That's my birthday - not Bob's.
My 50th in fact. OMG.

I'm not a big fan of my birthdays as a rule. I'd much rather ignore them, or pretend they aren't happening. In fact usually my (girl) friends seem more interested in marking them than I do.
Girlies are always suckers for birthdays: Eldoradoes - I'm looking at you!

This year feels a bit different though - it would seem churlish not to mark the fact that I've made it to a half-century, against all expectations, plus to be honest I'm starting to feel some twinges of mortality - as if my body isn't really going to last forever. Grey hairs are now sprouting like pigs bristles from the most unlikely of places and my belly button seems to be determined to make a break for freedom.
So I figure I better make the most of this Birthday, in case the rest of them aren't much fun.
By booking a whole week of entertainment!

To kick things off I took the opportunity to ceremonially rid myself of the wooden albatross known as Bob - my dilapidated wooden dinghy. He's an old development-class Cherub once upon a time constructed by someone in their garage who had too much time and plywood on their hands, but he hasn't sailed on the open water for a couple of years now. He just sits on the tarmac at Port Edgar Marina soaking up hundreds of pounds in berthing fees every year.

Bob was once a fine figure of a boat and he has provided us with a fair amount of fun in his time - I have particularly fond memories of a three-men-in-a-tub expedition around the Beamer lighthouse in a raging storm with two heavyweight buddies (sorry buddies - you know it's true) which required as much bailing as sailing.
Unfortunately the last few times on the water have resulted in Bob having to be rescued from certain calamity, either because of important bits falling off, or because he simply started to sink.
So Viking funeral time.

It would have been nice to sail him off somewhere isolated and scenic, like Inchkeith Island but scenic, for his funeral pyre, but I was afraid that without an inordinate amount of time, energy, or money being spent on him he was depressingly unlikely to make it out of the harbour. Plus I couldn't find anyone stupid brave enough to come with me.

Fortunately my friends the Brians kindly offered their extensive property for a Bob Burning Party, plus a road trailer to get him there. So we made an event out of it, barbecue, fireworks, and pumpkin carving contest. The whole nine yards.
Thanks Brians! Wonder what they'll do with all those leftover pumpkins?


My first Birthday present being a handy Costco card (Thanks Alex!) I was able to get a reasonable deal on the barbecue meat, plus a vast bottle of Buffalo Sauce - and my favourite butcher provided the rest. He had some very decently priced wild boar belly so I made up a batch of wild boar and maple syrup sausages highly recommended, as well as 3lb of pork, sun-dried tomato, feta and rosemary sausages good - tastier than the last tomato round. Since the meat grinder was already out, I also had a bash at making some spicy lamb burgers (Thanks Tony Singh!).
The sausages were both well-received, and not to blow my own trumpet, delicious.
Unfortunately I had to hide the lamb burgers, since they were clearly never going to hold up through the grilling process. I had to take them home to fry in a pan! Really carefully.

I took a leaf out my American friend Becky's book and served up barbecued chicken wings with the bottle of hot sauce and freezer bags for people to dip them into à la Buffalo (Thanks Becky!), and I relearned something about organising a barbecue:
- Start it going at least an hour before people are due to turn up. That gives you half an hour to get the charcoal glowing and another half hour to have a stack of cooked meat ready to feed them with the instant they arrive. Expectant and starving.

It's long overdue, but last night I extruded my first sausage!
Last Christmas (is it only last Christmas??) Mum bought me a sausage machine.
Yes, I know I put it on my Christmas list, but then I put a yacht and a motorbike on my Christmas list, so I never expected to get one. I couldn't have been more surprised to discover it hiding under my Christmas Morning pile of goodies from Santa if I'd woken up with my head stapled to the pillow!
And now a mere 10 months later I've finally taken the beast out of its box and played with it - you know I don't like to rush these things.
It turns out that making sausages is an awkward, fiddly, messy pain in the backside. In other words it requires some practice and a little skill.

I went down to my favourite butcher to talk turkey, er sausages, and buy the casings. I've always been particularly fond of tomato sausages so I thought I should have a go at those to start with, using sun-dried tomatoes, some extra tomato paste (the butcher's suggestion) and adding some basil to the mix. The butcher recommended I try belly pork, rather than the more usual shoulder (cheaper, no need for extra fat though possibly less flavour), so I bought a massive slab and saved half of it to make one of Shane Osborne's starters that I've quite fancied trying for a while.

