watercress soup

I’m a big advocate of seasonal ingredients. If the cyclical forces of nature inhibit produce growth, then it probably shouldn’t be growing at that time of year. And by proxy, you will experience far less pleasure consuming it than if you did at its peak. Have you ever tried to buy a fresh tomato in January? They’ll be insipid to the point of translucent unless they’ve been freighted in from the tropics or somewhere equally absurd. If you want tomatoes in January, do what the Italians do and use quality canned tomatoes or passata where the flavours of the summer bounty have been bottled and preserved.

When you do manage to get your hands on produce fresh and slap bang in the middle of its seasonal best, there is often little if anything you need to do to it or add to it to fully appreciate what it has to offer. A great example is this soup that Matt makes where the star ingredient is watercress, currently in its prime. It takes almost no time to knock up and contains the most minimal of ingredients – not even any stock. Yet the flavour from it is so fresh and vibrant and lively with the natural peppery hit from the leaves that it’s down as one of my favourite soups.

Good for both the body and the soul, I present to you spring in a bowl.

Watercress Soup

Serves 2

1/4 onion, diced
200g watercress
50g spinach
180ml boiling water
180g ice
Salt and pepper
Small knob of unsalted butter

Soften the onion in the butter until translucent. Add the watercress and spinach and toss them in the pan for one minute. Add the boiling water, bring up to the boil and boil for 2 minutes - push the leaves under the surface of the water during this time. Remove the pan from the heat and add the ice.

Tip The use of ice prevents the leaves from overcooking (thus retaining their nutrients) and preserves the vibrant colour of the leaves.

Stir until the ice has melted. Season with salt and pepper to taste – don’t use too much pepper as watercress is naturally peppery. Use a stick blender or transfer the contents to a food processor and blitz until smooth. Reheat to piping hot when ready to serve and decant into warm bowls.

Serve with a topping of your choice – a quenelle (neat looking spoonful - ask Masterchef) of crème fraîche, quark, Greek yoghurt, or a grating of parmesan. Don’t forget a couple of slices of good quality sourdough. A perfect Spring lunch in no time.

Alfiyet olsun.

colliers wood turkish restaurant - review

mitite köfte - minced lamb prepared with chopped onions,
fresh herbs and garlic, covered with a secret recipe sauce

If a Turkish restaurant opens up on my doorstep, it's inevitable I'm going to check it out. Even if it has taken over the spot of a previously unsuccessful and poorly reviewed Indian and not changed the decor, at all. We're talking huge revolving chandeliers, purple walls and damask wallpaper along with gold dado, and lilac faux silk string curtains. Direct your senses past the kitsch and they'll soon be met with the aromas of fresh meat hitting a hot charcoal grill (mangal) permeating throughout the venue. Sure, the bar could be a set from a Bollywood b-movie, but who cares when the food you are eating and the service you receive is very good indeed.

Matt and I decided to try out Istanbul Meze Mangal on a Thursday evening. The owners clearly left their creativity back in Turkey when coming up with the name, but what they lack in imagination and interior design, they more than make up for in food. For starters we delved into the world of the savoury Turkish pastry - in my opinion one of the best offerings from the cuisine. We ordered sigara böreği (cigar shaped pastry encasing creamy Turkish white cheese - £3.95) and patlıcan kızartma (fried aubergines and green peppers with a creamy yoghurt and tomato sauce - £4.50). The pastries were fresh, crisp and light and encasing a good amount of cheese with hints of mint. The aubergine whilst fried was not greasy, accompanied by oven roasted cherry tomatoes, and embraced by a completely delightful tomato and yoghurt sauce which we guessed was their sauce for the Iskender kebab. Both plates were slashed with lines of pesto which has no place on a Turkish plate, but I suspect this was an attempt to make them look artistic and I'm more than happy to let a courageous, if misguided, lean towards haute cuisine slide.

