You know it's Christmas when...

... you're standing in the middle of St Pancras station among crowds of stressed travellers eating a Pret Christmas Lunch sandwich.

Last minute marzipan

As I was gearing up for the big Christmas shop on Oxford Street last week, I decided that maybe this was the year to make gifts that would, for once, be received with a bit of festive glee rather than 'oh, great... you made this yourself!'
We had a party at the weekend I wasn't sure that marzipan chocolates would be a winner among a group of hungover/boozy twenty somethings, but I was wrong. They all got snaffled up, including my dodgy-looking handmade marzipan fruits.
The recipe is so easy it doesn't really deserve to be called a recipe. We used some plain and brandy marzipan from Waitrose, and a few packets of dark Menier chocolat patissier.

Roll the marzipan into Malteser-sized rounds, and get the chocolate melting. For two standard-sized blocks of marzipan, you'll need about a bar and a half of the chocolate and it's definitely worth getting the good stuff, because it doesn't separate or get all gunky like confectionery chocolate sometimes does. Melt it in a bain-marie and roll the rounds in the chocolate, then fish them out carefully using a fork to make sure the excess chocolate drips back into the bowl.

Pop them on a sheet of greaseproof paper and leave them in the fridge for a few hours. If you want you can also melt some white chocolate and use it to create decorative swirls and stripes on top. The chocolates can then be packaged up in all their gorgeous sugariness as little extra gifts. Sweet!

Sugar rush in Soho

My pal Saz and I went to try out the newly-opened Hummingbird Bakery in Soho this week. The decor: very cute. The cakes: very, very cute.

Hummingbird's most famous confection is the red velvet cake, which I had in cupcake form. The sponge was sweet, rich and moist, coloured an incredibly lairy crimson shade and topped with white cream cheese icing. Black-bottomed chocolate cake was also a serious sugar hit packed with chunks of chocolate. Of course, all the cupcakes looked calorifically beautiful lined up under the glass in all different colours, including the special Christmas ones with Santas and reindeers on top. It may not be grown-up, but sometimes you just need a big pink cupcake with glittery sprinkles on top after a hard day in the office.

The Shepherdess

At the risk of making this blog sound like I'm a total calorie-fiend, I'm going to describe a true gem of a greasy spoon where I had lunch today.

The Shepherdess Cafe on City Road/Shepherdess Walk is the real deal, an authentically retro caff that made me feel all warm and smiley. It's got a slightly chalet feel to it, and I really loved the painted-on curtains in the windows. I mean, how often do you actually see painted-on furnishings? 

Inside, the cafe has a really lively, cheerful, busy vibe. As you go in the door (which ain't that easy if there's a queue at the sweetie counter), you realise this is the genuine article: the faded-looking photos in the frames, the red table tops, the amazing green roofing decorating the servery area... It's a proper caff, with old-school, slightly mad decor and real character because of it.

Ok, so what about the food? I asked for mugs of tea as we sat down, and they arrived before I'd even got my coat off. I hadn't had any breakfast so went for a full-on fry up - even though it included chips, which I've always thought is a slightly strange and unnecessary addition to a fried breakfast - while my not-so-hungry companion had an avocado and bacon bap. He used to come to the Shepherdess all the time for lunch and this sarnie was his favourite thing to order. When it arrived, I could see why: the wholemeal bun was huge, for a start; the bacon was freshly cooked, and the sliced avocado ripe and generous, like it had literally just been scooped out of its shell and plonked in. The plate was garnished with three chips.

My breakfast was epic, a crammed plateful of the kind that keeps you full all day. I like baked beans to be soft and slightly mushy, a consistency that can only really be got from excessive cooking. Tick. Surprisingly good quality bacon, not too salty either. Tick. Crunchy, light, gorgeous chips. Tick. (So maybe they are a good addition after all.)

The Shepherdess - I say yes. I can't wait to go back.

Chinatown

My favourite restaurants in Chinatown are, without doubt, Chuen Cheng Ku (CCK) and HK Diner. The former, because I love its dim sum trolleys, and the latter, because it's open late and it's the best place for a post-club pile of noodles with friends. This week I've been to both, although only eaten in one (the queue at HK was just too long for us after a night out in Soho). 

CCK didn't disappoint. It was quiet - I guess that's Tuesday lunchtime for you - which meant we had a pretty much continuous stream of waitresses asking if we'd like any of the dishes on their trolleys. 

I hit the dumplings hard, as I always do, plus there were yam rolls, exceptionally sweet char siu buns and a very salty bowl of duck and noodle broth. The big dining hall with its chandeliers was as Chinatown-glam as ever, and this time we had a table right next to the dragon with the red light-bulb eyes.

