Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
Preamble, hare rama hare rama
This is my first harey recipe, and covers the making of a stock that’ll be used in two other harey recipes. It’s a pretty straightforward thing to do and a logical starting point. Unfortunately we’re busy cleaning the apartment this weekend as estate agents will be in on Monday to do an assessment and take photos… thus I may not get any other recipes out until next weekend. (We’ve decided that it is time to move into something that isn’t an apartment, and the owner has decided that it’s time to sell.)
Anyway, everyone should know how to make a stock and if you don’t you should learn! It really is rather trivial. These days you can get pretty good stock from the supermarket, and I mean the stuff in the fridge not the dreaded cubes (which I do use from time to time and I always have a few kicking around in the cupboard.) However, I do think you can make a better stock. It’s not just about better though, it’s about making optimal use of your food. Bones the butcher would otherwise throw out (these days), leftover roast chicken, whatever’s about really. Making stock is a skill worth learning and it’ll serve you well in the dark days ahead.
Of course this isn’t going to be a very typical stock, but you can look at the recipe below as a template. For example, you could replace the hare parts with a broken up roast chicken carcass and some chicken wings (from some good free-range birds!) The stock described here comes out pretty strong and quite gamey… good for recipes involving the rest of the hare but probably not much good for other cooking.
Input
Ingredients
I’m going to be a bit rough with the ingredients list here, precision isn’t necessary. The photo on the right really gives all the information you need, I could probably leave the list below out! Please use happy vegetables for happy flavours… save the bendy carrots for some chooks, local horses, or something. (And don’t buy so many that you let them get into that state next time… happens to me all the time, not having much livestock nearby I eat them raw before they can get too bad.) The ingredients can be multiplied by as many times as you’d like to make more stock, it’s great for freezing (and you can reduce it first to use less freezer space.) I don’t recommend trying to make it in a lesser quantity though, this is as small as I’d go for making a stock.
550g
hare forelegs and offcuts
drizzle
light olive oil
3 medium
carrots
2 medium
onions
3 sticks
celery
3
fresh bayleaves
6 sprigs
fresh thyme
handful
fresh parsley
Algorithm
Browned Hare Bits
First, preheat your oven to 220C. Ensure hare bits are clean, pat dry if wet, and toss with some oil in a bowl. Spread the bits around a baking tray and place in the hot oven for a 15 minute sizzle. Meanwhile peel the carrots (or don’t if they look pretty good) and chop them into about 3 or 4 pieces. Then quarter the onions, and cut the celery into 2 inch lengths.
Ready for simmer'n
After the hare bits have sizzled for 15 minutes remove from the oven and place the hare and all juices and scrapings from the pan into a smaller sized stock pot (22cm in my case.) Throw in the herbs and then pack in the vegetables, pack everything down as tightly as you can. The idea is that you want as little liquid as possible. Flush any remaining bits and oil from the hare roasting pan into the stock pot with about 500ml of water. Then top up the with just enough water to barely cover the content (note that the veggies may float a little, be careful not to add too much water.) In the end I added about 1.5l (photo left.)
Urgh, the strain!
Bring the pot to a gentle simmer, then place it on the smallest flame your stove can do. If, even then, it simmers any more than lethargically you might want to, assuming you have a gas stove, get yourself a simmer mat/ring for future simmering occasions (a fallback option, if you use an oven-proof pot, is to put it in a 120C oven after getting it to simmering point on the stove.) Now you can just leave it alone for about 3 hours, though you might want to give it a good stir every hour or so (I did, but it probably doesn’t matter.)
When the simmering time is up take the pot off the heat and give it a good 30-minutes to full-hour to cool down. When cool enough to handle strain the stock through a large-hole sieve or colander. Give it a good pressing to get out as much fluid as you can without pressing mashed vegetable through the holes in your strainer. Now strain back into the rinsed stock pot through a fine sieve (if you’re after a clearer stock you could do another step straining through wetted muslin, more about that some other time maybe.) Put the strained stock back onto the stove and re-heat/reduce as required for your purposes. I got about 1 litre of stock out of this which I then reduced down to 500ml of fairly rich stock. Alternatively, refrigerate or freeze the stock for some future cooking endeavour!
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
Hares have been associated with gods, goddesses, witches, fertility, and all manner of other myth and legend. For me, from this night onwards, hares are associated first and foremost with the best animal flesh I have ever eaten. Seriously, I should just give up on the whole food thing now as I don’t think I’ll ever cook myself something this good again. I’ve had grouse, considered by some the best thing on two legs; I’ve had wagyu beef, considered by some the best thing on four legs… Hare is, I suppose, somewhere between the two and four legged and fittingly, in flavour it is much like grouse, yet in tenderness and absolute melt-in-the mouth divinity it is much like wagyu. Admittedly I probably haven’t had the best grouse there is, and never having been in Japan I’ve certainly never had the best wagyu there is. Though, my first hare ever, bought from the local butcher, have I had the best hare there is?
