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December Hog Roasts

The weather is turning very icy now but Chef and Griddle is gearing up for another busy weekend and we will not let a bit of ice get in the way of our hog roasts.

We had an event on today at a farmers market who would like to supplement their organic vegetables with our free range organic pigs. We will also be cooking up some of the market’s organic potatoes in our roasting tray, to show off how superb they are when roasted in the pork juices. A few of the stall owners ended up asking if we could cook some of their vegetables as well and we did, with the results being fantastic. In the end the customers practically had a roast pork dinner with spit roasted pig, crackling, stuffing, apple sauce, potatoes , carrots , onions and fresh floured rolls. The meal went down perfectly, we tasted some of the roast organic vegetables and we must say they were absolutely amazing and will definitely be using them again for events in the area.

The event we have this weekend is for a wedding in Penzance, the couple have opted for our Alfresco Wedding Menu, this is a fantastic option for couples on a budget as it is less reliant on service but makes up for it with the price and the food you receive. This menu consists of whole roast pork and whole roast lamb served with all the trimmings, the couple will also receive three freshly made salads. Having two meats in this way is great foe taste as well as presentation as you can see both meats turning around and roasting whole. As I have mentioned before in these blogs lamb is a great meat for a sit down meal, especially when it is cooked like this.

This month has been one of the best yet for Chef and Griddle and we can definitely see the success continuing on into December and from there into the new year if you would like a hog roast in December I would definitely urge you to book now as we are almost full to bursting for the coming month.

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Summer Catering

Good Afternoon! We have had yet another manic week in the office this week, the winter months are typically known as being the quieter months for hog roasting but we have been booking events in every 20 minuites the past few weeks. Most of the jobs we have been booking in are for Christmas parties as is to be expected at this time of year, however we have also made a staggering amount of bookings for next year and 2014 as well. I think this is because our customers are getting ahead of the curve as they know how exceptionally busy we are in the summer months and they want to get their event booked in so they can breathe a little easier not having to worry about availability.

We have also been taking a lot of bookings for hog roast machine hires next year for the summer months ready for the festivals. Speaking of machine hires we hired out two hog roast machines with two pigs on Sunday for a customer that was serving 200 people in Keynsham. We dropped the equipment and the pigs off early on Sunday morning with two bottles of gas and the instruction manuals and collected them on Monday at midday. We cleaned the machines for the customer on this occasion, we usually ask that they are returned clean however the customer had agreed to pay the cleaning charge so we happily cleaned it for them.

We have also catered for a large party this week, the customer had our gourmet hog roast which typically includes the spit roasted pig with all the trimmings, three salads and warm new potatoes. On this occasion the customer wanted to swap the new potatoes for potato wedges which we did no problem, all of our menus can simply be starting points if you wish as all of our chefs can make anything you require of us, we have even been know to roast crocodile and bison in the past!

If you would like to book an event or machine hire for 2013 I would urge you to make your enquiry now using the contact form or call the office using the telephone number on the main page.

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Outdoor Catering

Last night Chef and Griddle catered for a 40th birthday party in Bradford. The weather was terrible, as I’m sure it was all over England, luckily we always take mini gazebos to outdoor events, so the food and ourselves were kept dry. It is also lucky that the party was indoors at an enormous house, we cooked and carved the food outdoors onto the guests bread rolls which they then took inside to eat. The menu which this customer had chosen was our Classic Hog Roast, which consists of a whole spit roasted pig, crackling, homemade stuffing and apple sauce served into a bread roll. There were 50 attendees, which a lot of people who make enquiries with us think is a low amount of people for a hog roast, which is simply not true. The customer was debating whether or not to put a few bits out for her guests to snack on, once the hog roast was finished, as the party was set to rage on all night. We told her that there would be no need for any extra food as we carved up the leftover pork and left it with sauces, bread rolls and the crackling for her and the guests. Since her event, she has got in touch with us to tell us that she and all of her guests greatly  enjoyed the hog roast. She commented that leaving her with the leftover food, as we did, was fantastic for later on in the evening when people needed a bit more food to help sober them up.

