Stewed octopus recipe: χταπόδι στιφάδο, jazzed up a tad

Greek recipes are nearly always straightforward, relying on the quality of ingredients to achieve the desired oomph. Even the notoriously difficult to get the knack of avgolemono requires skill rather than any convoluted kitchen gymnastics - and, of course, locally grown organic produce that in Greece is known simply as food. That's, perhaps, why it's so hard to achieve that gobsmacking level of meals so common in Greece when cooking Greek elsewhere.

So I decided to commit a sacrilege and spritz up the good ole octopus stifado with just a couple of very modest innovations. It has proven a major success when I made it for dinner in our vacation house in Lanzarote.

So here are the cooking instructions:

1. Warm up a very generous glug of olive oil in a thick-bottomed pan. Add the spices you are planning to use to infuse the oil with their essential oils. This time I used adobo canario, to pay homage to the host land.

2. Sautee one and a half heads of garlic until golden brown, then add three finely sliced red onions. Sautee until golden brown.

3. Add one gutted, cleaned and chopped up octopus (about 1 kg weight) as well as one and half heads of garlic broken down in cloves but unpeeled. Turn down the heat and stew until tender. Takes about an hour.

4. Add 700-800 g of chopped tomatoes, salt and ground pepper to taste. Stew 10-15 more minutes.

5. Serve with papas arrugadas - potatoes boiled in skin with lots of salt (or even better n sea water) until they get all wrinkly.

Clams, spinach and butternut squash soup recipe

  nspired by Korean jogae-tang clam soup, I made a few adjustments with some fantabulous results. 

1. Slow-fry some crushed garlic in some groundnut oil until golden.
   
2. Add clams, diced butternut squash, sprinkle with some fish sauce and fry a little.
   
3. Add water and bring to a simmer.
   
4. When all clams have opened, add roughly chopped spinach and simmer a little more.
   
5. Season with black pepper and fish sauce.

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!

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:

Black capelin roe, aka masago (まさご）

ot just the only credible clean-up of the financial crisis aftermath comes from Iceland, but also Lidl's own take on faux caviar at a humble £1.49 a jar. Despite this review by The Daily Mail's own McDonald's sampling guru India Sturgis, capelin roe, known in Japan as masago, could be a good introduction to the world of fishy delicacies for the uninitiated. 

It could be, because, probably in a bid to "posh it up", Norprawn, the manufacturer, decided to "upgrade" the natural yellowish-pink colour to blueish black with the help of no less than four chemical additives: E141 (chlorophyllin), E150d (sulfite ammonia caramel), E151 (Billiant Black BN, banned in many countires) and E163 (anthocyanin). With the accompanying stabilisers E422 (glycerol, previously use as automotive antifreeze) and E412 (guar gum) and preservatives E202 (potassium sorbate) and E211 (sodium benzoate), this product contains a whole constellation of industrial  ingredients to make this "luxury-on-the-budget" offering a veritable chav fodder.

Lidl is truly a mixed bag of tricks. On the one hand, they offer solid cooking basics of very consistent quality for half the ongoing price. On the other hand, half of what they carry is plain vile and fit to make sure consumers won't live until retirement. Caveat emptor.

Clams stir-fried with garlic, coriander and white wine

y cooking is very often an elaborate protracted affair. It can easily can take up a whole evening, punctuated with thoughtful wine sipping, while a piece of particularly nifty software reads me anthropological articles in a studiedly enthusiastic male voice reminiscent of the Pacific War newsreels. To make all that even more interesting, as I cook, I fix myself sort of amuses-bouche to stave off hunger. Normally, they are spin-offs of the main dish, like I can use some of the caramelised onions from the stew as the base for a canapé or some of the Italian marinade for the fish as a salad dressing. 

Last three days I got into a little habit of stir-frying clams with garlic, coriander, fish sauce and white wine. It's a super simple recipe that involves next to none effort yet yields superbly delectable results.

Here how it goes:

1. Crushed and sautée garlic in oil or butter.
   
2. Add clams and sprinkle with fish sauce. Stir-fry on medium fire until all the clams open, remove into a bowl.
   
3. Add chopped coriander, ground black pepper and a glug of white wine, deglaze.
   
4. Add the sauce to the clams. Serve with baguette and white wine. 

Shrimp stock recipe (fumet de crevettes)

use shrimp stock (fumet de crevettes) as the base for bechamel and so should you, it makes the whole difference, giving the lowly mix of fried flour and cream whole dimensions of flavour and richness.

