after several months of not being able to properly access your blog. When I finally opened up my admin page after goodness knows how long, I was pleased and slightly suprised to find some people had linked to me. Of course I was less pleased when I found they’d just been hotlinking my photos. Chuh!  

Then there were the forty or fifty comments largly made up by spam. Having been there when my spam filter was designed, I know that this spam isn’t made by spam robots as it used to be. There are apparently now many hundreds of trained spam monkeys trawling the internet and leaving badly disguised links to their websites, masqueraduing as gushingly complementary comments.  

Anyay, yes, hello, I’m back, at least temporarily. I still don’t have a real computer. Just a laptop with a screen I can barely read and no keyboard. Thank God the boredom of the Christmas holidays has finally forced me into typing on a barely functioning USB device to update this poor, neglected website. So now I can tell you about my recipe for sheep.

No, of course I couldn’t eat a whole one. Not in one go anyway. But this dish includes a fair number of sheep consituents.

Towards the end of August, I went to the Covent Garden Night Market specifically to see Fergus Hendrson perform on their stage kitchen. Softly spoken and slightly awkward in front of the large audience, he was a far cry from what you’d expect from a ‘celebrity chef’, yet he conveyed his passion for good cooking and ingredients better than any popular household name. Two things in particular stick in my mind. The first is his assertion that recipes are merely guides, not rules, for a genuinely good cook. The second is what I have come to hold high in my list of cooking commandments:

Love Thy Butcher

According to Henderson, if you find a butcher worthy of your custom and let them know how much you love them, you can expect great things. In his case, he got pig trotters. I was after sonething slightly different.

I was expecting a negative reaction clutching my short but unusual shopping list but the gentlemen at H G Walters barely batted an eyelid when I handed them the piece of paper. One veal kidney, some lamb sweetbreads and two lamb tongues would apparently be no problem.The two latter ingredients were destined for a recipe that held my fascination for some time: lamb rack with sauteed tongue and sweetbreads.

The original recipe, from the first series of ‘The Great British Menu,’ had obviously been created in the summer and required fresh broadbeans and samphire. I made do with defrosted peas but otherwise the ideas are largely unchanged. 

Sheep Feast (Rack of Lamb with sauteed tongue, sweetbreads and peas)

For Two People

• 1 large rack of lamb (wih about 6 rib bones in)
• 2 lamb tongues
• 350g lamb sweetbreads
• 2 handfuls of peas, fresh or defrosted
• 200ml fresh lamb stock
• unsalted butter- around 30g
• salt and pepper
• parsley to garnish

1. Prepare the sweetbreads: If they’re frozen, allow them to defrost. My butchers say that if you’re short on time, let them sit it some warm water to speed this up. Then soak them in cold water in the fridge for two hours.
2. Drain the sweetbreads. Bring a pa of water to the boil. Drop in the sweetbreads, bring back to the boil. Drain immediately and refresh in cold water. When they’re cool, peel off the tough outer membrane, then pop them in the fridge until ready to cook.
3. Prepare the tongues: Place in cold water and brinng to the boil. Simmer until tender (around 1 hour 15 minutes). Remove from the heat and allow to cool in the cooking liquid.
4. Roast the rack of lamb as you norally would. I brushed mine with olive oil, seasoned and roasted it in a preheated oven at gas mark 6 for15 minutes This gave me pleasantly rare meat. Wrap in foil and leave to rest.
5. While the lamb is roasting/resting, cook the peas in boiling water then drain.
6. Pat the sweetbreads dry and dust them with the seasoned flour. Heat half the butter in a frying pan and when it is foaming add the swweetbreads and fry until golden brown on all sides. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
7. Drain the tongues and cut in half. Sautee on both sides auntil golden brown.
8. Add the sweetbreads, stock and peas to the pan Simmer together for a few minutes.
9. Cut the lamb rack into cutlets and serve with the peas and sweetbread mixture. Garnish with parsely. Minted new potatoes made a good accompaniment to this.

All in all a good recipe. The slighly diappointing thing for me is that the sweetbreads weret te crispy type I’ve had before. Perhaps that is easier to achieve with calf sweetbrads. Still, the flavour was good and I imagine that if I’d had a chance to get my hands on some samphire, it would have been even better. Incidentally, lamb sweetbreads are CHEAP. Excellent value for money if you have a good butcher that can order them for you. The most expensive part of this meal was the lamb rack but, given the quality it was well worth it. 

