Being a Foodie in London (Events & Markets)

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been keeping myself busy with an abundance of food markets and events in London. And I’ve quickly learned.. there are PLENTY of both.. although I think I may need to find some sort of sailing or car event to satisfy my husband who’s been obliging my foodiness 🙂 I’ve blogged about Borough Market before but here are a few more events and markets I’ve been too recently and some old photos too.. As these photos are about being a foodie in London, I thought it appropriate to share a link to a blog I’ve just discovered The London Foodie written by a Japanese-Italian Londoner born in Brazil. Check it out!

Various Veggies at Borough Market

Meat at Borough (incl my all time favorite truffle mortadella)

Seafood (and a crispy duck sandwich) at Borough

Raclette (type of cheese & a Swiss/French dish of crispy gooey cheese!) at Borough

Experimental Food Society Exhibit at Truman Brewery (tried camel's milk ice cream!)

Cupcakes baked in quail eggs (creative but not easy to eat!)

Various Food Shapes

Mealworms, lambs testicles and more!

Whitecross Street Market

Hope you enjoyed the photos. I’ve been eating very well as you can see! The Experimental Food Society was, as expected, very interesting. From cupcakes in quail eggs to medicinal marshmallows.. I even ate my first ‘bug’ : a mealworm! It had been fried so really it was just a crunchy thing that didn’t taste like much. One day I’ll get the courage and opportunity to try something realllyyy “insect-y” like grilled crickets. Here are some links for the photos above:

• Borough Market
• Gastronomica
• Experimental Food Society
• Ginger’s Comfort Emporium (for camel’s milk ice cream)
• Pomp de Franc Cake Society (for the mini cupcake and cupcake in quail eggs)
• Whitecross Street Market
• Eat My Pies (for pies, scotch eggs and more! at Whitecross Street, owned by the Foodnetwork UK chef Andy Bates)
• Wild Game Co (for the venison burgers and more at Whitecross Street)

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My Ongoing Love Affair with Meat – Pork Edition

As anyone can see from my blog, I am an avid meat eater (click here for the first edition of my Love Affair with Meat). It’s fitting as my husband calls himself a “meat-a-tarian”. It also makes sense if you are familiar with Vietnamese cuisine (seeing I grew up eating it). You don’t exactly come across many vegetarian Vietnamese restaurants.. And if there’s one type of meat Vietnamese people love, it’s pork. Whether it’s roasting an entire pig, grilling it, braising it or drying it, we love pork. So despite being Vietnamese, my parents exposed my siblings and I to many different types of cuisine. We’ve had pork several ways, and I thought I knew a lot about pork.. But for some reason, I don’t have a single memory of eating pork the way the Brits do. And if you’ve ever been to a British food festival, horse race, air(plane) show, German holiday market, concert or any other outdoor event with food trucks in the UK, it’s highly likely you’ve had roasted pork with crackling in a bun with apple sauce and/or stuffing. My American readers might now be saying, “What on earth is crackling?!” Well my friends, let me show you…

Classic Roasted Pork with Crackling

Pork crackling is the result of roasting pork belly or pork loin with skin on at high heat. The skin bubbles up and, if done properly, crisps up to the most sinful and comforting crunch. The Guardian did a fantastic article on the Ultimate Search for Pork Crackling, check it out. The author addresses several different methods and her results are rather interesting. Needless to say, there are several ways to do it. But so much is dependent on how hot your oven gets and how much time you have to prep your pork. While I did a bit of research into different methods, the recipe I was using as inspiration was Andy Bates’s Slow Roasted Pulled Pork.

 

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The Pleasures of Slow-Roasting..

As I just finished watching BBC’s Saturday Kitchen (as I do most Saturday’s if I can help it, check out another post on the show), I wanted to quickly post in response to the viewer’s call-in question about lamb shoulder. I’ve been meaning to catch up on my posts to write about the slow-roasted lamb shoulder I made last week, so I thought this was a good a time as any!

Last Friday, Chris and I had some friends over for dinner and I wanted to make something different, not too difficult but still have some ‘wow’ factor. I remembered that I recently watched an episode of Food Network UK’s Street Feasts (with British Chef Andy Bates who is renowned for his award-winning pies, check out at EatMyPies.co.uk). He’s been exploring the ‘street food revolution’ in the UK and then making his take on dishes back in the kitchen. On a side note, I went to check out Andy’s stall yesterday at the Whitecross Street Market and was a bit disappointed he wasn’t there, but his mum was delightful and very sweet.. My spirits were quickly turned around when I tried his chorizo pie and traditional pork scotch egg..

