Last Friday I made a big pot of dahl (red lentils) for when my uni friends visit next weekend.

My secret ingredients are chipotle chilli (smoky and hot) and pulverised Indian pickle (hot, salty and tangy).

Yesterday I made oxtail stew using the Hairy Bikers oxtail stew recipe Was quite impressed with the result. I’ve made oxtail stew a few times but this is the best recipe yet. The only alteration I made was that I doubled the amount of red wine. But they don’t take all the bones and jellyish stuff out before serving. It’s time consuming to do that but well worth it for ease of eating. Also, they refer to it as an economical cut of meat but I paid £14 for approximately 2.4kg of oxtail (in Waitrose admittedly) and I reckon you lose about 60% in the form of visible fat, bone and jellyish stuff so it’s not that cheap.

3 Oct 2012
I used this stew recipe but substituted ox cheek for oxtail. I also added 1 tbsp mushroom ketchup. It was very good, in fact probably better than oxtail. Not only is the texture better, but you only have to cut off some tendon-y bits at the start; you don’t have to separate the meat from the bones etc after cooking.

7 Dec 2012
I made the oxtail stew but took the temperature down to 125C and cooked for 3.5 hours. Also, the HB recipe is ok for 2 oxtail rather than one.

I’ve found it hard to accurately recreate the food we learned how to cook at the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School, mainly because it’s difficult and expensive to get hold of galangal, holy basil and the right types of aubergine. I have bought shop bought curry pastes but even the most expensive seem out of balance compared to those we made in Thailand. When I use them I tend to add more garlic and ginger, add less salty flavouring such as soy sauce and I toast and grind some fennel seeds to add aniseed flavour.

Got some free range pork ribs (more please Waitrose) out of the freezer today and am marinading them overnight according to Mark Hix’s barbeque pork ribs recipe. For the marinade I made some five spice powder using this recipe. Verdict: Very good, but the ribs need a bit more of a chilli kick.

Update (9 Dec 11):

Yesterday I made Nigel Slater’s honey roast ribs. It wasn’t as good as Mark Hix’s recipe and was a bit too sweet.

Celebrated with dinner at Opus:

The food was good but the highlight was the petit fours with coffee:

Made this tonight from a Ken Hom recipe as part of Chinese meal. Really very good.

Tonight I tried to make duck teriyaki using Nigella’s recipe. I made a few adaptations to the sauce as I had to use what I already had in the cupboards so that meant mild rice vinegar instead of sake, pale cream sherry instead of mirin and 4 tsp of garlic and ginger paste instead of just 2 tsp ginger. I also fried a bit of spring onion in the groundnut oil and at the end I threw in one sliced yellow pepper and 2 handfuls of mangetout and sugar snaps. All these adaptations were fine. I failed only in the duck area. Sigh.

I had a whole duck you see. A lovely free range bird on special offer from Waitrose. Mr W kindly jointed it for me and I put the breasts back in the fridge for another meal. All the rest of the meat was to be used in the teriyaki. I thought that if I scored the legs quite deeply I wouldn’t need to bone them. Let me tell you, I was wrong. The juices next to the bone were still not running clear even though the smaller pieces of duck were way way overdone. Panicking, I fished out the smaller pieces and set them aside and scored the legs even deeper and threw them back in. I also added some water to the sauce to try to poach the legs a bit rather than just frying them. But somehow I overcooked the legs too and by the time the rice was ready I hadn’t reduced the sauce back down again after the addition of the water, well not enough anyway. So I killed all the duck and my sauce wasn’t syrupy enough either. Argh. On the upside though the sauce was quite tasty. This is what was left; I was too distraught to take photos of what we actually ate:

Moral of the story: no bones means NO BONES.

I spotted some osso bucco at Waitrose last time I went. Having never heard of it before I was keen to try it.

I cooked it roughly according to this recipe but I skipped the tomato, used proper beef stock and served it on a pile of mash with French beans.

It’s a beautiful silky, tender cut of meat and the marrow is the icing on the cake. I’ll definitely be buying more.

I adapted this from a recipe I came across about a year ago on a random blog found while Googling. This is the recipe I found. I do a similar thing with my sea bass but I make my sauce out of tiny spring onion circles fried lightly in a very small amount groundnut oil (too much oil and the sauce gets an unpleasant greasy top layer), then I add garlic and ginger paste and chilli and fry the mixture for a minute or so. Then I add fish sauce and lime juice and dissolve a little sugar into it. I don’t measure any of the quantities; the only guidance I follow is 1) make enough sauce to comfortably baste the fish and 2) the heat, sweet, salt and sour all need to be in balance. When you taste it you just know when you’ve got the balance right because no one flavour sticks out harshly.

When the sauce is done, I pour it over your whole (the bones make it taste better), gutted seabass. It’s best to use a container that fits the fish quite snugly so that the sauce doesn’t spread out around the fish too much. Then I put it in the oven at 200 degrees until the fish is cooked through, which takes about 20 mins. If I have some fresh coriander, I chop it up roughly and scatter over the fish before serving. A veg stir fry (again with very little oil) and unsalted rice are good accompaniments for the fish as the rice absolutely loves the sauce.

EDIT 1 Jul 2014: For one whole seabass start with 3 tbsp fish sauce, 2 tbsp lime juice. Add a little water to the sauce to stop it evaporating into nothing.

About a week ago I made carrot cakes from this cupcake book:

I was going to serve them with a pile of whipped double cream but it was suggested that I used a more tangy topping such as cream cheese frosting. These are the quantities I used, which I found to make enough for about 24 cupcakes:
100 g butter
200 g cream cheese
500 g icing sugar

Tonight I made baked lobster tails using this as guidance except that my marinade was simply butter and lemon juice. 12 minutes at 200 worked pretty well. Anyway, I served the tails with a salad and an approximation of ponzu dressing, which I first had at my in-laws’ who bought it from Waitrose:

I attempted to recreate the taste from memory. I knew there was an orange flavour, a fermented flavour and acid which is usual for a dressing. So I combined the juice of a tangerine, rice wine vinegar, dark soy sauce and light brown sugar. I wasn’t too far off if my memory serves me well but having checked the ingredients list on the Waitrose website it seems that I was quite far off the mark. Still, mine was a very tasty dressing. I don’t think Heston has anything to worry about just yet though.