Gin and Crumpets

Green & Blue Wines, East Dulwich

ginandcrumpets — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:12:40 +0000

Table of wines at Green & Blue

I’ll begin this post with an apology for the awful picture at the top of it, and the total lack of pictures hereafter. I did take pictures with my rackety, obsolete iPhone, but they’re mostly blurred, grainy and unusable – something I’m putting down to the romantic low lighting in Green & Blue Wines and not my limited photographic skills or commitment to trying all the natural wines I could.

Green & Blue is an off licence, bar and now restaurant has been brightening Lordship Lane’s parade of boutique baby gift shops and greengrocers since 2005. I was introduced to it by Sister Number 1, who still talks fondly of the sherry tasting she went to several years ago, when her enslavement to fortified Spanish wine was completed. I’ve been to several of Green & Blue’s informal but informative wine tastings over the years, usually followed by a dash for table in the bar and some plates of ham.

But Green & Blue now have a proper kitchen, a menu influenced by Ed Wilson, Terroirs‘ executive chef, and their own chef Simon Barnett, whose way with pork belly makes me want to worship him (more on that later). A couple of week’s ago Green & Blue’s owner Kate Thal invited me to come along and try some of their wines.

I’m forever drinking bubbles

We began the evening with what Kate admitted was a cheap shot, albeit a very expensive cheap shot: a comparison between Moët (£30.72 in Asda) and Larmandier-Bernier Terre de Vertus 1er Cru champagne (£46). Moët produce 26 million bottles of champagne a year, Larmandier-Bernier ferment a more modest 130,000.

The difference between the two champagnes was obvious as soon as I lifted the glasses to my face. The Möet was flat and muted, while the Larmandier–Bernier was effervescent and floral. It sparkled in the glass long after the Möet had given up the effort.

Made entirely from chardonnay grapes and without any dosage (the dribble of sweet wine / sugar added to champagne after the second fermentation), Larmandier-Bernier has entirely spoilt cheap, mass produced champagnes for me. I may finally have to treat champagne as an actual luxury.

(You make me feel like) a natural wine drinker

Having made her point regarding the wonderfulness of wines crafted by small producers, Kate introduced us to various bottles from the Green & Blue shelves. First we compared two sancerres. The 2007 Gerard Boulay Sancerre (£19.00) is made in a small vineyard in the Loire using the natural yeasts kicking about in the atmosphere to ferment it and has minimal amounts of sulphur added. The 2007 Sebastien Riffault Akmenine Sancerre Blanc (£19.00) is made on an even tinier Loire vineyard with natural yeasts, has no sulphur added and isn’t filtered, giving the wine what’s euphemistically described as a ‘rustic’, cloudy appearance.

The two wines showcased the different qualities of sauvignon blanc. The Gerard Boulay was clean, fresh and gooseberryish, while the Sebastien Riffault was grassy, herbal and astringent. The Riffault was the runaway winner of the wines that night – the bottle we all came back to and the one that was lavished with praise on Twitter afterwards.

It’s an unusual, captivating wine and the one that Kate said needs a special warning before it’s sold. Confused customers have bought bottles back because it doesn’t taste like a sancerre and is, well, cloudy. So now all Green & Blue staff are primed to alert customers to its strange deliciousness before the bottle is wrapped and sold.

Food, glorious food

After the whites we moved onto Spanish riojas: a 2005 Palacios Remondo Crianza (£13.50) and a 2008 Olivier Riviere Rioja Rayas Uva (£14.50). Both of these wines were wonderful – the warm breath of Spanish spice and sticky autumnal orchards wafting from the glasses. But our hearts had been won by the Riffault, so they didn’t get as much love as perhaps they should’ve.

What wasn’t eclipsed by the Sancerre was the food. We began the night with little bowls of a Spanish bean stew that was rich with porcine flavours. The pig theme continued with a beautiful slice of pork belly, the crackly-crisp surface giving way to melting, fat-streaked meat. For dessert there was a chocolate pot that I briefly thought would defeat me, but fortified by a mouthful of rioja (the reds went remarkably well with the cocoa-heavy pud), I made my way to the bottom of the bowl.

