But this year I’m going to be there. Not cruising the aisles checking the produce mind you. Oh no. I shall be a Pop-Up Pie Assistant to the wonderful Brays Cottage Pork Pies. If you are in any doubt about their wonderfulness then consider that they were one of only ten producers selected from over 70 to win a Bursary Award to enable them to have a stall at the show. And the list of people who rave about their pies is simply too long to mention…

I’m really excited about being Pop-Up Pie Assistant, I’m following in the trailblazing shoes of this list of luminaries of the Pop-Up Pie Assistant academy:

@Farctum and @Josordoni and @DrTimKinnaird and @deantoms and @enjoynorwich and @JonnyB and apparently even an MEP

…..each had their trade mark style I’m hoping mine will be a porkpie hat…

So of course naturally you want to come along and see me being pie assistant. You want to meet Sarah the driving force behind Brays Cottage. You want to sample the pies. Of course you do. Who wouldn’t.

And you’ve two ways to get there:

1. The usual way: pay your entrance fee pop along to the stall and buy a pie. We’ll be thrilled to see you.

OR

2. The GSD special way: enter my competition to win one of 3 pairs of entrance tickets donated by the show organisers, pop along to the stall, flash your special Pie Voucher and YES YES YES you get Bray’s Cottage pie for FREE. And better still you get a special GSD/WKF limited edition for this competition only gift.

WOW. This is truly an exclusive competition. You CANNOT get this deal anywhere else.

So what do you need to do:

Leave a comment on this post telling me why you deserve to win and how will your life be changed by experiencing pork pie nirvana. I’ll pick 3 entries (pair of tickets to each winner) on some basis yet to be determined, probably the 3 that I like most and failing that by random number generator.

Get entering you have until midnight on Friday 19 November. I’ll pick the winners on Saturday 20th and mail the tickets out to you.

Small print:

1. Tickets are general admission only. Excluding Saturday. They are non transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash.

2. You must present your special Pie Voucher to claim your free pie. One pie per person. And I’ll have a cunning system in place to ensure only the winners get their mitts on the free pies so don’t bother making your own, photocopying or anything else ‘smart’.

3. The Pie Voucher is also used to collect your GSD/WKF exclusive gift.

4. I’m the judge and my decision on who wins is final.

5. You can’t enter if you are related to me, sorry.

6. Oh and I’m there Thursday and Friday but you’ll still be able to claim your pie etc if you choose to go a different day

Sometimes the stuff I review has been sent to me for free, sometimes I’ve paid for it with hard cash, sometimes its been an exchange or barter of a truly old fashioned type – some of my help in return for food.

Just as I don’t review every single thing I buy I don’t review everything I get sent.

But somewhere along the line I thought it might be fun to have a rating system for the reviews.

So today I bring you…. (drumroll, trumpet fanfare)…..

…..Oh yes its…the…..

goodshoeday ‘shoe’ rating system (TM) ….gsdR(TM) for short

The reviews will be totally honest and the rating will be a genuine reflection of what I think but its also a little bit of fun, shoes instead of stars.

If you want to read my review ‘policy’ check here

If you want to understand how the gsdR(TM) system works then take a look here

And keep a look out for that gsd X shoe rated item stamp….I just know you’ll be seeing on slapped on rated products across the land very soon (once I’ve ironed out a few minor legal points that is…)

Oh and you can find my posterous blogs via the side bar links over there on the right >>>>>>

]]> http://withknifeandfork.com/reviewing-stuff/feed 4 http://withknifeandfork.com/competition-results http://withknifeandfork.com/competition-results#comments Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:24:55 +0000 http://withknifeandfork.com/?p=1180 So the closing date is passed. The entries are in. I’m about to draw the results for my first ever blog competition.

But first let me indulge in a little wander through some of the thoughts I’ve had about running a competition on my blog…..

1. It was fun, people do bother to write good replies if you set them a topic and now I know there are quite a few other stationery geeks out there.

2. You get way more comments on your posts if people think they are in with the chance of winning and from all sorts [...]

Continue reading Competition results

Until now.

Why?

Well two things really, someone offered a lovely prize, one I’d be happy to have myself and when I asked Twitter the verdict was resoundingly that competitions are GOOD….. I assume everyone is hoping to win. So good it would seem that one cheeky chappy (he knows who he is) suggested I design the rules such that he was guaranteed to win, very naughty. And I won’t be doing that.

So what’s the competition and what’s the prize?

Well the prize is this hamper of goodies:

which has been supplied courtesy of HamperGifts.co.uk, who provide a wide range of hampers, chocolate gifts and mothers day baskets.

