Steak with porcini mushroom cream sauce and pommes dauphinoise

For the main course of my home-cooked anniversary dinner, I had wanted to make steak aux morilles. This was one of my favourite dishes during my two-year stint in Geneva, when my family made regular trips to a nearby bistro to devour juicy steaks topped with this rich, creamy mushroom sauce.

Morel mushrooms are wrinkled and hollow with an incredible flavour: earthy, musky and delicious, they work fantastically with meat and in creamy gravies, and are capable of elevating a traditional mushroom sauce to something quite special.

Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to find anywhere I could buy these in the UK (I naively thought they may have some in Waitrose), and a quick look on the internet sees dried morels being sold for upwards of £60! So, I decided to go with porcini mushrooms instead.

For the steak and mushroom sauce:

Ingredients

2 good quality steaks (I used fillet steak)

Generous handful of dried porcini mushrooms (or dried morels, if you can find/afford them!)

Single cream, around 150ml

Begin by placing the dried porcini mushrooms in a bowl, and covering with boiling water from the kettle. Leave to steep for around 20 minutes. 

Meanwhile, heat a griddle pan with a splash of cooking oil until extremely hot (if you're unsure, add a tiny fleck of meat - it should sizzle up immediately). Add the steaks and cook according to instructions on the packet, and preference. It's usually around eight minutes (four on each side) for a rare steak, but this will of course vary with the thickness of the meat!

Remove from the pan and plate up - you can leave the steaks for a minute or two while you make your sauce without any ill effects to the taste.

Drain the water from the porcini mushrooms (note: if you're making a risotto or a stew, reserve the steeping liquid and add it to your dish, as it picks up a really good flavour from the mushrooms). Using the same pan as you did for the steak, add the soaked mushrooms, a knob of butter, and your cream. 

Turn the heat right down, and stir until the cream sauce has picked up all the delicious meaty residue from the bottom of the pan and your mushrooms are heated through. Pour the sauce over the meat, and serve.

Alongside the steak and mushroom sauce we had brussels sprouts (steamed for around five minutes until al dente) and dauphinoise potatoes.

I have to admit, while not a fan of ready meals in general, I've always been happy to cheat with dauphinoise potatoes: they're a perfect side for a meat and two veg style meal (a bit more interesting than plain old spuds), but far too fiddly to make from scratch on a weeknight. So, with no prior experience of making this dish, I was a bit apprehensive at how it would turn out (and how difficult it might be!)

I made a huge portion, and still have a couple of individual servings in my freezer (to be used in the place of the ready meal variety in the future).

Ingredients

1kg baking potatoes

2 cloves of garlic

150ml single cream (plus extra as needed)

250ml double cream

Salt and pepper, to taste

Optional: Gruyere cheese (for a melted cheese topping), or parmesan - I chose not to use any cheese as I felt it would be overkill after my cheesy souffle starter.

Start by peeling your potatoes, and slicing them into rounds of roughly the same thickness as a £1 coin. Place your potato slices into a colander, rinse thoroughly with cold water, and pat dry on a tea towel.

In a jug, measure out your single and double cream, and add the grated garlic cloves and plenty of salt and pepper. Stir to combine.

Lightly butter an oven-proof dish, and cover the bottom with an overlapping layer of potato slices. Season with salt and pepper, and cover with some of the cream mixture. Repeat this process until you run out of potato rounds, alternating layers of potato with the cream mixture. 

Make sure the top layer of potatoes is fully covered in cream. This is especially important if you are not putting in the oven immediately, as raw potatoes quickly start to go grey when left in the air. Covering them with cream gives you an hour or two's grace and allows you to get on with the rest of your cooking in the meantime.

When you're ready, place you dish near the top of a pre-heated oven at 160C (140C for a fan oven) and bake for around 90 minutes (or until the potatoes are soft), checking periodically that the top is not burning. If it starts to get too brown, cover with a layer of tin foil for the remainder of the cooking period.

