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y first visit to Istanbul was, in hindsight, quite traumatic. Back in 1999 I was a hardcore vegan and the sight of all the Turkish goodies sizzling tantalisingly on charcoals left me scarred for years.
That is why I have put myself through a self-administered culinary therapy. I recreate all the stuff I missed out on then in Turkey, here in London. Kuzu pirzola, grilled lamb chops, is a good example.
When I received the good news that I was accepted to the SOAS postgrad school, I celebrated Russian style, with a barbeque. The difference was that it was alcohol-free and apart from the scrumptious hand-made Colombian sausages I bought at Brixton Market, I also made Turkish sardines wrapped in grape leaves. I nicked the recipe from wonderful Ghillie Başan's mouth-watering Turkish cookbook. As all great things it is quite simple.
- Make marinade of olive oil, grated lemon rind, juice of the lemon, aceto balsamico bianco, clear honey, one crushed chilli pepper, sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper. Whisk all ingredients together well. The quantities are not arbitrary. The rule of thumb is that the marinade should come out pleasant to taste, a balanced mix of sweet, spicy and sour.
- Cover gutted and scaled sardines with marinade and let stay for a couple of hours.
- Wrap the sardine in grape leaves and baste them with the marinade.
- Grill on white-hot charcoals for a couple of minutes on each side. Do not overcook: when the eyes are white, it is done.
- I serve sardines with grilled vegetables (tomatoes, bell peppers, aubergines, courgette, onions, garlic) and turmeric rice.
rapping is a great way of cooking. Russians use cabbage leaves, Thais - pandan leaves, the Chinese - lotus leaves, the Japanese - bamboo leaves, Indians - banana leaves, Mexicans - corn husks. In Laos and Vietnam they stuff food into pieces of bamboo trunk. The whole shebang is about letting the wrapping flavour permeate the rest of the ingredients.
In the Near East, a vaguely defined area spanning from Greece and Romania to Armenia and Syria, grapes leaves (a.k.a. vine leaves) enjoy a wide coinage. Their flavour is not that strong but the pleasantly sourish kick they bring to food is well worth the trouble of wrapping. My parents are lucky to use fresh ones from their garden but I have to buy them jarred. Most of the preserved varieties I see in Europe are imported from Turkey. I buy mine in an Iranian-run shop at Brixton Market. The first dish I cooked in London using grape leaves was charcoal grilled sardines.
love all things obscure and bizarre. On my last forage to the Cheddar Gorge in Somersetshire, I stumbled upon this rather lovely cheese, Draycott Blue. It is named after a village where it is made, three miles from Cheddar Village.
It is made from unpasteurised milk and that is why it is not commercially available outside the area. It tasted very lovely: moderately sharp, low in salt, with a rather mild finish, resembling Bleu d'Auvergne. The only way to get hold of it without driving to Somerset is to buy it online.
hubarb, elderberries, pumpkin, green tomatoes and aronia - what is common between them? My Mom makes amazingly delectable jams from those.
This is one of her wonderful concoctions: physalis jam. It is not really your traditional Russian preserve but as it is made by a Russian woman in the midst of the Russian countryside from berries grown in Russian soil I might as well categorize it as a Russian dessert.
The land of eternal winter for Westerners, Russia has intensely hot continental summers. My parents grow on their estate peaches, grapes, walnuts and olives as well as a host of exotic flowers and vegetables from as far afield as Argentina and Thailand. In Southern Russia orange and lemon orchards as well as tea plantations are a common place. So much for stereotypes.
eneral de Gaulle once famously quipped about how France has 365 sorts of cheese while Britain has but two. In fact, while France was preserving its cheeses, Britain was busy fighting a war as a result of which (or mostly, rationing and austerity measures) the number of cheese producers tumbled from 3,500 before the war to 100 after it.
That said, English cheddar is one of the most popular cheeses in the world. To achieve this status a sacrifice was made: cheddar has lost its capital C and has become a generic name produced anywhere but the original place, the Cheddar Village in Somerset.
It is on quest for this real, AOC West Country Farmhouse Cheddar that we went there. Coincidentally, it is situated in a picturesque Cheddar Gorge, described by Robinson Crusoe's author Daniel Defoe as a "deep frightful chasm". These days it is a busy tourist attraction where real Cheddar is manufactured from the milk sourced within 80 miles from the Wells Cathedral. What makes Cheddar different from other cheeses is cheddaring, where heated curd is kneaded with salt, and of course maturing in the caves of the Cheddar Gorge.
In our age of marketing gizmos there are a slew of Cheddars with fancy and even bizarre flavours: from whiskey and cranberry to marmite and mango-and-ginger. I find it hard to buy in this gimmickery and prefer to stick to the time-proven good ole plain Cheddar. It is truly a great world cheese: pleasant to taste, versatile in use and easily recognizable.
There is an online cheddarometre that will help you determine the optimum thickness of cheese for your sandwich. If you are crazy enough to use it, enjoy!
ambal manis means "sweet sauce" in Bahasa Indonesia but such a simple name belies an amazing explosion of tastes.
