I’ve been to Gerswhins, which is on (or under) Dean Street before, but for a quick pre-gig meal. This time was a more leisured affair. The place is underground, in a wine cellar. It’s dimly light, from 100s of fibre optic strands from the ceiling. It’s a jazz resturant apparently. So, later in the evening, they had caberet; a guy in a dinner jacket, crooning to a recording backing track. He was actually pretty good, very professional and a competent singer; half-way through a Sinatra melody, an older couple, very elegantly dressed—man in blazer and tie, woman in skirt and formal top—started wheeling around the dance floor (that is the small gap between the tables). The woman looked happy and entertained, the man dignified and serene, although I noticed a momentary look of relief as he got to sit down again.

I could help thinking that the dimness was partly to cover up the flaws; there was a ice bucket hidden partly next and partly under my seat, catching drips from the ceiling; or at least the ones which didn’t fall on me. The toilets were dark, but with spotlight urinals which were stainless steel; the parabolic bowls shined the light back bright enough to burn your retinas; while engaged, however, my head blocked the light and, already half-blinded, meant I had to aim using echo location. And one of the taps was not screwed in properly, rotating Exorcist style rather than producing water.

A strange night; Gershwins is a bit tacky, but gets away with it for some reason; it was both elegant and naff simultaneously, which should be impossible.

Oh, yeah, and the food. I had a pepper and courgette soup followed by a mushroom curry; they were both excellent, even if the curry was a bit pokey. I had a pepper soup a couple of weeks ago (on the Grand Canyon of all places) which was lovely, so perhaps I should try this.

Originally published on my old blog site.

After my last experience with rice, I decided to get straight-back in there. Bought some more, and cooked it with beans and stuff. Managed to overcook the rice, which I haven’t done for a while.

I’ve been thinking about why I’ve started to each so many beans recently; then it came to me. I’ve got salad obsessed recently. My fridge is smaller than my freezer. Salad goes into the fridge, beans the freezer. It’s all perfectly logical.

Originally published on my old blog site.

How the world has changed. Once upon a time, rice was my main staple. I used to eat tons of the stuff. Nowadays, I have a more varied staple diet: noodles, pasta, bread, wheat, cous-cous, rice and, of course, the occasional tattie. While I was cooking some rice last night, I noticed to my dismay that it had got some infection — small mites by the look of things which, fortunately float obviously on top of the water.

I’ve had a 10kg bag of rice in my house for most of my adult life, but I fear now that I have seen my last. I shall be buying 2kg bags in future.

The mites were incredible though; it’s wonderful to me that a thing so small, smaller than this comma, can be a complete multi-cellular organism. Wonder what species they were?

Originally published on my old blog site.

The inspiration for tonights meal was by from my brother, who did me something like this a while back. A bean salad, with bread essentially.

Very simple: tin of mixed beans which I have had for quite a while — I think fresh would have been better; some fresh garlic, lightly chopped; olive oil; pepper; balsamic vinegar and lime juice. Served with an undressed green salad (with addition carrot and and parsnip), eaten with one of those boil-in-the-bag batton loafs.

Very simple, very nice. Back for more.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Having been in Vienna for a week, I thought I would comment on the food. In general, it’s very good. I can’t point my finger at a single bad meal (although several inappropriate ones — more later). The most common kind of food that I eat was Italian. As a world cuisine, it has the advantage of being the least offensive to all concerned. Both resturants that we tried were good; one of them managed to achieve a feet that I would have not believed possible and cooked a meal which might just have had too much garlic (gnocchi in garlic, chilli and olive oil). I eat Austrian food twice. One resturant mostly served boiled cow; here, I had Chanterelle mushrooms in white sauce which were nice, although the meal needed more variation. The other was for the conference dinner — queues were long, everything was meat, with the exception of fried, battered vegetables. The wine was not very good either. I think beer would have worked better for a meal consisting largely of bones. In general, conference meals were good though, although occasionally dull. The salads were really nice, although they kept running out. I guess the Viennese eat these as garnish, and served them in quantities appropriate for this.

