Since things are busy here, this is a good week for me to be borrowing ideas from other people so I don’t have to spend too much time thinking about dinner. So yesterday I thought I’d try out Lea’s pan seared duck breast with raspberry coulis.

I had everything I needed except the raspberries and the Chambord so I headed over to the big Tesco superstore to find some. That’s where I encountered a big problem. No Chambord. No Framboise. Nothing remotely useful in any sense. There were about 7 million different types of vodka (I hate vodka) but no bloody fruit liqueur anywhere!  Grr!

I got on the phone to goon to see if he could help. Goon said he’d go down to Threshers. They specialise  in selling wine and liqueur, so they should have this stuff, right? Yeah, fat chance. When I got back to goon’s flat he was there with a bottle of raspberry flavoured rum. Not quite what was required but I thought I’d improvise anyway.

So I followed Lea’s recipe adding about twice as many raspberries to account for the loss of liqueur. Amazingly, once all the alcohol had burned off the rum it tasted quite nicely of raspberry and wasn’t as synthetic as I had expected. Since it was a clear spirit the coulis ended up a VERY bright pink.

My next problem came from the chicory. The shit student fridge in goons flat had frozen it. It still tasted fine but had lost some of its firmness. So it was soft chicory instead of crunchy.

Despite the setbacks it was a nice meal. The chicory and raspberry worked particularly well together. I served it all with some rosemary new potatoes.

After the success of the last chinese style ostrich fillet I made, I decided to try a similar thing again with a different sauce. Months ago, I remember buying a jar of Tesco Finest plum sauce and not being too impressed. Since plums are in season, I thought it was about time I had a go myself.

It seems that the supermarkets only stock plums that “ripen at home” and most of the packs looked like they’d be spending a good four or five days doing that. Grrr!  I had to hunt around for a pack which looked dark enough for my sauce and even then I was a bit worried they’s be a bit tangy. They were fine in the end, although I think a bit of extra sugar in the sauce may have helped.

I used the same trick as before to cook the ostrich, cutting it into inch thick slices and searing on a high heat for about 45s on each side, then stirring it into the hot sauce at the end. I made the sauce by simmering the chopped plums  with sugar in just enough water to cover them until they disintegrate into mush. Then I added crushed ginger, freshly ground cinnamon, light soy, dry sherry and a touch of honey at the end. When all the liquid had simmered away, I strained the sauce and thickened it with a bit of corn starch before adding the ostrich.

At the same time, I had another go at making crispy seaweed by deep frying fresh greens. This was successful apart from the moment when the oil bubbled over the entire hob. I was actually quite scared I was going to set the flat on fire! A word of warning to all of you -USE A DEEP PAN TO MAKE CRISPY SEAWEED.  The water from the cabbage reacts violently with the hot oil and it bubbles everywhere!

Once I’d saved the hob from a fiery end, I had my ostrich and plum sauce with egg fried rice and the crispy seaweed of doom.

Yes, that is far too much egg fried rice. My arteries will be totally clogged up by the time I’m thirty but at least I’ll be able to say I had some damn good dinners.

Here is the crispy seaweed recipe, the egg fried rice recipe and the ostrich with plum and ginger sauce recipe.

Well, sort of simple. You know that when a food blogger says “simple” it is a very relative term!

The Imperial College undergraduates have returned to University which means three things.

1. The Union Bar is a lot more crowded
2. I have to go to various fresher welcome events (damn me for being on society comittees).
3. I have to get up before 9am for a change so that I can get there in time to teach.

Well, maybe four things. The college smells a lot more. This what happens when 18 yr old mommy’s boys are left to fend for themselves. They forget about things like washing and changing clothes. 

Points 2 and 3 together have meant I’ve had a few days where I had really late nights and fairly early mornings so I couldn’t do my usual three hour marathon cooking. So instead I had to have relatively simple meals. This one impressed me the most.

These are some honey and mustard chicken thighs. They’re easy to make, pretty cheap and very tasty. The marinade is just honey, Dijon mustard and English mustard mixed together. The chicken can be left in the oven for 40 minutes while you do other stuff and after that it’s just a case of crisping up the skin and maybe adding a bit of cream to the marinade to make it into a sauce. I had these with some string beans and crisped new potatoes.

The recipe was so cheap and easy that I’ll have to budget it and put it on the student recipe page.

MY other meal of the week was properly simple! This is griddled lamb steak with roasted mediterranean vegetable couscous. It also was suprisingly cheap because the lamb leg steaks were half price.

All I did was marinate the leg steaks in harissa while I went out, then came back and griddled them for a few minutes either side. The cous-cous took about 20 minutes to make. I shoved the vegetables in the oven with olive oil and garlic for 10 minutes till they were tender then mixed with the couscous, some coriander and toasted pine nuts.

