AND WHAT DID YOU EAT, MY DARLING YOUNG ONE?

Like all men of the library, I tend to think that the change from one year to the next as an essentially artificial and not all that important moment, but I’m not altogether averse to taking stock, not least because Blogger uses days, months and years as a way of counting the number of posts you’ve made, and the hits you’ve received.

So I’ve been looking in my photo files, at the pictures taken in the last year, that so far haven’t made it to the blog.  I’ve been trying (and in some cases failing) to recall the exact details of where and when I ate the food depicted.  Here are ten of them: not in any sense a “top ten,” and not in any coherent or historical order.

1) This, early in the year, was the smallest portion of ceviche I’ve ever seen, served at Loteria, a pretty good Mexican restaurant in Hollywood, which in general gives perfectly generous portions:

2) A sausage roll eaten in the café of an art gallery in Letchworth Garden city where there was an exhibition of prints by Eduardo Paolozzi, top artist.

3) Mushy peas in a pub in Saxmundham:

4) “Breakfast” in Chicago when I failed to find a cheery diner and ended up with a sugar overdose at Stan’s Donuts.

5) This is something very fancy at the Savoy – black pudding balls, I think, but I’m not sure what else.

6) This is Sunday breakfast at an Israeli restaurant somewhere in West Hampstead: 

7) An heirloom tomato eaten and artfully arranged in my very own test kitchen.

8) In a restaurant named Ravi Shankar, in Somers Town  – I’m sure that giant poppadum thing has a more specific name but I haven’t been able to find it on their website.

9) A Burns Night Haggis:

10) And finally, the last cheese board of 2018. Most of the cheeses here were bought at a farm shop in Gloucestershire with the terrible, terrible name of Jolly Nice.  Perfectly good cheese though, even if I have no idea of the name of that bomb-like thing at the front. It was good though.

SIZE IS SOMETHING

Ya know how you could sell more ceviche around here?

Bigger effin portions.

           To be fair Loteria, in Hollywood, where this was served as a starter, is generally pretty good on portion size.  This was just a misstep - possibly on our part - there were two of us (dudes) sharing.
            And, to be fair, there were four tiny Japanese girls at the adjacent table (glued to their phones throughout their meal) who, given the minuscule amounts of food they ordered, would probably have thought this was a feast.

SORROW TEARS AND CEVICHE

You must have read one of those articles that crops up every few years: some university department has researched what music “goes best” with which kind of food.  You know, “Acid jazz really enhances the taste of monkey brains” kind of thing.  Well …

On Saturday, it being my birthday, I went to a restaurant called Los Balcones (1360, Vine Street, Hollywood).  It used to be called Balcones de Peru – but they obviously decided they need something snappier.  “It is our mission to share our love for Peruvian culture, cuisine and of course the national spirit pisco.”

I think it’s a pretty reliable place and it always feels just a little bit special, without raising expectations too high.  And I’d been having a jonesing for ceviche, so I ordered some Ceviche Mixto – “striped bass, shrimp, octopus, squid, lime juice, onions, choclo, rocoto pepper” (though to be honest with you I couldn’t spot any octopus in there).  The choclo is the puffed up sweetcorn on the right.

  
There were Platanos Fritos there too: “Peruvian plantain fritters, baby greens, goat cheese dressing,” like this:

And Huancaina – “baby potato salad, boiled egg, creamy huancaina sauce. “

Anyway the food was really good – and if you dipped some of the sweetish plantain into the sour marinade of the ceviche you had a very good thing indeed going on.

But OK, so what music would you expect to accompany this Peruvian feast?  Have as many guesses as you like and I think you wouldn’t come up with Fela Kuti – but that was the soundtrack here, and it made me wonderfully, perhaps incomprehensibly, happy. I’ve been trying to find some connection between Fela Kuti and Peru and I’ve failed, so I suppose it was just the personal taste of somebody on the staff.

Looking at his physique when he was healthy (and of course he became extremely sick at the end of his life) it’s hard to hard to imagine him being much of an eater, though I did track down a website with an article from Ovation Magazine by one Mike Osagie which described Fela’s eating habits like this: “Fela was a voracious eater who ate like a lion.  He could pay any amount for a great meal.  For example, among his women only about two or three cooked for him.  The queen of whom was Fehintola ... who was rumoured to be Fela’s favourite because of her cooking talent and sexual prowess.

    “A champion of pastries and different brands of sweets, Fela was also crazy about good snacks like cupcakes and custard.”

     Who’d have guessed?