I’ll write up the full details of my roast hare experience in time, it’ll probably take a week or two given how little “spare” time I tend to have. It was quite a production as well, so isn’t going to be simple to get into words. In the meantime the following photo will have to suffice.
Ready to serve
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
It’s been a pretty terrible week for me. On Tuesday evening I lay down to sleep and suddenly had a sore throat, very strange. Seriously, there wasn’t a hint of a problem until I lied down and then within minutes it felt like I’d swallowed a caltrop. I’ve had the throat all week, progressively getting better while my head got worse. I tried to describe how I felt to Kat and came up with “it feels like I have a nest of insane, woolly ferrets running around in circles in my head.” All great fun, I assure you! sigh I never used to get colds and their ilk, must have stronger bugs here in the UK (admittedly this is just the second cold I’ve had in two years, so it could be worse.) Anyway, enough whinging, pathetic, weak human!
I’ve been looking forward to the weekend. In the preamble to my latest lamb shank casserole recipe I mentioned that I’d ordered a hare. Well, this morning we picked up our hare from Hamblings, it was only 10 quid! An animal fit for roasting that’d had at least a good 5 days hanging. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly how long it was hung for, the butcher said 5 days was the worst-case. Ideally a hare should hang for at least 7 to 10 days, and it’s pretty cool at the moment so longer would be better. The butcher got it in on Tuesday (it’d been hung prior to this), hung it for another couple of days and it was skinned and paunched on Thursday. I picked up some unsmoked streaky bacon from him too. I tried to get caul fat but he told me it’s “like gold-dust”, and said that’s the way it’s been since abattoir work became piece-work. Things that take too much time to do (and don’t yield much money) just aren’t done any more.
The butcher separated the hare’s legs from its saddle for me, then we wandered back home, via the veggie shop, to admire the goods. The first thing to hit me was the smell, this is one pretty pungent beast! Not a bad smell, not to my nose, but I think some might find it a bit nauseas. Anyway, you can admire the goods without the smell, as usual I’m taking plenty of photos!
Mr Hare
The meaty back legs I’m reserving for a casserole tomorrow. The saddle I’ve trimmed up and will roast tonight. The front legs and trimmings have gone into a pot with vegetables and herbs to make a game stock that’ll be used for both the roast and the casserole.
In other news, I put an order in with a catering company called Nisbets on Thursday. It was time for a new frypan, my old one I brought over from Sydney has reached the end of its non-stick life. Based on a recommendation from the much worshipped “Hugh book” I went for the Bourgeat brand (Nisbets was also recommended by the book.) Hugh described Bourgeat as the “current chef’s favourite” (in 2004), that seems a pretty good rating. I went all-out and ordered three different sizes! (20cm, 28cm, 3-eff’n-huge-6cm) I also got a nice big and heavy cleaver for butchering, well, anything really. Plus a length of muslin (something I’ve had trouble finding anywhere else), and a good solid muffin tray since we didn’t have one (it’s not generally going to be used for muffins though!) I can report that Nisbets’s “next day delivery” (their cheapest delivery option) really is next day! Here’s the loot:
Nisbets Goodies
I’ll be writing entries about the making of the stock, the roasting of the saddle, and the casseroling of the legs. Though, as usual, it will probably take a week or two for me to get the entries done, spare time is a rare commodity.
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
Preamble, or random chatter before the recipe
Lamb Shanks
The weekend of Feb 2nd was an interesting one in the kitchen, alas it wasn’t quite high enough standard to write about. In brief, we visited our favourite local butcher on the Saturday and picked up some very fresh English lamb liver and a bag of “stewing venison.” The liver I treated as simply as it deserved, sliced about 1cm thick, flash-fried for about 2 minutes a side in a very hot cast iron pan, and served with fried onions, sweet potato mash and a pita bread. I’m now a solid fan of lamb liver, this was a simple yet 100% delicious feed. I’ll try to cover something like it in more detail in the future.
The venison was very strong in flavour, a well hung beast I’d judge. I got extremely experimental on it’s ass, in chocolate style! As an accompaniment I cooked up my first ever mole (no, not a small rodent dug up from the local common), it worked pretty well but I’ll need to give it some more practice. I think I’ll have to pick up some of the fancy chillies from the chilli-dude at Borough Market (or grow them!) The venison itself was browned with some lardons then stewed for just 1.5 hours in lots of red wine with some carrots, onions, and celery. The venison was removed and the juices and veges passed through a food mill a couple of times then boiled hard, until it got too salty and I gave in and thickened it up a little more with some cornflour. Finally some 80% dark chocolate was grated into it. This was a very rich meal, very satisfying. The idea needs more work and a couple more tries before I can write it up.
