My sister sent me three novelty types from Australian jerky. It seemed only reasonable to compare and contrast them all together in one session. The pictures show each packet with a few pieces of jerky on top. These are all described as ‘the great Australian taste’; just how great it is we shall see…

Kangaroo jerky

When opening this the slight aroma of rotting cardboard was released, which did not inspire confidence. This aroma was also coming from each piece of jerky; this did not make me want to put any in my mouth. But I did, and by arse did I wish I had not. It had the texture of wax-soaked cardboard and the flavour was much the same but with a strong character of decay. Chewing it was hard enough as it kept releasing more of the filthy flavour and as I was in company I didn’t feel I could spit it out. By arse, I swallowed something this grim; I felt sullied.

Emu jerky

This smelled even worse, not just rotting cardboard but also a quite pronounced decomposing meat character. This went beyond ‘well hung’ in terms of its off flavours to reach the awful heights of ‘horribly decayed’. With my stomach still churning from the filth kangaroo jerky putting a piece of this malodorous vileness in my mouth would be a challengingly nauseating experience. By freaking arse, the taste of this thrashed the kangaroo offering in terms of ghastly favours of total horrifying severity. My to my chagrin it was quite strongly flavoured; more than a tad irksome as the mouldy meat flavour was making my stomach churn with every second I had this terribleness in my mouth. I closed my eyes, pinched my nose, thought of England and swallowed

Crocodile jerky

There is no nice way of putting this, but it looked and smelled like congealed vomit. Congealed vomit that has gone more than a little rancid. I really didn’t want to taste this, not only because I didn’t want to hurl but also because I thought I lacked the necessary skills in derogatory language to accurately slag it off. However, I thought if I described it I may be able to prevent someone else from making the mistake of putting some in their mouth so I broke of a tiny piece and began chewing. By all that is repulsive and abhorrent the rotten taste of sick this possessed challenged the imagination with its revolting character. I’ve eaten some really horrible food in my time, that visit to the Quick burger joint is a good example, or anything from the Woolwich loony bin, but for as long as I have my faculties I shall avoid crocodile jerky like a dose of particularly colourful dysentery.

A bit earlier tonight the partner cooked a lovely creamy fish pie for dinner. When he hauled me out of bed to eat it I thought it smelled lovely. However, I am feeling so unpleasantly ill all I could manage were a couple of forkfuls. Tasted lovely, but my ‘man-flu’ (aka the cold I caught a few days ago) is placing limits on what I feel I can manage to eat.

So what has been my main source of calorific intake for the day? Until twenty minutes ago it had been the few doses of Lemsip I’d downed. But this is obviously far too weak and feeble for a hero of the drink world (if I may classify myself as such). So I just popped a bottle of Henry Westons Special Reserve Vintage Cider. Hooray! 8.2% of characterful pleasure. That with the spot, alright.

I’ve tried one of these ‘Oooh fancy!’ Australian lime marmalades before. This example comes from Rainforest Foods and it is made solely from finger limes which grow in the rainforests of Australia. Here’s the jar of it:

So, how does it taste?

The texture of it seems a bit strange, slightly granular. More noticeable than that are the screaming levels of acidity and bitterness. However, the lime fruit character is strong and very appealing and it is reasonably sweet too. When I look at these characteristics as a complete entity this seems really rather intense, but finely balanced and quite exciting in terms of its fruity vigour. It is really a lively, delicious and interesting marmalade. Many thanks to Aimee for sending this jar over from Australia for the partner and I to enjoy; we most certainly will enjoy it.

The question that always distracted me when thinking about limes goes like this: What was the point of limes before people invented the cocktail? After trying these couple of lime products the answer to my question could quite easily be “The point of limes is to make marmalade.”

Finally, never put a slice of lime in a gin and tonic as that is terribly bad form, only lemons can be used.

The partner and I have got a bit too porky in recent years, so over the past couple of months we have made a conscious effort to shed some of the lard. Naturally, we could not cut down on our fine wine intake, nor indeed our occasional consumption of characterful beer, cider and perry, so we have attempted to alter what we eat.

I have largely stopped eating lunch (apart from the odd banh mi from Viet Baguette here in Woowich when I absolutely must have a quality lunch; the opening of this sandwich shop has improved Woolwich quite markedly) which I have found to be staggeringly difficult. I do not wish to whine about this excessively, as taking this medication has improved my life no end, but the anti-psychotic I am on to deal with my paranoid schizophrenia (Olanzapine) has the side effect of making one mind-bendingly, toe-curlingly hungry all the bloody time. Someone other than me might say that the hunger induced by Olanzapine makes ‘the munchies’ feel quite insignificant and utterly tolerable, but I wouldn’t know about that. The first time I was on it, about seven years ago, I’d go out and buy two packets of sandwiches for lunch, horse them down and then think “Oh I’d like some cake now”.

Our main effort on the calorie-controlling front is eating more sensibly. The partner does not have his post-work, pre-dinner sandwiches any more and the dinners we eat are less focussed on high butter content (less mash, oh no!). Tonight’s (somewhat early) dinner was a perfect example: hot and sour beef salad. Here is the recipe and see right for a picture. It is a characterful, interesting and totally satisfying dish. The ultimately pleasing ‘almost raw’, top-quality fillet steak-action that we all enjoy is present, combined with the hot and sour flavours of chilli, Thai fish sauce (nam pla) and lime juice. It may be perilously low in calories, but by cripes is it fun to eat.

I’ve blogged about hating salad in the past (here are my suggestions for improving more mundane salads) but in this one the salad element is quite minimalist. I would not suggest adding more lettuce, even if you are perverse enough to like it, as it is the most carcinogenic food per unit serving there is (see the last link about mundane salads). When I’ve served this and other salads of a similar character to guests I usually warn them not to eat the green bits.

