I spent what might be the ideal local/urban/farming/foodie Saturday in San Francisco during my visit last month.  Ferry Building Farmers Market + Alemany Farm + dinner with friends to feast on all our accumulated goods = serious eating happy times.

It started at one of my favorite places of porkaliciousness on the planet, the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market…

Where you can buy color-drenched stalks of rainbow chard ranging from pale banana yellow to deep red wine burgundy…

…and stuff your mouth with bountiful free samples of the brightest, most vibrant, flavor-bursting oranges.

But it’s so much more than just a farmers market – it’s a prepared food/street cart/mobile restaurant festival of serious quality meals on disposable plates as well.  All sorts of new snacks have appeared since I last visited the market a year ago, including an array of porkaliciousness from 4505 Meats (photo at top) like maple breakfast sausage rolled and baked in brioche or a muffaletta sandwich (Salami, smoked mortadella, terrine, Gruyère, and olive salad on a poppy-seed bun) or their famous chicharrones.

I’d already eaten a smoked salmon – meyer lemon – homemade cream cheese on sourdough bread sandwich from Holy Smoke, the stall I used to work at with the fabulous Sally and Cap’n Mike, so sadly I could only fit in a tiny snack from another newcomer since I last visited the market, Namu. I’d been wanting to try their ‘Asian-inspired new California cuisine’ for ages, and never made it up to their restaurant in the Richmond before moving. So I was excited to visit their stall at the Ferry Building, offering everything from kimchee fried rice to yuzu French toast to okonomiyaki.

I ended up with a fantastic little bite of meaty happiness known as the real Korean ‘taco’: a ssam-style ‘taco’ with seasoned rice, kalbi short ribs, daikon and kimchee salsa, kimchee remoulade, and homemade teriyaki wrapped in Korean and Japanese toasted seaweed. Brilliant.

I loved it – inventive and playful, with a rich, punchy undercurrent of teriyaki sweet and salty soy flavor from the short ribs topped with a layer of pickly freshness from the daikon kimchee salsa, all bundled in a toasty blanket of chewy yet crackly seaweed.

I only wish I had room in my stomach for cookies from Miette…

…or a fried egg panino with pancetta and provolone, or slow-scrambled eggs with crostini and crescenza, or broken farro porridge with raisins and almonds from another new (to me, at least) addition Il Cano Rosso.

I’ll just have to come back again soon. And drink Blue Bottle coffee and eat Kika’s Treats caramelised chocolate graham crackers from La Cocina with a bag of oysters and sausage on a stick in the sunshine by the Bay Bridge.

But I couldn’t eat a week’s worth of meals at the Ferry Building, although I’d like to (every day). It was farm time, so off I went to San Francisco’s amazing Alemany Farm. Until next time, Ferry Building!

Up next -  fava bean leaves, collard greens, and massive piles of horse shit at the farm…

]]> http://eatfamilystyles.com/2010/04/18/san-francisco-eating-happy-times-at-the-ferry-building-farmers-market/feed/ 0 http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/10/13/street-food-so-2009-the-hot-new-trend-in-food-is-now-sailing-your-way/ http://eatfamilystyles.com/2009/10/13/street-food-so-2009-the-hot-new-trend-in-food-is-now-sailing-your-way/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:57:12 +0000 mei http://familystyles.wordpress.com/?p=2268 Street food is big these days.  San Francisco has its Street Food Festival. New York has its street food Vendy Awards and its vendor turf wars. LA has taco and Korean BBQ trucks  so famous they’re getting profiled over here in London.

But I’ve just discovered the most exciting new movement in mobile food, coming to you straight from the South Harbor of Helsinki, Finland: BOAT FOOD.

The smiling Finnish lady on the boat may not promote her whereabouts on Twitter, but she does a brisk business selling an array of smoked and fried fish off her quaint little craft. Despite a bit of a language barrier, she managed to convey her selection with broken English, pointing, and a bit of guesswork on my part: whole smoked whitefish, perch, and trout; burnished fillets of salmon;  and palm-sized morsels of fried herring.  I purchased a small piece of the herring with a very thin layer of crunchiness and a generous sprinkling of dill sprigs for the solid price of 1 euro.  It was the perfect street food snack: delicious, slightly greasy, very local, and ridiculously cheap.

