What a response - watch this space for the next tasting

Thanks to all who took an interest in attending the tasting session for our seafood specials. Your response was overwhelming. Now that we know you're so interested, we'll be posting up advance notice and our next tasting session will be for our 24th Baburthday tasting menu.

This will be a very exciting tasting session and will most likely involve tasting dishes as well as matching selected dishes with wine. We'll be setting a date for this within the next fortnight, so watch this space.

Seafood specials tasting invitation

Would you like to decide what our upcoming seafood specials will be? Are you free to join us on Wednesday, 6 May at 2pm?

We're doing this for a few reasons. A number of our guests have asked about tastings recently and we thought it would be good to have their input into the menus we hope will please you. It's good for our chefs and front of house team to hear directly what you think about our food. And we'd like to give you the experience of looking in and giving your opinions and thoughts.

On the day we'll be tasting five starters and choosing three from:

COCONUT AND FENNEL BROTH WITH SEARED MONK FISH
TANGY MASALA SHRIMP WITH PUFF POORI
VERMICILLI COATED SAITH FISH BALL
RAJASTHANI SPICED SALMON SOOLA
TAWA FRIED KING FISH WITH PINEAPPLE SALAD

And we'll be tasting six main courses to choose three from:

STEAMED SALMON TROUT WITH BOK CHOY AND GINGER
SEA BREAM SANDWICH WITH GREEN CHICK PEAS KEDGREE
MANGALOREAN PRAWN CURRY WITH WHITE RICE
CRUSTED SAKTE WINGS WITH GARLIC MASH
CRAB KOFTA CURRY
SEAFOOD BIRYANI WITH AUBERGINE RAITA

There's a limited number of places available on first-come first-served basis, so if you are interested please call us on 0208 291 2400.

DO YOU HAVE RAFFLE TICKET 0586? IF YOU DO PLEASE CALL US ON 0208 291 2400 - YOU'VE WON A MAGNUM OF RIOJA.

Burns Night Himalayan Fling

We had an amazing and extraordinary evening on Burns Night and such a spirited gathering in the restaurant. So many people gave so generously of their time and of themselves to make this the best night we’ve ever had. The evening was a benefit for the Gurkha Welfare Trust and there are so many good souls out there who really extend themselves when it comes to helping other people.



First of all, we had a Gurkha piper, Deepak Raj, who performed magnificently – not only his playing, which was first-rate, but his entire manner and demeanour spoke volumes about the pride Gurkha soldiers take in being members of this esteemed regiment. He first played outside the restaurant to welcome guests in before piping in the bhuton, the Nepalese-recipe ‘haggis’ (more on this follows, including recipe).

Next, scriptwriter and good friend of Babur, Jimmy Gardner, smartly dressed and be-kilted, did a marvellous job of reading the Address to a Haggis. He said to us afterwards that when he cut it open, the smell of spices mixing with the offal and barley was so very appealing. Reaction throughout the restaurant was so very positive from the Scots, English and Asian guests that we feel confident in putting this bhuton on the menu as the stuffing for Nepalese momocha. The bhuton was served with a wee dram of Talisker and the smoky, peatiness of the whisky complemented the gingery spiciness of the bhuton and the tomato dipping sauce.














The raan, which had been marinated for three days in whisky and spices, was served with a gravy on strips of naan. It was meltingly fork-tender, served up with a homestyle dish of potato and okra and dal makhni, with Clos des Calipisses Carignan.

John Murtagh had been in Alloway the night before entertaining Alex Salmond and a room full of dignitaries to launch Scotland Homecoming 2009 with a piece on the life and work of Scotland’s national poet which he also wrote and directed. On the 25th itself he was performing Tam O’Shanter on horseback and flew back down to London especially to be with us. He arrived a bit frazzled but was straight up performing spontaneous poetry from his piece Third Degree Burns. A bit later on he introduced us to the world of high hypocrisy through a performance of Holy Willie’s Prayer that had the entire restaurant spellbound.




