Despite all the trouble I get from Goon, he does have his uses. For a start he wrote the anti-spam device for the comments box. Also, I think that spending time in his company is very good practice for when (if) I decide to have children of my own.

Goon has been working a lot recently. Sometimes he only comes back at 10pm, by which time I’ve cooked dinner so he doesn’t get to help much. He’s been saying that he misses helping me cook. I don’t understand why!  I generally reserve the tedious sous-chef jobs for him. But, since he managed a day off this week, I designed something that would be fun for him to cook and eat.

For a start, the dish would have to be one pot since Goon doesn’t like washing up. Secondly, it would have to involve something high fat, preferably cheese. Thirdly the vegetables would have to be hidden since Goon sometimes tries to avoid undisguised veg.

Fajitas immediately sprung to mind. I had a pack of Brindisa chorizo picante in my fridge that was crying out to be used in this. I decided to stew it with pinto beans, sweet potato and pancetta as well as the obligatory peppers, tomatoes and onions.

After deciding my plan of action and getting hold of the ingredients I didn’t already have, I went to fetch Goon and immediately started to wish I’d hidden my food more securely. Goon had somehow found my duck paté and was munching it straight from the pack.

With a bit of effort I wrestled the paté off him and gave him a choice of jobs. He chose to peel and  dice a sweet potato while I dealt with the herbs and onion for the fajita filling. As I was peeling the onion, I felt something wet cold and slimy hit me on the back of my neck.With trepidation, I turned around. Another wet and slimy object hit me in the face.

These projectiles were in fact sweet potato peel. Goon was playing a game that involved him flicking them across the kitchen and trying to hit the opposite wall. He would have been quite successful had I not been in the way!  

After that, Goon started to behave himself. All the jobs from then on were just sautéeing, stirring and tasting so he managed it mostly by himself. The only distraction happened when Goon got in an argument with his flatmate about the virtues of microwaving Tesco Value sausages.

NON COOKING FLATMATE:Of course I can microwave them.
GOON: No! They burn on the inside!
FLATMATE: What do you mean ‘burn on the inside’?
GOON: The insides go black and the outside stays raw.  It’s happened to me before!

The flatmate didn’t seem to believe Goon’s warning and, to be honest, neither did I. Goon grumbled and went back to cooking.This dish really is Goon-proof food. After a bit of initial sauteéing of vegetables it’s a case of throwing things into a pan, simmering and then adjusting seasoning.

Just sautée 1 medium finely diced onion with 2 minced garlic cloves,  3 chopped birds eye chillis and half a tablespoon of oregano, cayenne and paprika until the onion is soft. Then throw in a peeled, diced sweet potato and a chopped red pepper and sautee for a couple of minutes.  Then take 6 links of chopped fresh chorizo picante, 100g of pancetta and add that to the mix. When it is cooked, throw in a drained can of pinto beans, a can of chopped tomatoes, another half tablespoon each of the spices and enough beef stock to let it simmer for thirty minutes or so to give the flavours a little time to develop. When you think it is looking nearly ready (the mxture should be fairly thick), add tabasco to taste and then adjust seasoning for the other spices, salt and pepper. You may want to add tomato puree for extra tomato flavour .

At the end just stir through a couple of handfuls of chopped coriander leaf.

This made  A LOT. Enough for 4 people, which was great because, like all stews, it tasted even better the next day and provided Goon with a substantial lunch.

We had the stew in tortilla flatbreads with sour cream, grated cheddar and mixed leaves.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get Goon to eat the salad. Instead he replaced it with cream.

Would you like some meat with your sour cream, Goon?

As we finishe dinner, I heard the front door open. A second later there was an eruption of frantic screaming and swearing in the corridor. What the hell was going on? I opened the lounge door and in came a great plume of smoke. 

Goon mumbled something and ran towards the kitchen. I followed, panicking that I’d left the hobs on.

