Barbecue Forever!

Sunny weather means only one thing, (apart from instant sunburn for the pasty among us and inappropriate levels of nakedness amongst the fat and drunk male population) and that thing is barbecue! The ancient method of burning meat over open flames has remained popular throughout the ages for a reason: burnt meat is damned tasty.

I kicked off my 'summer of jerk 2010' with a few dozen pieces of jerk chicken. Here is the recipe (it belongs to Gizzie Erskine):

2 tablespoons of English mustard
2 tablespoons of vinegar
Juice of 2 limes (add zest too if you like)
4 tablespoons of honey
3 scotch bonnet chillies (4 if you're feeling crazy, seeds and all)
6 chopped spring onions (or regular onions)
5 cloves garlic
Handful of thyme
handful of oregano
Sea salt.

Mix everything together and rub it into 12 slashed chicken thighs. BBQ the hell out of them.

I followed this with a rack of ribs, they are covered in tasty tasty smoky marinade, which you make like this:

Squidge of ketchup
Splash of Worcester sauce
Splash of Tabasco
Splash of vinegar
Dab of English mustard
Squirt of honey
Tablespoon of brown sugar
Teaspoon smoked paprika
S&P
3 cloves of garlic crushed
Splodge of soy sauce
Splash of oil

As you can see it's not an exact science, just taste it until it's nice, then smother it all over a rack of ribs. BBQ the hell out of them.

We also had some prawny skewers, which are just prawns marinated in lime, garlic, chilli and oil. Do not BBQ the hell out of these, or they will be horrible.

I cobbled together a store-cupboard cous cous involving, in varying quantities:

Lemon juice
Olive Oil
S&P
Roasted red peppers
Tinned black olives
Dried cranberries
Raisins
Chilli
Coriander
Mint
Cherry tomatoes

Which was very nice indeed. I find cous cous and similar grainy things very versatile and difficult to cock up. Chuck in whatever you have knocking about in the cupboard and it'll probably be pretty tasty. Unless what you have in your cupboard is tinned peaches, sardines and peanut butter.

The food is all well and good, but the mighty gods of the barbecue demand booze, and gallons of it. I'd stolen some pretty dodgy Cypriot white wine from the fridge at work, which was frankly unfit to consume au naturel. Aware of the rule that fairies die when you waste alcohol, I decided to improvise to avoid wastage.

I chucked a couple of bottles into a pitcher with some sliced up lemons and oranges, and topped with ginger beer. This proved both highly intoxicating and quite delicious. Inspired by my new policy of 'whack it in a pitcher with a load of ice and drink it fast' - we created several further rounds of cocktails involving rum, prosecco, vodka, gin and basil. I cannot tell you the quantities or combinations, because frankly we were too drunk to remember. Use your initiative, and very little in the way of mixers and you can't go wrong.

Thursday Night Market (chicken on my stoop)

Since the recession closed most of the shops in Granville Arcade in Brixton, a company called Space Makers have been filling the empty units with pop-ups and short-term lets to keep the area ticking over and stop the space falling into disrepair or being sold to developers. There is an excellent article explaining this (far more eloquently) here.

As a result there are some really sweet little places in there now, a retro sweet shop, a Greek restaurant, a seafood place and a fancypants pasta cafe. The maze of avenues is becoming pretty gentrified as evidenced by the frequency of the likes of me and my white middle-class friends running about buying flat whites and artisan breads.

On a Thursday the market stays open until 10pm, and in an attempt to keep it 'Old Brixton' my friends and I decided to go for some jerk for dinner. Usually we frequent Bamboula or Negril for our jerk fixin's, but we switched it up this time and went to little more than a shack with an oil drum barbecue outside. I'm glad we did, it was easily the best chicken I've had. Ideally jerk chicken should be blackened by the flames of a barbecue for that deep charred flavour, citrusy but salty and warm with spice. This was all of those things and more. I think the experience was possibly improved by eating it with our hands on a ramshackle stoop in front of a poster of the emperor Haile Selassie. Old Brixton indeed.

Take Two (possibly Take Zwo, the sign is ambiguous)
Coldharbour Lane
At the Brixton Village Entrance, Jct Atlantic Road.

