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.