Food: Christmas dinner



We had Althea over for Christmas dinner after Anya went to sleep, and it's fair to say that we pushed the boat out a bit. Five courses, plus cheese and petit fours and lashings of fizz and red wine. Still feeling a bit bloated now.

Here's the menu:

Amuse bouche of pomegranate, salmon roe, and ginger tapioca

Salmorejo with scallops, bugs and tomato crisps

Duck roasted in young merlot with figs and apricots

Mulled wine granita

Berry and orange trifle

Cheese

Petits fours and tea

It was actually really easy to do in advance and would easily scale up to more people. We've got a fair amount of leftovers.

Here's a few of the courses:

The amuse bouche was dead easy and only needed a little advance preparation. The idea is to play off that weird textural sensation you get from salmon roe, that intensely fishy, golden amber stuff that sometimes turns up on top of sushi.

When you think about it, there's quite a few other foods that have this quality to them. Tapioca is one--something that I love in that Taiwan pearl milk tea and in a good tapioca pudding. I hated it as a kid because I felt it was like eating frogspawn, but that same quality makes it a good match for the roe. Plus, you can flavour it with whatever you want.

For the third ingredient I had wanted some citrus. There's a tragic blog somewhere out there of a guy who worked at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's garlanded fine dining restaurant, and spent days teasing apart pink grapefruit segments into individual cells for a garnish on his liquorice-poached salmon. I wasn't going to do anything like that, but some citrus fruits fall apart into cells much more easily. Pomelo breaks up in your hands and finger lime, a variety from Australia, will exude tart green spheres like caviar when you cut it in half and roll it between two fingers.

Well, Kate was doing the shopping and wasn't able to find either of these, so in a moment of inspiration she picked the ingredient that made the dish: pomegranate. The roe is actually very intense so it needs something like pomegranate to stand up to it.

The only bit of pre-preparation is making the tapioca. I flavoured mine with ginger but really you can use whatever marries well with the other ingredients-I was thinking of using anise if the citrus had been available. Just boil up a pan of water, add your flavourings--in this case, half a dozen slices of ginger root--add some seed tapioca, and first boil covered for 15 minutes then leave to cool for another 15. Drain and remove the flavouring and refrigerate--you can do this the day before.

On the day, get out your ingredients and take some of those Asian soup spoons that fancypants restaurants use for these things. You want to eat the whole thing in one mouthful. Place a biggish basil leaf on the spoon and then place some little dollops of tapioca and pomegranate seeds onto it, before taking a little roe and plopping it in the middle. A few shavings of lime zest and it's ready to serve.

OK that's enough for now. Other recipes to follow shortly.