…to all the Americans out there.
May your turkeys be plump, and your pumpkin pies sweet.
Hopefully see you soon.
HTM x
Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
Happy Thanksgiving…
Friday, November 23rd, 2012Strawberry & Rhubarb Pie
Friday, August 10th, 2012
I’ve had a bit of an obsession with the idea of American pie since watching Twin Peaks in my yoof. Something about that classic diner environment and Special Agent Dale Cooper’s palpable enjoyment of those perfect slices of pie really captured my imagination. The diner’s waitress, played by Madchen Amick, may have also had something to do with it.
We got fully immersed into the pie thang whilst we were out in the States, and this recipe is in particular inspired by a visit to Mission Pie that was just down the road from our apartment in San Francisco. In the UK we’re used to the idea of eating something like this as a pudding, but out in the states, pie is basically a snack. Something you’d have in the afternoon with a coffee, and it’s usually served at room temperature with some whipped cream.
Both rhubarb and strawberries are bang in season, and there’s something about the combination of the two that really works. The filling almost fizzes on your tongue like a sherbert sweet. The lattice top looks cool, but the pie works just as well with a solid lid, so don’t be put off by the fiddly bit.
Ingredients
For the pastry
340g plain flour
20g caster sugar
8g salt
240g cold unsalted butter
100ml ice cold water
For the filling
600g strawberries
300g rhubarb
Juice of one orange
Juice of one lemon
1 vanilla pod, seeds scraped out
140g caster sugar
Big Breakfast Cornbread Muffins
Sunday, March 18th, 2012
Believe your eyes. It’s a big cornbread muffin, encasing a boiled egg, shards of maple candied bacon, chilli and topped with more of that sweet, sweet bacon.
This recipe is totally inspired by a cornbread and egg muffin I had at a place called Sweetcakes in Chicago a few years ago. It’s an idea that’s been knocking around in my brain ever since, but in my mind, there were two major problems with their version of this inspired bit of breakfast madness. 1: The ratio of cornbread to filling. Too much egg, not enough bread. 2: No bacon. What a mistake-a to make-a.
This recipe rectifies both problems, but as a result, you can’t bake them in regular muffin tins as they’re just not big enough. So I use small aluminium pudding molds. The kind of thing you’d make a chocolate fondant in. Also, make sure you buy medium sized eggs, not the bigger ones you can get these days.
Ingredients (makes 6)
150 g yellow grits / cornmeal / polenta
150 g white bread flour
1 large red chilli, de-seeded & finely chopped
8 medium sized eggs (6 for the inside, 2 for the batter)
Felafel with Red Cabbage Salad
Friday, March 16th, 2012
I’ve got a lot of love for the humble falafel. I think I first tried them in Egypt when traveling with a mate during university holidays, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I used to make a weekly, sometimes twice weekly, pilgrimage to a place called Just Falafs when I worked in Soho, but it sadly closed a couple of years ago as their landlord jacked up the rent and they couldn’t afford to stay. For a while, I was in a bit of a felafel wilderness, until I discovered that making your own is pretty easy.
These have a good hit of garlic in them, so if you’re not in to that, just tone down the quantities a bit. I like to serve them in pittas with a crunchy red cabbage salad (recipe below), a tzatziki of sorts (recipe from an earlier post here), some salad leaves and hummus, which I buy (sorry).
One final note, don’t be tempted to leave out the flour as it helps bind the mixture. If you leave it out your balls will disintegrate when you fry them.
Ingredients (makes around 10)
For the felafel
1 200g can of chickpeas (drained weight)
1 small onion, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
Dante’s Spoon Bread
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Whilst road tripping in the Deep South of the US last year, we got pretty excited about the Southern food. And when you look at the evidence, there’s a lot to like. Barbecue, shrimp & grits, shrimp boils, fried pickles and green tomatoes, boiled peanuts, fried chicken, corn bread. Not the kind of thing to be writing about when you’re hungry like I am now.
Anyway, one of the many memorable meals we had was at a place called Dante’s in New Orleans. I mentioned it before in this post, but as an ‘amuse bouche‘ we were given something called a spoon bread. A close relative to corn bread, it had a softer, spongier texture, was deeper in colour due to the inclusion of molasses and as the name suggests, was eaten with a spoon. It was totally sweet and delicious, a bit like eating a desert before you’ve even started your meal, and I thought it was great. I asked our waitress if I could have the recipe, and before we left the chef handed it over, of which this is a slightly re-worked version.
Like they did at Dante’s, I baked mine in cast iron corn bread skillets (16 x 3 cm) that we picked up from the Lodge factory store whilst we were over there. But you could bake them in any oven proof dish, or do mini ones in a muffin tins.
