Flat Iron: no boobs

It’s enchanting, I’m sure, to hear your toddler utter new words and grasp associations. Less enchanting, perhaps, when said small person points at their pregnant mother and says ‘big boobs’, then at their dad and says ‘small boobs’. Ouch.

We pondered this and many other adorable things kids get up to with our Negronis at the workbench bar in the very-new, very-cool Flat Iron on Beak Street, with our friend G and the ready-to-pop Mrs/Dr G. She is so nearly there that I was quietly saying prayers last week that it wouldn’t happen at the table. Fortunately, she is a brilliant doctor so would no doubt deal with the whole thing whilst we all stood around with hot water and towels whimpering/passing out. It’s definitely true that these later stages of pregnancy are miraculous; her hair had a salon-fresh look and positively bounced, her eyes twinkled even in the near darkness*. These shiny outward signs of course belied a great deal of discomfort, not to mention a violent hankering after a glass of wine. Flat Iron is a no reservations kind of place, but half the fun is in the waiting, in their very lively bar in the basement. I hope it will be the only waiting the Gs have to do this month…

Vegetarians, take heed: Flat Iron does meat. Steak. Really well. (Not like that – though they made a concession for Mrs/Dr G.) The Flat Iron is the American name for the Butler’s steak, cut with the grain from the shoulder of the animal.  It can be tough if treated in the wrong hands. Turns out these are the right hands; after an amuse-bouche of popcorn cooked in beef dripping, the steaks came sliced on the diagonal on their own little boards, and beautifully seasoned; the BSG didn’t reach for the salt or pepper throughout. Each of us was equipped with a little meat cleaver instead of a knife (they might need to electronically tag these covetable things as they may go the way of the Quaglino’s ashtrays…) These were purely aesthetic but rather useful for trowelling on the amazing peppercorn sauce (you could choose between this, Béarnaise, horseradish and Fred’s Sauce, a tomato/Tabasco delight.)

If you’re going to master and serve only one thing, then each accompaniment has to be perfectly done. No complaints there. When I say that the chips carried the initial aroma of a McDonald’s bagful I mean it as the highest possible compliment. They were savoury and crisp. The creamed spinach was so good we ordered another dish of it, and a baked aubergine dish barely touched the sides. A little French glass of lamb’s lettuce with sharp, nutty vinaigrette offered a few mouthfuls to cut through the richness of it all.

In our enthusiasm, we felt it only right to cram in a pudding. And golly I am glad of it. The BSG tucked into a freshly baked doughnut** filled with rhubarb cream; if a test of enjoyment is measured by residue on the face then I’d venture that it passed. The rest of us plumped for the salted caramel mousse, expertly squirted into our glasses by our lovely waitress who then advised that we sprinkled it with salt (explaining its presence on the table). DELICIOUS, fun and light, and the perfect end to an immensely exciting evening (though thank goodness no baby arrived).

We left Flat Iron feeling thrilled and inspired. Needless to say, the BSG is on the hunt for an old soda canister to recreate the extraordinary pudding theatre at home (stand back - he rather fancies a savoury cheese soufflé version, coupled with blowtorch to brown the top) and I am pondering dream doughnut fillings; peanut butter and raspberry jam, anyone?

 

* Excuse the dingy photos, it really was dark in there.

**They serve doughnuts in the bar downstairs where you can gorge on them before you have your supper… Why the heck not? If my 7-year old self ran a restaurant, I’d have definitely made this rule.

Packing for the beach: sand-proof picnic

Ah, the seaside. Sweeping views, breezes, sandcastles and picnics. You sit back, the sun on your face and the wind in your hair and let the fresh air permeate. Now time for lunch, you unwrap your carefully made sandwich (make sure it’s yours though, with the special mark you made – you don’t want the dry-looking one), bite into the soft roll and get the unmistakeable grind of sand between your teeth. How the devil did that get in there? Split seconds from cling-film to mouth - unbelievable!

It may be fun for building with and burying people in, but when it comes to food, sand is an evil grain with many cunning plans. If your chosen bite falls to the ground with a thuck, you can forget it; it is irretrievable (except maybe if you’re a dog, but I know some fussy dogs). No, for a worry-free shore-side lunch, you need to come up with food that exposes as little of itself as possible to this elements, but remains as exciting and varied as picnic food can be.

I think we may have found a solution.

 

Last Saturday was scorchio, so a secret seven hit our local beach at Brancaster. The unfathomable Brit beach-going rule that ‘the nearer the car park and toilets the better’* meant that we had a huge stretch of it pretty much to ourselves. Not ones to miss a picnic opportunity like this, we took some sandwiches - two, actually. And they were HUGE. We hadn’t so much made these as packed them: two loaf suitcases rammed with flavoursome delights, one all hunter-gatherer and the other perhaps a bit more metrosexual (well, it has more veg in it). Both were free from the mountain of cling-film hell and the guesswork that accompanies so many beach outings. In the battle against the sand invasion, these brutes are all the food you’ll need, I promise. They’re neat, they’re fun to make and a bit like cake, sharing one makes you feel you’re all at a party (there’s also something rather grown-up about bringing a chopping board to a picnic…)

The first, manlier of the two (but refined – like Tom Ford) was the Shooter’s Sandwich, which G had read about courtesy of Tim Hayward on the Guardian food blog earlier this year. Over came the link and down went the gauntlet. This comprised well-seasoned steaks cooked medium-rare, whipped straight out of the hot pan and laid into a hollowed-out long loaf, lined with mustard and/or horseradish and smothered in a savoury, duxelles-type thing. Once the mustard-slathered bread lid is replaced, the whole thing is wrapped in greaseproof paper and string, weighed down with books/saucepans of water/chopping boards and left in a cool place (you’d be amazed how much debate surrounded this particular stage at one in the morning – GCSE Physics, was it? Everyone was an expert.) After an uncomfortable night under the press, the precious package was richly squished with savoury juices and ready to be transported, carved and consumed. Minimum fuss: maximum excitement.

