Football and food

How do you persuade children and young people to forget the junk food and eat healthily?

It's unexpected – but wonderfully logical – to see a football club making efforts to do just that.

Manchester City have started a series of recipes from the chefs at Carrington, the club's training ground. They're being published in the club magazine and online too.

Char-grilled chicken with pasta is a favourite of Gunnar Nielsen, the site tells us.

Baked salmon with a warm Niçoise salad, which is apparently the favourite of City and England number one Joe Hart, plus Shaun Wright Wright Wright-Phillips.

Now obviously this is all centred on 'health food' – it's for athletes, after all – but it isn't tasteless, isn't inaccessible and won't be very expensive. And it just might convince someone to try some real food. Okay, someone's got to cook it, but they're pretty straightforward.

It's nice to see some social awareness like this from the club – and it costs next to nowt to do this sort of thing.

One of these days, I'm actually going to have to try the stadium food. The staples of football fodder usually turn me right off, but the club has had Marco Pierre White in to do a revamp.

Okay, it's still pies and sausages, but the aim is to make it better pies and sausages. I'm going up later this month – perhaps I'll convince myself to give it a whirl.

Getting crabby about my cookery plans

Suddenly – and really rather strangely – I'm aware that while I’ve been thinking about food from my childhood, I have no memories of my mother cooking us fish. Yet I know that, in our time in Mossley at least, she visited the fish stall at the market, once a week or more, or sent my father there to get fish. But try as I might, I can recall none of her fish dishes.

I do remember – and with great love – fish ‘n’ chips from the chippy, which my father would occasionally go and buy and bring home for a Saturday lunch … with proper mushy peas, of course; there were also scraps (the left-over bits of batter) that you could buy for a penny or so a bag from chippies.

Later, I remember family trips to Blackpool and eating in restaurants where I’d almost always pick scampi.

Those things have stuck firmly in my memory – but not my mother’s fish dishes. And in being incapable of that memory, I’m also incapable of knowing exactly why that should be the case.

I do know that we never had any shellfish. Perhaps rather surprisingly under all the circumstances, I was quite prepared to try new things from early on in my adult life.

Well before the dawn of my ‘foodie period’, I’d eaten – and enjoyed – squid, mussels (before they seemed to have decided to disagree with me) and eel; foods that were really rather ‘exotic’.

At polytechnic in Leicester for a year, I discovered crab: you could buy it quite cheaply, ready cooked, from the market in the city centre.

I’d take it back to the halls and use a small hammer to break into the shell and liberate the meat. Then, as far as I can remember (because I long ago lost the un-illustrated Penguin cookery book that I got the recipe from), I’d warm it through with butter and some lemon juice and eat it on toast.

The book, incidentally, had been one of those great ideas of my mother’s: ‘I haven’t taught you anything much about cooking and I even stopped you doing cookery at school, so here’s a book of recipes now that you’ll have to cook for yourself’.

The hammer was my father’s idea of something practical that I should have. It’s still in the toolbox, if a tad bent.

Then today came reminders of crab: first Oliver Thring’s article in the Guardian and the associated piece about how to prepare and dress crab. Further recipes are apparently to follow.

Now my plans for the weekend have been blown right open: Never mind trashy retro food, crab has to be on the menu – particularly as The Other Half doesn’t really eat shellfish.

And to further complicate things, I then found this – which might be 'hard' by the standards of UKTVFood, but sounds relatively easy to me. And rather delicious. And if I'm going to buy a nice big crab, then it's going to do me more than one meal.

But there we are – at present!

And as if that were not making my foodie life complicated enough, my colleagues seem to have decided that I’m not doing enough to defend public services by making chocolate things to keep their spirits up!

Thank goodness there's marzipan in the house!

Time to get nostalgic

This coming weekend sees the start of the rugby league’s top flight season in the UK and France: I can’t forget the Catalan Dragons; watching matches in Perpignan is the root of my love affair with that country.

