Mediterranish

S deserved a break so I was deputed to create some kind of vegetable dish to accompany some partly home-made rosemary ciabatta. I 'll admit to being rather pleased with the Mediterranean platter I put together, which, as you can see, featured peppers, tomato, mushrooms and asparagus on rocket. The keys to succes, in a dish which I'd often fluff, were: cooking with someone who know what their doing and who acts as a kitchen assistant!, parboiling the vegetables in careful order before roasting, adding a few whole cloves of garlic, and really going for it with both herbs (oregano, thyme and others) as well as a fair bit of chilli, to give the whole dish character.

Hand rolled

I was a touch hungover on my first night back in Exeter for Easter. Sushi is a very soothing kind of dish for someone in such a state. It was so balming in fact that I began to enjoy natto for the first time. If you know what natto is and you are not Japanese then you probably know that you do not like it, but I think I am making my first steps towards becoming a fan. These fermented soya beans are quite something to both look at and, more importantly, to lift with your chopsticks for they are... ahem... slightly snotty in texture. Actually, I've just learned that 'sticky' is a more polite way of saying this.

All this is to stray somewhat off the main point, which is that S prepared a real feast for us, with, as the pictures show, a serving dish with avocado, cucumber, cress, cheddar, lettuce, egg and asparagus, as well as the natto, alongside nori for rolling, mayonnaise, soy and wasabi. Extremely carefully-prepared, simple Japanese food such as this becomes more and more appealing to me over time, so much so that I wonder if I have now opened up a part of my brain/tastebuds which craves more and more Japanese foods and is going to offer me even more pleasure as I come to understand the subtleties of Japanese preparations of food.

However you pronounce it

And thence to Marylebone farmer's market where they bought fine cheeses, salad bags, unusual + traditional Kentish apples (Malling) and a gooseberry bush. There's a good reason why this market has attracted such a buzz as there's an excellent variety of stalls, many of which are excellent value(my big salad bag was a quid and the gooseberry bush a fiver). There are some pricier stalls but nothing compared to the likes of La Bloody Fromagerie which you pass on your way in. Makes me want to try other farmer's markets in London.

SOS is not a cry for help

Number7 suggested Smiths of Smithfield for brekka and 1) who was I to argue? 2) how right she was to make that suggestion. This is without doubt one of the funkiest restaurants in London and lots of people evidently know that it is a great place for Sunday brunch. We waited a little while on big sofas with excellent Valencian orange juices and then joined the mixed crowd of trendies, families and oldsters at the tables. Number7 had a bacon and egg sandwich and I had a beanburger with houmous/babghanoush etc + chips. The food was just fine but it was the atmosphere which made the place: wonderful industrial architecture, fantastic fittings, upbeat music played that bit louder than would usually be acceptable (there was quite a lot of foot-tapping grooving going on amongst those waiting at the bar) and a really happy, metropolitan feel to the place.

Du pain

However lovingly No.7 is looking at the bread in this window, I feel reasonably confident in saying that my gaze sur le pain was even more longing. The bakery is just off Columbia Road and as the photo shows these people know what they are doing. I've just had a slice of my dark rye loaf (there's a loaf coming your way b!) and it's one of the spiciest rye breads I've ever had. Now you may shrug your shoulders and say 'but it ain't sposed to be spicy' and I will beg to differ because there was a fizzy kind of spiciness to this bread that worked just fine by me. And you may say fizzy?!

I'll have a marathon

One of the very few good things about training for a marathon is that you can eat bloody loads without putting on weight. Here's a fat-boy chilli I made for myself on Saturday after a long run along the Thames: vegetable chilli (obscured by not insubstantial amounts of cheddar), rice, Total yoghurt and a tomato, red onion and coriander salsa. They'd run out of soya mince in Tesco so I decided to cook with quinoa for the first time, on the grounds that it's super-healthy, -trendy etc. I'll reserve judgement on its usefulness as an ingredient until after I've used it to make something less hot and spicy, but the way the grains acquire little tails when cooked is kinda cool, if a bit icky.

No peas please

They'd run out of peas at the market, so I was forced to think on my feet a bit as I wanted to make another ricotta salad. I went for purple sprouting (appara you don't need to add broccoli these days), olive oil and chilli. I certainly feel that my inner Italian is channelling through pretty well these days.