Taste Buds

from the kitchen of

No mes amis, this is not a racing potatoes or even a dish which ever lasts for 24hrs but I suppose one might consider it a fast food, non? Pomme de Terre Le Mans

I was told many years ago by my grand-père that the original Hotel de France in La Chartre sur le Loir, owned for generations by the Pasteau family, used to serve this as a side to most of the Le Mans racing teams, who used the hotel as a headquarters during the races. He told me it was a particular favourite of Scottish driver Ron Flockhart, twice-winning Jaguar team driver of the Le Mans 24hr in the 1950’s, and that he would apparently devour a plateful before his racing sessions to keep him going throughout the arduous hours ahead! Ron and his business partner Hugh Langrishe had a motor garage in Ascot and would regularly eat at my grand-père’s then nearby restaurant. The recipe soon became a favourite amongst the customers, listening enrapt as the two men dined out on dramatic tales of racing derring-do. Similarly, the dish has been a worthy and popular addition to our Chez Pierre menu card for a long time and is easily prepped for the following day’s servings. An interesting variation on standard mashed potatoes it makes a very tasty side to both a formal dinner with guests at home or an everyday family supper. I am a big fan of our varied potato offerings here but I have to say this is one of my favourites, which we serve with pork chops, steaks, casseroles and other hearty mains.

INGREDIENTS

For 6 (adjust for more or less) 5 lbs maris piper or russet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes; 8 ounces full-fat cream cheese, at room temperature; 1 tbsp unsalted butter; ¾ cup sour cream; ½ tsp garlic powder; pinch of grated nutmeg; salt and freshly ground black pepper. TO CREATE

 Place the potatoes in a large pot and cover with cool water. Make sure they’re covered by at least 1 inch and bring the water to a boil over high heat. Lower the heat to medium and simmer the potatoes until a fork pierces them easily, 20 to 25 minutes.  Drain the potatoes in a colander and return them to the pot. Stir a few times to steam the potatoes in the hot pot to remove excess moisture before adding the cream cheese, butter and sour cream to the

For us here at CP an advantage is that these mashed potatoes can be refrigerated for up to two days and then reheated in a 350°F oven, covered in foil, for 45 minutes, or in the microwave in 1-minute increments, stirring between heatings. They can also be pot and then use a potato masher to mash the potatoes until smooth. Try to avoid overmixing, which can make the potatoes gluey, but don’t be afraid to mash them until they’re nice and fluffy.  Season the potatoes with the garlic powder, nutmeg, salt and pepper. Mix to combine before serving either individually or, as we do at CP, in an entrée on the table to suit the number of diners, who can help themselves.

frozen in single servings. Scoop 1 cup portions onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and freeze. Once frozen, remove the potatoes from the parchment and store in freezer bags for up to six months. Thaw in the fridge and then reheat as directed above.

© Sarah Lambert © Sarah Lambert

WILDLIFE GARDENING

The Village Tribune is pleased to be backing a great new wildlife gardening scheme … which you can get involved with from the comfort of your own garden

The Langdyke Countryside Trust - which already owns and manages seven nature reserves in the area - is launching a unique campaign to create a community nature reserve. The Langdyke Community Nature Reserve - the Trust’s eighth - will be made up from a whole range of established and newly created wildlife gardening plots … including yours! The Tribune is backing the scheme and encouraging readers to get involved. Langdyke chair Richard Astle said: “We are delighted the Tribune is backing our scheme. This is a very important project to give nature a helping hand across the area. “No matter how big or small your offer of help is it will be a boost to wildlife.” The aim of the project is to bring people together across the local community - and particularly across Tribland - to promote wildlife friendly gardening and to give nature a chance to recover. Organisers aim to share good practice and celebrate successes and make it easy for anyone to get involved. The scheme already has a number of supporters and early pledges mean organisers can claim to have an area the size of the Peterborough United football pitch. But there is still a long way to go if the project is to reach its goal of matching the size of the footprint of the Queensgate shopping centre. So please get involved. Taking part isn’t difficult and you don’t even need a garden. You could just install a window box or put up a bird table. Every little thing you do will help nature. It could be as simple as letting the grass grow in one area, putting up a bird box, planting some nature friendly plants or leaving a pile of wood for hedgehogs and other wildlife to live in.

