Family Styles » london

Community Feasting and the Best Cupcake Frosting You May Ever Put In Your Mouth

mei — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:39:38 +0000

I always wish I had access to a table large enough to seat 20 of my best friends around it for an epic dinner party. I still haven’t managed to acquire such a table or a room large enough to put it in, but I got a taste of what it might be like at a great event last night called the Hub Feast. It’s a potluck and a dinner party, a chance to meet great people and talk about all sorts of cool food things, and an opportunity to make an unnecessary amount of insanely indulgent peanut butter cream cheese-frosted cupcakes. What more could you ask for?

The event took place at one of the Hubs: a network of beautifully designed office/event/social spaces for members and their guests to work, meet, connect, innovate, and more, located as close as Islington (the first one) and as far as Bombay and Sao Paulo. I’ve visited the gorgeous wood-beamed and exposed brick-walled Hub King’s Cross a few times to meet with our friends at Hide & Seek and so was excited to return for one of their monthly community feasts, described as follows:

The programme of Feasts for 2010 is well under way now and this month, we’ll be looking at Guerilla Food. Across London, there are people running underground restaurants, growing things in weird and wonderful places, cooking in unpredictable locations and using food in ways previously not explored. If you want to meet these people and find out a bit more about what they’re up to, we invite you to come along.

As always, you can expect to sit next to people who love food, cooking it, talking about it and most of all, eating it. So bring both an open mind and a dish to share to eat with people that love all things food. An informal evening with a very loose agenda, we hope to create a feast where conversation about food, life, love and everything in between, can flow freely.

We’ve been chatting with the lovely Hub folks including Holly, Alex, Lucy, and Eleanor about doing some events, so they invited us down to chat about Rambling Restaurant and underground supper clubs and all things delicious and exciting. It all sounded like pretty much like my ideal evening, so Sarah, foodrambler and I baked up a storm of lemon curd meringue roulades and several batches of the most insanely deliciously orgasmic Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting.

A quick aside on these cupcakes: I’d recommend you don’t click that recipe. In all seriousness…it will haunt your dreams. The banana cupcakes are very good; the peanut butter cream cheese frosting will bring you to your knees in pure tastebud joy. The sublime happiness is only slightly marred by the guilty knowledge that the peanut butter (fat) plus cream cheese (fat) plus salted butter (fat) plus icing sugar in this frosting is probably at work hardening your arteries as soon as the cupcake crosses your lips and the smile crosses your face. However, keep in mind that all this tasty fat and sugar are calories that humans are genetically hardwired to love. This means it is not my fault when I eat gargantuan mounds of the frosting piped onto cupcakes (dangerous), slathered onto apples (healthy!), spread onto bananas (still good!), licked off of several kitchen tools (not so much) and then, finally, by the unabashedly deliberate spoonful. I guarantee you will do the same. Blame biology.

But back to the feasting – it was a lovely evening of meeting, chatting, and of course, lots of eating. We went around the table and introduced ourselves so everyone got to see who was there and their cool projects and organizations and affiliations. I had great conversations about cooking and food spaces with Holly from Food Stuff and talked sustainable food development with some great people from Forum for the Future and saw but didn’t get enough time to chat with Chris from the Real Bread Campaign. Meanwhile I ate fresh bread, hummous, spicy ginger carrot beetroot salad, Spanish omelette, flapjacks, apple crumble, spinach and strawberry salad, couscous, roasted vegetables, and so much more. One of my favorite dishes was an amazing wait-a-minute-this-is-vegan?-you-must-be-joking leek pie made by a really nice guy named Alessio, whom I tackled after dinner to express my delight in his dish and ask his secret. Apparently, it’s soy cream. Don’t worry, it’s not actually a secret.

It was a wonderful occasion to meet a lot of creative, friendly, interesting people, all equally in love with food and cooking and community and eating. I’m excited for the next one. You can come along too, but only if you promise to take home some cupcakes so I don’t have to. I still have some leftover frosting in the fridge and it is calling to me to come eat it with a big spoon…

A Night of Moulin Rouge at the Rambling Restaurant

mei — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:43:16 +0000

Welcome to the Moulin Rouge Ramble, a dimly lit den of cabaret, cake & corsets that popped up on Great Windmill Street a few weeks ago. Hosted by the amazing word-of-mouth agency 1000heads, decorated by the creative visionary Ali O’Malley, and captured on film by the fantastically talented Mark, it was quite the evening to remember…as long as you didn’t down too many absinthe cocktails.

