Eggs

For us, eggs are a weekend tradition: poached, baked (with cream and gruyere), scrambled, or in various sorts of pancakes.  We have experimented so far with poached eggs (need to figure out the pans); baked eggs (need to figure out the oven temperature - for more dishes than eggs; a work-in-progress); and this weekend, scrambled eggs with cream, butter, and chervil, on toast made from St John dark sour dough loaf.  The eggs are from Old House Farm, Herefordshire (purchased from Neal's Yard Dairy, purveyor in farmstead products.)

Tiny Birds and Four-legged Animals

We have been just amazed at the variety of small birds that are available at Borough Market and even in our Waitrose supermarket.  Guinea fowl as an alternative to chicken seems to be widely available.  At the Market, we have had a hard time choosing among pheasant, quail, pigeon, wood pigeon, ducks, grouse, and partridge.

We decided to go for a partridge last weekend, or in fact two, because they're small (and not too angry, either).  We recalled that a normal method for partridge is on a bed of cabbage, which is in season, so we picked up another Savoy cabbage as well. (Other ideas seem to include pears, as in the 12 days of Christmas.)  However, when we came back to the flat and searched for recipes, the one that caught our eye was partridge with leeks and prune sauce braised in cider. We browned some bacon, then sauteed leeks in its fat.  Then we added some cider and boiled it away, followed by some stock and prunes.  Then we removed them, and browned the partridge in the bacon fat. Finally we oven-braised the partridge with the leeks and prunes, for about 15 minutes (which was 5 minutes too long).  We removed the partridges, added double cream which we boiled down a bit. Next we fried some bread crumbs and toasted chopped hazelnuts, with some sage.  The birds were cut apart, and served on the bed of leeks with the sauce on top.  Maybe a little overdone, but tasty all the same! (Served with a dish of Kenyan green beans on the side.)

 For Sunday dinner, we decided to do the English thing and have roast lamb.  Our various cooking advice sites and books claimed that lamb shoulder makes a much tastier and tender roast than leg, so we picked a shoulder out of the case at the Ginger Pig, receiving some advice from the butcher about how to prepare it. (Slow cooking in a low oven.)  In the end, we adapted a recipe from Jamie Oliver, scoring and salting the lamb, and placing it in our casserole.

(The whole shoulder comes with a piece of the front leg attached; we had to cut it off to fit in the pot.) Rub it all over olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then roast covered in a medium oven for about 3-4 hours.  It smelled great all afternoon.  When the lamb was done, it had thrown off quite a bit of liquid, which we saved for a sauce; then cut the lamb apart easily:

For the accompaniment, we did mashed potatoes and celeriac, plus more leeks, with a parsley sauce on the side.  Super delicious!

The Borough Market also has a number of sellers of fresh pasta, so we sampled the tortelloni made by one of them on Monday night.  This was stuffed with a pumpkin ricotta mixture:  it was very fluffy and well-seasoned, and the pasta cooked up quickly and nicely.  We topped it with some butter, fried sage, and parmesan cheese, and served a salad on the side.  (Tune in below for more vegetables, and next week for even more.)

But what to do with that cabbage that we had initially bought for the partridge?  Cabbage soup, courtesy of a recipe from Jane Grigson.  Cut up cabbage, leeks, carrots,  saute them a bit in duck fat (but of course),  and then add some water, lamb stock if you have it (we have it!), and cook for a couple of hours. Add some chopped potatoes toward the end, and then warm up the leftover lamb in the soup.  Finally, it should be topped with a crouton with grated gruyere, and popped under the broiler.  Our gruyere left something to be desired, and we have not yet figured out the broiler except that if you leave the oven on very high for a long time, it will set off the smoke alarm.  The soup was especially welcome given the dip in the temperatures we have had.

(Note this is the blue casserole!)  This is also excellent for weekend lunches, but the remainder will be going into our capacious freezer for a return on another cold day.

