Street Food

These photos were taken in one street - the question is, where?

The answer is London’s Southbank, home to the National Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery and the British Film Institute.  Along a short stretch by the river are a few dozen vans serving high quality street food. Officially opening hours are mostly at weekends but we were there on a Tuesday, early evening, and a quick walk along the various stands made us wish we were eating then, and not later as planned (they close at 8pm).

So the comments I give are not mine, but from Time Out reviewers in a section called The Best Street Food in London. “In the capital it’s no longer a novelty to find exotic dishes served out of the back of a camper van. It’s gone way beyond the posh burger, and is better and more diverse than ever. Here along the Southbank you can find Iberico pork cheek with butter bean puree that felt like ‘being wrapped in a warm, soft duvet.”

Sutra Naan serves a soft and crispy naan with roasted red peppers. At others you’ll find curried lamb, giant pans piled with spiced vegetarian rice and chick peas. I saw one dessert: the spiral sticky sweet Jalebi.

The story of Indian food in the UK is interesting.  I discovered one family history from The Indians next door. The family’s journey began in 1920 when the great grandparents migrated from their small village in Gujurat, India to Nairobi in Kenya.  From there they came to settle in England, bringing with them a fusion of two cultures and a new method of cooking with unique smells and tastes. Using family recipes passed down from grandmother to mother and then to the present generation, they are now part of the exciting street food scene in London.

Art and Reality

The Museum of Fine Art (MFA) in Boston has an exhibition by Indian artist Subodh Gupta. It’s called Take off your shoes and wash your hands. Made from brass and stainless steel utensils it consists of objects commonly found in the kitchens of Delhi households. Accumulated and arranged, they evoke densely packed urban neighbourhoods and how the presence (or absence) of food might define a community. The kitchen is the centre of an Indian home.  Among Hindu families like Subodh Gupta’s, it’s also a sacred space where food is prepared for guests and gods alike; keeping the implements clean is partly an every day task, partly ritual. Installed en masse on the wall, the objects on the racks become suggestive of the urgency of the human search for sustenance and of the fundamental role that feeding and being fed play in human life.

I was reminded of this exhibition which I’d seen a few weeks earlier, when I was in a kitchen shop recently. The display (below) has many high quality stainless steel pots, saucepans and kettles.  From the price of good quality kitchen equipment today, I guess that the message here is that, even before you buy the food, feeding people does not come cheap.

Fish on Fridays

When I was at school the rule was that lunch on Friday was always fish. As a young girl I never knew why, but learned later that it was all to do with Catholic abstinence and penance (even though I was not at a church school.) If I thought this practice no longer applied, I was wrong. Current norms for England and Wales, issued by the Bishops’ Conference in May 2011, re-introduced the expectation that all Catholics able to do so should abstain from meat on all Fridays of the year.

So how did it happen that Protestant and Jewish children, as well as agnostics and atheists, should all follow the ‘fish on Friday rule’ ? Schools in England today are far less likely to endorse the practice of one religion - even if Christianity is the official church and Prince Charles is the Defender of the Faith. Imposing rules (and customs like Nativity plays) is now unacceptable, for fear of offending those of another faith.

I imagine that fish in the ancient Catholic world was cheaper and far less exciting than meat. Today cod is more expensive than steak and a grilled Dover sole is harder to find than exotic seafood. Salmon - once a 'treat’ - has become an everyday food, due of course to the farming which makes it much more available.

An American cousin visiting the UK in the 1970s, complained that everywhere she went she was offered poached salmon with mayonnaise and new potatoes. No doubt each cook was thinking this would be an excellent choice of menu, with Scottish fish taking pride of place on the table.

Today the farmed fillets make a perfect mid week supper.  Here they are marinaded in soy sauce and grated ginger, stir-fried with vegetables and finished with Chinese noodles. I fry some vegetables first (mushrooms, spring onions and sliced peppers). Then cook some noodles in boiling water for a couple of minutes (or according to the pack instructions) and drain them. Add the salmon to the pan of vegetables and cook over high heat for about 2 minutes on each side.  Throw in the cooked noodles and shake over a generous amount of soy sauce to complete the dish.

