I CAN’T RECALL if I have ever been at the wrong end of a mussel (or should that be a mussel at the wrong end of me?) but I’ve been pretty damn close.
My mussel dish of choice is moules mariniere ( not the miserable sort they serve up with factory frites to unwary tourists off the Grand Place in Brussels) although not all British chefs are aware this does not involve cream.
I can’t stand moules a la creme because I once ate it in a long dead Sheffield restaurant and as the cream went down it revealed an also long dead, rotten, putrid mollusc. It was only by a supreme effort of will that I stopped myself heaving up over the table.
It’s no great shakes producing a creditable version of moiles mariniere although some chains take no chances. When I saw mussels on the menu but was refused them without cream it told me all I needed to know: the kitchen had been so deskilled mussels and cream came ‘boil in the bag.’
Pulling mussels from the shell is a pleasurable experience, although it doesn’t make me feel like Wiiliam Tell as in the Squeeze song!
Their soft texture combined with a briny taste with a touch of sweetness, and liquor of wine, juices, butter, herbs and garlic mopped up with slices of buttered baguette make them an easy home dish at a fraction of the price eaten out.
The only downside is the impossibility of getting a proper baguette as besides what our household calls a French Stick.
There’s an R in the month and the mussels urge was strong so I headed down to Sheffield’s Moor Market and bought two nets at Smith & Tissington’s stall for £7.50 the pair.
From Shetland, they were relatively clean and just needed a scrape and de-beard before rinsing and leaving in the fridge.
if you are ever in a quandary about how many nets to buy always get more than you need.
You have to bargain for a certain number of discards before and after you’ve cooked them – about ten a bag in this case.
And a word of warning. If it doesn’t close completely when you tap it, bin it. Never, ever give a mussel the benefit of the doubt. And the same goes if it’s a struggle to prise wide a half open one when cooked.
And if you cook too many there’s always something exciting you can do with the leftovers, like pickle them.
To cook you need the biggest pot you have although you can always cook in batches. I cooked mine in a stock pot then ladled the opened mussels into a pre-heated casserole dish while the mussels liquor reduced.
I sautéed finely chopped shallot and a couple of cloves of garlic with a bay leaf in butter and virgin olive oil before adding the mussels, letting them heat up then adding a glug of white wine (not too much, you don’t want to spend ages reducing the broth), lemon, seasoning and herbs, in my case parsley and coriander.
I say it myself, they were lovely. Particularly when I reflected how much our mountain of mussels would have cost in a restaurant.
And we hadn’t ate them all.I still had about 20 I couldn’t get in the pan so cooked lemon up in a little mussel broth, shelled them when cool, popped them in dish and covered them in ground white pepper, cider vinegar and a tablespoon of broth.
They were great in a salad the next day. The remaing shellfish liquor went into a pot to freeze for my next fish soup.
The incredible story of how a pensioner hi-jacked a war memorial and convinced a lot of people that he’d tended it all his life . . .
ON SUNDAY, February 25, there will be a poignant ceremony at a war memorial in Endcliffe Park, Sheffield.
It will be the 80th anniversary of the incident in which the United States Flying Fortress bomber Mi Amigo crashed on the site in 1944, where the memorial now stands. All ten crew were killed.
Thanks to £21,000 raised by the Sheffield branch of the Royal Air Force Association, comrades in arms of their American counterparts, it now looks a lot smarter and tidier.
In recent years it had become what some might say tawdry and garish, certainly vulgar, after 87-year-old fantasist Tony Foulds set up shop there claiming to have tended it all his life.
The untended memorial in 2005. So where was Foulds?
That would have taken some doing as the memorial was not erected until 1969.
His story is that he was playing with friends in the park when the bomber, trying to make an emergency landing, crashed into some trees trying to avoid them.
He recalls seeing the pilot waving a warning. Ever since then he has lived with the ‘guilt’ of surviving. And out comes a handkerchief to wipe away the tears.
The story does not stand up for a moment. For a start the bomber was not trying to make a belly landing but spiralled down from the sky, according to contemporary newspaper reports.
And no other person that day has come forward to verify his story.
Curiously, no one had seen him at the annual ceremony down the years – always faithfully reported in the local press – until he became news.
A Flying Fortress seen head on
Somehow he had evaded journalists and park users until the ‘story’ came to light in 2018..
