Daisy Does Dinner for Kavey (NSFW)

I've known Danny for a long time. Not long enough to have seen him with hair, obviously.

But long enough that he wasn't yet the Food Urchin when we first encountered each other, online. He was Toady Dan, on the BBC's online food chat forum.

It's worrying isn't it?

I mean it's one thing letting a Food Urchin make you dinner. But quite another taking food from a toad!

Luckily, for reasons that have almost (but not quite) faded into the mists of time, I've known this sweet, egg-headed Essex lad as Daisy since the fist time we met in person. And saying that "Daisy's Doing Dinner Tonight" has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

I was one of the first to sign up to his Where's My Pork Chop (though not the first to get around to actually doing it, by a long shot). I roped Pete in to help and we made some shahi paneer, egg curry and basmati rice and I threw in a box of polychromatic Indian mithai (sweets) from my local Mahavir Sweet Mart. By his account, the effect of all that sugar was pretty psychedelic…

Now, Daisy did do a rather incredible imu, where he buried a headless lamb in his back garden, with fire, for many hours. And proceeded to feed an entire army of WMPCers!

But, I wanted a proper Reverse Where's My Pork Chop, usually abbreviated (with no explanation for the odd capitalisation) to rWMPC.

After a little badgering, Daisy gave in. At around the same time, he was talking on twitter about getting his hands on some game birds. I demanded Magpie Pie. Not because I have any particular desire to eat magpie, or even know whether it's a bird that is considered to be good eating. But for no other reason than that the name tickled my silly bone. Magpie Pie! Magpie Pie! Magpie Pie!

In the end, Daisy didn't get his hands on any magpies and we both needed to defer the date which is how we suddenly found ourselves agreeing to schedule for my birthday, at the end of September.

So what did he conjure up for me to celebrate my 21st again again again… ?

To start, we enjoyed a smooth, creamy cauliflower and blue cheese soup. Daisy had also lightly pickled some mixed fruit and vegetables for dropping into the soup as a garnish. The soup was delicious and I really liked the juicy little cubes of flavour provided by the pickle.

This was followed by a duck hash, greens and mushrooms and a fried duck egg each. We couldn't get the duck hash to form any solid shape, so it doesn't look gorgeous on the plate, but it tasted lovely, especially with the rich duck egg yolk mixed through it.

The highlight of the meal for me was the beautiful pear tart tatin, made from his own produce too! We served it with some posh ready-made fresh custard and it was just the ticket.

Best of all, having stuffed ourselves with the Tasting Menu at Launceston Place for lunch, and off to Dorset for the Meemalee's Kitchen Burmese Popup the next day, we realised we couldn't finish it all so there's more than half a tart left in the freezer!

Oh and what did I swap for the lovely meal above? I met Daisy in China Town late morning and introduced him to dim sum. I was very good and only had a bite of each dish but as I love feeding people, was gratified to watch Daisy munching through lots of dim sum delicacies, including his first chicken feet!

PS I really wanted to call this post Daisy Does Dallas, just because… but it made no sense, so I had to resist. I had a happy 2 minutes coming up with all kinds of Daisy titles like Daisy Does Deep Throat and Daisy Fucks A Duck but, you know, that'd make this NSFW. Oh wait, now the post is NSFW. Oops!

This post first appeared on Where's My Pork Chop?