Spices
After such an experimental weekend I decided to stick to more familiar territory on the following one. Lamb shank casserole is something I can do in my sleep! We picked up some pancetta and two very juicy looking English lamb shanks from the butcher on Saturday and everything else in this recipe came from the cupboard or vegetable bowl. I decided to twist my usual flavourings a little, throwing out the usual rosemary or cinnamon and adding instead juniper berries, star anise, cardamom, and cassia bark (almost the same thing as cinnamon really.) This flavour change worked well, especially in the surplus lentil soup.
I should add some sad news. Our preferred local butcher is Hamblings, since they’re Guild-of-Q and are a BASC Game’s On supporter. We only discovered them a little while ago, we considered finding a great butcher within walking distance of home an excellent bit of luck! (If you recall, when asked for rabbit the High Street butcher could offer only Chinese rabbits, ick. Meanwhile, Hamblings knows a local guy who shoots local rabbits … it really is a much more inspiring place!) One of the local councillors provides the surprisingly modern convenience of an RSS feed of monthly council news, including summaries of planning applications and their resolutions. It was from this that I learnt of an application to turn the Hamblings site into a “hot food shop.” Shock! Misery! I confirmed this with the butcher last weekend, they’ll be around for another handful of months and when they close they won’t be opening up elsewhere. The current butcher’s father started the business in 1969! Alas, of nearly 40 years we only get to know them for their final year, oh well.
We’ll be making the best use we can of Hamblings while it’s still around. We picked up more lambs liver (dinner last night) and a couple of very nice looking sirloin steaks (dinner tonight) today. Plus we ordered a fresh hare for next weekend, that’s going to be fun!
Anyway, enough chatter, I’ve got a recipe to write up…
Ingredients
Ingredients
Serves: 2 Large Dinners, plus 8 “leftover” 280g serves of lentils.
To serve more people simply add more shanks, the limit depends on the size of your casserole! I could add two more shanks to mine without a problem. This means you’ll add less water later and will probably want to make up the difference after the shanks are removed, otherwise the lentils will be too dry in the end.
2
lamb shanks (these shanks were 450g each)
1 tbsp
light olive oil (about 10g)
135g
cubed pancetta (lardons or streaky bacon will suffice)
1 large
diced brown onion (225g prepared, 260g before)
3 sticks
halved and sliced celery (180g prepared, 190g before)
puy lentils (soaked for 10 mins, then rinsed and drained)
Prepared Ingredients
I’m not going to detail the, minimal, preparation any further. The basic descriptions above combined with the photo to the left should provide all the detail required.
The first thing to do it pull out a heavy casserole, I own and love a blue 24cmChasseur which is the vehicle for almost all my slow cooked recipes. For years I tried this sort of thing with lesser stockpots and saucepans and, while they can do the job, they just aren’t as easy to work with. Stick the casserole on a medium heat and add the olive oil, heat until it runs freely (but not so hot that it smokes) then toss in the pancetta. This should merrily sizzle and pop but not smoke, toss the sizzling pig until golden brown. Now the lamb shanks, ideally at room temperature and patted dry with a paper-towel, make some space amongst the pancetta pieces and place the shanks fat-end down. Let them sit and brown for a couple of minutes, then put them onto their sides and do the same, turn and repeat until the shanks have a good all-round browning (except where the curve of the meat/bone make this impossible of course!) The browning probably takes about 15 minutes all up. With this done put the shanks aside in a dish but keep the lardons in the casserole.
Ready for liquids
The vegetables come next. Toss the onion, celery, and carrot into the pot. This should be sizzling quietly, like quiet radio static (“What’s that!?” Says the digital radio generation.) Keep the veggies on the move so that they’re evenly heated and keep at it until they’re translucent and just beginning to brown. At this point the eggplant and garlic goes in. Again, keep things on the move until the eggplant has absorbed any excess oil and is starting to soften up, this should only be about 5 minutes. Add all the spices, toss, and then nestle the shanks into the vegetables, shifting veggies out of the way so the shanks are as low as possible.
Just Level
In with 250ml of wine! Note, keep 100ml for later. In with the stock!In with the tomato! Now top the casserole up with water until the liquid level is just level with the tops of the shanks (photo left.) This took a litre of water for me, but will depend on the size of your shanks and your pot. Give everything a good stir, making sure the shanks stay low in the water. Don’t worry that the liquid is rather watery, we’ll deal with this later.
