Bucks bites: batter up

I’m not quite sure why the global schnitzel/escalope/tonkatsu phenomena hasn’t taken off on these shores. Sure, we have nuggets and kievs and breaded chicken strips (a box of 5 Maccy D’s Selects, with sour cream dip, is my new jam), but a flattened piece of meat, bread crumbed and fried, still remains elusive. And what isn't better breadcrumbed and fried.

After visiting Australia a few times to see my family, I'm often asked ‘why don’t you move there?’ To which I reply the weather (I’d melt); the history (I love old stuff, just ask my wife…); and the football (have you seen the A League…). 

But, as well as the fam, when I get back home I do miss being able to get a schnitty at the pub. Even if you have to drink your grog in schooners. For me it’s a near perfect pub meal, something you wouldn’t make at home – a proper schnitzel really requires shallow frying and involves much mess with all the double-dipping and dredging – and is also perfect to soak up the booze.

The Poles have a rich history of beating and breading things, which has made Syrena my second favourite place to go and eat in High Wycombe (almost next door to Dosa Special, which still remains my absolute favourite). 

It's a simple set up with a handful of tables, a counter at the back where you order and pay, and a short menu which includes both pork and chicken schnitzels (and sometimes a special of a breadcrumbed minced meat cutlet), which you can also order topped with cheese and mushrooms. 

I’m not always a traditionalist, but haven’t looked past the classic pork yet. The cutlets are crisp and hot and greaseless, with the thin carapace of breadcrumbs perfectly billowing up from the tender meat as they are fried to order.

Although the escalope covers most of the plate, there’s still room for a couple of scoops of potatoes, that exist somewhere in that perfect place between boiled and mash and strewn with dill. Salad won’t fit, so comes on the side. Normally two different types that may include their excellent coleslaw, beetroot, sauerkraut or pickled cucumbers.

The schnitzel topped with a layer of sauteed mushrooms and a layer of melted cheese is served with fries, garlic sauce and salad and is also pretty great, if not quite as great as the classic version. It's certainly a good post-pub choice (as the restaurant closes at 8, it would have to be an afternoon session).

Another favourite are tender slices of roast neck of pork that come with Silesian dumplings; bouncy potato dumplings traditional to the Upper Silesia region of Poland with a distinctive depression made with a thumb for gravy. The dumplings, which are similar to gnocchi, are boiled in salted water before being covered in the aforementioned gravy. Proper rib-sticking stuff that is especially good with their braised sweet red cabbage.

When we took Stealth along for dinner, she had one of her favourites, beef goulash. I think her favourite is still Mummy P's beef stroganoff, but she still seemed very happy with her choice. The beef and red pepper stew, with its deep paprika-spiked gravy, comes with buckwheat - an underrated grain that doesn't get the love it deserves.

Homemade deserts include pancakes served with sour cream and sugar - they can also be ordered as a savoury course with mushroom gravy or goulash - and crepes with cheese jam or Nutella. They also have a glass cabinet, like the ones my sister and I would press our noses up against when on holiday as children, with a variety of cookies, choux buns, brownies and waffles.

Even though I'm still off the sweet stuff, I have sampled their 'cheesecake' on several occasions before the sugar ban. I use the word loosely, as it's a behemoth featuring a pastry base, a fluffy cream cheese filling and a layer of fruit (I've tried plum and apricot), before being topped with a layer of crisp meringue. Unsurprisingly it's also very, very good. In fact, the only way to improve it would be to roll it in breadcrumbs and fry it.

New Year, same old

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions I’m firmly in the Homer Simpson camp; ‘You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.’ That said, I have a hugely determined streak, that surprises even me sometimes, when I want to set my mind to something.

For example, my ongoing Cadbury boycott -  that started in solidarity with the Ewing when they changed the recipe of Cadbury Crème eggs in 2015 - has now extended to encompass a blanket ban on everything Mondalez own, from Kraft mac and cheese to Ritz crackers via Oreos, Toblerone and Chocolate Oranges. Oh, how I miss popping candy chocolate oranges.

Not that I could eat the latter at the moment anyway, thanks to a self-imposed sugar ban that I began on the 13th of October, after ordering a McDonald’s chocolate milkshake for breakfast (yes, I know booze has sugar in it...). It was originally going to end over the festive period, but it's going surprisingly well, so now I am hoping to extend until Easter. Who can resist a hot buttered cross bun?

While I’ve been mostly extraordinarily good, in the style of the popular song I have found myself over the last few months eating four Malteasers (three original and one coated in raspberry flavoured chocolate, from Australia), three biscotti (when very drunk), two slices of Christmas pudding and a chocolate covered date (about as good as it sounds, but it did give me a little sugar rush).

More in keeping with my old habits, I persuaded everyone that what they really wanted was a (fairly) sober kebab on the Saturday before New Year. We had already sunk several bottles of Prosecco and (two sausage roll wreaths) but I did still worry about the wisdom of dragging people out to dinner at what is ostensibly a takeaway shop on Boscombe high street.

The surprisingly plush surroundings of the small restaurant area at the back - I was particularly taken by the juxtaposition of traditional tapestries and tin advertising signs - plus the BYO policy that saw us rock up with yet more bubbles in hand, meant the mood was more happily pissed and not pissed off.

The laminated menu is a short romp through familiar favourites, encompassing a selection of mezze dishes and moving onto grilled meats, with the notorious elephant leg kebabs rotating in the window and other skewers being grilled over a charcoal fire pit next to the counter. 

