after several months of not being able to properly access your blog. When I finally opened up my admin page after goodness knows how long, I was pleased and slightly suprised to find some people had linked to me. Of course I was less pleased when I found they’d just been hotlinking my photos. Chuh!  

Then there were the forty or fifty comments largly made up by spam. Having been there when my spam filter was designed, I know that this spam isn’t made by spam robots as it used to be. There are apparently now many hundreds of trained spam monkeys trawling the internet and leaving badly disguised links to their websites, masqueraduing as gushingly complementary comments.  

Anyay, yes, hello, I’m back, at least temporarily. I still don’t have a real computer. Just a laptop with a screen I can barely read and no keyboard. Thank God the boredom of the Christmas holidays has finally forced me into typing on a barely functioning USB device to update this poor, neglected website. So now I can tell you about my recipe for sheep.

No, of course I couldn’t eat a whole one. Not in one go anyway. But this dish includes a fair number of sheep consituents.

Towards the end of August, I went to the Covent Garden Night Market specifically to see Fergus Hendrson perform on their stage kitchen. Softly spoken and slightly awkward in front of the large audience, he was a far cry from what you’d expect from a ‘celebrity chef’, yet he conveyed his passion for good cooking and ingredients better than any popular household name. Two things in particular stick in my mind. The first is his assertion that recipes are merely guides, not rules, for a genuinely good cook. The second is what I have come to hold high in my list of cooking commandments:

Love Thy Butcher

According to Henderson, if you find a butcher worthy of your custom and let them know how much you love them, you can expect great things. In his case, he got pig trotters. I was after sonething slightly different.

I was expecting a negative reaction clutching my short but unusual shopping list but the gentlemen at H G Walters barely batted an eyelid when I handed them the piece of paper. One veal kidney, some lamb sweetbreads and two lamb tongues would apparently be no problem.The two latter ingredients were destined for a recipe that held my fascination for some time: lamb rack with sauteed tongue and sweetbreads.

The original recipe, from the first series of ‘The Great British Menu,’ had obviously been created in the summer and required fresh broadbeans and samphire. I made do with defrosted peas but otherwise the ideas are largely unchanged. 

Sheep Feast (Rack of Lamb with sauteed tongue, sweetbreads and peas)

For Two People

• 1 large rack of lamb (wih about 6 rib bones in)
• 2 lamb tongues
• 350g lamb sweetbreads
• 2 handfuls of peas, fresh or defrosted
• 200ml fresh lamb stock
• unsalted butter- around 30g
• salt and pepper
• parsley to garnish

1. Prepare the sweetbreads: If they’re frozen, allow them to defrost. My butchers say that if you’re short on time, let them sit it some warm water to speed this up. Then soak them in cold water in the fridge for two hours.
2. Drain the sweetbreads. Bring a pa of water to the boil. Drop in the sweetbreads, bring back to the boil. Drain immediately and refresh in cold water. When they’re cool, peel off the tough outer membrane, then pop them in the fridge until ready to cook.
3. Prepare the tongues: Place in cold water and brinng to the boil. Simmer until tender (around 1 hour 15 minutes). Remove from the heat and allow to cool in the cooking liquid.
4. Roast the rack of lamb as you norally would. I brushed mine with olive oil, seasoned and roasted it in a preheated oven at gas mark 6 for15 minutes This gave me pleasantly rare meat. Wrap in foil and leave to rest.
5. While the lamb is roasting/resting, cook the peas in boiling water then drain.
6. Pat the sweetbreads dry and dust them with the seasoned flour. Heat half the butter in a frying pan and when it is foaming add the swweetbreads and fry until golden brown on all sides. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
7. Drain the tongues and cut in half. Sautee on both sides auntil golden brown.
8. Add the sweetbreads, stock and peas to the pan Simmer together for a few minutes.
9. Cut the lamb rack into cutlets and serve with the peas and sweetbread mixture. Garnish with parsely. Minted new potatoes made a good accompaniment to this.

All in all a good recipe. The slighly diappointing thing for me is that the sweetbreads weret te crispy type I’ve had before. Perhaps that is easier to achieve with calf sweetbrads. Still, the flavour was good and I imagine that if I’d had a chance to get my hands on some samphire, it would have been even better. Incidentally, lamb sweetbreads are CHEAP. Excellent value for money if you have a good butcher that can order them for you. The most expensive part of this meal was the lamb rack but, given the quality it was well worth it. 

Happy New Year, everyone!

We’ve all been complaining a lot about the weather this summer. It has truly been a mixed bag, almost like Britain has developed a monsoon season.  To make it worse, the rain likes to make itself manifest at weekends or at around 6pm.

The weather is trying to spite office workers! How rude!

