A Valentine's Day feast

I usually prefer to stay in and cook on Valentine's Day. If you go to a restaurant, you pay over-inflated prices for generally average food and are surrounded by couples with nothing to say to each other! Last year, we deviated from this typical course of action and did go to a restaurant and of course, paid too much for average food in an environment of contrived romance. So this year, I reverted to type and decided to cook instead.

I wanted to do something different and special but was somewhat restricted by the additional challenge of also pre-cooking the next day's meal for when my parents arrived from Australia. So with limited time (although at least it was a Saturday), dishes and fridge space, the menu looked like this:

Pancetta-wrapped scallops with hazelnut and rocket salad
Stuffed lamb breast with flageolet beans and artichokes
Silky chocolate coffee pots with raspberries

I don't normally cook scallops as they are quite expensive, so this was a special treat. The scallops were wrapped in pancetta and skewered with a rosemary stalk then pan-fried in butter. They were served on a salad of rocket and toasted hazelnuts with an olive oil and balsamic glaze salad and accompanied by a glass of an Italian Pinot Grigio. Yum!


I cheated a bit with the main meal and asked our lovely local butcher for some of his stuffed lamb breast rolls that I had seen in the window the previous week. The accompaniment was a very easy warm salad of flageolet beans, grilled artichokes, roasted garlic, creme fraiche, dijon mustard and mint. I had never tried lamb breast before and while it was a bit tougher than I expected, served sliced on top of the salad and drizzled with gravy made from the pan juices, the flavour was excellent. I would definitely try it again but perhaps cooked more slowly for longer. We drank a Spanish Pinot Noir with this one.


Finally, we finished the night with Silky Chocolate Coffee Pots - an absolutely brilliant dinner party dessert as you make them the night before and they just sit in the fridge. These were super rich but a really lovely balance of sweetness (all that sugar!) and bitterness (good strong coffee and dark chocolate). The raspberries were also a nice addition to cut through the richness a little.

Here are the recipes (they are all from various Delicious magazines):

Pancetta-wrapped scallops with hazelnut and rocket salad
Serves 2

6 large scallops
6 thin pancetta slices
6 small fresh rosemary sprigs, all but the topmost leaves stripped
Knob of butter
Handful of rocket
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 tbsp balsamic glaze (or vinegar)
1 tbsp of toasted hazelnuts, chopped

Wrap each scallop in a splice of pancetta and secure in place with a sprig of rosemary, skewered through the scallop. These can now be chilled until ready to cook.

Melt the butter in a large frying pan over a high heat. Add the scallops and cook for 2 minutes each side until golden and the pancetta is crisp and cooked.

In a bowl, toss the rocket with the oil, vinegar, hazelnuts and some seasoning. Spoon onto two serving plates, top with the scallops and spoon over any pan juices.

Stuffed lamb breast with flageolet beans and artichokes
Serves 2

2 stuffed lamb breast rolls
olive oil

Half a small garlic bulb, top sliced off
1 tsp olive oil, plus an extra drizzle
Few rosemary leaves
400g can flageolet beans (cannellini would probably be fine too), drained and rinsed
130g grilled artichoke hearts
1 tbsp creme fraiche
1 tsp dijon mustard
2 tbsps fresh mint, chopped

1 tsp plain flour
100ml chicken or lamb stock

Preheat the oven to 180C. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and brown the lamb breast rolls. Move to a tray. Drizzle some olive oil on the garlic and add this to the same tray. Place in the oven. Remove the garlic when soft (about 30 minutes) and the lamb after 45 minutes. Set the lamb aside to rest.

For the salad, heat the tsp of olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Squeeze out the roasted garlic (discard the skin) into the pan and add the rosemary. Fry for a minute. Add the beans and artichokes and cook over a low heat until warmed through. Add the creme fraiche, mustard and mint. Season and stir until combined.

For the gravy, heat the fat in the tray used to cook the lamb over a medium heat and add the flour. Mix, scraping the bottom of the pan. Add some stock to make a paste and then gradually pour in the remainder until combined. Simmer until thickened. Season.

Slice the lamb breast and serve on top of the bean and artichoke salad with the gravy drizzled over.

Silky chocolate coffee pots with raspberries
Makes 4

125g caster sugar
125ml strong espresso
100g dark chocolate, chopped
250g marscapone
cocoa and icing sugar, to decorate
raspberries, to serve

Put the sugar and coffee in a small pan and heat slowly until the sugar has dissolved, stirring all the time. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave for a minute, then add the chocolate and stir until melted. Cool.

Put the marscapone in a bowl and beat until smooth. Slowly beat in the coffee and chocolate mixture, a little at a time. The mixture should be the consistency of thick pouring cream. Pour into individual espresso cups or small glasses and chill overnight.

Put the raspberries on top and sprinkle with cocoa and icing sugar to serve.

Scrambled eggs with feta and spinach

Some leftover eggs and feta inspired this creamy scrambled eggs with feta and spinach for brunch this morning. With a little bit of cream in the eggs and served on toasted Poilane sourdough bread, this was very tasty indeed!