I particularly like the fact that as well as the food goodies it comes in rather nice looking boxes, but that’s probably because I’m a bit of a stationery and storage fan, as evidenced by some of my posterous posts.

So what do you have to do to be in with a chance of winning? Well you have to post a comment on this post by 20^th September telling me what your favourite stationery item is. I’ll then pick a winner using a complex spreadsheet formula or much more possibly a random number generator. If you don’t list a favourite stationery item your comment won’t be included in the draw and if you comment more than once the earliest comment that meets the competition rules will be the one that counts…..so Dan there is little chance of rigging it in your favour….

Over to you to try and win the hamper.

Please note the hamper will be dispatched direct form the supplier so if you are feeling very generous you could choose to send it to someone as a gift. Note that delivery can be anywhere in the UK except the Channel Islands, PO Box or BFPO Box addresses.

Everyone loves burgers (well everyone who loves meat). Homemade ones are brilliant, once you’ve tried them you’ll never want to buy ready made again, because there is no point. They are really simple to make and they taste so much better.

You can mince the meat yourself but I’m guessing if you have a mincer you probably don’t need me to tell you about making your own burgers….

You should allow between 150g-250g of meat per person depending on whether you like small, medium or really quite large burgers. I find that 3 burgers from 500g is about right if you’ve got toppings and side dishes. Its also important that you go for the 20% fat mince, less fat and your burger just won’t be as juicy and tasty, burgers are not the place to be exercising fat content control. Get the best mince you can find it does make a real difference to the taste.

This is a kind of design your own burger recipe…..

Ingredients (for 3 people):

500g of mince (beef, lamb or pork)

1tsp to 1tbsp of herbs or spices to complement your chosen meat (see below for my favourite combinations)

salt and pepper

3 white buns or rolls, again the nicest you can find

cooking oil

condiments: mayo/ketchup/tomato/mushrooms/sliced cheese/bacon/lettuce/onion as suits you and the burger

sides: chips, coleslaw, salad etc

Method:

Break the mince up in a bowl, add salt and pepper and mix in. You can leave your burgers plain but I like to add some spices or herbs: add your herb/spice of choice, mix in and leave for 30mins to 1 hour for the flavours to mingle and then form the meat into three equal patties with your hands. You just need to squash and shape it and it will hold together fine. Aim for about 2cm thick and don’t worry if its not perfectly flat.

Pour some cooking oil onto a plate and coat each burger with oil by putting it on the plate and moving it about a bit on each side (don’t worry about the edges, just the flat surfaces).

Heat your chosen pan, a griddle plan will give you nice seared lines but a frying pan is fine. You don’t need any oil in the pan as you’ve already oiled the burger. When the pan is nice and hot put the burgers in. Turn the heat down about ¼ – ½ way. Leave the burgers alone to cook. After about 2-3 minutes they will be ready to flip and they will come away from the pan easily. Turn them over and leave again. This will give you medium-rare/medium burgers; cook for longer if you wish.

Serve on the buns with the condiments and side dishes of your choice.

Good spice/herb combinations are (picking just one usually works best). Use 1 tsp of spices (ready or freshly ground) or dried herbs and up to 1 tbsp of fresh chopped herbs:

Beef: chilli flakes or fresh chilli, coriander seeds or leaves, English mustard powder

Lamb: cumin seeds, coriander seeds, mint, oregano, rosemary

Pork: sage, smoky paprika

Think about how different cuisines spice their food and you’ll find plenty more options.

This love of printed matter takes on a new slant when, on Twitter, publishers are offering review copies to bloggers and at events generous souls are popping them in goodie bags. What is a girl to do? Well clearly one thing is to review them. And I did one full review of a book I got from a publisher, and I enjoyed it: both book and review. But the others that you can see above have created a little conundrum so I haven’t yet managed to review them. Why? Well its not that I only want to write positive things on my blog, but essentially I do want to mostly write about things I enjoy and can enthuse about a sort of ‘goodshoeday recommends’ approach. And some of these books I do heartily recommend (as you will eventually see) but I couldn’t always find much to say. I don’t want to simply repeat a press release and I don’t want to be bland or negative unless I’ve read a book cover to cover and as you will guess from the intro I don’t always do that with books I pay for!

I also don’t want to be obliged to cook a recipe just to be sure the it works (or doesn’t). There is endless debate about this with many saying if you haven’t cooked a recipe how can you properly review the book and those who, like me, think its in no way essential. I guess it depends who’s going to read the review and who the book is aimed at. If its “the basics of cooking in 100 pages” then yes it should all work if its “this is mostly full of pictures and ideas” well I guess they should still work but then its more about the inspiration than the exact quantities, after all who follows recipes exactly (except possibly when baking).

