Come dine with me: wild mushroom and herb linguine with goats cheese recipe

It’s rare that I post a recipe because I’m almost never at home, but being utterly skint at the moment, I’m trying to avoid eating out for dinner this month (work lunches don’t count, that’s someone else’s money). Thus I’m attempting to recapture my love of cooking. This means inviting people round, because I really can’t be bothered to cook for one. I loathe it: it uses just as many pans, takes just as much time, then you sit down and eat for a maximum of about eight minutes, listening to someone drone on about BP on the radio, then it’s all over and you still have to wash up. It’s like bad sex – boring, messy, unfulfilling and nobody ever says thank you afterwards. So last night B (my landlord) came over to regale me with tales of his own meaningless trysts, and I cooked him dinner. It wasn’t fancy or particularly imaginative, but I made it up, it worked like a dream and so I feel like I’ve discovered a new species. It’s the small things.

Put a massive lump of butter in a pan and melt on a low heat. Add a few cloves of chopped garlic and cook briefly, then add several handfuls of wild mushrooms – slice the big ones but keep the smaller ones whole – and a palm-full of fresh thyme leaves. Season and sweat until the mushrooms are becoming floppy, then remove from the pan and put aside. Using the same pan (mainly out of laziness, and the fact that since I moved house I find myself in possession of an extremely eccentric selection of kitchen equipment), boil and salt some water and cook some linguine. Drain well, put back in the pan, add the herby mushrooms, a palm-full or so of chopped fresh parsley and crumble in a thick slice of goat’s cheese (chevre blanc in this case). Mix together thoroughly then wolf, with a well-chilled bottle of cheap Beaujolais and a dear friend.

Oblivion in technicolour – the New York Sour

I recently discovered a new cocktail, the New York Sour, at Bar Chocolate on D’Arblay Street in Soho. For some reason, I drank more than one. It contains bourbon, lemon, sugar, egg white and, frighteningly, a red wine float. Having thought quite hard about it through the inevitable haze, I came to the conclusion that the New York Sour is a cocktail for someone who is pretending that they are drinking for fun, but is actually drinking to forget.

Goulash schmoulash – Aranyszarvas Budapest review

Aranyszarvas, 1013 Budapest, Szarvas tér. 1, Hungary

Really there is only one thing wrong with Aranyszarvas restaurant in Budapest and that is the fault of the European Parliament. Recently, a motion was passed to ban the chemicals routinely used every summer by the city council to kill off the monstrous mosquitoes which breed vociferously on the hot, humid banks of the Danube. This means that after a perfectly lovely evening on Aranyszarvas’s terrace, I write this lumpen and misshapen with huge, angry welts disfiguring my already not especially elegant legs. I look like a leper. Such are the lengths to which I will go for a good dinner.

Fortunately this was a very good dinner. Based on traditional Hungarian cooking, this restaurant drags an otherwise rather staid cuisine into the contemporary arena with huge success. I started with a duck liver cream with paprika caramel which was both sweet and smooth, with an almost citrusy freshness – you’d expect it to be horribly rich but it was light somehow, I suppose whipped with cream or perhaps with crème fraiche; almost like a mousse. Then followed a fabulous black pudding with chanterelles – three short lengths of succulent blood sausage, just the right quantity, and a scattering of lightly sautéed mushrooms. It was the side dishes that really sang though, since they so rarely do – clementine oil marinated courgette was a revelation. The courgette was still crunchy and the oil had a lighter, less overpowering flavour than you might expect, imparting just a hint of citrus and a bright freshness like that you find in cucumber. Pinched from other people: broccoli with anchovies and flaked almonds (genius, but then I think the addition of anchovies improves practically anything) and sautéed egg barley, which sounds revolting but was firm, nutty and incredibly moreish. We pondered about it for ages and came to the conclusion that they must cook up the barley first, drain it, then mix it with beaten egg and sauté it. I’d love to try it at home. I almost certainly won’t. The result if I’m wrong doesn’t really bear thinking about.

