Happiness is a bar in Segovia

By: Mr Robot

Actually that's a bit of a fib, since I'm not aware of anywhere called "Happiness" in Segovia, but if you pop into any of the bars in the city's old quarter, there's a good chance Happiness will show up, along with his good friends Oh My God and Oh My Tummy.

Segovia is just north of Madrid, about half an hour on the train, and is the city in which Queen Isabella was born and raised. She's the one who pawned her jewels to fund Columbus's Big Adventure but is more justly remembered, along with her husband Ferdinand, for booting the Moors out of Spain and thereby triggering centuries of forced conversion, bigotry and intolerance.

The Alcazar is where Isabella grew up, and the church in which she was crowned Queen of Castille is on the main square - it's the one that isn't the cathedral.

We're taking our 18yr-old American goddaughter on a tour of medieval Spain, so Segovia has been her introduction to Spain generally, and Tapas in particular. The perfect starting point not only for the history, but also because this is the land of outstanding free snacks

Bar Fogon, just behind the cathedral, is a great example. It's attached to a Sephardic restaurant and with inevitable irony has some of the best ham and shellfish in the city. Among numerous delights we were given was an anchovy and cream cheese affair that was more delicious than it had any right to be, and fantastic prawns cooked the best way possible - simply boiled in salt water, with a bit more salt on the shells.

Bar Infanta Isabella is a lovely place with deco-ish styling and served up little works of art, not least tiny canapés of liver parfait, along with humbler but no less tasty tortilla, tiny filo parcels of I-don't-know-what tastiness and battered chorizo lollipops.

Across the Plaza Mayor, with a name that escapes me, was a corner bar showing ludicrous game shows (great for the language skills!) and handing out ham and vegetable croquettes and some of the best fried chorizo you could hope for.

Down a little alley near the (staggeringly impressive) Roman aqueduct is Bar Duque which is a great place for the adventurous. Previously we've had pigs ears here (a mixed blessing) but this time got a pork and tripe dish that left both Mrs Robot and the adoptive Junior Robot cold, but which I snaffled quite merrily.

Segovia is a much overlooked city, generally considered as a day-trip from Madrid (if at all). It's a lovely, relaxing place to be and while it's true the sights can be "done" fairly quickly, the food never will.

Go there, stay there, eat there. Happiness will find you.

All images (c) PP Gettins

Retro recipe: Pork in Cider

By: Mrs Robot

Traditional cookery. It's rarely pretty, but it can be very tasty, and this pork in cider is no exception.

I've never seen any food bloggers refer to Susan Campbell's book English Cookery New and Old online. I love old cookery books, and this is from 1981, but looking back for traditional recipes. Campbell wrote several cookbooks in the 1970s but seems to have been largely forgotten as a cookery writer - though she's now the country's leading expert on walled kitchen gardens, so she hasn't lost her love of British food history. This book is divided into menus. Many recipes are preceded by a little paragraph explaining their origins or, if a recipe is 'new' rather than 'old', why it's being included in a book of English cookery.

The recipe that really caught my eye in this book was 'Grassy Corner', a pudding served at Cambridge May Weeks just after the Great War. It's a strange cross between a trifle and a charlotte, and as I love trifle and between-the-wars history, it appeals doubly to me. However as that serves 12 it'll have to wait until we've got plenty of guests coming. Instead, Pork in Cider was what I made. Layers of pork slices, separated by a mixture of onions and mushrooms, splashed with cider then topped with a layer of cooking applees and cooked for a couple of hours before being topped with a mix of Double Gloucester cheese and breadcrumbs and baked to crisp, it's far from the most attractiive thing I've ever made. Oh, but it is good. The juices from the meat, apples, onions and mushrooms combine with the cider to make a delicious sauce that will go perfectly with mash and green veg. I'll definitely make it again.

Retro recipe: hot cross buns

By: Mrs Robot

I love hot cross buns. Even though I'm not religious, they're part of the food culture I've grown up with, so I try to eat them only around Easter time. Things can become boring if you have them whenever you want. That's not to say you shouldn't have something if you really want it, just that it's a shame if everything becomes commonplace and there's nothing to look forward to.

