Bite Me!

I've been putting off putting this review online because I took some photos on a friend's phone and was waiting for them to be emailed over to illustrate my deathless prose.   This was a month ago and I've now realised that we could be here until next Christmas waiting around for him to get his ass in gear and email me the bloody things, so I shall just post this without photos and hopefully add them in later on.  Like, next year.

So, on to the review...

I’m always a bit wary of going for pub lunches on a Sunday.  Too often, amidst all the great hulking plates of roast beef with all the trimmings, you’ll find that the vegetarian option is something totally boring and non-roast related, like risotto.  Now, I like risotto, but it’s hard not to get envious when you’re spooning up a mouthful of insipid pap next to an entire tableful of people tucking into a hefty pile of roast potatoes and gravy.

I was therefore really, really happy about my lunch at The Water Poet yesterday.  They do a proper vegetarian roast dinner, with roast potatoes, carrots, parsnip, onion, yorkshire pudding, what seemed like a quarter of a head of cabbage and two massive, stuffing-filled vegetarian sausages.  And vegetarian gravy.   It was such an enormous plate of food that I could barely move afterwards, which is always the sign of a good lunch for me.  And they do Aspalls on tap.  I love that pub.

The Water Poet, 9-11 Folgate Street, London E1 6BX

Traditional Gambian cooking is a sloooow process.  After marketing and a quick snack of cashew fruit, we start to prepare lunch, which will take a good couple of hours to cook.  We made vegetable benachim (literally, “one pot”).  This is most often served in the Gambia with fish, but the ingredients we used were:

salt

whole peppercorns

a few cloves of garlic

one onion, roughly chopped

a handful of tomatoes

one tin (400g) of tomato puree

vegetable oil (a lot)

water

short grain white rice

three whole tamerind

two bitter tomatoes, whole (you might have trouble finding these in the UK)

one sweet potato

one cassava  (try Caribbean/African food shops for this one – they sell it in Brixton Market)

two scotch bonnets

two baby aubergines

a handful of okra

two carrots

To start with, put the oil (at least a large cupful) on the heat – in the Gambia, a small outside stove is usually used for cooking purposes, with either wood or charcoal as fuel.  While the oil is heating, pound the salt and pepper in a grinder (a normal pestle and mortar will do, if you don’t have one of the giant versions in the picture above!)  When this is ground, add the garlic and onion, then the tomatoes, and pound into a paste.   Once the oil is bubbling, add the paste, along with the tin of tomato puree and a tin.  Cook this for about twenty minutes – you should see the start to separate slightly when it’s cooked. 

In the meantime, prepare the vegetables.  Peel the cassava and sweet potato and cut into very large pieces.  Halve the baby aubergines and dice the carrots very finely.  Everything else can go in whole.  Once the tomato paste mixture is ready, add the vegetables (except the carrots) and a couple of cans of water and leave to simmer until the vegetables are ready.

While the vegetables are cooking, rinse the rice, add the finely diced carrots and steam until partly cooked.  Once the vegetables are done, take them out of the broth and keep them warm on the side.  Now add the rice to the broth and cook until all the liquid has been absorbed. 

To serve, place the rice on a large plate, and arrange the vegetables on top.  Blob the sorrel (or hibiscus) around the plate artistically. 

Now comes the fun part – eating!  If you want to observe Gambian etiquette, eat with your right hand, and make sure you only take food from the part of the plate or bowl nearest you – no reaching over.  Most Gambian families will eat all together like this, gathering around the same plate or bowl, so make sure you have one big enough!  And watch out if you don’t have asbestos fingers, as the food will be hot and if you’re greedy (like me) you can burn your fingers...

To eat, simply grab a handful of rice, and squeeze it into a solid ball in your hand.  Then chuck into your mouth.  Simples!  You will probably drop rice all over yourself if you’re not used to doing this.  If you want a bit of heat on your food, squeeze one of the scotch bonnets over your rice – don’t try and eat one, whatever you do, as they are really, really hot.  The vegetables you can just break chunks off and eat separately. 

Enjoy!

www.gambiahomecooking.com

People are always asking me what I eat for Christmas dinner - well, maybe not always, but fairly often around Christmas time!  So here's the answer for this year - roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, carrots, peas, honey & mustard parsnips, stuffing and veggie gravy.  OK, so it's not the most sophisticated-looking plate of food, but it's reeeaaalllly good.  And (ssh!) surprisingly healthy.

I'm especially proud of the vegetarian gravy, which has a really intense flavour and is very easy to make.  You will need:

boiling water

marigold vegetable stock

Marmite

Tabasco

red wine or sherry

Worcestershire sauce

soy sauce

porcini (optional)

Method

 Very easy - simply mix a dollop of everything together in a saucepan and gently reduce down for about ten minutes.   I haven't put amounts down since I just chuck everything in and then see how it tastes.  If using the porcini, soak them in a mug of warm water for ten minutes before you start, and then add both the mushrooms and the water to the saucepan.  Sieve the mushrooms out before serving.  If you want thicker gravy rather than a jus, add a little flour or cornflour to the mixture and whisk to get rid of lumps. 

This is so good my sister even prefers it to normal gravy...