Saag gosht is our favourite Indian dish and one we fight over when we go out or order a takeaway. I usually remember first and “bagsy” it then offer to share it with Stephen but really we should both order it as I’m not very good at sharing food. I thought it would be a good dish to use up a half shoulder of lamb that was taking up a lot of space in the freezer and reasoned that there would be enough for both of us.

The recipe was from Camellia Panjabi’s “50 Great Curries of India” which is fast becoming my favourite Indian recipe book. I find it much easier to follow than Madhur Jaffrey and have preferred the results. The only complaint I had about this is that it still wasn’t hot enough for me. I’ve found this with MJ’s recipes a lot and always increase the spicing but this is the first time I’ve noticed it here so need to allow for that next time. Otherwise, a really successful dish; less oily than a take-away but I prefer that anyway. Served with chapatis and moong dal.

Palak Gosht
Serves Four

700g lamn
2 x 0.5cm pieces of fresh ginger
2 cloves garlic
2 green chillies
100ml yoghurt
1/4 tsp cumin, ground
200g spinach
Oil
1 bay leaf
1 black cardamom
2 cloves
225g onions, chopped
1 tsp coriander seed, ground
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 tsp salt

Puree the ginger, garlic and green chilli in a blender. Whisk the yoghurt and add to the puree along with the cumin powder.

Marinate the lamb in this mixture for an hour, longer if possible. Blanch the spinach in boiling water with salt then drain and puree.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the bay leaf, cardamom and cloves. When the oil is really hot, add the onions. Fry for 15 minutes over a low to medium heat.

Add the coriander powder and saute for 2 minutes, stirring continuously. Add the cumin, fry for 10 seconds and then add a little water. Allow the spices to cook for a couple of minutes.

Add the meat and it’s marinade, stir and cook for 10 minutes until the yoghurt is absorbed. Saute the meat for 3 minutes and then add the tomatoes and tomato puree and cook for a further 2 minutes. Add 250ml hot water and 3/4 tsp salt. Turn the heat to low, cover with a lid and leave to simmer for a couple of hours. Just before serving, add the spinach and cook for a further 5 minutes. Check for seasoning and serve.

Then a coincidence came my way. I love coincidences; they make the world seem more interesting. For my wine (and spirits) diploma that I am studying, I was sent the subject for a coursework assignment: “The Premiumisation of White Spirits”. So I had to start studying the stuff. As part of it, I had to choose a particular brand on which to do a case study. I chose Grey Goose, a super-premium (i.e. even more expensive than premium) vodka produced in France* which is a huge seller in the US and is starting to conquer the rest of the world too. A few weeks later, completely out of the blue, arrived an invitation to a Grey Goose “Toast to Taste” event which sounded somewhat mysterious. So I had to say yes. For research purposes you understand, not because I would condone any of that sort of silliness. After all, they offered to send a car to pick me up so it seemed rude to turn it down.

So having arrived at work at an unreasonably small hour that morning to allow me to disappear early and get to the event on time, I was a little bleary eyed when I arrived and wasn’t really in the mood. That soon changed though. The car dropped me off in a lovely Georgian square and I started hunting for the correct door number. When faced with a rather anonymous-looking door, I wasn’t sure that I was in the right place until I spotted a brass plaque embossed with the Grey Goose logo. Nice touch.

I knocked and it was answered by a man wearing grey. I stepped inside and into a large but gloomy hallway that seemed reminiscent of the entrance of a hotel in a murder mystery novel. Along the right hand wall was an enormous floor to ceiling key rack hung with what must have been hundreds of keys. Some small, some big, some rusty, but all looking like they had a story to tell. I was handed a key with a red ribbon, told to stand near other people with red ribbons and led through to a tea room.

The tea room was light, airy, tastefully decorated and full of beautiful, impeccably dressed people sipping drinks and chatting amongst themselves. I felt like I’d stumbled onto the set of a stylishly Anglo-French film. Several people wearing grey flitted amongst the everyone else offering drinks, snacks and generally making sure that everyone had a good time. When offered a drink, I chose coffee and it arrived soon after in a perfect cup on a perfect saucer. So far so surreal.