So is this somewhat lighter eating pattern successful? Indeed it is! Since the end of November when we started this I have lost a shade over a most satisfactory 7kg. This is pretty good going, I feel. The partner has lost even more and I am incredibly proud of him for doing so. But sod losing weight as an excuse; hot and sour beef salad is a great dish any time you feel like a simple but characterful and highly gratifying meal.

I’m just reading an article on the Daily Telegraph about the new food strategy that is being cooked up by the loony, control-freak government in Blighty. It is pissing me off no end.

Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary who is cooking this up is clearly a nutter in the very worst sense of the word (he is also a vegetarian). By way of demonstration, he thinks that the government has to right to tell shops if they can have ‘buy one get one free’-offers. What the hell do supermarket offers have to do with the bloody government? It is none of their freaking business. Restaurant menus also need health and carbon-footprint labels, we are told. What a pile of overly-bureaucratic toss.

The Labour party think we need ‘big government’ to look after us and tell us what we can and cannot do. They want to meddle in the minute details of our lives and they have no reason for doing so. Most notably under the influence of the odious Gordon Brown, Labour has sought to move us away from the laudable Anglo-Saxon model of ‘all that is not specifically forbidden is permitted’ to a more Continental system of ‘all that is not specifically permitted is forbidden’. As a freedom-loving Englishman this vexes me no end.

As we know, it is a mistake to think that the evils of the world can be cured by legislation. Having legal limits on the size of a packet of crisps is just an overly interfering load of toss that it is worthy of the most worrisome Stalinist five-year plan.

I got an email asking what wine to have with turkey. Bloody hell. I would have the wine that is being served by friends who are cooking goose, duck, a damned good chicken, lamb or grilling a bleeding marvellous (literally) piece of beef. I wouldn’t drink wine with turkey because I hate and despise turkey. It is a fowl curse on the name of meat.

Invariably when we are served this filth one of two things will happen: Normally, the bugger will be totally dried out. it’ll taste of nothing and have the texture of dry cotton wool. All of those dry mountains of flavourless horribleness to hack through; I shudder to think of it.

The second thing that might happen is that you have a bird that has been injected with all the fresh water in Western Europe (jets of pallid fluid gush out when you cut into these) all so some hard of thinking mouth-breather can say, “Oh at least it is moist.” Moist? Is that such an amazing accolade? Sure, it has no taste and the texture of cotton wool, but at least the cotton wool is slightly damp. No.

“Turkey with all the trimmings”, must be one of the most hideously depressing phrases in the whole of the English language. It suggests food on the wrong side of ruined, served artlessly and ploughed through like mush from a trough, all whilst in the company of people who, at best, would all rather be elsewhere.

“Sweaty tests” is what I say to turkey, and so the question about wine with turkey would not work for me. I’d have the wine and not the turkey.

Today we have been looking through our latest recipe book acquisitions to find new things to cook. One book has really stood out as having interesting, inventive and inviting recipes in it: From Nature To Plate by Tom Kitchin.

Long time readers may recall we visited Tom Kitchin’s starred establishment when we were in Edinburgh back in April. It was great. Some of the things we tried there have made it into this book and we we’d like to try making them as well as many others.

For sure, as is the current fad with recipe books there is a lot of non-recipe waxing lyrical about the chef’s philosophy and why he is an all-round good bloke. I read bugger all of that shit. Well, some of it, but I wanted to get straight to the food. And the food bits are very good. Clear instructions, useful pictures, all of that kind of stuff you need.

Next weekend we shall report on our successes (or otherwise) with the recipes we’ve chosen to make.

We cooked a 3.2kg Sheepdrove Organic Farm chicken with the aid of some tarragon, chives and butter.

Firstly shove loads on butter under the skin, then cut up the herbs over the bird. Squeeze a lemon over the bird then shove the halves up its arse. A 30 minute sizzle at 220 Celsius followed by turning the heat down to 170 Celsius and roasting with regular basting for 50 minutes. Then rest for 30 minutes.

The flesh was moist and flavoursome, and there is plenty left for sandwiches. Hooray!

Right, so you’ve got a bit of Vacherin Mont d’Or and the bloody ‘priced like Harrod’s’ corner shop has no bread. So, the cunning idea arises to buy some crackers. And for the very best part of three quid I get a 150g box of The Fine Cheese Company’s Wholemeal Crackers. They are filthy pieces of horribleness.

I suppose some people might like the rough, sandy texture of these biscuits, but I could feel them abrading my teeth. This is something I rarely want to experience. As to the taste, it seems to be a taste which is very similar to the smell of cardboard tubes one finds in the centre of bog roll: dry, tough and associated with toilets.

What I want to know is why the hopeless shop Couture have to sell crap like this. Sure, it may say that it is organic, free-range, or other varieties of leftist shite, but that doesn’t necessarily make it taste nice. It’d be great if Couture could carry some things that you actually need to buy at reasonable prices rather than baroque, over-blown ephemera at stratospheric prices.

I love Vacherin Mont d'Or. It is one of the great treats of the year to see the first Vacherin Mont d'Or of the season on sale. I always make sure I leave it in the fridge for a few days before noshing it all is a cheese-a-rific orgy of stinky fermented curd, this means the fridge will smell of the cheese for a few months.

I know a lot of people have a 'thing' about eating the rind of cheese, but you shouldn't worry about that with Vacherin Mont d'Or. I'd also suggest eating them quite quickly once you've broached them, otherwise they go super-liquid and really start to honk.