In between John’s performances, Peter McCombie MW led us through a tasting of Amrut, an Indian single malt made from barley grown in the foothills of the Himalayas and matured at 3000ft in oak casks in Bangalore. Amrut is the name of a mythical golden pot which contained the elixir of life. Peter then led us through tastings of Dalwhinnie, Singleton and Talisker.

But there was still no end of whisky as Dalwhinnie was served with a caramelised oatmeal pudding.

And finally it was time to pick raffle winners. John Murtagh kindly agreed to present the grand prize, a bottle of The Famous Grouse Robert Burns Edition, a 37-year-old blend, one of only 250 bottles made for the occasion of the Burns 250th anniversary. Our winner was Mary Sutherland, appropriately wearing a Sutherland tartan scarf.



From the dinner, raffle ticket sales and spontaneous contributions, we were able to raise £1400 for the Gurkha Welfare Trust. For this we owe thanks to the Gurkha Welfare Trust for arranging Deepak to come and play for us; to Diageo for generously donating an ample supply of Talisker, Dalwhinnie and Singleton whiskies; to Amrut for introducing all of us to the experience of Indian single malt; to The Famous Grouse for our star prize which raised so much interest; to Jimmy Gardener for playing his essential part of addressing our first-ever Nepalese ‘haggis’; to John Murtagh for giving so generously of his time and for a performance the guests who were lucky enough to present will not soon forget; to our restaurant staff, both kitchen (led by head chef Jiwan Lal, with sous chef Praveen Kumar Gupta and front of house well-led by our head waiter/wine champion Rupam Talukdar; and, of course, to all those who contributed by purchasing raffle tickets or coming to the event itself.

Now, here's the recipe for bhuton, our Nepalese 'haggis'

Bhuton (Nepalese haggis)



1 sheep’s pluck (heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, stomach, windpipe)
2 onions, peeled and chopped fine
2 cups pearl barley, pan-toasted and ground in a mortar and pestle or food processor
1 2/3 cups suet
salt & black pepper
2” piece of ginger, minced to a paste
2 tablespoons finely minced garlic
2-3 fresh green chillies
1 tablespoon garam masala – cassia, large black cardamom, star anise
50g butter or butter ghee
Chopped fresh coriander
trussing needle and fine string
Thoroughly wash the stomach bag in cold water. Turn it inside out and scald it, then scrape the surface with a knife. Soak it in cold salted water overnight. Next day remove the bag from the water and leave it on one side while preparing the filling.
Wash the pluck. Put it into a pan, with the windpipe hanging over the side into a bowl, to let out any impurities. Cover the pluck with cold water, add 1 teaspoon of salt and bring the water to a boil. Skim the surface, then simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Hold aside 1-2 cups of this cooking water.
Drain the pluck when ready and cut away the windpipe and any excess gristle. Mince the liver with the heart, lungs and kidneys, season with salt and pepper, then stir in the shredded suet and the toasted ground barley.
Melt the butter in a large pan, add the onions and sauté until translucent. Add the ginger and garlic pastes and stir for a minute or so. Now add the garam masala, stir to mix and add the pluck mixture, stirring to mix thoroughly. Moisten with as much of the pluck water as necessary to make the mixture soft.
With the rough surface of the bag outside fill it just over half full – the barley will swell during cooking - and sew the ends together with the trussing needle and fine string. Prick the bag in places with the needle. Place the haggis on a plate and put it into a pan of boiling water. Cover the pan and cook for about 3 hours, adding more boiling water when necessary to keep the haggis covered.

Raw tomato chutney
1 cup chopped fresh tomato
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 teaspoons ginger/garlic paste
1 small green chilli, finely chopped

Combine all ingredients together at least two hours before serving to allow the flavours to blend.


Pumpkin bhaji (sautéed pumpkin)

½ small pumpkin (or substitute 1 large butternut squash)
Butter for sautéing
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
Salt to taste

Peel the pumpkin or squash. Make the thinnest possible slices you can – between ¼ and 1/8 inch thick, salt the slices and let them stand a few minutes. Heat the pan, add the butter, sprinkle in the fennel seeds and brown the slices on both sides.


