5 Spiced Indonesian Duck Satay

First off, apologies are in order for my stint in absentia, it has been a busy few months that have descended into a violent heat wave which has rendered me naked and on sofa betwixt jobs involving heavy lifting and subsequent excessive showering. You will be pleased to hear the time spent away from Gloopfood and in between jobs has been done so wisely; cooking and eating remaining firmly at the top of the list of vocations. Oh, and of course I have set aside ample time to get royally pissed off with people, below I offer a brief discourse before the main course; Bon appetite.

In March of this year whilst I was sitting at my dining room table at 31 Mysore Road writing the prequel post to this one, which, having had a quick glance appears to be in a similar tonal vein, I heard the postal flap clatter as what I assumed to be yet another menu fell to the floor. Upon closer inspection I observed four letters identical in colour and size addressed to the four housemates, and with them through the letter box a foul smell had oozed, viscous in consistency, a pungent pong riding atop an odious zephyr. I recognised it immediately, it was the unforgettable stench of estate agent.

After literally (I use the word correctly) months of searching for the perfect pad, or at least one that had four bedrooms rather than three and a cupboard, James, Ed, Dom and I found what was to be our home for next twelve months…. or so we thought. Contained within these official looking correspondences was a letter from Barnard Marcus notifying us that the land lord had, against categorical assurances from them that it would definitely be a minimum of twelve months we would be in there, irrespective of the six month break out clause, had decided to invoke said clause and wanted us to vacate the property so he could begin renovations. According to the notice which had been stuffed through our door, the low level employee who did so making it back to the office before the paper hit the floor, gave us exactly eight weeks to move out with all our belongings. Not an easy process when everything in the house belonged to us.

After a hectic property search which took us right down to the wire and as far south at Streatham and Balham, we were fortunate enough to land on our feet and find a house in Battersea a spit ball from the park. Inevitably however we were faced with having to deal with another parasitical sub-human before we could collect our keys and start our new life together, sandwiched between an extremely busy road and the main line into London’s Victoria station.

Sure enough the slimy individual with whom we had our dealings was essentially a criminal, gushing with verbal diarrhoea whenever he opened his mouth, making little to no sense whatsoever, and frankly treating us like we were idiots who were susceptible to his brazen and blindly apparent attempts at flattery. He was in fact totally useless bar picking up a phone and telling us the address of the house, once there we met our land lady who showed us around whilst we suffered his ludicrous ramblings. It will never cease to amaze me how estate agents will so unsubtly try and sugar coat a house that costs £650 per month to rent, it is what it is. When they start walking around oohing and aahing at a place they’ve seen several times before that is by all accounts totally non-descript, it makes me want to stab them in the face, wrap the body up in the cheap and shiny suit they bought from Next in the nineties, and throw it in the Thames.

You would have thought that after giving the green light on the house the process of completing forms and moving in would be fairly painless, you would be wrong. After losing several emails with signed documents that we had completed and returned on time, he then tried to convince my father and guarantor (as I am self-employed and have a somewhat Grecian bank balance they require more than just my word) that he couldn’t issue a tenancy agreement for our house until he had signed the guarantor form, and that we would have to pay our deposit and initial month’s rent before we signed the contract; a figure which amounts to over £6000. Couple this with the fact that Papa Gloop has been a lawyer for over thirty five years, information that the agent of darkness was well aware of, and his attempt at fleecing really does enter the realm of the absurd. After some probing it turned out that the reason he wouldn’t send the relevant contract with our new address on is because he thought we would go straight to the land lady and cut him out, losing him his agency fee. Now I’m certainly no Colombo but surely all this effort to conceal the address of a house we had already visited, a few hundred metres from our old digs, whilst in the knowledge that our new land lady is the deputy mayor of Wandsworth and also lives upstairs, may have been a little futile.

Now I’m not going to mention any names, as Omar at Next Door Properties could probably try and sue me for Defamation of Character. That said he would almost certainly misunderstand the contract, not to mention that if there is anyone he should take legal action against in this area it his himself. I would also like to add whilst on the subject of accountability that this is not an attack on Next Door Properties, rather the individual estate agent whose name I cannot mention for legal reasons . . . . . Although a hunch, personal experience and popular mass opinion would suggest that the rest of the office and indeed every other estate agent nationwide falls into the same bottom dwelling echelon.

The personal experience I speak of was gained in Leeds whilst at university there, where the standard of housing is one notch below Belsen Dachau. I recall one incident when I reported the -5 degree winds blowing through the 20cm hole in my bathroom wall leading to the outside to my land lord, and he came around to fix the problem with some duct tape and the side of a Golden Grahams box, it wasn’t even the more weather hardy Cinnamon pack. One estate agent had so many complaints they could’ve had their own spin off show from Watchdog, and gave their address out to tenants as on a street in the Leeds city centre, yet when the show went to visit them the building simply didn’t exist!

