Review: Koyal, Surbiton

Koyal is the third branch of the Dastaan empire. Unlike their Leeds restaurant, this time they’ve opened just a couple of miles up the road in Surbiton. It should make a big difference though: Dastaan is on a suburban shopping parade miles from the nearest train station, meaning anyone from central London has quite the …

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Ukiyo

Review: Ukiyo Hand Roll Bar, Covent Garden

So I need to foreshadow this review. I love sushi and sashimi, except for one element of it. The thin seaweed sheet used for wrapping rice in various sushi forms. It’s often hard to bite through, and the texture is neither crispy nor yielding. It’s essentially the closest thing to chewing on paper that exists …

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Glass nooooodles

Review: Liu Xiaomian, The Jackalope, Marylebone

Needing lunch, we settled on noodles at Liu Xiaomian, which has been cooking in the basement of the Jackalope pub in a quiet Marylebone mews for a few years now. This really isn’t one of the modern, polished, faux-street-food restaurants that have been springing up all over the trendy corners of London recently (most of …

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Review: Bala Baya, Southwark

So. Bala Baya describes itself as a Middle Eastern restaurant, as do a few review sites that perhaps keep their info updated. But older reviews and articles, that no-one ever updates, call it an Israeli restaurant. It doesn’t take much nouse to realise why they have re-badged themselves “Middle Eastern” as thoroughly as they can! …

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Review: Som Saa, Spitalfields

One of the first new-breed Thai restaurants in London, I was put off visiting Som Saa for a long while due to a sad episode of racism tangled up with the restaurant six years ago (here’s a relevant Twitter thread). But we were at Spitalfields and needed lunch, and I’m optimistic enough to hope that …

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Review: Koyal, SurbitonReview: Ukiyo Hand Roll Bar, Covent GardenReview: Liu Xiaomian, The Jackalope, MaryleboneReview: Bala Baya, SouthwarkReview: Som Saa, Spitalfields

Review: Green Cafe, Ludlow

Categories:

Cafes etc., Rest of UK, Restaurant Reviews

14 January 2012

It's simple and unpretentious at the Green Cafe - I'd need a camera capturing flavour to do it justice
It’s terribly inconsiderate of The Green Cafe to close throughout January. Who said they could have a holiday? I want lunch!

I want the best chicken liver pate ever created, with crispy bits of French stick toast and the most fruity and punchy fig chutney to cut the savoury meatiness perfectly. I want a bowl of smoked coley chowder with bacon and mussels, where all the flavours are so perfectly balanced it’s like a tightrope walker on a unicycle spinning eight plates blindfolded, in a bowl. Cream, shallots, parsley, bacon and fish have never sung together better. I want melting potato gnocchi with a palate-pleasing rich ragu made with Italian pork and fennel sausage. I want…

Okay, perhaps what I really need is a bit of perspective.

The Green Cafe is a cafe after all, and they serve light lunches and sweet treats from late morning until around about 4:30. They’re tucked away down beside the tumbling river Teme, below the quintessential market town of Ludlow. This is a real and deserved use of the word “quintessential” but I’ll save Ludlow for another day. The spot by the river is idyllic, and they manage to tuck about 20 covers inside a tiny dining room with another 10 or so outside when it’s not as bloody cold as it is now. It can feel a little squished on busy days, when the tables near the door are hobson’s choice and not a great choice in inclement weather with people trooping in and out. But hey, it’s a cafe.

So you wouldn’t come here for a romantic three course dinner. You would come here to have a couple of plates of deceptively simple lunch, all using local ingredients in season and washed down with a thoughtfully organised list of drinks including a few wines. Nothing on the menu runs over £9.00, from memory.

It's brilliant how so many foods, fish especially, are being rediscovered
Service is perfect: friendly and warm, nothing is too much trouble. Cakes are good too.

What’s with the “deceptively simple” though? Well, everything I’ve ever enjoyed here has been as perfectly balanced as that chowder, seasoning spot-on and flavours bouncing neatly off one another. Chef Clive Davis has a magic touch, and it’s a surprise (and a pleasure) that he chooses to express himself with this, the humble light lunch, rather than following the obvious route for a palate of his calibre into the airy realms of fine dining.

If you’ve come to Ludlow for a foodie weekend, including a slap-up meal at one of the two renowned restaurants in town, you’d be doing yourself a grave disservice if you didn’t squeeze in lunch at The Green Cafe. Hands down my favourite cafe, anywhere. Be warned: you should definitely phone a day ahead to book.

