Heaven nose I'm mooserable now....

I went to the doctor yesterday. Bad news I'm afraid. Apparently I might be lactose intolerant.

For as long as I can remember I have carried a handkerchief as a result of my nose running endlessly. Last year I'd had enough, and went to the doctor to try and work out what was wrong with me. My septum was so deviated from various bashes that my right nostril was pretty much closed up, on top of which I had several polyps, little mucus producing gribblers, taking up residence in my nose - sexy, yes? In June I had the septum straightened and the polyps removed. This made little or no difference.

So yesterday I went to a complementary medicine clinic where I had my toe prodded to see what I was allergic to. As feared, I was told to avoid dairy completely for 4 weeks and see what happens. That means no milk, no butter, no cheese, no fun. Breakfast is a complete nightmare - no cereal, obviously. No butter on toast - I am quite fond of Tahini as a good alternative but there is only so much peanut butter (Tahini's 1st cousin) and jam a man can eat. No yoghurt and muesli, no tea with milk in it. Lunch is more manageable. Indeed as I write there is a carrot and coriander soup bubbling away next door. But no swirl of cream on top of that for the Larder Lout.

It's the cheese that I'm really, really going to miss. Cheese on toast for lunch, generous snowdrifts of Parmesan on a bowl of pasta, a chunk of maturest cheddar and a nip of peaty whisky on a cold night, oozy bits of brie flopping lazily on hunks of french bread whilst sitting in the August sun with a cold glass of rose. Were this parchment I was writing on and not a blog, it would be stained with my teardrops.

So I'm in a bit of quandary guys, and urgently needing cooking suggestions. It's not that I relied on dairy products before particularly, it's just that now I'm not allowed them, they're all I can think about. The only upside is the benefit to my health. No dairy for a month, coupled with being off beer and cider for lent should do wonders...

So people, throw some thoughts my way - you, friends, family with the same problem, fave recipes, when you stop having cheese nightmares, that kind of thing...would be good to know.

Ciao for now.

Falling unlike Domino's...

No wonder nobody has any money at the moment, if Domino's latest figures are anything to go by. Somehow, impossibly, their profits are 10% up on last year. This makes no sense. The smallest, 'personal' pizza, costs a whopping £5.99. And I am not using this word with even a noodle of irony, because that is a whopping price for what you are getting. I'm not sure it's even worth my highlighting the health implications of eating a Domino's pizza - it's clearly not a salad. My beef is with the horde of people seen on the news almost daily complaining about lack of money. Now, I'm not for a second suggesting that they are lying, or that they all eat daily at Domino's, but someone must be. And it is a fantastic waste of money, it really is. Six quid can go a hell of a long way, food-wise, yet people are seduced into believing that a take-away pizza, or a trip to a dreaded All-You-Can-Hold-Down Chinese buffet is somehow a bargain. It is not. End of story.

For what I reckon cost me a pound, I had one of the best, impulsive pasta dishes I have had in a long time the other night. Incredibly simple, quicker than ordering a pizza and with little more washing up, it was a prime example of how even at moments lacking inspiration, time, or energy, it can be so easy to throw together a delicious supper.

Tagliatelle with leeks, mushrooms and creme fraiche


Serves 1

100g Tagliatelle
1 medium leek, trimmed, washed, and cut diagonally in thick slices
1 large field mushroom, sliced
1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley
1 tablespoon reduced fat creme fraiche
A squeeze of lemon juice
Salt, pepper and olive oil
Parmesan cheese

Bring some salted water to the boil and thrown in your pasta.

Heat a little oil in a large saute or sauce pan. Add the leeks, mushrooms and parsley, season and stir over a medium-high heat for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat and add the creme fraiche and lemon juice. Simmer for a minute or two. Drain the pasta when cooked, and toss into the sauce. Season with more pepper (it likes pepper, does this) and serve with some freshly grated Parmesan. Don't wait for the doorbell to ring, don't hand over any money.

