Al-Desko Dining: Victus & Bibo

Victus & Bibo sounds like it should be a posh wine bar.  Or a Roman drinking club's motto.  But it's not; it's a stall selling Turkish-style wraps.

Leather Lane is home to a plethora of food stalls, and thank goodness for it – this GrubsterBoy would get very fed up eating at his desk whilst trying to flick through the latest business developments if it weren't.

Victus & Bibo keep it simple: minced lamb, beautifully spiced, with chargrilled halloumi and parsley tabbouleh salad, smothered in lashings of tahini and chili sauce, all wrapped up tightly in a wrap. 

It's a great piece.  The tabbouleh is perfect – all salad and light on the bulgar wheat, unlike the eccentricities that often make it onto British menus and which, nice as they are, are thoroughly unauthentic.  Here it's the ideal rejoinder to the spicy lamb. 

The halloumi's good too, adding a bit of texture to what is otherwise essentially a mince wrap.  That said, you could quite easily lose the halloumi without really undermining the meal generally – so if you want to save your wallet (and your waistline) just a bit, don’t go feeling it's mandatory.

One thing:  The queue when you get there is pretty off-putting – stretching as it does around the stall and on still further.  But don’t be deterred – it moves quickly, and the reward is well worth the effort.

 - GrubsterBoy -

Toad in the Hole

Jeez, it's gotten cold all of a sudden.  In fact, there's something distinctly autumnal in the air.  Time for comfort food.

 

One of my all-time favourite comfort foods has got to be toad in the hole.  Sure, a decent steak pie (of which I am quite the connoisseur, I'll have you know) hits the spot every time.  But a good old toad is just somehow the pinnacle.  It's probably because it's so terribly, terribly bad for you, I expect – being, as it is, basically a massive Yorkshire pud full of fatty pork.  Still, served up with lashings of gravy, it's just too good to miss.

 

I make mine with caramelised, sticky onions in, as I think it lifts the dish somehow (and I have a very, very sweet tooth.  Try it.  Others mix in all sorts, whether it be sage or mustard seeds.  It's completely your thing to try, so let your imagination run away with you.

 

Ingredients:

 

This is the worst ingredients picture ever, because it basically is missing half the ingredients.  Like the beer.  And the milk.  And all the stuff I made the fake gravy out of.  Oh well.

Toad:

 

x8 good quality bangers

(I used a four each of herb and Cumberland, to make it more interesting, but it's really whatever you want.)

 

Hole:

x2 Large White Onions
1tbs Demerara Sugar
150g Plain Flour
x2 Eggs
85 ml Whole Milk
85 ml Beer

 

Veg:

(Whatever you like, really – let's not be prescriptive.  I went for autumnal veg, coz I'm basically feeling autumnal.)

 
Curly Kale
Parsnips
Carrots

 

1. Get the veg on.  This'll take way longer than you think it will.  I had about five each of the parsnips and the carrots – one each, plus one for luck.  Chopped into big-ish batons, covered in olive oil, liberally seasoned with salt & pepper and sprinkled with thyme (I had some leftover in the fridge).  Oh, and I threw a few cloves of garlic crushed with the back of a big knife in there too, for good measure.  Roast them in the oven at 180°C for 45 mins (give or take – so keep an eye on them), tossing them every so often.

 

They go in like this...

...and come out like this.

As for the kale, you can steam that in the last 5 minutes of cooking the toad.

 

2. Brown your bangers in a frying pan.  Don’t worry, you're not creating more washing up because we're going to fry other stuff in this pan too. 

 

 

Once browned (don’t worry, they don’t need to be cooked) remove and set to one side.

 

3. Slice the onions into thin strips, about half a centimetre wide.  Get 'em in the pan.  Keep the heat medium – you're trying to soften and caramelise them, not make crispy onions.  This isn’t a burger.  Also, don’t worry if they don’t really fit in the pan, they'll shrink.

 

 

Just keep stirring them every so often, and watch for crispiness.  Bad crispiness.

 

4. Meanwhile, make the batter.  Crack the eggs into a big bowl and whisk with an electric hand whisk.  Then add the milk and flour alternately – I have some nifty shot measurements, so did 25 ml milk followed by a tablespoon of flour, etc.  Keep whisking throughout if possible – fortunately I had a GrubsterGirl on hand to help me. 

