recipes:
corned beef hash
tagine
thai curry
locatelli's tuna pasta
kimchi bokum
alanis morissette
chili con carne
muc don thit
ma mère l'oye
merluza a la vasca
sausage and mash ~ a sonnet
spag bol as she is made
fish finger buttie by heston blumincheek
broad bean and pancetta rissotto
caesar salad
laab nuea
friendly kakapo
poor man's beef stroganoff
khao neow mamuang dailo
pinchos morunos
saddo's supper
dai's secret po'boy recipe
kippenwaterzooi met stamppot
omelette arnold bennett
(all recipes for billy-no-mates servings ~ multiply up if you actually have friends)
reviews, edinburgh:
le marché français
pho vietnam house
quijote tapas
the wednesday night hangouts
eh15
bluerapa thai
chop chop
petit paris
absolute thai
reviews: eateries in that london:
pix
sapori and da spago
corned beef hash
ingredients: tin of corned beef (uk style)
onion
potato or two
mustard, tomato ketchup, dried mixed herbs
keep the beef in the fridge so it cuts up easier. when needed, cut into half inch cubes. if using a large tin, i reserve a few slices for lunch. call me a pleb, but i love corned beef and ketchup sandwiches in a crusty white bread.
peel and chop potatoes into half inch or so chunks and parboil them for five to ten minutes, until just softening.
peel the onion and cut that up too. i often find half an onion is plenty, so i save the rest in the fridge.
heat some oil in a heavy metal pan (i have a great cast iron 7" skillet which sees most kitchen action here in the abode of stone). fry the onion pieces for a few minutes, then add the meat. after a few minutes stirring that, add the spuds. the meat will start to break up and everything gets stirred together. sprinkle with herbs (i know it's anathema to real cooks but i used a basic dried mixed herbs ~ you could select just sage and thyme and vary that with oregano or whatever). i like to add a dollop (that's a bsd or british standard dollop) of dijon mustard too. plus salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste of course.
then, the crucial bit ~ lashings of tomato ketchup.
(there are some great designer ketchups on the market now ~ stokes do one and, in the midlands of my youth and wildhood, the excellent lord nelson in burton joyce sells an own brand too ~ but these are too rich and tasty for this dish ~ i recommend the well known brands or even a supermarketownbrand of oversweetened mush for both this dish and the fish finger butty, of which more later).
mix it all in and cook until it's starting to crisp up a bit on the base. i have taken to flinging in a few frozen peas and letting them cook through as a token gesture to the five-a-day crowd ~ i live in scotland ~ you're lucky to see people get one a month here ~ and that's usually a turnip. if you really want to up your cholesterol levels, try putting a fried egg on top and eating it in front of the telly with a hunk of bread and butter.
recommended tipple: a tasty beer or porter. my favourite at the moment is raging bitch from flying dog of maryland. far too rich and tasty to work with oriental spicy stuff, it works well with this kind of thing. it starts out extremely fruity but ends up quite bitter. which reminds me of most of my girlfriends...
back to index
tagine
ingredients:
some meat or fishsome fruit ~ prunes or semi-dried apricots for lamb, preserved lemons for fish or chicken
onion
carrot
clove of garlic
other veg ~ sometimes a potato, unless serving with couscous
plain yoghurt
coriander leaves and stalks
honey
ras el hanout
the essential ingredients in any tagine are the pot, the meat, the fruit and the spices. ras el hanout means 'best in the store' and is a mix of assorted spices like cinnamon, cloves, chilli, cardamom ... and often a few rarer ones like rosebuds and ashberries. i cheat most of the time. i like to buy ready mixed ones from such places as jordan valley (the shop on nicolson st, not the geographical feature) and the other north african shops around there or the spice stall that appears on castle street whenever there are mini food fests.
sometimes i'll add a pinch of fennel or chilli or an extra cinnamon stick, sometimes i'll add a squirt of harissa from a tube if i want to spice things up. it's fun to experiment with different brands and additives ~ well, it is if the rest of your life is as empty as mine.
i bought my one-man tagine from a moroccan furniture shop on leith walk who had in a job lot at a tenner each. as someone renting a flat with only an electric cooker (chiz moan drone) it was one of my best investments. few dishes are as simple as this. fling stuff in, cook over really low heat for ages, eat. unless i overfill it i can just stick the base onto a tray, pour a beer and eat it up.
ok ... this is what you do ...
cut a small carrot into thick slices. put the tagine base on a very low heat (2 or 3 out of the 6 my hotplate goes up to) and pour a thin layer of olive oil onto it. lay the carrots on top ~ they stop other things sticking to the bottom while caramelising a bit themselves. smash or slice the garlic and add. coarsely slice the onion and add that.
meat can be cubed or pieces of chicken or fish left on the bone. fish may be better added after the veg have started to cook and the dish won't take as long anyway. add the meat on top of or in with the onions. you could have coated the meat or fish in the spice mix a bit in advance if you like but i usually just sprinkle a spoonful of ras el hanout at this stage.
cubed potato, mushrooms or peppers can be added now too.
pour over a very small amount of stock or even water. probably less than half a teacup. the conical lid will keep the steam circulating and any more will boil over the sides (as i keep forgetting). add the coriander, either chopped up and mixed in or whole and taken out before serving.
add a little salt and black pepper to taste, place the lid over the whole and go away for about an hour.
turn over the meat and make sure everything's saucy and the spices mixed in. now add the fruit ~ chopped preserved lemons (available from the same places you get the spices) or moist dried fruits to taste. especially if adding lemons it's nice to balance them by adding a little honey to the sauce. you can also fling in olives or almonds. no two servings need ever be the same. leave for another half hour at least.
to serve, either tip into another bowl or over some steamed couscous or with hot fresh khobz (crusty, flat moroccan bread). i just let the spuds do the carb work.
serve with some yoghurt on the side and mix in as required.
recommended tipple:
this goes great with chilled lagers or pale ales. or a nice crisp but fruity wine like a viognier or some of the spicier alsatians.
back to index
thai curry
ingredients: some meat or fish or seafood like large prawns
onion
some other vegetables
clove of garlic
coconut milk
coriander leaves and stalks
thai basil, lime leaves, lemon grass, thai fish sauce, lime juice, tamarind paste, chillis, as the fancy takes me
thai curry paste
thai fragrant rice
like the tagine above, there's a basic and simple technique which gets varied according to mood, meat and the vagaries of fate. the whole thing takes about twenty-five minutes, only five or ten of which are effort.
again i cheat. i have been known to make up my own curry pastes but i'm quiet happy to use the ones available in 400g plastic tubs (by maesri or mae ploy) from shops like the very wonderful thai@haymarket (who are also helping me learn thai, so i can confidently say praysanii yuu tang saay ~ 'the post office is on the left'). these tubs keep for ages in the fridge. the top shelf of mine has a whole selection and i have been known to grab them at random to decide which to go for. i'm never quite sure of the theological implications of selecting mussaman (muslim) curry paste when cooking pork but the taste still works.
the main pastes and therefore curries are:
red: hotter than the others, great with red meats (but they all go with anything)
green: slightly less hot, made with green chillies and great with chicken, add lots of herbs to make it even greener
yellow: curry is tamil for stew/sauce, gaeng is thai for stew/sauce, thais call this 'gaeng kari': so that's 'sauce sauce' then. a bit like an indian curry in flavour, it's good if the guest veg is a cubed potato.
mussaman: a dark yellowish paste, influenced by muslims from india, using turmeric and nutmeg etc
panang: a very red but milder curry with very fragrant flavours, works well with a dash of tamarind paste to enhance the bitter tang
you can cook this in any handy saucepan but i have a small wok with a slightly flattened base that i bought from a chinese supermarket a hundred years or so ago. it's just the job. another, bog-standard saucepan cooks the rice.
i buy my coconut milk in small, 165ml tins (by chaokoh). a large tin will do for two curries, but it goes off very quickly and attracts mould even from the safety of the fridge, so it rather commits you to another curry soon after — or finding a mate.
until recently i was using small green aubergines imported from thailand and thai coriander likewise. sadly these imports have become prohibitively expensive, so I use things like green or red peppers and english coriander (cilantro). but thai basil is essential ~ usually use sweet basil for meats and holy basil for seafood. i buy it in large packs but it freezes really well. just take it from the freezer and crush a handful straight into the pot while it's boiling.
right. after all that waffle, we can begin. select your meat and flavour and proceed thusly...
cut onion into chunks, crush garlic. cut meat into cubes or hack up joints. put the wok/saucepan over a medium-high heat.
put the coconut milk in the wok and add curry paste. getting the amount right is personal and random. a very large teaspoon or the best part of a dessert spoon does it for me but you might prefer milder (or hotter). check out the result before you decide to add some fresh chillies though.
add the garlic, onions, veg and meat and stir well (yes, some recipes say to fry the paste in some groundnut oil first or even fry the meat or soften the onions. i don't know if it makes much difference; i do know i can't usually be arsed).
add any extra spice ingredients and chop up stalks and leaves of coriander. crush or chop some basil leaves in. i like to put in a goodly helping of the herbs, especially in a green curry.
add a dash of fish sauce to taste (it's like adding salt to western food) and anything else you fancy trying out. meanwhile boil the water and cook the rice by whichever method you prefer. the curry will take ten to fifteen minutes to cook through, so putting the rice on after getting the curry going usually works out about right.
as the curry starts to boil, turn it down to a goodly simmer and check it thickens without boiling dry. stir occasionally to prevent sticking.
when everything is cooked through and the sauce reduced, i turn out the rice into a large shallow bowl and unceremoniously dump the curry onto it from the wok. i even have a nice set of bronze thai spoon and fork to eat it in a vaguely traditional manner, while reminding myself 'praysanii yuu tang kwaa' (it's on the right from where i live).
recommended tipple:
this also is best with chilled lagers or crisp wines.
back to index
tuna pasta with tomatoes and capers
from a recipe i saw giorgio locatelli do on telli
ingredients:
clove of garlic, olive oil
small onion or shallot
small tin of tuna
white wine
small tin (or half a normal one) of plum tomatoes
capers
basil (i usually use dried), salt, pepper
dried spaghetti (100grams per person if you really want to measure stuff)
as your man said at the time, this is your real fast food. it takes little longer than the 10-minute spaghetti.
so, assemble your troops and go...
put water on to boil, smash the garlic, finely chop the onion, get some olive oil in your pan (trusty wee skillet for me)
add salt and oil to the water and put in the spaghetti.
lightly fry the garlic and onion in the oil; as they soften, fling in the drained tuna (i usually keep some back with a little of the chopped onion for a tuna mayo sandwich next day lunch). break up the fish a little.
add half a glass of wine and let it reduce.
stir in the tomatoes and juice (you can add a little tomato concentrate too if you like) and add a desertspoonful of drained capers, a sprinkle of dried (or chopped fresh) basil, salt and pepper. reduce to a simmer.
