Quick Green Chilli

Green chilli, or chili verde, is a dish that is completely overlooked in this country but one that is extremely popular over in the US (from whence, I believe, it hails). I have an ambition of cooking a proper, slow-cooked chili verde to match my slow-cooked chilli con carne that I have perfected over the years (and promise to blog some day). But for the time being, here's a recipe based on a Jamie Oliver attempt at the green chilli that's still pretty awesome – and quick, above all else, so matches my quick chilli con carne recipe rather well (I feel…).

Ingredients:

800g pork mince
2 yellow onions
2 cloves of garlic
4-5 large tomatoes
1-2 green peppers
2-3 large green chillies (depending on how hot you like things)
Bunch of spring onions
1 tsp dried sage
Green chilli pepper sauce (see my note on chilli sauces)
1 lime
Bunch of mint
Iceberg or little gem lettuce
Sour cream / crème fraiche

Just a couple of notes on the ingredients. I had just been to Borough Market when I first made this and it shows in the ingredients pictured. I used green and yellow tomatoes, which were fantastic from an aesthetic point of view and led to lots of pretentious arty photos being taken.

I also used poblano green peppers, which are a kind chilli pepper actually (hence why the picture only shows my using one jalapeno pepper for spice – a bit of an error, it turned out, as it wasn't nearly spicy enough).

Both of these ingredient variations ended up being a good call in terms of flavour but neither are, but a very long shot, requirements. Genuinely, just go for good quality ingredients and forget whether you can get the exact stuff I used. Red tomatoes will do just fine, as will regular green bell peppers - turst me, I've made this since using regular ingredients just to be sure.

1. Finely chop the chillis, garlic and yellow onions (not the spring onions for the time being). Dice the peppers into 1cm squared lumps, to add a bit of texture to the finished product.

2. Brown the pork and dried sage in a big pan. Make sure the meat is nicely crumbled – I find that pork mince has a tendency to stick together a lot more than beef mince, so watch out for this.

3. Add the onions, garlic, chillies and peppers. Turn the heat right up and cook until the pork turns golden and all the liquid has cooked off.

4. Whilst this is happening, roughly chop the toms into lumps. When the liquid has cooked off, add the toms and a few dashes of chilli sauce and cook. A slug of water at this time can help the whole thing get a little more liquid, although you don’t want it sludgy like a regular chilli con carne.

5. Whilst it's cooking roughly chop a handful of mint and squeeze the lime. When it's ready, add the mint and the lime juice to taste. Serve on a bed of roughly chopped iceberg lettuce (this also works for chilli con carne, if you’re trying to be good) with a dollop of crème fraiche on top and scattered with finely chopped spring onions and roughly chopped mint.

- GrubsterBoy -

Crawfish Boil at Stax Diner

Some years ago, during the earlier days of our courtship, GrubsterGirl and I drove across the United States – from San Francisco to Miami.  It was an epic road trip, choc-a-bloc with memories and experiences that I shall treasure for my dying day.  It probably also made us as a couple, so that's pretty important to me.

One of those memories was sitting on a river bank in Savannah, Georgia (where the bus stop in Forrest Gump is situated) eating crawfish and generally lapping up that Southern charm.  Crawfish – which we call crayfish – are little freshwater dwelling critters that look like tiny lobsters and which are a big part of Southern cuisine.  You'd recognise their de-shelled tails from Pret sandwiches but otherwise don’t make a particular impact in British eating – even though they’re a rapidly expanding pest to Britain's waterways. 

The standard way of eating them is the crawfish boil: a peculiar, wonderful Southern tradition that involves cooking up great vats of the creatures with Cajun spices, sweetcorn, potatoes and Andouille smoked sausage and spreading the results all over a table for everyone to get stuck in.

Since I learned of crawfish boils I have been dying to get to one.  Last summer, Bea Vo (who's behind Bea's of Bloomsbury) ran a series of crawfish boils in London – she's a native Virginian, so probably knows a thing or two about them.  Sadly, I couldn’t make it.

However, she's back, now opening her new restaurant Stax Diner off Carnaby Street – and as a sort of warm-up gig, she organised a thoroughly hedonistic long weekend of crawfish boiling. 

To kick matters off there was a basket of garlic bread – ultra-garlicky, very American.

 

Then there were the drinks.  GG and I ordered up a pitcher of margarita – it seemed like a good economy at the time, and certainly turned out to be – what arrived was epically portioned.  So often when you order a pitcher thinking it'll be more economically sound, you end up getting 2.1 drinks for the price of 3.  Here it was very much more for your money.

