Disappointing sushi

I became involved in a conversation yesterday about the horrible habit certain British supermarkets have of putting slices of smoked salmon on cubes of rice, and calling the results sushi. It got me thinking . . . and thinking . . . and thinking, mostly about where I could get my hands on some sushi, rightnowthisminute.

Fate smiled on me in the morning when my parents rang and asked whether we’d like to accompany them to Oriental City in Edgware (see this earlier post for address details and ways to get there). There’s a big, Oriental food court there, and while I usually gravitate towards the Malaysian or Vietnamese stalls, there’s also a stall called Japan Food which I hadn’t tried before.

A sushi chef, knife in hand, napkin on head, was looking busy. I went to ask him whether he had any uni, and he nodded, but made it clear he didn’t speak any English and pointed me at a lady in an apron, who took my order. So far so good. I asked for four kinds of nigiri sushi (nigiri is the kind of sushi which is made from a bullet of hand-shaped rice with a piece of raw or cooked fish, shellfish, omelette or other ingredients neatly placed on top).

Tobiko (flying fish roe), are a crisp, tiny orange roe which are salted and sometimes flavoured before use. Uni is fresh sea urchin. Unagi is a cooked, fatty freshwater eel, grilled in a teriyaki sauce, and I think I am probably safe in assuming that you all know what tuna (maguro in Japanese) is.

They had everything I wanted, which was cheering. It took them twenty minutes to prepare the eight pieces of sushi. This is a bad sign; the chef was working slowly, which is unusual in a trained sushi chef. Worse still – as you can see from the photos, the sushi on the plate was . . . messy. Tobiko had spilled off the rice and out of its nori (seaweed) wrapping, and the unagi didn’t fit on its rice. This isn’t usual. The presentation of jewel-like sushi nigiri is important, and it’s a matter of pride for the chef. My chef was clearly not having a prideful day.

First, I took a tobiko nigiri. Not promising.This wasn’t a good example of the roe; it was oversalted and had a lot of gaspingly obvious extra flavouring. (Good tobiko is flavoured where it’s produced, but not with a sledgehammer and a shovel like this was.) The nori holding it on top of the rice hadn’t been toasted to make it tender to the tooth, and it rustled around in the mouth like a salty Mars Bar wrapper.

Fresh uni is very delicious stuff; if you like the taste of the sea you find in a raw oyster, you’ll love uni, which is firm but creamy, and tastes of sweet ozone and fresh seaside breezes. This was . . . fresh-ish. (I should have asked to see it before ordering.) Fresh uni is sweet, and it’s paler than this. Mine was still seaside-tasting, but a little bitter, and darker than it should have been. Chewy nori again. Disappointing.

The tuna – blah. At least it was quite nice and fatty. It was pre-sliced (how long does it take a guy with a sharp knife to peel two rectangles off a slab of muscle to order?), and had been sitting around for a while, a bit damp. And a horror was lurking beneath it – the rice hadn’t been mixed with the sugar and vinegar mixture that flavours it properly, and I got a mouthful of vinegar. I was beginning to feel seriously miffed.

Good unagi is one of my favourite things in the world. It should have been grilled moments ago, its hot fat crisping the skin and making the flesh tender, painted with a sugary-salty sauce and conveyed straight to the waiting mouth. This crisping makes the skin friable and easy to bite through.

I’ll leave you to guess whether this was good unagi. You might benefit from some pointers: it was stone-cold. It was chewy. It was about as crisp as a well-sucked whelk.

All is not lost. Next month, I’ll be visiting (and blogging from) an extremely good sushi restaurant in California, which does better and fresher sushi than any I’ve tried in some of the very expensive Japanese restaurants in London. I’ve started planning holidays around the opportunity to go there. Watch this space.

(For all you ever needed to know about sushi and quite a lot more, visit this absolutely excellent sushi guide from Randy Johnson, a fish-obsessing American who used to live in Japan.)

Prague roundup – Hotel Maximilian, hot drinks

A final Prague post – back to my kitchen on Saturday (there will be no post tomorrow, as I shall be busy adjusting my costume for the office Christmas party and later dancing ineptly, dressed as Hornblower, until the small hours).