There is no mention of him in the book Mi Amigo by local military historian David Harvey, which forensically explores the crash of the Flying Fortress and its aftermath.
So how on earth had it happened?
I set out to find why and published the result in two blog posts read by thousands. The story would make a comic novel, perhaps something after Tom Sharpe.
It involves lazy journalism, council officials content to overlook the facts, a credulous TV personality and an old man who let his imagination run away with him.
But let Tony tell you himself. An amateur video in December 2017 recorded him saying he had noticed the uncared for memorial two years before and decided to tidy it up.
So that takes us back to about 2016. It certainly doesn’t mean he ” spent his life paying tribute,” as eulogised in a letter to him from United States ambassador Robert W Johnson in February 2018.
It can be seen in a new display board at the site dedicated to the crew – and Tony.
Tony Foulds may have pottered about the monument unnoticed for years but for the fact that Sheffield-based TV personality Dan Walker decided to take his dog for a walk through the park on a crisp January day in 2018.
And there he met Tony.
As the then BBC Breakfast host tweeted excitedly a little later: “Just met an amazing man in Endcliffe Park. Tony Foulds was an eight year old playing in the park when a US plane crashed in February 1944.
Tony Foulds outside the memorial
“He has diligently maintained thè memorial ever since. He was planting new flowers. What a man. I am in bits.”
Excited Dan might have reflected how the story had gone unreported for over half a century. Or followed the first law of journalism: check your facts.
Which shows that sitting on a sofa in a television studio is no substitute for real journalism.
And very soon that sofa was occupied by Tony Foulds who repeated his story to the nation. No one sought to question it in the BBC.
In Sheffield they did. Local residents who regularly used the park were baffled by the sudden appearance of this old man whom they had unaccountably overlooked.
Some posted corrections on the BBC Breakfast website and reported them being taken down. Staff at BBC Radio Sheffield were ordered to stay silent.
Regardless, Dan Walker, or those close to him, realising that the following 2019 would be the 75th anniversary of the crash, hit upon the idea of celebrating it in a big way with Foulds as the centrepiece.
Tony and Dan at the memorial before the revamp
He tweeted again, this time with the hash tag #GetTonyAFlypast for the following February and the US ambassador swiftly agreed.
In the meantime Foulds became a celebrity. He was showered with honours and awards, among them a Btitish Citizen Award. There was an online campaign to give him an MBE, which went unheard.
He was even the subject of a portrait competition at the city’s biggest art show.
He was given a flight over the city along the route the Mi Amigo was supposed to have taken and money flowed in to a special web page dedicated to the ‘upkeep’ of the memorial, despite the fact it belonged to the city council.
Of course, local politicians jumped on the bandwagon. One MP enthused about Foulds in parliament while then council leader Julie Dore, with the same sense of judgement she displayed in the Sheffield Tree Scandal, proposed him for a local heroes’ ‘star’ outside the Town Hall alongside more deserving names such as astronaut Helen Sharman and Marti Caine.
The Mi Amigo wreckage and, inset the crew
It didn’t aeem to matter that local historian Harvey pointed out, as he had in his book and on my blog, that the attempted belly landing was an urban legend which arose as late as the Nineteen Nineties.
“There is no factual evidence to support or corroborate this story,” he has said.
Dan Walker has never spoken to him, although he missed a call from the star a few days after he had tweeted and Walker didn’t follow it up.
The renovated memorial
The BBC, incidentally, claims he was consulted but they didn’t ask the right questions. Harvey was at the flypast but just asked about the fate of the pet dog on board.
Surprisingly none of the local media wanted to touch the real story. An embarrassed contact at my old paper the Sheffield Star said they were only going to report Foulds’ claim, not support it.
The Yorkshire Post was no better. “At this stage having assessed all the material presented to me by one of my best journalists I am not minded to publish, ” editor James Mitchinson told me in an email.
The day of the flypast was a big event. The BBC broadcast it live and thousands crammed the park to watch USAAF and RAF planes overhead.
Ten men might have died but it was Tony Foulds, eyes welling with tears, who was the focus of screen attention. There was even a live chat between him and Walker, then halfway up Mount Kilimanjaro.
Contrastingly, a religious ceremony in the park got scant TV time.
The affair was all too much for one local resident who protested to the council that the evidence did not support Foulds’ story.