you should have about five minutes for the sauce to reduce and the pasta finish cooking, so chop up some tomatoes, cucumber and lettuce to make a side salad. Health freaks might want to knock up a light dressing, us cholesterol junkies will settle for a dollop of good mayo and a petit pain on the side and pouring ourselves a good tumbler of the vino blanco.
when it's just right, drain the spag, dump it on top of the sauce, give it a little swirl and tip it as a whole into the waiting wide and shallow bowl. buon appetito!
recommended tipple:
the same wine you cook with; it needs to be crisp and light, like a cab sauv or one of the italian team. i'll usually say what i'm using in the relevant tweet and that often depends on what appellation wines have got on offer.
back to index
kimchi bokum ~ korean pickled cabbage cooked with pork
pretty much my own recipe based on something served at the seoul restaurant in clerkenwell
ingredients:
pork steak
kimchi
clove of garlic, groundnut oil (or veg oil or whatever)
onion, sliced
mustard, soy sauce, sesame oil
sesame seeds
coriander, chopped
rice or noodles
it's more usual that kimchi is served as a side dish to almost every meal in korea, but this cooked version is very tasty. kimchi (or 'mat kimchi') is avaialable from almost any asian store these days and, being pickled, keeps for ages.
another quite quick bit of cooking, but you do need to do the first bit in advance ~ half an hour or so is fine, more is better.
if, like me, the pork steaks are usually hiding at the bottom of the freezer, it's best to slice them when they're half-thawed, cos you can get thinner pieces that way.
make a marinade with soy sauce, sesame oil, a little mustard and a few sesame seeds (if feeling flash, you can even toast them lightly in a dry pan and save some for a last minute garnish sprinkle with chopped corainder);
slice the meat thinly, trim off any fat and coat in the marinade. leave until ready to cook. of course if you're in a hurry, you can just coat the meat, drain it and head straight for the wok. let's face it, with the spiciness of the kimchi and all the other flavours, not to mention lashings of lager, you'll hardly notice the difference a good marinade makes.
when ready to go, start cooking the noodles or rice, slice up the onions and garlic, and heat a little oil in the wok (or frying pan).
soften the onions and garlic, don't let them colour. drain the meat slices and add them to the pan, stir frying the lot until the meat is lightly browned. stir in the marinade and let reduce a bit.
stir in a portion of kimchi (to taste: about the same volume as the meat is about right) and heat through. add most of the coriander and mix. add extra soy and seasonings to taste.
when cooked, turn out onto the drained noodles (or rice) and sprinkle with remaining corainder and sesame.
eat.
recommended tipple:
another one for the lighter beers or a crisp wine
back to index
alanis morissette
seafood in aniseed sauce
ingredients:
seafood ~ any combination of scallops, squid, prawns etc. can be made with monkfish pieces too, all at small-bite-size
anise liquer or pernod or ricard
clove of garlic
small onion or shallot sliced
tomato puree
double cream
basil, dried or fresh chopped
fresh pasta
a very fast recipe of my very own developed when i was living in spainland. its original name was mariscos anisette (seafood anisette) but for reaons lost in the alcoholic mists of time it took the name of a canadian chanteuse (for whom i have no particular fonditude). don't worry if you don't like strong aniseed flavours or the songs of ms morissette, the end result should just be a slight tang which lifts the flavour of the meat.
the old market in cádiz is as near as one can get to heaven on this earth and the fish market therein is the holy of holies. and in one corner thereof colas or 'tails' of seafood and other scraps are sold off very cheap. the locals called me el inglé' loco and this may have been partly because i was fond of buying these things ~ to them this is buying shellfish without the best and tastiest bit, while to folks up here it's not having to buy the bit we'd throw away anyway. so everybody's happy.
the powerful aniseed liqueur (anis seco) i used in the original is hard to get in the uk but pernod or ricard will do ~ they don't have the same depth of flavour, nor do they burn quite so spectacularly, but the finished product is near enough. nothing can quite compensate for it not having spainland wrapped round it anyway.
finely chop the onion and garlic as usual and fry gently in either a good olive oil or butter (if you really want to go for rich flavours and coronary diseases) until softened.
add the seafood and cook quickly on all sides ~ no more than a minute or so.
pour over the liqueur ~ about a shot glass full, according to taste ~ a little less if using real anis seco ~ tilt the pan and apply a match. do stand back; it can send a nice blue flame feet into the air which, though not searingly hot, can have a fun effect on the eyebrows.
return to a medium to high heat and pour in a tablespoonful or some of cream and a squirt of tomato puree. mix in and add about a teaspoon of basil (more if using fresh).
add salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste and serve over pasta.
oh yes, as this only takes about three minutes, you should have already put the pasta on (it's great with a fresh green fettucini which also takes three minutes) and made a side salad.
recommended tipple:
a crisp white wine of course ~ or for an andalucian touch, a very dry and salty manzanilla sherry
back to index
chili con carne
surely you don't need a recipe for this?! you'll be wanting one for spag bol next.
ok then, this is basically what i do; no doubt many a purist will find fault ~ so sue me ~ or just leave out the beans.
ingredients:
minced beef
clove of garlic squelched and chopped
small onion choppéd fine
small tin of tomatoes
ditto of red kiddly beans, drained
optional tomato puree (optional is the best make)
chili powder — i'm more likely to use a mix of cumin and flaked chilis and maybe a pinch of ground coriander seed
(if only cos i have them in stock and don't want to buy a ready mix of what i already have)
bit of very dark chocolate (i have some 99% cocoa buttons which are too bitter to eat but one dropped in here is great)
coriander, dried or fresh chopped
rice or crackers or crusty bread to serve
lashings of cold beer
quick and easy, this. fling some olive oil in the pan and fry up the garlic, onions and a bit later the beef until the veg are soft and the beef is browned.
you can add and boil off a splash of red wine at this point, if you like.
pour in the toms and beans and stir. add spices, salt and pepper, bump up the tomatoeyness with some puree if you like. note that in this context, as it did to the aztecs, 'spices' includes bitter chocolate. not a lot of chocolate and you can leave it out, but it makes a difference.
let it all cook through while the rice or whatever to go wth it cooks; stir in the herbs, heat through and serve.
easy peasy — bol sauce to follow if you insist.
back to index
muc don thit
vietnamese squid stuffed with pork
this is a delicious if fiddly dish, and it helps if no one brings your attention to the similarity between cleaning out a squid and what one might imagine cleaning out a condom would be like. as long as no one puts that image into your mind, you'll be fine.
i'd serve it with stir-fried pak choy in oyster sauce or, if you can get them from an asian store, some pickled mustard greens. and rice if you like but maybe some spare cellophane noodles would be even better. and beer.
ingredients:
a whole squid
minced pork
clove of garlic, crushed
spring onion or three, chopped fine
couple of chinese mushrooms, soaked in hot water for half an hour, drained, squeezed, de-stalked and chopped fine
some dried lily flowers if you have them, soaked, drained and chopped fine
cellophane noodles, soaked in hot water 20 mins and chopped up
fish sauce, vietnamese-style (more pungent than thai) for preference
clean out the mantle (body) of the squid, keeping all thoughts of condoms from your mind), discard quill and gunk, and peel off any dark, spotty outer membrane. wash thoroughly, pat dry.
if you have the head and tentacles, discard the beak and chop the flesh finely.
mix together the pork, garlic, spring onion, mushroom, flowers, squid bits, chopped noodles, fish sauce, black pepper (everything, basically ~ and you can obviously chuck in lime juice, coriander, even chili to taste, if experiment means more to you than authenticity).
stuff mixture firmly into the squid's mantle (any left over can just be fried up on the side) and sew up the opening with coarse thread ~ failing that jam a few cocktail sticks through it and hope for the best.
heat a couple of tblspnsfl of groundnut oil in a frying pan and saute the squid for 5 minutes, turning regularly. prick in a couple of places with a fine skewer or cocktail stick and cook for about ten more minutes, depending on size of squid ~ obviously you neeed the pork mix to be cooked through.
remove from pan and cut into 1.4762cm (roughly) slices and serve on a bed of shredded lettuce or noodles or, tonight at least, fried pak choy.
back to index
tromp l'oie
goose surprise
a surprise to me, at least. what do you call a chase that gets you a wild goose, though that wasn't what you were chasing?
i went to the market,
the farmers' market
but they hadn't got a squirrel, not anywhere there...
it all started when somebody twitted about a recipe for squirrel pie. as it happened, i remembered seeing squirrel on border county foods' excellent game stall recently, and decided to have a go.
but, like i said, no luck this week. but they did have a wild goose breast. and i remembered eating said busty substances at the long-gone hungry hussar of hampingstead, and started wracking my brane to recall what went with it — for a while, i remembered only that there was tonnes of stuff. then the word cholet or sólet popped into the vacant space i call my mind, and thus began my research…
sólet
hungarian bean thing
many cultures have their own version of this fart-factory of a delicacy. the french have the classic cassoulet, the asturians of spainland have their fabada and we in the uk have the true apotheosis of the dish: heinz baked beans with pork sausages (other equally delicious makes are available).
i'm going to have to cheat a bit, since the proper thing needs to be cooked slowly for a number of decades to get all the ingredients to stew into a blended and fragrant gunk. here's my substitute based on what i could find in the local shops.
ingredients:
½ bsd (british standard dollop) of goose fat
onion, garlic
small packet of smoked bacon lardons
tin of haricot beans
dried pearl barley
splash of wine
teaspoon or more of the excellent sweet paprika powder the lovely agata brought me from budapest
(substitute the best you can get if you don't have access to a lovely agata)
soften the chopped onions and garlic in the goose fat. add the lardons and cook for a bit on medium heat (i'm doing this in my tagine for the slow cooking). moisten with a splash of wine and reduce a little.
add the drained tin of beans and a small handful of the barley. season with salt, pepper and the paprika and mix.
reduce heat and cook very slowly for the rest of the afternoon, preferably while watching scotland lift the calcutta cup at twickers (well if italy can beat france, anything can happen). add a little water if it looks like drying out (maybe i should boil up the barley in liquid first?). i may squirt a little tomato puree at it too.
goose (wild? it was absolutely livid!)
so what to do with the goose? i just found a packet of red cabbage already cooked with apples in a polish store (this is where being a smartarse and eschewing upper case letters leads to ambiguity, so note that i mean 'polish' as in 'from poland', rather than 'stuff used to make surfaces shiny'). i'll heat that up as another side dish and probably 'roast' a cut up potato in one of my wee cast iron pans too — i shall use goose fat of course and i like to add a bsd of lime pickle to the pan to imbue the spuds with a delicate tang.
as to the goose breast itself i shall simply roast that quickly in the other covered skillet, to keep it pink in the middle. i'll rub it with salt and pepper beforehand and drain it and let it rest when i think it's done.
