Shalmanese

Okaaay, I think I might have just jumped waaay off the deep end there. I was thinking shrimp and peas and I somehow conceived of making a creamy shrimp milkshake and then drop in some bruleed caramel peas and get some of those giant bubble tea straws and a sealing machine... and voila "Shrimp & Pea Bubble Tea" (wow, it even rhymes! ). Then I thought "holy crap, even I'm not adventerous enough to drink that". Damn .

Doh, I forgot I also had a bottle of yuzu wine that I want to crack open as well as well as a bottle of ponzu. Can I do a Apple & Citrus intermezzo and then a yuzu toffee-crab apple? Or maybe Yuzu and cheese if I'm really getting crazy. Hrmm... edit: I probably need to pick up some fresh yuzu this week then.

Okay, so these are my thoughts for the challenge so far, just throwing stuff out there: For an appetizer, I wanted to do a simple orechettie pasta with pea puree and some sauteed Alaska Spot Prawns, using the peas in the dessert would be the easiest, trying to build on their natural sweetness although that wouldn't be local or seasonal. Using shrimp would be a bit tougher... hell, so I need to think up a shrimp dessert tapas. For a soup, after my experiments with seaweed paste, I think an asian kabocha & seaweed soup would be really cool and appropriately seasonal. For the main, I wanted to do a duck breast on parsnip puree, with some sort of fruity sauce. Since the soup is asian and the duck is western, I thought for desserts, I could do "squash meet west and duck meets east" theme for the next two desserts. Thinking about freezing some pumpkin puree in a sheet pan and then making a cinnamon/nutmeg caramel on some siplat and doing "mini pumpkin ice-cream sandwiches". For the duck, I want to make some sort of biscuit or shortbread flavoured with five spice powder and then glazed with a cilantro/mint/thai basil "jam". So thats 3 down... For the salad, I was a bit undecided but I think it should feature apples in some way and that paves the way for me to do an apple dessert. Can you get crab apples in Seattle, a mini-toffee apple with a twist inspired by the salad would be quite cool. Thats 4 down... What next, why not throw in a cheese course and then doing a cheese tapas? That would give me a lot of latitude to do something creative. And I need to do a proper dessert dessert and I have a honking massive 5lb slab of chocolate that I need to make a dent in and two bottles of double chocolate stout. Why don't I shamelessly plagu... uh... homage Mette's jaw dropping work and do a stout/chocolate mousse and then his "a chocolate bar with malted shortbread, chocolate malt ganache and beer marshmallow in milk chocolate"? That sounds like fun. Aaannnd, thats 6... so I just need the only truly original creation for the last tapas. I'll have to mull on that one a bit and let it bubble up. It has to be the most spectacular one of them all so we'll see. 7 days, 7 courses, 7 tapas, uh.... 6 people. Damn. Oh well, lets see how this goes.

The exciting things have been afeeted

Wow, holy crap. That came totally out of left field. Although very serendipitously. I actually woke up early yesterday morning for a big shopping trip with scarlett and heyjude and found Mette's PM waiting for me in my inbox. Of course, he didn't let me onto what he was planning so I spent an entire frustrating day shopping looking at hundreds of ingredients thinking about how I could integrate them into any sort of bizarre dessert. But as a result, I have a whole bunch of new ingredients I can play with and a whole bunch of dishes I can use to feature them. So the original plan was to invite a bunch of Australian students that I've met at UW for dinner next sunday and unveil my dessert to them then. Seeing as I like challenges and I like crazy challenges even more, I've decided to impose the following further restriction on myself: The dinner will consist of 7 courses, and the tapas dessert must evoke 6 features from the previous 6 courses as a "retrospective dessert tapas finish" with one totally unique one in there as well. Let the games begin!

Holy crap thats awesome. *cracks knuckles in anticipation*

The pans are called ramekins and you somehow got too much air into your brulee although I don't know how. Did you whip the cream at all?

I believe they're called "New Zealanders of Diminuitve Size" and no kiwi would be so crass as to call, they would at most, politely rebuke. Thing is, I genuinely don't much care for caviar. I really DID buy it for the reason I mentioned above.