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Foodie spending

Categories:

General Articles

11 January 2012

How much do I spend on food? This post was inspired by the first post of an interesting new blogger, The Skint Foodie, who has pointed up the nonsense of most government statistics on the subject of how much households spend on food. Apparently the most affluent 20% of us spend £38 per person per week on food and drink. Haha! HahahaHAhaHAHAha! One thing I’m pretty certain is that the most affluent 20% go out for at least one meal per week, with wine, which would suggest that they must spend the rest of the week rummaging through dustbins.

Anyway, we can laugh at government statistics all day. How much do I spend on food?

I’ve got a great advantage in answering this question. In 2010 we set off travelling around the world for a year (and blogged it), and this meant keeping a daily budget of absolutely

Oh to be back in SE Asia, where a huge and delicious feast is never more than a tenner
every darn thing we bought. It didn’t prove onorous, taking less than 5 minutes a day, and was instructive. Even if we ended up over-budget. Once we got home it just seemed natural to continue the habit, so I’ve got a record of our spending over the last six months. Not right down to the last bacon rasher, I do tend to just put “Butcher, £8.40”, but I certainly know how much we’ve spent on food.

It’s a lot. Actually, it’s the biggest part of our weekly spend by a long way.

So I ought to cover our eating habits in brief. Living in Ludlow, we’re surrounded by great local food shops; in consequence, I go to Tesco for exactly two things: loo rolls and chopped tomatoes. We eat well at home, but everything is cooked from ingredients; no ready-meals or cooking sauces. I like to buy good things, too. We only drink filter coffee, only fresh local juices, good quality chocolate, artisan cheese, you get the idea.

Eating out. Nothing like as often as when we lived in London! However, there’s probably one big (>£80 per person) meal every month, plus one or two other dining occasions lower down the price range. Of course there are also plenty of times when we’re out and need lunch, or dinner, or breakfast, or just a coffee. We’re foodies, so we don’t stop off at Pizza Hut or McDonalds. Maybe once a month we have a takeaway. And don’t forget that just because Christmas is special, doesn’t mean it gets excluded from the budget.

And so we come to the big figures. Over the last six months our average weekly spend per person (for a household of two) was…
£37 on groceries (excluding booze)
£6 on booze for the home
£41 on general eating out & takeaways
£61 on fine dining
Grand total: £145 per week on food and drink, each.

In context, our total weekly spend per person on everything except household bills is £330.

So food is where nearly half of our money goes. And I pulled out the booze deliberately to show it wasn’t going on bottles of old claret! In my defence, eating is probably my favourite pastime. But I’m only 10 stone, so it’s quality rather than quantity here. Recalling our eating habits back in London, this would easily have pushed over £200 each per week and the weighting would have been much more towards eating out.

Conclusions?

  • The Skint Foodie, aiming for £40 per week himself, is definitely a skint foodie
  • The office of national statistics couldn’t count its own buttocks with both hands
  • Food is a stupendously important part of our life and spending
  • If we ever needed to cut back, a moratorium on fine dining would be the best idea

I’d love to hear what other people spend weekly on food, and how it compares. Because I’m nosey. I do think it’s a useful exercise, but only if you try it over a few months. A trip to the Fat Duck will seriously skew your eating-out figure but it would be invalid to exclude it, just as the week before Christmas will skew the grocery (and booze!) figures but would be equally wrong to exclude.

Some people just can't stand a hit to their lifestyle

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Spiced game stew

Categories:

One-pot meals, Recipes, Spicy food

8 January 2012

Quick! While it’s still game season! Many good butchers will do a pack of mixed game; cubes and chunks of whatever they’ve got, and I think mine had at least venison and pheasant in it. D’you know, I didn’t really look that hard.

Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed Christmas this year as the season of spices, and I’m still in the mood for putting exotic warmth and depth into anything that will take it. A rich, melting game stew can definitely take it. The load of spices add a great deal of intrigue to the simple stew. I’d serve it to royalty without blushing or mumbling “sorry ’bout the ‘umble fayre, ma’am”.

