Eat Cook Explore

The Mince Pie Project For Kids Company and FoodCycle #MincePieProject

December 4, 2013 By London Food Blogger Leave a Comment

The Mince Pie Project is a unique charity initiative where top chefs create some unique mince pies and sell and auction them for good causes. The 2 causes chosen this year are The Kids Company and FoodCycle. (More about them below)

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The Mince Pie Projects kicks off at noon on Friday 6th December. 100 top chefs will each create two boxes of signature mince pies of their own design. One box will be auctioned to the highest bidder; the second box will be put up for raffle, in which anyone can get involved with a £2 donation per ticket. You can bid or buy a raffle ticket here: www.themincepieproject.com

Each box of signature mince pies will be submitted for the online auction, beginning at noon tomorrow and ending at noon on 13^thDecember.

Some of this years most original and most anticipatedmince pie marvels include; mince pie ‘santamosas’ from Great British Bake Off Winner and design guru, Frances Quinn; bacon, bourbon and butterscotch mince pies from Neil Rankin at Smokehouse, lemon meringue mince pies from Duck & Waffle head chef, Dan Doherty and a volcano inspired, molten mince pie from Nobu head pastry chef, Regis Cursan.

I had the chance to taste a selection of these mince pies at their launch event and I have to say that Neil Rankin’s bacon, bourbon and butterscotch mince pies were really unique and would be worth recreating yourself if you don’t win the auction or the raffle.

2-Mince Pie Project (3) The other more notable and adventurous flavours were Alyn Williams’ Mincey Pienuts, a hybrid of a mince pie and a doughnut filled with brandy custard. Then there was Mickael Weiss’ modern twist with a marzipan base and a sweet macaron topping. Everything worked in this one except I don’t like marzipan. Mince Pie Project

About FoodCycle FoodCycle builds communities by combining volunteers, surplus food and spare kitchen space to create nutritious meals for people at risk of food poverty and social isolation. Over 400,000 tonnes of edible food is wasted each year yet over 4 million people are affected by food poverty across the UK. Since FoodCycle started cooking in May 2009, their network of 1200 volunteers have served over 80,000 meals for people in need.

About Kids Company Kids Company provides practical, emotional and educational support to 36,000 vulnerable inner-city children. This includes 18,000 of the most at-risk children and young people in London, who face enormous challenges in their family homes and neighbourhoods. They provide support through four centres, outreach work and services in 46 schools. More information on the Mince Pie Project website: www.themincepieproject.com

Mince Pie Project

Filed Under: Foodie News Tagged With: Charity, mince pies

Mandarin Kitchen – Lobster Noodles Still Great

November 6, 2013 By London Food Blogger Leave a Comment

Mandarin Kitchen is one of the handful of places that we used to frequent for a decent Chinese meal in the Bayswater area. When we were students, a lot of friends had flat in the area and we used to congregate at a long closed restaurant called Hung Toa where the Roast Duck was famous. This used to be like a clubhouse, as all the gang would show up there sometime on a Sunday after a late night in the clubs on Saturday. We would almost always have the Roast Duck on rice. You would always see someone you knew in there, regardless of the time of day. Some of the staff from here left to open the now very popular Four Seasons.

For more formal Chinese meals or when the parents were in town, we would go to Mandarin Kitchen or Fortune Cookie (the old incarnation), both along Queensway.

After all these years, we still like to go to Mandarin Kitchen, especially when old friends visit London. Its nostalgic. The rather dated decor hasn’t changed much as they still have the cave like alcoves and walls covered in the strange plaster texture. There are still long queues for tables. There are big round tables to cater for big family meals and some smaller tables along the wall. When it’s busy, it’s frenetic.

The one thing we always order here is the Lobster Noodles. It looked like most of the customers in the restaurant on the night we were there ordered this too. This is the dish that they are the most famous for. On this occassion, we ordered Lobster Noodles with ginger and spring onions with a Yee Mein base. I prefer to order it with the crispy egg noodles base and a double portion of that too.

