I have been asked twice in the last few months for restaurant recommendations in Nottingham, and have been thinking I should maybe start reviewing the trips we make. Eating out is increasingly one of our leisure activities, as funds allow, and as time is short for cooking these days. Nottingham offers a huge range of restaurants in every price category.

We have had a number of restaurant meals since I resolved to start writing reviews, and, erm, no reviews yet. So I thought I would write a list as a warm up. This is non-exhaustive, and I am sure I will miss out loads of places we like in my haste to write something – anything!

Local to us in Sherwood

Sherwood’s restaurant scene is one of the key reasons we chose this awesome suburb when we bought our house. There is such a glorious range of eateries just a few hundred metres from our front door, and as often as not you can just turn up and eat at any of them without booking on those nights when the Hob Fairy has deserted you.

La Capanna – lovely Italian food, pasta and meat dishes mainly but I see they have started doing pizza as well. Regular specials and a permanent menu. Have the stroganoff if it’s on the board, otherwise I almost always have the pâté con crostini and the tagliatelle chef special. House wine is in litre bottles, which is sometimes a surprise.

Le Mistral – small and friendly French restaurant chain operating in a few counties near here. Good wine list. Small, tasty menu. Good value.

Rajah – our local curry house. V tasty. Good for veggies too.

Up in the other direction from home, on the edge of Mapperley Top, is the Bread and Bitter, fab pub with food, and definitely in the category of “should go here more often.”

Panda  – not the best food in the world but cheap and tasty and just right for when it’s Chinese you fancy.

City centre

Yammas – P’s sister had her birthday in their upstairs room, and we’ve been itching to go back since. Greek, meze style restaurant, food lovely, not too pricey, good and quick for a pre-cinema bite. On our last visit they did try and get us to order a little more food than you strictly speaking need, ie more than one meze main per person, but backed off when we said we were in a hurry and on a diet. (less convincing when you have puddings)

French Living – definitely my favourite of the French restaurants in town, but I tend to find it a little on the pricey side as I get carried away in the wine pages. Other options are Petit Paris and the other Nottingham Le Mistral, but by choice for me it is French Living. There is a really authentic French vibe about the place and all the staff are fluent French speakers, which gives me a little chance to show off slightly. It’s often the place we go ahead of a French trip to get P back in the mood of speaking French.  Open lunchtime and evenings, and although every time we have eaten there has been as a walk-in, we are always made to feel as if we were lucky to have got a table without booking.

Aubrey’s Creperie – great for lunch or an early, pre 6pm dinner, this creperie is valiantly trying, almost single handedly, to regenerate the seriously faded West End Arcade. They have super crepes, French cider, will cater gluten free or vegan if asked, and have delicious food. The place is tiny, and it sometimes takes a while to get fed, but it’s worth the wait.

Erm, right. List to be continued.

A twitter friend is asking for veggie and vegan recipes as he seems to be contemplating a veggie month.

I’m by no means veggie, but we try and have two meat-free evening meals a week.

Here are some of the things we eat.  (These are on the pink cards in my card index meal planning box… that has pretty much been gathering dust for the last month.) Many of these things are categories rather than specific recipes.

Pie.  Onion or mushroom and stilton.

Quiche. This old Jewish recipe is a particular fave. But I also like quiche that’s mostly tomato – spread tom purée on the bottom of the pastry case before adding the rest of the filling for more tomatoey oomph.

Patates yahni me ellis – a fab greek potato stew, dead simple, store cupboard ingredients, packed with flavour, also vegan.

Dahl. Amongst the first things I blogged about here – the recipe is around halfway down the page. Vegan. I’ll confess, I’m not a huge pulses fan, and I often struggle to eat an entire plate of lentils of any sort of cooking, but dahl is pretty good. As is hummus, which is easy to make yourself, especially if you start with tinned, cooked chickpeas.

Soup.  Leek and potato à la Julia Childs, I made a lot after seeing Julie and Julia. But caution – the recipe calls for parmesan rinds, and if it’s called parmesan, it’s not veggie! (this also means many pestos are surprisingly not veggie.) Other soups that go down well are mushroom, roasted tomato,  things with those little tiny pasta pieces like orzo, and things made with that bag of mixed things in the pulses aisle called soup mix, things like lentils, pearl barley and split peas in.  Pea soup is also a good one, but I usually make pea and ham, so that’s not a veggie night one.

