My Sloe food project

SO you’ve strained all the gin off your sloe berries and those bottles look a beautiful colour. But what are you going to do with all those leftover berries? Get the worms drunk?

It’s notoriously difficult to squeeze the last vestiges of gin from hard blackthorn but the alcohol is still in there. And as the watchword of this blog is Waste Not, Want Not, they are crying out to be put to more good use. As it’s Christmas, why not sloe gin truffles?

There is a small problem of getting the pulp off the small hard stones but I used a Mouli and got satisfying amounts of berry pulp through. You only need 75g for this recipe so freeze the rest for when you have time to make a boozy jam, jelly or chutney in the new year.

This recipe makes around 15 good sized truffles.

You will need:

25g butter
75ml double (heavy) cream
200g good quality chocolate, broken
75g sloe berry pulp
2 tbsp sloe gin
cocoa powder

Slowly melt the butter and cream together in a pan, stirring slowly. Let it just come to the boil for a minute then remove from the heat and stir in the chocolate, bits at a time, and stir until melted in. You may need to return the pan to the heat from time to time, still stirring. When all the chocolate is melted, thoroughly stir in the pulp and a little bit of your sloe gin.

Pour onto a Swiss roll tin, let it set then put in the fridge to firm up for a couple of hours. Then sprinkle the cocoa onto a plate and on your hands and scrape up spoonfuls of chocolate mixture and roll into balls. Cover with cocoa powder and put into little paper cases. The truffles soften quite quickly so you may have to put the tray back in the fridge halfway through for the mix to firm up.

Keep them in the fridge. They should last for a week if you’re planning ahead. They taste very good with a glass of sloe gin but be warned, they are very rich. It goes without saying you can use any other fruit you have used to infuse your gin or vodka.

Make mine a Veeno

Every bit as good as it looks

IN need of some refreshment I dropped into Veeno, the new Italian ‘wine bar café’ on Ecclesall Road Sheffield. Make a note of the address or you might find yourself at Veeno’s mini mart on London Road where an involtini may be hard to come by.

Veeno is near Berkeley Precinct (I refuse to call it the renamed Berkeley Centre) in what used to be Carluccio’s, a place some local people called pants although my main grouse was the giant pepper pot they wanted to grind on to your meal before you’d checked the seasoning or flag one down if it turned out you did need pepper. Just leave the condiments on the table!

Veeno is not pants. In fact, it is very good if a tad, no, a soupcon, expensive.

I was alerted to it by fellow blogger and Italophile Craig Harris and his wife Marie who had enjoyed a visit to the Nottingham branch of the 15-strong chain and got me a ticket to the opening night. Like me, the best thing about their Italian holidays is finding a cosy little enoteca (the Italian for wine bar) with good wines and boards of meat and cheese. I always remember one on Lake Como where I upset the owner by querying the bill until I told him I thought he’d made a mistake because it seemed too cheap.

Reader, you won’t be thinking it comes cheap at Veeno although it does food, drink and atmosphere pretty well. Fitted out with tables, sofas, alcoves, walls lined with wine racks, and a bar, plus a tasting room, it serves up some very decent wines with top quality meats and cheese, plus a smattering of bruschettas and spuntini, nibbles, the Italian equivalent of tapas or dim sum.

Inside Veeno

That way you don’t need a chef, just someone adept at putting good quality ingredients together. It seems simple but then the best ideas are. The two young men who came up with translating the enoteca to Britain are Andrea Zecchino and Nino Caruso, whose family just happens to have a vineyard in Sicily.

We’d found a table and were sipping our complementary glasses of house wine when I flagged down a chap who looked like he was Andrea or Nino. He wasn’t. He was Mike from Hungary but he was the owner as he had the franchise, his second after York.

Magyar Mike must have been in an expansive mood because he generously told us to order some food on the house. Perhaps he thought we were influential: Style setters. We liked Mike. The evening’s photographer didn’t hold the same opinion because he never pointed his camera at us once.

Craig promptly ordered the most expensive board in the house, the Italia, at £24.50. And he did it with a straight face. It was lovely and included some Formaggella al Tartufo, a northern Italian cheese with truffles and some runaway gorgonzola with walnuts, speck, the best fennel salami I’ve had, breads, oil, honey with truffle and plenty more. The price could have been worse. In Bristol the same menu item is £26 while in Kingston upon Thames it is £26.50. Magyar Mike is obviously pitching his prices at what he thinks Sheffield will stand. I thought that top whack for the same thing on Lake Como would have been 15 euros but then you’ve got to factor in the air fare.

The house wine at £4 for 175ml was pretty decent, from the Caruso e Minini vineyard. The same glass is £4.20 in Bristol and another 20p more in Kingston. But as Craig had gone large on the free food he felt it only right to go large on the paid-for wine so he ordered us a bottle of Greco di Tufo at a stunning £28 (a quid less than in Bristol). It had lovely honeyed appley flavours.

So there you have it, a little pricy but a very well put together exercise, which is why the chain is doing well. I cavil a bit at the name, Veeno for Vino, and the clunking ‘wine bar café’ self-description instead of enoteca but that’s just me. It won’t stop me going, though!