Lobster Noodles with ginger and spring onion

Mandarin Kitchen serves great seafood as the husband of the boss runs a seafood wholesale company. You can order the regular favourites like Crispy Duck too but that is just a distraction from the other choices. As they mainly do Cantonese Cuisine, there are a lot of familiar dishes on the menu for you to choose from if seafood is not your thing.

Steamed Bamboo clams

On this visit, we ordered an array of dishes to make up a casual Chinese dinner. All dishes were for sharing as the Chinese don’t really do “order your own main course” thing. Of the other seafood dishes we ordered were steamed bamboo clams with a soya sauce based dressing, prawn stuffed tofu soup, fried crab claws, some stuffed Japanese tofu and some fried green beans.

Crab Claws

Braised Japanese Tofu

Stir Fried Green Beans

Service was brisk and efficient. No superfluous fawning. The place was busy and buzzing. Not a place to have a romantic date but go with a group of friends for some great seafood.

It is comforting to know that the quality of the cooking has remained consistently above average, even after so many years. If you are around Bayswater, this is definitely a great choice for a very good Chinese meal.

Mandarin Kitchen
14-16 Queensway
London W2 3RX
020 7727 9012

(opposite Queensway tube station)

Filed Under: Restaurants Tagged With: Bayswater, Chinese

Win 5 Pairs of tickets to Salon du Chocolat

October 12, 2013 By London Food Blogger 10 Comments

In conjunction with Chocolate Week (14-20 October) Salon du Chocolat comes to London this October.

This is the glitziest showcase for Chocolate and it is coming to London for the first time. From Oct 18th to the 20th, London will host the first Salon du Chocolat. This will be unmissable if you want to meet lots of famous chocolatiers and see and taste some of their stunning creations.

Here are some of the events and highlights to look out for at Salon Du Chocolat:

The highlight is Salon du Chocolat’s world famous chocolate fashion show – a collection of couture dresses designed by top fashion designers and chocolatiers
Demonstrations from Great British Bake Off winner John Whaite, patissier to the stars Eric Lanlard and the Head Pastry Chefs from The Fat Duck, Le Manoir aux quat’Saisons and Hakkasan
A chocolate spa featuring chocolate beauty products, massages and a bathing beauty relaxing in a gorgeous bath filled with chocolate ganache
The best chocolate companies from the UK and abroad such as Artisan du Chocolat, Paul a Young, Rococo, Hotel Chocolat, Marc Demarquette, Melt, Divine, Prestat, Lindt, Valrhona, Pralus and Bonnat.

Win 5 pairs of tickets to the Salon du Chocolat Show

Here is your chance to win some tickets for the event. Just complete the steps as per the Rafflecopter widget below.

The first step is to answer this question in the comments below:

What is your best chocolate moment?

You will need to enter your name and a working email so that we can contact you about the tickets when you win. The prize is being offered by the organisers of Salon du Chocolat.

For more chances to win, you can tweet, share, etc on social media. You can come back and do this daily for more entries.

This giveaway closes on Thursday evening, 17 Oct.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Filed Under: Giveaways Tagged With: Giveaway, Salon du chocolat

Burgers By App At GrillShack

September 10, 2013 By London Food Blogger 5 Comments

London’s hunger for burgers has not abated, even with the recent flurry of high profile launches of new American burger imports. We now have a new homegrown burger offering.

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Grillshack on Beak Street in Soho is the new Richard Caring backed venture which positions itself as a casual, fast food place with a typically American diner menu. Burgers, roast chicken and steak and not forgetting the breakfast menu of pancakes and more.

We were there on the opening night to test out their technology and stress the system, so to speak. I did go back a 2nd time a few days later to see if things had settled down.

Grillshack is not your regular fast food place like the shiny plastic ones you find on the high street although it is in a similar price range. It has wooden benches and booths, naked tin cans holding your cutlery and napkins, a side table holding all the help yourself sauces and a drinks bar where you serve yourself your soft drinks. The music in the background is a soundtrack picked by whoever was nearest the mp3 player and the loos were weirdly pitch black (on the 2nd visit they had turned up the lights).

