dill sorbet: a food odyssey

Food/house hunting

2012-02-24T14:09:00.000-08:00

The prospect of moving house is always exciting for me. It brings new foodie horizons, new grocery stores, cafes, brunch spots, hidden gems. It's almost exactly two years since we started looking to move to Newington Green, all excited about moving a bit east. We love it here, but we're keen to buy and can't afford the crazy prices around here, so we're looking further east into Hackney. My dream is Lower Clapton, around Chatsworth Road ,and we've been spending more and more time over there, trying out local cafes and shops, cycling the streets and picturing myself living there full time.

Chatsworth Road is an interesting street, higgledy-piggledy Victorian buildings, a mixture of African, Caribbean, Turkish, working class and artsy cafes, shops and take-aways, part run down, part polished up, views of Canary Wharf at one end and slopes down to the luscious Hackney Marshes at the other. In the Victorian times right through to the mid 90s it held a regular street market, which has been reinvigorated in the last year. I've been a number of times over the past few months, and it promises many delicious eating options - dickensian classics! Japanese street food! Cakes! Artisan cheese and bread!

But the first up I tried out the Moroccan stall outside Epicerie 56, a lovely well-stocked and fairly priced deli. Meat and pastries were sizzling away, and it was a beautiful winter day.

I ordered a chicken bastilla - a thin filo patty, with the most perfumed, aromatic filling you can imagine. Brown chicken meat was mixed with almonds, cinammon, orange blossom and other spices. Just the most exotic and otherworldly taste, but so warm and comforting on a cold day.

We sat on little stools on the street corner and watched families stopping to chat, hipster strumming guitars, kids playing down the side rode. I could definitely live here.

Finger lickin' happiness

2012-02-24T13:02:00.000-08:00

I always find it strange when people who know me quite well assume I'm a vegetarian. I mean, I do live close to Stoke Newington, and I am very nice. But have you never heard me rave about meat? I was eating ribs for the second time this week, this time at my desk in the office, and a colleague suggested I might not be keen on them. Obviously they didn't hear me gushing about my trip to Pitt Cue Co on Monday. It was so good that I am going to rave about it here again, and there it is, immortalised on the interwebs.

Pitt Cue Co is the latest in a series of street food type outlets that have been so successful on the streets that they have made it onto permanent premises. MeatLiquor, of course, recently opened in the West End after building up a dedicated following in SE London and elsewhere. Lucky Chip, my personal favourite burger joint, is straddling the gap with a residency in the newly rejuvenated Sebright Arms. And now Pitt Cue Co has opened a dinky little place in a Soho backwater. As with all the best hyped places, demand massively outstrips supply and so getting there early and queueing is absolutely necessary.

We arrived at 6.30 on a Monday and waited about 45 minutes for a table (we could have had a stool after 25). But happily, we were in the cosy bar at ground level and cocktails and craft beers were on the menu. I opted for a delicious New York Sours, expertly mixed. Downstairs there can't be more than 20 seats, all intimately arranged, but enough room to get those elbows out and pick up some sticky ribs.

The menu is simple - there are St Louis ribs, beef ribs, pulled pork and a couple of daily specials. You can have them on a plate with pickles, chipotle slaw, and a side. Or you can have your meat in a roll. And there are other sides, such as spicy chicken wings, or duck hearts with pomegranate. I opted for the St Louis ribs with a side of mash with burnt ends - my dining parnter had a pulled pork roll, and we shared a side of the spicy chicken wings with pickled celery.

My main was just delicious - the ribs were lightly smoky from their long, slow, pitt-smoked cook, and came in a sticky, smoky sauce. The meat was unbelievably tender, and just a little pungent, as ribs should be. The chipotle in the slaw was subtle, but the mash was king of the sides, so so buttery and the burnt ends (the fatty, crispy ends of a smoked brisket) were so so sweet, salty and sticky. Just wonderful.

The wings too were nice - also slightly smoky (hey, they're not cooked on a smoke pit for nothing!) and in a warm, tomato sauce. The pickled celery went well with it.

So you might be thinking we'd be full by this point? I mean, we really ought to be. But you don't wait 45 minutes for a table just for one course. There were two desserts on that day - a snickers mess, and bourbon soaked sticky toffee pudding, with salted caramel sauce and amaretto ice cream. Of course we went for one of each.

The snickers mess was just the ultimate in excess. At the bottom a gooey chocolatey peanut meringue, then with lots of chocolate sauce, cream, caramel sauce, peanut brittle, ice cream. The combined effect was utter artery clogging pleasure. The sticky toffee pudding, more conventional, was equally delicious. The bourbon soaking gave the sponge a nice aromatic richness, perfectly complemented by the salted caramel sauce and the dreamy amaretto ice cream. I'd tell my vegetarian friends to queue up just for desserts. That good.

So Pitt Cue is truly the best meal I've had in 2012 so far. Oh, and did I mention it was about £26 per person all in, with all that food and a cocktail each? I'll be going back for sure. And I recommend you get there early with an empty stomach to make the most of it.

A little slice of Moro

2012-01-04T13:23:00.001-08:00

In general trend terms, I reckon I'm about 8 – 12 months behind the zeitgeist chasers, and probably an equal timescale ahead of the average joe. I didn't make it to #meateasy until its closing week, I still haven't been to Polpo or Hawksmoor. I loved the sound of Morito, but it had been glowingly reviewed in Metro, Time Out and the Guardian and the prospect of a 2 hour wait didn't quite appeal.

Now, Morito, as its diminutive name suggests is the little sibling of Moro - the Exmouth Market classic that has been bringing us the most delicious Spanish/North African/Middle Eastern inspired food for many years. I went there a few years ago and still salivate at the thought of that meal. But, unlike big sis, you can only walk-in in the evenings to Morito - no reservations or nuffin.

So I waited about a year and finally got to go to Morito a few weeks back with some chums from work. Chums who appreciate damn good food and sherry. Waiting a year has the benefits of not having to wait 2 hours for a table on the night - we waltzed in at 7 and took a neat table for four.

We kicked off with a glass of fino each - I had a crisp Manzanilla, reminiscing about my recent trip to Andalucia and tasting those salty sea breezes off it. Our first round consisted of jamon croquettes (so moist and flavoursome inside, perfectly crisp outside), a zingy chickpea salad, aubergine purée topped with dry aromatic lamb and pomegranate seeds (oh.my.god - this was amazing - one to recreate at home).

Next up we ordered a deep Portuguese red, accompanied by chickpea stew with chorizo and morcilla (tender and nicely pungent), cured cuttlefish roe (very delicate, fresh and tasting like a mouthful of sea), pimentos padron (nobody I know has ever been served a mega spicy one - is it urban legend?), and molten cheese with quince and walnuts (perfect combination - earthy walnuts, greasy and salty warm cheese and sweet and tangy quince - I could have eaten this forever).

The atmosphere was buzzy, clientelle were quite Clerkenwell (thick rimmed glasses ahoy, but hey, who am I to talk), and the service efficient but warm, with no sense of us being hurried despite it being quite a busy night later on.

So the wait paid off, but I'm already kicking myself for how many times I could have visited if I'd tried and loved early on. Numerous publications inform me that Peruvian food is so 2012, and that March will see two Peruvian joints opening in London. This time I'll be reporting from the frontline - no more missing out!

The four days of Christmas gluttony

2012-01-01T08:43:00.000-08:00

As a lover of food I look forward to the Christmas period for months, ancticipating all the delicious food I get to eat at all the separate celebrations with different family and friends. Speak to me around 29 December and it's a very different picture, when all I want is some raw spinach and some steamed rice. Just please don't show me another roast potato.

As I write this, I am sat on the train from Edinburgh to London and I am enjoying the experience of not eating. I have set myself the challenge of not eating for the entire journey. This is how people end up on the 'detox' in January – a binge/abstain pattern that a moderate like me just can't sign up to and claims for health benefits have been roundly discredited. Nevertheless, I shall draw the feasting season to a close with a round-up of my best festive meals.

Christmas day
Celebrated at my mum's, and documented well last year, this is, on paper, the most traditional of the dinners. But my mum is an intuitive and imaginative cook and Christmas dinner has become an increasingly ambitious affair. Last year we were proud to have 12 dishes on the table – this year, 14. And with a few new twists and innovations. Brussel sprouts this year were fried up with chorizo and chestnuts, last year's pear and parsnip croquettes recipe was refined – drier cooking helped preserve their structure, as did mixing in pureed walnut and garlic, a little bit of ginger was mixed into the carrot and orange, which was a bit more salad-y.

This year we started with quite un-Christmassy dishes – sauteed frogs legs, just butter, garlic and a bit of parsley. And then some 'sunshine soup' – all peppers, butternut squash, paprika, tomato.

Our bronze feathered organic free range turkey was delicious and juicy, and our small plates approach looks particularly awesome on my brother's OCD plate.

The twists continued into pudding – not one for convention, my mum made her own spin on a trifle, with a base of amaretto soaked apricots, topped with amaretto soaked amaretti biscuits (v sweet!), custard and grated chocolate. The classic chestnut whip (sweetened chestnut puree, whipped up with cream) was also served.

Boxing day
To my dad's, where his partner was doing most of the cooking. She prepared a starter of Stornoway black pudding, which was so soft, smooth and nicely spiced. Stornoway has a reputation for the best black pudding – I can confirm that it lives up to the hype.

The main course was beef wellington – a classic, and more and more popular. As a pastry, pate and beef lover, I couldn't hope for more. Marilyn cooked it nicely, the meat was perfectly pink in the middle, and the combination of flavours and textures was great.

In the evening my dad took us out for Thai food at a restaurant near his work. It was a little quiet a first and we got a royal treatment. The food was excellent and great value – I particularly enjoyed my duck in a spicy, tangy tamarind sauce.

The 27th
It's tradition among friends is to celebrate Christmas together on 27th December. This has always taken place at Afsi's family home, where they've always had a huge amount of leftovers (usually from three separate roasts) needing gobbled up by helpful and hungry young'uns. Major changes this year as Afsi now has her own flat. Taking a star-turn as hostess, Afsi had friends and family all round for a slap up meal, sitting around in her immacutely retro furnished flat, weighing up our homemade crackers, supping on G&Ts.

After a starter or chilli fried haloumi and tofu, we enjoyed a turkey wellington and a massive roast ham. Both were delicious, but special commendation goes to the turkey wellington, which was perfectly presented and no end of effort had gone into making it as delicious as it was. The pate was a home-made with porcini mushrooms and marsala wine, and the cranberry stuffing sinside the turkey was also home-made and delicious.

To top it all off, Afsi had made three puddings – a fruit bomb (very retro, one of my granny's classics), a chocolate torte and a Christmas cake. Impressive stuff.

The 28th
And on the fourth day of continuous eating we headed down to the Borders to my grandparents' house for a wider family meal. As a child, Christmas was always at their house – the only house big enough to host four generations of family, different in-laws, partners, and other family and friends. At its largest, there must have been upwards of 20 people in and out their doors on the day, with two meals to accommodate everyone. As some get older (I still have a living great grandmother!), other units break up, others expand and new families form, they've found themselves visiting other dinners and doing less of the hosting.

I love the trusty familiarity of my grandparents' cooking – it's simple and accomplished, with recipes and techniques fine-tuned over the years, and a few new influences and ingredients making their way into the mix. This year they cooked an Aberdeen Angus beef, with all the trimmings. It was a nice beef, well-cooked, simply seasoned and served with yorkshire puddings, potatoes, parsnip and carrots.

Pudding is my granny's particular forte, I think, and her lemon meringue roulade was just spot on. Perfectly light, flawless rolled. Everyone agred it was the best pudding they'd had over the Christmas period. A testament to years of making and refining delicious puddings.

So that was Christmas 2011, then. Time to eat a bit more healthily now.

Going Greek

2011-12-23T12:53:00.000-08:00

I'd love to chart every cuisine served within 2 miles of my flat. It'd be a fun exercise - and may help focus my efforts on local eating out. A project for a rainy winter's day perhaps?

What I find most interesting is thinking how the age and cuisine of restaurants can reflect waves and patterns of immigration, as well as different food fads. Blackstock Road, not too far away, and on my old route to work, is a scruffy, ungentrifiable strip, and host to many different communities at different points over the last fifty years. There's a little patch, half way between Finsbury Park and Highbury Barn, where there is a collection of rustic, but bright Sardinian trattorias, a pre-Wahaca-and-burrito-fetish-era Mexican restaurant, and a drab and austere-looking Greek taverna. I like that the patch is completely understated, without any of the hype and crowding of Upper Street or Church Street. It's a locals' spot.

With the nights long, the wind blowing cold and warm sun a distant memory, Greek food couldn't be more appealing. Greek restaurants are too often shrouded in the clichés of plate-smashing, belly dancing and ouzo shots; sometimes you just want to have some mezze and souvlaki without all that fuss. I'd never cycled past N5's Olive Tree and seen hen or stag parties, and a bit of googling found a few glowing reviews from proud locals.

Inside, there's a sense that it's been there since the 1970s (it's not - more like late 90s) - slightly austere green, plain walls, starched table cloths, a bit of cladding by the kitchen. It's a family affair, and at least three generations seem to be involved in front of house, kitchen and management. All very nice and keen to please you. We had superb banter with the waitress who I guess was about our age and told us that we reminded her of someone very clever from a TV show we hadn't heard of, and how excited she was to get off her shift and out some make-up on.

The menu offered a fair priced a la carte with a wide range of Greek meals and grills. But there's a set menu which seems to be available most of the time (including Friday and Saturday nights) which does 3 very decent courses for £10.90. It's mostly the classics - very well made dips and gorgeous pita breads, mains of moussaka, haloumi, baked aubergines and some more basic grilled meats, and a small selection of desserts (greek yoghurt and honey, honey cake with ice cream).

We opted for the set menu, doing a bit of topping up from the a la carte. And got a bottle of pretty nice white wine too. The dips and starters were really good - top houmous and reminded me of the differences between the Greek and more Middle Eastern versions.

I ended up opting for moussaka - an old favourite and something I'm rarely motivated to cook (too many stages, too many pots) and was very pleased, nothing to fault with it's creamy cheesy top, the olive oil soaked potatoes and aubergines or the aromatic lamb mince. Portions were very generous, and we over-ordered by getting a large Greek salad to go with the mains. A doggy bag for lunch the next day.

Overall, the Olive Tree was great for a hearty taste of Greece, decent, good-value portions and warm and homely service. Sure, it's not going to win any Michelin stars for innovative cooking, but what an excellent neighbourhood spot for a no-fuss, honest Greek meal.

Balls balls balls

2011-11-23T16:10:00.000-08:00

In terms of the food blogosphere I'm usually pretty late to get 'on trend'; same applies in most walks of life really. Though in comparison to the rest of the population, including my super clued in workmates, I can still be ahead of the game when I need to be. The latest example is with trend foodstuff meatballs. Apparently they are the dish of 2011, obviously I didn't find out til October, but when I heard tale of Luca's Meatballs hitting Dalston, I was bounding around the office and taking orders for a Thursday cycle order up to Ridley Road.

Ridley Road market seems ungentrifiable. A fantastic thing, in a part of Hackney where new concept stores are popping up almost weekly. It's a full on, stinky, bustling hub of West African diaspora - all dried fish, chilli peppers, broiler hens and music. You can get the cheapest super fresh veg you can imagine - three butternut squash for a pound anyone? Anyway, that a much-hyped meatball shack was opening up had people talking: was this the start of the Broadway Marketisation of Ridley Road? Surely not!

I roll up at Luca's expecting to see a queue of hipsters, DSLRs at the ready. Actually nobody was there, just Luca getting things ready. I started reeling off my order and asked if I worked nearby. I explained that I'd cycled up from Old Street (only two miles) and was very excited. I was rewarded with a tiramisu on the house. Nice one! Luca was incredibly charming and excited about his business, and later tweeted a photo of me with my haul.

The menu is simple - there are (beef) meatballs and spinach and ricotta balls. You can have them on a ciabatta (with tomato sauce, provolone cheese, lambs lettuce) or atop tasty polenta with a range of sauces: roast tomato, spicy tomato, mushroom/cream, gorgonzola. The base price is £3.50, but for an extra 50p you can have an extra ball or a small portion of veg - when I went it was braised baby beetroot.

As we tucked in back at the office, it was thumbs up all around. I'd opted for the ciabatta and it was just wow. The meatballs were splendid, perfectly formed, simply and subtly spiced with just a hint of fennel. The tomato sauce, again, simple and pure, combined perfectly with the smoky provolone. I was just about in heaven. My colleagues had the polenta boxes: one, a veggie, had 4 of the spinach and ricotta balls, the other went half and half. Both were blown away with theirs, particularly appreciating how well done the polenta was. I had a sample of the veggie balls and was surprised at their pungency. Will definitely be going half/half next time.

Luca's offer is expanding - it's positioned outside the newly licensed Wu's Market Bar, which is all tropical and bright inside. Luca will be serving up meatballs late into the night as well as anti-pasti platters and more. I'll be back.

Brunchin' brunchin' #3

2011-11-22T14:43:00.000-08:00

Brunch options just get more and more plentiful. I'm now well and truly spoiled for choice in my neck of the woods, as the joy of breakfast food spreads deeper and deeper. In recent weeks, still in my post Masters joy, it's been a steady stream of brunch dates.

So what's new?

Well, Barden's Cafe is fairly new. It's on the main drag in Dalston, formerly a grotty but charming basement venue, now forced overground by the clubbier club The Nest (always looks a bit dancey for an indie boy like me). A big old space, all high ceilings and sleek lines. But rolling up at an unfashionably early 10.30am we were able to get one of the best spots, a whole sofa area all for two. Sorry.

My brunch default is eggs benedict, because I'm rubbish at poaching eggs neatly and can't be arsed making hollandaise. But I was sorely tempted by the idea of french toast, bacon and maple syrup. Happily, Barden's had just the dish - french toast, bacon, poached eggs, maple syrup and cream. It sounded fishy - poached eggs with cream and maple syrup? Bacon and maple syrup and cream? HMM. I pondered for a good 10 minutes and then plumped for it. It arrived, a little pot of cream and a little pot of maple syrup sat separately. I didn't hold back in pouring it all over, and tucked in.

Wow. It actually really worked, just a great combination of flavours. Bits of saltiness here, sweet there. Oi oi. And only £6 too, so you can't complain.

From one side of Hackney to the other: my next brunch was at Bistroteque, from scruffy hipster to coiffured fashion set. Bistroteque is in a warehouse-y space in the badlands south of London Fields and north of Behtnal Green, just off Cambridge Heath Road amid strips of strip clubs. It's an ugly area, but achingly hip. In contrast with its bleak surroundings, Bistroteque is an amazing, stylish space, all white, high ceilings big windows and smart, trendy, efficient staff. A pianist does tinkly cabaret style piano covers of cheesy 80s and 90s pop - our finely tuned ears pick out Steps, Tiffany and S Club 7. Nice.

The brunch menu was fairly trim, but with some tasty sounding options: potato rosti with smoked trout and poached egg was tempting, but I ended up going for eggs benedict, just because I love 'em. But I was a bit disappointed with Bistroteque's offering - for one, one of my yolks was firm. That's not what you expect for £8. And the portions for the trout/rosti dish were very small. The ingredients were unmistakeably good, and the dishes nicely presented, but the disappointment of the yolk and portion size may have left us a little bitter.

From mega chi-chi to down at heel, our most recent brunch was at Acoustic Cafe 'round the corner on Newington Green. It always makes me happy when I walk past, seeing all the nice young couples of Newington Green sitting outside with their broadsheets and big plates of breakfast. It had a bit of an eastern Mediterranean vibe, a sign of its time in the first wave of brunchification, and a few twists on the brunch norms - turkish sausage, feta, olives, etc.

I ordered the Eggs Romano, which was scrambled eggs (my fave way of having eggs) mixed with feta, peppers, basil, onions, in a crisp pancake, served with CHIPS and salad. Petite and on trend it isn't, but it sure does the trick when you're a bit hungover and sleep deprived.

Small plates make me hungry

2011-10-31T14:27:00.001-07:00

Continuing the theme of small plates (and I even did a tapas evening for friends on Saturday), I wanted to make note of the delicious meal I had at Opera Tavern, on the day I booked my trip to Spain. The Opera Tavern is the sister restaurant of the more well known Salt Yard, and they both specialise in tapas or small plates from Italy and Spain. Getting a table at a few day's notice was tricky - an online booking system makes it all the easier for everyone else to get in there, so we ended up with a very un-Mediteranean 6.15 start time.

