superpitching

What a lovely delightful cereal bar treat! Thank you nice distributor outside a mainline train station - I'll take 10! Mmmm yum yum, 10 cereal bars for breakfast. Sounds about right...

Hang on...



New Users! Gastrointestinal discomfort may occur until your body adjusts! Increase your fibre intake gradually and ensure to drink plenty of water.

"ulp".

ITEM! The "plus" in FIBRE plus appears to be pretty much: chocolate, sugars, oils, glucose fructose "cocoa liquor"?? A fibre cocktail!

ITEM! New Users? OF FIBRE? Kelloggs, what do you think our diets are LIKE?

ITEM! This was actually quite nice, but of course it would be, it is chocolate and sugar and oats. And free. I suspect that there's not much less fibre in my McVities chocolate digestive that I appeared to eat immediately after I ate the cereal bar.

PS - here is the latest from Gwynneth Paltrow's GOOP newsletter, regarding home cooking. It starts, "As a home cook, one of the best things I’ve ever done was to build a wood burning oven in the back yard". Huh! My recommendation is to hit the Hut. Good old GP!

I am glad to dispell the mutterings of FOOD BLOGGERS who disparage the average standard of Chinese food available in the UK. Professor Layton knows where to go when he's in Chinatown - like any true gentleman.

Peppers!

And what do they serve?



Marvellous. Would eat all.

The Euston Tap! Because ONE real ale pub within 20 seconds of the Northern line wasn't enough! Personally, I'm over the moon as I can now be in the pub within 20 seconds of leaving my office. That 40 second dash to the Doric Arch could really take it out of one.

Due to open this Friday - I am keeping a keen eye on the load-in process that's happening this week. Yesterday I saw KEGS arriving. Today there is a sign advertising 27 beers and Monmouth coffee.

Still looks very much under construction on the inside. One might wonder how they're going to fit 27 kegs in there at all, but hey, if the Glass Bar could do it...?

Mooncake for lunch!
WITH COFFEE.
You heard...

Last Friday we had a Cheese and Whisky Tasting!

At some point I described the Stawley as tasting like A Forest by the Cure, and then go on to compare various cheese to the Nolans, Taylor Lautner, "not as good as Kayleigh by Marillion" etc.

Cheese and whisky goes less well together than hoped, but it was a great evening and I am very glad we Tried It! Thanks to Marna for hosting and amazing cheese provision!

The standard! Busaba (Store Street). A habitual haunt w/ one of my pals. We keep going back for the cult-ishly addictive Thai Calamares (aka "the special stuff"). The best combination on the menu imho is an order of thai calamares (so flavoursome! so frequently fresh! how do they DO it!), som tam (green papaya salad - they keep it moist so you can also dip yr 'mares in it should you wish) and a cold CHANG beer. I would not say no to some sticky rice along with this, but Busaba have kindly replaced the sticky rice with brown rice. Brown rice can BUG OFF. Well it's OK sometimes but dudes now is not the time.

The hip and new! Koya: Mr Noodles kindly alerted me to some sort of buzz about this new-ish udon shop, so dutifully I did the rounds food-blogs run by Bloggers With Cameras to check out teh buzz. VERY buzzy. Here is Mr Noodleses review, which even includes a photo. See... he's a proper food blogger innit.

SO,  the deal at Koya is hand-made superior udon noodles. Served either hot-hot (hot noodles in hot soup), hot-cold (hot soup, cold noodles on the side) or cold-cold (cold dippy soup, cold noodles - brr). I am afraid I wasn't quite sure how to navigate my way through these options - I've had hiyashi chuka ramen, but that's a different bowl of cold noodles all-together. In the end I BRAVELY went for hot-cold - cold udon noodles w/ hot miso-buta (pork) broth, along with some pork belly and onsen tamago on the side. You know onsen tamago right? It is HOT SPRING EGGS! They are sort of like poached eggs++++++. I've made them myself a few times but oddly I don't think I've had one in a restaraunt? That doesn't seem right... ?

ANYWAY. The food turned up relatively quickly, and gosh, why did I go for something I wasn't quite sure *how* to eat. The noodles are chewy, sticky and long, and come sitting on a little bamboo tray, with yr broth in a seperate bowl. I gamely attempted dipping noodles in the broth, but given a/ longness of noodles b/ general incompetence at navigating chopsticks SIGH, I think I made a bit of a mess. On their own, the noodles are good, but eventually I ended up scooping them into the bowl - after a few minutes they'd soaked up the broth perfectly and were the most delicious things ever? So... why have them on the side in the first place? Would hot-hot have skipped out the middle man here/ Oh well... might I add here that the broth was incredibly delicious? It pisses on other soups from great heights. The noodles themselves were also great, but perhaps I haven't eaten enough udon to *really* appreciate the greatnesss of the ones at Koya?