But no. Instead it turns out Goon had tried a little experiment to prove to the no-cook flatmate  that sausages really do burn on the inside when you microwave them. Goon had put two sausages in the microwave on full power for twenty minutes.

You know what? They DID burn on the inside. AND the outside. In fact, it’s a bloody miracle the kitchen wasn’t on fire. Goon binned the two sausage shaped pieces of charcoal and then ran to hide in his room. Everyone else started opening windows. The whole flat still stinks of smoke.

So the moral of the story is, if you have a small child, or a Goon, cooking with them can be fun. Just don’t  leave them unattended with a pack of sausages and a microwave.

Well, something like that anyway.

Freya!

Well done, Freya, for correctly spotting that Goon was snacking on green beans dipped in honey. They were actually unwashed raw green beans that he was supposed to be rinsing and chopping for me so I could make a garlicky bean accompaniment to some rabbit (see post below).

The thing is, if anything edible is left out, Goon will eat it. If two edible things are left out, Goon will eat them together. I made the mistake of getting him to chop beans next to a pot of honey and the inevitable happened.

I’m intrigued by Trig’s suggestion of anchovies in marmalade. Maybe I’ll leave those together on the worksurface and see what happens.

Very silly things happen if I leave Goon alone in the kitchen unsupervised. On Sunday night, he created his own culinary invention. 

Can anyone see (or guess) what Goon’s new favourite (and very unusual) snack is? He apparently enjoyed it although, I must admit, I wasn’t too keen.

It appears that it is time for teenagers all over the country to panic madly, as they suddenly realise that their mocks were a disaster and their predicted  A level and GCSE grades may leave them destined for a future on the checkout of Kwiksave.

At least that is how it seemed as my inbox filled up with mail from various tutoring agencies begging for people to provide maths lessons. It was good from the perspective of my bank balance but rather horrendous for my sanity, as I realised that I was going to have start teaching at from 9am on most days and not have a chance of getting home until 10pm.

On weeks like this I want to leave the cooking to Goon so that dinner doesn’t get served up too late and I get a reasonable amount of sleep before the next early start. After all, I’d taught him one or two things. For example,  salmon with creme fraiche and dill pasta was now in his repetoire and he had produced some paprika chicken almost completely unaided. On Monday night, I thought I would try this. I suggested he did something with fish and then went off to teach an undergrad until 8:30. After the two hour lesson, I was rather perturbed to find that Goon was still in his office, waiting for further instruction on what to cook. This of course, defeated the whole purpose of getting him to cook as he would get homeeven later than me!

So that ended up being a very late night and a painfully early start. The same late night and early start happened on Tuesday. By Thursday, I was looking a lot like something from a bad zombie movie. Goon, rather embarrassed by his behaviour on Monday, offered to cook again, providing I could tell him what to do.

After a very laboured think, (I wasn’t capable of anything else by then) I decided that spare rib chops cooked slowly in a sweet and sour sauce with stir fried noodles and vegetables would be nice and easy.

So I dragged Goon around Tesco to pick up ingredients and also got myself a nice pack of game paté, which I had been really craving since I’d just seen Jeanne’s delicious sounding home made chicken liver paté. Hopefully I’d  be able to enjoy some before running off the next morning.

The first thing I got Goon to do was make the sauce. It is a very easy one to make. You just get the juice from a tin of pineapples, add some sweetened water, ginger powder and then vinegar in small quantities until you  are happy with the flavour. A little tomato paste is added for colouring and, usually, I then add some onions and pepper which I have fried until just a little bit crunchy. Very simple!

Goon didn’t agree, and insisited I be in the kitchen to supervise. So I told him to start heating the pineapple juice and add enough sugared water to just cover the ribs in their little dish, while I chopped the vegetables. When I turned around I found that Goon had diluted the pineapple juice with enough water to fill the entire 1.5 litre pan. Admittedly I’d picked up some big chops but not THAT big.

