Category: Food

Starbucks

On By Laura MorganIn Food

I have a vague feeling that I’m supposed to hate Starbucks, but I can’t remember why. I used to think it was because they put proper coffee shops out of business, but then I remembered that we haven’t had proper coffee shops in the UK since the 1930s.

Anyway, I like Starbucks. I don’t go there very often, but when I do, I really like it. I like that you can sit on sofas and armchairs instead of on poky little wooden chairs, and I like that the music is quiet enough that you can read without hearing it, and I like how warm and steamy it is, and that you can buy a Guardian to accompany your coffee (or, in my case, tea), and I like that they ask whether you want them to leave room for the milk but let you pour the milk yourself.

The coffee may quite possibly be dreadful, but since I dislike and disapprove of coffee, this doesn’t deter me at all. The one thing I’d change, in fact, would be to make them open later, so that you could meet friends there in the evening rather than at the pub. Oh, and I’d have them make their cheese and marmite panini available all day, rather than just at breakfast time.

Still, if anyone can remember why I’m supposed to hate them, please let me know.

Smug

On By Laura MorganIn Food, Reasons to be cheerful

I think today might have been my highest-achieving day ever. This morning I got up and made Glamorgan sausages, washed up, and cleaned the kitchen; all before I left for work. At work, I did loads of work. At lunchtime I went to the bank and paid in a cheque, and went to Morrison’s and bought toothpaste, tissues, a mixing bowl, cling film, teabags and a tray for collecting rain water*, which list constitutes everything I needed and didn’t have in my egg. Then I went back to the office and did loads more work, before zooming off to the gym, and finally home for the sausages. Now I am heating up the remains of Sunday’s apple crumble and thinking about how grown-up I am.

It could only have been improved had I remembered to get travel insurance for our Norwegian fjord cruise next month, and to ring up and renew my library book. But you can’t have everything. It leaves me with something to achieve tomorrow.

* Congratulate me, please: I am the proud new mother of a Sarracenia flava, which in return for a constant supply of rain water promises to rid me forever of flying beasties and similar horrors.

Ramsay

On By Laura MorganIn Food, Reasons to be cheerful

I decided yesterday that a meal in a properly swanky restaurant is worth at least a weekend away, for the amount of pleasure it brings. This was on the back of lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Claridges restaurant, which might have been the best meal I’ve ever had. We had the set lunch, but it was so good I’m tempted to go back and try everything else, and if I could afford it that’s exactly what I’d do. As it is, I’ll just share the menu with you so you can enjoy it vicariously.

Since it was a special occasion our waiter gave us a whistlestop tour of the kitchen, which was much calmer and quieter than you’d expect. I thought kitchens of posh restaurants were supposed to be a louder and hotter version of actual hell, but this was more like a very orderly production line. Which, I suppose, is what it is.

(Do you like my new design, by the way? It’s not my own; it’s one of WordPress’s standard designs, but I like the layout and the header image, which makes me think of Ireland, where I will be next week. A fantastic meal may be a good substitute for a holiday, but there’s no harm in having one of each.)

A recipe

On By Laura MorganIn Food

This recipe doesn’t have a name, because I only made it up on Monday. But it was really nice, so I think it deserves to be written down. Call it anything you like.

Ingredients (serves 2)

2 chicken breasts

A handful of bean shoots

A handful of mange tout, chopped into pieces an inch long

Three spring onions, chopped up small

Brown rice

Cashew nuts

Butter

Olive oil

For the marinade

2 tbsp sesame oil

Three cloves of garlic, chopped or sliced

A little hunk of ginger, finely chopped

A sprinkling of chili flakes

Salt

A splash of lemon juice

Mix the sesame oil, garlic, ginger, chili flakes, salt and lemon juice together in a dish. Cut the chicken into smallish pieces and stir it in, making sure every piece of chicken is coated with marinade. Leave for at least half an hour.

Boil the rice. When it’s got about 15 minutes to go, heat the olive oil in a frying pan. Once it’s hot, add the chicken and fry quickly on both sides until it starts to brown.

Turn the heat down and add the mange tout and the bean shoots. Keep stirring.

When the rice has ten minutes to go, add the cashews to the rice pot. Once the rice is done, drain it, add a slab of butter and close the lid for a minute.

Add the spring onion to the chicken pan, stir and take off the heat. Take the lid off the rice and stir it so that the butter is mixed in. Add the rice to the chicken and stir everything together. Put on plates. Eat.

A creature of habit

On By Laura MorganIn Food

There’s another sandwich shop just opposite the one with the raw onions. This is an altogether smarter affair, with chicly-attired eastern European women serving the food in a humblingly brisk and competent manner.

 

But I have gotten myself into a…situation, and I’m not sure how – or whether it’s even possible, without causing offence – to extricate myself from it. The problem, you see, is that they do really good cheese and tomato panini, so that’s what I always order, and now as soon as they see me the staff start preparing a cheese and tomato panini (panino?) for me, before I even get to the counter. Which means that whatever I go in wanting, what I come out with is a cheese and tomato panini, because once they’ve started making it I can hardly ask for something different, can I?

 

They have lots of other nice-looking food, but I don’t think I’m ever going to get the chance to try it. I suppose I could order a panini and whatever it is I actually want, but that seems unnecessarily extravagant. So I guess I’ll just go on having the panini.

And a raw onion on the side, please

On By Laura MorganIn Food

Remember when kebab shops used to display plastic vegetables in their glass-fronted heaters, to make up for the fact that they didn’t sell any fresh food? Maybe they still do it; it’s some time since I’ve visited one (and I’ve still never had a kebab – my kebab shop adventures all took place during my decade of vegetarianism, so I used to make do with chips in pitta bread, which I still crave from time to time).

 

But a variation on that theme seems to have emerged in sandwich shops, where increasingly I see whole fresh raw vegetables plonked between the trays of sandwich fillings. I hadn’t given this trend much thought until this morning, when I caught the sandwich man next door by surprise as he was carefully arranging green peppers, red onions and tomatoes in a fetching tricolore pattern around the various bowls of tuna mayonnaise (I expect there were more fillings on offer than just tuna mayonnaise, but they all looked like tuna mayonnaise). He was clearly giving it some thought, and it made me wonder what, exactly, he thought he was doing. I wonder if they keep a separate collection of vegetables aside to use purely as decoration? And, you know…why?

Pick’n’mix

On By Laura MorganIn Food1 Comment

I just got carried away in the newsagent’s and bought £1.65’s worth of pick’n’mix. I can’t explain it; they didn’t even have any of the best sweets. I was just instinctively spurred into action by eight-year-old me. Anyway, it got me thinking about the best pick’n’mix sweets so here, in ascending order for added excitement, are my top five ever pick’n’mix sweets. I was going to do a top ten but I can’t think of ten, and I don’t want to compromise the integrity of the list by including placeholders.

5. Kola cubes
4. Shrimps
3. Chewing nuts (better than they sound)
2. Jazzies
1. Fizzy cola bottles (but the non-fizzy kind were rubbish)

I was going to include teeth because they were quite cool in a faintly horrifying way, but they never tasted that good.

Update: they did have fizzy cola bottles, but I’m eating one now and it’s very disappointing. Overly chewy (I suspect its best before date may be be some time past) and barely fizzy at all. There’s a lesson in this: you can’t go back.