Stand to cool for around 10 minutes before serving (straight from the oven, this will be extremely hot). You should aim to take the dauphinoise potatoes out to cool at around the same time as you begin cooking your steak.

So, there you go: a fairly decent attempt at a traditional french meal. Unfortunately mushroom sauce and creamy potatoes aren't the most compelling photo subject...but I promise, it tasted a lot better than it looks!!!

Seafood supper at the Bonnie Gull Seafood Shack

Bonnie Gull started life as a pop-up in 2011, serving up excellent seafood - and a good dose of seaside nostalgia - from a pie 'n' mash shop in Hackney. One year later, and the popular seafood shack has been reborn as a permanent restaurant, newly ensconced in a cosy venue just north of Oxford Street.

Despite its reincarnation, Bonnie Gull still feels very much like a seafood shack: with driftwood panelling,  blue and white-striped awning, and a muted colour-scheme, it has a distinctly coastal feel (even the barman was dressed in maritime stripes) - a little piece of the British seaside transported to the middle of the city.

It was fitting then, that the night of our visit was a wet one: blustery and cold, with rain beating down as we rushed from bus to restaurant, it was definitely reminiscent of childhood holidays by the sea. The restaurant is small - it only seats 26, and even that is a bit of a squeeze - but it felt companionable rather than cramped; the gentle buzz of chatter serving as a pleasant backdrop to our meal. An impressive focus on quality ingredients is very much in evidence: the menu changes daily according to the catch, and the restaurant is closed on Mondays because (as the manager informs me) "Monday is not a good day for sourcing seafood":

On the day of our meal, starters range from deep fried Mersea sardines to Isle of Man scallops (with chorizo, lemon puree and spinach), while the main course menu features grey and red mullet, wild sea trout, battered haddock, and plaice. There are even some non-seafood options (the sample menu on the website includes woodland pigeon ballotine and venison steak) - although (vegetarians aside) it would seem a travesty to order anything other than seafood in such a place.

In addition to the main menu, Bonnie Gull has an extenstive raw bar selection, serving clams, winkles, whelks, cockles, razor clams and languistines, as well as three types of oysters. My boyfriend overrode my initial squeamishness and ordered us a couple of razor clams. Arriving in their shells, balanced upon a dish of ice, these were excellent - meltingly tender, with a clean 'sea' flavour, they went perfectly with the accompanying 'shack' cocktail sauce.

While the starters all looked excellent - I was particularly tempted by smoked rainbow trout with potato pancakes, beetroot and horseradish - we decided to share a main course item as our first course: the whole Devon cock crab, with shack mayo and sourdough sounded too good to miss, but on a night such as this we were both in the mood for something a bit more warming for our main.

The crab was large and satisyingly meaty, with plenty of sweet crab flesh waiting to be extracted from the legs and claws piled up in the centre of the wooden serving board. The main shell had been hollowed out and filled with a deliciously rich crab mayonnaise, which we smeared onto the accompanying slice of toasted sourdough and drizzled over our salad. However, a word of warning: while we enjoyed this dish, I would probably not recommend it for people on a first date, as a few 'crab juice in face' incidents did arise from our enthusiastic claw-cracking. Very romantic!

For my main course I went for the plaice in caper beurre noisette. This was absolutely exquisite - the incredibly succulent, crispy-skinned plaice fillet lay in a pool of nutty brown butter, scattered with capers and dainty girolle mushrooms... I could easily have eaten it three times over, and have been craving it ever since!

My boyfriend opted for the fish soup. While this couldn't quite live up to my ridiculously delicious plaice, it was still very good: bursting with big chunks of salmon and juicy mussels, and threaded with strands of samphire, it was thick and extremely flavourful; perhaps a little too salty, but hearty and filling none the less.

However I do think that - given the excellent quality of the seafood here - it may be best to go for the plainer options on the menu: when it's this good, you simply can't beat unadulturated fish. Our neighbours went for the grey and red mullet - the former served alongside Anya potatoes and black olive sauce and the latter with fennel, pickled grapes and Pernod - and both looked stunningly good. (On the other hand, the seaside decor does make the battered haddock and chips a tempting choice!)