 

 

Action shot!

 

When you've got through it all you should have a trick, stodgy batter.  Fear not.  Add your beer now, again, bit by bit by bit, folding it into the batter.  You don’t want to lose the fizz.

 

 

By the way, I used Fursty Ferret from Badger Beers (the naughty brewery who, hilariously, apparently move goalposts).  Now, a batter is much too good a use for this fantastic ale, but fortunately you'll be left with tonnes of it, and it washes down a toad in the hole beautifully.

 

 

5. Once the batter is done, it needs to sit for 15 minutes.  This is the perfect time to get the roasting tin warned in the oven at 220°C.  Glug in a good 3-4 tablespoons of oil – I usually use sunflower, but apparently dripping works well.  I just think that GG will dump me if I start cooking with dripping.  By the way, always use a roasting tin – it gets much hotter than a ceramic dish, so the Yorkshire ends up rising higher and being crispier.  A friend uses a huge cast iron dish for this, which she says works a treat – I've tried it, and can confirm, but it obviously takes a lot longer to get really hot, which is what you want it to be when the batter goes in.

 

Give it 5-10 minutes to make sure it gets really hot, then add the sausages for a few minutes. 

 

Just a safety note here: hot fat is hot.  I mean really bloody hot.  So be careful: it will spit when anything is added to it.

 

6. By now your onions should be done perfectly, but if they got done sooner bring them back up to temperature.  Once hot, sprinkle the sugar over them and give them a good stir, so that the sugar melts and the onions end up coated in oniony caramel.  Resist the urge to eat it all now, this stuff tastes bloody amazing.

 

7. Get the roasting tin out.  The fat should be smoking (literally) hot.  Carefully add the onions, so that they are spread all over the sausages and the tin, like this:

 

 

Now pour the batter over, like this:

 

 

Push any onions off so they're not sticking out of the batter too much, otherwise they'll burn.  Now, get the damn thing in the oven, PDQ.

 

Oh, a word on timing.  This was based on a recipe that said 35 minutes, which was a lie.  I could have had this out at 25 mins and probably had it better.  So it ended up a little sunburnt.  Which I'm pretty damn cross about.  Tasted good, though.

 

 

Serve the whole thing up – root veg, steamed kale, toad in the hole.  Cover it with gravy – make your own, buy some in, whatever.  I used a Knorr Stockpot cheat, which was actually very impressive.  I split the water used to dissolve the little fella 50/50 with red wine, which was a real plus.  

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

Katz's Deli

Katz's Deli is famous.  Infamous, even. 

But lots of people (at least here in Blighty) don’t seem to know it.  So, let me put it this way: If you've seen When Harry Met Sally, and can remember that scene, well, that's Katz's Deli.

Got it now?  Thought so.

For all the English folk who have looked at me with a puzzled expression when I say I can’t wait to go to Katz's, there must be a dozen New Yorkers already on the Subway on their way to chow down.  Katz's defines busy – defines an 'every man to himself' attitude to dining, whether it's forcing your way through the queues or battling random strangers for the last table.

 

There's something brutally authentic about Katz's.  It's run down, it's basic, it still runs its fantastic 'send a salami to your boy in the army' military shipping campaign.  The walls are peppered with photos of celebs - local and international - with their arms around Mr Katz himself.  It's grubby, fat-filled food, and yet it feels somehow wholesome.   Basically, it's a classic New York deli, serving up wholly uncompromising plates of towering sandwiches, stuffed to the absolute gunnels with meat. 

Proper big thick paving slabs of meat. 

Sure, there are other things on the menu.  But frankly I wasn't interested.  I strode up to the counter and ordered.  No, that's a lie, I waited patiently (like a good Englishman) in an enormous queue whilst everyone else around me barged and squirmed past to make sure that they ordered first (like good New Yorkers). 

Pretty soon though I managed to get served.  And boy what a sight it was to behold.  In fact, I was so dumbstruck by the complete carnage – the crowds, the bustle, the shouted orders, the servers hacking away at slabs of beef like they might run off and escape – that I singularly failed to fully document the spectacle.  Sorry folks, this is as good as you get. 

