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 I witnessed. I’d joined my parents on a last minute trip to Varanasi because my late father Peter Birkett – a freelance journalist – had been sent there by the Express newspaper. He was there to investigate the extended family networks of the slum communities, in light of an arguably crass comment the Duchess of Kent made about Indian people being ‘richer’ than their affluent Western counterparts in terms of their supportive familial relations. I was packing a banana yellow Gameboy in my bum bag, but the children I was playing with were more mesmerised by a packet of balloons the photographer busted out.

My mother was petrified of me getting ill (bless her) so carried tins of corned beef in her handbag which we ate with fresh naan, which somehow passed the hygiene test. We rode on a crowded passenger train from Delhi to Varanasi and the attendants brought around dinner, which was actually festering buckets of slop with flies crawling on it. We eschewed, and my tummy remained in tact.

The next time I went to India, in 2010, a whole other kind of train ride beckoned as I was traveling as a journalist on the inaugural voyage of the Maharaja’s Express with one of London’s top Indian chefs, the lovely Vivek Singh. The train ride was more like Wes Anderson’s brilliant Darjeeling Limited than I could have hoped – we even went to the remote rural village visited by the characters in the film, and – and I know this sounds like some 70s acid trip delusion – I slurped opium tea from the palm of a prince of the Bishnoi tribe.

I saw the opulent ancient beauty of Jodhpur and Udaipur, and the poverty that I remembered from the last visit, which seemed emphasised by the luxe nature of my surroundings. Without my mother to watch my back, and with a food assignment to pen, I let my taste buds properly explore. We worked our way up from Mumbai, through Rajasthan to Delhi, and we tasted everything – from the the fiery hot Rajasthani goat curries to chargrilled paneer, chickpea-based Gujarati snacks and Indian hash browns for breakfast in Agra. It was here I also contracted amoebic dysentery, which made my life rather unpleasant for a couple of months on my return. But that’s India.

In January of this year, I was lucky enough to return to this crazy country to explore Mumbai in more depth. I was traveling with a fantastic bunch – London restaurant PR darling Gemma Bell; Olive magazine’s amazingly knowledgeable  deputy editor Lulu Grimes; the one and only Lucy Cavendish: mum of four and prestigious journo extraordinaire; Xanthe Clay – the Telegraph’s fearless food columnist and recipe writer and Ming Tang Evans: a fantastic photographer who provided us all with brilliant pictures from the trip. Leading us around were cousins Kavi and Shamil and Naved – the owners and chef respectively of London’s brilliant Dishoom restaurants which are based on the Indian city’s wonderful Irani cafes. You can read all about these, and their tragic decline in this piece I wrote for the Guardian.

Exploring the city with Shamil, Kavi Thakrar and Naved Nasir as our guides was absolutely fantastic because these guys know the city like the back of their hand – Shamil and Kavi because they used to visit their grandparents here, and Naved because he cooked here for almost five years. They understood the inquisitive, intrepid nature of our group, and as well as showing us the historic cafes, took us both on and off the beaten track – sniffing out good food at Chowpatty Beach, taking us for an incredible, authentic multi-course thali at the home of their lovely friend Pooja and on an guided tour of the Mohammed Ali Road, where we sampled some very unique and memorable Muslim street food – including bheja roti – rotis fried with delicate lamb’s brain and finished with a squeeze of lemon, a delicious, gelatinous trotter curry and bone marrow curry.

Bone marrow curry on the Mohammed Ali Road

My mother would have had heart palpitations if she’d seen the ramshackle state of some of the places we ate in, but I can happily report that apart from a momentary wobble, my tummy was fine.

Here are some of my photos from the trip – hope you enjoy.

The one and only Mr Kohinoor of Brittania Cafe – check out those specs!

The lone chandelier

Life sized cut-out of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at Britannia

Britannia’s famous chicken berry pulao

The best creme caramel I’ve ever tasted at Brittania

The amazing mosaic tiled floor at Kyani

Bun maska, chai and akoori (chilli scrambled eggs) at Kyani

Red carrots

Pomfret at the market

Pictures of Irani body builders at Yazdani bakery

The bakers at Yazdani

One of the chefs at Radio restaurant

Sunset on Chowpatty

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

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 trip to Brooklyn and Manhattan. But instead of solely drowning my sorrows with bloody marys and American films like I did when I came back from my first visit in 2009, I decided to cook up a storm inspired by my trip and the food magazines and cookbooks I brought back.

I was craving the hearty flavours of American-Italian fare – creamy mac n cheese and meaty treats. I’d been on a burger crawl of Brooklyn with Byron Burger founder Tom Byng, and was originally going to try my hand at burgers, but seeing as the butcher I use in Brixton market was closed on the Sunday and my only option was supermarket mince, I decided on a meatloaf instead: two parts pork to one part beef. I couldn’t get any veal, as most of the recipes I’d looked at had specified. I adapted two recipes I’d found, one from the Food Network’s magazine and one from my proudest new purchase, my copy of James Beard‘s American Cookery – a behemoth that I’d bought from the brilliant Bonnie Slotnick (163 West Tenth St, NY) in the West Village: a tiny, wonderful second hand book shop stocking out-of-print and antiquarian cookbooks. James Beard has no less than six different recipes for meatloaf here, but I went for the ‘Favourite Meatloaf’ one, which like mine is a mixture of beef and pork.

