Happy Halloween

I haven't cooked anything Halloweeny, but I did carve my annual cat pumpkin. I hope everyone celebrating has a lovely evening!

Nigella's cumin lamb ribs for potluck week

I actually hadn't planned this, but the other day we had a Nigella Lawson dish for tea, and this week it is Potluck Week on I Heart Cooking Clubs, so it was clearly meant to be.

The recipe - lamb ribs with cumin and nigella seeds - is in her new book, I think, but she's got it on her website as an exclusive for community members. Worth signing up just for that, I think. And it's good enough to tempt me to buy the book.

Lamb ribs are very popular in South Africa, as a snack, grilled over a wood fire, simply seasoned with salt and pepper (I posted about them after a trip to SA) but you don't tend to see them as much over here. But Ocado have started to stock them, so hopefully they will take off.

Paul was very sceptical about me cooking ribbetje in a newfangled way, but the weather wasn't up for lighting the fire and I didn't give him much option.

The recipe takes about a minute to put together, and then two hours of slow roasting while all the fat renders out of the ribs leaving tender meat and an abundance of crispy bits. We had them as a main meal, piled on stir fried vegetables, but they would make great party food, as long as you don't have a white carpet and aren't wearing a posh frock.

Duckherd's Pie - duck and celeriac shepherds pie

Duck scratchings

I am pretty sure "duckherd" isn't a word. And I am reasonably certain the Goosegirls of Grimm's Fairy Tales don't exist as a profession any more - if they ever cared for ducks as well as geese. But if a shepherd looks after sheep and a shepherd's pie is made of lamb, I decided that a duck pie, topped with celeriac mash, had to be a duckherd's pie.

Skinned duck breasts

It has lovely autumnal flavours and all the comfort you want from a mash-topped pie, but a bit of luxury from the duck.

This is a fiddle, because you have to render the duck skin into scratchings and mince the duck breasts, but you can do it in advance to take away the memory of the pain and it ends up tasting delicious. And we have extra pies in the freezer for another day.

Duckherd's Pie (serves 4)

4 duck breasts
2 leeks
2 stalks of celery
2 carrots
1tsp green peppercorns in brine
2 bay leaves
sprig thyme
1/2 cup vermouth or white wine
salt
1 small celeriac
2 medium potatoes
2 cloves of garlic
butter

Skin the duck breasts. This is pretty easy - basically just grip the edge of the skin and pull it back, using a sharp knife to coax any membrane away, so you end up with a clean, lean piece of meat and a thick piece of skin with a nice fatty layer.

Slice the fat into 1-2cm wide strips, put in a small saucepan with some cold water and bring to a boil on a medium heat. This will look very unappealing for quite some time as the strips go grey and wrinkled. But then the fat will start to render out and the water will evaporate (it's just there to stop things from sticking while you get going) and eventually you will be left with a pot of clean duck fat and a treasure trove of crisp brown duck scratchings. Drain, reserving the fat. Tip the scratchings onto a paper towel-lined plate and don't eat all of them because you need some for the garnish.

Cut the duck breasts, leeks, celery and carrots into chunks your mincer can manage. I try to keep the pieces a bit separated so I can do the duck first, followed by the veg, because I think it makes the mincer easier to clean.

Ready for mincing

Run the duck, green peppercorns and veg through the mincer on a coarse blade. Some of the peppercorns will stay whole, some will be minced, but I like that. If you don't like the peppery shock of biting into a whole peppercorn, chop or crush the peppercorns first.

Minced and ready to cook

Add a couple of tablespoons of the rendered duck fat to a heavy bottomed sauté pan and brown the minced duck and vegetable mixture. Add bay leaves, thyme and vermouth or white wine, put the lid on and let it simmer for about an hour until thick and rich. The minced vegetables give off a lot of liquid so you shouldn't need extra, but if it is looking too dry add a bit of chicken stock or some more wine. Season with salt.

The remaining duck fat can go in a ramekin covered with cling film for a couple of weeks of good roast potatoes, or into the freezer for the Christmas spuds.

