Photography by Keiko Oikawa
I think I could write the same first paragraph again, funny ol’ weather… We did manage to cook up a lovely barbie for the parents to celebrate Dad’s birthday. They phoned from the next village over 10 minutes away to let us know of their imminent arrival. At that point it was black and raining hard. As they knocked on the door, the sun came out, I poured the water out of the barbecue and refilled it whilst it was still drizzling. Luckily the firelighters caught and the rain abated quite quickly. Got out a tarpaulin and we sat with dry bottoms on the wet grass in the glorious sunshine for the next three hours, so bizarre…
Had some lovely end-of-season asparagus, wrapped in bacon and roasted until brown, drizzled with balsamic glaze, with parmesan flakes, olive oil and warm hollandaise. And to carry on the rich egg sauce thing, main course was the house signature dish of juicy rib eye cooked medium rare on the BBQ with tarragon packed béarnaise, char-grilled jacket potatoes, Greek salad, oven baked fennel and garlic flat mushrooms. And we knocked up a prune, almond and pear tart laced with calvados and more in the custard with clotted cream ice cream to finish the calorific stakes.
I visited milsoms at Kesgrave Hall (the furthest most outpost of the super Dedham family of hotels and restaurants) on the outskirts of Ipswich for the first time. Wow what a hidden gem, amazing setting just off the main north road into the town, nestled in lovely wooded parkland at the bottom of a hill you drive down. And what a dramatic mansion it is, more in the August issue. Terrific food, chic townhouse restaurant meets dining pub and upstairs amazing palatial rooms, luxuriously kitted out with avant-garde but cosseting interiors.
If you’re going, just remember you can’t book and if you’ve not been before, like milsoms at Dedham, you fill out your own order pad and give the order in at the bar. I lunched with Sue Bunting, their affable marketing manager, who gave me the breath-taking guided tour. Incidentally she is married to one of the Bunting family (who interests around Colchester include the charming Anchor at Nayland - amazing food trail with their kitchen garden and rare breed livestock - as well as the award-winning Carter’s vineyard at Boxted).
On Saturday, we visited the Suffolk Game and Country Fair at Glemhall Hall near Snape on the A12 (built by the same designer as Hintlesham Hall apparently, lovely building). Great to see the countryside take centre stage, promoting the good things our farmers and rural pursuits bring to the landscape and communities, speaking from a very biased perspective. Amazing retrieve display by the labradors and spaniels from the Suffolk Gundog Club, I am sure the human training had something to do with it but the canine skill on show was enthralling.
Picked up some excellent pies from the Woodbridge Fine Food Co. trailer – a duck, pork and apricot and a chicken’n’ham – as well as some of Nora’s delicious maple and walnut fudge in huge broken shards, tastes much better when you break it off rather than a processed cube and less guilt too.
Stopped off at Friday Street Farm Shop which really is an amazing food hall too, but they do sell lots of earthy home-grown produce from the fields out the back. Huge crates of asparagus including cheap sprue labelled ‘soup’. We needed some local chutney, snapped up Jules & Sharpie’s Hot Pear as well as Stokes Real Ale varieties and spied some lovely fat Essex raspberries from Bradfield near Manningtree. Wanting to do a fool kind of thing, we bought some excellent live yoghurt from the Reeves’ farm (who make the Buxlow cheeses) at Friston near Saxmundham and some not so local mascarpone and ricotta. Back home we made a quick coulis with icing sugar and a quarter of the raspberries and whisked it into the decadent dairy products and folded in the remaining fat berries. By God, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. No exact recipe but make it to taste, you’ve got to try it. Sadly we couldn’t resist long enough to make shortbread to go with it.
Lastly we popped into to see David at the Froize Inn at Chillesford the other side of Snape towards Orford. His lovely black lab Penny, one of three lovelies and mustn’t forget the cute spaniel, has just had a litter of pups, just over three weeks old. Mostly yellow, we fell in love with the black ones most of all, Mum is such a cutie ! Sadly they have all got homes, just yellow ones left, so have to wait until another litter from one of the other labs next Spring, best get the kitchen finished in time. I am sure my daughter won’t stop reminding me, she was besotted with them.
