Home-grown

Tasting is believing, as I hope my readers will discover, but last night I had some pretty tasty tomatoes and courgettes from my King's X veggie patch. Actually I had one tomato and two courgettes but they tasted damn good for their home-grown-ness. Funnily enough, the tomato had something of a smoky Mexican kind of taste to it - I've no idea why this should be the case as I've never before noticed tomatoes really having that flavour, but I guess that my senses were on over-drive, thinking "please let this taste nice, please let it taste nicer than the ones from Tesco's". Even if it hadn't tasted nice it would have been worth doing because, however cliched it may seem, there is something deeply satisfying and connecting about growing your own. Next up, potatoes methinks.

Good service

This is evidently my week to receive excellent service, all of which deserves to be praised. I hardly think that the traffic on this site will help places I recommend, but The Star at Petworth in West Sussex deserves recognition. We walked there across lovely countryside and - owners of restrictive pubs in mid-Devon who only serve carveries and stop serving at two on Sundays please take note - were pleased to see that a full menu was available till four on Sundays. The one slight problem was that we were a party of eight and there wasn't any room outside for us. No problemo: we'll just move one of the big tables outside and then you can have the best seats in the house, sitting more or less in the town square. The food was all very tasty (I had a ploughmans with chips!), the portions large and the service exceptionally friendly all the way through the meal. This was a more or less polar opposite to my experiences in mid-Devon for we felt really welcomed by this pub and they genuinely wanted us to enjoy being there, which we did a great deal, so I hope to be back one day to explore Petworth House and more of the really idyllic countryside roundabout.

Beeeg Urrrrp!

I am aware that a common complaint about restaurant critics is that they stop writing about food. All may well be fine in the first few months as it seems rather fun writing about napkins and demi-glaces as compared with their previous gig in row 3 of the Paris catwalk shows or adjuding the merits of the new breed of hot hatches. And then the novelty wears off and our critic begins to use their column as an excuse to rant about parking restrictions in Chelsea, hoodies or to deploy the column as a means to wooing the mystery Brunette with whom he seems to enjoy so many meals on the paper's tab.

All this is to say that I am aware that I have been straying away from food a bit recently and I can really understand how critics veer towards the confessional because there really are only so many times you feel you can use certain food-appropriate adjectives. I'll get to the food soon, but I must tell you about my encounters with French ravers in London this weekend. I was on a bus yesterday and the guy in front of me was talking in ze verr strrrong Franche acczent about going to ze afftteerrr parrrrrrty in Breeexton, and today I gave some directions to a woman who spoke about five or six words of English. What is remarkable about these words is that she only just managed to get across her question about finding Swinton Street, but on being told where it was, thanked me with a "Beeeeegggggg Urrrrrrrrrpppppp!" with accompanying double thumbs-up. Allez les ravers!

At the time I was walking towards Borough on one of my favourite London routes which takes in Clerkenwell, Smithfield, St Paul's and the Millennium Bridge, before ending up at Neal's Yard. Now I've bigged-up the service there in an earlier post but I really will be surprised if anyone can beat them in the service category in my end of year/end of blog awards. What is really remarkable about the places - especially given the assholness of many of their customers, one of whom kept budging me in the back in the queue - is that every server there is super friendly and knowledgeable and that they insist that you try every cheese before you buy, plus generous portions of all those that you end up not buying. I had my heart set on cheeses that were new to me and only partly managed this with some Adrahan, Cashel Blue, St Gall and Brie de Meaux, plus a little slice of membrillo, and some bomb-weight granary bread from Flour Power. Tasting notes follow:

Adrahan: [pictured] an Irish farmyard stinker. Like all the cheeses at NY this was in great condition and much riper than the example pictured. I'm not sure that it did anything special for me because it was simply a medium-strong version of this type of cheese and not really unique in any way.