Come check out Mark’s amazing photos of our ephemeral Parisian creation filled with candlelit erotic poetry, beef bourguignon, fishnet stockings and freeflowing champagne…

I tell you no lies when I mention the freeflowing champagne, generously supplied by the astonishingly accommodating, friendly, and up-for-anything folks at 1000heads. Lined up in the soaring foyer of their Soho office building were dozens of champagne flutes, ready to welcome our diners who had solved mysterious clues of translation and location to turn up cabaret-clad in front of the Windmill Club for a night of adventure.

More meals should involve top hats and feathers.

All that week, we’d cooked and cleaned and baked and transported and decorated, up to the very last minute. Below, we add last-minute touches while the dancers practice their burlesque routines.

Thankfully, our dedicated team had everything looking spectacular by the time everyone arrived.

The Rambling Restaurant was lucky to have the most dedicated and gorgeous team of corseted and feathered servers from 1000heads, including the wonderful Lauren, Lisa, Donna, Gemma, Nicola, Sam, and even more who pitched in to hang curtains, wash dishes, move tables and boxes and abandon their desk and office space to our bizarre activities. Below, Lauren and Lisa begin to take the cornichons and carrot salad out to be served with crusty baguettes & butter and foodrambler’s delicious pork rillettes.

The large flatscreen television gives away our boardroom-as-kitchen, from which we served and stewed our three course meal.

Here foodrambler and I spoon up slow-cooked beef stew with parsley cream sauce. While I loved the earthy combination of wine and spices in the bourguignon, it doesn’t make for the prettiest presentation. That was one of the many lessons we learned while serving 140 eaters over 2 nights, as well as very important ones on keeping food hot and timely for people. Just as foodrambler flambéed about 25 saucepans of beef that made her kitchen erupt in flames, we jumped straight into the fire for this dining challenge and learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t as we went along that will be valuable for future events. Most useful information learned: how to rock a corset-apron combination. So much wisdom gained over this experience.

Back in the satin-draped dining room, people showed off their masks and moustaches…

and displayed their amazing handmade Moulin Rouge themed hats (well done Ailbhe)…

and talked and ate and admired the decorations…

…and participated in a fancy dress competition led by the deliciously scandalous poet Abi Palmer…

…and even found love at the Moulin Rouge.

But mostly, I think, they drank….

and drank…

…and drank.

We certainly contributed by handing out a very strong absinthe cocktail that we called the Drunken Fairy, but is generally known as Death In The Afternoon. Judging by the feedback from some aching heads the next day, it’s pretty apparent why.

I acknowledge I had quite a strong hand with the absinthe from Liqueurs de France …

but it’s much more fun to blame it all on Nicola the Green Fairy.

Some of my favorite photos of the evenings are of the favorite people I met, including the shot of this laughing lady…

and this adorable photo of our sexy dancers, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs. I only wish I had been hardcore enough to go out dancing with them till 6am like some impressive people I know.

Even if you don’t go clubbing with dancers in fishnets, you at least need to fit in a photo shoot in front of the Windmill Club.

Before our late night marathon dancing and cleaning sessions, we ended with a very sticky Moulin Rouge Velvet cake. I loved foodrambler’s chocolate fishnet stockings, threatening to slide off the tilting cake into a pool of buttery frosting madness. I cut the red velvet cake into shocking scarlet slices that looked insane but tasted damn good.

And of course, everything tastes better with birthday candles.

Thanks a million to everyone involved. For more on the event, check out blog posts by foodrambler and 1000heads.

All photos copyright by Mark, except the last one from 1000heads.

I’m On A Roll! Or, The Painfully Punderful World of Sushi Making

mei — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:38:35 +0000

I love salmon nigiri, I love cucumber maki, I really love shrimp tempura and avocado hand rolls and, as the mini button says, I love Yelp. Thanks to the brilliant folks on the Yelp team here in London, I got to attend a sushi-making class at the brand new location of the paper crane-bedecked, double-fried soy garlic ginger chicken-producing Tsuru Sushi. In case you’re wondering, I also love paper cranes and all things double-fried.

Two things I discovered about sushi last night:

1) It’s really fun to get your hands (and face and sweater and hair and that of nearby friends) sticky with rice, play with your own sushi roller, ogle trays of shrimp tempura, squirt massive amounts of mayonnaise, and generally get all up in a sushi-making mess. And even though I’ve always been in awe of the many years of training to make sushi and even just to correctly prepare the rice, it gave me a newfound respect for sushi chefs and their immaculate, aesthetically perfect (not to mention delicious) creations when compared to our overstuffed rice bombs.

