It's been a year since Building an Appetite inherited the London-and-cook leitmotif of Cook Every Country. As much as I have enjoyed the brutalism and Bauhaus the city has had to offer, the concept of visiting a modernist building and cooking something connected to it has now run its cycle of novelty, repetition and diminishing returns. The time between my posts now pushing the limits of elasticity, I have accepted the spinoff has now reached its shelf life.
But where there are ashes, there is a phoenix. A new series – soon to be named – starts today, continuing the Discover London theme and setting its sights on another lush blogging ground – bookshops. In spite of Amazon and 
the pandemic, brick-and-mortar book sellers seem to have adapted and survived. Or have they? Each post in this series will take me to a bookshop to find out how the industry is coping and feature the usual additive cooked dish.
Things have already got off to a promising start.
The Freedom Press is the country's oldest anarchist publishing house and runs a shop in Whitechapel. Set inside an alley off the main road, the punk-core entrance was a sign of what was to come. The room was a shrine to radicalism, covered floor to ceiling in anti-establishment literature and décor. Zapata and Makhnov cohabited a bookshelf. The merch section was strewn with heck patches and pronoun 
badges. The sight of a Che graphic novel didn't surprise me in the slightest, but a Tintin one from 1989 did (now this one I had to buy, as a childhood Tintin fan), reimagining the young reporter as a class warrior fighting against the Tory government's injustices!
I googled Anarchist cookbook. My joy at finding a clean match dissipated when I read the table of contents. The book was a manual for the home manufacture of explosives, illegal drugs, telecommunication device jammers, that sort of thing. Not the kind of cooking I had in mind, but 
the book gave me the idea of making a non-deadly and safely edible spinach and artichoke bomb.
I wilted a heap of spinach. I squeezed out the water, finely chopped and added it into a mixing bowl. I drained an oily packet of roasted artichoke hearts. I chopped and added them into the bowl. I followed with a tub of cream cheese, shredded mozzarella, grated parmesan, onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne powder, salt and white pepper. I tasted and adjusted the spices.
I rolled out a sheet of puff pastry dough and quartered it. I dolloped the filling onto each rectangle. I encased the filling in the pastry, pinching and sealing the edges tightly. I shaped the balls and placed them on an oven tray. I baked in a medium oven for 30-40 minutes until the pastry was golden and started to flake.
The savoury bombs were quite easy to put away with a glass of crisp pinot. Yum!
Krishnan
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