Stiff upper lip, everyone, we'll get through it!

Oh, summer.  You tricksy thing.  Every year, those of us on this silly island think that it's going to be different.  Every year, we are surprised when the sun barely shines and we spend more time wearing socks than sandals.  Every year, the phrases "oh, and we had such a lovely spring" and "maybe we'll have an Indian summer" fall forth from our quivering lips as we hold back tears of disappointment.

Ah, but summer, you know what you're doing.  Day after day, you give us overcast skies, sunny mornings that turn to rainy afternoons and then suddenly, all at once, boom, SUNSHINE!  Hot, glorious sunshine, exotic blue skies over grassy parks, lushly green from all that rain - and sometimes on a weekend!  Then everything is forgiven and we revel in our lily-white legs, Pimms on the lawn and indolent afternoons.

Gone are the stews, the roasts and the crumbles of the colder months.  Even when it's still nippy, I refuse brattishly to cook anything resembling winter food.  Mercifully, although it may be raining, the weekend market stills provides enough of these to fill a salad bowl:

Such plenty would suggest jam, a clafoutis, a tart - or simply wandering into the kitchen, taking a handful and wandering back out again.

Of course, everyone has raved about these this year, and with good reason:

It's simply not an English summer without strawbs, whether with cream or without - may I recommend Cornish clotted instead of your usual double?

When I was growing up, a meal of cold meats, salads and my grandmother's magnificent curried prawns always marked a special occasion - Boxing Day lunch, my grandparents' wedding anniversary in June, or just a big family get-together - so I still feel like a meal of this kind is a treat.  There's an idea that because all the food is cold, it's quick and effortless to prepare, but I would say the opposite - people seem to make more effort precisely because of the lack of heat.  Look see:

That, to me, is a mini-feast full of treats.  Simple pleasures, you may say, but pleasures nonetheless.  Potato salad with cress (retro but classic), pate (no accents on this keyboard) and a salad of peach, mozzarella and prosciutto.  Basically equals yum.

So far this year, all of this has been eaten indoors.  There has not been a chance to say "oh, doesn't food always taste better when eaten outside?"  I know it's nearly the end of July, I know I've already seen 'back to school' things in the shops, but maybe, just maybe, there will be a weekend when we can do this again:

Obviously with full plates though.

I'm Easy for Meateasy (sorry Mum)

It's true though.

It is in a spirit of nostalgia that I write this post, for I write about something that no longer exists.  Something ephemeral, fleeting and over far too soon.  Dear reader, I am of course talking about that phenomenon, the pop-up.

Not just any pop-up though, oh no, a pop-up that pulsated with life and attracted a horde of loyal followers.  Alas, I came to Meateasy far too late, with time enough in my stupidly hectic calendar to go only once before it closed.  But, oh, what a 'once' that was.

(It is at this point that I must make a disclaimer.  You know the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, or something along those lines?  Not in this case, the pictures are truly dreadful, taken in semi-darkness on a phone, so please, let my words be your guide rather than pixels.)

I had heard tell of queues of over two hours to get in, as no bookings are taken, like some kind of initiation task - have you earned your place at a table?  Do you REALLY want this burger?  Do you?  DO YOU? - so I prepared a timetable that National Rail would be proud of, specifying almost to the minute when and where I would be meeting my dining companion so that we could charge to the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross to be at least in the first half hour of the queue.  It turns out that at just past six on a Wednesday, there wasn't much of a queue, just us.  Ace.

After an awkward moment with the door (me not being able to open the door, noticing a doorbell, "Ring Here for Meateasy", just like a proper speakeasy!  No answer of course, I just can't open doors), we made our way upstairs, following the sound of rockabilly to a large room, decked out in mismatched furniture, standard lamps with customised shades and a few rococo mirrors.  It could have been someone's living room, albeit with a fabulous bar in the corner that wouldn't have looked out of place in a swish gastropub.  Or a really awesome living room.

After receiving our instructions on the ordering process from one of the smiling Burgerettes, we found a table and devised a strategy for the next stage - you get the drinks, I'll get the food.  Boom, we were on fire.  My bespoke rum cocktail, an Orange Swizzle, all refreshing and dangerously quaffable, arrived in a jam jar:

A brilliant recycling idea, although I do wonder how much jam they must eat...

Alerted to my time-slot for ordering by the honking loudspeaker (certainly an efficient method on noisy evenings, but it kept making me jump), we chose from the menu that had been written on the walls - one cheeseburger, one bacon and cheeseburger, fries and onion rings.  All for about £20, which is not bad in this 'ere day and age.