Pudding porn

A couple of weeks ago I ate the best dessert in the world. I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth, so usually at that stage in a meal I default to cheese, or if too full for cheese, to cursing and coffee. On my last visit to Bocca di Lupo (yes, again) however, I was sufficiently intrigued by the prospect of Bergamot and prosecco granit-a-laska to throw caution to the wind. It was DIVINE. Bergamot is the herb that you find, extremely diluted, in Earl Grey tea – here it’s neat and its aromatic bitterness is extraordinary. In a large martini glass they pile the bergamot granita, pour over a splash of Prosecco, then top it with a two-inch layer of very soft meringue, which is then browned gently. The combination on the spoon, of hard, icy, crunchy, bitter granita and soft, warm, smoky-sweet meringue is like having somebody slowly kiss you while gently clamping a cold shackle around your ankle. Slightly alarming, but with a flush of promise. Yep.

Gauthier menu (refers to previous post)

Re: the Gauthier review, this is our menu with wines – we ordered four courses, each choosing a different dish and wine, which we swapped religiously halfway through each.

First

Green English asparagus, spring Italian truffle and brown butter
Gaillac sec, Chateau Clement-Termes 2009

Herb and ricotta ravioli, sautéed broad beans and jus de roti
Vin de Savoie, Les Alpes, 2008

Second

Roasted native scallops, celery, brown butter and lemon
Chenin Blanc, Morgenhof Estate, South Africa 2008

Spring truffle risotto, chicken jus reduction and brown butter
St Chinian Blanc, Château Puisserguier, 2008

Third

Wild sea bass on its crunchy skin, langoustines, courgettes and spring onions, crustacean sauce
Lubéron Rosé, Château Val Joanis, 2009

Red mullet and baby squids, fennel and confit tomatoes, lime/parsley jus
Bourgogne Rouge, JM Pillot, 2007

Fourth

Sweetbread and morels, lettuce and veal jus
Gaillac Rouge, Cuvée des Drilles, Dom. D’Escausses, 2008

Fillet of Angus beef, bone marrow potatoes, mousserons and broad beans
Tamaya, Carménère Reserva, Limari, Chile 2008

Final bill: £72 per head (including £48 sommelier’s selection)

French, fancy, fffft – Gauthier Soho review

Gauthier, 21 Romilly Street, London W1D 5AF

Met SB this week for our irregular restaurant expedition. Last time we did Galvin La Chapelle and left drunk, poor and ecstatic. This time, we did Gauthier and left less so on every count. It’s run by Alexis Gauthier, formerly of Rousillon (whence also comes the sommelier). We threw them off kilter as soon as we arrived by refusing our table, which was by chance situated right next to my old boss and his wife, who writes for me. They’re perfectly charming, but I’m not going to sit a foot from them at dinner. That said, once we were seated safely on a different floor, it shouldn’t have taken quite that long even to get a menu. They have a hilariously French waiter hierarchy, so that the guys in white coats can bring you plates and take them away, but they can’t take your order or bring you a menu, and the guy who can, who wears a suit to denote his superiority, can’t bring you a wine list or take your wine order and has to fetch the sommelier. Eventually, after enduring a display of two different olive oils, two different butters and about 87 different breads, we managed to order (I’ll list the dishes alongside the wines – selected by the sommelier - for interest in a separate post).

Green asparagus with truffle and brown butter was perfect, very savoury and cooked with just enough bite. We were also intrigued by herb and ricotta ravioli with sautéed broad beans and ‘jus de roti’ (thin gravy, essentially). Unusually it was packed with thyme, which gave it a fabulous herby kick. For the second course my favourite was truffle risotto with chicken jus reduction (oh look! Gravy again) and brown butter. I could have shoveled in a pint of the stuff, it was so light and yet comforting, and it had real wow factor combined with the wine. S loved the roasted scallops, which were sweet and soft.

Gauthier was famed at Rousillon for his attention to vegetables, and lo, we were both slightly disappointed by the fish and meat courses, particularly the fish, to which he appeared to have paid only the scantest of heed. Sea bass with langoustines was fine in its component parts, but had a really weird effect in combination – the contrast of the firm bass and the very soft langoustine made them seem dry and soggy respectively. Red mullet and baby squids with fennel and confit tomatoes was ok, but you need to be a bit concerned when the bit that makes the most impression is the confit veg. Fillet of Angus beef was very good but it didn’t make my heart beat faster, though the accompanying bone marrow potatoes were great – little potato cases made to look like bones, stuffed with roasted marrow, and the mousserons mushrooms were delightful, though not as superb as the morels that accompanied the sweetbreads in our other dish. I admit I found these a bit much – I expected them to be delicate, like brains, but to me they tasted overwhelmingly like that weird smoked cheese you used to get tubes as a kid. It was accompanied by a lettuce and veal jus, apparently, which by that stage tasted to me exactly like all the other jussss (plural).

