On 8th May 2010 poet, journalist and food artist Michelle Rambler opened Rambling Restaurant’s doors for the first time in South America. Back in March this year, on a quest to discover more about her Latino roots, Michelle upped sticks and set up camp in Buenos Aires. She has been artist in residence at Argentine artist Lucrecia Urbano’s studio in San Ferdando, a leafy suburb north of the city which is home to chocolate factories, farms and one of Buenos Aires’ largest villas miserias, La Cava.

Michelle writes…

Lucrecia set up a residency program alongside her studio in 2008 and has since invited along artists from as far afield as Jordan, the US and Spain to stamp their own unique print on the house and get involved with teaching art to the kids of the neighbourhood. I decided to play on the project’s name “Quien puede vivir en esta casa?” (Who lives in a house like this?) and call this Rambling outing “Quien Puede Comer en Esta Casa?” (who eats in a house like this?)

Breakfast in Buenos Aires is usually a rather low-key affair, with most portenos sipping on a fortifying cafe solo and a tostado before heading out to face the city’s ten-lane highways and whistling collectivos. Lucrecia and the other artists at the studio were thus a little shocked at the lavish and rapt description I gave of a full English breakfast as I pined for one after a heavy night on fernet branca and coke, the chosen tipple of the younger generation of Argentines. Lucrecia et al remaining doggedly unconvinced that so much fried food could ever constitute a pleasurable meal, I decided to make a mini English breakfast as a starter to prove that morcilla, Argentine black pudding, is perfectly palatable before 9pm.

I dragged my Australian friend Zoe out to San Fernando to help out with the muffin marathon…

…and was delighted to find quail eggs at the local market. Bacon not being a cut of meat you’ll find at the butchers over here, we had to use jamon crudo as a substitute, which we folded into delicate salty blush curls over buttery garlic mushrooms and topped off with a slice of morcilla and a fried quail egg.

Expert asador Andres lovingly cooked mountains of harissa beef and tumeric chicken kebabs on the six-foot long parrilla. It takes a full-blooded Argentine to really know which of the myriad different cuts of beef you are faced with at the butcher’s you should use for kebabs (the Argentines are very particular about their meat, be warned). Luckily Flor, who works with Lucrecia, had a friend in the countryside she could call up. Ten kilos of succulent carmine beef arrived in a bloody sack Friday morning and was served saturday with roasted aubergine and enormous bowlfuls of roof-tossed salad.

Argentines are crazy about ice-cream. On every major road you’ll find at least one heladeria, each boasting its own home-made version of Argentina’s favourite flavour, dulce de leche. For the uninitiated, dulce de leche is a sweet, sticky caramel spread, used liberally in just about every argentine cake or dessert. The supermarkets here stock a truly eye-boggling range of the stuff, but if Argentina sounds like a bit of a trek for a tub of toffee, you can make it quite easily by boiling a can of unopened condensed milk for an hour or so. Be careful not to overboil, explosions can happen. I’m also crazy about ice-cream but wanted to veer away from the obvious and when Lucrecia appeared at my door with a couple of cans of gloriously rich Canadian maple syrup asking if i had any idea what to use them for, I decided to have a crack at making a slightly different helado artesanal for Rambling Tongue.

Lucrecia donated not only the maple syrup but sacks of walnuts from her family farm in Cordoba, which took a while to crack and toast, but made a stonkingly good praline…

I mixed all the praline up with the maple syrup ice-cream base with some trepidation as I’d made the recipe up and it’s risky trying out an unproven recipe on 40 dinner guests. Using only cream and no milk meant that there was no risk of ice crystals forming and it turned out beautifully.

Being an artist in residence in a fairly remote suburb where you are advised not to go out at night because you may well get raped or shot (I doubt this to be true, I think it’s just the Argentine sense of drama and inclination to paranoia which feeds such claims), can make for dull nights. I amused myself by stencilling 80 small chocolate men to finish off the dessert.

I’d come across the idea for making a ridiculous number of edible houses after partaking in Maritea Daehlin Sitchet-Kanda’s brilliant installation at the Market Estate Project in Camden back in March. Maritea is a fellow Latino-Scandie and knows a lot about gingerbread, most importantly that cream is an essential addition to a good dough. Every other gingerbread recipe I have attempted has resulted in poor architectural material, but Maritea’s recipe results in a truly delicious and durable biscuit.

I baked happily.

I’d been working with the children from the area for the past few weeks, taking pictures to document their classes and generally providing much amusement with my half baked Spanish and buckets of home-made popcorn, the latter used for the most part as ammunition in frenzied food fights held across the yard. We invited them all along to ritually destroy the gingerbread model of the house I made.