The menu covers a range of cured meats, meat off the grill and fish, vegetable and meat based small plates. We staggered our order, savouring a small amount of flavours, musing and then ordering a couple more. First up was a chorizo and squid skewer topped with a tangy pomegranate seeds, cucumber and green tomato relish. The chorizo was clearly top notch and, chargrilled, went perfectly with the meaty squid. Very good.

This was followed by more squid, however, this time as battered rings with battered purslane too. It was my first purslane and a totally new taste, very salty and somewhere between seaweed and spinach.

After all that protein, we craved vegetables. A super green broad bean, tenderstem broccoli, gnocchi and pesto small plate was incredible. The pesto was particuarly fragrant and sweet, and every last spot was mopped up.

I'm a sucker for courgette flowers (and that's all my courgette plants were good for this summer - not the end of the world, seeing as they cost £3 a flower from Borough market) and particularly enjoyed Opera Tavern's, which left the flower attached to the baby courgette and was stuffed with a light, smooth goats cheese and drizzled in honey. Classic combination.

After a board of impeccable quality sliced chorizo, we climaxed on the Opera Tavern's most famous, and perhaps most unlikely dis - the Iberico pork and foie gras burger. It's a diminutive dish, but packed full of rich flavours, a velvety bite, and a perfectly formed little brioche bun. I ate it as slowly as I could, appreciating every last bite interceded by meat, bun, cheese and caramelised onions. Mmm.

We finished on a little plate of truffles, biscotti and a glass of dessert wine. Classy.

I'd definitely recommend Opera Tavern for the food, and it's possible to have a not-too-pricey meal there, although it's definitely in the 'treats' category. Atmosphere-wise, we were in the dining room on the 1st floor, and it was busy without being buzzy. The clientèle were clearly quite well off, but I didn't notice anyone as excited about the food as I was. Maybe that's what it is to be classy, eh?

Cadiz, if you please

2011-10-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

I wanted to see everything in Andalucia. I was tempted by the palaces of Granada and Cordoba, the small villages along the Costa Tropical, the faded glamour of Malaga. I wanted to see the sea and the mountains. But with only a week to play with, I decided on Cadiz as the other side of my first adventure in Andalucia, coaxed by the returns of its Google Image Search, it's sea-locked situation and tales of its slightly end-of-the-road atmosphere. As a destination for a couple of days, it didn't disappoint - and we managed to scale the length of the city quite a few times, chasing the sunset to the Cadiz's southwesterly tip at the Castillo de San Sebastian.

Just too dreamy.

Being sea-locked and all, Cadiz is famed for its fresh fish. Particularly fried. Tapas is also popular, but clearly not to the extent of Seville - there were times where we'd be roaming the streets for block and blocks trying to find open tapas bars, especially later on in the evening, and even in key plazas. It shows you can try too hard to the 'authentic' thing (late night tapas binges, you'd think) and sometimes that just doesn't work. Tapa prices were notably cheaper in Cadiz though and in some places you were given a plate for free with drinks, just like in the movies.

We had a couple of very memorable portions of fried fish. The first on our first lunch after the train ride from Seville. It was at Meson La Cartuja, just off the main square in the old town. A whole platter of fried fish, including white bait, sardines, cuttlefish and cod. For about 10€. Pretty amazing. We ordered a salad to go with it as we were afraid of death by protein - our salad also came topped with tuna. It was incredibly fresh and the batter was very light compared to that in British chippies.

We also tried the most popular freidura (fish and chip shop, basically), which is on Las Flores - a pedestrian street with lots of flower sellers. Lots of happy families strolled past, children armed with tall flowers, on their way home. Inside it was like a Spanish version of the British chippy, slightly weary, down at heel but full of all walks of lives tucking in to yummy fresh fish and other raciones. We had fat and juicy prawns fresh out the Atlantic, and some croquettes for substance. The prawns were delicious, so meaty and sweet.

Our top tapas was at La Marina, overlooking the market square. We had a tripe stew with chorizo and chick peas - my first time eating tripe and boy is that a pungent taste. Almost a bit too much for me, but the chorizo flavours helped to soften the blow. We also had tuna cooked in a sweet onion and oloroso sauce (delicious), kidneys in sherry and 'salad' which was basically potatoes with more tuna. All were delicious, and as you can see from our spread, we were a bit more mezze than tapas, having them all at once. The olive oil based sauces were so moreish, we really had to ration our bread soaking them all up.

We also had tapas at Le Gorda Te Da De Corner, a cheap, bright, studenty tapas restaurant, where all the tapa were 2€ or under. It wasn't all fancy pants, but the pork with an almond and cream sauce was tasty.

Some of our fanciest tapas was at snazzy Sopranis, just around the corner from our hostel. It was incredibly stylish, and the proprietress was pure Almodovar as she strutted around, taking care of her guests in heels and leather trousers. We just had a couple of dishes - duck ham with an orange zest and pine nut chutney, and a sardine and red pepper empanada, which was such a winning combination of flavours - definitely one to try at home.

Our final meal for the holiday was in Jerez, where we flew back from. Jerez is a sherry town - the air is thick with the smell of it - and has a comfortingly stuffy and conservative feel about it. Our guidebook told us that the sherry dynasties bred a local elite who like to ape the customs of the British upper classes, playing polo, wearing deck shoes, chinos and starched shirts.

Our lunchspot was right in keeping, Restaurante Alcazaba, a faded traditional restaurant, all yellow walls, wood panelling and lots of big hair (ladies) and slicked back hair (men). That's not to do it down though - a bit of olde worlde charm in an olde worlde town is just right. And all the Jerez slickers were onto something good - 4 courses and wine for €11! The first was a potato salad tapa to share, I had Revuelto - Spanish scrambled egg with wild mushrooms for a starter. It was all about the mains though - mine was slow-cooked oxtail in a rich gravy and sautéed potatoes. Pete had pork steaks in a roquefort sauce.

So that was it. The last of the sun for 2011, but a great introduction to Andalucia and authentic tapas. I'm all inspired to try out some of the dishes on friends and go back and see more of the region.

El Tapeador!

2011-10-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

As a (final) post-dissertation reward, boyf and I took off to Andalucia for 5 days of roaming the streets of Seville, Cadiz and Jerez in search of excellent, authentic tapa, sherry and warm autumnal sunshine. The only time I'd been to Spain was a trip to Barcelona with my mum in 2000 - a lifetime ago. Most of my 'grown up' travelling has been to the Eastern Europe (inter-railing for 6 weeks in 2004), Eastern Med (Bosnia, Croatia x2, Montenegro, Turkey, Greece) and Portugal, land of my forefathers. But some delicious meals at Moro and other tapas bars, reading the Moro cookbooks and hearing friends' tales of amazing times in different parts of Spain got me tantalised.

We went to an amazing array of tapas bars in our 5 short days there, so these are just some of the greatest hits from Seville - Cadiz and Jerez to come.

Salmorejo is the gazpacho of the south - it's thicker and smoother than the traditional gazpacho. It's topped with jamon and egg and lots of olive oil. We had quite a few of these over our stay - we loved the fresh taste of the raw tomatoes and then fruity acidity of the top notch olive oil. This was my favourite one - at bright and cheery Duo Tapas bar just off Alameda de Hercules:

One of the most fun things about kind of understanding Spanish is that you kind of know what you're going to get but the actual form and presentation is a total surprise. Or so it was when I ordered Tostada Bacalao, which I imagined would be toast with salt cod. What arrived was a lot fancier - thin crisps and subtle salt cod, fried together and modelled, with egg, as a patty topped with alfalfa sprouts. It was from Kiosko Los Leones, in the middle of Alameda de Hercules, which was great for people watching with a glass of Cava.

My favourite tapas bar was hands down El Rinconcillo, apparently Seville's oldest tapas bar. We rolled in after getting a bit lost in the winding alleys (it's very easy to lose your sense of direction), and it was still lively with locals at 11pm on a Monday evening. I ordered Espinacas con Garbanzos (spinach and chickpeas) and Bacalao con Tomates, which was salt cod served with a sauce of slow cooked tomatoes and peppers with lots of olive oil.

The bar itself was stunning - you could just feel the history and imagine it not being hugely different 300 years ago...

Another favourite in Seville was Meson del Pulpo, a galician restaurant in the centre of town. We had one of our most luxuriant lunches there - gobbling up a racion of Pimientos de Padrón, salty fried mini green peppers, a tapa of pork steak in an almond and sherry sauce (LUSH!) and a silky Galician octopus served with a confit potato. That one was totes simple, but so fresh and tasty.

And finally for Seville, an old favourite - Gambas Al Ajillo. This one reminds me of childhood holidays in the Algarve - spitting hot olive oil, sweet, sweet garlic sauce and perfectly fresh Atlantic prawns. We ate this one in an atmospheric little plaza in Triana, the old gypsy barrio. A band entertained us with shanties while I sipped a cool Manzanilla. I used bread to soak up every last spot of the garlicky, prawny olive oil.

Afterwards we caught an authentic flamenco performance at Casa de Anselma, one of the best places for low-key, passionate and gritty flamenco - which doesn't even open til midnight. It was the perfect way to an end our enchanting stay in Seville. Next stop: Cadiz!

Celebrating Turkish Dalston

2011-09-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

I blogged recently about Mangal, one of my most favouritest restaurants in the world and, happily, less than 10 minutes walk from my flat. That was, of course, before the riots of August 2011, which saw Dalston protected by the efforts of the local Turkish community, guarding their businesses foremost, but happily, stopping the looting from spreading west to Newington Green. The Saturday following was declared Thank Turk It's Saturday by a Facebook group, with over 6,000 'attending' and pledging to go and support the local Turkish businesses. I do anyway, but it was nice to have a more altruistic reason to do so.

That day, I went to my other favourite kebaberie, Yeni Umut 2000 on Crossway, where I celebrated last year's birthday and was also home to my first Dalston kebab experience a few years back. It's less well known and written about than the Mangals and is slightly more down at heel. The ocakbasi grill is in the middle of the restaurant with tables around, making for an intense and wonderful experience, with pally service and absolutely beautiful grills, all served with amazing bread and salad. I always order a plate of grilled onions in a tangy sumac dressing as part of the mix – onion breath is just not something I worry about!

***

Belinda, a superfab workmate and fellow Dalston/Stokeyite, has been banging on at me for ages to try Cafe Z Bar, further up towards Stoke Newington. Her recommended dish was the Mix Meneman, a Turkish scrambled egg dish. I love scrambled eggs and Turkish food, so surely the perfect brunch choice. I went a couple of weekends ago to celebrate the end of dissertation (I've been doing a lot of that actually – it seems to prefix everything I do) and it was worth the wait.

Mix Meneman is basically many eggs, chopped tomatoes, garlic, feta, Turkish lamb sausage and spinach leaves, all scrambled together and served in a metal dish. What can I say? It was delicious, maybe surprisingly runny, probably because it's quite heavy on the tomato, and perfect scooped up with fresh flatbread.

My friends shared some mezze dishes and found them to be tasty and exceedingly good value. My only complaint was that the service was a little surly and the music a bit random (early 00s chart) and loud. But the food/value ration definitely made up for it. I'll be back.

Persia via Peckham

2011-09-26T06:38:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago we took a little trip down to South East London. My London knowledge is very north-centric but I am routinely tantalised by blogs and reviews and tweets of SE London's burgeoning culinary offerings, but being wrapped up in my studies, I hadn't yet had the opportunity to visit this corner of town and sample it's greatest hits. On a separate note, as we consider our future housing possibilities, it is clear that much of North and East is becoming ridiculously pricey, even for people on pretty decent salaries, so a little cycle down south also served the purpose of exploring the side streets and high streets and asking 'Could I live here?'.

Top of my list was Persepolis – a Peckham cornershop specialising in Persian stock cupboard ingredients, fresh produce and cultural artefacts (shisha pipes, music and much more). Mrs Cornershop is Sally Butcher, who has published a Persian cookbook and is just about to bring out another: Veggiestan. She also runs a dryly comedic and insightful twitter feed that I've been following for a while, tempting me down to SE15 to stock up on rare ingredients. We also called in at Anderson & Co, a fancypants deli on Bellenden Road, a gentrifying strip of Peckham that estate agents will have you believe is some kind of urban shangri-la. And zipped rouund the streets of Peckham, Nunhead, Camberwell and Telegraph Hill. All surprisingly hilly.

So after a delicious slice of courgette cake with lemon frosting and a Square Mile coffee at Anderson & Co...

...we hit up Persepolis. It was beautiful inside: busy, colourful, lots of hand-written notices, many different varieties of pickles – pickles for all tastes and cuisines. Everything was laid out nicely and the selection was incredible. Pretty much any spice you could imagine was in stock, and in generous, well-priced bags. Most impressive was the selection of fresh specialist produce, including breads, vegetables and sweets that you would really struggle to find elsewhere. I just bought dried barberries, dried sour cherries, dried rose petals and a couple of jars of Persian pickled cucumbers, perfect for making Salad Olivieh.

I decided to try out a few of the ingredients in a Persian meal at home, and particularly practice my tahdig – the classic Persian way of cooking rice. I served with a tangy lemon chicken and a simple salad of tomato, cucumber, herbs and pickles. The tahdig can be made various ways and every Persian cook will insist their method is the best. I did a bit of googling to try and work out a relatively straightforward method for my first – it went a little bit like this:

Rinse the basmati rice you need (at least 75g per person – this is pretty tasty, and people will want more!) several times until the water runs clear
Soak for at least an hour in lightly salted water
Drain and place in boiling water - boil until cooked (maybe 8 minutes or so – don't want it to be mush)
Leave to drain; meanwhile, in a thick-bottomed saucepan heat a bit of oil or butter, enough to coat the bottom, maybe add a sprinkling of sugar.
Once the oil is hot, tip in the cooked rice, but don't stir! Just make 4 thin wells into the rice and cover with a tea towel, then a lid (wrap the flapping bits of tea towel into the handle.
Take a few strands of saffron and put in half a cup of boiling water – allow to diffuse for a few minutes, turning the water a light yellow, then pour into the thin wells. Carry on cooking for up to an hour, but 30-40 minutes should be fine.
You will then have a beautifully fragrant rice, with a caramelly, perfumy, crispy base. Mix it up a bit and serve!

I mixed in dried barberries, which I'd soaked in soaked in water and then caramelised in butter and sugar before putting the boiled rice into the saucepan with oil. From googles, it seems like chicken and barberry rice is a classic combination. I used this recipe for the lemon chicken – the sauce was AMAZING. I couldn't have enough of it, so lucky I made too much.

So I'm definitely sold on Persian cooking, and look forward to developing my repertoire further, especially for veggie friends once my copy of Veggiestan arrives. On South East London, I wasn't fully swayed, but having such a brilliant food store nearby is definitely a big pull-factor!

Back. This time properly.

2011-09-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

So I'm actually back this time. Having spent the summer turning out an epic dissertation for my Masters and working on the policy report for a major campaign for Shelter, both of which culminated last week. So the summer of writing about policy is over, and it's time to do other things and write about them again. I did spend a lot of time eating nice food - it was my reward for every epic day in the office or the library, and so have many food stories to tell.

Let's start with the burgers. Because 2011 has been the summer of the burger. But it's not the first burger renaissance in recent foodie memory. About 5 years ago, 'gourmet' burgers were all the rage. A rash of new mid-market chains popped up in middle-class high street locations, including the Fine Burger company, gourmet burger kitchen and Ultimate Burger, all with largely similar menues putting a 'spin' on the traditional burger - sweet chilli sauce, portabello mushrooms, thick cut fries, served in sanitised settings. The message was think again: burgers can be posh, don't you know. When the recession hit, many stores shut up and people were inundated with 2 for 1s (a personal hate) to get them to buy up the ailing brands. These chains are still going, but relegated to the naff of the O2 and shopping centres.

The arrival of Byron Burger a few years ago re-ignited the burger debate. But this time it was more about how simple you could make your burger and how well you could do those few simple components, with a paired down menu consisting of a few classic variations of the burger - cheese, bacon, cheese and bacon - and classic sides, fries, onion rings and courgette fries. Tasty. Byron has quickly expanded across central and yummy London and their restaurants are always busy.

The 2011 twist is even more back to basics, taking the Byron simplicity, but ditching the chic interior design. Well, just ditching interiors altogether. It's all about the BURGER VAN.

Meatwagon have arguably been at the vanguard, developing a cult following with their van dishing out amazing burgers to South East Londoners for the best part of last year til it got stolen. Their stint in the upstairs room while the Goldsmiths Tavern was being renovated whipped the kids up into a frenzy, with bright young things journeying to New Cross from all over to sample the #Meateasy speakeasy burger dining. It was literally amazing. We turned up at 6pm on the dot and already a sizeable queue was lined up. By the time we left at 8pm, the queue snaked right down the stairs, out the door and halfway round the block. Some of those people would be waiting for 3 hours for their burger.

I ordered a Dead Hippy Burger, which is The Meatwagon's spin on a Big Mac. Two juicy, meaty burgers, still light pink inside, smothered in mustard, served in perfectly light buns with cheese and gherkins. Boyf ordered one with cheese and bacon. And we had sides of fries and onion rings, which it turns out was a bit on the conservative side. City boy types sitting next to us ordered buffalo wings, chilli cheese fries and hot dogs in addition to their burgers.

Truly amazing though. The Meatwagon is coming to the end of a summer residency in Peckham Rye, as well as doing a number of festivals and one offs, including a night at Dalston Roof Park. Nothing quite like a burger and a pale ale, sat on synthetic grass, gazing over the rooftops of Dalston. Oh yes.

Last week I finally tried got to go to Lucky Chip, a slightly less well-known and hyped burger van that has been stationed just off London Fields this summer. Open from about 6pm in Netil Market, a goods yard with a bike workshop in an old bus parked there too, Lucky Chip just does burgers, hot dogs, fries and onion rings. No satay sauce or raita and lamb burgers, but classic ingredients, piled copiously together between buns. Oh my. Pete ordered a Selleck, which had burger, cheese, a colossal beetroot dipped onion ring and a hefty pineapple ring. Now try fitting that in your mouth in one:

I opted for a slightly more classic Sheen - cream cheese, smoked bacon, mature cheddar and caramelised red onions. Still absolutely massive, and utterly artery clogging, but an absolutely perfect combination of ingredients. We munched silently, apart from sporadic groans of pleasure and sighs of eating exhaustion.

The sides were also delicious. The beetroot flavoured onion rings were...huge. And maybe a little on the salty side, but you could ask for them to hold the sea salt if you were concerned. The chips were tasty too - hand-cut, skins on, and organic, apparently. Our chosen combination of dips weren't available, so the kind guys gave us little pots of home-made BBQ sauce (hickorylicious), deep garlic aioli, wasabi sauce and sweet chilli sauce. Just wow.

We cycled back to Newington Green, worrying that the frames of our bikes may crumple underneath us. But intensely happy.

It's not just vans that are in the burger market - posh restaurants are also spinning a good line of burgers, and Young and Foodish has just updated their Top 10 burgers in London list. Many burger opportunities await. Anyone fancy a burger odyssey?

Don't call me fattee

2011-06-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

Fattee is a word often bandied around our house. Mostly because Pete eats absolute shedloads for his slight physique (keen cyclist) and I feel the need to match his appetite (also a cyclist, but I do about 20% of the miles he does).

Fattee is also a favourite leftover and larder meal that usually gets made on day 3 of roast chicken leftovers. The original recipe was from the first Moro cookbook and involves some slightly more lengthy and complicated processes. So this is my lazy cheat's interpretation for when you want to make something nice but don't have time to burn.

