Food Revolution Review Borough Market

Time is flying, as I always say. My trip to London is over and I'm home again. 
Food Revolution Day is also over a few days already. A summary you can find here. A lot was going on that day, over 1000 events in 62 countries. Well, you could say around the world, although you could say, there were over 100 countries without something going on. However, Food Revolution Day 2013 is already in the planning. Next year it could even be bigger, though it is not only something for just one day. Constancy is important, to make good food choices every day, well as far as it is possible of course. Everyone has different possibilities. 
Whatsoever, I'm going on to cook myself around the world.
Let us go back then to May 19th 2012, Food Revolution Day. Location: London - Borough Market.
Borough Market in itself is already a great thing. If you around on Saturdays and have some time, have a look, you will not regret it. On that Saturday, though, there was a slight problem, foodwise there are so many lovely things to see, try, eat, and/or buy, that you simply cannot do it. The choice you have is really overwhelming: bread, fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, fish, chutneys, cakes, ice cream (with goat milk for example - couldn't resist), herbs, spices, and so on and many more things. The best way is to have a look for yourself.
For Food Revolution Day the apprentices of Fifteen turned up to bake pizza and sell it. Well, turned up, it's not so good an expression. Already very early in the morning they arrived at Borough Market to get ready and set up the wood fired oven. 
Then things were ready for going for the pizza.
Two kinds of pizza were on offer then: mushroom and stilton and the other one was brisket and horseradish. Although I like stilton very much (other may think it's a bit strong), I went for the brisket and horseradish one. 
How was it? Couldn't have done it better myself. After all I don't have a wood fried oven in the garden. For pizza I always have to turn my normal oven to full. After getting the perfect recipe for pizza dough and doing it that way, doing pizza at home has improved very much.
Oh, getting distracted again. From what I saw that morning on Borough Market, things went very well for the Food Revolution Event. The response was good. A great event at a great market.
It was really a pleasure to visit the market. There are many more markets were you can buy good food. The five days I have been in London I stayed in Brixton. Every single day there was market. How great is that? Really a good way to do your food shopping. 

Still Food Revolution Day - Vietnamese Cooking

By now Food Revolution Day is over, but not the Food Revolution. Hopefully this all made some people think about their eating habits.
At least I learned a lot and you know there is forever and always the chance to learn something new. That is if you are willing to. So again I had attended an event in connection with Food Revolution Day to broaden my view - this time it was about Vietnamese food.
Thinking about Vietnamese food,I have no clue, although there are living a lot of people around me, That are from Vietnam. They even have restaurants, but most of them do Chinese food (maybe not even real Chinese food, but only what people want).
Let us now go on with the event.

The table is set and it can begin. On the table some garnishing is waiting for the things to come. Did I say garnishing? Well, of course, it's for flavour as well.

To start with, a lovely soup, so full of fresh flavours - oh, how ignorant of me - of course it was phở, traditional Vietnamese soup. The red parts you see are far from being just garnishing. The chillies were actually quite hot.
After this soup we could proceed with the main part.

The next part included some work or rather participation. We were about to learn how to make Vietnamese summer rolls with rice paper. The ingredients were set out on the table.

You can do them with different things, but these were the ones we had. Just make sure you put some lovely herbs in it.

The rice paper is briefly dipped into water. Then it is ready for the filling.

Putting all the delicious ingredients on it, only making sure, it is not overcrowded. When you have a big mouth, though, you can make bigger rolls.

Then serve it with a soy based dipping sauce and enjoy it. Well, the roll doesn't look to good on the picture, but well, it was my first try.

A few rolls later, only a small dessert could still fit in. As you can see it is with strawberries and ... what do you think is the green bit? It contains avocado. Very nice, not too sweet and very delicious.
If you want to make Vietnamese summer rolls for yourself, have a look at Uyen Leluu's blog: Leluu. There you will find the recipe. She is also doing Vietnamese cooking classes and supper clubs.
Well, it's time for me to go home soon and for sure I will try some more Vietnamese cooking.

Food Revolution Day - Indian Street Food Supper Club

May 19th 2012 – it is Food Revolution Day, time to stand up for real food. So far as I can see it 631 cities in 58 countries are taking part. On the Food Revolution Day Website, 460 public events and 486 dinner parts are planned. 

 

So, have a look and see, whether you can attend anything or still even do something for yourself. Obviously you cannot be everywhere, although that might be interesting.

Yesterday, in London at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Fifteen, already something was going on: An Indian Street Food Supper club. Maunika Gowardhan together with a team was cooking some very delicious Indian Food.

Here are some of the lovely dishes to give you an impression. However, you have to taste for yourself to get a full picture.

Dahi Patata Puri: These lovely friends were stuffed with spiced potatoes, onions and served together with chutneys.

Bombay Vada Pav: a veg burger. Great was the sweet fennel and chilli dip that came together with it.

Chicken Kati Kebab Rolls: An Indian kind of wrap with chicken, red onions and tomatoes.

Rice with a prawn curry.

A vegetable curry – a bit spicy.

