Bangers and Lawrence Weston Community Farm

I'm tucking into these little beauties tonight. Honey and mustard sausages from Lawrence Weston Community Farm. It's good to know that the livestock for these sausages have had good, healthy lives with freedom to roam locally. The Farm run a meat club - produce from the farm. It's limited, so early ordering advised!





And this is what they turned into... The reason the mash is a bit green is not because I am a really appalling cook, but because there are leeks and onions and a bit of old left over cheddar in there. Proper job.

TS Cafe - putting the 'T' into, er, tea

Starbucks may be losing megabucks, but TS Cafe, on the high street in Shirehampton, just opposite the bus stop on the triangle was crammed full when I went in for a sneaky cup of tea before a SCAF meeting today.

And little wonder. The cafe offers a wide range of food from proper hot dinners to breakfasts and salads in a clean and friendly environment at really reasonable prices.

Shirehampton has been stripped of so many community facilities in recent years - and shutters are going up on so many of the stores in the high street - including of course, Woolworths. It is hugely encouraging to see a business like TS Cafe doing so well, and justifiably so.

Keep it up, TS Cafe team!

Lamplighters Roast - one of Bristol's best kept secrets

...If you carry on down Hung road, on the south side of the Portway, you find the superb Lamplighters Pub.

There's something a bit other-worldly about the Lamplighters as you walk down to it - it's so unexpected and has an aura of real history about it. And as you walk outside, you find yourself over looking the mudflats of the estuary, fishing boats, and the club house of Shirehampton Sailing Club.

But they also do a really superb roast - pictured, steaming away merrily, here. Its so good, you'll note my eyes have turned red with anticipation. No mean slices of meat, they serve a half chicken, dripping in gravy, with all sorts of veg, and two kinds of potatoes. And as I was ordering, the bar staff brought bowels of Yorkshire pud bits out as bar snacks for customers.

As we all become ever more health conscious, I commend to you the health values of the great British Roast - full of protein, and I should think this plate contains a hefty proportion of my 5-a-day. Healthy eating doesn't have to be depressing looking salads, as this meal shows. Our great British roast is as healthy a meal as any! Long may it reign in our pubs!

The British Raj in Westbury on Trym

If I'm glowing slightly in the photo, and have chronic red-eye, it's possibly because I've just enjoyed a good hot Madras, full of flavour.

I went into The British Raj ( Passage Road, W-o-T) after an evening out canvassing in particularly miserable weather. (It's hard to look 'parliamentary' through a fine drizzle/steady rain, when your hair's adhered itself in a wet heap to the side of your head, and your hands are too slopping wet to shake on greeting...)

So there was only one thing for it, a nice hot curry. The British Raj provided a gloriously warm welcome, very comfortable seating, friendly staff and lovely food- good rich sauce which although hot still retained all its depth of flavours. It is obviously best appreciated after a hard evening's canvassing (preferably with me of course) - so what are you waiting for?!

carbo-loading for the connoisseur

It's two days before the dreaded Bristol 10k, for which I have, through a combination of injury and diary-saturation, managed to do next to no training whatsoever. ( NOT recommended.)

The Inn on the Green on Filton Road in Horfield is hosting a massive bank-holiday weekend-long beer festival. I have written elsewhere of how there is nothing wrong with enjoying a good beer, responsibly. So it is without apology that I go to carbo-load before the Big Day at The Inn on the Green, and sample some of their huge array of Britain's finest beers.

And what a selection: I'm afraid I have managed to lose the wonderful menu that we were given as we went into the pub, but I sampled such delights as The Guzzler, a lovely well balanced ale called "The Reverend James" (as I recall), and a very stylish little number brewed from Irish whisky.

In true English style, the gazebo tent blew away, and a live band played songs by 'Madness' as the smell of barbecued burgers and hotdogs wafted through our hair and adhered to our clothes. It's what a bank holiday weekend should be: There was little real drunkenness ( we had one half-pint glass which we had to queue up to get re-filled, and real beer is much harder to drink a lot of, fast than alcopops...) but a lot of friends were made, and a host of local brewers celebrated for their craft.

