Banish your travel woes with a bite of a peach!

Are you feeling frustrated with the ever changing travel plans because of the COVID-19 situation? Not able to fly to your favourite holiday? Unable to even book a campsite because they have all been booked up by staycationers?

Planes and holidaymakers are grounded during COVID-19 shutdown.

What can you do to make you and your family smile in such tough times? Well, one thing which is right here in the UK and plentiful right now is fresh fruit, even better, British fresh fruit.

Go and get a shopping bag full of peaches, nectarines, raspberries, strawberries and much more. Some of these fruits are at their best in ripeness during August and September. Trust me, just bite into one and you’ll see what I mean.

When buying summer fruits:

• Check that the flesh is not bruised or peeling, otherwise they will have a short life back at home.
• Do keep soft fruits in the fridge so you can enjoy them for longer.
• Berries are perfect stored in a freezer bag and frozen for smoothies and desserts in the winter.
• There are so many British fruits in season that if you can, check the origin and choose British to save on their carbon footprint.

Here’s a recipe for a fresh and tasty salad which can be served as a starter at a dinner party, a side at a barbecue, or just because you fancy it! Don’t be afraid of peaches – they are delicious. If you worry too much about the ‘hairy’ skin, then you can either peel it off to reveal oozing tasty flesh, or if peach just does not do it for you then you can use nectarines instead.

Peach, Mozzarella and Prosciutto Salad

2 ripe peaches, cut into quarters with the stone removed

2 hearts of Mozzarella or 1 whole mozzarella, torn roughly into 8 pieces

1 packet or 8 slices of prosciutto or parma ham

5-6 mint leaves, roughly chopped

Drizzle of maple syrup or honey

Just pull the ingredients together on a pretty dish, serve and enjoy immediately!

Dry your eyes mate!

My favourite vegetable is the onion. Without it, hundreds of recipes and most cuisines around the world will be incomplete. Isn’t it wonderful that a humble bulb which brings tears to your eyes can become the backbone of so many dishes?

Onion is great as a base for so many dishes but I do love them as the main ingredient of a few dishes

spanish onions halved, drizzled with olive oil and baked;

spring onions barbecued in foil

baby onios pickled in vinegar

finely chopped red onion, tomato, fresh coriander and green chilli (Kachumber)

The unassuming little bulb is something that most people will find in the vegetable basket. When you go for your weekly shop, spy other people’s baskets or the checkouts, and I am willing to bet that most will have a bag of onions. What will we do without the onion? We would have bland curries and even blander soups and stocks. And as for the French Onion Soup. Well, that would be a bowl of tepid water with croutons without the onions. 

In fact I must admit that I am a big fan of all vegetables in the Allium family. Other than the onion, it boasts the mighty garlic, chives and leeks. Onion and garlic are the fundamental ingredients in Indian, Chines, Italian, Mexican and so many other cuisines that it’s a miracle this family isn’t known as the king of vegetables! So next time you are peeling an onion to start a dish, say hoorah for the onion and smile through the tears!

No tears Though there are a number of tricks ( see http://www.wikihow.com/Chop-Onions-Without-Tears ) to prevent you from crying when chopping onion, my favourite is to wear sunglasses. Other than keeping the enzymes from getting into your eyes, it makes you look cool when cooking!

 

Medicinal Though it’s well known that onions have medicinal qualities – they contain a natural chemical called flavonoid quercetin which apparently protects against heart diseases and cancer – my favourite use whilst at primary school was to sleep with an onion under my armpit. Next day you’ll have a fever (without any other symptoms) and you can can bunk school!

Joking aside….SON: What vegetable makes your eyes water?
DAD: An onion.
SON: You`ve obviously never been hit in the nads with an eggplant then dad!’

Q: What can you make from baked beans and onions?
A: Tear gas. 

One day two onions, who were best friends, were walking together down the street. They stepped off the curb and a speeding car came around the corner and ran one of them over.
The uninjured onion called 911 and helped his injured friend as best he was able. The injured onion was taken to emergency at the hospital and rushed into surgery.
After a long and agonizing wait, the doctor finally appeared. He told the uninjured onion, “I have good news, and I have bad news. The good news is that your friend is going to pull through. The bad news is that he’s going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life”.

