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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Undeterred by the witty and cutting insult  left for his previous culinary effort, Goon has agreed to go ahead with my plan to help him learn to cook. This is a great step forward for someone who has flatly refused to make anything more complicated than an omelette for the last six months.

Now, it is clear that Goon and I have completely different cooking styles. I never learned to cook at home as my parents had me on low calorie ready meals through my teenage years. Then, all of a sudden at age 22, when I finally got a long term boyfriend, I just started making simple things but without any recipe books. Those came later, when I got bored of making basic things and wanted ideas for new meals. I never followed a recipe as such, just got an idea of the ingredients and improvised. I find that I’m so impatient, I get bored reading instructions and just get them wrong.  Things are much more reliable when I make stuff up, which is why I’ll probably never be a good baker.

Goon is completely the opposite. He can follow a recipe really well but if there’s a typo (or the chef writing the recipe is a bit mad) Goon can’t make adjustments. He has no idea of how to compensate for things going wrong…. at least not yet.

So we’ve formulated a plan. Once a week (or more if he feels like it) I will go through my recipe books and find a recipe that I think will suit Goon’s cooking ability. Goon will try it with as little help from me as possible, then we’ll blog it. It should be a good way of reviewing basic recipes as well as being great for teaching Goon to cook.

For the first experiment of this kind, I found an exciting looking recipe by Nigel Slater from his book Real Food. It is a stir fry of pork fillet and cashew nuts with strong vibrant flavours of lime, chilli and mint. Since it is a stir fry, there wasn’t anything involved that was too scary for Goon. However, I didn’t agree with the recipe completely, so I adjusted the quantities to what I thought would work. There was a decrease in chilli, as Goon doesn’t like too much heat in his food, and I reduced the amount of lime because it just seemed totally ludicrous.

Of course, we need to go one step at a time. Goon can’t cook two things in parallel yet, so I made some fried rice to go with the pork and some wilted pak choi in oyster sauce, but he made the meat dish entirely on his own.

Pork with Lime, Cashews and Mint (Adapted from Nigel Slater’s Real Food)

• 400g pork fillet
• flavourless oil for frying (vegetable, groundnut, etc)
• 75g cashews, roughly chopped (90g was suggested, but I ate some before we started. I think 75g was plenty and I prefer the nuts chunky, so I changed the ‘finely chopped ‘ stated in the original recipe to roughly chopped).
• zest of 2 limes plus the juice of one (the recipe suggested 3 whole limes, we used 2 and it was still a bit much.)
• 3 green chillies, deseeded and chopped (maybe go for the suggested 4 red chillies if you like heat.)
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
• 4 spring onions, sliced on the diagonal
• 2 inches of ginger, peeled and finely shredded
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce (the original recipe suggests 2, but I knew this would make it too salty for me)
• handful mint leaves, finely chopped
• handful basil leaves, torn to shreds

1. Cut the pork into 2cm thick rounds, then cut each round into thin strips.
2. Put the oil into the wok, get it really hot and then brown the pork by quickly stir-frying it until it is golden brown in places. Pour the pork onto a plate with its juices.
   [Goon observation: It says to use a wok for a good reason. If you use a big saucepan like Goon did, not much of the pork will be in contact with the pan surface and it will take longer to brown. Since it doesn’t seal as quickly, it may lose more water than it should. It’s not the end of the world. Just pour off excess liquid and carry on.]
3. Turn down the heat a little and add the spring onions, garlic, ginger and chilli to the pan. Fry, stirring constantly for a couple of minutes. 
4. Return the pork to the pan and add the cashews and continue to fry these, whilst stirring, for another minute or two.
5. Add the fish sauce, lime zest and juice and stir through.
6. Finally, add the mint and basil.
   [Ros observation: The original recipe stated ‘add the herbs.’ This confused Goon as he thought there weren’t any herbs in the ingredients list.  Sometimes it helps to really spell things out.]
7. Taste and adjust seasoning.
   [Goon doesn’t like doing this. In fact, he tasted it and just said, ‘it tastes weird’. It turned out he meant ‘the lime is a bit strong’. In compensation I added some more mint and garlic, which seemed to help in balancing it.] 
8. Garnish with a sprig of mint and serve immediately with some fried rice.

***

So how did it turn out?

Not bad I say! With the minor adjustments I made, this turned out to be an excellent recipe, with wonderful bold flavours and a refreshing citrusy-heat that wasn’t too much for Goon. The lime wasn’t so overpowering by the time it reached the table, although I would stick to the quantities above rather than using 3 whole limes as Slater suggested.

