Exam season has ended and thesis draft 3 is currently being decimated by my supervisor so, for a rather lovely change this weekend, I had a day off! I think the last time this happened must have been August 2006 (yes, I even taught over Christmas and Easter). Unfortunately, my first days off clashed with one of Goon’s working weekends. This time he was attending Yahoo’s first European Hack Day.

No, I don’t see the appeal either. The good news was that I got a chance to visit my parents properly for a change and spend some time poking around our family home. I’m quite wary of doing this since our house tends to be a bit of a breeding ground for spiders. I’ve never understood the affinity they had for the dark spot under the stairs.

I did find some interesting things. A book of my old poetry for a start, a load of old music  I used to play and some stolen recipe books too. As you might expect, I also raided the cupboards. My parents frequently shop at Sri-Lankan grocery stores so there’s a rather interesting selection of tinned fruit and vegetables. This time, I took some jackfruit because Goon hadn’t tried it before. I also got my hands on what is possibly the best thing about Sri-Lankan cuisine.

These are string hoppers. A Sri-Lankan staple made from  rice flour dough. The dough is made from just rice flour, water and seasonings  but apparently you need to sift the flour several times and get the mixture just right or the hoppers fall apart or turn sticky.

Once you have your dough, a special hand press with tiny holes is used to press the dough into fine noodles. The raw noodles are allowed to fall onto a holder so they form little round, thin ‘cakes.’  These are then steamed until they are cooked and then eaten with  curries and coconut sambal. As with most carbs, they don’t have a very strong flavour of their own, but they have a marvellous texture. Not chewy, but soft and slightly springy. 

I have been forbidden from trying to make these myself. Apparently it is far too difficult and my parents have hidden the equipment from me . These hoppers were bought from a caterer’s shop and are particularly good. I took home enough to feed me and Goon with plenty left over.

When I got back to my flat I made some curries to accompany our hoppers. Firstly, a beef curry with coconut milk and Sri Lankan spicing. It’s not at all traditional to use beef since Sri Lankan Buddhists have some Hindu influences on their culture. Mutton and chicken are usually used, but I quite like curried braising steak.  I also whipped up some dahl with garlic, mild spices and black pepper. We had the jackfruit too, which was flavoured with tamarind.

I dived in, eating in the Sri Lankan way with just my hands. Well, just one hand actually. Like in many other cultures, using your left hand is a no-no. I find eating this way lots of fun. You use the hoppers to grab bits of meat and scoop up the vegetables. Goon looked a little intimidated by this method of eating. Then he went and got himself a knife and fork. I don’t think I’ve ever seen hoppers being neatly cut up before. It was a rather strange and funny sight for me. It’s a bit like watching someone eating fish-fingers with chopsticks!

Then again, a fork is useful for getting the curry soaked hopper pieces from the bottom of the plate.

I love this bit of the meal.

Goon really liked the hoppers and was intrigued by the jack fruit. I’d say it is an acquired taste, but I like it, especially in a sour-tangy curry sauce.

So, if you happen to live near a Sri-Lankan store, see if they make and sell string hoppers because I don’t think they’re found in any other cuisine and you’re missing out if you haven’t tried them. They’re definitely my favourite bit of Sri Lankan cuisine.

Unfortunately things haven’t eased off on the work front quite yet. My impending deadline was revoked when, in a fit of utter frustration, I visited my supervisor to inform him that I was getting nowhere with the proof he asked me to complete. It turned out there was a good reason for this. There had been a slight discrepancy between what he had ASKED me to do and what he actually MEANT,  which meant that I’d spent the last two weeks trying to do something that was probably impossible.

Such is the world of academia I suppose. At least I’m now on the right track and, since Goon has exams in a few weeks, he is spending most of his time at home revising learning the material. I thought that meant that I could indulge in some slow-cooked food as Goon was there to put things in the oven and keep an eye on them.