But it so happens that this season’s entire opening weekend of fixtures is to take place in Cardiff, at the Millennium Stadium – and thus The Other Half is set to be away for three nights.

So, what is a girl to do with three nights and two days to herself?

This one is starting to plan. And, as is so often the way with these things, first ideas are giving way to something rather different.

I had been considering trying to recreate the scallop bisque from the other week in Glasgow – or one with lobster or crab. And then some other rather posh stuff.

That was, however, until some little memory triggered in my mind while I was organising an online order for basics (cat food etc).

Like Nigel Slater in Toast, I started musing over culinary pleasures from years gone by. For some time, I’ve made occasional efforts to look in shops for Bird’s Angel Delight in butterscotch flavour. Today I found it online. The Other Half also remembers it fondly. I ordered some.

Then the site came up with one of those jaunty little suggestions – in this case, for malt loaf. I remember malt loaf with great pleasure: dense, fruity and slathered in butter. I ordered one.

Thinking of Slater’s experience, as he tried to find the foods he remembered from his childhood, and then eating them all over again, I contemplated a frozen Bird’s Eye steak & kidney pie.

I was saved from this by the fact that only boxes of four were available and this isn’t a multi-pack path that I’m aiming to tread.

Although it strikes me that perhaps the reason I liked them so much was that they always seemed to have a higher ratio of kidney to steak than any other steak & kidney dish. Okay, it will have been cheaper for the company that way, but as I’ve loved kidney for as long as I can remember, it was absolutely what I liked.

Then another idea took shape: why not try to recreate my mother’s pork pie?

She would take pork – quite lean, as I remember – and cut it finely, add a small amount of dried onion that she would have soaked in boiling water for a few minutes, together with some grated potato (which would hold some moisture).

This, with seasoning (although she wasn’t much of a one for pepper, if memory serves) would go into a shortcrust-lined, shallow enamel dish to be topped with further pastry and then baked.

She always made two at a time and served them with the freshest bread we had – this wasn’t France, but if memory serves me correctly, the bread (during the time this memory really comes from) would be from a little baker called Cakebread in Mossley.

It might not sound special, but it’s one of the stand-out food memories of my childhood and adolescence. I loved it. I remember the texture and the saltiness and the crisp thinness of the pastry.

Oddly – in retrospect – I remember it as the meat being minced: you know – those strings of meat? Not blitzed. Yet that doesn’t accord with my memories of not having it as often as I’d have wanted because it was such a labour-intensive thing for her to cut the meat.

Memory is a funny old thing.

I hadn’t thought about it for some time, but in Michel Roux’s book, Pastry there’s a recipe for a potato pie. That hardly sounds like French haute cuisine, does it? But it brought memories of my mother’s pork pie flooding back.

Some years ago, I tried it myself, after taking basic notes from Mother. It was dry and bland. Memory is such a funny thing, but I remain convinced that it should be as I remember – if only can I just work out the key.

I say “the key”, but my tastes have changed – been educated by experience – by the years. You can never really hope to recreate the past (and would we really want to?), but how odd that I have such strong memories of such a dish, cooked by a mother who worked hard at it, seeing it as a duty etc, but who has never allowed herself to really relish food freely.

There are other things I remember too. She never made a steak and kidney pie (that I can recall), but did cook steak and kidney (plenty of kidney!) and serve it with a beautifully crisp quarter of a pastry circle that’s she’d bake.

However, partly because that pre-Christmas experience at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese was just so disappointing, I’ve decided that steak and kidney pud is what I’m going to make. Possibly to be followed by butterscotch whip, served in a big bowl, on top of boudoir biscuits (soaked with sweet sherry?) and topped with some smashed Maltesers, to be consumed while curled up on the sofa in me jimjams, watching something trashy on TV.

And who cares – as long as I enjoy it? And okay – as long as it isn’t also denuding some developing world country of water in the quest to produce out-of-season grub for the West.

