Eating notes
On Thursday night I made us a pasta that I made up years ago, and used to cook a lot, but haven’t cooked for a long time. You cook an onion and garlic in olive oil, and then add some chopped up bacon to the pan and let that take on a bit of colour. Then you add a squirt of tomato paste and cook it down until it’s a deep, dark red. Then you add a tin of whole tomatoes, which you crush lightly with your hands, and a decent glug of water. You leave everything to simmer for a while, and just before you’re ready to start tossing the sauce through some cooked spaghetti you throw in a couple of tablespoons of roughly chopped capers. You can add chilli flakes to the pan when you add the bacon, and you can finish everything with a smattering of finely chopped Italian parsley.
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Over the past few weeks we’ve had corn fritters for dinner a couple of times. I always use this Simon Holst recipe, and we have our fritters with homemade guacamole, a homemade tomato salsa, sour cream, shredded lettuce and hot sauce. The other night I cooked us a few rashers of smoked bacon to tuck into our stack of fritters.
Corn fritters remind me of Dad. We used to eat them quite a lot when I was a kid, though usually we’d have them for brunch when we were on holiday or we had people round in the weekends.
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Phil and I took our friends Mary and James to the Anchor and Hope for dinner on Friday night to celebrate their recent wedding. I love the Anchor and Hope. It’s always busy and buzzy and the staff are funny. We had fried flower sprouts with harissa creme fraiche and lemon, which were a really good salty snack with the bottle of fizzy wine that Phil ordered. Then we shared some goat’s ricotta with blood orange, fennel and mint. We got a roast pork chop which came with white beans and wild garlic, and some roast rabbit, which came with mustard sauce and chips. I ordered sides of potatoes, lentils vinaigrette and buttered savoy cabbage, but our waiter must’ve misheard my pronunciation of cabbage, because we ended up with more chips. That wasn’t a bad thing though.
The rabbit was nice, but I said to Phil the next day when we were drinking oat milk flat whites in the sun that you always think rabbit is going to be great when you order it, but it never turns out to be as great as you expect.
Phil ordered buttermilk pudding with rhubarb for dessert. He was disappointed because he was expecting a warm, sponge-like pudding. I’d made this same mistake before and so knew he was going to get something like panna cotta. I didn’t mind, because the rhubarb was really good.
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On Tuesday I went to Scotti’s and had a cheese, pickle and lettuce sandwich for lunch. It was so simple but so delicious. It reminded me lots of my granddad, who isn’t very well at the moment. White bread, just as he likes, and lots of cheese. Whenever you eat cheese and crackers with my granddad he cuts himself about a quarter of each piece of cheese.
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On Saturday Phil and I walked along the Regent’s Canal from Camden to Maida Vale. Then we walked round Maida Vale, which, frankly, we found quite boring. Sure, it’s very beautiful, but there wasn’t very much going on, and there weren’t enough pubs round for our liking. It didn’t really matter, because we decided we’d go to Phoenix Palace near Baker Street station for dim sum for lunch. We love the Phoenix Palace. The service is so great and it’s just so ridiculous and fun.
They do these really delicious fried turnip cakes with little pieces of chopped up stem of an Asian green with an amazing XO sauce. We also had fish siu mai in a Sichuan pepper and green peppercorn sauce, some fried spring onion pancakes (which were more like little puff pastries full of beautiful, finely chopped fresh spring onion), crispy garlic prawn cheung fun, which are so, so good, and these amazing pork and peanut dumplings that were sealed up with gold leaf. All of this and Jasmine tea only cost us £50, which I think is very good for the quality of what you get.
Then we walked through Regent’s Park to Primrose Hill and laughed at a woman who had definitely stolen daffodils from one of the gardens. The King’s daffodils, no less.
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On Friday I walked from our place to Brick Lane. I went to Graam Bangla, which is a Bangladeshi restaurant. I went about a year ago and it was so great. They let you sample little teaspoonfuls of different curries and vegetable side dishes before you place your order. I had the fish ball curry, which I really love, and was sucked into buying a spicy spinach side dish. I love it there.
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We went to Whitechapel on Sunday and had lunch at Lahore One, which is one of our favourite cheap places in the city. It was very quiet at Lahore One, and in Whitechapel, which we figured was because a lot of people would’ve been fasting for Ramadan. We had the methi chicken, which is our favourite. It’s full of fenugreek and like no other curry we’ve had. We also had a chicken biriyani and a naan bread. The waitress sucked us into buying vegetable samosas too, which were yum. It was quite a big lunch, but that didn’t matter, and it cost us less than £30, which is silly.
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Whenever I go to the office I find that I get hungry at about 3.00pm, so I usually pop down to the Sainsbury’s below the office and buy a packet of crisps. Honestly, people eating packets of crisps in the office is a national pastime in this country. I often buy chilli flavoured Dorito’s because I try to convince myself that corn chips are the healthier option, but lately I’ve been buying these cheese and jalapeno flavoured crisps, which are ridiculous.
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On Sunday night I spoke to my sister in Brussels for over an hour. She said that she was going to get takeaways for dinner, which made me want takeaways, because we never really buy takeaways here, except for kebabs when we’re drunk. But then I remembered we’d been out for dinner and two lunches over the weekend, so we didn’t need to spend more money. Instead, we had homemade fish and chips with homemade tartare sauce and salad. Okay, I confess the chips were McCain’s ones and the fish was the breaded cod you can buy at Waitrose and keep in the freezer. Sue me.