1. I love pink Greenland shrimp (they taste sweet and are not farmed) and keep all the peelings refrigerated until I am ready to cook this. Put whatever shrimp peelings you have in a large pan of cold water with some roughly chopped celery stalks, carrots, leeks and halved onions.
   
   
2. Bring to a boil and allow to simmer for 40 minutes.
   
   
3. Towards the end season with salt, bay leaf, allspice berries, nutmeg, cloves and black pepper. Allow to simmer a few more minutes.
   
   
4. Set aside to chill and then refrigerate if you plan to use it later.
   
   
5. If you are planning on making some bechamel immediately, keep it hot, as it is the roux that needs to be chilled.

Shrimp stock recipe

Seafood bechamel pasta spaghetti recipe

his lovely recipe is a guilty pleasure: it involves a generous slab of butter and a whole glass of double cream. Without those, its trademark unctuously velvety texture is simply not achievable. Every time I think of cooking it, I have to remind myself of Nigella's maxim: "There's no good kitchen without butter!" Amen, sister!

1. First of all, for roux blonde, the base of the sauce: melt about 100g of butter in a moderately heated pan. Splashing a little bit of water beforehand helps keep the butter from burning. When it starts sizzling, carefully scoop out the froth and gently whisk in 2 tbsp of cassava flour and 1 tbsp of maize starch. I can hear the thuds of portly French chefs fainting on the floor, but yes, not your wheat flour, but good African cassava flour and maize starch. That's how you make bechamel light and fluffy like whipped cream. Stir the mix with a whisker until there are no lumps in sight. Keep stirring until the roux is a lovely golden colour, remove the pan from the fire and leave to cool. I immerse the pan in water for quicker results.
   


2. In the meantime, bring a large pan with a lot water to a boil. Mind and add some salt until the water is pleasantly salty: the taste of the pasta will depend on that. Cook your favourite pasta to your liking. I cook mine just one notch beyond al dente.
   


3. Bring to a boil two glasses of cream. I use double cream - "après nous, le deluge!"If you have proper seafood stock, it's your call now, make sure to use it hot! Fold the boiling cream and the stock if used into the by now cool and nice roux and bring to a simmer on a low fire while constantly stirring with a whisk, making sure there not a wee lump left. Add half a glass of dry white wine, some cloves, freshly grated nutmeg, freshly ground black pepper and some bay leaf to taste. Leave to gently bubble away for about 20 minutes. Add your choice seafood and small bits of filleted fish. Keep on fire for another few minutes. Take care not to overcook!
   

This time I served it on spinach spaghettoni (extra long spaghetti).

Billingsgate Market: London's freshest

o say that I am crap in the morning is to say nothing. All too oft, it takes about two hours for a huge mug of coffee, a handful of Chinese herbal pills, a round of Kundalini breathing exercises, an invigorating contrast shower and upbeat music throughout the commute to yank me out of lethargy into some semblance of functioning humanity.

It sure takes a promise of something really special to get me up at 3AM and drag my vehemently uncooperative body across dark and cold London. This time it was the perspective of a sightseeing session that worked the miracle. My group mate Tom used to work for an Italian restaurant and Billingsgate Market is where they used to buy fresh pesci spada and gambas and he promised us a tour. Nice.

Being the wholesale fish and seafood market of the capital of the country that has only recently started shedding its ichthyophobia, Billingsgate is sure not Tokyo's Tsukiji Market. A lot of the produce that will later be featured on the menus as "fresh catch of the day" is in fact hauled in refrigerator trucks. Well, how else then would you ship anything fresh from the tropical expanses of the Indian Ocean to a cloudy island in the North Sea?

At any rate, the choice is incomparably larger than the pathetic hike and pollock of my childhood's fish shops. The high turnover makes sure that the gifts of the sea are affordable to the gluttonous masses in the Big Smoke.

Speaking of prices, they are not that much lower than at my Brixton Market fishmongers, so a couple of quid difference is definitely not worth the tribulations of an hour-and-half night bus trip.

