Barcelona 3, Man United 1

London this weekend is full of football.  Even at Borough Market, we saw shoppers wearing their Barcelona scarves, and some in the shirts.  Bigger than the Super Bowl, they say.
Well, a big sporting event deserves its own special menu.  In honor of the underdog, Man United, I prepared an all-English supper on Friday night.  Two poached eggs from Old House Farm, Herefordshire,  Lincolnshire-grown asparagus, and some Charlotte potatoes.  The sauce is lemon butter.  Lemons and Lurpak butter from Waitrose.

But for our favorites, something more ambitious.  We found a recipe for chorizo and prawns on a Daily Mail web site -- any port in a storm; and adapted it as follows.
250 grams chorizo barbacoa from Brindisa
250 grams Tiger prawns (about 5) from Furness Fish Market (origin Madagascar), peeled
some sweet green pickled peppers from Brindisa
a couple of chopped shallots
a couple of chopped garlic cloves
olive oil
green peppercorns (an available alternative to red pepper flakes)
Madeira (in lieu of sherry) - about 3 ounces
red wine vinegar (in lieu of sherry vinegar) - 1 tsp
400 g canned plum tomatoes, chopped
crusty bread

Slice the chorizo into 1 cm slices, and sauté for 5 minutes or so in the olive oil.
Add the shallots, garlic, and prawns and sauté another 5 minutes.
Add the wine, tomatoes, vinegar, peppercorns, peppers, and sauté another 5 minutes.
Cut up some bread, and serve!

Drink a nice dry rosé from the southwest, sop up the liquid with the bread (St Johns brown loaf).  Cheer on the magical men from Barcelona, as they dance circles around the outclassed lads from Manchester.
The party lasted all night long, judging by the whoops and cheering we could hear from Bloomsbury Square, or at least until 3 am.

Bringing It All Back Home

We have only four more days in our flat on Bloomsbury Square, and the game plan now is to run down our supplies in preparation for our departure.  This will require some creativity but not necessarily worth recording.  Then we'll spend a week on a true holiday in the Lake District, in and around Windermere.  Although we hope for some good eating and good walking,  the weather, we have been warned, may not cooperate with the latter.
We have had some excellent dinners at home, as well as out, but have not kept up with their reporting, alas.   Another weekend in Cambridge produced leftover Indian curries, which kept us going in the week before Toulouse.  To celebrate the end of R's short course at LSE, we went to Sardo, the Sardinian restaurant in Fitzrovia.
Following our Toulouse weekend, we imported some of its finest products, and we've been subsisting this week on foie gras and duck breast.  First course, slices of mi-cuit foie gras from our friends at Samaran, who so obligingly pack everything in ice for us.

In addition, we shopped at a new stand in the Toulouse covered market, on recommendation from friends here, Le Cochon Regaleur.  We asked for a saucisson sec; the seller felt up all the sausages to see which would be the dryest, and this is what he recommended.

We think it is well enough preserved so that we can still enjoy it when we return from Cumbria.
We regretted that we did not have a true brioche loaf on which to spread our foie gras the last time around, so this time, R remembered that there was a promising looking bakery in the Marché Victor Hugo, and sure enough, their specialty was this brioche:  sweet and eggy and terrific toasted with the foie gras on top.

Here is the complete plate, with a small salad of wild rocket leaves.

(For a first course, we had asparagus that were left over from the Borough Market the week before.  Still pretty tasty!  There was asparagus all over Toulouse, as well.)
The next night was duck breast.  We sautéed it on the stove top, made a sauce with Madeira (trying to use it up), green peppercorns, and creme fraiche, along with some rather ancient Jersey royals, as well.  The duck was superb!!