I am sure I am going to run stormingly come Monday... Thanks, Inn on the Green - keep the beer festival afloat!

No orange oil at the Raj Pavillions...

There are few things better than a proper curry after a couple of good ales. So after sampling some of The Inn on the Green's best (actually, only a half, plus several samples of some of their huge array at the bar) , the newly selected Conservative prospective MP for Kingswood
and I thought it only right and proper to observe a great British tradition and go for a curry.

Little did we know as pushed open the door of the Raj Pavillions on Filton Road that we were about to have one of the best curries either of us has tasted. I'm not a great adventurer when it comes to curry. I'm not too keen on the layers of mysterious orange oil slick that heavily-sauced curries sometimes float in, so tend to opt for a slim-line and unadventurous chicken tikka. No sauce. But something called a Chicken Handi caught my eye.

It was when Sanjay, the waiter, (far left!) came up and advised us on choice of rice that we suspected we were in for more than your average post-pint curry. "Most of my customers don't need a menu" he told us. "They usually ask me to advise them on what's good to have." And the handi was very good. No orange oil slick, just a richness of layers and layers of real flavour. Fantastic.

The Raj Pavillions has been around for almost 30 years. If you've not been there yet, go. Tomorrow. Now if you must. And don't worry about the menu - Sanjay knows what he's talking about. They do sit-down meals and take-away next door. But because the food's so light on the orange-oil, be warned. In an hour's time you'll have recovered and be wanting more...

Raj Pavillions - 14 Filton Road, Horfield, Bristol - tel. 0117 951 9799 / 0117 9513310

Know of another top curry spot in Bristol? let me know!

Pub on the Common: Inn on the Green

The Inn on the Green, on the Filton Road (at the Gloucester Road end) boasts an enormous array of good English beers. You can just about see the extent of the choice in the number of taps in the background here.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying a pint of beer or a glass of wine in the evening. As long as you're not driving, and as long as that pint or glass of vino isn't followed by six more. And it's also a good excuse to support one of England's great traditional products - ale and proper beer, which is being replaced little by little by lager imports which are usually much stronger.

Here, I'm about to enjoy a 'Peat Porter', as my tasteful beer mustache reveals. My companions enjoyed a pint of the unfussily named " Beer!" and Butcombe Bitter respectively. We also enjoyed three packets of very exotically flavoured crisps. ( Sweet Chilli and Lemon, Bloody Mary - with a mysterious exclamation mark after it on the packet - and real parsnip crisps. I mean they are made out of real parsnips. ) As below.

For three pints of real ale and some packets of crisps, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Inn on the Green. It's been completely transformed recently into a really nice place to enjoy a great variety of British beverage. (In moderation, and responsibly, of course.)

potatoes don't get more exotic than this...

Strawberries and Shire

I wouldn't be English if I didn't make some comment about the weather on a bank holiday weekend. And it wouldn't be England if tomorrow's papers weren't festooned with pictures of scantily clad young women on beaches in Weston-Super-Mare and beyond, with incredulous headlines involving the world 'scorcher'.

And a scorcher it was. Some friends and I were hunting down a cafe in the midday sun of this scorcher, along Shirehampton High Street and came across JJ's bakery and cafe. We sat at one of the tables and chairs set out along the pavement to watch the world go by. Paris, eat your heart out.

I ordered an orange juice with ice, and a gargantuan and quivering custard slice. But everyone else seemed to have had the same idea. About the orange juice and ice at least. The helpful staff apologized that they had run out of ice, but that they would do their best. How do you 'do your best' when it comes to ice? I thought.

But JJ's came up with five star culinary innovation: Frozen strawberries. In your drink, instead of ice. Go to JJ's on Shire High Street and try it, quick. Because this is England - scorchers don't last long...

