Woof Woof

Went to a very cool little pop-up bar slash cabaret last night… hard to imagine I know, I too was a little bemused but by jove it was fun. I shall set the scene: snuggled atop the Bumpkin on Westbourne Park Road a wee little den that goes by the name of Maison de Chien has quite literally popped up. Higgledy piggledy tables and chairs, crazy flock wall-paper adorned with poodles and a well stocked bar selling canine cocktails for knock down prices (may I recommend the Chihuahua – a sooped up caipirinha muddled by a real life Brazilian). Its is run by Medium Rare (“pioneers of modern variety” http://mediumrare.tv/mrare.html) but fronted by Poodle and her sister Kitten (easy to spot, she’s the smiley lady with the big blonde barnet and slightly grubby nails – she’s a lady-bird breeding gardener by day) and they are on the first leg of their mission to introduce London to the pop-up cabaret-bar. At circa 10pm every night the lucky guests are treated to a cabaret by one of a number of fearless fruitcakes (in the nicest possible way) who last night had the whole room in fits before you could say woof woof. And the best thing about it is that you need not part with a penny, (except to quench your thirst). How the finances work is totally beyond me, it all just seems to darned good to be true. But its not. Open 6pm – til midnightish Wednesday– Saturdays, until end of March, when they will be popping up elsewhere. So very worth a visit.

21st Century Takeaway

This is a real quickie, but I just wanted to copy, paste and post it because I think it really is awesome. It is called the Instructables Restaurant (www.instructablesrestaurant.com), “the first open sourced restaurant in the world”. Ok its not a very catchy name, but the idea is super cool. Everything in the restaurant has been crowd-sourced from instructables.com (note to self must use it more) and everything can be downloaded to take home and make yourself, from your lunch to the chair you sat your pretty little toosh on. Its a whole restaurant built on free, happy, share-y, care-y loving, you scratched my back so I am happy to scratch yours and I just think we would all be much happier (and cleverer) if everything worked like this. And they have some pretty funky toasters too. Only downside is that its in Amsterdam. The Dutch are very good at things like this.

Oxtail

Until a couple of years ago, nobody under 40 really seemed to know about oxtail, resigned to the yellowing pages of dated cook books and plagued by memories of “harder times”... But thanks to a pesky dip in the global economy and an insatiable appetite for all things retro, oxtail has made one hell of a comeback as the saviour of frugal feasting, the one nominated for every penny pinching prize going and it now reigns supreme as king of kitchen economy. But until last weekend, I am ashamed to say I had never actually cooked it. Eaten yes, many a time, and many a time vowed to go home and recreate the thrifty masterpiece, but somehow I have never got round to it, until now. My grandmere, a grande dame of the highest order, bought a whole oxtail for my student brother who forgot (I suspect on purpose) to take it back to university with him. As luck (or fate) would have it, I became the proud owner our home-grown hero and this is what I did with it. It is an attempt to recreate I delicious oxtail number I had last week at Albertine, (1 Wood Lane, W12 7DP, 5 stars from me), and it was a pretty good replica. I served mine with mushed up butter beans, shallots, cream and spring onions, but any anaemic looking carb would do just as good a job methinks, if not better.

Braised Italian Oxtail

What you need:

Oxtail, about 2kg / 10 pieces – looks a lot, but 90% is bone, chopped into chunks

A couple of some, or all of these: carrots, onions (essential), celery, shallots all peeled and chopped into manageable chunks

Tomato puree, about a third of a tube

6/7 garlic cloves

Chicken stock, maybe a litre (whatever you have and then just top up with water, nobody will know)

Good slosh of red wine

1 tin of tomatoes

Chilli flakes, teaspoon

French mustard

Thyme

Plain flour

S+P

Patience

A big pot, preferably heavy based and oven proof.

