This will be my entry for this week’s weekend herb blogging, so I imagine a lot of you coming through from our lovely host’s site may want to see the photo …..

and skip to the end for the recipe.

Some others among you may notice something a bit odd about that picture. I’m sure you know that food bloggers generally take great care with their photography.  Hell, Amanda and Tyler even have their own photo tent with special lighting! Whilst I haven’t got that much equipment (yet), I still do my best for the blog. So why then do I have a fairly scruffy photo with my mobile phone, Goon’s course notes and several other pieces of rubbish in the background for this dish?

It’s all down to one of Goon’s flatmate.  Once upon a time, when I was a sprightly second year student, I thought there was no way I’d ever want to live on my own. My flatmates were great, I adored spending time with them and arguments were rare. How things have changed! Spending time at Goon’s in the presence of his cohabitants is starting to turn me into a bit of a misanthropic cow.

Let’s face it,when you’re a foodie, it is damn hard sharing a kitchen with people who think a good meal (as in one they would cook for a formal dinner party) is Tesco value tuna, tomato sauce and pasta.

Then we have the case of disappearing food. It appears the irritating squeamish one has another bad habit: throwing out food that looks even remotely unfamilar or has any kind of aroma. We have lost a dragonfruit “because it looked funny” and the best part of a pheasant “because it smelt funny” and a fresh pack of smoked salmon “because it smelt of fish.”

What the hell did she think salmon should smell like!? Rose petals?

A more pressing irritation is that, recently, one flatmate has taken to having Bible parties in the front room. Yes, you read it correctly. BIBLE parties. This means that the room has to be immaculate and we certainly can’t eat in there, which is a right pain because that is where the dining table is. Goon and I are forced to eat in his rather cramped bedroom on the very full computer table. 

It is annoying to be kicked out of the dining room when setting the table, but the conversations going on between this lot are plain disturbing. This lot have a book that lists all the words in the Bible alphabetically and gives page references for each. They LOVE that thing.

“Oooh, look it says the word ‘and’ appears 5,907 times in the Bible.”
“Really? I wonder whether these numbers have any significance.”
“How many times does the work ’the’ appear?”

Crazy!

I hate eating diiner in the bedroom. Rice gets on the floor and the lack of space means it is so much harder to photograph in there and we end up with clutter in the background. Also, Goon has a habit of hiding the plates under the bed so he can avoid the washing up. For days you wonder what the funny smell is, and then a couple of weeks later you find the plates, by then fully concious and with their own legs, making a daring escape out of the bedroom window.

Ok, maybe I made the last bit up, but they do end up covered in an interesting range of several species of mould. Goon’s bedroom is a mycologist’s dream.

Now that I’ve had my rant and explained the reason for the dodgy photo, here’s the interesting bit: a rough recipe for the Goan fish curry. This will work for most fish, although I prefer to use something white and flakey, like cod or haddock. This dish is easy to make and really tasty.

Take a large onion, peel it and slice it into  thin half-rings. Fry it gently in groundnut oil with a lot (about 1 tablespoon each) of coriander and cumin, a large clove of crushed garlic and about the same amount of ginger, two chopped red birds eye chillies, a teaspoon of cayenne, two teaspoons of paprika and a teaspoon of turmeric. When the onions are soft, add about 100ml of fish stock and about 150ml of coconut milk, and allow the lot to bubble until you have a slightly thin curry sauce.

At this point I add the ingredient that really makes a goan curry: tamarind. I generally use tamarind paste which I get from Asian speciality stores. I find the trick to using tamarind paste is to dilute it with a little bit of water and then add it slowly to the dish , tasting every so often to make sure you aren’t overdoing it. Tamarind is one of those things that can make a dish delicious but, a little too much makes it sour and, to some people, unpalatable, so it pays to be careful.   

After adding your desired amount of tamarind, add the fish fillets to the sauce and simmer for amout ten minutes until they are cooked. Then taste, adjust spice and seasoning and serve over basmati rice (perhaps flavoured with ginger and spring oniions) with a vegetable curry. Last night we had beans with coriander and garlic, cooked in coconut milk.

This is a really delicious dish. The tamarind provides a pleasant sour pungency that is followed by a slight sweetness from the coconut milk and a warmth from the spice. Personally I might add another chilli, but Goon gets funny about these things. 

It is the tamarind in this dish that makes it suitable to be an entry to Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging which this week is hosted by Becky from Key Lime and Coconut.

For those of you unfamiliar with tamarind, the spice is the fruit pulp of a tree native to East Africa. It now is found all over Asia and South America as well. The young fruits of this tree have the sour flavour that makes a Goan curry so special. As the fruits get older they become sweeter and then are more suitable for use in desserts.

