03.24.07
winter fare
Everyone is ill. The entire household trekked down to Southampton for an anime convention last weekend and have returned with a deeply unpleasant dose of something chest / throat / sinus related to suffer through. I seem to have got off lightly, which I’m attributing to the massive amount of fruit I’ve been consuming recently (although it’s altogether more likely that I’ve just had this particular bug before, or something). While everyone else is rolling around being generally unhappy, I managed to shift a couple of days of lingering illness with a decently long sleep and about a litre of Innocent smoothie.
With the house (and my LJ friends list) feeling so infected, I decided to take myself off out for a long-promised visit to Borough Market today. Despite living just a couple of tube stops from this famous food market, I’ve never actually gone there before, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Mac and I turned up at about 1.30pm with no clear objective other than “find something for dinner” - and I proceeded to spend two genuinely delightful hours wandering around looking at incredibly delicious things.
I think I’d expected it all to be more commercialised and sanitised somehow; it certainly isn’t that. Entire stalls are devoted to things which wouldn’t merit half a shelf in the “weird shit” section of your local supermarkets. I found a man selling incredibly sweet, creamy smelling fresh Parmesan (a million miles from the hard, sour stuff you get in supermarkets) which he cut off giant cheese wheels in front of you. A specialist stall sells only meat pies; another is dedicated purely to venison. In the butchery section, there’s a table of wild boar products. Delicious freshly made cakes and flans are around every corner; a cage-style enclosure houses a vegetable area stacked over six feet high in places with an eye-popping variety of fresh veg, the root vegetables so fresh the soil is still damp on them, the leaf veg uniformly crisp and beautiful.
The sheer variety is overwhelming, and frankly, I would have been a bit lost due to the absolute oceans of choice were it not for having the altogether more decisive Mac on hand to make “suggestions” (i.e. tell me what to do when I was dithering like a fool). We grabbed some salt beef sandwiches for lunch, first; huge ciabatta baps dumped on a disposable tin tray and then loaded up with as much fresh, steaming salt beef as they could fit without overflowing the tray, for four quid. I then decided I wanted to try something from the venison stall, having never cooked it before. We settled on a venison casserole (well, a stew really, since it was cooked on the hob rather than in the oven) with red cabbage side dish, and procured some delicious crusty bread to mop up the juices; I also picked up some lovely looking cheese and fruit, while Mac bought a fresh-baked apple and blackberry crumble pie for dessert.
It’s not exactly speedy food - over two hours of slow simmering on the hob, in fact - but god, that sort of food hits the spot. Cooked in a full bottle of red wine, the root vegetables crumble together with the fat from the meat to form a thick, rich gravy, flavoured by huge leafy stems of rosemary and a sprinkle of thyme and parsley. The big chunks of venison are dark and deeply flavoured, but so soft from lengthy cooking that they fall apart in your mouth; and the red cabbage, simmered with sugar and juniper berries in red wine and red wine vinegar, makes a lovely tangy side dish, which somehow tastes of winter. The whole thing is an ideal, warming meal for the cold snap of weather we’re suffering at the moment, and after chilling our hands and faces at the market this afternoon, I’m glad we opted for that rather than something a bit more suited to spring. It’s filling, too - and there’s plenty left for a couple of reheated bowls at lunchtime tomorrow, too.
I’m definitely going to make Borough Market into a more common haunt - although I may control my spend a bit better in future. 50 quid on tasty food isn’t something I begrudge in the slightest, but it might be better if it doesn’t happen too often!
(I know this blog is tagged as media and technology, but dammit, I can’t play videogames on an empty stomach!)