What you are looking for in good Vacherin Mont d'Or is a creamy and rich, yet grassy and fresh combination of flavours. It should taste of a lot. Spread (spoon) it onto some nice crusty bread and you will not go far wrong.

Presumably you know about Freud's problem with cheese? Something to do with the symbolism relating to his lactating mother in solid, rancid form. Weirdo.

I’ve got a bit of a thing for boudin noir, black pudding and the like. They are clearly very good for you, look at what a healthy person I am! I was very pleased to see some French West Indies boudin noir in Le Marche du Quartier (opposite Sillfield Farm in Borough Market) last Friday. It promised chilli action, and whilst there were hints of this its main character was a very tarragony herbal flavour. This was certainly interesting, but the slime-tastic texture was not terribly pleasing. It doesn’t compete with the boudin noir from the butcher in Nuits-Saint-Georges and is a country mile behind Sillfield Farm’s offerings.

Shall we remind ourselves what the totally amazing Stornoway black pudding from Sillfield Farm looks like?

 

It is from Sillfied Farm, of course. The wild boar Italian style sausage, pictured below, is a truly thrusting sausage of pulsating brilliance.

I’ve mentioned Sicilian style sausages from Sillfield Farm before. I am a fan of their finely balanced, deeply porky, slightly spicy favours. The wild boar Italian style sausage is much the same, flavoured with wine, cheese and chilli, but they are also stuffed with wild boar meat. Wild boar is perhaps best in sausages and it works a treat in these.

The sausages are very meaty, with a salty, cured flavour. The chilli heat is just powerful enough and they have cheesy hints. This is a complex, flavoursome sausage for lovers of food that has a high interest quotient. Great stuff.

I should add that they are gluten free. Hooray!

When Dan the neighbour invited us around to nosh on his bloody sausage I was very pleased to see this when we arrived at his flat:

They are three different types of black pudding from Sillfield Farm (London’s best pork butcher). The idea was to compare and contrast to see which style was our favourite.

Black pudding is easy to prepare, you just slice it (if it is not already pre-sliced) then fry the slices for a few minutes each side. Here it is ready to be put in the pan:

The styles are Bury (the smaller round slices), Homemade (the rectangular slices) and Stornoway (the large round slices).

Fry them up and serve with other piggy goodies and you have a marvellous breakfast:

So, on to the taste-off. We tried the Bury style first, which was a densely textured black pudding with lumps of belly fat and grains in it. This was Daniel and Jeff’s favourite; they said they liked the texture, the melting loveliness of the fat and its rich flavour. For Dan and me this was good, but we preferred the other two styles as we thought this was not strongly flavoured enough.

The Homemade style black pudding was similar in texture to the Bury, quite dense with fat and grain added, but it also contained some onion. In my view this onion really enhanced the flavour and added complexity. Again Daniel and Jeff really liked the texture. All four of us ranked this black pudding second out of the three.

Finally there was the Stornoway, Dan’s and my favourite. This was very different from the other two in that it was more loosely textured, as if it had been minced. Dan and I loved this texture, Daniel and Jeff were less impressed. I found the onion and spice added to this really made the flavour complex and interesting.

All three of these we could happily eat, but the pronounced differences between them made it possible to easily pick favourites. Since our views were so divided all I can do is suggest you have the same tasting challenge at home so you can decide for yourselves.

I’ve mentioned before that The Ginger Pig is the best beef butcher in Town. Last night we got to meet the meat in a more intimate manner as we attended one of their beef butchery courses. It was a veritable festival of the very highest quality beef, most instructive too.

The evening started off with a introduction to the Ginger Pig. They told us about how they raise their free-range longhorn cattle. Not organically, it seems, but they claim there are problems with organic certification. The pictures of their longhorn cattle looked almost as delicious as the large bits of dismembered cow hanging up behind us.

We had an over-view of the different cuts of meat on a cow, and we were told which cuts were best cooked which way. The charismatic French butcher who lead us through this was fundamentally against gratuitously using the most expensive cuts: if you want mince get a cut suitable for mincing rather than a steak cut. A useful gem of information he passed on to us was the if you want the best rump steak, get them cut from the thin end of the rump: this end is closer to the sirloin so will be more tender.

They were very keen to point out the advantages of the dry-ageing process their meat goes through. The butcher was candid enough to say it puts the price up, but results in superior grade beef. He did point out that ageing beyond a certain point (depending on the size and type of the cut) was pointless: needlessly wasteful without improving quality. This first part of the evening seemed an incredible sales pitch for The Ginger Pig, and we got the feeling he was not exaggerating the quality of their meat and butchery skills.

Then it came to hack up cow. Another equally charismatic butcher went through the cuts again but this time pointing them out on the large piece of cow saddle he had us feeling up and generally hauling around. It was clear this was supposed to be a really interactive experience, if you have the compulsion to always keep your hands clean this part of the evening would revolt you.

We got through three saddles of beef, chopping the carcasses into different servings under the expert guidance of the butcher. Most of us showed a somewhat embarrassing degree of ineptitude when it came to even the comparatively easy task of using a saw. The meat looked amazing, and as we cut it us he kept re-enforcing which bit was which and how it should best be cut. It was an educational experience.

Before we were allowed to wash our hands we got given two ribs of beef each to prepare for roasting. Once again, our skills at perhaps the easiest part, tying knots in the string to hold the beef in shape, showed us to be impractical city types. All fascinating stuff, and another sales pitch for The Ginger Pig’s skilled butchers. It certainly made you think that you should be going to a decent butcher and getting him to prepare your meat.

There was a terribly pleasing end to the evening. Whilst we’d been mauling beef the first butcher had disappeared off to the kitchen and roasted a massive hunk of beef. We stood around the butcher’s block and gorged ourselves on this powerfully flavoursome, tender, delicious, wonderful meat of utter brilliance. It was freaking triple-A, man.

