It's my Birthday and I'd cry if I wanted to!
But instead I had a Smoothie Party with my cute landlady and a few of our friends. It seemed like a healthy alternative to drinking. Since I'm on the dry :(

Aline suggested it, and even bought me a smoothy cookbook for inspiration! I also sneaked a few ideas from the menu of a local bar at the recommendation of my fellow guests at Stasczi and Andrew's wedding over the weekend. Yep she's hooked another one. You go girl!

It might have been easier if I had a juicer (I'll add one to my gadget wish list), but the shopping was still unusually straightforward I have to say, mainly requiring the gathering of some attractive-looking fruit, random herbs, a few cartons of fruit juice, ice cream and some doughnuts.

Once upon a time most of my friends lived in The Haunted House; a fine Georgian town house in Newington, one of Edinburgh's earliest suburban villa developments.
The house had massive, oddly-shaped rooms packed with mysterious faux-egyptian furniture and furnished with huge onyx fireplaces. It featured servant's quarters, hidden staircases and hosted many atmospheric parties. It was at one such party that I (OK, maybe with a little help from my friends) invented the doughnut smoothie, which I decided would also be a feature of this smoothie party.
Hence the doughnuts.

As it turned out, the hardest things to buy were carrot juice you really need a wholefood shop, a reasonably ripe pineapple though most good supermarkets do carry an abundance of pineapples seemingly made from styrofoam. and a decent vanilla ice cream.
Just in case the evening wasn't going to be liquid enough, and also because as usual for this time of year I have a couple of enormous pumpkin to use up, I made a big pot of good old-fashioned lactose-gluten-meat-fish-free pumpkin soup, and discovered crispy fried rice ball dumplings. Which I definitely plan on making again.

What with the not drinking and the not turning into a bacchanalian orgy my birthday party was a very family-friendly affair: Julia brought her 18-month-old monkey and Anuschka brought her spawn of the devil. At least - it's the only explanation I have for his evil red-eye in every single photo. To give the devil his due though, he really liked my doughnut smoothies.

That young devil can come again!

You would think, wouldn't you, that all that finely ground fruit would be fantastically good for you? And that you would would wake up the next day bursting with health and enthusiasm? Explain then, if you can, how I came to be so massively unwell next morning that I had to take the day off work and spend it sleeping. Finally waking up at 3 p.m. with a sore throat and a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.
What a waste of a holiday - I must have been ill!

Nothing for it but more liquid - and Aline kindly made me up a cup-full of her family's traditional flu remedy though she added extra cayenne as she felt I had probably built up more resistance to it than most.
I have to report that her remedy has quite a kick to it, and if you can manage to overcome your gag reflex and force it all down it feels like it might be doing some good. It certainly brought me out in a cold sweat.
As if not sweating enough had been my problem all along.

My Mum's visit left me with a fridge full of leftover cheese, some of it barely edible, that needed using up. So I invited Flora over for a cheesy dinner.
She brought her new footwear to show me.
Furry Boots?
On Flora's legs!

Apart from my staple Wyke Farm award-winning cheddar from Asda their most cheese-flavoured cheese, I couldn't resist some of Dobbies (not the house Elf - the one owned by fucking Tesco) 70% off specials on Old Amsterdam a fine mature Gouda Blacksticks Blue, Shropshire Blue and a rather nice Cave Aged Gruyère (I wonder if they have to take it to a special cave, or if cave is corporate Swiss for shed?)

Then Mum and I even added to the collection with a couple of smoked cheeses from our usual visit to Edinburgh's Farmers Market. You know, I keep buying stuff from the Farmers' Market - and I keep being enormously disappointed. This time was no exception. I bought some red onions that were half rotted, and some East Pier Smokehouse cheeses.
Well they might have been cheeses. They were cheese shaped anyway.
The Smokehouse advertises that it smokes the best Scottish produce and makes it better! which seems a terrible slur on Scottish produce. Our packages claim their contents to have once been Morangie Brie (from Ruraidh Stone at Highland Fine Cheeses) and a St. Andrews Anster.
Imagine if you took some smoke, and furiously pumped it into cheese-shaped moulds until it became solid. You'd have something like these cheeses. More or less inedible - they could just as well have been smoked foam rubber - but you can use them as flavouring if you like.
Smoke flavouring. If you don't happen to have any actual smoke.
Flora says it's time I checked out Stockbridge's new Farmers' market!

