On the Beat

Plaisir du Chocolat has gone into administration (ie it's gone bust).

On my way home this evening, I bumped into a former colleague; he was meeting up with some other people later, so he suggested we went for a drink.

So I found myself in a bar in Rose St. Not what I had intended for tonight; I was going to spend a quiet - sober - evening; but it would have been churlish, unsociable even, to say no.

We had a pint and a half, and some very good banter; and then we went our separate ways.

I came home a cooked a simple, but delicious, supper: grilled aubergine, grilled courgette and a large portobello mushroom, with a lots of olive oil and lemon juice and coriander. Plus a salad, and some rather nice bread. And a glass of rose.

It was absolutely delicious.

And as I ate, I watched the sun sink in the west whilst the iPod played my favourite John Coltrane and Gil Evans tracks. I hadn't even asked it to - it just kept picking on my favourite tunes from a wealth of records.

Wonderful. Just wonderful.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I made gnocchi. This was quite exciting: something new. It was part of my “oh my god what will we do with all this chicken stock” experiment. It is quite curious that I wanted to make gnocchi, since generally I don’t like them. I first had gnocchi made by an ex-girlfriend (she was then, and she still is), and it looked like awfully hard work. But then I once had gnocchi in Venice, and they were heavenly. So I am kind of split on gnocchi.

( Read more... )

But they got this one right!

You Are an Excellent Cook

You're a top cook, but you weren't born that way. It's taken a lot of practice, a lot of experimenting, and a lot of learning. It's likely that you have what it takes to be a top chef, should you have the desire...

Someone on my f-list has just posted about olive oils, which I had been thinking of doing for a couple of days, when I went to the local, famous Italian deli, V&C’s, earlier this week. Primarily, I wanted to see if they had wines on sale. (They did, but normally they have a whole room full of fine wine at discount prices; this time, they had only a couple of lines on offer.) But I also needed some olive oil: we were completely out.

The more I use olive oil, the more refined my tastes get. It is a long time since I was happy with supermarket olive oil; generally, I now buy single-estate Italian olive oil, often from Tuscany, but sometimes from Puglia or Sicily. If I am feel cheapskate, I may settle for V&C’s own brand (which I think is Puglian or Sicilian).

One of the interesting things about single-estate oils is that the olives are grown in the vineyards; so you can buy the oil, and you can buy the wine. (Hence so many of the single-estate oils being Tuscan.)

One of my favourite estates is Selvapiana. They do some delicious wines, and their oil is great too.

Looking at the shelf of oils the other day, I ummed and ahhed as I tried to make up my mind: seeing what they had, comparing prices, and deciding how poncey I was feeling. (They Poggio Lamentano – a delicious oil – bottled from a single vineyard, and from a single olive variety. At a price.)

I plumped for a bottle of Selvapiana, which is boxed.

At home, I was cooking; I opened the box. To find it contained a bottle of wine.

Rather nice wine – Vin Santo, a sweet dessert wine. (In Tuscany, it is often served with biscotti for dipping in the wine.) This was a surprise – Vin Santo wasn’t what I expected at all, nice as it is. You can’t really cook with it…

On the other hand, I had paid for oil, and I got wine. This could be a good deal. Their website didn’t list Selvapiana Vin Santo, so I called them up. I had indeed got a bargain; so I let them know that they had bottles of wine in the boxes for olive oil (both to help them – I like the shop – and to help anyone who is after oil rather than wine!).

But I am keeping hold of the wine, too.

I back to the shop later, since of course I did still need oil. Only this time, I opened the box, just to make sure.

I cooked another risotto last night, using the rest of the stock from the first batch I cooked a week or so ago.

As chickenfeet2003, it isn’t difficult per se – it is dead easy, even - just hard work: I got really bored doing all the stirring and my wrist ached; since I knew it would work, there wasn’t even the excitement of waiting to see if it would work or not.

One problem is that my wife really, really likes risotto; and she now knows I can make it; so it is going to become a fixture on our menu, I think.

Last night, it was a vegetarian risotto – standard recipe (with onions, this time), and a stick of celery added with the sweating onions, and loads of mushrooms added; I had put the mushroom in the heating stock for a while to make sure they were cooked (I wanted to just add them to the rice late on, so they’d be warm but still with some bite, but my wife pulled a face – she likes things cooked – though I am sure she’d have been happy with mushrooms in a salad – why didn’t I think of that last night?).

It was, frankly, delicious.

We had it with a bottle of Hardy’s sparkling chardonnay – good fizz at under £5 (on offer from Tesco until the end of the month – at least in Edinburgh! (I’ve just looked for it on the Tesco website, but they require you to register; so they can f*ck off, then!)

And then we hit the jazz.

Some while ago on gastrogasm, there was some debate about the environmental impact of the food we eat: how agribusiness affects the environment, and what consumers - that's us - can do about it.

I was thinking of this when I heard this story on BBC Radio Scotland last week. I am not sure if it got much attention outside Scotland, and I thought it might interest some of you.

In summary, Youngs, a Scottish frozen fish producer, has laid off 120 employees from a fish processing plant in Dumfriesshire, south-west Scotland; it will ship the scampi (langoustine) from Scotland to Thailand for shelling - taking advantage of cheap labour costs - before shipping them back again for further processing. That's a round trip of 12,000 miles.

The move has been roundly condemned in Scotland, from both a people and an environmental perspective, by all political parties.

It does seem particularly perverse, and very damaging (the article states that for every tonne of scampi, half a tonne of CO₂ will be released.

(x-posted)