Rich game stew, served up with sweet potato mash and broccoli

Spiced game stew (serves 4)

1lb mixed game, cubed
1 tbsp plain flour
3 rashers smoked streaky bacon
1 large onion, chopped
1 stick celery, chopped
1 turnip, cubed bite-size
1 carrot, chopped bite-size
1 chunk of celeriac, cubed bite-size
5 star anise
5 black cardamom (or green)
5 cloves
1 stick cinnamon
2 bay leaves
½ dried chipotle chilli (opt.)
1 glass Madeira
¾ pint beef stock
  1. Get a big casserole dish really hot on the hob. Dry-fry all the spices (except the chilli and bay) for a minute, then set them aside but leave the dish on the heat
  2. Season and flour the game, then brown it in a knob of butter. Set it aside in a bowl
  3. Add another knob of butter and start frying the chopped onion and celery. Chop the bacon and add it, frying everything up and scraping up the burnt bits from the browned meat.
  4. Next toss in all the other vegetables and keep frying for another 5-10 minutes, moving it about occasionally so none gets burnt
  5. Now add back the meat, all the spices (chop the chipotle up), the glass of Madeira and then the beef stock. I’ve said ¾ pint, but basically you want enough to almost cover everything, with the odd little island of meat or veg still visible
  6. Put the lid on the casserole and pop it in the oven at 170C for 1½ hours, at which point the meat should all be beautifully tender and the vegetables soft and soused with flavour

You know what, you can substitute the turnip, carrot and celeriac for about the same amount of many other veggies. Try parsnip, or a squash, potato, swede, maybe even j-chokes? You can leave out the chipotle chilli, although it only adds warmth; there’s not enough to raise a sweat. You certainly don’t need to use Madeira, either port or red wine would be fine, or indeed a bottle of dark ale (use less stock).

This stew wants to be served on a plate with one starch and one green. Mashed potato and purple-sprouting broccoli, or roast potato and curly kale, or whatever else you can dream up.

The one thing that might annoy the royal dinner guests would be the bits of whole spice in the stew. I’d fish out the cinnamon and bay leaves, but the other bits are too fiddly. Then again, this lot are used to finding lead shot in their game! They aren’t going to mind spitting out the odd clove.

Sunday morning pun

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Pork sous-vide(ish) and chestnut

Categories:

Recipes, Showing off

6 January 2012

Here’s a question for you. If it’s possible to cook fillet of beef by leaving it in a hot water bath at 50C for several hours… would you cook yourself if you stayed in a hot bath for just as long? Scary thought.

That’s sous-vide, by the way, for anyone who hasn’t come across it. Your meat is vacuum-sealed in a special plastic bag by a special little machine and popped in a special hot water bath that can keep the water at a precise temperature for several hours, or even a couple

Salty Plum's kitchen enters the 21st century... or at least has a peek through the door
of days for some meats. Meat tender, flavour locked-in, still pink but safely cooked, it just remains to pan-fry for a minute each side to give it some attractive colour.

I don’t have any of this special equipment, but surely a big saucepan, a milk thermometer and some clingfilm would do the trick? How very Blue Peter.

I settled on pork tenderloin and got a couple of nice steaks from the butcher. The water bath was actually the easy bit. After getting my biggest saucepan up to 62C I just put it on the tiniest hob on its lowest setting and – give or take the odd tweak – it stayed pretty much steady for the 1½ hours needed. For the vacuum I used plenty of clingfilm and tried to wrap the steaks very snuggly, then tied off the ends with string. It looked pretty good to me, but there were a couple of air bubbles which resulted in slightly uneven cooking as the water isn’t transmitting heat properly at those points. Worse, it also turned out that water got in during the cooking process. So: my pork was properly cooked, still very moist, quite flavourful, but not pink and firmer than I had wanted due to the bit of poaching that took place.

The rest of the dish worked a treat, so feel free to enjoy the recipe but either (a) cook your pork the old-fashioned way, in a pan for five minutes each side; (b) invest in proper sous-vide equipment; (c) perfect the clingfilm Heath-Robinson technique and tell me how you managed it!

Autumn on a plate: chestnuts, grapes, mushrooms with pork tenderloin

Pork tenderloin with chestnut sauce (sauce is enough for 4)

