Cooking With Richard

A gratin dauphinois, roughly from this Heston Blumenthal recipe:

Boston beer:

A giant steak. Very nice:

I totally enjoyed the Japanese film Paprika on the plane, and then bought it for N-sama as an anniversary present on DVD:

Gyoza and pork ramen from Sapporo Ramen in a little Japanese mall in Cambridge MA. The noodles were exceedingly good:

This is something they call “bubble tea“, which is a sweet tea with tapioca balls. The one I had here was made with red beans and green tea, but you can have other variations. I think this has probably got about a million calories in it, but it’s pretty pleasant to drink on a very hot day like today:

Clam Chowder, essentially a clam/fish soup with cream, with oyster-flavour crackers. This is a Boston / New England speciality. Pretty good actually:

Smoked salmon:

A more posh clam chowder:

Strawberries covered in chocolate, and cake. The strawberries were very tasty:

Red Hat Summit in Boston:

Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox:

Bagels for breakfast:

Da boyz:

Ummaii!

Our crazy driving holiday around Scotland is now over. I drove 1,104 miles. Here are some photos:

Troooon

Booooat

♫♬listen to the song ♪♫♬

Arran and Lamlash

Home of the worst pub on Arran …

Lunch

Castles and shika

Shikatetsu …

The Lamb and Whisky

The Array Whisky distillery, home of some rather pleasant spirits.

Loch

Maggie the moggie

It’s my bro’s moggie:

These sausages were from the butcher on the high street in High Bentham in the Yorkshire Dales.

They were absolutely delicious. I finished them off with an improvised gravy constructed from the cooking fats, cranberry sauce, sage, rosemary, red wine and water:

I made this last Sunday, because the oven is the only thing I can use in the kitchen at the moment. I stuffed the chicken under the skin with butter and herbs from the garden. With a cream gravy, roast potatoes and carrots.

Snails:

.. and pants:

I think this is a brilliant concept. This artist called “SLINKACHU” paints snails and then photographs them in urban environments. Previously he was famous for doing these little people on ordinary city streets.

I really hope that the artist lets the snails “go free”, perhaps to be discovered by a bemused commuter, or a snail connoisseur…

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While I was looking at this snail art, I saw that the artist had painted a sadly familiar “tag” on a snail, “TOX.08“. If you regularly travel through London, you will be familiar with the depressing vandalism of this teenager. I found this 10 minute documentary on the internet about the culprit of this eyesore, it’s worth watching because it shows the people who have to clear this spam off tubes, and where tube trains go in the night …

… but great food. This was a pasta / tomato / mozzarella dish from Jamie’s Italy book, which was fab:

Buta-no-kakuni:

I used a slightly different recipe this time, from here.

Oriental City has been under threat for so long, but it is finally to close at the end of May, to make way for soulless flats and a DIY superstore. (There aren’t enough DIY superstores in London apparently, so a one-of-its-kind shopping centre has to be leveled to make way for one).

I’ve been going there regularly for at least ten years, but today was the last time.

There aren’t really any alternatives. Chinese Wing Yip, down the road, is expanding, but they don’t have the other shops or non-Chinese food. Japanese TK Trading is miles away.

More discussion of the closure …

Thanks to ex-Mayor Ken Livingstone for valiantly defending the store — oh no, in fact he approved the planning application. Well, he’s been thrown out of office now, but his stupid planning decisions like this and others will linger on.

This is what I got from Utsuwa no Yakata Japanese pottery shop:

The garden is full of stinging nettles at the moment, vicious little bastards. What better way to show them who’s boss than to make nettle soup. I collected a large pot full of the shoots and heads, which turned out to be about enough for two people:

This is the soup, with a sprig of mint leaves (also from the garden). Very delicious — we should eat nettle soup more often.

This is the lemon from the lemon tree:

Same as this leek potato and bacon soup except that I didn’t have any leeks so I used cauliflower instead. Very tasty!

MEAT! Or more precisely, 11lbs (5kg) of pork shoulder down to the loin. This cost me under £20 and should feed about 15-20 people, so it’s actually very good value (if you have 20 people that need feeding).

If Justin gets his act together and calls me then I may well cook this for his party tomorrow afternoon.

Update

Not bad, a bit dry. Crackling was excellent.

I photographed a sparrowhawk catching, killing and eating a starling in the garden today. Well, the killing and the eating kind of overlapped. As you can imagine the starling was not too happy about this situation and made a lot of noise.

Click photos for larger versions.

ガーコ is still sitting on her nest. We’re expecting ducklings towards the end of this week. Here’s the latest photo of (an) egg, she covers them up before she goes out each time.

While you’re waiting, here’s a photo of our lovely long-tailed tits:

Here is M-kun playing Mario Kart Wii, which is bloody good fun: