Pick-up sticks

It’s been a little while since we’ve had a ‘compromise lunch’  - a meal, orchestrated by me, that also involves some sort of bribe in order to secure the Ewing’s participation. As if my company wasn’t quite enough.

This time, however, there was a twist. The Ewing wanted to go to Colindale to pick up her new four season sleeping bag and a new fleece for our camping trip, and promised to take me out for lunch if I came with her. How could a girl (read quickly approaching middle-age lesbian) resist?

I was excited to discover Jakarta was in the vicinity, so after we had finished arguing over folding tables and roll-up mattresses we could celebrate with Indonesian food (they also offer Thai and Malay-influenced dishes), which is still a rarity even in a multi-cultural megatropolis like London. 

I still have a big soft spot for the country, after several trips there when I was growing up (at the time my dad was a freight forwarder who worked closely with Garuda) and several of the carvings, statues and pictures in the restaurant reminded me of things we had bought back from our holidays. Although, sadly, our suitcases weren’t big enough for a giant lizard, like the one next to our table when we sat down.

To drink we both had the Thai iced tea. I'm not sure what gives it the violent orange hue (and I'm not sure I want to) but the milky sweet and fragrant drink was the perfect refresher in the dog days of a north London summer. They also gave us a basket of prawn cracker to munch on, my wife's absolute fave, as you can see in the above pic.

From the, extraordinarily good value lunch menu - £8.50/£9.50 for three courses (an extra quid if it’s the weekend) I started with chicken satay. Now, chicken satay, or any kind of satay, is one of my desert island dishes. The first time I tried it, as a small child on a family holiday to Bali, I couldn’t believe something could taste so exotic, so delicious. Even after a memorable night in my teenage years, when a then girlfriend’s dad made satay – with an excellent peanut sauce – and played us his old 60s records, until I got horribly drunk (and then horribly sick), couldn’t put me off.

My favourite kind of satay (spoken as if I actually eat it on any kind of regular basis) are the tiny little pieces of meat that must take lots of patience, and many more splinters, to thread on to the skewers, before being grilled over charcoal.

These were far chunkier, but never the less good; succulent and a bit smoky. The sauce wasn’t up to my ex's dads, but I not sure if anything will ever compare to that. Possibly because it’s perfectly preserved in my memory, possibly because of the whole jar of peanut butter and vast amounts of beer involved.

The Ewing had the prawn tom yum, (prawns hidden beneath a raft of mushrooms), one of her favourite soups. This one had the familiar lip-puckering sour edge, coupled with a huge whack of chilli heat that built until the beads of sweat appeared on her brow and tears in her eyes. The sure signs of a successful tom yum, but slightly disconcerting for the waitress who cleared our plates away.

Roast duck was served in a gargantuan portion, the soft and yielding meat draped with burnished, sticky skin that had been glazed in kecap manis, an aromatic, sweet Indonesian soy sauce. Some token shredded cabbage and carrot bought some crunchy respite.

The deep fried lamb chops in green chilli sauce didn’t have as much sauce as I hoped, but made up for it by being absolutely delicious. This was the first deep-fried version I have encountered, and hopefully not the last; the fatty, slightly gamey meat standing up to the fierce application of heat. 

What sauce there was comprised almost entirely of green chillies - along with a token bit of garlic and tomato – meaning the Ewing was more than happy to let me eat the lion’s share. Something I was more than happy to do, tempered by a glorious mound of fragrant, slightly sticky, white rice and another scoop of egg-fried rice studded with spring onion.

Pudding was a choice of tinned lychees - bobbing ominously like eyeballs, in a perfumed syrup - and that slightly chalky vanilla ice cream you used to get at a friend's houses if you went round for tea. With a good squirt of Ice Magic, if you were really lucky. Not really my bag; the Ewing, however, was sort of lucky, as I was quite happy to let her eat mine as well, despite her, weak, protestations that she was already full.

Although I didn’t get any dessert, I did manage to pick up a new fleece of my own on our trip to Go Outdoors. Nothing quite like the thrill of some new polyester. Sensible clothing and satay, a very successful Sunday.

