Lemon Cooks

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Sunday Throwback - Fish and Chips

This was at a pub in Pembrokeshire, reached after a fairly vertical hike for three hours along the cliffs in the blazing sun (and proceeding the equally vertical hike back the same way). The pub was the only place to eat, we were lucky to get in, and turned out to be far fancier than we were really prepared for.

It might have been the seasoning provided by exercise and being roaring hungry by the time it arrived to table, but this was an excellent fish and chips. Light crunchy batter, a minty pea concoction (we can't call this mushy peas. This was mushy peas sophisticated older sister who works in fashion and only wears stilletoes), and thick cut chips that were faboulously toasty on the outside and chompable in the middle, dusted with vinegar dust. This was a new one on us, and while breathing in around them had to be undertaken with caution it did work quite well. 10/10, would hike there again.

[lemoncooking]

Throwback Sunday - Home Cooked Tapas for One

Clockwise from the top:

Glass of Malbec

2 x lamb sausages with balsamic glaze

A slightly burned Spanish tortilla

Stewed mushrooms with garlic

Tomato Salad with black pepper and thyme

Padron Peppers, fried off with olive oil and salt

Salad of pickled grilled red peppers, green beans and oregano

[lemoncooking]

Iced Matcha and Wagashi, Tokyo

This was at Rikugien gardens in north Tokyo which is well worth a wander about - it's a good Edo-era garden with a nice spread of seasonal flowers. They also serve somewhat fancier wagashi than the norm. Usually there's some kind of bean paste nibble, but these as you can see were beautifully styled to suit the season and delicately flavoured. The Iris motif contained red bean paste but lightly floral in taste, and the little yellow one was styled after a local type of citrus and flavoured the same. Very refreshing.

Now I'm going to off on one about matcha everywhere else. Hit J to skip. In Japan you can, of course, get all the same flavoured milky matcha boba ice cream drinks you can mostly find everywhere else which I have to confess, I'm not a big fan of. I don't HATE-hate, but a little goes a long way for me. At least most of the time, they're not pretending to be Oooweeee-Wowzers Top Shelf Tea.

When Pret brought out their matcha latte, when it was a lot less common, I was very excited for it, until i realised they used some kind of horrible green tea flavoured sugar syrup, insisted on making it with coconut milk (why? Also lady in the Russel Square Pret WHY was it an impossible deal to swap that for regular milk??) and then as an extra fart to Uji... dusted with cinnamon.

The Saddest Lemon, that day. I didn't have high expectations, but I don't think I could have predicted anything as wild as coconut milk.

That's not really the situation that chafes me hardest though.

I will hold my hands up and confess to being a food snob in many ways with this being the first hill I will die on - If you're going to go to the effort of getting a premium ingredient and marketing that as the primary feature or flavour (and fucking charge me accordingly), then WHY are we burying that product under a load of cheap shite?

This happens way too often in my opinion. If you wanna eat tuna with mayo, I have no issue with that. Go right ahead. Fill the can. You want to put that on some maguro? It's not traditional, but again, I'm not going to judge. Individual tastes can be as unhinged as the individual pleases. Their plate, their choice.

But for the love of god, restaurants, the emphasis is on CHOICE. If you are bragging about dishing up premium blue fin (by way of example, please hold for a separate essay about sustainability), and I am paying out the nose for that specific thing, do not serve it to me on some soggy avocado and drenched in sriracha egg slop and sesame oil. I will flip the table.

Which is a long roundabout way to say - this is why visiting gardens in Japan is usually a delight to me. They serve tea. And you'll get it one of two ways only - hot and grassy, or in summer, optionally cold and grassy. Yes please!

[lemoncooking]

Sunday Throwback: Apricot Jam

I am a jam opportunist. If I can find good enough fruit, i'll make any kind of jam and horde it like a greedy little fruit dragon. A few years ago, the apricots were of incomparable quality, and I went slightly overboard, ending up with not only the batch pictured but two others of similar size. Jam keeps well, and it was only 4 years later I finished the last of the jars, even considering the swaps and trades I'd made along the way.

A quirk learned from my grandfather, is that I like to add the kernals of a few stones into the jam - well blanched and not too many as they do contain cyanide. The blanching reduces this, and you would need to eat far more and more often to become sick, but it's good to be aware. They add an almond flavour which enhances the fruit.

[lemoncooking]

Throwback Sunday - Wagashi

Seasonal wagashi just cheer me up a lot. These are all varying fruit flavours, with yuzu lemon in the top jelly, and kumquat in the mochi. I can't recall the flavour of the goldfish jelly - it may have been pear - but they certainly ate well.