Minutes later, our food arrived on paper plates - no namby-pamby cutlery here thanks, this is all you need at Meateasy:

Kitchen roll.  What a genius idea.  So much better than flimsy paper serviettes out of those frustrating dispensers - diners everywhere, take note.

The onion rings were unlike anything I'd ever seen.  I always thought that I quite liked onion rings, now I discover that I have been eating a pale imitation of the real thing.  Crisp and airy, the batter on these bad boys was so light, they almost felt healthy.  And the size of them!

What beautiful beasts, like savoury doughnuts.  Ah, the memories...

Enough of this waffling though, we all know that it's all about the burger.  Or should I say The Burger:

Unlike most commercially available patties, whether from a bar, a pub, a restaurant, whatever, this was the only one I have tasted that had the flavour of a homemade burger.  Cooked to pink perfection, the meat spoke for itself and its quality sang out.  We are talking proper, glorious BEEF here.  Argh, I kid you not, my mouth just watered then.  The plain white bun was soft and unobtrusive, a carby background to support the full load of meat, cheese, pickles and salad.  Meateasy makes it look so easy (ha, a pun), you wonder why so many other places get it wrong.

Yet now I must wait for my next Meateasy burger.  Like so many others, I will be patiently stalking the Twitter feed, on the alert for any hint of a return, hoping against hope that it will magically be this evening, this week, this month.  No doubt, on that first night, the place will be heaving and I can tell you now, I won't be politely ringing a doorbell, I'll be blasting my way in with a battering ram.

Boing!

"Spring is sprung, der grass is riz,

I wonder where dem boidies is...

Der little boids is on der wing, 

Ain't dat absoid?

Der little wing is on der boid!"

'Spring in the Bronx' there, to welcome us into this glorious springtime.  Hurrah for all things spring-y: sunshine, daffs, the first flush of green on the trees, root veg going out, softer stuff coming in, not forgetting all that rising sap of course.  I'm not going to 'ahem' or pretend that I didn't just type that, no point in being shy about it - let's face it, the clocks go forward and everyone starts to feel a bit frisky.  I for one am yearning to do this.  Seriously, I am one full skirt away from breaking into song every time I open the front door.

However, this is not a blog about friskiness, this is a blog about food, so I will now turn my attention away from the bedroom and towards the kitchen.  Oh, come on now, don't act disappointed.  You know where you can get that if you want it and it isn't here.  Besides, my mum reads this.

However, that does not mean that I am not going to get a bit excited.  Food is doing exciting things at the moment, at least in the seasonal fruit and veg world.  A bit like blossom, you spend ages looking out for the new stuff and poof, there it all is at once.  I try to buy the majority of my fruit and veg from my local farmers' market in Bermondsey, for many reasons: it's cheaper, it's tastier, I can buy only what I need, it's friendlier than a supermarket and I'm middle-class.  I spent ages last year pestering poor Ted, the veg man, about when rhubarb was going to arrive, so I learnt my lesson and kept quiet this year, instead just waiting for it patiently and then getting distracted by the wild garlic.  Dear reader, when I saw it, I actually cried "Wild garlic?!  Woohoo!"  Yup, out loud, in public, the works.  Hey ho.  

I had high hopes for my wild garlic - maybe I'd do a frittata with it, see what it did in a stir-fry, wilt it in a risotto, something along those lines.  But I forgot about it.  The poor stuff went all sad and droopy, so I thought I should humiliate it even further by pounding it with pine nuts and parmesan to make pesto:

Just look at that rich green!  Mashed with goats' cheese and stirred through linguine, with the addition of some roasted tomatoes, it made a fine dinner.  Blimey, it was strong though.  I reckon it's probably better to temper it with basil, rather than all garlic, it was a bit full-on otherwise.

I was rather thrilled by a weekend lunch of steamed purple sprouting broccoli, boiled eggs and buttered soda bread:

Those eggs are from the market too and you can definitely tell that it's boom time in eggland - look at the size of them, fairly bursting out of the eggcups!  And the colour!

That's definitely the best thing about spring food, the reminder that colour exists.  Here's that rhubarb I was talking about too, after cooking it with orange juice, brown sugar and stem ginger to go in an oaty crumble, served with thick, pale yellow Jersey cream:

Don't tell me you can't feel that sap rising now...

Beats, Rhymes, Mirth and...Brownies

Chocolate haunts my dreams.  I close my eyes at night and all I see is my hand stirring bowls of it: molten with butter, like a glossy pool; cascading into beaten eggs and sugar, spreading through the yellow mixture like a good-natured atomic cloud; unctuously smooth after the addition of flour, chunks of white chocolate rising to the surface with each stir of the wooden spoon.

