More recent food articles

I rather enjoyed reading Alice Hart's article in The Guardian on how to write a cookbook.  I think it's interesting the way that, as one of the commenters points out, a cookbook can't just be a cookbook anymore, you need to sell not just recipes but an idea of yourself, a way of life.  The whole thing made me realise how horribly unsuited I would be to writing a cookbook:  I criticise cookbooks all the time for lack of precision but I am exactly precise either.  There isn't much that I don't just make by eye or instinct and I tend to use cookbooks for inspiration rather than for strict recipes.

This article on child foodies, on the other hand, was just creepy.  I don't like the idea of assuming that children can't cope with adult flavours but something about these kids was just unsettling.  Kind of like those beauty pageants for small children.

Not creepy but just incoherent, this article from the Telegraph, on "why we all want to be vegievores:  the easy way to be a vegetarian" which turns out to be..  by not being a vegetarian, just eating some vegetables from time to time.  Now, obviously, I have nothing against people eating more vegetables.  But just eating some from time to time does not make you a vegetarian.  

Mushroom stroganoff

Stroganoff and rice

I make absolutely no claims for the authenticity of this dish, I only have the haziest of ideas of what the defining characteristics of stroganoff actually are but it is quick and tasty and involves mushrooms and mustard. That's generally good enough for me.

Chopped onion and mushrooms

Mmm, mushrooms

Mushrooms cooking

Fry 500g of mushrooms and an onion in olive oil (or butter) for around 10-15 minutes, add a dash of sherry, 300ml of crème fraiche, mustard to taste (I go for about three teaspoons of seedy mustard but I love my mustard!), salt, pepper and paprika. Fresh chopped parsley on top is good if you have it. Serve with rice.

Almost ready stroganoff

Restaurant review - Ottolenghi, Islington and Nopi

I have been to both Ottolenghi restaurants in Islington and NOPI in Soho. I really wanted to love them as much as I love the cookbooks but, sadly, that was not to be. My view on both restaurants was pretty similar so I'll review them in the same post.

Both restaurants had much more limited vegetarian options than you would expect from Ottolenghi's Guardian column and cookbooks – it's not so much that there weren't quite a number of options as that they were almost uniformly “lighter” options, more accents to the meat dishes in the mezze than substantial in and of themselves and, often, with ingredients repeated throughout the vegetarian options so it was hard to get dishes that were genuinely different from one another.

Essentially, I got the impression that no-one had actually looked at the whole of the menu from a vegetarian's perspective – each individual dish was nice but it was hard to put together a complete meal from the vegetarian dishes on the table without a) repeating ingredients a lot and b) eating a lot of vegetables and not much protein/carbohydrate. I don't want to sound like a barbarian but, really, I do expect to be full after spending £30+ on food in a restaurant. Even by the standards of nice London restaurants, I thought both were overpriced – it's not that the food wasn't good but it just wasn't quite priced right for me, for the prices they charge, I expect (literally) more.

I had one Islington restaurant specific gripe, too: we'd booked in advance but were sat on the long communal table without being warned of this on the phone – if we had been told, we would have changed the booking for a time when we could get a table to ourselves – the staff's attitude seemed to be very much “if you're in the know, then you'll get your own table, otherwise, we won't tell you”. I don't like that attitude much.

Overall, I'd rather stay at home with my cookbooks. Where I can get a table to myself.

Cookbook review - Ottolenghi, Plenty

Recently, Amazon sent me an e-mail inviting me to trade in my copy of Plenty. I instinctively wanted to go and clutch it. It is MINE all MINE and they can't take it away from me.

Anyway. This reminded me that I have been meaning to review it for a while though, perhaps, I hardly need to as the fact that I named this blog after one of his chapter titles probably tells you that I like it very much.

It's one of my favourite cookbooks. I particularly love the paella recipe, the ratatouille, and the stuffed onions. When he writes in The Guardian, commenters often make fun of his very lengthy lists of ingredients and it's true that virtually every recipe has more than 15 ingredients in it and is quite fiddly. But that's how you produce complex intricate flavours. It just isn't possible to do that quickly and with two ingredients, people!

I also make fun of his instructions sometimes – I find it particularly entertaining when he tells you things like “fry this for 6 minutes then add this and fry it for a further minute” but, if I'm honest, the recipes kind of do come out better when I follow those instructions than when I wing it. (Except for the stuffed onions which I've made often enough that I don't even bother looking at the recipe.)

What I really like about Ottolenghi's cookbooks is the precision, in fact, though I do mock it sometimes. You can really tell that he runs his own restaurants: the instructions are incredibly detailed and clear. There's none of this “oh, between 325 and 450ml of buttermilk”type stuff, Ottolenghi will tell you exact quantities and timings and will detail all of the spicing, so that you aren't left with “oh, season to taste” or similar rubbish.

The cookbooks are, I think, for the experienced cook but, if you are an experienced cook, especially if you are vegetarian or like to cook complicated vegetarian food, they are absolutely fantastic. If you want a cookbook that will produce nice food but with simpler recipes and shorter ingredient lists, I'd suggest High Fearnley-Whittingstall'sVeg instead.

I will review the Ottolenghi restaurants in a separate post.

Mushrooms stuffed with stilton and garlicky breadcrumbs

Mushrooms ready for stuffing

For some reason, this past month has been the month of the mushroom in our house. I seem to have cooked a lot of mushroom dishes. For instance, recently, I tried to recreate the mushrooms stuffed with stilton that we had atThe Vaults a little while ago.

