Well, I’m back at school now and it seems that the first day of the summer term has been a lot easier than the previous two terms. The kids are mostly revising now, meaning that there’s a lot less lesson prep to do and, to my astonishment, I left work today at 5pm! Previously I would have rarely left by 7:30.

I’m taking full advantage of these easy days before revision clinics take off and I’m thrown back into the crazy-busy schedue I had before. There has only been one problem with work these last two days. Apparently someone in the finance department decided it was a good idea to turn the heating off in the maths block and boy, is it cold!

I feel the cold badly anyway. You know the type of girl who insists the flat is kept permanatly at 25 degrees, doesn’t care about the heating bill and then still sits right next to the radiator all the time? That’s me. Any degree of cold makes me lose concentration remarkably quickly, and on these sunny but chilly spring days it is marginally warmer outside in the quad than it is at my desk.

After about half an hour of pacing up and down the office during my first free period and grumbling to anyone who’d listen, I decided I couldn’t take it any more and went and took refuge in the photocopying room. I didn’t need to photocopy at that point, but those printers don’t half keep the place warm!

Even my colleague Luke admits its freezing and he’s Northern! In fact, he  was the man who said last term that I was a weed for adding extra layers to go outside in February and that I should be made to live in a freezer for a week to make me understand the true nature of cold.

So for these last two days, I’ve been craving really warming food and, for a change I have had the time to make exactly what I wanted for dinner. After our initial training  day, when I spend all day sitting in the office with my coat and scarf on, I felt what I needed was this.

Marinated, Griddled Squid on Pepper, Tomato and Chickpea Stew with Smoked Paparika, Bacon and Chorizo

• About 200g baby squid, cleaned with hoods and tentacles seperated and heads discarded
• The juice of half an orange 
• 1 cubic inch ginger, crushed 
• a small onion, minced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 yellow pepper cored, deseeded and chopped, roughly into 1 inch squares
• 300g drained tinned chickpeas
• 3 tsp smoked paprika
• 2 tsp cayenne
• 300g chopped tomatoes
• 200ml fresh vegetable stock 
• 3 links spicy raw chorizo, chopped into small chunks
• 4 rashers smoky bacon, chopped 
• large handful of coriander, roughly chopped

1. Make a slit down the side of each squid hood and open it out, score in a cris-cros pattern over the outer side.
2. Mix the orange and crushed ginger. Toss the squid hoods in the mixture and leave to marinate while you prepare the stew
3. Sweat the onions and garlic gently until the onion is beginning to soften. Add the cayenne and paprika, stir well, cover and leave to cook for another few minutes.
4. Add the bacon. pepper and chorizo, stir and allow to cook for a further 3-4 minutes turning the heat up to just below medium.
5. Add the tomatoes, stock and chickpeas, stir well and bring to a gentle bubble. Leave uncovered to bubble down to a thick stew consistency.
6. Taste, adjust seasoning and when ready to serve, stir in the coriander.
7. Griddle the baby squid over a high heat for about 90s per side or until just cooked through. Serve the squid on the chickpea stew. I accompanied this with roast cherry tomatoes, wilted green spinach and a glass of rioja.

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. 

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.

At least, they have around here. I apologise to all of you that have attempted to e-mail me and contact me via comments during the last six months. I must have appeared very rude. 

It’s mostly my fault really. What kind of plonker starts a job before they’ve taken their PhD exam? Generally the kind of plonker who doesn’t understand that their job will take up 70 hours per week during term time. I possibly would have thought twice about it if I had known. I certainly would have delayed the start of my career if I knew I was going to write a grand total of 9 sets of reports during my first term and that my commute would total 2.5 hours a day. 

I have reason to believe that things will be very different next academic year. I really hope I’m right. As for now, I’ve just started a four week holiday and, now that all my thesis corrections are done, I’m properly free for the first time in nearly five years. So now I’ll try and catch up with everyone who I managed to ignore over the last two terms. 

And now that I won’t be spending at least 3 hours a day writing worksheets* and/or reports, hopefully my brain won’t have turned to mush by 8pm and I’ll be capable of creating some posts for this blog.

My cooking didn’t cease completely this term but time pressure meant that I couldn’t spend hours experimenting in the kitchen. I resorted to reasonably quick meals and, to my suprise some of them turned out to be quite good despite the lack of preparation. The reipe below was one of my favourite school-night suppers. It’s comforting, yet very healthy and doesn’t take much time to make. Plus there’s the added bonus that all the ingredients can be found in our depleted local Sainsbury’s or, more often, in the small Turkish stores across the road.

