Vittles (food & drink

Karen Broad lives in Burton Bradstock, with her husband and two mad dogs. She ran The Mousetrap in Dorchester, has lived in France and loves discovering new food producers. Tips to meet challenge of family feeding

This summer, feeding our families is going to be a challenge with prices increasing daily; it’s not easy but here are a few tips to help. n Plan your meals, go shopping with a list and stick to it. n Don’t buy what you don’t need. n The one meal convenience foods are not good value. So, be brave, make a large cottage pie from scratch and use up the leftovers. Mix the cottage pie together, form into individual patties, then fry. You have two meals for the price of one. n Dig into the depths of your freezer and cupboards and use things up. n Invest in a slow cooker and produce your own readymade meals. n Become a master of invention, be experimental. You cannot fail. You need food cupboard essentials, herbs, stocks, spices, baking ingredients. n Bulk up a meal with some cheesy scones, serve soup in a hollowed out crusty roll or small loaf. n It’s easy to reach out for those expensive ready-made meals when you are short of time. STOP! Here are three quick-to-make-meals

Haddock One Pot

1 tin cannellini beans Tomato puree Onion Smoked haddock Cooked Potatoes Spring greens Stock Sauté onion with some diced potatoes, tomato puree and a few mixed herbs, add the beans and some stock. Add diced smoked haddock and some chopped spring greens. Ten minutes later a cheap, nutritious, quick meal.

Savoury Rice

Rice (Arborio or Risotto rice) Ham or bacon lardons Peas. Spring onions Saffron or turmeric Good stock Sauté onions. Add rice and bacon lardons and spice and allow for the rice to become translucent (don’t burn) then add stock and allow to cook until rice is soft and has absorbed all the liquid, then add peas. So, what about a treat? Quick, delicious and impressive...

Portuguese Custard Tarts

Readymade puff pastry 500g readymade custard 3 egg yolks 100 grams sugar Grease a Yorkshire pudding baking tin, heat oven 180c Cut circles of the pasty and place in the tin. We need to bake these, so place some circles of baking parchment on top of the pastry with some baking beans (if you haven’t got these you can use dried beans or rice or even crumpled up tin foil) Bake until pastry is light brown, remove parchment. Mix egg yolks, sugar, and custard together and pour over the cooked pastry bases. Bake for further 15 minutes until light brown.

Guess what’s cooking at sculpture

Open air cooking and art displays will go hand in hand at a garden festival in Dorchester later this month. The Dorset Garden Festival will be held at Sculpture by the Lakes at Pallington from Wednesday, May 25 to Sunday 29. The event will include the launch of the new Fire and Food festival, where visitors can watch live open air cooking demonstrations and try free samples from expert chefs. Sculptor Simon Gudgeon, who founded Sculpture by the Lakes, said: “We know nature and garden lovers enjoy a visit to Sculpture by the Lakes every bit as much as art lovers, so this is an event created with them in mind. “We have brought in some fantastic independent nurseries and artisan producers offering a range of unique and special garden items, and of course visitors can enjoy everything Sculpture by the Lakes has to offer alongside, including our current exhibition of more than 200 sculptures.” Vendors at the festival will be selling plants including aquatics, perennials, ornamental ferns, bedding plants, shrubs, fruit bushes and trees, and will offer advice on their care. Alongside the vendors, artists and crafters will showcase unique garden ornaments and sculptures plus handmade planters, furniture and gardening tools. Chefs taking part in the Fire and Food Festival will include Marcus Bawdon, editor of the UK BBQ Magazine and author

HOT STUFF: The Fire and Food kitchen at Pallington and, right, baskets on display at a previous garden festival

Mum’s Kitchen...

White chocolate and Cardamom Tart with a Walnut and Hazelnut Base

This is a rich and delicious dessert for a special occasion. Raspberries or blueberries make a lovely accompaniment to serve with it. Ingredients:

200g walnuts 200g hazelnuts 175g butter, melted 250g mascarpone 100ml double cream 300g good quality white chocolate, broken into pieces 1tsp vanilla extract Seeds from 15 cardamom pods, crushed coarsely

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C, 160C fan oven. Spread walnuts and hazelnuts out on a baking tray and roast for around 8 minutes or until golden brown. (Nuts burn very quickly, so do set the timer. Check after 5 minutes as ovens vary) Remove and leave to cool. When cool, put half of the walnuts and half of the hazelnuts into a food processor and blitz to a fine powder. Put into a bowl and blitz the rest of the nuts to a

park Fire and Food garden festival

ACE OF SPADES; Simon Gudgeon at the new outdoor kitchen at Pallington with, above, garden displays and, below, tasty treats

of Food and Fire, Luke Vandore-Mackay, the director of High Grange Devon, an outdoor covered woodland dining and cookery school, plus Dorset’s own Mat Follas, former Masterchef winner and wild food expert. Meat will be supplied by the award-winning Brace of Butchers, Poundbury, who will be on hand with expert advice on Saturday and Sunday. The event, taking place in the new open air riverside kitchen, will also premier the Bent Copper Bar, a former horsebox transformed by Simon Gudegon into a cocktail bar with a domed copper roof. Simon added: “I have developed a love for fire cooking over the past couple of years, and that has given rise to a new element of the garden festival – Fire and Food –offering both the spectacle of flame cooking, and of course the delicious results.”

n Entry is £14.50 and tickets must be booked in advance at sculpturebythelakes. co.uk Children under 14 and dogs are not permitted due to fast-flowing deep water.

rough crumb. Mix with the powdered nuts and stir in the melted butter. Line a buttered 23cm quiche dish with non-stick baking paper. Tip in the nut mixture and press out firmly to line the base and up the sides. You want the base to be crunchy and quite thin rather than a thick crust. Chill it in the fridge whilst you get on the filling. Put the mascarpone, double cream, white chocolate, vanilla and cardamom into a pan and warm over a low heat, stirring all the time until the chocolate as melted. Remove from the heat. Pour the cholate mixture into the base. Return to the fridge to set for a few hours.

with Diana Holman

Vittles (food & drink) Balance and harmony key to good wine

Meet Jack Priestley, the manager of wine merchants Morrish and Banham’s Dorchester shop. Jack will be writing a regular column, passing on his secrets and sharing his knowledge about all things grape.

