Final Meal 2016 - Piri piri Croque Monsieur

It's an interesting feature of life that we often blame our own failures and shortcomings on bad luck, while simultaneously failing to acknowledge the huge role that the hand of fate plays in things beyond our control.

I'm not going to play the 'yet another disgruntled Remainer banging on about Brexit' card, given that I felt the campaign waged by both sides was pretty appalling and have no strong views either way. But, hubris aside, if we've learned one thing from this sorry referendum malarkey it is that wholesale, irreversible constitutional change should not be determined by a one-off poll requiring only a simple majority to pass.

It just shouldn't. Because it really is a fucking fucktarded way of doing things.

52:48 is hardly a clear mandate at the best of times, but several of the 52% expressed remorse almost immediately, and several more claimed they only voted Leave because they didn't think they'd win. Duh. Then you have this 'ere London. The strongest area in the country for Remain, with turnout badly affected by the weather and transport issues preventing folks from getting to the polls.

Piri piri Croque Monsieur - the dish of the Euro 2016 final

You could've held the EURef a week later and got a different result. Hold it five times, and it might end up 3-2 one way or t'other. It's effectively so close as to be a coin-flip, and the fact that we could easily have a different result simply because a few people changed their minds on a whim or couldn’t get to the polling station because their train home was cancelled simply proves that this is no way to decide the future of the country.

I'd be saying the same thing if Remain had won by such a small margin too, though obviously the status quo would've had less impact on the economy'n'shit. I was always more concerned that a close result either way would cause chaos in the Conservative Party, and so it's proven to be - I'm sorry to see David Cameron go, but lack of attention to detail has been arguably his biggest weakness in office, and so it's proven again with his failure to think properly about the rules of the Referendum and the part that luck can play if we don't take steps to ensure against it. Insist on a 60% majority - robust enough so as not to vulnerable to human whim, hailing storms or cancelled trains.

Anyway, having said I wouldn't play the disgruntled Remainer card (honestly I'm not!) I'll shut up in case people think I am.

Let's talk about football instead

It isn't just politics either. Euro 2016 has shown how fortune can have a massive and long-lasting impact on outcomes.

Two deserving finalists?

Hosts France might just about be one of the two best teams in the tournament, though they were very lucky to get past Germany.

But also in the final we have a desperately average Portugal side who struggled to finish third in their group, and didn't even win a game in regulation time until their semi-final win over Wales.

England were universally slated after losing to Iceland in the last 16, with Roy Hodgson going the same way as Cameron - but lets not forget that in the past year, England have beaten Wales, Portugal, Germany and France - all four semi-finalists. Again, it just illustrates how the fickle hand of fate makes a mockery of sport just as it does politics.

Will the winner of tomorrows Euro 2016 final be the best team in Europe in 2016? It's possible but tournament football is scarcely better at determining this than picking straws.

'Piri piri' is Portuguese for 'scraping through by drawing every game'

Anyway, a major final means that I create a recipe that combines the respective cuisines of the two finalists. There's a bit of luck in this too, as you never know quite how it's going to turn out.

I've done this a couple of times before though, with Black Forest Churrasco the dish of the 2014 World Cup Final between Germany and Argentina and Gnocchi Bravas when Spain took on Italy in the Final of Euro 2012.

This time we're going for a lunchtime classic, with a bit of a kick (how much will depend on how hot your Piri piri spice mix is, I go with good old reliable Swchwarz, tasty but not overpowering with chilli heat).

Piri piri Croque Monsieur

A French classic with a Portuguese twist!


Ingredients - serves two:

Bread, four slices, ideally French rustic style
Cheese, four generous but slender slices - I used French Comte
Ham, decent quality, four slices or so
French butter, you'd be surprised just how much! 
A shallot, very finely chopped/blitzed 
Piri piri spice mix
Madeira
Tomato puree
Salt



Method:

The first step is make the hot sauce - melt a little butter in a small saucepan and fry off the shallots until very soft, then throw in a generous pinch of the Piri piri mix and a squirt of tomato puree.