Edinburgh's Farmers Market notable exceptions, of course, are coffees from the Police Box Coffee Bars (which morphed suspiciously seamlessly from the now liquidated California Coffee Company ) and hog roast rolls from Oink.

It just goes to show that Farmers' Markets are all very well - but you can't beat the real thing: local shops regularly buying local products from local producers. You know, the kind of thing our high streets were full off before that fucking Tesco* arrived.

* [Insert favourite fucking supermarket here]

Mum came for a visit this weekend. Hurrah!
She took me to a show too - which I suppose is the kind of thing Mothers are supposed to do for their offspring.
In P. G. Wodehouse novels.

Fortunately Slava's Snow Show is brilliant. A fantastically deranged modern take on circus clowning; these clowns have evolved a long way beyond hilariously tiny cars and squirty buttonholes (though there may still be squirting).
See it if you can, and take the kids. The younger the better. They'll be traumatised for life!

Mum's visits usually follow a simple formula: some mild exercise visiting local Scottish sites of interest, drinking (to excess), and eating (to excess).

For this visit (like the last one incidentally) we took our token exercise in the picturesque Royal Burgh of Culross, making sure we arrived in time to sample Bessie's Tearoom's Haggis Creggans, about which we had heard good things on our last visit (you see; even during our exercise we find the opportunity for eating), and also time for a fairly thorough examination of the Palace.
The Palace is well worth a visit - both for its surprisingly authentic, dingy interior and the pleasant gardens to the rear; which offer both excellent views across the forth to the magnificence that is Grangemouth, and an extensive collection of very reasonably-priced garden vegetables that are for sale at the exit.

The hilltop Abbey is also well worth a visit, and we spent some time scratching our midge bites in its ancient graveyard where you will find gravestones sporting some very interesting tradesman's symbols from the 18th century, many of which we have been unable to interpret.
A third visit may be in order.

But enough of this drivel - what, you ask, is Haggis Creggans?

The version offered at Bessie's Tearoom is basically haggis stew, moistened with whisky and cream and topped with melted cheddar. It's nice enough, but I wouldn't travel all the way to Culross to taste it. I haven't been able to discover other references to exactly this dish, but have found Graham Harvey's A creamy Velouté soup of Haggis laced with Glenfarclas 15 year old [whisky] at Craggan Mill Restaurant at Grantown-on-Spey, so perhaps that's the origin of the dish?

Mum and I got a little more exercise on a Forth-side walk to Cramond, and I got rather more than I had bargained for having to lug car batteries around. The problems started when I came to start the car for the short drive down to the river, only to be greeted by a dismal churning noise, and no engine action. We got the car push-started by enlisting the help of a couple of game young ladies who happened to be passing - Thanks Girls! (Thank God too that the car was pointing downhill) I decided to immediately splash £80 on a new battery at Halfords (conveniently open on a Sunday) on the assumption that it was the most likely culprit given that I hadn't left any lights on overnight, the clock had reset itself to 1997 suggesting complete power loss, and the starter motor did appear to be turning. Just very slowly.
Good call as it happens - I had to use the battery and a pair of jump leads to get us back from Cramond, and just had time to swap in the new battery before (succesfully) driving to dinner.
When Mum comes I usually try and book a meal somewhere a bit posh (it's nice to have an excuse) and this trip we went for our second visit to Ondine.
Our first visit was so disappointing that I couldn't believe we hadn't just caught them on an off day, and all the raving reviews I read convinced me to give them a second chance.
Which just goes to show that other reviewers are complete idiots.

In pursuit of further fine dining I had a second, and much more satisfying, bash at making Eggs Benedict for Sunday brunch (or Eggs Hemingway for my smoked-salmon-munching Mother).
From muffins to... er... something indicating the end of a meal that starts with m? Massively stuffed? Munched out? But I digress...
A truly awesome meal - I have finally cracked the perfect Eggs Benedict. Cracked! And it only takes about 3 hours. Now let us forever go out for brunch and never make this again!

So that and a long-overdue return to the Kalpna covered the excessive eating (oh, me guts!).

