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.