How have these images lodged themselves on to the backs of my eyelids?  Why does the smell of chocolate still linger, ever so slightly, in my nostrils?  Baking four batches of brownies, decorating them to look like boomboxes, cutting and transporting them in an assortment of unsuitably shaped tupperware to a nearby pub, a procedure taking about five hours in total, will do that to you.

Five hours?  Never, I hear you splutter.  Dear reader, it's true.  Admittedly, whipping up a batch of brownies, even four of them, does not take long.  Ah, but when you have been given your first Real Live Commission as an 'event caterer' (now it's my turn to splutter, at my own arrogance), then it becomes a different story.  Especially when that commission comes with a design brief:

The Boombox Brownie.  A sweet treat fit to accompany a night of jazz, improvised comedy, hiphop and improvised rapping, staged by Marbles and Furniture at The Miller in London Bridge.  Looks easy, doesn't it?  Bit of chocolate, cut it to size, boom.  Er, yeah.

I didn't take pictures of the slightly dodgier realisations of the designs: the first batch when I made the boomboxes so big that I could only fit six brownies in a tin as opposed to the usual twelve; the second batch where the mixture rose so much that it engulfed virtually all of my carefully placed chocolate chips; or the third batch when I realised that you couldn't really tell the difference between the cooked brownie and the decoration.  Quite lucky I'd taken the day off work to do all this really, there may well have been tears at this point otherwise.

However, I think I finally cracked it with Batch 4:

See how it works?  Giant chocolate buttons as the big speakers (incidentally, I could only find giant buttons, not regular ones, sign of the times or what), white chocolate chips as the, er, smaller speakers (do these even have names?) and quartered cubes of white chocolate as the control button thingummies.  You can see why I was on food duty rather than having anything to do with the music side of things.

Then, ah, then, came the sweet smell of success.  A smell that filled my entire flat and which I am sure I carried with me for the rest of the evening.  To exaggerate the sections that would normally delineate a boombox (I wonder if 'delineate' and 'boombox' have ever been used in the same sentence before), to enhance the white choc chips and to suggest a graphic equaliser wotsit, I used some squeezy white icing to produce this:

Multiplied by about fifty, of course.  Ah, now you're understanding why it might have taken five hours...

But I mustn't complain.  I'm not complaining at all, actually, I was pretty chuffed with how they turned out and pretty chuffed to have been asked to do it in the first place.  And they did look really rather tempting all spread out on display (Batches 1, 2 and 3 are nearer the back):

All of them were eaten as well, which I reckon must be a good sign (although I should think the fact that they were free helped with that a smidge).  I even got a review!  A real one!  Right down at the bottom there!  "Sensationally gooey".  That's me, that is, I did that.  Hurrah!

Oh, and just in case you're wondering how much chocolate goes into making that many brownies, it's this much:

You'd think all of this would put me off chocolate for a while.  Alas, no.  I've written this whilst eating the remainder of one of those packets of chocolate buttons.

Restaurants - The Good, The Bad and The Ridiculous

I noticed recently that Zucca on Bermondsey Street was named one of Time Out's top 50 restaurants in London, so seeing as this is one of the rare occasions when I have actually been to somewhere on a list of this type, I thought that I would add my voice to the crowd, go all Observer Food Monthly on yo' ass and write a review.

Gosh.  Almost sounds like I know what I'm doing.  Ahem.

Admittedly, I visited Zucca quite a while ago, back in the autumn, but seeing as every time I walk past it the place is always full and the food looks so good I want to lick the windows, I don't reckon that it can have changed that much.  This restaurant is seriously brilliant, on so many levels.

Firstly, the service is spot on.  The staff are really friendly and attentive without going so far as to actually cut up your food and feed it to you, although our waiter nearly had a fit when we pointed out that he had brought us our wine without the water we had also ordered.  Bless.  Such service meant that our Sunday lunch in a restaurant full of couples, families and small children, usually a potent mixture destined to raise my hackles, was blissfully relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable.

Secondly, the food is beyond brilliant.  I would almost go so far as to say that it could bring on a food-gasm, but that may be distasteful to some readers, so I will merely hint at it...

We started with a selection of Italian breads and some olive oil - not usually noteworthy, but this olive oil really is excellent.  Lovely and peppery, but without catching you in the back of the throat and making you cough inelegantly, I couldn't get enough of the stuff, so I was very happy to discover that they were also selling it for £10 a bottle, so I'll be buying some once my Spanish 'special treat' oil runs out.

