FarSyde Restaurant, Ilkley

The FarSyde for me is like the old friend who you don't see for months, or even years, but with whom you can always just pick up where you left off. Consistently in my top two or three local restaurants for many years, it had been quite a while since my last visit, and so I'd really been looking forward to picking up our acquaintance again and reassuring myself that we still had plenty in common.

I was never going to be disappointed. Just entering the restaurant and seeing familiar faces with sincerely welcoming smiles was enough to remind me why The FarSyde is a place I will always be drawn back to. It just gets everything right. That it does so without any fuss or apparent effort is a credit to owners Gavin and Zoe Beedham,  management and staff and, no doubt, the many long hours of blood, sweat and tears they've been through to get to that point.

Lovely simple, thoughtful touches pervade the evening. The complementary home-made antipasti in the relaxing bar area while the extensive menus and specials boards are perused. A selection of freshly baked bread with artisan olive oils and home-made tapenade brought swiftly and courteously to the table as soon as we're seated. The extensive but sensibly priced wine list with a good range of wines by the glass, enabling one to match wine to food course by course. The efficient, well-informed  but unobtrusive service and a genuine concern that the customer enjoys every aspect of their experience. And all that's before the food arrives....

And what food. I commented that I could have chosen blind any dish from the extensive menu and I'm sure I would not have been disappointed. The descriptions are evocative, but to the point. The choice was difficult, but we shared a seafood platter to start which at £9.50 was excellent value and piled high with sea-salty freshness. Two unctious oysters, fat prawns, scallops, squid deep-fried perfectly in a wonderfully light batter with a home-made chilli sauce to die for.

My main course of Fillet of Beef served on an Oxtail Rosti with Braised Pigs Cheek, Roasted Baby Onions and a Red Wine and Truffle Sauce was simply one of the finest plates of food I have ever eaten. The beef was full of flavour, succulent, and cooked to melt-in-the-mouth perfection, while the oxtail rosti presented a delicious contrast of gelatinous meat and crispy potato. The pigs cheek almost went unnoticed among the richness of flavours on display, but provided yet another contrasting texture, crowned by the sauce which was plentiful and rich in flavour.

My partner's Roast Rump of Lamb garnished with a Confit of Lamb Shoulder, Nicoise Vegetables in a Thyme Sauce was equally impressive, and we were left defeated by the dessert menu which on any other occasion would have been plundered with equal vigour. At around £65 for two including pre-dinner drinks and wine this was great value, with better quality food and service than places that would have cost twice as much. I could happily eat my way through the FarSyde's menu and never eat anywhere else.

So, friendship renewed and we left promising not to leave it so long next time. We simply must make more effort to keep in touch.

FarSyde Restaurant, 1-3 New Brook Street, Ilkley, LS29 8DQ. Closed Sunday & Monday. Tel 01943 602030. Booking advisable.

Nigel Slater's Pork Ribs with Honey and Star Anise

I'd picked up a pack of Spare Ribs from the Blue Pig Company at a Farmer's Market a few weeks back, (six ribs for a pound - what a bargain!) and frozen them for a rainy, home-alone, TV dinner kind of day. This week provided just such an opportunity and I adapted a Nigel Slater recipe (Pork Ribs with Honey and Star Anise) from his Kitchen Diaries, to provide the honeyed stickiness that ribs just cry out for.

6 meaty pork ribs
3 tbsps honey
1 tbsp oyster sauce
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp dried chilli flakes
2 star anise
sea salt and szechuan pepper

1. Make a marinade with the honey, oyster sauce, garlic, chilli flakes, star anise, salt and pepper.
2. Place the ribs in a roasting dish and cover them with the marinade. Leave to marinate in the fridge for at least an hour, or better still overnight.
3. Roast at 180C for an hour and a quarter, turning and basting from time to time, taking care they don't burn.

Serve with rice - Thai is good - and salad or veg of your choice. Oh and a fingerbowl. And lots of kitchen roll.

Serves 1, happily!

Mark Sunderland Photography

The  new image on my blog header is by Mark Sunderland, a landscape and travel photographer based in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, whose wonderfully executed and atmospheric photographs of Yorkshire scenes are some of the most inspiring images I have seen.

I'm no photographer - as evidenced by this blog! - but even from my limited knowledge of the art I can tell that Mark spends a great deal of time over his compositions, and demonstrates enormous patience in waiting for just the right light in which to capture his scenes.

