Black Sesame Ice Cream

One of my more sentient (read *sober*) friends managed to take proper photographs of the food on the night. So as a tribute to her self control, and in the interest of keeping a proper record of the night, here is a closer look.

Also, here is a recipe for that black sesame seed ice cream, the total yield is around 1.5 litres (had to do it in batches in my machine)

5 tablespoons of black sesame seeds
500ml double cream
250ml milk
250g sugar
8 egg yolks

Toast the sesame seeds in a dry frying pan, be careful not to burn, then grind as fine as you can in a coffee/ spice grinder. Pour milk and cream into ta saucepan and add the powder, heat very slowly to infuse, stirring and not quite bringing to the boil (about 20 minutes). Whisk the sugar and egg together, when combined and smooth add a little of the hot cream to temper then pour the whole mixture into the saucepan and heat slowly constantly stirring until thick. Cool and pour into ice cream machine.

This is soooo good, very rich and sweet, like halva or something. But as David Lebivitz says, all you need is one perfect scoop. I served mine with the Oreo Chocolate Blackberry pie (Oreo cookie cheesecake base with chocolate custard and blackberries) and drizzled with a little pomegranate molasses to cut through the richness. Yum!

Black Dinner !

Oh My God! I have never been so tired! (I didn't really do myself any favors by going out drinking until 3:30 am the night before and only getting 5 hours sleep, but that was not the biggest contributing factor to my exhaustion) The whole day, up until my friends started arriving I kept repeating to myself that I am NEVER doing this again, but half a glass of wine into the evening I started really enjoying myself. I was too busy cooking to take any photos, so there aren't too many, I'll try and annotate them with general bullet points.

The Calm Before the Storm

The Good:

• My brother spent ages copying out the menu on the back of black and white postcards I got at the Tate, saved me having to explain the creepy stuff people were going to be eating.
• I'd found some really nice plates and glasses in charity shops over the last couple of weeks, um... I think that's the bit I enjoyed most about having a dinner party
• Somebody brought me a bottle of wine with a picture of a dead fish on it! Ha ha, morbid minds
  

The Bad:

• The table was a little too small for the 9 of us

Different Shades of Black

The Good:

• Boyfriend made the tapenade while I was in the shower, what a guy!

The Bad:

• This was all anybody had to eat for almost two hours because I was so behind with the cooking!

Kind of Last Supper Kawaii Looking Picture of First Course

The Good:

• Everyone liked it, phew! Instead of making cute tiny raviolis I ended up producing giant flying saucer disks because I didn't leave myself enough time to do it properly. According to some of my guests they looked like rubber sexual fetish devices, um... thanks?

The Bad:

• Three days on and my fingernails are still black from the squid in and black carrot juice. I'm starting to have to tell people that yes, I do wash!

Two of My Friends have iPhones - Wow!

The Good:

• Feijoada was tasty, but I ended up giving everyone giant portions
• Most of the people didn't really know each other but somehow (yeah, I think we all know how) everyone got on, enough to crack really weird jokes, like, a few people asked for White Russians instead of Black Russians! What a bunch of renegades

The Bad:

• Don't look at my messy ass living room in the background

I didn't manage to take a picture of the dessert, but it went down as well as the rest of the meal, two people asked for seconds and the Japanese girl from my office - the only person who'd had black sesame ice cream before - said it tastes exactly the way it should do :)

All the stress and running around was worth it, and I'm just so glad that those brave souls made it into the wildest wilderness of North London to join me.

Finished with a very stingy cheese plate and black grapes, which people were too full to touch and then there was a mad dash for everyone to catch their last trains home. Phew!

Black Dinner Prep

God, I'm so tired of looking at, eating, thinking about food!

