Appetite Indulgence » Ingredients

My favourite lunch

thefatbanker — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:05:29 +0000

This little picnic box of delight has fast become a firm favourite for our work team on Fridays. Available from a little stall in Borough Market, I’m sure it’s not so green vis-a-vis food miles, but who cares when it tastes so good!

Stuffed with melty parma ham, the most delicious mozzarella from near Capaccio south of Naples, melon or pear and finished with salad and salt, it is a picnic to die for. Simple, light and very tasty – brilliant.

Crap food? Please, we’re British

thefatbanker — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:40:22 +0000

Photo credit Richard Cawood.

I recently wrote a guest post on the state of food in the UK for Tablet Talk, the blog of Tablet Hotels. If you’d like to check it out, here is the link.

Borough Market Summer Colours

thefatbanker — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:59:19 +0000

Some people bemoan Borough Market for being twee, middle-class and expensive. With produce available there as good as this, I couldn’t give a monkey’s what they say…

Glastonbury 2009, Pilton, England

thefatbanker — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:34:10 +0000

Worthy Farm is a pretty special place, and Glastonbury is one heck of an experience.

Palate training – can I get better at ‘tasting’?

thefatbanker — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:15:18 +0000

Recently, I’ve been thinking about ways I might try and improve my palate. My interest was peaked after I read a post or article somewhere (sorry, can’t find it at the mo) about a restaurant critic who practiced identifying different spices through blind-tests in a bid to improve his ability to identify ingredients. I wondered if I might try something similar; the ability to more accurately identify certain tastes can only help in my journey through all things gastro, surely?

The article also got me to thinking about whether it possible to actually become better at tasting itself…

The article also got me to thinking about whether it possible to actually become better at tasting itself, as opposed to just being better at identifying those things one tastes. I don’t intend to dwell on the semantics here (snooore!) but I do think there is a difference. Improving my tasting ability should be accomplishable through rote practice, but can I actually train to enhance my taste experience?

I’d be keen to hear anyone’s thoughts on this idea, or on any methods that other’s have tried to improve their palate, however crazy they might be…

Wednesdays aren’t that bad!

thefatbanker — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:02:07 +0000

I quite like Wednesday, but some people seem to think they are quite ‘offal’!

Apologies, a very poor joke. Spotted this at the Ginger Pig in Borough Market yesterday and it made me smile. Good selection of offal, but I was looking for rabbit kidneys after a friend of mine flash-grilled some that he’d been marinating for while – delicious!

However, I learnt (always a good thing, learning) that rabbit is sold whole, so I wasn’t able to purchase just the kidneys. Oh well.

Allens of Mayfair, butchery masterclass

thefatbanker — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:20:23 +0000

Looks a bit macabre when I write it down, but yesterday I spent the afternoon in the heart of London’s Mayfair cutting up dead things…and I really enjoyed it. Those of you who are avid readers of this blog (that’s all five of you) might remember one of my first posts where I described the butchery masterclass that I’d kindly been given as a present by my cousin and his wife at Xmas. Well, yesterday it was time for me vs the meat…banker vs bovine…trader vs tripe.

Now, every so often I have a crisis of faith and question the integrity of my enthusiasm for food and cooking, restaurants and dining etc. I worry I might have jumped on the bandwagon of all things good-food-related that has swept the country in the last few years. I worry it’s a stance affected by the common popularity of the subject matter. I’ll find myself excitedly describing the delicate flavour of a recently consumed parmesan crisp, and I think, “You fool! You fraud! You great pretender! What on earth are you saying? Are you really getting excited about some baked cheese? Are you really that into food, or is it just a great big facade?”

I’d hazard that it takes less than a minute on a butchery course to confirm (or not) one’s commitment to foodie-dom. Confronted with a fresh carcass, knife in hand, about to get elbow deep in flesh focuses the mind dramatically on food, it’s origins/source and our relationship to the processes involved. I found the whole thing fascinating, it confirmed my interest in the subject and at Allens they made it a thoroughly enjoyable experience too.

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Allens is an institution and I recommend a visit for any foodie, even if not taking a masterclass. Housed in a beautiful listed building, the inside is very little changed from the past (listed status requirements) and it is a great example of a functioning traditional butchers. There is a little produce on display nowadays in the newly installed refrigerated cabinets but most walk-in customer’s requests are still brought up from the basement and cut to order there and then. Amazingly, the shop is staffed 18 hours a day (the first shift starts at 3am!) and from this tiny little hub they provide quality meat to the majority of the top hotels and restaurants in London.

Clothed in our butchers coats and equipped with chainmail gloves, we gathered around the butchers table in the centre of the floor while master butcher Glen introduced us to the session. Consummate skill and experience shone through in spadefuls as he skillfully turned a whole lamb into beautifully neat cuts of meat, whilst calmly talking us through everything he was doing.

Slightly daunted by the thought of attempting the same, I was a little relieved to find that we’d start out on just a chicken instead, after Glen had taken us through the correct steps. Armed with hugely sharp knifes and under the watchful eye of Michael, another master butcher we set to work. Although not as speedily, certainly not as efficiently and mainly due to the excellent instruction, we all eventually managed to get to something resembling breasts, thighs, wings and legs.

