I can’t believe I had to change the title of this post because no one has heard of Cephalonia. Honestly, if it isn’t Corfu or Rhodes, no one cares. 

This is another meal I really didn’t intend to blog, but it turned out really, really good! The recipe came from this Waitrose page and I only made minor alterations to it. I added a bit more of each of the spices and threw in more raisins.

I certainly wouldn’t have thought up that combination of ingredients myself but it really works. The raisins disintegrate completely in the stew, adding sweetness. The squash gives it texture and the peppers add a little bitterness.

I think I should cook Greek more often - I love savoury dishes that have cinnamon and cloves. I particularly liked the idea of tossing the pasta with marscapone and nutmeg. Delicious!

This time I got photos.

The reddy-brown stuff on the right is ”kukul mas.” That’s chicken curry to the rest of us. Like most Sri Lankan curries, it’s very hot. Roasted Sri Lankan curry powder gives it a dark colour and a distinctive flavour. I added  a little bit of paprika to bring out the red colouring.

I have talked about kiribath before. This time I tried to make it into diamond shaped blocks in the way it is traditionally served. The freshly cooked rice is made into a big rectangle like this.

As it cools, the rice becomes more sticky and you can cut into shapes. You can see these in the top picture.

The yellow curry is bread fruit. This was one of my favourite things when I was growing up. Until last night, I hadn’t had it for years and I was delighted when my Dad brought me some. As far as I’m aware, you can only find bread fruit in cans in Britain with the skin removed and the white flesh chopped into small pieces and cooked. It has a wonderful texture and, when it is heated in a curry, the fruit almost disintegrates. This thickens the curry and makes a wonderfully soft and gooey accompaniment to kiribath.

There is already a recipe for kiribath here. Try it! It is very nice. Also recipes here for the chicken and the bread fruit.

Remember those fresh greens I was talking about a couple of weeks ago? I had a feeling they might make good crispy seaweed. I was right!

I made seaweed once before using recipe from a chinese cookery book. It suggested using the green bits of pak choi leaves. The result was good but, since you can’t really use the white fleshy bits of the leaves, you have to use a lot of pak choi. This makes the seaweed a bit expensive.

The fresh greens were much better in this respect. They are quite big and the leaf stalks are small. 1 fresh green will make enough seaweed to accompany two meals. Don’t use the yellow bits! They don’t look very good.

I had my seaweed as an accompaniment to a beef fillet I picked up on the way home. I intended to have it in a Thai dish. In the end, after finding some peanut butter my housemate was struggling to get through, I made an Indonesian-style peanut sauce for it. I cut the steak it into thin strips, marinated them in soy and spices and flash fried them for just a few seconds. I served the beef and seaweed with some noodles and the peanut sauce.  The crispy seaweed recipe is here and the beef with peanut sauce recipe is here.

Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly a Wellington, but it was wrapped in pastry.

Another day, another new meat to try. This time it is the South African antelope, kudu, which is steadily growing in popularity amongst game eaters in Britain. I’ve been inspired by this page at the BBC and, reading that rose flavours work well with game, I thought I’d try it out on my kudu steaks.

There is an Iranian (I think) shop on my way to college and I found a selection of rose condiments there. I got some rose petal jam to make a paste to smother on the steaks. I mixed the jam with some lemon juice and zest, wrapped the entire thing in a rosemary and thyme crepe, covered it in puff pastry and baked it. It nearly worked very well. The problem was, the pastry wouldn’t rise!

Icouldn’t understand it. Usually gas mark 7 for 15 minutes will suffice. This time  it didn’t show signs of  puffing for about 25 minutes. After 40 mintes it was ready. This was all fine apart from the fact the kudu was now well done. I wanted it rare. I was annoyed.

Apart from that it was great. Kudu is very tender and juicy. I had it with lemon and coriander cous-cous. I had a bit of rose petal jam left so I made a sauce by mixing it with some white wine, cinnamon  and half a capful of cherry brandy, just to give it extra richness. It seems that cherries+roses+game=tasty. It’s definitely one to try with venison and pigeon. 

So, for those of you who like your meat well done, this is a good way to do kudu. Full details are here.

Next time I’m making my own pastry.

I first had kangaroo steak a couple of years ago at Archipelago, near Russell Street. This is an excellent restaurant which has a very original menu. However I think I did badly with the kangaroo dish, it was a touch overspiced and so I didn’t get chance to taste the meat properly.

