migrant|roo

With peanut butter and M and Ms - for Buzz's send off tomorrow :)

I made a pie today.

In fact, it was a birthday request from my Dad who had been craving a traditional chicken and mushroom pie - he got one for his birthday!

I used chicken thighs (poached for 40 minutes in stock, then carefully and lovingly de-boned and diced) instead of breast to ensure the chicken didn't go dry, and it worked really well. The filling was essentially a bechamel sauce (but with more chicken stock than milk) with sauteed mushrooms, tarragon and chicken.

Shortcrust pastry unashamedly bought off the shelf. Here's the beast in all it's glory - fed 6 people easily.

Served with chunky chips, roast butternut squash and thick gravy.

There was something satisfying about making one big "thing" that everyone shares, and it was fun to make something a bit more rustic and English after 2 weeks of south-east Asian cooking too.

Vietnam was undoubtedly my favourite country when we went around the world. A big reason for this was the food; I fell in love.

All this made the fact that I couldn't find a good Vietnamese cookbook even more disappointing, until now:

The Secrets of the Red Lantern is now my favourite cookbook. Ever! It's not just a cookbook, it's a beautifully presented story of one family's escape from the Vietnam war, leading eventually (I won't spoil the story) to The Red Lantern, a revered Vietnamese restaurent in Sydney.

We'd invited Flo, Tracy and Monkey over for dinner on Saturday night, so I thought "Hey! Why not cook 4 dishes from this fantastic new book?".

Lesson #1

Vietnamese food, although quick to cook, is not simple. There is an elegant simplicity to the approach of each dish; fresh herbs, fresh vegetables, fresh seafood - do you see the pattern? However, there is a lot of preparation involved, and I spent 4 hours in the kitchen frantically chopping, soaking, folding, tearing, picking, slicing, coating, marinading.. phew!

Lesson #2

I'm not going to cook four dishes I've never cooked before when hosting a dinner party. Thankfully, Tracy and Flo were 45 minutes late, but even so, I was shattered and the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it!

Lesson #3

Don't skimp on quality of ingredients. I know this might seem obvious, and it's something I try to do myself but it's worth mentioned here, if only because I'm feeling a bit smug. We made a huge effort on Saturday afternoon legging it around the city trying to find everything we needed totally fresh (not frozen or jarred if we could help it) and I think it played the most crucial part in the quality of the meal.

So, lessons over, how did it go? Well, at 5pm you I wouldn't have believed it, but by 7pm we were eating a really, really delicious, authentic tasting meal complete with home-made dipping sauces.

There's a downshot though - I was so stressed, snowed under with cooking that I didn't take many good photos. In fact, I didn't even get any photos of some of the dishes :(

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

A favourite of mine from when I was in Vietnam, these ended up being 10 out of 10 on the authenticity-scale, but it didn't come free; 15 rolls took me over an hour to make.

Deep-fried squid with salt, pepper and chilli

NO PHOTO

I've never deep fried anything before, so I was really worried about this. Luckily, we got some freshly caught squid which I sliced into thin strips so they'd cook quickly, then coat in egg-white and work in potato starch (heh, that was easy to find..). They cooked in hot oil in about a minute, whereupon I tossed them in sea salt, fresh cracked black pepper, red chillies and 4 slices, fried spring onions.

It's hard to explain the disbelief at how good they tasted when I tried them!

Rare steak and glass noodle salad

This dish had about 30 ingredients! Even the marinade had 10+ ingedients, but it was all worth it. I cooked the rump steak on a really hot griddle for 3 minutes each side and sliced it ultra thin. The salad was essentially a herb salad (basil, thai basil, corriander, perilla and mint) with glass noodles, red onions and cucumber, dressed (a mix of soy, garlic, corrainder, sugar and fish sauce blended together) and finally garnished with roasted peanuts.

The result was so fresh tasting, an absolute explosion of flavours.

Chicken with chilli and lemongrass

Another favourite of ours from Vietnam, I learnt the secret to cooking this one (aside from chopping the lemongrass really, really fine) was to let it cook longer than you think. It's not a stir-fry, it needs time for the sauce to really come together (I deglazed the wok in the middle, too) and for the onions and garlic to caramelize.