Pasta & Clams - In whiche the Hereo narrowly avoides calamite I know of no way to do this story justice except via anachronistic verse so here we go... Pasta & Clams, Clams & Pasta: I bought the clams from "Oyster Bill" at the U-District Farmers Market and I got given the Pasta by the Chefs at Union so I was quite probably holding some of the finest Pasta & Clams in the Greater Seattle Region but they needed to be used posthaste. Pasta & Clams, "What should I do with Pasta and Clams?" I ask scarlett. "I dunno, you're bright and resourceful, you'll find a way". "What should I do with Pasta and Clams?" I ask heyjude. "Something simple, a bit of oil, a bit of garlic and it's good". And in my heart of hearts, I knew she was right. We were supposed to "respect our ingredients" and "let their purity shine through" and pay penance to the Lord Alice Waters at least 3 times a day for delivering us from the land Vegetables de Canne and Chicken a la Factorie. But you know what... fuck Alice Waters and fuck the people who mindlessly parrot her, they've forgot how to cook and learned how to shop and managed to confuse the two. I had a brand new swag of stuff from the Asian Supermarket and I wanted to play with the big boys. So Clams & Pasta... Bacon is an obvious pairing, bacon works well with shellfish. So if Bacon, why not Proscuitto, surely that would work nicely. So, Clams & Pasta & Proscuitto... how about: Seaweed Paste! I picked this up because I knew it had to be good for something. It's seaweed, soy sauce, sugar and a bunch of thickeners. Intriguing... What else? Garlic, obviously! Greek Yogurt for thickening? Ponzu??? Sure, why the hell not all of em, if I'm going to produce an abomination worthy of Dinner II, it should at least be international! So I go back up and heat up a pan of EVOO and butter. Wait until the butter just about browns and throw in the pancetta to crisp up. Add in the garlic and the clams and clamp on the lid. Let it saute and steam at the same time, all the lovely clam juices leaking out. Once the shells are open, I add in a big dollop of the seaweed paste, and thicken it with some greek yogurt. Toss in the cooked pasta and stir it all together. I wince, taste and wince again... and then realise I had subconciously shut my tounge off in anticipation of the awfulness. I allow my tounge to resume full operation, taste again and... wow... that tastes... not pretty damn good but amazing. It needs a little grind of pepper and a splash of yuzu turned out to be the wrong direction for it but a dash of balsamic vinegar restored the balance. Holy crap, it's phenomenal now. What the hell? This, by all laws of foodology, has no rights to taste good. I should be gagging and lamenting the misguided attempt to "fuse" foods and repenting my sins against the Great Waters of Alice but no... it tastes... abso-fucking-ly delicious. I plate it up, and add some lumpfish caviar I had lying in the fridge that needed to be used up (frank admission, I bought the lumpfish caviar just so I could use the phrase "some lumpfish caviar I had lying in the fridge that needed to be used up" on eGullet) and voila: It tasted really, really, REALLY good. One of the best meals I've ever made and certainly one of the most unexpected.

