Three continents in a pan: stir-fried spinach with chorizo and onions

Considering what I stash in my cupboards, it's no wonder most of my cooking is some kind of fusion. Whether 'improving' French stews with Thai fish sauce or spiking hommous with dried lime powder, the Post-Modern culinary pastiche is the order of the day.

Today's lunch was whipped up at the epistemic crossroads of Thai, Spanish and West African cuisines: the classic Thai phat phak fai daeng was made with Asturian chorizo as well as African spinach, onions and Scottish bonnet peppers, proving a very happy marriage.

1. Slowly saute a lot of crushed garlic with a tad of finely chopped Scottish bonnet pepper.
   
2. Add sliced chorizo and fry on a medium fir until it makes the oil red.
   
3. Add some chopped tomatoes and red African onions, fry until the onions are soft.
   
4. Add a lot of chopped African spinach (it's more robust and sweeter than the regular one) and fold into the mixture. Fry until the spinach retain just a bit of crunch.
   
5. Season with Thai fish sauce.
   
   
6. Serve with steamed rice.

Pisto manchego (the best recipe)

The most satisfying recipe for that simple and hearty Manchego farmer treat, the pisto.

1.  Sautee  crushed garlic in olive oil.
2. Add chopped onions, red bell peppers and tomatoes.
3. Season with salt, black and red pepper.
4. Serve on top of slices rustic bread, topped with fried bacon dices and fried egg.

Split market: exactly where Diocletian used to grow cabbage

On the sunny Dalmatian coast of Croatia is where the Roman emperor Diocletian famously retired to grow cabbages. Inside and around his former palace sprawls Split's fresh market...

 

Splitsko tržište

Burns supper: haggis and deep-fried Mars bar

ondon is one veritable "travel dining without moving" destination. If you wait patiently enough dangling your feet in the flow, all cuisines of the world will come sailing by you. Just grab and enjoy.

It has been six years since I started thinking of going to Scotland. Besides the obvious tourist attractions, I was naturally curious about Scottish cuisine; so much the more that it did not seem likely to come across it anywhere outside its country of origin, even in London.

Well, turns out I was wrong. The time to enjoy Scottish food could not have come at a more appropriate time: the Robert Burns night, the celebration of the life and works of Scotland's dearest son, an 18th-century poet apparently responsible for, by crude estimate, half the Scottish poetry out there.

The centrepiece of what is known as the Burns supper, to which I was most kindly invited, was haggis. Contrary to the belief evidently widespread on the Stateside, it is not an animal but a sheep's stomach stuffed with chopped offal, oatmeal, onions and spices, boiled or baked in the oven. To many it may sound a very odd choice for a celebration meal, yet, just like the rumours of the rampancy of sheep-shagging in Wales, the many a negative review of haggis I had heard proved grossly exaggerated. Served with mashed potatoes and turnips ('tatties and neeps'), and traditionally washed down with copious amounts of whiskey, it is a straightforward, hearty and filling fare, a perfect match for the cold winter weather out there (the Robert Burns day falls on the 15th of January). 

Customarily, an eight-verse poem would be recited over the haggis before carving  it, we did with but the very first one, yet pronounced in an authentic Edinburgh accent (which made the meal ever more delicious):

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

By way of dessert, we partook in another Scottish tradition known as "deep frying ye ole bonnie Mars bar". It is very much what it says on the tin: dipping pieces of Mars bar into batter and deep frying them in hot oil. Whoever came up with this must have been a big fan of hot fat and sugar. Now I am the last one to oppose to sweet and high-calorie fat things, but some sacrifices are worth it and some are not. The hollandaise sauce is worth every whopping dollop of butter it is made from. Japanese tempura, feathery and crispy, is a highlight of one's meal as well as easy on the stomach. All the sugar you put into a rhubarb pie pays back manifold in terms of deep sense of satisfaction that hits you the second the pie hits your palate. Deep-fried Mars bars have none of those redeeming qualities. It is just as gooey, repulsively sweet and un-chocolatey as it is in its original form and shape. 

P.S. Apologies for the picture quality. I said it before and I will say it now: smartphones are shit as phones, shit as computers and shit as cameras. Good luck chasing your fave gadget's latest version.

Best Chardonnay ever: Quantum, Domaine Boyar, Bulgaria

ou know how tricky finding a good Chardonnay can be. That particular sought-after Chardonnay flavour, when tipped just a notch off the right balance can vary from obnoxious, as in many a New World brand too ripe from too much sun, to uninspiringly faint like in a French one from a bad year. Getting it just right requires a lot of skill and, even more importantly, time-proven knowledge of what a good wine should actually be like.

