Stella Newman's blog

Gramercy Tavern Warm Chocolate Bread Pudding...

2012-03-09T15:18:00.002-08:00

So, I decided to try my hand at the delectable Warm Chocolate Bread Pudding at the Gramercy Tavern, recipe here, courtesy of their amazing pastry chef Nancy Olson.

Quite scared that if I can make this pudding even half as well as the chefs at the Gramercy I'll be making it all the time...

It's relatively simple. Get a brioche loaf - M&S do this nice one:

Chop the crusts off, and chop it into little squares:

Then there's a slightly complicated bit where you have to add x to y, then y to x, then xy to z and z to xy... I should have roped in a friend at this point, as you need to add and whisk simultaneously, which is easier when one person holds the bowl and one whisks...however, given that I decided to make it in the middle of the night, this was easier said than done. (x = a mix of eggs and milk, y = hot milk, cream, vanilla and sugar, z = molten chocolate.)

The logical part of my brain is saying 'I'm sure if you just added x to y, then y to z, it would work out exactly the same' but the paranoid, anxious part of my brain (98%) is saying 'if you don't do exactly what Nancy Olson says, the world will end.' Call me Chicken Licken.

Anyway, do what Nancy says, or else, and then pour that over the brioche, smush it a bit, then add chunks of chocolate.

This photo speaks volumes about what a slovenly cook I am. Really, those chunks should be a third of the size, and cut with a knife but I just could not be bothered to do it neatly. Not least because x to y to x to z had left my kitchen counter with various smudges of egg and cream and chocolate that needed wiping up. Anyway on Sunday I shall show and tell regarding what it's like when you actually eat it....

postscript: so by the time I put it in the oven, we had drunk 9 bottles of wine between 7 of us. The photos are terrible:

and do it no justice whatsoever. Also, I messed up on my US conversions and had a bit too little cream to milk and not quite enough brioche, so there was too much sauce - however it tasted amazing. Am going to remake next weekend on a smaller scale and repost the finished product.

Sophie Klein's interview cake...

2012-03-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

There's a scene near the beginning of Pear-Shaped where Sophie makes a cake to take to her interview at Fletchers. She chooses this Orange and Almond cake by the marvellous Claudia Roden. I have no idea why I chose this particular cake when I was writing the book - I'd never eaten it, let alone made it. I guess I just liked the idea of it.

But it's been on my mind for a year now, and I've recently become obsessed with blood oranges and bitterness - so I finally got my arse in gear and I'm so glad I did. It is the easiest cake in the world, and if you're not averse to bitterness, I'd say it is show-stopping, particularly in terms of texture.

Other plus points: it only has five ingredients; and it's flour free, so very good if you're cooking for someone who can't or won't do wheat / gluten. And actually, it's almost entirely fruit, egg and almonds - so, fruit and protein (kind of) - therefore an optimum lean-muscle-building health snack....er...

Anyway, first boil two oranges for a very long time. I used blood oranges, rather than regular.

Boil them whole, then chop them up and remove the pips.

Blitz them in a magimix:

Beat six eggs:

Add the three remaining ingredients - sugar, loads of ground almonds, a tiny bit of baking powder.

Apart from the oranges boiling for two hours, the actual prep part, once they're boiled, takes less than four minutes. Bake the cake for 50 minutes. Sprinkle with icing sugar (ok, that's ingredient six if you're being pedantic) - and voila...

You're using the entire orange, including the peel, so while the boiling does remove most of the bitterness, this is not a super-sweet cake experience. Nonetheless it is beautiful and delicate and squidgy and luscious and light. (And I am a person who does not normally consider dessert to qualify as dessert unless it contains chocolate or custard or both.)

No wonder Sophie got the job...

Next time I make it, and there will be a next time, I'm going to experiment with a dark chocolate ganache on the side - I think something velvety (and chocolaty) would work brilliantly with it.

New York - the highlights

2012-03-04T09:32:00.002-08:00

In the back of Pear-Shaped there is a mini guide to my favourite places to eat in New York.

Last weekend I was in New York for 40 hours (sounds glamorous, was not. Was more like sleep-deprivation endurance test with bourbon and douche-bags to keep me awake. Actually was not so bad, in retrospect...)

In those 40 hours I tried to get round some of the places I'd listed to take photos to illustrate my choices.

So, from the top:

Corner Bistro burger, west Village:

Best eaten at 3am, after a drunken night in a super-hip underground bar on Great Jones Street that you can only access by crawling through a fire-exit backwards.

Corner Bistro is entirely to the point: meat, meat, meat. They play rock and roll (but not in a try-hard way, purely in an IT'S 1989! FIRST TIME ROUND! way.) It's spit and sawdust. But man oh man: that is a burger. Looks plastique but it so entirely satisfies one's basest instincts.

Serving suggestion: serve when drunk. When almost finished, order second burger for pudding. Then go to bed on double-burger stomach. Wake up, vow to eat sushi all day, then immediately go to Gramercy Tavern -

- my favourite New York restaurant evah! - and order their cheeseburger.

I know, I have a disease (known as greed.)

But it was so entirely unavoidable. The waitress said the potato salad had bacon in it. And then she said the home made mayonnaise was laced with bacon. LACED WITH BACON. That is so the title of my autobiography. She then explained that the beef was grass fed, from an eco-friendly farm in Virginia. (I mean, of course that is what a cow should be fed, but the way she said it made it sound like the cow was so damn happy before it was, like, not happy.)

The cheese was Cabot cloth bound Cheddar from Jaspar Hills farm in Vermont. Vermont! Cabot cloth bound! Doesn't that sound so darn regional and home-made and artisanal and delightful! I don't know anything about Vermont or about cloth-bound cheeses. What, pray tell, is a Cabot? But quite frankly if she'd said burka-bound I'd have ordered the damn burger at that point.

Onwards and upwards. When you've had 3 burgers in 10 hours, what your body REALLY REALLY needs is hot chocolate that's thicker than custard. Yes, City Bakery hot chocolate - one of the 7 Wonders of the World.

And whatdoyouknow? February just happens to be Hot Chocolate month at City Bakery - a different flavour each day, including 'Super Bowl Flavour' (with beer) and one called 'Hot Chocolate On A Peanut Butter Barge'.

I would trust no other hot-chocolate seller in the world to carry off these flavours. But the hot chocolate here is a drink of such magnificence, a guaranteer of instant good mood - that if anyone can do it, they can.

You can order it by the bowl, by the shot

or by various cup sizes.

What you cannot do is ever hope to live a non-obsessed life afterwards.

I forgot to mention pudding at The Gramercy. This is the warm chocolate bread pudding (made with brioche) that Sophie and Pauly in Pear-Shaped both trek across town for.

Sure, it looks all fancy-shmancy sitting there with its ice cream companion on a bed of cocoa nibs with a chocolate curl hat.

But when you get into it, it's a squidgy, unrestrained, melting chocolate delight.

And just look how pertily they serve their cappuccinos!

My final pit-stop was for spicy sausage and mushroom pizza at John's on Bleeker.

NY pizza wars are legendary. John's may or may not be the best. Jack Black says John's has the best brick-oven - so good he orders his pizzas plain. And Janice Dickinson (America's Next Top Model is NOT the same without her) clearly finds John's so delightful she can barely keep her skirt on.

Suffice to say, it's good pizza.

One final thought, from a billboard on the Bowery...

I don't know if burgers and pizza and hot chocolate count as material possessions what with them being temporary and all, but they sure do cheer a girl up.

p.s. I'm going to try making the Gramercy chocolate pudding on Saturday night and if it's any good I'll post it here soon.

Amaze-balls...

2012-02-28T15:35:00.002-08:00

I don't know why I have just used that ridiculous made-up word. I have tried to resist it, but resistance, as they used to say on 'Allo Allo, is futile. Hell, I don't even know why I just quoted 'Allo Allo, I was never a fan. I think it's safe to say I'm tired.

All I really wanted to do was show you these photos of my amaz-ing holiday. I hadn't had a proper holiday in years. I mean a holiday where you do absolutely nothing except sit in the sun and read and eat and sleep.

My friend persuaded me to go to a lake in Thailand, which has, like, totally NO internet, NO phone reception, NO electricity and NO flushing toilets. Call me old fashioned but I do like a flushing toilet. Nonetheless what this place lacked in plumbing it more than made up for in beauty:

I lived in one of these huts, and every morning woke up to this view:

And while there was no hot water in the shower, you could just jump in the lake where the water was oh so warm:

I don't really want to talk about the trauma of trying to go to the toilet in the middle of the night; I'm saving it for the new book; suffice to say, your options were:

pee in a pot in the dark (and risk missing the pot and pee-ing on your own floor)

try and cross a rainforest in the dark to reach the loo (that doesn't even flush) with only a cheap Argos own-brand headlight to guide you, and get attacked by fearless and slightly terrifying macaques like buddy here, in the process:

or pee out the back door of your hut in the dark, and fall in the lake and drown in your own pee, which is not the way I plan to leave this planet.

So I didn't pee for a week. Well not at night, anyway. But I did read a book a day, including two that I loved: Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy - which is a very dark, very funny book that made me realise I can probably get away with far more rudeness and darkness in my writing than I currently employ.

And The Elegance of The Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. I'd tried to read it a while back and couldn't get into it, but with the benefit of not constantly checking my lack of emails, I had the headspace to concentrate, and I loved it. A great, great central character. And I found myself learning lots of new vocabulary too. (And not, I hasten to add, words like amaze-balls.)

On the plane I saw three good films. Again, I know I'm late to the party but anyway: Moneyball, Thirty Minutes or Less, and Horrible Bosses. The latter two are dumb as hell, but they're my kind of dumb as hell. Thirty Minutes or Less stars Danny McBride basically playing Kenny Powers again, who I

in a really messed up way. And Horrible Bosses stars Jason Sudeikis, aka The Hair from 30 Rock, who I also want to get with.

I then undid all the good I'd done relaxing in Thailand, by haring off to New York for 40 hours. Long story. Well short story, but I'm fresh off that plane, so will post soon, with some good food pics.

Ottolenghi, the morning after...

2012-01-21T10:24:00.001-08:00

The only way for me to stave off a downer after the high of my book launch was to start the next day as I mean to go on: eating well.

I've spoken before of my obsession with Ottolenghi Upper Street. I've even put a little love letter to the place in the appendix of Pear-shaped. It's all about their perfect execution of the savoury

And the sweet.

So even though it was raining and grey and miserable on Wednesday morning, I woke up with one of my best mates, Jenny, who'd come down from Norfolk for the party, with a mug created in my honour!

We trolled off to Ottos to meet my sister, my best friend and her other half, who'd come from Sheffield, and ate our way through half of this:

I gave a copy of my book to the guys there, and in return they very generously gave me a box of their cakes, which included one of my favourites...

and an exceptionally pretty bag of mini-meringue treats!

Best swap evah....

And even though I then had to go and wash up 210 glasses from the party, when I'd done that I popped in to see my parents and remembered I'd given them some St John custard donuts from the party as a going-home present...

and they hadn't yet eaten the lot... which is just as well, as that's my job.

My book launch

2012-01-18T13:52:00.000-08:00

Feel like the luckiest person alive.

Pear-shaped, in the window at Daunt Books, Marylebone, my favourite bookshop in London.

Special delivery of 120 mini-custard doughnuts from St. John:

Some of my guests ate four each...you would, though.

So many amazing friends turned up to support me. Friends I've had since I was two, friends I've made in the last month, and three fantastic ex-boyfriends with their mums - I'm lucky I always seem to go out with men with lovely mums:

I had a very happy dad:

and my own lovely mum:

Loads of men bought the book as well as women - and some of the warmest reactions I've had so far are from men, though they seem a little embarrassed about buying a 'girl's book'...

These two are probably a little young for some of the content....

My dear friend Susie with the last bite of the last donut, at The Marylebone, at closing time.

