The French by Simon Rogan

The French, looking green'n'growthy

Christ, but it was awful. Shortly before The French closed in order to be saved by Simon Rogan, I organised a little field trip to say goodbye to the restaurant where Posh and Becks, it's said, had their first date. The consomme was dull, the sole Veronique was weird, and the bread trolley, which I liked because everything on it seemed to be topped with local cheese, had been replaced by a sad little tray. The only glory was the longstanding waiter who, just as I remembered, murmured winningly "Please. Shall we? Thank you!" as he cleared. You'll get no argument from me: The French needed a jazzle.

Now Simon Rogan has arrived. I went to the preview evening, and was thrilled. For one thing, I can now leave the house, avail myself of public transport, eat a world-class 10-course meal and be home before midnight. It's like living in Birmingham. For another, there's joy in the fact that this very Mancunian space, which has gone green and brown in line with Rogan's all-natural ethos, is offering something that the chef's other places do not. L'enclume is very slatey. Roganic, not surprisingly, feels temporary. The French offers some of the grandeur with which Rogan's food, veg-centric and 'umble though it is in parts, should rightly be surrounded.

For pictures of the dishes, have a look at my friend Deanna's blog. The preview menu we had wasn't the finished, finished article, but it's safe to say that ox in coal oil with little beads of kohlrabi and crisp pumpkin seeds, early spring offerings with lovely buckler leaf sorrel (I think; the wine flight was aloft by that point) and Herdwick hogget with sweetbreads and ramsons are the best dishes served in Manchester for years. The service is excellent, and they've kept the "Please. Thank you!" man, which delights me.

I have the same conversation over and over again with friends here who like food, and need somewhere they can take visitors - perhaps even from That London - to eat without risking mortification. The French is it, and much more besides.

Cooking with Ken Hom

Ken Hom with his dan dan noodles

One minute you're on the phone to Ken Hom, the next minute he's telling you, very politely, that you are in danger of overcooking your noodles. I interviewed the master of Chinese cookery for Metro recently, and I also interviewed the queen of Cactus TV, Amanda Ross, about Cactus Kitchens, the cookery school above the studios where Saturday Kitchen is filmed.

Coincidentally, when Amanda kindly offered me a place on their first Saturday Kitchen Experience class, it was the one Ken was teaching. He's only in the country twice a year, so it's a rare old business to be able to meet him. He's a practised anecdote-teller and, like all celebrities who have polite public personas, he threw in a few swears to let us know that he's human. As he talked he cooked dan dan noodles, made with ginger, garlic, spring onions, chilli and sesame paste, and garnished with deep-fried pork mince (absolutely delicious, as you might expect) and toasted, ground lip-tingling Sichuan pepper. Then we had a go, while he circulated, offering advice, tasting things and drinking wine.

I'm a bit of a cookery school obsessive thanks to three months at Ballymaloe, and Cactus Kitchens is pretty smart. It's part of a tasteful church conversion and the stations are well appointed, with sharp Michel Roux Jr Global knives (he's an investor and runs classes) and lots of kit, including induction hobs.Trying to find the right bits and pieces quickly in an unfamiliar setup made me sympathise, briefly, with MasterChef contestants who find themselves in a strange kitchen without the comfort of their own wooden spoons. It is, though, very easy to get used to kitchen luxury.

Some people will be here just to be in the same room as the chefs, but some will want to learn the more technical aspects of a dish. With this in mind, no matter how much it makes the lovely room look like Darlington Tech, they need to put a mirror (or, more likely here, a monitor) above the teacher's station so you can see what's going on in the pans.

When all the dan dans were done, we ate them, and then went downstairs for a sip'n'sign before Ken went off. He's a lovely bloke and he had plenty of time for everyone - it's all about access here, and you certainly get that. After that, it was the omelette challenge, where pairs of students emulate the show's eggy cook-off on the real set, with the real pans. I thought I wouldn't be competitive: I was. I didn't win, but I think I'm more bothered about overcooking my noodles in front of Ken.

Luck Lust Liquor & Burn

Sticky pork buns - excellent pic, no?

Frank loves liquor, so when fashionable cocktail establishment Socio Rehab reopened as Luck Lust Liquor & Burn last week, he insisted on conducting a lunchy fly-past. It's a dirty food job from the people behind Almost Famous, with overtones of the Food Network's evening programming. Anything Guy Fieri would get stuck in his moustache - mac and cheese, chilli, cheesesteak and a £30 'huge man vs burrito' challenge - is here, with pulled pork and bacon-topped burgers from Almost Famous.