House destroyed, everyone poured into the ceramic studio for poetry from Buenos Aires poet Juan Salzano, Los Angeles poet JC Sullivan, author, poet, singer and all-round inspiration Gabriela Bejerman and me.

See here for more photos. We’ll be back in BA for more Rambling adventures on the first Saturdays of June and July.

]]> http://www.foodrambler.co.uk/?feed=rss2&p=2430 2 http://www.foodrambler.co.uk/?p=2394 http://www.foodrambler.co.uk/?p=2394#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 10:46:01 +0000 foodrambler http://www.foodrambler.co.uk/?p=2394

A few weeks ago I went to my first Hub Feast in Kings Cross. For anyone unfamiliar with the Hub, it’s a virtual and physical network designed to “inspire and support imaginative and enterprising initiatives for a better world.” We’re talking social, cultural and environmental challenges here.

Holly is the brains behind the new community project Food Stuff, and organises these monthly pot-lucks, bringing people together to discuss food issues and eat each others dishes. This month’s theme was ‘guerrilla food’, and Rambling Restaurant was invited to come in and start the discussion. I’d never heard the term ‘guerilla food’ before, but am liking it more than ‘pop-up’ right now and feel like it fits well to what we are doing – chaotic, unpredictable, surprising events. It also sparked a lot of jokes about actual gorilla food and all the various things we could do with bananas.

I cooked up my lemon curd meringue roulade (recipe to follow), while Rambling Mei and Sarah made several batches of addictive Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting.

We sampled the massive range of salads, dips, bread, quiche, cheese and other delights brought by other Hub Feasters. My favourite was the carrot, ginger and beetroot salad and a potato salad that got hoovered up in the first five minutes. We talked food and sustainability with Forum for the Future and met many other excitable eaters.

Watch this space for details of summer Hub Rambles to come.

Last week I made my first pizza, courtesy of Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi at La Cucina Caldesi cookery school. I’d been there a year before, to witness Giancarlo demonstrate all the different dishes you can make with a certain pasta sauce from a jar. Unfortunately, by the time I’d eaten five dishes made with the stuff, I never wanted to taste its synthetic flavour again. In fact, it put me off jars of sauce for life. So it was with trepidation that I made my way back there.

It was a totally different experience. All the ingredients were fresh, Italian and full of flavour. The light, bubbly dough, made with Birra Moretti, icing sugar-fine flour and yeast, was incredibly soft and satisfying to handle.

My prosciutto, olive and basil baby: light, crisp, fluffy and flavoursome.

Concentration is needed for contemplating pizza…

…and cold Moretti.

I learnt a few pizza facts:
1) Always relax the dough overnight in the fridge.
2) Deep crust doesn’t have to be heavy.
3) Don’t put too many toppings on. I’m not really sure about this one though. I always think the more topping the better, but I guess tomato sauce might make the base soggy.

The consistently surprising Bompas & Parr have set up a Parliamentary Waffle House just off Carnaby Street, where you can vote with your mouth, right up to and including election night. It’s a place for wearing sailor hats…

…and serious debate.

Choose your waffle wisely: blueberry, banana or raspberry. I got that bit right, but didn’t realise that the drink also had political leanings, with Conservative pale ale, Lib Dem amber ale and Labour porter. I ended up sporting a red waffle, a blue drink and yellow hat.

I think the jellymongers have pinned their colours to the jelly. Come to think of it, all my photos have a yellow tinge to them too.

On Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th April we took on our biggest Ramble yet, transforming a Soho office into a secret cabaret den. Artist Ali O’Malley was responsible for designing this rambling interpretation of Pigalle’s infamous Moulin Rouge, making great use of satin, peacock feathers, chicken wire, fairy lights, paint and tea.

The office belongs to the word of mouth people at 1000 heads, who are some of the most up-for-a-challenge corset-lovers I’ve ever met! Not only did they de-wire all their phones and computers, shift desks and manage to carry on as a functioning office throughout all the disruption, but also proved their abilities in handling all sorts of obscure requests, including being able to reach the ceiling, procure frilly pants, become waiters for the weekend and rescue our rambling sanity.

Post Saturday-night exhaustion meets pre-Sunday evening calm…

…before the storm.

The clue read: Try a bit of French to English translation and head to a Great street in Soho. A leading 18th century anatomist and obstetrician resides in a circle of blue behind three iconic red boxes. Enter the middle box for further instructions.

We were mightily impressed with the quality of dressing-up, as guests gathered outside the Windmill strip club. Top hats were raised, pearls fiddled, feathers fluffed, moustaches twirled and masks adorned, as a sea of fish-nets, corsets, braces, hot-pants, stilettos and silver-topped canes awaited direction.