Thank you to my fab publishers Harper Collins for putting the whole thing on and making it such a special night for me. Thank you to everyone who took a plane, train, tube, got a babysitter, got there any which way, tried to get there, sent a message of support, helped with the nuts, helped with the drinks, brought flowers, brought gifts, tolerated the fact that I didn't get to say two words to many of you. Thank you to everyone who generously bought the book. I have never ever felt so absolutely overwhelmed with friendship and support, and I promise at the film premier I shall personally tell Alec Baldwin that it's not all about him, it's about you xx

The Ledbury - yes, it is that good

2012-01-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

Worth persisting to get a table for the £35 set lunch (I waited around six weeks).

Foie-gras parfait on a chestnut sable - seriously could have eaten at least 15 of these without blinking:

A rolled macaroni of crab and pumpkin with ginger and clementine (doesn't look as beautiful as it tasted, but it was as good, if not better than the crab lasagne at Galvin.)

Wild brill with normal cauliflower, martian Romanesco and shrimp:

Rhubarb millefeuille with yoghurt ice cream:

Lush bourbon caramel, blood orange jelly, and millefeuille macaroon

and best of all, bread

Specifically this perfect buttery little bacon and onion escargot (not as in snail, well, yes as in snail, but as in pain au raisin / escargot, not slug.)

The best thing I've eaten this year, admittedly only 12 days in. Bacon viennoiserie, my tip for 2012, you heard it here first...

The Alford Arms, Frithsden and Ferris, Ferris...

2012-01-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

How could you not a love a pub that quotes Ferris Bueller on its intro page? I guess if you were Cameron Frye's dad...

Ferris Bueller was released 26 years ago, which makes me feel old. I can still play back extended scenes in my mind. Maybe that should make me feel young or at least mentally agile? Either way, having just googled the actor who played Cameron, I am delighted to see that he has of late starred in a show called Stella, as well as Cougar Town.

Anyway, The Alford Arms. We managed to make it there with no map, two non-functioning iPhones, and faulty directions scrawled on a cheese menu. Am so glad we persevered - it was magnificent - the perfect country pub within an hour's drive from London, with outstanding food.

Having eaten the best part of two cows in the last three days, I skipped the Sunday roast, but it broke my heart not to eat this Yorkshire pudding:

Instead I had two starters. Scottish mackerel on horseradish new potato salad with rhubarb syrup.

I was dubious about the mackerel / rhubarb combo, but good old Nigel is never wrong and the above was a triumph - the sharpness of the rhubarb slicing through the rich, oiliness of the fish, with a punchy, tender-firm potato salad back up plan. (By the way, did you know rhubarb is a vegetable, not a fruit! I had no idea.)

Then on to pan-fried duck liver on eggy brioche with grain mustard sauce:

So French tasting and luxurious I almost wept with happiness. And finalement, blackberry frangipane with blackberry ice cream:

and Seville orange trifle:

with a perfect, golden, caramelised-round-the-edges pistachio biscuit.

If there'd been a decent dollop of custard in this trifle this would be a perfect 10 meal for me, but I'm harsh in all things related to custard dearths, so let's call it a 9.8.

MsMarmitelover and I enjoy some Thai and tea and cake

2012-01-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

Saturday afternoon was set aside for tidying one of the 14 piles of chaos in my home, doing laundry, and cooking a slow roast beef dish for supper.

Instead I went for a quick Thai lunch with MsMarmitelover at Fitou:

Super spicy gang penang with coconut rice

Sea bass with chilli and lemon

and found myself still with her three hours later, eating cherry cheesecake at Ottolenghi:

and having far too much fun to leave. As a consequence, my dinner party did not go off quite as planned.

To be fair it started with a disaster anyway, at 7am, when I decided to make chocolate panna cotta while hung over. I dropped the molten chocolate in the milk, and splattered it everywhere.

although they turned out fine in the end:

The Ottolenghi Jerusalem artichoke pithivier was over-ambitious on my part. The inside was delicious

as any combination of cream, lemon zest, rosemary, and Jerusalem artichoke would be; but I'm cack-handed as hell when it comes to assemblage:

and my crimping ended in a leak that had to be patched up with random swatches of pastry. Nonetheless the final product tasted lush - very very mellow, and I guess next time I'll fail harder.

Being a total puff pastry novice, I decided not to bother scoring an inner-circle on my little cheese, onion and tomato canapes, and ended up with some rather rebellious snacks.

However my figs soaked in port:

and then baked into biscuits with orange zest and polenta were a delight, albeit the yellowest things I've ever made.

Goodman: good. Very good.

2012-01-08T02:25:00.000-08:00

I'm a total Hawksmoor-groupie. If I'm paying upwards of £20 for a steak, that's where I'll pay it. The Cut is too Park Lane. Gauchos? Average. But my friend has been singing Goodman's praises for an age so I thought I'd give it a go. It's a winner.

Terrific rib-eye:

Fantastic sides, notably truffle chips. I hate truffles, why order truffle chips? Firstly - my friend doesn't hate them; secondly - they were executed perfectly - crisp exterior, fluffy innards, perfect dimensions. And finally, I smothered them in Bearnaise, which I don't hate in the slightest.

Plus great creamed spinach with gruyere.

And a little chocolate brownie mousse pudding to top it all off:

Happy days, to have two restaurants in central London serving such delicious meat, classy sides and quality booze in sexy, masculine rooms.

If I had to choose between them I wouldn't. I'd start at Hawksmoor Covent Garden with a Pina Colada and a cheeseburger. Then I'd cab it to Goodman's for a tranche of ribeye, some chips, spinach, and a glass of Zinfandel and then Merlot, then get back in the cab to Hawksmoor for campari based cocktails in the bar made by Shaky Pete, best bartender in London. Anyone fancy joining me?

The real thing...

2012-01-04T15:29:00.000-08:00

The lovely folks at Harper Collins sent me the first real copy of my book today, as seen modeled here by two of my dear friends.

It's such a strange feeling. Great but peculiar, something that's lived in your head for so long and is finally real. I wish my grandparents were around to see this - my two grandmothers in particular, who were both amazing cooks, and from whom I learnt that the greatest expression of love is over-feeding.

For some reason its arrival has sent me into a flurry of over-ambition in the kitchen. In the minutes between arriving home from work and seeing friends I've been on overdrive - thrice-boiled candied orange peel with cardamom...

Maria Elia winning combo rosemary and orange biscotti...

and Heston's simple chocolate cookies that I cocked up royally:

Great taste but format was not as Heston destined...

I guess the thing about putting your heart and soul on the page is that you have to be prepared for people to hate it and hate you. I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for that, but still.

Anyway, the very clever folk at PeerIndex are giving away some advance copies to readers who really love books about food and heartbreak and love. If you're one of them and promise not to turn troll, then see if there are any still up for grabs.

If not, it's out two weeks on Thursday...the 19th...

Bull and Last Day of the Year

2012-01-02T07:44:00.000-08:00

I hate New Year's Eve. I decided to get it out of the way early so on the 30th I went and ticked the following NYE boxes:

Got drunk
Ordered unnecessary Jagermeisters (although aren't all Jagermeisters unnecessary?)
Ordered friend to buy double coffee Patron tequilas all round (a joke, sort of, but he took me at my word)
Smoked verboten smokes
Had a little fight in the street
Had another little barney with a hot bouncer in a terrible Mayfair members' club, over which toilets were allowed for povs like me vs. which toilets were reserved for trust-fund-babies
Ended up in random home of trust-fund-baby, fending off advances and playing the name game (no, Putin is not a female pop star, yes, Pacman is alive, sort of, well, till the ghosts get him.)

Job done. Which meant I could go to a lovely gastropub on New Year's Eve and not worry about having to find some teenage kicks. So to the Bull and Last, near Highgate, which has some of the best food in London.

It's at least as good as The Harwood in Fulham, but for my money is a far more relaxed and enjoyable experience, and the service is great. We started with amazing canapes:

Goan chicken pasty with cucumber raita, pig's head dim sum (more like slow cooked shredded pork cheek in a beautiful light pastry with sesame seeds on top), braised shoulder of venison kromeski (basically a croquette), and this lush beetroot and vodka cured gravadlax on home made soda bread:

For starters I had chicken and cep orecchiette (anyone who reads this blog will know that I never say no to pasta.)

Very delicate oricchiette, more baby's ears than normal oriccchiette, with a very earthy almost-broth like sauce, and perfectly tender chicken thighs. Friend had scallops, Jerusalem artichoke & Alsace bacon:

For mains I had char grilled beef sirloin, creamed ratte potato, cavolo nero and trompette mushrooms. My photo does no justice to it, but suffice to say it was immense - perfect execution with quality ingredients.

I've had such a year of soils and foams and deconstructed sea-vegetables and all I ever really want to eat is beautiful simple delicious food like this.

For dessert, chocolate mousse, roast William pear and hazlenuts:

and then a course called 'Sweeties' which was actually four amazing petit fours:

Amaretti nougat, salted caramel truffle, lemon parfait sandwich, and blueberry marshmallow!

And a glass or two of champagne, just because...

HAPPY NEW YEAR indeed,

Stuff I loved this year

2011-12-30T08:20:00.000-08:00

I didn't do nearly as much cultural stuff as I'd have liked this year, but below are some of the things I loved (and a few that I didn't) in 2011.

Best Films

Bridesmaids

Kristen Wiig is a genius. I still think back to the wedding dress shop scene and laugh out loud. Comparing this to the Hangover is like comparing 30 Rock to Two Pints of Lager.

The Skin I Live In

Weird, insane and no less brilliant because of it. I can understand why it isn't everyone's cup of tea - the man I went with was too disturbed to speak afterwards - an added bonus.

True Grit

Coens back on form after the totally over-rated A Serious Man. I didn't think I could love Jeff Bridges any harder, post-Lebowski, but he's almost as brilliant as Hailee Steinfeld.

Films I missed but wish I hadn't

We Need to Talk About Kevin
Senna

Drive

Films I saw but wish I hadn't

Potiche

Contagion

Midnight in Paris

(By the way, how sharp is this interior at the new Everyman cinema in Maida Vale? When I first started going to the cinema, you were lucky if they had loo roll in the bogs. Now it's like walking into a double page spread in Elle Deco.)

Theatre

Jerusalem

Mesmerising, extraordinary, moving, hilarious and brilliant. I had no idea how exceptional Mark Rylance was. As good as the reviewers said.

The Killing - Season 1

I loved the fact that at the end of every episode I was convinced I knew who the killer was. And I'll have you know I was right the first time (but not the following 18 times...) Season 2 a disappointment, though I could watch Lund forever.

The Crimson Petal and The White

Beautiful, evocative, brilliantly cast. Romola Garai was exceptional. Chris O' Dowd was so good in this, I could almost forgive his Oirish accent in Bridesmaids.

30 Rock

Alec, Alec, Alec, Tina, Alec, Kenneth, Alec, Tracy, Alec.

Music

Adele - 21

It really annoys me when blokes I know say this is an average album, just because it's hugely popular and mainstream. The reason it's so popular is because it has heart and soul and passion and honesty and rawness, and just because something's mainstream doesn't necessarily mean it's cack. On a separate note it seems that everyone I really love this year is female (other than Daniel Craig. Oh, and I guess Mark Rylance. And Alec.)

Books

A Visit from The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

Original, funny, clever, moving, brave.

The Illumination - Kevin Brockmeier

Original, sad, clever, ambitious, brave.

The Cure - Rachel Genn

Original, intelligent, poetic, wise, brave.

Ms Marmitelover's beautiful Boxing Day brunch

2011-12-27T06:26:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to get a space at Ms Marmitelover's Scandi-inspired Boxing Day brunch yesterday.

She is my new favourite person. She loves the things I love (Nora Ephron, Charles Bukowski, food,) and I am nothing if not a narcissist. But she is also a fantastic cook:

Knows how to make the perfect potato salad with divine home made mayo, dill and red onions:

And how to make eggs look spectacular:

That premium yellow caviar is from Kalix in Northern Sweden; Ms. Marmitelover can tell you more about it here.

