I've had a busy week on the water with the 707 yacht UK Nationals happening at Granton this year; their first time in Scotland.
I volunteered my services in the pit of Synchro; one of the boats sailing down to the regatta from Port Edgar, and thanks to Rachel's indefatigable campaigning we also acquired the helming skills of the incumbent, and five-times champion Jon Powell and his other half, sailing journalist and former editor of Practical Boat Owner, Sarah Norbury.
It was fascinating watching him handle the boat, especially at the start where he managed to authoritatively stake out his space whilst keeping the boat moving slowly but under control for an astonishingly long time barely feet from the line.
I hope I picked up some good tips for getting a boat to the front of the pack.

Though Jon was surprisingly uninterested in the general sail and rig settings, other than the jib car position and getting the mainsail as high as possible, he was very keen on making sure the forestay was extended as far as it would go, and he did tweak the shroud tensions whenever he felt the boat wasn't moving as it ought. He was also quite critical of the parlous state of Synchro's bottom when we craned it out to give it a clean. Which I thought was in pretty smooth shape; shows you what I know.

Despite holding Jon down to only a fifth place, I hope I made a better fist of volunteering as crew than I did volunteering for the Competitor Management Team :( Apologies to Dara O'Malley who did a superb job of managing without me.

I particularly enjoyed sailing Synchro single-handed down to Granton; I rigged myself an auto-helm by tying shock cord to the tiller handle, so I could go forward and fly the spinnaker and everything! Very smooth, apart from its occasional inclination to furiously round up once I had my weight on the bow. I quickly learned how sensitive a 707 is to being steered by moving weight around to change the trim. At least, it is when the tiller doesn't move. Much.

I'd considered introducing our Southern guests to some traditional home-made Scottish tablet, but I just didn't have time to get round to it. Even my packed sandwiches were pathetic affairs of supermarket white bread and sliced packet ham, but spurred by Rachel's scathing criticism I stayed up extra late to make some taramasalata from the smoked cod roe I just happened to have lying around, as you do, and a Very Tomato Bread that I thought might make some tasty sandwiches with a bit of lettuce and that coddy roe flavour. My taramasalata sandwiches usually have sliced tomatoes in them anyway.
Hopefully I redeemed myself?

Isn't it amazing how shopping for a single ingredient can so rapidly snowball into a fridge-full of tenuously unrelated ingredients?
Or is that just me?

Take the cod roe.
After my recent, and very impressive, visit to Martin Wishart's restaurant (watch this space) I decided to have a go at reproducing Wishart's astonishingly airy beetroot macaroons with their horseradish cream topping.
First I needed horseradish, which is of course unobtainable from any brand of Fucking Supermarket™ so I resorted to scouring Edinburgh's various hippy-food stores. I started with the dependably earthy Real Foods store which did have in stock some vastly knobbly roots labelled wild horseradish. I gave them a good scrape with my nail, but they didn't yield any of the excoriating pungency I normally associate with horseradish, plus I didn't fancy trying to peel their twisted convoluted shapes, so I passed.
I did however spot a leafy bunch of beetroots and a bag of lovage. A massive bag of lovage.
Now I know from my visits to the Star Inn how nicely a hint of lovage can go with spinach and samphire, so now I had to buy some spinach. And some samphire. And still, of course, the horseradish. Fortunately the ever-reliable Tattie Shaws came up with the horsey goods, as well as the spinach.

The samphire was proving more tricky since my local fishmonger had run out, and after visiting all the others within cycling distance I decided to leave it for later in the week. On to the next macaroon ingredient - powdered egg whites.
An online search, a pilgrimage to Waitrose and a typically inept offline search through their shelves finally turned up Dr. Oetker's surprisingly small packet. Not a completely wasted search though - I was excited to discover a pack of smoked cod roe which I've been vaguely looking for so I could try making up some taramasalata. NOW you see the connection! It also gave me the idea of trying to blend it into the horseradish cream to top those macaroons, instead of the smoked haddock alternative I'd had playing at the back of my mind. The cod roe was sitting next to a small jar of salmon eggs, so I bought that too. I've had a salad in mind for them, but that's a whole other shopping expedition and the jar seemed like the kind of thing that would keep quite a while in the fridge.

