Aviation dinner

Pan Am is a new show coming out in the States, and while I don't have a particular 60s obsession I don have a Christina Ricci obsession.
I loved Addams Family so much when I was younger, my mum had to have a serious conversation with me about not drinking poison and electrocuting myself. I've watched everything Christina Ricci was in and totally wanted to be her until she lost a ton of weight and got a spot on Ally McBeal. Anyway, I can't wait until it comes out over here and I can start comparing it to Mad Men.
A few months ago, when I was in the throes of Aviation admiration I decided that airline food is actually a glamorous, sophisticated institution and decided to recreated it on solid land. Less life imitation art and more Plato's Theory of Forms, whereby you cannot really know what is real because all you have known up until now could have been a shadow of reality. Who is to say airline food is an inferior kind of food, it might not even be food at all, it's like comparing a chair to a painting of a chair - two totally different things.

Researching airline meals is actually a very fun thing to do, especially if you only have very limited personal experience. The first stop should definitely be Airline Meals, which catalogs reader submitted photos of airline meals (believe it or not). You can spend hours trying to decide what the brown stuff is or how sticky the tray looks, but ultimately it's way too much information.
When I went to University one of the 'rules' we had for writing essays was to quote at least three sources to back up our ideas (yeah, it wasn't a very good university), so I didn't feel comfortable making a decision without some more input. I asked around, and nobody could tell me the last thing they had to eat on a plane. Most airlines don't publish their menus online, but if you're willing to wait for it someone will eventually put a vintage one up for sale on Ebay. I hit the jackpot and got 10 identical PanAm menus from the 60s.
These feel really special, the menu inside is exactly the same but each cover depicts a different destination, exotics such a Yugoslavia, Japan and Portugal etc. The meal on offer, in French and English, is Leek Soup, Veal Duroc with Buttered Noodles, Salad and Dessert. This is a very interesting article about the cost of airline meals then and now and the reason meals are even being offered on planes, count yourself lucky, buddy boy. And let's just say I ended up spending more than £2.50 per head.
Leek soup
It's actually very very difficult to find a recipe for leek soup, almost everything I found had been fleshed out with potatoes which I suspect are there mainly for texture and dilute the flavour of the leek. Here is the recipe of the leek soup I made (but didn't photograph). The taste is creamy, slightly oniony with a great balance of sweetness with the sour notes. Once blended the colour is jade. Simple and cheap (and popular)
Bit of butter
4 leeks, chopped (green parts too)
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 glass of white wine
grind of pepper
1.5 pins of chicken stock

Fry the leeks in butter until soft, add in garlic and wine and cook for 5 minutes. Put in the pepper and stock and cook, covered for 45 minutes. Blend, adjust seasoning.

Veal Duroc
Good luck Googling this one. As well as being a forgotten French sauce named after one of Napoleon's generals, Duroc is also a breed of pork, so recipes will be for roasting pork, chops, sausages. Type in 'Veau Duroc' and you'll get one or two recipes in French, formatted in the most mind boggling way. Below is the recipe I used, it calls for things difficult to find in the supermarket,which I suppose is a good antidote to the austerity soup above. I got the veal in Selfridges (but I'm sure there are more cost effective sources), grew the chervil on the window sill and bought obscene amounts of powdered veal stock in France. The stock was the hardest part, the least cost effective option it to make it yourself, you just aren't ever going to have veal bones just lying around. I made the mistake of buying some liquid veal stock from Fortnum and Masons to use on a dry run and the resulting sauce was bitter and rancid tasting. By chance I saw chubby Knorr tubs of the powdered stock on a supermarket shelf in Chamonix and feverishly swept the whole shelf into my basket (you can buy this on the internet btw), the resultant sauce was sweet and savoury, herby and very very good. What's the big deal, why not just use beef? Because in comparison to veal stock, beef stock tastes like fat boy's farts. Trust me.
10ml oil
100g butter
8 veal medallions
40g flour
250g mushrooms
40g shallots
40ml cognac
1 glass white wine
500ml veal stock
1tbsp tarragon
1tbsp chervil

Heat oil and butter and fry off floured medallions, 7 mins each side. Set aside and fry chopped mushrooms and shallots in the same pan, flambe with brandy and delgaze with wine. Pour in stock and reduce until thick. Pour over medallions and sprinkle with chopped herbs.

Salad
Vertical Pear Salad. I love.

Dessert
This ended up being a little disappointing. Initially I wanted to use this recipe by David Lebovitz, which was supposed the be very similar to the pudding he developed for Virgin Atlantic. But I just didn't like it. It had the taste and texture of Angel Delight, which is a bit meh.
I briefly toyed with the idea of serving the dessert they had on the Hindenburg - that is to say, nothing, but didn't have the balls to be quite so conceptual. I ended up making trifles with grape jelly, and my fondest hope is that everyone was too drunk to pay attention to it.
We hope you enjoyed your flight.