Bring the liquid to just barely simmering, put the lid on the pot, and leave for 30 minutes. I suggest checking every five minutes three times to ensure the simmer is maintained. If it gets too eager you must reduce the heat. After the first thirty minutes are up give the casserole a good stir and turn the shanks. Do the same thing twice more at 30 minute intervals then after the next 30 minutes (so 2 hours all up) we’re done.
Reduced
Pull the shanks out of the casserole and put them aside in a bowl. Now push the flame under the casserole right up and in with the lentils! We want the liquid in the casserole bubbling pretty furiously, but not so much that it’s making a mess of your stove. Keep it like this until the liquid reaches a nice soupy texture, this is achieved by reduction and also by starches from the lentils. My casserole had lost about 1 inch (2.5cm) or liquid by this stage. Now stir in the extra 100ml of wine, this adds a desirable piquancy to the soup. Reduce the heat to a gentle simmer and keep on this until the lentils are done as you prefer, I gave them another 15 minutes. I like my lentils al-dente, especially puy lentils which will retain some of their lovely mottling if you don’t over-cook them. That’s really up to your own tastes though, stop the heat when the lentils have reached whatever you consider to be their perfect texture. Taste and add salt if desired, carefully.
Warming Shanks
We’re almost done now. The last thing to do is sink the shanks back into the lentils for about 10 minutes. This will re-heat the shanks and let the lentils cool a bit.
Serve by dropping a shank into a good sized bowl, ladling over as much lentil soup as desired, and topping off with some good EVOO and fresh ground pepper. A generous sprinkle of chopped parsley would go well I think, or even a gremolata, alas we didn’t have any parsley. Enjoy with a rich, dry red, maybe the one you cooked with — you do cook with a wine that is good enough to drink, right? I’m actually using a Banrock Station cask red for cooking at the moment, but prefer a richer wine to go with this meal. (Banrock Station was my preferred cooking plonk back in Sydney and a wine I’m quite happy to have a glass of. The price here compared to Sydney is scary, but that’s just London for you and the wine has travelled half way around the globe after all, bad “food mile” karma.)
Ready to Serve
Nutrition
In the end the lentil “soup” came to 2.9kg and per 300g serve has ~310 Calories. That’s taking into account all the ingredients above, assuming not much alcohol was lost from the wine, and that the lamb shanks added about 50g of fat to the soup (all erring on the greater side I think.) The other caveat is the pancetta, from one piece to another the fat content can vary wildly. So as usual, the nutritional details are a rough estimate (as you must realise these things always are!)
Lentil Soup: 300g
Thing
Value
Energy
310 kcal
Carbohydrate
34.5g
Protein
16.8g
Fat
9.2g
Sat
2.0g
Mono
4.4g
Poly
0.7g
Dietry Fibre
8.0g
I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide how many calories a lamb shank has, it’s simply too variable! After portioning out 300g of lentils for each shank we had leftovers to make 8 280g serves of soup, so 290 kcal per serve (+44 with a 5g drizzle of EVOO.)
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
I think I’ve found the best supermarket milk in the UK: Duchy originals organic freshly pasteurised Ayreshire milk. It tastes brilliant and, as it isn’t homogenised, comes with a little dollop of creamy goodness under the cap (probably containing 10% of the calories in the bottle!) Even the semi-skimmed product is pretty decent. All thanks to good old prince Charles.
Mentioning semi-skimmed brings another thing to mind: public health awareness as a function of corporate marketing[1]. Low fat anyone? Low salt? Low GI? Maybe it’ll be low pumpernickel next? Before you reach for the semi-skimmed take note that typically the Calorie difference is only about 25%. There really isn’t any point unless you drink litres of the stuff per day. A cup of the full-cream milk I have in front of me contains 160 calories, the semi-skimmed alternative would contain no more than 40 Calories less. That’s right, just forty. Taken in the context of a standard male adult intake of 2500 Calories the difference is a mere 1.6% (2.0 for the adult females.) Of course, for many, the “standards” are usually way off the mark (exactly how average are you?), in the context of my current calorie intake at 15% below BMR (~1650 Cals) this is still only a 2.5% difference! If I can fit normal milk into my diet then anyone should be able to!
The conclusion? Dump the bloody skim milk, it doesn’t taste good and makes stuff all difference anyway.
What about the fully skim-milk you ask? Well, you may as well stick to water in my opinion. But that aside, skim milk is typically 50% lower calorie than the full-fat cow juice, yet even then for a whole 250ml of the stuff we’re talking less then 5% of your daily Calorie intake. A quarter litre is a fair bit of milk too and, unless you guzzle glasses of the stuff straight, you probably have less than that per day taking into account normal sized servings of cereal and tea/coffee (I shudder to mention having milk in either though.)
Want some advice? Keep a closer eye on the sugar and other carbs in your breakfast and drinks. That low-fat chocolate milk drink from the inconvenience store would be fine if it didn’t have twice as many Calories in sugar than it has left out in fat.
