Laksa

Review: Laxsa, Soho

This year we’ve been doing a tour of SE Asia without leaving London. So far we’ve eaten Thai at Chet’s, Cambodian at Mamapen, Burmese at Lahpet, Filipino brunch at Kapihan and Laotian at Lao Cafe. Needing a bite of lunch in the middle of town today, we hit up Laxsa, a tiny Malaysian place in …

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Panisse

Review: The Horse Guards, Petworth

The perils of building a pub lunch into a proper walk in the country. By “proper” I mean a 16km hike, not a hour’s stroll. And the perils are clear: not eating enough beforehand (worried about not having an appetite) and so getting starving hungry on the walk, making the last hill before the pub …

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Review: Chet’s, Shepherd’s Bush

I remember the first (only?) Thai meal I had in America. This was, admittedly, almost eighteen years ago in California. Huge chunks of chicken breast, capsicum peppers, baby sweetcorn, all bathed in a sauce that was gunky and thick with coconut cream and flavoured with… well, nothing. Just the mildest hint of some familiar Thai …

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Pork toast

Review: Mamapen, Soho

Right in the middle of Soho is apparently the only place doing Cambodian food in London: Mamapen at The Sun & 13 Cantons pub. I’m not sure how long that statement will stay true? I’ve only spent a few days in Cambodia and didn’t search out a lot of local food (indeed, the only street …

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STP

Review: The White Horses, Rottingdean

The White Horses Hotel in Rottingdean used to be a pretty typical boozer and meh restaurant on the seafront of the postcard village of Rottingdean, along the way from Brighton. Recently bought and re-vamped, now it’s like walking into the set of an Agatha Christie, all tasteful art deco furnishing, cane backed chairs and bright …

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Review: Laxsa, SohoReview: The Horse Guards, PetworthReview: Chet’s, Shepherd’s BushReview: Mamapen, SohoReview: The White Horses, Rottingdean

A gourmet and his gout

Categories:

General Articles

20 March 2012

I explained to my new doctor that I have gout, have had it since I was 32, and am taking medication for it. He expressed surprise at my age (late thirties), asked if I ate a lot of fatty foods (no, and at 10 stone I’m hardly hefty), and then suggested I should certainly be

Not guilty! Port and cheese
avoiding cheese, port and red meat. All of which is wrong, wrong, wrong. Looks like even in the medical profession gout is a poorly understood condition.

But still, can’t complain. What could be better confirmation of one’s status as a top-notch gourmet than to get gout in your early thirties? Instant foodie kudos! Clearly I must dine out every night on pheasant and lamprey washed down with bumpers of old port, to be so afflicted.

The truth, as always, is a bit more complicated. For starters, it’s largely a genetic ailment so having got the relevant gene from my grandad (a martyr to ‘is gout) I was always likely to develop it. And while a rich diet is definitely going to exacerbate the condition, the usual suspects my doctor trotted out are not necessarily guilty. Port is no different from any alcohol, and alcohol is only a problem if you let it dehydrate you. Cheese and fat don’t contribute noticeably to gout, and there’s some evidence that dairy products are slightly beneficial. It’s a case of guilt by association: the fat old bloaters who suffer from gout in Victorian

Guilty! Blood, offal and especially beef
novels are always devouring the whole cheeseboard and hogging the port bottle. But it’s more likely to be the rich venison gravy or the half-dozen langoustines that did for ’em.

So, what is a gout attack?

It’s a form of arthritis, and often described as the most painful form. The most common joint attacked is the big toe. Pathetic, eh? What kind of man can’t live with a bit of pain in his toe? Imagine a little gnome with a sledgehammer trotting along beside you and smashing your big toe whenever you set your foot down. That’s the first three days. There was too much pain to sleep until I got my foot out from under the sheet. Yep, the touch of a cotton sheet felt like the gnome was using my toe as an anvil for beating out a ploughshare. This is after dosing myself with potent prescription painkillers. After those first few days it’s simply a case of gradual recovery over about a month, by which time I could walk without much of a noticeable limp.