I have also ordered clotted cream from Cornwall. I remember it as seasonal, but that was only because we only got it if we visited Cornwall for a holiday or if someone else did and had some sent to us.

I do remember my mother buttering white bread, then spreading it with Golden Syrup and adding clotted cream on top.

Dear god – for a woman who believed that: ‘we eat to live, not live to eat’, she had her moments of understanding that 100% culinary pleasure was the order of the hour.

I do sometimes wonder how much that was really her default position, and how much she forced herself to behave otherwise. These days, as I’ve mentioned before, she seems so much more relaxed: not that she enjoys cooking herself, but certainly food has become a common ground (to a degree) that we have and can therefore talk about.

When I visited last week, one of the first things she wanted to hear about was the food at Bistrot Bruno Loubet, for instance, which query hardly suggests a saintly denial of pleasure.

But back to the clotted cream: the purpose I have in mind is scones. Real ones – home made, crumbling and warm enough to melt butter and cream (if not jam). Just as I enjoyed in Glasgow.

I make enough to freeze a couple and leave them in the freezer for The Other Half for when he gets home in the early afternoon on Monday. All he’ll need to do is cook them through and scoff.

I do also want to make bread again – I have the kMix now, and the Raymond Blanc book that I’m reading has a recipe for bread that looks easy but spot on.

I do have some girly films to watch – but the only question now is whether I’ll have the time!

Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb

One of the joys of this time of year, when the nights might finally be lengthening out again, but the greyness of winter really starts to feel as though it’s dragging its heels, is the start of the rhubarb season.

It begins, of course, with the forced rhubarb: grown in dark sheds, where you can hear those tender, pink stems creaking in an effort to find the light.

In the UK, this also means rhubarb from the ‘Yorkshire Triangle’ around Wakefield, a name that suggests a certain sinister quality to a vegetable that has poisonous leaves, but whose stems can easily be put to all manner of culinary uses.

Actually, that’s one of the things that intrigues me: rhubarb is one of those foodstuffs that has been sectioned off neatly into puddings (well, crumble) and, err, that’s pretty much it.

For some years now, I’ve made Sarah Raven’s lovely rhubarb syllabub – but what else could you do with it? Is it limited to a few puddings or is it more versatile than that?

I love rhubarb. My mother used to make the obligatory crumbles – and she’d also stew batches to keep in the fridge and serve as a topping for cereal.

My sister was never as convinced. I liked the tartness: she’d sit and over-dramatically shiver if it wasn’t sweet enough for her taste. It was the same with gooseberries.

A few years ago, in possibly my first real moment of culinary creativity, I decided that chili would go wonderfully well with rhubarb. I’ve subsequently managed to rhubarb chili jelly – although far from brilliantly, since it gets all a bit complicated by the fact that chili apparently reduces the setting effectiveness of pectin. Experimentation has produced a decent taste – but not yet the right set.

A jelly will be a super condiment, like redcurrant or crabapple jellies, to serve with – well, to serve with pretty much the same things that you’d serve those with.

The fruitiness helps to cut through the richness of the meat: we use apple sauce that way with pork and mint sauce to balance the richness of lamb.

The French use raspberries with duck breast and even that cliché of a dish, duck à l’orange, is about using the citrus fruit to cut through the sweetness of the meat.

A book of Irish cooking on my shelf includes a recipe for herring with mackerel – but it uses the fruit as a stuffing and I’m hopeless at rolling up fish with a stuffing inside it.

The grain of an idea bnmkis present, though. I surfed a little, thinking of tuna. I’m afraid that I found this highly dubious image of someone’s idea, but while it didn’t inspire me, it didn’t completely put me off either.

On Friday, that grain developed into a full-blown experiment. After work, I bought salmon steaks. There were some rather tired stalks of rhubarb already at home.

Three stalks, cut into thumb-sized pieces, went into a pan with approximately a dessertspoon of caster sugar, a very little water, a few thin slices of a red chili and some redcurrants that were sitting in the fridge beginning to feel that they’d been forgotten.