A couple of notes before we begin, I’ve switch the molasses in the recipe for black treacle for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I find that molasses has a slightly bitter aftertaste which I personally don’t like, and secondly black treacle is easier to get hold of. Similarly, if you can’t get your hands on stone ground grits, just use polenta. Finally, the original recipe also calls for buttermilk. Again, this isn’t that readily available in the UK, but you can just switch this up for plain low fat yoghurt.
Ingredients (makes 2)
1 large egg
250ml butter milk / low fat plain yoghurt
Local Hero #22 Fette Sau
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
Day two of me pulling my finger out is another local hero from our stay in New York late last year, and trades the buttery crusts of pies for another American obsession. Barbecue.
I’ve wanted to visit Fette Sau since I read about it three or four years ago. Last time I was in New York, I failed to get my ‘cue on, so this time I vowed not to fly home without coating my face in barbecue sauce.
Tucked away down a side alley in Williamburgh, Brooklyn, Fette Sau is a temple to meat. The walls are adorned with scrawlings of different cuts of various four legged beasts, knives hang behind the bar, the white tiled walls are all butcher shop, and they sell their wares by weight as opposed to portion, which is great from a trying everything point of view. It also exposed the tactical eaters we overheard rejecting anything on the bone as it’s “…dead weight, man…”, which means no ribs, which is crazy right??
I wanted to try as much as I could, so after much deliberation I pulled together what I figured would be a killer selecta. Black Angus Brisket, Spicy Berkshire Pork Sausage, Pulled Berkshire Pork Shoulder, Duroc baby Back Ribs, Burnt-End Baked Beans and some green stuff to keep my digestive system alive. Now I was pretty pleased with the ribs that I made earlier in the year, but this was some next level business. The words that follow are not going to do what I ate justice, because I loved every friggin’ mouthful so much, but here’s a taster.
Local Hero #21 Four & Twenty Blackbirds
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012So given my general writing uselessness over the past couple of months, I’ve got some catching up to do. So, here is the first of two quick fire posts of places I wanted to give a special biggup to that we visited in New York back in October. Jesus. That seems like an awfully long time ago.
The first of these is Four & Twenty Blackbirds in Gwanus, Brooklyn. Now, as I’m sure you know, ‘pie’ is an American institution. It’s an old school love affair that has outlived cupcakes, macarons, whoopie pies and whatever sweet thang is currently de rigueur. The Yanks love it, and the queue outside Four & Twenty proves the legend above the door, ‘this must be where pies go when they die’.
Run by two sisters who cut their teeth working at their family’s restaurant in South Dakota, before slinging pies from their apartment in Crown Heights, NY, they set up Four & Twenty almost two years ago, and have been rammed ever since. There’s nothing particularly unusual about the place itself. It’s got all the trademarks of your typical hipster cafe. Bare brick walls, stripped back wood, tattooed serving staff etc, but it has a really welcoming, homely vibe. I guess you could describe it as pie in atmosphere form.
The pie on the other hand is unusual. And in a good way. We tried a selection including the plum crumble, brown butter pumpkin and the salty honey. All the pies are hand made, and come with the same crust, which is totally the right combination of tenderness and crumble, with a great buttery flavour. The plum crumble was amazing. Sweet and crunchy with a tart punch of local plums, all smoothed out with some lightly sweetened whipped cream. The pumpkin was everything a pumpkin pie should be. Dense, deep, moist, pumpkin-ey custard filling spiked with cinnamon and the surprise addition of a nutty richness supplied by the brown butter. And finally, and I have to be honest my least favourite, the salty honey. Richer than Daddy Warbucks, the custard filling was packed with butter and honey, set off with a generous sprinkling of salt crystals on the surface. It wasn’t in any way bad, but just too much for me.
I’m not going to lie to you, Four & Twenty isn’t exactly in what you’d describe as a ‘handy mid-town location’ but Gwanus and neighbouring Red Hook are areas on the up and up and well worth a look around, and I’m telling you, the pie alone makes the trek a no brainer. Special Agent Dale Cooper would be a very happy man.
How To Open A Bottle Of Wine With A Shoe
Saturday, November 26th, 2011A friend was stuck on the train the other day with a painful dilemma. She had a full bottle of wine and a raging post work thirst, but no corkscrew. What to do?
I immediately thought of this amazing clip of an inebriated Frenchman on the streets of Paris opening a bottle of wine with just a shoe. Not sure how it would have gone down on the train, but incredibly it works, so I thought I’d share it. You never know, it might come in handy in the run up to Christmas.
Vive la France!