The two highlights, though, were the the bakeries. I had croissant and coffee everyday. The coffee was rich, strong and without bitterness, while the croissants were delicious. The only exception here were the two breakfasts I had in the Ibis Hotel where I was staying; the croissant were stale and tasteless. And, finally, last night we found a Japanese. Not the greatest I’ve ever been too, but it hit the spot. The food was pleantiful, cheap and well cooked. I ended up having a second main meal, although we split it between two of us.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Blackfriars is a very posh resturant in Newcastle. I’ve been there a couple of times, and the food is reasonably good. On monday, I eat there; the veggie option is small but looked reasonable. I went for the stuffed aubergine in the end. It came with breadcrumbs and ratatouille (that is the contents of the aubergine cooked in tomato), rather than the cous cous that was on the menu; a pity as it happens, as the whole thing was rather too dry; something that would probably not have affected the cous cous.

In general, it’s confirmed my opinion. Blackfrairs is okay, but when you get down to it a polysyllabic menu, and artful arrangement on the plate does not make up for the unspiried dishes and a lack of flair for vegetarian food by the chef.

Course, the meat might be great. I can’t comment.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Went to the Cafe de Vie for lunch today. It’s quite nice inside, although would be better without the music. The menu was okay, rather than inspired: it’s basically posh sarnies, italian style, served by the French. The food looked okay on the counter.

Their service was interesting: the heated food (toasted sandwiches, sorry panini’s) was very slow to come. When it did come, the waitress described it in French, and seemed genuinely surprised to be answered in English. Everyone else got their food, but mine never appeared. I went and asked; they had forgotten.

So, no idea at all what the food is like, but I can say that it did offer a genuine and authentic French experience.

Originally published on my old blog site.

In the shop today, I noticed that they had some frozen soy beans. So, I thought I would give them a go. I’ve always been a fan of edamame that you get in Japanese food shops, so I decided to try and replicate it. Sort of. The beans were not in pods and I don’t have a steamer.

In the end, I boiled them with some fresh garlic that I had, strained, the water of, tossed them with chilli olive oil and soy sauce (heat and salt), strained the excess and eat them. Nice actually. Needed a bit more than the 4 minutes simmer the packet said, so I ended up giving them a quick microwave.

Not bad, although not exactly refined. I need to work on this one.

The rest of the mean was dry, curried tofu and chickpeas, a spinach curry and rice. Done this many times before. I need to do it more often, not least as I appear to have 3 kilos of spinach in my freezer.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Tried a new technique last night; basically, I just slow, shallow fried large lumbs of tofu. After a while, once they had sealed, I threw in some cayenne, garlic and, then, some Udon noodles with a bit of stock to let them cook.

Worked pretty well, as it happens. Took ages, as you’d expect from a bit lump of tofu, but required little effort.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Did a Spicy Tofu in Pitta as Simon and Rina were coming up. I thought they might be late, and we’d be in a hurry (they were, we were), so I wanted something easy to eat of the move.

This is incredible simple. I cut the tofu into blocks about 1cm x 1cm x 2cm. This goes into a frying pan with some rice vinegar, soy, and chilli sauce. This is all fried in, on a low heat for, well as long as you can be bothered to wait. Within reason, the longer the better, but an hour is a reasonable time. This is then served in pitta with salad. I added some felalal as wel, as I had it in the freezer.

We only had time for a quick bite each. However, we left the gig at 11 and the curse of Newcastle hit us, with all the food places closed and we scoffed the rest when we got back.

Originally published on my old blog site.

I tried a new tofu dish last night. Very simple. I boiled the tofu in a frying pan with a stock made from some tamarind stock cubes, oxo veggie cubes and some garlic flakes, flavoured with cumin and MSG. I also added some rice vinegar which turned out to be a mistake as it was far too sour — in the end, it needed sugar to perk it up. Anyway, after boiling the tofu and reducing the stock somewhat on the hob, I toasted the top under the grill. Then, finally, returned it to the hob, added a little water to dilute the stock again, and sprinkled on raw garlic and onion. Left this for a few minutes till the onion was soft, and eat with ramen noodles.

Worked quite well, in general. As is my usual practice, I’ll probably do the same dish again tonight, while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Tried a garlic broth this week, with garlic flakes. Think that this was a mistake; a couple of bulbs of garlic would have been better. Essentially, I fried lots of garlic for a while with a some onion and then some stock. Then added tofu, potato and udon noodles.

