random food porn: salmon hand rolls, fried pig’s ears, a belly full of tayyabs, and extreme scotch egg eating.

are you hungry? i am (shocker).  i’m currently roasting the potatoes, onions, and carrots from my organic veg box scheme in the oven with rosemary and sage from the garden (and by garden i mean five potted plants, two facing imminent death).  while those cook, i’m visually  stimulating my appetite, and hopefully yours, with photos of some recent things i’ve eaten.

we’ll start with the salmon, avocado and sesame hand roll from a sushi stall at the sunday upmarket at the old truman brewery.

delicious fresh salmon rolled right before your eyes! i’ve noticed there’s a lot more japanese home cooking here than in the states, where japanese restaurants are primarily sushi-focused. i went to an amazing okonomi-yaki (japanese pancake) place this week, which is apparently the only one of its kind in europe. post on that, plus videos, coming when i get my act together.

next up, fried pig’s ears! i have trouble turning down food items  that are: a) weird, b) things i haven’t tried before,  c) an unusual part of an animal, d) a local delicacy or traditional food and e) deep fried. the following item satisfied all categories (although some people might debate the use of the word ‘delicacy’), so obviously it needed to be in my mouth.

i’ll be honest, i was a little disappointed with the pig’s ears from the albion in islington. to be fair, i’ve never had pig’s ears before so i can’t really compare their version. mostly, they just tasted like fried…fat. chewy fried fat, like rubbery tendons encased in grease with a little bacon flavor. i enjoyed the pickled onion and caper accompaniment, but maybe some sort of sauce like a mustard or remoulade would have been useful to offset the pure fattiness.

next photo is a serious plate-o-meat from tayyabs, the worth-the-ninety-minute-queue pakistani restaurant in whitechapel raved about by critics, food bloggers, yelpers, and probably your mom too. thanks to my new friend chris‘s connections, we were ushered in promptly for our 7pm reservation and  immediately went to work. the food was disappearing too fast to take too many pictures, but i did manage to snap a photo of the absolutely incredible spiced lamb chops, seekh kabobs, and tandoori chicken. mmmmmmm.

everything else – a fantastic tindi masala (amazing curried baby pumpkins), dry meat (verrrry sloow cooked lamb that soaks up all the sauce and thus is ‘dry’), peshwari and garlic naan, and a few other dishes ordered by the tayyabs regulars – was fantastic. we stuffed ourselves silly. and then they brought out dessert on the house. gooood lord. obviously it would have been rude not to try everything, so we did our best to take down pistachio, mango and original kulfi, gulab jamun (like a sugar syrup soaked munchkin, for those of you raised on dunkin’ donuts), and two more unidentifiable creamy dishes.  we eventually rolled ourselves out the door like the inflated miss violet beauregarde from willy wonka, full to the brim with deliciousness.

while we’re doing things over the top, i’ll end with a photo of my scotch egg overdose.  i returned to eat my pies again last weekend to try another variety of andy’s scotch eggs.  having already consumed the salmon hand roll above as well as some thai duck rolls, i planned to buy one egg to try when i got home and had some more stomach space. i showed up just as he was beginning to break down for the day, so after chatting for a bit, he decided to throw in one of each kind for me to sample. sheesh. being a thorough and dedicated researcher, i had a slice of each.

the above photo is definitely one of the most bizarre i’ve ever taken. from the bottom going clockwise, you can see the traditional,  the intensely flavored smoked haddock, the lightly spiced chorizo (my favorite), an extremely subtle thai red curry, and a mild vegetarian mexican three bean.  warning to any of you who might find yourself in this situation –  i would recommend not eating five varieties of scotch egg concurrently. as delicious as they are, a girl can only eat so many deep fried meaty egg balls. and that’s all i have to say about that.