Oops. Did I say street food snack? I’m still wrestling with the correct terminology for food sold from watercraft.  If we’re going for parallels, I suppose I should refer to the area about which these mobile food vendors hawk their snacks-on-the-go.  Food trucks move around the street. Food boats move around the water. But Water Food just doesn’t sound right. Sea Food? Ocean Food? Harbor or canal or river food? Bodies-of-water food? Although the exact nomenclature may leave something to be desired, I can’t get over the brilliance of this mobile fish snack vendor. Yes, I realize I have a somewhat overzealous love for boats.

But I’m certainly not the only one who likes boats  (T-Pain does too!). Boats make people happy and so does mobile food and more people should put the two together.  And there would be plenty of opportunities to sell…come to think of it, all of my favorite markets are located by bodies of water. The Ferry Building Farmer’s Market in San Francisco is on the Bay. Pike Place in Seattle is on Puget Sound. Here in London, Borough Market is on the Thames and Broadway Market is on Regent’s Canal.  Clearly, it’s time for all these markets to get with the program and adopt the newest market and mobile food innovation of the future.

Anyone else know of any boat food vendors? Or want to donate me a boat to kickstart this new movement?  I am accepting all generous offers and in return you can come snack on my boat.

Bodies-Of-Water-Food, your time in the spotlight has come.

it’s an online game where people play in teams to solve foodie puzzles online and on the mean streets. teams (with awesome names like soup sluts, trans-fatso’s, and deep fried twinkie) win points for correct answers and also for submitting creative missions which people watch online and score. i ‘ve just barely skimmed the surface of photos and videos submitted by the 277 teams(!) but the current personal favorite of the UK office is this rap about the creme brulee cart by team fatty boombatty. seriously, this video is a delicious work of  genius.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB4VPHOPeQs&hl=en&fs=1&]

creme brulee on the street corner combined with a coolio parody video? that’s some sweet stuff right there. check out the best submissions from the game here and read what an nbc reporter/go game player has to say about the street food obsession here.

we’re so inspired and excited by the overwhelming commitment, competition, and creativity from the SF street food devotees that we’re considering running a london game! what do you think, londoners? are you up for it? we’d have you sampling spinach & agushi and violet cupcakes at broadway market, scarfing down scotch eggs at the upmarket, and of course, diving into a hot cheese avalanche. and you’d solve puzzles, take wacky photos, film short movies, vote online, and have a total blast while filling your belly along the way. no mid- 90′s rap music knowledge required, we’ll find an appropriate equivalent for iconic music videos starring michelle pfeiffer on this side of the pond.

to reverse paraphrase kevin costner: ‘if you will come, we will build it.’ seriously london, if you’d be interested in playing, let me know! i have a serious street food obsession and i think london’s got an absolutely incredible street food and market culture. let’s play with our food!

my mother has been working at the same building at MIT medical my entire life. that’s 27 years (as of last week…yeeesh) that i have been visiting or picking her up on the same exact street in cambridge upon which there have never before been big white street food trucks serving freshly made locally sourced meals. and all of a sudden, i pop into boston for three days and here you are, delightful clover food truck.  so happy to make your acquaintance.

if you don’t obsessively follow the san francisco food scene from halfway around the world like i do, you may not know that street food is big these days. it used to be just the taco trucks and the tamale lady when you were drunk at zeitgeist. now everything from soup to salami and curry to creme brulee is being sold from carts and bikes and trucks and hovercraft all over the city. okay, maybe not the last part, but that would be pretty sweet. anyway, the SF street food scene has seriously blown up recently, as have the NYC and LA scenes, many of whom release their locations in real-time via twitter. even from london, i know exactly when a delicious fatty cured pig part sandwich goes on sale at a random intersection in san francisco and i can only mourn that i’m about 6,000 miles too far away to get in line. it’s gotten so big that it’s even spawned a backlash of anti-street-food-fad-sentiment. yes, you know things have gotten big when the haters come out to play. but ignore them and revel in the excitement that is street food. beyond all the tastiness, what’s particularly exciting is that the amazing people at la cocina are organizing a street food festival and the go game is running a street food themed scavenger hunt!  if you’re anywhere near san francisco, go sign up to play because it’s going to be AMAZING.

anyway. talking about street food gets me so excited that i’ve lost track of the original topic of this post, which was intended to be the excellent clover food truck. hooray boston for not letting sf, nyc, and la grab all the attention and making an impressive showing of your own.