then i shall sit in my chair, rumbling and groaning with satisfied fullitide for the rest of the week, possibly passing away from a massive coronary during brain cox's wonders of the universe.
recommended tipple:
a heavy red wine ~ i tried to find a purveyor of bulls blood (or egri bikavér), once ubiquitous in the boozeramas of britain, but no more luck than on the wild squirrel chase ...
back to index
merluza a la vasca
hake in green sauce
hake takes me back to my spainland days, even though it was probably caught off cornwallshire even then. any white fish will do really but the new farmers' market at gorgie city farm had some hake, so...
ingredients:
hake steak or similar white fish
garlic, onion, chopped fine
olive oil
plain flour
white wine
fish stock or water
frozen peas
a few mussels and or clams, in their shells
hard boiled egg, chopped up
loads of fresh parsley, maybe a sprig or two of coriander or even a bit of basil, chopped up fine-ish
quick and easy, dust the fish with salt, pepper and flour, fry it in a skillet in olive oil a minute or two on each side, remove from pan, set aside.
add more oil to pan, soften the onion and garlic, add flour to make a roux of sorts.
add half a glass of wine, reduce and add stock. add the shellfish if available and cook for a few minutes (the flavours of the shellfish really improve the dish).
when the sauce is thickening, return the fish to the pan to warm through and add the broken up egg and some peas. i'm lazy enough to add the peas straight from the freezer but it is best to boil 'em up in another pan first. also i like to add a very very small pinch of chilli or a dash of tabasco just to lift it a little.
serve with patatas pobres ('poor man's spuds': smallish cubes of potato, slowly fried in olive oil with a little garlic and onion, very finely shredded). at the time of writing i'm going to do it with a warm version of the seville dish, zanahorias aliñadas (carrot in moorish style, sliced and fried gently with a touch of cumin and some cariander, moistened with wine ~ which should really be sherry but isn't).
recommended tipple:
any dry white wine really; same one you cook with. osasuna! (that's yer actual basque/euskara for 'cheers')
back to index
sausages and mash
A recipe found in Stratford on Avon
To sausages and goose fat in a pan
I add an onion, choppéd none too fine
And all these fry, unto a nice, dark tan;
Turn up the heat, add half a glass of wine.
Meanwhile have I in salted water boil'd
Potatoes peeléd and then slic'd up small
And when they soften (and when I'm well oil'd)
Season'd and butter'd and then mash'd withal.
Some of the water added to the dish,
With herbs and salt and pepper seasonéd,
The sauce is thickened, serv'd with (if you wish)
Green flageolets and one large glass of red.
Good honest grub, not fanciful or flash —
Will Shakespeare's way with sausages and mash!
back to index
spaghetti bolognese
the way what i do it
this must be the standard fallback recipe for any billy-no-mates or student who prefers cooking and the edible to opening a pot noodle. i already know bolognese sauce doesn't contain mushrooms and have been berated by italians for the very name: 'the bolognese sauce, she is not-a serve with-a the spaghetti!'. ok, to an ignorant inglese the difference between spaghetti and linguini is minimal but i have been using the latter recently — not for authenticity but because it was on offer.
but spag bol as a generic term is what you make it, how you like it and contains whatever you fancy. i do occasionally chop up a mushroom and sometimes i even remember to add it to the pan at some stage. so, in case anybody out there really wants to know, this is just a quick summary of what i do, no doubt totally lacking in authentitude.
chop garlic and onion fine, sweat them in the pan, chop a rasher of bacon, add that. after a minute or so, add a portion of good minced beef, stir till browned and then glug in some red wine. reduce that well, tip in half a tin of chopped plum tomatoes and add a squirt of tomato puree. put the pasta on to boil, add salt, fresh-ground black pepper and a large sprinkle of dried oregano to the sauce; stir, reduce heat a tad and let it thicken while preparing a side salad and pouring a large glass of the red. when pasta is done, drain and plonk on the sauce, stir round once and upend into serving bowl. top with lashings of good-quality partisan cheese, shaved, not grated. spag bol, salad and wine —— done.
what i can't understand is how my belovéd ninfa celestial seemed to do exactly the same as me and yet produce a far better-tasting dish. truly, life is full of mystery.
back to index
fish finger buttie
with kind permission of molecular gastronaut heston blumincheek
i believe that even the humblest of dishes can be given that extra edge by applying scientific knowledge and research. to prove this, i've taken the simple fish finger buttie and even stuck to the most basic of main ingredients to make something really special and turn, i hope, a simple snack into a truly orgasmic experience.
here i'm using five breaded cod fingers by birds eye and slices cut from a large co-operative farmhouse loaf. even the sauce is basically a co-op own brand tomato ketchup. now, you could vary these, use another brand for any of them but we celebrity chefs don't only make our money by charging punters hundreds for a meal, you know, so respect to the sponsors, ok? how often do you think oliver actually uses any of the crap from a supermarket? taste the difference, my arse!
firstly, prepare your bread. it's vitally important that the slices are neither too thick nor too thin. believe me, an ångström either way can diminish the effect. here at the dead duck we have very expensive precision slicing machines, developed for use with samples for electron microscopes, but for home use i reckon you should simply aim to cut your slices as close as possible to a thickness of 8.4732mm. cut two slices per sandwich but not too long before full preparation; they should not have chance to dry out.
the fish fingers should have been removed from the freezer and left to chambre for an hour or so before frying. a 12" cast-iron skillet should now be heated up to a temperature of exactly 456.5 degrees kelvin — assuming that is you're using my recommended oil mixture: this should be 73% olive oil (not virgin cold pressed, don't be silly), 24% soy oil and 3% groundnut oil (laotian for perfect results). once the pan reaches the desired temperature, two tablespoonsful of the oil should be added and brought up to heat before adding the fingers. these should be cooked for 3minutes 37seconds on each side, while playing a recording of the thrid movement of debussy's la mer (ideally in a performance by the chicago symphony orchestra) and preparing the bread.
to do this, spread the sauce to a depth of exactly 3.852222222222222mm on each slice. the sauce itself is a mixture of 95% ketchup, 2% anchovy paste, 2% cumbeslobodian truffle extract and 1% lemon juice, all blended with two drops of tabasco sauce. this can be prepared in advance and kept for weeks in the fridge or thrown into a nearby canal; it's up to you.
finally, place the assembled sandwich on a large white oval plate and garnish with watercress and red pepper extract. to enhance the experience, it is essential that you have prepared an atomiser of sea air — a basic brine, preferably collected from whitstable harbour (to give that oystery tang and essence of seabird droppings): this should be sprayed high into the air just before you settle down to eat. the ideal drink for this is a large glass of 2002 bâtard-montrachet, but do remember to cover the glass before spraying the room with rancid seawater.
enjoy.
back to index
broad bean and pancetta rissotto
the more observant of my follower (if there is one who comes here ~ for all i know i'm talking to myself as usual) might spot that certain meals frequently appear in close temporal proximity. this simply reflects wullie-nae-mates economics. one large tin of tomatoes is a lot cheaper than two small ones and a tin of flageolets verts can be stretched over three servings of sausages and mash. but, even in the fridgy climate and with those neat little plastic lids for resealing tins, there's only so long before the mould starts to take over the can. likewise cheeses: dishes like spag bol can be made without partisan cheese if it forget it (as i often do), but a good risotto can't. so i'm usually stuck with a prepacked and fartoobig wedge of tasteless supermarket 'reggiano', and even if i schlep over to one of iain mellis' wonderful cheesemongers, i usually get a chunk big enough to do a few dishes — ah, how i miss the loose lump cheese from lina stores in soho.
anyway, what i'm saying is, don't be surprised to see spag bol or even caesar salad listed later in the week.
another advantage to this dish is that it otherwise features the things that usually lurk in larder or fridge and requires no thawthought (i just coined that word and i rather like it). these are the things it needs...
the usual chopped (half) onion and garlic
some chicken stock (half a cube boiled in less than half a pint of water)
cubetti di pancetta – these smoked darlings come in handy wee packs available anywhere from valvona&crolla to fidl
carnaroli or arborio or whatevorio risotto rice (i use about a third of a coffee mug per me)
dry white wine
frozen broad beans (and maybe some peas too)
knob of butter (that's an ingredient, not a confession)
oregano, salt, pepper & a pinch of saffron if you have any around
it was gramsay in one of his newspaper columns who said broad beans make a great risotto and he was right — even if he meant fresh ones and i'm cheating. if you can get the real thing when they're in season, it's probably worth giving them a go.
good old skillet over medium/high heat, fry up the usual suspects in olive oil; when soft add the pancetta and cook that for a bit before adding the rice. stir the rice round to coat with a thin film of oil and fat.
add a splash of wine — go on, pour youself a glass while you're at it — oh, you already did — drink one, reduce the other.
boil up your beans and peas in the stock, remove from heat and add a ladleful of stock to the rice (i just add the beans as part of this process). unlike with paella, where the stock is added in one go and the pan covered, the secret with risotto is to add the stock a bit at a time as it gets absorbed and the rice turns gooey and creamy. so do just that, meanwhile adding the herbs and seasonings: a pinch of saffron adds a richness and colour but is far from essential.
when the rice is nicely cooked and al dente and most of the stock is used up and absorbed, stir in a few blobs of butter and a goodly splurge of grated partisan cheese, to make it really rich and creamy. serve with a crusty chunk of baguette, a mixed salad and a large glass of that white wine.
what do you mean you drank it all? open another bottle then, dimwit.
back to index
caesar salad
i probably mentioned already that using up ingredients is key to the varied diet of the wullie-nae-mates. caesar salad is a rather tasty alternative to all the high-carb trash i usually manage to disguise as cuisine. it also uses up some of the partisan cheese i buy for things like risotto and spag bol (see above). 'what of the anchovies?' i hear you cry. 'how do you use them up?'
well, smartytroos, a true caesar salad, as defined by its creator, caesar cardini (1896-1956), doesn't need them. the anchovy content of worcester sauce is sufficient. having said that, i do sometimes add them, which is why i prefer to buy small jars of the blighters rather than tins — easier to store.
it's all very simple. either you fling everything in a blender (my braun* hand blender has a nice wee 350ml chopper — behave) or you go all artisan and do it bit by bit as follows...
you take a little garlic and some salt and pestle them to a pulp in a mortar, adding a drop of olive oil and lemon (or even lime) juice. use a salted anchovy fillet instead of the salt if you must be a rebel. grate in your partisan cheese and mush that in, adding juice and oil to keep it moist enough. when that's all mixed in, stir in the other stuff and blend it all well.
said other stuff is the rest of the olive oil and citrus juice, a good helping of worcester sauce, some fresh-ground black pepper and some or all of a coddled egg. not many people coddle eggs these days, so i shall elucidate (they can't touch you for it).
