Cooking tips and wonderful flavour combinations

baboon2004 said:

Yeah, I'm two minutes from Smithfields and two minutes from Clerkenwell Road, which is the same eventually as Theobald's Rd I think...

May make a pilgrimage there next week - any other cuts you recommend picking up while I'mt here?

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Yeah clerkenwell runs down into theobolds.

they have nice sausages there and they often have some sort of real cheap deal - sometimes it'll be trays and trays of french corn fed chicken for 3£ (!) which are well nice, the stuff is sometimes pretty near sell-by date but its fine to use and freeze. or one time they had massive packs of smoked salmon for a fiver, and once big bits of nice cheddar for a quid, so its quite random. they have so many things in the window.

i got beef shin there to make a stew with, was quite nice. pork belly always a fave with me for slow roasting on sundays...

WEEN'S SUNDAY SAUCE

lets do this!

Looks good but seems a bit excessive chucking in pork chops and sausage as well as the meat balls...

viktorvaughn said:

Looks good but seems a bit excessive chucking in pork chops and sausage as well as the meat balls...

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it turns out my housemate has actually tried this dish after his brother went to the effort of cooking this gigantic feast. he said he found the layers of fat from all the meat to be pretty unbearable. i plan to at least one day try it myself though.

beetroot and potato smash with dill, parsley, lemon juice, salt pepper, splash of milk, crabmeat, mix them together then bake in the oven.

So where are the best places to get really nice fresh fish / shellfish in London?

And unrelatedly, I'm developing a grudging admiration for packets ready-to-fry udon noodles. I'm sure it's not as good as making them yourself but they do make for some rather nice stir-fries with very little effort.

J Sheekeys - not cheap but totally wonderful service, lovely bar. proper, old fashioned restaurant.

I was thinking fishmongers rather than restaurants...

Thanks, though...

Ah.

Steve Hatt.

http://www.bview.co.uk/r/00012490

If you read the recipes in newspaper supplements they often talk about going to the butchers and asking for exotic cuts of meat, and it just gets me thinking- do these boutique butcher shops actually exist outside of posh areas of London? Real butchers in my city are a lot more basic, for example I've not seen Fillet steak in a high street butchers, just sirloin, and yet fillet is readily availiable in big supermarkets and is presumably popular. The idea of going in and asking whether their meat is sourced from the Scottish highlands (as a paper would suggest) just seems ludicrous in these circumstances.

However, if the shop is ordering in a cow carcass, surely they must have access to dozens of cuts that are not on display. I've reservations about sounding like a character in the League of Gentleman, but presumably there's all sorts of stuff 'under the counter', even in the most no-frills of butchers. This seems like a strange way to do business.

i've often wondered about what Owen said too.

Yeah, they do sometimes. The village butcher from where I grew up recently retired and someone took over the business selling a really good range of stuff at fairly sensible prices. And you can get all sorts of interesting cuts at farmers markets and the like.

I guess that food writers could also argue that they're trying to push things forward and encouraging people to seek out the places that will sell something like fillet steak or beef skirt or whatever. For comparison, noone around here whinges that music bloggers who write about tunes that aren't available in your local HMV...

Having said that, the idea of trying to 'source' your food always gets on my tits a bit, I'd far rather just buy it from someone who I trust to only stock stuff that's good than pretend to be a world expert on livestock rearing based on having read a Nigel Slater column in a paper. (This applies doubly to restaurant menus - FFS all I want to know is that your chef knows what he's about and as picked the best ingredients he can get hold of, I don't really need to know the name of the cow before I make a decision.) Although I guess the basic point of talking to the people who sell you your food about what they're selling and finding people who give enough of a shit about what they're selling to have something interesting to say about it isn't a bad one.

trust english people to get hold of some sumac and then just use it to garnish cheese on toast.

Slothrop said:

I was thinking fishmongers rather than restaurants...

Thanks, though...

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There's lots of Jewish fishmongers up around Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill - cheaper than places like Steve Hatt. Lots of the Bengai shops around Brick Lane do frozen fish as well. I brought some Red Snapper in Stokey a few days ago - roasted it with jerk seasoning - absolutely lovely, really meaty texture.

DannyL said:

There's lots of Jewish fishmongers up around Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill - cheaper than places like Steve Hatt. Lots of the Bengai shops around Brick Lane do frozen fish as well. I brought some Red Snapper in Stokey a few days ago - roasted it with jerk seasoning - absolutely lovely, really meaty texture.

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walkerswood jerk seasoning is sent by god to make food happy. walkerswood or dunns river or do you make your own dannyl ?

owengriffiths said:

However, if the shop is ordering in a cow carcass, surely they must have access to dozens of cuts that are not on display. I've reservations about sounding like a character in the League of Gentleman, but presumably there's all sorts of stuff 'under the counter', even in the most no-frills of butchers. This seems like a strange way to do business.

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Yes of course. Especially when there are any Chinese or Italians living near to your butcher. They will buy all sorts of cartilage, the stuff that the majority of the ‘great British public’ would be repulsed by.

Bang Diddley said:

walkerswood jerk seasoning is sent by god to make food happy. walkerswood or dunns river or do you make your own dannyl ?

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As I was just cooking for me I used Dunn's River. Made my own in the past when trying to impress though. I might as well post the recipe:

Thyme
Cinnamon sticks
Fresh Coriander
Coriander seeds
Pepercorns
Nutmeg
Pimento seeds
Garlic
Scotch bonnet
Ginger
Lime zest and juice

Mash it all up in a blender with some olive oil and it is super tasty! I'm sure you can figure out quantities, smear on some chicken a couple of hours before and you're good to go! The key two flavours that mark out jerk seasoning seem to be thyme and pimento seeds (also known as allspice).

When I've cooked this for others, I've served it with a salad with cashew nuts and a honey/sherry vinegar dressing and plaintain. I put a bit of paprika and salt with the plaintain which brings out the flavour.

I'm making myself hungry....

I'm on quite a walnut oil flex at the moment. With pretty much anything - stir fries, pasta, dressing salads...