There are many things that we cannot make ourselves, and we treated ourselves to outstanding sushi on Wednesday at Sushi of Shiori, a tiny mom and pop place (8 seats) on a street that is otherwise devoted to Indian vegetarian restaurants and Indian confectioneries.  We had the tasting menu and it was outstanding!  Some grilled octopus to start, then miso soup, then a razor clam that had been marinated and seasoned.  Then a plate of sashimi, amazing scallops and salmon and tuna. Then a plate of sushi: they don't want you to dip the sushi, so they provide a little brush to put the soy sauce on top of the fish. The rice must stay without sauce.  There was still more! A wrapped in bamboo leaves steamed smoked eel on highly seasoned rice: yum! And the feature of the season, a wagyu beef slice on sushi rice. Every bite of every dish was exquisite.  Dessert was homemade ice cream: we selected black sesame seed, which was awesome, and chestnut, which was delicious but much more subtle.
We had one more meal out this week. After hearing Mauricio Pollini play Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier at Royal Festival Hall, we had a late dinner at a new brasserie in town, Les Deux Salons, an offshoot of Arbutus: both feature meat from the less familiar parts of the animals, and they do them very well: R had andouilette from Troyes (the waiter has to ask if you know what you're getting into: have you had this before?) and I had a very tender pork belly in lentils and greens.

It's a good thing that we can walk to so many places we go, and that we do! (We did take the bus to the Royal Academy of Arts this morning just to see if we could, but the bus journey calculated by google maps takes only 4 minutes less than walking.  It is great to be so central!)

It's becoming more comfortable

By the end of our second week in London, we've begun to figure out the limitations and possibilities of the stove, the oven, and our kitchen equipment.  We have augmented our batterie de cuisine with the essentials.  We have enough butter.  So this Saturday's trip to Borough Market proceeded with more of a plan; we even had some recipes in mind to prepare if we could get the right ingredients.

Since we are spending so much time in the kitchen (our washer and dryer are also located there), we should share our view.  (It is also the view from the living room, which is next door to the kitchen. Our two bedrooms overlook the square, although the "view" is obscured by the building's ballustrade.)

The tower block in the distance is Centre Point, home in the 1960s to some famous squatting.

But on to the food!

Fish was on our mind... the fishmongers at Borough Market don't all set up their stalls right at 8, so we wandered around looking to see what was available.  There was a small vendor advertising he was selling his own catch, from Dorset.  Mussels were especially good, he said; but he wouldn't recommend the plaice (although he was selling it).  We eventually settled on a dover sole from Applebee's, and asked for it to be filleted.   Then we bought some fresh girolles mushrooms, for a garnish, and some fresh chervil, an herb that is hardly ever available in our markets.

The menu was quite simple: we would saute the sole in our orange Le Creuset pot, which is fast becoming our go-to pot in the kitchen.  Using the Canadian cooking method (10 minutes per inch), we sauteed them just a bit, and they turned out firm and delicious.

We topped them with some sauteed girolles, sprinkled the chervil on top, and served with steamed potatoes, and a green salad with some fresh vine tomatoes.  Very elegant and very simple!  And perfect with a bottle of dry white wine.  (The wine situation is requiring more research!  We are not as enthusiastic about Oddbins' as about some of our other suppliers in the neighborhood.)

Our next night's meal would require more advance preparation, but for lunch, it was time for a simple meal of leftover guinea fowl made into a soup, and three excellent cheese from Neal's Yard Dairy:

These are from left to right a mild goat cheese, Dorstone; Montgomery cheddar, their stalwart; and Stichelton, which is a blue cheese similar to Stilton but made in the traditional way that Stilton no longer is.  It's been produced for just a few years now by a couple of guys who had been affiliated with Neal's Yard.  They claim the name Stichelton goes back to the 13th century, but if you take "Sti-lton" and add "Che" you get the new cheese!  It's very delicious.  Lunch on Sunday was cheese, soup, and fruit. Perfecto!

For Sunday dinner, we had decided to make beef cheeks, a cut of meat that's become very popular in restaurant circles, but one that is impossible to find in ordinary grocery stores or even meat markets (like tongue and other odd meats -- offal).  We had seen them at the Ginger Pig the week before, so we decided that this would be our slow-cooked weekend meal.   We adapted a recipe from Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook.  He presents his cheeks along with the tongue, but we decided to stick with our three cheeks.  First, they were marinated for about 24 hours in leeks, fennel, carrots, garlic, endives, parsley, onion, peppercorns, and a bottle of red wine.

