What do I have in common with The Royal Albert Hall, Eric Idle and Adolf Hitler?

Today is my birthday. Admittedly there is nothing very special about that, approximately 20 million others around the world will also have Happy Birthday sung at them, but for me, today, it is. Today, according to the saying, my life begins. Today I turn forty. I am so excited about what the day will bring that I actually feel as if I am turning ten!! I am about to embark on a four day birthday-a-thon. My wife and children will take charge today. Tomorrow, no doubt my work colleagues will have something planned, so I will continue being jolly and happy. On Saturday I am meeting a group of friends for dinner and on Sunday I seeing some of them again for breakfast. Then I shall go home and re-live the whole lot again. And again. And again!

For this week's blog, I have decided to find out more about 29th March and the number 40. It turns out that there are some pretty interesting facts. Not mind-blowing stuff, just "gosh, really, I never knew that" kind of interesting.

40 is the atomic number of Zirconium.

Forty is both an octagonal number, and a semiperfect number. Far too complicated for me to explain, I struggle with Count Von Count so click on the links to find out more!

Negative forty is the unique temperature at which the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales correspond; that is, −40°F = −40°C.

My nearest major road is the A40 and nearest motorway is the M40. The former is the trunk road connecting London to Fishguard, the latter connects London to Birmingham, which begs the question if there already is a way to get to Birmingham, why do we need HS2?

The planet Venus forms a pentagram in the night sky every eight years with it returning to its original point every 40 years. You see, fascinating!

Noah had to deal with forty days and forty nights of rain. Aahh, nothing like an English Summer!

The Quran says that a person is only fully grown when they reach the age of 40. All those years of being told to grow up and struggling to do so could have been avoided if only I had known this!

In Russian folklore, some believe that ghosts of the dead linger at the site of their death for forty days.

In football, 40 is generally considered the number of points that a Premier League team needs to avoid relegation. Not sure what any of this means, but I am sure someone will have heard of football.

Ali Baba had 40 thieves.

Supposedly we should only work 40 hours a week! Which un-unionised industry sticks to this one?

The theoretical number of weeks for an average term of pregnancy. For a human. A ferret is about 40 days.

The letters of the word "forty" are in alphabetical order.

After all this intake of knowledge, you may well now need forty winks!

29th March is.........

Boganda Day in the Central African Republic, remembering the first Prime Minister.
Day of the Young Combatant in Chile, usually celebrated with civil disorder by leftists and anarchists.
Youth Day in the Republic of China, commemorating The Yellow Flower Mound Revolt.
The feast day of Saint Bertold of Mount Carmel (also known as Bartoldus of Calabria)

Births......

1869 - Edwin Lutyens, architect, London
1900 - Bill Aston, British racing driver (d. 1974)
1902 - William Walton, England, composer (Troilus & Cressida, Wise Virgins)
1917 - Man O'War, racehorse (winner of 20 out of 21 races)
1931 - Evelyn de Rothschild, English banker/multi-millionaire
1931 - Lord Tebbit,
1943 - Eric Idle, England, comedian/actor (Monty Python)
1943 - John Major, British PM (C, 1990-97)
1944 - John Suchet, British TV journalist (Independent TV News)
1945 - Julie Goodyear, British actress (Bet Lynch-Coronation Street)
1955 - Brendan Gleeson, Irish actor
1957 - Christopher Lambert, actor (Highlander)
1964 - Elle MacPherson, Sydney, Austrailian super model and actress (Sirens)
1972 - Me
1976 - Jennifer Capriati, tennis pro (Olympic gold 1992)
2334 - Beverly Crusher, Copernicus Luna, fictional doctor-Star Trek Next Gen
2336 - Deanna Troi, Betazed, fictional counsellor-Star Trek Next Generation

..........Deaths

1848 - John Jacob Astor, charted American Fur Company, dies at 84
1912 - Robert Falcon Scott, British pole explorer, dies in Antarctica at 43
1972 - J Arthur Rank, 1st Baron Rank, industrialist/film magnate
1992 - Earl Spencer, father of Lady Diana, dies at 68

On this day in........

