Thai Mussels

I bought a big bag of Shetland mussels from the market last Friday. They're just coming back into season so I wasn't sure if they'd be up to much, but they looked good and were great value (about four pounds a kilo).

As it turned out they were fantastic; plump, sweet and juicy with very few dodgy ones to discard. Not too gritty or beardy either. I cooked them in a Thai style broth that sort of made them into a light Thai curry. Rice seemed like a more sensible accompaniment than bread or chips. Cheap, delicious and ready in less than half an hour.

I also managed a successful beer match with this dish. I've been attempting beer and food matches on and off for a while now with mixed success, so was really chuffed to get this one right. The tropical fruit notes from the hops worked really well with the coconut broth, and the moderately bitter finish cut through the richness of the dish.

If I'm honest the beer was bloody lovely anyway, I could drink a lot of this with or without food. You can buy the Magic Rock beers at Beer Ritz in Headingley

The Recipe

Serves 2

You will need:

1kg mussels
1 tin coconut milk
Basmati rice or Thai jasmine rice
thumb ginger (or galangal)
3-4 spring onions
1 stick lemongrass
4 cloves garlic
4 hot chillies
fish sauce
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1 heaped tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp ground chilli powder
white pepper
2 limes
small bunch coriander
cooking oil

What to do:

1. Cook the rice first. Thai jasmine rice would probably be more authentic, but I love basmati and use it for pretty much everything. This is how I do it: For two people measure out one cup of rice, then put it in a pan with one and a third cups of boiling water. Bring it to the boil on the hob, then put the pan lid on and turn the hob down to the lowest setting.

2. Check to see how the rice is doing after about 6 or 7 minutes. When almost all of the water has been absorbed (usually between 6 & 10 minutes) pour in about a quarter of the coconut milk, then put the lid back on, move the pan off the heat and set aside.

3. While the rice is cooking give your mussels a good rinse under the tap, pulling off any beardy bits. Any that don't close up when you handle them are probably dead already, so you might want to throw them away. Leave them draining in the sink.

4. Finely chop the spring onions, garlic, chillies, lemongrass, ginger, and around a quarter of the stalks from the coriander.

5. Heat a large pan and add a good splash of oil (sunflower or whatever, not olive) then add each of the chopped ingredients one at a time in the same order as they're listed in number 4, stir-frying as you go. Stir-fry the whole lot for about a minute.

6. Add the fennel seeds to the pan and fry for a few seconds before adding the rest of the dry ingredients (ground coriander, chilli powder and good pinch of white pepper), then fry for another minute or so. If it starts to stick add a bit more oil.

7. Pour in the rest of the coconut milk, the juice of one of the limes and a splash of fish sauce (not too much as the mussels will release plenty of briny liquid). Bring to a simmer.

8. As soon as the curry sauce (which is what it is now with any luck) is simmering throw in the mussels and put the lid on immediately. Leave on a medium-high heat for about three minutes.

9. Roughly chop the coriander leaves and plate up your rice (which should be ever so slightly sticky from the coconut allowing you to serve it shaped from a mould Thai style). Be quick, you don't want chewy overdone mussels!

10. Check the mussels after three minutes. Most (if not quite all) of them should have opened up. As soon as the vast majority are open they are done. Pour over the rice with plenty of the sauce, garnish with coriander and wedges of lime and serve immediately.

Taste of Arabia, Wakefield

An unexpected treat for lunch on Saturday, and the discovery of another food based social enterprise.

After the thrill of Wilkinson's I thought I'd grab some lunch in town before heading home for an even more thrilling afternoon of DIY. There was a bowl of stew with my name on it at the Country Kitchen Bakery, but when I arrived a lengthy queue was forming and I couldn't be bothered waiting. Casting my eyes around the food hall I noticed Taste of Arabia next door, which enticed me in mainly because it was completely deserted.

One plate of shawarma in pitta with chips and salad for £3.99 later I was rather glad I'd been so easily swayed. It doesn't look all that great, but everything was spot on. Spicy shreds of slightly chewy but very tasty lamb, heavily spiced with salt, chilli and possibly sumac, stuffed into a perfectly toasted pitta and doused in yoghurt and chilli sauce (out of cheap catering pack bottles but what do you expect for 4 quid). Everything in the carefully arranged salad was very fresh and provided cooling contrast to the spicy meat. Even the chips were good. They were the budget freezer pack variety served by crappy chain pubs the nation over, but actually fried properly (they're nearly always underdone in pubs for some reason) they went down a treat.

