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.

This is what happens when a alcoholic pyromaniac like myself gets in  the kitchen.

I’d picked up these steaks at Borough market because I hadn’t had boar in ages. I remember the first time I tried this meat very clearly. I was in an Italian restaurant  (Casa Vallée) in Leamington, with James, and my starter was a creamy, truffled wild boar pasta dish. It was delicious and I made myself a similar dish several times after that.

This time I wanted something different so went for a dish that was a bit more traditional. I marinated the boar in red wine, orange juice, juniper, rosemary and thyme then flambéed it in gin.

Well, actually, Goon flambéed it in gin. With my hair the way it is, I was going nowhere near those flames in case I ended up bald! He was having immense fun with it too. It seems that a bit of my evil side has rubbed off on Goon because he used the burning pork to play a mean trick on the blonde flatmate. It went something like this…

Blonde flatmate enters kitchen while Goon is holding the flaming pan, staring absent-mindedly out the window,

BLONDE FLATMATE: Oh my days!
GOON: Uh?
BLONDE FLATMATE: THE PAN!
GOON: Huh?

(a fairly long pause follows as Goon thinks)

GOON: Oh my God! It’s on FIRE!!! HELP!!!!
BLONDE FLATMATE:OH MY DAYS! EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! 

 (She runs out of the flat still screaming)

It’s a good thing she’s too daft to call the fire brigade, or we’d have been in real trouble!

While Goon was enjoying the blue flames I made a vaguely traditional sauce to go with the boar. I took some red wine and reduced it with orange peel  and rosemary then added some redcurrant jelly at the end. I discovered that I prefer Tesco redcurrant jelly to the Ocean Spray one, which I had bought before. The Ocean Spray jelly has quite a high sugar content and can easily make a dish too sweet.

So the boar was served with the sauce, some new potatoes and buttered spinach with nutmeg. I have to say that the flavour of the boar was just perfect. It was subtley orangey and loaded with juniper. I adore juniper so I was really happy. The texture, however, needed work. I think I should have tenderised the steaks. I’m sure I shouldn’t have cooked them any less (mine were slightly pink in the center)  but they were on the chewy side in places.  

Next time, I try boar I’m going to go for the spare rib chops. I think that these slow cooked with similar juniper and orange flavours will be really gorgeous. If anyone can give me tips on how to better deal with wild boar steaks, please let me know!

For a while there’s been this idea in the back of my mind about a nice, unusual way of ‘barding’ a chicken. I’m sure it is not entirely my own. It probably found its way into my subconscious from a cook book or a TV programme, but I have not idea which one.

The idea is to stuff the skin of the bird. This in itself is not at all unusual, many recipes call for putting butter and seasonings under the skin of a chicken before roasting it. But I decided I wanted to stuff the skin with chorizo. In particular Brindisa’s chorizo picante. I love that stuff! My hope was that, as the chorizo cooked, the oils would leak out and baste the chicken, keeping it moist.

So, during the last Borough market trip, I got my chorizo and also decided to pick up a guinea fowl instead of a chicken. I much prefer these birds. Their taste is so rich. They are what I wish chickens would taste like. I sliced my chorizo thinly, loosened the skin on the bird and carefully pushed the chorizo over the breast meat. Then I did the same with the thighs, although I wasn’t quite careful enough and slightly tore the skin on one of them. Fortunately it was a minor tear and it didn’t to cause any problems.

Before roasting it I brushed the skin of the bird with a mixture of olive oil, cayenne and paprika and stuffed it with onion and crushed garlic.

The chorizo made the guinea fowl look disturbingly knobbly. You can’t see it in the photo but it was one bumpy fowl! 

Roasting like this had a very interesting effect. In fact, I was mildly alarmed when I took it out of the oven.

I’ve never cooked a guinea fowl that looked like that before. The skin was crispy, and wrinkly, which was probably a good thing, but I was worried that somehow the chorizo had been counter productive and dried everything out.

Luckily this wasn’t the case. The guinea fowl was delicious! The meat was gorgeous and moist. The oils from the chorizo had been absorbed by bits of the meat, giving them an even richer flavour that normal.

The skin was out of this world! Imagine biting through perfectly crispy spiced chicken skin into thick chunks of meaty, spicy chorizo. It was heaven! I’m going to make this again!

I decided the rest of the meal could also have a Spanish theme so I grilled some peppers and courgette with olive oil and garlic and also and made a kind of veggie-paella thing.

Well, I say veggie but in the end I threw in the unused half link of chorizo that was left.

So there it is all together, you can kind of see the bits of breast meat that had absorbed chorizo oil. They’re stained red. I tried to get a proper close up shot of the stuffed skin but this happened.

I think I mast have got my greasy finger onto the lens at some point. Anyway, I think its just clear enough to see what is going on. The skin was properly packed with chorizo, which was great because I just can’t get enough of the stuff!

