Feijão do Luis@Brixton london review

here used to be a permanently empty Nigerian caff a new Brazilian joint is plying a busy trade on top of a Brazilian butcher shop. I bought from them some linguica de porco (pork sausage) quite a while ago and it turned out very flavourful, if a tad salty.

But for the restaurant I was waiting for Floyd to come to London, knowing how much he loves all things Brazilian.

• Coração de Galinha - chicken hearts stewed tender
• Feijoada Completa - smokey and clearly home-made (the menu claims it takes 24 hours to cook, it does taste like that, smooth and silky)
• Picanha Grelhada - the piece of beef cut called "butcher's cut",
  

The interior may be very caffish but what matters is that the food tastes like made just for you.

Feijão do Luis
Brazilian Point
Market Row Brixton
London SW9 8LD

Las Iguanas: how cheaper can you go?

e all know that London is one of the most expensive cities in the world. But make Kirill your friend and you will be introduced into the world of fine dining on a shoe-string. And that means exactly that: not eating cheap trash for next to peanuts, but having nice nosh in fancy places for a pittance.

Today we went to Las Iguanas in Soho for this very lovely lunch, all cooked to perfection:

• sopa de calabaza: mildly spicy and suprebly creamy butternut squash and coconut soup with a dollop of sour cream; the promised fresh coriander and stripes of corn bread were missing;
  
• chicken quesadilla: tortilla stuffed with spicy chicken breast, onions, peppers, cheese and salsa ;
  
• pasteles: a bit of misnomer, but this Chilean slow-braised lamb with raisin topped with creamed sweetcorn peculiarly explained in the menu as "a sort of cottage pie" is utterly delish!
• sweet potato fishcakes: flaked white fish and crayfish in corn crumbs served with aïoli;
• curly patatas fritas and salad, well lettuce doused with red wine vinegar, really.
  

Now for the bill: £8,87 for two, including tax and tip. Now you too want Kirill for a friend, don't you?

Pro's: You can't beat this price, can you? All entries can be ordered gluten-free.
Con's: Without Kirill's know-how, this place will cost you a pretty penny. Most mains are in the 12-15-quid ballpark.
In a nutshell: Perhaps the best to discover the greatness of South American cuisine outside South America.

El Rancho de Lalo@ Brixton, London review

Just when I was about to mourn the demise of Coma y Punto, my favourite Colombian joint in Brixton Market, in its ashes arose another one, El Rancho de Lalo.

They still serve the same good reliable Columbian fare. My all-time favourite bandeja paisa, a huge platter of meats and carbs is just as perfectly cooked and plentiful as at Coma y Punto and costs the same 9.50. The way they make the pig belly crunchy on the outside and juicy inside is inimitable.

They have spruced up the interior and exterior (it was rather shaby before). The maitre-d' swaggers around in the Colombian national costume. The lunch deal: one main + one drink for 6 quid fills up even a glutton like me. I had once their oxtail stew and another time their sancocho,which I succesfully tried to replicate later. Can find no fault with either.

Pro's: Super friendly service. Consistently good food. Great location for Brixton people-watching.
Con's: Slightly cramped seating.
In a nutshell: God bless South America for its food!

El Rancho de Lalo
94-95 Granville Arcade
Brixton Market
London SW9 8PS

Sancocho - Colombian beef soup recipe

ccording to my Chinese doctor, amino acids from meat are at their most digestible when in broth. This is why I cooked this Colombian sancocho soup for my sick landlord, who after 2 years of my relentless propaganda, had caved in and quit his 40-odd-year vegetarianism madness.

The original recipe calls for oxtail but since this time I had not stocked up on that, I made do with meat balls from the rundertartaar (pure minced steak with no fat or connecting tissue) I had brought from Amsterdam. I tried to imitate the wonderful sancocho I had indulged in a couple of weeks before that at the Colombian restaurant at Brixton market. It came out beautifully!



So here's the recipe:

1. Peel and finely slice half a head and 3 onions. Reserve a few cloves of garlic unsliced.
2. Sauté 2 onions and sliced garlic in a squiggle of olive oil until nice golden brown. Add some fish sauce or salt as well as very finely sliced Scotch bonnet pepper towards the end, if you like it spicy.
3. In the meantime, put one sliced onion and a whole head garlic in a pot with water (about 2 litres). Add some whole crushed black pepper corns, 2 carrots peeled and cut into small blocks and a stalk of celery, sliced. Add meat at this stage if you are using bones or oxtail. Put on fire, allow to simmer until the meat start coming off the bone.
4. Tip 2 into 3. Add the meatballs as well as diced cassava, sweet potato, green plantain, mandioquinha, chayote, garden eggs, or whatever other South American veg you get hold of.
5. Simmer until the vegetables are soft enough to eat.
6. Serve with chopped spring onions and coriander or parsley.