You know what, it was fun. It was fancy. The vegetables were perfect, which is rare. But ultimately, what with the complicated waiting dance and the fat bloke halfway across the restaurant talking endlessly and insistently to his silent companion about targets and markets non-stop for two and a half hours it was just a bit exhausting.

If Jim Henson did restaurant design – Crazy Bear review

Crazy Bear, 26-28 Whitfield Street, London W1T 2RG

Took a quick trip here for a business lunch today at the invitation of a contact, despite misgivings about the name. I can’t imagine why they thought it was a good idea to make a pan-Asian restaurant sound like a Canadian theme pub, but there you are. This restaurant is nothing if not incongruous, in every way. The menu is reasonably unpretentious (except for the tasting menus, which are just silly), it’s not especially authentic but is perfectly pleasant, with curries, noodles, ribs, duck rolls etc., the usual Thai-ish suspects cheerfully adapted for the Western palate.  It was quiet at lunchtime, possibly because it’s tricky to find – the clubby (and by clubby I mean gentleman’s, as opposed to Ibizan) wooden exterior doesn’t carry a sign, instead it is discreetly inlaid to the front step. But it’s worth the effort purely for the interior, which is a kind of insane Belle Epoch/Speakeasy blend of brass lamps, comfy swivel chairs and near-pitch darkness. The most gloriously bizarre thing about this place though, is the toilets. I still have no idea whether I was in the ladies because there was no sign on the door, indeed no indication was given that there was a door at all. I had to feel my way around pressing all the walls before I fell into a dark (again), completely mirrored room, lit only by a hideous purple light emanating from the trough sink, which started gushing as soon as I got close to it. Visiting the cubicle was disconcerting, partly because I made the mistake of looking up to find myself regarded by my own sombre reflection, and partly because I wasn’t  at all sure I’d be able to find my way out again. It was like being in Labyrinth, if Labyrinth had been entirely set in a futuristic Russian retro-theme-bar with no-one but a witheringly disdainful Eastern European bartender to help you rescue the baby. I was quite glad to get back to the office.

Home is where the hope is – Hadley House review

Hadley House, 27 High Street, Wanstead, London E11 2AA

My parents live in South Woodford and my sister E recently discovered a fantastic restaurant in nearby Wanstead, called, rather grandly, Hadley House (you can see beautiful pictures of the food on her friend’s blog, go to Ms Hedgehog’s comments on my Chicago restaurants post and follow the link, or there are a few less accomplished snaps below). If you knew SW, you’d understand why the unearthing of a decent restaurant is a bit of an event – there aren’t any, at least until now. We went there today for E’s birthday and weren’t disappointed (the service, incidentally, was impeccable). I was in an unusually healthy mood so I went for heritage tomato (those cute little yellow and red ones which are almost treacle-sweet), asparagus and herb salad, which had some sort of very smooth (by which I mean unvinagery), pale French dressing and was completely moreish, followed by spaghetti with sun-dried tomato tapenade, more asparagus, shaved black truffles and truffle oil. It wasn’t a combination I would have considered, but it worked, weirdly, and was a mercifully reasonable size. Our parents both went for pan-fried chicken livers on toast to start, which was by all accounts meltingly soft, and E had a fantastic chunky, clear minestrone, with wafer-thin slivers of parmesan. She and my Dad had roasts – pork loin and beef respectively, which was very good (the pork crackling got an especially favourable review but she ate all of it herself, the ratbag), but gave rise to the observation that you can’t get crispy roast potatoes in restaurants. It’s true, I’ve never had them. I can’t think how it would be physically possible to do if you’re churning out roasts for a full sitting. If anyone can enlighten me as to a place where it’s done (and consistently) I’d be grateful. That said, I’d heartily recommend this place to anyone in and around that part of North East London, it’s worth the trip.

Pictures: heritage tomato salad; pan-fried chicken livers on toast; minestrone; a half-eaten spaghetti which I only just remembered to snap.