And whatever you want to serve it with – spud, butter beans, polenta, big hunk of bread

Heat a little oil in the pan, and when beginning to sizzle, brown your oxtail chunks. When browned, set aside and sauté your veggies. They don’t have to totally soften, because my word there is plenty of time for that later, but just warm them up, point them in the right direction. Then introduce tail to veggies, and veggies to tails. Now I think its about now you do the flour bit, but flour is a bit controversial. This next sentence may well banish me from certain cooking establishments for life (my grandmother’s for certain), but I think its fine... so now sprinkle your happy veggie-tail party with maybe two tablespoons of plain flour, just so it coats them all in a light but sticky floury mess– this is to thicken things up a bit so you have more of a stew than a soup. Next up are the cloves of garlic (whole and with skin on is fine), thyme, chilli flakes, massive dollop of mootard, healthy slosh of red wine, tomatoes, and chicken stock – all in the pot. The idea is that everything is submerged so if you need to add a bit of water from the kettle in order to hit the plimsoll line, do it. On the hob bring to a gentle simmer then, if you are using an oven proof pot put into a pre-heated oven (sorry forgot to say – preheat the oven to 160 degrees), and if you don’t have an oven proof pot then you will have to do it on the hob – very low temperature and the occasional stir. Now all you have to do is wait. And wait. For about 2 ½ hours. I am sure you are more than capable of entertaining yourself but may I suggest that alongside watching the next three episodes of Mad Men you listen to this:


So great.

In the near 3 hours past, your funny looking lumps of cow tail should have morphed into the holy grail of frugal feats…soft, tender meat that Falls. Off. The. Bone. Very easy to verify – hoik one out and have a pick at it with a fork. If it flops off lazily, you my friend are at the last hurdle, you may pass go and you may collect £200. If things are still looking a bit tough and chewy then I’m afraid its back of the queue for you and another half an hour. However hungry / bored of waiting you may be, I think you really have to stick it out – tough oxtail is not something you want to be wasting your precious time on, in fact I think it would be hard to over-cook it as long as there is sufficient liquid (oh that’s another thing I forgot to say– check liquid levels are high throughout).

Almost there, but one last kind of fiddly hurdle. The picking off of the meat. This is optional, but you are going to have to do it either way, you’ve already spent a day on this, so whether you do it now or later when its on your plate andallyouwanttodoisshovelinamounthful, is really neither here nor there, but I’d do it now. So it is a bit of a faff, not sure what the accepted method is, but I just took the lumps out, left them too cool for ten minutes and then picked the meat off with my (clean) hands. In the ten minute wait you could scoop off the excess fat from the sauce left in the pan. Return picked meat to sauce and reheat.

Et voila, there it was - my very first oxtail supper. Delish. Think I'm going to try an oxtail curry next time.

Pot Curry

Chicken + spices + lack of dishwasher + idle streak = Pot Curry. Chicken, curried, and with rice, in one pot. It really is a stroke of genius, although I say it myself and one of the more fruitful consequences borne of my loathing for washing up. All you need to buy is a chicken and the rest is usually lurking on the shelves at home. There is one small technical issue that I should mention – the cooking of the rice.

Rice, like poached eggs, is one of those things that I have never quite got the hang of. I mean I can cook them, but you know some people seem to just have the knack; a blasé slosh of water and a vague mention of about ten minutes and what do you know, they lift the lid on perfectly steamed white fluffy rice or a pert little poached egg with a wobble in all the right places. The how-to of these culinary basics gets an inordinate amount of air time; everyone professes to have their own little secret which they are willing to impart on a strictly tit-for-tat basis, as if they are about reveal the path to eternal youth. Well let me tell you, I have tried them all – rinsing the rice, swirling the water, vinegar in the water, oil in the (rice) water, cold water, lots of water, an inch of water, barely any water, and I have concluded it is pot luck, quite literally, nothing more than a big watery game of chance. When you next see someone nail it, rather than letting that jealously bubble up inside, remember - they have merely happened upon the winning ticket following an unseen but lengthy run of less-impressive losses. Anyone that can do it twice in a row, answers on a postcard please.

