CHRISTMAS ALL OVER THE WORLD

It’s that time of year when we put together a care package for the brother-in-law Charlie who lives on Lopez Island, off Seattle.  And although the people who live on the island seem to be overwhelmed by the availability of wild fish and game, they lack a good “ethnic supermarket,” and so a trip to the Silom supermarket was required to buy some weird stuff for Charlie, along with slightly less weird stuff for myself. 

I went for snacks as you’ll see.  These regular flavor chicharons are  “A Filipino Favorite” – not everybody knows that, though I think I might have guessed.

Then there were these kind of crab-shaped, though not at all crab-tasting, things:

There were fried strips of pig’s ears in soy sauce – bit of a mixed bag there, some of the strips were nice and crunchy and easy to eat, some hard as rocks.

And Potae Potato Snack, made by the Useful Food Company of Bangkok:

But perhaps best of all – and this was for Charlie not for me – because the folks in Taiwan evidently don’t give a toss about western sensitivities, there was some vegetarian barbecue sauce decorated with swastikas:

And if this seems a bit dodgy, may I direct you to this menu dated 1911 from the Mission Indian Grill at the Alexandria Hotel in downtown LA.  That’s Indian as in Native American.

I first saw the image in Josh Kun To Live and Eat in LA which also shows the inside of the menu which seems utterly “non-native,” though it’s hard to argue with a menu that features pickled walnuts, salmi of domestic duck and Caviar Imperiale d’Astrachan.

The Mission Indian Grill looked like this:

And there were evidently rooms where less elegant activities went on.

THE BOMB

You know, I get the feeling that the citizens of Los Angeles are no longer quite as crazy about food trucks as they used to be.  Sure, the trucks are still in business and doing just fine, and if you’re in need of lunch or you’re coming out of a gig, then you buy some food from them.  But I get the sense there’s no longer that manic driving around in the middle of the night, tracking down the perfect taco truck that’s just parked on a bit of waste ground by the freeway onramp.  Sanity returns.

And so, emerging from the LA Convention Center one afternoon last weekend I picked the first food truck I liked the look of: the Okamoto Kitchen.  I especially liked the look of it because it was the one that had the shortest line.  These were the only guys waiting, and they looked like they knew a good food truck:

Not everything was available, not even the Yuzu Lime Soda which was a shame because I liked the sound of that.  But the Nom Bomb Sandwich could still be had; sweet-and-sour, teriyaki-glazed, deep-fried chicken with shredded cabbage, tartar sauce, and jalapeno on a brioche bun.  So I had that.  It looked like this:

It was a perfectly good sandwich.  Not the best sandwich in the world, not one I’d drive manically around the city in search of, but I enjoyed it all the same. Warren Zevon and me, we see pretty much eye to eye on that one.

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?

*

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.