We left with our two ribs of beef that we had prepared questionably well, full, happy and armed with the knowledge that a good butcher is a treasured resource. We have always known that butchers are great people, but learning more about their skills and knowledge made us respect them even more. Tomorrow night we’ll roast our beef and we thoroughly expect to raise a little toast to The Ginger Pig and its butchers as we nosh.

More information is on The Ginger Pig’s website.

This morning our great friends Dan Nye and ‘Non–stinky’ Jeff Home invited us around for breakfast. The important parts of it, the meaty things, came from Sillfield Farm. Long-time readers will know that we consider this to be the best pork butcher in London. The sausages and bacon from them are always excellent and today was no exception, but this time Dan and Jeff got something I had never tried before: Stornaway black pudding. It was a mind-warping black pudding of total brilliance. Rich and tasty with a good fatty character, but what made it so special, I feel, was the addition of a small amount of onion. This enhanced the complexity of flavours and had me wishing I could have had it all for myself. Amazing stuff. Go to Borough Market and buy some.

Sorry for the truly terrible joke. If you know what Nduja is you have knowledge I did not possess until a few days ago. This is it:

It is a spreadable salami from a small village named Spilinga in Calabria. Made from pig’s cheeks, lard and belly, with 25-30% local chilli, stuffed into pig’s intestines, smoked then finally cured for two months. If you spread a bit on toast you’ll enjoy its sweet, smoky, rich warmth from the chillies and mouth-coating fatty loveliness from the pig bits.

So tonight we use Nduja in pasta.

Cook as much pasta as you need for the number of people eating, 150g each of good quality dry stuff will normally do. When you cook pasta you need to add a truly incredible amount of salt to the water. The ratio is 100:10:1 so (for example) two people will require 3 litres water, 300g pasta and 30g salt.

Also, unless you are cooking gnocchi, which are really easy to tell when they are cooked (they float to the surface), you will need to taste the pasta to check when it is cooked. It may seem odd but you have to take instructions on packets as merely a rough guide, it can vary so much.

Once the pasta is cooked drain it immediately. If you fancy (and we often fancy) you can save a little of this salty pasta water to add to the final preparation. Put the pasta back in the cooking pot with a good slug of bloody good olive oil and about 50ml of the salty cooking water you saved and toss them together over a low heat.

Take 50g of Nduja per person, cut it into 2cm lumps. Add this to the pot of pasta and generally stir until it is all mixed together. Whilst it is over the heat you should add some grated sun-dried ricotta (or parmesan). Get noshing!

If you are fortunate enough to live in London you can buy Nduja at De Calabria in Borough Market. De Calabria’s website is here.

My long-time reader (Mark Locke, apparently) knows my views if you want someone to cook the steak for you: book a table at Hawksmoor, London’s best meat restaurant. You cannot go wrong with their offerings; it is truly, amazingly, stunningly good meat.

So what if one has to cook beef one’s self? The destination of choice is where Hawksmoor score their quality goods: the Ginger Pig. They have other types of meat, including some great sausages, but their beef is what draws us to their stand in Borough Market. These are the sirloin steaks we had last night:

 

Don’t they look great? They tasted even better. GP give their steaks a proper dose of dry ageing and this means they burst with throbbing flavour. Truly wonderful. When you have meat of this quality you really feel the need to get a charcoal grill installed to experience it at its best. Yeah, I like noshing on such wonderful meat.

There are a couple of other places which I would suggest you visit. The Wild Beef Company, who also have a stand in Borough Market, have some high-quality meat. However, they sell most of the serious cuts to restaurants so if you need something specific it is best to ring up in advance and ask if you can place a reservation for the meat you require.

Finally, for those of us in horrible South-East London you could do worse than drop by Dring’s on Royal Hill in Greenwich. They have served us well with quality fillet steak and some great ribs of beef. A good place to stop by.

I am sure there is other good beef in London; if you have found a source treasure it and make friends with the butcher as quickly as possible. Meat, the best stuff to put in your mouth!

Nick Ross, colleague of Daniel’s, gave us this bar of 100% cocoa chocolate from La Maison du Chocolat in Paris. I tasted a little bit as I was adding some to some food I was cooking and thought it worth posting a brief report. It has a rich, layered array of flavours, the primary of which is its incredible bitterness. It is not too dry or powdery, but maintains a good, mouth-filling richness as you eat it. Reasonably complex too. This is an interesting bar of chocolate.

Most of these 100% cocoa chocolates are too powdery and too bitter, this has enough balance to be really enjoyable. Probably best for cooking, all told, but the odd square when I need perking up will be sucked.

I don’t feel the need to rant terribly much about this, as I’ve done so before. However, I thought I would bring you a little video gem from the excellent BBC comedy The Mitchell and Webb Look.

Perhaps next time I go to a vegetarian’s place for dinner I should formulate some ludicrous dietary requirements myself. I like the idea of only eating foie gras and truffles.

I’ve been invited on a beef butchery course. Wehay! Won’t that just be a real hoot? It is not until October, though, so tales of hacking up cows will not be forthcoming in the immediate future.

Supermarket beef burgers. They are not beef burgers in the same sense that they are in the US or the UK; not meat plus filler but pure meat. They are referred to as steak hache rather than beef burgers and are well worth frying up on your barbecue.

They can get even better. Whilst in Burgundy we found that it is quite easy to get steak hache made from properly serious breeds of beef, Charolais specifically. These were super meaty and totally tasty. This is what burgers are all about, and they are all waiting for you in those hypermarkets over the channel.