Then it was left to simmer away – very, very gently.

Once it was cooked right down, it was mashed around a bit (primarily to better release the juice of the redcurrants) and then strained.

Adjust the sugar to taste. I also added a pinch of salt and a small glug of raspberry vinegar. Reduce a bit, then whisk in small pieces of beurre manié until you have something that’s the consistency of gravy.

Voila!

The technical idea was based on Rick Stein’s mushroom gravy for tuna, which I’ve been cooking for some years now, but this works very well with salmon. I’m sure it would work equally well with tuna, and probably duck.

But today, I made another small batch (no redcurrants or chili this time), to deploy somehow or other with the evening’s venison meatballs.

And then everything changed. Well, it’s the weekend, and things don’t always pan out the way you planned.

For various other reason, and after mulling over countless permutations of dishes with the aforementioned meatballs, I decided simply to concoct a pretty standard version. It was made up as I went along.

Meatballs: minced venison, complete with blood, into a bowl. A ‘cup’ of breadcrumbs – for some reason, this is the only US measurement I know that makes sense to me and which I use. Season. Mix by hand. Form into meatballs. Pop on plate, cover and chill. You really do not need to add an egg to meatballs – or burgers – to get them to hold.

When you’re ready, heat some butter in a big sauté pan. Brown the meatballs. Remove to a plate. If the butter’s remotely burnt, dump it, wipe the pan and add new butter.

Soften a diced onion and a diced carrot. Be patient – there are plenty of nice smells, so inhale and enjoy.

In the meantime, take a heaped dessertspoon of plain flour and whisk a little booze into it – just enough to make a smooth paste. Sherry would probably be an idea, but I only had Noilly Prat, so that had to do. Add a good, big squeeze of tomato purée. Whisk again.

Put the kettle on – yes, you can have a cuppa if you want, but that’s not what I was thinking about!

Pop some liquid beef stock concentrate into the flour-booze mix. Whisk again.

The onions and carrot should be soft by now. Pour a glug of your chosen/what’s-in-the-cupboard booze into the pan. Relish the smell while you deglaze: this is not some sort of sacrifice.

When some of the alcohol has boiled away (taste and decide whether that’s enough alcohol that’s evaporated or not!) and you’ve deglazed, add the flour mix and stir until it’s thick but even. Add the rhubarb mix and then as much boiling water as you need to reach a consistency you like.

Remember: you need little booze because the rhubarb mix is going to give you a big acidic fillip.

Pop the meatballs and any juices back into the pan. Add some peeled small potatoes. Taste – and adjust the seasoning if you think it needs it.

Put a lid on the pan, turn down the heat and leave for half an hour. The biggest question after this is how the potato is doing – potato always cooks more slowly in stock or sauce (George gave me that incredibly valuable piece of information some years ago – I’ve yet to see a book that mentions it).

So check your potatoes with a sharp knife. Taste again. And then decide whether it needs further cooking.

It is not, as they say, rocket science. The rhubarb might seem an odd idea, but it’s really no more ‘peculiar’ than those other fruit-meat/fish combos I mentioned earlier.

And it actually worked. It wasn’t remotely obviously that there was rhubarb in the dish, but there was pleasing tartness in the background – and indeed, that’s pretty much what wine would have added. Although I think the fruitiness just made it through, very subtly.

Why did it take me so long to understand this?

It occurs to me that perhaps some of us do need to go down an almost Heston route because we do not possess a history of knowing techniques. Perhaps, when we hit a certain age and if we haven’t learnt such things from standing next to our mother, watching, then even a small version of the Heston-like science becomes a vital way of learning?

But then again, that’s perhaps destroyed as an argument by my having picked some of these techniques up ¬– very recently – from one Raymond Blanc: hardly your backwoods Englishman!

But let’s get back to rhubarb, It's difficult to know why it became the word that actors supposedly use to each other when trying to look as though they were deep in conversation in the background of a shot or on stage.

