All Star Lanes

My last Uncle B case team event was an extremely special affair. I am so going to miss these paid-for work jollies, and even better, it was Max's 25th birthday. Chris had come up with some complicated voting system for what we were going to do, but we ended up going bowling, with Jon still promising to have a BBQ in his garden sometime soon (I shall hold him to that, don't worry).

Chris went completely crazy with the decorations at All Star Lanes in Russell Square. They were extremely accommodating and brought out the cake as needed and everything. But I think the waitresses soon got tired with all the balloons everywhere:

I do love the concept of the place, where even your bowling shoes are very 50s American-esque. However, I do think they take the piss a little with the pricing of the food. A steak is at around £18-20, and comes with a sprig of watercress. I went for a striploin, which I guess is a younger brother to a sirloin? Anyone who can enlighten me to American cuts of beef is welcomed to:I do like it though that you can order macaroni cheese with your steak here - one of the very few Americanisms that I wholly embrace. I also tried a bit of Maxy's enormous rack of ribs:

I shall move on from the food as it's quite obvious you come to All Star Lanes for the cocktails and slightly drunken bowling. We made a mistake of ordering some 'zombies', which people are limited to ordering 2 each! They were not nice!

And when it came down to the actual bowling, there were some real surprises. Chris looked like an early leader with some very stylish bowling, but it was Maxy who swept the floor with his amazing consistency. I managed to get the highest score I've ever got at bowling! But more practice needed methinks:

What I neglect to include here is that we also played a half game after this, where I scored a grand total of 1. Yes, 1! Maxy managed 84! Never mind... I blame those zombies...

Leaving Uncle B

I have worked for a very special organisation for the last 5 years, where Uncle B has treated me unbelievably well. It was also under Uncle B that I really learnt about food and have been able to afford to eat very well, so I will eternally be grateful. However, I decided this year was the right time for me to move onto to do other things, and will be starting a strategy role within the restaurant business in the next month. I won't mention who they are here, but I will also stop blogging about them just to be objective (although some very honest blogs about these restaurants already appear here!!!).

But anyway, the real reason for posting is to give out my recipe for brownies. These are unbelievably good brownies, and it generally how I make friends (just ask Matthew). It is actually a Nigella recipe, and yes, even I am shocked at how much fat/sugar goes in it every time I make them.

Brownies (makes about 48 - they are so rich you will want to cut them quite small)

375g soft unsalted butter
375g dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa)
6 large eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
500g caster sugar
225g plain flour
1 tsp salt (I sometimes just use salted butter and omit this)
300g chopped walnuts

1. Preheat the oven to 180C and line your brownie pan with some greaseproof paper. The pan I use is just larger than a A4 sheet of paper and about 2 inches deep.
2. Melt the butter and chocolate together (microwave is fine!) and allow to cool.
3. In a large bowl (enough to hold all the ingredients) beat the eggs with the vanilla and sugar.
4. Beat in the chocolate/butter mixture, then the nuts and flour. Beat to combine smoothly and scrape out into your brownie pan.
5. Bake for about 25 minutes - the trick is get it so that the top is dry, but the middle still looks quite undercooked - this will ensure that the final brownie is nice and dense and gooey inside.

Obviously you can omit the nuts and add in whatever you like - dried cherries in particular sound very nice. I also successfully managed to do a non-nutty version for Chris who is allergic in a little ramekin.

Apologies to the baymates who were in Newcastle and never got a taste! If you guys keep me on the bay mailing list, maybe I'll make them again soon :p

Indonesian in Amsterdam

It took me ages to post the follow up to Amsterdam (long story to be explained in next post), but here it is!

I suspect that Eugene's main motivation for organising the Amsterdam trip was to get Indonesian food rather than all the exciting things the city has to offer. Eugene is from Singapore, and has been spoilt throughout his upbringing in terms of food, and unfortunately the Singaporean/Malaysian/Indonesian food in London just simply sucks. I'm no connoiseur to be honest, I've never actually been in that part of the world, but I started to see what he meant.

The place that every guide book seemed to point us to was the very un-Indonesian sounding Kantjil & De Tijger, which is on Spuistraat (pronounced 'spau-straat'), a street which we kept finding ourselves at quite near the studenty city centre district. It looks completely un-Indonesian outside too, but step inside and you suddenly are hit with some wonderful smells.

