The Meadow Inn Ironbridge Shropshire

If you're looking for a place to eat in Ironbridge, Shropshire - The Meadow Inn Steakhouse at is 'just' outside of Ironbridge and is excellent!

From the minute you step through the door, you're made to feel welcome by the friendly staff.

 The Meadow Inn is the only 'Steakhouse' in Ironbridge and all the beef they serve is minimum 28 day matured.

 The Meadow has three very different dining areas inside.  Outside there’s a lovely decked patio area and a beer garden that stretches down to the river’s edge.  Perfect for relaxing with a drink in the summer.

Steaks are always cooked to perfection.  I’m always very pleased as I ask for my steak to be cooked ‘medium rare, but more on the rare side’.  The chefs have never got that wrong yet and we eat there quite a lot.  

I also think they should win an award for the best chunky chips - they are lovely and crispy and can't be matched anywhere!

It’s not only steaks on the menu, far from it!

You’ll find a great range of food.  Everything from vegetarian dishes, fish, chicken, totally yummy salads and a fantastic selection of filled baguettes. 

It’s worth noting the Bubbly Beer Battered Fish and Chips are delicious with mushy peas and homemade tartar sauce.  At the time of writing the children's menu priced at just £5.95 and includes an ice cream for pudding.

There is always a good range of tempting puddings or a cheeseboard to end your meal perfectly.

I could easily just sit and relax, eat and drink, quite happily all day.

Oh and by the way, The Meadow is also exceptionally clean and the loos are spotless!

So, if you’re in the area you really should visit The Meadow Steakhouse and you won’t be disappointed.
How to find The Meadow Inn.

The Meadow Inn at Ironbridge - A Review

I'm not telling anyone that it's my birthday on Monday. But seeing as it is, we went out for lunch yesterday at one of our favorite places to eat, The Meadow Inn at Ironbridge.

I must point out that since about October/November 08 The Meadow has had new owners. Since then, the already high standards have been upped and it is now a really lovely, friendly place where we could just sit, drink and eat, quite happily all day!

We arrived not too long after they'd opened for lunch, hence it was a bit quite, but not for long. We walked there, which normally doesn't take very long but because of the snow we've had we had to walk a long way round or we'd have slid on our bottoms all the way there!

The picture above is one of the bars - they have another one to the left.

Now, there is nothing that can be faulted with The Meadow Inn. The staff are really nice and friendly. It's very clean (the loos are spotless) and the food is excellent!

The Meadow is one of those places where you want to eat everything on their menu. They do smaller portions if that's what you want, or you can add just £2.50 for a larger sized meal. The small portions aren't that small either!

For starters I had the Char-grilled King Prawn skewers with a sweet chili relish - very nice indeed - I could quite happily had a whole plate of those!

As well as their main menu they have a blackboard which has a few more yummy dishes to choose from. So, from the blackboard, Paul had warm goats cheese with dressed leaves and walnuts.

For the main course, he had their double stack burger, which as you can see isn't small! I was cooked perfectly and the chunky chips were lovely and crisp, just as they should be.

I had to have steak, of course! The steak was cooked to absolute perfection - I always have steak medium rare.

They do a larger steak but this size (8oz) was just fine for me. I also had Bearnaise sauce, which was included in the price. Everywhere else you go, seems to want to charge £2 to £2.50 extra for sauce!

Now, another good thing about The Meadow Inn, is that their beef is minimum 28 day matured and is from Welsh border farms. It always bothers me that in some places you just don't know where they get their meat from.

Now, we didn't have dessert as we were FULL!

In my opinion The Meadow really does serve the best steaks and not just in Ironbridge! If you're ever in the area you must go there and see for yourself.

You wont be disappointed.

My Trip to London

Last Monday was a rather grey day in London - as you can see the weather wasn't too nice at all!

So I went on the train to London ready for the Television studios the next day. I can't mention which studios or the name of the programme either! Sorry to be all mysterious but we are not allowed to chat too much about it as it's a brand new cooking programme showing in a few months time.

We all stayed in a hotel that is inside the building to the left of the London Eye, you can see it in the picture above, so we were in a really good central place.

Seeing as I've discovered this amazing video thing on here you can see my video of what happened at the very bottom of this post!

I had a fine time - one day London travel pass in hand, I trundled off to Harrods!

I thought I'd share a few pictures with you for anyone that has never been there.

Harrods is huge - you can get lost in there. I headed straight for the food hall as you do.

Loads of different cheese's from just about everywhere were on sale.