I know which side my bread is buttered - both!

Finish with a dash of Madeira to achieve the desired liquidity, and leave on a low heat - you might want to taste it, add a little salt to taste and maybe more Piri piri if desired. Obviously for this project we want some robust, though not overwhelming heat and a bit of sweetness from the Madeira too.

The sauce should take about half an hour to reduce to where we want it to be - it's basically a sort of warm chutney.

In the meantime we can start prepping the rest of the meal - slicing the bread and cheese and so on. (If we had weeks of preparation we'd commission a specially-cured ham with Piri piri spices, but we'll make do with a normal Wiltshire cure for now.)

Toast the bread to sub-toast toastedness, if that makes sense - basically don't toast it for too long - and then butter on both sides. That's right, both sides. Like you used to have to do in those old Breville sandwich toasters back in 1989 before your mum married Biff Tannen.

Looking good...

Whack the slices of semi-toast in a hot griddle pan, flipping them over periodically to ensure they achieve a golden colour and crispy texture.

Layer a slice of cheese on top of each slice of toast - if the residual heat isn't enough to turn them gooey, knock them off momentarily with a spatula until they start to gooify, then slide them back on. Finally, add the ham to each slice, just allowing it to warm slightly atop the squidgy cheese.

Plate up immediately before serving, assembling the two halves of toasted bread, ham and cheese into sandwiches, with a good dollop of your Piri piri sauce spread inside.

Bon Appetit / Vamos a Comer!

Force Feeding

Having grown up obsessed with collecting Star Wars figures, it seems strange to reflect on the fact that, until yesterday, I'd only ever seen one of the films in the cinema - Return of the Jedi, on its original release 32 and half years ago. When I was six.

And having pretty much dismissed the concept of the prequel films altogether (I'm not even sure if I ever saw them all entirely through), mostly because of George Lucas's unforgivable tinkering with the original trilogy, I wasn't sure what to expect when we went to see The Force Awakens on its day of release. (Don't worry, there's no spoilers here - unless you're really looking for them!)

Not content with bringing The Force back into my world after a lengthy absence, I also took the opportunity to check out The Lounge at the Odeon Bayswater - where a full table service provides the food and drink, while you watch the film from luxury reclining seats with footrests. A strange combination, which has apparently been around for a few years, so it must be working out for them.

London's best shawarma is BACK!!!

Late night takeaways are a fact of life.

We've all eaten our share of dodgy fried chicken and toilet-grade kebabs when stricken with ferocious hunger pangs shortly after leaving the pub. Beer can do that to you.

Got a much better takeaway than the man on the bus

Perhaps the only real downside of the longer opening hours we've enjoyed for some years now is that most of the food options available at chucking-out time are invariably dire.

Well, almost invariably dire. There are, believe it or not, a few very special places where you can actually get something decent to eat at 12:37 AM. 

Back to my roots

It was three years ago that I first began to think about writing this blog.

I was eating my lunch in Singapore Sam, in the little food courty bit above the Tescos next to Canary Wharf DLR station. I think it was beef in black bean sauce. Maybe sweet and sour chicken.

Anyway, Singapore Sam (and indeed the little food courty bit above the Tescos next to Canary Wharf DLR station) has long since gone the way of all flesh... but the blog liveth on!

Back then, I had no idea I'd last for three years, or that I'd be awarding a Pub of the Year trophy, or that I'd find myself being recognised in restaurants from time to time. Indeed, I first conceived the blog as a modest guide to navigate a world of bustling anonymity.

It started out, in my mind, as a simple and fairly unambitious idea - go around reviewing all the places to eat lunch on the Wharf; Where to get the best sandwiches, the best coffee, why you should avoid Bene Bene because it's a pile of cheap shit and the sandwiches are slimy. That sort of thing.

Oh, and why Birley is one of the best things about Canary Wharf, obviously.

