kimbofo

How to make flambéed Irish coffee

Legend has it that Irish coffee was invented in the 1940s at Shannon Airport to warm up some American passengers who'd experienced a rather rough flight across the water.

The drink is essentially a hot coffee laced with whiskey and sugar, and topped with a layer of cream.

I've consumed my fair share of Irish coffees over the years, but none tasted as fine as the one I had last week -- appropriately on St Patrick's Day -- at the Dublin Writers Museum.

A chef from the Michelin star Chapter One Restaurant gave us a quick lesson on how to make the genuine article: apparently it's all in the technique -- and the quality of the ingredients.

Here's the recipe, courtesy of Chapter One and the Tourist Office for Dublin:

Ingredients:

• One measure of Jameson Irish Whiskey
• 12 fluid oz of coffee (Americano)
• 1½ teaspoons of brown sugar
• Small jug of pouring cream
• Nutmeg (whole)

Method:

• Preheat a flambé pan. Shave nutmeg and sugar into pan
• Heat on full until sugar has caramelised
• Pour small amount of coffee in pan to cool slightly
• Slowly pour in measure of Jameson Whisky for flambé effect
• Add remaining coffee
• Then pour whiskey and coffee mix in Irish Coffee glass
• Slowly pour cream over a teaspoon on top of coffee mix (ensuring not to sink the cream)
• To finish, shave some nutmeg on top

Sláinte Mhaith! (Good health)

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

How Twitter helped my quest to find the perfect cake shop

This is why I love Twitter. Earlier this month I asked a simple question:

 


And within a matter of minutes I was bombarded with responses -- all of them hugely helpful.

Here's a summary of what I was told:

@princess_knicks maison bertaux in soho is wonderful! http://www.maisonbertaux.com

@rachelala Maison Blanc (as in Raymond) nx to Richmond station, also Patisserie Valerie has several branches in C. London #foodie

@AboutLondon Chelsea Teapot on King's Road is lovely tea/cake shop. Has gluten-free options too.

@ManifestoBooks Patisserie Valerie - various locations I believe #cakesinlondon

@wkendLondon hummingbird bakery at South Kensington, fantastic cup cakes!

@beezan Is Valery's stll on Old Compton Street?

@jabtx1 haven't tried it, but hear Lanka Cake Shop in Primrose Hill is good.

@ZoeVH fleet river cafe nr holborn tube is just wonderful

@painting Chelsea Teapot on King's Road's gluten-free options > Delicious!! Don't eat breakfast or lunch beforehand!

@paperbk_reader Primrose Bakery (Covent Garden), Lola's Cupcakes, Hummingbird Bakery & Bea's, of course. Patisserie Valerie too.

@zengarden17 Del Aziz in Bermondsey Square (SE1) has lovely European style cakes & pastries. As lovely to look at as they are to eat.

@beezan If you want to travel out to Beckenham there is the SpongeKitchen - has lovely yum-yummy stuff to offer ...

@chasingbawa There's Princi and The Hummingbird Bakery on Wardour St. Also Paul on Old Compton St.

 

For the record, I went to The Chelsea Teapot with a friend last Sunday and it was awesome.

The shop was incredibly cute, with pastel coloured walls adorned with pretty frames and patterned plates, a bit like sitting in someone's country kitchen. All our food was served on old-fashioned China, including floral cups and a beautiful floral teapot, and the service was helpful and courteous.

But the food was what we went for -- and we weren't disappointed. I had the most amazing grilled chicken salad, followed by a ginormous slice of carrot cake which was unusually light and lemony.

My friend had a massive chunk of ultra-rich chocolate cake, with cream cheese frosting, which was still warm from the oven.

The chocolate cake was so good we bought extra slices to take home!

Melbourne: serving the world's best coffee

Place: BearBrass restaurant, Southgate, Melbourne, Australia
Date: January 13, 2011.
Camera: BlackBerry Curve.

When I moved to London all those years ago the thing I missed most about my homeland wasn't the weather or the friendliness of the people, but the wonderfully rich Italian coffee I had so long taken for granted.

I remember spending weekends trawling the cafes and eateries of Soho and the West End with a fellow Australian looking for that perfect flat white. The closest thing we came to finding that little bit of heaven was the Cinnamon Bar in Aldwych, but it still wasn't anything like a good cuppa from home.

Nowadays London is awash with coffee chains -- Starbucks, Costa, Cafe Nero -- and getting a half-decent coffee is no longer the trial and tribulation it was back in the late 1990s. In the past 12 months some of those chains have even introduced the "flat white" -- although they still don't taste quite as good as the ones produced Down Under.

How lovely, then, to enjoy silky smooth coffee after silky smooth coffee when I took myself to Melbourne for a bit of a mini-break last week. The best bit was not having to step into a corporate coffee chain to enjoy them.

