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.

Flora came around for dinner and brought her spare eggs (hen's eggs, I'm not suggesting some kind of insemination troika here) and, unexpectedly, Callum.
Callum hasn't eaten at Chez Karl before.
Welcome Callum - a new guest to add to my collection!

Last weekend I was buying liquorice roots in Real Foods, and had my eye caught by a basket of summer truffles, ingeniously placed by the till. Since they were pretty cheap (summer truffles are very definitely black truffles' poor relations), I decided to give one a good home, and finally dust off my copy of Truffles - Ultimate Luxury - Everyday Pleasure - a Border's bargain cookbook I've had around for a long time without ever opening it.
The book has no particular summer truffle recipe, but I rather fancied trying out their less fragrant, more earthy tones with a cauliflower base so I adapted a Cream of Cauliflower Soup with White Truffle. Which seems a more authentic approach anyway - since white truffle oil doesn't actually contain any truffle as you know.

I wanted to avoid boiling the truffle, and just added it for the final heating. I thought I'd finely slice the whole truffle, but to be honest the crunchiness is slightly distracting and the actual flavour of the truffle is practically non-existent. It's also quite tedious - the truffles are really hard! So I prepared a few nice slices to use as a garnish and then grated the rest of the truffle as finely as I could on a nutmeg grater. When you add it to warming soup and the truffle fires up you get a terrific earthy musk.

I couldn't think of anything very exciting (and seemly) to do with Flora's eggs, so we just had Brie omelette, but I did make up some coleslaw using up the horseradish cream I had lying around from my pastrami sandwiches at Port Edgar's two-handed race.
It goes pretty well with omelettes I suppose, if you like coleslaw. Could have done with some chips though.
Hmmmmmmmmm. Chips.

Homemade coleslaw and truffle soup - Callum wanted to know if I cooked like this every night.
Isn't he sweet?

So what could be better than spending the day alone in a small boat with your ex-partner? Especially an ex-partner with whom being in a small boat was the source of constant friction when you were together?
Exactly - so that's what Rachel and I did today, entering a 707 in the yacht clubs's two-handed race. Rachel helmed.
It's best to let Rachel helm. She sulks otherwise.

Being such a special occasion and all, I thought I'd try baking rye bread and making up some pastrami sandwiches for our lunch. Possibly I made this decision at Valvolla and Crolla's olive oil tasting, (yes they do olive oil tastings) where I found myself hugely excited by their display of fine meats.

I also happened to be browsing Tattie Shaws just down the road and they had some horseradish, which I figured that would go nicely with the pastrami (it's beef after all), so I made up a batch of creamed horseradish mostly following the version in Nose To Tail Eating.
Which is a terrific little book by the way, and grows on me more every time I use it.

The rye bread was good - very good actually for a first attempt, the horseradish sauce excellent (be warned though - grating horseradish makes your eyes bleed), but the sandwiches were just a bit meh.
They were a somewhat dried out by the time we ate them, for one thing. I should probably have been more generous with the horseradish sauce, sandwiches do tend to lose much of their flavour marinating in a not-so-dry bag for a morning. Fortunately I still have half a rye loaf left to experiment with.

Later it occurred to me that I should really have fed Rachel with Rachel sandwiches - the female equivalent of the famous Reuben sandwich.
A Reuben, for those of you not lucky enough to have lived in New York City, is a grilled sandwich of rye bread with corned beef, swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian or Thousand Island dressing. Best served with a gherkin.
A Rachel on the other hand, substitutes pastrami for the corned beef, and coleslaw for the sauerkraut.

So anyway, I made a more humble and more ordinary pastrami on rye. I rather fancied that slices of pickled beetroot might work well instead of gherkin, so I gave them a shot, under-lathered on some horseradish cream and topped off with a rockety/watercressy salad.

In anticipation of a gloriously sunny day I also decided to make up a flask of chilled cucumber, mint and fennel soup, together with a plastic container of brandy-marinating raisins.
I have at least learned from bitter experience not to add ice cubes to chilled soup to keep it cool - since they just lurk stubbornly unmelting in wait for unwary drinkers with sensitive fillings.

I think Rachel was impressed with my ridiculous efforts, though she did ask somewhat archly exactly how much cream there was in her soup, but unfortunately it turns out that during a two-handed race there is no free time to sample fancy sandwiches or novelty soups. It wasn't until after the race that I had the chance to show them off.
Rachel reckoned that we'd have been better off just stuffing a couple of flapjacks in our pockets.

Ingrate.