© Sarah Lambert

© Sarah Lambert

GARDENING SCHEME

By David Rowell

helpnature

HERE ARE SOME SIMPLE TIPS

The gardening scheme is part of Langdyke’s overall project to create a vision for nature across the area it calls John Clare Countryside - particularly the villages between Peterborough and Stamford. The peasant poet John Clare - who lived in Helpston - trudged the countryside and wrote about it in many of his poems. No matter how large or small your garden you can get involved in creating the community nature reserve by pledging an area of your plot which is turned over to nature. If you already have a wildlife friendly area that’s brilliant. If not, why not consider what you could do to create one. Langdyke, which is a charity run entirely by volunteers, is always on the lookout for families who want to become members and offers a variety of events (mostly online at the moment because of Covid restrictions). It is hoped to re-start nature walks and family days on the reserves in the near future. The Trust is also interested in hearing from anyone who wants to get involved in na-ture by volunteering to help with either admin roles or work on one of its reserves. You can find out more by visiting the website

langdyke.org.uk

All you have to do is measure an area that you can call wildlife friendly - it may be there already or you have plans to create it. Then visit the Langdyke website and pledge it as a little piece of the eighth reserve. There is no cost and your garden will still be your own. You can find out how to measure your plot and how to get involved by visiting the Trust website’s eighth reserve page at https://langdyke.org. uk/the-eighth-reserve/ You can also view a video there explaining more about the scheme as well as pledge your support. • When buying plants from a garden centre try and purchase wildlife friendly ones • Save the leaves in the autumn and pile them up in sheltered areas to create habitats • Let the grass grow • Feed the birds • Install a bird table or bird box • Don’t cut back hedges or trees in the bird nesting season • Keep a lookout for hedgehogs and make sure they can get in and out of your garden • Create a wildlife pond There is more information and videos on the website.

Writing this, on a cold, grey day in March, I am looking forward to warmer days, bluer skies and spending time in our garden. I also hope that we see at least as many hedgehogs in our garden this year as last. Memories of sitting quietly outside, listening to a very noisy hedgehog munching its way through a saucer of food, or of watching in delight four hedgehogs trying to eat from the same bowl, still make me smile today.

HELP OUR

Sadly, there is another memory which will stay with me. In October, we saw a hedgehog out in the middle of the day. This is usually a sign that something is wrong, so we went out for a closer look. We were devastated to find that the hedgehog was dead, with all the signs pointing to a very painful death, almost certainly from poisoning. With both happy and sad memories in mind, I’d like to share some information and appeal to fellow readers to do as much as possible to protect our local hedgehog population. In July 2020, hedgehogs were included in the Red List for British mammals, classed as vulnerable to extinction. This is so sad for these beautiful creatures, but it is not too late to act to save them.

Angela Trotter HELP OUR HEDGEHOGS

The hedgehog is known as the gardener’s friend. They eat slugs, beetles, caterpillars, etc and cause no harm to gardens. If you have hedgehogs in your garden, why not encourage them? You can do this by putting out a saucer of food, such as meat-based cat or dog food, dried kitten food, or specialist hedgehog food. It’s a good idea to put out a bowl of water, particularly in dry spells. If you are worried about other animals eating the food, it is easy to create a hedgehog feeding station: simply cut a 13cm square opening in the end of an upturned plastic storage box, and put the food and water inside. You might think of the garden visitor as ‘your’ hedgehog, but it is worth remembering that hedgehogs roam and forage over a wide area – up to a mile and a half. ‘Your’ hedgehog family will almost certainly be your neighbours’ hedgehog family too. Creating a hedgehog highway between gardens is helpful: a 13cm square hole in a fence or wall is big enough for a hedgehog, but small enough to prevent most pets getting through. You can ensure that your garden is wildlife friendly. Log piles, wild areas and compost heaps all offer shelter and encourage natural food supplies, for hedgehogs and other wildlife. Whilst a garden should be a safe place for hedgehogs, it can also hold many hazards. A pond is an asset in a wildlife garden, but can be a death trap for small mammals. Ensure that there are several gently sloping slipways around the edge of the water to enable animals to escape if they fall in. Or hang a piece of chicken wire over the edge, to allow hedgehogs to scramble to safety. Please check areas before mowing or strimming. And before using your compost, don’t forget to check it gently for sleeping wildlife. If you are interested in learning more about helping hedgehogs, The British Hedgehog Preservation Society has lots of information and online resources. They also organise Hedgehog Awareness Week each year, which aims to highlight the problems hedgehogs face and how we can help them. In 2021 it runs from 2-8 May. Finally, please, please don’t use slug pellets, pesticides and poisons in your garden. Let’s try to create only happy hedgehog memories this year.

