When a chef comes to stay...

Anyone who's ever read this blog previously or any of Inkymole's blog will have read the words, 'Jed Smith' and 'chef'.
Jed is one of those people that lives for his vocation and has the enthusiasm for his vocation as though it was his hobby, d'you know what I mean?!

Jed is currently grafting hard in our kitchen in preperation of having his own 'pop-up restaurant' at our place at the end of this week, see here.
Thus, he has ended up installed in our kitchen prepping, but because he's taken our space, he has ended up 'having' to cook for the 2 vegan residents everyday!!

So, today we ended up eating this for dinner:

Banana bread with chocolate crumbs!

Then this evening, we had:

Cucumber and coriander summer rolls with a little Vietnamese vinegar dipping sauce.

After this Jed chucked the remains of the dipping sauce into this:

Close-up:

 

 Beet tops and turnip wonton soup.

Then for desert:

 

Fried banana bread with chocolate crumbs and chocolate ice cream! Oh my Gosh! So dirty.

An unusually restful Jed chows down on his soup and contemplates his next move before his evening work begins.

Dinner with Jed is this weekend, June 8th and 9th, there aren't many places left, but if you're interested, please email ASAP.

A Week In The Belly Of NYC: Breakfast.

Usually it would be pancakes with a Krakatoan fruit pile on top, but today Sarah felt the need for greens and went for tofu scrambles with extra spinach. They came with two rounds of toast and a big heap of green and two silly-sized tomato slices, under a mustard dressing.

Leigh filled himself with pancakes but was willing to share a corner of one, which come, always, with maple syrup. A Raw Protein shake and a soya chai latte provided hydration (sort of - you can get orange juice or water but...why, when those are your options?)

We are at Earthmatters, 177 Ludlow, just round the corner (literally) from the infamous Katz's Deli.

http://www.earthmatters.com

A Week In The Belly of NYC: Sunday dinner.

Usually we'd have roast spuds, gravy and some sort of baked tofu with a field of vegetables on a Sunday, but today dinner was provided by Modagor, St. Mark's Place & 1st, NYC.

Simple but effective: fresh warm bread with houmous and chick peas; avocado, endive, beetroot and tomato salad with a side of pickles and olives.

We had sweet Moroccan mint tea and a Turkish coffee to share after (because Lord knows we have to stay 'on the level' if we ever actually do caffeine.)

We've been going to Mogador for a long time but still the super-speedy no-nonsense service took us by surprise, and the tea was lovely. We didn't think the pot would end.

But end it did, and we went across the street to Puddin', and had a 'mini' sized coconut and chocolate fudge pudding for afters. Stood and ate it in the tiny shop while talking to Clio, the owner, about her English roots and to Tim about his Polish ones. Like Mogador, not a 'vegan place', but like the majority of Manhattan, people with dietary omissions are just simply included...and it isn't a big deal.

Tomorrow we might make Lula's.
Ahhhh...Lula's....

A Week In The Belly of NYC: Sacred Chow.

L-R:
Hot pumpkin wine with ginger, double chocolate stout floater with vanilla ice cream, hard cider.

That is how you start dinner at Sacred Chow, 227 Sullivan Street, NY.

These way-more-interesting-than-usual drinks were followed by the best raw kale we've ever consumed ('massaged' with salt and covered in Dijon mustard - a crispy, salty, oily mystery), and a black olive seitan sandwich with low-key crusty bread. And juicy, strangely fleshy meatballs; Korean tofu cutlets with garlic, ginger and chilli; tofu with dill; root vegetable latkes made of dates with date butter; and barbeque seitan.

Puds were ridiculous with lavender and chocolate cheesecake (like 'eating soap with a bar of chocolate, in a good way') which came with a cumulonimbus of coconut creme fraiche lounging on the top (unfinished but escorted home through St Patrick's Day staggerers in doggy bag).

Sarah stuffed in only two thirds of a peanut butter and chocolate torte, bit delicious, and Jating's heroic consumption of a Dutch apple pie with vanilla ice cream and that slightly salty bake-sale crust embarrassed us both.

We got all this at http://sacredchow.com/
227 Sullivan Street, NY.

...oh and the waiter deserves props for barely being able to conceal his excitement about the food, but holding it down till he got to the lavender cheesecake.

A Week In The Belly of NYC

We come to New York pretending it's for work, but let's be frank, it's really all about the fact that we can eat whatever we like whenever we like - vegans are overwhelmed with choice here, and we take full, robust advantage.

First night, just what we wanted: after an eight hour flight and nearly two hours getting through 'homeland security': Vietnamese noodles at Lan Cafe, 342 East 6th.

Under $30 for two dinners, Pad Thai and Yellow Noodles, roasted brown rice tea and coconut water with decent tip! Both were seriously delicious and very fresh. The mock ham was a little too meat-like for our liking, but still tasted good.

"Higham on the Hill, Stoke in the dale; Wykin for buttermilk, Hinckley for ALE." - Shakespeare.

Inkymole and Factoryroad sponsored an ale apiece at this year's CAMRA Real Ale Festival. We've never done it before, but what an adventure. You see, you don't know what ale or cider you're going to be allocated…till you get there, dry throated, with tokens and £2 beer glass in hand.

Mole's beer could not have been more perfect. Holden's Old Ale is brewed 'by a woman' (to the handlebar-moustachio'd barman's shock and awe!), and it was dark, slightly rough and chocolatey - and a whopping 7.2%. Had I been that woman who'd brewed it, I couldn't have designed a more perfect spec. Not a good one to start off with though - had to have a volumetric climb-down with a 6% and 4% to follow. Either that or roll home uphill, blind. Check the cheesy pun on the cask - (my own literary skilz) and the fact that they left off my logo!

The Factoryroad beer was disappointing and weak, with a funny after taste. Its rubbish taste though was slightly offset by the magnificent punuendo in the name of the beer, so all wasn't lost. Check Factoryroad's label. Again the creators had clearly been on the sauce while they got the labels printed out, sat no doubt at a creaking PC with one eye on their glasses, mis-spelling, as they did, the word 'how' and casually inverting the logo so it sat in a weird black box.

Still, we're not (for once) here to crit the visuals. Who cared once the first couple were sunk?

If you want to find a real ale event where you live, you'd do no worse than to look here: http://www.camra.org.uk/

Holden's Brewery: http://www.holdensbrewery.co.uk
An alphabetical list of real ales and independent brewers in the UK: http://www.quaffale.org.uk

Booze for free.

I've just got a copy of this book I did the cover for earlier this year, by Andy Hamilton.

We're a long way from self-sufficiency, but we're working on it - we've had the gas disconnected and we heat the house and water with wood instead. We've been buying our vegetables from a farm half an hour down the road for the last ten years or so, always organic, always amusingly miss-shapen,  always delicious, we did the biodiesel thing for years, and I make my own skin cream…well, like I said, we're not there, but we try to make the right moves in that direction!

The book tells you how to make intriguing-sounding brews such as Broad Bean Wine, Pine Needle Cordial and Nocino, an Italian green walnut cordial. None of them are complicated, or fussy; you just need to focus, keep your kit clean (most of which you'll have at home) and most importantly have some space at home to store the fermenting oceans of potential goodness. Our friend Simon' does this already, and his recent birthday cider was impressively cloudy and delicious, needing maybe a little longer in hibernation, but certainly a shouder-softening testament to what can be done with some foraged apples, water and patience.

Here's the artwork for the book, along with an alternative version which didn't make the cut, and a place to buy it!

http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781905811700