BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

Obviously, once you find a source to buy blood, you’re going to buy blood.  And then you’re going to find something to do with it.  The mind reels at various sacred and profane possibilities but I decided to make blood sausage: black pudding, boudin noir, possibly even morcella.

I looked an online for a good recipe.  This wasn’t as easy as I hoped.  Of course I knew that pork fat is involved, and I had some pork fat in the freezer.  But quite a few of the recipes used a pork shoulder, in which case it sees to me you’re just making a pork sausage with a bit of blood in it.  And I happened to have some Atora beef suet in the cupboard, which may be only borderline legal in the USA.  I also, as it happened to have both pork and beef blood.

Other recipes required large quantities of groats – often barley, and I’m not a huge fan of barley.  I was prepared to use oatmeal but I didn’t want to go further than that.  But I thought having some liver in there might be no bad thing. Pretty much all the recipes, and this did surprise me, involved allspice

As regular readers know I’m constitutionally incapable of following a recipe but I did find this one on recipeland.com.  And yes, I did use beef blood rather than pork. 

I wasn’t absolutely sure what the target audience was – the kind of cook who needs to be told what mincing is, evidently.  And as for a shortage of blood and casing - well, you've just got to try a bit harder.  
 It's described as for “Black Pudding (Irish)” and incidentally it appears on the Facebook page for Irvington Farmers Market, identical but unattributed and it’s lost its Irish designated.  

          
Since I was looking for inspiration rather than precise instructions, I didn’t follow the quantities or the proportions and I definitely didn’t steam for 4 or 5 hours.  I found a rival recipe that suggested 20 minutes – so I followed that instead, obviously.

Came out looking pretty decent.

And even more decent once the sausages had been steamed.   

Do you want a bit of Irish in you?

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And how did they cook up?  And how did they taste?

Well, I was a bit worried that they might burst open during cooking but no, these are obviously strong, though yielding, sausage skins.  They kept their structural integrity very nicely.

And they tasted really remarkably, perhaps surprisingly, authentic; quite rich but quite subtle.  They could have used more salt and certainly more fat, but as a first effort, there was no reason for complaint.

I remember when I used to go out for curries with the lads in Sheffield, one of our number would say after a good meal, “You couldn’t fault it.”  This was high praise indeed, an indication that you certainly would fault it if you possibly could, but try as you might you just couldn’t.  Not sure I, or my sausages, could quite live up to that standard.

SANDWICH DE JOUR

 OK, I admit I mostly ordered it for the name – the Astro Melt, from Astro-Burger, at Kramer Junction, up in the Mojave.  Chicken, avocado, bacon, cheese – all god stuff, but the fact is I didn’t really enjoy it all that much – the chicken, though plentiful was a bit damp and tasteless.  Or maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.  I suppose that’s what comes of ordering food simply because you like the name.

It was very nicely presented though.

THE PIG AND I

I was in the Vallaria supermarket in Palmdale, Ca, where they selling the biggest pieces of pork skin I had even seen.  I bought one: there were bigger pieces for sale but why be greedy?

On the wrapper it said “chicharron delgado en bolsa.”  My knowledge of Spanish edges towards the nonexistent: I knew that chicharron was pig skin, but as for “delgado en bolas” – I suspected this might be some ancient or at least highly specialized way of cooking pig skin.

Now, of course, like all you Spanish speakers, I know that "delgado" simply means thin and “en bolsa” means in a bag – which is accurate enough but somehow it sounded better before I knew what it meant. 

REASONS TO BE EATING

Above (not absolutely in focus) is the Sa-Wooei Special Duck: “double cooked,” crispy, salty, intense, with a not-too-sweet, homemade plum sauce.  

         It would certainly be reason enough to go to the Sa-Wooei Thai restaurant, 10621, San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito, California.  But you know, food is never the whole or the only reason why you go to a restaurant.  I was attracted to the Sa-Wooei because it had a fine (if not easily legible) neon sign:

And perhaps even more because it was on stilts.  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen, much less eaten in, a restaurant on stilts before.

And then there was the garnish – a butterfly carved out of a beet.  Edible for sure, but nobody else in the restaurant seemed to be eating theirs.

All good reasons to go to Sa-WooEi, but really, above, all the duck.