Coming soon

Here are a few of the dishes I whipped up recently. I'll post the full recipes once I've written them out. I might even have to cook them again just to take photos...

Baked Cod, cherry tomatoes and pea, courgette and broccoli puree, served on wild rice with pumpkin seeds and chopped almonds.

Roast butternut (so good with so many things... but recently pomegranate seeds and very good quality feta cheese.)

Baked chicken fillets, wrapped in parma ham, filled with wild mushroom and aubergines

Sweet potato and trout fishcakes

Gnocchi with roast butternut, fresh cherry tomatoes and mozarella

Discharging the Electric

I was discussing my blog with a friend last week, and his suggestion was that I needed to find a bit more focus and direction - have a theme, so to speak. Initially I set up the blog so that I could post my recipes online rather than emailing them round after a dinner party. But like all things, it’s evolved and become more of a restaurant critique than of my cooking, but that is indicative of my current lifestyle. The balance will come back, and I should hopefully get more recipes as well as photos on the site soon.

It’s been a week of interesting turns food-wise. Dinner at The Electric in Notting Hill (where you can normally count on a decent meal) was good for the company but the food wasn't quite what I remembered it to be. I’ve eaten at all it’s sister restaurants too - Cafe Boheme in Soho, Balham Kitchen and Bar and of course the Electric many times. My dinner companion ordered steak tartar to start, and unfortunately he was rather disappointed. He’d been expecting steak tartar in the style one would get in Paris where the egg comes raw and the capers are on the side. While I found it tasty, it was only my second helping of steak tartar so I do admit to being an absolute novice. The other occasion, incidentally, was in Paris last year and I cannot recall if there was raw egg severed with it or not. We shared a bottle of Pinot Grigot, which was pleasant enough, but admittedly nothing too special. I ordered the Duck Salad as my main (feeling very confident after ordering duck at Lantry’s) and my companion ordered the pork belly.

The duck salad was not what I expected. It was an interesting combination of wild rocket, mandarin segments and the shredded duck; however, I found it to be a little bland. The pork belly unfortunately got cold due to us being too wrapped up in our conversation, and the chef was unwilling to warm it up again due to contamination issues.

The Electric has that buzz about it, although perhaps it is becoming more of a has-been with the number of other great eateries competing in the neighborhood (take Food@The Muse or any of Tom Conran's offerings - Lucky Seven and Bumpkin included). I would say that to have a truly fabulous evening perhaps one should be ordering the Lobster and chips or the Chateaubriand, but then I’d prefer going to The Cow and ordering their full seafood platter.

Vietnamese on Kingsland Road

Fittingly for the final farewell dinner with one of my besties, we went for Vietnamese on Kingsland Road last night. One of the good things about living in Shoreditch is the amount of Vietnamese restaurants on Kingsland Road.

Dinner last night was:
Prawn summer rolls with Hoi Sun sauce
Chilli Squid
Ribs (Pauline ordered these – was not a fan)
Followed by:
Prawn and Papaya salad
Lemongrass and chilli prawns
Whole steamed sea bass with coriander and lime (As usual, this was sublime)
All washed down with a lovely crisp bottle of white.

I do find it amusing and also indicative of our friendship that the (many) farewell's we've had the past few weeks have been around food. One last champagne lunch! One last Tuesday Night Dinner! One last Vietnamese on Kingsland Road! I'll miss G & S dearly - this is very much the end of an era.

Lunch at Zetter

I had a business lunch at The Zetter today, and while I've been there for cocktails before, I hadn't eaten there so I was rather looking forward to it.

To start I had "Grilled Green Asparagus With Poached Egg, Teruel D O Serrano Ham & Truffle Dressing" followed by the "Pan Fried Sea Bream With Braised Salisify, Rocket Pesto & Clam Ragout".

The starter had a generous amount of the Serrano ham on the plate, although strangely light on the asparagus. And the asparagus tips were peeled, which I thought to be a little strange considering they were quite young and tender. An all round good dish.

My main course was also lovely. The sea bass was pan-fried perfectly, with the skin being lovely and crunchy and the clams delicious. The 'braised salisify' - which I do admit to not having eaten before today - was more of a novelty vegetable than an automatic first choice. I do think there were a few other vegetables that could easily have worked as well - including something like pak choi if there was a need to bring a bit of fusion into the dish. We ordered a few sides - roasted new potatoes (far too salty but crunchy on the outside and soft in the inside), rocket and Parmesan salad (undressed and as you would expect) and then wilted spinach, which I think had some sort of light soy dressing.

Lunch was finished off with a decent double espresso (no sugar).

Smoked Eel Salad

Planning Monday night's dinner party has had me thinking about the more unusual salads I've made recently, and one that stands out is the smoked eel salad with roasted butternut, wild rocket, horseradish and pomegranate seeds. There's a wonderful fishmonger in Clapham South, and while I was very disappointed that he'd sold out of clams for the spaghetti vongole that I was planning on making that evening, he did suggest the smoked eel for my starter. The butternut was an interesting twist, and more included because a) not being widely eaten in the UK, I have an obsession with roast butternut and b) I had my heart set on including it in the meal somehow. Not that it didn't work well, I just think the combination of the peppery rocket with the rich, oily eel with the horseradish and crunchy pomegranate seeds can stand on their own.

More than just salad

I have a bit of a thing about salads. Maybe it was all those years being a vegetarian that did it for me.

I tasted the most gorgeous salad on Market Kitchen yesterday, which was part of a "Beetroot Masterclass". I know prior to tasting the salad, we were cracking jokes about the need for a beetroot masterclass, but in fact, I was completely impressed. I normally roast my beetroot, but steaming it just adds another dimension to the beets.

Jeremy Lee made a steamed beetroot salad with boiled egg, lambs lettuce, watercress and (made-from-scratch) salad cream. The combination was just incredible. The steamed beetroot was truly gorgeous - the colours on the plate were brilliant.

I made a lovely salad the other evening: Courgette ribbons, strawberries, crushed walnuts, goats cheese and fresh coriander. The flavours, textures and colours work really well together, and I love strawberries, goats cheese and coriander as a combination of flavours. I'm doing the courgette ribbons a lot lately as it's so easy and a perfect way to serve what could be an otherwise wintery vegetable in summer. It also brings a bit more depth to the salad.

I still have never managed to perfect the sublime carrot dressings that I had in New York a few years ago. I also had an amazing beetroot dressing (vegetable-based salad dressings must have been very on trend at the time) which I am definitely going to be trying out.

A day at Market Kitchen

I met Matthew Fort today, and I did develop a bit of a (non-sexual, of course) crush on him during Great British Menu. He is absolutely lovely, and incredibly funny. Tom Parker-Bowles is also rather lovely, and Jeremy Lee is very, very camp but a great chef. I was filming for Market Kitchen, and while that deserves a post all in its own, it did re-ignite the foodie fire in me.

I really enjoyed meeting Rose Grimond, who has given up acting and has started a business supplying food from the Orkney Islands (http://www.orkneyrose.com/). She sells her produce at Borough, and we got so deep into conversation about Borough, its alliance with the wonderful Boqueria market in Barcelona, that she almost missed her queue to answer Matthew Ford's question.

Such a lovely day out!