Hats off in particular to these hats made by Ailbhe.

Donna plays cloakroom assistant with style and excellent balance.

The Drunken Fairy was served. This was a champagne and absinthe cocktail, with champagne glamourously donated by 1000 heads and absinthe by the fantastically lubricating Liqueurs de France. It was the first time I’ve tried absinthe and it’s a heady drink, with a bitter aniseed taste. Unlike most booze, it seemed to fuel adrenalin, set the mind racing, the tongue chattering, and sent me and the Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs out dancing ’til 6am on Monday morning. Poet Abi Palmer might also have some thoughts on its effects…

After guests were seated, we kicked off with the Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs’ first Big Spender dance routine.

Dinner is served (by turn-of-the-century tarts and an absinthe fairy). We had Rillettes de Rambling with cornichons and carrot salad, cider vinegar and orange dressing. This was followed by beef bourguignon and parsley cream sauce with baby new potatoes and green beans. There are no photos of the food because, to be quite honest, it wasn’t the prettiest looking. This was a real learning curve for us. Serving 140 covers over two nights proved stretching to say the least and we have now learned our lessons in portion and temperature control!

The Chittys’ next routine was more contemporary than burlesque.

Next up was Mei’s deliciously squishy red velvet cake. All I can say to that is mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Thumbs up more absinthe!

Abi Palmer totally charmed us with her witty, erotic poetry and coy, but confident chat. After Abi came Parisian singer Anne Pigalle, whose performance was like nothing I’ve ever seen before… Think beautiful singing, sexual fantasy, a lot of swearing, lemon-throwing and storming off stage.

Well done to all those in fancy dress who really got into the spirit. Quite literally. Prizes were a bottle of champagne and a bottle of absinthe.

Adieu from the pretend strippers. ’til next time.

So, following on from Thursday’s haggis hunting post, the three lambs’ plucks continued to boil and change in colour and consistency. The lungs kept bobbing to the top of the pan like jostling whales.

Taking it out of the fridge over 24 hours later, it didn’t look so pretty and had a hardened layer of fat on top.

I continued the challenge with Mei on Saturday and was so glad to have her company; this is not a task I’d want to do on my own and Mei made it into a fun, surreal, slightly hysterical afternoon! Still following Tim Hayward’s recipe, we cut the heart and lungs into chunks and then pulsed them in the magimix until finely chopped, but not pate-like.

Cutting up lung was interesting. We decided to remove many of the larger tubes running though it, as they didn’t look particularly appetising. The heart was meaty and I’d like to try cooking it as a separate dish sometime, perhaps gentley sauteing, rather than simmering the hell out of it. The smell of the magimixed offal was really unpleasant and horribly reminiscent of cat food, so we spent a good half an hour not breathing through our noses.

Mei began to grate the liver, and then decided it would easier magimixed too. We mixed the meat with six finely chopped onions and then seasoned it with plenty of salt, white pepper, mace, finely chopped thyme and dried sage. It finally started to smell good.

In went 1.5kg of beef suet…

…and a 1.5kg of Hamlyn’s Scottish pinhead oatmeal, John McCann’s steel cut Irish oatmeal and some plain, rolled oats, all toasted in the oven. I bought the former two at Selfridges, only to discover that you can just buy plain bags of oatmeal at Morrisons, and presumably other supermarkets, for a tenth of the price.

We hand-mixed and tasted and seasoned until happy.

Then we had to find a way of cooking it, as had been unsuccessful in the ox bung/sheep stomach mission. After Weschenfelder failed to deliver my ox bung on Friday or Saturday, I rang Jack O’Shea butchers at Selfridges to see if they had managed to procure a sheep’s stomach. They had! So I jumped on the bus down to Oxford Street, only to find a very apologetic butcher, whose colleague had given it away to someone else. I was so upset that he gave me the biggest haggis I’ve ever seen for half price. It weighs more than my scales will tell me, but I’m guessing it’s about 2.5kg.

So, what with that and the homemade stuff we had a lot of haggis to play with. For dinner we tried haggis five ways, with some neaps and tatties (mashed swede and potato):

1) Wrapped in cling film and foil, placed in a baking tray of water and steamed in the oven.

2) Oven-roasted.

3) Pan-fried.

4) Rolled into balls, dipped in beer batter and deep fried.

5) In a stroke of inspiration that came to us at precisely the same strange moment, we hollowed out an English muffin and stuffed it full of haggis, then deep fried it. It was heavenly: a meaty donut, crisp on the outside and moist on the inside.

