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.

100!

Well this is my 100th post, woo woo, it took me a year and a half to get here, which is a bit dismal really. I always mean to write more often, and I cook a lot more now than I did a year and a half ago, but I suppose I'm just a layzeeass. The other factor is that I only really want to write about interesting stuff, topics that I would be interested in reading more about, not just random look-at-this-pasta-that-I-had-for-dinner-last-night.
I've also been working on a pet project, another ridiculous dinner party - based on the letter U. I sent all my friends an email with 'I love U' in the subject line, which I'm sure went straight into their spam folders.

Self Flagellation through cooking: Valentines Day Weekend

I went back to the Diocese of Sourozh this Saturday to help out with the meal after their Patronal Feast. I wrote about actual place a few months ago, if you go on the website in the link you'll see exactly one photo of me, sitting glumly in the background on the day after the night before. But this time it was different.
I arrived at 10 am on Saturday morning, was asked if I wanted breakfast, replied in the negative and was given a bowl of soup instead. Thank God, because it was the last food I saw for the rest of the day. Well, that's not quite correct, I saw plenty of food, for the next 12 hours I peeled and hand grated so many vegetables I thought my arm was going to fall off. By 9 pm I broke through the wall and got a second wind, and eventually went to bed after midnight when I could feel my legs anymore.
Sarcasm aside, it was a really amazing experience. For two days I was surrounded by the most inspiring women who in one way or another choose to give their lives to God. There was Maryanna (who I kept calling Annalisa for some reason) who's about my age and is a nun in training, she's living at the monastery and made the most incredible lentil carrot and potato soup.
There was Maria who brought along a few jars of her amazing pickles and gave us all the recipe (a lot of vinegar and a lot of sugar), more amazing though was her ability to stand around in the kitchen all day in high heels with no complaints. She came to Orthodoxy late in life, only about 6 years ago, I talked to her about the animosity I felt for the church after my mother died, and she had the same experience when her best friend died unexpectedly - but she got past it.
Katya, our fearless leader, gave me the recipe for the best fish croquettes I have ever had and some advise about going to Billingsgate market for the tuna - my idea of showing up at 4am armed with a cosh and the Haggler's Handbook is all wrong, you can come later in the morning (as late as 7am) and still get a great deal and no one will murder you in Canary Wharf.
Any here's the only photo I had time to snap
This is the kitchen I was working in, and the girl in the corner is Tatyana, total veg head. Maria and I had six or seven different jars of gherkins, some commercial and some home made, to test to select which were going to go in the salad. We would open a jar, taste a little slice of gherkin each, decide if they were too salty or sour or spoiled, the slide the jar over to Tatyana and ask if we should throw them away, she would eat the whole thing and say there was nothing wrong with them. Great system.

I came back to London on Sunday night, super exhausted. For Valentines day, the boyfriend, who had spent the last 5 years convincing me that it's a made up holiday and he doesn't believe in it, blindsided me with a blender. All my friend cringe when I tell them stuff like this, like when he got me a frying pan for my birthday, but I think it's romantic! It also meant that I felt compelled to make him a cake. This heart cake. It turned out so terrible I couldn't even bring myself to photograph it. But never mind, he still loves me.
Kisses xx

Bacon-Rap'd Scallops and Simon Says Salmon

I've been a bit of a layzeeass recently, and have been putting off writing up the last two of Coolio's recipes that I've tried but until I do it I can't move on to other things so hey ho, lets go.
Bacon Rap'd Scallops is one of the first dishes in the book, the legend goes that when Coolio started his catering company a client requested bacon wrapped scallops, Coolio doesn't eat pork so he improvised with 'beef bacon' which I used my incredible Google-fu skills to discover is an approximation of bresaola.
The other recipe is for baked salmon, and is meant to be made with your kids. Cute. Here's some photos.
Result:
The scallops are very good. Salty and sweet and garlicky and expensive to make.
Salmon is super plain, even though it looks kind of gross in this picture, the garlic and onion sprinkled on top are almost uncooked but the whole flavour is subtle and nice. For someone who damn near drinks chilli sauce from the bottle, it's a nice change of pace.
Coolio is cool, the book is pretty good. Next.