I have no idea what the particular aims of this social enterprise are, but they do have the tagline 'bringing distant cultures closer'. In the half hour or so I was there they didn't have a single other customer, so it was more 'distant culture being completely ignored by the local culture'. The nice Turkish man doing the cooking said they were there permanently, so please do pay them a visit before someone pulls the plug. What better way to bring distant cultures closer than by selling good kebabs in Wakefield market?

8/10

Taste of Arabia
Wakefield Market Food Hall
Union Street
Wakefield
WF1 3AD

Vnam Café, Manchester (revisited)

There's a new kid on the Manchester Vietnamese restaurant block. It goes by the name of Hanoi Quan and it's next door but one to Vnam Café. I was first alerted to its existence by Mancfoodian ages ago, and after it appeared to be open when I drove past a couple of weeks ago I'd planned a return visit.

It wasn't open on Wednesday night, and according to the guys in Vnam Café where I went instead it hasn't opened yet, and the owners are 'having some problems'. Oh well, that's put paid to my fantasies of Oldham Road developing into Manchester's answer to London's Pho mile. If they do ever open you can't miss the place, the sign is bright pink.

This was my third visit to Vnam Café over the last year (second visit blogged here), and all three have been good. Three meals is plenty enough to give the menu a good going over as it's brief and to the point. Various grilled things and rolls as appetisers, just six things on rice or noodles for mains, a few salads and pancakes, and of course noodle soups.

On Wednesday I had the summer rolls, then BBQ chicken with rice to follow. The summer rolls weren't freshly made (I don't think) but were pleasant enough, and two dipping sauces rather than one as a bonus. The thick peanutty one was excellent.

The chicken was simple but tasty. A chicken leg, de-boned then chargrilled so the skin was crisp and blackened but the flesh moist. Plain boiled rice and fresh salad. The whole lot doused in sweetened fish sauce with a little garlic and chilli.

I like this place a lot. The food is basic but reliable, served quickly and cheap. This meal cost me under a tenner. If the Manchester Pho mile doesn't quite come to fruition can we have a place like this in Leeds please. Just one will do. Pretty please.

7/10

140 Oldham Road
Manchester
M4 6BG

http://vnamcafemanchester.com/

Syrian lentils

Lentils, lovely lentils. It's impossible to cock up a big pot of lentils. The worst that can happen is lentil soup. This thought is comforting me right now because I've just made a complete mess of my kitchen trying to make calamari. Deep-frying in a wok on an electric hob is not as straightforward as it might seem. Just try and maintain the oil at a steady temperature without ending up with greasy mush or a house fire. Go on, try it. Bet you can't.

Lentils pose no such dilemma. I was particularly pleased with a big dish of them I cooked on Monday (veggie night in anticipation of Tuesday evening's meat-fest), so I thought I'd share the recipe.

Little packets of pomegranate seeds were on offer in the supermarket. I was planning on cooking lentils anyway, and the pomegranate reminded me of a recipe for Syrian Lentils that calls for pomegranate molasses. I wondered if adding fresh pomegranate to the finished lentils would make an interesting alternative, and so it proved. Think of tender, earthy lentils with a hint of smoky cumin freshened up with coriander and little bursts of fruity pomegranate.

Serves 2-3 as a main meal with some bread, 5-6 as a side dish, or maybe more as part of a mixed mezze.

What you will need:

250g brown lentils
2 medium onions
4 fat cloves garlic
a small bunch of fresh coriander
2 heaped teaspoons cumin seeds
1 lemon
a large pinch of dried chilli flakes
1 tsp palm sugar (or demerara)
a handful of pomegranate seeds
salt and black pepper to taste
olive oil

What to do:

1. Finely chop the onions.

2. Warm a couple of tablespoons of oil in a pot over a low heat, then add the onions.

3. Cook the onions slowly so they soften without colouring. Give them a good 15-20 mins to allow them to sweeten.

4. In the meantime crush the garlic, and finely chop the stalks from about a third of the coriander bunch. Also prepare the lentils by giving them a good rinse in a couple of changes of water.

5. When the onions are soft and sweet make space in the pot, turn up the heat a notch and throw in the cumin seeds. Let them fry for a minute or so, making sure they don't burn.

6. Add the crushed garlic, chopped coriander stalks and pinch of chilli to the pot, and fry for a couple of minutes. Boil the kettle.

