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.

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.