Time for a coffee

May 12, 2011

Making Pancakes

Well it was pancake time again for breakfast on Sunday, one advantage I guess of getting woken up early.

I make a simple batter of flour, eggs and milk, with a spoonful of caster sugar and some vanilla extract; and then cook using a hot pan. I really should measure the batter, but I find that experience allows me to “guess: the flour and milk. The key is the ensure that the mixture is smooth and coats the back of a spoon.

I have one just for pancakes, well I sometimes use it for omelettes or when I need an extra frying pan… shouldn’t really, but like any good cook, I need more pans. As it is getting old, though non-stick I do use some sunflower oil. I use a pastry style brush, it was a free gift from Jack Daniels and was designed to baste barbecue food with a Jack Daniels sauce. It therefore works really well in brushing oil onto the pancake pan.

If I am making large pancakes then I have the pan hotter than if I am making small ones, partly as the smaller ones are thicker, whilst the larger ones are made by swirling the mixture across the pan (and therefore are thinner).

I serve them with proper maple syrup. Personally I can’t stand the maple flavoured syrups you can buy, and will only buy the proper stuff. Yes it is expensive, but I would rather have the good stuff now and again rather than the horrible stuff all the time.

May 11, 2011

Grazing at the Piano

Down on the canalside in Birmingham there are quite a few places to go and eat, all (I think) are chains. On this occasion on the recommendation of the friend I was with, we ventured into the Pitcher & Piano. I have never been there before, seeing it more as a bar rather than a place to go and eat.

Even though it was an early May evening it was nice enough to sit outside. I often prefer not to sit outside, not that I don’t like sitting outside, on the contrary I really like it. However since the 2007 smoking ban, most outside eating areas have become the place where the smokers go, and sorry smoking and eating is something that doesn’t work for me. However it wasn’t too bad and no smokers were close. So we decided to eat outside. Considering this was early May, I was impressed by how pleasant it was. Usually it can be quite cold in May in the evening, but we were lucky the weather was nice.

Persuing the menu there were some nice things, I was initially tempted by a burger, but after some deliberation I went with the grazing menu. Lots of nice things, but even with all that choice I went with two things I like, things that I cook at home, things I seem to always order; I went with chicken wings and calamari, to go with it a side order of skinny fries.

The Cajun chicken wings were whole wings and to be honest were some of the best wings I have had out to eat for a long time. Not over-cooked, tender and with the right amount of spice, well maybe a little too spicy, but the sour cream served with them helped to cool the heat.

The calamari in batter was in strips, very similar to calamari I have had as Pizza Express.

This though was better, a nice crispy batter with tender squid. Really nice.

I also enjoyed the skinny fries.

Overall I enjoyed my grazing experience.

May 9, 2011

Roast Pork Belly with Roasted Vegetables

Crispy crackling, tender pork and tasty roasted veg; yes it was a great lunch and delicious.

The pork was slow roasted in the oven, this I have found is always the best way to cook pork belly, it also renders out a lot of the fat, so ensuring that the final outcome is tender pork with minimal extra fat. The flavour is intense and compared to something like pork fillet, which can be cooked quickly, it does not compare to the flavour of roasted pork belly.

About 30-40 minutes before the end of cooking time, I added some onions, carrots and parsnips to the roasting tray. Twenty minutes later I added apple and mushrooms. These cook wonderfully with the pork and have a really intense flavour.

I served the pork alongside the roasted veg, roasted King Edward potatoes (they worked well) and some carrots and steamed broccoli.

May 5, 2011

Is this self-catering?

Generally when we go on holiday we go self-catering, mainly as it gives us the option to eat when and where we want to. The problem with self-catering is that you don’t always get a decent kitchen and nearly always the equipment leaves a lot to be desired. I want to cook a nice meal, what usually happens is that I get so frustrated with the lack of space, lack of decent pans, blunt knives and rubbish cookers that I get all annoyed.

On a recent holiday after struggling to cook a simple pasta dish in the kitchen in our self-catering accommodation I was so fed up that when I was in the local Sainsburys I decided to purchase a processed meal and heat it up in the oven. To be honest I was quite surprised by how nice it was. Yes if you got all the ingredients yourself and cooked from fresh, yes it would be much nicer, but in the assumption that you have useless cooking facilities, this was certainly much easier.

We had the Roasted Pork Belly with slow cooked roast potatoes and red onions, served with a tangy apple and cider sauce.

If you are regular reader of this blog, then you will know I have a fondness for pork belly so as a result I know what it can be like and what it should be like. The dish is quite simple to “cook” place in a pre-heated oven for 35-40 minutes. No slicing, no dicing and no preparation.