Craig will doubtless be reporting at http://www.craigscrockpot.wordpress.com. You can check out the Veeno offering at http://www.theveenocompany.com

Veeno from the outside

 

The heart-stopping rise of King Cone

Lawrence Wosskow takes a lick

IT didn’t take more than a few minutes to like Lawrence Wosskow. That was par for the course. He got onwards and upwards by people liking him.

He was the chap who made a profit on some land in Central America and invested it in the then infant Café Rouge because he hit it off with the owner. He used the profits from that to buy an ice cream company in The Peak, whose owner took a shine to him, and struck up a friendship with Eddie Healey, the billionaire owner of Sheffield’s giant Meadowhall shopping complex, when he sold products there.

Money flowed in and he founded Out of Town Restaurants, the biggest UK restaurant chain then . . . but let’s go back to the beginning. If the former Silverdale pupil’s story is the ‘Local Boy Makes Good’ variety there is also a touch of Greek Tragedy.

I’d been a bit sceptical before meeting him at the old Hanrahan’s bar in 1992 as, glass of orange juice and straw in hand, he told me he’d bought Bradwell’s ice cream, a much loved but very local ice cream company.

Some months earlier I’d run a story saying Noel Bradwell, third generation owner of Bradwell’s Ice Cream, wanted to retire and needed a buyer. Lawrence, back in Sheffield from London because his wife Julie wanted their first child to be born here, and was looking to find a business.

He at first bid for the ski slope but missed out by a few thousand pounds. He must have been thanking his lucky stars in the years after that.

He told me his mother had shown him the cutting on Bradwell’s and suggested he buy it. Journalists like to feel they are involved and that much was true. But his mum also lived next door to Noel and he would have known anyway! What clinched a good story was he was going to use the popular Last of the Summer Wine TV character Norah Batty as his company logo.

Media-savvy Lawrence never intended that but he was good copy, as we say in the trade. I was to write about him and his ventures, on and off, over the next few decades.

Now he’s telling his own story in his self-published autobiography Little Chef, The Heart of the Deal. He was a young tearaway at school (a teacher wrote in his report that if he took as much interest in his lessons as with girls he would be a genius). He still finished up with 2 A-levels and 10 O-levels.

He was a genius at business. He became Marks & Spencer’s youngest-ever buyer at 24, took over or founded a series of successful companies and was, as he admits, “running at 100mph” when stress led to a near fatal heart attack after watching England crash out of the World Cup to Portugal in Germany in 2006.

My Profile magazine interview in 1999

He was on the brink of reviving the ailing Little Chef, an out-of-date empire of roadside cafes. Told to take it easy and quit business for up to three years the big plans fizzled out. Little Chef collapsed. After his brush with the Grim Reaper Lawrence moved his family to the United States, leaving his businesses and power of attorney in the hands of a childhood friend, James Burdall, who fleeced him of several millions (figures vary) and caused the collapse of his business empire.

The first I heard was when, not long after I’d retired I got a telephone call from him while I was driving to a holiday in Suffolk. I contacted my old office to put them on the scent.

Most people who are very rich have not made their money nicely. Lawrence Wosskow doesn’t fit that mould. He says he is able to ‘mirror’ the people he is with. Perhaps that is what worked with me.

I kept on writing about him although some stories were left to The Star’s business desk. To jazz up my copy I had dubbed Lawrence King Cone until I got a phone call asking me to stop because schoolfriends were teasing his son Toby. Regretfully I agreed. His family is everything. He claims it cost him £25,000 to replace the branding which featured his daughter Hannah, then aged two, because by the time she got to six she, too, was being called names at school.

He has had time for retrospection. Lawrence suggests that he suffered from inherited anxiety which he suppressed with an adrenaline rush from his business interests. He didn’t leave things to others. Before buying Little Chef he personally visited 220 out of its 234 outlets in 60 days.

There are some good stories in the book. He paid £250,000 for the Loseley ice cream brand and stock then discovered the stock was worth £300,000 so he’d bought it for nothing. He turned around another failing ice cream company, in North Wales, which so infuriated the former owner (whom Lawrence still sportingly employed) that he sabotaged the refrigeration unit. With half a ton of melting ice cream it was a race against time to find alternative storage. The ex-boss spent time in the cooler.

Another who did, Burdall, the friend who shafted him, was sent to prison for four years in March 2014 for swindling him out of £1.2m (although in his book Lawrence reckons it was nearer £3m, with the collapse of his companies). Bradwell’s was only saved with an injection of his own cash. “What hurt most . . . was the fact that Burdall transferred £20,000 the day he took over the chequebook, the very day I left for the United States. What a complete an utter scumbag,” he writes.

Later parts of the book chronicle the partying and high-profile friends he has made since, from Sir Elton John to Sir Richard Branson. He has done a lot for charity. Despite the name dropping he comes across as a genuinely decent, perhaps a bit too trusting bloke. After several years he and Julie, his teenaged sweetheart since 17, left the USA for tax reasons and now live in the Bahamas.

These days Lawrence (who, unfortunately, has written the book in American English) is a property developer. Sadly Meadowhall, now in different hands, turfed out his businesses through non-payment of rent during the Burdall saga. There are still not too many nice guys in business.

Little Chef: The Heart of the Deal is available on Amazon. Profits from the book will go to the Elton John Aids Foundation and Dreamflight.