Because whatever else you can say about rhubarb, it ain't bland.

And honestly, you really don't have to have it with custard.

A day with the folks

It was a funny old day yesterday. When my pre-Christmas cold gifted me a hacking cough, it was decided that the usual pre-festive trip to my parents would have to be delayed.

Not only did it seem crass to risk giving them the same cold, but the weather made the prospect of sitting on a frozen platform, waiting for a delayed train and constantly coughing, all the more possible.

So, after a busy start to the year, I finally made it to deepest, darkest Surrey yesterday morning – albeit after complications of a transport variety.

My parents had booked for lunch at a local restaurant: it saves my mother spending hours in the kitchen and gave us all time to sit together.

The restaurant, which they’ve been to a number of times and which they’ve taken me to once before, is El Nido in Wallington.

A family-run affair, this brasserie-style eatery may be Spanish-influenced, but much of the menu – even with Spanish names – is classic French.

I started with the country paté and toast: nice, thin toast, while the paté was pleasingly robust, with a nice hit of brandy in one bite.

Then it was on to the sole meunière (see what I mean about the French dishes? My father was having duck with orange and my mother had selected chicken with tarragon).

It was nicely cooked, albeit not the most special piece of fish I’ve had, but I didn’t really feel like one of the big meaty dishes on offer. The tiny potatoes, carrots, courgette and mange tout were all cooked very nicely too.

To finish, I selected a piece of lemon meringue pie – something I haven’t tasted in years, and which was tangy and rich and light all at once.

It’s an odd restaurant, though. There are hints of Spanish cuisine on the menu – paprika, a little chorizo etc – but it seems to me to be Spanish Very Lite (combined with French Pretty Lite Too) for people who haven’t really eaten Spanish food – or French food, for that matter. Which would certainly describe my parents. There is, then something peculiarly suburban about the culinary experience.

It’s essentially simple cooking, done decently. The service was excellent – the staff we met were delightful.
But what was most surprising was the cost: it’s barely any cheaper than Bistrot Bruno Loubet – a quid or two for most main courses, for instance, although some were considerably more expensive.

Given its setting and (presumably) the intended clientele, it does what it says on the tin and does it very nicely. But it really did make me realise, yet again, what stunning value Monsieur Loubet offers. And indeed, the ‘con’ of the price of food in this country, with the concomitant belief that really, really good food requires a second mortgage.

I don't want to slag off this place in any way – not because of the food, but because the service in particular was genuinely charming. And because local areas really need places like this.

But the prices were – to me at least – really quite surprising.

However, the foodiness of the day was really quite novel: food now offers a safe conversation ground for my mother and I (she seems to have set aside her “we eat to live, not live to eat” mantra), but my father has, more than once, described me as “obsessed” with food.

It’s an indicator of how lowly he sees food: he would never dream of saying anything similar if we’d spent an entire day discussing football or politics, but then again, food is not something that he is personally interested greatly in.

But he refrained from any such comments and I even got him talking a little about his own childhood in a Cornish village. I knew his parents had had their own chickens, but I didn’t know that they bred rabbits.

My paternal grandfather had made his son a little trolley so that he could take the rabbits to the market. It sounds a thriving little business – particularly during the war. But there were six rabbits, he added, who were never eaten but were “pets”.

We exchanged presents later: my mother had overcome her own feeling that it sounded a “bit peculiar” to get me Nigel Slater’s Toast, while she’d also spotted Green and Black’s Chocolate Recipes: From the cacao pod to muffins, mousses and moles, which she thought might be of interest. She was right.

There was further rail disruption on the return journey – but not too much. Before that, I’d done a piece of DIY for my mother – she’d been waiting for me to visit to do that: it’s been that way for well over two decades.

Not only can I increasingly handle a pan with some skill; in our family, I’ve always been the only one who really knew what to do with a screwdriver as well.

