Cooking The Books

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.