Honest Burger, Brixton

Rather shockingly, I had never been to Honest Burger before last week. I like to see myself as relatively well versed when it comes to the more celebrated venues on the London burger circuit but for one reason or another, Honest had slipped me by, despite the fact that there is now a second branch in Soho as well as the original Honest in Brixton Market. After an unsuccessful house viewing in Brixton last Wednesday, we ended up walking past when there was no queue in sight so took a table.

I ended up plumping for the Special that week which was an American burger with pickles, American cheese and burger sauce as although tempted by the eponymous Honest burger, I knew I would have food envy if I deviated from the matching orders of my pals. We also had a side of their incredibly moreish coleslaw.

So much has been said about Honest, that I don't have anything particularly ground-breaking to add but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The chips, as everyone says, are highly addictive and I really like the fact that the, I want to say £9, price point included the chips as so often now you are looking at at about that just for the burger.

With Honest rolling out their burgers across London now, with the Camden and Portobello branches newly opened, adding to their brace in Brixton and Soho, I think that if they can keep their consistency up then their popularity will only continue to rise and rise. And quite rightly too.

Roganic

In the light of L'Enclume recently being announced as the Good Food Guide's best restaurant in the country, it reminded me that I had not only neglected my blog, but neglected to post about my meal I had at Roganic in the week before it closed for good. I had never had the opportunity to try Simon Rogan's cooking before, as I have never had the pleasure of heading up to Cartmel, so when I heard that the two year pop-up in Marylebone was coming to an end we had to book a table asap.

I really don't know where to start when it comes to Roganic. This was such an awesome meal. And I really do mean awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring. It's the kind of food you sit there and you taste it and you end up thinking "Seriously??!". I've never had a meal before like I had at Roganic, and it has really opened my eyes when I didn't really think they needed opening. With a tasting menu the only option, albeit six and ten course variations for both the omnivores and vegetarians, you have to ignore any queasiness or dislike of certain ingredients and just place yourselves in the chefs accomplished hands.


We opted for the six course tasting menu (£55) though with the  bread rolls, little pre-starters and the post-dessert sorbet you could argue it was more like 9.


Really, really stupidly. I didn't take a photo of the menu! And as this meal was enjoyed an embarrassingly long time ago I can't remember everything but perhaps the soft cheese which finished the meal was my favourite. Though having said that, the heritage potato and onion ash course was truly spectacular. Or maybe actually the bread rolls. Oh I can't decide.

Even when you get past the ingredients and the ethics and the wonderful service, what is truly fantastic about Roganic is the cooking. It was the most eye-opening meal I have ever had.

Patty & Bun

I'll keep this short, as I am pretty much the last person in London to go to Patty & Bun.

On Saturday afternoon, to line our stomachs for the two hour no interval performance of A Chorus Line that we were due to see, my cousin and I thought we would hedge our bets and head to St James' Street to try and get our hands on a P&B burger. Luckily for us, there was no one in the queue, so we plonked ourselves down on the bench and only had to wait about ten minutes before we got a table.

Flo had a Smokey Robinson and I felt that as it was my first time there I had to get an Ari Gold. Now, our flaw at this meal was that I over ordered for us...... As well as our burgers we got rosemary fries AND the Winger Winger Chicken Dinner as I had heard such amazing things about the wings and I physically can't order a burger without chips. Now, I  loved the wings, but (please nobody shoot me) I found them too sweet. For one or two, it was amazing, and the fact they had been confited (is that actually a word, should it be confit-ed??) meant they were so succulent and just melted off the bone but after two, I couldn't really cope with the third. Though I am a big fat pig so I ate five as my coz only managed one.... So I clearly didn't mind that much! Burger was unsurprisingly great, my favourite bit was the pickled onions, I just can't get enough of onions. Chips were great, though didn't get too much of a rosemary hit, which I'm not complaining about as rosemary ain't my fave.

All in all, would 100% go back, just would order less :)

PS

GO AND SEE CHORUS LINE. THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO GO

Alquimia, Putney

Putney isn't exactly known as a foodie hotspot so when I saw a review of Alquimia in Putney from How Not To Do A Food Blog pop up on my Google Reader I was intrigued; especially as Putney's best (possibly only?) tapas restaurant La Mancha is now moving to Chiswick. I went along with Hannah and E on Sunday with no real preconceptions other than that I was hoping for a really lush tortilla. You see, I heart tortilla with all my, well, heart.

My first sense was one of relief as the restaurant wasn't empty. I am actually quite phobic of empty restaurants but as the last of the three of us to arrive I wouldn't have had much of a say in the matter over leaving anyway! There were a couple of tables finishing up as we went in and by the time we left the place had filled up with a mixture of couples and families, standard Putney really. Though, that is pretty much standard the world over, so a pretty unremarkable observation.