you get some water really hot, boiling or thereabouts, you put a whole fresh egg in and you take it off the heat. leave it for about a minute, then crack it into a bowl. if you're making enough for a lot of salads or to feed more than one, you might use the whole egg. otherwise just add whatever seems the right amount to the mix. yeah, some people might fear salmonella so you could leave it out but it's not the same without it, the risk is very low and (in the immortal words of tom stoppard) it's not as if the alternative is immortality.
when i were a lad (he digressed), my old gran would make wonderful buns and fishcakes and stuff. whenever we asked for the recipe she'd tell us the ingredients and the method but was unable to answer basic questions about quantities. i like to think i'm sharing the frustration this caused with you now, dear reader. like her, with her six decades of experience, i, with my innate laziness, do all this by eye, and i like to experiment and vary things — laziness and sloppiness are thus the cause of some happy (and, let's not deny it, many unhappy) accidents. suffice it to say that a little garlic and salt go a long way, the oil and juice are in the ratio of 5.463:2.376 (only kidding; two or three to one), a tad less worcester sauce than juice – and some add a dash of white wine vinegar too. cheese? no idea, how about an ounce for every tablespoon of juice? just play around, find out what works for you. too much of one thing? add a bit more of everything else.
so, that's the dressing: what does it dress? basically it's what my mum used to call a 'honeymoon salad' — lettuce alone ( 'let us alone', geddit?). shred or just rip up a cos (or romaine) lettuce into a bowl. to this you can add some shavings of partisan cheese, maybe an anchovy fillet or two and a handful of cretins (a culinary term for small, lightly toasted cubes of bread) — for best results put some cubes on a tray, sprinkle liberally with olive oil and chuck loads of herbs at them like thyme and sage and toast in a warm oven until they're just starting to colour; let them cool a bit before adding to the lettuce. finally, it needs to be lightly tossed to mix all the ingredients. this is a highly-skilled job: the mixing has to lead to a variety of taste experiences with every mouthful. fortunately, i'm naturally gifted in this area — so much so that my skill is evident even to complete strangers, who, despite never having seen me in the kitchen, often identify me on the slightest of acquaintance as a complete tosser.
that's the basic salad. i like to serve it with a side salad of cucumbles and tomatoes but increasingly these days people associate it with grilled chicken breasts. so why not?
i have been known to coat a piece of chicken with some sort of glazey gunk (some combination of brown sugar or honey, olive oil, soy, garlic, mustard, whatever) and stick it on my wavy-line griddle pan thing — but, at the time of writing, having had a bigger lunch than expected at word of mouth (review to follow some day), i'm just flinging some supermarket cooked ham in and opening a bottle of a recent discovery, alsatian pinot auxerrois from appellation wines.
* other makes of blender and means of blending hands are available. blending of hands is very silly, and is not recommended or supported by this website.
back to index
laab nuea
spicy, minty, beefy, salady dish from isaan (north east thailand)
in spring, when the edinburgh sun is in the sky longer and even manages to get out from behind the clouds on occasion, and the temperatures finally struggle above freezing, the front garden at number 21 becomes a riot of green, with a few flowers to boot. and for this writer the finest crop is an effusion of mint. the lady of the flat has given her blessing to my grabbing a handful when i pass on my weary way home from the caffs and shops of auld reekie, only too pleased to see it kept down a little. a blessing coupled with a warning to pick it from further back because "the wee doggies pish on the stuff nearer the railings".
and what is it picked for, dear reader? well, partly for the occasional mint julep, a drink i became partial to after buying a bottle of knob creek bourbon (though asking lassies if they fancied coming back to try my knob with mint was not very successful) —— simply boil up a syrup of 50-50 sugar and water and stick it in a jar with loads of mint to cool; strain out the mint and keep it in the fridge. whenever you feel like it, put some crushed ice in a wee frozzed glass (or pewter cup if you want to be authentic), pour over a slug of finest kentucky bourbon and add a sprig of lightly crushed fresh mint before pouring some of the syrup over it and drink with a straw.
but i digress. the other main use of this minty bonanza is the thai (or lao) salad known as laab. both refreshingly minty and tongue-carbonizingly spicy, it's a great summer dish served with khao neow or sticky rice (as in khao neow, lao bao, sticky rice on the lao border, from the thai version of 'my fair lady').
as well as gathering in the mint harvest, it needs a couple of other things to be pre-prepared. one essential ingredient is sometimes sold as laab powder; indeed laab mixes, with all the key ingredients are available, but nothing beats the fresh flavours (and scope for variation) of assembling them yourself. and laab powder is actually made from bog-standard white rice grains. heat a heavy skillet and stick in a wee shovelful of plain white rice (jasmine, basmati, uncle bert's easycook, whatever) and shake it around until it's all going light brown. let it cool and then stick it in a coffee grinder to reduce it to a powder. it keeps for a month or so in the fridge, though the sooner you use it the more of that great nutty flavour it'll retain. and the other thing you'll need to do is soak the sticky rice in water for a few hours before using. you have to buy sticky rice from your local asian stores of course, it is a specific type of rice and can't be made from the usual stuff. as i discovered after being careless, it sure doesn't work with risotto rice!
okay, so the ingredients... (recipe from the thai chocolate cookschool, chiang mai) :
beef mince — that's the nuea bit; but it's great with minced chicken (gai) or pork (muu) or even pre-roasted duck (ped yang)
2 or 3 shallots, preferably wee thai red ones (from asian stores), sliced very thin
1 tbsp laab powder (see above)
minced or powdered red chilli to taste (isaan style, use one bucketful; else about ½tsp)
2 or 3 cm of lemongrass minced very fine (use a chopper on a piece straight from the freezer and shave off very thinly)
½tsp or less white sugar (or palm sugar if you can get it)
1 or 2 tbs of lime juice or juice of half a lime or whatever's left after making a g&t
1 tbsp naam pla ~ thai fish sauce
mint and coriander (preferably thai), coarsely chopped
sticky rice, soaked
put the sticky rice on in a steamer. the lovely people at thai@haymarket sold me some dinky little bamboo steamers, which i line with muslin and fill with rice — one steamer per diner (ie one steamer; ho hum). i then stick them in my tall asparagus/sweetcorn cooking thing with an inch of water in the bottom, cover and leave until panicking when it boils dry. it takes less than 20 minutes to cook.
unless using duck (in which case just drain the fat off and mince or shred finely), put the minced meat in a pan with a minimal amount of water (it's really there to stop the meat frying and takes ages to boil off if you use too much). bring to the boil and stir it in a desultory fashion until the meat is cooked and the water all evaporated. remove from the heat.
add the chopped onion/shallots and the dry ingredients and stir well in. add the lime juice and fish sauce, then the leaves and mix well. put some fresh lettuce leaves into a shallow bowl and chuck the laab on top. garnish with anything else you fancy adding — some chopped tomatoes on the side, a few extra leaves — and serve with the sticky rice at the side.
goes down very well with a cold beer or six, and though i do prefer it by the banks of the chao phraya, i'll just have to settle for the abode of stone in edinburgh.
back to index
a friendly kakapo
in fond memory of Joe and Vicky
back in the early 80s i lived in warwick and frequented the charmingly eccentric eatery run by latvian ex-heavyweight wrestler joe zaranoff and his wife, vicky. one could fill a book with tales of the place, but their relevance here lies in their witty little starter (or was it a pud?) called a 'friendly dog': half a poached pear giving the effect of the head of snoopy with prunes for the ears and raisins for nose and eyes (research suggests the idea originated in a betty crocker children's recipe in the states).
some years later, entertaining some new zealand chums, we wanted to do a themed meal. so we decided on a vegetable wellington (one guest was a veggie weirdo) as a jocular main course and the obvious pud: fruit pavlova (claimed by both kiwis and aussies). but what to start with? well, i have always had a soft spot for the flightless parrot called a kakapo, a very endangered species indeed. that a bird could evolve to look like a feathered teddy bear has always amazed me. since those days, douglas adams and stephen fry have publicised their plight (and some aussie scientists have dared to say they aren't worth the effort and cost of saving!). more info can be found at the kakapo recovery website and on facebook you can follow sirocco, the kakapo who found fame by shagging the back of fry's co-presenter's head.
anywhichway, remembering vicky's doggie starter and mixing in the cute nz bird, led to the development of the friendly kakapo, the perfect starter for any dinner party.
to make two wee birdies, simply take a ripe avocado, cut in half, remove the stone and peel. place each half, hole side down, in shallow bowls and take a thin slice off each side and at the foot (wider) end, to give a flattened surface.
peel a segment of tangerine or satsuma to make the feet and two segments of grapefruit or preferably pomelo for the wings. again, trim the fatter ends flat and place them against the body, as in the pic. i couldn't get yellow grapefruit or pomelo today, so i'm afraid we have to settle for pink grapefruit wings. still tastes good.
press one blanched whole almond and two black peppercorns into the avocado to make the beak and eyes.
admire your handiwork, then make a dressing with some juice from the citrus fruits, some olive oil and perhaps a dash of wine vinegar. add salt, a smidge of mustard and ground black pepper and mix well (I put it in a wee jar and shake vigorously until it emulsifies a bit). sprinkle this decoratively over the bird. you may want to serve a little extra on the side.
the only problem then is the risk of getting too attached to the wee chappies to eat them. i'm calling this one eric. everybody say 'aaah!'
back to index
poor man's beef stroganoff
the recipe for beef stroganoff dates back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century. then it was made with cubes of beef, sauteed and finished with mustard and stock and a little soured cream. over the years, the cubes became strips of steak, and mushrooms and onions got added into the mix. it's one of the world's classic dishes.
then there's this cheap and cheerful version which isn't. but it's still nice.
this dates back to my earliest days of independent living. we had two main bibles in our kitchen: katherine whitehorn's cooking in a bedsitter and jocasta innes' pauper's cookbook. i think this (and a chili con carne recipe) came from the latter.
i seem to remember that the mushroom element (and some thickening) was provided by using a small can of campbell's condensed soup. i shall dispense with that bit.
so many of the things we used to cook, like the spag bol above, began with garlic, onion and mince. this is no exception.
so the mince stands in for the steak and, for the sour cream, you substitute a dollop of plain yogurt. but i shall restore the mushrooms, rather than go the soup route — if you want the sauce any thicker than the yogurt makes it, sprinkle in a little plain flour at the end of the frying stage.
fry the garlic and onion in a little oil until soft. it won't hurt to add a chopped-up rasher of bacon, assuming your dietary laws allow it.
add the mince and brown all over. fling in a handful of thinly sliced button mushrooms.
moisten with a little white wine, then add salt, mustard, a little paprika if you fancy it and lashings of freshly-ground black pepper.
finally stir in the yogurt, and cook gently (so as not to curdle it) for a few more minutes.
serve over plain boiled rice with a mixed side salad and perhaps a petit pain.