Gout is triggered by an unhealthy build-up of purines in the body, which end up crystallising in distant joints such as the big toe. Purines are typically generated from processing certain kinds of protein-rich food; hence shellfish, offal, meat on the bone and rich stocks are just about the worst possible foods for a gout sufferer (this table gives more detail,

I never expected my toes to appear on this blog
and the whole website is a mine of valuable information on the disease). The other major factor is hydration: purines are flushed from the body via liver functions, so if you get dehydrated then they’re much more likely to start crystallising.

So the perfect hypothetical recipe for a gout attack might be… going to a wedding on a Saturday, drinking far too much wine and no water in the evening, having nothing more than a coffee with a meaty cooked breakfast on Sunday and then going out for a four-course lunch involving scallops and pheasant. Silly me. By Sunday evening a tell-tale tingling throb had begun in my toe. This was going to be my third bout of gout and worst yet. It was at this point that I started reading about the subject in depth.

It became apparent that there are two choices for defeating gout; change your diet or take drugs for the rest of your life.

You change your diet to minimise purine intake. This means: say goodbye to all seafood, avoid any gravies or meat on the bone, don’t even glance at offal and make sure that you drink lots of water with alcohol in moderate amounts. Chicken is your friend, so are veggies and starches. This sounded terrible. What kind of a gourmand would I be if I couldn’t eat oysters, lobster, kidneys, liver, monkfish or enjoy a nice rich beef jus? GIVE ME DRUGS!

The drug you have to take for the rest of your life is called allopurinol, and it is blessedly free of (known) side effects. It does have one kicker: when you first start taking it, the purines that are released when it gets to work may trigger one final gout attack. “One for the road” sort of thing. Lovely.

So, three years later and I’ve had no more trouble with gout. I pick whatever I like off the menu and still drink the odd snifter of port. The modern gourmet doesn’t have to be a martyr to his diet. But I’m lucky; my gout is minor compared to what some sufferers go through.

Our little mascot does actually have a wounded foot, and is at the teddy-bear hospital right now. Get well soon!

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Review: Fernandez & Wells, Soho

Categories:

Cafes etc., London, Restaurant Reviews

12 March 2012

Most out-of-towners will usually find themselves somewhere around Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Circus or perhaps Carnaby Street at some point when they travel up to the metropolis. I certainly do. So it would probably be good to know about one of the best places I’ve ever

The gorgeous display of wild food at Fernandez & Wells
found for brunch, lunch or just afternoon coffee and cake. That would be Fernandez & Wells, on Beak Street just below the bottom end of Carnaby Street (they have a handful of other outlets, but this is the one we know and love).

It’s a very simple, modern space inside and if you want a sofa to surf on then just forget it – these are perches, for a sustenance break and a quick scan of the papers, nothing more. But what a great sustenance break!

The pleasure begins before anything passes your lips, with the display of food on the counter. No glass barrier here, they have confidence that their punters won’t be crass enough to start fingering the sandwiches or pinching the pastries. And in the same way that a face-to-face encounter with a lion on the African savannah is much more exciting than peering at one through the glass of a zoo enclosure, so the treats spread out on the hefty wooden table before you look far more enticing for their freedom.

My sandwich of wafer-thin Spanish pork with deliciously salty manchego was grilled to warm perfection, the bread full of crunch and taste. The rare roast beef in Maureen’s sandwich was melting in the mouth. Later we squeezed in gloriously authentic pasteis de nata.

That bread was scrunchily perfect, and so was the pork inside
I’ve been to Lisbon, I know they were right. If I had been more greedy the last huge slice of rose-petal jam Victoria sponge would have been mine. Maureen washed her sandwich down with a generous glass of fresh blood orange juice, while I had a flat white.

I must mention their coffee. First, I must confess to being a very lazy coffee afficienado. I drink lots of coffee, and I only drink good coffee. There’s no instant in our house, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve ordered a take-away coffee in a strange town or station and then dumped the whole cup in a bin because I couldn’t stomach the filth inside. But! But. I don’t know any of the right terminology to use in describing a cup of coffee, I’ve never been on a tasting course or avidly read books and blogs on the subject. I just know a good cup of coffee when I encounter it, be it flat white or French press.

The coffee at Fernandez & Wells is up in the top five cups I’ve ever enjoyed, and that’s out of an estimated 20,000 cups of coffee in 40 countries. ‘Nuff said.

