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.

Pancake what-day?
Well - Annick thinks it's Pancake Thursday, so that's what we're going for this year. Snot the same without kids anyhow. Unless you count Flora :)

Annick organised a Breton pancake party, which seem to be the same things as crêpes to me. Which is to say, pancakes which are cooked with their toppings in the frying pan at the end.
Annick had prepared a vast selection of cheeses, ham, tomatoes, cooked onions and mushrooms to choose from. And that was just for the savoury course.
She'd also gotten some goose eggs (or really big duck eggs) from a local farm so we had a couple of our pancakes with a sunny-side-up massive fried egg on top. They were absolutely delicious. And massive. With massive yolks
Apparently it's common in Brittany to have an egg cooked miroir on top of your crêpe (or rather galette - if you're using buckwheat), but you'd need astonishingly thin pancakes for that to work, and a normal-sized egg too. So we fried ours separately.
Did I mention how big the eggs were?
Massive.

Hardly necessary for me to bring some extra toppings then, but I did anyway.
For one thing I've been wanting to invent something combining chocolate and mushrooms and this seemed like a good opportunity.
For another I quite fancied some prawns and I know that Annick has a horror of all maritime comestibles. Which is a bit sad for a sailor.

For pudding pancakes we had Nutella, strawberries, bananas, lemon juice and sugar to choose amongst.
Not surprisingly few of us made it to pudding!

Annick went to the trouble of adding the toppings to the pancakes in the pan and cooking them there for a while - I quite like the way this melts the toppings into the pancakes, particularly the cheese. It's nice to have the sugar actually dissolved into the lemon juice rather than just crunching against your fillings, but it's quite a bit more faff.

I can't see it catching on.

Well, it's the end of pheasant shooting season, so last chance for that game dinner I'd promised Flora.

She reckoned she could get pheasant from her hunting people (ah, to have hunting people!), and I promised to cook what they shot, but it seems either they have really bad aim, or are greedier than expected, and Flora ended up buying her pheasant from the butcher like a plebeian.
It's all the same to the chef I guess.

I had some difficulty deciding how best to cook it though - ideally I would attempt to channel Keith Floyd whilst making a long slow pot-roast with red wine and pig's trotters, but this being a Thursday evening, and seeing as how Flora is actually bringing the pheasant with her and expecting dinner sometime tonight that isn't feasible.
So I decided to try a poaching approach instead - based around my Mum's Fasolia which I thought would complement the pheasant nicely.
A Pheasolia if you will.
It worked quite well I thought.

I made up some apple mashed potato to go with, but to be honest it made it awkward to eat. I think bread would have worked better. What about apple bread?

I was in two minds about whether to add some chorizo to the beans, and throw in some parsley to finish, but in the end I forgot about the parsley and decided to skip the chorizo to see how it came out pure.

In any case I had plenty of leftovers so I fried up some chorizo slices and threw them into it when I reheated it to try the best of both worlds. I even remembered the parsley this time!
The leftover mash made a really good leftover stew thickener, and the result was extremely tasty. I'm not sure which I preferred to be honest, it's a deeper, darker, richer stew with the chorizo, but on the other hand I quite liked the lemony freshness of my original.

You pays yer money, you makes yer choice.

Flora texts me to find out what we're having for dinner:

Obviously you can't tell from the context, but I'm pretty sure she was talking about Chinese food.

So to accomodate her simple request I looked out a Sweet and Sour Pork dish, only with chicken. Since I'd already bought a chicken for something else.

I figure that being orange it will bring lots of colour if I serve it hot it will definitely provide the warm and being a main course it should also be pretty savoury (exactly what main courses aren't savoury then Flora?).

I'll leave Flora to provide the sweet which just leaves the healthy for which I pull out a sharp, aromatic Crab and Sweetcorn Soup from Ken Hom to start. It must be healthy - it's a soup right?

As usual when feeding Flora - time is of the essence, fortunately the soup is pretty quick to prepare, especially if you buy the crab prepared (as I did) or tinned.

Job Done.

Today one of those painfully earnest middle-class middle-aged knightsbridge women on Radio 4's Woman's Hour taught me how to pronounce quinoa - like the cry of a Tourette's baby: 'kin WAH!.
Useful stuff, and just in time for the latest visit from Aline, my cute landlady, and another excuse for a (distinctly wholemeal) knees-up.

Aline loves to spend her time hanging out in Amazonian tree-tops, and since she's been trapped indoors for many months now writing up her foot-thick doctoral thesis, it's definitely time to break out and Party Party Peruvian Styley!

It's turned out to be our biggest gathering yet - partly 'cos almost everyone we invited actually showed up for a change you know who you all are and partly 'cos we also made it a surprise birthday party for Aline's friend Anuschka not that it stopped us forcing her to skivvy for us in the kitchen. So her friends had to come. Hah!

