http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHkTeyVUfc

Accompanying ‘eccentric’ musician Mr Robbie Humphries in the Kensington and Chelsea competition were: ‘posh’ estate agent Nick Le Ny-Clarke, ‘outspoken’ Nana Eshun and air hostess Louise Childs, who all battled it out to scoop the £1000 cash prize.

'Eccentric'

But those wannabe winners didn’t stand a chance in the face of Robbie’s culinary prowess, musical entertainment and impressively flamboyant moustache (which he’d waxed ‘specially for his TV debut) and none of us was at all surprised when Robbie, with his smoked salmon and fennel salad, slightly dubious (but apparently very tasty) chicken crumble and classic bread and butter pudding, decisively won the day.

And the winner is.... Robbie!

We all cheered heartily, raised glasses of champagne (it is Kensington and Chelsea after all) and celebrated a well-deserved victory for our friend, who put his winnings towards an engagement ring for Bun (she does love a chicken crumble).

Robbie’s (now famous) Chicken Crumble recipe
Feeds 4

Ingredients

2 purple carrots, chopped into half moons
1 large head of broccoli, cut into florets
2 leeks, finely chopped
1 roast chicken
½ small celeriac, grated
100g cheese, grated
Plenty of fresh breadcrumbs

For the white sauce

75g butter
75g plain flour
420ml milk
420ml chicken stock
Grating of fresh nutmeg

What to do with them

1. Preheat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 7. Start by making the white sauce. Melt the butter and mix in the flour, then slowly add the milk whisking constantly with a balloon whisk. Heat gently heat for about 5 minutes before adding the chicken stock and nutmeg shavings. Keep heating and stirring constantly stirring until the sauce thickens.

2. Next boil the carrots for 7 minutes and the broccoli for 4 minutes until nearly cooked through, and lightly fry the leeks for 4 minutes or so.

3. Remove the meat from the roast chicken and place in a pie dish with the carrots, broccoli, leek and grated celeriac. Add some salt and pepper and the white sauce and stir well.

4. Scatter over the cheese, followed by the breadcrumbs. Bake for 30 minutes until golden.

5. Boil the green beans for 10 minutes, then drain and toss with butter.

6. Serve the chicken crumble with the vegetables.

This recipe first appeared on the Channel 4 website, where you can also find recipes for Robbie’s smoked salmon and fennel salad and his bread and butter pudding.

THE CASH COWS

To keep up to date with gigs by Robbie and Brendan’s wonderful band The Cash Cows (featured as the after-dinner entertainment on Come Dine with Me) or to book them for a party of your own, visit www.thecashcowsrock.com. You can see them in action below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05Fje0kFSk4

Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that this book has some fantastic recipes and offers a healthier and much tastier, lighter alternative to your average Indian take-away (albeit with a little more effort on your part).

Since reviewing Indian Superspices for The Good Web Guide back in January, I’ve tried out several of the recipes, including the best Puy Lentil Dahl I’ve ever tasted and a truly spectacular (even though I do say so myself) ‘PMT-and-Pain-Annihilating Beef (I used chicken) Rogan Josh,’ which, for the record, I served up to a group of very hungover boys (they were none the wiser).

This week, I whizzed up Gurpareet’s Date, Cashew and Fennel Balls as a healthy alternative to my usual muffin or chocolate brownie. Sugar, dairy and wheat-free, super quick to make and containing ‘anti-inflammatory’ fennel seeds, this delightful little sweet snack is fruity and tangy, chewy and delicious – and almost, dare I say it, better than a brownie!

