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!

That Whole Foods supermarket is going to bankrupt me. I keep finding cool things like these that I want to try.

Picture borrowed from nandalaya.com, until I remember to photograph my own eggplants.

The market actually has a good selection of eggplants, from the normal aubergines we see all the time here to little yellow, white and blue ones. These tiny green ones caught my eye because I remember eating them in a green curry I had in Thailand. I was ill that evening with a horrible heat migraine and had stayed behind in my hotel room. Dinner was from room service and, after I’d finished, I tried asking the porter what the little, sour vegetables in the curry were. I’d assumed they were peas but the flavour was different and they had a harder texture.

Unsuprisingly, the porter was clueless and it wasn’t until I was visiting Saran Rom several years later that I encountered the little vegetables again. The staff here were much more well informed about the ingredients in the green curry and the maitre’ d even brought out a raw one for me to see. Apparently these eggplants are considered to be good in a green curry because of their slightly crunchy texture.

When I came across the plants in Whole Foods I made a mental note to make my own green curry with them. Then, on Thursday, I was planning to make a red curry with a twist but the key ingredient was unavailable. I thought it was a good time to make a green chicken curry instead with the exciting eggplants.

The curry was more difficult to make than it should have been. While i was getting my spices together, flatmate Ken came to ask me how to make a green curry from scratch. I started to tell him, and then realised that I wasn’t making a green curry at all. For some reason I’d gone on autopilot and was making a red one. I clearly need more sleep.*

So, I told Ken roughly how to make both a red and green curry paste and proceeded to make my red curry. Then I ran into problem 2. Somehow, during our move, we lost both our pestle and mortar pairs (i.e. Goon forgot to pack them). Fortunately Ken came to my assistance and did a pretty good job of pounding the spices in a bowl with a rolling pin.

Once the spices were roughly ground, I made my red curry paste and then the red curry in the way I normally do, except this time I threw in my eggplants roughly ten minutes before I was ready to serve.  

Those eggplants really look like large peas, don’t they.Fortunately they were just as good in a red curry as they are in a green one. We had our curry with jasmine rice and, on Schmoof’s recommendation, I tried stir frying some choi sum with garlic, ginger, chilli and oyster sauce. I threw some mushrooms in for good measure too. 

I’ve decided to enter Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging this week with this post, so I’ve done a little bit of research on these eggplants**.  Apparently eggplants are native to India Sri Lanka but are cultivated all over the place now. The wild plants produce small vegetables, like the ones I had in my curry. They were only half a centimetre in diameter. Cultivated plants tend to produce much bigger vegetables, like the purple ones we are used to seeing in our supermarkets.

The name ‘eggplant’ comes from the first growers of these plants in Europe and North America. The aubergines there looked a lot like Goose or Duck eggs since they were white and round.  

This week, Weekend Herb Blogging is being hosted by Chris from Mele Cotte. Head over there on Monday to see the other exciting submissions for this week’s WHB.

*Or less alcohol. I’ve had a fair few bottles of champagne since I found out about my new job.

**Ok, you got me, I just looked them up on wikipedia.

As you might have gathered from my posts this year, I haven’t done any cooking at my place for literally months. There are several reasons for this. For a start, Goon’s flat was literally three minutes from conveniences such as a tube station, a decent supermarket (well, decent in the sense it wasn’t one of those dodgy 24-hour corner stores) and was on a busy road so getting back home late at night didn’t cause any safety issues.

Then there is the fact that, although my flatmates are very nice people (in contrast to the nutters Goon ended up with), the flat itself left a bit to be desired. The plumbing is dodgy, it’s impossible to turn the shower on without a wrench and the storage space situation is ludicrous.

For example, this is our fridge, BEFORE I attempted to put my groceries in there.

That’s supposed to hold enough for the occupants of two double rooms and one single room. Potentially five people could live here permanently. In practice sometimes there could be six staying in the flat at one time. Help!

And, while the kitchen looks pretty there are more storage issues. You’d think from that photo that there was a good deal of space. But the cupboard under the sink is a dummy, the one to its left has the washing machine in it and the one on the far left houses the fridge. There’s not a lot of room for crockery and glasses.

And finally, I thought I’d mastered electric ovens but now I need to master an electric oven with no legible temperature markings.

The last of these little problems caused me a bit of trouble when Goon asked for a roast chicken for dinner on our first night in the flat. I got myself down to the amazing Whole Foods market in Kensington, picked up a lovely free-range, corn-fed bird, whose skin I stuffed with sprigs of tarragon. I also smeared some mustard under and over the skin and stuffed the cavity of the bird with onion and smoked garlic. When I came to put the bird in the oven, I had no idea where to set the dial so I thought I’d pop it in at the highest temperature for ten minutes to crisp up the skin then go for the number that looked like 160 C and hoped for the best.

I noticed that this oven got way hotter than I expected. After just a few minutes the skin of the bird had obviously crisped up a lot, so I turned down the heat early. I set it to what I thought was 150C but the bird still cooked in under an hour!

The next day, flatmate Ken gave me an explanation for what happened. The unreadable markings on the oven apparently went all the way up to 250 C. That’s a good 30C hotter than I wanted for crisping my skin. Also, when I turned down the heat it got left at 180C, not 150C. No wonder it cooked so bloody quickly!