So I have a pile of books I have garnered for free. To date I haven’t reviewed them. Well all that’s about to change because I’m ready to launch my all new patented method of book reviewing The GSD flip-thru (TM) . In the interests of objectivity I will be reviewing the books in individual blog posts in the order I received them, which is from the bottom of that pile upwards……

Bet you can’t wait for the first review ;0

Here’s what I came up with for her….

With monotonous regularity someone somewhere will go on about how an education system founded in “the 3 Rs” is just what we need to get back to basics and raise standards. Its always worried me a little that these three R’s don’t all start with “R”, hasn’t anyone but me spotted or is it phonetics for adults. Perhaps, despite the huff and puff that is was better in the past, its assumed those basics didn’t ever get through and so none of us know that only Reading actually begins with the letter R and that wRiting and aRithmetic start with other letters than “R”. Granted the “W” in wRiting is pretty silent in pronunciation but the “A” in ARithmetic isn’t, although there is an argument the R is for ‘Reckoning’ not ‘aRithmetic’. But the fundamental point of the three R’s is: get the basics right and all the rest will follow as day follows night. There is at least a grain of truth….. click here to read more over at Jo’s Kitchen blog …..and you get to see inside the exercise books!

So this month I got well ahead of myself and made the challenge almost week for the deadline instead of on the day!

The bread we baked was Turkish Pide and the challenge was hosted by Mrs Ergul.

I had a bit of fun with the US measurements getting muddled and almost using a whole stick of butter instead of half. But I got there in the end. The bread was really easy to make and very tasty. Mrs Ergul says the dough might be very wet but mine actually started off quite dry so I had to add more water to get it fairly sticky. I used my usual kneading technique of short gentle kneads spaced out through the rising.

To go with the bread I made some Turkish inspired kebabs (minced beef, chilli, cumin and coriander), some minty yoghurt and some tomato and onion salad. It was very yummy and I think they bread’s soft texture would be great with burgers. We used up the rest of the bread with dips the next day.

Here’s the method as given to us my Mrs Ergul (with some UK annotations by me):

Ingredients:

4 cups (to 5 cups) All Purpose Flour (ie plain flour, I only needed 4 cups and I used a cup measure as I have a set. 1 cup is approx 130g of flour)
1 and 3/4 cups Warm Water (1 cup = 236ml)
1/2 stick Butter ( melted ) (1 stick = 113g)
1/2 tablespoon Instant Yeast
1 tablespoon Sugar
1/2 tablespoon Salt

Topping:

Black and White Sesame Seeds (I used cumin seeds as I didn’t have sesame seeds)

In a large mixing bowl, mix all of the dry ingredients
Add melted Butter and Warm Water into this mixture and knead
The dough should be sticky
Cover the bowl with a plastic wrap and keep it in a warm place for rising
Let the dough rise to double its size
Knead the dough again until it is bubble free
Place a parchment paper on a 13″ by 10.5″ baking tray
Take the dough to the tray and make it flat with your hands until it cover all of the surface of the tray
Dampen your hands with Water if the dough stick to your hands on this step
Then take a knife and give the dough square shapes going deep down
Sprinkle some Sesame Seeds on top
Preheat the oven to 350F (R4/180C)
Let rise the dough for half an hour
Bake it for 30 minutes or until the color of pide turns light brown
Take the pide out of the oven and let it cool for 20 minutes and cover it with a clean kitchen towel to keep it soft

I have been doing a few things elsewhere…like over on my various posterous sites where I’ve been posting food and non-food related snippets and also splitting the food and none food into two separate sites.

Take a look here for food stuff:

And here for other not so foodie stuff:

I also wrote a guest piece for the world famous Where’s my Pork Chop? blog run by Danny at Food Urchin all about well food and the internet:

And of course I did my regular piece for Francoise Murat’s newsletter which you can find here but I’ll be posting the full post on the blog too soon.

And finally there’s another guest piece on another blog that will be popping up soon, I’ll let you know when it does.

So I haven’t been sitting round doing nothing, honest!

This is the third time Rude Health have wheeled out the hay bale and the rants are becoming so popular its hard to bag a slot to let your voice be heard. To whet your appetite for someranting here is little ol’ me going on about boeuf bourguignon at Abergavenny in September:

Ranting

I’m not going to be able to make it along this weekend but for anyone else who misses out the rants get posted here so you can always find your favourite.

Good luck to all the ranters this weekend particularly Scandilicious and Food Urchin who I KNOW are going to be brilliant ).

Go ranters go!