Worth Its Salt

A new foodie discovery we’ve recently made is of a selection of flavoured Welsh sea salt. As cooks (both professional and those at home) become more interested in each and every product they use, it seems obvious that new varieties of salt are catching the eye of those keen to enhance the flavour of their carefully prepared dishes. Ferran Adrià at El Bulli is allegedly a fan of Halen Môn’s pure sea salt from Wales, as is John Torode. Sold in some of the world’s finest delicatessens and foodhalls, Halen Môn’s range include a pure, white, gleaming sea salt, plus some really exciting naturally flavoured versions including one that’s smoked over Welsh oak, an organic spicy one, and one infused with Taha’a vanilla. Add the spiced one to give a homemade Bloody Mary a kick, while we’ve discovered the vanilla salt is perfect when sprinkled over a finished dish of seared sea scallop, served on bacon with a homemade rhubarb and ginger chutney. Divine. Quality ingredients for chefs that, clearly, know their salt.

Halen Môn, Brynlencyn, Isle of Anglesey, Wales
Tel: 01248 430 871
www.seasalt.co.uk

 

All That Jazz!

Barely has Cheltenham recovered from the excesses of the Gold Cup and along comes another event in the town’s glittering calendar. And what better place to rest your weary head during the proceedings of this year’s star-packed Cheltenham Jazz Festival than at the gorgeous Cowley Manor? Taking place from 29 April through to Sunday 4 May, both new talent and old (jazz) hands will be taking to the stage, while gig-goers will be washing down the performances with some expertly mixed cocktails back at the hotel’s sleek bar. Highlights of the week include the Cowley Manor sponsored Van Morrison concert at The Centaur on Wednesday 30 April and Eartha Kitt’s only UK festival performance. As well as gigs in the town, Cowley are playing host to an array of talent, including a French Jazz Evening on Thursday 1 May, featuring the delectable sounds of Fringe jazz quartet ‘Swing with Paris’, which includes a three-course dinner, an overnight stay and a full English breakfast the next morning to help soothe away the previous evening’s cocktail excesses. Prices start from £325 per room.
The bar at Cowley Manor is open nightly from 6pm until midnight throughout the week, and we’re sure you’ll be rubbing well-dressed shoulders with some of the event’s more charismatic and gorgeous performers and attendees.
Cowley Manor, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL53 9NL
Tel: 01242 870 900
www.cowleymanor.com
For more information about the Festival, go to: www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

 

For The Love Of Godminster

Being a successful purveyor of fine food and drink is no longer just about tasty creations. Not only does your product of choice have to be absolutely delicious, but it also has to arrive in beautifully designed packaging and have a range of other equally clever products in an ever-expanding range. Preferably of the award-winning variety. One of the standout producers at this year’s Food & Drink Expo at the NEC for the Resource team was Godminster Vintage: a cheesemaker of exceptionally delicious organic cheese first and foremost, but now with a range of prize-grabbing vodkas, chutney and biscuits that combine wonderfully with their tangy cheddar.
The Godminster estate is in Somerset, and the team behind this expanding brand aims to create a “self-sustaining environment where nature can regenerate and flourish.” Using their homegrown ingredients as a starting point for their creations, the talented Godminster team whip up ideas which are then passed on to trusted and respected food producers, ensuring that the quality of the core ingredients is respected.
A must to try, if you’re a fan of a cheeky, brunch-time Bloody Mary, is Godminster’s wonderful organic horseradish vodka that boasts a premium vodka smoothness with the subtle kick of a Bloody Mary’s best friend, horseradish. Using an organic vodka from a distillery in London, the team infuse the spirit with various roots and fruits, including elderflower, horseradish and cucumber. For the perfect Bloody Mary, mix a generous splash of the horseradish vodka with Godminster’s ready-made spicy tomato mix. However, we found ourselves supping the stuff neat at 11 in the morning at the Expo, such was its refined, elegant taste.
Order online, and be sure to treat someone you know with very good taste to one of the gorgeous gift packs.

