A sojourn by the sea

We’ve just got back from a very pleasant couple of nights in Whitby. We’ve been so many times that we’ve pretty much exhausted the tourist attractions so our trips now basically consist of wandering around and, er, eating. There are many worse ways to pass the time.

I was planning to do a photo food diary post for the blog, since it’s all been a bit quiet recently. But the reality of most of the food served at the British seaside (in my experience anyway; I have yet to visit Padstein) is rather beige. So posting pictures of everything might prove a little dull. Let’s have some edited highlights instead.

The Bay Hotel in Robin Hoods Bay is slightly famous as it marks one end of the Coast to Coast (which I’m determined to do someday). They have a book there that walkers can sign. We popped there for lunch and bagged a little corner table that looked out over the eponymous bay. Haute cuisine this is not, but I can confirm that the chips are good and the prawn sandwich generously filled. D ordered the fried seafood platter for reasons best known to himself and ended up with a pile of vaguely fishy tasting goujons. The menu mentioned squid, scampi, prawns and salmon which one would have thought would be individually distinguishable - not so! He did, however, agree that the chips were of a decent standard.


Excellent chips

Lunchtime view

Monday night found us in The Star Inn The Harbour which I like but find to be slightly inconsistent. Last time we were there we loved it, the time before it was good not great - which we assumed to be teething issues given that it had, then, not long been open. On this occasion, there was plenty to enjoy but a starter of squid, which cost £11 for a startlingly small portion left us feeling a little ripped off. Oh, and D found the apple sauce served with his pork belly and scallops to be overly sweet. I thoroughly enjoyed my halibut with a rarebit topping and candied walnuts but, again, the £24 price tag felt a little on the steep side.

Mimsy squid

Hmmm, what else? Oh, well, it feels a bit daft to pick out a tuna sandwich as a highlight since it’s one of the most ubiquitous fillings there is. But The Rusty Shears’ trick of adding chopped olives, red onion and gherkin to the mix really gave it a lift and is one I shall be copying at home.

A most excellent tuna sandwich

Sadly it was an all too brief trip and it is back to work tomorrow, but we have fish from a Whitby fishmonger still to enjoy for tea tonight...and a trip to Berlin on the not so distant horizon so it’s not all doom and gloom. Hope everything is well with all of you out there in Blogland. I will try and post more regularly between now and the end of the year (but I won’t promise because, well, pie crusts and all that... )

2018 - the year in review

As with most years, 2018 was like the curate’s egg – good in places.  For the most part, it involved a lot of keeping on keeping on.  Work ramped up and became considerably more stressful in the latter few months for various reasons beyond my control – bad.  I struggled a bit with my continuing digestive issues which began to have an impact on my mental health – tedious beyond belief for all concerned.  But there were no big upsets, or dramas or traumas – good.  We had a couple of lovely trips away, including a few days in a little shepherd’s hut in York which I never got around to detailing on here – excellent.  Yet again, I have managed to end the year lighter than when I started it, mainly thanks to a successful re-acquaintance with WW back in the summer.  That may have trailed off a bit of late but I am keen to get stuck back into it now we are emerging from the month of December, when somehow it becomes normal to eat mince pies for breakfast.

Dishes of the year is a tough one to call.  We went back to Raby Hunt and loved it every bit as much the second time around but given that many of the dishes were almost exactly the same as the ones that we had eaten previously, I don’t feel quite right to hand over another coveted trophy to them. 

An early contender was most definitely the stunning duck dish that we had at Joro in Sheffield.  We liked it so much that we recreated it at home for our Easter Sunday lunch, and I am not convinced that our version wasn’t even better!


The duck at Joro

The duck chez nous

But, to be honest, the thing that still stands out for me is this little fellow.

Pizza, Jim, but not as we know it

This was the scallop sashimi, spring truffle and togarashi spice “pizza” that we ate in Skosh back in June.  As mentioned above, I never really got around to talking about our York trip in much detail but we were lucky enough to eat some wonderful food and this dish was just head, shoulders and upper chest above pretty much everything else we’ve eaten this year.  Put it this way: we liked it so much that we immediately ordered a second one.  It sounds weird, it sounds like everyone’s idea of badly done “fusion” but the combination of flavours, the delicately balanced marriage of the sea and the forest floor, was absolutely sublime.  Skosh changes the menu pretty regularly, so I doubt I’ll ever get to have it again.

Dessert of the year came in the closing moments, and it may sound ridiculous when we’ve eaten at some truly wonderful venues, including Il Ridotto in Venice where we were served the most glorious, challenging pudding combination of truffle, ginger and pumpkin which was as strange and wonderful as it sounds.  Yet nothing can compare to the dessert that D made me for my birthday this year – the sticky toffee parkin.  A mash-up of the traditional sticky toffee pudding and the Yorkshire parkin.  I have the recipe and I will be blogging it shortly.  If you like sweetness and spice then you will adore this, I promise.