The Food Network mag did it with an accompanying garlic sauce, but I decided to do it with a rich, slow cook Italian tomato sauce, as suggested by Mr Beard, which I got from the Polpo cookbook. After all, this was to be an ode to American-Italian food!

For the meat loaf, Food Network had called for panko, instead of normal breadcrumbs, so I got some of the those from the oriental grocer on Electric Avenue, but unlike Beard, it recommends using a cup of milk, which I refrained from in fear that it would make it too sloppy. This recipe is an amalgamation of both, with little things like the fish sauce, spring onions, chopped gherkins and red chilli added in by me.

Of the meat loaf, Beard says this. “Meat loaf is a modern development. To be sure, Europeans long ago made pates of various kinds to be eaten cold as special treats. But the meat loaf we use so constantly nowadays is a product of the present century. The best loaves are those made with a combination of meats, honestly flavoured, and still moist when cooked. The average loaf cooked today is apt to be overcooked and dry because of the filler put into it; one finds recipes calling for oatmeal, cornflakes, and other cereals, as well as condensed soups and canned vegetables. A good meat loaf is similar  to a country pate. It should be highly seasoned and firm but not dry. It is much better eaten cold, when it slices nicely and holds its shape. It should have a pleasant texture and never be grainy. It may be served hot with a good tomato sauce, a brown sauce with mushrooms, or an onion sauce.”

American Meatloaf (with a slight Asian inflection)

2 tablespoons good olive oil
3 banana shallots, minced
500g minced beef
750g minced pork
1 tablespoon of chopped flat leaf parsley
2 tablespoons of fish sauce
1 chopped red chilli
2 eggs, lightly beaten
4 big gherkins, chopped
2 spring onions, chopped
1 cup of panko breadcrumbs
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 stalks of celery, minced
Pinch of salt
1/2 teaspoon of white pepper
1/2 teaspoon of sea salt
teaspoon of Tobasco

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Put the olive oil in a shallow frying pan and fry the garlic, chilli, shallots and celery for a few minutes gently until the shallots are translucent and lightly brown. Meanwhile, blend the panko crumbs until very fine. Thoroughly combine the meat with the seasonings and egg, add in the crumbs, and finally mix in the celery and shallot mixture. Pack into a greased loaf tin and cook for an hour, basting as you go, until the top is caramelised. Serve with tomato sauce and some kind of greens. Make sure you check the temperature with a meat thermometer when you take it out to see that it’s done.

I served mine with homemade red onion and rosemary bread, bacon mac ‘n cheese and a wonderful salad of broccoli stalks with floret vinaigrette (below) that I got from Bon Appetit magazine – but those are separate posts altogether for another time. Please excuse these pictures – I have lost my camera cable so these are the ones taken with an iphone. When my new cable arrives I will replace the pics with the good ones.

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 landing until it’s cleared a little bit. We’ll be coming down in about 15 minutes, and you may experience some turbulence.” Diplomatically put. The whole cabin clapped and cheered when we landed with a not-very-fun amount of force that had most of the married couples around me closing their eyes, holding hands and suspending their long-held atheism to mutter quiet pleas under their breaths. The two-year-old next to me slept through the whole thing – something reassuring about that.

Brooklyn was sticky hot. The skies were black and it was pouring with rain. I drank a few cups of coffee and had a dip in the Aloft hotel’s pool to try and trick my body into believing it wasn’t really 1am, before heading out to the hottest new spot in town for a some culinary R&R.

Governor, which comes from the team behind Brooklyn Heights’ much acclaimed Colonie and DUMBO’s Gran Electrica, sits on a characterful, cobbled street by the waterfront and – with its warm lighting, huge glass windows and chic, well-designed interior – beckoned me in like only the promise of a good restaurant can.

In the two months since it opened, this place has been earning itself a good rep (including this two star review from the New York Times this week), which is not surprising given that the chef – one Brad McDonald – a softly spoken, Mississippi-born 32-year-old, has worked at Noma and Per Se. The 60-cover restaurant is split over three levels – a sweet little cocktail bar when you enter, where the barman kindly whipped me up a smooth, perky concoction of gin, grapefruit, pastis and egg white, and then the main floor with banquette seating and an open kitchen with a short counter where you can sit and watch McDonald and his 11 chefs do their thing. We were sat on the rather nice mezzanine level, which has dark wooden floors and views over the whole restaurant and kitchen, and is presided over by a small and attentive team of front of house staff.

