The Underground Restaurant

As mentioned on my post about 'Home restaurants' or supperclubs as they are known in the States, I am finally starting my own paladare 'The Underground Restaurant'. 

Opening night 7th February. Location: Kilburn. Price: £10 menu fixe. Drinks can be bought or bring your own. Food: vegetarian, cooked on an Aga. 

Service: teenage goth. 

Email me at marmitelover@mac.com to book a place/table.

Further nights/themes to be announced.

There does seem to be a buzz about this...article in the Guardian.

Food to spoil father with, like a child.

Made a meze plate for the café, a tear 'n share dish. I like that sort of food. In fact being able to eat with someone is a deal-breaker for any kind of relationship with me. I can't stand people who don't eat, who pick, who toy, who don't dive in with gusto. Weight watchers are such a bore. 

I'm not a meat eater myself but my male role model is my dad, half-Italian, half-Irish, who not only eats ALL his own food, leaving not a scrap, even sucking the marrow out of the bones, but will be dipping his bread into your food as well.
Eating and drinking should be communal and sensual.
For this plate, given the limited ingredients available to me plus the fact that the café is vegan, I made baba ganous, falafel, hummus and tzatziki with pitta and salad. Baba ganous means 'food that mother spoils father with, like a child'. Don't you just love Arabic names for food? Like ras-el-hanout ...'everything good from the top of the shop'.
It's difficult to make a decent baba ganous without a wood burner. That smokey taste doesn't emerge from aubergines roasted in a gas oven in quite the same way. I also think the trick with baba ganous and hummus is not to put in too much tahini.

Baba ganous.
Take your aubergines, whole, sling 'em in the oven, forget about them for about an hour. After an hour, pull them out and peel the skins off. The skins come off easily.
Whizz up the aubergines with garlic, ground cumin, olive oil, lots of lemon juice, salt, and a small amount of tahini. Top with flat leaf parsley.

Hummus.
Now I know everybody knows how to make hummus. In my experiments, I've found the best hummus comes from using tinned not dried chick peas. And if possible those tins should be from India. I don't know why, but Indian/Asian chick peas taste the best in hummus.

Whizz up your strained chickpeas, add olive oil, lots of lemon juice, garlic, ground cumin, salt, small amount of tahini. You can add yoghurt, dairy or soy if you want it to be fluffier. Top with paprika.

Falafel.
I'm still working on the perfect fart-free recipe. I like Tamsin Day-Lewis' recipe with chopped up chilli's.

Raitha and tzatziki are similar dishes. I put dried mint in both, I find it works better than fresh mint. Tzatziki: yoghurt, salt, dried mint, fine strips of cucumber, lemon juice. You can use greek yoghurt or if you are vegan, soy.

Warm broad beans with feta cheese (fresh/dried mint with a lemon juice and olive oil dressing) or warm broad beans and artichoke hearts are good meze style dishes, sort of like Greek tapas.

I also made a raw courgette and fennel salad which I liked. The trick is to finely slice both the fennel and courgettes so that they absorb the flavours of the dressing. My dressing this time contained ginger, lemon, vegetable oil, salt. I would have added some orange but didn't have any. 

Cutting edge

It's my birthday this week. So I bought myself a present. I've never had a decent knife.
If you've never been married, you never get to have a 'wedding list' which enables you to properly equip your kitchen. Hence my collection of charity shop bargains, French brocante finds, stuff my mum got rid of, things found in bins...
Good knives are very expensive. At John Lewis a Global vegetable knife is 70 odd quid. I don't really like the ultra modern design of Global knives (particularly the handles) but they are supposedly one of the best brands.
I decided to go for the 'Global' Santoku knife which cost £53.

"A blade of many talents, Santoku literally means "three good things", referring to its masterful handling of slicing, dicing and mincing."

Must hand wash it and dry it. NOT allowed to put it in the dishwasher.
I have magnetic wall strips to store my knives. This saves counter space and knife blocks are unhygenic.

Home restaurants

Horton at the stove in his Dennis the menace apron

Miso is traditionally served at the end of a Japanese meal...

Warm sake

Waiting for the second sitting...

The original images...taken on my iphone...

The Newington Green chattering classes...

No, I'm not panicking!

Candles/mushrooms.

The onion, resplendent in it's solitude. (It's no longer on the menu)

Lotus roots, glad I got a chance to try them.