Unfortunately, since I'm on the dry until Christmas the excessive drinking will just have to wait. For another 2 months, 2 days 7 hours and 37 minutes. To be precise. Sigh!
Yep, I'm having my annual abstinence in a desperate attempt to lose some gut before the onslaught of festivities.
So far so pointless.
Next up - dieting?

Another successful sailing trip on Erin to Holy Island (Lindisfarne) down there in foreign England. Successful in the sense that we actually made it to the island - there have been several earlier expeditions when we have been beaten back by the wind, the waves or the adverse tide of our own nausea.

It was a fairly windy weekend, all in all, but quite dry and even a bit sunny so the sailing was good.
We pretty much whipped around, and since we'd taken four days off we had plenty of time to cover the ground - berthing over in Eyemouth twice and hitting Pittenweem for a fish supper.
We like Pittenweem we do. We must do. We keep going back there.
Really, it is a nice little town, and the harbour is very comfortable even if, as it says in Reed's Almanac, it does not encourage yachts. Though to be fair, they've always been quite welcoming to us - it is a pretty busy working harbour and God knows there aren't that many of those left in Scotland.

Jude joined up with us in Eyemouth for a night of drinking relaxation, but otherwise it was just myself, John, Aidan, Ken and young Maggie. Young Maggie is still in training - she's getting on well with the drinking to embarrassing excess, and she has the vomiting nailed, but hasn't yet learned to take her sausages like a man.

Since Aidan did the drink shopping we ran out of Whisky and Gin (thank God for Cava eh?) and since John did the food shopping we were left with a herd of pork loins.
Which I gave a good home.
We also had a huge packet of stir-fry left over which joined the pork. But honestly - packets of stir-fry. What a gastronomic horror show! A motley collection of spare vegetable parts which quickly develop the smell of old mattress and all of which take different lengths of time to overcook.
Plus how many boats have you been on which possess a wok?
I rest my case.

I didn't actually produce any memorable meals this trip, but Ken was mightily impressed by my bacon sandwich.
And he was right to be - they are the best damn bacon sandwiches in the world.
So specially for you, Ken, here they are.
Enjoy.

Oh and on another topic - apparently there was a curry-eating contest at a restaurant here in Edinburgh last Saturday. Why wasn't I told?

Finally - a long promised Sushi And Tempura evening with the Eldorardoes has arrived!

Sophie has been angling for another sushi evening (Angling. Sushi. Raw Fish. Geddit?) ever since our family lives went their separate ways.
Or theirs did. Mine's right here down the back of the couch where I left it.
Anyhoo, much as I love having the girlies over, like everything else it's been hard to find just the right time between my diary and theirs. But today is the day.

So the plan is that since Rachel is at work they'll get the bus over themselves and Rachel will come over later when she gets off.
Of course this rapidly descends into an organisational nightmare since the girlies can't remember from one day to the next where I live, or where they left the bit of paper with my address on it, how to phone people up to let them know they're on the way or how to get off the bus at my house before it sweeps them on to the glitzy wonders of Ocean Terminal's shopping centre.
They are soooo cute!

Fully cognisant (and frequently reminded) of Georgina's disliking for fish I also stocked up on pastrami, ham and nice blue cheese so that she would have some fishy-free alternatives to make sushi-type rolls from. (Despite her assurances that she would give the sushi a go she managed nothing more than a tiny lick at some pickled mackerel - perhaps not the best choice)

I stocked up good and early in the week on my vegetables, hams and cheeses and started trawling fishmongers and oriental supermarkets for the more exotic ingredients. Fresh fish, scallops, prawns not a problem: I have Clark Bros - a solid fishmonger near my office in Musselburgh, and Welch's just down the road in Newhaven.

I was disappointed not to find anywhere in Edinburgh that could provide me with any kind of fish eggs other than sturgeon caviar or cheap lumpfish imitation caviar. I wanted to get some Salmon eggs (fat jewelled orange Ikura for topping a gunboat sushi), flying-fish roe (tiny crunchy red Tobiko for decorating inside-out sushi) or Capelin (Smelt) roe (orange Masago for the dynamite) but was completely stymied.
I tried all the decent fishmongers - including Eddy's Seafood Market the reputable Bruntsfield upstart, all the fancy delicatessens (Valvona And Crolla, Marks and Spencers, Harvey Nicks) and all the Oriental supermarkets including the enormous Matthew's Foods.
But no joy.
Nor could I find any dried Shiitake mushrooms.
C'mon Edinburgh. Get your Japanese shit together!

