Hollywood glamour

I hadn't quite imagined donning a plastic apron and getting blue ink all over my hands at the V&A's Hollywood glamour August late night opening, but then I did get my own screen-printed 1950s style scarf to show for it. We'd queued determinedly (helped by rose in plastic cups) for an hour to do the workshop, run by eco-friendly screen printers I Dress Myself with designs by Sally Elford. Each one was based on classic designs from the museum's archive; the finished product looked more like tea towels than scarves, but in good way.

The museum was jam-packed. In the foyer there were free retro hairstyling and makeup sessions, but with the amount of people there, and the length of queues, it wasn't easy to get in on the action. Instead we took refuge in the gift shop, which I still think is one of the best museum gift shops in London - it always contains stylish stuff, and a great selection of books.

The V&A's lates take place once a month.

Grace Kelly's wardrobe

I wrote about the Grace Kelly: Style Icon exhibition for Amelia's Magazine  in April; here are some photos of my favourites...

The Summerhouse

Last Thursday my pal Saz and I went to the opening launch party of The Summerhouse by The Waterway, a beach hut-themed pop up restaurant in Little Venice. I was imagining it would literally be a shack on the canal towpath serving fish and chips, which just goes to show how little I know about Maida Vale. It was in fact in a former boathouse with an open terrace overlooking the water, and everything inside was nautical-themed: shell trinkets, comedy beach photos, navy stripes everywhere. Cute as (fish) pie.
Saz and I were charmed by the decor as well as the summery vibes, in spite of the distinctly chilly, windy April weather. We sampled some very lovely cocktails: lavender champagne and Pimms with blueberries, followed by canapes of various seafood dishes from the menu, including miniature fish and chips in little paper cups, crab croquettes and very potent Pimms jelly. The 'real' menu features all sorts of seafood -that might conjure up a holiday in the Hamptons, Brittany, or Whitstable for that matter: clam chowder, moules marinieres, fish cakes.
It's open now until October, and it definitely strikes the right tone for summer romance, although now we've tried it, Saz and I are just as likely to return for more of those lavender cocktails.

Fish food

At the weekend I found myself standing beside a river in Hampshire's idyllic Test valley, getting to grips with the basics of fly fishing.
I have to admit fly fishing is something I never thought I'd be doing, but the opportunity to do a beginners course came up and it suddenly seemed like a great idea. It was - contrary to what I'd been told - not at all boring. The sun shone for the first time in about eight months, and the tutors - who all work along the river on the fisheries - were incredibly patient.

As it turned out, no sooner had I amateurishly cast my line into the lake and was happily chatting to someone else that I felt the unmistakeable tug of a fish on the end.

Fishing, it turned out, is actually rather more brutal than I imagined. It takes care to get the fish out of the water without breaking the line, and then you have to kill it as quickly as possible by hitting it on the head with a miniature wooden hammer, or anything else that happens to be lying around. One of the pros then grabbed a stick and staked it into the side of the riverbank for me, to keep cool until the end of the day.

In spite of my clear lack of skill, it was a real thrill to actually catch a fish. We happily went home to put them on the barbecue with lemon, white wine and butter in a tin foil parcel. It tasted of the river, and was lovely and fresh and about three times the size of a trout you'd get in a supermarket - well worth the seven hours on the riverbank.

Japan-centric

I have a new love, and that is Japan Centre. I spent many happy hours - ok, maybe one happy hour - perusing food section at the back. WHOA. Is that place not a gold mine? How have I lived in London so long and never even been to Japan Centre?

1. A whole aisle devoted to instant noodles. Guilty, guilty pleasure.

2. Japanese Cheese Puffs. Seriously, these are amazingly light and far, far superior to any other similar cheese-based snack. Yes, the puffs are technically junk food, but at least they're the best kind.

The big freeze

Last summer a new frozen yoghurt place called Frae opened in Islington's Camden Passage. The kids (and I include myself in that) went nuts for it. Just 9 months on they've had a complete vintage-themed refurb, although the yoghurty goodness remains the same. I have to say I wondered if frozen yoghurt would fly in the cold winter months of London, but it was good to see the probiotic dessert trade apparently still flourishing even on a miserable rainy night in March. I slurped happily through a blueberry and granola pot of yoghurt while discussing the virtues of Eurovision with the owner and a complete stranger.

