Crack calamari!

One of the things you forget about London is that you can get whatever food you want, and usually to a very good standard. Having lived away from home for the last year or so, it's been really fun to revisit my old haunts, and remember just why I loved them so much in the first place.

I started going to Busaba Eathai with my crowd when I was studying at the LSE. One of us was actually Thai, and his girlfriend worked for Angela Hartnett, so he knew a thing or two about food. He always raved about their pad thai with crab and green mango, and I've been a fan of the clean, delicious Thai food ever since. I'm also glad to see that they've expanded quite cautiously, to the extent that there are only 3 in London, even though the one in Wardour Street has a permanent queue outside.

Today I went to the Store Street branch and was able to sit outside in the sun, so blissful! But what I ordered was probably not that suited to the weather. I really should come here more often, because I always end up ordering the same thing over and over, but given that this was my first visit in probably a year, I stuck to my favourites.

First up is what is affectionately known to my GU foodie friends as crack calamari, or if you want the proper name, Thai calamari with ginger and peppercorns. It's not that pretty, but it is very addictive, mainly because there is quite a sugary coating with caramelises when the squid is deep-fried.

My dining companion was a vegetarian, so didn't have any, so I ended up taking most of it home in a (very stylish Busaba homemade) box, and I've been munching on them all afternoon.

The other thing I always have is Busaba's take on tom kha gai, the aromatic coconutty soup. They serve it with glass noodles, and they give you a whole chicken thigh that has obviously been chargrilled (with skin left on!! woo!):

I really need to sneak into their kitchens and figure out how to make this - I have tried to recreate it at home, but their way with chicken is oh so very special. Or maybe it's the full fat coconut milk they use. Mmmm.

The only slightly alarming thing this is that I've just rechecked the menu, and this appears to have rocketed in price. It is still very reasonable at £10.60 a serving, but I do remember paying less than £7 for it not that long ago (or am I getting very old now??)

Foodie treats in the East

People always wince slightly when I tell them I live in East London, but it is such an underrated part of London. This is made even more so now that there are increasingly interesting and good places to eat around here. Everyone must know about Tayyabs in Whitechapel by now, but here are two more places you should definitely make the long trip over to try.

The first is Cafe East, a Vietnamese establishment originally in the middle of nowhere in Deptford, which literally had about 6 tables. It has recently moved to much larger premises right next to Surrey Quays Odeon, and whilst the location is still quite random, the food remains as good as ever.

Their menu is really quite brief, with some quite interesting English translations, but all you really need to know is to order copious amounts of banh cuon. Apparently their version is not at all authentic, and I must say I haven't found a similar version anywhere else in London, but essentially it is steamed rice flour rolls (cheung fun) with a pork, mushroom and vegetable filling, covered with slices of Vietnamese sausage, beansprouts, deep fried garlic and herbs. Doesn't sound like much, but it is a taste sensation!:

I met another Connie at this lunch (very confusing), and another one of Eugene's friends Cindy, both of whom have never really tried Vietnamese food before, both of whom loved the banh cuon!! We also ordered the more traditional prawn and vermicelli rice paper rolls to share, not quite so exciting:

But the other main thing I come to Cafe East for is their pho. Again, I don't think it's all that authentic, and they only offer rare or well done beef (so no brisket, no tripe, no other random organs unlike most other places), but their soup base is very good, very intense:

One thing to beware of is that their portion sizes are a bit ridiculous. I struggled to finish off my pho, and the beef and vermicelli salad that Cindy and Eugene both ordered were bigger than my head! This place is out of the way, but it is now within a 10 minute walk of Canada Water station, so come when the Jubilee Line actually works / when the East London line starts working again!

East London is also very good for not-so-ghetto, not-so-fancy dim sum. Yi Ban (一品) is right opposite London City Airport, a bit in the middle of nowhere, but is DLR-able as it's right next to Prince Albert DLR station. They have these huge windows all alongside one side of the restaurant, so you can watch planes go up and down, and it has much nicer service than your average Chinese eatery.

My family and our family friends John and Julie have been coming here infrequently for the last few years. The standard has picked up recently, so we decided to come here for Easter weekend dim sum. Beware that it gets packed at the weekend, so arrive before 12:30 if you don't want to wait.

