Finally I found some fabulous fennel fare!
As faithful followers of fashion will know I've been trying to find a robust fennel dish for years now, braising with vodka, baking with breadcrumbs, grilling with cheese, always slightly disappointed by how watery and underwhelming the dish turned out to be. But not any more - thanks to the Rebel Cook all my fennel failures are forsworn. Now I have a braised fennel dish to be proud of.

I came across the book in one of my many, many trips to the Starbucks in what used to be Waterstones near my work. Well nearish my work - but that's a whole other story. Not that I willingly shop at Starbucks you understand, but there are no Police Box coffee bars or other quality outlets anywhere nearish my work.
And they do that Christmas eggnog thing. Hmmmmmmmm eggnog.

So anyway, this cookbook on the bargain books table caught my eye and ended up in my collection. It's got some very innovative recipes in it (fennel and anchovies!), but this is the first one I've got around to trying. Like many of my recipe books the pleasure is more in the owning than the using. Which is slightly sad really.
Must try harder.

Today's dinner turned into a surprisingly nice ad-hoc meal - I also tried out a couple of Nigella Lawson's summery recipes: a gently pleasing baked ricotta with a slightly more aggressive grilled chicory.
Completely vegetarian too as requested by Flora who is apparently meatbound after her viking voyage to the Shetland Isles. Except for the anchovies of course.
Not in Flora. In the braised fennel.
So not completely vegetarian at all then.

What's that you say?
Actually we aren't attending an Alliteration Day activity after all? Arse!

Stormbound in Pittenweem. AGAIN!

We had always planned to overnight in Pittenweem, and we weren't going to let the fact that a hurricane was forecast, or the annual Un-Bass Rock Race course had once again been shortened to a big circle, get in our way!

We had a lovely barbecue organised and the weather was perfect for cooking up on the quay-side so after a delightful Saturday race we turned right back around, put up the spinnaker and sailed straight to Pittenweem where we we tied up, cracked open the Cava, unshipped the hunka meats and pulled out the bag of charcoal, the starter fluid and ... the lawnmower?
So where's the barbecue? Oops. Back in the garage :(

So we had to improvise an un-barbecue on the galley stove, and rather well too I thought. Not that it affected the vegetarian crewmate overmuch, since cheese is the closest thing we have to a vegetable on board. Fortunately one of the redeeming features of Pittenweem is a decent chip shop. Fish is a vegetable right?

Come the next morning, though, we discovered why all those other boats had decided to go home - the hurricane had arrived and the boat was bouncing around like a frog in a blender, even snapping the sternline at one point. So we tried to make our escape but completely failed to get the boat to turn through the howling wind into the harbour entrance and several attempts later had to give up and tie the boat back to the quay-side.
That meant skipper John and I staying on board to check and adjust the lines every hour (every goddamn hour) while the rest of the crew made their pathetic excuses and abandoned ship.

It took two more days for the wind to drop enough for us to get out, but apart from running out of milk (not helped by Pittenweem's single grocery shop closing at Sunday lunchtime) we had plenty of stores on board, as usual, and managed to keep our spirits up with the Cava and the GinAndTonics.
I turned out some very tasty Bacon-wrapped chicken parcels in a packet (a packet oh the humanity!) of peppercorn sauce, and we eventually got a pleasant sail back up the river arriving home by 2 a.m. Tuesday morning - just in time to get back to work!

Astonish your friends. Impress your guests. Stuff their lamb with oysters!
Though judging from the leftovers on their plates, my guests were not so much impressed as horrified.

Browsing, as you do, the Guardian's back-catalogue of recipes I came across an interesting-looking idea for stuffing a saddle of lamb with oysters. Then as I was passing the ever-excellent butcher George Bower in Stockbridge I happened to notice their sign warning of the imminent sellout of their stock of spring lambs, so I thought I'd better get my hunk of sheep while the going was good. Remembering the oyster recipe, and observing the fishmongers opposite I decided to get myself a bunch of oysters and a saddle of lamb to stuff them with. A thirty-pound-sterling saddle as it turned out. These small sheep are getting bloody expensive - I wonder if it wouldn't be easier just to rear my own and slaughter them in the bath?