How to make beautiful creme fraiche and sour cherry ice cream, in home-made crispy cardamom cones

How to make berries look pretty:

And bake lovely spicy gingerbread biscuits in festive form:

And these pussy-cat inspired Swedish rolls. How cool are they?

But more importantly, along with being super-talented in the kitchen and a fantastically hospitable host, she is totally sharp and hilarious and entertaining.

Thanks also to her delightful assistants, the very talented blogger Bellaphon, and Ms Maritelover's lovely and very smart daughter, The Teen.

Ms Marmitelover's brilliant book, Supper Club, is on every Top Ten list of the year. Buy it for yourself as your post-Christmas perk-up, and make a New Year's resolution to go to one of her events in 2012.

London Marathon 2012

2011-12-25T10:43:00.000-08:00

Does a 30 minute walk around Regent's Park offset this lot?

5 rib 4rib

Skirt now too tight. Will my mother kill me if I remove it at the dinner table?

How about my tights?

True that

Stellar cheese

With packaging like this it's rude not to.

The-damage-is-already-done -***-it denouement...

Earrings now officially too tight.

Thank you to my wonderful, generous, talented hosts for cooking an amazing lunch, for allowing me to take photos of everything, and then letting me have a little lie down immediately thereafter.

Christmas presents all on brand!

2011-12-25T03:04:00.000-08:00

Family are going to town on the pear theme this year. Merry Christmas everyone, hope it's a good one.

Christmas Eve - pretty, pretty.

2011-12-25T03:02:00.000-08:00

Can't believe it, I've lived in London my whole life and have never been to the Royal Opera House.

Well, I can believe it. I'm culturally unsophisticated.

And often more excited by the building:

And the funny Rudolph topiary spied from the roof of the building:

Than by what's on stage.

In this instance, The Nutcracker. Which was lovely - very Christmassy and pretty.

And then when I got home there was this sunset, which was also pretty, if not very Christmassy:

Meat Liquor - the famous Dead Hippie burger, and how I turned in to my dad.

2011-12-22T14:49:00.000-08:00

The most hyped burger of the year in London, the one all these people are queueing for?

The Dead Hippie, at Meatliquor. As ever, I'm late to the party.

In brief (long year, I'm tired): good enough burger. Not the double-pattied nirvana the blogosphere promised, not a patch on this bad boy, but tasty and carnal nonetheless.

Other highlights: the blue cheese dipping sauce that comes with the deep fried pickles. (I hate blue cheese so I don't say that lightly.)

The chicken in the chicken burger. Brilliant texture, great crunchy coating, let down by a papery bun:

Deep fried pickles - conceptually great, executionally not quite: batter too soggy.

Onion rings - not quite crispy enough, again almost great.

A long, long time ago, when I was 12 and three quarters, I went with my family for lunch to a groovy restaurant south of LA called El Ranchitos. El Ranchitos was Californication-esque. Grungy but not really grungy, dive-bar ish but actually quite clean. They played thumping loud 80s cock-rock, and more to the point they made mean burgers.

We'd been there a whole 5 minutes before my dad asked the hot tattooed waiter to turn the rock and roll down. I can still remember the moritification my near-teenage self felt when the waiter said no, and my dad dragged us out of there.

Tonight, Matthew, I am my dad. I can live with the Dexter-ish slaughter / blood themed decor at Meatliquor.

But the music's TOO BLOODY LOUD. I couldn't hear myself think.

I stopped short of asking my hot tattooed waiter to turn the music down, but the thought crossed my mind. Which made me feel old, which made me feel cross.

If I were 26 and on a date, I'd love this place. It's fun, it's cool, and even though it knows it's cool you can forgive it because it has a sense of wit. I'd drink loads of the bourbon-based cocktails, wolf down the burger and think I was almost, almost in Williamsburg.

But I'm not 26. I was out with friends, talking about adult things like babies and careers and unreliable builders. And I was acutely aware that I wasn't in Williamsburg, but I was 2 minutes from the back door of John Lewis, and had yet to buy most of my loved ones the right Christmas present.

So I didn't love it. I liked it though. I really did.

E. Mishkin - E is for Effortful, Ersatz, and Enough Already

2011-12-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

Hmmm. I'd heard mixed reports. Time Out gave Mishkin's 2 out of 5, and my chef friend said the same. Still, you've got to see for yourself, right?

After Spuntino's exhaustive try-hardness, and Da Polpo's very good pizzas, I thought it could go either way. But Mishkin's is basically quite nice food, hiding behind some faux 'old-fashioned and Jewish' shtick.

It has the usual surface charm of the Polpo chain - nice, young, good looking staff, nice lights:

Fashionably stocked bar...Sipsmiths anyone?

And a toilet with willfully awkward taps and retro wallpaper:

The whole concept claims to be 'a kind of Jewish deli' - and the menu does have lots of nods to Jewish food (chopped liver, bagels, latkes, matzo ball soup). However the entire experience is so-so, because Mishkin's lacks what real delis (Jewish or otherwise) have in spades: heart and soul.

We had meatballs (good flavour, texture too firm), onion rings and fries (not quite crisp enough.)

We had a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel which came with a soft boiled egg.

This was the closest we came to good. The fish was delicious - Severn & Wye salmon - and the egg was perfectly cooked, but the bagel was a 6 out of 10 bagel: not fresh enough, no crisp exterior to give bite, no soft yet chewy innards - just flavourless, too firm dough.

Come on guys. It is not that hard to source a decent bagel in London in the 21st century. You've spent so much time making sure your decor and fonts are cool, why not spend twenty minutes talking to someone who knows a bit about bread? Try Carmelli's, or Panzer's.

As we left, the waitress handed us a brown envelope, inside which was a copy of Ezra Mishkin's story. Ezra - who 'dreamed of owning his own restaurant' and established Mishkin's in 1931. (25 Catherine Street, site of this spanking new restaurant, was previously Taste of India curryhouse. ) The powers of the internet provide no evidence of a real Ezra Mishkin. The internet does of course tell us that Mishkin's is owned by the same two guys who run 4 other themed restaurants in central London, all established in the last 3 years....go figure... I have little choice but to cynically assume E. Mishkin is a marketeer's fictive creation. Which is fine. My sources tell me that Ronald McDonald isn't real either.

Except that the legend of Ezra Mishkin goes on to describe Ezra, shivering over a bowl of soup and pondering desperately his flight from the Ukraine, to escape being murdered - as his parents had been. Class: chuck in some murdered 19th Century Jews to give your restaurant some personality. Now that's cool.

Don't get me wrong. This is not bad taste on a Clarkson scale - though really who takes Jeremy Clarkson seriously anyway? (He's a paunchy middle-aged attention seeking bloke who says provocative things to help his career - just ignore him if he bothers you.) However it is, to me, proof that the food doesn't stand up on its own, and needs the whole 'back story' thing built around it - which is a shame. More attention to bread, less attention to cutesy, pretentious wank, please.

If you are the type of punter who loves a trendy contrived narrative to go with your trendy contrived menu, then, as they actually do say at Katz's deli, 'enjoy...'

On the other hand, if you are in Covent Garden and crave decent old-fashioned European kind of Jewish food, your money would be better spent at The Delaunay - the newly opened restaurant by the folk who brought you The Wolseley.

The Delaunay is gorgeous, grand and elegant - though not quite as buzzy or pretty as The Wolseley. I didn't take photos as it's really not that sort of place (Gordon Ramsay, Janet Street Porter, and possibly Shelley Von Strunkel were all there on the night we were.)

The food is good enough. We ordered a cheese-stuffed weiner, and a cheese-stuffed bacon wrapped weiner, purely so we could engage in a lengthy conversation about weiners with our poor waiter. The weiners were delicious - proper well done trash food, served with amazing waxy potatoes in a grainy mustard dressing. The side dishes (sprouts with chestnuts, carrots with ginger) lacked seasoning. The puddings were disappointing (pear and blackcurrant millefeuille thin and slightly soggy - not a patch on Pierre's millefeuille). The two sittings next to us both ordered the Salzburg Souffle for 2 which looked absolutely spectacular - a giant, golden puffed up colossus, with a soft middle - resembling a cross between a Baked Alaska and a souffle.

I probably wouldn't hurry back - not because it's not good, but because it's Wolseley light, or actually Wolsey dark - darker room, less lively. Next time I'm in Covent Garden, I'm going to Benito's Hat for a burrito: my cash isn't paying for the interior design, and I know the food's going to taste delicious.

Call me old fashioned and Jewish, but isn't that the point?

Happy Saturday

2011-11-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

First on the ice at Somerset House (skating like a drunken newborn foal.)

Pretty-pretty Tiffany Christmas tree and matching cupcake:

And champagne tea at No 1 Aldwych, with free refills on sandwiches (chicken & mustard mayo, egg mayo & cucumber, smoked salmon & cream cheese, plus mini Welsh rarebit.)

There's nothing I like more in life than free sandwich refills.

Except perhaps warm scones with clotted cream and berry jam, served with a perfect mini apple and almond trifle on the side, like a custard-y chaser.

Or even a trio of cakes:

A trio of cakes: the only thing better than a trio of cakes would be a trio of Trios. I miss Trios.

And the icing on the cake/s? All of the above was hosted by a man of such charm and good humour that he was willing to balance Battenburg cake in his ears, like a demented Princess Leia, just to make me and my friend laugh.

Bread - or why the Dukan and I shall ne'er be friends

2011-11-19T01:49:00.000-08:00

I love bread so much I rarely have it at home. I simply can't delay my own gratification - I go full on Homer and eat entire loaves without pausing for breath.

Recently a friend brought me round a still-warm loaf of home-made caraway rye. Feeling the heat through the wrapping induced a wave of happiness I hadn't experienced since I found out that I was right about whodunit in The Killing. And I'd been right since the first episode! (The fact that I'd changed my mind in every subsequent episode is entirely beside the point.)

But just because I rarely have bread at home doesn't mean I don't eat it pretty much every day. I recently went to a food event - the highlight of which was these bad boys:

Jazzy bread hands, with a wild garlic butter, made by artist Sharon Baker, who casts other body parts in bread too - like these scary hands and feet which, come to think of it, might work well dipped into jam or honey. The last time I dipped my toes in some honey, my breakfast companion said it wasn't the done thing at The Wolseley. What is it with young men nowadays? They embarrass so easily.

Anyway, these particular mitts were pretty tasty - the fingers were a little firm, but the palms were beautiful: soft, white cloud innards with a delicious chewy crust. Almost as good as this bread:

Boiled eggs and soldiers at The St John Hotel

- which I like for two reasons. Firstly, I love the size of this bread. If I were a Guardian arts journalist, I'd mention how the juxtaposition of form, the elongation of what is essentially the humblest and most democratising of foods, is playfully extended, in the best tradition of post-modernism, to act as metaphor for consumer society - the Hummer of toasts, etc. However I'm not a pseud, so I shall merely say I LOVE BIG LONG WHITE BREAD THAT MAKES LOTS & LOTS OF SOLDIERS.

The second reason I love this bread is that it is smothered in the saltiest paste imaginable - made of anchovies, shallots, vinegar and capers. My whole life seems to be one long Arthurian quest to seek out as much tasty salt and fat as I can find, and ingest it promptly thereafter, and this breakfast meets my needs admirably.

Paris - good taste, good taste, bad.

2011-09-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

La Grande Epicerie in Le Bon Marche, makes me want to move to Paris. That, Pierre Herme's praline millefuille, and a million other reasons.

I think it might be my favourite food hall. Dean and Deluca in New York is great but always too crowded at the front. Eataly is spaghetti Disneyland, but you could lose your mind in there. Harrods is full of people who shop at Harrods. Besides, I've never seen a purple eclair at any of the aforementioned: jolie, or what?