Roast squash and goat's cheese risotto

Risotto is still a somewhat misunderstood entity for many Brits. When I say many Brits, I mean at least my grandmother, and I imagine many others besides. For Grannie, risotto translates as 'ricey graveyard for leftovers' - any kind of rice (but preferably not risotto rice) slung in the oven with vegetables and perhaps some leftover chicken. Is she unique, or are there others who take this view? Either way, it's not really what risotto is all about.

For starters, it needs to be a particular kind of rice. A medium-grained, starchy rice, the main ones used in Italy being Vialone Nano, Carnaroli and Arborio (the one least used in Italy, most used in the UK). The idea is that the rice releases starch in the cooking, making it stickier and creamier than, say, basmati, and at the same time absorbs the stock and other flavours used in the dish.

And this is the fun part. Once you have got beyond the standard technique used to make a white risotto, it is a fantastic canvas on which to paint. This does not mean putting half of the larder into it, but instead using one or two carefully chosen ingredients to add body, flavour, and texture. This version is a little more time consuming than others, in that there are three separate processes, but I promise it is worth the effort, and if you keep on top the washing up you shouldn't have a filthy kitchen by the end of cooking.

Roast sqaush and goat's cheese risotto

Serves 4

1 small squash - I used Sweet Mama from the veg box, butternut would be grand
1 red onion, peeled and sliced thickly
6 cloves garlic
A few sprigs of thyme
1 small onion, peeled and finely chopped
300g risotto rice
1 glass white wine
2 litres of hot vegetable or chicken stock
50g goat's cheese

Preheat the oven to 220C.

Peel and deseed the squash, and cut into large chunks. Put 75% of these in a roasting tray with the red onion, garlic and thyme, toss in olive oil, salt and pepper, and roast for 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, boil the remaining squash in salted water and liquidize.

Heat a little butter in a large saute pan and stir in the chopped onion. Season, cover, and leave over a low heat for 5 minutes, taking care not to burn it. Remove the lid, increase the heat and add the rice. Stir for a couple of minutes before adding the wine. Once the wine has reduced add a ladle of stock. Continue stirring, adding stock each time the rice has absorbed the previous batch. After 15-17 minutes taste the rice. It should be a couple of minutes away from being cooked. Adjust the seasoning and stir in the pureed squash, goat's cheese, and most of the roasted squash, and a final ladle of stock. Turn off the heat but continue stirring for a couple more minutes.

Serve the risotto in warmed bowls, with a few chunks of roasted squash and red onion on top.

Cosmo Pan-Asian Restaurant, Bristol

There is not a sharp enough pencil to describe the horror that will greet you if you are brave enough to venture into Cosmo, the new pan-Asian, all-you-dare-to-eat buffet on the Triangle. The place is a study in how badly one can get a restaurant wrong, a lesson in crashing mediocrity, vile cynicism, and loveless cooking; an experiment in just how low people will stoop in order to save a few pennies. You are not a customer in Cosmo, you are a commodity, someone to be pillaged for money and then cast back into the street.

For one thing, you are press-ganged into paying on arrival – whether this is because they don’t trust people to pay the bill or because they are aware that, after a meal so abhorrent, few sober people will be willing to part with their money, who can say? Either way, this charmless, industrial service made one very uneasy. Having had your money practically fleeced from you at gunpoint, you are then led, not to a table in the light window – which may well have been what attracted you to this place originally – but down, down, down, past the buffets and into the nuclear bunker at the back. It is like eating in a submarine – airless, dark, claustrophobic, and unsettling. Waiters seem more like minions, all geared up with headsets, at the other end of which was presumably either the Samaritans helpline or the restaurant manager/commander barking orders at them. When at one point a waitress dropped a plate, we half-expected her to fall to the floor, gunned down by some invisible sniper.