One of his creations is a Slow-Roasted Lamb Shoulder with Feta Salsa. I’ve never actually cooked lamb shoulder before (chops/rack yes, but no other cuts), and I’ve never ‘slow-roasted’ anything either. Since I had the time that day, I thought I’d take a stab at it. And let me tell you.. There was definitely WOW factor. I marinated it in the morning (not overnight as I forgot!) and it was just fuuulll of flavor. And the smells that were coming through were incredible. There’s something to be said about the satisfaction of slow cooking anything.. kind of like the feeling you get when you bake I think.. The effort, love and care you put into it and the patience you have to have when the delicious smells are permeating your clothes and house.. all of it is worth it when you take that tray out of the oven and sigh with relief that it looks just as amazing as it smells. My only regret is that I didn’t take more pictures because I was hosting, but that only means that I’ll have to make it again! This dish was so straight forward to make. The simplicity of the ingredients makes the flavors wholesome yet bold and comforting. Mmm I’m remembering how the meat just melted off that bone.. And that feta just melts into the rich garlicky olive oil. I was amazed at the depth of flavor that the lemon zest provides without being ‘lemony’ too.. I highly recommend this dish! It is particularly brilliant for a dinner party as it’s interactive. Also, because it’s slow-roasted.. it allows you to clean all your cooking up before guests arrive. Ours were amazed at how clean the kitchen was when they came in (our kitchen/lounge is open plan). All I had to do was pull the lamb out and pour the salsa over.

Slow-Roasted Lamb Shoulder with Feta Salsa

Now whether or not my starter was a classic pairing isn’t exactly certain, but I wanted to keep with the Mediterranean theme. So I made a dish I’ve made before which is also straight forward, doesn’t require a lot of cooking and lets you clean up before your guests arrive – Scallops with Sauce Vierge (Click here for the original post on it). It’s a great starter as it’s got lots of flavors and freshness with the herbs, but isn’t too heavy at the same time. I served it with a side of ciabatta toasts. I prepared the sauce in advance whilst my lamb was cooking and let the flavors marry whilst I cleaned up. Then when our canapes were finished, I just seared the scallops in some butter/olive oil until they were just golden brown. Happy to say they were perfectly cooked!

Scallops with Sauce Vierge

So for the canapes.. I have no idea how I came up with this but it suddenly occurred to me the night before our little dinner party.. Here’s my Steak, Roasted Onion, Crouton Canape with a homemade Roasted Garlic Mayonnaise (click here for my post on making mayo).. For this mayo, simply take a whole head of garlic, chop the top off (to expose the garlic cloves), place in foil, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, close it up tightly and roast until the cloves are just melting. Use this olive oil to make the mayo (add more oil of course if need be) and squeeze in the bits of roasted, creamy garlic. These were such a hit and fairly easy to make! If you don’t want to make homemade mayo, just add the roasted garlic oil to store bought mayo.. Hope you try this one! Again, easy but with WOW factor 🙂

Steak Canapes with roasted red onion and croutons

To be a bit cheeky, I presented them on little plates with the mayo in egg cups!

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Chicken, Beef and Pork – Oh My!

All my British friends and family are more than likely to be familiar with the “3 for £10” meat offer at most supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury’s and recently Waitrose). For all my American friends and family, I’m sure I’ve complained to you how expensive meat is here! While this deal isn’t always the best I have found, it makes grocery shopping a little easier. In this case, I just picked three different types of meat/poultry and thought I’d figure out what I would do with them later. I still struggle with accessibility to quality meat in the UK.. I mean – let’s be honest. The steaks are just NOT the same as American steaks (unless you’re willing to spend a small fortune). Most of the time, steaks served in restaurants are thin and overcooked and have this distinct taste that I really can’t explain. However, I HAVE had a good steak here.. but it was one I cooked myself at Cordon Bleu with meat sourced from Allen’s of Mayfair (London’s oldest butcher shop with superb quality and the prices to match!).. Nonetheless, I still crave red meat from time to time. So that day at Waitrose, I decided to buy a tray of chicken thighs/drums (bone in, skin on), a couple frying steaks and some pork loin steaks.

The dishes I came up with were:

• Vietnamese Chicken Curry, served with rice
• Steak in a peppercorn cream sauce, served with roasted sweet potato and fennel
• Pork scallopini in a lemon, butter, caper sauce, served with roasted asparagus and angel hair pasta tossed with garlic infused extra virgin olive oil

Because it was National Curry week in the UK not long ago, I decided to use up my chicken thighs and drumsticks by making Vietnamese Chicken Curry. Now I’ve promised my mother that I’d never divulge her ‘family’ recipe. But what I can do is refer you to another Vietnamese recipe by The Ravenous Couple (a young Vietnamese couple cooking traditional recipes). There are a few variations of this recipe depending on the family, but their recipe is great. Since I don’t always have these ingredients on hand, I make a few shortcuts and a few additions.

