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!

Heh… so much for the return to blogging I anticipated after handing in my last thesis draft.

It turned out that handing in thesis coincided with Goon starting his exams. This really should have meant that I left him to it and had plenty of time to write. But, in reality, this was the first time this year that Goon  and I were both at home during the day, so we ended up spending large amounts of time in Hammersmith’s gastropubs.

Also, the unthinkable happened. I temporarily lost my will to cook! In fact I pretty much lost my will to eat, probably because of the exhaustion incurred by the weeks around Easter. Then I had an argument with my supervisor over my thesis which caused me to sulk for a few days. Then I got a bad case of flu. Bah!

But, as it inevitably would, my food enthusiasm has started to return, triggered off by a wonderful idea on a pub menu that was, as they so often are, VERY badly executed.

You see this here?

It’s a duck salad with pomegranate and blueberries. Congrats to the head chef of this chain for thinking of it -  what a great concept. Shame someone in the Hammersmith kitchen buggered it up. The duck was well overcooked and dry, and the dressing was really overpowering. Also, I think the duck breast tendon hadn’t been removed so it shrivelled more than it needed to. I feel I need to make my own version of it because I feel this idea could actually turn out to be excellent with a bit of care and attention. As soon as I get through our current kitchen supplies, that will happen.

And now that I’ve finished disecting my lunch, let’s get back to the important stuff. I think I’ll start with that ostrich wellington……

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

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

My favourite of the week was this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the second of my late night midweek dinners that grew into something unexpected. These pigeon breasts had been sitting in the freezer from the time I made my unfortunate bastilla. Since there was just enough for one, it seemed sensible to use them while Goon was away.

Again, I was just planing to cook them lightly, have some new potatoes and rocket and, maybe, a red wine reduction if I wasn’t falling asleep by that point. As you can see, the new potatoes and salad stayed. But, just before I started cooking, I was flicking through one of my newest cookery books, Geat British Menu, and spotted a starter for pigeon with caramelised red onions. This seemed like a good idea to me so I started frying one small sliced onion with a level tablespoon of sugar and a large knob of butter

As usual, as the onion was caramelising, I had a nose through everything else on the worksurfaces and in our cupboard. This time I discovered one of our mostly finished bottles of plum wine, which I had bought in Borough Market. I could see the plum flavours working very well with the gaminess of the pigeon and the sweet onion.

Usually I wouldn’t add fruit wine to food as it is a bit pricey and I have to go all the way to Borough to get more, but this one needed to be used soon. Plus, those bottles are STRONG with 14.5 % alcohol. I knew what would happen if i started drinking it by myself and I figured that adding a hangover to my already hectic week would be a bad idea.

So my remaining third of a bottle of wine went into my saucepan, not my mouth and, as I let the wine bubble down, the onions turned a very pleasing shade of pinky-purple.This on its own made me love this dish! A quick taste revealed that the sauce was crying out for star anise and cinnamon, so I ground a teaspoon of each and added them to the pan. Finally, I seared the pigeon breasts to medium rare and tossed them in the reduction which by then was very thick.

I think an tangy orange dressing on my rocket and potatoes would have been best to offset the rich sweetness of the pigeon dish but I had no oranges and so a bog standard balsamic vinaigrette had to do. The sweet-tangy combination still worked very well.

This was another one of those dishes that I need to make again. I believe it’s got potential to be really good if I ever get the time to think about it properly. The pigeon itself was great but could have been better with some marinating and a citrus dressing on the salad would have been better. However, in this state it was a very nice midweek dinner and fairly quick to make, which is just what I’ve needed this week. 

I wasn’t expecting to do another flower entry for WHB quite so soon after my Rosey Lamb, but inspiration struck me on Saturday.

That night I was due to be out late watching a production of Arcadia and I needed a reasonably quick dinner on arrival back home, preferably with the duck breasts in my fridge which needed using a.s.a.p . However, I was quite determined to not return to my fruit sauce rut. Also we had to grab a chinese on the way home the previous night so that cooking style wasn’t allowed.  I turned to the internet for inspiration.

It seems that Trig has a rather useful search engine that allows you to search food blogs. It’s there at the end of his side-bar.  Apparently it originally belonged to Elise at ‘Simply Recipes’ and as soon as I have time I’ll be trying to grab a copy for this site. It was this search engine that led me to this post at Chocolate and Zucchini.

Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of putting lavender with duck before? It seems obvious now. I didn’t want mine to have quite as much spice as Clothilde’s on this occasion. I wanted it to stay very light and floral, just because that was the mood I was in.

So, as I frequently do on occasions like this, I ran over to my spice cupboard, got out all the spices that Clothilde suggested plus any others I thought might work and started tasting. The interesting thing I noticed was that a small amount of ground coriander on its own tastes quite floral and not very curry-ish (if you know what I mean). I thought a pinch of it with the lavender rubbed into the duck would be good but I decided to omit the suggested cumin because that really did taste ’spicy.’

Before leaving for the play, I got Goon to grind some lavender for me. We coated the scored meat side of the duck with this and just a pinch of ground coriander seed. Then we wrapped the duck up in cling film and went out.

