This gallery contains 26 photos.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit India three times. The first was as an 12-year-old with a bad fringe and even worse bum bag: awkwardly chubby, pale and privileged and utterly gobsmacked by the smells, colours, craziness and social disparity … Continue reading
Creme caramel for Uyen's book
So I’m sorry I have been such a bad blogger of late. I know it’s been a ridiculously long while since I last blogged. I don’t mean to fob you off, and I know this is a lame excuse, but it’s not like I’ve been sitting around eating digestives with butter and salt and catching up on Game of Thrones – oh, hang on a minute, I may have done a bit of that – but I’ve also been ruddy busy.
Meeting the beautiful and talented Uyen Luu has been a big part of this. I’m not kidding when I say that Uyen is a one woman food creative machine. As well as being a brilliant writer, film maker, blogger and food stylist (but we musn’t hate her, because she is so lovely), she runs her own supper club in her adorable flat in Hackney, where she cooks what is, in my opinion – and I’m a bloody veteran of the Kingsland Road – the BEST Vietnamese food in London. And I know this because I sometimes waitress there, and I see and eat the food that her and her mother painstakingly prepare and send out. It’s sublime. My favourites include the spicy fried frogs legs and of course the unparalleled beef pho. It’s one of the single most restorative thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.
Uyen's beef pho
When I met Uyen (over cocktails at Happiness Forgets, natch) and expressed my interest in Vietnamese food, and in learning more about food styling, she was generous to welcome me under her wing and take me on as her assistant in the creation of her debut book: My Vietnamese Kitchen, which will be published by Ryland, Peters and Small (available to pre order here, now) in October this year. Those that have followed the blog for a while, or who follow my Instagram, will have seen lots of delicious pics of Vietnamese food lately, and will know that I am obsessed with it. So much so, in fact, that I made a pilgrimage to Vietnam in 2010, visiting Hanoi, Hoi An and Saigon, writing this piece for the Guardian on street food, and conveniently getting stranded for an extra week when a certain Icelandic ash cloud decided to thwart global aviation schedules. Aside from the amazing chance to work on the cookery and visual side of a cookbook, getting hands on with Vietnamese food and learning about styling from one of London’s freshest food stylists was just too good an opportunity to turn down.
This is Vietnam!
Assisting on this book has been one of the richest and most enjoyable experiences of my life. Working alongside Uyen, who hails from Saigon but grew up in Hackney from the age of five, and her superhuman mother Le, who doesn’t speak more than a few words in English, but makes her cooking intentions incredibly clear through instructive body language, was a huge privilege. When I went to Vietnam one of the biggest things I noticed was how hard working and industrious the women are, turning their front rooms into makeshift cafes and working endlessly to make enough money – using market produce that they source first thing in the morning to make resourceful but delicious, and perfectly balanced food from scratch. Le and Uyen are set in that mold and both have huge amounts of stamina, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had the chance to learn their recipes with them first hand. While we were prepping, cooking and shooting about 6 recipes a day, I barely saw Le or Uyen take a break or eat. They were too busy creating delicious food. I felt a bit like Elizabeth David must have felt in the 50s, learning about Italian cuisine from the mamas.
I love the contrasts in Vietnamese food – its herbal vitality, and the use of acid (lime and vinegar) along with umami (the ubiquitous nuoc mam fish sauce), sugar and heat. But you need to watch out for those birdseye chillis – especially where you put your hands after you’ve been chopping them!
Cody
Uyen’s recipes cover the Vietnamese classics – everything from making the perfect Banh Mi, to a simple breakfast of pineapple dipped in chilli salt – something that will always remind me of humid mornings in Hanoi and Saigon – as well as her own more modern creations, like the delicious mackerel ceviche summer rolls, and raw tuna with the most devilishly delicious home deep fried chips. And watching and assisting Uyen as she carefully styled and propped each recipe shot for her book was a massively eye-opening experience. She has such an eye for beauty and props, and a way with making food look stunning, and watching the way she communicated and styled with the brilliant photographer Clare Winfield, whose work is careful, well thought out and unique, was so brilliant. I felt like I was really learning from the best. I also prepared some of the dishes using her recipes, and I can categorically say that this girl has been seriously conscientious about recipe testing, because I had to make a massive creme caramel for a shoot and it turned out utterly perfect (see picture at the top of the page).
