Froggies at Timber Batts, Bodsham, Kent

My apologies for the long gap since my last blog entry, I hope it won't be this long until my next one!

Timber Batts is a lovely old country pub between Ashford and Canterbury on the road out of Wye.  It's tucked away in the tiny village of Bodsham (no, I'd never heard of it before either!) and it's well worth the effort of finding it for yourself.  There is plenty of seating inside at an eclectic mix of tables, but if the weather permits you might want to sit outside and enjoy the rural views from the quiet garden to the side of the pub.  Froggies is, as you might expect from the name, run by a French father and son who have done well to retain the traditional English pub feel while adding their own Gallic charm to the place.  There are a number of wine case lids from some of the grand estates decorating the beams, and every shelf and sill is covered in empty wine bottles that span generations and vineyards of the world, mostly having been drunk by the owner!

We stopped in for a quick lunch (and maybe a swift half!) on the way home and were genuinely delighted with the food.  Although the lunch menu is short, it is full of good options including a home made burger (more on that later), various baguettes and sandwiches, moule frites, or simply ham egg and chips.  Something for everyone then!

I was feeling pretty hungry, so I went for the homemade burger, which comes with french fries and a small green salad on the side.  It's a good job I was hungry, because there was plenty of it and it was delicious.  The difficulty with very thick burgers is cooking them right through without letting them dry out, something the chef managed very nicely indeed.  There was a generous side order of the thinnest fries, and the salad had a light drizzle of house dressing that just helped cut through the big flavours in the burger.  The ham and chips looked very good too, the ham was lightly smoked and thinly cut, while the baguettes were big enough to feed even the hungriest mouth.

One of my favourite things to finish a meal is a café gourmand, usually a shot of espresso with two or three mini deserts just intended to give you something sweet to finish your meal, so I was delighted to find it on the menu.  It came with a couple of home made macaroons and a glass of café liegeois (espresso coffee poured over coffee ice-cream and topped with whipped cream served in this case in a shot glass).  A close second choice for me was the trio of deserts, which included an apricot tatin, panna cotta,  and a raspberry melba.  The desert for people unable to decide what to have, but delicious none the less.

Easy to find?  No.
Worth the effort?  Certainly.
Worth the price?  Yes, I think so.

Fatfoodie adventures in Stoke!

Yes, I know it's not in Kent.  Again.  But there was good food to be had in Stoke!  Well....I say "in" Stoke, obviously I don't actually mean "in Stoke"....I mean near Stoke.  Alright, so not in Stoke at all, in Trentham and in Stone....but they're close enough, ok?

Anyway....the food.  Dee and I took the last few bits Josie needed for the start of her last year at Staffordshire University last weekend.  We stayed in the Travelodge (don't ask, and certainly don't go there!) at Trentham on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent.  Trentham Gardens is home to a great little place called The Pie Minister, a sort of modern take on the old pie and mash shops of my youth!  It was a light, airy, log cabin type unit with brightly coloured posters and info about their pies around the walls.

For a very reasonable price (about a fiver) they do a home cooked pie of your choice from a list of about a dozen with mash and red wine gravy.  For about £7.20 they do something called "The Mothership".  To my surprise Josie (who hasn't got the largest appetite) opted for the Mothership with a Thai Chook pie.  This comprised a lovely thai chicken green curry pie, a double helping of mash, a dollop of minted mushy peas, red wine gravy and sprinkles of crispy fried onions and grated cheddar.  Quite a plate-full.  I was even more surprised when she came very close indeed to finishing off the lot!  I opted for a PM pie mothership, but with a single helping of mash.  The PM pie is their signature dish, it's a sort of cross between steak and kidney and beef and veg pie.  Good decision to go for single mash, I can tell you.  There was still plenty of it.  Dee wasn't all that hungry, but she still managed to put away a large sausage roll with mash and gravy.

They sell t-shirts with "Keep Calm & Eat More Pies" on the front, and all the staff wear them as uniform.  I would have bought one, but they were so flimsy I didn't feel they were worth the tenner asking price.  All in all, very good quality and fantastic value food.  An ideal lunch stop on an autumn shopping day, hot and filling, lots of choice, worth a visit!

I've done this in the wrong order really, because Pie Minister was Sunday lunch, but dinner Saturday night turned out to be pretty good too.  We went to a village a few miles outside Stoke called Stone to revisit a pub / steakhouse that Ben and Jen took us to on our last visit.  Sadly for them, the ovens weren't working on that occasion so the menu choice was seriously limited.  Not so this time!