The fit-out is nicely done, tongue-in-cheek Americana that reminded us of Red's True Barbecue in Leeds and plenty more besides. It's freezing cold - there are places in Manchester that no amount of CaliMex sun-soaked Golden State blather can reach unless you turn the heating on. We huddled round our blue cheese dip with bacon and a bucket of barbecue Popchips, then Frank's quesadilla, Deb's ragingly spicy lettuce cups filled with chicken, peanuts and pineapple and mango salsa, grilled halloumi with roasted tomato ketchup (not really a cockle-warmer, that one) and yum yum sticky pork buns. Probably the best bit, the 'buns' were slices of lovely light brioche topped with clumps of pulled pork, 'Hawaiian' barbecue sauce and more pineapple and mango salsa. Deb didn't think they were too sweet or too lumpen, but I did.

Pudding, a salted caramel brownie that turned out to be an Oreo brownie, had an air of Momofuku Milk Bar about it, with a liberal layer of multicoloured confetti crumb between the chew-crunch of the brownie and a ball of really good malted vanilla ice cream. Less chocolate, more biscuit, it would have gone well  - granny alert - with a cup of Lancashire tea.

We got pretty much what we expected at Liquor & Burn; dirty food which, transplanted to the land that inspired it, would occupy the middle of the highway. What surprised me was the service. On Twitter, they create a certain mood (sample Tweet: "MEEEEOOOWWWW FUCK YEAH"), which doesn't necessarily suggest warmth and kindness, but they were professional, knowledgeable, and nice. Nothing helps an Alabama bone suckin slammer burrito go down like a bit of old-fashioned well-mannered waitering.       

 

I stole Craig Bancroft's pencil

Phil Howard dishing out the cheese course

Following a recent tasty but initially cold overnight stay in Nottingham, we have amused ourselves by planning the title of my (mercifully unforthcoming) memoir. It is to be called Sat Bains Fixed My Radiator. Or is it? There is a rival title, born of the moment Craig Bancroft, the estimable co-owner of Northcote, came over at the end of the opening dinner of chef-fest Obsession just in time to witness me putting a Northcote pencil in my handbag. Needless to say, we had had the paired wines.

Phil Howard, head chef at The Square, has done most of the Obsession festivals. On successive nights,  some of the toppermost chefs from here and abroad take over the restaurant kitchen and serve their food. Everyone gets the same thing at the same time, so it's like very high-end, small-scale banqueting, and it's a great way to try the chefs' food without going all the way to London, Madrid, or Atlanta. It's 100 quid a head for five courses bookended with Champagne and coffee. Mum made a face about the price, but it feels like good value when you see how much it's possible to burn through at Pizza Express with two grown-ups and a toddler.

Howard has a reputation as a chef's chef, and his strength and dedication to The Square are widely admired. His smoked mackerel veloute with oysters and caviar is also pretty impressive; the soup had an incredible rich, sweet smokiness which, he says, comes from home-smoking the fish (and this was just before the Big Mackerel Row). He later rated the smoking job as 8/10, which bodes well for a dish that scores his full 10.

Judging by the framed menu Howard was presented with, there had been a few last-minute changes to the finished menu. Not all the courses were spectacular, but the glazed veal cheek with cauliflower cheese, truffle shavings and raggedy little handmade farfalle really worked, and there was a frisson of Great British Menu banquet-style jeopardy as monitors showed the kitchen handling a delay to the rhubarb souffle-filled tuile cones served with custard and rhubarb sorbet.

I've been to Obsession before at the kind invitation of the Northcote team, and sat on the 'industry' table with an unlikely set of companions: Big Sam Allardyce, Angela Hartnett, and some of the north west's premier growers of root vegetables. Ken Hom was cooking and the food was great, but being in the thick of the dining room, surrounded by really excited customers who were really enjoying themselves, was probably better. And, of course, I got a 'free' pencil.

Four Tiers of Trauma: or, why some books should be better

There is a bit in India Knight's very excellent novel My Life On a Plate in which the heroine, Clara Hutt, describes one of the ways in which glossy women's magazines charm (or used to charm) advertisers. Whichever cosmetics house has stumped up the cash for the ad on the back gets the credit for the cover girl's make-up, whether their lipgloss was used or not. The casualties of this, Clara points out, are the girls who buy the featured lipgloss and then wonder, sadly, why that shade doesn't look the same on them. I'm not much for lippie, but I am one for cake. And Derek and Lucy's wedding cake, the paley beautiful project which has already occupied an unhealthy amount of time, got done despite, not because of, the book which inspired it.

I didn't charge the happy couple for their cake, so I don't feel bad about the fact that the idea - four tiers with hand-moulded roses - was lifted straight from the pages of Mich Turner's Couture Wedding Cakes (Jacqui Small, £30). It was published in 2009, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that some things on Mich's equipment list just don't exist, but still it hurts. I can Google with the rest of them, not to mention attend cake-head hobby fairs.The inch-deep round polystyrene cake spacers Mich calls for are not produced; I had to find a polystyrene factory and have them specially cut. 2cm diameter circular plunger cutters can't be got, either. I needed more roses than she suggests to block between the tiers; she gives no instructions for creating the little posy that looks so sweet on top of the cake in the book. I felt like the girl with the wrong lipgloss, but with only hours in which to solve a load of sugarcrafting problems before the door shut, Crystal Maze-style, with me and a half-finished cake on one side and, on the other, a harried bride sending her mother in law out to a big Marks & Spencer to find some of those ready-iced wedding cake layers and a box of dowels, two weeks before Christmas. Between Mich's half-baked instructions and my half-remembered cake dec course, it got done and thanks to photographer Helen Mary, who took the picture above, the lasting record of it is glorious enough to behold with relative pride. 

