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.

Roasting beef is really easy. You need instructions? Ok, here goes:

Turn your oven up to 220 Celsius and roast the beef for 30 minutes. Then turn the oven down to 160 Celsius and open the door until the temperature goes down that low. Then roast for another 9 minutes per 500g of meat. If you have a digital temperature probe you’ll want to stop roasting when the middle of the beef hits 50 Celsius; this will be rare which is how we want beef. Easy, eh?

Last night we celebrated the Jeff’s birthday with a roast rib of beef.

And I did get the bugger properly rare:

We ate it with leeks and triple-cooked chips:

We got the beef from the Ginger Pig, probably the best beef butchers in Town.

Many thanks to Dan for the camera work.

This recipe is so not mine I’d hate hate to actually repeat it here. I can post a link, though, to Heston Blumenthal’s brilliant spaghetti carbonara recipe (with handy tips on cooking pasta). He uses a chilli in it, amazing!

Daniel cooked this fabulously well tonight. It was terribly enjoyable. You may be thinking I need a picture at this point, but we’ve lost the battery charger for the camera and our phone cameras are rubbish. It is top stuff, and not too difficult to prepare.

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!

Daniel and my chum Keithy have been raving about the sandwiches at Fuzzy’s Grub for a while, so I was terribly pleased to be cruising past one of their branches at breakfast time. I can now see why they raved.

Our breakfast order was simple enough, we both wanted a bacon and egg bap, with the egg yolk slightly runny, the bap buttered and with HP sauce. They excelled in all departments.

I suppose the first thing that I should write about is the bacon. They use excellent dry-cure back bacon. They don’t cook a huge batch of it first thing in the morning and leave it to dry out over as the day progresses, but instead cook batches throughout the period of breakfast service. Moreover, it is not over-cooked and crispy. It tastes just great.

The eggs are cooked freshly when you place your order, and they seemed quite delicious to me. As I suggested, they cook them as much or as little as you request. Go for a ‘medium’ egg if you want the yolk slightly runny but not so runny as to ruin your tie.

Finally, the bap. How interesting can a bread roll be, you might wonder. But this was a top piece of bread, freshly baked, with a great texture and real flavour. It was buttered with real butter and just enough HP sauce. Lovely, just lovely.

I have to go past a branch at lunch time to try one of their roast meat sandwiches (roast chicken, I think I’ll go for), but breakfast was a top experience.

You can find a list of branches on their website. I urge you to pay them a visit.

The Hix Oyster and Chop House would be a lovely destination for those who don’t mind what food they eat, how it is served or how much it costs. Everyone else will feel let down.

When we arrived we both thought it looked like a knock-off of Saint John. The menu looked quite similar too, filled with interesting sounding meaty goodies. The wine list was cheekily priced, but they had an excellent beer and cider list. At this stage we thought we would do well; unfortunately things went down-hill from there.

The first thing that became abundantly clear was that the service was shocking. People who arrived after us were served whilst we were still waiting, and a couple of tables who were there before us had to wait even longer than us. One table was served their main courses with the plates from their starters still on their table. Our pre-starters, which involved opening four oysters and toasting a piece of bread, took half an hour to arrive.

Daniel’s pre-starter was Watt’s farm asparagus on toast with Gorwydd Caerphilly. Both ingredients are favourites of ours, but pairing them added nothing. Whilst we were waiting for them to toast the bread my Helford spring native oysters were just sitting on the service counter for half an hour. These were the best dishes of the evening, and they took least effort to prepare.

We then moved onto the starters. Daniel ordered something called Heaven and Earth; potatoes with apple sauce and black pudding. The entire texture of this dish was wrong; it would do for toddlers or other dentally-challenged people but slimy black pudding, mash and apple sauce is not for grown men. Once again, the flavours were not well-matched or distinctive enough. No thanks.