It was also really well done.  GG described it instantly, after the first sip, as taking her straight back to the States – I don't know what it was, but I agree – there was something about the way this was mixed that made it a firmly 'American' margarita.  Perhaps not original, or authentic – at least in the sense of Mexican authentic – but this was the real deal as a drink to wash down Southern flavours.

And before too much waiting, there it was – the main event, great, steaming bowls of loveliness.  Crawfish, sweetcorn, sausage and potato.

The kitchen, a small space by any standards (in a challengingly small restaurant that makes all that it can of the space available to it) was churning out prodigious great quantities of boiled crustacean.  Thousands – no, I expect tens of thousands – of those beasts must have been served up, all swiftly, all hot and all darn tasty.

It's a hands-on experience.  You have to peel each little critter by hand, pulling off the head and the end of the tail, then stripping the semi-soft shell back to reveal the bright pink-and-red tail beneath.

Then it's up to a choice of dipping sauce (clockwise from the bottom): Cajun butter (easily the best – think lobster and butter, but with Cajun spices to match the Cajun spicing of the boil), cocktail (standard, but very nicely done) and come back sauce (Bea's signature sauce – great tasting but perhaps better for a burger than seafood?).

Pretty soon, you find your plate piled high with carcasses.  Which is fine, because the policy is pile 'em high, all you can eat, discard the paper plate...

...and start again on a new one! Basically, munch, dump, repeat – until you're stuffed to the gunnels.

But leave room for pudding (or, perhaps, ought it to be dessert, this being American themed?).  Because Bea knows a thing or two about making sweet stuff.

First up, chocolate brownies.

OK, what's so great about chocolate brownies?  I hear you cry.  Apart from 'everything', let me tell you about these chocolate brownies.  Or more so, let me tell you just how awesome they were.  You could spread them on toast.  You'd want to, actually – spread 'em thick.  But they're also crunchy and crusty on top.  They're rich – but not prohibitively so.  They sumptuous, but not fatty or greasy.  They're brownies as they ought to be.

And then there were the ice lollies.  Or again, perhaps that should be popsicles?

I have nothing but praise for these.  I suspect they may have been just pure, mushed and frozen fruit, but who cares.  Because they were simply fantastic.  I could have eaten a dozen of those.  Seriously good.

In a sense this all seems a little futile.  The boils end tomorrow, and tickets are sparse.  You're not going to get to go and experience it yourself – and you should, because it's wicked. 

Except to say two things: One, there's hope it'll be done again.  It seemed wildly popular when we were there, and with luck that will mean repeats throughout the summer.  And two: Stax Diner opens on Friday.  And there's a soft launch – with 50% off food.  If the product turned out at Stax is as good as the boil, you'll be in for a treat.  So, even though I can’t tell you I've eaten the food and can recommend it, I still feel able to say with confidence: take a punt and give it a go.

 - GrubsterBoy -

 

Clockjack Oven - Menu Re-Launch

Last night I managed to bag tickets to the re-launch of Clockjack Oven, in Soho. 

I'll admit that I'd never heard of Clockjack Oven before an email came into the my inbox telling me that they'd up-ed their menu and wanted to launch it to a crowd of hungry foodsnobs.  Or words to that effect.  Never one to skip a cheap meal and/or a fancy opening, I jumped at the opportunity.

Clockjack Oven deals in the rotisserie chicken business.  This is a strongly growing field – what with the likes of Tooting's new Chicken Shop (much loved of the Standard) springing up, rotisserie chicken may well become the next big thing.  And why not?  I can see it's good business: Chicken is not expensive and (once you've got past the initial cost of installing a rotisserie machine) you've got a wonderfully low-cost, low-labour way of cooking really well cooked foul.  The French have been all over this for centuries (literally) with their poulet frites.  Now, perhaps, it's our turn.  Move over Nandos – rotisserie's arrived.

The menu re-launch was a set menu, consisting of...

Starters: a trio of salads and some buttermilk chicken bites with ranch sauce. 

 

OK, so far so good (although the pasta salad was a little bit... well, it was a little bit ASDA...).  I can't really tell you what each one was, as none of them were on the new menu – which seemed really odd, given that this was meant to be a new menu tasting.  There was a chalkboard up that said something about a salad bar at lunchtime.  Maybe that's what we were eating.

But they were nice.  This one, of pulled chicken, spinach and butternut squash was especially good – and came with a lovely sweet mustard dressing that worked really well.

