Entries Tagged 'Dinner' ↓

We had a Big Day in our house recently when The Man turned 30. As he’s a Proper Man who likes Proper Food I obeyed his wish for unusual animal parts and we had a beautiful birthday dinner at Fergus Henderson’s St John Restaurant, in Clerkenwell.

In the revival movement of the last fifteen or so years to give Britain back its culinary history, Fergus Henderson has played a special role. His philosophy of nose to tail eating and, especially, his focus on long forgotten gems of English cookery and use of British produce have been absorbed into the wider gourmet scene to the point that ‘seasonal British’ has become a mantra in every cooking column and the supermarkets actively promote Kent strawberries or Gloucester mushrooms with Union Jack labels.

But even though he’s been part of the London restaurant scene for so many years and so many have borrowed so heavily, Henderson’s approach remains distinctive, challenging and pure. Both St John restaurants, the original in Clerkenwell and the slightly more casual in Spitalfields, are minimalist to the point of harsh. A long row of school style pegs circumnavigates the blank white walls and the only decoration is the black industrial lampshades. Even The Man, who would happily live in a white cube with nowt but a widescreen TV, commented that it wasn’t the cosiest of spaces. I remark on the decor because it makes sense when you get to the food. The food is unadorned and stays true to the founding principles; what it lists on the menu, you get on the plate.

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Glorious beet, the queen of the garden: vibrant, voluptuous, earthy and packed full of more goodness per gram than any other vegetable. If beets had beds they would insist on a four-poster with velvet curtains because the humble root just doesn’t get lusher than this. Even the six rather pathetic looking specimens I picked up from an almost empty tray in the back corner of the local Woolies proved capable of filling the pot with an explosion of colour and flavour.

A gathering of disparate friends in a small suburban kitchen on a cold winter’s night (a thick frost had formed on the cars outside even before we had finished mains) was the perfect occasion to bust out a bit of beet action in the form of a borsch. What I love about this particular recipe is the degree to which each guest can nuance the taste and texture of their bowl to suit their mood. Feeling like a little tart? Add a bit more sour cream. Need to carbo-load for the ten minute walk to the shops in the morning? Add some potatoes. Your razor-sharp wit getting in the way of small talk with the cutie sitting next to you? Add a little dill. Served with a cheese board of cheddar, stinky blue, organic figs, dried apricots and roasted almonds, and a choice of fluffy white or fruit loaf, this went down a treat.

Two cattle dogs wrestling under the table and oodles of red wine added considerably to the pleasure of the borsch and the general chaotic atmosphere of the evening. The conceptual-artist-turned-art-blogger hypnotised my puppy, and then called the independent-activist-documentary-filmmaker on her paranoia about all things ‘nano’. At the other end of the table myself and another anthropologist grooved to some Italian lounge jazz, while an expert in Taiwanese art tried to get her head around the difficulties of building houses in remote Aboriginal communities being explained by a bureaucrat in a position to know. The only time the ruckus died down was when the historian of Jewish Lithuanian execution sites shocked us all with a detailed account of how to identify mass graves using ground penetrating radar.

If it sounds like I’m bragging about how interesting my dining pals were it is because I am. They are all ace individuals whose munificent friendship, along with the borsch and the wine, helped to take the chill off my winter blues for at least another day.

Luscious Borsch

Ingredients

6 beetroots
Veggie stock to taste
1 large onion
2 sticks of celery
Lemon or vinegar
Dill
Parsley
4 boiled eggs, chopped into chunks
4 boiled potatoes, chopped in to chunks
Sour cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Trim and boil the beetroots for half an hour or so, until tender. Cool, skin and dice into small cubes. Brown finely chopped onions with celery, add beetroot and stock and bring to the boil. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for twenty minutes. Add finely chopped dill and juice of one lemon, or a tablespoon or so of vinegar, and simmer for another ten or until done. Puree, and if too thick add a little water.

Serve hot. Provide sides of chopped boiled potato, sour cream, more dill, chopped parsley, and chopped boiled eggs (or anything else you think might go well – pickles? chives?) and add these to your bowl with generous whimsy reflecting the mood of the moment.