Half an hour later, when the liquid had finally reduced to a sensible level, I helped Goon finish off the sauce and poured it over the rib chops, which were sitting snugly in a roasting tray and popped them in the oven for 1 hour 30 mins at gas mark 4.  

Goon had decided that this cooking business was all too difficult. So I ended up being in charge of the stir fry on the condition he would watch and learn. He sat on the floor while I made the noodles, describing carefully what I was doing at each stage. At some point I noticed that Goon was no longer responding to what I said. In fact it turned out that Goon wasn’t even sitting on the floor any more.

I eventually found him hiding behind the kitchen door with a sheepish look on his face. In his hand was an empty pack of game paté.

Grrr! Only Goon could eat a whole 150g of paté in the time it takes me to cook a stir fry.

Anyway, the pork was good. I added a tin of water chestnuts at the end because I think they have a fantastic texture. For the stir fry, I used rice noodles with spring onions, ginger, five spice, some left-over pancetta, and cashew nuts and fried them all together in a generous measure of sesame oil.

This wasn’t my best photography day, was it? Ah well. Apparently my parents have bought me a new camera. Fingers crossed photography should, at the very least, become more consisitent.

If I hadn’t been there to witness it, I probably wouldn’t believe this story was true.

In my limited common sense, I’d decided to take Goon with me to Borough market in the hope he would like the cool stuff there and perhaps even buy something other than ostrich for a change. I was also hoping to teach him where all the stalls were so I could send him shopping one Friday lunchtime.

But Goon wasn’t as impressed as I hoped he would be. He followed me around but didn’t pay much attention. He had some fun prodding some headless rabbits by the Furness game stall but lost interest after a few minutes.

I didn’t complain too much at his apathy. It was useful to have him there. It turns out that being accompanied by a 6ft 5 tall Goon, who is dressed like a hit man, makes the crowds get out of your way VERY quickly, which is a rather useful thing in Borough on a Saturday afternoon.

After I’d done my shopping I asked Goon if there was anything else he wanted to see, He shrugged and grunted. I took that as a no. So I said, “Ok then, I’ll just go have a quick look at the cheese then we’ll go get lunch.”

I didn’t get the response I expected.

“Huh? Cheese? Where’s the cheese?” I pointed towards the other side of the market.Two seconds later, Goon was gone.

I tried to follow, but without Goon’s ’dangerous’ look, I was stuck, moving at a snails pace with the rest of the crowd.

Fifteen minutes later I found him standing behind the counter of an Italian cheese stall. I wondered why the farmers had taken him back there. I was not happy when I found out. One of the farmers was gesticulating enthusiastically around a large cheese, looking very, very smug.

“…and then you cut it in half again…. and wrap this bit up very tightly….” he paused as I joined them behind the table.  ”You a friend of his? I hope you like Gorgonzola.” My heart sank.

“Oh, no. Please tell me he hasn’t!” 
“Your friend here has bought this.”
“Oh my God. How big IS that?”
“Oh, about twelve kilos or so - I’ll weigh it up in a second.”

I couldn’t believe it. Goon had been out of my sight for fifteen minutes and he already managed to buy twelve kilos of one what was possibly the stinkiest blue cheese in the world. My stomach turned as I thought of the tube ride home.

The farmer heaved the cheese onto the weighing scales, which clearly were not designed for something of that size. “Well, that comes to… £98.43.” My jaw hit the floor. “Tell you what, give me £100 to make it easy and I’ll give you this goats cheese and throw in two of these too. He handed me a bag of what what appeared to be a buffalo milk cheese.

Goon nodded enthusiastically for a second then looked confused. He turned to me and said “Can I borrow £20?”

Cheeky bastard.

On the way home, Goon was being very protective of his cheese.

I don’t know why. Who in the world would try to steal 12kg of gorgonzola from a leather-clad giant?

The cheese was so stinky that, even though both Goon and I live in Hammersmith, I got the sudden urge to leave the train at Green Park, a good four miles away from my destination.

