There’s been a lot of it in this flat recently. Supporting two people (well, one person and a giant with the appetite of a starved woolly mammoth) on a teacher’s salary requires tight budgeting. We’ve had a lot of chicken liver dinners over the last term and I am always looking to find good deals.

I seem to have inherited my father’s love of food bargain hunting and, now that we have reasonable food storage space, I seem to have picked up his tendency for hoarding too. Before the pheasant season finished, we had two whole birds and four packs of breast meat in the freezer. We also had four ducks and 2 kilos of pork leg. Damn Sainsbury’s and their half price temptations!

Goon is not so good at budget shopping. He rarely checks the pricing on fruit and veg so he doesn’t even notice if what he’s picking up is organic or conventional and he never thinks to seek out the bargain bin. I suppose I can’t blame him really. During the time in between leaving his home in Leeds and acquiring me as his personal chef, he lived solely on tinned tuna with rice and, on special occasions, minced beef with rice. However, I have been trying to train him to shop more frugally and he does seem to be learning*.

One day, Goon noticed that the strings of garlic at our corner store were considerably better value than the individual bulbs** so he picked one up. Of course, Goon didn’t think to check on the quality of the garlic and, when he got home, I wasn’t too amused at being presented with a string of 10, slightly sprouted garlic bulbs. A week later i still had six of these on my hands.

Sorry about the blurring. The garlic was by then very much alive and trying to escape.*** I’m told that garlic in this form is just about useable if you pull out the shoots, but it wouldn’t be long before I had to bin the remainder of the heads. So what could I do in this situation? I had no time to make chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. There was only one thing for it: soup.

Lots and lots and lots of garlic soup. It’s very nice, although possibly not what you want on a first date and it would seem it develops in strength the longer you leave it. Still, it’s been doing a very good job of keeping the vampires away. I haven’t seen a single one since I made this****.

Garlic Soup (makes around 10 portions)

Ingredients 

• two pinches saffron threads
• 175g butter
• 6 heads garlic, peeled, shoots pulled out, chopped
• 4 small/medium onions, finely diced
• 4 sticks celery, chopped up finely
• 2-3 bay leaves
• generous splash dry sherry
• 2 1/2  litres chicken stock
• handful long grain rice
• 250 mls double cream
• croutons, parsley and freshly grated Parmesan cheese to serve

Method

1. Leave the saffron tosoak in a little hot water. 
2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan and add the garlic, onion, celery and bay leaf. Stir. put a lid on the saucepan and allow these to sweat until soft. 
3. Add the sherry, stock and the saffron and its soaking water. Bring to the boil
4. Add the rice and boil until the rice is cooked. Taste and add salt and pepper to taste.
5. Take out the bay leaf, add the cream and liquidise the soup.
6. When ready to serve, reheat and top with some croutons, freshly grated parmesan and parsley.

* The learning is well motivated. The last time he turned up with a £2 aubergine, half the kitchen crockery was projected towards his head.

** The fact that going to Sainsbury’s and picking up a three pack of bulbs would have been even better value is beside the point. To do that, Goon would have had to walk for a whole 8 minutes which is, of course, unthinkable UNLESS I have given him some money to pick up some fried chicken on his way back.

***Or perhaps it had been so long since I’d taken a photo in daylight I’d forgotten how to operate the camera without flash.

****(geekery) My hobby: pointing out the flaws in the assumption that correlation implies causality.(\end geekery) 

I think this might be called ‘having too much time on your hands’.

After 12 weeks of school canteen meals, scrounging processed cheese sandwiches from the kids’ lunch time maths clubs and, at worst but most frequently, skipping lunch altogether, I’m ready for some good home-cooked food at lunchtime. I may have gone a little over the top this time, but can you blame me? This is the first time since the Christmas break that I’ve had time to spend in the kitchen.

The dish pictured above is a tuna nicoise. Like most contemporary restaurants, I have foregone the traditional use of flaked tuna and replaced this with a seared tuna steak. I’ve also replaced the boiled hen’s egg with three soft (in theory) boiled quails’ eggs. Everthing else remains the same apart from a little (in theory) drizzle of balsamic reduction to dip the cherry tomatoes in. Yes, I know there is too much reduction and two of the quails’ eggs are overcooked. I’d like to see you make this perfectly first time around. :p

I first encountered a tuna nicoise made like this in a lovely little tapas bar in Leamington Spa. The dish didn’t stay on the menu for long but the memory lingered with me and I’ve never found a nicoise as good since then. So, what better to do on the first of my 21 days off work than recreate it as closely as possible in my own kitchen while Goon and our new pet looked at me as if I was crazy. 

Goon accused me of over-cooking the tuna.

Yeah, right, like that’s ever going to happen. I might forget to cook it at all one day, but overcook it? Never!

Have a nice day at work, everybody!

Mini Tuna Nicoise  (enough for a starter or a midday meal for someone who’s not particularly used to eating lunch)

• 1 small tuna steak (100g or so), griddled to rare (or practially raw if, like myself, you’re that way inclined)
• a small handful frisee lettuce
• 5 or 6 green beans, steamed until just cooked and cut in half)
• Around 10 black pitted olives, halved
• 2 or 3 baby new potatoes, cooked and halved
• 3 cherry tomatoes, halved
• 3 soft boiled quails’ eggs, peeled and halved
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinaigrette
• 2 extra tablespoons balsamic vinegar, reduced to a thick syrup.

Toss the lettuce, beans, olives and potatoes in the vinigrette dressing. Pile into the center of a large, flat serving plate. Balance the tuna teak on top. Arrange the tomatoes and quail egg pieces around the main salad and drizzle the balsamic reduction around it.