Amblin' back through Exmouth Market

Exmouth is a rather nice place, of which I'm fond for a number of reasons, but I wonder what it would make of Exmouth Market: trendy Clerkenwell street full of boutiques and gourmet foodshops for the local Guardianistas? I walked back through the market on my way back from swimming, partl because I hoped that De Gustibus would offer me two loaves for the price of one as it was close to packing-up time (they did, so I got a rye bread and an onion rye bread for £1.95). I also picked up some Cashel Blue from Sheridan's Cheesemongers, a stall specialising in Irish cheese. With the rye bread it is making a rather satisfying supper, rather better than the dull pasta + cheese or rice + vegetables that I would otherwise have had.

Not about food - I don't do this often

So David Miliband, a man described by the Guardian, and presumably therefore by the man himself, as 'an Iraq war critic' has become our Foreign Secretary. On a day when a bomb was discovered in the West End, I'm not quite sure who I loathe more: Miliband or the bombers. I know that in many ways one ought to detest the bombers more, but I can't help but think of the dead and the grieving in Iraq and the complicity of people like Miliband who voted for the war. What kind of 'Iraq war critic' didn't have the guts to stand up for a principle in 2003, when scores of his fellow MPs saw what was true and just, along with more than a million people on the streets of London? It's no excuse that he's a politician and that he needed to caluculate what was best for his own future, and for him to now trade on his supposed secret skepticism is an insult to those who took part on what was the biggest political demonstration in Britain's history and, rather more importantly, those who have died in Iraq, Britain and elsewhere as a result of his less than deeply held views.

On a more positive note, my half-day-off was wonderful and after lunch I wandered through town, stopping off to see two sensational exhibitions: Damien Hirst at the Brewer's Yard White Cube and Old Masters at Sotheby's. The Hirst show - which continues at White Cube in Hoxton - is great fun, not least because you queue for to see the bejewelled skull and are then taken into a darkened room by a security geezer who lets you know just how much it's worth and how many diamonds are on its bonce (the second skull above is the fantastic Mexican Skull of the Smoking Mirror of the British Museum). The rest of the show's fun too: a mixture of the silly, the mediocre and the just wonderful (more animals in formaldehyde, including a shark you can walk through and some wonderful paintings of scenes from a hospital). I had always known that Sothebys and Christies were must-visits but had never before had the gall to walk past the doorman to see paintings about to be sold as though I was a potential buyer. I need not have worried as the place was chocker with punters and there was a wonderful rag-bag of Dutch still-lives, Renaissance art and Turner watercolours.

All this was topped-off with pho at Pho (and I now know that you pronounce it fer) and some shisha, on the last indoor shisha cafe weekend..., at Menara, where Number7 and I bumped into the RSN party. London: it's a fun city.

In the hood

Since moving to the X, it has become home to some of London's hottest restaurants. Coincidence, you ask. Hmmm, yes I think so.

None have been more lauded than Acorn House, a mere two minutes from me, which is the current Observer new restaurant of the year and was decscribed by Giles Coren as being 'the most important restaurant to open in London in the last 200 years'. My schtick as I wander up the street is that - however good the place is - far from being the most important restaurant to open in the capital in the last two centuries, it's not even the most important opening within a three-minute walk of my flat in the last year. That honour should fall to Konstam at the Prince Albert, a restaurant so devoted to local sourcing that all the ingredients come from within the M25 (and the food's pretty good too). I do admire the ethical and green credentials of Acorn House, but it just bugs me that it has cornered all the laudatory press for following that path, when at least one other local restaurant had already taken the risk (and I believe that St Chad's, just down the road, also acts as a social enterprise in offering jobs to the disadvantaged, as is the case with Acorn House, which is allied to the Terence Higgins Trust - they share the same building). Anyhow, enough caveats, for even I am impressed that apparently the restaurant generates only one bin's worth of waste each week, which is a hell of a lot less than me...

