Cooking With Richard

This is the classic Japanese beer junk-food, yakitori of chicken’s innards - hearts, gizzards, necks and whatever. Here I’m using chicken’s hearts from Oriental City. The hearts are rubbed in salt, washed and splayed.

Many chickens died to make this meal …

I cover them in the “mystery sauce” which N-sama made (it’s got at least mirin, lots of sugar and some soya sauce, but I’m not sure what else):

While grilling you need to keep dipping them in the mystery sauce. They cook in about 20 minutes.

Recipe for yakitori, and for the dipping sauce (日本語).

Remember this? Delicious potato cakes, stuffed with lamb and pinenuts. Here is how to make it.

2lbs (1kg) of potatoes, peeled and the large ones halved. Boil these until they are part-cooked, let them cool and mash:

200g lamb:

50g pine nuts, toasted:

These are the spices I’m using: a teaspoon of cinnamon, 3 cardamom peeled, 3 cloves, a pinch of pepper and a pinch of ground nutmeg. Bash these together in a pestle and mortar:

In 25g butter and some olive oil, brown the onions, then add the spices, then add the lamb. It’s a good idea to let the lamb brown on the pan (ie. don’t stir it too much):

Add 1 tablespoon of tomato puree, the pine nuts, lots of chopped parsley, and 2 tablespoons of water:

After the potatoes have been mashed, add 1 large tablespoon of white flour, mix well and form into four or five dough patties. Use lots of flour to cover everything including your hands, so nothing sticks:

Now this is the slightly tricky part. Actually it’s not too hard. Take a pattie of dough in the palm of your hand, put two tablespoons of filling on top, then wrap the potato around, pushing the filling down inside.

This shows one:

Repeat for the other cakes:

Shallow fry the cakes in oil. Be careful not to move them around the pan because they’ll fall apart quite easily:

Leave them to warm in the oven:

Result! Accompanying, N-sama made a salad, and there are some lemons and greek yogurt.

Attempt to cook something Japanese.

JBS Haldane’s seminal essay: On being the right size.

Last time the tortellini was a hit, so I made it again. The filling is completely improvised, but contains the vital quintumvirate of pork, parmesan cheese, eggs, nutmeg and sage.

The pasta is the basic pasta recipe which I’m beginning to think doesn’t cook too well - the lack of eggs makes it easy to handle but watery and unfulfilling when cooked.

These are quite cool, but can we eat them?

From Jamie Oliver’s Italy, tetrazzini, named after an Italian lady called Luisa Tetrazzini who lived in a Californian hotel. If you believe Wikipedia that is.

Iranian street food, apparently. The recipe comes from the Casa Moro cookbook. The lemons are Opies preserved lemons and the yogurt is just greek yogurt with some milk and garlic:

This close-up shows the filling which is lamb, pine nuts and various spices (coriander, cloves, pepper, nutmeg). I could have done with about 50% more potato because I had loads of filling left over:

In no particular order …

Scotch eggs and Irish stew at The Peddler’s Daughter in Nashua, NH. The food was pretty good.

It’s a geek joke:

Freedom to destroy the planet:

They have the Antique’s Roadshow in the US, which I was quite impressed about. However they seem to have a lot less of the old fuddy presenters handling crockery with shaking hands, and a lot more about how many thousands of dollars everything is worth:

While I was walking along the bay, an eagle flew past holding half a pigeon. It dropped its meal on the ice and then sat in a tree while I grabbed my camera and took some pictures. This was (unfortunately) the best one:

A 16th century graveyard:

Cheeky squirrel:

The squirrel was next to this ice-rink in the main park in central Boston:

Carl Zeiss Planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science:

Some street scenes from the old quarter:

The office is in fact in Westford, MA which is miles away from Boston itself:

The Red Hat office:

Some typical lunches. I had to go a long way to find those fruits:

You get these daft warnings on everything. We went to a sushi restaurant and they were warning about food poisoning. Strangely enough they don’t warn about how you’ll die of a heart attack if you keep eating the junk above.

Cameron shows how gutless he is.

I’d respect him a great deal more if he just came out and said that he did it, and we should all be permitted to smoke dope.

This is only barely one step above a “Cat stuck up a tree” story.

See also the Framley Examiner.