During the day, it has certainly been hot enough to go out with just a t shirt on, but my leather coat remains in my bag in case the heavens decide to open a little bit earlier than expected.

The rapidly changing temperatures really confuse my appetite. As I went food shopping last Tuesday, it was a very warm and humid 22 degrees. I had a bit of a bargain binge, picking up half price duck breasts, and some lamb neck fillet reduced from £5 to £2.05 and half price broad beans. I was thinking lamb kebabs using some super cheap veg from the Turkish grocers and a broad bean and feta salad (feta also seems to be one of the grocers’ cheap items).  Sadly, as I went to leave Sainsbury’s I saw that it had decided to storm properly, complete with a bit of thunder and lightning.

Half an hour later, when I got home, the rain had just stopped. I was soaking from the waist down and my hands were numb. I NEED to buy a bigger umbrella. I certainly wasn’t up for summery lamb kebabs with a light salad any more. I was more in the mood for a casserole. Time for another score cupboard raid, I thought, and so this came into being…

It’s essentially a twist on a lamb blanquette, kind of inspired by lamb avgolemono (which I’ve only read about but never actually had). It was cheap, which is the important thing right now, and it still tasted very good: good enough for Goon to ask for it again. The ingredients were
From the bargain bin: approximately 500g of lamb neck fillet and 400g unpodded broad beans.
From the storecupboard/fridge/freezer: a lemon, some garlic, frozen peas, fresh tagliatelle, a splash of cream and an egg
From the Turkish grocers: parsley
From the windowsill: the remains of the poor mint plant, which is now properly dead.
Total spent on the meal: £2.02 for the lamb. 40p for the parsley and £1.37 on the broad beans, so under £4 for two generous servings.

Summer Lamb ‘Blanquette’

• Lamb neck fillet, around 450g, cut into bite sized pieces
• around 500ml vegetable stock
• 1 lemon, zested and cut into quarters
• about 10 mint leaves, finely chopped, plus a sprig or two to to garnish
• 2 handfuls of frozen peas, cooked.
• 400g of broad beans, shelled, podded and cooked (I’ve put a note on how to prepare broad beans at the end)
• 1 large egg
• around 20ml of single cream
• two servings of fresh tagliatelle, cooked (around 200g) tossed in parsley and olive oil if you like 

1. Brown the lamb in batches over a high heat.
2. Place in a saucepan of cold water, bring to the boil, then immediately turn down to a simmer.
3. Over the next five minutes or so, skim the scum that rises to the top of the water off with a wooden spoon.
4. Once no scum is left, drain the lamb and place in a pan with the vegetable stock. Bring back to a simmer.
5. Add the lemon zest and the chopped mint
6. After 30 minutes, the lamb should be tender. Strain off the liquid into a seperate saucepan, reserving all the solids and boil until reduced by half. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for 2 or 3 minutes. This is to stop the egg mixture from curdling when it is added.
7. Beat the egg and cream in a bowl. Add to the reduced stock, stirring constantly. This should thicken the sauce although you may need to return the pan to a low heat for this to happen.
8. Stir the lamb and other strained solids back in. Add the peas and broad beans. Warm through, taste, adjust seasoning.
9. Serve with the tagliatelle, squeeze over  some lemon juice, garnish with mint leaves and wedges of lemon.

Note: to prepare the broad beans: remove the outer pods and discard. Put the beans in their white casing into some cold water. Bring to the boil. After 3 minutes, drain and pour over cold water to cool them. When cool enough to handle, squeeze the beans. They’ll pop out of their casing and should be almost cooked.

 *************

If you’ve never tried lamb with lemon in a dish, you should try it. They pair up remarkably well. Sharp flavours cut through the natural fattiness of the meat. I noticed that the supermarket packaging suggested that lamb neck is grilled or fried. I suppose this works too, but it is amazingly tender when braised slowly like this.   Now, what to do with that duck….?

Almost five weeks later, I’ve decided to emerge again. This really is a strange job. In the week before the A-level and GCSE exams began we were running around like headless chickens, photocopying papers, running late evening revision sessions and marking like there was no tomorrow. Now the exam students have gone and I literally have nothing to do, hence I am writing a blog post during school hours.*

Oh, the joy of having three year 12 sets and a year 12 tutor group. They’re all really keen and really nice students and, in the middle of May, they all bugger off on exam study leave for the best part of a month, leaving me with a grand total of 4 lessons to teach this week. The down side of this is that the absence of 6th formers means teaching lessons is thoroughly exhausting. This is because three out of my four lessons  involve battling with a bunch of hyperactive fourteen year olds many of whom, since the warm weather began, seem incapable of staying quiet for five minutes, let alone revising through an entire 50 minute lesson. However, when your job only takes up 20% of your day, finding it tiresome isn’t too much of a problem.