recommended tipple:
i prefer a white wine with this but as it's beef a light red is good too.
back to index
khao neow mamuang dailo
mango and sticky rice a la dai lowe
when the mangoes are at their ripest and sweetest, this is a very popular dish in thailand. it's a simple combination of rice, coconut milk and fruit, reminiscent in concept to the rice pudding and fruit or jam i ate as a kid, but a hundred times nicer.
sadly, at the time of writing, getting good thai mangoes in season is as difficult as getting their herbs at any time. i suppose i should welcome anything, even economic trubbles, that reduces the enormous distances food has to travel these days. do you realise that in 1944 the average u.s. farm produced over two thousand calories of food for every calorie of fossil fuel it used? in 1944 the ratio became one to one and now, in the era of intensive growing and long-distance distribution, it has flipped completely the other way and rising.
but i do like nice ripe thai mangoes. and they don't really grow good anywhere near scotland. though if global warming increases, who knows?
anyway, the basic dish is made by soaking and steaming a portion of sticky rice, then stirring in a mixture of coconut milk and sugar (previously boiled together in a 2:1 ratio) and a goodly pinch of salt.
slice the mango and place with the rice on a serving plate or even a banana leaf.
boil up another similar mix of coconut milk or cream and sugar, but without any salt and pour this over the rice as a sauce. serve sprinkled with a few sesame seeds.
the 'a la dai' bit is a little touch i tried out with great success just after arriving back from thailand in 2006. finding the rice a little uninspiring as it was, i tried soaking it in a mixture of orange and pineapple juices before steaming. this not only imparted a fruity flavor but also gave the rice a pleasing hue.
in fact, if you were doing it as a dinner party pud, you could do some rice in the traditional way and some with fruit juice, arranging it tastefully on each plate or leaf for maximum aesthetic effect.
if i ever find a nice ripe mango, i might do it again and add a photo. don't hold your breath.
back to index
pinchos morunos
marinaded pork skewers with some other spanish stuff
it just occurred to me. i've eaten these delicacies all over spainland and ukland too. i've got recipe books in castellano and inglés and seen many recetas for them on the old interweb and elsewhere. always they are described as grilled skewers of pork in the moorish style. much is made of the influence on this dish of the moslem caliphate which ruled southern iberialand until five hundred years ago.
and no one ever seems to pick up on the strangeness that one of the few dishes which bespeaks this islamic influence strongly is made with dead pig.
it's like a traditional new york recipe for prawn and bacon bagels, already.
anyway, whatever the origins and however an islamic set of flavours was ever applied to the amazingly delicious piggy-wigs of the andalucian hills, it's a fine and simple dish to prepare.
as long as you remember to get the meat marinading the night before. i mean, if you forget and tweet that you're having them that very evening, just prior to getting the pork from the freezer and looking up the recipe, you'd look a right pranny, wouldn't you? so don't do that.
yes, you can do them with just an hour or so of marinading (don't) but they're so much better if you give them a night in the fridge. you could, for instance, rustle up a quick b.l.t. on the first night and postpone the spanish extravaganza for the following. if you did anything that silly, that is. just saying (oh, i hate that phrase!).
so cut up your fully-thawed pork steak(s) into cubes.
make a marinade with a good glug of olive oil, into which you stir assorted 'to taste' amounts of the following:
ground cumin
spanish smoked paprika (i prefer the hotter versions but that's optional)
thyme and parsley (i'm using dried, fresh is also good)
salt and fresh-ground pepper
recipes will also ask for crushed bay leaf and even crushed flesh of red pepper but can you really be bothered? i can't, and given the other flavours, i doubt anyone would notice.
soak the meat in all that, rub it in with a spoon, leave it somewhere cool overnight (maybe give them the odd stir when passing the fridge). then thread onto sticks and stick on a barbecue or other charcoal grill if available. otherwise grill or griddle them on a high heat until they're starting to char at the edges.
then serve.
no sauce or anything is needed, as they'd usually be part of a spread of assorted tapas.
at the time of writing, i'm planning to do them with pimientos fritos y patatas bravas (fried peppers and wild potatoes).
the peppers are those excellent long, sweet ones that you can often find these days. split in half and deseeded, they are simply cooked on a medium heat in a goodly quantity of olive oil until browning in places (edinburgh, in my case, ha ha). on serving, sprinkle with coarse salt.
(actually two peppers are more than enough, but the tools of evil that are supermarkets don't sell them singly. no matter — ¡revueltos de pimientos por desayuno mañana! ie soft-scrambled eggs with peppers for breakfast tomorrow!)
The potatoes are cut in smallish cubes and also fried in olive oil until softened inside and golden crisp outside. i'll add a simple sauce made by sweating some onion and garlic, then moistening with wine before adding some chopped tomatoes and chopped fresh chilli or cayenne pepper, salt, pepper and parsley, and heating until thickened. drain the spuds on kitchen paper then sprinkle with salt and pepper before pouring the sauce half over them in a vaguely decorous manner.
add a nice (ie large) glass of chilled dry sherry and i'll be transported back to my little gaditano salon. or would be, were it not for the lousy weather that passes for an edinburgh summer. ho hum.
back to index
daal bhat or saddo's supper
lentils and rice with a guest vegetable
one of these days, i may share a korean recipe for black noodles (jajangmyun). i'm told that in korean movies, an indicator that a person is unattached and lonely is to show them eating a plate of this simple, delicious but depressing-looking food. the black bean paste is available in many asian stores. the only difficult thing in making it is getting real korean noodles, made with flour and potato starch, that aren't packaged in an eastern equivalent of an instant noodle dish.
my own signifier dish for such a (now permanent) state is this one. red lentils and brown rice, boiled together to a mush. yes, i'm doing my best to make it sound even more depressing than it actually is.
i shall endeavour to summarise how it came to play this rôle in what passes for my life. here is a list of the contributory factors.
° many years ago a friend, who had returned from doing good in nepal, introduced us to the basic dish.
° a wife and i were going through our compulsory veggie-weirdo (nay, vegan) stage and it became an occasional feature of our mealtimes.
° nigel planer's character, neil, in the seminal sitcom, the young ones, was in the habit of boiling up vast pots of lentils for his housemates' dinner. and dropping them everywhere.
° i saw a documentary about a tribe of folk who inhabited some remote himalayan valley. despite the barren land and what might seem to us a poverty-ridden life, they seemed extremely content. and their meal almost every day was exactly the same. no, not this dish but a similarly simple dish of boiled millet.
° a wife ran away with a neighbour and colleague, leaving me, for the first but by no means the last time, all alone.
now, i'd already hatched some vague plan to try and live on the same thing every day, perhaps with the strange notion that it would make me as happy as those little mountain buddhist folk. but as regular visitors to this page may have noticed, i like cooking and i like my food. and i don't do happy. semper dai lowe, semper dolens.
so a compromise of sorts was reached.
each night for about a year, except on special occasions and visits to family and friends (all right, i admit it, just family), i half filled a coffee mug with red lentils and then topped it up with brown rice. i fried a coarsely-chopped onion and a clove of garlic in ghee (clarified butter, but vegetable oil is fine) and added the night's guest vegetable — chopped peppers, mushrooms, courgette, aubergine, whatever i'd grabbed from granny smith's veg shop in the centre of warwick that day. sometimes i added a sliced banana, which works surprisingly well, but needs adding to the pan later in the process.
then i'd sprinkle in salt and assorted combinations of spices. in a lazy mood, it would be a pre-mixed curry powder but extra fennel, chili powder, fenugreek or whatever would add a sybaritic note of variety to my ostensibly monkish lifestyle.
once all the flavours had mingled and the veg was softened, in would go the contents of the coffee mug. water was added to cover and the heat turned up to bring the mix to a boil. then the heat gets lowered and it's left to simmer until a thickened and softened mush.
serving is just a matter of turning it out into a bowl and eating with a dollop of yogurt/cucumber raita and some mango chutney/lime pickle, whatever.
there are pitfalls here. the longish cooking time makes it easy for the absent-minded among me to forget it's on, whereupon an economical dish becomes a charcoal mass in, far too often, a ruined saucepan. it never took me three goes though.
and there was the time when i picked up the pan too suddenly only to lose my grip when splashed with hot mush, causing the pan to fall, the handle to catch that of another pan and execute a neat flipover, pebble-dashing a wall of my pantry. and the real pity is that there was no one to be entertained by my standing there doing a perfect impression of neil the hippy, saying oh no! heaveeee!
i did it anyway. time to reinstate this dish for a season, methinks. think of it as the uktv gold of the cookery world. it's actually very tasty. and healthy. ish.
back to index
dai's secret po'boy recipe
spicy new orleans sandwich in crusty french bread
can't you read? it's a secret!! go away
back to index
willem-geen-vrienden kippenwaterzooi met stamppot
billy-no-mates chicken waterzooi with stamppot
before we start, a word or six about celery. your humble cook is no big fan of the stringy stalks, certainly no nibbler on the raw produce dipped in salt. but so many recipes of european origin call for the odd stick of the stuff, and as a flavouring in the right place it is excellent and irreplaceable. yes, celery salt is better than nothing but not good enough, not really.
but what's a single fellow — for that matter even a small nuclear family unit — of celery-doubters to do when the smallest quantity to be bought in shops is a whole ruddy head?
the obvious answer is soup; again not so much a beloved favourite as a passable and nourishing way to use up the stuff. so if you fancy giving this traditional flemish chicken stewy-fricasee thing a go, that's the best advice available, not least because this dish needs recognisable and munchable matchsticks of the ruddy stuff. unless you actually like celery, in which case there's no real hope for you, you weirdo. at least it's quite cheap.
if you want to sound a tad more posh, the matchsticks can be called julienne strips, and you need to slice up the white bit of a leek and a similar length of the aforementioned apium graveolens as part of the preparation. to be perfectly honest it's becoming clear to your lonely correspondent that this is far from being an ideal singleton's dish, but a sudden attack of nostalgia happened along just in time to meet a slightly unhappy digestive system, reeling from too much spicitude (and, let's not deny it, a little too much booze). fond memories of a starred eatery in the windswept massif central of franceland, run by a flemish chef, who had said dish as one of the specialities du jour, sprang eagerly to mind when the little grey memory banks were being accessed for suitable ideas.
it's quite simple really (albeit long-winded like the recipe). you can even use up some more of the weeds by sticking the chopped up greenery from the high end of the leeks and celery in a saucepan of stock (yeah, water and a cube will do, let's keep it real), along with a chunk of onion with an embedded clove and a bouquet garni (ok, a sprinkling of mixed herbs). fling in a chicken thigh or two ~ or a breast, whatever; bring to the boil and then simmer for 10 to 20 minutes.