Godminster Farms, Bruton, Somerset, BA10 0NE
Tel: 01748 813 733

 

His Eyes On The Prize

We never used to be fans of Formula One here at Resource – a sport spending too much money on big boys’ toys and riddled with in-fighting and politics, as far as we were humbly concerned. Some of the team were living in Spain for a few years, watching the Fernando Alonso craze reach fever pitch. We still weren’t bothered. Until… enter stage left Lewis Hamilton: a beautiful boy with excellent manners and a skill of mind-boggling, fearless proportions. Not only can this boy drive, but his media presence is a rare thing indeed. Stopping politely for interviews and avoiding the back-stabbing methods of his former pocket-size team-mate, Hamilton is our new favourite sportsman. Even after being pipped to the post in last season’s competition (cue cries of ‘he was robbed’ by the Resource team), Hamilton is firmly back on track (so to speak) with a win at the first race of the new season in Melbourne. We’re very much looking forward to his cohesive overviews of his many winning races and just hoping he’s ditched those awful shiny suits. Come on Lewis!

 

A Good Nose

With so many television programmes about wine and articles in the press by experts, you can know longer bluff your way to being a wine buff. One way of increasing your knowledge is to take a wine course – so as well as impressing your dinner party guests, you can also begin building a cellar of fine wines at home. If you’re interested in learning more, then Simon Chorley Art & Antiques are holding Wine Spirit Education Trust courses for all levels at their Prinknash salesroom this summer. Contact Simon Chorley via email, vs@simonchorley.com, or give them a call: 01452 344 499. Bottoms up!
Upcoming events at Simon Chorley: Thursday 10th April: Art & Antiques auction (Prinknash); Thursday 24th April: Collectors’ Sale (Prinknash); May 8th-11th: Art & Antiques Pavilion at Spring Gardening Show (Three Counties Showground, Malvern). The May 2nd Silver & Jewellery Valuation Day at Cheltenham Town Hall has been re-arranged for April 28th.

 

Giddy Up!

We never need an excuse to quaff Champagne and wear a fabulous outfit, but this week’s Cheltenham Festival certainly gives us a good reason. We hope you’ve already booked your room at Hotel du Vin, as this year’s four-day event will see the town expecting nearly a quarter of a million visitors who will be betting over £500 million on the 25 races taking place. No longer just about the horses or high stakes, the Cotswolds’ most elegant and affluent will be out in force. Expect a sea of glamour for Thursday’s Ladies Day, as the well-groomed compete for a very different kind of cup, with the Best Dressed Lady walking away with a four-star Ryanair European weekend away, £300 to spend in the Regent Arcade, and £300 of Molton Brown vouchers.
The event culminates in the world-renowned Cheltenham Gold Cup on Friday (which is sold out), with Kauto Star hoping to make the grade of this Blue Riband event. Call the box office for ticket availability: 01242 226 226.

 

Glorious Gloucestershire

The Resource editorial team is finally back on home soil, after some serious road-tripping through France and Spain in the comfort of a fabulous extras-stacked Land Rover Discovery (a full review of the vehicle and our Grand Tour will be online soon).
The plan, admittedly, was to post news stories every couple of days, but with infrequent access to free Wi-Fi (we’re sorry, but we absolutely refuse to pay for a service which is relatively inexpensive to install for hoteliers, especially the five-star big boys) we decided to take a much-needed break instead.
Highlights of our trip included a dazzling, slightly drunken eight-course dinner at Le Cinq in Paris’s deliciously decadent George V hotel; lunch sat on a windswept beach in Biarritz (we’re thinking we should invest in satellite offices in the upmarket town, with its Galeries-Lafeyette outpost and year-round populace of beautiful surfers); driving down the terrifyingly narrow streets of the ancient city of Segovia (and having to pull in our wing mirrors as our parking sensors went beserk); touring past the beautiful chateaux of south-western France; and eating roast lamb falling off the bone in Benahavis.
We’re feeling fully rested and raring to go, despite a few issues with email servers and having to move our editorial office upon our return (our head office address stays the same for now, if you’re planning on sending us gorgeous things to review!). We’ve had thousands of hits since our soft launch, and we’re hoping to dramatically increase that over the coming months, in the run-up to the first issue of Resource being available to Gloucestershire’s and The Cotswolds’ most affluent residents and visitors.
Please feel free to send us through any news items that you’d like us to consider, and if you need any more information about Resource, please do drop us a line.

