Food & Drink

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chef PAUL COLLINS

PRIVATE DINING IN THE LUXURY OF YOUR HOME

‘Not only was the food absolutely delicious, it was beautifully presented, and most definitely of the same quality or higher as some of the top restaurants in London.’

‘He turned our vague wishes into amazing dishes. We and all guests were totally delighted. A superb meal and most memorable dinner and evening.’

‘Paul is great on all the little details that make a simple dish into a great dish…a great way to entertain at home – we’ll definitely be booking again’

‘As a top UK chef, his resume says it all…’

BESPOKE LUNCHES & DINNER PARTIES IN YOUR HOME BY A MICHELIN AWARD-WINNING CHEF

www.chefpaulcollins.co.uk paul@chefpaulcollins.co.uk Mobile 07774 866902

CORNISH COLEY FISH

COOKED IN SALO WITH NEW POTATOES, ROCK SAMPHIRE, PARSLEY AND RED WINE

Sasha Matkevich, The Green

Image: Clint Randall

This is a sustainable choice of fish that has a little image problem – while its strong and meaty flavour is not great in fish and chips, it works beautifully with red wine vinaigrette, garlic and a good Ukrainian salo (cured pork fat).

Ingredients Serves 4 800g fresh coley fillet, boneless and skinned 8 long, very thin slices of salo or Italian lardo 1/2 bunches of mint 1 tsp flat leaf parsley, finely chopped 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped 50g salted butter 450g new potatoes, washed and scraped 200g rock samphire, prepped and blanched in salted water 1 large banana shallot, finely chopped 200ml red wine 200ml red wine vinegar 200ml extra virgin olive oil Dorset sea salt and black pepper for seasoning

Method 1 Portion the fish into four equal pieces and wrap salo or lardo neatly around each one, securing it in place with cocktail sticks. Refrigerate for at

least two hours. 2 In a large pan of slightly salted water cook potatoes for 14 minutes. Add butter, mint, 1/2 of the chopped garlic and continue to cook on a low heat for three-four minutes or until just tender. Set aside. 3 In a small saucepan combine red wine, red wine vinegar, chopped shallot and 150ml of olive oil.

Bring to the boil and then reduce slowly by half. Set aside and add the chopped parsley. 4 With the remaining olive oil cook the fish in a large frying pan on a medium heat. Do not add any seasoning at this stage. Fry for 4-5 minutes on each side. 5 Remove from the frying pan to a suitable tray and put in a warm place to rest for 4 mins. Add samphire and the remaining chopped garlic to the frying pan, season to taste and cook for 3 minutes. 6 Remove potatoes from the water and slightly crush with the back of a spoon. 7 To serve, pile the potatoes in the middle of 4 warmed plates and arrange samphire around them, place the fish on top of each potato pile and generously dress with the slightly warm vinaigrette.

WESTCOMBE CHEDDAR AND ROSEMARY BISCUITS

Paul Collins, Chef

This recipe is one of my favourite little snacks. Most of the time I double the recipe and keep it in the freezer. If you have a few guests round for a nice glass of rosé in the garden, you could get these out of your freezer and cook them in 10 minutes – a lovely little nibble for the summer. One of the other lovely things about this recipe is that it uses so many local ingredients including Westcombe Cheddar from just up the road from us, a cheddar with a real punch of flavour. Local yogurt is another of those Somerset ingredients and then I use the rosemary out of my garden, so if you don’t have that, just use what you do have growing!

Ingredients 150g unsalted butter, diced 180g plain flour Pinch of salt Couple of twists of black pepper 125g Westcombe Cheddar cheese, grated 40g natural yogurt 2 sprigs of rosemary

Method 1 Add the flour and the butter to a food processor. 2 Whizz up with a pinch of salt and the black pepper. 3 When it looks like breadcrumbs add in the rosemary and the cheese and blend again until it starts to come together. 4 Stir in the yogurt. 5 Wrap up the dough in clingfilm in a small log about 1 inch circumference and 6 inches long. 6 Rest in the fridge until it is firm enough to cut into ½ cm thick rounds. 7 Place onto a baking tray that has been lined with a non-stick mat. Rest for a further 10 minutes. 8 Bake at 180ºc for 10-12 minutes until golden brown. 9 Once out of the oven allow to stand for 2-3 minutes on the tray then grate a little bit more cheese over the top of the biscuits. Finish with another twist of black pepper.

chefpaulcollins.co.uk

Corton Denham Open 7 days a week

www.thequeensarms.com | info@thequeensarms.com | 01963 220317 Group bookings welcome

SAMPHIRE TART WITH BROWN BUTTER DRESSING

Mat Follas, Bramble Restaurant

Image: Steve Painter © Ryland Peters & Small

We’re well into the growing season for samphire and there’s lots to be found around the beaches of Portland but please only take it for personal use. We buy ours from a specialist grower for the restaurant. Samphire can usually be found in the fish section in supermarkets and fishmongers. Its sweet, salty flavours balance well with chilli, onion and nutty butter. If you can’t find samphire, this recipe will work well with asparagus but you’ll need to add a good sprinkle of sea salt.

Preparation time: 15 minutes Cooking time: 15 minutes Serves: 4

Ingredients 6 shallots, thinly sliced 100g unsalted butter 200g ready rolled puff pastry 150g samphire 4 red chillies 100g cubed feta cheese

Method 1 Preheat the oven to 200°C. 2 Put the shallots in a saucepan with the butter and set over a medium heat. Heat until the butter is foaming. Leave on the heat until the foaming starts to reduce, then remove immediately and

allow to cool. You should get a distinctive nutty aroma from the cooked butter. 3 Unroll the puff pastry onto a floured baking sheet and trim with a sharp knife to 30cm x 20cm. Bake in the preheated oven for ten minutes until the pastry is just starting to turn golden and has risen.