Happy New Year, everyone!

Since August, I have noticed something interesting happening to the comments I receive on this site. Around that time, this blog’s Google rating increased dramatically and I got a lot of new visitors.

Obviously this was good in many ways. I got lots of new commenters. Some left constructive feedback in my inbox and some left appreciative notes regarding recipes. Unfortunately this happened quite rarely and it seems that a lot of the people brought here by Google searches are illiterate morons.

I’m sure that my fellow bloggers experience the same problem: you look through your moderation queue and there are ten comments saying things along the lines of “EWWW BUTTERS!!!!” “LOL ROFL LMAO!!!” and “OMFG OOOOOEEEEEE!!!!” 

After a few week I became a little sick of having to manually delete this rubbish so Goon has helped me to install a new feature as part of my spam filtering for this blog. It’s called the idiot-auto-rejector. It checks a comment for bad grammar/lack of real words and then blocks any offending commenter from the site.  

The interesting thing is that, in its test stage, the idiot-auto-rejector didn’t just pick up random surfers. Some of my year 9 students had found the blog. Apparently the few of them who tried to comment don’t know how to write in sentences. I feel really sorry for our English department.

Clearly I’m not going to excuse poor writing in my comments box just because it is written by one of my students. I think they should know better. However, I did install a little extra feature in the idiot-auto-rejector just for them. When they try to access my site now they will see this message. Click on the link.

We’re quite proud of it, what do you think?

I’d have liked to put down something more offensive but I thought some parents might get cross. The irony is that I let Goon make that picture and as a result the grammar in the message is pretty bad, although it doesn’t hold a candle to my students’ efforts.

Of course, I’m also using my old secret weapon for disuading idiots from accessing the site: grossing them out with offal. So as the first proper food post I’ve made in a while, I bring you ox tongue.

Now that should have properly scared them off. Sadly that wasn’t my ox tongue although it is a good likeness. It came from a general web search as I am very bad at remembering to photograph things before I cook them. It’s big isn’t it? That’s about six main meals worth of meat. Goon cut our tongue into three pieces and a third was made into this.

It’s a very simple dish, so simple in fact I’m not convinced it needs a recipe, but it is a good way to be introduced to the flavour and texture of ox tongue. Since it was my first time cooking tongue, I specifically wanted to make something where I wouldn’t risk losing its flavour within a sauce, so I braised it on its own and then paired it with something that I hoped would complement it well.

This meat works well with piquant flavours which here are given by the sweetness of the tomatoes and the acidity of the red wine and a touch of balsamic vinegar.

********

Braised Ox Tongue on Penne with Tomatoes, Peppers and Red Wine

To prepare the tongue:

You’ll need 1/3 ox-tongue, 1 onion peeled and sliced into thick rings, 2 bay leaves, 5 crushed black peppercorns, 5 peeled cloves of garlic and a bouquet garni.

Ox-tongue is generally sold salted. So it is a good idea to give it a good long soak. We soaked ours for about 12 hours, changing the water every now and again.

Take a pan large enough to easily hold the tongue and put in the onion, garlic peppercorns, bay leaves and bouquet garni. Add the tongue, cover it with water and bring to a gentle simmer.

Simmer until the tongue is tender. This might take four hours if you are using a whole tongue. The third that we used took about two and a half hours.

Once the tongue is cooked, keep it warm until ready to serve.

For the red wine and tomato sauce

Ingredients:

• olive oil 
• 1 medium onion, peeled and finely diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced 
• handful of basil leaves, torn
• 400g tin chopped tomatoes
• 2 green peppers, cored deseeded and  thinly sliced
• 300ml good quality red wine
• balsamic vinegar and brown sugar to taste (about two teapoons of vinegarand one teaspoon of sugar).
• salt and ground black pepper to taste
• 200-250g dried penne, cooked and drained

Method:

1. Soften the onion gently in the olive oil.
2. Add the garlic and, once that has cooked through, add the peppers and allow these to soften for about five minutes- the idea is that they retain some of their crunchy texture. Remove them from the pan.
3. Now add the tomatoes and the red wine, bring to a gentle bubble and allow to reduce while you cook the pasta.
4. Stir through the torn basil and return the peppers to the pan.
5. Add sugar and balsamic vinegar to taste. Adjust seasoning and stir in the cooked penne
6. Serve the sliced tongue over the penne. I found that sauteed courgettes made a good accompaniment to this meal.

