This holiday it struck me how many bargain cookery books I have. There are more than two shelves full of those £3 Borders reduced paperbacks which specialise in cuisine from a certain country or continent. They look cheap, they feel cheap, heck, they ARE cheap, but I find these little books very useful.

I’d love to be able to go out and spend £25 each time I fancied trying out something new but sadly, if I did that, I probaby couldn’t afford the ingredients I needed to make good use of the books I bought.  Still, a book entitled “The Best Ever Curry Cookbook” isn’t likely to fill you with confidence about its contents but, rather suprisingly, it turned out to be quite informative and inspiring. Most of the book focuses on cuisine from the Indian subcontinent but around a third of it is devoted to curries from Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, the Phillipines and Indonesia. There are several very unusual recipes in this section of the book which I’m determined to try. The first on my list was the prawn and quail egg curry.

This was a really delicious meal. The flavour of the curry is delicate but earthy, dominated by garlic, ginger and turmeric with subtle heat (which could be increased if desired) and the lemongrass coming through right at the end. The sauce is thin, almost like a broth, which made it a nuisance to carry to the table but was wonderful mixed up with the rice. It pays to go easy on the fish sauce as its pungent flavour could easily overpower the other ingredients.

A note on the use of stock here: As far as I’m aware most ‘wet’ curries don’t traditionally call for stock and instead get their flavour from the meat being braised slowly. For this reason I assume the use of chicken stock in this meal is not authentic. However, I find the right stock can be really useful in making ‘quick cook’ curries like this one. I’d use a light fresh stock that isn’t flavoured with herbs. I always make stocks like these from the carcasses from my roast dinners because they are so wonderfully versatile. 

I have come around to the idea of egg in curry. As a child, there was nothing more I hated than finding half an egg in an overpoweringly hot and salty Sri Lankan dish but the quail eggs suit the delicacy of flavours here. This is definitely a meal I will make again, especially since it is quick enough for a schoolnight dinner!

Indonesian Style Prawn and Quail Egg Curry

(Adapted from “The Best Ever Curry Cookbook” by Mridula Baljekar, published by Hermes House)

Ingredients (for two people with big appetites) 

• 400-450g shelled  and cleaned king prawns
• 9 quail eggs, hard boiled, peeled and halved
• 1 small onion, finely diced
• 3 fat cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 cubic inches of ginger, chopped finely and crushed
• 2 red chillies, finely chopped
• half a level tablespoon ground turmeric
• 1 teaspoon sugar (I assume palm sugar is authentic- I had to use demerera)
• one half inch cube of shrimp paste or up to 1 tablespoon fish sauce  
• 1 small stalk lemongrass, tough outer layer removed, trimmed and shredded.
• 300ml thin coconut milk (pass 350ml normal coconut milk through a sieve)
• 200ml unherbed chicken stock
• 110g pak choi, or similar leaf, roughly shredded
• shredded spring onion green part only) to garnish
• plain boiled basmati rice to serve

Method

1. Sweat the onions, garlic and ginger together gently until the onions are soft but not coloured.
2. Add the chilies, shrimp paste/fish sauce and lemongrass. Fry for a minute so they release their favours.
3. Add the strained coconut milk, stock and sugar and stir well. Bring the mixture to a gentle bubble. Let the mixture reduce by about 40%.
4. Stir in the prawns and leaves and turn the heat down so the curry is at a simmer. 
5. Stir gently until the prawns have just turned pink all the way through. This should ony take a few minutes and the leaves should also wilt in this time.
6. Taste the sauce and adjust seasoning
7. Stir in the quail eggs. Turn the curry out into a serving bowl and sprinkle over the shredded spring onion.
8. Serve immediately with plain boiled basmati rice. 

Goon think’s  there’s something a little scary about Delia Smith. I think it’s something to do with this picture.