You can find a very similar recipe from BBC Good Food if you click here. One important hint: it’s best to use salmon with the skin on, as it is easier to cook that way and many people enjoy the finished crisp skin.

The scare of diabetes

Years ago one associated diabetes with injecting insulin and eliminating almost all sugar. Today we are far more likely to get ‘Type 2 diabetes’ which can be treated with diet and doesn’t involve hourly monitoring.  The prevalence of this illness is now much associated with obesity, but even those who are not overweight can receive a diagnosis that is far from welcome.

I’ve had a few tests (and scares) but at the moment I don’t have diabetes.  But I often think of those who do, so here are some pictures of just fruit: no cream, no custard, no cake.  If you’re observant, you’ll notice that the picture of the cut fruit does contain a spoonful of sugar, but you can easily leave this out.

Of all the fruit to be found in supermarkets, for me the best are the raspberries. They have managed to grow consistently large, flavourful berries even in the winter months and they continue now that we are coming into early summer. We’ll also be seeing ripe apricots and nectarines.

Come for tea, or no tea

My brother is coming to see our new flat for the first time.  I said ‘come for tea’. He told me they will be out to a very late lunch and won’t want anything to eat.  

I know what it’s like when friends offer you an array of cakes when you’re not hungry.  But there’s something between that and a small nibble.  My solution is a selection of chocolates (from Leonidas) and Marks & Spencer thin chocolate rounds with nuts.  I also had a few sugar pastries and arranged those on a dish. It doesn’t matter if they don’t eat anything.  We can finish it all up later!

The Brit Award

The new Covent Garden Market in South London is for wholesalers and professional chefs. They have an arrangement whereby top London chefs phone the fruit and vegetable market after the last customers have left the restaurant, give in their order for the following day and the fresh produce will be delivered before 9 o'clock in the morning. Click here to find out more.

For anyone who thinks the markets in Provence are unrivalled, they should pay a visit to this one (but you need to get up early as they are packing up by 8.30am.) There is a huge array of British produce and each month they put out a newsletter featuring the star produce. In May asparagus tops the bill, with wild garlic, peas, broad beans and yellow beefsteak tomatoes - all produced in the UK. Of course the other hundreds of items are flown in daily from all over the world.

Last week we were treated to a wonderful gift: instead of flowers our friends sent us bunches of freshly picked asparagus from Revills Farm Shop in Worcestershire. It was incomparable - miles away (in both senses) from the produce that reaches British shops all winter, coming mainly from Peru.  One of the experts at Covent Garden explained to me that the cool British climate helps, as the spears stay longer in the ground before they begin to sprout, allowing them to develop a better flavour than those grown under hot sun.

To my mind asparagus needs to be served with something oily: this can be extra virgin olive oil, a fine mayonnaise, or my favourite, a huge dollop of fresh unsalted butter. After you’ve enjoyed it on it’s own you can think of other ways to serve it.

My choice is to cut the lightly cooked spears into generous lengths and add them to a bowl of pasta. Instead of a sauce I add lashings of mascarpone cheese, black pepper and grated parmesan. Two quick hints: you really do need to peel the lower end of the asparagus to get rid of the tough outside (see the photo at the top), and then the best way to cook them is in a flat dish in the microwave with barely a couple of tablespoons of salted water for 3-4 minutes.

A virtual cake

Last week our oldest grandson graduated from Columbia University, New York. He has been there four years, majoring in German, but along the way studying many different topics including English literature, film and the Korean language. As well as working as an intern in his last couple of years, he also wrote a column as a reviewer of pop music.  None of this prevented him from being rated as one of the top 10% of students to graduate this year.

It’s the custom in America to provide enormous graduation cakes which can be cut into many portions - enough to serve the families and students.  At Columbia there are many thousands of these, so my guess is that the students went to smaller gatherings and the food provided somehow matched their studies (Grandson No. 1 got pumpernickel bread with smoked salmon in his German tent).