Pasta bake, eg this Simon Hopkinson special that needs you to get almost every saucepan dirty. (Srsly, read the recipe. A saucepan for heating the milk. One for making the roux. One for cooking the pasta, along with a sieve and a bowl.  An oven dish, another bowl)

Noodle salad with asian peanut dressing. This was on the meal plan for this week, and the ingredients are slowly rotting, uneaten, in the fridge still.

Things many veggies are sick to death of, as they are often the only choice. Mushroom risotto. Stuffed peppers. Stuffed mushrooms.  All nice things to have occasionally, however.

Definitely experiment with the grains: couscous, pearl barley, bulghar wheat or quinoa. All need cooking with something like stock to stop them being boring, but you can use this pilaf recipe with any of them, or rice.

Experiment with interesting vegetables, eg fennel.

Make your own pizza.

Roast tomatoes are awesome with anything – how about grilled halloumi and sweetcorn fritters? Or with boiled lentils, which have been jazzed up as follows: finely chop an onion and garlic and soak in red wine vinegar as the lentils boil in stock. Add a dollop of sweet chilli sauce and stir through the lentils.

Stir fry.

Any kind of salad, but we like Greek salad especially.

Fritatta. Omelette.

Roasted aubergine curry, eg this one from Come Dine With Me.  (This, along with the stuffed marrows I’ve done variously, are things that I have cooked and then for some reason not been able to face eating!)

I hadn’t really heard of this before this summer, and suddenly it’s everywhere. It’s essentially a cheap joint of pork cooked long and slow with barbecue-sauce-like marinade. After cooking, you reserve the sauce, take out the pork and remove the bones and fat, and pull it apart with forks, like rillettes or Chinese restaurant Peking duck. The sauce has its fat removed, and then to serve, you reheat the sauce and mix it with the shredded meat.

I cooked it for our dinner party on Saturday, and apart from it tying up your oven for an entire day ((or a slow cooker if you have one. I’m almost considering getting a slow cooker again just for this!)), it’s a really good dinner party dish. I had cooked the starter and pudding the day before, and it came out of the oven in good time to let me make the canapés in the half-hour before the guests arrived.

As I put the starter out, I set the fire under a big pan of potatoes which would eventually become mustard mash (potatoes with the skins still on, but cut smaller; wholegrain mustard; butter and something creamy – cream, yoghurt or quark, whatever was in the fridge). Then about halfway through the spud cooking time, I put prepared French beans and broccoli florets into boiling water. The pork had been ready since about 6pm, so I put the jug of gravy sauce into the microwave to boil it, stirred it through the meat, then brought out the meat, mash and veg in big steaming pots for people to help themselves.

The main recipe I read was Matt Tebbut’s, from last September’s Olive magazine, reproduced here. We’re not terribly seafoody people, and some of our guests had specifically said no fish, so no clams. Reading around on the internet found an enormous variety of different rubs and sauces, but the essential thing seemed to be that anything vaguely marinadey would do. So I rubbed mine the night before with salt and sugar, then on the day, improvised a marinade. It included: chopped onions, shallots and garlic; HP brown sauce, tomato purée, red wine vinegar, sherry ((I love sherry)), sugar, Dijon mustard. The lot was whisked together in a big lidded cast-iron casserole and the meat joint was wiped of its salt and plonked on top. I kept opening it up during the day to see how it was getting along, and ended up worrying it wasn’t cooking quickly enough. It got 7 hours in total, and each time I looked at it, I turned it up a bit, so it got 3 hours at 140 deg, a few more at 150 and had the last two hours at 180. It could well have been fine at the lower temperature, but didn’t seem harmed by the higher. I think this is a fairly forgiving dish. Each time I looked, I also basted, by spooning the juices over the side.

In terms of it being everywhere, it’s on the Clarkies supperclub September menu, for starters (their mixed grill sounds fab!)

And this evening I have been reading through the back posts on the blog of one of the Great British Bake Off contestants, Mary-Anne – and there was a gorgeous looking version made with apples, which sounds like a very good combination and which I am itching to try out.

So, pulled pork has a lot going for it. Delicious, cheap, flexible… but one final benefit, given that I am now starting to think with my “back to school” head on, is that it looks to be very easily doable either on a prepare ahead basis – make the marinade the night before and leave it cooking in the oven during the day on a timer – or that it looks eminently freezable. Make it at the weekend, and make ghost portions for the following week.

Mary-Anne on the GBBO is one of my favourite contestants, and her blog is top notch. Special shout out for her gorgeous looking and sounding Apple Rose Tarts.

As previously mentioned, we’ve signed up to host a pop-up vegan restaurant night on 26th November.