The menu itself is a bit mad, mainly because if you don't speak any Indo, you spend most of the time trying to decipher what things are, especially as most dishes comprises of 4 or 5 different things, none of them written in English or Dutch! Anyway, I plumped for a nasi goreng Kantjil, which I guess translates to their house special fried rice (hee hee):

It was blooming enormous! Several of us ordered this dish, most of us struggled to eat half of it, Eugene unsurprisingly scoffed all of his down. I was a bit put off by the very greasy looking home-made crisps, but I really like that coconutty-powdery stuff they serve with everything.

Still, it wasn't quite as enormous as what Fil and Emily plumped for, which was some sort of set menu which probably would've fed all 7 of us:

All very comforting, but I must say I'm not that bowled over by it. I guess this is the kind of thing people grow up with and it becomes their comfort food for choice, just like how lots of people don't understand the random cravings I have whenever I'm in Hong Kong.

I shall end on one non-foodie tip. On our first day, we did a free walking tour of the city hosted by New Europe Tours (their website here). They run these free tours all over Europe, and are generally done by enthusiastic studenty types who live on tips. The guide we had probably made up half the stuff he told us (this American kid who had a big big chip on his shoulder about his religious parents), but it was all very entertaining and a lovely way to orient yourself around the city. I'm thinking of going on one of the London ones this summer, it might be fun just to see.

Gaining weight in Amsterdam

Amsterdam was a very refreshing change from the US West Coast. It really should go under some fancy marketing campaign, because it really doesn't need the headline drugs and red light district to really get any tourists. It's such a chilled city, small enough to walk around, with enough interesting stuff to go and do, and most of all, people seem so blooming happy there!

The Dutch aren't exactly known for their food, but this time I went with some immense foodies. Eugene is probably the most foodie person I know, but Emily and Emma who also came are big foodies too, and Fil claims to be 'quiet foodie', whatever that is. Probably means Eugene and I talk too much about food as it is :)

There were 3 things we definitely wanted to try - first was Indonesian food, which will be in the next post, but also the more fattening Dutch pancakes and Dutch chips. The first time I had Dutch pancakes was when my friend Kaying took me to this tiny pancake place in Amsterdam run by this charming gay guy, who proceeded to stuff us with as much batter as possible. I couldn't find the place again, but I think pancakes are much of a muchness. We went to a place just off Damm, where I had the almost compulsory combination of ham, cheese, and mushroom:

They should rename this 'how much processed food can you fit on a plate' - still good though! Eugene had even more worrying bacon and eggs combo, which was literally half an English breakfast plonked onto a pancake. Look how happy he is!:

It was during this meal that it finally dawned on me what the HP in HP sauce stood for! Go and find your bottle and have a look at the label if you don't. I just wiki'ed it and the entry claims the poor man who invented brown sauce only got paid £150 for the HP brand, whereas Heinz bought the brand for £440M in 2006. Do people actually eat the stuff outside the UK? My preferred accompaniment to brown sauce, by the way, is one of Alan Wellington's steak sandwiches on the Southwark Habitat site, something I haven't eaten for a long time :(

It also dawned on me that as we were looking for Dutch chips, we may have got the Netherlands muddled up with Belgium. We did actually spend half a day looking for fresh waffles to eat before remembering that we were not in Belgium. But we did stumble across some finally just off the main shopping street. The smell and the queue told us it must be good:

Apparently this little shop started off making the sauces for chips, and branched out to also make chips. Even today, you have a choice of over 20 sauces to choose from, from the traditional Dutch mayonnaise to Belgian mayonnaise, curry sauce, chilli sauce, satay sauce etc. etc. But it was the chips that were the star - really really crisp on the outside, to the extent you think they've battered them, and really soft in the middle. We had them smothered in Dutch mayo (very creamy, but not as pungent as Belgian mayo), curry sauce, and another gloopy pink sauce that I can't quite remember. Once again, Eugene is looking very happy:

Thank goodness we walked a lot on this trip! Not that you really see fat people in Amsterdam - must be all that cycling and running over of tourists.

Neurotic fist-sized portions

First, I shall explain the rather silly title for this post. For training, Uncle B sent us all to Los Angeles for a week, and it was my first time in California, or the West Coast in fact. It has always seemed like a very strange part of the world to me, and not one I've been that keen to visit. This may have something to do with the fact that someone from California once told me that because your stomach is about the size of a fist, the volume of food you should aim to eat at meal times should also be about the size of a fist. No wonder people are so skinny there! So off I went to LA fully expecting granola to be everywhere as well as all the fake body parts. Plus I had heard that California had some of the greatest Asian food in the world - after all, the fortune cookie was invented in California :)

But as it turned out, we were stuck with hotel food for most of our meals, and I'm not sure I had the true taste of LA. However, we did see Hulk Hogan in the hotel bar, plus the Orlando Magic basketball team were staying at the hotel, so I guess that is an LA experience in itself.

