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India – the food bit

Delhi saw us eating less adventurously than I would have liked – we were on a tight schedule, eating mostly at the numerous ceremonies and parties, and later not able to eat due to a stomach bug. I still managed to get plenty of variety in, though, and can tell you about some of the highlights of the food.

Some of the curry I ordered was startlingly good. This is a Murg Tikka Patialewala – chicken marinated in yoghurt and spices, grilled and cooked in a pureed tomato and cashew sauce. The one-size-fits-all curry powder you see in the UK is a British empire invention, originally mixed for colonials to send home to cook with. No two curries in the same restaurant in India had the same base of spices (unlike those in some lazy Indian restaurants in the UK). This chicken was very heavy on the fenugreek and cumin, and had a lot of raw grated ginger stirred into it.

We ate breads with the curry – crisp parathas and open-textured naan, all made with rich and delicious ghee. Eating a curry with your hands takes a bit of getting used to (the right hand only – the left is reserved for . . . other purposes), but can be done quite neatly if you use a piece of bread as a little envelope to put your curry in. Papads (popadoms), grilled rather than fried, and flavoured with cracked black pepper, were served with every meal.

On one of our two free afternoons, we took a trishaw ride around Chandi Chowk, one of Delhi’s oldest market areas. The driver was pedaling furiously, and it was extremely hard to stop in the constant stream of trishaw traffic, but we were able to look at, if not taste, a variety of street food (all going past at speed).

People were crowding everywhere, many eating on the hoof. Stalls were ordered by type, so we pedaled through a stationery quarter, a car parts quarter, a sari quarter and a jewellery quarter. I asked the driver to take us to the food quarter. He put a spurt on and started to pedal enthusiastically through the crowd; no mean feat on a trishaw with two compulsive overeaters perched on the back.

Asking to see the nutritional sites was a bit of a mistake on my part. Unfortunately, ‘food quarter’ when parsed through our driver turned out to mean ‘chicken market’. Hundreds of chickens, packed five to a wire crate, hunched in damp and stinking misery. Given rumours of bird flu, I spent about half a second ascertaining that none of the chickens were coughing, and, waving my arms furiously, asked the driver to continue. He did.

Straight to an open-air, flyblown goat butchers. I gave up and went shopping for fabric.

One of the most impressive things available on the streets was the fruit. These pomegranates (are those custard apples with them? Let me know if you’ve any idea) were the reddest, glossiest, juiciest ones I’ve ever seen. We were able to enjoy some pomegranate seeds later, sprinkled on a curry. Satsumas, still green but perfectly ripe, were for sale everywhere, and we ate some in our room.

Lurid soft drinks punctuated all the wedding buffet meals. In the interests of science I tried all of these – the pink one tasted of roses, and the green and blue were identical in taste, flavoured with sweet, sweet spices, particularly cardamom. Other dishes at the buffets were tasty, but undistinguished (which is what happens, I suppose, when you’re catering huge amounts for more than two hundred people at once and trying to keep it all warm). Waiters popped up every twenty seconds with different silver platters of spicy canapes, and were not intimidated by my photographing all the food.

The very best thing I ate was this gulab jamun – a tooth-achingly sweet dessert made from a condensed milk sponge dough wrapped around nuts and spices, particularly cardamom, soaked in sugar syrup, and sprinkled with more nuts. The sugar syrup was also spiced – you can see a strand of saffron on the ball of gulab jamun in the front of the bowl.

I wish we’d been in India for longer, and had some more time to sample some less formal foods. Normal service resumes tomorrow – my stomach seems to be behaving again.

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Food Court, Oriental City, Edgware

*Update – Oriental City is threatened with closure. For more details and what you can do to help, see this post.*

Edgware. Those who know London will not be moved to thoughts of big white plates glistening with chef-ish morsels when they read that word. They’ll think about the the Edgware Road in NW9 as it passes through Barnet and its artery-clogging choice of dodgy kebab shops and the now, sadly, rebranded Munchy Burger, whose logo used to be an anthropomorphic burger with sinister, rolling olive eyes and a lolling tongue made of cheese.