That's because Melbourne is awash with independent coffee shops, thanks to the Italian immigrants that rocked up on our shores in the 1950s. Indeed, coffee chains don't seem to have much success here: Starbucks shut down 61 stores in 2008 because those stores struggled to attract customers.

The only coffee chain that seems to have a good reputation for good coffee is an Australian-owned one --  Gloria Jean -- and even then it has less than a dozen in the CBD, so it hasn't saturated the market.

The other added benefit of drinking coffee in Melbourne is that every establishment,  from the smallest sandwich bar to the biggest restaurant, seems to know how to make a decent one. And the coffee used is always top-notch.

In four days of coffee supping I did not have one bad coffee.

The only downside was a slight overdose -- three flat whites in the space of one morning (I was thirsty!) -- that left me feeling slightly jittery  and nauseous from too much caffeine. But even then I wouldn't swap the experience for the world: sometimes you just got to make the best of a good thing while you can.

Crispy duck pancakes

Place: Beijing, China.
Date: December 11, 2010.
Camera: BlackBerry Curve.

At the risk of turning this into a food blog, here's a quick snap of last night's farewell banquet meal.

I was excited to finally eat some authentic Peking duck, which is also known as Beijing duck. But I generally refer to it as crispy duck pancakes.

The chef carved the duck into thin slices right in front of us -- a kind of culinary entertainment, if you will -- and it was then piled onto a pretty duck-shaped china serving plate. (In the UK, the duck tends to be shredded rather than sliced.)

We piled the meat onto crispy pancakes and rolled them up with thin slices of cucumber, spring onion and hoisin sauce. Delicious!

Bono biscuits!

Place: up-market supermarket in Beijing, China.
Date: December 12, 2010.
Camera: BlackBerry Curve.

This takes the biscuit -- Bono brand chocolate cookies! *Boom boom*

(Thanks to some internet research, I believe these are one of Nestle's main biscuit brands in Brazil. And, just for the record, they've got nothing to do with U2 or Paul Hewson.)

Indulging in Beijing hotpot

All pictures take: Beijing, China.
Date: December 10, 2010.
Camera: BlackBerry Curve.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Beijing, eat Beijing hotpot!

Tonight one of my fellow travellers and I were lucky enough to share an authentic meal with our tour guide. Karen is Chinese, so knows her way around a menu, and because hotpot is one of her favourite dishes, us novices were in expert hands!

We ate at a popular chain restaurant that specialises in Beijing hotpot -- so popular we had to wait about 15 minutes to be seated. The place was heaving with young hip student types from Beijing, most of them seated on high stools around a bar, with individual hotpots in front of them.

Because there were three of us, we opted for a table and we had one hotpot between us, which sat in the middle. That's our hotpot pictured above. Usually the entire hotpot is filled with spicy ingredients, but ours came with a separate non-spicy section, just in case our Western taste buds could not cope with all the fiery Chinese chili.

The pot was turned on and began bubbling away. The effect was a bit like a sauna, as the steam rose and created a small cloud over our table.

Plate upon plate, loaded with fresh ingredients, then began to arrive. These included  lettuce leaves, sweet potato, tofu skin (that's the stuff that looks like fat noodles on the left), quail eggs, corn on the cob, mushrooms, vermicelli noodles, tofu squares, thinly sliced fish ...

and shrimps. (Meat eaters can also indulge in lamb, pork, beef and chicken, which generally comes rolled up in wafer-thin slices.)

These were then placed into the hotpot, as and when we wanted, to cook in the bubbling liquid.

Retrieving the cooked ingredients was a delicate art, but a ladle was supplied to make it that little bit easier. I loved fishing around in the hotpot to see what treasures I could discover. It felt like winning the lottery whenever I came upon a delicious quail egg!

Notice how everything is bubbling away and there's a lot of steam. This probably explains why Beijing hotpot is really popular in the winter months: it's a great way to warm up when the temperature outside is below zero!

Once I'd fished out a couple of ingredients I would dump them into my small bowl, which was filled with fresh coriander and sesame sauce. This is supposed to help temper the heat of the chili, but it also adds a really lovely nutty flavour to your meal.

The local beer, Yanjing, also helps!

 

The aftermath is a bit messy. You simply dump everything you don't eat -- for example, shrimp shells and corn cobs, direct onto the table. And there's plenty of  sauce and chili splatters all over the paper table cloth. We even left noodles -- slippery little buggers to pick up with chopsticks -- on the floor!

Of course the best thing about Beijing hotpot is the sound of the pot bubbling away and the steam rising off the top. But I also loved the way that cooking your own food, and the fun of doing so with other people, became part of the eating experience.

