after several months of not being able to properly access your blog. When I finally opened up my admin page after goodness knows how long, I was pleased and slightly suprised to find some people had linked to me. Of course I was less pleased when I found they’d just been hotlinking my photos. Chuh!  

Then there were the forty or fifty comments largly made up by spam. Having been there when my spam filter was designed, I know that this spam isn’t made by spam robots as it used to be. There are apparently now many hundreds of trained spam monkeys trawling the internet and leaving badly disguised links to their websites, masqueraduing as gushingly complementary comments.  

Anyay, yes, hello, I’m back, at least temporarily. I still don’t have a real computer. Just a laptop with a screen I can barely read and no keyboard. Thank God the boredom of the Christmas holidays has finally forced me into typing on a barely functioning USB device to update this poor, neglected website. So now I can tell you about my recipe for sheep.

No, of course I couldn’t eat a whole one. Not in one go anyway. But this dish includes a fair number of sheep consituents.

Towards the end of August, I went to the Covent Garden Night Market specifically to see Fergus Hendrson perform on their stage kitchen. Softly spoken and slightly awkward in front of the large audience, he was a far cry from what you’d expect from a ‘celebrity chef’, yet he conveyed his passion for good cooking and ingredients better than any popular household name. Two things in particular stick in my mind. The first is his assertion that recipes are merely guides, not rules, for a genuinely good cook. The second is what I have come to hold high in my list of cooking commandments:

Love Thy Butcher

According to Henderson, if you find a butcher worthy of your custom and let them know how much you love them, you can expect great things. In his case, he got pig trotters. I was after sonething slightly different.

I was expecting a negative reaction clutching my short but unusual shopping list but the gentlemen at H G Walters barely batted an eyelid when I handed them the piece of paper. One veal kidney, some lamb sweetbreads and two lamb tongues would apparently be no problem.The two latter ingredients were destined for a recipe that held my fascination for some time: lamb rack with sauteed tongue and sweetbreads.

The original recipe, from the first series of ‘The Great British Menu,’ had obviously been created in the summer and required fresh broadbeans and samphire. I made do with defrosted peas but otherwise the ideas are largely unchanged. 

Sheep Feast (Rack of Lamb with sauteed tongue, sweetbreads and peas)

For Two People

• 1 large rack of lamb (wih about 6 rib bones in)
• 2 lamb tongues
• 350g lamb sweetbreads
• 2 handfuls of peas, fresh or defrosted
• 200ml fresh lamb stock
• unsalted butter- around 30g
• salt and pepper
• parsley to garnish

1. Prepare the sweetbreads: If they’re frozen, allow them to defrost. My butchers say that if you’re short on time, let them sit it some warm water to speed this up. Then soak them in cold water in the fridge for two hours.
2. Drain the sweetbreads. Bring a pa of water to the boil. Drop in the sweetbreads, bring back to the boil. Drain immediately and refresh in cold water. When they’re cool, peel off the tough outer membrane, then pop them in the fridge until ready to cook.
3. Prepare the tongues: Place in cold water and brinng to the boil. Simmer until tender (around 1 hour 15 minutes). Remove from the heat and allow to cool in the cooking liquid.
4. Roast the rack of lamb as you norally would. I brushed mine with olive oil, seasoned and roasted it in a preheated oven at gas mark 6 for15 minutes This gave me pleasantly rare meat. Wrap in foil and leave to rest.
5. While the lamb is roasting/resting, cook the peas in boiling water then drain.
6. Pat the sweetbreads dry and dust them with the seasoned flour. Heat half the butter in a frying pan and when it is foaming add the swweetbreads and fry until golden brown on all sides. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
7. Drain the tongues and cut in half. Sautee on both sides auntil golden brown.
8. Add the sweetbreads, stock and peas to the pan Simmer together for a few minutes.
9. Cut the lamb rack into cutlets and serve with the peas and sweetbread mixture. Garnish with parsely. Minted new potatoes made a good accompaniment to this.

All in all a good recipe. The slighly diappointing thing for me is that the sweetbreads weret te crispy type I’ve had before. Perhaps that is easier to achieve with calf sweetbrads. Still, the flavour was good and I imagine that if I’d had a chance to get my hands on some samphire, it would have been even better. Incidentally, lamb sweetbreads are CHEAP. Excellent value for money if you have a good butcher that can order them for you. The most expensive part of this meal was the lamb rack but, given the quality it was well worth it. 

Happy New Year, everyone!

…to those of you who have tried to contact me via e-mail. I still have no home internet and our school server appears to not like my web based mail page. I can read your messages as they come into my Blackberry but I have no easy way of retaining or replying to the messages. Blame BT.Apparently I have missed some good blogger meet ups. Boo!