I bought myself ten fresh oysters in the vain hope they would yield the 8 oz of oyster meat called for in the recipe, and a pot of white crab-meat. In fact I had misread the recipe and thought it required both oysters and crab-meat, but it actually suggests smoked oysters and crab-meat as an alternative to the plain oysters, though in my defence it's not very clearly written. When my oysters yielded a disappointingly meagre 4 oz of flesh I also added a couple of ounces of the crab-meat and a half-dozen anchovies. But in the end there was rather more stuffing than my saddle could hold (and it was very nearly the required 3lb after boning and trimming as instructed), despite my best ramming efforts. The general opinion was that it really had quite enough oyster, I don't think the crab-meat added anything of great value but I quite liked the touch of anchovy saltiness, so I've amended the recipe accordingly.

According to the blurb at the top of the recipe, traditionally there were clear combinations of fish and meat - anchovies with beef, oysters with mutton, crab with lamb. Certainly there are plenty of eighteenth century recipes for shoulder of mutton with oysters, though I'm not so sure about the lamb and crab. The anchovies seemed to work for me though.
Anyway, since you can hardly find mutton these days this modern recipe calls for a saddle of lamb instead, and allows for (cheaper) frozen oysters which must be a particularly American thing - they don't seem to exist much over here.

The recipe also has something do with mustard, which encouraged me to a vaguely mustard-themed menu, with a herby mustard bread, roast potatoes with a floury mustard crust, and a mustardy butternut squash gratin. I stopped short at a mustard desert though - coward that I am. Perhaps I've been chastened by my experiments with crab ice cream?

On the whole a pretty tasty meal (well, I liked the lamb, the peas were oddly well-received and the panna cotta was as popular as ever) - apologies to my guests Grecky for the late invite, the lamb purchase was a bit spur-of-the-moment!

menu

My joint was about perfectly medium cooked (just slightly pink) after 1½ hours cooking - I took it out when the internal temperature reached 125° and it finally peaked at 130° while resting. Myself I would have gone for slightly more rare, and pulled it out at 110°F, but the meat was beautifully tender.
Unfortunately, the skin was a bit like hard rubber - it completely failed to crisp up: I really should have cranked up the temperature to start with for 15 minutes or so.

The gravy was a bit weird - I thought it might have taken a bit more colour and thickened slightly, but it remained somewhat on the thin side and a little grey and anaemic looking. Still reasonably tasty though. I did add some water to the roasting tin under the racked lamb, and perhaps I put in too much which prevented any of the juices from crisping up in the tin to give some colour.

I've learned from bitter (!) experience with the Christmas Goose that if you want to deglaze the roasting tin to make gravy, it's a good idea to add a little water (or juice/wine/vinegar/etc) to the roasting tin just at the start so that the first meat drippings don't stick and burn to a horrible layer of charcoal.
If you're sitting the meat directly in the roasting tin you can just make a protective bed of bones, mirepoix or sliced onion.
Unfortunately if you add too much water the drippings will never caramelise in the tin so finding some kind of middle ground would be ideal - this rolled joint did seem to leak quite a lot of juices.

I'd definitely make this again. But better :)

Razor clams. Damn those razor clams. I keep trying with them - I mean surely there must be something to them - they're ever so popular in all the fancy restaurants. Though on the other hand they are as cheap as dirt. So maybe the fishmongers know something fancy restaurateurs don't?

It so happened that I had a bunch of razor clams (or spoots) that I bought to try using instead of squid in my lacy squid. Incidentally, razor clams don't go lacy. In fact if you cut them up thinly and blanch them they just turn into rubbery bands. What (very) little flavour they ever had seems to be just leached away. So no blanching.

Your first problem when it comes to making something edible out of a razor clam is the grit. They love grit. They're just chock full of grit. Or sand. Or something equally gritty. So you need to rinse them really thoroughly in running water. Preferably overnight. But don't leave them covered in water - they'll just drown.