2) Writing about sushi leads to a lot of really entertainingly terrible puns. I’ll treat you to the best of the worst, stolen straight from my Yelp review of this fantastic Elite Event.

Having recently been to a Jameson and Guinness-drenched St. Patrick’s Day Party and a sparkly off-the-shoulder and neon pink leggings-rocking bowling party, I can tell you that Yelp is totally on a roll with the Elite events. I, however, am about to rock your brain with puns so terrible you’re going to roe-ll in your grave. And you’ll be ig-nori-ing these delicious pictures to run for cover from the ridiculousness. But seriously, this Elite event raw-ked.

Sushi maki-ng was so much fun – my favorite was the shrimp tempura hand roll, which starts with a rectangle of nori in the left hand and a small golf- or large ping pong- or indeterminately testicle-sized ball with the right. Smoosh your ball into a square of rice on the left side of the seaweed rectangle and make a tiny button of rice on the bottom right corner for later sealing.

You then squizzle on a fatty stripe of mayonnaise (and a rogue perpendicular cross of wasabi and sesame seeds, just because you feel like it).

And then comes the bristling deep fried magic wand of crunchy battered prawn accompanied by its trusty green avocado sidekick. Hello my lovelies.

Fold, roll, press, seal, stuff into mouth awkwardly because the massive cone of awesome is too large for one bite. Mmm. Emma, one of the friendly, knowledgable, welcoming, Prosecco-pouring owners, told us about the restaurant history, chatted about their as-much-local-and-sustainable-as-possible mission, and handed out magically addictive bites of crunchy soy ginger garlic double-fried chicken. Which is great because anything double-fried makes miso very happy. She also sliced our cucumber maki into smoothly sheared little cylinders with a worryingly sharp knife. I’ve always had trouble with cutting aesthetically pleasing slices when rolling sushi at home, and that is apparently because my knives are not sharp enough to slice open the jugular vein of an armoured rhinocerous with a casual swipe. Point taken.

We got to make salmon nigiri from beautiful slices of Scottish salmon.

That enormous fatty striped piece of buttery melting perfection became this only moderately malformed little mound of nigiri.

We also got to wear aprons! Fun! Here are Chris and Abi in sexy plastic gear feasting on our handmade masterpieces.

The food just kept coming. Besides our own rather unattractive yet tasty creations, we ate eggplant skewers and prawn crackers and wasabi peas and pork gyoza and more sushi with crab and salmon and prawn tempura and stuffed ourselves to the point of nori-turn. All in all, it was a uni-quely awesome event in a great restaurant filled with lovely people. Get yourself to Tsuru prawn-to. Make sure you eat the Chicken Kara Age.

Enough puns, you say? Shoyu can’t take it anymore? Are you bento-ver in pain?

I am soy soy sorry.

Almost 99 Bottles of Wine on the Wall…and Nearly 99 Courses to Follow.

mei — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:52:47 +0000

Imagine a world where your bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich comes in one surprising multitextured bite of Essence of BLT. Where Death of Elvis is a completely bizarre and completely delectable mouthful of solid yet somehow softly melting banana, peanut butter, nutella and jam. Where the cheese never seems to end and where the wine flows like the water dripping from the ceiling…

It sounds like Wonderland, but don’t be fooled by the 7 foot tall cross-dressing Alice in spectacularly tall heels opening the door. It’s 99, a pop-up restaurant run by friends Whetham and Dave, who have combined their impressive and inventive artistic, hosting, and culinary talents to create a spectacular and stomach-busting evening of performance, gastronomy and often a topsy-turvy combination of the two.

I was honored to be invited along to help out in the kitchen on the final night of 99’s first run. Donning pristine chef’s whites in the kitchen of their Victorian mansion in Hackney, I joined chefs Dave and Hugo to whip, dip, bread, layer, chop, and see the magic happen behind the scenes.

I sailed into the kitchen late in the afternoon with much of the prep and difficult work already done so I jumped straight in helping to prepare some venison scotch eggs. Dave had already made a venison sausage mixture and soft-boiled eggs and my job was to dip and encase in bread crumbs, dip and encase. All the better to deep fry with. Mmm. I’m quite excited to make these on my own sometime soon.

Here’s a glimpse of Hugo’s pop art plated version, with a shockingly green wild garlic sauce, sliced radishes, and some sort of tasty mayonnaise.