1871 - Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall
1882 - The Knights of Columbus were founded
1936 - Adolf Hitler receives 99% of the votes in a referendum to ratify Germany's illegal reoccupation of the Rhineland, receiving 44.5 million votes out of 45.5 million registered voters. So, a fair and democratic vote then?
1945 - World War II: Last day of V-1 flying bomb attacks on England.
1972 - I was born!
1973 - The last United States combat soldiers leave South Vietnam.
2004 - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia join NATO as full members.
2004 - The Republic of Ireland becomes the first country in the world to ban smoking in all work places, including bars and restaurants. And have probably ignored it ever since!

I hope you life has been enriched by the reading of this! Just look up your birthday, something quite good is bound to have happened. I love that the Albert Hall and I share a significant date, although I'm still trying to get over the fact that Elle Macpherson has never sent me a birthday card!!

I hope you all have a great weekend, anything like mine and I know you will!

Age is but a number.

How old do you have to be before you become middle-aged? This is a question that have been on my mind recently. You see, in seven days time I become forty and I would like to know if suddenly, overnight, I am to become middle aged. Should I be stocking up on Ovaltine, cardigans, carpet slippers and pipe tobacco? Will my teeth be unable to cope with cutlets and toffee? Am I to start holding the newspaper at arms length and peering down my nose to read it? Or is the day after my birthday going to be exactly the same as the day before? Apart from the headache of course!

A landmark birthday heralds an avalanche of sage advice from your elders, piss-taking from your juniors and lots of "welcome to the club" or "me next"'s from your peers. Occasionally, and usually after a flagon full of whisky, I get maudlin and think why did I never achieve the potential of my youth, why is my name not written in lights, spoken about in reverend terms and why oh why am I living in a semi?! But then the melancholic whisky fog lifts, I realise that in actuality the potential of my youth would have me living on a park bench, the electricity bill of having my 38 letter name and associated hyphens all lit up would be crippling, I would rather people spoke to me that about me and my house is just that, mine. And it has my wife, my two children and my collection of Commando magazines! Life at forty has potential!

I have found as I have grown older that birthdays are hijacked by children. This is by no means a bad thing, it just means that you do things that the children would like to do, the food for the day is either chosen by them or bought with them in mind. Unless you get a babysitter. Essentially, when you get to a certain age, your birthday is just another day. However to a child, a birthday, and it certainly doesn't have to be just theirs, is an excuse to wake up early, to make cakes and to decorate the house. It is a time of almost mystical proportions. It is right up there with Christmas day. I look forward to my birthday to see the look of enjoyment on the faces of my children. There is only one down side, I just wish I could be allowed to open my own presents!!

My two have been counting the days down, telling me every morning how many days are left and every night how many sleeps are left until the big day!! They cannot stop reminding me that I have a HUGE birthday coming up and their enthusiasm is so infectious.

There is a article in one of the supplements I read at the weekend that asks what your ideal 24 hours would be, no time or travel restrictions. I have often thought about this and have decided that a fortieth is the ideal opportunity to have such a day. Mine would be something like this:-

I would wake up in the Maldives, to the sound of my children stage whispering to my wife "is it too early to wake Daddy?" It will be 6.00am! I will have my cup of tea, toes sieving the white, powder like sand before my pre-breakfast snorkel in the warm, crystal clear Indian Ocean.

Breakfast will be the buffet in the Palm Restaurant at Blue Waters Hotel in Antigua. I had the most wonderful two years working there and would love to catch up with all the friends I made. Of course, the twenty foot shiny marble buffet, covered with every imaginable breakfast treat possible and the very smiley chef, cooking the eggs to order, has absolutely nothing to do with it!

The morning would be spent with a glass of champagne in hand, floating over the Okavango Delta in a hot air balloon. We would land for lunch in amongst all the animals. I have never been on a safari but it is pretty close to the top of my "ten things to do before I die" list.

The Orient Express would then whisk us off to Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, in Oxfordshire for full afternoon tea. I would open presents in front of the huge roaring fire in the Drawing Room. I have loved Le Manoir and Raymond Blanc ever since working there almost twenty years ago and can think of no better place in the world. I was torn for which meal to have here, however the fireplace won so afternoon tea on the carpet, surrounded by wrapping paper and family it is!



Le Manoir - just the best place in the world!



I would have to watch the sunset on Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia, hopefully with an elusive green flash as the sun dips down over the horizon. I did this twenty years ago and is an experience that I would love to share with my wife and children. I saw a green flash in the Caribbean and was blown away by it.

A sunset as it should be.