Your second problem is cleaning them - they're pretty ugly, complicated beasts that need various hard, foul or yes gritty bits removing. Some recipes just steam them like mussels, then slice up the flesh, but others clean and prepare them before cooking. Maybe if you can do this well enough you won't need to leave them all night in running water in your bath. Maybe.
You can persuade them to open up by briefly blanching them in boiling water, or pouring the water over them. (Or by drowning them!)
Cool them off quickly afterwards, though, or they'll turn rubbery.
Once the shells are open the body will easily pull out. You can hunt around the interwebs for videos and pictures of how to clean them (if you can work out what's going on). Mostly it's the used-condom-like digger which produces the best of the flesh. All I got from the rest of the body was something resembling a string bag, but I suppose that might get better with practice.

Your third problem is cooking them in some way that doesn't turn them to rubber. I'm sad to say I haven't found that method yet.
I did try grilling them in garlic butter on their shells, which wasn't too awful. They still turn a bit rubbery, don't have a huge amount of flavour, but you do get a lot of juice so it's nice to have a bit of bread to soak it up - at least the garlic butter tastes good!

Finally with the lacy squid!

I first encountered the squid de dentelle at Oloroso about a year ago. It was just a side-note in Mum's main course fish dish, but I was impressed by the way the thin squiddy strings had twisted themselves up like fishy curly fries, and how tender they were. I've been completely unable to find anything more about the idea since, despite some effort pacé Google. So I decided to use up some handy complementary leftovers and have a bash at making a squiddy pasta dish every bit as lacy as theirs.

Trust me to want to do it outside squid season though. Which, since you ask, is September - November (or June - January at the outside). I bought some razor clams from my excellent fishmonger to use as a substitute, but caved in completely at the sight of the freshly unfrozen squid at the fish counter of my local Fucking Supermarket™

Since I wasn't sure how to get that Oloroso lacy effect in my squid I prepared a number of different samples, intending to flash-fry them all and see how they turned out.
Firstly I sliced open two squid bodies along the seam and laid them out flat. One sheet I lightly scored on the soft (non-skin) side about 1cm apart, then sliced them both up lengthways in various thicknesses between the thinnest I could manage and about 3mm ribbons.
I also separated out the tentacles.

• Sample 1: Separated tentacles
• Sample 2: Squid tube, opened out, thinly sliced
• Sample 2a: Squid tube, opened out, 3mm slices
• Sample 3: Squid tube, opened out, lightly scored, thinly sliced
• Sample 3a: Squid tube, opened out, lightly scored, 3mm slices

I had my frying pan all prepped and ready to go, when it occurred to me to try blanching one of the sliced samples first and see if that helped, and was astonished to see them wind themselves up into lacy albino ribbons just like at Oloroso. Still beautifully tender too. So I just blanched the lot (slightly wary of overcooking them), all the samples seem to curl up pretty much the same way except for the tentacles.
So much for all my scientific endeavour.

The rest of my Lacy Squid Linguine and Panna Cotta with Raspberry Syrup came about from the collection of oiled artichoke hearts, tapenade and vanilla flavouring I had left over from previous meals.
I wonder if this might also be an occasion to bring out the squid ink pasta, but how to avoid the black-on-black crime of that tapenade?

Time for my cute landlady Aline to ship out to Borneo where she will become intimately familiar with the tops of ancient rainforest and Muslim full-body coverings. Not necessarily in that order. And hopefully not simultaneously.
She celebrated with a roast dinner to say goodbye to all her Edinburgh friends, which oddly, consisted mostly of boiled vegetables.
The food, not her friends. Her friends are quite nice when you get to know them! But then we do have quite a small oven.

We managed a sit-down meal for 11 people only an hour or so behind schedule, though we did have to hijack the spare bedroom for an impromptu dining room. Much to the distress of my new flatmate, who moved in later that evening. Or tried to.
Welcome Carmen!