Cashel Blue: I requested a 'creamy blue' and although I've had Cashel Blue many times I went with the server's suggestion and he was not wrong. Warm and ripe this is a really exceptional cheese with a fine mix of creaminess to saltiness and without the excessive, gritty acridity that I think mars many blues. I think my all-time fave has to be Cornish Blue which has a buttery-creaminess, but Cashel Blue is a solid cheese.

Brie de Meaux: NY famously only stock three or four foreign cheeses [list here, all I can see are mozzie, parmigiano, feta and the brie: http://www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk/thecheeses.html#] and as I had been thinking about brie quite a lot lately I decided to go for this and it did not disappoint. It is quite a rustic example of a brie with an impressive pong after an afternoon in the sun. They describe it as having a vegetabley taste and that is quite accurate.

St Gall: An Irish appenzell-style cheese which I liked a lot. It was rather like a fruity version of a good emmenthal, and I believe that this fruity character comes partly from the rind being soaked in wine or cider.

Brindisa membrillo: top-notch stuff and a a great complement to the St Gall in particular. Many things go with cheese - red wine, good bread, Carr's biscuits, chutney with some - and membrillo is definitely a winner with hard cheeses and it worked pretty well with the brie too.

SPECIAL NOTE FOR LOCAL READERS OF THIS BLOG (I.E. TWO THIRDS OF MY READERSHIP OF THREE): I have plenty of the cheeses left and plan to spend another evening with them very soon, to which you're invited.

From the market I then tracked up to Angel by tube to pick up some plums and damsons for pudding. This really is a super time to be fruit and veg shopping in the market because there's so much variety, prices are cheap and the quality is super-high. I can't remember having had damsons before and these Kentish ones are very nice but they can't beat the Victoria plums.

Well, it took a while but I got to the food in the end and I hope that you have coped with my inconsistent attitude towards blogging in recent months. I know that writing about non-food stuff is a function of having left facebook, but the good news is that I really feel like writing at the moment, so let me leave you now with my phrase of the day: Beeeeggggg Urrrrrrrrrp!

Walk 9 meal 5

There can't be many better post-dinner strolls than walking along the South Bank from the London Eye to Blackfriars: a walk that's romantic even when you're alone and nursing a seriously full belly. The lighting on the buildings and the way the city unfolds as you amble, finishing with the glory of St Paul's, plus the feeling of lots of other people really enjoying being there, make for a lovely walk.

Tonight I followed the recommendation of Sal, plus the New York Times, Time Out, The Good Curry Guide, and many other burghers, and took a trip down to Vauxhall to try Hot Stuff for the first time. I had been meaning to visit this vaunted Kenyan-Indian cafe for quite some time, not least because the prospect of really hot food is always appealing.

I am aware that over the course of this blog I have rather affectedly referred to quite a number of places as "joints", perhaps even falling into the cliche "neighbourhood joint", and am well aware that only jazz musicians of a certain age have any right to refer to cafes or bars as "joints". Anyhow, Hot Stuff really is a neighbourhood joint - a cheery, slightly scruffy place with friendly staff who spend a fair amount of time hanging out with their mates out front, when they are not looking after their customers (they do the hanging out and the service things very well).

I recently realised that rice is pointless in Indian restaurants and that all you need is bread and vegetable dishes, so in the interest of my readers I grossly over-ordered (taking a hit for the team, as I believe it's called) and went for chilli paneer, vegetable curry, "beans" and a peshwari naan. Before that I enjoyed a poppadum with a good selection of chutneys. All of the dishes were fine but I can't really claim any of them stood out, other than the chilli paneer in the sense that it was glow-in-the-dark orange. It is hard in words to convey quite how bright this dish was when it sat on the table and, presumbaly, how orange the inside of my stomach is at present. It wasn't a bad taste at all but I found myself slightly depressed that the paneer was remarkably un-seared and it was as though it had been baked (or even boiled!) rather than fried, and, like all the food, it was not actually that hot. The "beans" turned out to be black-eyed beans in a spicy sauce, though I couldn't tell you what spices were used in that or in the rather mediocre vegetable curry.