What you need (for two portions):
1 tin tomatoes
3 cloves garlic
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 medium size aubergine
100g long grain or basmati rice
small bunch of flat leaf parsley
2 pita bread
2 tsp pine nuts
150ml greek yoghurt
2 portions leftover roast chicken

You need to do a few things at the same time:
- make the tomato sauce - sizzle 2 finely chopped cloves of garlic and the chilli flakes in olive oil until slightly golden. Add the tin of tomatoes and the cinnamon. Allow to bubble away and thicken up.
- cook the rice, simples.
- cut the aubergine into 1 cm slices, and then in half again. Ideally you'd charr these on a girddle, but frying is fine too.
- toast the pita, then cut into strips
- toast the pine nuts lightly in a dry frying pan
- chop the flat leaf parsley
- mix the yoghurt with a crushed clove of garlic, maybe a little milk to thin, and some salt and pepper

Once those are all ready it's a layering job and you can decide whether you want to layer plates up individually or as a presentation plate. But you start with the scattering the pita bread at the bottom, then top with rice, spreading it out. Then add the chicken and the aubergine, spreading evenly. Then add the tomato sauce and top that with the yoghurt. Finally sprinkle the flat leaf parsley and toasted pine nuts. Then tuck in!

It might seem a little bit of a fiddly recipe, but all the stages are very easy and you can do multiple things all at the same time. The flavours work well - I always love tomato and yoghurt combinations, and there are some nice smoky notes from the toast, pine nuts and the chargrilled aubergine. It's an immensely satisfying dish and still impressive enough for visitors.

What is heaven?

2011-06-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

Whether you're half Portuguese or not, I'm hoping heaven looks a little something like this:

After all, I have been good.

This is a favourite spot of mine. A table outside Pastelaria Lisboa on Golborne Road, just in the shadow of Trellick Tower, which is one of my favourite buildings, watching the bustle of Portuguese diaspora life in this slightly forgotten corner of West London. When I lived in the suburbs as a young'un, my mum used to take us up here during half-term to give us our fix of pasteis de nata, stock up on Portuguese olive oil (nice and fruity and very good value, I still swear by it) and get us to engage in that side of our cultural background. She would get us to do the ordering Portuguese and we'd be rewarded with those eggy, custardy bits of goodness.

You can get pasteis de nata all over now, or "Portuguese custard tarts" as people call them. They're never as good as the ones you get at Lisboa. And the good news is I can pop over to Camden to Lisboa's deli there, or Stockwell if I was a South Londoner. And they're much cheaper too. £1.50? Pah! Of course, one isn't enough, so if we're being restrained it's three between two; if we've just cycled a long way, two each is totally justifiable. One is over too quickly - when you've fought tooth and nail for that perfect spot outside, you don't want to give it up too quickly.

Back on track

2011-06-08T15:31:00.000-07:00

With a three month backlog of delicious meals to tell the world about, where does a boy start? An old favourite.

There are some places I'll go back to over and over again, despite a list of restaurants I want to eat at as long as my arm. It usually involves impressing visitors with "look what amazing stuff I have on my doorstep!". My four regulars, depending on the guest, are Mangal in Dalston, Tayyabs in Whitechapel, Ottolenghi in Islington and Tbilisi, the Georgian restaurant in Holloway. Lately, I've taken meat fiend friends to Mangal for smoky Turkish lamb kebabs, amazing piles of fresh and tangy salad and freshly bakes breads. One friend who visited in January insisted we went again when she came back with her boyfriend in April. That's how good it is.

Dalston is a great place to take visitors. You can build up the mystique as you walk over, telling them about its Jekyll and Hyde character: by day a bustling, multicultural hub, all nail bars, dead chickens, fruit and veg, phone cards, religious chanting and popcorn. As night falls it's the hipster mile, sunglasses, big hair, the early 90s junkie look. But the barbecue smoke oozing out of Kingsland High Street/Stoke Newington Road's many ocakbasi restaurants gives it a summer holiday feel and the warehousey, slightly run down buildings gives it a feel of New York's Lower East Side. You take a right down Arcola Street and enter a bustling smoky grillhouse and you're transported into another world.

You pretty much always have to queue in Mangal, watching the chefs man the grills, the heat making everyone sweat but especially them as they knock the flaming coals around and turn the spitting skewers of prime lamb, quail and chicken. But arrive at a sensible time (ie. not 8pm on a Friday or Saturday night) and you'll be ushered to a table before long. The menu is short and sweet, and we nearly always get a mixed mezze (so cheap) to start - it's just humus, a yoghurt dip, baba ganoush and a tomato and bulgur salad but goes down wonderfully.

For mains I almost always go for the adana kebab, which consists of two minced skewers of lamb. Normally people think of mince as a cheap cousin to fully formed meat, a bit limp and flavourless. But not at Mangal, where it is succulent and more juicy, and has bits of chilli, garlic and herb in the mix. I've been known to deviate to the boyfriend's kebab of choice: cop sis, which are smaller, marinaded cubes of lamb. And my other favourite diversion is the iskender, which you can get either in adana or cop sis form, and is on a bed of bread, topped with tomato sauce and yoghurt. It's more of a dish.

I have just booked a relatively last minute holiday to a lovely little hamlet in southern Turkey. It's my first 'adult' villa holiday, and we've got a pool, barbecue, gardens, bikes and everything. I'm looking forward to eating out big time but also recreating some of my favourite Turkish/levantine dishes in situ.

Well hello!

2011-05-31T02:01:00.000-07:00

Last night I fell off my bike, got deep grazes and scrapes all across my body and face, but the worst thing was getting some pretty big chips out of my teeth. Feeling along the the bottom of my front teeth with my tongue, the crumbled bottoms of the three injured teeth felt fragile and useless; the nerve exposed and vulnerable.

I went to the emergency dentist today, and the news was not too bad. I'd been lucky, I could have done more damage and I'll have to have temporary fillings, which will then be replaced by permanent fillings that actually match the colour of my teeth. The advice I had from the dentists was not to bite into anything hard like apples, toffee, crust rolls...what about lamb chops, I asked, thinking of those chargrilled, spicy lamb chops at my favourite restaurant, Tayyabs, just around the corner? Yes, those too. And for how long, I asked? For a few weeks? No, for ever.

For someone always ready to bite into the next challenge, no matter how gnarly, this is quite a concern. And it brings in to sharp relief how precious a fully functioning body is for enjoying food. Of course I'll still be able to enjoy food, but I think I;ll always have a little niggle in the back of my mind: will this delicious apple/chop/ciabatta pull my tooth out?!

On the plus side, this has spurred me on to reignite my blog. I've been writing essays and revising for exams since February, and though I have the minor task of a 15,000 word dissertation ahead of me, I'll be blogging again. Yay.

Happy, smoky, milky

2011-02-08T15:34:00.000-08:00

Happiness is smoked haddock chowder. The smell and taste bring back some of my earliest childhood memories: a treat lunch at The Place to Eat on the top floor of John Lewis in Edinburgh, big glass windows with views down over Leith and over the Firth of Forth to Fife. I remember the smoky fish, the luxurious creaminess of the broth and the sweetness of the sweetcorn, and even when I went off fish later on, the smell of a smoked haddock chowder would always bring back happy memories.

Now that I'm well and truly back on the fish, I decided to pop in to my local fishmongers, the amazing Steve Hatt on Essex Road, and pick up smoked haddock for that purpose. I using this Channel 4 recipe as a basis, but upped the celery as I had quite a bit of that in already and I never get through it quick enough.

Making the soup was very easy, and the most fun bit was boiling the smoked haddock in the milk, which produced this amazing creamy, smoky milk foam that I couldn't resist dipping my finger in. MMMMmmm.

The soup was absolutely wonderful - it tasted just like it used to, so creamy and rich but not too heavy going. I thought the addition of extra celery worked well and would like to try it with fennel next time for some extra depth of flavour.

Tom's Victorian Chop House

2011-02-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

I had an overnight in Manchester with work last week. I really like Manchester, even though I only ever seem to go there on work duties. The last couple of times had been political party conferences, and the town is swamped with politicos, lobbyists, the media and party members. When I've had a free evening I've always tried to slip away from the throng of conference and find the beating heart of the city. Luckily, that wasn't too hard and I've been to some characterful (and bargainous) curry houses in the Northern Quarter, a basement Armenian restaurant and some fun bars and pubs.

This time I was on my own (no lobbyists for company!) and keen to try out some more of Manchester's dining options. I opted for the institution that is Tom's Chop House, a traditional north western restaurant/pub in the centre of the town, after lots of positive words from friends who've been there. It's all Victorian splendour inside: tiled floors, dark wood panelling on the walls, and lots of nice antique furniture. The waiting staff sensitively tucked me in a corner (slight look of sympathy when I asked for my "Table for one"!) with a good view of the restaurant and bar.

My first course was brown onion soup. It was very close to French onion soup (which I love), rich and deep flavours, the sweetness of the slow-cooked onions and the saltiness of the stock. Also like its French counterpart, it was served with a cheese crouton, although it was mature cheddar rather than gruyère. Really nice.

For my main I had a Lancashire beefsteak casserole with root veg and a dumpling. I do love a dumpling, and the casserole was utterly perfect. Really subtle but effective use of herbs and a good stock made the sauce delicious, while the meat itself was incredibly tender and clearly good quality.

The wine list was really expansive and not too expensive, but you could get some really nice stuff by the glass too. I opted for a glass of Borsao Garnacha Tinto, which matched the food perfectly. I was very full and the restaurant was getting busy with loud and happy Mancunians coming in to celebrate birthdays and catch up with long-time-no-seen friends. I ducked away from the chorus of 'I'll have a large Pinot Grigio!' to retire to my Travelodge and get on with some studying. But I was very happy to have experienced a slab of old skool Mancunian tradition on my one night there.

Mexican food getting simpler

2011-01-29T04:46:00.000-08:00

I've made it my new year's resolution to improve my skills in Mexican cooking. This came about following many trips to Wahaca, a fantastic meal in Berlin, and many outstanding burritos about London. The quality of Mexican food you can eat out has come on massively in recent years; yet my cooking had not. I love the fiery spices, the ubiquity of coriander (up there with dill on my herbs top 10), the tangy flavours, the slow cooked meet, the avocados, the limes. I love the ceremony of making up a wrap, the colours, the combinations. But I felt that my cooking of it was stuck in Tex Mex, I was using my own techniques without seeking to understand some of the science and structure of Mexican cooking.

I'd been dropping hints for Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple cook book for a long time and when I didn't get it (again) for Christmas (the outrage!) I bought it for myself. It's beautiful, informative and encouraging. 'Simple' is not a cop-out at all; rather, it explains the ideal ingredients and tells you how you can substitute accurately by using combinations of more readily available ingredients, and takes you through how to make some of the larder staples with just a few speciality peppers, for example. Once you've got the basics, you can easily put together some really exciting, authentic dishes at your local shops.

So last weekend I set about making my first Mexican food made simple. It was a Sunday and I had a whole chicken that needed using up. Rather than making a classic roast, I decided I'd make some kind of roast chicken burritos. With a couple of bunches of coriander and a packet of chipotle peppers from Lupe Pintos in Edinburgh, I set about my task.

I'd seen that so many recipes required a chipotle paste, I made that first. The dried chipotles were boiled in water for almost an hour, their steam filling the house and making us all cough at their potency. The smoky smell I recognised from BBQ sauce (love that stuff), so I'd already learned something. After a while I drained the peppers, mixed in white wine vinegar, lots of garlic, onion, salt, sugar and tomato purée and blended down to a paste. The house smelled amazing, although in the end I didn't actually need to use the purée for this meal. Well, at least it's in a jar now and ready for the next one.

I made a 'green rice', where you purée (notice a theme here?) lots of coriander, parsley, spinach together with garlic and onions, a splash of water and a pinch of salt, cook the paste and then mix in rinsed basmati rice before adding a mild stock. It was like cooking a pilav, and ended up very smooth, fragrant and tasty. I also made a smoky salsa, use the chipotle paste I'd just made. And when it came to the guacamole, though I'd made my own a hundred times, I carefully followed the steps set out in the book - a little lime then, a little later, a little chili first, then more in a bit. It was really, really very good. A lot of people don't like recipe books, believing them to stifle creativity and intuition in the kitchen. I agree to an extent, but I think it's always good to be open to learning from others and then build on your intuitive skillz!!

The finished product was delicious - the flavours all so fresh and light, the perfectly roast chicken going excellently with the fragrant green rice, the luscious guacamole, the zingy salsa and the slightly tart sour cream. The best wrap I've ever had. Lots of smiles on the other side of the table too.

Now that I've done that dry run, I should be ready to put on a super Mexican spread when hosting a dinner party in a couple of week's time!

Brunchin' brunchin' #2

2011-01-01T17:10:00.000-08:00

Brunch is big business in the yummy liberal enclave of Stoke Newington. So much so, that in a damning critique of the inner city middle classes's hypocrisy, the Independent journo highlighted the almond croissant and latte serving cafes of N16 as the frontline of social divisions that permeate right down to parents at the school gate.

Competition is fierce for brunch on Stoke Newington Church Street. Fierce for restaurants and cafes vying for the refined dollars of N16ers, happy to splash out on the good things in life. Fierce for would-be brunchers, with every table in every eatery hard won through hawking and stalking and opportunist pouncing. The sharp elbowed middle-classes indeed.

My old favourite is the Blue Legume, which does delicious brunch, lunch and dinner. Their brunch menu covers tansatlantic favourites such as eggs benedict, freshly pressed fruit juice combos (celery, apple and mint? YES PLEASE!) with more Mediterranean style dishes - olives, lamb sausage, haloumi all crop up in the cooked breakfast dishes. The prices are very reasonable and so the above-mentioned competition for a good table is tough. We recently even found ourselves brunching at the unfashionable hour of 10am to save us the table sourcing stress. On a bitterly cold, but sunny December morning it did the trick, but by 10.30am people were arriving in droves and by 11am the outlook was pretty bleak. So there you go: early bird, worm, etc.

I usually opt for the eggs benedict, which is always delicious, but most recently I plumped for the Mediterranean breakfast, the big 'un.

It was a delicious mixture of smoky, salty and fresh flavours; much less greasy than its English counterpart. The jam for the toast felt slightly redundant, but I guess some people like to finish on a sweet note. Ben had the fruit salad platter, which is an immense spread of exotic and more local fruit, presented beautifully and great for kidding yourself that it'll help you fighting off a cold.

The opening of Homa on Church Street midway through 2010 sent the N16 twiteratti into a gushing frenzy. A new spot, with beautiful, sleek interiors, a wine bar with a bang on winelist, excellent pizzas, bunch, cakes, locally smoked salmon. Is it too good to be true?!

We had a table late afternoon on Halloween. The surrounding streets looked like the scenes in ET, full of gleeful, screaming children dressed in immaculate scary outfits. The distractions of Halloween and our slightly odd timing made for a quiet and relaxed meal at Homa, with friendly service and tasty food.

Keen to try the N16 smoked salmon, I plumped for the Eggs Benedict. James was super keen and went for a plate full of smoked salmon with capers, cornichons, rocket and lashings of creme friache. Fancy pants. The salmon was really incredible - delicate smoky flavours, tender and very fresh tasting. In the eggs benedict it was served with fresh spinach, poached egg and hollandaise sauce, all of which tasted like they were made from really top ingredients.

Anna opted for a cooked breakfast of sorts, with scrambled eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, mozzarella and sourdough toast. Again, the ingredients were clearly super quality and well sourced, and it totally elevates brunch from being a fun social event with nice food to a proper foodie experience.

Meals at Homa are a good £2 or so more expensive than at Blue Legume and the experience is a little more slick, stylish and sedate. The ingredients at Homa are clearly a cut above the rest, but Blue Legume is still very yummy and has a lively atmosphere and more 'fun' menu in terms of smoothies, cakes, etc. Brunch is clearly a growth industry in Stoke Newington and you're truly spoiled for choice. Lucky me.

I love Christmas

2010-12-28T13:06:00.000-08:00

I love Christmas, especially this one, as I now have a new camera thanks to my lovely boyfriend (and his parents), mum, dad and others. Woop. Early signs are that it takes a beautiful picture, so I'll be working on my photo skillz to up the standard of photography on this blog.

As is well documented, I love Christmas dinner. It's my favourite meal of the year, with so many happy memories evoked. It's evolved over the years: different faces at the table, different settings, new dishes (this year: parsnip and pear croquettes!), shelved dishes (where's the mashed potato and cauliflower and cheese? Rightly relegated!), new customs (the Christmas eve cut price turkey hunt). But I love it for its ritual, its bringing people together and it's slow, social celebration of culinary excess.

This year was a particularly excellent Christmas dinner. Our turkey was the best ever, so succulent and juicy. It was a Marks and Spencer's free range organic bronze feathered beauty that we picked up on Christmas Eve for a third of its original price. The turkey hunt is fast becoming a favourite tradition - my mum has us stationed at supermarkets across Edinburgh at about 3pm on Christmas Eve, waiting for the supermarkets to slash the prices of their top tier turkeys. It's a game of nerves: jump too soon and you pay over the odds, leave it too long and you could be left with nothing. We were very pleased with our turkey.

The trimmings are key, and I think we counted 12 different dishes on our Christmas lunch plate:

Turkey, red cabbage braised with apple, roast potatoes in goose fat, home-made cranberry sauce (with orange zest), carrots with orange, brussels sprouts, little sausages, chestnut stuffing, parsnip and pear croquettes, bacon, leek, bread sauce and gravy. My favourites are the bread sauce (milk slow-cooked overnight with bay leaf and a clove stuffed onion) and the chestnut stuffing (chestnut purée, bacon, onions lemon zest, abundant parsley, breadcrumbs, egg: baked), without which it just wouldn't Christmas at all.

On Boxing Day, my siblings and I walk to the other side of Edinburgh (via the Topshop sale, for our sins) to join my dad and his partner for a second Christmas lunch. My dad isn't mega keen on the whole roast dinner setup, so will often cook a Portuguese style dish. This year he made a very meaty cataplana (it typically has clams, prawns and white fish, but my brother really dislikes fish) with melt-in-your-mouth pork loin and top quality chorizo and black pudding in a rich tomato and wine sauce. It was delicious and went down nicely with the free flowing cava!

The food has been amazing and there's been much more too: home-made ice cream, chestnut cream whip, leftover combinations, brunch out with friends. I'm definitely feeling fooded out and ready for some nice fresh salads and fruit!

Even the pizzas are posh

2010-12-27T04:50:00.000-08:00

You only have to flick through the piles of take away menus that come through your front door on a weekly basis to see that tastes are more and more sophisticated, even when it comes to the traditional junk food fest territory of the Friday night take away. The game has been upped and you can now even choose which Italian region you want your pizza from, some Indian take-away menus don't even feature chicken tikka masala and you can get dim sum delivered to your door. Of course, you still get menus with yellowing pictures of huge greasy pizzas topped with rubber cheese and rubber meat, but it's hard to see how those places will survive for much longer when you could have it so much better for the same price.

I've been in essay mode up until recently, spending long weekend days in the library, coming home tired and hungry with little energy to cook. This has meant lots of quiet, relaxed Saturday nights with a take away and a couple of episodes of Mad Men. Very young fogey, but a good excuse to try out some of north London's best pizzas!

Firezza is highly rated by an Italian born and raised friend and specialises in pizzas by the yard. Their bases are thick and rustic without being too doughy, but it's all about the toppings. Plentiful, plentiful top quality hams and salamis, huge basil leafs, sweet onions. Yum. The pizzas are actually huge and we weren't able to finish ours', as much as we wanted to, but they did for a very nice lunch the next day in the lirbary.

It's a small chain and there are a scattering of branches across London. Our nearest is by Highbury and Islington tube. There's a cheaper price (£8.50 a pizza) if you pick up, so I sent the boyf out on his bike to pick ours up.

Il Bacio is another small chain of Sardinian restaurants across a small stretch of north London: N16, N5 and N4, with lots of avid fans. The restaurants serve a range of Sarindian fare: fish and seafood dishes, pizzas and pastas, while Il Bacio Express on Stoke Newington Church Street focuses mainly on pizzas. The menu, being Sardinian, diverges from the pizzeria norms, with more sea food, olives, capers, fresh herbs and Sardinia specific hams.

The pizzas were delicious, especially for the topping combinations. The slight trade off for more interesting combinations compared to Firezza was that the topping didn't seem as good quality – the olives were quite plain and the meat wasn't as clearly top notch as that on the Firezza pizza.

Finally on the pizza front, not a take away, but I enjoyed the pizza at the Hideaway bar between Tufnell Park and Archway tube. It's a great little late spot, with a great selection of beers, wines and friendly bar staff who went out of their way to meet our cocktail demands (Mad Men themed!). Their pizzas are reputed to be some of the best 'outside Foreign' according to the Observer, so we were keen to try them.