The change in pace did leave me rather shellshocked last Friday when I arrived home to a flat which would be empty for the entire weekend with nothing to do. It had been weeks since I’d done anything but work, eat and sleep and I literally had no idea of how to occupy myself. Could it be that I’d forgotten how to have fun?

Well, yes, actually it did seem that way, especially since the vast majority of my friends live 15 miles away on the other side of London. It reminded me of the time when I was at school in Kingston Upon Thames and at the weekends my friends, who were considerably richer than me, would be going horse riding in Banstead, leaving me sitting in my room with my computer for company**. At that age, I entertained myself with computer games, mostly the now forgotten graphic adventure genre. These were games which I convinced myself were for those of a high intellectual calibre, i.e. they involved a lot of logic based puzzles and very little violence. This is almost certainly why they died out by 1999.

So, fortunately for the food blog, the lack of games to play, and hence potential for nostalgic time wasting, meant that I was forced to occupy myself by buying myself something fun and exciting to cook.

I admit I’m rubbish at keeping up with what is in season but, given all the major supermarkets have blueberries on special offer, I assumed it MUST be the right time of year for them. In any case, it turnes out they work rather well as an accompaniment to a delicious, tender lamb rack.

Lavender and Rosemary Crusted Lamb Rack with Blueberry Sauce (serves 1)

• 1 small lamb rack (about 350g-400g)
• 1 level tablespoon ground lavender
• crumbs from 1-2 slices of bread- enough to coat the rack
• leaves from 1 sprig of rosemary, very finely chopped
• some more rosemary- perhaps another large sprig torn into little bits
• 50g blueberries
• 50ml ruby port
• sugar to sweeten the sauce- around half a tablespoon but best done to taste.
• roasted new potatoes and a green vegetable or salad to serve

1. Preheat your oven to gas mark 7. 
2. Mix the breadcrumbs with the lavender and chopped rosemary.
3. Make deep slits between each rib bone in the rack. Push a piece of torn rosemary into each slit.
4. Coat the meat in the breadcrumb mixture.
5. Roast the meat to required doneness, then cover with foil and leave to rest for 15 minutes. As a rough guide, my 500g rack took 18 minutes to be roasted rare.
6. Place the berries in a blender. Add the port and blitz until smooth.
7. Strain the blueberry/port mixture into a small saucepan.
8. Bring the blueberry sauce to a gentle bubble. Allow to reduce until thick and syrupy.
9. Add sugar to taste. The sauce should have a slight tang to it but shouldn’t be very acidic. Adding extra port may help if your blueberries were very tangy.
10. Cut the rack into cutlets and serve with the sauce on roasted baby new potatoes and steamed asparagus.

*** 

Lavender and blueberries…. now why didn’t I think of that before! It seems a natural pairing in hindsight. I liked this idea a lot, so much so that I made Goon try it after he returned from his sojourn in Newcastle. Blueberries give a slight tang to the dish while the floral overtones of the lavender complement the unique fruity flavour of the berries. A fair bit of sugar is needed to mediate the acidity of the fruit. Too much acid just tastes odd with the slight bitterness of the rosemary and lavender. 

Now I should perhaps go and tidy up those posts i wrote during Easter with the intention of publishing one every few days this term. Then again, maybe it is too late to be posting about winter food, although looking at the rain outside, maybe it is wotrth reserving judgement for a couple of days. 

* No, really, I WROTE the post in school hours, then had to wait four days to sort out the photos.

**I blame my excessively geeky interests on this time. Few of the friends I made after leaving school are aware of just how nerdy I can be. However, the year 9s now have a pretty good idea of how bad it gets since I spent most of an evening (post 6th form departure) writing them a very authentic Star Wars based exercise sheet on standard form. My boss and I thought it was really cool. Only one of the year 9s agreed.

Not long ago,  I suddenly realised that one part of my cooking that had disappeared completely during the first weeks of my job was the home made curry. It’s not because they take too long to cook. I can pull together a decent Goan fish curry in about half an hour. Instead it’s the attention to detail that is the problem.

When making a curry I find I need to be really on the ball. The spice quantities in recipe books or on the web aren’t ever quite right and I find I need to be there tasting and adjusting constantly if I want it to be good. However, it has now got to the stage where Goon seems to have given up cooking completely so, it’s in the door at 9pm for me and straight into the kitchen.  Even after just a week of that it got to the stage where I managed to cook, serve up and then fall asleep on the sofa before I managed to eat.

I was woken up half an hour later by Goon who had managed to scoff most of my portion as well as his and was trying to shoo me away so he could get to his favourite programming spot in front of the television. Let this be a warning to you:never share a flat with a geek,especially one who doesn’t like cooking.

