It might just be the best bread in the world.  A warm, soft, tantalizingly nutty sesame loaf, fresh from the ovens just after 5pm…

…or one of THREE enormous olive loaves purchased in one go later that weekend.  I want to go olive spelunking in caverns and crevasses of doughiness.

Phenomenal with a large splosh of fresh ricotta cheese, liberally doused with several large gloops of good olive oil, a spritz of freshly ground pepper and a HIYAAAA of kosher salt.

Spectacular with an assortment of cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery…a punchy, saucy blue, the ever-orgasmic ash-striped Humboldt Fog, and a half moon of triple cream.  Because double cream isn’t good enough and single cream is just preposterous.

I can think of fewer recipes for happiness than Tartine bread + Cowgirl Creamery cheese + good friends + bottles of wine.

Just don’t expect to eat any of your delicious dinner afterwards.  Way to go on the triple olive bread and the triple cream, Steph and Lex. The Lawrence sisters, like the Li sisters, most definitely how to eat.

Hooray! It’s time for another Rambling Restaurant Singles Night featuring an aphrodisiac dinner, so you know things are bound to get hot.  Particularly when you have five people in a veryverycozy kitchen and have fresh bread baking in the oven, a giant vat of soup bubbling on the stove, and ten large pork loins popping and fizzing boiling oil all over the place.

Really. Hot. Temperatures. Luckily, there was also a dining room full of really hot people (yes yes, as in extremely attractive) all mixing and mingling on the other side of the curtain.  To get their taste buds primed and hearts racing, we served four courses featuring ingredients thought to have aphrodisiac qualities.  Of course, both dessert courses featured what is inarguably the most guaranteed aphrodisiac of them all – a large quantity of alcohol. Which is how we started the night as well, with glasses of passionfruit, raspberry and rosebud fizz.

Each cocktail came with a little tag marked with a suit denoting where to sit for your first table, along with some silly icebreaker questions inside to spark conversation or incite passionate debate.  Our eleven brave men and eleven brave women scattered amongst four tables to wait for these shiny happy braids of dough…

…to toast to perfection into these lovely browned plaits with a soft and fluffy white interior.

Ripped into chunks wafting thin trails of steam, these rolls dipped and dived  into large bowls of rich and creamy Jerusalem Artichoke soup, garnished with a swirl of hazelnut pesto, a flourish of extra virgin olive oil and a twist of crushed black pepper.  My apologies for the blinding glare of reflective soup.

While soup was seductively sipped, Michelle and I played with the searing loins. Seriously, that joke kept us entertained throughout the entire dinner service. She and Sarah had busted their asses stuffing and assembling the pork loins over the last few hours and the marscarpone, sage, asparagus, and pancetta – filled rolls were works of art.

Take the pork loin, pound it furiously, and lay it out on a flat surface. Line up your fresh ingredients in a narrow strip lengthwise about two inches in from the edge.

Roll the flattened loin into a narrow tube, keeping the pile of ingredients towards the center, and secure with an array of torturesome looking toothpicks.

And then…ta-da! A beautiful, colorful, and flavorful cross-section of meat, vegetable, and cheese. It’s like all your  essential dietary needs in one satisfying bite.

Sear the loins (don’t be restrained here – make it hot and fiery!) for a minute or so on each side until lightly browned, then wack them into the oven until your desired level of doneness.

We served the pretty little meat spirals (prettier in person, I promise) with gravy, roasted potatoes, and a wilted spinach and toasted pine nut salad with a red wine-honey-english mustard dressing.

Following the main course, it was time for more table switching, more new friends, and of course, more food.  For dessert, we served a fantastic find of Sarah’s called a St. Valentine’s Syllabub – an old school English pudding, popular from the 16th-19th century, consisting of heavy cream, lemon, brandy, white wine, sugar, and…some other stuff.  Since the cream required a lot of arm action to whip and solidify, I handed the bowl over to the lone male in the kitchen and instructed him to ‘beat it until you get a bulky whiteness.’