And now sliced open to reveal the precisely timed, perfectly joyfully oozy soft-boiled egg within…

I also did a bit of whipping. Specifically, I beat some cream into shape and talked some sense into some egg whites as well for a gorgeous layered syllabub of rhubarb essence, ginger biscuit, chocolate shavings, and other colorful delights. A saucy dessert combined with a saucy faced waiter, post-Alice costume change.

Some amazing dishes I had absolutely nothing to do with – the aforementioned Essence of BLT, made up of a stack of secret ingredients in all sorts of flavors and textures. I’ll give you a hint: there was lots of bacon fat involved. The pictures just don’t do this surprising mouthful justice, so we’ll move onto the third dish (after the BLT amuse bouche and the meal-in-itself Scotch egg) the sweetcorn veloute with chorizo foam: a steaming hot shot of creaminess with a rich meaty plop of chorizo infusion on top.

Lest you think the diners were anywhere close to done, up next came the squid ink risotto made from a deep reddish and minerally seafood stock, stirred lovingly by Hugo…

…and served up with a smile by a mysterious man clad in pink and green.

He wasn’t the only one waiter in a fabulous outfit – I enjoyed chatting with the stunningly talented costumier Nicholas Immaculate in pink puffs and pads and pleats below.

Things got a little unexpected with the next dish: a cold celery sorbet topped with a spritz of walnut foam. Being a bit of a celery detester, I figured I wouldn’t particularly like a cold mouthful of celery flavor, but tried it anyway out of curiousity. Verdict: icy cold celery is only marginally better than regular terrible celery. But even my least favorite vegetable is improved with a blanket of walnut foam and a pretty tile to rest upon.

As if everyone wasn’t already stuffed full of food, then came…the main course. I’m not even kidding. Smoked breast of pigeon, a square of sinfully rich celeriac dauphinoise, and black salt-sprinkled, butter-bathed baby turnips with a stripe of red wine reduction and an accompanying squeeze of garlic sauce.

The twenty-odd diners all seemed ecstatically happy, although I’m surprised they could even move out of their chairs. I didn’t take this picture, but I think it captures the general celebratory atmosphere of the 99 dining room, deluged with a gastronomic tidal wave.

Of course, this epicurean adventure (with matched wines!) wouldn’t be complete without sweets. And not just one, or two, but THREE desserts were to be had, including the lovely layered syllabubs from the beginning and the homemade Jaffa cakes below.

And then came the insanely addictive little morsels of mini heart attacks on a plate – Dave’s Death of Elvis creation featuring an unidentified powder that isn’t an illegal addictive substance but might as well be. Here he is holding a tray of his dangerous weapons of culinary delight, a single bite of structurally composed banana, nutella, peanut butter, and jam. I do honestly think he might have been trying to kill everyone with the gluttonous orgy of food.

Because then…then came the cheese. Not just any cheese. A theatrically displayed, rope-and-pulley-raised, antique cupboard-housed, ceremonially lowered array of Neal’s Yard masterpieces including some of the most enormous hunks of Colston Bassett Stilton, Montgomery Cheddar, Stichelton, and Waterloo I’ve ever seen outside a cheese shop. One might call these cheeses the pride of Britain and rightly so.

Somehow the diners remained upright and chatting rather than bursting at the seams. I’m not quite sure how, given the mammoth proportions of food served at 99 that evening. And in fact, something did in fact burst at the seams – the kitchen ceiling at about 3am in the morning, due to a bit of a watery incident from earlier in the day. Thank god it didn’t happen during service. But I do think it’s only appropriate, and yes it has to be said – it’s one of the few home-cooked meals I’ve ever eaten that actually deserved to bring the house down. Congrats Dave, Whetham, and Hugo on a job well done.

For more information, visit the 99delights website.

Rambling Restaurant at the Market Estate Project

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:35:14 +0000

We’ve cooked in old train depots and darkened car parks and city centre squats and sprawling warehouses. Last week, Rambling Restaurant added a soon-to-be demolished 1960’s North London housing estate to the list of odd and unusual venues, swooping in just ahead of the wrecking balls. In the amazing Market Estate Project, artists from around the world took over empty flats to create imaginative, engaging, thought-provoking and awe-inducing installations ranging from short films to death-defying performance art to covering entire apartments in building plans or blue plastic. We were honored to be a part of the day by cooking up all sorts of meals and snacks for people involved with the project.

Sarah and foodrambler conjured up massive pots of beef rendang and aubergine and sweet potato coconut curry with rice and creamy cool banana chutney to fill up the many volunteers before their very very cold outdoor shifts.