I had a chorizo and almond pizza, which was a winning combination, Spanish inspired. The chorizo was really good quality, very meaty, the peppers sweet and the almonds gave it a good rounded taste. The base was thin but not too crispy, which was a nice experience if not hugely filling. Still very nice and a great place for a local low key evening if you're in the Tufnell Park/Archway/Dartmouth Park 'hood.

Brunchin' brunchin' #1

2010-12-20T14:42:00.000-08:00

If my Berlin days taught me anything, it's this: brunch should be the king of all meals. If there's any way of spending your precious weekend days in more joy, let me know. But I can't imagine anything better than gathering some friends together and having good coffee, warm food, fresh juice, reading weekend papers and having a good natter. I've blogged brunch before, but I've always got space for more and want to share some recent favourites:

Lantana is a fairly new Australian brunch joint in Fitzrovia, just off Goodge Street. This means, crucially, that they get good coffee, chilled vibes and a fresh approach to a warm breakfast. I went one Sunday, meeting a doctor friend just coming off a nightshift at UCH. For her it was the end of a long day, for the rest of us it was the just the start. But for all of us, the coffee (flat white, why not?!) was excellent.

I had corn and herb fritters, topped with slow cooked garlicky tomato salsa, sweetcure bacon, creme fraiche with a twist of lime and a rocket salad. So so yummy, fresh, tangy and sweet all in one. Fritters are an utilised medium for the carb - stuffed full of herby flavours, they were a great earthy base for the fresh flavours on top.

One friend had scrambled egg with smoked salmon and fresh herbs, and the other (sweet toothed) opted for brioche french toast with poached pears and ricotta. I did swapsies for a bite of both: delicious. I tend to always go for a savoury brunch though, as amazing as a sweet french toast is. We all liked the Mediterranean flavours with a twist of antipodean zing.

Lantana is popular - we arrived just after 10am, and by 10.30 there were quite a few people waiting for tables. The early bird catches the worm, even if it defeats the point of brunch.

Rooftop one-pot

2010-11-14T06:57:00.000-08:00

It's the end of the growing season on our roof terrace, though I can't quite believe the tomatoes lasted until November. It was definitely a learning experience: aubergines can be tough to grow, you need multiple courgette plans for cross pollination, tomatoes need a lot of water, if you grow carrots in a pot they'll be tiny...but still delicious.

On the day we harvested the last of our pot grown carrots I decided to cook a tasty one pot roast dish. I love cooking all the ingredients slowly in one dishes and allowing them to infuse each other. The best meal we had in Croatia was at a plush harbourside in Komiza on Vis, where we had beautiful tender white fish baked in a big dish with potatoes, carrots and copious quantities of herbs and garlic and butter and olive oil. It was so simple and so perfect.

In the absence of fish straight out the sea, I browned some chicken legs and thighs in garlic and olive oil and put in a pyrex lasagne dish, before adding some parboiled (3 mins at boiling) and then halved new potatoes with their skins on, a leek, lots of garlic and all of our lovely little carrots. Lots of olive oil and some knobs of butter, and then into the oven. After a while I added finely chopped rosemary, tarragon, basil (all out the garden) and flat leaf parsley and a splash off white wine. I covered in tin foil and baked for maybe another 30 minutes until it was the perfect combination of crispy roast, melt in your mouth buttery, herby bliss.

The meal was a perfect bridge of the seasons, with summer's fresh herbs and winter's warming root vegetables. Maybe I was just feeling paternal, but our baby carrots were particularly sweet and tasty.

Better baking

2010-11-13T15:25:00.000-08:00

The western world is going bake-crazy! American-style cupcakes have been all the buzz for the last few years and by now it seems every second person can effortlessly turn out beautiful ornate cupcakes, perfectly frosted and covered in glitter. The supermarkets are on it too, charging full whack for industrial scale cupcake outputs.

My worry is that there is too much emphasis on the decoration and not enough on the crux of the matter: the cake. While the aesthetics of icing are clearly important and most definitely play a part in your cake decision, the substance, the cakiness of the cake are often forgotten. So many perfectly decorated cupcakes are dry and bland inside; there is often no art to the baking.

But two recent baked experiences have reassured me that some bakers are still passionate about their cake.

My friend Hattie has recently set herself up as a cake-maker and does a good run of traditional, well-made, feel-good baking. Hattie had her first stall at the Kentish Town Community Centre autumn picnic and I bought myself a bespoke sample platter. There were brownies (moist but not too sludgy), chocolate cake (impeccably iced, soft inside), rocky road (very sweet, chocolatey and moreish), as well as carrot cake, old school cupcakes (not American style) and vegan brownies...wow.

Obviously food tastes better when you know how much love goes into it, but Hattie's cakes are some of the best I've had in a while. Save your money next time you think of ordering a Hummingbird and get Hattie to bake you something! Drop Hattie an email on harrietphillips258 @hotmail.com if you want some good cake.

Another great baked experience I had was at the Great Brownie Bake Off at look mum no hands!, everyone's favourite cycle cafe, all in the name of charidee. Chefs gave demonstrations of their best brownie recipes, sharing handy hints and tips as they went along, and then the finished products were passed around the audience. Every 10 minutes or so, another batch of warm brownies would be passed around on plates and I quickly felt a bit queasy from the sheer amount of sugar.

The star attraction was Stacie Stewart, a recent Masterchef finalist, who is a total mod with amazing hair, attitude and cooking skillz. She is also Pete's workmate, so we got introduced and had a quick chat about the cake scene at the moment and agreed about the downsides of Americanisation, or something. Anyway, Stacie was very charming and funny and gave some great tips when she was mixing it up. She says cooking is an art and a science and you got just tell she's got both sides covered.

Stacie baked a chocolate cupcake with a chocolatey mascarpone icing. They were in short supply, so Pete and I shared one. It was very nice. Very soft, light cake and the icing was luxuriously creamy and caramely, but without being too thick or sugary.

I left on a total sugar high, but with a strong desire to get my bake on!

Green, mean, linguine

2010-10-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love most about this time of year is the appearance of fancy members of the cabbage family in our greengrocers. My particular favourites are kale and cavolo nero, kings of the cabbages. They both remind me of one of my favourite Portuguese dishes, caldo verde, a simple potato soup with finely shredded greens, topped with chourico and fruity, peppery olive oil. As a kid, I would crave for that rich, seaweedy, green taste but it was only ever to be had on holidays to Portugal.

I like my nice greens braised with garlic and chilli, Tuscan style. I like them in plain meals, where their sheer greenness is able to take centre stage. I recently made the greenest and meanest spaghetti with cavolo nero and it was totally delicious.

What you need (for 3 mains or 4 starters):
Big bunch of cavolo nero
4 cloves of garlic
300g spaghetti
Lots of extra virgin olive oil
Maybe some truffle oil if yr fancy
salt'n'pepper
parmesan

First, trim the leaves from cavolo nero and discard those woody stalks. Peel the cloves of garlic. Have a saucepan of water on the boil and blanch the cavolo nero and the garlic for four minutes, before draining and squeezing dry. Get the spaghetti boiling.

Transfer the cavolo nero and garlic to a food processor or, failing that, into whatever you use a handheld blender in, pour in some EVOO, and blend blend blend. When it has the texture of a firm pesto, season with salt and pepper and mix with the cooked and drained spaghetti until it's like a pan of bright green worms. If you are feeling flush, drizzle with some truffle oil.

Plate up, sprinkle generously with parmesan, and crack over some black pepper.

Mmm...healthy and delicious. It really works and tastes super fresh.

A hop over to Berlin

2010-10-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Between finishing my last job and starting the new one, I paid Elizabeth in Berlin a quick visit. Eliz and I moved to Berlin about the same time in 2005 and got to know each other through our love of music and the music blogs we both wrote, commenting on the indie scene in Berlin. I moved back to London after a year to finish my studies, but Eliz stayed on and has a super Berlin life and a super Berlin dog, Pip.

When I lived in Berlin I was an Erasmus student, living off a tidy EU stipend and a London level student loan, going to classes at Humboldt university by day and gigs, bars and restaurants with friends almost every evening. As students, we were most interested in good cheap eats and honed in on a handful of dependable restaurants - a 3€ Thai in Prenzlauer Berg, the "punk" pizzeria at Senefelder platz and many of Berlin's ubiquitous kebab shops. Treatsies was at Gugelhof, an informal but exsquisite restaurant specialising in the food and wine of Alsace. It was here that Chancellor Schroeder took Bill Clinton for dinner when he was in Berlin, don't you know!

With a few exceptions, eating out in Berlin back then was good but not super amazing. But now a foodie revolution is happening and Berlin's eating out offer is better than ever. I stayed with Eliz in Kreuzberg, and within 5 minutes walk there are Mexican taqueira offering what American friends are calling "the best Mexican food I've had outside north America", amazing cafes serving innovative twists on brunch. Supper clubs are popping up and some lovely neighbourhood tratorria have opened. Berlin really has it all!

The meal we had at Maria Peligro on Skalitzerstr was definitely one of the best Mexican meals I'd ever had. We started with margaritas, some of the most luscious guacamole ever and Sikil Pa´k, which is a dip made of pumpkin seeds and habanero chillis. It was super hot, with a sweet, sour and earthy taste.

For a main I had Tacos de Cochinita Pibil, which was shredded pork braised in sour achiote sauce and topped with pickled red onions. Big on the sours, the pork was so tender and the corn tortillas were substantial and soft and definitely homemade. Way, way beyond your run of the mill tex mex that's for sure. Other punters were also very happy with their selections. There are two other restaurants by the same owners in Berlin, but each one comes from a different angle on Mexican cuisine. Just take a butchers at the menu and try not to salivate.

A Vietnamese lunch in Neukoelln with Zara was also super, piled high with fresh ingredients and zingy and spicy. At €5, it gave Monsieur Voung, it's more upmarket rival in Mitte, a run for its money. With just three dishes on the menu for lunch, it was definitely quality over quantity.

But a trip to Berlin ain't complete without some bratwurst, and after a surprisingly unsuccessful trip to Mauer Park fleamarket, we tucked into some warming sausage while we enjoyed the bizarre cult spectacle of stadium-scale outdoor karaoke, munching and swaying along to 80s power ballads sung by Spanish students. Super.

But when I'm in Berlin, it's all about Elizabeth's home cooking. Brunch is a favourite and Eliz makes the best scrambled eggs. I reckon it's all down to the slow-cooking of whole garlic cloves before the eggs even get a look in. Followed by pear-filled mini pancakes, that's you properly set up for the day.

Homeburgers on my first night before a marathon night dancing til 6.30am at White Trash Fast Food were delicious and had Pip sniffing the air jealously as the grown ups tucked in.

Thanks Elizabeth for a super Berlintime. If any readers are going to Berlin and want any further recommendations, just drop me a line!

New job, new lunch

2010-09-23T13:32:00.000-07:00

Just last week I started a new job at Shelter, so I've moved from the heady well-heeled heights of Muswell Hill to the bustling, urban, trend-setting pavements of the Old Street area. It couldn't be further removed from Muswell Hill's child-friendly cafes and tapas restaurants - Old Street is bang in the epicentre of London's work economy - with offices for massive global corporations, super trendy media agencies and charities all standing shoulder to shoulder with independent cafes, shops and thriving markets.

The Shelter building is right next to Whitecross Street Market, which has stalls serving lunch every weekday, and a full blown food market on Thursdays and Fridays. I was amazed by the scale of the market and the sheer number of workerbees of all walks of life queuing up at their favourite stalls for a tasty lunch to eat back at the desk.

Being a spendthrift Edinburger, I'm usually all about the packed lunch and try to avoid frittering away my money on cold, factory-made sandwiches. But with all this on my new doorstep, I have resolved to treat myself to lunch out once a week (if I'm being good). So last week I went to Luardo's burrito van, which I had read about in Time Out's article on London's best burritos. I joined the (very long) queue and waited patiently, like a good Brit, to place my order.

Back at my desk, I unwrapped the foil and sunk my teeth in. The pork was generously portioned and so tender it melted in my mouth. It was full of fresh coriander, piquante salsa, rich cheddar, rice, sour cream and luscious guacamole. It more than filled me up and had me wanting to try the other fillings, including the beef, which had sold out by the time I got to the truck.

With so many great stalls to visit, I'm going to make my mission to try all of Whitecross Street's offerings a regular feature.

Oh pizza pizza

2010-09-20T14:31:00.002-07:00

I finally made it to Franco Manca, which has probably been London's most talked about pizzeria for the last couple of years. You can tell I'm a bit slow on the zeitgeist these days, but it doesn't help that the original branch was all the way down in Brixton and wasn't open evenings. A 'proper' restaurant opened late last year in Chiswick, way out west, and is thankfully open in the evenings for those of us who don't get to hang out eating pizzas on weekday afternoons.

The concept is simple. Super pizzas, made from carefully prepared sourdough, using tip-top carefully selected ingredients, cooked in a mega hot oven for about 90 seconds. The results are fantastic.

The dough is soft but not too chewy and a little crispy on the outside. The mozzarella is organic and from Somerset and has a lovely creamy, milky taste. Mine was topped simply with the tomato and mozzarella and fresh and dry chorizo and a couple of basil leaves. I couldn't have wanted anything more, it worked perfectly. The chorizo was top quality

With a small glass of very nice house wine and service it was just over £10, which is amazing considering the quality of the ingredients and just how utterly delicious it is.

Instead of desserting at Franco Manca, we popped round the corner to the original Chiswick Italian: Foubert's, for their tasty authentic ice cream. Don't bother with anything else there apparently, but the ice cream is amazing.

Mine was choc chip and amaretto, Celia had lemon and hazelnut (sentimental reasons, don't ask) and I hadn't had such good ice cream since I was cooling off by the Adriatic in July. I can still taste the proper chocolate-ness of the choc chips. Mmm.

So all in, Chiswick ain't a bad place for pizza and ice cream, as long as you manage to avoid the swarms of meeja types hanging around High Road House, the West outpost of Soho House and Shoreditch House.

Sunday slackers

2010-08-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

I've had a total slacker's weekend, drifting between cafes, restaurants and bars in Dalston, meeting up with friends and enjoying the fine weather. A perky black coffee at Cafe Oto, a trans-African lunch at Open the Gate, the new Black Cultural Centre that has just opened, and then a gorgeously creamy ice coffee at Tina, We Salute You at the end of my road.

But I'll focus on Open the Gate, as neither Tina and Oto ever seem to have any difficulty attracting paying punters in for their delectable cakes and coffees. Open the Gate opened earlier in the summer on Stoke Newington Road just up from the main conglomeration of Turkish ocakbasi restaurants. By day it is a big, bright open space, with more formal dining tables, a more laid back cafe area and a big performance space. African fabrics adorn the walls and ceilings, while the menu celebrates cuisines from all parts of Africa, the Caribbean and even Italy!

We were hungry hippos and ordered full meals, with roasted sweetcorn kernels and friend plantain chips as sides. I had Mafe, which is a West African beef and peanut butter stew. It was rich and nutty, the beef was generous and flavoursome, and was served with a nice crisp salad:

All very good for £5! The girls each opted for Chicken Yassa and the boys for a vegetarian cous cous dish. The Yassa was a sweet and smoky grilled chicken portion that must be running the nearby Nandos scared. The vegetables were stewed and included cabbage and carrots, and were probably the least exciting option, but, hey, veggies can't be choosers.

Coupled with the plantain chips and other snacks, we were all a bit stuffed. It was great to be able to sample dishes from around Africa and the Caribbean, even though the menu might be a little tame and geared at newbies like us. But clocking in at £8 each including a tip, it's good for a cheap and easy lunch.

I hope Open the Gate does well - they are making a lot of effort with their programme, which has everything from poetry readings to African markets, world music to art exhibitions. Dalston is increasingly associated with braying trustafarian hipsters, when its real magic is that people of all walks of life live together and you can dip in and out of cultures from one shop/cafe/restaurant/market stall to the next. Portholes into whole 'nother worlds like this are what separates Dalston apart from London's other young and trendy playgrounds.

Pimp my pizza

2010-08-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

I would love it if every evening is a culinary odyssey chez moi. It's not. I wish I had time to prepare a delicious meal from scratch, and I've been doing a lot more of that over the summer having slightly forgotten what it's like to work full-time, study part-time and try and try to have a social life too. When you get home at 8.30 after a full day at work, an hour's lecture and an hour's seminar, you want to eat something quick and easy.

One of my favourite easy meals is a pimped up ready pizza. This one is inspired from a pizza I had when I had to find a decent restaurant to take my Chief Executive and manager out for a meal at Labour party conference in Manchester in 2008. We ended up in a mid-range Italian called the Olive Press just off Deansgate. It wasn't the most exciting restaurant, but I had a very memorable pizza. The pizza was topped with crab meat, chilli, thin lengths of chargrilled courgettes, cherry tomatoes, coriander and a squeeze of lime.

It sounds like it was heavy with toppings, but it was actually fairly light. And the combination of flavours was amazing, so fresh, so fiery. A winning combination of Italian bases and Thai tastes.

So on some of those evenings when I'm too tired and hungry to cook a proper meal, I can whip a pizza out the freezer, layer it with prawns (also out the freezer) or a tin of crab meat, add chilli, cherry tomatoes and chargrilled courgette (sometimes I have some spare stock in), sprinkle some coriander over and, when cooked, squeeze some lime over it.

And then it's ready, and I am happy.

A barbecue for the British summer

2010-08-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

My friend Celia and I are on a joint culinary mission. I'm not sure quite what our aim is, but it involves regular dinner dates in central London trying new and interesting restaurants and finding out about cuisines previously unbeknown to us. This week we checked out Koba, a slick and shiny Korean restaurant in Ftizrovia (or, aspirationally, NoHo), my old stomping ground from when I was studying at nearby UCL.

Celia had acquainted herself with the Bibimbap style of Korean food when she stayed in New York, but I was a total newcomer to the cuisine. Koba serves a range of Korean food, including rice and noodle dishes; its speciality, though, is barbecue. Every table has a gas fired hot plate in its centre, and after we had a tasty miso soup, they fired our grill up.

You could order individual selections of meat (including strips of ox tongue!), fish and vegetables to cook on the barbecue, and there are a range of assorted selections too. We opted for the Koba special selection, which included thin strips of pork belly, baby octopus, prawns, beef, marinaded sweet and spicy chicken, and a spare rib.

Sensing that we were novices (and that I have poor motor skills!), the waiters tended to the barbecue in between serving other tables and showed us how to prepare the food. So once a piece of meat or fish is ready, you take it off the grill, dip in some sesame oil, place it in the middle of a leaf, top it with some thin strips of pickled cucumber and then add some spicy bean/peanut satay-like sauce, before rolling the rest of the lettuce leaf around it and eating it like an interesting relative of the dolmades.

The combination was delicious - the smokiness of the meat, the sourness of the pickle, the earthiness of the peanut sauce and the crisp, greenness of the lettuce leaf. The ritual of preparing each item meant there was build up and anticipation and each mouthful stood out.

While it was delicious, novel and fun, it definitely was more of a 'treat' meal at £25 a head. But there were plenty of cheaper things on the menu. Interesting to note that age old benchmark of an authentic eatery - we were some of the only non-Koreans there, so it's a sure sign that Koba offers a taste of modern Korean cuisine if you fancy it!

Dim sum ...and then some...

2010-08-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

I do love dim sum - those novel little packages of flavours, the ceremony of sharing dishes, the antiquity of the bamboo containers, the ritual of chopsticks, tea and soy sauce, celebrating each morsel for what it is. Yum.

China Town in central London is the obvious place to have a tasty dim sum meal, and places like New World are a fun experience, with waiting staffing pushing round trolleys coming round with dim sum offerings. Like an old school Yo Sushi. But there's dim sum life outside WC2 and in the last couple of months I have had some excellent dim sum at Yum Cha in Chalk Farm and Shanghai down the road in Dalston.

I went to Yum Cha on a warm Saturday evening before heading to a gig nearby. We had the most tender spare ribs in a rich mandarin sauce, juicy deep fried squid, prawn and pork dumblings, steamed honey roast pork bun, chicken shrimp and rice wrapped and steamed in a lotus leaf. All were fresh and authentic, and very good value for money when the bill came in at £11 each including a beer.

Yum Cha is quite a big place and wasn't too busy, considering that it's slap bang in the middle of Camden Town and is very affordable. If you live in the area, they do dim sum delivery - a novel concept.