Anyway, the point was: HRH Prince Charles sells good cow-juice.
[1] Something I’m not going to delve into in great depth. One of the wake-up moments for me, that made me take a closer look at just about every piece of “accepted knowledge” I came across, was coming to the UK and finding “non-bio” prominently displayed on many laundry detergent products. I had no idea at all what this meant! It turns out that at some point in the distant past there was some big scare about “biological” (containing enzymes) detergents causing drastic eczema and even toxic-shock, so everybody avoids the stuff. Meanwhile, back in Oz, companies market “enzymes” as a great thing for your washing powder (and I hear things are much the same in the US.) In the end it is all a function of marketing, this “fact” came up, some company pushed it into their marketing campaign, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Fat? Think of the billions made on marked up low-fat (usually high sugar) products, the English-speaking-worldwide anti-fat campaign has been around for decades yet this world gets more and more obese by the day. Eggs? Salt? Red meat? So many “evil” foods of this day and age have their original evilness based on flawed studies (some as long ago as the 1960s!) The great news is that more recent research is countering many of the earlier studies. Not enough salt will kill you, no saturated fat stuffs with your hormonal system, cholesterol from eggs is good for you. It’s all terribly frustrating, how do we know what to believe? I wish I knew. My best guess is keep things balanced. Almost always eat “rough” foods (i.e. stay away from things with more than three flow-chart states between their origin and your table: killed->packaged->cooked), and get a good share of calories from protein and fat (about 40% and 30% in my case). I’d say it is pretty clear that the government and industry backed low-fat-high-carb diet has failed. My, that turned into a rant didn’t it?
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
In my recent review of Coq d’Argent I mentioned Avruga Caviar. This topped off the timable that was part of Kat’s froggy entrée. I also referred to it as “damn good”, and it was! However, I should make the point that it does not seem to be actual roe… rather, some recombined smoked herring meat product.
When I wrote the Coq entry I assumed two facts: 1) That the caviar was herring roe, and 2) that “Avruga” was a generic term for herring roe caviar. The process whereby I unravelled these facts has been interesting, albeit a little bit of a waste of time.
Internet (Mis)Information
It all started with my Coq entry, I Googled “Avruga caviar” so I could link it from my review. I found two reasonable looking sources, one was on Wikipedia, a two sentence entry that said Avruga “is made from the roe of herring” (emphasis mine.) The second was on a site called iGreens.org.uk, which states that Avruga is “made from the roe of the common herring.” So I went ahead with this information.
Culinary Interest
The iGreens site said that Avruga was “Available from Waitrose, selected Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s.” Armed with this knowledge and an interest in getting better acquainted with Avruga I wandered up to Waitrose to get some bits and pieces for an evil cold platter for dinner. Alas, no Avruga! Instead I got a “herring caviar” named “Onuga®” in the hope that it’d be similar. We had a nice evil dinner of figs (argh! the “food miles!”), goats cheese, olives, and Onuga on spelt crackers. Washed down nicely with a 10yo tawny port. FYI: We do not normally eat this sort of food!
Before dinner I set about some Google sleuthing to see if “Onuga” was “Avruga” and find out more information about herring roe caviar.
Avruga® Revealed
In time I tracked down an official product page for Avruga to discover that the word Avruga requires a registered trademark symbol. Avruga® is the name of a product marketed by a Spanish company called Pescaviar. Along the way I also discovered that it is produced for Pescaviar by a company called Cataliment (no online info) and has Marine Stewardship Council “Chain of Custody” certification. This latter information comes from the news page of a website belonging to marine fishery consultants MacAlister Elliott and Partners.
So not only is it great “caviar”, it also takes the pressure off the poor old sturgeon and has impeccable environmental credentials. Eating this stuff should give hippies orgasms.
Spreading The Word
Armed with my new-found knowledge I trundled off to update the Wikipedia article. Aiming to clarify that “Avruga” was a product name and expand the snippet with the information about the producer and environmental certification.
This is the first time I’ve edited a Wikipedia article and doing so is an interesting insight on how the whole Wikipedia process can work. You just need enough enthusiasts who can’t get their priorities straight (I’ve really got other things I should be doing), Wikipedia has a whole Internet full time wasting nutjobs like myself.
After making some edits I discovered things like it being useful to review the “history” and to add update comments (I didn’t even see the form field for this when editing the entry.) Anyway, in the history I saw “Clarified the fact that it is not fish roe” followed by “Avruga caviar is made from herring meat not the roe? What utter garbage. I ate some avruga caviar tonight at a restaurant. It is ROE. Corrected article accordingly.”.
I was intrigued.