Over the next few days I also tracked down samphire at my favourite fishmonger near my work (though they don't do cod roe!) and picked up a fillet of Sea Bass to go with, stocked up on lemons and crème fraîche and set to on my dinner.
Since I now had such a plentiful supply of novelty ingredients I thought I might try a few fun variations on the samphire/spinach/lovage combo:

• regular: Blanched the samphire, made up a beurre monté (pacé Martin Wishart) and sweated a half-dozen sliced lovage leaves with the spinach. Drained, re-blanched the samphire and mixed together.
  Good - though it turns out you can overdo the lovage
• horseradish: Grated some horseradish, lubricated it with lemon juice and mixed it into the samphire/spinach/lovage.
  Not awful, but not exactly a match made in heaven.
• salmon eggs: Quite beautiful - glistening like orange jewels on a froth of emerald silk.
  Unfortunately it doesn't taste as good as it looks - the salmon eggs are great big fat things and the samphire is too easily overwhelmed by the burst of fishy flavour when you bite into one.
• cod roe: Stir in some buttered cod's roe. No need for the spinach here - it works better without.
  A match made in heaven!

And I still haven't made the macaroons!

Ah, Sorrel Day rolls around again.
No, as you might think, it's nothing to do with the sadly neglected, but deliciously tart seasonal leafy vegetable - it's a memorial for the Battle of Mont Sorrel near Ypres during World War I. Way to die - you glorious bastards!
It just happens to be slap-bang in the middle of sorrel season - when you might be lucky enough to find sorrel for sale in your more earthy organic food stores or at the local farmers' market. You certainly won't find it many other places - it is now considered an un-fashionably challenging flavour for we Britons and is therefore never to be found in your local Fucking Supermarket™.
Which is a pity - it's a very easy vegetable to prepare; you can use it raw in salads (strip out thick stalks) or wilt it to make a silky sauce.
Like spinach, which it resembles, sorrel wilts down to nothing so you'll need to use more than you expected.
Unlike spinach it turns a slightly unpleasant cowpat brown when cooked so you may want to disguise the color.

Sorrel also has a distinctly tangy, acidic flavour not unlike rhubarb. And like rhubarb and gooseberries it gives my teeth little socks to wear.

My youngest ex-daughter Georgina cooked me a very tasty (and very tastefully presented) dinner last week Great job Georgina! in exchange for maths lessons, and she could have substituted some sorrel for the spinach in her Easy Cheesy Bake, but then it seems only yesterday we were struggling to persuade her to eat identifiable vegetables. So I'll settle for small miracles.
As I encourage her through the mysteries of algebra: Baby steps, Georgina, baby steps.

Is it an inevitable part of growing older that everything becomes shite?
Take this stainless steel vacuum flask. Alright, it's not a Thermos™ - it's a Tescos, and OK it didn't cost me £20 it cost me £3. But still, you'd like to think it would actually work. For keeping soup hot and stuff.
Wouldn't you?
Well, you'd be disappointed. Like all modern products, it works about a half-dozen times, then breaks. Or dies. And you have to throw it away and buy a new one.
Time was, you would buy a vacuum flask and expect to pass it on to your children. Of course that was a proper Thermos™. But then when I look at Amazon's reviews for proper Thermos™ flasks a disturbing number of people say that theirs stopped working after about a half dozen goes and had to be thrown away.
It's actually getting so that I accept this state of affairs. I plan on things being shite, and having to throw them away in a few months. I buy them by the dozen to compensate. I calculate my return on investment between buying one thing that isn't shite and buying twenty that are, and usually come out with the shite ones. It's just less risk. Particularly when most of the stuff I buy these days is sight-unseen off of the internets.
But I ask you - is this any way to run a civilisation? Make everything as cheaply as possible in the Far East so it has to be used once then thrown away?
No wonder we're running out of resources, and money.
When everything's shite.

Malvern is one of those quietly decaying ancient spa towns which still reek of Victorian self-assurance and which were once not shite. The place is still quite proud of being where they build Morgan sports cars - the epitome of quality artisanal discomfort. Enormously expensive, hugely durable but vastly time-consuming roadware whose components are each carefully hand-crafted things of beauty but which somehow fail to all properly fit together, like the Land Rover they had the reputation of being, well, a bit shite. Nevertheless, on the back of such pumping, pounding, pistoning shite was our empire built.
World-beating shite.
Shite that lasted.

In 1994 we sold Jaguar Land Rover to the Germans, then on to the Americans in 2006 and finally the Indians in 2008.
We had an empire once. Now we can't even make our own bicycles. Isn't it a fucking disgrace?

Anyway, I recently drove down to Malvern to visit my old friend Niel of Raha for his 50th Birthday HA! Now you see the investment in my own extravagant birthday celebrations paying off! and it turned into a right old curry-fest:
I dropped in on my brother on the way down which mandated our traditional Spicey Cottage curry takeaway, and again on the way back up when we were obliged to consume another round of Karahi Goshts so that I could bring a couple back home to freeze.