Limelight

In Manila we went to a market in Makati that’s nicknamed the millionaires’ market, and it was quite a lot like a smaller version of Borough Market. The stalls sold everything from Japanese pancakes - squashy, chocolatey, milky things fried in round muffin moulds - to roasted suckling pig to meat tacos. The Philippines is also apparently home to the ultimate mangoes. The best were the little yellow ones, shaped like kidneys, which I’ve only managed to get my mitts on once before and I have to say they were the most delicious, fragrant mangoes I’ve ever tasted. The other amazing fruits that seemed to be everywhere were calamansi limes. Instead of dipping food in a dish of soy sauce, you squeeze out the juice of a calamansi and maybe mix it with a little chilli. The juice is citrussy and sweet, sort of like a lime and an orange at the same time, and we found them everywhere: served with food, stuck on the edge of a cocktail glass, ground up into a slush puppy.

Kebabs and macaroons in Finchley Road

I went along to the opening of the new Finchley Road branch of Comptoir Libanais in February and tried some really lovely salads (tabbouleh, fattoush) and snacks (chicken and pickle wraps, kebabs, pumpkin kibbeh, falafel). I was amazed at how inexpensive their menu is and, as a big fan of 'picky' food (tapas, mezze, dim sum... you get the picture), I loved being able to try loads of dishes without getting full. The mint tea is lovely too - extremely refreshing and packed with mint leaves and a hint of rosewater. Dessert-wise, Comptoir sells every imaginable variety of baklava, as well as French-inspired pastries and cakes like macaroons with a Levantine twist of rosewater, saffron or cardamom.

Street food 1

Next stop: Penang, which is famous for its street food and hawker stalls. Street food's always a bit of a gamble - it can either make or break your whole holiday eating enjoyment - but it's a risk I'm willing to take for a plateful of char koay teow, the fried rice noodle dish with prawns, onions, clams, chilli and beansprouts which you can buy at virtually any street corner in Penang. This is koay teow thng, a noodle soup with fish balls, served in my favourite colour dining accessories.

Melaka

Apparently the thing everyone likes to eat when they visit Melaka is chicken rice balls. So, of course, we did it too. There were loads of restaurants around the town touting their rice balls but we went for a local-filled place on the same road as our hotel in Chinatown, which as it turned out served only three dishes, so we had them all: rice balls, boiled chicken, and cabbage. The rice balls are basically made with slightly glutinous rice flavoured with chicken stock and rolled into little balls.

The best thing about the restaurant was the fact it was a traditional Chinese shophouse: the back of the dining area opened onto a lovely airy courtyard and someone’s house. They seemed to be ten-a-penny in Melaka’s Chinatown, and most of them are pretty well preserved, but then history is what this city’s all about. 

Chicken rice balls

Nuts for coconuts

As I've discovered over the years, a trip to Malaysia is all about the food. Having two breakfasts (one at home, one outside - maybe roti canai or fried noodles), or randomly popping out for a laksa, even if it's not actually a mealtime, is pretty normal. Even going to the food court at one of the malls in KL is a gastronomic experience: my favourite is the sleek, glossy, upmarket one in Bukit Bintang's Pavilion Mall, where I had a hot, hot curry laksa yesterday and a Penang-style turnip and peanut wrap. 

The Batu Caves just outside Kuala Lumpur is definitely one of the best sights to see in the area. We were just in time to see the end of the Thaipusam festival and the roads around the cave and its temple were packed with stalls and stalls selling brightly-coloured sweets, snacks and drinks, Indian slippers, bubble machines and beaded jewellery. The place was jangling and jostling with energy and people and music and traffic. After a sweaty trek up the 250-odd steps to the cave and back down again, we stopped for a coconut break. The top is sliced off with a sort of machete and inside is a slightly acidic, clear but very refreshing 'milk' - it's more like juice, but apparently as the coconut ages and dries out it becomes a creamy milk. 

Supper Club Episode 2

It's been a while since our epic adventure in goulash for Supper Club, but I feel I should finish what I've started.