So what's it like inside? Well, it's a pretty good-looking place, mainly whites, green and wood, which suffers slightly from its long, thin footprint, which means that most tables are in effect simply two sides of a long bench. The issue here is that one person in a group will always be on the outside and it is not therefore that great a set-up for those of us who have issues with people brushing behind us whilst we eat. I may be overstating this as, when I walk past in the evening, the place is beautifully (darkly) lit, and there is actually a fair amount of space in the walkway, so after a glass of wine or two I'm sure one would forget one had such an anal 'personal space in restaurants issue'. This was certainly not a problem for me today as I was lunching solo, as a way of starting off an afternoon of fun. I have to attend a boring conference at work tomorrow, so I decided that Friday would be the new Saturday. I'm off to see Damian Hirst in a mo', but I will now get round to describing the food. Jeez, this guy is beginning to get like all those food critics who end up writing about nothing but the food.

So, the choices at lunch were between soup, salads or pasta/risotto. I went for salads on the basis that it offered a chance to try more things (3 salads for £8, 4 for £10) and also as it seemed more lunch-y than nettle risotto with garlic, which did appeal mucho mucho. The salads I went for were as follows: bobby beans with tahini and toasted sesame seeds; roasted sweet potato, pale miso and faro; early summer artichoke 'erbette'; and spring beetroot and carrot with toasted fennel seeds. Before they arrived, I tucked into two slices of excellent multi-grain bread. When the salads did arrive they made up what was probably the most colourful plate I've ever been served in a restaurant, which rather delighted me. The portion sizes were generous and I am certainly full as I write this, which is both a delight and a relief.

The quality of all the salads was high and it varied, I think, from good to really special. Dish by dish, the sweet potato was good, as it should have been since roasted sweet potato is a good thing, though the miso was barely present, if at all, and the faro just wasn't in attendance. The artichoke was a dish of two halves: when you ate bits which were well-dressed with the herby vinaigrette,you thought 'gosh, delicious', but the drier portions induced musings of 'could be better'. The carrots were just not that special, but the beetroot really was. Now beetroot is the kind of thing one doesn't eat all that often and there is a danger of being suckered into saying something like 'and the beetroot was so good that it expressed the very essence of beetrootness, like vegetables are supposed to in that Alice Waters' restaurant in California', but, as I avoid prentention, I shall say no such thing. It did remind me quite how lovely beetroot can be, though, and it had been beautifully cooked so that the texture was perfect. The bobby beans were just fantastic. Of all the dishes this is the one that I'll try and recreate, since the idea of french beans with tahini and roasted sesame seeds is just such a good one - the toastiness of the accompaniments seemed perfect with the crunchiness of the beans - and I shall ogle this salad as I walk past on my way to work. All the salads - as the menu announces - are served at room temperature, and quite right too.

With a sparkling mineral water and service the bill was £13.84, so not cheap, but pretty fair for a restaurant which really aspires to be a good place, in what it does and in the food it offers. The place the salads reminded me of was La Zucca in Venice, which I would say is the best salad restaurant I've ever encountered by a long way. No other eating place has ever really made me think of La Zucca before, so it is to Acorn House's credit that it is aspiring to such heights.

Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,1953988,00.html

On stir fries

Recently I've found myself cooking myself into a right rut, as often tends to happen if you don't cook for others. Evening after evening has featured rice or couscous, along with various vegetables, cheese and sometimes yoghurt. Quick, easy, sometimes tasty, and borrrrrring after a while. In truth the only one of these meals that really worked was couscous with field mushrooms, cheddar and yoghurt. Now that was tasty, but only because the mushrooms were excellent and they cooked really nicely in some butter.

Anyhow, I have decided to work my way out of my rut and am making a stir fry this evening. Back when I really couldn't cook, I coud make quite a nice stir fry, but somehow learning to cook has led to me messing up stir fries when I've tried them. Hmmm, perhaps I really couldn't make a nice one back in the day.