I first took advantage of this by trying to make a simple but rich dish of beef stewed in red wine - a bourguignon type thing adapted to include whatever vegetables and wine I had in the kitchen. I left the beef marinating in a rich, mellow red with the partially cooked veg and gave Goon the instructions to brown the beef, return it to the casserole with the wine and put it in the oven at 150C, adding a little stock if it looked like it would dry out.

You’d think that with such a simple dish nothing could go wrong. You’d be mistaken. I arrived home at about 9:30pm after failing yet again to finish my Chapter 4. Goon wasn’t around. I tutted, thinking he should have stuck around to check on the food, especially since it turned out that he’d left the dish in the oven uncovered. Closer inspection revelaed that things were much worse than I thought.

The extremely large casserole dish was full, and I mean FULL of liquid. I had intended to cook the beef in almost pure red wine but it looked like Goon had added a couple of litres of something to it. I removed dish from oven and tasted. Something inside me died. My beef was cooking two litres of plain water!

I panicked. There was far too much water to boil away. My best option would be to drain the beef as soon as possible, replace the cooking liquid with something appropriate and give it some extra cooking time so it developed a flavour. That is exactly what I tried to do, grabbing the nearest bottle of red from the worksurface. I relaxed slightly and tasted again.

Who’d have thought we’d have a bottle of red wine out that was OFF!?

It was at this point that Goon walked into the flat and immediately had to duck as every kitchen implement I could lay me hands on went flying at high speed towards his head. Once he’d taken cover in his room I drained the casserole again and found an unopened bottle of red, tasted that and added it to the dish. 

I was seriously worried that the food was going to be inedible. The casserole had retained some of the flavour of the slightly vinegared wine.  Goon, who’d stopped hiding in his room, wandered into the kitchen, picked up a spoon and tasted the casserole.

“What have you done to this? It tastes very tart to me!”

I very nearly killed him.

At this point the casserole turned into a stew and I did everything I could to save it. In went extra tomato and garlic plus a couple more bay leaves. I put it on the lowest heat possible and gave it another hour to see if it recovered.

Suprisingly, the tartness did start to soften. I added extra herbs and black pepper and a little bit of lamb stock, which really helped to alleviate the sharpness of the dish. In the end we actually had an edible and actively pleasant meal, although not nearly as good as I had wanted it to be. It took AGES for the flavour to recover and we ate at about 11:30pm, but still, it was better than beef cooked in water or off wine. 

So the lesson for today was, if the wine for your bourguignon is a bit tart, lamb stock, winter herbs, bay leaves and garlic seem to really help. Also, even the most simple instructions can be misinterpreted by a Goon.

When it comes down to it, although I like eating pancakes, I hate making them. They’re a bit time consuming and generate a fair bit of washing up. They don’t provide me with the creative license I like to use when I’m cooking (not until I get to making the fillings anyway) and there’s usually someone around who’ll eat them as they come out of the pan so that I, when I think I’m finally done, turn around to find an empty plate and a bunch of fat gits demanding more pancakes.

However, since it was Shrove Tueday this week, I thought I’d use the pancake tradition to give myself an excuse to try something I’d wanted to have for a while. I first encountered this dish in Renezio, a very nice little Italian eaterie in Shepherds Bush. I’ve since learned that it is an Italian classic.

The dish was a cannelloni filled with veal. The pasta was replaced by very thin, soft crépes. Apparently, back in the day, these crépes would be frequently be used to make a poor man’s version of cannelloni or lasagne. I thought the Renezio version was fantastic and I’d been dying to make some of my own. So, this Shrove Tuesday, I gave it a go. 

It seems that veal mince is rather hard to come by. I’m sure I’ve seen it at Borough, but I didn’t have the foresight to buy any last time I went and I quickly found that no supermarket would stock any kind of veal cut suitable for mincing. Since there also was no poultry mince anywhere, and I REALLY couldn’t be bothered to mince up some myself, I went with the next best thing: pork mince.

The rest of the recipe was close to the traditional version. The filling was essentially a marinara sauce with added pork mince, chopped spinach and ricotta. Once it had been rolled in the crépes, I topped the canneloni with bechamel sauce and mozzarella and baked it for about 15 minutes.

