Birds Nest Soup is a classic Cantonese delicacy made from the spittle nests of the Cave Swift. yàn wō (燕窝), translates literally as "swallow's nest": salty and sweet, hence the seaweed and seafoam (sugar). Larousse states that the Cave Swifts feed on gelatinous seaweed before breeding, but when the nests were first discovered by European travellers in the C17th, it was thought that the nests were made of lime and seafoam.

Todays Ingredients:
Noodles
Seaweed
Lime (dried slices)
Sugar

What a fanciful Romantic notion - that the foam of the waves crashing against the rocks could be a foodstuff for the Swifts...

I trundled in this morning with all my stuff - it takes a while to set up each day, and the staff at the Cafe Society are brilliant, and I try to keep mess to a minimum and work quickly. This morning, Tina, the owner, had arrived back from her holiday - she was away for 4 days, a testament to how hard she works, running two businesses - most people go away for a week, 8 days... two weeks. Not Tina. We had a chat, and she passed on to me some of the concerns her customers have - the raw meat I was using in my sculptures (if we can call them that, I reckon they're assemblages) was really offputting to customers. So, the first thing we agreed on was no more raw meat. That's okay by me.

So, 'Home is where the heart is' - and the heart had to be taken right out of it. This assemblage was designed to have a lambs heart sitting under the roof, and the gingerbread platelets and pasta evoked the beautiful shapes that can be found in microscopic photographs of blood. I thought an egg sandwich was a kind of homely food, and eggs are big on the agenda with me - my grandmother used to collect semi-precious gemstone eggs (about the size of  hens' eggs) and the egg as emblematic of a life-cycle is something that crops up regularly in what I do.

No heart in "Home is where the heart is'. The eggs were fried, not beaten or scrambled, but that's work for another day.

Charity begins at home - that's what I was brought up with. Putting coins in food goes a long way back for me - my mother still puts coins in her Christmas puds... when I was a tiddler, the height of excitement was finding 1p or 2p embedded in a sticky ball of fizzy something called a fizzy bomb...

I bumped into George on the High Street this morning, and as he waited for his hairdressers to open, so he came with me and we had a cup of tea. George is very highly skilled - french polishing for one, and he took to assembling this birdbox like a duck to water. We had the opportunity to chat; he is far away from his family, here in the UK, with his own two children, and we talked about taking care of children. There's peanut butter all over this birdbox, sticky goo that some kids love, but I have to say he did a great job.

Sausage meat, scotch egg, bacon bows.

What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails and puppy dogs tails,
That's what little boys are made of.

This nursery rhyme goes back a long way - originally, 'snips' and snails and puppy dogs tails - 'snips' being eels. We don't breed frogs for eating in this country, as far as I kno, and being near the Estuary, eels seemed to me to be more appropriate.

Recipe:
I iceberg lettuce (water source for the slug and snail)
2 fresh outcrop of slug-friendly mushrooms
1 eel
9 toothpicks and some pins
5 puppy dog tails (or shaped wholemeal bread if you prefer)
1 slug
1 snail

Method:
Assemble and play spot-the-snail

Is that what little boys are made of? Maybe so.