Not long ago,  I suddenly realised that one part of my cooking that had disappeared completely during the first weeks of my job was the home made curry. It’s not because they take too long to cook. I can pull together a decent Goan fish curry in about half an hour. Instead it’s the attention to detail that is the problem.

When making a curry I find I need to be really on the ball. The spice quantities in recipe books or on the web aren’t ever quite right and I find I need to be there tasting and adjusting constantly if I want it to be good. However, it has now got to the stage where Goon seems to have given up cooking completely so, it’s in the door at 9pm for me and straight into the kitchen.  Even after just a week of that it got to the stage where I managed to cook, serve up and then fall asleep on the sofa before I managed to eat.

I was woken up half an hour later by Goon who had managed to scoff most of my portion as well as his and was trying to shoo me away so he could get to his favourite programming spot in front of the television. Let this be a warning to you:never share a flat with a geek,especially one who doesn’t like cooking.

There’s no way I could manage to make something that requires concentration whilst I am in that state of exhaustion so home made curries might have to become a holiday treat. This half term, I wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass me by so, during a Friday visit to Borough, I picked up my favourite currying meat, came home and made this.

Saag Gosht with Red Peppers  

Ingredients 

• 450g mutton, lamb neck or other red casseroling meat, cut into bite sized pieces
• vegetable oil or ghee for frying
• 1 medium/large onion, thickly sliced into rings
• 3 medium cloves garlic, minced,
• 2 teaspoons grated ginger
• 2 birds eye green chillis, chopped
• 300ml (or just enough to cover the meat in step 2 below) home made lamb or beef bone stock (nothing herby). Water will do as the mutton has a rich flavour of its own, but I much prefer using a simple bone stock. 
• 1 tsp ground fenugreek
• 3 teaspoons ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 1 red pepper, cored deseeded and cut into small pieces
• 200g fresh spinach, washed and thoroughly drained
• a handful of chopped coriander leaves plus extra to garnish

Method

1. Brown the mutton pieces on all sides over a high heat in the oil/ghee. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
2. Turn the heat down and add the onions to the saucepan. Fry gently until they start to soften.
3. Add the spices, garlic and ginger.
4. Once the onion is cooked, return the mutton to the pan, barely cover with the stock, place the lid on the saucepan and simmer for around 2 hours. Keep an eye on the curry and, if it starts to become too dry, add a little more stock.
5. In a seperate pan, fry the pepper until soft, then add this to the curry with the chillies. Stir the curry well and continue to let it simmer for another five minutes so it takes on the flavour of the peppers.
6. Taste and adjust spice balance if necessary.
7. Wilt in the spinach. Taste, adjust seasoning and serve over pilau rice, perhaps with a lentil side dish.

***

As far as curries go, this one has a relatively short ingredients list. it includes the staples of coriander and cumin, but contains few other spices. The distinctive flavour of this curry comes instead from the red peppers.  An excellent accompanient to this dish would have been a naan bread flavoured with garlic and cumin, but my baking skills still aren’t up to much, so I went with spiced pilau rice and some garlic dahl instead.

After a long seven weeks of no home made curries, this was a breath of fresh air. A take-away hasn’t got the freshness and vibrancy of  home made Indian food so I’d urge anyone to try making their own at least once, even if time constraints mean it can’t be a regular occurence. Start with a decent recipe, but always be prepared to adjust the spice levels to suit your own taste.

It looks like it will be another five weeks at least until I get another chance to do curry, but, given its game season that is probably for the best. It is now the season for rabbit pie and roasted pheasant, so I’d better get myself to Borough soon. 

Our new flat has some good points and some bad points.

There are a few teething problems. We still need to have our washing machine repaired and the central heating is broken, but the only real annoyance is the journey to work. When I decided to take the flat, I looked at a map and thought the walk to school looked  reasonable. It was only a touch longer than my previous walk into college. However, nobody told me about The Hill.