So I think we have a success! Hopefully in time, Goon will be able to do the rice and vegetables too.

Many of you who are resident in the Midlands and the South of England will recall a Friday not long ago when it rained very, very heavily all day. With such weather (which happened to catch me umbrella-less as I was wandering around Borough) it wasn’t too suprising that I was encouraged to buy and cook some proper cold weather food. And so this was born.

Even though it is late July, here in the UK it is still casserole weather. This particular one is made from wild boar, rum and orange and was inspired by this recipe (last one on the page) for a roasting joint. I’ve adapted it to suit little pieces of slow cooking meat.

Wild Boar, Rum and Orange Casserole

(plenty for two when  served with mashed potato and perhaps a green vegetable)

• 400g diced casseroling wild boar.
• zest and most of the juice of 1 orange
• large sprig of rosemary
• 1 tablespoon thyme, chopped
• 1 small onion, minced
• 2 small cloves garlic, minced
• handful of pancetta (optional- we had some spare, so I used it)
• 4 small tomatoes, peeled  and chopped
• 1 medium carrot chopped
• substantial splash of rum ( I used a dark navy rum because we happened to already have some, but any would do really)
• a large glass of white wine
• vegetable stock to cover the meat in your casserole dish

Brown the boar in a hot frying pan. Transfer to a casserole dish.

Fry the onion, carrot, herbs and garlic gently in a little butter in the pan until the onion is soft and the carrot partly cooked. Add the pancetta and cook it through.

Add this mixture to the casserole along with the tomato and grate in the orange zest. Season with salt and pepper

Cover the meat with white wine and stock and place the casserole in the oven. Cook this, covered, for about 1.5 hours at 140C, then remove the lid, add a generous splash of rum and cook for a further 30 minutes. By this point the boar should be tender.

If the gravy isnot thick enough, pour it off into a saucepan and let it boil vigourously until it reaches the desired consistency, then return it to the casserole.

Taste the dish and add the orange juice (and maybe more rum) to taste  Serve over mashed potato.

***

This has been my favourite way to have wild boar so far. In the past, I’vefound it hard to balance the ‘nuttiness’ of the meat, but this casserole solved that problem. I think that letting the boar cook in white wine is what did the trick.

Goon really liked the dish but he said it reminded him of school dinners. Obviously, this really worried me for a second, but it turns out what he meant was ‘he’s not had a stew with carrots in since he stopped having school dinners.’

Slow cooking really seems to be the best way of preparing boar. The frying steaks are expensive and no amount of tenderising seems to do them much good.  This casseroling boar cost me a mere £3 for just over 400g. I do seem to be getting a small discount for  being a regular customer at Sillfield Farm, but you’d still pay less than £4 for that amount. It’s a very good deal!

So, if your local farmers market has boar in stock, I thoroughly recommend trying it. It has a fantastic flavour and is excellent value for money.

I’m lucky to have a great, friendly butcher’s shop near my flat. I found it, oddly enough, by reading the River Cottage Meat book which led me to the website of the Guild of Q Butchers. It was there that I discovered that the butcher’s shop H G Walters was literally 10 minutes from my front door.

Since I’ve started visiting them I’ve grown addicted to their maple cure bacon. In fact, all the pork I’ve had from them has been awesome, so last Saturday I decided to try a pork roast. I bought a decent sized  loin of pork, which the butcher untied so I could stuff it.

I’d had a plan to stuff my pork loin with a mixture of pears, walnuts, sage, rosemary and celery and serve it with a stilton sauce. But, when I came to make my roast, I noticed I had a small problem. I’d assumed the butcher would have left the string in for me to re-tie my joint, but he hadn’t. So I rang up Goon to ask him to pick some up on the way home.

Sadly, I underestimated Goon’s capacity for being lazy. Goon stopped off at the small Tesco metro instead of going to the big supermarket. I would have expected both places to stock some kind of string but apparently the small store didn’t and Goon didn’t want to walk the ten minutes extra to the big shop. So he decided to pick up an alternative. I wasn’t too pleased when I found out what he bought.

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN, ‘YOU GOT ELASTIC BANDS’!!?”

Goon looked at me me sheepishly. “There wasn’t any string anywhere.”

“You’re honestly telling me that it’s impossible to find string in a large shopping centre in Hammersmith at 8:00pm on a Monday night?!”

 ”You can use these, can’t you?”

I didn’t have a clue how these colourful bits of rubber would fare in a 160 C oven but I was willing to bet they weren’t the best thing to put on my roast.

