Look what I found at the Prahran market!
Striped heirloom tomatoes from a Paris market.
I've titled this 'blushing salad', one of the 15 courses I ate at Mugaritz a few weeks ago. It was a pretty little herb and blossom salad on top of a emmentel cheese broth. As I gently moved the leaves to begin eating, the baby vegetables hiding underneath, namely the beetroot moved and tinted the broth this pretty colour. (All the Mugaritz experience to come)
Fruit jellies in Lyon, France.
This one is for PDC, I think we took more photos of this hill than at the Louvre.
Some jamon with prices in Euros at the La Boqueria market, Barcelona.
Pimms in London...
Wild Strawberries at Cal Pep, Barcelona, just before they were put in the bottom of one of the 'foams'.
Perhaps not a beautiful photo, but a beautiful dish at Gandarias, San Sebastian, Spain. The leg of a suckling pig that was roasted until the skin was crispy and the flesh soft and falling from the bone. Simple delicious food. 
The 'ham and clams', as I saw it not so eloquently written. Essentially, fat juicy clams cooked with cubes of jamón and served in a impossibly viscous and rich porky, clamy broth. This was possibly one of my top five dishes of all time. 
Tortilla, an egg and potato omelette that was slightly unset and served smeared with a heady aïoli. 
The beans were braised but tasted incredibly light, the dressing was sticky and high acid sweet, and the sausage I'm not entirely sure what it was but it had rich crumbs of foie gras through it. 
The 'foams' as the staffed called them had 5 daily flavours. To the right in the image was the crema Catalina that was an orange and cinnamon spiced foam topped with sugar and then blow torched. The other flavours were pineapple, coffee, lemon and a white chocolate foam with macerated wild strawberries in the bottom. 
And then there was the food...
Crispy fried baby fish of a few different varieties, school prawns and calamari rings all tossed together and perfectly seasoned.
The 'ham and clams', as I saw it not so eloquently written. Essentially, fat juicy clams cooked with cubes of jamón and served in a impossibly viscous and rich porky, clamy broth. This was possibly one of my top five dishes of all time.
Tortilla, an egg and potato omelette that was slightly unset and served smeared with a heady aïoli.
Pan fried fish, that was sectioned and bones removed in front of us.
The beans were braised but tasted incredibly light, the dressing was sticky and high acid sweet, and the sausage I'm not entirely sure what it was but it had rich crumbs of foie gras through it.
The 'foams' as the staffed called them had 5 daily flavours. To the right in the image was the crema Catalina that was an orange and cinnamon spiced foam topped with sugar and then blow torched. The other flavours were pineapple, coffee, lemon and a white chocolate foam with macerated wild strawberries in the bottom.
The cold weather, has reminded me of these beautiful strawberries I ate in Marseilles, France.
Weird looking little suckers aren't they!
Percebes are a Spanish delicacy, also known as a gooseneck barnacle (food nerd, I know!), they grow on rocks on the north-western Spanish coast, and apparently are quite dangerous to harvest.
Slightly warm from being cooked, the flesh looks like a soft mushroom with a strange filament thing on top. The taste was quite intriguing, some what like a fresh briny oyster with the texture of a clam or mussel. The overriding memory is of a delicate fresh sea taste and trying not to get the squirty juices all over me.
Essentially, for people like me that only possess school French (and in my case supplemented by a decent dose of food and wine French), the menu was a simple version of fish bisque to start served with crotons, raw garlic to rub and grated gruyere cheese. We were given a large pot to help out serves from. Like magic the raw garlic was grating straight onto the croutons that we where then to throw into the soup. Unfortunately from the stench of our skin the next morning we went a bit crazy with this.
After the soup we were served some mussels that had been steamed with what I suspected was some wine and Provencal flavours; local herbs, tomato, garlic and some white zucchini and capsicum.
Next was a huge cast iron pot of a house made pork pâté, that we were given a knife and left again to help our selves, it was incredibly rich with what I’m sure is every type of offal imaginable.
After the pâté we were offered a beef or fish course. The fish was a lightly floured and pan fried plate size flat fish, perhaps like a sole? Served simply with a wedge of lemon.
The final sweet course was a slice of what when I was a kid, I’d call Neapolitan ice cream. The quality was very basic but it was served with a generous glug of some type of local liqueur, as if we needed it by this stage, as the only beverage options at Lou Pescadou was carafes of wine; local white or rose, served by the litre carafe... Well what more can I say than, one was not quite enough but two was a little foolishly holiday spirited! Especially for PDCs head the next morning hehehe
Though the food was basic, it was delicious, interesting and obviously had a strong local following from being squeezed between locals at long tables running the length of the dining room, all night.
