Wild hop shoots thankfully can be found growing all over the place. Preferring moist, alluvial soils, and by that I mean 'fine grain fertile soils deposited by water flowing over flood plains'. Thanks free dictionary. Hops like fences and things to climb and grow around - I found these little shoots growing on some wire fencing by the railway in Chiswick. 

The Latin name is Humulus Lupulus, meaning that to my basic mind they sound rather more like a spell from Harry Potter.

Everyone loves hops, since they make beer. Indeed Adnams have just this year been calling on the general public to find and send in their wild hops for a wild hop beer; you'll get a bottle of the brewed wild beer in return. It's the hop flower though that brewers are interested in, leaving the very useful and tasty shoot for the rest of the foraging world to take on. 

I'm following a recipe for a silken fresh cheese. The other day when I made a fresh cheese, it was far crumblier and more ricotta-esq. I'm looking for a cheese that I can elegantly quenelle onto the plate and rely on hops as adornment and other finishing touches for texture.

 To make the cheese, heat the milk slowly to 30c, add the buttermilk, cream and rennet. Do not stir. Once at 30c, transfer straight to a silicone lined container and cook in the oven at 37C for an hour to an hour and a half until tofu like in texture. 

That's all, on hops, and cheese. Such an incredibly straightforward and rewarding process. 

[Apparently, Charles Darwin entertained himself while sick in bed in 1882 by studying a hop plant growing on his window-sill. He noted that the tip of the stem completed a revolution in 2 hours.]

I'm thrilled with this information as right now, I'm not feeling very well, and hops are my focal point too. 

On the 28th November, i am very excited to be taking part in a wild foods showcase evening with expert forager Chris Hope and some other incredibly exciting chefs and food partisans. (Note the poster above says that i work at noma, which is no longer the case, i spent some time there earlier this year but now work at michelin starred Hedone restaurant in Chiswick.) 

The evening is set to be a full evening of festivities and celebrations surrounding what we can find on our doorsteps and with plenty of wild food going around to taste and of course plenty of wine to accompany this. 

Myself, Chris, Hugo and Owen will be hosting the evening and there will be a series of films, nutrition talks, wild food cookery demo's, workshops, and photographic displays...all washed down with wild food and drinks from the bar.

It is set to be a great evening all round and also lots of fun!

If you'd like to come along to this event - you can see more details and purchase tickets by clicking here.

I hope to see you there!

This week i needed some energy packed breakfast bars, on the go food to take with me on my journey to work. I bike to the train station and get a 10 minute slot on the train to pack down a quick portable breakfast snack before getting off the train and biking the rest of the journey to work. I start at 7am and work through until 12 midnight 5 days a week, and with little time to stop to eat in the morning, I need something healthy and energy packed to fuel a busy day of mis en place in the kitchen. So, I came up with these bad boys as something to look forward to every morning and know it's the kind of food  i want to be putting in my body every morning.

Oat, chia, cashew, honey, almond and cranberry bars. 

Ingredients:
250g oats
50g butter (or coconut butter)
80g chia seeds
2 tablespoons honey
1 - 2 tablespoons agave nectar
2 handfuls cashew nuts (toasted first if you like)
2 handfuls almonds (toasted first if you like)
1 - 2 handfuls of dried cranberries
1 - 2 teaspoons sea salt flakes, i used maldon
1 bar lindt 80% chocolate

Yield: 
10 - 15 bars depending on the size you want

Method:
Place 50g butter in a saucepan and melt, add 250g porridge oats and mix together. Soak 80g chia seeds in water and allow to expand to form a cooked tapioca type consistency, a gelatinous mixture, and add to the pan with the heat off. Stir together. Add two tablespoons of honey and one to two tablespoons of agave syrup, measuring the sweetness level according to your own taste. Add a couple of handfuls of cashews and almonds, and a handful of dried cranberries, a teaspoon of sea salt flakes and stir to combine. Transfer to a lined baking tray and bake in the oven at 150C for twenty to twenty five minutes. Remove from the oven and leave to cool. 