An Australian eats Indian food in London

Some time in November 2008, there was an article in the Time Out newsletter about foodie walks in London. Some of them were extortionately expensive at around 80 pounds, but I noticed an Indian Food Walk for a bargain 10 pounds for two hours. I reserved a couple of places, but as the snow fell in London this week, wondered if wandering around outside for two hours was the wisest thing to be doing in February. That being said, it ended up being a cold but beautiful sunny day - perfect for journeying out to Southall in distant West London to meet with Monisha Bharadwaj, our guide for the day. Monisha has had a fabulous, envy-inspiring foodie career - she does cookery classes, has written books, been on TV - and she was a lovely host.

We started off by venturing into Quality Foods, a huge Indian supermarket, where we learnt about some interesting Indian vegetables, such as bitter Gourd and saw some things you rarely see, such as fresh turmeric. We spent some time in the spice aisle, where I was pleasantly surprised to see that the majority of these spices we can get at our local Finsbury Supermarket! Monisha advised us that for the majority of Indian cooking, we should only need seven spices - ground cumin, cumin seeds, ground coriander, chilli, turmeric, black mustard seeds and garam masala. Certainly makes it seem less intimidating! It was interesting to see the massive bulk quantities available at this supermarket - no 500g packets of Basmati here!

After spending some time in the supermarket, we continued on, stopping to watch naan being made in a tandoor (and sampling it - yum! Crispy and light, not heavy and oily like a lot of naan) and to sample some Punjabi Chai tea, which was pink (!) and very sweet and milky. We also sampled some Indian sweets (not sure about them) and had the opportunity to sample pan, which I wasn't really keen to try. Judging from the faces and comments of those who did, I don't think I missed out - this one definitely goes down as an 'acquired taste'.

It was a really interesting experience and a place I would otherwise never have visited. One of the things I really love about London are these pockets of different cultures. You can experience completely different ways of living without leaving the city.

After the tour, we wandered around for a while and eventually stopped at the Glassy Junction pub - the first pub in the UK to accept rupees - and apparently it still does! After a couple of Cobras, we headed to Madhu's Indian Restaurant. I had never heard of this restaurant, but it looked lovely and the menu looked good. Googling it now, it seems to be quite famous and I can definitely understand why. We started with some poppadums, which came with the UK Indian restaurant standard of condiments (a good one that we could adopt in Australian Indian restaurants!). These were the best condiments I had ever had - spicy and tasty mango chutney, a chilli type sauce reminiscent of property barbecue sauce and a green minty paste (I don't know what these were). Across the board, very good.

We shared a starter of Paneer Cheese patties with spinach - light and crispy, these were a reasonable starter, but not necessary in retrospect. Without these, we may have had more room for our mains of Chicken Makhni (Butter Chicken essentially) and Keema Mutter (lamb mince with peas) with rice, peshwari naan and raita. I often find that curries can tend to be either too oily or move past spice into just heat. These curries both had a small amount of heat, but actually had real spice flavour. The unadorned accompaniments of plain basmati rice and raita that was really just natural yoghurt were also a welcome change and helped to put the focus - rightly so - on the curries. While the curries were excellent, it was the naan that was the true star. Always the measure of an Indian restaurant for me, the peshwari naan here was like none I had had before. Sweet from the fruit and coconut, light and crispy bread texture . . . . my mouth is watering now just thinking about it! We washed all this down with a pleasant lemony Pouilly Fume from the Loire, quite similar to a Pinot Grigio.

While Madhu's was fractionally more expensive than most Indian restaurants, it was worth it in every way. Service was excellent - the staff actually talked to you! - and the food was outstanding. The only downside for us, is that it is such a long way away :(

Miss January - Sausages with lentils

My calendar this year is just a freebie that came with the December Delicious magazine. January's dish of Venison Sausages with Lentils enticed me all January, so with only a few days to go, I decided to give it ago. The lentils were rich and tasty from the beef stock but the Venison Sausages (I'm afraid these were from Sainsburys - my local butcher doesn't sell venison sausages) were quite dry. Mine didn't look quite as good as the picture, unfortunately.

The lovely fresh figs we had for dessert, simply cooked with brown sugar and served with cream, were as good as a picture though. Mmmmm.... figs .....

A new seafood shop in Finsbury Park

I absolutely love the food shopping in my immediate local area. I almost feel a bit smug at the moment - the TV is packed with famous chefs telling you to support your local businesses, shop local etc etc, and we do about 90% of our food shopping within about 800m of our flat! We do have some brilliant places - Highbury Butchers, Whites Fruit & Vegetables, Da Mario Italian Deli, La Fromagerie cheese shop, Highbury Vintners wine shop, Finsbury Supermarket (which has everything and more that a big supermarket would have except for liquid stock, crumpets and vegemite - so that is pretty much what I buy from Sainsburys). The service is so friendly, they know who we are, it is quick, pleasant, well-priced, plenty of choice and as an added bonus - local. The one thing we were missing was seafood.

