I have to add, Stuart and Maria's explanation of the food was interesting -- the ochre soup was Lalande-grown tomato-courgette-coriander with a creme fraiche quenelle.
The salmagundi salad was endive on a bed of ricotta sage, with grapefruit, grapes, mint, lemon balm, fennel and celery flowers. Endive and grapefruit strike me as a stern pairing with not enough to offset the astringent aspect. A dish should only have one bitter thing in it.
Roasted onions with pink peppercorns, rosemary, oregano, thyme flowers stuffed into a gigantic raw zucchini.
Duck with black currant sauce by Dan.
Roasted homegrown potatoes.
Zucchini cake with lemon, cardamom, raspberries, strawberry coulis.
There was a salubrious effort to serve fresh food from the garden. Putting zucchini in everything reminds me of the days when the hippies were just starting to plant their own gardens and every day another 10 pound zucchini was discovered and had to be eaten. They put it in everything. The tomato soup. The cake. It's not nice.
I have to say too many herbs and pungent spice like cardamom isn't nice either. Sage and endive and grapefruit might be good together. With mint, lemon balm, fennel and celery? I don't know.
There are a plethora of
grapefruit sage cocktails that are trendy -- that might be the inspo Stuart is using for the unusual infusion with the ricotta.
The emphasis on fresh seems to have been an enterprise of Stuart's -- to dig the onions and potatoes and pick the black currants which presumably were hanging around with the 25-foot-long zucchinis waiting for Maria to come out of the house? A for effort, girleen.
I would have served the zucchini on its own-- charcoal grilled, with the halved onions, dressed with some of the duck fat? -- instead of using it as a throwaway stealth ingredient in the soup and cake.
And, with herbs as with accessories, take at least four off before you leave the house.