Finely chopped chillies, onions, sugar, galangal and garlic are fried in vegetable oil to achieve a highly delectable balance of spiciness ad sweetness. Strictly speaking, sambal manis is a relish as it is a rather thick paste. It is much milder than its more famous cousin, sambal ulek, which is basically crushed chillies with some salt. S-s-spicy!
There is sometimes a confusion because another, very different condiment is called sambal ketchap manis. It is a mild soya sauce and tastes nothing like sambal manis.
I buy it ready made. The best one I found is from Koningsvogel of Rijswijk, Holland while the one by Conimex tastes quite vile.
ow do people become food critics? For some it is the lucky combination that gets them the job: liking free meals and being friends with the editor. Issue in, issue out they churn out rambling nonsense but who cares: the content is there and the advertisers pay.
I don't have good referrers for my quest for good Chinese food in London. I don't yet know any Chinese people here. That is why I read what food critics write. Or, more correctly, I have just stopped doing that. Because many of them do not seem to know peanuts about food.
I just went to Bao Zi Inn, a Chinese eatery in Newport Court, Covent Garden, based on a review in Time Out. Granted, there are differences in opinions. But how can you praise to the skies veritable muck that, despite your insisting on the opposite, has just the names of the dishes to do with authentic Szechuan cuisine? While in London's Chinatown at best you can have forgettable meals, this one is several notches beyond that.
Despite Time Out's claim that Bao Zi Inn has brought about a culinary revolution, I witnessed all classic Chinatown fodder crimes:
- stodgy noodles in flavourless broth;
- snivel-like starch-based "gravy";
- main ingredients pre-cooked in bulk in the morning;
- dishes made of combinations of 2 and 3.
Our spinach salad was made well in advance and had a stale taste of overmature vinaigrette. It also contained a handful of peanuts boiled into perfect tastelessness - nice touch! Six miserly pork dumplings (I recognise the type I sometimes buy frozen) came in sesame oil with dry chilli concoction sold for 3 quid a bottle in the supermarket round the corner. They were accompanied by a bowl of water they had been boiled in with a few shavings of spring onions sprucing up its sad appearance.
Two skimpy spoonfuls of mapo doufu had no trace of aubergines or mince, just silken tofu and pre-made "Szechuan gravy". The same gravy was dolloped on overcooked soba in our "spicy Szechuan noodles", perhaps the most uninspiring and insipid since a bowl of instant noodles at a railway station in the Russian countryside back in 1999.
We stood up from the table half hungry and 35 quid poorer but the worst was the horrid aftertaste of a trashy Chinese eatery.
ut it it would be too spicy!" quoth our waiter when I ask where is our kimchi we were supposed to have as a side order. Well, well, well, you did not see me eating spicy yet. From our faces and accents he must have gathered we can't take hot peppers but why would we come to a Korean restaurant then at all?Little Korea is tucked away at the very beginning of Lisle Street in Covent Garden. It is a cafeteria-looking budget eatery with an extensive Korean-Japanese menu. I stumbled upon it when walking around Covent Garden with my visitors from Amsterdam but they refused to eat "foreign muck", so I kept it until a more auspicious time, namely, Floyd's visit.
As once again I failed to get hold of my sanchae bibimbap, I went for one with seafood in a hot plate (해산물비빔밥
). For the price (£5.99), it is quite a treat even though the seafood mix comes from the frozen section of the supermarket. I won't act a prissy purist, I use it myself.
Floyd had a jjam-bbong (짬뽕), which actually is the same as Japanese champon, just spicier, a generous bowl of spicy-ish udon with veggies and seafood. I must say the way I fix it is much more exciting, but don't we all think our cooking is the best! However, to give due credit jjam-bbong was hearty and honest.The banchan (Korean side dishes customarily accompanying bigger orders) consisted of three entries.- Firstly, rather bland if not inedible kongnamul (blanched bean sprouts) that lacked the sesame flavour I expected.
- Secondly, somewhat insipid courgette pickles.
- Very nice classic kimchi from Chinese cabbage, done just the way you expect, crunchy and spicy.
As it goes with Asian food and two big guys who regularly work out, that did not quite feed our faces. The bulgogi with rice (불고기 덮밥
) we decided to share turn out very nice, if obviously not freshly cooked just for us. Luckily, it was not of the slimy texture of constantly reheated muck that you get all too often in many a Chinese grease joint in the area. For five quid you can't ask for more.
I love Korean food for the punchy kick of fresh flavours and, of course, hot chillis. I love the smell of gochujang and barbecued meat, what a blessed combination! The hwe moochim, a Korean cross between sashimi and spicy carpaccio that I always get in this place is always a very special treat.
ince the topic of aphrodisiac food seems to have attracted quite a bit of attention here, I will write more about these magic tablets. Although not technically food, they are pure herbs.