The hotel actually had what was apparently a restaurant that people from all over LA would drive to go to, and given that the hotel was in Marina del Rey, quite far from downtown, that is quite a big claim. Personally, the name was enough to put me off: it was called Jer-né, pronounced 'journey', potentially the wankiest name I've ever come across.

The food itself wasn't bad - and I wasn't sure how to make sure of the huge portions coupled with the fist-size eating rule. The prawn starter was enormous, each prawn was probably half a fist:

And my main of halibut was also enormous - the first about 2 fists big - they must have some GM halibut on the West Coast! Don't be fooled by how empty the plate looks:

We also jer-néd (see what I did there) out one night to a local restaurant in Venice beach. Again, Joe's Restaurant had a great reputation, there was even a rumour that it had a Michelin star at our table, but again, everything was a bit meh. Starter of mushroom risotto was actually very nice, but way way way too heavy as a starter:

The following photo of beef with mash and parsnip crisps hides the abomination that was the mashed potato. It was watery, and it was hideous. I'm reading 'The Man Who Ate Everything' by Jeffrey Steingarten right now, a great little book of food essays by a man who decided to have some food adventures before becoming a food writer for Vogue. It's hilarious in places, but he also devotes a whole chapter on why you can't make good mashed potato. The chef at Joe's has obviously been taking tips:

I've been pretty mean so far, and I do recognise that the meh food might be to do with eating with large groups with set menus, which never puts restaurants in a good light. So I shall end with a little write up of In And Out, a Californian burger joint that the Californians are very proud of. The thing it's most famous for is they only have about 4 things on the menu (literally 'Hamburger', 'Cheeseburger', 'Double Cheeseburger' and 'Fries'), but the trick is that there are a series of code words that can get you extra stuff, like onions on top ('animal style'), or just meat and cheese without the bun ('flying Dutchman').

And given that all of Uncle B's children are severe geeky types, it's no wonder we really got off on this. Here is a '4 by 4', literally 4 burger patties with 4 slices of cheese:

Actually, the burger I had (single cheeseburger) really wasn't bad, the meat tasting a lot fresher than most fast food chains. Plus you get to play with the root beer machine. Definitely the most fun meal we had in LA.

Ooooh la la a La Strand

Although we do have a dining club at work, the majority of people care little about food, and normally my moans about the lack of options around the Strand falls on deaf ears. But I must admit that it is steadily getting better. In the last year or so, we've had a few good chainy places open up near work - Carluccio's, Wahaca, and to the joy of the males in the office, Nando's. I also really like Bedford & Strand, a lovely little wine bar place that does very good quality British grub.

There was also another little wine bar on William IV Street which I also liked, mainly because it used to serve proper British bangers as a bar snack with your vino. This place appears to have died since I've been away though, replaced by a littel French brasserie/wine bar called Terroirs. Matthew Norman nearly wet himself about this place in the Guardian a few weeks ago, giving it 9.5/10 (read the review here). Just the mention of duck scratchings was enough for me to go.

Unfortunately, it seems that the whole of London also read that review, and it's near impossible to get a table there at a decent time. Even on a Wednesday night, calling a few days ahead got us a table at 9pm, which inevitably meant a glass of wine at Gordon's beforehand, which meant I was a little squiffy when it finally was time for dinner.

Inside though, it is very buzzy and tres francais in appearance. The lovely shiny red tables are a little bit too close together, but it just gave us the opportunity to be nosy at what our neighbours were eating. The menu is roughly separated at bar snacks (e.g. duck scratchings at £2.50), charcuterie featuring some very happy pigs (£9 for the board), small plates (e.g. potted shrimp at £7), and plats du jour (e.g. sea bream with cockles at £14).

Greedy as ever, we wanted to try as many things as possible, so we went for a variety of small plates, a bit like French tapas really. The following, clockwise from the top left, are potted shrimp on toast, garlicky bacon and snails, and smoked eel with celeriac remoulade:

Bacon and snails again here, but the scallopy looking one is actually bone marrow with truffles, and the little pot are those very famous duck scratchings:

We also had a chorizo with piperade (spelling?), which is basically a very thick red pepper sauce:

Highlights of the meal was definitely the eel - such a good combination with the remoulade, which cut through the richness of the fish, and the portion just the right size to make you want a little bit more. I also now have a new business idea of packaging those duck scratchings and selling them in corner shops, for which I will probably face a law suits from people keeling over with heart attacks.