I'm so pleased, I feel like I've finally got a crack at mastering Vietnamese, one of my favourite cuisines. I learnt a few lessons, but I'm not put off at all - just totally exhilerated by that most fantastic cookbook.

I've actually got an excuse for the couple of weeks silence around here - I was on holiday!

In Surfcastle, I think I've found a place I'll go back to over and over, year after year.

Before I go on - please check out my Surfcastle 2008 Flickr Photoset/album - it speaks volumes, more than I could in this post.

It's a big, beautiful old house in the village of Baleal, which happens to be one of the top surf spots in Portugal, if not Europe.

What makes Surfcastle isn't just the location or the perfect surfy house - the people who run it are completely awesome.

Our surf coaches for the week, Dan and Ginjes were so helpful and so keen to help us improve and coach us almost one-to-one. There are heaps of surf camps that do lessons of 50 people plus, but not the Surfcastle guys. We had Ginjes and Dan between 6 or 7 of us most days!

Joao, Elfie and Laura were the perfect hosts, making sure we were extremely well fed and looked after.

The whole experience was a little bit perfect to be honest. A tiny, quiet village out of tourist season. A really hard but addictive new sport to learn. Beaming sunshine away from cold, dark England. Most of all, meeting some absolutely amazing people who just want to kick back, have a little fun and surf.

As far as the surfing itself goes, I love it! I got the hang of it slowly but surely, but it's definitely he hardest sport I've ever turned my hand to. The constant paddling, watching the waves, balance and timing make it almost impossible to nail in the beginning, but as I touched on earlier we had two brilliant coaches who worked hard to make sure we understood how to nail it.

So by the end of the week, we were exhausted from the sun, beer, partying and most of all surfing - there's nothing like coming home from holiday feeling knackered by wanting more.

It won't be long before I'm back at Surfcastle, and that's a promise!

Man, it's rare that I spend so long preparing and cooking something that ends up looking a bit unspectacular, but today was one of those.

Slow-cooked Lamb shoulder, with gnocchi and caremlised butternut squash

Taking the meat off the shoulder and trimming the fat took bloody ages! Satisfying seeing it brown off in a very hot griddle pan before being stuck in the oven for an hour with an onion, a touch of stock and and oregano.

I thought I'd double experiment with the gnocchi - attempt them for first time, and also try and inject some earthy mushroom flavour into them. Did you know that 12 mushrooms, finely blitzed in a mini-food processor then gentle fried in olive oil disappear to almost nothing? The yield was about 2 tablespoons of fine mushroom paste.

I used Jamie Oliver's gnocchi recipe - classic potato (none of yer fancy Roman semolina brand here) - adding in the mushroom paste half way through.

While this was going on I continued to develop my mild addiction to oven-roasted tomatoes - I put 12 of them, quartered, into the oven for 90 minutes with salt, basil and olive oil. Also in an already full oven was half a butternut squash cut into a thin, long strips (for extra crispness keep them thin) drizzled with olive oil.

All that was left was to combine the shrunken, intense tomatoes into the lamb making a rustic lamb ragu of sorts - then serving over the gnocchi, a scattering of crispy butternut squash pieces and some grated parmesan.

Warming, autumnal, rustic and bloody hard work.

After a very busy few months at work (remember Balloonacy?) and a lot happening over a busy, social summer, I was feeling really run down and low on energy and motivation.

So I went on a long bike ride. About 4 days long in fact; I did the C2C (Coast to Coast) bike ride. Some stats before the gorey details:

• 15 cereal/energy scoffed
• 3 B+Bs recovered in
• 0 punctures suffered
• 1 item of crucial waterproof clothing lost
• £88 of train tickets purchased
• 37.4 mp/h top speed
• 352 photos taken
• 2 payphones used
• 4 full, huge English breakfasts eaten
• 6 litres of self-filled water from mountain streams, drunk
• 0 people accompanying me

Check out my Flickr album with the best photos from the trip.

Here's a rough map of the route:

The trip was spread over 4 days, where I did around 40 miles a day until the last day where I did nearer 70.