As I write this I am aware that I am being rather harsh about a good, pretty cheap restaurant (all the above was £13 before tip), staffed by nice people who evidently care about the food and their customers, and don't get me wrong, the food was tasty and I could see myself going back and ordering more dishes to get a better sense of the menu. The problem is that having lived in Sharjah and having eaten n times at the Clay Oven I know what Indian food can be and how vivid different spicing routines can feel, even in hot dishes, and how great a range of differentiation there can be across a series of dishes. I don't know why the caged bird sings, but I do know how seared paneer and ginger can taste in a truly great saag paneer and my problem with London's Indian restaurants is simply that none of them approach that level of cooking.

It is not for wont of trying that I have reached this conclusion. A selection of places I've tried, to give an indication of geographical diversity would include: New Tayyabs in Whitechapel, Indian YMCA in Fitrovia, Sagar in Hammersmith, Rasoi Vineet Bhatia in Chelsea, Rasa in Stoke Newington, Madhu's in Southall, Dadima in Wembley, and Sabras in Willesden. Now all those places are very highly rated and there are some to which I'd definitely return, but are there any to which I feel I need to return? I still have that niggling feeling that somewhere out there is a great, relatively undiscovered Indian restaurant in this city, but who knows where? Next stop Tooting I think, to sample what are supposed to be a great set of south Indian vegetarian places, though I have a sneaking feeling that the place of my dreams is definitely north Indian.

Imed's pasta tip

I've been lucky to know some people who just have cooking magic in their fingertips; the kind of people who can make something yummy out of scraps and for whose cooking you might even go easy at lunch jus because you know that you want to feast on their food in the evening. One such person is definitely Imed, Tunisian pasta master and I thought of him the other day as I followed his basic pasta technique of removing the penne from its boiling water well before it was cooked, and then finishing the pasta in the tomato puree, onion and spice-based sauce which I was making in another pan, with a bit of the water added to the mix. Now I know that posh Italian chefs fry their pasta with the sauce, but the magic of Imed's method is that it works just as well with dried pasta and it is truly amazing how the flavours actually become imbued in the pasta, rather than simply sitting atop a pile of starchy carbs.

Eating in America

I'm writing this to Bob Dylan as we listened to a lot of Bob on holiday in NYC and the Hamptons, and he reminds me of all that's best about the US, though I can't quite shake the feeling that it's better to be listening to him in London than over there. I say this partly because being there made me realise just how different our societies are and quite how incredibly market-oriented and blindly nationalist America is as compared with Britain. None of this came across in the wonderful places and people with whom I stayed, but as I sat like a zombie in JFK airport last night reading the New York Times and watching CNN report on the 'surge' in Iraq I realised that even a small child exposed to a free media in Europe would be able to punch holes in the naive jingoism of coverage that majored on video-game style shots of American troops running between buildings and which, in the case of both paper and TV, evaded Iraqi suffering and the queer logic and morality of the whole enterprise.

