End Game London, Part Two

We give you three more meals from Borough Market to Drury Lane.  For our fish dinner, we settled on filet of John Dory (also known as St Peter fish because of the spot on both sides).

  We decided on a simple bonne femme type sauce, with ordinary mushrooms.  This required us to make a stock, so we requested the head and the skeleton from the fish, purchased at Applebee's fish shop.

With the trimmings and some herbs and onions, we made a fish stock:

Meanwhile, still looking for the perfect peas (which are only available to St John, we believe), we shelled some young English peas for the vegetable:

Sauteed some mushrooms,

Then we poached the beautiful filets

in a combination of stock and wine. for about 7-8 minutes.

For the sauce, we boiled down some fish stock, combined it with egg yolk and cream, and warmed on the stove top, then folded in the mushrooms.  The golden color comes from the egg yolks, and so does the thickness of the sauce.  On the side, Jersey royals, of course, and peas, and served with a chilled bottle of Nautilus, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

Sunday night, after a movie, was for lamb neck.  We'd been seeing this dish on various menus, most recently at Great Queen Street, and we'd also seen them at the Ginger Pig, so we looked into recipes.  Did it need long slow cooking à la osso bucco?  Or was it quickly roasted, like pork tenderloin?  There may be several different cuts, but what was on offer at Ginger Pig was the quick kind.  We also saw some beautiful fresh beans at the Turnips stall at the market, and grabbed them too for their novelty and loveliness.

Inside, they look like this.  They are borlotti beans from Italy, but they are very similar to cranberry beans.  Why doesn't anyone grow these for our farmer's market?

But the main event was the lamb.  (These are Yorkshire-raised heritage breeds, mind you, but they don't name the breed. Another stall would have sold us Herdwick lamb neck from the Lake District, but we are loyal to the Ginger Pig.)  Here is the basic cut.

We then marinated it for awhile in rosemary (shown above), garlic, and olive oil.

Then it will be stuffed and roasted in a hot oven.  For the stuffing, the marinating herbs and garlic, plus breadcrumbs.  Here is how you make bread crumbs by hand.

Then make the mixture:

Next, split the neck filet, not cutting all the way through:

Stuff the filet with the bread crumb mixture.

And tie it together.

Brown it in the Le Creuset pot, on all sides, slowly until brown and crispy.

Then place in a hot oven for about 20-30 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare the beans by cooking them for about 25 minutes in chicken stock (or water), with some garlic and thyme.
Then, have a glass of wine and watch the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition on BBC.  Our favorite was the Ukrainian, Andrei Bondarenko, who had won the Song Prize the night before (as did Bryn Terfel in 1989). Here he is singing the aria from "Eugene Onegin," "Ia vas liubliu."

He didn't win.  A terrible miscarriage of musical justice.  But he will be singing at Glyndebourne and he's only 24!
Meanwhile, back to the dinner.  Take the beans, dress them with some oil and vinegar and some sliced spring onions.

Remove the neck filet from the oven, and let it rest a bit while you admire it.

Then slice it...

And serve, with the beans and Italian asparagus (Puglia) on the side. (The English asparagus season is Done.)  Garnish with a little warmed Damson plum jam, for that sweet English taste.  An excellent cut.  Let's hope we can find it at a farmer's market near us.

One more meal to report, but first some scenes from the neighborhood. This is the Grand Lodge of the Masons, just around the corner, on Great Queen Street.

And here is one of our two favorite coffee shops, Store Street Espresso, on Store Street (of course), between Gower Street and Tottenham Court Road.  It's very minimalist, the art has recently changed, and they make a fine espresso macchiato.

R is always happy to stop here on his way to work or after a seminar at Cemmap.