There’s no way I could manage to make something that requires concentration whilst I am in that state of exhaustion so home made curries might have to become a holiday treat. This half term, I wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass me by so, during a Friday visit to Borough, I picked up my favourite currying meat, came home and made this.

Saag Gosht with Red Peppers  

Ingredients 

• 450g mutton, lamb neck or other red casseroling meat, cut into bite sized pieces
• vegetable oil or ghee for frying
• 1 medium/large onion, thickly sliced into rings
• 3 medium cloves garlic, minced,
• 2 teaspoons grated ginger
• 2 birds eye green chillis, chopped
• 300ml (or just enough to cover the meat in step 2 below) home made lamb or beef bone stock (nothing herby). Water will do as the mutton has a rich flavour of its own, but I much prefer using a simple bone stock. 
• 1 tsp ground fenugreek
• 3 teaspoons ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 1 red pepper, cored deseeded and cut into small pieces
• 200g fresh spinach, washed and thoroughly drained
• a handful of chopped coriander leaves plus extra to garnish

Method

1. Brown the mutton pieces on all sides over a high heat in the oil/ghee. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
2. Turn the heat down and add the onions to the saucepan. Fry gently until they start to soften.
3. Add the spices, garlic and ginger.
4. Once the onion is cooked, return the mutton to the pan, barely cover with the stock, place the lid on the saucepan and simmer for around 2 hours. Keep an eye on the curry and, if it starts to become too dry, add a little more stock.
5. In a seperate pan, fry the pepper until soft, then add this to the curry with the chillies. Stir the curry well and continue to let it simmer for another five minutes so it takes on the flavour of the peppers.
6. Taste and adjust spice balance if necessary.
7. Wilt in the spinach. Taste, adjust seasoning and serve over pilau rice, perhaps with a lentil side dish.

***

As far as curries go, this one has a relatively short ingredients list. it includes the staples of coriander and cumin, but contains few other spices. The distinctive flavour of this curry comes instead from the red peppers.  An excellent accompanient to this dish would have been a naan bread flavoured with garlic and cumin, but my baking skills still aren’t up to much, so I went with spiced pilau rice and some garlic dahl instead.

After a long seven weeks of no home made curries, this was a breath of fresh air. A take-away hasn’t got the freshness and vibrancy of  home made Indian food so I’d urge anyone to try making their own at least once, even if time constraints mean it can’t be a regular occurence. Start with a decent recipe, but always be prepared to adjust the spice levels to suit your own taste.

It looks like it will be another five weeks at least until I get another chance to do curry, but, given its game season that is probably for the best. It is now the season for rabbit pie and roasted pheasant, so I’d better get myself to Borough soon. 

Our new flat has some good points and some bad points.

There are a few teething problems. We still need to have our washing machine repaired and the central heating is broken, but the only real annoyance is the journey to work. When I decided to take the flat, I looked at a map and thought the walk to school looked  reasonable. It was only a touch longer than my previous walk into college. However, nobody told me about The Hill.

Most people may call it Highgate Hill, but i think of it as Highgate Mountain. It makes up little more than ten percent of my journey but takes about a quarter of the time. On my first morning I stopped, astounded just after Archway station as I faced the 35 degree incline in front of me. The first thing our Head Master said to me after I staggered into the common room that morning was “Are you alright? You look like someone who’s just come up The Hill!” 

I’m seriously considering getting a skateboard to speed up the journey home. 

On the plus side, the flat is conveniently placed so I can walk to Borough Market within 40 minutes (or bus it there in fifteen). In the case of that journey, there’s no crazy hill to slow me down. So, while i miss Kensington Whole Foods, my foodie cravings are satisfied by the Borough stalls, which is where I got myself some of Farmer Sharpe’s mutton neck.

It might seem  a bit silly to be buying slow-cook meats when I’ve got so little time in the evenings, but the advantage of this cut is that you can leave it in the oven for a few hours while you get other things done. In fact, to make good use of some mutton neck, all you need is a root vegetable or two, some herbs and some pearl barley.

Mutton Neck and Pearl Barley Stew

Serves 2 generously

• 400g mutton neck, cut into bite sized cubes
• 1 carrot, sliced
• 1 medium parsnip, sliced into rounds
• 1 small leek, thinly sliced
• 2 large cloves garlic, minced
• 2 handfuls pearl barley
• 2 sprigs of rosemary
• leaves from 2 sprigs thyme
• 150ml lamb or vegetable stock
• 100ml dry white wine
• mashed potato to serve

1. Preheat your oven to gas mark 3.  
2. Get a frying pan really hot and brown the cubes of meat. Transfer to a casserole dish.
3. Turn the heat down and gently fry the leeks and garlic until they are soft. Add these to the casserole.
4. Soften the parsnips and carrot in the pan for a couple of minutes and add these to the casserole with the herbs and barley. Cover everything in the casserole dish with the stock and wine, stir the mixture to evenly distribute the ingredients, cover the casserole dish and place it in the oven for two and a half  to three hours, stirring the mixture occasionally. 
5. Serve with mashed potato and cabbage.