Green & Blue has always been a treat of a place and with its new kitchen up and running, it’s now that bit closer to being a slice of paradise in East Dulwich. For a write-up that features some beautiful pictures of the food and a significantly more informed review of the wine, go to the wine rambler. And for a write up that goes into more of Green & Blue’s new menu, go to Eats Dulwich.

Thank you to Green & Blue Wines for hosting the evening.

The Dish & The Spoon, Nunhead

ginandcrumpets — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:36:47 +0000

The Dish & The Spoon

So, the food blogging shoe is finally on the other foot. After a couple of years of offering my opinion on other people’s cafes, restaurants and bars I’m finally pulling on some whites and going to work in a kitchen. The cafe I’ll be pouring my newly minted chef’s heart into is The Dish & The Spoon in Nunhead (61 Cheltenham Road, to be precise).

The Dish’s arrival in South East London is down to Shona Chambers (@sathlondonshona on Twitter), who found herself in need of a family-friendly cafe after the birth of her son. Being a go-getting sort of a woman, she decided to open one up herself rather than wait around for someone else to supply her quality caffeine and cake needs.

The Dish is going to open in May. I’m not going to jinx the building works by giving a specific date. Let’s just say May and hope we don’t suddenly unearth a site of archeological or ecological importance while refitting the kitchen. We’ll be open Tuesday to Sunday, 7.30am to 4pm most days (later opening and closing on the weekends, full details on The Dish’s Facebook page).

Shona takes her hot beverages very seriously, so the coffee will be from South London coffee fanatics Dark Fluid and the tea from Tregothnan. The food is to going to roam happily through Britain’s lush fields, orchards, dairies and farms and then skip abroad to roll around in lovely spices. Expect munchy salads, aromatic soups, tarts in buttery pastry cases and sandwiches themed around ham and cheese (ham and cheese is the king of sandwiches). And obviously there will be cake. Lots and lots of lovely cake.

I’ll blog more as we get closer to opening, but you can get regular updates from The Dish’s Twitter feed @DishSE15. Keep an eye my Twitter feed @ginandcrumpets for pics of The Dish’s, er, dishes as I finesse them before opening day.

Easter baking round-up

ginandcrumpets — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:34:26 +0000

Hot cross buns

We are days away from a glorious, four-day long bank holiday and how else would you want to spend it than in your kitchen baking things? I mean, realistically, the sun isn’t going to shine, so you may as well get the flour, sugar and butter in and plan to snuggle up next to your oven, turning out cake after bun after cake.

Good Friday clearly requires hot cross buns, warm from the oven and dripping with butter. For a classic hot cross bun recipe, stuffed with raisins, mixed spice and ginger, click here. If you are a slave to novelty, then these chocolate and orange hot cross buns could be the semi-religious yeasted bread product your heart is longing for.

And if you’d like something new, but can’t countenance anything as sacrilegious as chocolate in a hot cross bun, try a hot cross bun loaf. All the usual flavours and ingredients, but in a modern loaf format. Use it as the base for cheese on toast. Blindingly good, I promise you.

Chocolate Easter nests

Once Good Friday has been toasted and buttered, there’s the problem of Easter itself. You have two traditional cake choices: the chocolate Easter nest or the Simnel cake (if you haven’t already made one for Mothering Sunday. Or if you have and just want another one).

The benefit of chocolate Eaater nests is that you can use the excuse of keeping The Children entertained as a reason to make them. Even if you don’t have any. Click here for an easy recipe. If you’d prefer to load up on marzipan and dried fruit, click here for the Simnel cake recipe. Happy Easter baking.

Simnel cake

Chocolate and orange hot cross buns for Aol Lifestyle

ginandcrumpets — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:03:45 +0000

Chocolate and orange hot cross buns

I’m getting in early with some Easter baking over at Aol this week, and I’ve come up with something for that oft forgotten minority: people who don’t like dried fruit. How they suffer during traditional British festivals, like Christmas and Easter, when sacks of currants, sultanas and raisins get dragged out of the cupboard and converted into cakes and buns so heavy they could be fired from canons in a particularly retro war.

So, this year’s hot cross buns contain no with dehydrated vine fruit at all. Instead, they are stuck with chunks of dark chocolate, along with a good whack of cinnamon, ginger and orange zest to give them that all important medieval Good Friday flavour. Click here for Chocolate and orange hot cross buns recipe.

