July: ox tongue with tomato sauce

Wow, this is late! I know I said the same thing last month too, and I really should write up my cooking more quickly. But it has been soooo busy! So much for August being a quiet summer month, today has been the first day in a long time that I’ve not been rushing around trying to do a million things at once. And have I enjoyed it!

The only thing I “had” to do was go to The Ginger Pig butchers on Abbeville Road in Clapham to pick up pigs ears and pig skin for tomorrow, which is August’s #oneoffalamonth extravaganza – crispy pigs ears and pork scratchings. As you can tell by the fact I’m writing this up on 30 August, I’m almost out of days in the month! Fortunately, Tom Kitchin has come to my rescue, providing recipes for both. Really, I should get double credit for cooking TWO dishes this month!

Indeed the pigs ears are on the boil/simmer for four hours as I type, so it’s all ready for tomorrow’s dinner and the pork scratchings look pretty easy to prepare…! Here’s a little preview of what’s cooking…..

No, they don’t look amazingly appetising like that, and yes, I’ve used the flame on the hob to singe off the hair (in the absence of a blowtorch) although I think that’s going to be the least of my problems!

Anyway, last month’s ox tongue was pretty epic. It was very “real”, and there was no way round it, I was cooking a tongue.

As was the case in June, the recipe was from the brilliant Anissa Helou’s Offal: The Fifth Quarter.

ingredients

1 ox tongue, weighing about 1.2kg
1 onion, studded with 3 cloves
1 carrot, trimmed and quartered
1 branch celery with leaves on
1 leek trimmed
1 bouquet garni (thyme, laurel, parsley)
8 peppercorns
Sea salt to taste

Put the ox tongue to soak in cold water for 1-2 hours to clean it of any blood. Drain, rinse and put in a large pot. Cover with water and place over a high heat. As the water comes to the boil, skim it clean. Add the vegetables and seasonings. Lower the heat and simmer for 2 1/2 hours, or until the tongue is tender.

Prepare the tomato sauce:

5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, very finely chopped
3x 800g tins Italian tomatoes (I used normal tinned tomatoes and that worked fine)
1 bouquet garni (thyme and laurel)
Sea salt and fresh ground pepper
18 cornichons, extra fine, sliced lengthways into thin slices (I forgot to add this, again, it turned out fine)
3 tbsp capers, rinsed

Put the oil in a saucepan and place over a medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the onion and fry, stirring occasionally, until golden. Add the tomatoes and bouquet garni, season to taste and simmer for an hour or until the sauce is reduced by half. Pass the sauce through a fine sieve and return to the pan. Add the cornichons and capers and simmer for 5 more minutes.

When the tongue is done, peel the skin off while it’s still hot.

Cut into medium-thick slices and transfer to a pre-heated serving dish. Pour the hot tomato sauce all over and serve immediately with boiled new potatoes.

Although a bit icky to handle, it was worth it and very tasty. And cheap – only about a fiver for the tongue!

As a starter, I turned to what is now my faithful and best friend in the kitchen, Diana Henry’s A Change of Appetite and made her delicious squid with couscous, chilli, mint and lemon.

It really was a treat and very easy to put together. I’m so glad that 2012 was my year of shellfish as I got used to handling different produce, including squid, and now I find it dead easy to prepare.

Ingredients

FOR THE SQUID
800g squid, cleaned
3 tbsp olive oil
Juice of 1/2 lemon
FOR THE COUSCOUS
300g wholemeal couscous (I used normal coz I couldn’t get wholemeal)
6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
150g French beans
2 tbsp olive oil
6 shallots, sliced
3 garlic cloves, finely sliced
2 red chillies, de seeded and finely chopped
6 spring onions, trimmed and sliced on the diagonal
Leaves from 12 sprigs of mint, torn
Leaves from 10g flat leaf parsley, left whole
1 1/2 tbsp capers, rinsed
Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lemon

Cut the wings from the squid, if big, slice into 3 or 4 strips. Slice the whole squid into rings about 1cm thick. Wash, removing any remaining gunk from inside the bodies. Drain, cover and keep in the fridge until needed.

Put the couscous into a bowl and add 2tbsp of the extra virgin olive oil, 500ml of boiling water and seasoning. Cover with cling film and leave to plump up for 15 mins.

Steam (I boiled) the green beans until al dente then run under cold water and drain.

