We fancied a bit of Spice this Christmas and so for our recent festive themed supperclub we turned to Thomasina Miers’ ‘Chilli Notes’ – a lovely homage to everyone’s favourite capsicum. Using this book as our guide for a menu, we cooked up treats that showcased not just chilli heat but the fruity aromatics too.
Next weekend we’ll be hosting our final supperclub of 2014! Where does time go? As usual, for our last supperclub of the year we’ll have a festive theme, and this year we’re bringing a bit of spice and heat, using Thomasina Mier’s Chilli Notes as our guide.
Warming, comforting food to bring some festive cheer to December? Yes please!
We’d love to know what you think!
We got our bake on again the other weekend, and this time Autumn was our inspiration – queue lots of brown, beige and orange bakes!
We’re covered in scaffolding at the moment as the Manor is having a new roof put on. So it was lovely to dust down and get out the vintage crockery, if only to bring back a temporary sense of normality to the Manor!
Our welcome cocktail was an invention of mine – lady marmalade. This was bourbon and orange liquers mixed up with orange juice, lemon juice, ginger ale and lemon syrup. Guests seemed to love this for its refreshing, fruity spiciness. I’ve promised to post the recipe in due course so watch this space.
For savouries I kept it simple but tasty. Around bonfire night I love a good jacket potato, and so for the tea I did mini ones with a salty, herby crust. I served these atop home baked Boston beans. Haricot beans were slow cooked with treacle and bacon – leaving you with something that tastes just liked the famous brand, very bizarre! My other offering was a tasty slice of rarebit with Yorkshire stout and Wensleydale cheddar. The salty, umami flavours worked really well with my sweet tomato and apple chutney. I ate a good few of the leftovers! I think rarebit is very underrated!
Susie prepared one of her trademark pork pies – a very beautiful thing indeed! She mixed it up a bit by putting some apple in the meat mix, leading to a sweet and succulently soft pie. Guests were salivating over this and I’m not surprised. Susie’s other treat were fishfinger baps – the ultimate in comfort food. Line caught cod was breaded and baked and then served up in Susie’s homemade baps and homemade tartar sauce, yum!
Bakewise I was keen to try my hand at a pumpkin pie. I steamed pumpkin pieces until tender and then passed through a sieve to produce a smooth puree. This was then mixed with spices, eggs, maple syrup and lots of sugar to create a very bizarre custard! This was baked in my homemade sweet walnut pastry. The outcome was not dissimilar to a cheesecake as the savoury element of the pumpkin played through in an subtle sour way. I served it with grand marnier cream, crystallised ginger and candied pumpkin seeds, which were lovely and nutty. I also baked up some friands – a cake I am quickly becoming obsessed with for their nutty, chewy moistness! This time I used my homemade mulled pears, ginger and almonds in the mix and then if that wasn’t enough I topped them all with lashings of salted caramel! I’ve discovered Nigella’s easy recipe, which is much simpler than faffing around with sugar thermometers.
Susie baked up the obligatory scones, these were a lovely vibrant yellow from the fresh eggs she used. We served these with homemade apple and damson jam. Whilst I have been obsessed with friands, Susie has been obsessed with choux pastry! She’s been experimenting with eclairs over on her Sticky Pinny site. For the tea she created moresish little malted chocolate eclairs. Choux pastry was filled with a malted crème pat and decorated with a luxurious chocolate ganache and crumbled maltesers! Her final offering was an orange and pistachio cake. This was a colourful, fruity interlude in what was otherwise a very Autumnal menu! Guests didn’t have any room for this cake so they all went home clutching doggy bags!
So as 2014 is drawing to a close we have one last event this year – our chilli themed Christmas supperclub. We’re just putting the finishing touches to the menu and will publish soon. Hopefully by then the building work will be done and the scaffold will be down so that we can celebrate Christmas properly!
The nights are drawing in and the weather’s cooling down, so what better way to step into Autumn than with our afternoon tea event next weekend! We’ve pulled together a menu of warming, comforting classics with all the Manor twists.
Tell us what you think!
This weekend saw us celebrate in style for our third birthday, wow time flies! Our little supperclub is now a terrible toddler and growing up fast. We did away with our usual habit of theming the event around a specific cook book and instead based it, selfishly, around our two favourite things – meat and beer, whoo!
The beer was provided by our good friends at Brewdog, who were keen to see how their beer could be used as an ingredient and also how it paired to our food. Susie and I worked with the lovely Russ (Brewdog Northern Sales Manager and general beer geek) to design a meaty menu and pair appropriate beers with it. We wanted a menu that would excite and then fill up our guests with lots of meaty goodness!