Wake up and smell the butter

It was Sunday morning. The Other Half was on his way to Yorkshire for a final pre-season Rugby League match and I had the house to myself. Okay – to myself and the cats.

As you may already have read, macarons were on the menu – and that all went in mixed sort of fashion.

But when I’d hauled myself from the pit, the first question that had to be dealt with was that of breakfast.

Now me being me, I’m not ‘good’ at breakfast – or certainly not when I’m not at work. Then, I tend to pick up something from the Pret opposite the office or nip up and risk the deli bar after I’ve taken off my coat and booted the computer.

On Sunday, with serious baking ahead, I needed fodder – and was remarkably disciplined. I opted for straightforward scrambled eggs. No toast – just the eggs.

I heated some butter in a heavy-based saucepan and whisked up three eggs. And then the smell of melting butter caught my nose. Oh god … breathe it in, girl, deeply. What an aroma!

Some time ago – and goodness knows where – I read that you should only whisk eggs for cooking as late as possible and that you should only season them at the very last minute before cooking. Chemical processes begin when you start either of these actions – and you want to delay those processes as long as possible.

I forgot the latter. There was another lesson. As I sat, relishing silky smooth scrambled egg, I had to season at the table – and noticed quickly the un-evenness that that produced. Some mouthfuls perfect; some over-salty.

And so, let’s fast forward to yesterday. There was part of a bottle of Riesling and part of a container of chicken stock left over from Sunday.

During a rapid post-work shop, I bought chicken thighs and, after a cuppa, gently heated a large knob of butter in the large sauté pan and waited. Incidentally, what constitutes a “knob” of butter? It’s another of those things you have to gauge by instinct – and, of course, experience.

What I was waiting for – what I was listening for – was the sound of the butter.

It’s that Raymond Blanc again. In A Taste of My Life, he writes about how his mother would sear food; how you’d just be able to hear the butter; about how she’d cook the meat like that for around 10 minutes.

Blocking out the Hackney traffic outside and The Simpsons inside, I bent an ear and, with my nostrils full of the glorious smell, waited and listened.

The gentle popping happened. The chicken breasts – dried – went in, skin side down. I resisted the temptation to move them around and left them for around six minutes. When I turned them over, they were a pale gold, flecked with rich, brown spots. I left them again.

When every part of the surface of the flesh and skin was browned, I popped them into a bowl and replaced them in the burbling butter with an onion, chopped – but not too finely.

And again taking my lessons from Monsieur Blanc, I spread that out across the pan’s surface – and left well alone. No: do not be tempted to move the onion around – that’ll effectively mean it steams or boils. I cooked it like that for around 12 minutes, testing twice and realising that, while still holding its shape and some bite, the onion was getting ever sweeter.

Then in went some plain flour. Cook for a couple of minutes. It doesn’t matter how messy it looks at this point, the important thing is that you need to cook the flour through.

Then the wine and a good scrape around the pan to deglaze, picking up all the bits of the caramelised meat and onion. Then the remains of the chicken stock: not out of a bottle, but my own homemade variety.

Bring it to the boil and add a bay leaf and a carrot and parsnip, both diced reasonably evenly, plus a few peeled small new potatoes – all of which were hanging around, demanding to be used before they were too far gone.

Then taste. Season. Leave a few minutes. Taste again. Puzzle over what’s missing. Realise that little salt has actually gone into the dish and add some more. Lid the pan, turn down the heat and leave for 20 minutes.

Taste again. Leave to cook some more. Repeat. The vegetables are cooked but holding their shape nicely. The meat is beginning to flake invitingly away from the bone.

Look at it, smell it, taste it.

Another touch of Monsieur Blanc: not all herbs are equal. Bay was added early in the cooking process – it’s one of the robust herbs that can cook for a long time and not suffer. But several are not. I vaguely knew this – but not so concretely. A couple of minutes from the end – no more – and handful of chopped flat leaf parsley goes in.

Then serve and eat.

