My boyfriend is the master of procrastination. To say he gets ‘easily distracted’ is like saying Keith Floyd was partial to the odd glass of wine on special occasions. Sometimes though his habit of poking about in the dark corners of the internet leads to the discovery of gems like this video of ‘disco fry eggs’. How he got there I do not know. I do not need to know.

The recipe is amazing. Oil is heated in a fiercely hot pan like a shallow wok, then green chillies are added and the aromatic bite of capsaicin rises. An egg is cracked onto the sizzling oil and smooshed around, before spices rain down from a hand out of shot. We had to identify them by eye – the pollen yellow hue of turmeric made it easy to spot, while the red and brown ones seemed most likely to be chilli powder and garam masala.

Then comes the best bit, as a bread roll is split and placed cut side down on top of the eggs, before the whole thing is squished down flat with a circular metal thing on a stick. I’ve no idea what this implement is, or once was, but it seems to serve its purpose here very well. We used the obvious substitute – a potato masher.

The whole eggy, bready mix is then flipped and squished, flipped and squished again. There is basically a huge amount of flipping and squishing. Once cooked, and very importantly, really properly squished, the pancake shaped mixture has developed lovely crisp bits around the edge, while there’s still soft, fluffy eggy bits inside. The spices have cooked out but are still boom! definitely there in refreshingly large quantities. At the end the whole thing is split in half and folded to serve.

We basically tried to follow the recipe as accurately as we could from the video, trying to move quickly and therefore making a right mess in the process. There is a pair of trousers which I fear will never recover from ‘turmeric-gate’.  The flipping provided some comedy moments. The end result was pretty special though. The only changes we made were to garnish it with coriander because that just made sense and some finely chopped spring onions because they go on everything in this house.

I shall not hesitate to claim that this is clearly the best hangover breakfast of all time that no-one seems to know about. It has eggy foundations, it contains chilli and spices, it’s a bit filthy, and there are laughs to be had whilst making it. The hangover boxes are ticked. The absolute best thing about this though is that I think the bread and the folding clearly qualifies the dish as a sandwich. An Indian eggy bread sandwich. Joy!

Mumbai Disco Fry Eggs (serves 1)

One thing you don’t need to worry about is the mixture in the pan looking a mess. It will taste brilliant, I promise. Anyway, the messy edge bits give you the crispy bits of joy that you desire.

2 eggs
2 small soft round rolls, 1 large soft round roll, or 1 hot dog bun, split
3 green chillies, sliced (or more or less to taste)
Chilli powder
Turmeric
Garam masala
Salt
Fresh coriander
Finely sliced spring onions
Oil, for frying

Heat a frying pan or skillet over a medium high heat and add some oil (couple of tablespoons should do it). When hot, add half the chillies and fry briefly. Add the eggs and break them up a bit. Add the rest of the chillies, then sprinkle on a generous pinch each of chilli powder, garam masala, turmeric and salt.

Put the split bun on top, drizzle over a little more oil, and add another dusting of all the spices. Use a potato masher or similar shaped implement to press down on the buns so they are smooshed into the egg. When it’s fairly flat, flip it over and squash down again. Flip again and squash, then flip again and squash. The final result should be flat as a pancake and crisping at the edges.

Cut the eggy pancake in half down the centre. Fold each half into a sandwich, put on a plate, sprinkle with coriander and spring onion, and serve.

Gourmandizing London is a public art project – a group of people who make murals inspired by the recipes of South East London. A while back they e-mailed asking me if they could use my brown stew chicken recipe and I said yeah, sure, go ahead, without really clicking at the time as to exactly what they were going to do with it.

They then went and produced this freakin’ awesome mural, which has been down by Father’s Barber shop in New Cross for yonks! Apparently though, when Gourmandizing went to the barbers to propose they painted the mural on the side, they found themselves with a situation…

“Just after the hol­i­days we walked into Father’s, showed him our Brown Stew Chicken sketch and asked what he thought. He looked it over and said “Bruv it’s great, your [sic] the artist, but I don’t eat chicken.” For a man who got Muham­mad Ali to sit down for a hair cut, twice, you fig­ure out how to remix a recipe.”