Rodizio Rico: Brazilian churrascaria@Islington

ne of the most overused words in food writing is succulent. As protein-based life, we enjoy putting in us everything that approximates our inherent water content of 80%, hence the everlasting appeal of juicy cocks and sappy strawbs. The deepest layers of our ancestral collective memory dating from the arid Rift Valley's hominids compel us to crave anything evoking moisture.

It is no wonder then that Rodizio Rico, an all-you-can-eat Brazilian churrascaria (grill) restaurant on Islington Upper Street rides on this bandwagon too. Succulent is how they describe their fare. Unfortunately, what its passadors (meat carvers plying between the tables with skewerfuls of grilled animal pieces) offer has little backing to this claim. For £22.50 a head, it sure is hard to offer no-time-limit all-you-can-eat rib-eye steaks to everyone, so what you get is silverside (primarily used for corned beef Down Under), rump cover and chicken gizzards.

I am quite used to ordering my steak medium rare to have it medium but here there was no chance to employ that trick: the best I could get was half a notch before well done. Whether it could be down to the Health and Safety tyranny or something else I will never know.

The salad buffet is very New World, being large and colourful. It features deep-fried Middle Eastern pieces, bean-based Brazilian starters and stews, generic "international" salads and a lot of French fries. All of those had that unmistakeable imprint of the contempt a hard-nosed carnivore has for plant-based food. Dry falafels, sour olives, bland couscous, mayonnaise-heavy coleslaw, etc.: I made the effort to try them all but there was none that I would have another helping of.

I may sound pissy but you have to go there to believe the queues. We had to wait at the bar long enough to polish off a whole bottle of wine despite we had a reservation. My American friends were naturally outraged at this manifestation of the tempo brasileiro spirit. As always, I was the one who insisted on waiting patiently and giving the place a chance but this time around I was wrong.

Pro's: Easy to order as there's no menu.
Con's: Even a reservation won't save you from queueing. Airfield noise levels.
In a nutshell: Good place for a major protein re-fuel if you are not awfully fussy about your meat.

Rodizio Rico
77-78 Islington Upper Street
London N1 0NU

Nasi lemak: rice for the hard to please (coconut rice recipe)

he smell of freshly cooked rice wakes the Pavlov dog in me. I can't walk past Asian restaurants without my mouth suddenly starting watering. However, many people find plain rice boring. For those, there is coconut rice which is very easy to cook and compatible with a lot of dishes.

For me, coconut rice forever associates with Malaysia, where by the name of nasi lemak it is a national dish. It blends perfectly well with the lush spice-heavy aromas of Malaysian cuisine. I was quite surprised to see my old favourite served in a Colombian restaurant.

Cooking coconut rice is interpreted in a variety of ways but here's my own simple recipe that invariably yields fine results:

1. Rinse rice seven times until water runs clean.
2. Put the rice in a thick-bottomed pan and cover with twice as much coconut milk. I stick my finger upright for measurement: if the rice reaches the first joint, the coconut milk should come up to the second one.
3. Add some fish sauce. I put enough to make the content just slightly salty.
4. Put the pan on high fire until it boils, then reduce the fire to minimum.
   
5. Allow to steam away about 20 min. By all means resist the temptation to peek under the lid! The fat in coconut milk will prevent the rice from burning. Instead it will start frying at the bottom. Remove the pan from the heat when you smell the characteristic fragrance.
6. Let stay covered for a few minutes, then gently fluff the rice with a wooden spatula and allow to stay for another few minutes.
7. Sprinkle with toasted garlic or onion or chopped coriander and serve with gado-gado or chorizo colombiano.

Pedro Jimenez: a Chilean pearl

he price of wine does not always reflect its quality. Hyped château produce can make you shrug in bewilderment, while a marked down bottle of supermarket wine can turn out supremely quaffable.

This one I unearthed a couple of years ago in, get ready for this, Lidl. Since then, year in year out, I have been relying on this rather obscure cultivar from Chile's Coquimbo region for white wine to accompany my spicy Asian dishes. It stands up amazingly good to the herbal exuberance of Thai cuisine.

For the best taste, allow it to oxidise in your glass a bit and don't drink it too chilled. It is what they call in French perlant (ever so slightly effervescent), not full-bodied (I don't fancy that in my whites anyway) with a pronounced minimalist passion fruit bouquet and minerally notes.

Interestingly enough, the grape it is made from, Pedro Jimenez, is one of those original European cultivars that were wiped out by the phylloxera epidemic of the 1860s. The distance spared Chilean vines then and now they are the only few remnants of Europe's original viticultural glory.

Mandioquinha: a root veg from Brazil

s it always go with me, an innocent trip to buy some sesame seeds ended up with me walking away with 4 bags of foodstuffs. Such is Brixton Market, a serendipity outlet where you never know what you are in for.

