The Weimar Republic Coffee Awards 2013

I sort of love the idea that the (actual) Weimar Republic might have had Coffee Awards, but I sort of also suspect they probably didn't. Which is a shame, but they were probably busy being more concerned about other things.

But let us not stop more important things getting in the way of this, the inaugural Weimar Republic Coffee Awards 2013. I have spent the past year conducting a completely unfair, unbalanced and not in any way thorough survey of the coffee available throughout our fine nation. And now the results are in.

To test coffee appropriately, my rules state you should order a flat white and an espresso. This will give you the best picture of both the quality and flavour of the coffee itself, how it works in a more complex (slightly) beverage, with milk, and also the coffee making skills of the establishment in question.

In practice, drinking a flat white and an espresso everywhere you go isn't practicable, particularly if you want to test more than one establishment's coffee in the same day and don't enjoy caffeine hallucinations. But still, I tried my best. Here are my favourites:

Flat White, Berwick Street, Soho, London


Possibly one of the first British cafes to bring the flat white to the UK? And how glad I was of this. When I first left the UK for Australia in 2008, I had never heard of the flat white. I was very much a tea drinker. And then I discovered the joyful flat white. Why couldn't English people make coffee like this? Why did we put up with those milky, bathtub sized travesties, with several inches of flavourless froth sat on top? When I came home, in 2011, I was overjoyed to see flat whites in English coffee shops. So, thank you, Flat White in Soho, and your fine flat whites.

The Bean, Stoney Street, Beeston, Nottinghamshire

My local. And fortunately so. We buy all our own coffee beans here and they grind them for us too! And they do a grand flat white.

Wired, Pelham Street, Nottingham

A new one in Nottingham. Excellent, and good food too.

Hot Numbers, Gwydir Street, Cambridge

Very fine coffee. These people are into coffee so much that I just felt like a person with a hot drink in comparison. I sampled two different espressos and several flat whites (on separate visits I must point out!).

Boston Tea Party, Park Street/Cheltenham Road/Gloucester Road, Bristol

There's a few of these around Bristol and the west, but those 3 are my favourites. Glorious rich, creamy flat whites. This one was made in the newest Gloucester Road branch, which I'm a bit in love with at the moment because it has opened up less than 5 minutes walk from my parents' house. Thanks, Boston Tea!



Well, the above are all fine contenders in the Coffee of the Year stakes. But none of them have won this coveted prize. "Who has won?" I hear you shout. Well let me tell you that the winner is *drumroll*........

..... Society Cafe, Kingsmead Square, Bath

One of the greatest espressos I have tasted, possible ever. And a fine flat white, and a wonderful establishment filled with lovely furniture and books and magazines. I wrote on the chalkboard in their toilets, to thank them. I'll thank them again. Thank you, Society Cafe. And well done!

Christmas is coming...

The tree is up! To make up for last year, when we left it so late we ended up tree-less, we were ready this year on December the first! The Pretty Dandy flea market also happened the same weekend, so we went along and stocked up on all the lovely handmade decorations, including the ceramic 'love' heart and the little fabric Christmas tree you can see in the picture.

I'm enjoying the soothing glow of the lights right now after a pretty crazy day at work. All our IT systems went down just as I was frantically trying to meet a deadline, so that was a bit of a pain; all has been sorted now though and I feel back on track. To top it all off, the heating at the office was also suffering an engineering fault, meaning that when I arrived this morning the thermometers were showing 13.8 degrees! We all sat there painfully cold, bundled up in whatever we could find until the engineers came to sort it and it slowly returned to comfortable conditions this afternoon.

After all that, I wanted comfort food for dinner, so I turned to one of my favourites: smoked haddock topped with grated cheddar and breadcrumbs, with creamy garlic mash (and for ultimate joy I used 3 cloves!). Creamy, smokey, heartwarming joy on a plate.

Springtime...snow

Well I can honestly say I wasn't expecting this:


That was the view on the University of Nottingham campus earlier this afternoon. We are under quite an unexpected amount of snow at the moment! Strange to think that this time last year, I was sitting in the garden in 25 degrees on my week off, with the magnolia in full blossom, drinking dandelion and burdock tea and watching the bees start to come out. I really hope the weather gets a bit nicer for next week and the Easter long weekend, as we are hoping to take a trip to Bristol. Then in two weeks time we are off to Paris!

Anyway, we did have two nice snowdays this weekend. I managed to persuade Mark to drive me to the library on Saturday afternoon (yes I know it's only round the corner but the pavement was iiiccceey!), I needed to return The Blue Flower and I managed to get my hands on two books I have been after for ages! Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan and Monkey Grip by Helen Garner.

I was actually planning to buy Underground Time (or rather, Les Heures souterraines) while we are in Paris but once I saw it I thought, nah, I'll read it now! I'll get another of her books in Paris.

Saturday evening was time to try out a new tart recipe, which was SO GOOD.


Lay puff pastry into the tart tin and crumble in some big chunks of stilton. Cover with some chopped walnuts. Layer with thinly sliced pear and bake the tarts for 30 minutes or thereabouts, on 180 degrees or thereabouts. The added bonus of this recipe is that the making process involves one of the GREATEST SINGLE PLEASURES OF HUMAN EXISTANCE: crumbling blue cheese with your hands and then licking your fingers. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

A super-speedy sort-of pizza

An ABSURDLY busy week at work this week, but on the whole not a bad one. I can't wait for the weekend to relax and breathe though. Only one day left.

