Checked in: Hoi Polloi

 

Sorry it's been awhile since my last post, but time flies by when your stressed out and busy. Well in less than two weeks, Hub and I will be relocating to Rio de Janeiro! I'm so excited and anxious about the whole thing. I've never been to Brazil so it feels pretty much like a crazy dream to be moving somewhere that I can't imagine in my mind. I can't picture it, smell it, touch it or taste it, but everyone tells me how much I'm going love it. Everything in Rio will be new to me: the people, culture, work, life...I mean the list goes on and on.

My last day at work, the wonderfully colorful 34 restaurant, was last Friday and a week prior to my departure I had a fantastic leaving dinner with my crew. My colleagues Gina, Grace and I started off with cocktails at Callooh Callay. It's a fun little bar with a speakeasy room in back. We had some spicy Thai concoction and then moved onto a more spiced up version of the Espresso martini.

We then headed off to Hoi Polloi, new restaurant from the Bistrotheque Group, located in the recently opened Ace Hotel. The main entrance is hidden behind a lovely flower shop on the high street and the room itself feels like a worldly American diner. I liked the warm wooden panels, big globed lamps, and newspaper menus. We started off with oysters and fried snacks: chickpea fritters, pickled onion rings, puffy scratchings and the amazing thousand layered potatoes. They are cooked three times and fried in beef fat (i know) and pulling the layers apart and dipping them into creamy sauces was divine.

Moving onto mains, Grace had plaice with fennel and brown crab and I had the wild mushrooms, artichoke and potato dumplings. YUM. GG kept things semi-healthy with some steamed fish and more of those potatoes. Well in fact we all ordered more of those potatoes cuz they were damn good!

 

And of course we had dessert. GG got the chocolate barley & black malt ice cream by La Grotta Ices and because no one was watching me, I shared the chocolate Cambridgeshire cream with Grace. But to be fare it was so decadently rich, we didn't finish it. Well I don't think.

We had friends working at Hoi Polloi that night and gave us some good company including Clive Gregory, whose got great hair. It's salt and pepper and curly and I imagine Hub with this kind of coiffure in years to come.

And we had more Espresso martinis. This was very good.

I really like Hoi Polloi and the team is great, everyone was so friendly and the bartenders are not only chatty but make fantastic cocktails. Definitely worth returning to before I leave and if you come here, please order those thousand layered potatoes.

In the Kitchen: Beer bread with a side of Cannelini soup

 

Over the summer my friend Erin invited us round for an American BBQ feast, which included an amazing beer bread loaf. She had just returned from a US road trip and had picked up a specialty beer bread mix in New Orleans. It was so good, but packed with really naughty ingredients. I had more than I should have and of course, what I loved the most was the underlying sweetness to it. So I decided to modify the recipe and create a healthier and more wholesome version.

Beer Bread 

Makes one small loaf 

• 1.5 cups of spelt flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 cup brown rice syrup
• 3/4 can beer  
• olive oil butter for tin and for brushing

Beer bread is a yeast bread that is sweet with a subtle beer flavor. It's usually made with white flour, beer and sugar. For this recipe, I exchanged refined sugar with brown rice syrup, which I discovered in a recent wholefoods course. It's more natural and low GI. Beer bread is supposed to be light and fluffy because of the yeast. So I swapped the white flour with spelt flour; an ancient grain that is different from modern wheat but still contains both wheat and gluten. It is still heavier than white flour, but tends to bake lighter than traditional wholemeal flours. Mix in all the dry ingredients, then add the beer. Poor the sticky, liquidity batter into a buttered tin. Bake in a per-heated 200C oven for about 25-30 minutes.

Hearty Cannelini Bean Soup

I decided to pair my beer bread with a hearty bean soup and a side of burrata; the protein and fat found in the beans and cheese balanced the sugar in the bread. As mentioned before, things that slow down the release of sugar into the blood are protein and fat so it's so important for me to have a balance of these at every meal. Although I do find it difficult sometimes and just fail.

• 1 can cannelini beans or any white bean really
• 1 red onion
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 vegetarian bouillon cube
• 2 cups of water
• 2 bay leaves
• dried rosemary, oregano and paprika
• salt & pepper to taste

First sweat the onions and garlic in a little bit of olive oil until nice and soft. Then add two cups of hot water and the bouillon cube. Bring that to a boil and then throw in the remaining ingredients. I don't really measure my herbs, but best to start with small dashes. Then just add as you taste along. Once it's heated through, you are ready to grub. I like to puree half of my soup in a blender then mix it back in with the rest. I find that blending the soup releases more flavor from the onions and garlic, but I also like to retain a bit of chunk.

And voila! The beer bread turned out really nice and the subtle sweetness worked well with the savoriness of the soup. The burrata was absolutely divine and a nice added touch, it's a fresh mozzarella cheese with cream inside. Funny story is that burrata was given as a peace offering from our noisy neighbors. They sell cheese by day and throw house parties by night. A few days earlier they had kept us up AGAIN and after telling them off, they gave us two batches of this cheese. SCORE.

Interesting reads for this post:
What about Spelt?
Thorough brief on Spelt
The skinny on brown rice syrup