Dinner would be a great big party with all our friends. There would be great food, oodles of wine and dancing until the small hours. I cannot make up my mind where to hold this and have decided that actually, in this case, the company is far more important than the place and as long as all my oldest and closest friends are around me, it could be anywhere.

Bed would be under the stars, in a hammock, falling asleep watching the Northern Lights as they scamper back and forth across the sky. I would, however, wake up in my own bed!

Unfortunately this is just my dream. I have no idea what I am doing on my birthday, what treats may be store, however I can guarantee that the day will start early with stage whispering and my presents will be half opened by the time I get to them. I can't wait!

Audrey Hepburn said "Success is like reaching an important Birthday and finding you're exactly the same!" In that case I hope that next Friday I wake up feeling terribly successful, after all forty isn't old if you're an oak tree!

Give it some thought and let me know what your ideal day would be like.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

The greatest mystery on earth!

I need help! Can you all please answer this one question:- what is the point of Tofu? Is it a food, it is a building material or is it a scientific experiment gone wrong?

 

Seriously! Can anyone justify this stuff? I have a friend who used to eat tofu and seaweed in some kind of cat's pee broth for breakfast. She used to tell me it tasted good and did wonders for her body. The crazed look in her eye as she watched me eat a bacon sandwich somehow made me question her reasoning and fear for my life!! I am pleased to say that she is now back to normal, chewing bones and drinking Bovril!



Tofu looks harmless enough, but then so does semtex!

I am not now, never have been and never will be a vegetarian. I cannot think of anything in the world that would persuade me to forgo meat. Fran Lebowitz summed it up well when saying "vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat."

One of the many things that wind me up about vegetarian food is the fact that it gets marketed as meat products, nut cutlets, soya bacon rashers, tofu burgers, vege sausages. What came first? The beef burger and pork sausage or the equally well know aubergine burger and lentil sausage!? If I went into a butcher, asked for half a pound of mince and followed that with "and kindly shape it to look like a head of broccoli, my good man" do you think I would a) be invited to join their loyalty scheme b) be told never to darken their doors again or c) end up in the next batch of pies? Hmmm, let me think!

So, vegetarians, please take note, shape your protein to look like vegetables and not the very things that you have all shunned and refuse to eat!! And stop with the whole tofu thing!!

Recently, however, I have found myself in a strange position. I was musing about my love for mushrooms, big, small, wild or tame. I love them all and would happily eat nothing but mushrooms for the rest of my life, as long as herbs, spices, seasonings and diary products were thrown in as well! As I was dreaming of the various dishes that would keep me going, the sudden realisation hit me like a freight train - if I really did eat nothing but mushrooms, I would have become a vegetarian!! Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!! I would, overnight, have become the beardy, sandal wearing, Guardian reading vegan of my nightmares!! This must not be allowed to happen!! Ever!! Quick, pass the beef!

Albert Einstein said that "nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." It will come as no surprise to learn that I don't agree with this sentiment, particularly if we want to keep evolving for the better. I will, however, admit that not all vegetarian food is bad. Try this one for a light lunch or supper. It is straight out of a Weight Watchers book and is actually very tasty.

450g bag of ready washed spinach
75g wholemeal bread
3 eggs
150ml skimmed milk. Semi or full fat is fine, just adjust the points
200g low fat cottage cheese
1 tablespoon of mustard
75g reduced fat cheddar
Seasoning
Sliced tomatoes

1.     Pre-heat the oven to 200°C or 180 if a fan oven.
2.     Cut the corner of the spinach bag and cook in a microwave until done, at least one minute, but keep checking. If you don't have a microwave, put in a colander and pour a kettle full of boiling water over. Make sure to squeeze as much water out as possible.
3.     Put the bread, eggs, milk, cottage cheese and mustard in a food processor and mix well. Add the spinach and 25g of the cheddar and whizz briefly to mix together.
4.     Butter or lightly grease a 1 litre low oven proof dish. Pour in the mixture. Cover with thickly sliced tomatoes and grate the rest of the cheese on the top.
5.     Bake for 40-50 minutes or until nicely puffed up and golden.

This goes very nicely with a salad for a light lunch or as an accompaniment to chicken or steak! For those of you who understand pro points, a quarter of the recipe is 5 points.

I will leave you with a conversation I had with a guest at a wedding I ran some years ago. A lady called me over and pointed to the plate of beautiful lamb in front of her.