Heat the 2 tbsp of regular olive oil in a frying pan and sauté the shallots until they are just soft and still pale, then add the garlic, chillies and spring onions and cook for another couple of minutes or so.

Fork through the warm couscous to fluff it up, then add the green beans, all the stuff in the frying pan and the herbs, capers and lemon zest and juice and the remaining 4 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil. Taste for seasoning and put into a broad, shallow bowl.

Pat the squid with kitchen paper, heat the 3 tbsp of olive oil in a large frying pan or wok until really hot and then stir-fry the squid for 40 seconds, then reduce the heat and cook for a further 30 seconds. Squeeze on the lemon and season. Scatter the squid on top of the couscous and serve immediately.

It was really delicious and I definitely want to cook it again. Even without the couscous the squid is great, and baguette would be a good way to mop up the cooking juices.

Diana Henry also provided the inspiration for dessert and we had ricotta cheese with honey, blueberries and peaches – delicious!

Right, the ears have finished cooking so I’d better get onto the next stage of prep…fingers crossed tomorrow goes well!

June OneOffalAMonth: Lambs’ kidneys with sherry

Wow, I am behind in my blogging schedule again! But fortunately I’m still cooking up a storm and adding recipes to the list for the next few months. While July is sorted for next week (ox tongue in tomato sauce a la Parisienne), I’ve added tripe with chickpeas and Singapore fish head curry for August and September. The tripe recipe is a Galician recipe and came out of this weekend’s trip to Vigo in north west Spain. It was a truly delicious dish, as well as a fantastic mini-break, and I can’t wait to cook it myself!

Anyway, back to June’s kidneys. In the end I went to The Ginger Pig on Abbeville Road in Clapham to get supplies as they’re near my house and I thought I should try them out. I love their produce, and have in fact done their pork butchery course, but they are a bit dear. However I was pleasantly surprised that the lamb kidneys were only 80p each. I made up for that with the Poulet Fermier des Landes bought here for main course – over £16!! But it was delicious, so I shouldn’t really complain.

For the recipe I turned to the fantastic Anissa Helou’s book, The Fifth Quarter: An Offal Cookbook, some friends got me for my birthday. I was originally going to cook devilled kidneys but in the end I didn’t have all the ingredients I needed, so I dashed to M&S to pick up a bottle of sherry, and cooked kidneys with sherry and parsley. Quite delicious and so quick and easy to do.

In honour of the World Cup, for the chicken I turned to Brazil for inspiration, courtesy of the Guardian, making Caipirinha ‘beer can’ chicken (it’s the 4th recipe). The only amend I made was rather than using cachaça (which was anyway impossible to find in London when the world and his wife had bought it all up in bulk to make caipirinhas while watching the football), I used a combination of Peruvian pisco and rum. This worked very well and I doubt anyone would have tasted a difference. As you can see, it was a lot of fun to make (and fit in the oven!).

I served it with mash – I had considered making dauphinoise potatoes, but I’d have needed a much larger oven! I did learn from the May experience and made sure I had only one “last minute” dish, so I could relax more and spend less time in the kitchen and risk neglecting my guests.

For dessert, mum had brought her saffron kulfi again so we finished the meal like kings 🙂

So, to OneOffalAMonth for July. I’m going to make ox tongue in tomato sauce, which is also from Anissa Helou’s cookbook. I really need to place my order with the butcher…..

Lamb sweetbreads a la Nigel Slater

Wow, this post is late! I cooked the lamb sweetbreads for May’s #oneoffalamonth almost a month ago! I suppose the important thing is the cooking, rather than the blogging, but I do like having a culinary record and I know I’ll regret it if I don’t keep it up – I need something to show my future children I haven’t had a completely misspent youth…

So, May. I decided to cook lamb sweetbreads as I had read a few good recipes, and was really spoilt for choice. The tricky decision, however, was from where to source the sweetbreads? After the trotter incident with my usual butchers, I thought I might be best off trying somewhere else for May, in case the butchers were a bit peeved I didn’t come for the trotters in April. Oh, the drama of offal!

Instead I found the Butchers at Leadenhall market, which is pretty close to my office in Moorgate. It’s a much, much smaller setup than Smithfield but the butcher was very kind and helpful. In fact, he’s not actually a butcher, but a chef at the restaurant that’s attached to the butchers. He’d never really come across sweetbreads, but was very happy to order them for me and was pretty intrigued by my cooking challenge. He was also able to supply the lamb chops for the main course, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I finally settled on Nigel Slater’s sweetbreads with peppers and mushrooms.