I've come to appreciate that the Chinese are big on communal eating -- no-one orders separate dishes, everything is shared and there's a lot of loud talking and fun to be had in the process. It makes me wonder why we don't do this more often in the West. It gives you a chance to try all kinds of different foods, rather than sticking to one plate.

If you're ever in Beijing -- or Sechuan province, which is famous for its fiery Sechuan hotpot -- this is one experience not to be missed.

Scorpion skewers and other tasty morsels

All pictures taken: Street market in Beijing, China.
Date: December 9, 2010.
Camera: Panasonic TZ3.

Before I came to China I had terrible misconceptions about the food. I thought everything would be weird and horrible. On the contrary, it's been quite normal -- and delicious. I may have actually put on weight, instead of losing it, because I've eaten so many yummy banquet meals.

But this morning, wandering through a Beijing street market, we got a glimpse of the freak show food I thought was de rigour  in China. It was the scorpion skewers that caught my eye first. The chap selling them made a point of showing us that they were still alive by tickling their legs with another stick. Seeing the scorpions move and unfurl their tails gave me the creeps.

Further on we saw lots of other odd creatures on skewers, including giant spiders, locusts and sea horses. And then there were the bowls of foul-smelling tripe (see below).

Of course, there's plenty of Western food in this city, so we're not going to starve. And from what I can gather, most of this odd stuff is done just to attract the tourists -- though goodness knows how anyone makes any money from it if all we do is go around and take snaps of it.

For all the tea in China

 

All pictures taken: Dragon Well Tea Village, Hangzhou, China.
Date: December 4, 2010.
Camera: Panasonic TZ3.

Most people associate tea with China -- it is, after all, the nation's most famous (and popular) drink.

Today we visited a village on the outskirts of Hangzhou where green tea is grown.

The steep hillsides were covered in tea plants, all planted in neat rows resembling box hedges. The perfectly arranged greenery, where not an inch of soil was wasted, created beautiful patterns shimmering in the hazy mid-morning sunlight.

The smell was divine, but I was partial to the autumnal red leaves of Japanese maples dotted on the terraces.

Later we got to drink a cup of freshly picked and dried leaves from the very farm we had just  ambled through. The leaves were placed in a small glass, then boiling water was poured on it. Over time the tea leaves settled at the bottom of the glass and we were able to drink the beverage.

The taste? Absolutely divine.

You can read more about Dragon Well tea via this wikipedia entry.

Ladies night

Place: View from Yas Hotel, Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Date: November 18, 2010.
Camera: BlackBerry Curve.

Thursday evenings in Abu Dhabi are the equivalent of Friday nights in the UK -- they mark the end of the working week -- with one notable exception. If you're female you can take advantage of "ladies night" promotions -- a set of standard, but potent, cocktails which don't cost a penny.

So, last night, my sister, her husband and I headed out to Yas Island, a short drive from where they live, to partake in the free beverages.

But first we sat outside one of the international hotels -- there are about five arranged in a circle -- and drank ice-cold beers while watching the parade of flash cars drive in and out of the development and the endless family groups making their way to the Jonas concert at the nearby arena.  It was a balmy 27C, and for the first time since finishing work at the end of October, I felt like I was properly on holiday.

Afterwards we went to Angar, an Indian restaurant in the Yas Hotel. It had an open kitchen, all gleaming white tiles and polished stainless steel, behind a glass window. The food was good, too: a shared vegetarian platter, followed by servings of butter chicken, a chicken and pumpkin dish, sag aloo and hot, buttery and totally delicious garlic naans.

Then onto Stills bar, across the road, where we were greeted by wall to wall men, mainly expat Brits by the looks of it, lurking in the dark. I guess that's why the bar offers free cocktails to women, because you certainly wouldn't go there for the ambiance.

We sat outside in a white polished courtyard adorned with palm trees and twinkly lights and enjoyed Cosmopolitans, before calling it a night sometime around 11pm, and catching a taxi home. It was a lovely evening -- even if we only scored two free drinks apiece out of it.

A great pub to while away a summer's evening

 
Place: The Rising Sun pub, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England.
Date: June 12, 2010.
Camera: Panasonic DMC-TZ3.

We had a really lovely time in Berkhamsted on Saturday, catching up with an old friend whom we hadn't seen for more than two years. After a long relaxing lunch at The Old Mill we wandered along the canal until we came upon The Rising Sun pub. We couldn't walk past the sign declaring it to be the "Cider Pub of the Year 2010" and so in we went...

We then spent several hours in the late afternoon sunshine, sitting on the wall of the lock, sampling the wares. When most of the clientele headed indoors to watch the England vs USA World Cup match at 7.30pm, we suddenly found ourselves being handed complimentary bowls of hot salted popcorn and a plate of potatoes. Who cares about football when there's free food to be had?