King's Cross Road

I eat out a lot - probably more than I should – so it seems about time I put some restaurant-talk on this blog. My freelance job as a restaurant reviewer has given me lots of opportunities to sample fabulous (and sometimes not so fabulous) food around London, but sometimes the best, and most atmospheric, restaurants are ones friends suggest, or places I stumble upon randomly.

King’s Cross Road is the last place I thought I’d find a hidden gem of a restaurant, but so it was when, sopping wet on a rainy Thursday night, my boyfriend and I stumbled into the Paolina Thai Café to meet a friend of ours.

It was said friend’s suggestion to meet there, and unless I’d been looking for it, I probably would have missed Paolina’s altogether. Inside, the café has the frankly amazing décor of a Seventies sauna, with wood-panelled walls and retro furniture. There are a few two-seater tables and the open kitchen in the front of the restaurant when you walk in, and watching the women frying noodles in a huge wok got our stomachs rumbling as we waited for our table.

Paolina is a bargain for several reasons. Firstly, most of the dishes cost less than £6, and secondly, you can bring your own bottle of whatever, thus only having to pay a very small corkage fee. Our favourites were prawn Pad Thai, a simple take on the dish with a good number of butterflied, juicy tail-on prawns and sweetly spicy fried rice noodles, and the red chicken curry was lovely too: rather runny, but creamy, hot and fragrant.

The fact that all the tables were occupied, and immediately re-filled by waiting punters, shows that Paolina’s must have a pretty good following. Its dark, warm back room with its formica tabletops and electric heaters was full throughout the evening, and we arrived pretty late. I loved its old-school look and its smallness, and the fact that three of us ate to fullness for under £20. I didn’t think you could eat out properly in London that cheaply nowadays: time warp indeed.

Hot stuff

I was given a big bagful of hot green and orange chillies last week, and the excess quantity got me thinking: how best to preserve them?

I turned to the interweb for help and found a surprising number of sites dedicated entirely to the love of chillies (personal favourite: www.chillies-down-under.com). The options for dealing with surplus peppers seemed endless: pickling, preserving in brine or oil, air drying, freezing, turning them into various sauces, chutneys and preserves… 
In the end I decided to try a simple chutney recipe. It was my first go at pickling and most recipes recommended using pickling vinegar to avoid discolouration.

Once the chillies were deseeded, chopped, washed and ready (there were about 15-20 of them), they went into my biggest pan along with three chopped onions, seven tablespoons of dark brown sugar, a teaspoon of garam masala, and a litre of water. With the lid on, I boiled them for about 30 minutes, then chucked in 200ml of pickling vinegar, and simmered with the lid off for another 30 minutes until the mixture had reduced by about two thirds.

The end result was a seriously fragrant front room – it still smells of gherkins, as do I – and a large bottle of hot, spicy, sweet chilli chutney. Sterilising the bottle was the most annoying part of the process (boiling and baking it, while trying not to burn yourself, is no easy task) but there’s something quite satisfying about having made something edible on my first go. Women’s Institute, here I come. 

Chestnut foraging in London

The smell of roasting chestnuts at the corner of the Strand is the smell of Christmas, is it not? 

As a lifelong townie, I can’t help feeling slightly suspicious of eating anything I basically found on the floor. I don’t know the first thing about foraging in the wild, but for the last two Octobers I’ve eagerly headed to London’s parks to hunt for chestnuts. It’s not only satisfying and fun but a very good way to save quids on buying them in the supermarkets.

This year, the trees seemed to have dropped their fruits earlier than usual and all the chestnuts I found in Greenwich Park and Hyde Park were miniature compared to last year. It wasn’t exactly elegant rootling around under the trees, especially because it’d rained the day before. Then, when I got home and started washing and cooking the chestnuts, I had an irrational fear. What if I poison myself?

They weren’t really big enough to be worth roasting, so I followed instructions found on the internet  for making chestnut puree and washed, halved and boiled the chestnuts for about ten minutes. Then there was the laborious task of peeling them. Luckily some had come out of their shells in the cooking, but most of them had to be picked or squeezed out by hand. At last, after about forty minutes of work, I had one small, rather unpleasant-looking bowlful of chestnut pieces.

Before blending them with sugar and cream to make the puree, I decided I’d better sample the goods. They tasted just as chestnuts should, with that thick, sweet yet slightly savoury chestnutty richness. My boyfriend – who, initiated in countryside ways, will happily pluck random-looking berries to eat, unwashed, there and then - took one look and refused to touch them.

Here are some top tips for lovely, lovely chestnuts.
Chestnuts are prone to mould, so once you’ve found them, get them home quick and cook them right away.
Always pierce the shell of the chestnuts before cooking or they’ll explode – not a good look, trust me.

Food adventures in the Czech Rep

My ancestors were Czech, but until recently my only experience of the homeland’s cuisine was a trip to the Czech and Slovak House in Hampstead where, on my pal’s recommendation, I ate my first-ever svickova: a sort of roasted beef escalope covered in creamy vegetable sauce that tasted like sweet, milky turnips, served with light bread dumplings. She’d warned me it was an acquired taste, but everyone else at the table had ordered the same dish, and seemed to be loving it. What was wrong with me? Was I missing the Czech food gene?

