Courgette flower power

It's been a while since I've wrote up any of my recent culinary conquests, it's quite time consuming writing a thesis.. such an inconvenience! That's not to say I haven't been in the kitchen slicing my fingers with a peeler and getting burnt from splashing oil. 

One of my latest purchases has been quite a revelation, the Salt Yard book. It's now one of my most used, the mackerel escabeche a particular delight. Something I wanted to try out was the courgette flowers that I have every time I go back to Opera Tavern, however trying to source them is a absolute pain. Until I randomly came across them at a farmers market opposite UCL. Check Wildco out HERE if you want to know where they are, got some nice cavolo nero from them as well.

The recipe is fairly simple as long as you are delicate with the flowers, if buying make sure you check the integrity, and few packets had flowers that were pretty much decimated. Not ideal, especially at £2.50 for 4.

Food over London and the Tentacles of Doom

Always keen to try something different, so after being inspired by the octopus dish at Opera Tavern, and Anthony Bourdains' No reservations in Lisbon, I wanted to recreate my own version. Good octopus isn't the most easiest to source with most supermarkets selling puny white things that are no doubt accountable for most comments of 'octopus just tastes like rubber' as well as inadequate cooking methods. Also, the internet is awash with loads of contradictory advice until I stumbled upon this video from Tom Kitchen.
I picked up a large atlantic octopus from a little Portuguese cafe in Kentish Town, called Wine Cellar, a gem of a place, the espressos and pastéis de nata they do are amazing. They also have a sizeable amount of Portuguese produce including Bacalhau and a great selection of frozen seafood. Downstairs is a huge wine cellar (as the name suggests), so it's well worth checking out if you are in the area. Since the octopus is frozen the first part of the tenderising process is already done.

Cooking with Olives II: Olive Hash Browns

Olive Hash Browns

This is the second of our olive-based recipes, and this time I've gone with a combination with potato as again I thought the starchy, creamy potato flavours would go well with the salty, anise-tinged black olives. I've seen recipes for olive mash before, so I thought I'd take a slightly different spin and go for a hash brown.

This recipe was created using black olives from Fragata, which they kindly provided for me along with some other great ingredients. Fragata are currently running a promotion in order to win a chance to cook with the one and only Jose Pizarro! If you're interested in entering the competition, please click here. The second recipe contains piri piri peppers, which were also kindly provided by Fragata!

Cooking with Olives I: Monkfish with Saffron and Olive Sauce on Cous Cous

Monkfish with Saffron and Olive Sauce on Cous Cous

This is the first of my two recipes using black olives. I basically wanted to combine black olives with fish, because I think that neutral, meaty fish like monkfish is complimented so well by that salty, anise-like taste of the black olives. I also like to cook down the sauce until it's a thick paste, almost East African style so that the paprika, coarse garlic and saffron retain their characteristic fiery intensity.

This recipe was created using black olives from Fragata, which they kindly provided for me along with some other great ingredients. Fragata are currently running a promotion in order to win a chance to cook with the one and only Jose Pizarro! If you're interested in entering the competition, please click here.

Here goes:

DIY Sous Vide - Salmon

According to Heston (see article) all foodies should have a sous-vide. Well I hate to burst his, no doubt elaborataly formed, bubble but not all of us have a spare £300 for a water bath, and another hundred for a (not even professional) vacuum sealer. Nevermind the fact that each of them are the size of the microwave, it's probably one of the most inconvenient gadgets you would be likely to purchase.

Sous-vide is the new standard in cooking and allows for ultimate temperature control to cook your food evenly while not overcooking the outside, also the main advantage is that if temperature is maintained it'll never overcook. No excuse for inconsistency if a restaurant uses one of these!
Help is at hand for those wanting to do sous vide at home, a few fellow foodies have been fighting the system, and have come up with some DIY methods to do your own sous vide set up. It's all very 'Blue Peter' but it does the job....just about

Professional sous-vide - Cha-ching

Opera Tavern - Pigging out at the 'Tavern

Opera Tavern @saltyardgroup
23 Catherine Street

Opera Tavern is by far my favourite restaurant in London. It's food lies in between great cuisine and indulgent sharing food. From it's marvellous mini burger, of ibérico pork and fois gras, to the incredible ibérico pressa. Yes, there is a theme in what they do well here, and it is the pork from the black footed acorn fed pigs. While, the other dishes are good these are definitely their USP. 

