Something more important to talk about

I don't think I'll bother blogging about Bordeaux, the last stop on my trip. Mainly because there's nothing much to blog about. However, here is something that I'm sure is close to everyone's hearts... well stomachs anyway.

Recently near where I'm staying in Wokingham a seafood restaurant opened up. Part of a chain called Loch Fyne. Naturally, when you think "chain restaurant eh, how good can it be??" One thing that a large chain can do, though, is pour a reasonable amount of money into ensuring a good supply of ingredients, should they choose to. I can safely report that this place is FRICKIN AWESOME. The food is top notch. According to their promotional stuff, they have their own smoke house and fish supply meaning..yep... they smoke their own salmon, trout etc.


This was my entree, a Bradan Orach. I swoon just thinking about it. This plate is a piece of lightly smoked salmon on the far left. Going anti-clockwise around there are 3 types of smoked salmon. The difference is in the length of time they've been smoked. The one to the lower right has been smoked for 12hours, up from that the fish was smoked for 18hrs and the top left one has been smoked for 24hours. I can only say again that this was fantastic. The biggest piece was very fishy in flavour, but the smokiness was very delicate. The first piece of salmon is similar to what we get back home, but going around, the smokiness intensifies. Not just that the flavour of the salmon is enhanced substantially.

Now then, this was my main, a Bradan Rost. This is kiln-roasted salmon, which is then char-grilled and served with a shellfish mushroom and whiskey sauce.

The fish was incredibly intense in flavour and quite salty too. The sauce was delectably sweet. Sort of creamy. It went beautifully with the mussels, which were tiny and had a lovely strong mussell-y flavour too. Sounds obvious, but sometimes the bigger the servings the more dispersed the flavour is. It doesn't look like much, but it was very filling.


Now onto something else. This was what I made for myself for dinner last night.



This was a sage and tomato sauce with chicken pieces served over linguine. I scratch made the sauce. No crushed tomatoes or anything out of a bottle. 5 tomatoes, 1 onion and about 200g of diced chicken chunks.

Evaluation: Not bad, the chicken was a bit overcooked and 1 onion was too much. Flavour wise it wasn't too bad. Chicken isn't particularly good to use to intensify sauce flavour. I should have used some sort of seafood mix or beef, but since I had neither I had to make do. The linguine however was done to perfection, which is a good thing since I managed to screw up last time i made linguine.

Till next time on Benny's Kitchen Experiments!