Calm down, Lea.

When I went to pick up the meat to make my ostrich wellington I noticed something rather intruiging on the stall. Ostrich liver for £4.50 with the claim that it was comparable to calves liver.

How could I resist? So the next week I went back to grab some. The idea of blending  lightly flavoured vinaigrette with figs and serving it over calves liver came from the book ‘Secrets’ by Gordon Ramsey. It hadn’t let me down so far so I thought I’d give it a go with the ostrich.

Not my best photography day. So here is ostrich liver wiht roacket salad, fig vinaigrette and blurry polenta. :/

The ostrich liver was very nice but I don’t think it’s quite right to say it is similar to calves liver. It has a slightly stronger more grassy flavour. As a result it overpowered the accompaniments I’d chosen for it. To be honest I think it would have gone better in something like this chicken liver and mavrodaphne recipe. It’s definitely one to try again though!

Only an emergency because there turned out to be considerably less rabbit than there should have been.

I bought the rabbit from Furness Fish and Game at Borough. This was a mistake in itself as the next day I found a Manor Farm stall at Notting Hill market and they sell them for nearly a  pound less! Usually Furness are fine but this time it was a bit different. I got the rabbit to make something similar to this for myself and Goon.

I had told Goon to put the rabbit in to slow braise while I was still in the office. Then I met up with him and his friends briefly at the pub before heading over to cook. He was still out when I got back. I pulled the casserole dish out of the oven. At first I wondered how Goon had managed to fit the rabbit into such a small container. Then I realised. This rabbit must have been a very sad rabbit as it only had two legs.

So quick improvisation was needed. I decided to stick with the idea of a creamy sauce with mustard and mushrooms but added some left-over turkey to make up for the lost rabbit. The result was actually very tasty.

The sauce was made with cream, mustard a bit of white wine, rosemary and thyme. Sliced mushrooms, cooked bacon, turkey and rabbit were added and then the sauce was tossed with tagliatelle.

The meal was good… but just wait until I get back to Borough… someone will get an earfull.

It’s all a big rush here at the minute, but since I’m tired and hung-over I thought I’d relax and dedicate a few hours to updating the blog. Beats marking undergrad’s work!

Goon said he wanted canneloni as, like me, he used to like it when he was little and hadn’t had it in ages. This gave me the perfect opportunity to try out an idea that had been swimming around in my head for a while.

My parents had given me a can of lobster bisque at the beginning of the summer and I thought of making a pasta sauce for shellfish from it. Then the idea developed into a seafood canneloni filled with scallops, prawns and white fish in in the thickened bisque. The top would be covered in a saffron cream sauce.

As luck would have it, there were scallops on special offer at Tesco and also haddock, which I used to bulk out the canneloni filling. I got a few king prawns and a couple of squid to add to the mixture too. I thickened the bisque and added chopped parsley,crushed garlic and a dash of cream. Then I used it to gently cook the squid, prawns and flaked haddock. Finally I seared the scallops and stirred them in.

The topping was just cream with dissolved saffron and some grated mozzarella to make the top brown.

My one mistake was to use cooked dry lasagne sheets. The damn things were a little bit too narrow which made the whole job of rolling them up very difficult! I eventually managed but it was after much stress and shouting at Goon for convincing me to make canneloni.

I had a quick flash of inspiration for the veg too that evening! I planned to have fresh spinach but instead I cooked it and mixed it with some cream cheese and nutmeg. It actually worked very well! 

And also… therre was the last slice of my cherry cheesecake.

This was a remnant from the three course meal I cooked on Friday. More on that when Simon sends me the pictures!

On Saturday night I was lucky enough to return to Imperial Wharf and visit Saran Rom. This place is very special indeed. From the amazing food to the perfect service, you are guaranteed to have a great experience here.

The restaurant itself is stunning. A great deal of thought has gone into the layout and each table looks beautiful with its perfectly matched cutlery and glasses. The menu has a very wide range of delicious sounding dishes. I am lucky in that I got to sample quite a lot of them. The starters in particular are very exciting.

This was a plate of prawns wrapped in rice noodles. It was a little dark in the restaurant for my camera, but rest assured all the other dishes were just as beautiful.  The duck spring rolls were probably my favourite in terms of flavour but the beef with green curry sauce came a close second. The green curry was as good, if not better, than the green curries I had in Thailand.

The highlights in the main courses were the smoked duck curry and the crispy red snapper with mango sauce. I had a herby spicy venison dish which was also very tasty.

The team serving us were faultless in every way. Our waiter, Greg, was fabulous through the entire meal. He has obviously come to know the menu very well and is always ready to give good advice on the dishes. The style of service is fairly formal but not intimidating.

The highlight of the meal has got to be the amazing Irish cofee. They make this in front of you at the table and it really is spectacular!

So if you are in London and like Thai food, give this place a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Here is Saran Rom’s website (needs Flash 8  ).

