I’m redesigning it slowly!

Looks like this could become a regular feature.

Goon rather enjoyed making our tuna steaks the other day and so he wanted another turn at cooking. I suggested that he use up the other half of the uber-slab of salmon he bought last weekend.

Goon hasn’t really got the hang of thinking up things to do with food. He can follow recipes now, but unless someone tells him exactly what to do, he feels a little bit lost. This caused a bit of a problem as he couldn’t find any easy salmon recipes he liked online. He said he might just grill it and boil some new potatoes but I thought he wouldn’t learn much from doing that.

So I had a bit of a think and came up with this for Goon to try: pasta with dill, white wine and creme fraiche topped with the grilled salmon drizzled with some olive oil and a dressed side salad. 

It turned out to be a good learning experience for Goon. For a start he found out that creme fraiche comes in tubs which are too small for anything useful. We had to bulk out the sauce with some single cream.

I had to take over making the sauce in the end. Goon nearly tried to make it by stirring creme fraiche into the pasta and then adding half a bottle of wine. I explained that it was difficult to mix the wine and cream together after they’d been added to the pasta. Goon seemed to understand this,  but when I also explained the concept of reducing a sauce to give it more flavour, Goon got scared and ran away to hide in his room. He came back when I agreed to handle the sauce and he tried grilling the salmon.

The salmon worked out fine in the end but I had to stop Goon from taking it out from under the grill too early. He was bothered by the fact the skin was smoking slightly as it browned and kept turning the heat off. We nearly ended up eating raw salmon, which would be fine as I like sashimi, but I got the feeling we weren’t really dealing with sushi grade fish.

Right at the end we found out that Goon had forgotten to buy salad , so we ended up having a side of salted, buttered spinach with our meal.  It wasn’t bad for such an easy thing to make. I think it would have been even better with something a bit tangy added to the pasta. I thought chopped gherkins at first but they’d be a bit overpowering. Capers maybe? 

I think Goon is improving. What shall I get him to try next?

If you look down the comments on the ‘About’ page here you’ll see a message from a lady called Jane asking me if I was interested in writing for a student magazine. Needless to say, with my current restricted income, I was VERY interested in doing this, especially since I write about food on a daily basis anyway. 

So Jane and I started conversing over e-mail and she eventually sent me the front page of the magazine. The line on the bottom right of the page caught my attention. “Quick and Easy Recipes.”

Hang on. Is this the stuff I’m supposed to be doing? I wondered if Jane had actually looked through the site because I can’t recall the last quick and easy recipe I posted. Most of my cooking takes about two hours to complete. True, the double G&Ts slow me down somewhat but the timings hardly compare to using a stir in sauce.  

And what does easy actually mean? If the average student is anything like the engineering undergrads I teach, I’d expect them to find operating a microwave a serious challenge.  But that would rule out pretty much any recipe worth writing down.

So I thought long and hard about what to write and eventually came up with…

Spicy breaded turkey cutlets. Cheap, easy and sort-of quick. Plus its a good way of getting rid of unused bread.

The idea is simple. You take these thin turkey steaks, brush them with tomato puree, coat in egg and cover with a mixture of dry breadcrumbs, cayenne, paprika and mixed herbs then fry until cooked. They go pretty well with some cous-cous and courgettes. 

The turkey only takes a minute or two to cook and the preparation time would have been about 15 minutes had  I not been cleaning the kitchen whilst cooking. The pack of turkey, which cost £3.60, would feed three or four easily and the spices hardly add anything to the cost. So I estimate that with a fairly simple cous-cous and courgette accompaniment the price would be around £1.50 for a large meal.

Hopefully it will do for the magazine. I have some turkey left so I might try again at the weekend and see if it can be improved. I think maybe getting some tomatoes and making a garlicky tomato and courgette salsa might work.

Now I just have to think of one more. Maybe this should be a long slow cook recipe that can be left in the oven while the student goes down the pub. Hmmm…..

It makes me happy. So do my new ruby coloured glasses.

True I have a child’s taste in drinks, but I love this sparkling Shiraz the Aussie winemakers like to produce. The Hardy’s version has been on special offer recently and so I grabbed a bottle.