So you will need:

1 healthy looking chicken

Cumin seeds, coriander seeds, chilli flakes/dried chilli, a couple of teaspoons of each

4 cardamom pods

3 or 4 onions

3 or 4 cloves of garlic and a big hunk of ginger chopped roughly (you can keep that fiddly skin on).

1 lemon

Basmati rice for 4/5 people (quanitites of rice is another enigma I am yet to solve, I shall leave it up to you)

Raisins or sultanas

Fresh coriander

Spring onions (not essential)

Flaked almonds (not essential but nice)

Olive oil

S+P

An oven proof pot / pan / dish or relatively deep roasting tray and big enough to fit a chicken and the rice.

Chop up the onions into quarters and put them, the garlic cloves (whole), cardamom and ginger in the bottom of your receptacle of choice with a little olive oil. Crush your coriander and cumin seeds and chilli in a pestle and mortar and with a bit of oil rub over your chicken, halve the lemon and put it inside the chicken. Sit the chick on the onions and garlic and pour in a little water, a couple of eggcup-fuls, to the bottom of the tray/pot. Roast in the oven like you would your average chicken for about an hour at about 180 degrees.

Now is the tricky bit – the rice. Rinse it (I think with basmati this is important), and carefully put it around the chicken. Pour as much boiling water as you deem fit over the rice, (but not the chicken) - the water needs to be hot otherwise you really muddle the oven temperature. On my last go at this, I poured enough water to cover the rice with maybe an inch of water. This may seem a lot but the complex chemistry of rice gets (even more) complicated when its sharing its bed with a chicken and in an oven rather than on a hob. Gently stir the rice to lift the onions / garlic and ginger off the bottom of the pan and return to the oven for 30 minutes. Again this sounds a lot, but as I said rice is tricky.

Whilst waiting for the rice to do its thing, you could toast your almonds in a dry pan, roughly chop your coriander and if you really want to show off, soak your raisins in some hot water. This isn’t so essential if you are using sultanas as they tend to be softer anyway, but raisins can sometimes be a bit chewy which is great in muesli but not so good in rice. Pouring hot water over them and leaving them to soak for ten minutes softens the little blighters up a bit. You might also want to check up on your rice occasionally – we all know how difficult it be sometimes.

After half an hour, your rice should be looking like you’re one of those people with the knack. Not only that but the rice will have made friends with all the other stuff in the pan and be bursting with chickeny spicey goodness. Lift the chicken out of the pot and let him rest for 5 – 10 minutes. If, for some totally inexplicable reason your rice isn’t quite ready, this is the ideal opportunity to surreptitiously pour in a bit more water and give it another few minutes.

When all parties are ready decorate your rice with raisins/sultanas, almonds and coriander, give it a bit of a stir to mix in the onions, garlic and ginger and carve your chicken. Serve with a dollop of yoghurt, a green salad and some mango chutney.

Hello Blog

So I’m a beginner here, and not entirely sure what I am doing… it all looks so fun and easy, so romantic, so foot loose and fancy free when you’re reading everyone else’s, and now doing mine its really difficult. I feel a bit of an idiot; I tapping away frantically, the delete button mostly, struggling find anything to say about my most specialist and favoured subject. Its even more ridiculous because part of the reason why I’m finding it so hard is because I am imagining an audience that doesn’t even exist. I am, in fact, writing to myself. This whole thing is bizarre.

Sod it, carry on, I’ve started now…

So the plan is, to write down some of my thinkings on food. Frugal food. I, like lots of people, love food but I am economically shackled by a student-esque budget, yet not willing to succumb to more traditional budget solutions that normally arrive in a tin. Pocket friendly food is what I spend my thoughts on, and I have decided to write some of them down. Maybe they will be useful for other greedy people who have to put their pennies elsewhere, but I also hope people who have the luxury of not worrying might have a gander too. That is of course assuming anyone will ever read this. I still haven’t worked out how people come across these things….

Anyway, that is my plan. I have broken the ice. Still feel like I am talking to myself though.

p.s. look at my perfect breakfast