I hadn't come up with the masterstrokingly brilliant 'Ben Viveur' pun at that point, and was thinking of calling the blog 'The Wharf Foodie' or something equally mundane.

My strapline could've been 'Where the Financial Services Industry go to read about places they might like to get their lunch'.

Or maybe not.

Meat Market

One of the perks of working close to Borough Market is that there's no shortage of options when the clock turns lunchtime.

So many eateries, so little time, and fasting two days a week as part of my diet means that it will take me a while to try everywhere - but given my penchant for the market, I was familiar with a fair few places in the area anyway.

I already knew, for example, about the good value lunches at the recently-reopened Brew Wharf, and the stunning Spanish street food at Cafe Brood. And, frankly, an unmanageably huge number of other brilliant places.

What I can't get my head around though is what will happen once the Shard is fully open for business and full of office workers (plus a few residents and hotel guests). How many pubs and restaurants and food stalls will the area need to cope with that lot once they move in?!? 

Who wants pork? Get your hot pork here! £6.50 to you, guv

I guess they'll have to build another, even taller Shard next door to accomodate their eating and drinking requirements...

Talking of big, impressive things, everybody knows that I'm a bit of a sucker for a large hot meat sandwich for my lunch, but it has to be said that I've yet to find somewhere that does this anywhere near as consistently well as Birley Salt Beef in Canary Wharf.
 
There are a couple of contenders in Borough Market which needed checking out, even if it's hard to stand out with so much competition going on in the area.

The Fast track

It's day 2 of my 5:2 diet today.

Or maybe it's day 4?

Technically, I could argue that it might be day 7.

Confused? Good. But I know perfectly well what the fuck I'm talking about, which makes me feel superior, and being on a diet is all about feelings of superiority, obviously.

Yes, I've succumbed to the latest fad diet doing the rounds. I know - who'd have thought it? But I'm fully bandwagoned-up and ready to go.

Big news, no?

Montaguan Bicenquinquagenary

As many people predicted, England’s strategy of playing for penalties coupled with being quite bad at taking penalties means that we’ll have to wait a while longer for national sporting pride to be restored.

Maybe we'll do better in the Tennis? Or maybe we won't. Andy Murray's first round match at Wimbledon is a ridiculously tough one against Davydenko, and if he gets through that, the giant Croat Ivo Karlovic will likely await him in the second round. Two very strong opponents who in previous Championships would have been amongst the seeds.

So prepare for the crushing disappointment of an early Murray exit. Our best hope of getting a player into the second week might be Laura Robson who won the Jailbait singles a few years ago.

Murray's not even English, anyway.

But one thing we true Englishmen, women and children can – nay, must - celebrate this year is the 250th anniversary of our people inventing the sandwich. Go England! Go John Montagu! Hereditary Peerage is the mother of invention!

I've blogged about sandwiches before, of course, as like many people I often eat them for my lunch, but now there's a (relatively) new sandwich shop in town: 

The Earl of Sandwich on Ludgate Hill looks very nice on the outside, with a fairly classy branding that emphasises the heritage and history of stuffing bread with tasty fillings.

Trying to stop my heart breaking - a Valentine's tale

Having largely avoided going to the doctors for many years, events all seem to have caught up with me in recent weeks, and the conclusions drawn from a spate of visits to various clinical facilities for myriad assessments and blood tests has concluded that I suffer from high blood pressure and Type II diabetes. (In addition to the various gouty, asthmatic, arrythmic ailments that befouled me.)

Great.

Diabetes and high blood pressure are strange beasts, in that you don't necessarily 'suffer' from them (I have no discernable symptoms) but having them can make it a whole lot more likely one will suffer from things that are properly hurty - blindness, stroke, heart attack, heart failure etc.

(You'll have realised by now that this seasonal blogpipe has relatively little to do with love, but then St Valentine himself suffered from cardio-vascular problems and excess glucose, so it's topical. OK, maybe he didn't. I'm ill. Indulge me.)

A week in the life of a Birley king

One of the things I’ll miss most about Canary Wharf when we leave will be Birley's.