Churrascaryee-ha – BBQ the Brazilian way

A quick BBQ recipe, having been to one last weekend at the house of two friends, where our friend W stole the show with his modest Tupperware of marinated pork fillet. Why I haven’t thought of doing this before I have no idea, but inspired by the Churrascarias of Brazil (BBQ restaurants), he cut it into small, bite-sized slices about the width of a finger and just handed it round as each batch came off the grill, rather than the big chunks of meat you normally do for BBQs. A few seconds on each side and it was done – melting and succulent. This is his glorious marinade recipe: 

2 tbsp fish sauce

juice half a lime

1 tbsp toasted sesame oil

2 stalks lemongrass

2 cloves garlic

1 tsp sugar (palm sugar for pref, or plain caster)

Mix, marinade for at least a good hour, preferably more. Slap on BBQ for a few seconds on either side. Eat before anyone else realises you’re cooking it.

Pie in the skyscrapers – Chicago restaurants

I’m recently back from a trip the US to visit a friend who was directing a play at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (if you happen to be in Chicago before June 6, try to catch the Taming of the Shrew, it’s very funny and deals with the mind bogglingly unacceptable subject matter in a witty and ingenious way. Anyway.) I started in Boston, where I had a not especially accomplished but serviceable clam chowder (clams a bit chewy, potato lumps a bit huge, but thick and warming and enormous) at Stephanie’s on Newbury Street. The location, on the main fancy shopping drag with table outside affords priceless people watching, and is better than the food, which is ok but doesn’t quite get where it’s trying to go. In Coda, in the South End, I also tried a surprising little starter of steamed parsnips with dried cranberries, pine nuts, parsley and sultanas. It sounds like a side, but there’s no real reason why that should be the case. It would also work, I think, with the addition of squash, and of course, chopped bacon (as is usually the case with practically anything).

Then, Chicago, to which I had never been and was enchanted. Sitting on the top of the Hancock Tower, you get the most superb view, which really brings home what an architectural marvel the city is, and how modern it was when it was built. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that you would build skyscrapers in the Mid-West, bar a simple determination to make your city the most modern in the world. There’s no need to go up, if the Mid-West has anything at all to offer, it’s space. It is the flattest thing I have ever seen. It stretches forever into the distance without so much as a bump to interrupt its ballerina-chested flatness. Extraordinary.

These are some of the places I ate on my wanderings around this beautiful blip on the landscape. There’s one other to add, the name of which I failed to write down, but will repost later. 

Russian Tea Time, East Adam Street, Chicago

You can’t miss this place, as you pass the old-fashioned porch awning, you’re regaled with vaguely Eastern European music piped from within. The menu is huge, but if you’re familiar with Eastern European food it’s pretty clear that a lot of it is fairly similar.

They bring you hot tea, which has a faint raspberry aroma, and I ate a cup of borscht, followed by pelmeni, Russian dumplings. The borscht wasn’t the usual clear broth with ravioli-style dumplings that I’m used to from Polish restaurants in London, this was a busier proposition altogether – delightfully oily (with that weird orange rim you used to get on school spaghetti Bolognese) and full of chunks of purple-stained potato and cabbage. It was sweet, sour and warming. Borscht always makes you feel as if you’re doing yourself good.

I was a bit taken aback by the pelmeni – they came naked and unadorned, just a circular plate with twelve pale little parcels arranged rather forlornly around the edge and in the middle had been gravely piled a small mound of grated carrot. This was delightful – aromatic with cumin and coriander seed, sweet and moreish. There wasn’t quite enough of it, and rather too many dumplings. Pelmeni consist of a thick dumpling pastry, rather like a very heavy fresh pasta, filled with minced meat, onion and parsley, and served with sour cream and garlic yoghurt on the side. Simple but effective, rather like a punch in the head. I was completely defeated after six. Though it was very tasty I was quite relieved that I didn’t sample the yoghurt – my onion mouth lasted quite long enough (like, all afternoon) without the enhancement of raw garlic. The urge to fall asleep then and there was almost overwhelming, and I didn’t even sample any of the vodkas, though it wasn’t an especially exciting selection, fairly standard. They do ‘flights’, so if flavoured vodka is your thing then you can happily anaesthetise yourself on all sorts of concoctions, like the four adults at the next table who were merrily handing them round under the suspicious gazes of two rather picky small children.

