When did slow-cooked barbecued ribs become the unofficial signature dish for the whole of Leeds?
I don’t know, but I’m not complaining, and even though I exaggerate slightly, there do seem to be loads of rib joints springing up all over the city.
This one, Red’s True Barbecue, is the current, undisputed leader of the pack.
Red’s has developed a sort of semi-religious following over the last few months. People speak of it in slightly awed, often hushed tones, of the smoke and the food, and the impossibility of getting a table. It’s hammed up by the restaurant itself, with clever marketing encouraging ‘belief’ and devotion. Their irreverent take on the creation story made me smile.
Red’s is a huge slice of Americana beamed down into the middle of Leeds. It sits on a busy corner near the Corn Exchange, red neon signs shining into the dull street outside – bold, brash, confident, but homely and welcoming. Big food served with big smiles.
The menu is essentially an awful lot of very slow cooked meat, smothered in barbecue sauces of various types and finished over flames. My ribs were tender, tasty, the meat falling away easily from the bone … not the usual gnawing struggle. These were ribs from a well-looked after pig – the amount of meat and the thickness of the bone made that obvious. There’s little point putting meat at the centre of a menu unless it’s the absolute best, and this was just that. More…
Sicily is one of the most interesting parts of Italy, not least from a culinary position. The island’s position as the biggest in the Mediterranean, the ball to Italy’s boot, means that it’s endured attack and invasion from all sides, each successive wave of occupation leaving another layer on the island’s cuisine.
The effect has been to create a rich and varied food history, with nods to the Arab east, the African south, France and Spain in the west and elements of Greece’s reach punctuating the island’s culinary history in the same way that Ancient Greece’s architectural mark still shows in ruins scattered through the landscape.
The over-riding geographical influence is that of Italy, with pasta and rice dishes prevalent as across much of southern Italy. Italy is just one of a whole range of different influences, though, influences that together create a unique and diverse cuisine, a marriage of history, culture, place and terroir.
This volume of recipes from Sicily comes via the Silver Spoon Kitchen. The Silver Spoon
is one of the undisputed classics of the Italian cook book world. It has a place in many Italian kitchens, in the same way that Delia’s Complete Cookery Course
has in many of ours … it’s one of those classic go-to manuals for times when you need to know how to ‘do’ something properly, but it has a flair and style that our go-to books often (always?) lack.
More….
I’ve recently hit a little Friday evening routine, detouring on the way home from work to plunder the shelves of the brilliant Saltaire Wines (@SaltaireWines) for a bottle or two of Proper Beer. Most weeks, I seem to come away with something or other from Thornbridge Brewery.
Thornbridge’s beer is punchy and interesting, and has a bit of attitude about it. Their most widely known brew, Jaipur, is a regular standby, and it’s a proper explosion of a bottle.
There are others, and Raven, strangely labelled as a ‘black IPA’ is a brilliant example of why more and more people are reconnecting with what I glibly titled ‘proper beer’ a few lines ago … it’s a ferociously bitter, dark beer with overtones of grapefruit and undertones of roasted malt. It’s a confusing little beer – not quite a porter, but deserving of the ‘black’ part of the title in its richness and depth, but there’s also a floridness to it that befits an IPA.
This is what real beer is about, and this is why people are rediscovering it.
Confusing … yes, but not wrong for that.
Just drink it with the thought that good things should be challenging in mind.
www.thornbridgebrewery.co.uk
Cod is very firmly on the endangered list, and we’ve come to accept that its consumption comes with a healthy dose of guilt.
That’s no bad thing – trawling has decimated Atlantic cod stocks over the last few decades, with numbers plummeting.
That’s true of Atlantic cod – our main source – but stocks in other places are healthier because of better management and more sustainable fishing methods. Most of Norway’s cod, for example, is caught off the country’s far northern coast, in the Barents Sea, which has a healthy stock of cod that’s sustainable and growing.
The best of this cod is caught between January and April around the spawning grounds of the Lofoten Islands. This fish is in its absolute prime … it’s just finished a migratory journey across the icy waters of the Barents Sea. and this experience leaves it strong, muscular and cleansed.
The very best of the best is designated as ‘Skrei’, a traditional Norwegian delicacy that sells for a premium price, and it’s worth it. The cod is astonishing – thick, meaty flakes of beautiful, translucent white fish with thin layers of succulent fat and shiny, clean skin. The taste is fresh, clear and pure. This is what cod really tastes like. It’s the best fish I’ve ever eaten by some distance.
But how is fishing cod sustainable at all, when there are such dire warnings around about a deep-sea Armageddon? The answer is simple, and two-fold.
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It’s Mother’s Day today.
It’s a bittersweet experience, the pleasure of seeing our kids with their homemade cards and bunches of daffodils tinged with the regret of not being able to give my own mum the same things, not being able to hug her and tell her I love her any more.
It gets easier every year, but it’ll never be an entirely normal day, never a routine celebration.
There’s a wound there that won’t heal, can’t heal, shouldn’t heal. It won’t heal because this is what marks me now, this is what made me an adult, that week so many years ago when worlds crumbled and slipped away.
But there’s another side, a side that calls for a feast, because mothers are brilliant, aren’t they?
I might not have mine, but there’s one right here, and she’s getting a decent lunch if me and the kids have anything to do with it.
I read a tweet this morning that made me snort with laughter, something like Mother’s Day being a time when mums across the country get taken out to pubs and served Yorkshire puddings vastly inferior to their own.
We’re determined not to let that happen.
So, something at home. A lamb shawarma, or an approximation of one, at the very least.
More….