"I'm sorry but I am a vegetarian."
"No problem at all" I replied "I will get an alternative for you"
"Thank you very much, do you think it would it be possible to have chicken?"
"But Madam, you are a vegetarian?"

"Oh yes, but I eat chicken!"

So, not really a vegetarian then, just bloody fussy!! How I wish I had said that out loud.

Have a great weekend and Happy Mothering Sunday to all you Mothers out there. I hope you get the day off!

The elusive perfect poached egg!

For many years I have been a huge fan of Eggs Benedict. A crisp, toasted muffin, butter melting and dripping over the sides, a couple of slices of smoked ham, a perfectly poached egg, as soft as the down on a new born duckling, all covered in Hollandaise Sauce, warm, luxuriantly rich and oh so naughty! The first two are very simple to achieve. The third is slightly harder, but not out of reach of us mere mortals. The fourth on the other hand, is bloody nearly impossible!! I have thrown away so many eggs from hollandaise gone wrong, I am sure I must be on some sort of chicken hit list.

As I say, the first two parts need no comment or instruction, so I will jump straight to the poached egg. Traditional egg poaching is not something that many people feel comfortable with. These days, there are pans and pouches and disposable bags that take the majority of the fear and mystery out of poaching and yet, that said, poaching an egg is still something that most people steer well clear of.

I shall endeavour to give some pointers to enable you to produce the perfect poached egg. This is by no means the only or the best way, however it always produces the soft eggs that I love, sometimes a little too soft I admit, but I have always passionately loathed overcooked eggs so would rather risk soft whites than hard yolks. To produce the best, round and compact poached eggs, you must have the freshest eggs possible.

Always use a pan that seems far too big for the job. I find a sauté or chef's pan is best as you can get a spoon in easily to lift and test the eggs without risking them breaking. You will need at least a three inch depth of water. Add a splash of vinegar and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down until you have a simmer. Some people suggest having the water swirling around the pan. I have always found that this really doesn't work and just creates a mess, but maybe I'm just doing it wrong. I always have the water as stationary as possible.

Break all your eggs into ramekins, a separate one for each egg. Gently lower the ramekin into the water at an angle. Holding one edge, allow a small amount of water to come over the opposite edge of the ramekin and, very gently, pour the egg into the water. As quickly as possible add all the other eggs to the water in the same way, hence the need for all the ramekins and the pre-cracked eggs. Start on the far side of the pan and work in a clockwise direction. That way you will know which went in first and they can come out in the same order, having all had the same length of time in the water.

Using a slotted spoon, carefully get under each egg to ensure that they don't stick. Once they have started to set, you can turn up the heat a little to create a small amount of movement in the water. As you can't cut an egg to see how cooked it is on the inside, you will need to rely on touch. Lift the first egg in out of the water and gently press the top. You will be able to judge how soft or hard it is.

There are now two options for you. If you are eating them immediately, cook to your preference, remove with a slotted spoon to remove excess water and serve. If you want to keep them for later use you can always cook them so that they are just under how you want them to be, take them out of the pan and transfer them to cold water to halt the cooking. To reheat them, which will also finish the cooking, either put them back in boiling water or in a steamer. This is a great way to reduce time in the kitchen when you should be with your guests.

The last and certainly the hardest stage of Eggs Benedict is the Hollandaise Sauce. I am sure I am not the only one out there who has problems with this sauce and, unwilling to give up having Benedict on a Sunday night, I have tried every packet, jar and pouch out there and had never found anything that comes close to the proper, restaurant quality stuff. They ranged from the barely bareable to the downright rancid! Then, just like buses, two solutions come bounding along together, much to the delight of my taste buds! The first is a pouch by a company called Potts'. It is suitable to keep in the cupboard so there is no need to worry about it going off. I found it in Tesco, £1.80 for a 200g pouch. Whilst it is not the fresh stuff, it holds its own and now has a permanent place in my cupboard. I have also discovered that these guys have a whole range of sauces, both sweet and savoury, all suitable for the cupboard and all available on line and in the supermarket!! Three cheers for Potts!!