So my ingredients tonight are: garlic, ginger, fennel fronds (sounds good doesn't it - in truth they were the only bits of fennel that hadn't gone off), spring onions, aubergine, carrot and red pepper. Who knows whether this will work. My soy sauce is Kikoman, so that should cover some ineptness, but in truth I am pretty convinced that the dish will turn out to be filling but rubbish. I am semi-tempted to use some tomato puree, but perhaps that would be a bad idea? Chilli sauce seems like a better idea. Hmmmm. Shit, I've now discovered that I don't have any oil of any kind - surely a prerequisite for a stir fry.

Suffice it to say that the finished product looked nothing like the photo above...

In fact, now that I've finished dinner, I can honestly say that my stir fry was disgusting. The only good thing about it was chucking it in the bin and having some avocado on toast instead. I vow from hereonin to only eat stor fries cooked by those who know how to cook 'em.

Guanabana

I am about to try to cook a stir fry - of which more soon - and reasoned that the best accompaniment would be a can of Rubicon Guanabana. I am a big fan of the Rubicon range for a number of reasons and increasingly find that the fizzy guanabana is just what I fancy on certain occasions. If it's not Diet Coke time (after lunch or in a sun-kissed cafe, I wish), Sprite time (chez Number7 and in Indian restos), then it's Guanabana time (after swimming or with Oriental food). I'm not actually sure what a guanabana is, but it has a yummy flavour. And that is the end of this rather banal post.

Easy to mock

In preparation for a light jog through Bloomsbury and Fitrovia to Marylebone Farmers Market, he donned his Nike windcheater and collected his hessian bag from Stroud Farmers Market. Of course he didn't shop at Nike these days, but somehow the brown bag, with its Hayles Fruit Farm logo, counteracted any negative vibes that the Nike apparel might throw off. He had managed to pull off a mix of '90s brand aspirationalism and, er, 2000s brand aspirationalism.

It's easy to mock farmer's markets, going organic and all the other food fashions of middle-class Britain in the twenty-first century, but I can't help but feel that something good is going on here. Jogging to the market my dominant thought was how nice it was to live in a city full of markets and how Sunday has gone from being one of my least favourite days of the week to perhaps my favourite, and how nice a sense of community you get from markets in the city.

Whilst at the market I was on the lookout for celebs and trying to avoid getting poked in the eye by unthinking assholes with giant umbrellas, and on the way back I got to musing on pricing in farmers markets. My guess is that if farmers markets are ever to move beyond being a Sunday treat for the middle classes, then they're going to have to think about pricing in quite a serious way. The one item in the market which crystallised this thought was asparagus, which is of course in season at the moment. Now I know that if I were to go up to Chapel Street Market in Islington (a regular as opposed to a farmers market) I'd pay either £1 or £1.50 for a bunch of British asparagus, whilst I guess that the same thing would be around £1.79 or £2 in a supermarket. At Marylebone it varied between £2 and £3.50. The latter price is just a joke in my book and a real two-fingers to consumers, whilst the former price, which I'd consider to be reasonable for a really great product, is revealing of just how unwilling stallholders in farmers markets are to look at competitors and price accordingly. Now I'm no poster-boy for free markets, but there's a good reason why in a traditional market, more or less all fruit and veg can be found at roughly the same price, with perhaps a divergence of 30-50% max, and quite often within a range of 10-20%. The same cannot be said for farmers markets where many seem to see it as an opportunity to price at what they regard as being the highest possible price that people will pay, reasoning that there is a middle-class feelgood premium which allows them to charge prices which people would not consider elsewhere. What's more we ought to remember that these steep prices are being charged without any middleman taking a cut, so I have little sympathy with those who use farmers markets as a means to raking in excessive profits and ignoring the long-term future of both their businesses and markets in general.

