Landing on my door mat this week was a copy of the recently published Suffolk Cook Book.  Featuring over forty five recipes, all submitted by some of the many Suffolk businesses and personalities working within the local food scene. Recipes are diverse, with varying levels of cooking competence required.  From a very simple, very do-able and delicious Suffolk Gold rarebit with caramelised red onions (Suffolk Farmhouse Cheeses) to a ... drum roll ...Confit pork belly and pan fried mackerel fillet with carrot buttercream, candied bacon almonds, gin spiked blue berries, marzipan and pork jus, which is more challenging. (Executive Head Chef Alan Paton at Stoke by Nayland Hotel). Tempting my own taste buds and with an inspirational story and a recipe as far away from Suffolk as you could imagine is a Prawn, Pork and Cucumber Salad (Red Chilli Kitchen). The book showcases the fine Suffolk produce and ingredients that are available on our doorstep. I set my 19 yr old niece the challenge to cook anything that she would fancy from the book  and she chose the Elveden Gluten-free sticky toffee pudding (Elveden Courtyard Restaurant) which was absolutely delicious. The Suffolk Cook Book is £14.95 and is available from the businesses featured in the book, from Waterstones and online at www.amazon.co.uk.

Check out the new Kitchen Club Masterclasses at The Suffolk Food Hall! I took part in a game masterclass last week which was enormous fun. As well as being informal and informative I made five new foodie friends. I am glad that I arrived hungry because we were served coffee and croissants while we listened to the enthusiastic Food Hall team telling us about the Broxstead Estate produce. The provenance of the ingredients supplied for the days cooking, and used on site is incredible, with as much as possible sourced from the farm. Mikey from the butchery gave a great demo on preparing a pheasant. De-boning, rolling and tying up ready for the oven.Then it was up to us to practice what we had learnt and to remove the breasts off our birds to make our own Pheasant Kievs. Head Chef Steve Robson was on hand throughout the day to talk through the recipes and share his expert knowledge and tips. We made our own garlic butter to stuff the Kievs and were also taught the technique to confit the legs of the pheasants and confit a beautifully carved (by ourselves) piece of potato. Steve kept us busy as we went on to prepare a Red Onion Tart Tatin. This was a carefully thought out menu, perfectly timed, because after two hours of chopping, rolling and stirring we got to take our finished dishes up to the restaurant and enjoy a leisurely lunch. Time to chat, ask Steve questions and swap notes with each other. There was far too much to eat in one sitting, so leftovers are boxed up to take home to enjoy later. More coffee, then back to the kitchen (which had been tidied in our absence) then on to work on our dessert recipe which was a Chocolate Fondant with Blackberry Compote. By the afternoon we were really getting in to it and enjoyed the challenge of spicing up our own blackberry compote and seeing who could get the perfect gooey middle to their pudding. Puddings were revealed at 3.30pm, with lots of oohs and aahhs, as we went back up to the restaurant to enjoy our astonishingly perfect puddings and more coffee. A great day out, with absolutely everything provided including a fact sheet, recipes and I hear a little gift to be added too! Masterclasses cost £75 per person with a very generous discount if you book all four in advance.

• The Masterclass team
• Mikey the butcher
• Duck fat for confit
• Pheasant legs ready to confit
• Making tarte tatin
• garlic butter
• Head Chef Steve
• Simmering confit potato
• Chocolate fondant from the oven
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Its Breakfast Week! Shake Up Your Wake Up and see how many exciting ideas you can come up with. Yesterday we had a Toasted Bagels with Smoked Salmon and Creme Fraiche and today was Yorkshire Rhubarb, Greek Yoghurt and Acacia Honey. Tomorrow I am hoping to go to Tiffins Tea Emporium in Long Melford for one of their lovely breakfast specials.