When he was young - maybe two years old - his parents decided that their children shouldn’t be exposed to sugar, so they never offered him cake or biscuits. When he came to tea with the grandparents it was another matter. They somehow didn’t seem to mind if I served eclairs and meringues, which were all happily devoured.  But knowing that sugary things were somehow ‘wrong’ made him eat the cakes very quickly and often I would find him lurking in the kitchen having a second or third helping of something he specially liked.

As he’s been living away from London for four years now, I’m not sure if he still has a passion for cakes, but just in case I made him a virtual strawberry cream cake, took a picture and sent it to him in the form of a card. It was the first thing I had baked in my new oven and to my surprise and delight it worked well.

Here are some pictures of the assembly: first the sponge, spread with whipped cream, then topped with sliced berries and finally finished with more strawberries and raspberries on top.  The day after I served this cake we were going away to Italy and there was a large amount left, so I gave it away to someone I hope enjoyed it.

Restaurants in Italy

It seems to me there are two kinds of restaurant: those that want to reproduce the very best of home cooking, and those that offer something they consider more refined, certainly more adventurous. We tried one of each when we were in Tuscany, both in the town of Arezzo, not far from where we were staying.

Arezzo is as beautiful as Siena, with a stunning central square surrounded by the kind of golden hued architecture you see everywhere in Tuscany.  Agania was strongly recommended by our hosts: a packed, unpretentious space where they specialize in local cuisine. We were served home made pasta with duck sauce, juicy steak on the bone, ravioli, and my choice (see the photo above) : a minestrone soup filled with hearty vegetables and much parmesan on the top.

A few days later we were back in the town and this time we chose Le chiavi d'oro (the Golden Keys) restaurant.  Here they had more elegant tableware and smaller portions, with a long wait between courses. But even with their inventive menu, pasta is still almost obligatory, being served after the primo (first course) and before the secondo (main course). Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, but I wanted to give you an idea of what I chose: the lightest of potato gnocchi with grated white truffle on the top.  The others went for osso bucco and steak tartare. 

Which meal did we enjoy more? To be honest the one in the cheaper restaurant.

What’s for breakfast?

Back in London, I’m having toast and butter. If I run out of bread, I pop out to the local shop which is no more than five minutes walk from our new flat. In Italy, it takes a bit longer. The house where we were staying in Tuscany was high on a hill, at least fifteen minutes drive to the nearest village.

Our host was always up before us (the shutters in our bedroom ensured complete darkness so we woke up much later than usual). When we came down for breakfast she had already been down to San Giustino and bought bomboloni at the baker there. These doughnuts, filled with custard cream -  crema - are only good when they are really fresh. They are deep fried and dusted with sugar and make the perfect breakfast with a cup of coffee from the espresso machine.

Later in the morning we walked down the hill to the nearest hamlet called Gello Biscardo. There is possibly a church, but no shops, just small houses clustered on a few steep roads. Surprisingly there is a restaurant but it’s so off the beaten track that I wonder who would ever know about it.

The best Italian food in Toscana

With all the eating out we’ve done in restaurants in the last eight months, I can’t remember anything as consistently good as the food we had in Italy this week. Home cooked, using seasonal ingredients, served with generosity and many bottles of local red wines, every meal was a treat.

Here are some photos of what we ate:

Peppers roasted on the barbecue

Succulent veal

One of the many locally bought cheeses

Artichokes and peperonata

Fennel and zucchini.

Thank you to JS and CS for a wonderful break. This was better than any spa for relaxation and certainly matched the food at the best restaurants of Florence or Siena.

The real thing - Italy

This week I’ve been in Italy.  We’ve been staying with our close friends who have a house surrounded by hundreds of olive trees, in the heart of Tuscany. We flew to Pisa and then drove on, through Florence, to the Val d'Arno.

It’s a haven of peace, with the most perfect food cooked by our host JS, the best Italian cook I know (second only to Anna del Conte). She treats us to freshly baked  pastries from the local pasticceria, followed by lunches and dinners looking out over the rolling hills.

Pizza and potato?

Anyone who has just moved house (even a food writer) can be excused for heading out in the evening after a hectic day unpacking and arranging things.