It looks like this electric oven is still producing the interesting spotting effect on cheese topped food.

And typically there was one roll that wouldn’t fit in the dish. Actually, it wouldn’t fit in our stomachs either, so I had it for breakfast this morning.

I suppose veal mince would have perfected this, but the pork substitution worked suprisingly well. I served my crespelle with a simple green leaf salad tossed in a dressing of lemon infused oil and balsamic vinegar.

In theory, I’m not supposed to be writing up any more recipes until that damned thesis of mine is finished but, I noticed that there are very few decent recipes for this dish on the internet so it seems silly to not record what I did. So here is the not veal crespelle recipe.

Have you ever been in the position where you’re so, so hungry that you can’t concentrate on anything? You know? The times when, whatever you try to do, all you can think about is food?  This was the position I found myself on Thursday evening, after eating nothing for the entire day and having the hangover from hell.

Wednesday night had been an interesting experience. Who’d have thought a group of PhD mathematicians could be quite such hardcore drinkers! I mean it isn’t exactly the occupation which makes you think ‘party animal’, is it?

I hadn’t been out drinking in about three months, after deciding that morning tutorials were less painful when I only had my compulsory glass of wine with dinner (and possibly a G&T to aid my creative cooking). However, I was convinced to head of for just the one drink……..

A couple of glasses of dodgy college wine on an empty stomach, while not excessive in themselves, were enough to convince me I could possibly handle another two small glasses. My very persuasive office-mate somehow turned those two small glasses into three large.  After five hours in the pub, I just escaped being dragged off to a late-license bar, then managed a semi-conscious stagger home.  Six hours later, I awakened with little memory of the latter part of the night (especially the half-eaten packs of Chinese food on my floor - how the hell did those get there!?) and realised that I had to get up to teach. Oh. Dear. God.

So after a very, very painful morning tutorial and a day of sitting at my desk, doing no work, shaking a lot and not being able to eat anything, my hangover gently started to subside. However, it was replaced by something almost as bad.

HUNGER MEASURABLE ON THE RICHTER SCALE!

It was like I hadn’t eaten for three weeks! With this sitution of near-starvation, my mind started inventing dishes. Creamy, comforting, fat laden dishes, with lots of meat….. rare, juicy red meat …..(drool) . It didn’t take long before the rumblings in my stomach led me to invent this artery clogger.

This is (lots of) rare fillet steak with a creamy stilton and wild mushroom risotto, crushed walnuts and a port reduction.

The risotto was made as a normal mushroom risotto except I substituted  soaked wild mushrooms. I added the soaking liquid to the stock I used too. At the end, I stirred in a ludicrous amount of stilton (about 100g) and then gently crushed some walnuts in a pestle and mortar before sprinkling them over the top.

I had a little trouble with not gagging as the port reduced. Those damn alchohol fumes! But once all the ethanol had gone, I was happy.

I seared my steak for 1 min 15 per side and let it rest for 5 minutes whilst I served up my risotto, then sliced the meat and arranged that on my plate.

Yes, it IS a lot of steak. What? I told you I was hungry! 

This was exactly what I needed after the pain of Thursday. Risotto is comforting however it is done, but adding great chunks of stilton to it made it even more so.

After eating I curled up into a ball and slept, vowing never to get drunk again. Well, until my next birthday, obviously. Oh, wait. That’s only until Monday. Ah well! :/

So during the holiday season, when everyone is away and I’m on my own, what do I do? I find the most expensive treat food I can and cook it in very self indulgent ways! Then I post about it to make everyone feel jealous.

That was the plan anyway. I was hoping that while everyone was away for Christmas, I’d be able to trash the kitchen and make whatever I’d like to eat. Unfortunately the market forces at this time of year made that a bit tricky.

It seems that the only thing that the supermarkets DON’T run out of at Christmas is traditional Christmas food. On the night of the 22nd, there were hundreds of shelves full of turkeys whole salmon, brandy butter and Christmas pudding. The other shelves were empty. Shame. I had great plans for some calves liver.

