George Hotel, Stamford - Seafood platter

Dr Weasel and I spent this week's Bank Holiday Monday in Stamford, where we had our wedding reception in 2004. The George Hotel is one of my favourite places in the country: it's a coaching inn that's been active since around 947 AD, with a gorgeously planted garden, quiet lounges with inglenook fireplaces, comfortable rooms and two very good restaurants. It's in Stamford, a beautiful market town built out of creamy Barnack stone, a few minutes from Burghley House, the palace built by Elizabeth I's treasurer, William Cecil. We spent the morning at Burghley, then stopped at the George for the afternoon to have tea and scones by the fireplace, and read our books.

The hotel is probably the oldest still functioning in the UK. The original coaching inn forms the heart of the building, with the two religious buildings on either side incorporated into the inn about 500 years ago. One side used to be the Holy Sepulchre, a hospital of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The George's historical success came from its position at the side of the old Great North Road, and pilgrims and knights of the Holy Sepulchre stopped here as they travelled from the north down this main conduit on their journey to Jerusalem. There is a crypt beneath the cocktail bar where you can see part of the old hospital, and little architectural details pop out all over the building; trefoils carved in the stone, medieval gateways and the thick walls which once formed the outside of the building, now inside the hotel.

There are two restaurants at The George - the Garden Lounge is smart, but less formal than the Oak Panelled Dining Room, where men are asked to wear a tie. (Dr Weasel had left his in Cambridge when we visited a few years ago, and was given one by the head waiter.) Try the Oak Panelled Dining Room if you get the opportunity; it's an experience simply to sit in the beautiful room, lit only by candlelight. The wine list is fascinating and meticulous, and the food, traditional English dishes like Woodbridge duck, suckling pig and a wonderful sirloin of beef, is always hearty and delicious. (We've looked up from our plates to see Judi Dench eating in the restaurant twice in the last few years - stalkers take note.)

We ate yesterday's meal in the Garden Lounge, where the menu is a bit lighter. The menu changes seasonally, but there are a few constants - the gruyere fritters with a Thai chilli jam have been on the menu since I can remember. I had this gorgeous Brittany Platter - a dressed crab, a langoustine, an oyster (only one, sadly), a clutch of whelks, little palourde clams, cockles, mussels, tiny pink prawns and a huge king prawn. The enormous platter was served with a green salad spiked with celery, home-baked bread, and three home-made mayonnaise sauces; a Marie Rose, a mayonnaise tout simple and an astonishingly good tartare sauce.

The seafood here is always good; this was gloriously fresh. The shellfish, steamed gently, tasted of the sea, and the prawns were sweet and tender. It's always good to find a whelk that's not gritty or slimy, and these whelks accomplished that with aplomb. Grated egg yolk and white garnished the crab, and my, those little clams were a thing of beauty. Remarkably, I nearly managed to finish this; I left about five prawns, a couple of mussels, a whelk and some of the crab's brown meat. Nearly 24 hours have passed, and I'm still full.

If you're in the UK and looking for a weekend away, or if you're visiting England from abroad, do think about spending a couple of days at the George. There's nowhere I know that serves up that mixture of tradition, service and comfort quite as well. Ask for the kippers as part of your enormous breakfast, and tell them I sent you.

Crab pate with Melba toast

Something deep in the lizard-bit of my brain seems to be saying that I need to eat more fish. Ever alert to what my inner lizard is telling me, I've been eating a lot of seafood this week. And when the weather's warm and humid, nothing is nicer than a glass of wine and some chilled crab pate on Melba toast.

Dressed crab is always curiously inexpensive in the supermarket - doubly curious, when you consider how delicious it is, and how easy it is to work with, all ready-shucked and packed in its own carapace. To make enough pate for two smug fish-lovers, you'll need:

1 dressed crab
2 tablespoons melted butter
Leafy parts of a stick of celery
½ teaspoon quince jelly (if you can't get hold of quince jelly, use redcurrant)
1 teaspoon tarragon leaves
Small handful chervil
Juice of half a lemon
½ clove crushed garlic
Pinch of cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper

Put all the ingredients in the blender and whizz until you have a fine purée. Pack the resulting pate into a greased mould (I used a silicone muffin mould, which looks like a timbale mould in shape, but is easier to handle) and chill for an hour, until the pate is firm enough to turn out in one piece. Dress with chives and some more chervil.

The tiny amount of fruit jelly in this really brings out the strangely fruity sweetness of the crab. We ate the pate with Melba toast, which is delicious and looks dreadfully complicated. It's actually simplicity itself. Just toast white sliced bread in the toaster as usual, and when it's done, slice off the crusts. Separate the two sides of the slice of toast from each other by pushing a sharp knife through the soft bread in the middle of the slice, and grill the white side of each bifurcated toastlet under the grill until it's golden and curling. Pour a glass of Semillion Chardonnay and get munching.

Seared scallops in smoked prosciutto with chilli oil

Waitrose is currently carrying a really good prosciutto affumicato - a cold-smoked, raw Italian ham. It's delicious straight out of the packet, but I've been wondering for a few weeks what I could do with it in a recipe. It needed to be something simple; this stuff is very good indeed, and deserves not to have its flavour masked with too many other ingredients.

The answer came to me at the fish counter at the end of the day. There were a dozen queen scallops left - small, but sweet and firm, and not pumped full of weight-increasing water. (If you are shopping for shucked scallops, ignore any which are soft and white - they will be full of water. A non-watered scallop is a creamy colour, and is sometimes tinted the palest pink.) They were labelled with some money off, since they'd have gone out in the trash at closing time if they'd not been bought. I snaffled them along with a dozen slices of the prosciutto and ran in the direction of my frying pan.