One more thing needs saying. F&W isn’t a cheap cafe, the sandwiches are over a fiver. But I don’t really care, I’d rather truly enjoy one of their sandwiches with a great cup of coffee than bolt down an adequate but entirely uninteresting number from Pret or Eat with a cup of hey-it’s-all-caffeine-anyway brew.

Food safaris. Great idea.

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Som Tam, Thai papaya salad

Categories:

Recipes, Spicy food, Vegetarian

8 March 2012

One of my favourite culinary memories of our year-long trip around the world was the salad in Thailand. It’s called Som Tam and typically combines raw shredded green papaya with all the best south-east Asian flavours: garlic, chilli, lime, peanut, fish sauce, palm sugar to make a bowl of pure zing that punches with sweet, sour, salt and heat in equal measure. There’s not a lettuce leaf in sight. I will go on record: lettuce is boring green crap with no value except to pad out otherwise perfectly good salads and sandwiches.

Mmm... Mr Prawn really loves his spicy Som Tam salad!

Now, there’s one essential problem with making Som Tam at home in England. Green papaya. It’s easier to find a parking space in Kingston on the Saturday before Christmas than a green papaya. Don’t whatever you do go and buy the “least ripe” papaya from your local supermarket – it will still be way too ripe. No, you have two options if you don’t happen to live next door to a really good oriental supermarket. First: buy a green papaya on-line, for £8 plus another £7 postage and packing. I got mine from this website, and it worked an (expensive) treat. One is enough for six to eight portions of salad. Second: start rummaging in the greengrocer for something to use as an alternative.

The green papaya is only there to provide texture and to absorb and distribute all the strong flavours added to the salad, it tastes of pretty much nothing itself. You just need something that will shred into fairly crunchy strips that eat well raw. I’ve found mention of Som Tam made with apples, or carrots, but the former I think bring too much of their own juicy taste and the latter are… well… carrots. Blech. And so I bring to you the perfect alternative to green papaya, nearly identical in texture, mild in taste and cheap to boot… Turnip Som Tam.

It’s perfect.

Som Tam, Thai salad (serves two)

Two handfuls shredded papaya/turnip
1 tomato, sliced in thin segments
1 small handful fine beans
2 bird’s eye chillies
1 fat garlic clove
2 tsp dried shrimps (optional)
1 handful roasted unsalted peanuts
3 tsp palm sugar (or caster)
3 tsp fish sauce
Juice of 1 lime
  1. Roughly chop the chillies and garlic (a fresh, juicy clove is important) then pound them to pulp in a pestle and mortar
  2. Add the palm sugar and pound some more, you want to end up with pretty much paste
  3. Now add the dried shrimp if you have them, pound some more. These are also hard to come by, but you won’t lose much by omitting them
  4. Next add the peanuts, and pound them into little bits but not to a paste. The peanuts need to be roasted, but not salted or coated – I found that I had to buy monkey nuts and shell them
  5. Top and tail the beans, and cut into inch-long pieces. If you’ve only got a small granite mortar, you’ll probably find it is full by now, so put the beans in a large bowl and crush them a bit with your knuckles. Add all the gunk from the mortar
  6. I used a third of a green papaya, or one good sized turnip. I shredded it with a mandolin, as I’m not sure how well a simple grater will get on with these veggies – it’ll probably be okay.
  7. Add the shredded papaya/turnip (or whatever you are substituting), the sliced tomatoes, the fish sauce and the lime juice. Go in with your hands and smush everything together, just spend a few seconds bruising everything so all the flavours mingle.
  8. Taste some. This is important, as personal taste and variation in the ingredients really come into play in this dish. Some limes have very little juice, some fish sauces are stronger than others. So: add more lime, fish sauce or palm sugar as necessary to get the right balance of flavours for you.

Enjoy! Oh, and I should have said: if you don’t like much heat, go for only one chilli. The perfect accompaniment to any Thai food, or any simple seafood dish for that matter.

There's a fine line between substituting ingredients and making something completely new.