The pizza and potato? No I didn’t have them together, but these are two of the options at our local Pizza Express.  The Man in the Armchair kitchen chose pizza with aubergine (eggplant), mozzarella and basil, with slivers of chilli that gave it a zizz.

Instead of dough balls, they had little potato balls on the menu. Presumably made from mashed potato and deep fried, they were a good addition to my glass of Prosecco while I waited for a bruschetta with fresh tomato, red onion and pesto.

We’ve also been frequenting another pizza chain, Zizzi,that produces more than passable pizzas. For a starter we chose ‘jewelled gnocchi’ which turned out to be a small dish of multi-coloured potato gnocchi (spinach, beetroot, tomato?). It came with a slightly spicy red sauce but the promise of colour didn’t really make up for the less than exciting taste.

Talking about pizza, you really should go to the Italian Pizza Connection. This small place at 94 Bishops Bridge Road, Bayswater, London W25AA serves authentic stone baked thin crust pizzas that are so huge they take up half the table. It’s a favourite meeting place for many Italians who spend an evening with a good bottle of fruity Italian wine and enjoy a pizza prepared with traditional ingredients, sourced in Italy, cooked in the ancient, original way. Why no photographs? The usual problem: taking pictures in a dark room or under the light of a pizza oven doesn’t give a fair view of the food.  Just take my advice and head out to Bayswater for a real treat. Click here to find out more.

The calm after the storm

Beginning to get straight. This is my cookbook collection and the eating part of the new kitchen. Friends came with flowers and Son No. 2 brought a box of Pasteis de Nata from the Lisboa Bakery in West London. (Click here to find them.) These are quite the best Portuguese pastries and done as brilliantly as the originals which have been made in Belem, just outside Lisbon, since 1837.

I have to admit there were a dozen in the box and after the family left, I ate a second one.  Then later in the evening I wolfed down the last one, reflecting on how thoughtful and and kind all our family and friends have been.

Quick meal for a crowd

When we were in Boston there were eleven of us in the house and for the first four days we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner at home.  For me this would have meant making lists, followed by huge planning, much shopping and considerable cooking.  For daughter in law No. 1 who was in charge of all this, it did involve huge lists and much shopping but some of the cooking was shared with granddaughter No. 1 and others in the family

On the first two evenings they had also invited guests so the numbers went up. What do you make to keep the family happy for lunch? The answer is a frittata - an Italian style omelette made in big pans (it’s called tortilla in Spain).  This one was potato and fried onion; there was also a similar one with sliced mushrooms.

They were served with a simple green salad, brightened with sliced radishes.

New York

This is a street scene near MOMA - the Museum of Modern Art.  Below is what I chose from the cafe menu.

Crispy Sicilian-type flatbreads served with pea salad: sugar peas (snow peas in USA) topped with nuts and shaved parmesan. Before we left to see the latest artworks we had coffee and tiramisu.

Big portions

Restaurants in America serve large portions.  The stack of pancakes we ordered started off much bigger; what’s shown in the picture is actually a third of what they served.  It’s ricotta pancakes with bananas topped with a caramel-type ice cream and drizzled with maple syrup.

Below is a home made pancake.  Called Dutch Baby Pancake this was made by son No. 4 in his New York apartment.  I thought we were going out to breakfast but he assured me he’d be happier whisking up the batter for a few minutes and waiting for just 15 minutes while it cooked. It’s the perfect hot breakfast which cooks while you take a shower and get dressed.

The batter is simple: flour, milk, eggs and sugar. The baking pan is greased with a little butter (or you could use baking paper and do without it at this stage). The pancake rises as it cooks (but deflates quite quickly when it comes out of the oven.)  All it needs is plenty of maple syrup and a large dollop of butter to finish it off.  As a variation you could fry some sliced apples in butter and splash over some rum.  Whichever you choose, I can assure you there won’t be any leftovers.

The Armchair Kitchen

Now we’ve moved, into an exciting, bright new apartment on the 8^th floor. The experience of relocating has been described in many different ways. I would liken the first couple of days to being in an avalanche! On Wednesday and Thursday last week we were treated to the ‘unpacking service’ from the removals company. This consisted of two guys unloading more than a hundred boxes and distributing the contents on to any flat surface they could find!