I’d like to tell you a little bit about my life in wine. Share a few stories, tell you what’s new and exciting in the industry and hopefully I’ll pass on a bit of knowledge too and offer some tips and advice for anyone with an interest in wine. I grew up in Weymouth into quite a foodie family and my dad was, and remains, a passionate wine enthusiast. Wine was always a part of mealtimes and social occasions. Since a young age I began tasting, always intrigued by the flavours, the stories and the joy of wine. On a trip to Australia, I bought a beat-up old car, and toured the Adelaide Hills asking for a job at various vineyards. Someone took me on and I’ve never looked back. Immersed in wine, I’ve worked in vineyards, wineries, tasting rooms and now I run a shop in Dorchester for Morrish & Banham. I have learnt how to taste wine. All the greatest wine critics, you and I will all use the same process. Look, sniff then taste. It all sounds rather simple. But the key is being present. Tasting wine requires your attention and a good memory, so maybe keep a notepad to hand. The colour, is it clear, bright, straw in colour, or perhaps deep ruby? The smell, give the glass a swish. Are the aromas of citrus and freshly cut grass? Or are they black cherry and plum or black pepper? You don’t have to have the greatest nose in the world, but take a few moments to appreciate the aromas. What does it say to you? The more you ‘taste’ the better you’ll become at recognising different flavours. Take a moderate sip, think about the flavours, the acidity. If it’s red - you’ll likely notice some tannin too. You’ll hear wine folk bang on about balance, balance is key, ask yourself are all of these elements of the wine singing in harmony? Finally, do you like it? There are so many wines out there to discover, use this simple guide explore and enjoy your wines. Cheers!

MAN OF TASTE: Jack Priestley

Community spirit well in stock at village shop

A band of friendly volunteers and a small team of paid staff keep the community at the heart of the award-winning Halstock Village Shop and Post Office. This not-for-profit shop means prices are kept as low as possible and surplus profits are ploughed back into the community. In 2019 the shop won the Centenary Award from the Plunkett Foundation, which stated: “Halstock Village Shop is not just an original, it is the original –the original community owned and run shop that helped create a template for others to follow.” With locally made bread, cakes, sandwiches and pasties plus a huge choice of cheese, chilled and frozen foods along with fresh fruit and vegetables, all as locally sourced where possible, and wine, cider and beer, the shop is a go-to destination for villagers. The shop also makes sure it has those ‘odds and ends’ that we all run out of so annoyingly, like batteries, clothes pegs, balls of string, bin bags and reading glasses. There’s a friendly community room behind the shop where you can buy fresh coffee. And every Thursday, a coffee morning is held here in Halstock Village Shop with steaming coffee and home-made cake!

HEART OF THE COMMUNITY: Halstock village shop

The West Dorset Magazine, May 20, 2022 31 Vittles (food & drink)

Lizzie Crow – AKA Lizzie Baking Bird – is a self taught baker, who has a stall outside her home in Upwey each Saturday. See her scrumptious eats at lizziebakingbird.co.uk or find lizzibakingbird on Instagram.

A really tasty treat for our furry friends

Our dogs have a big impact on our life, as friends and companions and working for the military and police and as therapy dogs and so on. With this in mind I figured they deserve a home-made treat. Dog biscuits are ridiculously easy to make with just four ingredients. I have a natty bone shape cutter (you can pick one up very cheaply) and you can either buy one or use whatever you have knocking about.

Makes 12 bone-shaped biscuits Ingredients 125g apple 125g carrot 1 egg 200g wholemeal flour (plus more for rolling out)

Oven at Gas 6/ 200C. Grate the apple and carrot together (alternatively if you have a food processor pop the ingredients in the bowl and blitz). Take the pulp and put in a mixing bowl with the egg and flour. Stir until the ingredients come together to form a soft dough (I usually dispose of the spoon half way through and get my hands in there). If too stiff then add a tablespoon or so of water. Too sticky then add more flour. Each brand and type of flour will take varying degrees of fluid so you may need to add the water. Once you have a smooth dough put in the fridge to rest for 30 minutes. Take the dough from the fridge and lightly flour a pastry board. Roll the pastry out to circa 5mm thick. Cut out your biscuits and place them on a baking tray lined with parchment . Leave a little space in between but not too wide as these biscuits don’t spread much during cooking. Turn the oven on and allow the biscuits to begin to cook as the oven is heating up. This will be counter intuitive, but you want these biscuits to dry out and bake. Leave for about 45 to 50 minutes (until the biscuits are crisp rather than bendy). Switch the oven off and leave to cool. When cold feed to Fido. As you can probably tell my dogs love ’em.

n Lizzie bakes at home and has a stall each Saturday in the The Old Ship Inn, Upwey. Checkout her website lizziebakingbird.co.uk Have a look at her Instagram feed to see her make the biscuits