Kopparberg: Swedish pear cider

love picnics. There's hardly a better drink for dining on the grass than cider and perry. Festively fizzy, naturally aromatic and with just enough alcohol content to get your delightfully buzzed but not inebriated. Up until recently, I had to wait to go to France to buy cider and perry there. The English varieties fall into the category of working-class booze and seem but a cheap flavourless alternative to beer.

However, Tesco's on High Street Kensington, a far cry from the Brixton branch, which mostly competes with Iceland in providing the essential components of the "White trash diet", presented me with a lovely discovery. Kopparberg cider comes made from pears or apples and can also be alcohol-free. It could be down to Sweden being ruled by a bunch of Frenchies, their royal family, but Kopparberg tastes and smells as if it hails from Normandy. At 2.19 a small bottle it is not a bargain compared to the excellent champagne-sized 78-cent cider at Auchan but it sure can tide me over until my next grocery trip to Lille.

Scotch egg

ere they are in front of me like a pair of gigantic shaven and tanned highlander testicles. Despite the name, the blessed idea to deep-fry boiled eggs covered in sausage mince and breadcrumbs occurred to some English people at London's posh department store Fortnum & Mason. We can only guess what combination of circumstances and train of thought had led to this invention but these days Scotch eggs are a popular party snack from Minnesota to Jaipur and from Inverness to Lagos.

For some unfathomable reason, these days it is widely considered the ultimate picnic food. It is also a permanent fixture on gastropub menus. The picture below by Guardian's David Sillitoe may explain my incredulity about the whole Scotch egg hoopla.

Hanami picnic in London: the best of Japanese gastronomy and aesthetics (ロンドンの花見)

he Japanese custom of hanami, enjoying the beauty of cherry blossoms, came about under the influence of China's refined Tang Dynasty in the 8th century AD. It originated as a sacred ritual for the imperial court: Shinto priests would offer sake to sakuras so as to divinate the new year's harvest.

Before too soon, the Japanese figured out that pouring sake on trees was a waste and that is how gastronomy replaced religion. By the 12th century the custom of having meals under blossoming cherry trees spread to all the walks of life of the Japanese society.

There is a philosophical meaning attached to this pastime: the empirical observation of the transience of youth and beauty allegorised by the cherry blossoming lasting but a couple of weeks a year. However, as the laconic Japanese saying goes "Hana yori dango", "Dumplings before flowers", that is, "To hell with blossoming spring flora, let's tuck it away!"



This week Victoria and Ekaterina came to visit me from Moscow. We had planned a picnic since a while ago but were very unsure about the weather. Luckily, today turned out a glorious day. We bought our Japanese grub at Rice and Wine Shop and Kulu Kulu Sushi on Brewer Street and moseyed on over to St. James's Park.



There is no set menu for hanami. Perhaps, the only seasonal entry would be hanami-dango: a skewered trio of rice flour dumplings with sweet red bean filling. For our picnic we had:

• miso-shiru;
• a big order of nigiri-zushi;
• o-nigiri: nori-wrapped rice dumplings with various savoury fillings;
• chuuka-wakame: shredded seaweed salad with Chinese sesame dressing;
• loads of edamame, soybeans in the pod;
• boiled spinach in peanut sauce, certainly a newcomer to the Japanese diet, yet none the less enjoyable
• hanami-dango and Japanese green tea to polish them off with.

All this Oriental exuberance set us back mere 38 pounds for three. Not shabby at all for Central London, is it?

My Moscow banker girls also indulged in a bottle of Australian semillon. The wine got them in a very cheerful mood and we went on to gorge on some very nice cake from Patisserie Valerie on Piccadilly Street. A hunky Turkmen guy in the Prêt-a-Manger next door supplied us with free coffee (thanks to our ladies' charm) and we finished our dessert just on time to catch our Handel's Royal Fireworks Music at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

I had spent about a month looking for best hanami spots in London. Although there are a lot of cherry trees in the city,only a few locations are suitable for picnics. Email me for a list!

It is quite funny to recall just how much negativity I experienced when trying to put together a hanami event in London. I failed to interest a single Japanese person. My guess that there are two types of Japanese in this city. First, those who came here out of their will tend to distance themselves from their native culture: they would rather go to a pub than eat sushi in a park. Second, expats who were sent here and who are way too busy for anything else but sleeping it out after a week of hard labour.

