Barbecued quail

Wow I’ve been a bit rubbish at this over the past month or so, haven’t I? The last thing I posted wasn’t even about me wrecking a recipe either; it was simply a picture of an egg. Jesus.

While I’m going to lie and claim that my hectic schedule and whirlwind social life are to blame for the silence it’s actually just due to my inherent laziness and inability to do anything more than flap my arms about and complain in hot weather.

Anyway! Many moons ago I had a barbecue to celebrate the fact it had finally stopped raining and 2010 being the year I try to make a real, half-hearted attempt to expand my palate I decided to give quail a bash.


I found a recipe for barbecued quail on Nigella’s website – yep, that one again – which had a lovely sounding marinade. I decided to forgo this as a) I forgot to take a list of ingredients with me to the supermarket and b) I just wanted to see what plain old quail tasted like.

After cooing over the ostrich egg I popped off to find some quail. Nestled in between the chicken and grouse were pairs of little birdies, snuggled together in their dinky plastic trays. I threw a couple in the trolly and trundled off in a happy little daze, glad that everything seemed to be going my way. When I got home and read the packaging I could have kicked myself. My quail had grown up in a shed. In my strange little brain I had decided that they must be free range as it’s posh food. I have no idea how I came to this conclusion but was both scared and comforted by the fact Alex, Charlotte and my mum shared my warped view. Anyway, deep breaths etc.

Promisingly the first step of the quail recipe – spatchcocking the birds – contained the words ‘very easy’. Unfortunately this was a lie.
With a tiny naked bird on the chopping board I advanced with the sharpest kitchen scissors to 'cut along both sides of the backbone'. This was not ‘very easy’. This was very fiddly, very stupid and very annoying. And also very crackly as I snipped through its bones. Eventually I managed to cut its spine out and squished it all down. And then realised MOST OF ITS INSIDES WERE STILL INSIDE!!! After a bit of shrieking I realised I was actually okay with this and poked around with a knife trying to work out what everything was. I still have no idea but wow it sure beat a game of Operation. Unfortunately the next three birds didn’t go so well and in the end I just cut them in half and hoped for the best.

Alex loves food - and by that I don’t mean she’s a chunker - but when I excitedly shoved a quail in her face, beaming manically (me, not the quail) she looked a bit sick and told me she didn’t think she could try it as basically it was weeny and that made it cute and that made her feel bad. I stared at her blankly for around, ooooh, five minutes until she cracked and agreed to taste a bit.


After the throw-away barbecue was (unsafely) lit on top of our rusty, unused, real barbecue (and I’d put out the fire caused by the cardboard packaging) on went the birds. They took around fifteen minutes or so though in all honesty for all I know they were still raw. I’ve got no idea what quail should be like but they seemed pretty done.

After carefully eyeing up the quail Alex manned up and took a bite. And then proceeded to eat three. Charlotte and I watched on in wonder as she packed it away. “I know earlier I said I wouldn’t try rabbit stew if you made it but sod that! I’m going to eat everything from now on, however fluffy.” I’ll take that as a culinary success.

Personally I thought they were lovely. I was expecting them to have a very strong gamey flavour but they were beautifully delicate. While making sure I didn’t crunch down on a bit of tiny bone was a bit of a bore I would definitely do these again, maybe roasting them next time.

Roast duck

A friend of mine, Daisy (in the middle), is currently living in Madrid and popped over this week to celebrate her 21st with a rather wonderful party. To say thank you and hasta luego I decided to do some sort of duck dish. Unfortunately I didn’t plan it very well at all and ended up doing a roast lunch on the warmest weekend 2010 has seen so far.

After rejecting a neat little oven-ready duck (it felt too much like cheating) I ended up with a giant, free-range bird that looked quite daunting. Especially scary were the little stumps of feathers left poking out of its wings… or whatever those bits were. I’m still not quite sure.

When I shoved the squidgy carcase onto a chopping board to prepare it I got a bit of a shock. The duck had TROUSERS on. I imagine these used to be it’s legs but it’s wings were so massive I freaked out slightly and started to get a bit hysterical, imagining that these extra bits of skin were bum flaps or something.