Despite loving hot cross buns, I'd never actually made them until this weekend. I started trying yeast cookery in 2015, and this year felt brave enough to tackle the buns. Also, I have been extraordinarily annoyed by shops bringing out nonsense variations like 'double chocolate hot cross buns.'* The recipe I used was from Julie Duff's book Cakes Regional and Traditional. Oddly, the recipe she gave didn't include the piped-on cross, but the buns in the photo in the book had clearly had a flour/water mixture piped on to make the cross shape. Luckily I'd seen enough other people making them to know that the decoration needed piping on. (Kavey's Hot Multicultural Buns being the most recent example.**)

However, I'm getting ahead of myself. I first attempted the buns on Good Friday and misread the instructions on the yeast, so added a teaspoonful instead of a tablespoonful. Oh dear. After several hours waiting for it to rise, I realised my error and the dough went in the bin. On Easter Sunday I tried again with the correct amount of yeast and, appropriately, this time they rose.

The buns turned out denser than the sort you get in the shops, though that could be because our house lacks sufficiently warm places to get a really good rise. They were also sweeter than shop-bought ones, possibly because of the sugar in the recipe, possibly because I overdid the glazing. I didn't mind that; they tasted fab and I think I will try to make baking hot cross buns something I do every Easter from now on.




*STOP MESSING AROUND WITH OUR TRADITIONS, YOU GITS. 
** This I do not class as messing around with tradition as it is taking something traditional and sharing it with everyone, as opposed to taking something traditional and throwing that tradition out of the window for the sake of chocolate.

Dan Dan DAAAAAN!

By: Mrs Robot

I've had a real craving for noodles all of a sudden. I'm not sure why - maybe the coming of spring has put me in a mood for lighter foods than my winter pies and stews. It was a good excuse to revisit some favourite old cookbooks. Given what we had in the kitchen, Dan Dan Mian from Mi Mi Aye's book Noodle! seemed like a good plan.

We'd made Ching-He Huang's recipe for Dan Dan Noodles some time ago, but it wasn't quite our thing. However, her recipe uses tahini paste and Mi Mi's doesn't, plus Mi Mi's seems to use a lot more spicy ingredients, so I thought I'd give it a go and see if we liked her version any better.

As with so many recipes in Noodle!, while the list of ingredients seems long, a quick read of the recipe reveals that the process for making Dan Dan Mian is actually very simple. You can't just start and throw in ingredients as you go along, you need to get everything ready in advance, but as long as you do that, it's very easy to make the dish. Most of the ingredients are store cupboard staples: soy sauce, black vinegar, xiaoxing wine and so on. The only thing we didn't have was Szechuan preserved vegetables. I don't know what those taste like, so subbed in some of Mr Robot's homemade kimchi as that was preserved, vegetable, and tasty.

("Oh, we just substituted homemade kimchi." How poncy does that sound?)

We both very much enjoy Szechuan peppercorns. They have a fearsome reputation, which they really don't deserve. They're numbing, not burning. Chillies make me hiccup, but I can eat those peppercorns with no problems (I occasionally chew them raw, straight out of the jar). Mi Mi's recipe began with oil seasoned with a whole tablespoon of the things, and only got better from there. The resulting minced pork sauce was rich and dark with soy sauce, spicy with Szechuan peppercorns, then stirred by each diner through bland, delicious noodles.

We could quite easily have eaten twice as much, not because the portions are small but because it is delicious and we are greedy. Ziggy, one of our two feral kittens, came along and tried to help himself, but was shunted off pronto.

I will definitely be making this again.

Retro recipe: Tonight we're going to party like it's 1959...

By: Mrs Robot

It's no secret that I love vintage - or, as I generally call it, Old Tat. Back at the start of January my lovely friends Naomi and Zoe sent me a 1959 cookbook called Fun With Food: Planned Menus For All Occasions. It struck me as a book that might help out a housewife from a relatively humble background (or one who grew up on wartime rations), whose lifestyle has gone somewhat upmarket and is suddenly faced with hubby's boss coming for dinner. What to do?! Call on this little book by Nella Whitfield.