And so to the food. McDonald describes it as “New American”. And what does he mean by that, exactly? Is it a la New Nordic? “I’m not sure yet,” he told me with a smile. “It’s a reflection of what American culture is, which is a melting pot. As a chef you can gain freedom by drawing on different cultures, and we do that in the way we treat locally-sourced ingredients. Some ‘New American’ chefs are taking traditional recipes like clam chowder and making them modern – we’re taking local ingredients and making them unique to us. In terms of technique – that comes from all over the place – places I’ve worked and seen have influenced that.”

All of this becomes clearer when the dishes – which vary from riffs on classic flavours to something altogether more esoteric – start to arrive. We begin with the snacks. Warm, crusty sourdough that’s made fresh in the restaurant everyday comes with a plate of fresh, crunchy, peppery radishes and a slick of thick, creamy house churned butter that’s topped with crunchy dehydrated chunks of cheese rind (a sort of in-house salt).

Then there’s the delicate, melt-away tapioca crackers filled with beautiful hand-chopped beef tartare, bound together by a subtle, but umami-laden mussel emulsion with ramp capers (capers made from the buds of wild ramps – a wild American allium), and topped with rocket. Pork gets its moment too, in the form of pickled trotter – cubes of glistening, succulent, gelatinous pig foot, lifted with astringency from the pickling, with velvety chunks of spicy eggplant on an aerated pork skin cracker: a well balanced, textural mouthful.

My favourite of these palate perkers though is the poached oysters on toast: small slices of the toasted sourdough forming a pleasingly crunchy backdrop for the luxuriant oysters, which have lost none of their iodine tone in the careful poaching, and are doused with an intense lobster emulsion – as heady as any bisque and garnished with pretty little garlic flowers.

Smoked tomato tartare is another revelation: clean cubes of soft, lightly smoked tomato flesh intensified by a deep, creamy mousse of mackerel, punctuated with crispy little fried sourdough croutons and purslane leaves that taste of green.

There were some uneasy side glances in my party with regards to a couple of the menu items. The first was labelled ‘live sea scallop, ponzu sauce and cilantro oil’ and I think evoked visions of large, pulsating molluscs sliding around the plate. In reality what came was a thing of beauty – a pearlescent scallop shell bearing delicate cubes of sweet, almost translucent raw scallop wonderfully matched to the citric ponzu and fragrant coriander oil. The dish was finished with a slick of house-made soy sauce, which was fuller and more flavourful than any soy I’ve ever tasted – the fermentation process palpable in its savoury depth of flavour.

McDonald explained to me how he inoculates soy beans and then leaves them in the restaurant’s cellar to ferment in order to make the sauce. “It means a lot to us to learn the process of making. So instead of pulling a soy sauce off the shelf, we’re making it ourselves, and generally we’re trying to do as much of the production as we can in-house, which I suppose is a more European approach,” he says.

Another dish that speaks of this very artisan ethos was the other controversial one. And it was controversial insomuch as it was a celery root dish and we had a celery sceptic in our midsts. I say ‘had’ here very deliberately because McDonald’s rendering of the ingredient just may have cured our celery cynic of his dislike of the ingredient, cleverly disguised as it was as mac n cheese. The chef had cooked thin ribbons of the vegetable like pasta, added lemon for freshness and smothered it in a smooth, creamy sauce of powerful American cheddar. Topping it off were waxy yellow flakes of preserved egg yolk that had been grated over the top adding a cheesy, salty kick. The dish was a real gem – at once familiar and entirely new – the strange, distinctive celery notes adding a whole other dimension to something traditionally considered low brow comfort food.

McDonald later showed me how he makes the preserved egg yolks, by sourcing embryonic eggs (which are just the yolks in the early stages) from his butcher, covering them in salt, sugar and black pepper, leaving them for a week, air drying and freezing them. It’s a big process for something that’s a tiny element of a dish – but it’s worth it for the distinctive flavour it adds, and this obsessive attention to the tiniest detail is what makes eating here so special. It speaks of the sort of thoughtful, trailblazing restaurants McDonald has cut his teeth in, and situates him among the cheffing elite.

But simplicity is also done well here. A bowl of sweet, fresh summer beans and shishito peppers – each one perfectly cooked, comes swimming in boisterous whipped-up salt cod and topped with a ruby drizzle of chorizo oil, which is spicy and almost fruity. It’s a stunning combination.

I’m still not sure what ‘Amish quail’ is exactly, but I do know that it was cooked until yieldingly tender and tasted delicious served alongside the best foie gras I’ve ever eaten: intensely salted and charred on the outside and wonderfully sweet, unctuous and light/creamy within. This came with spigarello: a sort of wild American spinach and a complex and addictive miso-squash caramel.

That epic ensemble brought us to the end of the savoury courses, and was followed by a flurry of distinctive, brilliantly executed desserts that included celery root cake (another hit with our reformed celery phobe) with pickled meringue and grape sorbet, which sounds incredibly weird but ate very well, and an impressive honey soufflé with an earl grey creme anglaise that spoke of some seriously well-fed bees.

Next time you’re any where near Brooklyn, I’d recommend booking a table at this joint. Because I’m pretty sure that pretty soon, that won’t be very easy.