So it's not as easy as I might have hoped to get the sausage skins onto the feeder, like trying to roll on a metre long condom. Now I know why condoms are lubricated - a thorough soaking of the sausage casing in warm water really helps (it turns out). Then you have to fill the skins smoothly and evenly - not surprisingly I ended up with a lot of hamburger meat from splitting overfilled sausages, and a lot of pork mousse from over-mincing. But I'm sure I'll get better with practice, and even the mousse tasted quite nice, even if I was a bit cautious with the tomato flavour this time.

Flora was lucky enough to be the first to be invited to taste my sausage, and I made us a nice upmarket bangers and mash for dinner. We kicked off with that Crispy Pork Belly with Apple & Frisée Salad made with the pressed leftover sausage belly (delicious!), then those sausages with seasonal mash with pumpkin and red onion, cleansing green beans with lemon and black olives, and a slightly spicy chilli ginger tomato gravy.

In classic eating-for-the-end-of-days winter meal style we finished off with a massive baked toffee apple pudding consisting of mostly hot sugar.
From belly pork to a porky belly. Now bring on the apocalypse!

For what it's worth here's my dinner plan - it failed at the point of putting in the pudding though, since we had to watch some Big Bang Theory first while waiting for the sausage to settle.

Well, 2 uses for leftover yoghurt sauce at least.

Every so often I'm overcome with a nostalgic desire to get absolutely pissed and furiously consume one of the frozen Spicey Cottage Curries (Karahi Gosht - extra spic"e"y) that my Mum brings up for me from her (and once my) local curry shop.
It's a complicated ritual that involves laying in a stock of Marston's Strong Pale Ale (a fine brew which is both delicious and reasonably priced, not to mention 6.2% ABV, which possibly explains why they seem to no longer make it, the nannyist bollocks), making up a nice soothing pot of yoghurt sauce and running a bubbling foam bath in preparation for the evening's entertainment. This may seem a lot of effort, but it does have the benefit of cutting out the tedious need to spend the night pub-crawling through Wibsey trying to get loaded enough to really enjoy the curry at its source.

First I stick a few starter beers in the freezer, make up a vat of the yoghurt sauce du jour (they're all a bit random as to quantities and precise ingredients, but it's hard to go wrong), then I roll out the seeds from a half-dozen or two thin green chillies and slice them over the top of the frozen curry, put the lid back on the tin-foil container and pop it into the oven on its lowest setting. Then it's into the bath with some bubbles, the first beer and Radio4 Extra for company.

Luxury.

The curry is ready to eat when the mouth-watering smell of it fills the house, and you can't resist its call any longer.
Or you regain consciousness in a cold bath. Whichever comes first.

Usually I end up having to make too much yoghurt sauce for just the one meal, it being too hard to grind up fewer ingredients, so I have to think of things to do with the leftover.
Obviously I can make up more curries to eat with it, but it also makes a reasonable topping for a spicy soup if you happen to have a bunch of vegetables that need boiling hanging around and some trahana to bolster them with.

This time I thought I'd see what it's like as a marinade, so I poured the leftover sauce with a bit of extra garlic over a couple of pork chops and stuck them in the fridge for a day. I made up a quick curry with some frozen peas, a small pot of rice, and stuck the chops under the grill. Shake off excess sauce first - or it'll just burn.

To be honest the sauce isn't really rich or complex enough to impart all that much flavour to the pork, even if it does a reasonable job of tenderising the meat though it takes a day or two. Of course you can always add spices to boost its potency.
The peas were better than the pork :)

I used the rest of the sauce to whip up an Aloo Dom adding a bit of extra grated ginger root to fry up with the coated, par-boiled potatoes in a generous amount of oil to give some extra crispiness before adding the sauce (as was - except for a bit of extra salt and the obligatory extra chillies) and simmering until tender.
That worked pretty well.

Of course, now I've got leftover curries from the leftover sauce, which I need to make more curries to eat with, like this delicious achar gosht or these not-quite-so-successfull tandoori aubergines, and before you know it I've returned to the days of endless curries and the terrifying cycle repeats.