We had the most pleasant start to the meal. The table next to us had a big plate of what looked like 酥餅 or flakey biscuits, something obvious not on the menu. So we asked one of the waitresses what it was, and it turned out they were specials they gave to their 熟客 loyal customers. We certainly are not that loyal, but they gave us a plate anyway! They were very flakey and slightly almondy/coconutty, and best of all, free (we're so Chinese)!:

Overall, the standard of the dim sum here is absolutely fine. The very standard 蝦餃 'har gau' prawn dumplings and 燒賣 'siu mai' pork and prawn dumplings were just ok, but some of their more unusual dishes are actually very good. Their 八爪魚 octopus is very very good, although you wish the portion was a big better (you can tell they bulk it up with pickled vegetables underneath!!):

Their 墨魚餅 fried cuttlefish cake was very homemade looking, and had some lovely coriander and spring onion flavour:

I also liked their 豆苗餃 pea shoot dumplings. I love pea shoots, and the flavour of them really came through:

My favouritest dim sum dish ever, 牛柏葉 tripe with ginger, was very good, not greasy like it sometimes can be:

We also indulged in some pudding. Julie recommended what they call the 雷沙滑湯丸, a very flowery name for what is basically moochi with a sesame and peanut filling. It was very moreish given it was made fresh and still hot when it arrived at the table, but very heavy too:

Other good East London dim sum places that you might also want to try:

• Peninsula 新世紀 - at the bottom of a Holiday Inn in North Greenwich - consistently good over the years, but this one really needs a car to get to
• Shanghai 上海 - located in an old pie and eel shop in Dalston - used to be very good, including a dim sum 'happy hour', but standards went down after it changed hands, and I haven't been in nearly a year
• China Palace - by the Excel centre, it used to be called Superstar and had a list of discounted dishes every weekend - but haven't been since it changed hands

Birthday dinner

It was my birthday yesterday, and I really wanted to go to Latium. Not only is it my favouritest place in London, I went there a few birthdays ago, and without telling them, they managed to figure out it was my birthday, and came out with some free petit fours with 'Happy Birthday' written in chocolate across the plate. But alas! It was Easter weekend, and they were closed.

So we ended up at Morgan M on Liverpool Road N1. I fear this is a deeply underrated place - maybe it's because a bit out of the way (the nearest tube is Highbury & Islington, and that's a good 15 minute walk away). I've been there twice before to eat their 6-course taster menus, which is offered with matching wines to ensure you don't really remember the last 3 courses, and both times, the highlight has been their red mullet with citrus sauce. However, Dave was feeling a bit ropey, so we opted for their 3 course menu instead.

But, it soon turned out that even if you order 3 courses, you actually get 5 (really not bad for the £39 price tag!). To start, an amuse bouche of gazpacho with a tomato confit - that tomato confit is just genius, very flavourful:

My starter proper was by far the best thing we ordered all night - a ravioli of snails with roasted garlic and red wine sauce. The pasta was impossibly thin, the simple filling of snails with root vegetables earthy and delicious. The thing I wonder most about though is the garlic - the texture was still quite hard, yet it was very mild. How on earth did they get it that mild without turning it into mush?

I had the most trouble choosing the mains, with 2 fish choices (John Dory and wild sea bass) and 3 meat dishes (duck, rabbit, and fillet of beef). I really wanted something light, but went for the duck, mainly because it arrived at the next table looking rather delicious. It was duck two ways - first a simply pan fried duck breast, second the duck leg braised until it had fallen apart, accompanied by lots of lovely spring vegetables:

Dave's John Dory was also very good, came in a lovely light saffron broth.

We normally never eat pud, but this time we ended up having two each! There was a pre-dessert of vanilla rice pudding with an almond tuile biscuit - very pretty, but rather unexpected, no picture unfortunately. And the puds at Morgan M are rather special. We'd tried their raspberry souffle before, and it was just as good as we remembered. Look how high it rose!

Personally I think they ruin it slightly by pouring coulis into the souffle, making it a bit oversweet. The other pud we tried was their chocolate moelleux, which had a choice of being made with milk or dark chocolate. I went for the dark:

As you can see, it comes with a shot-glass of something. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was kind of like a homemade Bailey's, but I was so full by this stage I found it wholly unnecessary.

Overall, as much as I love this place, there is sometimes way too much going on on the plate. And the man still has a bit of an obsession with sorbets. Another minor minor point is that I felt that the service was a wee bit intrusive this time - they did seem to want to come and fiddle with our table every 5 minutes or so. Nevertheless, a fab dinner. And don't forget that they match wines with every dish for you, and you can buy a different glass with each course!

And this is where it might go horribly wrong...

I consider myself an alright cook, but one recipe has always alluded me, and that is the mighty beef wellington. In theory, it really isn't that difficult technically, but I have always been worried about overcooking the beef and ruining an expensive piece of fillet. But given that I have so much free time on my hands right now, I thought I would take the plunge.

