Hand To Mouth

From abcteach.com

Yellowtail’s been on sale at my beloved grocery store, but I haven’t yet dropped that skittish feeling I get when I cook with fish. Growing up, I never ate any beasts of the sea. Now, like Donny from The Big Lebowski, I always feel out of my element around them—frantically triple-checking recipes, making sure everything is exactly so.

But lo—I might have a new dish to settle my cowardly hash.

Delicious Coma is the spin-off food blog of a young woman named Anjali, who taught in Japan via the JET Program and maintains the blog Giant Jeans Parlor. It’s full of cheerfully rendered explanations about Japanese food, including this post about buri, or mature yellowtail. Giant Jeans Parlor also once posted (Anjali’s since left Japan) a weekly Friday feature on Japanese candy that left me homesick for my own days teaching English in Korea. Kollon! Morinaga Milk Caramels! Want want want.

Where was I? Oh yes. I can’t wait to try my hand at the yellowtail recipe.

I’ll keep you all posted.

The first Friday and Saturday of the month are fast-approaching, friends! It can mean only one thing: the previously mentioned Whitecross Street Food Market. I know, I’ve teased you long enough. It’s time to look at what they had on offer last time, and plan co-ordinated visits in a timed fashion in order to make good on all bargains and delicious items on offer.

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Truly outstanding.

A Proper Breakfast

Sourdough rolls filled with Valrhona chocolate, from the Levain Bakery.

Mango tea from Harrod’s.

Oranges from Fairway.

A Proper Lunch

Cilantro-lime hummus*.

Tzatziki*.

Stravecchio from Fairway.

Peppers from the Greenmarket.

Farmstand blueberries.

A Proper Dinner
Brown rice.

Rasam*.

Chayote-red pepper curry*.

*Recipes after the jump.

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Steve Forrest for The New York Times

My boyfriend tells this funny story about a road trip he took to Savannah with our friend S and S’s friend Neil (Neal?) who was visiting from London. They drove through Dublin, Georgia, on their way there.

I’ve got a lot of friends from Dublin, and I can tell you it’s a tiny town, something the two of them stressed to Neil (Neal?), who hadn’t yet encountered any small-scale Southern towns on his trip to the States. He nodded along.

As they sped down one of Dublin’s main roads, Neil (Neal?) bounced up from his seat, his head bumping the ceiling of the car, and went totally apeshit:

“YOU SAY THIS TOWN IS SMALL,” he roared, “BUT IT’S GOT TWO MCDONALD’S. TWO MCDONALD’S!! COR, ONE OF EM’S RIGHT DOWN THE ROAD FROM THE OTHER ONE.”

“Dude, it’s a small town, even if—”

“BUT IT’S GOT TWO MCDONALD’S! AND YOU SAID IT WAS SMALL!!!”

I thought of that when I read about the redesigns that McDonald’s Europe is backing. B, your town has such hoity-toity McDonald’s! They’re even swankier than they were when I visited England 5 years ago and my father and I munched Quorn patties at one another at 2 AM in Manchester, surprised at how decent they were.

I’m of three minds about the changes. First—I don’t really care, because I don’t really eat at McDonald’s. I live in New York. Pizza, falafel, arepas, dosas, dumplings. Second—I guess it’s good for a brand synonymous with sub-quality service and aesthetics to upgrade. Third—But, but [insert standard misgivings and chest-beating about food chains]!!

Your thoughts, readers?

Being wholly and completely original in cooking is a rare thing. The foundations of good, tried-and-true flavour combinations are so well-laid it often takes silly measures like making cubic watermelons or beet-root sorbet to truly surprise and shock people.

Personally, my cooking ‘innovations’ tend to be inspired and based upon the ideas of others (I always try to give credit where credit is due!). I mix things up with my own ideas in order to create a brand new little baby/mutant dish that can go on to grow up and become a moody teenager like all my others. This is the story of one of those little dish podlings.

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Jerk chicken, coleslaw, rice n’ peas

Last week I took the bus through Hackney (along Kingsland High Road) with my friend C. Looking through the bus window at all the delicious-looking exotic vegetable shops, halal butchers, and the chaotic Ridley Road Market, I was thinking that if I were to move to a different neighbourhood in London, I might like to go to Hackney. It seemed so full of life, rent was slightly cheaper, I could cycle to work – what more could I want?

My friend C is a Londoner born and bred, and she immediately scoffed. “B, only this street! I mean, yeah, this is great, this is ‘trendy poor,’ but go two blocks away and there is nothing and you take your life in your hands walking home from the bus!!” Right, I thought. Good to know.

For those of you who don’t know, Hackney was named worst neighbourhood in the UK last year on a national TV programme. It is a complex area of London - in the heart of new development for the Olympics, but still home to some of the city’s most deprived citizens. But we hadn’t come to Hackney to debate gentrification and issues of mixed communities. We came for the Caribbean take-away from Peppers & Spice.

As we lined up outside (Peppers & Spice always has a line) to grab our take-away, I got to thinking about the term “trendy poor”. I mean, I wanted to live in Hackney as it is a neighbourhood with people from a variety of different cultures and backgrounds, there are many independent local businesses I could support, the restaurants around it are inexpensive and diverse and I would be able to get to work easily. But all of those reasons seem to fade away when you consider the lives and struggles contained in this neighbourhood as just a fashionable flash in the pan for a middle-class, educated, suburban Canadian like myself. What’s a girl to do?

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I had plenty of time to browse the electronic food world this weekend, as my party pooper tendencies expanded and multiplied when I became ill on Friday and spent most of the weekend in bed with my laptop taking 3 hour naps. I did go the Ironmonger Row baths on Sunday, and after sweating in a hot room and plunging in a cold pool, sweating and plunging ad nauseum, I feel somewhat like a human being again today.

Right. To food! Over on the Times food section, it seems as if all the UK food-loving public is waiting with bated breath to see who will reign triumphant with the biggest pair of chef bollocks: Gordon Ramsey or Marco Pierre White. Seriously, it’s like they can’t put any other faces on the front page anymore. Although I have a fondness in my heart for Gordon Ramsey (the F-Word is a great show), I hate this aspect of the cooking world. I honestly read these articles just to become deliciously indignant as to the testosterone saturated state of the professional cooking industry. (cue GOB Bluth: COME ON!!!) It’s pretty fun in an angry kind of way.

I’ve been highly amused by the high-flying food high-jinx of Robyn (aka The Girl who Ate Everything)’s trip to Phoenix. There is something so delicious about updates coming in almost real-time. Since she is kept so busy making sure we all have lots to talk about on Serious Eats, I hope she has a most relaxing vacation.

Finally, the Guardian’s food section has a weekly baking master class authored by Dan Lepard that I’ve been enjoying. While I’ve never been a really big baker (although I did go through a phase in university where I baked pretzels with cumin on a weekly basis), this week’s recipe is for black bread – something that isn’t so easy to find here in London.

Until next time – 867-5309,

X B

(A Proper Breakfast)

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So last weekend we had a party, and of course, I made some food. However, I didn’t actually want to have a party. I wanted to come home and fall into a coma and forget that anything beyond my bedroom existed. You see, right now I’m working 2 jobs in addition to an unpaid internship, obsessing over this blog (aka my precious) and I just ended a very important if slightly dysfunctional friendship with someone very important to me. So I wasn’t so much in the lampshade- and toga- wearing mood when Saturday night arrived. However, my flatmate had been wanting to have one for months, she had invited people weeks in advance, and she really asked nothing of me except that I show up.

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