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.

Banh mi are the new cool thing, we feel at the cutting edge of food style sourcing them out across London. Today’s offerings from the Greenwich vendor were perhaps the best we’ve had.

Located in the little food market on Greenwich High Road (between Stockwell Street and Nelson Road) there is a banh mi stand called Baguette and More. They had a range of Vietnamese sandwich offerings. I had a barbecue pork and Daniel a ‘special’. All of the ingredients seemed good and they were clearly well prepared. Both of our sandwiches were really excellent examples of the oeuvre, all the right flavours and textures: spicy and salty, crunchy and soft.

We were feeling a bit smug about the high-quality action at Viet Baguette in Woolwich, now there is incentive to head further afield for our lunchtime banh mi fix.

Just a few doors away from Fenchurch Street station (great building) there is Tike (pronounced tee-kay) a properly cool and properly good purveyor of Turkish food. Given the quality and how affordable the food was we found ourselves slightly surprised it wasn’t throbbingly busy.

The dining room itself was modern and reasonably stylish, they didn’t need to have the background music pumping quite so loudly, though. The poor maitre d’ was circling constantly, seemingly so worried about his lack of clients he felt the need to ask if everything was alright when we had only bread on the table.

The bread was excellent. Little pillows of pita bread which had inflated in the heat of the oven, fresh and tasty.

We had three little plates to start. Lachmajun was a wonderfully crisp piece of bread with spiced meat with lemon to squeeze on top. We really enjoyed this until Daniel used the offered hot ground chilli powder a tad too liberally and blew his head off with every bite. Miutebel was warm aubergine dip with roasted pistachio nuts on top. This had good, fresh flavours and plenty of richness. Very enjoyable, we kept filling the parcels of pita bread with this. Finally a less successful little plate. Ichli kiofte were little ground wheat wrapped balls of minced beef. They were just a touch anonymous.

Our main courses were anything but anonymous, indeed I’d go as far as saying they were brilliant reconstructions of fast food dishes. My beyti kebab was excellent meat wrapped up in crispy bread and sliced into elegant little strips served with grilled chillies (which are sometimes frighteningly hot) and tomatoes. This dish was a revelation for me: Turkish food with style, panache and really good ingredients. Tasted fantastic, and the transition of textures between the cripsy bread and the tasty meat was very satisfying.

Daniel chose a marinated lamb shish kebab and again it was presented with flair. There were square sheets of flatbread above and below perfectly cooked pieces of really quite tasty lamb: lamb tucked up under the sheets in bed. It served on the taste-front and was quite amusing, but we both agreed my selection was best.

We had a couple of desserts, which didn’t surprise us with how tooth-aching sweet they were, and left feeling full and happy. This has to be one of the best semi-fast food dining establishments in The City, the food can live up to its slight degree of pretention and it will not break the bank.

Contact: Tike Restaurant, 5 Fenchurch Place, EC3M 4AJ Telephone: 020 7702 9965

We are off to Hawksmoor (reviews here and here, and some pictures here and here) for the umpty-third time this year. Our first trip was back in February when I was still hilariously insane and took Daniel there as a treat to thank him for his patience with me. Wow, things were so difficult back then. When I think back to how chaotic and frightening my mind was I find myself amazed that I survived it. I was a wreck. But anyway, the excuse for tonight’s meal is my birthday. The day was yesterday but Hawksmoor allow you to take your own wine in on Mondays for a fiver corkage. I’m taking a mag of smart Cornas.

The meat there is really fantastic, clearly the best in London. Indeed, from the macaroni cheese via the ribs to any piece of beef you fancy the food is all really good. The atmosphere is unstuffy and relaxed; charged, I feel, with a hunger for big mouthfuls of meat. When you have made sure you arrive ten minutes before anyone else in your party and head to the bar. Its 1920s themed cocktail list and highly skilled bartenders* make this a destination booze-fount. Those excellent geezers at Embury Cocktails rate the Hawksmoor bar very highly.

The question remains, which steak? The 600g sirloin on the bone can be amazing, with the tenderness of fillet but much more flavour. But then, I haven’t had a rib steak for a while. I remember having an amazing one on one of our first visits. That steak tasted of one hell of a lot. Chateaubriand and fillet from Hawksmoor have also done the taste business in the past. This will be a prickly conundrum for me to cogitate upon as I get dressed for dinner.