I write about cookbooks for part of my living, and I really appreciate the ones that work. This is one of the many reasons why.

Adventures in Chocolate Plastique

Chocolate plastique may sound like an eighties synth band, but it's much more serious than that. My friend Lucy is getting married in December and she is the kind of bride who does not muck about. She came round to look at my cake books and, barely halfway through her first brew, she'd decided that the wedding cake she wanted me to make for her big do is Mich Turner's Chocolate Rose Polka Dot, from Couture Wedding Cakes (Jacqui Small, £30). It's a stunner, and my favourite from the book: four tiers of chocolate truffle torte covered with white chocolate plastique and blocked with roses handmade from it. 

Only a fool would not practice a project like this, so when our friends Chris and Louisa asked guests at their recent wedding to bring a cake to be shared for dessert, I saw an opportunity and ordered five kilos of chocolate and a tub of cocoa butter from Chocolate Trading Co. 

Chocolate plastique, aka modelling chocolate, is made from a water, sugar and glucose syrup mixed with melted chocolate, cocoa butter and lots more glucose. It's rolled out and use to cover cakes in place of marzipan and sugarpaste, and better hands than mine (perhaps working in cooler kitchens) can model flowers from it too. I'm used to working with sugarpaste, but this stuff is completely different. It tastes of chocolate, but the Callebaut I used made it quite yellow. It's stretchy, melty and obstinate. It sticks. It slackens. It refuses to form a crisp line, and needs cutting with scissors, not a knife. I couldn't make get roses out of it without adding tylo powder, which is usually used to turn sugarpaste into something akin to flowerpaste.

Mich Turner is a woman who understands drama. Her cakes are huge; the second-smallest, 9-inch tier of Chocolate Rose Polka Dot, which I made as a single cake for Chris and Louisa (pictured - Frank's motorbike is for scale), is in two layers, took 11 eggs and filled the bowl of my Kenwood to the brim. My arm nearly fell off just folding the flour in. I've no idea how I'm going to make the 12- and 15-inch base tiers of Lucy's cake. I fear I may have to bring a polystyrene dummy or two into play. And I wonder how Lucy would feel about ivory sugarpaste. It might not have the ring of synthpop about it, but it does have the ring of sanity.      

At home with Momofuku Milk Bar

Like the look of these cornflake-chocolate-chip-marshmallow cookies? Lemme tell you, they were delicious. Not unlike the chocolate-chocolate cookies, chocolate crumb, cornflake crunch and 'crack pie' from the same book, Christina Tosi's Momofuku Milk Bar (Absolute, £25).

There's often a lot of what Tim would call  Billy Bullshit surrounding New York food phenomena and Milk Bar is no exception. They've trademarked several recipes (I understand the impulse, but I think it's probably futile) and Tosi's defiantly personal approach to desserts is widely admired by a legion of would-be diabetics. The book was subject to a strict embargo when it was published UK-side in May. The crack pie (fudgy, with a homemade biscuit shell and a hard-to-find key ingredient, powdered freeze-dried sweetcorn) is mentioned in breathless tones and the cookies are made with bread flour. It's like a cult.

Knowing that we were off to NYC to get married (and to eat), I fell upon the recipes with a particular fervour. Would my crack pie come out like Christina's? Can I equal the cookie excellence which is a cornerstone of the empire? Well...yes. The methods are a bit of an arse because of Tosi's unusual stipulations (for the cookies you cream butter, sugar, glucose and eggs for ten minutes) and use of bits and pieces that you've made earlier (because earlier, you weren't wiping curry sauce off a toddler, you were making cornflake crunch). No expense is spared, either. But the results were pretty impressive, with a look roughly approximate to the pictures in the book.


I was surprised, then, that when we rounded off a lovely lunch at Momofuku Má Pêche with a trip to the Milk Bar upstairs, the cornflake cookies turned out to be a bit pathetic. Flat, sweaty and softening in their plastic wrap, with no hint of the goodies in every bite that's part of the Tosi ethos, they were just...not as good as mine. Or, I have to presume, as good as they should have been. And there's a lesson somewhere about these parts about why home baking often tastes better than shop-bought baking, however cack-handed the execution. It's fresh. It hasn't been sitting in a plastic sleeve on a shelf. And in the case of the Tosi tasty, you don't have to go all the way to New York to try it.