So brown stew chicken became brown stew fish. Pretty darn cool. If you want to know how to cook it, get down and have a look, the recipe is painted on the wall. Or er, you could just make my original brown stew chicken recipe instead.

Check out their website here, where they’ve also done some cool stuff with Persepolis and Brickhouse Bakery.

This has been er, brewing, for a while.

Firstly I must say that I genuinely love beer, and I’m very happy that we’ve finally embraced the fact it isn’t all about the likes of Stella, Carling or worst of all, Heineken. No, Peroni. That tastes like BO. There are some fantastic beers out there, made with love and care; from light, citrussy pale ales to stormy, thick, chocolate hinted stouts. I love many of them, truly, but also, there are problems. Big problems.

What is it, exactly, that brewers seem to be doing now, making their beers hoppier and hoppier and goddamit, even hoppier? It’s just not pleasant. Okay, so we want to taste the hops, that’s the point and that’s the beauty of this ‘beer revolution’ as I’ve heard it called but seriously, know when to stop. The super hoppy beers have no subtleties of flavour, no complexity left, but most importantly, they’re just not nice to drink. They’re too bitter. They’re unbalanced. They lack skill in the making. It makes me angry. I’d almost rather have a pint of Stella. Almost.

And the craft beer pubs! Holy shit. This is where my spleen really starts pumping out its juices. Bitter, angry juices like the beers many of them serve. These pubs should be wonderful havens, oases in the world of dirty lines, dirtier glass washers and fruit machines blinking in the background. Instead, some tool has started the trend of making them the most impossibly uncomfortable places to have a drink. Let’s start with the seating. The Craft Beer Co. in Brixton sports a fine example here – what were they thinking? Instead of seats that actually encourage a person to get comfortable, enjoy their drink and – god forbid – actually want to STAY in the pub, they have decided to make them look like instruments of torture and – surprise – they feel like them too. The seats are hard little stools, at silly heights, with er, bike pedals to rest your feet on.  I’ve always wanted to feel like I’m on a bike while i’m having a quiet pint. No really. And just before you start thinking it might actually be fun to have a little pedal while you sup, you can forget it, because THEY DON’T EVEN GO ROUND. You’ll just have to lean on the cold metal table instead, the one with a big old crank on the side which lets you adjust the height in between knocking your knees against it, arse slowly going numb.

Annoyingly I couldn’t find a pic of the bike pedal thingies, they’re downstairs. 

Then there’s the acoustics. A total lack of soft furnishings is the problem. I expect the designers think this makes the pub look cool, because we need to make drinking beer cool, right? It’s not just for beardy CAMRA members; old timers with old attitudes. Well here’s the wake up call, people – beer already IS fucking cool. Get over it! Stop trying so hard! Make a pub we can sit in and actually hear the people we are trying to socialise with! The upstairs area in Craft is practically unusable once it has more than 5 people in it. Their perfectly normal levels of chatter are just a cacophony; a wall of sound flying up around the filament bulbs hanging in cages.

This is not a gender issue, either, so don’t even bother going down that road. I know as many women as men who enjoy good beer and I see as many in craft beer pubs. I hear as many men complaining about these ridiculous trends.

The bottom line is, just let us all enjoy (most of) the drinks that people have (mostly) lovingly made. There’s no need to keep so many on, either. How will I believe those beers are kept and served properly when there’s so many of them? A small, well chosen, changing selection is more appealing, at least to me, anyway. Maybe I’m alone on that point.