I’ve been thinking about my trip to Fuzzy’s Grub and this has led me to think of what roast meat I’ll have on my next trip there. Roast meat is such a pleasurable thing to eat, but which is best? This calls for another fantastic Elitist Review poll!

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I’m going to have to think about this for a bit before I commit myself, there is just so much happiness in different flavours of roast hunks of protein.

Once again, readers of my RSS feed will have to come to the site proper to vote.

Today’s brunch comes from the best pork butcher in Town: Sillfield Farm. I had a good chat with the butcher about the quality of sausages and how important it is for them to be really meaty. We had Sicilian sausages (which are my favourite sausages ever, but these had a touch too much chilli), dry-cure steaky bacon and fried eggs.

That drink in the background is a tequila sunrise.

We spent a long weekend in Sweden, so as I am sure you can imagine there is bugger all to report about the food. However, this meat merchant did have an amusingly named sausage:

Ok, I exaggerate slightly about the lack of good food in Stockholm. We saw this sausage on a stand specialising in quality Swedish meats in the Hötorgshallen market; he had some excellent smoked wild duck and great smoked reindeer. Also we went to two pretty good restaurants which I shall post reviews of over the next couple of days.

My mother was recently in Australia visiting my sister and brought back some of what she claimed was the best lime marmalade she had ever tried. She is clearly in a marmalade mood at the moment.

The company that makes this has a website but I don’t think ordering a jar or two of marmalade by airmail is the best of ideas. We shall have to leave this for our Australian cousins and any visitors to farmers’ markets in New South Wales.

Tuckombil Native Foods three fruit native lime marmalade
This is a lovely green colour and just opening the jar results in an explosion of candied lime aromas. There are big lumps of lime peel in it. It tastes really rather acidic but has a good fruity sweetness. Perfectly balanced, if you ask me. There is a real persistence of limey acidity flavours on the finish, keeps your mouth watering and makes you want more. Delicious!

When my mother last visited she raved about some marmalade she had scored, we said it would be interesting to try some so were very pleased when she posted us a jar.

The ingredients list for it are impressively brief: Seville oranges, sugar and lemon. The oranges come from the Upper Alentejo in Portugal, and we are assured by the label that this is a privileged micro-climate for them.

Its colour is quite dark and it is rich with large lumps of peel. The taste is quite intense, super candied-orange action. Certainly bitter, but in a very pleasing manner. Pretty sweet, too. It is more like orangettes than any marmalade I have ever had. Quite delicious.

£4.50 well spent. Thanks Linda!

You can get it here.

I am as English as the day is long and therefore I like little pleasures. When someone offers an English person a cup of tea they will respond with the enthusiasm of someone who has just been given a thousand pounds. I think this is a fine and noble trait; it is good to be happy, even it is only a little thing that cheers you up.

I was thinking about this character of the English when I was so pleased with my lunch. The ‘priced like Harrods’ shop in my development has some really nice bread and so for lunch I made cheese and onion sandwiches. Sandwiches don’t get much simpler than cheese and onion. My mood was just getting better and better as I made them and when I got to eat I bloody loved them. Little pleasures. I feel I am back on top form when I can be made so happy by something as simple as a cheese and onion sandwich.

Tonight we held a modest little dinner party for my mother and stepfather. For a change, it wasn't terribly wine-tastic, as the food was of the unsophisticated kind. It was terribly good, though. We cooked Boston baked beans:

And wonderful Sicilian sausages from Sillfield farm:

 

You can tell those are good sausages because they go pink when you cook them: meaty goodness!

It was not the most refined of dining experiences, but the food slipped down a treat. I have to say it is also nice not to be feeling violently ill, as I have for the past ten days or so.

Hooray! I'm out of the bin for another 70 minutes, and I just want to share some food porn with you. Go here.

Honestly, I've no idea why people complain about foie gras. The geese and ducks bloody love being fed, they run up to to have the grain shoved down their throats. I say 'run', perhaps 'roll' is more accurate

The partner is just back from Finland were they sell the most appealingly-named soup you could wish to try:

Red soup

Yellow soup

And, most thrillingly, white soup. Yum.

Researchers at Oxford, that home of high-quality science, have new data which supports what all right-thinking people would know anyway. Namely, vegetarians and vegans suffer from greater shrinkage of the brain when they get older compared to people who eat meat.

Of course, Pravda has already had a go at vegetarians, we know that organic vegetables are bad for you and lettuce is the most carcinogenic food per-unit serving.

Vegetables, just say "No! No! Take them away!"

There are a myriad of cookery books all competing for our attention. I cannot claim I've read all of them, but I have experienced a few which any serious cook will find very useful.

As far as general recipe books go, ones that cover a variety of foods, there are three I can whole-heartedly recommend. Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson is a wonderful little book that has easy recipes and tells interesting stories associated with the ingredients.

Simon Hopkinson is a great chef and an entertaining author, perfectly willing to dabble in more baroque food as presented in the second book I would recommend: The Prawn Cocktail Years. This book is a real hoot, with all kinds of food that are no longer fashionable such as coq au vin, marquise au chocolat and other dishes time has passed by.

The final general recipe book I feel is worth shelling out for is How to Eat: Pleasures and Principles of Good Food by Nigella Lawson. This is a big book packed with easy to follow recipes, with sections including low-fat food and cooking for children. There is plenty of interest in this book.

There are two books I would suggest for dealing with specific ingredients. If you fancy some fishy action then Rick Stein's Seafood is a very useful book. It has plenty of information on how to prepare different types of seafood as well as lots of good recipes.