This time my lucky find was Brazilian mandioquinha (aka arracacha in Spanish). It is a root vegetable indigenous to South America. Its taste is a cross between parsnip and chestnut.

I fixed it in the authentic Brazilian way: boiled and mashed, with fried spinach and bife de tira, baby beef steak. No condiments but salt and pepper not to mess with natural flavourful goodness!

The spinach they sell at the market is more robust and has a stronger, faintly bitterish taste than what you get in supermarkets.

Coma y Punto: Colombian Restaurant in Brixton, London

rixton market is full of surprises. Perhaps, about the only thing you won't find here is penguin meat. The rest is there. After my love at first bite with a Colombian chorizo, I discovered a Colombian restaurant there.

Coma y Punto is a simple café right off Coldharbour Lane. A Colombian flag is hung right outside so that you wouldn't mistake it for an Egyptian or Vietnamese place. It is constantly swarmed with Colombians - a good sign, at least qua food authenticity.




We started with drinks: Pony, a sweetish Colombian malt drink for Floyd, and sugarcane juice with a dash of lime for me. My drink was very different from the sweet and aromatic greenish liquid I was used to in Thailand. It looked and tasted more like Russian stewed fruit compote.

The bandeja paisa (£8.50) I ordered is a quintessential Colombian dish. It combines all cultural influences that are present in the country - indigenous, Spanish and African as well as, perhaps, at least half of Colombia's protein deposits. My platter consisted of:

• ground grilled steak
• chicharrón (fried pork rind)
• fried beans
• a fried egg
• fried chorizo
• fried plantain
  
• boiled rice
• sliced avocado
• coleslaw
• an arepa (flat unleavened corn bread)
  

As you can see even if from just the description, it was a meal fit for a giant.

Floyd's giant carne a la brasa, thin slices of grilled beef (£9.00), arrived with rice, fried plantains, coleslaw and two hash brownies.

As we tucked in in our food, a plasma screen on the wall kept displaying video after video of Colombian music. A lovely touch, adding to the ethnic experience. The simple and honest peasant food is perfect to provide you with nutrients for a day of hard work. Just as English breakfast, it is a bit of a guilty pleasure though.

Pro's: Lots of protein and calories to get you going for the whole day.
Con's: Cramped seating.
In a nutshell: Authentic Colombian food at great prices.

Chayote squash: a.k.a. cristophene

epending on which shop you buy it at Brixton market, it is called chayote, chow chow or cristophene. Apocryphally, it goes by "old people's lips" on the Stateside. If you look at the picture you will see where they are coming from.

Chayote is uniquely crunchy, juicy and starchy. Its texture and taste are a cross between squash and guava. It can be used like either.

I find it quite pleasant raw with the sugar and chili powder pepper, just like they have unripe guava in Thailand.

So far I have tried it in its squash emploi in Ghanaian abenkwan and will report on my further findings.

Chorizo colombiano: a gutful of goodness

on't let me anywhere close a food market! I just received a shipment of exotic foods from Amsterdam - 3 packs of REAL tempeh, dry gado-gado sauce and a bag of quinoa among oodles of other goodies, but I still went to Brixton market and committed a careless thing. On my way home I happened on something I could not resist. At 80 p a pop how could I? This time it was chorizo colombiano, home-made Colombian sausage.



The people at the shop did not seem very willing to divulge the secrets of their trade, so the only thing I found out about chorizo colombiano that it is made of half pork, half beef with garlic and herbs.

Some things need no additional touches. This sausage is one of them: it's chunky succulency only takes a quick fry and some garnish, arroz con coco (coconut rice) and ensalata mixta. This chorizo is hand-made at the butcher's, so unlike its cousins of factory provenance, meat in it occurs in discernible chunks. As you cut through the sausage, out bursts a heady aroma of garlic and fresh coriander followed by surprising quantities of rich juice.

I first took out a bottle of red but then change my mind in favour of some gorgeous Chilean white. This Pedro Jimenez from Chile's Coquimbo Valley has a fresh vigorous taste with a final nose of passion fruit. It goes perfectly with the herby fragrance of chorizo colombiano.

Carniceria Los Andes, 1st Avenue, Brixton Market, London.

Huevos rancheros: South American scrambled eggs with vegetables

Well, this is entirely my own enhanced version of the highly popular huevos rancheros. First I sauté smoked bacon and chopped red onions in olive oil. This is followed by a dash of aceto balsamico bianco, a glug of oyster sauce and a generous grind of black pepper - these tastes should be incorporated into the oils and juices that later will spread across the dish.

Then I add chopped bell pepper, garden eggs, okra and tomatoes. When all the veggies are still crunchy there go 3 free-range eggs. It comes out smoky, peppery, filled with the flavours of all the veggies.

For a complete breakfast: a cup of hot coffee, a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice (spremuta) and some whole grain bread with sunflower seeds.