My little friend also came with giblets. As these are usually in a bag shoved inside I grabbed a trouser leg in each hand and had a look. There was just a big lump of red flesh with the spine in it (I’m not really selling this, am I?) and I realised I was going to have to get its insides out myself. After jumping around manically laughing for five nervous minutes I whipped out some latex gloves and prepared to get my hands metaphorically dirty. Thankfully as I tentatively poked my fingers where no fingers should go I felt plastic. I thanked whatever higher power was looking down on me that day and pulled out a little bag of ducky innards.

With the oven preheated to 200°c I plonked Daffy (see what I did there?) onto a roasting rack in a roasting tin and with the tip of a knife pricked the skin all over.

Obviously the times change with the weight of the bird but my duck needed to be roasted for about two hours. An hour in I took it out of the oven to drain the fat. There wasn’t too much in the tray but this was because it had all collected in the cavity. With the help of an oven glove, some tongs and my mum this ended up in a measuring jug, ready to be sloshed over the roast potatoes with a bit of olive oil.

Sixty minutes later a gorgeous, golden duck came out of the oven and after letting the meat rest for ten minutes I set about carving. And then gave up. In the end I just sort of tore it apart with a knife and fork. I had been unsure what to do gravy-wise and ended up buying a Waitrose shallot and red wine sauce which was lovely.


While this whole post makes it sound rather horrid it was one of the nicest things I’ve ever cooked. The nicest thing if you ask Charlotte. I would go as far as saying delicious. But as a complete novice in the kitchen I still get nervous around uncooked meat so it’s nice to know what you’re up against.

Rosemary and thyme roast chicken - and why I always buy free-range

Confession: I have never roasted a chicken.

I understand that absolutely everyone everywhere has roasted a chicken but I am a complete rookie. I don’t really understand how it works. Pretty much whenever I cook meat I make sure it has the texture of Clark’s boot leather in case I poison someone. This includes meats that are meant to be pink such as lamb and beef. If I see the slightest rosy tint they go back in the oven for another half hour. It’s dreadful I know but I’d rather chew roast beef for forty minutes than get botchulism. I don’t help myself by reading Daily Mail articles about men who ate a steak and very quickly became paralysed until their hearts stopped. So roasting a chicken - a meat that can absolutely not be pink - terrifies me. But tonight I overcame this hurdle by, you know… putting a chicken in the oven…

I am a little bit obsessed with Waitrose rotisserie chickens. Especially the rosemary and thyme ones. They stopped doing them in the Ealing Waitrose for a while and when I asked why the answer was “health and safety reasons”. I have absolutely no idea what this means but no matter: they’re back now. So when planning my first roast chicken this was obviously something that I had to try.

Grub (who I realise I’ve cooked for quite a bit recently – I think I’m starting to know his kitchen better than my own) summoned me round on Saturday evening to celebrate his lady’s football team’s 9 - 2 win. We made a deal that he would buy the ingredients and I would cook us dinner. After texting him a shopping list that included ‘a free-range happy chicken that never even LOOKED at a shed’ he panicked and bought two. One was a standard Waitrose chicken and the other a Tesco’s free range chicken.

Having spent an awful lot of time recently reading the Channel Four Food website I’ve gathered that even a standard chicken in Waitrose has had at least a vaguely good life; once in a while seeing the sun and pecking at the odd worm. I’m sort of (read: not brilliantly) boycotting Tesco as they refuse to get rid of their standard, awful, battery-farmed chicken rubbish because lots of horrible people like them.

My mum is basically a pescetarian (having started eating fish when she was pregnant with me) who stopped eating meat because she found it cruel. To her that’s just a personal choice but she doesn’t have a problem with anyone else eating it. She’s always cooked meat for me and does a fantastic roast. But I’ve been brought up always eating organic and free-range meat. She thinks – and I strongly agree – that if you are going to eat an animal it should have had a good life before it goes to slaughter. And I honestly think that free-range meat tastes a lot nicer than an animal that has been cooped up for the whole of its life.

I think the big argument against free-range food is the price and that’s fair enough (I’d hate to meet to sort of person who would eat battery hens if they all cost the same) but when you eat factory farmed chicken for instance, what are you letting yourself in for? How good can a bird that has been reared in a shed packed to the rafters, some of them dead, fed until it could burst and rarely being given darkness in which to sleep, be for you? In my mind it can’t be healthy. I would rather eat a meat once week than twice and pay the same amount for it and know that I wasn’t putting money towards giving something a terrible quality of life as well as putting lower quality food on my plate.