I booked into the handily-placed Foley Arms Wetherspoon Hotel in the centre of Malvern - handily-placed for the pub downstairs anyway - where I met up with my dear old college chums Chris and Cathy Hardly-Home.
Robin and Marion Tart were there too JOKE - Hi Rob! and we all went out ... for a curry at the very good, but unadventurously titled Bengal Brasserie [may now be closed down] opposite.
Next day at Niel's place, his wife Roz laid on a very tasty curry buffet for lunch before we hiked up the Malvern Hills for a geography lesson over a plastic of Cava. Then back down for an evening of curry at another local restaurant, followed by Port and the Matrix.
Couldn't have been better.
In honour of his birthday I added a new vegan category to my recipe indexer - did you notice?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY NIEL!

Anyhoo, I actually wanted to talk about salads: as Shakespeare tells us - these are our salad days, the days of spring and early dawns. Bikini weather is fast approaching and suddenly I have several days of solid currying to shake off.

Once famed for its restorative spring waters, nowadays Malvern is stuffed with bookshops, charity stalls and tat emporia for the visiting cardigan-and-pipe brigade, not to mention those curry restaurants, but it also happens to be host to a quite reasonable Farmers' market in the Priory grounds where I couldn't resist buying freshly-picked local asparagus from the Vale of Evesham and a pot of garlicky green olives to turn into salads when I got them home, though by then the asparagus was starting to turn just a little bit leathery :(

Flora came round to enjoy the asparagus salad and moan about the leather with some simple fresh grilled sardines and moan about the bones. Quoth the redhead: The sardines taste great - but I just can't be arsed with all the bones.

I had to invest in a couple of avocados for the salad dressing, but they developed into a very reasonable strawberry-mayonnaise-dressed avocado salad of their own, on which I used up the last of my poached eggs as a topping.
I mean I used up the last of my eggs. Obviously they weren't poached when they started. They were just raw; I imagine the chicken would be very upset to lay poached eggs. Especially if they were boiling hot at the time.
Maybe the chicken I poached for my Coronation Chicken sandwiches would have laid one. If it wasn't DEAD.
Coronation Chicken is a salad right?
Like soup. That's a salad too.

So I made a couple of those.
Soups.
I used the stock leftover from poaching my Coronation Chicken to make an extremely good Carrot, Orange, Ginger and Red Lentil Soup or Dark Chicken Stock. Then I asked Rachel, my ex-partner partner Yep, that does make sense in our defence of the Burnside trophy what kind of soup she'd like me to bring.
In my shiny new shite Tescos flask.
That's Port Edgar Yacht Club's Alastair Burnside memorial two-handed trophy yacht race that we won last year. And again this year as it happens. I blame the damn fine cauliflower and blue cheese soup she requested.

And that's it.
Wow, it's been a LOOOONG spring!

I've been wanting to do a nice rich red-wine pot-roast in my slow cooker for a while. When my butcher offered me a whole monster veal shank for £25 I jumped at it. Despite his scepticism about my choice of wine colour (Osso Buco is more properly braised in white wine) the more I admired the glorious meat, the more I convinced myself it would take a good red wine. It was a surprisingly hefty joint - weighing in around 3kg, and the flesh quite rich and dark, so I'm guessing it was an older calf than that usually used for Italian ossobuco but ideal for taking the stronger flavour of red wine. Which is handy because I happened to have several leftover bottles lying around begging to be used up.

Aidan and Jude very kindly came over to help out with eating some of my black pudding (this time some of the baked loaf version I'd cut into sections and frozen) and to lend a hand with the monster shank. Lucky for me or I'd be dying of rosso buco poisoning about now.
They also made handy guinea pigs for my latest ice cream innovation - avocado and chocolate flavour!

Apart from the hours of slow-cooking my monster shank, most of the meal prep work was done the night before and the remainder was pretty easy to turn out for dinner.
I served the fried homemade black pudding on a creamy mushroom sauce, with a little strawberry-dressed mixed leaf salad and some red onion.
Since my monster cuts of shank were too intimidating to serve individually I just piled them into a quiche dish and dressed them with the strained cooking liquor for the guests to help themselves.
They seemed well satisfied :)

Though I think they approached dessert with some justifiable trepidation (memories of my crab ice cream still too raw for comfort) they seemed pleasantly surprised by the result. I'm not sure it's actually better than plain old chocolate, but it's certainly not worse. Plus you get to watch your guests faces when you tell them it's avocado and chocolate flavour.
And you can't put a price on that!
Cheers!