Sticky toffee parkin

And an honourable mention to the Guinness cake that I ate during my first visit to the Rusty Shears.  The thought of this still makes me smile.

More icing than cake

At home, we’ve been dousing everything with sriracha and coriander and green chilli chutney – sometimes both at the same time.  My palate is becoming better and better at tolerating heat and I’m really beginning to learn how, like a pinch of salt or a drop of acidity, it can really bring cooking to life.  If I was going to commend one recipe to your attention this year it would be the chutney / sauce / salsa / whatever because it is such a good fridge staple.  I can think of few savoury dishes that would not be enhanced with a hefty splodge of this stuff.

As ever, I’d like to thank everyone who pops by and reads my little blog.  I still enjoy writing it after all these years, as a chronicle of adventures both at home in the kitchen and further afield.  And while it may not be a diet blog per se, it still stands as testament to the fact that I will never quite give up on trying to nudge the scales down to unremarkable levels. 

To all of you I wish a very happy New Year and here is to great things for all of us in 2019.

Revisits - Ruby Hunt and The Star Inn the Harbour

On Monday, D and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary. And of course we did so by spending an entire weekend indulging our appetite for delicious food. We are consistent, at least, in our greed. It’s a shared obsession that is probably one of the primary reasons that we have managed to (more or less) stay together.

On Saturday night, we returned to our favourite restaurant of last year, Raby Hunt which is just outside Darlington. Holder of two Michelin stars it was a fantastic experience first time around (which you can read about here) and just as wonderful now. The only...I hesitate to use the word problem because it wasn’t the least bit problematic...was that many of the dishes on the set tasting menu were either the same or similar. As before, the signature razor clam with celeriac and almonds was a highlight:

And the kitchen’s pastry game is strong, especially when it comes to producing a chocolate and olive oil mousse which combines ethereal lightness with rich, cocoa filth:

But we both agreed that one of the nicest things we ate was, in fact, one of the few brand new dishes - a wagyu beef nigiri topped with sea urchin. Teapot, that was fabulous. The Japanese influence was, I think, a new direction for the kitchen and one I liked very much indeed:

It was a fantastic privilege to eat these amazing plates again but, given the plethora of other places out there which we are keen to try, and our limited funds, I would not be inclined to return for a good few years to allow time for a bit more variation to creep in. We discussed, as we drove away, whether one should prioritise the known and glorious or the unknown and potentially not-so glorious and reluctantly came down on the side of the latter. Although D intends to win the £110 million Euromillions Super Draw this week, at which stage it will become a moot point.

We then high tailed it across to Whitby, and Sunday found us on another revisit: The Star Inn the Harbour which I wrote about here.

Well, what a revelation. I don’t think it had been long open when we visited in April and the kitchen has really flourished since then. We liked it well enough last time round but this time a couple of dishes blew us away. A lobster and summer truffle mac and cheese was superlatively good:

And D was in raptures over his coley with a light curry sauce, declaring said sauce one of the nicest things he has eaten all year:

We will whisk a veil over a slightly over chilled dessert (we did feed back to the kitchen via our absolutely charming waiter) and say, rather, that overall we were seriously impressed and pleased to see that the wonderful produce from this corner of the Yorkshire coast finally has a restaurant that can do it proper credit.

Recent Eats - the Out and About Edition

My brother told me earlier that he was upset not to have been mentioned on the blog recently. So - hello D2. If I had got round to talking about the rather splendid meal we had at The General Tarleton for my parent’s anniversary then his name might have come up (given that he was there. As were my lovely sister in law and nephew and niece. I was slightly worried that little D and little S would be bored silly going out to eat but they, as befits the next generation of foodies, were fab. Better table manners than their uncle 😉).

Anyway, not only have I neglected to write about the GT but quite a few recent foodie adventures have gone unchronicled, so I thought that I would do a couple of quick round up posts, one for eating out and one for cooking at home. Let’s start with the eating out, shall we? And maybe throw in a few characteristically appalling photos?

Firstly, Whitby. I mentioned, at length, how much I loved Rusty Shears but we also took the opportunity to check out the latest venture by chef Andrew Pern, The Star Inn the Harbour. Our verdict - nice. It is not, nor is it attempting to be, The Star Inn, and is unlikely to earn Whitby its first Michelin star. But Whitby was crying out for a slightly more upmarket establishment and this fits the bill. Emphasis on fish and seafood, just as it should be given the location. Slightly twee decor, but I like twee. My mackerel escabeche with caviar creme fraiche and salted hazelnuts was a particular highlight.