When we embarked on what would prove to be an epic trip to the Czech Republic this summer, I have to admit that sampling the local food was, for once, not something I was looking forward to. I  decided I’d probably be on a goulash-only diet for the whole trip, but as it turned out, I was wrong.

Our first meal in Prague was an opulent breakfast at the Café Imperial. The Café is one of those old-fashioned high-ceilinged, classic European dining rooms, with walls and ceilings covered in mosaics. (A tip: if you ever visit this place, make sure you go to the loo. The gold swan taps truly are something to behold.)

Prague was hot. It must have been about 30 degrees outside and we all felt hungover with fatigue from the 5am flight from London. Our long-overdue big breakfast started with a basket of bread, which contained half a dozen miniature rolls of all shapes and covered in seeds or grain. I couldn’t resist a fry-up, Czech-style: ham with eggs arrived as a huge, conjoined, plate-shaped omelette, with three sunny-side-up eggs and thick, salty, lean bacon. Obviously, I professed shock at such an enormous portion (I couldn’t possibly eat three eggs, etc etc) before polishing it all off.

That evening, we headed to the local pub for dinner. Beer arrived in hefty glass tankards and as soon as one was finished, the waitress would bring another over and add it to the tally on a scrap of paper.

My friend said she’d been looking forward to having svickova for months; the rest of us went for variations on roasted meat. I asked for roast pork with sauerkraut and potato pancakes, and the portion that arrived was enough to feed about four people. The meat was tender; the sauerkraut mild and spiced (not like the pickled vinegary stuff out of jars) and served with a whole green chilli on top. I couldn’t get enough of the fried crisp potato pancakes, spiced with caraway seeds (another crucial Czech ingredient). Czech cooking may well be the ultimate comfort food. It’s heavy, hearty, and it takes you right back to wood fires, cold winters and foraging. Or so I imagine.

On our second day in the city we went to watch a football match at the new Prague stadium, which was a very civilised, easy going affair. At half time, I made a beeline for the snack counter, and bought myself a sausage.

I’d heard a lot about how good these sausages (called klobasa) were. They turned out to be seriously large and bright red, like saveloys but with the spicy warmth of paprika, and fattily satisfying when munched with a cold beer. They were served on a little cardboard tray with a dollop of mild yellow mustard and a piece of sourdough bread. There may be better sausages to be had elsewhere in Prague, but frankly, for football food, this was definitely a step up from some nasty hot dog van.

The final food highlight of the trip was the only meal that could really be described as fancy. We ate it in the distinctly retro surroundings of the Jested Hotel restaurant, and to be honest, it wasn’t so much the food but the experience that made it an amazing meal. Planted on top of a mountain, the Jested’s space-age spire is a radio communications tower and the lower levels house a hotel and restaurant.

Jested’s decor is like being in a Sixties sci-fi movie – sort of futuristic and retro at the same time, from the original egg chairs to the beige light fittings. Inside it, as the mists swirled around us and the countryside landscape gradually faded into darkness, we ate something European but I was so distracted by the surroundings, I can't really remember what it was – I think I had chicken. Afterwards we retired to the incredible-looking bar, which we had all to ourselves, and drank mojitos adorned with tinsel straws. Next morning at breakfast, the buffet table included all the usual stuff: eggs, ham, salad, plum vodka.

On our last night, back in Prague, I hobbled out for a late dinner and, attracted by the synthing sounds of a Casio keyboard, settled into a beer hall in a quiet back street. The waiter informed me grumpily that there was nothing but goulash left. 

Bean there, done that

My neighbour grew enormous bean plants last year and it looked so easy, I decided to have a go myself. I’ve never successfully grown anything from seed, and the whole idea of gardening never appealed to me until I realised I could actually grow stuff I could eat. It began last summer when I bought a mixed-herb planter and discovered the joy of actually having fresh mint around to add to cocktails and salads. Sadly the herbs didn’t prosper (although the London squirrels still seemed to like them – I found one on the balcony, nibbling the rosemary). This year I re-used the wooden trough the herbs came in to make my bean paddy.

The instructions on the packet said the beans should be spaced well apart but I only had a limited amount of soil and still wanted a serious crop of beans, so I just shoved about twice as many seeds into the trough and hoped for the best.

As the weeks went by the seeds sprouted into shoots and by July I was munching on my first ‘crop’. Weirdly furry, they otherwise looked pretty normal, if slightly bulbous, and they tasted really fresh and clean. I boiled them for a few minutes and then tossed them in olive oil with some lightly fried garlic and fresh mint: lush. And all the more satisfying that they came from my own scuzzy balcony-garden.