Most people may call it Highgate Hill, but i think of it as Highgate Mountain. It makes up little more than ten percent of my journey but takes about a quarter of the time. On my first morning I stopped, astounded just after Archway station as I faced the 35 degree incline in front of me. The first thing our Head Master said to me after I staggered into the common room that morning was “Are you alright? You look like someone who’s just come up The Hill!” 

I’m seriously considering getting a skateboard to speed up the journey home. 

On the plus side, the flat is conveniently placed so I can walk to Borough Market within 40 minutes (or bus it there in fifteen). In the case of that journey, there’s no crazy hill to slow me down. So, while i miss Kensington Whole Foods, my foodie cravings are satisfied by the Borough stalls, which is where I got myself some of Farmer Sharpe’s mutton neck.

It might seem  a bit silly to be buying slow-cook meats when I’ve got so little time in the evenings, but the advantage of this cut is that you can leave it in the oven for a few hours while you get other things done. In fact, to make good use of some mutton neck, all you need is a root vegetable or two, some herbs and some pearl barley.

Mutton Neck and Pearl Barley Stew

Serves 2 generously

• 400g mutton neck, cut into bite sized cubes
• 1 carrot, sliced
• 1 medium parsnip, sliced into rounds
• 1 small leek, thinly sliced
• 2 large cloves garlic, minced
• 2 handfuls pearl barley
• 2 sprigs of rosemary
• leaves from 2 sprigs thyme
• 150ml lamb or vegetable stock
• 100ml dry white wine
• mashed potato to serve

1. Preheat your oven to gas mark 3.  
2. Get a frying pan really hot and brown the cubes of meat. Transfer to a casserole dish.
3. Turn the heat down and gently fry the leeks and garlic until they are soft. Add these to the casserole.
4. Soften the parsnips and carrot in the pan for a couple of minutes and add these to the casserole with the herbs and barley. Cover everything in the casserole dish with the stock and wine, stir the mixture to evenly distribute the ingredients, cover the casserole dish and place it in the oven for two and a half  to three hours, stirring the mixture occasionally. 
5. Serve with mashed potato and cabbage.

 ***

Can you believe it? I wrote a recipe which only involved five steps!

This was my first attempt at what I’d call ‘proper cooking’ since I started at Highgate. Everything else in that first week had been rushed pasta jobs and take-aways. It was really good to finally have some decent food inside me again.

This was proper comfort food. After three hours, the meat will literally melt in your mouth.  The pearl barley absorbs  the juices of the casserole so you end up with a very thick gravy, which has taken on the wonderfully rich flavour of the mutton.  Mashed potato is the perfect accopaniment to this, mixed up with the barley and delicious gravy from the casserole.

Some people find mutton a little fatty, but this can be partially overcome by cooking this as a stew on the stovetop and skimming off the fat as it rises to the surface. Although this dish takes a long time to cook, it requires no attention so you can get on with other things as it sits in the oven. Lucky for me, as I had a fair bit of marking to do that day!

This will probably become a regular appearance on our dinner table this winter. if you can get your hands on some mutton or lamb neck, it is well worth a try. 

Here’s a question for the food bloggers reading this. Have you ever made a dish that you were so pleased and excited about, you wanted to blog it right away so that other people could also try it, only to find that, when you uploaded the photos, every single one looked like utter crap? What do you do in that situation?

That is what happened just over two weeks ago, when I first cooked ostrich in a yakitori -style marinade. I was really shocked by how good it was, especially since it is such a simple thing to do! The flavours were absolutely perfect. The sweetness of honey and stem ginger in the marinade brought out the gamey flavours of the bird and the umami of the soy complemented its beefy side. Without a doubt, it was the best ostrich I’ve ever had- and I’ve had a LOT of ostrich.

Like I say, the pictures of the delicious meal were terrible. So terrible that I decided not to blog it. Instead I would wait until I could next afford more ostrich fillet and make the meal again, being careful with the presentation. 

That is precisely what I did on Tuesday night. Unfortunately, it seems that ostrich yakitori is just not a photogenic meal and, yet again, most of the photos were bloody terrible. This time, however, I will blog it anyway since one photo was almost passable

Just remember, it tastes much, much better than it looks. 