The one thing I could find was a nice, but rather expensive chunk of fillet steak hidden behind another turkey on  the meat counter. At the very least that it meant one night’s dinner was sorted so I snagged it immediately, to the very vocal annoyance of the woman behind me, and then fought my way to the checkout.

As I waited in the queue I coulnd’t help wondering what is it about Christmas that makes small  children cry all the time. I thought the point of the whole holiday was to make things fun for them, but on the whole they seem way more miserable than usual. At least their wails were doing a good job of drowning out Bono and co. on the shop radio.

The fillet steak turned out to be an excellent treat for one. I made it into thai chilli beef with deep fried basil and served it with coconut-lime rice and stir fried pak-choi with mushrooms and garlic.

This was a nice simple dinner to make after the stress of trying to find the ingredients. I got a tablespoon of fish sauce, a tablespoon of water, one large crushed garlic clove, 1 cubic inch of crushed ginger and a level tablespoon of sugar and mixed the lot to form a marinade for my beef. I cut the beef into strips and tossed it in the marinade.

Just under an hour later, I  deep fried about 10 large basil leaves until crispy and left them to drain on some kitchen paper. In preparation for the rice, I set some lime leaves simmering in diluted coconut milk (half a can, or 200ml of milk, plus half as much water. Then I went to sort out the beef.

I fried half a chopped red bell pepper with half a finely diced onion, another crushed garlic clove, 1 cubic inch of crushed ginger, 1 red chopped chilli and a bruised lemon grass stalk. When these had softened, I added the beef and stir fried until it was cooked on the outside. Then I took it off the heat.

I added two handfuls of rice to the simmering coconut milk, and while it was cooking stir fried the vegetables with some sesame oil. At the end I just served the rice alongside the beef topped with the basil leaves and some chilli oil. I had the vegetable stir fry on the side.

Maybe it is something to do with the food I brought up on, but I find the combination of coconut milk and strong chilli incredibly soothing. Combine that with the meltingly tender fillet steak and the great flavour of the fried basil and it make for an almost perfect meal for a quiet night in. For me anyway.

There were supposed to be four posts on my treats but I was so hungry when I had the last one I forgot to photo it . More on the other two soon, plus, when Dad gives me the photos I can tell you about the meal I cooked for him and Mum.

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’m going to be rather poor in a few weeks time. The PhD funding’s run out and tutorial students seem thin on the ground at the moment.

To partially remedy this, I have decided that I will continue to do what I have been doing for the last few days. That is cooking for my friends and myself in return for them buying the ingredients and some wine.

I think it is a good idea. I get free food. They eat something that isn’t pot noodle. Bulk cooking makes things cheaper. It would make sense to try and convince them that is a great idea by cooking something they like that I know I can do well.

Unfortunately I don’t do things that make sense. Instead, on Tuesday, I decided I was going to make a dish that I hadn’t cooked before. Worse than that it was a dish I have never EATEN before, and neither had they. So there I was making swedish meatballs, a dish with an unknown flavour to us, in a return to 1960s culinary fashion to try and impress some people who were born in the late 80s. I must be an idiot. 

I had read several recipes for swedish meatballs and seen a lot of variation. Generally the meat is a mixture of pork and beef and has ‘warm’ spices for flavouring. Often breadcrumbs soaked in milk are mixed into the meat. They are either served with gravy or a cream sauce, boiled potatoes and lingonberry. For some reason this dish was super-popular in Britain and America in the 60s and 70s but is not so common now.

I decided I would opt for pure beef meatballs (beef mince was going cheap at Tesco) flavoured with allspice, cinnamon and mace and served with a sour cream and dill sauce on pasta. Potatoes didn’t appeal to me that day and I had no idea of how to get hold of lingonberry!

Luckily for me, the reaction to the meal was one of positive suprise. Goon said “these don’t taste like meatballs.” But he liked them anyway. MJ ate some even though she’d already had dinner so I think that must be an endorsement. Personally, I thought they were good but could have done with something… ……ginger maybe. Is that too strange? 

