Now, homemade mayo is a completely different animal than the one which comes in a jar, so don’t even think about it!  My recipe (like many of the best things worth knowing) is stolen; from Richard Corrigan (you know, the funny Northern Irish one from the Great British Menu).  Good book by the way. 

Ingredients (enough for plenty):

2 egg yolks (please please please don’t throw away the whites – make meringues!)

1/2 heaped teaspoon Dijon mustard

1/2 heaped teaspoon English mustard

1/2 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1/2 tablespoon lemon juice (fresh not Jif!)

1/2 teaspoon salt

a pinch of cayenne pepper

250ml rapeseed oil (you can use vegetable oil per Corrigan’s suggestion, but i prefer rapeseed oil – just because it makes it a nice yellow colour!  You can use any vegetable or sunflower oil, but olive oil is too strong flavoured and inclined to split easily)

Instructions:

Whisk everything except the oil together in a bowl

Slowly whisk in the oil, little by little (resist the temptation to rush)

Now you have your homemade mayo – serve with the crusty bread and the beautifully sweet crevettes and everyone will love you, despite the minimum of effort!

If you’re feeling pretentious, which you’ll have guessed by now I often am, put your mayo in a nice jar, like one of these clasped hinged numbers and serve on a big old chopping/bread board with the bread

Enjoy,

KP

Now then, this is simple. Honestly.  Not in a Delia way, but in a supermarket recipe card way. 

Slightly showy sesame toast is the topic of the day.

Ingredients:

• Raw peeled prawns, about 500g
• Raw unpeeled prawns, about 8 – when you get them home, peel the middle, but leave the tail and head on. Then butterfly them, i.e. open them down the belly so you can flatten them out a bit, but without cutting all the way through.
• 2-3 spring onions, outer layers peeled off.
• About a 2cm piece long piece of ginger, peeled. I find it’s easiest to peel ginger with a knife.
• 2 tablespoons light soy sauce – kikkoman is fine.
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 egg
• 3-4 tablespoons sesame seeds
• About 8 small slices of sliced white bread
• A metal slotted spoon or something else useful for fishing things out of hot oil!
• 1 litre of oil (groundnut preferable, but most cooking oils will suffice)

Assemble as follows:

Chop spring onions and ginger as fine as you can.  Add to food processor/blender/similar.  Add peeled prawns (keeping the part-peeled ones back).  Add egg.  Add soy.  Add sesame oil.  Add a pinch of salt if you like. Blend.

Toast the bread.  Lightly, so it’s just started to go golden.  I guess this is about 1.5-2 on the average toaster scale. Top trick for keeping it crispy (unless you are sensible enough to own a toast rack – which KPette will not allow me to buy!) is to put pairs of slices together like in a house of cards.  Leave it to go at least nearly cool.

Now, place the part shelled prawns on their butterflied backs in the middle of each piece and then spread the mix thickly on the toast covering the body of the big prawn.  The thickness of the mix should be about the thickness of cheese you’d cut for a slightly overindulgent sandwich (a bit over half a centimetre, it’s not crucial but there needs to be a bit of a layer; you can’t spread it like you spread marmite!)

Sprinkle with sesame seads. The coverage is not important, something between 30% and 100% coverage of the mix with seeds is fine.

I’m assuming from here in that no-one has kept their deep fat fryer from the early nineties, but if you have, dust it off, you’ll be on easy street.  For those of you with a pan, the bigger the better, you’re going to need a minimum of about a litre of oil. Groundnut or similar which is pretty flavourless is ideal, but if all you’ve got is sunflower, that’ll be fine. 

You can test if the oil’s ready by dipping one of the slices of toast in: if the oil bubbles it’s ready. You’ve got to do a properly manly sustained dip, no girly dips please.  I know.  You’re scared of hot oil. It’ll be fine.  I promise!

When it’s ready, put the toast in the oil mix side down. As many as you can fit in one layer in your pan/fryer. You’ll need to do this in batches.  It takes about 2 minutes per batch, but check it, when it’s nice and golden it’ll be done. Fish it out and leave to drain on some kitchen paper.

