Cooking The Books

Jen Cafe

I spend a lot of time in Chinatown - whether eating out, grabbing takeaway or doing a grocery shop - so it was a pleasure this weekend to find a gem that I'd never been to before.  At the back of my mind I have memories of a small green establishment where ladies make dumplings in the window but it wasn't until this weekend that I finally got around to going and confirming its existence.

Jen Cafe is a tiny place at the far end of Chinatown, sat on Lisle Street just before you hit Charring Cross Road (here in fact).  Its most distinguishing feature is a pair of ladies in the window working on a dumpling production line.  One lady rolls out the wrappers while the other deftly fills and folds them creating tray after tray of neatly pleated pork and vegetable (or plain vegetable) dumplings.  Inside it's very basic, green melamine tables - each with a tray of condiments: black vinegar, soy, chilli oil and sugar (I think this is for drinks) - and single A4 print out menus inside plastic folders.  The menu had the usual Chinese roast meat along with quite a few fried noodle and noodle soup dishes, I hardly looked at it though as I was there for one thing and that was the dumplings I'd seen made in the window.  I went for one portion of boiled and one portion of fried, probably a bit too much for one person really but I couldn't make my mind up and I had no one to share them with.

I had to wait quite a while for the dumplings to arrive but it was worth it.  For £4 the first plate had 8 boiled dumplings on it which were stuffed full of flavour (and heat).  They also made me feel a lot better about my own attempts as they looked closer to them than the perfectly pleated ones I buy frozen in the supermarket.  They were so good in fact that I had to keep eating them despite the ridulously hot temperature and I ended up burning my mouth. 

Second to come was the £4.50 fried dumplings, the same as the boiled ones I believe but fried in a potsticker style so a crisp bottom and steamed top.  Although the texture was great with these they didn't seem to taste as good but I think this was more to do with my burnt mouth and the after effects of the chili oil I'd consumed that anything else (I have since returned and can confirm my burnt mouth and chili overload was the cause of these not tasting so good - they're in fact equally as gorgeous as the boiled). With a mug of green tea this lot came to £9.70, which was lucky as I only had a tenner in my wallet and it doesn't look like the kind of place that takes cards.  It did mean they got a very paltry tip though.

When I left I had a little look at the ladies making them and once thing I noticed was the lady rolling the wrappers out rolled the edges of the circles a lot thinner leaving a really pronounced thick piece in the middle.  I'd read about this in recipes but had found it really tricky to do with my huge rolling pin, the lady here did it perfectly though with a tiny little wooden rolling pin.  The thinking behind it is the edges get pleated together and become double thickness and so by making them thinner you stop your pleats being double thickness to the dough surrounding the filling.  In the future I shall try harder to perfect this.

I'll definitely be going again (as mentioned above I've actually been again already before getting around to blogging the first time) as I want more of them and I'd like the girlfriend to have the pleasure too.  Next time I'll try and get more of a spread to see what the roasted meats and noodle dishes are like too.

Steak and Chips

I went out for a meal on a stag do recently (to a gastro pub with a great menu) and I reckon 4 out of every 5 blokes ordered the steak.  What a cop out - unless I'm in a steak restaurant I don't hold a lot of regard for steak and chips when dining out.  I know men are meant to love their steak, and I do, but I think if steak and chips is the most appealing choice on a menu it's either a very poor menu or the person ordering needs to broaden their tastes a bit - each to their own though.  If I'm out I want something that I can't do easily at home, something that shows the chefs skills off a bit and not how they can buy a decent bit of meat, use a grill pan and a deep fryer.

I do love my steak though and occasionally I get the craving, one such occasion was last week.  I decided I wanted a steak and Stilton baguette and nothing was not going to stop me, not even the fact that the only steak in the supermarket was a cheapo bit of rump (sound familiar?).   

This is hardly a recipe but this is what I did.  I took my cheapo rump and gave it 90 seconds a side then rested it for a good few minutes on a warmed plate.  You want to let the heat from the outside penetrate into the middle, enough to warm it (if you're going to serve something cooked then it shouldn't be cold) whilst keeping the middle raw - it also gives the meat a chance to unwind a bit.  Whilst this was going on I spread a baguette with a little mustard, laid some mixed leaves and sliced tomato on top and lopped off a couple of slices of Stilton.  Once the steak had rested a bit I laid it on the tomatoes, placed the Stilton on top and then used the top of the baguette to mop up the steak juices before placing it on top.

I'd love to say the steak was melt in your mouth but that would be a lie.  The texture certainly gave away the cost of the steak.  It had loads of flavour, don't get me wrong, but you had to work a bit to extract it.  The rare beef, Stilton and fresh bread is a fine combination though and worth giving a go if you've got a better bit of steak than I had.

