Brixton. Yup.

Sunday night.  A time for taking stock of the week whilst watching Drop Dead Diva (officially the worst thing I've ever seen - a 'shallow', blonde model dies and comes back to life in the body of a harassed, 'fat' lawyer, and discovers her inner beauty, intelligence and kind heart. Yup. Literally, that's it. She cries a lot) with a cup of hot water.  I'm trying to cleanse my liver. Google Medical science seems undecided as to whether this is possible or even necessary, and I couldn't find a consensus on actually what to do, so I just put some hot water in my Sunday mug and threw a lemon in for good measure.

True

Anyway, last week I made a tricolore salad with lemon oil, a prawn curry, a wild rice thing with pumpkin seeds, parsley and yoghurt, salmon with pea shoots and hazelnut butter, and a knockout (if I do say so myself) warm mushroom salad from Smitten Kitchen, one of my favourite blogs. I do what people do with Wikipedia articles or Spotify (ending up by mistake reading about The Fall of Constantinople in 1453, or listening to German electro-trance) with food pages. With the exception of the tricolore (I've kind of got those 3 ingredients down), all of the recipes were found by me or my flatmate while browsing online and were as easy as falling off a log.  I'm not going to write them out because they already exist and I can't claim any flashes of genius on my part. Also I'm not a copyright lawyer.  Incidentally, Sister number 2 called me today and told me that my use of phrases such 'as easy as falling off a log' is what will preclude me from ever being truly cool.

Well, sucks to her because I went to Brixton on Friday and loved it. How cool is that?  I feel I know quite a lot about Brixton because Jay Rayner is a big fan of the food stuff going on there and wrote a round up article on, specifically, Brixton Village for the Guardian. I've actually only been there once in the past 5 years, and on that I occasion I was having an existential crisis, a fox screamed in my face and McDonalds was shut because of a stabbing.

So, not great memories, but this time around I had a great time.  It has a slight touch of the East Londons, but in a much, much cooler way. The people aren't posing.  The market hasn't had a coat of gloss paint.  The restaurants don't have concepts.  Queuing for food doesn't seem  pointless so much as practical when people are operating out of small open fronted covered market stalls.  We wandered around and could have eaten at 5 or 6 places that all looked fab. In the end we were so prosaic as to go for one which had a free table, Tapas Pa'Ti, who were doing an incredible deal of 6 plates plus a jug of Sangria for £30.  We then went on to Seven for ginger mojitos.

You can find more information about the whole set up here -  http://brixtonmarket.net.  It's a great place to hang out, and given I'm about as trendy as Mary Berry (we have the same jacket), that's not something I would have thought I'd be saying. .