On October 4th we’ll be celebrating three years of running our little supperclub! Never did we think we’d last this long! We’ll be holding a special event and serving our guests some meaty treats, from uber modern streetfood to traditional dishes, with a twist. We’ve linked up with the wonderful Brewdog Brewery to pair up each of the courses to some fantastic beers! Russ from Brewdog will be at the event too to chat about all things beer! It’s going to be a fabulous evening, we can’t wait!
On Saturday Dan and I hosted eleven wonderful guests at the Manor for an afternoon of Mediterranean teatime treats. Taking inspiration from our our friends across the water, including Spain and Italy, we created some unique bold tastes for our guests to enjoy that would take them to warmer climes, at least for a couple of hours!
The welcome cocktail was an elderflower fizz to tingle the tastebuds before the savouries, this was concocted using Dan’s homemade elderflower cordial. First up were a number of Spanish inspired delights. My Gallician Chicken Empandas were filled with lightly poached chicken, spiked with paprika, peppers and tomato, encased in crisp, lightly flaked homemade pastry. Continue reading
Fancy coming to our supperclub? Well now you can as we’re pleased to announce three new dates. You can book onto any of the events below!
To celebrate our third birthday we’re using two of our favourite things to help us celebrate. Your ticket price will include several delicious beers paired to your canapes, starter and main course, hand selected by us from one of our favourite breweries, which has been confirmed as…Brewdog! Strong ales with flavour and bite! We’re really looking forward to pairing these beers to our food.
The food will all have a street foodie ,meaty theme from ribs, burgers, slow cooked treats – perhaps we’ll even get our smoker back out?! Unfortunately this is probably not one for the veggies, we promise to make it up to you in the new year when we’ve got the new Ottolenghi book! Tickets will be £40pp and include paired beers plus a few extra Manor treats!
We love the changing of the seasons and what better way to celebrate Autumn than an infamous Manor Afternoon tea. We can guarantee that our sweets and savouries will be crammed full of comforting, warming treats and surprises. You won’t leave hungry! Tickets will be £20pp and include a welcome cocktail on arrival.
Our favourite time of year! To date we’ve celebrated Christmas in style with Delia, Nigella, Scandilicious and now it’s the turn of Thomasina Miers. Using her ‘Chilli Notes’ book as inspiration, we’ll be spiking festive treats with our favourite capsicum. If you fancy a bit of heat to warm up on the chilly winter nights, then why not join us?! Tickets will be £33 each and include a welcome cocktail on arrival.
We hope you can join us! Please remember to look at our T&Cs before booking
In a few of weeks we’ll be hosting another afternoon tea. We really do love donning our aprons and baking delicious morsels for our guests. Given the glorious weather we’re having we’ve decided to take inspiration from sunnier climes, with all of the offerings inspired by the Mediterranean.
Bold flavours with the usual Manor twist. We’d love to know what you think!
We brought some Latin sun and flavour to the Manor this weekend. South American food is big business at the moment and we found lots to inspire us from the likes of Thomasina Miers’ hit Wahaca books, Martin Morales’ Ceviche and the huge Latin American food compendium that is Gran Cocina Latina by American Maricel Presilla. So many recipes to choose from that we just decided to cook them all!
Guests were welcomed with a glass of ‘Latin KIss’ a fragrant concoction of aged tequila, homemade elderflower cordial and sparkling water – a light, floral take on a classic Margarita. Nibbles came in the form of crunchy corn kernels flavoured with chilli and lemon, a crunchy delight!
We did away with our classic canapes and starters and instead offered up a series of small plates to give guests a wide range of flavours and taste experiences. First up was a shot of spicy red bean soup inspired by Presilla’s Puerto Rican recipe. I have to say I found her book ever so slightly overwhelming (and no pictures!) but doing the supperclub made me properly trawl through and test things out, which I am glad of. The spicy thick soup was freshened up with a sofrito which is basically a sauce you add at the last minute. Full of freshness from lime, peppers, chillis, coriander and red onion it gives the soup a real fresh bite.
Next up were my favourites- little potato cakes filled with cheese and spring onion and fried in bright orange achiote oil. They were served up with a sweet and spicy peanut mole and fresh salad. Comforting and very moreish!