*Last time we went there I said to the bartender, “I can have your most hilariously heroic cocktail, please?” She grinned and said, “That is the kind of question I had been dreading getting today, which is my first day. I only started half an hour ago. But don’t worry, I can sort you out.” She made something called an old fashioned, which suited my heroism requirements down to the ground.

Poor old Daniel, actually having to trek across town to get to work. The advantage of this is that he is right near a branch of Wahaca, a fun and unpretentious lunch destination. Today I met him there.

Last time we visited we just got a selection of the market food dishes, little plates of goodies for sharing. Today we had a couple of these to start with before having a larger main course.

The first little plate was a chicken tinga taco. These were pleasingly chillied up and had plenty of fire to keep you interested. The black bean tostadas were also nice, but a bit difficult to eat without spraying them everywhere. These two were perfectly good enough to get us in the mood.

For main courses we both had the Yucatan special of pork pibil. This was a parcel of shredded pork which had been marinated in a spicy, slightly orangey sauce. This was positively bursting with flavour with very tender meat in large, moist lumps as well as more shredded pieces. It came with some black beans and rice which was a slightly intestinal shade of green. These were just fine, but clearly the meat is what we cared about.

Apart from my margarita lacking both heroism and acidity this was a very successful lunch. Daniel got in and out in his allotted lunch break and it didn't cost the earth. The food was easily good enough and that is what we care about most.

Contact details on their website.

At the end of last month we visited a totally boring purveyor of tedium called Viet Baguette. A comment on a blog was our only hint that a identically named, but much better, banh mi establishment was here in horrible, horrible Woolwich. Lurking somewhere near Lidl, that scummy merchant of prole swill, we were told. A trip into the foul rain and wind was rewarded with excellent sandwiches for very little money.

We had a spicy pork and ‘special’ banh mi. Both bursting with freshness, with the desired combination of sweet and savoury, soft and crunchy flavours and textures. My spicy pork sandwich was chillied up just perfectly, but Daniel said he would have liked his a bit hotter. If we are being really picky I could say that the bread wasn’t amazing, but at £2.80 for my sandwich I am not going to lose much sleep  over this.

Given that it is now possible to buy a decent sandwich for lunch, Woolwich is now somewhat less of a total dump. I will be going here regularly.

This was my sandwich:

And this was Daniel’s:

We got a 2kg boned shoulder of lamb from a reliable source and decided to cook something new with it. It was a total success. To make this staggeringly easy dish you will need:

2kg boned shoulder of lamb
400ml fresh chicken stock
150ml white wine
3 onions roughly chopped
2 sticks of celery chopped
2 carrots chopped
A couple of sprigs of rosemary
A couple of strips of lemon zest
A slug of olive oil
7 cloves of garlic peeled and crushed

Get your oven up to 160 Celsius. Into an oven-safe stew pot put the slug of oil then add the onions, garlic, celery and carrots then fry them over a medium heat until the onions begin to colour. Put the shoulder of lamb into the pot, add the stock, wine, lemon zest and rosemary. Then put a lid on it, stick it in the pre-heated oven for 2.5-3 hours, then carve it up and nosh with great delight. We served this with baked potato mash which was just lovely.

Isn’t that simple? It was a totally brilliant dish, especially satisfying as we just made the recipe up. Having a really good bit of lamb was undoubtedly the way forward. Mr T used to cook brilliant pot-roast lamb back in Oxford, a dish I had missed. This will be a regular dish on the menu.

Amazing chicken stock, originally uploaded by David Strange.

What remained after sandwiches and much picking at that 3.2kg chicken was used in to make some stock. Just stick all the bones, bits of skin and stuff that is left from your roast chicken into a big stew pot. Throw in some chopped carrots, onions, celery and if you are really keen some leeks. Shove in a couple of bay leaves and some thyme. Put a couple of big glasses of cooking-grade white wine in the pot then top up with water until all is covered. You then simmer the lot up for 3-4 hours before straining the liquor off the boiled up bits and saving it in the fridge or freezer.

This batch of stock was very satisfying when it came to using some for today's meal as it was so concentrated it had turned to jelly thanks to all the gelatine from the carcass.

Herb roast chicken, originally uploaded by David Strange.

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!