We traveled to Prague with Voyages Jules Verne; a much cheaper way of doing it than if we’d booked the flights and hotel directly. They offer accommodation at the Maximilian, which we found to be really, really excellent; the hotel, a belle epoque building opposite one of Prague’s oldest churches was refurbished in a very minimalist but comfortable style at the start of 2005, and is immaculate inside. (My parents, who took us to Prague, had stayed in the same hotel in September and had liked it so much that they decided to return this month.) The chocolates on the pillows were by Lindt, the toiletries in the bathrooms by the White Company, the linen soft and comfortable and the breakfasts . . . whee, the breakfasts.


Ten different cheeses, every bottled sauce known to man (two kinds of Tabasco, maple syrup, three mustards, Worcestershire sauce, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, ketchup, flavoured oils, two different pestos . . . ), five different preserved meats, two kinds of hot sausage, bacon, grilled vegetables, eggs any which way, ten different breads, three home made yoghurts, six preserved fruits, honey, a huge selection of jams, an infinite variation of teabags, a whipped sour cream with chives, granolas, fresh fruits, six juices, sliced cucumber and tomato, French pastries galore and the best coffee I’ve had in a hotel.

I positively waddled around Prague.

So – a hearty recommendation for the Maximilian, which also has an honesty bar (how refreshing) and a small library full of books about the city and by local authors and artists which can be bought at the front desk. Room rates are on their website, but you may find better prices through an agent.

Now, those hot drinks. Prague in December is cold. We had some snow, nearly killed ourselves by waddling into frozen puddles without looking and sliding headlong, and I found taking photos while breathing pretty difficult because of my cloudy breath. I found a few really excellent cafes which, if you find yourself in the city, you might want to pop in to in order to stave off the hypothermia.

The Municipal House (here on the right; you’ll find it next to the Powder Tower where the city’s gunpowder was stored) is one of the most important Art Nouveau buildings in the city. Inside the building is a concert hall, a very expensive restaurant, and one of the most beautiful cafes I’ve been in. The decoration throughout the building is perfectly unspoiled; it’s still as it was in the very early 20th century; drinking in the cafe will make you feel as if you should be wearing a flapper dress and a cloche. (Or spats and a cravat – I am aware that some of the people reading this will be a little too hairy and muscly for dress-wearing.)

It was too early in the morning to drink something hot and alcoholic with my dignity intact, so I settled for a Viennese coffee (proper whipped cream this time) while Mr Weasel had a hot chocolate almost as rich and thick as those in Paris. (Any lack in richness was made up for by the decorations.)

All of the old town is easily walked; there is also an excellent tram service if you have arthritic knees. When you’ve hauled your breakfast-filled carcass up the hill to Prague Castle, you’ll find the Lobkowicz Palace, where there’s an outdoor terrace (heated; they also provide blankets) with remarkable views over the city and more excellent coffee and chocolate.

Be aware that in Prague there isn’t really any such thing as the non-smoking section; this can get pretty painful, so if you can find somewhere with a heated outdoor section, you may find it preferable to being in the cosy indoors in a fug of smoke.

Of course, you may find that you require something to drink with a bit more of a kick, in which case you’re in luck; every cafe in the city will sell you a hot punch, mulled wine, grog and a sybaritic list of other hot alcohol confections; I had an excellent glass of something involving Kirsch and maple syrup at the Art Nouveau Hotel Pariz. I’m still trying to get my own mulled wine recipe just perfect; I promise you’ll be able to read it some time before Christmas.

Witchy restaurant, Prague

Witches are good news in Czech kitchens. A witch doll hanging up in your kitchen will, apparently, bring luck to your house, scaring away evil spirits. The life-size witch with the glowing LED eyes outside U Carodejek (Praha 1, Ramova 4, tel 222 314 957) nearly scared the Weaselarium away, but we are at heart a brave people, and went in to see what their dumplings might be like.

Themed restaurants. They’re usually a total turn-off, but my Mum was craving something authentically Czech, and the menu was full of the dumplings, roast and boiled meats and cabbages that are typical of Prague, so we sidled past the witch and found a table, right next to the broomstick and the empty shoes. The menu was the sort of thing which is precisely built to please my very carnivorous father; he was delighted to see something called Piggish Knee represented, alongside whole turkeys, ducks sliced in two along the spinal column and all manner of sausage and dumpling.