“I doubt it.”  I said. “They’ll probably snap when they get hot.” Goon started wrapping rubber bands around my pork loin. “STOP IT!” I shouted. 

“I’m sure I’ve seen them used like this before.”

I resentfully agreed to let Goon tie my pork loin with rubber bands on the condition that we test them in the oven first to see what happened. As I’d thought,the bands didn’t like the heat. Within five minutes of them being put in the oven, we had a multi-coloured gloopy mess to scrape off the bottom shelf. 

So much for the elastic band idea. I needed a new plan but by now all the shops had shut and  I couldn’t find anything oven-proof that I could use to secure my pork.

In the end, after a lot of debate, we resorted to skewering. This wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds. The main problem was that the pork skin was very thick so, to get the skewers through, I had to aim for the bits where the skin had been scored. This meant  there weren’t that many places I could skewer the pork so the joint wasn’t held together very well at all!

Yes, I know, it does look ridiculous. But at least i some of the stuffing stayed in. The rest turned into a horrible burnt mess at the bottom of the dish but I think about half survived.  

The pork still cooked well though. It was tasty and juicy and the pear-walnut-stilton combination (that made it) was great with it.  

The rest of the meal worked fine too, although you can’t really go too far wrong with boiled new potatoes and steamed broccoli can you?

Apart from the great quality pork, the stilton sauce was definitely the best bit of the dish. It was made from a little chicken stock which I reduced with some dry cider, white wine and a small sprig of rosemary which was removed at the end. Then I melted in the stilton and added a touch of double cream.

I’m looking forward to trying this idea again with a properly tied joint.  

I don’t often post about the quick midweek meals I make, even though in recent weeks there have been a fair number of them. But Goon insists I post this one because he absolutely loved it and, in his words, “It’s not as mental as some of [my] other recipes so people might want to try it.”  I don’t know which way to take that.

This recipe was loosely based around something I found in a Reader’s Digest recipe book, ‘Great British Cooking- the Healthy Way’.  Needless to say mine was not all that healthy and, to make it worse, I accompanied it with mash. This was a great way to try pork fillet, which neither of us had eaten before, for the first time.

You will need…

• 400-450g of pork fillet, cut into inch thick rounds,
• 1/2 small onion, finely diced
• 100g of stilton, chopped into tiny bits
• 50ml double cream,
• 50ml of a good quality cider, 
• a splash of dry white wine,
• about 12 rosemary leaves, finely chopped 
• about 100-150ml of chicken stock.
• the obvious salt, pepper and butter to fry
• Lots of fluffy mash to serve plus some veg (in our case strips of celery, green beans and carrot cooked until still mildly crunchy)

What to do…

Take the rounds of pork fillet, use your hand to press them to roughly an even thickness, season and set aside. Fry the onion and the chopped rosemary leaves gently in a little  butter until the onion is soft. Add the stock, cider and wine and then add the stilton a little at a time and allow it to melt in. Add the cream and let the mixture bubble down until it is thick.  Add seasoning to taste (and maybe more cheese if you’re that way inclined.)  Then fry the pork collops in batches for about 3 minutes per side. You want the pork to still be juicy. Toss the pork in the sauce and serve, garnished with more rosemary with the mash and veg.

As I say, Goon REALLY liked this. I think mash really was the best accompaniment to this dish. Who can resist mashed potato mixed with stilton sauce?

Despite all the trouble I get from Goon, he does have his uses. For a start he wrote the anti-spam device for the comments box. Also, I think that spending time in his company is very good practice for when (if) I decide to have children of my own.

Goon has been working a lot recently. Sometimes he only comes back at 10pm, by which time I’ve cooked dinner so he doesn’t get to help much. He’s been saying that he misses helping me cook. I don’t understand why!  I generally reserve the tedious sous-chef jobs for him. But, since he managed a day off this week, I designed something that would be fun for him to cook and eat.

For a start, the dish would have to be one pot since Goon doesn’t like washing up. Secondly, it would have to involve something high fat, preferably cheese. Thirdly the vegetables would have to be hidden since Goon sometimes tries to avoid undisguised veg.

Fajitas immediately sprung to mind. I had a pack of Brindisa chorizo picante in my fridge that was crying out to be used in this. I decided to stew it with pinto beans, sweet potato and pancetta as well as the obligatory peppers, tomatoes and onions.

After deciding my plan of action and getting hold of the ingredients I didn’t already have, I went to fetch Goon and immediately started to wish I’d hidden my food more securely. Goon had somehow found my duck paté and was munching it straight from the pack.

