Author: Jag

At the weekend just gone I went shopping for some “mithiai” on my local High street. (Mithiai = Indian sweets, e.g. jalebi, gulab jamun, burfi, rass malai etc.) There’s four shops in my neighbourhood for this kind of stuff and although we prefer the Punjabi-style, Southall/Greenford is a bit too far from where I am in NW9, so instead of wasting time (and precious energy) driving to Southall in heavy Saturday-morning traffic we make do with the excellent quality Gujurati-style sweets and savouries just a few minutes walk away from home. We zeroed in on a shop called Supreme Sweets, which (along with Gayatri Sweet Mart) we go to quite a lot. Only this time I noticed a new sticker has appeared on the front door of the shop:

I’ve noticed that more and more shops are displaying these Google Maps stickers in their windows. It’s kind of weird to see something that normally dominates the experience in the “virtual world” to start to creep into the “real world”. At first it seems kind of cool, but the more I think about it the more “creepy” it feels. Is Google Maps aiming to become the next Yellow Pages? (Perhaps it already is.)

Anyway, since we’re on the subject of Google, what do you think happens if you paste any of the following statements into Google and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button?

Mutter paneer, Kheema, Yellow daal, Lamb biryani, Punjabi chicken, Channa masala, Rogan josh, Stuffed parathas, Stuffed chillies, Tasty pakoras, Pilchard rice, Indian fish cakes, Indian KFC, Masala salmon, Prawn bhuna, Mint sauce chutney, Masala potato wedges, Spicy chicken niblets, Vegetable rice, Delicious aloo gobi

🙂

It’s Slough’s best kept secret. An informal Lebanese (kebab-shop-style) eatery on Slough’s High Street that does a house-special dish called “Lunch Box”, which is piles of Lebanese savoury rice, veg, salad, hummous, chicken and lamb shwarma (shredded grilled meat), and falafel all served on a plate with Mediterranean-style bread and condiments (oilves, pickled peppers etc.) on the side plus a can of soft drink of your choice. All for £5, and that includes unhurried, eat-in at really nice tables (with lovely chairs), but most of all with fantastically friendly service often from the ever-smiling proprietor himself (Hassan?), who will remember you next time you come along. Can you get any better than that? No wonder the place is packed with regulars at lunch times most days. The food is assembled on a plate on the counter and is laid out with attention to detail, right down to the well of olive oil in the hummous. And it tastes excellent. In my opinion far better than many formal restaurants in the same class of food. Which makes the taste-to-value ratio exceptionally high.

A growing number of us in the office come here every couple of weeks at this place as it makes for quite a fulfilling lunch, and so I have built up a Flickr set of images over time. The last time we ate there the owner came to take our plates away when we were finished and asked us if we’d enjoyed the meal and then suddenly asked if we knew someone called “Route 9”. Immediately we knew he meant “Route 79” and that he had found my Flickr pics via Google. He was so chuffed I got my meal on the house! How good is that?

Now, you know I don’t do adverts on these pages, and this restaurant almost certainly built up its reputation by “word of mouth”, so if you ever do find yourself in Slough at lunchtime and you like East Mediterranean food (or even if you like Indian-style food), then you should seriously consider visiting Al Fanouse. It’s ace. We love it.

If I’m travelling to and from work when I’m not using my beloved bus, I will almost certainly be using my car. A car journey to work will involve cruising up the West London arterial road called the A40. In my view the A40 highway is the best of London’s urban highways. I wrote ages ago about how exhilerating a drive Westbound on the A40 can be early in the mornings, and even uploaded a video of a portion of the journey a long time back. But what goes West must go East (I have to get back home I suppose), and the last time I mentioned the A40 Eastbound on these pages it was a couple of years back when I was singing along to Elvis round about Christmas time.

The journey Eastbound on the A40 is an acquired taste, and I think I’m beginning to appreciate it now. Except when there’s long traffic queues of course. Which is what happened yesterday. Why? Because of a significant chunk of the ninety-thousand people making their way to Wembley Stadium for an England football match against Croatia using the same road. It’s a real pain living close the nation’s main football stadium on match days when driving home from work. It’s even worse when we end up losing the match and failing to qualify for a major European football tournament:

For a train to Slough at Ealing Broadway.

