Steak and kidney-less pie

One of our more memorable meals in London was taken on New Year's Eve at the Battersea Pie Station in Covent Garden. We had ended up there after attempting a walk along the Thames, starting from Cannon St. At Blackfriars, we were stopped by the crowd and safety control units who were policing the area and keeping people away from the riverside, due to the fireworks event that was schedule to take place later in the evening. Our detour away from the riverside took us through some very London sites of great historical interest. It almost felt Dickensian.

Poultry obviously takes its name from its former association with the chicken trade.

We were intrigued by what looked like a private function with a focus on seafood...

... and highly unamused by this vile-sounding Christmas food special! (It has been described as: "An overwhelmingly negative reaction, ranging from 'aggressively disgusting' to 'one of the worst things I’ve ever put in my mouth'. It gets points for effort, attempting to combine virtually every festive ingredient, but it tastes like someone has pushed their Christmas leftovers into a blender and served them with rice.")

New Year's Eve is a very quiet day for London business people, but even when London is supposedly sleeping...

... it keeps changing looks, as it prepares for various events, and this time, the portaloos made it look like it would be welcoming the New Year with a heavy bout of drinking.

We eventually needed to use a bathroom ourselves, so I popped into a Pret-a-Manger and bought some Christmas mince pies which I'd really wanted to try while in London.

When I asked for the bathroom facilities, believe it or not, this place did NOT have toilets! So we held off, in the hope that we would eventually find a place to take a leak legally.

At The Strand, the former Aldwych tube station, often used as a film location, looked ghostly silent. This street was cut off to strollers due to the fireworks event.

Somerset House was looking very festive with its ice rink (where we found some free bathroom facilities).

I had a quick browse through the ridiculously overpriced Fortnum and Masons shop (it was sponsoring the ice rink) - 50 pounds for a set of 6 Christmas crackers, did I read that right?!

A short stroll away, we found ourselves at Covent Garden. Cold weather makes you feel hungry all the time. I chose the Battersea Pie Station, in the hope that I would find some steak and kidney pie (and Cornish pasty - another of my favorite pies in New Zealand). We weren't disappointed. My family lets me do the ordering most places when in London, because they know I know the food well enough. My early life in colonial New Zealand stopped abruptly just when New Zealand's food tastes became more international, so I still have fond memories of New Zealand old-fashioned comfort food, which were invariably British-based.

Chicken and mushroom pie, steak and kidney pie, and Cornish pasty - ~20 pounds, with a bottle of beer and a cup of tea.

Back home, when I decided to make a steak kidney pie myself, I found it near impossible to find kidneys! In Greece, the sale of beef and chicken kidneys has been banned since the mad cow furore - which started in the UK; yet, they aren't banned there! Although lamb's kidneys are still available for purchase here, when I tried to track some down, I found that they are never severed from the actual animal, so you have to buy the part of the animal that they are connected to. This is done for transparency reasons: in this way, the butcher is showing you that the animal was healthy - if the kidney is missing, the buyer may wonder whether the animal was sick. 

I used this very easy-to-follow recipe as the basis of my beef stew and pastry. The beef stew was cooked last night, the pastry was made this morning, and we had the pie for lunch with some leek and potato soup. 

To replace the umami taste of the kidneys, I bought a packet containing two slices of kavurma, adding some mushrooms and soya sauce (I was out of Worcestershire sauce) to my beef stew. I think the taste was successful, and the whole family enjoyed the pie, which will be made again eventually, because I froze half the stew. Slow-cooked food takes a long time to cook, so why not make a double batch and save your time later?

Bonus photo: A chat with the butcher where I bought the beef also revealed another mysterious EU meat regulation, which forbids lamb's spleen from being sold - but cow's spleen is permissible!

At any rate, if you have close relations with someone who raises their own meat, you can procure everything. I had lamb's spleen in sheep's intestine last week at an inner-city cafe bar, where the landlord-owner-cook prepares everything freshly and to order.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Barbie (Μπάρμπη)

The invention of Barbie is a double-edged sword: although she is a bimbo, even a girl who never had a Barbie doll will still act like one at some point in her life. It can't be helped because if a woman doesn't go through some bimbo stage in her life, she can never really create her own feminine style.