This stuff is best served lightly chilled and is lovely and chocolately but still fruity in a forest berry kind of a way. It makes me very tipsy indeed. Probably because I drink it so bloody fast!

As I ended my student’s lesson on Sunday night I got a pair of text messages from Goon. The first one just said

“When are you coming around for food today?”

I was intending on heading straight back to my place but I thought, “What the hell,I’ve got nothing to do tonight” and replied enquiring what I should pick up to cook. 

“Nothing. I’m cooking. Meat marinating. Dinner ready forty minutes after you get here.”

This suprised me a lot. So much so, in fact, that I choked on my last sip of tea and ended dribbling down my front. Nice way to keep the respect of your students. Needless to say Jamie found it hilarious.  

After explaining the situation to him and his mother (and describing Goon’s previous cooking attempts) they suggested I get back to Hammersmith very fast to stop him.

Unfortunately, due to London’s horrendous, dysfunctional transport system, the quickest way from Parson’s Green to Hammersmith is to run. The second quickest way is to walk. This is in spite of the fact that there are two direct buses. I managed a mixture of both.

Forty-five minutes later I was at Goon’s flat looking dubiously at some tuna steaks being marinated in chilli oil. Goon was attempting something that, in my opinion, restaurants rarely get right: seared tuna steaks.

Apparently Goon had been reading some blogs I link to when he found Julia’s post on seared tuna steak with peppers and noodles. He thought it looked simple enough for him to try and went to buy the ingredients.

Since he had other suitable ingredients about from the Thai Salmon the other night, I tried to convince Goon to jazz things up by making a honey and soy dressing for the tuna. This idea turned out to be too scary for him so I made the dressing and got him to toss some spring onion and coriander in with the noodles.

In the end it would have gone very well but Goon was obviously reading instructions on how to cook tuna steaks twice as thick as the ones he bought. I saved two of them when I saw him trying to cook them for two minutes a side. The other two, unfortunately, I didn’t see until it was too late. Goon reduced the cooking time to 1 min 15 per side but the steaks were very thin and still dried out.

This was the best of the four steaks. It was cooked for 1 minute 15 per side and rested for five minutes.

Not bad going for a goon! Goon was a bit upset that two of the steaks hadn’t worked preoperly but I think he did pretty well considering that whenever I order ’seared’ tuna in pubs, it arrives cooked to a crisp.

But of course, there isn’t an evening that goes by without Goon being a goon. Last night, he turned on the taps in the kitchen then wandered off and forgot about them. Not very long after his front doorbell rang and the ladies living downstairs informed him that a lot of water was coming through their ceilling. It seems he had flooded his kitchen. And the one downstairs.

Well, what do you expect in a place where the most frequently cooked meal is pasta with Tesco value stir in sauce?

I should have known better. When I was asked to cook a Sri Lankan style curry in the Latymer Court kitchen, it should have been obvious that I’d also have to provide the necessary equipment. But in my mind, every kitchen comes with a pestle and mortar and at least four decent sized pans that aren’t covered in rust.

So cooking the curry turned out to be a LOT more difficult than expected. The pan problem was easily sorted out by cooking two things at a time and using the oven to keep things warm. The spice grinding problem was a little more tricky.

Freshly ground roasted spices are the most important ingredient in a Sri Lankan curry. They’re what makes the flavour so distinctive and without them I think there’s little point in bothering. So the lack of pestle and mortar was causing me some serious issues. I went to use the blender but, in the shock of being used for the first time in 8 years, it immediately blew a fuse.

We ended up resorting to making Goon grind the spices with a wooden spoon and a ceramic breakfast bowl. Needless to say, the curry powder was a little more chunky than usual but at least the flavour was still good.

The next problem was stopping the ingredients from walking away. The Latymer Court kitchen is small and cluttered and, to make it worse, someone had obviously been tidying when I wasn’t looking. My coriander vanished without a trace and never reappeared.

So the lamb curry was on the chunky side and the breadfruit curry was a bit plain from the lack of coriander. Luckily breadfruit is fantastic on its own because of its amazing gooey texture which made it one of my favourite treats as a child. 