First impressions can be deceptive – Edgware is not all threatening burgers and ancient doner kebab. Hidden about 300m from Colindale tube station, behind a branch of Asda, two car parks and a Mercedes showroom, is a giant Malaysian mall which appears to have been transported wholesale, Star Trek style, from somewhere in deepest Kuala Lumpur. There are shops selling manga toilet paper holders, a place where you can buy an antique Chinese kang to sleep on and a porcelain monkey with LEDs in its nostrils, bonsai shops, a harshly-lit shop selling mysterious pieces of plastic with Japanese lettering, a live lobster emporium . . . and a proper Malaysian hawker centre, or food court, where you can pretend you’re on holiday for the afternoon and eat accordingly.

You enter the scrimmage of tables, hang around until you can find the seats you want, and then order as many or as few dishes you like from any of the twenty-odd Malaysian, Tamil, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese stalls clustered around them. On ordering and paying, you will be given a ticket with a number on. When your number flashes, your meal is ready. We went with plenty of change in our pockets and a large appetite.

Today we decided to concentrate on Vietnamese food from a stall on the mall side of the food court, along with some Chinese favourites from the roast meats stall pictured at the top of this post. This is a good place to take children. It is important that they realise that the the undifferentiated chunk of brown stuff on their plate was at one point a duck with a hook in its neck.

About £10 a head is enough to eat yourself silly here. I got some cha gio – the Vietnamese crispy spring roll, sometimes called nems. These are, to my taste, pretty superior to the Chinese variety. Their skins are made from a kind of rice paper, and their fillings include the glass noodles I cooked with the other day, with crabmeat, pork, carrot, different mushrooms, beansprouts, shallots and nam pla, that salty, fermented fish sauce which is used in much of South East Asia instead of soy. It is savoury and salty, and not fishy. I bought some of the rice paper skins in a Vietnamese supermarket in Paris a while ago – these are time-consuming but not difficult to make at home. (Another thing to add to the list for future posts.)

The cha gio are fried in a wok until crisp, and served with lettuce and mint leaves. (The mint in the picture above is Thai mint, a tender and sweet leaf which doesn’t grow very readily here in freezing England. When making these at home, I use whatever mint comes to hand from the garden.) A lettuce leaf and some mint are wrapped around the crisp little rolls, the whole ensemble is dipped into nuoc cham, a sauce made from nam pla, sugar, chili and lime. The rice paper wrappers, once fried, are crisp and chewy all at once, and the taste reminds me to ask Mr Weasel to bury me with a bottle of nam pla in order that I’m completely happy in heaven.

I needed something else to dip into this stuff – Banh Xeo, a kind of rice-flour and egg cross between an omelette and a pancake, flavoured with turmeric and filled with crisp beansprouts, prawns and marinaded pork. This too is served with lettuce and herbs to wrap and dip. The plate-sized disc (whose name, charmingly, means ‘happy pancake’) is fried in a hot wok until crisp, and folded gently around the filling. This one wasn’t the best I’ve had from this stall (the best was sublime, and I’m going to keep trying until they do it again); this pancake was a little wet and more oily than usual. Perhaps the wok wasn’t hot enough. It was still pretty darn good, and now nestles somewhere just to the left of my liver.

Mr Weasel opted for Bo Luc Lac (Shaking Beef), a lean, fried, steak dish served with a sweet, soy-based, garlicky sauce. This is served on a bed of Vietnamese salad which is made from mooli and carrot, in a mild, sweetened, rice vinegar, and Chinese leaves. We’re always amazed at the quality of the meat here – this dish was made with a gloriously tender piece of fillet steak.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Delhi for a family wedding, which promises to be larded with squishy, sweet Indian things. If the hotel’s promised broadband turns out to work, I’ll be updating on the hoof. I am equipped with a suitcase full of medication for every conceivable stomach upset – I hope I don’t need any of it.

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Dim sum at Taipan, Milton Keynes

Forget paper, gunpowder, tea and umbrellas. China’s greatest contribution to my personal culture is dim sum, a meal traditionally eaten for brunch. It’s made up of an array of tiny dishes of little stuffed buns, fried morsels and steamed goodies, all artfully presented, perfectly delicious and the optimum size to pop effortlessly into a lazy weekend mouth.

Dim sum translates from the Cantonese as “to touch the heart”. For us it’s always something best shared and enjoyed with friends and family. This weekend, we went to Taipan, an excellent restaurant located surprisingly in the jungle of concrete and traffic controls that is Milton Keynes. The owner informs me that their new chef is presently doing something very wonderful in the evenings with garoupa and other fish considered delicacies in Hong Kong but relatively unheard of here – I’ll have to pop back in in a few weeks to check it out.

