The other reason to visit the Dionysos is the amazing cooking. Ahmet’s daughter, Didem Senol trained as a chef in New York and then Istanbul before becoming the chef at the Dionysos. Her cooking is creative, exciting and uniformly delicious. She and her fantastic team scour local markets and use produce from the Dionysos farm further up the mountain. From the start Ahmet created an organic farm growing a lot of the vegetables, olives, fruit and herbs used in the hotel. More recently he invested a considerable amount of money in building an olive pressing unit to extract their own oil. Their extra virgin olive oil is a very high quality oil which they use in all their cooking. The oil is called Amos organic olive oil and is the oil extracted from the early harvesting of their olives around the farm and Dionysos estate. Amazingly they won a coveted award at the annual olive oil “Oscars” in Italy the first time they entered last year! Amos olive oil is now ranked in the top 100 extra virgin olive oils in the world. Not bad for a fairly new venture. Sadly they don’t produce enough to satisfy both the Dionysos requirements and commercial outlets so you can’t buy it except at the Dionysos. Fortunately this year Didem has put together a wonderful book containing a lot of her recipes which I highly recommend. Called Aegean Flavours it is a great way to sample her take on the best of Turkish ingredients in ways I would never have tried. However one recipe which isn’t in the book is the following recipe for White Yoghurt Soup which my husband adored and so I got Unda to tell me the recipe on our last night. Here it is with a few tweaks as I was slightly worse for wear when he dictated it to me after several Margharita’s!

White Yoghurt Soup

This amount will serve 10:

2 litres water

100g  easy cook rice

Mix the above ingredients and cook for 15 mins until the rice is cooked.

500g natural yoghurt

1 free range egg

125g plain flour

1 litre water

half lemon juiced

small handful of oregano or 1 tsp dried oregano

1/2 tsp chilli flakes

handful chopped mint

small handful chopped tarragon or 1 tsp dried tarragon

handful chopped parsley

1 tablespoon salt

pepper

1 x 400g tin drained chickpeas

50g butter

Mix all together except the chickpeas and herbs and bring to a gentle simmer. Use a whisk to stir in the flour as it tends to clump. Add the butter and herbs followed by the chickpeas, continue simmering for a few minutes and serve.

Fatima

There hasn’t been much to report on our three Gloucester Old Spot pigs that hadn’t happened to our last three rare breed pigs. Twice a day stand well back and sling a bucket of food in the general direction of trough and repeatedly go out to refill their water butt which they love up-ending! I don’t know how they managed to do it but every time they splashed me with mud. Because they insisted on knocking over the water butt we ended up with a small corner pond next to the butt which never dried out. Like the last pigs they loved rolling, sitting and walking around in this muddy sludge and because they were so greedy and assertive they would jump up at the fence whenever they heard me coming, hence the splatterings!

Anyway this last Monday was D-Day for them. This time Neale had booked them into a relaunched abattoir at Bishop’s Castle run by a consortium of local farmers/producers which seemed to be a well run, small operation. There Fatima, Flora and Freya were unloaded along with a variety of other rare breed piggies. Unlike last time I didn’t have any pangs of guilt or sadness, just relief at not having to get changed again every morning! This time I was present during the butchering. Glynn and Radek did a splendid job of creating an enormous number of a variety of joints, chops, boned and rolled bellies as well as producing a nice stash of sausages from all the trim, and a lot of face meat for Neale to attempt brawn. Wow, what a taste sensation that was. Absolutely delicious, so succulent and tasty. Served with our Dukeshill Piccalilli and one of our lettuces from the garden it was a sublime summer lunch. Slightly fattier than our Dukeshill potted ham hock and with a subtly different flavour it took an age to make, mostly because it was so fiddly to remove the meat from the fat, so in fact using the head meat from our three pigs we only managed to produce two loaf tin sized brawns. We will keep you posted as to how the brawn development at Dukeshill goes!

Brawn

March

Last time I mentioned about Neale’s first attempt at growing a variety of fruit and veg in his four raised beds was back in March when he had just created the actual beds. It’s amazing how quickly, just four months on, we now have a glut of the most delicious vegetables. We’re learning hard and fast from our mistakes as well as our successes such as one large lettuce a day is too much for just the two of us, peas need covering with netting to prevent the pea moth maggots from spoiling numerous pods and our broad beans are covered with little black bugs. As for the raspberries, big mistake not covering them with netting. Every morning for the last week I walk past the raspberries on my way to feed the chickens but if I don’t pick them there and then they are gone by the end of the day. I’ve even caught a pheasant repeatedly jumping to snatch gooseberries from our standard gooseberry trees – quite cute to watch!

