Beyond a Magimix or a hand mixer, I’m not big on kitchen gadgets, but this little discovery has become indispensable in a very short space of time.
The Herb Saver pretty much does what it says on the tin. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of spending above the odds for a bunch of fresh herbs at the supermarket, only to find that two or three days later that they are wilted, soggy and unusable. For those of us without a River Cottage style herb garden and limited outside space, there aren’t many alternatives but to keep buying packaged herbs and dealing with the fact that some will go to waste. Until now.
The Herb Saver gets round the wilting issue by keeping the herbs cool and hydrated. You fill the bottom reservoir with cold water, stand your herbs upright (stalks down) in the water, close them into the ‘chamber’ and then pop into the fridge.
In our experience, the herbs will keep at least three times longer that usual, which has got to be a good thing, right? I’m sure you could achieve similar results with a jam jar, but it also looks good, and fits perfectly into our fridge door.
You can buy the Herb saver on Firebox for £13, which means after a few weeks it will have pretty much paid for itself. Recommended.
At Hand To Mouth Towers, we don’t have any outside space that allows us to grill meat over an open fire, which can be a bit frustrating during ‘barbecue season’. So when I get the chance to get busy with some hot coals, I try and make it count.
For me the undisputed kings of the grill are Côte de Bœuf or the porterhouse. Both are pretty primal cuts, with plenty of marbling, and if well hung, bags of flavour. Whilst at Forcalquier Market we picked up some amazing rib steaks to barbecue, and they made an awesome dinner.
Ingredients (serves 6)
3 x Côte de Bœuf steaks (around 700g each)
Herbs de Provence
Salt and pepper to taste
Method
You want your ribs to be at room temperature before you grill them, so get them out of the fridge before you start your barbecue. Now get your barbecue super hot. You want to sear and caremelise the outside of the meat when you put it on, so it needs to be as hot as Hades.
As people who read this blog will know, I’m not a huge fan of overly fussy food. 9 times out of 10 I’d rather eat a really well cooked roast chicken say, than some complex Heston-esque creation swimming in a sea of foam. There’s a certain pomposity that comes with this kind of food and the people, or so called ‘foodies’, who wax lyrical about it. But every once in a while it does one a bit of good to see how the other half live, especially if someone else is paying. In this case, my parents.
About half an hour’s drive from the villa my folks rented there’s a small village called Cruis. It’s a pretty unassuming little place, in many ways a typical French village, but we’d been told that the restaurant at the hotel in town was very good. Like the village, the Auberge De L’Abbaye didn’t look that special, plastic chairs and vinyl checked table cloths out on the veranda, so we were kind of unprepared for how good the food was.
The menu was succinct, but not limiting. Bursting with local meat, veg and seafood from slightly further afield, I could have happily eaten all of the dishes on the menu. I started with some local asparagus which was served with a qualis egg and kind of morel mushroom velouté sauce. The asparagus was firm, tender and delicious, the quails egg a nice touch, but the crowning glory was the sauce. Totally packed with the morel flavour, and with a few mushrooms scattered around the plate, it was deliciously rich. Many a mushroom soup could learn a lesson or two from that sauce.
Been crazy busy since we got back from Oz, so have got a bit behind on the writing stuff. But back to the land down under for a quick coffee related post.
As mentioned previously, there’s been a bit of an Australian coffee shop invasion in London over the past year or so. Places like Lantana, Flat White, Milk Bar and Kaffeine have their own style and atmosphere, but all have one thing in common. Great coffee. As I understand it, ‘coffee culture’ hit Australia and New Zealand about the same sort of time as it did in the UK in the early 90s, but interestingly instead of succumbing to the big brands pumping out the brown liquid passing itself off as coffee sold the length and breadth of our high streets, our Antipodean cousins adopted a more artisan based approach. In fact, such is their devotion and knowledge of good coffee that even the mighty tentacles of Starbucks have failed to gain a foothold in Australia. As my friend Mutber put it, “…you can’t sell a bad product to an educated audience.”
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.
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.
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.
Hand To Mouth is a blog about food. Eating it. Cooking it. Reviewing it. Reading about it. And everything in between.
I’ll be regularly posting recipes, restaurant reviews and opinion about anything food related that grabs my eye. Hopefully there’ll be a few laughs along the way, and I promise not to cut the cheese.
If you like what you see please let me know, and equally don’t be afraid of throwing a few rotten tomatoes my way if you don’t.
BIG thanks to Tom Hardcore at Nation for the blog design.
