As I mentioned in my last post, Goon had a couple of friends staying last weekend. I was supposed to be cooking for them, so we’d bought a huge leg of lamb to roast. After all, everyone loves a roast, right?

Wrong. It seems that someone didn’t like potatoes and someone else didn’t like peas, or vegetables in general. Anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time will know about my tolerance of fussy eaters. I really can’t be bothered trying, especially if potatoes and green veg are off the list. So I gave up trying completely  and that’s how we all got stuck with take-away.

That left me and Goon with the problem of what to do with the huge leg after his friends had left. It would feed six at the very least, probably more, so there was no point in us roasting it whole. Goon suggested chopping it into lamb leg steaks, which I thought would have been a great idea if we had a meat cleaver. As it is, we have nothing that could handle the large bone in a lamb leg, but Goon thought he’d improvise anyway.

Goon cut some meat away from the bone He then just hacked chunks off until we had two decent sized steaks, which I marinated in a home made olive, garlic and basil pesto.

The problem was that Goon didn’t know what to do with the rest of the meat, so he just, sort of, hacked at it.

Hmm… well, I have to say it’s actually better than the butchery at a certain place we buy from in Shepherds Bush. At least Goon had managed to keep the bone intact rather than getting shards of it in the meat.

Goon got bored at theis point, wrapped up the meat in cling film (exactly as it is in the picture) and then bunged it in the fridge. It got an interesting (high pitched and whiny) reaction when the blonde flatmate came home and found it.

The pesto for the lamb steaks was a very simple one. I just used olive oil, chopped black olives, chopped garlic and a big bunch of torn basil and popped them in a blender, then tasted and adjusted the ingredient balance until I was happy, This got smeared all over the scored lamb leg steaks.

The next day we hunted around for things to serve with our pesto crusted steaks. We found Jersey Royal potatoes on special offer, and since everyone raves about how fantastic they are, we snatched them up just to see what all the fuss was about. I also spotted some broad beans, which have apparently just come into season, and picked up some feta so I could make a salad with them.

I was pleased with the lamb. The meat took up the marinade flavour very well. I just wish I had some fresh oregano to add to it! The salad worked particularly well. It so happened that I had some peas in the freeezer and half a courgette in the fridge that I could throw into the mix. I also had some rather tired looking mint but just enough was still usable for me to make an mint-infused olive oil dressing.

I see what people mean about the Jersey Royal potatoes. They have a really good texture and a slightly more earthy flavour than other new potatoes.  I still think I prefer Anya potatoes though.

This meal was the first time I’d had broad-beans since I was a kid. It reminded me of going strawberry and broad-bean picking in the school summer holidays. It seems that broad-beans are one of those things I like much more as an adult. Especially with some mint and crumbled feta.

The rest of our lamb has now been cut into bite sized pieces and is sitting in the freezer. I need to think up ways to use it fast since Goon is moving in a week!

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!

Last Sunday, over lunch, I was telling Goon about how I wanted to enter WTSIM no 5 (which Cooksister Jeanne is hosting) but was totally stuck on ideas. The theme this time was stuffed vegetables and fruits.  Goon had a suggestion.

GOON: I know what you can stuff. I’ve seen green wrinkly things. The label said you can stuff them.
ME: Any idea what they are?
GOON: Green wrinkly things.
ME: But what are they called?
GOON: I don’t know. But they’re green and wrinkly.

I was clearly going to get no more information about the mystery vegetable from him and I mentally dismissed the green wrinkly things as some figment of Goon’s imagination. But, that evening, six of them appeared in the kitchen.

I recognised them immediately, although I think I’d describe them as more knobbly than wrinkly. Goon had picked up kerala, which had appeared in my mother’s kitchen from time to time when I was little. It’s a vegetable which, like courgettes and sprouts, drives fear into the hearts of small children.

Here the vegetable is known as bitter gourd. It’s called that for a good reason. In order to remind myself what the kerala tasted like, I cut a tiny sliver from the middle of the largest one and tasted.

For a second I thought it wasn’t so bad but, literally a few seconds later, there seemed to be a small chemical war going on in my mouth.  My face contorted and I made a noise that was something like “GAAAAAAAH!” The next ten minutes were spent trying desperately to drown out the flavour with cherry brandy. It didn’t go easily. *

I was seriously dubious about trying anything with the green knobbly gourd but, since Goon had gone to all the effort of getting it, I thought I’d better make an attempt at cooking it. Some people actively like it, so there must be something I could do to de-bitter my kerala.

