Prawncrackers

The farmed ones don't grow as big as the wild ones of course. But they are absolutely perfect for Chinese preparations, they are the ideal size for steaming whole on a plate. As for taste, the ones I've been getting recently have been as good as I've ever tasted. The last wild one I bought was darked skinned and tasted very muddy like the bottom of the sea.

Just making sure you get a balanced meal Chris, gosh I'm turning into my mother! If you have meat you must have some veg with it too etc etc

Yup David, at the wholesale market. Turbot is between £8-£9 per kilo, that fish you see was just over tenner. The paler skin fish at the moment are better eating then the dark ones, they have a muddy flavour. Even if they are free I'm not sawing my own marrow bones ever again, not vertically at least, it was a real pain in the arse! I ate a brilliant steak the other day David, bought from Deer and Dexter when I was visiting Cartmel. I know you get around, if you ever see any of their produce on your travels I would not hesitate to buy the lot.

I've been hankering for a good Reuben sandwich ever since visiting Katz's in New York. It was the first thing we ate on holiday, we landed, checked into the hotel and jumped into a cab to go straight there. I adored my Reuben but the wife was a little disappointed with her corned beef on rye. So where can I get a good Reuben here in the UK? Well as everybody knows, nowhere, good pastrami just doesn't seem to exist! So I've been brining a piece of brisket for a few weeks and even though the weather has been pretty bad I managed to smoke it for a couple of hours on my Weber kettle. Finished in the oven and left overnight. Slicing the cold pastrami the day after got me very excited indeed, it looked very promising. I like slicing my pastrami from cold as I can control the exact amount. A quick zap and assembly had me transported back to Houston St. My wife declared it was better than her Katz's experience with the corned beef, but I wouldn't dare to compare my Reuben to theirs. It was darned good though: The farmed turbot at the market has been really good lately. Usually I would normally steamed it whole in the typical Cantonese way but last week I decided to butcher one up to pan roast for the first time, saving the livers of course (I had two fish). I made a brown shrimp butter sauce and mixed in the mashed up lives for extra unctuousness. I decided to serve it off the bone with a simple salad and boiled potatoes: I found out today that one of the most difficult things to do is splitting a marrow bone vertically with a small saw, i was trying to replicate this dish. But split it I did and I roasted it with some sweet red onions. I wrapped the ends in streaky bacon as I was paranoid of leakage but it didn't really work. The bacon bits were nice in the parsley salad though and the final mess on the sourdough toast tasted a-ma-zing: The marrow bone in the picture was resting on a bed of pork cheeks. I made a ragu with them in the pressure cooker, perfect looking little meatballs that when approached with a fork collapsed into juicy piles of meat:

Just reading this thread for the first time and I'm surprised no one has followed up on this very good point. In fact I think it's a fundamental point. Personally I don't know any Chinese person who would cook just one of these dishes to eat solely with plain rice. Dishes like these would always be served alongside several others. The last dish of Stir-fried ginger beef looks lovely, if I was cooking it for my wife and I then I would have some veg with it too or maybe stir-fried prawns with broccoli. If there were more people, then I would steam a fish and poach a chicken too. But never would I eat a stir-fried dish like that on it's own with rice, are Erin and I alone here?

Blimey, now that presentation does look good. Hard to believe it's the same place. It helps that the photography is gorgeous too, natural light wins again.

Great quality photos, I'm tending to someone antipodean too because of the lovely sunshine and the flowering plants. Is it Nickrey?

I've never ever fancied the Waterside Inn, just looking at the prices is enough to put me off. Those pictures haven't done much to change my mind. Pam, aside from the assiette of desserts, which part of that meal could we not have cooked at home?

You're silly, I like that! Go with your gut reaction always. On a connected point, has anyone tried to recreate Peter Luger's special steak sauce? I remember it being quite nice, not overpowering the steak at all. It'll be good to add to the sauce options.

