Farmyard foray

9:23am Tuesday 27th November 2007

Housed as it is in a little wooden hut, the tea room at Broom Mill Farm nevertheless provides delicious home-cooked food.

IT is one of life's intractable mysteries that in an age when man walks the moon, organ replacement surgery is damn-near done on the day ward and it is possible for a train to get from London to Paris in the time that it takes the number 213 bus to dawdle from Darlington to Peterlee, no one appears to have invented a quiet coffee machine.

Kettles don't count.

Worse yet, when the coffee crusher eructated into life at 7th Century Broom Mill Farm, near West Auckland, it drowned the dear departed Dusty on the music machine. There are regimes in which men hang for less.

They could have done with a touch on the thermostat, too, though the chap who sat throughout with his coat collar turned up - and the wife who constantly hugged herself, like one of those silly little girls Christmas clubbing on the Quayside - may have been overdoing the theatricals somewhat.

Since recent columns have established a certain reputation for querulousness - you know, being grumpy - it is perhaps best to get such minor matters out of the way because Broom Mill is otherwise, unequivocally, excellent.

It's also commendably inexpensive.

Matt and Tracy Betney took it over 20 years ago, came from Warwickshire, have already made a name for the quality of their meat and associated products, especially sausages.

The lad's now making his own salami, too, having spent a week in Italy learning the cure. There's a drying cabinet in the farm shop, the salami army on parade like - it seemed - those unfortunate moles which still hang from drystone walls in Teesdale.

The tea room - café, bistro, whatever - is new, run by Helen and Robert Tait, both qualified chefs. It's housed in a wooden hut the approximate size of that occupied by the Auf Wiedersehen brickies but altogether more congenial and without need to worry about Jimmy Nail's feet.

"We did worry that visitors might think the farm smelled a bit, but that's what farms do," said Matt.

The Taits had a restaurant in Selkirk, came to County Durham to retire.

"Within six weeks we were bored silly,"

said Helen. She's a bit of a star, this lass: warmly welcoming, effervescently chatty, forever on the go. "I should be like Twiggy," she said but, then again, shouldn't we all?

The menu to date reflects the limitations of the kitchen, due substantially to be extended after Christmas. Among much else, they look forward to providing traditional Sunday lunch. "His Yorkshire puddings are to die for," said Helen.

This was Sunday lunch, too, maybe a dozen in, Matt wandering round in his wellies. No six days shalt thou labour for these boys. Word had soon swept the stockyard that the miserable old feller from the Echo must be looking to be down on the farm. Oh ye of little faith.

We began with that great rarity, a soup - vegetable, in this case - which hadn't been emasculated in a blender.

It was very good: hot, reviving, packed with flavour.

The Boss - surprise, surprise - had gammon and eggs (£4.50), the gammon having spent its active life about ten yards away. The sausage - pork and leek sausage - was mixed with orange and apricot stuffing, seasoned with a touch of nutmeg and a pinch of salt and pepper.

The baked potato which accompanied it was a tender model of that unappreciated art, the leeks and sprouts cooked perfectly to keep the flavour in. Even William Brown - just William - would have eaten sprouts like that.

The lemon cheesecake, great gorgeous doorsteps of it, had been made on the premises that morning. With coffee the bill for two reached about £22.

The entirely coincidental thing about the farmyard foray was that, at a do in Chilton just two days previously, a lady had urged us for once to write about a place which did simple things well. She just found it.

■ Broom Mill Farm is just off the new West Auckland bypass, off the A68 south of the village, with a working waterwheel, farm shop and planned riverside walks in the spring. The tea room is open seven days, weekdays 8.30am-4pm, Sundays 9am-4pm, the menu including all-day breakfast.

Telephone 01388-834564.

SELF-PROCLAIMED two weeks before its opening to be Darlington's finest restaurant, promoted seven days later to be the North-East's finest restaurant, Gastro in Gladstone Street has closed within two months. Notices in the window blame essential maintenance due to a collapsed drain. Passers-by are assured that the finest's fortunes will be revived shortly.

IT seems a bit brazzened for Northallerton, county town of North Yorkshire, to boast a pub called the Durham Ox. Bull by the horns, the Tykes have probably laid claim to that, an' all.

It's yon end of the High Street, next to the post office and to the Northern Echo branch office. I'd have bought them all their teas, honest, but they seemed to have gone home.

It was last Wednesday evening, a stopoff before the match, and not - emphatically not - the England match. This was Northallerton v Squires Gate - once the name of Blackpool airport - in the FA Vase.

The Ox runs a curry club, every day until 7pm - six options including vegetarian, plus chips or rice, naan, poppadom and a pint of lager or smoothflow for £4.95 the lot.

The wise choose chips. You can't dunk with a bowl of rice.

No matter that there may be people out the back who don't know a jalfrezi from a jaffa cake, that real ale wasn't included in the offer or that they played the television and piped music simultaneously.

It was a tasty and a substantial meal and for less than a fiver, with beer or soft drink, no Ox to grind whatever. Unlike England, Northallerton won, an' all.

FROM the Durham Ox to the White Horse Hotel, on the northern skirts of Darlington - long under threat and closed these past 12 months. It reopens on December 11 under the Sizzling Pub Co aegis, promised to be a pub for locals.

"Famous sizzling food" will be on offer all day. Red hot or otherwise, we shall no doubt join the queue.

CASK Marque, the people who check real ale quality, have launched a new real ale trail, featuring - but not all at the same time - 170 pubs in the North-East and Yorkshire.

It may be why Men's Health magazine reckoned being a Cask Marque inspector, and paid for it, one of the top ten jobs in Britain.

Better yet, and especially for those in the great desert between Darlington and Durham in which only the Stanley Jefferson in Bishop Auckland is included, details are available online at www.caskmarque.

co.uk.

Anyone who knows his place, and his postcode, can also text "cask", followed by the code to find the two nearest Cask Marque accredited pubs.

...and finally the bairns wondered if we knew how you start a rice pudding race.

Say go.