I don’t want to sound like some middle class hippy – as I’m really, really not – but I think things taste better when you know that the meat you’re eating has had a good life or that the vegetables you’re munching on haven’t been sprayed in a load of chemicals. Maybe it’s just me but I would never buy battery chicken or eggs (or anything but British pork) because I believe it’s not worth how ever much money you save – in all honesty I think that if you really look at what you’re eating you’re not saving anything at all.

But ANYWAY: roast chicken.

The packaging on your obviously free-range chicken will tell you how long it should be cooked or the butcher will give you an idea. I always thought you could just stick chicken in the oven but I’ve found this isn’t the case. You should rinse your chicken out. Please don’t take this as kosher but I basically stuck mine under the tap and filled the cavity up with warm water. Then, while shuddering massively, I stuck my fingers in and did disgusting things for a bit. Some red bits came out with the water – I didn’t look too closely – and I did this a couple of times.

I stuck the (Waitrose) chicken on a roasting tray - I’d heated the oven to around 200°c - and stuck half a lemon up its bum (just to keep it moist – promise.) and some rosemary and thyme stalks. I chopped up a few handfuls of both these herbs and then attempted to get my hands under the skin. You have to be a bit rough to do this but gentle enough not to rip the skin. Stuff the chopped herbs between this and the breasts and try and even them out. Rub a tiny bit of olive oil over the chicken with a bit of salt to crisp the skin up and sprinkle over the rest of your chopped herbs.

Roast this in the middle of the oven for as long as you’ve been told to and you should end up with a lovely succulent, flavoured chicken. And the moral high ground.

Piri piri chicken

The clocks went forward on the 28th of March to mark the start of summertime. And what better way to celebrate than to have a barbecue? Of course we are talking British summertime here which meant it was absolutely chucking it down outside. So rather than taking my eyebrows off during an unfortunate incident involving lighter fluid and delirium tremens I dragged my griddle pan to Hammersmith to cook indoors for Grub and Charlotte.

For your piri piri marinade you need:
6 to 12 red chillies
3 cloves of garlic
½ a tablespoon of paprika
½ a teaspoon of oregano
Around 1 teaspoon of salt
50ml of red wine vinegar
100ml of olive oil

If you find this makes more marinade than you need don’t worry as it’ll keep for a couple of weeks if it’s been nicely sealed up in something.

I arrived to find Grub bellowing down the phone at his internet provider, Charlotte shrieking down my phone about where she could park (half seven on a Saturday – ANYWHERE!) and got in to trouble with the oven. You see it’s got lots of knobs on it and I don’t know what any of them do. Even Grub has to light the stove by a process of elimination. While he bollocked web geeks I stood looking a bit lost and finally just turned a selection of dials and hoped for the best. If you know how to work an oven heat it to 180°c / gas mark 4. I managed this after Grub came in to say hello and ask why I had the grill on.

Stick the chillies on a baking tray and roast them for 10 minutes. How many you use depends on how long you want to spend with your mouth open, fanning it with your hand going ‘eeeh ooooooh ohohohoh’. I thought they smelled rather lovely but Charlotte repeatedly asked if they were burning. Out they come a lovely ruby red with crispy brown splotches, all wrinkled and hot. Once they’ve cooled enough for you to handle them roughly chop them up.


The garlic part of the recipe I had involved a quick Google (thank God Grub had put those internet chaps in their place and got it working again) as it said to use blanched garlic. Apparently you do this by placing the peeled cloves of garlic in some cold water, bringing it up to the boil, draining and repeating twice more. This leaves you with something that I imagine feels like just a warm eyeball and needs chopped up.

Now very simply put the vinegar, olive oil, salt, paprika, oregano, garlic and chillies into a pan and simmer for a few minutes. The photo isn’t brilliant but this was such a wonderful mix of colours and it smelt amazing.



Let this all cool down and then pour it into a food processor or a blender and purée it. Let the chicken marinade in it for an hour minimum before cooking.