Anti-inflammatory Date, Cashew and Fennel Balls
Makes 5 (I doubled the quantities and made 12)
Recipe by Gurpareet Bains, taken from Indian Superspices

Ingredients

1 tablespoon fennel seeds (analgesic, anti-inflammatory)

75g unsalted cashews

90g pitted dried dates

80g dried cranberries

Mango juice (I didn’t have any so used cranberry juice, which also worked well)

Desiccated coconut for coating

What to do with them

1. Pound the fennel seeds in a pestle and mortar until ground (I didn’t bother with this step)

2. Put the ground fennel seeds and cashews into a food processor and blitz until the cashews resemble breadcrumbs.

3. Add the dried fruits to the food processor and process until the mixture becomes a paste. You may need to add a few drops of mango juice to get the right consistency. Start with one tablespoon of mango juice (or any other kind of juice would work), working up to about three tablespoons if necessary.

4. Divide the mixture into about five equal portions shaping into them into balls using the palms of your hands. Roll the balls in the desiccated coconut until completely coated.

5. Keep stored in an airtight container in the fridge for up to seven days (they taste better when they’ve been in the fridge for a while!)

* Indian Superspices by Gurpareet Bains is available for £8.99 from Amazon.

A classier sort of brasserie...

With two Michelin-starred restaurants – one in Leith and another by Loch Lomond – Martin Wishart is a beloved big wig on the Scottish culinary scene, but if your pockets don’t quite stretch to Michelin status, or you just fancy something a little less, er, fancy, then The Honours, a sophisticated take on the traditional French brasserie, offers a very happy compromise.

Part brasserie, part fine dining, this plush marbled and leather interior with winks of gold is expensive and luxurious, but the atmosphere retains a light, airy feel – not formal or hushed like a Michelin-starred restaurant – and the excellent cocktail bar, open to non-dining guests, helps keep the vibe relaxed.

Being a brasserie, the menu is very French, with ingredients such as espelette pepper and fish cooked á la plancha giving a welcome nod to the Basque region of South-West France where we all know French cooking and ingredients are at their best. But there’s plenty to make the Scots proud too with locally sourced fish, meat and cheese and seasonal Scottish ingredients used wherever possible (my super-fresh Loch Fyne crab marie rose starter being a good case in point).

Loch Fyne Crab... ©KeithWaugh

This a menu to flounder over. Would I have Sea Bream á la Plancha with confit tomato, fennel and balsamic? Rabbit á la Moutarde with pomme sautée? Or Ox-Cheeks á la Bordelaise with pomme purée? In the end, under Tom’s recommendation, I plumped for the Steak of Iberico Acorn-fed Pork, which was a good choice, tasty, tender and more lamb-like and red meaty than normal pork and part of a dream team alongside sides of creamed spinach, parmesan and nutmeg, glazed organic carrots and gratin dauphinoise.

Again, while the dishes here are essentially classic French brasserie food, they are presented in a way that is more classy and refined, edging towards fine dining, but not so much so that they require a delicacy of eating. For pudding, Becca and I shared an encouragingly hearty and just-rustic-enough apple tarte tatin for two with caramel sauce (that came in its own little jug) and cinnamon ice cream, and I honestly don’t think I’ve eaten many better.

The bar area

Meanwhile, the cocktails were so good that we had one pre-dinner (whisky sour) and another post-dinner (espresso martini) and rolled out feeling so merry, full and satisfied that we clean forgot to feel nostalgic for our student days, or the cheap pizza and ten tequila slammers that would have shaped our evening ten years ago….

The Honours
58a North Castle Street
Edinburgh EH2 3LU
T: 0131 220 2513
E: info@thehonours.co.uk
W: www.thehonours.co.uk

TOP TIP: Book well in advance to secure a table…

* Apologies for the lack of food photos in this post. I didn’t take any and The Honours didn’t have any!

It was four hours long, very relaxed and fun, and yielded three perfectly plump, pastry-all-the-way-round, creamy, and, yep, truly delicious chicken and leek pies. I took them home to a pie-loving Heid, who helped me to scoff all three and said that all his Sundays had come at once….

