East & West - Review

Oh, well. And if this ISN'T a Christmas miracle then I don't know what is. I found this old review in my drafts and while some of you may have read it before, some of you definitely won't have! Wow, oh wow.

Anyway, this was the last review I ever did as the official Food Reviewer for this lil newspaper. The end came thanks to what SOME people would regard as "a series of fuck ups". Actually, these fuck ups have ended up making 2013 one of the most fulfilling and fantastic years I've had as an adult on this planet.

So, RIP food column but hello to becoming a better, happier human.

Love and best wishes from the meanest muncher in town xxx

SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT

​Food Review: East & West

Address: 227 Abbeydale Road, Sheffield S7 1FJ



Visit Laura's blog at www.meanmuncher.blogspot.com

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Nothing is new; it’s all been done before. The Rolling Stones were the best rock ‘n’ roll band, the 1920s/50s/60s had the best fashion and Nokia phones are basically as good as technology is ever going to get. Sadly, the same can be said for the world of food: an Indian restaurant usually means a pickle tray to start, some curry and a side; an Italian means a thin-crust pizza or lasagne and a Chinese means chicken coloured in with a luminous orange highlighter.


So, when you come across something a bit different, something that you don’t quite understand, it’s a bit of a shock to the system. East and West is a tiny, inconspicuous South Indian and Sri Lankan restaurant squeezed onto Abbeydale Road and is exactly that: a cuisine that until now, I was virtually unaware of.

The neon sign à la ‘local takeaway’, the no-frills interior spotted with wonky tables, the toilet located outside, down an alleyway, and the metal school-dinner trays that each course is served upon might cause the typical restaurant-seeker to do a Dionne Warwick (walk on by, for the uncultured). However, if you’re feeling a little adventurous then East and West is just the ticket.

I still don’t fully understand the menu – what is a starter and what is a main? Do these things even exist? Why do we eat three times a day? I don’t know! Stop asking me questions! To ‘start’ I had the Chilli Paneer (£4.25), which was a total dream and highly, utterly recommended: chunky peppers, onions, and this un-meltable cheese all smothered in the greatest sharp, zingy sauce.

We then moved onto a Dosa, which is basically a large crepe, filled with whatever you like. It’s not quite a main and it’s not quite a starter – reflected in the price (£3.50 - £5.95) but it’s worth a try. We tried grated paneer and masala dosa, both of which were nice and tasty but could have done with a bit more filling to warrant the Sahara-esque expanse of pancake.

The brilliantly-titled Chicken Devilled (£5.50) for me, at least, conjures up terrific images of a world taken over by chickens, all led by a possessed rooster despot. Back in Sheffield though, this translates into chilli chicken and is a joy.

I must point out that East and West is no longer a BYOB establishment and they enforce this new licensing very strictly (a woman left the restaurant because she was not permitted to drink her bottle of red onsite). Alcohol is for sale though and the bottle of wine we shared did the job nicely, so much so that my recollection of how the food tasted from this point onwards is slightly hazy.

To finish, I ordered the Mixed Veg Uttappam (£4.95), which is described as a thick crepe. For me, it felt more like a solid omelette, full of chunky tomato slices and a few peppers but garnished superbly with herbs and a choice of three sauces to dip into.

The gratification of eating out and being able to pick something like an Uttappam, in complete ignorance, is something I miss. This new world of guessing and road-testing unfamiliar dishes and liking them or not liking them is something that we so rarely see now. This owes to the authenticity of the food at East and West, marking it on the map as a must for any food lover.

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Fusion Organic Café - Review

UNRELATED: missing my bro this Christmas (he is on an oil rig)

I wanted to do a post on ‘how to have a vegetarian Christmas’ (above) but I couldn’t be bothered to take any photos and my mum has done all the cooking which means it would be a bit of a cheat. Next year, huh?

Anyway, I wanted to bring to you a little story. When I was about 8 or 9, my parents took me to Spain for a summer holiday and it was the first trip on a plane I had ever had!

We flew with British Airways and apart from the whole getting a metal lump filled with people into the air and actually managing to steer it to a specific location, the most fascinating thing for me was the sick bag.