Anyhow, now I've got that off my chest I'll move on to the food, which was damn fine. I'll start with the absolute culinary highlight of the trip which, realistically, was featured one of the best bitefuls of my life and merits a trip to NYC in and of itself I should say. The venue was a doughnut joint called Doughnut Plant, which I had seen recommended on egullet and given that it was tipped by donut lovers in a city with very high standards in that department, my expectations were pretty high. Now my love of doighnuts has been something of a running thread across this blog, but I's got's to tell ya that you can forget your Krispy Kremes, your Dunkins, Greggs, the whole lot, because this place is the real doughnut promised land. They're made without any kind of artificial crap and there are a limited number of flavours, many of which I hope to try across a long life that is based on general healthiness so that i might stuff my face with doughnuts every time I'm in America. Another key thing to point out about them is that they are big, perhaps 50-70% bigger than most doughnuts and that ain't no bad thing as far as I'm concerned. This time around I eschewed their famous peach donut, the chocolate offerings and the regular styles, to go for Sunflower and Coconut Cream. The former was a regular style donut covered in a sunflower-seed encrusted sugar glaze and it had a truly wonderful soft savouriness to its inside which worked perfectly with the suga rush of the outer casing. Having eaten this, I struggled to see how the coconut cream donut could compete, but let me tell you this was quite an epiphanal moment because you know you sometimes smell something like a sun-tan cream and think 'wow, that smells so good I could eat it'? Well, once I bit into the ring of the doughhnut and encountered the filling, I realised I was eating a comestible version of the most beautiful, haunting coconut suntan cream in the world: it had a pleasing saltiness to it as though some of the coconut milk was there as well as the flesh of the fruit, and it was without doubt one of the most fun things I've ever eaten. At the moment, they have just one branch in the Big Apple and a series of franchises in Japan. In some ways I hope they stay small because it's pretty clear from the shop that they are totally crazy about what they do and you'd have to suspect that it'd all become a bit more blah if they went global, but in other ways I think that everyone deserves the chance to sample their coconut cream.

After that, nothing else could compete, but I ate very well in America, not least because I went on holiday with some terrific cooks who rustled up some fantastic barbecues, risotti, plum tarte tatins, and so on and on and on. We didn't actually eat out a great deal but the quality of groceries (especially the bread, bagels and cakes) in the Hamptons was pretty bloody high.

In NY I did also visit one of my fave places, Gus's Pickles on the Lower East Side, which is a very cool pickling joint where all their stuff is served from giant barrels on the street. New Yorkers take their pickles pretty seriously and one of the things I like most about food there is its Jewish/East Europeanness and Gus's is justly famous, so much so that it seems there are pickles out there which claim to be made by Gus that just ain't. Anyhow, I picked up a little selection to eat as a pre-doughnut appetiser and was as impressed with the pickled tomato as before and marvelled at the fact that you could buy pickled gherkins in 'fresh', 'sour', 'semi-sour' and 'hot' varieties, of which the latter was my fave, though it really packed some heat.

The mozarella is damned good in NY too and if you order a mozzie salad, what you'll get is cheese of the kind of calibre that is available here at Borough: a tender-tough membrane covering a pillowy-soft, salty, luscious, creamy inside. The fries weren't bad either, though the next time I visit I want to take my interest in both chips and pizza a bit more seriously because this was the visit that convinced me both that I'd struggle to live in America and I've led a richer life for having eaten some of the best of its street food.

For more info on DP and its founder, Mark Israel, described by Saveur as a "doughnut Don Quixote" for his wild visions of what doughnuts can be, see here: http://www.doughnutplant.com/

Finally

Without wishing to brag, I finally cooked something with a hint of invention and tastiness to it yesterday. Actually, I may as well be big-headed and say that I think I made two things that were pretty good and I can also imagine how they might be improved. The first was a mix to plonk in some mini croustades, consisting of some Total yoghurt, finely diced spring onion and Pecorino Tartuffo di Toscana. This truffled cheese is without doubt my favourite ingredient in the world at the moment - the cheese itself is fine but the truffliness is just something else, something that's hard to describe but it certainly has that coveted nail-polish taste once well identified by b.

The other dish was a plate of pasta without pasta; in other words, pasta fillings without the pasta itself, for those rare moments in life when you don't actually want the pasta but just want the sauce. I'm not sure when such moments are, but working on the assumption that they may in theory exist, my three sauces today were: balls of spinach, ricotta and nutmeg, cubes of roasted butternut squash, cored with a sauce of reserved squash, sage and parmesan, and aubergine rolls with a tomato, onion and parmesan filling. The nice thing about them is that they can be presented sushi style as they are all quite dainty and look nice on the plate.

Now back to my usual slovenly ways with a bag of Doritos and guacamole on the sofa...

