Day Two: Braunston to Weedon – The Narrowboat Inn

I had high hopes for this one. The pub is a recently refurbished Charlie Wells. It’s been nicely done and has a really comfortable feel inside. Good range of beer, cider and wines. They cleverly moved us few diners into a smallish room so the atmosphere stayed buzzy and friendly. The food was presented beautifully. We started by sharing dips and bread. The dips were Puy Lentil Hummus and Carrot & Cumin. Taste wise, they didn’t quite work and we didn’t finish the plate. Neil’s game pie looked sensational – a big square beast with a pastry topping, a basket of chips and a little pot of peas. But then, as we know from day one, looks aren’t everything. The pie was more rabbit than game, the sauce tomato, not rich red wine as billed on the menu, and the puff pastry top had lost its puff. My dish however, was pretty yummy. Nice firm mash, lovely tasty pork, and a cinnamony apple puree to top it off. Top notch and my dish of the week – judged on that alone the score would have been 9/10.

6/10 “Not as pretty as it looked.”

Day One: Rugby to Braunston – The Old Plough Inn
What I imagined to be a good start to our walking week, turned out to be the absolute highlight. The Old Plough is a proper local pub with no pretentions to be anything other than that. The bar is rough and ready, warm and welcoming, full of characters and serves up a good pint. Next door though, their restaurant is stuck firmly in the seventies. And imagine, if you will, the son of the old waitress from Acorn Antiques – well that was our waiter.  But looks and style aren’t everything; the food was homemade and wholesome, tasty and plenty of it. We both ate the same, pea soup, very fresh and light, followed by chicken and mushroom pie. Proper pie with good shortcrust pastry and a nice tasty filling. It was let down by presentation, some particularly half-hearted veg and a gravy that just didn’t go with the pie’s own juices. But otherwise good stuff and good value too.

7/10 “Unpretentious, good value, homecooked pub food.”

“Only a fool would cook a chicken devoid of its golden skin, basted with oil or butter or both. Roasted, grilled or cooked in shallow butter, the skin crisps, bulging and glistening in the heat. Seasoned with a little too much salt and a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of the cooking juices, the skin of the chicken is almost as good to eat as its flesh. Sod the skinless chicken breast imprisoned on its blue polystyrene tray. Chicken for those who don’t really like chicken.”

Never the less, in January, my editor wanted a Healthy Eating Foodie article, and this is the result!  I put a call out to our local establishments to see what they are doing this January to save your waistline.

The Red Lion in Bozeat: “Each Tuesday in January our Chef’s Recommendations Board will include low calorie dishes and will include meals suitable for those following Weightwatchers or Slimming World. We plan to include a low calorie starter, three mains (one suitable for Weightwatchers and two for Slimming World (one Red and one Green) and a low calorie dessert. Our Main menu will continue to offer plenty to those who don’t need to diet or who have ditched their New Year’s Resolution already!”

The Swan Inn & Bistro. Bar lady Sam, specialises in helping her clients lose weight and keep it off. So she is ideally placed to advise on the Swan’s menu. She suggests Pan seared sea bass served with roasted cherry tomatoes, basil pesto and fresh veg – to make it even leaner, ask without the pesto. Sam also says “Don’t be afraid to ask for changes to what you order. Decent restaurants will do what they can to please you. For instance, if your dish comes with a sauce or dressing, ask for it to be served on the side so you can use it sparingly. Ask any visible fat to be removed from a beef/gammon steak before it’s cooked. If you can’t resist chicken skin, also ask for that to be removed. If you are hungry and can’t find anything suitable in the mains, ask for a low fat starter to be made bigger, or a main to be made into a smaller portion.”

The Bell and Bear, Emberton. Jon, the chef and owner, arranged a special low fat, low calorie menu option last January. His customers thought it was a great idea and were very complimentary of the menu selection. But never-the-less everyone ordered from his standard menu. Clearly it sounded too good! So this year it is the full fat option only at the Bell and Bear! However, everything is cooked to order at this pub, so the chef will happily amend any dish to make it as healthy as possible. Or ring up the day before to get something specially created.

Tapas y Pintxos, Olney – perfect choice for dieters. You can eat as much or as little as you like, and you can completely avoid carbohydrate. Although it’ll take some willpower to resist their bread and garlic mayonnaise!

The Golden Rule I’m lucky enough to be able to enjoy eating out often. I love my food, and I like to accompany it with a bottle or two of wine. My golden rule is simply to stop eating when you feel full. Even the most delicious plate you have ever tasted.

