Picota Cherries
Picota cherries are available for just a few short weeks (their season runs from mid-June through to August) so if you spot some – your local ASDA has them in punnets (£1 for 450g) – grab some!
“Picota cherries have been grown and hand-picked by family farmers form the beautiful Jerte Valley in the region of Extremadura for hundreds of years. This unique fruit is juicy, has a deep sweet flavour and like a good bottle of wine, is protected by Denomination of Origin status – they are not grown anywhere else in the world.
You’ll notice these cherries fo not have a salk. This is beacause, in the mild, sunny climate of the Jerte Valley, Picota cherries ripen slowly – for up to twice as long as other cherries – and the stalk naturally detaches from the fruit when it is picked.”
Picota cherries are delicious eaten oin their own or in a bowl with some good quality vanilla ice cream – add a splash of Pedro Ximenez for an additional flourish. Each punnet I opened contained a recipe booklet offering differing recipes created by José Pizarro – chef patron of the Brindisa tapas restaurants. the dish pictured is a variation of their Serrano Ham and Manchego Salad. Full details can be seen on SpittoonExtra.
Coolcucumber 7
The brand-new seventh Coolcucumber TV programme is now available to view
at a screen near you.
Goodies in this programme include;
- A whirlwind tour of this year’s Henley Food Festival – where the crowds turned out in spite of the rain.
- a look at the famous and “refreshed” Langan’s brasserie – now with no scaffolding…
- a visit to two more fabulous Paris cafes
- The great Elena Salvoni tells how London nearly lost its most fabulous maitre(sse) d’ to the rag trade.
- Fancy some tapas? Here’s how to get the real thing – leave your passport at home.
- And a new restaurant in Kent – The Mulberry Tree – that’s becoming a true destination. (You’d never find it by accident.)
You can still watch any or all of the previous programmes at coolcucumber.tv
and all programmes are available to download and take with you to watch away from the Internet.
Calling All Home Cooks
RDF Television is about to start the production of a brand new cookery series for BBC2, called Home Cooks (working title).
The project is still a little under wraps, but I can tell you that production will be kicking off shortly. We need to find Britain’s most passionate home cooks, people who love to cook, and to entertain, and who would be willing to open up their home to guests to put their skills to the test.
The show will be very different to cookery shows currently on television and it takes inspiration from the current trend for Pop up restaurants
Are you a passionate Home Cook?
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Do you have a talent for entertaining your friends and family?
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Would you like to cook for guests in your own home?
RDF Television and the BBC are looking for Britain’s most talented home cooks to take part in a new BBC series. In each show our hosts compete against each other by putting their cooking and hosting skills to the test. This show will take home cooking to impress to a whole new level.
For more information please visit www.meontv.co.uk/homecooks, contact us on 0117 970 7629, write to us at RDF Television West, Regent House, Regent Street, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 4HG or email us at homecooks@rdfmedia.com.
The Good Pub Guide Online
Now available – The Good Pub Guide interactive website which provides an on-the-move and up-to-the-minute guide to all UK pubs. So even without the book, you can get the invaluable guidance of its decades of expertise and hot tips from its many thousand reader-reporters, free from its new website www.thegoodpubguide.co.uk.
“Over one in four of our thousand-plus top pub recommendations has a really nice garden,” says editor Fiona Stapley. “So if the weather turns up trumps, you can enjoy all the best of British pubbing outside, in appealing surroundings. But if it turns grey, what you’ll find inside will be top-notch too.” The Guide’s spot-on descriptions take you to good waterside pubs, too – around one in twelve of the better pubs is well placed by river, sea or lake.
Backed up by countless reader reports, The Good Pub Guide 2009
The entire list of carefully selected Good Pub Guide recommendations and descriptions from the UK’s annual guidebook is on the site with the added bonus of latest news, customer ratings and comments with space for publicans to announce ‘what’s on’ every week. Each entry has full contact details and an integrated Google map.
Bottle of Chardonnay Goes for 180 Trillion Dollars
Neleen Strauss, co-owner of City wine dining restaurant High Timber, currently has 180 trillion Zimbabwean dollar notes at the restaurant, which have become a real talking point amongst diners bemused and unused to seeing such colossal figures on bank notes.
She has even been getting offers from some of her diners to purchase the notes with hard UK currency, with the irony of the GBP equivalent versus the high face value not lost. The notes are made up of a 100 trillion, 50 trillion, 20 trillion and 10 trillion and were acquired when a customer recently made an unconventional request to purchase a bottle of the Thelema Chardonnay 2007 with the Zimbabwean notes.