I was, however, astonished and delighted to randomly find Sea Urchins (uni) at Clark Bros, and since they were only eighty pence each (EIGHTY PENCE EACH!) I bought four of them anticipating that one of them would be bad, and that I'd completely screw up opening one of them; this being my first time.
I just love sea urchins. To my mind their flavour is the very essence of the sea.
Though you do have to get over your natural squeamishness at the state of their insides to fully enjoy them when you prepare your own.

In the morning I took advantage of the peace and quiet in my flat to gut, clean and fillet the fishies (sea bass and mackerel) make up a vast (as I thought - though it soon ran out!) bowl of sushi rice, and to pickle the mackerel fillets.
Just time for a quick cleanup before the madness begins...

Welch have just expanded into a new retail shop-front which is very clean and attractively designed, plus they have a lobster tank. So as soon as the Eldorado girlies arrived (late) on the number 10 bus we headed on down to the fishmonger where the girls had great fun choosing a lobster of our own, settling on a youngster we named Larry. (The fishmonger told us that the lady lobsters have a sort of feathery net curtain effect around their back ends - something to do with catching their eggs. But I have yet to find any confirmation of that)
We also picked up a final few fresh fishy goodies that the girlies fancied - a slab of tuna (slightly dark and moist to be honest - which is a shame because they had some beautiful looking tuna earlier in the week) and a handful of enormous prawns.

Georgina seemed to form a particularly strong relationship with Larry the Lobster introducing him to our checkout lady at Asda and playing schoolyard games with him in the kitchen, so I was a little concerned how she would react to his slaughter.
We had a full and frank discussion about the best ways of dispatching Larry, in which I proposed putting him gently to sleep in the freezer for a couple of hours, but the girls all seemed happiest with the idea of just splitting his head open with a massive knife. Sadists.
They weren't so relaxed about it when it actually happened though - first there was the massive gush of clear liquid (I told them it was just seawater, but take it to have been lobster blood) which caused Sophie to run vomiting to the bathroom, and then there was all that embarrassing thrashing. Which went on. And on. And on. In fact the damn lobster just didn't seem to want to die, and continued twitching even after several minutes of swimming around in a giant pot of boiling water with his head split in two.
I since discovered from wikipedia that lobsters' brains operate from distributed ganglia, and that disabling only the frontal ganglia doesn't usually kill the lobster.
Now they tell me.
So - the things I have learned about killing lobsters?

1. Chill the lobster for a while in the freezer, or overnight in the fridge and then just chuck him into a big pot of boiling water and slap the lid on. Don't look! You could, of course, just freeze him completely - but then you've got a frozen lobster to defrost.
2. If you do decide to cut his head in half, hold him firmly belly-side down in a thick towel and use a big knife to cut down through the cross-shaped markings on the back of his head in one firm thrust. Then hold on tight.

Once everyone had gotten over the trauma of Larry's demise, and he was happily bubbling away in the pot for the necessary 5-6 minutes per pound, The girlies got on with making their choice of the perfect dessert for an oriental dinner - Astoundingly Good Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Fortunately I also had some (novelty) Green Tea Ice Cream that I'd made earlier!

The cookies didn't turn out quite as well as the last time we made them, but then Rachel's oven is of a more professional standard than my own. I figure the cooking temperature is a bit critical. And possibly the mixture was a bit runnier than the last time.
But the ice cream was a definite hit.

Finally on to preparing the dinner:

• cracking out Larry's flesh which Georgina undertook with evident relish
• slicing up the vegetables
• skinning, de-boning and cutting the fish
• making the tempura batter
• whipping up the tempura dipping sauce
• making up the dynamite sauce
• rolling up the sushis

you know - all that stuff that gets a bit tedious for young girlies: slaving away in plain sight of seductive platefuls of luscious fresh hot chewy cookies that are strictly out of bounds (eventually I hid the plates).
I kept up the nagging though and we got quite a lot done, but some of the sushi ideas I'd had in mind ran out of steam: we didn't really get around to making the California Rolls, or organising the components for a do-it-yourself session.
Ah well, all the more leftovers for me!