The taste was fairly good, although it didn’t keep that well. The main problem was the colour; it was pretty palid looking and would have been better with, say, lots of soy in the broth base.

I will work on this; I like the concept of garlic as a main ingredient rather than a garnish.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Bought a copy of Bend it like Beckham a while back; personally, I disagree. I’d rather be able to cook Aloo Gobi than kick a curve ball. Fortunately, I can, I did. Yeah, it was alright.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Have been suffering from a problem; due to some over-exuberance, I’ve had to eat with a teaspoon for the last few days. Fortunately, on sunday I’d cooked some bulgar wheat with chickpeas. Today, was curried rice.

Very simple: garlic flakes, oil, pepper, black mustard seed, all fried. Then add rice vinegar and some soy. After a few minutes of frying put in a enough rice and fry it drish, then add enough water. Finally, spice with an Oxo cube, cumin, coriander, turmeric and add a small amount of tomato puree and chilli sauce.

To give it a bit of bulk, I added peas, broad beans and some quorn chicken. Turned out rather well, as it happens. Takes about 15 minutes in total.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Simple meal today; onion, a suede and quorn mince, fried for a while (yes, with chili and garlic flakes), then simmered with tomato puree, and thicked with Oxo cubes and gravy granules. Add mashed potato, peas, beans and spinach. Thick, warm and filling. Pity, really, that I got around to this just as the weather is starting to get warm.

And, yes, it should have been a pie. I’ve clearly been scared by the pastry experience of last weekend.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Decided to do sausage rolls and beans after a hill walk on sunday. Nice idea, but I turned out to have no beans, no self-raising flour and forgot to put fat into the pastry. The pastry was solid. The sausage actually worked okay, though. Some dodgy Sosmix from down the road. Just add boiling water. I put in spinach and garlic flakes into the water first, and lots of pepper.

Pretty good, actually.

Originally published on my old blog site.

I used to think that aduki beans were a joke from the Beano. When I was a kid, Baby Face Finlayson used to eat them after coming up with some dastardly scheme.

More recently, I discovered that they were real. So I tried cooking them last night. Rather nice, as it happens.

The meal was this:

• tofu
• red onion
• garlic flakes
• rice vinegar
• soy sauce

All of this was fried in garlic flavoured olive oil, tofu first with the soy and vinegar till brown and then all the rest dumped in. This was eaten with rice, with peas and broad beans, with a light drizzle of liquidizied chilli.

Very nice as it happens. The aduki beans taste like a cross between baked and kidney beans, but didn’t overwhelm the rest of the meal.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Decided to try the curry house from a few nights ago, as I was on the Quayside last night. I think it’s called "the Rasa" but I forgot to write it down. Sadly, it was suffering from the Newcastle disease — it was fully booked. I don’t understand why this is such a common problem here, but there you go.

Instead, we ended up next door at Vujon. It was okay. The seafood angle was well covered, but the veggie options were poor. I ended up with the set of side dishes option, which were adequate.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Finally got around to buying some garlic flakes that I saw being used in t a resturant a short while back. Combined with a bit of chilli, as well as being garlic flavoured, this are actually quite hot.

Cooked them with some potato, tofu, red onion and bulgar wheat. Very nice indeed.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Went out for a curry tonight, with an old friend of mine. Fortunately, he knows lots of nice places to eat in Newcastle; this is good, because, currently, I don’t.

I can’t remember the name of the place, but it’s near the Quayside, and rather pink. But the food was excellent. We had a daal, a strange pancake bread, a cabbage dish, dosa and some vedna. I’ve been a fan of dosa for ages, since discovering them in the Punjab Tandoori in Manchester. I’ve only had then in one other place, so it’s great to find another resturant cooking them. I even tried making them for myself once, using some of the wonderously named "Mr Git’s Dosa Mix". It never worked.

As well as his dosa mix, Mr Git also makes vedna mix. I did buy some, but never tried it. So, this was the first time I’ve actually got to eat them. They were great. A light donut made out of lentils.

Afterwards, we went back to the pub and I almost fell asleep. I hadn’t realised how tired I was.

Originally published on my old blog site.