In the next day or two we'll also put up our recipe for raan as so many who were at the Himalayan Fling were asking for it.


Now, what shall we do for Burns Night next year?

Hi - Yet again it's been far too long since I've posted an entry.

We've had a good summer at Babur. We took the restaurant on the road. We didn't go far, but we had a good trip. Our first outing was to Blythe Hill Fields in June for what was the Brockley village fete and it was a terrific day out. We met a lot of people we hadn't seen in a long time and the weather couldn't have been better. And if you think a postcode in SE London doesn't know what a village fete should be, we had Morris dancers, the local church choir, the village brass band and welly-wanging. In July we went at least a whole mile further, to the Horniman Museum's Utsavan Fest, a celebration of music from India and they had a wonderful line-up of performers.

Our 23rd Baburthday celebration went very well and customers were very pleased with the effort our chefs and wine champion made in matching up five dishes to five wines we had selected for a tasting menu.

The news that has me very excited at the moment is Harden's 2009 London Restaurants guide. Harden's has always liked Babur and we've been very grateful to them and their customer/reviewers for their good opinion of us. But this year's guide had a special treat for us. We found out about it in the Evening Standard in an article about the release of the new Harden's and it said:

"Babur is named the capital's best restaurant in the £34-a-head and under category.The restaurant in Honor Oak Park is described as a modern Indian with wonderfully original cuisine."

It's hard to say just how exciting and wonderful that was to read and how good for all of Babur's hard-working staff to have some recognition. Thank you again to all who took the time and had the interest to write about us.

We've got our new a la carte menu up and we're hoping response to it will be good. Putting a new menu together is like playing three-dimensional chess. When you've got a short menu, every dish has to work for its place. Each one has to be different from the other, with different ingredients, cooking methods and spicing. The work of the menu has to be spread around the different stations in the kitchen, otherwise we get gridlock when it's busy and that's not good. And, of course, we have to keep our eyes on the cost of things because we have to be able to provide good value.

That's it for now but will be writing again very soon as we're getting ready for our next mini-food festival. We'll be celebrating Diwali with an exciting range of vegetarian dishes from 15 October to 30 November. So keep a look-out and stop by again soon.

Go fly a kite – Part 2

Hi there. I’m glad to say that our Punjabi festival is up and running and so far response has been pretty good. The dishes are turning out well and most of our customers are ordering from the festival menu. Most people looking in from outside will never realise what it takes to get a festival organised, but I guess that’s the same for most things.

Just as one example, we wanted to hang patangs (Indian fighting kites) in our front window and in our skylight but could not find anywhere to buy them in India. In the UK we could have bought patangs made from nylon or mylar but traditional ones are made from paper and then painted, so these wouldn’t really have looked right. So there we were, stumped and not long before the festival was due to begin.

Then Titu, one of our chefs, spoke up and said he’d make the kites if we would get the paper and bamboo for him. And he was really keen to do it because he used to fly kites back in India and, of course, he always made his own kites. We still needed someone to paint them for us and patangs are painted in all sorts of ways, with traditional decoration like ‘moth’s eyes’ on either side of the wings, like fighting cocks and other birds but they’re also painted according to the artist’s whims with political slogans, Bollywood stars – I even saw one with the profile of Alfred Hitchcock. Where would we find someone to do this for us on such short notice.

That’s when Pippa Graber came to our rescue. Pippa organises exhibits in many of the art galleries in our part of south London and she knows a lot of artists. It’s worth taking a look at her site – www.artdoglondon.co.uk - to find out about gallery exhibits, local artists and photographers.

Pippa put us in touch with Kate Pritchard, a Chelsea Arts graduate who does both sculpture installations and painting and she was happy to have a go at painting 14 kites. Her brief was to paint some traditionally and some with more local images. We couldn’t have been more pleased and delighted with the results. Along with a peacock, elephants and banana leaves, she also gave us the London Eye and a Damien Hirst ‘dot painting’. If you want to see some of Kate's work, take a look at her site: www.katepritchard.beep.com

Using kites as the image for the Basant festival has proved to be an idea with legs. The day we were hanging the kites, Pippa passed by and told us about the Blythe Park Fun Day, a family day out with food and events for children. The event is on Saturday 28 June and we’ll post more details in the next few days. We’ll be there and Titu Xxxx will be making kites and demonstrating how to fly a patang, Kate will be there with us painting kites and we’ll be serving some good Indian picnic food – our head chef Jiwan wants to do an enormous pot of biryani, some veg and non-veg kebabs and some cold snacks like chaat and puri.