Uh. Oops. Sexual innuendo so thick you could scoop it with a spoon.  And layer it with toasted almonds, juicy red raspberries, and top it with a tuile biscuit heart (in my defense, ‘bulky whiteness’ is exactly what you’re aiming for in the recipe. I did not make that up).

Such adorable tuile hearts, just the right consistency to break or crush or stomp into pieces, as foodrambler said. However, we should also remember that hearts can jiggle and wiggle, bewitch and bewilder, and they can most certainly intoxicate.  Especially when served as a Glow-In-The-Heart Gin & Tonic Jelly, as molded by the fabulously inventive jellymonger duo of Bompas & Parr.

Under normal light, it’s an architecturally impressive jello mold that packs the wallop of  a silky smooth G&T in one cool and condensed mouthful. Way classier than a cherry red gelatinous mess of jello shot in a Dixie cup.

But it gets so much cooler. Just add blacklight and it glows! It’s like magic! Especially after ingesting many spoonfuls of gin-soaked jello!

We gave one to each table to share and then split another one behind the scenes. And then another. By then, things were starting to get a bit hazy.

Which meant, time to head off to the pub!  A Rambling Restaurant Singles Night would never be complete without a proper visit to the pub.  At which point this story must end. Can’t give away any secrets! You’ll just have to come along next time…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/02/16/a-rambling-aphrodisiac-dinner-complete-with-searing-loins-and-gin-tonic-jelly/feed/ 6 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/12/24/sugar-and-spice-is-nice-at-the-rambling-restaurant/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/12/24/sugar-and-spice-is-nice-at-the-rambling-restaurant/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:55:56 +0000 mei http://familystyles.wordpress.com/?p=2558 Bright colors are nice too.

At the last Rambling Restaurant of 2009, we served a trio of richly colored dips – chickpea hummous, beetroot hummous, and carrot cumin dip. So pretty in pink.

For maximum dippability, we prepared straight-out-of-a-hot-oven-and-onto-the-grill flatbreads. Take Moro flatbread recipe (recipe below), multiply by 15 (eek!) and you have a lot of steaming hot fresh bread  in your future. Also a lot of rolling pin action. Stop whining, it’s good for the arm muscles.

I know making your own bread for a meal sounds thoroughly unrealistic, but this pita-like bread only needs about 20 minutes to sit. This means you can take about five minutes to make the dough, let it sit while you chop vegetables or prepare something else, and have WOW-YOU’RE-AMAZING homemade bread to accompany your meal. Even if it’s only yourself you’re impressing, it’s totally worth it. Especially when you fold it over and stuff it with sauteed spinach and halloumi cheese and roasted eggplant and other such delights.

We followed up the onslaught of foldable starch and pretty bowls of mush with a Turmeric Lime Chili Chicken over a Roasted Eggplant, Pomegranate Seed, Scallion, Parsley, Mint, Tomato Fattoush with a dollop of Cumin Yogurt Sauce. It’s a lot of ingredients that somehow all work in symbiotic grace to produce a happy mouthful of amazing.

But a discussion of odd-sounding ingredients that don’t really seem like they’d work together but actually will blow your mind would not be complete without Chef foodrambler‘s dessert: Orange Blossom Almond Polenta Cake with Coriander Syrup.  You might not think you like coriander, but I DARE you not to like this cake. I like this cake so much I am actually going to make it right now for a Christmas Eve Day Brunch.  I also like you enough to show you this pretty picture which does no justice to the rich, moist, exotically sweet and just a touch of spicy cake perfection.

Garnish with a twist of orange, a sprig of cilantro, and a spoonful of honeyed syrup with dots of coriander seeds.  Staring at this picture makes me very happy that this cake is only several hours in my future.  For those of you gluten-free people out there (sis Irene Bean is testing out a potential gluten allergy),  this cake is made with polenta and not flour. Woohoo!