I tried it again a couple of months ago in a Walkabout pub. They do several kangaroo dishes. I opted for a salad and it was very good. Since then I’ve found places to buy this meat online. Osgrow and Alternative Meats both stock this as well as a wide variety of other exciting things. Gamston Wood who have a stall at Borough Market but, sadly, no website, sell Ostrich and Kangaroo  and I am informed they will be expanding their selection soon.

Kangaroo has a very similar flavour to venison and there isn’t a huge difference in price. Half a kilo of a good quality steak cost me about £11 - about the same as an off the bone venison haunch. I had been told it went well with berry sauces so after a bit of internet research and looking at the special offers in the local supermarkets, I came up with this recipe. The idea for the sweet potato came from The Amateur Gourmet. It doesn’t look like he’s put up a recipe so I’ve offered mine.

For some reason I’ve been craving Sri Lankan food recently. This is very weird as I thought my parents’ cooking had put me off it for life.

My parents see food as being purely functional.  Everything in the kitchen gets thrown in a pan and stir fried to death. Every vegetable in the fridge gets chopped up, thrown together with soya mince, quorn sausages (yes, they’re veggies) rice, chilli sauce, soy sauce, tomato sauce and lettuce and cooked until the sausages are solid and the lettuce is soggy. Once, for a dinner party, tandoori chicken got made with strawberry yoghurt because Mum thought it wouldn’t make it taste any different. And then there was the lamb chop that was left in the oven so long I thought it was pork.

However there were some things which I really miss. Mostly things I had on holiday in Sri Lanka. Kiribath is amazing stuff and a well made Sri Lankan fish curry never goes down badly. I’d like to find some breadfruit too.

So I thought I’d give it a go, and it worked. Very well in fact. I made..

Mungatta Kiribath: Kiribath is rice cooked in coconut milk and is traditionally served on New Year, birthdays and other special occasions. It has a risotto like texture, but is slightly more sticky. Its often pressed into a large square and cut into diamond shaped pieces. Mungatta means mung beans. These are sometimes added for a bit of extra texture and flavour.

Fish Curry: Sri Lankan curries are similar to South Indian curries in a lot of ways. There are subtle differences in the spicing. Often a LOT of chilli is used. Also the spices for the curry powder is roasted before being ground, giving the flavour of the curry more depth

I served these with some okra that I fried gently with curry powder and a touch of chilli powder. I would say that it was a big success. It certainly seemed to go down well with my housemates who tried it.

This happened in true “Ready Steady Cook” style last Sunday. There was a French rabbit in the freezer, chorizo in the fridge, a big pan and not a lot of space anywhere. Paella was the obvious choice. Fortunately, it turned out to be a tasty choice too, although its construction turned out to be quite stressful.

It should have happened like THIS. But that would be far too easy.

Problem number 1: No Paella rice. Solution - substitute Japanese sushi rice and believe it or not… it worked!

Problem number 2: No red pepper.  Solution- stir in  some red pepper soup and put in fresh chopped tomato for colour.

Problem number 3: No herbs. No solution to this one. I just prayed there’d be enough herbiness in the stock to make up for it.

Problem number 4: The chorizo was covered in a shrink wrap plastic that I mistook for the chorizo skin. I’d added half the chorizo before I noticed and spent a while picking plastic out of the pan.

Problem number 5: The rabbit was looking at me funny. No - not really a problem but why leave the head on the rabbit when packing it? It’s pretty useless. Isn’t that weird? Guess it isn’t in France. Also we had a freak rabbit with a disturbingly big liver.

After all that we eventually had a paella that was very nice apart from the occasional bit of chorizo plastic floating about. We paired it with a nice Rioja and some dolmades we found in the freezer.

For ages I thought that blogs were a rubbish idea. I still do. There are far too many people taking up webspace posting really boring details about their lives that no-one really cares about.

But now I’ve discovered food blogs my attitude is changing. I really like cooking and eating and, more importantly, cooking and eating ‘interesting’ things. I’ve got to the point where, if I’m looking through a recipe book or around the shelves in the supermarket I find I’ve seen and tried it all before. Even restaurant menus are looking old. So where do I look for ideas? It turns out that the most exciting and original recipes can be found online in food blogs. There are hundreds to sort through… these three are the best I’ve found.

Lex Culinaria

The Amateur Gourmet (refresh the page and look at the cool pictures at the top!)

The Passionate Cook

Now I’m making my own contribution. Maybe one day it’ll be nearly as good as these guys’ pages.

I guess I’d better sort out a design, think of a name and get a camera!