Twenty three people to feed and water - so we went buffet style, mostly cold food which seems to be quite the Peruvian thing, and just a couple of hot stews: One meat and one of those 'kin WAH things - an Inca favourite. Allegedly.


I played only a minor role in the cooking this time - I catered for the non-vegetarians with a pork adobo and a rack of crackling, I under-cooked some peruvian-style rice to go with, and then busied myself with jugs of Cuban Mojitos to get the cocktails rolling.
OK, not exactly authentically Peruvian, and we had planned on more native Pisco sours, but they're kind of fiddly to prepare and we had only limited amounts of Pisco, so we decided to save those for later when things had relaxed a little and we had some time to ge the food processor out.
Pretty hard stuff to get - Pisco. A kind of Peruvian grape poteen, with a fairly distinctive odor of herbal sweat, it's not widely stocked, though you can order it on the internet for around £25 (promptly delivered too I have to say). Or you can buy it from Harvey Nichols for £105 [Tamaya's Gran Pisco is sadly no longer available there :( ].
You do the math.

The sours went down rather smoothly, when they finally put in their appearance, but I guess the party was pretty much drunk out by that point, because we ended up with half a jug that we just couldn't get rid of, not helped by Jenny's mum Liiisa refusing to have anything to do with them!
So I stuck the leftovers in my ice cream machine's ready-frozen sleeve and put it straight back in the freezer. I thought it might freeze smoothly without needing to be stirred being mostly egg white foam. But I was wrong. The result is a crunchy frozen Pisco mousse. Not awful, but no substitute for ice cream I'm afraid.

My Mojitos, meanwhile, met with almost universal female disapproval. Too sour apparently. I reluctantly muddled in more sugar. Still too sour. So I added a bit more sugar. Then still more sugar. Finally the girls were drinking slightly alcoholic sugar syrup and still complaining, and when we collected all the glasses at the end to wash what did we find at the bottom? Yup - a thick sticky layer of undissolved sugar.
Lady wussies. They should stick to their Baileys!

Still it seems there are advantages to having a party for mostly teetotal, non-smoking, vegetarian, mothers. They didn't completely trash the joint and they all went home at a reasonable time. Dammit - I must be getting old!

Speaking of glasses - how is it that despite laying out a whole stock of paper plates and plastic knives, forks, and cups, every single piece of cutlery and crockery that we own ended up dirty?
I guess we failed to padlock them away!

I was going to make some deep-fried fritter-like things for pudding half-way throught the party, but was overcome by an attack of common sense and for once we ended up making absolutely all of the food in advance.
Bonus!

Here are the few simple dishes we made to entertain the masses:
menu

We borrowed a handy bilingual book of Peruvian cuisine from Aline's friend Julia who was also good enough to bring along the haddock ceviche, Which she didn't make following the book. Slightly suspiciously I thought? and Aline did a good job of trawling the web for vegetarian-friendly versions of peruvian classics, making good use of a site called, appropriately enough, Peru Food

And a good time was had by all.
All that's left is for Aline to sober up, bind her massive thesis and get a real job!

Yes, once again 'tis the season to stuff your bird and stuff your face.
We like a traditional goose for the Christmas bird in our house; lovely succulent meat, never dry. Plus you get about a year's worth of beautiful fat for your roasties. Anyway, if it was good enough for the Cratchits it's good enough for us!

Following our traditions I picked the stuffing and the starter. I quite liked the sound of Nigella's gingerbread stuffing so we went with that. We were slightly worried that it might turn out too sweet, so we replaced some of the gingerbread with regular bread, but to be honest it was still a bit overwhelmingly sweet and sticky. I think I might go back to something a bit more traditional next year.

Unusually this year we also had a roast duck.
Since my brother decided to have himself a family we are now forced to get dressed (get dressed! On Christmas day! The horror!) and treck the mile upon mile (yes: two miles) to his place for Christmas Dinner. So fearing there wouldn't be enough leftover bird to feed two families for one entire day, Mum and I decided to have a second Christmas dinner at home on Boxing day with a duck. We were taking no chances.

For starters we made up some of Aidan's goats cheese parcels, which seemed to travel well when Aidan brought them around to my place, but unfortunately Mum ignored all my careful instructions on how to cut up the cheese and instead mashed it to paste before I got the chance to stop her. So they were a bit soggier than I had hoped.

After our Boxing Day leftover goose fry-up, many dinners of leftover cold goose, stand pie and pickle, and many lunches of leftover goose and leftover ham sandwiches, we traditionally finish off the very last bit of bird in Mum's famous pilaf.
It's a bitter-sweet meal - marking as it does the end of Christmas. The delicious end of Christmas.
Nothing left after that but to start working on those leftover mince pies.