 ***

Can you believe it? I wrote a recipe which only involved five steps!

This was my first attempt at what I’d call ‘proper cooking’ since I started at Highgate. Everything else in that first week had been rushed pasta jobs and take-aways. It was really good to finally have some decent food inside me again.

This was proper comfort food. After three hours, the meat will literally melt in your mouth.  The pearl barley absorbs  the juices of the casserole so you end up with a very thick gravy, which has taken on the wonderfully rich flavour of the mutton.  Mashed potato is the perfect accopaniment to this, mixed up with the barley and delicious gravy from the casserole.

Some people find mutton a little fatty, but this can be partially overcome by cooking this as a stew on the stovetop and skimming off the fat as it rises to the surface. Although this dish takes a long time to cook, it requires no attention so you can get on with other things as it sits in the oven. Lucky for me, as I had a fair bit of marking to do that day!

This will probably become a regular appearance on our dinner table this winter. if you can get your hands on some mutton or lamb neck, it is well worth a try. 

Remember the large lamb leg that Goon had fun butchering? Goon had to move out of his flat this weekend and the remaining four portions of lamb leg, which had been sitting in the freezer, had to be used up.

I decided to act on Schmoof’s recommendation and turn two portions of the meat into some harissa marinated lamb kebabs. That left the final batch of lamb to be used on the night before we left. The weather recently has been more reminiscent of late autumn than midsummer and, as always, my appetite was determined by this. I wanted a stew, but something a little more exciting than a straightforward red wine, carrot and celery combination.

Flicking through random internet pages, I came across one idea which looked particularly interesting: a lamb stew with lemon and dill. I have to admit, this is not a combination I would have thought of myself but I was intrigued and, since there was just enough time to enter this month’s ‘In the Bag’ event, I thought I could somehow incorporate the other ingredients for the event into the meal. Broad beans would work well with the lemon and dill in the stew and some Jersey Royal potatoes crushed with olive oil and herbs would be lovely mixed up with the juices.

The stew would have been easy to make too, had it not been for the intervention of Goon’s wonderful flatmates. This time they had managed to cause trouble without even being there. As I started to prepare my ingredients I noticed there was something different about the kitchen. 

ME: Goon! Where has all the kitchen equipment gone?
GOON: Uh?
ME: We used to have two cheese graters. Where are they?
GOON: (Thoughtful Silence)
ME: And the chopping boards… and the garlic crusher….and half the pans… 
GOON: Uh-oh. 
ME: (suspiciously) What?
GOON: The girlies moved out today.
ME: What? They took all the useful kitchen equipment with them?
GOON: Must have done.
ME: BUT WE BOUGHT HALF THAT STUFF!
Goon: Yes, and most of the rest of it came with the flat.

I can’t repeat what I said next as I’d like to keep this site family friendly. I’ll let you use your imagination. 

So it seems that one or both of the girlies have taken their money saving endevours further than I expected and claimed half the kitchen equipment as their own leaving us and the other boy in the flat without half the stuff we needed. I have to say, I’m rather glad I’ll never have to deal with either of them again, although I will miss torturing the blonde one with my offal based dinners.

Fortunately, Goon’s ability to perform mindless boring tasks for long periods of time meant that we could produce finely chopped lemon zest, which could almost pass for the grated zest I wanted for this meal. Chopping vegetables on a dinner plate was a real nuisance though. Despite the setbacks, we eventually produced a decent stew.

To start with I finely diced an onion and minced two cloves of garlic. I then let them soften on a low heat in a little olive oil with half a bunch of finely chopped dill. When the onion had softened, I  browned my chunks of lamb leg steak, added them to the pan covered them with lamb stock and a glug of white wine. I brought the mixture to a gentle simmer, threw in half a tablespoon of the finely chopped lemon zest and let it stew gently for two hours. After this time the lamb was tender, so I added two handfuls of young broad beans and turned the heat up to a steady simmer. After about 10 minutes, the beans were cooked and the stew was a good consistency so I tasted, added more chopped dill, lemon zest and black pepper and, just before serving, squeezed in the juice of half a lemon.