What does everyone else think? Am I being cranky? I know one thing for sure, the person who designs a comfortable, useable, actually pleasant craft beer pub is going to be raking it in. Speaking of which, The Rake in Borough Market is fine, although I can’t be arsed going there because it can only fit about 5 people. I really don’t want to single out Craft here either, they have some great beers, and I do drink there, but they provide a very good example of what I’m talking about. The only place I’ve found that’s been in any way nice has been in Manchester. Come on London, pull your socks up.

When moving to a new flat recently I envisaged the shiny new, mahoosive balcony as a lush urban garden, flourishing verdant green with bush upon bushy bushel of salad leaves, herbs, courgettes, beans, basically anything I could get to grow vertically; anything that would crawl, climb or thrive in a pot. The only flowers I’d allow would be my favourite sweet peas, the odd geranium, a clematis or four and and…okay so I wanted everything.

I’ve managed to cultivate the sweet peas, the geraniums (already here) and a dying clematis. Some herbs are flourishing, albeit left field ones, like wormwood (absinthe) which is bitter but rather tasty in many things including, surprisingly, hollandaise. The vegetables, well, not so much action on that front. Some lettuces are doing well. Ummmm. Hmmm. So as I sat pondering this state of affairs from my makeshift office/boot camp (I’m currently working 12 + hour days – get the tiny violins out), it struck me that there was one more thing that could be eaten – the marigolds. I was damn well going to get a meal out of this balcony.

The basis of this salad is herbs. Recently I’ve been taking the approach to herb usage seen in countries such as Iran and Georgia, by which I mean I’ve been using them basically like salad leaves. See below a salad of mint, parsley and dill with asparagus. We ate it with lamb chops rubbed with za’atar, Turkish chilli and garlic, sprinkled with radishes.

For the marigold salad I used mint and parsley, tossed with pieces of fried flat bread, red onion slivers, sliced dates, pomegranate seeds and feta. The marigold petals have a slight peppery heat, but mainly they just look gorgeous. It’s a festival of sweetness from the fruit, against salty feta. The dressing has it going on too – olive oil mixed with viscous date syrup, balanced with acidity. It’s a lesson in the power of contrasts basically, and darn if it doesn’t look purdy.

Date, Feta, Pomegranate and Marigold Salad (serves 4 as a side salad, 2 as a main)

1 handful of mint leaves, picked, although leave some in sprigs
1 handful parsley leaves, picked,  same as above
A few crunchy lettuce leaves like little gem or romaine, shredded roughly
150g feta cheese (proper feta cheese)
8 dates, pitted and each cut into a few pieces
1 small red onion, finely sliced
1 small pomegranate, seeds removed (the easiest way to do this is to halve it, then smack each half on the skin side with a wooden spoon, working your way around until the seeds come out. Wear an apron. Pick out any white pithy bits)
1 flatbread, or one large pitta bread or similar
The petals from 1 marigold (optional, obviously), picked and really, really thoroughly washed (the bugs LOVE them)

For the dressing

4 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons date syrup
1.5 tablespoons white wine vinegar

Cut the flatbread into squares and fry it gently in a little oil until crisp. Set aside on kitchen paper.

On a large serving plate arrange the lettuce, mint and parsley leaves. In another bowl, combine the dates, pomegranate seeds, feta cheese and red onion. Add the flatbread pieces and mix well.

Combine the dressing ingredients and whisk to emulsify. Season with salt and pepper.

Arrange the cheesy fruit mixture on top of the herbs, and drizzle with the dressing. Sprinkle over the marigold petals, and serve.

South Londoners need a heads up about this place. I feel a tension here between wanting to keep the place open and yet still being able to get a table. Still, it’s in Streatham (or as it’s called in our house, St. Reatham), so there is hope.

The Napoli pizza (£6.50), my favourite anchovy, olive caper combo was as good as the the best I’ve had anywhere. Note the lack of cheese. The pizza had the correct qualities of a Neapolitan pizza as far as my knowledge goes (that’s not very far); a spotty bottom to the dough, a silken ‘soupy’ middle and sparse toppings (the real set of guidelines are extremely strict I hear, lots about wood fired ovens, dough pH and yeast). Oh and the tomatoes! Imported from Italy, obviously. I could have drunk the can.