Finally I found some fabulous fennel fare!
As faithful followers of fashion will know I've been trying to find a robust fennel dish for years now, braising with vodka, baking with breadcrumbs, grilling with cheese, always slightly disappointed by how watery and underwhelming the dish turned out to be. But not any more - thanks to the Rebel Cook all my fennel failures are forsworn. Now I have a braised fennel dish to be proud of.

I came across the book in one of my many, many trips to the Starbucks in what used to be Waterstones near my work. Well nearish my work - but that's a whole other story. Not that I willingly shop at Starbucks you understand, but there are no Police Box coffee bars or other quality outlets anywhere nearish my work.
And they do that Christmas eggnog thing. Hmmmmmmmm eggnog.

So anyway, this cookbook on the bargain books table caught my eye and ended up in my collection. It's got some very innovative recipes in it (fennel and anchovies!), but this is the first one I've got around to trying. Like many of my recipe books the pleasure is more in the owning than the using. Which is slightly sad really.
Must try harder.

Today's dinner turned into a surprisingly nice ad-hoc meal - I also tried out a couple of Nigella Lawson's summery recipes: a gently pleasing baked ricotta with a slightly more aggressive grilled chicory.
Completely vegetarian too as requested by Flora who is apparently meatbound after her viking voyage to the Shetland Isles. Except for the anchovies of course.
Not in Flora. In the braised fennel.
So not completely vegetarian at all then.

What's that you say?
Actually we aren't attending an Alliteration Day activity after all? Arse!

Stormbound in Pittenweem. AGAIN!

We had always planned to overnight in Pittenweem, and we weren't going to let the fact that a hurricane was forecast, or the annual Un-Bass Rock Race course had once again been shortened to a big circle, get in our way!

We had a lovely barbecue organised and the weather was perfect for cooking up on the quay-side so after a delightful Saturday race we turned right back around, put up the spinnaker and sailed straight to Pittenweem where we we tied up, cracked open the Cava, unshipped the hunka meats and pulled out the bag of charcoal, the starter fluid and ... the lawnmower?
So where's the barbecue? Oops. Back in the garage :(

So we had to improvise an un-barbecue on the galley stove, and rather well too I thought. Not that it affected the vegetarian crewmate overmuch, since cheese is the closest thing we have to a vegetable on board. Fortunately one of the redeeming features of Pittenweem is a decent chip shop. Fish is a vegetable right?

Come the next morning, though, we discovered why all those other boats had decided to go home - the hurricane had arrived and the boat was bouncing around like a frog in a blender, even snapping the sternline at one point. So we tried to make our escape but completely failed to get the boat to turn through the howling wind into the harbour entrance and several attempts later had to give up and tie the boat back to the quay-side.
That meant skipper John and I staying on board to check and adjust the lines every hour (every goddamn hour) while the rest of the crew made their pathetic excuses and abandoned ship.

It took two more days for the wind to drop enough for us to get out, but apart from running out of milk (not helped by Pittenweem's single grocery shop closing at Sunday lunchtime) we had plenty of stores on board, as usual, and managed to keep our spirits up with the Cava and the GinAndTonics.
I turned out some very tasty Bacon-wrapped chicken parcels in a packet (a packet oh the humanity!) of peppercorn sauce, and we eventually got a pleasant sail back up the river arriving home by 2 a.m. Tuesday morning - just in time to get back to work!

Astonish your friends. Impress your guests. Stuff their lamb with oysters!
Though judging from the leftovers on their plates, my guests were not so much impressed as horrified.

Browsing, as you do, the Guardian's back-catalogue of recipes I came across an interesting-looking idea for stuffing a saddle of lamb with oysters. Then as I was passing the ever-excellent butcher George Bower in Stockbridge I happened to notice their sign warning of the imminent sellout of their stock of spring lambs, so I thought I'd better get my hunk of sheep while the going was good. Remembering the oyster recipe, and observing the fishmongers opposite I decided to get myself a bunch of oysters and a saddle of lamb to stuff them with. A thirty-pound-sterling saddle as it turned out. These small sheep are getting bloody expensive - I wonder if it wouldn't be easier just to rear my own and slaughter them in the bath?

I bought myself ten fresh oysters in the vain hope they would yield the 8 oz of oyster meat called for in the recipe, and a pot of white crab-meat. In fact I had misread the recipe and thought it required both oysters and crab-meat, but it actually suggests smoked oysters and crab-meat as an alternative to the plain oysters, though in my defence it's not very clearly written. When my oysters yielded a disappointingly meagre 4 oz of flesh I also added a couple of ounces of the crab-meat and a half-dozen anchovies. But in the end there was rather more stuffing than my saddle could hold (and it was very nearly the required 3lb after boning and trimming as instructed), despite my best ramming efforts. The general opinion was that it really had quite enough oyster, I don't think the crab-meat added anything of great value but I quite liked the touch of anchovy saltiness, so I've amended the recipe accordingly.

