Winter

Basically, this is almost *exactly* how I'd like to look. Although I'd swap the jeans for some by Tender Co. Unfortuneately, I get to wear a suit all day. Almost every day. Hey ho.

Brown, Oh Dear tee over heavy selvedge jeans. Japanese jacket in wool / linen with a scarf. Viberg boots ("Icy Mocha Chromexcel" cowhide leather from Chicago's Horween tannery) and a rucksack. 


Click through for more details on each piece.

Another Noodle Dish - Potted Shrimp

Potted Shrimp is one of my favourite dishes: I don't know if it's the slightly nutmegy, old-fashioned warmth of mace, or the fact that it's one of the few times you can literally spread pure butter on toast with impunity, but there's definitely *something* about those little ramekins full of small, brown crustaceans. 

There are many, many recipes for potted shrimp. Felicity Cloake summarised more than a few in the Guardian on the way to producing her "perfect" recipe. I follow it pretty closely, but I don't add lemon juice (I prefer it on the side when served), and I don't like the addition of Gentleman's Relish (Patum Peperium or anchovy paste). I also substitute cayenne for a Basque pepper called piment d'Espelette. 

One useful thing that's happened since Felicity's article, is that brown shrimp are now on sale at Waitrose. Oh. And they are relatively sustainable. 

Ingredients (serves 4-6 depending on ramekin size)

2 x 90g packs of Fisherman Brown Shrimp

180g unsalted butter

Large pinch of white pepper**

Large pinch of mace

Small pinch of piment d'Esplette*** (and a touch more to garnish)

1. Melt the butter is a pan, either skimming the milk fats that bubble to the surface, of simply straining the clarified butter through muslin

2. Return most of the butter back to the (clean / dried) pan, and add the spices. Heat gently for five minutes - literally just tickling the butter with gentle heat. It's very easy to burn the spices, so watch it carefully!

3. Allow to cool slightly. I keep the remaining clarified butter in a small jug in a pan of hot water, to stop it from cooling to a solid

4. Divide the shrimp between the ramekins and pour over the spiced butter. Pop into the fridge for a while to firm up and then top with the reserved butter

5. Dust with piment d'Esplette and serve with toast


**I grind my own, buying white Penja peppercorns from The Spice Shop 


***A mild Basque pepper that seems to have a "rich, fruity, ripe [flavour], with a hint of lemon and raisin."

A Noodle Dish (with no noodles)

This recipe is, of course, not a Lancashire Hotpot. The furthest north it gets is Muswell Hill. But it’s still pretty tasty. I think the idea for individual hotpots comes from Nigel Haworth’s Hotpot with Red Cabbage from Great British Menu, but this is a far simpler and quicker dish.

I make this largely with leftovers from other dishes, for example a slow cooked shoulder, or indeed leg, of lamb. It’s probably sacrilege, which is why I’m not even going to try and link this dish to Lancashire, for fear of reprisals…

Ingredients (makes four individual hotpots)

Leftover lamb

Four or five medium white onions*

Five or six decent sized potatoes*

Beef stock

Butter

Pepper

Four ramekins**

1.    I carefully pick through the leftover lamb, removing most of the fat and any connective tissue. I tend to pull apart the meat by hand, as I find it gives a better texture to the finished dish, but you can (of course) simply cube the meat

2.    I then simmer the meat gently in beef stock for 30-40 mins (I use the bottled stuff from Waitrose thanks to an unhealthy obsession with Nigella from a few years ago). This second cooking seems to loosen the meat again and also provides a cooking liquor***

3.    Halve, de-skin and thinly slice the onions

4.    Halve and thinly slice the potatoes (about the thickness of a one pound coin)

5.    Butter the ramekins and start to layer the hotpots: potato, onion, pepper, meat, potato, onion, pepper, meat

6.    Spoon a few tablespoons of the stock into each ramekin

7.    Top with a neat layer of potatoes and dot the top with butter (or brush with melted butter if you prefer)

8.    Cover with double layer of foil and cook for 30 mins at 170C with a final 10-15 mins at 180C uncovered to crisp the top

I like to serve this with crispy kale, red cabbage or other seasonal wintry veg.

*I appreciate that my ingredients are a little vague, but it all depends on the size of the vegetables, and the ramekins

**Leftover pie dishes from, e.g. Charlie Binghams, are ideal

***in the original dish, you wouldn’t necessarily need to add stock, as the meat and veg would be cooked long and slow in a lidded pot, making their own cooking juices

The Fancy

Oh what a lovely beetle...

These lovely scarabaeidae beetle prints (Ateuchus sp) are actually tea towels from Natural History, a company that produces lovely homeware, notebooks and paper based on designs from nature. The tea towel is available here and retails for £12. I also rather like these Hummingbird cushions and this red coral linen wall hanging, based on a print by the 18th century explorer, naturalist and artist, John Ellis FRS. Oh. And they've been running a competition all week to try and win some of these goodies! Enter here at their rather interesting 'blog...!

Great Scott

It's been a good year for culinary time travel: first Heston Blumenthal opened the stunningly well-received Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, relishing in meat fruit, powdered duck and tipsy cake. Then, just as you've finally managed to get a table (there's a three month waiting list), Marcus Wareing goes and opens another one in the recently restored St Pancras Hotel on Euston Road.

It's a remarkable setting; the imposing Midland Grand Hotel had lain empty since the eighties, and, despite many efforts, seemed as though it would never reopen. It was always strange that one of the first sights that greeted visitors stepping off the Eurostar was a derelict building, the last crumbling vestiges of George Gilbert Scott's neo-Gothic Victorian masterpiece.