Although it isn’t the most photogenic thing, this meal was very good. I wish I had come across the idea before. The light fresh  flavours of the lemon and dill were a good balance for the richness of the lamb. The crushed jersey royals were a great accompaniment. I loved mixing the gravy in with the potatoes, they were delicious together. However, I think the stew would be even better with some more mature meat. Not mutton necessarily, but autumn lamb or perhaps hogget. The stew was good, but a little extra richness in the meat would make it perfect.

So here is my slightly late entry to ‘In the Bag,’ a fairly new event run by Scott at Real Epicurean, Julia at A Slice of Cherry Pie and Cherry at Cherry’s English Kitchen. This time Cherry is hosting - I hope she doesn’t mind that this is a day late!  The idea is that the host gives you three seasonal items that you need to incorporate in the meal. The items for June were lamb, broad beans and new season potatoes. Take a look at Cherry’s blog in a few days when the round up is posted and you’ll no doubt find lots of great recipes using these three ingredients.

As I mentioned in my last post, Goon had a couple of friends staying last weekend. I was supposed to be cooking for them, so we’d bought a huge leg of lamb to roast. After all, everyone loves a roast, right?

Wrong. It seems that someone didn’t like potatoes and someone else didn’t like peas, or vegetables in general. Anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time will know about my tolerance of fussy eaters. I really can’t be bothered trying, especially if potatoes and green veg are off the list. So I gave up trying completely  and that’s how we all got stuck with take-away.

That left me and Goon with the problem of what to do with the huge leg after his friends had left. It would feed six at the very least, probably more, so there was no point in us roasting it whole. Goon suggested chopping it into lamb leg steaks, which I thought would have been a great idea if we had a meat cleaver. As it is, we have nothing that could handle the large bone in a lamb leg, but Goon thought he’d improvise anyway.

Goon cut some meat away from the bone He then just hacked chunks off until we had two decent sized steaks, which I marinated in a home made olive, garlic and basil pesto.

The problem was that Goon didn’t know what to do with the rest of the meat, so he just, sort of, hacked at it.

Hmm… well, I have to say it’s actually better than the butchery at a certain place we buy from in Shepherds Bush. At least Goon had managed to keep the bone intact rather than getting shards of it in the meat.

Goon got bored at theis point, wrapped up the meat in cling film (exactly as it is in the picture) and then bunged it in the fridge. It got an interesting (high pitched and whiny) reaction when the blonde flatmate came home and found it.

The pesto for the lamb steaks was a very simple one. I just used olive oil, chopped black olives, chopped garlic and a big bunch of torn basil and popped them in a blender, then tasted and adjusted the ingredient balance until I was happy, This got smeared all over the scored lamb leg steaks.

The next day we hunted around for things to serve with our pesto crusted steaks. We found Jersey Royal potatoes on special offer, and since everyone raves about how fantastic they are, we snatched them up just to see what all the fuss was about. I also spotted some broad beans, which have apparently just come into season, and picked up some feta so I could make a salad with them.

I was pleased with the lamb. The meat took up the marinade flavour very well. I just wish I had some fresh oregano to add to it! The salad worked particularly well. It so happened that I had some peas in the freeezer and half a courgette in the fridge that I could throw into the mix. I also had some rather tired looking mint but just enough was still usable for me to make an mint-infused olive oil dressing.

I see what people mean about the Jersey Royal potatoes. They have a really good texture and a slightly more earthy flavour than other new potatoes.  I still think I prefer Anya potatoes though.

This meal was the first time I’d had broad-beans since I was a kid. It reminded me of going strawberry and broad-bean picking in the school summer holidays. It seems that broad-beans are one of those things I like much more as an adult. Especially with some mint and crumbled feta.

The rest of our lamb has now been cut into bite sized pieces and is sitting in the freezer. I need to think up ways to use it fast since Goon is moving in a week!

Last Sunday, over lunch, I was telling Goon about how I wanted to enter WTSIM no 5 (which Cooksister Jeanne is hosting) but was totally stuck on ideas. The theme this time was stuffed vegetables and fruits.  Goon had a suggestion.

GOON: I know what you can stuff. I’ve seen green wrinkly things. The label said you can stuff them.
ME: Any idea what they are?
GOON: Green wrinkly things.
ME: But what are they called?
GOON: I don’t know. But they’re green and wrinkly.

I was clearly going to get no more information about the mystery vegetable from him and I mentally dismissed the green wrinkly things as some figment of Goon’s imagination. But, that evening, six of them appeared in the kitchen.

I recognised them immediately, although I think I’d describe them as more knobbly than wrinkly. Goon had picked up kerala, which had appeared in my mother’s kitchen from time to time when I was little. It’s a vegetable which, like courgettes and sprouts, drives fear into the hearts of small children.