Enough of Aline's friends are piscatorians to justify trying out my idea for an en Papillote fish with vanilla flavouring which I was very happy with, and seemed generally well received. Pity my photo of the parcel's contents drowning in a pool of watery-looking juices didn't do it justice!
It's a pretty easy dish to make because you can get most of the prep work out of the way well ahead of time - I roasted the tomatoes and made up the tapenade, and the vanilla vodka infusion over a couple of evenings last week. I did have to spend about half an hour de-boning the Dory earlier in the day, which was a lot more trouble than I wanted. Damn those Dory bones - they really hang in there. I think it's worth putting in maximum effort though - I just hate finding a mouthful of bones - it spoils the whole dish.
I cut out the greaseproof paper and foil sheets ahead of time, but I didn't want to make up the packets until just before cooking - I wasn't sure what the (presumably) slightly acidic tomato juices might do to the tin foil if they were sitting around for any length of time.

I was given responsibility for the roast potatoes (successfully crunchy) and the roast parsnips (not-so-crunchy), and Aline took charge of everything else. See here for details She did a terrific job of timing it all, despite being hindered by the oven going out two or three times. Not sure what's going on there!
Aline also wanted a special mention for her hard-working and long-suffering! KP Des who did an excellent job of peeling and chopping all the veg and nuts - thanks Des!

Our dodgy oven might explain the slightly disappointing nut roast Yes - nut roast! Apparently vegetarians really do eat the stuff! which was a bit soggy, and then a bit burnt from its rescue grilling. Either it was the oven thing, or it was including rather too much vegetables, or it was mixing it up too early and leaving it sitting around for too long.
Pity, because it was actually quite tasty. For a nut roast :)

Happy Trails Aline!

Mum's visiting on a sailing weekend, so we planned our day around the Sunday race - starting with breakfast at the Orocco Pier in South Queensferry before I would skive off to join the yacht crew. It seemed like a safe bet - the Orocco Pier is a rapidly expanding, hip and upcoming bar/restaurant that has a balcony and, newly, a terrace garden with a fine view of the Forth and her bridges. It recently had a visit from Prime Minister David Cameron for goodness sake: Well I bet they didn't serve him what we had.

I had naturally assumed that Eggs Benedict would be on offer as part of their Sunday Brunch package, but no such luck. So Mum and I settled for their breakfasts - me for the Full British, and she for the Vegetarian. Full or otherwise.
I can't remember a more dried-out scrubby breakfast from even the worst greasy spoon motorway cafe. The eggs seemed to have been cooked the previous century, the toast pressed into shape using the dried crumbs found in the bottom of the toaster and my bacon might have been substituted with a leather bookmark by mistake. Half the advertised ingredients were missing and we had to chase our waiter for the rest.
So - my Orocco Pier Review: Poxy breakfasts but magnificent views.
Pity we couldn't have gone to the Boathouse instead, but it doesn't open until 12:30.

Thank God for places like Oloroso that know how to serve decent food. We ate there with Aidan and Jude the night before - so perhaps we had been spoiled?

As it happened, I didn't need to abandon Mother and go racing after all, so after our completely unnecessarily poxy breakfasts we took the Maid of the Forth ferry out to Inchcolm Island and enjoyed the Indian Spring. If that's a thing? Well - a hot, sunny day like in summer but in spring. Just in time too, it was already starting to cloud over on our way back and it's been raining and snowing ever since.

Inchcolm is well worth a visit - you can easily spend a couple of hours investigating the only-partly ruined medieval abbey and the World War fortifications. It's also a fantastic place to sail out to and camp overnight as I have done many times from Port Edgar sailing club. In fact it really used to be a popular highlight of our summer and a chance to do something a little different: organising a couple of RIBS or the occasional yacht to ferry our tents, water (the island has only an untrustworthy well for fresh water), and enough food for a small barbecue, we would spend a pleasant weekend sailing up and down the 10 miles between Port Edgar marina and the island along the Forth estuary. I particularly remember one year the weather turned evil and we had to abandon our boats on the island to collect on a calmer day and get the ferry back on Sunday so we could make it to work on Monday. The nice captain of the Maid of the Forth even took pity on us and let us off the usual fee.