Behind closed doors

Now that I’ve experienced my first closed door restaurant in the UK, I am surprised it has taken this long to repeat this delightful activity.

There is something slightly mischievous about going to eat at a closed door restaurant – a sense of adventure. Thrill-seeking. It’s because you aren’t really visiting a restaurant, you are being invited into someone’s living room. That you don’t choose the menu, it’s put together for you. And that you don’t ask for the bill at the end, you leave a ‘donation’ in a little envelope on the desk by the front door.

My first experience of a closed door restaurant or supper club as many prefer to call it (though I think that sounds more smutty!) was in Buenos Aires where a large number of  friends and I took over a couple’s little flat in Palermo. Since then, as I travelled through Asia, the excitement of trying another supper club waned as I didn’t come across any suggestions for similar experiences.

So when recently a colleague recommended a supper club in East London, I jumped at the chance to try it. The fact that it was Vietnamese in cuisine only heightened the anticipation. When recently people have asked which part of the world was my favourite to visit in the last year of travel, the answer has always been Vietnam. Other than the long, stunning coastline, the food in Vietnam really captivated my tastebuds. And besides, it’s the lengthy coastline in Vietnam which provides the copious quantities of seafood, which I totally fell in love with.

In the top three of all experiences in my life, is sitting on little plastic stools at the food section of Ben Thanh market in Ho Chi MInh city, surrounded by colourful vats of food and slithering fish being sold for wholesale. At this little stall, we’d point at this shellfish or that and wash it down with a glass of fragrant Dalat blanco.

Fernandez & Leluu live in London Fields and organise suppers a couple of times a fortnight. The house is narrow and when you enter it, you would be forgiven for thinking that there might only be a small gathering for the supper club. In fact, Leluu manages to fit 26 people in her narrow sitting room. Mind you, the crowdedness adds to the titillation of sitting next to strangers. You are invited to bring your own wine and Leluu points you to the seats she’d like you to take. There is a hint of seating arrangements as though you were at a wedding.

A couple of minutes after taking our seats and popping open the first bottle of the ‘Fat Bastard’ Pinot Noir (if you book to go here, I recommend you buy wine elsewhere as there is limited choice close to the supper club), a couple came and joined us at our table. Whether this really was deliberate on Leluu’s part or not, we were delighted to have the company of an energy trader and his Vietnamese girlfriend. It turned out that the Vietnamese girlfriend was in fact Danish-born and a budding shoe designer. The conversation flowed easily and the first course arrived.

By far my favourite course of the eight served this evening was this simple appetiser of fish cakes. These were served with radish leaves and a sweet chilli sauce to dip into. These delicious little morsels of food gave way to starters. First a puff pastry with creamed chicken, mushrooms and sweet peas – the French influence taken care of.

Then slices of barbecued pork with spiced vermicelli which we agreed lacked heat. Then other bits and pieces, which if I am honest, I am struggling to remember. As we went through the courses, we found they were tasty but sanitised for a Western palate. The flavours that stand out in Vietnamese cooking for me are lime, coriander and chilli – fresh and bursting on your tongue. Though I could tell that the food was prepared with care, it just didn’t have the zinginess I associate with Vietnamese cuisine.

In the middle of the courses, the Pho arrived. At our table, we had speculated whether this elephant would make an appearance. With a mixture of anxiety and trepidation I took the large bowl of soup from Leluu. The broth tasted like homemade chicken consomme and there was a large portion of noodles sitting in it with slices of cooked beef. The broth was tasty but lacked depth. A plateful of mixed leaves and herbs and more wedges of lime to add to the soup would have improved the dish greatly.

At this point, the sequence of courses took an interesting turn when we received a large bowlful of prawn crackers at the table with a salad of grated chicken, carrot and banana blossom. The crackers were crisp and spicy and really rather good. The salad I found to be really rather offensive to my palate – the texture of banana and chicken with grated carrot was vile.

We were feeling very full at this stage but managed to taste mouthfuls of the next couple of courses including goujons of steak wrapped in betel leaves and breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the last course arrive at the table.

