After our last experiment in wild boar, I was keen to try and find a different cut of the meat which had all the flavour of the steaks  but none of the dryness. Slow cooked spare rib chops seemed to be the way to go and I was pleasantly suprised to find these were a third of the price of the steaks and only cost £3.20 for two reasonably sized chops at Borough Market.

I intended to braise them in a sauce slowly for two hours to get them tender. The problem was which sauce to use. I knew the orange, juniper and red wine combination had worked well before but I wanted to experiment more with the flavours of this meat before I started repeating old ideas.

When I’m trying out a new ingredient for the first time, I usually turn to the internet for guidance. Unfortunately the problem with ‘unusual’ foods is that not many people have tried them and good recipes are few and far between. Even something like wild boar, which has been eaten for centuries yields few useful results simply because it isn’t all that popular now.

The only recipe that caught my eye, one for boar chops with mustard, honey and apricot was a broken link . Well, at least I had an idea of what to try. I sent Goon out shopping for some apricot jam, dijon mustard and accompaniments for our meal.

I made a mixture of about 25% dijon mustard, 25% wholegrain mustard and 50% apricot jam.  On tasting this I decided it was sweet enough without any honey, so I just put the chops in a baking dish with some rosemary then poured over the glaze. The chops went in the oven for two hours at gas mark 3 while I made some potatoes dauphinoise.

It seems we found exactly what we were looking for in these chops. The meat melted in the mouth but had just as much flavour as the steaks. I’m really confused as to why these were cheaper than the steaks, which were verging on chewy even when tenderised and lightly cooked. Could it just be the extra cooking time?

The only thing that went wrong for this dish was the presentation. Thinking carefully about the visual aesthetics as well as the flavours, I decided that red cabbage with juniper would be the best accompaniment. I instructed Goon to get either this, savoy cabbage or another green vegetable of his choice if he couldn’t find any. Goon came back with white cabbage. So both accompaniments to this dish were rather pallid and the plate as a whole was not very photo worthy.

But here is a picture of the cooked glazed chop anyway.  

For many years now, James has been telling me stories about how his father, a security guard at Aldershot Army Base, gets goat meat from the gurka’s staying there. Apparently these guys buy whole dead animals from the local farmers and then butcher them up themselves for curry. These stories always intrigued me and I wanted to try curry goat myself.

My experience of Nepalese food has been limited to a single restaurant on the Uxbridge Road in Shepherds Bush. It certainly is good and, while I lived near it, I would visit it on almost a weekly basis after late night  rehearsals. The cuisine is very similar to North Indian cuisine, with some curries that are mild and creamy and some so hot they’d strip your tongue of tastebuds! I was always rather disappointed that goat curry was never on the menu.

It wasn’t until Franka at Can Cook must Cook mentioned Trinidadian curry goat that I suddenly realised I had a hope of finding goat meat in London. Franka pointed me in the direction of Shepherds Bush market so, on my first free Saturday, I wandered over. It didn’t take me long to find a small butchers advertising curry goat in the window for a mere £2.99 per kilo. There were other interesting looking things there too, including whole oxtails and a sheep’s head. I made a mental note to come back from some of the goat leg (again cheap at £1,89 per kilo) and the oxtail.

Even though goat meat is very rarely eaten in Britain it is an extremely popular meat in some other areas of the world. Despite this, I seemed to find it difficult to get some good information about cooking it. The best I could find, was one line in a Wikipedia article stating that the meat should be cooked long and slow. After doing a bit of research on the spices involved I came up with this plan:

1. Fry off some finely diced onions, garlic and red chilli, add ground cumin and coriander, garam masala, minced garlic, ginger and fennel seed.
2. Brown the goat in the spices, cover with water and leave to simmer gently for three hours.
3. Shortly before the goat has cooked, roast some more coriander and cumin seed and make a curry powder of these and fennel seed.
4. Remove goat from liquid and keep warm. Boil the liquid repidly to reduce it. 
5. Fry some more onion, garlic and ginger. Add curry powder, more garam masala, a little tomato and chopped coriander. Add reduced goat stock, simmer for a bit, taste and adjust seasoning. Stir the meat in, warm through, top with sliced spring onion and serve over boiled rice  with a vegetable curry and lentils.

That is pretty much how it worked in the end, except that, on tasting it, I decided it needed a touch of cream, to make it like the lamb curry I had in the last nepalese restaurant I visited. I’m not sure how authentic that was but it made a big difference to my curry.