The only thing amiss in this Bulgarian Chardonnay brought back from a trip to, surprise, Bulgaria was its somewhat incongruous name, Quantum. Everything else was utter perfection: the balance of acidity, the understated smell, the bisquity nose, the round finish. In fact, practically every Bulgarian wine I have sampled was superlative or very close to it, reminiscent of the quality consistency and Olde-Worlde elegance of, who would have ever though, Chilean wines. At least when it comes t wines, the media-propagated image of horse-cart-riding and cabbage-munching uncouth and dim Eastern Europeans could not be farther from reality.

We paired it with a plain boiled Canadian lobster for one our traditional welcome-the-Americans dinners. Last two years we have dropped the "turf" part from the menu as an outdated and not really such a wise tradition and it works just fine.

How to cook bulots (whelks) the French way

 have always bought bulots (whelks) in France. Farmed mainly in Normandy, these gastropods are well-fed, lush and always sold cooked - or so I thought as I had never bought them outside France. Until one late London afternoon I stumbled upon them in Brixton Market. Just when I lined up baguette, mayonnaise and white wine and got ready to eat them, quelle horreur, they turned out to be raw!

So, I had to add another survival skill to my collection: cooking whelks. This is how you do it.

1. First of all, soak your whelks in cold water for at least an hour. Tht way they will release their droppings into the water so you won't have to eat them.
2. For half a kilo of raw whelks you will need two litres of water, 50 g of salt, one bay leaf, a prig of thyme, a teaspoonful of white vinegar and a generous sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper.
3. Bring everything to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Allow to cool down in the resulting court bouillon.
5. Serve, just as I did, with home-made mayonnaise, baguette and white wine. This time I flavoured my mayonnaise with a paste made out of crushed anchovies, garlic and walnuts mixed with some Modena vinegar. A Parisian would hyperventilate and swoon but my Languedoc brethren and sistren will sure understand me!

Fields: Mediterranean flight of fancy in Hackney Central

he beauty of London is that here we have things that would never happen elsewhere. A combination of cultural lassez-faire attitudes, somewhat questionable excess of money, and diverse and dynamic populations snowballs into a milieu conducive to craziest, fanciest, most daring ideas and enterprises. 

Fields, an ostensibly unassuming restaurant in Hackney Central I visited the other day, is a shiny example of that. A brainchild of a Turkish Marxist historian passionate about food, it boasts a Mediterranean fusion menu craftily executed by a Maltese chef and a French sous-chef, and expeditiously delivered by a charming Spanish waitress. The effortlessly exquisite and refreshingly affordable wine list contains the best of all continents, save Antarctica. As I went through it, I noticed Argentina's vertiginously fragrant Torrontés, Chile's unwaveringly reliable Chilean Sauvignon Blanc as well as the best of Entre Deux Mer's whites and reds. Apparently, it was put together by another academic foodie, a Croatian/Bosnian lecturer from SOAS. Great food does take an intellectual effort.

A tableful of meze/tapas we shared between us proved a dinner in its own right:

• smoked fish platter: salmon and swordfish;
• smoked salmon stuffed with ricotta;
• beef carpaccio with sliced artichokes and herbs.

The mains included:

• whole chargrilled seabass marinated and stuffed with mint, fresh tomato, olive oil & lemon;
  
• what they claimed to be Salade Niçoise turned out to be a huge chargrilled fresh tuna steak on a bed of French beans, fresh tomatoes, olives, peppers, new potatoes, lettuce, red onions and boiled egg with wholegrain mustard vinaigrette;
  
• whole grilled sea bream arrived blanketed with stir-fried peeled shrimp and underscored with the chef's own creation, strawberry-and-mint sauce.

Surprisingly, these seeming culinary acrobatics yielded a very wholesomely delectable fare, with no whiff of Nouvelle Cuisine's studied trickery. The portions were generous and it took us an extra effort and extended time to tuck it all in. All fish dishes came with copious  amounts of  fresh lemons, nice  touch. Just when we thought we were about to meet Mr. Creosote's fate, a dessert sampler platter arrived, probably to illustrate the owner's leftist persuasion with an example of duped masses perishing from excesses of consumerism. How very decadently thoughtful!

Clams Breton style, recipe

Palourdes à la bretonne, or clams Breton style. Palourdes is the closest French word I could find to call these clams (they would be called coques, if they were ribbed). In fact, they are Vietnamese natives, known locally as Nghêu Bến Tre, quite a mouthful, so let's stick with palourdes.

