Matt and I eat Stoke Newington

After having a boat full of people on Sunday, everyone headed off to their real lives and took Jason and Oscar with them for a few days so it was me and the cat again. She hates me at the moment because she has to have antibiotics twice a day for her diseased fang (a good band name, Diseased Fang) and spends most of her time sulking under the sofa so I was glad to leave the boat to go and meet my friend Matt. He doesn’t really like city life and had come specially to see me, so I felt it was important to show him a London he wouldn’t ordinarily see. Partly that was already solved by the fact that I live on a boat. The rest was solved by our shared passion.

Matt is a foodie. He’s such a foodie that he is in the midst of writing his own cookery book and has an Instagram account dedicated to the process of cooking and photographing what he finds, makes and eats (@mattgloverfood). We met through work and stayed for the snacks.

A few weeks earlier when I discovered the joys of Stoke Newington I sent him a photo of a wonderful, Japanese cookware shop called Kitchen Provisions (now that I look it up for the blog it seems they have several branches). It has beautiful ceramics but the main draw is an entire wall of Japanese kitchen knives behind the counter. I was fairly sure that was where Matt would want to go, but I had back ups in case I’d misjudged it. It turns out I had not, so we set off to Stoke Newington on the hunt for all things food.

Once we got to Seven Sisters, we needed to catch a bus for the last leg of our journey. This involved having a chat with a very helpful barista, another chat with a man who had an exceedingly friendly Staffordshire bull terrier and a chat with a man who freely admitted he had no idea which bus we needed but was willing to help us if we wanted. We did not.

We finally got on the bus and I sat next to a lady who was also extremely chatty. For the ten minutes of our journey we ranged from creaky knees to the hell that is shopping in Primark to the menopause. She got off at the same stop as us and after wishing us a lovely day she said: ‘Remember, Jesus loves you.’ Taken slightly aback by the late introduction of Jesus, we were even more amazed when she strode off in front of us and turned out to have been wearing a large cardboard sign strapped to her back with the words ‘Jesus Loves You’ in big, colourful letters the whole time. She was a stealth Jesuser, which it turns out, is exactly the sort of Jesuser I like best.

There are so many great shops in Stoke Newington, it took us a while to get to the knives, but it was worth the wait. The chap behind the counter doing knife maintenance was the actual co-founder of the shop and once Matt asked him a knife related question, the floodgates opened. Matt wanted a particular shape of knife, and the man was determined that he wasn’t going to sell it to him because he wanted the ‘wrong’ knife. It could have been supremely annoying to be fair, because if you want to cut your toenails with a scythe or julienne carrots with a hatchet you should be able to do it if you’re willing to pay and you’re not going to leave the shop and immediately behead someone. It wasn’t annoying because the chap is so passionate about his job that it was obvious that he a) knew his stuff and b) was desperately trying to help. In the end, Matt fled to the ceramics and I diverted the man by telling him about our upcoming visit to Japan in November. He got wildly excited and we ended the best of friends with him inviting me back to visit him in the shop before we go so he can give us tips on the best places to visit and things to eat. Knifemageddon was averted and Matt was able to buy a beautiful bowl without being told it was the wrong one for the job.

We lunched in the magnificently named; ‘Good Egg’. I call people good eggs all the time. Being a good egg is a thoroughly decent, solid thing and I’d say this place was appropriately named. Excellent coffee and a small but perfectly formed menu. We had chunks of merguez with preserved lemon yogurt dusted with sumac and squares of fried halloumi drizzled with thyme honey and za’atar to start. Mains were a smoked haddock hash and a lamb shawarma hash. The hash was more structured than others I’d had. Served in a heavy, cast iron skillet you got good amounts of meat/fish with quartered, skin on new potatoes that were perfectly cooked. There was some kind of gently spiced mayonnaise that tasted more like a hollandaise sauce and ribbons of softly melting onion. The haddock came with roasted capers and the lamb came with some kind of onion based pickle. They each had a fried egg on top. We shared everything and everything we ate was perfect. They had great mounds of babka on the counter which I lusted after but was just too full to eat for dessert.

We did an extensive amount of shopping. Matt bought beautiful cookware and I, in an attempt to be frugal, bought four Black Wing pencils, because they were an excellent price, a jar of chilli, sesame and peanut dressing and a second hand book.

On our way back we stopped off at the magnificent Turkish greengrocer’s I had visited before and bought provisions for dinner. A variety of tomatoes in every colour and shape, the fractal delights of a romanesco cauliflower, a handful of downy, sun blushed apricots, fistfuls of herbs, a knot of purple garlic, some samphire and a bunch of rainbow chard. We stopped at the deli by the marina to pick up mozzarella and a wheel of rye loaf and headed boatward to make dinner.

Matt made a wonderful, herby salsa verde and a tomato salad. I baked the cauliflower with the chilli and sesame dressing. While that was cooking I sautéed the samphire and chard with butter and garlic and we cracked open the Perello olives I had in the cupboard, which Matt got me addicted to in the first place. He photographed it all and then we ate it slowly and messily with huge enjoyment before I sent him back to Leicester to recover before we do it again.