All of which happens no more of course. The killjoys at Historic Scotland have put an end to that little bit of pleasure in our lives as part of the grand plan of creeping bureaucracies everywhere to stamp out all joy in the world.
Is it misplaced fear for our health and safety?
Is it out of greater consideration for rocks, plants and animals than for humanity?
Or is it because they are just naturally miserable gits?
Who knows. You could always write and ask them.

After Mum left (sorry Mum!) I got around to trying out her idea of serving my savoury chocolate sauce with aubergine rather than mushrooms, to which end I made two deep slits down the side of an aubergine, stuffed these with slivers of garlic, parsley, basil and thyme, though I should really have started with a good dose of salt and roast it in a little oil in the oven at Gas 6 for 45 minutes with some potatoes and a few whole mushrooms thrown in towards the end.
Not, I thought, as good a combination as the mushrooms. The chocolate and the aubergine don't quite play well together. It's not awful, but they're obviously not natural allies. I think the chocolate sauce would need to be far more aggressively savoury, and possibly chilli, to suit the aubergine better. Possibly not worth the effort though.

Liver. The great divider. Some people hate it and others detest it. But you can't beat it for price.

Browsing my local Fucking Supermarket™ the other evening after work. As you do. As you have to do 'cos all the other shops are shut when you leave work and have time to do any shopping. Anyway, I was somewhat surprised to come across a pack of calves' liver which had somehow escaped their sanitisation of any meat product which looks too red or meaty and might terrify the shoppers. And for the bargain price of 50p/lb as well. So naturally I snapped it up.

I was equally surprised when my friend Flora expressed an interest in helping me eat it when I happened to mention what I was having for dinner. Girls eating liver? Unheard of!

Once upon a time you would see great shoals of these ruddy little fellows lying panting and glistening on the local butchers marble slab alongside all the other beautiful inside-out animals, just begging to be slurped down like oysters. Unfortunately now that all the butchers have become tattoo parlours and all flesh is grown in white Styrofoam vats in Fucking Supermarket™ chill cabinets, good honest offal is hard to come by. And not best quality either.
Which is a pity because treated right it's delicious stuff.

Firstly you don't want to cook it the way your Mum did - poaching it to death until it resembles crumbly shoe leather. Overcooked liver is just awful, it must be pink and ruddy on the inside.
Secondly it really needs a robust sauce to go with it (not Bisto diarrhoea), otherwise it's difficult to get over the coppery offalness of the stuff. I rather like sauces based on gin or juniper berries, and often I'll just flame off my flash-fried liver with a couple of tablespoons of gin and finish with a squeeze of lime rather than go to the trouble of making a sauce. It's quick and easy and it's quite lovely, but today I was keen to try this particularly weird-looking Carved Angel recipe for Gin and Lime sauce.

Oh, and thirdly you need to pay some attention to the type and quality of the liver. It does need to be fresh, and while calf (or veal) and lamb liver are very tender with a fairly mild flavour, pig liver is quite a bit stronger (and sometimes I think rather fishy as if they were feeding their pigs fish-food or something!) and ox liver is like a meat turnip. So it's definitely a case of horse livers for courses.

Encouraged by internet suggestions I accompanied my liver with a sweet potato and globe artichoke gratin Yes, Globe Artichoke. I know - I thought I might have misread it too. And maybe that's how the recipe started out, but it actually works well! My liver dinner was enjoyed by all.

Now that my Mum's visiting to restock my freezer with Spicey Cottage curries though - my Buddhist, Piscatorian Mum - I had to hide all the liver.
However, since I still had about half my gratin left, I reworked it with a new layer of cheese and breadcrumbs actually it was nicer the second time around - the sweet potato was better cooked and I made more effort to mix the topping so it didn't just set like a cheese hat and served it with a vegetarian version of my mushrooms in chocolate sauce. The vegetable stock doesn't thicken the sauce as well, but the flavour was just fine, and I improved my methodology slightly by using a whole Ancho chilli rather than the chilli powder and avoiding blending up the onions into the sauce - which had given it a rather coarse texture.

