Bird of Smithfield

Last night I went to Bird of Smithfield, the new restaurant just a stone's throw from the famous meat market, started by Alan Bird, veteran of The Ivy. On my visit, it was still almost a building site in parts, but despite the odd wire dangling like tentacles from the ceiling, the restaurant was already looking stylish, with armchairs surrounding the bar and interesting paintings around the dining tables on the cosy restaurant floor.

Everything on the menu sounded delicious, and although I was tempted by the treacle cured salmon or a fresh salad with goat's cheese, I couldn't resist the Dorset crab which came with fantastic crispy thin slices of bread. The rich mayonnaisey dressing covered delicate crab meat and fresh avocado - I found myself asking for more bread to enjoy every last morsel of this creamy delight! My mum's asparagus were cooked to perfection, with a superb hollandaise.

Mains was a tough decision too, although I was very happy with my slip sole, served with brown shrimp and samphire. The texture of the fish was great, and the intense flavours brought about in combination with the almost earthy shrimp and salty samphire transported me to the coast. With such a rich dish, I struggled to finish the extremely generous portion - one fillet would have sufficed for me! I would have preferred the triple-cooked chips to be much more crispy (admittedly my standards based on Heston's Hind's Head are high), but they were wonderfully fluffy inside.

The chocolate pot, made with Original Beans' Cru Virunga, was a hit, topped with a powerful salted caramel cream, and hiding a little surprise of popping candy.

Having not had trifle for a long time, I was mightily impressed by the rhubarb trifle with 'Bird's Custard': decadent, but refined - I'll be returning to Bird of Smithfield, if just for some more scrumptious desserts!

Damian Allsop Chocolate Workshop

I had a fantastically fun, educational, and tasty morning at a chocolate workshop this morning, run by Damian Allsop, the producer of CH₂OCOLATES. He specialises in chocolates made with a water-based ganache, which he discovered helps to bring out and retain the flavours of the chocolate - and his creations really are superb. I'm snacking delightfully on my going-home-present, a bag full of a selection of different chocs, despite greedily stuffing my face with the stuff earlier!

But, of course I didn't just spend the whole time eating, I also learnt a lot, as did the other amateurs (chocolate-lovers) at the workshop (perhaps apart from my omniscient mum!). First, Damian gave an enticing introduction to the production of chocolate, from the picking of the fruit pod (which surprisingly grows on the trunk of the tree since it's too heavy to be hanging off the sides), to the extremely important but often overlooked fermentation, to drying, roasting, and finally manufacturing. As well as the scientific side, we saw some beautiful pictures of the cacao beans, still with their multicoloured hard outer skin, and then the smaller inside beans covered in a white pulp, followed by examples of the processes involved in refining the bean.

After the food-history lesson, it was time for the taste test. We started off with a fairly average supermarket-quality dark chocolate which we decided was a bit too bitter, had no fruity notes, and the different flavours weren't smoothly connected which made it unpleasant to eat. We moved up the scale, starting to get hints of fruits like tangerines, and arrived at Original Beans Cru Virunga, which was full of cherry flavours and a mouth-watering acidity, which lingered in the mouth.

Suitably warmed up, we watched Damian give a demo of making a chocolate mousse, before having a go ourselves. To get the consistency that would normally come from cream, we thickened the water with xanthan gum (a thickening agent), before combining this with our melted Cru Virunga, and folding this into a meringue mixture. Of course, being true professions, we didn't opt for the super-fast and easy electric whisk to transform liquid egg white into fluffy meringue. Nope, instead we used the good ol'fashioned hand one -  which I have to admit I slightly regretted after my arm almost fell off from exhaustion (despite whisking tips from the expert, Damian). We then left this to set in the fridge for a few hours, after a quick taster! Another group also added in a raspberry sauce to the milk-chocolate recipe, which gave it a great extra kick.

Damian showed us how to make liquorice financiers (cake), and fruit jellies (no gelatin, just a vegetable gelling agent and xanthan) as well, which were a great accompaniment to our mousses, and were fantastic topped off with spicy ginger crisps, and served immaculately in the shape of a cacao pod!

Finally, we tried everything, all in different combinations, to find which we enjoyed the most. I particularly liked the little liquorice cakes, topped with my chocolate mousse, and the apricot sauce! The whole session was thoroughly enjoyable, most definitely worth the 7 O'clock Saturday morning start, and 2 hour journey each way! Thank you Damian!

Chocolate Festival and Meza

I had a fun day yesterday, starting at the Chocolate Festival at the Southbank. It's on until Sunday in the square behind the Royal Festival Hall, and there's some great chocolate to taste and buy along with some interesting talks from the people behind the chocolate.

I popped along to do a quick shift behind Original Beans' stall, explaining what I knew about the origins of the bars, the rare Porcelena cocoa beans (named after its white appearance similar to that of porcelain), and the inspiring ethos - a bar plants a tree! It was great fun, and I enjoyed meeting people who knew and were interested in finding out about chocolate. Just before the event started to wind down for the evening, I popped round to have a peek at the other stalls and tried Damien Allsop's mini egg which had a delicious salty caramel filling. He's a great chocolatier who's speciality is water-based ganache, and I love his raspberry chocopop with crackling space dust!