Marika’s classic chicken, leek & bacon pie
Makes 6‐8 little pies or two 7.5” round pies
Recipe by Marika Gauci

I gave the heart one to The Heid. Who says romance is dead?!

Ingredients

For the white Sauce:
30g Butter
30g flour
500ml milk
2 tsp mustard
1/2 chicken stock cube, crumbled

For the filling:
3 tbsp Vegetable oil
600g Chicken, medium diced
1 leek
1 onion
2 garlic cloves sliced
100g lardoons or smoked streaky bacon, diced
100g mushrooms
1 tsp tarragon or sage
Black pepper and salt

For the short crust pastry:
500g Plain flour
250g Butter
125ml of very cold water
40g Parmesan cheese, grated
½ tsp salt
1 egg, beaten, for glazing

What to do with them

1. First make the Sauce. Add the butter into a saucepan and melt, then add the flour, mix well with a whisk for a few minutes. Then add all the milk at
once, whisking well. Take the saucepan from heat if it starts to thicken. Now add the mustard and crumble in the stock cube. Season with salt and pepper. Leave to cool.

2. Add a little olive oil to the casserole dish and fry the diced chicken to brown, don’t add salt at this stage as it will draw out the moisture from the chicken, just a sprinkling of pepper. Once a little brown or fried for 5 minutes, ladle out the chicken and set aside to rest so the juices and flavour escape.

3. Add a little butter and fry the sliced leeks and onions until shinny, then add the bacon and mushrooms and fry for a few minutes, until they start to caramelise. Finally, add the sliced garlic and tarragon/sage. Now add the chicken and juices back into the mix.

4. Cook on a medium heat for a further 5 minutes.

5. Take from heat; add the sauce to the chicken and leek mixture and leave to cool completely. If you’re in a hurry, fill the sink with cold water to draw out the heat fast. (If your filling is too hot for your cold pastry you will have an uncooked soggy bottom to your pie, so don’t skip this step)

6. Meanwhile make the short crust pastry. Place flour, salt and diced cold butter into a mixing bowl. With your fingertips, lightly rub the together the butter and flour until it resembles ground almonds or breadcrumbs. Try and be as light and airy as possible and lift the flour up high with hands to allow lots of air into the mixture. Think cold. When that’s done add the parmesan and mix.

7. Make a well in the mixture and gradually add water or all at once, one hand on the bowl other quickly mixing until the mixture comes together in a loose crumbly dough. Tip out dough onto floured surface and squeeze together, turning around a few times so the crumbs can marry up. Flatten the
dough, cover with clingfilm and chill in fridge for about 30 minutes.

8. Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 5

9. Remove the pastry from the fridge, flour the surface, and roll the pastry out to the thickness of a pound coin and the size of your pie dish(es)

10. Fill with cold mixture. The top can be a little thinner than the base if you like. Brush whisked egg around the pie rim to act as a glue. Fix the pie lid then crimp, decorate as you wish. Don’t forget to make some holes and egg wash the top.

11. Place on a pre-heated baking tray and bake in the pre‐heated oven for about 30 minutes until golden brown.

Marika’s Sunday Pie Club takes place twice a month at the Central Street Cookery School in Clerkenwell and costs £60. To book a place, visit  marikas-kitchen.com

Feeding anyone who is not mentally or physically incapacitated, but who is old enough to have sex, is an absolute non-negotiable no-no in my book, and this is particularly true if the feeding in question is done in a ‘sexual’ manner.

A non-negotiable no-no

On the few occasions that I’ve encountered it, I’ve been struck down with the kind of self-defeating ‘compulsion to look’ that one only gets when faced with the truly horrifying. And the sight of a couple feeding each other, publicly and lasciviously, while you try to enjoy your steak on the next door table, is – make no mistake about it – truly horrifying.

This has much to do with the fakery that must be engaged to indulge in such antics in the first place, by which I mean that only people having very, very bad sex would ever feel the need to convince fellow diners that they aren’t; if you’re that horny, why not skip dinner altogether? Or better yet, eat at home.

