Chiang Mai – & The Cool Curve of Coffee Bars

The Gulf Islands seem to represent Thailand’s mainstream/gap yah partyville and short holiday culture and Bangkok the loud smelly, vivid sensory big city experience. Meanwhile, Chiang Mai carries the alternative or younger cultural scene. I’m not pretending it isn’t geared for tourism; there are tourist markets and innumerable travel agents make sport out of selling a ‘same same’ set of excursions (I’m a particular fan of the ‘non touristy’ bullshit in the picture below) typically including trekking, cooking, zip lining, ATV and mountain biking. But Chiang Mai also seems to have this underlying young alternative personality.

From the (admittedly very limited) two weeks I’ve hung around here, it seems down to the lesser presence of a music scene and cafe culture. There are fewer late tourist-only bars with drunk people falling out and not so many international retail/food chains. There are lots of great coffee bars and cafes and you aren’t hassled past the point of “no thanks” by tuk tuk drivers. Unlike in Bangkok, where they’ll chase you down the street and take umbrage if you ignore or dismiss them.

There’s, some good live music in many of the bars. People seem happier, younger and there is a strong university presence. Again, it’s subjective and partly based on my having landed in a great chilled out hostel with a great cafe next door. Now here’s a cafe with personality that I’d love to have near where I live. It’s called Birds Nest and is charmingly decked out.

It’s themed like a bird cage (bear with me), with a hand-painted tree on the wall, painted and model birds and associated paraphernalia (like the eggcup) around. It plays varied background jazz music, as the owner also owns a local jazz club and it’s got nicely miss-matching wooden furniture. There’s an impressive array of modern classic and reference books (from Bryson to Bennett, Tolstoy and travel guides). There are also board games like chess, go, draughts, scrabble and brain teasers like rubix cubes.

And I’m not only bigging it up because it did one of my favourite things which was to serve me perfect soft boiled eggs. The majority of its food is freshly cooked and cheep (like the budgie). For example, you get a great breakfast of fresh fruit, yoghurt and muesli (which would tend to see me through to dinner); green, red, massuman and Penang curries; hot sandwiches with fresh bread and even homemade pita bread and hummus.

Its the kind of place you meet very interesting people. For instance, I met a local guy named Pisit, known as Peter, who was jamming on the guitar and killing time before a job interview. We had a chat about music and we talked about out favourite current bands (he also works as a DJ) and he is launching an online music radio station. It’s launches today, so have a look: http://www.marchroom.com/.

Back home, I think too many cool places like this fall foul of the a dangerous curve. People seek reliability, so the economics of what I call ‘the cool curve’ destroy fun of places like this. A place becomes well known and usually prices rise, the brand is used to open a chain or group and standardisation takes over. The more people go there, the less cool it gets and the more standardisation happens. The less cool and charming it is. The chain then trades off a standard quality or reliability brand and the magic is gone. The cycle is to an extent, inevitable, but some cities manage to cultivate a culture where more of these great little boutique places pop up.

That’s the kind of city I’d like to live in.

A Christmas cheeseboard with no equal

Although Christmas is perhaps not synonymous with cheese for people, it’s always a feature of chez Clark, come the yuletide period. A household with a strong appreciation for cheese, we use Christmas as the perfect excuse to stock up and have a fromage-fest. Usually on Boxing day, it will be a feature along with cold meats and salad.

This year I’ve come across a couple of new cheeses including Bath Blue, which a pal got for me on a visit to the Great British Cheese Festival which have inspired me to try and create a board with a balance of cheeses and something new. So thought I’d do a spot of research and some ideas from fellow cheese appreciators on what makes a good board. A few of the comments were:

• “Variety – and unpasteurised cheeses ” – Chris
• “Something hard, something blue, something soft and a bit of goat” – James
• “Needs something creamy. Call me Scottish, but oatcakes are a must” - John
• “Something stinky!” – Carla
• “A good cheeseboard shouldn’t be pretty, just rustic” – Ellie (provider of said cheese)

Where to begin! I think there are a few key elements to a good cheeseboard, aside from the cheese itself:

• Accompaniments: jellies, chutneys, nuts, grapes, figs etc
• Biscuits and/or bread: different cheeses work better with different ones. I like soft cheeses on bread, hard cheeses on oat or wholemeal biscuits and blue cheeses on crunchy slim crackers
• Presentation: for cheese there are a few things to get right. Temperature is the most important thing because it affects the taste and spreadability. A nice wooden board is good aesthetically but to Ellie’s comment – it shouldn’t be too pretty!
• Booze: a good port and/or wine to go with is super important

By the way (if you think I’ve missed something from this I love to hear it).