In the next few days I’ll devote a few hours to catching up recipes. Blame the Civil Engineering students for me getting behind! If they didn’t get so many questions wrong I’d have finished marking their work hours ago!

And now we have the baked honey and mustard chicken thigh recipe.

I’ve been so ridiculously busy this week that now I’m having to do a load of really quick posts just so I can keep up with my food. I’ll start with the easy ones -that is the ones that didn’t come from my own recipes so there’s not much for me to say about them!  

I’ve decided to forgive Gordon Ramsay for knocking me over the other day. His recipe for salmon with a red wine and crispy bacon sauce is so totally delicious that I have to. It comes from his book, Secrets, which I can’t recommend highly enough, even if he won’t sign it without me buying his autobiography.

This was Friday night’s dinner and was served with crispy new potatoes and the sad remains of a savoy cabbage. Well, I had to use it up sometime I guess. Of course, I can’t reproduce the recipe for this. For people wanting to have a go at making their own version up, it’s not too hard. Essentially the sauce is reduced red wine with a touch of port with onion, bacon, thyme and rosemary.

Make sure you get the skin nice and crispy! I find the easiest way to do this is to rub a little salt on the salmon skin and then grill it on a medium heat setting. Keep a close eye on it and when the skin has browned slightly, take it away from the heat. I find this gives a nice moist salmon steak with a great crisp skin.

On Sunday I tried out Lea’s recipe for chicken piccata. I thoroughly recommend this! It’s really good. I had to adapt it slightly because I had mini-fillets instead of chicken breasts and I ended up accidentally doubling the sauce quantities. This didn’t bother me as I like sauce but the end product looked very different to Lea’s.

It was totally delicious though! My angel hair pasta has gone walk about, so I had to settle for linguine. Ah, well.

Saturday deserved a bit more attention and so the post detailing it is below. I cooked this kangaroo dish for myself and Andy, who has decided to finance my taste for strange game in return for it being ’skillfully’ (ahem) prepared by me. It appears MJ is freaked out by people eating strange animals. Yay! That’s two people freaked out in one week. I’m getting good at this!

Well, if I’m going to serve this to all the food bloggers, I should give it a dummy run!

If I was serving it to anyone else it wouldn’t be quite that rare. Unless they were like me and wanted it like that, of course!

I’ve done all the individual elements of this meal before but I’d never combined them until this weekend. I’ve made a red wine and bitter chocolate sauce twice before, both times with venison. The first time I used a recipe on the BBC food website which had WAY too much chocolate in. Yes, believe it or not, there is such a thing as too much chocolate.

This time the sauce was just right. I used a fairly chocolately shiraz-cabernet to base it on. This isn’t necessary but I would make sure to use a wine that wasn’t too tart. Richness and mellowness are what you need for this sauce.

I marinated my kangaroo steak in port, minced onion and chopped rosemary before coating it with oil and cooking it rare. I’ve found that kangaroo needs to be cooked on a lower heat than beef steak as the outside will dry out a bit otherwise. To compensate for this it needs slightly longer cooking. My small steak needed about 4 1/2 minutes per side on this medium/high setting. 

I love the way dauphinoise potatoes are so easy to cook but still taste great. I don’t want to think about how bad for you they are! If you haven’t come across them before, dauphinoise potatoes are thinly sliced waxy potatoes layered with garlic and pepper and cooked in cream. Truly artery clogging but still delicious.

So all this was served together with red cabbage braised with juniper and sugar. It was a very warming dish indeed! I’ll put up recipes soon. I am a few days behind on the posting now.

EDIT: And finally here is the Kangaroo with Red Wine and Chocolate Sauce Recipe

Or should I say, he just bumped into me?

For the last couple of weeks, the Waterstones in Kensington has been advertising a book signing for Gordon’s new autobiography, ‘Humble Pie’. I don’t particularly want a signed copy of this book. What I DID fancy was a signed copy of his recipe book, ‘Passion for Flavour,’

So I wandered over to the High Street Ken. store to see what was happening. There was already quite a queue but if I joined right then I thought there wouldn’t be much of a problem. I talked to the staff and they said that, since Mr Ramsay was there to promote his autobiography, I could only get another book signed if I also bought that.

It would cost e an extra £12.99. F*ck that. I mean, I think Gordon’s cool but not THAT cool.

Since I was there, I popped upstairs to the cookbook section to have a browse. On my way down, I saw a sudden flurry of activity at the door and about ten people were moving rapidly in my direction. The line barged past me at quite a rate. As I looked around to see why they were in such a hurry I caught a glimpse of the man in the centre of the line.

Yes, it was indeed Gordon, being ushered up the stairs by the shop staff and some other people, who I assume were his publishing team.

So there you go. That’s my excitement for the day. I nearly got knocked over by Gordon Ramsay.

I love the celebrity hole that is London!