Franco Manca. The best pizza in London. Possibly Europe. Potentially the world. Yes, it’s a big call Sam Newman, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one.

You wouldn’t really expect to find a serious contender for the highly competitive title of best pizza in Brixton, south London, a place usually more famous for jerk chicken and guns. Walk through the sights
(goat carcasses, shrivelled dried fish), sounds (reggae, dub, one love under Jah) and smells (fishy, meaty, inner city) of Brixton’s rambling street market to get to Franco Manca, which operates out of two holes in the wall on either side of an arcade in the covered market on Electric Lane.

Franco Manca takes its pizza capital S seriously. Their specials board lays it on the line, – “Neapolitan fundamentalism” is chalked up along the bottom. They use a sourdough made from two kinds of organic flour
sourced from outside Naples for their base. As the foundation of a great pizza, nothing is more important than nurturing dough that will become crispy but chewy bases in the wood fired furnace. We over
ordered – three pizzas between me and The Man – and all were outstanding. The bases had exactly the right level of flexibility and chewiness, the crust was charred in a few places and beautifully bubbled from the intense heat. The passata actually tasted of tomato and suggested a long, intimate involvement with no small amount of oregano. The margherita showed off the purity of their approach, the Neapolitan with capers, as well as olives and anchovies was salty deliciousness and the sausage (fresh & dry chorizo) addictive. They only offer 6 pizzas, plus 2 specials, one kind of organic beer, one red, one white wine, and it’s only open 12-5 Mon to Sat. They know what they’re on about and no messing.

Word has got out about this place and the queue was a good 40 people long when we arrived. But we’d made the trek from north London to south in the spirit of adventure (with compass, water bottle and
passport) and weren’t going to be deterred by a few other punters. Although, as a side note, there was an amusing difference in the clientele queueing for Franco Manca and those doing their shopping at the African fabric shop & middle eastern dry goods emporium, wheelie trollies trailing behind. It’s run by a frenetic sergeant major Italian guy who bosses this substantial queue of stroppy hungry Londoners around and keeps it all moving pretty swiftly – it’s a tightly run operation, probably not the place for a romantic dinner for two. Tables are shared as necessary to cram everyone in, which – shock of shocks for aggro London- actually led to us being invited to drinks at the pub round the corner by the chatty couple sitting next to us!

So. Franco Manca. Best pizza in London.

Where do you go for the best pizza? Discuss.
 
 
 
Emica’s last post was on Trafalgar Square Tourist Traps.
Picture credit – timeout.com

I am very good at cooking for other people, but very bad when I am by myself. Other people get lavish meals like lamb shanks in Middle Eastern spices on preserved lemon couscous with carrot, beetroot and parsnip roasted in brown sugar and olive oil, followed by lemon delicious pudding. But when I am child-free and left to my own devices I eat crap. Some nights I’ll just get chips and gravy for tea, or cook pasta and cheese, or fried eggs on toast (NB: no veges). I also have an unhealthy obsession with dukkah (sesame seeds and nuts and spices like cumin with salt) and have been known to eat half a jar of the stuff, stuck with olive oil to most of a loaf of fluffy white bread (gosh, I’ve been wanting to own up to this for ages, it feels good to get it off my chest). It was delicious, but I did not feel so good the next day.

Recently returned to a single state, I have resolved that I simply have to devote as much attention to cooking nice things for myself as I do when cooking for other people, or I will become lardy and unhealthy. As we know, being lardy and unhealthy is inimical to dating but, more importantly, leads to permanent ill-health and it’s hard enough to meet a bloke in Katoomba without confining yourself to the hospital grounds.

But enough about non-dating in the Blue Mountains. This post is about how virtuous I am for cooking even though I didn’t really feel like it, how I managed to work dukkah into the meal without overdosing on the stuff, and how it’s important to just get going and do stuff for yourself, because the results are really special. And it doesn’t take much effort, or cost much.

