Veg heaven at Riverford Homefarm Restaurant

During my recent weekend in Devon, when I wasn’t butchering various animals as part of my game cookery course (which you can read about here) I also went to stuff my face at the fantastic Riverford Homefarm Restaurant near Taunton. Riverford are the Devon based organic veg box people, who over the years have grown into a massive network of regional farmers and growers that get good quality organic produce all over the UK. I had no idea that they had any restaurants, until I’d started to hear good things filtering through from various foodie friends.

Game on – day two

Missed part one? Well read it here then!

So after a whole day of stuffing rich food into ourselves and a night of jolly drinking we awoke early on the Sunday, bleary-eyed, to prepare ourselves for yet more butchery! Luckily I’d seen sense to stick to local yummy ciders the night before, but my gaming partner had been at the red wine and agreed she was not 100%. A crisp walk up to the cookery school soon sorted us both out.

Our Sunday session seemed far more calm and collected, maybe we had just settled in with the resonance of the kitchen, I don’t know? We started doing our mise-en-place (prep) for our dinner later in the day, so it was quite similar to a supperclub day in fact. This included heating up cream, laced with lavender, ready for a wobbly pannacotta and chopping up tiny bits of veg for our anticipated consomme.

The rabbits we prepared the day before were handed back out again. They had been marinating overnight in a concoction of five spice, garlic and thyme. They smelled amazing and their fate was a giant pan full of melted duck fat. These were to be cooked, confit style, in a low oven for 5 hours and would be turned into rillets for us to take home.

Game for a laugh – day one

I do love a bit of rich, meaty game, and when we served venison at our Delia’s Christmas supperclub last year it was probably one of the tastiest things I’d eaten in an age. Plus when we did a beef version, it just wasn’t quite the same.

Anyway, game is an ingredient that I guess I don’t use often enough. Living in the city it’s not always the thing that’s widely available in the market, so it’s not an ingredient I feel amazingly confident about. I’d done a brilliant course at Ashburton Cookery School last year that taught me some great knife skills that I still use now, and I wanted to take it to the next level.

Being in Devon the cookery school is hardly local to Leeds. But I have friends in Devon and they’d bought me some vouchers for the school for my 30th birthday so it seemed a good idea to pop down and learn about game!

Red legged partridges ready for plucking!