When I eventually got back to Goon’s and he opened the door, I was actually overwhelmed by the stench of cheese. Without a garage or a cellar, Goon had decided to store the gorgonzola in his living room.

 As I’m sure you can guess, the other residents weren’t best pleased. Fortunately it turned out that the cheese wasn’t going to be there for much longer as Goon was going to give it to his dad as a birthday present.

So Goon’s poor father is probably at this moment carrying a twelve kilo cheese on the train from London to Leeds. I suppose the upside is he’ll get a carriage to himself!

Why oh why did I start cooking for a Goon?

Last night I was making a nice stew (more on that later ) and I was running a bit short on rosemary, cinnamon and garlic, so I called Goon and asked him to pick some up. Goon arrived with  the cinnamon and garlic. There hadn’t been any rosemary in the shop. That was ok, I was expecting the little Tesco Metro to not be too well stocked.

What I wasn’t expecting was to have all this dumped in front of me.

Goon had bought every pack of herbs that there was in the shop! This means two things

1. I have more herbs than I could possibly use before they all go off. We don’t even have any freezer space.
2. Goon still hasn’t learnt that rosemary tastes substantially different to things like tarragon and coriander. It seems I need to give him more kitchen training.

I guess I didn’t get through the last time he did  something like this.

The parsley would be useable if I didn’t already have another massive pack in the fridge. I see a fair number of pestos and herb crusts being made in the near future. Anyone know what to do with a huge pack of dill when you don’t have any fish?

On Tuesday night I was stuck out reasonably late on another teaching job ( ….grumble, geumble,  GCSE students, grumble…) and  I’d decided that I’d be far too knackered to cook when I got back. So I decided to try and convince Goon to take over for that evening. To be honest, I’d expected a lot more resistance to this plan but he seemed actively keen.

Goon hadn’t done any cooking in quite a while, but since he had been progressing well up until the last attempt, I decided to leave him up to his own devices this time. I left him two free range chicken breasts (another bargain bin find) and let him decide what to do with them.

Although he’s learning fast, Goon still isn’t very inspired when it comes to cooking. He’s done very well in that he’s gone from mqking only microwave rice to being able to follow a easy recipe, but he doesn’t seem able to think up things for himself, nor is he able to spot obvious flaws/misprints in the instructions. 

The recipe Goon decided to try was this one from Saturday Kitchen on the BBC.  Not a bad idea, looking at the ingredient list but there were a lot of problems with it. For a start, how rich?! I’m not one to shy away from getting out the cream and butter but this was just too much.  It needed stock or something to give it less density and more flavour. Also, talking about flavour, Goon doubled the paprika, mustard and worcestershire sauce in the dish (looks like he’s learning ) and it was still edging on bland.

He was very pleased with how it looked but both of us agreed that it needed more flavour (even after alteration) and less double cream! Poor Goon!

I find this happens a lot if you follow recipes to the letter.  I only do this on occasion with Gordon Ramsay and  Delia Smith recipes and, even then, I sometimes find it doesn’t quite turn out how I’d like.

I’m not having a go at the chefs. With the variation you get in natural produce, it must be nearly impossible to write foolproof recipes. After all, 200g of liver could apply to three or four thin slices, or one massive slab. Ditto vegetable sizes, ages of spices etc.  For this reason, I take every recipe I read with a pinch of salt (oooh, I made a sort of accidental pun!) and more often than not, just completely re-invent them to suit what is in my cupboard  and/or the nearby supermarkets, using my own (admittedly gin-retarded) tastebuds as a guide. Zen cooking is the way forward!

Goon isn’t quite ready for that yet, but I guess he might get there one day.  Now that he’s ok with following recipes on his own, I’ll try to get him to start reviewing them. We’ll let you know when we’ve found some nice Goon-proof dishes!