Write Away

Opinion: ‘The future is bright as I bow out’

Council leader John Holdich will not be standing in the May elections.

Peterborough City Council leader John Holdich gives his view on the council and news and issues affecting you in his final column for the Peterborough Telegraph before retiring from politics...

With the local elections just around the corner - and restrictions on media reporting between now and then - I’m sad to write that this is my final column. I announced last January, just before the pandemic hit, that I wouldn’t be standing for re-election and instead retiring and drawing to a close a career in politics spanning 44 years. Of course, the elections were postponed last year, but my decision remains. I owe it to my wife Barbara and the rest of my family, who have steadfastly supported me over the years, to give them more of my time I know that I will leave the council with mixed emotions – sadness for the people and responsibility that I will miss, pleasure for the extra time I will have to spend with family and friends, and a huge sense of pride for the successes I have achieved over the years. In fact, one of the proudest moments of my career in politics has been the way the council has worked tirelessly – supported by so many individuals and groups – to ensure that everyone who has needed support during the pandemic has received it. That has included assisting the hundreds of people who have been shielding, or are more vulnerable to the effects of the virus, through the city’s support hub and the hundreds of people we have helped to self-isolate – handing out £500 grants to those that qualify, totalling £648,000 to date. We have worked with councils across Cambridgeshire to provide a countywide contact tracing service to contact people who have tested positive for Covid-19 - those the national team could not trace - and we have provided financial support to 3,800 businesses, delivering more than £46.6 million in business grants and £42 million in business rate relief. Many of those businesses may not have survived without that support. Our refuse collectors who have gone out during the highs and lows to collect our waste, our social care staff who have continued to care for our most vulnerable – I could go on. Another highlight and a great source of pride is the development of a dedicated university for Peterborough, something we have needed for many years to prevent our talented young people leaving the city and to offer our employers a good crop of people to apply for jobs. The first teaching centre opens in September 2022, along with the research and development centre to create a net zero technologies cluster in the city. In the next few years there will be a second teaching site to grow capacity to 5,000 enrolments per annum and there is the potential for a second phase of the research and

development centre and, much further down the line, a third teaching site. This project will have a huge impact, not only on what the city will look like in 20 years’ time, but on the opportunities available to our residents, the success of our businesses and on informing external perceptions of Peterborough. I am also very proud of the work that has taken place over the past decade to redevelop our city centre. Cathedral Square, St John’s Square, Bridge Street and many other parts have had new life breathed into them. At Fletton Quays, construction is underway for the new Hilton hotel and on the adjacent site a new Government hub, anchored by the Passport Office, complementing the apartments and office space that has already been built. Looking ahead, our City Centre Local Development Framework identifies and plans key areas to be developed in the coming years, such as the station quarter, North Westgate, Northminster and Rivergate. Looking a little further back, I was proud to be responsible for the creation of the city’s housing association, Cross Keys Homes, which allowed us to spend over £100 million modernising properties. There is no way we could have spent that money on new bathrooms and kitchens if we had not set up the housing association, owing to the percentage of rental income the council, as the homeowner, was required to pay back to the government. So many residents benefitted from that decision and still do. I have so many other decisions I am proud of – the millions we spent upgrading or rebuilding every school in the city, my backing of the council becoming a unitary authority, giving us more decision making power locally, or my support for the creation of the combined authority, which has seen at least £100 million coming to our city which we may not otherwise have had – I will have to keep details of those and the many more projects and people I would love to mention for my book, if ever I write one! I think what I will miss the most about being a councillor is having the ability to help people. It is a gift and a privilege that I have never taken for granted. That said, I plan to keep in contact with some fantastic council officers, many of whom work tirelessly across our communities, so that I can still help people where I can. I am also sad that it will be the first time in 142 years that there has not been a Holdich on one council in the city or another! I believe that Peterborough’s future is incredibly bright and that the time is now for us to take the city to the next level. I will be keeping an eye on things, that’s for sure.

Helpston Street Party 2021

We're keeping our fingers crossed that everything will go to plan and we can all be celebrating this summer so we've earmarked Saturday 10th July for a Village Street Party. Please put the date in your diary! More details soon ...

Mindless Behaviour

Northborough field and stream - what mindless behaviour to empty all the books that have kindly been donated to the community into the stream. Only to be followed by setting the bin on fire and smashing glass bottles on the grass for young children and dogs to step in. There are no words Kaz Jane