Soft Shell Crabs

It was Dom's birthday Saturday and we had a barbecue and food thing round his house. I thought I would attempt to cook some soft shell crabs like the ones I had at Vietnamese restaurant Song Que recently.

I obtained the crabs from Longdan which is a Vietnamese owned oriental supermarket. There's one opened on Hackney Road near the Shoreditch end. I've been going there quite a lot recently to buy tofu and oriental vegetables as they are incredibly cheap compared to the same stuff in a normal shop.

When I've been in there buying that stuff I've been bothering the staff, asking about what soft shell crabs they sell. They only come frozen, for £34 you can get a giant box and for £7 you can get a box which is still very big. I went for the £7 box. They are in a solid block of Ice so if you do buy them they will take at least 12 hours out of the fridge to defrost.

I've done a bit of research as to what soft shell crabs are. They're crabs which have been killed just after they've molted their shells so the new shell they are growing is very thin and soft.

I decided to deep fry the crabs as they were when I had them in the restaurant. I dried out some cheap bread rolls and grated them to make bread crumbs. I added a decent amount of salt, pepper, paprika and chilli flakes to the bread crumbs.

I then dusted the crabs with flour, dipped them in a bowl of beaten egg and then coated them in the breadcrumbs.

The crabs were then fried two at a time in hot vegetable oil. I always test the heat of the oil by dropping a bit of the breadcrumb into it to make sure it's at frying temperature.

I fried them for about 2-5 minutes each. They give off a delicious smell when frying and the grey bluey bits go pink and red while cooking. Be careful as I've heard that they can pop and spatter although I didn't have any problems.

I wasn't successful at replicating the oriental style I was going for however the crabs had an English seaside feel to them like posh scampi. They were very good. I had them with some sweet chilli dipping sauce.

I remembered that when I had them before they were not served with the large claws as I discovered you cannot bite through these. The larger legs were also a bit difficult to eat whole and it was easier the suck out the meat. If I do them again I'll probably give them a trim of the hard bits.

Sesame Snaps

I've been finding myself in a lot of organic and health food shops recently as Mathilde has been eating some of that stuff.

There's a lot of odd foods, odd people and overpriced vegetables in these types of shop but one constant that is in every health food shop that I do enjoy is the humble Sesame Snap.

I've had a go on their chocolate and coconut coated versions but nothing beats the plain and original type. You can properly get into eating loads of these and they are only 25p each.

Song Que Vietnamese Restaurant

My friends Mike and Carmel for a joint birthday booked a table for seventeen of us at Song Que on Kingsland Road, just above Shoreditch. It's suppose to be a good restaurant, it gets all good reviews and whatever but if you do go prepare yourself for the rushed service.

I understand that at seventeen people we did have the biggest table at the restaurant but the feeling that they want to serve you, take your money and then get the table ready for the next customers is apparent before you've even sat down. This is because of the panic and urgency of the waiting staff which reached it's peak when one of the waiters got an angry little tantrum on when someone asked for more time before choosing their meal from the menu. The waiters calmed down once we ordered our mains and from that moment on the atmosphere was fine. We were well behaved and did actually eat, pay and leave in our allocated two hour window.

The food was mostly good here is some of it.

I got the Soft Shell Crabs for my starter and they were pretty fucking decent. They are battered and fried with a burning hit of chilli. I've had the same thing at Ping Pong but their crabs are small, expensive and tame. You only get two sets of legs at Ping Pong at Song Que however you get a decent portion size that contains all the whole bodies of a few crabs chopped and put in a much spicier batter. You can tell from the texture if you've got a chewy set of legs or a squishy centered, seaside flavoured bit of body. If you were wondering yes you eat the shell cos it's soft, hence the name.

Here's some vegetable spring rolls that Mathilde had. They were good, not too much bean shoot but I will say the batter was a bit KFC.

For my main I got Fresh Water Eels. They were battered and fried with lemongrass, loads of chilli, and some funnily chopped large chunks of onion. If you look at the photo above you can see the battered things are the bits of eel.