sigara böreği - cigar shaped filo pastry
encasing crumbly white cheese

patlıcan kızartma - fried aubergines in a
yoghurt and tomato sauce

For mains Matt ordered the yogurtlu adana köfte (£10.95) - one of my favourite types of kebab. This comes with a layer of bread with a yoghurt sauce (similar to the Iskender sauce mentioned above, but without the tomato). If the sauce is right and the meat is good, it's difficult for this dish to go wrong and it's why it's one of my all time kebabs - this place did not disappoint. The sauce was exceptionally creamy and flavoursome and whilst the köfte had the odd small nugget of gristle that had to be removed from the mouth, the flavour was top notch. I ordered the mitite köfte (£8.50), not something I've heard of before but the menu description was flirtatious enough for me to firmly place my finger on it - minced lamb prepared with chopped onions, fresh herbs and garlic, covered with a secret recipe sauce. Secret recipe sauce, you say? Hit me.

Turns out this secret sauce rendered these köftes some of the best I've ever had the pleasure of encountering - a crisp and beautifully flavoured casing with soft and succulent middles, seasoned with herbs. I attempted to decipher the components of this secret sauce but my brain soon gave up once it realised the task was detracting from fully savouring the pleasures of the flavour and texture. When I'm 'Mmmmm'-ing after every mouthful, you know it's something good.

Iskender kebab - served with a layer
of bread and a tomato and yoghurt sauce

warm Turkish bread

We were offered 'garlic sauce or chilli sauce?' and whilst I was almost expecting a large plastic burger joint squeezy bottle of both (as you would expect from a standard take-away kebab house at 2am on a Friday night), we were in fact presented with two small pots of home made sauces. Very pleasingly, the garlic sauce was not garlic sauce at all, it was cacık (the Turkish version of the more widely recognised Greek tzatziki), and the second pot was full of chillies chopped up with seasoning and a tomato sauce (I think). I wonder if they were introduced as 'garlic sauce, chilli sauce' to help those not au fait with the full repertoir of Turkish cuisine to relate to. The table next to us had a young couple who ordered doner with chips. Chips?! Why have chips when this place serves delicious warm and fresh Turkish bread! No Turk would eat their kebab with chips. But these guys were not Turkish and there is so much more to doner or shish in this cuisine that much of the people of Britain have not yet had the opportunity to recognise. Istanbul Meze Mangal focusses on kebabs (of which there is a huge spectrum) and does it very well. But the Turkish cuisine stretches far beyond this - perhaps the couple saw this venue as a peg higher than eating the food from your standard take-away kebab joint in your car - here you can do so at a glass table and with linen napkins.

If you venture into a proper Turkish restaurant that has a menu where half of the contents you've perhaps not heard of before, I urge you to order one of these items. It will most likely be a more authentically Turkish dish that will help you to discover the full range of what this country has to offer. And it's worth taking note, kebabs are just the start of it. But it is a good place to start, none-the-less. And if you're in the SW London neck of the woods, this place is up there with the best to sample them. Turns out you don't need to live in Harringay to eat good Turkish food in London. I think I may have found my new local.

Liked lots - food, staff, incredible koftes, freshly made bread, outside space for warm days
Liked less - the decor
Good for - big parties, eating good Turkish food outside of North London

Alfiyet olsun.

This review can also be found on the Your Local Guardian website.

pepparkakor - swedish ginger thins

If you've ever stepped into a supermarket in Sweden (the food section in your local Ikea will provide the next best alternative, albeit possibly with equine occupation) you may know about pepparkakor. 

If the name doesn't ring a bell, the description may - very thin and very crisp dark spiced biscuits, also known as ginger thins or ginger snaps. I picked up a couple of boxes when visiting Stockholm over Easter, one for home and one to take to work for colleagues. Turns out I ate most of both boxes as it's almost impossible to dull the come hither tones of their unique texture and mildly fiery flavour. 

They're not like any other biscuit I've encountered - incredibly light and completely void of moisture lending to their unmistakable crispness. And those who did get a chance to dip in a paw before I managed to scoff the contents of both boxes thoroughly enjoyed them for the same reasons.

