Alex takes a few hours away from The Hole in the Wall to appear on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and talk food, cooking and Masterchef with Antonia Brickell
Listen Again (until Tuesday 1st November)
I cannot believe I am writing this blog post. To make the leap from aspiring food writer to Masterchef finalist was really quite something but this might just top it.
I’ve got a restaurant. Maybe it will help things sink in if that is repeated.
I have my very own restaurant. And what a restaurant it is.
The Hole in the Wall in the delightful village of Little Wilbraham, just outside Cambridge, is about as picture perfect as an old pub can be and I love it.
I am delighted to announce that in July I will be opening my first restaurant in Cambridge.
Full details will be released on June 30th but in the mean time for mailing list and priority bookings please send an email to bookings@alexrushmer.com
In the beginning was the word and the word was barbecue.
For many of us barbecue is a simple affair: an excuse to drink cold beer, grill meat, enjoy the outdoors and spend a few hours getting to know one’s inner Neanderthal. For others, though it is an obsession and vocation bordering on the religious.
So, it’s been a while.
Life took a turn for the busy and now it’s April. Already. There’s been a lot of cooking: a tasting menu for a shoal of pescetarians. A supper club for 40 cooked entirely on an Aga (and a barbecue once we realised the hot plate couldn’t get hot enough to sear the meat). Receipe writing for a new magazine. And plenty of menu development for Project X which is nearing completion.
Project X is currently top secret but involves a permanent home for my food after a year of searching. It would seem that finding a restaurant isn’t that easy but please do watch this space for a hugely, massively, wonderfully, brilliantly, tremendously exciting announcement in the very near future. You, dear readers, will be the first to know.
But for now, how about a recipe?
Oh, crunchy salty pork skin – you may well be the perfect snack. And if website hits are anything to go by then I have some empirical evidence to prove this fact. My recipe for pork scratchings has been viewed more than any other. By quite some distance, in fact. Turns out people really want to know how to make pork scratchings.
‘Hot chocolate’ is the most comforting duo of words. It’s cuddly and capable of initiating a wonderfully childlike regression. Sofas and blankets and fires. Marshmallows. Movies and slippers.
If you could eat anything, anything, right now, what would you choose?
Sometimes hunger is a general niggling feeling in the base of the belly that can be kept at bay by a bowl of cereal or slice of toast. At other times though it affects the psyche as well as the stomach. It claws its way into the deepest recesses of your frontal chow cortex or some other part of the brain.
Salt is a miraculous ingredient, not merely for its ability to accentuate flavour but also for its magical preservative qualities. Often these meet in glorious harmony and create something truly delicious.
December has a smell all of its own. Cloves. Pine logs. Satsumas. Cracked walnut shells. Cinnamon. Brandy. Cold blushed cheeks. A warm, sweet perfume rendered stronger by bolted doors and closed windows and lengthy dawns and early nights. Darkness it seems, accentuates the scent of December.
But for all that warmth and spice, for me, it is the smell of preserved fish that does the best job of summoning the ghost of Christmases past.
Jannson’s Temptation: from a shoot by @Photolotte for Verve Magazine issue two out now, featuring my column on Swedish food
I'm Alex Rushmer: writer, chef and Masterchef 2010 finalist. Welcome to my little corner of the Web. Why not get a cup of tea, snuggle down and make yourself at home?