 

A (Mini) Grand Tour

 

Just in case we don’t update our website as often as usual over the coming two weeks, fear not: the editorial team are off on a grand tour (of sorts) of France and Spain in a shiny, new, dashing, black Land Rover Discovery. Celebrating grand touring trips of old, we’ll be meandering down through France and Spain, stopping off at local markets, tasting the local wines and cheeses and staying in some gorgeous hostelries along the way.
Heading from Gloucestershire, out east to the Eurotunnel (so easy and painless) we’ll be spending our first couple of nights in the decadent, unashamed luxury of the George V – arguably Four Seasons’  jewel property. A full review, including a review of the two Michelin star Le Cinq, will be online as soon as we’ve finished basking in its glory.
Onward then, down through France (stopping off at various gastro-packed chateaux) and onto Rioja where we’ll no doubt fill the boot of our beautiful beast of a vehicle with cases of vino. Then on to the beautiful, ancient city of Granada in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and on to glitzy, brash and bawdy Marbella – where we’ve heard the locals have already started topping up their tans on the beaches. We kid you not. On the reverse journey, we’ll be taking in Madrid, San Sebastian, Biarritz and La Rochelle, to name just a few luxurious stopovers. And because we’re driving, we’re packing the Discovery and our Globetrotter cases with all of the most essential creature comforts: an iPod Touch for a vast array of tunes and audiobooks to keep us entertained; cashmere blankets and cushions so that both driver and passengers are cosy and comfy; an outfit for every eventuality; delicious toiletries so that we can spritz and moisturise the whole way; a few bottles of Champagne plus some delicious snacks in our coolbox in case we get peckish before our planned pitstops; our shiny MacBook Pros so we can update Resource online; a pile of gorgeous, glossy fashion mags and destination guides; Tod’s driving loafers for maximum comfort (and a pair of fabulously unnecessary leather driving gloves for maximum grip when we’re driving through Paris); and enough space left over for any essential and frivolous purchases that we make along the way. Cheap flight to Málaga? No thanks.
Email us with any must-see or must-eat travel suggestions for our trip, and we’ll post news and reviews all along the way. Á bientôt!

 

A Finger Of Fun

A sighting of Land Rover’s beautiful LRX distracted us momentarily from Apple’s latest launch: the wafer-thin, super-pretty, size zero MacBook Air. Dubbed ‘the world’s thinnest notebook’, Apple’s latest supermodel has its sights firmly set on the wireless generation. According to its creators, it’s a thin as your index finger, and yet still boasts a bright, crystal-clear 13.3-inch widescreen LED display, a backlit keyboard and a large multi-touch trackpad which steals some clever functions from the iPhone and iPod Touch. One of the machine’s biggest coups is in what it lacks: rather than add a few pounds, the MacBook Air has been built without an optical drive (in other words, there’s no disk drive, for those of still using 80s parlance!). If you must install a DVD or use a CD, then you can do so remotely from your desktop computer (Apple is, quite rightly, assuming that us Macophiles boast two, three, sometimes four kinds of their addictive pieces of kit). Fast, thin and very, very pretty, Apple is very much still strutting its stuff and putting PCs in their place. Do we really need to tell you that we want one?

www.apple.com

 

We’ve Seen The Future…

… And it’s beautiful. 60-year-old Land Rover’s LRX hybrid-crossover is a catalogue of technological advancements and incredible detailing, without losing sight of the brand’s core values. From the iPhone docking system, to its tyres engraved with the LRX logo; from the spacious interior that glows colourfully depending on how the vehicle is being used (green for economy mode, red in sports mode, blue in standard), to the floating LCD graphics on its electronic display; from its 4×4 agility, to its sound environment credentials. Muscular yet sleek, the compact two-door signifies the future of the Land Rover brand: lighter (thanks to the use of polycarbonates and aluminium), more environmentally friendly (from chromium-free dyes, carpeting made from sustainable source, fabrics made from recycled plastic bottles, improved fuel efficiency and reduced C02 emissions) and yet still practical and gorgeous, the LRX is expected to hit showrooms in three years. Your iPhone is going to have to wait a long time for its rather swanky new mobile home.

www.landrover.com