Vegan cake and a drink

I had some of my stepmother's relatives over for dinner, they're very religious and observe the Lent... religiously, which means totally vegan and alcohol free for the next couple of months.
I got in some falafels and houmous (which it was totally tempting to pretend to have made), olives and artichokes, and made guacamole, cucumber dipping sauce, steamed broccoli, fennel salad and lemon risotto. All of which I forgot to photograph of course.
I made this incredible vegan, flourless orange cake which went down LIKE A FREAKING HOUSE ON FIRE!!! Natasha asked for the recipe, it made me so happy, basically you boil a couple of oranges then blend with tofu, olive oil and ground almonds. Very very grown up, tart and delicious. See? Last little piece left.
But the thing I'm most pleased with (apart from almost reducing the boyfriend to tears when I made him hoover and wash all the floors twice before the guests arrived) is my incredible alcohol free cocktail. You just crush together some raspberries and ice and pour over equal measures of apple juice and tonic. I swear to God it tastes like there's booze in there, that's why I've dubbed it Miley Cyrus. Best served out of vintage girly goblets.
Oh, and everything went smoothly despite it being the freaking Ides of March, and almost nobody got stabbed...

Part four - Ube ice cream, urmasice and umeshu

Dessert was a simple affair of aforementioned ube ice cream, umeshu and urmasice. Umeshu is a Japanese dessert wine made from the Ume fruit, like a plum or peach or something
This is what my 'drinks cabinet' really looks like all of the time.
Urmasice is a Bosinan cake which I made three or four times, trying to get it right and failed miserably every time. Basically you're meant to bake buttery little dumplings and then soak them in lemon syrup overnight. They never held their shape in the oven, someone suggested freezing them before baking, but I didn't have any room in my freezer because of all the freaking ice cream in there! The taste was nice though, sweet buttery and lemony.
Dig the cute espresso cups?
Ciao!

Part three - Uzska

Uzska are the traditional Polish dumplings served either bobbing along in borscht or on their own. I bought this fantabulous gyoza press from the Japan Centre when I was(seriously, I pretty much cleaned that place out)
which makes the process a lot simpler. Just make a dough, kind of like a pasta dough but with sour cream mixed in, roll out - you don't need a pasta machine for this - cut little circles out, place the circles in the press (with a teaspoon of the filling) and squash together. Perfect every time. The filling is meant to be either mushroom or beef - I used both and served them with a beetroot and green apple salad and a scoop of horseradish cream, sprinkled with yuzu ponzu.
This was the most successful dish of the night, most people had seconds (maybe I was just super stingy with the portions?)
And of course, the most important lesson learned was that all food tastes better when eaten off of Royal wedding commemorative plates
It should have been me!

Part two - Urchin Croquettes

I woke up at 5 am on the Thursday before the party, sprung out of bed as energetically as is possible under the circumstances, had a cup of coffee whist brushing my hair and ran out the door. You have to picture what it's like to run on pure adrenalin, for the last two weeks I had been frantically making to-do lists for every day counting up to the big finale, and now as I stood on the (packed for some reason) train to Poplar station I could triumphantly check off 'wake up early to go to Billingsgate Market before work'.
This is the view I took in when I got off the DLR.
The dawn light filtered thorough the Millennium Dome's support towers and bouncing off the Bank of America building. If it wasn't for the smell of fish you could almost ignore the single story structure of the market, which looks and feels out of place in suit land.
I made my way down the motorway, along a tall metal fence surrounding the market. 'How do I get in?' I wondered, then I saw this
Sheesh, take it easy man, didn't realise it was such a big secret!
The selection was interesting, lots of razor clams, plenty of whole salmons for a tenner, some fish I couldn't identify. The tuna loins were already vacuum packed and priced at around £13 per kilo (half of what you would pay at a supermarket!) but obviously they're not going to rip open a package and cut you a little slice so I had to buy the smallest piece I could find - 4kg (I did get a nice-face discount, and some relationship advise from the trader, so I feel as though I came out on top in the end).
Here it is
I couldn't stop photographing it, it was so beautiful, a deep dark meaty colour. I couldn't help sneaking slivers as I was portioning it up and the taste was just incredible. I cut a big piece for my dad and another one for the boyfriend's mum, and set about grinding the rest up to make the body of the croquettes.
The recipe is fairly simple, you grind together fresh tuna, onions, and a loaf of white bread soaked in milk, season to taste and form into little balls, fry to seal and then finish off in the oven. I mixed in a little chopped urchin into each croquette - I was desperate, ok?
This proved to be the most difficult course, I mean look at it, what a bloody mess!
It's meant to be some kind of half assed charcuterie plate. I pickled some cauliflower in sugar and cider vinegar, and almost killed myself looking for the cheese. Urbriaco is an Italian cheese soaked in wine. I thought I'd found a trader in Borough Market, and dutifully wrote 'Saturday - wake up early and go buy the cheese' to do on the morning of the party, and get this - dude never showed up! I went home seething that he decided to sleep himself out of a 100g sale that morning, and stopped in at Waitrose to get some unpasturised hard cheese (Un-pasturised, get it?), a poor second choice. Luckily I found out thorough this blog that Selfridges Food Hall also carries Ubriaco and dispatched the boyfriend to go and fetch me some. Phew, crisis averted. This is why you should always read blogs, children.

