Dinner at Andrew and Heidi's

A couple of weeks ago, we were the lucky dinner guests of our friends, Andrew Spurgin, formerly Executive Chef at Waters Catering and now a partner in the new catering company Campine, and his wife Heidi - a graphic designer and all-around super cool chick. I tend to think Heidi is responsible for the super chic decor of their vintage jewel-box home on a Mission Hills canyon, but Andrew clearly has his creative side as well. The food he turned out for us was artful and delicious in equal measure. The meal was influenced by their recent trip to Japan, and our first course was this beautiful and delicious plate of sashimi - sliced raw Mano de Leon scallops, uni and beautiful garnishes of crunchy seaweed, a Japanese spice blend, a salted cherry blossom, vanilla salt, and fruit...

The Uni was melt in your mouth delicious, and the mano de leon scallop was utterly perfect. All of the seafood came from Catalina Offshore Products. This is Andrew's rendering of the dish - I wanted to frame it. (See what I mean about that artistic side??)

The next course - also depicted above - was a four part dish of clams in a bacon "dashi" - with an uni pudding, sticky rice, butter poached spot prawn, deep fried prawn head and roe. The spot prawns also came from Catalina Offshore Products.

With the meal we enjoyed this very lovely cold sake....

Between the courses, Andrew retired to the kitchen to do his work, while we drank more sake.

This course was a rich braised pork belly with udon noodles - and yes - indeed that is a cricket on the plate. A green curry cricket, to be exact. I couldn't detect much green curry flavor - but it was certainly crunchy.

For dessert, Andrew plated up some mochi with strawberries as a refreshing little palate cleanser. We also had some crunchy crabs - and I have to admit, around that time my memory gets a little fuzzy.... lots of sake you see...

It's true that Andrew and Heidi could have served us rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and we still would have had a blast spending the evening with them - but this kind of skill (and their great stylish space) deserves to be shared. So please to enjoy... but don't bother asking me for Andrew's phone number. If you want to eat this food yourself, you'll have to call Campine!