For One Night Only - We're A Proper Restaurant On Saturday the Captain held a social mixed golf day followed by a meal, and I was allowed to choose a menu for the night, so...... Sweetcorn soup with roasted cherry tomatoes and chilli oil. Grilled goat's cheese on a garlic croute with balsamic dressed leaf salad and grilled peppers. Duck confit on mustard mash with smoked bacon and leek sauce. Chicken pot roasted with lemon, thyme, basil, white wine and olive oil. Lightly spiced grilled salmon on a tomato and herb sauce. Warm chocolate brownie with steeped fruits, vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. Fruit baskets with chantilly cream. Ably served by Rob... ...and Georgie.

Central Heating for Kids ? Yes, your children will really get up and glow with a bowl of warm and nutritious raw ducks blood soup.

Cooking Lessons Now it has gone very quiet at work, well to be honest it is absolutely dead, we were closed for four days last week for flooding and on the days we have been open it has rained so much that hardly anyone has ventured out onto the golf course anyway. So, with it being quiet we are working on expanding Chefling Carol's repertoire. Yesterday we made chicken breasts with white wine, cream and wild mushrooms, a tomato and chilli jam, and choux buns which I forgot to photograph. The chicken was very simple, and delicious. 2 skinned chicken breasts 1/2 onion, finely diced 1 cup dried mushrooms 1/4 bottle white wine 1/4 pint double cream 1/2 pint chicken stock olive oil, butter, salt & pepper Put a splash of olive oil and a knob of butter in a saute pan, add the onions and sweat without colour, add the chicken breast and cook for a couple of minutes on either side. Soak the dried mushrooms (porcini or mixed, we used a mix) in the hot chicken stock. Add the wine, mushrooms and stock to the chicken, bring to the boil, then simmer for about 10 minutes, turning the breasts after five minutes. When the chicken is cooked, bring back to the boil and reduce the cooking liquor until there are a couple of tablespoons of liquid left. Add the cream, stirring it in, then raise the heat again and reduce by half to leave a rich sauce of coating consistency. The jam was just as easy. 1 kg Ripe tomatoes 6 fresh red chillies finely sliced 3 tablespoons Nam Pla Fish Sauce 8 cloves garlic, crushed 600g sugar 200ml red wine / cider vinegar Dice half of the tomatoes, blend the other half. Put all the ingredients in a pan, bring to the boil then simmer, skim off any froth that rises to the surface. Simmer, stirring every few minutes to release any bits that have settled on the bottom of the pan. It took roughly two hours to reduce the jam to a nicely sticky and jam like consistency. Put the jam into a sterlised jar and allow to cool, serve when set. You must leave the chilli and tomato seeds in the mix as they contain the pectin that will make the jam set, if you sieve them out it won't set.

Cook Like An Ecaudorian Because new friend Eva bought me an Ecuadorian cookbook, that's why. So all I need to do now is to figure out where I can get hold of a Capybara. Or failing that, a guinea pig or two. "Hello ? Is that the pet shop ? "Yes Sir, what can I do for you ?" "I'd like to buy a guinea pig" "Yes Sir, do you want a male or a female ?" "Er, which is the most tender ?" "Excuse me ?" "And how many servings can I expect to get from one ? Hello, hello, oh, I think they've hung up."