The tricky bit was getting the breadcrumbs to “stick” to the sweetbreads. Even though I used the beaten egg, it was still tricky and a lot of burnt crumbs ended up in the pan. It was delicious, however, and even my friend’s two children aged 5 and almost 3 enjoyed them (always best not to explain exactly what they are!).

For the main course I’d found an Ottolenghi recipe for lamb shoulder chops with peas and feta, which looked delicious. I actually ended up getting leg chops, rather than shoulder, and they were much bigger. I’d got one per person, but that was really a bit unnecessary and there was lots left over.

I have to admit, I did bugger this recipe up a bit. Despite marinating the feta, I completely forgot to add it (it was still sitting in the fridge at the end of the meal), and I also forgot to add the peas! What a crap hostess I am. I had, however, made a salsa verde and also potatoes with olive oil and herbs, so it’s not as if anyone went hungry!

The next day, I made the dish properly, cutting up the leftover lamb and adding peas and feta; it was totally delicious and beat the dish I served hands down, so I do owe my guests an apology – you missed out!

For dessert I turned to Diana Henry to make Greek yoghurt and apricot and honey ice cream. Without an ice cream maker. It is one of the most yummy creations, and you really do appreciate it all the more for having made such an effort – breaking it up 3 times during the freezing process – but next time I’m definitely going to borrow my mum’s ice cream maker!

I also tried again at making honeycomb, but this time used another recipe, not Nigella’s, and it turned out pretty good, although my sous chef (brother) did burn it a bit. He just need a bit of practice 🙂

One thing I’ve definitely learnt from May’s cooking challenge, and I’m surprised it’s taken me so long, is that I need to have only one “last minute” dish when people are over, not two. I was in the kitchen so much, as was my sous chef, I didn’t get to enjoy the evening as much as I’d have liked, and it would have been because I was a bit flustered that it was all taking so long to do that I forgot the feta and peas. Oh well, you live and learn, and I’m taking these lessons on board for June.
I’m cooking this Sunday for Fathers’ Day and will be making Devilled Kidneys and in honour of the World Cup, I’ll be making a Brazilian recipe, Caipirinha “beer can” chicken, which was in last week’s Guardian and looks delicious. Mum’s going to bring dessert, maybe kulfi or mango ice cream, so we’re sorted. I just need to find a recipe for devilled kidneys and work out where to get them….

Trotters with black beans

Wow, this post is very late! While I make sure I cook the offal once a month, my dedication to writing needs some work.

So April was trotters. My aunt in India would cook us a delicious dish of mutton trotters with black beans, which I was keen to recreate in Lindon. The first obstacle: mutton trotters. Post foot and mouth, they’re (literally) off the menu, so I went for pork trotters.

I went to my usual Smithfield butchers to request them but they didn’t know if they’d get them in and couldn’t request them specifically, so it was going to be luck whether they got them in. They were also hugely amused at my questions over cleaning and preparing the trotters “You’ve got a lady razor, haven’t you? Just use that.” I can’t say I was as amused as they were and left feeling none the wiser.

Fortunately my mum’s butcher was more helpful and without the embarrassing banter and so she got 6 trotters for me – cleaned, prepped and cut into pieces for me; £5.25 for over 2kg – bargain!

So then to the recipe. The one that came through from my aunt via my cousin didn’t quite look right so mum found one on a Parsi cooking website – copied below.

Chora ma Kharia
trotters in black eyed beans

Ingredients
60 ml Canola oil 3 large onions diced
2 tbs garlic paste 2 tbs ginger paste
2 tbs each ground cumin and coriander
1 tbs turmeric
Chilli powder to taste
1 can chopped tomatoes
3 – 4 tbs tomato paste 3 tbs brown sugar
Salt to taste
6 pork trotters (cut into 4 pieces each and rinsed under cold water)
210 g black eyed beans washed and soaked for 1 hour (I used 2 tins of black eyes beans)
150 g fresh coriander

Method
In a large pot heat oil and fry onions till soft and golden.
Add ginger, garlic, cumin/coriander, turmeric and cayenne pepper
and stir for a minute till fragrant.
Add crushed tomatoes and tomato paste, mix well.
Add brown sugar and salt and stir
Add trotters and beans (discard the water and rinse) and mix till well coated.
Add enough fresh water to cover the trotter and beans and create gravy.
Bring to a boil and then simmer on medium low, covered for 2½ to 3 hours (the longer the better) until cooked through and almost falling off the bone. Stir occasionally. Adjust seasoning (salt and sugar) to taste.
Garnish with fresh coriander and serve with warm crusty bread,
“gaur amli kachumbar” (see recipe below ) and lemon wedges.