Then chief executive John Mothersole wrote back: “Given the role of the BBC in picking up on the story and initiating the event, I think that fact checking should fall to them.”
So much for due diligence.
And the BBC subtly shifted its ground. From flatly declaring on news bulletins and magazine programmes that Foulds had been tending the memorial from day one, it now misleadingly said:
A painted pebble at the memorial
” Tony has not claimed to have tended the memorial site for decades. He regularly visited but has only been looking after it for the last few years.”
Contrast this with what Dan Walker tweeted and claimed on TV. “He has diligently mauntained the memorial ever since (1944).”
The flypast and outside broadcast certainly brought publicity and put the memorial in the spotlight, even though Foulds, making almost daily appearances there, turned it into a gaudy shrine.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Sheffield RAFA refused to go on the record about his spurious claims.
Author David Harvey, is charitable. While putting the blame on the BBC for the inaccurate reporting, he says “Poor old Tony has found himself in a position where he can’t retract from his ‘local hero’ position as it would be extremely embarrassing for him.”
He adds:”What gets my goat is that the story should be about the ten airmen. Sheffield had a lucky escape. It’s one of the city’s greatest stories.”
Should anyone still believe in the truth of Tony Foulds’ claim I advise them to read David Harvey’s excellent book.*
David Harvey’s book on the crash
In it he details contemporary newspaper and eye witness reports of the Mi Amigo falling out of the sky.
Nowhere is there any mention of the plane attempting a belly landing and trying to avoid schoolchildren.
There were certainly children playing in the park but the plane crashed into trees.
It had circled the city for some time but Endcliffe would have been a postage stamp of a landing strip for such a big plane. In fact, the engines failed and it fell out of the sky.
So will Dan Walker, now with Channel 5, and the BBC mark the anniversary by admitting the big mistake?
Will the local Press finally print the real story?
Over to them . . .
*Mi Amigo, The Story of Sheffield’s Flying Fortress, is published by ALD Print, Sharrowvale Road, Sheffield, at £6.95.
NO ONE smashed a plate, at least not deliberately. But we did get a blast on the old balalaika and blue and white flags on our orange polenta cake.
It was Greek night at the once a month bistro run by Sheffield zero waste enterprise Foodworks at its Sharrow Old School kitchen.
Now me and Greek food have always had an uneasy relationship. It started when I reviewed a Hellenic-themed restaurant for The Star back in the Eighties, the sort of place where you paid to smash crockery and it paid to triple-check your bill afterwards.
I didn’t review it kindly and when they complained my boss told them to go to Ephesus . . . or something like that.
Then when I holidayed in Greece every restaurant seemed to have the same menu and the same stray cats winding themselves around your ankles and filching food from your plate.
Gabriela is ready for service
We’d flown into Athens on a sweltering night and the one thing we wanted was moussaka. I know … but it’s the sort of thing you do on holiday. It was the quite the worst I have ever eaten.
Only later did I learn that the vast majority of tourist moussakas are made in Romanian factories, frozen and lorried in.
If Odysseus had eaten it the night before he set sail he would have jacked it in and we would never have had the Odyssey.
Now the bistro night, like most of the others, is masterminded by Gabriela, Foodworks’ senior chef hubs manager. Gabriela is from Romania so I thought it best to keep quiet about the moussaka.
Moussaka isn’t even on the menu and Gabby has not provided even one stray cat but we have blue and white napkins and paper flags, plus plenty of olives to get us in the mood.
Foodworks finds a home for surplus food from the major supermarkets and other businesses and turns it into fresh and frozen meals at its kitchens cum cafes in Sharrow and Upperthorpe.
Sea bass with lemon potatoes
Then there’s its warehouse where more food is saved from waste and a farm which supplies fruit, vegetables and herbs for the busy kitchens.
Just to give you some idea Foodworks served up 6,726 lunches from January to June and thats not counting frozen meals. Altogether some 500 tonnes of food is saved from landfill.
Gabriela had the pick of the warehouse once she had chosen the night’s theme so we started, how else?, with pitta, olives, dips and stuffed vegetables, followed by sea bass with lemon potatoes and ended up with a traditional orange polenta cake.
It was lovely stuff for the 44 of us sitting down to eat and I didn’t see much left. Who would have dared after hearing Foodworks ‘ CEO Rene Meijer tell us it was “gobsmackingly bananas” that food was going to waste in a time of climate change.