BOOM. Olives, bread and olive oil on the table along with automatically brought to the table tap water. Really lush bread actually though unfortunately no idea what it was. I would guess, but my brain has gone totally blank on Spanish breads.. Other than churros. Which are definitely not bread. But also lush. Though totally irrelevant. Sh, Katie.

One friend was on a bit of a budget so Hannah and I decided to order together:

Unsurprisingly, first shout was tortilla (£6.50). This was gorgeous and light and fluffy and potatoey and eggy and all you could want in a tortilla. It came with bravas sauce and ali-oli i.e. win-win. I'll be honest, thought I was going to get a whole one but I am super, super greedy.

Ham, chorizo, salchichón and lomo - though don't think or know whether this is the right order......

This was such a gorgeous spread of cured pork. Special shout out to the rolled ham on the right, Jesus Christ it literally melted in the mouth. This was £12 but a really generous portion and especially so when only two of you are eating it!!!

This was on the menu as a salad of duck and warm beetroot (£8.20) , which also came with orange and possibly grapefruit segments and dressed leaves. I really thought this was lovely, not something I would normally think of as Spanish but hell, if they say it is, who am I to disagree and it was really gorgeous. Duck is definitely my favourite meat, so I'm pretty fussy about it, and this was a beautifully put together plate and I would have happily eaten the whole thing :)

 Now, I don't eat fish (UGH) unless in smoked form or in pate or in fishcakes or fishfingers (do they count?) but I do like the odd bit of seafood. I refused Hannah's initial suggestion of octopus because its rank so we settled on the tapas staple of gambas with garlic oil (£7.80) . I TOTALLY freaked out when I saw they were still in insect form to the point that when I pulled the head off I was terrified by all the blood until it was pointed out to me by Hannah that this was tomato oil so I felt a bit stupid. Though she kept saying Grazia instead of gracias so I feel we are kind of equal. I would have liked more of a garlic hit with these but I'm overwhelmingly partial to garlic so that is probably just me! 

 Think I must have had prawn on my lense.... These were the little goodbyes they left with our meals. Apple chunks with lemon juice and mint and some very powdery chocolate truffles! Really lovely touch.

I ended up paying about £20 for my half of these dishes and a coke including service. Really lovely service by the way, the touches with the olives and bread and these mini desserts and friendly staff made me not even consider to quibble the tip.  It's not somewhere I would go every day because I can't afford £20 lunches  sans alcohol every day but I think it is a fantastic restaurant and is a great addition to the gastronomic wasteland of chain restaurants that is Putney. (Enoteca Turi on the High St is excellent btw but mentally expensive)

A Wong - A Journey Through China

Right, I am no expert when it comes to Chinese food. Ever since I realised there was an alternative to the MSG neon food you get in a lot of places I have been fascinated. I have always been entranced by the bright red ducks hanging in the windows of the Chinese restaurants in Bayswater though have always been a bit wary of picking one and being disappointed as there is such a huge spectrum of varying quality in the Chinese food scene in London.

I had heard a lot recently about A Wong on Wilton Road in Victoria so decided to give it a go. I turned up with a good friend, a 6pm reservation and a truly atrocious hangover, I was hoping for something spicy and some dim sum and then heading off. What ended up happening was we went for the £38 eight course tasting menu and didn't end up leaving until 3 hours later. Consequentially, not having been prepared for this marathon meal, my phone battery died, so the pictures are minimal and crap.

The staff were very sweet they introduced the tasting menu explaining that the chef (Andrew Wong, LSE and Oxford student who gave up his economics headed career to take over his late father's restaurant) had been on a journey round China and had brought back what he felt were the highlights of the different provinces. I'll be honest, I can't really remember everything I was told so this is a slighty hazy overview

Step 1 Hong Kong. Three different, very decently sized, dim sum.... one, was filled with pork and prawn, with a little pork cracker on top, one had a vegetarian tapioca on top, and one had a citrus foam on it..... I can't be much more specific than that because I was so hungry I gobbled them down practically before the waitress had said what they were.


Next stop was.... I'm not actually sure where the inspiration was from but it was a tea smoked egg with fried strips of tofu, they almost looked like vermicelli noodles, the idea being it was like an egg sitting in its nest. There was incense brought over at the same time which played havoc with my hangover and I found a bit overpowering. We also had a slight problem as my friend doesn't eat runny yolk (her loss, I know) so we tried to remove it using chopsticks and a spoon which resulting in our egg going splat on the table Humpty Dumpty style, so I can't really comment on the egg..... the tofu was lovely and crispy and salty though.