Of course, meat is what we are all really interested in cooking, and you'll do it justice if you follow the guidance in The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This is probably my favourite cookery book; meat is generally the way forward. Hugh has useful things like roasting time and temperature tables, and even some recipes in which meat is not the main ingredient, such as the utterly delicious Boston baked-beans. This book is the monk's manhood.

Finally, a book I've mentioned a couple of times recently is the key to successful Thai cooking - Thai Food by David Thompson. You cannot go wrong with this book. The recipes are clearly presented and quite delicious. It also gives plenty of information on the history and culture associated with the food. A real gem.

I do own other cookery books, but these six are those I would least like to do without. If you buy these you'll always be able to cook up a storm and impress your dining companions.

Not being able to eat wheat puts a dampener on enjoying food. All prepared food seems to contain wheat. Supermarkets these days have 'free from' aisles, which supposedly have wheat-free treats. Normally 'free from' means free from flavour. Now, the 'priced like Harrods' corner shop in my housing development have started selling wheat-free cakes; if only they were free from flavour.

Mrs Crimble's honey caramel cake is one of the most utterly repulsive foods it has been my displeasure not to have avoided tasting. I didn't even swallow it so totally repellant was it. The texture was dry and powdery and it tasted like the smell of kitchen cleaner; cheap perfume and soap. I am really disgusted that I can still taste it a couple of minutes after I spat it out. The word 'horrible' goes nowhere near far enough to describe this travesty of a cake.

I used to blow up custard powder and flour when I was a youth, but this lorry driver managed a far bigger explosion than I could have dreamed of. It would have been fun to watch.

Sitting just off Edgware road Green Valley can be found; a Lebanese delicatessen of such quality it is deserving of destination-status for any lovers of Lebanese food.

We have been there many times before, but as we were coming back from Oxford via Paddington today it seemed an ideal opportunity to drop by without trekking off the path home. As ever, our visit there was most profitable.

They have a wide selection of Middle-Eastern foods to choose from. Their lamb kibbeh are always pleasing, we got six. For general snacking purposes the falafel are the best I've had in London, delicious. They have a range of prepared salads, mujadarah (lentil salad with fried onions) is a personal favourite. I have many happy memories of this dish causing me to fart like a trumpet major: this merits buying a large tub full. They have excellent bean salads and great hommous.

As well as the array of prepared goodies they have a well-stoked meat counter, which usually has such things as lamb testicles, whole ox tongue and for the more conventional diner the beef, veal and lamb look excellent.

There are plenty of Middle-Eastern canned goods and excellent flat-breads which are so good it is deeply painful that I cannot eat wheat. In the fridge you shouldn't miss out on the Power Horse energy-drink, hits the caffeine spot and sounds vaguely suggestive.

There is such an embarrassment of riches it can sometimes be hard not to splurge out excessively but, as we know, the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. What can I say but cruise up the Green Valley and enjoy noshing.

Contact details: Green Valley, 36 Upper Berkeley Street, London W1H 5QF. 0207 402 7385.

Those of us who have difficulties with wheat can have a miserable time choosing food; wheat is in bloody everything. However, on my last trip to our local branch of Sainsburys I checked the ingredients of two of their 'Taste the difference' range of sausages and was delighted to see they didn't contain wheat. Hooray! I love sausages and it is great that a supermarket is pandering to picky eaters like me and making some gluten-free ones. The favours of choice are Sicilian and British pork and herb.

OK, they may not reach the stellar quality of the gluten-free sausages from Sillfield Farm, but they'll do very nicely, thank you.

I have railed against the danger of salad in the past: lettuce will give you cancer. Obviously lettuce is to be avoided wherever possible, but there are ways to make it even less healthy.

Leftist-shite sloppy thinkers generally believe that organic fruit and vegetables are more healthy than standard fruit and vegetables. This is, of course, total bullshit. Organic fruit and vegetables are not sprayed to prevent them from rotting, so by the time they reach the supermarket shelf they are laced with carcinogenic fungal metabolic by-products that non-organic offerings do not have.

Now, the hard of thinking may think that the compounds used to preserve non-organic fruit and vegetables would be dangerous. This is really sloppy thinking, who would knowingly lace food with toxins that damage people? Of course, you can wash these preservatives off the surface of non-organic food, where as organic fruit and vegetables contain their carcinogenic compounds all of the way through; they cannot be washed away.

It is only organic fruit and vegetables that are dangerous, organic meat is fine (to be sought out, in fact). So, avoid lettuce, definitely avoid organic lettuce. Not buying organic fruit and vegetables will also save money; cheaper and healthier, hooray!

Last Saturday we joined the neighbours to cook a veritable feast of Thai food. We could not have done this without the truly excellent book Thai Food by David Thompson. It is much more than a cookery book; it has much to say about the food culture and history in Thailand. It is a fascinating, mouth-watering read and experience has shown that the recipes are reliable.

Of course, to make Thai food you need the correct ingredients. We are extremely fortunate to have an Oriental supermarket just down the road from us; a trip to See Woo (known as See Woo Run for those of us who grew up with Janet and John books) provides all one needs. We cannot be alone in cooking Thai food in South-East London as See Woo is generally heaving with shoppers.

We started off with pla hoi shenn or raw scallop salad. The scallops were quite lovely with all of those fresh lime, coriander, mint and chilli flavours, but we didn't have quite enough scallop meat to keep the dish balanced. Good of Daniel to try preparing something new; we shall probably re-visit this recipe.

Our second course was a dish we've prepared before: goong cha nam pla or raw prawn salad. This is always a real roller coaster of a dish with all of the garlic and chillies keeping you interested, not to mention in pain. Chilli pain is good, though, gets those endorphins flowing. A top dish prepared with plenty of skill by Daniel.

