The morning after the night before, I awoke afresh after having slept off the previous night’s dinner decadence at La Famiglia with a renewed sense of anticipation for the lunch to come. Still more sleep couldn’t hurt, and the hour ride to our destination with designated driver in tow would allow me some catch-up snooze time before our feast. As mentioned in Part 1, Sunday lunch was at The French Horn, a classic French restaurant in Sonning, famed far and wide for their spit-roast duck.

Duck roasted over a spit in the drawing room

The restaurant has the look of a classic French manor. French period furnishings dot the drawing room where, as we entered, four ducks were being roasted on a rotisserie in plain view at the fireplace. With aperitifs to start, we perched ourselves by the fireplace. Not only was it warming for the soul on this damp autumn afternoon, it was also a mouth-watering way to pre-empt our lunch, watching the act of cooking before the actual act of eating itself. With the ducks glistening as they turned on the rotisserie, it was a truly a feast for the eyes.

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The best way to approach a weekend of eating indulgence is to have a designated driver, someone who is preferably not you. The flexibility of being able to drink is the most obvious bonus, but when you’re rolling out of a restaurant after a meal it’s rather nice not to have to worry about how you’re going to make your way home. Then there’s the matter of when you’re heading out of town for Sunday lunch where, practically, a car is a definite must. In our case, lunch was at The French Horn in Sonning-On-Thames. Practicalities aside, it was also rather nice after having eaten yourself silly to be able to doze off in the car on the way back to town… but more on that later.

First up on the weekend were our Saturday night exploits at La Famiglia, a Tuscan restaurant. It bills itself ‘as a destination for the rich and famous’. Case in point: Jennifer Aniston’s flying visit to London back in June this year to meet up with her then (now?) beau John Mayer. During that trip she dined at La Famiglia and the event was captured all over the tabloid spreads. Enough said.

Located just off the Kings Road, La Famiglia also caters to the well-heeled of Chelsea, and on this particular Saturday night, every table was thus filled. The décor is rustic, predominantly white with splashes of blue, and softly lit. To create that family feel, there are abundant pictures of ‘the family’ lining the walls. The space is tight however, and the tables were small, and in our case too small to comfortably fit four. (No doubt Jen wasn’t forced to squeeze into her seat like this)! But it’s wonderfully seductive with a charming ambiance and a sense of time-honoured tradition that seems to draw you back time and time again.

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One of the billed highlights of the BBC Good Food Show, held at London’s Olympia from the 14th to the 16th of November, was ‘The Cookery Experience’ where a line-up of celebrity chiefs had been called in to present. There were some big names, including Nigella Lawson; James Martin, host of Saturday Kitchen; and John Torode, of Smith’s of Smithsfields and a judge on Masterchef.

Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck was also part of the line-up, and I couldn’t help but go along to hear what radical alchemistic culinary tit-bits this esteemed chef would offer to a live audience. Whilst I suspect his approach to food isn’t for everyone, by combining the science lab with a kitchen, you can’t help but acknowledge that he’s revolutionised cooking and that he pushes both the boundaries of technique and the limits of sensory perceptions.

At the BBC Good Food Show, Heston featured excerpts from his 2007 Christmas Special broadcast last December on BBC2, Heston’s Perfect Christmas Dinner. In the programme, he had invited six celebrity guests to dine in a car park which he had filled with frosted Christmas trees, and also presumably with lots of outdoor heating. For that dinner, he was inspired to draw on some of the traditional symbols of Christmas: gold, frankincense and myrrh, which he incorporated as part of his starter. In search of frankincense, he travelled to the lost city of Ubar in Oman which historians speculate is possibly the earliest shipping outpost of frankincense in the world.

From the bark of a frankincense tree, he extracted its sap, and for his starter he used the extract to create frankincense tea. The tea was then poured over an edible gold-plated bullion, filled with veal stock at its core. When the hot tea came into contact with the bullion, the latter dissolved to create a richly flavoured broth which was then consumed using a spoon crafted from the bark of a myrhh tree.

Back to the BBC Good Food Show, and each guest present was given an envelope containing a transparent sliver of gelatine set with the sap of frankincense from the same tree in Ubar that he had used to create his Christmas dish.

The flavour was quite complex, and tasted slightly bitter and quite peppery, with an aftertaste that stayed with me for well over an hour. Also in the envelope was a small wafer, the same as the one which had been included in the Christmas crackers that he presented to his guests on the programme, and which “tasted like the smell of a baby.” Made from milk powder, vanilla, pistachio and a touch of cream, it tasted like, well, the smell of a baby.

The presentation also covered some of the other dishes that he cooked during his Christmas Special. He also talked about one of his most recent creations, his Fat Duck dish – the “Sound of the Sea”. This is a seafood dish, and each diner is to wear a set of iPod headphones which play the sounds of the sea as they eat this dish. The effect is to enhance the taste by tapping into your audio senses. Towards the end of this segment he also revealed that this was perhaps one of the dishes that he was most proud of having created in his career.

During question time at the end, one person in the audience asked if there was anything he couldn’t cook, which he initially responded to by playfully pretending to walk off stage. His verbal response was that even if you don’t achieve success with your first attempt at a recipe, repeated attempts will ultimately achieve for you the results you desire. For a man who taught himself to cook, and then went on to earn three Michelin stars for The Fat Duck, it’s easy to believe that this is truly his ethos.

Web: http://www.bbcgoodfoodshow.com/

Roasted partridge with white truffle broth

I once entered into a humorous discussion with an American about English slang. And by that I mean slang used by British people for he really didn’t consider it correct to call such slang ‘English’. He was American after all, and from cowboy country – Texas to be exact, with a cowboy hat to show for it. Newly arrived in London, everything was quite astoundingly strange to him. For those of you who have ever had the experience of being an expatriate, the feelings of perplexity around the unfamiliarity of a new country might resound. But perhaps the most perplexing thing for him was the ‘language’. “Bob’s your uncle?? Now what is that suppose to mean?” he would say.

Hmm, I take his point. I too am an expatriate in London, but I do know what ‘Bob’s your uncle’ means. Jamie Oliver has used it often enough on his cooking shows, but I don’t know why it means what it does. But then, I’m hardly one to ask. Not having grown up in Britain, I’ve not been exposed to certain ‘English’ slang. Take for instance the idiom ‘pig’s ear’. Goodness knows I had no idea what an ear of a pig meant until it was revealed to me at an eating expedition to the gastropub, The Pig’s Ear, as rhyming slang for beer.

The Pig’s Ear had come to my attention on account of a similarly piggy friend of mine murmuring into my little piggy ear something about having recently dined there and thoroughly enjoying it. Browsing through Peter Prescott and Sir Terence Conran’s book, Eat London, I also happened to stumble across the write-up for The Pig’s Ear. They rate it as one of the best gastropubs in London. This meant only good things, which was why my friends, S and T, and I went in search of a little piggy adventure.

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Some say cookbooks are the new porn. I personally find them quite entertaining, if, and only if, there are lots of photos, and only if the photos are all of hot and steamy dishes. Visually stimulating, they can arouse my senses and heighten my desire for that nourishing-looking morsel on the page, immediately transporting me into a heavenly world of exquisite comfort eating.

As I scanned the menu at Champor-Champor, a fixed-price affair (2 courses, £25; 3 courses £29.50), I also wondered whether menu porn could be considered the new porn too. A good menu can be a titillating promise of the tasty things to come. It can occasionally be a tease too, making you want all that is offered when all the while you know it won’t be possible. On this menu, sandwiched in between the starters and the mains were the interestingly entitled inter-courses (with a £2.80 supplement). Porn anyone?

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