The pieces of meat labeled ‘curry goat are obviously the spare bits as they had a fair bit of bone in them and a little gristle but the meat itself was gorgeous. The flavour was very much like mutton but much more rich. The three hour simmer had done it good and the meat melted in the mouth.

I decided to make an aubergine, chilli and tomato concoction to accompany my goat and also some tarka dahl and plain boiled basmati rice. It’s definitely a dish i’ll ake again, although I think Trinidadian curry goat has to be tried first. 

After my previous unsuccessful attempt at cooking ostrich liver, I was compelled to have another go, this time having the advantage of knowing what it tastes like.

Before my previous attempt, the flavor had been described to me as ‘comparable to calves liver.’Not that ‘comparable’ really means much. After trying it I decided that the flavour was a stronger, more like chicken liver but more … sort of… grassy.

I decided I’d try out my chicken liver with mavrodaphne recipe substituting in the ostrich liver. The result was a very good flavour balance. I think that in future, I’ll continue to treat this liver like chicken liver not calves’. Maybe I’ll even make ostrich and brandy paté!

Unfortunately I seem to have encountered a problem. Goon is one of those odd few who likes liver but only when it is very well done. He has a problem with the texture when it is cooked pink in the middle. I have a problem with the texture when it isn’t . It looks like I’ll be cooking liver for just me in future. Either that or I’m going to have to do something clever like cook it in two batches and then add it to the sauce just before serving it.

Goon is a nuisance sometimes.

This is what happens when a alcoholic pyromaniac like myself gets in  the kitchen.

I’d picked up these steaks at Borough market because I hadn’t had boar in ages. I remember the first time I tried this meat very clearly. I was in an Italian restaurant  (Casa Vallée) in Leamington, with James, and my starter was a creamy, truffled wild boar pasta dish. It was delicious and I made myself a similar dish several times after that.

This time I wanted something different so went for a dish that was a bit more traditional. I marinated the boar in red wine, orange juice, juniper, rosemary and thyme then flambéed it in gin.

Well, actually, Goon flambéed it in gin. With my hair the way it is, I was going nowhere near those flames in case I ended up bald! He was having immense fun with it too. It seems that a bit of my evil side has rubbed off on Goon because he used the burning pork to play a mean trick on the blonde flatmate. It went something like this…

Blonde flatmate enters kitchen while Goon is holding the flaming pan, staring absent-mindedly out the window,

BLONDE FLATMATE: Oh my days!
GOON: Uh?
BLONDE FLATMATE: THE PAN!
GOON: Huh?

(a fairly long pause follows as Goon thinks)

GOON: Oh my God! It’s on FIRE!!! HELP!!!!
BLONDE FLATMATE:OH MY DAYS! EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! 

 (She runs out of the flat still screaming)

It’s a good thing she’s too daft to call the fire brigade, or we’d have been in real trouble!

While Goon was enjoying the blue flames I made a vaguely traditional sauce to go with the boar. I took some red wine and reduced it with orange peel  and rosemary then added some redcurrant jelly at the end. I discovered that I prefer Tesco redcurrant jelly to the Ocean Spray one, which I had bought before. The Ocean Spray jelly has quite a high sugar content and can easily make a dish too sweet.

So the boar was served with the sauce, some new potatoes and buttered spinach with nutmeg. I have to say that the flavour of the boar was just perfect. It was subtley orangey and loaded with juniper. I adore juniper so I was really happy. The texture, however, needed work. I think I should have tenderised the steaks. I’m sure I shouldn’t have cooked them any less (mine were slightly pink in the center)  but they were on the chewy side in places.  

Next time, I try boar I’m going to go for the spare rib chops. I think that these slow cooked with similar juniper and orange flavours will be really gorgeous. If anyone can give me tips on how to better deal with wild boar steaks, please let me know!

I think that, when I make a journey to Borough Market,  I should avoid asking Goon what he’d like. This is because he always says the same thing: bloody ostrich fillet.

Yes, I do like ostrich fillet. It is gorgeous stuff but, since it is so expensive (about £10 to feed the two of us) I feel the need to do something really exciting with it whenever we have it. To begin with this wasn’t a problem, but now we’ve had ostrich lots of times and I’m running low on inspiration.

The internet is useless for finding recipes for this particular meat. Let’s face it, there are a lot of terrible ostrich recipes out there. For some reason half the world seems to have gone ‘Hey- there’s some new low fat, low cholesterol red meat available. Let’s take every beef recipe we can find and substitute.”