I think of you lot while ordering, you know. I was aware that very few people reading this blog would be inclined to wander into a Czech restaurant with a life-sized witch on the door (yes, I am kicking myself for having run out of batteries before leaving the restaurant and not photographing the thing) and order a pickled frankfurter, so I did it for you.

Here is my frankfurter, really a Mortadella-type garlicky sausage. It was not completely inedible. The vinegar was a sharp, white one, and the jar it lived in had been packed with hot peppers. The sausage was presented with a slit along it, one of the chilis stuffed inside. It was served with some vinegar-dressed onions, and caused all sorts of howling in revulsion from my Mum when I ate it at her. For heaven’s sake. Going into the restaurant was her choice. She enjoyed a very good potato soup, but given the keening noises she made every time I waved the sausage at her, might have enjoyed it more if I’d not been there. Oops.

Piggish knee arrived. This picture really doesn’t do justice to the sheer size of the thing. I am still trying to work out which part of the pig this might be; clearly it is a joint, but my careful study of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s precise diagrams reveals the unwelcome fact that pigs don’t have knees that bend like ours do, and this object really did look an awful lot like my own knee, but rather more tanned. (I seem to remember from reading the Beano as a kid that the only creature that does have human-type knees is the elephant, but I don’t think the Beano is butchers’ canon.) Perhaps this was a pig-knee-equivalent. Despite it being the size of his head – a large head; we’d been trying to find him a hat earlier – Dad gobbled the whole thing making happy gurgling noises.

Mr Weasel fought valiantly with this half-duck, which he described as ‘primitive but pleasant’. With prose like that he should start his own blog. The bread dumplings were not as good as those we had on our first evening here, but this dish was also accompanied by a potato dumpling made with flour and a very waxy potato, which he enjoyed. My mother, recovered from her sausage dismay, ate the duck’s other half.

I ordered very badly; I asked for the sirloin (ha!) in cream sauce. What arrived were two thin, thin slices of pre-roast beef (I think from a gristly topside – and what an insult, this, when the rest of my family was wrestling with chunks of protein large enough to brain a reindeer with) swimming in a sweetish, fruity, watery sauce thickened with flour. A spoonful of cranberry jam was dolloped on top of the meat, and the whole thing was topped with the abortion in a can that is pre-sweetened, squirty cream. I have now spent several days wondering why, but I’m still no closer to guessing.

I ate my husband’s food while he wasn’t looking.

No deserts this time; three of us were too full, and one of us had too recently eaten squirty cream to stomach pudding. Thank God for late-opening Christmas markets overflowing with marzipan snacks and chunks of gingerbread.

Prague – beer, dumplings, veal, more beer

I think they knew I was coming; nothing in the world is more likely to get me into a restaurant than the words SLOW FOOD in great big yellow capitals.

I am delighted to note that every single restaurant menu in Prague appears to be bi-, and occasionally tri- and quadri-lingual, so ordering is a doddle. This sign was displayed outside a restaurant called U Modrého Hroznu (Husova 15 Praha 1 – Staré Mesto). It’s next to a beer hall frequented by Václav Havel, the ex-president (it was shut this morning; I’ll try to post from there later in the week), and good smells were seeping out through the cracks around the door. We spent about thirty seconds wondering just how we would feel about dumplings, decided that those feelings were mostly positive, and went in.

The restaurant is tiny, and has two rooms; the one we were in has only three tables, so if you’re going in the evening you’d be well-advised to book.

Our waiter was strangely dour. I can only surmise that his puppy had just died. We grovelled with gratitude over the excellent food, beamed at him, told him how happy we were to be in his beautiful city – and were rewarded with a stubbly glare which later degenerated into an outright snarl. No matter. The food was coming thick and fast, and my, it was good.

Czech food is heavy. This is a country where protein is king, and offal is treated with the respect it deserves rather than being consigned to emulsified bags of pulp, fried and fed to schoolchildren and cats, which is what we seem to do with it in England. Dumplings there were in profusion. I had spoken earlier to a Czech lady who told me the story of her parents’ courtship; her father had nearly jilted her mother a week before their marriage, when she first cooked him a dumpling. ‘It was like tennis ball, or dinosaurus egg’, she said. ‘Fortunately she also was very pretty.’ The dumpling clearly occupies an important place in Czech culture which elevates it to the position of National Preferred Starch, and is, apparently, surrounded by all kinds of arcane etiquette. Perhaps our attitude to dumplingkind was what was making the waiter so grumpy.