When I'm busy and late home from work, dinner is usually just whatever can be thrown together in the quickest time. So thank the powers of food-production for that ready-rolled puff pastry you can buy in the supermarket. I love to just chuck stuff on it, shove it in the oven, and devour the resulting feast.

Just shove it on a tray and score round with a knife about in inch in from the edge. Brush some milk over it and bake for 15 mins or so, so it puffs a bit. While this is happening, chop up whatever you want on top. Get the pastry out and squash down the middle (within the lines you have scored) with a fork. Chuck toppings on. Bake again for 20-30 mins (depending on what you've put on top, some things need a bit longer). Favourite toppings include courgette, tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, feta cheese, halloumi, spinach, mushrooms...pretty much anything goes!

A little brown stew and some healthy living

Happy New Year!

It seems ages ago now, but New Year's Eve passed in a cheerful and relaxing way in our house. We cooked up a lovely stew from mushroom and pearl barley (thanks to Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries vol.2!), eaten with a little crusty roll I baked in a hurry (and therefore wasn't perfect, but hey!), and a bottle of the perennial favourite wine of our household, Chateauneuf-du-Pape.


I baked a quick apple cake, which went from nought to oven in less than 15 minutes thanks to the wonders of the Magimix, and Mark delved into the Nigellissima book and came out with 'Tiramisini' - a sort of rudimentary tiramisu and utterly delicious.

We watched On Her Majesty's Secret Service and then Jools Holland, and danced along to perennial favourite band of our household, Dexy's Midnight Runners.

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Back at work, I was scoffing my leftover mushroom stew with some colleagues, who had salads from our little office cafe. One commented that it had been some time since she had seen a salad and I had to agree. And all of a sudden I was craving fresh, simple food.


I came home that night and tossed quinoa, spinach, beetroot and grated carrot in a bowl with a bit of lemon juice, honey, olive oil and grated manchego. We ate it with great big tuna steaks, just slightly seared so they were deep red and rich in the middle. A healthier start to 2013.

Vegetarian Christmas Dinner

Mark and I are both vegetarians (well, pescetarians (fish-eating veggies), but that usually results in blank looks), which is always a bit of a pain at Christmas. Or rather, not a pain for us so much as for everyone else.

During our years in Sydney, Christmas dinner was an easier affair. In the heat of summer, the Australian Christmas feast includes as much fish and salads as heavy hunks of meat - with heaps of oysters and prawns, and tuna and salmon steaks flung on the barbeque amongst the sausages.

Back in the UK of course meat is the undisputed centrepiece. And so, wherever we go for Christmas, we are always met with the question: "what are you two going to eat on Christmas day?" It feels awkward. Extra effort has to be made to accommodate your 'difficult' dietary requirements. So, this year, we offered to cook the whole Christmas dinner ourselves: vegetarian style.

A preconception-challenging, tradition-upheaving, Christmas dinner revolution!

After some research and a few practice runs, we settled on a pie as our centrepiece. This pie to be precise - a triple layered feast of spinach, ricotta, pearl barley, mushroom, chestnut and butternut squash.

After the run-through revealed that the timings given in the recipe were overly optimistic (40 minutes preparation time was more like 4 hours), we made the pie on Christmas eve and kept it in the fridge overnight. It looked like this:


We put it in the oven at 11am on Christmas day, and by 2pm it looked like this:


Layers!


And here it is as part of the full spread: we did all the usual roastie trimmings, with sprouts and peas too.


For pud, we baked pears (again, the day before) in a mix of white wine, brandy and apple juice, seasoned with cinnamon and cloves. We thickened up the juice with arrowroot to make a syrup. It made a nice alternative to Christmas pudding, which I can NEVER eat after a big roast dinner and I am astounded by anyone who claims they can.

Of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without a bit of Christmas pudding. We didn't make a pudding, but we made a compote of stewed fruit in Marsala for the same effect. Delicious!



Anyone got any other good alternative Christmas dinner ideas?

Irish Soda Bread

I must admit to not having eaten much soda bread in my life - I think a few times on holiday in Ireland, and, strangely, a few times in Sydney. In Sydney it was always with my friend Aisling, who was on a constant quest for good soda bread to remind her of her Dublin home.

I have been slowly working through the bread chapter of my copy of The Great British Book of Baking and this recipe is in there, so I thought I'd give it a go. It quickly became a firm favourite. It really is one of the easiest recipes I have ever come across and takes no time at all (no yeast and no kneading like 'normal' bread!), and is UTTERLY delicious. You do need to get hold of wheat germ and wheat bran, neither of which were in my local Sainsbury's or Tesco, but find yourself a good health food shop and you'll be sorted in no time.

Mix 200g wholemeal plain flour with 200g white plain flour. Mix in 25g wheat germ, 25g wheat bran, teaspoon of salt, 1.5 teaspoons of bicarb. Add 350ml buttermilk and mix in with your hands to make a soft, sticky, rough-looking dough. Turn out onto a floured surface and shape into a ball. Set on non-stick baking tray, gently flatten to 4cm high, score the dough with a cross and dust with flour. Bake for about 35 mins, until it's golden brown and sounds hollow when you tap the bottom.

See? Easy. I'd really recommend this whole book too, if you are newish to baking or want to expand your repertoire. The recipes are super-easy and it has all the greats, from Bakewell Tart to pork pie, treacle tart to hot cross buns, challah to focaccia and everything in between. Also the best Death by Chocolate EVER.