As we did it in a wine-fuelled frenzy in the wee hours I have no photos of the process, but here’s the ‘after’.

I more than made up for it the next morning when we started on the second sanger, based on a New Orleans invention, the Muffuletta. It is a picnic in a sandwich.

This involved a sundried tomato and olive mush made in the food processor with which we lined our hollow loaf, partnered with liberal glugs of green olive oil.

Then alternating layers of Parma ham, salami, Taleggio cheese and roasted red peppers were carefully added.

If I were to be really picky, it perhaps could have done with some more green in the form of avocados – but these would have quickly turned brown so perhaps courgettes and basil instead – I confess that I am prone to over-packing. Nevertheless, that’s the beauty of it: anything goes. To be honest, it would have benefited from the overnight torture the Shooter’s Sandwich had received, being a bit drier and less yielding (perhaps more olive oil required?) Who knows, but it was delicious, fun to build and sand-free. I am very much looking forward to experimenting with the next one.

*Two miles of wide, dune-backed beach and the 50 metres around the entrance is a labyrinth of windbreakers, killer stunt-kites** and orange Crocs.

**Having seen it with my own eyes, it is perfectly possible (probable) that such a stunt kite when badly driven is capable of grounding and swallowing a hefty teenage boy – especially when said bad driver is their dad. It is also absolutely hilarious; just ask his mother.

A time to gather

I know this blog primarily centres on taste but, in terms of memories and associations, smells are equally evocative, if not more so. How appropriate that wood smoke, a breath of it lacing the evening mist as we arrived in Norfolk on Friday, is for me a comforting scent of home. It transports me to countless afternoons spent clearing (ragging about in) woods as children, building huge bonfires with Dad and Grandpa and watching them crackle. Then if we were very lucky we’d wave a marshmallow on a stick at the embers until the doughy white skin blistered brown and started to ooze. This was usually the stage at which we lost them to the fire, making the eating all the more pleasurable.

Despite recent Indian Summer-like days, those damp mushroomy notes of autumn have returned to the countryside; the perfect accompaniment to the spike of smoke, pricking our nostrils and calling to our olfactory gear just as the springtime called Mr. Mole out of his burrow in The Wind in the Willows. It makes you want to wrap up and get outside for walks, to light the fire and be cosy. On Friday we ate at our warm and welcoming local pub, The Dabbling Duck, which was celebrating British Food Fortnight with some very British dishes, steak and kidney puddings and crumble with custard among them. The BSG’s Lancashire Hotpot didn’t touch the sides. I plumped for fish in a golden batter, with enormous chips and minted mushy peas – it was Friday after all!

Each season brings its own welcome scents; one of the roses in the garden smells so sweet, like the most delicate cup of tea imaginable, its petal-packed heads flower twice a year. At the height of summer, the swathes of lavender under the windows exude a heady fragrance, as they heave with bees (which incidentally have a very keen sense of smell – honeybees have been trained to detect landmines), clamouring for their hit, and as the heads are warmed by the sun, by the evening it is intoxicating. However there is a power to autumn’s earthy aromas, when evidence of nature’s industry is in such abundance, and something deeper, winter, waits beneath the surface. The hedgerows heave with berries, fruits and seedpods, furnishing their occupants with storable riches before they close down for the year.

Thoughts drift to mushroom-hunting excursions amongst the leaf litter - until you realise that Nature being Nature doesn’t make any one thing that looks like the photo in the fungi book, but rather several of them. Which is it; the ‘slow agonising death on ingestion’ one or the ‘very nice with toast’? The ensuing 45 minutes is spent flicking though the book several times to make absolutely sure, then abandon the mission in favour of the more hazardous in appearance but far lower fatal-seizure-risk chestnut (nut allergy sufferers excepted). As I write this I am lunching on a velvety mushroom soup: I am sure that the very nice person who picked these enjoys the fact that their patch isn’t full of idiots keeling over every half hour, so I’d say its definitely something best left to people who know, save perhaps a couple of flat field mushrooms from a damp pasture – and you know what they grow out of…

Feeling guilty at the drifts of apples littering the garden, uneaten and neglected, the BSG and I decided to bring them back and make them into a chutney or 20. And we didn’t stop there – at his Mum’s house we took pity on some unripe green peaches and he ploughed through the cookery books until he found a pickle to include them. Our kitchen has become a job-centre for unemployed fruit. Thank goodness we take in homeless jars, too. While we were at it, why not pickle some red cabbage too? Speaking of smells, the eye-watering sting of malt vinegar is not something I miss once it’s gone…

I am not averse to the odd present, and when the BSG returned from a recent work trip he gave me a pot of gold. Wow. A proper giant’s jar of French moutarde, in a rustic-looking (read more expensive) ceramic pot - which I’ll hang on to for storing salt - it has a very pleasing sulphur colour and a sharp tang. Even luckier for me then, that the BSG served up a perfect rare steak, served on sliced beetroot slicked in horseradish and a crisp green salad to celebrate its first outing. I hear you say that horseradish AND mustard is a belt and braces approach to a steak, but I couldn’t resist.