Here the vegetable is known as bitter gourd. It’s called that for a good reason. In order to remind myself what the kerala tasted like, I cut a tiny sliver from the middle of the largest one and tasted.

For a second I thought it wasn’t so bad but, literally a few seconds later, there seemed to be a small chemical war going on in my mouth.  My face contorted and I made a noise that was something like “GAAAAAAAH!” The next ten minutes were spent trying desperately to drown out the flavour with cherry brandy. It didn’t go easily. *

I was seriously dubious about trying anything with the green knobbly gourd but, since Goon had gone to all the effort of getting it, I thought I’d better make an attempt at cooking it. Some people actively like it, so there must be something I could do to de-bitter my kerala.

I called up my parents to see if they could help me make this strange vegetable edible. Apparently they’d only ever used them in salads and curries, which didn’t really help me with my plans for stuffing, but cooking with sugar and tamarind seemed to be a common theme. The internet also provided me with some help. The bitterness of the kerala could be reduced by scraping off some skin, deseeding it, rubbing it with salt and soaking in cold water. I decided to try and balance the bitter flavour with a very strong sweet and sour stuffing made from tomato, onion,  and lots of sugar and tamarind. After all, it works for chicory. The dish would be an accompaniment to  a Sri-Lankan style goat curry.

I didn’t really know what to expect from my kerala as I began to prepare them, but scraping off the skin was easy enough. It did however leave a big green mess in the kitchen.

Once the skin was off, I cut the kerala in half and looked inside. Like many gourds, it had  a clear divide between the flesh and seed area.

A small knife was ideal to scrape out the seeds. Now there was a cylindrical hole in the gourd which was a perfect shape and size for stuffing. 

So the gourds were salted and soaked for an hour whilst I finished preparing the rest of our dinner: the slow cooked goat curry and spiced rice. I also made a lot of dahl, just in case the gourd was inedible.

The tomato chutney stuffing for the gourd was simple to make. I sweated some onion, added a couple of fresh chopped tomatoes, tomato puree and coriander, then added lots of sugar, tamarind and just a drop or two of vinegar to make it really sweet and tangy. Once the gourds were stuffed I cooked them in the excess tomato concoction.

Now, maybe Goon accidentally found the bitterest bitter gourds in the shop, but even after lots of soaking, these things were still not very nice. Goon ate one piece and said “Why the heck would anyone voluntarily eat these things?” I have to admit, I was thinking the same thing. The sweet and sour flavour certainly helped but, after a few bites, the bitterness was overwhelming. I can’t believe that some people actually eat it without salting it first!

So, if you happen to be a bitter gourd fan, good for you. I don’t get it but I think the sweet-sour thing turned it from totally inedible to the point where I could manage a piece or two. Fortunately there was plenty of curry so we didn’t go hungry.

This is my entry to this month’s Waiter, Waiter event. The roundup will be on Jeanne’s blog very soon, so go and check out the other entries. I’m sure that, unlike me, most people even made something they could eat!

* Which meant I had to drink a lot of cherry brandy. Shame.

Thesis draft 2 is finally in! \o/. Now I can finally emerge from my relative silence. To those of you that I’ve been ignoring over e-mail etc, my sincere apologies. It really has been THAT hectic over the last two weeks.

Tuition sessions have also settled down a little (she says returning from teaching until 9pm :s) so I have time to blog again . Of course, whilst sleeping and generally living became low of my priority list, cooking certainly didn’t (except on the one day that Goon demanded Chinese take away) so here a few of the things I really wanted to blog about but couldn’t.

My favourite of the week was this.

Between teaching sessions on Saturday morning, I managed a quick detour through Shepherds Bush market, picked up some goat, which went into a Jamaican goat curry and the lovely red sea bream you can see in the picture above. The fish only cost £4, which is a lot cheaper than the supermarket bream I’ve seen. That evening the fish was marinated in orange and ginger,  grilled until the skin was cripy and served on egg fried rice with a sweet and sour sauce and some prawn crackers.

Of course, with Easter weekend came a host of supermarket special offers, including half price duck. This, in imitation of a very good pub lunch I had, was rubbed with star anise and then roasted with cloves and cinnamon under its skin. I served it with a pear chutney and attempted to make ginger flavoured roast potatoes, although the ginger turned out much more subtle than I’d hoped. I always have trouble making things taste of ginger. Any tips on that front would be much appreciated.

Also, I took advantage of a half price lamb leg which was the principal ingredient in this rather colourful dish.

The whole leg was crusted in a mixture of coriander seed, cumin, fennel, and turmeric, roasted to rare (for a change) and served with vegetable couscous, a sweet red pepper sauce (recipe adapted from Sher’s at ‘What Did you Eat?’) and minted courgettes.

