RECENT ADVENTURES

In between the many, many restaurant visits, writing recipes for various brands and for my own cookbook, the cooking for pop ups and catering gigs, I've had a few more random adventures recently.

These started at the end of November when I was invited to Taste Festival, by the lovely people from Currys PC World and AEG, the bi-annual restaurant festival that took over Tobacco Docks for a weekend. Several London restaurants gathered there to showcase some of their best dishes, and producers of various types of food, from charcuterie, to coconut oils, to alcohol were there selling their wares. It was a really lovely Sunday, mooching around the docks, sampling gins, fine teas, and food. I took Becky along with me and we had some delicious smoked salmon from Hix, served with pickled cucumbers, a fish taco and a short rib taco from Mole Taco Bar, and a couple of chicken dishes from M Restaurant, before joining Jeremy Pang in the demo room and whipping up a prawn pad Thai, and a chicken dish under his always-so-easy-to-follow-instruction.

Then it was up early the next morning for a visit to Tuscany with Filippo Berio, who I'll be working with on some of my pop ups next year - very exciting, and you'll hear more about that soon. We flew out to Pisa, then travelled on to Lucca where their HQ is to sample some of the newly pressed olive oil that had been freshly harvested, and have a tour of the Filippo Berio factory, as well as eat a LOT of the delicious local cuisine, learning how to cook some of the dishes ourselves, and popping in to a Fratoio, where locals bring their own olives to be made in to oil. It was a fun and fascinating two days - I learnt so much, ate even more, and tasted copious amounts of olive oils which was all washed down with lots of lovely Italian wine!! Here's a few photos from the trip for the moment, and I'll be doing a separate post on their lovely oils, which I got to sample again last week at a dinner cooked by Valentine Warner, soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting back from Tuscany the reality of missing two days in the run up to Christmas hit me, with a LOT of work to catch up and various pop ups and catering gigs to get done. Though I did manage to have a fun evening out with my ma last week, as we were kindly invited to a preview of Christie's next sale by the lovely people at VII Hills gin, where we looked at art we couldn't afford, sampled delicious mince pies, bought a Christmas cake and truly got into the Christmas spirit! I've now got a mini tree at home, and am looking forward to the next few weeks!!