A stronger Breeze

So I hear that Cafe Breeze, on Henleaze Road, is planning to expand into the next door gift shop - offering more table space and a new array of gifts. Congratulations! Cafe Breeze is another cafe-gem in Bristol North West's crown of places to eat, drink and sit and read the papers. Continuing in the cafe-pub review section of my blog, let me tell readers who've not yet been to Cafe Breeze, what they're missing:

I don't think I've ever walked into Cafe Breeze and had a choice of more than three tables. It is always packed. And with good reason.

The mochas come in tall glasses, layered, like those fudge cakes called things like 'death by chocolate'.

It may not offer the stout fagots and mash fare of the Cookie in Lockleaze, (see below) but it serves up both exceptionally good coffee and a full menu of good, unobtrusively cosmopolitan breakfast-lunch food. It serves abundant frothy cappuccinos, and probably the best mochas I have ever had. The mochas come in tall glasses, layered, like those fudge cakes called things like 'death by chocolate'. There is cream on top, and then they sprinkle on chocolate flakes that go shiny and melt slowly into the cream when you touch them with your spoon. ...but enough of that. If it's lunch you're after, they have a wide range of salads, hot and cold food- and my particular favourite, huge, hearty bowls of soup with great doorsteps of bread.

I'm delighted Cafe Breeze are branching out. But they're going to have to watch it- they're going to have to guard their gift-shop space jealously otherwise people like me will set up camp with a paper and a mocha amongst the gift-section.


There are lots of non-chain cafes in Bristol that make Nero and Starbucks look like a doctor's waiting room! Support local business and tell me if there is a cafe I should visit. Post a comment below, or email me at charlotte@charlotteleslie.com

The Cookie is Good

One advantage of being a parliamentary candidate is that you get to go to a lot of different cafes. There are nine wards in Bristol North West- and that's a lot of cup-of-tea possibilities. Since I've been selected, I've recuperated in lots of great Bristol coffee bars, greasy spoons and , yes, the odd pub here and there. I'm comforted to see that despite the flood of chains of trendy wine bars and the steady creep of Starbucks and Nero, there are still some great British cafes and pubs, which still serve proper mugs of tea, a good hearty breakfast, and in the case of the pubs, a good selection of the West-Country's finest produce.

All this sampling of coffee, mugs of hot tea and the occasional pint is far too good to keep to myself, so I thought I'd start a bit of a cafe-pub review slot. And my inspiration? 'The Cookie' cafe, Gainsborough Square, Lockleaze.

The Cookie is a little unusual. At time of writing, it has a hand written notice stuck up inside the front window, saying that there is good and bad in the world, and calling on customers to bear in mind their moral conscience. You have to live with it, the sign says. It confirms to customers that in a world of good and bad, The Cookie is good. Specialties as fagots and mash, steaming bowls of hot apple crumble with vanilla-ish smelling custard, and generous mugs of sweet tea may not be so good for the conscience of the dedicated salad-eater, but unlike fast-food burger chains, The Cookie serves nothing but good wholesome food. A lot of it involving gravy. I was on my way to meet someone for lunch, so was quite good and had just a mug of tea ( the proper size, nice clean crockery) and a slice of fruit cake. The staff were rushed off their feet, but were really friendly and efficient.

We live in a world where we are lead to believe that a proper protein-packed English breakfast of egg, bacon, toast and beans is bad, but that a croissant loaded with fat, a coffee stuffed with sugar and cream, a muffin oozing sugar and weird hydrogenated fats, or a burger boasting dubious body parts is ok. Everything in moderation, but there is nothing wrong with a proper English food. We should be proud of it. Generations before us were brought up on this fare, and it hasn't done them so badly. I'm going back for fagots and mash. And for anyone wanting the same, I can confirm, The Cookie is Good.

Do you know of a great non-chain Cafe, Greasy Spoon or Pub that I should visit? Let me know by posting a comment below, or emailing me charlotte@charlotteleslie.com