considering how zealously i follow the street food scene online (that’s a really nerdy statement), i’m happily surprised by the totally serendipitous nature of my encounter with clover. waiting to pick up my mom and drive off to new york for the weekend, i noticed the small crowd standing next to the truck parked directly across the street from her office. my street food radar started beeping an insistent alarm, so i wandered over and perused the handwritten menu. upon seeing the happy crew of lunchtime munchers and the breakfast options like granola and popovers and lunch selections including a variety of cold salads and hot sandwiches, i knew something good was in store. and i was seriously psyched to see that the sandwich special of the day – a pesto, fontina and cucumber creation – featured basil from allandale farm in my hometown of brookline, which i used to visit as a kid.  i love that they’re supporting local producers and in fact, apparently their brunch is nearly 100% local, down to even the flour. so fantastic.

i chatted with the friendly people taking orders for a bit, and they recommended the popular chickpea fritter sandwich, pictured at the top. mmmmmmm tasty. warm, crunchy, and lightly spiced fritters, topped with a deliciously cool and creamy cole slaw, and lovingly encased in a thick wheat pita, toasted on the outside and perfectly chewy on the inside. i was really impressed with the quality of the bread and said so to the really nice guy wearing the clover t-shirt in the top photo whose name i am stupid for not getting. he told me that they actually get the bread from new york city because they couldn’t find a good enough alternative in the boston area. that’s true testament to a passion for quality. not exactly local, but excusable for bread that good.  you can see by the doughy strands in the photo below that this is a whole different ball game from those thin, hard, and dry pieces of cardboard that sometimes try to pass themselves off as pita pockets.

mmm. that photo makes me want to go back right now and eat another one. but even more so, i want to go try their brunch, which changes depending on what’s seasonal and available, but has at times featured pancakes with wild massachusetts blueberries,  corn fritters with local corn, and agua fresca made from local mass strawberries. damn, gina! that makes me happy. and hungry.  i love the local and seasonal ethos, i love that they’re all about running out of food (only serve what’s fresh and don’t waste!) and they even spoke at IDEO recently.  that’s pretty freaking cool.  apparently they’re using the truck to test out recipes for what will someday be a clover restaurant. i’m psyched to patronize your brick-and-mortar establishment, but keep on with the street food, ok? there’s nothing like standing in a light drizzle with a bunch of eager eaters and stuffing your face with a really amazingly good sandwich, unless it’s a really amazingly good sandwich and a big glass of lavender lemonade.  thanks clover food truck! you’re only 3,000 miles away or something, so i might even see you again sometime soon…

one of the best presents i’ve gotten recently is my trusty little eat.shop.london guide, which i’ve been addicted to since hopping over the pond. the author lives somewhere in the east end and has introduced me to some of my favorite local spots within minutes of our hackney home. i’ve eaten my way through nearly every east london location in the book. through pounding the pavement in search of each amazing spot, i’ve also stumbled across some lovely little gems that deserve a place in the next edition. i highly recommend the books – they’ve got editions for a number of major cities.  i love the visuals of the book and the amusing content and one of my goals in life is to write and photograph the second london guide.  cabazon books, i’m here for you. or rather, you’ll be hearing from me.

anyway, one of the food spots mentioned in the book, spinach & agushi,  is so local that it can only be found once a week at broadway market on saturdays. i can also be found weekly at broadway market, but i’ve been so busy eating roast hog sandwiches, violet cupcakes,  and wild mushroom risotto that i’ve only passed their ghanaian food stall with a longing glance and vowed to return posthaste.

return i did with michelle, one of my many conspicuous consumption partners in crime. after a wild mushroom sandwich from sporeboys, we worked up our appetites again wandering the market chatting with producers and sampling more food until we finally felt ready to take on spinach & agushi. our menu options were as follows:

we went for the slightly spicy and flavorful jollof rice with two stews – the namesake spinach & agushi with crushed melon seeds and a shredded chicken in a smooth and slightly creamy peanut sauce. they sprinkled a bit of carrot salad on top with a splash of hot sauce, we parked ourselves on a sidewalk curb and stuffed ourselves full of authentic ghanaian goodness.

make your way to the market and try it yourself! i’m excited to see what other dishes make it into the rotation and thus into my belly. i’ll be back!