Tonight we tried one of the menus. It was supposed to be three courses, starting with strawberry cocktail, but I forgot to buy any strawberries. As it was essentially strawberries macerated in kirsch, served in glasses tarted up with either strawberry or lettuce leaves, I considered serving neat kirsch with a lettuce-leaf garnish, but thought better of it.

So, straight onto the chicken pie. The book called it chicken pie, but it also contained ham and, unusually, hard boiled eggs. You start by boiling the skin and bones with stock veg and a bay leaf for a couple of hours to make a stock, then put sliced egg in the bottom of a pie dish, pop chopped chicken and ham on top with some seasonings (including mace and a tiny bit of  grated lemon peel), top it up with stock, whack on a puff pastry lid and bake it.

Let's rewind there. 'Top it up with stock'. The recipe states three-quarters of a cup. I had my misgivings. It said nothing about flouring the chicken a little, so a nice gravy would be made during the cooking. However, I was sticking to the recipe for this, so in the stock went.

I baked the pie and it looked lovely, but when I dished up it was as I'd feared: the stock was still basically stock. Very tasty stock, but not the sort of thing I'd be prepared to include on the plate. I left it in the pie dish. The pie (served with cabbage and sweetcorn) tasted fine but not brilliant, and I couldn't help wondering how much of the flavour had leaked out into the stock. I'd make the pie again, but I'd flour the chicken slightly and use far less stock, just enough to keep it moist.

Pudding was 'Daisy Cream'. No daisies were harmed in the making of this dish. It was a jelly (jello) based dish. The recipe called for pineapple jelly but that wasn't available, so I settled for lemon. It was mixed with evaporated milk and finely-chopped pineapple and glace cherries. It's the sort of thing people laugh at nowadays, but it was actually pretty nice and, as Mr Robot pointed out, essentially a 1950s equivalent of pannacotta. I'll definitely leave the glace cherries out if I make it in future; they didn't introduce anything much flavour-wise, and my attempt at making cherry daisies for the top was lamentable.

So, it was an interesting meal. Which isn't to say it was bad; it didn't wow us but certain flavours, such as the seasoning in the pie, were much more sophisticated than I'd expected, less than a decade after the end of rationing. For its day, this was pretty posh fare to be eating at home. I'll definitely be trying more from the book as some of the puddings look quite good.

Restaurant Review - Pablo's Bistro, Bradford on Avon

By: Mr Robot

Pablo's Bistro, Bradford on Avon

Nestling in a valley a few miles southeast of Bath, Bradford on Avon is one of those picture-postcard chocolate-box cutesy places it's hard not to hate. The kind of place that, when presented with a valley, simply can't help but nestle in it; populated by the sort of people who read an article called "Why we should all move to Bradford on Avon" and act upon it.

However that does make it the kind of place that grows a decent food scene, of which Pablo's Bistro is a little Spanish highlight. BoA is also on one of the main train lines which is an excellent feature for the only driver in the house, who vigorously enjoys his wine.

We'd booked up for Mrs Robot's birthday and I'm pleased to report not a whiff of staff singing or surprise things with candles in - this is a grown-up place that treats its customers with respect.

It's also very very tiny. If it were one of the many boutique clothes shops displaying six frocks and a handbag you'd think, "gosh this is a bit cramped". As a restaurant seating around 25 it's, well, pretty cosy.

That said, if your idea of making friends is to gently brush someone's hair with your bottom as you head to the loo, this is definitely the place for you. The welcoming staff negotiate the space with the grace of ballerinas; we of a more heffalumpy nature must simply suck in the belly and smile apologetically.

Once we squeezed into our window seat, though, we were presented with menus as comprehensive as the place is small.

Salted Almonds, the perfect bar snack

This is proper tapas, done properly (ok, it's not free with booze, but you know what I mean) and in my pre-visit browsing I'd identified something like 17 dishes we'd desperately want to try. As it turned out we only managed 11 but by gumbo they were good.

The only disappointment came early on. We kicked off with some olives, a dish of salted almonds (an absolutely brilliant snack - I've no idea why it's not more common), Rebujitos and what they called Carne Espanol but the rest of us know as a Tabla Variada - a board of bread, meats and cheese, that's pretty much the compulsory start of a good evening.