Also, there was a rather nice rocket, parmesan, pine nut and raisin salad.  I like savoury food with sweet stuff, basically, so this worked well.

But my favourite bit of the starters was the buttermilk chicken bites.  Or, as they'd call it in the US of A, popcorn chicken.  I've had popcorn alligator too, which tasted about the same.  But I digress.  These were great – I'd gladly have a meal of these.  I'd get fat, I'd risk heart disease, but I'd be happy. 

After the starters followed the main.  A bowl of chicken and chips. 

This is a tricky one.  Because I don't want this to be a bad review – because it wasn't a bad restaurant at all, in fact it was pretty good.  But, please, Clockjack Oven, what are you doing?  This is a menu tasting, an opportunity to show off your best work, to flaunt your wares for the world to see and, hopefully, for some enterprising blogger with more than three regular readers one of which is his mum (so not me then) will write about it and lots of people will come to see for themselves. 

So why oh why oh why have you given me a bland (in fact, rather salty) bowl of chicken and chips.  Because there's plenty of exciting stuff on your menu.  There's an interesting looking coleslaw.  There's a hearty looking club sandwich.  There's sweetcorn cooked in bourbon and honey – that actually sounds really flipping good, like mouth-watering-as-I-type good.  I would love to tell you about all of the exciting stuff they do, but the menu tasting didn’t let me taste the menu.

And why didn’t you serve your chook with at least one of the four sauces you menu proclaims?  Actually, really why not?  And don’t give me cost – you charge 50p for them.  Because without the sauce it was dull.  Sorry, but it was.  Dull.  James (my partner in restaurant arms for the evening) commented: "Nandos is tastier than this" (he went on to qualify that Nandos was also drier – and I'd honestly choose moist over tasty any day). 

It was just a bit of a cock up, that's all.  A bit un-thought-through.  Because, despite the blandness of the dish, it was technically superb.  The chips were great – not the cheap french fries of fast-food fame, but proper frites that actually tasted potatoey and lovely.  The chicken was incredibly – and I mean, incredibly – moist, juicy and succulent.  Clockjack Oven does that sort of stuff well, and they should be recognised for doing so. 

- GrubsterBoy -

Bonnie Gull Seafood Cafe

The Bonnie Gull Seafood Shack, situated in Fitzrovia, has been a staple for may seafood loving-Londoners for the last couple of years, since converting its Hackney pop-up into a full-blown restaurant in 2012.  In that time it's built itself a thoroughly decent – and well deserved - reputation for top-notch seafood, whether of the kind that swims, scurries or just hangs about on the seafloor.  So when it was announced that it would be opening a second branch – The Bonnie Gull Seafood Cafe I was quick to book a table.

 

The idea of the place is to transport you to the coast – perhaps Cornwall, or Devon, or some other spot on the South Coast.  For me, it took me straight back to family day trips to Cooden Beach in East Sussex, where we used to spend so many days of summer, but I imagine that all patrons will get some whiff of the sea, some twinge of nostalgia for sunny days on the beach and fish suppers wrapped in newspaper. 

 

The real star of the show, however, is the food.  Which is precisely what you'd want – and expect.

 

We started with a round of oysters.  The Bonnie Gull offers a great selection to choose from.  When we visited there were five varieties to choose from, although it's all dependent on supplies and freshness – the one thing you will be absolutely convinced of is the freshness of the food.  In fact, this might be a good time to mention that, although I'm going to show you what we ate, the chances of you seeing all (or, indeed, any) of these dishes should you visit is pretty low.  There are some staples that seem to be on the menu regularly, but the menu is absolutely dictated by what's freshly available.  So it will change - often daily, it seems.  This, in my opinion, is a very good thing.

 

We had the whole oyster range – not to be outdone – including Carlingford Rocks (GrubsterGirl's favourite) and Portland Pearls (my mollusc of choice).  And fantastic they were.

 

One of the main attractions, for me, to The Bonnie Gull is the selection of shellfish.  I absolutely adore food that comes in a shell – especially wriggling, crustacean types – crab, lobster, prawns, brown shrimp, crawfish, langoustine – you name it, if it crawls and swims, I'm probably going to love it.  The Bonnie Gull serves all of these in spades. 

We then moved on to more substantial starters. 

Crab on beef-dripping toast, with avocado. I love crab meat (seriously love it, it's quite possibly my favourite food) so had to try this - even if my main was a little crabby (as you'll see in a bit...).  Absolutely fantastic – a beautiful ratio of brown and white meat which was complimented terrifically by the avocado. 

