Epoisse

WARNING...WARNING...WARNING...Long dull self indulgent foodie post.




My son gave me this for my birthday



so thought I'd have a dinner party to try out some of the recipes: the more complex and obscure the better (I like to test my dinner guests)



Ordinarily, it would have to be on a Saturday, but suddenly realised I could devote the whole of friday to cooking.

Menu:

FIRST COURSE
Warm salad of sweetbreads with a roquefort and creme fraiche sauce



I LOVE sweetbreads, although most people I know would not touch them with a bargepole. "Yuk!" they say. Bloody hypocrites. You eat meat don't you? So you should eat everything, or at least try them.

Got them from Yasir Halim:



which is the only place I know in London who always have them.



SECOND COURSE

Whole shoulder of Wild Boar slow roasted in a Cassis & Brandy sauce, and served with Barley Risotto



Rang up the butcher earlier in the week. He is an excellent butcher in a poncey part of North London who is well used to catering to the local discerning North London Dinner Party Intelligensia Brigade



Conversation went like this

"Hi Guys, I need a shoulder of wild boar..."

"FARRKIN' 'ELL, not another one. You've got that bleedin' Michel Roux book ain'tcha? Farrk me, I think we've emptied the forests of Perigord single handedly."

"Oh..umm...so can you get me a shoulder for tomorrow?"

"Faarkin' 'ell, you are jokin' right? Next week earliest mate."

"Ah..err..."

"I can do you a nice pork shoulder on the bone this afternoon. 5 kilos eighteen quid."

"Oh, well,  er...what is the main difference re the texture, flavour and cooking protocol viz-a-vis wild boar and the domestic pig?

"Abaat thirty faarkin' quid, and it doesn't stink"

"Sold."



THIRD COURSE

Cheeseboard:

Chaource


Comte


and...wait for it...Epoisse

     

This is a cheese only for the very brave


Or the very innocent.



You will be assaulted by a hurricane of overwhelming, dark, dirty, hellish flavours screaming over your tongue: a blast from the sewer, a gale of halitosis, a salty squall of pigsty. Delicious.



FOURTH COURSE

Chocolate Marquise: A La Gavroche recipe from the eighties, so it has After Eight Mints in it - terribly witty, as Michel himself admits in the blurb.



This took forever. I had to make almond biscuits, three differenct ganaches: Creme de Menthe, Rum, and plain, assemble it, and make it into a loaf/brick type structure: see above. And let me tell you, MINE LOOKED BETTER!! (must get a camera)

I started at 10 in the morning, and was at it, more or less, until 7.00pm when the missus got home from work, with only a short break around 2.00pm to better myself by reading a couple of chapters of Proust in the original french



Just after 8.00 our guests arrive and I give them some bubbly and salted pecans. You just toss them in a frying pan with lots of salt and a teaspoon of oil: delicious.

I fry off the blanched sweetbreads, and melt Roquefort with creme fraiche. Serve with lemon dressed salad with a little raw shallot


Picture of me banging the dinner gong

Next course: I take out the massive 5K lump of pig that has been slowly roasting for four hours, and carve it at the table. FANTASTIC!! Beautifully tender and mucho flavoursome. Falls off the bone. Serve it with the barley risotto, which is finished with ground almonds, parmesan, and fresh thyme. Also served with an incredible sauce made from the juices, with a bit of extra Cassis and stock.

Then I reveal the cheeseboard, which answers my guests earlier questions about the state of our drains.
Amazingly, the Epoisse is finished off!! Result!!

It's about 11.00pm. My guests are slowing down.



I dust the Marquise with coco powder and grated chocolate. Sprinkle it with raspberries, and present it on a red glass slab



A bit like this only MUCH more impressive. MUST get a camera, or possibly a phone. They have cameras on phones these days, right?







Anyway, about 1.00am, they all stagger off home, or collapse in the gutter, whichever is the sooner



And best of all: tomorrow's Saturday.

Gotta love retirement

Bob Hoskins Lives!

Sleeping with my new hip is gradually getting better (see earlier posts), but still causes a little discomfort at night.


So most noises will disturb my sleep at the moment.

So imagine my joy when last night, having finally got off to sleep at about 1.30am, I am awakened by a sodding car alarm coming from down the street.

It had clearly been set by Torquemada



 to go on for long enough to wake you up, stop just as you were getting used to it, stay off so that you had just enough time to go back to sleep, and then start up again.