GAUR AMLI KACHUMBAR
Sweet and Sour Onion Salad
For the chutney

150 g deseeded tamarind 180 g jaggery (gaur) or brown
sugar
150 g pitted dried dates 350 ml water
Salt to taste.
1.In a pot mix tamarind, jaggery (gaur) or brown sugar and dates.
2.Add water and bring to a boil.
3.Simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, add more water if required.
4.Cool to room temperature and press through a medium sieve (alternatively use a blender).
5.Adjust seasoning.
6.Can be stored in refrigerator in a sealed glass jar.
7.Let stand for 30 minutes for flavors to blend.

For the salad – ingredients

1 large red onion, sliced fine. 1 small green mango diced
1 large tomato, deseeded and diced Half English cucumber, diced
75 g fresh cilantro, chopped. 1 fresh green or red chilli
deseeded and chopped fine

Method
In a bowl mix sliced onions, green mango, tomatoes, cucumber and fresh coriander.
Add half cup of chutney to the salad

I also had a last minute panic because I hadn’t originally planned to make a starter and then changed my mind at the 11th hour. Fortunately typing “easy Indian starter” into Google came up with a delicious Karwari prawn recipe that was easy-peasy and so delicious.

The chutney for the salad was lovely and produced enough for a couple of jars and is perfect with cheese, so a double win 🙂

My parents came over (my bro sous-chef was in Liverpool for a very bad football match) as they also love my aunt’s dish (my dad’s sister). We all loved this recipe but we couldn’t quite decide if it was quite the same as her’s or just “good different”. I guess at some point we’ll need to do a cook-off!

Oh well, it was all very tasty – served with tortillas in place of chapati – and the pile of bones at the end tells it’s own story!

Full credit to my mum for her help this month, not only did she supply the trotters but she also brought the desert. Pistachio kulfi is a staple dessert at my parents but this time mum surpassed herself with added saffron in the kulfi – we ate like kings.

The only disappointment was my attempt to make honeycomb to go with it. I used a Nigella recipe but it never fully “set” and so I had to abandon it as it risked locking my guests’ teeth shut!

And with that, we’re already onto May – how has time been flying so fast?? I’m cooking next weekend for a group of friends and we’ll be dining on lamb sweetbreads. I’ve found a Nigel Slater recipe, but I want to do some more research before I decide for sure. This will be the starter so I still need to decide what to cook for main course…..research is going to take some time 🙂

Chicken liver pate for Navroz

Apologies, this is a very tardy entry considering the March event has come and gone 2 weeks ago on the 21st!

I used the occasion of Parsi Navroz as the hook for the dinner, inviting my parents, brother and best friend to join the celebrations.

For this month I chose liver as offal du mois, specifically chicken liver. I’ve never been a massive fan of serving a single, large piece of liver (like many, I’ve been scarred by school dinners of lumps of over-cooked liver and bacon) and decided it would be more interesting to use the livers to make pate, which I’ve never done before.

In honour of Navroz, I turned to Diana Henry’s A Change of Appetite, which has a recipe for Persian saffron and mint chicken with spring couscous. You can view the full recipe in an article in The Times, although you’ll need a subscription to read it; otherwise buy her book, it’s great! Hat tip to Laura for giving it to me for my birthday!

As for the chicken liver pate, I turned to The Guardian’s Felicity Cloake for the perfect pate. And I returned once again to Smithfield Butchers for the chicken livers – £2.50 for a 1kg tub!! This is amazing! I doubled the quantities to make the pate, and still had enough left over a Sunday lunch of fried livers with balsamic vinegar and chilli – delicious.

I thought the pate would be really difficult, but actually the only tricky thing was straining the blended ingredients through a round strainer into a rectangle dish. My bad.

I didn’t take pictures while cooking because I either forgot or decided it just wasn’t that pretty. Cleaning and cutting up chicken livers ain’t pretty, but oh wow. Delicious and easy! I substituted sherry for the requisite Madeira as I didn’t have it, and it went very well. I would suggest using less butter to set on top of the finished butter – I cut down the amount I used and I still think it was too much. Reduce by half, I’d say.