This is also one of my improved recipes: normally, Breton style would mean aux lardons et oignons, with bacon and onions. However, a  long afternoon in St. Mâlo, Brittany, spent looking for mussels cooked that style, proved that locals have never heard of anything of the kind. I did not give up and went on to elaborate on what Breton style cooking should be like, which is how all "traditional authentic national cusines" were invented in the first place anyway.

So here's my take on nationalist mythopoetics:

1. Sautee a head of crushed garlic and three chopped shallots in butter.
   
2. Add 2 sliced leeks, a generous handful of Chantenay carrots, diced smoked bacon and stir-fry until haf ready.
   
3. Add 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of clams and continue to cook until the clams start opening.
   
4. Add a jar of double cream and a glass of dry Breton cider.  Picardian blonde beer or dry white wine can do too, although it will deliver a chink in the armour of this dish's authenticity.
   
5. Stir well, gently bring to a boil and simmer with the lid closed until the smell of alcohol goes. Did I say it: remember to stir every now  and then.
   
6. Douse liberally with freshly ground black pepper. No salt necessary as the clam juice and bacon are salty enough.
   
7. To be followed by a nice Breton dance:

Choucroute garnie: simple recipe

rench food is not all la-de-da made of fois gras, frog's legs and truffle shavings and served on a doily - just like not every Frenchman is an effete and jaded urban cynic.  Since the French Revolution put an end to farmers eating boiled bark, peasant food has become more sophisticated, while staying true to its simple roots.

Take, par example, choucroute garnie, one of my favourite winter foods, hearty, filling and wholesome. The juniper berries, a generous glug of white wine as well as good quality organic free range happy pork turn the lowly sauerkraut and boiled potatoes into a veritable gastronomic experience. It's peasant food par excellence, so it cooks itself while you can indulge, peut-être, in a spot of mutual blowjob, and then, to clean the palate, in the rest of the wine, as Mireille Matthieu is crooning in the background.

Basically it's like this:

1. Sauté onions in duck fat just a tad beyond translucent, they should taste sweetish.
2. Add sauerkraut, juniper berries, whole black pepper and bay leaf.
3. Pour some white wine.
4. Arrange nice chunks of smoked bacon, saucisse de Toulouse, boudin blanc on top- I skip frankfurters and strasbourgers and use boudin noir instead but you don't need to.
5.  Simmer until the pork is ready, generally up to an hour. In the meantime, boil or bake some potatoes.
6. Voilà - serve with white wine from Alsace, Riesling or Gewürtztraminner! 

Strada@London: new menu

 don't need really any particular luring to dine at Strada. That's where I go when I'm in the mood for consistently enjoyable no-nonsense Italian classics. So when I was offered to taste their new menu with whomever I cared to come with, I jumped at the opportunity. In return I was asked to write an honest review. So here's the breakdown:

The starter, large green Castelvetrano olives were meaty and flavourful but the portion was on the skimpy side.

Antipasti platter - Parma ham, Napoli salami, speck ham from Trentino, buffalo mozzarella from Campania, vine-ripened tomatoes, olive tapenade and bruschetta pomodoro - was nice, same as usual, not enough for three men though. We were not allowed to order more.

I never order a bruschetta for a starter, to me it's a glorified sandwich and so did it turn out: grilled bread with some chopped tomatoes on top.

Risotto is easily the most abused Italian dish. The opportunity was not missed this time either: boring and watery, risotto verdure tasted like buttery rice porridge. It reminded me of my worst vegetarian days.

Rigatoni speck with bits of ham and broccoli reminded me of the lunch fare in my short time at kindergarten. Über-meh.

Orata al forno, whole grilled sea bream though was sublime: very fresh tasting and cooked to perfection, with scrumptious crunchy skin with just a sprinkle of salt and thyme and delicate juicy flesh. A side of exquisitely steamed vegetables and boiled potatoes kept it good company.

The dolci were run-off-the-mill forgettable factory-made pistaccio ice-cream and chocolate mousse. Nothing horrible but nothing to write home about either. Just something you can buy frozen in Lidl.

Overall, I was not impressed with the new menu. As a paying customer I would only order the grilled fish. However, I will keep coming to Strada for my regular favourites. And also for cacciuco, a Sicilian fish soup that was new but not on the tasting menu.  

I thank Strada for the opportunity, however, for the next time I would advise them to put their best, not the mediocre, on their tasting menu. Perhaps, just what they serve daily anyway?

Stale bread pudding recipe

Baking has always been exclusively my parents' remit. My Mum churns out pies, buns, cakes and the like on a nearly daily basis and even my very male supremacist Dad is highly apt at making that king of doughs, leavened one.