Mark grew up in Yorkshire but left to go to university. He moved back in 2005, after an absence of 24 years, and set about photographing the landscape of his native county with fresh eyes, using the techniques acquired and a style developed over the previous decade on journeys to more distant landscapes in the western USA, Patagonia and Iceland.

Mark has published a book, "Yorkshire Through The Seasons" comprising a selection of landscape images of the Yorkshire Dales, Moors and Coast taken over a four year period. For full details and a preview, visit http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/608485

A selection of framed prints and some greetings cards are available for purchase if you visit the Yorkshire Deli Cafe in Ilkley in person, or you can view more of Mark's work and order prints, cards or his book directly from his website, http://www.marksunderland.com , which also gives details of where you can catch him at fairs, shows and exhibitions around the county over the next few months.

I've selected four images - one for each season - which Mark has very kindly agreed to let me use so that my blog header, as well as the weather, can change with the seasons!

British Food Fortnight

Who Benefits? The Minnows or the Fat Cats?

I'm a wizzened old cynic at heart, as anyone who really knows me will tell you. I greet phrases like "The worst of the recession is over", "Its in the post" and "Yes Dad, I promise I'll phone Grandma" with the bucket of salt they invariably deserve.

So when I visit the British Food Fortnight website looking for evidence of the promotion of  regional produce and I'm directed to the sites of the major supermarkets, my natural cynicism immediately leaps into overdrive. But am I right to be so dismissive of the event? My foodie heroes The Hairy Bikers say they "love it" - am I really so completely out of touch?

British Food Fortnight was first held in Autumn 2002, supposedly as a celebration of the rich harvest of British produce available in the UK. It claims to have been responsible for increased sales of British food, improved education of children in the benefits of eating British produce, helping increase the proportion of British food bought by government bodies, as well as raising awareness among consumers generally. But have independent producers really benefited from it?

This year's BFF is taking place from 19th September to 4th October (yes it is actually 16 days so that it can cover three weekends). Yet as someone working directly in the food trade, and specialising in British regional produce, I have had not a whiff of publicity or communications from the organisers about the promotion. Tellingly, not one of the independent suppliers I have spoken to in the last few days were even aware of it. 

Not that I think it really matters. Its a bit like Valentine's Day, or Father's Day - I'm sure most lovers and parents (and those who are lucky enough to be both!) would rather be appreciated all year round than in a concentrated burst of frenzied activity once a year. And there's also more than a malodorous whiff of jingoism in much of the BFF publicity. They choose to stress rather smugly on several occasions throughout their promotional  material  that foreign hygiene regulations and farming standards are inferior to our own, rather than promoting the many positive aspects of British produce.  That may well be the case, although many would argue unnecessarily so, and is anyone really going to stop buying Danish bacon, for example, because they fear that the pork may be tainted by sloppy Danish welfare standards? I think not.

I'd be a lot less cynical about British Food Fortnight if it came across more as a genuine attempt to promote local independent producers and retailers over and above the supermarket bandwagon-jumpers. Sadly, there appears to be little or no evidence of that.

Keith Floyd Dies

That Keith Floyd has died of a heart attack aged 65 will come as no surprise to anyone who watched last night's Channel 4 film, "Keith Meets Keith", in which the first true British TV celebrity chef was seen to be a sad, frail figure, a pale shadow of his former exuberant self. I hope that the fact that his death apparently coincided with the broadcast of the film is simply a bizarre coincidence, especially given that the programme ran like a visual obituary in any case.

However I can surely be forgiven for imagining (rather morbidly I accept) a scenario whereby Floyd, outraged at his portrayal in the film as a controlling alcoholic has-been, dragged himself seething to his unsteady feet, raised his walking cane in the air shouting "F**k You All", before collapsing contentedly, and permanently, believing he had had the last word.

As is usual in these circumstances, there will be tributes, followed after a dignified time by the stories of how difficult he really was to get on with, or worse. I will bide my time and state my case, of which I'm certain, in due course, but in the meantime, rest in peace, Keith, you were my first true food hero.