So what to do then? We are what experts are calling ‘The Jilted Generation’. Why is it that Radio 2 and the press keep harping on about how “house prices are going up and isn’t that wonderful”! Wonderful for our parent’s generation and anyone else sitting on a big pile of property investments from the financial boom of the 1980s, but pretty bloody crap for us lot. Especially when the exponential rise in property prices is totally disproportionate to feeble rise in income rates. It’s no wonder than no one can afford to buy without signing their life away to a 70 year mortgage scheme.

“But the interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in years” Mr Osbourne will tell us.

Well poo poo to that, as soon as we’re locked in the chubby baby and his little red suitcase will undoubtedly wade in and hike them back up again, even if he can’t do it directly I am in no doubt he will find a way, then we shall all be in negative equity and paying off deficits rather than into our pension funds, which he would of course steal as well. The government seem to think it’s a shift in society and that we are deciding to rent for longer and have children later, holding onto our youth and life as young professionals, when the simple fact is we can’t afford it. The average age of first time buyers who invest without the help from their parents has risen from 24 to 37 in on generation!

So again I ask the question, what to do then? Do we move abroad? France? 75% taxation, no thanks. Italy? Essentially a third world country. Germany? Well other than their fantastic wine and hilarious stand-up comedy there’s not much attraction. Greece…….

Perhaps a shift in priorities is needed? I leave you with plenty of unanswered questions and a quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

We have bigger houses but smaller families: 
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgements;
more experts but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but we have trouble crossing the street
to meet the new neighbour.
We build more computers
to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever,
but we have less communication.
We have become long on quantity
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow digestion;
tall man, but short character;
steep profits, but shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window
but nothing in the room.

  

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

4 gressingham duck breasts

Chinese 5 spice

Indonesian Satay Sauce, Ketjap Manis (dark brown in colour)

Mixed stir fry vegetables, spring onions, bok choi, carrot shavings

Dark soy sauce

Toasted sesame oil

Chilli oil

Salt & Pepper

Method:

1) Score across the fat of the duck breast and rub the five spice and a couple of tablespoons of the satay sauce into the breasts to coat them, cover and leave to marinade in the fridge for a couple of hours.

2) Chop up the vegetables and set aside.

3) Take the breasts out of the fridge and heat a tablespoon of both the sesame and chilli oils in a frying pan, place the duck in skin side down and cook over a medium heat for 8-10 minutes until the skin is nice, crispy and brown. Flip the breasts over and cook for another 6-8 minutes skin side up.

4)  When done take the duck out of the pan and let it rest on the side, add the vegetables to the pan and fry in the juices of the duck, if there is a bit too much juice then get rid of a bit otherwise you might make the veg a bit soggy. Fry until cooked but with a bit of crunch.

5) While the veg is frying slice the duck up, place the vegetables on a preheated plate and lay the duck out on top. Sprinkle a few spring onions on top and a few drops of Satay sauce.  

Honey Soy Salmon on a Carrot and Coriander Purée with Garlic Butter Scallops and Wasabi Mushy Peas

I was lounging around in my sitting room last week in the company of my three housemates, talking about everything and nothing in particular; it had been a reasonably long day for all of us yet we were in high spirits, the hours spent in the grind of our various vocations had failed to dampen the mood on Mysore Road. Or so we thought . . .

Being a trifle on the tepid side in relation to my temperate temperament, I called my housemate Ed up on a particular nuance in his vocabulary that had been niggling at me for some time; his habitual use of the prefix “to be honest” before at least 30% of what comes out of his usually erudite gob. I see no reason for it, a waste of breath, but more importantly, and this is the real issue I take with this particular turn of phrase; is he insinuating that when he doesn’t proclaim the validity of his views that he is in fact lying? How can I trust him? I’m not sure I can!

The same can be said for plenty of other unnecessary phraseology that has crept into the English language over the years; the word ‘literally’ for instance makes my father’s blood boil when it’s used out of context. After a particularly turbulent landing at Innsbruck airport last year one of his friends remarked how he had “literally shat himself”, this resulted in a ten minute tirade and interrogation as to whether the friend in question literally did have shit in his pants. Now even though his loving children instigated this particular exchange, I share his frustration at this grammatical infliction, paramount to the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.

“Like” is another word that fortunately seems to be drifting out of circulation, certainly amongst the older generation, of which we are continually drifting towards, each day another closer to death. A relic of 90’s Americana it rudely invaded the vocabulary of an entire generation of children, infecting their speech via the medium of poisonous movie trash.