Now go find yourself some cake too. Happy holidays!

Moro Flatbread

What You Need:

1 cup flour
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 tsp dried yeast
a bit less than 1/2 a cup lukewarm water
1 tbsp olive oil

NOTE: this amount makes about four small-plate size flatbreads, enough for one very very hungry carb fiend like me, or two normal people. Multiply appropriately depending on your eating party’s level of carbophilia.

What You Do:

1. Mix the flour and salt in a big bowl and activate the yeast in the water, if necessary.

2. Slowly pour the water and yeast into the flour and incorporate by hand. Once all the liquid has been mixed in, punch the dough around for a few minutes. If it’s too sticky, add a bit more flour. Add the oil and keep kneading until you have a single ball of dough with a relatively smooth texture and a bit shiny with oil.

3. Let sit, covered with a damp tea towel, for about 20 minutes.

4. Pull off small balls, larger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball, and roll them out to your desired thickness onto a sturdy floured surface. A good rolling pin is handy here, but floured wine bottles work just as well.  We decided to go super-thin at Rambling Restaurant, but I like the thick and fluffy kind too.

5. Once the dough has been rolled out, you can either put them on a lightly floured baking tray or a lightly oiled pan. At RR, we decided to do both – stick it in a hot oven until they puff up and lose their wet doughy sheen, then finish off on a griddle pan for some tasty brownedness. Either way is delicious.

6.  Cook until puffy, browned, and yearning to jump into your mouth. Dip in something tasty and pat yourself on the back for having produced your very own homemade bread. That is, if your hands aren’t busy tearing apart your creation and stuffing it in your mouth.

like you enough to leave you with a picture so you can start drooling yourself.

As if the Old Market Hall in Helsinki weren’t amazing enough on its own, it can also boast of a beautiful location just on the water overlooking the South Harbor. Enormous cruise ships loom as tall as skyscrapers and as large as city blocks, dwarfing the little local tugboats and ferry boats that zip through the harbor and around the coast and islands. In the helpful visitor’s centre just by the Market Square I bought a 24 hour travel card that included unlimited travel on the trams, buses, and most excitingly, the ferry to the islands of Suomenlinna. Let’s be quite frank -  I will never, ever, fail to be highly entertained by being on a boat…

Of course when setting off on an island adventure, one must always think ahead to provide sustenance for the daring and dangerous trip ahead. Unlike most other stranded islanders foraging for coconuts and dead bugs,  I had the luxury of departing from a ferry stop a mere four minutes walk from the Old Market Hall so I stocked up on Finnish treats for the voyage.

I started with a mini loaf of classic Scandinavian rye bread (100% ruis!)  and bought some strong Finnish cheese that I can’t even begin to pronounce but is spelled viinitarhurin.  Brushed with wine and aged for six months, the cheese reminded me a bit of a comte or gruyere with its smooth slices crumbling into nutty shards.  Add a bit of  deep burgundy colored and intensely flavorful Rudolph the delicious cold-smoked reindeer and it’s a ridiculously adorable little Finnish sandwich of love.

Snacks in hand, I boarded the ferry for the 15 minute ride across the harbor to Suomenlinna…

Suomenlinna, the  ‘Castle of Finland’, is a sea fortress spread across  six islands off the coast of Helsinki in the Gulf of Finland.  It’s  a UNESCO World heritage site currently home to 900 permanent residents and several museums, schools, restaurants, a library, arts centre, theatre, and even a minimum security labor colony. The fortress was constructed by the Swedish crown back in 1748 to protect Finland from Russian expansionism, which unfortunately did not keep Russian forces from seizing control of Helsinki and the fortress during the Finnish War in 1808.  With so much history and a beautiful landscape of old stone fortifications amidst cobblestoned pathways,  overhanging trees and gently rolling hills, Suomenlinna was the perfect place for a brief afternoon visit. Unbeknownst to me, it’s apparently an extremely popular picnic spot for the people of Helsinki, although most of them are smart enough to go during the summer when it’s just a little less chilly.  Step away from the ferry dock and through a cobblestoned tunnel and suddenly it’s almost a small town in New England…

right down to the beautiful autumn foliage. If I can’t be back in Massachusetts for the fall, I’ll take the southern Finnish islands instead. I also appreciated the colorful bottle arrangement below which was just the start to a whimsical and fantastical series of window displays. Unsurprisingly, Suomenlinna is home to multiple artist studios and theatres:

