I need to do more storecupbioard based cooking. The results never fail to please and it’s always a good feeling to know you’re saving money. I guess I do it less than I used to because I’m spoiled by the area in which I live. Everything’s available within a five minute walk unless, of course, it’s Sunday. 

Last Sunday I wandered into Waitrose on my way home and found a pack of duck liver in the bargain bin. At £1.30, I couldn’t say no. Although I’d never cooked duck liver before, I thought it fair to assume it tasted similar to chicken liver and that’s the basis I worked on when I made this.

 Lurking in my fridge was a bunch of parsley and a bag of rocket which, combined with some walnuts from the storecupboard and a chopped granny smith apple made a nice tart accompanimnet to the livers. I dressed this salad with extra virgin olive oil mixed with a little apple juice and brown sugar and then served it on a bed of black pudding. The potatoes were just thickly sliced and roasted until golden brown in duck fat (from the last time I had duck). The livers were simply seared until just browned on the outside.

And that was it really. No need for a recipe with something so simple, and I doubt I could remember quantities anyway. The duck livers were, as I thought, similar to chicken livers but more rich with a great texture. At that price they’re a much better choice than calf liver.  

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!

The internet is a funny place isn’t it? For a start, it isn’t really a place at all, although it does feel like one: a seperate world where people can quietly have a look into other people’s lives (yes, serial lurkers, I still know you’re there ). It’s a place where one can anonymously irritate and insult perfect strangers all day without getting punched in the face and, on a chatroom somewhere, a lonely guy in his mid forties can start a loving relationship with a beautiful girl in New York without knowing that in reality she’s a fat hairy man from Newcastle.

I’ve heard some people say that one day the internet will be the world’s single source of information and will eliminate the need for books and television. Personally, I hope this doesn’t happen. I’m no stickler for tradition but I think there is one big problem with the net at the moment: search engines. Search engines were designed to be intelligent, but they are, for now, very, very stupid indeed. To demonstrate what I mean, let’s try a little experiment. Open a new tab on your browser (or a whole new browser window if you’re the type to have a messy desktop) and go to www.google.co.uk. Now, search for ‘how to cook couscous’.

Obviously Google, the biggest and most important search engine in the universe, is designed to bring you the best and most useful results for your query. Look down to the bottom of the page (possibly the top of the second page) and you should see a link starting ‘Andy Millar….’

That’s right, in Google’s opinion, one of the world experts on cooking couscous is Goon. The man who the other day served up crunchy pasta in a carbonara, the man who asked me if chocolate truffles were dug up by pigs in France, the man who I recently caught trying to drink sherry soaked raisins straight from a mug, is one of Google’s top choices for advice on cooking this particular carbohydrate.

Needless to say, Goon has never cooked couscous by himself. It is very, very dangerous to trust Google’s recipe choices.

Of course, in reality, I love the internet. Over the last week when my access was limited, I felt like I was going slightly mad. Google is the one of the things I use the most, both for searching and for advertising on my site. However, on occasions it does frustrate me. There are days, when I have a bit of comment abuse from the internuts and I wonder why they have decided to attack me so suddenly. Generally it turns out that Google has put me top of an image search for cute fluffy bunnies and I bet you can guess which posts it links to.

Then there are the occasions where Google does send people with relevant queries to my site but directs them to the wrong place. If you search for beef mince recipes (as a ludicrous number of people appear to do), my blog’s first appearance will direct you to the archive for September 2006, which is totally useless. I do have a page somewhere with beef mince recipes but that obviously isn’t relevant.

Now, one of Google’s favourite pages on my blog appears to be the recipe for devilled kidneys. It was an old page, from before the great hard drive crash of Summer 2006. The picture was gone, the recipe was vague. However it was Google’s 5th hit. I was embarrassed, so I decided to spruce it up and, to make sure that Google doesn’t start sending people to the August 2008 page instead of to the right place, I’m giving it a Google boost.

So, Google spiders, are you watching? This is the recipe for devilled kidneys. That’s right, a devilled kidney recipe. In fact it is a lamb kidney recipe too.  You may wish to call it a deviled kidney recipe  or a recipe for deviled kidneys.

I think that should do it. I’m afraid you have to click on one of the links to see the devilled kidney recipe. You’ll see why.