The things you can see on the far left are tempura vegetables. I had a little wasabi cream to dip them in, just to provide an exciting contrast to the sweetness of the meat. The ostrich is sitting on some fairly standard stir-fried noodles, to which I added the leftover egg yolks from the tempura batter, some leftover vegetables and a little sesame oil.

‘Yakitori’ Marinade for Ostrich

These marinade quantities are very rough as I was constantly tasting and adjusting as I made it. Here’s my best guess at what we used for approximately 450g of ostrich fillet.

• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 1/2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 small chunk stem ginger, crushed
• 3/4 tablespoon sherry (as a substitute for sake)

Cut your ostrich fillet into large chunks. Combine the marinade ingredients and toss the ostrich chunks in the marinade to coat them. Leave to marinate for at least two hours, tossing the chicnks of meat in the marinade every half hour.

Next, skewer the chunks of ostrich.  I think these  skewers would be ideal done on a barbeque, but all I have is a crummy electric grill. So I griddled the skewers on the highest setting instead, cooking them for about 45 seconds, then turning them by 90 degrees until all the exposed meat had been cooked. This meant we got the nice blackened flavour on the outside of the skewer, but the inside was still lovely and rare.

Tip the excess marinade into a small saucepan. Bring it to boiling point, and let it thicken. Serve the ostrich skewer with noodles, rice or whatever you like, with the thickened marinade drizzled over it.

***

Many of you who are resident in the Midlands and the South of England will recall a Friday not long ago when it rained very, very heavily all day. With such weather (which happened to catch me umbrella-less as I was wandering around Borough) it wasn’t too suprising that I was encouraged to buy and cook some proper cold weather food. And so this was born.

Even though it is late July, here in the UK it is still casserole weather. This particular one is made from wild boar, rum and orange and was inspired by this recipe (last one on the page) for a roasting joint. I’ve adapted it to suit little pieces of slow cooking meat.

Wild Boar, Rum and Orange Casserole

(plenty for two when  served with mashed potato and perhaps a green vegetable)

• 400g diced casseroling wild boar.
• zest and most of the juice of 1 orange
• large sprig of rosemary
• 1 tablespoon thyme, chopped
• 1 small onion, minced
• 2 small cloves garlic, minced
• handful of pancetta (optional- we had some spare, so I used it)
• 4 small tomatoes, peeled  and chopped
• 1 medium carrot chopped
• substantial splash of rum ( I used a dark navy rum because we happened to already have some, but any would do really)
• a large glass of white wine
• vegetable stock to cover the meat in your casserole dish

Brown the boar in a hot frying pan. Transfer to a casserole dish.

Fry the onion, carrot, herbs and garlic gently in a little butter in the pan until the onion is soft and the carrot partly cooked. Add the pancetta and cook it through.

Add this mixture to the casserole along with the tomato and grate in the orange zest. Season with salt and pepper

Cover the meat with white wine and stock and place the casserole in the oven. Cook this, covered, for about 1.5 hours at 140C, then remove the lid, add a generous splash of rum and cook for a further 30 minutes. By this point the boar should be tender.

If the gravy isnot thick enough, pour it off into a saucepan and let it boil vigourously until it reaches the desired consistency, then return it to the casserole.

Taste the dish and add the orange juice (and maybe more rum) to taste  Serve over mashed potato.

***

This has been my favourite way to have wild boar so far. In the past, I’vefound it hard to balance the ‘nuttiness’ of the meat, but this casserole solved that problem. I think that letting the boar cook in white wine is what did the trick.

Goon really liked the dish but he said it reminded him of school dinners. Obviously, this really worried me for a second, but it turns out what he meant was ‘he’s not had a stew with carrots in since he stopped having school dinners.’

Slow cooking really seems to be the best way of preparing boar. The frying steaks are expensive and no amount of tenderising seems to do them much good.  This casseroling boar cost me a mere £3 for just over 400g. I do seem to be getting a small discount for  being a regular customer at Sillfield Farm, but you’d still pay less than £4 for that amount. It’s a very good deal!

So, if your local farmers market has boar in stock, I thoroughly recommend trying it. It has a fantastic flavour and is excellent value for money.

Of all the commonly eaten food creatures, shellfish and cephalopods seem to be treated with the greatest trepidation. I suppose that, in today’s world of sanitised chicken breasts in plastic wrappers, the sight of eyes, tails, legs and tentacles is a harsh reminder that you’re actually eating something that was a living and breathing creature.

