Hiphopsideproject

A couple of weekends ago I introduced mine and Adam’s Mums to mojitos at the Huddersfield food festival. They enjoyed them greatly.

We’re having a party this Sunday, I’ve stocked up on Rum, 8 bottles of Soda water, & mint. Adam’s Dad’s bringing 30 limes. I’m sure fun times will be had by all.

How to make a mojito

Grab a tall glass, add a shot (or two, if you’re feeling frisky) of white rum (seriously, don’t bother with a branded version, you won’t tell the difference!). Cut up a lime, bung it in the glass, add a good handful of mint & some sugar syrup/granulated sugar… get a drink masher thingy, or the end of a rolling pin, and pummel the mixture together. Top up with ice & soda water, yummers! Enjoy! Raspberry it up by adding uh.. raspberries.

It was Adam’s birthday on Monday so I made him a wonderful cake. It’s a stylised version of a star trek science officer badge, and the insides are red velvet cake. Om nom, my friends. The angle here isn’t great, but you get the idea, right?

And yes, those are indeed margaritas! We cooked up a special birthday feast of beef burritos from the Wahaca cook book and washed them down with home-made margaritas, who knew they were so easy to mix? All you need is tequila, limes, ice and triple sec. Neato!

I really, really wanted some form of Mexican food this evening. We hadn’t bought anything spectacularly Mexican at the shop this weekend so it was time to improvise a little. I present to you… the potato & egg dinner burrito!

Indeed! I assume this kind of dish would probably be better placed at breakfast time, but hell, it was gooooood. Shall I tell you how to make one? It’s proper simple.

First up, go to the co-op and buy the only tortilla wraps they have which happen to be garlic & corriander. Also remember to pick up sour cream.

The next step, crack some eggs, whisk them with some milk, salt, and pepper and then scramble them nicely. DON’T mix them hard, that’s loserish, be gentle with your eggs. & Don’t whisk them whilst they’re cooking, that leads to bad scrambled eggs of gross burnt bittiness. Set them aside whilst they’re just undercooked, put a lid on the pan and they’ll be cooked to perfection by the time it’s all over.

Dice up some potato, we used our home grown ones, you’ll want a small pan full depending on how many of these things you’re making. Nice. You want them in nice bite sized chunks. Boil these for a few minutes until tender but not squishy, shouldn’t take too long. Whilst they’re doing that, slice up an onion, and a tomato, and make some guacamole & grate some cheese.

Drain your potatoes, add them to a frying pan with the onion & a selection of garlic, chili, cumin & corriander powder. Fry them up realll goood.

While they’re cooking start assembling your burrito. First some egg. Then cheese, them tomato slices, on top of that add some guacamole, and then a good dollop of sour cream. You can either put your jalapeños on now or after your potato.

When your potato is done, nice and coloured with some crispy bits, spoon some on each burrito.

If you’re anything like me then your burrito won’t close, and you’ll make an ass of yourself if you try and eat it with anything other than a knife & fork.

Good times!

When we were organising our schedule for London, I said to Adam that I really wanted some good mexican food before we headed to see Wicked. (Huddersfield has a severe lack of Mexican food, the only Mexican eatery being over priced and cliché, they have things like duck in hoi sin sauce on their specials menu… whut?!)

Adam was straight on the case looking for a decent, reasonably priced mexican restaurant for us, preferably one where we didn’t have to book (‘cos we didn’t really know what time we’d be eating). The boy came up good when he sent me a link to the Wahaca website, http://www.wahaca.co.uk/, I’d heard about the mexican market eatery before as Katie had posted a few photos from one of her visits there, but it’d slipped my mind until Adam found it again.

Wahaca currently has two locations in the centre of London, one in Covent Garden (where we went) and one in Canary Wharf. They also have one in the Westfield Shopping Centre. We perused the online menu (a nice downloadable PDF version of the real menu, why don’t more restaurant websites have this?) and pretty much decided on the ‘Wahaca Selection’.. seemed like a great chance to sample a variety of the goodies and discover what we might want to have the next time we go.