Then it was the province best know for its vegetables so we had a mixed bowl of Chinese vegetables. This came with a shrimp butter and lots of tiny weeny little shrimps (I know shrimps are tiny weeny but they were still cute). There were some crispy, perhaps dehydrated and then dried circles of a vegetable which neither of us had any idea what it was but they provided a nice contrast in texture.

 Next was the "fish course" which was 'poached Scottish razor clam with sea cucumber, pickled cucumber, vinegar tapioca and wind dried sausage'. For someone who doesn't really like seafood that much I really enjoyed this, and we were encouraged to swallow it in one (??!?!?! don't think those were there exact words) by tipping into our gobs with the shell. Photos stop here (I know right, gutting, they are so lovely and clear) because my phone died.


 Sichuan was next with gong boa chicken with peanuts and rice which I was pretty nonplussed by.  Was really hoping for big numbing chilli from the Sichaun peppers but I didn't really get any. Then was possibly my favourite course with beef in oyster sauce and big fat Chinese mushrooms. I get a little confused here though because there was spicy lovely aubergines served with the beef I think, but it was spicy so I'm wondering if maybe it was the chicken........ Regardless the beef was gorgeous. Honestly think it might well have been the nicest beef I've ever had. Then came Beijing with pineapple and chilli and a typically Beijing yoghurt, nice little touch was a little paper cover for the yoghurt with what I'm guessing was a pretend brand. Basically there was a little logo and lots of Chinese characters. Loved the pineapple and chilli but the yoghurt at this point in proceedings left me very stuffed! Lastly was a lychee granite with a sugar sphere which had a soft meringue and mango puree inside. By this point, I'll be honest, I was just waiting to finish but this was a lovely cooling cleansing finish to the meal. This was from a province beginning with F.

And there ended our journey through China!

Thanks for sticking with me through what is possibly the most un-informed write up of a meal I have ever read. Next time I will try harder but I was so overwhelmed what with the hangover and the surprise decision of ours to have a tasting menu that I wasn't really prepared for the onslaught of information!!!!!!!!!

Bearing in mind that to go to one of the new modern Chinese restaurants in London such as HKK, the latest Hakkasan outpost, or at 'Demon Chef' Alvin Leung's Bo you are looking at £48 (only offered at lunch, otherwise its 15 courses for £95) or £98 for ten (no sex on the beach edible condom at A Wong though....) for the tasting menu, I think that a restaurant like this showing these ingredients and attempting to start to educate the dining public on the differences between Chinese regional cuisine and for 8 (very decently sized) courses for £38 is damn good value. I had a fantastic evening with a good friend of mine and the service was swift, friendly and knowledgeable. I'm sure there are better restaurants, there always are, but I loved it and as I waddled off to Victoria I knew I would definitely be going back.

Salad Dressing

In my afformative teenage years, I, along with my friend Jess, was always given the job of making the salad dressing whenever a big group of us were cooking at someone's house or went away on holiday together. This mainly stems from an attempt Jess and I made while we were all away at a cottage in North Devon to make supper. This was such an unmitigated disaster that I can't even remember what we were trying to make, all I can really remember is that we were both absolutely plastered and were finding ourselves incredibly funny while everyone was just getting pissed off and hungry. That was really a roundabout way of saying that the dressing with my friends and family is always given to the person who doesn't know the first thing about food/flavour/cooking as you can't really go that wrong with oil and vinegar. While yes, I was/am not a great cook, I still took this as a bit of a slight and consequentially now am slightly obsessed with salad dressings.

Surprise, surprise, my favourite dressing is the one that my Grandma always has in her fridge. She has absolutely no idea what goes in it as it is "just a little bit of everything, dear".  Bearing in mind my gran also has a jar of béarnaise sauce in her fridge that she regularly uses and has had since 2010, the ingredient list for her dressing really could be anything. From what I can discern though it is olive oil (obvs), white wine vinegar, garlic, celery salt and sugar, though there is far, far more in it.

To go with the leg of lamb last weekend for Easter I made a dressed aubergine salad of sorts? Is a salad a salad if  there is only one main thing in it????  I roasted some strips of aubergine with sea salt and olive oil just until they started to roll up and brown slightly and then while still warm added them to a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, chopped red chilli and chopped garlic. IT WAS LUSH. So lush in fact that I ate it all before the lamb was ready which wasn't really the plan but oh well, sh*t happens.

To my knowledge Jess' hasn't progressed much further than our initial failures at cooking, I remember at uni she just used to eat tortillas washed down with instant mochas, but I am starting to feel that I am getting little by little slightly further away from being the one who gets lumped with the dressing.