An overnight trip down the river in slim company to Eyemouth.
Possibly due to the complete failure of the yacht club, during the upheaval of the building of a new Forth crossing, to advertise the race, or maybe just part of the steady decline of sailing around these parts, for whatever reason this year's Convoy Cup race featured only two lonely entrants - ourselves and a Fisher Row Moody 27 Bilge Keeler called Sulumar.
As you can imagine - we fancied our chances for a prize, but sadly despite beating the competition by 1½ hours over the five hour race, we still lost by an hour on corrected time. Damn these handicappings are harsh!
Still we got to eat well on the way there!
Eyemouth has suffered for as long as I've been going there with having nowhere worthwhile to eat. Though the fish shop is perfectly adequate, the only other restaurant fish available seems to be frozen or breaded pap courtesy of Captain Birdseye, and I consider my meal at the local gastric pub "The Discontented Sole" to be amongst my most horrible dining experiences.

Fortunately these times are gone with the re-opening of the Churches Hotel and Seafood Restaurant under Lesley Orson and Lawson Wood, whose fishy skills we thoroughly tested whilst recovering from the race.
Or possibly from the GinAndTonics?

As dedicated followers of fashion will know I'm allergic to shellfish - have been ever since I stuck a prawn in my eye on the seafront at Leigh-On-Sea to impress my first proper girlfriend Louise and it blew up like a comedy eye balloon. So naturally I try to eat shellfish whenever I can, for one thing it's delicious, and for another I like to keep an eye on my reaction, so I'll know if it ever looks like ramping up and killing me. Provided it's only doing it pretty slowly, of course.
It's an odd thing actually - it doesn't happen with all shellfish and it doesn't seem to depend on how they're prepared. But the fresher they are the less they seem to affect me. Crustacae are the worst, mussels, scallops and squid give me just a little tickle, and oysters don't seem to affect me at all (touch mother-of-pearl).
So anyway, I couldn't resist the menu's Luxury crayfish and prawn cocktail. And luxury it was too. Hardly any life-threatening allergic reaction, a lovely rich creamy Marie Rose sauce (secret ingredient - mayonnaise!) and a delightful little salad dressed, as I was told, with a fragrant homemade herb oil. It took me ages to figure out where the occasional delicate bursts of basil were coming from!

If I have a complaint about the restaurant it's that they didn't have any tomato juice for my Bloody Mary. Bloody Hell!
Still I was suddenly struck with the idea of serving the Bloody Mary they didn't have in a giant beef tomato. With a straw sticking out. So struck in fact, that I had to make an immediate note in my brand new smartphone. Having recently lost my classic dumbphone I decided to finally bite the bullet and upgrade to the latest and greatest all-singing all-dancing smartassphone.
This modern technology is a white-knuckle ride people, and I'm still hanging on grimly. Ask me how it's going in a couple of years....

So, seeing as how my first course hadn't killed me, I had the scallops for my main. And such scallops I have never had. They tasted even fresher than ones I've cut open straight off a fishing boat, and these had been given just the merest hint of a scorching hot pan to give them a little caramelised glaze.
Beautiful. Though a bit skimpy if I'm honest - I was slightly jealous of the other dinners, but then I got to try them all anyway so that's alright then.

For dessert I chose the unlikely pairing of an undrinkably sweet, dark sherry called Pedro Ximénez (from the grape of the same name) and vanilla ice cream.
On it's own the wine tastes like alcoholic prune juice, though not alcoholic enough to be worth drinking, but paired with the ice cream there's an almost alchemical reaction which creates an inspired dish. Just pour the shot glass of sherry over the ice cream until balance is reached, then dig in.
And throw the rest of the sherry away!

Anyway, I liked the hotel so much that I bought the company. Well, OK, I just hired them out for my birthday party.
But to my bank account that's feeling like the same thing.

In an unrelated tickling I recently fed Flora some of Anthony Bourdain's Norman mussels (or molds as Google Translate unreliably informs me) which she ate with the gusto of two, huge blokes. That Bourdain - he may be a mercenary bastard and his food might be a bit rough around the edges, but he sure knows how to cook.

I usually try to plan my evening meals with Flora a few days in advance. I try, but I rarely succeed. What usually happens is I end up wandering around my local Fucking Supermarket™ at lunchtime trying to put ingredients together in my head. Sometimes it comes off and sometimes it doesn't. Today Flora demanded noodles I thought I'd make some neat little bundles of pasta and a few other vegetables cut into noodle-like ribbons (so we aren't just having noodles) by shaping them with ramekins. So most of my wandering around the aisles was looking for noodly vegetables. I was thinking courgettes and apple, but then I noticed the Asian pears Isn't that a bit racist? A racist fruit? and thought I'd give them a go.
I also had an idea that ribbons of sharon fruit (persimmons) might go nicely with carrot, but they didn't have any persimmons. Though they had some lemon grass. So I went with that.

