I’m more of a carrot person than a stick person. Consequently, most Mondays I find myself taking a trip down to the coffee bar at work to buy hot drinks for my team, who have completed their timesheets by my draconian and unreasonable 10am Monday deadline. As it is tricky opening lots of doors and negotiating stairs with a tray full of drinks, I consider taking the lift to be justified, and every week, I stand in the lift with a tray of drinks (usually two teas, three hot chocolates with caramel or hazelnut and a juice of some kind), look into the infinite reflection and think about how I’d photograph it.
I was trying for two things here. Literally, an echo is sound reflected, so doing something with reflection seemed like a good way to go. But also, I wanted to capture that sense of an echo as something left behind; a remnant of the no-longer-present. Hence tripod, cable release, a half-second exposure and some funny looks from the cleaners.
I am so far behind schedule. And I don’t even have an idea for Foxtrot yet.
I’m still not entirely clear why we booked North Norfolk as our Easter holiday destination. It just seemed to happen - one minute, we didn’t have a holiday booked, the next we were staying in The Pink Room of a B&B in Sheringham. We’d had no recommendations for places to stay or eat, so were kind of making it up as we went along. The day before we set off, I flicked through my father-in-law’s 2013 Michelin Eating Out In Pubs book, and noticed that their pub of the year was a place called The Gunton Arms, a couple of miles outside Cromer and only a short drive from where we were staying. We called ahead and got a table for the second-to-last night of our holiday.
We thought we knew what we were getting. When something is described as a gastropub and gets recommended in a book like that, you immediately jump to a certain mental image - lots of glass and chrome, maybe some light wood and a water feature. All we knew for certain was that it had a log fire, over which some of the speciality dishes were cooked.
I certainly wasn’t expecting possibly the best pub in the UK. We walked in to discover a packed front bar, complete with a pool table, dart board and dog. AC/DC on the jukebox, and a decent selection of handpulls stocked with local ales. We were dressed for dinner, but we wouldn’t have felt out of place if we’d stumbled in wearing muddy hiking boots and cagoules (unlike the ‘walker friendly’ pub we had popped into earlier that day, where we had been hurriedly manoeuvred into a corner to keep us out of harms way). We shared a table with a family of bikers. I could have sat there for hours, but we did, after all, have a table booked for dinner.
We hadn’t booked in time to get a table in the Elk Room, the main dining room containing the aforementioned log fire, but were instead in a side room decorated with an amusing combination of neon signs and a giant lace crab. Service was just the right amount of attentive, and the menu and wine list were both broad and reasonable.
Venison Mixed Grill
I chose a starter of devilled duck hearts on toast, and The Wife went for one of the daily specials, crab soup with cider brandy. My hearts were nicely pink in the middle and generously spiced, but I have to admit to serious soup envy - it was deeply flavoursome and warming.
I had decided on my main course before we even got to the pub, the mixed grill of venison having been highly recommended by more than one person. All the venison on the menu comes from the deer park in which the pub sits; it couldn’t have a shorter journey from field to plate. The mixed grill comprises steak, sausage, a burger ball, liver and heart, served with a redcurrant jelly and a side of cabbage, cooked with bacon for good meaty measure. Everything was pink where it should be, and I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed a piece of liver quite as much in my life - smoky and chargrilled on the outside, meltingly soft inside. K opted for the venison sausage (cooked on the fire in the Elk Room) with mash and onion gravy, a heroic choice given the size of it (I may have helped).
Caramel & Biscuit Cheesecake
We got involved in the puddings before our bellies had time to work out exactly how much we’d eaten. We’d both narrowed it down to the same choice of two, so we split the difference and shared the tiny cinnamon doughnuts with custard, and the caramel and biscuit cheesecake.
After coffees, and a strange conversation with the restaurant manager who had decided he looked like a chunkier version of me, we repaired to the bar, where I found a Lagavulin 16 and a table near a fire. The family of bikers were still ensconced in their corner, the remains of some very tempting-looking bar snacks on their table, and a game of darts was in full swing. I’ve never been anywhere which has so effortlessly combined the atmosphere and ethos of a Proper Boozer with serious restaurant food. Next time, we’re staying over.
Tags: Food
(It’s been a while since I posted a recipe. This one has been honed within an inch of its life, so is about ready for sharing)
Once a year, usually the morning after a big work Christmas blowout, someone will have the bright idea to do a huge MacDonalds breakfast run. Now, I don’t consider MacDonalds to be food, and it rarely if ever occurs to me as an option when I think about getting something to eat. But I have to admit that there is something about the breakfast McMuffin that can turn my head on these hungover occasions where I crave salt and non-specific protein. So I set out on a mission to create the perfect breakfast muffin at home. How would I know when I had achieved perfection? I set myself the following parameters;
- the sandwich must contain at least sausage, bacon, egg and cheese. Any other breakfast items are optional
- the bread component must be an English muffin
- it must be possible to eat it like a sandwich, ie without need of a knife and fork. This requires paying attention to the thickness of the sandwich as well as ensuring that filling-droppage is kept to a minimum
What follows is the result of many experiments and iterations. Serves 2.
