In praise of iceberg

Iceberg lettuce is one of those ingredients that gets a bad rap, not least from me, but there are times when it really is just the thing. I reflected on this twice today as I had lunch in what is probably my favourite lunch-spot in London and then dinner in what is one of my two or three favourite dinner spots. I hadn't planned either meal but they both happened and I ain't complaining. Lunch was at El Vergel on Lant Street in Borough. I had exactly what I'd had on the other three occasions I'd been there: tacos with refried beans, salsa, spring onion, shredded iceberg and feta, with a Sprite on the side. Jeez, it really is one of the zingiest, most delicious, salty, earthy, fresh and wonderful dishes available anywhere. The pot of extra salsa on the side, available with all dishes, is so good that I just started eating it with a spoon. This time I didn't have any of their cherry cheesecake, but only because I'll be back for it, and the great news is that El Vergel is now open on Saturdays from, I think, 9-2, which is news that many people were waiting for, including readers of this blog!

Dinner was at another resto I'd been to two or three times before, loved two or three times before and, strangely, is also about to open on Saturdays (from mid-June). I had, of course, the same dishes at Pho as I'd had on previous occasions: summer vegetable rolls followed by hot and spicy mushroom and tofu pho. Goddamit, those summer rolls - stuffed with cold vermicelli noodles, carrot, bean sprouts, mint and shredded iceberg - are the best example of a healthy dish having the capacity to be tasty in the world. Well, one of the best in that category, and I'd put the Leon superfoods salad in that class too. The pho was as hot, delicious and full of crispy tofu as I had remembered. Washed down with a beer from Laos, this was a supper to savour.

Bish, bash bosh, let's talk dosh: £5 for lunch, £13 for dinner - what a great food city London can be, not least because it can make you rethink your attitude towards iceberg.

Lisboa

OK, first I must say sorry to my loyal, select band of readers for my radio silence here. I'm afraid that I managed to lose my camera (three Ixys into the ether in three years...) and couldn't really face blogging without pictures, but in the spirit of hoping that the camera will turn up, I'm back. I'm not quite sure where this particular entry is going to go, but I thought I'd write about my food experiences in Lisbon, which I visited last week for a truly amazing EU meeting. Unfortunately the food was not quite so stellar and was not especially Portuguese, but who said that blogs needed to be full of tasty authenticity?

We were staying in a beach hotel just outside the city (truly 'tis a hard life) and most of the meals were eaten there, though we also went into town on a couple of occasions. Before going I had had quite a lot of high expectations of getting to to have some super local things - especially custard tarts - but I did also have a bit of a sense that this might be the kind of trip where being a vegetarian put one at something of a disadvantage. I was right about that as the welcome dinner at the hotel proved. It was a buffet and the dishes available were grated carrots, tomato wedges and a salsa-y pepper of peppers, onion and so on. The main course was the same... There were many cakes available for pudding and since I felt pretty bloody virtuous, I had carrot cake and lemon meringue pie. I'd also had the first two or three of what seemed like dozens of bread rolls I consumed over four days.

I was pretty excited about brekka as I had been led to believe that there might well be big selections of cakes and perhaps even the famous Lisbon custard tarts. No such luck, but there were quite a few types of pastry and also slices of cheese and tomato, so no grumbles from Gallois, particularly when he also found a local shop to stock up on Diet Cokes. Lunch continued the doubling up theme of the night before as the starter was melon with ham, or without ham in fact, followed by a main of... fruit salad, knocked back with a number of bread rolls. By this point some of the vegetarians were starting to revolt, but little did they know of the monster they were going to create: namely, the omelette monster, for no sooner was the word 'vegetarian' uttered in Hotel Costa Caparica than chef was cracking the eggs to whip up omelettes for the special ones.