For Pete's birthday I took him out for a dim sum lunch at Shanghai on Kingsland High Street in Dalston. We rocked up at about half two on a bustling Saturday afternoon, the main road brimming with all walks of life and the extremists: extreme hipsters, extreme evangelists, extreme Communists. Shanghai, a former eel, pie and mash shop is all tiled walls and tiled floors - a hangover from when Hackney was the main domain of the Cockneys. Some of the tables are in benches and booths in that front section, but the majority of the restaurant is in a fairly traditional parlour style restaurant with chintzy décor and linen table cloths.

The dim sum was totally top notch. We had fried cuttlefish and coriander cakes, which were salty, juicy and chewy in perfect proportions and served with a shallow dish of broth for dipping. The chicken spring rolls had real, discernible (!) bits of chicken and were packed full of tasty bits. Steamed buns with barbecued pork were soft, fluffy and then sticky in the middle and very satisfying, and the steamed dumplings (vegetable dumplings in carrot juice pastry, crystal prawn dumplings, steamed minced meat & chive dumplings) were also perfectly formed and flavoured.

The bill was a scandalously good value £18 for six dim sum portion, drinks and service. And there are savings to be had if you go for dim sum between 3 - 5pm, even on weekends. Utterly scandalous for such delicious food. Being just 10 minutes walk from my flat, I know I'm going to be a regular diner at Shanghai!

Some summer salads

2010-07-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

Our (not so) new flat has a roof terrace with views of the City, and overlooks the domain of a family of urban foxes, some BBQ-happy hipsters, a building site and a small council estate. All very London. It has become a veritable jungle of vegetables and herbs growing in ports - courgettes, broad beans, aubergines, tomatoes, basil, mint, rosemary, tarragon, lavendar, salad leaves, carrots. With the recent warm weather we;ve been eating almost every meal on the terrace, whether it's coffee and croissants (to die for!) from Le Belle Epoque to evening meals with crisp white wine. The prospect of al fresco dining inspires summery cooking and I've been making up some nice salads for these balmy evenings.

One was a mackerel Nicoise style affair, with smoked mackerel fillets, served with broad beans, green beans, runny boiled eggs, etc. Play it by ear with quantities, but all you need to do is boil some new potatoes (and when they are almost done, add in the green beans and the broad beans and boil), chop up some cherry tomatoes and some gem lettuce, add the mackerel fillets, whip up a cider vinegrette with lots of pepper and mix it all together, topped with the runny yolked eggs and you have a very nice, healthy, summery salad.

With some green beans and broad beans left over, I re-jigged the salad idea, starting by frying chopped chorizo with onions and garlic, before quickly deglazing the pan with a splash of white wine. I boiled potatoes and added beans, beans and then some peas to the pan like last time. Then I mixed together the vegetables with the chorizo etc, shaved some Manchego cheese into the mix and served as a warm salad.

P.s. sorry about the absence of posts recently! Holidays, etc.

Sizzling spice and all things nice

2010-06-13T03:39:00.000-07:00

Even blogging about making curry was enough to make me hungry for Tayyabs, the Punjabi curry house in Whitechapel. So, with a friend down from Glasgow last weekend, we duly paid a visit.

Tayyabs is known for its sizzling slabs of spicy meat, its bargainous prices, its loud and buzzy atosphere and the fact that you are likely to have to queue for about an hour on a weekend evening for a table. We arrived at 7.30pm on a Sunday and were amazed to find the queue was only half its Friday/Saturday length - with only 30 minutes before we were sat at a table. The queue still snakes around the tables and you can watch the diners faces light up with ecstasy as spitting plates of meat and other chargrilled goodies waft past. Tables of students, families, older couples, city workers and multiple generations of Pakistani families are all united by the democratic pricing and prospect of amazing food.

We started with lamb chops and grilled paneer. The lamb chops were sizzling, spitting and giving off the most amazing smell. The meat was crispy and hot on the outside and beautifully tender inside. They brought out the animal in me as I picked them up and gnawed at them to get every last bit of meat off the bone. The paneer was for our vegetarian co-diner, but us meat-feasters shared a cube of it, which was also delicious.

The main courses followed in quick succession. Despite Tayyabs being a palace of meat, I opted to have the baby squash dish, Tinder Masala. The pieces of squash are tender and juicy and the sauce is powerfully spicy, fruity and rich and topped with delicious caremalised onions. Others had Lahori Chickar Chana, a chick pea curry, and Karahi Chicken. I obviously wangled myself a generous taster of each - all were amazing.

Almost the best bit, though, is the naan breads. We each had peshwari naan (rice, however well cooked, is a mere vessel) and boy are they something else. You can smell the butter on them from the other side of the restaurant and they are so soft, spongy, fruity. Wow. I could eat them for every meal, for every day of the rest of my life (which may be significantly shortened by their butter quotient!).

We ate until we could eat no more, and then some. And exited very happy into the warm sunset bathed streets of Whitechapel to take the newly opened East London Line back to Dalston. I have such a long list of restaurants that I want to try, which makes it hard to justify visits to the same places over and over again. But when the food and experience is as fantastic at Tayyabs, I'm prepared to make an exception.

Tayyabs is at:
83-89 Fieldgate Street
London
E1 1JU

Nearest tube is Aldgate East or Whitechapel.

Marrow viewpoint

2010-06-06T04:11:00.000-07:00

A while back I saw marrows going for cheap at Waitrose. Never having cooked with those fantastically oversize courgette-type-things I bought one whopper and then puzzled over what to do with it. A straw poll of foodies at work suggested I make some chutney with it and a quick flick through the Observer magazine revealed a recipe for a marrow and tomato masala. Perfect. So I made both!

The marrow masala was a great opportunity to put some of my newer cooking tools to the test. It required a homemade paste (my first ever!), which required my prized Magimix. Toasting the spices and mixing all the other fragrant ingredients (who knew paste involved so much garlic!?) was so much more satisfying than buying a little jar from the supermarket, and now I have my own super quantity of home-made paste to use for future easy curries.

I layered the ingredients in my le creuset cast-iron casserole dish: onions caremalising nicely at the bottom, big hollowed out marrow sections next, then whole plum tomatoes, tinned chick peas all around and butter on top. And cooked it slow and low for two hours. The end result was impeccably tender, fragrant and juicy. It reminded me a little of the baby squash dish at legendary Tayyabs - maybe not quite there on the spice front, but getting there.

So it was totally delicious and hopefully the start of adventures in curry from scratch. I've often thought that if someone said "You can go any cookery course in the world..." that I'd choose some strand of Indian cooking. It seems to be a whole art and science in itself and one which I enjoy immensely. My birthday is next week, so any places on cookery courses gratefully received!

Nostalgic: Dartmouth Park

2010-06-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Allow me to briefly to be nostalgic about my old 'hood.

Just before we left I noticed an interesting-looking pub open up in the spot of an unwelcoming old place on Highgate Road. On my late cycles home from the library after a day's studying I would catch glimpses happy bohemian types sipping ale, bare bulbs, exposed floors, chalk boards. Oh...to be finished my exams, I thought.

Well, in the brief window between finishing my exams and moving house, I made it to The Southampton Arms. It is a pretty special place - it doesn't have a telephone, you can't reserve tables, it only sells independent UK ales and ciders and pork pies, sausage rolls, scotch eggs, roast pork sandwiches. Nice.

When we rolled in they had already sold out of scotch eggs, so we had a round of pork and cider pie (served with piccalilli) and sausage rolls (served with a light tomato salsa), which were delicious. The pork pie was meaty and fruity, with pastry a million miles removed from those nasty jelly and fat pies you pick up from the supermarket. The sausage rolls also good.

Later on we ordered some pork rolls. Wow. The rolls were so soft and buttery, dusted with flour in a totally old school way. The pork was juice and was accompanied by delicious apple sauce. Though there was only one slice of meat in each roll (not representing the best value for money at £4.50), it was still very delicious.

So if you find yourself on the Parliament Hill side of the Heath on a lovely sunny day, it would be well worth your while to have a post-park snack and pint at the Southampton Arms. It is also much less smug and has much better drinks than the Bull and Last up the road.

Resettled: Newington Green

2010-05-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a shamefully long time since I last posted, but with good reasons - I had exams for my Masters and then I moved house. And now I've done both, it's time to regain a sense of normality. This involves cooking for pleasure, eating out with friends, discovering all the delicious foodie finds in my new area (Newington Green).

The subtle differences between neighbourhoods is one of the things I find most fascinating about London; how a little shift (two miles at most) to the east and the character of the streets and their inhabitants and their cultural and culinary offerings change.

From my house in Dartmouth Park, you could walk 300 metres west and you would find well-heeled but low-key gastropubs fringing the heath. 400 metres west and you would find neighbourhood Italian, tapas, Ethiopian restaurants; bargainous, delicious little secrets. To the west the clientèle were older with more families, to the east young professionals and empty nesters nestled together.

From our flat in Newington Green, there is a more exciting patchwork of differences in direction. A plod north takes you first to a band of Turkish places; okacbasi houses which give out the most amazing smoky smells, to the East lies the multiculti melting pot of Dalston, with West African, Carribean, Turkish and cockney shops and stalls on the high street and in the amazing Ridley Road market. A venture South or West will take you to well-heeled Highbury or Islington, with boutiques, delis and abundant yumminess. So, very well served!

So the first few weeks have been an intensive discovery mission around the new area - the greengrocers, the bakeries, the butchers, the markets, the brunch spots, the take-aways. But there was no question about where our first take-away would be from: Mangal 1, the classic Dalston kebab joint.

Eager eaters were gathered outside, charcoal grill smells wafted out the door. We ordered our Adana kebabs, and each came with a separate salad container and bread. The results were amazing, mind-blowing; even when surrounded by piles of boxes and everything else in disarray. A tasty start to an exciting new chapter!

Soho smoke pit

2010-04-04T13:24:00.001-07:00

To celebrate the return of a good friend from a year in New York we went to none other than Bodean's, the all-American 'BBQ smoke house' that popped up in Soho just over a year ago. It's part of a mini-chain with a few other restaurants in London's 'aspirational' neighbourhoods (y'know...Clapham, Fulham, etc.) and was set-up to bring 'the taste, the style, the soul of the beloved Kansas City barbecue to London town'. Or so the story goes.

You enter into a the diner/deli upstairs, which is for more informal (m)eating - TV screens around the room show football games, people eat off trays with their eyes glued to the screens. With a purposefully dull yellow light and the sound of match commentators, it did actually feel like a scene out of some American movie. So early points for authenticity! We got a table in the downstairs restaurant, which is arranged as intimate booths and has a similar all-American vibe to upstairs.

We started with a nacho platter - which had that liquid nacho cheese on it, along with salsa and (squeezy) sour cream, jalapenos and guacamole.

I think generally I prefer real cheese and real sour cream, but maybe this is more authentic of the American experience? I don't know.

For my main course I had Burnt Ends, which are the succulent, charred end pieces of joints of meat (usually brisket) which have been cooked over a smoke pit. They were very juicy, smoky and tender from the cooking process. Served with fries and coleslaw it was a tasty, greasy and satisfying treat. We also enjoyed copious amounts of Bodean's own BBQ sauce, which was very tasty.

For Soho and considering the 'experience' atmosphere of Bodean's, it was a good value meal. The service. The service was good too - even though few of the staff were American, they embraced an all-American attitude to service, which helped complete the experience, although one of the waiter's was a little over attentive and kept popping up to see if we were still enjoying our meal (we were)! I don't have any other smoke pit experiences to compare this to, but I would definitely recommend Bodean's as a good starting point for London-based smoke-seekers.

Fishy Fridays

2010-03-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

As part of my fish odyssey I'm using Fridays' traditional status as Fish Day to expand my skillz with cooking fish. So far that's included fish pie, paella and portuguese shellfish stews (yum). Last Friday I decided to cook tuna steaks in a Moro-esque style.

Tuna steaks in pomegranate with grilled fennel salad

You'll need:
2 tuna steaks
3 tablespoons of pomegranate molasses
olive oil
Salt'n'pepper
teaspoon of cinnamon

2 bulbs of fennel
Bunch of flat leaf parsley
sherry vinegar
Handful of coriander

Mix together the pomegranate molasses, two tablespoons of olive oil and the cinnamon in a bowl before adding the tuna steaks and making sure all sides make contact with the marinade. Let it marinade for a couple of hours if you can, but half an hour will be fine.

Start heating up a griddle pan.

While the tuna is marinading, chop the fennel top-to-bottom and douse in olive oil. When the griddle pan is smokin', throw on the fennel and let it cook til it is becoming translucent and is charred in the right places. Remove from the pan and put in a salad bowl. Mix up a dressing with sherry vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper and pour over the fennel. Roughly chop some flat leaf parsley and mix into the salad.

Now it's time to cook the tuna. Ensure the griddle pan is still sizzling hot and place the tuna steaks on. Depending on the thickness of the steaks and how you like it, you could cook them for as little as one minute each side.

I served it with fried potatoes and a garlic yoghurt, which worked really well. I love the rich tanginess of the pomegranate molasses combined with the sultry saltiness of the tuna steaks, and the parsley and fennel with their own fragrant notes. It's amazing how a few exciting (but easy enough to find) ingredients can teleport you to Mediterranean holidays, al fresco dining, warm breezes, sea air... Speaking of which, I've just booked my summer holiday - two weeks in Croatia and Bosnia. Mmmmm.

Middle East, made easy

2010-03-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I went with friends to check out Le Comptoir Libanais, a new mini-chain of stylish little canteens serving Lebanese food. I think the first one popped up in Marylebone early last year and now there are branches in Bayswater, Swiss Cottage and Westfield. They've already received heaps of praise from the likes of Time Out, and it seems everyone else went to try it months and months before I did, but hey...!

We started with drinks - I had a zingy rosewater lemonade, which was sour, aromatic and refreshing all in one. The others had similarly zingy and flavoursome fruit drinks, such as pomegranate and orange blossom lemonade. Yum.

We shared a mixed mezze platter, which had everything you would expect. Fresh humus, smoky baba ganoush, citrussy tabbouleh, falafel, cheese samboussek, a rice salad and picked vegetables. It was all very nice, but not radically different or superior to mezze platters you would find at other Lebanese restaurants in the neighbourhood.

Next up we had wraps - I had half a chicken taouk wrap and half a haloumi and olive wrap. The flatbread itself was nice, wholesome tasting. Maybe I'm a bit more used to greasy street food, but I felt the wraps could have benefited from smatterings of the magic triad of salad, tomato sauce and garlic yoghurt sauce. In sensible quantities I hasten to add! This would have presented the wraps from being a bit dry.

Overall, it was a pleasant experience - nicely decorated, friendly service, the food was nice and the bill was very reasonable. But I've had tastier Lebanese food elsewhere in London. The Independent's review likened it to a Middle Eastern Carluccio's - I wouldn't go quite that far, but it did seem to be Middle-East made easy - for people who might not have considered venturing into a 'proper' Lebanese eatery. This is no bad thing really - anything opens up people's palates to the joys of Middle Eastern cooking is a good thing. But don't go to Le Comptoir Libanais expecting much more than an introduction.

Mexican, my way

2010-03-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

When Guardian Media Group hinted that The Observer newspaper might be closed down to cut the company's losses, my heart sunk. Not because the Observer is a very nice Sunday paper, or even the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, but because it could spell the end of Observer Food Monthly (OFM), my monthly food and lifestyle bible. As a teenager I would flick through it, especially enjoying the supermarket product comparisons, strangely. So I was very relieved that OFM got to stay, while Observer Women, Sport Monthly and Music Monthly all wound up. And last weekend, the first 'revamped' OFM was on the shelves!

It was definitely a good edition with some interesting new columns and features, including Lunch with Mariella (Frostrup) - it was Alistair Campbell this month. But what inspired me the most was an interview with Thomasina Miers, the founder of Wahaca, and excerpts from her new book Mexican Food Made Simple. I've yet to cook any of the recipes, but it got me thinking of tasty Mexican inspired recipes to make myself.

Sweet potato and edamame tortillas

You will need:
3 medium size sweet potatoes
100g frozen edamame/soya beans (I buy mine from Japanese supermarkets)
Pinch of cinnamon
Pinch of allspice
Pinch of cumin
Clove of garlic
Small red chilli
Handful of coriander
Splash of soy sauce
Olive oil
Sour cream
Refried beans
Mature cheddar
Tortilla wraps

Peel and chop the sweet potatoes into 1cm cubes. Put on a baking tray, splash on a bit of olive oil, add spices and roast until soft inside and a little crispy on the outside (about 20 minutes). Meanwhile you would be bringing the edamame beans to the boil. Drain when they are ready and combine with the sweet potato cubes when they're ready.

Separately, mix up a de-seeded and finely chopped chilli, crushed garlic and roughly chopped coriander with the juice of a lime, a splash of soy sauce and a glug of olive oil. Pour over the sweet potatoes and mix together.

Now assemble your tortilla - heat it up first, under a grill preferably, spread on some refriend beans and some sour cream, add the mix, top with cheese, fold it up. Enjoy!

I liked the slight oriental tang to it, mellowed out by the sour cream and the cheese.

I enjoyed it so much that I made it again on Friday for friends, along with Wahaca's Pumpkin and chorizo, classic tomato salsa, avocado and lime slop and the usual toppings.

Every last morsel was wolfed down and guests were happy. The chorizo and pumpkin worked incredibly well and the sweet potato and edamame also worked a treat. I'm now excited to get a copy of the Mexican Food Made Simple and hone in my Mexican cooking skillz!

Russian through London

2010-03-14T09:50:00.000-07:00

So it's confirmed; we're moving a bit east to Newington Green in May. My friends who live in NW postcodes are now determined to make sure I make the most of this part of London's offerings before moving two miles east, never to return, obviously.

So today I toddled over to Primrose Hill for lunch with friends at Trojka, a Russian restaurant that is a bit of an 'establishment' among the Primrose Hillbilly types. I love Russian and Eastern European food - hearty stews, sour cream, dill, stuffed things; and then the influences from its neighbours, from Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan and beyond. I went to Moscow a few years back and my friend took me to restaurants serving all kinds of cuisines you would be hard pushed to find in Britain, although I've found both Georgian and Armenian restaurants.

The menu at Trojka covers lots of Russian classics, as well as many favourites from around the bloc. Given my love for this part of the world, choosing a dish was hard, but I plumped for a Coulibiak, a hearty pie filled with salmon, spinach, rice and buckwheat, topped with sour cream and dill and surrounded with a sweet tomato sauce. It was a perfect combination of flavours and textures and was incredible value at £7. My friends had Pelmeni (cheese and potato dumpling) and Gypsy Latke (gypsy-style goulash with potato pancake), both delicious.

To start we shared an 'Armenian salad', which was a simple but winning combination of beetroot, grated carrot, avocado, pepper and new potatoes.

I also had a tea with raspberry syrup - which was bizarre but nice. I remember from my time in Moscow that there's a fondness for sweet things - Russian 'champagne' is so sweet that your teeth feel coated after one glass of the stuff. And raspberry syrup tea was actually quite nice. Without milk, obviously.

The service was a tad slow, but it was a busy Sunday lunch (and Mother's Day of all Sundays), but the food was well worth it. The atmosphere was buzzing with a mixed set of Americans and Russians in London, as well as your usual north London bobo types, and the décor was bright and luscious. I would like to go back for an evening meal at some point - try some of their Georgian wines, Russian vodkas and hear the live music.

New brunch options

2010-03-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Our landlady has decided to sell-up, so we'll soon be upping sticks and finding somewhere else to live. I love living where here (Dartmouth Park), but it's exciting to think of all the new foodie opportunities in a different neighbourhood. I've lived in the Tufnell Park area for 5 years and still haven't been to every restaurant - I can now focus my energies on visiting the rest of the places I want to try out, such as Nuraghe, Spaghetti House and back to 500 for one more delicious meal. Incidentally, they're all Italian! Yum.

Today Pete and I had took a stroll around an area we are quite keen to live in - Newington Green/Mildmay. It was a lovely sunny Sunday and all the locals were out enjoying the weather, brunching away, playing on the green. We walked around the local shops, restaurants and bars and found great grocers, lovely little neighbourhood restaurants and nice pubs too. Definitely a go-er.