Hujra, Mitcham Road, Tooting

ginandcrumpets — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 07:44:40 +0000

Of all the dark gifts the fall of the Roman Empire gave us, the dining table and chairs is one of the worst. Reclining on a couch, dipping dormice in honey and honing your rhetoric, seems a much more pleasurable way of eating than sitting spine straight at a table wondering when your neighbour is going to pass the mead.

Giant naan bread

But the Barbarian hordes would insist on being uncomfortable. Their communal benches and boards started us plodding towards chilled dining rooms with tables laid like etiquette chessboards. I’ve always despaired of sitting upright at dinner. My energy reserves are usually low and really, they need to be focused at digestion rather than deportment.

So you can imagine my delight when I walked into Hujra and saw one wall of the room lined with carpeted, curtained booths. I could eat my dinner lounging on a double layer of rugs, weary limbs supported by scatter cushions. Joy unconfined! Shoes kicked off, I installed myself alongside Sister Number 1 and the Kung Fu Sisters and settled down to an evening of ordering meat by the kilo.

Hujra special chicken wings

The Kung Fu Sisters are Tooting residents and Hujra is one of their local discoveries. It serves Pakhtoon (Pashtun) food from the north west of Pakistan. I know next to nothing about Pakhtoon food so I submitted myself to the Sisters’ guidance, insisting only on ordering chicken wings because I can’t resist an opportunity to gnaw on tiny bones.

The chicken wings were, in fact, a plate of the meaty mini drummers, which I found perversely disappointing as it’s sucking flesh from between the ulna and radius that’s my particular delight. But I realise not everyone views the feeble forearm of a flightless bird as the prime cut, and the chunky upper arms provided enough warmly spiced flesh and bone to let me do my best Henry VIII impression.

Chappli kebabs

If chicken wings had been my must-have, the chappli kebabs were the Sisters’ mustn’t-miss. The three huge rounds of minced lamb were aromatically flavoured with a mix of spices, including a lingering hit of cinnamon that gave them a fascinating savoury-sweet moreishness. It was with extreme politeness that we divided up the meat, everyone hoping for one more mouthful than their neighbour.

Hujra serves several of its main course dishes by the kilo or half kilo. Seeking variety, like the greedy London thrill seekers we are, we ordered a half kilo of Hujra dam pukht, a half kilo of chicken karahi and the seasonal vegetable of the day as a nod towards balancing our diet.

Hujra dam pukht

Hujra’s Facebook page tells me that dam pukht is a type of slow oven cooking that emerged in India and Pakistan 200 years ago. Meat, vegetables and herbs steam together is a sealed pot, producing a stew of succulent lamb that slips willingly from its bones while the potatoes and carrots soak up the herby, coriander-thick juices.

The chicken karahi was, in theory, made with boneless chunks of chicken but happily mouth-sized joints made their way into the pan alongside pieces of easy-to-chew chicken breast. The dish, spiked with tomatoes, green chilli and garlic had a more familiar flavour than garden astringency of the dam pukht and, importantly, plenty of sauce for us to dip our giant naan bread in.

Chicken karahi

Naans in Hujra come in baby blanket size, hanging from a metal spike. An airy bread with just a touch of butter, it made an excellent sponge for soaking up the karahi sauce and also a sturdy scoop for the vegetables of the day. They turned out to be mostly potato and carrot, with a scattering of tomato and green chilli.

I would describe them as the only disappointing bit of the meal – not because they weren’t tasty, but because potatoes, carrots, tomatoes and green chilli were already well represented in every other dish. But they were served in a fancy black cauldron, so I forgave them their ubiquity.

Qahwa – traditional green tea

The bill for this feast of meat, washed down by endless teapots and cardamom-heavy tea, came to £54, not including service. Having spent no time patrolling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, I can’t tell you whether Hujra is serving authentic Pakhtoon cuisine just like mother used to make.

But I don’t really care about authenticity. Only neurotic bores worry about whether the food they’re eating is culturally correct before concerning themselves with whether it’s delicious or not. I liked what I ate – especially the chappli kebabs and dam pukht. The staff were friendly, helpful and didn’t try to rush us as we nibbled our way through the naan, and I got to eat slumped on soft furnishing. I can’t imagine a meal better than that.