This week, I made a VERY yummy celeriac and parsnip soup, which was dead easy. You just take a celeriac – a funny lumpy vegetable that manages to be like celery, potato, cauliflower and ginseng all at once – and chop the tops and bottoms off it. Then you quarter it, eight it, peel off the skin and chuck it in the pot with two quartered onions, two or three cloves of garlic, some water, some dry white wine, two peeled parsnips, a bay leaf and some thyme. Cook it until the veges are soft (about 20 minutes) and then blend it to bejeesus, add some soy milk or stock to get it to the consistency you want and warm it through with some salt, pepper and a vege stock cube if it’s not savoury enough. Serve it with some crumbly parmesan on the top and drink the rest of the wine while you eat.

But the nicest dinner of the week incorporated green veges AND enabled me to eat dukkah. I just love simple pasta dishes like grated zucchini or pumpkin tossed through spaghetti. Tonight, I fried an onion with some small pieces of sweet potato, garlic and a finely sliced piece of preserved lemon (my most specialist secret ingredient). When that was rocking I shredded a small bunch of silverbeet into the frypan, tossing until the colour brightened. I mixed it up with some fetta, a bit of butter, a smidge of cream and a small handful of coriander leaves. Then I mixed it into hot, fairly wet pasta (so the pasta water made a kind of sauce) and sprinkled dukkah over the top.

It came out lemony, with plenty of bite in the silver beet and the salt of the feta and nuttiness of the dukkah hanging perfectly off the sweet potato. I even had enough left overs to ensure that I don’t have to buy lunch tomorrow, which is good in these global financial crisis-ridden times.

I am really interested to hear about other people’s eating vices so invite PDP readers and writers to share their sins against fine dining. However, to ensure we honour the goals of this blog, perhaps it’s best to temper stories of vice with tales of how we have managed to redeem ourselves by cooking clever and artful food, even when we is by ourselves. So, c’mon contributors and commenters, share.

What’s the point of having a food blog if you can’t post your Asian aromatics snapped in Canberra’s perfect winter afternoon light?

Dried blood orange peel, green onions, ginger, sichuan pepper, sand ginger and cao guo ready to cook up a big pot of Sichuan red-cooked beef. The germ of the idea came from the fresh tofu skin I bought at the farmers market on Saturday morning:

I asked my twitter food friends for suggestions to use it, having only used dried tofu skin before. After I realised the skin was too fragile to stuff – and after the weather took a turn in the freezing effing cold direction – I starting thinking of a chilli laced braise.

The braise was thrown together after reading Fucshia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cooking and Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking

Ingredients

1 kilo chuck steak in 2 cm cubes
2 Tablespoons corn or peanut oil
20 g ginger, sliced thickly and smashed (about the size of a ping pong ball)
3 spring onions (aka green onions, aka scallions), trimmed and cut in thirds
90 g chilli bean paste – about four generous tablespoons
4 Tablespoons Shaoxing wine
2 teaspoons dark soy sauce
2 pieces dried citrus peel – likely tangerine from the shop, or what you have at home
1 teaspoon whole Sichuan peppercorns
2 cao gao*
2 pieces dried sand ginger*
2 star anise
1 litre stock (I used half chicken stock, half water)

1/2 cup dried lily buds*, tied in a knot and the hard bud end pinched off, soaked for 30 minutes in hot water from the kettle
6 fat white capped shiitakes, soaked for 30 minutes in hot water from the kettle (use different containers)
the same volume of fresh tofu skins, in 2 cm lengths

Method

Blanch beef cubes in a saucepan of boiling water, drain and rinse.
Heat oil in a wide pan, and add chilli bean paste and stir for a minute or so until the smell rises and the oil is red. Add beef and all ingredients up to (and including) the stock.

Bring to a boil, lower heat, cover and cook for about 2 – 21/2 hours until meat is ridiculously tender. Do not be afraid of the sea of oil on top – you won’t be eating it. You can cool it to reheat later which improves the flavour and allows you to defat it.

Reheat and add the second group of ingredients, and simmer until the flavours are infused, 20 minutes or so. Serve with coriander over rice and lots of green veggies.

Although it seems like a huge quantity of chilli bean paste going in, it’s not super hot, more of a deep background warmth. It will make your house smell better than you thought possible.