They didn’t have any borek available- a small mercy, given the volumes of food that followed - but the hummus was pretty good, if unspectacular (currently nothing is beating my own homemade #Nutribulletwanker version) and grilled halloumi came in an ample portion, balanced on a heap of redundant salad.

Starters were accompanied by half a dozen Frisbee-shaped puffy flatbreads, fresh from the oven, which looked like far too many, even for committed carb-fiends, until we realised they also accompanied our kebabs. Chicken shish for the Ewing and the Lion, a mixed lamb shish chicken donner for me. 

The bread, as the online reviews had promised, was excellent. crispy and soft and smoky all at once, although I was slightly saddened there wasn’t some under the meat to soak up the pool of juices and errant chilli sauce, which is what I asked for to accompany my kebab, along with a dollop of good old garlic mayo.

The chilli sauce was slightly curious, more like a Mexican style salsa, that we got addicted to while eating tacos around Southern California and Mexico last year, but no worse for it and a lack of heat probably helped with the corresponding lack of heartburn the next morning (although I did chug a few pints of water before bed to counteract the salt and sparkling wine).

The kebab was excellent – big chunks of lean lamb (neck fillet?) atop a pile of very good chicken donner; shreds of tender thigh marinated in a garlicky herby mix a world away from my student days.

The chicken shish was also commendable. Two skewers of marinated chicken breast, grilled quickly over charcoal and served with mixed salad, coleslaw, garlic sauce and pickled chilli peppers that all ended up on my plate. Not a bad thing to have forced upon you in all honesty.

2018 hasn't been a great one, truth be told. After a very bright start, the last few months, for various reasons, haven't been easy; at all. But these things too shall pass. And with the help of the ever-patient Ewing and all my lovely family and friends, plus plenty of fizz and skewered meats, I'm already exited to see what 2019 brings. If I carry on with the kebab life, gout and reflux, probably.

Jenny from the (concrete) block

I have a long running love affair with the Elephant and Castle stretching back to my late teens/early twenties, when I remember being in a friend's car, driving around the iconic roundabout late on a Friday night. The lights, the chaos, the concrete. A few years later Stealth moved in to a flat just off the Walworth Road and it quickly became one of my very favourite places. Anywhere.

The shopping centre, particularly, is an area that's often been maligned. I would say unfairly, but, as much as I adore coming out of the Bakerloo line tube station on a Friday night, and seeing the majesty of the Faraday memorial in front of me, looking to the left at the rain-streaked adverts for the bingo and the bowling pasted to the blue plastic cladding panels, I'm not sure that even I really think that's true.

Which is why I'm conflicted that the green light has finally been given to bulldoze the shopping centre to the ground. While proposals from Delancy building nearly a thousand new homes and creating a new university campus, there is an uneasiness that lack of affordable housing and the removal of many independent businesses will help hasten the social cleansing that has all ready irrecoverably changed the character of the area. With many people who have lived and worked in E&C pushed further into London's peripheries and much of the areas unique character lost.

Due to a very complicated arrangement that only could have been contrived by Stealth, on our last visit we had to be out of the flat at 9.30 on a Sunday morning. For two hours. As she had roused me early from my bed on Christmas Eve eve, I decided to extract my sweet revenge by insisting we all went for breakfast. In the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. 

Jenny's Burgers, tucked away in a corner on the first floor, remains curiously untouched by the 21st century speeding past just outside it's door. A relic from a time past there's a pane of glass in the window held together with hazard tape, a fruit machine, peppered with cigarette burns, by the counter and the interior decorated with Day-Glo pictures of the menu that have been printed out and carefully backed on sugar paper. There was also a little sprinkling of tinsel around the mirrors on our visit, to really ramp up the festive cheer.

Jenny's offers the JJ Burger, which appears very similar to Wimpy's - another iconic piece of British life that is slowly disappearing - bender in a bun. With it's curled frankfurter sitting atop a beefburger, I can't say I wasn't tempted, especially at £3.40 including chips, but it was even harder to pass up a fry up. And with the two guys behind the counter exuding a wealth of warmth and experience to all comers, I felt we were going to be in good hands.

You couldn't have a fry up with out a good cup of splosh, creosote-coloured and so strong the spoon stands up in it. As the Ewing and Stealth are fancy, they had a giant cappuccino and a gallon of black coffee, respectively. Alas, being extra caffeinated didn't help with the quality of the conversation much (although I must be fair and note the Stealth didn't try to read the Sunday Times on her iPad once).

I had chips almost solely to annoy Stealth, because of her mistaken belief they don't belong with breakfast. Although they were cut thin enough to be verging on fries, and a little wan, they tasted pretty good, and even better with a good squirt of abrasively vinegary ketchup. The sausage was comfortingly cheap and paste-like, just as it should be. 

Toast was white sliced (the Ewing, as she always does, ignored the sanctity of the completely refined fry up and went brown), with butter already melted. I added my beans, and a few errant chips, to mine for DIY triple carbs on toast.

While I'm reluctant to think good things about the changes that are going to befall this vibrant patch of South London in the coming months, I'm hoping provisions will be made for those who chose to make this their home and the unique character is (mostly) preserved. But for now, I was more than happy to see the annual outing of the Christmas lights around the iconic elephant that stands proudly outside the centre. Let's hope it's not the last time.