The next day, we braised the cheeks on the stove top for a couple of hours, jumping up every few minutes when the steam from the covered pot hissed onto the hot stove.  We were still very nervous about the heat being too high and the liquid boiling away.
Once the cheeks were done, we set them aside and went to see a movie! (Henry's Crime.)
Then we came back and finished everything:  the cheeks were reheated, then removed from the marinade.  We threw away (sad) the vegetables, and boiled down the braising liquid.  Meanwhile, we prepared a pot of Savoy cabbage, which have been lovely at the market.  Following Jane Grigson, we sliced it, steamed it for a few minutes in about 2 centimeters of water (we used the oval blue Le Creuset), and then drained and simmered in lots and lots of butter.  The color stayed nice and bright and the cabbage was still crisp and delicious.

Then we made the sauce for the beef cheeks, again following Keller:  we grated a few tablespoons of fresh horseradish, added it to some whipped double cream, and squeezed in a bit of lemon juice.
The last step, to slice the cheeks:

The picture doesn't really do them justice; they were firm and yet tender, with the taste of tongue, but with their own texture.  Scrumptious.  Then we put everything together, including some boiled down braising liquid, for the dining table:

This was a super meal the first time, and made terrific leftovers a few nights later. (We made fresh horseradish cream; and the cabbage was not quite so green, but still tasty.)

Browsing for recipes, we came across a macaroni and cheese using Stichelton cheese, from Gordon Ramsay's F-Word show.  It also required girolles -- how convenient, since we had bought plenty at the market.  And wandering through the Covent Garden neighborhood on our way back from seeing an exhibit of Cezanne's card players at the Courtauld Institute, we came across this pasta from Carluccio, called gigli del gargano all'uovo.

whose shape almost mimics that of the girolles:

The rest is simple. Just saute the mushrooms and some shallots; then melt some butter with cream, add two-thirds of the crumbled Stichelton and about a half cup of Parmesan cheese.  Stir in the mushrooms.  Meanwhile, cook the noodles until they are almost tender.  Combine everything in the casserole, top with the rest of the Stichelton and another quarter cup of Parmeson cheese.  Bake for 15 minutes, let rest for another 5, and buon appetito!

And there was still more in our refrigerator!!! We had also bought 4 Toulouse style sausages from the Ginger Pig.  Most of the recipes we consulted suggested that this was the basic sausage for cassoulet.  We didn't have any of the other ingredients, though, like beans, and confit of duck, and all the rest. What to do?   There seemed to be a classic recipe, from the southwest, for lentils and sausages.  The sausages on the ipad even looked just like ours!  And we already had French le Puy type lentils in our larder.

Lentil and Toulouse Sausage Casserole
Serves 6
300 g green lentils
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions chopped
2 fennel chopped
2 cloves of garlic peeled and chopped
3 sprigs of thyme
1 bay leaf
1 cup canned chopped tomatoes (or fresh if you have them)
200 ml red wine
6 sausages
large bunch of Italian parsley

1. Heat the oven to 200 C.
2. Heat olive oil in a casserole dish, add the onion, fennel (or celery) and garlic and saute for 5 minutes. Add the thyme leaves stripped from the stalks, bay leaf, tomatoes, mix together, and cook for 5 minutes.
3. Meanwhile saute the sausages on all sides, making sure your exhaust fan is working properly.
4. Remove the onion mixture from the heat, add lentils and red wine, and then pour in enough water to cover. Place the sausages on top, cover with a lid and cook in the oven for 30 minutes.
5. Stir in the parsley just before serving.

We often make a dish of lentils and Italian sausage from Jamie Oliver's Italian cook book.  There the lentils are cooked separately, dressed with vinegar and oil; the sausages are roasted in the oven; a separate tomato sauce is made, and everything is served with some broccoli raab on the side.  So now we have two great lentil and sausage recipes.  (The toulouse sausages come with or without garlic -- these were without.  They are more coarsely ground than regular sausage, and have a great texture in a dish like this.  You can learn more about sausage from the Ginger Pig themselves!)

And that was our week of cooking!  We had a couple of meals out, at Cigala, a neighborhood Spanish restaurant that we always think will be better than it is, and which first caught our eye as a set in the Mike Hodges film, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.  In the film, Charlotte Rampling owns the restaurant.  In real life, I think it is Mike Hodges' brother.  On Friday, we had an economical Indian vegetarian meal at Ravi Shankar, and then went to see the new Peter Weir film, The Way Back.  We felt guilty to be well nourished for that one, but we learned a lot about even more innovative adventures in cuisine: grubs, tree bark, and rattlesnake (tastes like chicken).   And a batterie de cuisine that makes ours look like it came from l'Escoffier.