Fortunately, I checked the oven just in time so we got a chicken, which was not quite as juicy as I’d have liked, but hadn’t yet reached the stage of being overcooked. The skin was nice and crispy though and the mustard gave it a good flavour and suprisingly dark colour. But, five minutes longer, and we would have had one dry and possibly inedible bird!

And then came the final problem of the evening. While my two flatmates appear to be better cooks than any of Goon’s ex-cohabitants, our kitchen is mysteriously lacking in decent knives. This was the only one that we could attempt carving the chicken with.

It’s a good knife, but rather old and in need of sharpening. Plus it’s not really big enough to carve a chicken. Goon did his best but we ended up with a rather messy chicken, hacked straight down the middle.

Hopefully things will get easier as I learn the use this oven of doom. In fact, I imagine I will learn to use it properly just in time for me to move out of this flat in September. Ah, the joys of student life. Thank God it’s nearly over.

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!

Apparently so. On my last trip to Notting Hill’s farmers’ market I was pleasantly suprised to find a pack of pheasant breasts at the Manor Farm stall. They weren’t cheap, but I really miss pheasant when it goes out of season, so I was delighted to grab hold of these.

At first I thought they must be frozen but I was told that they were fresh. Apparently, even though the gamekeeper supplying the stall couldn’t shoot birds out of season, he would manage to catch some from time to time, and so the occasional bit of pheasant would end up on the stall in late spring.

I was so enthralled with my pheasant, I thought I should do something exciting with it. Then, on reflection, I realised one of the things I miss most about  pheasant in the summer is simple things like this.

Here I just stuffed the breasts with porcini mushrooms with I’d fried up with some onion, herbs and garlic, then wrapped them tightly in streaky bacon and roasted them. We ate them with fresh egg tagliatelle tossed in parsley and olive oil and steamed asparagus. There was a calvados cream sauce too, although I forgot to photo it.

Hooray for Manor Farm! I hope they manage to get one or two more packs in the next couple of weeks. I also discovered this week that they do some very tasty venison and chilli sausages that I’ll be going back for.

A few posts ago, I mentioned a pub meal I had that was really not as good as it should have been.

This ‘duck breast salad with pomegranate and blueberry dressing’ was a great idea, but somehow had come out all wrong. The biggest problem was the duck breast itself. It was overcooked, but hadn’t had enough time on the skin side to make it crispy. Also, whoever had prepared it apparently hadn’t heard of the benefits of removing the tendon from a duck breast.

Ignoring the duck breast, the salad itself was ok. But, after a while, the dressing, which I think was pure honey, became overpowering. The sweetness almost worked against the tartness of the blueberries but it was a little too much. I felt it needed tempering.

Even though the execution of this dish wasn’t great, I totally loved the idea behind it and that’s why I wanted to try out a variation on it myself.

The duck breast was the easy bit. I’ve cooked those dozens of times before and I think I’ve got the hang of them now. I could also easily mimic the spinach-watercress-spring onion combo of the pub for the salad but the dressing was a bit more tricky. I wanted to keep some of the honey but find a way to lessen the intensity of flavour. On a whim, I took half my pomegranate seeds, juiced them in a blender, then strained the juice into the honey. After tasting the mixture, one thing was obviously missing. So i added a capful of rosewater to the dressing and also decided to dust the meat side of the duck breasts with powdered rose petals to give the dish a very noticable rose flavour.

I prepared my duck in the same way I always do. For a start I alsways get my duck from Manor Farm’s stall at Notting Hill farmers’ market or from Furness at Borough. The quality of meat at these two places is a lot better than most supermarket duck.

As for method of preparation, this one seems to be fairly reliable.

1. Score the skin of the duck is a cross hatch pattern, with lines about 1.5cm apart. Try to cut as far as you can into the skin without exposing the meat.
2. Rub a pinch of salt into the skin to help it crisp up nicely.
3. Turn the duck meat side up and look for the white tendon. It’s a good idea to remove this as this is what makes the duck breast shrink when you cook it. I use a very small, sharp knife to do this, slipping the knife under the tendon and cutting it away. The difference you get from moving the tendon is very noticeable. The meat seems softer and jucier. 
4. When you are ready to cook the duck, get a frying pan hot (I use the highest heat setting on my electric hob) and cook the duck skin side down 8 minutes, then turn it and cook it for 1 minute 30s skin side up.
5. Rest the duck wrapped in foil for about 5 minutes before serving.
6. When you’re ready to serve, cut it into thin diagonal slices for pretty presentation. Or don’t bother, and just eat it.

If I haven’t just missed the deadline, I’m submitting thi post to Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging, this week hosted by Pat at Up a Creek Without a PatL. Several ingredients make it eligible to qualify. The salad leaves, the pomegranate and the rose petals would all be good reasons to enter. But, I’ve decided to use this post to draw attention to the humble blueberry, which I think is a much underused ingredient in savoury cooking. While it’s all over the place in the form of yoghurts and muffins, you don’t often see a blueberry sauce for venison or the berries used in salads like this.. This is a shame as blueberries have a superb flavour which goes really well with game.

So, next time you’ve got some duck or venison (or kangaroo for that matter) in the fridge, why not try out partnering it with blueberries? It’s a very tasty combination!