We had a lovely little brunch at Tina, We Salute You on King Henry's Walk, N1. It was a light, nicely decorated cafe filled with super-laid back educated hipster types reading the sunday papers. I had a (now ubiquitous) flat white and toast with cream cheese, cinnamon and honey, both delicious. The coffee was rich, creamy and fruity almost; the toast smacked of New York somehow - the tartness of the cream cheese, the muskiness of the cinnamon, the sweetness of the honey. Delicious.

We're hoping to view a flat around the corner from Tina's next week, so fingers crossed that we can make this our local!

Fish pie

2010-02-27T14:59:00.000-08:00

I have a strange history when it comes to fish. Some of the first solid food I had as a littl'un was fish. I used to adore shellfish - I remember greedily gobbling mussels, clams and prawns from my parents' Cataplana on holiday in the Algarve. But at some point, I can't remember why, I stopped liking fish and seafood altogether. For most of my life, I couldn't stomach the thought of the seas' fine produce, save for prawn mayonnaise, batter calamari and tinned tuna. I tried at various points start eating fish again, but it was only when I was in Montreal in 2007 that I plucked up the courage to order a moules frites.

On subsequent trips to Croatia and Portugal, I tried more and more fish and seafood. In Portugal the seafood was particularly good. We stayed in Sesimbra, a fishing village down the coast from Lisbon, where I ate razor clams, crabs, squid, sardines, swordfish.

And yesterday, after much craving, I made my first fish pie. I cycled over to Steve Hatt on Essex Road, which must be one of the best fishmongers in London. The fish is top notch, so fresh that you can't smell a thing, and Steve Hatt's young lads are incredibly jovial and helpful as they prepare your fish. When the guy serving me sussed I was making a fish pie, his eyes lit up and mentioned his envy to his colleague. Such is the love of fish at Steve Hatt's! They also had a great selection of fish and seafood, including the lesser spotted razor clam. I shall have to go back for some another time.

I decided on a Mark Hix recipe for fish pie, as it looked the most sensible and traditional of all the recipes that Google threw up. Start with the basics and then you can innovate! It was quite a process-y meal - lots of different pots and pans, sieves and collanders, but all of it made sense and contributed to a lovely, comforting pie in the end:

I served it with some dressed leaves and some steamed spinach with butter. The mashed potato and the fish elements probably blended together a little too much. This might because I didn't let the fish mix set for long enough. It was absolutely delicious though - just as homely, fresh and luxurious as you'd hope. The way that the recipe suggests cooking the fish (poaching for 2 minutes, then later cooking in the pie) had the fish just right. I used cod, salmon and smoked haddock (smoked by Steve Hatt himself!) and it was the perfect combination. Might have also been nice to have prawns in, but the tweaking and adjusting I can do next time.

The whole experience of making fish pie has definitely upped my confidence in cooking with fish and I am now ready, eager and willing to try out some more dishes. Smoked haddock chowder next? Mmmmm....

Tufnell Park tapas

2010-02-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

Last night I finally made it to Cafe del Parc, after years of cycling and bussing past it regularly. It's located halfway up Junction Road, which is a rather dreary main road that links Tufnell Park and Archway, although there are a few hidden gems there, like the Hideaway and some nice antique shops. I'd always been intrigued by its stylish frontage but never stopped to take much of a closer look.

Inside it is utterly charming - the kitchen is in the middle of the restaurant and totally open, complete with luscious herb plants, bottles of olive oil and hanging chorizo. The tables are arranged around the kitchen; the menus printed on brown paper and attached to clipboards to accommodate for the seasonally evolving menu. The music was fairly loud Indian instrumental stuff, which actually worked quite well. Café del Parc is said to be inspired by old Ibiza and you can well imagine that hippy vibe there.

The menu was absolutely WOW. There were probably about 40 tapas dishes on it, all of which would have been delicious. Luckily there we were a party of four and could justify a reasonable order, even with one seafood eating vegetarian! The wine list was also incredibly well chosen and reasonably priced - we plumped for a rosé that was deep fuschia in colour and beautiful to taste.

We started with some home made bread with olive oil and some olives with garlic and preserved lemon. All of which were amazing. Our first round of tapas was potted shrimps in saffron butter - tasted of the sea, a carrot and lentil stew which was rich with cumin and served with aniseedy dill, and filo pastry stuffed with spinach, feta and pomegranates - this was one of the highlights of the evening - sweet, sour and salty all in one, we could well have ordered seconds.

Next came Moorish lamb skewers with butter bean mash. The lamb was smoky and tender and still juicy and pink inside. The butter bean mash alone would be worth ordering the dish for - rich with roast garlic and herbs, my friend has already tried to re-create it at home!

Calamari rings arrived next - and were a world away from your typical ruibbery bland calamari experience. Again, they tasted of the sea, the breadcrumbs tasted positively healthy and they came with a delicious garlic mayonnaise.

The next dish was a meaty highlight - pan-fried chicken, chorizo and Serrano ham in a creamy, paprika-y sauce. I could have eaten every last drop. We also had deep fried goats cheese balls in orange blossom honey - goats cheese is one of the few things I don't enjoy, but here it was so smooth and soft that it was actually a pleasure to eat.

Next up was razor clams and salad in a sweet wasabi dressing. There could have been a more generous serving of razor clams, but they were still sweet, meaty and delicious. The wasabi dressing gave it a nice kick too.

The last dish to come was the ol' classic, Patatas Bravas, which you just can't go wrong with really:

After such a delicious meal it was hard to resist having a dessert. We opted for the home made ice cream selection, which included a scoop of malaga raisin and cinnamon, a scoop of pomegranate and a scoop of orange ice cream. Wow. We also shared a chocolate mouse, which was rich and eggy, topped with some vanilla ice cream.

Every dish was absolutely excellent, but there were so many more we could have chosen. 12 dishes between four was just the right amount though. I will certainly be going back with anyone who is interested to make more progress on the menu. The tapas were definitely reasonably priced rather than cheap, but the ingredients were clearly of excellent quality and when the bill worked out as £23 per head including wine, it certainly felt like one of the best value meals I've had in a long time. So, whether you live in the area or not, it's definitely worth making a trip to Cafe del Parc if you are in search of quality, imaginative tapas in a lovely setting with great service!

Legend of Leong

2010-02-19T10:16:00.000-08:00

After a late Sunday afternoon film at the Prince Charles with friends, we wanted to have some tasty food in China Town. So many places, many tourist traps, but we plumped for Leong's Legends on Lisle Street after reading many favourably mixed reviews. The décor was all timber and low lights and there was a bit of a speakeasy vibe, which was quite cool really. The restaurant was busy for a Sunday night and it passed the age-old quality benchmark of 'native' diners.

We kicked off with some some turnip dumplings, which were all shrivelled and flaky on the outside and gooey and flavoursome inside.

We also had some steamed vegetarian dumplings, which weren't too exciting really:

For the main course, Ben had the 'three cup' squid - three cups refers to the equal quantities of soy sauce, rice wine and sesame oil. With a hint of anise, this was a rich, treacly, more-ish sauce that I kept dipping my spoon into.

I had Kung Po chicken, which was sweet and fiery. It was served with heaps of whole chillies - I tried one and it blew my head off.

I'll admit that the service was a bit shambolic, dishes coming out at lots of different times, chicken instead of squid in the first instance, other dishes forgotten. But they got it right in the end, and were not rude about it at any point as some reviews have suggested. I'm no expert on Taiwanese cuisine, but it tasted great, ingredients seemed to be fresh and it was definitely a cut above the average China Town fare.

Bruxelles sans moules

2010-02-13T12:35:00.000-08:00

Pete and I went to Brussels last weekend and we didn't have moules frites, we didn't have waffles, and we didn't eat copious amounts of belgian chocolate. Fail? No way!

We did have...

A delicious salmon and broccoli quiche and yummy healthy salad:

A spinach burger (!!) from lovely organic vegetarian cafe Greenway, wherethe friends we were staying with used to go every week when they studied in Gent:

Boudin blanc while perusing the Jeu de Balle fleamarket:

Falke's delicious home-made lasagne:

And a sneaky cone of frite et mayo after some serious sampling of beers at Plasir Flagey:

And lots and lots of amazing beer.

So we learnt there's more to Belgium than the old culinary clichés. But the absence of moules prompted me cook some this week!

Casa Moro

2010-01-24T14:53:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to receive Casa Moro for Christmas - it's even more beautiful than the first Moro cookbook, all turquoisey azulejos on the cover, more stories about ingredients and places. There's more of a Spanish leaning in this one, with detailed accounts of the Sams' travels through Andalucia and Morocco.

I tried making their their 'potato cakes stuffed with lamb and pine nuts', which sounded quite like the bombas picanté I enjoyed at Café Andaluz in Edinburgh over Christmas. The recipe involved making an aromatic lamb mince mixture with lovely herbs and toasted pine nuts, which would then be encased in a potato dough and fried. I use the conditional tense because I got flustered and totally screwed up the potato dough. I get stressed about fiddly bits of cooking and try to avoid complex pastry making and other fine-motor-skill-demanding processes. So I turned the dish into a 'middle eastern' Shepherd's Pie by putting the lamb mix in a casserole dish and topping with the potato dough! And it was wonderful - who needs fiddly little balls anyway?!

I served it with my interpretation of a dish I had at Café Andaluz - roasted cubes of parsnip and sweet potato, with chick peas in a yoghurt-tahini-parsley sauce. It was lovely and earthy, tangy, warming.

To make the lamb mixture fry some finely chopped onion in olive oil and butter. Once golden, add 300g lamb mince, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, some grated nutmeg, the ground seeds of 3 cardamom pods, 3 ground cloves. Cook for a bit longer before adding some toasted pine nuts, finely chopped parsley, a tablespoon of tomato purée and a splash of water to add moisture. Cook for another few minutes and you have a beautifully fragrant, exotic dish that will transport you far away from this grim British winter.

Persia, near Primrose Hill

2010-01-17T14:47:00.000-08:00

My favourite thing about living in London is the sheer cultural diversity of its inhabitants. I love being on a bus and hearing different languages in every direction. But most importantly, every diaspora group brings with them their culinary traditions by opening restaurants, cafes, grocers and delis as cultural outposts for diaspora to seek comfort and for curious diners' to discover the exciting and far flung cuisines.

I admire the dedication of The World in 202 Meals in their mission to sample every national cuisine moonlighting in London's restaurants. I have a similar mission in mind, and made a visit to Iran on Haverstock Hill last weekend in the form of a restaurant called Tandis.

I've long been intrigued by Persian/Iranian cuisine - my good friend Afsi is half-Iranian and I have many fond memories of popping round her family's house and snacking on leftover Salad Oliviyeh or hearing tales of the perfect Tah-dig. More recently, I've been dying to go to Persepolis in Peckham and get my hands on some rose petals, dried limes, barberries and other exotic staples of the Persian kitchen. Similarly, Tandis has been on my radar for some time having featured in numerous lists.

Everything about Tandis was great. The service was warm, helpful, personal - the owner was keen to ensure we chose dishes well and entered into a jovial debate with my friend Tamara over the virtues of different condiments for her Loobia Polow (her Iraqi roots said yoghurt, he said tomato salad). The décor is stylish and luxurious, the space light and airy. And the food...wow. There is a big range of starters that you could eat Mezze style, but the waiter advised us to save ourselves for the mains. The mains include a wide range of kebabs as well as some rice dishes and a long list of meaty and vegetarian stews.

I was most interested in the stews - some with split pea and aubergine, others with ground, dried limes and sour plums. I opted for Khoresh-e esfenaj-o alu - a stew of Lamb, spinach and sour plums. It was incredible - the sour, sweetness of the sauce, the green vigour of the spinach and the tender, slow-cooked lamb. Wow. It was almost overwhelmingly tasty with such potent flavours. It came with a huge pile of saffron rice - I love that pungent, perfumed taste. A vegetarian friend had the a split pea and aubergine stew which was also tasty.

We had been advised to save space for dessert - and it had to be faloodeh - a rose and lime sorbet filled with thin vermicelli and topped with sour cherries. It was invigorating, perfumey, sour and bizarre. But very good.

I learnt that the sour taste is prominent in Persian food experience. I think sour is quite an acquired taste - it doesn't feature in many European cuisines and, when it is, it's balanced against another taste sensation. I like it though. That said, there were plenty of dishes that weren't all about the sour. I will definitely be going back - it was very reasonably priced (£7-8 for a stew main, £10 - 11 for a kebab main) and there is just so much on that menu I want to try!

Christmas lunch #2

2010-01-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

I like a traditional Christmas lunch - turkey, trimmings, etc. Without fail, I have had that traditional lunch at some point over the Christmas period, even as my family shrinks, expands, ages, modernises, dissipates and reforms. New techniques have been introduced over the years - goose fat on potatoes, parmesan on parsnips, pancetta and chestnuts with the sprouts - but the essential dishes are always the same:

Turkey
Gravy
Bread sauce
Cranberry sauce
Roast potatoes
Roast parsnips
Brussels Sprouts
Pigs in blankets
Stuffing

The most important things in that lunch for me are bread sauce (well-cloved) and the stuffing, which my mum makes every year from a Good Housekeeping recipe - chestnut puree, lemon zest, parsley, bacon and breadcrumbs coming together so nicely, they'd do as a dish in themselves. My mum makes the cranberry sauce from scratch with generous shavings of orange zest.

A recent addition to the Christmas food experience is the turkey hunt. My sister is a free-ranging environmentalist and can quite easily live off food that supermarkets throw out. On some more Christmas Eves my sister has showed up at my mum's house with a couple of top notch turkeys that she picked out of M&S or Waitrose bins totally free. This year my mum had her offspring positioned in supermarkets across Edinburgh waiting for the turkeys to be reduced in price. At Morningside Waitrose other people were onto the same trick as me (those canny, tight-arsed Morningsiders!), and turkeys were flying (almost literally) off the shelves as soon as the halo'd red and white reduction sticker had been slapped on. My good timing helped us to get a gigantic organic, free range, bronze-feathered turkey for £27 (would have been £65!).

This Christmas was a funny one - my mum's husband was stuck abroad, my sister was stuck at a protest camp and, in the end, there was just three of us eating. It was an awesome dinner and we enjoyed it with a lovely bottle of Gewürztraminer. I piled my plate so impossibly high, but still managed to finish every last morsel.

Needless to say, there were plenty of leftovers. I love re-creating the meal in smaller quantities until there is only leftover turkey. Then it's time for turkey pie, turkey curry, turkey soup, turkey risotto, turkey salad and so on.

Christmas lunch #1

2009-12-23T00:32:00.000-08:00

Gathering together around the ritual of food and wine is one of my favourite things about Christmas. Over the course of December, I'll get together with most people I know at some point for a meal. Working with a bunch of lovely foodies means that the team Christmas lunch is something to look forward to indeed.

I work in the leafy inner-suburb of Muswell Hill, which has more boutiques, cafes and delis than you could ever need. Yet, for all that muesli money, there's very little in the way of nice independent restaurants or decent pubs. So for our Christmas lunch we went to the Woodman pub at Highgate tube. The Woodman used to be a run-down spot for ageing and under-age drinkers, positioned unfavourably at a junction on grimy ol' Archway Road (A1).

It got 'done up' almost two years ago and now it's a cosy, but spacious, unpretentious pub, with a great kitchen, well-picked wine list and massive outside area. The menu has French, British and Mediterranean influences and the Christmas menu reflected all those.

I had braised Lamb shoulder with aman bayaldi (slow cooked aubergine and other med veg) with olive mash. Joyously, massive bowls of traditional trimmings were placed in the middle of the table so that even non-traditionalists could enjoy pigs in blankets, red cabbage and roast potatoes and parsnips.

To finish I had a chocolate cheesecake, which was unsurprisingly rich and luxurious and had a lovely, caramelly biscuit base.

Most people will have had their Christmas meals by now, but bear the Woodman in mind if you're ever up in that neck of the woods (literally - Highgate and Queens Wood are both within spitting distance of the Woodman!) - it is a welcome change from the chain pubs and restaurants of Highgate Village and Muswell Hill.

Big brunch

2009-12-20T12:02:00.000-08:00

I hate breakfast for the most part. I've gone through almost every cereal brand there is, tried every topping on toast you could think of and experimented with all kinds of milk substitutes - oat, almond, soy, rice. And I've never settled on any one breakfast that I can sustain for any length of time. But one thing I can always come back to is french toast or eggy bread.

As a teenager, it was one of the first things I learnt to cook myself. I can't remember being shown how to do it - but my mum must have shown me at some point. My favourite topping is cooked apples, bacon and maple syrup. On weekend days when I wasn't working at Boots I'd put a CD on and leisurely go about pulling it together.

This is how I do it. For the eggy bread, beat together a couple of eggs and a reasonable splash of milk. Mix in some cinnamon. Get four slices of thick, soft white bread and dip them in the egg mix so that they're covered in the mixture. Heat up a pan with sunflower oil until hot. Fry on both sides until nice and brown.

Meanwhile, you'd have peeled some a big cooking apple, cored and diced it. Fry in another pan in butter. On the other side of that pan put in four rashers of bacon. Cook over a medium heat - adding a handful of currants and a generous pinch of cinnamon while you're at it. Once the apple is soft and the bacon crispy, spread evenly over the eggy bread.

Plop a couple of dollops of greek yoghurt and swirl some maple syrup over it and you're good to go!

Roasted love

2009-12-18T14:10:00.000-08:00

Now that it is certifiably winter, there's no better excuse than to be cooking delicious roast dinners. One thing I've learned is that there are whole different worlds of roasting. Thinking about all the roast dinners I've had in my life, I can attribute different styles of roasts to different people. I'd say my mum's are French-inspired - real herbs, lemons and nice vegetables cooked alongside. My grandparents' roasts are much more traditional, served with lovely rich gravy and root vegetables, often straight out their garden. Mmmm.

When it comes to cooking a roast myself, I'm quite a fan of rubbing, marinading and then slow cooking. I tend to buy less classic cuts of meet - lamb and pork shoulders recently. I like grinding up spices - like cumin seeds or fennel seeds - with garlic, salt and chilli, and maybe paprika. Then cooking for hours and hours on a low temperature. I cooked a shoulder of lamb for 13 hours in anticipation of dinner last Sunday and it was just so, so tender and moist. The meat was literally falling off the bone as I took a knife to it, while the exterior was crispy and spicy.

Accompaniments matter too. I've been inspired by my recent visit to Moro and served recent roasts with braised cabbage topped with yoghurt and sumac. Celariac mash accompanied a pork shoulder...

...and a full Ottolenghi-esque mezze accompanied the lamb. I served it with roast potatoes and artichokes with lemon and olives, grilled peppers in green tahini, beetroot with yoghurt and dill, lemon braised fennel, and braised cabbage with yoghurt and sumac again. It was delicious.

I'm going to experiment with some other roasting styles over the Winter. I have the Silver Spoon and a friend recently gave me Ripailles, so there should be lots of new inspirations!

A taste of Kenya

2009-12-06T10:52:00.001-08:00

At work I've been lucky enough to have been joined by a lovely Kenyan lady called Nancy on a Commonwealth Fellowship placement. Of course, much of our discussion has been of food, especially lunches. Together we've explored the difference between lasagnes from M&S, Sainsbury's, Planet Organic and Cafe on the Hill, we've delighted in worktime snacking on flavoured rice cakes and cake bars. We googled and googled for Kenyan restaurants in London and, shockingly, there ain't none. The closest we could find was a Ugandan restuarant in Tottenham Hale. Finally, on Friday evening, Nancy cooked Kenyan food for the team and I can taste those amazing flavours!

Nancy prepared:
A goat stew
A banana stew
A bean stew
Chapati
Ugali (Maize cake)
Sweet potatoes

It looked a little something like this:

The goat stew was my absolute favourite. I'd eaten goat meat before but not for a long time. It was so sweet and tender, with a rich, strong flavour. I can't understand why we don't eat more of it. The sauces were all fairly sweet and mildly spiced. There is a large Indian population in Kenya and their culinary influence is clear - chapati is served with most meals and the spice mixes are similar but subtler.

The bases of the dishes were mostly tomatoes, garlic and onions, before stock was added. Despite being fairly 'conventional' ingredients (bananas excluded, of course) but the flavours were distinctive and exotic. I guess that's the goat and the banana for you! Nancy wasn't able to get quite a few ingredients hat she wanted, even in the multicultural mecca of Finsbury Park. Ingredients, such as ground peanuts, would have showcased a completely different set of flavours if they'd been available.