This cake looked a little Blue Peter, but I admired the lack of restraint nonetheless:

But really it's the produce that dazzles:

The produce and the wall of butter.

You know I'm partial to a little too much butter.

Other things Paris does with some style - flowers:

Stairs:

Staircase up to the gazebo in the new Mandarin Oriental hotel

Parks:

Jardin du Luxembourg

But strangely not handbags.

I have a lot of time for ironic cats, truly I do. Nonetheless this monstrosity is a bridge too far / too fur. (Can I get away with that pun?) And it costs over 750 euros.

Makes sense when I tell you that it comes from Colette. I've said everything that needs to be said about Colette in Pear-shaped. Emperors-new-clothes, except the emperor couldn't afford them.

The Pierre Herme Praline Millefeuille - worth the remortgage

2011-09-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

The absolute best cake in the world - mythical, ridiculous, the stuff of dreams. I once had a two day migraine and the only thing that cured it was one of these:

This slice of super-awesomeness is worth walking an hour across Paris for, it is worth queueing round the corner when you get there for, and it is worth the money: 6 euros and 90 cents.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that small cake is nearly £7, so I do not say the above lightly, yet it is true. He is joined here today by his compadre, the Infinitely Vanilla Millefeuille - who is perhaps better looking:

and certainly none too shabby in the eating:

Regardez - his luscious, vanilla pod-flecked cream.

Nonetheless it is the Praline Millefeuille (aka 2000 Feuilles) that has the edge: super flaky, crisp, golden-to-the-point-of-caramelisation thin pastry, trying to keep in check the world's most rampantly divine praline cream, scattered with feuilletine - crunchy little shards that cut through the thickness and offer up a holy trinity of texture - flaky, creamy and crunchy.

Don't these two make a pretty pair?

So good we tried to eat the cardboard PH on top, even after we realised it was cardboard.

The best house in the world

2011-09-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a short trip to France, staying in the loveliest house in the world.

This is the house that features in Pear-shaped, when Sophie and James go to France. It belongs to my friends Sophie and Sean who very generously let me stay there and make up all sorts of rude shennanigans*. The house has this cool window onto the swimming pool that I am a bit obsessed with.

It's in a tiny village on the river Aude, in the Languedoc - very pretty:

But more importantly home of some exceptional wine, like this bone dry pale rose Pinot Gris from Gerard Bertrand. Bertrand is an ex international rugby player, looks like super-fox Vincent Cassel and is one of France's best wine-makers, working in an area called La Clape (insert cheap joke here.)

We went to his vineyard and restaurant, L'Hospitalet, in the hills above Narbonne, for lunch.

The chef there sure likes to gussy up a tomato:

But not as much as the chef at the place we went to for dinner, La Distellerie (both meals excellent.)

But here's what I like to do best with a tomato:

Sprinkle salt on it and eat alongside a piece of still warm freshly baked baguette, a thin spread of butter and a slightly thicker spread of Boursin style garlicky cream cheese. Then retire to the pool with a Kate Atkinson, a cold glass of wine and the anticipation of The Thick of It on DVD for when the sun goes down. Simple pleasures. Simple pleasures with butter and Malcolm Tucker.

*When my mother found out I was returning to this house, she asked if I was going to be gallivanting around naked and getting involved in weird Barbie doll role play, as per the book. Aside from the fact that last time I went to the house was with my mate Mavis, with whom there was zero nudity, my mother seems convinced that everything I write is true. I'm not sure whether to be insulted or flattered: does my mum think I'm entirely lacking in the powers of imagination, or is it some sort of backhanded compliment - my writing is so vivid she cannot BELIEVE it is not real. Hmmm. Wait till she reads the scene I've cooked up with Vincent Cassel, Alec Baldwin and me in a hot tub, in book two. Then I'm really going to get an earful...

The Waterside Inn: Back to '89

2011-08-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

Actually more like back to '84, when Duty Free was the raciest show on TV, and Banjo bars were a regular feature in my life. Pure mid 80s time warp: that's what it feels like walking in to The Waterside Inn. Not in a bad way; just in a major way.

The Waterside Inn has held 3 Michelin stars longer than any other restaurant in the UK. It is run by a Roux (Alain - cousin of Michel Roux Jr. from Masterchef, son of Michel Roux Sr - who along with his brother started Le Gavroche - my favourite posh restaurant in London.) The Waterside Inn is in beautiful surroundings on the Thames, in Bray, even in the rain:

and it is breath-takingly expensive for the a la carte menu (£103 for a main course, anyone?) However, it does have a set lunch for £58 - a comparative / veritable bargain. (It was my birthday. Besides, you also get temporary use of a colourful array of pashminas to protect against the cool August wind. You don't get that in Nandos now, do you?)

And, the food is amazing - amazing, and stuff I would never be able to make at home.

For canapes you are served these beauties:

which in close up look like this:

There's smoked eel, a very salty anchovy cheese straw, something with capers and tarragon on a lettuce leaf - all delicious.

Then for a starter: a duet of salmon gravadlax and tartare with beetroot salad and wasabi sauce.

A main of super rare spit roasted beef rump fillet, garnished with a terrine of braised shin, potato and girolle croquette, and a red wine gravy, sorry, jus....

A pudding of creme brulee (where are the acute accents on this thing...grrr) with praline, and almond ice cream. So a perfect, rich, vanilla cream, with hidden swathes of posh Nutella running through, alongside a dense, perfectly white fragrant ice cream that feels like dense snow against your teeth.

And finally an array of beautiful petit fours, and coffee (included in the price. And I did have 5 cups of coffee to get my moneysworth. And to sober up from the two bottles of Michel Roux rose wine - delicious and only £30.)

A lavender macaroon, just about one of the prettiest things ever, and on Justin-Custard-Doughnut-Man's menu for his final supper.:

But not as beautiful as this mini raspberry tart, which is a lot like the one in Pear-Shaped that Sophie wears on her head for the Tarts party... This one went straight in the mouth - unfortunately in the mouth of my companion...

Everything we ate was utterly delicious. Plus the service was phenomenal, and the waiters flirted with us just the right amount.

It's the perfect place to go with your in-laws / an old aunt / anyone who loves food, on a special occasion.

The St John Custard Doughnut - all hail the master

2011-08-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

As previously discussed the St John Custard Doughnut is a mythical creation, a thing of beauty,* and one of the best treats in London. It does things to your tongue and your brain that are illegal in several American states.**

It is also proof to me that there is a God, in this case a pastry God, in the form of Justin Piers Gellatly, Executive Baker and Head Pastry Chef of the St John empire. Starting out at 15 washing dishes, he’s worked in the business for 23 years, the last 11 of them with Fergus Henderson at St John.

As well as being in charge of St John’s legendary breads, now served at over 30 top London restaurants, Justin looks after all their baked goods. He recently did a spot of catering for a certain royal wedding – 2000 rolls – toasted rye, white sourdough and raisin - plus some buttery buns for the morning after bacon sarnies. And he is the inventor of THAT Doughnut.

First things first, Justin wanted a brioche-inspired, buttery dough. He uses Lescure, a French butter with a low water content and drier texture, to ensure perfect consistency. The finished dough combines strong white bread flour, butter, salt, sugar, eggs, yeast, water and lemon zest, which lifts and offsets the dense rich custard inside perfectly.

Strong white bread flour. Great packaging, no?

Justin trialled around 50 doughs over 6 months in development, encountering over-exuberant yeast and exploding doughnuts along the way.

The custard was a different story and he nailed it first time. He mixed 50% Crème Patissiere (to chefs, what concrete is to builders - Raymond Blanc) with 50% Crème Chantilly (double cream mixed with sugar and vanilla.) The result is a luscious thick, rich yet light vanilla dream. It has a fullness to it that feels as satisfying on your tongue as a water balloon in your palm.

When Justin presented the finished prototype to his boss, there were nearly tears in Fergus’s eyes.

Justin and his team now bake 500 donuts at a time for St John Bakery in Bermondsey on a Saturday morning, and another 100 for St John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields on a Sunday morning.

St John Bakery at the end of the Saturday shift, not a doughnut left in sight...

The dough is prepared the night before and given a 24 hour bulk fermentation (the doughnuts are kept as one large lump of dough, so that the flavour can develop fully.)

Tomorrow's bread, proving today

The custard is made in the wee small hours of the morning. The dough is divided and rolled into 47g balls, left to double in size in the prover for two hours, then arranged in batches of 25 per proving tray – then fried quickly in vegetable oil.

Justin, Executive Baker, with a proving tray, which holds 25 dough balls

After a brief pat with a paper towel, each doughnut is given a good roll around in sugar, left to cool, then hand-piped to bursting, full of custard.

At close of play there are never any doughnuts left. Not one. Ever.

If I worked in this bakery I’d be fired on day one for eating the stock. How often does Justin allow himself a taste of his own confections? Turns out he hasn’t eaten a custard doughnut for a few months. That’s the thing about gods; way more will power than us mortals.

‘I crave cornichons!’ he says by way of explanation. It does make a certain sense – a salty, acidic, sour counterbalance to the richest, creamiest sweetest puff of joy imaginable.

If you are brave and want to try recreating these at home, the recipe can be found in Beyond Nose To Tail. If I were you, I’d leave it to the doughnut masters. Just get here early.

Mini Q&A with Justin, the Doughnut Master:

Perfect accompaniment to a St John Custard Doughnut: A glass of champagne

Favourite London restaurant, aside from St Johns: Anchor and Hope, Waterloo

Last supper:

Guests – My wonderful wife Louise Jane Gellatly

A few glasses of Krug with some crab meat toast

Wine with the meal - a chilled red (Brouilly)

Starter – Confit Rabbit Nicoise salad (Anchor and Hope)

Main – Grilled Onglet, chips, watercress salad and béarnaise sauce (very heavy on the tarragon )

Dessert- Custard tart

Cheese- Roquefort , Water Biscuits and Ruby port.

Earl Grey Tea, violet macaroons and chilled Poire William

Calvados and cigars

* Keats, who wrote Endymion (first line ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever…’) used to live a stone’s throw from St John Bakery, in Tooley Street.
**Did you know it is illegal to own a ferret as a pet in California and Hawaii?

Jose on Bermondsey Street - part II

2011-08-15T13:35:00.000-07:00

Second trip to Jose, even better than the first, in spite of the fact that I had to stand throughout the meal as they only have 17 chairs, and I gifted my friend the 17th. The only other place I happily eat standing is McDonalds and on those rare guilty-pleasure occasions I'm invariably drunk.

I am all class.

Highlights were the ever-changing tortilla, today smoked paprika and peppers. Smoky, sweet, tender, delicious:

Phenomenal prawns with chilli and garlic, this time with their clothes on:

And spectacular ham and cheese croquettas, that make it on to my uber-list:

Finally spicy, tasty lamb meatballs in a beautiful fresh, sweet, vibrant tomato sauce:

All delicious and simple - high quality raw ingredients, executed perfectly.

The proof's in!

2011-08-06T16:53:00.000-07:00

Moving swiftly on from Francis Ford Coppola's immodesty, check out the title page of my first proof for Pear-Shaped! So exciting. Not sure what to do vis-a-vis a hyphen...

San Fran Redux

2011-08-06T16:48:00.000-07:00

San Francisco, just like I pictured it.

More giant produce, this time a Brussel sprout - not a cabbage, a Brussel sprout:

We stayed in Pacific Heights, one of the most beautiful areas of a generally beautiful city, and home to some of the grander mansions such as this:

You can even drive around the 'hood with Zillow on your iPhone, looking at how much each house cost. Extraordinary - everything from $3.4 to $33.9 million. This one was weird - note the metal dude on the left:

Zillow doesn't report how much for this poor doggy in the window:

Highlights of the trip included this beautiful heart-shaped wine at Chez Panisse:

These tomatoes at the Castro Farmer's Market, and these amazing summer squashes:

An eight ball, San Fran style:

I could happily work in this store:

Seriously, beer, bourbon and hummus - winning combo.