Ifyou may think you’ve never had tamarind, you may be suprised. It is one of the main ingredients in Worcestershire sauce! 

So there we go- a rant, a recipe and a brief collection of facts on a very tasty spice. Never let it be said that this blog lacks variety.  

It seems I have finally found a little bit of time to post this week. Well, actually, I haven’t as such. I’m still supposed to be writing thesis but I have got to the stage where I’m just far too hungry to concentrate on anything challenging, so i might as well give up until I get the opportunity to eat which, if I’m lucky will be in an hour.

So this week’s enormous workload means that my cooking has also been fairly limited. There’s been a restaurant visit, a take away, a pheasant sausage linguine thing (which I’ll write up if I get the chance) and this rather strange invention of mine.

I was rooting through my cupboards at the weekend when I came across a jar of rose-petal jam, which I had bought ages ago to use with game. It got me thinking about an idea I had been meaning to try for a while.

I have made this lavender roasted lamb a few times and the success of it made me want to try out a different culinary flowers. Rose was the most obvious to go for next. I already had  rosewater and the jam so the only thing I had left to try out was dried rose petals.

Luckily for me, I live reasonably close to a bunch of Iranian shops where I could find some dried Damascus rose petals. Apparently spice specialist stores will stock them too, although I’ve never seen them anywhere else.  Dried rose petals are used in Middle Eastern cooking as a spice and are most commonly used in the powdered spice mixture Ras al Hanout.

My plan was to make a dry spice rub out of the just the petals for a half lamb leg, pour over a rose jam and lemon ‘glaze’ and roast it.

The rose petals certainly looked weird, but the smell was gorgeous when I was grinding them up. I used about one and a half heaped tablespoons of petals and ground them into a fine powder. Then I made little slits all over the leg, put a sliver of ginger into each one and rubbed the rose powder over it. The glaze was made simply by diluting rose petal jam with rose-water  and adding the grated zest of about half a lemon.

While that was all roasting in the oven I made some saffron roasted potatoes. These were suprisingly good for roast tatties without goose fat, and were also quite easy to make. I boiled a pinch of ground saffron in enough salted water to cover the potatoes for a few minutes, then added the potatoes and brought the pan back to the boil. After five minutes, I drained them and gave them a good shake to fluff them up, put them in a roasting pan and coated them in olive oil, to which i had added another pinch of ground saffron stamens. After 40 minutes roasting they came out beautifully golden.

Finally, I made a sauce of more rosewater, more jam, lamb stock, rosemary and beaujolais. I deliberately chose beaujolais because of the strawberry flavour of the gamay grape. A rose-strawberry flavour sounded great to me! I ended up simmering the stock with a sprig of rosemary for about five minutes, then adding rose water and the jam and reducing it. The beaujolais went in right at the end so it retained its strawberry flavour.

This really worked amazingly. In fact, this is the kind of meal I’d want to work on so I could make it my signature dish. The flavour of rose is lovely with lamb and the subtle strawberry and ginger was delicious. The lemon imparted a good aroma without getting in the way of the other flavours and the saffron potatoes were a perfect delicately flavoured accompaniment. I accompanied the meal with some sauteéd courgette strips tossed in butter with a tiny bit of chopped mint. Actually pretty near perfect, even if i do say so myself.

The best thing about this is I’ve found a new garnish ad it is PINK! \o/

I’ve decided to make this an entry for Weekend Herb Blogging (the brainchild of Kalyn at Kalyn’s Kitchen), since rose features so massively in this dish.  This week the event is being hosted by Anna at Morsels and Musings.

For many years now, James has been telling me stories about how his father, a security guard at Aldershot Army Base, gets goat meat from the gurka’s staying there. Apparently these guys buy whole dead animals from the local farmers and then butcher them up themselves for curry. These stories always intrigued me and I wanted to try curry goat myself.

My experience of Nepalese food has been limited to a single restaurant on the Uxbridge Road in Shepherds Bush. It certainly is good and, while I lived near it, I would visit it on almost a weekly basis after late night  rehearsals. The cuisine is very similar to North Indian cuisine, with some curries that are mild and creamy and some so hot they’d strip your tongue of tastebuds! I was always rather disappointed that goat curry was never on the menu.

It wasn’t until Franka at Can Cook must Cook mentioned Trinidadian curry goat that I suddenly realised I had a hope of finding goat meat in London. Franka pointed me in the direction of Shepherds Bush market so, on my first free Saturday, I wandered over. It didn’t take me long to find a small butchers advertising curry goat in the window for a mere £2.99 per kilo. There were other interesting looking things there too, including whole oxtails and a sheep’s head. I made a mental note to come back from some of the goat leg (again cheap at £1,89 per kilo) and the oxtail.