Now I’m wondering what exactly caused the skin to crisp up like that. The 15 minute blast on gas mark 7 just after I began roasting it would have helped but I’d never managed to get crispy skin that way before. Ideas anyone?

I’ve always taken pride in the fact that I’m the least picky eater I know. Snobby sometimes, but rarely picky. It’s true that when my good friends meet up and get excited about the prospect of going to Pizza Express, I will scoff (sorry, guys, I love you really), especially when there’s an outlet of Fish! a few doors down. But essentially, when you put something on a plate in front of me, I will eat it.

The obvious exception to this might be if the thing is still moving, but I fortunately haven’t been put in that situation yet.

It hasn’t always been this way though. There used to be a few foods, whose mention alone would leave me heaving.

The first of these was macaroni cheese. Specifically the macaroni cheese produced by a certain pre-school in Kingston-Upon-Thames. Think of Kraft Dinner and add more slime.

Funnily enough, it looked remarkably like this picture. It took a good few years before I got over that one. Come on! Look at it! Can you blame me?

But, the most horrible thing for me, the food I would actually have nightmares about, was YORKSHIRE PUDDING!

Aaargh! Yorkshire Pudding! Food of the Devil!

You might think it's more than a little bit weird for someone to have anything against this dish. After all it is one of the more bland things you find in your roast dinner. But let me explain…… (cue floaty harp music and melting pictures)…..

I was five years old and it was my first day at primary school. We'd been led down to the school canteen for a roast lunch by the dragon-like teacher of the year above and were sat in our tables of eight eating toad in the hole. I remember that I didn't think much of it, but I ate the sausages and vegetables. Then I got to the yorkshire pudding. Frankly, it smelt wrong. I cut a tiny piece of the end and tried it. It tasted very, very, wrong. I spat it back out onto my plate, unaware that Mrs Dragon-Like was standing right behind me.

After quite a lot of squawking from her and a few tears from me, it was made clear that I would not be leaving until I had eaten everything on my plate and, to make it worse, neither would the rest of my table. Talk about pressure!

And so, I had to eat more. So I closed my eyes and took a bite, chewed and swallowed, fighting hard against my gag reflexes. The teacher waited for me to continue but by now I had other things on my mind.

I heaved. I heaved again. Then a few seconds later I vomited all over the table. The other girls were screaming. The one next to me was crying. I think Mrs Dragon by this point must have been wondering how the hell she could talk herself out of this one. I was quickly led away to the sick-room.

I didn't touch yorkshire pudding for almost 20 years after that, when James convinced me to try a bit from his plate. NowI actively like it. I'm still very wary of primary school teachers though.

So, why have I been spending this precious time when I could be writing my thesis telling you about my old food phobia? Because it's more fun that writing maths, obviously! Also it is because I was reminded about my food phobias not long ago. Another thing that I used to hate was gammon. A less serious version of the story abve happened a few years later when I ordered the meat in a restaurant. I simply couldn’t eat it because of the salt and then never touched it again…. until last week.

It turns out that gammon is one of Goon's favourite things. He'd had it with his family at Christmas and was missing it when he got back. I wasn't terribly keen on the idea of making it but eventually I was convinced to try.

I guess they do look kind of cool, studded with cloves like that. This was a small smoked gammon joint from Sainsbury. After reading that soaking reduces the salt content of the meat, I popped it in some cold water for about 24 hours, refreshing the water every five or six.

When it was time to cook it, I studded the meat with cloves, refreshed the water again and attempted to bring it to a simmer. Typically, the dumb electric hob wasn't powerful enough, so I had to roast the joint instead.

So I untied it, took of the rind, scored the fat and retied it, then popped it in the oven at gas mark 4-5 for about an hour and ten minutes. Twenty minutes before the end I poured a glaze of honey, cinnamon and cherry juice over it. After resting the meat for about ten minutes, goon carved it and it looked something like this.

We had it with buttery new potatoes and broccoli with the excess glaze tipped over the meat.

Now for the verdict. I still don't think I actively like gammon. Even with all that soaking it was still pretty salty. Admittedly, the glaze made it much better and the leftovers were good in a cream sauce on pasta the next day, but the sliced gammon on its own just didn't do it for me.

I'd make it again, since I didn't hate it as much as yorkshire pudding, but only if someone specifically asked me to. Anyway, I'd be happy to be proved wrong.*

*Please note that this does not apply to any statement in my thesis. If you prove any of those wrong, you will quickly find yourself in a lot of pain.

So, with a title like that you are either going to think that

1. I’ve taken the whole alternative meat thing too far and have  cooked up someone’s pet pooch.
2. I’ve found a little known pasta recipe originating from an old coastal region of Croatia.

I suppose technically those who went for point 1 were a little closer to the truth because what I mean by dalmatian lasagne is this.