I endured this for about an hour, then flung the duvet aside, removed the pillow from between my legs I have to sleep with, and hobbled down three flights of stairs to look out the front door, (buffo), to try to locate the source of the racket. There it was, fifty yards up the road, some smartarse BMW-type smugmobile flashing away and howling intermittently.



 I was tempted to grab a shovel and beat the car to death, but the sight of a large hairy limpimg naked maniac crushing a car with a shovel at 2.00am might have brought me to the attention of plod, or worse, a terrified neighbour thinking they'd stumbled into a zombie movie



and given me two barrels to the brain.

Instead, I grabbed the phone book (yes, I still have one) and half heartedly looked up the council listings to see if there was an appropriate department.

There it was! 'Noise Abatement Squad'. Not thinking for a minute anyone would answer, I rang the number, and was answered almost immediately by a quiet mannered gentleman with a husky Bob Hoskins voice.

I explained the problem, gave them my number, and told them the whereabouts of the offending vehicle

'Not to worry Sir, we'll be right over.'

'Do you think you might be able to do something about it?' I whined

A quiet throaty chuckle. 'Oh we'll deal with it all right', said Bob ominously. What he didn't say was "NO ONE WAKES UP TAXPAYERS ON MY MANOR!!!"



Now fully awake, with no chance of going back to sleep while the Car Alarm Torture was still in full flow, I sat up and did my hip exercises



About thirty minutes later, I heard a bunch of gruff, murmuring male voices outside up the road: sure enough there they were, crowding round the vehicle.


 Couldn't see what they were doing, but about five minutes later to my utter delight and disbelief, I heard the sound of breaking glass, twisting metal, and the heavenly refrain of, I think, sledgehammer-on-engine.



The hellish alarm wail then abruptly stopped in mid warble, never to be heard again.

A couple of minutes later the phone rang, and Bob said, 'Nose Abatement Squad here sir, we've located the vehicle and managed to neutralise the alarm. You'll have no more trouble tonight.' I was almost tempted to ask if he neutralised other things, like telesales operatives and Carol Vorderman, but left it at that.

Never have my Council Tax Dollars been better spent.

The Artisans of North London

Beautiful day today, so me and the missus have an earlyish (9.00am) walk via Ally Pally to Crouch End for a morning coffee and to exercise the hip.

The Ally Pally Farmers Market is setting up



Set on the lower slopes of Ally Pally Park, this is the place to go to buy traditional locally sourced authentic Morroccan olives, tapinades, harissa, Cappucino, and all manner of similar made up names of stuff designed to relieve the Crouch Endians and Muswell Hillites of their cash



It does, however, have one stall worth visiting. Bokit'la. This is a stall selling Bokits (a sort of French Carribean Pasty but a millions times better than the hideous drain-tasting Cornish monstrosity.) Lovely thin fresh dough, fried and filled with beautifully spiced chicken, fish or veg with lovely fresh salad and a generous serving of hot sauce (strength 1 - 4. I of course insisted on 5).

It is run by very handsome dudes as below


and I consider it the best street food I have ever had, and I've had a few I can tell you. Isn't locally sourced food marvellous!

Anyway, on I hobble to Crouch End and struggle to find a coffee shop that has not been infected by a) children, or b) this latest awful fad, in particular popularised by this chain:



Now don't get me wrong. I've been in some of these and it's all very nice, but they do insist in serving coffee the French way, ie in fecking BOWLS



Now I understand why the French have their coffee in bowls: they indulge in that most quintessentially French but completely disgusting habit of dunking your morning croissant in the coffee. Hence the bowl, to allow for more dunking capacity than a cup. The result of course is this.



A filthy messy sludge in a bowl. Why anyone thinks such a ridiculous fad would catch on here, I have no idea, but of course North Londoners seem to lap it up. Literally.

Anyway, we found this place



and without really thinking, I sat at the first available little table, which had rather low seats a bit like this


and as I lowered myself down with my stick in one hand and the other on the little table, said table tipped over, and I managed to grab onto a passing waiter, a passing punter, and the ridiculously low light fitting. My wife also lunged over and grabbed me, and the whole ensemble gradually slipped to the floor, in an embarrassing slow motion tableau vivant.




Amid concerned enquiries as to my well being, I employed my trusty wince and we moved to a more stable table.

Very good coffee AND a cup with a handle -  a bloody miracle.

On the way home passed an Artisan Bakers...

Picture of an artisan baker making an artisan baguette

...and an Artisan Dentist...

Honestly Miriam, he's MARVELLOUS and so authentic...