It's a problem, having a meal of curries. Because the leftovers don't really work with anything else but curries.
So you have to make another curry dish to bulk out the leftovers, then you've got more leftover curry for which you need to make more curry to go with.
Before you know it you're trapped in an endless cycle of curries from which, nice as they may be, there seems to be no escape.

This is where I've found myself after cooking Anuschka her tandoori chicken kebabs last weekend.
Since I already had a decent amount of leftover marinade I decided to roll it on into a marinade for Pat Chapman's version of Chicken Makhani with the addition of a bit more of his marinade ingredients Though not the yoghurt. I didn't have any yoghurt so I threw in some fromage frais instead. and of course a bit more chicken.
After a couple more days of kebabs, I finally got around to the full-blooded makhani with two legs and thighs. Pretty nice it was too, though it might have been even better with the juices from a whole roast chicken or two!
If as I did you end up with a gallon of spare makhani sauce, you can put it to good use as a nice accompaniment to pork chops.

I've also been working my way through a couple of mushroom recipes now that I've started, re-running a rather nice Balti mushrooms in creamy garlic sauce, mainly by adding more garlic, and trying out the novelty Mushroom and Okra Curry with its rather more successful Mango Relish.
Since I then had a bonus mango on hand I also tried a mango dal which turned out to be just delicious.

Flora popped around to help out too, and was particularly complimentary of the rice I had made by first frying a half teaspoon of brown mustard seeds, yellow mustard seeds, a generous teaspoon of sesame seeds, and then throwing in a teaspoon or two of fenugreek (methi) leaves. She was lucky to arrive after I'd finished off all my fenugreek seed rice. Which wasn't quite so complementary!

My cute landlady Aline has also just arrived back from India, full of stories of Gobi Manchurian and Mirchi Vada, and amazingly enough still keen on eating curries, so I've been working up a Saag Paneer, only without the paneer, seeing as how she's allergic to cow. Cashew nuts seemed like a likely alternative and led to a very satisfying Saag Kaju.

Anuschka bought me the curry book that doesn't exist for her birthday. (I know - don't even try to make sense of that.) And I volunteered to make her any recipe she chose from it.
She picked the slightly long-winded but very tasty tandoori chicken kebabs which I finally got around to making for her and her son Willy today.
Fortunately I had some extra tandoori paste leftover from another meal, so it simplified the preparation slightly, but I still needed to get the chicken marinating on Thursday night to give it a good 48 hours to season.

Since I was up anyway I reduced some khoya whilst jointing the chicken, (you get just enough time to skin and de-bone a chicken thigh or leg before the milk starts to stick) and used it to make some kulfi for our dessert.
I wasn't really pleased with it to be honest, although the taste was good, the texture was very dense and heavy. (Though oddly it seemed lighter when it warmed up again!) Also the khoya seemed lumpier than I remembered. Whether that was down to not stirring often enough (read continuously!) or whether I need to stir through some cream at the end as several other recipes do I'm not sure.

Anuschka is terrified of hot spices (does that make it odd for her to buy me a curry book?) so I made a (fairly) gentle saag paneer side dish. 5½/10 Also I've never done much mushroom currying, so I fancied trying out a very mild coconut mushroom curry: coconut milk and mushrooms - what's not to like? meh! Well, it sounds a lot more tasty than it turns out.
I used the whey from my homemade paneer and some of the leftover coconut milk as liquid for the basmati rice, and that was extremely tasty - so the mushroom dish wasn't a complete loss!

I'd make the chicken again, and maybe try and spice up the saag paneer, but the kulfi definitely needs work and I don't think I'd bother with the mushrooms.
In fact I've been dabbling with another creamy mushroom curry to have with the leftovers (together with a banana chutney which didn't make it to the first meal) that seems more promising.

It did cross my mind to wonder if Anuschka had bought me the cookbook in expectation of my volunteering to cook her some tasty curries from it, but Aline assures me that Anuschka just wouldn't be that devious.
I'm not convinced though - she's a woman after all.