Lasagne with an interesting spotted top. Hmmm… maybe its more like a leopard.

Those who saw this emerge from the oven said things like ‘Oh, cool! How’d you get it to do that?’ In reality, I have no idea why it did that. I put it down to a quirk in the design of the electric oven I was using.

If I’d INTENDED the weird spot pattern I’d have been very pleased with myself. But I bet that if I do exactly the same thing the next time and make lasagne with the intention of it being spotty, the blasted thing probably won’t brown at all!

Anyway, spotting aside, this was a mighty good lasagne! It had a slightly spicy filling of pork sausages, tomato and pepper and was topped with a mild cheddar sauce.  I’m fairly sure the idea wasn’t entirely my own. I think that I might have even seen it on someone elses blog, after which it implanted itself in my subconscious until I was stuck with nothing to cook on New Years day. Then I realised that this could be made from things I already had in my cupboard.

Into the  pan went a chopped onion with 2 cloves of crushed garlic a chopped red pepper and loads of oregano with some olive oil. One the veg had softened I added 6 skinned, seeded chopped tomatoes, and about 1/3 bottle red wine and a tablespoon of tomato paste and a dash of tabasco. Then I fried up  6 chopped pork sausages (Tesco finest from the bargain bin ) with another garlic clove and threw that in to the tomato mixture before reducing it until nearly dry.  The topping was a simple milk-based cheddar sauce.

This turned out tobe really tasty and a nice light meal after I’d been sitting around the house all day doing nothing. I just served it with a side salad of mixed leaves with a lemon- olive oil dressing. I think it was really cheap too. Those sausages only cost 40p and most of the other ingredients were vegetables. The red wine was technically not cheap, but it was left-over from a couple of days ago. This is definitely one to make again when  sausages are on offer!

Remind me never to let Goon go shopping for me again. 

I’d decided to make this meal quite some time ago as I’d found two rather large pieces of pork belly in the Tesco bargain bin for 60p!   I’d never eaten pork belly before but I knew that losts of people absolutely love it and I’d heard it made pretty good crackling. So I thought a nice autumnal dish of crispy pork with an apple compote, juniper braised cabbage and mustard mash would go down well.

While I was heading over to Goon’s flat he rang me to see if he needed to buy anything. So I sent him to get two apples and a bottle of cider for the sauce plus some mashing potatoes. As soon as I got there I realised that the potatoes were, in fact, waxy and managed to borrow the correct version. Unfortunately I didn’t realise until much later that Goon had forgotten the apples.

So I had a choice of either: 

1.  having no apple compote
2. yelling at Goon for being a goon and sending him back to the shops.

Guess which one I went for. Goon returned not long after with a bag of twenty apples. I fear I will be eating apples for a long time   

The moral of this story is, when you need shopping done properly, do it yourself! Or at least avoid enlisting the help of someone incapable of memorizing a four item list. .

At least the cooking went without TOO many glitches (just one burnt finger). I prepared the pork belly by rubbing it all over with cinnamon and allspice then salting the skin and roasting it. I finished it off under the grill to get some nice crispy crackling. The apple compote was just caramelised apple stewed in cider, reduced till dry and broken up with a bit of honey and cinnamon. I served the pork with some mustard mashed potatoes and red cabbage braised with juniper.

I’m not sure why everyone raves so much about pork belly. I couldn’t help thinking of pork scratchings as I ate it. It was just a bit too fatty for my taste. I think I might try it braised at some point to see if that’s any better but, to be honest I think I prefer other more meaty joints.

Now, has anyone got any good ways to use up a lot of apples?

EDIT: Here’s what I did for the pork belly with apple compote.

I don’t know why I get such immense pleasure from proving fussy eaters wrong, but I do. So, on Monday, while cooking for goon at his flat, I took advantage of an opportunity to get him over one of his food fears. 

To be fair, Andy can’t really be classed as a fussy eater. He will try almost anything once (apart from cod roe) and seems to be actively adventurous in restaurants. However he has three major culinary flaws.

1. He doesn’t like figs unless they’re in fig rolls
2. He prefers normal brocolli to purple sprouting
3. He’s not all that keen on oysters

Number 3 is an absolute crime but there wasn’t much I could do about that. Number 1 seemed like a good one to deal with, especially since there are some lovely juicy  figs around now. I picked up 3 from the Iranian store on Hammersmith Road and thought about how I could find a way that Andy would like them.

Since goon is a simple creature, the easiest way to make him eat something is to cover it in cheese. I went one better.

I cut the fig into little pieces, caramelised them and then spread them over a pork spare rib chop which had been slow cooked in ruby port, so it went really juicy and tender. Then I covered the whole thing with loads of melted blue stilton and served it with a port reduction, mashed potato and cabbage.

No sign of the figs! 