But it’s also the act itself – more infantile than sexual – that is so idiotic and cringe-making to watch. Babies are fed. Grown-ups can feed themselves and to muddle this basic fact in the name of foreplay is to get foreplay all wrong.

Done as a joke, of course, this can be very amusing (see clip from 0.30)…

But, for the most part, if you’re in a restaurant, you’re over the age of three and you’re seriously indulging in this sort of faux-sexual charade, the joke, I’m afraid to say, is firmly on you!

“Get there for 6.30pm or we’ll lose our table,” were the strict instructions, so I arrived promptly but at the wrong one in Mayfair instead of the more newly opened branch in Soho – doh! Never mind, I hopped in a cab and a fiver later was only ten minutes late, but in plenty of time to quaff a few pre-prandial vinos with the girls.

Burger & Lobster has been blogged about endlessly since it launched in late 2011. Offering a choice of – you guessed it – burger or lobster for a flat price of £20, it’s a formula that has worked brilliantly, particularly as both the burger and the lobster are done so very well.

Of course, only a mug would order a burger for £20 (rather expensive) when there’s a whole lobster on offer for the same price (rather cheap), but I expect Burger & Lobster makes its margins on the mugs, and all eleven of us ordered lobster.

The burger is rather expensive... Image via London Larder

Scouring a lengthy menu while trying to chat with one’s companions is the most unrelaxing bit of eating out, so I love it when I’m given little or no choice in what I have. At Burger & Lobster, the only choices you have to make are: 1) what to drink, 2) whether to have your lobster steamed, grilled or served in a roll. If you opt to have the burger, you can choose whether to add cheese and/or bacon.

The lobster is rather cheap... Image via London Food Freak

I plumped for the grilled lobster and it surpassed expectations. Perfectly cooked and deliciously fresh, it came on a large platter, in its shell, which had been helpfully cracked in a way that made the whole thing very easy to deal with. A handy skewer meanwhile helped us delve meat out from the tricky bits, and we dunked away merrily in the amazing garlic and lemon-butter dipping sauce.

Eating lobster can be a messy business, but any unruly flecks of fish or shell were expertly thwarted by plastic bibs (issued at the start of dinner) for which those sitting in close proximity to Serena said they were particularly grateful….

Those sitting next to Serena were v grateful for their bibs.

Lobster and burger dishes here all come with chips and salad. The chips were as chips should be (thin and crispy) while the salad was nothing like those pointless, soggy ‘garnishes’ that we so often seem to suffer in life. No, this was fresh, crisp lettuce, properly dressed and topped with crunchy homemade croutons and a generous shaving of parmesan – in other words, a genuine salad rather than a droopy afterthought.

That we were a big group of pretty ladies (oh, stop it!) may have had something to do with the charming, attentive service, but such an easy-peasy ordering structure – “4 bottles of wine, 11 grilled lobster. Coming up!” – must surely help to keep the staff smiley.

A pretty lady

I haven’t been to the other branches of Burger & Lobster, but the Soho one is huge and at 6.40pm on a Wednesday was completely packed with young urbanites, all having a lovely time. Despite its size, the atmosphere is cosy with that artfully underdone, industrial-style interior styling that seems to be everywhere these days – what can I say? It works.

Another 'industrial' interior.

Since Burger & Lobster launched in Mayfair, it has opened the Soho branch that we went to, plus one in Farringdon and another on Bread Street in the City. With the new branches has gone the old and very irksome no-booking policy it used to have, and – assuming lobster or burger is what you’re after – this all makes for a pretty perfect set up. Well done – and HAPPY BIRTHDAY – Mazzy!