I’d like to try making haggis scotch eggs: boiled quails eggs wrapped in haggis and then in breadcrumbs. Mei said she’d like to make haggis dumplings.

Tomorrow night at Rambling we won’t be deep frying the haggis, as I don’t want to give anyone a heart attack, what with the battered Mars bars for pudding as well. But we will all be reading from the book above:

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face
Great chieftan o’ the Puddin’ race!
From them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my arm.

This more or less translates as:

Fair is your honest happy face
Great chieftain of the pudding race!
Above them all you take your place,
Stomach, tripe or guts:
Well are you worthy of a grace
As long as my arm.

Personally, I agree. I’ve always loved haggis and think homemade stuff is particularly delicious.

Lamb’s pluck is not that easy to get hold of. After trying a range of butchers, all of whom seemed to think that making my own haggis was a bit insane and needed a good few days to get hold of any, I tried the excellent  Marky Market. He rang me, as requested, from Smithfield meat market at 4am on Wednesday to tell me what was on offer. I’ve been having Delicatessen-style dreams about sheep organs ever since.

A few hours later he arrived with a bag of three lambs’ plucks, delivered straight to my door and up four flights of stairs.

I was shocked but quite excited by the fact that all the organs were still joined together and the blood bright red, as if the lamb’s insides had been pulled out just that minute.

Today I started following Tim Hayward’s step-by-step instructions to his haggis challenge last year. I must say, the fact that he isn’t doing it again this year made me worry that it might be an extremely disgusting process…

Feeling a bit like a wicked witch in a fairytale I separated the livers and and cut out the hearts of the three plucks. This was pretty simple and just involved just one gutsy stroke for each. I then set about cutting the gristly windpipe from the lungs. Washing these was a strange sensation. I’ve never seen or felt lungs before; they were large and strangely smooth and soft, like liver but lighter. I ran water through the heart ventricles and got rather a shock as I put my finger in to rinse out any blood clots and was spurted with a gush of bloody liquid. I’ve always quite liked handling liver and once when I was little my nanny threw an uncooked liver at my older sister’s pristine friend and we ended up having a liver fight. Not today. Concentrate on the haggis.

I’ve put everything except the strange looking windpipes into my big stockpot, covered them in cold water and brought to the boil. Very strange and exciting things seem to be happening in there right now: the lungs, having turned a deeper purple and part white, are refusing not to float and there is a mixture of pink bubbles and brown froth forming.

After a couple of hours I’ll turn off the bubbling pot and leave the plucks to soak in their cooking juices overnight. Either tomorrow or Saturday I’m hoping that an ox bung will be delivered in an envelope by Weschenfelder. If not, I’ve been assured by Oliver Thring, who is also making haggis, that something clever can be done with cling film and foil. I’ll make the actual haggis mix this weekend, with the help of Mei, who has never seen a haggis before and is enormously excited by the prospect of grating liver.

If the thought of all this gore doesn’t send shivers up your spine, come join us on Monday night for a three-course dinner at Rambling Restaurant Burns’ Night. There will be homemade haggis-stabbing, neaps, tatties and poetry!

Mei and I were seated at a long table with a whole host of interesting people from a variety of countries. There were a couple of other smaller tables too and couple of foodbloggers I recognised – Magnus and Beth.

The attention to detail was stunning, with each napkin made of a different material, bottles of tapwater and bowls of buttery, chilli popcorn to nibble on. The table was not so much clothed as wrapped in brown parcel paper and had the menu and little notes written all over it, encouraging us to interact with our neighbours to find out what we’d be eating.

We started with a dish I recognised from Ashburton cookery school: homemade tortelli filled with goats cheese and orange pepper, with a fresh pesto sauce and topped with a deep fried basil leaf. This was followed by lamb loin with creamy dauphinoise potatoes, crunchy green beans, mushrooms and a heavenly madeira sauce. We were also served with an amuse-bouche of lemongrass and coconut sorbet served in a spoon.

A trio of desserts was brought out with a flourish and plenty of ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhhhs’ from fellow diners. The Turkish delight cheesecake was a recipe from Marcus Wareing’s new book Nutmeg & Custard, but Lex had put her own twist on it, creating a topping of pomegranate floss from her local Turkish grocer. It was so good I nearly fell off my chair.

We were served with pink bubbly to start and Australian muscat plus coffee or tea to finish. All in all, a truly satisfying meal in stylish surroundings, hosted with real care and attention. Looking forward to your Banjo Patterson night ladies!

In March I got excited by and involved in promoting the Big Lunch, but not quite as involved as art student Stephanie above, who is wearing a cabbage as a hat.

And went to a very strange party populated by green people, lions  and long pepper at the Lord of Bath’s house.