Now this may seem pretty harsh, but the fact is that by shopping on a budget - which I'm obliged to do - I still had a great time at the market and I simply ignored the £3.50 asparagus outlets and the places that charge for salad by the 100g, as if dopey old William is going to fall for that trick. Instead I followed the crowds to the super-duper Manor Farms where all the vegetables are ready-sorted into bunches and boxes, so you know exactly how many giant field mushrooms you'll get for £1.50 (three), how much that punnett of peas will be (£1.20), quanta costa a giant cucumber (80p) and that carrots are 10p each. Now some of these prices are rather more than a regular market but realistically they're pretty similar to those found in supermarkets and I'd much rather give my cash to the farmer and let them have the cut normally demanded by Tesco's. I bought some beautiful looking red and white radishes from them for 80p too and I must say that I'm really looking forward to a lunch based on this haul. I'd also single out Perry Court Farm of Bilting in Kent for praise. I've bought delicious English apples from them in the past and sought them out to get some tiny little Red Pippins, all bagged-up so that I could see that I was getting seventeen apples for my £1.50. The assistant then asked if I fancied a bag of pears on a two bags for £2.50 deal and I went for that after tasting their truly luscious Conference pears. Now I'm slightly funny about pears usually because I like them hard and flavourless, but I even I could tell that these juicy, perfumed fruit were top banana, as they say, so I took the deal and felt I was getting great value. Last-up I bought some raisin rye bread from the Exeter Street bakery for £2.50. Now you may well be right in thinking that the name played a seductive role here, but there was also another good reason why I was prepared to pay extra for a bread which I regard as being the best style of bread in the world as an accompaniment to cheese which is this: the guy was also selling other breads for a quid and on tasting them and the raisin bread it was clear to me that he wasn't pricing the bread that I wanted at the higher price simply because he could, but because this was a pricier bread to make and as a customer you made your choice between a set of products where you could be reasonably sure that the profit margins were comparable across the range.

Now this may seem a pretty mean-spirited attitude on the part of this consumer, but I like farmers markets a great deal and I want to imagine that they can continue to grow and grow so that they become a daily presence on the streets of big cities and little villages, but what I don't want is a situation like that in France - where such things really are a daily fixture but the prices induce a nose-bleed pretty quickly. There there seem to be plenty of punters willing to fork out a hefty premium artisanale, but I tend to think people are mugs for doing so because if farmers markets here are ever really to democratise food production, they can't sustain the variable levels of pricing seen at present and the promotion of niche, luxury goods. A bunch of asparagus just isn't the same as a Porsche or a Tag-Heuer (or whatever the contemporary emblems of dope consumerism are); in the end it's a green vegetable that should cost about a quid fifty a bundle. If you want to drizzle yours in first crop Villa Versace olio, fine, but bog-standard supermarket olive oil and some salt will do me fine.

Warwick - who knew?

The last time I was taken to Warwick, I was apparently an especially truculent guest. On being taken round Warwick Castle, I apparently announced that I was bored and decreed that we could only visit one more of its boring rooms before heading off. I don't know why I'm writing about this as though these things are mere allegations for I remember my rudeness quite clearly! Anyhow, back we went to Warwick this weekend and what a revelation the place is: a truly special Norman and medieval church at St Mary's, lots of lovely Tudor buildings, walks by the river, and a traditional old market where I was able to buy some 'Afterburn' cheddar: packed full of red and green peppers, garlic and red chilli; just the thing for a Ploughman's or a baked potato.

In the evening we almost went to Pizza Express, but then we chanced on a place called Catalan which served tapas until 8pm, which was perfect for us. We went for some excellent patatas bravas, a mild manchego (a good one I thought), some espenicas a la catalana (not as good as Catalan creamed spinach for me), a vegetarian paella (nae bad), some so-so garlic mushrooms and some really excellent olives. A very nice place, pleasant service and a courtyard garden, so I'd certainly go back for dinner if ever I were in Warwick again. I may well be back because more and more I'm coming to see that in spite of the veil of prejudice that lies over the Midlands, it is in fact a pretty wonderful part of Britain, full of some really beautiful historic towns and countryside.