Unlike New England, Suomenlinna is also home to a combination church and lighthouse. In fact, this is unlike anywhere else in the world, as apparently only the Finns are inventive enough to combine a house of worship with a useful nautical navigational device. The church was actually built during the Russian era as an orthodox church and originally had 5 traditional onion-shaped domes, which were removed upon Finnish independence in the 1920s.

The layout of the fortifications over six different islands results in beautiful waterways cutting through the fortress with charming bridges and paths. It’s so pretty and pristine at times that it almost feels like a storybook illustration.

But then you see reminders that in fact, almost 900 people live on Suomenlinna and despite living in a world class maritime monument/tourist attraction, they still must do their laundry…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/10/05/food-in-finland-part-two-a-market-picnic-on-the-islands-of-suomenlinna-the-sea-fortress/feed/ 7 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/08/30/amsterdam-part-one-exploring-an-amazing-foodie-street-in-a-city-of-munchies/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/08/30/amsterdam-part-one-exploring-an-amazing-foodie-street-in-a-city-of-munchies/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:18:28 +0000 mei http://familystyles.wordpress.com/?p=2056

i knew i was in a city of good eating when one of my first morning stumbles was into a shop called ‘cheeseland’ with wheels of emmenthaler the size of a monster truck tire or a dog bed for a large-ish golden retriever.  to give you a sense of scale, that wedge has a larger diameter than my kitchen table (not that you’ve seen my kitchen table, but it’s of a good size).  hellooo and welcome to amsterdam.

the reason for my cheese shop visit was thanks to a few days in holland hanging out with my friends rootster and flinner, two of my favorite people who live far away in chengdu, china, whom i clearly do not get to see often enough. these two party legends emailed and said ‘hey we’re going to be in amsterdam next week! come meet up!’ and i said ‘hmm….okay!’ and a week later found myself enjoying all of amsterdam’s myriad sources of entertainment.  i love living on a continent with affordable train travel, even when you live on an island. amazing.

since i got in on a fairly late train, my first real experience with amsterdam’s quality food came on a solo morning tour of the streets around our friend’s apartment near the central train station. i left root and flinner to catch up on sleep in a new time zone and ventured out to get coffee and munchies. and just so you know – it was 9am so i don’t mean that kind of coffee or that kind of munchies -  those came later in that day (remember mom, it’s legal there!). haarlemmerstraat, the street right outside our friend’s place must be some sort of gourmet thoroughfare because i visited two cheese shops, three bread and pastry shops, an olive oil store, a spanish and an italian delicatessen, a lebanese bakery, and two juice bars over the course of the trip.  i knew it was a good neighborhood when i immediately ran into this chocolate and sweets shop:

i may not know the exact translation of bonboncreaties but unlimited delicious is certainly speaking my language. they even had a signs for a new food fair in nearly every shop window. i’m seriously tempted to go back next weekend.  the beautifully crafted chocolates and cakes were gorgeous but i was in a savory mood so i continued on to kaasland in the top picture. i was enticed by the bright green color of the pesto cheese (in the very center of the photo) and the friendly dutch woman behind the counter recommended an amazing deeply flavored and almost caramelly aged gouda as a local specialty. i also purchased a warm loaf of brown bread and some fresh fruits and vegetables from the supermarket including tiny ripe strawberries and juicy sweet tomatoes.