I also followed a trail of flowers and cryptic clues to The Sea Flower, an ultra-secret Dalston supper club at the home of marvellous mixologist Grant. He ran it for three consecutive nights each week, each time featuring a different cuisine. This week was a vegetarian Indian feast, which had been cooked by an Indian family and then trolleyed across London on the overground.

The room had been transformed into an Indian tent; the walls and ceiling were hung with silk and we sat like sultans on piles of cushions at low, white tables, palm trees sprouting from the centre of each one.

I spent much of the night discussing life-changing plans with my friend Tam, some international photography students and a large tiger.

Among the dishes served were bowls of crispy, yoghurty, fresh, spicy goodness, which were passed around the table. The meal was finished off with little parcels of paan, as well as hookahs and apple tobacco. Wine was shared and the most delicious cocktails were mixed. Each person donated what they thought the meal was worth into a large music box, complete with twirling ballerina.

I came home from work on Tuesday 31st March with the sinking realisation that not only did I not want to have dinner the next day with seventeen lawyers, but that I never wanted to speak to another lawyer ever again. (That was, of course, an exaggeration. I’ve spoken to lawyers since – many of the more interesting ones have been to Rambling Restaurant and I have some lovely lawyer friends! The ones I was primarily fed up with were, for example, those that insisted on holding conference calls in the car on the way to their best friend’s funeral or those that revelled in their success in evicting small tribes from rainforests and acting for large retailers in child labour cases…)

April 1st was not only April Fools day but the day of the G20 London Summit. There were protests scheduled at Bank, where I was due to have dinner, and I was having visions of being suited and booted in a restaurant with a fat cat clientele and suitably patriarchal name, coming face-to-face with surprised acquantainces protesting outside the window. It wasn’t just that: it’s incredibly frustating being presented with a plate of beautifully cooked food, but having to battle with pen, notebook and some sort of constructive legal conversation while your dish goes cold and sad before your very eyes. What a waste!

So I spent the night talking with my sister, flatmate and oldest friend (all three legends) and drew up a pros and cons list for quitting my job. The cons list was pretty short and mainly consisted of variations on the theme of “it’s a bad idea to quit a good job during a recession”. But when is a good time to quit? Five and half years of desk jobbing was enough. There were many many items on the pros side and the list just keeps on growing.

I began 2009 with an incredible pot luck feast at mine, where friends shucked oysters, cooked slow-roast pork, brought delicious salads and baked melting chocolate fondants. I served up vanilla icecream and raspberry sorbet and then spent much of the month being ridiculously pleased by my new ice-cream maker. My friend Jess went back to live in the bountiful fish paradise that is New Zealand. I was suitably saddened by her departure and blogged rather uninspiringly about hairy vegetables. On the first day back at work I had an appraisal, which went something like this:

Boss: So, how are you getting on? Are you happy with your job. It all seems to be going rather well doesn’t it?

Me: [too hungover and infused with January blues to lie, and having been there for three and a half years without a squeak of discontentment] Actually, I’m not happy. I feel a bit uninspired by it all.

Boss: [looking rather shocked] Oh! Oh dear. Um, well, what can we do to rectify that…

Me: [hopefully] Maybe I could be here less…

So, I began my heavenly four-day week. Which, even though it meant squishing rather more than four days work into four days and several editorial all-nighters, was just great. It gave me a chance to work on my blog and just have a lot more fun.

FEBRUARY

I went surfing in Fuertaventura, a strange place full of moonscapes and OAP nudists. Surfing was something I learnt how to do in 2008. 2009 saw me becoming increasingly bad at and cross with it. I discovered that surfing in freezing cold wind over craggy rocks is not as fun as surfing in the sun on a perfect beach, even if it does look like vanilla icecream.

February was also the month of snow-ball fights and Lebanese food in west London, cooking over an open fire in Wiltshire and perfect pizza at Al Parco by Parliament Hill.

I also went to Bompas & Parr’s scratch ‘n sniff screening of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover. I’d become a massive fan of their innovative food design a couple of months before, when they’d sent me a recipe for glow-in-the-dark gin and tonic jelly that made all my friends fall down drunk at Christmas dinner.

I managed to bag a job as Camden Editor for YourLocal London website, which took me out and about, chatting to local businesses, reviewing restaurants, bands, plays, searching for lost pets and exploring Camden’s pop-up shops, wildlife and vineyards… Suddenly that four-day week was more like a six-day week, but a lot more interesting.

It was also in February that I went to Horton Jupiter’s Secret Ingredient and Ms Marmite Lover’s Underground Restaurant and was truly bitten by the idea of cooking for strangers…