Whew, what a day. Exciting things are afoot, watch this space. Photos will be up soon when I can get my camera to behave. I went all around Seattle today with the impossibly cheerful and bubbly scarlett and the wonderfully generous heyjude. Scarlett showed me around the U-district farmers market and introduced me to all the cool vendors there and I picked up a bunch of nice stuff. Next, we went over to Wallingford with a short "detour" along the way at the *cough*bakery on 45th St*cough*. Went over the bottleworks where I picked up some nice stuff, next door to City Cellars where we randomly bumped into David LeClaire, a sommelier who runs a whole bunch of wine shows and tastings and stuff as well as being a really nice guy. Went down south through Queen Anne to Pike Place. Stopped briefly at Union where she's a PR person there (sorry, I'm afraid I'll get your title wrong so you'll have to say exactly what you are). Visited the kitchen there, had an impromptu vinegar and anchovy tasting and got given a free bag of pasta which I'm going to cook tonight. Phew, even writing this is tiring me out and I'm not even 1/2way done. Then we went down to the ID and had lunch and the Green Leaf where I was handed off to heyjude. From there, we headed to PFI which I have to say... without any exaggaration whatsoever, to be the best food store I have EVER set food in by a clear mile. It's simply... I mean, I don't think... You just need to check it out if you haven't already. I was starting to fear that I had been getting bored with shopping and had a decent idea of what foods were available and what their uses were. PFI just blew that notion out of the water, I bought $100 worth of stuff (which is a lot since thier prices are 1/2 - 13/rd the price of everywhere else) and I don't think I came close to 1/10th of the stuff I wanted to buy and experiment with. Among the things I DID get were lingonberry syrup, canned sour cherries, salt cod, 5 pounds of really good dark chocolate for $3 a pound, proscuitto for $13 a pound, orechetti pasta, halvah sesame paste... and I'm not even mentioning the stuff I wanted to buy but didn't. Seriously, go check it out if you haven't already. From there we went to uwajimaya where I picked up a whole bunch of asian staples, soy sauce (light & dark), oyster sauce, kecap manis, fish sauce, sambal, ponzu, bonito, kombu and a whole bunch of other crap. Plus the requisite goodies like roasted sunflower seeds, roasted peanuts and lychee flavoured white rabbit. Finally, from there I headed over to heyjude's place to lust over and gawk at her cookbook collection which has not 1 but THREE French Laundry Cookbooks, one of which is a limited edition, only 100 ever printed version (I lust after it soooo much). Finally headed home after nearly 10 hours straight of solid shopping, what a day. Whew.

AFAIK, Amazon does not ship pans overseas . edit: which is not to say you couldn't use a 3rd party service

I find this kinda funny as there is an old wives tail that potatos put into a soup can absorb only the salt and not the water and help fix oversalting on a soup.

Huh? My potatos boiled in salt are noticably salty. In fact, for masked potatos, I season the water to taste like the sea and the potatos come out perfectly salty with no need to salt post mashing.

Thanks for the tipoff Abra. I'll pick some up this weekend and see what I can do with em.

I hope that was a typo because otherwise this story just became a whole lot more sordid than I imagined .

I make a ton of hummus and just go through it with everything. Carrot sticks and roasted pita chips are a favourite but it's great to munch on.

I'm free this weekend. Need a volunteer? PM me.

This may sound snotty, but I can't help it. How can you miss Australian lamb when that's almost all that is available (along w/NZ), at least in grocery stores? Also, I would be interested in what you believe is better (subjectively or objectively) about Australian vs US lamb. ← It always seemed slightly obscene to me to move to a different country and then eat food from your old country that had to be shipped halfway across the world to get to your plate, especially when there are passable alternatives. Man, cooking alone can be tough sometimes. I decided to roast a chicken and I seem to be genetically incapable of roasting a chicken without going all out on the sides. So I had: Roast Chicken with an Almond & Sage Stuffing and a Red Wine & Sage jus Roasted Fingerling Potatos Roasted Cauliflower & Broccoli with Shaved Parmesan Sauteed Lobster and Chanterelle Mushrooms Salad of Lettuce, Sorrel, Bacon and Fried Chicken Livers So much food for one person . Is it bad that the only times I am homesick is when I wish I could share a taste of what I'm cooking with my family?

I always bang it out a couple of times to get most of it out and just ignore the inevitable residue. Someone on eG suggested burning the stuff off using your gas burner. I haven't tried it but it sounds like it should work.

Here's something I've been working over for the last few months: Bone Marrow Ice-Cream. Roast a whole bunch of bone marrow bones a la Fergus Henderson and then just churn like a normal ice-cream except with less cream to even out the fat content and less sugar. drizzle a little parsley "coulis" and garnish with a caramel glazed chicken skin for the crunch. Maybe serve with a mincemeat pie.

me too!

You didn't talk at all about how it tasted .

If you don't want to reduce it further, throwing in a tiny bit of gelatin and pectin should give you a slightly firmer, thicker mouthfeel without unduly affecting the purity of the flavour.

Check out The definitive Buffalo Wing thread for a great pictorial on how to make wings.

Hrmm... How about instead of that, you try wattacetti's mouthwatering Pineapple pave: The recipe is here