It seems almost redundant to mention the food, as you know by now that it is going to be nothing short of apocalyptic, but it seems churlish to write a restaurant review without bringing it up (which, incidentally, I almost did on several occasions). For a place that apparently prides itself on fresh, healthy cooking, the starters were either a postscript of this notion, or somebody had accidentally dropped most of them into a deep fat fryer on their way to the buffet. The rather disconcertingly named ‘dragon’s balls’ were wan and sludgy and lacking in any discernible provenance, and the spring rolls were about as palatable as a jockstrap. The spare ribs were just about edible, and while the satay tasted OK, the chicken (and this went for every chicken dish) was alarmingly soft, not in a perfectly cooked kinda way but in a what-the-fuck-is-this kinda way. Question upon question begs itself. Has the prawn toast ever actually encountered a prawn? What really is the chef’s special? Did my dragon’s ball just move?

Out of the frying pan of the starters and into the fire of the mains. What have we here at our authentic Asian buffet? It’s sausage and chips! Can you bloody believe it? Perhaps they were the best sausage and chips in town, perhaps they would have rescued this car crash of a lunch, it doesn’t really matter – we were there for Asian food, for better or for worse, and that’s what we ate. The beef in green peppers with black bean sauce was like eating an oily shoe, only, somehow, even worse. Let’s try some of the ‘chef’s special balls’ (seriously, what is this testicular obsession? It’s like a 14-year-old wrote the menu). Nope, they’re disgusting too. Lamb stir-fried ‘Mongolian style’ (almost sounds like a threat) certainly helped to explain why Genghis Kahn was such a belligerent little bugger – if I had to eat this kind of swill on a daily basis I’d be waging some pretty serious wars myself. It was monstrous. Ditto duck pancakes, chicken madras, and Thai green curry – all just dire.

In an attempt to wrestle some sort of positive from what, until now, had been an abject disaster, we bravely had a sniff around the pudding station, which yielded nothing but further disappointment. Jelly that more bounced than wobbled, cakes that looked about as appetizing as a dog’s arse, and strawberry ice cream that we doubted had ever been near a cow or a strawberry, all put the final nail in Cosmo’s coffin. Minutes from a serious panic attack we left the bunker gratefully, vowing to never return.

Surely this is a joke? Somewhere in the Midlands there must be a fat man in a loud suit having a ruddy good laugh at our expense. Because no restaurateur could open a place like Cosmo with a straight face, genuinely believing they were offering an authentic Asian experience to their diners. Sausage and chips? Pull the other one.

If anyone else has been to the Bristol Cosmo, or any of the other ones, for that matter, let me know your thoughts.

Lunchbox no.2

To those of you who have sent me lunch box ideas, thank you very much. Indeed, thanks to all of you who send recipes, thoughts, suggestions in. The thing is that I tend not to plan what I'm cooking, but more deal with what I've got to hand, so I'm a bit crap at actually going out and shopping for the recipes you have sent me, all of which sound delicious - Fred's coronation partridge, Adam's chicken with sherry and cream (must try asap, sounds right up my street), and Jack's squirrel in breadcrumbs. Time will come when I'll try these things (well, maybe not the squirrel).

I did, however, try one recipe given to me by a girl on my course, Eve, for Ackee and Salt fish. Apparently this is the quintessential Jamaican dish, and so I spent a frankly nightmarish hour in Tesco extra trying to rootle out these ingredients. If you're familiar with French, or indeed Eastern European cookery, salt fish shouldn't be too controversial a notion. The Russians eat the stuff as it comes, cardiac-arrestingly brackish and verging on the inedible, washed down with vodka. The French are rather more delicate with their morue - salt cod - gently poaching it in milk and herbs before mixing it with mashed potato to make a brandade.

The Jamaican method is somewhere in between the two, retaining the essence of the salt fish rather more than the French, but not erring into the ghoulish chewing on something that looks more like a giant's crusty sock than something one would want to eat that the Russians go for. You boil the salt fish in water, drain, cool and remove skin and bone. Chop up some onions, chilli and tomatoes and soften in oil for ten minutes. Ackee is a fruit that comes in a tin, which looks somewhere in between cod's roe and rooster's testicles (if you have ever seen rooster's testicles) but tastes rather better. Anyway, you drain this, chuck it in with the vegetables, simmer for 10 minutes with the fish and serve with rice. It was pretty good - I was pleasantly surprised - but with a blizzard blowing outside it just didn't feel right. Maybe I'll give it a proper write up when I give it proper attention. I fear I let it down, so wouldn't want to pass this on.

