Oh Yes! Bettys!

I know someone is going to tell me that Bettys isn't ethnic and it certainly isn't in London. But I always want to tell other people about any good (or bad) food experiences I have. I was in Harrogate at the beginning of the week and I found myself standing in front of Bettys, as if by magic. I believe in fate and destiny and so on. I do believe it was fate for me to be standing in front of the mouth-watering window displays of the famed bakery and restaurant. So I went in. I really wanted to have their stem ginger cake but they were all out. Instead, I had the warm ginger sponge with toffee sauce and creme fraiche. It was wonderful! The creme fraiche just cut through the utter sweetness of the toffee sauce. There was a slight gingerness in the sponge but you hardly noticed. And it was warm, just right. Really wonderful! I then proceeded to have the rarebit. I know I had an upside down meal - dessert and coffee before the main meal. But who cares?! The rarebit was also lovely with the tomato chutney. Although I must say that I have had better chutney. All the same I enjoyed it. It wasn't the cheapest afternoon tea I have had; it cost £30 for two people. But it is Bettys after all. I took home a tray of shortbread and a caddy of tea. Shame the shortbread only lasted a few minutes.

Stekt Strömming

Whilst we are still on Swedish food, I thought I should share with you another great Swedish meal and my absolute favourite - stekt strömming and potatismos. In English: fried herring with mashed potatoes.
It is one of the most amazing thing for me that Swedes are not obese with the amount of fat they eat. It just goes to show that it is not the eating of fat that makes you fat but what kinds of fat you eat and what you do the rest of the time that you are not eating.
Stekt strömming is pretty simple to make; you fillet the fish, season with sea salt and white pepper, coat with rye flour and fry in butter until golden brown. This meal is not recommended for a low fat diet because the potatismos is also made with lots of butter and a little bit of cream. It is the best mashed potatoes you will ever have. When I first discovered stekt strömming, I ate it every day for two weeks. I only stopped because I was warned that that there are government guidelines against eating baltic herrings everyday. Apparently, it is something to do with the heavy metals in the Baltic Sea.

Janssons Frestelse

Every winter, I miss Sweden. The last few months have been particular difficult for me because for some bizarre reason I want snow and snow is not easy to come by in England. I want a lot of snow and I am just not getting it here in London. However, a couple of weeks ago, I woke up to snow. Yes, in London! There was snow and the whole place looked so beautiful with the trees and houses covered in snow. I was happy for two hours and I didn't want to move back to Sweden. But then the snow melted and I went back to missing Sweden.
I lived in Sweden for nearly two years and loved it. Of course I didn't like everything about Sweden. For example, I hate that some people who use snus would just spit it out without thinking about it. It's disgusting! So if you do use snus, don't just spit it out onto the pavement.
"What is snus?" I hear you ask. Snus (or snuff) is tobacco put under the upper lip. People don't want to smoke or are not allowed to smoke, so they use snus instead.
Anyway, back to the good things in Sweden. In my Swedish classes, my teacher would ask me to write essays and translate recipes. One of the first Swedish recipes I translated into English was Janssons Frestelse which means Jansson's Temptation. I am not a big fan of potatoes but I really love this dish. In Sweden, it is made with tinned sprats but I use anchovies partly because when I first saw the recipe I thought anjovis were achovies. I now know that anjovis means sprats but I still use anchovies. I don't use as many tinned achovies as I would sprats because tinned anchovies tend to have too much salt. Here is the original recipe.

 1-2 tin sprats (approx. 20 whole sprats)
 2 large onions, sliced thinly
 500g (around 6 medium potatoes), peeled and cut into strips
 300ml cream
 A handful of breadcrumbs
 2 tablespoons butter
 1 teaspoon dill (to serve)


1. Preheat the oven to 225oC.
2. Fry the onions in a tablespoon of butter.
3. Butter an oven dish.
4. Put a layer of potatoes in the oven dish.
5. Then layer the rest of the potatoes with the onions and sprats.
6. Put a final layer of potatoes at the top.
7. Pour over half of the cream; sprinkle the breadcrumbs and add the butter.
8. Cook in the oven for 30 minutes.
9. Add the rest of the cream and cook for a further 30 minutes.
10. Garnish with dill and serve with sliced tomatoes and knackerbröd (Ryvita).

*You can use a number of different tinned fish including anchovies and tuna. Be careful when using anchovies as they tend to be heavily salted.

SAFARA

Safara, the arabic word for journey or travel. That is the name of my new magazine website which is dedicated to African food and travel. I am an African and I serve people African food for a living. My catering company Simply African has been providing catering services to mostly business clients for nearly a year now. The business is doing well, not as well as I had hoped for. But part of the reason is that I have been unable to employ a chef who understands African food (and I do mean food from the whole continent) and who would like to help me take the business to new heights. The other reason is that people have not been exposed to African food. This is about to change. Safara Magazine is born and is there to help everyone prepare African food in their own home. It will show you how to prepare the African cocktails, tell you about the best African wines (not just the South African wines); you will get information about the different places where this great food comes from and hopefully, it will help you see Africa in a better light.
Why not decide that tomorrow night is Africa night and try and prepare African food and also get some wines. You know, the more you buy African produce and products, the less poverty you will see on the continent. Buying African provides jobs and then you will be able to stop senidng aid to the continent. We need trade not aid.

