminded that it is a good way to get rid of an aubergine. So here goes...

 

Serves 4-8 as a side dish

Ingredients

1 normal aubergine about 250-300 g
3-4 large red peppers about 600-800 g
1 medium onion
juice of half a lemon
3 garlic cloves
1 tsp chilli powder
1 dsp olive oil
salt & pepper

Method

1. Heat oven to 220 Celsius with a fan oven or higher with conventional oven
2. Put aubergine, peppers (seeds removed) and whole onion on a baking tray in the oven for 15 min. The skins of the peppers will probably go black which is not a problem.
3. Remove the aubergine and peppers, switch the oven off and leave the onion in the oven
4. Put the aubergine and peppers in a bowl and cover with clingfilm, leave for 30 minutes
5. Take the peppers and aubergine and remove the skin (should come off easily). Remove the onion from the oven and skin it too.
6. Place the skinned peppers, aubergines and onion in a food processor. Add remaining ingredients and blend together.
7. Put in a bowl and allow to cool. Refridgerate then serve cold.

Ajvar is a good side dish to accompany a BBQ.

I think that using aubergine as a base for a mash works well. I had a great side dish at Anokaa in Salisbury which was based on aubergine with shallots and coriander seeds. In Munich I had something similar to ajvar in a Bulgarian restaurant but it had less pepper and more garlic.

On my first business trip to Italy about 20 years (, OK I'm old) ago I tried real espresso for the first time. As somebody who only ever liked black coffee and fairly strong-tasting coffee at that, I was in my element! BTW, I can recommend the Calabrian coast (toe of Italy) I had great seafood and wine as well as coffee.

In the mid 1990s we had a holiday in Tuscany and we bought a Gaggia espresso machine. Italian colleagues had always said that the key to a good espresso machine was the pump and that the more Bar the pump could produce the better the espresso. I spoke about 50 words of Italian and the 60-year old proprieter of the appliance shop and his wife spoke no English. However when they spoke of la pompa and he showed fairly decent biceps they were telling me that the Gaggia machine had a good pump! It proved to be excellent value until it gave up the ghost about 7 years later.

Wifey (who hates coffee) decided to buy me a replacement a few years later and it also produced great espresso. It was a Kenwood and like the Gaggia it has a heavy metal coffee drum with a rubber seal to go into the machine. The key with espresso is not just to produce strong black coffee - you can do that with a filter - but to add the tasty foamy crema which distinguishes espresso from strong coffee. Now after years of good service the Kenwood died.

For my birthday wifey bought me a replacement as she knows how I love espresso or other strong coffees with crema. Unfortunately the machine produced no crema and just tasted like a strong black coffee. It was a DeLonghi machine which I think is US-manufactured. Inspection showed that the metal coffee filter was very light and there was no rubber sealing ring; what Gaggia describe as the crema ring.

We returned the machine and got a refund and went to another shop. We found what seemed like a good espresso machine complete with crema ring. This time no water was pumped through the coffee filter drum. Everything was pumped through the cappucino steam outlet even if it was switched off. We went through the manufacturers instructions 3 times with the same defective result. I had not noted the manufacturer but it was again DeLonghi. Second machine returned in one day!

While the above results may be a freak, we are not going to look at DeLonghi again for quite a while. Verdict on the next machine is still open but we will look further afield.

I have been fascinated by how the caramelisation of some vegetables enhances their taste. This happens with onions, carrots and especially shallots. I have roasted onions with other vegetables or with meat in the oven. I have often noticed how on roasting a sweet onion juice leaks out and then burns onto the roast pan; need to figure out how to capture it.

My tapas book describes how to caramelise shallots. Basically you take 100 g sugar and some lemon juice and heat it in a pan to start to caramelise the sugar. You then add the shallots and add a further 300 ml water and allow the mixture to reduce in the pan.

I did not have any shallots but had some big onions. At about 1/3 kilo each I thought they were a similar mass to about 10 little shallots. I thought it would be worth trying to caramelise with honey rather than sugar; this was due to my train of thought on mustard and honey and another train of thought was the fact that honey was used rather than sugar in the middle ages, just like parsnip instead of potato.

On previous occasions I have tried adding a honey glaze to things like roast salmon, but with mixed results. This is an area where I need to develop my technique.

I followed the same procedure as in the tapas book but with a good 100 g of honey. Technically it worked, it took a while for the onions to caramelise slowly. However the end result tasted too strongly of honey. I had overlooked the strong distinctiveness of the honey taste.

So third experiment, partly successful. So overall a 50% success rate.

Everybody was fed enough, there was a large pile of pots and dishes and no clouds of smoke in the kitchen. Definitely worth trying a few things.

In thinking of honey and mustard, it occured to me to use the parsnips. There were not enough potatoes for my boys' voracious appetite, so I thought I would use the parsnips too. There is a subtle sweetness to parsnips that I thought could work with the other parts of the meal. Since the boys were not so keen on mash I thought it was pushing things too far to

I often wonder what was cooked in the middle ages before the potato had arrived from North America. I am aware that parsnips did feature more strongly then and have known that parsnips can be roasted or mashed in a way analagous to potatoes. Since my childhood I have had roast parsnips which are roasted in a similar manner to roast potatoes. However I have also been aware of differences. It is not just that the parsnip is shaped more like a carrot than a potato, but it is more fibrous.