Short of having to drive to Ikea in Croydon every time I wish to replenish the stock (which has long since dwindled to a painful pepparkakor void), I soon realised the only solution would be to find a recipe and make them (regularly) myself. 

After quite a bit of research, it turns out achieving the signature snap is a challenge. There are online stories of bakers making dozens of batches with varying degrees of ingredients, still unable to claim victory over the elusive and unique texture. Suggestions involve excluding any fat whatsoever in order to remove all moisture. Others say bake for longer at a lower temperature. Further advice speaks of using very strong and unfamiliar raising agents for the tough dough.

Well, I found a recipe and a process that read right to me. I tried it, and I nailed it first time. If you want to achieve the same texture and flavour as those boxed Swedish thins, use this recipe.

This recipe is from Cook's Illustrated Magazine (November 2011) and is an absolute corker. It is also incredibly quick and easy to make the dough - the majority of your time will be spent rolling and cutting out the individual biscuits. 

The recipe suggests this makes about 80 biscuits but I've ended up with double - I suspect I've rolled the dough half as thin as the recipe has. So  if you do in fact want 80, I would half the below ingredients. Or you'll end up with 160 biscuits filling up two large Tupperware boxes. Not a bad situation to be in, in my opinion. Keep them airtight and they'll last you for as long as two people with an average biscuit intake would need to eat them.

Pepparkakor

Makes 80 (or around 160 very thin ones as in the pictures)
2 1/2 cups plain flour

2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/2 tsp salt

170g unsalted butter

4 tbsp ground ginger

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground cloves

1/4 tsp pepper

Pinch cayenne

1 1/4 cups packed dark brown soft sugar

1/4 cup molasses or black treacle

1 large egg plus 1 large yolk

Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt together in bowl. In the meantime, heat the butter in a pan over a medium heat until melted. Lower the heat to medium-low and continue to cook, swirling the pan frequently, until the foaming subsides and the butter is just beginning to brown. Turn off the heat.

Whisk in all the spices and then add the brown sugar and molasses to the butter mixture and whisk to combine until the sugar has melted and you have a smooth mixture. Add the egg and yolk and mix again with the whisk to combine. You should have a dark, sticky, smooth and glossy mixture.

Pour this mixture into your bowl of flour and combine with a spatula until you have a dough - don't over work it. Cover the bowl with cling film and keep in the fridge for the butter to firm, at least an hour.

Adjust your oven racks to upper-middle and lower-middle positions and heat the oven to 130C (fan). Line two baking trays with non-stick baking paper or silicone paper. Break off a portion of the dough and with your hands mound into a round and squash down. Take a rolling pin and slowly roll it out - if the edges are dry and crack, smooth them out with your fingers and continue rolling slowly. If any of the dough sticks to your rolling pin, just reverse the roll to remove it and join it back to the main mass. 

Roll them about as thin as 1mm - don't worry, they do rise a little in the oven. Use a small cookie cutter to cut out your shapes. Carefully lift each biscuit and place on your baking trays - leave a slight gap between each as they do expand slightly. You will fit about twenty per baking tray. Gather up the remaining dough and join with the rest of the mass. Break off another portion and repeat the process until all your dough is used up.

Place one tray on the upper rack and while it's baking, roll out and fill up your next tray. After 15 minutes or so, transfer the partially baked top tray to the lower rack and rotate 180 degrees. Place your second tray of biscuits on the upper rack. When your first tray is done, remove from the oven and transfer each biscuit to a cooling rack. Bring the top tray down to the bottom shelf, and continue this rotation until you've cooked all your biscuits. The biscuits are done when they are hard to touch and just darkening around the edges - around 15-20 minutes.

Tip The dough can be refrigerated for up to two days or frozen for up to one month if you want to get ahead. Let the dough stand at room temperature for 30 minutes before shaping. Let frozen dough thaw overnight before proceeding with the recipe. 

Settle down on a comfy arm chair in the evening with half a dozen thins, a glass of cold milk and a good read. I'm sold. 

Afiyet olsun.