Once people began trickling in, we Rambling Restaurateurs turned our attention to making canapes for visitors and staff and lucky wanderers. Homemade chickpea and beetroot hummus on crackers, carrot and cumin dip on crispbreads, mini onion quiches, and Michelle’s famous fried-on-the-spot fish and chips.

In between dishing up cute little newspaper cones and assembling sandwiches for staff sustenance, we found some time to explore the incredible and inspiring works of art. Like an entire flat – bedroom, living room, bathroom, balcony and all – transformed into an enormous blue plastic balloon:

And another apartment entirely papered over, top to bottom, in building plans:

More art photos and some thoroughly inauthentic banh mi sandwiches after the jump…

There were beautiful murals and graffiti art and random creations to be found around every corner and down each hallway.

One of the most shocking and unexpectedly beautiful sights of the day was this performance piece by the lovely Tom Geoghegan, who hung suspended and completely immobilized off one of the estate towers for several hours in the freezing cold.

Looking up at him earlier in the day, we had wondered if he was real or some sort of hanging dummy. Turns out Tom is very much human and very much susceptible to high winds when hanging many many feet off the ground. I really enjoyed learning a bit about his various projects over stacks of bastardized chorizo banh mi sandwiches.

The most whimsically joyful flat award goes to this pink balloon-filled kitchen, where Sarah, Antonio, Marc and I stopped in for a cuppa tea and a chocolate biscuit or two.

I’d like to fill an entire apartment up to the ceiling with balloons or maybe rubber exercise balls so you have to squeeeeeeze through, like a grossly enlarged Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit.

It was exhilarating and exciting and inspiring to run around an empty housing estate late at night and imagine all the lives lived within the walls now covered in blue plastic and spray paint. RIP Market Estate: from birth in 1967…

…to burial in 2010.

A Southern Spread at Rambling Restaurant: Pulled Pork, Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and Squirty Cream!

mei — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:21:24 +0000

With an American-themed meal at our last Rambling Restaurant, we just had to do a dessert featuring the never-ending source of birthday party fun for all ages: shakeable whipped cream in a sleek metal canister. They have it over here in the UK, except they call it…squirty cream. I thought that it might be just an affectionate nickname, but nope. It even says so on the packaging.

Hilarious. Say hello to the squirty cream and a slice of sweet potato pie. But wait, dessert first? Nothing wrong with that, but let’s rewind a bit to cover this Southern-inspired feast from the beginning. Sadly, I failed to take photos of the slices of warm cornbread with chunks of sweet corn and a dusting of paprika. You’ll just have to imagine them stacked in cute little baskets and served with pretty rounds of colorful green, red, and yellow jalapeno-chile butter.

Next up, shared ramekins of creamy mac & cheese with a crunchy cheddar and ciabatta breadcrumb topping, served up baked, browned, and bubbling.

The main course was a stomach stuffing plate of pulled pork with homemade barbecue sauce on freshly baked rolls, dirty rice (made satisfyingly, mouthwateringly dirty with chicken livers sauteed in the trinity of green pepper, celery, and onion), and a light lemony cole slaw.

We had an extreme overabundance of pulled pork, which is never a bad thing, although this picture’s a bit extreme. WARNING: GRATUITOUS PULLED PORK PICTURE AHEAD.

I had fun playing mad scientist with all the spices and condiments in foodrambler’s kitchen to make the sauce. Despite doing my best to write down the ingredients as I sprinkled, stirred, splashed and tasted, I completely failed to get a coherent recipe on paper. If you don’t care about measurements or timing, here’s sort of what it looked like:

An Extremely Inexact Barbecue Sauce Recipe

What You Need:

2 onions
2 cloves garlic
2 jalapenos
splash of vegetable oil
2 cans chopped tomatoes
maybe a 1 and 1/2 cup of cider vinegar
about a 1/2 cup of honey
maybe 1/2 cup of brown sugar
a few tablespoons english mustard
a looooooong squirt of ketchup
a splash of orange juice
a few shakes of chili flakes
some sprinkles of paprika
white pepper
black pepper
salt
umm…I’m forgetting stuff…oh well.

What You Do:

1. Saute onions, garlic, jalapenos in the oil until soft.

2. Chuck in everything else. Let it cook and reduce and thicken a bit. Play around with it. Taste, taste, taste. Add more of whatever if necessary.