We had amazing Catalan food at Contigo in Noe Valley where Ottolenghi had been the week earlier so we knew we were on to a good thing. This is a corn, bacon and cheese pizzette. I think corn and bacon is as winning a combo as darn near anything:

Not sure how Spanish a corn and bacon pizza is but anyway, it was delish. Also amazing clams and bacon:

Tartine is an award-winning bakery everyone raves about. Be prepared to queue. My still-warm orange, cinnamon breakfast bun was a moment of unmitigated joy:

Tartine Morning Bun

Their other cakes are mighty purty too:

We took a little trip over to Hog Island Oyster Farm, in Tomales Bay, an estuary about an hour's drive north of the City. A perfect day - a handsome man

super-fresh oysters

and triple-cream cheese spread thickly on wild sourdough:

Hog Island Farm is basically a super-hipster weird hillbilly oyster rave in the middle of nowhere.

Then from one extreme to another. We drove inland across to Sonoma, wine country, and popped first to Ridge, a vineyard famous for its fancy shmancy Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon blend.

Within an hour we've gone from cold, roughneck and barnacle-y to hot, posh and super-sleek. And then on to the awesome-est place of all - Francis Ford Coppola's winery, Disney Wine Vegas, a shrine to all things Coppola:

This place is fully hilaire. Luscious country club

meets mega-brand merchandising opportunity

Apocalypse Now - in liquid form. The horror...

meets shrine to immodesty:

Who, little old me?

Although how cool is this?

and this?

And how very uncool this:

Kirsten Dunst channeling like Marie Antoinette, duh...

Can't wait to have my own vineyard.

America - land of food as big as your head, and bigger.

2011-07-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

God Bless America. I love this country. I'm currently in California. If I lived in California I'd be morbidly obese because of stuff like this:

but also this:

Hard to show scale here - I did try re-arranging the papayas, to little avail.

Seriously, you don't stand a chance when even a healthy choice like a papaya is super-sized.

These papayas were in Ralphs supermarket, where the shelves resemble this Andreas Gursky photo that I love, which sold for £1.7 million, making it the most expensive photo ever sold.

I get a bit Rainman when I'm in American supermarkets. I just love this sort of shit:

and check out this selection of pickles:

So much beauty in too much choice.

I actually went to Ralphs to check on a couple of things in the book. Firstly, their selection of Ben and Jerry's. Am delighted to report back on this Limited Edition flavour with an excellent pun title:

My list of dream jobs goes as follows:

AA Gill's job
Chief namer of new Ben and Jerry's flavours
Tina Fey's joke sounding board
Alec Baldwin's cleaner
Writer on The Simpsons / The Onion

The other reason I entered Ralphs was to look at their cakes. In Pear-Shaped, Sophie goes to Ralphs in a state of heartbreak, looking for a sugary treat, and is paralysed by choice. She looks at the cakes and they all look too big / too fake. I wanted to check that I was on the right track - given that the book is in final proof stage, it's a bit late to start fact checking, but hey ho... Anyway, am happy to report they sell exactly the sort of over-sized, over-fussed up baked goods that I'd imagined, comme ca:

Where is Dan Big Hands when you need him? These cakes look normal sized, but they are not. They are grotesque, gigantique, gargantuan, fundamentally gross parodies of normal cakes.

Finally, I leave you with what I find a sinister line-up:

As you know America is a litigious nation, so I shall reserve my jokes for another time, another place. For now let's just give thanks that we are not chickens at the mercy of Chef Emeril's Chicken Rub.

Wellcome Dirt, and Da Polpo

2011-07-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

London in the summer: it's rained for ten minutes ever half hour since 9 this morning. The only thing to do on a day like today is be cultural and stuff one's face.

We popped in to the Wellcome in Euston to see the exhibition on Dirt. I love the Wellcome - it's always got something fascinating on, the space is great, they have these beautiful lights in the coffee shop that change colour

and the Peyton and Byrne concession has very good coffee and these endearing Hazlenut Bears, competing with the more conventionally attractive Gingerbread Men for one's affections.

The exhibition itself was good - quite a lot of faeces involved, some grim stuff from 1930s Germany and some good quotes on the wall in a font I like:

We then headed to Covent Garden to try out Da Polpo, sister restaurant to Polpo, Polpetto, and Spuntino. This family's growing, fast. Da Polpo's definitely my favourite member.

Partly because the staff were fantastic - charming, knowledgeable, friendly; partly because the room is really relaxed and calm - far less effortful than Spuntino, and not as crammed as Polpo.

But mostly because the food is more consistent and coherent.

We had a couple of the cicheti, small bites - an arancini that was ok (not as good as the ones at Bocca) and a betta crocchetta, with parmesan and potato.

Then we had two pizzette, small pizzas. These are not like Pizza Express small pizzas, which seem to shrink every year. Rather, they're thin, crisp and light, with delicious toppings. Spuntino does a good line in them, and Da Polpo offers even more. Totally delicious. One bianco, with red onion and mozzarella,

and one with soft egg, spinach and parmesan

I asked my companion Dan to put his finger next to the pizzetta, so you can see the scale, but Dan has big hands and you wouldn't necessarily be able to judge it. He said it's 12 inches across. He would. I'd say it was 10.

My favourite thing was this super-simple shaved fennel, curly endive and toasted almond salad in a light lemony dressing:

The only slightly under-whelming dish was these meatballs, made with chickpeas, spinach and ricotta

which to be fair I take the blame for, as I don't see the point of meat-free meatballs. Just call them balls, or veg balls or something. And then don't order them. (Although the tomato sauce in which they were covered was excellent - very fresh, clean and sweet tasting.)

We ate loads and the bill was less than £13 a head, including service. A very strong 8.5/10.

One other noteworthy point - in the ladies' loos (I cannot vouch for the men's on this occasion) - if you look up, you can see people walking over your head on the glass in the pavement above, which is mildly unnerving.

Morito

2011-07-17T11:04:00.000-07:00

Morito is the little offshoot tapas bar of Moro, the excellent Moorish restaurant on Exmouth Market. Moro is consistently great, and consistently busy / booked up, so having a walk-in place next door is a good idea.

We went to see Sylvie Guillem at Sadlers Wells and popped in here beforehand. (I know sweet f.a. about ballet, but I've seen Sylvie Guillem dance twice before, and she is mesmerising - her body's like a ribbon. I want to be her almost more than I want to be Tina Fey.)

We were in a bit of a rush eating and I forgot to write down details but in essence we ate this:

Bread basket - good - 7.5/10, particularly the flatbreads

which come with a little dish of sumac, salt, chilli, and a fennel related arrangement,

and which were delicious served with this pretty, pretty beetroot, feta and dill dip (I love dill deeply.)

The absolute stand-out dish was the chickpeas - super moreish - crispy, crunchy salty little explosions, on a bed of fresh, sharp cucumber and tomato.

Ottolenghi has tried to recreate the dish - he fries the chickpeas, although I wonder if they've been roasted and then fried - not sure. I shall return to this recipe at a later date and try it myself.

We ate this delicious, tender pork with peppers

and these phenomenal spicy salty Mojo potatoes, which had coriander and chilli - and were very similar to the potatoes I ate in Lanzarote after I broke my finger when a surf board fell on me.

The chickpeas and the Mojo potatoes were exceptional and I'll be coming back for both. I'll try Ottolenghi's version of the chickpeas and report on how close it is, and I'm going to hunt down a recipe for these bad boys too.

Between here, Jose, Brindisa, Dehesa, The Salt Yard, Barrafina and Opera Tavern, Londoners are getting pretty damn spoilt on the high-quality tapas front. Now if only there was a similar flourishing of places serving top-notch made-at-the-table guacamole, I'd be very happy indeed.

Jose on Bermondsey Street

2011-07-09T17:25:00.000-07:00

Jose Pizarro's new tapas and sherry bar, which opened a few weeks ago on Bermondsey Street, is great. I'll keep it short, as I went to a second tapas bar, Morito, for dinner after lunch here today and there's only so much small plate action a girl can take.

First things first, I love Bermondsey Street - the buildings are beautiful and quirky and modern and mixed up and cool, and they come in great colours:

Very spring / summer '11, this sort of putty colour. Never did it for me in H&M, but it works on a building.

There's a couple of very good pubs, the fantastic Garrison restaurant which serves a mean steak and chips:

gorgeous little boutiques, the Fashion and Textile Museum, a great looking Vietnamese coffee shop, the awesome London Glassblowing Studio on Bermondsey Street where they have beautiful objects such as this:

...and then you pull back a block and realise you're a stone's throw from The Shard.

which may become less hideous at night when it's lit up, or when it's finished, we shall see. Anyway, Jose is on the corner of Bermondsey Street and Morocco Street.

I want to live in this building off Morocco Street. I love Flatiron style buildings, they always remind me of wedges of cheese.

Get to Jose a few minutes before it opens at midday or you'll have to queue. We got there just in the nick of time as it was instantly rammed.

It's very little, which I think is a good thing. Easy to say when you've got a seat and aren't having to queue.

Everything we ate was delicious and extremely well executed.

You get a little jar of crispy crunchy broad beans, or haba in Spanish. At least I think that's what our waiter said, I was pretty much tipsy from the moment I sat down and started necking white rioja. I'm a totally crap daytime drinker but decided to embrace the concept of the siesta, what with it being a beautiful sunny day and all.

We had the tortilla, which was made with honey, walnut, aubergine and blue cheese. Normally I like my tortilla's pretty much straight up potato, onion, no chaser - but this really was delicious.

Then we had some more wine and some stuff and I think judging from my photos these are almost definitely prawns with garlic and chilli:

They look like they're spooning, don't they? Very romantic.

Also some Iberica ham. Salt and fat, salt and fat - what is not to love about salt and fat?

Bread and tomato. Jose's rendition was faultless - super fresh tomato, clean flavours, perfect slightly soggy bread with fruity olive oil on it. So simple and so pleasing, I could have eaten another five portions. I should have eaten another five portions because I can't remember what else we ate...Oh well, them's the breaks.

I do know that after a very good caffe con leche we went and sat in the park and stuffed St John custard donuts in our gobs, which was the perfect end to a perfect morning.

Then off home for a siesta before doing it all again.....

Maltby Street

2011-07-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

You know that feeling that you're the last to know about something? I hate that feeling. Like on Popbitch when someone would post 'corn', a scathing response to some gossip that was as old as the repeal of the Corn Laws. (I secretly liked 'corn' as a diss - it meant those two years doing GCSE history weren't wasted after all.)

Maltby Street's been on my radar for ages, since my old flatmate Slash (not that Slash, though I did meet that Slash in LA years ago and he was terribly nice) mentioned it, in a 'I'm surprised you don't know about Maltby Street when all you ever do is talk about your next meal,' kind of way.

Strictly speaking I'm probably not the last to know, as Maltby Street still feels like a well-kept secret and is joyously un-rammed, unlike Borough Market, which now permanently feels like Thorpe Park on August Bank Holiday weekend.

The nearest tube is London Bridge, home of THE MASSIVE CHARMLESS SHARD, which is not any prettier close up than from a distance.

Maltby Street actually refers to two stretches of railway arches about 5 minutes walk from London Bridge, which house some fantastic food retailers / wholesalers.

We started with a coffee in the sunshine outside Monmouth Coffee. There's such a relaxed atmosphere - it's very low-key and communal - couples, families, grannies, fashionable Scandinavians, the odd super-hipster with silly glasses and pale pink pedal pushers.

We walked past these rather impressive goat's curd and garlic confit crostini, 50p a pop, at 40 Maltby Street.

and past various arches owned by Lassco, the architectural salvage company, with random things like these old radiators

and these cinema chairs for sale:

Among these arches are fabulous little shops like Mons, which sells delicious French cheeses

and Fern Verrow

who sell biodynamically farmed seasonal produce like these plump, perfect broad beans

and these slim fennel, which look almost alien:

If you then walk through to Druid Street, you get to this lot:

More fantastic meat, sausages, cheeses:

and breads:

Most exciting for me are these guys:

The St John Bakery, which is only open to the public on a Saturday, sells their fabulous bread:

but more importantly one of my favourite things in the world, the St John custard donut.