It may be the end of the week for most people but for hog roasters, the weekend is just the beginning and we are straight back at it. This weekend we are very busy again, we have a large event in Twigworth on Saturday. We will then we need to clean the machines so that they are ready for Sunday, when we are hiring out two machines. We are supplying the machines with two freshly prepared pigs and two boned and rolled pork legs for a customer who is catering for a large amount of people in Somerset.

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Christmas Comes Early

We have had quite a busy week at Chef and Griddle this week with two party menus, a corporate event and another party tonight!The corporate event was a for a small haulage company in Wrexham who were celebrating an excellent financial year and treating the staff to a hog roast for lunch at their offices. The weather wasn’t fantastic but we were able to bring the hog roast indoors to the canteen to serve the hog. The menu was our corporate menu one which consists of a spit roasted pig, professionally presented crackling, freshly made stuffing and apple sauce served into a bread roll. The staff loved the hog roast and kept coming back for more pork of which there is always plenty.

One of the party menus was our menu two on which you get a choice of a number of meats such as lamb, beef, chicken, turkey or a BBQ menu. The hosts of the party chose chicken option which we served with piping hot stuffing and freshly made gravy. The menu two also comes with a vegetarian option so the client chose to have roasted aubergines with feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, caramelised onions and chilli, for a very colourful and flavoursome vegetarian alternative.

The second party menu was for an early Christmas dinner for a family as their eldest son is going travelling over the Christmas period. The clients had the winter warmer menu which is understandably becoming increasingly popular over the Christmas period. This menu has the choice of pig or turkey as the meat and seasonal vegetables as a side dish, they chose the turkey for the traditional festive meat and had freshly prepared mulled wine to go with it.  Spirits were high and everyone had a little bit too much mulled wine but that what  early Christmas is all about!

The event tonight is for a 40th birthday party and the weather is terrible, luckily we have our little gazebo to protect us and the hog I will update you on how it went tomorrow.

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Spit Roast Lamb

Yesterday was the Islamic New Year and we were out cooking a Halal lamb roast for 100 guests in Addlestone. The Islamic couple that we were doing the roast for are repeat customers of ours who trust us to do an exceptionally tasty Halal spit roast. The menu that the couple opted for was a whole spit roast lamb with rosemary and thyme along with roast potatoes which we cooked in a tray with the lamb fat.

For the vegetarians we prepared meat free somosas which went down a storm. This was all served onto high quality crockery which we collected after the meal and cleaned off site. In the office the new years eve enquiries are flooding in especially for machine hires and pigs. Our machines can fit through most normal sized doors and have pneumatic tires for ease of transportation, so they are an ideal machine for new years eve parties. We can also supply pigs and lambs to go in the machine and will put it in the machine for you and set it going, so all you have to do is check the temperature of the meat and carve it when it is ready. We also supply all of our machines with a 19 kilo gas bottles which is enough to feed around three pigs or lambs.

We are also getting a lot of enquiries for weddings and corporate events in Summer next year, summer is always a fantastic time for hog roasts. Due to the large number of enquiries we are receiving and the fact that we are so exceptionally busy in Summer we urge you to start booking your hog roasts straight away to avoid disappointment. We can provide everything from canapés and desserts to simple evening meals such as bacon and sausage rolls with a few salads. Christmas is also still a very busy period for us with us booking in quite a few turkey roasts this week for Christmas parties or just family gatherings. We are all looking forward to being able to share the festive cheer with people through our hog and turkey roasts and we bet they are going to make a lot of customers extremely happy.

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Christmas Party Catering

Christmas is not too far away now and the number of enquiries we have had about Christmas hog roasts is amazing. A lot of people tell us that pork may not really suit the festive celebrations and ask if we can do any other meat. The answer is that we absolutely can and quite often do. We can do lamb which is absolutely fantastic when spit roasted and served with mint sauce and mustard and dill sauce. Even more festive than a lamb is our turkey roast where we roast numerous turkeys whole and serve them with piping hot stuffing and cranberry sauce. Spit roasted turkey is great for people that don’t the hassle of making their own Christmas dinner, which lets face it creates a lot of stress on what is supposed to be a fun family day. Our chef will turn up in his chef whites and your family can see the turkeys spin and roast for hours, you could also have seasonal vegetables with the turkey which we call our winter warmer menu – call the office for your free winter warmer quotation now.

