week 24 - My Lisbon - Nuno Mendes

While the world is a very different place to the one we knew six months ago in many ways, for the  the Ewing and I at least, life has rolled on by without too much upheaval. We're lucky to both be working - albeit from home - and to both be busy at work (although it's sometimes hard to feel fortunate about that...). And while many plans have been cancelled, or postponed, and we haven't seen any of our family and friends for the last three months - save for two recent, socially distanced meet ups with one of my oldest mates, and the Ewing leaving supplies on her parent's gate post - this week things really hit home.

This week we were supposed to be going to the Algarve for a few days with my Dad - who was due to visit from Australia, where he now lives - and then take a trip over the border to Seville for some R&R with my wife (WHO is she? - TE). Of course, far more tragic losses and upheaval have been experienced over the past weeks than the fact we couldn't have a few days eating custard tarts and drinking vinho verde, but realising that we weren't going to make it to Iberia in June, and we weren't going to see my Dad at all this year, did feel like a bit of a blow.

Of course, the one thing we could do was try to create that holiday vibe from the comfort of home. (while managing to pick the week were the weather broke and it actually rained for the first time in forever...). And so I ordered Nuno Mendes - chef of Chiltern Firehouse fame - 'My Lisbon'. His celebration of the traditional Portuguese dishes he grew up eating - and, after taking holidays in the Algarve every year as a child, I remember well, too - while the Ewing scoured the supermarket for Portuguese wine.

As well as drowning our sorrows, I also made Carne de porco à alentejana, or pork with clams. Despite being faintly weirded out by the idea of the live clams being in the fridge overnight (and even getting up just to check they hadn't drowned - (They live in water the whole time!!! - TE)) this was pretty simple to chuck together. Although I did use a hefty glug of piri piri sauce at the end just to jazz it up a little bit. Or possibly that's just my jaded palette after annihilating it with chilli over the years.

There was also a batch of warm custard tarts with cinnamon caramel that tested our marriage and were almost worth it, if not a patch on the ones you can buy from the Pingo Doce supermarket that is just down the road from the apartment we were supposed to stay at in the Algarve. Although we did discover a little Portuguese supermarket just off the Headington Roundabout in Oxford during our few days off work that sold excellent bica and bola arroz.

The pièce de résistance of my week of Iberian cooking was Polvo à lagareiro com batata a murro, or octopus with 'punched' potatoes. The octopus, which thankfully came ready boiled, was pretty good, but the potatoes, covered in the coriander (I also learnt that Portugal is the only country in Europe that uses coriander in its cuisine) pesto, were even better.

Octopus with smashed potatoes, olive oil and piso

Polvo à lagareiro com batata a murro

Serves 4

600g boiled octopus tentacles, cut into large chunks

For the piso

a bunch coriander

1/2 garlic clove

1 lemon, finely zested and juiced

3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

For the potatoes

8-12 floury potatoes, such as Maris Piper or similar, skin on

olive oil

2 bay leaves

4 garlic cloves, smashed

To make the piso — Mix together the coriander, garlic, lemon juice and lemon zest with a generous pinch of salt and pepper until you have a paste. Nuno recommends a pestle and mortar, but I used the Nutribullet. Stir in the olive oil. It will keep in the fridge for a few days with an extra glug of olive oil on top.

To make the smashed potatoes — Preheat the oven to 210°C. Cook the potatoes in plenty of salted boiling water until just tender but not breaking up. Remove from the pan, drain well and leave until cool enough to handle. 

Murro means ‘punch’ in Portuguese, so press each one gently with the palm of your hand. Toss them in a bowl with the olive oil, bay leaves and garlic and season with salt and pepper. 

Put them in a large baking dish (big enough to hold the octopus too) and bake for 30 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy.

Drizzle the octopus with extra-virgin olive oil and put the pieces on top of the potatoes. Increase the oven temperature to 220°C and cook for about 20 minutes, or until the octopus has lovely crispy edges. (The bbq would work well here, too)

Drizzle with the piso, and serve in the baking dish for everyone to help themselves.

Portugal - squid with the squad

While I was very excited to have finally finished writing about my American adventures – well, almost finished, there’s still the story of the day I went to Venice Beach and ate avocado pizza followed by avocado ice cream, but maybe that’s a story best left untold – working through the enormous amounts of food I had consumed meant that in the meantime I had managed to fit in a whole ’nother holiday.

Normally I wouldn’t plan trips so closely together - if only to give my cholesterol levels a chance to stabilise - but my Dad was visiting from Down Under and had suggested meeting for a week in the Algarve, home of many memories from the many great  holidays we spent there when I was growing up. It also meant that I wouldn’t have to properly unpack from my States trip. And, however much I think I hate doing other chores, there is a special circle of hell dedicated to opening your suitcase and actually dealing with the stuff stuffed inside.