Reformed Herring
When someone makes such a pompous sounding “statement of fact” with no backup I get edgy. I’ve done it myself so many times and had it end in an embarrassing counter-proof almost as many times. The other thought is: why would someone bother to say it isn’t roe without some good reason? Since it is certainly seems to be roe.
The first thing I did was take a look at my jar of Onuga. The line “reformed herring product” was suspicious, if strangely worded. Reformed, like reform school? The ingredients revealed that the main contents were “water” and “smoked herring”, no mention of roe? I’m pretty certain that if it was roe it would say so!
But Onuga is not Avruga! On a closer look at the Avruga product page I noticed the phrase “Pescaviar has developped[sic], from wild herring, a unique product” and no mention of anything like “roe” or “eggs.” And re-reading the MacAlister Elliott page revealed the phrase “faux caviar.” I also did a Google image search to try and spot the ingredients list on the jar, in the fuzzy edge of one image I saw “smoked herring”.
I dug a little deeper and found the references to Pescaviar and Cataliment on the Marine Stewardship Council’s “PFA North Sea herring” certifications page. Both entries are for “smoked”. Adding this up with the information from the MacAlister Elliott site starts to make it sounds like much the same thing as the Onuga caviar.
I don’t claim any of these things as proof, but I’m certainly feeling convinced.
Who Cares?
I made another update to the Wikipedia article on Avruga caviar to include my new observations in as much of a “wikipedian” manner as I could. It’s hard work avoiding “weasel words.” Then again, the original article cited no sources as all, if I knew the markup for it I’d tag “has seen Avruga quickly gain popularity” with “citation required”. It seems feasible, but I’d like more information to back that up.
What does this mean for Avruga? I have to admit that the concept of caviar has a certain exclusive air to it and that the idea of “reformed” fish meat “caviar” feels like a cheapening of this. However, we need to be realistic about these things! Get off whatever try-hard, wannabe, foodie high-horse you’re on and just enjoy it. Call it tiny balls of firm fish jelly if you like.
The Onuga was good, firm little balls with a mild fishiness. Was it “good caviar?” It didn’t have the crispness and “burst” of real caviar, for sure, and Kat and I would go salmon caviar by preference without hesitation. I don’t think the Onuga was as good as the Avruga either. But without a side-by-side test it is hard to say, enjoyment of food is physiologically and psychologically complex. There are many influencers; in this case accompaniments, environment, and perceived value come to mind immediately. The Avruga would have also lacked “burst” I assume, so certainly requires revisiting without the trappings of a “high class” restaurant meal. Also, I only had maybe 5 or 6 little balls of Avruga and didn’t give them my full attention, since it was Kat’s entrée. It certainly wasn’t bad, we did come away from it thinking “damn good,” after all.
Gah! I’ve got to try and get my priorities straight! I thought train-spotting geeks were bad… here I am spending 3 hours worrying about faux caviar! I’d better put my jellified smoked herring balls back into the fridge and go to bed.
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
Yes, Ylläs (and some other) entries are still going to happen! From 09:00 last Sunday through to 23:00 last Friday 100% of my computer/net time belonged to work. I was in Germany dealing with some stuff. Getting back late on Friday night I turned off all the computers and spent the entire weekend computerless. A rare luxury, but one that means that things don’t get done.
When I got back from Germany a box of goodies from my mum back in WA was waiting for me. Plus, I grabbed a couple of bottles of whisky from the tax-free in Heathrow. Plus, we did a trip into London on Saturday and visited a catering store and Borough Market.
The image above contains, left-to-right & top-to-bottom:
Quattro Foglie ORO — Extra virgin olive oil from the EEVO stall at Borough Market.
Mum’s Quince Jelly — My all time favourite!
Promite — Never found this in the UK, I hate Vegemite and love Promite.
Mum’s Brinjal Ajvar — An Indian eggplant chutney, Kat’s favourite (she eats it from the jar if I’m not looking!)
Mum’s Duhhah — Perfect with the EEVO we got!
Mum’s Indian Tomato Kasundi — Great with everything.
Mum’s Tangerine Dream marmalade — Never tried it but it’ll be good.
Three wines from “back home” — The brute force of Aussie wines is quite a shock after months of mellower wines.
Aberlour 12yo — My favourite of the two, sweet and smooth.
Cragganmore “Distillers Edition” — Good solid flavour, maybe a “lighter” cousin in flavour to my favourite: Lagavulin 16yo. (No apostrophe on the bottle?!)
We also grabbed a couple of great cheeses, including the organic, unpasteurised Stilton that I can’t get enough of. At the catering shop we just picked up a few things missing from the inventory:
Butter Dish — I hate keeping butter in the fridge but we didn’t really have a spare dish with a cover and couldn’t be bothered with cling-flim.