[lemoncooking]

Throwback Sunday - Cataplana

Cataplana is a Portuguese fish stew. You find variations on the theme of 'lots of fish and tomato' everywhere around the Medditerranian for very good reason - it's delicious.

Being Portuguese, this varies from bouillabaise and paella through the use of good yellow potatoes, the slightly waxy type, and fresh sardines.

They must be fresh. Sardines are only worth eating if they are canned or virtually minutes from the water.

This is not something to order and eat on ceremony and i think making it neat and tidy to eat would be antithetical. This is a dinner where you all sit around communally cracking shells and licking your fingers, and being bothered by the cat who is going mad for the sardine heads.

[lemoncooking]

English Breakfast Don

Ok, bear with me on this one. I know it's weird, but also trust me, it kinda works. I had a lot of chicken sausage to use up and I had already done the usual round of bbq - fry-up - sausage and mash and I live on variety, so as soon as i realised the sausage would pair well with soy sauce, I was all in.

This is a light sausage with a decent amount of green onion in it, and I think you could easily replicate it with nothing more than chicken mince and chopped scallions. Grill the tomatoes, cook off the meat, fry the egg. Stack it all over rice with a drizzle of sesame oil and soy sauce to taste. Cracked black pepper. Honestly, I think you could even sneak the 'baked beans' or mushrooms in too if you steamed the rice with daizu soy beans and/or enoki. Wa-fu meets eikoku. Anyway, I really enjoyed it.

[lemoncooking]

A Very Squiddy Birthday to Me

In 2014 I was not having a fabulous time living in Japan. I was in the middle of a diploma as well as working full time, which cranked my work hours up from 45 hours to over 60; I was pissed off in my job because of shenanigans about promotion; family back home were dealing with some sad and scary things while I was 6,000 miles apart, and my closest friends had either left the country or revealed themselves in the worst ways possible to be far less invested in our friendship than I was. It wasn't great. May, my birthday, and I kind of hit burn out. I had to keep going until December to finish the course I was mortgaged into, I'd already resolved to quit my job, and I'd just had to miss my grandfather's funeral. I wasn't really in the mood to party, even if I had anyone to go with - anyway, all this sob story is background as to why the meal I went out for probably stuck in my heart so firmly. Because it was so good, and such a wholeheartedly pleasant and welcoming meal. I went alone, to a new-ish sushi place near my house. A blink and you'd miss it, no name kind of place, which unusually specialised in squid sashimi. They found out it was my birthday. They made it beyond special. The clientele in there were ordinary people. A few construction workers, a retired guy also eating alone. A couple of office workers. A Thursday night.

This year, I got to go back for my birthday and I was delighted to find it hadn't changed a bit. The same kind of customers, the same warm hospitality, and delicious food. I'm a lot happier in life now, but I think even if I hadn't been so low, this place would have stuck with me. We ate far too much - silky squid sashimi; a little mustardy salad and soused mackerel appetiser; fresh and crunchy whelk nigiri; a juicy variation on the theme with Korean-style marinated raw shrimp; a crab croquette which has possibly ruined all other crab croquettes for me it was that superior; fat, unctuous scallops, and far more sushi than we expected. We never found the sake anywhere, but it seemed chameleonic, changing flavour with the food. Now sweeter. Now fruitier. Now saltier. It had 'Dragon' in the name.

At the end, we stared at the bill because with the exchange rate in our favour, it seemed criminally cheap.

Sometimes going back somewhere that struck you as special is an exercise in disappointment if the gamble doesn't pay off. This time I was lucky. I hope you too have similar luck to find something that buoys you when you are low, celebrates with you when you deserve it, and stands the test of time.

[lemoncooking]

Coffee and Almond 'Croissant'.

Ok, I'mma be honest with you, I can't remember what they call the buns at this cafe. I wasn't paying attention - I saw it, I wanted it, I ordered it. They brought it to my table and I evaporated into a fugue of sugar and nutty euphoria. Needless to say, very bloody good and if I'm ever that way again with time to kill, I shall once more be lost in the flakey embrace of whatever this thing is.

Coffee was good too.

[lemoncooking]

Zaru Soba with Tempura

I have to say, in Japan these days I find Google reviews etc to actually be a bad way to find places I really enjoy eating at. The reasons are several-fold. Firstly, if you browse in English, you'll find the places that, fundamentally, cater to tourists best. Now that's not an unimportant factor if you don't speak the language, you aren't familiar with Japanese food beyond the transect of dishes that have become popular overseas, or you just find wrangling unfamiliar places and menus stressful. But the ranking is not always representative of the quality of the food in the local sense; moreso the tourist customer experience and preferences. A five star place may only to me be three star food and the benefits don't benefit me as I'm just that much more familiar with the cuisine and language.