While in the West Viagra brings short-term benefits without addressing the root of the problem, the Chinese have taken a more holistic approach. Nan bao (男宝), meaning 'male treasure', is a mix of herbs that fixes your whole system so that you have more sexual drive. It takes two weeks to finish the treatment course, but its benefits lasts long.
Nan bao can be bought in most Chinese pharmacies. It is not covered by most basic insurance policies but then again you do not need a prescription for it.
t is my birthday, that is why I will write about my single most favourite dish. No it is not sushi, but its European equivalent, the French assiette de fruits de mer, seafood platter.
I discovered its pleasures on my first trips to Normandy. Unlike in Holland, where I lived then, the French do not feel compelled to deep-fry every bit of taste out of fish and seafood. Half is consumed raw or blanched. No heavy sauces are used so that one can enjoy the gentle fragrance of the gifts of the deep brine.
First year I would just go to France and order it in a restaurant, granted Amsterdam is just a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the French border. As my French improved and I learnt the names of seafood I started arranging my own platters, put them on ice and take them back home. You can by a ready-made one for 20 euros on Auchan but it takes the fun out of it.
If you are too intimidated to do your groceries at a French market (I used to be), go to the poissonnier section in Auchan and pick
- a lobster,
- a crab,
- a box of oysters,
- then shrimp,
- bulots (whelks) and amandes (cockles, aka poor man's oyster) half a kilo each,
- perhaps some crevettes grises (brown shrimp) and bigourneaux (periwinkles) if you like those (I do!)
Then get some lemons, baguettes, mayonnaise and a couple bottles of Muscadet or cidre brut and you have a slap-up seafood dîner for two. Drive on to a scenic location for an additional aesthetic kick.
discovered this restaurant on a rainy day on my first month in London. Hungry and frustrated, I was skipping the puddles: my left shoe started leaking and it was too late to go back. Lead-grey clouds were pissing a cold sprinkle on the stressed out urbanite crowds. As I moved along the grey gravitas of Pall Mall towards the National Gallery, I saw an unusually bright sign: Jom Makan, C'mon Let's Eat in Malay, sounded exactly the right kind of invitation.
Inside the minimalist post-modern cafe interior nothing told of what kind of sunny fest I was in for. With the first bite of rendang daging, beef slowly stewed in coconut milk with herbs, I was magically transported from soggy November London to sun-drenched Kuala Lumpur. Everything is made right: you could count grains in fluffy and fragrant coconut rice and teh tarek, Malaysia's national drink is "pulled" at the bar to form a frothy cap at the top of the glass.
Malay food is not very well known outside its country of origin and undeservedly so. It uses all the herbs of the neighbouring Thailand and the spices of its cultural cousin Indonesia, but with a unique twist of its own. Sitting exactly half-way on the main trading route between India and China, Malay cuisine seems to have very creatively absorbed influences from those culinary giants too. It all makes for a great mix, healthy, flavourful and exciting. However, even in London, the seat of Malaysia's former colonial master, Malay eateries are still far from being a familiar sight.
I have come to Jom Makan umpteen times since my first visit. I think I have tried every dish on the menu. They all have been consistently good, just the right bit easier on spices than in Malaysia, since hot food does go down as easy in a colder climate.
Begedil, when cooked right, IS a big deal. It's a deep-fried curried potato dumpling. Do not let the word deep-fried put you off, it is done the Asian style so you end up with a crunchy crust and tender spice purée inside.
Nasi ayam hainan, chicken with rice Hainanese style: if spice is not your thing, you will like this. It is served with great sauce, mix of ginger and sweet chilli. A wee bowl of chicken broth that comes with it is to die for, mixing the flavours of toasted garlic, ginger and scallions.
Kari ikan, fish curry, is a great way to cook sea fish. Zesty from ginger and mildly sour from tomatoes, its spices only accentuate the flavours of okra and salmon. I remember in Malaysia they use red snapper or other white fish for this.
Kerabu daging is slivers of grilled beef on a bed of lettuce and asparagus sprinkled with Assam vinegar. Sometimes the asparagus is missing, sometimes the vinegar. When you get all the ducks lined up, you're in luck: it is a really great combination.
Chicken satay with peanut sauce on a bed of lettuce, a classic Malay street snack. Satay is said to derive from the Hokkienese word for "three pieces".
Rose-flavoured milky cold drink, air bandong, literally means "rose water".
Malay bread, roti canai, although fried in oil is not greasy. I could eat it plain, really, so tasty it is.
My favourite, nasi lemak, consists of a dollop of sambal cumi-cumi, belacan-based squid curry, and a dollop of rendang daging, beef stewed with coconut milk and spices. It comes served with fried peanuts and dried anchovies and a boiled egg and chicken or coconut rice.
This popular South East Asian dessert, tapioca pearls topped with coconut milk and palm sugar, is a bit of acquired taste. I love it with crushed ice because this is how they serve it in tropical climates.
This is a true chef-d'oeuvre: creamy mango and coconut sorbet in the shape of a boiled egg. Just the right amount of sweetness and full of original fruit flavour.
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.
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