A recent trip to a wedding in Cork, Ireland, led me to a lovely beach which has a bed of seaweed. To our delight, we discovered lots of winkles under the rocks.
We stayed in an amazing hotel called Ballymaloe, which has been run by TV chef, Rachel Allen’s family for decades. We were well fed with great food though could not stop feeling peckish looking at the freshly collected winkles.
We just HAD TO eat them!
The lady at the reception told us we could not have a kettle in the room so we could not cook them by boiling. We pretended we would like to have tea in the bedroom but were told there was no kitchen in our building- so blanching/poaching could not happen either.
Luckily, as hotel guests staying for a wedding, there was at least one allowable heat source- an iron!
Upside down iron = Hot plate for searing winkles? We decided to have an experiment…. Continue reading to see how we cooked the winkles on a hotel room iron >>
I have not heard much about Takashi Murakami’s work before, but as I grew up in Hong Kong where Japanese cartoons are shown daily on TV and Japanese manga is pretty much part of people’s life, I am not a stranger to Japanese sexual fantasy, especially how women are usually portrayed as figures that have big breasts, short body and super long legs. Takashi Murakami has ’embraced’ this part of Japanese culture by making two 3 metre high sculptures of what would have been palm size dolls. You can check them out in the Gagosian Gallery, which held an amazing light exhibition of 
Winkypedia 