I used the Gordon Ramsay recipe from The F Word/Sunday Lunch cookbook. I tried making it for 2, but the beef fillet really needs to be at least 500g to work, so it's more like for 3...

Beef Wellington (serves 3ish)
500g flat mushrooms
500g beef fillet, ideally barrel shaped
2 tbsp English mustard
6 slices parma ham
300g puff pastry (I cheated and bought ready rolled)
1 egg yolk

1. Rip the mushrooms into small pieces, then blizz in a food processor until it forms a paste
2. Fry the mushrooms on a high heat, for about 10 minutes, until all the moisture is taken out of it, then set aside to cool. It will feel like absolutely ages, and I did think I was going to burn the mushrooms, but it does take that long to get all the water out. Then it looks quite unappetisingly like soil:

3. Wipe clean the frying pan, add in a little olive oil and back onto a high heat. Season the beef, and then sear all sides, careful not to actually cook it. Set aside to cool:

4. Once the beef is cool, brush mustard all over the surface.
5. Lay out a big piece of cling film, and then lay out the parma ham on top, with each slightly overlapping:

6. Spread the cooled mushroom soil over the ham, so there is a very thin layer all over. I found it easiest to use my fingers to squish it all thin and everywhere.
7. Time to wrap your parcel! We found it easiest to wrap the ham/mushrooms over one side of the beef, and then use the cling film to make sure it is stretched tight. Then tightly finish rolling, with excess cling film of each end - twist the ends, and then 'roll' the roll a few times on the work surface to make it even tighter:



8. Put in the fridge to set the mould for about 15 minutes, and in the meantime, roll out the puff pastry if you were good enough to buy non-ready-rolled (or have made your own even!)
9. Remove the cling film, then put the beef in the middle of the pastry. Brush egg yolk all around, and then carefully wrap around the barrel, finishing with some extra egg yolk to seal. I found the whole thing 'dry' enough to not even worry about leakage. Put back in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
10. Put on a baking sheet, with the seal at the bottom, and then score the pastry all over. Then brush all over with the last of the egg yolk
11. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200C for about 15 minutes, then turn down to 180C for another 10 minutes. (Gordon recommended 25 mins then 20 mins for a 750g piece of beef, we were being overly cautious) - and look how golden brown it comes out!:

And when we finally cut it open, it was exactly right! I guess some people will find it a little rare, but we thought it was perfect for our tastes! We served it with just some simple courgettes pan-fried with garlic.

It was absolutely divine, but unfortunately my body retaliated a bit. I haven't eaten such a huge lump of meat in a long time, and I did feel as if it was sitting in my tummy undigested for most of the night, actually had trouble sleeping! So it means I actually have some leftovers for tonight. Woo!

Lunch by the beach

It was my lovely partner at work, Alan, who first introduced me to the wonders of seafood in Barcelona, and it was also him that recommended going to Can Majo in Barceloneta. As it turns out, it is one of the most popular places in Barcelona to eat seafood, and we soon found out why. It is literally on the beach, with lots of lovely seating outside. But given we are from Hong Kong, we were very happy with our table inside, out of the sun :p

The inside decor is really very simple, and we had a table right by the kitchen. Some would argue this is probably the worst place to sit in a restaurant, but we loved seeing stuff being ferried in and out. There is also an awesome fridge just outside displaying all their treasures:

One thing I really loved was that they were happy to serve everything 'family-style', which is what we're used to in our culture. For starters, we had some octopus Galician style (scoffed too quickly for a photo), and fried small fish (also scoffed, but just enough time to take a teeny photo) - both excellent. The potatoes with the octopus was probably the highlight of that dish, impossibly smooth and waxy, and the fish so sweet and fresh. We also shared a huge shellfish platter, which was really quite bargainous at €36 given that there was copious amounts of langoustines and lobster:

Perhaps the most exciting thing in the platter was their 'spiny sea snails', which were very reminiscent of the 東風螺 we had when we were all kids. Very sweet, and very pretty:

Can Majo is also very famous for its rice, and even though paella is a southern Spanish dish, almost every table seemed to be eating it. Personally I found it a little too rich actually, maybe because the other two dishes were also 'tomatoey':

We also tried some fideua, which is a Catalonian version of paella, made with short vermicelli rather than rice. This I found to be much much better than the paella, they somehow manage to keep the pasta very al dente, and I loved the texture. I've already eaten lunch, but this has gotten me all hungry again:

We also had a rice casserole with lobster, a more brothy affair. I loved how they managed to very fairly split the lobster between our 6 plates, especially as I got some lobster brains - mwahahaha!

Amazingly, the bill came to just over €200 for lunch for 6 people (inc. a very delish bottle of Gewurtztraminer and 2 desserts), very good value given the quality and amount of seafood that we had. Definitely some of the best seafood I've had in Europe, when's the next trip back?

