Howard’s House in Teffont Evias seek a passionate, talented sous chef to join the team at our country house hotel and restaurant. Work with an award-winning head chef to create dynamic modern British food, using the finest fresh ingredients. This is an exciting new opportunity to work within a highly skilled team, exercise your own creativity and flair, and work with the freshest seasonal ingredients from our extensive kitchen garden and the finest local suppliers.
2 – 3 years experience required. Competitive salary and good tips.
Please contact Simon Greenwood on 01722 716 392, or email your CV to [email protected].
A sense of humor has been essential during lockdown. Who has not chortled at a funny What’s App or belly laughed through the repeat of a favourite comedy series? This could have been one written by Brad Ashton our next Blackmore Vale u3a speaker. He says: ‘The best thing about my profession was not having to be a performer, watching a good comedian get a laugh, sitting back and thinking, ‘I wrote that’.
To hear Brad’s backstage stories, the Zoom talk is on Tuesday 3rd May at 3pm. For how to link into this or if you would like to share you newly acquired lockdown skills with u3a groups please contact Susan Kidd [email protected].
There is a risk that we are all so giddy that we now have the chance to meet a whole 5 other people outside that we over order our treats this Easter weekend. Should that be the case, I have rustled up a delicious bread and butter pudding using up all your leftover hot cross buns.
The basis of a good bread and butter pudding is simply some kind of bread, sugar, butter and a custard mixture. You can use all kinds of bread (from your homemade sourdough to an enriched brioche or Panettone) but the secret to a delicious pudding is the custard and giving the pudding a chance to soak in all that custardy goodness before baking.
Hot Cross Bun & Butter Pudding : Image Heather Brown
I recommend indulging in some good quality milk and cream and you can’t get better than direct from your local farmer from one of the many milk vending machines across Dorset. You can find your local milk vending machine using Dorset Foodie Feed’s Directory – just pop in your postcode, and select ‘milk vending machine’.
If you have dairy intolerances then I recommend substituting the milk with a good quality oat milk and cream. Oatly also offer an excellent vegan friendly vanilla custard if you are trying to remove the eggs too (most supermarket hot cross buns are now vegan friendly).
I haven’t added any extra dried fruits or spices to this recipe as my hot cross buns were fruity enough. If you are making this recipe with other types of leftover bread, then you can add some dried fruit in amongst the layers and sprinkle 1tsp of cinnamon across the top.
300ml full fat milk 100ml double cream
4 egg yolks
75g golden caster sugar 50g to 100g butter
1tsp vanilla extract
zest from a lemon
6-8 hot cross buns
In a large jug, whisk together the milk, cream, egg yolks, half of the sugar, lemon zest and vanilla extract until combined.
Cut the hot cross buns in half as if you were going to toast them, then cut the hot cross buns in half again, top to bottom (through the cross). Butter each side of the hot cross bun pieces and place them all into an over proof dish, squished up against each other. You want to choose a dish that doesn’t leave much space (the dish I used was about 25cm square).
Pour over the custard mixture. Make sure the mixture gets in all the spaces in the dish, wiggling the pieces to make sure the custard is underneath too. Leave the pudding to soak up the custard for at least 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 180 fan/gas 5. Sprinkle over the pudding the remaining sugar and add some more little pieces of butter.
Half fill a roasting tin with boiling water and place your pudding dish into the water (make sure the water doesn’t go over the top of the pudding dish). Place them both into the oven and bake for about 40 minutes until the top of the pudding is golden and puffed up (the layers will shrink down a little when it cools).
NB. The hot water gently and evenly cooks the custard but you can leave out this step if you wish.
You can serve this hot from the oven with more fresh cream or leave to cool and cut into pieces like a cake.
To join an existing in-house team to carry out a selection of works including stonework, brick/blockwork and plastering across our property portfolio in Dorset. Experience is essential. You must be adaptable, able to carry out a range of duties and able to use your initiative. You will need to hold a full driving licence. Competitive hourly rate, dependant on experience.
Please send/email a covering letter and your CV to: Robert Stenhouse, Project Manager, Ilchester Estates, The Estate Office, Melbury Sampford, Dorchester, Dorset DT2 0LF [email protected]
To join an existing team providing first class carpentry across our property portfolio in Dorset. Experience is essential. You must be adaptable, able to carry out a range of carpentry duties and able to use your initiative. You will need to hold a full driving licence. Competitive hourly rate, dependant on experience.
Please send/email a covering letter and your CV to: Robert Stenhouse, Project Manager, Ilchester Estates, The Estate Office, Melbury Sampford, Dorchester, Dorset DT2 0LF [email protected]
This month it’s all about Venus as it returns to the evening skies in April, making it a planet to keep an eye on for the rest of the year. Venus will slowly re-emerge into the evening twilight as an ‘Evening Star’, just as it did for much of 2019 and 2020. Perhaps tricky to see in the early part of April due to it’s positioning with the sun. But as the month moves on things will improve as Venus’s brightness will help the planet stand out so that it can confidently be seen against the evening twilight.