Even though goat meat is very rarely eaten in Britain it is an extremely popular meat in some other areas of the world. Despite this, I seemed to find it difficult to get some good information about cooking it. The best I could find, was one line in a Wikipedia article stating that the meat should be cooked long and slow. After doing a bit of research on the spices involved I came up with this plan:

1. Fry off some finely diced onions, garlic and red chilli, add ground cumin and coriander, garam masala, minced garlic, ginger and fennel seed.
2. Brown the goat in the spices, cover with water and leave to simmer gently for three hours.
3. Shortly before the goat has cooked, roast some more coriander and cumin seed and make a curry powder of these and fennel seed.
4. Remove goat from liquid and keep warm. Boil the liquid repidly to reduce it. 
5. Fry some more onion, garlic and ginger. Add curry powder, more garam masala, a little tomato and chopped coriander. Add reduced goat stock, simmer for a bit, taste and adjust seasoning. Stir the meat in, warm through, top with sliced spring onion and serve over boiled rice  with a vegetable curry and lentils.

That is pretty much how it worked in the end, except that, on tasting it, I decided it needed a touch of cream, to make it like the lamb curry I had in the last nepalese restaurant I visited. I’m not sure how authentic that was but it made a big difference to my curry.

The pieces of meat labeled ‘curry goat are obviously the spare bits as they had a fair bit of bone in them and a little gristle but the meat itself was gorgeous. The flavour was very much like mutton but much more rich. The three hour simmer had done it good and the meat melted in the mouth.

I decided to make an aubergine, chilli and tomato concoction to accompany my goat and also some tarka dahl and plain boiled basmati rice. It’s definitely a dish i’ll ake again, although I think Trinidadian curry goat has to be tried first. 

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.

Does anyone else think that curry leaves are under-used? When I was growing up, this wonderful emerald green leaf would crop up in a lot of my dinners. My parents were fond of using them wherever they could, especially with lentil dishes.

Now I notice that, whenever I go out to an Indian restaurant, there’s not a curry leaf in sight. It’s a real shame as I think this leaf adds a wondeful unique flavour to curries. I wouldn’t even consider making a Sri-Lankan meal without them now. Thank goodness they freeze so well!

The only restaurant I’ve found in Britiain that makes good use of these leaves is Memsaab in Chelsea. They use them in several of their dishes, including the delicious lobster I had on my last visit.It was this lobster dish that inspired me to make Friday night’s dinner. I had a craving for curry and I had a bag of frozen squid  in the freezer.  I thought a mimic of the flavours that went with my lobster would be a particularly good way of getting rid of it.

The problem was, I had no idea what was in that sauce, so I got improvising. I remember the sauce being light and creamy, which suggested to me that coconut milk had been used. The spices were light but definitely a main feature of the dish. I decided to try out cumin, coriander, ground ginger, a little fenugreek,  a touch of red chilli and garlic.

I simmered the coconut milk with softened onion, the spices and the curry leaves for about 10 minutes and tasted. It was lacking the sweetness that I remembered from the Memsaab dish so I added a bit of tomato puree. When I was just about happy with the flavour of the sauce, I cut off the scallop roes and let them simmer in the sauce for a couple of  minutes then added the cut up squid. When they had just turned translucent, I took the pot off the heat, seared the scallops seperately then added them to the mix.

A quick taste let me know that a squeeze of lemon was needed plus a little more spice. Once that was added, I was pretty happy with the dish so it was time to make the accompaniments. I wanted something else light and delicate and so I boiled some basmati rice with saffron and cardamoms and made a tarka daal as a side dish.

On the whole the curry was very good. It wasn’t up to the standard of Memsaab (unsuprisingly) but good for a first attempt. I absolutely loved the curry leaves in this but I did feel something was missing, I still can’t put my finger on it but I’ll keep experimenting until I do.

On a whim, I’ve decided to submit this post as a very late entry to this week’s Weekend Herb Blogging, invented by Kalyn at Kayln’s Kitchen and, this week, hosted by Anna at  Anna’s Cool Finds. Although this dish would probably qualify on several different ingredients my herb of choice this week is, of course, curry leaves.

When it comes down to it, although I like eating pancakes, I hate making them. They’re a bit time consuming and generate a fair bit of washing up. They don’t provide me with the creative license I like to use when I’m cooking (not until I get to making the fillings anyway) and there’s usually someone around who’ll eat them as they come out of the pan so that I, when I think I’m finally done, turn around to find an empty plate and a bunch of fat gits demanding more pancakes.