I think this is a shame. It is a waste of the great flavour of ostrich. After all, we don’t generally use beef as a lamb substitute or vice versa, so why is ostrich used as a beef substitute? Since lamb and beef have fundamentally different flavours, I would neither sub beef into a classic lamb dish, ike roast lamb wiht mint sauce,  nor top lamb with a port and stilton sauce. The same goes for ostrich.

For some reason, not many people feel the same way, which is a shame because ostrich has a beautiful distinctive flavour. True, it bears a passing resemblance to beef (especially when overcooked) but the flavour is lighter with a sort of gamey ‘kick’ to it. I think it is rather like a cross between duck and beef but a little sweeter than either.

It was the beef  and duck flavours I had in mind when I made this dish. I knew that duck is frequently served with wild mushrooms (an idea which quite appeals to me) and I’ve had beef fillet in brandy-cream sauce many times already. A combination of the two sounded like just what I needed for the ostrich. 

Now I know I’ve mentioned that ostrich is a very dark meat. I think it’s about time I qualified that statement.

 See? Very, very dark! And not all that appealing in that state.

To turn it from that slug-like object into something very tasty, only two minutes of pan-frying per side (on the highest hob setting) are needed followed by about 5 minutes of resting in a warm place wrapped in kitchen foil. This really is a meat which is best eaten rare.

I made the sauce for the ostrich by gently frying half a finely diced onion with a minced garlic clove until soft then stirring in about 40g dried wild mushrooms that had been soaked in boiling water for about 10 minutes. Then I added about 100ml double cream, a little soaking liquid from the mushrooms and about 50 mls beef stock.

I let this reduce until we had a nice thick sauce then added a big slug of brandy which I had flambéed in the pan I used to cook the ostrich. I served the steak topped with the mushroom sauce alongside some wild rice and sauteed green beans.

This dish suprised me so much! I thought I’d seen the best of ostrich, but I was wrong. The flavours here were great. They complemented the ostrich’s beefy flavour without overwhelming the sweet gaminess.  I was very happy indeed and can thoroughly recommend this combination.

One thing to note is that is important to use a reasonable brandy for this - nothing too expensive but definitely not ‘cooking brandy.’ It is the only way I’ve been able to get brandy sauce to work, cheap brandies seem to make the sauce lose its flavour pretty quickly.

If you fancy branching out and trying ostrich, I thoroughly recommend Gamston Wood at Borough Market as a fantastic supplier. They might even have some more liver in next week \o/

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.

Since i’ve been so busy lately, I’ve had to do a lot of last minute “What the hell do I have in the fridge and what the hell can I make with it” type cooking. If we combine this with any particular cravings I have on the day, the results can be quite ‘interesting’. I thought I’d share some of the more successful random experiments with you. I got some good photos so it would be a shame not to!

First up is the less than attractive sounding crustacean linguine.

This was more Goon’s craving than mine. He wanted prawns and he wanted pasta. In the Tesco freezer was a bag of ‘mixed seafood which was made of squid, mussels and king prawns. Some small scallops were on offer so I bought those too.

The dish was started by frying a finely diced onion in olive oil with two crushed cloves of garlic and some oregano. Then I added a 400g tin op chopped tomatoes, lots of tomato puree and 1/4 of a bottle of white wine. Once the sauce thickened and the flavours had developed I stirred in the seafood mix and added a couple of handfuls of shredded fresh basil before mixing in a couple of portions of linguine. I finished off by searing the scallops and sitting them on the pasta. 

That was very tasty and fed me for another day too.

Next isthe ostrich fillet with sage and onion sauce. This was a success from the point of view of how I cooked the ostrich. I wrapped it in foil and baked it for 12 minutes at 220C. It came out a rare/medium. Next time I’ll do it for 10 1/2 minutes but it did cook wonderfully evenly.

The sage sauce wasn’t the best thing for the ostrich. It was OK, but I think ostrich is better when its gamey flavours are highlighted. This sauce just didn’t do that. It would have been great with beef though! 

And finally there was the salmon tikka masala. Yes, I know it usually is made with chicken, but the salmon needed using.

The recipe is the same as for the chicken version. Take you meat and marinate it in a mixture of yoghurt, crushed cardamom, ground cumin, ground coriander seed, tomato paste, garlic and ginger for a few hours. the baked it until cooked and make a sauce for it with double cream, ground cashew nuts, tomatoes, and the same spices I mentioned above. I think this would work well with very fresh salmon. Mine only had a day left in it but it still made a tasty meal. I served it with coconut rice and tarka daal.

And yes, I garnished it with dill because I had run out of coriander.