I appear to have been neglecting the blog a little this week. I’ve been busy ‘perfecting’ the  recipes I’m writing for a student magazine. On the occasions when I haven’t been doing that I’ve either been cooking huge 3 course dinners (more on that later), visiting restaurants (more on that later too) or persuading Goon to cook for me. This was his latest attempt which, in my opinion, went quite well.

That is chicken with a white wine and cream sauce. Apparently Goon already knew how to make a version of this. It was one of the things he tried before settling down to his staple diet of plain noodles in stock. His version involved simply mixing equal portions of cream and white wine then adding chicken and heating until cooked through. 

There was plenty of room for improvement there, I thought. The first thing I did was get goon to add some flavour to the sauce. Goon sliced the chicken into strips then sauteed it in a little oil until it was just cooked through. Then he removed it from the pan, added some chopped onion, sliced chestnut mushrooms and garlic with some fresh thyme and parsley and cooked this gently until the onion went soft. Then he deglazed the pan with the chicken stock and wine.

This time I managed to convince Goon to let the sauce reduce. We let it halve it volume, then added double cream and let it bubble until the sauce was thick. Finally we stirred the chicken back in and served it over rice.

It was very tasty apart from some chicken pieces being a little overcooked. Next time I may leave Goon unsupervised in the kitchen to see what happens!

Ok, so I finally settled on two things to send to the student magazine The-sis.

The spicy crispy turkey concoction,

and my old recipe for Pork Ribs with cola BBQ sauce which I have improved by adding smoked paprika. 

I wonder if any students will actually try these.

When I say seared…

I mean seared! None of this medium-well rubbish the pubs dish up! :p

I saw this tuna steak sitting on the Sainsbury’s fish counter and I couldn’t believe no one had snatched it up. It was about an hour till shutting time and still it hadn’t gone! I don’t understand why. It was a big, juicy, deep red, beautiful piece of fish and you could tell it was fantastically fresh. I had to have it.

Tuna seems to be frequently reserved for asian style dishes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’d had a sesame-chilli tuna dish last week, courtesy of Goon, so I wanted something different. I was vaguely aware of a dish made with tuna fish and cannelli beans but my internet browsing seemed to suggest that canned tuna was the usual thing to use.

Why have canned tuna when you can have lovely steak? Well, apart from the obvious price issues.  I decided to make up my own tuna and cannelli bean recipe.

First I made up a marinade. I mixed equal quantities of lemon juice and olive oil. The oil had come from my tub of artichoke hearts so was flavoured with garlic, herbs and had also taken on some flavour from the hearts. I also added a large crushed clove of garlic, a bit of finely chopped parsley and some tomato puree. I coated the steak and left it sitting for a few hours, covered, at room temperature since it was very cold already.This meant that by the time I wanted to cook it, it was just the right temperature.

I made the cannelli ban concoction by softening some onion with parsley, garlic and thyme then adding vegetable stock and simmering it right down until thick. Then I added some chopped celery and the beans and cooked for a couple of minutes so the celery was still crunchy but had absorbed some flavour from the stock.

Finally I seared the steak for just over a minute per side, and served it on the cannelli beans topped with a big chunk of thyme butter, with a side of fine asparagus tips. Not bad at all for a quick and easy meal.

Shame its a bit too pricey to offer to that student magazine.

As I was doing my shopping on Sunday, I saw something I couldn’t resist.

A whole duck (giblets and all) for £4.50! I hadn’t particularly planned on cooking for more than one that evening but how could I not when I had this at my disposal? I also thought it was be a nice suprise for Goon when he got back from his working weekend. He seems to quite like coming home to whole cooked animal carcasses. I guess it must be a bloke thing.

Recently I’ve made duck with raspberry and duck with orange. I quite fancied cherries but I was out of cherry brandy .  The only fruity liqueur I could find in my cupboard was a nearly full bottle of cassis.

So I went looking for blackcurrants. It seems it has got to the time of year when berry fruit isn’t readily available. So I had to get tinned blackcurrants. The upside to this was that I could make a nice blackburrant glaze for the duck. I took two tablespoons of honey and mixed it with enough juice from the tin to make a thick paste then smeared it over the skin and in the cavity of the duck. Then I put some crushed garlic and a couple of rosemary springs inside the duck and roasted it.

Of course, roasties were a necessity. Maris piper potatoes roasted in goose fat are the best thing! I don’t know why goose fat is so good for this but it just makes the potato edges come out all light and crispy.

The blackcurrant sauce for the duck was made from simmering the blackcurrants with a sprig of rosemary in some water until the blackcurrants had softened. Then I added sugar, a glug of cassis, a few dropsof raspberry vinegar and some red wine, let it reduce down a bit then removed the rosemary, popped the rest into a blender for a few seconds and strained it.

Yum yum yum! Duck with fruity sauce and roasties! You might notice my duck is not as rare as usual. This is because supermarket timing instructions are utter rubbish. It said 20 minutes per 500g- so in theory 1hr 30 for this duck. I knew that they’d be talking crap to some extent, so I took it out after an 1hr 5 and it was medium well done. I’d have destroyed it if I left it in any longer!