Salmon with Spiced Lentils and Minted Yoghurt

Ingredients

• two large piees of salmon fillet, skin on
• Enough seasoned cornflour to dust the salmon skin (I think any flour will work here)
• 3 handfuls puy lentils, rinsed
• fresh, unherbed vegetable stock (two to three times the volume of your lentils)
• 1 medium onion, finely diced
• 2 tsp cumin
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons fresh, finely chopped coriander, plus some extra oursley chopped leves to garnish
• 8 heaped tablespoons of plain natural yoghurt you might want to scale this down- Goon REALLY liked the yoghurt)
• around 30g mint leaves, very finely chopped

Method

1. Fry the onion gently in olive oil with the cumin and ground coriander until the onion is soft. 
2. Add the garlic and continue to fry for another few minutes until the garlic is cooked.
3. Add the vegetable stock and lentils, stir well and bring to a gentle bubble
4. While the lentils are cooking, mix the mint and yoghurt and set aside 
5. Grill the salmon skin side down over a medium grill for three minutes.
6. Dust the seasoned flour over a plate and then turn up the grill to medium/high  
7. Lift the salmon of the grill, press the skin into the seasoned flour then return the salmon to the grill, skin side up, and grill until the skin turns a crisp golden brown.
8. Remove the salmon from the grill.
9. One they are cooked, drain the lentils. Stir in the fresh coriander.
10. Spoon the lentils onto a serving plate and top with dollops of minted yoghurt. Place the salmon fillet, skin side up, on top and sprinkle over chopped coriander.
11. While this meal was sufficient for me, if you are serving a carb fiend, you may want to have some basmati rice on hand to keep them satisfied. 

*I imagine that any teacher reading this is thinking ‘Why are you spending so much time writing worksheets?!’. In response, my school’s maths department has an unusual policy of not teaching through textbooks so all our resources are created by hand specifically for each lesson. This has a lot of advantages and I’m in favour of it 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time, I just want to sleep.

 …quick, easy, weeknight food. It’s just not like me is it? What happened to the days of the lemon and rose glazed lamb leg and the duck, pomegranate and blueberry salad  or the three hour marathon cooking sessions that resulted in these chilli tortillas. I miss those days.

In fact, I think two things happened……

Firstly, I left the foodie heaven that was West London. You might think it strange that I say this but, given that I have no car, the resources for food experiments were so much better in Hammersmith than they are here in Hackney. I remember the days when I felt aggrieved at not finding fennel on my way home on a Sunday afternoon and moaned about not having access to decent raspbery liqueur*. Now,even on a weeknight, I’m stuck with whatever the near empty shelves Holloway Waitrose can provide at 8pm and it has to be something I can cook quickly so I can get a reasonable amount of sleep before my 6am start the next day .   

And, speaking of the early starts, I knew there’d be dry posting periods during termtime but I wasn’t quite anticipating the extended periods of blogging silence that have occurred since I started at Highgate. But then, when you’ve got to the stage where you arrive home so tired you can’t even eat, let alone cook, the idea of maintaining a food blog seems downright insane.

The problem is that things went a little bit wrong for the maths department this term. A colleague left us, which we were expecting. What we weren’t expecting was the sudden resignation of his replacement shortly before the return to school. Needless to say, this has left us all a little stretched.

In theory, compared to some of my colleagues, I got a fairly good deal. I picked up one new class: the brightest of the GCSE year with some really lovely kids**. That meant only four hours extra teaching per week ( read that as approximately 7 hours work per week). However the timetable also had to change, cramming 80% my fortnight’s teaching into 4 days. Precisely two weeks ago, I was in the middle of that 4 day stint AND trying to write reports for all of my four sixth form classes.

I was exhausted. I had an impossible workload to complete before the next day. I left work at just past 8pm*** having arrived at 8am and with a 75 minute commute each way. I was promised dinner when I got home and, unsuprisingly, Goon found an excuse as to why he had forgotten to make it by the time I arrived. So, barely awake, and in an extremely bad mood, I rushed to the small Tesco Metro, picked up the best steak I could find and invented something suprisingly good given the limit on the lack of marinating time and ingredients. If I’d had the foresight**** to keep a marinating steak prepared in the fridge, this would have been absolutely perfect.

*****

Spice Marinated Sirloin Steaks with Roasted Sweet Potato Wedges and Coriander Pesto

Serves Two

For The Steak Marinade

• 100ml chilli oil
• a tablespoon finely chopped coriander
• 2 large cloves crushed garlic
• 1 cubic inch ginger, peeled and crushed
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground coriander
• 1 green chilli, finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons cayenne

You’ll Also Need

• Two hefty sirloin steaks
• two medium sized sweet potatoes
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 teaspoons paprika
• 50g coriander
• 50-100ml of chilli infused olive oil
• 1 green chilli
• 3 minced cloves of garlic

Mix together all the marinade ingredients. Score the steaks in a criss-cross pattern. Brush all the marinade over the steaks and leave to marinate  (I fell asleep for two hours at this point which seemed to be just long enough. Overnight woud be better)

Peel the two sweet potatoes and cut into wedges. Coat with the olive oil mixed with the paprika and roast at gas mark 7 for 20 minutes or until tender.

Put 50g of finely chopped coriander in a blender jug with 50 ml of chilli infused oil, with the chilli and garlic. Blend until smooth, adding more oil if necessary.  Heat through in a small saucepan for around 5 minutes. Serve the steaks and wedges with the coriander pesto.

*****

* Yes, yes, I was spoilt. 

** and a few nuisances who make life difficult for me and the rest of the class, but such is life.

*** This is partially my fault. I started talking to one of the brightest year 11s about various maths-philosophy type things for an hour. But then, he’s one of those, intelligent personable students that genuinely makes teaching worthwhile, even if he is too polite to tell you that you’ve held the entire conversation with a streak of board pen across your face.

**** well, psychic ability I suppose