The ceiling is amazing - it's different in each part of the food hall.

All different kinds of coffee are sold.

I love looking at all the 'fancy' food they have. The prices are quite fancy too!!

These lobster halves were actually not too bad in price considering this is Harrods they were £17.95 for each half.

Although a cauliflower was £3.95 compared with the normal 'everywhere else' price of around 89 to 99 pence! I shouldn't think I'd have made my cauliflower soup if I had to shop there! A baby gem lettuce was also £3.95 in Harrods.

Below: Lots of posh looking chocolates.

The Sushi bar - not sure on the prices here but I did notice a

small glass of white wine was £9.95

This Valentines chocolate heart (hollow) was a mere £150

........and nope Paul is not getting one!

Then I headed off to the pet department - no pictures of the animals cats, dogs, bunnies etc as photographs are quite rightly not allowed there.

The Egyptian stair case or escalator is used to get to the pet department.

I also stopped by the television department where you can buy a 70inch Television for the absolute bargain price of £30,000 - Yep 30 grand!!

Now this is a Cat Bed! A real bargain at £395.....not!

Also in pink for the same price - can't be bad eh?!

Later on we (our team of four people) met up to eat - I was in need of food!!

I must say the other team members are all really nice people and I'm really glad to have met them.

This was our starter - between three of us as one person couldn't get there early enough to eat with us. A right bargain that was as Monday night was 50% off all food! It's a pub chain called (much to my horror) 'The Slug and Lettuce' what a yucky name!

Now here's a very blurred picture (but you get the idea) of the London Eye

at night!

So, if you really feel the need, you can watch the 'Jan can talk for England'

version of what happened below!

A stroll around Much Wenlock, Shropshire

This post has nothing to do with food, it's just something I thought some people might find interesting.
On Saturday just gone, we went for a walk around Much Wenlock. It's about 5 miles from where we live, so we went in the car, parked up and had a walk about. Anyway, here are a few pictures.

Picture Below;

The 'Police station' on the left is now someones house! It looks very similar to the old Police station in Ironbridge that has now become a really nice Indian restaurant.

Below; I had to take a picture of this - it's called 'The Mutton Shut' - you can read about it here.

Apparently 'shuts' were cobbled short cuts to other areas and usually named after nearby pubs. There is also a George and Dragon Shut in Much Wenlock.

Passing by some of the shops in Much Wenlock.

In this picture you can see a bit of a queue to get into butchers - I have heard from several people that it is such a good butchers that there is always a queue!

At Christmas it goes into the next street!

You can read more about the history of Much Wenlock here

Blogger Meets Blogger!

On Tuesday of this week I met up with another food blogger!
Maggie is so easy to get on with, she was very good company. We had a great time, talking about food and everything else under the sun!

Maggie has a lovely blog, which I know a lot of you already know about called 'Kitchen Delights'.
If you haven’t visited it before then I suggest you take a look. She makes lots of lovely looking desserts.
Anyway, we went to Shrewsbury and looked around the many foodie shops there. One of which was just the kind of shop I’d been looking for called ‘Setonaikai’
I was in my element!

We had a nice lunch too at the Peach Tree in Shrewsbury. We both had deli sandwiches. I had the Tuna Melt deli sandwich and Maggie had the Vegetables & Melted Welsh Goats Cheese. I have to say the food there was excellent.

I did take pictures but sadly, I only had my old mobile phone with me which doesn't take very amazing pictures. My usual one is in the menders and wont be back for at least another week.

Thank you again Maggie for such a nice day, we will have to have another ‘outing’ again soon – when you've had time to recover from my non stop chat that is!

A Walk to Ironbridge, Shropshire

This post has nothing to do with food, it's just something I thought people might find interesting. The Iron Bridge was built in 1779, and was the first structural use of cast iron.

I love Ironbridge itself, which is also the name of the place. There is so much history there and there's also a Victorian Town further down the road at a place called Blists Hill.

Yesterday we took a walk there and the following pictures are in order of that walk.

Down a steep hill - well it's seems steep on the way back up!

A house at the bottom of that hill.

Here's a cute looking pub called 'The Horse and Jockey'

A Rooftop!

Now were are at the old Police Station, which has since been turned into an Indian Restaurant. It's our favorite place to eat Indian and is called 'The Pondicherry'

A couple of other restaurants on the way down.

An old fashioned sweet shop called Memory Lane Sweets.


Now we are at the Iron Bridge itself, with tourists everywhere!








Just past the bridge still walking down by the river there are many shops, Bed and Breakfast places and loads of Pubs!