So I hope you’ll understand if the posts this week are less than organised.  First up will be a couple of memories from our recent visit to Boston and New York, and then it will soon be back to business.  

Find the teapot

While you’re looking at this display of unglazed pottery, below is another teapot - with some iced biscuits which are fun.

Why am I concerned about tea?  Because this week we are moving house and it’s well known that the removals men need to be offered copious cups of tea throughout the day.

For those of you who have been following my blog (and my life) for the past eight months you will know that we have been without a settled home for all this time.  Now the moving around (sleeping in about 15 different bedrooms in 3 different countries) has happily come to an end.  

(By the way the pottery teapot is in the centre of the top row - in a display from a studio in Boston, USA).

Inspiration for some nibbles

The picture shows some quail’s eggs.  I doubt if many people can taste the difference between these and hen’s eggs, but the attraction is undoubtedly the miniature size, making them ideal to serve with a dip at a drinks party.  But as you will also see from the photo, there is a disadvantage: they are hard to peel and it’s almost impossible not to damage some of the eggs as you remove the shells.

The way they are arranged reminds me of the English game Solitaire. This is a game for one player (hence the name) where you move pegs or marbles around the board and the aim is to be left with just one remaining. In America there is a card game called Solitaire, which translates into the English game Patience. We all know about pavements and sidewalks but this might be a new bit of translantic vocabulary to learn!

Now here’s another finger food: asparagus.  I know many people like to roast the spears, but there really is nothing better than steamed asparagus served with good thick mayonnaise.

Finally, beets (beetroot in UK).  I have used a mixture of the traditional dark red ones and the yellowy ‘golden beets’. I always cook beets in the microwave, as it uses little water (so it keeps the flavour better than boiling), and of course it takes a third of the time to cook. They are garnished with parsley sprigs and a dressing of hazelnut oil, lemon juice and seasoning.

I was wrong

Last week I wrote about cheesecake.  I put up a picture of a light cheesecake made with ricotta. I contrasted this with the much richer versions you buy in coffee shops or restaurants, saying they can be heavy and oversweet.  Now I eat my words.  Daughter in law No. 1 (with whom we were staying for ten days) produced the lightest ever, fluffy cheesecake as a dessert. Made from cream cheese, butter, sugar and eggs, and flavoured with lemon, vanilla, orange-flower water and almond extract, it was baked in a springform pan and had a gentle wobble as it came out of the oven. In fact it was slightly undercooked but that made it even more yummy as if the cake part had it’s own creamy sauce, to go with the tart cooked rhubarb that was served on the side.

I forgot to ask for the recipe, but it’s hardly worth mentioning a cake unless I give some indication of how it’s made, so a google search came to the rescue and I found the details of the Russian Tea Room cheesecake online.  Click here to find it.  The method isn’t hard at all but you need to take care (and have patience) preparing the tin to make sure the finished cake doesn’t collapse.  It is totally worth the trouble.

Chocolate perfection

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to take photographs in the way I want, since I don’t have a tripod or access to natural light.

So here are two photos by a professional.  Ilian Iliev has been sharing his work with me for some years. Now he has brought out his own cookbook, Cooking with Yogurt. It’s available to buy here and has won the award for Best Photography Cookbook in the UK. It will go on to compete for the best in the world at the World Gourmand awards in China at the end of this month.

This is wonderful news for a photographer turned cookery writer and the book (which I hope to review soon) will be a perfect addition to our cookbook libraries.

Vichyssoise

The origins of this soup are not clear.  Julia Child claims it’s an American invention, but this seems doubtful.  Louis Diat, a French chef at the Ritz Carlton in New York City, told the New Yorker magazine in 1950 how he ‘reinvented it.’ In 1917 when he had been at the Ritz for seven years, he remembered a leek and potato soup made by his grandmother and how he and his brother used to pour in cold milk to make it cool. The name vichyssoise comes from Vichy, a town not far from where he grew up in Montmarault, France.