At this stage, i decided i wanted to turn these nutritious bars into a slightly more decadent breakfast snack and since i don't consume any chocolate at any point in the day other than this, i melted a bar of lindt 80% dark chocolate in a bowl over hot water and transferred to a piping bag in order to drizzle somewhat erratically over the bars, with another sprinkle of sea salt flakes and a touch of crunchy demerara unrefined cane sugar, the ultimate finish to my ultimate bars. 

I then packed these up in baking parchment and individually wrapped them to take one each day on the go. And i have to say, these are pretty goddam perfect for the mornings, i love them and will be making my own breakfast bars each week now changing up my ingredients and looking for the best combination. 

This week - I'm doing macadamia, cranberry again (i love the sweet sharp tang these bring), and yoghurt drizzle. The great thing about the ponsy 'drizzle' is that you get the taste of the slightly more indulgent topping without eating a whole load of actual badness, it's just a smidgen, and really when you think about it - we're told a square of dark chocolate a day is good for our hearts - so i say why the hell not at breakfast when you most need that extra buzz to get going with the day! And onto the salt, i know it's frowned upon, but i love salt, and since i make all my own food i monitor what goes into it all, and i know, i need that salt in my diet. Plus it makes the bar freaking awesome...

Obviously, if you don't want butter, chocolate, or honey, and you want more of a raw foods bar - apply the same recipe, minus the honey and add more agave nectar and use coconut butter instead. Then cook it at a lower temperature for a longer time in order to dry the bar out, you just won't have those tasty caramelised edges... I cooked mine, but will be experimenting with more 'raw' bars in the future. 

Working in an industry fuelled by passion and making those necessary compromises to achieve and get a good reputation in that industry is a double edged sword and can be at best - exhilarating & intensely rewarding, but exhausting, since you really are living on the edge emotionally and because you haven't stopped in days (and I mean, you really haven't stopped for anything), and at worst downright soul destroying, panic attack inducing and  basically kinda gnarly. But, the ups make up for the downs and that's why you carry on. It's a bizarre kind of love affair, a type of eating disorder I suppose. You love eating, so you cook, you cook so much, you don't eat, when you stop work, you're so exhausted - you forget to eat, go straight to sleep and then on your days off, when you've finished sleeping, you eat defiantly and aggressively, testing the very limits of gluttony. Call me Gargantua mwah ha ha.  

After some cheffy soul searching out at noma, the worlds best restaurant, I came back, did a couple of trials in restaurants in London and against the odds (it wasn't my type of restaurant, on paper), I took a job at Dinner by Heston. Fera at Claridges had been the restaurant calling to me, but my trial didn't leave me feeling enamoured. Don't get me wrong, the food looked pretty, the chefs all seemed genuinely nice, but something didn't sit.  Dinner had asked me to start on the 1st September, leaving me a couple of months biding my time freelancing for an events company and doing some private work here and there. Even though Dinner by Heston is considered by 'the world's 50 best' to be the 5th best restaurant in the world, for some reason I also wasn't feeling totally at one with the idea - as in, I was honoured and privileged to be offered a position there, but looking back on this, I felt how could I possibly turn down such a great opportunity? I started to get excited about what i would learn and lo and behold before long I had started at Dinner in the mighty Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge. 

