Quick! It's 14 degrees, get out the Barbecue!

You can guarantee very little in life, that is just how things are. What you can guarantee though, every Spring, is the return of British barbecue season. Once the painfully depressing laden skies and eternal drizzle start to dissipate and the skies open up just a little. And once the thermometer gage starts to increase just a tad, you can guarantee that somewhere around the British Isles, a group of dedicated souls have disembarked on that quintessential game of patience, to light the disposable barbecue. We are positive souls us Brits, never in the field of human food preparation has so much been owed by so many to so few warm days. Any hint of that fabled high Pressure and we find ourselves in the local Asda car park stacking up on too many burgers, sausages and of course the delightful invention that is the disposable barbecue.

It is the ultimate love affair, the chance on one of the few occasions throughout the year to get out of the kitchen and out onto the garden or local park and do exactly what you would have done indoors. If we were visited suddenly by a batch of ET's imagine the report they would compile 'they may be killing themselves with rising sea waters, wars and famine but man they can cook, anywhere, all with a foil box filled with coal and mesh!', intriguing.

Barbecue's are fantastic though. Anything that can be cooked on one instantaneously tastes better. Barbecues are the ultimate response to good weather, they are the embodiment of enjoyment, they make us all feel better because they remind us of the days when we were having fun. And of course all of the good days that we remember were filled with sunshine.

God bless comfort food

Comfort Food, everybody has their favourite, but what properly constitutes comfort food? Although I guess I have my own favourite and indeed my own perceptions of what it should consist of, I still get mildly confused about the concept. It's just one of those phrases that seems to get tagged on to so many food types, but how do we distinguish it?

Talking to my girlfriend yesterday, enjoying the freakishly early summer sun with a picnic, we got into the conversation as to what it exactly entails? (Our relationship definitely revolves around food!) Firstly I think we need to draw some distinctions, categories if you will. Should comfort food refer directly to how it makes you feel physically, such as the warming sensation of a Sheppard's pie on a cold winter's day? Or maybe relating to something Psychological that reminds you of your childhood, maybe something like beans on toast or jam sandwiches?

Whichever way you look at it, comfort food is a glorious concept. Sometimes though it can get confused with all things unholy, the junk of the food world. Disintegrating on the sofa the morning after a heavy night out and your body craves junk food, it's a fact of life. If we put aside the science for a minute and your natural craving for sugar and salt, the comforting nature of junk food is what we really crave. Is it then, for arguments sake, the unhealthy element of food which makes it comforting? A pasta bake without cheese is ok, a pasta bake with cheese is momentous and comforting. Would then a cheese sandwich be comforting, probably not. It is this fundamental difference which I find bewildering.

I see myself, somewhat unapologetically, becoming obsessed with these little personal preferences. I could be talking to someone about something totally unconnected, wheels maybe, when all of a sudden I have managed to turn the converstion around to dippy eggs and soldiers. Which, coincidentally, is my comfort food and cannot be beaten.

The demise of the chippy!

Not that I am one for hankering over the demise of a Great British institution but I feel we have found ourselves at somewhat of a crossroads. On one hand, the good old chip shop has, over decades, become integral to the communities of British towns and villages. Much like the pub and the local post office, fish and chip shops were one of those places that you could just, count upon. Nowadays, however much we ignore it these Great British bedrocks have become stale, ignoring the unsustainability of their produce, increasing prices beyond recognition and as a consequence of all this, turning to less traditional, more fast-food centered food-types.

Now without trying to hang-on to the coat-tails of the recent Channel 4 'fish-fight' campaign, I definitely want to echo their sentiments. In order for chip shops to evolve they need to react to the needs of the times and the need of the times is to turn to lesser known fish and spread this over many different species. For all it's tender flakiness, size and adaptability Cod is virtually unparalleled, but we all know the problems with it's stocks (and prices). That's why turning to sustainable and tasty fishies has to be the future! So, Mr Chip shop man, forget your Cods, Haddocks and Plaice for a few (hundred) years and turn your attentions to these veritable beauties!

Sardines
Gurnard
Sea Bream
Coley
Mackerel!
Pollack
Dab
Oyster

Another fantastic fish to use is Hake and nothing tastes quite as good as homemade fish and chips using this wonderfully moist and flaky white fish and is something I've used and found to be an even better substitute to Cod. It's kind of a take on High Fearnley-Whittingsall's recipe but with my definitive twist! It takes no longer than 30 mins and is ultra-easy.

Ingredients:

2 good sized Hake or Pollack fillets
Rogan Josh curry paste (Balti and Madras also work well)
2 good sized Maris Piper potatoes
A bowl full of defrosted Petit-Pous
Fresh mint
Dried rosemary
50g Butter
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
100ml Milk

Cooking method:

1. Slice up your potatoes into good chip-size wedges, with the skin on! Pop into a pan of heavily salted boiling water for 5 mins. Drain the potatoes and place back in the pan and add a glug of the oil, sea salt, black pepper and a tspn of the rosemary.