Our final effort on the salad front was nahm dtok, grilled beef salad. This is a dish which deserves a damned-good piece of beef and grilling it only until it is very rare. David Thompson suggests this could also be made with pork, venison or hare, but I like the rare beef path.

We then had a soup course: dtom yam gung - hot and sour prawn soup. There are two tricks to making this. Firstly, the soup broth is made by boiling up all the the prawn heads and shells; this makes a powerfully flavoured stock. The second trick is not to cook the raw prawns directly over heat, but put them in the serving bowls and let them cook very slightly by pouring the hot soup broth into the bowl. This makes for a lively, exciting soup with perfectly (under-)cooked prawns

 

Moving onto main courses we started off with neua pat nahm prik pao kaek - stir-fried beef with spices. This is a powerfully flavoured dish, even though it doesn't have much chilli. The combination of beef and the spices makes this very reminiscent of cooking from the middle-ages in Europe. Well done Jeff for pulling off this dish so successfully.

A Thai meal at home would not be the same without Dan cooking a green curry. He has mastered the art of cracking coconut cream, a necessary step in the production of a first-rate green curry. I was very pleased that the chicken he cooked it with was thigh meat which is just perfect for this kind of dish.

Daniel prepared the final dish: pla meuk tort gratiam prik thai - deep-fried squid with garlic and peppercorns. The squid we chose was pretty big, as you can see in the picture, and it was perhaps a bit leathery. This was the least successful dish of the meal.

 

Overall, the boys did well. It was a great meal, filled with all of those exciting, fresh, pure flavours of Thai food. If you wish to follow our example, Thai Food by David Thompson is a must buy: recipes, history and (let us be honest) a pleasing degree of food porn.

Pravda is having a go at vegetarians, calling them a freak of nature. I particularly liked the paragraph:

Furthermore, cosmetologists say that a typical vegetarian has dry and fragile hair, dull eyes and unhealthy complexion. They can hardly stand criticism and have a low boiling point. They raise their voice, swing their arms and splutter when arguing. They are weak even in their logic. They exemplify their righteousness with the cow, a herbivorous animal, and say that nature originally made a human being as a vegetarian creature.

Of course, there is something slightly suspect about vegetarians. Anyone who can deny themselves pleasure for completely arbitrary reasons shows they are misguided at the very least. Cooking for vegetarians is always a pain, even vegetable soup needs chicken stock to make it good. Strange people. And if any vegetarians are offended by reading this just remember we have been told that "They can hardly stand criticism and have a low boiling point".

My packet of Lurpak butter has this to say about wonderful, wonderful mashed potato:

When it is made properly it is a marvellous thing. I wouldn't make it with Lurpak Spreadable, though.

I may have had a shitty time at Quick in France, but that made me more depressed than angry. I've just witnessed the true anger fast food establishments can generate at Doubting Dan's completely hilarious site. There is a man who is in touch with his anger; almost makes me want to go to Burger King with him. Almost... KFC is right out, though.

OK, my blog entry title is copied from here, but:

Three hundred grams of quite ripe Gorgonzola Dolce slapped a satisfied smile across my face, even though it required wiping the excess cheese from it in order to discern the smile. I do like cheese, it is one of those partially-spoiled foods that can provide so much pleasure. Sigmund Freud had a bit of a problem with cheese, we are told, some problem with the symbolism relating to his lactating mother in a rancid, solid form. Weirdo.

The great British fry-up is under threat. Older readers will remember that in Peter Palmer's opinion we will not be missing much. Now the best breakfast one can get is in one's own kitchen.

For breakfast today I had bacon chops from Sillfield Farm.

These are really just thick-cut pieces of back bacon, but I found them quite delicious. They just require frying for a few minutes so are terribly easy to prepare. Of course, they wouldn't be the same without being made from high-quality Sillfield Farm bacon.

We have a couple of friends from Oxford days coming around for dinner tonight; there will be some hilariously fine wine consumed. Our starter will be salad with confit of goose gésiers dressed with my favourite dressing. Gésiers are the gizzard muscles of ducks and geese, they are delicious little bundles of meaty goodness. 'Confit' means they have been preserved in the bird's own fat. We will then have Tolosan bean stew with bacon served with Sillfield Farm black pudding. The stew is cooking as I type and the entire flat is filled with a wonderful aroma of beans and garlic. We will finish off with some British cheeses from Neal's Yard Dairy: Cheshire, Lancashire and Caerphilly.

Once again, Sillfield Farm have provided quality pork products that fill one with pleasure when eating them. Namely, last night's dinner of Sicilian sausages:

You can tell they are meaty because they go pink when cooked. Sicilian is one of my favourite flavours; they are flavoured with chilli, Parmesan and Chardonnay wine. However, if you should ever find yourself buying Sillfield Farm sausages and they have gluten-free Cumberland rings available then these are the ones to go for.

This news story on the BBC is reasonably interesting. Apparently research has shown that chillies have been cultivated, exported and used in cooking for over six thousand years. That is pretty much the dawn of agriculture, so nice to know that even ancient man enjoyed fiery food and would go to great lengths to make it.

I roasted a goose for Christmas dinner tonight; it did not work out exactly as I had hoped. Roasting meat in a fan oven is always difficult, but I failed to take enough account of its drying effect, cooked it for too long that resulted in quite a dry bird.

Tip of the day: Don't roast a 4.5kg goose for two hours at 180°C in a fan oven.

Sadly I didn't take a picture when the chicken was just out of the oven. It looked good, but sadly turned out to be a bit dried-out. Still had a reasonable flavour, though. My advice is that to cook a 4.5kg you need to do it for less than 2.5 hours. Maybe I could have turned the temperature down a bit as well.

