Jersey: Wine and fudge

Once Lauren and Suzy had had their fill of the shiny and the sparkly, we took the bus to La Mare Wine Estate, where Helen and Steve had got married two days before.

While there was sadly no sign of hors d’oeuvres being handed out, as during our previous visit, we took the tour of the vineyard, which culminated in a wine tasting. We were taken around the estate and shown the vines – with little baby grapes hiding among the leaves – and where the wine was made.

The tasting took place in a function room, with a video showing … something. I don’t know, it was a month ago and I was drinking wine and cider on an empty stomach. I’d be surprised if anyone remembered the content of the presentation. Once we were shown the where the brandy was made we moved on to see the chocolatier at work and tasted their special black butter fudge.

Lauren after white, rosé, red and cider

After spending a few pounds on traditional Jersey fudge we had lunch in the restaurant. No roses and peacock feathers on the table this time, and no speeches either. And for a very long time, no food either and eventually we had to chivvy them up – we have a plane to catch! It all worked out though and we had our food (very nice ham and cheese roll for me) and took a taxi to the airport.

We left Jersey and flew back to the mainland on the same little propellor plane, but this time we had a window by our seats – bonus! Aerial photography is that much more difficult when you’ve got a propellor turning up in every shot though.

When we reached the English coast the pilot told us we were over Bognor Regis. That white complex by the coast is the Butlins holiday resort. I love seeing the patterns of settlement and as we passed over Worthing Lauren even spotted her grandparents’ road.

- Shoreham -

- Preston -

- Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club at Withdean Sports Complex, centre right -

Back at Gatwick airport we avoided the big queues at passport control, being shepherded down through “Arrivals from the Channel Islands”, barely needing to even show any ID to anyone. Welcome home.

Jersey: Peacock feathers and chocolate drops

Having filled our bellies with champagne, it was now time to sway into the restaurant for the reception. Each table was dressed with flowers and peacock feathers and Helen’s Dad had done the calligraphy for the place cards himself.

So let’s talk about the important stuff first: the food.

The starter: Pan roast hot smoked salmon, roast lemon aioli, grilled wild mushrooms and baby leeks with pecorino, pink pepper and parsley pesto. A dish for fans of alliteration.

The main: Pan roast corn-fed chicken breast with sweet potato mash, baby leeks, crisp pancetta and tarragon cream sauce.

And for dessert: Assiette of steamed raspberry sponge with advocaat cream, classic chocolate mousse and champagne and strawberry jelly. All three desserts were delicious and the sponge had lavender flower buds sprinkled on top – the first time I’d ever eaten lavender. If I’d had my laptop with me, we’d have been videoing a variety of approving noises for Helen and Steve’s choice of dishes. As it was, we made do with giving Helen our thumbs up across the restaurant.

The speeches came before dessert and despite leaving half his notes behind, Ricky pulled off his best man’s speech with panache and a lot of good one-liners. My favourite being “I’ve got a lot riding on this. Steve said that if I do a good job, I can be best man at his next wedding.”

Later on Peter, Helen’s Dad, did a quiz – clearly setting quizzes runs in the family. However Peter’s quiz was right up my street and my team ended up winning. There were a number of different categories, but celebrity trivia in cryptic crossword clue form? I AM THERE. We won chocolate drops made by the vineyard and could choose between bookmarks or magnets. I went for a bookmark – (a) because I like to think I might read a book again one day and (b) a lot of my possessions could be ruined pretty quickly by a magnet.

After dinner there was music and dancing and wedding cupcakes were laid out for those not completely stuffed already. I sat outside for a while with the others enjoying the summer evening. At one point I noticed that I was missing the top button on my dress and magically Lauren remembered that I had mentioned something pinging against me sometime earlier. I was still sitting in the same place and so we dived to the ground to look for it. Amazingly Suzy found the little green button by the light of her mobile phone, hidden in the grass under the picnic table.

At quarter to one the taxis arrived and we set off back to our hotel, wishing Helen and Steve a happy honeymoon – and promising to get together for food again soon. Because clearly we’ve not eaten enough yet.

Click the high-kicking legs for more photos from the reception

CDWM: Lauren continues to feed us

By now, we were full of crudités, soup, fish pie, cheesecake and sorbet. But there was more! Lauren brought out a plate of her trademark dark chocolate truffles to finish us off. As we enjoyed them the tealights along the centre of the table began to burn out one by one – Suzy hastily rearranging them if one dared to dwindle out of sequence.

Continuing the quiz theme that had sprung up after my CDWM evening, Lauren brought out a box of general knowledge trivia questions for us to take turns asking and answering. Trivia is much more my area – no useful information here, no siree – , but there was no score-keeping. So technically, I won.

