Tummyrumble

Food and restaurant gems around Peckham, on a map even

The other day I was asked this question on Twitter:

@manne I just moved to SE15, can I ask you for your neighbourhood food highlight list? I would really appreciate any tips!Sun Jan 16 23:58:48 via Twitter for BlackBerry®Arianna Halshaw
AriannaHalshaw

While I am no expert on Peckham and its hidden treasures (that title certainly goes to Helen Graves of Food Stories, @FoodStories) it made me realise that I know quite a few places I frequently go back to.

Update 2011-04-14: Also see this food and drink map that Helen Graves made. With a bit of luck Lizzie at Hollow Legs will add info about New Cross to it. Some interesting places in New Cross these days, like the great coffee shop London Particular.

Update: Helen Graves has also published a list of her favourite food places around Peckham, do check it out!

Not wanting to disappoint, I quickly whipped up a Google map with my favourite Peckham food and drink places and tweeted the link to Arianna (if the link to the map isn't working in your browser, try using Firefox, right now there seems to be a bug in Google Maps links...):

View Peckham gems: food and restaurants in a larger map

(If you want to share the map with someone you can use this more compact link: http://goo.gl/maps/sJMw)

From New Chan's, my favourite take away Chinese, to W Bunting Butchers and Victoria Inn, at these places I have never been disappointed. Much.

There is a special mention of Aldi in that map list, but for the best supermarket shopping I would recommend Sainsbury's in New Cross. Lots of buses going there from Queen's Road, huge place, great vegetables, nice deli section. Kick's the living daylight out of ASDA, Morrison's and the massive Tesco on Old Kent Road.

At time of writing this, there is of course also the fantastic burger popup #MEATEASY run by Yianni Papoutsis of The Meat Wagon just down the road in New Cross (which I had better point out, lest I would be accused of trying to big up Peckham a bit too much). So if you read this before mid March 2011, get your ass down there. It will love you for it.

The day after I sorted the above map out my friend Daf who also recently moved in to the area posted on Facebook a list of places he intends to visit. Here are some of the gems he has shortlisted in Peckham or nearby, to check out when you are not eating and drinking:

• New Gallery - looks funky and is either busy or empty.
• South London Gallery - has a nice little cafe, one for a chilled Sunday perhaps.
• Nunhead Cemetery - beautiful Victorian cemetery to stroll around in.
• MOCA London - point out that they have not joined forces with Saatchi (?) and is sort of a gallery kind of artsy space.
• The Rivoli - the only intact 1950s ballroom in London, hosts events and charity functions.
• House Gallery - in Camberwell, also has a nice little cafe to chill out in.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery - not in Peckham, but worth the trip cross the border to Dulwich. One of the oldest exhibition spaces in London.

To stay abreast with what's on in the area, the website Spoonfed has a Peckham section. There is also a @SE15 Twitter account posting the occasional news link and update.

Do keep in mind that you are just a short bus ride on the 345 away from Brixton, where you find a great food market, exiciting restaurants like Franco Manca, and Ritzy, one of the oldest still running cinemas in London!

That should keep a newcomer busy for some time, if you know places I have missed that definitely should be on this list, please leave a comment below! :)

Loin of lamb, stuffed and rolled - slow cooking Sundays

Stuffed lamb loin
Originally uploaded by Manne.

In my not so very expert opinion, lamb must be ideal for roasting. Lots of fat packed with flavour, and ideally served slightly pink, it is difficult to get it wrong. If I can get it right, anyone can.

What mainly attracted me to this recipe (from The Cook's Book) was the stuffing. Spinach, loads of garlic, double cream, chopped kidneys... Lovely. Rolled in a lamb loin it would probably be enough as a whole meal for any paleo or low carber. We decided to roast a few parsnips and carrots though, to make it a more complete meal (and get some nice leftovers for bubble and squeak breakfast).

Went to the butchers yesterday to have the loin prepared and got a fantastic demonstration of where the kidneys sit in the lamb. Since the recipe confused me a bit, saying that the stuffing required the "kidneys of the saddle of lamb" I wasn't sure if the actual kidneys were what they meant, or if it perhaps was some special cut of meat.

So when I asked, the butcher simple showed me a whole lamb where the kidneys sat snugly nested in a casing of suet right at the top of the lamb saddle.

Behold the very kidneys that went in my spinach and garlic stuffing
Originally uploaded by Manne.

As the entire saddle is quite big, and probably could feed 20 people, I settled for just buying the loin.

Snip, snip, cut, cut, ten minutes later I had a perfect loin in my bag, with the kidneys for the stuffing resting on top. If you live in the Peckham area, I can't recommend the butchers on Peckham Park Road enough. Friendly, helpful and able to provide most anything.

Lessons learned from cooking this:

• Stuffing volume is more than is supposed to fit in the lamb roll. With that knowledge before I started stuffing, I wouldn't have had to scrape so much of it off the bench...
• Tying string around a lamb loin is tricky on your own. For next time I need to grow an extra hand, or have a kitchen assistant.
• Putting a roasting tray on top of the gas cooker is dangerous. It heats up extremely fast, burns the fat, and skews the pan. Fry in a frying pan first and then transfer to the roasting tray.