I know it's pathetic to post two such similar pictures, but I honestly love these donuts so much I couldn't bear not to put both on here...

I'm coming back next week to spend some time here with the King of Donuts, Justin - if I don't die of excitement in the mean time.

After our little adventure, we rushed back over to Bermondsey Street for 11.55, to queue outside Jose in time for midday opening, more of which forthwith...

Spuntino - with a side order of hype

2011-06-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

When restaurants are this achingly trendy it's difficult not to turn up expecting too much, or too little. People rave about Spuntino, but then again people rave about the film Crash, or the burgers at GBK.

I'll admit I have baggage, from a night at Polpo, Spuntino's sister restaurant, where the staff were arsey and the food distinctly average.

I came expecting to be irritated by the self-consciousness of Spuntino's hipster styling.

I'd been to Torrisi in New York, the most painfully fashionable small-plates Italian restaurant in the universe only last month. I'd queued like a desperate BAPE fan on the first day of the sale. While the food at Torrisi was generally excellent, the whole 'fun / drama' of waiting in the street for an hour to see if you can get a table is a bit, well, boring. So I guess maybe I have two sets of baggage.

While I do think Spuntino wears its fashionability a tad awkwardly, like a lime green jump-suit, overall I was pleasantly surprised. Not amazed or bowled over; but we had mostly really good food, and a very good time.

It's cute. It's shticky. They give you free spicy popcorn, they have rough brown packing paper menus, featuring a a variety of Italian, American, French and British dishes. I can't think of another menu in town that has pizzetta, grits, Croque Monsieur and egg & soldiers all on the same menu. It's a little confused about its identity, but then again aren't we all. The barmen look like they've been dragged away from a Fleet Foxes gig for the night. One of them wears a vest so low that if he were your daughter you'd send him back to his bedroom and tell him to put some clothes on.

Like Polpo, it's all about small plates. When did small plates get so big? I don't mean big as in filling, I mean big as in ubiquitous. And why is no-one pointing out the Emperor's New Clothes element of the London restaurant scene? Small plates = big business because you have to order lots. You spend more for less. I'm sure Stringer Bell would be running a Cicchetti bar if he was here with us now.

Anyway, on to the food. You're greeted with the aforementioned small mug of popcorn. Compare and contrast to Gilbert Scott who charge a cover just for average bread. Then we had farmhouse cheddar grits - probably the only duff call of the order. It was neither cheesy nor gritty, but more like a bland and pointless encounter with an unidentified carb (and yes, I do know it's actually corn.)

Then eggplant* chips, fennel yoghurt. Eggplant is what they call aubergines in Billyburg, grandma. Do keep up.

Then my favourite, a fennel, fig and olive pizzetta. This was delicious - light, salty, fresh tasting, good dough. I tucked in before I remembered to take a photo (I am so entirely over taking photos in restaurants.)

And then a fresh slaw, made up of julienned asparagus, red onion, red cabbage, fennel and pickled celeriac in a light lemon dressing. Fresh, delicious, crunchy - very good.

And a ricotta, pea and radish crostini, which was pleasant enough, although I'd had a killer broad bean puree bruschetta earlier at lunch here one of my favourite gastropubs which was tastier.

The puddings were really good. One brown sugar cheesecake with grappa prunes, one chocolate, pecan and whisky cake, two happy eaters.

We came on the hottest Sunday night of the year. Glasto Sunday. The cool kids have left town, so we didn't have to queue, like you apparently do every other night. Would I come back and queue for this restaurant? No. Would I come back? Sure, why not. It's good. Would I think about anything I ate here after the event, would I crave it the way I crave the spicy sausage pasta round the corner at Bocca di Lupo. No. But if you come out of the clip joint next door after a depressing paid-for sex act and you have a desperate craving for truffled egg on toast, then this is definitely your best bet.

Verdict? Generally a force for good, excellent desserts and pizzetta, but must try-hard a little less hard.

Gilbert Scott and Fashionable Cornflakes

2011-06-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

I've decided I hate taking photos of plates of food in restaurants for the following reasons:

It gets in the way of eating the food.

It makes you look like a nob-head.

It makes you feel like a nob-head.

I think, going forward, I shall formulate an absolute back-to-basics, topline review system that doesn't make me feel like a douche. But I think photos are sort of necessary nonetheless. You'll be able to tell I took these in a bit of an anguished hurry, hence the distracting shadows at the bottom of pic.

So, Gilbert Scott - what do you need to know?
1. The room is beautiful. Look up at the ceiling, utterly magnificent.
2. They charge a silly £2 cover charge for bread that's a 7 out of 10. Not cool. The restaurant is expensive as it is, there's really no need for this.
3. The food is very very good. 8 out of 10. Service - a 7. A bit slow, a tiny bit snotty but nothing you could really pin down.

We had a spatchcock chicken with lemon and herbs - tasty but not much to get your teeth into, and I always feel sorry for the chicken's undignified pose.

Also the globe artichoke and tarragon tart. I think I love tarragon more than any other herb (apart from dill, basil, coriander and lemon verbena.)

Pretty, but pretty small.

The sides were exemplary. Perfectly crispy crunchy roast potatoes with fluffy insides. No photo, but I guess you're familiar with the visual appearance of a roast potato.

Perfect Yorkshire puds - super light inside, crisp outside, really excellent.

Then for pudding Mrs Beeton's snow eggs - a victim of their own success I fear. My expectation was probably too high - I thought they were only so-so / snow-snow... (sorry.)

And finally 'Warm Chocolate in a Pot, Chocolate Cornflakes.' I must congratulate the Tarzan / Jane-like description on the menu. It was some molten chocolate, covered in a chocolate soil / crumb, with some cornflakes on top.

Cornflakes are so hot right now I'm surprised Kim Kardashian isn't getting a vajazzle of the Kellogg's cock applied as we speak. Maybe she is, I guess I wouldn't know. Either way, I'm a firm believer in everything in its right place, and this wasn't it. Pleasing enough, in that you can't go too far wrong with warm dark chocolate, but just not really complementing the dish.

Verdict - definitely worth a visit, good for a special occasion, stunning room, delicious but expensive.

El Bulli - bye for now :-(

2011-06-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

I was unbelievably lucky enough to go to El Bulli two years ago, and wrote about it at the time. As it's about to shut I thought I'd post it here because it was such an extraordinary experience.

When my Dad managed to score a table at El Bulli, The Best Restaurant in the World, I was in two minds about going. Yes, food is my life, my three-hourly obsession, one of the greatest sources of joy in the universe. But I’m as happy eating a Corner Bistro cheeseburger as a girl can ever be, and I don’t hold much truck with jus and foam and truffles. I like simple stuff done well. But then again, 50 covers, a million applications for tables – yeah, I’d be an idiot not to say yes. Plus, I’d just finished writing my first novel and was heading back to a desk job and a summer of serious, sensible behaviour. I’d do my first day back at work, then fly to Spain for supper to console myself.

I apologise for the non-technical nature of this review. I don’t speak in the vocabulary of reductions and sous-vides. I’m just telling it like I tasted it – increasingly weirded out, a little bit drunk on amazing Cava and Albarino, and with the added oddness of thinking my Dad was going to have a medical incident from course 17 through to course 36 (more of that later.)

First things first – the setting: ridiculously picturesque, beautiful, dream-like. It smells of cedar and pine, it’s overlooking the deep blue sea, the sun is setting; it's awesome.

We had a look at the kitchen - more like a lab, with 45, yep, 45 chefs clustered round the counter, silently labouring. We met the boss, Ferran Adria - intense, polite, a genius. And then we're off:

You start with nibbles and cocktails on the terrace. In my house this is the hour of the Pringle, and if you're lucky a gin and tonic. In Casa Ferran, it's the start of the fireworks.

First, a mojito, and a caipirinha - in canape form. You take a 2 inch piece of sugar cane out of a glass of ice and suck it. The former has fresh mint, the latter, fresh lime zest. It's cool, fun, wouldn't get you drunk but hey. Then, on a wiggly, metallic silver freeform dish, is served a wiggly, translucent ‘crystal of parmegiano’ - looks like molten plastic, tastes totally delicious.

Then it's five things at once:

Mimetic peanuts - supermagic. Looks like a monkey nut, you delicately put it in your mouth and it explodes in a pure, thick, almost treacly peanut taste sensation.

Olives made of olive oil - spooned out of a jar, they're olive shaped, olive sized, and made of olive oil. They keep their shape, it's a great trick, not necessarily one worth repeating.

Cherries umeboshi – a perfect balance of sweet and sour - great.

Black and white sesame disc - Karl Lagerfield-y, tastes like a cloud.

Vanilla 'cellophane' - again with the translucence - see through sheets of vanilla, save for the black dots of the pods. Interesting, technically brilliant - slightly odd to have vanilla at this stage in the proceedings, but good.

Darn – and I forgot ‘Coniferous’ – they bring you a little pot plant, and a glass of what looks like milk. You take a sprig of the plant – I’m sure I’m wrong but I’m guessing it was pine from the title…. Anyway, you eat the sprig, then drink your milkshake – gin, yoghurt and honey, and the pine zings. It’s a bit like drinking Glade, but better, but not great.

Then we moved to the table, and it was just relentless. Mostly in a brilliant, beautiful, breathtaking, insane, magic, fun, clever and entirely creative way. A couple of things weren't to my taste - inevitably - but for the next 3 hours you're just dazzled and entertained by the ideas and the execution and the love that has gone into this experience.

I'll keep it brief, there's a lot of it.

Cornet of nori with raspberry and soya – mini seaweed cone filled with intense raspberry flavour. Beautiful, tasty, not as good as Ben & Jerry's Half Baked.

Black sesame sponge cake with miso – looks like a piece of fozzy bear’s head, with a yellow daub of miso. We’re instructed to eat it in two bites, but I think I crammed it in in one – looks more interesting than it tastes.

Oyster leaf with dew of vinegar – awesome Jedi mind trick. A sage coloured leaf with 4 or 5 perfect droplets of vinegar resting on it. It looks like a leaf, it tastes like an oyster. You think ‘hmm, is this an oyster coated leaf? Is this an oyster that looks like a leaf? Is this a leaf that’s been cross-fertilised with an oyster? WTF is going on?’ Whatever it was, it was cooool.

Then Gorgonzola Moshi – a perfect, plump, small ball of cheese and cream that bursts in your mouth. Awesome mouth-feel, and a perfect size – any bigger would have been overkill.

Grilled strawberry – a hot strawberry injected with gin, and topped with juniper. I once dated a man who was injected with gin. I digress. It was ok – at this stage in the meal you get blasé about the fact that the juniper enhances the sweetness – almost actually enhances the pinkness – of the fruit.

Truffle surprise – two leaves, filled with crazy, curly shaved truffles, and smooth shaved truffles. I don’t like truffles (yeah, I know you can’t take me seriously as a foodie now but I just don’t) – but these were good.

Haricot bean with Joselito’s Iberian pork fat – Joselito, your pork fat is awesome! Can I sample your other fats? The dish looked like two fat slugs in a drizzle of dishwater.

It put my sister off, but I’ve eaten worse. Anyway, these giant beans and ham combo were great – like a mini cassoulet, deeply satisfying and savoury.

Prawn two firings, named after that scene in Goodfellas, perhaps. You couldn’t find a prawnier prawn on this earth – perfectly, briefly cooked, yet with fabulously crispy, crunchy legs, and served alongside a tiny spoon of garlic sauce, with a lilac garlic flower. Fabulous, deconstructed and delicious.