the most amusing moment of the morning came when i tried to buy coffee to bring back to root and flinner. every shop on the street seemed to be a ‘coffeeshop,’ not actually a shop that sells coffee. i finally stopped in one with a large espresso machine in the back and asked the guy behind the counter if they sold takeaway coffee.  he smiled and handed me a brochure on ‘amsterdam coffee’ and said ‘this is what coffee means in amsterdam.’ right…i get that. but..how does one actually buy coffee? i finally discovered a place that not only served actual drinking coffee but produced its coffee with the incredible robot machine on the right. i want it to wiggle its espresso arms and go waaaalll-eeeeeee.

after stuffing ourselves with bread and cheese and veggies, we did a bit of wandering around the city’s beautiful cobblestoned streets, over shimmering canals and past ornately decorated old buildings and churches. root and i caught up on several years worth of talking, stumbled upon the red light district and tried our best not to get hit by bikes. here’s the two of us probably standing in the middle of a bike lane.

root being a fellow serious eater, it wasn’t too long before we were hungry again and returned to haarlemmerstraat to pick up more snacks. my favorite purchase was some of the best bread i’ve ever had, a flattish crunchy brick of mixed olives and sundried tomato:

we also couldn’t turn down these amazing pastries on display at vlaamsch broodhuys, which i believe means breadhouse (which has a lovely but totally unintelligible dutch website).

i was intrigued by the prune tarts in the center but ended up going for abrikozen, frambrozen, and rabarber frambozen (apricot, raspberry and rhubarb raspberry). the rhubarb was very good but a bit too dense and floury, the apricot was better but not quite there, and the raspberry was absolutely spectacular. tart, sweet, sugary perfection.

our last foodie visit on haarlemmerstraat the next day was a fantastic gourmet food store specializing in olive oil, vinegar, and mustards.  one wall consisted solely of huge metal canisters full of oils imported from spain, italy, france, and even a fair trade olive oil from palestine.

i picked up some peppery italian olive oil and we also succumbed to the siren call of some delicious olives and marinated purple artichokes. root and i also made a beeline back to the breadhouse for more olive and sundried tomato bread. i could graze on this street for ages.

i’ve got posts on some traditional amsterdam specialties coming up, as well as some items you may not want to let anywhere near your mouth. if you’re ever in amsterdam, make sure you visit the foodie paradise of haarlemmerstraat. i’ll even give you the addresses if you bring me back snacks…

***

Meeuwig & Zn (olive oil, mustard, vinegar, etc. shop)

Haarlemmerstraat 70
1013ET Amsterdam

Vlaamsch Broodhuys (amazing bread and pastries)

Haarlemmerstraat 108
1013EW Amsterdam

i’m making focaccia for rambling restaurant tomorrow! i’m excited because it’s my first time doing any real cooking for our secret supper underground restaurant and because i’m currently in the midst of a focaccia obsession. i’m also a little nervous because it’s my first time doing any real cooking for our secret supper underground restaurant and it better be good because people are paying for it. yikes! i think it’ll be great, but bread can be temperamental and i really hope it doesn’t get angry with me tomorrow.

just to get some practice in (and stuff myself full of yummy carbs again) i played around with some more focaccia this evening. to make the dough, i followed the recipe from my last focaccia post in which i state that i can’t really be held responsible for any accuracy of measurements. wooooo, that was an understatement. in reading my own directions, i realized i had misremembered the milliliter to cup conversion and written down what would result in a watery goop rather than anything that might remotely resemble dough.  don’t panic – the appropriate corrections have been made to the recipe, which let’s all admit was loose enough to begin with. just adjust as necessary and it’ll be fine (p.s.  i will always do my best to transmit useful information, but  just use anything i say as a starting point anyway).