Minus points: it's pricey, and they don't sell Asahi Black. Waaaaaai.
Plus points: the broth, the onsen tamago, nice general ambience if you will, you can order scraps of batter to go in yr udon (though you get way more if you just order the tanuki udon at beloved Donzoko - which also sells Asahi Black,  I AM JUST SAYING).

The new-near-my-office! This is getting long now, but the third place is Mai Sushi on Chalton Street. We went on the spur of the moment after a drink at the Somers Town Coffee House, and ordered a mix of nigiri, sashimi salad oh and a bottle of TAKARA PLUM BOOZE. We didn't really need to order that, but it was there... they also have "raspberry sake". Scary.  Here is their full menu, which has a much bigger sake list than I think I remember seeing? I must report that we had had several "small ales" before this trip so my accurate reporting suffers a little. Whilst I don't remember eating too much (Kake may beg to differ), the seabream really stood out as delicious. I want to go back and have the grilled salted seabream (look for the 'shioyaki' bit of the menu), or maybe seabass, or maybe mackerel. And it's always important to see if the nasu dengaku is good?

It also says they do a hotpot, but what sort, I wonder? There's Vietnamese, Tom Yum, "rice soup hotpot" (w/ seafood), mix BBQ, but uh, why no shabu-shabu in a Japanese restaurant?

I think I need to work on taking some photos, I highly suspect no-one will read all of this w/o a photo 'sweetener'...

I threw the 'kimchi' away.

You can't make kimchi with white cabbage. The salt just didn't DO anything! this is the first time ever that salting has not had ANY effect. It was enough to pickle a human!!

One does not need to keep mouldy cabbage in the fridge.

In the bin.

GROSS!

My lunch is some shredded cabbage and carrots, briefly stir-fried with some random c.rap, a slice of PORT SALUT cheese, a slice of PORK LUNCHEON MEAT* and some rice w/ gomashio (for when your rice is just not salty enough). I suspect the cabbage is not cooked properly, but then again I am from the North and suspect cabbage is only cooked when it is boiled for 8 hours.

Anyway. Blah.

My fridge is full of cabbage. I recommend only buying a head of cabbage when you have a definite plan for what to do with it. There is a bowl full of the cabbage/carrot mix, and in the pyrex, there's some chopped salted cabbage slowly decomposing.

I plan to make kimchi.

Not because I particularly WANT to make my own kimchi (it is easy enough to buy), but because I still had a whole flipping half a head of cabbage left, and it was the only tolerable looking thing in the Tassajara cookbook.

Oh yes - no recipe book I own has a recipe for cabbage apart from Tassajara! Well, perhaps Fatty Slater has a recipe for cabbage, but it will necessarily involve "adding bacon" and I didn't have any so feh. (Actually, chiz!! Here is a cabbage and lentil salad that I would eat. Count this up for another time I missed having the internet... relying on RECIPE BOOKS for recipes instead of consulting THE CLOUD? Get a life, grandma)...

*Tesco Value of course~

I spent 20 minutes last night julienning a/ NINJIN b/ potatoes c/ green peppers in order to make a delicious "tricolore" salad for lunch today. I cannot find my knife sharpener (not that I am at all convinced it does anything anymore), and my slicey-knife is totally blunt. Slow. Progress.

Still, it was all worth it after I fried up all those lovely sliced vegetables (howto: soak potatoes, add oil to pan, carrots first, then potato, then green pepper, then add salt and pepper originally from this book which is a good no nonsense lunchbox affair), and then I remembered today is a rare office outing for lunch*, and I needn't bring anything...

Still, I am sure it will be fine for up to a week in the fridge. What could possibly go wrong?

Anyway. Pffft. Mandolines are for wimps with no knife technique anyway...

*Balfour! A place I have been walking past for years. It's been extended and refurbed, but they still do a set lunch which actually looks quite good!

All I can think about at the moment is dim sum, which makes it even more irritating that much lunch is a sodding "Innocent Vegetable Pot". I have spent the morning being envious at Ken's trip to Tim Ho Wan (here are someone elses photos), but a lot closer to home is Penninsula, by the Holiday Inn in North Greenwich. (Whenever I think of a Holiday Inn, I start singing "Holiday Hymn" by Vic Godard, which I constantly mis-sing as "Holiday Inn" which is amusing if you like that sort of thing). I have never been, but gosh they have lots of dim sum. I think I should eat it all, or alternatively, get married there as they appear to have some offers on. If you book 20 tables they throw in a wedding dress, karaoke and a suckling pig, marvellous. Anyway, back to the dim sums, and Kake, here you go:

http://www.mychinesefood.co.uk/printmenu/dimsum_chinese.htm
http://www.mychinesefood.co.uk/printmenu/dimsum_english.htm

They say: "The traditional accompaniment to all this food is Chinese Tea; we offer a selection of different leaves, with dark, intriguingly musty Bo-Lay, a flavourite alternative to the ubiquitous Jasmine and Shei Sin."

Suspect intriguingly musty = we found it down the back of the sofa, watch out for mothballs. Yummy!