Archive | December, 2011

Rudolph on toast

22 Dec

DASHER, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donna, Blitzen and… sorry Santa but Rudolph won’t be leading your sleigh this year.

He’s been pulverized, mixed with spices and garlic to create a delicious pate. Mmm, Rudolph on toast.

Reindeer pate

If you’re worried about piling on the pounds over Christmas, reindeer has one of the lowest fat contents of red meat – a mere two per cent – so it could be the answer. And you can rest assured that you’re not eating an endangered species – the reindeer are farmed in Sweden by Sami herdsmen and fed a diet of moss and lichen.

The packaging of my tin of reindeer pate looked innocuous. A white label announced an arctic delicacy, ‘an indulgent Christmas treat’ and claimed Rudolph’s relative was inside. When I opened it the pate didn’t look very appetising – dark, plummy meat clumped together so it resembled cat food – but it was surprisingly tasty.

I didn’t have any Knackebrod (Swedish crisp bread) so I slathered it onto some toasted not-very-authentic ciabatta.

Smoother than Michael Buble singing Christmas classics, the pate tasted rich and gamey but not overpowering. It  wasn’t as greasy as pork-based pates and was infused with spicy cognac – it definitely had sparkle.

So if you want to treat your family to something exotic, festive and tasty this Christmas, shelve the turkey. Buck the trend and treat them to some reindeer pate instead.

Reindeer pate is available from www.firebox.com

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Corny but tasty

16 Dec

Weird food: Mince pie flavoured popcorn

I HAVE a Christmas confession.  I hate mince pies. The stodgy pastry and spiced, gloopy mixture sends shivers down my spine. A bit unfortunate really as it is only thanks to the pesky pastries that I reached the heady heights of being a  Guinness World Record Breaker. 

I write ‘heady heights’ with a massive dollop of sarcasm because the record I hold, along with former colleagues Luke Chilton and Michael Xuereb, is for eating the most mince pies in a minute. And we achieved…two.

I can hear you snorting with laughter. You’d think wolfing down two mince pies in a minute would be a piece of, er pie. After all, most people manage to shovel a few down at Christmas, along with endless turkey, chocolate log and trifle.

But the pastry dried out my mouth then combined with the mincemeat to create a sticky glue that stuck my jaw together. The tactic was to take small, delicate bites then gulp them down, but it took me at least 30 mince pies to work this out.

Despite being red-faced from the mince pie sweats and  green about the gills (at least I was sticking to a festive colour scheme!) I managed to secure the record. But it left me scarred and the thought of even the tiniest morsel of mince pie passing my lips made me shudder.

So it was with trepidation that I tested Joe and Seph’s Mince Pie flavoured popcorn.  Continue reading →

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Ghastly Garlic Puddings

11 Dec

Garlic Tiramisu: A bitter end to the meal

NOTHING tastes quite as divine as Tiramisu. Rich, coffee-soaked sponge, fluffy cloud-like Italian cream, curls of chocolate sprinkled on top. Unless, that is, you lace it with pungent garlic.

And that is what you’re letting yourself in for if you eat at Garlic and Shots, a restaurant in London’s trendy Soho where everything, including puddings, comes with lashings of the abominable bulb.

This tar-like chocolate gloop, doesn’t taste of coffee, is topped with thick, tasteless cream and has the overpowering aftertaste of garlic. A bitter end to a disappointing meal.

With branches in Palma and Stockholm, Garlic and Shots, founded by the Swedish Olsson brothers, is aimed at the hairy biker, Ozzy Osbourne fan or heavy metal head-banger.

Mounted stag’s heads, photos of skeletons and a papier-mache Michelin man adorn the walls. It’s trying to be edgy but with the wipe-clean, laminated menus and toilet facilities featuring peeling paint and graffiti, it’s just a bit, well, dirty.

As rock classics blare from the stereo, our pink-haired waitress brought me a garlic and honey vodka shot. Sweet at first, it hit the back of my throat and made me shudder. It was like hearing ragged fingernails scratching across a blackboard.

I tried to console myself by thinking of the health benefits of garlic. A member of the onion family and closely related to the chive and the leek, it can prevent heart disease and cancer –  and of course it wards off vampires.

Amateur: Steak with a garlic cross

The main course fared slightly better. The ‘Transylvanian vampire steak’ melted like butter when I cut into it, but was ruined by tomato and peppercorn sauce that tasted like something a hard-up student had knocked up from a tin of tomatoes and far too many peppercorns. Topped with a ‘garlic cross’, literally two shreds of garlic in the shape of a cross, it looked amateur.

The lamb shank was tender and juicy, accompanied by a garlic and malt whisky butter, red wine jus, and trees of asparagus wrapped in bacon. But the lamb and steak, as well as all the other main courses – chilli con carne, bangers and mash, seafood stew or burgers –   are dishes you’d expect to contain garlic. Nothing special.

Another dessert, Swedish radio cake, was a tarted up Rich Tea chocolate biscuit cake. The chocolate tasted cheap and the garlic hit left a bitter aftertaste.

I thought the chef would caramelise the garlic to make it sweeter,then expertly combine it with other ingredients to enable    the flavours to marry. No such luck.

The restaurant felt like a gimmick. Like paying to meet Dracula, and then discovering it’s your dad’s mate wearing a pair of fake fangs.

The tin pots full of parsley on the table did little to dampen my garlic, death breath. Leaving my half-eaten dessert I couldn’t get out of the rock-style restaurant fast enough – like a bat out of hell.

Garlic and Shots, 14 Frith Street, London, W1D 4RD, 0207 734 9505

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