* There are some ingredients that you may not have on hand, but most Asian groceries should have them. The cao guo is the big ridged nutmeggy lookin’ thing, like cardamom in flavor but with a kind of peppery-menthol note. They might be labelled “Tsao Kuo”. Sand Ginger looks like slices of dry pale bark and might be labelled “sliced ginger”. Dried Lily buds are about 5 cm long and thin, and might be labelled “golden needles” or “tiger lily buds”. Fresh tofu skin is hard to come by, but soaked dried tofu stick works just as well.

As suggested by Mark in comments, you might want to check out my earlier post on demystifying Asian grocery ingredients for some background and more info.

London has been at the heart of foodie fashion for several years now but, just like the mullet haircut refusing to die in the face of more current tonsorial trends, the capital still has more than its fair share of fried chicken outlets, kebab joints and tired sandwich bars serving coronation chicken on white sliced, grimly hanging on to their positions on high streets and back alleys across the city. So what’s a hungry tourist to do?

A sandwich and a juice at one of the endless Pret-a-Manger or Starbucks will provide the necessary to keep you fuelled for sightseeing. But to get under the skin of London a little and experience something more than these chain stores’ identical offerings, replicating themselves like a virus afflicting prime locations, you don’t need to head off the beaten track – you just need a few local pointers.

The redevelopment of Trafalgar Square some years ago transformed it from a traffic-ridden hazard to one of the great public spaces: grand, accessible and at the heart of all things London. A food mecca it is unfortunately, and most emphatically, not. Stepping off the Square, however, offers some excellent eating options at reasonable prices – a double act that’s particularly hard to pull off in this most expensive of cities.

The fantastic thing about London is how compact the centre really is. Looking to the Tube map is actually misleading: what may take several stops and require changing lines can, in reality at street level, be a matter of a few blocks walking. So it is that Trafalgar Square is connected to Buckingham Palace via one of London’s most pleasant walks, under the Admiralty Arch and through St James Park. The Park, conveniently for the hungry tourist, is home to Inn The Park, a light, spacious restaurant and upmarket takeaway. Overlooking the duck pond, Inn The Park is popular with both sightseers en route to or from the Palace, Houses of Parliament or Big Ben and government bureaucrats from the ‘Westminster village’ because it so successfully achieves a relaxed, child-friendly café atmosphere, while serving excellent, seasonal and largely organic food at – for London – reasonable prices.

On a warm day, choosing from the salad or sandwich options – no tuna-sweetcorn-mayonnaise here! – plus a delicious sweet something and an artisinal bottled juice and joining the office workers sunning themselves on the grass is an instant cure for sightseeing-fatigue.

If, however, you are heading the other way out of Trafalgar Square, braving the reheated pizza hell that is the 10 minute walk towards Leicester Square and in need of a quick refuelling pit-stop, Gaby’s on the Charing Cross Rd is the place. Unprepossessing from the outside and with old-school formica tables inside, Gaby’s offers a range of Jewish and mezze style dishes like chickpea salads, eggplant with tahini and butterbeans cooked with onions and garlic, making it a great option for vegetarians. It’s not a vege establishment though and their salt beef sandwiches with mustard are famous. With the feel of a typical English caff and offering both dine-in or takeaway, Gaby’s is a low cost option serving an outstanding selection of European Jewish and more Mediterranean oriented food.

Of course, you may have emerged from the labyrinthine National Gallery, blinking in the sunlight like a mole long under ground and in need of a restorative drink. Head down the Strand and right down Villiers St, towards Embankment Tube station, and you’ll be rewarded with Gordon’s Wine Cellars.

Overcome any doubts about its dubious appearance and take the precarious and rickety looking stairs and suddenly, what seemed like just a corridor, opens out into a surprisingly large underground drinking den. The small bar area stocks a wide range of wines by the glass or bottle – when I was there last, this included several sherries and a rather nice claret – but don’t ask me what vineyard it came from ‘cos I’d drunk quite a lot of it by then! Tucked into the subterranean foundation arches of the buildings above, perhaps even of Charing Cross Station itself, Gordon’s is intimate and highly atmospheric and not for the claustrophobic. Tables are close packed, candlelit and disappear into the gloom and the damp, curved brick ceiling is within touching distance. That’s touching distance when you’re sitting down. As a popular bar, there is spillover space outside, which would accommodate any severe claustrophobes or, indeed, any punter unluckily trying for a table on a busy Friday night.