The best bit of my starter was the part that ruined it. It sounded great on the menu, lamb sweetbreads with bacon and leeks. However, after these ingredients had been fried they were briefly boiled in some broth. The broth tasted lovely, but it totally ruined the texture and flavour of the other ingredients. Daniel had recently had the exact same ingredients served at Saint John; they could cook it whilst Hix could not.

At this point we were not happy and hoped they could not cock up our main courses which sounded like easy things to prepare. How wrong we were. Daniel’s fillet steak was served on the bone, with at least one third of it being bone or connective tissue. What is the point or ordering fillet steak if it is not a piece of the very best meat with nothing worth discarding? Considering there was bugger-all meat on it they really went over-board with the amount they charged (£34.50 for 300 grams, bones included). What little meat there was was a bit wet and lacking in flavour even though it had been grilled well. Hawksmoor serve better beef for less money.

My main course reminded me of the Iams pouches our cat loves so much. I don’t love them. They were supposedly barbecued beef ribs, but this was some strange definition of the word ‘barbecue’ which seemed more like braising to me. They tasted stunningly boring, with a distasteful texture and a worrying sauce soaking them. Our side-orders followed the ‘not particularly good’-pattern with dried-out chips and fried asparagus and wet green tomatoes in grease-soaked batter.

The dining room had a neon sign in it saying ‘Fucking beautiful’ (which cannot have been a reference to the cooking or the service) but this was positively tasteful compared to the soft-porn pictures adorning the toilets (two of which are reproduced at the end of this review).

The food was dull at best which seemed irksome as they were not afraid to charge for it (£70 a head for three courses including two bottles of beer/cider). After feeling so positive when reading the menu we felt cheated and unhappy. I’d avoid going if I were you.

Their website is here, but why would you want to visit it?

Here are their toilet decorations:

Classy, eh?

Right, this is serious cooking with the truffle. Buy the best chicken you can find, weighing about 2kg. Make sure it is up to room temperature before you start preparing and cooking it.

Make some slits in the skin and slip in some lumps of unsalted butter. Then cut your truffle in half and shove half under each side of the skin. It’ll look something like this:

Heat your oven up to 230 Celsius and cook the chicken for 15 minutes. Then turn the heat down to 190 Celsius and cook for 45 minutes, basting every fifteen minutes. Finally, turn the oven off and half open the door and leave the chicken inside to rest for 30 minutes. It’ll then look like this:

Now doesn’t that look quite, quite wonderful? You can carve it and serve with whatever you fancy; Daniel prepared some German potato salad. If you like, and we do like, you can slice up the truffles and put them on the chicken. Our platefuls looked like this:

You want to drink some serious white Burgundy with such a decadent meal.

Many thanks to Mark Locke for the truffle. We really enjoyed it.

Daniel was given a truffle on the condition we write up what we cooked with it. Seemed a good deal to me. The first thing we made was a truffle omelette.

Step one is to put some top-quality eggs (Burford Browns are delicious) in an airtight jar with the truffle for four days; this infuses the eggs with a truffle flavour. Two eggs per person will do just fine.

You then make an omelette with the eggs. Do you need me to tell you how to make an omelette? It cannot hurt, I suppose.

The first thing is to separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs. You then beat the whites until they are stiff and bubbly. This is so you have a light, fluffy omelette; if you beat them together it will not have the correct texture.

Then quickly whisk in the yolks and cook over a medium heat. If you want to be really decadent you can mix in a few truffle shavings at this point, but it is not strictly necessary as the eggs will have taken on enough of the flavour. That is all it takes. You will then have a lovely omelette infused with wonderful truffle flavours. Daniel chose to eat his with toast.

Cafe East has moved since we first reviewed it. It is now in a rather soulless shopping centre, and the cafe itself is more like a school dining room than the previous slightly squalid but charm-filled establishment. However, if you want quality noodles and Vietnamese food in London this is the destination of choice.