Superfast free wifi – as shown on the menu – is a nice surprise for the techie geeky friends I was with. This is for you to download their app through which you can make your order. You can then pay by paypal via the app, possibly the first UK restaurant to have paypal as a payment option.

Grillshack App

Through the app, you can order food to have in house with your allocated table number or you can order food to takeaway. There are a couple of alternative terminals in the restaurant for you to self order and pay too.

We loved the idea of the app where you can just click a couple of buttons on your phone and a beer and burger materialises in front of you. Like magic. Without any human intervention.

Grillshack ordering instructions

The menu is short. A basic burger is £4.95 which you can then adorn with bacon, cheese and another beef patty. There is no information about the provenance of the beef like other new burger places have been playing up. I don’t think the target clientèle here care much about that. For sides, the offerings include french fries, shoestring fries, radish slaw and corn on the cob.

I had a burger with bacon and we shared a few of the sides. My single burger (£4.95) was a bit too small, even for me. Loved the Chipotle sauce (they should sell this separately) that I doused on everything but not so much the ineffective jalapeño sauce. The French fries were very crispy, big thumbs up, shoestring fries were a bit meh. Loved the corn with lots of butter and a bit of cheese on top, very messy but delish.

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The Chipotle sauce was a hit, the Jalapeno, not so much

Friends had the roast chicken (£7.95) and steak with shoestring fries (£9.95) , a substantial portion and very reasonably priced.

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For pudding only a choice of 2, a carrot cake and the cookie ice cream sandwich which was an instant hit.

The cookie ice cream sandwich, a winner!

The service that we experienced on the first night was a little confused but on the subsequent night, all was fine. When you order your puddings, they should give you a little token to collect your puddings after the meal. Ours came with the mains which we sent back. The food arrived promptly and the quality was uniform, the French fries were still good.

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So a meal for 4 with an abundance of food and drink on the table amounted to about £30. A bargain for a meal in Soho.

Grillshack
61-63 Beak Street
London W1F 9SL

Opens all day.

Eat Cook Explore was a guest on the opening night and a paying customer on the second visit.

Filed Under: Restaurants

Artisanal Ice Cream at Black Vanilla

September 9, 2013 By London Food Blogger 3 Comments

Black Vanilla the Artisanal Gelato Shop in Greenwich recently teamed up with fellow Greenwich based Meantime Brewery to make some new flavours for their shop. This gelato shop was started by a husband and wife team who wanted to make a natural product that they could happily feed their kids.

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The 2 new flavours were Meantime Chocolate Porter Black Cherry Verigato and Meantime Raspberry Wheat Beer Sorbetto. I went along to their shop to taste these new flavours.

The shop is along the stretch of road that leads to the Greenwich Market. They don’t have a massive neon sign outside so look for the discreet little name board hanging over the door.

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How they make Gelato

Being a Gelateria, they make a vast variety of different flavours too. The ice cream is made on the premises with no artificial ingredients. The charming shop manager showed me how they make their gelato in the specially imported Italian machines. They make about 38 trays or about 200 litres a day. They use locally sourced milk which is mixed with natural fruit flavourings and churned in the machines to add air and increases the volume, which results in the gelato.

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Black Vanilla Greenwich

On to the tasting, firstly the Raspberry Beer flavour was made with some added raspberry purée and the beer. It tasted a bit too beery for me but others loved it. The chocoloate sorbetto is a chocolate sorbet laced with ribbons of the beer made into a sauce. Even though this was meant to be a sorbet, it was rich and choclatey. Loved it.

They have the usual flavours like strawberry and vanilla but one that stood out being glaringly blue was the Smurf flavour. This banana flavoured ice cream is a “must have” in all gelateria’s in Italy and is a surprisingly popular top seller. THe blue colouring is actually natural and it comes from a flower, probably the same one that we use in Malaysia for colouring rice.

