Borscht

4 uncooked beetroot, cut into chunks
1 small white cabbage, cut into strips
4 medium peeled boiling potatoes, cut into chunks
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 ribs of celery
[Optional carrot]
2 1/2 pints of chicken or vegetable stock
1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
Sea salt and ground pepper
Sour cream
Dill

Bring vegetable stock, cabbage and beetroot to the boil. Add vinegar. Cook for 20 mins. Add potatos, onion and celery (for variety you can also add carrot). Cook for 20 mins. Add seasoning. Cook for 20 mins. Serve with sour cream and dill.

Sumo food

While we're on the subject of eating in Tokyo, I might as well recommend a really interesting local cuisine. Chanko-nabe is a hot pot that's cooked at your table and is favoured by sumo wrestlers bulking up. First meats, mushrooms and vegetables are cooked in the hot, flavoured broth, then after they've all been eaten rice of noodles are mixed in with the remaining liquid to finish off the meal - any finish off anyone with a less than sumo sized appetite.

It's far more delicious and interesting than that sounds and a Japanese culinary experience that's not travelled as widely as sushi, okonomiyaki et al.

The one I went to is: http://www.dreamark.co.jp/waka/e_index.html. I tried the Yokohama one, which was excellent, but they have outlets in Tokyo proper too. It is a chain, but it really doesn't feel like one; happily recommended.

Itadakimas

One of the great things about dining in Japan is that it tends to feel like an adventure. Not only are you frequently trying new things, but often the restaurants take quite a bit of finding: partly because Japanese addresses are not so precise as western ones and partly because of the concept know as "kakurega" or hidden-away restaurants.

So what does it take to be kakurega? It's not enough just to be on the 5th floor of a narrow Tokyo shopping district building. That's commonplace in high-rise Tokyo. No, to be kakurega you really should be in an office building, or under a bridge, or round the corner at the end of what looks like a service tunnel...

I've always been amazed at how my Tokyo friends not only know dozens of these places, but also seem to have an instinct for finding more, whether they've been to the area before or not. It's like they can smell them.

Based on this adventure principle on my last trip to Yokohama Kristof and I wandered down a few badly lit urban-industrial streets and finally found a little place in what seemed to be an otherwise closed post office that specialised in skewers of chicken meat: skewes of all hearts, all gizard, all liver? No problem.

So next time you're in Japan, try asking "kakurega resutoran wa doku des ka?" and see where you end up....

Three Choirs Vineyard - Classic Cuvee

I don't usually write about wine, because I know I'm not that well educated. But I do enjoy sparkling wines very much and I've been lucky to try some great ones. So this times I'm going to review a wine, because I'd hate anyone to spend money on this when something much better is available for not much more £.

According to their website Three Choirs Vineyard is England's leading and most awarded, single estate vineyard. You can stay there overnight in one of eight rooms or enjoy a wine tasting and lunch for £60.

I won't be going though, because this week I tried their Classic Cuvee sparkling white wine made by the champagne method from a mix of Seyval Blanc (80%) and Pinot Noir (20%). It's nice to see Three Choirs using the French grape Seyval Blanc though maybe Chardonnay and Pinot Blanc would be prefereable, or even a blanc de blanc since red grapes are harder to grow here. Real champagne uses Chardonnay as the white grape.

Three Choirs say it's "Dry and subtle... very similar to a good champagne but at a fraction of the price." It is indeed dry but rather than subtle I'd have to say it's bland. Smells of nothing much; large bubbles of CO2 burst with no flavour at all. Yes, at £9 or so a bottle (bought by the case) it's half the price of an acceptable champagne but it yields a fraction of the pleasure.

A much better choice IMHO would be Chapel Down's Brut NV which costs £15 but offers significantly better value.

It's said that the future of English wine is in sparkling wine - we have similar soils to Champagne and a focus on non vintage wines helps maintain an acceptable standard in poor years - but this wont offering won't convince any of the sceptics.

'Kobe' in the UK: Discerning Food & Lucies Farm

I'm sure if you're reading this in the UK you've probably heard that there's no one better than Discerning Food to supply your gourmet foods and ingredients. And maybe it's true - I'm sure they have an excellent range of many fine gourmet items. I wouldn't know because as far as I'm concerned they exist to sell one thing: wagyu (aka Kobe) beef.

Yes, it's very expensive - £250 for a sunday roast size cut - but you can get into wagyu for as little as £22 for 12 sausages or £38.50 for 5 200g steaks.

Or is you know you really want it, why not try Lucies Farm's UK herd (the Discerning Food wagyu comes from Australia). Minimum order is £100 (and £16 P&P). Prices start at under £10 for rump.