That evening we went to a pretty smart restaurant called Vela Latina close to the Belem Tower by the Tagus River. The nibbles were slices of smoked salmon and cute looking slices of bread - huzzah, bread - but it turned out to be bread stuffed with some kind of chorizo... We negotiated a special starter, which was a pea soup whose dominant taste was chicken stock. Ho, hum, some real bread had arrived by this point. For the main we had pasta with ceps, asparagus and tomatoes: nae bad. Pudding was a lemon and vodka sorbet. William's extra pudding - once the senior academics paying for the whole shebang had left our table - was a custard tart, or rather a pasteis de belem, for the eponymous tart actually originated from the very district of Lisbon in which we sat. I had seen a big plate of them by the entrance to the restaurant and was determined to get my hands on one that night, for I knew there might not be another chance. It came with a shaker full of cinammon and was truly outstanding: plenty of crispy pastry and a big, big custardy flavour, slightly burnt on top and oh so creamy in the middle. It was washed down with some kind of vin santo - the two best things I had on the trip. The wines with the meal - a white Serras de Zeitao Vinho Regional Terras de Sado 2005 and an Alento Alentejo 2005 red - were also delicious. I particularly liked the fruity/rich balance in all the reds I tried.

I fear I have risked boring an audience more used to dinky little reports, so I shan't labour over the other lunches I had in the hotel which featured, amongst other things, a tower of cheap mozarella, tomato and dried oregano (nae bad), tagliatelli with a tomato sauce (hmmm, mine was warmer than the others') and spaghetti with a tomato and mushroom sauce (hmm). We than had a grand farewell dinner that featured a greatest hits rendition of all the vegetarian dishes the kitchen had learned to create, including, to great cheers from my table (but not from me), omelette, and one of the most bizarre dishes I have ever seen which consisted of bean sprouts and melted cheese: not a combo I can recommend. I got drunk and ignored most of the dishes and can recommed Super Bock beer. I can also praise Portuguese cheeses for I snuck out on the last day and bought some super local cheeses from a grocer's. While I may have seemed a bit snooty about the food in the hotel, in truth I didn't really care because the meeting wasn't about the food, and I'm really keen to go back to Portugal to drink wine, drink beer, eat cheese and have a custard tart every day that I'm there.

Neal's Yard

I am now really beginning to wonder quite why I was always suspicious of the idea of Neal's Yard. What, quite frankly, as I believe they say, is not to like about a cheese emporia stocked with wonderful British cheeses in tip-top condition, staffed by people who both really love cheese and treat every customer with friendliness and respect? To say I was well impressed is a serious under-statement because I can't recall a recent food-buying experience that was more fun than queuing in NY, being offered cheese whilst queing, eyeing up the amazing selection and breathing in deeply so as to fill myself with cheesiness. The three cheeses picked were real winners: a Wensleydale that displayed all the virtues of the "Great Northern Cheese" (sour, salt, creamy, chalky whiteness), a farmyardy soft cheese called Tunworth and my new, latest, at this moment in time fave cheese, which is called Jennywood and is displayed in all its wild, rough, crazy glory in one of the photos.

Konditor and Cook

Had some very fine carrot cake on my first visit to K&C, at the Borough branch, impressive for the sweetness of its icing, the lovely look of the cake itself, flecked with much carrot, and, er, the whopping size of the slice. Photos are of some of the other delights.

Ze truffe

"Ze truffe eez ze aromateeeque mushhhh-rhooommm" as that Belgian dude who appears on Gordon Ramsay's "Hell's Kitchen" once informed b and me in Verre in Dubai. I had meant to buy amazing basil from Gazzano so as to make fresh pesto but, in its absence, I cooked some raviolini with white truffles which were pretty damn fine. You could smell the truffle in the cold pasta and it was rolled into some suitably mild soft cheese inside the raviolini. I served it simply with olive oil and salt, but could be tempted by perhaps making a buttery, herbal sauce next time around, or perhaps adding some soft cheese and peas or broad beans. With some home-made garlic bread and a salad of excellent wild rocket, mozarella and cherry toms, this was one of the better meals I'd cooked in a while, thanks to the super ingredients from Clerkenwell's best neighbourhood deli.

Japanese sweets

However hard I've been training my palate to enjoy distinctively Japanese tastes, I still do not get Japanese sweets of the well-packaged kind which are available for sale at every station and tourist site in the country. These particular bean-based, jellyish delicacies came from Kyushu and had a slight date-iness to them, but when I say slight I really mean slight because such sweets take blandness to a new degree for this untutored/uncultured palate. So much so that I wonder if people even eat these things in Japan or whether they are simply ceremonially handed over as gifts and then rather less ceremonially dumped in the bin. Must work harder on probing the subtleties of the bland I think.

Mango Madness

Aplphonso mangoes are in season and even for someone like me who is not a crazy mango fan, they're irresistible for their deep, long, rich, rich sweetness.

