This week we made puff pastry. It’s not so much complicated as it is time consuming, waiting for each turn of that pastry to set before rolling it again. And all that butter! Surely it cannot be good for you. I suppose I have always known how fattening pastry is, but knowing and seeing aren’t necessarily the same thing. You attain a new sense of reality when you work with food, and so perhaps ignorance was indeed bliss.

Puff pastry goodies

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This past February, the chain of Little Bay restaurants (in Kilburn, Croydon, Battersea and Farringdon) hit the headlines when they introduced a ‘pay-what-you-think-it-is-worth’ pricing policy for the month of February. Designed to be ‘recession busting’, the irony was that diners ended up paying about 20% more on the menu price.

This ‘pay-what-you-want’ concept was not new. Clifton’s Cafeteria in California operated such a system as far back as the 1960s, and since then, there have been a sprinkling of other eateries in the States which have also done the same throughout the decades. And, Peter Ilic, the owner of Little Bay, actually first introduced the concept to the UK in the 1980s.

So was the ‘pay-what-you-think-it-is-worth’ campaign back in February designed to be recession busting, or a masterstroke in marketing? Call it what you will, but Little Bay are certainly clever with their offers, and have come up with another one. The latest, available to diners at any of the Little Bay restaurants in the months of June and July, is a half-price theatre ticket voucher for use on either of the two summer shows at Sadler’s Wells . For full details and terms and conditions go to the Little Bay website. I haven’t been to a Little Bay in about a year, but when I last went the food was really cheap and fairly decent.

Tea for 2

I love the odd spot of afternoon tea. There’s something so quintessentially English about this culinary art form, working your way through the sandwiches, the scones (with all that gorgeous clotted cream) and then the cakes, all washed down with tea. I remember up to about four or five years ago, some of the 5 star hotels in London would serve an opulent all-you-can-eat affair of unlimited quantities of sandwiches, scones and cakes. This doesn’t seem to be the norm anymore, which is probably better for my waist line, but is being sorely missed by my greedy little foodie disposition.

Having eaten at Sketch before, at both The Lecture Room and Library (the one star Michelin restaurant), and The Gallery (the less formal dining room), I thought it might be time to try out The Parlour, the third of the dining areas at Sketch. The patisserie on display look delectable, and there is a long list of amazing sounding concoctions on their cake menu such as the ‘Gariguette Tartlet’, (strawberry and black pepper cream tartlet, strawberry and tomato tartare, loukoum-rose water and strawberry icing); the ‘Red Pepper and Manjari Tart’, (manjari ganache with a flourless chocolate biscuit filled with preserved red peppers on a sweet dough base); and the ‘Hojicha éclair’ (pâte à choux filled with hojicha cream, hojicha fondant). All of these are priced at £5 each.

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Duck rillette

If you previously read my blog post on Terroirs, you would have probably noted that I have already been to this restaurant and wine bar twice in a very short space of time. So this return trip, my third visit, is really the return after the return. But hey, who’s counting? I really like the place. That, a craving for some of their super delicious duck rillette, and the feeling that I hadn’t explored the menu to its fullest potential meant I was predestined to go back. Call me a groupie, but one’s got to do, what one’s got to do.

Actually, it wasn’t only the duck rillette I wanted to try, but also the Lincolnshire smoked eel with celeriac rémoulade. I had been eyeing it up on both my first and second visits, but some other dish would call out to me more. This time round, I promised myself that there would be no distractions of such nature. And so, the eel was the first thing that rolled off my tongue when the waitress came to take our order. Oh that, and the duck rillette of course.

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This week we covered short pastry. We made leek, asparagus and blue cheese tart (yum), chicken and mushroom pie (delicious) and lamb pasties (ok). There was lots of prep, so it ended up being a rather long day. But making the pastries wasn’t so much the challenge as trying to bake them in the ovens at college. The ovens can be a bit temperamental, and they don’t always work as they should. After half an hour of baking, my pies still would not cook, and it took two oven changes, and a further 20 minutes before I achieved a result.

Chicken & mushroom pie

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