The Christmas goose and chicken were delivered today. Here is the chicken:

It may not look it in that picture but it is a monster. Over four and a half kilograms. My recipe books give instructions for cooking chickens weighing up to two kilograms... Hmmm...

Today is my birthday and I am having some friends over to help ease the pain of becoming even more knackered and crapulent. I don't want to spend the evening tied to the cooker so I have made something where all the preparation can be done in advance: a daube. This is beef and bacon stewed up in white wine and beef stock with a few vegetables added for extra flavour. I started cooking it this morning, as stews are often better if they are cooked a long time. All it needs now is to be warmed up when my guests arrive and served with some pasta. The recipe I used comes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's excellent River Cottage Meat book. I highly recommend this book as a great source of recipes and philosophy on cooking meat.

David.

Even though I am an atheist I still think that Christmas is a good excuse to have a blow-out meal of lovely meat. I cannot stand turkey, it is so dry and flavourless, so I cook a more traditional Christmas bird: goose. I recommend as a good source of free-range geese this place. I got a wonderful goose from them last year that was full of flavour and quite delicious. They also sell huge free-range chickens that are similarly lovely. I've just put my order in for a 4.5kg goose and a 4.5kg chicken; this should keep us full for a few days.

David.

My lunch today was Sillfield Farm Bury-style black pudding. These are sold as whole sausages that you can slice up and fry. Jolly good they are too. They have a reasonable content of grain and fat, but stuffed with rich, cooked blood. This is the best black pudding I've had, and I heartily recommend that you head off to Borough Market or go to Sillfield Farm's website and pick some up.

David

Spring has arrived in the UK, and this means some good food is available. At Borough Market last weekend we purchased some of the first Lincolnshire asparagus of the season. It was quite expensive, but very good indeed. We also got some Jersey Royal new potatoes. We cooked these both up with some quail for Sunday dinner. It was perhaps the only meal we have cooked in which the vegetables were more expensive than the meat. The potatoes were the best we've had in some months.

Here is the quail barded with goose fat and bacon ready for roasting.

Ready to eat.

David and Daniel

Black pudding is really decadent. The cooked blood of animals prepared for our deep viceral satisfaction make it a real treat. Silfield Farm make an array of black puddings and this is one of the best:

Yorkshire Sliced Black Pudding - Breakfast Fry.
It's quite grainey with noticably sized lumps of fat. It's really good. This is an incredibly hedonistic expression of black pudding, bettered only by Silfield Farm's Bury-style. I'll have that tomorrow...

I cooked a chili last night. This is a really simple thing to make, but it is a rich, satisfying meal. You can also cook enough so that there is some left for lunch the next day.

Key ingredients in a nice, but I am sure completely non-traditional, chili are:
Streaky bacon; quite a lot of this, fried before adding to the chili
Plenty of fried onion
Dark chocolate; a few squares, I have some 85% stuff that works fine.

The chocolate adds richness and complexity to the flavour. It was really nice.

David.

Tonight I am cooking a cut of beef that is not terribly highly prized: shin of beef.

The trick with these lesser, tougher cuts of meat is slow cooking and so I am making a daube. This is a meat stew with beef, bacon, carrots and celery cooked in wine and beef stock with some thyme, bay leaves and orange zest in it. In order to make sure the meat is tender it has to be cooked for a long time. Ideally it would be left overnight and re-heated the following day. Slow cooking uses the minimum temperature possible to ensure the meat is cooked. In this case I will simmer the daube on the lowest heat possible, so the surface of the stew just quivers with heat. Given enough time this reduces the tough cut of meat into melting tenderness. I'll be very un-traditional and serve it with gnocchi. If its any good I'll post a picture.

David.

I really hate salad, they are generally incredibly depressing. Worst of all are those salads one finds in minor English restaurants and pubs: limp iceberg lettuce, half a tomato and a few slices of cucumber all served at fridge temperature with hardly any dressing. Dreadful stuff. Yet, over the past year I have served many salads that have been edible largely thanks to the power of decent salad dressing. My recipe for decent dressing is:

One part balsamic vinegar
Four parts good extra-virgin olive oil
Dijon or English mustard to taste

These can be beaten together with an electric whisk. This combination often goes quite thick when whisked together. Due to the hideous nature of general salad ingredients you need quite a lot of dressing to make them palatable. As I've suggested, bacon bits are a useful improver. Cheese is frequently useful too; I like thin slices of Parmesan.

I should point out that salad is actually incredibly unhealthy. When I was an epidemiologist I attended a lecture that included a mention of carcinogenic (cancer-causing) foods. Apparently, per unit serving lettuce is the most carcinogenic food there is. Cucumber is third most carcinogenic. When I tell people the risks of eating salad they immediately say it is due to the chemicals on supermarket vegetables. Not so, it is due to the Caffeic acid naturally present in lettuce and cucumber. Lettuce is really very carcinogenic and I really should continue to avoid eating it regularly. If you'd like to read more about naturally-occuring carcinogens then this holiday menu has some more information.

David.

The best bacon I have ever tried comes from Sillfield Farm; they have a stand at Borough Market near London Bridge. Best of all are the dry-cure streaky bacons, both smoked and unsmoked. You can tell it is good bacon because when fried it does not foam with hideous white phosphates as supermarket bacon generally does. The flavour of this bacon is second to none, very powerful, porky and not too salty. Gently fried these bacons are quite marvellous for breakfast, lunch or chopped up in a salad. Also, this bacon can be obtained in un-sliced blocks, which can be cut into cubes for an excellent addition to any stew. Sillfield Farm also make excellent sausages and black pudding.

That bacon was a bit too cooked for my tastes, I don't like it too crispy, but it was top bunny nonetheless.

David.