Along with the exceptional fish, the venue itself has plenty of character - the toilets, labelled 'winkles' and 'clams'*, were a nice touch - and with the charming concept backed up by excellent food, Bonnie Gull looks to be highly succesful: on the night of our visit, there were even some people braving the blustery Autumn night to sit outside! Unlike many of London's trendy new restaurants, Bonnie Gull does take bookings - but with limited space I'm sure their tables will fill up fast, so you had best get in there! I'll certainly be coming back next time I'm in the mood for some fish.

*Worringly, it took me more than a few seconds to work out which I was...

A fancy french dinner for a special occasion

Five years ago last Tuesday, my boyfriend and I 'officially' started going out*. To celebrate having put up with each other for so long, and to distract from how tragically old this made us (read: me) feel, I decided to prepare a special dinner to mark the occasion.

Anniversary flowers

Occasions like this are the perfect opportunity to try something new in the kitchen - with just the two of us, there's less pressure than a dinner party, both in terms of scale, and expectations (after five years the relationship is unlikely to suffer excessively from a culinary mishap or two!) - so with that in mind, I decided to try a few new things.

Anniversary champagne

I chose a 'french-ish' theme for the menu, although this was derailed somewhat by my boyfriend's insistence that we have banoffee pie for dessert**.

Menu

Frisee salad with cheese, sliced pear, and caramelised pecans
Double swiss souffles
Steak with a cream and porcini mushroom sauce, potatoes dauphinoise, and brussel sprouts
Banoffee pie

Given the number of recipes involved, I'll split this post into three. So, to begin at the beginning, let's talk about the starters:


The frisee salad was relatively simple to make. Aside from caramelising the pecans and mixing up a vinaigrette, it really only involved layering everything onto a plate.

Ingredients

1 pear (this should be ripe - mine wasn't)
Cheese (something which goes well with pears - most recipes call for blue cheese, if you're into that!)
Frisee salad leaves
Caramelised pecans
Grain mustard vinaigrette

I was a bit disappointed in the cheese - I bought it from a stall at Borough Market over the weekend, and had specifically asked the man on the counter for something that would go well with pears, but it wasn’t quite right. I'm not sure what it was actually called, but it was a hard cow’s milk cheese, quite strong and salty; somewhere between gruyere and pecorino.

The caramelised pecans were a bit more successful, adding a pleasant sweetness to the salad. They were especially lovely when included in a mouthful with pear, salad leaves, and grain mustard vinaigrette.

Caramelised pecans, cooling on their foil - yum!

Ingredients
(Note: this makes waaay more pecans than you need for the salad - but the leftovers are pretty tasty!)

250g pecans
25g butter
50g sugar

Add the butter, sugar and pecans to a saucepan, and heat until the caramel is smooth (that is, when all the sugar is fully dissolved) and has taken on a rich brown colour. Spread the caramelised pecans onto a layer of tin foil to cool, then store in a airtight container in the fridge until ready to use.

These seem to keep pretty well - I made them the day before my salad, and took the leftovers in to work the day after that, and there was no noticeable deterioration in texture or taste.

I went with a grain mustard vinaigrette, but this would probably also be nice with a sweeter dressing - I saw some pear salad recipes which used maple syrup in their vinaigrette, which could be nice.

Ingredients

Grain mustard
Good olive oil (extra Virgin)
White wine vinegar (substitute this with lemon juice if you prefer)

Mix a heaped teaspoon of grain mustard with equal parts olive oil and vinegar. Whisk together with a fork, and you're done.

To assemble your salad, start with a layer of frisee salad leaves. Top with slices of pear and  cheese, sprinkle with the caramelised pecans, and drizzle with vinaigrette.

This is a simple starter: it's not too filling, and served nicely as something to whet the appetite before the cream fest to come (what with the souffles, dauphinoise potatoes, and bannoffee pie, I used a LOT of cream in this meal!)