Rhubarb, almond and polenta traybake for Aol Lifestyle

ginandcrumpets — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:17:45 +0000

Rhubarb, almond and polenta raybake

Calling all gluten-free bakers. Take yourself over to Aol Lifestyle right now because there is a gluten-free traybake recipe there than I am absolutely certain you will want to make. 100% sure.

Made with that magic combination of ground almonds and polenta and topped with my fruit/vegetable of choice at the moment, rhubarb, it is a totally awesome cake that’s good warm for pudding or eaten cold, slice by slice, over the course of a few days (OK, I admit, over the course of a day). Click here for the recipe.

Nunhead American Radio

ginandcrumpets — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:06:49 +0000

Last Monday I spent half an hour talking nonsense about Nunhead, The Contented Calf Cookbook and stapling posters to trees on the Nunhead American Radio Show with Lewis Schaffer on resonance fm. If, for some strange reason, you weren’t sat at home listening to resonance and missed my stella turn, you can listen the podcast and my wildly varying accent here.

Eating pizza with the Pizza Pilgrims

ginandcrumpets — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 09:25:49 +0000

The Pizza Pilgrims' van photographed by The Faerietale Foodie

When I moved to London, back in the days when everything was powered by steam engines and there was a cheeky cockney urchin pickpocketing plutocrats on every corner, street food was limited to late night hot dog carts selling tubes of greasy, gristly sausage to drunks. They were one of the hazards new arrivals to the Capital learned to negotiate, along with the Northern Line and the packs of feral city traders that stalked the City’s champagne bars.

Since then, there has been something of a renaissance, and no market is complete without a bánh mè stall and someone selling foam-fluffed cups of coffee. The latest arrivals to this scene are The Pizza Pilgrims. Run by brothers Thom and James Elliot, they bake Neapolitan-style pizzas in the back of their van and sell them at Berwick Street market.

Cheese tasting plate photographed by The Faerietale Foodie

A few weeks ago I was invited to a pizza preview at The Endurance. First stop was the pub’s back yard and a chance to admire the Pizza Pilgrim’s van – an ape van into which they have bravely installed a pizza oven that gets up to 500°C.

Back inside, we started the evening with a tasting plate of pizza constituents. A fluffy baked doughball demonstrated the ovens’ capacity to turn out crisp-crusted bread, while the selection of cheeses meant we could ponder which one we’d prefer on our pizza.

There was an Italian mozzarella that, on the plate, seemed sweetly bland compared to the bouncy punch of the Laverstoke Park mozzarella. Fior de Latte (cows’ milk mozzarella) was delicately creamy if a bit boring, while saline Laverstoke Park ricotta and smoked scamorza kept our taste buds interested. A smear of nduja, the spicy sausage of the moment, and a shot of perky tomato sauce had us anticipating the main event – the pizzas.

Margherita Pizza photographed by The Faerietale Foodie

First up were margherita pizzas (the best kind of pizza there is). The British mozzarella, so interesting uncooked, was lumpen and squeaky on the pizza, while the Italian mozzarella was transformed into a layer of silken loveliness. But it was the Fior de latte that triumphed. Robust without being overpowering, rich without being greasy, it was the perfect complement to the tomato sauce and chewy dough.

A series of delicious pizzas followed the margheritas. Pizzas topped with nduja and fennel salami, a marinara that showcased the base and sauce without the lovely distraction of the cheese, rolled strombolis with crisp shells and soft, sauce-soaked interiors and finally, to the greedy delight of the carb-loaded diners, a Nutella and ricotta calzone. There is always room for desert, especially when it involves Nutella.

Nutella and ricotta calzone photographed by The Faerietale Foodie

Chockfull of bread and cheese, I rolled into the night. The following week I was back in Berwick Street for The Pizza Pilgrims’ first day of trading. A margherita folded in half and wrapped in a sheet of greaseproof paper was borne back to my office and eaten as slowly as I could bear to, mostly to prolong my colleagues’ envy as they contemplated first their sandwich and then my excellent, excellent pizza.

Pizzas start at £5 and you’ll find the Pizza Pilgrims on Berwick Street during the day (no nighttime pizzas yet). My thanks to Thom and James for a wonderful evening, and a very good lunch (I paid for that one, so the pizzas must be good to make me part with actual money) and also to The Faerietale Foodie who kindly let me use her photographs after my phone with all my pictures was stolen.