We also went to The Moon and Sixpence for lunch, a rare beast for Whitby, in that it is unashamedly modern in design. There was sriracha on the menu, for goodness sake, mixed with mayo and drizzled over some very yummy crispy squid. Happiness is.

D’s main course was underwhelming to say the least (it takes a certain level of incompetence to make a gumbo bland) but all was forgiven when dessert arrived - the most amazing warm cookie pot. I think that I probably made some inappropriate noises.

Talking of cookies - they appear to be having something of a moment. We went along to one of the first Eat Norths of the year, and forced ourselves to share a pot of raw cookie dough because we got given a sample while we queued for beer and...well. More inappropriate noises. It was sold by The Baking Biker and oh, sweet Cheezus, I’ve just seen that you can buy it online.

Finally, and bringing us bang up to date, I got around to visiting Mommy Thai last night. It’s a tiny little venue in Leeds city centre serving, unsurprisingly, Thai food, and very nice it was too, not to mention exceedingly good value - under £30 for one starter, two mains and two bottles of beer. I have a rather annoying tendency to always order Pad Thai when confronted with a new menu and this was a fine example of the genre.

But I think D’s main course of five spice pork pipped it to the post flavour wise.

They offer a special lunchtime deal and I am very tempted to head back soon and avail myself of it given that it is walking distance from the office. Although I doubt that I would achieve much by way of work in the afternoon with a tummy full of noodles.

Rusty Shears, Whitby (my new happy place)

We took ourselves off to Whitby for a couple of days this last weekend. We booked it months ago to mark the date on which we first met (fourteen!!! years ago) but we never need very much excuse to travel across. It's the perfect place to relax, take deep breaths of chip-scented sea air and be a wee bit indulgent.

And if it is indulgence that you are after, alongside a side of whimsy and a good, stiff gin then look no further than Rusty Shears - a tea shop come House of Gin. Was there ever a more appealing combination?

It doesn't open in the evening, but the sign reassures customers that gin is served from 11am, and there is nothing guaranteed to make one feel more hedonistic than ordering gin and tonic with lunch (we waited till one o clock because spirits before noon does feel wrong). There is an absolutely massive selection - we managed to try five different ones across the course of two visits and still had barely scratched the menu's surface. Amongst them - a local gin brewed in someone's garage just up the road and a Scottish gin with a mere two botanicals (juniper and rosehip should you be interested). It was total ginvana.

But obviously sustenance is needed alongside and the menu of sandwiches, light bites and the most delicious homemade cake hit the spot perfectly. I jumped at the chance to order a Reuben on rye, a great personal favourite, and D opted for wild mushrooms on toast. Then we committed the grave error of treating ourselves to a piece of cake apiece. I say error; the cake was fantastic, sublime. My Guinness cake with a thick layer of lighter-than-air-and-sweeter-than-a-kitten's-purr frosting was perfect. D's maple pecan cheesecake was a delight. But all that sugar occasioned, unsurprisingly, quite the slump and we ended up staggering back to our room for a much needed post-cake nap. Still, that's what holidays are for, no?

There was nothing that I did not like about this place from the eccentrically nostalgic decor (Miss Marple after she'd hit the gin selection) to the enthusiastic and charming staff. Oh, actually. I'm sad about the fact that it isn't open in the evenings - we could absolutely have whiled away an entire evening and an awful lot of money there - and that it is in Whitby rather than Leeds. But perhaps, given how much I both gin and cake, it is all for the best.

TWTWTW: Easter 2016

The weather outside may be frightful (par for the course during a UK Bank Holiday weekend) but here, chez WWF, all is peaceful.  Apart from the feline member of the household who was bombing around just a minute ago - not sure what it is she is chasing.

So on Wednesday we took ourselves off to Whitby for a couple of nights.  The colour theme of the sojourn can pretty much be summed up by this picture:

Very Grey.  But hey, you don't go the seaside for sunshine.  You go for atmosphere.  You go to take random pictures of seagulls:

You go for FISH AND CHIPS:

That plateful of loveliness is brought to you courtesy of Trencher's which I heartily recommend to you if you find yourself in Whitby and don't fancy queuing outside the Magpie.  I really liked the fact that they offered a small portion which was perfectly Seren sized.  I can never manage all the chips in a standard - when D and I get takeaway I always push for two fish and one chips between us.

Ha, but check out what happened on the Friday that we were heading back to Leeds:

The Weather Gods can be right bastards sometimes.