Devon knows...

I've just come back from five days hols in Devon and have various observations to make about the food I had there:

1. One day in Devon = one day's penance when I get back for me I think, because my diet of cheese, cheese and onion pasties, fudge, cakes, chips and home-cooking there does now need to be counterbalanced.

2. Don't expect a warm welcome in mid-Devon. I really like the area but had my most frustrating food experience of the year on Sunday when it took abut two hours to find something to eat at lunch-time. The first stop was the Exeter Inn just outside Bampton, which is a very pretty place, and we were all in good spirits as we looked at the menus whilst having a drink outside. The problem was that when we tried to order we were told we could only order dishes off the dinner menu, even though they had a lunch menu, and when asked why this was the case were told "it's just not worth it", with regard to serving the lunch menu on a Sunday. The pub was half-empty at this point and their attitude smacked of real laziness and dislike of customers, so off we went to Bampton itself where we found: a locals pub where the "fuck off" signals were pretty loud and clear, as was the smell of overcooked boiled potatoes, a Co-op with three sets of sandwiches, a bakery with empty tables that claimed we needed a booking (I can see the article now: New Hot Tables of the Globe, including that crap bakery in Bampton), and another pub that only did carveries on Sundays. The welcome was less than stunning in all these places, so on we went to another pub which, at 2.30, wouldn't offer us food as they finished at 2.0, and, finally, to Pulham's Mill near Wimblehall Reservoir, where we had some very nice ploughmans in their pretty garden.

3. Otterton is still a fine place. I bought some of the flour from the mill to make some nice Devon bread back in London and then we walked to Budleigh and I saw a kingfisher for the first time. That rocked!

4. The Nobody Inn is also still good news. I had couscous with roasted vegetables and goats cheese, but the real highlights were a bar snack of dried, hot broad beans, and some luscious mocha ice cream.

5. I really like the beach cafe at Budleigh a lot. I'm writing this post in a state of some tiredness and am vaguely aware of struggling to use words of more than one syllable, but the cafe really is good. I had ciabatta with something that was advertised as houmous, but wasn't but it didn't matter as it was a yummy mix of chickpeas, yoghurt and herbs.

6. The Sidmouth folk festival is fun, though I can't claim to be as into all things Morris as is Riccardo. Along with hundreds of others we queued for chips from the place on the main street and they were pretty good, though serving scores of customers isn't that much excuse for garnishing a veggie burger with, er, nothing - not even a lettuce leaf or a dollop of mayo. That'll teach me to not each fish.

7. Delia's guacamole recipe is really good. Suzy made this one night and I was really impressed how zingy and fresh her version is. It's made without olive oil and is a great alternative to richer versions.

8. Manstree Vineyard is still a super place to pick fruit.

9. Shaul's do a very tasty cheese and onion pasty and Topsham is still one of my fave places in the world: wine, walks, cheese, pasties, the best views and a great outdoor pool. Si, si.

Yum Yum

Is it just me or is there something slightly mysterious about the way that Chinese takeaway food is made. I guess I can't cook Chinese and I have an added level of suspicion because they so often skank vegetarians, but I must say that I have no clue how they make their sauces, which is perhaps why I don't eat Chinese all that much, even though it's a cuisine I like a lot and I think I'd put a meal at Hunan up there with one of the wildest and most enjoyable I've ever eaten.

Anyways, I tried Yum Yum on Caledonian Road today, for it had been noted that it was somewhat surprising that I had not been there. In the interests of reviewing, I over-ordered in quite a serious way and had vegetable chow mein, chilli tofu and some plain rice. Actually that wasn't massive over-ordering since my stomach muscles are currently coping with the input they dealt with earlier. All of the food was fine and the chow mein had that kinda smokiness that I can't quite identify, while the tofu did have some chilli kick, though none of the crunchy lusciousness and serious heat of Pho, which will always be my go-to place for SE Asian food.