LIVING in South Somerset, we always have to leave ourselves with plenty of time to get to Bristol, if we are reviewing productions at the Old Vic, the Hippodrome, the Redgrave (up in Clifton) or the Tobacco Factory in Bedminster. Sometimes we eat first, sometimes we take sandwiches, sometimes we stop at a favourite fish…
IN the middle of September we were at the 15th annual Sturminster Newton Cheese Festival, and as we sat on straw bales in the warm Indian summer sun, drinking perry, our shopping clustered round our feet, I realised how much things had changed since I first started writing about regional foods. It was a long…
PHILIPPA Davis, the travelling chef from Shaftesbury, has been swamped with plums on her recent engagement in the south of France where she faced an almost impossible task of making use of all the plums growing in the garden. For her latest trip she was in Stirlingshire in Scotland where she found a freezer full…
TRAVELLING chef Philippa Davis was back in Dorset in time for the annual Great Dorset Chilli Fest at St Giles Park near Wimborne – and the hedgerow harvest of blackberries … The tropical sun set a thousand colours over the lush vegetation as the choruses of tuneful birds swooped through the warm evening air back…
FANS of TE Lawrence and excellent home baking have a double treat at Moreton Tea Rooms – the delicious cakes at the award-winning tea rooms are displayed on the bier on which Lawrence of Arabia’s body was carried to the funeral at nearby St Nicholas Church with its beautiful engraved windows by Laurence Whistler. Moreton…
IT’s a sad fact that Britain’s biggest selling “smoked” cheese isn’t actually smoked: look at the labelling and you’ll see that Applewood is described as “smoke-flavoured” and “smoky”. We won’t sell it in our shop – if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. Our suggestion to anyone who arrives looking for this…
TO say that my husband is fanatical about beans is an understatement. He collects them as a numismatist collects stamps. When abroad he seeks out shops which sell the seeds, a hobby which has taken us to some interesting back streets in major towns and cities abroad, while our friends spend time in galleries or…
PHILIPPA Davis, the adventurous travelling chef from Shaftesbury, has now finished her month in Boston. She had intended her final postcard would be about night fishing – but the photographs didn’t work! She says: Maybe I should have thought it through a little better? I had visited Harvard a few days prior to this and…
WHEN in Rome … and when in the USA, you definitely want to smoke pork ribs. Travelling chef Philippa Davis from Shaftesbury is currently in Boston and her latest postcard recipe is for her successful version of the classic hickory smoked baby back pork ribs. As she says: Smoke gets in your eyes… so try…
THE National Trust has signalled its commitment to the long term future of one of the country’s favourite heritage breeds of cattle with the arrival of a new Red Devon bull, at the National Trust’s Kingston Lacy estate near Wimborne. For more than a century Kingston Lacy has been one of the main places to…