Restaurant Review : Piccolino, Ilkley***/* I have more or less stopped doing restaurant reviews locally because everybody knows who I am, but chain restaurant Piccolino ( part of the Bank - Zinc - The Restaurant group) has just opened up on the site of Johnson's / Honest Lawyer, and they don't know me yet. The decor is lovely, really light and airy on both floors, extra windows have been added, the old circular stair has been removed and the area opened up to allow light from upstairs to fall intot he lower seating area, it is a good job all round. We went on Tuesday lunchtime, without booking, and were promptly seated. The restaurant was fairly busy downstairs and had about another 16 or so diners upstairs, pretty good going. I had a beer, Mrs YS a lemonade and we perused the menu and specials. Piccolino is not cheap, 2.95 for bread !, 2.75 for olives, starters begin at about 5.50 (or 3.95 if you count garlic bread as a a starter) and get right up into what I would term healthy main course territory. We opted for a risotto with scallops for myself (at a very healthy 8.95) and calamari fritti for Mrs YS at 6.25, main courses were suckling pig (which our Italian waitress said would be crispy) for me at 14.95 (potatoes were extra, 2.95), and spaghetti carbonara for Mrs YS at 8.95. I ordered a bottle of Montepulciano which at 16.95 was almost the chaeapest bottle of wine on the list. The starters were good, the squid came in lovely crisp and light batter, my risotto was slightly dry but well flavoured and the 3 seared scallops were tender and juicy. Main courses, the spaghetti was very good, the suckling pig rather less so. From being on the other side of the pass, I think there is a huge technical difficulty with serving suckling pig on an a la carte menu, if you're doing a whole pig for a party or banquet it is relatively easy to get the skin ruddy brown and crisp and have the flesh soft and tender, but with individual portions it is very hard. My pig then was qite a nice piece of meat, two decently thick slices on roasted squash (which had been rubbed with chilli oil I think, a nice touch), but the skin had all the crisp and crackly qualities of a boiled inner tube, yuck. I had a very similar dish, for a very similar price, at Gordon Ramsey's Boxwood Cafe, and it was awesome, crunchy crackling, succulent pork, fabulous potatoes and a rich, deeply flavoured jus, here it was nice without being anything special. The wine was very good, the desserts, which the menu is at some pains to point out are made here by the chefs were good, £5 for a small square of Tiramisu though, we went the whole hog and had dessert wines, Moscato for Mrs YS, Vin Santo and cantucci for me, and then coffees. The total bill came to £84. The important thing for Piccolino is how is it going to compare to Ilkley's other good restaurants, well, for decor and location it is on a winner, as far as food and pricing goes it isn't dissimilar to Farsyde or Tubby Wadlows (nor I presume to Martha & Vincent, which I havn't got round to visiting yet), I think the food at both Farsyde and TW to be better than this though. Three / four stars, getting my main course right would have been worth four stars, but we did have a nice time and I thought that the service was good, maybe there are just a couple of minor teething problems to be sorted out in the kitchen but on the whole it was a good meal. *Why wasn't I at bookclub last night ? Er, pre lunch beer, then a bottle of wine, then dessert wine, then asleep on the settee.......

Last Night's Dinner Springbok and Impala burgers from Alternative Meats. I can't honestly say that I thought that either of the burgers were great, they were meaty, not gamey, but so heavily flavoured with herbs and pepper that we couldn't decide if there was any difference in the flavour of the two antelope beasties. I might try the company again, but I would go for steaks / joints rather than burgers to try and get a proper taste of the flesh. Anyone for Kudu / Wildebeest / Zebra ? Yorkshiresoul's dinner guests beware.

To Be Honest Sir, You'd Be Better Off With A Burger I know the customer is always right, but last week, after four huge days of hosting the Northern Ladies Seniors event, I got a bit shirty with a customer who asked for his fillet steak well done. I approached the table and asked the party how they would like their steaks cooking. "Well done," says the first one. There is a pause. "But this is Lishman's very best fillet steak," I say. "Well done," says the second one, at which point I make the beefburger offer. The third one says, "Actually I can't eat steak, it's too tough for me, can I have something else." And I lose the plot. "There is nothing in the kitchen that is more tender than this steak, just nothing at all," I say, rather loudly, and with a wobble of emotion in my voice. After the rest of the party sensibly decide to have their steaks no more burned than medium rare I return to the kitchen not in the best of tempers. I grab one of the steaks and begin cutting thin slivers from it. "Here," I bark at Carol and Ann, proffering a piece of raw meat on the end of a knife. "Eat this." Much to the credit of the girls, they eat the raw steak. In protests against the well done's of this world, when I have my steak for dinner, I "sear" it for about thirty seconds a side, then put it on a hot plate with hot sauce, I can't honestly say it was cooked at all, but it was tender and fantastic. The thing is, the customer isn't always right. Fillet steak contains nothing but meat, it is one of the most underused muscles in a beasts body, so it remains extrememly tender, unlike neck and shin for example which do a lot of work and are therefore tough as old boots and require hours of gentle cooking. If you cook fillet to well done, you cook all that tenderness out of the meat and reduce it to a state not unlike the sole of an old leather boot. If you want your steak well done, try rib eye, or perhaps rump, something with a bit of fat and gristle to it that may benefit slightly from the extended cooking. On the other hand have a beefburger, I'll gladly cook it well done and you won't have to pay fifteen quid for it.