towards the end of this process, get those strips of leek and celery and stick them with a knob of butter in a flameproof casserole (or the base of a tagine if you like ~ or, if you're lucky enough to have one, a lovely vietnamese pot from a chum's gallery, like the one bubbling away while this is being typed), fling in a few more herbs (extra sage if you have it) and sprinkle on a little mace or grate some nutmeg, as it sautées gently for a few minutes over a medium to high heat.
now take the chunks of meat out of the stock and lay them on top of the julienne 'nest'. strain some of the stock over until it starts to lap at the sides of the chicken (many recipes say cover, but if using a good pot with a ceramic lid, this isn't really necessary as the juices and flavours should circulate nicely and you can always give it a turn now and then). put the lid on, lower the heat, and let it cook slowly for another half hour (reduce times if it's but a wee chunk of flesh). save the spare stock in case it dries out ~ and for the soup tomorrow … and tomorrow … and tomorrow …
this would traditionally be eaten as it is, with crusty bread or even buttered toast, but greed and another burst of nostalgia, this time for a more recent visit to amsterdam, has resulted in the production of a side-plate of stamppot. this is the dutch or flemish equivalent of colcannon, champ or bubble and squeak, one of the many and glorious variations on mashed up spuds and veg. all it needs is a carrot and it could even be called a hotchpotch (or hutspot). but it hasn't, so it isn't.
boil some spuds — it's not a fried dish, so they need to be freshly mashed and hot. again, you can fling in the shooty end of the celery and some shredded leek, as well as any sprouts or spring onions you might have lying around. chop up and fry up a rasher of bacon too, if you like. then simply mash the lot together with butter and salt and pepper to taste. you'll need some cream to finish the waterzooi, so add a dash of that to this too. worry not — recent research shows that fats are pretty harmless after all, and it's the sugars you want to worry about. and be grateful that cream freezes well, cos you don't need a lot.
finally, take all the solids out of the waterzooi and put them on a plate with the stamppot, preferably resiting the chicken pieces on their now-wilted vegetable base. turn up the heat and add some cream (double for preference, but single is being made do with at the moment, on account of that being what was in the freezer), reduce to a smooth sauce and, as they say, adjust the seasoning. pour over the meat and serve.
last century, in the luxurious michelin-rated gaffe, there was a slight contretemps between the extravagant loonies and the economical sane folk in the party, over what part of the exquisite wine list to go for, and, if memory serves, a rather extravagant white burgundy won the day. however it may make more sense (gastronomically as well as in the light of more straitened times) to down a crisp belgian blonde (beer!!) with this. to this end, appellation wines provided a rather nice bottle of grimbergen.
smakelijk eten!!
back to index
omelette arnold bennett
omelette with smoked haddock and parmesan cheese
i'd like to give credit to nigel slater, whose recipe in the grauniad inspired me to cook this dish, but the true thanks must go to the chefs at the savoy hotel in that london who created it for the eponymous writer (1867-1931), author of one of my favourite comic novels, the card. in fact, i gave some thought to working on a variation of the dish to be called omelette denry machin (after the hero of said book). luckily for you, i was unable to think of any smartarse connections.
luckily for your correspondent, embra is a city well stocked with fishmongers, and the nearest one to the abode of stone, down gorgie road, has a
wonderful range of smoked fish in the window, the first requirement for an arnold bennett. an undyed smoked haddock seeemed to fit the bill, but
a touch of bright orange might well do the job, and perhaps varying or even mixing the fish content could be a fun experiment. could an arbroath
smokie in the mix make it an omelette walter scott for instance?so, as raymondo used to say on the jimmy young show, this is what you do.
take some smoked fish and simmer it for five to ten minutes in milk. meanwhile beat a couple of eggs (using the old 8" skillet here, so two large eggs is fine for one overlarge guy) with some salt and pepper.
break the fish into large flakes, retain the milk and use to make a white sauce with a knob of butter and plain flour (no salt of course, the fish provides enough, but a sprinkle of pepper, preferably white, can be added). pour the eggs into the hot, buttered pan, gather a few times and let cook while you fold the fish back into the sauce and add a load of roughly chopped, crinkly leaved parsley. when the eggs are about set, spread the sauce over them and sprinkle on a layer of grated partisan cheese. i added a little grated cheddar to this, to lessen the pungency and improve the melting effect.
put the pan under a hot grill until the cheese is bubbling, take it out, take an (optional) photograph for your website, sprinkle on a little extra parsley if desired and serve.
of course one delight of wullie-nae-mates cooking is that garnishes are superfluous. and also that the difficulties of serving a dish like this from a steep-sided skillet are hardly relevant. for it was at this point that the advantage of a real omelette pan, with sloping sides, became apparent. the mess on the plate was not as attractive as it had been in the pan, and the dish was briefly renamed omelette gordon bennett. so bear this in mind, those of you lucky enough to have a charming guest to serve.
and, whether in company or alone, it goes very well with a crusty bread, like a petit pain, and a crisp side-salad with a tangy vinaigrette dressing.
and of course a good white wine, probably something smokey like fumé, or anything crisp but tasty, will go down a treat.
back to index
where i'm (sometimes) eating
french eatery and shop, 9a west maitland st, edinburgh
having just had a lunch there, i realised i ought to add some 'reviews' in lieu of recipes, for when i eat out.
one of my muchtoomany haunts for a
obviously, based in haymarket they do a roaring lunchtime trade in takeaway sandwiches, coffees and pastries and get packed out when the rugby internationals are on, especially when the french are in town.
manager romu has recently revamped the place, giving it a lively new feel and the only downside for a passing roué might be the fact that his charming young staff are not quite like les serveuses d'antan (see vai and emmanuelle on the coffee pages).
i often bemoan the lack of a good croque monsieur outside france, and le marché comes closest to rectifying that. 'french living' in nottingham, while a great bistrot for an evening meal, had the nerve to sell an anæmic (but adequate) cheese'n'ham toastie under that name. a croque is not a toastie! le marché's may not be the best i've had but it does have béchamel sauce in it and the cheese on top and tastes pretty damn good ~ a great value snack for lunch with a glass of the quaffable house rouge. and my companion (also genuinely french) had an excellent confit de canard with sautéed pommes de terre nouveaux.
à la prochaine!
back to index
pho vietnam house
3 grove st, edinburgh eh3 8af
so good, i painted the owner! this tiny restaurant in a cupboard on grove street is the new project of young jodie xyzptlk ngurgle (or something like that) from ho chi minh city.
seating only 20 souls and with no booze licence, it's a cosy, byob affair. great for me, as it's a ten minute walk from home, with a call in at ash mccobb's appellation wines to raid the selection of unusual beers on the way.
this corner has seen any number of interesting-looking eateries come and go before i've even had chance to try them (the proverbial spondulicks being more elusive than ever these days), so when i discovered this one and how good the food was (and, let's not deny it, how lovely jodie and her mum are), i was keen for purely selfish reasons to spread the word so it stays in business. so go there or i will find you and i will kill you.
pho (pronounced something like 'fur') is the national snack dish of vietnam. basically a soup with flat rice noodles, it can be bought on any street corner and the joy of eating it (apart from the great-tasting stock) comes from playing with the flavour by adding your own, ever-changing combination of fish sauce, soy, chilli, lime and chopped greens; perhaps best with the thinly-sliced beef, it can also be served with chicken or tofu.
the rest of the menu reflects this snackbar approach. vietnamese food is not startlingly different to the chinese and thai dishes we're now so used to, but it is distinctive enough not to be mistaken for them. the chicken curry has a different set of flavours from its thai cousin and is almost white in colour. the wonderful chicken, fried and braised on the bone in a chilli and lemongrass sauce is probably my favourite but the pork loin, now enhanced with extra flavours like star anise, is challenging strongly. and the gloriously refreshing cold spring rolls, with noodles, prawns, pork and mint, make a great starter.
ostensibly to visit relatives and bring back more recipes, but more likely to avoid my attempts to murder her aberdonian husband and run off with her (if you tasted her cooking you wouldn't blame me ~ the way to a man's heart and all that ...), mum went back to vietnam before xmas and has stayed to open a spa. but jodie's partner has made a fine substitute chef, despite being polish ~ and male.
and the clincher, as if one were needed, is the value. £5.90 gets you a one-course lunch and a can of drink, and the evening meal won't set you back a lot either. so what are you waiting for?
and now, if you like the pixtures on the walls, why not check out her mum's new art gallery, just a chopstick's throw away in haymarket terrace?
back to index
quijote tapas bar
13a brougham st, edinburgh eh3 9js
i lived for a crazy year in cádiz in spainland. i miss it and especially i miss eating seafood on the seafront as the sun sets over the allterative andalucian atlantic. for the last decade (good grief, has it been that long?!) i've been boring people to death with my grumbles about the lack of a real tapas bar in the uk.
sure, there are plenty of adequate places serving good spanish snack food and plenty of plasticky ones like the tasca chain, but nowhere seems to serve real 'tapa' portions. no visit to the gaditano shops was complete without at least three visits to bars for maybe a couple of gambas here, or two or three albondigas there (with a glass of fino or a cerveza each time), none of which set me back more than a couple of quid. ok, prices will have risen but if the portions are small enough, a josé-sin-amigos could still get a varied meal rather than a huge helping of the same thing. dionika and barioja are fine, but insist on garnishing and presenting each plateful with some sort of aesthetic added
¡por fin! (at last!), in el quijote bar y tapas edinburgh now has such a place and it's already establishing itself as a cool hangout joint for the spanish community. set up by a group of friends, including a couple of sevillanos, it's the perfect place for a platter of iberian jamon or some chipirones a la plancha (griddled small squid) with a glass of dryest sherry
during the day they function more as a café cum tapas bar but needless to say they also do larger scottish-style evening portions. but the place is so laid back they'll do just about anything on the menu as a snack at any time.
if they were any nearer to dalry, i'd probably spend far too much of my time there. as it is, it's cheaper than renewing the passport and heading back to my little city by the bay ...
back to index
my wednesday hangouts
clerk st, edinburgh eh8
on wednesdays i like nothing better than to speak a strange language almost but not quite entirely unlike spanish. to do this with bemused natives of spainland and far more fluent brits, i head for a pub where such people congregate for what is known as the edinburgh intercambio (all welcome). it gets going around 8 or 9, so i often eat in the area and have three regular haunts.
