Ever since our wonderful evening at The
Finsborough Wine Café (see here for full write up), I’ve become a little
obsessed with food and drink matching. Our lovely guide talked to us about how
a wine should either compliment or contrast to the meal. His secret being that
to compliment it, you include the wine you’re drinking into the sauce. As it
reduces, it becomes more concentrated making this a sure fire way to have your
guests comment on how the food tastes quite a lot like the wine, whilst you
beam and nod – never giving your secret away (whoops).
The morning after our wine tasting, having
then gone on to taste what felt like most of the cocktails in London, we got up
famished and in need of some hair of the dog. Instead of reaching for the
usual: Big tom’s tomato juice, which comes with all the bloody mary
accoutrements sans vodka blended in, we thought we’d try out the sparkling asti we’d bought the night before and had miraculously managed to transport home via
Ping (again) and Old Compton Street without smashing. Moscato d'Asti is the perfect
brunch drink, as it’s only 5% alcohol, comes in a ½ bottle size and tastes
sweet in a non-sickly way with elderflower notes. Decision making when you’re
hungover is tough so with the drink in place and feeling like I needed a dirty
full English but also like my poor body could do with some tlc, I went out in
search of brunch ingredients with a difference.
There’s something very healing about buying
all your morning essentials without stepping foot in a supermarket. I headed
straight to the excellent green grocers outside of Kentish Town tube station
where I picked up a couple of beef tomatoes and some spinach so fresh you could
(and had to) shake the earth off it. Then on to the butchers who had some
potent smelling chorizo sausages and happened to have eggs that day too.
Finally, I went to Whole Foods (my guilty pleasure) to pick up some pan de
campagne – I am very particular about bread as a general rule – but even more
so for brunch.
Chorizo scrambled eggs with roasted beef
tomatoes and buttery spinach
Ingredients for 2:
2 chorizo sausages
3 large eggs
A big bunch of spinach
2 beef tomatoes
Toast of your choice
Olive oil
Paprika
Butter
Rock salt
This recipe is beautifully simple because the
flavours already in the chorizo do all the hard work for you and it takes under
½ hour to make.
Pre-heat your oven to 200 degrees, slice
your tomatoes to about 1 inch thickness and place in a roasting dish. Douse
with olive oil and sprinkle paprika and rock salt over them evenly. These will
need 20 minutes in the oven.
Whilst they cook, wash and drain your
spinach and place in a steamer. Don’t actually start steaming until 5 minutes before you serve up.
Pan fry your chorizo sausages, turning at
intervals for about 10 minutes .them with a fork when they start hissing and
spitting to let their spicy oil run out. Then taken them out of the pan (keep
the pan, oil and all to the side). Cut your chorizo into 1 ½ inch slices and replace
in the pan.
Make sure you’ve remembered to put your
spinach steamer on the hob by this point and put the bread in the toaster so it’s ready
when the eggs are. Whisk your eggs together and add a little
milk (no need to add salt). Place the pan with the chorizo back onto the hob
and then pour in your eggs. Scramble the egg and chorizo mixture so the chorizo
oil infuses the entire thing.
Whilst the eggs are cooking (they only need
about 3 minutes), plate up: Put the toast on your plates with the tomato slices
over them and the spinach on the side with a dollop of butter to melt over it. When
the scrambled egg and chorizo is done, place that on top of the tomatoes and
serve with your asti.
This is the ideal hangover cure, as the
alcohol is light, the chorizo salty and oily and the tomato and spinach virtuous. You may need to lie down again afterwards... don't say I didn't warn you.
You can buy Asti in any good wine shop but you can also order it from the Finsborough to guarantee the same one here.
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