As he put it, and who would want to argue, just by sitting down and tucking in we were making a difference.
Of course, food is no good unless it is prepared well and that is down to the efforts of Gabriela and her fellow professional chefs Simon and Jonathan with volunteer cooks Jean, Kath and Phil and servers Jan, Sue and Rachel.
So why not pop along to the next bistro in November and do your bit to make a difference?
DISCLAIMER: I’m not entirely unbiased since I do a regular kitchen shift at Sharrow and was Gabriela’s guest on the night. But this was good value in anybody”s money.
IT has been a poor year for apples – I haven’t even had my juicer out – but a pretty good one for that other member of the apple family: rosehips.
The hedgerows are full of them and I picked a pound or so for my annual supply of rosehip syrup.
It’s great drizzled on ice cream, pancakes or to flavour my weekly batches of kombucha, that fermented tea drink which does your bowels a lot of good!
Every time there is mention of rosehips writers trot out the story that it helped Britain stay healthy during World War Two.
Rosehips contain vitamin C, up to 20 times or more that of oranges, in short supply during the war. So in 1941, for example, there was a drive to collect them, chiefly by women and children, and some 200 tons were turned into 600,000 bottles of syrup.
Sugar, of course, was also on the ration but the state had the supplies. At home, people could replace sugar with honey, or simply have the syrup unsweetened.
Boiling will destroy some of the vitamins but there is so much more in the first place you needn’t worry.
Chew a rosehip off the hedge and it will taste faintly orangey and sweet but make sure you don’t swallow the pips or fine hairs, once used as itching powder.
Traditionally you waited till the first frost to soften the hips but these days we all have freezers so I pop them in there until I have enough.
First, though, you want to top and tail ( use scissors ) and wash them before freezing.
I used a River Cottage recipe but all are basically the same. It helps if you bash up the defrosted hips and you can do it in a food processor.
I had about 600g of hips and I boiled them up with an equal quantity of water. Bring to the boil then simmer for 20 minutes, removing any scum.
Then I lined a sieve with a layer of muslin to strain the liquid and keep out the pips and hairs.
Washed,, topped and tailed rosehips
It’s up to you how much you sweeten it but two-thirds the amount of sugar to juice is about right. Add the sugar and heat until dissolved, pouring into sterilised bottles.
You don’t need to keep it in the fridge but my syrups soon start to ferment and need to be ‘popped’ every so often so cooler storage will slow fermentation down.
Simmer the hips before straining
As you can see, the rosehips may have started out bright red but the syrup ends up orange, the colour of the fruit is is a substitute for.
You don’t have to stick to syrup. You are already halfway in the process of making a jelly, ideal on toast or to enhance sauces and stews.
However, despite being in the apple family, rosehips don’t have the same amount of pectin. That’s easily resolved by boiling up with some apples or adding a tablespoon of lemon juice.
IT’S nearly 30 degrees and Daniel Grimm is trying to persuade Sheffielders to try some of his soup. For free.
In this heat? Is he mad? No, he’s Hungarian.
Hungary is in the very centre of Central Europe where they love cooling, soothing, often fruity summer soups.
So this is just the kind of day for soup. If you were in Budapest.
Sweet and sour plum anyone? Or sour cherry? How about chestnut or if you want savoury, turkey and tarragon?
Daniel, aged 39, with a quarter of a century in the food business behind him, has just launched a new company, S(o)uper Ltd, selling eight different varieties in takeaway tubs from his pals at Cafe Tucci’s premises on Surrey Street and Ecclesall Road.
Daniel with Cafe Tucci boss Salvatore Capasso
I’d have thought a Hungarian would be selling goulash, I say, scanning the list and failing to spot it.
“Sshh! We don’t use that word here, it’s a Neapolitan cafe,” says Daniel pointing a finger to where the Soup That Does Not Speak Its Name hides coyly behind the label, beef and vegetable.
Daniel, in Sheffield since 2012, in England since 2005, has done virtually everything in the food business both sides of the kitchen door. You might have seen him as general manager of Brazilian steakhouse Tropeiro ( now closed ) or front of house at Ego.
“Now I want to do something for myself and build a business,” says Daniel, who has teamed up with Romanian Claudiu Bungau to run the company.
The soups on sale at Cafe Tucci
He’s wearing a T-shirt which says ‘Ask me about my soup,’ so I do.