Brick Lane, Curry Again

When it comes to Sunday dinner there are three choices I favour. The good old roast, when you’re feeling traditional; a barbecue when it’s too hot to contemplate lashings of gravy and Yorkshire pud; and a curry for all other occasions. It may not please the purists, but in a country where tikka masala is our national dish why not slather a bit of tandoori marinade on your chicken dinner before falling asleep in front of Songs of Praise.

Of course many may think that filling up on ghee-laden mountains of rice and bread and spicy platters of charred meat, all washed down with fizzy lager, would be a disaster come Monday morning, when you’re slumped back in the office battling with the gastric consequences of that extra bhaj, but alternate weekend working means Mondays are my Sundays. Ergo Sunday evening is my Saturday night.

Stealth probably doesn’t know what day of the week it actually is, but is always up for a good curry, so after a sunny afternoon stocking up on beigels and drinking glasses of fresh watermelon juice and avocado smoothies on Brick Lane we met her at Needo Grill, the final missing piece in my quest to try the Whitechapel trilogy that also features Tayyabs and the Lahore Kebab House.

Needo was set up by the former manager of Tayyabs, so you have the pick of their lauded dishes without the mile-long queues.  Inside the red and black decor is smarter than Lahore and brighter than Tayaabs, although constantly spying yourself in the mirrored walls isn’t conducive to ordering yet another round of naan bread. Drinks are BYO, so we stocked up with large bottle of cold Cobra from the nearby corner store en route.

To start we shared the mixed grill, a platter of sizzling lamb chops, seekh kebabs, chicken tikka and grilled onions. While I’m not sure these were the best incarnations of the classic that I have had - the lamb chops particularly lacking the requisite fat and char ratio - they possessed a pleasingly fierce chilli kick that went well with the sweet yoghurt and mint dip that had appeared with our plate of poppadums.

Since our previous trip to Tayyabs had been marred slightly by Stealth claiming she had been struck by a gastric ulcer, before lying sweating in the corridor by the loos (never a dull moment) I took this opportunity to reorder the stalwarts, plus the pumpkin, that we had been too stuffed to order before. There was also a buttery nan for me that was mostly eaten by Stealth (no, no, I don't want one, really) plus two roti that were mostly eaten by Stealth, too.

Firstly we have the worst picture (not a single effort to capture this was in focus) of the best dish, the fabled dry meat. Never has a moniker been less appealing and, thankfully, less deserved, the ‘dry’ describing the lack of gravy rather than the texture of the dish itself, reminding me of a rendang, with soft shreds of sticky mutton in a thickly reduced and well-spiced sauce.

Accompanying were two vegetable choices.  The first was the Dal Baingan, a mixture of nutty lentils and smoky baby aubergine – although I notice singular, rather than the two we were served at Tayyabs. The consistency of lentils was also slightly looser. 

We also tried the Punjabi Tinda, or baby pumpkin, curry, with a pleasingly grown up sweet and sour flavour and, again, lashings of ghee (in case you fear veggies are actually good for you).

Overall I’d pick the dry meat at Needoo and the grilled meat at Tayyabs, but I’d give either a firm recommendation (the Karahi Ghost at Lahore Kebab House also deserves a mention) without much hesitation. 

Going at an off peak time, we arrived at about half five on a Sunday evening, also means  less hurrying and harrying by the waiter, who graciously lent us their bottle openers and provided jugs of iced water long after we had finished our main meals.

As always after a curry, pudding was a stretch too far. We had, however, bought Stealth a present, in the form of a Cinnamon Tree Bakery biscuit from our visit to Wapping market, to nibble on later.

In fact both Stealth’s gingerbread elephant and the Ewing’s shortbread owl were most appropriate, forming the first instalment of a new series ‘owners who looked like their baked goods’ - even featuring the adoption of an cigarette trunk for extra added likeness.  

A cheering Sunday night scene of friend swapping biscuits (Stealth bought us some earless rabbits lovingly baked by our friends Claire and Kam) and certainly one that was worth missing the traditional joint of British beef and golden heap of roasties for.