Brighton Bonanza – 13/03/16

Dan finally got home on Friday and we had a quick lunch of avocado and cheese on toast – we had one left over from the salad ingredients-before heading back on the road again.  Although this time in a shiny new car.

We got to Brighton about 3pm and were greeted with a completely unnecessary, but delicious, meal of homemade soda bread, ham hock terrine and a quick mango pickle.  And bubbles.

We went for dinner and cocktails in a wonderful Japanese restaurant called Oki Nami.  No offence to Dan, but it is nice to eat out with someone else capable of hoovering down raw fish at the same rate as me.  Both S and I had sashimi platters as starters while Dan had the halibut tempura.  Then S and Dan were both dazzled by the specials board and had the venison.  Dan is a push over for a specials board.  I had a fish loaded Udon.

The next day we had a wander along the sea front and gelato for breakfast.  I had toffee and pecan, and salted caramel.  Dan had coffee, chocolate and mint choc chip.  S had mint chop chip and apple pie.  One of the joys of being an adult is that you can do this kind of thing.  It’s brilliant.

Between rugby matches S went all Nopi on our asses.  He made the beef croquettes, but with ham hock instead of beef brisket.  Fortunately he’d done all the time consuming leg work of making the stock, cooking the pork and forming the croquettes before we got there.  All that was needed was to coat and fry them.  I kindly lent him Dan for the shallow frying.  I mostly drank prosecco and got in the way.

 

They were amazing.  Utterly amazing.  We all very politely sat and stared at the last one before we had to go and get a knife to cut it into three.  None of us were willing to sacrifice one last bite for British etiquette.

I now have the difficult decision of when I’m going the make the bloody things.  Too soon and it looks competitive.  Too late and I won’t be able to compare properly.  Especially since S made the two substitutions of beef for pork, and panko for standard breadcrumbs.  Oh woe is me.

When we first arrived S showed off some beef cheeks he had marinating.  We’ve never used beef cheeks before, so we were obviously intrigued.  Especially when we heard how little they cost.

We have since been informed by other parties that Brighton is behind and curve and actually beef cheeks are really fashionable and expensive.  That’s right.  Brighton being slow on food.  Eating and drinking are pretty much the main things to do in this hipster breeding ground.  I think it’s more likely that beef cheeks are already old news in Brighton.  But not old enough to be retro.  Or uncool enough to be ironic.  It’s a delicate path these people tread.

Anyway.  S put them in the oven just as the first rugby match started and took them out again as the second ended.  He then reduced the sauce, made a pearl barley risotto and did something fabulous with some baby onions.  The end result was wonderful.

The texture of the beef cheek was virtually spreadable. We generally agreed that the sauce was a little too intense and almost bovrilly.  We narrowed it down to too many beef stock pots in the initial cooking liquid.  S and I struggled to finish as it was so intense (also there was A LOT of beef).  Dan cleared his plate…then ours when we weren’t looking.

Sunday we went out for a pub lunch then headed back home.  Dan ordered from the specials board.

We were shattered when we got home.  It turn out staying up to the early hours of the morning drinking ikea flavoured snaps is not restful.  That’s flavoured snaps from ikea not snaps that tastes of flat packing and family feuds.  So clearly the answer was more cooking.

Admittedly it was all pretty simple cooking, with wine, stretched over a few hours because we’re not sure we could handle anything complicated.

We started by making a toasted rice gelato.  Obviously.  I personally have issues with this recipe as it calls itself a gelato yet contains no eggs.  But we are utter rice snobs/fanatics so we thought we’d give it a go.  We have four different types of rice in the house as a standard.  This has on occasion gone up to eight.  We buy basmati in 25kg bags.  It is the carbohydrate of choice in this house.

Anyway to start the gelato off we soaked some basmati in water for five minutes.  Then spread it on a baking tray and cooked it in a reasonable hot oven until golden brown.  Or until our noses caught the first hint of it catching.  Whichever works for you/your oven.

Whilst this was going on we made “Japanese Somen Noodle Salad” from Harumi’s Japanese Cooking.  Harumi Kurihara is described on the cover as “Japan’s answer to Delia Smith”.  We’ve no idea how accurate that is but there are at least two recipes in this book we have done many, many times.  This is one of them.

It is essentially a Japanese tuna mayo pasta salad.  It’s supposed to use somen noodles, but on this occasion we used soba, which are buckwheat based and more filling.  We use 200g to feed four and they cook in minutes.  These get combined with a tin of tuna (in brine, so perks for the Bollster), 200g of deseeded sliced  cucumber that has been salted and patted dry, 100g of chopped onion soaked in water for 5 minutes to take the edge off, about 8 tablespoons of mayonnaise and, finally, a touch of soy sauce.

Once the rice was toasted we put in a very heavy pan with some sugar and milk.  The actual recipe required a double boiler, but we don’t have one of those, so careful monitoring on a low heat and a heavy pot would have to do.  We cooked the rice for over 40minutes, until it was mostly soft.  We pretty much gave up on getting it all soft at about the 40 minute mark.  We also pumped up the volume and gave it a little bit of a harder boil for 5 minutes in the vain hope of softening everything.  Once we gave up we gave the mixture a thorough blend and put it aside to cool.  In the morning we’ll add whipping cream and stir freeze it.

Whilst the rice was cooking we also made a somewhat deconstructed minestrone.  It was essentially a vegetable soup with a macaroni cheese on the side.  We won’t bore with the details since the soup was particularly uninspiring.  A shame since it was a nice idea.

We have to admit that eating the other half of this recipe is entirely dependant of how good a day we have at work.  A good day and we’ll be virtuous.  A bad day and it’ll be macaroni cheese on chip shop chips.

Post script: For those of you still wondering the four types of rice we usually have are white basmati, sushi rice, brown basmati and risotto rice.  The extras are thai rice, camargue red rice, paella rice and wild rice.  Okay, that last one isn’t really a rice.

Post post script: Gelato is toasty deliciousness.

Post post post script: Bad day.