Woz on The Baltic

My pal Woz has a regular blog, but sadly no perma pages for individual posts so I'll quote him in full on his trip to The Baltic.

"As for lunch...the iPOD Perv and I tried out The Baltic on the corner of Blackfriars Road and The Cut. The lamb was exquisitely tender - a really filling stew with white beans. The barsz (beetroot soup) was great and just the way I like it (without dumplings). I have been told that the cherry and strawberry vodkas are to die for (as is the blonde waitress from Gdansk)."

Check out Woz Writes for culture, poetry and some food related stuff too.

As for the Baltic I've got a little over a year to go until I hit St. Petersburg and I'm looking forward to this first visit to a whole new culinary culture; maybe I'll try The Baltic first to get me in the mood.

Eat my words - 2

'All menus at the French Laundry revolve around the law of diminishing returns. That is the more you have of something the less you enjoy it.' - Thomas Keller

The Criterion, Picadilly, London

Two Marco Pierre White restaurants in a week? Yep, but this second visit was for a set lunch menu, at a very reasonable £17.95 so it's a passable extravagance.

At 12.30 on a Thursday Criterion was doing ok business - I'd guess about 35 covers were in, though that number still gets lots of "personal space" when the venue is as cavernous as the Criterion. I'd only dined here at night before, and the place has a lovely grand cafe feel in the day time as the light sparkles from the golden ceiling, a glittering mosaic that helps light arches decorated with motifs inspired by ancient Constantinople, and of course the Scheherazade of French Mediterranean food.

I had a glass of prosecco at £5.50 to accompany my meal. I turned down bottled water and the waitress provided tap-water instead.

A starter of duck rillette, toasted poilane was excellent with currents of seasoning which made every mouthful subtly different from the last.

Pan fried seabream with ratatouille and tapenade veloute came in a perfectly 'lunch-sized' portion. The fish was beautiful - fresh, soft flesh with crispy skin and a soaking of the veloute. The ratatouille was decent, but a little bland compared to the vibrancy of the bream and the preceding duck.

I decided to try the fromage du jour which turned out to be a smoked, hard cheese - I'm pretty sure it was a smoked cheddar and I meant to ask which when I paid the bill but forgot. The cheese was fine and came served with a fulsome fruit loaf, but was no better than the cheese plate Kate prepared for us the previous night at home. I think next time I'll go for tart ; ) Coffee was delicious, at £2.50.

And at less than £18 for three courses there will be a next time, very soon indeed.

White Slave

Well, I finally finished White Slave by Marco Pierre White and it was all rather a tumble at the end, over a decade compressed into the last couple of chapters as though nothing of great interest had happened to him since he stopped cooking. Oh there's some late juice about other chefs who've offended him (the stuff about Albert Roux is revelatory, about Gordon Ramsay less so); the mildly interesting tale of the sinking of his restaurant Titanic; and a little bit about his much rumoured marital bust-ups. But nothing as well realised or remembered as the first parts of the book, where he was serving apprenticeships and opening Harvey's. The style is fairly stilted to the end, nothing like as readable as his columns or as personable as the interview he gave on Google promoting the book (check it out on You Tube). For such a charming man the book is rather charmless. That said, if you have any interest in the story of the man who was clearly the most important British chef of the 20th century then you'll need to read this, and will probably get enough out of it to make it worthwhile.

Anyway, I'll be looking forward to his upcoming appearance on Hell's Kitchen and new cookbook. Indeed it seems to me that after a decade in seclusion MPW is pushing himself forward again; which should be interesting.

Rocket Pizza, NOT at 612 Broadway East, Seattle

Ever loose a restaurant that felt like a friend? For me it was Rocket Pizza which used to be on 612 Broadway East in Seattle. Man that place rocked. I'd shop for LPs at Orpheum then hit Rocket for a slice of eggplant pizza - yum, I'm drooling just thinking about it. When I moved away I missed it; frankly there's no really great pizza in England. None. Nowhere. No one's looked harder than I. So when I went back to Seattle a few years ago I was straight down to Broadway for my pizza. Only to find my beloved Rocket had gone. So next time someone asks if you want one more slice? Better say yes; one day your dream pizza might be gone too.

Footnote: when digging up the address for this blog I discovered that The OK Hotel, Last Exit on Brooklyn, Twin Teepees and The Dog House are gone too. Man, poor Seattle.

Stockpot, Old Compton Street, London

What is it about the Stockpot? The daily photocopied menus of British and continental dishes? The double-take cheap prices? The prime Soho location? Nope. It's the food. How they serve such tasty lunches for typically under £5 is a mystery to me. How they do it while paying Soho rents doubly so.