7. Add the lentils then pour over enough boiling water to just cover them. Bring to the boil then turn down to a gentle simmer.

8. Simmer until the lentils are soft and just starting to break up. The time this takes varies wildly from one batch of lentils to the next. These took ages, around 70 minutes in total. Check the pot every now and again and add a little more water if it looks a bit dry.

9. When the lentils are ready have a taste. They will need a generous grind of salt and pepper, then take them off the heat and add the juice of the lemon.

10. Roughly chop the coriander leaves, then add the pomegranate seeds and as much coriander as you like to the lentils. Serve immediately, ideally with some flat bread.

Cattle Grid, Leeds

FREEBIE ALERT

That little disclaimer is a first for this blog. Last night I ate rather a lot of food and I didn't pay for any of it. Freebies are a contentious subject amongst bloggers. Some blog away with impunity, accepting anything offered to them and providing positive copy irrespective of quality, whereas at the opposite end of the scale others refuse point blank to countenance the idea, preferring not to risk compromising their independence.

I'm sure that most of us lie somewhere between those extremes. Personally I've never had any fundamental objections to accepting a free meal, but always thought I should set myself a few rules in the event that it ever happened. The rules are:

1) Be honest about it. I'll tell you if I didn't pay for it.
2) Don't give it marks out of ten. I usually rate meals out of ten, but a freebie isn't really a representative experience so I don't think it's fair to compare it directly with meals where I paid the bill.
3) Try to write a fair and balanced review. I try to do that anyway, and feel like I ought to try extra hard if I'm not paying.
4) Don't accept any old offer. The rule of thumb here is 'would I like to try the restaurant/product anyway, and would I be willing to part with my own cash to do so?'

Rules one and two speak for themselves. You'll have to read what follows and decide for yourself whether I've complied with rule three. As for number four, yes I'd have given Cattle Grid a try anyway, but on this occasion I had an ulterior motive. As it was a Blogger's event it was a great opportunity to finally meet some of the people I've been waffling at on Twitter in recent months.

Right, now that's out of the way, on to the review. After arrival, drinks, introductions and so forth we were seated and welcomed to the restaurant by Steve, one of the proprietors of Cattle Grid. Steve then proceeded to deliver a rather long and rambling, unexpectedly frank, seemingly drunken, very sweary, often funny and sometimes tedious speech about all things Cattle Grid. No stone was left unturned, from disparaging comments about other steakhouses (Hawksmoor, Goodman), to the restaurant businesses they would most like to emulate (Pizza Express, Nando's), to the provenance of their produce (mostly British beef, currently from Yorkshire, occasionally Uruguayan) and the difficulties of sourcing reliable, good value beef. By the end of it I was slightly drunk, very hungry and didn't quite know what to make of the place. Better to let the food do the talking.

Ribs to start were the highlight of the meal for me. They were large with plenty of tender meat and doused in sauces that weren't overly sweet. I particularly liked the piri piri variety which were nice and vinegary with a good chilli kick.

The steak was disappointing. I'd ordered the T-bone medium rare, exactly the same as Neil sitting next me, yet somehow they'd manage to cook mine considerably more. It was medium at best, but probably more medium-well. It was overseasoned too, the predominant flavour being salt. The chips were a bit limp and would have benefited from another minute or two in the fryer. The watercress was pointless but then it nearly always is (the proper fiery stuff being very hard to come by for some reason).

Of two sauces we tried the bearnaise was pleasant but the peppercorn was a bit dull (more salty than peppery). A side of onion strings would have made a great beer snack, being deep fried slices of onion, very slightly battered, with about a kilo of salt added. As it was they arrived after everything else was nearly finished (some sort of problem with the fryers) so were mostly left uneaten.

Of the other meals I saw or tried, Rachel's rib-eye was a miles better steak than mine (fair play to Steve, that was what he recommended). It was cooked as requested and had much more flavour. I didn't try Penny's chicken burger, but it was bloody enormous and seemed to contain one topping too many.

The ice-cream I had for pudding was decent quality stuff. Others declared the chocolate brownies to be lovely, the waffles to be boring, and creme brulee tasted nice but was a bit eggy.

All in all a very enjoyable evening, and it was lovely to meet everyone. Thanks to Emma from Culture Vultures for organising it. The food was a bit of a mixed bag though, and the main event, the steak wasn't really up to scratch. I probably wouldn't return to Cattle Grid, except maybe for a few of those ribs.

I haven't read anybody elses write-up of the evening yet, but will add links to them here when I've checked them out.