In an area where hungry bankers and regulators are decadently spoilt for lunchtime choice Birley still stands out like a bready, meaty beacon in an uber-competitive field of lunch.

Unless you obsess about these sorts of things in the way that I do, you may not be aware that there are actually five, no, six Birley outlets on the Wharf, all with different specialities? That’s one for every day of the week – if you fudge the maths, which we will, obviously - and whereas going to the same place for lunch everyday would normally turn out to be rather tiresome, I always felt that Birley’s range is so diverse that one could quite happily go there every day and not feel cheated at all.

So guess who’s spent this week going to a different Birley shop every day?

The A-Z of BLTs

The annoying thing about 'little-known facts' is that they tend to do the rounds until everybody knows them, which seems to defeat the object really.

A surprising number of people know that Mike Nesmith’s mum invented Tipp-Ex, but fewer know that my father invented the BLT.

That might be because he didn’t actually invent it, obviously, but as a hungry child I believed he had invented the BLT, and in many ways that’s more important.

Back in the 1980s and early 90s, we often drove out into the countryside – or at least as far as Mitcham Common which almost felt like the countryside in them days - to catch pond life, walk disused railway trackbeds and extinguish forest fires.

Spartan by name...

We’d sing folk songs as we jauntily sped along in his Spartan Roadster or whatever eccentric vehicle he happened to be driving that month, armed with a picnic hamper full of apples, fruitcake, beer nuts, those little stubby bottles of Ruddles County they used to do back when it was still good, and, of course, BLT sandwiches.

(Another little-known fact, and one that's actually true this time: Dad sold his Spartan to one of the puppeteers from Spitting Image!)

It's commonplace these days, of course - the BLT, not the Spartan Roadster - and quite possibly the most popular sandwich filling in the world, but to a growing and excitable lad back then, they were a revelation.

Bacon had hitherto been something eaten hot for breakfast or cooked with liver in a thick sauce. Sandwiches contained ham, jam or peanut butter and that was that. But cold bacon? In a sandwich with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise?!? This bold new invention blew my mind and instantly became my favourite sandwich.

The Father Christmas moment

It was at least a couple of years before I realised that Dad hadn’t invented it at all – not that he’d ever actually claimed as much, mind – and that people all over the world were enjoying BLTs and had been doing so long before I existed.

Maybe it was watching Trading Places a lot that did it – eventually I’d have realised that the scene where the old boys explain pork belly trading to Billy-Ray refers to a bacon, lettuce and to-may-to sandwich, and as such, it probably wasn’t confined to my father’s picnic hamper.

Randolph and Mortimer didn’t quell my enjoyment of the BLT too much though and I’ve continued to eat them regularly for the last 20-odd years, which has been singularly unchallenging because availability is, to put it mildly, widespread verging on ubiquitous.

And whoever actually invented it, the little-known fact I want to establish is where to get the best BLT within five minutes of 1 Canada Square. With plenty of options to choose from the only thing for it was to try and eat my way through every BLT available on The Wharf – not in one sitting, mind – and see if any of them can hold a candle to those I consumed eagerly as a boy.

The ambrosia of nostalgia means that they invariably won’t, but there’s no such thing as a really bad BLT, though some are quite a bit better than others - and I should know as I've eaten BLT for lunch every day for the last week…

  

B to the L to the T

Pret Beech Smoked BLT, £2.89 (or £3.45 eat in!)

First up, we have the most widely-available BLT on the Wharf, due to the sheer number of Pret outlets. Their reputation ain’t what it was a decade ago, and the BLT demonstrates just why this is the case!

The Pret BLT looks the part but fails to deliver on taste. The granary bread is sliced too thin, making the sandwich dry on the outside but fall-aparty in the middle due to a surplus of tomato juice.

There is lots of smoky bacon, but it’s a bit greasy, and the Romaine lettuce isn’t a good choice to cut through this.