November already. I picked a handful of pics taken on my cameraphone last month. A handful of everyday London contrasts and a quirk or two. Click the green button below to load. Turn up the volume. For an interesting effect advance through the pics in a very slow “skanking” rhythm to the beat of the music, and keep cycling round, looking at the photos but focussing on infinity in an immersive trance, losing yourself in the multimedia of it all.

Music by a London reggae band called Black Slate formed in 1974. The sound is “old-skool” but represents the sound of reggae in Britian in the 1970s and much of the Steel-Pulse-like ’80s. This was probably their most famous track; Amigo, recorded in London 1980 for the album by the same name. Why oh why don’t we get new music like this any more?

You will have noticed by now that it’s getting darker earlier by the day. And the weather is getting more miserable by the day too. Nothing can compensate for the fact that (unless your job causes you to be outdoors for a lot of the time during daylight) you are going to experience darkness, cold and wetness most of the time you are travelling to and from work. For the next six months or so anyway. It’s a depressing time of year and I can’t wait for the Spring.

Still, some places try to make you feel good by trying to recreate a kind of “tropical”, warm weather, feeling. Take The O2 for example. Formerly known as the Millennium Dome, this entertainment complex has it’s own wannabe equivalent of Leicester Square right outside it’s main entrance. Being there the other day for a show, and we couldn’t help but be captivated by the “hot springs” in operation in the square outside. Which incidentally isn’t square, but goes by the name of Peninsula Square.

The “hot springs” were a lot of fun!

London is quite well-served by international airports. There’s four obvious ones that make a claim to be serving London to international jet-setters; LHR and LGW are familiar ones (Heathrow and Gatwick) and LTN and STN are the dubious ones (London Luton? and London Stansted?). But there’s also LCY. Yes, London City Airport. In the heart of Docklands. Well in the heart of somewhere near Silvertown near North Woolwich I suppose. I used it for the first time the other day, and I would say that it’s, er, quite alright really. It’s small, and I like that. It’s only 5 minutes from the plane to the street. And that’s because there aren’t huge crowds of people to cater for due to the fact that the planes that use this airport hold far fewer people than the planes that use the big airports. But the great thing about this airport is that it’s only two DLR stops from the Jubilee Line, which is my tube line home.

I LOVE Singapore Fried Noodles. I usually get this tasty dish from my local Chinese takeway when I come home late after work and there’s no concept of a dinner at home for me to prepare or reheat. Well recently I had an urge to cook this favourite dish of mine from scratch – all by myself. And so I did. And what a thoroughly enjoyable experience it was. If you like Indian-Chinese “fusion” type stuff then you will love Singapore Fried Noodle. Why not have a go at making it yourself? Click here to see how I did it.

It was ace. Makes me hungry just thinking about it.

There is a wonderful little café-style Indian restaurant in my neighbourhood called Rose Veg. It has an extremely extensive menu that sprawls across about 20 pages of plastic-laminated booklet that covers all types of Indian and Indo-Chinese cuisine. From Northern chaats to Southern dosas and idlis, the menu at first seems overwhelming. Personally, I think it’s a great place. Because the food is cheap and the service very unpretentious; You sit at the table of your choice, you order, and you eat. As it comes. And then you pay the owner of the place (who happens to man the till) on the way out. It does take-away too. It’s “pure” veg in the sense that no animal products are used at all. Also, it’s alcohol-free, so it’s not the sort of place you go for a “beer and a curry”. Apparently it was nominated for a UK national award for the best UK vegetarian restaurant a couple of years back, therefore, it’s really popular with the local (mostly Gujurati” population, and it’s reputation causes people to travel from afar to eat there. Although they have a website, it’s marketing is mostly limited to “word of mouth” and it’s packed out most weekday evening and weekend lunchtimes. We love this place because the taste-to-value ratio is extremely good, and it’s an extremely relaxing place to have a really tasty and informal lunch at the weekend.