The Cheap Greek

Now I know that The Real Greek may not be the most authentic cuisine, according to my learned Greek friends, but at the moment they have a deal which includes SIX dishes and TWO drinks for £20. In my opinion this is well worth getting involved with. You can then tuck into a very cheap and pleasant dinner with a friend for very little money. Look at what you could order!

(I do not know the names of any of these dishes, it's all Greek to me [did I? Yes I did]) The offer is running until 23rd February 2011, so there's plenty of time to take advantage, hell, you could even go twice or even thrice if you're feeling crazy. The Real Greek will also be donating £2 of each bill to charity, so that's another good reason to go.

What are you waiting for? Download the voucher here immediately.

Village East

Naomi and I made another stab at this modern brunching lark on Saturday, but didn't manage to meet up until 2:30pm so it was really more of an early dinner by the time we took our seats at Village East on the newly trendy Bermondsey Street.

We had what was a pretty decent lunch, I chose a burger topped with foie gras and caramelised onions and Jones had hake with a clam 'casserole.' I am normally a bit sceptical about jollied up burgers, because really all I'm interested in is the quality of the meat and whether they've cooked it how I've asked them to. The meat in my burger was good, it had been cooked medium rare causing me to exclaim "look! pink in the middle, they never do that!" and was still juicy but with a charred crust. Top marks on that. The little piece of liver on top was a bit lost in a burger really, so I picked it out and ate it separately. Soft sweet liver doesn't really have a place in a lump of meat in a bun affair in much the same way that Billie Piper has no place in a metal band.

We had deserts because 'we deserve it' although in reality we don't really deserve it, and after my gluttony in America, all I deserve is steamed veg and broth. But we ordered anyway, because we are greedy. I had a crème brulee which was all right, not the best I've had (which incidentally was at The Green at Goose Green, home of the best club sandwich I've ever had, and now sadly closed. Why God? Why?!) It was sort of bland and eggy, not vanilla-y enough, but the crust was good, so it was around a 7/10 overall. Naomi had honeycomb semifreddo with poached plums which she declared 'all right' too.

We decided that Village East was about that, 'all right' nothing special, and when we received the bill, it dropped in our estimations yet further. With a bottle of wine and a bellini each our bill came to £85, which for a burger lunch is a bit strong.


Village East
171 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3UW
020 7357 6082

Possibly the happiest event of my life to date.

I can't believe I did my entire New York write up without mentioning our finest hour: The Brooklyn Fried Chicken Cook-Off.

Tiring of persistent drizzle we fell into a small neighbourhood 'pub' where we were delighted to discover $3 pints of weak beer. We decided that this was as good a place as any to regroup and decide where to head next. It was then that the eagle-eyed Ceilidh spied a sign on the door and went to take a closer look. This friends, was the sign:

We made some enquiries with the fellow who appeared to be in charge, and imagine our delight when he said that the chicken was not only free, but that we were actively encouraged to eat as much as we could. This was surely turning out to be the best day of our young(ish) lives.

Excitement was building as dozens of locals brought trays and dishes of family recipe fried chicken through the door and placed them on the pool table at the back of the bar. I overheard snippets of conversation in which secret ingredients were discussed in hushed tones. Apparently Cap'n Crunch cereal makes a good addition to batter. Talk of brining and soaking in milk abounded and I realised that there's a lot more to fryyyyyin' chicken than I had ever imagined, I suddenly felt very English indeed.

People also carried in great serving dishes of sides; coleslaw, potato salad, mac and cheese and pickles to place alongside the trays of chicken glistening under the lights. Sauces were nestled amongst the foil trays, with some opting for traditional barbecue, others choosing Thai chilli sauces or even infused vinegars to dip their chicken into. I went virgin on all of mine in the interests of a level playing field.

On the orders of the master of ceremonies we pounced on the table, piling our plates high with pieces of friiiiied chicken and returning to our table to chew enthusiastically on the bones and swill it down with watery beer. We then marked each chicken out of ten, sadly I was pretty lax in my marking as I'd failed to note the contestant numbers in my excitement to consume as much as humanly possible. When will I learn?