My server was a delight, however, exhibiting classic New York charm.  Brief and to the point, he presented me with a stacked side plate, almost as big as many a Londoner's lunch, of different cuts to try.

I settled for pastrami on rye with mustard, however, the classic choice.  And by settled, I really mean 'I lucked out'.   Because this was something incredible.  Seriously, mind-blowingly incredible.  GrubsterGirl went for sliced brisket on rye (on the left).  Equally amazeballs. 

And all of it served up with not one, but two different kind of pickles.  I mean, how lucky can one guy be?

NYC has long been associated with such delights as pastrami, salt beef, broiled brisket – basically, all the various ways of tenderising and curing the toughest (but easily the most flavourful) cuts of cow.  And if Nuu Yoik is the promised land of such delights, then Katz's must be the ultimate shrine. 

 

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

Breads Etcetera

Saturday we knew would be a heavy evening.  So we knew that Saturday breakfast had to be equally tough to set us up for a long day and an even longer night.

 

This left us with only one option: Breads Etcetera, on Clapham High Street. 

 

It's a fun little concept.  Basically, it's all about the bread – and, boy, do they know how to bake it.  Literally tonnes of that stuff must pass through their ovens every week, as the cool kids of Clapham and its environs descend upon the place every weekend for brunch.  The guys who set it up started life as bakers – one of the owners popped in whilst we were there and we had a little chat – and has over 12 years' experience of baking.  Their range is incredible – from plain old sourdough (about which nothing is plain, this is some of the best I've had) to walnut and rosemary breads to dark, sticky Norwegian rye.

 

Each table comes adorned with its own Dualit toaster and they specialise in what they call 'DIY Toast.  The basic idea is you head up to the basket of bread, carve off great slaps of bread, and toast at your table.  It's those little thoughts and ideas that can make somewhere really different and interesting, something that Breads Etcetera can proudly boast to be. 

 

It's unlimited, so you can stuff yourself until you pop, which I basically did. 

 

GrubsterGirl wasted no time getting stuck in.

 

 

But if the bread is the star of the show, the supporting cast are pretty Oscar-worthy too.  All their supplies of meat and eggs and veggies taste and feel proper fresh, and high quality.  These are no frozen, 15% pork, budget bangers; these are proper, hearty Cumberland sausages, full of yum.

They also do an exciting array of breakfasts – not just full English brekkies, but carefully thought out and well executed dishes that are meals in their own right.

 

GrubsterGirl launched into the wild mushrooms, which basically is a mound of wild mushrooms on toast, accompanied with (in this instance) a sausage.  It's more normal sides are bacon, mackerel terrine or chicken liver pâté, the latter of which I have tried and (hot-damn!) it is good.  I know what you're thinking: chicken liver for breakfast?  Don't knock it 'til you tried it, folks, is all I'll say.

 

 

I went for the 'Cowboy Brekkie', with the charming slice of sourdough with a fried egg inside.  There's something wonderfully childish not just about the idea but about its execution.  It also came with a couple of rashers of bacon (what breakfast / brunch would be complete without it?) and homemade baked beans.  A word on the beans: they're incredible.  Rich, gooey, bloomin' spicy, and with at least a whole sausage diced up in there for good measure. 

 

 

What's more, even the walk-on parts fare well.  Proper juices and coffee that even an Italian barista could be proud of. 

 

 

All in all, a proper, filling brunch – and one of the best in Clapham, to boot.  Now for a lie down.  I'll leave you with a picture of the best egg holder I've ever seen. 

 

 

You'd need a lot of soldiers for that.

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

 

PS: This place is really the only restaurant that I can think of that genuinely suffers from multiple personality disorder.  No, seriously, it can’t seem to make its mind up – it seemed to start out as Breads Etcetera but now the menus are covered with references to 'The Ferm'.  In my view, 'Breads Etcetera' is a great name for a place that sells bread primarily and a lot of other stuff to fill you up kind of on the side.  Whereas 'The Ferm' means… well, not a lot to me, to be honest.  I've gone with Breads Etcetera as everyone seems to know it by that name. 