The un-erotic story of U: Part one - Ugro Soup

All I can say is that I got very very drunk, and I don't even want to tell you what happened to my camera. Urgh, I really actually need to erase that mental image...

Anyway, here we go.
Our magical story starts a few weeks ago and involves a lot of Google-fu, trips to random food shops and stress, stress, stress.
I've hit every single charity shop near my house and office looking for nice random crockery, but still ended up purchasing most of the extra soup bowls or whatever from Zara Home. I found a revolting rotten chair in the street, and me and my brother spent an entire Saturday sanding and re-upholstering it
Well anyway, this isn't a DIY show. Had to borrow 3 chairs too. These are the menus -
Good old Uccello and Uglow and Utrillo too, I went to three different galleries to pick up the postcards - had to cancel date night because Friday is when the National and Tate Modern are open late - the ol' bf wasn't very happy about that. Someone might have called someone obsessive and someone else might have called them a big stupid dumb ugly gorilla back. I don't know who these people are, I just went to the check out and paid for my postcards! YouknowwhatImsayin'?
Also, clock the totally awesome 'umbrella' table cloth. Maybe I am a little obsessive.
The first thing on my list was Ugro, a Tajik lamb soup made with noodles and meatballs. Long story short, I didn't take a picture, but my version was basically 'minimalist' if that's what you want to call it? It had no noodles or peas or potatoes, just meatballs and cubes of carrot. I bought a shoulder of lamb, cut the meat off of it (got a picture of that)
boiled it up with onions, garlic, bayleaf and sumac to a thick broth, ground the meat and made that into meatballs.
Honestly, trust me when I say this, there is no way to have a letter 'U' themed evening unless you have a meat grinder.
End of part one.

Bitch ripped me off!

No, not really. Even I am not that vain and deluded. But dig this clip from a recent episode if Nigella Lawson's new show where she mentions the black supper scene from A Rebours and then makes a squid ink risotto!

Pirojki

Yeah I got a place where I get this stuff. I shouldn't really talk about it, it's just something to take the edge off, you know?
Nah mate, that's not Charlie, just a bit of yeast.
Live yeast is pretty amazing stuff, I got this in a Russian shop within Wood Green shopping center and really it's the only place in London I've seen it for sale, out in the open at least. I'm sure you can probably stroll into a bakery and ask for some but that doesn't really guarantee anything. Most people who bake use dry yeast, which doesn't like me very much and almost always refuses to work.
Anyway, yes, I'm baking.
I finally decided to see if the oven at the new place works properly, and of course I had to do it in the most stressful way possible. I invited a couple of girls from work for dinner and planned to serve them a big bunch of Russian stuff, which pretty much meant I was shopping, cooking and cleaning all day on Saturday and Sunday - you know, woman's work. I switched on the oven to preheat it for a cake, and got a noseful of the most revolting burnt bleach smell, the landlady hadn't cleaned it properly, so gross. It took the boyfriend all afternoon to scrape it clean, and I ditched the cake idea and went out for a little stroll instead.
These are the ingredients for dough for little hand pies, pirojki in Russian. Usually when I make these I'll buy a pack of shortcrust pastry from the supermarket and a pack of puff pastry and squish them together, but now that I'm almost a real adult I guess it's time to learn how to make it from scratch. The packet on the right is of kefir, a cultured milk drink that's totally good for hangovers. The way to make it is of course pretty nasty, you have to get a special kind of mushroom and dump it in a pint of milk and the next day you get a slightly thick, tangy load of kefir. You fish out the mushroom, give it a rinse and pollute another pint of milk with it, the kefir is your to drink. I actually have a friend who has one and she keeps threatening to give me the offshoot, once you get it you're pretty much obligated to keep it alive with a fresh supply of milk every day. I'm thinking about it.
Anyway, the dough, I got this recipe from a blog and the woman who posts it recommends putting the bowl with the dough in a basn on warm water to rise - such a good idea. After two hours it goes from this
to this
You then roll it out into little circles, if like me you left your mother's beautiful marble rolling pin behind when you flew the family nest, then use an empty wine bottle (or a full one, if such a thing is to be found in your house) and fill them up. I made half with cabbage and half with beef and egg. Bake them in the oven for a bit, serve, and get a wrist fetishist to take the photo (yeah, that's a thing)
Result:
Well I tasted the dough before it was baked and it was pretty delicious, tangy almost meaty with a warm yeasty flavour. So I was a little disappointed that once baked it turned super dry, but stayed soft. I think I need to try again...

Correction!

The friend referenced in this post has demanded credit! (or some horse shit like that) So please enjoy this video of some guy I went to school with (Jack Brotchie), and other beautiful boys, being asked slightly creepy questions by Peter Lorre. Look out for the one with the calm human face.
And after that, watch this totally awesome cooking video! I love you, internet. x

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...

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!