Café Iberico, North LaSalle Street at West Superior, Chicago

I came early (well, early for a European, just before 7pm) but this well-known place was already filling up with early-onset dates and groups of girls. Brilliantly awful Spanish language soaps on the TV (silent) and boisterous, vaguely Spanish music complete the slightly touristy but good natured atmosphere. You can sit in the massive main restaurant (it’s evidently good for groups later on in the evening, the enormous sangria jugs lined up above the bar must make the place go with something of a swing) but as I was alone I sat at the bar to people watch, and was surrounded by pairs of women. Tapas is perfect for women because you can order a ‘small’ number of ‘small’ plates and then gorge while pretending that you’re having a light meal. Also, there’s no chance that your treacherous companion will do that awful thing of suddenly ‘just’ ordering a salad, making you feel both greedy and aggrieved, an unsisterly act of aggression that women inflict on each other all the time out of competitive instinct.

I had the chorizo plate, a selection of chunks of sausage at varying stages of incineration, some slightly weird but most of which were fine, and included a very nice black pudding, which was a bonus. In the spirit of enquiry I also tried the goat’s cheese – all over the US I see this dish:  baked, oddly tasteless goat’s cheese in a puddle of overcooked, oversweet tinned tomatoes, occasionally utterly unimproved by a lacklustre scattering of dried oregano. Don’t order it, it’s ghastly, and the fried garlicky bread I got with it on this occasion was a weird green colour and a bit chewy, as if it had been microwaved before frying. What made this all utterly worthwhile however, were the prawns (which the Americans call shrimp). Hot, fresh, juicy and bursting with flavour, they were perfectly cooked with tons of browned chopped garlic, chilli flakes and parsley. They’re divine and for the hungry shopper, definitely worth the short walk from the main shopping drag North Michigan Avenue (known at this point as the Magnificent Mile. There are various other ‘honorific’ street names in Chicago, denoted by slightly weedy brown signs, but none of them except the Mag Mile have really stuck, ‘Today’s Chicago Woman Way’ being a good example of why).

Earwax Café, North Michigan at Damen (Wicker Park), Chicago

I really liked this place. It has a fun and colourful, somewhat shonky interior (the door is the thing that says ‘animal exhibit’ on it. It took me a little while and some skulking, peering through the window of Myopic Books across the road to figure that out). It’s a big room but is divided up with individual little wooden booths placed in a row down the middle, which seat maybe four each, as well as tables at the sides. The booths are tall and wooden, like pews and decorated with cut-outs of fleurs-de-lis and four-leafed clover shapes. The interior theme is sort of circus/freakshow – hand-painted banners hang on the wall with pictures of knife throwers and an intriguing attraction called Ostrich boy. The staff, two men when I visited, were extremely amiable, the music hip. This is clearly a genuinely hipster place but without the annoying addition, at least at 11 in the morning on a rainy Thursday, of too many hipsters. I had a fabulous espresso milkshake – 2 shots blended with icecream and topped, rather unnecessarily it has to be said, with whipped cream. Bad for the heart yes, but good for the soul. I’ve probably said that before. I also had an unusually perfect, hot, fresh 3 egg omelette with spinach and feta – the filling was properly mixed through and generous. I’ve generally found before that Americans don’t really understand the delicacy of omelettes, tending to tread rather heavily with eggs, so this was a very pleasant surprise. Rye toast with fennel seeds was ok, though I always expect something different from rye, having a more Germanic sensibility when it comes to bread, and you never quite get enough butter to start out (if, like me, you tend to load up your toast with trowel). They usually serve it with home fries (chipped potatoes, cooked not quite enough to be crispy, usually), but for some reason I never fancy potatoes at breakfast, so I swapped them for a fruit cup of melon, grapes and strawberry, which looked a bit dusty but was actually perfectly nice.

Wicker Park is a very cool little area with a passing resemblance to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury – the road is peppered with cute little boutiques and just across the street from where I sat at my window table I could see a shop touting ‘Mystic Tarot’ and ‘Energy Stone’s’ (freedom for apostrophes!) next to a venue advertising a gig by a band named Trampled by Turtles.

Crofton on Wells, N. Wells St, Chicago

Ok sorry about this but I didn’t take notes here because there was a lot of serious discussion going on about the theatre production (it was first preview) and it didn’t feel entirely appropriate, but this is absolutely one to visit. It isn’t cheap, by a long way (though they do have a prix-fixe for about $38 which is pretty good value) but it’s a very nice fine dining experience. I might repost about this one when I’ve dug out the menu, which I pinched.