Cooking The Books

British Delights

Making the assumption that folk visit this site, have a read and then come back again to read newer posts you may have noticed that I’ve not written about any food from England. This is for the simple fact that I don’t really cook a lot of recipes from England. I’ll always buy British produce, if the option is available, but the food will tend to end up in a foreign dish. It’s not that I have anything against the traditional food of this country, it’s just a love of variety and with near 200 countries’ worth of recipes to choose from English dishes aren’t going to pop up too frequently. Toad in the hole gets cooked occasionally and I adore a fried breakfast but outside of that we’re talking the occasional stew or roast really. Maybe I should up the amount of local recipes I cook and stick them on here, for the moment though I shall break from the norm once and cook something from these shores.

Every now and again I hear of Staffordshire Oatcakes and every time I do I think ‘I must give those a go’. I never do though. Last week I was reading this post on the UK Food Blogger’s Association and it was enough to make me finally give them a go, I imagine this author’s success was due to this being the first time I’d actually seen a photo of them.

 

I grabbed a recipe from a lady called Rose and stocked up on the ingredients ready for the weekend.

 

Lasting 3 posts isn't too bad - is it?

The reason I started this blog and gave it this name was to force myself to cook recipes from books and I did intend to follow this mission statement.  I had such a great breakfast Sunday though that I want to write about it and I don't have any cooking book exploits to back it up.

On Saturday it was Chelsea vs West Ham so being a dutiful Chelsea fan I headed down the pub to watch the game.  This meant that I started drinking about 12.30pm and as I was off out with the girlfriend on Saturday night I didn't finish until some point after midnight.  Needless to say I was feeling a bit tender Sunday morning but I'd booked up to meet my friends and their children for lunch and I'm not one to cancel at short notice.  As such about midday I headed down to the local for a spot of lunch. 

The local in question is a place called The Lonsborough and it's on Barbauld Road in Stoke Newington.  The Lonsborough is gastro-pub in every sense of the word I guess, it has a black board full of wines and another with a selection of main meals and desserts with  decidedly restaurant prices.  The food is great but you do pay for it.  On the menu Sunday were normal and veggie fry ups, roast Old Spot pork, roast Fore-rib with Yorkshire, half a roast chicken with stuffing and a pumpkin curry.  The portions are big and top quality, the roasts aren't cheap at £13.50 but for that you a lot (8 or 10 ounces I'm guessing) of well prepared top quality meat.  For the beef it's two thick slices of well marbled and hung rib served a nice shade of reddish-pink, a big yorkie, a few roasties and then a mix of nicely al dente veg with a thin gravy made from the juices.  For some reason I had my heart set on a fry up and so that's what I ordered and it was so impressive I had to take a snap and write about it and the place on here.

It's a beauty isn't it - one huge sausage, 2 rashers of griddled bacon (they're under there somewhere), two runny eggs on a huge slice of bread, beans, a tomato and, to provide some energy for the day ahead, a mass of fried spuds.  Admittedly it was £8.50 but I felt I'd got great value for money when it was presented to me. This was washed down, in case you're starting to think I drink to much, with a pint of coke.

The place has lots of seating, whether at tables or on big leather sofas and benches, and being that area of London it is very nicely done up with lots of old wood and sandblasted steel.  In the summer they have a courtyard open out back and the chefs have an undercover barbecue from where they turn out some grilled delights - that's for another day though.  As it's Stoke Newington it's kid friendly and there tends to be a lot of kids which I guess is either a plus or a negative.  For some reason there's no kids portions on the menu though but they'll happily split a main between plates. 

All in all it's a great pub for food and if you live nearby go check it out.

Buenos Dias

I like Mexican food.  Well I think I do because although I've never been to the place I try to read up and then cook dishes from a lot of cuisines and Mexican is one I've investigated a bit.  It started with a couple of books but over the years it has become increasingly via the net.  My first Mexican cookbook was bought in Sainsbury ages ago, it's called 'Cooking of Mexico' and is written by an author called Lourdes Nichols.  Googling around it was originally written in 1983 and the revised version came out for Sainsbury in 1985.  As I was only 9 then I imagine it had been sat on the shelves for a while before I grabbed my copy.  Outside of the interesting recipes it seems it was a good investment as a used copy is now going for £8.33 and I think I paid a meagre fiver for mine.  Before this book my idea of Mexican food was fajitas, tacos and nachos which were the only dishes that seemed to pop up in the Tex-Mex inspired restaurants in the UK in that time.  This book is a miniscule 93 pages but within it there was so many things I'd never seen before: frijoles, mexican chorizo, tostadas - to name a few - but first and foremost soft corn tortillas.  Their combination of nacho-like taste and soft texture are well worth seeking out but for some reason I think we've only started seeing these in UK supermarkets in the last couple of years.  This cookbook had a recipe for them but getting masa harina at the time was an impossible task and so it was years before I tried making them.  Thanks to the Cool Chile Co. masa harina is available easily, if not rather expensively, now though in my local Sainsbury.

I decided to make this weekend a Mexican weekend and so fresh corn tortillas were on the menu.  Recently I've been reading up a bit on improving my food photopgraphy and one thing that kept springing up was make sure there's plenty of natural light.  Currently we only seem to have a few hours of daylight a day though and not wanting to get caught out by an overcast afternoon I decided on a Mexican breakfast and for me that means only one thing - huevos rancheros.  If you've not heard of this before it consists of fried tortillas topped with refried beans, fried eggs and cooked tomato salsa and is a great start to the day.  In preparation I went out and bought my masa harina, my kidney beans, my coriander and my tomatoes, onions and chillies.  I then proceeded to drink for about 11 hours straight then wake up in my dressing gown not very sure how I got home and feeling a tad on the tender side.  Not one to be sidetracked from my cooking task though I headed downstairs and proceeded to prepare for the meal.  As I had my new photography tips to put into practice this also involved setting a tripod up and making a few adjustments to the camera much to the amusement of the flatmates who'd also been out with me the night before and whose methods of dealing with their hangovers differed slightly from mine. 

The first thing to make was the tortillas and I just followed the recipe on the masa harina packet for these - so 250gr flour mixed into 330ml of warm water.  The dough mixes really easily and doesn't stick and then you leave it for 15 minutes, I guess for the flour to absorb the water.  After this time take balls (this amount makes 10-12) and make into tortilla shapes.  You can use a tortilla press, a rolling pin, pat them out between your hands or copy me and place the ball between two sheets of greaseproof paper, place this between two chopping boards and then stand on it.  It works surprisingly well but since someone suggetsed the hand patting method (they'd seen mexican ladies on TV do it) I will give this a try next time.  Once they're tortilla sized and shaped chuck them one at a time onto a dry, hot frying pan and cooked for maybe a minute a side storing on a tea towel whilst waiting for the others to finish.

The rest of the recipe was taken from a book by the aforementioned Lourdes Nichols but a bigger hardback called Mexican Cookery which I picked up from the local Oxfam recently.