Then there is the fact that, when it comes down to it, these creatures do look rather bizarre. In fact they look so alien that the horror writer HP Lovecraft seems to have based his designs for ancient evil Gods on them.

Picture from www.paleos.com

Doesn’t the evil God Cthulu look like an overgrown squid on legs? I’m glad that is all fiction, or I’d be in a lot of trouble with all the tentacles i’ve eaten in my time.  

While I can partially understand a slight hesitation in wanting to try these rather odd looking creatures, cephalopods can make some really tasty meals. Here is one of them.

This is octopus, dressed with a spicy oil and coriander served with coconut and lime rice and some curried green beans. Personally I think that, in this form, the octopus looks rather appetizing. But it didn’t start off looking like this.

If you’re of a squeamish disposition, you’d better quit reading this post here. The more adventurous among you may prefer to click on the ‘more’ button to see my octopus on the way to becoming this tasty meal. But don’t say I didn’t warn you!

(more…)

The problem I’ve found with being a foodie is that, the more you cook, the more sensitive you become about your cooking and the more particular you become about what you eat. At least this is true of me. I’ve discovered that there’s a part of me that can be quite a ridiculous snob. My ‘inner chef,’ as it were, seems to have developed the temperament of a certain sitcom character from the early 90s. *  

Last Saturday, flatmate Mike and his girlfriend, Christina, arrived at home while Goon and I were tucking into our dinner.

“What’s that you’re having?” he asked, “Steak and chips?”**

A perfectly reasonable question given what he saw, I’m sure you’ll agree. But for some reason the small voice of my inner chef in the back of my mind greatly objected to this description of our food.

“Steak and chips! STEAK AND CHIPS?! This is a venison fillet au poivre with a damson wine reduction and HOME MADE maris piper chips!” it screamed silently at me.

Fortunately my conscious mind recognised how utterly daft this statement was and  managed to keep my inner chef under control. Not many people have encountered this side of me. This is probably for the best. It’s outbursts have been reserved for Goon, (when he gets the shopping list wrong), my parents (whenever I go into their kitchen) and the manager of a particularly rubbish and expensive gastropub.

If my inner chef starts escaping on a regular basis, I might need to seek psychiatric help.

The venison fillet au poivre came about after I learnt about the origins of Steak Diane. Apparently the dish was originally made with venison and was named after the Greek goddess of hunting. I’d only ever seen the dish made with beef so I wondered if I could adapt the modern recipe to suit the rich flavours of deer. 

But, when I got home, I remembered that I’d finished the last of our cognac (the key ingredient in the Steak Diane sauce) on the day we moved flats***, so I needed a new plan.  I had a flash of inspiration and decided to make a reduction of the damson wine I had bought the previous morning on my trip to Borough Market. When the wine reduced, it turned out to be sweeter and more fruity than most red wine reductions but not quite as rich and syrupy as port. It was a perfect balance for the venison! The only problem was I needed to reduce about half a bottle to get enough sauce for the steaks. 

Apart from the chips, this meal was very easy to make. First I took about a tablespoon of back peppercorns and cracked them using a pestle and mortar. Then I crushed a clove of garlic and mix it with about two tablespoons of olive oil. I used the oil to coat the steaks and pressed the cracked peppercorns into the steak so the steak was lightly coated with the peppercorns.  The steaks were left covered for about an hour.

In the mean time I made the chips. I think maris piper potatoes are great for this. They have the best texture.  

I peeled six medium sized maris piper potatoes (which made a few too many chips, but we still ate them) and cut them into inch thick chips. I brought a pot of salted water to the boil and placed the chips in it. Once the water came back to the boil, I let it bubble for five minutes then drained the chips well. Since I don’t have a deep fat fryer, I had to cook my chips on the hob. I got a saucepan of sunflower oil hot then deep fried the chips until they were golden brown in batches of 8 at a time. It only took a minute or two for each batch to cook.  

As each batch finished cooking, I drained them on kitchen towel. Then, when they were all done, I seasoned them with salt, pepper and garlic granules.