We rolled up with my parents, who live nearby enough that we can pretend we’re not driving fifty miles just for lunch, and set about the dim sum menu (presented here as a list of numbers, menu items and boxes to tick; three or so dishes per head should be sufficient, but we usually seem to tick more) with gusto. We then asked the manager if we could have the black bean crab (not dim sum, but an evening restaurant dish) as well. It’s an excellent time of year for crab, and the one which arrived at our table, steamed, segmented by the chef and stir-fried in a glossy black bean and pepper sauce was full of rich red roe, tasting of the sea. The sweet meat came away from the claws and legs we cracked open cleanly, with a minimum of the slightly revolting sucking which everyone in my family seems to start doing the moment we think nobody’s looking. We puddled the meat in the sauce.

Dumplings started to arrive in the bamboo steamers they were cooked in. Clockwise from the top, these are chiu-chau fun guo (peanuts, garlic chives, pork, prawns and shitake mushrooms), prawn and coriander dumplings (whole and minced prawn with herbs), and crystal dumplings (pork, water chestnuts, bamboo shoot, prawns, and other vegetables). We ate these with fresh chilis in soy sauce. A chili sauce and a chili oil were also on the table.

Each of these dumplings is wrapped in a rice flour skin, which becomes transluscent when steamed. Texture here is as important as flavour, and the different meats and vegetables which go to make the fillings were cut evenly into tiny pieces. The crystal dumplings in particular have a beautifully fresh crunch.

This dumpling is a bao, a fluffy, steamed bun made from a yeasty, white flour dough. This particular bao is filled with char siu, a barbecued pork in a rich red sauce. (An excellent char siu recipe used to be found at Shiokadelicious, which, to my horror, doesn’t seem to be around any more. Perhaps Renee got a recipe book deal. Fortunately, Jessica at Su Good Eats makes it to a similar recipe here.)

This particular bao is about half the size of my clenched fist. (I seem to clench my fists a lot these days.) When we visit family in Malaysia, one of my favourite breakfasts is one of these buns (but a larger one, perhaps the size of Mr Weasel’s muscular clenched fist), stuffed with char siu or perhaps with a gingery chicken mixture, or a paler pork in garlic. We really miss out here in England, where our closest equivalent is the dry-as-dust Cornish pasty. Don’t expect a recipe for one of those any time soon.

Nuggets of turnip paste rolled in XO Sauce and fried until the outsides are crisp arrive. Each is the size of a grape. Turnip paste sounds very un-prepossessing in English, but is actually a light savoury cake made of grated mooli (Japanese radish), rice flour, preserved Chinese meats, dried shrimp, ginger and other spices. It’s always fried or baked until crispy – this presentation makes it even crisper and lighter, while the XO Sauce underlines the flavours already present in the paste. My friend Wai’s mother makes a wonderful turnip paste at home – I must ask her for the recipe.

I am delighted that the waiter has decided to put this dish next to me. I cunningly hide it from everyone else behind the teapot.

More dishes arrive. Unfortunately, despite my best effort with the teapot, the family is swooping in with chopsticks faster than I can take photographs now, and I need to get in there too if I’m not to be denied my rightful dumplings. I manage one more photograph; a chive dumpling (pork, chives, garlic, soy and spices) which is first steamed, then pan-fried to get this crisp finish. These are garlic chives, which presently I don’t grow in the garden; I think I have a packet of seeds somewhere, so hopefully you’ll get to see some in the summer. They’re thicker than normal chives, and have a pronounced garlic flavour.

Several dishes later (I’ll have go back to Taipan in a few weeks and do a follow-up post so you can find out about the rest of them) we admit defeat, and waddle from the restaurant into the gaping maw of Milton Keynes, where I need to find some shoes for the wedding we’re going to in India in a few days. Thank God your feet don’t get noticeably fatter when you eat your own bodyweight in dumplings all at one sitting.

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Everything stops for tea

I married Mr Weasel not just for his charm and good looks, but also for the fact that he does the washing up, sharpens a knife like a pro, and has parents who live in Ilkley, a beautiful town in Yorkshire which boasts one of the best teashops in the country.