 

PPS: Sadly, Breads Etcetera has almost no online presence whatsoever, which doesn’t help one track it down.  Still, you can't really miss it once you get to Clapham High Street: just look for the place with a 20 minute queue coming out of it…  Still, totally worth it.

Food Porn #2: Little Sister's Smoothie

 

GrubsterBoy's little sister made this for her very hungover big brother.  We threw a massive party last night (wahey!) and now feel ghastly.  Urgh.  But here it is, in all it's glory, the ultimate hangover cure.  Banana, raspberries, blueberries, redcurrents, ginger and cocount water.  Heaven in a glass right now.

Al-Desko Dining: Bahn Mi Bay

The junction of Theobald's and Gray's Inn Roads is not an unnatural place to situate an average sandwich shop selling cheap buns and baguettes to the working masses that horde in and out of the city every day.  So to find a really bloody good sandwich shop selling decently priced and exciting baguettes to those same hordes is a rather more attractive prospect.

Fortunately, that's exactly what you have with Banh Mi Bay.

 

Banh Mi Bay presents itself as a mid-sized restaurant serving up bowls of steaming pho and other Vietnamese treats, as well as a take-away joint for those of us who need to scramble back to our desks to spend our lunch hours grabbing surreptitious bites between bouts of spreadsheet reviews. 

I can't speak for the former, but judging from the fact that the place was packed and there was a queue virtually out the door, into the rain, for the next available table, I'm guessing it's pretty good at what it does on the sit-in-and-eat front.  The fresh, made-to-order atmosphere, with staff constantly manning an open grill to get patrons meals to them as their cooked, is testament to this.

 

The other side of the coin is the bánh mi, the French baguettes stuffed with Vietnamese goodies, meats, pickles and fiery hot sauces.  That was the main event for us.

I went with a colleague and we resolved to share a Banh Mi Dac Biet, their special sandwich.  This, it turned out, was a mix of fillings including pork pâté, chả lụa (a sort of mashed, boiled pork sausage, but not really – much, much better than it sounds) and spiced pork.  So a total pig fest, really.  Nowt wrong with that.  Also, to accompany our báhn mi we decided to share a box of prawn spring rolls.  

 

 

Starting with the spring rolls, these were great.  Nice, crunchy little numbers accompanied by a very-evidently homemade sweet chili sauce that was not too sweet (but good and spicy!).  A little bit greasy, but not too much so – but then they're deep fried, so they were never going to thoroughly avoid that curse.

 

 

Also, as a completely peripheral note, look at that presentation.  I mean, look at it.  Really.  Who does that?  Who goes to that kind of effort for a take away box of spring rolls?  And, you know what? Munching down those little greasy numbers with a side of iceberg lettuce and mind works wonders.

No, my only complaint was that there were only three rolls.  Which can make for an uncomfortable conversation when you're sharing with someone...

Next up is the bánh mi.  This was a revelation.  I'd had rip-offs of this before, but this was just brilliant.  Stuffed full of smokey, spicy pork, perfectly offset with the cucumber, pickles and coriander that keep it company, it’s a real wonder that these little treats haven’t become big news over here already.  The pâté is a masterstroke too: it's rich taste and creamy texture add a certain depth to the dish, without which the sandwich would be all the poorer.

Now, I'm no aficionado of Vietnamese cooking.  In fact, various trips around the world have taken me to many of its various corners, nooks and crannies, but not really to Asia.  Other than a week in Hong Kong a few years ago and a week lined up for next year in Singapore,  I can’t claim to have had much experience.  So I can't tell you if this is authentic.  What I can tell you is that it’s ace.

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

Jambalaya

Jambalaya is one of those funny dishes that lots of folk in the UK have heard of and very few are confident that they could adequately put into words.  If you think about it, cooking up rice with various kinds of meat, fish and vegetables could run a gamut of options: paella, risotto, pilaf, biryani, kedgeree to name just a few.  It's one of the elephants of modern cooking: I may not be able to describe it, but I'm damn sure I know it when I see it.

This isn't helped by jambalaya being a dish that I can’t say I'm totally familiar with.  My experience of eating jambalaya is, in fact, limited to one occasion: Coop's Place in New Orleans.  The memory still lingers, of a night out being stuffed with a rich and smokey mash-up of rice, smoked sausage, ham and rabbit, washed down with local raspberry Abita Ale.  One of the best meals of my life and a culinary highlight from a long roadtrip with plenty of culinary highlights.  All this was then followed by whiling away the night to the wee small hours in the crowded but intimate Spotted Cat Café, jiving to the tunes of the Jumbo Shrimp Jazz Band.  What a night.