Some Catering Terms Explained Summer Soup "I say, what is the soup de jour ?" "It is summer soup Madam." That is, it is summa this, and summa that. There is almost nothing in the world of food that can't be turned into soup by an adventurous chef, leftover veg = cream of veg soup, leftover veg and two portions of steak pie filling = beef and vegetable broth, ok, so you might think twice about adding that half jar of pickled gherkins that have been loitering in the fridge for a while, but it will probably work, tell the customers it's a Bavarian speciality. Seven Week Gravies Back in the good old days when the Nazi Party Environmental Health allowed you to use stockpots all week you would just throw all the days meat and bone scraps in the top and let it bubble away, the end of week stock was always far better than the start of week stock. It's the same principle for gravy, after the first carvery of the week you would chuck all the little scraps of meat and fat and bone into the gravy, then the next day you boil it up again, sieve out the bits and serve it. These days of course the EHO doesn't let you do this, that's because they are a bunch of tossers who ought to be burned at the stake they are working very hard to make our food safe to eat. Repeat this for a few days and the gravy will be pretty good, keep it going for weeks and the gravy will be so awesomely meaty, so much the very essence of roasted dead cow that the chefs will probably not allow it out of the kithen at all and will just just sit around dipping big hunks of bread into it. This will taste even better if eaten with a glass of chef tax wine, chef tax ? Chef Tax So, you were too cheap to pay the restaurant's drinks tariff and you have brought your own wine / champagne / port / whisky to have with your meal / anniversary / wedding function. Chef Tax is the difference between the amount of wine you brought to the restaurant and the amount of wine that you and your guests actually get to drink. Mind you, if you think the chef's are thieving buggers, you ought to see the waiting staff. Think you can get around it by counting the bottles afterwards ? The waiters have already out thought you there, they went to Tesco earlier on and bought 6 bottles of Tesco cooking wine, then they decanted your Chateau L'expensive and poured the Vin de Cheapo back in, and when your guests were pissed then never even noticed. Chef tax also applies to cakes, wedding, birthday etc. If you bring it and then get chef to cut it up, well, it's going to shrink a little. Thw worst incidence of chef tax that I saw was at my last job when my boss was seen sneaking out the kitchen door with an entire tier of the couple's wedding cake, he really liked fruit cake. Obviously though, these are all things that I saw as a young chef, and you can be assured none of that malarky goes on in my kitchen, now, where's that bottle of Lafitte gone........

Book Review : Extreme Cuisine - Jerry Hopkins***** The question you need to answer for yourself is, are you a neophile, or a neophobe ? That is, do you seek out the new and different, or do you fear and shun it ? In a culinary sense, I'd hope to place myself amongst the neophiles, I've always thought that there is very little that I wouldn't eat, no matter how strange it was. Jerry Hopkins excellent exploration of the world's stranger cuisines seeks to challenge these presumptions. Extreme Cuisine could so easily have fallen into the lads mag trap of over simplification and base shock and horror, but Hopkins' book is well researched and all the foods contained within are given a sympathetic tasting (the author has devoured almost every item in the book) and description, there is a brief but informative historical background for each foodstuff, notes on present day production methods and suppliers if appropriate, and a few recipes for those folk hardy enough to want to try their hand at cooking camel, jellyfish, sea slug or roasted crickets. What wouldn't I eat then ? Most of the stuff contained in this book I'd have a go at, bats, rats, mice and guinea pigs, yes, no problem. Jellyfish, I think I could, slugs, well, maybe, ants, bees, wasps, caterpillars, I think I could force myself, but there are two things in here which I think wouldn't pass my lips even at gunpoint. Fried spiders, oh the horror. I really don't think I could chew on a crunchy, hairy, fried tarantula. There is a worse horror within these pages though, balut..... This is a 16-18 day old fertilised duck egg, first you make a small hole in the end and suck out the juices, then you chip away the shell to reveal the chick embryo inside and eat the lot. Apparently it has the texture of cooked egg white and a flavour not unlike duck liver, but I think I'm never going to find out if that's true. Extreme Cuisine is a great book, packed full of the weird and wonderful foods from around the globe, weird to us Westerners perhaps, quite everyday and banal to the inhabitants of other countries. Things that might seem normal to us can be viewed by others as strange, unusual or horrific. Once at my parent's house we had some Chinese guests over for dinner, and after dinner, as we Brits do, a cheeseboard was served. The guests looked on in trepidation, they sampled tiny portions of cheddar, and then one brave soul put a small piece of stilton in her mouth, she looked appalled and ran from the table to the bathroom. Our guests found it difficult to believe that anyone could possibly eat something so obviously vile as rotting cheese.