3. Pour over your shredded and pulled pork and let simmer on the stove even more until tender as hell. Yum.

After this major carb load of cornbread, macaroni, rolls and rice along with a heaping scoop of pulled pork, most of our guests were suffering from serious Southern food coma. Which meant it was time to pull out our two intense sugar bomb desserts.

Option 1: Sweet Potato Pie with a florette of Squirty Cream and a gentle snowfall of nutmeg.

Option Two: A delectably tacky and addictively delicious Pineapple Upside-Down Cake with canned pineapple and glace cherries from the twisted genius mind of Sara.

Just like my imaginary Southern grandma used to make. I can just imagine her whipping out this beauty as we sip sweet tea (with generous shots of bourbon) in the gazebo under the magnolia trees and gossip about the neighbors. Syrupy, sticky sweet and superb.

And in case you’re wondering, that plate was licked clean before you could say ‘Oh Grandma, I couldn’t possibly eat another bite.’

Option 1: Sweet Potato Pie with a florette of Squirty Cream.

A Rambling Aphrodisiac Dinner, Complete With Searing Loins and Gin & Tonic Jelly

mei — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:11:16 +0000

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…

Food Events Around London: Tea Parties, Pizza Parties and…Wine Parties?

mei — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:25:51 +0000

I love parties. I’m in the process of planning a big family joint birthday party for my mom, sister and dad that may or may not involve an entire roast pig. Who doesn’t love a good party? Obviously, the best parties include copious amounts of food and alcohol. At many London parties and events of the last month or so, my alcohol consumption has drastically outweighed the food consumption. Often, my memories of the event can get a bit fuzzy. Luckily, I took pictures.

Here’s a photo from the Bibendum wine event at the stunning Saatchi Gallery. Can you spot the foodrambler?

Amidst approximately 149803454 bottles of wine spread over something like 10 galleries on 4 floors were all sorts of cool installations by local designers:

Equally alcoholic was the fabulous Yelp’s Burst Birthday, a surprise-filled soiree in an old metalworks building complete with a grassy garden tea party room filled with tea cups of gin and teapots of tonic amidst tiered trays of sugar-stacked snacks. I’m still dreaming about the plate below of melty chocolatey caramelly Millionaire’s Squares…

The room was carpeted in real grass (hand laid by our dedicated friend Lizzie!) and populated by a small community of garden gnomes, one of whom came home with me at the end of the night. Chris and I named him Chomsky. We’re nerds.

The Yelp party also featured a real tube-car-as-a-bar slinging free cocktails and bunch of market-style food stalls, including fantabulous frozen yogurt, a sort of bizarre spiralled potato chip on a stick, and my most favoritest roast hog people.

Last up, I got a chance to taste the new Pizza Express menu by Francesco Mazzei, the chef from an award-winning London restaurant called L’Anima that I’m hoping to go to someday. Shockingly, I’d never had Pizza Express before – it’s a very popular chain in the UK – but I was quite impressed with what I tasted of the new dishes. I liked the spicy Calabrese pizza the best – a thin and crispy crust, fior di latte mozzarella, watercress in basil pesto, a few more chilies and peppers, and most importantly, nduja sausage. Anything with nduja on it is a friend of mine.

Mmmm…looking at pictures never fails to make me hungry. I’ll take a spicy pizza, a few Millionaire’s Squares, a bottle of that rich and chocolatey Malbec, and a teacup of G&T. It’s 2am. Bibendum, Yelp and Pizza Express, do you deliver?

Growing Spaces in Unusual Places: London’s Urban Agriculture and a Super Mini Garden

mei — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:48:06 +0000

Seems like everyone is talking about urban agriculture these days, with innovative new ideas ranging from tiny little crowd-funded SF city farms to fantasy skyscraper-high vertical farms. From pundits to policymakers, foodies to farmers to futurists, a lot of people are starting to think about urban food production for the sake of local economies, the environment, community resources, jobs creation, urban design, potential food security issues. and many more reasons. I’ve been reading this really interesting report by the London Assembly called Cultivating the Capital: Food Growing and the Planning System in London (big PDF here) about working with city planners to increase the growing potential of the city.