It was all executed very well, but like at St John, you do have to think about the combination of things you order. Our selection definitely had too many salty porky things, which would have benefited from a nice plain salad really. We also had a very unexciting crepe with cherries whcih was quite unspectacular.

Overall though, I'm just waiting for this to be less popular so it can be more of a easy place to pop by after work. I also love the fact that they do a good range of 500ml carafes of wine, which means if there are 2 of you, you can have a little bit more than a glass of wine between you without having to order a whole bottle.

Making ice cream

2 weeks ago, just before I returned to work, I had the slightly mad idea of inviting 25 people over for lunch. I've made an incredible number of friends over the years through my work with Habitat for Humanity, and I thought it might be a good idea to invite everyone I've met through Habitat for a bit of a catch up. We all come from very different walks of life, from people in the US Air Force to Yorkshire miners, and I do feel my life has been very enriched by being able to learn from such a diverse group of people.

I did become a bit obsessed as to what to cook everyone. I had initially thought of doing a barbeque, but obviously, the day came and it promptly started raining at 11am, so it turned into somewhat of an oven party. To be honest, most of the savoury food was good mainly because they came from excellent suppliers. The most special mention has to go to the sausages from The Sausage Shop in Trimley, Felixstowe. Rod and Diane of The Sausage Shop live next door to my family home, and their sausages are incredible! My parents have to export some to me every time they're in London.

The one thing I cooked that everyone loved was the ice cream. I really shouldn't tell anyone, but making ice cream is one of those things that seems very impressive, but is dead dead easy. And I don't even have an ice cream maker. This recipe is from the lovely Rosalind from The Cookery School:

Rhubarb ice cream (enough for lots of Habitat mouths)

For the rhubarb compote:
450g rhubarb
100g sugar

For the ice cream:
1 pint single cream
3 oz caster sugar
3 egg yolks

1. First make the compote. Clean the rhubarb, removing any tough bits and chop into inch long pieces. Wash it well, but allow some of the water in which it has been washed to cling to the pieces as this will provide moisture whilst cooking.
2. Place the rhubarb in saucepan and gently bring to the boil. Use a lid to keep the steam in the pan so keep it moist. Once it comes to the boil, turn down the heat and cook until the rhubarb collapses - remember to stir from time to time so it doesn't stick - it is very quick, only takes 5-10 minutes.

3. When the rhubarb starts to collapse, add the sugar and allow to continue cooking slowly until you get a nice rhubarby sauce.
4. Taste for tartness and add more sugar if necessary. I usually make sure it is a little tarter than you'd think as the ice cream is quite sweet, plus I do lack that sweet tooth. Remove from the heat and let it cool.

5. Make the ice cream: beat the egg yolks and half the sugar together until thick and creamy.

6. Bring the single cream and remainder of the sugar to the boil, careful to switch the heat off immediately after boiling point is reached.
7. Pour the cream slowly onto the egg mixture, beating all the time to avoid curdling. Then return the mixture to the saucepan you used to boil the cream and cook on a very low heat, whisking until the mixture thickens.
8. Be careful not to overcook the custard or it will curdle. It is 'cooked' when it coats the back of a metal spoon:

9. Cool the mixture to room temperature, then add the cooled compote into the custard. I normally don't mix it in too well to get more of a ripple effect.
10. If you're blessed with an ice cream maker, at this point, chill the mixture and then churn in your ice cream maker as per your manufacturers' instructions.
11. If you're relying on good old elbow crease, put the mixture into a freezer-proof dish and allow it to freeze until the sides are starting to set (takes about an hour). Remove from the freezer and beat well, beating down all the ice crystals. Return to the freezer.
12. Every hour or so after this, take the ice cream out and beat it thoroughly, and do this about 3-4 times. The more you beat it the smoother the ice cream will be.
13. Eat in small quantities - it is very rich!

The other variation I made was dime bar ice cream. This is inspired by the infamous G&D's ice cream parlour in Oxford, the site of all our guilty pleasures during my uni days. Instead of making the rhubarb compote, put 3 dime bars into a blender until you get this glassy looking sand mixture. It will smell incredible. Then add to the custard mixture when it has completely cooled, and freeze/beat in the same fashion.