Divide the mixture between four ovenproof bowls, removing the bay leaves and woody thyme sprig if you come across them. Or make just one large one if you don't have to worry about portion control or there are more than two of you at dinner. I made two to eat that night and two in foil containers for later.

Peel and chop the celeriac and potatoes into even-sized chunks and boil until tender, giving the celeriac a 10 minute head start. Add the peeled garlic cloves in with the potatoes. Drain the veg and mash thoroughly with a good knob of butter.

Spread the mash over the duck ragu. I don't go in for piping that sort of thing but you could if you wanted to. I did try to pretty it up a little bit though. Allow another little nut of butter to melt over the surface of each one, and garnish with a couple of duck scratchings.

Allow the ones you are freezing to cool completely, cover and freeze. The ones you want to eat sooner rather than later will need a 180C oven for 35-40 minutes until the top is well-browned and the filling is bubbling up around the edges. Serve with a simple green vegetable.

Curry week

Apparently it is National Curry Week. I'm not sure what the aim is, but several people have tweeted. Anyway, let's assume that the awareness of curry in Britain is poor and needs to be raised.

This is actually our second curry of the week, but I didn't take a picture of Murali's chicken dry fry on Monday night. We had it with tomato rice, also courtesy of Murali, as his wife brought us a jar of fab tomato pickle which is apparently what single men in Bangalore live on. You stir a couple of spoonsful of this pickle into your rice and supper is prepared. Beats the hell out of a ready meal.

So: pork vindaloo, from Richard Turner's book Hog. Delicious, and much more subtle than you would expect from the amount of garlic in it. Shredded cabbage, stir-fried with mustard seeds, curry leaves, garlic, chilli and ginger. Flatbreads, seasoned with kalonji seeds. Completely delicious.

Purple kale, sausage and bean stew

This was inspired by a Portuguese caldo verde - but it turns out purple kale doesn't lose much colour when it's cooked, unlike a lot of other purple veg, so I guess it is caldo roxo?

Anyway, this is a one-pot meal that requires very little in the way of preparation. But the kale really does take a solid 45 minutes to become tender. I don't think it would have suffered to have an hour and a half.

This isn't a proper recipe. I just sauteed 4 or 5 whole cloves of wet garlic in olive oil, then added a couple of sliced Montbéliard sausages and a small diced potato that needed using up. A good slosh of vermouth, the washed and shredded kale and then I put the lid on for it to steam on a low heat for about half an hour. A tin of cannelini beans, a stock cube and enough boiling water to make it stewy but not soupy. If I was making it for three people I'd add an extra tin of beans but keep the rest the same.

Yes, Chef! Doro wat and injera

I first heard of Marcus Samuelsson from Joanne's blog - she was publishing some of her recipes on his blog. And shamefully I didn't pay very much attention. They were her usual healthy but delicious-sounding vegetarian dishes but I never looked into who this Marcus Samuelsson was. If I had a mental image of him I guess I imagined he was a vegetarian chef from Minnesota or something. Then I saw an episode of The Taste and realised that he was definitely not a vegetarian from Minnesota.

It meant that I was delighted when his memoir, Yes, Chef!, was chosen as the latest Cook the Books Club selection. And the story of how an Ethiopian child was raised in Sweden and became a celebrity chef in New York is really quite something. In a Sliding Doors scenario there are so many little twists that could have changed everything - if his mother hadn't made it to Addis Ababa, if his grandmother hadn't taught him to cook - so many factors came into play, but Samuelsson's determination is the thing that shines through.

Having read Helen Graves' posts about visiting Ethiopia with World Vision, and the process of making injera, I was pretty keen to have that as part of my Cook the Books contribution. I discovered that Ocado sell teff flour in tiny quantities, but it was enough for me to have a go.

I followed this method, using 23g of teff flour and 60 ml water for a half quantity, every time it specified 1/3 and 1/2 cups. I did a seven day ferment, and it behaved perfectly. It bubbled when the recipe said it would bubble and had a fermented, grassy aroma when it was supposed to. I didn't do the bit with the food processor, because the flour was very finely milled and there wasn't any grainyness to get rid of.