The notion of caramelizing fish popped into my head while I was buying my lunchtime roll-mop herring. I fancifully imagined wrapping salmon pieces in a thin, teriyaki-flavoured, crispy shell, but the result was a lot more (very) sticky toffee than brittle crunch.
I wonder if a bit more experimenting, perhaps with making the coating thinner, cooking off more of the soy sauce from the caramel, coating the fish with something powdery to dry off the surface might produce better results?
Or the idea might just be doomed - I see that Heston makes a fishy shell based on Gellan (a polysaccharide gum), but I haven't been able to figure out how hard it is - I get the impression it's soft and springy like jelly.

According to my fishmonger there was a glut of octopuses at the wholesaler. Though a pedant might have said octopodes, and an ignoramus octopi, however you decline them the phrase still brings some pretty horrible images to mind - maybe I've seen too many Alien films!

I can't remember cooking octopus before, squid yes, octopus not so much and it looks hard to avoid them turning to rubber.
According to my fishmonger's Greek friend freezing them helps to break down the tissues slightly, but I decided to have at a couple of his fresh ones to see how they turned out.
Some research suggested that the best approach would be a long slow braise, so that's what I went for.
The result was quite tasty, and the octopus flesh reasonably tender, but held surprisingly little flavour which had all leached out into the sauce, leaving the octopus very reminiscent of tired chewing gum.

Probably dinner wasn't much helped by having little time to enjoy it before packing up for the Anstruther Muster weekend - stuff a dry sack with my sleeping bag and new camping pillow, a quick shave and I'm off.

Ha! I should be so lucky - and so a moan about razors:

My brother Kurt bought me a light tent for Christmas.
Not last Christmas obviously - that would be ridiculously precipitous. No, the Christmas before. Or possibly the one before that.
Personally I like to savour my Christmas presents. Hoard them. Build up the anticipation. Drag out the pleasure.
Of course, beyond a certain point you can't stop the savouring and start the enjoying, because by then you might have saved yourself up for just a massive disappointment.
So there you are - trapped. Fearing the letdown. The bitter disillusionment.
Can't open the box. Can't put it away. Too late to send it back.
God I love Christmas me!

Anyhoo, whenever-it-was ago I decided my food photos were rubbish, so I asked Kurt to get me something to help out; he has some experience of these matters.
Since I generally take photos of my dinner, which I usually eat at dinner time, when it's generally dark, I'm always having to use the flash on my camera. And flash photos of food don't look very flattering. I figured Kurt would get me an external flashgun or something, but he went and bought me this whole light tent setup. Like a complete miniature studio.
Now I've been writing up an article on sandwiches for the yacht club magazine, and I wanted some quality photos of this fantastic new concept in lobster sandwiches I invented so this weekend I finally cracked open the box and set the thing up.

There's a bit of fiddling popping out the white nylon tent and getting the lights set up, so I don't know that I'll be doing this every time I make a dinner, but then I got going with a few tasteful shots of a small lobster prior to sacrificing it for my sandwich filling. You need to do a bit of careful arrangement of the subject so it's raised above all the seams of the tent, as I clearly demonstrate below, but I was pretty pleased with the results - the photos are coming out great.
Now I just need to figure out what all those other buttons on my camera are for.

Thanks Kurt!

My neighbour Nancy has an allotment and gave me a bag of broad beans yesterday. Apparently she doesn't like them. Good for me I suppose, though personally if I had an allotment I'd grow things I liked.
So today I had beans on toast for tea. But I didn't bother getting out the whole light tent thing, and my photos are back to their usual incompetence.
Thanks Nancy!

The Olympics are on apparently. Did you know?

Call me a miserable curmudgeon, but I'm just not happy to see a venal political class successfully con the country into spunking billions of our hard-earned tax pounds on corporate welfare for the most greedy, abusive, parasitic companies on earth.

Anyway, despite my reluctance Flora came over for dinner with a gift of some fancy Italian pasta she just received from her friend Captain Doctor Army Jo and we caught some of the sailing competitions.