Saturday Brunch at Hélène Darroze at The Connaught, Mayfair

Well I've only gone and found the best brunch in London. A bold statement, but allow me to explain.

The Connaught is a prestigious five star hotel nestled in a quiet corner of Mayfair Village and is home to the two Michelin-starred Hélène Darroze restaurant. 

Each Saturday, in the dark wood panelled room with carpeted floor and Damien Hirst originals, you will find a feast available in the form of a buffet brunch. Or as I like to refer to it, 'two Michelin-starred all-you-can-eat'.  Yes, you heard. I suspect this needs no further sell. But indulge me.

There are three courses to this exercise of epicurean endurance. The first and final course are self-serve buffets. Take any preconceptions associated with the dirty b-word, and along with those dark and lingering memories of the petite mort experienced the last time you overindulged at Mr Woo's £12.95 all-you-can-eat-MSG offering, lock them in the basement of your mind. 

Instead take this word and elevate it to the highest pedestal in the land, because it's these dizzy heights of ingredient quality and exceptional front of house service we're dealing with. For your main (and middle) course, a menu is available to make a single selection from and this is prepared and delivered whenever you are damn well ready for it. No rush, no pressure. Just uninterrupted, unadulterated pleasure.

Pictures speak more than words can do justice to this meal, so I'll let them do most of the translation from the tangible we experienced to the viewable equivalent.

Starters
Charcuteries: Basque black pork from Pierre Oteiza; ham seasoned with Espelette pepper sliced 'a la minute' on the antique Berkel machine; saucissons; Jésus; chorizo (above).

Home-made pork terrines and galantines. Grilled vegetable antipasti and aubergine caviar. 
Assortment of fresh salads including a Mariette with orange citrus dressing; Mesclun (small young leaves) with chervil; The “Connaught” Caesar with parmesan and anchovies; bitter chicory and Stilton. 

My favourite was a beautiful pink beetroot and buffalo mozzarella of which I kept returning to.

Smoked Scottish salmon, smoked halibut and smoked eel with the choices of garnish from: capers, dill, spring onions, chives, confit tomatoes, olive tappenade, sour cream, Greek yoghurt. 

Scrambled eggs with Royal Bortago (cured fish roe).

Freshly baked breads and an assortment of Viennoiseries made by chef including pain au chocolats, croissants, raspberry or hazelnut chocolate filled brioches, the most incredible 'butter bread', small baguettes, rye buns.

my first plate

a shot of creamy artichoke soup

Recline and perhaps take a little stroll to the lobby and back for some tactical internal space making. Maybe order a pot of green tea to assist the digestive juices.

Ready for the next course? 

Mains
From the main menu, both Matt and I initially ordered the braised Aberdeen Angus beef ox cheek burger, mounted by a saddle of duck foie gras. What red-blooded human wouldn't order that? 

With the gathering benefit of hindsight realised half way through my second helping of starters, I decided to change to the oysters to ensure I had room for everything to follow. These were Maldon oysters from Kent served with shallot vinegar, apple and celery, lime emulsion, and French pork crepinettes (a type of flat sausage). 

In all honesty, these were not the best oysters I've had (the reigning title holders are those from The Wright Brothers Oyster and Porterhouse), but I should have known better. As they say, one should only eat oysters in a month containing the letter 'r' to get them at their peak (i.e. September - April) and we are indeed a whole four days into May. 

I doubt my palette is that attuned to the changing tides of seasonal produce, but I certainly found them lacking in that unmistakable flavour of the sea. But I find the slippery bastards difficult to resist when they flirt so outrageously with me from the menu. The hot porky balls of goodness served on a square of slate were delicious though.

my second plate

The burger was delivered in a package smaller than a usual burger, a welcome sight after a no holds barred round of starters. 

The braised cheek patty was thick and intense with the concentrated flavour from the prolonged low cooking and with the slab of fatty duck liver astride, the combination delivered wonderful rich and meaty flavours laced with a hint of iron, lightened by the small side salad that accompanied it. 