In other Easter tidings, I made my first ever batch of hot cross buns:

Yes, not things of beauty, are they?  They tasted nice though - a denser, breadier texture than shop bought offerings.  My next attempt will up the spice content, but the basic recipe I used can be found here.

Some sad news cast the slightest of shadows over the long weekend; my parents' beautiful tabby cat, Minnie, has been diagnosed with a tumour and is only like to be with us for a few more weeks.  I got the chance to see her yesterday and she is still in very good health and spirits, eating well and quite happy, so it looks as if the rest of her time here will be peaceful and content, as, indeed, was her whole life.  She will be very much missed.  I wrote a bit about her here.  Minx has kindly agreed that this week, Minnie should provide the obligatory cat picture.

Random

I have recently been going through the photos on my phone and deleting them to create some storage space - the iPad is their home now. One of my plans for this year is to actually get some physical copies printed and do some scrap-booking. How quaint.

My photos can be divided into broadly three categories: Minx, Food and Other. Given that Minx spends 85% of her time asleep, I am not sure exactly why I have ended up with so many pictures of her. But then she is very beautiful.


I have a soft spot for this one because it was actually saved from the Cat Protection League's website - this was the shot they used in her bio and, so, the first picture that I ever saw of her. She looks so scared and sad here, doesn't she? Very different from the contented, purring bundle of fur that is curled up next to me as I write.

There is a sub category of Other which could best be described as "Shots of D where he is trying to pretend that he is not being photographed". I like these (and note the edge of a thumb creeping in to the top left hand corner of the shot).


But the number of food pictures - ridiculous. Particularly since some of them, I no longer remember what or where they are. Here we have a very pretty, but entirely random, cup of something with something else on the side.


Sometimes it must have been home cooked dishes that I intended to blog but failed in doing so. I can only assume that is why I have a picture of what I think is baked eggs and toast:

And another of sea bass (?) with parsnips (?) and garlic (?). This was one of D's and I'll bet he never wrote the recipe down so it will never be recreated exactly.  And what is the beige mush next to the roasted garlic cloves?  I seem to recall that this was a delicious plate of food and I'm now intrigued.

Sometimes it's restaurants that, again, I meant to write about but didn't. These are from our first trip to Homage to Fromage but they're no good for a review now because I haven't got a scooby what the dish on the left is:

Or what any of these cheeses are:

Although for all that, if you are in or around Leeds and like cheese then it comes highly recommended.  You have to really like cheese though - the menu does not cater for the lactose intolerant.

So it's been a pleasant (if slightly random) trip down memory lane, going through all of these and the lessons we take from it are - er, make notes, write up blog posts when you say you're going to do so and never serve up beige mush.  The other lesson is take photography lessons.  It is slightly disappointing to realise that my photography skills have remained so consistently terrible throughout the years.  Perhaps if I ever win the lottery, I can employ the very talented Lesley to take photos for me full time?

Anyway, I'm now off to delete all said random food pictures. A cull. A purge, if you will.  Which, clearly, will leave me with plenty of memory space for more adorable cat shots...

Whitby (and weight loss)

There are very few places in the world that I love as much as Whitby.  I've been visiting since I was a child and much of it has barely changed.  There is something completely timeless about the place.

For once, we were blessed with the weather. For the day and a half that we were there, we had constant sunshine and blue skies.  Whitby has a brooding quality which means that it suits grey skies and mizzle but it was so nice to walk round in short sleeves and feel the sun on our skin.

We went to the arcades, took a boat trip, climbed up to the Abbey and just...wandered.

On Thursday evening, we had planned to go for dinner at Green's bistro, which seems to be the closest Whitby gets to upmarket cooking.  But in the pub we found a corner table which was right by the window and afforded amazing views out across the seafront.  We couldn't bring ourselves to leave but lingered as the twilight fell and the lights of the arcades became increasingly gaudy in the gathering dusk.  So pub grub and cheap white wine it was, and then we fell into conversation with a large group of Goths who were there for Whitby Goth Weekend and ended up staying until well past the bell called time.  Next time, Green's!

Fish and chips at the Magpie Cafe were superlative as usual although I eschewed them in favour of  hake with a smoked haddock fishcake and creamy vegetables.  LOVED this and definitely would like to recreate something of the sort at home - I thought using a fishcake as an accompaniment was such a nifty little idea.

Points may have gone by the wayside to a certain extent, but prior to the trip, there had been a steady downwards trajectory all week, with a total loss of 2.6 kg across 6 days.  I expect to see a bit of a bounce tomorrow but nothing that a restrained weekend won't take care of.  I'm in a really happy place at the moment - I don't necessarily know what has caused the massive upswing in my general mood, but I am not going to knock it.  Onwards and downwards lovely friends, and a very happy weekend to you all!