Cooking The Books

Glastonbury 2008

As mentioned last post I spent the weekend at Glastonbury and amongst the music and alcohol there was also a requirement to eat occasionally.  Glastonbury is large, to say the least, and along with the nice stuff there's pretty dire food there so I thought if I blogged my experiences I may help people wade through the choice in the future.  Alas by the time I decided to do this I'd already eaten one meal (a rather tasty falafel from by the Park Stage) and so it's not quite a complete list of everything I ate.  Late one night I also had a couple of spring rolls and a sweet and sour chicken on rice but I forgot to snap them too.

To help you in future years hold your mouse over the notes button of the below pictobrowser and it will tell you about the food and where it came from, at the end I was give my top three and the dish that gets the wooden spoon.

So onto the finishing rostrum.

Melamine Tables

As my last post shows I do love a bit of fine dining but looking back over the years I think a majority of my most memorable meals have been eaten off of melamine - cheap, cheerful and wipe clean.  From a Full Monty breakfast in Northampton's Giggling Sausage cafe through to marinated raw fish and congee in Tawau (Malaysia) my mind is full of amazing meals in places that look, if you're being polite, pretty crappy.  I find if you know where to look though, or just get lucky, then the places can throw up the most fantastic meals.  Maybe all their effort goes on the food rather than the interior.

 On Saturday I got to add another to the ever-growing list of melamine memories when I visited Sweet & Spicy in London's Brick Lane.  We'd been drinking with friends and decided a bit of food was in order and our Bengali friend suggested we try this place, saying they frequently made the drive down to grab take out from there.  With him coming from a family of restaurateurs I was happy to go along with the suggestion.

Post-beer and with more beer due we wanted somewhere quick so this place’s canteen layout, with food ordered at a counter, ladled from big vats and then delivered to your table promptly, was perfect.  The menu was short with only 4 or 5 options each of vegetable, chicken and meat curries.  Talking to the man behind the counter he suggested hot meat curry or mince, potato and egg curry - looking on the menu the same choices were called meat madras or aloo keema.  

I'm Back

The exam has been and gone.  Hopefully I've passed but I won't find out till late August, and anyway this is a food not a financial exam blog so enough of that.

It's been hard work for both the girlfriend and me these last couple of months and so I decided to take us out somewhere nice to celebrate and the choice was Gordon Ramsey's restaurant Maze.  I've been lucky enough to eat at both Claridges and The Savoy over the years and whilst I found the food nice and the venues amazing their food is a bit staid for my liking.  I had high hopes for Maze though with its far more modern looking menu and the taster plate format.

Inside Maze is very slick, lots of leather and wood and dim lighting, a little too dim in fact which made taking snaps a nightmare, no subtle shots here but blinding flash lit affairs instead.  We started with a cocktail (rhubarb and honey Bellini for the lady, gin martini for me) in the bar but were soon shown to our table ready for the main event.  There is an a la carte menu but we were only given the taster menu and told that we could have a la carte if we pleased.  No thank you.  I like to try out as many things as possible so the suggested two starters and two mains each from the taster menu was perfect.  Jason Atherton is the head chef at Maze and two of his dishes made it to the final of the recent Great British Menu TV show and one was on the taster menu - the assiette of sandwiches BLT and Croque Monsieur.  This was duly ordered along with three more starters and four mains, all different so we could sample the maximum amount of flavours.

I think the easiest thing here is to go through the dishes in the order they arrived.

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.

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.