Central Europe goes big on soups and they just don’t think of them as winter dishes. Served cool or cold, they can take the edge off long, hot summers.
As he is just starting out Daniel, who uses family recipes, is hiring space in a commercial kitchen while the fledgling company gets off the ground.
The soups sell at £5.50, initially at Cafe Tucci, and he is hoping local supermarkets and delis will also take the product on.
The soup menu
It’s lunchtime and he is serving free samples to curious passers-by. His personal favourite is turkey and tarragon, not too hot, which tastes quite luxurious.
A Filipina lady approves. “It reminds me of soup back home. Without the coconut.”
Think of Hungary and you think paprika but, oddly, Daniel is not one for spicy food. “Which is strange since I’m married to Mo, from Nigeria, and they love hot spices.”
Other flavours will follow. He’s waiting to see which tickle the Sheffield appetite. He’s a friendly, enthusiastic chap and I wish him well.
In fact, I hope he finishes up in the soup. Literally!
Daniel (centre) and Claudiu tempt a shopper
*Cafe Tucci will be opening a third venue shortly at Kommune so Daniel’s soups will also be available there.
YOU fancy a meal out but don’t want to trade home comforts for a stuffy restaurant dining room?
Ideally it would be dining al fresco but the pesky British climate has a habit of turning a little bit too frisky and can rustle up a squall or a downpour at the drop of a weatherman’s hat.
What you really need is a halfway house, all the comforts of eating inside outside and ideally a chew with a view.
Something perhaps like Sheffield’s newest dining experience – three miniature geodesic dining domes on the emerald lawns of the Kenwood Hall Hotel, Nether Edge.
Customers can book the domes for two hour slots and, depending on the time of day, order lunch, afternoon tea or an evening meal.
The sharing platter
Step inside and you are instantly shielded from the weather but with a panoramic 360 degree view over the hotel’s 12 acres, leading down to the lake.
Each dome has a circular table seating up to eight people. There were four of us.
It’s a bit like being under a giant transparent brolly with an uninterrupted view and no wind to whisk your napkin away.
It’s early days – the domes have only been open for about a month – but customers enthuse over a magical evening experience. As the daylight fades the domes light up, fairylights twinkling everywhere you look.
Our party enjoyed a sunny lunchtime, free from draughts, in one of the domes.
And we couldn’t agree more with general manager Ruslana Yarmolyuk who describes a dome as ” a cosy private dining space suitable for every occasion.”
While this is one meal where it’s all about location, location, location the food comes up to the mark.
Time for dessert
We enjoyed a sharing platter of charcuterie- meats, cheese, breads and olives – at £13.99 a head and another of desserts (£10 pp) with excellent cheesecake and choux buns. A roast lunch is £17 or you can book an afternoon tea from the Laura Ashley tea room.
Of course, if you can see clearly outside others can see in, so you do get an idea of what a goldfish in a bowl feels like!
Dining at the domes is all about a sense of occasion, either as a couple, family ( remember they seat up to eight) or having a party.
REMEMBER when every other menu you looked at had butternut squash on the starters and lamb shanks on the mains?
Any chef worth his or her salt could turn them into an irresistible dish – lustrous soup, fall off the bone meat – with a minimum of effort and pennies.
Then as I remember, it was pork or ham hocks.
Now chefs have discovered beef cheeks. Cook ’em low and slow for three or four hours, some do it for even more ( you hardly need any gas on the stove top ) and they transform into melting moments so tender they fall apart at the touch of a knife.
Superb, complete with their own broth, with mashed potatoes or turned into a ragu.
Trimming the cheeks
They come with a pretty high mark up but you can get pretty much the same result (minus the cheffy twist perhaps) at home.
I have not seen them on sale in supermarkets so you need a good butcher. When I first saw them on the slab at Ralph Thickitt, Sharrowvale Road, Sheffield, and heard the price I had to have a go.
Make sure they have been properly trimmed of sinew and fat. If they are not ( my last purchase were obligingly yanked out of the chiller for me ) finish the job yourself. You can melt down the trimmings to give you enough fat to seal them off in the pan or casserole.
Then set them aside and saute off finely chopped vegetables, an onion, garlic, a couple of carrots and stalks of celery with some herbs: bay, thyme and sage and whatever takes your fancy.