Then we got a postcard from Lewisham Council about the Bike and Kite Festival on Blackheath which takes place Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June and if we can, we’ll be there as well. More details on this next time as well. Thanks for stopping by again and we hope to see you, either at Babur or Blythe Park or maybe even Blackheath. You never know where we’ll turn up next.

5 May - 16 June

Hi there. We’ve been busy the past couple of months. Our celebration of Babur’s 525^th birthday was successful – our chefs gained a lot of confidence through cooking a cuisine they didn’t think they were familiar with. But as they were trying recipes for the festival, they realised there were interesting similarities (and some differences) with the Indian cuisines they’re more familiar with. We also raised over £400 for Afghanaid and their programme of replanting orchards in Afghanistan, some of which were first planted by Babur 500 years ago.

We’re about to start celebrating Basant – Punjabi New Year – with a festival of Punjabi cooking. Jiwan Lal, our head chef, has been wanting to highlight his home cooking for some time now and I think he’s really come up with some terrific dishes. He’s using noisettes of lamb to make dhungar lamb tikka which is marinated with smoked, crushed spices so the meat has a smoky taste from the marination as well as cooking in the tandoor. We’ve got some other Punjabi lamb dishes I never tasted as well made before like raarha lamb which is cooked in a tomato onion masala; and lamb patiyala which is a slow-cooked knuckle of lamb. But then are known for Punjabis having a good way with lamb.

What surprised me was just how much I liked some of the vegetarian dishes like the Punjabi wadi ki sab, white lentil dumplings with a nutty taste and a crunchy texture that reminded me of the gate kadhi, gram flour dumplings from our Rajasthani festival. But the veg dish I really loved was the sarso ka saag, mustard greens and spinach with corn-meal crisp bread. Being Bengali, I like mustard greens but I never tasted anything like this before and I thought I could be vegetarian on this dish.

And the dish that delighted us all was the steamed shoulder of lamb, which is sort of like the Punjabi version of Peking duck. Thick slices of shoulder on the bone are marinated for three days in lots of spices then steamed slowly till all the fat melts and bastes the lamb and it falls off the bone. You eat it with roti and thin slices of cucumber and red onion. This dish came from Azra Ali who is the wife of Riaz Ali, one of the two brothers who have owned a series of very good Punjabi restaurants around London. Some of you may remember when they owned Mirch Masala in south London and 5 Hot Chillies and Nauroz, both in north London. Wherever you are, thank you. The recipe appeared about eight years ago in Tandoori magazine and this seemed like a good time to put it on a menu.

Steamed shoulder of lamb

10-12 portions

10 lbs lamb shoulder, sawn into wide strips (about 4”, 10cm) by butcher

4 Tbsps crushed red chilli

4 Tbsps red chilli powder

4 Tbsps salt

5 Tbsps cumin

6 Tbsps coriander

4 tsps ‘OUR OWN GARAM MASALA’*

large handful crushed garlic paste

large handful crushed ginger paste

250ml lemon juice

vegetable oil to cover meat for marinating

Mix all spices, oil and lemon juice in large bowl to get even marinade mix. Taste to be sure of marinade flavour. Mix meat in well to completely coat with marinade. Put in fridge and marinate for at least 3 days. Can be made extra hot with fresh green chilli.

Put in pot with oil and marinade on medium fire and turn over frequently for about 20 minutes as meat must not brown. Once marinade starts bubbling, seal pot with flour/water paste. Steam for 3 hours until meat is soft and falls off the bone.

Serve with tandoori roti, julienne cucumber, thin slices of red onion, sliced chillies, wedges of lemon.