The first is the aforementioned hostelry itself:
the greenmantle
now, like heston blumincheek, i like nothing better than popping over to switzerland and chucking carefully measured quantities of cumbeslobodian truffles and rare breed henfruit into the large hadron collider to make that perfect omelette (after all, as any fule kno, you can't make an omelette without smashing higgs ~ i'll get me coat).
but, also like heston (i believe), i also appreciate a good old burger and a pint in a pub. and both of these (and other such delights) are available at the greenmantle. a good selection of bottled beers as well as draught ales like hobgoblin and bitter and twisted (the one they named after me) sit alongside a rather good menu, the stars of which are the puddledub burgers made from finest free-range scottish buffalo and topped with various extras, served with the essential accompaniment of chips, chips and more chips.
it can get pretty lively: as well as manglers of spanglish, it's a popular pub both with locals who want to watch some footy and the local strudel population, including wednesday-meeting groups like the trampoline society, the runners and the kendo soc. supply your own jokes.
but sometimes i'm that side of town a bit too early or just fancy something a little more exotic to start the evening. in that case i direct my feet mainly (apart from an occasional and delicious masala dosa at the kalpna indian veggie-weirdo restaurant), toward the kampong ah lee or the ong gie.
both of these are great value and thus popular with a strudel crowd. their popularity with diners from the relevant part of the world must mean something too.
kampong ah lee malaysian delight is a malaysian eatery a hundred yards further down clerk street. a café style place with quick service of individual plates (or bowls) with rice or noodles included, the portions are certainly on the scottish side. i have barely started my exhaustive survey of the menu as yet, so it's too early to nominate a favourite. i think beef rendang is winning (yes, i know it's an indonesian dish, it's still nice here).
ong gie korean is more of a takeaway but does have room for a few diners. in north london i lived above the legendary you me house (now in malden) and got very used to eating and even cooking (see above) this little-known cuisine. and i've missed it. now, suddenly, edinbuggle has a good restaurant on dundas st (shilla) and this cool little takeaway in newington.
i just did a bit of research and find that the owners are described on one review site as 'probably the nicest people on the plant [sic]'. what plant they're on, i don't know but they are indeed very very nice people, very helpful and happy to explain or discuss any aspect of their country's fascinating cuisine.
there's a squid dish i could only ever get in the seoul in clerkenwell, and your man says, if i give him a day or two warning, he'll prepare that or any other dish in time for my visit. which is nice.
there are two very small tables crammed into the waiting area, supplied with the impossibly thin metal knitting needles that pass for chopsticks in the erstwhile hermit kingdom — be grateful they are always backed up by a spoon. food comes with complimentary ginseng tea and, while you won't get the table barbecues for your bulgogi beef or the red hot stone bowls for your bibimbap (a glorious hodgepodge of rice and assorted ingerdients topped with a fried egg for you to stir together with fiery red bean paste), the value and the deliciousitude will more than compensate.
it certainly sets me up for una noche de cerveza y sandeces. ¡salud!.
back to index
eh15 restaurant at jewel and esk college
24 milton road east, edinburgh eh15 2pp
so there i was, sitting in one of the mini-chesterfields at the scottish arts club, having a wee snifter or six with buffy mcspratwarbler, when this amiable cove joins our number and the conversation turns to the subject of the daily grind, as it often will despite one's best efforts. turns out said a.c. is a senior panjandrum of some kind at an establishment called jewel and esk college, out to the east of duddingston, that place with the loch of skating vicar fame.
"well, gosh, golly and blow me down", says i, "i'm only heading for that very location this coming tuesday! lived here six bally years, never heard the name so much as whispered and now it's popping up in conversation more often than the sexual peccadiloes of our own dear royal family."
my forthcoming descent upon the place was all down to meeting this absolutely gorgeous and charming young bulgarian lass who's studying 'hospitality' or some such nonsense. turns out her project for this year is to shovel bucketloads of said hospitality over willing (and paying) volunteers in the form of delectably prepared produce from arran and ayrshire, supported by that worthy institution, the isle of arran distillery, who were even throwing in a generous dram of their own hospitable produce as a digestif. you'll not be surprised to hear that your humble correspondent was only too pleased to assist in the lassie's education. we gentlemen are a dying breed, but someone has to keep the end up.
naturally the panjandrum chappie was only too keen to sing the praises of his establishment, open to the public and providing
some grub of tip-top quality and equally t-t value. in fact it turns out that willing volunteers can subject themselves not just to food
but to all sorts of therapies, health and beauty thingies like massages and the like, for minimal cost and with only the slightest risk of being
poisoned or crippled for life.duly convinced and booked in via their neat little website, i also found that the 44 bus takes me pretty much from the door of the abode of stone to the entrance of the college itself. said eatery is at the top of a modern brown block dubbed 'the club' (round the back in the photo, the big windows being those of the café). it boasts a rather sweet terrace that in the climate of edinburgh may well be a pleasant place to sit on five or six nights of the year, but even in the indoor warmth a large picture window affords pleasant prospects to arthur's seat and the ski-slope of the pentland hills out to the west and south, vistas the solitary diner can drink in while doing likewise with a glass from the short but excellent wine list and watching the evening sun go down.
one need hardly say that the students who make up the staff are friendly and eager to please, not having been sufficiently exposed to the awful british public long enough to become jaundiced or slovenly and having degrees to aim for. that and the fact that they all seem to be jolly nice chaps and chapesses anyway.
so to my meal. i began with a beautifully presented plate of mussels, with a breaded crustiness far less brittle than my own and far more garlicky, washing it down with a very pleasant chilean sauvignon blanc. this was followed by a breast of pheasant served on what the menu described as a vegetable rösti and mustard mash. to be honest, the menu also said it was a wood pigeon breast, but, as they explained, a shortage of said plump grey birds had caused them to fall back on pheasant. being inordinately fond of both avian delights, i was happy to accept their grovelling apologies and even meatier substitute, the libation this time being a pleasantly soft merlot. soft but less pleasantly so was my piece of broccoli, which i'd have preferred a bit more al dente. Having said that, the dear old pater would probably have called it undercooked, as vegetables at anything firmer than pouring consistency do not go down well with him, so one accepts that tastes do vary.
and very happy i was with both dishes. both pheasant and mussel are dashed easy coves to get wrong, easily dried out by the slightest overcooking, not unlike your devoted correspondent. and these were moist and delicious (rather, it must be said, unlike said correspondent). to round things off, a piping-hot apple and rhubarb crumble was topped with a quenelle (or, as the more common folk might term it, a dollop) of cream, delightfully infused with ginger, giving a lovely grace note to the sharp fruit undertones or something like that.
a delightful evening indeed.
i'm very tempted to go back soon and try the general fare. there are, so they tell me, regular special events and themes advertised, like everything else these days, out there on the interweb, and the place even functions outside term times. so all i need is the slightest of excuses to hop aboard another fear-and- lothian bus and see what else they can do. i wonder if buffy's free next week?
back to index
bluerapa thai
6 torphichen place, edinburgh, eh3 8du
some of us thai freaks were saddened by the passing of the chiang mai restaurant in dalry road a year or so ago. there was always something gloomy and uninviting about the place from outside, which may account for the lack of punters who ventured in, but the food was generally very good and the service very friendly. i got to know the owner and staff reasonably well and they were only too pleased to let me practice my thai language — though they seemed to get a bit fed up of being told praysanii yuu tang saay. maybe they already know where the post office is. maybe i should learn more phrases.
thai is one of my favourite cuisines (and countries) and, even though it led to my discovering the contrasting but equally excellent passorn thai and absolute thai in tolcross, it was a loss not to have somewhere on the doorstep of the abode of stone.
so it is with some delight and relief that your humble correspondent is able to tell you that khun fon has returned to the big city, after her adventures running a thai in bathgate, to open a slimmed-down reincarnation of chiang mai under the name of bluerapa thai, opposite torpichen cop shop.
(in case you're wondering, bluerapa is a sort of pun on burapa ~ the thai word for 'eastern' ~ and reflects the blue lettering of their sign ~ which needs to be noticeable, as this street is mainly used by cars, buses and coppers and is less noted for its passing trade in diners)
fon has brought the same chef, the very capable mon, with her and even has the delightfully dotty khun taang guest-starring as a waitress at weekends, so it's no surprise that the menu is a lot like the old one. khun mon is always keen to vary the classics slightly, so the yum salads i'm so fond of will feature unexpected but highly effective pieces of mango or apple. fon is keen to use fresh ingredients, locally sourced where possible and offer an affordable but interesting dining experience: quite a trick if you can pull it off in a tiny café with no licence. but when it does work, as it undoubtedly has at pho vietnam house just round the corner, it can be a recipe for success.
i've always favoured mon's curries and some of his more elaborate dishes over the basic stir-fries 'from the wok', but that could just be a comment on my taste in general. on my inaugural visit i had the drunken scallops and the beef nam tok (which means 'waterfall', in reference to the tears or sweat it can produce, but simple negotiation will get the chili toned down ~ or even bumped up to isan intensity if you like a challenge), accompanied with sticky rice. both were delicious, the steak and scallops tender, the sauce and dressing spicy but flavoursome.
this is one more welcome addition to the now fascinating (annoyingly so to a man with no income) area round haymarket, with great byobs like this and pho adding to the sushi houses of dalry road along with chop chop for chinese, khukuri for great nepali grub and a number of curry houses, including the sadly underappreciated mumbai mansion, which is my favourite in edinburgh. but that's another story...
back to index
chop chop
248 morrison st, edinburgh, eh3 8dt
this has become an edinburgh institution and i'd like to think myself partly to thank for this, even though their fame was consolidated the minute a certain mr ramsay took one bite and declared the dumplings to be 'fucking amazing'. i still can't quite work out why they haven't blazoned this review across the window in place of the rather questionable 'can a billion people be wrong?' (by which logic the world's burger giants would also claim to provide delicious or even edible food to their eagerly malnourished customers). but when i and the love of my life first moved here they were newly opened and usually empty. fearful that it would close down and a supply of cheap, different and delicious food, a short stroll from the abode of stone, would wither and die, we started telling strangers in the street about it, as well as littering the art college and other such places with their garish yellow and red flyers.
certainly word of mouth played a part in the success that got them nominated by their fans and onto the telly, leading to regular difficulty in getting a table when dropping in on spec (and i prefer doing such things spontaneously, me) and the opening of a second branch in leith last year. my only real complaint about this is not that it has taken culinary wizard jian out of the haymarket kitchen but that she also took with her rita, my favourite lithuanian waitress (later a dumpling maker in her own right), who always greeted me with the most delightful and affectionate hugs i have had in my life — and much as i love my food, i love hugs even more.
it's become so well known, there doesn't seem much for me to say (not that this normally stops me), but it's a bit of a marmite place. i don't mean that it's best spread thinly on toast, but that while most people seem to love it, as any google of reviews will show, a fair few don't take to it at all. firstly this may be down to the fact it sells slightly more unfamiliar food from northern china (where wheat, rather than rice, is the staple crop) and does so in the style of a large popular street cafe. i reckon their coming second on the f word was more down to the poncey southern diners' expectations of presentation than anything to do with the flavours. and to set it against a cantonese restaurant like sweet mandarin (as a strudel in the 70s i ate at their grandmother's restaurant!) is like pitching a spanish tapas bar against a polish barszcz and bigos caff.