I have also noticed that the Japanese are very sceptical about the non-Japanese being able to appreciate the finer aspects of their culture. Truth be told, to an extent it has proved true. However, luckily for me, Victoria and Ekaterina overwhelmed me with their enthusiasm for the whole undertaking. It is to their pro-active curiosity and positive energy that I owe most of the success of my first hanami picnic in London.

Poiré: French pear cider

hoa, this smells like pears!" Floyd's first gulp of what he thought was cider ends up in a surprise. Not an unpleasant one at that.

Poiré is cider's less known cousin. Also known as perry or pear cider, predictably, it is made from pears. In France it is only 2 percent alcohol as opposed to cider's 5, although British perries can be as strong as 8. I discovered it by accident shopping for regular apple cider in Brittany, although Mantilly in Norman department of Orne is the unofficial capital of poiré in France.

A distinction needs to be made between real perry and commercial perries. The former is produced to strict standards and uses natural ingredients and brewing techniques allowing no additives. On the other hand, commercial varieties are full of enhancers that do nothing but messing with the original taste to make more marketable to the masses.

Real perry is made from tart sorts of pears rich in tannin (the substance responsible for the astringent taste of red wine), which are not meant for eating. It has a somewhat sharp, dry taste. Because of its low alcohol content I use poiré as a picnic booze to accompany salads.

Bulmers pear cider is heavily advertised all around London these days. I am very curious to try it and share my impressions.

Barbeque - most voted by our primeval ancestors

I was brought up on barbeque. My Dad would take me cross-country skiing miles and miles into the Sub-Arctic taiga where, after clearing up a little plot from 3-foot-thick snow we would make a camp fire and have home-made munches while waiting for the flame to calm down and the cinders to become white.

Lamb, reindeer, or sometimes even saiga or bear meat as well as whole tomatoes would have been marinated in vinegar, onions, and black pepper the day before. Pre-skewered by Mom, they would then slowly get cooked, becoming deliciously charred on the outside but remaining pink inside. The smoky and tangy aroma of Dad's barbeque is one of the most powerful memories of my childhood.



















Since then I have travelled around the world and seen other ways of cooking meat over charcoals: Japanese yakitori and Southern soul barbeque parties, Argentine parillada and Bavarian steckerlfisch, South African braai, Indian tandoori, Turkish fish grilled in vine leaves and Catalan charcoaled with parsley butter.

Best barbeques all around the world share the same secret. It is very simple yet too many people don't seem to understand it. All too often meat is yanked into raging fire only to end up as scorched bits of burnt animal protein. The Main BBQ Principle is so important it should be put to music and chanted as a mantra at dawn and sunset:

The coals must be white
With no flames in sight!

This mantra should also be in every beginner cook's textbook: chicken and rosemary, lamb and mint. These combinations are unbeatable. You can see both on the picture above.
Fish hardly needs any herbs or spices as they would overpower its delicate flavour, just some sea salt, coarsely ground black pepper and a sprinkle of lemon juice are more than enough. To make white-fleshed fish flavour more pronounced it can be soaked Japanese style in the mix of equal parts of sake, mirin and shoyu.

One more rule that can be emphasized enough: always pat dry whatever you barbecue. I use thick kitchen rolls for that. Wet meat yanked on hot coals ends up half-boiled instead  of deliciously sizzled.

Another fantastic way of grilling fish they know in Thailand. Thai fresh-water catfish is gutted, stuffed with  fresh lemon grass, rolled in sea salt and put on grill. It is served with a fiery dip of chopped chillies, crushed garlic and fish sauce.

The same dip is fantastic with Southern Thai grilled fresh-water prawn. They are done à pointe, so that the meat is just done but the buttery innards, called man goong in Thai, remain uncurdled. Delish!
These are great companions for barbecue (see the picture below):

• kurkuma rice
• Southern potato salad
• verdure alla griglia: grilled aubergines, zucchini, shiitake and red onions marinated in mix of olive oil, white wine vinegar, sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper
• grilled portobello mushrooms filled with sauce of crème fraîche, white wine, oyster sauce and, you guessed it, coarsely ground black pepper.