So, when a couple of “lads” came and sat down inside this place a few days ago and started to look the through the menu booklet we couldn’t help but be bemused by overhearing their comments about the “strange” items on the menu and the lack of “beer”. We figured that they were “newbies” who had never eaten there before and probably had expectations of it being a standard sort-of “curry house”. It was amusing hearing them “complain” about the strangeness of the menu (“what no chicken tikka masala?”) and generally just mocking the whole thing in a really quite condescending way. I wondered why they had come here in the first place? Anyway, all was revealed when they were joined by what seemed to be their “lady friends”; who must have been parking the car or something in the previous few minutes. As soon as the ladies sat down next to their “laddish” partners, the conversation took a sudden and dramatic change: the ladies were excited about being here, they had been here before and they thought the food was excellent. They were recommending all kinds of dishes from the menu and were looking forward to ordering their favourite items. They talked about how this place was really popluar with “Jains”, who observe extremely strict dietary requirements, and how tasty the chaats, South Indian and Indo-Chinese fusion dishes were.

Needless to say, the attitude of their “lads” changed quite suddenly. Far from being mocking and disappointed with where they were eating, they were full of respect for the place. Nodding and agreeing with everything their partners were suggesting.

It’s amazing how attitudes can change and be influenced so quickly by different points of view. Especially when those points of view belong to your nearest and dearest.

Anyway, if you ever find yourself in the North-West London area looking for a place to eat a real Indian-style lunch on a budget, then you can’t go much too wrong at Rose Veg. It’s excellent.

There are some windmills on the A406 North Circular. Right opposite the big Tesco next to the IKEA in Wembley. They seem to be mounted on a new low-rise shed-style building that rose a little like a phoenix from the ashes of the red-brick office monstrosity that stood there for years before being demolished. The windmills sort of symbolise eco-friendliness and environmental kindness. They seem to send a guilty statement to those of us stuck in our cars in the traffic jam on the North Circular Road below, crawling slowly towards the Hanger Lane Gyratory.

I have to admit they do look a little out of place where they’re situated. You don’t expect to see things like that on the side of the North Circular.

If you want to impress a dinner partner with something a little more intimate than usual, then why not try making an authentic-as-possible Spanish paella? Not only is it really easy to make if you’re only cooking for two, it’s tasty and leaves very little to wash up afterwards. (You eat it straight out of the pan.)

And forget about all the times you’ve had a dish by the same name in the office canteen or non-Spanish restaurant, this is the method I picked up in Madrid.

And it’s pronouced “PerYAYer” – not “Pie Ella“.

Click here to learn how to make this really tasty dish.

The lady with the hat is running for the bus.

She didn’t miss it. But I’m missing mine.

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and really wish you were standing on a sandy beach in glorious sunshine and nice cool breeze throwing flat stones into the sea and trying to make them bounce on the surface of the water? Well yesterday I got out of bed early, fired up Google Maps and looked for the closest beach to my neighbourhood by tracing an imaginary, dead-vertical line from North West London down to the Southern coastline of England. It turns out that such a place is only an hour or so drive away and is called the London Borough of Littlehampton, and that’s where we spent the day. It was brilliant; the sunshine, the breeze, the sand, the sea, the views. Press the green button in the Shockwave Flash object below to load up a musical montage of cameraphone snaps from yesterday’s daytrip. Turn up the volume and regret that you didn’t make it down there yourself on what was probably the last glorious day of this summer.

Music was “Summer Son”, courtesy of Texas, 1999.

As you can see from some of the pics in the slideshow, turning up to the beach at Littlehampton early in the morning means you have a lot of it all to yourself. This is very unusual for the South coast of England. The journey there is also interesting. There are some breathtaking wiews over the hills and valleys of the South Downs to absorb as you go South via the A283 and A284 approaching Arundel.

I remember the days when I would wait in eager anticipation for a swing to become free at my local park.

It was a race to get there first. But when you did, it was a lot of fun right up to the point you were called to go home.

Fast food chicken restaurant chain Nando’s likes to put chalkboards out on the pavement with witty phrases on them to try to tempt people inside.

On this occasion the message, to me at least, sounded a little prohpetic. You know when you’ve been out of town for a few days and longing to eat home-cooked food when you get back? Apologies to any veggie readers, but having survived on bread, cheese, espressos and fondue for the last few days (Geneva) I am just lusting after fiery hot tandoori chicken wings and some ice cold beer. The sign above is what I encountered as I turned the corner on to my local High Street on my way to get chicken for cooking. (I didn’t chicken out though.)