Displaying items by tag: fast foodie

This three hour tour takes you through the foodie paradise of Bethnal Green in East London - from the famous and beautiful Columbia Rd flower market for fresh morning coffee and pastries from Italy,  to Brick Lane, the home of curry, with foodie stops all the way.  Jamie Oliver comes here to buy his Vietnamese street food and even the kebab vans are good.  So we can try fresh oysters; beigels stuffed with salt beef or smoked salmon, traditional Cockney pie, mash and eels and home made baklava - from the traditional shops that have been here for years, and from the fabulous new street food vendors that cook here at the weekend.

The tour is £10 per person, runs most Saturdays and Sundays and meets at Hoxton station. You buy your own food throughout but don't worry, it's mostly under a fiver and you'll easily walk it off! It starts at 11.00am going for coffee, and ends at 2.00pm with whatever you liked best...and there is even a Cockney cashpoint to get your money out in rhyming slang!

Send me a message for details of the next tour dates and how to book.

From the original London home of real bagels - Brick Lane - we joined a long queue that moved faster than you can get your money out and enjoyed the perfect £3.50 breakfast/brunch/lunch/teatime/midnight snack. Bursting with meat and oozing with mustard and pickle, you can see them being steamed and baked out the back, being filled out the front, and they are open twenty-four/seven.

Today in the car I listened to a progamme telling us we would soon be eating insects. It has been predicted that by 2050 the world’s population will have increased to nine billion, and the demand for food will grow with it. One of the things we will be worrying about in the future is food security, and we won't care what we eat, as long as we eat something. Much has been done behind the scenes to develop this idea. It's not just a notion - it has legs. In an article in the New Yorker Dana Goodyear quotes the man who first explored the idea of so much protein being freely available. " DeFoliart envisioned a place for edible insects as a luxury item. The larvae of the wax moth (Galleria mellonella) seemed to him to be poised to become the next escargot, which in the late eighties represented a three-hundred-million-dollar-a-year business in the United States. Given a choice, New York diners looking for adventure and willing to pay $22 for half a roasted free-range chicken accompanied by a large pile of shoestring potatoes might well prefer a smaller pile of Galleria at the same price."   You see, it's all in the name; call it something nice and we'll all try it.

• casa marzu cheese
• drying out bugs
• yum yum
• crickets anyone?
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It's only in Europe that we cringe at the idea, although in Sardinia there is the cheese riddled with maggots pictured here, called Casa Marzu. Bugs are a traditional food in many cultures across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and over 1,000 insects are known to be eaten in 80% of the world's nations. They include 235 species of butterflies and moths, 344 species of beetles and 313 species of ants, bees and wasps, as well as 239 species of grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, amongst others. Other commonly eaten insects are termites, cicadas and dragonflies. And we do eat them already, we just don't know about it - there are permissible levels in tinned sweetcorn, some shredded bits in fruit juice and the odd bug in frozen broccoli. Of course in the old days we would have had much less choice,  John the Baptist is said to have survived on locusts and honey when he lived in the desert, and we would all eat a spider if it was life or death or I'm a Celebrity. But most of us have a long way to go. It needs to look right...we're not good at wings and eyes and legs, so we need it to be presentable, on lettuce and in breadcrumbs. But some people do have the recipes - cabbage, peas n'crickets anyone? It's just that the website they're on - girlmeetsbug.com, looks a bit like the old suffolkfoodie blog...

Yesterday we headed off to the community event held by USAF Lakenheath to celebrate July 4th. They sure know how to hold an event and cook for the thousands of visitors attending.  Not a commercial food outlet in sight, but an amazing selection of foods prepared to raise funds for the various organisations that exist on the base. We ate corn dogs, hot and spicy chicken wings with carrot and celery sticks, smoked brisket with fried pickles, kebab combo of chicken and beef kebabs with corn on the cob and funnel cake with cinnamon sugar. These guys pictured made us chicken fajitas with sour cream and tomato salsa.  It was a great family day out  with an amazing firework finale.  The food just kept on coming, ooh, and yes, there was Aspalls cider in the beer tent.

The sun was full out for this and so were the hot sauce and chutney sellers - rather too many for one festival. But local bands and good fast food, we had hot fried mackerel sandwiches. Remind me to look for an airstream on e bay for suffolk foodie.

Invited to the opening night here at the new LP club (used to be Ruin) where downstairs the wood fired oven burns continually, making the best properly thin and crispy Italian-rather-than-American pizza in minutes.  And upstairs in the bar some very good singing  - one of them has got through the first round of the X Factor!

Probably our final garden campfire of the year this weekend - and talking about the new pizza restaurant in Bury got us hungry. So we made our own dough, used up some old cheese and a few olives, smoothed down a little space in the coal and cooked our own.

So many tomatoes at the moment that I have had every recipe I can think of and made soup, pasta sauce, ratatouille and lots of others.  But this was simple and delicious and used up a bit of old ciabatta at the same time. So easy I'm not going to put it in Recipes - just spread pesto (from a jar not home made) on the bread, halved cherry tomatoes and a shaving of parmesan, then grill until brown. If you teach your children this they can make it after school, and it works really well on half a muffin too, just call it mini pizza.