Cheese-wise, I think I’m going to go with the following this year:

• Bath Blue
• Colston Basset Stilton
• Aged mature cheddar
• Cambazola
• Brie
• Goats cheese
• Something unpasturised if I can find it!

And in terms of accompaniments, it will be chilli jelly, spicy chutney, nuts and grapes. Booze-wise, it will be a fairly standard Taylor’s port. I’ll update this post with some pictures once I’ve done the board over Christmas

Steamed sea bream with chilli, lime and ginger

I’m always pleased when I manage to find bream in supermarkets or fishmongers, as it’s deemed to be ethically sound and is listed as a good alternative to endangered fish like cod, halibut and hake. Bream is increasingly popular and it’s really easy to cook, very tasty and reasonably priced.

My basic guideline for cooking a 350-500g bream is to season and oil it, wrap it in foil and bake on a tray in the oven (190C)  for about 18+ minutes. Because the fish steams in its own juices, you can’t really go wrong and it won’t dry out.

Adding to this basic approach, you can use whatever flavouring you like and some options are:

1. Lemon zest and juice
2. Chopped chilli, lime juice and slices of ginger
3. Chilli, garlic and ginger
4. Lemon and parsley
5. Spring onion, garlic, soy & chilli

For all of these, all you need to do is stuff the flavourings around the fish and in the cavity. You can also make some cuts along the fish to help the flavour into the fish.

I personally love option two and like using one fairly hot chilli, a few centimetres of ginger and the juice of half a lime when baking two fish. You can discard the bits when you’re serving, but do spoon over a tablespoon of the juice. Serve with potatos or chips.

Fantastic Morrocan lamb wrap recipe

I recently visited Exmouth market at lunchtime with my colleague James and we both enjoyed a great Morrocan lamb wrap. The well-known restaurant Moro has a food stand there, as do many other local restaurants and other sellers not based in the area. Collectively, they selling all kinds of interesting foods and it’s a real delight visiting the market there – I suggest you try it if you can get there on a lunchtime on a nice day. There’s also a cakes stand which has some very nice looking cakes, including some great cheesecakes.

The lamb wrap from Moro was really tasty. It was slow-cooked lamb, spiced with great Moroccan flavours and served with a crunchy salad, fresh red chilli and yoghurt. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to try and replicate it. I’m sure my lamb won’t be quite as nice as that from the restaurant by all-in-all, it came out well. Here’s what I did.

I roasted a shoulder of lamb in the same way I did for a Jamie Oliver recipe called mad Moroccan lamb. It’s essentially a shoulder of lamb, crisscrossed deeply with a knife and rubbed with a mixture of ground cumin, corriander, black pepper etc. You give it a good three hours, so it’s very brown and the fat can render off.

Then, you leave it to cool and then take the meat off the bone. Try to get rid of any really fatty bits, but do try to keep in as much of the crunchy outside as possible. Then mix and mash it all together in a bowl. You can keep this for some time. I kept it in the fridge for a week, but it’s probably best to freeze some of it in smaller portions, so you can come back to it.

This just went into a wrap (I used a multi-seed one) with a tablespoon or two of natural yoghurt. For the salad, I chopped up cucumber, radish, celery and de-seeded tomatos and a reasonable portion of red chilli all pretty small (the red chilli as small as I could) and mixed it all together before adding to the wrap. I had some parsley at the time as well, which was a good addition too. That was pretty much it – but very, very tasty. I’d thoroughly suggest trying it.

Even better – cook the lamb for a Sunday roast and they just plan this as how to use the leftovers. Very economical and extremely tasty.

Food allergies and the huge amount I don’t know

Recently I’ve become increasingly aware of food allergies, as a number of people I work with, including Kate have allergies such as gluten intolerance. Kate recently started a gluten free (GF) blog called Postcards from a gluten free life. I’ve not really thought about allergies in the past, but they affect a huge amount of people and present a real challenge to how people source, cook and eat food.