So the meal plan:

• a clear light fish soup to start abandoned due to lack of energy
• pressed pickled mackerel log roll sushi check
• assorted rolled sushi check
• assorted gunboat sushi check
• inside-out California rolls featuring Larry The Lobster fail
• assorted tempura with dipping sauce check
• baked dynamite scallops check
• an exciting smorgasboard of do-it-yourself components from which guests will assemble their own sushies fail
• desserts double check!

For the tempura I decided to attempt a blending of some of Heston Blumenthal's mad batter ideas and my own tempura batter experiments and not only so that I got to try out my latest gadget - a soda syphon.
OK, well mostly.
I added vodka to my batter number 7 and used Sapporo instead of soda water, filling up the soda syphon and refrigerating it about an hour before making the tempura.
To be honest I thought the result was a slight regression, and the batter came out a bit runny (you need to be able to pour the damn stuff into the syphon in the first place after all) and was probably not as crispy as it might have been after being made up for such a long time. But it did make a pretty good talking point, was a lot of fun when it ran out and farted batter everywhere, and was actually quite a handy way of dispensing the batter.
I look forward to trying it out for regular fish 'n' chip batter.

Rachel, Chic and Nicky turned up in short order and the feeding commenced, with a round of sushi followed by an endless stream of tempura.
Except for Sophie, who after all my nagging felt too ill to eat with us and had to go for a little lie down in a darkened room. Poor old Sophie - the whole thing was her idea too. Fortunate indeed, then, that she was not too weak to pass the time watching YouTube videos and facebooking all her friends.
Nicky very kindly brought along a dessert of her own - knowing my fetish she baked me a ducky cake and a flock of fondant ducklings. So that's:

• desserts - triple check

I think everyone went home satisfied.

As is becoming something of a habit now, I had another dinner party for Aidan, Flora and Jenny featuring another endless stream of tempura with the leftovers from this meal - remembering to include the clear fish soup - and still went on to make up a massive stockpot of leftover soup with the remains from that one.
As of two weeks later I'm still eating that soup, and I've got three more containers of it in the freezer!

Tonight Flora felt the need for muffins. The need.
She's a girl and you know how they get these uncontrollable urges. Not like boys. Boys can easily contain their urges. We just choose not to.

Anyway, Flora came round to make muffins, and left the decision of what to have for dinner open-ended, so we spent an extraordinary amount of time examining my local Chinese takeaway menu for dishes which might satisfy Flora's further need for mushrooms and bamboo shoots, and planning our trip to Asda to take in ordering the dishes on the way out and collecting them on the way back. The trip to Asda being necessary due to the quite astonishing fact that I appear not to possess a bun tin!

Unfortunately, despite all our meticulous planning, we were disappointed to find that the takeaway is shut on Tuesdays and now, Mondays.
Today is Monday and it is shut.
So we decided to fall back on our own resources and make a chow mein stir-fry with some tinned bamboo shoots and mushrooms from Asda, only to be hugely disappointed to find that Asda did not have a tin of bamboo shoots. How is that possible? I thought it was some kind of law that every supermarket was required to have a tin of bamboo shoots hidden amongst the bottles of Kikkoman soy sauce in their ersatz ethnic food section?
But then, just after we had abandoned our stir-fry plans, and Flora had started hinting about how much she liked coconut rice, we came across a cellophane pack of stir-fry ingredients that, lo and behold, contained some bamboo shoots. So I was just about ready to throw away all my cooking principles and buy a pre-prepared pack of stir-fry garbage, when I was saved by the fact that Asda had completely sold out of fresh egg noodles. Hurrah!

So we returned to the theme of coconut rice and I persuaded Flora that I could turn out a simple Thai-style stew in a reasonable amount of time (whilst going easy on the chillies). Which simple recipe I reproduce below.

Whilst looking for the bamboo shoots Flora was distracted by a tin of lychees, so we took that along too - I used some of the juice in both my coconut rice and and the Thai curry - then threw the rest of it away.
OK, not really. They aren't half bad with a dollop of yoghurt as dessert.
And the muffins weren't half bad either. Though Flora might have gone slightly mental on the flavourings, electing for both chocolate chips and blueberries.
Lots of blueberries.
And not much stirring.
Which meant that occasionally you would get a mouthful of blueberries so intense that it was like biting into a lemon, and some of the muffins seemed to be entirely muff.
But we like to live dangerously!