Paprika-battered queenies. If you don’t know what a 'queenie' is, it's basically like a baby scallop – although fully grown – that are best known for coming from the waters around the Isle of Man.  (Writing this post I have discovered that there's an annual queenie festival in the Isle of Man at the end of June each year – there's a date for future diaries.)  This was another hit of a dish – great fun, tasted fantastic and seemed to go on forever and ever, without leaving you feeling stuffed – just what one wants in a starter.

Meanwhile, I tucked in to cockles cooked in cider and pancetta.  This was actual an accidental order – I was so busy chatting to my dining companions that I misread cockles for clams, so was slightly taken aback when these arrived.  Still, the two are not so terribly different (someone, somewhere, will probably want to kill me for saying that) and besides what I got was lipsmackingly fabulous that I can't – and shan't – complain. 

In fact, they disappeared remarkably quickly...

One of my companions also had the hot smoked salmon with horseradish cream and beetroot.  Sadly I didn't try this (there's only so much one can eat) but I heard that it was a 100% hit.  And doesn't it just look it?  I can well imagine that if you visit with someone who doesn't like seafood that much - and there are people who genuinely don't - this could be a good place to start at.

Also, potted brown shrimp on sourdough toast.  An absolutely staple, but beautifully done and served warm - which, as I have written before - really brings all the flavour out. 

Moving on to the mains then...

I have to confess that I was a bit of a bad food blogger when it came to the mains.  You see, the main I had was a bit hands on, and was also my favourite thing, so I have to admit that I was a little bit distracted.  OK, I was a lot distracted.  I snapped a few of my friends' mains – including this delicious lobster roll...

A proper, hearty, filling serving of the king of crustaceans, in a lovely, charred brioche bun and decorated with nasturtium flower leaves (which are clearly becoming all the rage).

There was also this fantastic crockpot of Devon seafood – mixed fish and shells (haddock, cod, clams and mussels I remember, other things I sadly forget) cooked in a rich bouillabaisse Provençal sauce – was simply stunning.

But the standout attraction, the piece de resistance, was the crab.

OMFG that crab.

Described on the menu in playful terms as 'smash your own crab', along it came, ready to play with (please note: I went for the 'lightly pre-smashed' option, which I strongly recommend for anyone not eager to (a) cover themselves in crab gunk; and (b) take out their companion's eye with faster-than-light flying shell shards).  The head meat had also been helpfully picked and flame-grilled, allowing for easy eating, as well as avoiding the toxic crab gills.  Although many people dodge the brown meat, smear a little on toast with some mayonnaise and a healthy helping of white meat, all drizzled with lemon squeeze, and enjoy for a slice of pure heaven. 

It even came with a little hammer to aid the smashing process.

Big claws, filled with juicy white meat - this was a cock (male) crab, so had the larger nippers that lead to more of the good stuff.

So time for pudding. 

Where to go from here, eh?  After sophisticated starters and beautifully hands-on mains (at least in my case) what could a Grubster honestly need now?

Well, the answer's simple.  You remember how I said the whole thing was seaside focussed?  Well, think about what you'd have at the seaside.  Think about summer days on the beach.

MR WHIPPY.

I have written elsewhere about the joys of Mr Whippy – that much derided, soft serve ice cream.  Here it was as if they'd taken the concept and revolutionised it.  It was Mr Whippy, Captain, but not as we know it – soft, cold, sweet but also rich and creamy – all of the best bits of the iconic ice cream with all of its worst bits made good.  In fact, with the addition of popping candy and freeze-dried raspberries – not just made good but made awesome.

Finally, just s small hat tip for the coffee - and, in particular, the tiny wee milk bottles it comes with.  Very cute, well played.

It's also worth taking a moment, if I may, just to remark upon the wonderfully helpful and friendly staff, who sorted us out with a big table as a special request and who knew the menu inside-out and back-to-front.  Cheers, guys.

I think you can already guess what I'd say as my closing remarks.  I loved this place – it's truly fantastic, and well worth the visit.  Price-wise it's not the cheapest place in town – but then it's not bank-breakingly expensive, and to be honest you're eating seafood in London – if you want it cheap, go somewhere you don’t have to transport that notoriously difficult (and costly) to transport foodstuff.  And, you know what?  It is absolutely worth it.  Top marks, definitely.

 - GrubsterBoy -