I'm skipping the whole Burns Supper extravaganza this year, mainly due to laziness and a lack of guts :)
However, I do have a fantastic concept for next year, and so I'm here to stake my claim to it: wrapping the haggis in gold leaf!
Extensive research reveals no prior art.
See that Golden Haggis? I invented that...

Whilst I'm here inventing things I've decided we need a Scottish alternative to the fasting period Lent. I'm calling it Bent - it's when we feast on porridge and haggis. And whisky. For forty days.

So anyhoo, I invited Flora to share my Un-Burns supper of black pudding and salad. I figured that's about as un-haggis as you can get whilst keeping to the spirit of the thing. Plus it's a salad - so it's dead healthy too!

In the process of making the salad I discovered an excellent combination of flavours for marinating mushrooms which meant that I ended up with a surfeit of marinated mushrooms, which led inexorably to disappointingly mediocre exotic stew. And a surprisingly well matched Caribbean-styley pumpkin mash handily using up a few more of my leftover pumpkins. Yes I still have leftover pumpkins. Yes they're still edible. They've been living in my icebox spare room.
Some days it just seems the cooking will never end.

Which leads me back to the black pudding. Though I bought the ones for our Un-Burns Supper, I've been wanting to have a go at making some for ages, particularly since I came to grips with making my own sausages. So I finally motivated myself to actually do it, having chased down a butcher willing to give me a bucket of blood. Unfortunately he was only willing to give me a very large bucket of blood. Which is soooo much blood. I decided to be creative with the puddings I made and concocted a chocolate and an apple flavoured variety to serve as the starter for a particular meat-oriented (which of mine aren't?) bloody non-romantic Un-Valentine dinner I had in mind. Well, when you get to my age...

Of course the bloody puddings might have come out a bit less bloody and a bit more black if I hadn't invested in a bloody useless comedy meat thermometer courtesy of Polder which works just long enough for you to throw away the receipt before displaying only joke temperatures. I blame my equipment. And no, it isn't an accident, I've tried two of them and they both do the same thing.
Fool me once - shame on you; fool me twice - I'm a fucking idiot!

Anyway - I won't be making black puddings again anytime soon, fun though it was I ended up with blood everywhere. And it took hours to hose off. Also now I've got yards and yards of black pudding to eat.
I've enticed friends around to share them.
I've given them away at work.
I've filled my freezer with them.
I've created a (quite tasty) mixed-vegetable white mustard sauce to eat with them.
I'm bloody sick of them!

Over Christmas my host Suzannah and I somehow got into an argument about vinegar (only in my life eh). I think I may have made a tiny criticism of the Kissantell's meagre range (she was proud to offer both malt and Balsamic), upon which she demanded photos of my cupboards.

So as requested here you go, enjoy:

Christmas with the Kissandtells.

Now that Mum's gone on to better things, it's down to Brother Kurt and his oddly-named family to carry on our venerable seasonal traditions. It turns out that Mum left some big boots to fill. Mainly with baking, (Thanks Suzannah!) but also ample sidepockets of goose ordering, Pringles stocking, and pork roasting. Fortunately brother Kurt (and his little helpers) took care of all that, which just left me with the onerous task of actually having all my presents wrapped by Christmas Eve, and not relying on being able to turn up late and spend the rest of the holy night wrestling with paper and sticky tape. Humbug!
I blame the kids. The Kissandtells are sadly afflicted with children, and as any fule kno: children ruin Christmas. Ah well, I suppose time heals all wounds. Eventually!

As usual I come bearing gifts of starter and stuffing and, new for 2013, the cheese board.
This Christmas I will be mostly stuffing with Pear and Sage. And since we don't have to cater for any pesky tarians this year it's also mostly meat :) It turned out quite well actually, particularly the extra dish of it we roasted separately. I'm slowly coming to accept that stuffing which comes out of the goose is doomed to mediocrity - it's always greasy, soggy, and underwhelming. Whereas baked on its own you can get a nice crunchy topping with plenty of good flavour and texture within.
Sigh, I suppose you can't fight tradition. Greasy, soggy stuffing it is.

My gravlax on rye crispbreads starter went down pretty well: just smear the crispbreads with a dose of crème fraîche horseradish sauce, pile on thinly sliced gravlax, top with a scattering of dill fronds and a few capers, and serve with a lime wedge.

Incidentally - the difference between sour cream and crème fraîche?
The French stuff is thicker, richer and less sour than the British version.
Much like their women.