When we got back I got Goon to grind another tablespoon of lavender while I very gently infused some melted butter with a sprig of rosemary. I removed the rosemary,  then drizzled in about four tablespoons of  honey. I thinned the mixture gradually with just a tiny bit of chicken stock while stirring and tasting until I thought it was at the right level of sweetness. Finally I added the lavender bit by bit until the flavour balance was right and we had a sweet floral sauce.  At this point I decided it needed some depth so another pinch of ground coriander went in and then I was happy. I had to use a bit of cornstarch to get it to the right consistency, but never mind.

As usual I pan fried my duck. I find the best way to do this is to first remove the white tendon on the breast. This will stop the meat shrinking and seems to stop it becoming tough too. Then score the skin almost through to the meat and cook it skin side down on a reasonably high heat for 10-12 minutes (or a very high heat for then turn up the heat on the hob to maximum and fry it for an additional 1 minute 45 seconds skin side up. This makes the duck a nice rare/medium. 

One thing to note is that too much lavender will make the sauce bitter. I had to rebalance my sauce by adding more honey and stock when I found this out and as a result ended up with too much sauce. As long as you aren’t a moron like me and add the lavender slowly, and taste regularly, it shouldn’t be a problem. 

It was a great success! The coriander, used sparingly, added depth and accentuated the floral flavours in the sauce but gave no detectable ’spicy’ flavour. The honey and lavender sauce was unusual but gorgeous. Goon gobbled it up very quickly. I decided to slow down and savour. The flavours in this sauce are too interesting to rush.

The only thing that disappointed me about this dish was that I wanted the sauce to be actually be lavender, rather than the caramel colour that it was. Even the few pieces of lavender I threw around as a garnish didn’t really stand out as being purple.  I somehow think I can’t overcome this problem without the addition of food colouring, which would just be silly. 

Anyway, Goon seemed to enjoy the sauce even more than me. We had our lavender-honey duck with new potatoes tossed in herby butter and simple steamed purple sprouting broccoli, so at least there was some purple on our plates! 

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging this week hosted by Kate at Thyme For Cooking.

Remember, if you’re going to get lavender for cooking make sure that is safe to eat first. Just ask the vendor if it unsprayed. For those of you in London, you can get dried culinary lavender from ‘Herbs from Heaven’ at Borough Market.

A cancelled tutorial has allowed me to make the first of my backlog of posts! 

Next in the series on skin-stuffed poultry we have this.

Seriously, since I made this guinea fowl with chorizo stuffed skin I have not wanted to cook my birds any other way. I next tried this technique on poussin with sliced chestnut mushrooms and ham. Then on duck, simply stuffing the skin with garlic and herbs and scoring it before roasting. That was the best duck skin I ever had!

This addition to the collection was a bit of a late night rush. I was feeling uninspired and so decided to call Goon to see if he wanted something in particular for dinner. Goon went silent for a minute and then said “uhhh….chicken.” And that was it. How helpful.

So I went for a wander around Tesco. I considered buying a whole chicken and doing something with the rest of it for lunch, but then remembered there was no more room in the fridge for ay more leftovers. I thought about chicken breasts, but ran away screaming at the price. Why on earth does it cost the same to buy two breasts as it does a whole chicken!?

Eventually, after about half an hour of umming and erring I picked up two poussins on the basis that the minimal leftovers could go straight in a pot  with the carcasses for stock. Poussins are great like that! I still didn’t know what the hell to do with them but I thought a bit of improvisation wouldn’t go amiss.

All I knew was that I was going to put something under the skin. But what? I opened my cupboad in the vague hope of finding some inspiration. Instead what I found was irritation as an open bag of couscous fell out and spilled a fair bit of its contents over the kitchen floor. Curses!

After the arduous job of sweeping the floor was over, I examined the leftover couscous. Just enough for two portions was left. I thought that had to be a sign and it was decided tha tonight’s poussin would have a Moroccan theme. 

Another inspection of my cupboard revealed a half used pot of harissa paste which would be my skin stuffing. I also added some thinly sliced sautéed garlic and then put half an onion into the cavity of each bird.

As the poussins roasted I whipped up a sauce by blending the flesh of roasted red pepper  with smoked paprika and some cream. I also made a couscous accompaniment with aubergine, fennel, coriander and pine nuts.

And that was it! This meal was really simple and suprisingly good. 

The flavour of the meat was absolutely phenomenal. The poussin breasts had totally taken on the flavour of the harissa and were spicy and gorgeously garlicky. The skin didn’t crisp all over as it had on previous ocasions, but just on the wings and legs where the larger pieces of garlic had gone  The only thing I wasn’t totally happy with was the red pepper sauce. It was good in itself but it was different to the other components of the meal . Goon liked it because it balanced the heat of the poussin but I think I should have made it less creamy.

So this improvisation with poussin was very successful and, to make things even better, we have a base for rich meaty poussin soup. I think that will be used to make tomorrow’s lunch. The question is, what soup to make?  

I suppose that, if I will insist on experimenting like this, I should expect things to go a bit wrong sometimes.