It could also have done with a good, sharp mayo, but instead the whole thing lacks flavour, and it’s very poor value compared to most of the competition.

Rating: Disappointing

Tesco BLT. £1.80 (or cheaper as part of meal deal)

The mainstream supermarket option boasts a decent amount of filling and ticks all the boxes for a classic BLT.

The bacon is sweet rather than smoky, the ratios are right, and while it’s not exceptional, it’s good value and does the job.

Rating: Acceptable

Tesco ‘Light Choices’ BLT, £1.50

At only 290 calories and with over 30% less fat than Tesco’s standard BLT, this is an appealing option that could do well in the Satiety Index.

The ‘formed’ bacon has a processed feel to it, is unsmoked, and there’s not much of it. Suprisingly for a low-fat offering there’s not much salad either, but the malted granary bread doesn’t taste like a cut-down option.

The low-fat dressing in lieu of mayonnaise tastes of very little, and to add a little something, the sandwich contains a lot of black pepper.

The whole thing is a bit weedy, but then it’s meant to be a healthy option.

Rating: Disappointing (but OK in a low-calorie context)

EAT Handmade BLT, £2.89 (£3.45 eat in)

EAT are the new, smaller, Pret and appear to have copied their business model almost to the letter, not to mention their prices.

The difference is that EAT’s BLT is far better.

The sandwich is well-filled with a good balance between the perfectly char-grilled and very meaty back bacon and the salad components. A mix of lollo rosso and frisee (I think!) lettuce adds interest to the texture, and the tomato comes through nicely.

The bread is again malted grain, which seems to be the standard BLT holder, and my only criticism is that there could have been a smidgen more mayo.

Rating: Tasty

Waitrose/Boots British BLT. £2.45 (or cheaper as part of meal deal)

Branded as ‘Waitrose’ but on sale in Boots next door, this is a visually appealing sandwich, with a lighter bread, crisp iceberg lettuce and plenty of tomato and mayonnaise giving it a fresh and colourful appearance.

The bacon is smoked and fairly salty, and I like a little more gravity to my bread, but this is a very strong contender and would be particularly enjoyable outdoors in the height of Summer.

Rating: Pleasant

Kruger ‘Really Fresh’ American crispy bacon with tomatoes, lettuce & mayo, £2.40

Kruger’s speciality is fresh juices and smoothies, but their entry into the BLT fray is an interesting one.

There’s plenty of filling and the bread is a decent, fresh granary with lots of bits.

The salad is fine but the bacon is strange - unsmoked, dry and brown and broken up into little bits, almost like the soya-based ‘bacon flavour’ topping you put on salads. They have a tendency to fall out and make the sandwich less satisfying to eat.

It might be ‘Really Fresh’ but it’s also ‘Really Salty’ – way too much sodium and not enough mayo. It’s a shame because if they kept the bacon in whole slices and added more mayo to cut through the salt, they’d have a good sandwich. 

Or maybe I've just overdosed?

Rating: Frustrating

Birley hand-made BLT, £3.85

The plan was to save the best until last, and this is the only place on The Wharf (of which I’m aware) where there’ll assemble the sandwich in front of you. Fresh is good, and the freshness is evident immediately, particularly in the crunchy lettuce and juicy tomato.

They offer a choice of white or brown bread and various options, but to ensure a fair comparison with the other sandwiches in the test, all of which are served on granary, I went for brown and mayo only. It’s very nice brown bread too, full of nutty grains.

It’s the most expensive BLT by some distance, but it’s a big doorstep fucker, with loads of filling and therefore the most substantial. The bacon is of the streaky variety, and I usually prefer back, but it’s tasty and there’s lots of it, while the mayo has the right balance between creaminess and sharpness.

Even after several days of lunching on BLTs, this went down a treat and it’s the only one that really took me back to the golden age. Next time I want a BLT at lunchtime (which probably won't be for another couple of weeks) I'm coming back to Birley.

Rating: BriLlianT

How to damn organic chickpeas with faint praise

‘You should review’, said a colleague of mine some weeks ago, ‘that new hummus and falafel place that just opened up on the plaza.’