*This is how the recipe appeared in Tandoori. Jiwan came up with his own blend that seemed to create the same taste but he was also being a bit cagey about exactly what the spice blend is.

Also, before I go I wanted to tell you about a couple of offers that will be starting when our Punjabi festival begins. We thought of this because so many of our customers want to come to our food festivals but we can’t always accommodate everyone who wants to come to dine between 7:30 and 8:30. We thought we’d offer a couple of incentives to dine early or late with us. So we have two offers for you: 7 by 7 – all main courses offered at £7 when ordered by 7pm; and Wine after 9, with a free glass of wine (matched to your main course) for orders placed after 9pm. Both offers are valid from 5 May to 30 June and for parties up to four persons. You can also view our Punjabi festival menu, see our offers and make a booking online at www.babur.info.

Thanks for stopping by and next time I’ll have some news about our summer festivals and probably some other things by then.

HAPPY 525TH BIRTHDAY, BABUR

18 February - 18 March

It’s now just over two years since we re-opened Babur and it’s been a good year. What’s been especially gratifying is the enthusiastic response everyone has shown for the new look of the restaurant.

We’re all very happy with the way the restaurant has turned out but it has taken some getting used to. We didn’t manage to do as many events last year as we would have liked to. And judging from your response to the events we did hold, we think you’d probably like it if we did some more. Our two main events last year were the Colours of Rajasthan and our six-week celebration of the restaurant’s 22^nd birthday with a tasting menu. Thanks so much for your support and enthusiasm.

This year, we’re going to try to host more food events (more on that in the next mail) and for our first, we thought we’d go back to our roots. Some of our customers who celebrated Valentine’s Day with us last year may remember that our menu was also celebrating the Emperor Babur’s 524^th birthday. Well, the name of Babur has done very well for us over the years and we thought it would be good to find out a bit more about him.

The Bagh-i-Babur (Babur’s Garden) was built exactly 500 years ago. The Kabul of Babur’s day was very different from the Kabul we see today on the news. He planted his 11-hectare garden (which he called the Bagh-i-Wafa, Garden of Fidelity) on the slope of a hill in the countryside with views of his citadel. In his autobiography, the Baburnama, he describes his garden in real detail and in a way that is surprising from a man who conquered an empire:

In the southwest portion of the garden there is a pool surrounded by orange trees and some pomegranate trees. All around the pool is a clover meadow. The best place in the garden is there. When the oranges turn yellow it is a beautiful sight.

He writes in amazing detail about the land and produce of Afghanistan, about the fertility of the country, saying that the apples from one district are the best, while another produces the best pears or grapes. He talks about the banana trees he had planted and when they fruited, or about the sugarcane and orange groves, or the almond and peach blossoms in spring.

The past 30 years have not been kind to this beautiful country. During the Soviet occupation, many of the orchards were cut down for firewood because there was no other source of heat in the cold Kabul winters. It might sound silly to say, but we felt we wanted to give something back to the place the man who gave us his name loved best.

Since 2002, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has been restoring the walled Babur Gardens, including the simple grave open to the sky Babur requested for himself, and at the same time restoring one of the great amenities of Kabul to its people. Looking at what the Gardens were before and after restoration (which you can follow on http://www.archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=12541), it’s easy to see why Babur so loved Afghanistan. But there were many productive orchards across Afghanistan and these need to be replanted.

In 1990, Afghanaid began setting up nurseries of fruit and timber tress to help introduce new varieties and demonstrate better ways of planting and cultivating trees. By late 1994, a stock of 67,727 almond, apple, apricot, peach and other fruit trees had been grown for distribution in four provinces.

This is a large-scale, long-term project and we are pleased to be contributing towards this. To see what Afghanaid is doing, visit http://www.afghanaid.org.uk/events/baburs_525th_birthday.phtml. During the course of Babur’s 525^th birthday celebration, from 18 February to 18 March, we will contribute £1 for each party that orders from our festival menu. Customers who wish may make their own contributions.

We’ll be posting the festival menu and more information in the next blog entry and we hope to see you during Babur’s 525^th birthday celebration. Thanks for visiting.