I only have started baking recently, inspired by Nigella's voluptuous poetics in her How To Become a Domestic Goddess. This recipe is a slight improvement on her "pudding made from rich man's leftovers".

Beat 2 eggs, a generous glug of rhum, 250 ml double cream and 3 tbsp demerara sugar. Fold in half a chopped stale baguette and let soak for half an hour. Mix in a handful of raspberries and a handful of black chocolate chips. Put in a buttered porcelain tray, sprinkle with a little demerara sugar and bake 40 min at 170 degrees.

Serve on your boyfriend's bubble butt.

Puy lentils and Montbeliard sausage cassoulet recipe

In the days before Napoleon III and Eugenie's with their trend-setting fancy lifestyle became the role model for the newly affluent French bourgeoisie, daily food for the majority of the French was like this: all-in-one casseroles. Chopping and cooking whatever is available on the day into something between a soup and a main course is the ultimate way to feed a big family at the end of a hard day. In France this type of dish is actually known as cassoulet or (caçolet in Occitan) and can still be found on lunch menus in bistrots and auberges, always an inexpensive entry.

For me, it is a winter comfort food that reminds me of my Mother's cooking so as the astronomical spring starts on the 20th of March, this Puy lentils and Montbeliard sausage cassoulet may be the last one I cooked this winter.

Cooking a cassoulet takes a couple of hours but you don't need to be present all the time, it's really about chopping and letting it all just simmer away as you delve into your Facebook comments.

1. Soak Puy lentils in plenty of cold water. Peel and slice a head of garlic and a few shallots.
   
2. Slowly fry the garlic and the shallots in olive oil until golden brown.
   
3. Add chopped Montbeliard (or Toulouse, or Morteau) sausages, potatoes and any root vegetables or tubers you can get hold of: carrots, parsnips, root celery, salsify, turnips, topinambour. Mix well, cover with a lid and allow to cook until half-ready, stirring occasionally.
   
4. Add the lentils and enough water to cover it all. Add bay leaf, all-spice berries and pepper.
   
5. Turn the heat to low and allow to simmer until the lentils are ready.
   
6. Salt to taste. I also use fish sauce and a smidgen of liquid smoke for the extra oomph. Serve with crunchy baguette and a glass of red.

Madeira food and dining

adeira is not exactly your gastronomic destination. What you mostly get here is what guidebooks politely call "hearty fare": simply cooked peasant grub.Fried chicken or fish with a side of potatoes and veg - centuries of British involvement with the island's economy seem to have taken its toll!
For an island plopped whack in the middle of an ocean, Madeira lets down in the seafood department: there is fish and seafood galore in the markets but in the restaurants they end up cooked in the blandest and most forgettable way, oily and overdone.The fiery looking bunches of dried chillis I saw in the markets never seemed to find their way in any food that I tried. Could they just be used to ward off evil spirits in houses?Funchal's Mercado dos Lavradores may be named Workers' Market but it is mostly busloads of German cruise ship tourists that are unloaded into it with astounding frequency. Heaps of most exotic fruit make you wonder why it was the lowly apple that Eve had to be seduced with in Paradise.



Bacalao, the salted cod, as seamen's staple is probably what ensured Portuguese colonial expansion, but hello, refrigeration has been with us for over a century! I have heard so many times that it can be cooked in 365 ways but in each dish it tasted like bits of PVC soaked in stock from Knorr's fish cubes.The local specialty, espada (scabbard) filet with fried banana is of highly dubious culinary value: very good fish prepared in the most unimaginative way.

On the other hand, lapas grelhadas are a treat. Cooked very much like your escargots à la bourguignonne, grilled with garlic-parsley butter, they come together perfect with a sprinkle of lime juice and a sip of nicely chilled Portuguese white.

Madeira's finest seafood restaurant, Doca de Cavacas is definitely head above shoulders of other comparable establishments on the island, but then again, it's not such a hard feat. A platter of rather oily grilled fish, squid and prawns comes with the sides of boiled potatoes and vegetables. Meh.What is superlative in Madeira is bread and pastry. The local round bolo de caco is good enough to eat plain. With some garlic butter it makes for a scrumptious meal!Madeiran pastry is cheap, abundant and universally perfect, nothing to do with the utterly dull and boring British Madeira cake.Some varieties, particular those involving coconut flakes, apparently have been brought back by emigrant Madeirans workers returning from Venezuela, hence names like bolo Venezuelano.
Pastéis de nata, egg custard cakes that seem to have a universal currency from Macao and Dili to Lusaka and Manaus, are invariably delectable with a shot of punchy fragrant espresso.Bolo de mel, another Madeiran specialty, is a treacle sponge bun with nuts, delish dunked in port.