Ume, Ube and Uni

I don't have a good answer when people ask me why I chose the letter U as a theme for my next dinner party. I think I was really drunk a couple of months ago and kept saying 'I love you, I love you, I love you' to "someone" and I thought this was really funny. Really funny and a great idea.

Believe it or not, there aren't a lot of foods that start with the letter U. I toyed with the idea of pig uterus as a starter (found in a Chinese supermarket, they look like little curly shoelaces) but the mere mention of this prompted revulsion in even my most adventurous friends. Pretty much the only other raw ingredient I can think of is urchin (that's sea urchin, not homeless children, David) so I started with that. I remembered this article from The Guardian from a few years ago, dude was working his way through the alphabet, cooking an exotic meat for each letter and settled on urchin, he had to do a lot of leg work around London to find the stuff and ultimately nabbed some in Selfridges. Well this was years ago, I followed in his footsteps only to be told that they no longer sell them, I ended up finding some in the Japan Centre. Maths fans (that's all of you, right?) work this out - this guy was offered 3 kilos for £72, which he declined in favour of 25 grams for £6.50, terrible deal, but I suppose not every one wants a ton of this stuff in their freezer. I got mine at 100 grams for £18, 300 grams in total. The sum makes me cry a little but it's still better than the price he paid.
Uni/ urchin is an acquired taste, it's buttery, a little salty, a little sweet and I think quite bitter. Served as sushi, the sweetness of the rice and savouriness of the nori mask the bitterness a little but it's still not something I would describe as a delicacy. The other obstacle was how to make this expensive, complicated ingredient stretch to feeding 10 people. The Guardian recipe struck me as a little uninspired, but most of the other recipes I found online suggested making it up into a pasta sauce as well, which just did not suit my show off sensibilities. But timing is everything, urchin is in season during the winter, and one of my favourite blogs devoted a few posts to it, one of which included a recipe that mixed the roe into the pasta mixture. I love it when the planets align like that.
Their recipe requires something called yuzu kosho, which I found both in wet and powdered form in the Japan Centre. The yuzu is a citrus, the exotic love child of a lemon and a grapefruit - taste wise, common in Japan and cultivated somewhat in the US as well, but virtually unheard of here. And yuzu kosho is a blend of the zest and green or red chilli (here's a recipe if you want to make your own, another amazing, inspiring blog). My special Japanese source at work tells me that yuzu kosho is typically used as a soup base, and you can tell, it's a very strong concentrate - not something to just spread over your toast in the morning.
The pasta rolled out in a beautiful leathery sheet, very fragrant, and flecked with specks of this and that. But when cooked I found it lost any delicacy and became a big bowl of starch, barely suggesting any flavour other than chilli unfortunately. I don't think that this is a problem with the recipe, I only used half of the urchin quantity specified, it's an image problem. I don't really want to serve people a pile of pasta, it's a bit yawn-tastic, and doesn't showcase the ingredient as much as I'd like. Next
Ube is a kind of sweet potato, popular in the Philippines, so much so that ube ice cream is a totally normal thing available in the shops. So wierd, I wonder if it will ever catch on here.
Old David L is my go to guy when it comes to ice creams. Maybe I should buy another ice cream book at some point, for contrast, but I don't see the point at the moment - as soon as I bought the machine I realised that don't actually like ice cream all that much. It's too creamy, and sweet :( (this is the bit where the boyfriend looks over my shoulder and calls me some kind of precious princess)
Anyway, in the book that I do have he mentions an ube ice cream he had in San Francisco a couple of times and gives a recipe for a sweet potato version. I found this jar of overly sweet spread in Chinatown and literally went to town on it!
The taste is nice, sweet in an indiscriminate way, it'll do. Oh and blah blah blah, something about ume.