I went for pork meatballs with pasta and a side of garlic bread for £5.20, one of two daily specials. The meatballs came after about 15minutes, but no sign of the bread. The waitress couldn't explain why, and dropped the item off my bill, which raised the agregate price of the meatballs to a whopping £4.40. The food itself was delicious and my mood, sitting at a table almost outside on the pavement, could not be dented by the pinball service. I know I'll eat there again whatever, it's got character that you just can't pay for.

L'Escargot (Ground Floor Dining Room), Greek St, London

When Marco Pierre White walked away from cooking I walked away from his restaurants. It wasn't a big thing, but they'd diminished in some way in my mind and there were way more restaurants than I had time to eat in. Had I really assumed that that perfect black risotto at Criterion had been ministered too by MPW himself? Or that he was beavering away behind the scenes when I was at Quo Vadis? Nah. I know that since the Harvey's days the chance of getting anything touched by the hand of God were slim, but still I expected his presence would have been missed. So for several years MPW and I have been estranged. Then recently I picked up his White Slave autobiography. It's not particularly in his voice, as a quick comparison of his restaurant reviews in Waitrose Food Illustrated and the authorial voice in the book will confirm, but the anecdotes are interesting, as much for what they contradict about the legend as for what they confirm. Thus inspired I sort of planned to check out an MPW venue, probably Mirabelle, in the near future.

Which brings me to last night. I'd intended to pop into Criterion for a pre-theatre (I was actually off to see Ozzy Osbourne at Wembley Arena) but when I arrived they were closed for a private party. So I hauled up to Quo Vadis, but the menu looked like Cafe Pasta to me. No problem, round the corner to L'Escargot we go.

No problem getting in, I'd say that the dinning room at 6pm was probably 60% full (about 40 covers I'm guessing, when full). Right up to sitting down I'd really planned on having the very reasonably priced pre-theatre menu (available 6-7pm, £18 for three courses). But then that menu! Having just been reading The Soul of A Chef by Michael Ruhlman there was no way I could pass on a ballotine of ham hock and foie gras and once converted to the a la carte there were no second thoughts.

I asked my waiter, a very young Frenchman, what a ballotine was. It's round meat, served cold, he explained. I hoped not - that would make it a gallotine, which is cold, whereas a ballotine is hot. When it arrived it was, well, warm, which seemed perfect, the foie gras just lightly shined with melted fat where it had been heated. It was utterly delicious, the coarse ham the perfect contrast to the buttery smooth foie.

A chop of lamb served with petit pois puree and roast potato cubes followed. The lamb was probably the finest I've had in London; sweet, tender and perfectly cooked. I was a little over faced by the huge portion of peas, but I manfully ate most of them.

Desert of chocolate tart was perfect. Perhaps because it was early in service the torte had a light, just out of the oven consistency and deep flavourful tastes that perfectly balance bitter and sweet over a dark chocolate biscuit base.

Service overall was very good. Front of house made me feel very welcome and the service, though sprightly in the pre-theatre hours, was never pushy. The décor was pleasant, with Miro on the walls in the main room (and a rather cheesy selection of nude photography in the men's room). Prices were very fair: £8.50 for starters; £12.95-14.95 for mains; £6.95 for desert (£8.95 for cheese). Perhaps I'll go for the upstairs Picasso Room instead of that trip to Mirabelle.

I'm not buying any new cookbooks...

but used one's are a different matter.

Today I grabbed three.

Geoffrey Zakarian's Town/Country: 150 Recipes for Life Around the Table for £2 - a very lovely looking collection of paired restaurant/home dishes using the same key indgredients. Doesn't look like it's even been read, never mind used.

My Gastronomy by Nico Ladenis for £2. I'd just been reading about Ladenis in White Slave, the Marco Pierre White auto-biography and this was a serendipitous find.

And lastly Soup Kitchen, a compendium with recipes from various well-known chefs who each present favourite soups. £1.50.

Eat my words

"Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner" - Byron, Don Juan

Currywurst

So this past weekend was Stevenage's annual two day international market. Yep, another venue for overpriced cheese and factory made lace. However it's always worth the trip for the "authentic" German sausage stand - where this year I went for the curry-sausage.

Currywurst is German's top take-away, right up there with kebabs. A pork sausage, usually chopped in a special machine, seasoned with a sweet ketchup and yellow curry powder. Served with Brötchen (a white bread roll).

Currywurst is sold in take-away cafs and outdoor sausage stalls (which is how I first encountered it in Hamburg) but I've heard rumours of restaurant versions turning up from time to time.

Weirdly currywurst has never crossed over into a decent supermarket version to eat at home (correct me if I'm wrong).