Flavoured butters arrived. The red one was pounded in a pestle and mortar with sun-dried tomatoes and a very strong onion, the round yellow one with roast garlic. The long sliver is a beautifully lactic and sweet butter of the kind it’s easy to find on the continent and almost impossible to get your hands on in the UK.

Mr Weasel and my Dad led the field in beer-ordering. Only one was on offer in this restaurant – a pale, wheaty Pilsner with a glorious flowery aroma.

Intent on the whole Czech experience, I ruined it all by ordering something Italian for a starter – a carpaccio of beef. My Mum, across the table, had an endive and carrot salad with a sugary lemon dressing, and Mr Weasel and my Dad opted for a pate. The carpaccio was advertised as coming with Parmesan shavings, so it was a surprise to find soft gratings of something a bit like Gouda spread about the plate, but it was extremely good; the raw steak was soft, tender and meaty. The pesto in the centre of the plate was home-made and sharp, but again made with something that wasn’t Parmesan; it was still very good indeed.

The main course arrived, heavy with dumpling. These were bread dumplings (that which looks like moulded potato around the edge of the plate), and I had been expecting something small and round; instead we got slices of something loaf-shaped. (I found a recipe here if you feel like having a go. The dumpling is so light that it has to be sliced with a thread.) The dumplings were airy, and soaked up the rich, reduced sauces with our meats. In the picture is a pork potroast which was strangely delicious, but somehow not entirely European. The glossy, dark sauce had been spiked with a light soya sauce and some sesame oil; the richness of the sauce, the thick meat and the light-as-air dumplings were a triumph together.

Weiner Schnitzel came, fried to a perfect gold in that delicious butter. Two goulashes (‘the best in Prague’, according to the waiter, who now appeared on the verge of suicide) were inhaled by the men almost as fast as the beer. The only low point came with the one dessert that was ordered (Mr Weasel, hypoglycaemic again); his chocolate banana was a banana dipped into Nutella. In the restaurant’s defence, it was pretty clearly a dessert marked out for children, and, as my mother pointed out, it was a very nice ripe banana.

Now, clearly, it is not in your interests if I keep going back to the same restaurant every day until Tuesday. I am, however, sadly tempted. Tomorrow, I shall be investigating the Christmas market, and attempting to purchase edibles and somehow store them until Christmas for presents without eating them. Perhaps I will get something for the sad waiter and see if I can make him crack a smile.

Onuga ‘caviar’

Caviar. It’s expensive, it’s delicious, and we’re being encouraged to avoid it to save the Beluga sturgeon from extinction. Being an impoverished fan of the pressed salted stuff, my little heart leapt on reading that Waitrose were stocking Onuga, a ‘completely natural . . . caviar substitute’, which, according to their advertorial piece, has a ‘smoky. . . clean, fresh taste’. The man behind it, Patrick Limpus, is full of the ethical values contained in his little black pots, and says: ‘I love caviar, which is why I’m so proud to have come up with a worthy – and delicious – substitute.’

What follows is entirely my own fault. I used to work in magazine publishing, where one of my jobs was to edit adverts posing as real articles like this; I knew what the Waitrose magazine was doing, but I was still intrigued. I remained intrigued even when I looked at the tiny (and relatively expensive at £6) jar and read the words ‘reformed herring product’. It’ll be lovely little herring eggs, I posited. Dear little herring eggs that the nice man from the magazine has made salty and tasty for me. I love fish roe. I will walk miles for flying fish roe (tobiko) sushi (which is also a pretend fish roe product, not tasting of much on its own; the Japanese flavour and colour it until it’s something approaching manna), and I’d sell my soul for proper caviar. I knew I was going to be on my own at home all day on Sunday (Mr Weasel has to hand his thesis in on Wednesday, after several years of hard mathematical slogging, and is hiding in the lab polishing his diagrams), and decided I deserved a lunch of dear little herring eggs on blinis to cheer myself up in my solitude.