I never had a Barbie doll when I was young because my mother never bought me one, and she never had one either naturally, being a Greek villager born a few years before WW2. Nor did I ever get one as a present, since most of our family friends were Greek people of similar backgrounds to our parents. Barbie dolls were expensive in my youth; these days, there are cheap facsimile versions available to poorer pockets, so most girls own some kind of dress-up doll. Hence I never really found it necessary for my daughter to have one, but she got them anyway from her godmother, who bought them for her own daughter too. By the time she was nine, half a dozen Barbies and Barbie-lookalikes adorned her shelves.

She never really enjoyed playing with them in the way that I would expect girls to enjoy them, but she did regard them as girls' toys, due to traditional sex orientation trends. Obviously, there would be Barbie talk at school, which she could join into because she owned a Barbie herself; no doubt this gave her some security and self-confidence among her peers.

Barbies picking fruit during a gap year on a working vacation: "Pity we forgot the suntan lotion, eh? The sun's good from this height."

Barbie was also something she could play with without her brother. Of course, he regarded Barbie as a girls-only toy, but he also viewed Barbie as a way to tease his sister: at least, this is the person we would often blame when we found a Barbie with a broken leg or Barbie's accessories went missing. Although this would upset both me and my daughter because it was an invasion of private space and she was not really the vengeful type that would destroy his toys (she'd ask me to do it), I could also see that my daughter wasn't really into keeping Barbie intact. She cut a Barbie's hair and painted her nails, both of which are generally irreversible procedure on dolls. And since I couldn't really stand Barbie myself, I was hoping that her Barbies would eventually die in some way without my needing to do the dirty deed myself.

"This is a palm tree, right?"

This summer, my daughter surprised me by giving all her Barbie dolls away to a neighbour's granddaughter that she often plays with. I was thrilled to bits - the bimbos had left the house without any help from me. Her brother was relieved too: "So it doesn't really matter that I broke that Barbie bike when we were young because if you still had it, you would have given that away too, right?" For me, this is a sign that they have both developed their own different playtime interests; it is the point that they have started to show their independence away from each other when searching for leisure activities.

"Just let me know if anyone's coming so they don't see me with my pants down, LOL."

Even though I was glad to see the end of Barbie in our house, I was also intrigued as to what made her take the decision to get rid of what I thought might have been regarded by her as a precious toy. Never having a Barbie myself, I really couldn't work this one out. But I know what might have pointed her towards giving something away that had outlived its use in our own home. We have two bags in our house that are always being filled with things we don't need any more - one for clothes, and one for toys; when the bags fill up, we take them to a church or give things away to friends (in the same way that we were given most of the contents of those bags). Instead of passing on the responsibility to me to recycle those things, she took the initiative herself.

"This is a good site for the end-of-holiday party - we can do pole dancing here."

When I asked her why she gave away her Barbie dolls, she told me she wanted to clear some space from her shelves for her new toys; her shelves are now cluttered with nail polish, hair bands and her own self-styled bead jewellery. She is simply moving on to the next stage of creating her own identity, one that Barbie helped her develop in her own mysterious girlie way.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Offal (Τζιγέρι - Εντόσθια)

It's a load of old waffle
that awful is OFFAL.
It may not look good
to treat it as food.

But once you have cut it
and floured it and fried it,
believe me, there's nothing
that tastes quite just like it.

Maybe it's hiding
in that little SAUSAGE
you ate as of late
in your wholemeal bread sandwich.

So next time you're buying
a small spring-born lamb,
you might think of eating
what you thought was spam.

It's liver and kidney
and sweetbreads and heart,
the kind of things chucked
in a steak-kidney tart.

Let it all cook until it is crunchy;
just think of it then as a squidgy BIFTEKI.
And when it's all done, it needs very little:
some lemon juice, salt and horta to fill you!

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.