I feel the need to apologise for the quality of the photographs in todays posts. I have the problem that, whenever I am out at a restaurant with Goon, I am not allowed to take pictures myself. This is because Goon gets embarassed and insists on taking photos with his little camera phone.

I used to be the same way myself, but I’ve found in recent months that photographing food in restaurants can be quite fun. Big, famous resaurants are well used to foodies taking snaps for their blogs anyway. 

The staff in smaller places are sometimes confused by my behaviour. But then i mention the website and, judging by the swift improvement in service and the looks of horror on some faces, they almost always without fail assume that my little blog is some big important review site. Of course, I do nothing to encourage this misconception. I do nothing to discourage it either, but never mind. This way we get better service.  

But unfortunately this time we have Goon’s dodgy camera phone pictures.   The one upside to this is that goon sent me ALL the photos on his camera … including this hilarious one he accidentally took of his double chin.

HAHAHAHA! Honestly, how do you accidentally photo yourself like that!?

So below are reviews of two rather nice restaurants in Shepherds Bush. Enjoy!

And I mean FULL of mushrooms.

At some point last week I was planning on making a quick meal from a venison haunch steak I’d bought at Notting Hill’s farmer’s market.  I’d been discussing what to make with Goon over MSN and decided that a red wine sauce would be nice but I was also craving pasta. So I thought that a pasta side with porcini mushrooms, pine nuts and other things thrown in would do.

When I got to Goon’s I got a bit of a suprise. I hadn’t asked him to do any shopping but he thought he’d be nice and go anyway. He’d gone to get mushrooms for me but, on arriving at the shop, had forgotten what mushrooms I wanted. So he bought them ALL.

On the table there were chestnut mushrooms, organic chestnut mushrooms, organic baby button mushrooms, large button mushrooms, closed cup mushrooms, some non-descript general mushrooms and large portobello mushrooms.

Seven packs of mushrooms at 300g each.  No porcini mushrooms. Goon (probably fortunately) didn’t know mushrooms sometimes are dried. So I went back to the shop and got some.

So to get rid of my mushrooms since then I’ve made spaghetti bolognese with extra mushrooms,

beef stroganoff with added mushrooms and a mushroom and leek medley to accompany some nice rare roast beef. 

Today and tomorrow I’m having mushroom and roast beef sandwiches. Then I’ll be making some chicken and mushroom pies.  

At the end of this week I’ll never want to see another mushroom again!

The roast beef probably deserves its own post but I can’t be bothered today so I’ll just leave you with the pictures. It was very nice and perfect for sunday night. I crusted it with wholegrain mustard and served it with a port gravy with roast potatoes and the mushroom-leek concoction.  

I appear to have been neglecting the blog a little this week. I’ve been busy ‘perfecting’ the  recipes I’m writing for a student magazine. On the occasions when I haven’t been doing that I’ve either been cooking huge 3 course dinners (more on that later), visiting restaurants (more on that later too) or persuading Goon to cook for me. This was his latest attempt which, in my opinion, went quite well.

That is chicken with a white wine and cream sauce. Apparently Goon already knew how to make a version of this. It was one of the things he tried before settling down to his staple diet of plain noodles in stock. His version involved simply mixing equal portions of cream and white wine then adding chicken and heating until cooked through. 

There was plenty of room for improvement there, I thought. The first thing I did was get goon to add some flavour to the sauce. Goon sliced the chicken into strips then sauteed it in a little oil until it was just cooked through. Then he removed it from the pan, added some chopped onion, sliced chestnut mushrooms and garlic with some fresh thyme and parsley and cooked this gently until the onion went soft. Then he deglazed the pan with the chicken stock and wine.

This time I managed to convince Goon to let the sauce reduce. We let it halve it volume, then added double cream and let it bubble until the sauce was thick. Finally we stirred the chicken back in and served it over rice.

It was very tasty apart from some chicken pieces being a little overcooked. Next time I may leave Goon unsupervised in the kitchen to see what happens!