Black Vanilla have recently won 2 more Great Taste Awards for their Fortnum & Mason Green Tea Sorbetto and Vanilla Gelato with Woodford Reserve Bourbon Salted Caramel.

If you have never been to Greenwich, there is much to see including the Cutty Sark, the Observatory, walk on the Greenwhich Meantime Meridian and see the green laser that shines along this at night.

Then drop in for some gelato at this shop. Black Vanilla has 2 branches, one in Greenwich and one in Blackheath.

Black Vanilla

5 College Approach
Royal Borough of Greenwich,
SE10 9HY

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Beer, gelato, Greenwich

Speciality & Fine Food Fair London – Interesting Finds

September 9, 2013 By London Food Blogger 4 Comments

The show this year was much bigger, over 200 extra exhibitors. I usually go along to find new food trends and to find new food producers or interesting products. I did a quick blitz through the show and met a few interesting people and learnt a few new things.

Here is some of what I saw today:

Empire of the dogs -There is a new British Hotdog on the market. Love the name and love the packaging. It comes either ready to eat with the bun or just a pack of sausages with less than 7% fat. All made with either outdoor bred pork or red tractor beef. It is about 275 calories per dog and should retail for about £3-£4. It somes in various flavours like chorizo and polish kielbasa sausages.

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I tasted this delicious Canadian Hickory Maple Salmon and it comes on a cedar plank. More please.

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Then I chatted to the man who brought over Canadian Maple Syrup. Things I didn’t know about Maple Syrup: It seems there are 3 grades of syrup and these are dependent on when in the season the sap is tapped. Early season is quite light in colour and flavour. Mid season, called Amber or Grade 2 is darker in colour, has the most mapley flavour of the 3 and is the most popular. The third one is a Grade 3 which just taste like sugar water and not much flavour, also the cheapest. Most the ones available in the UK is grade 3 syrup.

Also had a chat with Phil from Origin Coffee who sources these interesting coffees from small farms around the world. Last year they had a small batch of this powerful Bolivian coffee and this year, the equivalent is one from El Salvador, the San Carlos which is described as Citric and Balanced but if tasting this without milk, it’s quite acidic with a real kick. You can read about his travels to find new coffee producers on his new blog - http://wherethiscoffeecomesfrom.wordpress.com/

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Then there was the Meridian stall that was showing nut butters without added palm oil. A lot of guys were getting a bit excited about the Almond butter, a favourite with body builders it seems.

The Garlic Farm has a new range called Vampire but this one caught my eye, a Roast Garlic Jam. Unusual and surprisingly palatable.

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I met Maria Tyrrell from Lomito whose family makes this Chimichuri sauce which she used to make a prize winning pizza with last year. This sauce had more flavour than the sauces I have tasted in Argentinian restaurants in London. On the Argentinian stand, they also had some flavoured Mate teas and the yummy Dulce de Leche.

A smoked trout that doesn’t taste muddy. I tasted this on the RR Spink stand together with some smoked salmon. The trout has a bright orange colour and had a lightly smoked flavour. More on this product later.

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I learnt a lot about Mexican Chillies after chatting with Dodie Miller of The Cool Chile Co. Who knew that fresh and dried Mexican chillies have different names. All a bit confusing. They make a delicious Chipotle Salsa and have these interesting packs called Cowboy beans, pinto beans and ready to cook sauces.

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Mexican Chillies

This year the show incorporated the Chocolate Fair and there were a number of chocolate producers there. I didn’t have much time to check out a lot of these but found a few interesting chocolatiers.

Madecasse Chocolates from Madagascar, fair trade and made in Africa.

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Then I tasted these Vietnamese chocolates from Marou with the beautiful packaging. Jonathan Tailyour explained that they are all made from the same bean but the flavours were so varied. Some were fruity, some had hints of coffee. Quite a taste sensation. Even with over 70% chocolate, these did not have that bitter taste of a lot of the bigger retail brands. These are stocked in Harvey Nichols and delis. One of the better examples of bean to bar chocs.