So what is it?  Very simply: leeks, potatoes, chicken stock and cream.  It can be served hot or cold and garnished (as in the picture) with freshly snipped chives. The two vegetables are simmered in the stock till they are tender. I prefer to use a light vegetable stock instead of the chicken stock, making it suitable for vegetarians. The mixture is then liquidized till it is completely smooth. This buzzing may take up to ten minutes, but believe me, it’s worth it, because you end up with a velvety soup that is equally good hot or cold. To thin it down and add the creamy taste, you can use milk or cream. Click here for a recipe giving the details.

This soup was made (in large quantities) by daughter-in-law No. 1 and served at one of the many feasts she provided for our large family.

An apple a day

There is a well-known Victorian proverb “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”  Another version, from a Pembrokeshire magazine advises: “Eat an apple on going to bed. And you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”

Now, years later, this advice is backed up by a new study at Oxford University which has found that healthy over-50s who added an apple every day to their diet benefitted as much as those who turned to tablets. It seems that quercetin an  antioxidant found in apples, had a similar effect in reducing the incidence of heart disease and stroke, as prescribing statins. But a word of warning: it has to be emphasized that those taking the drug should not simply stop and eat apples instead, without speaking to their doctor first.

Now here’s an interesting thought; in the 1840s, ‘keeping the doctor away’ meant reducing the number of visits he paid to the home. (It was invariably 'he’ and not 'she’). It might surprise young people today to know that doctors spent half their time on home visits, whereas now it’s hard to get a doctor to come out at all. If it’s seen as an emergency,  you are more likely to get a locum who doesn’t know you than the General Practitioner you know well.

In the novel Capital by John Lanchester there is a moving description of the elderly woman Petunia, going to visit her GP. She is waiting for a diagnosis from her young doctor. Going through her head are many thoughts, as she watches the doctor entering data on his computer. “She had worked as a secretary in her youth. It was interesting how things had changed so that the person doing the typing was now the more important one.” And then, after hearing the news that she was dying, she thought “it was unbearable. And like so many unbearable things, it had to be borne.”

On that note I’ll stop digressing and remind you that the antioxidant quercetin is also found in onions, blueberries and cranberries, so you have more of a choice!

Cheesecake

Certain cakes are Jewish favourites for different festivals. For example Honey or Ginger cake is always served at New Year (Rosh Hashanah); Doughnuts are for Chanucah and Cheesecake is usually made in the summer for Shavuot.

But the version I devised for this picture is perfect for Passover. Any of you who are following will know that for eight days Jews don’t eat anything with flour, so this cheesecake with no pastry base makes a light and appealing dessert.

Cheesecake can be as rich and sumptuous as you like, but the very ingredients that make it so smooth and creamy can also result in a heavy dessert. The one on the plate with a swirl of coulis - a sauce made from fresh raspberries -  contains eggs, vanilla sugar and ricotta cheese, instead of the double cream and cream cheese of the traditional recipe. It makes a perfect end to a substantial meal.

How to feed the ducks

We are all used to newspaper articles telling us how to eat healthily.  Now comes a new idea: what should we throw to the ducks when we are walking past a pond?  It seems that there is now a campaign to stop people giving ducks a bad diet. The Canal and River Trust has found that ducks didn’t much like bread and would prefer something green.

So next time you head for Regents Park lake, you should stop off and buy some kale, instead of grabbing a few crusts of stale white sliced. The trust, which is campaigning for people to feed ducks with lettuce leaves rather than ‘junk food’ bread, said it had carried out a 'lettuce taste test’ to find out whether the birds 'favoured one type of leaf over another’.  So the lucky ducks on Aylesbury’s Grand Union Canal have been offered a selection of green vegetables. Ratings out of 10 show that kale was most popular, followed by pea shoots and rocket. Iceberg didn’t rate so high and watercress was absolutely rejected as the ducks didn’t recognise it as food!

Isn’t it interesting how some charities spend money?  There are always deserving cases and for the Canal and River Trust the ducks are top of their list.

The photo above shows three vegetables I put together to make some soup: kale, potato and leek.

Why did I go to all the trouble of chopping and cooking when I could just have pushed the kale into a bag, gone down to the lake and had a good feeling from knowing that the ducks there are going to be more healthy?