Bengali Bhapa doi: baked yogurt with fresh mango.

To round the meal up at the end a cup of Chai – spiced Indian tea was served.

This was only a partly selection of the deliciously real food at this great event. I would also tell you something about the good wine that was served with it, but I don't have a clue anymore about it - it was Italian, handmade and great.

Foodwise there is really going on a lot around the world. So, have a try, it is never to late, however, you are not making it anyway to try everything, but you still can check out a lot of lovely things.

Red wine cake

Why am I doing this? 5:30 in the morning (or shall I say in the night) and I'm busy in the kitchen baking cake. Because I want to have cake, when visitors are coming today? That would be a possible answer. But I could buy a cake. That would be an option. Nevertheless, I'm baking myself. You know what you get! Usually! At least you know what's in it. Homemade you get things you very likely, in fact, for sure will not get in the shop.
Here once again I found myself digging through my old papers and I came across the cookbook: Now I help myself! In fact it's not a cookbook in this kind of sense. It is a collection of recipes from some old friends. Back then, when I left the secure shelter of my family home to go out and have a place on my own, these friends made this collection of recipes to help me survive. Some of these recipes are hand-written, other typed with a typewriter, photocopied, or printed from the computer. Honestly, it was very nice of them to provide me with this, but I haven't been through most of the recipes. Already at that time I had been into cooking and knew a few things, that would already sufficed to aid in my survival.
Now here is the recipe I picked from this collection: Red wine cake.

First of all I like to give you the recipe as it was in there. It was written by typewriter with some hand-written notes ("Super easy!", "Nathan has chosen this as his favourite recipe ..."). I only made slight adjustments in accord with what I had at home.


Ingredients
250 g butter
250 g sugar
4 eggs
4 teaspoons of vanilla sugar

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of cocoa powder

100 g of chocolate cut into small pieces

125 ml red wine

400 g flour

2 teaspoon of baking powder

Instructions
Bake for one hour at 175°C.

That was it. No instructions. As the handwritten note said, this recipe is to be classed as "super easy!", that should be sufficient to get satisfying results.
Right, you could like cream the sugar with the butter, separate the egg white from the yolks, mix in all the ingredients apart from the egg whites, be happy, then continue with beating the egg whites and folding them in, grease a springform tin, put it in the oven and ... here you are. Have I forgotten something? You could put some icing sugar on top later.
Since this recipe was for a poor and helpless let to survive in the great, mean, dangerous world, you should manage to reproduce this cake.
Have fun!

Here are some other cakes I did lately. I would say "cakes around the world", but the number of countries represented by these is quite limited, so not really too much around the world.

Blue berry cake

Berry tart

Caramel apple cake

Chocolate tart

Far Breton

Lemon cake

Pear ricotta cake

Lime cream cheese cake (or maybe Caipirinha cake)

Pistachio cake

So far about baking and cakes. Five more days and it is May the 19th - time for Food Revolution Day. Make sure you enjoy that day with some real food. I will. Later I tell you more about it, afterwards. Only four days, though, and it is time for food travel for me. More about this later as well.
I hope you enjoyed the red wine cake. What, though, you don't have an open bottle of red wine at hand? I guess you need to substitute or open one and enjoy the remaining red wine at another occasion.

French baking - bâtard with red wine and walnuts

The bread baking spree goes on. Or shall I say, time for exercise. Considering the amount of kneading necessary you don't need to go the gym. Well, at the moment I have to, it's prescribed from the doctor. However, I would say: "Baking a bread a day, keeps the gym away!"

Coming back to the baking itself, though, now it's time to use red wine for the bread. Also with this run I reduced the amount of liquid used, that is just 200 ml - half water and half red wine. The result looked nice to me. In the first step the walnuts come to the dough when it starts looking like a dough. The recipe said to use 300 g of walnuts, but I just used the amount I had left at home. To be honest, I would have had a lot of more walnuts at home, even more then 300 g. The only problem, they are all whole nuts, so cracking them open and all the work ... I was a bit too lazy for that today. I can live with it.

Finished product

Again, I used cling film to cover the rising dough, but this time I oiled it lightly as I learned it from the Cardamom Twists from Scandilicious. You see, bit by bit you can learn things and improve.

As you can see on the picture (hopefully you see it), the crust looks quite nice. Today I was not so shy with the knife and cut a bit deeper into the dough before baking.

the first cut is the deepest (I think I remember hearing something like that)

So, if you don't see the crust being crispy on the first picture, you can trust me that it is/was. It worked out really good. The bread tastes really nice. When you cut it open, it looks a bit pinkish - lovely.

If you are not so much into baking your own bread, honestly, you should have a go. This would maybe also a good idea for Food Revolution Day on May 19th: learning, how to bake your own bread.

When you buy your bread in the supermarket you don't know what really is in there. If you always buy your bread at the bakery you cannot be sure with every baker, or it maybe is a bit more costly. Whatsoever, if you do your own bread, you know what is in there, you can have a greater variety, you can have fun, and (look above) you can have exercise for free and don't have to go the gym.