Beef is also a fantastic spit roasted meat for this time of year, we cook whole beef sirloins and serve it with horseradish sauce, Yorkshire puddings and red wine gravy and is actually one of my personal favourites. Our sumptuous desserts are also fantastic with  a Christmas meal, we can make almost anything from chocolate torte to mince pies, one of our most popular desserts at this time of year is the sticky toffee pudding which is freshly prepared and I must say absolutely gorgeous.

We have a number of Christmas parties booked in at the moment and all look to be fantastic events, most of them are work parties. A lot of people booking their Christmas parties tell us they worry about their guests having to go outside and retrieve their food in the freezing cold the U.K is known for at this time of year. We always tell them that if there is a small amount of ventilation then we can very easily roast indoors and it is perfectly safe to do so, meaning their guests can stay toasty and warm in the venue.

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Bonfire Night Catering

This week has been another busy one for Chef and Griddle and it started with a bang! We catered for 200 people on bonfire night who wanted our classic hog roast menu which consists of whole spit roasted pig, professionally presented crackling and freshly made apple sauce and stuffing served into a roll.

The fireworks display was fantastic and it was clear that no expense was spared. The display started with a Guy Fawkes mannequin procession and ended in an explosive finale of fireworks launched one after the other in time to music.

To cater for this many people we roasted a whole hog as well as two pork legs which made us plenty of pork to serve that many people. Very large parties are not a problem for us as we can simply bring along more machines and cook more pigs and pork legs to go with them. We have catered for parties as large as 1000 people and above in the past with no problems. The weather was very cold as temperatures suddenly plummeted near the office this week but we barely felt it as we had the serving tent to break the wind and the hog roast machine to keep us warm as well as dashing around serving people.

 

The guests loved the hog roast which was served buffet style with four Chefs serving the food to make sure everyone was served in a timely manner and no one was left waiting for their hot rolls. The crackling was very popular, we had served it onto circular platters for guests to help themselves and it was a huge success. I personally love to put the crackling in the roll with pork stuffing and apple sauce as it creates a crunchy texture and the way in which we cook it stops it from breaking your teeth but is still crunchy at the same time. The way that we prepare it is to score the pig, pour fresh spring water on it then rub rock salt all over it which gives it the fantastic flavour as well as help it cook faster.

Bonfire night is always a fantastic night for us at Chef and Griddle and we are already looking forward to next year to enquire about bonfire night hog roasts for 2013 fill in an enquiry form on our website.

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Halloween Adventure & Looking Ahead To Bonfire NIght

Halloween was a fantastic night for hog roasting and we had a very busy evening at Chef and Griddle. We are also looking ahead to bonfire night which will be another great night for hog roasting, whole flame roasted meat suits bonfire night to a tee, why roast Guy Fawkes when you can roast a pig? We can also provide BBQ catering which is quite simply unlike any BBQ you have had before, we source all our meats from top quality butchers and you can really taste the difference.

We can also freshly prepare bonfire night themed desserts such as sticky toffee apples and treacle pudding to end your bonfire night celebrations with a bang.If you are interested in a bonfire night hog roast it is a good idea to enquire now as the date is fast becoming booked up so move fast to avoid disappointment.

We have catered for a number of Halloween parties the past few days and at the weekend, however the one last night was probably the wildest. We found ourselves hog roasting in the middle of a forest in the lake district, this might seem impossible but all we really need to roast a hog is the machine, a bottle of gas and the pig. Everyone ate the pork rolls huddled around the camp fire and munched on their crackling which we had presented onto a circular platter. When the guests were done eating we cleared away the rubbish and there was no sign we were there in the first place apart from the remains of the fire.