At least I can say that the mung-atta kiribath went without hitches.

I’m sure I’ve posted about this before but possibly back in the days when absolutely no one read my blog. Kiribath is a traditional Sri Lankan dish of rice cooked in coconut milk. This coconut makes the rice sticky so it can be formed into a ‘cake’ and cut into pieces to serve,  It can be made sweet or savoury and has lots of variations. My favourite way to have it is with loads of garlic and black pepper added. I also add mung beans to give a more interesting texture.

So, we got there in the end and had Sri Lankan style lamb curry with mung-atta kiribath and curried breadfruit. Here is the sri lankan lamb curry recipe.

It’s been another busy week here. It is half term for the schools which means I’ve had a surge in requests for tutoring. The result of this is that many of my evenings have been spent with my A-level student doing exciting things like sketching graphs so I tend to get home late.

It was on my way back from one of these tutorials last night that I got a call from Goon. It seemed he was after my cooking that evening and was already wandering around Tesco looking for things he wanted to eat. I was seriously considering takeaway for the third time that week (yes, I know, I’m a bad, bad person) but since Goon has good (expensive) taste I could manage cooking if he was buying.

It seems that he must have been VERY hungry because, when I found Andy in the shop, this was thrust into my hands.

A whole side of salmon. Over a kilo of fish. To me, this seemed rather a lot for two people but Goon wasn’t convinced. I tried to get him to put it back and buy two reasonably sized fillets (there is not enough room in either of our freezers for that thing) but he was VERY determined to keep it.

It was only five minutes until closing time so I had to think fast to figure out what to do with the salmon. I did a quick run around and picked up a load of thai ingredients as that was the first thing that came into my head.

I eventually convinced Goon that half the great slab of fish would feed us both and then chopped it up into four bits. I rubbed the two for that night with a mix of cumin and ground coriander seed and marinated it in coconut milk, lemon, crushed ginger, crushed garlic and fish sauce.

While it was marinating I made a sauce which was essentially a reduced Tom Kar. This has got to be one of my favourite types of soup. It is made of vegtable or chicken stock simmered with coriander, green chilli, lime leaves, lemon grass with coconut and fresh lime added at the end. Its lovely and creamy but refreshing from the flavours of lemon and lime.

I grilled the salmon until the skin was crispy then served it with some egg fried rice, (into which I’d thrown a lot of leftovers), the sauce and some spicy baby aubergines. The sauce was just perfect. The flavours in the rice were possibly a little strong for the salmon-some steamed jasmine rice or noodles may have been a better accompaniment- but the aubergines were great. These little ones have such a fantastic crunchy texture!

Here is the thai salmon recipe, and a basic egg fried rice recipe.

By the way, does anyone else like their salmon cooked ‘rare’, or is it just me? This, in my opinion, is the best way to have it. Just cooked all the way through but still dark pink in the middle.

Remind me never to let Goon go shopping for me again. 

I’d decided to make this meal quite some time ago as I’d found two rather large pieces of pork belly in the Tesco bargain bin for 60p!   I’d never eaten pork belly before but I knew that losts of people absolutely love it and I’d heard it made pretty good crackling. So I thought a nice autumnal dish of crispy pork with an apple compote, juniper braised cabbage and mustard mash would go down well.

While I was heading over to Goon’s flat he rang me to see if he needed to buy anything. So I sent him to get two apples and a bottle of cider for the sauce plus some mashing potatoes. As soon as I got there I realised that the potatoes were, in fact, waxy and managed to borrow the correct version. Unfortunately I didn’t realise until much later that Goon had forgotten the apples.

So I had a choice of either: 

1.  having no apple compote
2. yelling at Goon for being a goon and sending him back to the shops.

Guess which one I went for. Goon returned not long after with a bag of twenty apples. I fear I will be eating apples for a long time   

The moral of this story is, when you need shopping done properly, do it yourself! Or at least avoid enlisting the help of someone incapable of memorizing a four item list. .