If you have five hours to spare, I filmed the whole thing using the live broadcasting service Bambuser. Tune in next Sunday for another live edition of Slow Cooking Sundays straight from my London kitchen.

(Now, why you would want to do that is beyond me, but considering I had 43 people watching the feed this evening... Ask me questions, and I will answer. ;)

Ingredients

Spinach & Garlic Stuffing

20 garlic cloves, peeled
1 tbsp butter
splash of olive oil
100 ml double cream
800 gram spinach
kidneys from the lamb, diced small
2 egg yolks

Ingredients for stuffed lamb loin
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Roast Lamb Loin, Stuffed

1 lamb loin, boned, stuffed with spinach & garlic
rosemary, loads
1 bulb of garlic, halved crossways
olive oil for frying

Method

Spinach & Garlic Stuffing

Set your oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Peel and blanch the garlic cloves for a minute. Drain and put in a foil package along with the butter and olive oil. Roast the garlic in oven for half an hour, then crush the garlic in a large bowl. Reserve the infused oil for frying off the lamb loin later.

Reduce cream in a sauce pan to half its volume.

Blanch the spinach (I did this by adding spinach leaves and boiling water from my kettle in batches to a large stock pot, as 800 grams of spinach is a lot of volume when raw...). Drain and leave in cool water for a few minutes to refresh.

Squeeze the spinach dry and chop roughly, add to the large bowl with the garlic.

Toss the chopped kidneys in a hot pan for half a minute or so, then mix them with the spinach and garlic along with the cream and egg yolks. Season with salt and pepper.

Roast Stuffed Lamb Loin

Stuff the loin with the spinach and garlic mix. You really don't need to use more than half, save the rest of the stuffing for warming in a pan later and serving as a side.

Add the stuffing in layers, so you put some stuffing along where the spine sat, then fold the fillets over, add some more stuffing, then finally roll it all up folding the skin flaps across eachother.

Tie it up to a roll. Do yourself a favour and have someone else present to help you with this. That third hand to have a finger to press on the knots is important...

Start tying each end, and then one or two loops around the middle. Tie it tight, but not too hard. If you do, the stuffing will push out through the ends while roasting.

Heat some olive oil (I reused the oil that I roasted the garlic for the stuffing in) and sear the roll all around in a frying pan until golden. Transfer to a roasting tray, along with the oil and juices from the pan, and surround the roll with rosemary and the halved garlic cloves.

Roast in oven until done. Which in my case was determined using a meat thermometer. As it reached 56 degrees Celsius in the center, I took the roll out to rest. It took about 120 minutes or so for my 2 kilo loin.

Put the roll on a rack and leave it for another half hour or so to rest. The cooking continues, so this is important. It also makes it easier to deal with when slicing it up later.

While the roast is resting, make a nice gravy. You'll find lots of recipes for nice gravies (is that really the plural?) online. When there is five minutes or so left of the resting time, heat through the remaining stuffing in a frying pan.

Ingredients for stuffed lamb loin
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Carve thin slices from the end of the loin roll. If you got the roasting right, it should be slightly pink in the middle, and oozing meat juices.

Serve with the gravy, a quenelle of the warm stuffing, and perhaps some tomatoes or sliced romano pepper for added crunch and freshness. Delish.

Scottish shortbread flavoured with malt sugar

Scottish shortbread
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Went to the Ben Greeno Supper Club this week, for the Glenfiddich Burn's Night. Was fab. Benjamin Greeno (@bgreeno) is a great host, welcoming and easy to talk to.

Fellow guests were ranging from chefs to journalists covering the modern space race (!) and I really should write a little bit about the night as I took photos of every single dish. Lots of food geeks there, so felt alright to take photos for once. It was also Ben Greeno's last Supper Club night in London, and I can only feel quite lucky to have had the opportunity to try out his cooking at Tudor Road in Hackney.

As the weekend is coming to an end though, I don't think I will find the time, so if you are curious on Ben Greeno's cooking check out Chris Pople's review instead. It is much better than what I would ever write. ;)

Anyway, one of the dishes we had for dessert at Ben Greeno's was a vanilla mousse with malt biscuits and elderflower infused sultanas. It was stunning. Chris Pople uses the words "inventive", "delightful" and "Michelin star" in his review and I wholeheartedly agree.

Vanilla mousse, sultanas in elderflower, malt biscuit (Ben Greeno)
Originally uploaded by Manne.

The malt biscuits provided a fantastic crunchy contrast to the fluffy mousse, and had a flavour of Maltesers (unsurprisingly) and when dinner was over I asked how they were made. The key ingredient is something called malt powder, or malt flour.

Kindly handwriting a note (I plan to frame it, who knows, in five years time it may be worth a quid or two on eBay as I think Mr Greeno will be very successful in his future career) and giving me a whole bag of the malt powder that went into them I had to experiment a bit.