With a bit of effort I wrestled the paté off him and gave him a choice of jobs. He chose to peel and  dice a sweet potato while I dealt with the herbs and onion for the fajita filling. As I was peeling the onion, I felt something wet cold and slimy hit me on the back of my neck.With trepidation, I turned around. Another wet and slimy object hit me in the face.

These projectiles were in fact sweet potato peel. Goon was playing a game that involved him flicking them across the kitchen and trying to hit the opposite wall. He would have been quite successful had I not been in the way!  

After that, Goon started to behave himself. All the jobs from then on were just sautéeing, stirring and tasting so he managed it mostly by himself. The only distraction happened when Goon got in an argument with his flatmate about the virtues of microwaving Tesco Value sausages.

NON COOKING FLATMATE:Of course I can microwave them.
GOON: No! They burn on the inside!
FLATMATE: What do you mean ‘burn on the inside’?
GOON: The insides go black and the outside stays raw.  It’s happened to me before!

The flatmate didn’t seem to believe Goon’s warning and, to be honest, neither did I. Goon grumbled and went back to cooking.This dish really is Goon-proof food. After a bit of initial sauteéing of vegetables it’s a case of throwing things into a pan, simmering and then adjusting seasoning.

Just sautée 1 medium finely diced onion with 2 minced garlic cloves,  3 chopped birds eye chillis and half a tablespoon of oregano, cayenne and paprika until the onion is soft. Then throw in a peeled, diced sweet potato and a chopped red pepper and sautee for a couple of minutes.  Then take 6 links of chopped fresh chorizo picante, 100g of pancetta and add that to the mix. When it is cooked, throw in a drained can of pinto beans, a can of chopped tomatoes, another half tablespoon each of the spices and enough beef stock to let it simmer for thirty minutes or so to give the flavours a little time to develop. When you think it is looking nearly ready (the mxture should be fairly thick), add tabasco to taste and then adjust seasoning for the other spices, salt and pepper. You may want to add tomato puree for extra tomato flavour .

At the end just stir through a couple of handfuls of chopped coriander leaf.

This made  A LOT. Enough for 4 people, which was great because, like all stews, it tasted even better the next day and provided Goon with a substantial lunch.

We had the stew in tortilla flatbreads with sour cream, grated cheddar and mixed leaves.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get Goon to eat the salad. Instead he replaced it with cream.

Would you like some meat with your sour cream, Goon?

As we finishe dinner, I heard the front door open. A second later there was an eruption of frantic screaming and swearing in the corridor. What the hell was going on? I opened the lounge door and in came a great plume of smoke. 

Goon mumbled something and ran towards the kitchen. I followed, panicking that I’d left the hobs on.

But no. Instead it turns out Goon had tried a little experiment to prove to the no-cook flatmate  that sausages really do burn on the inside when you microwave them. Goon had put two sausages in the microwave on full power for twenty minutes.

You know what? They DID burn on the inside. AND the outside. In fact, it’s a bloody miracle the kitchen wasn’t on fire. Goon binned the two sausage shaped pieces of charcoal and then ran to hide in his room. Everyone else started opening windows. The whole flat still stinks of smoke.

So the moral of the story is, if you have a small child, or a Goon, cooking with them can be fun. Just don’t  leave them unattended with a pack of sausages and a microwave.

Well, something like that anyway.

After our last experiment in wild boar, I was keen to try and find a different cut of the meat which had all the flavour of the steaks  but none of the dryness. Slow cooked spare rib chops seemed to be the way to go and I was pleasantly suprised to find these were a third of the price of the steaks and only cost £3.20 for two reasonably sized chops at Borough Market.

I intended to braise them in a sauce slowly for two hours to get them tender. The problem was which sauce to use. I knew the orange, juniper and red wine combination had worked well before but I wanted to experiment more with the flavours of this meat before I started repeating old ideas.

When I’m trying out a new ingredient for the first time, I usually turn to the internet for guidance. Unfortunately the problem with ‘unusual’ foods is that not many people have tried them and good recipes are few and far between. Even something like wild boar, which has been eaten for centuries yields few useful results simply because it isn’t all that popular now.

The only recipe that caught my eye, one for boar chops with mustard, honey and apricot was a broken link . Well, at least I had an idea of what to try. I sent Goon out shopping for some apricot jam, dijon mustard and accompaniments for our meal.