I called up my parents to see if they could help me make this strange vegetable edible. Apparently they’d only ever used them in salads and curries, which didn’t really help me with my plans for stuffing, but cooking with sugar and tamarind seemed to be a common theme. The internet also provided me with some help. The bitterness of the kerala could be reduced by scraping off some skin, deseeding it, rubbing it with salt and soaking in cold water. I decided to try and balance the bitter flavour with a very strong sweet and sour stuffing made from tomato, onion,  and lots of sugar and tamarind. After all, it works for chicory. The dish would be an accompaniment to  a Sri-Lankan style goat curry.

I didn’t really know what to expect from my kerala as I began to prepare them, but scraping off the skin was easy enough. It did however leave a big green mess in the kitchen.

Once the skin was off, I cut the kerala in half and looked inside. Like many gourds, it had  a clear divide between the flesh and seed area.

A small knife was ideal to scrape out the seeds. Now there was a cylindrical hole in the gourd which was a perfect shape and size for stuffing. 

So the gourds were salted and soaked for an hour whilst I finished preparing the rest of our dinner: the slow cooked goat curry and spiced rice. I also made a lot of dahl, just in case the gourd was inedible.

The tomato chutney stuffing for the gourd was simple to make. I sweated some onion, added a couple of fresh chopped tomatoes, tomato puree and coriander, then added lots of sugar, tamarind and just a drop or two of vinegar to make it really sweet and tangy. Once the gourds were stuffed I cooked them in the excess tomato concoction.

Now, maybe Goon accidentally found the bitterest bitter gourds in the shop, but even after lots of soaking, these things were still not very nice. Goon ate one piece and said “Why the heck would anyone voluntarily eat these things?” I have to admit, I was thinking the same thing. The sweet and sour flavour certainly helped but, after a few bites, the bitterness was overwhelming. I can’t believe that some people actually eat it without salting it first!

So, if you happen to be a bitter gourd fan, good for you. I don’t get it but I think the sweet-sour thing turned it from totally inedible to the point where I could manage a piece or two. Fortunately there was plenty of curry so we didn’t go hungry.

This is my entry to this month’s Waiter, Waiter event. The roundup will be on Jeanne’s blog very soon, so go and check out the other entries. I’m sure that, unlike me, most people even made something they could eat!

* Which meant I had to drink a lot of cherry brandy. Shame.

This has got to be the best thing to come home to after a night out. 

Well, it would have been if things had gone to plan.

I don’t get to go out very often any more. In fact, apart from occasional trips to the pub after seminars with my fellow mathmos, I don’t go out at all. This is why I was so excited about going to my friend’s houewarming party last night. I’d been really good friends with this girl at university but partially lost touch after she finished her degree, so I was looking forward to a big catch up.

My original plan was to stay out until 11:30 and get takeaway on the way home, but the idea of stodge actually made me feel a bit sick. So I went for what was, in my opinion, the next quickest option.

In the afternoon I headed to my local fishmongers (Cape Clear) to buy myself some nice sea bream. The people there are very helpful and they’ll pop a lemon and some parsley in the bag for you with your fish for free. It’s practically a ready meal in a bag but with nice, fresh ingredients and no artificial anything. All I needed to was grill the fish for a few minutes, then add the lemon and chopped parsley and perhaps boil some new potatoes. Could it be any easier?

While I was there I also got to sample some samphire for the first time. I really liked it so I bought a load to go with my fish dinner. After all, it would only take seconds to cook.

So I was all set up for a night out with some friends followed by coming back to a gorgeous, tasty dinner. My mistake was trying to take Goon with me. After I’d planned to leave at 7pm, Goon turned up at  7:15 and somehow then spent 40 minutes in the shower. So, by the time he was ready to go, we were over an hour late and, with the tube engineering works, we’d end up spending twice as much time travelling than we would at the party.

So no night out for me.

Dinner was still tasty though, and I got to try out the interesting new vegetable whilst sober, which certainly wouldn’t have happened if I went out. Another plus side is that I can submit my samphire to Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging which is hosted by Rinku from Cooking in Westchester this week.

Even though samphire has been eaten in Britain for ages (hundreds of years), a remarkable number of people (well, at least amongst the students I hang out with) haven’t heard of it. For some reason it doesn’t make it’s way into the supermarkets but is sold in proper fishmongers. The plant comes in several different varieties. The one I got hold of was marsh samphire. Apparently rock samphire is sometimes also eaten pickled and is a delicacy in Lancashire and Northumbria.

I think marsh samphire is a wonderful vegetable, with a pleasant flavour, that is a bit like salty asparagus, and a crisp crunchy texture. It’s a great thing to eat alongside fish. When I tried it for the first time at the fishmongers, I had it raw, but usually it is blanched in hot water for a few seconds or steamed for a very short time to lessen its saltiness. Last night, I went for the first option, then tossed it in lemon and butter.