2 pork tenderloin steaks
2 rashers smoked streaky bacon
For the sauce:
1 stick celery
2 shallots
1 clove garlic
200g cooked+skinned chestnuts
1 tsp fresh thyme
50ml Madeira
400ml vegetable stock
2 tbsp cream
2 tsp truffle oil
  1. Slow-fry the bacon until it is cooked crispy, then reserve the bacon fat and let it cool
  2. Season your steaks, put them on your clingfilm (in your sous-vide bag), pour the bacon fat on, wrap them insanely tightly (use the vacuum machine to seal the bag) and pop them in the saucepan (water bath) at 62C for an hour. Or pan-fry the steaks in the bacon fat after making the sauce!
  3. Chop the shallots, celery and garlic then fry them softly in a good knob of butter until golden
  4. Reserving 6 chestnuts, chop the rest and add them to the pan along with the thyme. Turn up the heat, then pour in the Madeira and let it bubble and reduce until just a sticky coating on the veg
  5. Pour in the stock, then simmer it for 25 minutes. You could use ham stock, or perhaps 50/50 with the veg stock
  6. Add the cream, give it another 5 minutes, then add the truffle oil and blend the sauce until smooth. Check seasoning
  7. Halve the reserved chestnuts, chop up the bacon, and fry them together in a little butter for a couple of minutes – they make a nice addition to the pork

I served this with a round of black pudding, some button mushrooms fried in butter and garlic, and a small bunch of red grapes. The whole dish was pleasantly autumnal and yet surprisingly light. No potato, rice or pasta because the chestnuts seemed to give enough starch. However, I think there’s any number of other vegetables that would go well here: pan-fried celeriac cubes, parsnip mash, shredded cabbage, braised celery…

Enjoy!

Sous-vide on a budget!

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Goulash

Categories:

One-pot meals, Recipes, Spicy food

3 January 2012

Growing up, and then starting to cook at University, I can remember the horrible meekness of cookbook recipes where strong flavours were concerned. I don’t know if this stemmed from war-time deprivation and paprika rationing, or if it was just a timid British palate. Bolognese with a pinch of herbs, chicken jalfrezi with a teaspoon of curry powder. Thankfully we’ve mostly got it out of our systems. But nevertheless, look for a recipe for goulash and you’ll still find plenty out there that call for “1 teaspoon paprika” or – ohmygosh – for a really raunchy dish: “2 teaspoons paprika”. American recipes seem equally pathetic when it comes to putting in flavour.

Try two tablespoons. And make it smoked paprika while you’re at it. And stop buying those stupid little jars of Schwartz spices. If you’re going to do any authentic Indian cooking or even give enough punch to your goulash then you’re going to be through a jar in one (maybe two) recipes.

Looking a bit more poncy than I remember from our trip to Prague, but the taste is pretty similar

There’s no such thing as “the” goulash recipe; it’s not a classic French dish, it’s a peasant stew or soup enjoyed right across eastern Europe. But from my own experiments I can confirm the following: (1) a bit of tomato is good, but not a whole tin – treat it like a bolognese and it won’t be right; (2) be cautious trying to add root veg – it feels like a natural thing to do, I know, but when I tried parsnip it added nothing to the goulash and beetroot was decidedly wrong; (3) beef definitely works out better than pork, although the addition of any kind of preserved pork sausage is a winner.

This is my recipe, but I have to say it varies a bit depending on what I have to hand.

Goulash – serves 4

½ kg braising steak, cubed
30g butter
2 onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 large red pepper, chopped
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 tbsp sweet smoked paprika
1 tbsp hot smoked paprika
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tbsp worcester sauce
1 tsp dry-fried and ground caraway seed
½ pint strong ale
½ pint beef stock
2 tbsp soured cream
1 tbsp chopped parsley
  1. In a large casserole, fry the onion in the butter for 5-6 minutes on a medium heat.
  2. Take the dish off the heat, add the paprika and still in.
  3. Back on the heat, add the garlic and the steak, fry until the steak is browned all over – the juices from the meat should prevent the paprika from burning.
  4. Add the beer, stock, tomato puree, worcester sauce and thyme. Stir, season, cover and cook on a low simmer or in the oven at 170C for at least 1.5 hours but preferably 2.
  5. Add the red pepper, tomatoes and any potato or parsnip you want. Check the seasoning while you’re at it. Cook for another 40 minutes or so.
  6. When it’s done, either stir in the soured cream and chopped parsley or add them on top after serving.

You can serve goulash on a bed of plain rice, but equally good is with a hunk of crusty bread or some mashed potato. Really good is making Polish potato pancakes to go with it. Goulash has a great affinity with cabbage; you can go the whole hog and serve sauerkraut on the side, or just plain boiled and sprinkled with a little vinegar. If you like to tone down the spice then just stir more soured cream into the pot after cooking. Or only use sweet smoked paprika. Oh, and as with many spicy slow-cooked dishes you’ll find the goulash even better if you cook it the day before and re-heat!

Enjoy.

Well yes, I know that's cossack dancing

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