Belgo Beers

On the spur of the moment we decided to go out for moules and frites last night at Belgo Centraal in Covent Garden. The mussels were amazing, but for me the enourmous selection of Trappist beers took the centre stage. Didn't get any shots of the food, but here's some of the beers...

De verboden vrucht - 8.5% abv, brewed by De Kluis, the same company that brews Hoegaarden.

Steenbrugge Dubbel Bruin - 6.5% abv. The guy on the label is Sanctus Arnoldus who was a medieval monk. Apparently he got the local villagers drinking beer instead of water because the water was boiled during the brewing process which meant it was less toxic than water at the time. Yay for beer!

Trappistes Rochefort. Brewed in a monastery in Rochefort, Belgium. Comes in three flavours - 7.5% abv, 9.2% abv and 11.3% abv. I can't remember which one I had as things were getting a little bit blurry at this point.

Hackney Empire

I was on my way back from the shops just round the corner from my flat when it started snowing heavily. The traffic instantly came to a grinding halt and I snapped this picture. I know it's no David Bailey, but there's something very Christmassy about it and I really like it.

Cod of the Weekend

My dad hired a boat to go fishing in the Thames Estuary last weekend, and so half a dozen of us arrived bleary-eyed at the dock under Rochester Bridge at about 05:00 to cruise out in the buffeting wind and driving rain for a day of rods, hooks, worms and fish guts.

Once the sun came up and the weather calmed down it turned out to be a whole lot more fun. We all caught our fair share of dogfish and whiting, although I managed to blag what felt like a whale when I hooked it. When I eventually pulled it up to the surface it was apparently a large (for the season) cod. Large enough, in fact, for me to win an award in a competition that weekend that I didn't even enter, and get my photo in the local paper!

Cod of the Weekend! And a new nickname: "Mick".

Note: There were no other codling caught on the trip. Graham East is telling porkies.

Anyway, once I got that little fella home (the cod, not Graham), I filleted him down and made some nice fish and chips and home-made tartare sauce.

Whiskers and Biscuit

My brother and his girlfriend have recently adopted a couple of zebra finches, and they've lent them to us for the weekend.

Well, they've gone on holiday and asked us to baby-sit them. Same difference...

They're very cute, either way.

Norfolk Broads

It was a friend's sister's 30th birthday last weekend and a bunch of us hired a couple of boats on the Norfolk Broads for a little celebratory holiday. I figured that since they'd been nice enough to invite me along, I'd do something nice and make a cake in the shape of the boats we were hiring...

This was the initial design after learning that we'd be spending the weekend on a barge...

...except on further digging I found we were staying on something more like this so I had to go back to the drawing board with very little time left to make it.

Here's the basic sponge cake, all jammed-up and ready for the marzipan.

Marzipan layer added.

Iced and decorated.

In the end, the boat was small, cramped and very very warm at night. However the beer, boating and company more than made up for it, including the massive game of water-pistol pirates in small lake off the side of the main river, which the locals really weren't impressed with :-).

I also slightly overestimated the amount of cake for the number of people, so the leftovers were given to the swans that had been following us all holiday, but they weren't impressed either when it sank without a trace. Too much icing, maybe?

Lamb Chop 2

After going to Lamb Chop back in March, it seemed like a good idea to put our new-found butchery skills to use. Armed with a couple of pages of scrawled notes, some sharp Global knives and vague recollections of where to cut and in what order, we bought a whole lamb carcass from Borough Market and hauled it back to my flat. It took most of the day to prepare, but the end result looked pretty special laid out on the kitchen table. See for yourselves below...
Step 1 - cut the neck (scrag) off to cut into chops later.

Next, cut the whole carcass into three primal cuts. Cousin matt is demonstrating "The Forsythe" in the background.

My flat isn't temperature controlled like the processing plant was, so spare parts have to kept in the fridge when not working on them.

A good way through the process you'll have a load of lamb joints like this. Note the tenderloins near the middle of the picture - these are the most tender parts of the animal and are amazing flash-fried and served with some roast veg.

A bit more hacking and chopping later, and the result is a vast array of chops and joints. We used Cousin Matt's mincing machine to mince the offcuts.

Waste-not want-not. We used the bones to make a few pints of fresh stock. The end result was about 16kg of meat for £160. That's about the same as regular supermarket meat, but ours is certified organic Salt Marsh lamb from Rhug Farm in Wales, instead of anonymous prepacked produce.

FL Edge & Son - butchery course
Rhug Estate - butchers stall at Borough Market

Orange Cheesecake

Everyone knows how to make a cheescake, right? I won't bore you with the details then, but here's a few pictures of one I made...


Biscuit crumbs! I eschewed the traditional rolling pin and plastic bag technique in favour of a food processor. Boooooooring...

Mix with some melted butter, then press into the bottom of a greased cake tin.

Mix up some cream, philadephia, a couple of drops of vanilla and some other magic ingredients, then pour them over the buscuit base. bake in a bain marie until it wobbles very gently when rocked.

Most of the way there now, but not quite finished yet. The grains in the topping are orange zest, in case you're wondering.

The finished cake. I decorated it with some tangerine pieces, and made a syrup from sugar, water and some juice I squeezed from a couple of oranges.

Food porn!

Lamb Chop

Inspired by an episode of River Cottage where Hugh Fearnly Whats-His-Face gets a life-long vegetarian to butcher down a whole lamb, I recently visited a meat processing plant in Norfolk with Cousin Matt to attend an amateur butchery course.

Once the novelty of wearing a protective chainmail apron and glove wore off we knuckled down and spent a few closely-supervised hours butchering a whole carcass down into the primal cuts, then into joints and finally preparing them for a real butchers shop display.

We made copious notes on the train home to prepare ourselves for a bit of home butchery later in the year, although after spending a whole day in a meat locker I started to feel a bit queasy about halfway home. No mishaps, but it was a close call... There's some links at the end of this post if you want more info / contact details.


Cousin Matt suiting up into his protective chainmail apron. They're quite heavy although you get used to them pretty quickly.

The first primal cut removed from the carcass.

Skip forward a few hours and the carcass is reduced to a table full of joints and chops. Nom nom.

FL Edge & Son - butchery course
Rhug Estate - butchers stall at Borough Market