Hairy Bikers do Yorkshire

I've been avidly following  the latest Hairy Bikers  series on BBC2 - "The Hairy Bikers' Food Tour of Britain". Dave Myers and Simon King are no-nonsense northern boys, who have an uncanny knack of de-mystifying complex cooking techniques and taking pretentious chefs down a peg or three. Their obvious enthusiasm for cooking, for people and for fresh, local produce is totally infectious. Their previous series in which they've biked round the world exploring different cultures and cuisines have been enlightening and entertaining, and their accompanying recipe books accessible and enjoyable to read.

This latest series is an ambitious project which must have taken many months to make. Over 30 episodes, the Bikers cover 15,000 miles, visiting a different British county in each show, meeting the locals, visiting producers and identifying the county's 'signature dish'. They then cook that dish in public (with hilarious consequences and bountiful Laurel and Hardyesque joshing) before devising their own dish using the finest local ingredients, which is entered into a 'cook off' with that of a prominent local chef, with local diners judging which dish best represents the county on a plate. Impressively, more often than not the hirsuit ones - who are not professionally trained chefs - come out on top in the blind tastings.

I do have some minor gripes. I think the series is too long and drawn out to put forward any coherent message. Too many of the counties chosen have little or no discrete identity, and midway through the series its becoming clear that some repetition is creeping in - the range of produce covered could have been wider. Sausages and beef figure regularly, for example, and apparently the signature dish of both Antrim and Oxfordshire is a breakfast fry up - the latter involving a regional sausage variety that no local had heard of.

Also I cannot understand why the BBC schedulers chose to put this programme out so early, at  5.15pm. It is reasonable entertainment in its own right, for sure, but primarily it is a programme for the serious foodie - most of whom will surely either be on their way home from work (like me), looking after kids or cooking themselves at that time, if that's not too gross a generalisation.

So, thanks only to Sky+, I can tell you that on Friday's show the lads 'did' North Yorkshire. As I know only too well there is an absolute wealth of produce to choose from in this vast and varied county, covering two National Parks, from its rugged hills and glacial valleys to its rolling moors and bleak coastline dotted with quaint fishing ports. It was to the latter that the bikers were drawn for the bulk of this episode, preparing, perhaps inevitably but quite impressively, Yorkshire Puddings in Scarborough and investigating freshly caught fish in Whitby.

The boys also discovered 'Black Porkies', sausages (again) from Mainsgill Farm, near Richmond, made with pork and black pudding. These are held up in the programme's publicity as "the regional speciality", which is a dubious claim, but they looked delicious nevertheless, despite the inevitable sausage-making footage wherein the resulting links looked more like joke-shop dog turds.

To climax, the hairies cooked off against the Michelin-starred Andrew Pern from The Star Inn at Harome, one of the best pub-restaurants in the country, never mind North Yorkshire.

This time, perhaps not surprisingly, the professional came out on top. Pern  produced an "Assiette of Harome-reared Duck" with a confit, roast thigh, pan-fried breast and liver of duck along with a poached duck egg which looked well worthy of the accolades heaped on the man in recent years.  Dave and Si opted for a fillet of Whitby Turbot with Langoustines in Chive Butter which, while equally appetising, was not in the same league as Pern's dish.

As food programmes go, this is about as entertaining and educational as it gets. It was fascinating to see inside a Michelin-starred kitchen and get a glimpse of the procedures and standards that such a chef applies, and the Hairy Bikers are clearly more at home in their native north than in the faceless southern counties.

As an aside, Andrew Pern came across in this episode as a top chap with a great sense of humour and a humble awareness of his own abilities. he was keen to impress that The Star is "a pub first and foremost" and aware of the need to feed the traditional northern appetite. As Pern observed, there were "no fusions and foams round here".  I have lunched at The Star in the past and was mightily impressed by all aspects of his operation, which now includes a butchery, deli and hotel as well as the pub. I fully intend to re-visit for dinner when time and funds allow. In the meantime, Pern has produced an excellent recipe book, "Black Pudding and Foie Gras"  which no keen foodie or aspiring gastro-pub chef should be without.

Campaign for Real Gravy Moves to Yorkshire!

The Fenwick Arms at Claughton, Lancs, the scene of one of Gordon Ramsay's most memorable TV Kitchen Nightmares, has closed.

Brian and Elaine Rey have moved - along with the Campaign for Real Gravy, invented by Ramsay to help save the ailing and pretentious pub restaurant - to The Ship Inn at Aldborough, near Boroughbridge in Yorkshire.