Zucca does starters in a tapas style, with quite a long list of them to mix and match.  We went for a puntarelle salad and a plate of Parma ham with figs, drizzled with more of that oil.  Puntarelle is quite a bitter leaf, a bit like chicory in flavour, so a mouthful of that with the salty ham and the sweet fig was quite something.  My mouth just watered a little bit then, just at the memory of it, I kid you not.

To follow, my mother had monkfish and cima di rapa (which is a bit like broccoli leaves) and I had sea bass with wild mushrooms and salsa verde:

Ooh, mamma.  The meaty fish and the piquant sauce were just so good together, I don't know why I don't make this myself.  Oh yeah, because sea bass is annoyingly expensive and I'm not a chef.

We finished with coffees and desserts of apple cake and a panna cotta (my favourite Italian pud) with stewed plums, both of which were light and delicious, so that even after three courses, we felt pleasantly plump as opposed to heftily rotund.  All of this came to about £60, which is really not bad at all when you look at the quality of the food.  I read somewhere that the owners wanted to keep the prices reasonable so that locals would be happy to eat there, rather than pricing them out so that it was only suitable for business lunches and special occasions.  I really hope that they keep it this way.

So, that was obviously the good, but what about the other two?  The second, sadly, is a restaurant close to Zucca, just across the road in fact, at the Bermondsey Square Hotel.  Now, I love Alfie's takeaway - their chips are perfect, their fish is always beautifully cooked and they do something I like to call The Takeaway of Champions, chips with a half-bottle of champagne, total genius.  But the restaurant is just bizarre.  I went there a while ago with friends and started with a beetroot salad:

Now, I'm not someone who says "Oh no, that looks weird, I don't like it already", I actually love that stuff.  Funny little puddles of sauce, architectural piles of veg, I'm all over it.  So I was quite excited by all this colour and texture - did you see the blue things?  Pickled onion - wondering how to build a forkful of cheese with a slice of beetroot and then get some of that painted on sauce to get all the flavours together...oh, so disappointing.  It all just tasted cold and vinegary.  And I have no idea when they painted that sauce on as it wouldn't budge, so I have no idea what it tasted like.  

My spirits lifted with the arrival of my steak, looking all plump and juicy, but then promptly plummeted when I cut into it.  Admittedly, it was done to a turn, a really good medium rare, but I don't know how long they had then left it before serving as it was barely hot and the veg was lukewarm verging on cold.  Such a shame as it could have been so good.

The ridiculous is quite ridiculous and just a bit of a joke really.  I was in Frankfurt for work a few months ago and had to eat at the airport.  The night before, some of us had gone to a proper, non-touristy German restaurant where I'd had schnitzel for the first time, with fried potatoes and a fantastic sauce:

Woof.  It was mega, it was tasty, it was a heart attack on a plate, but damn it was good.  Could have had another one straight away.

The next day, I flew home but had to eat at the airport.  I thought I should probably have a Frankfurter, if only out of politeness, and was served something so hilariously bad, so laughably different from the night before, that I had to take a photo of it:

Still ate it though.

Ouf.

Does anyone else still feel full?  Full when you wake up, full when you go to bed?  My eating habits are all out of whack as well - it seemed perfectly reasonable over Christmas to have breakfast at about half past eleven, probably consisting of a satsuma, a cold sausage, a mince pie and a couple of dates.  I should be sick of stodgy food, dedicating myself to being teetotal and veering solely towards vegetables and steamed fish, but I'm not...maybe it's partly because I want to prolong the holiday feeling, maybe it's because it's cold and wet outside and I just want to eat loads of cosy comfort food.  Whatever the reason, I have some sausage and mash cooking behind me as I write this - to hell with tofu!

It is in a spirit of nostalgia that I write this post (nostalgia for something that only happened a couple of weeks ago), as I looked back at the photos I had taken over the feastive period.  (That typo is intentional by the way.)  There is something luxurious about cooking at Christmas, if you have the time and inclination, both of which I was lucky to have.  I started the day before Christmas Eve with this:

Inside that gold wrapping lies 180g of solid, pure cacao.  Not chocolate, so it tastes very bitter when you try it by itself without any dairy element or sugar added.  Also, without the wrapping, it just looks like a lump of brown stuff, hence the shinier version depicted.

After twenty minutes of grating (which is a really long time to be grating, it's lucky the rest of the recipe is easy, I was shattered), you get a chopping board full of chocolate:

Mix with some heated cream and sugar, chill it in the fridge, roll it into balls and boom:

Chocolate truffles, easy to make, ages to prepare.  Ergo, something to be made at Christmas.

If you're short on time though and want to bring on some meat sweats, you could do what I did for Christmas Eve dinner and marinade some pork ribs in whisky, honey and some other stuff that I can't remember in the fridge for a day and then roast them in the oven:

Phwoar.  Makes you drool, non?  