Nerdy, I know. In case you don’t want to read the 93 pages yourself (almost half of it is just appendices!), the report looks at the current situation of urban food producers, the barriers they face in growing and getting their products to market, and potential innovative solutions. It also analyzes the city land that could be used for food production and encourages the use of unconventional growing spaces, from rooftops to parks to housing developments. And in terms of specific action, the report recommends that the Mayor of London promote and support policy and planning to increase Greater London’s food production and distribution channels. They’ve got lots of important reasons to back up their suggestions:

‘There is a good case to be made that commercial agriculture is one of the best and most productive land uses in the Green Belt [an undeveloped area around London, set aside primarily for agriculture, forestry and outdoor leisure, but mostly not actively farmed]. The benefits include: opportunities for local job creation, skills development, regeneration, preservation and management of green space, potential for waste management, providing healthy locally produced food and so reducing food packaging and food miles and the potential for improving food security.’

One of the big points is how much unused space there is within London that could be directed towards food production. The UK has these small plots called allotments that are available to the public for gardening/farming, but there are also swaths of unused industrial land and vacant building sites that could be improved visually and put to good use by developing for small-scale agriculture. And it can get really small. The report says, ‘Almost any site, irrespective of size, location or soil conditions can be used for food growing operations by making use of raised beds, skips and builders’ bags filled with good quality soil.’ Why not use green roofs or land along highways or railways or unused office land?

And it doesn’t even have to be a profit-making food-growing enterpise – it’s just fantastic to be able to produce any of your own food. And then you can get reaaaaally small. Because it doesn’t really get any tinier in terms of space and literal lack of land than living on a houseboat (shoutout to my friend Olivia living on a houseboat in Alaska right now). And yet, this creative houseboater has developed an innovative way to grow tomatoes in a space smaller than that occupied by our forlorn and all-too-neglected barbecue grill.

I always talk about how much I’d like to grow my own food (despite my propensity towards immediately and invariably killing every single plant I’ve ever owned, including the cacti). But I always live in the middle of cities and never seem to have enough space or enough land. Yet these boaters have taken a very unexpected site and turned it into a mini growing area. How sweet would it be to go pick tomatoes off your roof while enjoying this view of City Road Basin along Regent’s canal?

And looking back towards my hood…

A bit of inspiration for those of us who support the idea of more local food production. Until I get my act together to actually plant something, I’ll continue to buy vegetables from my local CSA veg box (and a shoutout to Growing Communities for being mentioned as one of the best programs in the report!), but I’m glad that other people are doing lots of growing in unexpected places.

Someday, I’ll be able to walk outside and pick what I want for dinner. Someday, someday…

Adventures in Haggis Making: Sheep Innards, Beef Kidney Fat, and Fun with a Deep Fryer

mei — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:34:37 +0000

: A handful of haggis

When I was told we’d be celebrating our Rambling Restaurant Burns Night with poetry, whiskey, and homemade haggis stabbing, my thoughts went like this:

1. Awesome! I’ve always wanted to try haggis.

2. By the way, what’s Burns Night?

3. And while I’m asking…what, exactly, is haggis?

4. A sheep heart, lung, and liver minced and mixed with oatmeal and onions and stuffed inside a sheep stomach? We are definitely going to need that whiskey.

Haggis, to most ignorant Americans like myself, is one of those iconic Scottish associations like kilts, bagpipes, and Mel Gibson covered in blue facepaint and exuding a throaty roar for ‘FREEEEDOOOM!’ We might have heard of it but almost certainly wouldn’t be able to say what it’s made of, only that it has something to do with terrifying animal parts and probably shouldn’t ever be consumed until after seven shots of Scotch.

Well, let me set the record straight on two fronts.

1. As much as you may love William Wallace in a skirt, kilts weren’t invented for another three centuries (one of the many twists of truth contributing to Braveheart being second on a list of ‘most historically inaccurate’ movies ever made).

2. Haggis is, shockingly, absolutely delicious.

However, it took quite a long time and a lot of work to get it to that point. And I’ll be honest, there was a fair amount of grimacing, gagging, nose-holding, and are-we-really-serving-this-to-paying-customers?-questioning along the way. It all started with my haggis-making partner-in-crime, foodrambler, hunting in vain and then finally securing three lamb’s plucks – the windpipe, heart, lungs and liver – for our haggis adventure. Following this recipe from the Guardian by Tim Hayward, she began the adventure the previous evening by cutting out the windpipes (blecch), boiling the plucks for several hours then leaving them to cool overnight in the murky cooking liquid.

A rubbery white sheep heart above and a massive chunk of liver below. Not exactly the most appetizing start to a meal, is it? Don’t worry though, there is deliciousness to come…

Once out of the liquid and cut into cross-sections, the lungs were smooth and vaguely spongy while the heart was uncomfortably pink and muscly looking.