So I confess that I'm coming to this latest experiment a little nervous.  The bar has, after all, been set a touch high...  Still, here we go.

Ingredients:

x4 uncooked chorizo(esque) sausages
250g raw king prawns

x1 large yellow onion
x1 large red fresh chili
x3 sticks of celery
100g okra (I know, I know, this isn’t gumbo so okra doesn’t belong here.  But I bloody love it, so you're all gonna have to learn to live with it...)
x3 sweet peppers (I actually used a couple of packets of Sainsbury's baby sweet peppers, which I think taste flippin' fantastic.)
A few sprigs of thyme
x3 cloves of garlic

500ml chicken stock
x2 400g tins of chopped tomatoes
Tobasco sauce (to taste)
225g American long grain rice

Chopped spring onions (to serve)
Lime wedges (to serve)

1. Chop all the veg up.  Dice the onion into medium size chunks, slice the fresh celery diagonally relatively thinly, chop the chili finely, chop the okra lengthways.  The baby peppers I used are great and are rather aesthetically pleasing if you carefully hollow them out then cut them into rings.  But who has the time for that crap most days?

Well, me, obviously.  Anyway...

2. Meanwhile, get them sausages in the pan.  Give them a prick and cook for 10 minutes or so with a smidgen of olive oil in the pan that you intend to do all the cooking in. 

(Yes, I know there are only three and I said four.  Three wasn't enough, right?  So, basically, you're getting the advantage of my screw-up.  So be grateful, OK?)

You want to cook them until they are not just about cooked, then remove them.  I have my reasons for avoiding overcooking them.  You're just trying to achieve two ends with this stage: Firming up the meat so that they can be skinned and sliced, yet stay whole when they go back in the pot for further cooking.  Secondly, you want to get the oil out so you can cook everything else in it.

3. Add the veg and cook it in the chorizo juices.  Chrush the cloves of garlic into the veg and cook away for 5 to 10 minutes, until the veg is just starting to soften a bit. 

4. Add the rice and the leaves from the thyme sprigs, and stir into the vegetables.  Cook for a couple of minutes on a high-ish heat, stirring the rice to coat it in all the oil left from the sausages.  A bit like you would a risotto.

5. Add the stock, tinned tomatoes and a bloody good few shakes of Tobasco.  This fiery little number comes from Avery Island in Louisiana, so is the perfect accompaniment to any Southern American Creole dish, in my view. 

Turn the heat down and get the dish to a gentle simmer, then cover and set the timer for 12 minutes.  But be sure to give it a stir every so often, though, or it'll stick.

6. Whilst all this is going on, your sausages should have cooled.  Very carefully skin them - the meat will be soft and will want to break up quite a lot.  Don't let that happen, if at all possible.  Once skinned, cut them into discs (again, very carefully - be sure to slice them back and forth, not just try to guillotine them - that won't work out well for you.

Surf and Turf.  Mmmm.

7. Get the lid off and have a good look.  I found that most of the liquid had gone, but not all, and the rice was cooked.  This isn’t ideal; jambalaya's not a soup.  If you have the same issue, whack the heat up to full and cook quickly for a few minutes – you'll find most of the wet cooks off without splitting the rice.

This is the stage you want to throw the prawns and the sausage into the mix.  They only want a couple of minutes to cook, otherwise the prawns will become quite tough and the sausage will break down to nothing.

8. When all is done, serve straight up, piping hot, with spring onion sprinkled on top and lime squeezed all over the shop.  Add more Tobasco too (unless you’re a wimp).

It's a wonderful, warming, comforting dish.  I feel like I ought to be eating it only during the summer, only on particularly muggy, humid, sticky, hot summer days – basically, on days approaching Louisiana's climate.  But the truth is that it’s brilliant in winter too, and as we head into autumn there's a lot worse one could do than scoop down prodigious great quantities of this mish-mash of Creole flavours.

 - GrubsterBoy -