Restaurant Review - Farsyde, Ilkley***** We were lucky to be treated to dinner at the Farsyde Restaurant by my parents-in-law, thanks again folks. We had drinks in the bar area before being seated, there was a selection of home made bread offered of which I chose a black olive bread roll. I'm not going to be able to remember what the other three ate, so I'll just review my food and wine. Starter - Warm salad of woodpigeon, roast new potatoes, pancetta, paw-paw and tarragon dressing. (£5.75) Very nice, with the pigeon breats just retaining a hint of pinkness, a reasonably substantial starter but it is a restaurant catering to Yorkshiremen so that's fair enough. To be honest I didn't notice the paw-paw in the dressing but the dish was fine without it. Main - Calves liver on garlic mash, tartlet of mature cheddar & chorizo. Lovely, the liver was pinker than the pigeon, just how I like it, very tender, the mash was smooth and creamy and very garlicky. Main courses are priced in the £12-15 range, I din't notice on the menu whether veg & salad cost extra, but they did on previous visits. Price wise then this places Farsyde on a level with Gordon Ramsey's Boxwood at the Berkeley in London. Dessert - Trio of chocolate, brulee, brownie and chocolate & honeycomb ice cream. For me, you can't have too much choclate at the end of a meal and this was great, a nice change in textures and temperatures with the warm brownie and the ice cream. (£4.95) Wine - We had a good bottle of South African red at about £16, I didn't take notes and have forgotten what it was, very good though. I don't know the total bill, and I'm not asking, but you can see from the prices that Farsyde isn't cheap, it is really, really good though, we have been here a few times and have always had really good meals. The servie is good, staff pleasent and polite, a good evening was had by all.

It's Fightin' Time In Espresso Land Cafedirect versus Starbucks. Ethical beverage suppliers Cafedirect have announced plans to roll out a chain of coffee shops to take on global market leaders Starbucks. Penny Newman, chief exec of Cafedirect said "It's about championing a different way of trading coffee. It is also about being a business, not being a charity." I'm afraid that I'm only going to offer lukewarm applause for this scheme, British city centres are already fairly dire. They are dull, uniform, homogenised, Americanised. It doesn't matter whether this new chain will be British owned and fairly traded, it will be just another faceless, same old, same old in a few years time. We don't need yet more chains of stores, what is wrong with you people ? It's the public that are to blame for all this plastic food and drink, you want the same burger in Leeds, Liverpool, Los Angeles and Lagos, so that's what you end up with. The same crappy coffee in Bradford, Berlin, Bermuda and Buenos Aires. I'm quite lucky, I live in Ilkley, and to some degree the town has managed to resist the march of the multinationals. We have a broad selection of independant, different, interesting, unique places to eat and drink. There are some chains of course, the Cow & Calf has become one of the Inkeeper's Lodge chain of same menu gastro pubs, Costa Coffee has moved in on our last small scale newsagent, and we're stuck with the empire building Tesco or the nicer/pricier Booths, but on the whole, it's a nicer, more varied place to live and shop than many towns. We're not quite as independant / quirky as Hebden Bridge, but it's not bad. It would be far nicer if your town could have an independant coffee shop, selling Fairtrade goods. Wouldn't you like your town to have more independant, more interesting shops and businesses ? Choose where you spend then, before you walk through the door of easy, comfort zone, Superhyperglobal Coffee Inc., tomorrow, stop and think, is there somewhere else you could shop ? Or maybe there isn't, after all, big companies always say they are only providing what the customer wants, and looking at our cities, what we want is interchangeable anytown UK-USA.