But a few weeks ago, a seafood shop opened up on Seven Sisters Road, so the area is now complete. Despite being from Queensland, I've never cooked a huge amount with seafood and am defnitely not confident with whole fish. Most of the fish at this shop is displayed whole and while I'm certain the lovely man there would fillet it for me, I decided it was time to branch out and try a whole fish. He gave us two whole trout for 5 pounds, which I thought was pretty good and I decided to make Pancetta-wrapped trout (although I used the excellent smoked streaky bacon from Highbury Butchers instead of pancetta) served with beans and almonds - pretty classic combination. I think it looked quite impressive, but I do find whole fish difficult to eat and somehow a bit dissatisfying in the end.

Completely satisfying though was the Spicy Prawns with Chickpeas served with flatbread, lime wedges and natural yoghurt. We had also bought a 1 kg bag of frozen raw prawns for 8 pounds, which we divided into three lots. We used the first lot to make this delcious spicy tomato prawn meal, which made enough for dinner for 2 and lunch for me the next day. Pretty good value, I think!

So thanks to the lovely fish man for opening his fish shop - the local shopping here is complete and I'm looking forward to experimenting with more seafood dishes.

Homemade chutney

One of the things I love about being in London in Winter is that the cold weather does inspire you to cook things that take a long time. Having the stove on for hours helps to heat the flat and as we are spending so much time in the flat, you can afford to hang around while a big pot bubbles on the stove for 2 or 3 hours.

So I've been thinking about making a chutney now for a few weeks. It does sound terribly English, doesn't it! I've been collecting jars as we finish using them and finally a couple of weeks ago, started looking for a recipe. There are a lot of different variations, so the choice was tricky. In the end, I chose one that suggested you could eat the chutney pretty much straight away, but it would also keep. A lot of them recommended storing the chutney for 1-3 months before eating it. I couldn't wait that long!

So on that basis - and because it did sound good - I chose this Pear and Apple chutney from the UKTV food website. Spread out on the bench, it did seem to be quite a lot of ingredients and had probably added up to 10 pounds, so I was hoping it turned out okay! A lot of chopping later, my biggest pot was full to the brim with lovely looking ingredients - how could all these ingredients result in something that wasn't good?? It took about an hour to come to a simmer (and we gave up and turned up the heat and put on a lid to get it there!) and then let it simmer for an hour and a half. It was still quite liquid-y after this time, but otherwise tasted good. The chutney made six jars full of varying sizes as well as a good-sized portion that we had for dinner with some honey-roasted ham, provolone cheese, Poilane sourdough bread, grapes and red wine. A delicious version of a ploughmans. Lucky we liked it, because it made a lot! I think there is something to the bitey cheddar with chutney, so along with smoked ham, I think that will be the next ploughmans . . . and the one after . . . and the one after . . .

An un-Australian Australia Day

So the plan was to meet at the Temple Walkabout for a few Aussie beverages to celebrate Australia Day. For the record, I'm really not a fan of the Walkabout - it is either only attractive to yahoos or brings out the yahoo in people who go there. But we didn't have any other plans, so on a cold, rainy London Sunday (particularly un-Australian weather!), we made our way to Temple only to find that the people we were supposed to meet weren't there. But I did enjoy my TED (Toohey's Extra Dry - we do have good lager in Australia (except for Fosters, which no Australian in Australia would ever drink. Do they even sell it there?)).

So as the Australia Day plans were aborted, we decided to seek alternative entertainments. Only the previous day, I had been reading about Gordon's Wine Bar - apparently the oldest wine bar in London (established in 1890) and a London institution, but one I hadn't heard of. I was not entirely sure where it was, but recalled it being somewhere in the neighbourhood of Temple/Charing Cross. We did finally happen across it and very tentatively entered a more than slightly dodgy looking doorway just next to Charing Cross station. If I hadn't read about it, I certainly would never have gone in! But through the tiny doorway and down the steep and narrow staircase were the underground caves of Gordon's Wine Bar. Awesome! The focus is on sherrys and ports in barrels, but they also have quite a good wine list (an Indian Cab Sav anyone?). By sheer luck, we managed to get a table in the candlelit cave (it was very dark, so unfortunately, the photos are quite dark) and started with a glass of Concha y Toro Cab Sav from Chile and a Hazy View South African Pinotage. Both were quite similar and perhaps less gutsy than anticipated. Gordons also has an impressive cheese selection and for a reasonable 7.60 we got a beautifully ripe Camembert and a stinky washed rind Irish cheese (not sure what it was called), along with half a baguette and some pickles. The cheeses were exactly the right temperature and the whole experience was very rustic and authentic feeling! Not wanting to leave so soon, we also enjoyed a glass of Bordeaux (just gutsy enough) and a Fat Bastard Bourgogne (very mild even for a Pinot, despite the name!).

The whole experience was fantastic - I will definitely be going back and would take anyone who came to visit London. It was probably the least Australian, but most 'London' thing we could have done on Australia Day in London.