While I’ve decided to only write about one restaurant we visited on our trip - no one has time to read about every sardine or Super Bock we ate over the week (spoiler, there were a lot) -  Portuguese food is, on the whole, both excellent and underrated. It may not be fancy, but from cold beers to warm custard tarts, salt cod to cabbage soup, roast suckling pig to piri piri chicken, there are plenty of good ways to get fat.  

And of course you can wash it all down with some serious booze with a range of port wines, madeira, vinho verde, ginja cherry liqueur, and medronho – a potent firewater made from the fruit of the strawberry tree, which confusingly look like lychees, that is a speciality of the Algarve – all cheap, good and available in copious quantities. I also recently discovered they make a rice pudding and cinnamon flavour cream liqueur, the thought of which fills me with a kind of delirious excitement that something so magical exists.

While it might not be the fanciest or the hippest, and it’s certainly not the quietest, Adega da Marina does remain one of the best known restaurants in Lagos. Even the Ewing had heard of it before our visit, although that may have had something to do with the fact that they are known for the football scarves and flags that hang from the rafters all around the cavernous room.

One of my Dad’s friends, who owns the apartment we were staying in, gifted them a promotional Wasps RFC flag, sponsored by a well-known cider maker, but it was put up on the wall with the Magners side facing out. Maybe they are just as upset they moved from Wycombe to Coventry as I was.

All meals in Portugal start with couvert - small plates that typically include breads, pates, olives and cheese - that are bought, unbidden to the table and are charged if you eat them. You can ask the waiter to take them away if you don't want them, but there was precious little chance of us rejecting slices of crusty bread slathered in sardine paste and the round of cheese made of a mix of cows and sheep milk. 

The house salad is also excellent; a simple mix of knobbly tomatoes and cucumbers, sweet white onions and grated carrots, and topped with fresh oregano and a simple oil and vinegar dressing.

The dish they are probably most famous for is the prawns, ordered by weight, either simply boiled in the shell or, as we ordered, fried in plenty of garlic and olive oil. We ordered 400g , above, a giant platter that was nearly too much (there isn't really such a thing when it comes to garlic prawns) that cost the princely sum of 16 euros.

As good as the prawns were, the platter of fried baby squid from the special board were even better. Soft and bouncy, like the lyrics of a Prince song, there wasn’t a hint of grim, fishy rubber band elasticity, just the sweet hint of the sea combined with a slight hint of iodine from their ink and lashings of good olive oil and salt.

Alongside, although barely necessary, was a mountain of chips. While I’m fairly indifferent to a fried potato, or really a potato of any kind (with apologies to my Irish grandmother) there is something about a Portuguese potato that is quite untouchable. Holidays as a kid would see me eat my annual allowance in a fortnight, and I am pleased to say they are still as wonderful (and I have still retained my voracious capacity).

I didn’t get pictures of my Dad and the Ewing’s main meals, (probably just as well, judging the quality of the one’s I did take) but they enjoyed the classic piri-piri chicken and a majestic whole sea bass respectively. So much so that neither of them could manage desert, even between them, something virtually unheard of. Even more so when the Ewing had to walk past the desert cabinet on the way to the loo and was given a recommendation for the syrup-laden orange roll by a very enthusiastic lady.

Obviously she wasn’t going to let that information go to waste, so when my Dad was at the Irish bar by the Marina watching Ireland win their first test Down Under since before I was born (not before my wife and my father though, backing up my assertions during our trip that I wasn’t yet old) we decided to go back for lunch a deux. Partly for the orange cake and the prawns, and partly because we knew they would be showing the Belgium Algeria game from England’s World Cup group and it would be a shady place to watch it away from the heat of the afternoon sun.

As well as the prawns, we also ordered a portion of the clams à bulhão pato, served steamed with white wine, lemon and garlic. Like their mastery with spuds, the Portuguese are pretty good clam-cookers -  in fact so much so that one of their most famous dishes, Porco à Alentejana, combines pork, clams and cubes of fried potatoes (I had a very good version a couple of doors down from Adega on our first day in Lagos, accompanied by a bottle of Matteus rose and the Portugal versus Morocco game) – but I digress.

These were equally wonderful, especially eaten, like the prawns, with a pile of crusty bread to drag through the briny, buttery juices and accompanied by another bottle of cold vinho verde. They also contain a serious amount of garlic, so make sure your significant other tucks in as well, or holiday romance may be off the cards.

The orange roll looks a bit like our swiss roll, but has a close texture and richness which comes from the fact it is made entirely of eggs and sugar, with no flour at all. It's then soaked in a orange syrup, and is sweet and rich and fragrant, like most Portuguese puddings.

I went with the classic pudim flan, which is very similar to a creme caramel. A rich baked custard of milk, cream, egg yolks and sugar, in a smoky puddle of caramel sauce and best served with a strong bica, or espresso coffee, alongside.