Evil Empire 'Misled' Shoppers Morally dubious Tesco's price policy And again Oddly, I wrote to Tesco back in January 2005 to question their pricing policy on strawberries, my letter went unanswered. I have written to Tesco a few times to question various points of their food policy, in my experience they give bland answers to about half of all enquiries, and totally ignore the other half. Tesco' supposed support for British fruit growers is a little odd, all last Autumn they had large banners in store proclaiming their support for these farmers, I eventually managed to get the banners at the Ilkley store removed when I put in a written complaint stating that for weeks at a time you could purchase fruit from Italy, Spain, South Africa and Argentina, but not from the UK.

Soup's Head To Head We're thinking about selling our home made soups to take out/home, so I popped up to Evil Empire (aka Tesco) and grabbed a quick selection of ready soups to try out. Tesco Cream Of Mushroom Soup 95p* This is nasty, chef robyn and myself both pulled faces after trying this. We both thought the overwhelming taste was of chemicals, there isn't any flavour even remotely resembling mushrooms, it's just nasty. Tesco Finest Pea And Ham £1.79** This looks nice, it's a good vibrant green colour with lots of shreds of ham in it, and the flavour ? Predominantly mint with the vaguest hint of pea. I would have preferred the soup to be a little thicker as well, I think pea soup should stick to your ribs a bit, if a soup's thick you can at least let it down to suit you. New Covent Garden Wild Mushroom £1.99*** This was alright, it tasted pleasent, but not fantastic, again it was a bit on the thin side and the mushroom flavour was a little diluted, but it was better then the Tesco one. New Covent Garden Puy Lentil and Toulouse Sausage £1.99**** Although this should more correctly have been called Tomato Soup with Lentils and Sausage, it was easily the best of the bunch, well flavoured with good chunks of fresh tomato and slightly crunchy lentils. The only downside was that the sausage tasted rather mealy and overboiled, it would have been much better with something like chorizo added. We wern't madly impressed with this selection of ready to eat soups, especially the Tesco own brand ones. Soup isn't at all difficult to make, both me and chef Robyn thought we make soups much better than this selection.

The Haggis Head To Head Blackface vs. Lishman's vs. MacSween's Looks All three haggi (is their a plural for haggis ?) look good, both the Scots haggi are presented in natural casing, all three were heated gently in a non stick frying pan (personally, I prefer pan frying to steaming/boiling), and served with tatties and neeps, mashed of course. Texture MacSween's has a delightfully crumbly texture, and a decent bite to the oatmeal. Lishman's didn't crumble and remained solid during cooking, the oatmeal could have had more texture. Blackface did crumble nicely but again could have done with a bit more texture. Flavour The MacSween's wins hands down, really meaty and well seasoned and giving off a delightful, mouth watering smell, this is the strongest tasting of the three haggis. The Lishman's haggis was fairly good, although a little more seasoning and 'meatiness' would have been nice, and the same can be said for the Blackface. In our taste test, we would recommend the MacSween's haggis, it looks the most appealing when cooked, and has the richest, most well developed flavour and the best texture of the three. MacSween's ***** Lishman's *** Blackface *** ***** Superb **** Good Quality *** Slightly Above Average ** Below Average * I Don't Want This In My Mouth Ever Again

Blackface Lamb My lamb arrived from Blackface on Thursday, both Mrs YS and myself are big lamb fans so we won't quickley get bored of eating the same thing night after night. The lamb was jointed and vac packed and came as follows.... 2 legs, one whole (and high cur on the leg for a really good sized joint), the other cut into two smaller joints. 2 shoulders, presented as the legs. 20 chops, 16 cut up, the others left as a rack Liver & Kidneys - havn't seen this, it must have dropped into the depths of my freezer. Flank piece. Shanks. 1 Haggis. So far we have had some of the chops just simply grilled, and last night I braised the shanks. I usually buy my meat from Lishman's of Ilkley, so, in a comparison, how does the Blackface fare against the free range lamb from my local butcher ? Well, it is good, but I'm not sure that it is any better than the Yorkshire lamb from my local butcher, the chops were good, but sometimes I've had some awesome lamb from Lishman's, the shanks are not really a good test, once anything has been brasied for hours it should be tender and succulent however it started out. Lishman's are just edging it at the moment then. A whole lamb from Blackface cost £109.