A promise

no, not the echo and the bunnymen song but a promise that i made to three ladies who were interested in the buddhs'a delight recipe. i'll get to that in a moment but as i'm on the subject of echo and the bunnymen i might as well tell you a story. i went to see them at the birmingham hippodrome (hopefully pulled down) in december 1985 and the most memorable thing about the gig is the fact that we had to sit down throughout or be beaten by the very large and overly-aggressive bouncers.

i went with a good friend of mine at the time, one ian cock. an unfortunate name i think you'd agreed, apologies to other cocks who might be offended by that. i lost touch with ian several years after leaving poly, although a group of us had met up regularly for quite some time. with the advent of the internet, one can often find old acquaintances with a simple web search, so i thought i'd give it a go. ian used to live in burgess hill or hayward's heath near brighton so, and let this be a warning to you, i searched in google for 'ian cock brighton'. suffice to say, i didn't search for very long.

recipe: buddha's delight

start with a small buch of fresh coriander, one small onion and some minced garlic and ginger

then add roughly equal quantities of

lime juice
lemon juice
rice vinegar
free from worcestershire sauce
double (or to taste) some sweet chilli sauce
agave nectar or honey to taste
a little plum sauce

blend the lot in a jug until well combined. you're looking for a balance between sweet, hot and sour.
now add some kecap manis, dark soy, light soy, or tamari depening on what you have and your allergies. you need some dark stuff. if you are coeliac the tamari is thick enough anyway.
taste for the salt now and then season. fry off your veg etc add your noodles then the sauce and cook to allow to coat everything.

i'll re-edit this when i remember the stuff that i've left out.

cheers

wayne

Menus

It's difficult to know how many people have been to see us since we opened. As I've said to many of you, on our first weekend the total was zero, save for some family and friends who showed up on the Saturday. It really started to go in the right direction in early December, when, one Saturday, we had more paying clients we didn't know, than paying friends that we did. This meant that our first couple of menus did not sell that well. In fact the first menu was sold only to family and friends and we've introduced one or two of the dishes from those menus recently.

On the next menu we'll be doing the same, re-introducing a dish, the falafels (apologies for spelling, I do it differently every time) that we thought were really nice but that only a few people tasted. This is likely to be something that we do from time-to-time, if only because it reduces the first-Thursday pressure.What we would really like to know is, what dishes would you like to see come back? In order to allow for this feedback, you can now click on the past menus page and tell us what dishes worked for you. In the kitchen we can get a feel, but it's a noisy signal. For example, take the last weekend. On Thursday we sold about twenty portions of the cassoulet but does this mean that those customers want to see it return sometime? I liked it but is that how we should develop every menu? Incidentally on Friday the Buddha's delight was best seller, Saturday it could have been the beef (it wasn't but you get the idea). One of the pitfalls of the frequently changing menu is that it is infrequent to have customers return to order the same thing twice.

It did happen to the webmaster but on that occasion it was a waiting error (we made him pay). So did the cassoulet work, or did the majority of the twenty conclude that they'd never eat it again?