Being the intrepid culinary explorers/deluded masochists we are, we sliced off minute pieces of the heart, lung, and liver to taste them in all their unadulterated glory. I’m sure you’re not surprised, but this turned out NOT to be a good idea. Offal is generally not the most appetizing of foods when you haven’t added any additional seasoning or flavor. Then add in the fact that the innards were ice cold and straight out of a disturbingly sewage-colored meat bath and both of us ended up jumping up and down and squealing in disgust at the musty lumps of chilled sheep innards in our mouths.

Lesson learned, we returned to the daunting task at hand. Dicing six onions was the easy part. Next, we tossed the heart and lung into the food processor and pulsed it gently into a fine mince.

Next, we grated the liver in the food processor to avoid the pasty textured chunks from turning into pate. Here’s a photo from foodrambler’s haggis post of me working the magimix on the meat.

I think the expression on my face is veering between skepticism, bemusement, horror and disgust. Note how I am as far as humanly possible away from the food processor in a vain attempt to avoid directly inhaling the stench of chopped lamb bits. Below, the pungent strands of sheep liver.

All the dicing, slicing, and mincing of the heart, livers, and lungs began to fill the kitchen with a distinctly unpleasant smell. The thought crossed both our minds simultaneously: this smells exactly like cat food. Then the uncomfortable realization came to us…in fact, this is what cats eat. We are literally making cat food.

As you can see, it looked like cat food too. But just when we couldn’t really hold our noses much longer, we started mixing in the onions lying underneath the offal mince and all of a sudden, the smell changed. The sharp onion scent cut into the decaying meaty odor and the mixture somehow became warm and almost familiar, like the rich wafting steam of a slow-cooked stew. The transition was aided by the inclusion of a generous amount of salt, white pepper, sage, thyme, and mace (the outer layer of nutmeg) for a layered and wintry hint of spices.

The general smell of the kitchen was further enhanced by the comforting aroma of toasted oatmeal, both of the rolled and Irish steel cut variety, which we wacked into the oven until lightly browned and then added to the pot.

But haggis wouldn’t be complete without one last element of grossness and that came in the form of eight boxes of shredded dried suet.

I had to look up ‘suet‘ on wikipedia to even find it in the grocery store – in case you’re wondering, it’s the raw fat that surrounds beef kidneys. It looks like rodent turds made of candle wax.

Once we’d added a few ladlefuls of the sheep pluck stock to moisten and plunged our hands deep into the pot to mix, the haggis was smelling remarkably good and ready to be cooked.

Except, unfortunately, due to a stolen sheep stomach incident at Selfridge’s as well as a mail-order mishap with a backup ox bung (the attractively named last yard of a cow’s large intestine) we had nothing to stuff our haggis into.

Forced to experiment, we came up with a bunch of alternate showcases for our haggis:

1. Steamed in the oven by surrounding scoops in a layer of plastic wrap and then aluminum foil.

2. Oven roasted

3. Pan-fried

4. Formed into balls, dipped into batter, and deep fried. Having just acquired a deep fat fryer for Rambling Restaurant, you can expect to see a lot of deep fried items making an appearance on this blog. Right up until my first heart attack.

5. Finally, after playing around a bit in a game of What Tastes Good Deep Fried? (Answer: EVERYTHING!) the ultimate haggis preparation came to us in a simultaneous bizarre great-minds-think-alike moment.

I present to you – Haggis. Stuffed into an English muffin. And deep fried.

It’s a Boston creme donut gone wrong or maybe so right – a rich, warm, meaty inside surrounded by a crunchy, oily, golden exterior. It was shockingly, decadently delicious, but I couldn’t eat more than two bites without feeling my arteries harden in protest.

The verdict of the haggis cooking comparison? Steamed was unanimously voted the best, as it allowed the oatmeal to cook, soften, and become infused with the intense meaty flavors of the offal. The roasted was okay, the pan-fried was too dry and crunchy with bits of oatmeal, and the deep-fried options were delicious but way too over the top for a meal ending with deep fried Mars bars. Instructions for that coming up soon…

All in all, haggis making was an entertaining, educational, at times both delicious and disgusting experience. Along with the traditional accompaniments of neeps (mashed swede, or rutabaga), tatties (potatoes) and cranachan (a Scottish dessert of whipped cream, honey, whiskey, raspberries and toasted oatmeal), my understanding of Scottish culinary brilliance has increased by leaps and bounds over the past few weeks. Add in a real Scot reading Burns’ Address To A Haggis followed by a stabbing…and the haggis experience is complete.