Mercat de Sant Antoni

Although we stayed within a 15 minute walk of Mercat de la Boqueria, we discovered we were actually staying a stone's throw away from Mercat de Sant Antoni, a much more local, but no less amazing food market near Sant Antoni metro station. As well as being close, there were none of the annoying photographers as in Boqueria who just snap and don't buy anything and hence annoy all the shopkeepers.

I really started thinking about buying a holiday home in Sant Antoni whilst walking around this market - how amazing would it be to have it as your local! The shopkeepers were absolutely adorable here. Most don't speak a word of English, and my Spanish is atrocious, yet you can tell they really respect their food, as well as knowing tons about it. They take so much care with each customer, it's simply a pleasure to shop here. For example, I asked to buy some avocados at one stall, and the woman refused to sell it to me because she said they were passed their best - you'd never get that in London.

Again, it was the variety of seafood that really caught our eye. Just look at the variety of stuff you can get - so many different types of prawns, huge hunks of tuna, dover sole, 白飯魚...:

Gorgeous looking red mullet:

So many types of clams, we were confused at what to buy. We ended up with some Berberecho (middle left hand bucket) in the end. The attention the woman paid to them was amazing - she repeatedly tapped them to seek out the empty ones, and threw any away that she wasn't happy with. We ended up putting them into a hotpot, the soup was impossibly sweet.

Even more exciting (how can you get more excited Connie?!) was the discovery of 賴尿蝦, mantis shrimp which is affectionately known as 'pissing themselves prawns' in Cantonese:

These are an absolute childhood favourite, I have such fond memories of gnawing at their impossibly sweet meat. However, they have become quite rare even in Hong Kong, especially the small native ones that we used to eat. You can still get mahoosive ones that are normally fried with garlic in the big seafood centres in Hong Kong, but they are just not the same.

But the ones in Barcelona were more like what I have in my memories. They are a complete bugger to get into - very sharp shells with lots of little hooks to get into your fingers - but they are so worth the effort. We very quickly boiled them, and they retain all their gorgeously sweet flavour. Such a shame we only ate these once.

The most disappointing though were the crayfish which we experimented with:

They look fab, don't they, but their meat was very disappointing - soft and withered. We wondered whether they had died in transit, and had started emitting enzymes which met their deterioriated really quickly.

A note on these markets though, and probably a note on Spanish shopping in general. These places stayed open really late during the weekend, until about 8pm, but there is the siesta time, anything from 12 to 4pm, when nothing is opened. Markets do not open on Sundays, and even on Mondays, they are very quiet, with the seafood sections completely dead. I suspect it is because everyone's too busy at church to go and fish on Sundays - we'll know that we should make it a weekday visit next time.

海鮮團 visit Barcelona

I was lucky enough to be taken to Barcelona with work back in 2005, and it has been a place I've wanted to take my parents to for a very long time. Amazing food, amazing weather, gorgeous beach, what's there not to like? I finally pulled my finger out this year and organised a mini food holiday with the family, accompanied by John and Julie to form our 海鮮團。

We deliberately rented an apartment very close to La Rambla, mainly for the proximity to Mercat de la Boqueria. It is a real testament to how much the Spanish value food to have such an amazing food market bang in the middle of their equivalent to Oxford Street. Unsurprisingly, we all got a bit overexcited by the immense choice available there. Just look at how perfect these papaya are:

And ultimately what we came for - fresh seafood, and so much choice too! The langoustines below were so fresh they were still bubbling at the mouth:

The Spanish are extremely open about their love of eating animals, with sheeps heads and all sorts of internal organs on display. I have zero qualms about eating this kind of stuff, but even I felt a bit guilty with the following picture (Babe is one of my favourite films!):

We returned home with a huge turbot, prawns, and some amazing vegetables to cook our first meal in Barcelona. Unfortunately, we were also a bit too greedy and quick, so I could only take one picture before we scoffed everything. My dad was a bit of a genius with these prawns, which he simply dry-fried with some salt and pepper:

So simple, so delicious. It was helped with a recent family discovery of 頭抽, which is the first pressing of soy sauce. Very similar to extra virgin olive oil, it is the first pressing of the soy beans - most soy sauce you buy recycles the soy beans to make a much more diluted sauce. It was the first time I knowingly ate 頭抽, and god was it good!!! It is so flavoursome and rich in unami, you'd think it was completely laced with MSG. You can't buy it in the UK though, so I'll treasure the few drops my dad left at my apartment - will probably scoff it all very plainly with some plain rice :)