Aren’t they pretty? It’s all Garrett’s fault that I bought them. I went to buy some to look up the ingredients for him and then they were on a 3 for 2 offer. It would be rude NOT to buy them!

This collection of chocolates comes from Hotel Chocolat. There were three packs: rose petal truffles (light pink),  kir royal truffles (dark pink) and a selection of random alchoholic ones. In the end I decided I could take or leave the kir royal ones but the others are AMAZING!

Hotel Chocolat has branches all around England. If you happen to pass one, go in and try. You won’t be disappointed. Even if you don’t try, go in anyway, look around and drool at the beautifully designed goodies. Everything in there is so pretty! 

Lea at Copperpots has tagged me to join this rather interesting project started by Angelika in Vienna. It asks this question.

WHICH MENU WOULD YOU SERVE BLOGGING FRIENDS FOR A WELCOME DINNER UPON THEIR FIRST VISIT TO YOUR HOME ?

This is a bit of a tough one for me since I hardly ever need to do more than one course. Dinner parties aren’t really commonplace amongst London students. In particular, I don’t generally make dessert, but there is one I made for a Valentine’s day meal many years ago that I kept doing again and again.

So here is my menu. I’ve made it quite autumnal since it’s getting pretty god-damn cold out there, but I never really stick to using local seasonal produce. The things at Borough Market are a bit too exciting for that. This is a mix of things I’ve done before and things I’d like to do. Of course, offal and alternative meat have made an appearance.

A Warming Menu for my Food Blogging Friends

Oxtail Consomme 
*
Chicken Liver and Brandy Pate with Apple Chutney and Melba Toast 
*
Rare Fillet of Kangaroo with a Red Wine and Bitter Chocolate Sauce, Served With Dauphinoise Potatoes and Braised Red Cabbage
*
Cherry and Almond Cheesecake
*
Coffee/Irish Coffee/Something From My Spirit Selection

I think I’d have a white bordeaux with the pate and a nice sangiovese with the main course. I have no idea what wine goes with cherry cheesecake! Any suggestions? I always have Sauternes around if I can’t think of anything else.

I think I will tag Garret, Rob, Cid and Mace at Vanilla Garlic to host the next virtual dinner party and Julia and Rob from A Slice of Cherry Pie. Also Franka at Can Cook, Must Cook if she’s around. It seems she hasn’t posted in a while.

Kidneys are great for making cheap and tasty meals. Some people are freaked out by them but I think they’re missing out in a big way. At about 40p per portion (200g), I can’t think of any food that is better value for money and is easy to find.

I think kidneys go best with an accompaniment that has a bit of a ‘kick’. So last night, looking through my cupboards I came up with a sauce made of cream, English mustard, worcestershire sauce and brandy with a bit of pepper.

I think I’d suggest that, if you want to try something similar, you use a nicer brandy than I did. I had very cheap stuff which seemed to lose it’s flavour quite easily during cooking, so I ended up needing to use a lot.

The end result was lovely. The msutard and brandy went really well with the kidneys and the cream mellowed the sauce by just the right amount. I served it with some Italian easy cook rice I’d picked up since the shops were out of long grain. I’m not sure if I’d had it before. It had a nice texture and was pretty good with the kidney dish.

And the best thing about kidneys is scaring the girly-girls who have issues with eating things that are obviously from animals. You know the type who’ll eat meat but only when its ground up and covered in breadcumbs?  It appears that Chrissy falls into this category. There was a lot of horrified noise when she walked into the kitchen and saw me cutting them up.

I thought it was hilarious.

Here is the  kidneys with a creamy brandy and mustard sauce recipe.

I think that sometimes I go a little over the top with my cooking. This has a tendency to happen a lot on Sunday nights when there isn’t that much else to do, even in London.

This cooking marathon happened spontaneously. We were going to have a Chinese take-away but they all shut too early or were too far away. Also most of them are rubbish compared to home made fresh food.

So I decided that I’d make chinese instead. In the fridge there was a fillet steak and salmon and so we had….

sesame beef fillet with asparagus and mushroom and….

salmon with spring onion and ginger. No MSG in sight. All of this was served up with some egg fried rice.

Well, I say no MSG but I suppose I can’t vouch for the prawn crackers. These come from Sharwoods and a really a lot of fun to make. They start off being tiny little transparent discs that puff up into prawn crackers when you drop them in hot oil. It kept me amused for good 15 minutes!

The beef was my favourite bit of the meal. I love the flavour of fried sesame seeds. Sweet, nutty and almost floral. Chestnut mushrooms have so much flavour and are just perfect for these dishes.

I rubbed salt on the salmon skin, grilled it and made the sauce separately with vegetable stock, ginger and five spice. It would have been better if I’d had time to marinate it but there isn’t much room for marinades in spontaneous cooking.

Hopefully there’ll be recipes soon but I’ve got such a huge backlog of posts to get through now I might struggle!