Mimetic almonds - this and The Egg are my favourites. They were the best combination of pyrotechnics and wit and deliciousness. They just made me think: Ferran Adria is audacious and funny and clever and brilliant and fearless and driven, and I am so lucky to be alive, and here, and eating this.

The almonds: a dish of various pale brown, cream, invisible (yes, transparent), and toffee coloured almonds. It’s like the Saddam-Hussein-lookalikes of almond dishes. A few of the almonds are real almonds, and you’d better believe they’re the best almonds you ever tasted. And then some of the almonds are actually dead-ringers for almonds, but are made from sesame. And then the see-through almonds taste of almonds but are made of magic. And the white almonds taste intensely of cherry. I think this is the stage in the proceedings where I felt most delighted / on drugs. It was just utterly brilliant.

After this course, my father – a giant of a man (6 foot 6), who carries the various strains of ageing – asks the waitress for a breather, and takes himself off for a walk. In my mother’s head, this translates to ‘my husband is about to have a coronary.’ She starts having kniptions. Her anxiety immediately infects me, to the point where I start believing that at any bite he might now cark it. I’m happy to report he is still alive and well, but it did make the second half of the meal a slightly weird experience.

Back to the food: mushroom CRU with hazlenut. I don’t know what the CRU means, but the dish was intensely woody, but lightened with a froth of hazlenut. Tasty and odd – the mushroom texture was entirely solid and smooth – like eating room-temperature marble.

Pumpkin and almond sandwich – cute and gimmicky – a three inch simulacrum of a baguette. The ‘bread’ part had the texture of Styrofoam. It was very futuristic and visually cool, but at this stage of the meal, you're so spoilt, you become toxically blase about anything that doesn't taste as exceptional as it looks.

Then Sea Anemone with Te – delicious – lemon caviar, kombu – very Sea-like and beautiful to look at.

Pinenut shabu-shabu – another brilliant visual trick – three tiny see through pouches, with variations on a pinenut theme – you dip each bag into a cup of what tasted like Riesling, and you get an intense nutty payoff.

Razor clam with seaweed – perfect, amazing textured, super fresh razor clams.

Trout roe risotto – beautiful little peachy-pink eggs, with a sliver of gold on top. It’s that David Cross thing of eating gold being the ultimate ‘Fuck you’ to poor people that was front of mind when I looked at this dish, not in a good way.

Sea cucumber with mentaiko and rhubarb – delicious, soft, beautiful flesh, sour, pungent rhubarb to compliment. I’m glad I googled sea cucumber after I ate it, cos man, that is one ugly holothuroidea.

Abalone – always reminds me of Roxy Music that word – with Iberian ham and enoki mushrooms – great textural combo of soft, solid, fat and salty.

Squid with foie fat and corn risotto – There is nothing I don’t love in this dish. Having said that, the finest foie gras / sweetcorn combo I ever had was at Mr Underhills – the awesome Ludlow restaurant that is one of the best experiences of food I’ve ever had.

Parmesan Ravioli – at this stage, you’re really going to have to work hard to impress the crowd – everything has tasted good, looked beautiful or cool, and you’re starting to feel like you need a new tummy. But Adria pulls it off, with another see-through dish, this time parmesan ravioli. The picture doesn’t do it justice, but it’s near invisible pockets of intense parmesan flavour. The best thing about the dish, apart from its party trick appearance, is the caper and coffee, that work brilliantly to intensify the flavour of the cheese. Who’d have thunk it.

Then on to suckling pig tail, three tiny little crispy crunchy pork treats, which come with a mini soup of ham and melon.

And then we’re in the final stretch, my dad is still breathing, and it’s pudding time.

We start with Pond. A mini ice-skating lake, covered in sugar crystals, and what lies beneath is a super-pepperminty pond, that you break the ice and dive in to.

Then mango ravioli – a perfect replica of an egg yolk – plump, juicy, and immediately dissolves in your mouth in a super-fruity celebratory burst.

Then Coco / aka The Egg, my other favourite, after the Saddam-Almonds. A giant, super-white egg arrives at the table. The waitress (staff were amazing, by the way) cracks the egg for you, and gives you a little shaker of curry powder, and you tuck into a frozen coconut milk egg, a bit like an Easter egg, but so much greater.

And then Puff Pastry of Pineapple – an ultra industrial looking wafer, like eating a computer ribbon that tastes of pineapple. Interesting, tasty, but more intellectual than enjoyable at this stage.

And then there's a honey bon bon like a giant amber pearl, and a pudding with snowflakes that I can't even work out what's in because I'm exhausted and overloaded.

And finally on to The Box. By this stage I'm totally over-full, and have no appetite left. However.

If you bring me a giant chest full of crazy chocolates, I'm going to eat a giant chest full of crazy chocolates. I think most diners maybe pick 2 or 3 of the 10+ options presented in the box, but hey, you're paying 230 euros for the meal, you might as well try everything, right? Twice they tried to take the box away, twice we held on to it. Chocolate that tastes like raspberries, chocolate that looks like blood red twigs, freeze dried fruits, weird discs with I don't even know anymore in the middle, beautiful tablets like a mini dime bar but better...I'm actually getting dizzy just recalling them. Anyway, next time I go, I'll try to exercise more restraint, as eating 10 chocolates after 36 courses is probably 'de trop' as they say, but what can you do.

I don’t do acid. I suffer from an over-active, over-anxious imagination at the best of times. But leaving El Bulli, I felt high and weirded out and amazed, as if I’d just been on a really great acid / cocaine / skunk trip. When I told my ex that the experience was almost spiritual, he mocked me – I’d mock me too. It’s a much-abused word – Trudie Styler - but truly, El Bulli is such a special, unique place, and the experience is so extraordinary - that I think the word is justified. It makes you feel extremely joyful and alive and exhilarated.

24 hours later I was eating a quarter pounder with cheese and fries at Girona airport. Truth of the matter was that tasted pretty darn good too....

(If you read the book when it comes out, you will spot that I have recycled the experience, and translated it into a date with the love interest in the book. I am at pains to point out that my dad is not my love interest in real life, and that my work is entirely fictional. But as my beloved Nora Ephron says, 'everything is material'... )

The other Otto Man

2011-06-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

I think it's true to say that the world has been made a better place by Matt Groening.

He's been responsible for producing more hours of quality entertainment than anyone else on the planet.

What with it being 5.45 on a Sunday morning, and Alec Baldwin not being here right now, I thought I'd take one minute to champion Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons.

He's probably about my 14th favourite character on The Simpsons, quite a long way down after Comic Store Owner, Selma & Patty, Moe, Principal Skinner's mum, Ralph, Apu.... gosh, maybe further than 14 but still, I do love the Ottoman.

Turns out we have more in common than you'd think: 40 of the Otto man's favourite things.

We seem to share a love of dogs in bandanas, onion rings, and so much more...

Ottolenghi Upper Street - The Rules

2011-06-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

My second favourite place to eat in London. Every thing I’ve ever eaten here has been perfectly executed and I’ve eaten almost everything, at least twice. Come for breakfast, lunch or a cake – or dinner if it’s payday. Ottolenghi uses herbs and spices so brilliantly, he elevates an ingredient as prosaic as broccoli into something stellar. The food looks magnificent and bounteous and tastes better than it looks.

My Ottolenghi rules of engagement:

If you go to the Upper Street branch on the weekend, go EARLY or expect to queue forever.

Do not take a boyfriend whom there is any danger of you splitting up with at a subsequent date. You do not want to scar Ottolenghi with the sadness of happy memories.

But do go there with at least one other person, so you can try all their salads, and their cake (and, I suppose, vice versa…)

If you order bread, make sure you get cornbread in the selection – spicy, crumbly and slightly sweet - utterly delicious.

The broccoli is better than any broccoli you’ve ever had anywhere.

Ditto the butternut squash, ditto anything with green beans, ditto the granola, home-made nutella and jams.

Their banana jam made me un-hate bananas, temporarily.

At lunch, don't just order the salads.

True, the salads are extraordinary, and any meat-eater would not feel deprived if they just ordered the salads. But the meat and fish options are unmissable - particularly dishes such as rare beef fillet with horseradish, or lemony sumac chicken.

Take a cake home for someone you love – including yourself. I can think of no greater expression of appreciation and affection than something sweet from Ottolenghi in a white paper bag.

My favourite cheap eats in London - part 1

2011-06-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

At heart I am all about the cheap eat. While I’d never say no to a meal at the Gavroche (set lunch = excellent value considering the quality of the food, plus it includes half a bottle of beautiful wine) – I am never happier than when I’m eating something delicious that costs a tenner or less. Simple things done well – that is a t-shirt I’d wear, along with Team Aniston, and one with a picture of Alec Baldwin’s face on it. I love Alec Baldwin so bad it hurts, but more of that in my second novel.

So, in no particular order here are three of my favourite bargain places / things to eat:

Fitou, 1-3 Dalgarno Gardens, W10 (near Wormwood Scrubs prison. The glamour…)

This is probably my favourite restaurant in London. It is totally cheap and cheerful, hard to spend more than about £15 a head even if you’re being a total pig (it’s BYO) – but most importantly the food is outstanding. I once saw the Prime Minister here, but don’t hold that against the place if you’re not a fan.

Starters: - Fish Cakes, Papaya Salad - super super spicy, not for the faint hearted.

Mains: – Gaeng Penang chicken – a really thick, hot red coconutty curry with lime leaves and fresh chillies, again super spicy and addictive.

Pad See Ew – stir fried broad rice noodles with eggs and green vegetables in a thick soy sauce. A perfect combination of soft, crunch, salt, almost sweet and above all tasty.

Coconut rice – sets off the spicy chicken curry perfectly.

St John* – Smithfields, Spitalfields, and other

Most people love St John because of the whole nose to tail eating thing. They rave about the trotters, or whisper sweet nothings about chewing on a pig’s ear. Well I’ll admit it. I’m scared of offal. I do like liver, but anything more adventurous and I fold.

There are two reasons why I like St John so much, and neither of them have anything to do with soft tissue:

1. The custard donut of the Gods. They used to serve these at the Spitalfields branch during a brief window, only on a Sunday morning. Now they serve them at their Bermondsey bakery, only on a Saturday morning. When I first ate one of these donuts I became obsessed. Thick, dense, Madagascan vanilla custard, injected into the crispest, lightest donut casing. If I ever become really rich and move to the South of France, I will, like Elvis with his peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches at the Colorado Mine Company, fly myself back on my private jet to London just for a taste of one of these.

2. Welsh Rarebit. The opposite of adventurous I know. But really really great Welsh Rarebit. Goes back to A Simple Thing Done Well. It helps that St John make some of the finest bread in London. On top of their white sandwich loaf they put a combination of Neal’s Yard Montgomery cheddar, Guinness, Lea & Perrins, Coleman’s mustard and a touch of cayenne. Savoury, salty, tangy, melting perfection.

*St John's main menu is not cheap at all, but either of the above two options, fortunately, are.

C&R café, Rupert Court, W1

This is the sort of place I’d walk straight past if I didn’t know not to. It’s garishly lit, in a crappy alley in Soho, and shows no indication of its greatness – other than an occasional queue. A word of warning - do not let them seat you in the basement if you have a sensitive nose and don’t like the smell of toilets.

C&R’s strengths are soups and noodle dishes – every time I’ve strayed from these I’ve regretted it. (Except for the roti canai side dish – a light, buttery Malaysian bread served with a searingly hot spicy dipping sauce – an essential starter, whatever you’re ordering for your main.)

The greatest dish on the menu is the Singapore Laksa – by far the best of its kind I’ve had in London. A spicy coconut milk broth, with chunks of chicken, prawn, tofu, noodles and other floating wonders – it is a truly satisfying one-bowl soup meal. Some folk struggle to finish the generous portion but not for want of trying.

Hawksmoor - how do I love thee, let me count the ways....

2011-06-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

I love a great burger, I truly do. My favourite is from Corner Bistro, New York - not very practical when you live in London, have had a few glasses of wine and NEED that perfect combo of quality meat, melted cheese, ketchup and a pillowy light but dense bun, preferably made of brioche without the sugar, with a few sesame seeds on top.