According to the blurb at the top of the recipe, traditionally there were clear combinations of fish and meat - anchovies with beef, oysters with mutton, crab with lamb. Certainly there are plenty of eighteenth century recipes for shoulder of mutton with oysters, though I'm not so sure about the lamb and crab. The anchovies seemed to work for me though.
Anyway, since you can hardly find mutton these days this modern recipe calls for a saddle of lamb instead, and allows for (cheaper) frozen oysters which must be a particularly American thing - they don't seem to exist much over here.

The recipe also has something do with mustard, which encouraged me to a vaguely mustard-themed menu, with a herby mustard bread, roast potatoes with a floury mustard crust, and a mustardy butternut squash gratin. I stopped short at a mustard desert though - coward that I am. Perhaps I've been chastened by my experiments with crab ice cream?

On the whole a pretty tasty meal (well, I liked the lamb, the peas were oddly well-received and the panna cotta was as popular as ever) - apologies to my guests Grecky for the late invite, the lamb purchase was a bit spur-of-the-moment!

menu

My joint was about perfectly medium cooked (just slightly pink) after 1½ hours cooking - I took it out when the internal temperature reached 125° and it finally peaked at 130° while resting. Myself I would have gone for slightly more rare, and pulled it out at 110°F, but the meat was beautifully tender.
Unfortunately, the skin was a bit like hard rubber - it completely failed to crisp up: I really should have cranked up the temperature to start with for 15 minutes or so.

The gravy was a bit weird - I thought it might have taken a bit more colour and thickened slightly, but it remained somewhat on the thin side and a little grey and anaemic looking. Still reasonably tasty though. I did add some water to the roasting tin under the racked lamb, and perhaps I put in too much which prevented any of the juices from crisping up in the tin to give some colour.

I've learned from bitter (!) experience with the Christmas Goose that if you want to deglaze the roasting tin to make gravy, it's a good idea to add a little water (or juice/wine/vinegar/etc) to the roasting tin just at the start so that the first meat drippings don't stick and burn to a horrible layer of charcoal.
If you're sitting the meat directly in the roasting tin you can just make a protective bed of bones, mirepoix or sliced onion.
Unfortunately if you add too much water the drippings will never caramelise in the tin so finding some kind of middle ground would be ideal - this rolled joint did seem to leak quite a lot of juices.

I'd definitely make this again. But better :)

Razor clams. Damn those razor clams. I keep trying with them - I mean surely there must be something to them - they're ever so popular in all the fancy restaurants. Though on the other hand they are as cheap as dirt. So maybe the fishmongers know something fancy restaurateurs don't?

It so happened that I had a bunch of razor clams (or spoots) that I bought to try using instead of squid in my lacy squid. Incidentally, razor clams don't go lacy. In fact if you cut them up thinly and blanch them they just turn into rubbery bands. What (very) little flavour they ever had seems to be just leached away. So no blanching.

Your first problem when it comes to making something edible out of a razor clam is the grit. They love grit. They're just chock full of grit. Or sand. Or something equally gritty. So you need to rinse them really thoroughly in running water. Preferably overnight. But don't leave them covered in water - they'll just drown.

Your second problem is cleaning them - they're pretty ugly, complicated beasts that need various hard, foul or yes gritty bits removing. Some recipes just steam them like mussels, then slice up the flesh, but others clean and prepare them before cooking. Maybe if you can do this well enough you won't need to leave them all night in running water in your bath. Maybe.
You can persuade them to open up by briefly blanching them in boiling water, or pouring the water over them. (Or by drowning them!)
Cool them off quickly afterwards, though, or they'll turn rubbery.
Once the shells are open the body will easily pull out. You can hunt around the interwebs for videos and pictures of how to clean them (if you can work out what's going on). Mostly it's the used-condom-like digger which produces the best of the flesh. All I got from the rest of the body was something resembling a string bag, but I suppose that might get better with practice.

Your third problem is cooking them in some way that doesn't turn them to rubber. I'm sad to say I haven't found that method yet.
I did try grilling them in garlic butter on their shells, which wasn't too awful. They still turn a bit rubbery, don't have a huge amount of flavour, but you do get a lot of juice so it's nice to have a bit of bread to soak it up - at least the garlic butter tastes good!