When I had my first taste of Vietnamese food – in Song Que on the Kingsland Road in about 2003, when I had to negotiate my way past a man in a night gown behind a tower of tupperware to get to the toilet, my palate lit up at the herbs I scattered on my pho and the tangy garlic and scorching chilli of my soft shell crab. In Hanoi seven years later, I watched in awe as a women crouched on her haunches and spread mm thick rice pancakes over her steaming drum, filling them with the most delicious pork mince and black mushroom before scattering them with almost candied fried shallot. I dipped the banh cuon into the sweet, salty sour dipping sauce with my chopsticks, closed my eyes in delight, and never imagined, in my wildest dreams that I’d someday play some small part in the UK’s most exciting and authoritative Vietnamese cookbook.
Thank you Uyen, thank you Le and thank you Clare.
If you’ve been following my Twitter or Instagram (BrixtonRose) of late, you might have seen that the other day I got together with my pal, the lovely and hugely talented photographer Helen Cathcart for a day of cooking, styling and photography. I’m a massive fan of Helen’s work, and we’ve worked together in a writer and photographer capacity before, so it was a real treat to have her over to my flat in Brixton and play around with some props and yummy food. As someone who is lucky enough to write about food for a living, it was great fun to spend a day getting hands on with ingredients (most of which were sourced from Brixton’s markets and stalls, of course) and focusing on the visual side of things. I have also spent some time assisting the gorgeous and very brilliant Uyen Luu on her forthcoming Vietnamese cookbook, which you should all be very excited about – it’s going to be amazing!
For this shoot I prepped, cooked, styled and, with Helen’s help, propped the recipes, and Helen took these lovely pictures. We were both pretty pleased with the results, so I hope you enjoy the photos.
Clams, white beans and kale
I’ve become really obsessed with kale and white beans, together with shallots, white wine and parmesan lately. This time I added clams. I’ll print the recipe soon I promise.
Mackerel en papillotes
The recipe I used for this was taken from Elizabeth David’s French Provincal Cooking book
Saffron, rosewater and lamb shank curry
Having just got back from a trip to Mumbai, where I picked up some fantastic props in the chaotic but wonderful Chor Bazaar, I was keen to do one Indian dish. I used a fantastically fragrant recipe from Vivek Singh’s ‘Curry’ cookbook, and plated the shanks on the ancient, but brilliantly kitch blue enamel bowl I found at the market.
Persian pavlova: Muscovado meringues with pomegranate, lychees, whipped cream and pistachio nuts
The meringue recipe I used is from Anna Hansen’s Modern Pantry cookbook
Tonka bean and chilli truffles
In Chor bazaar I picked up a couple of fantastic vintage tins. To present these truffles, which are again from Anna Hansen’s Modern Pantry cookbook, I used the old Indian Amol tin.
A few weeks ago I came upon a glut of glass jars (thanks to a frantic clean out of my mother’s fridge, which seemed to be stocked for the end of the world with preserves that went off in 2003), and thought it would be nice to make some festive preserves. It’s not something I’ve done before, but it’s been on my food ‘to do list’ for quite a while. Luckily, my wonderful friend and fellow food writer Sophie Dening saw me Tweeting for recipe ideas and sent me Beryl Wood’s wonderful ‘Let’s Preserve It’ book to get me on my way. It’s a fantastic book, full of accessible and delicious recipes arranged in alphabetical order – I’d strongly recommend it to anyone wanting to get their preserve on.
My first thought was to try my hand at a simple marmalade, and given the time of year, a clementine, rather than orange one. Wood’s book has a very simple clementine marmalade recipe, but I thought I’d perk it up with the addition of a glug of Campari, which I had to hand. The bitterness of the Campari balances the sweetness of the clementines and gives it a nice bit of extra depth. Wood’s recipe calls for steeping the fruit and skins in water over night, with the pips reserved in a muslin bag which also soaks with the fruit, but I didn’t do any of that. Aside from the fact there weren’t any pips in the clementines I picked up, I only had an afternoon to tackle all of this.
Instead I reserved about half of the skins and roasted them in a hot oven to concentrate the flavour, adding this to the pan of fruit and skins, and giving an extra citric intensity. I also added cloves and cardamon, which I think work well with the fruit. Here’s my recipe, which is adapted from Wood’s.
Clementine and Campari marmalade
Takes about two hours altogether, makes four jars
450g clementines
850ml water
680g sugar
25ml Campari
Two cloves
A couple of cardamom pods, crushed
Preheat your oven to 180c. Peel and finely slice half of the clementines, reserving the skin. Lay the skins out onto a baking tray and roast in the oven for about 12-15 minutes, keeping an eye on them to make sure they don’t burn. Finely slice the remaining skin-on fruit. Put all of the fruit and skins into a heavy-bottomed pan or a preserving pan and add the water. When the skins have finished roasting, roughly julienne these and add to the pan.