After a few minutes of looking around and drinking my coffee, a lady appeared and summoned me to follow her. Then I realised why I was supposed to have been standing with other red-ribbon people (which I hadn’t): we were being led off to discover the “secrets of the house” together as a group with other similarly-ribboned guests. Down stairs into the basement, where we met the Keymaster. Behind him were three doors and he chose certain of us to go into each door after studying the keys that we had been given. I ended up in a French cafe with a woman sitting at a table reading a magazine. Interactive of course… I ended up in the role of someone she had met years ago and how she remembered the bread we had eaten and the water we had drunk on that day as if it was only yesterday. Having done my homework, I realised this was all about evoking the essence of Grey Goose’s ingredients: French wheat and limestone-filtered water. Very clever. Very memorable too.

Then back upstairs to the tea room, where cocktails had appeared. The cocktail du jour was Grey Goose Le Fizz which had been created by one of the Grey Goose “Brand Ambassadors”. Made with Grey Goose vodka (of course), elderflower cordial, lime juice and soda then served elegantly (naturally) in a Champagne flute, it was refreshing and very drinkable. Bit more chit-chat, bit more looking at the French pictures on the wall and the bottles of Grey Goose arranged here and there like object d’art. I tried an extremely delicious macaron and a couple of carefully prepared and expertly cut small sandwiches.

Soon the lady appeared and gathered us red-ribboned people together again and this time we were led upstairs where she handed one of the group a letter and motioned to us to enter a door. Enter we did, and we were in a large room where a woman was reclining on a chaise longue, reading a book. Soft music started to play, along with recital of a poem / narrative of how she loved to wander into the wheat fields and dance.

So she did. When we turned around, the other half of the room was full of wheat. Half of my brain was thinking “ah, very clever, more wheat worked into the story” and the other half was thinking “Wow, a wheat field inside a house! Inside a house!!!”. She danced around in the wheat field for a while and then the girl who had the letter handed it to her and she read it out. Poem about wheat. Then we filed back down to the tea room which I had started to think of as the “nexus” in a strange time-travelling world.

Another Le Fizz and some chit-chat later (during which I observed that the Grey Goose logo was frosted onto the windows as well as being on the brass plaque outside) we were ushered in an elevator and up to the top floor. Here a “laboratory” had been set up and we were asked to smell things in jars, and write down thoughts and feelings while attached to a “monitor”. More about taste and smell and how it makes us feel. Which in retrospect is very interesting – part of what I wrote about in my assignment was the fostering of emotional attachments to brands.

Back down to the nexus and probably another Le Fizz I think and then listened to a talk by the Grey Goose maître de chai Francois Thibault. He’s the man who is in charge of Grey Goose production. Other vodkas, gins, etc, would have a master distiller but Grey Goose, being very French, has a maître de chai. All about taste and extracting the essence of the finest French wheat when making Grey Goose. And about Cognac. Grey Goose is bottled in Cognac and blended with limestone-filtered spring water from the area, so the Cognac association is heavily played. French. Luxury. Long history of premium spirits production. etc.

A somewhat surreal and all-round brilliant afternoon. I came away thinking that should I find myself buying vodka in the near future that it would definitely be Grey Goose. Then chastised myself for having been led astray from my previous standpoint.

A few days later not just a bottle of Grey Goose arrived by post but also little tasting bottles of their flavoured versions – Lemon, Orange and Pear. I mixed Kerri a Le Fizz which she really enjoyed (and ordered another of) and then played around with the others, making a delicious cocktail with the pear vodka. I gave myself the credit for inventing it but it turned out similar to one in the accompanying little recipe book and the ingredients weren’t dissimilar to the Le Fizz although the resulting taste was quite different: Grey Goose Le Poire vodka, elderflower cordial, small squeeze of lime, shake with plenty of ice then add a splash of soda. We didn’t have vermouth, so didn’t venture into martinis, but will certainly do so soon.

Grey Goose is available in Waitrose for £32 a bottle and in bars for probably considerably more. You may notice its blue-and-grey adverts around London as this event is part of its first big UK marketing campaign. I saw a lot of them on Westfield’s electronic advertising boards recently when walking through.

* Though some people think that vodka comes from Russia or Poland and is made from potatoes, it doesn’t actually have to come from anywhere in particular, nor be made from anything in particular. And although a lot of it does come from Eastern Europe, Absolut is of course Swedish and Finlandia… well… Finnish. Various others are made all over the world. It is often made from grain (wheat, barley or rye) and cheaper stuff from sugar beet.