Burger & Lobster
36 Dean Street
London
W1D 4PS
@Londonlobster
T: 020 7432 4800
E: soho@burgerandlobster.com
To find out details of the Mayfair, City and Farrindon branches, visit www.burgerandlobster.com

Muffin madness

Post-Christmas time is slimmin’ time; we’re meant to eat near-nuffin’
But my mind, I find, runs over-time – I want a bloody muffin!
I don’t resist, I can’t desist; they all taste too damn fine
I want to eat some muffins, yeah; I want them all the time
Prêt’s blueberry ones are bitchin’ with their soft and gooey centre
While Costa’s ones with poppy seeds are absolutely mental
I love a Starbucks breakfast one with raisins, nuts and honey
Ottolenghi does a savoury one; it’s good but it costs money
Post-Christmas time is slimmin’ time, but muffins – I can’t stop!
If I don’t watch out – I know, I know – I’ll have a muffin top.

And on the subject of muffins….

The finest tea I've ever tasted.

Imporient tea is so good that I bulk order boxes of the stuff and carry round a secret stash in my wallet to ensure I never again have to drink Tetleys. But I’m not alone.

Indeed, I once mentioned my little foible to Deckchair, who I was delighted to discover does exactly the same thing. “Some people carry condoms,” he shrugged, “others carry tea bags.” It’s just a question of priorities, I suppose.

A question of priorities

Anyway, tea runs in the blood for the Deckchair family, which has been dealing it since 1872 and really knows what’s what when it comes to creating the perfect brew.

My personal favourite from its selection has always been the Imporient 100 Tagged Tea Bags (now re-branded as the Birchall 100 Tagged Tea Bags). Made from a closely guarded blend of tea sourced from across East Africa, it makes for the sort of fortifying cuppa that I fondly imagine once won wars. What ho!

What ho!

But its herbal varieties – in particular the Green Tea & Peach and the Camomile – are excellent too. These are made with all-natural ingredients which are helpfully contained in little sachets to give you all the taste of loose tea but none of the fiddly, tea-straining hassle.

Imporient has its own Pfunda (a type of rich volcanic soil) Tea Estate in Rwanda and, according to its site, is one of the largest tea buyers in East Africa. It is also a highly ethical organisation with accreditations from The Fairtrade Foundation, The Rainforest Alliance and The Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP). Meanwhile, it donates a percentage of the profit made on every packet of tea purchased from its online store to the Noel Orphanage in Rwanda.

The Pfunda Tea Estate

It’s all good stuff really and once you try it, I promise, you won’t look back. In fact, before you know it, that little sachet of Imporient tea may just find its way into your wallet and then, well, who knows where it could lead….

My faves…

* For a proper old-fashioned cuppa, order The Birchall English Breakfast Tea or the Birchall Great Rift

* For an anti-oxidising herbal hit, order the Green Tea & Peach blend

WHERE TO BUY

Visit imporient.co.uk to order online and find out more.

Not everyone has food on the table.

So when you hear that there are children, living right on my gluttonous food blogging doorstep here in the UK, who are going hungry, who regularly miss meals, or who rely on cheap takeaways for their daily sustenance because they can’t afford to eat in a way that the rest of us take for granted, well, it’s quite shocking really, isn’t it?

Kids Company is a fantastic charity that offers support to 17,000 vulnerable inner-city children and young people. Earlier this year, it launched a Plate Pledge Appeal to help address the escalating problem of child hunger in the UK and so far has raised £217392 for this worthwhile cause.

Kids Company Christmas food parcels all ready to be sent out.

This year, I pledged to donate 50% of all proceeds gained from sales of my illustrated Christmas Cards to the Kids Co Plate Pledge Appeal and its excellent food programme.

I could have sold none and it all would have been rather embarassing, but thanks to the generosity of all those who bought cards, I’m pleased to donate a not insignificant £150 (including £30 from Gift Aid) to this appeal.

As we stuff our faces this Christmas, this means that 150 children out there, who may otherwise have gone hungry, could now be doing the same. Thanks so much for your support and HAPPY CHRISTMAS!