Ben said that putting some of the malt in shortbread makes for a really nice combination, so that's what I decided to try and make first.

Having never made shortbread before (hey, I don't bake) I first visited the School of YouTube for some tips and pointers (check out this great 80s clip on how to make Scottish shortbread), and realised that this was a perfect excuse to use that Kenwood kMix mixer that me and Ing bought last year.

Keeping it rustic, and traditional (which is another way of saying that I am a lazy git who can't be bothered making biscuits out of the dough...)
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Made one bog standard shortbread dough, which I then split in two. Flavoured one with chocolate chips that I blitzed in my handmixer and the other one with half a teaspoon of the malt powder.

A note on the amazingness of the Kenwood mixer. I was fascinated by how the dry ingredients for a long time looked like a crumbly mess in the bowl, and then suddenly as if someone threw a switch I understood what it means when baking ingredients "come together". From crumbly and dry to smooth and mallable in a few seconds. I so have to use this machine more. Matcha shortbread anyone?

The malt flavoured biscuits indeed have that great Malteser like taste to them, although I think I could have used more powder. Perhaps a full teaspoon to half a shortbread batch. As expected, the chocolate chip shortbread are disappearing from the cake tin at a rate about twice that of the malt ones. They are awesome.

Thanks to Ben Greeno for a lovely evening, a great pointer towards use of malt powder, and a bag of the stuff to experiment with.

Pickling red cabbage

Pickling red cabbage
Originally uploaded by Manne.

I love the blogosphere. Every week I find recipes and cooking tips I want to try, and my only problem with it is that there aren't enough hours in a weekend.

Last week I came across this recipe for pickled cabbage at a really good blog, Chef Hermes, where occasionally great suggestions for exciting food is posted.

With half a head of red cabbage already in the fridge, and never used canning jars in my cupboard from when Wendy moved in (the kitchen has never been this packed full of great tools to work with) it must have been fate.

Besides, I love cabbage in all forms. Soured, pickled in vinegar, pickled with salt Japanese or Russian style, browned for Swedish Christmas... Rich in vitamins, great condiment to LCHF meals to cut through the fattiness.

A little bit of chilli kick has never hurt anyone, right?
Originally uploaded by Manne.

This was surprisingly quick and easy, although I ran out of malt vinegar and had to top up with some red wine vinegar. Didn't have any mustard seeds either, so threw a few coriander seeds in as a replacement.

We'll know in three week's time how it turned out.

Chicken salad á la low carb

Low carb chicken salad
Originally uploaded by Manne.

There are probably as many recipes for chicken salad as there are cooks in the world. It's one of those great dishes that you can basically whip up from anything. As long as there's chicken in it of course.

I do love a good chicken salad, although many recipes tend to have pasta, noodles or bread in them. Trying to stick to my low carb regime as much as possible, I decided to come up with a low carb version that still would provide a good dose of energy.

Brazil nuts are awesome. They not only contribute a nice crunch and flavour, they are also the nuts that contain the most saturated fat. While you have 13% carb in them, they will bring you 18% protein (good stuff!) and almost 70% fat (of which 25% saturated)! Lots of energy right there. There's also a load of magnesium in them which is great for your muscles and nerves. They are also said to help alleviate stress.

Ingredients

Proportions aren't that important. If you like more of something, use more of it. The ingredients below will serve 2 hungry people.

1 rotisserie chicken
1 bag leafy greens, like watercress and baby spinach
1 small goat's cheese (100 gram)
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 small red onion, halved and sliced very thin
1 red apple, chopped chunky style
1 small jar sun dried tomatoes in oil (150 gram)
1 small bag brazil nuts (200 gram)
1 lemon (for juice)
black peppercorns, freshly crushed
sea salt flakes

Low carb chicken salad ingredients
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Method

I usually build the chicken salad up in layers, and don't mix it until it's on the table.

Take a large bowl, and make a bed of the leafy greens in the bottom.

Chop and add the celery and apple. I prefer my apple pieces quite chunky. The celery and apple add a great crunch to the salad, and I prefer red apples as they are slightly sweeter in flavour and bring a nice colour among all the green stuff.

Half the red onion and slice it very thin. The thinner, the better, so quite the opposite from the chunky apple pieces. You should hardly notice biting into the onion slivers, they are really just there for a subtle kick.

Chop the brazil nuts coarsely (you could add them whole, but that makes the salad quite hard work to eat...) and sprinkle over the veg in the bowl.

Rip the rotisserie chicken to pieces and strip all the meat off, tear it in chunks and add to the bowl.

Chop up the sun dried tomatoes, add to the bowl. Get some of that flavoursome oil in there, it can't hurt. Then crumble the goat's cheese on top.

Squeeze the juice of the lemon over it all, and drizzle some olive oil on top to add golden high lights to the cheese.

Layers of tasty goodness
Originally uploaded by Manne.

A few quick turns with the pepper mill, and a sprinkling of salt flakes and you are ready to serve.

Serve by mixing it up a bit and make sure you get a little bit of every ingredient in your bowl. Eat. Great stuff.