Allow to cool for a few minutes, then using a sharp knife, cut a line halfway through the pastry about 2cm in from the sides. Press the inner pastry down using a fish slice to flatten slightly. 4 Check the samphire shoots for any woody bases and remove them. Tear the samphire into 2cm pieces and set aside. 5 Scoop the shallots out of the butter in the saucepan.

Scatter around the inner pastry section along with some of the butter. Scatter the samphire, and chillies (use as many or as few as you like) around the tart and crumble over the feta. 6 Return the tart to the oven for 5 minutes, until the feta starts to melt and the pastry turns golden brown and crispy. 7 Remove from the oven, drizzle a little more brown butter over the tart and serve immediately.

bramblerestaurant.com

Recipe from Vegetables by Mat Follas (Ryland Peters & Small) £14.99.

A MONTH ON THE PIG FARM

James Hull, The Story Pig

My shorts are on – it’s 5.30am. I have come outside to write my August copy, after all, surely in July it should be nice enough for that. I pace around the garden to try and find a nice spot to sit, but it’s a chilly morning so I have settled in the tipi, looking out through the garden path, blanketed in purple catnip, to a froth of overflowing flowers beyond.

The radio is on next to me, quietly enough to soothe me into another day without distracting me from writing. The news is on and Boris is clinging to power. By the time you read this, he is likely to have disappeared into exile and we will be in a frenzied jostle to find a new ‘leader’.

Behind me in the paddock next to the cafe I can hear the gentle banging of the feeder as a large group of growing piglets take an early morning feed. The grass is long, way higher than the piglets, and it’s brown and seeding. Often it is hard to see the pigs as they meander through the Savannah-type landscape. There is no way I can count them at the moment. After I write this I will feed the rest of them. Having finally reached our herd total of 500 pigs, that’s quite enough!

Quite incredibly, apart from a few boars that we have to buy in so that we don’t inbreed, all our pigs have been bred from our original pair. Animal selection is important as with any breeding, although our approach is far less scientific than the large commercial pig farms. Of course, our main criteria is shape and speed of growth, but also big considerations for us are temperament and ease of loading! As I carry out nearly all the pig work on my own, pigs that work with me are a big help.

We have sows farrowing every day at the moment, one a day, in a paddock just over the brow of the hill. The sows make their nests and gently pop their piglets out, one by one. I have been checking them through the night quite often as we have a pesky fox trying to steal the piglets under the cover of darkness. Cunning as a fox they say, very true – there is no way I would sneak into a pig ark and try and steal a piglet away from a sow.

We have one paddock that is empty of pigs at the moment and with the rains that we have had lately suddenly the ground is covered in field mushrooms. Mushrooms like pig poo it seems and it shows the soil is healthy. I haven’t seen mushrooms growing like this since I was a child when I can remember picking baskets of them with my mother.

We have decided to change sheep breed. Ours, although beautiful to look at, really are hard to manage (catch!). I dread having to do anything with them as it’s never easy. So we are going to find a new breed of lawnmowers, the criteria, being easy to handle, at the top of the list.

Down at the cafe we have put up our second tipi to provide extra seating for if and when the weather turns We have just built a most beautiful woven hazel fence to help protect us from the breeze and enclose our seating area. If anyone is looking for that type of fence, come and have a look at ours and we can put you in touch with Paul who built it for us.

Our list of jobs never seems to go down. I am as ever struggling to keep up with the garden, although thank goodness for Julia who comes every week and helps us. She also nearly always brings the sunshine with her. She is great at telling me that the garden looks good when I think it looks messy. That’s the thing with gardening, it’s very rarely as we want it – maybe about 2 weeks at the beginning of June it looked perfect to me. As I write Charlotte has just glided past with freshly homemade quiches for the cafe – it never stops, and on that note, I must go and feed pigs and count the new piglets.

PRETTY IN PINK

David Copp

Matteo Nicolas/Shutterstock

Not so long ago rosé wines were dismissed as lighthearted summer alternatives to more serious white and red wines produced In France, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

However, in recent years growers have paid greater attention to providing wine drinkers with real alternatives for their summer drinking.

The recent remarks of the head of the Frescobaldi company, one of Italy’s leading winemakers, reveal something of the fresh approach to the production of more distinctive and stylish rosé wines to the extent that Italy has vaulted the list of other leading exporters to become the third-largest European exporter of rosé wines.

Really good pink wines are being made all over Europe and they are beginning to win more serious consumer attention than ever before. Growers have found that Grenache Noir and Cinsault combine well to make wines of great character. They have also found that the drier Pays d’Oc climate encourages the full ripeness of more traditional varieties such as Pinot Noir.

I retain my fondness for the best rosé wines of Provence and the Loire but I heartily recommend readers to make their own investigation – trying wines from different regions at different price points to determine what best suits their palette and their pocket.

Most of the pink wines I have tasted recently are refreshing, light aperitif-style wines that pair well with antipasti, light summer salads and grilled fish. They are generally fruit-forward wines with crisp minerality which are ideal for lunch or early evening refreshment.

Certain supermarket wine buyers have an affinity with this style of wine. Morrisons have a particularly good record for offering good value for money white and rosé wines. Tesco, ever competitive, also have some attractive bargains. Sainsbury and Waitrose are always reliable. Good wine merchants know their customers and tend to look for smaller, more particular growers.

Despite the wider range on offer, Provence rosé remains a firm favourite, but I have recently been tempted to cast my net wider and I can assure you that there are a lot of wines that will be fun to try for yourself over the next few weeks of what I hope will be a warm and pleasant summer.