• I haven’t been able to find curry paste in the UK, so I use Madras curry powder from Costco UK and it tastes just fine.
• I don’t often have the patience to cut shallots, so I just use white/yellow onions.
• Again, I don’t often have the patience to marinate the chicken but if you have time then it will only make your dish better!
• My family doesn’t usually add carrots (even though it’s traditional). Instead we add sweet potato chunks. We also don’t add onion wedges.
• My husband likes his curry thick, so I’ll add some corn starch/flour with water.

Vietnamese Chicken Curry by TheRavenousCouple.com

While I can’t reveal my mom’s measurements, my method is basically this.. Cook chopped onions and garlic until translucent. Add curry powder and secret ingredient. Cook a minute or so. Add chicken and brown on all sides. Add chicken broth, fish sauce or salt and smashed lemongrass. Let cook and then add chopped potatoes, sweet potatoes and coconut milk. Let cook and thicken as necessary. For some added spice, add cayenne.. Traditionally, Vietnamese curry is eaten with fresh baguettes but it’s often eaten with rice vermicelli or plain white rice. It’s also always better the next day or day after that! PS.. I’ve used up leftover mushrooms to make a vegetarian version of Vietnamese curry – check out this old blog post.

So after eating curry for dinner and lunch the next day, I was ready to cook my steaks (click above for recipe). This was a dish I thought of based on my basic pantry ingredients. It’s such a great classic and is super fast to make. Also, a creamy rich sauce is great to mask a lower quality meat! I used basic Oxo beef stock cubes and didn’t actually have any wine to add, but it was still great! To make the sauce super rich, I reduced the stock quite a bit and added a knob of butter at the end. The sweet potato and fennel combo came about purely because they were available at my local market. I was trying to come up with more creative and nutritious starches to bread and pasta. So I had leftover sweet potato from making curry and roasted it with the fennel. Fennel is a great vegetable which isn’t used too often. I didn’t grow up eating it but I see it so often lately that I’m doing my best to find new ways to cook with it. It did take quite awhile to roast though. So be prepared to wait for this one. But this dish is really minimal in prep and has very little cleanup!

Steak in creamy peppercorn sauce with roasted sweet potato and fennel

So as I worked my way through my very full fridge, I was torn on what to do with my pork (click above for recipe). They were pretty thin already (just about 1cm thick), so making any hope of cutting ‘chunks’ for a Vietnamese dish were out the window. I also wasn’t in the mood for cooking with fish sauce.. It CAN smell the house up a bit 🙂 So I figured I’d utilize the capers I had yet to open. I originally wanted to make an escalope (breaded) but realized we were low on breadcrumbs. It’s also a bit messy to set up an assembly line of flour, egg wash and breadcrumbs. But dipping in just flour isn’t so bad! Due to the recent unexpected heat wave, asparagus had a second season and was available in abundance at my local market. This is one of my favorite vegetables and I think I’ll be eating more of it.. It’s so easy and quick to roast and can be eaten on its own, in an omelet or tossed with garlic and pasta! Whenever I think of scallopini or escalopes, I always think of warm pasta. Since I’m on a garlic kick right now, I took the easy route and infused extra virgin olive oil with a LOT of garlic. I found that if you let it infuse until the garlic slices become really soft and golden, the taste isn’t too strong and doesn’t stay with you for ages. This is also my ‘fast’ way of getting nice garlic flavor instead of roasting a whole garlic. But yum, remembering this dish is making me very hungry.. pasta, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, meat, butter, lemon.. Mmmmm.. Hope you enjoy!

Pork Scallopini in Lemon Butter Caper Sauce

P.S. I recently discovered my new favorite ‘affordable’ wine! Sainsbury’s House Cotes du Rhone. 75cl is £3.99. It also comes in mini 250ml bottles that are 2 for £3.

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Exploring Surf and Turf

A couple of weeks ago I watched an episode of Nigel Slater’s Simple Cooking focused on the theme of surf and turf. He visited local fisherman who cooked fresh scallops with chorizo. It was a super fast and extremely basic cooking process – using the oil from the chorizo to cook the just-caught scallops. Despite its simplicity, it looked full of flavor and steaming with freshness. The show is still up on the site for another month or so. Take a look and it’ll make your mouth water!

It got me thinking about this very well known combination of surf and turf. Most people automatically think of steak as the turf and usually lobster or fish as the surf. I liked that the chorizo and scallop provided a somewhat surprising combination, yet so obvious upon closer inspection. If you think about where chorizo comes from, you’ll remember or learn that its origins lie in Spain. It’s often seen in traditional dishes such as Paella (a rice dish known for its yellow color from the saffron in it). Paella can be made with a variety of ingredients, but the most popular (internationally) is a mixed ‘surf and turf’ version. Very often it will have large prawns, squid, mussels, chicken and/or chorizo. The paprika and peppers add so much flavor to this sausage and allows it to complement the sweetness often found in seafood such as scallops or shrimp. I like the indulgence of surf and turf as well.. If you pair it with fish, you’re getting your omega’s and being ‘healthy’.. But you offset it with the deep flavor of the crispy chorizo.. Mmm..