We will be having the rest of it tonight, as a salad, preceded by leftover Gordon Ramsay mac cheese with girolles and Stichelton. (NOT left over from our first post about this, back in January.  We made it for the second time last week.)
We shall be spending just over two weeks in a new flat on Drury Lane.  Will we look for a new muffin (and coffee) man? Or stick to our routines at Store Street Coffee or Monmouth Coffee?  Will the batterie de cuisine meet our standards?  And what will the Borough Market have in store now that the English growing season has begun?  Here is a glimpse of the Cambridge farmers' market from a couple of weeks ago:

Lots of greens, including mystery greens, and onions, potatoes, and much more.  Also fish:  we had kippers for breakfast on Sunday morning.

That's them on the left.  Warmed in the Aga oven.  Bones and all.

We will report on our last nights at the White Hall, since we have one more Borough Market to attend before heading north.  And then stay tuned for adventures in the new kitchen.

Toulouse, the Sequel

We are back in Toulouse and the first night's conference dinner was held at Michel Sarran, the outstanding Michelin two-star restaurant where we dined in rapture a month ago.  This is the menu for rapture part 2:

A plate of amuses-bouches to start, including a prawn on a spoon, a tiny napoléon, and a croquette, then:

Foie gras de canard de la Ferme de La Cave en soupe tiède à l'huitre de Belon

Langoustine tempura et pulpe de mangue épicée marinée au combawa,
Algue nori et caviar d'Aquitaine en rémoulade aux shiitakes et huile de sésame

Rouget entre deux craquants, fenouil tendre au beurre d'anchois,
Mousseline au safran du Quercy, "Parfums d'une bouillabaisse"

Pigeon du Mont Royal, supremes frits en kadaïf à l'encre
Les abattis en croquette, la cuisse en ragout fondant de petits pois

La sélection de fromages de Monsieur Xavier [I passed by Monsieur's shop near the Victor Hugo market today -- the selection was pretty tame compared to what I saw in the window!]

Oranges glacées au vin chaud et pain d'épices
Glace à l'huile d'argan et noisettes croquantes

Chocolat crémeux Caraïbe aux graines d'acacia torréfiées,
Sorbet guanaja, chocolat chaud cannelle acacia


Then a couple of rounds of petits-fours, including little "chocolate cones."

Wines to match each course, and 1988 Armagnac at the end.

Eve Greene's definition of Michelin stars: at a one-star, you know the ingredients and the technique, and you could replicate the meal if you had the ingredients and worked really hard.
At a two-star, you can discern the ingredients but could not duplicate the techniques.
At a three-star, you have no idea how they do it!
On this scale, Michel Sarran is at least two-and-a-half.

Mmmmmm!

Luncheons on the Thames

Another long (four-day) weekend, with brilliant weather -- sunny and COOL.  And something to celebrate, of our own.  So on Saturday, we booked for lunch at the River Cafe, that pioneering Italian restaurant in Hammersmith, on the Thames.   We couldn't have predicted it when we booked, but the day was sunny and dry, and so we opted to dine on the terrace, amidst the flowers, herbs, and vegetables they are growing for the kitchen.  Children of guests played in the sunken garden in the middle of the terrace.

We started off with the cocktail of the day, Rossinis (crushed strawberries and Prosecco) while we perused the menu. Everything looked great, although the prices were astronomical.  We decided to skip the antipasti, and move straight to the primi.  R. had fettucine with white asparagus, which was perfect, the asparagus full of flavor, the sauce delicate.  I had spaghetti con vongole, shelled tender clams which also included some pieces of tomato and agretti, also known as monk's beard and marsh grass, a long thin green vegetable that grows near the sea, and is salty and tangy.  Its season, like wild garlic, is a short one.    (Looking at the sample menus to figure out what this was called, I realize how absolutely seasonal are the ingredients used at the River Cafe.)
For the main course, R had a whole (small) Dover sole, and caramelized hearts of trevise, a vegetable we saw a couple of times at the Borough Market but which has disappeared now that we found a recipe we wanted to try.  The sole was baked to perfection, easy to bone, and very easy on the palate.  The sauce -- meat juice? -- was mysterious but ravishing.