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Review: The Gurnard’s Head, Cornwall

Categories:

Pubs, Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

5 March 2012

A lovely sight at the end of a very long day
It’s been a very long day. You’re navigating along a narrow winding lane with rough granite walls on either side, occasionally rounding a corner to find yourself driving through a farmyard, or face-to-face with an oncoming tractor. Grey clouds roll overhead, to your left is a high and windswept moorland, to your right there’s just a handful of moody cows and a long drop between you and the slaty Atlantic ocean. You’ve left the last town in England* behind you, and what the map says is about four miles seems to wind on forever. You’re in Cornwall, of course. And then ahead of you rises the friendly granite bulk of a pub in glorious isolation, with “Gurnards Head” written on the slate roof in huge white letters.

It’s hard to imagine a location more requiring of a friendly welcome, a cosy room and some good cooking. Luckily the Gurnard’s Head scores high on all three. I get the impression that most people choose to dine and stay the night. Very sensible too, as it stands in glorious isolation on the rugged coast of Penwith, the very last bit of Cornwall before you fall into the Atlantic. And why attempt a

The dining room in the Gurnard's Head
perilous drive to the nearest town on a dark and stormy night when there’s perfectly brilliant food on offer at the pub?

As far as accommodation goes, the rooms here are going to divide opinion. I loved it; gorgeous Welsh blankets on the comfy bed, old unfussy sticks of furniture, a book shelf of random tomes and a window out onto the rough Cornish moorland. The in-room hot drinks include freshly ground coffee and tea that was actually grown in Cornwall. On the other hand, the shower was a piddly electric unit that dispensed scalding hot then freezing cold water in (mercifully predictable) twenty second bursts, the mechanism on the window blind was broken, there was no wardrobe to hang up clothes, no full-length mirror and no desk or table to sit at. So if you are the kind of person irritated by quirks and only happy with “all mod cons” then I suggest you check into the St Ives Holiday Inn. You’ve been warned!

Downstairs there’s a friendly bar, with friendly bar staff, and a boldly painted rustic dining room that makes the most of the massive

Oyster rissole in a vichyssoise of alexanders, which sounds as good as it tasted
granite walls of the old pub. Proper local beers on tap, and an interesting and thoughtful selection of wines by the glass. The wines are excellent value, the more so once you sit down to eat. We ambled down for a drink at the bar before dinner, refreshed and ready for the trough.

My starter was a plate of rich, sticky pieces of braised calf’s tongue. Delicious, but knocked into touch by Maureen’s dish of oyster rissoles sitting in a bowl of grass green vichyssoise of alexanders. If you’re not a forager that might look a bit greek. I ‘splain. Alexanders are a wild plant vaguely like parsley, one of the first things to start growing on clifftops and almost forgotten as a food. I’m guessing they provided the strong green colour and flavour that complimented the warm, crunchy, salty rissole so well. I just love being given something

This cod is as handsome a plate of pub seafood as I could ever want
from the hedgerow that I’ve scarcely heard of, especially when it tastes good.

And so to main course, where I chose guineafowl and Maureen picked cod. She won again, this being probably the most perfectly cooked piece of cod I’ve encountered, no doubt benefiting from having been landed less than ten miles away. It was accompanied by fat, chewy pickled cockles and a balancing mixture of veg. My guineafowl was a superb supper dish, the bird carefully cooked to keep some pink and matched beautifully with creamy mousseline potatoes and enormous fat chunks of braised leek. I don’t mind saying, I am never going to cook leeks any other way ever again.

My dessert was a log of banana-y parfait with a dark chocolate sorbet and crystallised peanuts. The sorbet was great, the first example to convince me that the words “chocolate” and “sorbet” should ever be used so closely together on a menu. The parfait wasn’t my thing; parfait logs always look industrial, with little indentations from

Melon soup, delicious: deep and yet light
the wrapping still visible like moulded concrete. Maureen, feeling full, went for a melon soup which was light but had a surprising depth of roast melon flavour and plenty of umami. As someone who has tried (and failed) to make melon soup taste good, I could really appreciate it.

Good stuff. We trundled back upstairs very well fed and watered, marvelling that such a neat gem of a dining room should be able to survive in such an out of the way place. Especially as their rate for Dinner, Bed & Breakfast is so damnably reasonable; their mid-week winter special D&B&B was £125 per couple, which feels like either the room or the meal were almost thrown in as a freebie. A stay at The Gurnard’s Head is a huge and welcome breath of fresh air.

We enjoyed ourselves so much that we stayed (and ate) another night. Scallops, crab, more great fish and kippers for breakfast!