I shoved some baked potatoes in the oven while this was going on and hastily stuck some sausages under the grill to stop Charlotte stuffing her face with sneaky bits of the baguette I’d bought to go with dinner. I did these in the bourbon and Tabasco glaze I mentioned in another post (4 tablespoons honey, 10 drops Tabasco, two tablespoons bourbon) and they were lovely.

I used a splash of oil in the pan when I cooked the chicken but wouldn’t again as there’s enough in the marinade.

Once this was nice and browned I chucked it onto plates with a potato and some salad. If it’s a bit too hot for you squeeze over some lime juice.

Due to the fact I’m a complete idiot and can’t really time anything well we ate at 11 o’clock so if you’re as special as me I’d suggest doing all this and marinading the chicken the day before you need it.

I also tried my hand at mayonnaise but the less said about that the better.

Indian Saturday #1: Rogan josh

On Saturday night I went what I can only describe as mental and decided to knock up a couple of Indian dishes for Charlotte and myself.

First up is rogan josh from Anjum Anand’s Anjum’s New Indian.

The list of ingredients looks incredibly long (especially when you’re wondering around Waitrose with an A4 shopping list) but when it comes to cooking it actually doesn’t seem too bad.

750g of lamb or mutton, cut into chunks
3 or 4 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1 blade of mace
7 black peppercorns
3 cloves
2 black cardamom pods
5 green cardamom pods (I could only find green ones so used 7 of those)
5cm of a cinnamon stick
A large onion
2 medium tomatoes
12g of fresh ginger
6 large cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of ground fennel seeds
2 teaspoons of ground coriander
1 teaspoon of red chilli powder
2 teaspoons of ground cumin
1 and a half teaspoons of garam masala
A pinch of salt
3 tablespoons of natural yoghurt
Fresh coriander

It won’t come as a shock to anyone that even with a bit of prep I managed to miss out the cloves and put all the spices in at the wrong time. Charlotte hit the nail on the head when she said “It’s not the best curry I’ve ever had but it’s still tasty.” I’d say that as she ate her body weight it must have been okay but by the time I served it up she was hungry enough to have eaten it off the floor had I dropped it.

So you have the ginger and garlic mix to hand while you’re cooking I’d do this before you start.
Chop the garlic and throw it in a blender and add the peeled and chopped ginger. Keep the chunks quite big or they’ll get lost under the blades like mine did. Add a slosh of water and whiz until you have a paste.

The tomatoes need to be puréed so I’d suggest using tinned ones. I was using fresh, uncooked and unskinned tomatoes at it wasn’t half a job. The 1980s kitchen equipment came out (with the usual story from my mother about how it’s older than me… maybe) and the tomatoes got ineffectively schmooshed in a bowl. They then went through a sieve but somehow there were still strips of skin in there. This wasn’t end of the world but strangely enough it’s probably better to do it properly.

Put both of these to one side and heat the oil in a large non-stick pan. Throw in the peppercorns, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and the mace. The recipe very clearly says ‘add the whole spices’ but I, in my true village idiot style, put all the spices in. Fry the spices until they sizzle and then add the onion. Cook this until it’s browned and then add the lamb, stirring until it’s also browned all over.

Pour in the garlic and ginger and lower the heat. Stir it about for a couple of minutes and the garlic should start smelling like it’s cooked. In goes the ground coriander, cumin, fennel, chilli powder, salt and garam masala. Stir this for just under a minute.

I couldn’t find any powdered fennel so Charlotte was given my make-shift pestle and mortar (plastic bowl, rolling pin) and told to crush away.

After the last of the spices go in add the tomatoes and turn the heat up. This then cooks for fifteen minutes and needs stirred once in a while. If it starts to dry up too fast add a splash of hot water.

After the fifteen minutes mine was still quite watery. I’m not sure it should be as the recipe says ‘add enough water to come halfway up the meat’ but never mind. Bring the curry to the boil and then turn the heat down quite low. Simmer for around 35-45 minutes until the meat is lovely and tender. The liquid should reduce into a thick gravy. Stir in the yoghurt before bringing back to the boil. Remove it from the heat, mix in a handful of roughly chopped coriander and serve.

Cooking with middle class students

I’ve just finished the first week of my scary new job so decided to finally write about the last thing I cooked as I was too lazy to do it before.