A lot can be said by the food cooked in the market. Grilled seafood in Barcelona's La Boqueria Market was superlative. The only ocean-derived item we found in Billingsgate Market's café was this grilled scallop bagel with bacon and cheese. It tasted just the way it looked.

Jambalaya in November: un peu de soleil dans l'eau froide

aving lived 7 years with a Southerner, you would think I must have had jambalaya more than half a thousand times. Far from that, it is my first time ever I laid my spoon and fork on one.

America's answer to paella, jambalaya combines West African cooking methods with the ingredients of the New World. I am too lazy to post the recipe, you can find it in one of the following books.

Gaeng som cha om kai: something hot in a cold country (แกงส้มชะอมชุบไข่ทอด)

rarely cook the same dish two times back to back. With all the diversity available to us these days, it would be a shame to get stuck in a culinary rut. Moreover, my penchant for dietary diversity is in line with the little theory that I have recently developed. See, most of us eat the same stuff , week in, week out. It will be mostly what we like, what we know how to cook, or what is available in our local supermarket.

That kind of skewed pattern of food intake deprives our bodies of a multitude of nutrients. Your body, like a house, needs constant maintenance and you need as many various amino acids, polysaccharides and enzymes as possible to make sure that you keep the temple of your soul in the best possible condition.

This week the sunny and crispy cold weather in London has put me in the mood for some spicy food. The contrast between the chilly air outside and the warm, fuzzy glow of chilli peppers and ginger inside is one of the greatest carnal pleasures. I decided to whip up some gaeng som (แกงส้ม, alternative spellings: kang som, kaeng som, gang som) - spicy-and-sour Thai soup normally served with an acacia omelette. I cooked it on Sunday, to give my cold limbs a perk after a nice afternoon hang-out in Regent's Park, and then once again on Wednesday for a dear guest.

Here, in one serving, I had a most cosmopolitan congregation: mussels from New Zealand, rice from India, shrimp from Greenland, eggs from Britain, fish sauce and tamarind from Thailand, tomatoes from Italy and onions from Egypt. To paraphrase Confucius: "有菜自远方来，不亦乐乎?" ("When food comes from afar, is that not delightful?")

So here is the recipe:

Kai cha om (ไข่ทอดชะอม) (acacia omelette)

1. Take 100 g fresh cha-om (see the picture below) and pinch off the soft leaf parts and the most tender twigs. Discard the branches and stems. Watch out for the thorns!
   
2. Tear cha-om in two half-inch pieces and fold 4 fresh free-range eggs and a dab of fish sauce.
   
3. Heat a skillet, cover the bottom with a bit of vegetable oil and, when the oil is hot, tip the egg and cha-om mix.
   
4. When the omelette is ready on one side, flip it over and wait until the other side gets nicely golden brown.
   
5. When ready, remove from the fire and cut into inch-by-inch squares.

Gaeng som (แกงส้ม):

1. Peel one medium red onion, half a head of garlic, one-inch piece of ginger. Mince it all with 3-4 prik kee noo peppers in a mortar, and mix with juice of one lime, half a glass of tamarind juice, a tablespoonful of kapi (shrimp paste, crucial for the right flavour!) and a nice glug of fish sauce.
   
2. Marinate whatever you are planning to put in the soup - shrimp, shellfish or fish - for at least half an hour.
   
3. Bring 2 glasses of water to a boil, add a handful of haricot beans and a few garden eggs cut in quarters.
   
4. Add the marinating mixture (1) to the soup, simmer gently for a couple of minutes, then add a can of chopped tomatoes and the fish/shellfish.
   
5. Gently simmer for a few more minutes.

Serve gaeng som in a bowl topped with a pieces of omelette and freshly steamed rice on side.

Now for the soundtrack: Something Hot In A Cold Country by Echobelly

When Yanks are in town, it's time to get cracking!

t has already become a tradition: when Floyd comes to visit me in London, we always have a surf and turf dinner. For those unfamiliar with the American ideas of luxury food, it is steak and lobster served on one plate. On the Stateside, it is usually the most expensive entry on the menu ordered on special occasions, like when you really want to impress your date.

The surf part comes in the shape of a lobster tail, to make eating easy. For the sake of a more picturesque display, I like a whole creature, for which you will need special utensils. Other accompaniments include corns on the cob (classic American!), dill and butter dip, Italian salad and potato wedges.