Our history with butter

The role of butter in our lives has produced both joy and anxiety.  One of my early memories is sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, on the first floor of her two-flat apartment building, and having her spoon feed me pure butter. Pure bliss!  A favorite children's book of ours was Anne Rose's How Does a Tsar Eat Potatoes? We loved the imagery of one of the ways: They build a wall of butter and shoot the potatoes from a cannon through the wall of butter into the tsar's mouth.   Another Russia story, presumably apocryphal:  we were told in the 1970s that the Soviet Union kept a five-year supply of butter frozen somewhere in the Ural Mountains, a national fats reserve.

We were victimized once by our own butter shortage.  One Christmas Day, when all the grocery stores were closed, we ran out of butter (probably for the Yorkshire pudding).  A desperate foraging among gas station convenience stores finally saved us, but I have always insisted on having at least a pound of butter to spare, "just in case," in our refrigerator. And at least three for Christmas Day.

Given this history, I was particularly tickled by the advertisement we've now seen twice in the local cinemas:

Yesterday, when I was shopping at Waitrose, I saw a young man reach for a package of frozen lasagna, and I wanted to say, "Young man, try an omelet instead." I said nothing, of course, but put two, not one, packages of Lurpak butter in my cart.

A week in the kitchen

We continued gingerly to experiment with the heat levels on the stove, and to apply our slowly acquired techniques to food that we bought at Waitrose.   Our second meal in London was sauteed lamb chops, tiny green beans, and small flaky Charlotte potatoes.  Meat and 2 veg:

Continuing with the chop theme, and sticking close to potatoes, we then tried to add the oven to our repertoire.  Our standard method for pork chops (using the thick ones from Tamworth pork that we buy at home from the Moore family farm) is to saute them on the stove, and then finish in a 375 degree oven for about 20 minutes.
The oven!  The flat comes with very clear laminated instructions for most of the functions and appliances, and the oven was no exception.  It appears to work on a timer, i.e. it will start cooking your casserole at the time you set. (This feature must have been made obsolete by the microwave.)  To use the oven like normal people, one moves the dial to the icon of the hand, signifying "manual."  But it took a long time for the oven to heat properly, and meanwhile, the rest of our meal was a-cooking on the stove top.
This consisted of sauteed mushrooms, kale and shallots with a little lemon flourish at the end, and  -- yes, potatoes!  The chops got a little over done and the hot pan triggered the smoke alarm, but this allowed us to figure out the exhaust hood -- turn on the "on" button on the plug in the wall; and how to open the kitchen window.   We did not do these chops justice, but perhaps another day we will try some heritage pork again.

Finally Saturday arrived, and we traveled to the famous Borough Market on the south bank of the Thames, near London Bridge tube station.

The market is under construction (again); a rail viaduct is being installed, so the stalls have been moved around and it took awhile to find our favorite places.  The market opens at 8 on Saturdays, but people were still setting up at 8:20 or so.  The nice thing about the early time is that it's not very crowded.  By 10 am things get pretty congested.

We decided that we would buy some scallops from one of the fish mongers. 

and a chicken for Sunday dinner, but in the end selected a guinea fowl from a stall specializing in game.  We added streaky bacon from the Ginger Pig, 

root vegetables and greens, and some nice pears.

Home on the tube to unpack our purchases and contemplate our first serious meal of scallops, inspired by the photo from Koenrat's Gazette.

Saturday night we made sauteed scallops in clarified butter so they would get nice and brown on both sides (see below), 

accompanied by buttered and parsleyed parsnips.  At Daunt Books we had bought Jane Grigson's 1970s Vegetable Book, thinking this would help us navigate the mysterious new vegetables we would have to opportunity to try.  Her recommendation for the parsnips is to cook them standing on their ends, with the smaller tips in the end. The base would simmer and the tops would steam.  But these, parsnips, anyway, were lighter than water, and kept floating, so we cut them up and boiled them like this.

Buttered leeks would accompany the scallops:

And some of those tiny green beans from Kenya, that are really flavorful and last a few days in the refrigerator, too.

A pretty quick meal with top-notch ingredients, and voila!

That was our Saturday dinner.  Sunday was for guinea hen, and time to get serious about employing our Le Creuset casserole on the stove top.

One reason we chose the guinea hen was that the chickens were all kind of big for just two of us and the size of our pans.  The guinea hen was just the right size and had nice texture too.

