In Sickness and in Health.

Today has been a day based on two main activities. Knitting and cooking.

I am currently knitting P a pair of slippers, which while away the hours beautifully. Couple that up with watching House and you have a pretty awesome morning/afternoon. However I am full of cold and currently malingering on the sofa throwing tissues around like confetti and drinking lemsip. MMM paracetamol -y.

So I headed out to the wonderful Lower Marsh Market. It is a street that links Waterloo Road and Westminster Bridge Road and it has lots of little stalls all selling all number of things, from bike parts and faux fur tiger print rugs to hand knitted children’s clothes and dream catchers. There are also any number of food stalls. Moroccan, Carribean, Thai, Italian, French… the stalls vary from day to day selling everything from lasagna to jerk chicken and my absolute favourite, a stall that sells Indian food wrapped up like a burrito.

I have eaten there a couple of times before, being at school all day normally puts a stop to my visits and today I had a bowl rather than a wrap this time, of chicken keema with kidney beans and rice with hot sauce, it warms you right through, the curry was mild and thick, with an ochre sauce that didn’t drown it – the fate of so many poor curries – so you savour the meat more. 

He’s a very affable fellow too who obviously pours his heart and soul into his food and buisiness. Do check him out, his name is Vinod and he trades in Lower Marsh, Covent Garden and just off Victoria. http://www.chulafusedfoods.com/ London needs more Indian food on the go if you ask me 🙂 He’s branching out into all sorts of things, the quality of his food however never falters.

I finished off my trip to the market (getting the boeuf bourgingnon ingredients) with a trip to the french pattiserie stall for a cookie the size of my face. It’s such a beautiful stall with pastries and tarts, meringues and millefeuille all huge and crumbly.  you can’t really get the idea of size from these pictures, but if you take it as read that the cookies are the size of a spread hand/your face then you can figure out the size of the other goodies! 

Boeuf Bourgingnon this particular recipe serves 3-4 (hungry people)

Ingredients – 1 kg of beef shin (you can use cheek too, both are really flavoursome) cut into smaller chunks about 2 in. 3 long shallots halved, 3 large cloves garlic whole, 1 carrot sliced, one onion sliced, 125g button mushrooms you can quarter them, I prefer to bung them all in whole, a heaped tablespoonful of flour, olive oil, 425 ml red wine, 500 ml beef stock.

Method – 

Preheat the oven to 160

A dash of olive oil in a heavy bottomed pan heated until it’s smoking slightly.

Put the cubes of beef in the pan and lightly brown

Then remove the meat and brown the onion in the juices and oil, return the meat to the pan. Add a heaped spoonful of flour to coat the meat and soak up the juices.

Slowly add the wine stirring all the time, turn the heat down slightly

Add the mushrooms, the carrot slices, the halved shallots and the garlic cloves

Then add the beef stock and make sure everything gets covered. It looks like a lot of liquid but it will reduce. 

Put in the oven with a lid for 4 hours. Beef shin needs as much time in the oven as possible to become really tender.  It’s beautiful meat; red, shiny, marbled through with lines of fat which make it really juicy and almost shreddable when it’s cooked slowly for a long time. The smell that is currently emitting from my oven is mouth watering and wonderful. it’s only been in there for an hour.

The best cure for a cold; making, cooking and eating a really hearty meal. Nothing beats it. Roll on 8:30.

Borough Market

Today I went to Borough Market; my favourite place in the whole of London apart from my home, and spent two glorious hours in 3 degree weather immersing myself. I love Borough, the jumble of stalls clustered together all vying for space with devoted men and women wrapped up like parcels manning them. It’s always packed (as it should be)  and this makes it all the more wonderful, a non attended market – is there a sadder thing? So not only can you enjoy the food, but people watch too. The best advert for the stuff on sale is the expressions of those eating it. A girl tucked into a pulled pork baguette, the crispy bread flaking slightly as it broke and the shredded pork so succulent and juicy it’s almost falling out of the sides it’s so crammed in. The smells of mulled cider and wine drifting through the alleys as huge metal pans groan under the weight of paella and curries. Wheels of hard and soft, squidgy cheeses behind glass all wrapped up with thick paper, or sliced into wedges ready for home, chalkboards all declaring wares and sharing jokes and news, while huge strings of dried chillies, red and wrinkled, rub shoulders with whole rabbit and pheasant with fur and feathers still firmly on and all the colours of the veg stall bleeding into the flower shop next door. Jazz for the eyes.

I headed to the Fresh Olive Company http://www.fresholive.com/borough-market/ (there are many purveyors of olives there, this one is my favourite), beautiful, glazed china dishes all filled to the brim with beautiful, green treasure. All different sizes and marinated in exotic and quite frankly delicious flavours; basil and garlic, lemon, basil and mint, chilli, garlic and cumin or stuffed with peppers, citrus rind and garlic. I ordered two medium pots (£3.50 each) one with giant green olives stuffed with birds eye chillies, little tongues of pure fire that blow your head off and another with smaller ones covered in a chilli and garlic marinade.

I then headed to the exotic meats stall (http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/page/3012/Gamston-Wood-Farm/120) The lady in the photograph is the very same who served me and she told me all about how to cook them, what to serve them with and even knocked 50p off the price and picked up kangaroo steak and 2 each of zebra,  llama and elk burgers, none of which I have ever tried or cooked with before all of which look amazing. The meat is very lean and easy to cook with apparently, tomorrow I will be cooking kangaroo steak with sweet potato mash, purple sprouting broccoli (also purchased at Borough) and a red wine jus.

It is probably time I mention Mr Cool. He has chosen this name – something I believe he will live to regret – and he is the primary recipient of most if not all of my cooking. I wanted to start this blog to write about the food I cooked, share recipes I come across and restaurants I visit, Mr Cool is the ‘Len Goodman’ of the enterprise (again, I think he’ll live to regret this) scoring the more experimental attempts. The first being kangaroo steak and sweet potato mash.

Anyway back to Borough, I also picked up a packet of homemade granola with blueberries, 4 red and orange gerberas, and sampled a range of teas from Darjeeling to Mrs Liu’s 100 year old red tea. Marvellous stuff. The fish stall (http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/page/3012/Furness-Fish-and-Game/76) had a bowl of hand dived scallops with stir fry and crispy bacon going for a fiver which I am now resolved to try. I dunked fresh bread in sweet balsamic and fruity olive oil struggling to balance sun dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts on the slices. I sampled dense, moist and seriously chocolaty brownies from Konditor & Cook (http://www.konditorandcook.com/products) and returned home laden with booty. My onlyregret of this trip is that my camera ran out of battery.