Wednesday morning started with a sausage sandwich- which I managed to eat too rapidly to get a picture of- considering food and photography are two of my biggest passions, they very rarely intersect: the photos I usually take of food are simply just visual reference to look back at in the future.
I’m off work again today- I’ve just left my old job at Sargasso, and my new job is yet to open properly, so currently I’ve managed to get away with just working 4 days a week at a pub in Homerton called the Plough. It’s an interesting time to be a chef and work with food- Brexit and Covid left the industry chronically understaffed, so many people left the industry for good. All these things having a myriad of economic and material effects, it’s forced restaurants to value their staff more, wages have increased, as well as them being even more focused on more localised menus.
In anticipation of the so called heatwave, me and my girlfriend invested in a portable bbq, hoping to be able to take it to the beach this week- the heatwave never quite came into fruition, but we have managed to make use of it in the garden. Last night I got it out again to grill a medley of veg with some chicken thighs.
I put together a grilled onion salad- well singed red onion, olive oil, muscatel vinegar and plenty of salt and pepper.
Grilled red peppers with nothing more than a touch of oil and sea salt- after they are de-skinned and deseeded.
The chicken is my girlfriend’s recipe, it’s a combination of spices- cumin, paprika, cinnamon, coriander, marinaded in yoghurt with garlic, lemon and bay.
While I’m indulging my deepest Neanderthalic urges, cooking over fire, Emma was attempting to sanitise half the kitchen in preparation to decant sloe gin we’d almost forgotten about.
It was deep purple and syrupy, not too far off calpol. It tasted pretty sublime, even if it had probably over fermented a little.
Jakob Grant (he/him) is a chef living in Kent and working between London and Kent. We are so excited to share his food journals at Fortified Gazette this week. You can find him on his Instagram here.