Stephen cooked this last night and I’m sure he won’t mind me saying that it didn’t turn out quite as planned. He had intended to use prawns but couldn’t find any and used scallops instead. The delicate flavour of the scallops didn’t really stand up to the tomato sauce and they became a bit lost, which we should have realised really. It would have worked well with prawns though so perhaps we’ll give this another go next week.

While this was far from a disaster, one thing we did learn was that blitzing the tomatoes before cooking them results in a really creamy sauce. Possibly too creamy when paired with fish but brilliant with the bacon. In a different dish, the addition of some cheese with that sauce and that bacon would have been great.

Initially, this was going to be just green beans, taking the place of the spaghetti, for a healthy, mid-week meal. I was far too hungry for just a little bit of fish and some vegetables today though so added some spaghetti in at the last minute. As a light lunch or starter it would have been fine without the pasta but it definitely needed the extra carbs to turn it into a proper meal.

Essentially, it’s just crab spaghetti with some beans and peas added to it but the long strands of runner beans were fun to twirl onto the fork with the spaghetti and it was a good way to eat some tasty, summer vegetables without the pasta being the main event.

Sadly, rather than tame my pasta craving, I seem to have stoked it even more so you can expect a reverse of this in the next few days: bowls stuffed full of pasta, plenty of rich sauce and just a few token vegetables for a nod to summer.

When I thought this up this morning, I was quite pleased with myself. It used up some fridge-bottom ingredients, was fairly quick, used seasonal vegetables with an interesting dressing to bring it all together. Stephen has just pointed out that actually, it’s just a variation on Tuesday’s dinner and, like everything else we’ve eaten this week, features something plonked on top of something else.

None of that really matters if it tastes good though and, luckily for us, this did. The potatoes were boiled with some dill and added to the briefly-cooked peas and asparagus before being tossed with a honey and mustard dressing. The salmon was then plonked on top.

The dressing did work as I thought it would and brought the whole lot together but the asparagus (not part of the original plan) was the real star. Of course, it’s a traditional pairing for smoked salmon but the sweetness of the honey really brought out the grassiness of the asparagus.

We don’t currently have any plans for tomorrow night’s dinner but perhaps I’ll try to think of a different way to present it, even if it does turn out to be just another something on top of something else.

So, day six of our World Cup Cuisine series and our first loss: none of the teams that we have chosen so far have lost their games, but when choosing Honduras we figured that that roll was likely to end anyway. I only had a vague inkling where Honduras was before I looked it up, so for those who don’t know, it is in Central America, with El Salvador and Guatemala bordering it to the west and Nicaragua to the east.

Our first idea was a coconut and seafood soup, but it looked complicated and also contained various vegetables that we would have been hard pressed to find, although I am certain that they could have been found somewhere in London had we looked hard enough. Then we found a recipe for pupusas, which are a something like thick, stuffed corn tortillas. They originated in neighbouring El Salvador, but are very popular in Honduras too. As we had masa harina for making tortillas and also some left over Mexican beans that we could use to stuff them, they sounded like just the thing.

We added a little more water to the masa harina than we normally do to tortillas, to make it a bit more pliable. We formed it into four balls, made a little dent inside each ball and filled two of them each with some of the beans and some left over chorizo (from last night) and a little grated cheese. Then we pressed them in our tortilla press (not quite as thin as a tortilla though or the filling would get squashed out) and dry fried them for a minute or two on each side.

Those with the beans inside them were more successful, especially if you bit into a nice cheesy bit. We made some salsa roja, to go with it, which is a cooked tomato, onion and chilli salsa with quite a lot of dried oregano in it. It was a good match to the pupusas, especially since the filling sometimes didn’t get that well distributed inside it and you ended up with half of it being mostly doughy and needing something to make it more interesting.

So a success from the point of view from making something new and interesting, but if we made them again we’d need to work on trying to get a bit more filling into them and getting it more evenly distributed inside.

Unusually for us, we were out on both Friday and Saturday night this weekend which didn’t leave much time for weekend cooking. We had planned on cooking beef brisket today but a surfeit of cheese meant we opted for macaroni cheese instead.