Calf liver is my treat for when Goon is away. It’s an automatic reaction now. If Goon is going away to work on his business or visit his parents, I head straight into Borough Market, find my way to the Ginger Pig and buy myself the nicest bit of veal liver they have. You see Goon isn’t a big liver fan. He can cope with chicken livers providing I soak them in enough cream and alcohol, but he hates lamb liver and is ambivalent about calf liver.

At £25 per kilo, ambivalent isn’t allowed!

So calf liver is reserved for the days when I have the flat to myself. My problem is I always buy the liver without knowing what to do with it. Last weekend I was after a change from the usual creamy marsala sauce but the internet was providing little inspiration. In fact, the recipe websites seem alost saturated with straightforward liver, bacon and onion recipes. That’s not quite what I wanted for my treat!

Eventually an idea came from an old BBC recipe. A liver, bacon and onion recipe by Gary Rhodes involves serving liver with melting onions with marmalade. A bit of musing led to the recipe below. Unfortunately, due to the great Islington juniper shortage that hit last weekend, I didn’t sprinkle my calf liver in finely ground juniper as intended. Instead, I dusted it with 1 juniper berry I had left, after giving it a good soak in gin.

Then I gave my own liver a good soak in gin. Happy times.   

Calf Liver with Juniper, Caramelised Apples, Maple Cure Bacon and Tangy Apple Onions

• 200g calf liver
• around 8 juniper berries, finely crushed
• 1 apple, peeled, cored and cut into 6 pieces
• around a level tablespoon of honey
• around 30g-40g butter
• 2 sprigs rosemary
• 2 rashers maple cure bacon
• half a small onion, sliced
• a tablespoon of apple sauce
• a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar and sugar to taste 
• half a glass of fruity red wine

Sprinkle the liver with finely crushed juniper berries and press them in properly (or soak it in gin!). I suggest the calf liver is  cooked to pink in the middle. For the liver you see in the picture, that involved dry frying for approimately 30 seconds on each side and resting for 5 minutes wrapped in foil.

Melt 3/4 of the butter over a low heat in a small saucepan and stir in the honey. Add the rosemary sprigs and allow to infue for a minute or two. Add the apple slices, sir to coat in the butter. Turn the heat up slighty so the apples caramelise. They should be golden brown on the outside, but firm. Discard the rosemary sprigs before serving.

The bacon was grilled until crisp. Easy

And for the onions, the only involved part of the meal, soften them in the rest of the butter until golden brown, add half a glass of red wine, allow to bubble down until almost completely evaporated then stir in a tablespoon of apple sauce. Add balsamic vinegar to taste- this will depend very much on how sweet/tart your apple sauce was. Calf liver has a delicate flavour compared to, for example, lamb liver, so you don’t want the onion to be overwhelmingly tart, just slightly tangy. I doubt you’ll need to add sugar but it is probably worth having some on hand just in case.

I served this with some simple buttered wilted spinach but spiced braised red cabbage would also be good.

Haggis is a funny thing. Providing you lie (or at least avoid saying anything) about what it contains, you’ll find that almost everyone who tries it absolutely loves it. However, mention the list of ingredients, and you’ll find most people run away from it, screaming.

I’ve always loved the stuff and, since I started buying it from Borough Market, I’m enjoying it even more. Goon is a recent convert too, so I frequently pick one up on my Friday shopping trips. The only problem is that my eyes have always been bigger than my stomach and I’ll inevitably buy a haggis that is far too large.

This happened to me last week. I picked up a big haggis which we had that evening in the traditional style with creamed potatoes and swede (I couldn’t find any turnips.)

That left about a third of a haggis to use up. It could have been enough for just one for dinner but, since Goon is now a permanent resident of my flat, it made much more sense to combine it with something else to create a meal for two. I thought of haggis stuffed chicken breasts but there was one problem with that. Chicken breasts are usually sold skinned and the skin is my favourite bit.

Luckily I found that Whole Foods in Kensington is one of the few places around that sell supremes of chicken.  When I was at school, I always thought that a chicken supreme was a dish of chicken gristle coated in a dodgy ‘white wine and mushroom sauce’ that was more like milk thickened with cornflour. I didn’t find out it was also a cut (the breast plus the wing with skin attached) until  I started visiting farmers markets and came across supremes of guinea fowl. I haven’t seen this cut of chicken anywhere except in Whole Foods, which is a real shame.

