Chicken legs in a Mexican mole

This is the second of my unpublished Mexican street food recipes, a mole. A real Mexican mole requires a very long shopping list and hours of cooking. There is chopping, mixing and roasting involved. It contains difficult to find chilli varieties, stale bread, nuts and then another twenty or so ingredients. This version (for recipe, click 'read more') is super simple and quick. It most probably won't fool a Mexican person, but it has the basics covered - chillies, chocolate, nuts - and is incredibly tasty and rich.

Mackerel tostadas

Last year I created some easy peasy Mexican recipes for the Allerhande street food special. Allerhande is a complimentary Dutch magazine published by supermarket chain Albert Heijn (the Sainsbury's of Holland). The special never saw the light of day; it was killed somewhere in a ferris wheel of corporate approvals... Of course, all recipes that appear in such supermarket-owned mags use prefab mixes and other processed ingredients that are, you guessed it, for sale at said supermarket. Despite this, two of my Mexican recipes use mainly fresh ingredients and are made from scratch. One of them is this one (for recipe, click 'read more'). The only ready made product in it is the flour tortilla. I'm not a huge fan of factory flour tortillas - they're usually dry and tasteless. However, if you brush them with oil and bake them in the oven they become crispy, like tortilla chips.

Eat a lot: All-you-can-eat taco night at Das Gift

Yesterday I spent €9.95, a fortune in Berlin money, just so I could stand in an endless queue then eat reheated chicken and pork ragu, scooped onto supermarket flour tortillas, from a plastic plate. With a plastic fork and a plastic knife. Accompanied by a VERY roughly chopped pico de gallo. Yes, you could eat as much as you wanted, if what you wanted was the chicken filling. They ran out of the rest pretty quickly, especially the potato dish which I didn't get a chance to try at all. Who knows it may have been a meal-saver!

Sure, Das Gift is a pub, not a restaurant and people come here for the beers, the alt berliner kneipe atmosphere and, I suspect, to ogle the landlord who's a member of the band Mogwai. But when you charge a tenner for food in Berlin, you need to offer more than this I'm afraid...


Suffice to say I was happy to be there in the company of good friends, who made up for the lack in decent food. Next time I'll be eating in Das Gift, it will be the Walker's salt and vinegar crisps.


Das Gift, Donaustraße 119, 12043 Berlin (Neukölln), open daily from 7pm, dasgift.tumblr.com

Drink a lot: Chocolateria Sünde, Kreuzberg

Chocolateria Sünde, Oranienstraße 194, Berlin (Kreuzberg), open Mon-Sat, chocolateria-sünde.de

Cupboard cooking

For the past week or so, there's been a bit of a project going on in our kitchen. We're trying to empty our kitchen cupboard of all the things that have been lurking around in there for a while. I sometimes get a little overexcited in the shops, especially when abroad, and end up bringing home loads of food that promptly gets forgotten about...


The Kitchen Cupboard Rediscovery Project has led to some interesting dinners this week, including käsespätzle (why do I not eat this more often? It's lush) and risotto (lots more risotto to come in the next few weeks I'm afraid).


Today it meant a breakfast of toast with 'vlokken', a Dutch chocolate sprinkle that I haven't eaten in eons - it's one of those things that I have a craving for about once every, oh, two years. It's too sweet for words but, sprinkled on a hot piece of toast with some melted butter, is better than I remembered. Makes me feel like I'm a kid again, getting my Sunday morning treat. Only on a Monday. Nice.