One of the nicest parts about growing your own is deciding what to cook based on what looks ripe and ready right outside your door. All the food magazines have countless seasonal recipes to try and it has been really fun to try lots of them out such as the chicken with broad beans in a creamy dijon sauce; linguine with goats cheese, peas and broad beans; spinach & red chard lasagne; french bean, pea & hazelnut salad; raspberry and gooseberry jam; beetroot in white sauce; lamb with carrots, new potatoes, shallots, garlic, peas & broad beans ……  The other really good reason for growing your own apart from the freshness is the savings it’s made to my housekeeping budget. I have been surprised though at how little difference there is in flavour to freshly dug or picked to some of the veg you can buy locally at farm shops or even supermarkets. Perhaps that has more to do with the varieties we have chosen to grow this year but I must admit I was expecting to be blown away by the flavour which I haven’t been for the most part. All tastes perfectly nice and I’m sure side by side with the usual supermarket veg ours would have the edge on flavour. We have much to learn – a work in progress as you might say!

June

Situated just up the road from the beautiful Eilean Donan castle of BBC logo fame, Plockton was just round the corner from the Kyle of Lochalsh from where you could drive over the bridge to Skye. My sister had pre-booked the Three Chimneys on Skye for a lunch thinking it was just up the road! Surprising considering she got an A for geography and did town planning but then that might explain a lot. We had all wanted to visit the restaurant having read various reviews over the years so off we set. An hour and a quarter later we arrived on an incredibly isolated peninsula with the most beautiful views, with seals sunbathing on the exposed rocks just off shore.

The restaurant has been run by the same family for about twenty years we were informed by the really lovely staff. They have always used local produce in season and the menu reflected this. The starters ranged from Asparagus and Ramson (wild garlic) soup to my starter of Charred Blade and Tongue of Lochalsh Beef with Tattie Scone, Celeriac Slaw, Pickled Walnuts and Onions – divine. My main course was the Bourride of West Coast Hake, Monkfish, Razor Clams and Squid with Crushed Jersey Royals, Purple Sprouting Broccoli and Sorrel and Neale’s the Seafood Platter with Loch Dunvegan Prawns, Dressed Drumfearn Mussels, Seared Sconser King Scallops, Loch Harport Oysters, Potted Colbost Crab and Winkles with salads.

The puddings were equally delicious. I had the Hot Toddy Parfait with Rhubarb and Aniseed Brittle to finish. Cost for three courses was £35. My cousin in law, Tony, who lives and works in London didn’t feel the food was as clever as in the best London restaurants or the flavours as intense but I think he chose badly always going for the very rich, heavy dishes. For myself I thoroughly enjoyed my lunch. Would I recommend this place? You bet and only fourteen hours drive from London!

The blade of beef

The Hake

The awesome seafood platter

Hot Toddy parfait

This recipe is adapted from one featured in this months Olive magazine, an excellent foodie magazine which we subscribe to at Dukeshill. I noticed that the ingredients comprised three of my favourite things, honey, olive oil and pistachios. Having just launched our great friend, Susie’s olive oil this month at Dukeshill, been inundated at home with eggs and having twenty or so jars of our home produced honey left it seemed the perfect recipe to try. My capricious chickens being rare breed girls produce when they want to but by goodness they’re worth the wait! You can see how yellow all our eggs are from the colour of the sponge above but then we do have the most spoilt hens in the world. They are fed on ridiculously expensive organic layers pellets and corn and are allowed to roam round an acre of orchard. We go from feast to famine but at the moment it is very much feast on the egg front. I end up giving eggs away to anyone who pops round whether they want them or not! I also wanted to use up our delicious, runny honey Neale harvested from his bees last summer before he harvests the next batch shortly.

I have doubled the quantity of honey for the size of the cake as it was much more squidgy when drenched with the delicious honey/pistachio syrup. Our lunch guests seemed to really enjoy it. In fact the photo was of Bill’s plate who I had to restrain whilst taking the photo! Perfect with some fresh English strawberries and cream or Greek yoghurt.