At least the cooking went without TOO many glitches (just one burnt finger). I prepared the pork belly by rubbing it all over with cinnamon and allspice then salting the skin and roasting it. I finished it off under the grill to get some nice crispy crackling. The apple compote was just caramelised apple stewed in cider, reduced till dry and broken up with a bit of honey and cinnamon. I served the pork with some mustard mashed potatoes and red cabbage braised with juniper.

I’m not sure why everyone raves so much about pork belly. I couldn’t help thinking of pork scratchings as I ate it. It was just a bit too fatty for my taste. I think I might try it braised at some point to see if that’s any better but, to be honest I think I prefer other more meaty joints.

Now, has anyone got any good ways to use up a lot of apples?

EDIT: Here’s what I did for the pork belly with apple compote.

It seems that, to a lot of people nowadays, pigeon is a weird thing to eat. I certainly got a very funny look when MJ enquired about what I’d be cooking yesterday. But during Victorian times and before, this meat was very popular. It has a very intense game flavour and I would even say that it tastes a little bit like liver.

Perhaps this would be a way to introduce squeamish people to that kind of flavour without them being freaked out by eating organs!

Since the flavour of this meat is so gamey, when I decided to make a risotto with it I wanted other strong flavours too. I decided I’d have meaty porcini mushrooms, bacon, rosemary and a fruity Italian red wine.

Actually, the wine wasn’t Italian in the end. It was on the Italian shelf of Tesco’s wine section and half price so I picked it up without paying much attention to it. Yes, I know, I’m a cheapskate student.  I was rather suprised when I got home and found the wine was actually French. Luckily it still was quite fruity, so it turned out to be perfectly good for the risotto.  

Pigeon is one of those meats that tend to dry out quickly and so I cooked it by briefly searing thin slices of breast. Then I kept it warm, away from the hob, whilst I made the risotto and stirred the meat back in at the end.

It tasted delicious but the sad thing about this meal is that I can’t see how to present it well.

Cooked pigeon is kind of a grey-purple colour and the wine made the risotto a reddish brown. ot really an attractive colour combination. It’s a shame as the flavours in this dish are fantastic. Hmm… you can’t really see the pigeon in that picture so I better post this one too.

So, now you can see it is a very dark meat- darker in fact than that photo really lets on. 

Despite the fact that it is in good supply and not that popular, pigeon is still very expensive! Each pigeon breast costs £1 and I think you’d need three to feed an average person. Damn me for being addicted to Borough Market. 

Here is the Wood Pigeon and Red Wine Risotto with Porcini Mushrooms and Bacon recipe. 

Why is it that, even when I make myself a really simple dinner, I still end up going to bed after 2am! This didn’t bother me much a couple of months ago, but now I’m doing some heavy duty tutorial work which involves be being awake and vaguely competent early in the morning.

I am very, very tired indeed.

I hoped that food last night would be quick. To be honest it would have been fine if I hadn’t tried cooking at  the same time as my flatmate Ken. Its quite nice living with him and Mike. Even though we’re rarely in at the same time, we share a love of musical theatre and a large proportion of last night was spent listening to the soundtrack of Batboy, which is by far the best musical I’ve ever seen. The problem was that until the CD finished I was too busy singing along to cook. Then we realised it was 11pm.

So we both decided dinner was a good idea, but of course, with two of us cooking different things the whole process took twice as long! Hence I was washing up at 1am.

I was really craving pasta and also something with lemon. So I braised some chicken thighs in a mixture of lemon, chicken stock, crushed garlic, white wine and tarragon and reduced the braising liquid to make a sauce. Fortunately my angel hair pasta had returned from wherever it disappeared to last week, so I tossed this in finely chopped parsley, coated it in garlic infused oil and served my chicken thighs and sauce on top with a side salad of rocket dressed with pesto. 

Ken had a very nice looking rump steak with couscous and brocolli 

I don’t understand why some people peel the skin off chicken thighs! If you crisp it up, it is really yummy. I love the combination of lemon, tarragon and wine- this dish really hit the spot. Next time I may make even more sauce!

EDIT: Chicken Thighs with Lemon and Tarragon recipe is now here.