In addition was a pot of chips which were essentially a single potato cut into four large wedges and an espresso cup filled with home made tomato sauce. Some might say the chips were an unnecessary addition to the already hefty burger bundle, but they went well with my oysters.

Other options from the main menu included eggs Benedict with York ham and black truffle from Perigord (£5 supplement); macaroni and cheese with an aged Comté and Bellota ham gratin; and a chicken based one I alas can't recall.

Dessert

You'll likely be a good hour and a half to two into this marathon by now. Hopefully you've paced yourself, strategically not filled up on the incredible breads, gone for a short jog around the block, and have room for yet more. And quite a bit more there is.

My third plate consisted of sourdough filled with hazelnut and raisins enjoyed with the assortment of cheeses, grapes and cubes of quince. Generous slabs of Manchego and Comté along trinket sized mounds of goats cheese. The nutty sheep's cheese of Manchego is one of my favourites and I indulged in a couple more visits back to the board.

my third plate

A wonderfully friendly French man of statuesque Amazonian proportions guarded the dessert corner - tables laden with fresh fruit, cookies and cheesecakes, brownies and mini-cup cakes, poised ready to slice and plate up as small or large a portion as you desired. 

But probably more importantly, he stood behind a large bowl of waffle batter and a waffle maker. Say hello to freshly made waffles with your topping of choice at the wink of an eye. Matt built up such a rapport with this gentleman that after a huge first portion, that was all the communication needed for a second plate of hot and quartered waffle excellence to be delivered. 

Maple syrup and honey our drizzling of choice, but also available was quince jam, Greek yoghurt and more. The aroma of these freshly cooked permeated the whole room - if you didn't think you had any room yet, tap into the reaches of your second stomach for these.

my fourth plate, plus a quarter of a waffle

Matt's second waffle round

the waffle man

Coffee

If you haven't already had your caffeine hit during this meal, now would be a good time. Short of injecting a double espresso straight into the jugular, you're going to need some help fighting the onset of fatigue induced by your blood directing itself straight to your gut by this point. 

And all the espressos, cappuccinos, Americano's, flat whites, special blend teas and fresh juices you could possibly want come as part of the buffet brunch. The coffee was not only of superb quality, but served in beautiful Hermès crockery. The silver service and heavy deep-cut crystal water glasses were touches of finesse that helped sharpen the whole experience.

A special mention must be given to the front of house staff as they were without fault. From the maitre d', to the waiters, to the  waffle man they were all attentive and smiling and raconteuring with the clientèle.

We were there for around three hours and at no point did we feel rushed - we were positively encouraged to make further visits to the buffet bars, frequently asked if we would like any further drinks, and I was fully indulged when I requested to photograph the displays with responses of 'please madame, of course'.

the first to be seated - it soon became full

The whole experience as you would hope from a double starred venue was exceptional. A classy yet leisurely and informal way to start the the weekend.

The room quickly filled with an array of first time diners, couples on birthday treats, anniversary brunches, tourists, gathered families and morning shoppers alike.

My advice would be to reserve a table close to opening, request a paper from the lobby and savour the full term of the brunch. The hours of service are from 11am - 2.30pm. Our table was for 11am and we somehow managed to roll ourselves out at around 2.15pm.

When considering the quality and abundance of food on offer, the service you receive, the duration of the stay and the setting you're housed in, I regard this meal to be of exceptional value despite what may initially seem to be a hefty price tag.

The food consumed during this meal prevented me from feeling hungry again until around 8pm - and if you know me, that's saying something.

This makes a wonderful alternative to a dinner treat for someone close or for that special occasion. Who wouldn't appreciate such quality ingredients on tap, all morning long. What special Saturdays were made for.

Three courses £55.00
Three courses for children £39

Liked lots - quality of ingredients; impeccable service; unlimited tea, coffee and juice; unlimited starters and desserts; waffles made to order; the outstanding butter bread; grand setting; the beautiful Hermes crockery
Liked less - people on neighbouring tables chewing with their mouth open; the oysters
Good for - a special occasion; whiling away a Saturday morning; not needing to eat for the rest of the day

Alfiyet olsun.