Looks a bit like some burnt slugs have ended up in a bowl but they were lush. Oh and shoot me, it was bottled lemon juice, I wasn't going to start faffing around in the snow to find lemons.
 

I BOUGHT A WOK

I'M SO EXCITED

That is all. 

Pimp My Sandwich

I have the rather unfortunate luck of working in Park Royal. For the uninitiated this is actually the largest industrial park in Western Europe and a rather grotty place just next to Acton in NW London. I have been working here for just over two years, previous to that I was working on New Bond Street, two places which couldn't be more different if they tried. Lunch breaks are pretty non existent as there is not really anywhere to go, there isn't even a blade of grass in sight, let alone a park (Park Royal is a very misleading place. Similar to the first time you get taken to Piccadilly Circus and realise you are at a junction and not a circus at all. CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT).

Lunch options are predominately either the caff, the other caff or the Lebanese caff. Not actually sure how one spells café pronounced without the e but I'm going with caff. There is, however, one giant feature of Park Royal that you can't ignore which is the giant 24 hour Asda opposite Central Middlesex Hospital; do hope I'm doing all of this justice. Asda gets seriously dull after a while as there are no cooking facilities to speak of at work unless you fancy losing a few kilos through contracting a combination of Norovirus and Lymes disease from the mouse infested kitchen. This means options are limited and laziness usually leads to a bog standard pre packaged sandwich. I can't complain, these are really  cheap, but really not that nice, so yesterday I took the not particularly interesting or brave move to Pimp My Sandwich.

Construction Recipe:

1 Asda ham and mustard sandwich
A pot of Bromley's Pickle Company Tomato and Chilli Jam
1 packet of 'Real Ox' Crisps - (in light of recent discoveries they are probably on to a good marketing ploy putting 'real' in front of their animal ingredients....)
1 plastic knife (for fear of kitchen contamination one must only use ones personal plastic knife)



Combine.

NB: Please note that the knife is only for spreading and is not for eating.

Eat.

It doesn't actually taste that great but is a darn sight better than the un-pimped version.

No photo is necessary. Seriously.
 

Recipe Wishlist

I know I'm not alone in that I am a bit of a cookbook hoarder. Compared to most my collection is pretty small but I can see it eventually spiralling out of control.

This was the first ever cookbook I purchased when I was 13:



I wish, wish, wish I still had it!!!! You can buy it still though and I'm seriously tempted.....

I thought I might try and give myself a bit of structure for my blog based around my unfortunately rather unused pile of cookbooks by forming a list of recipes that I plan to cook in the upcoming couple of weeks.

-  Shakshuka from Jerusalem - Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. I picked this up in January in the sales and this was the first thing that jumped out at me. I don't think I'll be making my own harissa unfortunately... or labneh.... maybe at a later date!

- Roast Chicken
I can roast a chicken alright, but I want to be able to  roast a chicken really well. This is all starting from the beginning for me so roasting a chicken is a pretty good benchmark. The recipe I'm going to do is from Simon Hopkinson, Roast Chicken & Other Stories.


- Melanzane Ripiene
From  Elizabeth David's Italian Food which my Mum has always adored but to my knowledge has never actually cooked anything from.

A Pretty Dull Confession

My name is Katie and I'm addicted to reading other people's blogs. My Google Reader is jammed full of them. I can only read them when I'm feeling happy though. Was a bit sad over Christmas and couldn't look at any blogs. 70% of them are about food and I think strangely while a lot of people like to eat when they are down, I avoid food like the plague. Food is definitely something that means contention and when I'm cooking and eating, I feel fulfilled.



I also am apparently addicted to not writing on my own blog, even though I only have just started it! I think the cold weather has thrown me, plus I haven't had a laptop, work has blogged Blogger so I've been having to write on my phone. Using my phone for a length of time is no mean feat bearing in mind how plastic encrusted it is! Incidentally I have very weak wrists (no sniggers, please), and this phone is not helping matters.

I am typing this on a brand new laptop, testing out my new camera. It's average. though you can see a bit of my house! It also just took me about 20 minutes to upload  that, I'm having serious issues with Windows 8.

Apologies for the ramble.

My blog and I are ready to do this properly now


 

Bone Daddies

DISCLAIMER - I wrote this ages ago, work went mental and I forgot to post it....