Hence, I decided to make a Chorizo and Fish Surf and Turf. In thinking about paella, I initially wanted to put my surf and turf over rice. But I didn’t want the dish to be too heavy. So a light alternative is often couscous which is conveniently a whole lot easier to make. I also happened to have some homemade chicken stock in the freezer to add more flavor to the couscous. I had wanted to use a meaty fish like monkfish or cod that could be cut into chunks and still hold its shape. Sadly the fish monger didn’t have any, so I settled for Haddock which was still a good thick alternative. Really this dish is SO simple and very fast. You don’t have to have a salsa on the side, but I thought it was a good way to add some freshness and bring more vegetables to the dish. The citrus was a nice way to cut through the flavors as well. I hope you’ll try this!

Surf & Turf No.1 - Haddock and Chorizo over Courgette Couscous with Corn Salsa

For the next surf and turf idea, I caved and went back to the original paella/rice-dish idea. Except I had been craving risotto and had homemade chicken stock that needed using, so I thought why not replace the paella. Traditional risotto is pretty straight forward. Your main ingredients are onion, garlic, butter, risotto rice, white wine, chicken stock and cheese. The main techniques to get here are first to coat the rice in butter (with the onion and garlic) and second to go low and slow with adding one ladle of stock at at time. I didn’t really follow a recipe to make the risotto, but here’s a simple, classic one if you need one – Pea and Pecorino Risotto. To spice up this basic risotto dish, I added another surf and turf combo – click here for Chorizo and Roasted Prawn Risotto. I used a technique that I’ve seen on Ina Garten‘s show Barefoot Contessa. She swears by this method, and I am a firm supporter of it! Simply cover a baking tray with foil, toss some raw prawns with olive oil and salt and pepper, arrange on the tray and bake at 400F for 5-6 minutes. Just be sure to take it out just as it turns pink. It’s easy to overcook it, but if you don’t your shrimp will be super juicy! Because I wanted to minimize the work for this dish, I first tossed the raw prawns with a bit of chilli olive oil, salt and pepper. I arranged them on the tray and then scattered thinly sliced chorizo all around it. I turned the temperature down a bit – about 170C and made sure to keep an eye on them. Such a great midweek meal! Hope you enjoy.

Classic Pea & Parmesan Risotto Topped with Chorizo and Roasted Prawns

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Chicken for Non-Chicken Lovers

Just over a week ago, I got back into one of my favorite routines – watching Saturday Kitchen with James Martin. And as usual I thoroughly enjoyed the programme. James Martin really is a fantastic chef and tv chef. For one thing, he’s cooking entire meals live (not like ‘cooking segments’ on US news channels). He also gives good, relevant cooking tips and advice. Just now while looking up his website to link to, I discovered that he has a new venture called Life, Fork & Spoon which is a food delivery service with either fresh or frozen meals that can be delivered to you next day. I had a quick browse and for the prices and quality of food the service looks really good. This would be ideal for hosting a dinner party, especially around the holidays.

Anywho – on to the chicken. One of the dishes James cooked on the September 24th programme was his Pot-roast Chicken with Potato Ragu. Although James makes every dish seem easy to make, I promise this dish really was easy. And it’s perfect for the changing autumn weather. It’s cosy and because of the rich stout you almost forget it’s chicken. So because it’s a BBC show, they couldn’t officially mention which type of stout he was using but it was clear he was using Guinness. Any stout would work but he highly recommended the ‘un-named’ Guinness brand.

I only made a couple changes to the recipe. Because I had some, I added a couple cloves of garlic and half a carrot to the onion for the roasting. I didn’t have any homemade stock available, so I used beef stock cubes. I also doubled the concentration, so I used two cubes for the same amount of water. Also, for the ragu, I forgot to buy cabbage but had leeks so just used those. Also forgot the parsley which would’ve been a nice fresh touch but I didn’t think it was the end of the world. And I used regular onions instead of shallots.

BUT despite those changes, I was very happy with this dish. I also used a technique which my Dad does with every poultry he cooks – I let it soak in a brine. I just looked online and dissolved 1/4 cup salt and 1/8 cup sugar in 1 litre of cold tap water. Then I just made enough of the brine to cover the chicken in a large bowl. I let mine soak for a couple of hours but overnight would be best. What this does is make the chicken super moist. Just dry it when you’re ready to get cooking.

I hope you’ll try this dish! It’s great for two because you can eat the legs/thighs for dinner and save the breast for lunch or a pasta dish the next day. Enjoy!

Pot Roast Chicken with Guinness

Potato Ragu

A great way to mix things up with your Sunday Roast!

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