First R cut it up and then we browned it.

Then we sliced some fennel:

And some lovely endive:

And more of the leeks:

 They all stewed together in some good butter from Neal's Yard Dairy in the orange pot, while the guinea hen rested on the side.

Once they were nice and tender, we added some chicken stock (comes in a concentrate from Waitrose), and some Chimay beer.

Add some thyme, cover, and cook slowly for about an hour.  We were finally getting the hang of regulating the stove top!  Meanwhile, while waiting and savoring the wonderful smells coming from beneath the lid, we sampled some Jamo ham we had bought from the Brindisa stall at Borough Market...

Finally, the meal was finished:  guinea fowl braised in vegetables with blond Belgian beer.  And mashed potatoes, of course, to keep the mouli mill earning its passage over the ocean.

The chicken and its sauce made excellent leftovers, and later the next week we turned it into a soup, pureeing the remaining parsnips.  Excellent!

We had also bought some terrific looking brussels sprouts at the market, but couldn't manage to work them into any of the weekend meals.  So on Monday we made brussels sprouts with bacon, and potato.  we tried steaming the sprouts in a collander over boiling water, but the seal was not really tight enough. The color is good, though:

Meanwhile, we were sauteeing the bacon in the work horse Le Creuset:

Then we combined the bacon and sprouts and let them "get to know one another" and the sprouts to soften a little more:

Note the sprouts are still green!  And here is our Monday supper:

The sprouts lasted a good while, too, and they held their flavor pretty well during the week.  What with leftovers and a couple of visits to restaurants (Great Queen Street and Arbutus), our second week produced no culinary breakthroughs.  But on Saturday morning, we journeyed again to the Borough Market, and will report soon on week two of our pan Atlantic cuisine.

First steps in the kitchen

We have arrived.  We have an electric stove with which we are not very familiar.  We have a neighborhood Waitrose with ample fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats (including the highly exclusive organic Duchy Originals, the Prince of Wales's own endangered brand, bailed out of near-bankruptcy by the deal with Waitrose), as well as aisles and aisles of prepared and frozen food.  For our first meal in Hampstead eight years ago, we chose bangers and mashed potatoes, and for tradition's sake, for our first London meal of 2011, we select carrots, mashed potatoes, smothered onions, and fresh pork and sage sausage from the meat counter.  Keith Richards has recently explained his epiphany about the proper way to cook bangers, but sorry, Keith, we did not start with a cold pan.

Here is our first stove-top full.  January 3, 2011.

We forgot to buy mustard!!  So we went to the even closer (and even more dominated by frozen and prepared food) Sainsbury's.  The meal is complete.   I'm not sure we repeated the menu eight years ago, but the variety of sausages from the Ginger Pig and elsewhere will be very tempting. Not to mention the ability to use that mouli mill to make the mash.

The Batterie de Cuisine

We expected that the flat, based on experience with the firm that lets this and others, would have a basic variety of kitchen implements and utensils, but we tried to imagine, based on our experience eight years ago in a Hampstead furnished flat, what might be missing that we could not do without.  On one hand, we understand that experienced cooks can improvise; on the other, we wanted to be comfortable, too.

We brought: a mouli mill with all three disks; a chef's knife; a paring knife; a Kuhn Rikon vegetable peeler; a folding funnel, because we had one; kitchen shears; an instant read thermometer; and a medium-sized Le Creuset cast iron casserole, which is presumably why the suitcase in which it was packed was opened for inspection during our trip here.

As it turned out, the kitchen is reasonably and efficiently equipped. In addition to the essentials for cleanliness (dish washer, washer, and dryer), and cooking and storage (stover, big freezer-fridge), there are some pans, an oval Le Creuset casserole (had we only known!), a can opener, a cork screw (that will need to be updated), ample dishes, table wear, cooking spoons, and knives, linens, serving dishes, an immersion blender, and three types of coffee makers: a normal automatic drip machine, an espresso machine (yet to be tested), and a small French press.

We bought: a strainer; a half-litre pyrex measuring cup; a whisk; an unusual Parmesan cheese grater that has yet to be tested in battle; and a pepper grinder. Even though we had proven that one could grind peppercorns in a mouli mill, we weren't sure it was good for the mill's longevity.

This is plenty with which to get started, and in our next post, we will share our first meals, beginning with our traditional "bangers and mash."