This was a very seafood weekend, exactly as a trip to Cornwall should be

* – in fact the tiny town of St Just is further west, only a mile or two from Land’s End, but you’ll allow me some poetic license

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Food Bloggers Unplugged

Categories:

General Articles

3 March 2012

My last few posts have been restaurant reviews, so for a bit of a break I’ve decided to chip in on “Food Bloggers Unplugged” and let my audience know a bit more about where I come from food-wise. Thanks to All That I’m Eating for inviting me to do so.

What or who inspired you to start your blog?
In July 2010 I went travelling around the world for a year with Otter (that’s a nickname, not a literal otter) and decided to keep a blog: Otter Adrift. Well, it’s what the modern round-the-world traveller does. I’m very pleased with my travel blog, love looking at it and reminiscing. When we got back I still had itchy blogging fingers, and food seemed like the obvious subject.

My audition for TV food presenter... or rather, just cooking in a self-catering cottage in Australia

Who is your foodie inspiration?
For as long as I can remember (that’d be university, 20 years ago), I’ve cooked all my food from ingredients. I never touched ready-meals and even turned my nose up at ready-made pasta sauces. And from about the same time I have always sought to eat out at independent restaurants and cafes in preference to chains.

I honestly cannot think who or what was the original inspiration for this. I think I’ve just absorbed this and that from a whole variety of sources. People describe themselves as passionate foodies. Sadly, I’m just a moderately interested foodie. Pff.

In the same way that I’ve never followed a football team or been a huge fan of a singer or band, I don’t really have any strong feelings about all the abundance of food celebs. Hm. I probably have most time for Nigel Slater.

Your greasiest most batter splattered cook book is?
I have about 20 cookbooks. 15 of them have scarcely been opened since the initial flick through. Of the remaining five, easily my favourite is Nigel Slater’s “Tender”. Because it’s not just recipes, it tells you how each vegetable works and what works with it. For a make-it-up cook like me, perfect.

The best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it and what was it?
MmmMMmmm. Black pepper crab in Singapore. That was such a huge crab, and so beautiful. South-east Asia is the best region on the planet for good food. South America, by contrast, is the worst. I recently recreated the black pepper crab at home, and it was almost as good.

Drooling over Singapore black pepper crab

Another Food Blogger’s table you would like to eat at?
Tricky question! Whenever I read another food blog I’m envious of their obvious passion for cooking and how much time they must spend in the kitchen, trying things out and getting them right. It could be Memalee, since I’m still reminiscing about all the great south-east Asian food from our trip while I write this. Or it could be All That I’m Eating, because we share a taste for doing tasty and seasonal things with market produce.

What one kitchen gadget would you like Santa to bring you? (money no object)
How about a smokery? I love smoked flavour in most things, so that’s something I’d like to play with myself.

Who taught you how to cook?
No-one. I didn’t start cooking until I went to university, and my early attempts were disgusting but not deadly. I’ve just absorbed stuff over the years; tips and ideas from cookbooks, TV programs and eating out. Mum has sent me various recipes over the years too, of course! So yeah, self-taught, gradual improvement.

I’m coming to you for dinner, what is your signature dish?
If signature dish means the thing that most friends or family are likely to say “oh, you should try Matthew’s X…” then it’s probably the humble Spanish omelette.

What is your guilty food pleasure?
Well, I’m a helluva food snob so I don’t really have any guilt in the sense of “I shouldn’t eat this crap”; no McD’s fries, no chocolate Hobnobs, no pop tarts, no ready meals. I suppose if I didn’t rein it in my cream tea habit could easily get out of control! So: stuffing myself with scones, jam and clotted cream.

Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn?
I may be in my thirties and only 10 stone, but I have that supreme ailment of gourmands down the centuries: the gout. I was afflicted about six years ago and I can’t think of any way a big toe could be more painful, unless it was perhaps being hit repeatedly with a sledgehammer. I suspect I’ll blog about this in more detail at some point!

We're all snobs about something, however we label it and whether we like it or not

Finally, I must confess that I’ve looked around the few food blogs I read with any regularity and they’ve all done this questionnaire already – so I can’t keep the ball rolling by inviting another five respondents. I’ll just draw your attention to my list of “Links”, in the right-hand column. They’re all great blogs, so check out any that appeal to you.

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