Then our hostess revealed that there was one more treat for us and we were each presented with a cardboard box, with a personalised, hand-stamped gift tag. Inside … more food, but food to take home with us this time: a whoopie pie. I’d not heard of whoopie pies before, but very much enjoyed it a couple of days later with a cup of coffee. It’s two chocolate cakey-biscuity things sandwiched together with marshmallow goo in the centre and proved to be a very tasty memento of a great evening. And we got to keep the boxes. Seriously, stationery and food – Lauren has me sussed.

Lauren’s own photos of the evening can be found on her Flickr photostream

CDWM: Lauren’s dessert

With the way I’ve loaded my recent photos to Flickr, you could be forgiven for thinking that Lauren had provided the The Red Arrows as mid-meal entertainment. She did not. But she did have a handy-dandy sofa in the kitchen onto which we could collapse between courses while she whipped up the next culinary delight. A tip for anyone doing a Come Dine With Me evening: provide comfy seating for your sated guests and they will mark you well. True, they may also fall asleep and whine about having to get up for the next course, but that’s the chance you take.

Lauren’s dessert was a New York baked cheesecake with a delightfully palette-cleansing raspberry sorbet. Mmm, raspberries. The story she told us of how carefully the cheesecake had to be treated – please to pull on your kid gloves and lay out a red carpet before it – put me off ever baking a cheesecake myself, but the result was great.

CDWM: Lauren’s main course

Does anyone spot the reason that Lauren was so good at matching flags to countries in the quiz at Helen’s Come Dine With Me? This world map hangs on the wall by her kitchen table and serves as a great talking point and impromptu “find X” on the map competition. It’s fun to see how far we’ve travelled over the years and to plan where we might go next.

Lauren’s main course was fish pie with spinach and carrots. Not just any old spinach and carrots though. The spinach was cooked with garlic and lemon and the carrots with orange zest and rosemary.

Our fish pies were not just in individual portions, they had been personalised to suit each person’s particular taste – for me there was less chili, because I’m a complete baby when it comes to levels of spiciness and for Helen, her fish pie was devoid of prawns, prawns just being too far along the weirdness scale of seafood for her liking.

Then having suffered so very much walking from the kitchen to Lauren’s room on the top floor to record the video about the starter we moved filming location and I carried the laptop outside. You may have noticed how our videos have developed over the course of this food venture. We started with very organised videos at first and always listed exactly what we’d had to eat. Now we don’t repeat ourselves as much in that regard and instead use the energy saved to heckle each other more.

CDWM: Lauren’s starter

While we were nibbling our nibbles and then talking about them Lauren was busy at the stove preparing our starter. It’s so nice being a guest at these evenings. You get to just kick back and watch someone else work. Maybe that’s why restaurants sometimes have open kitchens: to really underscore the patrons’ enjoyment of “it’s not me who has to wash up”.

The starter was roasted tomato, red pepper and saffron soup, which was decidedly yummy – no Heinz tomato soup from a can here. The saffron had apparently been a bit troublesome, tasting too much like flowers for Lauren’s liking, but she completely saved it with a splash of tabasco. As someone who is very sensitive to anything spicy/hot, I found the tabasco very interesting in that its heat was not accumulative. While a dish with chili gets hotter on me the more I eat, the soup had a zing to it that wasn’t tiring.

Accompanying the soup were home-made bread rolls – full-size versions of those we’d had as nibbles. Seriously, Lauren made everything herself for this meal. It wouldn’t surprise me if she set the table with cutlery she’d forged herself next time.

I hope you’ll excuse all the heavy breathing and complaining in that video. I’ve always approved of the layout of Lauren’s townhouse: you enter on the same level as the living room; kitchen and garden are downstairs, bedrooms and bathroom are upstairs. Great, you get home and you don’t have to go far to collapse on the sofa. Except when we were there the living room was being the plasterboard and power tools room, so we went from the kitchen to the top of the house to record our video – which, when you’re stuffed full of food, is very hard work. Perhaps Dave could install a lift for us as his next DIY project?

Come Dine With … Lauren

Early on Saturday morning I received a text from Lauren, who was feeling the pressure somewhat having had to restart her dessert after a flop the evening before. A few hours later she sent me a video reporting on her progress thus far, which I was allowed to watch as no secrets were revealed. The reason for being asked to wear pink and white wasn’t to be revealed until we got to her house later either.

A few hours later we were being welcomed by our hostess (wearing a pink dress) and shown to the kitchen, where the table was so beautifully set. Suddenly it was clear why we’d been asked to dress in pink and white: everything was pink and white.

As I had expected Lauren had not just been busy at the stove, but also with needle and thread. On each plate lay a personalised, hand-embroidered napkin, which we were to keep as a memento of the evening.

While we raked through a pile of Lauren’s clothes that she had thinned out from her wardrobe, we whetted our appetites for the meal ahead with miniature bread rolls and puff pastry sticks with pine nuts and goat’s cheese with a tomato and olive dip. It should give you some indication of the amount of food we all put away that evening that I’m splitting this Come Dine With Me report into 5 separate posts! For now though, our first impressions: