01/06/2019

Food & Drink Round-Up: May 2019

In this post I share some of the food and drink highlights from last month, bringing together the best of the blog and from my social media during May 2019.

 

MICROGREENS

There’s something really special about growing your own food and always a feeling of excitement when you see the first shoots appear.

At the beginning of the month I aimed to demonstrate that you don’t need loads of outdoor space to get the benefits of homegrown food by posting about growing microgreens. Microgreens are simply immature plants grown from seed, picked and eaten when they’re still only a few centimetres tall. If you’ve bought mustard and cress in those little plastic punnets, then you’ve already eaten microgreens.

Writing that post was a change from my usual recipes and reviews and I plan to publish more guides to simple things to grow at home. Read my post about microgreens here.

 

FEAST STONE

Early May saw the first Feast Stone: the market town’s new street food event. I went along to see what it was all about and was mightily impressed.

By all accounts the night was a huge success, so more Feast Stone’s are to come. Read my post about Feast Stone here.

 

AN EPIC BURGER

One thing I’d been after at Feast Stone was a burger. I’d queued up twice at The Little Diner, but never timed it quite right. So popular, they’d either stopped taking orders for a while or the wait was too long for my greedy impatience.

But oh, did I make up for it a few days later! I decided to create one of those ludicrously stacked burgers you have to hold together with a skewer. Reader, it was good.


First off, I started with some fantastic minced beef from The Village Butcher Ipstones. There’s absolutely no point using poor quality beef if you want a phenomenal burger and this stuff, from the butcher’s own family farm is full of flavour.

For me, the bun is also important. I hate flabby bread in any guise, but you don’t want anything too fancy here either. So I made Homemade Crusty Bread Rolls. Because I didn’t want them too crusty with my burger, I baked them on a tray instead of my usual cast iron pot.

All this loveliness was layered up with rashers of smoky, salty back bacon from Denstone Hall Farm Shop, melting Cheddar cheese, pickled gherkin and mayo mixed with hot sriracha sauce. Oh, and the accompaniments were homemade crispy onions and oven baked skin-on fries with garlic and smoked paprika.

Comfort food at its finest.

 

HAWASANA AFGHAN RESTAURANT

From food that’s very familiar, to something entirely new to me: Afghan cuisine.

I heard about Hawasana from a Facebook follower who contacted me to say I should try it. Intrigued, I went along to what must be one of Stoke-on-Trent’s best kept foodie secrets.

I discovered that the influences on Afghan food are the bordering nations of India, Pakistan and China, the latter being the source of our favourite dish of the evening. At Hawasana I found incredibly good value, tasty food served with genuine warmth and generosity. I really recommend you give it a go: read my review of Hawasana here

 

FALAFEL WITH SOCCA

I had a feeling that falafel would go really well with the socca (chickpea flatbread) I posted about in April and the point was proved in May when I paired them with my homemade baked falafel.

One of the things I loved about the socca was that, although much lighter than a bread wrap, they hold together really well. And that certainly paid off where the falafel was concerned because, as usual, I overstuffed them with loads of salad, chilli and tahini-yogurt sauces.

A combination that’s going to become a Summer regular at our house, I think!

 

A SALAD POSTPONED

We had some really mixed weather in May. A particularly dull and chilly day postponed my plan to share a wonderful salad recipe full of the ingredients of Spring and Summer.

Instead, I revived an old favourite, Creamy White Bean Soup. With its delicate, garlic-herb flavour it makes a warming lunch on a nippy day.


It was certainly a case of great minds thinking alike as a number of my followers fed back that they were planning on making, or had already made the soup.

 

THAT SALAD

Of course the weather turned again and I did then post the great salad I’d been itching to share.

It’s based on quinoa, which I’ve only recently become a fan of. If you don’t know what all the fuss is about with this seed used as a grain, then take a look at my Quinoa Salad with Peas & Broad Beans.

There’s also juicy roasted tomatoes and crunchy toasted pine nuts in the satisfying salad, completed with a vibrant fresh mint vinaigrette.

And don’t think you have to wait until the new season’s peas and broad beans are available to make it. Frozen ones can be excellent quality and value – that’s what I used anyway.

 

THE OLD FLEECE, ROOKSMOOR

About the same time we moved north from Leicester to the Staffordshire Moorlands, our closest foodie friends headed in the opposite direction, down to Cornwall.

I’d especially loved our mammoth Saturdays of eating and drinking at ours or their house. We’d start in the early afternoon with a three course meal or barbecue, and end in the small hours of the morning with maybe cheeses, meats and homemade bread. But the moves meant a five hour drive each way, making even a weekend get together difficult.