Venus – Shutterstock
Later in the month Venus has a close encounter with Mercury. On 25 April, Venus and Mercury appear extreemly close (in astrological terms) just after the sun has set, and the remain together in the Northwest horizon for about 45 minutes after sunset. Best to see Venus after the sun has set using a pair of binoculars.
More planets to spot in April:
It shouldn’t be long before Mercury too pops out of the bright twilight sky. While Venus takes a while to crawl away from the Sun, Mercury appears to move much faster and over the following nights the Solar System’s innermost planet zips away from Venus, climbing higher in the sky. It retains a pretty decent brightness too for the rest of the month. It’s a great opportunity to try and spot Mercury if you’ve never seen it before.
Mars is now well past its best for its current viewing, with its brightness dropping over the month and its apparent size dropping as well as it moves away. It’s also getting lower as darkness falls. Its rapid apparent eastward motion will keep it visible for a while longer but with such a small viewable disc size it’ will be tricky to get any serious detail from the planet even with a telescope.
Jupiter is a morning planet, rising 70 minutes before the Sun at the month’s start, but this month it doesn’t rise very high in the sky at all. Saturn is the last planet that you can observe this month and again it is a morning object, making only the briefest of appearances quite low before sunrise and then soon lost to the early morning light.
Robert Montague Frith 16th June 1944 – 11th April 2021
It is with great sadness that the family of Robert Frith announce his sudden and untimely death. A wonderful family man and successful businessman, a man of great humour, integrity and loyalty, Robert had an enormous passion for life and lived life to the full until his last breath.
After three and a half months of their own lockdown, poultry birds across the country on the 1st of April were allowed to finally leave their sheds, houses and coops. Their lockdown, known as a ‘housing order’, has many more draconian measures than what we experience. Birds across the United Kingdom have been shut up with no access to the outside; let alone a trip to the pub! However stringent they were, the measures were in place to protect them from the ever-spreading Avian Influenza (AI), more commonly known as bird flu. Whereas COVID-19 shielding means keeping distance from your neighbours and the local shopkeeper, the bird flu super-spreaders are your every day, roaming wild bird. You need to think of that beautiful duck tearing freely around the British countryside as an anti-masker flaunting lockdown laws, licking lampposts whilst heading to your local supermarket to study variations of kissing on numerous fruit and veg perishables. Unthinkable…. I’m sure!
Empty Chicken Range at Westleaze – image by Andrew Livingston
In the UK so far, it has been reported that over 250,000 birds have been culled due to contracting the disease and as a keeper of a large number of hens, we keep a close eye on how close to home reports of AI cases are coming up. For example, in November and December, there have been reported outbreaks in the Abbotsbury Swannery and Gillingham respectively. With the unfeasible cost of insuring one shed of our birds against AI around £3500, we have to be doubly careful with our biosecurity when going on to our farm. Admittance into sheds is prohibited from any unnecessary visitors. For anyone that does enter the living space of the birds, known as the ‘specific bio-secure area’, has to ‘wear overalls, disinfect shoes and wash hands. Most modern farms built today have a shower build by reception so visitors ‘must shower on and shower off’ site to ensure the tightest biosecurity. Imagine the queues outside your Tesco if you had have a quick full-body scrub before doing your shopping! Thankfully, however, there are a few signs that lockdown measures won’t be necessary for the future. A recent study completed by Wageningen University, Netherlands, showed that the use of lasers around chicken houses and ranges sees a reduction in wild bird activity by 99.7%. The lasers fire beams of light into the sky, which oncoming birds deem as an obstacle so they disperse from the area for protection. Admittedly, it is a drastic form of social distancing, but it is a possible method that would greatly deter possible infected birds and protect farmer’s livelihoods. In a facsimile with our own pandemic, birds are being granted protection through the use of a syringe. In the Bergen aquarium in Norway, the penguins in the enclosure are having their second jabs against the disease. So expect to see a penguin in your local with their vaccine card soon, enjoying a cold one.
We are eagerly awaiting 12th April, when we can welcome customers back in to the shop to browse physical books and catch up on all your news. Can’t wait
In the meantime, this fascinating debut from Stephanie Scott is well worth a read and will be a book you want to press into other readers hands.
A gripping debut set in modern- day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime, What’s Left of Me Is Yours follows a young woman’s search for the truth about her mother’s life and her murder. In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the wakaresaseya (literally “breaker- upper”) a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other, in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings. When Sato hires Kaitaro, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Sato has never truly understood Rina or her desires, and Kaitaro’s job is to do exactly that until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitaro fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter Sumiko’s life. Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, What’s Left of Me Is Yours explores the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession. Beautifully written, atmospheric, and immersive, Stephanie Scott’s What’s Left of Me Is Yours tells a propulsive story about heartbreak and loss and the greatest mystery of all, family.
A stunning debut: tragically beautiful, sensuous and haunting. Wow, just wow. Wayne