I love the little side streets.


Below is the main street, with the river on the left.




Below are the Lincoln Hill Lime Kilns.



Under tremendous heat, rock hard limestone was transformed into powdery-fine lime in the lime kilns.
Lime kilns have been found in the Gorge since medieval times.
These kilns operated from about 1760 to 1870 when Lincoln Hill supplied huge quantities of lime stone to the surrounding iron furnaces.

Below is one of the many pubs!

And finally, this is the view from where I'm sat with my wine in one of our favorite pubs! 'The Swan' in Ironbridge.

Thassos 'Four Seasons Apartments' and Greek Food

Thassos is such a lovely island. We stayed in 'The Four Seasons Apartments and Studios' and they were fantastic.

This picture was taken from our studio (there are 25 studios and only 2 apartments) the can studios sleep 3 (the 3rd person would sleep on a sofa bed) and are extremely clean. Very modern and stylish. The pool is only small but was never packed out at all.

The staff at the hotel were very friendly and really very helpful. The pool bar serve food all day and the range of food is really good. Moussaka, Pastitsio, Greek Salad, Chips, Steak, Burgers, Toasties, Full English Breakfasts........I could go on!



The shower and toilet - see what I mean about nice and clean!



The Studios opened in May 2008. They are available to book through Thomson but not one of the pictures Thomson show (as I write this anyway) are not pictures of The Four Seasons at all - Not one of them!
Also, they are not situated in Skala Rachoni either as stated! They are about 5 miles away from there going towards Thassos town.
The hotel puts on a free return mini bus service to take you into Thassos town at night which, without that, you would have to get a taxi which costs 6 euros each way.
On the first day you arrive the mini bus takes you to the supermarket to stock on on drinks etc which I thought was a great service and as I'm always hungry my main concern is FOOD! So at least you can get drinks and things for your room which of course is fully equipped should you feel the need to cook........I did not feel the need to cook at all even though I love cooking, I was on holiday!!

The only good thing Thomson have done is post pictures of what you think looks an 'okay' sort of place to stay and when you get there you are really pleased to find that they are actually excellent and so clean and modern and much, much better than the pictures they show!

Thassos is such a beautiful island but we think you really must hire a car if you go. We went for a week and only hired a car for one day so we could go all the way around the island.

Forget the buses - they are okay if you don't mind waiting anything up to 40 minutes until it arrives! The timetables are just not any help. When they do turn up they are nice air conditioned coaches which is one good thing.

Okay, this is a shop front in Limenas (Thassos Town) selling jars of olives, oils and different nuts in syrup. I got some Greek Oregano that was actually from Thassos.



The drive all the way round the island is about 70 miles and then you are back to where you started. You can not go wrong as there is only one main round that goes right the way around the edge. I mean on the edge too sometimes! Very winedy and up one minute and down the next. The scenery is fantastic. We just stopped where we could, parked up went to a few different beaches, had lunch and carried on our way - that's the life!

This picture is of Skala Rachoni beach.



This was part of a meal we had in The 'Gorgona Restaurant' in Skala Rachoni. Fried Feta on the left and Spicy Cheese Salad (is what they called it on the menu) on the right.



And below is Pepper and Tomato Stuffed with Minced Meat and Rice.



Thassos town (Limenas) is just full of places to eat. Lots of locals eat in many of the places there too.
One place we really liked was in one of the side streets, see picture below.



More lovely Greek salad, and Cheese Croquettes.
Once again it was Feta cheese with roasted sweet peppers and on top was hot green peppers or we think chillies. We LOVE feta cheese - Can you tell?!
Mmmmm YUM!



Another excellent place to eat is 'The Thassian Resturant'.

Below, Roasted Peppers with the skin removed, stuffed with feta cheese and baked in the oven.



This is Aliki beach, which if you look at a map of Thassos is at the bottom right of the island and was one of the places we stopped to have a dip in the sea and have lunch. You can see the place we ate in (above the sign in the middle of the picture).



It's a shame as I don't have pictures of everything we had to eat, there were so many nice dishes but sometimes I felt a bit, no very silly with my camera taking pictures of food! I tried to explain to one Greek man when he saw me with the camera he thought I wanted a picture taken of us - but I didn't I wanted the FOOD photographed!

Below, is Aliki looking from the road side where we parked up. The beach shown above is to the left of this picture.



Well, I've gone on way too much, but all in all Thassos was a lovely island and met a lot of lovely people especially a couple called Sara and Barry.

By the way - I've just noticed this is my 100th POST!!!!