Sponge

5 properly free range, organic eggs

225ml Greek yoghurt

225g golden caster sugar

100g ground almonds

zest of 2 oranges

zest of 1 lemon

150g plain flour

200g semolina

2 teaspoons baking powder

200ml Fino olive oil

Syrup topping

150g shelled pistachios, toasted and crushed

300ml runny honey

juice of 2 oranges

juice of 1 lemon

This is really dead easy. Just mix together all the sponge ingredients in a bowl and put in a large cake tin greased with olive oil and dusted with flour. Bake at 180′C/350′F or the top of the baking oven of an Aga for 50 mins or until an inserted knife comes out cleanly. Leave to cool slightly for 15 minutes then cut the top of the cake all over.

Meanwhile place the toasted pistachios in a dry frying pan and heat then add the honey and orange and lemon juice and bubble for two minutes. Allow to cool for 10 mins then pour the nutty syrup over the cake, still in the cake tin and leave for 30 mins to allow the syrup to be soaked up by the cake. It’s easier to serve straight from the cake tin.

Serves 10-12

Chorizo, butter-bean & tomato (breadcrumb topping to be added!) gratin

This recipe is sort of a cross between a summery French Cassoulet and a Spanish chorizo dish. Really tasty and gutsy but served with a dressed green salad it also passes as a summery supper dish. Anyway it happened that I had some of our very own chorizo made at Dukeshill using our Berkshire pig, Tallulah to use up. Neale and I have been eating quite a lot of our chorizo in various recipes, but as always seems to happen I end up feeding quite a few family and friends and as a result I never get around to photographing the finished dish or writing about it. One of my favourite but oh so simple ways of eating up our chorizo is to fry it up in olive oil and serve with our home produced eggs for breakfast or we may have it with our version of Huevos Rancheros on corn tortillas if we’re feeling particularly hungry.

This recipe uses the chorizo we made at Dukeshill using unsmoked, rare breed pork, lots of sweet and hot paprika, loads of fresh garlic, cloves and salt and a few other spices – delicious!

300g chorizo, cut into chunks

2 x 420g tin butterbeans, drained and rinsed

olive oil (preferably our Andalucian Fino)

1 large onion, chopped

3 gloves garlic, chopped

1 large carrot, peeled and diced

2 sticks celery, diced

100g diced bacon (or pancetta)

several sprigs of thyme

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1 tablespoon paprika

1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes

75g white breadcrumbs

parsley

seasoning

Dry fry the chorizo and put in gratin dish. Put a good slug of olive oil into the frying pan and add the onion, garlic, celery and carrot and gently fry for 10 minutes.

Add the diced bacon, thyme and spices and stir in for about a minute.

Add the tomatoes, butter beans and 550 ml boiling water.

Add to the chorizo in the gratin dish and give it all a good stir.

Pop in a low oven 150′C/ fan 130′C/ simmering oven of an Aga without covering for 2 hours to allow the liquid to become reduced and the flavours to develop.

Add the breadcrumb topping and chopped parsley. Pop back in a hot oven at 190′C/fan 170′C/ bottom of the roasting oven of an Aga for about 15 minutes until the topping is crisp and golden.

Serve with a leafy salad and lots of Spanish wine!

Chorizo with Butter-Bean & Tomato Gratin

Tartiflette Savoyarde

There are all sorts of slight variations on this simple Savoyarde speciality. I know it may seem slightly odd that I’m promoting this recipe now as it always reminds me of alpine ski fare, but it is just too delicious to confine to the winter months. However as I had some of our delicious, perfectly ripe organic Perl Wen brie (completely unlike those hideous, tasteless rock hard wedges of brie usually found in supermarkets) knocking about in our fridge as well as a huge hunk of our Tamworth bacon (c/o Lola), a little leftover cream and some sad, old King Edward potatoes it seemed to shout tartiflette to me at least. Served al fresco with some Petite Cherie little plum tomatoes, our Fino olive oil, sea salt and basil it made a divine lunch dish. As they say proof is in the pudding and I’ve just had to wrestle away the dish above from my greedy husband who was diving in for thirds!

Some variations on this dish include using white wine, chicory, celeriac, herbs, garlic, various other sorts of cheeses etc. but I like it as follows:

750g potatoes (such as King Edwards, Desiree, Maris Piper) peeled and thickly sliced

200g bacon chunks (or pancetta)

olive oil (preferably Fino)

2 onions sliced

400g Perl Wen brie (or Reblochon) derinded and sliced

284ml double cream

salt and pepper

Par boil the potato slices in boiling, salted water for about 5-10 mins, then drain in a colander and refresh with cold water.

