Dehesa - pinxos that pinch your pocket

Would you believe I ended up at Dehesa because at the street festival "A Taste of Spain" (taking place on Regent Street) you couldn't get a single glass of bloody wine ANYWHERE and in order to nab the most microscopic piece of jamòn you had to queue for 45 minutes at one of endless regional stands whilst anxious ladies thrust brochures up your nose under the sweltering sun. Taste of Spain? Waste of Spain if you ask me.

So anyway, Dehesa.... well they certainly saw the Brits coming. One of an endless newish crop of pinxos, tapas, cicchetti, over-priced tiny grilled things on plates that in Europe cost about 2 euros - type bars. The classic tortilla is £4. Yes, a combination of egg and potatoes. £4. For a quarter slice. Good? Hmm... if you can't knock this one up better at home...

The food is good, don't get me wrong, it's just far from exceptional and lacks the heartiness and richness that real Spanish tapas can impart despite the small portions . A bowl of hard boiled quail's eggs with rock salt and paprika at £5.50 was a bit too gimmicky for me, when they could have done something incredible had they poached them and burst them over some fresh asparagus for example. The salt to quail's eggs ratio was enough to have the health police rushing round for a cholesterol check too, you could have baked a whole fish in the salt, there was that much of it.

I had mozzarella with olive tapenade and crostini. The sort of little dish that you get in Europe for about 5 euros and comes with a giant oozing cheese and four or five thick slices of grilled bread slathered with the black stuff. This was all twee and dinky, wee mozarellas of ok quality and two tiny crostini on a slice of bread that could double for a wheat thin spread with what can only be described as a "dainty smattering" of tapenade. As though it were marmite.

The biggest joke was the drink however. Davy's wine bar knows its stuff when it comes to serving sherry. A decent glass can be obtained there for a fiver with little fuss or show. Here it took a good 15 minutes for a glass of fino to arrive and when it did, Raquel, who'd ordered the more expensive Manzanilla Pasada, had almost a third less in her glass than I did with my Ximenez . When she enquired as to the reason, we were fobbed off with a pretentious "its about the intensity of flavour and how it is imparted in a smaller quantity." To which Raquel, a Spanish born-and-raised lady with considerable experience in the wine deparment simply scoffed "so, I pay more, and get less?" Then looked at me as it to say "can you imagine a waitress saying that to some crusty sherry-producing farmer in a smoky Andalucian bar and getting away with it alive?" TO which I could only cringe...

Now Polpo on Beak Street on the other hand... super cichetti!

12-hour wine braised shin of beef

I stole this from the River Cafè cookbook and it must be the most fool-proof, hassle free and delicious way to pot roast a beef I have ever come across. You'd be hard pressed to mess this recipe up, and it sunds impressive enough to ellicit "ooohs" of wonder from your friends.

First arm yourself with a 2.5 kilo piece of beef shin, with the bone still in it. Then go and purchase a couple of bottles of Chianti, doesn't need to be the best at all, but Chianti has good flavours to marry with the beef.

Pre-heat your oven to 70 degrees, the lowest setting you can get. After seasoning generously, plop your beef shin in a deep, heavy-bottomed cast iron pot - one that can go in the oven eventually - and pour over one bottle of wine. Add about 30 cloves of garlic, a handful of herbs of your choice, such as thyme, rosemary and parsley. Bring to the boil rapidly for 2-3 minutes, then turn off the heat.

Pop the beef in the oven and leave it for twelve hours, checking every four hours or so to see if the wine needs topping up. Best to do it over night.

Once cooked, take the beef out and put it on a carving plate, wrapped in foil to keep it warm and succulent. Pieces should literally be falling apart by now.

Reduce the wine by boiling it vigorously on the hob, add onions if you want. Once it has reduced by a third, strain it, mush up some of the garlic cloves into the strained jus and serve with your sliced beef, and some roasted root veggies. Aye carumba!