Meantime, it's about time I posted another lunchbox. Yesterday I sat hungry in a language class, ruminating over what I might have for lunch. The fridge at home was bare, and seeing as I only had half an hour for lunch, resigned myself to forking out £5 for a sandwich. Remembering, however, the half carton of chopped tomatoes in the fridge and the tin of butterbeans in the cupboard, I came upon the most frugal, quickest, yet most delicious of lunches. Soup is a great lunchbox fallback - improves when made ahead, and can be quite easily popped in the microwave.

Tomato and butterbean soup

Serves 1

200g good chopped tomatoes
1 tin of butter beans
Pinch of chilli flakes (optional)
Small handful of parsley, chopped
A little grated parmesan
Good olive oil
Salt, pepper and sugar

Heat a little oil in a saucepan. Pour in the tomatoes, drain the butterbeans and add to the pan with the chilli flakes if using. Season with salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar. Simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve with a sprinkle of parsley, parmesan, and a drizzle of good olive oil.


PS - if you have a must-do recipe, take a picture of it and email it to me - jteramsden@hotmail.com - and I'll put it up, I promise.

Spanish venison

There seems to be a bit of a problem with deer in the country at the moment. There are around 2 million deer in Britain, of which the main species are red deer, roe deer, fallow deer and muntjac. This, it seems, is far too many, and a serious cull has been called for. Bad for the deer, good for us.

OK, let's look at both sides of this before people start telephoning the RSPCA. On the one hand there is no denying that they are absolutely magnificent animals - dignified, even kingly - and that the unabated slaughter of them (or indeed any animal) is completely unjustified and verging on the insane. However, if you look at both the human and ecological impact of so many deer, the argument for culling is compelling. The damage that deer do to the natural habitat of literally thousands of species renders it uninhabitable, so the biodiversity in vast swathes of forest is shrinking at an alarming rate. Wildlife needs delicate management. Furthermore, the road accidents caused by the sheer volume of deer is perhaps reason enough to cull ("just don't drive!" I hear you cry...a discussion for another day/blog perhaps).

Anyway, either way experts reckon that we need to cull about 100,000 deer a year, which means that venison (the meat from deer) is going to become more and more available. At home we have a lot of roe deer in particular who, while beautiful to look at themselves, render the woodland less so, destroying young woods with ease. As a result there is often a fair bit of venison around, and I have found it rather too easy to get into the habit of basic 'roast, rest and eat' cookery. But it's such a wonderful meat that it lends itself well to adaptation. It is very lean, so any stewing needs doing with a hefty amount of bacon or something similar. But its loin makes wonderful carpaccio, or can be a great replacement for a steak.

This is what I did with a haunch the other night. If you're not confident with a knife you could get the butcher to do the first part, but it's not a particularly complicated piece of butchery.

Braised haunch of venison with chorizo and mushrooms


Serves 6

1 roe deer haunch
2 large onions, peeled and sliced
300g chorizo, roughly chopped
500g button mushrooms, halved
200ml red wine
200ml stock
Salt and pepper
Oil

Preheat the oven to 190C.

First remove the bone from the haunch by cutting down the length of the bone and working the flesh away around it. Lay the meat out flat like a giant steak and season all over with salt and pepper.

Heat some oil in a large saute pan or roasting dish, brown the meat on all sides (this will take a few minutes) and set aside.

Add the onions, chorizo and mushrooms and stir over the heat for a couple of minutes, then add the wine and stock. Bring to a boil, add the meat, cover (tightly with foil, if using a roasting pan) and cook in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes.

Rest and serve with butternut squash mash and purple sprouting broccoli. And a hefty amount of the chorizo and mushroom jus.