The second solution is courtesy of my sister-in-law. Caroline has always made her hollandaise from scratch and has never had an issue. I was mesmerised by the knowledge that someone in the family can produce this liquid gold. How can a mere mortal be blessed with the almost mystical gift of sublime hollandaise production? Is she some kind of alchemist? No, she cheats! Caroline, I apologise, this may seem a tad harsh as cheating is far too strong a term I admit, however what else is a short cut if not a cheat, albeit well intentioned and with the most fantastic results? What she has managed to do is to a produce great and seemingly nigh on impossible sauce without any of the poncy, chef-like naffing about that has always seemed to be key! She has trimmed the recipe down, cut out 75% of the effort and yet, at the end, she has the most fantastic hollandaise that I challenge you say is not up there with the restaurant stuff. And, she does it at home. Yippee!! There is hope for me!

I will now put a recipe book recipe along side Caroline's and let you compare and judge! Both will produce enough for four generous or six normal helpings.

Michel Roux's version	Caroline’s version
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar 1 teaspoon white peppercorns, crushed 4 egg yolks 250g butter, clarified (melted butter with the milk solids and water removed), cooled to tepid Salt to taste Juice of ½ lemon	2 egg yolks 250g butter, ice cold in small cubes Lemon juice to taste
In a thick-bottomed stainless steel or copper saucepan, mix the wine vinegar with 4 tablespoons of cold water and the crushed peppercorns. Let it bubble to reduce by one-third, then leave to cool completely. Add the egg yolks to the cold reduction and mix with a whisk. Put the saucepan on a heat diffuser over a very low heat and continue whisking, making sure that the whisk comes into contact with the bottom of the pan. Gradually increase the heat so that the sauce emulsifies progressively, becoming very smooth and creamy after 8-10 minutes. Do not allow the temperature of the sauce to rise above 65°C. Off the heat and still whisking, pour in the tepid clarified butter in a steady stream. Season the sauce with salt. At the last moment, stir in the lemon juice. Pass the sauce through a muslin-lined chinoise to eliminate the crushed peppercorns if required, and then serve immediately.	In a thick bottomed non-stick pan put the two egg yolks and put the pan on the lowest possible heat your cooker can do. Whisking continually, add the butter, one cube at a time until you have a beautiful, glossy sauce. It may not require all the butter. Add the lemon juice to taste. If you find the sauce is too thick, add a splash of water to loosen it. If the sauce should curdle and split, put it in to a bowl, clean the pan, put back on the heat and add one yolk. Add the curdled mix, one teaspoon at a time, whisking all the time until it gets back to proper hollandaise sauce consistency, then continue adding the butter. Serve immediately.

Toast and butter your muffins, top with your favourite ham, add the eggs and spoon over liberal quantities of hollandaise. Like all the very best egg dishes, such as piperade, Benedict should be enjoyed on your knees in your most comfortable armchair!

Does it get any better?

Having given you the recipe for Hollandaise, I feel I should also give you some of the variations of it and their uses. You won't need to add much of the various flavourings.

Sauce	Add	Use with
Béarnaise	Tarragon	Steaks, grilled fish, chips
Choron	Puréed and sieved tomatoes	All fish, chicken and shellfish
Maltaise	Blood orange juice and zest	Fish or chicken
Paloise	Chopped mint	Lamb steaks and cutlets
Foyot	Reduced meat glaze	Steaks and lamb

I wish you all the very best of luck with both the eggs and the sauce. Let me know how you get on.

Have a great weekend.

As sweet as.....'37!

Over the past two decades I have tasted some amazing things, both food and drink, however my own personal beverage Nirvana was reached a couple of years ago and I have come to the conclusion since then, that no matter what I drink, I will never beat the experience. And that doesn't bother me one jot! I have decided to enshrine the moment for what is was, to except that it just doesn't get any better and to stop trying to find another moment to replace it. Some things just can't be beaten, no matter how hard you look. It is like a mountaineer, having climbed Everest, refusing to believe that a larger mountain just isn't there. I have found my Everest and have stopped the search!

I have always worked around food and wine and have been fortunate enough to have worked in some truly superb places. I have been afforded culinary opportunities that nowhere else could have done.

During my career I have enlarged my love for all things sweet, in particular sweet wines. Now, I am not talking about Blue Nun and Liebfraumilch, sweet wine indeed, but entirely the wrong kind of sweet. I am talking about the proper, sticky sweet, golden nectar known as pudding wine. I have sampled more wines than I can remember and, whilst the New World do have some great examples, I truly believe that for an exceptional pudding wine you must stay in Europe. To my mind there are only two places for the sublime. I'm not saying that I won't drink from anywhere else, however should I ever be offered my own choice of wine; I would have to go either straight to Bordeaux, to Sauternes and Barsac, or to Hungary to the Tokaj-Hegyalja region for Tokaji Aszú, a wine so great it is sung about in Hungary's National Anthem! I doubt many countries sing about Blue Nun!!