This article was inspired by Clare Gott’s ‘Rules to Healthy Restaurant Eating’. Thanks Clare, your article inspired this one. I particularly like your comment: Do not worry about the fat content, fat is healthy – because that means we can all enjoy Nigel Slater’s chicken skin!

The Bell and Bear at Emberton created an Apple Day (21st October) menu – with each course containing apples and designed to pair one of our areas home-produced ciders – menu reproduced to the right.You will have read here already of Virtual Orchard Hard Core – I am a big fan of its razor sharp, apple-packed taste. Their source of apples is to forage, swap, beg and possibly steal, windfall apples from gardens and forgotten orchards throughout the area. How Lawrence can consistently create CAMRAs national Gold Award cider from this random collection of apples is his best kept secret.Long may it continue.

The third cider on the menu is made from a private orchard in Cold Brayfield for private consumption – so a bit of a special tasting. It was lovely and fresh. His orchard makes about 900 bottles a year, which is less than three a day. Not really enough I’d say.

Anyway, what you really want to know is how was the food? Firstly, matching food to such diverse cider flavours has to be a true skill of the pallet on its own. Jon nailed this one with every course perfectly balanced. We kicked off with Virtual Orchard’s experimental sparkling cider, which on its own is too dry even for me, but with the addition of cassis was the perfect start to the evening. From then, my menu highlights were the belly pork, cooked for 36 hours into submission and served on a tomato and chorizo sausage reduction which had more flavour packed into its tablespoon than a weeks worth of Spanish stews. And despite not being a desert girl, the apple pie ice cream was simpy outstanding – a very fitting end to an apple celebration.

The menu
Virtual Orchard Sparkling Cider & Cassis Cocktail on arrival
**
Chef’s Appetiser: Fennel & Apple “Cappuccino”
**
Seared Scallops, Emberton Cauliflower, Homegrown Apple and Local Horseradish Puree, Black Pudding, and Apple Balsamic Vinagrette served with tasting of Local Guest Cider – Cold Brayfield 2010 Cider
**
36 Hour Local Saddleback Pork Belly, Cider Braised Chorizo Rosario, Butterbeans, San Marzano Tomatoes served with a tasting of Woughton Orchard “Medium Dry” 2010 Cider
**
Butter Poached Pheasant Breast “Sous Vide”,Smoked Bacon Crisp, Girolle Mushroom Croquette, Calvados Mustard Sauce, Local Squash & Liquorice Puree with Local Potatoes & Seasonal Vegetables served with a tasting of Virtual Orchard “Hardcore” 2010 Cider
**
Tastings British Cheese to Share with Homegrown Apple Chutney & Grapes, Oxford Blue, Hereford Hop, Mayhill Green, Ribblesdale Superior
**
Chef’s Pre Dessert “Bad Apple” Sorbet (Made from Emberton Pears!)
**
Homemade Apple Pie Ice Cream with Deconstructed Caramel Apple Pie served with a tasting of unpasturised apple juice

Great night down the @bellandbear in celebration of #AppleDay with @WoughtonOrchard, @phoneboxfoodie and others. Happy days! —
Laurence Conisbee (@VirtualOrchard) October 22, 2011

And clearly the new chef is pretty particular about what he serves up. The dishes are cooked fresh and well, coming out of the kitchen with different looking, tasting and smelling sauces (whereas usually they are all a bit tomatoey, and hot). My balti was tremendous – a thick oniony brown (not red) gravy and heated with black pepper – full of flavour. And the chicken was fresh, not tandooried. The other half had a proper runny madras, again bursting with flavour and just the right amount of heat. The chef, Abdul, came over to see us, and he is a delight, gentle and quiet, with a clear passion for his food. A refreshing addition to the Spice Garden’s kitchen.

What did Phonebox Foodie make of the event? Well clearly we were in heaven with a full day of fabulous feasting and grazing on quality local concoctions, right there on Olney Market Place with some amazing entertainment thrown in for good measure. So just in were crazy enough to miss all the fun, here’s a brief run down of what went on.

How does it work?
This year, books of tickets were on sale -£2.50 vouchers to spend on the delights at the festival. It is quite a good system,much better than the previous year when the vouchers tied you into a starter, main course and dessert. This year you could spend your vouchers on whatever took your fancy, nibble on the smaller items all day, drink it away at the Hopping Mad beer tent or blow the lot on a huge Paella – the choice was all yours. My only criticism though is that the denominations should have been smaller. All items were £2.50, £5 or £7.50. This made some things a bit expensive, for instance £5 for soup. Clearly £2.50 would be too cheap, but a fiver is steep. £1 vouchers next year please!