I never thought I’d end up buying a Delia book. It’s just not my style of cooking. I’m much more of a Gordon Ramsey fan.  However, a few days ago, I bit the bullet and picked up her Complete Cookery Course as many people had said it was good for teaching beginners. There certainly were a lot of recipes in it, which would make it a useful tool for Goon, and I noticed a few good ideas for me to try too.

That evening, I took the book to Goon for him to have a look. Goon cowered slightly on the sofa, as the giant face on the cover bore down on him.

“It’s got very detailed instructions,” I said soothingly. “You like detailed instructions, don’t you?” Goon nodded, then whimpered slightly at Delia’s creepy half-smile and stuck his face in a cushion.  I sighed and took the dustcover bearing Delia’s portrait off the book. Goon was much happier after that. 

My plan was for Goon to cook a recipe of his choice the following night using some cod. I’d specifically chosen fish as he’d not tried cooking it before. It didn’t take Goon long at all to find the easiest recipe in the section: baked white fish with a sauce made from sour cream, capers and watercress. 

The recipe is as simple as it sounds but it needed a fair bit of alteration. For a start it called for just one teaspoon of fresh tarragon, which really wouldn’t have been enough. Ditto the quantities for capers and watercress. We doubled the values for all of these.

The main problem though, was this recipe leaves the fish a little dry. I think it is because the suggested baking time was a bit long. Next time I’d change the 20 minutes at 190C to 15 minutes at 180C.

Baked Fish with a Sour Cream, Caper and Watercress Sauce (Adapted from Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course)

Recipe to follow soon: Apologies for the delay, my home computer had a small…. umm…’accident’ with a glass of wine, which has left the keyboard a little worse for wear, which means I’ll need to copy out the recipe and bring it into the office before I can type it up.

***

Goon found this recipe very easy to follow. If he hadn’t been so late starting it, he would probably have been able to make the accompaniments to the meal too. As it was, I took over that part of the meal as I wanted to have dinner before 11pm.

I have noticed that, even though Goon claims he needs precise instructions to cook, he doesn’t actually follow them at all. He’s just as blazé with quantities as I am. Sometimes he asks me questons which makes it obvious he hasn’t even read the recipe he’s trying to follow. Still, with me in the kitchen shouting, “Read the ****ing recipe!” he seems to be getting better. 

As for our verdict on the meal, we thought it was fine but nothing to write home about. I think the sauce could have done with a bit more flavour. Perhaps a little extra wine or the addition of a little fish stock would have helped. The main downside was the slightly overcooked fish, but I’m sure knocking a few minutes off the cooking time would sort that out.

For Goon’s next cooking experiment, I’ve picked something reasonably challenging. To give you a clue, it will involve a cheese sauce topping. I wonder how he’ll cope with that.

Undeterred by the witty and cutting insult  left for his previous culinary effort, Goon has agreed to go ahead with my plan to help him learn to cook. This is a great step forward for someone who has flatly refused to make anything more complicated than an omelette for the last six months.

Now, it is clear that Goon and I have completely different cooking styles. I never learned to cook at home as my parents had me on low calorie ready meals through my teenage years. Then, all of a sudden at age 22, when I finally got a long term boyfriend, I just started making simple things but without any recipe books. Those came later, when I got bored of making basic things and wanted ideas for new meals. I never followed a recipe as such, just got an idea of the ingredients and improvised. I find that I’m so impatient, I get bored reading instructions and just get them wrong.  Things are much more reliable when I make stuff up, which is why I’ll probably never be a good baker.

Goon is completely the opposite. He can follow a recipe really well but if there’s a typo (or the chef writing the recipe is a bit mad) Goon can’t make adjustments. He has no idea of how to compensate for things going wrong…. at least not yet.

So we’ve formulated a plan. Once a week (or more if he feels like it) I will go through my recipe books and find a recipe that I think will suit Goon’s cooking ability. Goon will try it with as little help from me as possible, then we’ll blog it. It should be a good way of reviewing basic recipes as well as being great for teaching Goon to cook.