Today I passed my Yachtmaster exam. Yay for me!

I'm especially glad about it because I would not want to do that again. It was extremely gruelling since there were three of us taking the exam, and the examiner insisted on making sure each of us performed every single possible exercise. Sometimes several times.

The whole thing took from 11 o'clock Thursday morning to 2 o'clock Friday afternoon, with a generous 3 hours of sleep between 5 and 8 a.m.
The weather was mostly pretty mild, which was a bonus, but there was still enough wind to allow one of us, who shall remain nameless, to ram the boat at speed into the end of a pontoon whilst undertaking an extremely tricky manoeuvre to come alongside under sail and in the dark, putting an enormous gouge into the hull.

We decided to simplify our evening meal during the exam by making up a huge pot of stew beforehand ready to reheat. I made my apple-supplemented stovies, and invented an interesting variation on the theme of glazed carrots. (There was no honey on board, see, but plenty of marmalade.) They seemed to go down well, though there were complaints that no one could taste the apple in the stovies. Which, I explained, was the general idea. A subtle enhancement, I explained. Also, being Scottish, they complained that they weren't authentic Stovies since they had corned beef in.
Everyone's a critic.

Poor old Flora - here she comes for dinner with a mouth full of ulcers. Stress apparently. Definitely nothing to do with trouble, you know, down there. Definitely not.

So I concocted a soft and gentle meal, nothing too spiky, nothing too spicy, nothing too acid, all creams and purée: A nice (if unauthentic) pork stroganoff, puréed potatoes, mixed veg and to follow; a soothing homemade vanilla ice cream.

Mostly wasted effort, though, as the ungrateful guest started her visit by helping herself to some distinctly ulcer-unfriendly pickled gherkin slices, and then spent the evening complaining that what she really fancied was take-away food like what they're always eating in The Big Bang Theory.
Pah.

Not a bad meal on the whole, though I think it could have done with some kind of crispy, crunchy greens (cabbage or kale?) on the side.

I'm ashamed to say that the the mixed veg were just out of a frozen packet that I heated in a small pot with a generous knob of butter. But the pork stroganoff is real enough.

Mum's up for a weekend visit.
Mostly visiting me, though she did spend a day with Rachel's Mum. Hey, just 'cos we split up doesn't mean our Mums have to!

We started off the weekend with a shopping trip to the Farmers' Market, where I feasted on Oink's Hog Roast rolls, and a California Coffee Company coffee. You know - the people that operate out of those ex-police boxes.
They make the best coffee. Except for Kilimanjaro Coffee on Nicolson Street. They make the best coffee.
But I still like the California Coffee Company's Java roast. In fact I've got a bag of their beans right here. Well. In the kitchen. I don't sit and hug it or anything. Not with the lights on, at least.

Anyway, we finished the day off with a very satisfying return visit to David Bann's most excellent vegetarian restaurant on St Mary's Street. The savoury courses were just great, and their Chilli Margaritas as good as I remembered. The desserts were a bit disappointing, but maybe that was only in comparison. They didn't seem to show quite the same sure-handed inventiveness in the matching of flavours.
I was particularly impressed by their beautifully aromatic tarragon-butter spinach, and a delightful banana chutney which perfectly complemented their Thai-style tofu fritters, which Mum ordered for a starter.
According to the waitress, who seemed well-informed so I trust her, they leave the bananas to almost-ferment, before mixing with turmeric, cumin, fennel and fenugreek. Mum's main course were chilli crepes served with a chocolate sauce. Not only did the sauce complement the crepes, but it was also delicious with our side order of rosemary and thyme sprinkled chunky chips. I think there may a meal with chips and chocolate sauce in the offing!

Suitably inspired I decided to recreate Bann's tarragon spinach when I cooked Mum's leaving dinner tonight.
At the Farmers' Market we picked up some of Stichill Jersey's Eildon Blue Cheese which needs eating, that I thought that might go well with broccoli, and we also bought some rather nice looking whitecurrants (since all the gooseberries on offer looked sad and mouldy), that I decided need a crumble to bring out their best side.
The rest, as they say, is history...