Then when they are nicely translucent pop the beef cheeks on top ( about one per person or halve them like I did for us) and cover with a couple of glasses of red wine and beef stock ( a cube and a shake of soy in my case).
Once it’s up to a simmer put the lid on and leave it, apart for the odd stir, for three or four hours. Test for doneness with the point of a knife.
Then take out the meat, remove the bay and liquidise the broth. You have now got a superb sauce for little effort.
Serve with mash and your favourite vegetables. We like buttered cabbage and carrots.
Searing them off
Of course, you can add all sorts of embellishments for extra unctiousness, perhaps a spoonful of redcurrant or fruit jelly or an anchovy or two.
These would be ideal for dinner parties. Like all stews and curries, this dish improves with a little keeping. They are just reheated in their sauce, gently, until piping hot.
Serve whole unless your guests are like my wife and don’t like chunks. They can be sliced. And the cheeks freeze well.
Don’t worry if they don’t look as if they won’t all fit in the pan at the outset. They will have once you have seared them off.
“I suppose this is what you might call boiled beef and carrots?” said my wife after a beef c,heek Sunday dinner.
I thought about it and laughed. She was right. A de-luxe version, though.
I RECKON the waiting staff at Tonco, that quirky little restaurant tucked away in the corner of Dyson Place, Sheffield, play Menu Bingo in idle moments.
And the one who draws croquettes usually takes the prize.
It’s the most requested dish most days says our server Simon.
Small wonder. I remember one with courgettes in the summer, all creamy interior inside a crisp, dry shell. So I’ve got my taste buds cued up for the blue cheese and Jerusalem artichoke with a quince aioli. Now there’s a novelty.
But it gets sidestepped by a special described as ” Hog’s head with our own brown sauce. “
It sells itself to me because I am a sucker for pig’s cheek ( if I decipher the restaurantspeak correctly ) and want to compare the sauce to my own homemade concoction.
Tonco has an open kitchen
It’s good, the meat shredded and studded with tiny diced carrot in the trademark soft filling, the exterior a satisfying crunch.
And the brown sauce gets my approval. Ten years ago every chef around was making it and it’s good to see at least one kitchen giving it a reprise. This is made with prunes, apples but no onions to give people who can’t eat alliums a shout out, according to the chef.
Tonco, run by Joe Shrewsbury and Florence Russell ( Jo and Flo) and named after a long-forgotten Barnsley soft drink, also does a nifty line in ravioli. I have fond memories of a summery one filled with goats cheese last summer.
Today’s has a roast beetroot filling, pleasant enough, but there are wedges of beetroot garnishing the dish and, even more, pallid yellow beetroot which barely makes a contribution, so this is rather overdoing things.
Beetroot, beetroot, beetroot!
Wisps of cavolo nero just irritate but roast hazelnuts provide crunch against good firm pasta. This time the goats cheese is outside, as a sauce.
Tonco still has its lunchtime special offer of three dishes for £22 and the house wines are fairly priced. There always seems to be something to intrigue on this menu even if this diner is not necessarily entirely bowled over.
I always associate Tonco as having a bit of a thing for turnips. Perhaps beetroot is the new turnip here.
BACK IN the Sixties as a young reporter for the Beccles & Bungay Journal I would be sent to cover village shows.
There would invariably be a tent or at least a table full of homemade jams and jellies, pickles and preserves, usually made by stout matrons from the Women’s Institute.
All very motherly and middle class but never for one moment did I guess this might one day be hip.
Then it was raspberry jam and pickled onions, these days it’s more likely to be a kombucha or kefir (fermented drink) bubbling up for prizes.
I am at Hideaway, a dishevelled former factory, the White Rose Works, in Eyre Lane, Sheffield for the city’s second Pickle Fest.
I can give 30 or 40 years on the next oldest person there, and rather less hair, as people gather for workshops, talks, browse a few stalls, buy food or enter one of the several categories to have their prized jam, chutney, sauce, pickles or ferments to be judged in a mass taste test later that day.
I bring along three entries, two for the non- hot sauce category: Pontack, made with elderberries, and a brown fruit sauce from prunes and apples, plus a chutney from foraged windfall apples in my neighbourhood.
The contestants waiting to be judged
I’m delighted to find these are the first entries if you don’t count the jar entered last year which no one could open and has been resubmitted this year. Tough competition.