Serve with soy and sweet chilli sauce.  Enjoy.

Gung hee fatt choi

KP

Franklin’s is one of the reasons we moved to East Dulwich.  It’s one of Lordship Lane’s myriad foody establishments; in fact it’s two of them – there’s a Franklin’s farm shop across the road as well.  Fifteen years ago East Dulwich wasn’t even allowed to talk about London’s culinary map, nevermind appear on it.  Franklin’s was one of the restaurants which started to change that, and it’s testament to its success in that pursuit that it was still here for KPette and I to enjoy on Friday night.

Franklin’s is towards the southern end of Lordship Lane, as far as most usually dare go (although this is not the time to chastise the meek who have failed to stumble upon The Mag).  There are some tables outside which in the summer give you a better idea of the French bistro atmosphere you’re about to stumble on. Squeeze through the door and there’s a lively crowd in the bar at the front.  East Dulwich’s thirtysomethings have left little Cameron and Ophelia at home with the au pair and are enjoying a little ‘apero’ in a place that makes them feel miles away from it all as soon as they walk in. Busy, but never too busy, with a bar that’s well stocked, but not overwhelming, you could happily go every week and never make it to the restaurant.  We pushed on through, I knew there was better to come.

The dining room at the back has less of the bustle, but is nevertheless cosy and always busy.  There’s a big open hatch so you can see into the kitchen, walls hung with local art and simple bistro style tables giving a confident but understated sort of atmosphere.  There’s nothing pretentious about Franklin’s as might be said for some of East Dulwich’s other offerings, the food and the service are left to do the talking; and they tell quite a tale…

The menu was well-balanced, seasonal and simple, with six or so dishes for each course: none of them complicated, all reliant on the best ingredients being treated well.  KPette had mussels with white wine and chorizo to start.  It sounded like a trendy ingredient had been oddly thrown in to a classic dish, and I was a little sceptical, but I shouldn’t have been. Mussels aren’t just the preserve of the Belgians and the French after all and the chorizo was totally in keeping with the rustic nature of the dish.  A word on the chorizo itself – there are so many awful renditions of this sausage being hawked by every grocer going, but this chorizo tasted like it tastes in Spain.  Tempted as I was by the choice of fresh oysters, with half an eye on cheese and wary of the generous portions, i abstained from starters.  A wise move it turned out. My shin of veal with buttered leeks and black pudding was colossal.  Melt in the mouth, but colossal.  The veal was perfectly slow cooked, falling off the bone and well-accompanied.  KPette went for steak (rib-eye i think), perfectly cooked with an expertly executed béarnaise.  We just about found room for dessert.  Three great slabs of cheese and array of biscuits arrived with an unnamed, but wonderful jam. 

The wine list, like the menu, is brief, but well-balanced, and it includes a good number of half bottles.  We plumped for a half of Sancerre and we never quite made it to red as intended.  The Sancerre was excellent and well worth the money.  The port was less good, but passable nonetheless.

Despite some minor forgetfulness over our requests for the bill, we enjoyed the service too.  The right level of attention.  Knowledgeable, friendly staff, well-organised.

Overall, a pretty enjoyable experience.  I know we’ll be back.  I think it’s my favourite local restaurant, and that’s probably saying something in East Dulwich.  If you haven’t been, go; but not too often, I want it for myself.  An unpretentious local restaurant with skill, balance and quality in abundance: surely a rare treat, even (or perhaps especially) in East Dulwich

Same rules as ever, one score: nine out of ten

KP

Tonight I met some friends after work for what was billed as ‘drinks and dinner’. Notice that’s not drinks followed by dinner, that’s drinks AND dinner. Yes that’s right, a gastropub! I’m not about to go on a major gastropub rant, I promise. Whenever I go to somewhere which might be described as a gastropub I do so enthusiastically, but I am conscious of the ‘supermarket factor’, i.e. that jacks of all trades tend to be masters of none. Having said that, I’d rather shop at Waitrose than an average greengrocer, an average butcher, an average pharmacist and so on.