This whole meal literally took 15 minutes to cook, and most of that was taken up by waiting for the potatoes to boil. The fish, after its skin was rubbed with salt, had about 8 minutes under the grill. I spent two minutes incinerating some parsley to add to some melted butter for a makeshift sauce and the samphire was done in seconds.

So who needs ready meals when you’ve got fish? \o/ Well, people who don’t like fish obviously, but I’ve never really understood them 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!

The other day, I decided to look back over my posts from the last 8 months or so and something struck me about the duck dinners I’d been making. There’s been: 

1. Duck with zesty orange sauce
2. Duck with raspberry coulis
3. Duck with blackcurrant glaze
4. Duck with cherries and brandy

Oh no! I’ve become stuck in a duck with fruit rut!  The one exception to this was the spontaneous curried duck but I was very drunk when I made that, so I’m not sure if it counts.

In desperation to get out of this dangerous habit, I went looking around the internet for ideas. It seems that most of the world was ALSO stuck in a duck with fruit rut. There are a few recipes for duck with port but even they seems to involve cassis. There were some red wine reductions suggested too but, meh, boring!

So, with the internet yielding no inspiration I went looking around the shops when my eye was caught by …

beautiful bright pink rhubarb. It had been ages since I’d cooked with it. The last time had been in a rhubarb crumble I made about three years ago. I imagined the tanginess going really well with my duck and to make it even better, rhubarb isn’t a fruit, it’s a vegetable, so i would be out of the fruit rut!

The only problem I could see was that Goon didn’t like rhubarb and, let’s face it, it isn’t as easy to disguise as figs are.

Later on at home, Goon was looking very suspiciously at the rhubarb. ”Rhubarb’s sour!” he said. Apparently there’d been bad childhood experiences with rhubarb crumble. So I did what I thought best, and ignored him.   

Looking through my cupboards, I found a few chunks of stem ginger to add to my rhubarb compote, which turned out to be remarkably simple to make.  I simmered the rhubarb, ginger and a sprig of rosemary together in some cider with loads of sugar until the rhubarb was soft.

Then I poured off the excess water and removed the rosemary. Finally I pan fried the duck breasts to rare (well, verging on medium this time perhaps)  and served them with the compote and sides of some asparagus sauteed with garlic and gratin dauphinoise.

Yay, pink! \o/ The crazy pink colour of the compote was enough to get Goon to try some. The gingery flavour alonside the tanginess was enough to keep him eating it. Who needs artifical colours and flavours when you’ve got stem ginger and rhubarb?  It was lovely with the duck and the creamy dauphinoise was a really good accompaniment. We washed it all down with an equally pink and slightly sweet Californian rosé.

I’ve decided to put this up for weeked herb blogging, which this week is being hosted by Ed at Tomato . So, to make it educational,  here are some interesting facts about rhubarb.

Apparently rhubarb wasn’t eaten before the 17th Century, when sugar became readily available to most people. I guess that makes sense: it’s pretty damn sour by itself. It contains a fair bit of oxalic acid, which in high doses is a neurotoxin, although you’d have to eat about 5kg of rhubarb leaves (or even more of the shoots)  to have any harmful effects. There’s still enough in rhubarb stems to strip your teeth a little though!

The rhubarb bought at this time of year is ‘forced’ to grow out of season by increasing the temperature around the plant. This is done by covering the plant with an upturned bucket. Forced rhubab is more tender and more brightly coloured than that grown in season. Traditionally, this first rhubarb of the year is grown in the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ of Leeds, Wakefield and Morely.

And, quite annoyingly, even though rhubarb was always considered a vegetable in the past, this changed in the 1940s. When the plant was exported to the States, the confused officials didn’t know how to classify it. They decided it should be classified on how it was eaten. So I guess, technically, if I’d eaten my compote in America, I would have been eating a fruit and I’d still feel stuck in a rut.

For once, I’m glad I’m in England!

Up until now, Goon has always insisted his steaks are cooked for longer than mine. I think that’s probably fair considering I tend to take the ’show it the pan’ approach to cooking certain meats. But with tuna, this is no longer the case. Goon now likes his tuna seared and it’s all to do with this fab Ramsey recipe.

It’s a classic really, seared tuna in a mustard, honey and soy coating with crushed black peppercorns pressed into the fish, served with braised and caramelised chicory. If you happen to have the book ‘Secrets,’ do try this recipe.  It is really delicious and doesn’t look too bad either!

I know, I know, its half way through January - why am I posting about something that happened around Christmas now?