I made a mixture of about 25% dijon mustard, 25% wholegrain mustard and 50% apricot jam.  On tasting this I decided it was sweet enough without any honey, so I just put the chops in a baking dish with some rosemary then poured over the glaze. The chops went in the oven for two hours at gas mark 3 while I made some potatoes dauphinoise.

It seems we found exactly what we were looking for in these chops. The meat melted in the mouth but had just as much flavour as the steaks. I’m really confused as to why these were cheaper than the steaks, which were verging on chewy even when tenderised and lightly cooked. Could it just be the extra cooking time?

The only thing that went wrong for this dish was the presentation. Thinking carefully about the visual aesthetics as well as the flavours, I decided that red cabbage with juniper would be the best accompaniment. I instructed Goon to get either this, savoy cabbage or another green vegetable of his choice if he couldn’t find any. Goon came back with white cabbage. So both accompaniments to this dish were rather pallid and the plate as a whole was not very photo worthy.

But here is a picture of the cooked glazed chop anyway.  

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.

It appears that it is time for teenagers all over the country to panic madly, as they suddenly realise that their mocks were a disaster and their predicted  A level and GCSE grades may leave them destined for a future on the checkout of Kwiksave.

At least that is how it seemed as my inbox filled up with mail from various tutoring agencies begging for people to provide maths lessons. It was good from the perspective of my bank balance but rather horrendous for my sanity, as I realised that I was going to have start teaching at from 9am on most days and not have a chance of getting home until 10pm.

On weeks like this I want to leave the cooking to Goon so that dinner doesn’t get served up too late and I get a reasonable amount of sleep before the next early start. After all, I’d taught him one or two things. For example,  salmon with creme fraiche and dill pasta was now in his repetoire and he had produced some paprika chicken almost completely unaided. On Monday night, I thought I would try this. I suggested he did something with fish and then went off to teach an undergrad until 8:30. After the two hour lesson, I was rather perturbed to find that Goon was still in his office, waiting for further instruction on what to cook. This of course, defeated the whole purpose of getting him to cook as he would get homeeven later than me!

So that ended up being a very late night and a painfully early start. The same late night and early start happened on Tuesday. By Thursday, I was looking a lot like something from a bad zombie movie. Goon, rather embarrassed by his behaviour on Monday, offered to cook again, providing I could tell him what to do.

After a very laboured think, (I wasn’t capable of anything else by then) I decided that spare rib chops cooked slowly in a sweet and sour sauce with stir fried noodles and vegetables would be nice and easy.

So I dragged Goon around Tesco to pick up ingredients and also got myself a nice pack of game paté, which I had been really craving since I’d just seen Jeanne’s delicious sounding home made chicken liver paté. Hopefully I’d  be able to enjoy some before running off the next morning.

The first thing I got Goon to do was make the sauce. It is a very easy one to make. You just get the juice from a tin of pineapples, add some sweetened water, ginger powder and then vinegar in small quantities until you  are happy with the flavour. A little tomato paste is added for colouring and, usually, I then add some onions and pepper which I have fried until just a little bit crunchy. Very simple!

Goon didn’t agree, and insisited I be in the kitchen to supervise. So I told him to start heating the pineapple juice and add enough sugared water to just cover the ribs in their little dish, while I chopped the vegetables. When I turned around I found that Goon had diluted the pineapple juice with enough water to fill the entire 1.5 litre pan. Admittedly I’d picked up some big chops but not THAT big.

Half an hour later, when the liquid had finally reduced to a sensible level, I helped Goon finish off the sauce and poured it over the rib chops, which were sitting snugly in a roasting tray and popped them in the oven for 1 hour 30 mins at gas mark 4.  

Goon had decided that this cooking business was all too difficult. So I ended up being in charge of the stir fry on the condition he would watch and learn. He sat on the floor while I made the noodles, describing carefully what I was doing at each stage. At some point I noticed that Goon was no longer responding to what I said. In fact it turned out that Goon wasn’t even sitting on the floor any more.

I eventually found him hiding behind the kitchen door with a sheepish look on his face. In his hand was an empty pack of game paté.

Grrr! Only Goon could eat a whole 150g of paté in the time it takes me to cook a stir fry.

Anyway, the pork was good. I added a tin of water chestnuts at the end because I think they have a fantastic texture. For the stir fry, I used rice noodles with spring onions, ginger, five spice, some left-over pancetta, and cashew nuts and fried them all together in a generous measure of sesame oil.

This wasn’t my best photography day, was it? Ah well. Apparently my parents have bought me a new camera. Fingers crossed photography should, at the very least, become more consisitent.