This growing interest conveniently coincided with an invite I recieved to a Sainsbury’s event about GF and food allergies.  The company relaunched its Free From range recently, so invited a number of food bloggers to an evening about cooking for food allergy sufferers to raise awareness. Gluten free and other food and related bloggers including Lucy, Molly, Pippa and Anne cooked a number of dishes and I put together a thai beef salad. There are some pictures of the fun event here.

It helped shine a light on some of the basic issues that food allergy sufferers face. Sainsbury’s reckons they end up spending 40% longer in store because so much time is spent checking labels. A nice anecdote I heard was that some people call Sainsbury’s new Free From aisles (now appearing in their bigger stores) the library aisle, because everyone is reading packets! But even eating out, food allergy sufferers are made to experience humiliation and inconvenience. Because most restaurants only cater for vegetarians explicitly on their menus, people with other dietary needs have to check ingredients or order off-menu. This – and I’ve experienced it first hand plenty of times – can be at best, inconvenient and mildly humiliating or at worst, result in illness, allergic reactions and gross personal irritation. Kitchens ill prepared to cater specifically for specialised requests overlook key instructions like “no nuts” and it could easily result in death, since anaphylactic shock is a very real threat to (not only) sufferers of peanut allergies.

Information and communication seems to be one of the major themes faced by ‘coeliacs’ (people who suffer from gluten intolerance) and other allergy sufferers. A friend of mine who recently had an operation resulting in considerable dietary challenges asked her doctor – post-operation – ‘so what can I eat’. The answer was short and shrift and she’s not had a great deal of help from her doctors, except as to what she can’t eat. Fortunately Sainsbury’s have kindly offered to help her explore a few culinary options. There are also some great gluten free and other allergy blogs around.

The effort Sainsbury’s is putting into Free From appears to be considerable. Taste and quality seem to be key issues faced by buyers and the company has gone to the effort of making a real education push and even realigned the supply chain for some products so they can produce fresher gluten-free bread products. Meanwhile, they have a phone line that will help consumers understand what they can eat and there’s a growing webpage with extra information. Interestingly, many of the suppliers in the market are very small niche producers; some only produce one or two products. This makes the supply chain issues even more complicated, but apparently the area is growing fast.

For Lent, I decided to try and set myself a challenge by giving up bread and despite a few lapses, it’s proved to be an interesting one. Some people, myself included, rely on bread a great deal and eat it many times a day. Great though it is, it’s proved eye-opening to try and cut it out completely and frankly, it does show me to an extent what people face. With allergies growing among the population, we can probably expect to see a lot more supermarkets market such ranges, but I think the restaurant community has a very long way to go.

Are brown eggs better quality?

Eggs are great, I love eggs. I’ve given up bread for Lent, so I’m having to dip sausages into my boiled eggs at the moment, which is actually a really great thing. It could well last beyond lent.

Anyhoo, I was chatting with someone on the bus about eggs earlier (as you do) and the question of shell colour arose. As you can imagine it would, on a rainy Monday morning on a packed 521 bus. Shell colour doesn’t actually have any relevance to quality, interestingly enough. But while in the US white eggs are preferred and brown used in industry, in the UK the opposite is true. Nice little Monday factoid for you. And here’s the reference from Wikipedia.

Egg shell color is caused by pigment deposition during egg formation in the oviduct and can vary according to species and breed, from the more common white or brown to pink or speckled blue-green. In general, chicken breeds with white ear lobes lay white eggs, whereas chickens with red ear lobes lay brown eggs.^[15] Although there is no significant link between shell color and nutritional value, there is often a cultural preference for one color over another. For example, in most regions of the United States, chicken eggs are generally white; while in the northeast of that country, and in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, they are generally light-brown. In Brazil and Poland, white chicken eggs are generally regarded as industrial, and brown or reddish ones are preferred.

I wonder if white eggs are seen to be in some way cleaner by Americans, while Brits see brown eggs as more good ‘n’ proper and from an organic farm or something. What do you think?

Surbiton Farmers Market

Since moving to my new residence in Surbiton, I’ve struggled to find as many good local food shops in close vicinity, so it’s fantastic that there have recently been some farmers markets in my street, Maple Road. The local shops (listed here: http://www.mapleroadsurbiton.co.uk/) sponsored the market, which included a number of great stalls – mostly food – but also some flower and arts stalls.