I think it's time to sing the praises of the Ducasse-Fat Guy method again! (If Ducasse is a French cooking god, does that make Shaw his prophet?) Whenever it gets too cold/wet/windy/snowy/British to chargrill outside I turn to this method to cook my thick steaks. I've been doing this ever since I first read this thread, maybe seven or eight times and it has never failed to deliver. Forget about the char taste, the crust using this method is another beast altogether. The complex brown buttery flavours are awesome and has a natural affinity with beef. The method is so controllable and produces evenly pink tender meat throughout. Though I do like to start my meat straight from he fridge to make sure is on the rarer side. I had a Dexter forerib yesterday that i trimmed down (can't wait to make burgers with th trimmings). It was a fantastic piece of meat, nice marbling for grass-fed UK meat and it cooked up perfectly. Easily the best steak I've ever eaten in this country. I ate a porterhouse at Peter Luger's in Brooklyn last month so the memory of steak perfection is still fresh in my mind and on my tastebuds. But hand on heart, this steak compared favourably to that memory. There's been a bit of to-and-froing on the Hawksmoor thread and about high-end British steakhouses in general. I can see both sides of the argument but here's a nail in the coffin for one side... Meat £10.70, butter 30p, time 40 minutes: All hail Ducasse and his messenger Shaw

Loving your week Kayb. You know I've never made a chilli from scratch and the list of ingredients that you mention has me intrigued. Can you expand a little on the your method, I'd love to cook a your authentic cowgirl chilli.

Yeah I must apologise for the size of my photos, they look fine on my little netbook but I do know they're rather large on a normal sized screen. I'm a little lazy and should really resize them so they fit. David, I'll repeat what Alan has said, I too try to do as little processing as possible. The setting on my camera is set to Vibrant colours, and most of the time I just use Picasa to crop and up the brightness. I only use Photoshop on special occasions to up the contrast and fix colourcast when it's needed . For this last set of pictures from L'Enclume because we were sat in the conservatory the light was ideal. Coupled with the wonderfully artistic looking food, all i had to do was press the shutter once, i couldn't fail! The conservatory was full when we were there and everyone else had the set lunch - monkfish cheeks to start, suckling pig then almond cake. Decent sized portions with little inbetweeny stuff too and the bread. Good value for £25.

Sorry, if I'm going to take a 320 mile round journey then I'm going to need some meat! That's what the missus and I did last Friday. Cartmel is a lovely village and the market was on so we left Brum at 8am and got there at 11am to make sure we had time to do some shopping before lunch at L'Enclume. What can I really say about our meal that hasn't already been said in this 10 page thread? Just simply awesome. There were elements in every dish that I'd never tasted before and little twists on things that were familiar but in the end it was simply the gorgeous flavours that won us over. This is confident food cooked and served by wonderfully professional and warm people. The staff made us feel very welcome, I can't wait to go back. For that reason I'm insanely jealous of anyone living within an hour of this place! Here are some pics and short descriptions of what we had: Duck fat lollies, parsnip and tapioca crisps: The amuse cleverly mimicked the table decoration. An apple meringue with oyster and seaweed: Cumberland Sauce jelly, butternut squash, blood sausage Salt & Vinegar crispy rice and cod yolk (cod roe mousse wrapped in saffron gel), bacon, cream off egg and garlic My wife was moaning that there wasn't any bread. All the other diners had some with their regular lunches, why can't we? When all a sudden, mmm great bread arrived with creamy butter and Maldon salt Turnip Root, Shredded leaf and stems, Duck WIngs, Vegetable Juice with Onion and Juniper. Very Japanese in execution even down to the grated turnip. In fact I could recognise a lot of Japanese flourishes in the meal not least with the use of Japanese crockery: Smoked Artic Charr, pickled Beetroots: Artichoke flesh and crispy skin, fresh goats cheese, crosnes, farm shoots and calamint: Dublin Bay Prawns, wild cabbage, carrots, wild chervi, toasted millet: Vintage Potatoes cooked in chicken fat, flaky crab, crispy chicken skin, three-cornered garlic. My favourite dish of the day, simple flavours exploding in my mouth: Skate "Belly", Cockles, Coastal Herbs: Beef Rib hiding under Celeriac,Crispy Oxtail and Alexanders: Iced Celery and chestnuts, white chocolate and English Truffles. Wife wasn't keen on this one but for me the transition between savoury and sweet was perfection: Greengage, Honeyed Wine Jelly: Apple Sorbet, Thyme Custard, Poached Crab Apple and Cobnut Crisp: To finish, Parkin Cake and Douglas Fir Shakes:

I got mine about four years ago. Be careful with any kind of bone, fish or meat, it won't handle it. Though apart from the crusty bread I can't think of anything else to warn you about. It is great for slicing cooked meat, duck breasts especially with the delicate crispy skin.