Why, why, WHY do I get myself into things like this? Goon’s brother came to visit for the weekend and Goon wanted to show off the high class life style he lives down here in London. Naturally, my cooking had to feature as it makes up about 50% of his diet now. So, what did I say? I said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll cook a three course meal.” 

It’s true I like to impress, but that was just dumb.For a start I didn’t get to Goon’s until 7pm. Not good as I hadn’t done any prep work. I started by making the dessert, my alchoholic cherry cheesecake,  as it needed a long time to chill. The base was simply crushed digestive biscuits soaked with amaretto and set with butter . While that was in the freezer, I whipped together some cream cheese, marscapone and double cream for the middle and added some lemon juice and zest. Then I made the topping with black cherries simmered in their own juices with some sugar and a good slug of cherry brandy.

After assembling that and leaving it chilling in the fridge I moved onto the main: ostrich ‘wellington’. My ostrich had been marinating in a mixture of apricot brandy and orange juice. I coated it lightly with a duck and port pate, wrapped it in some rather haphazard rosemary crepes  (the weighing scales had gone walkabout so I had to guess quantities) and wrapped it all in puff pastry.

And yes, I had the practially blue bit in the middle.  

Finally it was time to make the starter, just in time for everyone to arrive. This was seared scallops with ‘champagne’ (or cava) risotto and truffle oil. No major hiccups here, despite this being the first time I cooked scallops. The only problem was I had forgotten to buy any nice looking salad so I had to borrow some iceberg leaves.

Goon and the others turned up at about 10:30pm, so dinner was very late. I was fairly pleased with all of it. I think that there might have been better risottos to make than a champagne flavoured one but I thought the title sounded impressive. The ostrich Wellington was great. I didn’t expect it all to be eaten but it was devoured pretty quickly.

So quickly that it got half eaten before I could get proper shots. Here is a slice with somenew potatoes beans and a port reduction. I think Simon (Goon’s brother) enjoyed it and that was the main point.

Calm down, Lea.

When I went to pick up the meat to make my ostrich wellington I noticed something rather intruiging on the stall. Ostrich liver for £4.50 with the claim that it was comparable to calves liver.

How could I resist? So the next week I went back to grab some. The idea of blending  lightly flavoured vinaigrette with figs and serving it over calves liver came from the book ‘Secrets’ by Gordon Ramsey. It hadn’t let me down so far so I thought I’d give it a go with the ostrich.

Not my best photography day. So here is ostrich liver wiht roacket salad, fig vinaigrette and blurry polenta. :/

The ostrich liver was very nice but I don’t think it’s quite right to say it is similar to calves liver. It has a slightly stronger more grassy flavour. As a result it overpowered the accompaniments I’d chosen for it. To be honest I think it would have gone better in something like this chicken liver and mavrodaphne recipe. It’s definitely one to try again though!

After the success of the last chinese style ostrich fillet I made, I decided to try a similar thing again with a different sauce. Months ago, I remember buying a jar of Tesco Finest plum sauce and not being too impressed. Since plums are in season, I thought it was about time I had a go myself.

It seems that the supermarkets only stock plums that “ripen at home” and most of the packs looked like they’d be spending a good four or five days doing that. Grrr!  I had to hunt around for a pack which looked dark enough for my sauce and even then I was a bit worried they’s be a bit tangy. They were fine in the end, although I think a bit of extra sugar in the sauce may have helped.

I used the same trick as before to cook the ostrich, cutting it into inch thick slices and searing on a high heat for about 45s on each side, then stirring it into the hot sauce at the end. I made the sauce by simmering the chopped plums  with sugar in just enough water to cover them until they disintegrate into mush. Then I added crushed ginger, freshly ground cinnamon, light soy, dry sherry and a touch of honey at the end. When all the liquid had simmered away, I strained the sauce and thickened it with a bit of corn starch before adding the ostrich.

At the same time, I had another go at making crispy seaweed by deep frying fresh greens. This was successful apart from the moment when the oil bubbled over the entire hob. I was actually quite scared I was going to set the flat on fire! A word of warning to all of you -USE A DEEP PAN TO MAKE CRISPY SEAWEED.  The water from the cabbage reacts violently with the hot oil and it bubbles everywhere!

Once I’d saved the hob from a fiery end, I had my ostrich and plum sauce with egg fried rice and the crispy seaweed of doom.

Yes, that is far too much egg fried rice. My arteries will be totally clogged up by the time I’m thirty but at least I’ll be able to say I had some damn good dinners.

Here is the crispy seaweed recipe, the egg fried rice recipe and the ostrich with plum and ginger sauce recipe.