So, preconceptions firmly put to one side: what is a gastropub? The term is used pretty widely, so i think it’s best to see it as a spectrum starting at local pubs with good food (this generally excludes places that do ‘meal deals’ or provide colouring books for the kids!) and going up to what are basically fully fledged restaurants which happen to be housed in old pub buildings with hand-pulled beer and without tablecloths!

Tonight’s venue was the White Hart in Kennington (or Lambeth depending on how fussy/old you are). It sits squarely in the centre of the gastropub spectrum: it essentially functions as a pub, but if you want to eat, they’ll do table service with a specials board and a (reasonably) balanced menu which pretentiously features the chef’s name at the bottom! I have to say, at this stage (post menu pre dinner) I was pleasantly surprised. There was an interesting wine list, an interesting menu and a good atmosphere. The decor is mildly trendy with a Parisian feel to the lighting and layout and New York style booths and exposed brickwork.

The mains included rabbit pie, coq au vin and bream as well as a couple of steaks and a burger. Vegetarian options are limited as my veggie friend complained vociferously to the waitress – although she is a regular and she does alway complain about the veggie options, so maybe it’s not that bad!

KPette and I both went for specials: her for the ballotine of pollack wrapped in Parma ham and me for the lamb two ways: roast rump and braised shoulder with Dauphinoise (this was one dish – I wasn’t just being greedy!)

To be honest, I was disappointed from here on in. The rump was really delicious and the thyme jus was great with the sweet baby onions, but the shoulder was more burned than braised and the Dauphinoise was lacking something…everything except the thinly sliced potato really. KPette faired similarly, the ballotine was good in itself, although the accompanying mussels were an odd adornment. A common feature of gastropubs was sadly evident at the White Hart, namely a failure to serve full dishes, so the lamb came with Dauphinoise, but no vegetables and the Pollack came with a sea of veg but no carbs. Choosing sides is a veritable lottery neither knowing what you’ll need nor what you’ll get: seasonal greens apparently means a bowl of slightly yellowing broccoli.

KPette did have a pudding: sticky toffee with custard, but I will confess I have no idea if it was any good, because I was drinking Mexican red wine, yes Mexican wine! At the expensive end of the by the glass list chalked above the bar was a 2006 Mexican number..why not! When a pub sells Mexican wine you assume they’ve unearthed a gem, but it was just oak and not much else. The Spanish red was not much better.

For the record, the beer was average brewery fayre supplemented with Sharp’s Doom Bar and Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. These seem to be in just about every (trendy) pub I go in at the moment, but are both fantastic, although I prefer my Doom Bar cold.

That’s it really. Signs of promise, a bit of a rollercoaster of expectation, but ultimately we’re back to the supermarket factor…and this was Sainsbury’s. Not Waitrose, not Tesco, Sainsbury’s; albeit with a couple of Taste the Difference ingredients thrown in!

If you’re local and like somewhere that’s a good pub and a good restaurant try it. You won’t be disappointed. I’m fussy, and more importantly I’d always rather have two small Christmas presents than one big one: I’d rather go to a really good pub for a drink and then a really good restaurant for dinner.

I suppose I should give it some marks out of ten. I haven’t really established a system for this yet, but I don’t want to separate aspects of the dining experience, so there’ll be no food, service, ambience scoring from me.

It’s a gastropub, so it can have a dinner score and a pub score.

Dinner: 6.5/10
Pub: 7/10

KP

With mild trepidation I’m going to begin to diarise my foodie adventures here. This is more for my own benefit than for anyone else’s, although this is fortunate, as currently I have a readership of one!

I’m sure the scope of this blog will expand and contract like a veritable accordion as my foodie intrigues take me first one way then the next. Nevertheless, the intention is to write about my rather amateurish domestic cooking for KPette and our cacophany of friends as well as about the rather more polished experiences enjoyed elsewhere in ED, Londinium and beyond.

In due course, it will doubtless be evident that I have an unhealthy obsession with (borderline fetish for) cookbooks. Anyway, best to get it out in the open they always say, at least before anybody catches me referring to the authors of said tomes in the first person! Nigel, Hugh, Raymond and Pru are indeed very dear to me, but not through any personal experience!

Right, without further ado, time to blog on…

KP