Food Mill — The best way to make many soups and tomato sauce, alas, not the classic Moulin (the one they had was too big and too expensive).
Mandolin — Again this isn’t the mandolin but an 80% cheaper Japanese rip-off. Will see how long it lasts.
Conical sieve set — Hard to find but most useful, they didn’t have any muslin unfortunately but that’s easy to find elsewhere.
Grater — It is so hard to find a good grater!
Oil Jars — With pouring spouts so I don’t get an oily thumb and don’t splosh too much EEVO on dinner.
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
Hm, before Mary posted this I’d never even considered that someone old enough to talk wouldn’t know “Meat is made from animals.” After reading this story, and the one linking to it, it begins to sound normal. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I did grow up in a restaurant — so maybe my world was different. After all, in butchers and the like it’s normal to see very animal-like carcasses hanging around, literally. But even thinking of the humble whole chicken found in most shops, how can anyone mistake that as something that wasn’t once walking around? Then again, I’m not four years old.
Maybe it’s an American, land of plastic food, thing? Or a city thing? But even in Sydney the animalness of meat seems clear. In inner Sydney butchers (the good ones) carcasses are hanging, and chicken feet are on display (OK, maybe western Sydney for the latter).
I call beef “cow” and pork “pig” and have for a very long time I think. We had laying hens back home and the link to what was on our plates was unmistakable, I’d have thought. Only once did we try to eat one of our own chickens… that was mostly because I wanted to. I killed it and, IIRC, plucked it (Mum might have) and Mum cleaned it. It was baked but, while tasty, turned out to be rather tough. His name was “Elvis”. My sister was rather upset, you see, I killed the wrong rooster. I killed the one she’d named. (But she never went vego!)
We didn’t try to repeat this experiment with other excess roosters I killed. They fertilised the occasional lucky tree. One rooster had to be killed twice, I stuffed up the first attempt. For the brief period between his killings this rooster was dubbed Lazarus. This is the time I learnt that it was better to use the axe than try to break the neck (there’s a technique to that that I didn’t know at the time). In a note of defence, to the person keeping laying hens roosters are an inconvenience, one is OK (you need a succession after all) but they can be mean to the hens and are noisy.
I hope that in the future I have the chance to do it properly. I’m better informed now, I know that a rooster as old as the one we roasted (in it’s second year) isn’t right for roasting, but is good for, say, Cock-au-Vin.
Rewrite 2007-11-30: The espresso improves and I partake of it more often, a general re-write.
It isn’t entirely fair to rate Cinnamon Square as just a “coffee house”, their raison d’être is given by their catchphrase: “the theatre of baking”. That said, they have the distinction of providing the best espresso in Rickmansworth so I feel Cinnamon Square belongs here since they’re “my local”. Unfortunately “best espresso in Rickmansworth” is not, on it’s own, a great qualification. The competition is generally atrocious, although a couple of the Italian restaurants serve an excellent shot (but are not really accessible for the causal espresso).
The gory details: A Cinnamon Square espresso is high standard but not brilliant, rating at New Orleans to TBA equivalence. Cinnamon Square even comes close to filling the role in my life that both filled back in Sydney, being a short walk away from where I live and where I usually work. We have espresso at Cinnamon Square every Saturday we’re in town, when I’m working from home (permanently these days) I pop in once or twice every day, if they were open on Sunday it’d be every day of the week! Alas, the best local coffee place doesn’t follow New Orleans’s virtually “always open” hours.
Update 2007-12-30: Cinnamon square is now open on Sunday!
The length of the pour is usually appropriate but with too-frequent “fill the cup” efforts, and crema is normally full and firm. The coffee tends to the sour-bitter ends of the spectrum, but certainly not far and it is quite good. I don’t know the origin or age of the roast but it is fresh ground (the least you should expect these days). There’s potential for truly excellent espresso here, possibly just some grind, machine, and roast tweaks away. The most significant problem is barista training, which is usual for places that aren’t primarily coffee houses. Sometimes the head hasn’t been packed well enough and the volume of the pour swings between just-right and full-up (luckily the demitasse are small so full-up isn’t as bad as it could be).
The espresso covered, I can’t finish without mentioning the pusscakes[1] Their namesake product is evilly delicious, they’ve even won a “great taste award” for the “Sweet Fermented Bun” (aka “Cinnamon Square”). I have a hard time resisting these every time I go into the shop, especially since I love cinnamon, but alas a ball of sugary starches isn’t going to work out on my nutrition spreadsheet. The Cinnamon Squares keep good company with a selection of danishes, cupcakes, and other delights — we’ve never had a dud. They do well in the savoury department too, with beautiful breads and a range of lunches, the goat-cheese focaccia is excellent (but beware: their focaccia’s are huge). We don’t eat much bread but when we do fancy some this is where we go, they do a good range of large and small loaves and bake regularly.