Turn on the heat and simmer the whole lot for about 1,1/2 hours, until the skins are tender. Then add the sugar and Campari and stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved. Turn up the heat and boil rapidly to set, this could take anything between 10-20 minutes. I used a cooking thermometer to help me – the boiling point of jam is 105c but if you don’t have one a good trick is to spoon a bit of marmalade onto a cold saucer and leave it for a minute. If, when you poke it, it has a fine skin on top – it’s ready to set.
Pour the marmalade into warm sterilised jars – this is so easy to do in the microwave, top with wax discs and store for up to a year.
T’other night I had an impromptu gathering, and needed to pull something yummy and filling out of the bag, on a pre-Christmas budget. Inspired by a dish cooked for me once by my good friend and fellow Brixtonite Liz Marvin, I came up with a sort of sausage casserole-cum-fabada – my take on the lovely unctuous Spanish pork and bean stew. I made it with some delicious sausages that my butcher Dombeys makes in house, and enriched the stew with some fantastic morcilla: spiced Spanish blood sausage from the Portuguese deli (not Continental, the one further down Atlantic road near to Argos, which I think is better value). I wanted something I could cook in my Le Creuset, in one fell swoop, and this was just the ticket. To liven it up and add a bit of perky crunch, I added an panko breadcrumb topping with thyme and lemon zest for freshness and texture. You can find bags of panko in most good Asian supermarkets – I got mine from the brilliant Thai shop on Electric Avenue.
Brixton market fabada
Takes about an hour including prep and cooking, though you could cook for longer if time is on your side
Six of Dombey’s homemade pork sausages or some other good quality sausage
1 450g tin of butter beans or cannellini beans, drained but with about a quarter of the brine left in
3 banana shallots, finely sliced
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 200-250g morcilla blood sausage, sliced into 2cm thick slices
1 large glass of red wine, preferably something like a rioja or Malbec
Extra virgin olive oil
The zest of half a lemon
Two handfuls of panko breacrumbs
A handful of thyme leaves, removed from the stalks
Heat a good splash of olive oil in you Le Creuset or a deep casserole dish over a medium heat, and add in the chopped shallots and sausages. Turn the sausages over to brown them – for about five minutes – giving them a prick with a knife point. Then add in the garlic and chopped morcilla and coat with the oil. Cook it until the garlic goldens and the morcilla goes a deeper colour – about three minutes, and then add in the beans and red wine and simmer on a low-ish heat for at least 20-25 minutes. If you want to leave it simmering for longer, add in a splash of water every now and then so it doesn’t dry out.
In a small frying pan, heat a tablespooon of the olive oil over a low heat. Add in the panko, lemon zest and thyme and coat the ingredients together, frying until the panko breadcrumbs turn golden, at which point you should remove the pan from the heat immediately to avoid them burning.
Serve the fabada topped with the breadcrumbs and accompanied by a kale or rocket salad.
When it’s getting dark at 4pm, you know it’s time to start feasting. I had some friends round last weekend and I wanted to spoil them with cosy home-cooked dishes that would warm their cockles and make them feel sated and happy. Because I knew I had a tough week ahead of me, and because I wanted to have fun, dammit, I settled on a roast for the main course. I wanted something I could whack in the oven and leave to its own devices, which in this case was a nice fatty British lamb shoulder, covered in rosemary and garlic and slow cooked for four hours (180°C) with some peeled carrots and onions.
The starters, or perhaps ‘nibbles’ is more apt, were two things I got out of the Polpo cookbook; rough chopped chicken liver pate and walnut and rocket pesto – both things that could be easily made in advance and slathered onto some toasted sourdough (from Wild Caper, natch) on the night. I added chopped tarragon to the pate recipe because I bloody love tarragon with chicken, and I used Courvoisier rather than port and brandy, because it’s what I had to hand. It worked well, but next time I might be a bit more generous with the cognac…
With the lamb I served two sides inspired from my travels and recent meals. I did a take on Jansson’s temptation, an amazingly comforting Swedish dish which is basically dauphinois without the garlic and with the genius addition of anchovies, which as you know, go ever so well with fatty lamb. I had this recently with my Chateaubriand at the new Hawksmoor Air Street, and have been thinking about it ever since!