They were good. I've never had eel before but they had loads of tiny soft bones and the meat was like white fish but denser with a more oily flavour. I think the onion was a bit undercooked and there was so much of it I think it was being used as a filler.

Birthday boy Mike had this Beef and Tripe Noodle Soup. I didn't taste any but he tells me it was good. Apparently that's the meal all the reviewers like.

There was also a nice selection of condiments on the table. I'm a fan of the condiment. You've got chilli flakes in oil, soy sauce, chilli sauce, hoisin sauce and a fish sauce which was similar to Thai nam pla except you could actually sniff and taste a bit of it without vomiting.

To go with my meal I had a few bottles of imported Vietnamese beer Halida and it was good to see that the other more well known Asian beers they sell are also the real thing, imported from Asia and not brewed under license in the midlands.

All in all it was a good meal and pretty cheap too. We all paid £21 each, almost all of us had a starter, two drinks and that included a decent tip.

Dom chose exactly the same meal as me so here's a picture of him stuffing a chunk of battered crab down his throat.

Ellie King's amazing barbecued leg of lamb

This Sunday, to celebrate Steph's birthday, we headed over to Ellie and Mike's house for a special lunch.

The weather was a bit blustery so despite the food all being cooked on the BBQ we ate indoors around the table.

Ellie was following a recipe from 'At Home With Jamie', I think you can find it here if you don't want to buy the whole book although a cursory glance suggests it's a worth a look, on the Telegraph web page look for the recipe entitled 'Best barbecued meat and homemade barbecue sauce'.

A leg of lamb was marinaded in all sorts of herbs, spices and lubrication's and roasted in the oven until the meat was still pink in the middle. The fat and juices from the meat and the marinade had coagulated into an amazing glaze, this glaze was key for the next stage.



Once the BBQ was at cooking temperature onions, with some butter and rosemary in the middle, and sweet potatoes, dusted with chili and salt, were wrapped in foil and put amongst the embers whilst the leg of lamb was put on the bars above the coals.



The meat was brushed with the remainder of the glaze and turned every few minutes so it could develop a nice sticky crust. Once the meat was nearly ready some foil parcels containing greens with lemon and olive oil were put above the coals to steam for a few minutes.

It was some of the best lamb I have eaten in a long time, the BBQ had given it an amazing smokey flavour, within their skins the sweet potato had collapsed down to almost a mash like consistency perfect for sopping up the juices and the green veggies were fresh and zingy tasting.



As if all this wasn't enough we then had homemade rice pudding with big dollups of jam, I was in hog heaven!

Happy Birthday Steph!

Cheese Round Wedding Cake

I was invited to my friends Garry and Nicola's wedding reception last weekend. They said they didn't like normal fruit cake which wedding cake is normally made of so went for something else, a cake made from rounds of cheese.

I've got no pictures of the rounds assembled into the wedding cake as I missed the unveiling I must have been distracted by the free bar or something.

The cheeses included a stilton, a smoked cheddar, a mature cheddar, two small rounds of goats cheese, a soft cheese which was like a posh port salut and a large round of hardish cheese which I couldn't work out what it was. It's on the left side of this picture next to the bride and groom figurines.

My favourite was the goats cheese rounds. They were covered in a thick crust of blue mouldy rind but were silky and delicious underneath that.

Chicken Shop Grime

In which grime crew 'Red Hot Entertainment' spit bars about the different special meal deals available at chicken shops in and around Canning Town.

Fish Balls

I found these in the Kosher section of Sainsburys. They looked interesting and Dom brought them cos he said he'd had them before and they were nice.

They're made with minced white fish, potato, onions and matzo meal. It says on the packaging you can eat them hot or cold. I tried them cold and it it tasted weird. They are potatoey just like fish cakes are but they have a tangy sweetness to them. After 15 minutes in the oven they were far more edible but there still is something odd and cheap about them. The insides are a bit rigid and stodgy.

I much prefer your standard fish cake from a reputable fish and chip shop. Faulkners on Kingsland Road does the best I've ever had although I have never done any extensive research into high quality fish cakes.