They’ve since moved to Hampshire, so we can at least meet up roughly halfway, usually somewhere in the Cotswolds, for a walk followed by a meal. There’s often a swapping of foodie items too; sometimes local honey or beer, or maybe oatcakes, home sown tomato plants or homemade chocolate treats.

For our meet up in May we went for a walk on lovely Rodborough Common with its far reaching views. After, it was lunch at The Old Fleece in Rooksmoor. Besides the great food, The Old Fleece is very dog friendly. Just what we need with our cocker spaniel Larkin and our friends’ beagle Marga in tow.

My starter of Smoked Chicken Caesar Salad was a fine example of how just how good this salad can be. It’s always a positive sign when white anchovies are included and I thought the smoked chicken a nice twist.

My main course was tasty duck with plum sauce, fondant potato, carrot puree and pak choi. To finish there was a large and gorgeous Eton mess cheesecake.


If Sunday roasts are more your thing, then they looked pretty good too – generously portioned with local meat including free range pork.

 

DINNER DATE ON BBC RADIO STOKE’S THE TAKEAWAY

Towards the end of May I made my fourth appearance on BBC Radio Stoke’s foodie show The Takeaway.

Celebrating the best food across Staffordshire and Cheshire, it was lovely to be asked back, this time as one of Michelle Daniels’ dinner dates. My fellow dinner daters in the first half of the show were Steph and Nicole from Slamwich Club. It was great to meet them after eating at their place in Hanley a few times. Thankfully, my review of Slamwich Club had been a favourable one!

 

Through being part of The Takeaway, I’ve discovered loads more great foodie businesses like Seed Chocolate and Feast with Friends. It’s also meant I’ve met people I’d previously only communicated with through social media, like Sara Bailey of Laying the Table.

Guests of the show are asked to bring a sample of what they produce or something from Staffordshire or Cheshire that they love. Previously noting that Michelle Daniels has a bit of a liking for chocolate, I decided to make an indulgent version of my Oat Bites.

These beauties have double the amount of peanut butter and maple syrup found in the original, plus they’re covered in 70 per cent dark chocolate. They seemed to go down well, especially with sweet-toothed producer AJ who agreed they tasted a bit like a Snickers bar.

 

FIRST LETTUCE FROM THE GARDEN

There’s always a fair bit of excitement when I get to eat the first produce of the year from the little vegetable plot in our back garden. Yes, there’s herbs pretty much all year round. But starting to harvest annual crops is something else.

In May I picked the first lettuce leaves from my raised troughs and couldn’t be happier with them. We’ve previously grown them in the ground, but the raised troughs seem to get less attention from slugs and snails.

I decided to eat them as the base of a lunchtime egg mayo open sandwich. I think open sandwiches are ideal for greedy people as you get to pile on more filling. The bread was homemade, of course, and I topped the sandwiches off with home sprouted alfalfa. Bliss on a beautiful, sunny Spring day.

 

A VISIT FROM BIG BROTHER (NO, NOT THAT ONE)

One of the advantages of writing up recipes for this blog is that my favourite, homemade things are at my fingertips. Otherwise, I’d have to rack my middle-aged brain to remember how I actually cooked loads of things.

This came in useful when, on the last day of May, my big brother came to stay for a long weekend. He likes his food too, so this involved lots of cooking as well as eating out.

First off was a lunch of bruschetta (okay, toast) with my Roasted Beetroot Hummus.  I topped it with feta, toasted pine nuts and mint with homegrown pea shoots on the side. This was followed by a Genoa cake which I’ve made a few times now, tweeking as I go. I’m carefully holding on to my notes as I think this will probably be the subject of a future post.

In the evening we had salad, homemade pasta and a rich ragu I made with beef short ribs from Denstone Hall Farm Shop. I guess the ragu really ought to serve 4-6 but we managed to eat the whole lot between the three of us. I forgot to take a photo (possibly I’d had a little too much wine by then?) so here’s one from my original recipe post.

Pudding was a tiramisu. But I can’t claim credit for that recipe as I always faithfully follow the one in Claudia Roden‘s epic The Food of Italy. I never change a thing as it’s perfect just as it is. Another one to share on the blog, perhaps?

 

COMING SOON…

The next day was the start of June, so there ends my round-up for May.

Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to hear about my foodie June, including:

 

 

All photos in this post © Moorlands Eater

 

Filed Under: Producers & Suppliers, Recipes, Eating Out, Everything else...