Pork goes curiously well with shellfish. One of the most memorable meals I've had in years of French eating - I even lived in Paris for a bit, hunting down that perfect supper - was a silky, heady casserole of pig's trotters and beautiful baby clams. (The restaurant was le Pont de l'Ouysse in the Dordogne, for those doing the stereotypically British thing this summer. Turn your speakers off before clicking that link - there's French electric guitar midi on the jump page.) Of course, the Chinese specialise in the pork/shellfish combination; much of the filling in your dim sum is made from a minced prawn and pork mixture, and some of the more wonderful things I've had with scallops, preserved oysters and abalone have been heavy on the stewed belly pork.

This being the case, I got some Chinese chilli oil out of the fridge to go with the scallops. I usually have a few jars on the go; one with a dried shrimp base, one with just garlic and chillis (surprisingly good in Italian sauces) and one with a dried scallop base. This was Way On's XO scallop version (many Chinese supermarkets in the UK carry it - if you can't find it, use one with shrimp), and it finished the dish beautifully, making the scallops darkly rich and spicy without tasting characteristically Asian.

For twelve little parcels, you'll need:

12 queen scallops, without roe
12 slices of prosciutto affumicato (use Speck if you can't find the prosciutto)
1 teaspoon chilli oil (see above)
Olive oil

Wrap each scallop, parcel-style, in a piece of the prosciutto. You don't need to secure with a skewer; the ham clings to itself nicely, and once heated will not be soft enough to unravel. Don't season - there's plenty of salt and spicing in the ham, and you'll get heat from the chilli oil. Heat the olive oil over a medium flame for a couple of minutes.

Cook the scallops for precisely four minutes on each side (you want the ham to be crisp and golden where it's touched the pan, but the scallops should be only barely cooked in the centre to keep them sweet and toothsome). Remove to a serving dish and drizzle with the chilli oil - it's packed with searingly hot chillis, so a little goes a long way. Serve with crusty bread and a Sauvignon Blanc.

Mussels with creme fraiche - moules a la creme

There is something horribly primal about cooking mussels. I think it has to do with the elbow-grease you have to put in cleaning them and slaughtering any barnacles they might be hosting, hauling bits of their still-quivering little mussely bodies off, and the suspicion that the dead ones may not be dead, but merely pretending in the hope you'll throw them back. (Sadly, these fakers are not smart enough to realise they're 50 miles from the sea.)

I had some very good moules marinere in Wimereux, a town in northern France, in September. Each tiny mussel (smaller than the mussels you might buy to cook at home) had a pea crab living inside its gills (you can see a very graphic video of one found in a mussel here), which, although admittedly mildly creepy on first encounter (Gah! There is a tiny thing in my mussel), made the whole mussel experience about twenty times better, adding flavour and, dare I say it, texture. Lovely, leggy, crispy texture.

The mussels you can find at an English fishmonger will almost certainly be farmed, rope-grown mussels. This means that they're not as gritty as wild mussels, but they're also not as flavourful. On the other hand, though, you can really go to town with the flavours you cook them with, so it's not a total dead loss.

Mussels straight out of the plastic fishmongers' net are rather unprepossessing. They're slimy, they have a straw-like, tough 'beard' attached (you're going to have to remove this later, so pay attention), and they offer a home to a myriad of exciting barnacles and other little friends. Some will be open; rap them on the working surface. If they're alive, they'll shut. If they're cracked or dead (or feigning in the hope that you are on a quayside somewhere), they'll sit there, inert, daring you to look them in the eye. Bin them.

Run a sink of cold water, and drown the sad, live mussels. Give them a good scrub with a little brush, take the beards between your fingers, and yank them off. The larger the mussel, the harder you will have to yank. This beard is not, obviously, a beard, mussels having no weak chins to hide from lady mussels, but is a fibrous mass they grow to attach themselves securely to rocks (or in the case of these guys, ropes). When you pull it off, pull towards the shell's hinge; you might tear apart the meat of the mussel pulling towards the open end, and this will kill them, prevent you from dealing them the unique, boiling-in-wine death you're about to offer. The ones in the picture above are cleaned. They look a lot more appetising.

For this recipe, which serves two people, you will need:

2kg mussels, cleaned
1/2 a bottle white wine (I used a chenin blanc)
4 tablespoons creme fraiche
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
1 large bunch parsley
1 large bunch chives
5 shallots (or 1 large onion) chopped finely
4 cloves garlic chopped finely
1 large knob butter

Soften the shallots and garlic with the thyme and bay leaves in the melted butter over a medium heat for five minutes. Turn up the heat, then add the wine and creme fraiche. Simmer for five minutes to burn off the alcohol, and, while the wine mixture is bubbling, tip all the cleaned mussels in. Slam the lid on. The mussels, already pretty grumpy that you've removed a useful body part, will expire in the steam, giving their salty juices to the sauce - you don't need to add salt yourself.

(On re-reading this, I realise it sounds positively pornographic. This is half the fun of shellfish.)

Keep the lid on for three minutes, then check the pan. Fish out as many as have opened as you can, and put them in a serving dish (I use large salad bowls - there's a lot of shell in there). Put the lid back on and steam for three more minutes - they should now all be open. (Discard any closed ones; they were probably dead before you cooked them.) Take the mussels out, leaving the sauce in the pan. Stir the chives and parsley into the hot sauce, leave it for a minute to allow any sand or grit to settle (very unlikely, this, with rope-grown mussels) and spoon it over the open shells.

Make sure you've got some good bread to dip in the buttery, juicy sauce, and use your fingers to pull the satiny little mussels from their shells.

I usually end up naming some of my more recognisable mussels. Clint, the very big one with the nigh-unremovable beard, and Fifi, the teeny, beardless one with the barnacle beauty-spot, both died for my supper. It was a worthwhile sacrifice.