I know a lot of people use dinner parties as an opportunity to show off and try new recipes on their friends but that is just way too much pressure for me. I want to be sure, without the shadow of a doubt, that I'm going to be serving something tasty, that I know exactly how to prepare, and always have a contingency plan. The boyfriend complains that I don't delegate properly, every time he slinks into the kitchen and offers to help I get frustrated with the way he peels carrots or boils water, but it's not my fault if he's doing it wrong!!!

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I've been testing recipes for the past two weeks, and have finally come up with my menu - also, that I've been eating all the mistakes and triumphs for lunch so to be honest, I'm a bit sick of black food... shhh, don't tell.

Also, I've gotten into innumerable arguments with people about how black black is. In the beginning I strove for purity, but in the last couple of days I've gotten desperate and abandoned my standards. So the final menu will be something along the lines of:

• Appetizer selection including home-made beetroot crisps, blue corn tortilla chips, tapenade, rye bread with caviar, duck saucisson (which I didn't make but you can tell it doesn't have sodium nitrate in it because of how freaking dark it is), charcoal biscuits with Guinness cheese and wasabi nori
  
• Starter is squid ink ravioli with mushrooms, black pudding and purple carrots. One of my friends told me last week that she is on a gluten free diet, um yeah, thanks a lot. I'll make a special batch of buckwheat pasta for her.
• Feijoada with black rice. If any of my guests had told me that they don't eat pork, dinner would have been canceled. I actually had other ideas for the main course but had to resort to this slightly less elegant, but amazingly delicious option when I remembered that I'm not a millionaire and realized that I don't have too much time left to play around.
• Oreo, chocolate and blackberry pie with black sesame seed ice cream. Try as I might the chocolate sorbet jut did not want to co-operate. There's a very wierd batch in my freezer at the moment that I made with caramel instead of sugar and added a few tablespoons of sweet black bean paste to in desperation. It tasted oddly 'dusty', but is pretty black.
• Drinks will be Pinot Noir, Guinness, Black Sheep Ale, Black Russians (of course!) and kalimotxo. A Basque girl used to work in my office and she told me about this combination of red wine and Coca Cola - rank, right? Well it's an acquired taste but really not too different from sangria. Ole!

Here is a list of dishes I had considered making but but didn't manage to find/taste/convince people that it wasn't gross.

• Silkie Chicken. Like a polar bear this thing has white feathers and black skin, bones and and in some cases meat. They're a common enough food in Asia but entirely impossible to source in London as a meat. That is probably because they look like this and most people who keep them in England raise them as domestic animals or for eggs only. It's totally possible to buy one from a breeder but the chances are that they're too old to eat anyway, riddled with antibiotics (to make them live longer), and once you tell the owner that you are basically planning to eat their pet, they're not going to be very likely to sell it to you. Oh and they're crazy expensive too. It's such a shame, I even had a butcher calling in favors with farmers to try and get me one, but no luck.
  
• Gordon Ramsey has a recipe for turbot poached in red wine, it's absolutely beautiful and also pretty expensive and complicated to cook well for ten people at once. Maybe next time, and I'll serve it with...
• Purple potatoes. These are not really black enough, throughout the whole planning process I've been very resistant to the option of just adding colorants to the dishes unless it was part of the original recipe (like the squid ink pasta), but maybe had these been roasted with balsamic vinegar... mmm salsify on the side....
• Huitlacoche. What is huitlacoche? Sounds so exotic, until you call it Corn Smut! This a fungus that grows in corn cobs and is actually considered a delicacy with a sweetish nutty mushroom taste, I have a recipe for chicken stuffed with huitlacoche, but good luck trying to persuade anyone to eat it.
• Marmite. This is not going anywhere near my house, my kitchen or my face. Same goes for licorice yuk yuk yukky yuk.