and it's interesting, given that a few decades ago people were finding thai food too different and too strong-flavoured (and goodness gracious me was poking fun at the brits by asking 'what's the blandest thing on the menu?'), that many reviewers call the flavours 'bland'. i'd say subtle. with the exception of chili-mad areas like szechuan, most chinese food is about understated combinations of flavours and textures and what jian can do with dull-sounding combinations like pork and celery or beef and turnip never ceases to amaze me. anyway, you can mix as powerful or gentle a dipping sauce as you fancy with the garlic, chili oil, soy and vinegar provided, to lift those flavours to your personal taste.
a dish which encapsulates the whole question is their astounding (to me) fried aubergine and garlic. to some it's over greasy, over garlicky and a bit too squelchy (i like that in a woman) — to me it's delicious and if you don't like it, i'll have yours. but everyone has their own favourites and maybe everyone can find a few dishes they don't like on the extensive menu (but not expensive, unless, like a few reviewers, you come from parts of the world where dumplings are only 20p each — but then so is the daily wage of the average waitress). my bafta-nominated nephew (14) would walk here from solihull (which is odd because he lives in nottingham) just for twenty large portions of their unbelievable fried chicken wings.
i'm so glad to say i only have to walk from dalry road — and that he is rarely here to nick my wings.
back to index
petit paris
grassmarket, edinburgh, eh1 2ju
"here as i sit at this empty café, thinking of you" as mr ferry once sang, "i remember all those moments, lost in wonder, that we'll never find again."
perhaps fortunately edinburgh's own little piece of paris is rarely empty enough for such reveries, but memories lost in wonder it does hold aplenty, at least for your world-weary reviewer.
back in the day when said w-wr first came to visit auld reekie with the love of his life, 'twas the first of many lunch venues, and the delight of eating there may well have contributed to the decision to move here from that london. sure enough, it became a frequent haunt, especially for lunches, whenever she could (mild sarcasm alert) with difficulty be torn away from her arduous studies (mild sarcasm ended) at the nearby art college.
so now, when your correspondent returns there, it is with a tendency to sit, not to say sojourn, like keats's knight, alone and faintly loitering, wiping away a nostalgic tear, while tucking into a hearty plate of petit salé aux lentilles and guzzling a glass of the excellent vin de maison. on the other hand there is the compensation that a flatulence-inducing sausage and lentil stew is more appropriate for a guillaume sans-amis than the companion of a celestial nymph in human form. every cloud ...
and still it stands, in the centre of le marché de l'herbe, and still it is a mainstay of the local scene, for tourists and edinburghers alike. and, as on the day of writing, it's more a place for convivial dining than solitary pining, more for joie de vivre than mal du pays. i can do that at home.
as in most eateries in franceland itself, the plats du jour make for a great value lunch. your reviewer and his companion, the legendary woodstock taylor, began the meal with a salad of blue potatoes and smoked sausage which tasted as delicious as it looked odd. equally delish were both woody's coley and your reviewer's chicken in blue cheese sauce (no, the blue motif is not intended as a metaphor for any emotional state; it's just a coincidence, ok?), and the portions were heartier than recalled from earlier visits, even before adding the optional but excellent green salad or assiete de légumes. even the salad dressing is exquisite.
and the ambience, always at least as important as the grub, is unfailingly pleasant here. charming staff with none of the arrogance for which the french waiter is traditionally (and perhaps unfairly) renowned, and an atmosphere and style that seem to bring out the cordial side of all diners. even those prone to wistful proustian souvenirs du cœur...
tous ces moments, perdus dans l'enchantement, qui ne reviendront jamais, indeed, bryan. jamais it is then.
back to index
absolute thai
22 valleyfield st, edinburgh, eh3 9lr
it's a thursday night in embra and, as we wander down the mean but busy streets, past eateries expensive and economical, it's hard to believe there's a recession on. no room in pho, chopchop heaving, and some group of revellers has monopolised quijote. where are two guys and a heartbroken lass to go for a consoling meal?
the answer, it seems, is absolute thai in tolcross. i've been a couple of times before and there's never anyone else in. and no, i've checked, there's no back entrance for people to run out when they see me coming, which has been known to happen.
it seems weird, this emptiness. they have a website, there are any number of glowing reviews online and in the magazines, and most of all the food is really great. but here we are again, the only diners in the place. maybe it's just when we call it's quiet, they've been around a while and they must survive somehow. maybe most of their trade is pre- and post-theatre from the nearby kings. which means it's a pity said temple of thespia currently has the builders in. but maybe james corden and co will pop in and try the place while they're in the goldoni rehash there next week.
maybe it's the austere interior and backstreet location that offset the reasonable prices that often come with home-style cooking and byob boozery, even though there's now a great place to get interesting tipples in the nearby provenance wines. perhaps it's the pleasant but rather shy lads who act as waiters (the owner's sons i'm told) making some folk feel awkward. or like i said, maybe i just keep calling at quiet times.
but there shouldn't be quiet times in a place as good as this. even my regret that there was no beef rendang available this time (yes, it's a dish from indonesialand, but they do a really great one here) was allayed by the fact that this let me discover other less familiar dishes like the excellent duck in black pepper and garlic sauce as well as great starters, maybe the best fishcakes i've had and a really good thai curry. preparation and presentation were impeccable and i don't feel guilty that we took full advantage of the appetite loss caused by our companion's crestfallen condition. hey, we know how she feels:— we gave her hugs, we ate her curry. fair swap.
must go back soon. so must you, dear reader. and you, mr corden.
back to index
pix pintxos
63 neal street, that london, wc2h 9pj
the times they are an-improvin'. after years of moaning about uk 'tapas' bars not serving tapa-sized portions, your reviewer suddenly finds two such places, albeit 400 miles apart, in the space of six months. what's a solitary billy-no-mates to whinge about? don't worry, there'll always be something.
to my little corner of andalucia in auld reekie, we can now add pix pintxos, where the cool bars of bilbao spill into the west end of that london.
basque pintxos (or pinchos in castillian) are 'thorns' or 'spikes', and also a type of tapas, like the canapes of madrid, where a beguiling array of ingredients are tastefully arranged on long oblique slices of baguette. the pintxo is also the long designer toothpick which serves the double purpose of holding the ingredients on the bread and, in this bar, showing how much you've had when it's time to ask for the faktura (la quenta). the pricier the snack, the longer the stick, so a swiss army knife and whittling skills come in really handy (only kidding, guys).
the bar is covered with large plates of these delightful snackeroos, but so sparingly stocked that one has no doubts about their freshness. the diner is handed a plate onto which as many or as few of the tempting tidbits can be transferred — and of course, offered a drink. as a brunchtime treat, your indefatigably dedicated reviewer managed to limit himself to two, though it was a struggle to resist the assorted constructions in ham, cheese and aubergine. a wedge of beautifully moist tortilla de patatas (or whatever that is in basque) accompanied a sort of mini all-day breakfast pintxo, slices of serrano ham topped with a lightly fried quail's egg. and all was washed down with a glass of one of the finest manzanilla sherries he has ever tasted.
it would be unreasonable to moan that one still can't find spanish tapas at spanish prices, of course. one can and does moan about the british rating and tax system that makes life so hard for small businesses and costly for their customers, but that's not a subject for this page. so your reviewer will say that in such a charming bar in the middle of covent garden, with such lovely (british) staff, a tenner for those three items was a tenner very well spent.
this writer also has his inbuilt preference for the small trader and dislike for the chains, while realising that almost every small coffee shop proprietor would jump at the chance of mr fastbucks' millions. pix already has a branch in notting hill and is about to open a third in soho. something this good and, for british soil, innovative, deserves to do well but it is to be hoped they never become a corporate entity and lose their personal feel.
or, if they must, the sooner they open an edinburgh branch, the better. i'll happily manage it ...
osasuna!! (¡salud!)
back to index
sapori, covent garden, and da spago, south ken
da spago, 6 glendower place, that london, sw7 3dp
"how the fuck", asked my hostess and friend, a veggie weirdo artist but none the worse for that, "do places like pizza express, let alone pizza hut, do such a roaring trade in this city when you can get real pizza like this for hardly any more cash?!"
and that is indeed a question that has troubled your indefatigable correspondent, dearest slobbering reader. on this all-too-brief visit to that london, time was found to renew acquaintance with two favourite italian haunts.
back in the day when said correspondent had a life and even a job, he would frequent and even paint a wonderful tapas bar in pudding lane, appropriately named fuego. sadly, my old mate, the then manager and now owner, has had a rush of egotism to the head and renamed it franco's but it's still worth a visit. however, the current relevance is the diminutive camerera with the long hair standing with her back to the viewer (the artist himself features behind the till in a position he occupied so often that it goes a long way to explaining the banking crisis, let alone his current joblessness). her name is mercedes and despite being a lass from northern spainland, she now manages the excellent sapori in drury lane. even when she's not there, her bubbly personality seems to inspire all her charming staff and the food is always excellent in value and flavour.
at the very time when pundits were starting to comment on the fact that italian restaurants were stuck in a stodgy 50s time bubble, sapori and a few others (like the nearby bertorelli's) were starting to present a lighter and more colourful version of traditional cucina. not only are the pizzas crisp and deliciously topped but the pasta is imaginative and the main dishes gloriously varied. go there and tell mercedes dai sent you. you'll be treated like royalty — ok, to be honest, that's how she treats all her customers, but in many places saying dai sent you is a good way to get thrown out.
obituary: it is very sad for a gastro-gnome like your humble correspondent to see any much-loved eatery bite the proverbial dust. sad to say, a fellow aficionado of this wonderful institution has written to say that it is there no more and to ask if further information was available as to (one hopes) a reincarnation elsewhere in that london?
sadly, dear readers, the answer is no. the news came like a bolt from the blue, a week of mourning has been observed with black risottos and bitter chocolate, but no information is available from the frozen north. if anyone can shed any light, especially with the torch of hope, on the full story, it will be very welcome. now, brothers and sisters, let us bow our heads and observe a minute's silence, before going on to read about the hopefully still trading spago...
at a similar time in the dim-and-distant, your reviewer was a regular visitor to the henry wood promenade concerts at kensington's royal albert hall. and though the default post-gig eatery was the sadly-missed and gut-busting daquise, haunt of expat poles galore, the traditional meal for the penultimate night was da spago, the very scene of my young friend's pizza-related outburst.
in quite a cool part of the city, this place manages to be both cool and cosy, with a family-run buzz about it that always puts the diner in a good mood. it was (but sadly no longer seems to be) the home of the greatest spaghetti al cartoccio, seafood and pasta cooked with tomatoes in a sealed wrapper of foil, which gave off the most delicious aroma when torn open. no matter, the other pasta dishes are still excellent and vongole made a fine substitute.
but the pizzas are the stars now, perhaps moreso because what was once a huge downstairs dining overflow area has now been cut in half by a huge, fuck-off, wood-burning pizza oven, churning out prime examples of neapolitan art.
so pizza-lovers of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your chains!
back to index