I’ve reviewed Franco Manca, Brixton’s brilliant pizza establishment, already (go here for the review). I don’t really need to repeat all of it, but it is worth re-iterating that their pizzas really are of wonderful quality and very affordable. It is a great place to stop for a quick lunch, which we did today with our lovely friend Katie. As you can see in the last picture , she was well up for diving right into her pizza.

My choice of pizza was one of their home-cured Gloucester old spot ham offerings; quite delicious. It looked like this:

The partner had a pizza topped with fresh and dried chorizo; he was most satisfied with it.

Finally, Katie had one of the daily specials: a quattro stagione. Her enthusiasm for quality pizza is plain for all to see!

If you want a quick lunch, or a really high-quality pizza, or preferably both you will find Franco Manca delivers the goods. We shall return many more times.

Last night we dined at London’s newest two-star: The Ledbury. It was totally compelling. We were hoping to have pictures of every course to embellish a detailed review. However, in their moodily-lit dining room both our cameras failed to produce any even remotely pleasing snaps of the evening’s loveliness. Consequently, rather than subject you to a long, bleak expanse of text I’ll be brief and deal with general impressions and highlights of the meal.

We chose the tasting menu as the price was little over the a la carte choices and it had dishes we would have wanted to order anyway. All the dishes were elegantly presented on quite pleasing tableware, usually with an array of little nibbly accoutrements around the edge of each plate. Every dish was quite wonderful, intelligently prepared from the very best of ingredients; two courses really stood out for me.

Firstly, squid risotto with Sherry and cauliflower. ‘Squid risotto’ needs some explaining. It was not made with rice, but with bits of squid cut into rice-sized pieces. The texture was extremely risotto-like, but it tasted mind-expandingly brilliant. The Sherry was in the form of foam and enhanced the squiddiness no end and there were impossibly thin shavings of raw cauliflower stacked at the end of the plate. This was one of the most wonderful things I have ever eaten; a stunning, fantastic re-imagining of risotto.

The second dish which rubbed my rude bits (aren’t they rude?) was the shoulder of Pyrenean milk-fed lamb cooked for twenty-four hours with confit shallot. The half-shallot was cripsy and flavoursome but the lamb… oh the lamb… Rarely have we eaten such skilfully prepared lamb. Its texture was mesmerising, meltingly tender so it almost dissolved in your mouth releasing a rich array of captivating tastes. Quite extraordinary.

The wine list was one of the best I’ve seen in London. The mark-ups were not excessive for a two-star, each bottle being approximately double retail prices. It was certainly packed with many highly-desirable wines which were usually in the realms for affordability, and there were plenty of keenly-priced, more ordinary wines for the less rabid oenophile.

I cannot fault the service; they were charming, friendly and helpful, running the course of the meal with inconspicuous ease. It is not a large restaurant, but they seemed to have staggered the arrival times of their diners very effectively so that at no point were the staff over-whelmed. It was a relaxed, perfectly paced meal.

The Ledbury is clearly one of the top dining establishments in London, and I thought our meal there was one of the very best I’ve had not just in Town, but anywhere. As far as the cost went it once again confirmed our view that fine dining is an under-priced  source of gratification. If you want inventive, compelling food with top wines in a pleasing environment you would do well to get a booking at The Ledbury.

Contact details: The Ledbury, 127 Ledbury Road, W11 2AQ. Telephone: 020 7792 9090

It was rather cold when we set off for our trek across London to Broadway Market, our quest was for the highly recommended banh mi stand there. Banh Mi 11 delivered the goods in terms of excellent Vietnamese sandwiches even if they took a while to prepare.

Banh Mi 11 are part of the Ca Phe Vietnamese coffee stand, located in a little courtyard half way along Broadway Market. This gives them space for some seating. They start serving banh mi at 10am, but as we got there a bit early they gave us some Vietnamese green tea as we waited to keep us warm on the bitterly cold morning. Then we got our banh mi

First up was a quad meat special. The banh mi lady apologised that the bread was smaller than usual; apparently it was made that morning and it had been so cold the bread hadn’t risen properly. It didn’t matter as we found the bread to be crispy and flavoursome. All the usual goodies of pickled carrots and radish, cucumber batons, coriander and (not quite enough) chillies. It was powerfully meaty with a good pork liver character from the pate. Quite delicious, but (as I said) a bit lacking on the chilli front.

Our second sandwich required an even longer wait as they cooked the pork to order; additionally it took a while for them to finish building and firing-up their barbecue. When it did finally arrive this Imperial BBQ banh mi was well up to standard. The pork was perfectly grilled and (this time) seasoned with a decent amount of chillies. Worth hooning across Town for, we thought.