I've been thinking about a seafood ice cream for a while now, as you do. Partly for my long-maturing stuffed-squid meal, and partly for the hell of it. I ultimately want to do something with wasabi crackers (like those chinese prawn crackers, but wasabi flavoured) and maybe oyster ice cream as a starter, but I decided to have my first stab at making one for a dessert and I went for crab, though I also thought prawns might work.

I invited Aidan and Jude around for a first attempt at making our planned Erin's Signature West Coast dish. Over here on the East Coast - since we didn't get the chance when we were on the West Coast. That's to be a black pudding and scallop stack with a lime-butter sauce for your information.
I didn't tell them what the pudding was going to be!

I started on the dessert the night before, making up the broth before going to bed. I also remembered to get the ice cream machine sleeve into the freezer compartment days early (hoping to to do better than the last time I tried to use the damn thing). Then I had time to make up the custard early in the morning and leave it chilling for several hours first in the fridge then in the freezer to get it absolutely as cold as possible without freezing it, knowing how poor my freezer is.
This seemed to do the trick, because the ice cream machine successfully churned the mixture to ice cream in about 20 minutes. (Well, to be honest it wasn't quite frozen even then, but it was very thick and the machine couldn't churn it any more. Maybe I was a bit heavy on the egg yolks?). Then I stuck the sleeve in the freezer until dinner time, turning the contents around with a wooden spoon every so often when I remembered.
The ice cream was quite a lot of effort really, it's a pity the result was a bit underwhelming.
I made the guests try and guess the flavour, which they eventually got with a bit of prompting (and some incredulous muttering) and they were mightily impressed with the concept. But not the delivery.
I don't think the world is quite ready for seafood ice cream as a dessert. It's too much of a psychological dissociation when your mind is expecting pudding and your mouth is feeding you crab.
I still think it has potential as a starter, but I'm pretty much alone here. Aidan did suggest wasabi ice cream instead of my wasabi crackers. I guess there's gonna to have to be a lot of ice cream making going on. Maybe when Aline comes back and we get a new freezer?

Aidan kindly brought the starters, which were rather tasty hope I've got the recipe down Aidan?

I started the mash off nice and early by baking King Edwards well ahead of time for 90 minutes at Gas Mark 6 before running them through a potato ricer and then leaving them to one side in a small bowl, liberally smeared with butter and covered with cling film. When ready to reheat the potato I boiled up some milk and double cream in a large pan, then added the potato and some roughly chopped dill fronds and mashed the potato around until it had warmed through, adjusting the seasoning at the end.
I made up the lime butter sauce half an hour ahead and kept it in a warmed thermos flask.
I fried the black pudding and apple rings just before the guests arrived and put them in a low oven to keep warm.
Preparing everything in advance this way meant that I needed only to stir-fry the pak choy, reheat the riced potato and fry the scallops to serve up the dinner.
The sauce is pretty nice, and quite popular with the other guests, but it's very limey. I found it a little bit too tart for the meal, I think I'd try a Mornay sauce next time.

I decided to try out a couple of different ways of frying up the scallops, just for comparison:

• My usual method of quick-frying in (or brushed with) a little clarified butter (or pancetta fat) over high heat in a griddle.
• A method suggested by John Ogden who used to own the Seafood Temple in Oban — Gently fry the the scallops in an inch or two of butter turning occasionally, until they turn opaque.

We figured the scallops tasted about the same, though they do look prettier all caramelised from the griddle.
However, it's a lot easier to control the slow cooking in butter, it may take a bit longer (and cost a fortune in butter), but you can better manage the cooking speed, and they don't really need that much attention. When you're frying them over high heat it's quite easy to overcook the scallops and turn them into little rubber bullets.
So especially if you've got a lot of other stuff going on I think the deep-butter technique is going to work best.
Thanks Og!

As per usual, I managed to completely forget about taking photos of the end product. So I had to make the meal all over again the next day using some leftover black pudding. But it did give me the chance to try the black pudding stacks with a Mornay sauce instead and I also added a layer of crispy pancetta to the stack, which I managed to forget the first time around! I also served it with celeriac purée instead of mashed potato this time. Just 'cos I didn't want to throw half a celeriac away. It was perfectly good that way too.

I rather liked the Mornay sauce (though don't make it too thick), but then I missed the limeyness of the first meal. Maybe I could try a Mornay sauce with a hint of lime! Ugh no! Or a lime-butter sauce with a bit less lime?
Meh. Life's too short.