The job wasn't all  i had cracked it up to be, almost in line with my underlying suspicions, and understand - i wanted this to work. You don't wait two months for a job, that you  feel honoured to have been offered, to then expect it to fail. But it wasn't for me. Dinner by Heston was a restaurant manned by a huge brigade of chefs; i don't know, maybe 30 - 40 at one time, to meet the demands of the restaurant. Serving 120 covers for lunch and 170 for dinner was a huge feat that the restaurant met daily very smoothly and with very little fuss. It's a calm pass, and when you see Ashley there, leading the pass, it's genuinely inspiring, you don't need a manically pressured and loud service, it's when it runs smoothly and calmly that continuity and standards are met. Serving 2 michelin star food at that volume is a great coup that they are rightly proud of and during a pep talk where the team was congratulated on working so well and seamlessly together, they hoped to be able to improve on this and up the number of covers next year to 175 perhaps. The goal of the restaurant, it is safe to say, is a long way from any aspiration I ever had or indeed want. It's a different kind of animal. The menu changes rarely - items move around perhaps once a year, if that, as far as I could see, and was informed. Firm favourites stay - the meat fruit certainly is an iconic dish and is what contributes to the incredible reputation of the restaurant. According to another team talk, apparently it is one of the most instagrammed food images of recent years.  So i was at least pleased to be working on that section making meat fruits for my very short lived time at that restaurant. It didn't take away from the fact though, that my personal passion for food revolves around the seasons and change. Spontaneity and the ability to adapt to new ingredients and learn about these, at the same time. A constant evolution of the seasons and ingredients. Understanding better the soils around us and what these give to us. There sadly was going to be none of that in the restaurant. Certainly I would have learned the Heston way to perfection, because when you are doing something 300 times a day, to factory like precision, you can eventually do that work in your sleep. How boring, if you're like me. After resigning and explaining my reasons, I couldn't quite muster up telling the incredibly nice chefs at Dinner that I didn't feel quite inspired there, as they honestly are so passionate about what they do. It was a learning experience none the less, these days I certainly don't believe in mistakes. 


I went back to freelancing and continued my search for the perfect restaurant job, feeling a touch disheartened that the right restaurant wasn't out there for me. A ludicrous notion, I know, in the capital city of England, but I couldn't quite find where I thought would be a perfect fit. Maybe it didn't exist, and as one of my freelance colleagues suggested to me; perhaps restaurants weren't the right move. I didn't buy that though. 

So back in October, I had a trial at Hedone restaurant in Chiswick, a michelin starred joint voted 63rd best restaurant in the world. What I saw at my trial won me over - they are a restaurant very romantically fuelled by passion alone, a changing menu in accordance with the seasons, and one that honestly doesn't make a whole lot of profit based on the quality of ingredients being served to guests. Go there! it's amazing! I can't endorse it's food enough, each day I am blown away.  Head chef and owner  Mikhael changes the menu daily, spontaneously dependent on ingredients and mood. Something that's right up my street. He is an ingredient driven chef, believing in using only the best quality ingredients, no compromises. In fact, he is well known around London as being one of the few chefs who buys based on quality and not price and as a consequence has a great reputation with suppliers. He is vastly knowledgable. To top that, they make their own bread in their on site bakery which delivers, frankly, phenomenally. Their bread has reached international status, heralded by harsh critics as being the best they have ever had - the best in the uk at the very least. Whether it is or not, I don't care, it's astounding. The secrets of this trade, i wanted to learn. 

So now, I proudly work at Hedone and each and every day I learn something new and exciting. It fuels the very reason I chose to do this, and makes me believe I will learn so much here and really be a part of something special before I choose to one day venture out in the big wide culinary world on my own.

My fingers are crossed! 

For anyone out there who has thought a little about perhaps hosting or wanting to go to a supper club, and wants to know a little about it, here is my first and very exciting experience of hosting a supper club...

Last week myself and partner hosted a supper club at our flat in Wandsworth. Not having done one before and not knowing quite the general etiquette or rules for this particular branch of dining institution, we were relatively unequipped. I mean, we knew how I thought the supper club should be run, but beyond that didn't know what to expect, who would be coming, how the direction of the evening would form. What if the conversation ran dry?! Shit. Coupled with the pronounced notion that it could be an actual re-enactment of 'Come Dine With Me' with diabolically pretentious guests critiquing my food, like assholes, and picking holes in my decisions. Cool, not worried at all then...