The Salsiccia e friarielli (£9.50), with Italian sausage and broccoli was also excellent, although living in the shadow, as most things do, of the anchovies. I’ll never learn to not bother going sharesies.

I’m not sure which I loved more, the food or the guys who are behind it (obviously it’s the food). Plucked straight from a high street in Naples, they’re all shiny black, denim and bling on tattooed skin.

I can’t see St. Reatham becoming a food destination to be honest, which is just as well. They don’t like strangers in town. Not unless they’re hip Italian boy strangers with a sour dough mother.

Bravi Ragazzi Pizza
2a Sunnyhill Road
SW16 2UH

Suya started to occupy my thoughts a few years ago when I noticed a takeaway place in Peckham: Obalende Suya Express on the high street. To say the place looks ramshackle is putting it mildly – the sign is caked in pigeon shit and interior design consists of a few stick-legged metal chairs with  scraps of fabric hanging off them. Obviously I went in, and I caught them on a good day; the suya was tender, smoky and like nothing I’d tasted before. Sadly the quality isn’t consistent. Boo. Thoughts turned to making my own.

A colleague of mine regularly travels to Nigeria and once, very kindly, she brought me back a package of suya spice. It came wrapped in someone’s bank statement. I tried it out at a friend’s BBQ but the results were a bit weird; the meat released a musty fug that smelled like Peckham down wind on a bad day. Rotting yams with a hint of fish and the dusty corners of an African back alley. That was several years ago, but recently I decided to have another crack at it.

Basically suya is either sliced beef, chicken or fish, rubbed in a mixture of (crucially) ground peanuts and a mixture of flavourings including paprika, onion powder and ginger, amongst others. This is called tankora. The meat is threaded onto skewers and cooked and as far as I can tell, the smoke flavour is essential. It is served with a pile of tankora at the side plus some sliced onions and tomatoes.

Cracking the BBQ out again this weekend seemed like a balls out banger opportunity to salve some psychological wounds and get back down with the suya. Obviously there’s no point doing things by halves so we decided upon a suya three way cook off: a home made version, vs. the scary Nigerian must-in-a-jar vs. a packet of ready made mix picked up on Rye Lane.

Suya spice from Nigeria…mild but musty 

The Peckham blend…spicy 

Home made version mixed with the peanuts

Making your own tankora is basically a case of grinding up the nuts but stopping before they become peanut butter, then mixing with the other flavours and smearing onto the meat. We did this right before cooking which worked very well; the meat is sliced so thinly that to marinate it seems less necessary.

Really tasty sirloin from Flock and Herd in Peckham 

Skewered

Three way taste off

As we were grinding up the nuts to make the home made marinade it occurred to me what had gone wrong with my first attempt – the spice mixes are sold to be mixed with peanuts, not used neat. No wonder it was a little *cough* intense. It turns out that the home made version was the most vibrant, as you would expect. Handy really, considering not everyone can get bank statement wrapped packages from Nigeria, or nip down to the local African shop.

It’s hot, this recipe, humming with chilli and ginger. The ground nuts add buttery textural intensity, which made the gloriously tender sirloin seem even more so. In short, it was bloody tasty. A new BBQ favourite.

Suya 

600g sirloin steak, cut into slices about a cm thick (get the butcher to do this as it can be a bit tricky)
50g peanuts (salted is fine, just don’t add any extra salt to the mixture)
1 teaspoon chilli (grind up whatever you have, or use chilli powder)
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder OR you can be a fly beeatch like me and use 1 teaspoon ground up crispy fried onions from a bag

Grind up the peanuts in a spice grinder or blender. Stop before they become peanut butter. Add all the other spices and smother with the paste. Grill over the direct heat on a BBQ, leaving the inside slightly pink. Serve with a pile of the spice mixture if you like, and some sliced tomatoes and onions.