It started promisingly enough; the little black dots did look like fish roe, and on opening my precious jar I put one on the end of my finger, and licked. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, expecting the little egg to pop and release its delicious, oily juices . . . nothing. I chewed. Ah. That’s what they mean by ‘herring product’.

A little further reading revealed the true nature of my little jar of fishy punctuation marks. They’re reconstituted herring meat mixed with a seaweed product to make them gel into little balls, which are then salted and coloured with ‘vegetable carbon’. They taste like chewy taramasalata.

Onuga’s website makes it pretty clear that the emphasis in developing the product was on the mimicing the appearance rather than the flavour (or the incredibly important texture) of true caviar. ‘Onuga . . .’, they say, ‘. . . not only looks like the real thing but it tastes delicious too’. Delicious. Not ‘like caviar’. They claim it’s effortlessly superior in taste and texture to plain old lumpfish roe, which at least pops for you, rather than rolling round and round your mouth like pellets of fishy denture fixative.

The flavour is pleasant, but I feel I’d have been a bit better off with a tub of Waitrose’s very good premium taramasalata, or with a pack of smoked salmon. The texture is a disaster.

I’ve made twelve blinis. After piling all of them with creme fraiche, Onuga and chives, I eat three, and then I do something unheard of in this house – I throw the rest away.

Beer or pudding?

Meantime Chocolate Beer, from the Greenwich brewery, is, they say, specifically aimed at women, who, according to those marketing it, drink alcopops in preference to beer. Nonsense. Some of the best nights (and worst mornings) of my life have been courtesy of the Cambridge Beer Festival, where both Mr Weasel and I have ‘worked’ (I use the term advisedly) as staff in previous years. One of the things that swung the choosing of our present house for me was its handy location next to a real-ale freehouse with a fantastic restaurant (nothing like having your Fenland ale within staggering distance – those who email me and appear reasonably sane will be told where it is, but I’m not publishing its name here for fear of people breaking into the house to steal my cake). Beer and I have a glorious, long and ultimately pretty intimate relationship. Girlie beers are not for me.

Or are they? A while ago, when Sainsbury’s started stocking Meantime Chocolate Beer, I thought I would try an experimental bottle of the stuff. Damn me if they haven’t come up with something grown-up, silky and both beery and chocolatey at the same time. I may be a real-ale bore, but this stuff, marketed to death and not out of a pump (it is, however, bottle-conditioned, which means that new beer and yeast is added to the finished beer in the bottle, making it finish its fermentation and develop fizz after the lid has been put on) is just magnificent. There’s not a hint of sweetness to it; any chocolate flavour is the smooth, dark, dry taste you get from a very high cocoa-mass chocolate and not overpowering, and it combines beautifully with this extremely malty, quietly hoppy beer to make something quite disturbingly drinkable. A note of vanilla ties the malt and chocolate together. This is definitely not a novelty beer. If you’re in Sainsbury’s, pick up a bottle; I think you’ll like it.

Now, clearly, buying only one bottle of beer would be the action of someone who wasn’t thinking awfully hard. I was thinking hard. So I bought another. My second bottle was one of Liefmans‘ utterly gorgeous Kriek, or cherry beer, which comes wrapped in a pretty twizzle of printed paper.

Perhaps I do like girlie beers.

Liefmans Kriek is considered one of the very best cherry beers. (Kriek, by the way, is pronounced ‘Creek’, if ever you are in Belgium and struck with a terrible craving.) It’s an unexpectedly sour drink which almost makes your mouth pucker; tart and fruity, but rounded and terribly, terribly delicious.

The beer is a deep, wine-red, with a pretty pink head. (No photograph in the glass, I’m afraid; I forgot to take one before I started drinking, and the glass has lipstick and fingerprints on it. Disaster.) It’s unfiltered and unsweetened (important, this; lots of cherry beer is sweetened, and it’s not anything like as good), and so full of cherries they almost dance in front of your eyes as you sip it. There’s a hint of almond, possibly from the cherry stones. It’s like a wonderful fruit juice. A wonderful fruit juice that makes you fall down and giggle.

Yeast. This week it’s my number one microbe.

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.

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.

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.

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.