(otherwise known as squid in a tomato and clove sauce, Indonesian style.)

West London really is the place to be at the moment. This morning I discovered that what appears to be the world’s biggest Waitrose has opened by Shepherd’s Bush Green along with 40 or so restaurants as part of the Westfield development.

This shopping centre is ludicrously large. I intended to ‘pop in’ today on my way into school to see what the fuss was about. Not only do you need a map for the development itself, individual shops are big enough to merit having their own complex floorplans. At one point I found myself looking diagonally across the centre so most of it was in my sight. It was so enormous, I had a slight attack of vertigo, felt a bit sick and had to leave. Then it took me 15 minutes to get to the exit.

Yes it is THAT big. So big that, if it wasn’t for Wholefoods, it would render Kensington High Street totally redundant. So here I am, nestled in between cheap restaurants, the best butcher in London and a gargantuan shopping centre. This is my smug face.

Goon has become a bit disconcerted at my sudden good mood. I suppose that from his point of view, his girlfriend has undergone a complete personality transformation, from grumbling and snarling to generally quite happy. If it wasn’t for BT, I would only have one other complaint: the seemingly endless stream of colds.

Colds are an occupational hazard for teachers, particularly when they’re new to a school. I can’t remember a day this term when we (the maths department, that is) were all sniffle free. Germs like children and children like giving their germs to teachers. Fortunately I know the best thing to treat a cold: a big bowl of curry.

I have more than made up for last year’s lack of curry making and have been trying to expand my repetoire. The dish below originates in Indonesia and is lightly spiced and not at all hot. It’s perfect if you want something pleasantly invigorating but aren’t in the mood for a chilli based assault on the senses. It’s so mild that you might not class it as a curry, but it hit the spot for me, especially after the burningly hot Thai curry I made the previous night. It’s quick to make too, so a perfect schoolnight dinner.

Cumi Cumi Smoor (for 2 big portions)

• 400g of squid, cleaned, hoods cut into strips, 
• the juice of a lime 
• 1 onion, peeled and finely diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 plum tomatoes, peeled and chopped  
• 8 whole cloves
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 150ml unherbed fish or vegetable stock or water
• plain boiled rice or saffron rice to serve
• chopped coriander/ sliced spring onion to garmish

1. Get a large frying pan hot and stir fry the squid until it just curls up. Remove it from the pan, place it in a bowl, toss in the lime juice, cover and keep warm.
2. Turn the heat down to low, add a little more oil, then add the onion and garlic to the pan and cook gently until soft.
3. Add the tomato, stock, cloves and nutmeg. Stir well, ten allow to bubble gently until almost dry. Taste and season.
4. Stir in the squid and warm through.
5. Serve with saffron rice or plain boiled rice, garnished with chopped coriander and/or spring onion.

******

That has got to be the understatement of the year and, to be honest, it is not so much technical problems but extreme technical incompetence. Apparantly it takes over two months for BT to set up Option 1 broadband. This morning, after spending two hours on the phone to their technical support ‘gurus’, I was told that actually no one had a clue what was going on with my internet and I would be offline until at least November the 4th.

Somewhere in India, there are two helpdesk people, sitting, shaking, and possibly crying underneath their desks. I have given up my policy of not blogging from my workplace and have come into school to write a post even though it is half term.

Other than lack of technology and blogging equipment (I also had no desktop, no photo software and my camera card reader got lost somewhere in my move) things are pretty sweet in West London. I found a flat which is essentially a large kitchen with attached sleeping area. It has an ancient rickety gas cooker, which has already caused me several burns, but, hey, at least it’s gas! The freezer is on the barely existing side, but to make up for it I have a big pink sofa. Yay! 

Now that I’m back, I’m quite convinced that my irritation at living on the Islington-Hackney border was not just a case of the grass being greener. I am so happy to be back in Hammersmith. My flat is within 10 minutes walk of at least eight nice but affordable restaurants and at least two nice but more expensive restaurants. Roll on payday! A five minute detour on my way home from work takes me to what must be the best butcher in London. The supermarkets are decent. True, a floor assistant responded to my request for black pudding by taking me to the chilled dessert section,  but I found brawn in the bargain bin! ! Woohoo! I also have a supply of interesting ingredients from Shepherds Bush market and a load of expensive but bizarre things to gawp at in Wholefoods.

The new job seems very promising too….. but more on that later.