As for cooking the chicken and couscous, this was actually pretty easy. Again, I bought the chicken thighs from Smithfield – £10 for 16! This place is amazing. The boning of the thighs took a while, but it was a doddle sitting at the dining table in front of the TV. Oh yes, fun times 🙂

Rather than cooking the thighs for the whole time on the griddle pan – which would have taken a long time as I had so many to do and I would risk burning – I cooked them in the oven and finished them off on the griddle.
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And the couscous was delicious – truly spring-like
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All in all v delicious. Now I just need to work out what to make this month – yes, it’s April already!! My cousin has sent me her mum’s recipe for trotters, which is delicious, so maybe that. In hindsight I haven’t been doing the most challenging things so far, so I think I need to take the plunge – finally – and do something bold. Watch this space!

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Ox heart – from Peru with love

My bad, I’m already running a week late with writing up last week’s offal lunch. A holiday in Palma was too much fun to spend time writing up the blog!

So, to the meal and prep. I’ve already decided that the boys at Smithfield Butchers – just down the road from my Moorgate office – are going to be my BFFs (Best Foodie Friends) while I cook my way through my offal menu.

At least offal is turning out to be (so far) a damn sight cheaper than shellfish – a 2kg ox heart cost just £5.40!! Bargain! And as you can see – it was huge!

When my friend, Ella, suggested I cook heart in February in honour of Valentine’s Day, I immediately knew what I wanted to cook: anticuchos. My old flat mate, Jaime, is Peruvian and an amazing cook and had cooked this for groups of friends a couple of times and we’d also eaten it on the streets of Lima when a group of us went over there in 2008. But what to do for the recipe when Jaime’s back in Peru and “cooks from love, not recipes”. Not massively helpful.

Martin Morales, owner of Cerviche in London’s Soho, had published a recipe in The Guardian a couple of years ago, and it was to him I turned.

Jaime and Martin had actually run a pop-up Peruvian kitchen in Farringdon together in 2011, so it felt appropriate to get the recipe from Martin.

And so to the preparation of the heart. It was quite a beast to deal with and a bit like a biology lesson!

I applied the same rule I did when cooking the shellfish: if something looks a bit too weird, get rid of it and don’t serve it. As with the shellfish, this rule of thumb served me well here. Once you cut the fat and ventricles away (not a sentence I ever thought I’d write!), the meat was actually very lean – it then made sense that Martin had said you could substitute rump steak for the heart if you wanted.

The marinade was very simple to put together and from start to finish the whole thing only took about an hour and then needed to sit in the fridge overnight. Simples.

I decided to go the whole Peruvian hog and make cerviche for starter and Dover Sole. After Jaime Oliver’s slightly disastrous prawn cerviche in January I was a bit weary, but between Marin’s recipe, and the one Jaime sent to me, I felt I was in safe hands.

My brother, who has acted as sous chef (sometimes the main chef) at these meals, prepared the cerviche to serve as his fish filleting skills are far superior to my own, even though we took the fish filleting course together!

We didn’t need quite as many limes as Martin’s recipe suggested, but still 14 limes is quite a lot. I’d also recommend more fresh chilli, as per Jaime’s recipe. Is also highly recommend Jaime’s addition of cubes of sweet potato, to add a different texture. Altogether, delicious.

When it came to cooking the ox heart, in Peru it is cooked on skewers over a fire – a BBQ, if you will – but failing that in a first floor kitchen, I thought skewers over a griddle pan would work. Alas, it didn’t, so we (my sous chef brother and I) took the meat off the skewers and fried them in the pan, which actually worked very well. The meat was very tender (I guess as the heart muscle does get a lot of exercise!), and was a real surprise for my somewhat sceptical guests!

The meat was complimented beautifully by the Wancaina sauce – a recipe Jaime had sent I me that morning. Made with peppers, feta cheese and condensed milk, it sounds horrid, I know, but try it – it is a life changing sauce. Really. I’ve included a couple of photos below of the cooking process, but Jaime’s blog really does this much better, so please do give it a try, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I really wanted to finish the meal off with something chocolatey, and after having to reject Gino d’Acampo’s chocolate and pistachio cake (one of the guests had a nut allergy) and not being able to do chocolate fondants because I realised at the last minute I didn’t have pudding basins, I finally settled on chocolate mousse. I used espresso coffee in it as I’m not a fan of alcohol in my desserts, and it turned out brilliantly. And was so easy to make! Definitely a keeper recipe. I served it with M&S honeycomb ice cream, which I’m addicted to and goes very well. With everything.