The double swiss souffles were the stars of the show. I have had these once before in a restaurant, and loved them, but have always been too scared to attempt a souffle myself, let alone a 'double' souffle...In fact they were laughably simple to make:

I used the recipe from Mary Berry's Complete Cookbook***. It's worth reading it through before you start, as everything needs to be done at once, so it definitely helps to have done some preparation before you put make the roux!

Ingredients 
(Note: the original recipe serves six, so I scaled it down to serve the two of us)

15g butter, plus extra for greasing
15g plain flour
100ml milk
20g Gruyere cheese, grated (I used the leftover cheese from my salad)
1 egg, seperated
20g grated parmesan
100ml double cream

You will also need: 2 ramekins, a small roasting tin (to serve as a bain marie) and a shallow oven proof dish.

Step 1: Melt the butter in a non-stick saucepan, add the flour, and stir together for one minute. Remove from the heat and gradually blend in the milk, before returning to the heat and bringing the mixture to the boil, stirring until it thickens.

Step 2: Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the grated Gruyere cheese and the egg yolks (make sure you stir quickly so the egg yolk doesn't start to cook!)

Step 3: Whisk the egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Stir 1 tbsp into the mixture, before folding in the rest.

Step 4: Generously butter two ramekins, and divide the mixture between them. Place the ramekins into your small roasting tin and pour boiling water into the tin until it comes half way up the sides of the ramekins.

Step 5: Bake the souffles in a pre-heated oven at 220C (200C if you have a fan oven) for 15-20 minutes until golden and springy to the touch (mine were done after 15 minutes). Leave the souffles to stand for 5-10 minutes; they will shrink by about one third. (I left mine for 5 minutes, because I'm impatient!)

Step 6: Butter your shallow oven proof dish. Sprinkle half your parmesan cheese over the bottom of the dish. Run a knife around the edge of each souffle, then carefully un-mould them onto the parmesan layer.

Step 7: Season the double cream with salt and pepper, and pour over the souffles. (Note: if your dish is too large, you may need extra cream to cover the bottom. I topped mine up with some single cream, just to stop everything from drying out. If you're making six souffles with 300ml cream, this probably won't be a problem) Sprinkle the remaining parmesan over the top and return to the oven for 15-20 minutes until golden.

Mary Berry serves her souffles garnished with chopped chives: my boyfriend hates them, so I missed this step out.

OK - so one of them collapsed a little. Still, not bad for a first attempt!

So - there were my starters! Recipes for main course and dessert to come...

 *we were 18, so by official, I of course mean "facebook official". If it's not on facebook, it doesn't count...

**disappointingly, as my addiction to The Great British Bake Off has had me itching to try my hand at choux pastry

***This really is a fantastic cookbook: with almost 500 pages of recipes, it covers a huge array of different dishes, and is incredibly handy to have on your kitchen shelf!

Smiths of Smithfield

I love Smithfield Market: the oldest and largest wholesale meat market in the UK, it transforms each morning into an unlikely meeting of besuited office workers and white-coated butchers; coffee-clutching bankers side-stepping huge wheelie bins of animal carcasses on their way to the City.

The surrounding area is home to a number of fantastic restaurants, many of which source their meat from the nearby market. One such place is Smiths of Smithfield (S.O.S.) - split into four floors, each with a different menu and ambience, the overarching focus is on good quality meat used in solid, well-thought-out dishes.

I recently ended up visiting twice in one week - once with a group of work friends, for a boozy meal in the Second Floor "Dining Room", and once for a relaxed weekend brunch on the Ground Floor.

DINNER

The evening meal in the Dining Room - an atmospheric, dimly-lit, loft-style eating space - was extremely good. The twelve of us were seated on a square table, three on each side; a seating arrangement we found far preferable to being spread out over a long rectangular table. The food was excellent, and pretty good value too: drinks and mains, plus a couple of shared puddings and a few coffees came to £34 a head - not bad at all, given the quantity of wine imbubed.