I adapted my recipe from one I found in Delicious magazine. I added in thyme, even though authenticity dictates rosemary, because I had some to hand and I always think thyme and caramelised onions are lovely together. I also added in the zest of a lemon to give it a fresh lift.
Jansson’s Tempation
Takes about an hour and a half including prep, serves 4-6 as a side
2 white onions, finely sliced
25g unsalted butter, halved
5 medium waxy potatoes, finely sliced as you would for Dauphinois
300ml double cream, seasoned with white pepper and a pinch of salt (no more because of the anchovies)
1 and a half cans of good quality anchovy fillets in olive oil
The leaves from 4 sprigs of thyme, or rosemary
The zest of half a lemon
While you’re slicing all the ingredients, preheat the oven to 180°C. Drain the anchovies, pouring the oil into a frying pan, add half the butter and heat until the butter has dissolved into the oil. Then add the onions and make sure you’re cooking them over a very low heat, until they’re sweet and melty but not charred – should take about 20 mins. Near the end, add in the thyme and cook it with the onions for about five minutes. When the onions are sweet and translucent, remove from the heat and set aside.
Butter a deep baking dish or tin with the rest of the butter and layer half of the potatoes in it. Pour over the onions and then place the anchovies evenly spaced on top. Place the remainder of the potatoes on top and pour over half of the seasoned cream and lemon zest. Bake for about 30 minutes, then add the remaining cream and bake for another 25-30 minutes, until the top has caramelised and the potatoes are cooked through.
The other side was a kale salad: because kale is in season right now, and I wanted something fresh and sort of healthy to go with the guilt of the lamb and JT. It’s based on a raw Tuscan kale salad I had in Nashville (the yanks are really good at kale) at a place called Tavern, which was so delicious and texturally interesting with all the nuts and raisins I couldn’t stop eating it. I’m pretty sure the Tavern version didn’t have chilli in it, but where I can I like to add a bit of fire to salads.
Raw kale salad with toasted almonds and sultanas
Takes about 20 minutes, serves 6 or more as a side dish
400g curly kale, de-stemmed and roughly chopped
Two good handfuls of sultanas
Two good handfuls of sliced almonds
The juice of one lemon
50ml nice extra virgin olive oil
50g Parmesan, finely grated
Red chilli flakes
Preheat the oven to 180°C. While you do this, whizz the kale up until it’s fine like tabbouleh. I did this in two batches to get an even chop. Then lay the sliced almonds onto a baking tray and toast in the oven for 8-10 minutes or until they’re starting to go golden.
Mix the lemon and olive oil until it’s emulsified. Put the kale into a large mixing bowl, add the sultanas, chilli flakes, Parmesan, and when they’ve cooled, the almonds. Mix it all up nicely using a spatula or good metal spoon. Pour over the dressing and give it one more stir.
To finish off the meal, we had a delicious hunk of Gorgonzola DOP which was kindly sent to me by Gorgonzola, which we ate with some rather interesting Sav Birch Sap wine, which was given to me by the Swedish chef Mathias Dahlgren at a recent meal he hosted in London.
Dessert was treacle tart. I had this very one a couple of weeks ago at a friend’s house and they kindly passed on the recipe, which is Heston, though I used April Bloomfield’s brilliant grated sweet pastry recipe for the case! I served it with clotted cream. These guys enjoyed it. Or at least looked like they did:
I love broccoli. It’s one of the foods I really crave when I’ve been overindulging, which, as you know, happens fairly regularly. I came up with this recipe after a couple of days of eating, when I got back to my flat and happened to have some aubergine and broc in the fridge. I wanted something wholesome and nutritious, but tasty and sating at the same time. I particularly love the nutty flavour broccoli takes on when you roast it in a bit of olive oil in a hot oven: it’s somehow more interesting and satisfying than just blanching it, and it retains its crunch a little better, which works really well against the squish of the roasted aubergine. You can add a dollop of crème fraîche to the dressing if you find it a bit sharp, but personally I like it that way – I love how the acidity cuts the creamy aubergine flesh.