I wondered if I should start collecting them from all the different airlines. The one (overwhelming and ultimately fatal) worry I had was that most of my friends had already flown before. What was the point in collecting them when everyone else already had TEN sick bags? I was on the back foot and instead of fighting against adversity, I gave up.

Over the next few years, I had the good fortune to fly with Aeroflot (you shared a recycled one), Emirates (a 24-carat gold sack for one’s pukes), JAL (a cute Hello Kitty bag), American Airlines (supersize), Virgin (you puke into a sexy cabin crew member’s hand) and so on and so forth.

And each time I flew, I thought “you stupid, stupid idiot – why didn’t you start collecting them when you first thought about it” but NOW, I can’t start collecting them because I have missed all these opportunities already and so there is absolutely no point…even if I manage to fly on a million more airlines, there is still no point because I have missed all these opportunities.

And this is how I feel about Fusion Organic Café in Sheffield. It’s always a worry to review a restaurant when you have spoken at length about sick. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea here so let me be explicit:

I ONLY WISH THAT I HAD TAKEN A PHOTOGRAPH OF EVERY SALAD I HAVE EVER EATEN THERE BECAUSE THEY VARY EVERYDAY, THEY ARE MORE INVENTIVE THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE AND THE PEOPLE THERE PRODUCE SIX SALADS EVERY DAY. I STOPPED TAKING PHOTOS BECAUSE I HAVE MISSED SO MANY AND NOW THE TASK FEELS OVERWHELMING. THE SALADS ARE DELICIOUS AND THE ONLY REASON THEY ARE LINKED TO SICK IS BECAUSE I SHOULD HAVE STARTED TAKING PHOTOS OF THEM WHEN I FIRST THOUGHT ABOUT IT.

And so, this is (to eliminate any remaining confusion) a positive review.

The salads cost £3.70. You get to choose 3/6 salads and when I say salad, I mean lentils and sweet potato and bulgur wheat and purple sprouting broccoli, olives, courgette ribbons, coconut rice….basically all the stuff that you can’t be arsed to cook! For all the veggies out there – this place is as good as it gets for a work lunch. It’s almost all veggie and loads of gluten-free, dairy-free stuff. OMG I can’t shut up about this place and OMG it does meat too for all you cute-baby-animal eaters (lol lol).

Oh and one final thing. The café is a training café linked to Freeman College so that young people with learning difficulties or behavioural problems can train and work in a great environment. The staff there – especially Moo, who is perhaps the most enthusiastic cashier I have ever met – are wonderful. It’s a great business and a producer of ultra-healthy food that we are lucky to have in Sheffield.

Butcher Works, 74 Arundel Street, Sheffield S1 2NS – I think they close at about 3pm and they are also shut in school holidays. Take out or eat in.

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Carrot and Hummus Crunch on Sourdough (or Irish Soda Bread)

The final sandwich, complete with my mangled hand.

The national airline of Belgium is called SABENA. I know this because when I was 9, my family took me on a coach trip to the Black Forest in Germany. Obviously, it would have been very tiring to do the trip all in one go, so we had little overnight stops along the way. One such stop was in Brussels, where we stayed in a hotel that was rather close to the airport.

Upon arriving at the hotel, you couldn’t help but notice a big fuck-off sign spelling out SABENA on the side of the terminal. Obviously spotting a good opportunity for a quick quip, the coach driver’s sidekick announced “That’s the Belgian airline. It stands for Such A Bloody Experience, Never Again!”

Oh and how everyone chuckled. Especially me because a) that is what you do when a grown-up joke is made, to show that you “get it” and b) I was still at the stage where “bloody” was a bit risqué, as was “piss”.

Anyway, as I was making this sandwich and everything was going wrong, I thought about SABENA. I mean, the final deal was, well, okaaay…although perhaps my enjoyment was thwarted by the various disasters along the way. I have lots of leftovers so have a few more opportunities to work out whether I actually do like this meal or not.

I was initially attracted to the recipe, by Nick Sandler and featured in the Meat Free Monday cookbook, because it was very short. For a lazy cook, this is always a deciding factor (along with How Much Washing Up Will This Create?). The meal used soda bread (can be bought ready made), hummus (can be bought ready made) and some carrot/garlic/seedy thing, which I would of course make by myself.