I went for the rib steak, which was absolutely delicious: meltingly tender, it boasted a powerful chargrilled flavour (the scent drifting up from my plate as I waited impatiently for everyone else's dishes to arrive...). I swapped the chips for seasonal vegetables: consisting of a large portion of courgette and squash cooked in a light garlic butter, these were surprisingly tasty for the 'healthy' option.

Other members of our group opted for impressive looking "Smiths" burgers (chunky patties topped with melted cheese and tomato relish and draped with a strip of bacon, served alongside a bucket of tasty fat chips); a large portion of roast lamb (the special of the day, for two to share - two generous cuts of meat sitting astride a pile of roast potatoes, with a jug of mint sauce on the side); tender salt beef with horseradish and spring onion mash; a colourful risotto primavera; and slow-roast pork belly with salsa verde.

Only two of my colleagues ordered dessert, but I managed to sneak a spoonful of both! Sticky toffee pudding, topped with a creamy scoop of vanilla ice-cream and drenched in a gorgeously rich caramel sauce, was exceptionally good. White chocolate and berry cheesecake (which may have been a special of the day, as I couldn't see it on the menu) was also delicious: firm, crumbly baked cheesecake studded with sweet berries and drizzled with a swirl of fruit coulis.

http://www.smithsofsmithfield.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/SOS_DiningRoom_samplemenu.pdf

BRUNCH

Brunch, a few days later, came after a heavy night out (in Infernos no less - we like to keep it classy!). By day, the ground floor bar area doubles as a casual dining room. Light and airy, with warehouse chic decor (all exposed beams and chrome air vents) and big communal tables, the atmosphere is laid-back and family-friendly, with a relaxed buzz of chatter forming the back-drop to your meal.

Along with another of my friends, I ordered a Full English. It wasn't perfect: the toast (topped with scrambled eggs) was soggy, and the bacon - neither smoked nor browned - was a bit rubbery and quite 'pork-y' (if that makes any sense). However, I have very high standards: to be fair to the chef, fried mushrooms, eggs and sausage were all perfectly fine, roast tomato was good, bubble and squeak (a tasty patty of mash and greens) was very palatable, and my friend liked the black pudding (which I don't eat, so am unable to comment upon).

My other friends went for a bacon sandwich (more of that rubbery bacon, although he didn't complain) and a chicken burger, which looked pretty good - although not quite as tasty as the burgers enjoyed by my colleagues a few nights before.

Our brunch ended up lasting somewhat longer than we'd expected, with an interminable downpour of torrential rain causing us to be trapped there for over four hours, but we were happy to linger.

The waitresses, while friendly enough, were a bit distracted. It was incredibly hard to get their attention, and even when we did manage to catch their eye, they kept rushing off mid-way through our order (which became pretty comical the 3rd or 4th time it happened!)

Despite the avoidant waitresses, we did manage to order in a few rounds of drinks - the usual teas, coffees and juices, and, later on (as the rain outside continued...) some more interesting beverages. I ordered a coke float (this wasn't on the menu, but they obliged me by dropping a scoop of ice-cream into my drink), while two of my friends upped the stakes by opting for alcoholic milkshakes.

They both went for the same drink - the Brandy Alexander, a concoction consisting of brandy, frangelico, vanilla and chocolate ice - which was delicious, although very rich! (I might have to go back to try the Apple Crumble - a delectable blend of apple schnapps, goldschlager, vanilla ice, and crumbled biscuit).

http://www.smithsofsmithfield.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/SOS_Ground_brunch.pdf

OVERALL

The good food and laid-back atmopshere - not to mention the handy location mid-way between my flat and my office - means that I'll definitely be heading back to Smiths of Smithfield. I'd love to check out the swanky Top Floor menu, or go for drinks in the Wine Rooms.

Also, while I didn't discover this until after we had left (my friend thought I would be too obvious and didn't tell me!), it turns out James McAvoy (of X-Men fame) was sitting further down our table as we ate our brunch!!! So, as well as being a great place to go for a hearty meal, Smiths could be a good spot for some celebrity spotting!