If you’re in Rickmansworth and have a hankering for an espresso you can’t do better than Cinnamon Square, and you absolutely must try their namesake at least once. It’s also worth visiting just to see the cute little heritage-listed 500-year-old building they’re in — where even I bang my head on a padded rafter and can smugly think to myself: “Ho ho ho, I’m so tall.”[2]
Cinnamon Square, be there or be without a square!
[1] Pusscake: A term I picked up in my youth when labouring for a paver. Often I would be sent to the bakery “for pusscakes”, this pretty much meant anything sticky and sweet, but especially those containing cream and/or custard.
[2] I’m told that this reflects the fact that the average height was significantly lower 500 years ago, and you do find lintels low enough for me to bang into surprisingly often in old buildings in the UK. I’m only 5’9″ barefoot.
Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.
Coffee House: Caffé Nero, Rickmansworth
Address: 80 High Street, Rickmansworth, WD3 1AQ
Rating: Below even the depths of Gloria Jean’s (Sydney-Coffee Rating System) Chain Website | Map (Hey, why’s the Ricky satellite imagery suddenly a decade old?! The building I live in is a sandpit!)
Update 2007-12-30: Very recently a sign appeared in the window of the local Nero outlet informing passers-by that Nero is switching over to BT OpenZone. I’m not a huge fan of BT OpenZone but they are my roaming wifi provider because everywhere I’ve been (US, Sydney, Perth, UK, throughout Europe) I can usually find a place that my OpenZone account works (almost every hotel I’ve stayed in uses a provider that partners with OpenZone). Of course, OpenZone aren’t the only provider to have extensive worldwide partnerships like this (T-Mobile do, and most APs in Europe I use are actually T-Mobile). Anyway, the important point is that OpenZone has a far more convenient pricing structure than “Surf and Sip”, importantly this includes a no-upfront-fee pay-per-minute account type. Even though minutes are expensive here in the UK (why? no idea, because they can be I guess) this makes “Neronet” far more useful for the casual low-frequency user. Now, they just need to elevate the average quality of their espresso above “chain store”, hah.
The only “‘net Café” in Rickmansworth is a Nero outlet. Even though the coffee is pretty terrible I’d be happy to sit here for an hour or two and tap away on the laptop, mainly because the chairs are comfy. There’s a big problem though: the cost. A day-ticket costs 10 quid, which is the cost of about 5 coffees and is the lowest price ‘net access ticket you can get. A month costs 40 quid (twice as much as I pay for my home 8Mbit ADSL and telephone combined), and a yearly access ticket is 200 quid. The access provision company is “Surf and Sip(TM)” and, on the prior-to-payment café web pages, I can’t find any listing of the outlets where I can get connected to them. I’d bet it’s probably only available in Nero outlets, and outside of Ricky I never go to Nero.
Coffee notes about Nero in Ricky: If you get the right person you can get a barely drinkable espresso, that’s one staff member in about ten. I only drink Americanos here, watering down bad espresso can make it not insult my mouth at least. I used to have coffee here most mornings (simply to get the caffeine fix) but now that I’m working from home I go to Cinnamon Square instead. On the Sydney-coffee-rating scale this place is below Gloria Jean’s. They do have some decent panini though, so on Sundays Kat and I tend to have coffee and a panini for breakfast here (there’s not really anywhere else to go).
I’d really rather have a Starbucks in town, the coffee is a little better and the ‘net access is a little cheaper (but still not very well priced).
I’m almost tempted to try the local Wetherspoon’s pub for ‘net access. The coffee will probably be undrinkable, but they give you 30 minutes of free ‘net access with each drink you buy (and a coffee only costs about a quid there). But I can’t really bring myself to step into a pub before midday, even one with coffee and a breakfast menu. Also, the Penn is a pretty bodgey chainpub that I wouldn’t normally wander into at any time of day.
It doesn’t help that it is Sunday and the only things open are Nero, the Penn, and an Italian place we don’t go to.
So, 1.5 years into living in Ricky and Sundays still suck and (legally sound) out-of-home ‘net access is still a myth. I thought it might have picked up a bit by now. Unfortunately this is a town of rich semi-to-fully geriatric professionals (many retirees I’d guess) and breeders… so there’s probably not a lot of market for a bit of modernisation.
If it fit into my visa provisions I’d seriously consider trying to pick up a little café on the high street that shut down a while back. This Nero place is absolutely packed, the coffee and food are both dull but there are no other options (hey, even I’m sitting here).
I wonder about WiMax. They say it’s long range, if I ran an AP from my balcony what sort of cover could I get in buildings. How much does line-of-sight matter? How much does WiMax gear cost?