I’ve only eaten it once before and was a bit underwhelmed but had high hopes for today’s dish since we had some really good cheese to add to the sauce: Stinking Bishop and Coolea. The sauce was indeed delicious but unfortunately, in my quest for a crunchy topping, I over-cooked the macaroni which meant the pasta was rather dried out. I should have put the whole thing under the grill to brown on top rather than leaving it in the oven.

We didn’t follow a recipe for this but cooked the macaroni as per the instructions on the packet and made up a white sauce at the same time. The cheese was stirred through the pasta, along with some oregano and then put into a dish with some more grated Cheddar on top and cooked for far too long.

With rather a lot of leftover potatoes we weren’t entirely sure how to use them up. We briefly discussed lamb chops as an accompaniment but when I got to work I noticed some half-price hot smoked salmon and, never being able to resist a bargain, I brought that home. I’d intended to use it in some kind of salad and palm the potatoes off on Stephen for lunch but he suggested we just pair it with the potatoes we already had, reasoning that the sweet, smoky salmon would work well with the spicy potatoes. I wasn’t so sure, worried that there would be too much going on. Stephen was right though. It was definitely a robust dish that may not be to everyone’s tastes but we liked it. Very quick and easy too.

After vowing last week to make more regular updates, I’ve slipped again and this is almost a week old. Sorry, this week things will definitely be back to normal.

We’d had a butternut squash hanging around the kitchen for a while that really needed to be used so Stephen came up with this recipe for it, which is a lot like sag aloo but with squash instead of potatoes. I like butternut but I prefer to eat it in spicy dishes so the sweetness is masked by other flavours a little. Luckily, Stephen was aware of that (not so much luck as me repeating it over and over I suspect) and kept it in mind while cooking this dish.

The potatoes were also used in an effort to rid the kitchen of leftover food and worked very well. Don’t let the relatively small amount of cayenne pepper fool you, these were fiercely spicy but a perfect match for the warm, sweet butternut.

Dry Potatoes with Ginger and Garlic
Serves Four to Five (we halved this)

625g potatoes
Ginger, 5×2.5, peeled and coarsely chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled
3 tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon fennel seeds

Boil the potatoes, leave to cool and then chop into 2-2/5cm dice.

Put the ginger, garlic, water, turmeric, salt and cayenne pepper into a blender and blend to a paste.

Put the oil into a large frying pan and set over a medium heat. When hot, add the fennel seeds ans let them sizzle for a few seconds. Add the paste and cook for two minutes.

Add the potatoes and fry for 6-7 minutes or until the potatoes have a golden-brown crust.

We spent a brilliant New Year’s Eve with some friends who have just moved into a new house. Since they weren’t familiar with their kitchen, we offered to cook something to bring with us and ended up settling on coq au vin (similar to this recipe but not completely, I’ll update the recipe at some point). We had originally planned something Thai but we were still at my mum’s without a mortar and pestle and easy access to a Thai supermarkert. This was quicker, easier to source and meant we weren’t doubling up on ingredients that would fill our already bursting cupboards when we got back to London.

We started with a bruschetta of green pesto, mozarella, tomato and basil. Not the satay originally planned to go with the Thai food as we managed to inform our hosts of our menu change just in time.

Happy new year!

Coq au Vin
Served Four

1 whole chicken, jointed with the carcass reserved
250g bacon, chopped (or lardons)
1 large onion, chopped
6 shallots, quartered (or halved if small)
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 bottle red wine
300 ml chicken stock
2 bay leaves
6 sprigs thyme
Salt and pepper
250g button mushrooms

Season the chicken pieces and then brown them. Remove from the pan and set aside until later.

Fry the bacon until the fat has rendered. Remove from the pan.

Fry onion, shallots and celery until softened. Add the garlic and cook for a further minute.

Add the bacon back to the pan and deglaze with the wine. Add the chicken stock, the carcass and all the other ingredients (apart from the mushrooms) and bring to the boil. Season with salt and pepper and then simmer for 20 minutes. Add the browned chicken and mushrooms and cook for a further 20 minutes.

Just before serving, remove the chicken, bacon etc. from the pan so you’re just left with the liquid. Discard the chicken carcass.

Add in a paste of flour and butter, bring to the boil and cook for a few minutes to thicken the sauce.

Return the other ingredients, stir to incorporate and serve.