Cooking with Nicky #1, #2, #3 and #4

It was around a year ago that I started this blog.  I haven't really written that much in it, the photos aren't spectacular (although I like to think that they might be getting slightly better as I take more of them) and I have no idea who actually reads it, but I've really enjoyed doing it.  Although sitting at a computer is sometimes the last thing I want to do on a weekend or after a day of looking at a screen, the sense of satisfaction after having actually written something, about putting my thoughts into a concrete (though virtual) form, never lessens.  So hopefully I will carry on writing about food for at least another year.

One of the effects of this blog is something I did not expect at all, which is that I have apparently acquired Knowledge.  Over the past year, I have frequently heard the phrase "you must know x about x foodstuff, you have a blog".  In all honesty, dear readers, I know diddly squat about food.  I have had no training, I've never taken any cookery lessons apart from those in my final year of primary school and I certainly have no qualifications.

Yet somehow I have started teaching a friend how to cook.  This makes total sense.

'Cooking with Nicky' did not get off to a particularly auspicious start.  After a request to 'learn more about meat', I started off by showing her how to make a quick pork dish - pork loin steaks served with a honey and mustard sauce, accompanied by mashed potato.  Not the best dish in the world when it turns out afterwards that The Student doesn't really like mustard.  And has since confessed not to really like potato that much either.  Still, onwards!

Lesson #2 went waaay better - everyone likes cake, so we were already on to a winner when I showed her how to make Nigella's carrot cupcakes with cream cheese icing.  Just look at the beautiful things that she created!  Oh, you can see why mothers cry when their children bring them something homemade...

Oh, the heart swells.

Heady with the success of Lesson #2, we bravely returned to meat for Lesson #3, to make Diana Henry's Pacific Lime Chicken.  Chicken thighs marinated in soy sauce, honey, sugar, lime juice and thyme, deftly manoevred with knife, fork and spoon so as not to actually touch anything that would remind The Student of dead flesh, were then roasted in the oven and served with a green salad.  So unbelievably easy (even with the manoevring) and so delicious.  I unfortunately did not take a picture this time, but I've made it myself before and it looks a bit like this:

Mmm, golden crispy skin.

Lesson #4 was rather impromptu and involved another chicken number, this time to use up some chicken breasts and veggies.  Now, I am not a natural rustler.  I am not one of those people who can always produce some amazing feast out of half a potato, some cold beans and an orange, declaring 'oh, I just rustled it up'.  Admittedly, my rustled dish will usually be edible (note the word 'usually'), but I feel a lot more confident with a cookbook by my side.  My mother would say that this is because of my upbringing - not that she always used a cookbook, oh no, the very opposite as she was a very ambitious rustler, hence me learning to cook 'to survive'.

So thinking what to do with chicken and vegetables, not the most taxing of challenges, took a remarkably long time.  Eventually, we plumped for roasting the veg in a dish, then halfway through the cooking time, smearing the chicken with sundried tomato pesto and sitting it on top of the veg to roast along together.  See, see how ludicrous it is that I should be teaching someone how to cook?!

And yet, I do.  Because she is lovely and humours my insistence on free-range chicken, my weird request to take the bones home with me to make stock and my kitchen fascism on the most efficient way to peel a garlic clove (flatten it with the heel of your hand first, the skin will pop off a treat).

Next lesson: more cake.  

Birthday treats for who - the cook or the cookee?

It is no secret amongst my friends that I absolutely, wholeheartedly love birthdays.  It doesn't have to be my birthday either (although that helps, I am an only child after all), as I love other people's too.  I'm not much of a shopper, I've never really been into massive amounts of clothes, shoes, CDs, make-up, and all that other stuff that fuels the wanderings of teenagers round and round shopping malls.  Obviously I still bought all that junk - what is teenage friendship if not a group of girls all carrying identical shopping bags? - but now the only forms of shopping that get me going are food shopping, book shopping and present shopping.

Until recently, I worked at a publishing house and basically got all my books for free.  I have over one hundred still unread on my bookshelf.  So book shopping isn't really much of a concern these days.  Food shopping is a constant, present shopping is a fairly regular occurrence, but the best thing about birthdays is that often you get TO COMBINE THE TWO.  Heaven.

Birthdays are a wonderful occasion anyway, but I am positively ecstatic when I get to cook for someone for their birthday too, whether by making a cake or a whole meal.  Imagine my joy then, when at the end of July, I was able to do both in one week.  Go on, imagine it.

The first birthday was that of someone whose knee has reached the heady heights of fame by appearing in this blog, so a meal of favourite foods was on the cards.  However, my planned starter of scallops was thwarted by them not being properly in season - the lovely Maximus Fishing at my local farmers' market informed me that they were too puny to eat, but that clams might be a good alternative.

Ooh, reader, was I chuffed with these.  I sort of guessed that you probably steam clams open in white wine, garlic and parsley, and mercifully, I guessed correctly:

Three apiece of these giant creatures was filling enough, especially with warm ciabatta dunked in a bit of single estate olive oil - I'd not done that before, but it was like adding seasoning without using pepper or salt.  Curious.  No idea how that works.

For the main course, I served up a version of number one on the favourite food list - chicken and chorizo paella with lots of glorious smoked paprika.  I quite like this picture as it looks like the chicken thighs are lurking like hippos in the rice and stock:

Unlike hippos, the chicken did not attempt to drown anything just for the fun of it, but instead obediently turned succulently tender after a stint in the oven.  Yes, the oven, not the stove-top.  Thank you, Diana Henry, for removing the temptation to stir paella.

Ta-da!  Triumph in technicolour!  (Or as technicolour as my camera-phone allows.)

Dessert was something not on the official favourite foods list, but this is something that the man in question cannot share when out in a restaurant unless it has been specifically pre-arranged prior to ordering, so I was pretty sure that it was a safe bet.  And anyway, who doesn't like chocolate cake?

Another thank you to Diana Henry.  This cake is phenomenally rich and it's quite hard to have a second slice, but you can just about choke that other one down if you pour a bit of cream over the top.  Tough times, I know.

For the second birthday, as my flatmate has someone who likes their knee, I removed myself from the meal zone and entered mere cake zone.  Although to say 'mere' to describe this cheesecake would not do it justice.  A baked confection as opposed to the more available chilled version, this is, according to Nigella, a New York cheesecake.  This cheesecake is one of the reasons why I would like to go to New York.

After a brief struggle to fit all the whisked egg whites into the same bowl as the combined cream cheese, creams, sugar and egg yolks, thus resembling a rather over-ambitious cloud:

...the mixture was then poured over the chilled digestive crumb base in the tin and then subjected to a baking procedure lasting about four hours, with various flapping about with turning ovens down, off, keeping the door closed and then opening it again etc etc blah blah blah.  None of this is important though, when you feast your eyes upon the creation that emerges:

Or, as in my flatmate's case, just feast your whole face.

See?  That's birthday joy right there.

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.