I love going to restaurants, I always have. I was always very well behaved when taken out to eat as a child as the fear of being taken out if I misbehaved and therefore missing the food was a hellish concept. When I know I am going somewhere to eat I studiously pore over the menu for days if not weeks in advance working out precisely what I'm going to have and exactly what I'm going to make everyone else order as well. I sincerely hope I will write more on this blog about what I cook rather than where I eat, but I am far better at eating than cooking so I don't have high hopes.........


A couple of weekends ago my darling cousin Flo and I went out for a day round town (I live in SW London so it isn't exactly a million miles away). We went to the National Gallery, I took her on my now well established educational routine involving much shutting of eyes, staring at Byzantine faces and then running round to Renaissance to compare. We then wandered over to Soho to find Bone Daddies which I had been reading a lot about as one of the leading players in London's current ramen obsession (alongside Shoyru Ramen, Tonkotsu and the comparatively well established Koya).

We started off with the fried chicken, kara age for the highly fluent in Japanese, which were lovely nuggets of goodness served very simply with a lemon slice. I thought they were incredibly moreish but my cousin wasn't so bothered, not that I cared that much as it meant I had loads.

We both had the T22, I avoided tonkotsu as I had already had some at it's namesake a couple of weeks previously and was after something different rather than looking for a direct comparison.

I can't remember exactly what was with it (I don't think specific details are going to be too much of a feature of this blog) BUT there was a soft boiled egg (natch!), spring onions, cock scratchings (queue lots of lolz from me and my cousin, and the waiter looking slightly fed up of the joke having had to explain for the gazillionth time that it is crispy chicken skin and nothing to do with chicken genitalia), soy ramen and chicken. We didn't actually realise their was spring onion, which was very uneducated of us, so we ordered extra, but it was a great shout if I say so myself because I heart alliums. Woo I said alliums in a sentence. Twice.

I actually preferred the Bone Daddies offering to Tonkotsu. To me I found it all a bit more interesting. Not just the food, which I thought was great but as I say, I didn't actually have tonkotsu ramen and I'm not much of an expert on noodles so can't comment on variations, but the atmosphere. I found Tonkotsu a bit cramped and dark, whereas Bone Daddies was bright and airy though I am not a fan of high uncomfortable stools when there is no where to leave your plethora of shopping bags...

Delia's Coconut and Lime Chicken

I actually made something on Saturday night which tasted of something. Usually when I attempt to make something from scratch, it tastes of water. Delia didn’t fail me though and it tasted lovely. Super, super easy, so easy in fact that clearly even I couldn’t bugger it up. Just chicken breast, spring onion, coriander, fish sauce, green chillis and coconut milk. BOOM. My only glitch was having brown rice rather than white rice, not actually a glitch I know, but as I said before, I really want to try and do things properly! On the plus side, the brown rice was lush and now I not only know how to cook rice but I also know that I made waaaaaaaaaay too much.

SUCCESS

Woah that is a tiny photo.

So that went well.....

Got home from work last night, all raring to go and then promptly watched tv while my Mum presented me with a risotto. Not a good start to my cooking revolution. She really trumped my lack of cooking by not only making a risotto but a pie and stock. Oops. My first task is to work out what I am going to cook first….. I need a recipe that I will stick to, and by stick to I don’t mean go all creative and do my own thing, I mean actually pay attention and not remove ingredients that I don’t like (nutmeg, ginger, coriander, cinnamon, five spice, the list goes on and on). I’m not ever going to be able to cook off the top of my head if I don’t start establishing what I am crap at and what I am really crap at and to work that out I need to teach myself the basics. As that wise, wise lady Julie Andrews once sang “let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start”, and to me, the beginning is Delia. I have the full copy of How to Cook that I bought last year when I had one of these “must cook more” moments, I hasten to add that while that was a moment, this is a definite life plan. Promise. So. Step 1 – find appropriate Delia recipe that won’t scare me and yet still feel like I have done something new, which shouldn’t be hard as my cooking experience is extremely limited.

About time too.

I doubt I will ever let anyone other than myself read this, but I need to try and enthuse myself into cooking more. Don’t get me wrong, I by no means struggle to consume copious amounts of food, but I need to start trying to be slightly more adventurous when it comes to cooking.. I can talk the talk but I really can’t wok the wok; well, not at the moment. Bit by bit I am going to try and build up my confidence as by I currently am far too scared to cook for other people in case it tastes like poo and don’t see the point of cooking elaborately (or lets be honest, just anything much more than a baked potato) for myself. My lovely Mum has bought me a new lovely Sabatier knife block (knives included, she didn’t just get me a branded bit of wood, that would be a bit crap) for Christmas, so in the words of Martine McCutcheon, this is my perfect moment. So here goes………..

DISCLAIMER: This is not a New Year’s Resolution. Incidentally, that is to go to the gym more.