So, starting with picking a date, followed by the development of a very vague outline of a menu, I posted details of the event online through the website 'meet up'.  You can click here to see my posting (and also some pretty fab reviews from my very lovely guests!). 

Having capacity in our flat for 8 people, I was pretty stoked to see places claimed within a day, and conscious that we were going to have to do some monster re-jigging in the flat to make extra space for the guests. Logistics. Much like the kitchen space was going to have to be maximised for plating all the courses I had in mind.  

(To the left is my Mackerel starter.) 

Onto the money - payment comes through paypal in advance so funding the evening was in advance, pretty tidy in case you just so happen to be living by the skin of your teeth...

The premise of the evening was british seasonal fare, meaning the menu wouldn't be finalised until the week leading up to the event, so I could source the best quality and most bang on season produce. A few weeks prior to the event, I started making syrups and vinegars from seasonal foraged berries (which i previously posted about). The blackberry and hawthorn vinegar was tasting particularly good in my mind, and my gut instinct was telling me it was going to be an epic partner to a tasty bit of venison. Thus, I had selected my main course and later devised the rest...

Scouring borough market, whole foods, and supermarkets for the best produce was my aim, and I indeed finalised my menu which, despite all the planning, left me with very little time to spare to sit down for a much needed glass of fizz before the guests arrived! 

So, at 7 o clock on the dot, we welcomed our first guest, and the rest trailed in from there, meeting (thankfully) abundantly flowing conversation and a full evening of seasonal fare. 

Here's the menu:

Welcome drink - 
My version of a 'Jamaican' - cold steeped hibiscus tea, with Vodka, Orange, Burnt Orange and mint.
Canape 1 - 
Marinated heirloom tomato with goats curd yoghurt and basil
Canape 2 - 
Salt cod brandade with gentleman's relish and sea purslane
Canape 3 - 
Crispy chicken skin with hibiscus granita and sorrel
Starter 1 -
Earl Grey Smoked Mackerel with Gentlemans relish, carnival squash, pear, kale crisp and nasturtium
Starter 2 - 
(Homemade) fresh cheese with rosehip and yeast emulsion, malted sourdough croutons, 
Mid - 
Fermented barley grains with sorrel reduction and chestnut mushroom
Main  - 
Slow cooked shoulder of venison with venison reduction, blackberry and hawthorn, celeriac puree and a celeriac sheet. 
Dessert - 
Earl Grey baked custard, with whisky caramel, almond meringue and creme fraiche

Unfortunately - due to the hectic schedule we gave ourselves of plating up in our small kitchen, and the number of courses, neither myself or partner remembered to take pictures of everything, frustratingly, but in the gallery below at the bottom of the page are a small selection from the evening...

Supper clubs can be as easy or as hard as you make them, i made mine a little tricky - lots of courses, but I wanted to impress! In the future, I would without doubt simplify things for myself, but then again, that's half the fun, and I kind of thrive on the challenge. 

What's really great, is that you get to hear feedback from complete strangers, not friends who may be biased, and when it ispositivve feedback, it's something that you honestly really want to hear. I hope to god they weren't lying, but I don't think so! Here's the feedback that was posted on the meet up website:

An amalgamation of a beautiful setting, lovely company and fantastic food (oh that venison!) by an extremely talented and creative chef... Thanks for a thoroughly enjoyable night Harriet and Richard (and for the ski-tips!), I'd say let's have this supper club on a weekly basis :-)

Harriet Mansell is a delightfully friendly and fabulously skilled chef! Her supper club with her lovely partner Rich, is the best I have ever been to!!

A seriously talented chef. Inventive and surprising dishes, very well presented. Great ambience. Cool evening.

Lovely exciting food with unexpected twists. Beautifully done!

Fantastic night with exceptional good, company and atmosphere! We'll done Harriet and sous chef Richard! You nailed it!


Can't wait to do the next one!!