...and a genuine Artisan Coffee Shoppe which was packed out with smug, bearded gits with little Max strapped to their fronts


where they  - not a word of a lie - were serving coffee in BASINS


Someone pass me an Artisan sickbag

Chains

To the National Theatre last night with the missus. First proper night out since my Hip Op.

Started the evening at the Skylon Bar overlooking the South Bank for cocktails.




 £15 a pop, but fantastic venue and views over the Thames




Then to The Shed, which is the new, temporary theatre built in front of the National Theatre.


Made of rather striking planks of red wood.

Unfortunately, our seats, although front row upstairs, were right on the side, and more than half the stage was obscured by having to look through racks of stage lighting.

This in fact turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the play had a disappointingly worthy theme (third world exploitation through foreign aid) and was rather like an AS-Level student's project. You know, where Angry Young Men all stand about on stage and shout FUCK!! at the top of their voices, before covering everything in fake blood




"Play" finally finished at 9.30 to thunderous applause




We walk along the embankment looking for a prospect for supper, and it’s all, ALL bloody chains. Prezzo, Ask, Yo sushi, Feng Sushi (oh ha ha), Giraffe, Livebait, Starbucks, Café Nero, Costa, Chez Gerard, Black & Blue, Pret, Café Rouge, Browns, blah di blah di blah. They are all full, crazy busy, noisy, brash, expensive, derivative and basically pretty bloody awful. I’ve eaten in a few, and I know.

The whole country is being taken over by chains, whose food tastes like it has been manufactured in a central processing plant in Middlesbrough and pumped through underground ducting to emerge as uniform slurry in various local distribution outlets, otherwise known as a “Restaurant"

They are all, in everything but name, like MacDonalds, and I believe some are actually OWNED by MacDonalds

So we are walking along The Cut, where the New Vic is, and come across this place



and we’re instantly back in the fifties. No, not a fifties lookalike, but The Fifties. No retrospective nostalgia. This is the real thing. Original décor. The place looks like it has been untouched for 60 years.



 About 2/3 full, no blaring music, no cutting edge lighting solutions, just people having an Italian meal. The waiters are not twenty something Lithuanians, but, shock horror, ITALIAN, and to a man, they are all old, bald, slightly sweaty geezers, with their beerguts hanging out of their black waistcoats.



“Table for 2?” we say to the nearest sweaty geezer

He shrugs and points to a table. A shrug! I would rather have a genuine shrug than a false smile any day of the week. This chap has never been on a Customer Relations Training course for a restaurant chain and believe me, is much the better for it.

The place mats are oblong purple plastic, vintage 1955. The menus come in purple plastic covers.
Classic. The food is just plain Italian food. No provenance. No long descriptions of how “our world famous meatballs were prepared by rolling them on the inner thighs of Umbrian Nuns.” Just Prawn Cocktail. Saltimbocca. Veal Parmigianino. That’s all you want isn’t it? Just tell me what the hell you’ve got.

Provenance.

Ye Gods

I was in a poncy Spanish Restaurant earlier in the year, and they had a leaflet to accompany the menu that had SEVEN PAGES dedicated to the provenance of salt.

Marketing. Ye Gods again. Marketing is the act of raising expectations to such a level that you are always disappointed.

Anyway, I look at the starters. Egg mayonnaise. Egg Mayonnaise! I hadn’t seen egg mayonnaise on a menu for what…three hundred years?

So I go for that and the missus goes for prawn cocktail. And we get just that. A hardboiled egg covered in mayonnaise, with a very nice, fresh green salad, and prawns covered in pink Marie Rose sauce. Lovely.

Then I have what is described on the menu as “veal escalope with a mushroom, cream and sherry sauce”. And I get a nicely cooked escalope of veal, covered with a sauce made of mushrooms, cream and sherry. Exactly what it said. Completely unpretentious. Clearly freshly cooked and absolutely delicious. How hard is that to do? Why do so many restaurants nowadays have to embellish everything?

Everything has to be designed to within an inch of its life: the lighting, the décor, the bar, the seats, the menu, the bloody table mats. The customer is treated like a three year old with the attention span of a goldfish. Unless we are entertained and distracted for every second of the time we are in their chain, we will get bored and go next door.

It is as if they are suffering from a collective inferiority complex.

Anyway, we had coffee, which was extremely good despite not being covered in whipped cream, hundreds and thousands, cocoa powder sprinkled in the shape of the Trevi Fountain, caramel sauce, marshmallows and a fried egg,


paid the very reasonable bill, and left, saying goodbye to the staff as we exited.

No one took a blind bit of notice

Classic

We shall return