One final meal to report, one that was a long time in the making.  One of the specialties of St John, we'd heard about but never tasted, was Jersey royal potatoes with melted Stinking Bishop cheese.  We had the potatoes; we bought a wedge of Stinking Bishop a couple of weeks ago. (It gets its name from the perry, which is cider made from pears, used to wash the rind; the pear variety is called Stinking Bishop.)  Unfortunately, the Stinking Bishop got eaten before we could make a meal of it.  We planned to get another wedge, but the very solicitous server at Neal's Yard (we shared comments on meals at St John; for his anniversary, they made a half of pig's head, cooked sous-vide, then confited it, then grilled).  He recommended, for melting, a slightly less runny Irish cheese, Ardrahan, since the Stinking Bishop was already pretty runny. (Ardrahan also makes Lullaby Milk: check it out.)  Of course, we agreed.
For the cheese dish, then, following a blog post allegedly based on St John, we decorated the Ardrahan cheese with some sprigs of rosemary.

Then bake in a 200 degree C. oven for about 15 minutes until it's softened and somewhat melted.

Meanwhile, boil the Jersey royals, and then smash them a little with the potato masher.

Serve separately at the table, spooning the cheese over the potatoes.  We also made a side dish of lentils, because we had them to use up, with some vinaigrette and bacon.

And that is our London cooking adventure.

Beyond cooking this week, we watched the hilarious new Francois Ozon film with Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, Potiche, "unadulterated fun."

End Game London, Part One

Two last trips to Borough Market.  What to choose?  We decided again for the weekend double of seafood and game bird.  After the halibut, we chose a fat Lakeland pheasant, and picked out a nice Savoy cabbage that looked green and healthy.  We found a recipe from Simon Hopkinson for  braised pheasant,  garlic, cabbage, and fat bacon that used mostly ingredients that we had in our dwindling larder, supplemented by a trip to Lamb's Conduit Street for some sherry.
Start with one lakeland pheasant.

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F.  Heat 25 g. butter in a large cast iron pan (Le Creuset is perfect, Simon says.) Cut 4 slices of very fat, streaky bacon into squares, add to the butter in the pan. (Smoked streaky bacon from the Ginger Pig is a staple, always on hand.)

Let the bacon sizzle until it has generated a large amount of fat, then remove the bacon from the pan.   Season the pheasant with salt and pepper and brown carefully on all sides, until "golden and crusted."

Remove and set aside.

Now add 10 large peeled garlic cloves and brown slowly in the crusty pan.

Drain off most of the residual fat, and pour in a generous splash of Madeira or sherry, and 75 ml white wine.  Stir with a whisk and then add 100 ml of "good" chicken stock and 3-4 sprigs of thyme.  Bring to the boil and put in one small firm head of cabbage, cored, quartered, and sliced.  Simmer until the cabbage begins to wilt and lose its stiffness.

Then push the cabbage aside to make room for the pheasant, bury it in the cabbage and strew the bacon around, tucking them into the cabbage.

Cover the pheasant-cabbage with parchment paper (or foil), and put the pot, covered with its lid, in the oven for 1 to 1.5 hours. Remove from the oven and let rest for 20 minutes to settle.  Serve with plain boiled potatoes.  Or Jersey royals, if you've got 'em.

Obviously, we don't cook like this every night. Sometimes we go out. Sometimes we have cheese or eggs. Or leftovers.  For example, to use the extra peas and carrots from the halibut, we made a sauce for the fresh spinach pasta from the folks at LaTua.  Start with Guernsey cream from Neal's Yard Dairy, another staple.

Add it to the peas and carrots, with a splash of sherry.

Cook the fettucine (from the freezer to the pot), and serve!

And dream about the next trip to the market, and our last chance for English exotica.  Stay tuned.

We Live on Drury Lane

On our return from the Lake District, we moved to a new flat for the duration of our London stay, a modern one-bedroom flat on the ground floor of a block in Drury Lane, just one block west of the Royal Opera House, and around the corner from just about everything else, including one of our favorite restaurants, 32 Great Queen Street, and an excellent modern Indian restaurant, Moti Mahal.  (In fact, it is very likely that our flat's rear wall is adjacent to MM, or if not, the Prince of Wales pub next door.)