i had some zucchini, onion, and potatoes left over from my weekly organic vegetable bag, so i sliced them into very thin rounds with my discount shop cheese grater and managed to keep both thumbs intact this time. i am so wanting my own mandoline, not to mention my kitchenaid mixer and immersion blender from san francisco. sigh. anyway, it’s super easy to experiment with tasty focaccia combinations. just cut all your veggies into thin slices so they cook all the way through and lay them out on the dough between the second and third rising periods and poke the dough a bit in between the toppings. i sprinkled chopped sage and thyme on the zucchini slices, chopped rosemary on the potato slices, and onion rings over the whole slab. yum.

so pretty! then a long drizzle of olive oil and leave to rise for a final 45 minutes. stick in the oven until the smell becomes overwhelming, remove from oven and eat.

two random notes:

1. this focaccia can be a meal in itself, especially if you stick some cheese or meat or other vegetables in side. i sliced a huge square open when still warm and stuck in some slices of halloumi cheese. yuuuum.

2. often when i’m cooking or baking, i find myself hungry and impatient while my creations are in the oven. this probably stems from back in the day when i was like 10 years old and used to bake amazing apple pies with my babysitter lisa. after trimming the edges of the pie crust, we would bake the little irregular bits into cinnamon sugar cookies to eat while the pies were baking. perfect to tide over antsy children while the pies cook and cool and then are finally ready to eat.

unsurprisingly, i am still equally unable to wait for things to cook. in this case, if you get hungry while waiting for the focaccia to finish baking, you can fry up any leftover vegetable toppings really quickly because they’re already sliced so thin. just add a little olive oil to a frying pan and they’ll cook in just a few minutes. tasty with cheese, or eggs, or on a slice of toast…just save room for the focaccia!

i am not particularly good at following directions when it comes to baking. often, i am also bad at planning ahead to make sure i have/purchase all the ingredients necessary to make whatever i initially planned. i used to think that both those failings were major liabilities on the kitchen front, but i’ve decided that they can actually result in unexpectedly useful instances of discovery and creativity.

take, for example, the above roasted tomato focaccia. i made my first rosemary and sea salt focaccia last week, following this recipe from a spoonful of sugar as closely as my inattentive measuring and poor gram-to-cup conversion skills would allow. the result was a tasty but certainly not exciting sort of flatbread, a little too thin and a little too dry to be considered a really stellar focaccia.

upon attempting my second round of focaccia,  i had the brief thought that maybe i should pay better attention to the recipe, which seemed to work really well for the author. then i decided to screw it and go the opposite route. instead, i’d just make the adjustments i deemed necessary – i wanted it to rise more, so i added more yeast. i wanted a more moist bread, so i added more olive oil. i also found this recipe for perfect cherry focaccia from a chef from the river cafe (their menu makes for some very enticing reading btw; i shall venture there once i actually start generating an income).  i really like what this writer, stevie parle, says in the recipe:

‘Its hard to give a recipe for bread, as it is in the hands of the baker, use this recipe as a guide.’

stevie, i appreciate that. i’m going to stop feeling like i should follow recipes. i don’t usually for cooking, but for baking it always seems like you need exact amounts of your tsps and tbsps (or gms and mls and all those english abbreviations that make my life more difficult) or your cake will implode or something.  so my recipe for roasted tomato focaccia, borrowing heavily from stevie’s delicious sounding cherry focaccia, will be a bit of a non-recipe.  there are probably some good reasons why stevie does what (s)he(?) does, but it worked amazingly well for me the way i did it.  hope it works for you.

caveats: a) the only really important parts are bolded. the other parts may be mildly informative or my own superfluous blather. b) this is my attempted recreation of a recipe where i didn’t measure much. sorry if my amounts aren’t very specific or turn out to be wrong, but that’s the point of a non-recipe, right? trust your bread instinct and you’ll do fine.

roasted cherry tomato focaccia with mixed garden herbs

what you need:

about 25 cherry tomatoes

about 3 cups flour

about 10 g yeast (i used fast-action because that’s what they sell at the corner store. fresh would probably be better).

about 2 tsps sea salt

about 1 1/2 cups water

olive oil

herbs (i bought little pots of basil, oregano, thyme, and sage at the columbia road flower market last week and decided to experiment with all of them, plus the rosemary plant that i have somehow managed to not kill yet). feel free to choose the herb of your choice, they all tasted fantastic.

what you do:

1. mix the flour,  salt, yeast and water in a mixing bowl and start scraping it together by hand (if you use fresh yeast, you have to dissolve it in water first). if it’s too sticky, add more flour as necessary.