Risotto con Asparagi e Verdure - Asparagus and Broccoli Risotto

Everyone's cooking risotto at the moment it seems, and since pasta now sits in the negative column of my diet plan I am increasingly turning to rice as a way of getting that satisfactory carby bloated feeling of gastronomic satiation. British asparagus is in its prime right now and broccoli is nice for a bit of crunch too. I unfortunately can't have parmesan or butter, but frankly they aren't wholly necessary if you're working with a tasty stock, and doing without is that little bit healthier! I used the leftover stock from my chicken and chickpea casserole and just added some more water.

For two people you'll need:

4 handfuls of arborio or carnaroli rice
1 bunch of British asparagus, discard the tough end of the stalks
handful of broccoli florets
handful chopped cabbage
1 sliced leek
3 chopped sage leaves
1 onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 litre of good strong chicken or vegetable stock
1 glass of white plonk
salt and pepper
olive oil


Heat a glug of olive oil in a heavy bottomed frying pan, add the diced onion and garlic and soften until transluscent. Add the rice and coat evenly with the oil, stirring for about 2-3 minutes. Add the chopped sage and stir in. Add a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Add the glass of wine and start stirring the rice grains, cook until the wine has evaporated.

Turn the heat down under the pan to a simmer. You can now start adding your stock, soup ladle by soup ladle, stirring slowly. After the third ladle of stock, throw in the asparagus tips, broccoli, cabbage and leeks. Only add another ladle once the previous one has more or less been absorbed by the rice. This is usually every 45 seconds or so, but you can tell just by looking.
After about 18 minutes, taste your rice for bite. Good risotto should have bite, not be completely cooked to a mush, but the amount of bite is a purely personal taste. Keep adding stock until the rice has the right level of bite for you and the consistency is creamy but not runny and the rice slides off the back of your wooden spoon in a gloop.

Taste and season further if necessary. If you want cheese, stir some in just before serving. Eat in the company of a delicious man and a good movie.

Fresh Egg Ravioli stuffed with Pumpkin

I dug out the pasta maker on day two in the new house and set about making my first batch of proper egg pasta. I nicked Jamie Oliver's recipe but tweaked it as he failed to mention one thing that makes stuffed pasta all the better... adding a teaspoon of milk for every egg you put in the mix makes your pasta much more malleable and smooth than it would be otherwise, especially useful when you are stuffing shapes and trying to stick the ends together!

For 4 people you will need.

250 g durum wheat flour

250 g semolina flour

3 eggs

8 egg yolks

8 teaspoons of milk.

Sift the flour together and pile onto your work surface then make a well in the centre. Put the eggs and yolks in the well, start beating gently with a fork to amalgamate the lot. Once you have a roughly sticky solidifying dough, dump the fork and start to work into a dough ball with your hands. Knead thoroughly until the ball is smooth and elastic and shiny.

Wrap in cling film and pop in the fridge whilst you prepare your stuffing (or just leave for 15-20 minutes until you're ready to cut into shapes).

For pumpkin stuffing you'll need:

1 quarter pumpkin

three fat cloves of garlic

1 bunch of flat leaf parsley, chopped roughly

a nice grassy olive oil

salt

pepper

veggie or chicken stock

Slice your pumpkin nice and thin and crush and chop your garlic. Heat a pan, add a good thick glop of oil and start to soften the garlic. Once translucent, add the pumpkin and coat evenly. Turn up the heat and fry for a couple of minutes, then add a bit of stock and simmer. Only add enough stock to stop the pumpkin burning, you don't want a soupy stuffing.

Be generous with the pepper, add salt to taste and throw in the chopped parsley towards the end. Mash the pumpkin up occasionally with a fork or wooden spoon until you have a pasty, smooth consistency. Take off the heat and transfer to a bowl to let it cool.

Get out the pasta maker, or equip yourself with a rolling pin! I start with the pasta maker on a low setting like 1-2 and feed small balls of dough through two or three times until it starts to become pliable and warm up. Gradually make the settings higher and higher until you have a sheet of pasta about 2 mm thin. Lay out your sheets of past, cut into squares. Add a spoon of stuffing in the centre of each pasta square, damp the edges of the square with milk and fold one corner over the other. At this point I recommend the following handy link for making pasta shapes, as I would be a disaster at explaining them without sounding like a poorly translated Ikea assembly booklet.

