Cooking The Books

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.

Absence

I was told by a blog reading friend never to apologise about the quality of your photos or the fact you're not posting as it's a big assumption that folk have noticed you're not there and that they think your photos are normally of a good standard.  As such even though I know I've not been posting for a while I've kept schtum on the matter.

As a reader has commented on my absence though it's only polite to respond.  I have not stopped eating or blogging (well I have stopped blogging but I will start again) I'm just busy studying for an exam at the minute.  Life over the last month or two has consisted of about 50 hours at work and then another 20 plus hours of studying each week, a relentless schedule of seven day weeks that are slowly turning my brain to mush and leaving me no time to blog - woe is me.  I am still eating though.

The exam is on the 7th of June so I'm on the home straight now and I promise to make up for any absence (assuming more than one person has noticed) over the course of the summer.  I have a celebratory meal booked for the Friday after the exam and also have a trip to Spain and another to Cambodia and Malaysia which should all provide some hopefully interesting blogging.

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.