Being alone

I did the trip alone, which turned out to be both good and bad. I'm not really very used to being on my own, coming from a big, loud family and having been with Jo for nearly 6 years. Not being used to it, I don't like it very much, meaning I didn't like a lot of the solitude I found whilst out there - but on reflection, I can see that it's definitely good for me to be out of my comfort zone for a while.

The halo period

.. was absolutely stunning! Loosely, the first 2 days were across and out of the Lake District, and the last 2 days were a long, winding traversal of the Northern Penines.

The weather on days 1 and 2 was really good; sunny in spells, but mostly cloudy - very easy to cycle in. The scenery was breaktaking as I rode up and out of countless valleys with lakes dotted around in every direction.

On the 3rd day, however, the rain came..

The rain

Unbelievably, I left my water and winproof jacket in the B&B on the very first night. Nice. The rain on day 3 was weird, not heavy, but very dense.

I had 2 notably huge climbs: the first up Hartside at 1900ft and Black Hill at 2000ft. The view from Hartside was amazing and after a long rest and drink I set off towards Black Hill.

The climb was so much tougher (lots of sharp, steep hills) and when nearly at the top the fog made it impossible to see more than 10 meters around me! I know that there were roads I was cycling on with sheer drops that I simply couldn't see because of the blanket of white. Mental stuff, and to be honest really daunting and scary.

After more climbing, more fog and more rain I don't think I've ever been as relieved to see a warm pub with a room than I was when I rode into Allenheads, some 7 and a half hours after setting off. Brutal.

The last day

Right, I bought a map from Sustrans (the excellent UK cycling charity) which mapped out the route (beautifully and thoroughly might I add) and it also provided route profiles - simple line charts that show the size of the hills between places on the route.

Based on that I decided to ride a much further distance on the last day because the route profiles showed 2 climbs out and then downhill all the way to Sunderland, and I figured it should be a cruise.

Wrong!

The route profiles for that last part, in my opinion, completely wrong. 2 climbs turned into 8 and I found myself on a very weird, wide B-road with no road markings. The rain was driving so hard and the landscape had turned from intricate valleys to vast, open expanses.

In this expanse was little me, on my little bike, on a fucking long road shared only by these gigantic "Tyne and Wear Road Rock" juggernauts.

Because the climbing had already been so tough I really started to become freaked out about how little ground I'd covered and once I was truly in the middle of absolutely nowhere and could see no houses, towns, huts, animals, nothing at all whatsoever I started to truly freak out.

There was no mobile reception at all, I couldn't make any sense of the map I decided there's no way I was riding down the 6 mile monster-hill I'd just climbed so I'd keep going.

Just like that, half a mile down I see a blue glimmer through the fog - the turn off for the Waskerley Way, a 25 mile "dedicated cycle track" which offered a "superbly relaxing cruise down to the Tyne".

Bollocks. "Dedicated cycle track" meant for the most part a shingle, dirt and rock track. "Superbly relaxing" turned into "Arduous and exhausting" due to the fact that it'd been raining for 2 weeks and there was surface water all the way down. For 25 miles and 2 hours, I was constantly riding through puddles and mud pits. I became completely caked in mud - water pouring off me, out of my shoes, off the bike.

Once I'd come out of the sheer wilderness, the Waskerley Way continues into frankly flat, boring riverside rides through post-industrial Tyne and Wear area. I was so tired and so beaten up, I was counting the meters to the station so I could come home.

It got better - the grit, water and 25 mile downhill wore both sets of brakepads to a nub rendering them useless meaning I had to freewheel the last couple of miles into Newcastle.

That was after I washed self and bike using a bucket and tap at a petrol station 5 miles out of Newcastle (stuffing a snickers bar in the process) so that I wasn't in such a rank state that they'd turn me and mucky bike away from the train.

I made it in, and following lots of waiting and long train journeys I was home on Tuesday evening, some 91 hours after leaving.

I'm so proud of myself that I did it. Its not the kind of thing I do a lot, but it's certainly something I'm going to do a hell of a lot more of. The scenery, adventure, focus and solitude have left me feeling genuinely refreshed :)

I know, I know - it's been ages.

But i've got a half written blog post (and heaps of photos) about an awesome cycle trip I went on over 4 days:

Coast to Coast - riding from the West of England to the East.