Anyway, we had the meatballs with a side salad. It appears that it is difficult to make goon eat salad so MJ had a go at the “here comes the aeroplane” trick that works on most three year olds.

Apparently goon bit her finger.

Here’s the swedish meatball recipe.

You might have noticed that recently I’ve been trying to increase the numbers of curries in my cooking repetoire.

I find Indian cuisine the hardest to experiment with. Maybe it’s because I don’t have an intuition for the spice flavours, but I find that I need the guidance of a cookbook. It’s a little bit frustrating because this cuisine is one of my favourites.

Hopefully, if I keep on trying, I’ll get better at this. I’ve already discovered that my book at home, ‘Indian Home Cookery,’ is a little bit lacking. You often need to treble, or in some cases, quadruple the spice quantities. Either that or I’m losing all my tastebuds.

For example, the vindaloo recipe in this book gave me a good idea of which spices to use but needed a lot of changes. For a start, it didn’t have any potatoes. Now, maybe someone will correct me, but I’m quite sure vindaloo means “with vinegar and potato”. Also the recipe needed  a minor adjustment for the fact that I didn’t want to cook my sirloin steak for an hour.  Then of course there was the obligatory quadrupling of the spices.

Honestly, the person with the blandest palate in the world would find the book’s curries underspiced! Fortunately I’ve learned how to scale up the quantities successfully!

I had my beef vindaloo with some garlic lentils and spinach. Don’t worry about the rice in the background. It was a bit of a presentation experiment gone wrong. All you need to know is that it was flavoured with caraway seed and turmeric. Here is the full beef vindaloo recipe

When I say cheap I mean really, really cheap. It cost me £3.80 and made enough for three hungry people with leftovers. In fact, it would easily feed four people with normal appetites.

Pastitsio is another thing I hadn't heard of until I read the book ‘Home Cooking'. The dish is made of a layer of macaroni, or other tubular pasta, a layer of moussaka style meat sauce and topped with béchamel . It looked something like this.

Every now and again, when work is slow, I'll read some of the web pages devoted to food photography to see what I can learn. I've been making some progress. Compare my first photos to the ones on this page and you'll see what I mean. Most of these sites talk about colour, lighting, beackground, depth of focus and so on. What most of them don't mention is that there are some foods that really are not photogenic. Nothing will make them look pretty.

The worst culprits for this are large pieces of stewed meat, like the oxtail I had for dinner last night. First I tried some close ups.

That didn't really help since oxtail isn't the prettiest meat to look at. Then I tried a some distance shots. This was the best one.

But no matter how many bits of greenery I threw at it, the oxtail just wouldn't look pretty. At least in this one you can see how rich and winey the sauce was.

Originally the oxtail was supposed to be served with a pearl barley “risotto” with just carrots and leeks. But after inspecting the 300g of tail, I noticed there wasn't very much meat  so I decided to add some red lentils and bacon to the barley mixture.

I stewed the oxtail in some red wine (Hardy's cab-shiraz which is on a half price offer at Tesco at the time of writing) along with carrot, celeriac, mushrooms onion and parsnip. I added a fair bit of rosemary too. The sauce was really rich and tasty and all the vegetables had taken on the flavours of the wine. The meat needed long slow cooking so I left the hob on its minimum setting and just had the stew steaming ( but not simmering) for a little over 3 hours.  

It was an interesting meal to eat. Oxtail is very fatty, which is probably why it is so nice. I could feel my arteries clogging up with every mouthful. At the same time, the pearl barley and lentil combination was loaded with protein and fibre. It actually tasted like it was really good for you but, unlike bran based food, it tasted good too!

I'm not sure if I'll get oxtail again soon. It was very nice, but you pay a lot for a small amount of meat, even if it is on special offer. I really loved the barley and lentils. I think it would make a fantastic vegetarian meal if the bacon was left out. I'll definitely be using it to accompany other stews.