December Balti Triangle Walk 2

Apart from the restaurants, another thing that I look forward to seeing in Balti Triangle are fresh and/or exotic vegetables.

Here are some examples.

Turia.

Evidently it is a kind of gourd.

These green leaves are over-grown rocket.

I bought these. The leaves can be eaten as salad and the stalks in stir-fry. Yum yum. And only 60p a bunch.

Red mooli (radish).

I don't know how they taste like.

And these. Look like chesnuts, but these are 'Sangara' according to the name plate.

I heard that they taste like water-chesnuts. To be boiled to eat.



Although these were very interesting, I did not buy them, as they did not look fresh enough.


Balti Triangle walk continues...

Strolling and shopping in city centre

It was cold and dump yesterday.

I did not want to go out, but as my flat is very cold during the day time (I have central heating in the morning and in the evening only) and as I was running out of milk, I eventually went out.

On normal Saturdays I go to shop in Cape Hill, but as I am leaving for Greece in 10 days, it was unwise to buy too much food (besides, I have some plans to eat out in these days). Consequently I just went for a quick shopping in city centre.

I slightly regretted my decision seeing so many people there doing Christmas shopping. I don't like crowded places.

But, I could not resist going to see the last days of Woolworth's.

It is a historical moment in which the scenery of British high streets will change forever. Well, it might be an exaggeration. But it is still a symbolic moment of this period which will be rememberd in history as "Global Recession".

The one in the photo is the Pallasades branch of Woolworth's. There were lots of people and some of the shelves were already empty. Many of the things are getting fixed rate discount (like "20% off anything from this section"), so you might find some bargain.

But, I escaped in 5 minutes. Too many people.

Fortunately the Open Market was not too crowded, for it was still around 3 o'clock and it was very cold.

I bought some vegetables that looked to be in season.

Broccoli shoots.



I am not sure of the name. They are similar to purple sprouts, except that these are green. 3 or 4 packet of these were for £1 depending on stalls. I suppose they can be boiled like broccoli or stir-fried like Chinese Gailan. If you boild these with spaghetti in salted water, they make immediately one plate added with olive oil and Parmiggiano cheese. Fast food.

Also in season seemed are Savoy cabbages, 1 costs from 50p to 60p.



This cabbage does not exist in Japan and first I did not understand how could I eat such a hard cabbage. Apart from the tendre core, the leaves are quite tough, so they needed to be cooked until soft, more than 15 min in boiling water. As it is so hard, it can withstand long cooking like minestrone. The outer leaves are hardest, but if you cut them very small or thin, they are sill edible and I guess rich in minerals and vitamin judging from the colour.

I met savoy cabbage earlier in the week in Turners.



Just boiled cabbage, but only the inner leaves. They were soft and paler in colour.


Then I went to Marks and Spencer's to buy milk. As I wrote about my organic milk obsession several days before, I buy milk only from certain shops.

The pricing in M&S is beyond my comprehension. Some of the items are double or three times higher than the supermarkets/discounters I usually go. The broccoli shoots as above cost in M&S 99p a packet. I guess it is ok to buy ready-made foods here, as they look quite different from the ones I see in other supermarkets, but I would not buy veggies and meats here, as green grocers and butchers give me better deal (and I am not speaking only about the price).

And the cashiers were SO slow. I really missed ALDI/LIDL, even Tesco's and Asda. The woman at the till was nice and smiley, but it did not make me forget the 10 minutes waiting time in a very short queue (3 or 4 people, and only 1 of them had a basketful, the others only 3 or 4 items).

M&S FOODS business model baffled me.

Delia Smith on Frozen Food

Today I ate lunch at Lahore Buffet (review) restaurant in Ladypool Road. I ate so much that I could skip dinner. A review will be posted soon on Wonderbimringham.co.uk.

And in the evening I watched much discussed Delia Smith's new TV show accompanying her new book, Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking.

Whole thing did not make much sense to me. She introduced us to how to make hummus from frozen chick pea. Well, why shouldn't we use tin chick pea which does not even need to defrost, and virtually all the cooking books say that it is a viable solution? I am sure I will have harder time to find frozen chick peas than to find tin chick peas, which do not even occupy precious space in freezer and consume electricity.