DISH OF THE DAY?
I tasked myself with tasting as much of the food on offer as possible in order to award a dish of the day. Daft idea! Firstly no way could I get around to eat it all so any verdict would be totally unfair. And secondly, how
to choose from the ones I tried? My tastebuds wrapped themselves around a gorgeous venison and duck egg scotch egg from the BULL INN; pakoras from THE FOUR PILLARS; paprika chicken in ciabatta and sticky chicken wings and a sausage in a roll from PASTURES POULTRY; the butternut squash chilli from BEANS and a rather welcome Pims and the latest real ale, Hoppiness, from HOPPING MAD. We also wandered around tasting bits of cheese and dip and chocolate from the stands who were involved, enjoying the lime, coriander and chilli dip so much we ended up buying three bottles.
Click to view slideshow.

It's the highlight of the year – Big Olney Food Festival time! So far tried the venison and duck egg scotch egg and a pint of new Hoppiness—
HB (@phoneboxfoodie) September 17, 2011

INGREDIENTS
100g butter
100g golden
caster sugar
6 apples, cored and cut into wedges
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Handful of pecans, toasted and chopped

METHOD
Heat the butter and sugar in a pan over the fire or a medium heat. As it begins to bubble and turn golden brown, add the apples and cinnamon and cook for 5 minutes, turning to coat the apples in the toffee mix. Stir in the pecans. Serve immediately, on their own, or with an apple muffin or giant chocolate chip cookie!

Thanks to Delicious Magazine for the recipe – take a look at their great selection online.

In this month’s edition of the Phonebox Magazine, four of our local eateries printed their favourite soup recipes. We’ve got Fennel Soup from the Bell and Bear at Emberton; Potato, Rocket and Parmesan Soup from the Bull Inn, Olney; Mushroom and Spinach Soup from Beans of Olney; and Irish Broth with Pearl Barley from the Swan Inn and Bistro, Olney. You can also see the recipes here on the blog.

Each of the recipes have been posted on Facebook, and this is where you come in. Visit us on facebook.com/phoneboxfoodie, find the recipe posts and ‘like’ your favourite. Whichever soup gets the most likes wins the Soup Wars crown. But, in a bit of a twist, the prize for this coveted accolade is that the winner must cook up a big pot of the soup and donate it to a local homelessness centre.

So get voting for your favourite now.

A PASSION FOR DOUGH
No artificial additives, long cool fermentations, and a passion for quality flour and good ingredients, have resulted in quite a cult following for these breads. They look beautiful, and the fantastic fresh smell makes them impossible to resist. Certainly once you have tasted it, you’ll be glad you gave into temptation. More pretentious reviewers might call the breads ‘artisan’ – we just call them damn good!

WHERE CAN YOU GET IT?
Amazing Grains will cook to order, needing at least 24 hours notice, but more quirkily, and to get back to the point of the article, you can get their bread from the Twilight Basket on Fridays: from 6pm at the Bell and Bear, Emberton and from 7pm at the Robin Hood, Clifton Reynes. It disappears faster than that pint of ale, so you need to be quick.

THE BEST OUTSIDE SPAIN
You can also experience Amazing Grains expertise at Tapas y Pintxos, Olney’s newest restaurant. Wanting to offer authenticity and quality to their customers, they chose Amazing Grains to supply their Pan Moreno. The literal translation is brown bread but the actual product is a very dense dough which produces quite a heavy but very tasty bread. They serve it before the tapas with allí oli (garlic mayonnaise) and also use it as the toasted base for ‘Bruschetta Mallorquína’ when it is topped with Sobresada sausagé, onion and melted cheese. Mark Wilkinson the chef at Tapas y Pintxos states ‘it is the best I’ve tasted outside Spain itself!’

Telephone: 0771 415 3267
www.amazing-grains.com

SOUP WARS: THE BULL, OLNEY

Ingredients:
1 medium Onion (diced)
2 sticks celery (diced)
1 large leek (trimmed & diced)
100g rocket
500g potatoes (peeled & diced)
100g parmesan (grated)
100mls cream
Salt & Pepper

Method:
Sweat onion, celery & leek gently in a little olive oil until soft
Add potatoes & cook for 2 – 3 mins stirring constantly
Add salt & pepper
Add water to just cover ingredients
Cook until potato is soft
Blend with a hand blender adding rocket & parmesan untill smooth
Add a little boiling water untill serving consistency is obtained
Whisk in cream
Serve with Amazing Grains crusty bread (sourdough or the potato and rosemary cob would be ideal) & for really special occasions, drizzle the top of the soup with a little truffle oil