High tea is a tradition which has clung on boldly in Yorkshire, when the rest of us are spending our Saturday afternoons eating crisps in front of the television. When we visit the family, we are usually treated to a huge table on a Saturday, piled with scones, curd tarts, jams, toast, cakes, muffins – and endless cups of excellent tea.

Betty’s Tea Rooms are a strange thing indeed in a town fifteen miles from Leeds, Leeds being full of the sorts of places footballers eat. Betty’s is an old-fashioned teashop of the kind you read about in dismal Somerset Maugham stories about margarine and the death of hope, but without the death and the margarine. Betty’s is emphatically not dismal. Betty’s is a glorious beacon of lightly browned carbohydrate and gloopy, gloopy, sweet sauces.


I should remark at this point that the quality of the photographs in this post may be a little . . . rubbish, since I loathe and detest wandering into restaurants, tea rooms, bars and cafes and pointing my camera at things. I am half-Chinese, and I become terribly paranoid that people are casting me in their heads as a strangely grumpy-looking Japanese tourist when I pull out the camera. This leads me to try to photograph things in secret, which isn’t a recipe for good pictures.

Nobody wanted to go to Betty’s. We’d already eaten enough lamb to keep a (smallish and reasonably delicate) rugby team nourished and warmed for the day at lunchtime, and it hadn’t gone down. I bullied my mother-in-law and husband into accompanying me with the promise of cakes.

Cakes there were by the dozen. Beautiful, jewel-like cakes; the sort of cakes you expect to see lined up in a Paris branch of Hediard or Laduree. Gleaming counters of the things stretched as far as the eye could see; cakes laid out in glistening rows on cool marble, topped with shining, jellied fruits, palpitating curds and elegant piping.

My mother-in-law and Mr Weasel perked up.

Betty’s was opened by a Swiss confectioner in 1919; the first branch was in nearby Harrogate. The company has stayed small, keeping its few tearooms in Yorkshire while marketing its teas around the country as Taylors of Harrogate. The staff wear starched white aprons and black skirts, and the tearooms themselves have a real sense of 1920s’ style. The menu still has a Swiss influence in this unlikely place, the savouries menu featuring rosti with raclette and other good things.

We weren’t up to another main course, and Mr Weasel was refusing to eat anything at all (he is watching his figure in order to be able to consume more curry before erupting out of his swimming shorts when we visit India next week), so decided on a brown bread ice-cream sundae (ostensibly for me, but ultimately gargled, swilled and slurped in the most part by Mr Weasel, who was hungrier than he thought) and a custard slice for his Mum.

Brown bread ice cream is altogether more wonderful than it sounds. I seem to remember Sainsbury’s trying to sell it a few years ago; they stopped because not enough people were brave enough to try it. A shame. It’s glorious stuff. At its simplest, it’s a really good vanilla ice-cream with roasted breadcrumbs, caramelised in demerara sugar. It’s got everything; crunch, sweetness, a toasty mellowness from the crumbs and a lovely contrast between the melting ice-cream and the friable crumbs.

The sundae was enormous. It was also pleasantly uncomplicated; just glorious ice-cream in one flavour, crushed pecan nuts, broken amaretti, a glossy, buttery toffee sauce and some cream. Two pecans on top vanished somewhere while my head was turned photographing a custard slice.

Tea arrived. We’d asked for a pot of Darjeeling (which was described on the menu as being a tippy pekoe; I am not a tea expert, but it was extremely good) and a pot of Lapsang Souchong. Each came in a silver-plated pot with a handwritten label on the top, explaining which was which. We were given one little silver strainer per pot, lemon slices, cold milk and hot water to top the pots up with.

While the tea was cooling, we got to the important task of eating. This photograph of the excellent custard slice is slighly blurry because I feared expulsion from the family if I didn’t hurry up and let my mother-in-law eat it. She sliced it in half laterally, ate the base with a little custard and then ate the fondanty top with some more custard, all the time informing me that it is very easy to lose weight when you just put your mind to it. I do not know how she stays so thin.

I am rubbish at cooking patisserie. It’s fantastic to go somewhere to eat things you can’t cook yourself, making Betty’s one of my favourite places to eat in the country.

Full of sugar and love for our fellow man (especially if he is a Swiss confectioner), we staggered back up the hill to the house, where a vast spread had been set out, involving cheese scones, hams, a block of cheese the size of my head, pickled shallots, a loaf of bread and a big jar of pickle. I worry I will not have room for those curries next week.