I took 14 small mushrooms, took out the stalks and put them into a buttered oven dish. Then scattered 250g of stilton, the sliced mushroom stalks (waste not, want not!), 300g of crème fraiche on top, in that order.

With added stilton

Mmmm, stilton

With mushroom stalks added on top

With creme fraiche added on top

Musing on what I thought was missing from The Vaults' version, I realised that it was the obvious: garlic! So, I crushed in three cloves of garlic into two slices of bread's worth of breadcrumbs along with olive oil, salt and black pepper. 

The missing ingredient!

Breadcrumbs tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic

Having sprinkled the mushrooms with the breadcrumbs, I then baked at 180 degrees for 25 minutes. 

The finished product

Verdict: tasty but some of the mushrooms were a little undercooked. I think, next time, I'd be tempted to roast them on their own for 10 minutes or so before adding the crème fraiche and breadcrumbs and baking for a further 25 mins or so. I think, also, it would have helped to have melted the stilton into the crème fraiche as then that element would have been hot before it went into the oven.

One to experiment with more another time.

Restaurant review - The Warehouse Cafe, Birmingham

Yes, I know I said I was going to post about places I love in London but there are places I love outside London too..  and probably #1 on that list is The Warehouse Cafe in Birmingham.  I have friends in Birmingham who I visit regularly and, every time I go, we pay a visit to the delightful Warehouse Cafe

It's not much to look at on the outside, down a slightly dodgy looking alleyway, housed within Birmingham's Friends of the Earth building, and you have to press a buzzer to be let in, go up some slightly pokey stairs but, when you get there, delicious vegetarian food is your reward.  The service can be a little wayward but the food is just great. 

I've had a lot of meals there and never had a bad one.  The menu covers all the bases - some really interesting, innovative options (I had a delicious pease pudding with fried chappati and onion bhajis today and the savoury cheesecakes are always winners) to more traditional British style food (e.g. vegetarian sausages and mash or burger and wedges), so there's something for everyone.  The puddings are a highlight, even for me as someone who much prefers savoury food - they are interesting and different but not in a gimmicky way, for instance, a while ago I had a lovely Eton Mess with balsamic vinegar there.

I think the food is right up there with The Gate's and yet priced for Birmingham so great value if you're a Londoner passing through. 

Restaurant review - The Vaults, Cambridge

Much though I love my home town, Cambridge, it has never seemed to have as many good restaurants as it should do.  Or perhaps during my formative years, I just never had the money to eat at them.  Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised recently to have a lovely dinner at The Vaults.

We had the dinner menu which suggests that you have 2-3 dishes each and share.  I had the twice cooked eggs and half of the goats cheese toast and the mushrooms with stilton.  The mushrooms with stilton were delicious - I spent half my time thinking "mmmmm" and half thinking "I must figure out how to replicate this at home" (I have an idea of how to - will post when I try out my idea).  The goats cheese was pretty tasty, though came in rather small portions.  The twice cooked eggs were a good idea but rather underseasoned - I'm not sure they were salted at all and, in my view, eggs really need at least a little salt - so a bit disappointing.  Though, really, I enjoyed the mushrooms so much that I wasn't that disappointed.

In general, the only real quibble I had with the food was that the portion sizes seemed a little arbitrary - the meat dishes that my husband ordered came in much larger portions than the vegetarian dishes.  Fortunately for marital harmony, the mushrooms came in a reasonable portion size so we weren't reduced to the indignity of squabbling over the last bit of stiltony sauce.

I rather wanted some gelato to finish (as previously mentioned, I love gelato) but, sadly, they'd run out of every single flavour.  I attempted instead to order some pomegranate dessert wine but they'd also run out of that.  So, poor me, I ended up with a rather lovely espresso martini to round off the meal.

Despite having had five dishes and bread to share, a glass of wine each, a pudding for my husband and an espresso martini for me, the bill came to around £60 which I thought was damn good value.

Overall:  definitely the nicest meal out I've had in Cambridge.  I will return. 

Places I love in London: Gelupo

So, a while back, I said that I'd write - as the  mood struck me - about my favourite places to eat and drink in London.  Today:  Gelupo.  I love Italian ice-cream.  It was love at first taste.  Italian ice-cream somehow managest to taste more like its flavour than the actual flavour does - Italian lemon sorbet is more lemoney than actual lemons, Italian blood orange sorbet tastes more like oranges than they do..  Above all else, Italian ice-cream tastes like Italy - like sunshine.

I have sampled a lot of Italian ice-cream in London in a quest to find this experience closer to home.  It was a tough job but someone had to do it.  There is a lot of lovely Italian ice-cream in London.  Marine Ices is reliably tasty and has a great range of sorbets, especially.  Gelateria Danielli once served me some truly extraodinary blackberry sorbet.  Cafe Chai, down the road from where I used to work, was a great source of "I've had a bad day, I need some Italian ice-cream" pickmeups (and, again, is particularly good for sorbets - I used to particularly enjoy their pink grapefuit sorbet).

But the winner has to be Gelupo.    The first time I had their blood orange granita, I spent the whole weekend talking about it to everyone I met.  Yes, I was a granita bore. But it actually was that good.  I actually don't usually like granita that much, too icy and not enough fruit, but Gelupo's granitas are amongst the nicest things I have ever eaten.  The sorbets are delicious too - the blood orange one is lovely but so too is the clementine and..  well, basically, they're all good.  And, then, the ice-cream itself - I had the peanut butter ice cream yesterday with a scoop of bitter chocolate and.. well, suffice to say, I just want to talk about it for the rest of the week..