For the first experiment of this kind, I found an exciting looking recipe by Nigel Slater from his book Real Food. It is a stir fry of pork fillet and cashew nuts with strong vibrant flavours of lime, chilli and mint. Since it is a stir fry, there wasn’t anything involved that was too scary for Goon. However, I didn’t agree with the recipe completely, so I adjusted the quantities to what I thought would work. There was a decrease in chilli, as Goon doesn’t like too much heat in his food, and I reduced the amount of lime because it just seemed totally ludicrous.

Of course, we need to go one step at a time. Goon can’t cook two things in parallel yet, so I made some fried rice to go with the pork and some wilted pak choi in oyster sauce, but he made the meat dish entirely on his own.

Pork with Lime, Cashews and Mint (Adapted from Nigel Slater’s Real Food)

• 400g pork fillet
• flavourless oil for frying (vegetable, groundnut, etc)
• 75g cashews, roughly chopped (90g was suggested, but I ate some before we started. I think 75g was plenty and I prefer the nuts chunky, so I changed the ‘finely chopped ‘ stated in the original recipe to roughly chopped).
• zest of 2 limes plus the juice of one (the recipe suggested 3 whole limes, we used 2 and it was still a bit much.)
• 3 green chillies, deseeded and chopped (maybe go for the suggested 4 red chillies if you like heat.)
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
• 4 spring onions, sliced on the diagonal
• 2 inches of ginger, peeled and finely shredded
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce (the original recipe suggests 2, but I knew this would make it too salty for me)
• handful mint leaves, finely chopped
• handful basil leaves, torn to shreds

1. Cut the pork into 2cm thick rounds, then cut each round into thin strips.
2. Put the oil into the wok, get it really hot and then brown the pork by quickly stir-frying it until it is golden brown in places. Pour the pork onto a plate with its juices.
   [Goon observation: It says to use a wok for a good reason. If you use a big saucepan like Goon did, not much of the pork will be in contact with the pan surface and it will take longer to brown. Since it doesn’t seal as quickly, it may lose more water than it should. It’s not the end of the world. Just pour off excess liquid and carry on.]
3. Turn down the heat a little and add the spring onions, garlic, ginger and chilli to the pan. Fry, stirring constantly for a couple of minutes. 
4. Return the pork to the pan and add the cashews and continue to fry these, whilst stirring, for another minute or two.
5. Add the fish sauce, lime zest and juice and stir through.
6. Finally, add the mint and basil.
   [Ros observation: The original recipe stated ‘add the herbs.’ This confused Goon as he thought there weren’t any herbs in the ingredients list.  Sometimes it helps to really spell things out.]
7. Taste and adjust seasoning.
   [Goon doesn’t like doing this. In fact, he tasted it and just said, ‘it tastes weird’. It turned out he meant ‘the lime is a bit strong’. In compensation I added some more mint and garlic, which seemed to help in balancing it.] 
8. Garnish with a sprig of mint and serve immediately with some fried rice.

***

So how did it turn out?

Not bad I say! With the minor adjustments I made, this turned out to be an excellent recipe, with wonderful bold flavours and a refreshing citrusy-heat that wasn’t too much for Goon. The lime wasn’t so overpowering by the time it reached the table, although I would stick to the quantities above rather than using 3 whole limes as Slater suggested.

So I think we have a success! Hopefully in time, Goon will be able to do the rice and vegetables too.

At least not the one I used last night. Remember how I said the Murdoch Press book ‘Home Food’ was great? I was wrong. It’s great for inspiration and contains plenty of things a good cook should have in their repetoire, but as far as the actual recipes go, I’m not at all convinced.

I think I’ve already mentioned the disastrous kedgeree recipe which I followed two years ago. To be fair, if I hadn’t looked in that book, I’d never have heard of kedgeree, but I’m certainly never going to use it’s recipe again. Last night I had a similar experience.

The dish in question was farfalle with tiger prawns, horeradish and lemon. So you’d think it would be a zesty and powerful dish with a real kick to it, right? Wrong! It was stiflingly bland. I added extra horseradish and lemon but it didn’t help much. In the end I added a bit of dijon mustard, which turned out to be a very good thing indeed. After that the pasta was alright, not great,  but at least it had some flavour. 