If Gordon’s is too busy to fight to the bar, a short walk across the footbridge at Embankment Station to the Royal Festival Hall offers very different, but equally atmospheric drinking potential. Festival Hall has recently been stylishly refurbished at some expense and both the Hall itself and surrounds now offer chain and non-chain, budget and high end catering options. But for that riviera feeling, it must be the Riverside Terrace Café. Spilling out from the main foyer and overlooking Southbank promenade and its fairy-lit Plane trees, it offers tables with prime people watching positions and excellent light lunch. On a busy Sunday afternoon, tables on the Terrace Café can be in short supply, but views to accompany drinks need not be lost. Head up to the bar on the fourth floor for one of the most wonderful views in London. This nameless bar largely exists to serve audiences attending performances at the Hall, but it is open to the public and a ticket is not required to take the lift up, buy a drink, take up a position on the balcony and enjoy the spectacular views across the river towards Westminster and, to the east, Tower Bridge. Truly a magnificent experience.

Being a tourist in one of the world’s great cities need not mean a diet of uninspiring and overpriced chain-store averageness, nor are Michelin stars required to avoid this fate. With a few pointers, it is entirely possible to eat well and drink in style in London, even in the most touristic of locations.

Installments one , two, three, four and five.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I ran into Camel Man’s Wife and begged for a fillet of camel to play with in the kitchen but to date they have yet to deliver. The camp dogs have done better, with the Camel Man’s Boys dropping off enormous sections of back bone at various places around the community for them to chew on. We had one little dog drag a stinking piece of hump fat at least twice his weight into the arts centre last week in an effort to keep it for his own exclusive pleasure. He was most indignant when promptly chased back out.

I have nevertheless managed to get my paws on a little bit of dromedary on the sly. A friendly sparky called Richard had been staying with the Camel People while working on various jobs around the community, including fixing our hot water system (we had endured over two weeks of luke warm showers). Over coffee one morning before the sun had much of a chance to warm the day he offered me some freshly dried camel jerky. Marinated in sweet chilli sauce and coriander seeds, it was among the most tender, tasty jerky I’ve eaten – and having lived in Namibia for a couple of years where biltong from all kinds of bush meat is a fav snack, I’ve tasted quite a bit. Nice work, Camel Man. I almost forgive you for being so tight about providing meat for the rest of us.

Ever wondered what a camel’s oesophagus looks like?

Despite the lack of camel there have been some other unusual menu items to get excited about. Roo tails are a favourite camping meat out here and can be purchased frozen at both the community store or road house for $7 a pop. Surprisingly there is considerable variety in the quality of tails – I am reliably informed by a long time connoisseur that the black ones sold at the road house are a little tough.
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A few weeks ago I did a session on things to cook with possibly unfamiliar things from the Asian grocery store for my women’s group. I came home and started to write it up, and then my laptop died and I am still resting between computers. On a borrowed laptop for the moment, and claiming the blog Amnesty originated by Eating With Jack and used to such great effect by Jackie herself, then extended by Claire of Melbourne Gastronome and enthusastically (and gratefully) joined by Ed from Tomatom and Sarah of Sarah Cooks. It’s twitter’s fault.

This is approximately how much stuff you need to demystify your average Asian grocery store, with the addition of a bonus Hairy McClary backpack full of nappies, wipes, toddler snacks and a cold drink. If your car is getting fixed, you’ll be needing a large hand truck. Fortunately I didn’t have far to go.

When you get there you’ll need tables to fill up with all manner of until-now mysterious things, like giant packets of fungus and small jars of stinky fermented tofu, bundles of greens, jars full of bark, tiny bottles of mustard oil so pungent it burns your nasal hairs, etc, etc.

I think one reason why some people are cautious about buying things from an Asian grocery store is that so much stuff is packaged, and if you don’t know what it is, or what the thing you want looks like, it gets confusing. So we ripped open all the plastic and set about rehydrating, sniffing, poking and tasting.

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