And now that’s over, I just need to work out what to cook in March! Maybe chicken liver pate……

Braised ox cheek with flageolet beans and turnips a la Valentine Warner

I wanted to start off easy for my first offal challenge and ox cheek seemed the easiest way to begin. The warming stew recipe I found in Valentine Warner’s The Good Table.

And where did I buy the ox cheek? Well Mr Warner was very helpful, suggesting Waitrose for supplying a “forgotten cuts” range. Not only did they sell the ox cheek, but as a cheaper cut, it was only £11 for 1.5kg – a bargain! That came to four of these cheeks, which easily fed 8 (including 6 boys) and we still had leftovers for the next day #winning

This was actually a pretty easy recipe, as long as you’ve got time to hang around while it cooks. It actually worked quite well for me so in between stages I could lay the table, tidy and get ready for my guests to arrive. Clearly it’s not a weeknight recipe, needing about 4 hours prep and cooking time, but it really is a joy to cook on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The only criticism of the recipe I had was it said to deglaze the pan with red wine after frying the ox cheek, but it didn’t say what to do with the wine afterwards. I added it to the casserole dish, obvs, but if Val needs someone to double-check his recipes for his, I’m the gal for the job 🙂

So the question then turned to what to serve for starter and dessert. Dessert was easy – I now have a go-to pan a cotta with Baileys. This is a geniusly simple recipe from Gino d’Acampo’s Italian Escape cookbook, which accompanied the ITV series. As long as you hold your nerve when making the caramel, although don’t hold your nerve for too long! The first time I made it I had to chuck the first attempt and then google “how to get burnt caramel off a saucepan”. The answer? Hot water and baking soda. Anyway, slightly tricky caramel aside, this is a sinch and your family, guests and anyone you’re trying to impress, will love you for it.

The really big question was what should I make for starter? As the ox cheek was being served with wasabi mash (genius), I didn’t want anything too heavy to start the meal. Shellfish! Prawns! Some of you will recall my oneshellfishamonth challenge in 2012. Back then, I made tandoori prawns. This time, it was with a chilli and white cabbage salad from Jaime Oliver. This was delicious, but the issue was that the prawns were meant to “cook” in the lemon juice, but after 45 minutes (it was meant to take 15-20), we gave up as the natives were getting restless and we cooked them in the griddle pan. Still very delicious!

And the ox cheek turned out pretty amazing too, it had really broken down and melted in your mouth…..totally yummy and definitely something I want to cook again and again.

And the pan a cotta turned out pretty amazingly too. I made one big one rather than individual ramekins coz I didn’t have enough for 8 of us. I also used fresh vanilla pods rather than essence because I found it better with the pod when I’ve don’t taste comparisons for this recipe. But it’s still pretty relish either way!

So what’s next? Not sure, maybe (ox) tail, maybe…..heart?! And I need to fix a date. Roll on February!

A new year, an offally good challenge

2012 was a stunning shellfish success; starting with mussels and a few friends, the cooking challenge grew to dinner parties for up to 10 people. It was a brilliant year, ably helped by my sous-chef brother and friends and my long-suffering boyfriend who had to deal with shellfish taking over a whole weekend each month. Thanks to you all!

2013 was bread, and less of a success. It started well with soda bread in January, but “naan-gate” in February set the tone for the rest of the year.  Not only was bread waaay trickier than I expected, but there was no sense of occasion (I do love to throw a dinner party). The ciabatta went well, as did the baking lesson at the E5 Bakehouse, but baking bread’s just not for me. And so we come to 2014…..

Having firmly establised that I should stick with savoury challenges, with the odd dessert thrown in for good measure – the question arose: what to cook in 2014? After due consideration with a group of friends at a Polish restaurant (this dining club needs a whole blog of its own), I/we settled on offal.

Just think of the possibilities: heart, liver, kidney (standard), tripe, brain, trotters, ears, tail…..the possibilities are endless (and some are a little bit scary). You’ll see the list is a bit of a work in progress!

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Which brings us up to date and January – ox cheek.