Next up was a whole oxtail (easy!), swiftly followed by the tricky feather-blade steaks, which required the removal of lots of gristle before being cut into steaks (for a video of one of the Allen’s staff doing this properly, click here.) Finally, there was the French-trimmed middle neck of lamb which were the most rewarding, most fiddly and most frustrating (video here).

Several things impressed me during our hour-and-a-half with Glen and his colleagues, but foremost was the skill and ease with which these chaps move a knife around the joints and bones of these cuts as they produce incredibly neat pieces of meat; just insanely skilled. A fantastic and informative way to spend a couple of hours, especially when considering the amount of meat you get to take home too (in nice bags, with individual recipes for each cut of meat). And all our hard work fully justified a lazy late-lunch at Scott’s across the road…

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Allens of Mayfair
117 Mount Street
London W1K 3LA
0207 499 5831

Whole Foods, Time Warner Center, New York

thefatbanker — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:32:40 +0000

I coat myself with a cynical exterior; I’m a banker, it’s my job to appear world-weary and bitter (apparently). But every now and then this ice-cool veneer is punctured by an enthusiasm for something that is so strong that I can’t keep it under wraps, despite the risk of ridicule.

On this occasion the object of my rather worryingly-strong enthusiasm is the US grocery chain Whole Foods, and the one under the Time Warner building in New York, in particular.

I’d been to the Fresh and Wild’s in London prior to their re-branded as Whole Foods, but before our weekend in New York I’d never had a dose of the full-scale Whole Foods experience. Suffice to say the place blew me away; quite simply the widest and most gorgeous range of fresh food and ingredients I’ve ever seem in a one-shop set-up.

As a result of this ‘find’, our breakfasts and snack-lunches while away took on epic-feast proportions. Yes it is expensive (but not much more so that M&S or Waitrose), and yes it’s holier-than-thou approach could be a little galling in these tough economic times, but I liked it A LOT and am not ashamed to say so!

(There would have been a nice picture of the huge meat counter from this store to accompany this post, but whilst attempting to take the snap I was curtly informed that no photographs were allowed in store. Queue deep suspicion about what it is they are trying to hide…..!)

Thoughts on Recipease

thefatbanker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:36:13 +0000

We’ve had a chance to pop into Jamie Oliver’s new venture Recipease a couple of times and sample the food, so I thought it was time I jotted down our thoughts on the set-up:

First up, no doubt, the food we’ve had has been great. Really tasty, hearty and generous portions of comfort foods with big flavours; just what you’d expect from a Jamie Oliver experience. We shared a couple of portions of the Baked Salmon In a Bag, which worked really well with the included olives, but needed some extra veg to make it a proper FatBanker meal size. We also bought and froze (no problems there), the weighty Fantastic Fish Pie, which we ate a couple of days later. This was very good. Huge chunks of fish and prawns, with the interesting addition of spinach in the pie (is this traditional??)…didn’t need much added to make this a generous meal for two.

Ok, that’s the view on the food we’ve tried, how about the shop and concept itself?
Inside, the shop is nicely decked out, modern yet homely, the open cooking-space at the back looks welcoming and spanking clean. As you’d probably expect, there are plenty of JO products placed around inviting purchase.
Some of the prices made us baulk: a tub of olives for 12 quid is an eye-watering example. Also, given the prevalence of big-red-letter discount and offers on show at other retailers at the moment, it was odd to walk into a store and see none on display at all.
The closing time has been brought forward to 7pm on weekdays. This seems a little odd given the demographic in the area is heavy on young city workers who will only just be passing on their way home about this time. Unless, of course…
…the intended demographic is the day-time ‘at-home-mums’, in which case they seriously need to make the shop more baby-buggy friendly as the current layout means a lot of the shop is inaccessible to the little darlings.
You can’t book a cooking course in the shop itself, you have to do it online instead. This is odd, right? Overheard a funny conversation, where a customer, having been talked through the concept by one of the friendly staff was impressed enough to ask to book a course, only to be told she couldn’t do it in-store. Daft.
No nutritional values on the boxes of prepared foods. My gorgeous date ensures me that every girl (and possibly guy) worth her salt will want to know just exactly how much olive oil has gone into the preparation of these lovely meals before they commit to buying them.
Is anyone going to return to the store for further purchases after having been show how cook the dishes once? Fresh organic ingredients are available next door in Waitrose too. And you can get loo roll there at the same time.

Bill’s Produce Store, Brighton

thefatbanker — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:34:33 +0000

I forgot to mention in my recent Brighton post one of my favourite places to have brunch on the weekend when in Brighton. Evil FatBanker sits on my shoulder and suggests that given how busy this place gets anyway I should keep it to myself in a vain attempt to ease getting a table, but that wouldn’t fit the spirit of these caring-sharing times (and would confirm many people’s worst fears about us bankers!).

Bill’s Produce Store can be found on North Road, just behind the sparkling new library. Styled as a fun, depot-cum-cafe, it sells fresh fruit and veg and some interesting pots of stuff and other some such, all very nice and pretty. But I come here for the food; the fresh, home made, in-cred-ib-ly delicious food. I could rattle on for ages about it, but I’ll let my pictures tell their 1000 words instead. Enjoy…

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