 The pub is in two halves with a large central bar area.  To one side is a very modern feeling disco type pub, complete with bar stocked with several fruit flavoured ciders, alcopops and any number of fizzy beers.  The other side though is a rather nice, modern feeling restaurant which feels much more like a wine bar than a pub.  Fortunately for me, there were a couple of good real ales on, Marsden's Pedigree and Jenning's Cocker Hoop (which I felt it was in the interest of my loyal readers to try).

The menu was also in two halves.  On one side was a selection of fish dishes, ribs, and the usual gastro-pub type offerings, and on the back was a grill and hot-stones menu.  As you'd expect, prices ranged from
around £7 to £16 for main courses.  We dispensed with starters in the vain hope that we might have room for a desert, and dived straight in to the main courses.  Our waiter and waitress were friendly, chatty, and knowledgeable.  They explained the menu and the three steak specials on offer.  We could have chosen an ostrich steak, a buffalo steak or something called a bistro steak.  Dee opted for the latter, which turned out to be a nice thick beef rump steak cut from a particular part of the rump that makes it almost as tender as fillet but with all the meaty flavour of rump.  This came topped with a fried duck egg, chips and mushrooms.  Josie and I weren't in the mood to be refined, so we both chose the rack of pork ribs, but with different sauces.  I went for Jack Daniels BBQ, while Josie chose hoi-sin.  I have to admit, although they were both good, her sauce was better.

It's hard to do anything too imaginative with ribs, but putting a good sauce on them is a great start!  If there's one thing I love it's slow cooked ribs where the meat just falls off the bone.  I cut the end one off the rack, picked up the end of the rib itself, and by the time I'd got it to my mouth the meat was back on the plate leaving just the clean bone in my hand!  Spot on.  The coleslaw was very good too, high quality supplier or home made, I'm not sure which.  I've never been a big fan of the whole hot stones idea, I'm not sure I want to pay extra for the joy of still having to cook my own dinner.  I want chef to cook it for me please, I'm sure he'll do a better job of it.

In spite of a good choice of deserts, we only had room to share one between the three of us.  We had the house speciality, a hot baked cookie still in the iron skillet it was cooked in with a dollop of vanilla ice-cream.  The waitress warned us that the skillet was still very hot indeed, but both the girls still managed to burn themselves on it!  They both agreed it was worth it though.

Next time we visit Stoke we will probably revisit both the Steakhouse and the Pie Minister again.  If you're in the area and hungry you could do worse than do the same.

Loch Fyne at Bluewater

The choice of places to eat at Bluewater shopping centre are close to infinite.  As well as all the usual fast-food rubbish and mall food-court suspects there is a Yo-Sushi, a brasserie, a Leon and a Loch Fyne restaurant that stand out as being better than the rest.  Yesterday we opted for Loch Fyne, being in the mood for some good seafood, and it turned out to be quite a good decision!

We went in past the fresh wet-fish counter, where you can buy lobster, dressed crab, crayfish, langoustine, sole, trout fillets, salmon....the list goes on.  It was all well presented and gave the restaurant area a market feel.  The fairly short menu features a wide variety of seafood dishes, from the traditional cod and chips to the ever present fish pie, mostly between around £10 and £17 with a few exceptions at either end of the scale.  There are a couple of non fish dishes too, including sausage and mash (which looked pretty good, actually!), a veggie dish and an informative wine list.  The specials board had a couple of starters and three main courses, all fresh fish caught that morning in Scotland.

We got off to a fairly slow start, given plenty of time to choose from the menu.  That said, once we had ordered, the drinks and food arrived pretty quickly and the service was friendly and relaxed.

We both decided to go for some slightly off-beat dishes (what a surprise, I hear you shout!) rather than one of the fillet or fish steak staples.  Dee had a delicious monkfish and prawn thai green curry with sticky rice and a handful of prawn crackers.  The green curry was zingy and tasty, with a good chilli kick at the end, using monkfish was a good choice because it is meaty enough to stand up to the big thai flavours that come to the fore.

I opted for prawns and scallops (scallops are my favourite thing!) on a bed of sautéed mushrooms and spinach with chilli jam and sticky rice.  The scallops were cooked perfectly, the prawns were delicious, the rice was certainly sticky!  The chilli jam?  Well, it could have been great, but it reminded me of burnt hoisin sauce more than anything else.  It was tasty, and it worked with the prawns and rice etc, but it overpowered the scallops.  Shame, because as just a prawn dish it probably would have worked.

We both managed to stick to our guns on this occasion and skip the deserts.  First time for everything, eh?  So next time you're at Bluewater and starting to get peckish, keep on walking past all the stuff you see in every high street and try some nice fresh Scottish fish for a change!