2. Place your Hake fillets on a plate and smother in Olive Oil, making sure that every inch of the fish is covered. Now is the time to season with coarse black pepper and sea salt. Using 1/4 of a jar of the curry paste, smother your fish on the flesh side only with a knife. Place on a baking tray and pop into a pre-heated oven for 15 minutes at 180c (fan assisted) 200c (without).

3. With about 10 minutes to go on the timer place your peas in a saucepan and heat for 2 mins and then add the milk. By now your peas will be starting to emulsify so add the butter and the mint and season to taste.

4. Once you have achieved a good rich, fragrant tasting mixture whack on the hand blitzer or pop into a blander and reduce down to a semi-fine consistency.

5. Remove your fish, chips and place on a heated plate with the pea mixture. Serve with homemade chunky tomato relish and you'll never have any need or inclination to visit the chippy again!

Ragu ragu!

So....bolognese sauce. Everybody's favourite, old faithful, classically lovely. So why has everybody got their own recipe? The Ragu sauce that takes its name from its origins in Bologna, Italy bears little resemblance to the slop found on some dining room tables and restaurant passes. Even so, everyone loves this old favourite and most people have a recipe that is particularly unique to them. So in the vein of everything that is Delia Smith, here is my version....

Ingredients:

500g lean beef mince (a little pork mince would be great too!)
2 tins chopped tomatoes
Glass of wine (preferably a good full-bodied Merlot or Shiraz)
4 cloves of garlic
2 small onions (or 1 large one!)
2 sticks of celery
3 smallish carrots
A whole pack of button mushrooms
2 heaped tspn's of Oregeno
A bunch of fresh basil
Worcestershire Sauce (1/5th of a bottle)
2 small chunks of dark chocolate (above 70% cocoa)
Beef stock cube
Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Cooking method:

1. Chop all veg into tiny pieces, sounds laborious but adds to the rich texture!
2. In the meantime, cook your mince down in your large, heavy-bottomed saucepan with the glass of wine and half the worcester sauce. This will help infuse the flavours into the meat and not just into the sauce.
3. Remove the meat and liquid and set aside, in the same pot add a good lug of extra virgin olive oil and start to sweat the garlic and onions, leave them in for 5-7 minutes or until sweet and starting to caremalise.
4. Add the rest of the veg, oregano and chopped basil (including chopped stalks) and sweat down for 10 minutes until you have a fragrant mix of vegetables and herbs.
5. Add your mince and liquid and stir on a medium heat. Add the tomatoes and break in your stock cube and chocolate. At this point you will have the beginnings of a good rich rust coloured sauce. You may want to add 200ml of water just to give it enough consistency for the hours ahead!
6. Leave on a low heat for at least 3 hours or 5 if you have the time or the inclination to ensure the richness and the flavours are transferred from one ingrediant to the next.
7. To finish, add the remaining worcester sauce, basil leaves and a splash of the wine for good measure.
8. Serve with tagliatelle, buckets of Parmigiano Reggiano and fresh baby leaf salad.

Lovely stuff!

A very British food revolution?

Evolution or revolution? This is the million dollar question....

Let's pull no punches here, the UK has never been a hotbed of culinary delights, that is safe to say. Restaurants up and down the country were, up until relatively recently, synoymous with the same bland, uncompromising food. People lapped it up, seemingly eager to taste another variation on the Prawn Cocktail-steak and chips (well done)-black forest gateau combination, all washed down with a bottle of Blue Nun. Roll on twenty or so years and how far have we progressed?

To the casual observer, our food tastes and offerings probably won't look much different. The UK still has the base element fixated on the hearty, the quick and the convenient but look underneath all of that and the nation has started to sprout the green shutes of gastronomical recovery. Everywhere you look, even in the provincial towns of Beefeaters and Pizza Huts, independent eating establishments are sprouting up on every corner. It's as if the British have finally awoken after a hundred years of culinary hibernation, but where do the root's of this awakening lye?

We have, for a number of years, looked out over the Channel with a kind of ornate bitterness. It's as if we accept the fact the French, the Italians and even the German's just have a better notion of food. Despite the fact that food still played a significant part in our lives, most families still eat dinner around the table together, the actual food was in some respects, a means to an end. Over the past few years, maybe down to the proliferation of celebrity chefs and their television programmes, our apprecation and clamour to provide the best has steadily increased. Eating freshly prepared, locally sourced and organic meals is no longer the pursuit of the middle classes. Now, singles, couples and families up and down the country seem to share the same vision of increasing freshly prepared and homecooked food into their diets, and this can be nothing but a good thing. The result is that people identify with food, they see their relationship with the process of creation and want to share and enjoy that relationship with others.