After leaving Zoo on the 12th I was technically unemployed for a week. I had decided to spend my time preparing for my new position and trying out a lot of recipes but instead I went to Manchester and gave myself a two-day hangover.

My friend Asha is in her third year of a drama degree there and is currently in the middle of her dissertation. So obviously I thought that this would be the best time to go up and demand all of her attention. Intent on giving the poor student a taste of the high life I crashed through her front door with four bottles of champagne and expected to be knee-deep in Pot Noodle and empty pizza boxes. In actual fact I was greeted with a fridge full of fresh food, green tea and fancy cook books. In the end I was the only real student there at all: drinking beer at the crack of midday, watching two week’s worth of Neighbours on the internet and eating chips for breakfast.

I arrived on Shrove Tuesday and the plan was to make pancakes for lunch. To relax before this challenge we cracked open a bottle of Bollinger and I helped Asha learn some lines. I absolutely love doing this and get far too in to it. Unfortunately I went mental and was unable to do my crap American accent for one of the characters so did the whole thing in my crap Australian accent instead. I realised it was time to stop once Asha told me she was ready to punch me in the face. By now we were well and truly squiffy and pancakes were replaced by a trip to Pizza Express, washed down with a bottle of their rose cava. After dinner we weaved our way to a fundraiser for Asha’s play where within two minutes I had paid £3 to have a penis drawn on my hand - which only came off on Thursday evening. After a few more drinks we trotted home where it seemed essential to open another bottle of bubbly while Asha taught me when to use ‘who’s’ and ‘whose’. I thought I’d mention this as a word of warning to anyone else who thinks leaving school at 14 might be a good idea. There really isn’t anything more embarrassing than reaching 21, still not knowing and having to ask your friend to explain it.
Apart from the two of you then Googling ‘whom’.

Wednesday was a bad day for the both of us. Having managed not to be sick Asha sloped off to a rehearsal and I decided the best thing for my hangover was to drink four cans of Coke. I was wrong and spent most of the afternoon twitching and unable to concentrate on the high-brow documentary I was watching (http://snipurl.com/uf8wp). Later we recovered enough to make it to the cinema where we saw A Single Man. I cried through out most of it and I’m still unsure if that’s because it was very sad or my body was just doing anything it could to get all the alcohol out of my system. Cooking had once again fallen foul of the demon drink.

Waking up with a (vaguely) clear head on Thursday meant it was finally time for pancakes. In to a bowl went 100g of plain flour, a pinch of salt, one egg and 300ml of milk. It started to look like batter once Asha snatched the bowl from my grasp and beat it properly. Out of the corner of my eye I had seen her hovering by my shoulder, hopping from foot to foot, itching to say ‘shall I do that?’ so prolonged her agony for as long as possible. We had planned to go shopping that morning but after our slightly undercooked breakfast lazing on the sofa all day seemed a much better idea.

That evening we pulled our socks up and planned a lovely farewell dinner. We picked an invention of Asha’s based on a Nigella Lawson recipe.

I suppose you would call it a Thai red chicken and mango curry. Apart from the fact it isn’t red. The list of things you need seems rather long but when you’re as middle class as Asha most of the ingredients are in your kitchen anyway. And they are:

1 tablespoon of wok oil
1 spring onion, finely sliced
½ - 1 red chilli, deseeded and finely sliced
Diced chicken
2-3 teaspoons of red Thai curry paste
2 cloves of garlic
200ml of coconut milk
250ml of chicken stock
2 teaspoons of fish sauce
Assorted veg (we used mange tout, baby corn, courgette and broccoli)
The juice of half a lime
Diced mango
Fresh coriander

Heat the wok oil in, surprisingly, a wok and add the spring onion, chilli and garlic. Brown these off and add the curry paste.

Throw in the chicken and give it around five minutes to start to cook properly.



Pour in the coconut milk, chicken stock and fish sauce before bringing to the boil. Chuck in whatever vegetables you’re using and simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, adding some coriander five minutes before it’s done.

Squeeze the lime juice over everything, add the mango and give the curry another five minutes or so for it to soften. Serve with some more fresh coriander on top. I would have uploaded a picture of it but I took it on my phone and it looks a bit unappetising.