The highlight of this should have been the Jamon, but I'm afraid that was a letdown. Soft, pale and bland, it had all the hallmarks of machine cut, plastic wrapped, supermarket stuff. This was a worry.

Excellent chorizo, membrillo with the cheese is a nice touch. Shame about the ham

Normally the Jamon is the pride of the establishment and the single biggest indicator of quality. Maybe they'd had a problem with the supplier, maybe they couldn't get the good stuff at a viable price. Whatever it was, this didn't bode well.

Chicharrones & Croquetas - both to die for

Exchanging worried glances, we returned to the menu. I went for Chicharrones, Mrs R for Croquetas de Jamon - not without trepidation since it relies on the ham and is her favourite thing in the world.

Well our fears were unfounded. and everything that followed was a delight.

The chicharrones were outstanding: succulent, crunchy and salty as could be, with the all-important squeeze of lemon. And the croquettes were perfect with tiny chunks of proper Jamon this time - golden, crisp and gooey. Just as they should be.

Mightily relieved, we went on to Tortilla (pretty much the closest we got to vegetables all evening), Pollo al Ajillo for madame and Gambas - prawns with jamon & chorizo - for me.

My prawns saw a return of the plastic ham but this time fried crisp, and it was fine alongside the chorizo, peppers and onion.

Mrs R's chicken in garlic was much more creamy that we've ever had in Spain but tasted wonderful - a luxurious pimping of the bar staple.

Left to right: Gambas, Pollo al Ajillo, Tortilla

We were starting to creak a bit by now but I had an agenda and would damn well see it through. I've lost count of the number of times recently I've opted against squid and regretted it, so I was determined to have the calamares. And it was a wise choice.

Hunny bunny

Then there was the rabbit in honey.

I've never seen this in Spain but it called to me immediately so there's no way I was leaving without it.

It was great - the flesh was perfectly tender with a sticky honey glaze, and a top layer of saltiness that rescued it from over-sweetness and made the whole thing profoundly satisfying.

Mrs R was under some duress by now, but I persuaded her to go for one more dish and she opted for Albondigas.

Meatballs (for it is they) was one of the first tapas we'd ever had and remains a favourite despite some variable experiences.

These looked homemade in the classic style, though made distinctive with big punches of garlic and smoked paprika. They were also pretty substantial (as they should be) and I won't pretend to be sorry she could only manage half of it.


I sincerely wish we'd had capacity for pudding - they have a "tapas selection of desserts" that looked particularly tempting - but by then could only have ended badly. A fine coffee and home was the sensible option.

It's a tremendous little place, Pablos, bringing authentic, classic dishes with a couple of twists of personality.

The price is pretty reasonable too - vegetable dishes around £3.50, and fish and meat coming in around £5-£6 per plate.

Our total cost was around £50 per head, including cocktails, a good bottle of red, and a last-minute bottle of Boqueron beer (excitingly, made with seawater!). Given the quantity, quality and variety of what we had, I consider that pretty good value.

Being slightly less extravagant, you could fill a very happy couple of hours for less than a night in the pub.

I can see this becoming a firm favourite - and once summer kicks in it'll be perfect for lazy afternoons of wine and eats and more wine and more eats, just as tapas should be.

All images (C) PP Gettins

Laksa Mondays

By: Mr Robot

Back in the early years of this millennium, you could find me in Bath's Green Park Tavern pretty much any day of the week because it was
a) close to home,
b) even closer to the office, and
c) a proper pub complete with open fire and sticky-toffee carpet.

Sadly those days are long gone and the GPT has since been reinvented several times - most recently as a moderately swish (ie. clean) Smokehouse.

 It's a shameful admission that until recently I'd never actually had a Laksa. Not even made one of the sundry Nigel Slaters that are kicking around the house. But in menu or cookbook, whenever I think of it - and I do, often - there's always sometime a bit more exciting, so I do or have that instead.

Not least because I sort of thought I sort of knew that Laksa's a kind of coconutty, noodly soup, so what's there to get excited about? Which is monumentally stupid because Ohn No Khao Swe is also a coconutty noodly soup, and almost the best thing in the world. So I'm a buffoon.