Finally there was the super-lemony guinea fowl. Super lemony because, before I roasted it, I slipped very thin lemon slices (and herbs, garlic and butter) under its skin. For some reason lemon seems to keep poultry really moist if you squeeze it on before cooking. In the case of my guinea fowl, the juice of the lemon trickled out over the flesh during t cooking and kept it really succulent as well as giving it a great flavour. As usual, giving the skin a stuffing make it go very crisp.

I also shamelessly stole this fab idea for mussels with leeks and blue cheese from Anna at Morsel’s and Musings. I omitted the spinach and served my version over some linguine. My picture didn’t come out well at all. My mussels glowed so much they looked radioactive.  I don’t mind too much though, as Anna’s green lipped mussels look way better than  the ones I had to buy from Tesco.

So there we go, a selection of the things that kept me sane during the nightmare that was the last ten days. Since things are much calmer now, I’ll hopefully be able to tell you abou my visit to Market Kitchen soon and the exciting time I’ve been having with my new favourite food book.

However inclusive you try to make a blogging event, there’s always one moron that’s going to be totally confused by it. In the case of this month’s  ‘Waiter, Waiter’ event, that was me.

The theme for this round of the event is ‘’Waiter, Waiter, there’s Something in My Easter Basket.” I am good at ignoring public holidays. I managed an excellent job with Christmas this year and my efforts were only thwarted by my parents who found it totally unacceptable that I would be spending the with only the internet for company. I find Easter much easier to ignore. Apart from the shutting of shops (and College) on Easter Sunday, I go about my life as usual. I’m even tutoring on Easter Monday. Unfortunately, that meant that when Johanna, the Passionate Cook, announced the theme for the March edition of ‘Waiter, Waiter’ I was totally stuck.

For a moment I thought I could do something on Sri Lankan New Year, which often happens a week after Easter, but this year due to the quirks of the lunar calendar, it isn’t happening until early May. Bah! That was no help.

It wasn’t until Johanna came by my site and commented on my rosey lamb dish that I had any source of inspiration. So, you earthlings eat new season lamb at Easter, do you? Fair enough. I eat lamb whenever Goon decides he wants it. But this was as good a time as any to do some herb and spice crusting.

Just a couple of days later, Goon decided he had a craving for lamb. I had a lavender and herb crusted canon type thing in mind for the event, so I sent Goon out to find a butcher with some good quality lamb in stock.

When Goon arrived home he was not carrying a boned loin of lamb as I’d expected, but two whole rib racks. I’d never cooked these before but I knew Goon had a thing about them. He’d seen them in the shops and thought they looked cool.There had been many shopping trips where I had to stop him picking them up ad hiding them amongst the other items in our trolley. Of course, the moment he started craving lamb and went shopping unsupervised, they were the first things he thought to pick up.

The only thing that bothered me about these was the price tag on them. £7 per rack. Well… at least it looked like a lot of meat. I was anticipating a fair bit would be left for lunch tomorrow.

Typically, after spending all that time feeling smug and thinking that I was being clever making my roast lavender lamb, it turns out that the French have been doing it for years, particularly around Provence. The recipe I used was fairly similar to the traditional one. I’m sure this will work with any roasting joint of lamb so long as the roasting times have been altered accordingly.

First of all, coat your lamb joints in a bit of dijon mustard.

Then take abouit two tablespoons of fresh thyme leaves and about 15 rosemary leaves and chop them finely. Then get a level tablespoon each of coriander seed  and dried lavender and grind these. Mix the herbs and spices and pat the mixture all over the meat.

Oh, and if you’re going to take a photo, it’s best to do it BEFORE the meat goes in the oven. Otherwise it looks a bit strange like this

Completely ignoring the rubbish Tesco cooking instructions, I cooked my lamb for 25 minutes at 200C and then rested it for 15. It turned out quite a nice medium rare. Goon’s was properly rare. I tried to convince him to swap but he growled at me and kept a tight grip on his plate.

We had our lamb racks with a side of butterbeans crushed with garlic, cream and thyme and steamed purple sprouting broccoli. I didn’t think this dish needed a sauce but I suppose that if I was going to make anything, it would have been a light red wine reduction. I was impressed by the flavour of the herb crust. The lavender was very prominent and was complemented nicely by the herbs.

I couldn’t believe how quick this was to make! The whole thing was done in 40 minutes and probably eaten in ten. Given the amount of meat we had, there was suprisingly little leftovers. It seems that when Goon said he was craving meat he REALLY meant it.

So there is my fairly late entry to this month’s ‘Waiter, Waiter,’ hosted  by Johanna. Thank goodness she came by the site or I’d never have thought of anything to enter!