Wonderful Wembley

A day trip to see the sights of Wembley: the Shri Swaminarayan Hindu temple, views of the stadium and Dadima, a Guajarati restaurant close to Alperton tube. One of the select that merits both a red (quality) and a green (value) star from Time Out, Dadima is a tasty joint specialising in a series of thalis, though when I next go back I'll order from the carte because I can't believe that I turned down a dish called 'chilli paneer'. The food was good without being exceptional and I felt the bhel poori was so-so compared with that on offer at Chutneys on Drummond Street, but I reckon I'll be back to try that paneer.

Chickpeas and chips

If you ever happen to find yourself in Whitstable and are vegetarian or not a fan of oysters, then a pretty fine meal can be had on the beach with some chips from V.C. Jones and goodies from the deli a couple of doors down. The chips were the best I've had in a long, long time and a step above top London chippies like North Sea and Masters Super Fish. They were a pretty deep, almost burned brown in places and pleasing in their potatoeyness without the dull doughiness that I find increasingly characterises chips. The chickpea and chip combination (here the chickpeas were in a tomato sauce) is a good one and I was also very impressed with the juiciness of the vine leaves from the deli. Very convenient bench-style groynes are on offer on the beach and you could do worse for a pudding later than the excellent cakes at Samphire.

Watching a Woolwich BBQ

The challenge of not knowing

It's pretty rare that one bites into something with no idea how it will taste, but this happened to me the other night when I cooked some rice with a 'rice mix' of spices brought back from Kyushu in Japan by the Merovingians. I could tell that it was going to be pretty hot because it had a bright red chilliness but beyond that I had no clue as to how it would taste, nor what the other ingredients were, most especially the little ball like things. I'm not quite sure if they had actually eaten this in Japan or whether it was similar to things they had eaten, but the ingredients were all in Japanese so there were no clues there at all. I'd love to be able to say that I loved it to be bits but I didn't and wonder how much of that came from not having any clue as to what the mix contained. The more I think about it, it was quite a memorable dish and worth cooking for that alone but I think I need a bit more education on southern Japanese spices before venturing into the unknown again.

We hope it's mish, mish

Given that it is one of the great feats of culinary alchemy, it seems strange to me that mish is not a better known dish. How long can it be, I wonder, before one wanders past the supermarket salads and sees endless varieties of mish aside the coleslaw and the cheese and chives dip. Perhaps it is because it is Sudanese that the dish has never really made the 'Arab canon' in the way that felafel and babaghanoush have, for it certainly has nothing to do with its taste, for, for those in the know, mish is perhaps the greatest of all mezze. The alchemical element comes from the fact that the dish needs to be made about 24 hours in advance and stored in a fridge so that its constituent parts might meld together to make gold. I presume that storing it for even longer would be no bad thing but cannot imagine that anyone would allow it to sit in the fridge for more than a day. The ingredients which really need time are the fenugreek and black onion seeds, which soften as they begin to sit together with the yoghurt, feta, green chillis and chilli powder. The final flavour, best appreciated on toast, is hard to describe other than to say that it adds up to much, much more than the sum of its parts. Three key flavours are its creaminess, sourness and hotness. Goddamit, there are at least eight hours before I can start snaffling the big pot that's waiting in my fridge!

Arabisch feast mit tabooley

Number7 came round for an evening of neutral partisanship, where we celebrated Liverpool's (eventual) win against Chelsea, and the joys of Arab food. For some reason I decided to slightly supermarket-ize some of the dishes, so in a hommage to Tesco's in house dips rather than to authenticity, I made lemon, coriander and chilli houmous. This was slightly complicated by the smoke that started coming from my blender whilst the mix was being cut which, unfortunately, gave the houmous a rather rough, 1970s dinner party sort of feel. Rather better was the tabbouleh which I made with Number7 in mind, for it was she who first alerted me to the value of adding almost no bulgar wheat to the mix. It was zingy which was good. I also made some yoghurt and cucumber, as you do, and we had sides of many pickles from a Turkish shop and lots of toasted mini pitta, plus olives and chunks of feta. There's something pretty satisfying, and aesthetically pleasing, about loading up a big plate of mezze and the colourfulness of the combination of dishes is part of the pleasure and an indication of the underlying healthiness of much Arab food.