Very nice fella, I took the same path as you, from the Shun all steel cleaver to the Takeda Gyuto! Mine is the 210mm version, the geometry of these knives is just incredible - the taper becomes so so thin it hurts your eyes trying to focus on the edge. Word of warning do not ever try to slice a crusty loaf with it, you will cry for all the microchips. Though it is very easy to sharpen, and once you put a mirror polish it will look even better.

Ikura!! Please tell me you are you going to do kaiseki style multi course Japanese meal, please.

Another point to consider is the quality of the photos. If you take the chef's perspective, especially those in the higher-end places, they've laboured over the dishes, the presentation is perfect and they've sent it out. They've had so much control over the visual aspect of the food only then to have a blogger take a) some blurry ill lit or (heaven forfend) b) harshly flash lit photo making the food look less than appetising being released for all to see and judge. Of course, it's not practical for the chef to ask whether every picture taken will be published even less to inspect every one so the easiest solution for them is just to ban food photography. But to ban photos altogether is a little churlish. A lot of people go to nice restaurants for special occasion, a group photo is a nice memento of a good meal.

Funny thing I was in Chester yesterday on the way back from the Lakes. Dropping in on friends, they were raving about a local steakhouse Upstairs at the Grill, if it's near you it may be worth checking out. Not very helpful with your original question I know!

Not at all Pam! Even in my thickest Brummie accent i couldn't be that dry If Andreas Antona is doing proper steakhouse then I'm genuinely licking my lips in anticipation. In the land of 2 for £5 sizzling steakhouses, I'm all over anyone who knows their grain-fed from their grass-fed.

Nick, this is very exciting news indeed!

I'm sure Harters has heard all about Birmingham's many fine restaurants. But the question was around the NEC/Solihull, and on that count we may be struggling! Solihull town centre there's The Townhouse, standard gastropub stuff menu here, but done pretty well. On the high street there's Solihull's first fine dining place The Fat Cat (can't find a webpage). I can't personally recommend it as I've not been but the missus has and liked it. But as I write this, she says it's closed down! Solihull, not good for food.

I asked the very same question not long in this thread here. I wouldn't hesitate to get that book, it's fantastically detailed. Love your Japanese dog, I'm so making that next time.

Hmm that's a nice comforting dish to start the week. Looking forward to seeing more, I suspect it's going to be totally different to my week. Which is the great thing about the eG foodblogs and members in general, we all have such varied tastes and talents. Are you going to combine some MG with Japanese cuisine this week?

Ok, this blog is going to be locked tomorrow lunchtime (US time) so if you have anymore questions about it please fire away, i'm happy to answer as many as i can. Kayb, the quail eggs were lowered into boiling water and cooked for exactly two minutes then cooled immediately. If i had to be critical about that dish then I'd have liked to deep-fried the scotch eggs a little shorter so that the salmon was still rare. But i was conscious that i bought some very orinary supermarket salmon so cooked it a little over deliberately, if i had bought that whole salmon on Thursday then i would have done it that way. Technically I think the best executed meal was Wednesday's Cantonese affair but that is because that is the most practised one. There were little mistakes in Thursday's and i cooked way too much veg that night too. I like to be critical of myself as I believe it's the only way to improve.

I definitely couldn't keep this up for another week not least because my wife wouldn't want to go through all those dishes and pans again. Not to make this sound like an acceptance speech but special thanks to her for making this week possible! It's been great fun blogging this last week, hope you've all enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed putting it all together. I've never done anything like it before so all your positive comments have made it all worthwhile. Has it been a typical food week for me? No, I've condensed about three weeks of cooking into one. But hey, I've been on the forum for years now so I feel I owe you guys a decent first blog. My typical week would not usually see me cooking huge meals on a Wednesday and Thursday. Thursdays in fact I usually go round to my mothers for a family meal. I would tend to eat out or get a take-out once or twice so at the most I would cook 4 or 5 meals a week, ranging from throwing some pasta together to experimenting with new dishes like today. Next week would have been totally different, I've got three restaurants booked as it's my birthday! What didn't I get to do this week that I wanted to do? Well, i did cancel an order at the last minute for a 5kg Salmon on Thursday, but butchering a big salmon on top of everything would have been too much - so no gravlax even though I'd bought the dill already! It would have been nice to have done some Charcuterie but I only just got half a pig last month. I suppose I could do that next time, if you'll have me back.