We finished up with a summer berry cobbler and yet more beer before groaning off into the night clutching at our bellies. The bar also had a free brunch station at the back offering bagels with various toppings which you could just go and help yourself to. I think there really ought to be more free food in bars and pubs in the UK, surely it'd be helpful to soak up some of 'binge drink Britain's' rowdy behaviour?

New York

So the three people who regularly read this blog may have noticed that I've not been updating with my usual regularity. This is because I've been eating myself unconscious in New York, and my fingers are now too fat to type accurately.
I shan't bore you with a separate post for each of the 2,000 restaurants that we ate in, merely provide you with an overview of the high- (and low-) lights.
Since we were in the big 'apple', we made a solemn yet unspoken vow not to eat any fruit for the duration of our stay. Instead we insisted that almost everything that passed our lips was either deep fried or coated in sugar, or both.


Kicking off with a pizza the size of Jupiter, our arrival on the culinary map was well and truly marked for our poor weak British stomachs. Starved and exhausted after a long flight, a curtailed tube (subway?) journey and the effort of dragging two suitcases around the streets of Manhattan for half an hour, we arrived at our hotel and flopped onto our beds. Realising that we needed sustenance immediately if not sooner, we headed out with resolutions to just 'go to the first place we see and eat everything they sell.' The first place we saw was a pizza place called Sal's which apparently George Dubbya has eaten in. We purchased the last pizza they had, demanded that they sprinkle sausage all over it, and returned to our hotel. It became clear that the reason this was the last pizza in the shop was because all of the families of twelve, football teams and morbidly obese grease-chuggers were in bed or had dined elsewhere. We could probably have fed six with our table-sized pizza, but instead we decided that it would make a fine breakfast and boxed it up for the morning. Keeping it classy...As a first New York meal, it was pretty faultless and did the job of expanding our stomachs for the gastronomic onslaught of the week to come. The base was light but chewy and the toppings were neither overwhelming nor underplayed.





After trailing around in the rain all day, peering at skyscrapers obscured by fog and cloud and shivering in our 'summer' jackets and flip-flops, we treated ourselves to dinner at the Grand Central Oyster Bar to cheer ourselves up. This was only really effective in the short-term. Whilst I enjoyed my oysters, even without dipping them in KETCHUP like my fellow diners (really, who does this?) and the mountain of fist-sized scallops DEEP FRIED IN BREADCRUMBS (we had to keep up the 'vow of the fried food' somehow) I emphatically did not enjoy the vomiting, hallucinations, cold sweats and other ahem, side affects which saw me languishing in a pool of my own sweat on the bathroom floor at 3am crying and praying for death.


Despite this brush with death (dramatic, me?) I have not been put off oysters, I see them as a sort of extreme food, and the risk of illness only really makes them more exciting for me. Every mouthful is a terrifying dance with dysentery, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. Christ I'm daring.
Fully recovered but planning a low-key day food-wise; dry bread, plenty of water, the odd piece of fruit or maybe a plain muffin, you know, the sort of thing that people recovering from near death situations exist on so as not to enrage the beast that's taken residence in their stomach who insists of rejecting everything that enters his realm in the most violent and unpleasant way.


This did not last long as Polly and Ceilidh wanted to visit Katz's deli, made famous by that scene in When Harry Met Sally, which apparently gives them leave to charge eye-watering prices for bagels. We took our seats next to a wall crowded with photos of famous folk buying salami and so forth at the legendary deli, and ordered ourselves some pastrami bagels. Just a light little thing for my delicate constitution you understand, I really couldn't cope with anything heavy or rich...
Thick wedges of pink pastrami glistening between the black sides of pumpernickel bagel and enormous pickles set us on our feet for the day, which was fortuitous since we were very nearly knocked off them when presented with the bill...

Following a dogged day of sightseeing and endless pavement pounding, we found our tired arses at Madison Square Park where we were delighted to see the Shake Shack, a mecca for burger lovers, a contingent which we certainly count ourselves amongst. The fabled queues were not super long and within about 15 minutes we were squealing with delight as our buzzers vibrated and we rushed to collect our burgers. Foolishly we had opted for mere single patties, a mistake rectified when me and Polly returned two days later and went for the full double experience. Coupled with a 'concrete' - a solid ice-cream milkshake full of peanut butter, cookies, sauces and all manor of cavity inducing 'mush-ins' our cholesterol was sky-rocketing but our hearts were contented. Sitting on the little tables in the sun-dappled park with the Empire State Building soaring into the sky behind us was one of my warmest memories of America.