Things we learned this Christmas:

• Kurt's fan-assisted oven cooks a goose quite a bit quicker (and drier) than Mum's old gas oven, so our 10lb (before stuffing) goose was ready in 3½ hours at 165°C rather than the predicted 4¼. If we had been paying attention we would have wrapped it in tin foil earlier to limit the browning, and taken it out before it dried out. A bit.
• Bread sauce swells as it cooks, so you need to make sure to choose a large enough dish. Also, you have to keep an eye on it and stir occasionally as you don't want it to brown on top. Add more milk if necessary - bread sauce cooks in less than an hour in Kurt's oven.
• The Kissandtells don't appreciate exotic cheesery. Next year it will be Babybels, cranberry Stilton and those novelty flavoured mini-cheddars coated in thick wax.
• Mum's baking recipes leave much to be desired - like any resemblance to the things she used to make. Sigh. Back to those Be-Ro cookbooks...

Well, 'tis the season to be practicing my Christmas delicacies.
So this year I'm wheeling in Flora to be my willing victim, you will recall that my traditional family Christmas responsibilities (other than the usual admonishments to put on some bloody underpants) are starters, stuffing, and gravy.
Despite the discomfiting and inconvenient absence of Mum this year, my brother and I plan on bravely continuing our family customs, with Kurt taking on the goose, vegetables and steaming up one of Mum's puddings, whilst his ex-wife partner yes, it's both complicated and ridiculous ;) shoulders the baking duties. I rarely bother practicing the stuffing (too much to eat), and I have long since perfected the art of gravy, but I like to have a stab at the starter before the big day.
Dammit, I should have used that as a pun last year for my Christmas sausages!

On the practice menu this year:

I have to say, the starter was well worth practicing too - there was a marked improvement in both the fish and crispbreads between the rehearsal and Christmas dinner.
I should probably have taken on the pudding, then Flora could have had dessert too - I was just lazy. Sorry Kurt!

Is it a sign of getting old when Doctor Who starts to seem too juvenile? It has now moved through the three stages of TV sci-fi show grief: first terrifying, onto boring, then childish. I fear the next and final stage will be woke :(

I actually quite like the new, younger Doctor model (to my surprise), but his budgie-headed assistant Clara Oswald is a complete disaster, and all I want to do is punch her dumb face in.
The Rings of Astrakhan has to be the stupidest episode I've watched since they wheeled K9 off to the scrap yard, and most of these 50-year special things have left me singularly unmoved.

Whatever happened to clever time-based scheming like the stuff in Blink? I mean - he is a Time Lord after all.
Solving every puzzle, and escaping from every trap by using a magic sonic macguffin sort-of misses the point really.

Anyhow. You'll find this week I have been mostly cooking my leftover pumpkin (yes, I still have leftover pumpkin), chorizo and salt cod.
Oh, and a roast chicken. I'll grind its bones to make my Christmas bread stock.

So many pumpkins, so little time. To eat them before they rot apart and stink my flat out.
After Pumpkin Palooza it took me 6 days to do all the washing up, and another 4 days to finish eating all the cooked leftovers. It's been just like Christmas!

I cooked up quite a few of my spare ingredients into a surprisingly unappetising Tomato, Beans, Feta, Black Olive and Feta Bake, which I then froze. So I'll probably never finish that!
I managed to stuff a pumpkin with most of the rest of the vegetables, which just leaves a fridge-full of bloody marys, another dish of cooked borlotti beans, those bloody egg yolks and a score of pumpkins...

Does a dish really count as leftovers if you have to buy more ingredients to make it? Well, when answering the question what to do with almost a dozen leftover egg yolks? I bought a pack of bacon and some leeks to make a quiche - so a partially leftover supper then. I also came this close to buying some pre-prepared shortcrust pastry from the local Fucking Supermarket™ too but then I came to my senses. It takes about 5 minutes to make a batch of shortcrust pastry, people, and maybe 5 minutes to wash up, plus you get to experiment with slightly different variations each time as part of your evolutionary strategy for developing that perfect crust. (You do faithfully record all those failures along the way right?) Look it's only a short step from ready-made shortcrust pastry to the sellout madness of Delia which can only end with the buying of bags of frozen mashed potatoes and tins of mince. So just don't.

In the interests of transparency, though, I should confess I've been known to buy ready-made puff pastry. And jars of mayonnaise.
The shame!

Two weeks later and I've finally used up the last non-pumpkin leftover in a much more satisfactory borlotti bean stew. Something along the lines of Mum's fabulous fasolia but with bacon. And chorizo. And feta cheese.

Only 16 pumpkins to go...