Of course, we had our venison rare. The steaks went into a hot frying pan for just over a minute per side (basically just long enough for the outside to be properly cooked) and then were wrapped in foil and left to stand for about 8 minutes. As the steaks were standing, I literally just let half a bottle of the damson wine bubble until it was concentrated and slightly syrupy. I did’t feel the need to use any herbs with it, the flavour of the reduced wine was perfect on its own. 

It would have been totally successful if Goon hadn’t objected to the steak being peppered. Personally, I liked the combination of pungent peppercorns, rich meat and sweet wine sauce. The flavours were fantastic together.

We had our steak and chips venison fillet au poivre and home made maris piper chips with a rocket salad, coated in a simple dressing made from olive oil, rasperry vinegar and a touch of balsamic. I’d say it was a notch above your average steak and chips, but probably not enough to merit the daft fancy name my inner chef gave it!

* Or perhaps a certain currently successful real celebrity chef. 

** Please note that when you imagine Mike talking, it must be with a very strong Coventry accent. It’s not the same otherwise. 

*** Well, it have been a nuisance to carry it all the way to my flat, right?

Well, perhaps ‘Bogus Journey’ would be more appropriate seeing how poor Marina and Ted ended up. 

I think I have mentioned before that one of Goon’s flatmates is into having late night parties with her church friends in Goon’s living room. When this happens, Goon and I tend to eat out.

The reason why we abandon the kitchen when these parties happen is simple. Like their host, this girl’s friends can be a bit funny about what they term ‘weird food.’ Weird in this case means things such as pigeon, rabbit, and duck as well as ostrich and other alternative meats*.If anything gamey is around, the party host gets a little upset, not wanting to ‘weird out’ her friends.

Unluckily for her, on the day she decided to spontaneously invite people around to the flat, I happened to be cooking one of the weirdest things I have to date.

As she came into the kitchen to make her friends a pot of tea I was busy rinsing a pair of red mullet, which I’d decided to name Marina and Ted after an amusing menu item I’d seen on holiday in Sri Lanka**.

The party host shuddered at the sight of the whole fish, before getting out her supplies. I didn’t say much, in the hope that she wouldn’t turn her eyes in the direction of the hob. However it was only a minute before her attention was caught by the large bubblng pan.

HOST: WHAT is THAT? 
ME: Do you really want to know?
HOST: Uhhh…..
ME: You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you, you know.
HOST: It looks like…an…egg?
ME: Yes, it is an egg.
HOST: WHAT ON EARTH MAKES AN EGG THAT BIG???!

At this point Goon and one of the guests showed up.

GUEST: Hi…where’s the… oh, wow! Is that an ostrich egg? Cool!

I decided I liked this guy.

The host, looking slightly pale with her hand over her mouth, ushered her friend away.  Goon shook his head sadly and said, ”Oh Dear. It’s not a Tesco Value chicken egg. She doesn’t understand.”

The ostrich egg was being boiled in advance so I could make a scotch egg with it in the next couple of days. Dinner for that evening was on Marina and Ted.

The two mullet were in for special treatment. I was using a recipe from Gordon Ramsey’s ‘Secrets’ which involved dissolving some saffron in oil and applying it to the fish skin, which makes the skin a beautiful colour and gives the flesh an amazingly strong saffron flavour. Since there wasn’t much to the two fish, I also stuffed them with some chopped king prawns flavoured with finely chopped parsley and garlic.

As the two fish were being prepared for the oven, another guest wandered in. He came over to where I was, looked at the fish and said “Eurrgh!”

Now, I’ve been told that, when I’m really angry, I have a very scary, psychotic look. I wasn’t really angry at this point, but it appeared my moderate irritation had generated the same expression because this guy looked properly terrified.

He started stammering. ‘ Uh-I-d-don’t…l-like…f-fish.”

Maybe I should feel bad for what happened next. But I don’t .

I bent down so I was on eye level with my two mullet, put my ear close to  their heads and then looked at the guy, careful to hold my psycho expression and said,  ”Marina and Ted say they don’t like you either.” The guy laughed nervously then, perhaps deciding that I might actually be a psychopath, left at speed.

God, I wish I could be that quick all the time.

I was still chuckling to myself as Marina and Ted came out of the oven. I decided to serve them with ratatouille as suggested by the Ramsay recipe, but also added some spiced long grain rice to turn it into a main course

And a very satisfying main course it was too. The saffron really complemented the flavour of the mullet and the ratatouille was perfect with it. I’m glad I added the prawn stuffing as those fish were pretty small.