this  post is all about the best cupcakes i’ve had so far in london. i took kellin to visit the adorable and wonderful broadway market during her last hour in london before returning to italy. stuffed from our borough market visit, we brokenheartedly turned down wild mushroom risotto, ghanaian food, and roast hog with crackling sandwiches. but we decided to treat ourselves to ONE mini cupcake because they were so ridiculously cute, and obviously brownie mountains and fresh strawberries with jersey cream were not quite enough dessert for the morning.

so we stopped at the happy stall of violet cakes and bought the enticing rhubarb and rosewater mini cupcake, a pale  pink and perfectly formed little turkish dome of dessert.  it was, quite honestly, ethereally delicious. so light and smooth yet so intensely flavored, like having the essence of rose petals in your mouth. such a tiny bite yet such a concentrated burst of taste! we promptly returned and bought another.

salted caramel this time. buttery, sweet, reminscent of birthday cake but with just a tiny hint of saltiness to give it a grownup edge.  so good that we actually stopped walking, turned around and returned for a third. we ended with elderflower, which i’d only had in cocktails until then (side note: apparently you can go elderflower foraging in london, as evidenced by the locally grown cocktail served at sunday’s rambling restaurant. more on that coming soon!).  lightly perfumed, vaguely herbal, fresh-tasting and summery. truly incredible.

chatting with the cupcake sellers a bit, we discovered that the cupcake base is all the same – a light vanilla sponge cake – and the variations come from the perfectly symmetrical florettes of buttercream frosting lovingly squidged on top.  apparently the colors and flavors of the frosting are all natural; according to their sign, they use ‘pure fruit purees, flower essences, vanilla pods, Valrhona chocolate, dark caramel, or freshly brewed espresso’ to obtain those beautiful shades and unbelievable flavors. so gloriously delicious and also organic and all-natural. my mind is boggled that the intense purple hue of that candied violet cupcake isn’t made with food coloring!

trying to find out the genius behind these cupcakes, i’m stymied yet intrigued by the mysterious nature of violet’s website. all you see is a massive gorgeous photo of cupcakes and no information. but google says that the company was started by claire ptak, a former pastry chef at chez panisse.  this explains both the all-natural-organic thing as well as the oh-my-god-you’re-amazing thing.  chez panisse appears to have that effect on people.

i’m going to go out on a limb and say that i think i’ve just discovered the best cupcakes in london. and i haven’t even tried that many cupcakes in london. but i’ve ravaged the most famous and highly lauded new york cupcake shops like a japanese movie monster takes down tokyo – magnolia, sugar sweet sunshine, billy’s, and babycakes, to name a few – and based on these three incredible bites, violet just might be better. but you know what – it’s much too soon to say. clearly this is just  a hypothesis that can only be verified with a great deal of dedicated and thorough research. violet cakes, i’ll see you next saturday to begin my study…

we also had an incredible paella bought off the street corner on our way to see a fantastic and hilarious production of As You Like It at the Globe, an open-air theatre on the Thames recreated as it was in Shakespearean times. you even get to stand in the yard like the peasants did back in the day.

no trip to london is complete without some serious market visiting, so i’ve got borough and broadway market posts coming up. until then, my favorite food photo of the week: the emotionally distressed gingerbread man.

is he in danger of being bitten by the vampire-esque gingerbread man behind him? maybe he’s just afraid of losing his head. in my mouth. mmm….

we’ll start with the salmon, avocado and sesame hand roll from a sushi stall at the sunday upmarket at the old truman brewery.

delicious fresh salmon rolled right before your eyes! i’ve noticed there’s a lot more japanese home cooking here than in the states, where japanese restaurants are primarily sushi-focused. i went to an amazing okonomi-yaki (japanese pancake) place this week, which is apparently the only one of its kind in europe. post on that, plus videos, coming when i get my act together.

next up, fried pig’s ears! i have trouble turning down food items  that are: a) weird, b) things i haven’t tried before,  c) an unusual part of an animal, d) a local delicacy or traditional food and e) deep fried. the following item satisfied all categories (although some people might debate the use of the word ‘delicacy’), so obviously it needed to be in my mouth.

i’ll be honest, i was a little disappointed with the pig’s ears from the albion in islington. to be fair, i’ve never had pig’s ears before so i can’t really compare their version. mostly, they just tasted like fried…fat. chewy fried fat, like rubbery tendons encased in grease with a little bacon flavor. i enjoyed the pickled onion and caper accompaniment, but maybe some sort of sauce like a mustard or remoulade would have been useful to offset the pure fattiness.