Hmmm! Occo

Are there any awards for the laziest blogger in blogosphere? If so, I may be in contention. I don't know why I seem to abandon the prospect of writing with no one to criticize me or my writing especially not Mrs. Campbell, my thoroughly disliked Form 2 (Year 8) English teacher. You would think that I would be jumping at every opportunity I get to write but I don't. Having said that, I do have a valid excuse as to why I am not blogging as much as I should. I have a job which is more like 6 jobs i.e. I run my own company. It involves catering, not the easiest thing to be doing and I also am now putting together an online African food and travel magazine. Oh yes! Africa will soon have its portal on the web where you can find all the information you need to impress those around you. You will be able to find working recipes of everything from Jollof Rice, one of West Africa's favourite to Moroccan Tajines, to Bobotie and Injera. And the site will look good too!!! This for me is a truly exciting time but it is also a really busy time. Putting SAFARA Magazine together (for that is its name) has not been easy because I discovered two things in my search for authentic African recipes and ingredients. One is that with the exception of the maybe the Egyptians, Africans have never written down recipes until quite recently and two, the recipe for a particular dish is usually based on what is available in the cook's home at the time or perhaps region. It is very difficult to say conclusively this is how you make Jollof Rice or whatever the dish is. It is made even more difficult because I don't want to change the recipes because then they won't be authentic. I have decided that what will happen is that we will include as many recipes as we get for a particular dish and we will leave it to the reader to decide. We could also put authenticity badges or ease of finding named ingredients or something else that would let the reader decide whether they want to go ahead with that recipe or dish.
It isn't all bad this online magazine thing. I have had the priviledge to interview a few people, Africans and otherwise and also to visit a few restaurants (the few African restaurants that exist in the UK). That leads me to another gripe. Why are there so few African restaurants in London? And those that exist, why are so many of them so bad? I see very few non-Africans in a majority of these places. Now you might get upset with me. But if you run a restaurant and you don't think it is a problem that the majority of non-Africans do not and will not eat at your restaurant, then I feel sorry for you. C'mon guys! Let's put some excellence into what we do! Infact, if you don't include the Moroccan restaurants you will be hard pressed to find any good African restaurants. So a warning to all you restaurateurs out there who own African eateries, we at SAFARA will be out and about and we WILL write about you.
Anyway, I am off to interview the chef at Occo, one of those fantabulous Moroccan places that we can talk about. And yes, Morocco IS Africa.
Ciao

African Food

I am back to my normal ranting ways. sad isn't it. I must be an angry person under this lovely exterior. Anyway I have good reason to rant. I have started a new journey which is the online magazine, Safara Magazine. It is a world's first I believe. It is the world's first publication, online or otherwise, which is totally dedicated to African food, drink and travel. Infact, African food does not usually get a look in in other magazines or websites. There is the small matter of Moroccan food which has started to get noticed. You can now see a number of different Moroccan dishes on supermarket shelves. But still I wait for the really good African restaurants. Don't get me wrong there are a number of African restaurants but I am still wondering why we don't see any African restaurants in the top rated restaurants? I am quite annoyed that in all the time I have been reading the Caterer magazine I have never seen an African restaurant or caterer featured in the magazine. I have even decided not to renew my subscription because I don't feel that ethnic food is even being considered by the magazine's editor and writers. We need to do something about it. Get African restaurants up to scratch and get African food out there. People need to find out about African culture through its wonderful food.

Couscous

Having been away for a while, you would think that today's post would be nice and chilled. Infact, today's post is a bit of a rant, so bear with me.
I am getting a bit fed up of some of the supermarkets and other stores offering poor qualities of ethnic foods. Why do they not get help or advice from people in the know? Why do they continue to impose these absolutely awful concoctions on people which in turn makes people averse to eating ethnic foods? There are two dishes that seem to have entered the main stream (by that I mean supermarket shelves) which are being done so badly that I am thinking of writing to the offending supermarkets and stores. One is tabbouleh and the other is couscous.
Who told the supermarket food technologists that tabbouleh is a lot of bulgur with a bit of coriander and tomatoes? If it was would it be called a salad? Having said that I have seen rice and pasta salad by which they mean cold rice and pasta. Tabbouleh when it is done properly is so beautiful, fragrant and light. Can someone please tell the supermarkets, the food stores and the cafes that tabbouleh is a mixture of herbs with a little bit of bulgur? I would love to tell them but I have lost my voice shouting.
Speaking of shouting, I decided to take a short walk to my local supermarket to do some research on couscous. This was a bad idea as all I wanted to do at the end was shout. Couscous has also entered mainstream because of a number of chefs using it in their cooking. One of these chefs does a couscous in a packet, one of these pre-steamed and dried things with lemon and lime flavour or something to the effect. How on earth do these people live with themselves offering such rubbish to the public and calling it food? Especially when you think he is a chef and is unlikely to serve that crap in his home. When you try and educate the person who has been eating nonsense called couscous about how couscous whould be light and fluffy and not gummy all you get is "that's not really how chef X does it". My reply is usually: "what does chef X know about couscous? Has he been making couscous all his life? Is couscous with chicken his mother's signature dish? No, he just happened to jump on the passing bandwagon which he will soon alight once another one comes along."
So give me a break people. Make tabbouleh the herb and spice salad that it is, not a main course accompaniment. Couscous should be steamed and not boiled. Of course if you come from a certain part of Africa, you are allowed to have couscous as a dessert and that's all.