I Tweeted about these bad boys a few weeks ago when I discovered that they’d been re-stocked by my lovely Scandinavian friends down the road from work, but such is my love for the Peanott Kubbe that I thought they deserved a post all of their own.
I rarely get evangelical or geeky about chocolate bars, but having discovered the Peanott Kubbe last year I can make an exception. Hailing from Norway, and roughly translated as ‘Peanut Log’, it’s a chocolate, peanut and toffee bar with a difference.
Veal had a bit of a bad rep in the 80s, but that didn’t stop the veal escalope becoming one of my favourite things to eat when I was growing up. There used to be this great Italian restaurant called La Baita up the road from my folk’s place in North London that we’d to go to on a pretty regular basis. I pretty much always ordered the veal escalope, which was served with sauteed potatoes and deep fried courgette. Not exactly healthy, but very tasty.
This is a bit of a remix of that childhood favourite. The prep is a bit fiddly, but well worth it.
Ingredients
For the Veal
2 veal escalopes
Seasoned plain flour
Thyme, finely chopped
Breadcrumbs (enough to coat both escalopes – 250 ish g)
1 egg, beaten
For the Courgette & Potato Cake
1 large potato, grated
3 courgettes, grated
1 medium onion, finely sliced
A tweet from Warp Records got me a bit hot under the collar yesterday. The reason? A few posthumous new tracks from the donut obsessed J Dilla. Released on Stones Throw Records, you know this is going to be one of those occasions where style and substance go hand in hand. Just check out the packaging and donut slip mats. Tasty!!!
For those that don’t know, J Dilla was an incredible Hip Hop producer who sadly passed away in 2006. He was prolific, and insanely talented, producing for the likes of Busta Rhymes, Erykah Badu, A Tribe Called Quest and even Janet Jackson (possibly a low point there).
In collaboration with Madlib, he made one of my favourite Hip Hop albums of the noughties, the awesome ‘Champion Sound’. Just check ‘The Heist’ and the title track if you want any evidence. Mad and Dilla were supposed to make a follow up. I’m not sure whether they got started or not, or whether any tracks will ever see the light of day, but we live in hope.
His music has had a lasting impact on hip hop and beyond, and many consider him to be the father of the so called ‘wonky’ sound being championed by artists like Flying Lotus.
Anyway, I’ll leave you with one of the tracks off Donut Shop, Dilla’s rather acidic take on Men With Hat’s 80’s folky synth-pop tune ‘Safety Dance‘. Enjoy.
For more info on Dilla, check out the fantastic three part Stussy Produced mini documentary on the man himself.
RIP.
As mentioned in a previous post, avocado on toast is one of our favourite breakfasts over here at Hand To mouth Towers. Recently we’ve been remixing it by adding a fried egg. A small change, but a significant one. Give it a go.
Anyway, a bit unremarkable in itself, but this morning I cracked my first ever double yolker and it’s pretty much made my day.
Thats is all.
Happy Sunday.
There’s an old adage about doing one thing well as opposed to doing a few things averagely, which would have been very apt for this post, but despite trawling the whole interwebs I can’t find it. Oh well.
So last night our fiends Charlotte and Mark introduced to us this restaurant called Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte. It seems it’s a bit of an institution, but somehow never made it onto my radar. It’s on Marylebone Lane, right opposite the awesome Golden Hind fish and chip shop (which deserves a post all of its own – all in good time), and is a great example of the benefits of the ‘do one thing well’ mantra.
At L’Entrecôte there’s basically no menu. You sit down (after a lengthy queue if you arrive at peak times) and get served a lettuce and walnut salad with a lovely mustardy vinaigrette, followed by steak frites. The steak comes served thinly sliced, covered in the restaurants own special sauce, the recipe of which is closely guarded. And that’s it. Kind of.
I’m going to be away for Easter in Australia visiting the future in-laws, so am going to miss out on the traditional treats that I’d be indulging in with the family down in Cornwall.
Food wise, the main thing I’m going to miss is the Hot Cross Buns. I love them. Toasted, slathered in melting butter and a good dollop of course bitter sweet orange marmalade. Anyway, I told myself that I wasn’t going to miss out, so decided to make my own for the first time. This recipe is lifted pretty much lock, stock and barrel from here on the BBC Food website, and the results went down a storm.
Ingredients
625g strong white flour, plus extra for dusting
1 tsp salt
2 tsp ground mixed spice
45g unsalted butter, cut into cubes, plus extra for greasing
85g sugar
1 lemon, zest only
So to much hype and fanfare, Marmite has launched a new limited edition product, Marmite XO. Billed as the only choice for true Marmite connoisseurs, XO (Extra Old) purports to have a deeper, richer, more complex flavour, like a fine wine.
Now off the bat, I should probably admit that I’m a Marmite fan. I love the stuff. Always have done, probably always will. But I’ve got to admit that there’s something about Marmite’s recent behaviour thats beginning to piss me off a bit. I was quite into the Guinness variant that came out a couple of years ago, and then the champagne one that came out around Valentine’s Day. Neither tasted as good as the original, but they felt a bit special. No song and dance, just a nice little treat for Marmite fans.
But now with the whole XO marketing campaign, premium price tag, ’spoof’ website and Facebook blah blah blah, it all feels a bit of a cynical money making operation. It stinks of Unilever’s clumsy brand police and ad agencies trying to be ever so clever.
It’s been around for a while, but I first read about Jim Lahey’s ‘no knead bread‘ in a Saveur magazine when I was in New York last year. I’d already got the bread baking bug, and the idea of a loaf that required no kneading seemed a bit odd, even a bit sacrilegious. I did a bit of research on line, and found out that everyone raves about the loaf, and it basically put Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery on the map.
Anyway, it definitely got me interested. How could a loaf requiring so little work be so good? Life just isn’t like that. So I gave it a go. The loaf is cooked in a cast iron pot, a bit like an Australian damper, so you’ll need a Le Creuset or something similar for it to work.
Ingredients
3 cups (430g) flour
1½ cups (345g or 12oz) water
¼ teaspoon (1g) yeast
1¼ teaspoon (8g) salt
Olive oil
Rye flour (for dusting)
Method
Mix all of the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix together for a minute or so to form a ’shaggy’ dough. Transfer the dough to a larger bowl oiled with some olive oil. NB. the dough will expand to around 4 times the size, so make sure your bowl is big enough. Cover with clingfilm and let the dough develop for 12-18 hours at room temperature.
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