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...