My supremes came from nice plump corn fed birds and were a good thickness for stuffing. I cut a pocket in each breast and stuffed it with my haggis (and a little black pudding because I like it). Then came the fun bit.

I wanted to wrap my supremes in bacon so that the meat would encase its stuffing tightly. But how could I do this without  covering the skin?  I decided to use my trick for stuffing the skins of whole birds.

The skin on the supreme could in theory easily be removed by just cutting it off with a sharp knife. Instead, I used my knife to loosen the middle portion of the skin whilst leaving the left and right sections attached to the meat. Then I slipped my finger under the skin to lift the middle bit of the skin away from the meat, then pushed the bacon between the loose skin and the meat. After that, I could carefully wrap the bacon around the supreme so it covered the opening to the stuffing. 

The dark bit on the right hand side is the now very crispy chicken skin, still on the supreme, with the bacon wrapping beneath it. I suppose I could have roasted the skin seperately, but that wouldn’t have been so much fun, would it? The liquid over and around the supreme is a whisy cream sauce (just single cream and whisky reduced with a touch of worcestershire sauce) . There are also some steamed green beans and a porcini mushroom risotto.

And just in case you didn’t believe me about the haggis and black pudding stuffing, here it is inside the chicken breast.

This meal was rather too much food for two people so we had leftovers from our leftovers meal. :/  But I enjoyed the meat in a sandwich the next day and the risotto will probably be made into arancini. That is, if it lasts that long!

It’s been a bad week. A week that involved three take-aways. I am hanging my head in shame.

It wasn’t all my fault. Goon had coursework due in on Thursday and stayed up all night on Wednesday  to finish it. Running two companies and  having a day job while doing a degree isn’t easy. On the same day, I had to do a lot of teaching then I had to (quickly write) and present a seminar for some other PhD students. It’s not easy working one job and doing a PhD either. So both of us were totally knackered out by the evening. We just had to resort to chinese take-away. Goon fell asleep so quickly that the chinese ended up being his breakfast.

Over the next two nights, Goon had some geeks friends visiting. I was going to cook until I heard the list of non-acceptable foods. This included peas , potatoes  and pasta , so I threw my hands up in the air and gave up. 

It’s interesting how, even if it doesn’t hit your waistline immediately, a spell on a diet like that can really make you feel rubbish. On Sunday, i was feeling totally lethargic and I put this down to the bad eating.  To compensate, I thought I’d so something tasty  but I needed to use the duck legs that were sitting in the fridge.  I came up with this.

Here we have two duck legs (they were on offer at Sainsburys, four for £3.29 \o/) which were slow-roasted on a bed of carrots, celery and leeks with garlic and rosemary. One the duck had cooked, the vegetables were stirred into a sauce made from puy lentils cooked with minced onion and garlic in red wine and vegetable stock. I served all this with pearl barley, tossed in herbs and some wilted fresh spinach flavoured with nutmeg. I admit I did add a touch of cream to the spinach, but only a touch. 

On the next day, I really did feel more like myself. The best bit about this meal was that it tasted so wonderfully wholesome. That’s the great thing about this rustic, homely cooking. You can feel it doing you good as you eat it and yet it’s really, really tasty, especially after three consecutive days of fat and stodge. I find lentils addictive, I even get random cravings for them sometimes. And, as for the duck legs, they were roasted long and slow so all the fat came off and we had melt-in the-mouth-meat and perfectly crisp skin. Hooray for ducks. :D

The next night, I followed suit with a chicken-liver and bulgar wheat pilaf.  

Not the most exciting thing to look at, I know, but another meal like these should sort us out completely, and then it will be time for mashed potato!

After the whole casserole fiasco (post above) and  a certain comment he made about my cooking (see this post), I was in a very bad mood with Goon. Moreso because he didn’t seem to want to apologise and he spent the next day sulking, refusing to help with any of the household chores and definitely not helping in the kitchen while still expecting me to feed him. Grrr! Men!

I had an easy way to solve this problem. If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that Goon has a lot of trouble cooking without supervision. If I were to stop cooking for him he’d either live on takeways or his previous diet of tinned tuna on rice and plain noodles cooked in stock. The easy way to stop him sulking would be to refuse to cook for him at all. But that wouldn’t be as fun as what I decided to do.