I had a piece of wild Scottish salmon that had been baked whole in a salt crust, served room temperature with an aiolli sauce.  Again, the fish was cooked to perfection, tender, firm, flavorful.  The vegetable accompaniment was sauteed Italian spinach (some of which grows in the garden there), sauteed peas, and sauteed mache.  (The peas were greener than they look here!)

The wine was a Tocai Fruiliano from Schiopetto.
We couldn't pass up dessert on such a lovely day.  Many wonderful gelati and sorbets to choose from, but we went with classics: lemon tart and chocolate, hazelnut, and espresso cake.  We didn't need to eat anything the rest of the day, and we didn't!

Our plan for either Sunday or Monday, depending on the weather, was to rent bikes in Putney and ride a ways down the National Cycle Route 4, through Richmond Park to Hampton Court and maybe beyond. The day was another sunny one, cool, and with a brisk wind, so we headed off on the Piccadilly Line to Putney Bridge and across the Thames to get to the Putney Cycles bike shop just as it opened at 10.  We rented two Giant mountain bikes, which would have been fine if R's seat had stayed at its intended height.  Unfortunately, it sagged as we were climbing up Henry's Mound (a.k.a. heartbreak hill to us) in Richmond Park, and the rest of the ride was not optimal.  All around us were serious Sunday cyclists in all manner of kit.  With its hills (hills in London? Just like Hampstead and Highgate) and long straight roads, Richmond Park is quite the cyclist's destination.  We negotiated the "peak," from which the whole of London to the east can be seen, and coasted down the other side, coming out in Kingston, and crossing the river there.  We then followed the Thames path around the southern part of Hampton, stopping for a peek at the Tudor facade.

We had the feeling that the wind was at our back most of the way, so we were worried that our return trip would be more difficult (unlike the Canal du Midi, when we fought the wind going out, and coasted coming back).  We were hoping to find a nice riverside cafe, something less congested and more scenic than the franchise restaurants across the bridge in Hampton, so we kept going down the river.  The path was lovely:  there were swans on the water and birds in the bushes along the way; sometimes more people, sometimes less, sometimes none, on the path.  The fancy cyclists had gone elsewhere - too much pedestrian traffic here, and the trail was not paved. Many cyclists like us.   Lots of boats -- cruisers, canal boats, row boats, sculls.  But no sign of a cafe.  At Sunbury Lock we were beginning to despair and thought about either turning back or exploring a dead looking village across the river, but a local walker told another inquiring cyclist that there was a hotel/pub just a few minutes further up.  This turned out to be The Weir, in Walton-on-Thames, which had a lovely courtyard overlooking the channel of the river leading to the lock.  A lot of cyclists and others were already there, but we managed to order before the crush.

Here is the hotel proper.

The atmosphere was great, and we sat down gratefully with our pints of ale, waiting for the food to be served.  We ordered steak and ale pie (below), and chicken and mushroom pie.  Classic pub fare, classically ordinary.  But the location couldn't be beaten.

On the return trip, we rode through the middle of Hampton Court's park, stopping for a quick look at the rose garden and detouring through the park past the maze, and back through the village of Ham to Richmond Park, taking a different (less steep but still facing strong winds) route through the park.  There are huge herds of tame deer throughout, horseback riders, pedestrians with dogs, and the riders in their spandex were still here in force five hours later.  We made a little better time back to Putney because I wasn't stopping to check the map every half kilometer.  (It was good we had a map! Thanks, bike shop.) The riding along town streets, behind and in front of buses, was less scary in reality than it has appeared looking from the sidewalk in Bloomsbury Square.  At one point, I realized there was a huge bus right behind me approaching a bus stop; and I wasn't going very fast.  It didn't hit me!  Were we less cautious because we had opted for helmets?  There are bike lanes on selected streets, especially those designated as part of National Cycle Way 4.  We negotiated the buses, the lights, the right turns, and the traffic circles, and made it back to the cycle shop at about 3:30, a little worse for the wear.  But it was glorious!