Our executive chef Adam Clark gave a bravura performance at this year's Cornwall Food & Drink Festival.

Adam gave a cooking demo at the festival, demonstrating how to make Gunnard Steamed on a Bed of Bladderwrack with Wild Mussels, Sauce Vierge and Organic Marrow with Bacon and Herbs.

The marquee was packed with keen cooks eager to hear more about how to make the most of Cornwall's native ingredients.

Sally Jamieson, who came to Cornwall from Devon especially for the festival, said: "I loved Adam's demonstration, he was so down to earth. When he first told us what he was going to cook, I was a bit intimidated. What do you do with seaweed? But he made it all seem so easy and manageable. I am definitely going to collect some seaweed while we're here and have a go at making it."

Adam's passion for local, seasonal produce means he is often to be found wild food foraging the cliff top and shoreline below the hotel. He regularly rustles his way along hedgerows and through bushes, treetops and rock pools looking for inspiration.

His use of wild ingredients including gorse, ramsons, rock samphire, sea beet and sea vegetables lifts his menus above the usual humdrum hotel fayre.

“I’m always on the look-out, poking through hedgerows,” he says. “Nature tells you what ingredients make good bedfellows for a dish."

Adam takes enormous pride in preparing dishes using a wide range of quality Cornish produce.

Adam’s tip: “Experiment with foraged ingredients. When you are out and about, walking the dog say, open your eyes and see what’s cropping up.
“If you come across blackberries and crab apples, grab a recipe book and experiment. A blackberry and apple jelly works really well.

“Don’t peel or deseed the apples, just chop them roughly and cook them until tender. They are packed with pectin, which is great for jams and jellies.”

A wonderful wedding that didn’t cost the earth

The words ‘green wedding’ can conjure up visions of a bare foot bride in a hemp sack banqueting on brown rice.

Not so at Bedruthan Steps. The hotel takes great pleasure in hosting weddings, and great pride in ensuring that sustainable does not mean drab, over-priced or lacking in luxury.

Bedruthan was witness to a beautiful wedding here last month that was as stylish, fun and eco-conscious as the couple getting married.

Chrissie and Jonno Page live in Newquay and have a quintessentially Cornish ‘how we met’ story. Jonno, a chef and surf instructor on Tolcarne Beach, asked Chrissie out after coming to her rescue when her nose came into closer contact with her board than is usually advised.

A few years later when they decided to marry, the couple knew they wanted a sustainable wedding. For Bedruthan, that meant working with them to create a celebration that reflected their personalities and respected their budget, the environment and the comfort and enjoyment of their guests.

The couple are surfers, so the environment matters to them as much as it does to us. From 100% biodegradable sheep poo paper invitations to borrowing and returning shells from the beach for their table decorations, this couple wanted to celebrate without impacting negatively on the environment.

And they did. The menu was carefully chosen to be as sustainable as possible - all our ingredients are sourced as locally as possible and in line with our responsible purchasing policy.

Chrissie’s mum’s family is French, so instead of the usual dessert, our chef surprised her with a croquembouche, a stunning French cake made of a pyramid of profiteroles.

Transport is usually the biggest factor in a wedding's carbon footprint, but our eco-hero and heroine chose the most sustainable mode of transport around. Guests staying in Newquay were ferried to and from the wedding using a Bio Travel mini bus, which meant a smaller carbon footprint and fewer cars on the road.

Chrissie said: “Where do we start to thank you?
“Our day was perfect. We had the most wonderful time.
“The venue looked beautiful, the food was simply out of this world and chef's croquembouche actually reduced me, my mum and my entire French family to tears (and then set off the next table too).
“It was magnificent.
“To the French, it is such a tradition, and they were so honoured to have the cake, but none of us were expecting something so stunning and intricate, it really made the day.
“People are still talking about the food now. It was a hugely important part of our day and chef exceeded all our expectations.”

Congratulations Chrissie and Jonno. We are so pleased your day was perfect and wish you many more perfect days together.

Bread is good for you

Toast, sandwiches, bagels, naan, wraps, pitta…whichever way you butter it, bread is a splendid invention.

A slice or two contains many of the vital elements that fuel our bodies through the day, supplying B vitamins, calories, fibre, protein, iron and minerals. Knead we say more?

So keen are we on bread here at Bedruthan that we've organised a bread-making break especially for those of you who want to learn the art of leavening, kneading and fermenting.

The course is taught by Tom Hazzledine, aka Baker Tom. He started bread-making at the age of six, mixing up flour and water in the bathroom sink with his brother and baking it in the family oven. “We made a hell of a mess,” says Tom.

Now he bakes more than 200 organic loaves a day at his shop in Truro, and supplies Jamie Oliver’s 15 restaurant just down the road from us at Watergate Bay.

Tom’s been working hard to change bread’s bad wrap. His aim is to encourage people to rediscover bread in all its glorious forms and flavours, and to realise that bread can be good for you as well as delicious.

He believes industrially-made bread may be behind many of today’s wheat intolerances. “Supermarket bread has no real crust, so you don’t chew it properly,” he says. “Chewing triggers the enzymes needed to fully break down the bread in our stomachs.”

Tom makes a mean carrot, mustard and thyme bloomer, not to mention a fantastic foccacia and his Guinness and black treacle bread won the 2008 Royal Cornwall Show best new product award.

Tom is passionate about bread and loves running his master classes. “I help people produce better bread using their own oven and things they’ve probably got lying around already.

“Things like water sprays to create steam, garden tiles as pizza stones and terracotta pots instead of tins.

“Bread should be like any other food: you regularly make it yourself at home and get it from a restaurant or bakery when you don’t have time or fancy something special.”

Bedruthan’s Bread Making Break runs from the 5th to 7th of November and costs from £297 (£60 course fee).

http://www.bakertom.co.uk