Now the choice of wine is always a bit of a doozie, as you are having red meat and seafood in one helping. I guess the inventors of surf'n'turf were not from the stock who would have seen that as a problem, so I adopt their easy approach too: I just pick whatever wine I fancy at the moment, never minding the convention. Chilean Sauvignon Blanc from the Coquimbo Valley is well-balanced, as you would expect it from a Chilean, citrusy and utterly quaffable.

Smokey creamy mussels recipe

fter fixing mussels in accordance with the traditional time-honoured recipes for umpteen times, there necessarily comes a time when you feel like making your own contribution to the world's seafood cooking wisdom. This recipe is my (very liberal) variation on the traditional Breton way of cooking mussels with cidre and bacon (moules à la bretonne).

Mussels cooked this way are apparently so good that last time my ex simply had to have me cook them in the precious few hours that I spent in Amsterdam between my planes - at midnight! I was surely happy to oblige.

Here how it goes:

1. Peel and thinly slice half a head of garlic and two onions (or a big handful of shallots instead of the onions).
2. Melt a generous chunk of butter in a mussels pan (like Nigella says, there's no good kitchen without butter).
3. Fry garlic and onions on medium fire until golden brown.
4. Add 2 kg pre-washed and de-bearded mussels and cook stirringly occasionally until all are open. Removing the released juices a couple of times helps to cook the mussels quickly without overcooking. Keep the juices for later!
   
5. Remove the mussels.
6. Add a glass of single cream, a glass of dry white wine, the mussel juices and some coarsely ground black pepper. Simmer until the smell of alcohol disappears.
   
7. Add a tablespoonful of liquid smoke and the mussels and give it all a nice stir. The advantages of liquid smoke are that it is filtered many times and is supposedly healthier than smoked bacon. This shall make you feel better about all the cream and butter in this recipe!
   
8. Serve with oven-baked frites and white wine. The creamy and smoky broth needs to be served in lions head bowls, it somehow tastes better that way!
   

Whitstable oysters: Britain's best

They say that what goes around, comes around. That's true, but every time the game level is up.

Chez Liline: pelagic perfection, London restaurant review

Good seafood restaurants are hard to to come by in the cities: the supply lines need to be quick to maintain freshness, the paramount attribute of this delicate product. But imagine if a fishmonger was also a seafood restaurant proprietor. Someone who deals in fish would also cook it and serve it. And if that someone was from a tropical island amidst the Indian Ocean, with a passion for flavours and fine cuisine.

Such a place does exist in London in, of all places, Finsbury Park. Chez Liline is a Mauritian restaurant, serving food from that peculiar place where such diverse cultures as French, African, Indian and Chinese blend into something quite delectable. Imagine black beans, chillis and fresh basil adorning one dish: yummm, indeed!

Every time we go there with my friends Dusko and Mack, we get the Chef's Menu, the FRench version of the Japanese omakase, where you let the chef decide what is good for you and what is best today.

Everything comes freshly cooked from the kitchen, sizzling ina cloud of aromatic vapours. The variation is not large, it's samish combinations and ingredients every time, what matters is the perfection to which everything is cooked!

The starters are different kind of seafood - mussels, scallops, baby squid and shrimp stir-fried with sauce: spicy blackbean, butter.

view restaurant latakia syria review

Like I promised, to balance out my review of the worst restaurant in Syria, I'm sharing with you the news of the best one.

- Drive down the Corniche, take only right turns for next 10-15 kilometres, you will see it!

The instructions from our landlord, from whom we are renting a "chalet" on Latakia's lovely garbage-and-rubble coast, are approximate at best. Following their spirit, we do find the place he mentioned, in about 5 minutes from the Corniche, Latakia's main promenade overlooking the industrial terrain of Syria's largest port.

Turns out "The View" consists of four restaurants: Italian, Mexican, Syrian and seafood. We put off pasta and nachos until we hit Naples and Cancun, and as kebab and hommous-weary as we are, we make a beeline straight to the seafood "The View - Sultan".

The large hall reminded me of the interior of the better Soviet restaurants from the 70s. Syria and the USSRwere great friends for many decades, united mostly by their hate of Israel and the USA.