I’ve been spoiling myself this month, eating and drinking far too much. This has had the effect that I am skint, yet again, until I get paid on Friday. To avoid this happening next month, I am using the fact I can’t visit my butcher on Sundays to force myself to eat more vegetarian food. Last Sunday I didn’t need much convincing. After a heavy weekend I go off the idea of meat and start craving grains and other healthy foods. I used the opportunity to make myself a few portions of a nourishing meal that would freeze well, just in case work gets more demanding as we head towards mid winter.

4 Bean Chilli

• 1 can each ready to use kidney beans, pinto beans, black beans, chickpeas
• 2 x 400g tins chopped tomatoes (or 800g fresh, peeled and chopped)
• 2 medium/small onions onions, minced
• 6 small cloves garlic, minced
• vegetable oil to fry 
• cayenne peper- 2-3 teaspoons
• paprika- 2-3 teaspoons
• 3 teaspoons dried oregano 
• frehly ground cumin- about a teaspoon
• freshly ground coriander seed- a teaspoon
• a small bunch of coriander 
• 3 red peppers, cored, deseeded, chopped into small pieces
• beef stock- around 500ml
• a good shake of tabasco (optional)
• Tortillas to serve with soured cream and grated manchego (or mild cheddar) cheese and possibly a nice green salad.

1. Put the onion and garlic in a large saucepan and fry gently in the olive oil.
2. Chop the coriander stem finely- about a handful would be good- throw this into the pan with the spices.
3. When the onion is soft, add the red pepper and allow to sweat, pan covered, for a couple of minutes.
4. Stir in the beans and tomatoes. Add the tomato puree and stock and stir well
5. Let the mixture simmer, covered, for half an hour, stirring occasionally.
6. Uncover, take off the lid and allow to bubble down to a thick sauce consistency..
7. Taste, adjust spicing if you like and if you’re that way inclined, add a shake of tabasco.
8. Just before serving, stir in a couple of handfuls of chopped coriander leaf.
9. Serve on flour tortillas with a big dollop of sour cream, grated machego cheese, some more chopped coriander to garnish and a simply dressed green salad.

*****************

I have missed blogging a lot. Now I’ve started my new job, I should have time to write a couple of times a week so hopefully, as soon as I have a net connection I’ll be back for good and I may even be able to let you see what the kids here have been cooking in our after school club. Wish me luck! 

The internet is a funny place isn’t it? For a start, it isn’t really a place at all, although it does feel like one: a seperate world where people can quietly have a look into other people’s lives (yes, serial lurkers, I still know you’re there ). It’s a place where one can anonymously irritate and insult perfect strangers all day without getting punched in the face and, on a chatroom somewhere, a lonely guy in his mid forties can start a loving relationship with a beautiful girl in New York without knowing that in reality she’s a fat hairy man from Newcastle.

I’ve heard some people say that one day the internet will be the world’s single source of information and will eliminate the need for books and television. Personally, I hope this doesn’t happen. I’m no stickler for tradition but I think there is one big problem with the net at the moment: search engines. Search engines were designed to be intelligent, but they are, for now, very, very stupid indeed. To demonstrate what I mean, let’s try a little experiment. Open a new tab on your browser (or a whole new browser window if you’re the type to have a messy desktop) and go to www.google.co.uk. Now, search for ‘how to cook couscous’.

Obviously Google, the biggest and most important search engine in the universe, is designed to bring you the best and most useful results for your query. Look down to the bottom of the page (possibly the top of the second page) and you should see a link starting ‘Andy Millar….’

That’s right, in Google’s opinion, one of the world experts on cooking couscous is Goon. The man who the other day served up crunchy pasta in a carbonara, the man who asked me if chocolate truffles were dug up by pigs in France, the man who I recently caught trying to drink sherry soaked raisins straight from a mug, is one of Google’s top choices for advice on cooking this particular carbohydrate.

Needless to say, Goon has never cooked couscous by himself. It is very, very dangerous to trust Google’s recipe choices.

Of course, in reality, I love the internet. Over the last week when my access was limited, I felt like I was going slightly mad. Google is the one of the things I use the most, both for searching and for advertising on my site. However, on occasions it does frustrate me. There are days, when I have a bit of comment abuse from the internuts and I wonder why they have decided to attack me so suddenly. Generally it turns out that Google has put me top of an image search for cute fluffy bunnies and I bet you can guess which posts it links to.

Then there are the occasions where Google does send people with relevant queries to my site but directs them to the wrong place. If you search for beef mince recipes (as a ludicrous number of people appear to do), my blog’s first appearance will direct you to the archive for September 2006, which is totally useless. I do have a page somewhere with beef mince recipes but that obviously isn’t relevant.

Now, one of Google’s favourite pages on my blog appears to be the recipe for devilled kidneys. It was an old page, from before the great hard drive crash of Summer 2006. The picture was gone, the recipe was vague. However it was Google’s 5th hit. I was embarrassed, so I decided to spruce it up and, to make sure that Google doesn’t start sending people to the August 2008 page instead of to the right place, I’m giving it a Google boost.