A Lad's Salad : Duck Salad with Fatty Croutons

I'm going for a slightly different angle on this one. So this came out of a combination of wanting to empty out some ingredients from my fridge left-over from the lab barbecue and wanting to do a recipe post about salad as opposed to strictly meat and veg on the side. OK, as you can see from the photo above there is definitely an abundance of meat here, but I hope that there are enough greens here to keep your mum happy!

Bring the beef

What's great about going to lots of different events is getting to meet different people. At the recent Burger Breakout, I bumped into Adam from noshable.co.uk who partners with @CornishGrill who supplied the meat for that event, and put me on their Cornish Food Club email list, where you can order some fantastic cornish produce. They have a stall on Maltby Street market (also another gem, I would have otherwise not known about) where you pick up your order from. Maltby street market is just around the corner from London Bridge, unfortunately when I went I did not have much time to check everything out, but I'll be back. From their stall they also have a BBQ going with amazingly priced steaks and whole lobster (incredibly fresh from Devon)

If cooking for yourself or others, above all is sourcing, if you get great meat and can cook to a good standard, it's going to stand out so much more than heavily farmed supermarket stuff. Obviously you expect to pay a bit more, but for special occasions it's well worth it. The Cornish Food Club get their meat from Philip Warren Butchers, which also supplies Michelin starred restaurants, and even Pitt Cue Co.

Ice Cream...now with more thigh bone

Following swiftly on from our Ice Creams of London special, and before the sun disappears again behind some omnipresent rain clouds, I've knocked up a batch of some ice cream...but not as you know it!

With a dinner party coming up I felt some crazy urge to pull something extravagant out of the bag, and with the weather approaching 30 degrees (where has that got to :( ) I thought I could try something different with ice cream. Despite not actually owning, or knowing anybody, with an ice cream machine, I thought this would be a great idea. After trawling the web, I came across this amazing place in Portland, called Salt & Straw with flavours like Pear & Stilton, and Strawberries, honey balsamic and cracked pepper. Amongst these, one that did catch my eye was bone marrow and smoked cherries.

FD IN - Veal meatballs with mushrooms in port sauce

I thought I’d start my own posts on this page with some eating in rather than a new restaurant. Me and Ms Mowgli bought a pack of veal meatballs (500g, Waitrose) on offer and thought of doing a sort of German spin on it inspired by a recent trip to the Black Forest. We ate the dish with Spaetzle, which are a kind of noodles commonly eaten in Germany:

- The spaetzle (150g/person roughly) was first placed in salted, boiling water. It was then cooked according to a Google translation (German->English!) of the instructions. We boiled it for 8 minutes before allowing it to rest in hot, non-boiling water for a further 8 minutes before being coated with unsalted butter.

- Whilst the spaetzle was boiling, we fried the meatballs in a ”healthy” dose of melted butter (I guess 2-3 tbsp of olive oil would be ''acceptable'' too, but the butter makes it taste so good!) over a low/medium heat in a frying pan until the meatballs were browned and just start to caramelize. The meatballs were then kept in a bowl with some kitchen paper on top (to soak up the excess butter…I could eat that paper on its’ own!).

- We then fried a pack of white button mushrooms in the juices and butter leftover from the meat. Once they started to soften, the mushrooms were then seasoned with salt and pepper (I like to add quite a lot of pepper here because I think it spices up the veal nicely). I used to be more of a mushroom snob but then Ms Mowgli showed me the error of my ways with an amazing garlic button mushroom dish (for another post!).

- We then added about 50 ml of port (cognac would also be good, white wine would be lighter) and reduced at a medium/high heat until the liquid was reduced by half and the alcohol evaporated.

- We then added a pack of single cream. A 50:50 mixture of creme fraiche/double cream could be added for a more gallic flavour, but I prefer the single cream as it is a bit lighter. Creme fraiche does give a sour note which nicely balances out the sweetness of the port though so it’s excellent too.

- Finally we added some roughly torn, fresh flat leaf parsley to finish the dish. We then allowed the dish to simmer for a couple of minutes and served with the spaetzle!