We started off with both vegetable and meat-filled spring rolls. Both were pleasingly crisp and packed with flavour. Quite delicious. I preferred these to our other starter, bi cuon, or crispy pork-skin rolls. These tasted just fine but they were predictably on the chewy side.

One of our number chose a chicken curry, com curry, as his main dish. It had chicken, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and coconut milk in it, quite like a Thai curry. The speed with which he necked it spoke volumes about the quality. I had a little taste and was most impressed.

Daniel and our other guest had two variations on the noodle dish bun bo hue. Daniel had raw beef with his and it was quite brilliant. The stock was rich and bursting with flavour, with thin slivers of beef and top-class rice noodles. The other variant was with prawns, which were in a prawn-tastic broth that I had to keep stealing spoonfuls of, so good was it.

Naturally, I chose the best dish, pho dac biet, or beef, chicken and prawns in spicy broth with vermicelli. The pieces of meat and prawns pleased me no end but the spicy stock was even better; just spicy enough but not in the slightest painful. The vermicelli were all one could ask for of noodles. I was tickled pink.

Two courses each and drinks cost us £12 each, a bargain! The food is clearly superior, as is the dining experience, to other noodle bars such as horrible, horrible Wagamama’s. A simple but faultless meal that was keenly priced. I strongly urge you to visit.

Cafe East, 100 Redriff Road (Surrey Quays Shopping Centre), London SE16 7LH. Telephone 020 8691 7777.

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.

Tailend Restaurant and Fish Bar, Edinburgh

Tailend Restaurant and Fish Bar was our last meal in Edinburgh; they served the best fish and chips I’ve had as well as other seafoody goodies. It was a great experience.

We walked in via the fish bar, the kitchen seemed large and busy. The fish bar was suffused with a meaty smell thanks to their use of beef dripping to fry the food in; unlike most such establishment it did not smell rancid. On going through to the restaurant we were pleased to see it was full and we got one of the last couple of tables.

The menu was packed full of fishy wonders, and they were willing to grill fish as well as fry it in batter or breadcrumbs, which suited Leena as she was a bit worried about having fried food. When our battered delights came Daniel and I thought she was missing out.

The wine list was short and uninteresting, as were the beer and cider offerings. I soon moved on from boring, boring Magner’s cider to Irn-Bru (check out drinks.elitistreview.com for an examination of this odd drink).

For a chippie the menu was unusually extensive. Leena started off with a couple of scallops grilled in their shells, they looked a bit too small for us to ask for a taste, they also looked a bit over cooked. She said she liked them. Daniel had dressed crab. The white meat was quite tasty, and we were surprised by how much we enjoyed the brown meat which is normally not such a thrill. My fork kept straying into the crab shell so I could have a bit more. My starter was also a great success, battered fresh water tiger prawns. I loved them! Dense and meaty with quite wonderful batter.

Leena chose grilled monkfish tail for her main course, it was well-prepared and very fresh. My haddock was quite delicious, although a tad over-cooked. Fish from a chippie is usually over-cooked, so I didn’t mind in the slightest. It tasted wonderful, the batter was brilliantly light and crispy and not grease-soaked. The mushy peas that came with it were a treat. Daniel ordered what must be the single greatest thing I have ever eaten from a chip shop: battered langoustine tails. The batter was prefect, crisp and crunchy, but the langoustine tails themselves were just on the edge of being cooked. They were soft and yieldingly tender in your mouth. Super top bunny! We had a vat of the chips to eat, which had been fried in beef dripping so had a pleasing meaty character.

We didn’t bother with dessert as we were completely stuffed. On our way out I felt I had to lean into the kitchen and say how much we enjoyed the food; they looked pleased to have some feedback.

Maybe there are better chippies in the UK, but I doubt it. It was a great experience, if you like this kind of food you’d be a fool to avoid Tailend on a trip to Edinburgh.

Contact details on their website.

And so our reports from Edinburgh draw to a close. It was a great city to visit, with interesting architecture and some lovely places to eat and drink.