Following a fraught journey on the inscrutable underground system, Polly and I arrived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where we promptly deposited ourselves in the nearest 'pub' Spike Hill and ordered some strong liquor and a bottle of wine. We repped our nation admirably in the drinking stakes that night, which saw us through post-game drinks in a dive bar, swing dancing in a speak-easy and vodka in our hotel room. Brits on tour. Apart from the life-giving cocktails, we shared the biggest bowl of olives I've ever seen, some very good home-made houmous and a heavenly pulled pork sandwich which was one of the best things I ate on my trip. Sticky smoky shredded pork in a bun with barbecue sauce and coleslaw, I would eat this every day if I had the metabolism for it. 

What else did we gorge on? Honourable mention must go to my friend Diana who cooked us a beautiful Puerto Rican meal of chicken, red beans, plantains and rice despite being dead on her feet from two weeks of Grand Jury duty, a full-time job AND a university course. She is a miracle in tiny human form for the energy that she manages to maintain despite existing on about two hours sleep a night, I'm delighted that she's soon to marry my friend Jamie, a Londoner who moved to Brooklyn five years ago.
On Diana's recommendation we went to check out Cafe Habana for some Cuban food and ambrosial frozen cocktails - I won't forget the Morita in a hurry, a lethal combination of mojito and margarita. I went for pulled pork (again) but this one was casseroled in a citrusy marinade and served piled high with yellow rice and black beans. Having never tried Cuban food before, I'm now searching desperately for somewhere in London where I can feed my new pork addiction. Speaking of which I bought a hilarious recipe book called Pig: King of the Southern Table which I will report on in the fullness of time, probably when I’m back eating solids rather than salads in a bid to return to my pre-holiday weight.

Between these mammoth meals of fried meat and carbs we managed to squeeze in a couple of cupcakes from Magnolia and Sugar Sweet Sunshine respectively and a mother load of Reese's peanut butter products, for which I have a special weakness. Owing to my peanut butter addiction, it would have been remiss of us not to visit the Peanut Butter cafe, which serves The Elvis, a deep-fried peanut butter, maple syrup and banana sandwich with optional bacon. I balked at this, but ordered a maple peanut butter and bacon sandwich which was not deep-fried, and can report that it is a fine if slightly alien combination. We left with a couple of jars of flavoured peanut butter (cinnamon raisin and maple syrup) with which I think I will be making cookies from. Actually it's more likely that I'll just be eating spoonfuls of it from the jar. 

 You’re probably feeling a little nauseous just reading this litany of food with which we abused our waistlines, so I shall leave you. I must pop out to buy more elasticated-waist trousers, or sweatpants as my American friends would have it.

Barely remembered Barrica

I went to Barrica a few Fridays ago to celebrate the beginning of my holiday. I should have written about it straight away but I had to pack in a mad hurry and get myself to the airport as, true to form I had failed to prepare, and therefore prepared to fail. Also I had a couple of bottles of wine afterwards, so my memories are a bit hazy. Just for a change. It must be such a comfort to you that I'm giving such accurate and considered feedback on these places, else however would you know where to eat?

I remember that the dishes were all delicious and a far cry from the horrible greasy uniform tapas that you get so much in London. Each plate was a different pop of flavour and the dining room is bright and airy, though we sat in the front next to the big windows facing the street as it was a sunny evening and it helped us to feel very European. Chicory with blue cheese and almonds, and baby squid with red onions were stand outs for us, but we were disappointed not to see marrow bone on the menu.

The staff are charming and very helpful, overall it is a very good place for some dinner, though don't go if you're starving, or it'll cost you a small fortune to fill your belly. I'd recommend going after work to sip sherry at the bar and dipping into a few tasty morsels to stop you falling over with drunkenness rather than for a slap up meal. Unless you are rich that is, in which case, fill your boots.