The confessional menu
View from the back
The kitchen
Aubergine with pesto and pine nuts
Saltfish croquettes with salad and spicy tomato sauce
Tasty frangipane (particularly delicious) with home-made icecream
Biscotti
The gorgeous room upstairs…
Kitchen Jezebel, as she’d like to be known, has finally found a use for her basement! Turn it into a supperclub!
I met Fat Les there and we started with drinks in the garden, moving inside to the exotically decorated lower ground floor room for dinner. The other guests, two of whom, like Jezebel, were from Irish backgrounds, were all interesting and the conversation soon moved onto politics. Some of us despaired that we had no one to vote for. One guest felt so strongly about voting that he felt people should be jailed if they didn’t. Conversation was stimulating and lively.
The dinner was wittily themed around The Last Supper:
An eating ceremony:
Confessional Menu
Bad Thoughts
Glass of Pomegranate fizz
Venal sin
Aubergine and goats cheese wraps with pine nuts, thyme and caper sauce.
Mortal sin
Salt cod croquettes and sweet tomato sauce.
Absolution
Almond tart with blackberry ice cream.
Forgiveness
Tea, coffee and pistachio biscotti.
Having just come from a day trip to Lille in which I spend all day eating, I didn’t feel that I could do her food justice in the way that it deserved on this occasion. Especially as, upon entering, the first thing she said to me was “I’ve spent days cooking. It’s such hard work!”
Jezebel by day is an eco consultant, she has campaigned for safe cosmetics, primary prevention of breast cancer and a ‘nesting’ project which encourages nesting mothers to be to cautious about toys and the use of chemicals when decorating and furnishing the room where their baby will sleep.
She doesn’t use synthetic fragrance, believing that in the future, wearing strong synthetic perfumes in a restaurant will be as unseemly as smoking over your food. She cites the example of the perfume ‘Poison’ being banned in certain restaurants.
Jezebel says
“Strangely,when we are clean we spray, lather, rub and douse ourselves with a cocktail of toxic substances and then, depending on your perception, we might ‘stink’. People would be shocked if they knew what’s in the products they use. The closest thing some products have ever come to ‘natural’ is the picture of the flowers on the bottle! The whole issue of our perceptions of what is ‘clean’ is something that’s studied closely by the cosmetics industry.”
The writer William Boyd agrees, writing recently in The Observer that ‘it can’t be long before perfume is banned like smoking’.
Jezebel is allergic to dairy, wheat, vinegar and sugar but does eat meat. She minimises the use of salt, preferring to let the inherent taste of fresh food shine through.
However she will cook dairy and wheat dishes for the supperclub but will do a special evening for the increasing numbers of people who share her allergies. She also plans to do an Irish night with stew and soda bread.
Contact Kitchen Jezebel to book places and find out more here. Tickets £25
Cardinal sin of mis-spelling 'dessert' on the menu, committed!
I like the idea of the Sin menu .. Don't make you feel guilty at all when you eat 🙂
I came across another blogger who went to Lille – was it the same thing? I think so…what was that all about? It sounded exciting!
The whole thing about perfume is definitely food for thought – my you do mix with interesting people!I love it! And the food looks good too! Oh and we are plotting to come see you very soon! xxx