However, since it was Shrove Tueday this week, I thought I’d use the pancake tradition to give myself an excuse to try something I’d wanted to have for a while. I first encountered this dish in Renezio, a very nice little Italian eaterie in Shepherds Bush. I’ve since learned that it is an Italian classic.

The dish was a cannelloni filled with veal. The pasta was replaced by very thin, soft crépes. Apparently, back in the day, these crépes would be frequently be used to make a poor man’s version of cannelloni or lasagne. I thought the Renezio version was fantastic and I’d been dying to make some of my own. So, this Shrove Tuesday, I gave it a go. 

It seems that veal mince is rather hard to come by. I’m sure I’ve seen it at Borough, but I didn’t have the foresight to buy any last time I went and I quickly found that no supermarket would stock any kind of veal cut suitable for mincing. Since there also was no poultry mince anywhere, and I REALLY couldn’t be bothered to mince up some myself, I went with the next best thing: pork mince.

The rest of the recipe was close to the traditional version. The filling was essentially a marinara sauce with added pork mince, chopped spinach and ricotta. Once it had been rolled in the crépes, I topped the canneloni with bechamel sauce and mozzarella and baked it for about 15 minutes.

It looks like this electric oven is still producing the interesting spotting effect on cheese topped food.

And typically there was one roll that wouldn’t fit in the dish. Actually, it wouldn’t fit in our stomachs either, so I had it for breakfast this morning.

I suppose veal mince would have perfected this, but the pork substitution worked suprisingly well. I served my crespelle with a simple green leaf salad tossed in a dressing of lemon infused oil and balsamic vinegar.

In theory, I’m not supposed to be writing up any more recipes until that damned thesis of mine is finished but, I noticed that there are very few decent recipes for this dish on the internet so it seems silly to not record what I did. So here is the not veal crespelle recipe.

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!

Freya!

Well done, Freya, for correctly spotting that Goon was snacking on green beans dipped in honey. They were actually unwashed raw green beans that he was supposed to be rinsing and chopping for me so I could make a garlicky bean accompaniment to some rabbit (see post below).

The thing is, if anything edible is left out, Goon will eat it. If two edible things are left out, Goon will eat them together. I made the mistake of getting him to chop beans next to a pot of honey and the inevitable happened.

I’m intrigued by Trig’s suggestion of anchovies in marmalade. Maybe I’ll leave those together on the worksurface and see what happens.

I’m afraid that, when it comes to cookery books, I can be a bit of a cheap student. Most of my (now rather large) collection was found in the ‘reduced’ section at Borders. The exceptions are Ramsay’s secrets and a couple of Nigel Slater books.

The most inspirational of my bargain finds is a book called ‘On the Grill’ by Matthew Drennan. Whilst this book is dominated by barbeque recipes,  and hence not appropriate for my measly selection of kitchen equipment, some of the ideas for flavours are great. One recipe particularly caught my eye for rabbit that is marinated in red wine,  then barbequed and served with a dried fig and prune chutney.

I couldn’t (and possibly wouldn’t) follow the recipe exactly, but I wanted to try an adapted version. Drennan’s recipe involved a farmed rabbit, as a wild one would be very tough when barbequed. Since wild rabbits are much easier to come across around here, I got one of those. I thought I’d marinate my bunny in red wine as he suggested but then braise it gently in the marinade instead of grilling.

A thought struck me as I constructed my marinade. The chutney Drennan involved prunes. Now what did I have lying around that tasted more than a little bit prune-like…..?

So a very generous splash was added to the red wine along with rosemary and thyme and, after roughly 12 hours of marinating, the rabbit was cooked at 140C for three hours. 

Although Drennan’s recipe called for dried figs, I much prefer fresh ones and I could easily get my hands on some from the small Iranian grocery store near High Street Kensington. The chutney style thing I turned them into was somewhat improvised. It involved lightly caramelised  diced onion, chopped figs, honey, cinnamon and another splash of the ‘prune gin.’

The rabbit, which had turned an rich burgundy colour was served up with creamy mash and green beans. The deep red wine and ‘prune’ flavours had permeated the meat really well and went nicely with the fig accompaniment.  Admittedly something like saffron rice  probably would have suited this better than mash but, hey, we had potatoes to use up and Goon fancied mash.

There are plenty of other great ideas to try in the book. The next one to appear here will probably be saffron and orange chicken.

Very silly things happen if I leave Goon alone in the kitchen unsupervised. On Sunday night, he created his own culinary invention. 

Can anyone see (or guess) what Goon’s new favourite (and very unusual) snack is? He apparently enjoyed it although, I must admit, I wasn’t too keen.