Quote Andy Gilder="Andy Gilder"If you find yourself in Chester, try a meal at Joseph Benjamin (www.josephbenjamin.co.uk). Small place - only a dozen or so tables, so if it's a weekend you might need to book - and an equally small menu, but the highest quality. Had a vegetarian antipasti, different breads with cheeses, olives, hummus and delicious caramelised onion chutney. Followed that with a vegetable ramen. Pak choi, ake mushrooms and other veg in a chilli and ginger broth. Enough spice to give it a kick but not overwhelming. The chicken caesar salad that Mrs G had was "the best she's ever had". Can't recommend the place highly enough.'" Oh hey there Joseph

Quote Andy Gilder="Andy Gilder"If you find yourself in Chester, try a meal at Joseph Benjamin (www.josephbenjamin.co.uk). Small place - only a dozen or so tables, so if it's a weekend you might need to book - and an equally small menu, but the highest quality. Had a vegetarian antipasti, different breads with cheeses, olives, hummus and delicious caramelised onion chutney. Followed that with a vegetable ramen. Pak choi, ake mushrooms and other veg in a chilli and ginger broth. Enough spice to give it a kick but not overwhelming. The chicken caesar salad that Mrs G had was "the best she's ever had". Can't recommend the place highly enough.'" Oh hey there Joseph

Having tried black pudding for the first time earlier in the year (after going all my life saying "I will never try it") and liking it

What's the best things to do with it?

Scallops and bacon is a good one, cubed up fried like croutons in a salad, with some apple sauce and pea shoots, in little fritters and served with pork, mix with sausagemeat for a great burger, stuffed in a chicken breast with a whiskey sauce.

Or my favourite way, sliced and fried with a poached egg on top, a couple of bits of bacon, lorne sausage and a tattie scone.

If you can get it Stornaway Black Pudding is one of the best around.

Cheers for that! Scallops one sounds interesting as not had them in a long time

Talking about black pudding I'm heavily into chorizo at present.
Chop it up, cook it in the oven and it gives a nice bit of a crunch to a green salad.

Nice.

Our local French deli sells a beautifully soft chorizo – cooks wonderfully. Makes a lovely frittata with some finely-chopped shallot.

On black pudding, I don't often buy it, simply because it's usually very dry – and I can get 'Bury-style' here. I do wonder if that's because most if not all British black pudding is now made with pasturised blood and not the proper, raw stuff.

I love the French version, [iboudin noir[/i (or the very lightly spiced Catalan version) which is much softer. We'll have the latter a few times in August when we're over there. As with the chorizo, it can make a very nice frittata – and just simply grilled, with some sliced apple, gently fried in butter, on the side.

It would also be remiss of me not to mention [ihimmel und erde[/i, which is a traditional German dish of black pudding, mash, fried onions and apple sauce – which I have actually eaten in Berlin. The name refers to the two types of apple in the dish – the 'apple' coming from the tree ('himmel' – heaven) and the potato coming from the earth ('erde'), as 'Erdapfel' (earth apple) is old German slang for potato – which itself brings to mind the French 'pomme de terre' for potato.

Fascinating stuff, this.



The Spanish have a nic little black pudding as a tapas dish too.

It's a global dish.

It's a bit of a worry when you see the cr@p that comes off it when you oven cook it, mind.
I cooked a rack of lamb on Barbie during the week.


Probably not the professional way to cook it but it tasted mighty fine.
Bit overcast but it's going on again today.
Gonna try barbecued belly-pork this afty.

I let the man do a [ibraai[/i yesterday – pork and apple patties, Toulouse sausages and steak. A salad of pickled beetroot and orange segments on the side.

I was discussing with him the other week about doing a joint like that sometime – possibly with lemons and sprigs of bay and oregano on the alongside.

Crap? That's very tasty spicy fat you know, just made for dipping your bread in.
I was raised on black pudding and Lancashire cheese, the Bury type of pudding Minty mentioned but at the moment I'm eating Clonakilty white pudding, quite peppery and not as heavy as black.

This whole thread sounds like a recipe for CHD.

Had a day "up country" last Tuesday in Portugal, our host was a contractor who wanted to show us a bit of his country north of the Algarve and we spent most of the morning admiring their water conservation works up in the hills, fairly mundane stuff to us but of vital importance to them as most of the surface water courses will be dry in a few weeks time.

Anyway, food - he spent some time driving down narrow lanes looking for a particular roadside bar/cafe and eventually, after driving past it and not believing it could be the place we found "Casa dos Presuntos" in a village called Cortelha, what looked like a roadside cafe where you'd get a coffee and a dried up sandwich turned out to be one of the best restaurants in the area, Tuesday lunchtime had about twenty punters in there but it fills most nights and every weekend with customer who drive the 30km inland from The Algarve to eat there.

Our host ordered a platter of pork for the three of us to share as a main course, fairly straightforward stuff but with a taste that I have never found in pork before, the loin was marinated and the chops that were served as a side dish were so tender that they just melted off the bone, served with a huge salad (from a neighbours garden) and potato slices sauted in a garlic sauce - amazing flavours off the meat which I suspect was simply and locally raised, plain country food that was ten times better than anything I've eaten in the restaurants that cater for the wealthy down on the Vale do Lobo.

We couldn't decide on a specific sweet so the owner brought out another platter and not wanting to be rude I ate all four variations including the thinly sliced chocolate bean plant - all of this washed down with a bottle of red wine, haven't a clue which one as our host chose it from the range of 300 different bottles, he chose it because the producer was a friend of his - three different pork dishes, four different deserts and half a bottle of red wine for lunch, I could get used to that.

Later that day and nearer the coast we stopped in another village for a coffee, unfortunately we picked at random a small cafe where the owner was crazy about sweets and puddings and I'm sorry to say that I could not resist and had a huge slice of fresh raspberry merangue and then three samples of very sweet almond deserts and biscuits - eight puddings in one afternoon is a world record for me.

We didn't bother with our tea that evening.

As black pudding is mainly made from pigs blood in the UK I doubt it.

Oh Minty, it isn't the pasteurisation that is the problem, most of it is dried blood to make it easier to transport. I find Bury puddings to be dry due to their being rather big chunks of fat rather than it being rendered and added to the mix.

Time for another tube of Charley Barley for me, I've run out