next photo is a serious plate-o-meat from tayyabs, the worth-the-ninety-minute-queue pakistani restaurant in whitechapel raved about by critics, food bloggers, yelpers, and probably your mom too. thanks to my new friend chris‘s connections, we were ushered in promptly for our 7pm reservation and  immediately went to work. the food was disappearing too fast to take too many pictures, but i did manage to snap a photo of the absolutely incredible spiced lamb chops, seekh kabobs, and tandoori chicken. mmmmmmm.

everything else – a fantastic tindi masala (amazing curried baby pumpkins), dry meat (verrrry sloow cooked lamb that soaks up all the sauce and thus is ‘dry’), peshwari and garlic naan, and a few other dishes ordered by the tayyabs regulars – was fantastic. we stuffed ourselves silly. and then they brought out dessert on the house. gooood lord. obviously it would have been rude not to try everything, so we did our best to take down pistachio, mango and original kulfi, gulab jamun (like a sugar syrup soaked munchkin, for those of you raised on dunkin’ donuts), and two more unidentifiable creamy dishes.  we eventually rolled ourselves out the door like the inflated miss violet beauregarde from willy wonka, full to the brim with deliciousness.

while we’re doing things over the top, i’ll end with a photo of my scotch egg overdose.  i returned to eat my pies again last weekend to try another variety of andy’s scotch eggs.  having already consumed the salmon hand roll above as well as some thai duck rolls, i planned to buy one egg to try when i got home and had some more stomach space. i showed up just as he was beginning to break down for the day, so after chatting for a bit, he decided to throw in one of each kind for me to sample. sheesh. being a thorough and dedicated researcher, i had a slice of each.

the above photo is definitely one of the most bizarre i’ve ever taken. from the bottom going clockwise, you can see the traditional,  the intensely flavored smoked haddock, the lightly spiced chorizo (my favorite), an extremely subtle thai red curry, and a mild vegetarian mexican three bean.  warning to any of you who might find yourself in this situation -  i would recommend not eating five varieties of scotch egg concurrently. as delicious as they are, a girl can only eat so many deep fried meaty egg balls. and that’s all i have to say about that.

continuing my series of posts on london’s amazing markets, i’m now going to deluge you with photos and effusive/obsessive words on the fantastic global bazaar of eats available at the sunday upmarket at the old truman brewery on brick lane. chris and i have hit up brick lane every sunday since we moved to hackney, but didn’t make it all the way down to the upmarket the first weekend as we were distracted by various household and junk items at heavily discounted prices (read: dug out of someone’s attic or stolen off the back of a truck).

luckily, we kept walking south the next sunday and happened upon an adorable stall of japanese food. impressed by the setup and unable to turn down anything involving street food and a deep fryer, we ordered the special donburi of assorted fried items and a slab of salmon on a bed of rice with salad and teriyaki sauce. YUM.

having happily filled our bellies, we then turned a corner and walked down a narrow alley lined with stores and restaurants  into ely’s yard,  a huge lot filled with picnic tables, food stalls and tons of people. we then realized that a whole new world of food was before us and i mean LITERALLY a whole world – i’ve never seen food from so many different countries and cultures in one place in my whole life.  off the top of my head, i recall peruvian, japanese, thai, sri lankan, turkish, argentinian, russian, ethiopian, moroccan, peruvian, tibetan, chinese, spanish, brazilian and caribbean. oh yeah, and mauritius island food. SERIOUSLY? the two of us wandered around for ages with our mouths open, drool spilling unattractively from the corners, wishing we were cows and had four stomachs to fill with international delicacies.

since we were both stuffed with friedness, we just wandered and ogled and took mental notes of what to eat when we returned the next weekend. which is exactly what we did, eamon in tow and stomachs ready to do some global adventuring.

we made a beeline straight for love-me-tender, a stall that roasts an entire pig and does these amazing pork and applesauce and rocket sandwiches. vegetarians, look away. pork lovers, commence salivating.

the fragrance of their slow roasted hog with a mix of herbs and spices (i could only identify rosemary and fennel seeds) just might be the most enticing smell in the world. i should start bottling and selling it as perfume (i bet i’d get asked out more often if i started wearing it, but it would probably get a little awkward when my dates start licking my neck really early on in the evening, although i can’t say i’d blame them).