Saute the bacon in a splash of olive oil until crisp and golden. Add the onions and cook for about 10 mins until the onions are soft.

Butter a gratin dish and arrange layers of potato, onion and bacon and cheese, seasoning as you go but don’t add too much salt.

Pour the cream over and bake for 40 mins at 190′C/ fan 170′C/ top of baking oven in Aga until the top is golden and bubbling.

NB. This also works really well using Ardrahan washed rind cows milk cheese, intermittently available from Dukeshill.

Ready - bring it on!

Fatima mounting the fencing

Apologies as I realised I had not updated the Pig Diary since February and time marches relentlessly on. I’ve been somewhat occupied with organising modifications to my Mother’s house down in Devon to enable her to continue to enjoy living there but allowing for ease of living. Always tricky to be site foreman from a distance of 180 miles! In between hurried trips down there I have been slinging food our three little piggies way without really noticing their development, either physically or characteristically. The one good thing about my absences has been my daughters, Laura and Lucy, have noticed them for the first time and are quite adamant that they are seriously looking forward to eating this lot! This has a lot to do with the frighteningly aggressive way in which they push and shove for food. They even jump up and rest their fore-feet on the fence. I thought Sydney our labrador was the greediest thing on the planet but it turns out these pigs are, and a lot more in your face about it. Remembering Oinky, I assumed that Gloucester Old Spots were more docile; they’re certainly meant to be. This lot have been biting fingers, nipping boots, ramming legs, so much so, that none of us go in the pen with them without someone else diverting them with food. At least we’ve been sticking rigidly to the prescribed number of scoops of their organic pig food with only a few carrots and apples every now and then so hopefully they’ll be leaner than the last lot.

Keen and eager for breakfast

Fatima and Freya

Surprisingly we are nearly two thirds of the way through eating Tallulah (Berkshire), Lola (Tamworth) and Oinky (Gloucester Old Spot), our last batch of pigs. They were much more endearing than this bunch and I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that the current threesome are sisters so they already came with a pack mentality and consequently are bolder. Tallulah, Lola and Oinky seemed far gentler although at the time I remember thinking Tallulah and Lola quite fearsome towards the end. We’ve just had the most delicious Wiltshire cured Lola ham for Easter c/o the Dukeshill curing team. Amazingly it wasn’t at all fatty which must be down to a Tamworth’s conformation as I remember Lola being a long, relatively thin pig. Tallulah’s leg was very fatty but she looked like a barrel by the end. Our guests were raving about it and we had to provide them with doggy bags at the end. The whole yummy leg only lasted two days, washed down with piccalilli and pickled oranges and with egg and chips on day two. It always amuses me when new Dukeshill customers say they couldn’t possibly get through a whole ham. Granted if you live alone you might be bored after three weeks of ham ‘this and that’ but it is such a versatile food, keeps forever in the fridge and all ages seem to love it. Why wouldn’t you have one?!

Grand Canal, Venice

Butternut squash ravioli

Having just returned from a few days in Venice for Neale’s birthday it never ceases to amaze me how many delicious ways there are of serving vegetables when you are freed from the constraints of the English cooking mentality of meat and two veg! Venice wasn’t cheap by any means however we managed to eat splendidly for a reasonable sum each day and the variety of dishes on offer was mouth watering. I may be being a little harsh but I do find English cuisine, in most restaurants, to be very formulaic and predictable when it comes to how to best present vegetables. Sad considering there are plenty of recipes out there showing us how to use all sorts of vegetables in imaginative ways. I do get so bored when in a supermarket, looking at all the fruit and veg on offer. Most of it is grown far away, picked before achieving full ripeness, grown for yield and uniformity and invariably tastes of very little. I am always blown away by freshly picked, home grown fruit and veg especially when the varieties are particularly good for flavour. On this note I’m very excited because Neale has built four raised beds this year and is currently growing just about everything, although most of it is still under the surface! He does assure me that he has only planted the very best varieties for flavour such as Ratte potatoes, nobbly, yellow Venetian courgettes etc.- I’ll let you know but at the moment our cat Gus thinks he’s just had four enormous litter trays dug and the rabbits Neale worked so hard to keep out of the garden are edging ever closer! Fatally he had rabbit-proof fencing put the whole way round our perimeter but sadly failed to eradicate the last few ‘indigenous’ rabbits before sealing them in.