Salad (Salade?) Nicoise

I'm pretty useless at planning ahead when it comes to food.  I like to do a bigger shop on Sundays but mainly to take the car and pick up bottles of carbonated water and other liquid items that aren't too bus friendly.  When it comes to planning food ahead though I try not to bother.  I spend a lot of time each day thinking what to eat and it will change frequently over the course of the day, let alone between a big shop at the weekend and a Thursday evening.  I know what I want and I want it now, but will probably want something different in two hours time.

Luckily for me, well i look at it that way anyway, I have to walk past a Sainsbury between my office and the tube station so I can plan what I want to eat during the day then pop in and get the ingredients quickly on the way home.  Earlier this week I was thinking what to eat so was having a little run through of what was in the fridge that needed using up: some salad leaves, some tomatoes, some sugar snap peas and a couple of eggs I'd hardboiled on Saturday because it was their use by date.  It may call for green beans normally but the first thing that sprang to mind was the old faithful salade nicoise, just changing the beans for sugar snaps and slapping a lump of seared tuna on top.  I knew I had anchovies at home too so all I needed was some new potatoes and a lump of tuna and maybe some bread to bulk it up a bit.

My heart was now set on this so I popped into Sainos, found loose new potatoes complete with dirt, some mini plum tomatoes (the big tomatoes can get used another day), a still warm baguette and then, aargh, no tuna.  I took the gamble that Marks and Spencer (oh, yeah, there's one of those in the tube station too) would have some and bought the rest.  Alas when I got to M&S all they had was a single pack of tuna steaks left which looked a bit white-bits-between-the-layers heavy - we'd gone too far to pull out now though so I cracked on.

Meat Lovers Paradise

A few years back Rick Stein spoke lovingly of an ocakbasi (a Turkish barbecue restaurant) called Mangal Ocakbasi on Arcola Street in Dalston.  I have eaten there and it is indeed a fine restaurant, whilst the food is great it suffers from being a bring-your-own beer place with a single menu on the wall outside the restaurant.  Good food and great prices but not the most refined.  Due to this when I want a ocakbasi fix I tend to eat at its sister restaurant Mangal 2 just around the corner on Kingsland Road.  The food here is equally as good and has the added advantage of being a tad more upmarket with individual menus and Efes, a Turkish beer, on sale.

Ocakbasis (pronounced ojakbashi I believe) tend to have a big fire pit in the middle of the restaurant where a seated Turkish man sits sweating and cooking skewer after skewer of meat, fish and offal.  The food's simple, well seasoned fare served with Turkish bread and salad.  On previous occasions I've gone for the mixed kebab with quail (pictured above) but on that occasion I fancied some offal so asked the waiter if we could make out own mixed kebab.  He said fine so for the three of us we asked for a chicken and lamb with yoghurt sauce and then plain grilled kidneys, sweetbreads, chicken and lamb shish.  I'd been telling our guest that the portions here were huge and when the food arrived it was no exception.  Even with two reasonable sized lads it was struggle to eat it all but in the end we succeeded.  When the bill arrived we were shocked to see that to make our mixed grill they'd just combined 6 main courses and so we'd managed to eat 6 main courses between the three of us - no wonder it was hard work.  On top of our mammoth eating feat that night was also marked by the somewhat eccentric artists Gilbert and George being sat on the table next to us.  What more could you want in an evening?

Last weekend I decided to go again and was surprised to see Gilbert and George sat in exactly the same seats they'd been sat before - I can only assume that 8 o'clock on a Saturday night is regular for them.  I decided to let the similarities between the evenings end there though and ordered the aforementioned mixed kebab with quail.  For £13.95 you get a chicken wing, a lamb chop, a deboned and rolled lamb chop, an adana (minced lamb) kofte, a few chunks of cubed lamb and a whole quail.  All expertly seasoned (think lots of salt) and grilled till full of smokey, charred flavour yet still beautifully most.  This comes with a pile of salad and a basketful of Turkish bread, there's a lot of food to get down but it's so good it's hard to leave any, well leave any meat anyway.

So if you fancy some fantastic Turkish Barbecue and some artist spotting get yourself to Mangal 2, Stoke Newington Road on a Saturday evening.  If you just want the fantastic food go whatever time suits you better.

Ma La

The food of Sichuan is often referred to as having ma la, numbing heat - the heat coming from chilies and the numbing from Sichuan pepper.  From what I've read in my new Hunanese book they tend to stick just to the heat though.  There's one dish in the book that has both though and even takes its name from the combination - hot and numbing chicken.  I'd been wanting to cook something with chicken thighs for a while and so this, along with the chili and Sichuan pepper, caught my eye and I decided to give it a bash.  The dish starts with the chicken being deep fried and after my recent efforts with beef with cumin I made sure that I followed the recipe to the letter this time.  As much as I like cornflour thickened sauces the idea of the glossy, oily chicken appealed more.