It wouldn’t be a latin American event without a classic empanada. I experimented with two fillings. The first, a veggie option, was sweet potato, black bean and chipotle all bound up in a butter based pastry. The second was beef shin slowly braised in beer, coriander, Amarillo chilli and lime – which you may remember from our Peruvian event earlier this year. This came in a lard based pastry for the meat eaters! Both pastries were lovely to work with – very soft, flexible and compliant! However I felt the butter based pastry gave the best result. The beef filling, for me, was by far the winner – complex flavours of sour heat combined with comforting soft beef, yum!
For my next starter I looked to Peru, land of quinoa, for a super healthy but tasty salad. Quinoa was dressed in a uchucuta sauce made from cheese, herbs, corn and Amarillo chilli. I added some sunflower seeds for texture, orange segments for sweetness and dressed the plates with watercress, asparagus and yet more uchucuta sauce. Lots of lovely green in what was quite a brown meal overall!
Finally, to freshen up everybody’s palates I put together an intriguing ceviche. Essentially this is raw fish ‘cooked’ in citrus juice that is not everyone’s cup of tea! For the fish phobics I presented a brightly coloured and fresh tasting mango and chilli ceviche. For the more adventurous it was mackerel and gooseberry – two ingredients at their seasonal peak at present. I’ve only made this twice and first time I couldn’t get mackerel, the second time I struggled to get the gooseberries! Anyway oily, flaky fresh mackerel was ‘cooked’ in a tigers milk of lime, Amarillo chilli, orange juice and gooseberry puree. The result is a fresh, fruity, sour, invigorating flavour. It is a most bizarre mouthful which really confuses the brain when you get fruity freshness combined with almost smoky fishiness!
Following a small gap Susie laid on the main event – BEEF! Freshly sourced from Keelham Hall Farm Shop, this was very good beef indeed and got everybody talking. Skirt was the cut of the day, which was flash fried, rested and then thinly sliced. It was dressed in a gorgeously tangy, earthy and firey chimmichurri. Argentinian inspired, this is a marinade that goes onto food after cooking. I really like it as a steak accompaniment as it lets the meat really sing and come to life. The smells coming from the dining room at this point were amazing, and the room went totally silent which is always a good sign. We kept the sides fresh and light given the food enslaught there had been! One of these was a Cuban avocado salad – a bit of a deconstructed guacamole. Secondly was a classic Mexican red rice, spiked with tomatos, garlic and chilli.
And so now on to the weather… a beautiful, hot summers day, which would have been a delight had we not been sweltering and melting away in an extremely hot kitchen! The dining room was equally balmy and so we offered up some icy mango sorbet to refresh plates and cool people down. Seconds later and the heavens opened with a torrential downpour that lasted until the small hours – not ideal for guests who had come in shorts and sandals!
Dessert was a homage to chocolate, caramel and passion fruit – surely the three best things in the world?! This dainty trio came in the form of a white chocolate and passion fruit mousse topped with dark chocolate mousse. This clever little pud creates its own sauce when the passionfruit syrup collects in the bottom as the mousse sets. This came with a crumbly cinnamon shortbread biscuit sandwiched together with a rich chocolate ganache. Finally it wouldn’t be a Manor celebration without some of our now famous salted caramel ice cream, so full of sugar and salt that it barely sets, particularly on a hot day! Still tastes fit though.
For petit fours I made some marshmallows, which I have been obsessed with making for ages but have always been too scared to do. Want to know the gossip?… They’re dead easy! Yes, admittedly they do involve sugar thermometers, hot syrup and a lot of whisking. But if you can see past that then do give them a go. Mine were mocha flavoured – subtly rippled with coffee and chocolate and dusted with cocoa. They seemed an apt nod to the Aztecs and were perfectly light to finish off such a huge meal!
Because we really wanted to finish our guests off, Susie made some delicious take home cupcakes, of the chocolate orange variety. Hope our guests had them for breakfast this morning!
Our guests were mainly newbies which was lovely! We loved talking to Jan from Ambleside who is thinking of setting of her own supperclub venture and we look forward to the invite when it’s launched in the next few months! It was a shame that, for various reasons, there were NO taxis available come home time. It was a lesson to us, and so we’ll ask guests to prebook taxis in future to facilitate an easy night. You’d think that in a city the size of Leeds that transport wouldn’t be an issue, but anyway!
So, all in all it was lovely getting the Manor back together again after a three month break. Renovations are still ongoing so we will be doing some adhoc dinners and teas to fit around this for the rest of the year. Dates will be going up over the coming weeks so keep an eye out. In the meantime if you fancy some delicious cakes, bakes and savouries courtesy of me and Sticky Pinny then why not book onto our Mediterranean Afternoon Tea on August 16th. We still have a couple of spaces left so be quick and grab them!
Dinner at the Manor 