After the coldest-ever trip to the shops (this was the weekend of the near-apocalyptic snow flurry in London) we returned home mid afternoon to finish preparing our dinner for eight. Bearing in mind that we'd stayed up til 3am the night before - after going out on the razz - to start cooking the goulash, it was with extreme horror that we discovered we'd added WAY, WAY too much paprika and the fiery brown liquid in front of us was in no way edible. To make things worse, the paprika I'd used was from Hungary, and therefore written in Hungarian, so I had no idea of the usage instructions or what was even in that crazy powder.

Significant Other resourcefully solved the problem by siphoning off all the insanely hot gravy and replacing it with water. We poked it anxiously. The rather sad-looking stew returned to the oven, and we hoped for the best.

Everyone started arriving a few hours later and by now the dinner was, thankfully, shaping up. We made them have two shots of slizovitch first and served a selection of cold Polish and German meats for starters, with freshly-baked bread rolls and a Czech-style potato, boiled egg and gherkin salad which was made very easily by combining the ingredients with mayonnaise and lemon juice. I would probably never have thought to buy Polish salami before but it was fab - a bit like a more smoky version of a Peperami, which, let's face it, we all love.

At last the massive Le Creuset dish was got out for the goulash moment and I must say, it was pretty good. The sauce was spicy, slightly sweet from the carrots we'd added - not a disaster, as we'd feared. The knedlicky dumplings were steamed and we had Savoy cabbage with it. A warm glow of achievement settled upon me (or maybe that was just the combination of wine, slizovitch, sloe gin, beer...).

That's the best thing about Supper Club: it's stressful, even if you don't mean for it to be, and something will inevitably go wrong, no matter how prepared you are. But it's a really good excuse to make an effort, and try things you never normally would cook at home.

(At this point I would give the goulash recipe... but seeing as it was hardly an expert attempt, here's one that actually went right!)

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Czech Potato Salad

1/2 jar gherkins or cornichons, sliced

1 bag new potatoes

a handful of chives

1 jar mayonnaise

juice of 1 lemon

3 eggs, boiled

salt and pepper

Boil the eggs and the potatoes. When cool, peel and cut the potatoes into small chunks. Do the same with the eggs. Add them with the sliced gherkins to a mixing bowl and combine with the mayo, lemon juice, chives, salt and pepper.

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Czech shopping

The Czech shop I wrote about in my last post - Halusky, in East Sheen (or Mortlake - not too sure about southwest London geography) - was small, and rather sparsely stocked due to the snowy weather when we arrived. In spite of that, we still managed to stock up on everything we wanted: a load of Czech dried goods (ie. beer and dumpling flour), frozen knedlicky dumplings and Slovakian chocolate bars. It was quite impressive: from the outside, Halusky looked like a regular newsagent's, but inside everything, even the shelf-edge labels, were in Czech or Slovak.

It got me thinking about the trip I made to Prague and Bohemia in the summer. Prague has an amazing cafe life, and my favourite one was Slavia, for its deco perfection - see below! -closely followed by the Cubist Cafe.

Supper club

I never realised how true the cliche about going to the gym in January is until I, er, went to the gym in January. The place was packed out. There was an actual queue to use the treadmills. At every turn, there was a new recruit being shown around.
It had been quite a while since my last gym effort, confirmed by the fact that I fell off the cross trainer when I attempted to get on it. But this story does have a point. Going to the gym is great because there are TVs there and my favourite thing to watch while struggling away on some hideous machine is Channel 4's so-wrong-it's-right Come Dine With Me.
Last October, my friend suggested a group of us should start a Supper Club, each hosting a dinner party with a different theme. She sold it to me by describing it as 'like Come Dine With Me, only without the voting at the end'. She and her boyfriend hosted an amazing first instalment: they served delicious homemade gyoza dumplings, fried duck breast and garlic rice for their Japanese-themed supper.
This weekend it's my turn to host. We're going for an eastern European-inspired theme with goulash as the main dish, and various meats and Czech-style potato salad for starters.
I'm also really excited because we're planning an expedition (which may or may not actually take place, depending on laziness) to a Czech food store in East Sheen to pick up some other essentials: slizovitch, Czech beer, klobasa sausages and gherkins, and no doubt a bunch of other stuff. I love going to delis and foreign food stores to wander along the aisles and among the unfamiliar labels, and this Czech shop is meant to be one of the best in London...

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.