heads up

Craving for seafood is not an ideal situation when there is no such thing around. That's why the art of keeping some interesting leftovers in the refrigerator, can turn things around in unimaginable rewarding ways. 

My refrigerator incursion started with a portion of mud crab head, which made a tremendous tapa. It came from that edgy front part of the shell, not far from the eyes, which basically is the soft shell right before it becomes the real new shell. 


Dinner was unintentionally meant to be a heads promenade, so the following move took me to a juicy mulloway head. I simply boiled it for no more than five minutes, together with onion, peas and a fresh tomato to be decorated with extra virgin olive oil. In order to execute this kind of operation I always need plenty of time, and I literally mean it, to go through every single bone and cavity. I can't afford to do it if I happen to be starving, but otherwise it is a highly inspiring process. 

The menu was ideal for an albariño. There was one only bottle left, a 2010 Leirana, which I picked up in the small town of Meaño last May. That day I was going to meet Rodri, the young brain behind the winery. He had suddenly left somewhere else two hours away, so he called his father, who I ended up meeting together with his gracious mother. They showed me all around, and I even got a free bag of lemons, as well as lettuce they grow right close to one of their vineyards.

My weekly pilgrimage to the temple of chocolate in Syd City had its reward: the  cardamom ginger bon bon, which Jin Sun offered last Friday. I don't think it was anything new, but apparently it had been out of the menu for a while. The flavour was genuinely exciting. I could easily eat a full box of them.