However, I had read on Twitter and stuff that soda bread was really easy and that homemade hummus was in a completely different league to the supermarket stuff! So, in an attempt to impress my readers (ha ha), I boldly decided to make everything myself….from scratch!

Off I toddled down to Rotherham town centre to pick up the ingredients. I already had most of the stuff that I needed for the soda bread and the only outstanding ingredient, buttermilk, was surprisingly in stock. I also soon had everything I needed, in my basket, for the hummus, until I went off to find the tahini (ground sesame seeds and olive oil).

Buttermilk sourced from Rotherham!

 After a long, drawn-out search involving various staff members, every aisle in existence and Tesco computer databases, my search ended with a “Sorry love, this one is new on me. If it’s not with the curry stuff, I don’t think we will have it.” So, I put the chickpeas and other hummus-y stuff back and picked up a tub of ready made stuff. SABENA.

Back at home, it was time to make the soda bread. This actually wasn’t a disaster at all, despite the finished goods looking somewhat like the elephant man’s head. This is the easiest bread IN THE WORLD. The recipe says it takes an hour (including cooking time) and usually these timings are ambitious because not everyone has ingredients measured out in endless mini bowls. Anyway, it actually DID take an hour because it couldn’t possibly take longer!

Dah-dah!

I used the Irish Soda Bread recipe from Good Food and it was great. The method urges you not to overwork the dough and so my “loaf” did go into the oven looking more like a collection of pieces of dough, although it did work out well in the end.

Before cooking (a hodge-podge of bits of dough)

 To add another complication to the most complicated sandwich I have ever attempted, I had decided to join a band. Not in a serious way (eg; no one in this band would ever consider music as a career) but in a “let’s hang out in some really cold practice rooms and jam!” sort of way. Which is basically an excuse for some guys to smoke doobies…and that is why everyone joins a band, isn’t it?

My boyfriend was going to pick me up at 6.45pm and it was 4.45pm, so there was plenty of time BUT I had no carrots. “Don’t worry,” my Dad said “I’m going out, so I’ll pick you some up!” All was good, so I began to cut up my chilli and garlic. Over an hour later my Dad finally arrived home because there seemed to have been some kind of northern carrot shortage, so it was all rush rush rush and then, for some INSANEEE reason (self-sabotage), I decided to a) double the quantities and b) manually grate the carrots instead of using the food processor because I thought it would be too much washing up. SABENA.

Look how much fucking carrot there is and I STILL had more to do :-(

 The root vegetable God had forsaken me because the carrot grating step took just over half an hour. My hand was about to fall off, a bit of finger had been grated into the mound of orange stuff and wet carrot was sticking to every surface, towel, tap and floor tile in the house. This shambles went on for such a ridiculously long time that I missed band practice and spent another boring half an hour washing up instead. SABENA.

A literal MOUNTAIN of hand-grated carrot.

 So, feeling all sweary, sweaty and frustrated, I bundled the sandwich together and gobbled it down. SABENA! SABENA! I think, what with the sophisticated ingredient of caraway seeds, I was hoping to be a bit more bowled over by the taste than I was. I didn’t let the carrot mixture fully cool, so that may have been a problem. Like I say, I think I should try it all again another day, when I’m feeling a little less besieged, and then make my final judgement.

The carrots, cooking (obviously).

 Serves 2 (I doubled these quantities) (SABENA)

“Fry 2 coarsely grated large carrots in a pan with 1 tablespoon olive oil, 2 chopped garlic cloves, ½ chopped red chilli and 1 teaspoon caraway seeds over moderate heat for 5-8 minutes, stirring frequently. Cool before using in the sandwich. Cut 4 slices of sourdough bread. Spread 100g hummus onto the bread, followed by the carrots. Remember to scrape in the caraway seeds and chilli. Add 2 tablespoons Greek yoghurt to the bread in blobs, followed by a handful of chopped coriander. Season with freshly ground pepper.”

I just mixed the coriander into my carrot mix and I also forgot to season with pepper. Please note also, that after watching Jamie Oliver on (I think it was) the Jonathan Ross show, I jazzed up my lame supermarket hummus with cumin and paprika, plus a little parsley. It tasted a bit nuttier, I think. SABENA. Also, this dish is super garlicky, when you consider the hummus (which is enough to repel all people for at least a day aka very useful) AND the cloves added to the carrots. So handle with care, my friends.