So what was it like?

It was rather quite nice. The combination of pork belly and potatoes worked well, the pork was quite tender and tasty, though I could tell it had been cooked and then heated up. It could have done with some more onions, whilst the potatoes were a little too salty for my tastes. The cider sauce was really nice, this did need to be heated up separately, but easily done in the provided microwave. Both myself and my wife enjoyed eating it and she said it was the best meal we had on that holiday, though to be honest it didn’t have a lot of competition!

A little secret, we had it again a few weeks later when we were back home, and then I did have some decent cooking facilities…

May 4, 2011

This is how you do it…

Why is it that so many coffee places can not get making a simple Americano right?

This Americano from Caffe Nero is a perfect example of how it should be done.

Great espresso coffee topped off with hot water. A great coffee.

At quite a few coffee places I go to, they just get it plain wrong. The key is that the crema (that’s the froth on the top) adds so much to the coffee drinking experience and flavour. Lose that and the coffee is nowhere as near as good as it could be.

I quite like my Americano strong, now I could do that by asking for an extra shot, however as a cheapskate I ask for less water. You would be surprised by how many baristas have no idea what I mean by “not too much water please”.

I really enjoyed my Americano from Caffe Nero and would go there again.

May 3, 2011

It’s just a chicken sandwich…

I was on my way to catch a train when I stopped off at my local Costa for a coffee and a sandwich.

The coffee was a Flat White, well it was nearly a Flat White, well one can live in hope!

As for the sandwich, it was a chicken salad sandwich on malted brown bread.

So what did I think?

Well it was a chicken salad sandwich and there isn’t much more to say.

The most flavoursome part of the sandwich was the bread. The chicken was cooked processed chicken, so tasted like chicken, well as in tasted of very little. The salad was mainly bland tomatoes and iceberg lettuce. There was some mayo which overpowered the chicken and salad, though you could still taste the bread. There was texture, as the salad was crisp, but I would have preferred a more soggy sandwich with lots of flavour.

The problem with mass produced sandwiches is that they are catering for the mass audience. The mainstream want something like this sandwich and in many ways prefer a bland sandwich over one with flavour. I remember watching a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall programme a few years ago on chicken and he did a taste test between organic free range chicken and a supermarket battery chicken. Interestingly most people preferred the supermarket chicken. The organic one had “too much” flavour.

We as a society have got so use to bland chicken that we now prefer bland chicken. ask yourself do you prefer breast or thighs? Chicken breast has a lot less flavour than the thighs, but most people prefer breast.

As a result of this, I get a rather tasteless chicken sandwich rather than one bursting with flavour.

May 2, 2011

Not quite…

A few weeks ago I went to La Tasca in Leeds for meal with some friends. It was a Monday evening, so not the busiest evening to go out. The place was reasonably empty, so expectations were high that things would be good and that we would get some good service….

Well…

Not quite…

Though our waiter was quite enthusiastic about taking our orders for drinks and food, the service we had afterwards left a lot to be desired.

Our initial order of tapas dishes, seemed to take a long time to arrive and when they did, they were warm, as though they had been left somewhere for a while before they arrived at our table. Now I know that authentic tapas are just warm, so it could be argued that they were suppose to be like that… We had ordered two selections of tapas from the menu, and two additional dishes. The second selection arrived just as we were finishing the first. These were hot and straight from the kitchen.

As for the other two dishes, well we had to ask for them, and it would appear that they had gone to a different table! So our final two dishes arrived somewhat later.

So what of the tapas themselves. Well the calamari was nice, fresh with a crunchy batter, but slightly let down by an excessive sprinkling of sea salt. If you brushed that off, then it was quite nice. There was a nice creamy chicken dish that I liked, but no idea what it was or the name. I did like the deep fried anchovies, think of whitebait but with a stronger flavour. Alas this was one of our missing dishes and arrived last and I was quite full at this point. To be honest I enjoyed most of the dishes and they had flavour and texture. Some things were very good, some were good and some I know could be a lot better. For example the “sample” paella dishes are not paella as I know it should be, but then maybe one day, I should just order paella at La Tasca to see what they do with their standard paella. The fritata was okay, but not sure if that was just me, or it’s suppose to be like that! At the end of the day I have had much better tapas dishes from La Tasca and as a result I was slightly disappointed.

However as with any “dining experience” it’s not just about the food (though the food is important) it is also the atmosphere, the ambience and the service.