2. add a good pour of olive oil (i think i used maybe a 1/4 cup?) and mix it in until the dough gets a smoother and more pillowy feel. then knead it – punch it, roll it, make funny shapes with it – for about 10 minutes or 3 michael jackson songs or until, as stevie says, it gets  ‘soft and luxurious’.

3. put your slighty puffy dough ball back into a lightly oiled bowl and cover it with a damp tea towel. leave it for an hour or two (try to get some work done, in my case) and come back when it has doubled in size on its own like a magic sponge from when you were a kid. like a proud parent, i love checking on my dough to see how it has grown.

4. spread the dough out into a pan and leave it to rise another 45 minutes or so.

5. now comes the most satisfying part – use your finger to poke your dough in a grid (or whatever pattern you like, i won’t judge) and stick in the cherry tomatoes. prick them with a fork so they don’t explode in the oven (or in your mouth like hot lava pockets, as chris says) and then sprinkle your bread with herbs and a generous drizzle of olive oil. don’t be scared, olive oil makes everything taste better. leave for another 45 minutes or so and the dough should have risen around the shiny little red globes.

6. stick your masterpiece in the oven for about 30 minutes at 350° (that’s a total estimate, i still don’t really understand my british oven). in other words, just wait until it gets brown and amazingly yummy looking, then pull it out.

7. let cool so it just barely doesn’t incinerate your mouth, then promptly eat nearly half your incredibly delicious creation until you are uncomfortably full.  to be honest, i don’t quite recommend this last step, but i fully understand if you follow my lead and do the same. you may not be able to help yourself.

there are so many different variations to this recipe too – i’m excited to see what other tasty vegetable, herb, cheese, and meat combinations could result with experimentation. we might even serve some at this week’s rambling restaurant! i’ll let you know how it goes…

we’ve had a steady stream of friends and family rotating through the hackney hostel over the past month, which has meant many a fantastic food exploration throughout london. having some of my favorite people in town has been wonderful, not in the least when your houseguests bring you delicious treats straight from paris like these insanely decadent macaroons from the famous ladurée shop.  from the top:  salted caramel, chocolate, rose, and pistachio. amazing. thanks chris and ant!

of course, no visit to the hackney hostel is complete without visiting several markets. we made the absolutely essential saturday morning hangover stop at the toasted cheese stall at borough market, then hit up the usual suspects like scallops and bacon, fresh oysters, strawberries and cream, lamb burgers, halloumi veggie burgers, and all those old friends. a new discovery was the focacc-with-many-deliciously-unexpected-ingredients like the one i purchased with leeks, pine nuts, and ricotta. i’ve started experimenting with making focaccia, which i’ll post about someday, so it was inspiring to see all the inventive combinations. my most recent visitors – anthony, dan, and christine – show off my focaccia here. you can’t really see the bread, but you can see their excitable foodie delight (especially anthony’s).

later that day, dan and i went to the opening of the beautiful pavilion at the serpentine gallery thanks to his friend sam, part of the design team.  well done sam.

after our swanky gallery visit, dan and i went to a swanky dinner at a fabulous anglo-french restaurant called le cafe anglais.  now judging by the photo we may not look like we belong anywhere swanky, but believe me, we looked sharp.  sadly, i didn’t take any photos at the restaurant so you’ll have to use your imagination to envision dan’s rabbit rilletes with toast and pickled endives,  which was a cute little pot of cute little shredded rabbit cooked in fat until tender. we had to dig through about a quarter inch of solid fat to get to the deliciousness within. i had an amazing fish soup and then a gloucester old spot pork belly while dan had grilled plaice fillet with roasted tomatoes. i’ll most definitely be going back there.

