with baked sweet potato and Redcurrant-Ginger sauce Yes I couldn’t fit the whole title in the post header.   

Christmas holidays +boredom =

daft presentation for a kangaroo steak.

I did a similar thing ages ago with a cassis sauce, back in the days before I had a camera. Last week, when I realised I had a kangaroo steak to use, but not an awful lot of inspiration, I thought I’d just repeat the old recipe to provide a photo for my old post. As an extra incentive, amongst the things my parents gave me at the end of my stay was a single asian pear. I thought this juicy, crunchy fruit would be even better in this recipe than the pears you get growing around here.

Then, all of a sudden some holiday-driven inspiration struck and I thought of replacing the cassis with redcurrant and ginger.  After all, ginger goes really well with sweet potato, which I was using to accompany the meal.

The meal was simple to make. The kangaroo was just marinated in red wine and ginger then baked at 220C for about 12 minutes. It was a fairly thick loin steak so it came out  rare -  just how I like it!

The sauce was made by softening some finely chopped onion with grated root ginger in butter, then adding a little redcurrant sauce and some red wine and simmering with a stem of rosemary. Once the sauce had thickened, I strained off the solids and kept it warm while I waited for the kangaroo to cook.

The caramelized pear  and roasted sweet potato were done exactly the same as before except this time I didn’t bake the sweet potato in honey, just in butter. I guessed it would be too sweet alongside the caramelised pear and the ginger-redcurrant sauce. 

Finally I made a daft arrangement of the food and topped it with a sprig of parsley. It actually looked better in real life than in this photo. The colours were too dark for my cheap-sh*t camera to cope with. I had to turn the brightness right up, just to make it visible.

Incidentally, I was right about the asian pear. Just the right thing to use with this dish. The kangaroo-sweet potato was served alongside some tenderstem broccoli which had been par-boiled and sauteed in garlic butter. It is quickly becoming one of my favourite vegetables.

My craving for calves liver didn’t disappear by Saturday morning so I had to go to the only place that would stock it in spite of it being Christmas: Borough Market.

There I was thinking the supermarkets were busy. They were not a patch on the crowds in Borough by Saturday afternoon. Through all the bustle I searched for the liver and something to feed my parents . The liver turned out to be a much easier job that the fish for Mum and Dad. There was a huge slab of it in the ’Ginger Pig’. After  a lot of crowd fighting by one fish stall, I just managed to get hold of enough monkfish to keep the parents happy and then squeezed myelf out of the market.

The calves liver turned out to be remarkable quality. It was from the ‘Ginger Pig’ and was probably the best liver I ever tasted. Like I said I had something indulgent in mind when I bought it.

The liver was soaked in marsala for a while and then pan fried until just pink in the middle. I didn’t make a sauce for it but instead just drizzled some more marsala over it and served it with truffled angel hair pasta. The sauce for this was made of cream enriched with egg yolk and  black truffle oil.

In this meal I also discovered tender stem brocolli. What great stuff! It’s almost like purple sprouting broccoli but you don’t get the problem thet some bits go soggy while the stems are still raw! This time I just steamed it but I think I’ll be trying lots out lots of other ideas with it soon.

Goon is starting to get a bit cross at me because he’s never had calves liver before. I keep saving it for a treat for me when he’s not around.  Oh come on,  who’d want to share calves liver?

When I get a chance and when Gamston Wood have some in stock, I might try this dish out on some ostrich liver. The flavours were simple but it felt really indulgent. I guess that must have been the black truffle pasta!