Gus's litter trays!

Whilst in Venice we were served the most delicious vegetables in dishes such as sea bass on braised red chicory, asparagus lasagne, butternut squash ravioli with pine nuts, home-made gnocchi with scampi and broccoli sauce. Vegetables are either very much integral to the dish or are dressed up so they stand out in their own right rather than being left floundering on the side of the plate as is so often the case in the UK, both in home cooking and in your bog standard restaurants. Perhaps this is why we Brits love Asian cuisine so much with fabulous curries and the equally delicious vegetable side dishes available to take away in virtually every town and village.

As for fruit in the UK don’t get me started. Vile, unripe, flavourless, unappealing mounds of fruit greet you at the entrance to every supermarket. Why oh why is this the case when we have such amazingly good, tasty old species of fruit such as Winter Queening apples for eating, Codlin apples for cooking, quinces and greengages which the shops never seem to offer. Instead we are offered star fruit and rock hard soft fruits, out of season and flown thousand of miles from far flung corners of the globe! We also have the climate for producing the best array of berries, cherries and currants in the warmer months such as loganberries and mulberries, again hardly ever seen commercially. Home grown is fab, and carefully sourced farm shops are very good as are the few amazing green grocers, as ever mostly in London. Organic makes no difference to the flavour but obviously has a feel good factor and is supposedly better for you but I am always sceptical about food classifications. Maybe one day a real foodie will be employed as a buyer for one of the big supermarkets, or better still a few more ‘quality’ greengrocers will pop up – I live in hope!

Fino Extra Virgin Olive Oil

You may remember from my previous post, “Andalucia Trip”, how much I raved about the wonderful olive oil produced by our friend Susie Taylor. Using olives grown in her olive groves around the Andalucian town of Casarabonela she produces a range of superbly, robust and extremely tasty olive oils. I am delighted to let you know that we are about to launch 2.5 litre tins of her fabulous Andalucian extra virgin olive oil available exclusively through Dukeshill. This quantity seemed just the right amount for us to be offering based on our own personal usage at home and the typical quantities ordered by a Dukeshill customer. We use it every day in all sorts of ways. Since coming back from our weekend at Susie and Rupert’s stunning villa in Casarabonela, we have adopted the habit of having crusty bread dipped in Fino olive oil, lemon juice and seasoning for the odd breakfast. With just a simple orange it is a divine way to start the day rather than the ubiquitous cloying, sugary cereals and sugary spreads. Invaluable in dressings, in soups, for baking, grilling, roasting, marinading and even neat! I use the oil when baking cakes when I want them to be particularly moist such as for carrot cake, in vegetable dishes such as aubergines with honey, potatoes and garlic, in gazpacho etc…. It’s versatility is endless and if I had to list my top ten cooking essentials this would most definitely be one of them. Fascinating to go back thirty years when it wasn’t readily available in the UK or even mentioned in cookery books. My Mother never, to my knowledge, used olive oil at all until the eighties and yet it is now everywhere. How our eating habits have changed, though sadly for many families still not for the better. However that is not the case with Susie’s fabulous oil in your larder!

Olive oil is, and always has been, a staple of Spanish life as it is in most Mediterranean countries, and has become increasingly so in the UK in the last decade. Spain is the world’s largest producer of olive oil and there are over 100 million olive trees in Andalucia alone – they adorn even the tiniest plots of land – every Juan Dick and Harry has one!  Some of the olives are marinated with delicious herbs and then eaten but the majority are pressed for olive oil. Olive oil classification is fairly complicated, like wine, but the highest grade oils are “extra virgin” (which means they have an acidity level of no more than 1%).  This Fino olive oil is an “extra virgin” oil blended from a variety of olive types grown in and around the village of Casarabonela – arbequina, hojiblanca, manzanilla – it is great for salad dressings, drizzling, oven roasting, baking, sauteeing or just dipping – the great flavour will perk up even the plainest cooking.  And don’t forget it’s really healthy too.  Do give Susie’s Fino oil a go and see what you think.

Don’t forget for smaller quantities and for the delicious Fino blended oils you can order direct from Susie at Fino.