I realise that this was very, very long and I could have just skipped straight to the curry but this saves me having to repeat what I did on my week off to anyone who bothers to ask.

Plain and simple lamb stew

This is the world’s most bog-standard stewy/casserole thing and while I realise that it sounds very plain and boring it’s actually rather tasty and great to just pull out of the fridge to heat up after a long day.

I usually use leg stakes as they’re just really easy but my favourite thing about stew is you can chuck absolutely anything in and it doesn’t matter.

Sooo…
Lamb
Carrots
New potatoes
An onion
Garlic
Lamb stock
Herbs of your choice (because I’m generous like that)

Heat the oven at 150°c and roughly chop up half an onion and three cloves of garlic. If, like me, you love the stuff - or you’re just worried about Dracula touching you up in your sleep - shove in a bit more. Though if you’re like me after a glass of cava and just want anyone to touch you up at all use a bit less. Either way brown these quite well in a pan and throw them in a casserole dish.

Handy tip that may not work: I weirdly find that if I wash my hands in cold water rather than hot the smell of garlic pretty much disappears rather than lingering around for the next three weeks.

Cut the lamb in to biggish chunks and brown these in the pan really well too.

Round the carrots and half the new potatoes and these go in the casserole dish with everything else.

I only use a small amount of water when I dissolve the stock cube as the meat seems to be tenderer if there’s less liquid. This goes in the casserole dish with the herbs and then the whole thing goes in the oven for three or four hours.

I tend to put the lid on my casserole dish askew so that there’s a bit of a gap. It doesn’t seem to dry up but the lamb seems softer and the whole thing a bit thicker.

Roast lamb for idiots.

The weekend before Christmas I was invited to an early, not very festive lunch - which I cooked. I was supposed to only be doing a pudding (which I’m clearly an old hand at) but our elected chef cancelled a few days before. I stood up and decided to take the main-course bullet. “I’ll get the take-away menus out then” joked our host and oh! how we laughed. Until I threatened to lynch his pug. Which surprisingly wasn’t a euphemism.

I decided to cook slow roasted lamb, roast potatoes and veg with pigs in blankets. I know they’re supposed to go with chicken but they really are my favourite bit of Christmas. I spend weeks desperately waiting for December to start so I can start wrapping pigs in pigs. They just don’t taste as good at any other time of year.

I popped to the meat counter in Waitrose because I couldn’t make it to the butchers and got a shoulder of lamb as I really can’t stand fatty meat. My old flat mate used to love having a fry up with me as I’d spend five minutes carefully cutting all the fat off my bacon which I then dunked on his plate.

I’ll admit I bought ready-made pigs in blankets but they’re very easy to make. I think small, plain sausages are best, with smoked streaky bacon. If you wrap a sprig of rosemary with the sausage it gives them quite a nice flavour. The Waitrose website has quite a good recipe for a honey, Tabasco and bourbon glaze. You mix two tablespoons of bourbon, 10 drops of Tabasco and four tablespoons of clear honey together and you’re done. And a bit drunk.

Maris Piper potatoes are one of the best for roasting as they’re waxy. There’s a very good reason this is good but I can’t for the life of me remember it. Par boil the potatoes for ten minutes in slightly salty water (science bit: salt makes the cells break up quicker which helps the crunch factor). If you swish them around in a colander it roughens the surface giving you more crunchy bits. Some people dust potatoes in flour to help them stay crisp when they’re out of the oven. I’ve never bothered with anything like that as mine are usually in my tummy before they have a chance to soften.

While I pre-heated an oven at 150°c, though it might have been 180°c as all the numbers had worn off the dial, I used a knife to poke some holes through the lamb – while gleefully pretending to stab a tiny little person - which I then stuffed with quarter of a clove of garlic and a lot of rosemary. I did this after having a little cry about the blood that was in the packaging with the lamb. God, I really am suited to this cooking lark.

I then wrapped the lamb in some tin foil and stuck it in the oven for an hour. After a few very limey cosmos I unwrapped the meat and stuck the potatoes in for another hour and a half. If you turn them half way through this stops the bottom sticking to the baking tray and gives you more crispy bits.

Anyway in the words of someone doing a really rubbish Jamie Oliver impression: bish bash bosh, all done, pukka me old china. Laaaahvly!