If you're interested in trying to make some Kenyan food, visit this website

Moro

2009-11-26T13:44:00.000-08:00

A few years ago a dear friend bought me the Moro cookbook. This was when I'd just moved back from the culinary wasteland of Germany (you would not believe how terrible supermarkets are there) and I was beginning to get into cooking big time with my flatmates. I was excited to be back in London - land of farmers' markets, normal markets, global food options. I delighted in skipping up Seven Sisters Road to get the generous bundles of fresh herbs, slightly exotic vegetables and fish to make Moro meals. I read about the restaurant time after time in the Observer Food Monthly and in Time Out, I walked past it countless times, I eyed up the menu online. For our birthdays (in June and July), my partner and I decided we would treat ourselves to a meal at Moro. And last weekend, at the end of November, we finally did!

It all started simply, with delicious sour dough bread olive oil. We munched on that while we contemplated the short, but perfectly mouthwatering menu.

It's worth saying that the service is impeccable at Moro. It was a busy Friday night, the restaurant was bustling with contented, enthused punters and they could easily have been hurrying us along, but were friendly, informal and attentive. We finally settled on a selection of sherries - not the kind of sherries that your grandma drinks too much of at Christmas, but exciting, delicate, interesting sherries served perfectly chilled. The website describes them like so:

"Try this selection to discover the sheer deliciousness of bone dry sherry, from the salty sea breeze tang of Manzanilla, through the more pungent, assertive Fino, finishing with the more complex Manzanilla Pasada whose rock pool aromas are overlaid with subtle nutty age."

For starter I had a pumpkin kibbeh stuffed with sweetly spiced onions, raisins and chick peas. It was served with a radish and pomegranate salad and musky seasoned yoghurt.

Pete had swiss chard stalks with raisins and anchovies. It was earthy, salty and sweet all in one.

My main course was strips of charcoal grilled lamb, served with a smoky, spicy aubergine and bulgur wheat pilav and a shredded cabbage and yoghurt salad. It really was just heaven on a plate - the combination of flavours were perfectly balanced, the meat was super quality and the charcoal imparted just the right amount of smokiness.

Pete had woodroasted pheasant breast, served with onions caremalised in Pedro Ximenez and braised cabbage. I should also say that the wine list was excellent, with a really broad, well-chosen selection of wines by the glass. We had a glass of Gotim Bru and a glass of Mestizaje (described as mid-weight modernist!).

For dessert it had to be the classic Moro yoghurt cake with pistachio and pomegranate seeds. It's something I've made from the Moro recipe book before, so I was keen to try it as it should be. I was pleased to find that my own version wasn't too far off the mark, but this was just stunning: sweet, sour, fruity, nutty, and perfectly paired with a glass of Vino Dulce de Moscatel!

I can honestly say that it was one of the best meals of my entire life. It was a faultless experience, the food and the wine were out of this world, the atmosphere was warm and happy, and punters and waiters alike were equally enthused about the food. Now - to try and replicate at home!

A little something Caucasian...

2009-11-19T14:41:00.000-08:00

In 2007 I spent a month in New York following the end of my finals. I spent every day exploring different neighbourhoods and their unique culture and culinary offerings. One day I went to Coney Island and ate the famous hotdogs from Nathan's on the boardwalk. I walked along the other side of the Atlantic a few blocks and ended up at the other Brighton Beach, a Russian enclave known as Little Odessa. All the street and shop signs were written in Cyrillic characters and when I went into a CD shop I was greeted in Russian. My trusty Time Out guide recommended a Georgian restaurant.

It was the most surreal meal of my life. The restaurant was cavernous and plush, like an empty Las Vegas casino. We were the only people in the restaurant, though the waiters were loading up a massive banqueting table behind us for a diaspora feast.

We started with a kind of Georgian mezze and it was then that I fell in love with Georgian cuisine. Positioned between Russia and Turkey, the influences of both cuisines were beautifully present in the dishes. Copious amounts of dill, parsley and coriander were in the spinach salad, pureed beetroot, potato salad and med veg salad, with ground walnuts adding a earthy richness to the former and dotted with gem-like pomegranate seeds. It really was a flavour explosion.

We drunk traditional Georgian semi-sweet red wine - the vineyards are supposedly the oldest in the world and the wine is just so beautiful, rich, complex, ancient. Fairly typical in Georgian cuisine is to serve food at room temperature - for my main I had spring chicken in a walnut sauce, one of the most exquisite and satisfying thing I've ever tasted. All the while a singer sang hi-NRG Slavic ballads to the almost empty room, adding to the otherworldliness of this periphery of New York City.

London has a couple of Georgian restaurants. For a traditional meal, go to Tbilisi on Holloway Road; a restaurant I love so much that I will blog about it in its own right some point soon. Little Georgia near Broadway Market is also good, though a little bit lighter during the day. My mum gave me a Georgian recipe book for Christmas last year and I try and cook a mini feast every now and then.

Recently, with the aide my lovely Magimix, I was able to re-create the chicken satsivi (walnut sauce). I served it with rice and a salad of roasted med veg, dressed in red wine vinegar, fenugreek, ground coriander and lots of fresh herbs. Delicious. Recipe here.

Japanese food: super kawaii!!

2009-11-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

When I think about what I do and don't know about food, I realise just how much I don't know. Japanese cuisine is one that I am keen to get to know better. Various friends and colleagues have 'got into it' and invested in Sushi sets and the whole 'nother world of stock cupboard ingredients you need to make it well. A friend whose brother spent a few years in Japan took me to the Japan Centre at Picadilly Circus. I was amazed to find a veritable superstore of all things Japanese - fresh noodles and soups, chiller cabinets with ready meals, a world of dry goods and, downstairs, a bookshop.

At the bookshop we bought our friend Sabrina a cookbook on Japanese pub food, Izakaya. It tells you all about the very particular and interesting pub food and culture in Japan and, when I went to a new Japanese pub in Clerkenwell, the Crane and Tortoise in August, I was able to tell my co-drinker all about it! Basically, it's a bit like tapas - lots of fried little snacks with exciting Japanese condiments, like wasabi mayonnaise. We had deep fried octopus balls, pork dumplings, and some more conventional potato wedges:

I also went to check out Ikura on Haverstock Hill with my Belsize Park-dwelling chum Tamara who loves raw fish and raves about the endorphins she gets from it. The restaurant is all sleek black and red interiors, but not at all pretentious and expensive. I'm told the food is very authentic, too. We started with delicious spicy grilled octopus, chewy and smoky, just how I like it.

While Tamara gorged on raw fish...

...I opted for a more low-key brothy udon noodles. It was earthy and... gosh, I don't know if I have the vocabulary to describe Japanese food! It made me think of Murakami books - food always features throughout them and I remember various times when a character has been schlurping on udon noodles in the middle of the night in some 24-hour cafe. That strange, somehow health-giving seaweedy taste, the salty both and the bizarre addition of reconstituted seafood bits; it's all other worldly and evocative of Murakami, which is a good thing.

The food was delicious; words fail me right now, but Ikura was good, wholesame, low key and affordable.

After some more sushi for lunch today I have resolved to learn more about Japanese cooking in 2010 and maybe some of it will end up here!

My Portuguese sweet tooth

2009-11-01T11:02:00.000-08:00

My adventures in Portugal at the beginning of July seem like a million miles away with autumn in London getting into full sway. But I'm not too far from Lisboa Delicatessen in Camden where I can buy great pasteis de nata and bring it all back. Looking through my food pictures from Portugal, it struck me how many different Portuguese puddings there are and how integral they are to the cuisine.

Pastries or pasteis are a big part of everyday life in Portugal. Every neighbourhood or town, however grand or scruffy, will have at least one decent pastelaria, where locals will stand at the long bar to have a quick bica (espresso) and a pastry of some sort. When we were in Portugal, we noticed that 3-5pm was a very popular time to engage in this ritual.

The most famous pasteis is the pasteis de nata, or 'Portuguese custard tarts' as some call them. I don't like that description - it puts them on the same level as those insipid chemical custard tarts pensioners buy from supermarkets. Anyway. I had at least 10 in my 14 days in Portugal, and none were better than from the world famous pastelaria in Belem. We had three between the two of us and I could have eaten a couple more!

We visited the town of Sintra, which is full of elegant and dramatic palaces on top of mountains, and were sure to try their local delicacies. These are called queijadas de Sintra and are made with fresh portuguese cheese and sugar and egg and cinammon and have a slightly pungent savoury taste to them, in a good way.

Watching locals ordering and eating is an almost foolproof way of making sure you get a real local taste, so after eating our queijadas, we ordered one of these pastries which was filled with the same cheesy mix as the queijadas. Also delicious.

Pasteis de coco are another popular treat. It's another egg based pastry, this time with coconut and a cherry on top. Ah!

When we were in the Alentejan city of Evora we shared a hefty slice of chocolate cake made by the nuns in the convent. It was as rich and gooey and lovely as it looks.

Come Dine With Me: the conclusion

2009-10-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

I posted earlier about the Come Dine With Me 'competition' that some of my friends and I were doing. In total there were four teams, hosting four meals. To recap:

The first couple's meal took place in June. Their theme was Salon de Versailles (think: Marie Antionette era France). This is their summer fruit and prosecco terrine.

My partner and I were up next, in early August. Our theme was modern Scandinavian. I think our star turn was our Smörgåsbord, pictured below.

At the beginning of September, the theme was Glamorous Gourmet. Unfortunately, I was all fluey and had barely functional tastebuds. Luckily, the flavours was strong! We started with a cassis/cava cocktail that had real flowers in, and then went on wheat-free blinis topped with goats cheese, aubergine, and med veg. Next up was slow cooked cherry tomatoes topped with a creamy concoction. The meaty main was duck in a cassis sauce served with mashed potatoes.

This was followed by a lemon tarte with a pine nut crust - sumptuous. Next up was a 'modern cheese board', with plum, Camembert and drizzled with clove oil. We finished with homemade chocolate peanut truffles. Yum.

The final Come Dine With Me was a fortnight ago and the theme was Alice in Wonderland: Mad Hatter's Teaparty. The event took place at my friends' massive warehouse apartment in Dalston, which is in a maze like building. Playing cards lead the way through the corridors to their apartment where we were greeted with an Alice and Wonderland cocktail: an Amaretto sour. Next we took to the picnic tables for a mini meal of blackberry tart, custard tart, buttered toast, turkey sandwich and a toffee. This was chased up with a cocktail contained in a miniature bottle with a 'Drink me' tag attached.

Introduced as starter, we then had a tomato and vodka consommé with a heart shaped ice cube. And next was what we thought was the main course, a freshly made fish and chips and mushy peas wrapped in that day's tabloids. That's where things started getting a bit more zany - the portion was small so everyone asked for more and duly ate more - but the course was followed by another starter: a leek and feta terrine. And THEN we had the main course: pies and salad. By this stage everyone was totally stuffed.

But there was still plenty of eating to be done! A whole pool table covered in desserts - boozy chocolate mousses, cupcakes, jam tarts, chocolate brownies. And even a cheeseboard. Not that anyone had any capacity left!

The results of the competition were announced at the end - all parties' scores were very close, but my team won! Woohoo!

Shroom safari

2009-10-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

After a hectic week the last thing you'd want to do is get up at 8 O'clock on Saturday morning, travel for 1.5 hours across north and east London to get to Hainault in Essex and spend the morning getting drizzled on in muddy woodland. But yesterday was different.

I was, in fact, on a fungal foray; mushroom-picking. A friend from work who is also an avid foodie had been banging on since last October about the wonders of this mushroom walk lead by a local self-confessed mushroom anorak. Some of my fondest foodie memories are of walking through fields in the Scottish borders with my Grandad, picking massive, delicious field mushrooms. How could I say no?

About 30 other people also decided to spend this drizzly, but mild, Saturday morning in Hainault Forest in the pursuit of mushroom knowledge and mushroom. The guide knew almost every mushroom we found by site and advised on their edibility. This was my only consideration. We found fungi of all varieties, growing on trees, bright red, prickly, slimy, waxy, aniseedy. I was with six people I knew, so had to restrain my hunter-gather instincts and share my finds, but I ended up with a sizeable haul, including one oyster mushroom, one big parasol mushroom, one puffball, lots of butter caps and quite a few jews' ears.

They made for a tasty cooked breakfast this morning, sautéed with butter, garlic and parsley and then with a splash of calvados and some sour cream. Served on toast, it was a hearty, herby start to a day about town.

Baked happiness

2009-10-23T10:13:00.000-07:00

When it comes to comfort food, nothing beats a spicy, Italian style tomato sauce. If, like me, you always have tinned tomatoes, olive oil, chilli flakes and garlic in, you can have it whenever you want, whatever the weather. I could eat it by the spoonful, without accompaniment. Sometimes I like to have it with penne, topped with basil and parmesan. Other times it is the making of a sausage bake.

But one of my all time favourites is the baked aubergine parmigiana. Gorgeous smoky aubergines, chargrilled, combined with this most sumptuous of sauces and heavenly expanses of parmesan cheese. And topped with mozzarella crispy breadcrumbs. Could you get any more comforting?!

It's an incredibly simple dish to make. For 4 people, you'll need two tins of tomatoes, one onion, three aubergine, one packet of mozzarella, garlic, parmesan, breadcrumbs, wine vinegar and basil.

First, chop the aubergine into 1cm slices across the way. Heat up a griddle pan with a little oil and cook the aubergines in batches so they have nice chargrill marks.

Meanwhile, finely chop the garlic and onion and, with a teaspoon of chilli flakes, allow to sizzle for a while in olive oil. Add the two tins of chopped tomatoes and allow to cook, uncovered for about fifteen minutes. Put a little wine vinegar at the end and tear up some basil leaves and stir in.

Once the aubergines are all done and the sauce has thickened put a thin layer of tomato sauce across the bottom of a lasagne kinda dish, then a smattering of parmesan, followed by a single layer of aubergines. Repeat these layers until you’ve used all the ingredients up, finishing with a little sauce and then cover in grated mozzarella. Top this with a scattering of breadcrumbs and put in the oven for about 20 minutes.

Once it's nicely browned and crispy on top, take it out the oven, let it cool a little, and serve in nice big wedges with salad and garlic bread. Ah!

Belissima! So simple, so easy, so happy-making.

What a Turkey!

2009-10-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Deciding where I want to holiday is always tough. Cuisine is the primary consideration, but that's got to be weighed against authenticity, value, climate, language, etc. My trip to Portugal earlier in the year ticked all of those boxes, but the time spent planning it to make sure that it did tick those boxes was inordinate. To recuperate from the party conference season I wanted an easy, quick fix and decided on Turkey.

The WHERE was the tricky bit. Istanbul was the penultimate destination on my inter rail trip in 2004. I remember the excitement of the 23 hour train journey there from Bucharest, drinking tea and eating salted cucumbers with the conductor, and then arriving in the scorching July heat to find myself, as I had hoped, in another world. I have ideas about travelling through Turkey by train and bus and being very thorough and authentic, so I didn't want to use up too many Turkey credits with this one. In the end, I decided on Oludeniz, on Turkey's south western coast. From my research, it was beautiful, accessible (via package holidays), affordable and still warm and sunny in mid-October.

Oludeniz was indeed beautiful, accessible, affordable and still warm and sunny in mid-October, but it was also full of Brits Abroad. Brits Abroad are not especially keen to immerse themselves in local cultures and cuisines, and the vast majority of the restaurants served full English breakfasts, apple crumble, egg and chips and all those clichéd favourites. There were, however, three great restaurants in the town serving very nice, typical Turkish cuisine, so all was not lost.

The Oba Motel is the last remaining of the hippy settlements that were in Oludeniz long before the asphalt blocks, neon cocktail bars and Turkish delight shops. It still has tree house style huts to stay in, but also features a large, mostly outdoor restaurant service up tasty Turkish cuisine and genial service.

We visited a couple of times, and on both occasions we started with a freebie mini mezze plate, with burnt aubergine, a yoghurt and garlic dip, spiced hummus and a tomato and pepper dip. This was served with the customary so-freshly-baked-it's-all-puffed-up-with-steam pita breads, which are a million miles from those dry pitas you get all vacuum packed from the supermarket.

On my first visit, I had a tasty vegetable casserole, cooked and served in a clay pot. Yummy squash, aubergine, carrots, peas and peppers featured in this simple but satisfying dish.

The other time we visited the Oba Motel, we treated ourselves to a whopping fish platter, with swordfish, calamari, prawns, white tuna and lake trout. All freshly grilled over coals and served simply with the usual sides of rice, chips, salads and green bean stew. The fish was so, so fresh and juicy and laced with just the right amount of char taste.

Desserts in restaurants are seemingly not too big a deal in Turkey, the only dish consistently on menus was baklava, obviously. At Oba we tried a dish, which was warm bananas with (warm) honey, cream and cinnamon. It was really nice, but I'm not sure how traditional it is. Any ideas?

I'll write about the rest of my Turkish culinary experiences later...

Fig and Fennel salad

2009-10-01T10:26:00.000-07:00

Not a great start to blogging to take another two week break. But I've been busy guvna, honest! I actually have. My job involves going to each political party's annual conference, staying for about 3 or 4 days at each, putting on an event, meeting politicians and other bigwigs, going to lots of events for interest, to ask questions and live off the endless spreads of canapes, fingerfoods and run-of-the-mill wines. I'm going to blog about all that jazz later. The super-extra time pressure is a self-inflicted part-time Masters which I've signed up to do alongside my full-time job. It's all going to get crazy!

Today, however, I'm going to tell you about a tasty meal I cooked a couple of weeks back before it slips my mind.

I was walking past the fruit'n'veg stall at Kentish Town tube when I was grabbed by a scrawled notice: "4 figs for £1". I picked up 4. Then I saw another scrawled notice: "2 fennel for 50p". I bought 2. I halved and griddled the figs, then sliced top-down the fennels and griddled them too. Meanwhile I roasted quickly some chopped walnuts, prepared some rocket, chopped some manchego cheese, threw the lot together and whisked up a sherry vinegar dressing. Mmmm...it was delicious, smoky, earthy. It looked like this:

I have a thing for 'posh' sausages. When I lived in Berlin, you'd think I'd have had plenty of brilliant sausages. But once you've tried the exciting sausages available in farmers' markets and better supermarkets in Britain, German sausages don't cut it. The sausages you get in the supermarket and from street stalls in Germany are so processed you'd hardly know there was meat in them.

While there are clearly many better sausages to be had than the Sainsbury's Taste the Difference range, my biggest weakness in sausages has always been their Parmesan and Pancetta blend. Any guest that came to visit me would ask "can I bring anything from Britain? Cheddar cheese? Irn Bru?". No. Parmesan and Pancetta sausages from Sainsbury's. I hadn't seen them in Sainsbury's for about a year and then spotted them at the big 'un in Camden and had to buy a pack. I cooked them and served them with the fig'n'fennel salad and some zingy potato salad too:

All in all, a lovely end of summer meal.

Latin meat sweat

2009-09-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

My Dad was in town over the weekend to speak at a conference and we finally hit up one of London's many rodizio restaurants: Rodizio Preto, which is in Pimlico.

A rodizio or a churrascaria is a kind of Brazilian restaurant where various cuts of various meats are grilled on a barbecue, then brought to your table by a waiter who cuts you a portion off and puts it on your plate. Being quarter Brazilian and my Dad being half, we thought we would get back to our roots and discover our Latin spirit. Or something equally contrived.

I hadn't really known what to expect. Pimlico, I'd dismissed as a nothing area: Victoria Station Borders, but was quite surprised to walk down Wilton Street to find a bustling, broad high street lined with restaurants, shops and bars with a well-heeled but not exclusive feel. Preto itself looked bustling, 20 and 30-somethings in their Saturday night finest filled the sprawling outside tables as smartly dressed waiters tender to their meat and alcohol needs. As we approached, my heart sunk very briefly - was this my worst nightmare? A gimmicky good times restaurant?!