There was a time, long ago, when Britain was at the forefront of gastronomy, war and convenience put paid to that. Recession and the ensuing increase in food prices have given a not-totally unexpected silver lining to our relationship with food. People now 'grow there own' and ignore the senseless 'best before' and 'sell by' dates that tempt people into wasting incredible food. Above all, people seem to want to spend the little money they do have on experiencing and rejoicing in food and the atmosphere that it can create. So in a way, we have experienced a mini-food revolution, and long may the battle continue.

Portsmouth: The food lovers lost city?

For a city of its size you cannot deny that Portsmouth packs a punch. In equivalent measures, Portsmouth as a city has the equivalent land mass to say that of... Woking, but what it delivers surely can't be ignored. For many, think Portsmouth and you instantly think ships, the Royal Navy, a beleaguered football team or scruffy tenement blocks but to a Southsea resident such as myself, those things, to all intents and purposes, may as well be 100 miles away.

As a Southsea-ite, here on a five-year-long stopover from university (like so many others!), the rest of the city, never mind the rest of the country, seems to be cut adrift. What this has succeeded in achieving though is a kind of culinary twilight. Surely there are no other places in the country that packs so much in to such a small area. Amazingly, within an area covering one third the size of Portsmouth there are no less than 71 eating establishments, seventy-one! To put that into some perspective, Southampton, a city eight times bigger than the town of Southsea can only muster an ordinary 150. In terms of a ratio between population and number of restaurants there would be a restaurant for every 357 people, or just enough people to start a semi-ferocious revolution.

Some establishments are Southsea institutions. Soprano's, on Palmerston Road, serves up home cooked contemporary Italian that both looks and tastes as if care and attention has gone into it's creation. Agora, a Turkish eatery on Osbourne Road embodies the atmosphere of the restaurant in it's food by being both warm and comforting. Midnight, one of the 21 Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants in Southsea alone, manages to conjure delightfully thoughtful and delectably tasty dishes in contemporary surroundings.

Not all of Southsea's eateries conquer the taste buds as much as the aforementioned but you'd be hard pressed to find an area of the UK with so little publicity with so many gastronomical delights...

The Dogs, Edinburgh.

“Borderline pretentious but does itself justice!”

After booking, cancelling, rebooking and then cancelling another restaurant already for our first night in Edinburgh we hoped that our indecisiveness would eventually pay dividends as we plumped for 'The Dogs' after the interesting description in the Lonely Planet guide.

The night that we were there had that feel of a balmy midsummers evening (even tough it was the start of April!), the kind of night where you can smell the tarmac if it happens to rain. This gave 'The Dogs' it's first negative, it was so hot in there! After sitting down on a table for four (I never like this, you feel like your sat at your gran's) we were given the menu for our perousal. From first glace it looked as interesting as the guidebook and website had made out, interesting and thoughtful dishes made from sources of fish and cuts of meat that in another world would be used as bait to attract the bigger fish or smashed into pulp and used for burgers.

For starter, as my G/F and I are due to go traveling soon, we decided to share the starter of hot smoked salmon and piccalily salad. After no more than a matter of 5 minutes the starter was on our table, complete with a fantastic few wedges of crusty granary bread with hearty, salty butter. The salmon was well cooked and extremely tasty and was well-matched with the rough and ready piccalily which basically consisted of large flourets of cauliflower. For a salad dish it was a real treat and the flavours matched up perfectly.

For main my G/F opted for the Hake on smoked fish potato cake and I opted for the Coley on spring greens. I would have to say from the outset that both dishes were superb. Both pieces of fish were cooked to perfection, not easy with such brittle specimens and were seasoned well. The potato cake and mustard sauce complimented the hake admirably and although the Coley dish lacked any carbohydrates the caper dressing and mountain of greens packed underneath gave it the flavour punch it deserved.

For desert I opted for the merangue and ginger nut parfait which, despite being far too dense, tasted unbelievably good. The orange sauce and ginger nut reacting perfectly together to create a symphony of taste against the coolness of the parfait, top notch. My G/F opted for the uber-lemony posset which was so lemony it could have taken the face off a badger. Despite this it was also devine and we both reacted in the same way as you do after expereincing taste on that level.

Even though I have obviously rambled on for a while now I am not one for writing reviews, in fact I have just finished writing my only other one for 'The Cellar Door', another Edinburgh establishment. The reason is that we were there for 2 nights and experienced two great meals in two completely different restaurants, hence the excitement. The big difference wasn't so much the food, as both were exemplary but it is the little touches which make something perfect. The Dogs, although I think I understand the feeling of the place just felt a tad on the 'trying too hard to be cool' side. Pretty staff, post-modern decor, interesting and varied menu, yes. No music, lack of warmth (atmospheric, not temperature!) and the feeling that the staff could tut at you for choosing the wrong thing. Other than thjose minor faults, awesome....