Living in Madrid but with Boyfriend in Germany, we've decided that 2013 is going to be The Year of the Mini Break. So we started as we meant to go on with a long Easter weekend at The Pig, a country house hotel in the New Forest in Hampshire.
The Pig is an indulgent mixture of luxury, countryside and gluttony - think wellies meets champagne.
The design of the hotel makes it feel more like you've stumbled into someone's home: crackling fires in the drawing room, mismatched sofas, Edwardian portraits on the walls and shelves in the library piled with board games and books on country walks and British wildlife. Our four-poster, shabby-chic bedroom came equipped with an old-style telephone, a claw-footed, roll-top bath and a handy stack of national trust manuals on keeping chickens.
The dining room, the star attraction, is a renovated Victorian-style conservatory, with mismatched crockery and the most enormous kitchen dresser I had ever seen.
The food (the real reason we were there) centres around the kitchen garden: the chef is driven by what the gardener and the forager turn up with at the kitchen door. It's famous for its 25 mile menu, in which every ingredient is sourced, if not from the kitchen garden, then from a 25 mile radius. The kitchen even smokes its own salmon, kippers and hams on the premises.
Keeping to the porcine theme, the menu starts with a selection of pre-starter "Piggy Bits". Little slivers of crispy pork belly with spiced honey were delicious porky bundles of heaven.
Hand-dived Lyme Bay scallops with streaky bacon were so good that I ordered them two nights in a row, and forced rhubarb jelly with foraged rosehip syrup and Dorset yoghurt sorbet was so springlike and sweet that I cursed myself for not ordering it two nights in a row. Breakfast is homemade "naughty granola", poached pears and cherry compote, an enormous pile of eggs benedict, and the Sunday papers.
After a lazy stroll around the vegetable patch, a visit to the quails and chickens in the garden (the pigs were, sensibly, huddled inside out of the cold), and a stomp in our wellies through the New Forest, we were in need of warming up.
Even the elderflower and mint in our champagne cocktails were homegrown.
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| The cocktail menu, nestled inside a pig keeping manual. There's a theme here. |
Although we had optimistically brought tennis rackets and cycling gear with us, and pondered the idea of booking into the spa (massages are given in a little potting shed next to the kitchen garden pond), curling up for the weekend in front of the fire with a book and a bottle of red wine was just too tempting.