anyway. we bought two sandwiches and started chatting with stefan, the really nice guy who makes the sandwiches and the homemade applesauce, about the care and time they put into their meat. he talked about sourcing really good heritage pork and shot the breeze with chris, a former barbecue catering company man, about not rushing the process. the sandwiches were fantastic, although the meat was so good that the applesauce and arugula was almost too distracting to fully enjoy the savory, slow-roasted flavor. maybe next time i’ll see if stefan will just give me a big leg of pig to gnaw on.

next, chris and eamon went off to investigate the mexican food situation while i made my way over to a japanese food stall selling these intriguing little round thingies which turned out to be takoyaki or octopus balls. EXCITING! according to the description on a chalkboard with a cute little octopus cartoon, takoyaki is a ball-shaped pancake made of butter, pickled ginger, tempura scrap, spring onion, and diced octopus (which is kind of odd, as ball and pancake seem to be mutually exclusive shapes. wikipedia calls it a dumpling. whatever).  the ball/pancake/dumpling/sphere of interesting flavors is then topped with ‘honey-sweetened fruit and vegetable-based Japanese Worcester sauce’ (which i think is what they call worcestershire sauce here), the mayonnaise of your choice, seaweed, and bonito flakes. here’s a visual for you:

mmm. i stood and watched the takoyaki being made, which is actually a fascinating process. three people were carefully monitoring hot pans with rows of convex half-spheres, each armed with a tiny little pick like you would use to dip things in fondue.

they used the little picks to constantly rotate the balls in order to get an even browning on all sides of the sphere. i was curious as to the process of getting to the ball shape in the first place, which was answered when the guy on the left took out a big bowl of batter and poured it into the molds.

he then grabbed a big handful of diced spring onions (which i believe is the brit term for scallions/green onions) and sprinkled it over the top of the batter. after a few minutes, he used the poky thingie to draw lines on the pan in the rows and columns between each of the half spheres . once each of the balls had been effectively separated, he used the pick to scrape the surrounding batter into a mound in the center.  he dropped a few more ingredients into the ball and then started the rotating process again to keep the balls evenly cooked. it’s a fairly complicated and labor intensive process to do on-the-spot as a street vendor, which makes me appreciate these little balls of joy even more.

upon tasting the takoyaki, my first impression was OWWWWWWW. HOLY CRAP, THAT IS A BALL OF FIRE. the inside of the pancake is like a molten hot earth center of boiling lava that quickly sears your taste buds into submission. once my tongue finally recovered, it could appreciate the crazy mix of flavors in the octopus balls -the sweet teriyaki gooeyness of the sauce, the warm, mushy, buttery  pancake taste, the vaguely fishy chewy bits of octopus – it’s a huge party in your mouth and everyone you can possibly think of is invited.

after burning my own mouth and then destroying chris and eamon’s as well, i nabbed bites of their  pork, chicken, and mole tacos. my verdict? pretty good for london, which is notoriously bad for its ‘mexican’ food. but i acknowledge that i have what might be impossibly high standards after living in the mission for three years.

next stop on the international eating express train was the ethiopian vegetarian stall where we bought an injera with a mixed salad. injera is a spongy and slightly sour pancake eaten in a lot of eastern african countries, made from rice flour, wheat flour, sorghum flour, corn flour, yeast, and water, which was topped with three sauces and then rolled into a wrap.

the stall, uniqe injera, had the ingredients of all the sauces listed, which was helpful in determining all the complex flavors involved. the three sauces in the injera were:

meser wet: green lentils, ethiopian spices, garlic, onion, vegetable oil, tomato puree, parsley, and salt

gomen wet: spinach, potatoes, carrots, onions, tomato puree, garlic, green pepper, black pepper, vegetable oil, and salt

shiro wet: soya flour, green and red peppers, garlic, onion, vegetable oil, ethiopian spices, parsley, and salt

the stall also had a great spread of various vegetarian dishes like olives, cabbage salad, corn and bean salad, potatoes, and more. fresh, delicious, healthy, and all piled high on your plate. so tasty, so different and so worth it.

there are even more wonders to come from the upmarket, but i’ll leave it there for now. only so much your eyes and your stomach can take at once. check back soon for a movie starring….fresh donuts!

if you’re seeing this photo back in the States, you’re probably thinking, GOOD LORD mei, what in god’s name are you eating over there? well, my dear friends, welcome to the wonderful world of the scotch egg.  the traditional scotch egg, as shown above, is a hard-boiled egg removed from the shell, surrounded by minced sausage, rolled in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried. if you’re still recoiling in horror from that photo, come over here and try one, because it’s  really seriously delicious.