In summary, very good banh mi were on offer at Banh Mi 11. The bread was in a league of its own, but the fillings were not quite up to the standard of Baguette and More in Greenwich. However, if Broadway Market is in range for you it would be a mistake not to go and try these, just don’t turn up too early on a cold morning. There are other foodie-tastic stands in the market as well.

As we have now tried the offerings from six banh mi establishments it is interesting to note the variety in the standard recipes. Banh mi 11 had red peppers and very little umami flavour, we like the umami character.

We were supposed to be going to Mon Me for lunch today, but (pleasingly) I have been asleep for the past twelve hours.

Find Banh Mi 11 on the web or really with-it people (like me) can follow them on Twitter.

After barely any food yesterday and another drag of a night with insomnia I thought I’d cheer myself up with a tasty breakfast treat. Most of the breakfast establishments in Woolwich are just too horrific to visit, so I found myself in MacDonald’s. How bad can it be, I thought? I had no idea…

This was what MaccyD’s had the temerity to serve me under the pretence of it being breakfast:

This travesty of a dining experience consisted of a bacon roll with brown sauce and a hash brown. The roll itself was a flavourless piece of spongy pap; bread only in the very vaguest sense of the word. However, the appalling bread was not a patch on the utter horror that was the soggy, limp, strangely chewy and actively nasty bacon. I’ve had some pretty poor bacon in my life but this was a memorably ranking experience in the annals of vile food. The brown sauce? Well, it was brown. I’d like to dispense with the hash brown as rapidly as possible: it was a rancid lard-soaked conglomeration of fungal foot shavings. Only not so tasty.

I was staggered by how mind-bendingly nauseating this array of filth was. I could not bring myself to choke down more than a few mouthfuls. Even after a night of no sleep and little food there are some depths to which I cannot sink.

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.

If you live in the UK you will have encountered the news that Cadbury, the iconic British chocolate manufacturer, has been snapped up by the American ciggie company Philip Morris in the guise of their subsidiary company Kraft. The outgoing chairman of Cadbury has even pronounced that job losses in the UK are an ‘inevitability’ after this takeover is finalised. Bad news, eh?

The loss of jobs in the UK is certainly not good news, but as far as the takeover in general is concerned I am not sure we should be too bothered. There are a couple of pertinent blog posts (riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, alas) on toryradio.com: “I don’t care who owns Cadbury” and “If you object to Kraft taking over Cadbury you better not use US goods”. These make it very clear that in a global economy this kind of takeover will happen all the time, and we should not demand protectionist laws to stop them from happening.

People who do want British industries to be protected from foreign companies buying them are thinking sloppily and have double standards. A vanishingly small number of people complain when British companies do well abroad and buy up their foreign competitors. Most of us would, quite rightly, complain if such advances by British companies in other countries were blocked by protectionist laws. This is why we have international trade laws, they (attempt) to allow a level playing field for all companies from all countries.

The odious Gordon Brown may say that the government is "determined" to ensure that Cadbury jobs are secure, but these things are not really in his domain to meddle with. If an international company wants to wind down its operations in a particular country no government could enact any legislation that would stop them from being able to do so. Gordon is just trotting out populist rubbish in the crazy hope that people might like him and his government a bit more.

Naturally the people working for Cadbury might be concerned about their jobs, but to decry the loss of a ‘Great British Institution’ is just small-minded and fails to see that such deals recognise the UK as a thriving and profitable economy which is good to be doing business in. I was quite surprised to read this blog post by a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate. He calls for outmoded protectionist laws to keep British things British. This seems an odd argument from a Conservative politician. I wonder how he would respond if the US blocked BP from opening more petrol stations there because they were a foreign-owned company. Free trade is what keeps both the world and local economies vibrant and ever expanding, we cannot retreat into our own little corner of the world and just hope everyone leaves us alone. If they did we would be broke.

As long as I can buy the occasional Wispa bar and the adverts remain amusing (sometimes lewdly suggestive, see below) I am not too bothered who owns Cadbury.

There are plenty more posts out in the blogosphere about the Cadbury takeover, some of which cite the specific qualities of Cadbury’s chocolate that they worry about being lost. Yes, I will buy the (very) occasional Cadbury’s chocolate product, but the Raedwald blog perfectly captures the synergy between the makers of Philadelphia and the manufacturer of Dairy Milk. However, he is wrong to suggest Charbonnel et Walker as purveyors of fine chocolate, Valrhona and Pierre Marcolini are far better.

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.