It was beautiful, adventurous, difficult and solitary. Looking forward to posting properly about it with photos!

A few months ago a small team of us (Karen, Nico, Tom and myself) at POKE built a new website for the excellent Ottolenghi restaurant.

As a "thank you", Yotam and his team at Ottolenghi kindly invited a large mob of POKE food-heads across to Leith's Cookery School for a Saturday morning lesson in mediterranean and Isreali cooking.

It was really, really nice (but also a bit weird initially) to socialise with Pokers outside of their two natural habitats: the studio, and the pub! Everyone was buzzing and it was a brilliant morning - everything was perfectly organised and the recipes were absolutely delicious (I've cooked them all since the course at home).

I tried to get some decent photos, but it was a bit manic with all the cooking - here's the best of the bunch:

The hardware

Knife skills

Red onion, cucumber and dill salad

This might look plain, but it's far from it. We salted the cucumber after scooping the seeds out to get them to release a lot of water, giving them loads of crunch. The dressing was a mix of vinegar, sugar and dill - the vinegar really took the edge of the onions. This is going to be eaten a lot this summer :)

Chicken and courgette burgers

I've always been scared of burgers - no more. It was an extremely wet mixture before cooking, my nerves were jangling.. but the lesson is to trust the professionals; after 2 minutes in the pan they firmed up enough to flip and the rest, is delicious history.

The Meal

All together, along with my favourite dish of the day: the bulgar wheat, caremlised onion and feta salad. You can see it in the background, unfortunately I was too busy faffing around cooking to get a proper shot of the bulgar salad on it's own.

Messy dessert

Raspberry and passion fruit mess, made with the infamous Ottolenghi meringues! I managed to coax a few meringue secrets out of Yotam too ;)

A fully brilliant day, capped off with a few pints in a local pub and a sleepy, sunny, gentle journey home.

Like most London-workers, I've become a serial sushi eater. I've only ever tried to make sushi at home a couple of times before, enjoying limited success.

A couple of weeks ago when Monkey and Rob came to stay for the weekend I decided to give it another go, but this time I was going to buy the best salmon fillet I could find. After a bit of hunting around on that Sunday morning with Rob, it turns out the best we could find was also the biggest. So I made a shitload of sushi!

The salmon was an organic skinless fillet from Waitrose, and I picked up some nori sheets too. I didn't have any sushi rice so I used unwashed (don't laugh - not washing keeps the starch in making it more sticky) basmati rice.

One thing nobody tells you is that when making sushi (especially a lot of it) the rice gets absolutely EVERYWHERE. It sticks to your hands, gets trodden into the carpet, in your hair - everywhere. I find having wet hands makes it much easier to pick up rice without it all sticking to your hands.

Rolling was good fun - the first one was shit, the rest were good. My knife was just about sharp enough, but making sushi really makes me want to splash out on one of these bad boys :)

Big fish, sharp knife

Attempt #2 at rolling - looking good

All rolled

The spread (well, half of it..)

Cut rolls

It's rare that I eat so much sushi that I feel completely full. This was one of those times. We ate, and ate and ate and there was still a massive slab of salmon left over.

The World's First Race Across the Internet is over! It took an extra huge (have you had enough hyperbole yet?) effort from Mattias, Dezza, Igor, Greg and Mike and I over the past couple of weeks to pull this one out of the bag, and it's so hugely satisfying that people enjoyed it so much. FFS, I got 74 comments on a single post! All the well wishes and thanks is really appreciated by us all - it was brilliant watching the buzz around the race during the past week and I'm immensely proud to have been involved in building such a unique and fun piece of work.

Oh - have you checked to see if you made the top 500 on the Balloonacy Leaderboard?

So, with the past 3 months being so busy I can't believe it's the summer!

This weekend just gone I've finally got back into the kitchen, cooking:

• Asparagus with german smoked ham and chili and balsamic glaze
• Linguine with chorizo, king prawns, red onion, pepper and basil chili oil
• Barbecued mackrel with roasted Mediterranean vegetables

I've got heaps of nice photos of them, I'll be posting them on Friday or Saturday, hopefully whilst out in the garden in the sunshine drinking a cold one.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I've taken recently: