Eataly London review - Lunch and a tourist attraction

A cornucopia of Italian food, a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach, a good place to meet friends or have lunch with colleagues, somewhere to get a leisurely breakfast before you catch a train, a tourist attraction somewhere you can pick up ingredients for dinner to take home or even take an Italian cookery course - all this under one roof?
 
If you like Italian food then you simply must visit Eataly on Bishopsgate, next to Liverpool Street Station. It opened in May 2021 during the pandemic, and when I returned to my office nearby in September it was the first place I went to check out on my lunchbreak. I was amazed!
 
Walking in I thought I had either entered an Art Deco arcade in Milan or perhaps the Sefridges food hall. A huge effort has been put in to make this a beautiful place with a high end feel (and rest assured the prices match!) with decorative archways and even the way the produce is arranged which is truly Instagram worthy. Check out some of my photos below!

Whether it’s a wall of coffee, a pick and mix selection area with Italian chocolates rather than the usual gummy sweets, watching the bread ovens get fired up or watching mozzarella being made, there is so much to take in. The charcuterie counter had more types of ham and salami than I could imagine; there are also fridges selling pre packaged products. The wine floor has over 2,000 different bottles and the pasta aisles had me dying to take some home and try - I will definitely be back to pick some up once I have decided what to do with it. There were colours and shapes of pasta I’d never even imagined - I particularly loved these striped sombreroni which are little sombrero hats that apparently you stuff like cannelloni and bake in the oven. But at around £7 a bag they are definitely more of a one off treat!

While I was there I decided to get some lunch. There is a chiller cabinet with sandwiches but I wanted to try the freshly cooked food. There’s a counter where you can buy pizza by the (square) slice, a fresh pasta bar, a cafe where you can get pastries and a proper restaurant upstairs though I couldn’t see a menu without going in.

I went for the pasta which had three or four options (I don’t know if these change or always remain the same) and opted for tagliatelle with bolognese sauce. It was served in a cardboard tub with a lid, which I took over to the seating area; free water is provided which I thought was really nice. The pasta was very good - I love fresh pasta - but at £11.50 it was very steep for lunch and I don’t think this is something I would do again unless I was meeting a friend for lunch.

Overall though I loved Eataly; the products are pretty expensive though I do want to come back and buy a few things once I have thought of some things I will actually use - but it’s also a lovely place to have a wander round and simply enjoy seeing so many specialist and unusual (in the U.K. at least) Italian products under one roof!

Slimming World Linguine with Crab and Chilli

This dish reminds me of something I would order in an Italian restaurant or better still, eat while on holiday somewhere sunny, ideally with a view of the ocean. It's actually based on a Slimming World recipe for the rather more prosaically named 'crab noodles' and is really quick to throw together.

Cook some linguine or spaghetti according to pack instructions; when is cooked, drain, and add some tinned crab (a small tin will do 1-2 people depending on how generous you want to be with the crab), a few dried red chilli flakes or a pinch of fresh chopped red chilli, some finely chopped red onion, a squeeze of lime juice, and the grated zest of the lime, and some fresh parsley on top. Serve with broccoli or a salad on the side. Delicious!

Chicken Broccoli Pasta Soup

This soup is definitely a meal in itself - in fact it's barely a soup! The good thing about it is that you can thin it down as much as you like - so if you want something really chunky and filling (that's more like a bowl of pasta than soup) you can have it, or if you want to be able to drink your lunch rather than eat it with a fork (let alone a spoon) then you can do that too!

I came across a recipe for chicken broccoli alfredo soup on Food.com and decided to make it for my lunch last Sunday; I did reduce the quantity of the ingredients but still had enough left for the rest of the week!

Instead of half-and-half which you can't get in the UK, I used mainly milk with a dash of double cream. The resulting soup was deliciously creamy. I didn't have any farfalle pasta so I used macaroni which worked well.

This was a very filling soup that tasted rich and creamy and keeps well for a few days afterwards though you might find you need to add some water to thin it out again once it has been in the fridge for a while!

I'm sharing this with Cook Once Eat Twice, hosted by Corina at Searching for Spice.

Sonoran Chicken Pasta

 

The Sonoran is a desert in Arizona and this pasta dish is described in 'America's Most Wanted Recipes' as 'dressed in a spicy Southwestern cheese sauce'. As usual I did my own take on it, leaving out ingredients I don't like (jalapeno peppers and black beans) which probably changed the recipe a fair bit, and I couldn't get hold of the American velveeta cheese in the ingredients list, but I really liked the way this turned out - it tasted really good!

 

So for the version that I did, to serve 2 you need:

2 tbsp. butter or marg

1/2 onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed

2 tbsp. plain flour

250ml chicken stock

pinch of salt

100ml milk

dash of Tabasco sauce

1/2 cup grated Cheddar

1/4 cup grated Parmesan

1/2 cup tomato salsa

1/4 cup sour cream

2 chicken breasts

 

Penne pasta to serve

 

Cook the pasta in a pan of boiling salted water until tender. Open out the chicken breasts so they are butterflied and either fry using a little Fry Light or oil, or grill or oven cook depending on your preference, until the chicken is cooked through.

 

Meanwhile melt the butter in a large saucepan and fry the onion and garlic. Stir in the flour to make a roux and gradually stir in the chicken stock until you have a smooth sauce. Season, add the milk, Tabasco and cheeses and heat until the cheese has melted and the sauce has thickened.

 

Add the salsa and sour cream and stir until blended.



 

Drain the cooked pasta and stir into the sauce, and top with the chicken to serve.

Sweet Potato Mac and Cheese

I love macaroni cheese and after eating a fairly disappointing one at the Caballo Lounge in Epsom, I decided to make my own. I had a magazine cutting from You magazine (the only thing I like about the Mail on Sunday!) which is from a Nigella Lawson recipe. It can also be found in the book Simply Nigella and you can read the recipe here.

Nigella says this is the best macaroni cheese she's ever eaten and while I might not quite go that far (the way they do it in America is brilliant if calorific), it really is very good- and a bit more healthy than it might be with the addition of some veg.

It uses a combination of feta cheese and Cheddar and the sweet potato gives the dish a lovely colour as well.

This is really easy to make, delicious and the leftovers are good on the second day. Something I will definitely be making again!

I'm sharing this with Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes.

5 Easy Lunchbox Salads you can take to work for lunch

I've been eating a lot of salads lately, and taking one in to work every day for my lunch. It's cheaper than going out and buying one every day and this way I can put exactly what I want into it. Sometimes I get into a bit of a rut eating the same salads every day and end up looking around the internet for inspiration so I thought I'd share my current top five.

Please excuse the simple presentation - this is literally how I take the salads into work for lunch!
First up is really easy - any types of lettuce that you like, topped with feta cheese and chunks of fresh watermelon. A light vinaigrette dressing goes well with this. I usually eat this salad with a packet of ready cooked chicken pieces for protein and to make it more filling.

This salad is my latest addiction: pear, blue cheese and walnut. Again you can use any type of lettuce as a base, and if you like things like cucumber add it in (I don't). I used gorgonzola - I was going to use Roquefort but couldn't get any, but this worked really well. Top with peeled and sliced pear and a handful of walnuts. This goes well with a blue cheese dressing.

 

A different type of cheese for this salad: goat's cheese with bacon lardons (you need to cook the lardons first then let them go cold before adding to the salad). Use on a bed of your favourite lettuce. This goes well with a wine vinegar and Dijon mustard dressing.

 

 

 

This one takes a little longer to make but is good if you want something more substantial for lunch or to take on a picnic. Cook some pasta and drain; while it's still warm, toss through some green pesto from a jar, add some crayfish or prawns (I used crayfish here) and some pine nuts. You can serve this hot or cold.

Finally a bulgur wheat-based salad. This one does take a bit of preparation but you can make a larger quantity in one go. Put the bulgur wheat in a bowl and cover with water; leave for 15 minutes and then drain. Bring a pan of water to the boil - you need roughly three cups water to one cup bulgur wheat. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and leave to stand for 5 minutes and drain off any excess water.

I used cubes of roasted butternut squash in this salad; sweet potato works really well. If you don't have time to cook, you can buy tubs of roasted sweet potato, butternut squash and carrot to add to salads from Tesco. I've also added feta cheese and some fresh parsley.

 

 

I've certainly got no excuse to have the same thing every day for lunch now!

One-Pot Cheeseburger Chilli

I wanted to make spaghetti Bolognese for dinner but realised I’d run out of spaghetti, so instead of just using a different shape of pasta I decided to try out this recipe for “cheeseburger chilli”. It’s basically minced beef in a tomato sauce, served with pasta and topped with cheese. The chilli element comes from adding chopped red chilli and red kidney beans – I thought I had a tin in the cupboard but it turned out to be black eyed beans. I don’t really like those (it’s mainly the texture – I don’t eat baked beans either) so I pulsed them in a blender together with the passata to make a healthier tomato sauce with hidden veg. Both red kidney beans and black eyed beans are meant to be good to eat if you have high blood pressure, which I do, so that's another bonus.

 

The other thing about this recipe that stood out was the way that the pasta is cooked. This is a one-pot meal where you fry the mince and then add the pasta and water into the same pan. I used a bit too much water so it didn’t all get absorbed and I had to drain a little away, and I was worried that I was draining some of the flavour out of the meat, but it tasted really good. If you’re looking for a hearty, healthy meal that won’t mean a lot of washing up then I recommend you try this!
 

 

 

To serve two, you need:

half an onion, peeled and chopped

1 chilli or 1-2 tsp Very Lazy chopped chilli, to taste (err on the side of caution if you don't like it too hot!)

2 tbsp. olive oil or 1 tsp coconut oil which is what I used

300-400g minced beef depending on how big an appetite you have

100-150g pasta like penne or macaroni, ditto

300g passata

150g black eyed beans or red kidney beans (the latter is preferable)

2 tbsp. chopped fresh parsley

50g grated cheese like Cheddar or Emmental plus extra to sprinkle on top if you like

 

If using a whole chilli, carefully remove the stalk and seeds and chop it finely. Heat the oil in a large saucepan and fry the onion, chilli and mince until the mince has browned.

 

If you don't like the texture of the beans (or have children who won't eat it if they see them) then pulse in a blender with the passata and add to the mince. Or if you have more grown up tastes than I do, add the passata and beans straight into the pan. Season with salt and pepper.

 

 

Then - and this is the part I found weird - add the pasta to the pan and enough water to cover the pasta. Simmer until the pasta is cooked - you may have to drain off a bit of water. Finally stir in the cheese, and serve topped with fresh herbs and a sprinkling of cheese if you like.

 

Meat Free Monday: Fettuccine Alfredo (sort of) with Cheddar and Stilton

For the second Meat Free Monday in January I decided to make a pasta dish, but wanted something more interesting than just pasta and Dolmio sauce - and something that my fiancé would still consider a 'proper meal'.

Fettuccine Alfredo is a pasta dish tossed with Parmesan cheese and butter - one of those simple dishes that needs to be done really well. I didn't have any Parmesan but did have other cheese in the fridge that needed using so I decided to make my own take on this, with Cheddar and Stilton! So it isn't really Fettuccine Alfredo at all, more of a cheesy pasta!

 

I'd seen a few recipes for Fettuccine Alfredo online that used double cream but I wanted to make a healthier version (I've lost 5 pounds in the first two weeks of this year - who needs Slimming World when you've got a wedding dress to get into?!) so substituted Quark instead (an almost-flavourless curd cheese you can get in most supermarkets).

So my recipe was:
Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and cook some tagliatelle.

In a separate pan, melt a little butter and stir in 2 tbsp. plain flour to make a roux. Gradually add milk, stirring, until you have a smooth sauce.

Bring to a simmer and add grated cheddar and stilton to taste. Add a tub of Quark (this made enough for three portions).

 Stir until you have a lovely thick cheesy sauce and pour over the pasta.

I served this with some broccoli and some garlic bread for my fiancé; I knew I'd have more luck persuading him to eat a vegetarian pasta dish if there was garlic bread too!

I'm sending this to the Meat Free Monday challenge, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes. Jacqueline also runs the Food Blog Diary which is the place to go to find out about all these blog challenges!

Leftover Sausage Ragu with Spiralized Butternut Squash Noodles

Welcome to my second Spiralizer Saturday! As part of my January health kick I’m going to use my spiralizer for dinner once a week as a way to get myself eating more vegetables, fewer carbs and generally have a healthier meal.

If you have a recipe that can be made using a spiralizer please add it to the linkup at the end of this post.

 

I actually made this recipe a couple of weeks ago to use up some leftover cooked sausages from a new year’s buffet at my fiance’s mum’s house. She is vegetarian so gave us all the leftover sausages to take home! I wanted to find a recipe I could use them in and had the idea of chopping them up and making into a sort of ragu (a meat-based sauce), to serve over spaghetti for my fiancé and with butternut squash noodles for me (he won’t eat butternut squash but I was dying to try it in my spiralizer!). So here’s my recipe:

 

Sausage Ragu with Butternut Squash Noodles – an original recipe from Caroline Makes

 

Serves 2

 

 

Sausages: if standard size, 2-3 per person. If chipolata, you will probably want more. The sausages can be raw or cooked – see instructions below.