Then, in the evening we visited The Modern Pantry Pop-up at Meza, where I enjoyed the fresh and exciting cooking of Anna Hansen. The menu was really interesting, and everything sounded sensational. I opted for the salmon sashimi to start. The organic fish was so fresh and had a lovely clean taste, and the dressing made from truffled umeboshi, which is a sour fruit, wonderfully complimented and accented the citrus yuzu (a Japanese fruit) and the texture of the crunchy flying fish roe (or tobiko) was great.

For mains I tried the roast butternut squash, tofu and leek filled inari (pouches made from an omelette-like mixture), with crispy walnuts and wild rice, and a salty miso broth. It was a very earthy dish, quite different from my starter, and it had a great rustic sense, but was also highly voluptuous, with a deep aroma and soft-hard textures.

Finally to finish I had the salted coconut tapioca with a green tea and chocolate mouse, with mango, passion fruit and a coconut wafer. I'm not completely sure why I chose this, because I'm not a great fan of green tea, but I liked the crunchy passion fruit with the sweet coconut, and the crispy wafer.

All in all a delightful day, and a delicious meal!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

I've had a very tasty last couple of weeks, starting off of course with Christmas lunch. As a vegetarian, I didn't have any of the traditional turkey, but chose a recipe from the BBC Good Food website, and made it into more of a tart. It was delicious, especially with crunchy pecan nuts on top! We also decided to not opt for the traditional Christmas cake, instead experimenting with a quite ambitious Chocolate bombe, which consisted of home-made "cheat's" fruity ice cream (frozen cream) surrounded by beautifully buttery brioche bread and enrobed in dark chocolate! Very tough to cut, but also tough to beat!

On New Year's Day, feeling adventurous, I gave my mum a quick crash-course in rolling maki sushi, while she created a delicious aubergine dish from the Nobu cookbook. The sushi was delicious, with fresh tuna and salmon from our local fishmonger's - Moxon's. Unfortunately (or not, depends how you look at it...) I cooked WAY too much rice, and after determining to finish it whilst at its freshest, I could hardly move! The baked aubergine with bonite and dashi ponzu was also a great success. I particularly loved the way that the bonito flakes danced around on the hot aubergine!

Another recent great meal was a squash, ricotta, and sage lasagne, which finished with a wonderful crispy top, which was great to crunch through, and the combination of squash, ricotta and sage was certainly something to try again.

And just this evening, I was delighted by a lovely savoury tart tatin, with goat's cheese, caramelised red onions and chestnut mushrooms in puff pastry. It was so yummy that we polished it off before I could take a photograph! The mushrooms were great in the tart, and not something that I would normally associate with one.

Chocolate Unwrapped & Richard Corrigan and Sat Bains at Bentley's Oyster Bar and Grill

I've just spent an interesting afternoon at Chocolate Unwrapped next to borough market at

London Bridge, and was reminded of my fantastic meal at Bentley's Oyster Bar and Grill. Richard Corrigan, the chef at Bentley's teamed up with Sat Bains to produce a fantastic lunch as part of a stunt called 10-10-10 by American Express to pair up some of the UK's best chefs, and see them work together to invent fantastic menus.

The dessert that I had was amazing. It was made with Original

Beans by John Freeman of Restaurant Sat Bains (http://www.restaurantsatbains.com/),

and was an amazingly oriental chocolate dessert. He used coriander and yoghurt with crumbled chocolate shortbread, which was surprisingly complimentary to the deeply intense, velvety chocolate and gave an incredible earthy flavour. I think that this earth taste was in fact reflected in the whole meal, especially the starter, an oyster soup, something which I'd never tried before. Having not been too keen on oysters before, I was pleasantly surprised with the deliciousness of this. The frothy soup was like spooning up the sea, and the oyster was actually quite tasty!

The highlight of the meal for me, though, was Sat's salmon dish. It looked like it could have just

come out of an alien flying saucer, with the dark green bobbles spotted around the fish. But the fish was stunning, a match even for my grandma's salmon. I'm not sure what Sat did, but I seem to remember that it was poached for a long long time at 40 degrees, but it tasted so fresh, it was almost like eating sashimi, and the pickled ginger added to my suspicions... there was just something indescribably fantastic about it. The texture was phenomenal, because each flake would just peel away. It was just the sort of dish that made me smile :)

Chocolate Week's event was very busy, especially the talks, and I

think it's great that people are becoming more interested in chocolate. There were a few tacky stalls, with flashing lights and gold flowers, but also some charming sculptures, including the gorilla that I'd seen a few weeks ago at the experimental food fair. There was also a rather beautiful chocolate treble clef, which I liked. I tried a rather unusual Marmite chocolate from Paul Young, which was really tasty, with

a very subtle umami flavour just breaking through. His Marmite bar was greatly superior to Marmite's own brand, which I must say was absolutely sickly. Paul had also done a strange chocolate wall, for people to sign and write messages on, which was very fun, and got loads of attention!

Yummy Paul A Young Chocolate Brownie

Just had a really delicious chocolate brownie from Paul A Young (http://www.paulayoung.co.uk/), which my mum brought home for me. It was rich and gooey and topped off with some hazelnuts. Thoroughly recommended.

William Curley - Amazing Cake!

As a treat for being such a good teenager and foodie (and starting this blog) 'The Better Foodie' a.k.a my mum brought home a yummy surprise for me - a cake from William Curley http://www.williamcurley.co.uk/ (a top-notch chocolatier and patissier for those who are not acquainted with high quality confectionary).

This was absolutely delicious! Mango, passion fruit and chocolate! Called the 'Passion Fruit and Mango Entremet' Really light and wonderfully comforting after a day of being late and forgetting tests!