The final addition of the self-raising flour was fascinating. This was my mixture when I added it - sitting just below the 400ml mark.

And this was the mixture a couple of hours later when I was ready to cook them. I guess the acid from the sourdough activated the raising agents in the flour and made it go nuts. Very satisfying.

I wanted to do something that would acknowledge both Samuelsson's Ethiopian and Swedish heritages, and I thought that little injera would be an outstanding base for very Scandi sour cream and cured fish. So leaving the batter a bit thick, I made canapé-sized bites.

They look like little crumpets

I meant to top them with crème fraiche, gravadlax and salmon roe, but laziness got the better of me and I couldn't be bothered making the gravadlax. I just went more lavishly with the salmon roe.

As a little snack these were perfect. The tang from the injera was the perfect thing with the salty salmon and creamy, sour crème fraiche. I might have to do these again, maybe for Christmas.

The main event, though, was the injera served with Samuelsson's own recipe for Doro Wat and a mustardy lentil salad. The lentil salad was not at all to my taste, but the firey Doro Wat was delicious.

I actually made this right at the beginning of August, but hadn't got around to posting. So now you only have about a week left if you want to join in! But it is definitely worth a read.

Square Pie's Pie World Cup

From time to time people (usually people who don't know us well) ask us how we co-habit, as an Australian and a South African. How do we manage about sport? Doesn't it get fraught? Are there hostile silences  and cross words about cricket? It's actually pretty easy - neither of us is particularly nationalistic and neither of us pays much attention to the sort of sports that people get nationalistic about. I knew the Rugby World Cup was coming but, well, it's not Quidditch is it?

So I haven't been getting too excited at the prospect of dozens of burly men running around in tight shorts. I mean obviously it's crossed my mind, but let's not get carried away. It takes a good food gimmick to get me really worked up.

Square Pie have come up with just that gimmick in their Pie World Cup. They've developed a pie for each of the countries competing in the Rugby World Cup, and on the days each team plays, they'll put the pies up against each other in their stores. They'll be tallying the sales and putting them in a league table for a chance to progress to the next round. So tomorrow, to coincide with the tournament opener, England's steak and ale will be up against Fiji's goat curry.

The Australian Pie

I've had the steak and ale - it's their classic that they sell through Ocado as wee canapies as well as full-sized pies. It's very good, and as a bit of a sweetener, Square Pie has partnered with the Dallaglio Foundation. 10p from the sale price of every Dallaglio Foundation steak and ale pie will go towards their work with disadvantaged young people.

At the launch of the Pie World Cup I was hoping that they'd have canapie-sized pies so I could try a good range, but sadly they were full-sized. With the best will in the world I can't eat more than two pies, and I was on my way to my dance class and the prospect of two hours of spotting spins on a full stomach inhibited me further. But I had to try the Australian pie - as I said, I'm not hugely nationalistic, but the combination of kangaroo, mushroom and shiraz sounded like a winner. The pastry was nice and flaky: it wouldn't pass the old Australian footy pie test of eating it out of hand, but as long as you have access to a plate and fork it's the perfect texture. The filling was richly meaty - I wouldn't swear to being able to tell the difference between kangaroo, venison and beef in a blind tasting but it definitely tasted good. Maybe a little too sweet from carrots, but that's a minor quibble. I didn't even reach for the ketchup which is my default when faced with a pie.

I only had room for a couple of bites of a second flavour of pie, and which pie to choose was a real dilemma. I would have liked to try the Fiji goat curry, or Georgian chicken, mushroom and sour cream, but I opted for Canadian moose. Now, I was expecting moose to be similar in flavour to kangaroo or venison, but it was much more delicate. More like veal than beef. The Canada pie is very peppery and, dare I say it? much more to my taste than the Australian pie.

The Pie World Cup is only running in store, so I am going to have to print out the fixtures card and plan some trips into Old Spitalfields Market to taste some of the others. I think the pie draw is more evenly matched than the rugby teams - but may the best pie win.

O Canada!