Our chef-partner has begun setting up a website for the series of events she is cooking for this Autumn, including a sample menu page. And whilst the dishes there are not necessarily those she will be cooking on the night, as seasonality is an important factor, they do look pretty damn amazing.

My only concern with the Stripey Cat diet is that I know our hostess is much more able to eat chilli and garlic than we are – we are fast turning into People Who Like Garlic But It Doesn’t Like Us. (of which, another blogpost sometime soon)

Less vegan, we’ve also secured tickets for Clarkies in October, so we will be able to see how the only supper club in Notts does things (although their style – including a choice of three dishes for each course – seems to me to be pretty hard work!)

EDIT: Clarkies have got in touch on Facebook to say they DO do vegan food too – my apols for missing their link!

We have a whole bunch of essentially hedgerow like plants growing in the garden. We’ve been making elderflower cordial for a few years. I’ve had a couple of goes at elderflower champagne as well but it always goes mouldy in the first fermentation before I can get it in bottles. Still, the cordial makes cracking salad dressing, cake and best of all, gin’n’tonic’n’elderflower.

Something in the weather this year has made all the fruiting plants in the garden go mental: blackberries, damsons, crabapples and the elderberries are all doing quite well.

In previous years I have made blackberry vodka – very easy, very nice. We still have most of a bottle of elderflower gin which I think we probably steeped for too long and has quite a bitter edge. Perhaps if I sugar it…

This year I’m having a go at patxaran – something MYM has been talking about for a few years: steep pernod with sloes, coffee beans and a vanilla pod. There are not a huge number of google hits for that, but there is sloe.biz, which appears to be a forum dedicated to things you can do with sloes. One of their topics dedicated to patxaran suggested you can use ouzo instead of pernod, and suddenly I realised I could make something like that without even going shopping, as I had damsons in the garden, undrunk ouzo in the drinks cabinet, coffee beans from the time I bought those instead of grounds (or possibly from the time I wanted to drop them in sambuca) and vanilla beans from eBay.

Within just a few days it’s taking on nice red hue.

Howabout crabapple wine? I’ve got a demijohn that hasn’t done anything possibly ever (… that’s a point. Why do I even own a demijohn?) How long would it take to pick and crush 6lbs of crab apples? Where do I get campden tablets and the other weird ingredients? (Wilkos probably, that’s where the demijohn and the airlock came from) Can I really ever use the fermentation bucket ever again, after it’s been living in the roofless, spidery shed for the last six years?

Perhaps I’m better off sticking to the steepy types of recipes rather than the actual brewing. Elderberry liqueur?

Surprisingly easy and surprisingly gawjus recipe this evening, cooked as a main for Pudding Club as our friends wanted to try out their new tarte tatin pan. Dead quick too – less than an hour to put together and cook (although I spread the time out by making it before driving to Long Eaton to cook it.)

In the supermarket, on the conveyor belt, as I was unpacking, a woman behind me with a thick Italian attic quizzed me about the cannelloni pasta, which is tubes. Where did you find those? I looked everywhere! I explained it was right next to the lasagne sheet pasta and she dashed off to find it before her shopping rolled to the front. She too had large quantities of spinach and ricotta in her basket.

First prepare to make the cheese sauce: simmer a pint of milk (UHT is fine) with an onion, bay leaf and cloves.

Two bags of spinach and one tub of ricotta make the filling for the pasta tubes: cook the spinach with a few tablespoons of boiling water then drain. Grate in some fresh nutmeg and beat in the ricotta cheese.

Pipe the mix into the cannelloni. The two bags of spinach and the tub filled around 14 pasta tubs.

Next cover them with a tomatoey sauce. I used Lloyd Grossman’s tomato and chargrilled vegetables sauce out of a jar – and it took two jars to do the job. For some reason, I would never buy a cheese sauce but I am more than happy to buy tomato sauces. My homemade tomato pasta sauce is always a little disappointing, so when I am making pizza or pasta, I’m happy to buy in the tomato sauce element.

The cheese sauce is a buttery roux – made as per my lasagne recipe. Cover the tomato sauce with a thin layer of cheese sauce and heat the whole thing for 20 mins at 150 deg C. Then cover with a mix of breadcrumbs, parmesan and something interesting and crunchy. I went for pine nuts, sesame and linseeds in the end after about 10 mins scrabbling around the kitchen looking for the half packet of chopped walnuts that I know is in there somewhere. Whack under the grill to blacken the gratin. Serve. Eat. Nom.