Edit: Here are some other reviews of the night:
Penny from Bronchia
Katie from Leeds Grub
Elly from The Magic Square Foundation




Waterloo House
Assembly Street
Leeds
LS2 7DE

http://www.cattlegridrestaurant.com

Pork hock udon

I love noodle soups. I don't know why I'm writing this now because I'm craving noodle soup something rotten, but have no suitable ingredients in the house and no intention of leaving it to get some. I'm sort of torturing myself with temptation.

Anyhow I love noodle soups because they are the comfort food of the gods, because they are infinitely variable, and because they can be utterly, utterly delicious. There's rarely an occasion when a great big bowl of steaming goodness won't hit the spot. From the simple, almost ascetic pleasure of a clear broth spiked with nothing but a scattering of herbs and a few shards of ginger, to the dense, rich pungence of a good laksa.

I make noodle soups all the time, rarely bothering with a recipe and mixing and matching ingredients from across East and South-East Asia as the fancy takes me. They're always satisfying, and sometimes memorably delicious too.

This was a particularly good effort, so I thought I'd put it on the blog. The flavours are quite clear and bright, with added richness from the fatty pork and crackling. I'm sure it's not in the least bit authentic, but if it's close to the cuisine of any country I'd guess it's Japanese with a bit of Vietnam thrown in.

it's a leftovers recipe really, so you need to have the pork prepared in advance. I had it left over from a different meal. If you do it from scratch a whole hock should do about 3 people.

What you'll need per person:

handful shredded pork meat

about 1 pint pork stock

shards of crunchy crackling

fish sauce

sriracha chilli sauce

2 spring onions

1 hot chilli

1 clove garlic

small lump ginger

mint

coriander

lime/lemon

1 sheet udon noodles

some greens or other veg (I used runner beans)

To make the pork, stock and crackling

1. Simmer the hock with onion, celery and peppercorns for a couple of hours, skimming off any scum from the surface. 

2. After a couple of hours remove the pork and veg from the stock. Chuck away the veg. 

3. Pull the skin/fat off the hock, then pull off the meat and shred it. 

4. Put the remaining bones back in the stock and simmer for another hour. 

5. Dry the fat, salt it and roast in a hot oven 'til you get crackling.

To make the noodle dish

1. Finely slice the spring onions and chilli.

2. Shred or grate the ginger and garlic.

3. Chop some mint and/or coriander leaves.

4. Heat the stock in a large pan or wok.

5. Add the noodles, greens/veg and pork and heat until the noodles are just done.

6. Squirt in some fish sauce and sriracha to taste.

7. Garnish with the garlic/ginger, the spring onions/chilli, the mint/coriander, the crackling and a wedge of lemon/lime.

8. Serve immediately, stirring in all of the garnishes with your chopsticks.

For blogs providing more expert coverage of all things noodles I can wholeheartedly recommend Eat Noodles Love Noodles and Hollow Legs.

The Cross Keys, Holbeck, Leeds

I've been meaning to check out The Cross Keys for ages, and finally ended up in there twice in one weekend. Friday night was beers only, then I returned on Monday for a bank holiday lunch. The lunch menu comprises sandwiches and a handful of mains, less ambitious than the evening menu but still sounding a cut above your average pub grub.

A rare skirt steak sandwich with caramelised onions for me, and a Gloucester Old Spot bacon and brie sandwich for my dining companion. Chips to share.

The steak in my sandwich was spot on, rare as described with a rich, almost gamey taste. It was a bit chewy but I like that sometimes and it's exactly what you'd expect with skirt. The only problem with this was that the bread wasn't really up to the task . It was very soft, cut thickly from a good quality white sandwich loaf, and disintegrated rapidly. Something a bit sturdier to stand up to the steak would have been better. I wasn't keen on the caramelised onions, as they were far too sweet for my taste. Good sides though, both coleslaw and salad being nicely dressed.

The chips were excellent, probably the best pub chips I've eaten this year. At a guess they'd been at least double, or possibly even triple fried given the perfect texture (outer crunch and inner creaminess). The bacon and brie sandwich was declared satisfactory, but warm bacon would have been preferred.

As with Friday's visit table service was provided for drinks as well as food. The guy serving was friendly and efficient. The bill was just over twenty quid including a drink each and a tip. A return visit to sample the evening menu is definitely on the cards.

7/10

107 Water Lane
Leeds
LS11 5WD


http://www.the-crosskeys.com/