i should stop here and say that the traditional scotch egg is not always delicious and is quite often pretty nasty. as andy, the maker of this delicious scotch egg told me, they’re usually sold at service stations (gas stations) and overcooked, mushy, and full of scary meat. thank god someone is addressing this important issue and that someone is andy.  as the chef/creator behind eat my pies, andy is bringing back the retro british delicacies with an impressive attention to ingredients, an innovative fusion of food cultures, and an emphasis on the thoughtful preparation of well-loved but often poorly manufactured classics. he also referred to a slow food-like philosophy on making simple food with good ingredients, an idea that he says lost traction during the war when fresh ingredients were scarce and led to the overprocessing of ingredients and glorification of fast food. i’m hoping to chat more about this with him when i’m not staring distractedly at a bountiful array of deep-fried things i can put in my mouth.

chris, eamon and i found andy during a gluttonous orgy of face-stuffing at the truly amazing  sunday upmarket at the old truman brewery on brick lane. i have LOTS to say about this international food paradise, but you’ll just have to wait for that. the three of us started the afternoon with the goal of eating our way around the world, but ironically enough, we ended up eating the most historically local of foods at eat my pies, including the could-this-get-any-more-britishly named rare roast beef yorkshire pud bap. i’ll get to that after i talk about the scotch egg.

for an item with a lot of ingredients and multiple layers, it’s a surprisingly smooth bite. andy purposefully doesn’t overcook his eggs, which means a soft, very slightly runny and still orange center rather than the dry crumbly pale yellow yolk that’s found in typical scotch eggs (or so one might say if one typically ate scotch eggs). the egg is surrounded by a delicious and unexpectedly mild blend of pork mince, sage, worcestershire sauce, english mustard, salt, nutmeg, and a lot of pepper. this meaty baseball of protein is then deep-fried in a breadcrumb mixture of, in this case, brown wholemeal bread.

i say ‘in this case’ because andy serves so much more than the traditional version of the scotch egg. his modern fusion take on the british classic has resulted in the development of the exciting and enticing thai red curry, smoked haddock, mexican three bean, and chorizo scotch eggs. WHAAAT??!? i am SO excited to try all of them. and i’m psyched to have just found on andy’s website that he can be found at whitecross street market, where i just this morning  promised to go and grab more tasty coffee from my new friend and world barista champion, gwilym. worlds colliding…so much awesomeness in london…need more room in stomach…

thai red curry and smoked haddock eggs, you are crazy but i bet you are also crazy delicious. speaking of crazy, wouldn’t it be crazy/awesome if you had a bird that laid scotch eggs? maybe it would be a whole menagerie of different birds of all shapes and sizes and colors, each of which laid another variety of scotch egg. you could wake up every morning to the cooing and crowing of your happy birds who have just laid a delicious breakfast snack for you! and no need to cook! interestingly enough, scotch eggs are commonly served cold, so you could eat them straight out of the nest. although it’s sort of gross to eat something that has just come out of a bird without washing it, and washing a scotch egg would be gross, and come to think of it, this whole idea is pretty gross. let’s move on.

did you notice that the thai red curry and the smoked haddock eggs are different colors? did you think they were laid by different birds? NO! it’s because andy makes a different breadcrumb mixture for each of his eggs. YES! so cool. such attention to detail.

i’ll finish up by talking about the superlatively english yorkshire pud bap that chris just HAD to buy. to translate: pud = pudding and bap = a sandwich roll which i have been told is usually white and often floury but in this case neither. whew. pudding, as we’ve discussed before, can mean all types of things here in the UK. yorkshire pudding is like a cross between a biscuit and a pancake and a popover, traditionally served with roasted meats and other dishes with gravy. it’s made  by pouring pancake batter  into hot oil which then rises to form a doughy pincushion. andy, being the wonder that he is, uses this eggy puffball to surround succulent slices of rare roast beef and mixed greens and then tops off the whole brilliant mess with this incredible homemade horseradish cream. creme fraiche, horseradish, white wine vinegar, mustard, nomnomnom.

chris, thanks for your unending patience with my food photography dithering, particularly when something seriously delicious is in hand. i wish that photo did it justice.

andy, so glad to have met you! i will see you soon. you, but more specifically, i will see your pork pies soon…i bet they are just full of awesome.