Wow!! I haven’t updated for some time so I thought I’d better get on it! Last time I blogged was after our village fete, which again was a huge success raising even more money that the year before. Alot has happened since then, enough to keep be busy enough to not have much time to update. Though I have put all of my Christmas menus on here for you all to have a look. What an amazing summer we had. I could not have even begun to predict how busy we were going to be. During the month of August alone we were 1500 covers up on the previous year of the same month. Astonishing! So that sort of helps to explain the lack of updates. We have continued to be busy to this very day and next week is looking busy too. The weather really played on our side this summer with hardly any rain, which is good for us as a business and good for you the customer, but not so good for the garden… more on that in a bit. We were really pushed to our limits in the kitchen this year as my sous chef parted ways during August so it left us short staffed. Meticulous planning and menu writing made sure that I had made things as easy as I could have. A huge well done to Jamie who really was the star player in the kitchen over the summer. He did tremendously well after Ivan left us. My kitchen ports also did an amazing job at making sure that the kitchen was still spick and span during the busy times. I now have my new sous chef who takes the reins in my absence and I’m pleased to say that Laszlo has fitted in really well and is doing a great job.
A big day for us during August is of course the Regatta. With Thorpeness celebrating 100 years as a holiday destination it was set to be an amazing night. With hoards of people coming it was going to be a busy night. At the Dolphin there is always alot of preparation that goes into making sure that the night goes as smoothly as possible. We have a live band outside which starts playing after the fireworks at 9pm, they are a great band and manage to get a whole lot of people up and dancing. We also have bouncers on our gates of the garden, mainly to keep out under age people but are also on hand should people who have had a few to many get a bit wild. The cellar is stocked to the rafters to make sure that we can keep every bodies glasses topped up, that’s if they can get to the bar as at any given time during the evening the bar is normally 6 deep. All of the furniture is moved out of the pub. Any thing that can be picked up is shifted out of the way and kept safe in the barn. Everything from pictures on the walls to the rugs on the floor, and everything in between, is moved so that it doesn’t get damaged as the night moves on. At the end of the night it is a big team effort from all of the staff to get the pub cleaned up again and ready for the next morning to serve breakfast to our residents. So a late night it is as its all hands on deck to straighten things up. The picture below is from regatta night, you can just about make out all the heads in the back ground – the garden was packed out. It was really nice to see so many people sat around the patio where the band was playing, the night had a real festival feel about it.
The thing that comes with feeding lots of people is lots of food and there was certainly plenty ordered on my part to make sure that everybody that visited us over the summer went home fed. I have just had a quick tally up of some item that we sold over the summer…..
- Smoked prawns – 120kg
- Dressed crabs – 650
- Smoked salmon – 68 sides
- Hot smoked salmon – 42 sides
- Cod fillet – 230kg
- Duck breast – 330
- Steaks – 550
- Sea bass fillets – 480
- Minced beef – 450kg , which means we made around 2650 burgers
- Chips – 1490kg
The bottom 2 figures I find incredible, the usable beef on a beef cow is around 220kg, that’s once all the offal and bones etc are gone. This means that just for our burgers we used about 2 cows and because of the size we serve our steaks we used nearly a whole cow just for steaks. And almost one and half tones of chips… that’s a lot of potatoes. So that is one big shopping basket we need for the summer and those numbers above are just a fraction of all the food that I had to buy in.
Now for the not so good news….
Whilst we were lucky enough to bask in the sunshine for most of the summer it seems that caterpillars enjoy doing the same thing. Over the bank holiday weekend whilst I was busy at work and unable to give my garden the attention that it should have had, an army of caterpillars appeared and stripped everything from my sprouts, cabbages, kale and sprouting broccoli. I was devastated when I came home one evening to find this. All my hard work was being enjoyed by some pesky little critters. I was, however, lucky to be able to enjoy some courgettes, corn, runner beans, mange tout, tomatoes and I just picked 3 pumpkins last week, which made some excellent soup for the menu. So all was no lost from my garden but I was still gutted to find everything had been eaten. I recently trimmed all of my herbs back and brought them into work and made some flavoured oil. Covering them with pomice oil I have left them in the dry store to develop their flavours and I’m hoping to use them at Christmas to give some excellent flavour to the turkeys.
I have also had a whole lot of produce from Johns allotment in Thorpeness. Baby carrots, long radishes, cherry tomato, heirloom tomatoes, plum, runner beans, rhubarb, apple, round courgettes, yellow courgettes, curly courgettes, parsley, coriander and of course the infamous Thorpeness leaves are all things that have featured on my menu over the summer. I took pictures and tweeted some of the best ones, so check my twitter account to see all of the produce that I had. Now the weather is beginning to turn abit with the new season upon us it is nice to be able to put some new dishes on the menu using some of the local produce. It would seem that plums are in abundance this year so I put them to good use and made a chutney using some Aspalls cyder too. This is on the menu with my pork belly dish and is an amazing combination as the tart flavours of the chutney cut through the fat of the pork belly to make a really well balanced dish.
This weekend is the Aldeburgh Food and Drink festival at Snape Maltings. The event get bigger and bigger every year which is fantastic and gives us a chance to show the rest of the country the best of what Suffolk has to offer. It draws some excellent chefs who will be doing demo’s throughout the day and plenty on offer for those who want to have a sample of all things good from Suffolk. I will do my upmost to make it to the show this year but we have a busy weekend here at The Dolphin. Kerry will be there selling my pies which I am busy with today, David has made another excellent batch of biltong which will be on offer and of course our infamous sausage rolls from the village shop will be on sale too. Please be sure to ask Kerry all about Christmas at The Dolphin as she will have all the information to hand to book your Christmas parties and more.
So this is just a quick and edited update of how things went down during the summer hols. Now that things have got back to normal a bit I will once again do my up most to make sure that I update every week. Make sure that you follow on Twitter @funky_banana for everyday tweets from the kitchen to see what else I get up to
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