When Jeanne (of Cook Sister!) announced that the subject for this month’s Waiter, Waiter…. I was delighted. It gave me the perfect excuse to try out something I had never made before but had had enjoyed several times  in restaurants. I was set on making bastilla.

If you haven’t yet tried bastilla, you should as soon as you get the chance. It is a great invention. It is a slightly sweet but spicy pie from Morocco. Traditionally it is made with pigeon but over here it tends to be replaced with chicken . I suppose thet is because pigeon is a bit expensive. The pie filling is flavoured with cumin, coriander, turmeric, ginger, garlic and rosewater and is encased in phyllo pastry topped with flaked almonds, sugar and cinnamon.

Apparently the pie is traditionally made by slow cooking whole pigeons until the meat is tender. I could only get my hands on pigeon breast so I had to formulate a different plan. I decided I would slow cook the pigeon in duck stock with the traditional spices, softened onion  and rosewater, then shred the meat for the pie filling. After that I would wrap the filling up into a filo pastry pasty , coat it with cinnamon sugar and flaked almonds then brush with beaten egg before baking it.

At least that is how it SHOULD have happened.

Things weren’t really working in my favour last night. My student turned up forty minutes late for our lesson, which meant that,  subsequently, everything ran late. This isn’t great when you’re planning on a 3 hour slow-cook dinner 

Also, Goon got back from his working weekend at 11:30pm, which meant that I was functioning without my sous-chef (or as I think of it, menial-job-monkey). So everything took twice as long to prepare as it would otherwise have done. The end result was that I took the pigeon off the heat at 11:30pm,  after 2nrs 15 cooking instead of 3 hours.

Fortunately the meat was tender, although it wasn’t quite shreddable. I cut it into little pieces instead, tasted, adjusted spice balance . 

Then came my major failing of the evening. I hadn’t worked with phyllo pastry before and no one had warned me about it. I suppose we all have to learn somehow.

I wrapped the mixture in a couple of phyllo sheets, topped with the sweet seasoning and baked.  I had no idea how quickly the outer layer would cook, nor that the inner layer would not cook at all in that time. Whoops.

Well, if you ignored the pastry disaster, this would have been good. The filling was tasty and moist, although shredded meat would be much more authentic (assuming Moroccan restaurants do authentic bastilla) than my finely chopped bird was. The vegetable cous-cous accompaniment was great (although that isn’t exactly difficult is it?), as was the sauce, which I made by reducing the cooking liquid of the pigeon and adding a good dollop of harissa. 

so there you have it- a not entirely successful entry to Waiter Waiter. I will make this again and next time it will work!

P.S This is the first time my shiny new camera has been used for the blog. I think it is making a significant difference to photo quality.  

P.P.S For any you Star Wars geeks reading this, I was tempted to do some Bastilla turning to the dark side reference thing in the titile but I figured that only about four people would get it.  Plus I’d look like a freak. I’m noping that no one apart from Star Wars geeks have read past the first line of this paragraph. Otherwise I’m going to look like a freak anyway.

My favourite bit of cooking is trying out new ideas. Writing up my thesis tends to leave my creative urge a little unfulfilled so I end up overcompensating for it in the kitchen. I aim to try a couple of new things each week and on occasion, like last night, three new things happen at once.

The centerpiece of last night’s meal was something I adapted from an idea I got from Freya. After my last attempt at poultry (the chorizo stuffed guinea fowl) she mentioned that she’s stuffed the skin of a chicken with mushrooms and truffle paste.

I decided that I didn’t have the funds to justify buying truffle paste, but i loved the mushroom idea and thought it would be perfect with a nice, delicately flavoured poussin. So I took some chestnut mushrooms, sliced them and sauteed them in butter with garlic and parsley before using them to stuff the poussin skin.

Poussin Stuffing in Progress

Then I slipped some serrano ham in between the mushrooms and the skin, hoping the flesh of the poussin would pick up the flavour of the garlic and mushroom and the skin would pick up some smokiness from the ham.

My carb accompaniment was a cross between a dauphinoise and a boulangere partially inspired by Trig’s latke’s. I saw these and suddenly got a craving for potatoes and sour cream and so this was born

This is potatoes layered (like a boulangere or dauphinoise) with onion and paprika. I poured over a mixture of  sour cream with a little chicken stock mixed in and baked the potatoes for about an hour and fifteen at gas mark 5.

Finally, my vegetable accompaniment was shredded brussel sprouts stir fried with butter and pancetta, which, once they’d cooked, I made into a little nest for the poussin

So the verdict for my three experiments was this. The poussin was awesome. The mushroom  and garlic flavours were very noticeable in the meat, whch had stayed very moist. The skin was perfectly crisp and had gained a little flavour from the addition of the ham, although it wasn’t as much as I had hoped.

The potato dish was very good, like an exciting version of  dauphinoise. While it didn’t have the luxurious richness of dauphinoise, it was a pleasant and interesting change. The sprouts were fine. They were nothing to write home about, but still tasty, and I think they’d be a good way of converting a sprout hater.

Also, the three dishes complemented each other reasonably well and the combination of sprouts, paprika and cream gave the whole meal a slightly Eastern European feel.

I wish I felt this inspired more often!