Secondly, it seems like if you browse in Japanese, almost nowhere is good. Japanese reviewers... love to complain. And they complain and down rate places for the tiniest things. So it's really hard to gauge if this 3-star place is a shop where there are genuine flaws and it's going to be mediocre. Or if it's actually really good and has just somehow fallen foul of some Keyboard Karens. Also sometimes the locals also prioritise experience over quality. We wandered into one 4 star cafe which... to be frank, was a dump. The guy running it was lovely and clearly popular with locals, but it was still, 100% a dump. So for me, I tend to avoid deciding I want to eat a specific thing, I tend to avoid looking on tabelog or google, and instead I just follow my nose. Pretty much every time I've done so, it's worked out great. This meal was one such. I had half an eye out for tempura as we were drifting around the edge of Asakusa and the area is supposedly a speciality location for it. We didn't want anything too heavy, either, so when I spotted this little tucked away shop doing soba and tempura (a menu of just a few items is also another green flag) lunches, it was a winner. The vegetables were light and not at all greasy, the shrimp was juicy and flavourful, and the soba had a nice bite and the pickles were home made.

Where is it, you may ask. Well, that's my secret. All I'll say is walk south from Asakusa and west of Kuramae and good luck!

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Ekiben Although I didn't eat it on the train, I did grab this bento for a day out to the aquarium at Sendai. Uncle Fish got a snow crab special and I opted for this tour of Tokhoku specialities, which I have to say, was really good! Special stand outs were the little octopus katsu in the top middle with sweet omelette; the sweet plum in the bottom right corner, and the marinated taro in the top right. Finished off with seafood crackers from Matsushima, it made a decent feed to keep me going.

[lemoncooking]

Throwback Sunday: Scampi and Chips and Ale

I went on a solo trip to the New Forest (neither new, nor a forest as you may be imagining) to get away From The Horrors for a few days. Staying in a tiny village, dining options can be limited, but there is usually a pub which if nothing else, will serve up something hot and affordable. There is something nice about parking yourself in a bench in a pub garden, supping a cold ale in the golden hour, with the sun making the scampi look golden. This will not solve all of life's problems, but it doesn't hurt.

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Cauliflower Cake

This is an Ottolenghi recipe, and is really some kind of crustless quiche than a cake, but it is excellent. light, tasty, with pops of flavour from the cumin. As demonstrated, it's also robust enough to stack inside a lunch box and gallop off up the hills for a picnic. Recommended with warm tomatoes, peppery rocket salad, and as many cans of pimms you can fit in your pockets.

[lemoncooking]

Sunday Throwback - Treacle Tart

Despite the name, it's usually no longer made with treacle (mollasses). English Treacle is usually lighter and slightly less sweet than American Molasses, and varies in flavour from slightly bitter to just plain syrupy. As a result, treacle tart also varies. Sometimes it's too sugary for my taste, but this was a really excellent one, lightened with a bit of lemon. Not so sure about the fennel garnish, mind you.

[lemoncooking]

Iced Matcha and Joyo Manju at Tsuruga Castle

Iced matcha is a delight, especially as Uncle Fish and I got caught out by the unexpected heat of the Aizu-Wakamatsu bonshi. That is to say, a basin surrounded by mountains in which all the hot air likes to squat. Thankfully, it wasn't just me - various Japanese tourists likewise getting off the bullet train and immediately asking why it was hot as balls in May. It's Bonshi.

Anyway, the sweets were nice, with a bouncey crepey dough surrounding a red bean paste filling.

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Jomon Soba with Mushrooms

This is a rare kind of soba, and possibly is only available at the Jomon museum near Shin-Aomori. It's made with acorn, chestnut and mountain yam, and has a thick, springy texture which Uncle Fish and I both really enjoyed. The recipe is a kind of reimagining of what people in the Jomon stone age era of Japan may have eaten. If true, then they ate damn well!

I'm kind of sad it's not more readily available and eyeing the trees in the park...

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Beef Tongue

At the amusingly named Tanya restaurant in Sendai - we had to wait for an hour and honestly, I'm sure we could have gone elsewhere and had equally good beef tongue with less of a wait, but hunger is the best seasoning and we did enjoy it. The soup is oxtail, which was a bit chewy.