The plan nearly failed as goon came into the kitchen while I was slicing the figs. He asked me ‘what I was doing with the passionfruit.’ Bless. I didn’t tell him that I was actually holding a fig but I did let him know that it definitely wasn’t anything tropical.

In the end, the trick worked. Goon ate the figs and liked them and was suprised when he found out what they were. I was very pleased with how the pork turned out. Slow cooking in liquid makes these cuts go beautifully tender. The port, cheese and fig combination is a classic!

I’m never happy making mash with no butter or cream though. Ah well, I’ll have my own fridge soon to stock up with full-fat goodness.

I’m in the middle of moving at the moment, for the second time in three months. Renting is a pain in the backside.

So, for the last week or two, I’ve been avoiding buying food and have been making an effort to empty my fridge and freezer. It would have been a bit easier if I hadn’t decided to buy a cabbage a few weeks ago. I used last night’s dinner to help me get rid of unwanted fridge items, like leftover bits of carrots, onions and so forth.

I decided to go for an adaptation of this Rick Stein recipe for sausages and puy lentils since I already had some cumberland sausages in the freezer. The basic idea of my version was the same, except I added my fridge leftovers of chopped carrot, pancetta, onions and extra rosemary to the lentils.

The bubbling pot of lentils was tasting great but I had a small problem. I had nothing to serve it with. I’d already used up all my potatoes. I thought rice would be good but I seemed to have run out of basmati and long grain. However, I did have a box of  arborio which I decided would be better than nothing.

I was right, it was better than nothing but it really, really was not anywhere near as good as plain old long grain. It had a strange, almost waxy texture that wasn’t very nice.  It seems there is a good reason why this rice is reserved for risottos!  Fortunately the sausages were yummy, which more than made up for it.

So the moral of the story is, don’t try boiling arborio. But you probably knew that anyway.

It appears that recently I have been spending a rather large amount of money on food. That combined with the fact I only have 1 month of PhD funding left has made me think I should maybe cut down a little on my spending. I should probably also stop blogging so much and make more of an effort in writing my thesis, but then, I'm only human. One step at a time: I'll just reduce my spending a bit for now.

So in the next week or two I'm going to try and get through all the stuff I've shoved in my freezer. This doesn't mean the blog's going to get boring (at least I hope not) because there are still some interesting things I've yet to use. There is oxtail, quails' eggs, lamb leg steaks and a range of seafood. Unfortunately there are also chicken breasts. It's going to be a struggle to do something exciting with them.

Last night saw me getting rid of a bulk of fresh ingredients from the fridge. I had 3 links of chorizo, a load of random cheese, a variety of fresh herbs and some salad. There was also James' mutant beetroot that he bought at Borough then left at my flat. I doubt I'm going to get round to using it.

I also have a 3kg bag of penne that I really regret buying. So, in a bid to get rid of at least some of it, I made a pasta bake vaguely based around this. Mine had added marscapone, garlic, onions and rosemary and I topped it with some cheddar.  Yes, I have a LOT of cheese. I served it with a 15p reduced salad from Sainsbury's with a vinegarette dressing.

The Chorizo and Taleggio pasta bake recipe is here now.

I finally got round to getting myself some crocodile fillet at Borough last weekend. My crazy diet is going to bankrupt me soon!

I had tried this meat once before at Archipelago, a great restaurant near Tottenham Court Road. I think they'd served it with some yellow bean dressing and called it “Cayman Islands.” It tasted good, despite the daft name.

That happened about 2 years ago so I couldn't quite remember what the meat was like. Most internet sites describe it as a cross between chicken and fish. I guess that makes sense since crocs eat fish and are closely related to birds. Since I had more of that fantastic Brindisa chorizo in my fridge, I thought that a variation on the ever popular chicken and chorizo skewers would work well.

Some people say crocodile has a delicate flavour. Others call it bland. I thought the latter was a more accurate description. It's not as bad as chicken and there is a slight hint of fishiness to it but I wouldn't buy it for its flavour alone. The texture, on the other hand, was great. It's a bit like monkfish, but more meaty. I suppose it's similar to lobster too.

Some of my crocodile chunks picked up the chorizo oils and tasted like that. The others just tasted subtley of the paprika I'd dusted them with. Either way, the skewers were good and went well with the roasted red pepper sauce I made.

I served them with a pearl barley salad, an idea I shamelessly nicked from What We’re Eating (link on the sidebar). I also had courgette, panfried in a mint butter.

This was the first time I tried pearl barley outside of soup. It took ages to cook but was very nice. I don't think it's really a carbohydrate but it's a good enough substitute! I mixed it up with some olives, mushrooms and sundried tomatoes and made a lemon and basil oil dressing. I managed to over-lemon the salad slightly but it was balanced well by the red pepper sauce, so it was ok.

Here is the recipe for crocodile and chorizo skewers with red pepper dipping sauce.