In his excellent book, ‘The Yoghurt Cookbook‘, Arto der Haroutunian talks about the health promoting properties of the white stuff, and its supposedly life lengthening power. By my reckoning I should live until at least 180, providing the yoghurt can counteract a history of fags, booze and fast livin’.

Cultures which consume a lot of yoghurt, such as the Georgians, are huge believers in its supposed powers, and have used it as a cure for…well, pretty much everything actually, for centuries. I can’t vouch for the validity of those claims, but I can vouch for the taste, and its hangover curing properties. This buffalo yoghurt made in a traditional clay pot brought me back from the brink; I’m talking nausea, shakes, the creeping doom…not a whisker of it after I’d gobbled this lot down at the side of a rocky road in Georgia.

Yoghurt in Georgia 

The yoghurt I tried in Ethiopia recently was a little more…challenging. I asked the lady we were visiting how she made it, and she replied ‘well I just put the milk in this bucket (straight from the cow in the back yard) and leave it on the shelf for three days.’ That’s one approach, although it is of course really just curdled milk and not ‘proper’ yoghurt. The taste was very sour and it had a loose wobbly texture. The Ethiopians often mix it with chilli powder and drink the whole glass like a shot, and I can see why. I spent the next three hours concerned about potential gastrointestinal payback.

Yoghurt in Ethiopia

Mixed with chilli powder

Labneh, then, is basically yoghurt that’s been strained of its whey. Of course I adore it because, well it’s like yoghurt to the power of ten. Once strained, the resulting substance is more akin to cream cheese, but with the obvious tartness of yoghurt; that sour freshness that yoghurt-lovers crave.

I’ve found that the best brand by far for making yoghurt is Total. It’s even better than the mega expensive stuff I bought from the farmers’ market, which relinquished hardly any liquid. It is thick and creamy before straining  which is a good thing if you’re eating it straight up, but with labneh you want some residual sourness.

To make labneh, mix the yoghurt with a large pinch of salt, then wrap in muslin, or as I have done, a clean/brand new dishcloth. Hang in the fridge (to be honest I used to just hang it in a cool place but now I have a very hot kitchen so the fridge it is) and allow the whey to strain away for about 5 to 6 hours. The longer the strain, the thicker the labneh, obviously.

After this time it is ready, and can be used or preserved in a number of ways.

Try rolling in herbs and preserving in olive oil…it’s then lovely just spread on bread. It’s also delicious rolled in dukkah, or za’atar. Straight up it’s best topped with punchy flavours like anchovy and chilli, or dolloped onto salads as you would use a goat’s curd for example.

My favourite way to use it right now however is to stuff it into Turkish peppers before slinging them on the BBQ. They are lovely when wrapped up inside a flat bread with a kebab, oozing their creamy centres against the sizzling meat. If you’re up for it, you fly bastards, stuff some green chillies instead.

Labneh Stuffed Peppers

1 x 500g tub Total yoghurt
Large pinch of salt
About 5 mild green Turkish pepper for stuffing (you could also use the long red Romero peppers if you can’t find the Turkish ones)
Oil
Muslin or a dishcloth for straining

In a bowl mix the yoghurt with the salt. Line a bowl with the muslin or cloth and scrape the yoghurt into it. Tie the top with string or whatever you have and suspend it from something. I used to use a cupboard handle but now I have a very sun filled, hot kitchen and so I hung it in the fridge. Set a bowl underneath to catch the whey. Leave for 5 or so hours. It will be usable but soft after 3. If you want to make balls with it and preserve them in oil then the longer the better as the labneh will need to be fairly firm for rolling.

Cut the tops off the peppers and de-seed them without cutting the sides. Stuff with labneh. Rub with oil, salt and pepper and either grill on a BBQ or underneath a hot grill until charred in places and soft. Serve either in kebabs, or on toast, in pittas…