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I am so excited! I made my own sugar today from a whole, raw sugar beet. Now I need to know if this passes the 'clean' eating test. Everywhere I seem to look at the moment in my foodie world I am surrounded by clean eating. Blogs, newspapers, Newsnight, social media - it's the buzz word. Gluten free, sugar free, natural, unrefined, superfoods, bad bad food processing, dreadful dairy ingredients, killing you softly with your grains...wheat. We need to be very careful that this current trend does not lead to a dysfunctional relationship with food. Mind you, it is actually nothing new. In 1982 when I was 23 yrs old, about the age of many of these beautiful, mainly thin, young, clean eating women, I wrote my first recipe book. That's me in the picture. About as much publicity as I got at the time was the second page of the Bury Free Press. But I love the Bury Free Press, so that's great. My books, the First and Second Chalice Recipe Books (never managed a third!) were vegetarian and vegan recipe books. I owned and ran the Chalice Vegetarian Restaurant in Bury St Edmunds at that time and we made our own Tofu, sprouted our own beanshoots, ate every grain under the sun, including quinoa, buckwheat and linseed, grew our own veg, used unrefined sugar in everything, put honey in our Barleycup, and as for the deadly nightshade vegetables and leather shoes.....no way! So with some fond memories of my formative cooking years and a nod to healthy eating I bring you my  Sugar Free Lemon, Cinnamon and Sugar Beet Tart.

Vacherin Mont D'Or making in Switzerland.  One of my top ten cheeses. 

The Cookery School at Braxted Park in Essex launch their brand new 8 week evening course - cook with confidence on 11th april.the course aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to a wide variety of essential cookery techniques from baking bread to knife skills.throughout the 8 weeks, participants will create an exciting and varied menu of dishes including fresh ricotta and spinach ravioli, fillet of trout with salsa verde, chicken noodle soup, steak and ale pie, and even the perfect roast dinner with all the trimmings. with eight sessions on a monday from 6.30pm until 9.45pm, the course costs £795 per person.

Who would refuse an invite to visit Green and Blacks stall at the Christmas Fair in Bury? It took a while to find them but we persevered and were more than rewarded by a couple of tastes of the various bars they produce and two bars of their thin Sea Salt chocolate to take home. Really nice guys on the stall too. This company were the fore-runners of the chocolate trend that has now made it possible to try specialist chocolate from all over the world - and this is still some of the best.

We had an invitation a couple of weeks ago to review Giraffe in Bury St Edmunds, our local town and full of chain restaurants. We've worked our way through the chains over the years and find them pretty soul-less with below average and uninspiring food, so we weren't exactly jumping up and down at the thought of dinner. But we nipped into town on the evening of the Christmas Fair, took a look around the town, enjoyed a mulled wine on Angel Hill and then wandered over to that ugly Parkway. Once inside though, Giraffe is a very pleasant place with a newly painted tropical themed decor.

The menu is appealing and includes Global Mains, Burgers, Small Plates and Salads, pretty much covering all that is on trend in the fast and casual dining market at the moment. We quizzed Kate, our server, to find out if the food was really made in-house. Yes it is, with fresh ingredients used and prepared on site. I'm not convinced by the chicken potsticker dumplings that I tried but perhaps these come in ready made? But the home-made lemonade was as good as I have had out anywhere, while Johny Cakes tried classic Mojito's (note the plural...) which had a generous measure of Havana Club and were made from fresh limes and mint - not a mix.

Miso Lime grilled salmon was perfectly moist and the Wasabi fried rice a good wholegrain base for the fish. The side of seasonal veg also ticked the healthy box and was served with a nice parsley oil rather than butter. No homemade desserts Kate admitted, but I ordered the apple and passion fruit crumble and she remembered that this was actually made in-house. I didn't want the accompanying ice cream so asked for fresh cream and as none was available a dish of mascarpone was offered instead.

We thought that we would be in and out of Giraffe in an hour or so but we had got really comfortable; we were well looked after and were enjoying the food and the drinks so ended up being the last to leave. Sorry!

Phoebe Rivers Cripps was at the Suffolk Show this year - and will bring her food truck to your event. I tried a very nice longhorn beef chilli.

We have been going to this for years, but have never tried cold pressed coffee although it was last years hot new thing, until we met a nice young man from Hey Bermondsey Coffee Co who gave us a taste at this years event. We also found the meat mince pies for our Christmas cafe and as usual, enough pens to last the year at sf hq.