Luckily our hog roast machines have inflated tyres so it wasn’t too hard to move it from the van to the campsite and back again even over the rough terrain.

The weather has been rather awful near the office recently but it is nothing compared to what the Americans are going through with hurricane Sandy at the moment. If it was to rain on the day of your event it would not be a problem for us at all as we bring mini gazebos to cover the cooking and serving area of the hog roast. We bring these gazebos along to all of our outside events as there are few things worse in life than a damp pig!

 

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Busy Weekend

Our catering teams have had a very busy weekend at Chef and Griddle, we had two events booked in one for Saturday evening and another for early Sunday. The event on Saturday was for a Halloween party for a group of students at a university, they had our classic hog roast which consists of a whole spit roast pig, professionally presented crackling, freshly made stuffing, apple sauce and fresh floured rolls. The party was fantastic, there were a number of weird and wonderful costumes on show such as someone dressed as Psy from Gangnam Style fame. As is usually the case at university a lot more people turned up than originally intended and they were all interested in the hog roast. However we always bring more food than is required and there was enough to go around very comfortably.

After the party we cleaned all of the machines ready for the next day of catering they are all stainless steel so the cleaning did not take too long and we got an early night to prepare for our early morning.  The event on Sunday was a breakfast meal consisting of warm bacon barms for a group of paint ballers before they started the days activities. The barms went down a treat and they all seemed to look a lot livelier for that time of morning once they tried the food.

On the way back from the paint balling event our events manager received a call from a lovely woman who was a bit on the panicked side to say the least as she had been let down by another company for a hog roast that evening. We agreed to do their catering that evening as we had no other events we had to go to, luckily our butcher was able to provide us with a pig at short notice as that is not always the case. The event went fantastically, the woman and her husband were very thankful that we provided their hog roast at such short notice and they even wrote us a card to say thank you which came in the post today.

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Wedding Hog Roasts

At Chef and Griddle we have had a very busy week in the office and also had a flat out weekend catering. We catered for a small party of 50 for a lovely couple’s wedding in Andover, they wanted a quieter wedding with only their closest family and friends present. A common question that we are asked is whether we can cater for these smaller number of guests and the answer is we absolutely can., as we are very close with our suppliers we can basically pick the size of pig to suit your event.

We had a member of staff situated to spot the bride and groom as they were on the way back from the church, when we spotted the happy couple making their way back we started pouring their reception drinks to have them ready for when they arrived. The couple had also chosen canapés to warm their guests up for the hog roast, the chef and griddle serving staff were constantly returning with empty platters of canapés as they were exceptionally popular. The most popular were the honey glazed gourmet sausages which were skewered on sticks and served on a platter with a whole grain mustard dip.

There were a number of vegetarians at the wedding so we freshly prepared them a Spanish quiche consisting of high quality organic vegetables, at chef and griddle we don’t believe that vegetarians should be left out at a hog roast just because roasted meat is the focus of the meal. We can freshly prepared a large number of vegetarian options from stuffed peppers to roasted aubergine.

The main roast also went perfectly, the pork crackling was golden, flavoursome and lifted off easily. The couple had also opted for a small spit roast lamb which is quite a popular option for weddings due to the diversity of having two very different meats on offer. The spit roasted lamb looks very similar to the pork whilst it is cooking so it is also a good option for people that want whole roasted meat but decide not to have pork. Lamb is also a fantastic tasting meat and it has never tasted better than when it is slowly flame roasted and basted with its own juices. The guests all lined up with their real crockery and went from the roast pork to the roast lamb, most of the guests had a bit of both as they had never tried pork or lamb prepared in this manner.

Serving this small amount of guests did not take long even though we were chatting to them as they came along, for larger amount of guests we simply take more staff and hog roast machines so nobody is left waiting for their food.

Enquiring about wedding menus is easy, simply fill in our online enquiry form and we will send you out prices and information about those menus. You can also call the office and have a chat with us about what you require for your wedding and we can get a quote emailed out to you.