After twenty odd holidays to the Algarve over the years, it was great to finally show the Ewing some of my happiest childhood memories - including the beautiful beach that my Dad and I both confessed we never really liked going to. Too hot and too sandy. The apple never falls far from the tree.

Luckily she loved the holiday just as much as we did and there's already talk of returning, to both Lagos and Adega, where I'm looking forward to completing a hat-trick of visits.

Riddle me this

Just a couple of weeks after enjoying a boozy, seafood blowout overlooking an Essex Estuary, the Ewing was particularly delighted for the chance to enjoy a second one in quick succession - this time at Riddle and Finns in Brighton’s famed Laines.

Inside features the obligatory high-topped marble tables, cool white tiles that bought to mind Soho's Randall and Aubin and Rex and Mariano (RIP, although its successor, Zelman Meats, is also very good).

Beware that if you are in a pair you have to sit adjacent to each other, like old people in garden centre cafes, and you may also have to share your table. Probably not an issue, but even the Ewing was frustrated by the woman opposite us, and her insistence on loudly instructing her builder on the kitchen extension down the phone.

Good sourdough came with homemade mackerel pare, taramasalata, aioli and... horseradish. Clearly I had zoned out when the waitress announced this nugget of info, so it made a surprise sinus-clearer when I loaded it up on a crust of bread.

We started with half a dozen oysters - rocks, as they hadn't had their first natives of the season - a mixture of Rossmore, Carlingford and their oyster of the day, which I felt sure I wouldn't forget, then promptly did.

You can add sauces and toppings, for an extra fifty pence per bivalve, from a comprehensive list including Killpatrick - barbeque sauce and bacon lardons; Porthilly - deep fried & served with pickled vegetables and citrus mayo; and the classic Rockefeller. And while I do, sacrilege, like a cooked oyster, we ate these au naturel (don't worry, we both remained fully-clothed), although I did anoint mine with a liberal splash of red wine vinegar with finely chopped shallots.

The Ewing took advantage of the excellent value set lunch menu, two courses for £14.95, picking the mussels as her starter, with a spare spoon for me. Having eaten plenty of mussels in my life - many of the best looking out at the flat, windy beaches of de Panne on winter trips to the Belgium coast - these were, with no sense of hyperbole, some of the nicest. (oh they were so plump, silky and delicious - TE).

Big and plump and sweet, but not like the tasteless green lip behemoths, with a velvety sauce that we both clashed spoons over. I also enjoyed the late addition of baby spinach leaves and cherry tomatoes, not quite as strange as it seems.

At nearly twenty quid (it's simply listed on the menu as 'Riddle and Finns fish pie') I hoped my choice of main would be worth it. But when a bubbling dish full of chunks of smoked fish and salmon, topped with a burnished carapace of cheesy mash and crowned with a king prawn and a scallop, appeared (I asked for it to be served without the pesky half a boiled egg) I knew I had made a good decision.

A slightly less successful one was to serve the whole thing on a round of slate. Not only did it make the thought of turning the molten hot pie out a rather unappealing one, but it made it nigh on impossible to cut my veg without the shiver inducing screech of metal on rock. I'm not normally overly fussy about my choice of crockery, but this time I was firmly on the side of We Want Plates.

My unadvertised veg meant we also ordered a side of samphire; entirely superfluous, but very good. Especially when the brackish fronds were dragged through the accompanying dish of ethereal hollandaise sauce. A pairing to rival the more familiar asparagus, with the sea vegetables' season conveniently running on right behind.

The Ewing's main was a kinda re-hash of her starter, but with with the addition of squid and clams and served with pasta, and was no worse for that. A generous portion, well seasoned, with well-cooked pasta and a cold glass of vino blanco - you couldn't want for much more.

Dessert - a chocolate ganache creation with a base of tonka bean shortbread and layer of raspberry and lychee bavarois, decorated with a melange of flowers, mint and berries - looked the part, but failed to deliver. The shortbread was soft and the ganache a little chewy instead of melty. The unadvertised chocolate truffle-type things, rolled in coconut and embedded in a swirl of lemon flavoured cream, were pretty good, though.

After several glasses of prosecco and a very nice white Bordeaux, double espressos were in order, taken while chatting with the - super lovely - staff about the influx of Wycombians to the town that weekend.

The total bill just nudged a ton. Yes, a fair bit of cash to drop for lunch, but well worth it for fine quality fish and seafood served in lovely surroundings. You could, of course, get out for far less and far quicker than we did while still having a thoroughly lovely time, but probably not quite as much fun.

We emerged into the daylight to be greeted by a bright and breezy early autumn afternoon, The perfect weather for a slightly pissed (well, the non- designated driver), walk along the shingle, both buoyed by another wonderful seafood lunch and already planning our hat trick. In fact, the only thing I wouldn't want to repeat was the unplanned dunking in the North Sea. Eating all that fish hasn't metamorphosed me into a mermaid quite yet.