Pictures of the big event tomorrow ;)

Inspiration for the Black Dinner

Some dude I went to school with turned me on to A Rebours by Huysmans and mentioned that his friends' parents used to host black dinners. Not dinner in the dark, not horrible burnt food, but elaborate, well researched dinner parties for their literary friends. Here is the paragraph that mentions this, it's at the beginning of the book and only serves to draw the protagonist as a spoilt, bored eccentric.
Spoilt, bored, eccentric? Me me me! (and someone else, here's somebody who manages to make it look easy http://marmitelover.blogspot.com/2010/03/midnight-feast.html)
I'm still thinking of the menu, waiting to hear back from a butcher about something very exotic, and a greengrocer about something a bit dirty...

Pear-Caramel Ice Cream

Regardless of what I said about milk product in my previous post, I'm still a girl and ice cream is ice cream! Well actually I still had a pint of double cream left over from making the kulich, but this had pears in it which cancel the fat out. I'm not a scientist or anything, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works...
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that everyone knows what a scoop of ice cream looks like, so here's a picture of the the apparatus hard a work. It's doing this sound - brrrrrrmmmmmmbrrrrrrrrmmmmmmm
Result: OMG, this is so good! Pear is a much underused fruit, so there is no way to really describe the taste. It's sweet and creamy, but not cloying or heavy, like apple pie with custard, almost - but one that you could eat an infinite amount of. It's very tempting to say that this recipe is worth the price of the book, but this recipe is available for free online. I really appreciate Lebovitz's attitude towards sharing his recipes. Annoyingly he's living it up in fancy pants Paris for most of the year, and like crumbs from the king's table, he's seen fit to dish out a few pearls of wisdom to us great unwashed! No, that's not it at all, his style makes him seem so open and approachable that even if all of the recipes are out there already I would still buy the book, read the preface, look at the pictures, and make notes.
As for the ice cream maker, no, I definitely shouldn't have bought that. Might have to start bouncing my butterball butt to a gym...

Chocolate Sorbet

I'm planning a very elaborate dinner part in a few weeks, all the food is going to be black! I got the idea from a book some dude I went to school with recommended and the concept fits in perfectly with my show-off, arsy personality ;)
I'd never heard of a chocolate sorbet until I saw a mention on David Lebovitz's site. Actually, there was a line about it in Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho', but that was meant as a ridiculous joke. I'm not the biggest fan of milk because it leaves this weird coating all over your mouth, and made with dark chocolate this would totally be black and completely unexpected (I think at least a couple of the people I'm inviting are convinced that black food is going to be burnt food... I might have to resort to that, lets see how this goes).
Lindt also makes 90% cocoa dark chocolate, but I couldn't find any. I bought a brand new ice cream maker just for this dinner party, so if this doesn't work and I have to boil some prune pudding for dessert instead, you're all dead!
Result: Well that's a funny shade of black! The taste is pretty good, but the texture and color are a bit off. There is a grittiness from the cocoa powder which I don't really like but nobody else in my tasting panel noticed. And I will try adding some black sesame seed paste or blackcurrant to adjust the color. Hopefully that will work on the first try, because I don't know how much ice cream I can eat!

Bresaola Result

I went to Hastings for the Easter weekend and left the bresaola hanging for a few days longer than I was supposed to. Well, I figured after five weeks one day wouldn't make much of a difference, right?
Wrong. Look at this thing, you can hammer in nails with it! It's so hard and dry I had a really hard time cutting in to it. And to think, the whole time I was fretting that it was way too humid and it wouldn't dry properly! The temperature in the little fridge was really easy to control, but the only way to decrease the humidity was to open the door and air it out once a day. In the end this method is way too DIY, you can't really control anything.
The taste is actually not bad, like well seasoned jerky or something.First of all it's not the delicate pink hue that it would be commercially (because I didn't use any sodium nitrate in the cure) which doesn't affect the taste, but my perception of what it will taste like. It tastes a lot gamier than I would imagine beef would, and doesn't have the melt in your mouth quality that I had expected but is not bad. Well, it's pretty bad. I think if I had bought this in a shop, for real money, I would be a bit disappointed. But like a mangy old family dog, I love this because it's my own. Mmmm, bet that image has got everyone drooling.