the best thing about working in Chiswick is...

...is this place, and the amazing smell of brewing



At least once a week, a delicious malty smell comes wafting through the windows of our office thanks to the Fuller's Griffin brewery down the road. Imagine the smell if you baked a loaf of bread containing a large amount of malty Ovaltine. Delicious. Also makes me happy to think that I'll be drinking the results of this delicious smell in a mere few weeks time. Yum.

The sushi post

Is coming. Holidays and forgetting where you've put your digital camera can really slow down this posting malarky. Also coming: the best soup in the world. Really.

roast chicken

This is the best part of a roast chicken dinner: the sticky, delicious left-overs.

'Left-overs' isn't really the right word: one or two more entire meals, plus sandwiches are sitting on this plate not six feet away and there's nothing left-over ish about them (aside from the meat, stuffing and mayo sandwiches: surely the best meal of the lot?)

As I type this, I haven't yet performed the lovely chore that is stripping the meat from the bones, but I've already planned exactly where every ounce of this chicken is going. 

Sandwiches on Monday and Tuesday, and lovely vaguely Japanese spicy chicken noodles in delicious chickeny broth tomorrow. Normally I'd use the meat on Monday and the stock on Tuesday but due to being out on Tuesday, a Monday chicken blow-out it is. 

Tomorow also sees my first ever attempt at making sushi. The rice, mirin, rice wine, seaweed etc as well as a cucumber and some salmon (smoked - sacrilege, I know, but this is a practice run and using good fish on what will probably be entirely disasterous sushi is an even greater sacrilege) is piled up excitingly in the kitchen. I'm prepared for, and even rather looking forward to messy and potentially collapsing culinary disaster tomorrow, esp after a Christmas season of failure-is-not-an-option high-pressure meals, cakes and chocolate gift-making.

sprouts

Not liking sprouts doesn't mean I don't eat them. Historically, I've had between two and four every Christmas, partly due to famillial festive pressure and partly because every year I think that my palate will have matured enough to appreciate their bitter cabbage-y-ness. I like cabbage, so sprouts should be a logical step.

I've cooked them before under duress - usually chopped up with enough honey and nuts (chestnuts or almonds) to please Mr Kellogg (sprout lovers tell me this is delicious - I felt it a waste of potential cake ingredients). But following much pleading in Sainsburys from bf (who loves them), decided to buy a stalkful. They did look nice on the stalk.

This is them: cooked with pancetta, butter, half a red onion and (a little bit of) caraway. They were boiled for a few minutes first, and then added to the rest of the mixture, and were still nice and crunchy inside when we ate them. And I don't know if it was the cold taking the edge off my tastebuds, but I actually thought they were pretty nice. Which is s good job, as there's still half a stalkful in the cupboard that need using up. Bf very pleased.

On the left of them is a lamb steak from Gonalston Farm Shop in Nottinghamshire (full love letter to Gonalston to come over next few weeks). God it was gorgeous. As you might be able to tell, there's a little bit of rosemary on the top, the fat is deliciously crispy and it is beautifully pink inside. What you can't tell from that picture is how meltingly delicious it was. I'm licking my lips as I type.

olbas oil

What a great time to start blogging about food. Terrible cold, no sense of smell or taste. Even Olbas oil, until last night, wasn't getting through.

As a result, everything (outside of breakfast) has had to have a different kind of flavour - something you can feel in your mouth, like chilli or bitterness. I've eaten a noodle broth with so much chilli that it made my eyes water and two types of curried soup (one homemade, recipe to follow) and one amazingly nice one from Waitrose (Keralan Chicken? Possibly.) Bitter chocolate is nice, in a different kind of way. It's weird, as when your sense of smell is fully intact, you almost completely lose this bizarre feeling on your tongue.

The other half is back tonight, and while my tastebuds are loving bitter flavours, I'm taking the opportunity to cook sprouts (with pancetta, honey and caraway - in theory this should work...) which he loves. Hopefully this will be the night that I finally learn to love them too. Or else, not being able to taste will be some sort of consolation. Talking of consolation: going to Sufi on Saturday. That is incentive enough to recover, if I ever needed one.