Well the people I was with were excellent company and I really enjoyed the evening, so from that perspective it was great.

The service on the other hand was, well variable, sometimes good, sometimes downright awful. An example, very few deserts were available as they had run out of vanilla ice cream… Now this was in the centre of Leeds, a Tesco Express was just around the corner, was it really too much effort for someone to get a tub? Well knowing how these chains work I suspect that if they did, there would be hell to pay from senior management over staff using non-standard ingredients. I also guess that they wouldn’t be able to re-claim the cost of the ingredients. Yes processes and guidelines are in place there to make sure the business runs smoothly, but when those processes fail, as in this case the supply of vanilla ice cream, there must be contingency plans in place to give staff the “freedom” to improvise to ensure that the customer can get what they would like. As in our case, so that the customer can get the desert they want without finding out that none are available because the supple chain failed, and procedures stop improvisation (by getting in some ice cream) to fulfill that need.

So I did indeed have a good evening out, the company was excellent, the food was good and yes I would go again to La Tasca, well maybe not in Leeds.

May 1, 2011

They’re back…

It would appear looking at the new menus from Café Rouge that started this April, their merguez sausage is back!

I lamented a few months back that

What I did notice was that the merguez sausage was no longer on the menu, which is a personal favourite.

Well it’s back!

In Café Rouge’s new Petits Plats assortment, one of the choices is

Merguez – spicy beef & lamb sausage with harissa mayonnaise

These Petits Plats look and sound a lot like Tapas.

You can also have them in a sandwich.

Tartine Marocaine £7.95
Open sandwich of sautéed spicy Merguez sausages & caramelised onions with houmous and crisp chicory on grilled sourdough bread served with a minted crème fraîche

I do like the Merguez sausage and therefore I may, just may go and try them again.

April 30, 2011October 13, 2020

Roast Beef Dinner

Last week I was down at the Oake Manor Golf Club. Now I hasten to add this wasn’t for a game of golf, but for an event about social media in education. Though it does make you wonder, all those people playing golf, where on earth do they find the time?

Anyhow, at the event, lunch was provided and it wasn’t a cold buffet, nope there was a carvery, and it was a proper carvery, freshly sliced beef or pork and lots of choices of vegetables. The beef had lots of flavour and the veg was really nice too. Certainly one of the better roast beef dinners I have had.

One of the worse was at the National Trust Heelis Café in Swindon.

I went for a traditional roast beef dinner. At £7.50 I expected to get an excellent home cooked roast beef dinner… well I didn’t.

Yes the potatoes were home roasted, and were roasted and not deep-fried as is often the case in some restaurants, pubs and cafes. The carrots were fine, but the brocolli was limp, having spent too much time under a heat lamp. The beef was a real disappointment, wafer thin slices of cooked beef that had been re-heated in gravy. This is something that cheap catering does, and not something I expected from the Heelis Cafe. The Yorkshire Pudding looked and tasted like it was heated up in the microwave and to be honest I did wonder if the meal was from the day before (as we did order early at midday) and had just been microwaved. I was expecting a proper carvery and proper slices of roast beef, not the equivalent of a £3.99 meal from a supermarket cafe.

Yes that was a real disappointment.

One carvery I remember was at the St Ermin’s Hotel in London.

It was December 2006 and I was at a meeting there, and we had lunch and it was an excellent lunch, nice selection of starters followed by a delicious carvery. Now I have no idea if that is still the case, but I hope it is.

April 25, 2011

Oh I hate it when that happens…

After a lovely day out I went into the kitchen to cook something to eat for the family. I had in my head what I was going to cook and the ingredients were already in the fridge.

And then….

Oh I hate it when that happens…

What?

Well as I got the pork steaks I was going to grill out of the packaging I noticed an odd smell. They were off, well they had only just gone off… Very disappointed and annoyed. All those well laid plans and ideas were scuppered.

Looking back into the fridge I realised there was not much else in there that I could use instead. Was also getting too late to get something out of the freezer and ruin it by trying to defrost it in the microwave. Also going out to buy the ingredients “again” would take up too much time. The annoyance was compounded by the fact that the green veg I was going to use, had also gone off.

At this point I started to check the fridge to see if it was in fact working! I did turn it up a bit.

I suspect that with all this hot weather, and despite been well within the “use by” dates, poor stock keeping at the local supermarket had resulted in a much shorter shelf life than anticipated. I have seen at some supermarkets fresh food left out in the sun as it was unpacked from the lorry.

In the end I went with chorizo sausage, with some salad.

It was nice, but still disappointed and a little annoyed.