The reason is because Dad took this long to send me the photos.  Now I can tell you what I made to satisfy the requirements on this enormous list.

First of all I should give a bit of background on my parents’ eating. It is fairly well described here.  Almost all meals at their house are curries. On occasion you’ll find them making a spicy stir fry. The general method of cooking is ‘boil with curry powder.’

So, when I arrived at Mum and Dad’s on Sunday, it turned out mum was working that night so the family meal had to be delayed until Christmas day. However we’d bought some tuna chunks from Sainsbury which were going to become Mum’s dinner. Dad was going to curry them (for a change ). I couldn’t think of many worse ways to treat tuna and I felt I needed to prove to Dad that you really don’t need to curry everything. He didn’t seem to believe me.

So rather oddly, Dad and I had a bit of a cook-off. His method: take tuna cubes, simmer for 20-30 minutes in water with two tablespoons (eek!) of sri-lankan roasted curry powder, garlic, ginger and a heck of a lot of chilli.

My method: Marinate tuna cubes with in an ad-hoc ginger-based marinade for an hour. Heat a little olive oil in a non stick pan with a few slivers of garlic and a little green chilli (no seeds.) Fry tuna cubes on a high heat setting until the outside is totally cooked (should be about 1.5 minutes), then turn off the heat and allow the residual heat to keep cooking the fish. After about  a minute and a half, toss through chopped coriander leaves and a little lime juice. Drizzle some chilli-infused oil over the fish and  serve immediately. 

Shame I still hadn’t figured out how to work the auto-focus on Dad’s camera.

Mum would be the judge in theory. In practice, things went something like this.Now, I’ve altered some of the wording as I guess not an awful lot of you reading this understand Sinhalese, but the meanings in this conversation have been unchanged.

Mum: We’ve both been overcooking tuna. Next time we pan fry it like this.
Dad: I like mine better.
Mum: But this pan fried tuna is soft. Not tough like the curried tuna.
Dad: I like my tuna hard.
Mum: Also without the curry powder, I can actually taste the fish.
Dad: I don’t like the taste of tuna.
Mum: i like the coriander and chilli too
Dad: I hate coriander.

So there we go. Dad’s tuna dish was better, regardless of what Mum thought.

For my own dinner I had a swordfish steak which I made a hollandaise sauce for. I’m sure I’ve said before that making hollandaise sauce is easy. Correction: making hollandaise sauce is easy IF you have a whisk. My parents don’t, so I was whisking my sauce very quickly with a fork.

By some miracle it didn’t curdle. I didn’t dare let it thicken too much, so I had a very, very thin hollandaise. It tasted fine though.

And since you are al probably wondering what the hell I thought up to satisfy Dad’s uber-list of fad requirements. Here is is.

Marinated monkfish with a lime-cream sauce served with chilli noodles and garlic steamed pak choi. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but given the restrictions I thought it wasn’t too bad.

Dad now has a new fad. He doesn’t like things with subtle flavours. I kid you not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve not got around to reviewing it yet, but about a week ago I went back to Mimouza restaurant in Shepherds Bush. I love most of the food here and as usual was unsure on  what to have for a starter. Goon decded he wanted bastilla (probably my favourite) so I was torn between the merguez and the zaalouka (a mixture of aubergine, tomato and coriander.) I decided to have the merguez but a couple of days later I found I was still craving zaalouka.

Now that surely is something that doesn’t happen very often. Nevertheless I really wanted zaalouka and by last Thursday, I couldn’t take it any more. I needed to at least try and make my own.

I’m not really one for making starters for midweek meals, so I decided the zaalouka would have to be a side dish for something. I also had a spaghetti squash that needed using up so I decided use them both as acompaniments to some lamb kebabs. 

I made the kebabs by lightly griddling chunks of lamb leg steak (which had been marinating in harissa for a few hours) and skewering them with aubergine and yellow pepper which had been griled with lots of olive oil and garlic. I served these on top of the zaalouka, which was made by simply pan frying aubergine and onion  then simmering these with plenty of tomato, lots of ground cumin, coriander seed and garlic and freshly chopped coriander with just a hint of turneric.

I had some chilli oil for dipping too.

This was the first time I’d tried spaghetti squash. I have to admit the whole ’squash-turning-to-spaghetti’ thing is very exciting. Ok, I didn’t love the flavour and texture quite as much as pasta type spaghetti, but it was still damn good. I tossed it in olive oil, cumin, grond coriander and cinnamon to make it an appropriate side dish to the kebab-zaalouka combination.

The only problem was i did’t realise quite how much it would make. We still have left-over squash in the fridge. :/

Hmm… maybe I should have de-speckled that photo.

Anyone for lots of leftover squash?