Bulots: like escargots but from the sea

lso known as escargots de Bruxulles, bulots are an indelible part of the assiette de fruits de mer. In plain English: no good seafood platter is without whelks. Meaty with a decadent flavour of marine corruption

I buy them already boiled in court-bouillon, so the only thing I need to do is to pry the fleshy part out of the shell, dip it into home-made mayonnaise and consume with fresh baguette and chilled Muscadet.

Kuki wakame (茎わかめ): Japanese seaweed stems

h Christmas! The time to wash down lovely oven-dehydrated turkey and vein-clogging trifle with copious amounts of hangover-sure punch. Last year, however, I escaped the joys of London's festive season to eat raw fish on a hotel rooftop. As the tropical night's tightening embrace was squeezing more and more sweat out of my body, kuki wakame (茎わかめ) was what I had swapped the obligatory fart-inducing Brussels sprouts for.

Nominated as among world's 100 most invasive species, wakame kelp has stems whose lovely texture is simultaneously crunchy and jelly-like, described in Japanese as kori-kori. When used as food, they are called kuki wakame and have a nice flavour of seawind. Wind, however, is where all parallels with Brussels sprouts stop.

This Japanese-style aemono salad requires minimum cooking: the accent is on harmonising (aeru) the ingredients. So, here goes the recipe:

TBC

Chuka iidako: best way to cook baby octopi (中華いいだこ)

he only time when paedophilia is cool is when it comes to food. Think lamb and mutton. Or young chick and old cock. Although there may not be nothing wrong with old cock, we all still do prefer young blood to old tuskers in our kitchen.

Chuuka iidako (中華いいだこ)　is the Japanese idea of a Chinese recipe for baby octopi (in my opinion, that's the most decent sounding plural for octopus). Call me weird, that was as close to turkey as I got for my Christmas 2009 dinner. The rest was mostly raw fish.

Anyways, here's the recipe you were looking for:

10 baby octopussies (there you go!)
one can kidney beans
one can diced tomatoes
400 g minced beef
one onion
one stalk of celery
3 big chili peppers (quantity varies depending on the hotness factor of the peppers you are using)
salt, pepper, allspice powder, bouillon cube

1. Rinse the octopi well in running water. Smash the heads and remove the intestines. Bring a pot of water to boil, put a few tea leaves and the octopi for about 30 seconds.
2. Stir-fry the mince with a bit of oil in a frying pan, when the meat is done, add finely chopped onions and celery as well as the de-seeded and chopped chili peppers, crushed bouillon cube and the seasoning.
   
3. Drain kidney beans and add them to the pan together with the tomatoes.
   
4. Cut the octopi lengthwise and add to the pan. Stew on low fire for 30 minutes.

Enjoy!

Takoyaki: Japanese octopus balls (たこ焼き)

ried octopus balls and fried ram balls may sound similar but there's a world of difference between the two. Despite its English name, there is nothing testicular about takoyaki. In fact, they are pieces of octopus deep-fried in a ball of batter.

A highly popular street food, they are as indispensible to Japanese innumerable and ubiquitous local festivals as candy floss to British fun fairs. Osaka, Japan's second largest city, is the country's takoyaki capital to the point where the takoyaki grill pan (takoyaki-teppan or takoyaki-ki) is said to be a part of every Osaka bride's dowry.

These days every fishmonger seems to carry octopus and the rest of takoyaki ingredients can be easily procured in your local Asian grocer.

1. Mix 2 cups of flour, 2 and half cups of dashi, and 2 eggs in a bowl. The flour/dashi proportion may vary depending on what kind of flour you use but the resulting batter should be as thick as drinking yoghurt.
   
2. Heat a takoyaki grill pan real well and brush every cup with a bit of vegetable oil (it should start giving out some smoke).
   
3. Fill the cups with batter to the brim. Put bite-size pieces of pre-boiled octopus, red ginger, dried shrimp (sakura-ebi) and come chopped green onion in each hole.
   
4. When the bottom half of each ball is nice and brown, turn it over with a toothpick and grill until the other half is the same colour.
5. Takoyaki are not supposed to be cooked till hard, a degree of softness (called torori in Japanese) is normally sought after.
   
6. Serve with takoyaki sauce (okonomiyaki sauce is an permissible substitute), a wee bti of mayonnaise (the lusciously unctuous Kewpie brand is the best)Top with a sprinkle of bonito flakes (katsuobushi) and ao-nori.