Till recently my top London burger was from Jo Allens. It's a classic - perfectly sized, meat that tastes like meat, great bun and they keep it simple - some onion, lettuce, tomato. A beautiful pickle on the side. The proportions of the Jo Allens cheeseburger are damn near perfect.

I also like the burger at Bar Boulud but I'm not a fan of ostentatious douchebags or eastern European hookers so I avoid Knightsbridge most of the time - shame, as it's an excellent burger.

But my new favourite burger (isn't that a Seattle band name?) is from Hawksmoor. I love Hawksmoor. I always have a good time there because they do two of my favourite things - Pina Coladas and red meat - better than almost anywhere in London.

Pina Colada - apparently made with coconut sorbet to keep it lighter and smoother.

Let's just take a moment to celebrate the staff at Hawksmoor Covent Garden. Shaky Pete is one of the best barmen in London. But more importantly he has the patience of a saint. Hawksmoor do two types of chips on the menu - triple cooked and beef dripping. My friend was scared of the beef dripping variety so I asked Pete if he could bring us one of each chip so I could try to persuade my friend to order the beef ones. If I was a waiter I'd have pulled a face and laughed off the request (it's Saturday night, it's bloody busy, make up your own mind you annoying indecisive bint.) But Pete actually went to the kitchen and brought us back an entire portion of the two chips.

Half demolished sampler de frites - the triple cooked were actually better in the end, thinner but still with great flavour.

Such great service - generous, accommodating and done with a face that suggested there was nothing in the world he would rather be doing.

The blogosphere has been banging on about the Hawksmoor Kimchee burger since day one. I love kimchee but I love a cheeseburger more than almost anything, and I asked the other waiter (nickname unknown) if I should abandon something I love for the sake of an internet promise, a dream. Again with the great service - he brought the kimchee on the side, no charge.

And while the kimchee is undeniably phenomenal - fiery and tangy and sour and hot - my burger with Cheddar was the best possible cheeseburger experience a girl could have in London and had I succumbed to the flashy charms of the new and fashionable, I would have missed out.

My friend was a lightweight and didn't finish the whole burger - it is wonderfully large - so Shaky Pete brown-bagged (or enveloped) the leftovers, along with the kimchee. How happy would I be if the postman brought this to me tomorrow morning?

Happy days.

Bath time

2011-06-05T02:39:00.000-07:00

Trinity is a brilliant restaurant in Clapham run by chef Adam Byatt that offers a variety of reasonably priced and inspiring Masterclasses: http://www.trinityrestaurant.co.uk/masterclass.html

I signed up for their 3 hour course (with lunch) on Slow Cooking, and half way through the meal I turned to the man next to me and said 'I want to live in South London.' Not true (I blame the wine). What I meant was 'I want Trinity to be in North London.' The food is delicious, the room relaxed and informal, the staff faultless, and the bread so stunning I can envisage trekking here regularly just to be near it.

Perfect, beautiful, buttery heart-shaped home-made bread (served with home-made Jersey-cream butter.)

Sous-vide literally means cooking things under pressure, in a bag under water. When I was a kid, 'boil in the bag' was synonymous with slimy white fish drowning in claggy white sauce. However sous-vide is a long-established technique used in many of the world's best kitchens. 'Boil in the bag' is a slight misnomer - the water tends to stay at a lower heat than boiling - but the bag part is key. Meat, fish, veg, even fruit can benefit from enhanced texture and flavour. Certain cuts of meat benefit particularly from the process - for example neck, shoulder or bavette. The collagen relaxes in the water bath and the membranes break down, transforming tough cuts into tender. With sous-vide cooking you can very precisely control your end result, ensuring consistency across the board - key in a restaurant context.

That's the thing - sous-vide is not super-practical for the domestic cook. While you can fashion your own water bath, maintaining and monitoring temperature can be a pain - and of course your food needs to be properly vacuum-sealed. If you want the restaurant style kit, it'll cost you - around four grand for the vac pac, another grand for the water bath. So, prohibitively expensive for non-oligarchs. Plus the two machines take up a lot of space. Of course if you have dug out the basement of your oligarchy Knightsbridge home, alongside your home cinema, pool and panic room you could own a lovely little sous-vide set up - but then you probably own a lovely little in-house chef who you keep in the basement too.

Water bath with bavettes enjoying a relaxing Radox moment

Vacuum pack machine

The class was run by Trinity's sous chef, the charming and talented Graham Squire, who talked us through general techniques and the science behind them - and then through a specific menu that we were fortunate enough to eat.

The class is not hands on (we didn't cook) but even better it was mouth on. Along our way Graham fed us various delights, including melt-in-the-mouth foie gras, and the crackliest crackling outside of a Krakow crack den.

Above you can see some of the ingredients that went into our lunch. The Granny Smith was vacuum packed but not sous-vided which enhances the intensity of flavour and texture merely through the vac-packing process.

Salmon is a good fish for sous-vide-ing; because of its high fat content the fish doesn't dry out in the way a skinnier fish might. These are Scottish Loch Duart salmon fillets - vacuum sealed with star anise, thyme and garlic. The garlic is kept whole - water bathing brings out the intensity of flavours, due to the long, slow hanging out time. Graham confitted the salmon in the bag with clarified butter, at 55 degrees for 20 minutes.

After sticking the fish in the bath he made a delicious chive oil in a Thermomix which he rapidly transformed into a chive mayo.

Chive oil made with veg oil & chives

Becomes chive mayo

He also water-bathed some eggs for 48 minutes at 68 degrees, giving him the yolks you see above, which he then chucked in the Thermomix and made Hollandaise with. Graham explained that because Hollandaise can be notoriously tricky to make (dangers of the curdle) - using eggs that you can fully control ensures the process is fool-proof.

Then it was time for the main event - an amazing 6 course lunch featuring many of the ingredients he'd water-bathed for us earlier, Blue Peter style.

First was coddled pheasant egg (he'd been in the bath) with asparagus vichyssoise. Alongside the egg under the surface of the soup is a spoonful of home made curd, and on top some home-grown pea shoots, along with a little bit of the chive oil from earlier that had been hung to remove sediment.

Then the salmon, served with samphire (aka sea asparagus - I do like a sea vegetable with a nickname), monk's beard and lemon beurre blanc.

One day Steve Jobs will invent technology that will allow us to truly experience texture on a computer screen. Till then you'll have to get by on the amateur pic above.

Then they chucked in a lovely little freebie - a taste of salt-baked goat's cheese (Crottin - which features as a cameo in Pear-Shaped, bizarrely.)

Then on to foie-gras 'en croute' (sour dough lid) with golden-raisin puree and compressed apple (remember from earlier - vac packed but not bathed. Guess Granny Smith's a shower kind of girl.)

And then there was more... the slow-cooked bavette, who we'd discovered in the bath when we arrived. He'd had a four hour bath at around 55 degrees, followed by a flash pan fry to give him a beautiful crisp exterior to show up his lovely pink insides.

And then a little pre-pudding pudding of foamed yoghurt with apricot compote, honey comb and nut crust.

And finally warm rhubarb (also bathed - so liberated, so Swedish, all these fruit, veg and meat bathing together...) and custard, served with milk ice cream and strawberry dust. I wish the dust in my home was strawberry dust - would be much more fun doing the housework....

All in all it was one of the best 4 hours I've had this year - certainly the best 4 hours I've ever had in Clapham. There were six of us on the course - perfect as it felt very personal and special. You could ask whatever silly questions you wanted. And the whole thing, including a faultless 6 course lunch, wine, and a brilliant introduction to the world of sous-vide cost £50, which I would have paid for the food alone, let alone the booze and the education.

I'm also going to check out Adam Byatt's book, which has very accessible recipes you can cook at home: How To Eat on Amazon

Graham also recommended Sous-Vide by the legendary Thomas Keller, for further inspiration:
Sous Vide on Amazon

Pear-Shaped...

2011-04-16T05:02:00.001-07:00

So.

I have a novel - Pear-Shaped - coming out in January 2012 with Harper Collins. It's a comedy about love, heartbreak and custard, and features lots and lots of food: you can pre-order / buy it here on Amazon.

Sophie, the heroine, works in desserts. On a trip to New York she discovers the Compost Cookie at the Momofuku Milk Bar. (If you're in New York, go - it's awesome. I recommend the aforementioned cookie, and the crack pie: http://www.momofuku.com/restaurants/milk-bar/

My editor suggested I make some of these cookies to hand out at the London Book Fair.

The recipe is widely available online, but by the time Pear-Shaped comes out, the Milk Bar cookbook will be out on US Amazon: momofuku milk bar cookbook . Buy it and you'll get loads of life-enhancing recipes, and won't repeatedly splatter butter over your MacBook.

The cookies are called Compost Cookies because they're full of random things - crisps, pretzels, coffee grounds, chocolate chips, butterscotch - basically all your favourite junk food. Part of the key to their appeal is that perfect balance of salt/sweet you see more and more of nowadays (cf. salted caramel - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/31cara.html)

I'm rubbish at mass production and generally avoid cooking for more than 6 people, so I enlisted an elf called Dan, one of my few male friends who listens well to instructions.

There are many excellent blogs out there that can take you through the recipe well enough - I used Cookie Madness's honed version.

I will merely recap my key learnings from the experience:

Firstly - the cookies use a shit-load of butter (8 ounces per batch of 24.)

I am of the belief that there's nothing in the world that isn't made better by butter. My beloved Leonard Cohen has his Tower of Song - I have my Tower of Butter.

Learning Two: Borwick's have excellent packaging - regardez - stylish, British, classic, elegant. Unfortunately this one's been in the cupboard since the late 70s, so I was forced to venture out and buy new bicarb.

And for whatever reason my local supermarket no longer stocks the above low-key, under-stated packaging. No, it offers me only this - compare and contrast.

Now there's a time and a place for jazzy and vulgar, and that time and place is Vegas, 1985. I don't understand why people sign off on packaging like this - for the same reason that I don't really understand Michael McIntyre's career.

On to equipment: the first two times I made these cookies I used a hand held whisk. Don't do this - it's a total bugger to constantly get the buttercream off the blades when you're mixing for the full ten minutes that the recipe necessitates. This time I borrowed my mum's Kenwood which she was given as an engagement present. It works brilliantly 41 years later - very impressive.

Also invaluable is a spatula. You know that thing I said earlier about vulgar and jazzy being bad things? That doesn't apply when it comes to spatulas. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to Albert?

On to the contents of the cookie. Choose your salty and sweet treats carefully. I chose Hula Hoops (such a fine crisp), pretzels (I bought long stick like ones, but pretzel shaped would be superior from a texture point of view) - and crinkle cut crisps.

Staff: men in the kitchen always seem to leave chaos in their wake. Dan the Elf was in charge of flour sifting but only on the basis that he not allow a molecule to slip outside the mixing bowl. I'm glad I have friends who are scared of me. After twenty minutes of painstakingly sifting as if the sieve was Lalique - barely brushing it with his fingers - I started to feel sorry for him. I re-briefed him to treat the sieve more like a tambourine, but to bash it as if he were an 8 year old girl who's very good at maths, rather than, say, Bez.

What else... erm, well like I say, don't rely on me for the recipe - merely for lateral footnotes, but one thing you do need to know is that you MUST keep the cookies in the fridge for as long as possible before they go in the oven - 1 hour absolute minimum, preferably 1 day.

The best of the bunch - they look a bit anaemic here, but that's only because I didn't use the flash.

You get the odd rogue naughty cookie misbehaving, comme ca...

Best strategy - eat while still warm, in front of its other cookie cousins - discourages renegade cookies following suit.

What else... oh yes, I have a very nice mum who lives locally, who came round and helped me make the cookies look pretty in little bags.

Momma Newman hard at work

And there you have it. An edible bribe. Watch this space.