Again, regular readers will know, Goon hates lightly cooked liver, okra, and very spicy food. Since Goon was refusing to come into the kitchen I had no problem in producing this for dinner that night.

That’s lightly cooked chicken livers in an extra-hot peri-peri sauce with added okra thrown in. It’s garnished with big slices of red chilli. Mwahahahaha!

 I told Goon the next night we’d have gumbo, the night after that a beef and bhindi phall perhaps followed by some type of liver curry. It turned out I didn’t need to hold up my threat beacause Goon turned from sulky to apologetic very quickly.  Flowers even appeared the next morning.

Hehehe. I win.  Plus the peri-peri chicken livers were actually delicious if you don’t have some weird anti-chilli or anti-liver complex. If I can finish a chapter of my thesis before my next student arrives I’ll write up a recipe for it. 

After my previous unsuccessful attempt at cooking ostrich liver, I was compelled to have another go, this time having the advantage of knowing what it tastes like.

Before my previous attempt, the flavor had been described to me as ‘comparable to calves liver.’Not that ‘comparable’ really means much. After trying it I decided that the flavour was a stronger, more like chicken liver but more … sort of… grassy.

I decided I’d try out my chicken liver with mavrodaphne recipe substituting in the ostrich liver. The result was a very good flavour balance. I think that in future, I’ll continue to treat this liver like chicken liver not calves’. Maybe I’ll even make ostrich and brandy paté!

Unfortunately I seem to have encountered a problem. Goon is one of those odd few who likes liver but only when it is very well done. He has a problem with the texture when it is cooked pink in the middle. I have a problem with the texture when it isn’t . It looks like I’ll be cooking liver for just me in future. Either that or I’m going to have to do something clever like cook it in two batches and then add it to the sauce just before serving it.

Goon is a nuisance sometimes.

My craving for calves liver didn’t disappear by Saturday morning so I had to go to the only place that would stock it in spite of it being Christmas: Borough Market.

There I was thinking the supermarkets were busy. They were not a patch on the crowds in Borough by Saturday afternoon. Through all the bustle I searched for the liver and something to feed my parents . The liver turned out to be a much easier job that the fish for Mum and Dad. There was a huge slab of it in the ’Ginger Pig’. After  a lot of crowd fighting by one fish stall, I just managed to get hold of enough monkfish to keep the parents happy and then squeezed myelf out of the market.

The calves liver turned out to be remarkable quality. It was from the ‘Ginger Pig’ and was probably the best liver I ever tasted. Like I said I had something indulgent in mind when I bought it.

The liver was soaked in marsala for a while and then pan fried until just pink in the middle. I didn’t make a sauce for it but instead just drizzled some more marsala over it and served it with truffled angel hair pasta. The sauce for this was made of cream enriched with egg yolk and  black truffle oil.

In this meal I also discovered tender stem brocolli. What great stuff! It’s almost like purple sprouting broccoli but you don’t get the problem thet some bits go soggy while the stems are still raw! This time I just steamed it but I think I’ll be trying lots out lots of other ideas with it soon.

Goon is starting to get a bit cross at me because he’s never had calves liver before. I keep saving it for a treat for me when he’s not around.  Oh come on,  who’d want to share calves liver?

When I get a chance and when Gamston Wood have some in stock, I might try this dish out on some ostrich liver. The flavours were simple but it felt really indulgent. I guess that must have been the black truffle pasta!

Calm down, Lea.

When I went to pick up the meat to make my ostrich wellington I noticed something rather intruiging on the stall. Ostrich liver for £4.50 with the claim that it was comparable to calves liver.

How could I resist? So the next week I went back to grab some. The idea of blending  lightly flavoured vinaigrette with figs and serving it over calves liver came from the book ‘Secrets’ by Gordon Ramsey. It hadn’t let me down so far so I thought I’d give it a go with the ostrich.

Not my best photography day. So here is ostrich liver wiht roacket salad, fig vinaigrette and blurry polenta. :/

The ostrich liver was very nice but I don’t think it’s quite right to say it is similar to calves liver. It has a slightly stronger more grassy flavour. As a result it overpowered the accompaniments I’d chosen for it. To be honest I think it would have gone better in something like this chicken liver and mavrodaphne recipe. It’s definitely one to try again though!