That was a great meal. I scared the hell out of someone, had tasty food and Goon got to play with the fish skeletons. Perfect!

* Note that normal food by definition is chicken, pork, beef or lamb (flesh only- no offal) frozen peas or potatoes and that all of these must cost less than £1.25 and be packaged with a blue stripy label.

** The misprint on the restaurant menu simply read ‘Marina and Ted  Mullet’. Apparently after correcting spelling and grammar, it would have read ‘red mullet from our marina.’

The best way to confuse a foodie is to ask them one question: “What is your favourite food?”

Someone distinctly non-foodie, like my Dad, will be able to answer this immediately: “‘Tesco crusty bread”.  In fact I’ve found bread is a very common choice amongst those who aren’t that bothered about food. Other popular answers include chips, chicken and steak (medium well). A foodie, on the other hand, will probably find that question a real challenge to answer. They’ll think for a while, then reel off a list of several things they can’t decide between. On the odd occasions they can answer, it will either be oysters, foie gras, or something really obscure. 

I was recently forced to answer this question myself,  by someone even more stubborn than me. The inquisitor was one of my ten year old students. I don’t know why ten year olds are so inquisitive about random things, but, for some reason, my eating habits held much more interest to her than our work on percentages.

She flatly refused to do anything until I gave her a proper answer. Apparently my honest response of ‘I can’t choose’ was not acceptable. After a long, stubborn silence from both of us, I gave in and chose something that I absolutely love that would also alert her to the fact I am a bit of a weirdo, so, hopefully, she’d never ask me anything like that again.

My food of choice was rare ostrich fillet. There’s something about the rich game flavour combined with its beefiness that makes me happy to travel half way across London on a regular basis to make sure I get my next fix. The problem was that, once I’d given my small tormentor my answer, I had a craving for ostrich I couldn’t get rid of. Luckily, it was Thursday night and so I had the option of running off to Borough the next morning.

And so the subject of the picture above came into being. It was Goon who inadvertently came up with the idea for what to do with this particular fillet. He wanted “that thing I made for his brother“. I could do that, but I had a hankering for madeira, so I decided that this time, for a change, I would make a Wellington in a more traditional way.

As far as I’m aware a ‘traditional’ Wellington is made by lightly coating a beef fillet in foie gras paté, topping it with a thin layer of chopped flat field mushrooms cooked with cream and madeira wine, wrapping the whole thing in crepes, then pastry and finally baking it.  My plans for minor alterations (apart from the obvious meat substitute) involved replacing the field mushrooms with porcini and the foie gras with a mixed game paté.

i started off following this recipe for crepes (half way down the page). This combination produces a very light batter which is just right for making thin crepes that keep the pastry dry but are otherwise barely noticable in your end product. Before the batter went into a frying pan, I added a handful of finely chopped rosemary and thyme for extra flavour. 

My next job was to brush the ostrich fillet with my paté. This turned out to be the only problematic part of this meal. Someone (I wonder who ) had binned the game paté I’d left in Goon’s fridge. As I stode off towards a certain flatmate’s room, brandishing a large sharpened kitchen knife, Goon picked me up, told me to calm down and reminded me about the three tins of French duck paté that Dad had brought back on his last trip to Paris.

The three tins quickly turned into one as Goon got his hands on the paté and started scoffing, but I salvaged the last one and spread it thinly over the ostrich fillet. Finally, I soaked some porcini mushrooms, and fried them with a splash of madeira and cream for a couple of minutes until the mixture was dry enough to spread over the top of the fillet. Once that was done, the fillet got wrapped in crepes, then the pastry and went in the oven.

Thirteen minutes at 220C was enough to make the Wellington a perfect rare.

The dark liquid you can see in the first picture is a port reduction. There were some purple potatoes too, which I was disappointed to find I didn’t like. I’m hoping I just cooked them badly… now if ony I could find out what the damn things were called, I’d ask for tips on how to do it next time!

In spite of the oddly dry purple potatoes, this meal was was really good and there was some left for lunch the next day which makes it even better. If I had been available at the time I might have submitted this to Sam’s event, Fish and Quips. It’s a shame I was too busy.