Some months ago I tried deep frying slices of parsnip (about 1 cm thick). I assumed that since roast parsnips take roughly half the time of roast potatoes in the oven that the fried slices would fry quickly. I was wrong, the parsnip slices were nice and golden but undercooked. Their properties are a bit different from spuds and I will need more practice before I have mastered them as an ingredient.

The Humble Spud recommends parboiling potatoes for Rösti so I parboiled the parsnips for 10 minutes. I then grated them with my MagiMix using the coarse wheel. The result looked coarser than normal Rösti but there was not an obvious way to make it finer. I finely chopped a small onion and fried it and added it to the grated parsnip. I then tried to pat together the mix into cakes and then fried them. Unfortunately they all fell apart in the frying pan a bit like my stovie disaster. I fried them a bit longer but then had to serve as my boys needed to go out.

Taste was not terrible, but again the parsnips were a bit undercooked....and the result certainly could not be described as Rösti as they had fallen apart. I am not sure if next time I need to do more parboiling or whether I should abandon the Rösti idea and simply bind the mix with an egg. That would certainly not fall apart.

So one success, this experiment failed but might be worth retrying. One more to go...

When thinking about what would be a good accompaniment to some good quality sausages I had the idea of combining mustard and honey.

The 'Humble Spud' had a recipe for mustard mash which included a mixture of wholegrain mustard, english mustard and chopped parsley. Although I love chilli, I am not a fan of english mustard; it is somehow hot and strong in a crass way. I much prefer the more subtle flavour of mustards from France and Germany or some British wholegrain ones. My boys do not like english mustard either but are particularly fond of Hausmachersenf which is a German sweet mustard that in Bavaria is served with Weißwürste. In my garden we are having a great second crop of chives so it seemed daft to buy parsley at the shop.

I peeled the remaining potatoes (at least half a kilo), boiled them and drained them. I then added a slosh of olive oil, a shake of salt, a small handfull of chives chopped by scissors, two cloves of garlic pressed, two heaped teaspoons of wholegrain mustard and two heaped spoons of sweet mustard. I mashed the lot together and served with the sausages.

My boys do not like mash without a gravy. With no suitable stock around I did a simple gravy consisting of a finely chopped onion, two finely chopped garlic cloves, two heaped teaspoons of cornflour, a slosh of soya sauce and two or three sloshes of red wine, plus more water added later.

Having not tried this before the measurements are not well tested hence the informality of the description. All the boys like the mash - even my son who said he hates mash said he would eat it again. One success, two more experiments to go...

When Oregano experiments with preparing food, Mrs Oregano usually gets very nervous. It is not that she does not try new things herself, but she either fears that the boys will get nothing to eat or there will be a terrible mess in the kitchen (usually true ) or that there will be smoke pouring out of the extractor (not too often ). Usually when Mrs Oregano is nervous, this stresses Oregano and he makes more mistakes and then cooking shifts from relaxation to an angry experience.

This weekend Mrs Oregano is abroad visiting her family. So it was a good opportunity to try some new things. Oregano originally planned doing bangers and mash...but ended up incorporating 3 experiments.

One reason was that there there were not enough potatoes, but some parsnips lying around. The second reason is that I have been reading two cookbooks we have had a while but rarely used. The third reason is that if I provide good quality sausages, my boys will tolerate some experimentation round about.

By the way the books I read were:
a) The Humble Spud, Hamlyn, ISBN 0 600 60586 8, 2000
This goes into a wide variety of preparing potatoes with a little on parsnips and sweet potatoes. Some stuff is familiar. For example in the Netherlands, Mrs Oregano's family combine kale, endive or other green vegetables with mashed potato. A few things were new or things that I had eaten before but never made for myself like Rösti.
b) The best 100 Tapas, Aldeasa, ISBN 84 8003 340 1, 2003
This explains basic tapas (though misses my favourite pincho moruno) and soups.

The experiments were a mixed bag as you can see from the following postings

When I started blogging I thought is was a chance to express myself with the drivel I would not normally utter in polite company without boring them. So I have not been ready for tagging. Nevertheless I do not want to be a spoil sport so here goes...my tag from MyFirstBook

So MyFirstBook wants seven personal facts:

1. The country of my birth, my children's birth and where I am now living are all different
2. I am a distant relative of a corrupt 19th century US president
3. Something in computational geometry is named after me
4. I have come up with lemmas (mathematical results less important than theorems) that are probably of no use to man nor beast.
5. I used to make chappatis during my PhD days but have lost the knack
6. My favourite music is Pink Floyd, Genesis and Jean-Michel Jarre - OK my taste did not develop beyond the 1970s.
7. I love watching birds of prey

So I tag the following

Bellydancer
FunkyFarmer
GilraenH
Irish-le-Feaux
kiku2u
ladosy
PrincessFiona

I am a saddo in the sense that I believe strongly in the value of doing lots of exercise and eating good, fresh food...yet I suffer from hypertension. Judging by my relatives it is not in my genes but more in the way I respond to a demanding job. I have had quite a few demanding roles in the last 20 years and have generally performed them well...yet I have lacked an inner self-confidence (which I have successfully hid). Maybe (but I dunno) this has lead to high blood pressure and I am taking drugs to address that.

I also have (yum, yum!) put myself on a very high garlic diet. (My kids do not accept it is just for medicinal reasons!). Of course in many cases it is for the taste amplification.

Today I saw an interesting entry on the Telegraph website. Apparently dark chocolate is good for high blood pressure.