Everything is very modern in the flat, with high tech appliances from Zanussi that would be impossible to operate if I hadn't found the operating manuals on line.  The built-in convection oven seems more reliable than our oven on Bloomsbury Square, but the elegant hood above the stove top has no manual and no way to operate it.  (The oven will not work until the clock is set, and the automatic feature turned OFF.)

The kitchen and living room are all one unit, but quite spacious, and the flat screen television on the wall (there is another one in the bedroom) plays radio and TV, and music from our ipad, through the Airport Express connection R first set up in Bloomsbury Square.

The dishwasher is 3/4 size, and the refrigerator is also very small.  The freezer is very tiny, and there is only one microwave oven.

There is a decent array of cooking pots and implements, but we are glad to have our own batterie.  One could easily live here and not cook at all; there are restaurants and cafés and coffee shops and bars galore in the neighborhood.  There is also the Grand Lodge of the Masons, a hulking 1930s building to which dozens of men in black suits arrive every morning, carrying their secret regalia in bags or briefcases.  From our flat, we see nothing of this.

The view from the flat is onto this interior courtyard, around which are arrayed about 11-12 flats per floor. (Some look in, some look out onto Drury Lane or Wild Street.)

This Covent Garden neighborhood can be very noisy, as there are many bars with patrons spilling onto the pavements just outside our door, but inside is very quiet, except for the helicopter that circled all day last week because of a fire at Marconi House, and yesterday a flock of seagulls that kept circling in much the same way.

The time is growing short, and there are still restaurants to try, which compete for meals at home.  We went to 32 Great Queen Street on our arrival, and last week visited a Spanish-Moorish restaurant, Moro, over in the East, that has been highly recommended.  And following a great theatrical event, a revival of Arnold Wesker's "Chicken Soup and Barley" at the Royal Court, we had a post-theatre supper at St John Hotel, in the heart of Leicester Square.  This was the second time we had eaten there after the theater, and both times, by 10:30, the crowd was thinning out.  This time, though, the crowd included Fergus Henderson himself! He was dining with his family.  As other patrons left, they seemed to know him, and went up and thanked him and told him what they'd had for dinner.  We did not report to him, but we will do so here:  R had tripe and peas with pea shoots for a starter, and lamb's sweetbreads and butter beans for the main.  I had "terrine" for a starter, which was a delicious paté, and duck leg with carrots for the main.  The duck was tender and succulent, and the carrots were perfectly done.  The waiter talked us into dessert, somehow: we had stewed figs, custard, and fried honeycomb; and a custard tart.  Both were delicious but perhaps a bit de trop.
But we also had continuing ambitions to try out the new kitchen and continue to make the most of the Borough Market.  Our first meal in the new place, following Saturday's trip to the market, was halibut in parchment - except that we forgot the parchment at the old place, so used foil.  First, the "wild Scottish halibut," from the Furness Fish Market:

We planned to keep the halibut moist by making a butter with chervil, as in this action shot.

Next, we butter a piece of foil.

And place the fish on top, salting with Cornish sea salt. (Isn't that just a beautiful piece of fish?)

Smear the chervil butter on top.

And seal.

Meanwhile, we prepared some baby carrots and peas, and simmered them briefly separately and then together, while the fish is in the slow oven.  Potatoes are boiling off to the side.  This AEG ceramic stove top is much more sensitive than our electric cooker at Bloomsbury Square.

After about 10 minutes (10 minutes per inch), the fish is done, and the packet is opened!

Serve with the peas, carrots, and boiled Jersey Royal potatoes, for a royal housewarming dinner.

The wine was from our cache of two cases that we bought from Majestic  Wine Warehouse (delivered), just up Drury Lane from our flat.  This bulk order is much preferred to bringing home a bottle or two or three at a time from Waitrose (and Majestic sells only in minimums of 6).  With the halibut, a Muscadet sur Lie.