Daintees

Is anybody interested in a party?

I noticed that Martin Stephenson is playing Newport in January but it’s on a Saturday night. I am a long time fan of the Daintees and probably saw them seven times between 1986 (keele university) (picure below) and 1992, when I saw them at Bristol University on crutches (I was on crutches). Both times we went for a drink with them back stage.

Anyway I appear to be rambling, the point is that I can book Martin for an appearance the night after the Newport gig and was going to do it as a Canteen Christmas party (albeit in the middle of January).

Anyone interested in coming, please let me know and I’ll set the wheels in motion. It really would be a great opportunity to hear one of the country’s best songwriters.

pannacotta

i said in the newsletter that we'd be doing a coconut pannacotta and i've just watched levi roots on the television and that made me think about mango and passion fruit. the result is a mango and coconut pannacotta with passion fruit and kiwi salsa, something a bit different to the one we were going to do. it will be vegan and will also have some cardomom in it.

whay hey, that should be cardamom shouldn't it?

please don't be my enemy

i'm a big fan of the waterboys and like to play them whenever possible. i think that one of the best tracks on the "this is the sea" album is be my enemy and it appears that we have made one of our own. it had to happen sometime because one cannot walk in the world without ruffling someone's feathers.
at present we are being attacked online in the review sites. i can guess as to the reason why but i find stuff like this rather childish. what i particularly enjoyed was the fact that the food was revolting both times that 'veggiefreak' had been (this in addition to the long waits, poor service and arrogant/rude chef (look in the mirror, wayne, ed.)). i usually do not return if it was revolting the first time but i guess we must have showed some promise.
if you care to look, you will see that this review appears on (almost) every review site. let's hope it has the desired effect, i could do with a couple of quiet nights.cheerswayneps. i'm working up a load of recipes which i'll post up pretty soon.

sticky toffee pudding wars

last night we had our much anticipated sicky toffee pudding war. i believe that we do a very good sticky toffee pudding but we were challenged to a taste-off by kate and dylan. last night they brought their version in and i have to say it was delicious. our version is light because it is my belief that at the end of the meal you are looking for something at that end of the spectrum not a rib-sticker. their version is a rib-sticker and i should say that both are vegan. the result was that we agreed that they were different versions of the same thing, i could certainly not say that ours was better, it wasn't, but i know i could finish my version.

it has also made me realise what the tea and biscuits reviewer meant when he suggested that our version had had all the flavour sucked from it. i don't agree with that but it is not the pudding that dylan made. for those of you who would like to see that version, the link is below.

Dylan's pudding

if you want to stop the sauce from splitting, use a small amount of xantham hum, too much and it'll be wall paper paste.

cheers and thanks to the family stewart

wayne

from discrete to continuous and more charges

i have a theory about bookings and i can't help it, i have to share. most people eat out a given number of times per month, year, whatever and these discrete events, when summed over the population, gives the (approximately) continuous distribution of available bookings over a given period of time. sometimes the discrete events intersect, valentine's day is the best example, and we see a peak in the wave function and at other times they mostly don't and bookings are hard to come by. for us, last saturday was one of those events, the latter, whilst last night was the former. we could have seated another eight tables and this presents us with a problem.

we are not going down the two sitting route, book a table with us and it's yours as long as you want it, but we may have to ask for deposits on large tables. the problem that we had last evening was that we had a booking for 14, only ten of whom turned up. one person had rung to let us know and 13 versus 14 makes no difference anyway, however the other three meant that we had a table of 4 which we could not sell because we did not know about it. in the future for large tables we will book in principle but ask for a deposit one week before, the need for this is precipitated by the reduction in spend per head that we've noticed since the beginning of the year. our margins are such that small differences can have significant effects, especially as we are only open 3 evenings a week.