Allegedly currywurst sauce was invented by Beliner Herta Heuwer while playing around with ingredients on one boring afternoon. However there are plenty of other currywurst creation myths. Wikipedia sites one where a sausage stall owner in Essen, dropped a can with curry powder into some ketchup and novelist Uwe Timm wrote a fictional account of the origin, proving how much this, now probably unknowable, fact preys on the German culinary consciousness. Fair enough - after all currywurst is a product of the post war years and one tends to think the recent past should be somehow recoverable. Me, I'm just satisfied that for two days of the year currywurst makes it to my town.

Want to experiment? Why not, since each vendor's currywurst varied subtly anyway, much like English fish & chips. Just take a couple of daubs of cheap, runny ketchup and mix on a plate with enough curry powder and paprika to create a visible suspension. Serve with a hot pork sausage cut into 1.5cm rounds. Sprinkle over more curry powder if needed and eat with a white bread roll (dinner roll).

Suze In Mayfair, 41 North Audley St, London

What does New Zealand cuisine mean to you? To me it meant nothing at all until I tried this bistrobar run by Tom and Susan Glynn. It clearly matters a lot to them that the place is run by a couple - their names are prominent on their business cards, side by side just as the bar and bistro are clearly equal halves of this fun and fancy-free dining concern.

There's plenty of New Zealand wine on the menu, but dear reader, I was driving so I can't say much other than that you'll be spoilt for choice. The assured cuisine has an Australian flavour to it (just about the worst thing you can say to a Kiwi I guess) with lots of seafood and shellfish alongside that timeless classic, NZ lamb. Portions were hulking and good value at ~£7 for a starter and ~£15 for a main. Plenty of asian flavours like lime leaf, coriander, ginger feature as do a few odd veggies like Kumara sweet potatoes.

There are interesting australasian beers too, though I didn't get to try those either! ; (

Overall, not somewhere you'd cross the country for (I got the impression most of the people had just crossed the street from nearby offices) but one you'll remember fondly if you do give it a try.

MENU 13th June 2007

Black Pudding, with apple and cinnamon chutney
Beer Soup
Lemon Roast Chicken with Potatoes
White & Dark Chocolate Torte
Selection of English Cheese
Belgian Chocolate & Beverages

My friends Graeme and Kristof came for dinner last night. Overall it went pretty well. The black pudding and chutney were both impulse pick-ups from the St Albans Farmer's Market. The beer soup recipe was from Simon Rimmer's latest book, Rebel Cook. Lemon roast chicken was made by Kate, and is a variant on a receipe from Tessa Kiros. The torte was nearly a disaster when I didn't allow the filling to chill long enough before spreading but luckily turned out pretty well the next day after a night of refridgeration and some judicious cream disguise added by Kate. A selection of British cheeses was pretty much wasted since we were all stuffed by then, but no doubt I'll have another crack at them tonight. Cocktails of Lanson and Sloe Gin were served late in the meal and proved quite refreshing. Neuhaus chocolates finished the meal (and us) off nicely.

Beef Stifado

For 6

1.5 Kgs Stewing steak

100g plain flour

1/2 bottle of red wine

2 Tbsp (30ml) red wine vinegar

3 Cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

800g baby onions or shallots

Olive oil for frying

1 cinnamon stick, broken in half

3 Bay leaves

1 tsp ground allspice

2 Tbsp tomato puree

200ml beef stock (made with oxo / stock cube)

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 160 deg C / Gas mark 3

Cut beef into large chunks around 2" Season the flour with plenty of black pepper and a bit of salt, and coat the chunks of beef. In a fairly hot pan, heat the olive oil and when hot, fry beef until sealed on all sides and slighty browned. Put into a large casserole or a pot with a lid when done.
Add some more oil to the pan and fry the onions over a medium heat until they start to brown - about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and fry for a further minute. Put this into the casserole with the beef. Pour the wine into the pan, add the red wine vinegar, cinnamon, ground allspice and heat until it just begins to boil. Add this to the casserole along with the beef stock and the bayleaves. Stir in the tomato puree.
Put the lid onto casserole and put it into the oven. Occasionally give the stifado a stir. It will take at least 3 hours to cook, but 4 will be better.When it's done, the meat should be very tender and the sauce nice and thick.
Traditionally, this dish is served with crust bread to mop up the gravy,
Can't remember where this recipe originally came from, but thanks to whoever ; )

Science loves cooks

Last night I made muffins. Bit of flour, bit of milk, egg, baking powder, sugar. Some rasberries. A topping of oatmeal. 25 mins in the oven. Yum. The reason? A new silicon cupcake/muffin tray. No need to prepare cases. Easy to turn out. Science loves cooks.