Of course, all that changed when the Marriot Group took over, restoring the cathedral-like hotel to its former, extravagant and strangely romantic glory. Re-opening exactly 138 years after the Midland Grand, the hotel now houses the Gilbert Scott; a restaurant and bar named in honour of the building's architect, and presided over by Executive Chef, Marcus Wareing.

Wareing, famously Gordon Ramsay's protégé (although now estranged), could not have picked a better location to open his second restaurant. Where the Berkeley is sumptuous in reds, the Gilbert Scott is redolent in monochrome marble and muted leather, housed in splendid, high, vaulted chambers and ornately-decorated ceilings that at once seems cavernous and strangely welcoming.

The bar is relaxed, if a little less comfortable than I expected (perhaps the slightly hard chairs are designed for eating rather than drinking), and serves a good range of cocktails and spirits. Gins range from Plymouth and Tanqueray to Junipero, Oxley and Sipsmith, while the cocktails list will be updated on a seasonal basis. We started with an 1873, the signature drink of CO2-charged Bombay, apple, cranberry and rhubarb and an English Garden - a Citron vodka rickey with apple brandy. Both were a little on the sweet side, although our charmingly helpful server dried the latter out with a little more lemon juice. It's rumoured that the black pepper and salted butter popcorn they serve alongside the drinks will kick-start a renaissance in gourmet popcorn across town. If it does, I'll not be complaining...

But make to the main event. Dinner. I must admit that I'd read a lot of reviews of the Gilbert Scott. "Proper" reviews (i.e. those written by seasoned and well-respected restaurant critics and not by part-time watch ‘bloggers) were generally good but ranged from poor (Fay Maschler) to brilliant (Giles Coren). Twitter and the 'blogosphere were awash with Tweets about less-than-perfect meals, complaints about over-crowding and under-whelming food. There were also the usual comments about the role of Executive Chef - was Marcus ever there? Luckily for us, Mr Wareing was there last night. And the meal was good. Although I learnt a lot more about the next table's Bank Holiday weekend than I'd intended (more about that later). They did get one thing right though - the tables are dangerously close together; if you're going to be discussing super injunctions, I'd eat elsewhere.

Back to the food. We ordered Mushrooms on sippets and Bacon olives to start. The sippets were more substantial than might have been expected; two large portabella mushrooms on a piece of toast, doused in a rich, almost demi-glace sauce specked with parsley and dotted with meltingly soft cubes of bone marrow. The bacon olives were salty slices of bacon-wrapped forcemeat, served with endive and a mustardy vinaigrette. Both were excellent. We were drinking by the glass, and I foolishly paired these with a rather lovely, light and minerally Domaine de Rimauresq Rose 2009. The mushrooms swamped the creamy, slightly floral wine, which was a shame. But still very enjoyable.

Mains were Kentish Pigeon in a pot and Soles in coffins. The latter was unexpectedly inverted - the single coffin (a slice of crisped potato skin) sitting atop samphire, three fillets of sole on a bed of creamed potato. The sauce was rich and buttery with a hint of vermouth, spotted with brown shrimp and a sprinkling of aromatic mace. The lemon sole was perfectly cooked and immediately made me want to book into the courses available in Billingsgate to learn how to properly fillet flat fish. The salty hints of samphire were an inspired addition. The Kentish pigeon was cooked medium-rare and served in a pot with prunes, more mushrooms and thyme. Another rich, unctuous sauce covered the two breasts, which sat atop a bed of savoy cabbage. It was delicious - earthy and gamey offset by the sweetness of prunes. A glass of red from Hochar Père et Fils, Château Musar went remarkably well with it.

As we were ogling the dessert menu, I inadvertently caught the eye of one of the chaps on the (very) nearby table. Having broken through the "fourth wall" we asked their advice on puddings: avoid the Snow Eggs, try the Manchester Tart and order the Warm chocolate in a pot. Of course, we ordered the Warm chocolate in a pot, supplementing this with the Jaffa cake and Earl Grey tea ice cream. The chocolate was good: dark, runny, like a fondant, and topped with cornflakes and creme freche. The Jaffa cake was incredible: a moist, marmaladey, orange-slice covered sponge encasing a chocolate filling. Simply delicious.

Service was prompt, well worth the 12.5% but also included a somewhat unusual £2 per person Cover Charge - presumably for the excellent sage and fennel seed bread. All in, for cocktails, three courses and a couple of glasses of wine, the bill was around £160 for two. An early supper version of the menu is available from £24 for three courses. The wine list begins at £25 a bottle, and there is plenty in the £30-35 range for those who worry about these things.

Overall: a well-deserved four stars. I just wish I'd not been able to hear next-door's conversation about untrimmed lady gardens.

The Fallen Blade

Jon Courtenay Grimwood's first foray into the world of fantasy is certainly ambitious: he couples his trademark quick-witted, talon-sharp writing with an earily-pitch perfect evocation of an early fifteenth century Venice in which the descendants of Marco Polo rule the island state. He then throws in a host of magical creatures (some of which are recognisable, others not so), the Machiavellian machinations of an entire court and finally dusts it liberally with Shakespearean references for good measure. Oh, and at the heart of it, a love story or two. That this is just the first of a planned trilogy makes it even more extraordinary. It's obvious from the multi-stranded plot, excellent character development and slight lack of denouement that there is far more to learn about the foundling 'vampire' Tycho, not least who - or even what - he truly is, as well as more of this imagined history of the world. This book has a) reinvigorated my desire to return to Venice, b) got me re-reading Othello and c) waiting on tenterhooks for the second book. Not bad for a first stab.