It can hardly be described as some sort of rocket-science dish, but it was (as much as it could be) all my own. Or put another way, I didn’t consult a recipe book.

What I used – what I relied on – was Blanc’s technical advice: in the case of the initial caramelisation of the meat, his evocative description of his mother cooking.

And slowly, slowly. There is no need to rush. That’s one of the keys, I think. We have become obsessed with our food being instant – or almost, as though time spent preparing food is time wasted. Why? Increasingly I understand that time spent in the kitchen is an antidote for the insanity of London life.

I have been working to make myself slow down when I’m eating: yesterday, I worked to make myself slow down when cooking.

It paid off. It wasn’t a starburst of flavour, but there was real depth to the taste: the sweetness of the meat, vegetables and stock; the acidity of the wine and the bitterness of the parsley. I’m not imagining it: it was there, in something that I made.

Of course, none of this is exactly hampered by trying to do what Blanc recommends – learning to taste. Learning to think about what you’re eating – and also tasting constantly as you cook.

I felt close to serene. Not giddy – but serene. Only time will really tell, but it feels as though I’ve taken a very big step forward; as though I’m moving onto a slightly different culinary plane. It’s not an unwelcome thought.

A second helping at Bistrot Bruno Loubet

There is always a risk that, when you return to a restaurant within a short time of first experiencing it, that return can lack quite the edge of excitement of the first visit.

Just to start with, there isn't the same surprise element.

So it was with trepidation – albeit a miniscule amount – that I had booked for Bistrot Bruno Loubet for yesterday evening, for The Other Half's birthday.

Since we were both at work and since the staff bar isn't open on a Monday, I'd opted for 6.30pm. Not too long to twiddle the thumbs before dining; not straight after walking out of the office either.

We were, unsurprisingly, the first through the door for evening service. But the bar and the cocktail menu provided ample pleasures before we sat down to eat.

A charming barman made me a French 75 (which, he explained, is named after a WWI French cannon) and is made of Tanqueray gin, lemon and sugar, and Champagne. He added a maraschino cherry – they're back in fashion, apparently. Very nice it was too; very refreshing.

There are other Champagne cocktails named after French cannons of the same era – one replaces the gin with brandy, the other with vodka.

The Other Half had a 22nd July, which was made up of Four Roses Single Barrel bourbon, Kings ginger, Evan Williams
honey and pressed apple juice. Served short over cubes, it was garnished with a fan of green-skinned apple.

And so it was to dinner.

This time, I started with the guinea fowl boudin blanc on cassoulet beans. A light-as-a-feather, mousse-like confection, cooked until its casing was just caramelised. Sweet and luxurious – as were the beans. But everything was lightened by the tomato that was cooked with the beans, which added freshness, and the parsley, which gave it a bitter layer. Wonderful.

My main was from the dishes of the day – how tempting was the veal liver? – and was fillet of stone bass, served with new potatoes and a hint of lime. Charred on the skin side, this was a big hit of meaty fish – given a real zing by the lime.

For dessert, I opted for the rhubarb, orange and vanilla Clerkenwell mess. Never mind being a "mess" – what a surprise! The perfectly cooked and sweetened rhubarb was delightful – but the punchline was discovering that the orange was the tart flavour instead. That put such a delighted smile on my face: what a twist!

The Other Half opted for mauricette snails and meatballs, with mushrooms: the snails were tiny (as were the meatballs) and were served already out of the shells. It was the first time he'd ever eaten snails and apparently enjoyed them.

That, he followed with the beef daube bourguignon and mashed potato, and single scoops of chocolate ice cream and pear sorbet to finish.

Around half way through our meal, colleagues walked through on the way to a birthday reservation themselves. Since it was essentially on the basis of my ravings, I felt a twinge of nerves.

But an email this morning eased these: they had a wonderful time too.

And as before, the service was excellent. Friendly and warm, but without ever making you feel that someone was hovering behind you or rushing you.

Not one iota of disappointment, then.

Now when's the next birthday?