I’m not sure if this was a deliberate challenge designed to cunningly wrongfoot me and my blogpipe, but if it was, I failed at the first couple of attempts. You see, to get to ‘that new hummus and falafel place’ I have to walk out the tower and right past Birley Salt Beef.

Not an easy thing to do of a lunchtime, that. I’m only human.

I mean, what sane person could possibly eschew a sandwich full of hot roast beef or crackling pork belly and walk on by, merely in order to munch on some tasteless chickpea nonsense?!?

The basil paradox

Today I grabbed a crayfish and chilli wrap from one of the seven thousand and two Prets on the Wharf for a hasty lunch on the move - being so busy with real life'n'shit over the past month or so, I haven't been able to do things like eat proper sit-down lunches, or - ahem - write blog posts... well that's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

Anyway, the wrap was fairly indifferent, but upon the packaging, the following snippet of overt worthiness caught my eye:

'Air Miles: We believe air freighting fruit and veg is completely over the top. It's unneccessary and, with the exception of fresh basil leaves, we don't do it.'

Hmm, alrighty-roo then. But what is so special and fresh about their basil that it has to be flown - and I might be using my imagination a little too readily here - half-way around the planet in a Boeing 747 with a colossal carbon footprint dangling between it's legs, when every other ingredient used by the chain can be sourced locally?!?

The irony is that on this very day we've started growing a little basil plant which will sit on our balcony - and that's probably the only thing we're able to grow. And I'm sure it will serve my culinery purposes just fine, thanks.

But for whatever reason, Pret - who apparently use locally-reared and slaughtered cattle in their beef sandwiches, locally-caught crayfish in their wraps and locally-grown and pulped mangoes in their smoothies - feel the need to import their basil from the Solomon Islands or somewhere.

A few hours ago I had no idea that this would be the issue that would relight the Ben Viveur blogfire, but there you go.

If anyone from Pret is listening, I'm happy to supply fresh basil for you from my balcony if you give me a few weeks. You might need to buy me a house with an aeroplane-sized herb garden to meet your requirements though...

Sandwich Course

They say that a man in Canary Wharf can live a hundred lives and eat a hundred different lunches every day.

Actually, nobody has ever said that as far as I'm aware, since I just made it up, but it's true that there are so many places to grab lunch around here, the choice is almost too much.

With the weather turning colder, salads and sushi are becoming less appealing, and hearty steaming soups rather more so, but what of that evergreen favourite, the humble sandwich?

At a conservative estimate, there are probably some 50 different sandwich outlets on The Wharf, with each offering maybe 20-30 different sandwiches - that's at least a thousand to choose from, without taking into account individual customisations ('extra mayo, hold the butter... Because it's actually margarine and I don't like it, fuckwit, that's why.')

The Satiety Index

The scare tactics began a few years ago.

‘Traffic lights’ on foods, telling us all, in a bright red, amber or green way, just how bad things were for us. Number of calories, amount of fat, amount of salt, that kind of thing.

Strangely enough there were very few all-green items on sale in the supermarkets, and lots that mixed amber and red, with maybe one token green column. (Ready salted crisps, for example, which score low in sugar and high in everything else.)

I do wonder just how they can accurately calculate exactly how much saturated fat or how many calories is in something anyway?  And does the figure quoted apply to the entire contents of the packet or the amount a person is reasonably expected to eat, disregarding any crumbs or sauce that gets left behind?

(I think an apple (probably all green except in the sugar department) contains about 50 calories, but is that if you eat everything including the core, which I normally don’t? In fact I don’t even usually get close to the core, so I’m probably only eating just over half the mass of the apple)

Anyway, whatever the inherent ambiguities in the system, it has stuck, and now the Food Standards Agency, in its final throes before likely Coalition dissolution, has been actively persuading the food industry to roll out such systems out beyond the chiller cabinet in the house of Sainsbury, extending it to fast food outlets.