Inspired by the 'paladares' or home restaurants in Cuba, Horton Jupiter opened his own home restaurant 'The Secret Ingredient' at his council flat in Newington Green, London. I must confess I have been thinking of doing this myself for about 5 years but it has taken Horton's initiative to give me the courage to do it. Watch this space!

It seems to be a trend. A group I know in London are doing the same thing this month, this time with a Marie Antoinette dress code. As the credit crunch looms, people cannot afford to eat out, so what better weapon to offset the cost of home entertaining than charging your friends to come over and eat? Your friends will bring their friends, so, into the bargain, you meet new people. Horton charged £10 for a meal of about 8 courses with sake wine.

His living room had been turned into a 2 table dining room, with red and white decor, candles and mood music. Horton is in the avant-garde band 'They came from the stars, I saw them...' so even his choice of music adds interest.

As I entered I saw Horton, perspiring in chef's whites, darting about in the kitchen, cupboards open, platters on every surface.

My fellow guests consisted of a lute maker who also refurbishes a Scottish castle; Ms Canal Explorer, always sparkling company; an anthropologist who investigates brands not tribes and two other delightful ladies who unfortunately I didn't get a chance to speak to, but knowing Horton, they had to be cutting edge arty types.

The food was Asian in theme: miso soup (delicious), cabbage wrap sushi, interesting pickles served in oyster shells, rice, lotus roots, new potatoes in a rich tamari sauce, nicely seasoned Chinese mushrooms. The strangest item was a solitary large onion, one each, apparently a Japanese speciality, but which looked like one of those pickled onions in a jar that you get in fish n' chip shops. (Horton asked for feedback on the food a few days later and had noted that the onion was left. Now how many restaurants do you get asking for your honest opinion?). Food was aplenty, we were all fair groaning with the amount we had eaten.

For dessert we made room for a strange waxy dessert, a mixture of salt and sweet bean paste. We then played by sticking our spoons onto the remainder of the mixture and lifting our plates with the spoons.

The dishes were stylishly presented on star, leaf or shell shaped dishes (we all had different plates) and we were served by Horton's fragrant girlfriend Rachel, as silent and smiling as a geisha.

At the end, Horton, slightly pale, came out and flopped on the sofa. We all applauded. It was a magical, unusual evening, very enjoyable and had that individual touch.

Unlike my personal experience in Cuba of a 'paladare' home restaurant. Maybe I was unlucky but the food was poorly cooked, (despite pretending that the husband had fished it himself that morning, the clearly frozen langoustine was dry and tasteless), the children stood around looking resentful and the whole meal was over in 40 minutes. It was as if they couldn't wait to get rid of us. Although I speak good Spanish, conversation was desultory and we had to argue about a bizarre surcharge at the end, which also spoiled the mood. Their goal in earning a few quid from tourists was a little too evident. But, I must say, in general Cuban food is pretty bland, even before the revolution.

Similarly there are 'mothers' restaurants in Bologna (link). Everybody knows that the best Italian food is at mama's table, this project enables you to eat with an ordinary Italian family, experiencing regional traditional rustic food. As a stranger guest you become a "companion" (companion is derived from cum panis, which means "with whom I break the bread"). The cook, the mama is called a 'cesarina'. Don't you just love that? Like a female Cesar, you are in her domain!

Homefood says "we have affectionately named "Cesarine", in praise of all the grandmothers, the carers, the aunts, that have enriched our childhoods and made them happy with tastes."

Lastly there are Jim Haynes, an American ex-patriate, Sunday suppers in Paris, just the thing for that city, which can be so hard to penetrate if you are an outsider. He has been doing this for over 30 years. In the next few months I am going to visit them all.

Bossy

Yesterday there were mutterings about my bossiness when in the kitchen. When I'm the chef. I tend to feel that when I'm cooking, it's my domain and everybody else can just fuck off. Sometimes I just don't have the sang-froid to be cool and polite when say, another member of staff chooses peak rush hour to come in and ask for food. I may well respond irritably. They complained that I

"act as if I'm in charge".

So sue me. 

Oh well. I wasn't put on this planet to be liked. 

Yesterday I cooked a bunch of stuff. But I do find English vegetables incredibly uninspiring. I did something interesting with tempeh which I slightly nicked off another blogger but cannot remember who. I marinated the tempeh in lemon zest and juice. Then made it into risotto by stir-frying the tempeh, rice, ginger and garlic in sesame and olive oil. Then added water. I topped it with roast fennel.

The dish was a success but tempeh is basically pretty disgusting. It tastes like bum hole. (Not that I've ever tasted bum hole. Coughs.)