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My friend Andre and his new Man Food range of pickles including the award winning bread and butter (pickled cucumbers).

man food

Then my friend Malaysian Chef Norman Musa with his new range of Asian flavoured ice creams and chocolates. He even had a very strongly flavoured durian flavoured ice cream.If you have never tried durian, this could be a good introduction. It is made with Thai Durians (as this is what we can get in the UK) which has been left to “age” for a further 2 weeks. We Malaysians like our Durians more pungent than the Thais. Watch this space for announcements of a Malaysian Supperclub collaboration with Norman in the near future.

chef norman musa

Interesting Branding

The following products had interesting branding and packaging that I liked.

branding

A great show, lots to see and taste and met some new foodie friends.

The Speciality & Fine Food Fair is held at Olympia and is on until 10 September 2013.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Speciality & Fine Food Fair

Win a copy of the Sainsbury Magazine Cookbook

September 6, 2013 By London Food Blogger 5 Comments

Sainsbury’s Magazine has put out a great cookbook with a compilation of over 100 recipes from their contributors like Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigella, Raymond Blanc and Thomasina Myers among others. There are sweet and savoury recipes included in the 100.

Sainsbury Magazine Cookbook

The book has stunning pictures too so you can see how each dish should look before you choose one to cook.

To win a copy of this book, just leave a comment below AND tweet to say why you would like to win the book. Do make sure that you fill in your details in the Rafflecopter app below as that will be picking out the winners.

Make sure that you leave a comment and hit submit as previous winners picked by the app had to be disqualified as they didn’t leave a comment even though they ticked the box on Rafflecopter to say they did. (I do check).

Closing Date: 14 September 2013

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The prize will be sent by Sainsburys.

Filed Under: Giveaways

Gaucho Smithfield’s Mini Beer Festival

September 6, 2013 By London Food Blogger Leave a Comment

Gaucho Smithfield held a mini beer festival in collaboration with Meantime Brewery. Our beer matching tasting menu kicked off with a flight of Meantime Brewery beers and some delicious little steak and ale pies made with the stout from Meantime.

The beers featured were the Yakima Red ale made with red hops from the Yakima Valley, a raspberry wheat beer, a chocolate beer and a stout.

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This was followed with some beer cocktails created by Amol. The first one was the a very refreshing Beer Pimms made with the raspberry beer and this was followed by a clever new concoction of a Caramel Mojito which was topped up with the chocolate beer and rum. These new cocktails will be added to the their beer cocktail list.

They show you the cuts of meat when you order

Our meal started off with a plate of mixed empanadas featuring beef, chicken and cheese. These empanadas had light flaky pastry and well seasoned fillings.

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I like the way that they show you the cuts of meat when you order and all the staff have to go through a thorough training on the menu. Our delightful waitress was very knowledgeable about the cuts and provenance of the meat. She convinced me that I should try the Gaucho tasting plate of steak which has three cuts of beef including a chorizo (sirloin), vacio (flank) and entrana fina (marbled skirt) each with a different marinade. Beautifully tender steak and delicious sauces.

The Gaucho Tasting Plate

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Besides regular fries and spinach, we had some unusual Argentinian side dishes like black quinoa and humita saltena served in a corn husk. Humita Saltena is a pre-Hispanic native dish in South America made with corn meal and spices (in Argentina).

Gaucho Smithfields

For pudding we shared a Dulce de Leche cheesecake which was unctuous. This was served with another beer cocktail , an inspired espresso beertini made with the Meantime Coffee Beer. This was a perfect accompaniment to pudding and if you like coffee after your meal, I would definitely try this instead.

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Espresso Beertini

Lastly, we were served a Patagonian sparkling Dessert wine, delish. The Mini Beer Festival goes on until September 7th where you can enjoy some beer tasting, beer cocktails and even try your hand at making some.

Gaucho is also holding a beer and food matching masterclass with brewmaster Rod Jones. This will be a five course be inspired menu priced at £75 per person.

Gaucho Smithfields Cowhide furntiure