It all worked out quite well, we ended up getting their about 4.30pmish as we wanted to have time to walk up the Mall and take a look at the Palace before heading to the show at 7.30pm. We got a table right away and both ordered margaritas, Adam went for the traditional and I got a hibiscus flavour which tasted a bit like berries. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos from Wahaca because we were travelling light before going to the show. We ordered some nachos with salsa (nice, chunky salsa fresca which came with a small bucket of nachos) and our Wahaca selection which consisted of:

• 3  pork pibil tacos – these are soft tacos and quite small, about 3/4 bites each. The filling is a shredded spicy pork, akin to my favourite pulled pork.
• 2 broad bean quesadillas – very interesting, Wahaca have a thing about using seasonal local produce in their food, and with this quesadilla I think they’ve discovered a great recipe! If you’re not familiar with Mexican food a quesadilla is a sort of sandwich made from a tortilla filled with cheese and other ingredients and then grilled or griddled until it goes all melty.
• 3 chicken mole tacos - soft tacos again this time filled with a mole (thick, spicy sauce) and chicken. Quite messy but very tastey!
• 2 black bean tostadas - have to confess I only tried half of this, I was so stuffed. A crisp tortilla topped with lovely fresh ingredients, nice, nice.
• 2 new potato taquitos –  Another great use of a typically british ingredient, these are wrapped up tortillas filled with different things and then deep fried and topped with sour cream. I liked these, plus they weren’t too big so all the stodgy carbs weren’t too bad.
• Green rice & black beans – exactly what it says on the tin, the black beans were realllllly good though!

Overall I was really impressed with the food – for the price, quickness of service & use of ingredients – I’ve seen a few not-so-good reviews floating around the net, Time Out weren’t incredibly generous with their star-rating, but then again they still gave them a decent enough review. Some of the reviews are complaining that they once bought a huge taco filled with amazing things in Mexico for about $2 but then came to Wahaca and got small ones and had to pay almost £5… c’mon, get some perspective. This is a central London Mexican restaurant where you can get a table almost instantly, have great food served quickly made from fresh, locally sourced ingredients, wash it down with a super tastey margarita & then not have a heart attack when the bill arrives. Perfect place for people visiting the city like we were, and I’m sure it’s great as a regular haunt for Londoners too.

The founder of Wahaca, Thomasina Miers, recently released a great Mexican cookbook too, Mexican Food Made Simple – my copy is on its way as we speak – which is full of basic Mexican recipes that’ll help you through out the old el paso kits. Yep.

Oh! oh! And, you get a neat little packet or chili seeds with your receipt :)

This weekend we made Whoopie Pies from a recipe in last month’s Sainsburys Magazine. Traditionally they’re made from chocolate sponge and aren’t decorated with anything, but the sainsburys recipe suggested icing and sugar balls, so we went with it.

I used a confectioners pipe to make the sponge biscuits more even, but even then it didn’t work out amazingly well when my nozzle fell off. They kinda space out when they start to cook anyway.

The interesting thing about the whoopie pie is the filling, it’s actually a marshmallow cream. I don’t kow if you’ve ever had that stuff called Marshmallow fluff before, in the jar, but it’s kinda like that… mixed with butter. I think next time I might not even include the butter, made it a bit sickly.

The sponge bits taste like the sponge fingers that you put in the bottom of a trifle, really nice and light.

So I haven’t included the recipe because you can just google for a good one, it might even be on the sainsburys website? They were fun to make, though, and I’ll probably have another go with a chocolate version.

ETA: the Sainsburys recipe told me that these only last 6hrs after they’ve been filled and iced?! What the hell?! we had them the next day and didn’t die, so it must be to do with the quality of them degrading (ie they might go soggy).