So, Google spiders, are you watching? This is the recipe for devilled kidneys. That’s right, a devilled kidney recipe. In fact it is a lamb kidney recipe too.  You may wish to call it a deviled kidney recipe  or a recipe for deviled kidneys.

I think that should do it. I’m afraid you have to click on one of the links to see the devilled kidney recipe. You’ll see why.

It would appear the internet I had ready set up in the new flat was cancelled by the old tenants. Can’t say I blame them, athough it would have been nice if the estate agents had mentioned something. Tonight I am posting from Goon’s flat, 5 minutes from Covent Garden Market, where we have just  been shopping. We had some more oysters and fizzy, then I went haywire and bought some spicy salami, some pecorino, olive oil and balsamic syrup. After tasting the salami and cheese, Goon decided he wanted sausages and something cheese related for dinner, so I went and bought some additional good quality pork sausages and red onion chutney and we are now waiting on some hot dogs with smoked paprika wedges for dinner, while nibbling on the salami and pecorino.

It took us 40 minutes to work out how Goon’s new grill worked. This is why my gas cooker rocks, even if I’m paying more than Goon to live in zone 2.
I also bought Goon a cake from Lavender Bakery. I ate most of it. This is why I don’t make cakes: I would end up the size of a house.
Due to internet setup times I may be away for a week or so. No matter, it will give me time to sort out the interesting fungus growing on my new kitchen’s window.  Ah, the joy of renting….

See you soon!

There have been a few occasions when I’ve wondered why I blog. With the abuse from former students, the idiots who ‘tlk in txt spk n thnk yr fd lks dsgustin rofl lmao’ and the sheer amount of time it takes to write a post and upload some pictures, you have to wonder why we bother.  But then I remember all the fantastic people I’ve met through this site: other bloggers, a few readers and various people in the food industry. That makes it worthwhile in itself. Then there the few occasions when you get invited to some really great events.

Last Friday I was lucky enough to be asked along to have a look around the Covent Garden Night Market. This is a summer special. It runs through August on Thursday and Friday evenings hosting some fantastic stalls and catering for a variety of tastes. As well as tasty things to munch on while you’re there you’ll find all kinds of foodie delights: breads, meat, game, teas and coffees and Italian olive oils and vinegars as well as some of the Borough Market regulars. 

I arrived shortly after 6pm last Friday, just in time to meet some other food bloggers including Helen, Julia, Niamh and Krista before the entertainment began. 

Each Friday at 6:30pm the kitchen theatre on the West Side of the market plays host to some great chefs. Last week it was the hairy bikers who cooked up a three course meal of a starter with seared scallops and salmon, a Tuscan style beef salad and a dessert of zabaglione.

The Hairy Bikers, being their hairy, entertaining selves.

 Si slices delicious fillet steak. I am jealous.

 Let me assure you that fillet steak was amazing. If I heard correctly, it came from the Northfield Farm stall at the market. Apparently on the 28th of August, the guest chef will be Fergus Henderson.  Pig’s ear salad, here I come!

After that little spectacle and almost being eaten alive by a Hairy Biker’s irate fan who NEEDED to be close to the bikers, it was time to explore the market along with Julia from a Slice of Cherry Pie and Niamh of Eat Like a Girl. The first port of call was obvious for me.

Who could say no to oysters and prosecco? Ok, it supposedly isn’t the best season for them but they were still very good and at £10 for 6 oysters plus a glass of bubbly, they aren’t too badly priced. If you decided to indulge, try not to be like me and spill oyster juice down your arm and skirt. I smelled like fish for the rest of the evening. Classy.

As we sat and ate our oysters, I thought how nice it was to meet other food bloggers, especially after corresponding for so long over messages and e-mail. It was comforting to be chatting to two other young women and find out that they’re just as terrified of motherhood as me and for the same reasons. It’s not just the commitment or the physical and financial strain that worries us, oh no. It’s the thought of 9 months with no cheese, wine or rare meat! 

Continuing to explore the West Piazza, we found some very tasty salami.

It’s a shame that the wild boar sausage had sold out by the time we got there but we got a taste of the spicy salami. I must say it was absolutely delicious with a substantial spicy kick.

And here we have a paella pan with paella.There’s always paella at these markets, isn’t there?

Also present were Manor Farm. I have recommended these guys for years. If you want to catch them at Covent Garden, go EARLY. They sold out fast.

Finally, I got a briefly introduced to Michelle of The Lavender Bakery who is selling some beautiful cupcakes.