sunday morning found us back at my usual weekend routine of columbia road flower market and brick lane upmarket, where i had the best okonomiyaki of my life. i may only have had four of these japanese cabbage-base pancakes in my life, but this one blew the rest out of the water. little bits of sweet corn, crunchy cabbage, tangy japanese sauce, and a crispy layer of fried cheesiness on top with a gentle sprinkling of dried seaweed. yes, it looks like a hot mess but it’s delicious. come visit me and i’ll show you.

ant, chris and i also filled our bellies with roast hog sandwiches with rocket and apple sauce and then sampled our way through indian wraps filled with spicy goat curry, arancini rice balls, just-made doughnuts, freshly battered fish and chips, and so much more.  i love how everything is made in front of you at the market – everything comes straight off the grill or straight out of the hot oil and goes right into your mouth.  i acknowledge may not be exactly a good thing for you, but it sure tastes good.

but the highlight of the freshly made treats? anthony’s churro, which came directly out of the hand-rotated churro-making machine (gotta get me one of those) and into the deep fryer. once out, it rolls like a happy puppy in a bed of cinnamon and sugar, then receives a direct injection with a crazy churro-injection machine, filling the empty churro with an insane mixture of half chocolate and half homemade dulce de leche in one decisive downward motion.  seriously, i don’t know who invented these wacky machines whose only purposes are to make hollow spiral churro tubes and then fill them with cavity-inducing gloppiness, but i applaude their ingenuity. that’s on the level of the cotton gin and the internet.  holy week’s-worth-of-calories-in-a-deep-fried-sugar-sprinkled-chocolate-filled-stick.  note the compromising photo of anthony on the right, before he succumbs to the incredibleness about to invade his mouth.

food tour from the hackney hostel over. coming soon, farm tour with a big ass pig and a decisively male donkey.

peter, my new swedish cousin-in-law, has just informed me that stenugnsbageri means ‘stone oven bakery’. mmm. walking to the wedding, cousin lexi and i stopped and did some drooling at the array of loaves in the window and i vowed to return the next day.  my belly is so glad i did.

i bought one of these wickedly pointy little rye loaves as well as the crusty and warm wheat loaf below.

i planned to meet up with my cousins soon after to share the bread with them, but we miscommunicated the time of meeting and i was left to eat the majority of both loaves by myself. i consoled myself by purchasing some famous swedish cheese that begins with V and is very strong and has one of these (ö). [that makes a hilarious little surprised face].

i (barely) refrained from tearing into these tantalizing little pastries (in front of one of the  largest cathedrals in sweden) until i met up with my cousins again and had some assistance.

sugar and vanilla on the left, rhubarb in the center, and mixed nuts in a sugary glaze on the right.  they also had versions of the oval pastries with raspberries and chocolate and a huge selection of large loaves of all shapes and sizes.  since i was heading back to copenhagen that night, i refrained from purchasing any breads larger than my forearm. however, i was very tempted by these flatbreads below that remind me of danish kroner.  money with holes in the center  is just more exciting than regular coins, perhaps because they remind me of  donuts and bagels.

they looked a bit too hard to be delicious, but peter informs me thats how they’re supposed to be. in fact, they’re known as ‘hard bread.’ due to their hardness they last a long time and he even has some packed in his luggage to be hauled all the way back to sierra leone. i somewhat doubted that peter’s bread would still be edible once he gets back home. but he assured me the bread lasts quite a long time, although it may have trouble with the sierra leone humidity. and of course he’s right.

thanks to google, i have just learned from the 1950 edition of the st. petersburg times that this bread uses a special kind of sour milk which helps it stay fresh for 80-90 days.  daaaamn. i am currently rather impressed by both swedish culinary ingenuity and the internet. well done both of you.