Ingredients
2 “English” muffins, sliced in half.
3 sausages of your preferred breakfast variety. Lincolnshire is my recommendation.
2 eggs
3 rashers of streaky bacon
Some (say 4 large, 6 small) mushrooms
A nicely mature cheddar, sliced
Equipment
2 egg rings, the same diameter as your muffins
Method
Get the measure of your muffins. You live or die by your diameter in this recipe.
Strip the skin off the sausages with a sharp knife and form them into two thin patties of the requisite diameter. Make a dimple in the middle of them with your thumb.
Chop the mushrooms and bacon into matchsticks.
Heat a grill to medium-high and put the sausage patties under. You’ll need to turn them in a couple of minutes.
Heat a non-stick frying pan with a little oil and fry the matchsticked bacon and mushrooms for a few minutes, until the mushrooms are softened and the bacon is starting to crisp up.
Arrange the bacon and mushroom mixture into two equal piles and put an egg ring around each pile.
Break an egg into each egg ring, and break the yolk with a fork. Gently stir the egg into the bacon and mushrooms.
You did turn your sausage patties, didn’t you? They can come out from under the grill now. Pop the muffins under the grill cut side up, with the cheese slices arranged on one side of each.
Flip your bacony-mushroomy eggs. Once the muffins are lightly toasted and the cheese is melty, assemble as follows (from the bottom up): Muffin half with cheese, then sausage, then bacon/mushroom/egg, then muffin half to finish.
This happens every year. I go great guns on my first two or three letters, and then grind to a screeching halt. More often than not, said halt is because I get half an idea stuck in my head for the next letter, and obsess on that, rather than looking at other angles. “Delta” presented a few ideas; the concept of difference, which I discounted as being too close to my idea for Echo; river deltas, but we don’t have any of those in England; I even considered a foray into film to shoot this letter using Ilford Delta, but that felt like too much of a project in itself. I ended up back where I started, at the first word association that popped out of my head. You say “Delta”, I say “Blues”.
I dislike clothes-shopping intensely so when I find something that suits me, I stock up. My jean of choice is the Levis 512, button-fly, bootcut, and apparently discontinued. I have (I think) 8 pairs, half of which are packed away at the back of a cupboard, stockpiled for a future where the 512 is no longer available and I am hopefully still a 32″ waist. The four pairs here are at various stages of distress, ranging from never-worn to barely-serviceable.
…and the Chocolate Factory.
Actually, the Cadbury’s factory in Bournville, on the outskirts of Birmingham, is very much the opposite of Willy Wonka’s factory, which no-one (especially the reclusive owner) is ever seen entering or leaving. The village of Bournville was established by the Cadbury family to provide homes for the workers at the factory, and included playing fields (complete with pavilion), a fishing lake, swimming pool and bowling green. The name was taken from the Bourn Brook which runs through the site, and they stuck ‘-ville’ on the end to make it Frenchy.
Nowadays, as well as producing a chocolatey aroma you can smell from the motorway, the factory is home to Cadbury World and is horrifically busy at half-term.
Every January, an intrepid bunch of idiots get together in a meeting room at work and attempt to learn a bunch of songs, which are then performed to a few hundred extremely drunk people at the Assembly, Leamington Spa’s lovely music venue. Said idiots call themselves The Occasionals, and I am proud to count myself amongst their number.
The Occasionals are an 8-piece outfit with no permanent singer - we provide the backing for a kind of extreme karaoke we call Star Factor. There is voting, and at the end of the evening one of our singers for the evening is crowned winner. What I love about it more than anything is that very few of the entrants seem, to me at least, to care one jot about the competition; it’s a chance to be on a real stage, with lights and everything, fronting a band, singing their favourite song to their friends. and colleagues. The chance to be a rock star for one night a year.
When I realised that ‘Bravo’ was going to coincide with Star Factor, it was clear what my subject matter was going to be. I set up my camera with the 11-16mm Ultrawide on the lip of the stage, using a Manfrotto Pocket and plenty of gaffer tape. I then ran a cable release along the stage to where I stood, so I could trigger it at appropriate moments. I switched the lens to manual focus and set it at infinity and, once the lighting chap had set his lights, picked the lowest ISO I could that would give me decent shutter speeds at f2.8. It was then just a case of hitting and hoping.