Some that I visited included:

• Norbiton Fine Cheese Company (which will come as little surprise)
• Simons Free Range Eggs (pretty straightforward proposition)
• Allingham Farm (which had a good variety including non-traditional) 
• SussexWay Traditional Meat (where I got a nice belly of pork)
• Corte dei Signori (got some great extra virgin olive oil)

I was thoroughly happy with what was on offer and even managed to get some mutton, which is hard to get hold of. I also tried a new cheese from the Norbiton Fine Cheese Company. It’s good to know as well that you’re dealing small local businesses, which helps to mitigate the feeling that all my money goes to Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.

Though I’ve not yet heard whether the markets are going to continue, SussexWay Meat’s website suggests they are going to continue to be regular – on the 3rd Saturday of each month at Maple road – here’s hoping!

Norway trip cont. – Bergen

Having been a bit lazy on the blogging front, this post has been sitting in my drafts. Think I’ll post it for posterity and to close off the Norway trip…

After our visit to Finse, we travelled to Flam and spent four days cycling, walking and lazing. Food-wise, it was pretty uneventful and we mostly barbequed. We did have one slight food mishap, having tried to use some preserved mackerel fillets. In Norway they  vacuum pack fish and so far as I can understand – before using it, you have to soak it in water to get rid of the salty taste. Not being prepared for this, we tried to barbeque it having soaked it for only a few minutes. Which was disgustingly unsucessful!

Bergen was far more interesting. Being a costal city, it has a great fish market and it’s a historically interesting market too. Bergen accomodated one of the main four offices of the Hanseatic league during the height of the league’s powers. In the old days, the Hanseatic league was an alliance between German city states, which had trading agreements with hundreds of North European cities.

The fish market – as it operates today – seemed largely tourist-driven, but it has a great selection and is a fun experience. We were even able to buy some vacuum packed wild salmon and gradvalax to bring home, with the fishmongers more than eager to send tourists home with lots of goodies.

Ingredient sales up, prepackaged dinners down…

Another story that caught my eye this week was one from the Observer, in which Rebecca Seal reported on figures that suggest a significant move away from prepackaged food. Some very interesting stats include:

• The sale of convenience food rose by 300% in the past decade… Asda says sales of economy white potatoes have risen by an astonishing 3,017% in a year
• At Morrisons, sales of the ingredients for Sunday roasts are up 44% on the year
• At Asda, beef kidney sales are up 74% and pork shoulder 58%
• When Sainsbury’s featured basic beef chunks on an in-store recipe card, purchases rose by 2,000%.

Seal attributes this to the efforts of celebrity chefs creating more interest in cooking; this may well be the case. However at this stage the trend could go two ways. Either cost pressures will dissuade many consumers from experimenting with new foods and cooking as a result of job pressure or being unemployed, or people will seek budget relief by attempting to cook more. The issue lies in whether people percieve cooking as cheaper than prepared meals and how far health affects the purchasing decision.

There will also no doubt be a strong reaction from the packaged food industry which will target marketing efforts at this very trend towards healthier food, particularly in the credit crunch. FMCG companies frequently up their marketing at times of slowdown in an attempt to drive market share, so this could well affect the balance of power.

I for one, will keep trying to find cheap ways of preparing my own food.

M&S to Change its Sourcing Strategy

The FT reports today that M&S is to continue and expand its use of non M&S branded products. It’s food business seems to have been a large part of its sucess in recent years, almost imposing itself on the rest of the business and expanding into clothing real estate. The store in Ealing for one has adapted and been totally remodelled to cater for the bulging food section.

I hadn’t realised they’d started selling products like Tetley tea and Hellman’s mayo (probably because it was a limited trial), but this is going to increasingly be part of their offering. This will bring them more into direct competition with Waitrose, which is the only supermarket in the same part of the market as M&S, price/quality wise.

You have to wonder what this’ll do to M&S’ existing suppliers and how their mix of imports vs. local suppliers will change. I have to say I do like Waitrose’s approach in trying to convince people that as many of it’s products as possible, are local. And I hope M&S go down the same road and not just in terms of how they position it.

However, I still prefer to beat the drum about using local shops though – I barely seem to use supermarkets at the moment and I’ve gone so far as to scope out the local shops in locations I’m planning to move to. If only there were more local shops to chose from.