The brief for this round of Dinner Club was 'foreign'. Matt plumped for Spanish, me for Japanese, Charlie for South African (cheating, if you ask me) and Simon for French.
Japanese was a bit challenging. First because you require lots of different groceries and accessories. Second because Dinner Club is meant to be about 'haute cuisine' not simply 'cuisine', and if you want to make super-cheffy Japanese food you need an entire arsenal of paraphernalia in the kitchen, and there's a distinct shortage of posh Japanese chefs with recipes on the internet. In English.
So I battled through. Sushi to start. I've made sushi once before but decided to trial it on Sunday and subject Jason to the result. Sunday's was decidedly average, with very little flavour and lack of seasoning. So I changed the vegetable in question from butternut squash to sweet potato, seasoned the rice properly, and seasoned the contents too. Genius - sweet potato, spring onion and Philly sushi.
Main was initially only going to be Sir Ottelenghi's
Black Pepper Tofu. In hindsight, this would probably have gone down a treat and been fine on it's own. But no, I had to push it a little further. In addition to that, I made
Kabocha Korroke using butternut pumpkin, with a wasabi creamy mayo and tonkatsu sauce (purchased as impossible to make by the very kind Simon at last minute). Was that enough? No. I also had to make
Teriyaki Chicken Yakitori (would have been beef but stupid shop had funny shaped meat). All of that, a little excessive but flavours went quite well together and it was exciting to have lots of bits to choose from even if we did have to eat them off of 70's pastel coloured plates.
Then dessert. Japanese dessert is actually quite hard, as they're not that into desserts - more sweets with those disgusting bean paste weirdness and jelly blurgh.
Japanese custard was an option but I settled on
Japanese cheesecake as the custard didn't seem particularly Japanese to me. Don't know what makes it Japanese except perhaps for the engineering degree that you need to construct the water-proofing on the cake tin, but wow. Delicious. Daft cake came out of the oven looking
like a proper cake but sank overnight leaving me concerned I'd completely screwed it up. However, tasted wonderful so clearly not a fail even if it doesn't look like the pictures. Went great with my Clynelish Distillers Edition. So great that I don't really recall much of the clean up process. Wins all round.