Anyhoo, when word reached the Robot mailbox that Masterchef winner and pride of Bath, Ping Coombs ,was doing a Laksa pop-up at the GPT Smokehouse, we had to go.

Did I mention the lovely tables?
We spent a long time looking at them

The set-up was a good one, I think: fixed Laksa for the main course but with a few options around as starters/sides and puddings.

As already noted, Laksa in itself doesn't really make me gasp but I was interested to find out about the sides, (streetfoody stuff I hoped - win) and anyway if you're going to do the thing, this seemed like an excellent place to start.

How right I was.

It's not in my nature to be mean (honestly, no matter what you may hear) but I have to say the service was somewhat creaky. Talking to the staff afterwards, they freely admitted they'd been taken by surprise at the popularity of the event. Which is kind of daft on one level (Ping!), but also disarmingly sweet.

So seating was kind of chaotic ("just find a place - it'll be ok") but luckily we'd run into some of the nice people from the Pig Guide so we had strength in numbers.

I'm sure that, had it been just two Robots, there'd have been a lot of anxious whirring and some burnt diodes in the social-acceptibility networks. As it was, we were ok with chums.

The wait, it is true, was a tad lengthy, and some people got a bit grumpy. Personally I'm more forgiving of a pop-up; in this situation it's not the "professional" environment I'd expect from a regular night in a full-time establishment. In some ways it feels almost closer to a dinner party, even if I am paying to attend. Certainly I have a great deal more sympathy for (and identify with) the poor bugger in the kitchen. I don't know, maybe that's patronising, but I hope it's kind.

In any case, the ready supply of Exmoor ale and good company meant timing wasn't really an issue. Had it been just the two of us, there may well have been phone fiddling, thumb twiddling and eventually bickering and bitterness, but that's just us.

When the food showed up, it was a real joy.

Great sadness that the pork-scratchingy thing had sold out was balanced by the truly brilliant porky-rolly thing that was so intensely flavoured yet comfortingly tender it was little short of addictive.

Porky-Rolly Joy. As stolen by Evil Wife

I honestly can't convey how good this was. I know that's my failing and I should try harder, but it's late. When I make it myself, I'll wax more lyrical. Promise.

Mrs R had been hesitant about the prawn and chive fritters, until she tasted them. The texture was akin to onion bhaji (was it gram flour? I've no idea, but it was soft and nutty inside, which you can already imagine alongside sweetness of prawn lumps and oniony freshness so I need say no more).

Needless to say I had no such doubts, and hope to be rewarded for my faith in due course.

Oh ye of fritter faith...

The laksa itself as the main course really stood up, for me. Yes it was rich and fragrant, which I'd expected. I hadn't anticipated the strength of fish sauce*, or how well it would harmonise with everything else.

As we've recounted at length, fish sauce and all its ilk has been something of a learning curve. A couple of years ago, I'd have been actively put off by the very thing I'm praising now, because truly the fish sauciness made the dish for me.

That's the way (a-ha, a-ha) I laks....sorry

(*I can't say for sure it was actually fish sauce - it might have been mashed dried shrimps or something else I can't bear to think about. It was that surprisingly strong element, though, that both stood out in itself and enhanced everything else).

Delicious tender pork, prawny prawn, soft egg and softer noodles were all lovely, but oh that soupy sauce.




It's fair to say Mrs Robot wasn't quite as enchanted as I, but it's also fair to say she's both weird and wrong.

We didn't make it to pudding, which is a shame because there was some coconutty (possibly noodly) thing that really appealed to me.

But last orders was looming and by the time we noticed we were pretty much the last people standing - however unsteadily.

What was a real delight, though, was that Ping made the effort to come out and talk to every table, and gave everyone a good amount of time to boot.

We caught the end of that as we came in, when she was seeing to the earlier sitting whilst trying to set up for us lot.  At the end of the evening she was clearly knackered but still charming, and cheerfully willing to spend plenty of time with her punters.

There's an argument that, since she's trading on her TV success, we should expect nothing less - but I've seen enough great and not-so-great (frankly rubbish) behaviour to really appreciate the time and attention she gave us.

She even gave me the recipe for the amazing porky-rolly thing.

But I'm damned if I'm telling you.

All images (c) P P Gettins