The so-called Campaign, of course, is merely a crass marketing gimmick aimed at bringing in coachloads of punters who care more about a close flirtation with TV notoriety than they do about good food well made with fresh local ingredients. The Reys showed little sign in the two TV shows and on my own visit of caring about the latter, and oblivious to their own shortcomings, reportedly blame the TV show for a subsequent downturn in visitors! Whether or not their campaign has any impact in its new location remains to be seen, but I shall be paying a critical visit very shortly, so watch this space!

Chicken Braised in Spiced Orange Sauce - with thanks to Rick Stein

I've been a huge fan of Rick Stein since his early and more hirsuit appearances in the Keith Floyd TV shows of the early 1990s. I've eaten in his restaurants (and his fish and chip shop!) bought his recipe books and avidly followed the various TV series. So I reckon he owes me one. So I'll take my payment in the form of this recipe if that's OK, Rick?

I was glued to the latest BBC TV Series, "Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey", and the book of the series was added to my ever-increasing collection just as soon as it was available. It's a weighty but very readable volume - as all the best cookery books are these days - not simply collections of recipes but with background and photography which brings the food to life and puts it firmly in its historical and geographical context.

Ever since the series aired I'd been wanting to cook his Duck Braised in Spiced Orange Sauce (p 75) which looked very tasty on TV, but I keep forgetting to pick up the requisite duck joints when I'm shopping. So this weekend I made a special trip out to pick up the ingredients for the recipe, but could I find duck joints anywhere? Nope. So I thought on my feet, and bought some chicken legs and thighs, and thought I'd try a poor man's version instead. And I have to say it was absolutely delicious.

There's a wealth of contrasting flavours in this dish - sweetness from the orange and sugar, sour from the fish sauce, spice from the star anise and subtle heat from the chillis, and they combine superbly in a mellow fruitfulness that Robert Browning would have died for.

So thanks for this Rick - please don't set your publishers on me, I'm posting this in praise and with respect to the master, and I have adapted it quite a bit! And I would urge everyone to buy the book - its a great read as well as an excellent reference guide to oriental cuisine generally.

Chicken in Spiced Orange Sauce (with thanks to Rick Stein)

Serves 2-3

Oil for Frying

6-8 Chicken Legs and Thighs

3-4 Cloves Garlic, crushed

1" piece of ginger, peeled and grated

500ml Orange Juice (I actually used half orange, half apple and mango which worked fine!)

2 tbsps Thai Fish Sauce (Nam Pla)

2 tsp sugar

3 Star Anise

2 Red Chillies (seeds in, finely chopped)

2 sticks lemon grass - cores finely chopped

2-3 Large Spring Onions, thickly sliced

1. Fry the chicken (in batches if necessary) in a little oil over a medium heat in a large pan until browned. Remove.

2. Turn the heat down and lightly fry (but do not burn) the ginger and garlic for a minute or so, then add the orange juice, sugar, fish sauce, star anise, chilli and lemon grass and season with black pepper. Stir well and heat through.

3. Return the chicken to the pan and simmer for 35-40 minutes until the chicken is tender.

4. Add the spring onions 5-10 minutes from the end of cooking time.

5. Thicken if necessary with cornflour/cold water solution (I found this unnecessary as I was serving it with rice that would soak up any excess  liquid, although the sauce had naturally thickened anyway).

Goes really well with Thai rice and could also take a green vegetable on the side.

Great British Food

I've been enjoying the latest edition of Great British Food magazine, which carries an informative feature on Yorkshire food and drink, alongside a host of other interesting articles on British produce.

Essentially a marketing vehicle for 'Food from Britain' and the various regional food groups (but none the worse for that), Great British Food claims to aim to "bring our food and drink to life and tell its story from plot to plate".

There are over 50 recipes concentrating on the use of seasonal produce, some well-researched features on products and producers from around the UK, and all the food and drink-related news you would expect in a quality food magazine, obviously with all the emphasis on British produce.

This issue also carries an interview with James Martin who voices his opinions on farmers markets: "..too many organisers just want the cash... (they) should give something back to the community".
 

I was particularly impressed with the standard of photography in the magazine, which certainly brings the recipes to life.

Great British Food is available from Tesco and WH Smith for £3.99 for a 130 page issue, or you can buy or subscribe online for £16.96 for 5 issues, saving 15%, at http://www.greatbritishfoodmagazine.com/