Pimped hummus (cumin and paprika).

 NB: OH MY WORD, I JUST READ THAT BACK (proof-reading, you see) AND SAW THAT IT SAID SOURDOUGH, NOT SODA BREAD!!! What an unmitigated DISASTER! I baked and wrote about the wrong bread, which just shows how completely and unreservedly SABENA the whole thing is.

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Caramelised Onion Cheese Toastie

2012. Twenty Twelve. Two thousand and twelve (no one says that, it’s so unbrandable).

It’s been a year, hasn’t it? Well, not just any year but a year with one extra day! It’s such a joy to be gifted with yet another day, which doesn’t really mean anything at all when you remember that the mechanical parts of our bodies don’t work in or take account of days or years. So you haven’t really lived for another day at all; it was just another span of time that was called something different.

What did you do with that extra non-day? I complained that I had to be at work for another day with no thanks or praise and wondered whether I should mention it to my boss so he could adjust my pay accordingly. A colleague advised me against this and pointed out that, thanks to Queenie, we would be getting an extra day off anyway. I couldn’t be arsed to work out whether I would be better off, worse off or exactly the same, so I just shut up and did some work.

In the middle section of the year, a miasma of happiness and togetherness forcibly descended onto the UK or maybe just London (I became very London-centric at this point and often thought that “east, west” etc. on the weather forecast was referring to Hackney and Shepherd’s Bush, not Norfolk and Cornwall).

We all know what happened this year. Loads of big stuff; stuff that everyone thought we would completely fuck up but actually turned out rather well. When Jeremy Hunt had the bell ringing incident, I thought that the Olympics had peaked before it had even begun but in actual fact, the sports were really great too (and we were also treated to a second instance of political-it-must-be-satire thanks to Boris dangling from a zip wire).

But forget about the Olympics and the Jubilee and the end of the world that didn’t happen and the re-election of Obama and all that stuff because none of it really matters. This wasn’t the year of Team GB (I bet they’re really regretting their homage to Jimmy Savile now aren’t they?) or the Royals or the prank phone call or the president we wish we had for ourselves; this was the year of….dum dum dum

Paul McCartney: the embarrassingly avuncular Beatle that somebody (against the will of everyone in the UK) expropriated for the benefit of, um, everyone in the UK.

I’m not going to slam him though because he is a brilliant, brilliant musician and seems (as far as you can tell, which you never really can) to be an okay kind of guy (not withstanding the Heather Mills years). Caveat, caveat.

Finally, I should say that my basis for thinking Paul might be a nice guy is thanks to his cameo in The Simpsons episode called “Lisa The Vegetarian”.

 Paul and his late wife Linda inexplicably find themselves on the roof of the Kwik-E-Mart with Apu and Lisa where a discussion about vegetarianism begins. Surely you have to be quite nice to be a veggie – at least not a total psychopath. Anyway, this was all but forgotten until Christmas day when Paul came into my 2012 yet again with his “Meat Free Monday Cookbook”.

It’s really, really good and I like the fact he takes a realistic view of a meat-free life, rather than just bulldozing meat-eaters with PETA pictures. The book is broken down into seasons (always helpful, so you can incorporate the most plentiful and therefore, cheapest vegetables into your meals), weeks (for each Monday) and meals (breakfast, packed lunch, lunch, snack/side, dinner and dessert).

One such packed lunch caught my eye: the cheese and onion sandwich. It uses goats’ cheese and cream cheese mixed together and sandwiched, with caramelised red onion and rocket, between two slices of granary bread. Caramelissssssanything makes me drool and I was craving a cheese toastie, so I decided to sack off the goats cheese etc. and make a good old toastie with the addition of caramelised onion.

Something so "sweaty" has never looked or tasted this good.

Heat some oil in a frying pan and add half a sliced red onion. Allow the onion to sweat. When it begins to wilt, add a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar and a little seasoning. Cook for another 3 – 4 minutes.

I used edam cheese and made these in a normal toastie maker.

It was divine. So, so lovely and I can still smell the onions in the kitchen, which is a bloody good thing. So Paul, you are forgiven and will be allowed to return to our screens limitlessly in 2013. 

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