You help yourself to an extensive salad bar, which includes various rices, typical Brazilian bean stews, salsas, various potato salads, battered bananas/plantains, croquettes, cabbage stuffed with cream cheese, pork scratchings, onion rings, more cabbage...phew. I filled my plate to the max - I wanted to try everything. With just one piece of meat on it, it looked a little something like this:

Waiters cheerfully walked around with huge cuts of meat on skewers, fresh off the barbecue. They came around at a pace that just allowed you to do one portion justice before saying yes to the next. Different cuts included beef steak, beef ribs, pork shoulder, chicken hearts, chicken wings, turkey breast, lamb , spicy sausage. Etc. I paced myself and tried just about every different cut that was on offer. Each cut was succulent, melt-in-yr-mouth good and you could tell it was good quality stuff.

The diners there were a really diverse bunch: from big tables of birthdaying Brazilians to young families enjoying a rare meal out, over 60s couples to mid-twenties couples, everyone was having a good time, sipping big cocktails, chatting to the waiting staff. It was nice to see so many different people designating a big meal out as a Saturday night's entertainment and being so happy for it. The ceremony and ritual of the rodizio really makes the experience.

If you are thinking of going for a rodizio, you might want to look at this Time Out article which looks at a few of the main one. I've heard Rodizio Rico, a small chain, is a bit more expensive than the others. I would definitely recommend Preto, but there might be better bargains to be had in NW10, which has a big Brazilian population. And wear stretchy trousers (aka buffet pants) - you'll need them.

Red veg

2009-09-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

I love going to Parliament Hill Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings and picking up some interesting veg for the weekend. Last weekend I bought a purple cauliflower and a bunch of beetroot.

Pete cooked a beetroot risotto - quickly becoming a staple in our house. Unsurprisingly, it turns out looking like a garish reddy-purple maggot slime. But it has a delicious sweet, root-y celery-like taste that you don't get from beetroot when you prepare it any other way. With added mascarpone, this is a perfectly lovely, rich, warming dish for a cooler end of summer evening.

We use the Times recipe, but with a little less parmesan.

The purple cauliflower went to good use in one of my favourite Ottolenghi salads: Chargrilled cauliflower with dill, capers and cherry tomatoes. The cauliflowers are very lightly parboiled - about three minutes - then flung into a smokin' hot griddle pan until they are nicely charred.

The dressing helps the magic of this dish - 2 parts olive oil to one part cider vinegar, finely chop some capers, add some crushed garlic, salt'n'pepa, some wholegrain mustard. There you have a very tangy jus for your salad.

Combine the charred cauliflower with baby spinach leaves and cherry tomatoes and pour over the dressing. Chop up a generous handful of dill and drop it in. Enjoy with toasted pitta bread. We served with lemon-y turkey breasts. Yum.

Bull and Last, NW5

2009-09-07T03:47:00.000-07:00

It's so typical that you wait ages - years, even - to check out a restaurant and then, when you do go, you have a cold and under-active taste buds. Not ideal! But the Bull and Last, a much touted gastropub on Highgate Road NW5, did not disappoint.

Located just opposite Parliament Hill Fields and, handily, just around the corner from my house, the Bull and Last shot to fame when Giles Coren reviewed it for The Times last autumn, followed by Time Out and The Evening Standard, all singing its praises. I like to try and avoid that kind of hype: let the Zeitgeist hawks have their fun and move on to the Next Big Thing. The pub is nearly always busy when I walk past, but we were seated pretty quickly at lunchtime yesterday.

The Bull and Last is beautifully simple and rustic inside: cavernous Victorian high ceilings and huge windows give a sense of space and light, mismatched stools by the bar, chalked blackboards detailing their suppliers. Good looking, though overworked, waiting staff run around trying not to trip over the many pedigree pooches and children meandering away from the tables of slightly smug north London bohemian families.

Not feeling too hungry and saving a 'big meal experience' at the Bull and Last for a day when I have more active taste-buds, I went for the pigeon and pistachio terrine, which was served with a spiced plum chutney. The terrine was gamy but fresh - a celebration of the pigeon's slightly smoky, meaty flavours. It was paired perfectly with the plum chutney, a bistro salad and some bread.

I was jealous of my co-diners' charcuterie boards. The Bull and Last's homemade charcuterie is now the stuff of legend and included deep-fried pig's head, duck prosciutto, some boozy liver pâtés and other bits and bobs. Also on offer was a fishboard, which a couple at a neighbouring table intimately fed to each other. Nice.

The main dishes change frequently, but there there are traditional homemade snacks such as scotch eggs, black pudding sausage rolls waiting to accompany a pint on the way home from a chilly walk up the Heath. There's lots of proper hearty gastropub fare too, and the desserts are supposedly excellent - there was Fererro Rocher ice cream on the menu when I was there. If the entire menu is as tasty as our snack lunch options, I'm going to have to make quite a few trips back to do the Bull and Last justice.

Portuguese Man-of-Snacks

2009-08-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

I spent the first two weeks of July travelling around Portugal. I am quarter Portuguese and quarter Brazilian (as well as being half Scottish and lived half of my life in Edinburgh and half in London and a year in Berlin) and have spent many holidays as a young'un in various bits of Portugal.

Many of my early memories revolve around Portuguese food - the first bowl of calde verde of the holiday, taking a break from the sun to chomp on some buttery torades in a smoky pastelaria, the smell of chargrilled sardines, the satisfaction of biting into a warm, freshly baked pastel de nata. My parents would sometimes cook a cataplana when I was a toddler and I would greedily eat their clams, prawns and chorizo, soaking up the fishy tomato sauce with bread.

Portuguese cooking is not well known outside Portugal - not nearly in the same way that many other Mediterranean cuisines are. The wondrous Pasteis de Nata are savoured across most European cities, Nandos is bringing a very small element of Portuguese cuisine to the masses, while the cookbook Piri Piri Starfish is raising the cuisine's profile among foodies.

My recent trip to Portugal was a veritable culinary voyage, eating all my favourite dishes, re-discovering some old tastes and trying out some new dishes. I'm going to detail these in bursts as I blog along. So today it is...Portuguese snack food!

A tasty lunch of beef croquette, pasteis de bacalhau, and a tasty chicken empanada.

Tosta mista - a classic snack lunch of cheese and ham toastie.

Torrados - thick white bread, toasted and drenched in butter. Bliss.

rissois de camarao - a prawn pastry in breadcrumbs.

Eating out in Edinburgh

2009-08-14T03:18:00.000-07:00

I grew up in Edinburgh, a city that was most definitely ahead of the curve in developing a café and dining out culture. Back in the late 90s we had great brunch cafés in our neighbourhood (Marchmont) frequented by students, young families, bobos and pensioners alike. Despite our chilly, windy and wet climate, the French restuarants of the Grassmarket spilled out onto the streets, while independent cafés and Scottish bistros popped up in all sorts of nooks and crannies.

The relative absence of mid-price chain restuarants (no ASKs, very few Pizza Expresses, I don't think I've seen any Zizzis, Slug and Lettuces, Ping Pongs, Loch Fynes, etc) means that this significant price bracket is populated by a diverse range of quality, independent, interesting restuarants. In fact, some have been so successful that they have opened up other branches in different parts of town or even in Glasgow (or vice versa).

What with it being festival time in Edinburgh (and me paying a visit), I thought I'd give a run down of my favourites:

A Room in the Town - my all time favourite. A delightful, airy, characterful bistro serving up innovative modern Scottish cuisine. Think haggis terrine and whisky gravy, sea bass with asparagus and cherry tomatoes, games sausage and parsnip mash. You can get a 3 course lunch for under £15 a head, and it's BYOB too.

The Zulu Lounge - just a few paces from my Mum's flat in Morningside, this quirky, cosy South African café is covered in zebra print, has yummy muffins and brownies and whatnot. And specialises in decadent hot chocolates, such as this calorific Cadbury's 'Crunchie' hot chocolate. Ooh my arteries...

Café Andaluz - Stylish tapas restaurant that started out in Glasgow but was so popular they had to open one on George Street in Edinburgh. I ate at the spectacularly moorishly decorated restaurant in Glasgow's West End last night and it was delicious, atmospheric, classy and authentic. My only complaint would be that some of the dishes skimped a bit on key ingredients. Café Andaluz is popular with Edinburgh's Spanish community, so it must be good, right?

Alba Flamenca - another testament to the popularity of tapas in Edinburgh! This intimate restaurant is part of a very popular flamenco dance school, and the short tapas menu and wine list is well chosen and impeccably prepared. It's also a good deal cheaper than Cafe Andaluz, though less atmospheric and stylish.

Spice Box - My dad ordered a take-away from here on Wednesday night and I could not believe how amazing Thai food can be. Spice Box is run with love by two innovative young upstarts and some excellent Thai chefs. It's take-away only and, such is the demand, you'll have to wait a while for it to arrive, but it is so so so worth it.

Mother India - flavours and seasoning to die for at this Glasgow-originating Indian tapas (yes, tapas again). Perfectly sized portions so that you can have 4 dishes between 2 and not feel too full. The food is clearly top quality and the menu has lots of interesting dishes, such as crab samosas!

Le Mouton Noir - Classy, stylish and affordable French restaurant in Bruntsfield. It's classic bistro fare, but excellently done and lovely surroundings.

Favorit - An old favourite (geddit?!) of mine - often open til 1 or even 3am, you can get fancy fruit beers, refreshing Czech lagers, smooties, milkshakes, ice cream floats, brownies, sandwiches, tacos, etc etc. It's stylishly decorated like an American diner and it's just a good place to catch up with friends at any time of day or night.

Toast - Just round the corner from my old house and formerly Kaffe Politik - Marchmont's defining café, this is a great brunch spot at the weekend, with excellent Eggs Benedict and other great options. It does breakfast, lunch and dinner during the week, excellent cakes and coffees and commands the same diverse clientelle as its predecessor.

Le Bon Vivant - A new opening in the upmarket New Town, this is a dark, elegant champagne bar, with a twist: it's totally unpretentious, totally friendly, totally affordable. They sell £1 bites, including deep friend risotto balls, tartes, black pudding, as well as yummy soups (I had smoked haddock and pea chowder - it was delicious).

La Voute to the top

2009-08-12T00:50:00.000-07:00

Strange things have been happening in Archway over the last few years. Formerly the area had been the subject of ridicule; a grotty, grimey bus interchange, a gyratory system dominated by monolithic decaying office blocks and filthy dive bars. The smug folks of neighbouring Highgate, Muswell Hill and Crouch End would shudder at thought of eating out in Archway...

But things are changing. Sure, Archway is still a grotty, grimey bus interchange; the gyratory system is pretty horrid (I cycle round it twice a day), but there have been some wonderful restaurants and cafés opening in recent years. The most notable is the wondrous 500 - an unassuming-looking Italian at the top of Holloway Road that cooks up imaginative, excellent seasonal cuisine, with great wines and deserts and snacks and everything is so good and VERY affordable. More about that later!

One of my favourites of this new wave of new establishments is La Voute on Archway Island - right in the middle of the gyratory system! You wouldn't know you were surrounded by the A1 though; La Voute is a veritable oasis. Inside it's all clean lines, space, light...almost Ottolenghi-esque. Out the back there's a tranquil patio with plenty of tables out the back, surrounded by bamboo fencing. Look up and you see the backs of rickety Victorian terraces and the top of Archway tower; look around and you see happy couples, young families and students tucking in to brunch, reading the weekend supplements, making the most of the free wi-fi.

The food is Mediterranean-inspired with a definite leaning to the Eastern Med (Turkey, Greece, Cyprus). There are luscious brunch spreads with haloumi, spiced lamb sausages, scrambled eggs, spinach filo pastries. There are tasty toasted sandwiches, quiches, salads, crepes, croissants and pastries. La Voute also does delicious finely crafted patisserie-style desserts for the weekday coffee and cakes crew. The service is very laid back and it's a great place to catch up with friends at a leisurely pace without feeling obliged to keep ordering food. And if you did, it's very affordable too!

Given that it's only open during the day, it's great to see that La Voute seems to be doing a good trade. It's precisely the kind of chilled out hanging out spot serving great quality food and drink that is too rare in London, especially given the number of people who like that sort of thing. Keep up the good work, La Voute!

Come Dine With ME

2009-08-09T09:46:00.002-07:00

I'm lucky that many of my friends share my love for food. It means I'm never short of buddies to check out new restaurants with, or try out exciting recipes for, or even to go browsing the fancy kitchen equipment in John Lewis...what a buzz!

So when the idea was mooted in April that, as a friendship group, we would embark on our own Come Dine With Me voyage, I was very excited. There's nine people in our 'game', three pairs and one set of three. Such are our busy metro diaries that last night was only the second Saturday evening in all that time that we were all able to come dine with each other.

The first pair to host an evening was Ben and Hattie. They opted for a Palais de Versailles theme. When their handmade invite arrived in the post with butterfly confetti you could almost hear the squeaky sound of the bar being raised. The meal was delicious and served as follows:
- Greeted with pomegranate-laced bubbly
- An amuse bouche of celariac puree topped with caremalised fennel
- Asparagus with hollandaise
- Fricasse of chicken with mushrooms in red wine (both mains served with orange braised chicory)
- Saffron Tarte with wild musrooms (for the vegetarians)
- Prosecco and summer fruit terrines, served with orange zest and cocoa meringues
- Cheeseboard

So for the the next month or so I plotted my theme and menu. The theme was to be modern Scandinavian cuisine, inspired by the website New Scandinavian Cooking and tales of the world's third best restaurant, Noma in Copenhagen. It also helped that my décor is Danish or mid-century in style, and I love Scandinavian indie and pop music.

Ideas for how to top the already high standard included a midsummer's dip in Hampstead ponds (surely we could pretend we were on a beautiful pine forested island on the Stockholm Archipelago), or karaoke to our favourite Scandinavian hits. But I decided to focus on the food and drink and do myself proud with that and my excellent (nordic) taste in music and design!

We started by toasting the evening with a shot of vodka which I had infused with dill and lemon zest for over a week. It tasted pure, perfume-like and elegant. You wouldn't believe it was 40% alcohol.

Next up was the star turn: the Smörgåsbord. I prepared miniature rye bread open sandwiches with salmon I cured myself (with vodka, dill and juniper berries - very easy actually) which was topped with a horseradish foam; a beetroot and apple salad with sour cream; prawns with ginger and orange zest; samphire on a caper and creme fraiche spread. We served it with a sparkling rosé from Provence. It looked stunning set out on our massive white plates and went down a treat.

As an interlude or palate cleanser we served heart-shaped ice cubes with pickle, dill and juniper berries next. It was a little gimmicky, but it buys time for plating up the mains!

The meat eaters main was classic Swedish meatballs with a creamy gravy, served with new potatoes and dill, and a fruity salad of orange and shredded cabbage with a horseradish ice cube on top. The vegetarian main was a tower of portabella mushroom, cinammon and calvados infused apple and jarlsberg cheese with the same sides. The gravy was a particular personal triumph - my mum has tried to recreate the Ikea gravy so many times and this was the closest to the 'original' I've tasted!

Time for another interlude: this time a rose, mint and redcurrant flavoured heart-shaped ice cube. Rosewater is such a clever one. A little splash of it can add a very exotic twist.

The principal pudding was apple, honey and rosemary ice cream which I made totally from scratch and without an ice cream maker! I quickly whipped up (literally) a honey and cinnamon foam to accompany and scattered some dried rose petals over it.

A friend at work who used to run a restaurant advised me to finish the meal with a chocolate hit, which, playing to win, I did. We melted a couple of bars of Green & Black's 70% and mixed it with redcurrants. They didn't quite hold their structure after setting, so were a bit messy, but really hit the spot.

It was really nice to feed so many people and to experiment with Nordic cuisine like that. It was lots of hard work and I was relieved to serve the last course and know that our Come Dine With Me was over and I could look forward to the next two instalments over the coming months.

Incidentally, I've never seen the television programme itself. Am I missing out?!

Oh, and if you are interested you can view some of the recipes which inspired the meal here:
Dill Scnhapps
Cauliflower, shrimp and ginger salad
Swedish Meatballs (Note: for the gravy, I cooked onions and added them in, as well as some paprika and lots of pepper, then puréed it all - much better!)
Cabbage and orange salad
Beetroot, Horseradish and Apple Salad
Gravlax (cured salmon)
Apple ice cream with honey and rosemary

Currying local favour

2009-07-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs a good local curry house. I am fortunate enough to live within spitting distance of mine. I can almost even see into its kitchen from my bay window! My local curry house is called Chameli's Tiffin Runner (website coming soon!) and is on Chetwynd Road in Dartmouth Park, North London. On moving into the 'hood in February this year my new neighbours strongly urged me to try out Chameli's and its 'out of this world flavours'.

It took a few take away-nights before I could pluck up the courage to break my loyalty to Monsoon, also located within spitting distance in Dartmouth Park. Don't worry Monsoon, I still love you, but...

...but Chameli's Tiffin Runner is just exceptional. The flavours are amazing. I haven't tasted such well-spiced Indian cuisine in north London, ever. The chef uses fennel seeds in quite a few dishes, which imparts the dishes with a subtle liquorice taste. This was particularly exciting in their mango chutney. The menu features a lot of dishes that you don't see in most local Indian take-away menus, and you might not quite recognise dishes whose names you do know, but trust me, it's all good.

The korma sauce features exotic saffron and home made yoghurt, smoother and more luxurious than you're standard. Too often the meat in an Indian take-away comes in inexplicable chewy chunks, but at Tiffin Runner the meat is succulent and tastes well seasoned through effective marinading. The Tiffin Runner Special Chicken is particularly exquisite - the chicken comes in a rich, deeply spiced gravy with wine.

Chameli's is in the process of re-branding and will soon be called 'Tiffin Runner' (it was originally called Chameli) and the menu has expanded and is now printed on glossy paper rather than black and white A4. But there's definitely no drop in quality - I just hope that the good folk of north London will get to find out about this hidden gem and enjoy this amazing Indian food.

Until the end of August Tiffin Runner are doing a 'credit crunch special' of 2 poppadom, 2 mains, 2 sides, 1 rice and 1 nan for £16.50. It easily feeds three hungry hippos and it's a great way of trying some of the new dishes on the menu. We did it last week (see picture above) and it was divine.

To place an order or for more information, call Chameli's on 0800 917 4363.

Ottolenghi love

2009-07-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

A large part of the time I spend thinking about food is spent thinking about Ottolenghi food. For those of you who don't know, Ottolenghi is a small collection of restaurant/delis in London. Their food is albout amazing fresh flavours, ingenious combinations, using plenty of great quality ingredients, copius scatterings of fresh herbs. They published a cookbook, which has since become a bible for me and my friends.

I try and cook at least one Ottolenghi recipe a week, whether it's from the book or Ottolenghi's weekly column 'the new vegetarian' in the Guardian's Saturday magazine. Last night I cooked roast chicken with saffron, hazelnuts and honey. It was amazing burst flavours and smells from the souk, gently exotic and luxurious with its saffron, rosewater, cinammon, honey, lemon and ginger. The roasted hazelnuts gave the dish a velvety earthiness, and combined with the honey, cinammon and rosewater, it was like a semi-savoury baklava.

A quick google revealed that Gourmet Worrier had cooked it fairly recently and adapted the recipe a bigger meal, so I shall re-driect you there for the recipe. I used thighs rather than drumsticks though. I do love the thighs!

My partner is also mad keen on Ottolenghi and cooked last week's new vegetarian recipe, beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish. I am absolutely wild about beetroot, especially when combined with plentiful heaps of fresh dill and creme fraiche or yoghurt. With the addition of preserved lemons (or in my case lots of lemon rind, not ever being able to find them in my local middle eastern shops and being too lazy thus far to preserve lemons myself) this was the zingiest, freshest meal I've had in a while. Here's a photo:

That's enough Ottolenghi for now. Don't worry, though, plenty more to come!

Another food blog

2009-07-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

I absolutely love food. I live to eat.

Food is on my mind pretty much all the time. You'll often find me envisaging the remnants of my larder and fridge and daydreaming possible recipes. Or you'd see me drooling over the restaurant recommendations in guidebooks as I plan my next trip away. Or I'll be gushing with friends, family or colleagues about the meal I made last night, the olive oil I bought from the Portuguese deli, the pictures and recipes in the Observer Food Monthly. Yes, I do truly and absolutely love food!

I intend for this blog to be a celebration of food - food I cook, restaurants I visit, cuisines I 'discover', culinary adventures, great shops, my favourite ingredients, implements, techniques.

This isn't going to be all about pretentious food and expensive restaurants. This is about my food odyssey - my everyday, passionate, inquisitive journey through cuisines, flavours and experiences. I hope you enjoy it.