Summer of Street Food

A while back we predicted that "street food" would be the talk of the town, the crumbs on everyone's lips and the most requested "theme" for the urban BBQ of Summer 2013 - and low and behold we were right. Our chefs have been busy all summer stirring paella in Bedford Square, carving kebabs at the Tower of London and BBQ'ing beer can chickens everywhere.

Over the summer we have...

Graffiteed 215 square metres of bespoke pop ups using 40 cans of spray paint...

Cleaned and steamed 80kg of mussels, chopped 10kg of shallots, 2kg of garlic, 12 bunches of parsley and opened 15 litres of white wine for moules mariniere...

BBQ'd 60 chickens sitting on beer cans...

made 350 posh fish fingers...

 And finally stirred a lot of tasty paella...

Not bad for 5 weeks work!

Canapés in The Undercroft, Banqueting House

No, no, your eyes and taste buds are not deceiving you, that was meat fruit, the clever create kitchen have been practicing for weeks on this historical delicacy, but don't eat too many there's more to come...

Did you like the cauliflower blancmange with crispy sage? They were originally made in James I's era to show off the skills of the chefs. We think, in 2013 that our little rounds of black pudding with fried quails egg show of our creative chef skills. How about those corn fallow deer with damson cheese, whipped curd and baby cress canapés?

Now back to the bar again to grab a glass of champagne as all this food is making you thirsty! Apparently there is a tray of sustainable rope grown mussels with crispy english pancetta, parsley breadcrumbs and parsnip puree served in the shells and gilded quails eggs with celery salt being passed around in that direction, who doesn't love edible silver?

Did you get distracted by the beautiful looking smoked eel with horseradish curd, beetroot caviar and rock chives and the london gin cured salmon on toasted sippets with whipped caviar sour cream and borage cress. Who knew eel was so tasty!

It must be nearly time for dinner but not before you try the scotch woodcock of creamy scrambled egg served in little egg shell with anchovy soldiers, what fun presentation! Oh and there goes a tray of olde sussex rarebit trencher.

Did you hear the trumpet? It must be time for dinner; get ready to dine like a King at the opulent banquet. Enjoy the speeches!

New Year, New Food, New Trends

The create kitchen predicts what's hot 
and what's not for 2013 

(and a few trends we are going to push this year!)

Street Food
Back in October when we ate our way through the launch of KERB, the new street food market sensation at Kings Cross Boulevard, it got us thinking...so expect big things from the create 'streat' movement this Summer!

Recipe resurrections making the classics cool
History has given us some amazing recipes which have long been forgotten and we think it's about time people remembered them; our menus are going be crammed full of sippets, flummeries and heritage varieties of vegetables.

Making sweet savoury
Just like fashion, food follows trends. Some are good and some are terrible and some are just plain strange, but if you are clever and can combine the good and the strange we think, you have an excellent recipe for success. 

Our star dish of Autumn/Winter 2012 was a sirloin of beef with cashel blue and chard bread and butter pudding, and looking forward, we are thinking duck and hot cherry and beetroot summer pudding is a must. 

A few more to look out for:
Trash food - the gourmet junk food.
Gourmet grilling - spit roast cow and vertical bbqs both a spectacle in their own right and here at create, we are masters at both.
Sharing platters - the new tapas!
Eating your greens- foraged herbs and baby cress have made greens cool again.

KERB

Last night our Executive Chef Alan and I (Menu Designer) ventured out of our suburbia comfort zone and headed north for the launch party for KERB. 

For those of you who have had your head in the sand for the last year, street food has become cool, and the infamous eat.st on Kings Cross Boulevard was recently re-launched into KERB.

With the intention of eating as much as we could I think in hindsight we did pretty badly, quality- excellent, quantity- disappointing, only managing to attack 2 food vans.

A good portion of the evening was spent in queuing up for the Bhangra Burger with a lot of other trendy “urban foodies” with tweezled moustaches and lumberjack shirts, and had a very delicious lamb wrap, spicy enough to numb my mouth but with a lime/aubergine pickle which I found really addictive (which is worrying as I really dislike aubergine) but totally worth the wait.

After retreating away from the spiced haven we went in search of something else. The queue for the steamed pork bun was endless, the guys selling ribs were sold out and were packing up, so we decided to divide and conquer. I went to Healthy Yummies, not such a good name but amazing scallops with celeriac puree, bacon and sea herbs, it was so good that I didn’t have the will power not to eat it before taking a photo so this one is from their website.

By this point we were really full and the queues were heaving and we were running out of legal tender so rather than running the risk of dancing for money we retreated back to familiar territory where moustaches are only grown for Movember and the only check you see is on tweed.