Stuffed pasta can keep in the fridge for a day or two, but frankly its more fun just to eat it as soon as possible! Boil some water, place the pasta in the boiling water for about 3-5 minutes depending how al dente you like it. Serve with a bit of melted butter in which you have fried some sage leaves.

Enjoy!

Spicy Toms Fish Compote

This is a nifty little tomato compote that can be whipped up with minimal effort and packs a punch for any roast fish dish.

You'll need (for three roast fish):

a box of small cherry tomatoes, pick the best you can it will make all the difference.
bunch of flat leaf parsley, chopped roughly
two huge cloves of garlic, chopped
tablespoon of capers
half a tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil, chopped
the olive oil from the anchovy tin
two or three small dried red chillies, depending on your tastes
sea salt
dribble of balsamic vinegar

slice the tomatoes in two and put in an oven-proof dish. Coat in the olive oil, add extra oil if you feel it needs it. Add all the other ingredients and stir the whole thing up. Pop in a hot over, gas mark 5, for about 40 minutes until the whole concoction has roasted to a bubbling tomatoey paste. Serve with roast fish and lemon wedges. Yumbles!

Brixton Follies: Bellantoni's Pasta Shop

This is the first of what I hope will be an exciting little series of reviews of eateries in the newly revamped, renovated and rejuvenated Granville Arcade in Brixton, AKA Brixton Village. Left abandoned and dilapidated for the last ten years or so, a creative arts agency by the name of Space Makers took it over just before Christmas and invited artists, thinkers, entrepreneurs, chefs, writers, cineasts and more to take over the empty stalls and transform them into usable spaces, thus reviving the back of the market with a series of pop-up shops, cafès, even a tiny cinema and street theatre, DJ booths and children's reading clubs.

The Space-Makers end of the market has only been opened a couple of weeks and yet already a few places are making waves in the national British press. Time Out, who recently made it its mission to track down London's best coffee, riled a few readers by failing to include Federation Coffee, by the Coldharbour Lane entrance to the market. More on that later...

The first eatery to catch my eye, not surprisingly, was an Italian one. Bellantoni's is a tiny shop, with dark wood panelled front and large windows which seats about 5 (at a squeeze) people inside and has two tables outside. Behind his small counter, Dario Bellantoni a young chef from Genova, whips up fresh hand-made pasta daily, along with a small selection of tasty bites and, of course, coffee. On the Monday I popped in, there were two baked pasta dishes with spinach and rocket, or shiitake mushrooms, as well as cannelloni stuffed with meat.

Good wholesome warming food, full of flavour and perfectly comforting given the sub-zero temperatures outside. My meal came to £5.50 with coffee, which is less than you'd spend on a dubious Big Mac meal from hell up the road. A few locals from the market strolled in for a chat and a bite as Dario busied himself twisting tagliatelle into nests and dishing out relationship advice to anyone who'd listen. Once he plonked down a small dish of homemade twisted bread beside me and a large jug of olive oil to drizzle I felt teleported back to the Bel Paese all over again. "Tomorrow, he said as I shovelled creamy spinachy deliciousness into my mouth, I will make stuffed tomatoes". There was also noise about a possible baked apple cake.

At the deli counter, a small selection of well chosen cheeses, including the sinful and divine Burratina - a sort of softer mozzarella oozing buttery cream - and smoked Scamorza which is perfect grilled until soft and served on a bed of rocket with thin slivers of parma ham. Neither of these cheeses are easy to find in the UK, so jot Dario's address down now!

The warm red walls of Bellantoni's are strung with chilli peppers and small framed anecdotes and quotes from the Chef, doling out such nuggets of wisdom as "If you know, you know, if you don't know, you don't know". Failing the messages on the wall, Dario's entertaining stories will pepper up your lunch as will the excellent coffee.

Bellantoni's is opposite the art gallery and the Enter the Field pop-up shop