For the salad
Serves 2
Half a head of broccoli
One teaspoon of dried red chilli flakes
One garlic clove, sliced
One medium aubergine
Two handfuls of baby spinach leaves
1/2 teaspoon of Maldon sea salt
Glug of olive oil
For the dressing
Half a small tin of anchovies in olive oil, chopped
The juice of half a lemon
A handful of flat leaf parsley, chopped
Five teaspoons of olive oil
A splash of tabasco
Half a teaspoon of honey
Half a teaspoon of crème fraîche (optional)
Method
Preheat the oven to 180. Slice the aubergine into hearty rounds (about 3cm thick). In a bowl, coat the aubergine in the oil, salt and chilli. Then lay them onto a flat baking tray and place in the hot oven for ten minutes. In the meantime, cut the florets of broccoli off the stalk, reserving the stalk and any leaves, as these can be roasted too. Cut the florets into bite sized pieces – some might be the right size but you might have to slice others in half. People tend to throw the stalk away, but it’s actually just as tasty as the rest of this brassica if you get to the tender inside bit, so waste not, want not. Cut off the rough end of the stalk, and peel with a knife until you get to the tender pale bit inside. Slice into 2cm thick rectangles.
After the aubergine has cooked for ten minutes, remove the tray from the oven and turn the rounds over. Now add on the broccoli florets, stalk and any leaves. Drizzle with a bit more olive oil and return to the oven for 15-20 minutes.
While that’s cooking you can make the dressing. Briskly combine the lemon juice, olive oil, tabasco, honey (and crème fraîche, if using) until it’s all emulsified and then add in the chopped anchovies, garlic and parsley.
When the vegetables are ready, take them out of the oven and let them sit for five minutes. Arrange the baby spinach on the plate, scatter over the aubergine and broccoli, and drizzle over you dressing. This dish works well on its own as a healthy supper, or on the side of something like roast lamb.
As you might have noticed from my rather oyster-centric Twitter feed, last week I spent a few days in Denmark snuffling out oysters. The trip coincided with Denmark’s Oyster Week – an event aimed at raising awareness about the country’s oyster production.
We traveled to the Wadden Sea Centre (a UNESCO World Heritage Centre) in Ribe, South West Jutland which, aside from being a haven for many species of migratory birds, is populated by thousands upon thousands of Pacific oysters, which we waded 6km (in the fetching waders, above) to pluck from their beds. Unfortunately I made the foolish decision to leave my waterproof in Brixton, which meant I got thoroughly soaked by the pelting rain – but it was kind of worth it when we tasted the oysters fresh from the sea, and Kasper, our tour leader cracked a bottle of Moet.
It was a good job we worked up an appetite, because that night we were treated to an absolute feast by English chef Paul Cunningham, who’s now cooking at Henne Kirkeby Kro in the wild West of the country – quite a contrast from his former kitchen at The Paul in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens. Paul won a Michelin-star for his food at The Paul, and I’m sure it won’t be long until the stars come shining down on him here – where he’s using the extensive kitchen garden for the freshest ingredients, and making use of his rural ingredients for the best supplies. It was great to see the big man (he’s hard to miss, at over six foot) so happy and relaxed in his new environment, as towards the end of his time at Tivoli things were pretty fraught.
Paul is a maestro of flavour. He’s not afraid to put bold tastes together on the plate (a native oyster cooked on a Green Egg with Marmite, butter and toasted rye bread is one such example), but he rarely misfires, and manages to always get the balance just right. His love of good food is tangible when you eat his dishes – they are original, distinctive and memorable, a bit like the chef himself.
Check out this fantastic video of Henne Kirkeby Kro by First XI:
The next day it was on to Glyngore – a historic fishing harbour where we met the wonderful oyster producer Sven, who fishes for the most delicious native oysters and blue-lipped mussels from the Limfjord, which is renowned for its special, mineral rich waters. After being shown around the production site, where oysters for restaurants including Noma are graded and packed, he cooked us a wonderful oyster-based tasting menu.
Then is was time to don those waders again and search out some of our own natives in the Limfjord. Sadly, my waders leaked and I managed to get totally soaked, which I think may have inhibited my oyster catching abilities (or at least that’s my excuse), but some of us found some. Others netted some spider crabs, which apparently tasted good, but looked too much like actual arachnids for my liking…
You can read about the trip, producers and food in more detail in my forthcoming article for FOUR magazine.
Photos by Kasper Fogh
This gallery contains 8 photos.
A few days ago, I was here: Now, I’m here: Brixton, I love you, but in the words of Cat Power, “you’ll never be, never be, Manhattan.” So I was blue to be home after one very tasty and informative … Continue reading
This gallery contains 17 photos.
I landed in JFK in the midsts of a fleeting tornado. But they didn’t tell us that on the plane: “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s some cloud, wind and rain over JFK at the moment so we’re going to hold off … Continue reading