As expected the sailing coverage was both dull and inept, the cameramen seemingly paid some kind of bonus each time they can cut away from any vaguely interesting action developing on the course to another painful bout of trite drivel from a pretty bint in a RIB.
Fortunately the pasta was rather good:
Massive ridged multi-coloured pasta tubes like giant cannelloni - I reckon they might be bombardoni but whatever they are they proved a good way to use that £10 black truffle impulse-buy that I picked up at Dobbies last time I passed through on my way to my dentist. I'd been wondering what to do with it.
I like to get myself a little treat every time I go to the dentist. Preferably something nice and sugary. Or really hard :) It's such a long drive, and I'm already taking the time off work anyway.

So thank you Captain Doctor Army Jo!

It was also a good opportunity to use up the last of the cobnuts my Mum brought me up from Kent on a surprisingly good raw ceps salad which Flora also particularly liked.
Thanks Mum!

Flora was much less impressed with my Lycheese dessert. And she does like lychees. And Ricotta.
But I enjoyed it.

A month without drink now, and still no sign of my penis.
I know it's down there somewhere.
Sigh.

I suppose it would help if I also cut down on the sacks of Doritos at work, but it's sooooooo hard. And working is sooooooo boring.
Sigh.

As a nod to my attempts to trim down to bikini weight I've been eating more salads, but it's been hot recently. Damned hot.
And some of my salads have been pretty hot too. So not really salads at all then.

I gave a Jamie Bastard Oliver microwaved (microwaved!) recipe for dressed potatoes hot potato salad a go, and it was rather nice!
Bastard.
And I tried out a rubbish Nigella Lawson idea for braising little gem lettuces which are salads too, right?

Then Flora brought over some duck to turn into Duck Chow Mein - a winning move on her part:
 - Cost of reduced-price duck breasts (Flora): £2
 - Cost of all the vegetables and noodles (Karl): £20
Kerching!

I don't think there's any way I can get away with pretending that was a salad though.
Bugger.

Doctor Jenny is moving.
Again.

So in celebration Mum and I went to visit her charming-but-too-expensive cottage in the foothills of Angus to cook her a goodbye meal on her AARGA.
We took her some of my experimental bread made with Mum's Herman, some liquorice liquor and a bunch of fish.

I've been reading through Heston Blumenthal's recipe (if recipe is quite the right term for his wide-ranging meal concepts) for salmon poached in a hard liquorice shell. I was inspired to try out some of the flavour combinations in a puffy fish packet. (That's puffy fish not puffer fish. Which would be a whole different kettle of, er, fish.)
And thus was my Liquorice Salmon En Papillote born.

I've had some previous disappointing experience with using liquorice essence from a herbalist (Napiers on Hamilton Place - since closed down), which provides surprisingly little liquorice flavour (though it does capture the aroma quite nicely). So I decided to try extracting my own liquorice liquor by boiling up the roots, which worked pretty well actually. I boiled mine for an hour, but I suspect you could stop earlier without any loss of flavour. You get a brown liquid which smells only of wood, but has a clean strong taste.

I wanted to get hold of some Chardonnay vinegar for my vanilla mayonnaise, but this appears to be impossible to find in Scotland's capital as I discovered from my tour of the delis of Edinburgh. Or the remaining delis of Edinburgh. It turns out that most of the reliable Peckam's shops have closed down, and I was disturbed to discover that Stockbridge - that bastion of artisan middle-class sentimentality has now been thoroughly colonised by two different Fucking Supermarket™ Local stores. I assume these are called Local stores as a hat-tip to their express purpose of destroying all remaining quality and diversity left to local shoppers.
As you stand on St Stephen Place and gaze at the magnificent Doric pillars flanking the archway that until 1906 led to Stockbridge Market, when it was replaced with sheltered housing - presumably for people who did not require fresh produce, you can't help the sinking feeling of watching history repeat itself.
Our march of mediocrity continues apace; terrific.

The puffy fish was absolutely gorgeous, particularly interesting was the way that the asparagus took up the liquorice flavour - more eagerly than the fish in fact. Asparagus and liquorice really do match very well - and would make a lovely side dish on their own.
I served it with Sue Lawrence's potato and celeriac gratin, made with cream infused with juniper berries and mace (it's not Sue Lawrence's - it's mine!), which particularly complemented the vanilla mayonnaise.

We ate dinner taking our last opportunity to admire the view from Jenny's patio of the hills and mountains across the Tay valley climbing off towards Fort William. And as the sun slipped to the horizon and a fiery glow descended on the hilltops, whirling windmills in the distance sparkled and burned like vast roman candles. Suddenly they almost seemed to justify their vast and pointless expense.

Goodbye country cottage with your AARGA.