And now for the shocker….. I made DESSERT! I finally have broken out of the savoury main meal mold. Goon read everyone’s suggestions for what to do with our excess apples and decided he wanted  apple pie.

And before anyone else says it, NO IT ISN’T A HEART ON THE PIE!!!! It’s an apple -can’t you see the stalk and leaf? Sheesh! . The pie got attacked and devoured before I got a proper shot of a slice, so this was the best I could do.

I was very pleased with it. It had apple, cinnamon and honey in the filling and a sugared shortcrust pastry crust. It took up time I technically didn’t have, but it was fun to make. I really am going to have to try some of this proper baking soon.

Here’s the Roast duck with blackcurrant Sauce Recipe

On Saturday night, due to extreme exhaustion and a early morning tutorial near their house, I ended up staying with my parents. In fact it was just my Dad in the end as my Mum had a night shift at work.

Usually when I have to stay at my parents’, I get a take-away. They aren’t exactly into cooking (for stories on my Mum’s cooking see this post from when I started the blog!) and I always find the lack of basic storecupboard ingredients a little offputting. However last night I thought that I’d brave it since I had some king prawns which wouldn’t last much longer.

On the phone to Dad, he asked what I was going to cook. I said I’d be doing a prawn curry of some kind. Since Dad has recently started eating seafood again after many years as a veggie, he wanted to try some so I agreed to let him be my kitchen assistant for the evening.

Firstly I asked him what he had at home that I could use. He seemed unsure of what to answer. So I asked more specific questions.

“Do you have any natural yoghurt or cream?

“No. But you can have natural cottage cheese.”

THIS is why I rarely let them cook for me. They think substituting cottage cheese for a yoghurt and cream curry base is a good idea!

I thought I’d not risk asking him for anything else and emptied everything in my cupboards into a carrier bag before heading to Surrey. Due to a series of mishaps (inclusing Dad’s car breaking down), we didn’t get home until 10:30. So much for an early night then. I set about cooking a mughlai korma: a curry involving mild spices based on yoghurt, cream and almonds.

Having Dad as a kitchen assistant is interesting. He has a tendency to tidy things away very quickly, usually before you’ve finished with them. Also, despite living for thirty years in the same house, he has NO idea where anything is.

I found out quickly that even typical Sri Lankan ingredients are hard to get hold of in my parents kitchen. I asked, “Do you have curry leaves for the breadfruit?”

“No, but there are these things I found in the freezer.”

“What are they?”

“I don’t know but they look like leaves.”

I decided to avoid the unidentifiable green objects and went looking for a grinder to grind some almonds. You would not believe what we found. I would have taken a picture but Dad was too embarrassed to let me.

Literally this grinder was covered in about 6 years of fungal growth. It was hideous!  Dad ran off to disinfect it. Meanwhile I found a pestle and mortar and completed the curry.

Essentially, I made the curry by frying onion with a bay leaf, ground cinnamon, garam masala, crushed ginger and garlic then stirring in a mixture of natural yoghurt and saffron. Ground almonds, cumin, chopped coriander and double cream are stirred in and finally the prawns are added and heated through.

We tried to make a breadfruit curry too but that became a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. I like plenty of gravy with my curries but Dad apparently doesn’t. I put my usual amount of curry powder in with the breadfruit but when Dad took over he only added about half the water and coconut milk that I would have done. The breadfruit ended up a bit overspiced.

The prawn curry turned out very well. It is a lovely creamy curry and the spices lend a delicate flavour. I made caraway seed rice to go with it too.

And finally, here are recipes. King Prawn Muglai Korma,   and my version of  Breadfruit Curry.

I seem to be running out of ideas for lamb kidney recipes! Guess it must be time to get some of the veal kidneys I saw at Borough instead, although I’m not entirely sure if they’re all that different. Maybe pig kidneys would be more interesting!

Here is my latest offal offering.

Lamb kidneys with in a red wine and bacon sauce with mushrooms and onions. Unfortunately this meal was made stupidly late as, once I’d done most of the prep work for the vegetables, we discovered our pack of kidneys didn’t smell quite right. There is no way in hell I’m risking eating offal that might be dodgy!

By then Goon had his heart set on this kidney dish, so he ran off to get more. Half an hour later he was back with every pack of kidneys the shop had. Apparently Goon didn’t want to risk another pack being off. So now he has a freezer full of kidneys. Good thing we’re both offal fans.

I made this dish by frying the kidneys as usual and removing them from the pan. Then I fried the onions, mushrooms, garlic and bacon until they were all cooked and deglazed with a mixture of shiraz and lamb stock. I let this all bubble down, thickened it with just a touch of cornstarch and stirred the kidneys back in. I threw in a little worcestershire sauce, finely chopped parsley and some black pepper and served it over long grain rice.

It was pretty good but not quite as good as Devilled Kidneys or Rinones al Jerez. I guess those two are classics for a reason. Still, this was good for a change and Goon wolfed it down. Here is the recipe for lamb kidneys with red wine.