She insists that it goes well with frozen Greek pitas. Come on! Where can I found them in Birmingham? (If you don't know, my husband is Greek and we have been looking for Greek pitas here for some years now).

Then frozen sea bass fillets grilled with bottled tomato sauce, and frozen scallops with garlic butter. Are we really need to be told how to do it? And these ingredients (frozen sea bass fillet and frozen scallops) are pretty expensive, and I don't want to ruin them with her "cheating" method.

Well, it was a dismal viewing. Really.

New Chocolate shop in Selfridge

Passing Selfridge Food Hall yesterday, I noticed they installed a new chocolate shop. It is called Bouquets de Chocolats, and just behind Yo! Sushi  (now, you should be wondering if there is any such space between Yo! Sushi and Pret a Manger, and you are right; there isn't and they just crammed into it).



It is from Bayonne (town French Basque region) and makes bouquets with chocolates, as well as other small chocolates. One bouquet of 220g costs £10, 440g for £20, and so one. I guess it is expensive, but the price of chocolates changes greatly according to the quality, so I cannot really tell without eating it.

There is also demostration by a chocolatier (well it was a chocolatière when I saw).



I don't like chocolate so much, so I don't think I have chance to buy it. However, this chocolate drink counter looked interesting.



£2.45 for a cup. Even so I should be really hungry to be able to try one, as good chocolate drink is very filling.

Frozen Okra

I love Okra, but it is time consuming to clean them.

I am not speaking about washing them, but removed the hard part of okra one by one. Especially when I have to cook dinner after having return from the job, I don't have energy to do it.

So, a very convenient alternative to fresh okra is this frozen okra.



I can buy it from Asian grocers in vicinity. This packet costs me 89p for 400g, which is more or less the same price as for fresh ones. They are already washed and the hard part is removed, so all you have to do is to open the packet and start to cook.

Another advantage of the frozen version is that the okras used for it are very small and tender. I like large, crunchy okras, but my Greek husband prefers these small tender ones that are more common in Greece.

When I lived in Japan, I could not eat okra as many as I wanted, as they were expensive. Another reason for me to feel happy in Birmingham. :)

Morbier Cheese and Summerset Brie

I don't eat much of cheese, but I do like good quality cheese. In England cheese culture is not as interesting as in France or Italy, and in normal supermarket shelves it is difficult to get hold of good quality cheese.

So, sometimes we go to House of Fraser's cheese counter and buy a bit expensive cheese. As said, as I don't eat much cheese, we can afford a couple of quid more.






I usually go for British cheese, but for this time my husband wanted to try French one. So I chose this less expensive one called Morbier. It was the first time we tried this cheese. It is nice but a bit bitter to me, but he liked it. It is half hard, creamy cheese, with a bit of bitterness.





I liked more was this Summerset Brie cheese. It was on half-price offer, 99p for 100g. I don't like so much Brie, but this one was really really yummie. So soft and creamy. Probably I don't like just cheap Bries.

Goatfish

Birmingham has a large fresh-food market at the centre of the town. During weekdays I cannot go there as it is open only during the normal office-hour. Saturday is my day of investigate it.

The market closes at 4 to 5 o’clock depending on individual stalls, so if you go there after 3, you have better chance of getting bargain.

One Saturday afternoon, when I was walking around the market without having in mind what exactly to buy, I was stopped by a fishmonger offering a plate of fish for 5 quid.

I saw four colourful fish of various size, that I have never cooked or eaten. Asked the fishman what were they, and I was told they were “goatfish”. I was not sure how to cook, but the attraction of unknown was too powerful.




Back at home, I started to do some research about goatfish and discovered they have white meat with delicate taste, as they were in a same family as red mullets. They are often eaten in curry or deep fried. By the way, I learned also that they are called goatfish because they have a goat-beard like thing under their chin.




I decided to go for deep-frying, but I also tried bake in oven; this is oven cooked version. It was actually quite nice, but as the meat itself does not have strong flavour, deep-frying has the effect of concentrating enhancing it.

It was an interesting experiment.