After bubbling up the marinade to create a glossy sauce and a gesture at health in the form of a spinach salad, I give you the finished item:

I believe that recipe was intended for 6-8 people, my mother and I ate it ALL.  Yeah, baby.  AND we had a mince pie afterwards.

Sometimes a mince pie is not enough for pudding though.  It's more of a snack really, isn't it?  Definitely not big enough to count as pudding, no way.  What you need to count as pudding at this time of year needs to be big, in a dish, out of the oven and either contains cream or you can pour some on it.  Now, this next picture shows a whisky and marmalade bread and butter pudding in the assembly process - I thought it looked too nice not to take a picture of it:

Ideally, I would have taken another one upon its exit from the oven, all golden and puffed up, but I forgot as I was so focussed on getting it dished up and in my mouth.  So, ahem, this is it the next morning:

Now, either you can think that two people ate all that the night before while it was still hot OR you can think that two people ate some the night before and then sneaked some cold spoonfuls the next morning.  Your choice.

So yes, maybe it is a bit weird that I am writing about Christmas food in January.  Maybe it is a bit weird that I haven't taken down my Christmas banner yet.  But hey, not half as weird as the mincemeat crumble that I am about to make - yep, there's still some left...

Eat, drink and be merry!

Hey kids, how's tricks?  Astonishingly, it's been about six weeks since I last blogged, life has somehow run away with me, but I have been doing lots of fun things with friends which in turn have led me to the subject of this post - FEASTING.

I don't know about you, but I get pretty excited about this time of year - not just Christmas, but winter in general (and I do hope that you have noticed my lovely seasonal banner, courtesy of the very clever Mr Jon Monkhouse, whose website I would put a link to if I knew how) as it means big bowls of hot, comforting soup, clouds of mashed potato that you want to bury your face in and second helpings of cinnamon-y apple crumble and custard.  Ah, winter, you're always welcome in my kitchen.

It also seems to be the time of year when I feed people more.  Not just more helpings, but more frequently, which suits me down to the ground, as cooking for more than one means I get to try all those recipes that just suit larger quantities of people.  I had my friends Laida, Lynsey and Ferg over for dinner a couple of weeks ago, which meant that I got to try out this bad boy:

Peeping out from under a cheddar cobbler topping is a glorious beef stoo, which I served just with some buttered leeks - seasonal veg, dahling, it's all about the seasonal veg.  I would post the picture of the stew served up on the plate, but to be honest the flash on the phone and my below-par food photography skills made it look rather uncannily like sicked up dog food, which is not really the idea.  Suffice to say, it tasted really quite scrummy and it was the perfect thing for a freezing winter evening.  Also, I feel proud to say that Ferg, a former professional athlete, judo player and a 6 foot something man seemingly made entirely of muscle, declared himself full after eating this.  Apparently he only usually says this once a year.

Now, this next dish was made when my friend Caroline came over from Dublin to stay for a weekend - not for a crazy weekend in London, oh no, none of that, but for a weekend to be spent, and I quote, "sitting down".  So sit down we did, but always with a cup of something or a plate of something, such as this:

This is the rare occasion where the picture of the food on the plate looks nicer than the food in the dish (in this instance, like sausages surrounded by shrunken testicles, not ideal, I think you will agree).  Ladies and gentlemen, if you look to your right you will see an aforementioned cloud of mashed potato and to your left, fat, succulent sausages bought as a special treat from Borough Market cooked in onion and grapes.  Yes, grapes.  No, I wouldn't have thought of it either.  That's why I buy recipe books.

I am very lucky with my friends as I have yet to have a single one of them refuse pudding, which is a blessing as I don't feel that I have fed people properly without giving them pudding as well.  Am I secretly a feeder?  Am I a 1950s housewife reincarnated?  I wouldn't be surprised as this next photo was taken less to portray the crumble and more to show off my newly acquired VINTAGE 1950s BLUE PYRITE (quite rare according to the man on the stall but then he would say that) DISH THAT I'M REALLY EXCITED ABOUT WHICH IS A BIT WEIRD AS IT'S BASICALLY A DISH BUT NEVER MIND BECAUSE I LIKE IT:

Ahhh.  Just looking at it makes me smile.  I'll go into the kitchen in a minute and have a look at it too.  Ahhh.

I think that this will be my last post before Christmas, but, dear reader, I hope that you have a lovely time feasting with all your loved ones.  I leave you with a picture of, in my humble opinion, the ultimate Christmas food, made this year with the mincemeat made from the apples of my last post.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you....The Mince Pie.

Merry Christmas!