A scoop of avocado and coconut ice cream served with a couple of cubes of melon. This dessert sounds a lot more exotic than it tastes. Perhaps it was the blandness of the dishes it followed which left me impartial to this last course. Perhaps I came with too high expectations. Given this was my first Vietnamese meal after visiting the country last year, it was most likely the latter.

Whitechapel Market

Another visit to Tayyabs in East London today and though the meat was a little chewy this time, it was really interesting to walk around Whitechapel area. It really comes alive at the weekends. Stalls of clothing and nick-nacks are set up along the road, and with half of the pavement closed off for road-works, the people were extra squashed in today. It took a log time to reach the station at tortoise pace behind families with little ones in tow.

What struck me was not how multi-cultural Whitechapel is but how almost 90% of women wore a hijab. Is it possible that the area now is more exclusively Muslim than it was previously?

Tower Hamlets, which is the borough Whitechapel falls in is home to the largest Bangladeshi community in the UK. Wikipedia states that approximately 52% population of Whitechapel is Bangladeshi. That’s more than one in three but that still does not make up the numbers of hijabs I saw today. And last time I looked, I didn’t think that most Bangladeshi women covered their heads and faces. Their heads but not often faces too. I did see a number of stalls selling hijabs in various colours and styles. Perhaps weekends attract other populations of Muslims to Whitechapel too.

There was certainly no tension and it was great to see so many women out shopping as opposed to a largely male population which is what you see in the nearby Brick Lane.

At the heart of Whitechapel and not far from the Royal London Hospital is the East London Mosque which serves the Bangladeshi as well as other Muslim communities of East London. Next door from it is the London Muslim Centre and their combined accommodation can hold 5,000 people, making it the largest mosque in the UK. I looked on the mosque’s website and found that it is involved in all sorts of activities to encourage tolerance in the community and attract young people to its doors to ensure religious learnings but also give them a safe place to spend time.

It was at the mosque’s website that I found a whole lot of information and activities list for Somali community. So perhaps it was the Somali women who had increased the numbers of covered heads I saw this afternoon?

I also read on a website somewhere that the council wants to ‘regenerate’ Whitechapel Road to restore the historic buildings but also rejuvenate business and have shopping districts. The problem is that when there is such regeneration, it pushes out the local businesses to make room for chains and superstores. Wouldn’t this totally change the face of Whitechapel as it is now – a bustling and multi-cultural local bazaar where people come together to buy specific ethnic items?

Popham in your mouth – the black puddings!

A few of us were on the road from London to Torquay for a birthday party and realised that we drive right past Popham. There is very little of note in this sleepy little village not far from Stonehenge. There is a small service station with Little Chef. Having always found Little Chef’s dark, gloomy, overpriced with the worst food ever, what made us stop here and wait half an hour to get a table?

A couple of years ago, that nerdy chef who spends more time in a lab than in a kitchen – Heston Blumenthal – took a challenge with Little Chef to convert one of their service station restaurants’ food to something a little more inviting and edible. As it was 11am and as we were exactly half way between London and Torquay, it seemed like a good place to check out.

The first thing you notice is the absence of old dark wood and dirty curtains. The sun was shining and the place was bathed in a beautiful light, showing off the bright colours of a long bar around which tall stools stood, right next to the open kitchen. This was very inviting but also full of people so after a short wait, we were seated at a booth and handed menus by a surprisingly cheerful waitress. She took our drinks order and left us to devour the lengthy menu.

Heston’s specials stand out in red letters and a different font on the menu so its easy to choose if that’s what you’ve come here to try. We all went for the  breakfast menu and I chose the Olympics Breakfast. Our hot drinks arrived and again, it was a pleasant surprise to get a decent cappuccino and filter coffee.

My breakfast was a handmade all pork sausage with bacon, chips, beans, a field mushroom, two free range eggs and the best black pudding I’ve ever tasted! In fact it was so good that I decided to write this post just to mention the black pudding!

Before leaving, I went to use the facilities and was taken aback when someone shouted out an order from behind me in the cubicle. It turned out that there are individual speakers in the toilets which play peculiar sounds and music! Slightly unnerving! But on the whole a good experience all round!

Why can’t all other Little Chef’s be transformed into the same style and food as Popham? Beats me!