My own Everest came about four years ago when I was helping to run a Fine Wine dinner. With pudding we served Château d’Yquem 1937. Yquem is without doubt Bordeaux's, and therefore France's, finest pudding wine. The wine starts off very pale yellow in colour, the liquid, fruity and sweet. Over time it darkens to the colour of amber and the sweetness intensifies a thousand times. The 1937 was sublime. I can honestly say that my life became a little more complete in that moment. And yet, at the same time, I was touched by a mere hint of sadness, a sadness that can only come from knowing that you have just achieved perfection and that that example of perfection is now a thing of the past, never to be recaptured, never to exist again. It has become a yardstick. I have a colleague and friend who was with me that night, who regularly attends wine tastings. He often comes back saying "I had the most amazing this" and "the most sublime that" and depending on who gets in first, the next comment is either "but was it a '37 moment" or "but it didn't match the '37." That small shared glass will stay with me forever, a memory that can never be taken away or tarnished, in fact can only grow and mature with the years, just as if was still in the bottle!!

The difference a few years can make is incredible

Some people of influence in these matters would no doubt suggest the best pudding wines need the finest foie gras, the lightest soufflé or the most complicated and layered pudding that only the very finest pastry chefs in the world can create! Not necessarily!! I am a firm believer in place and setting. Why should the world's finest wines only be consumed in the world's finest restaurants? Who is to say that your own home, filled with friends, eating great food cooked by your own fair hands should not also be the ideal setting? Now, don't get me wrong, a slab of foie gras, pan seared, as crisp as a crème brulée top on the outside and as soft as candy floss on the inside, resting on a doorstep of toasted brioche, served with a warm poached pear and rich Madeira sauce is the very thing that I would walk over burning coals for. This, though, is not something I could recreate at home and should be left to the professionals. On the other hand, perfectly acceptable foie gras can be bought in jars from many good butchers and can be, and indeed has been, eaten at home, brioche in hand.

For me though, even if the entire culinary world was my oyster, I would have to go for Bread and Butter pudding and double cream with my pudding wine. A bottle of Château Doisy Daëne, a fantastic Barsac, not the cheapest of pudding wines I admit, but very reasonable nonetheless, would be the perfect partner for the B and B. I like having humble foods with lavish wines. The B and B is just bog standard and made by me. It doesn't need a 3 Michelin star Chef to lovingly cook it to look like a Bernini sculpture. It doesn't need bread made from flour milled between the thighs of vestal virgins, it doesn't need milk from Himalayan yaks or eggs from golden geese!! It just needs care and attention, some great chums and enough time to give it the due consideration that it deserves. It doesn't really even need the rest of the meal!! Seriously, try it one day, just a great pudding and a great pudding wine, either at a table or even better, sunk into a bean bag, the Sunday papers all around, like minded friends and maybe an old black and white on in the background, Kind Hearts and Coronets would be my choice. These are not moments to have before going somewhere else. These are moments to have for the sake of having a moment; they are memory makers and should be cherished.

Just keep in mind what American author Clifton P Fadiman said “A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.”

As we are now in Lent, try my Easter Bread and Butter pudding. After years of painstaking self-sacrifice, testing all different kinds of breads and flavours, I have found that keeping it simple works. Hot cross buns work well, as do other white breads, your normal white sliced, brioche is superb, even baguette works. Brown bread should be avoided at all costs, it’s just doesn't work. Bread and butter pudding is not a healthy pudding option, it should never be, and using brown bread instead of white won't make it so. It's the eggs and cream that make it what it is and reducing the quantities of either will just ruin the pudding. There are certain expectations in life. If you drive a Rolls Royce you would be very disappointed to discover a 2CV engine under the bonnet. Similarly, your B and B must be rich, creamy and full of sultanas. Don't add overpowering flavours. Orange and apricot are complementary; chocolate is too much and will overpower the final result. The wine is not a necessity, however, if you are going to take the Rolls out for a spin, wouldn't you rather have Julia Roberts or George Clooney along for the ride?

I hope you have a great weekend, full of future memories!