The festival is organised by a loose group of people called Social Pickle, explains Lisa Marriott, one of the organisers who, like other young women, is wearing a fetching sash with the organisation’s name.
It gives the event, for an old-timer like me, the slightly disconcerting air of a Sixties beauty contest with Miss Pickles on display although of course the real beauties are the jars of Green Bean Chunky Ketchup and evil- looking Carrotchanga for sale at the pay-as-you-feel stall.
“We started during Lockdown preparing surplus ingredients for meals for our Food Hall Project ( on Brown Street) and realised there was a lot of energy around,” she says.
What couldn’t be used immediately was pickled and preserved.
“Cider vinegar was our first project, sold in local shops, and we’ve expanded into weekly Glut Clubs.”
I’m impressed. They are not just sitting back and waiting for surplus food to come in. Some are going out and foraging for it.
With things like sauerkraut, kimchis and kombuchas the Fermentation Generation is a lot more adventurous and sophisticated than its grannies. In fact, they’re making a bit of a fizz.
I couldn’t stay for the judging and I’ve been waiting at home for the telephone to ring and tell me if I’d won a category ( not that they were overwhelmed with entries ).
To pass the time I took home one of the jars of Carrotchanga. ” We fermented the carrot to make a Ketchup then added other stuff,” someone said. It tastes how it looks, wicked.
And did they have a serving suggestion? ” Put it on your chips.
*The brown sauce was runner-up in the non-hot sauce category.
WE’VE BEEN eating out quite a bit lately: on a roll you might say plenty of good food to enjoy.But rather than bore you with a bite by bite rundown here are selected mouthfuls.
Let’s start with dinner at newly opened Rosmarino on Abbeydale Road, Sheffield, an Italian in what had been the premises of a Portuguese eatery and before that a Polish one which had a dozen soups on the starters).
It’s their first restaurant together for newly-married Abdellatif, from Casablanca, and his Anglo-Italian wife Lidia. Abdel opened Olive with his brother on Ecclesall Road a couple of years back while Lidia’s family had La Terrazza (now Bella Donna) on Sharrowvale Road.
Unlike many Italian restaurants the place does not feel overcrowded with plenty of space and elbow room between the tables. “We took quite a few out,” Lidia told me.
We ate with foodie friends Craig and Marie Harris, who know a thing about Italian food. My starter of calamari was a wee bit chewy but had a lovely jalapeno and lime jam to go with it (£8.50).
A main of ravioli with a gentle hit of black truffle (£15.95) impressed with its good, firm pasta and lively mushroom and parmesan sauce. We topped things off with a home made tiramusi made, surprisingly, with lemon drizzle cake. It worked!
On to Tonco in Dyson Place, which always makes me think of turnips because they once featured heavily on its very esoteric menu. It always seem to faintly annoy me: must be the irritating Pud-Pud to signal the dessert section!
Ravioli at Tonco
But a family lunch here was terrific, in particular some courgette and Spenwood cheese croquettes (£6), crispy shells enclosing melting interiors, hogget meatballs wrapped a littlepointlessly in vine leaves (£8) and quite lovely summery goats cheese ravioli in a very simple but effective lemon butter and little gem sauce. Oh and the fig leaf custard tart (they were making those fig leaves work!) with bergamot puree was a great hit, too.
Next stop was a lunch at Trippetts in Trippet Lane, run by one-woman gin Wikipedia (and dispenser) Debbie Shaw and her husband Carl, who can always produce something special with his small plates menu.
Sliders at Trippets
Stupidly, I forgot to record the gins but did appreciate a trio of samosas and a duo of sliders (minii hamburgers) made from venison and beef in dinky little buns. I enjoyed the contrast in textures between the two meats.
Finally to The Broadfield on Abbeydale Road where it is always advisable to book, even on a Tuesday night, because the restaurant area gets rammed.
The Broadfield has a better-than-pub-food menu with classics such as home made pies and a Mittel-European-style roast ham hock of the kind you’d find in Prague.
That’s got a lot of calories (the amounts are listed on the menus) so I thought again and had the bangers and mash. Well banger because there was just one but homemade and what a plonker! It was very tasty, the pork helped along with ginger, a very old traditional spice, particularly with bacon. I was glad I chose it. And here’s the picture.
Another helping from Martin Dawes 
You must be logged in to post a comment.