Fry Light or 1 tbsp oil

Half an onion, chopped

400g tin chopped tomatoes

Pinch of salt

½ tsp oregano

1 whole butternut squash

 

If you are using raw sausages, chop with scissors and fry them with the onion in a little oil until cooked. If using leftover cooked sausages, fry the onion as above then when the onion is translucent, add the chopped cooked sausage.

 

Put the tomatoes, salt, oregano and 100ml water in the pan and simmer until the sauce has reduced.

 

 

 

Meanwhile peel the butternut squash and cut the ends off so each end is flat. Place in the spiralizer and choose whether you want thin spaghetti style noodles or thicker, fettucine style – I went for the thicker ones for a change as I hadn’t done that before.

 

There are various ways you can cook spiralized veg - boil, or rather blanch, as they only take a couple of minutes; fry in Fry Light or similar, or oven bake. I already had the oven on as I was serving my fiancé's ragu with spaghetti and doing him garlic bread as well so laid out the butternut squash noodles on a baking tray, sprayed them with Fry Light and roasted them in the oven for about 15 minutes. They turned out really well.

Serve the ragu over the top and enjoy.
 

 

If you have a recipe that can be made using a spiralizer please add it to the linkup below.

 

 

Courgetti (Zucchini Noodles) with Tomato and Red Pepper Sauce

This year’s trendy kitchen gadget is the spiralizer, which turns vegetables (and fruit) into spaghetti-like strands. I’ve already used it to make these sweet potato waffles which were much tastier than I expected, and really healthy. I hadn’t successfully made ‘spaghetti’ out of it yet – I did spiralize a carrot, and bring the strands to the boil, at which point they turned to complete mush. Lesson learnt!

This time I had a courgette (zucchini) in the fridge left over from making vegetable kebabs for a barbecue and remembered that courgetti was one of the first recipes I came across for the spiralizer – courgette spaghetti. You can serve it with whatever you like; I also had some tomatoes and red pepper left in the fridge from the barbecue and found this recipe from Hemsley and Hemsley, two sisters who have a healthy eating website and recipe book.

They recommend eating the courgette raw but I didn’t really fancy that as I don’t even eat courgette at all normally, so I decided to fry it in a little butter. Be aware you don’t get a huge amount of ‘spaghetti’ from one courgette; it was enough for a small portion (it was pretty late when I got home from work that night and I didn’t want a big dinner at 9pm) but otherwise I would say this amount is more of a starter, side dish or small meal. For two people, I would do three courgettes.

I changed their recipe a bit:

To serve one, you need:

Spiralizer machine

1 large courgette, trimmed flat at each end

Half a red pepper

2 tomatoes

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp of oil for the pan plus 1 tbsp for the sauce

Clove of garlic

Handful of fresh basil

Handful of cashews or peanuts (I couldn’t find cashews in the cupboard and at 9pm wasn’t going to keep looking, so used unsalted peanuts!)

NB: Ideally you need to make the sauce, or at least the red pepper and tomato part, the day (or several hours) before.

Preheat oven to 165C.

Line a baking tray with foil and spread around 1 tbsp oil. Cut the tomatoes in half and the red pepper into chunks and place face down in the pan. Roast for about an hour; I had my oven at too high a temperature so the skins on the tomatoes burnt, but they were very easy to remove. After an hour, add the garlic to the tray and roast for another half an hour.

  

Remove the charred skins from the tomatoes and pepper and squeeze the garlic out of its skin, either into a small bowl or straight into a food processor. I did this part the night before so kept the ingredients in a bowl in the fridge.

In your food processor blend the tomato, pepper, garlic, vinegar and rest of the oil, plus the basil leaves, nuts and salt and pepper.

To make the courgetti, place the courgette in the spiralizer and turn the handle until you have what looks like spaghetti. You can eat this raw, according to the Hemsley and Hemsley recipe, but I preferred to warm it through in a frying pan in a little butter. Top with the tomato and red pepper sauce.

For someone who has honestly never willingly eaten courgette, I was very surprised at how nice this tasted! I think it will take a bit of getting used to- courgette that is, not spiralizing –but I would definitely class this recipe as a success.

Courgette is known in the US as zucchini but the name courgetti definitely sounds better for this dish! But since it does also begin with Z, and that is the letter I have chosen this month for Alphabakes (which I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker) I am sending it in.

I'm also sending this to Extra Veg, hosted by Jen's Food, on behalf of Helen at Fuss Free Flavours and Michelle at Utterly Scrummy.