Work and wait patiently

Hello there. Glad you could stop by.

Sometimes you have to take a long view of things and just wait and work patiently. That’s how it’s been for our two wine champions, Arjun and Rupom. Way back in March when we were trying out wines to go with our Rajasthani festival menu, Peter McCombie MW (our wine consultant) said that for some people, the idea of a sommelier is a bit intimidating and that he liked the idea of a wine champion. This is someone who is interested in wine and how it works with food, someone who can talk with customers about the flavours and how they will best work together.

For many of our staff, who are Muslim, this isn’t really practical, but fortunately for us, Arjun and Rupom were really enthusiastic about combining wine and food and – as Hindus – drinking wine is not a religious problem for them. Peter suggested that the Wine and Spirit Education Trust courses would be good to help them along and make them feel more confident in talking with customers.

Since then, they’ve really taken hold of their role as our wine champions. We had quite a bit of wine from our old list that was no longer available from our suppliers. But there were mostly odd bottles and suppliers will only take back whole cases, so we thought to sell them as bin ends at a reduced price to our customers. They were good wines and we would have kept them on if they were still available and it seemed that they were all sold in no time at all and when I saw how fast they were going, I held on to a few bottles as gifts for some of our customers.

We subscribe to Harpers, the wine and spirits trade magazine and they always get hold of it as soon as it comes in. They read over everything, take in what’s written about the wines – they’re really teaching themselves about wine. So on Monday they both go for their first course at WSET and they’re both looking forward to it. They’ve already been so good at it, I can only imagine what they’ll be like once they’ve gone on the course. I think they’ll want to carry on to the next level, but we’ll see.

Our chefs have given me their first draft of our 22nd birthday tasting menu. I think it’s about 40% there, but thought I would share it with you and if anyone has comments, please post them to the blog. Of course, customers can order from these specials as they normally do, choosing whatever dishes they want, but we’ll also offer the entire specials menu as a tasting of each dish.

As I said last time, we’re celebrating for the entire month of July and are sending out £22 gift vouchers to all the customers on our mailing list. But we’ll also give vouchers to new customers who come in to dine and they can use the voucher on their next visit.


TESTING MENU FOR JULY

STARTERS

Green spice marinated guinea fowl tikka with cucumber and garlic salsa

Indian style crab spring roll with coriander and ginger sauce

Lamb pattice stuffed with Iranian dates

A tangy combination of potatoes with crispy flour pancake


MAINS

Smoked skewer of lamb mince wrapped with brown thread

Chicken cooked with yoghurt, green chilli and cardamom

Kashmiri style ox tail rogan josh tempered ratanjoyt

Lotus flower, cottage cheese and green peas cooked with creamy tomato sauce


SIDES

Yellow moong dal tempered with cumin seed and clarified butter

Sweet corn and baby corn with spinach and coconut


DESSERTS

Pounded rice pudding with Alphonso mango

Rose petal crème caramel


What do you think?

There are some additions I want to make to this menu, like patraani machi – a classic Parsi wedding dish of firm white fish fillets with coriander and mint chutney steamed in a banana leaf. It’s on our specials this month – we make it with turbot and it’s very popular - almost as popular as the black cod dish from our Rajasthani menu, which was our most popular specials dish ever. That was made with a mustard seed sauce and mustard mash and it was so good I could eat it every day and never get bored.

And whatever we might change, the dori kebab will definitely be on the menu. This is a dish devised for the Nawabs of Lucknow. It’s a bit like gilauti kebab – finely minced lamb patties tenderised with green papaya. Dori kebab is shaped like a seekh kebab but comes on a square profile skewer, wrapped in string and to serve it you pull out the string to release it from the skewer. It will make a nice bit of tableside service. One other dessert I want to add is sugarcane and ginger sorbet – we have someone who makes sorbets and ice creams (like our chikoo ice cream) for us and he also makes for a lot of good Indian restaurants, like Benares. I think it will be very refreshing and cleanse the mouth between the main courses and the other desserts.

Well, thanks for stopping by and hope you’ll come back for a look next week.
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Cooking with gas

There’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time and wanted to share with you. We’ve been getting such good response on our food and so many kind words for our chefs and we’re really pleased about that and thanks to all our customers for saying so.

But, as I say, that made me think about customers coming into our kitchen for cooking lessons. I know that at Café Spice Namaste Cyrus Todiwala does cooking lessons and they also offer cooking lessons at Chutney Mary and Andy Varma, the chef/owner of Vama, also offers cookery classes. So we’ve been talking about this at Babur.

We’d like people who come to our cooking class to be able to be as hands on as possible because you always learn and remember better by doing. So for preparing mise en place and cooking, people in the class will be guided by our chefs. From our other restaurant, Planet Spice, chef Raj Pandey has already done classes so he might lead the class but our Babur chefs, Jiwan and Pravin, will also be there and they can also guide customers through the learning.

The classes would have to be on a day when the kitchen isn’t so busy because our kitchen just isn’t big enough for extra people at busy times. We were thinking about Monday afternoons. Then, after the class was over and the food cooked, people in the class would sit down to eat what they had prepared. Any comments?

Also, we’ve been trying to come up with a name for our Babur takeaway. We’ve tried to think of an alternative to ‘takeaway’ and then thought that our customers might be able to help. So if you have any ideas about this, please post a comment or send us an email. We’ll give a dinner for two to the person who suggests a name we use.

And lastly, this week’s recipe for Tawa-Griddled Pomfret comes from another of our chefs, Sheik Unus. We want everyone to get a bit of the spotlight and hope you enjoy his recipe.



TAWA POMFRET
(Serves 4)



Ingredients:

4 small pomfret (about 150gm – 170gm)

For the marination:
2 Tbsps ginger garlic paste
juice of 2 lemons
salt to taste
2 tsp ajwain (carom) seeds
1 tsp red chilli powder
½ tsp turmeric powder
100ml mustard oil
1 tsp cumin powder, briefly roasted in a pan
1 tsp gram flour

Method:

Wash the fish in cold water, pat dry then make three deep incisions on each side of the fish.

Mix all the ingredients for marination in a bowl.

Apply this marination to the fish and leave it for 30 minutes.

Heat one deep frying pan put some mustard oil then add the fish one by one to the pan and carefully cook about three to four minutes per side.
Remove from pan and serve hot.