I n general, I’m not the type of cook that follows recipes to the letter. I tend to look over them and then invent my own dish based loosely around the suggested flavours. Last night’s cooking reminded me why. Everytime I faithfully follow instructions things don’t work. This doesn’t bother me particularly as I find it’s much more fun to be creative in cooking and the results are always better, but I know lots of people who will slavishly copy what it says in the book. I wonder how they cope. Maybe this is why some people claim they can’t cook- they’re following recipes which, frankly, don’t work.

I’m not happy at all. The squalid conditions on my student halls (i.e. bugger all fridge space and an average 33C room temperature) have meant I lost a lot of food. Firstly my ostrich steaks , which were bloody expensive, and then my poussin and the lamb hearts which had only been in the fridge for two days. Somebody is going to get an earful tomorrow.

Apart from losing £20 of meat, I also had to deal with returning home at midnight to find out everything in fridge had rotted and make a quick trip to a dodgy Fulham curry house. Luckily their lamb vindaloo turned out ok and was actively good paired with my own saag daal, which I whipped up in a few minutes.

I have a solution to the state of my halls: get my own fridge. It is being delivered tonight and I’m putting in my room, for which I already have an air con unit. That should sort things out. 

Anyhow, to cheer myself up I bought myself a funky “presentation” plate and a brand new cast iron griddle pan. Last night I took the opportunity to use them by making myself a comfort meal of ribeye steak with garlic and mushroom sauce, cheese and basil polenta and asparagus.

Ribeye steak is lovely and tender- almost as good as fillet and much cheaper! This particular one was perfect. It was stripy on the outside but pefectly rare in the middle.

I discovered the secret to doing this very recently. The trick is to undercook the steak slightly and then immediately wrap it in baking foil. The foil stops moisture escaping from the steak but the residual heat will continue to cook it for a while. So, to make my “just beyond blue” steak, instead of cooking it for 90 seconds on each side like the packet suggests, I cooked it for 1 minute per side then let it rest. The result is a juicy, evenly cooked steak.

On another positive note, I found my favourite cookbook. It had gone missing in my parents’ house for over a year and then miraculously re-appeared on Saturday.

It is part of a series published by Murdoch Books. It’s perfect for a beginner cook. It has basic recipes for pretty much every classic meal. Classic bolognese, pilaffs, kedgeree and nasi goreng are all in there along with crumbles and cheesecakes. It is just the thing to find out the basic components of a meal so that you can practice and improve on the recipe yourself. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who want’s to get into good cooking and especially to students wanting to break out of the “pasta and sauce” mould.

It seems that even when I have half a week off cooking there is lots to write about!

After the experiment I felt the need for a little time off. Since then I’ve visited three Chelsea restaurants. I’ve put up reviews for all of them now. On Thursday night I visited Kishmish, an Indian restaurant on Fulham Road. This was very disappointing but things got much better afterwards when I visited Deep Seafood Restaurant. That was an expensive but very satisfying treat. The next lunchtime I had tapas at La Rueda on the King’s Road. There weren’t many Spanish places in Shepherds Bush so I was delighted to find somewhere so near my flat that does good tapas at reasonable prices.

My empty fridge on Friday morning necessitated another Borough Market trip. This time I returned with a rabbit, some wild boar, more ostrich (I can’t get enough ostrich!) duck eggs and some cooking lavender.

In need of cooking inspiration I made a trip to the Borders in Fulham. Borders bookstores always have a range of discounted cookery books. They tend not to be from the big famous chefs, but quite often you’ll find thick £4 paperbacks with lots of interesting recipes from one particular cuisine. This weekend I picked up a book of Thai recipes and something called “On The Grill” which has lots of interesting variations on Mediterranean dishes.

 I also got a little black book so that I can make notes in restaurants for reviews and make the staff nervous. Hehe.