“That was like, so cool”, you could hear the youth saying. I was one of them! Afflicted by this linguistic parasite from across the pond. Why was it “like so cool”, and not just “so cool” instead? Why were we living in this perpetual parallel universe where things were not quite what they seemed?

I find myself biting my lip when asked on an aeroplane; “Would you like a drink, at all”?

What do you mean “at all”? Either I want one or I don’t! Or are they inviting me in to a lengthy debate wherein I could establish the level of thirst I would have to reach, to then decide that I did indeed require a liquiditous substance with quenching capabilities?

When we have guests around who ask my mother where the toilet is, she simply replies that we don’t have one. So either they ask where the loo is or cross their legs instead.

I could go on, however there are simply too many of these imperfections to mention, so instead I will simmer quietly, attempting to harness in my emotions until the point when some unfortunate soul offers me a ‘beverage’ with accompanying ‘serviette’ and I will stab them in the face!

After getting so riled up there a few things that can bring me back down again more swiftly than a good meal, and this one is no exception. The Japanese flavours in the Wasabi are warm and comforting when combined with the smooth texture of the peas and crème fraîche, the sweet and salty salmon atop the fresh and spicy carrot and coriander purée is a welcome juxtaposition, whilst the scallops are just a treat that should be eaten far more often.    

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

For the carrot and coriander purée -

6 large carrots

Small handful of coriander, finely chopped (a little for garnish)

2cm of fresh root ginger, finely sliced

2 large red chillies, deseeded, finely chopped

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons crème fraîche

Salt and Pepper

Wasabi mushy peas -

2 cups garden peas, frozen is fine

2 tspns wasabi paste

1 tablespoon crème fraîche

Scallops -

12 scallops, coral removed

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

Knob of butter

Salmon -

4 salmon filet sections

1 tablespoon runny honey

8 tablespoons light soy sauce

2 tablespoons dark soy sauce

Toasted sesame oil

4 spring onions finely chopped

Large pinch of poppy seeds

Method:

You will need a blender for this, there’s no way around it.

1) Marinate the salmon filets in both the dark and light soy sauce, with the spring onions as well, for at least an hour.

2) Chop the carrots and cook them until tender, strain and chuck in the blender with the ginger, chillies, garlic, crème fraîche and coriander. Blend until extremely smooth, and then add salt to taste. This is very important, as it will bring all the flavours together. Set aside in a saucepan with the lid on.

3) Boil the peas for 5 minutes until cooked, add to the blender (you may want to rinse it out first) then chuck in the wasabi and crème fraîche and blend till smooth. Season to taste and set aside in a saucepan.

4) Heat a little sesame oil in a non stick frying pan over a medium high heat, take the salmon out of the marinade and add the filets to the pan skin side down and cook for 6 minutes. Then spoon / squeeze the honey over the top of the salmon and add a few tablespoons of the marinade before turning them over to cook on their tops for another 2-3 minutes. The skin should be crispy and delicious looking!

5) Whilst the salmon is cooking score across one side of the scallops in a cross hatch, heat the butter in a pan, add the garlic, then fry the scallops for 2-3 minutes on each side over a medium heat, making sure they have a golden sheen on them.

6) Just before the fish is ready reheat the delicious green and orange mushiness in their respective pans, plate up, garnish with coriander and poppy seeds. Enjoy. 

Salmon Glazed in Whiskey and Soy with Buckwheat Soba Noodles

It was inevitable that when the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and the first bite of information was sent on Christmas day 1990; that before long the internet would become home to millions of web sites that went far beyond the confines of necessity and functionality, into the realms of the ludicrous, surreal, and downright bizarre – ‘Get Ahead of the Games’ is one such web site. For months now we have been warned off entering the city to avoid the promised apocalyptic grid lock of confused locals swimming against a tide of wild eyed foreigners; ‘Olympic Lanes’ were to provide safe passage for terrified athletes barricaded behind bullet proof glass, as the contaminated public ran around feasting upon each other in the barren zombified wasteland of the middle and outside lanes.

I went to the Olympics on Monday, and I left plenty of time to catch my train and tube in anticipation of a rather uncomfortable game of sardines to make it to Westminster Pier and our boat to Greenwich. As it turns out, the campaign to warn off us Brits from the city unless it’s absolutely imperative to enter, at our peril, has been by far the governments most successful to date. There were barely any people on the train from Ealing (queen of the suburbs and home to my girlfriend), the tube was bordering comfortable, we didn’t have to jostle through a group of Spanish students at the exit of Embankment, and there was an alarming lack of tourists from the Orient along the South Bank. As you can imagine experiencing England without the cueing was most disconcerting.

Fortunately Karma was restored with a lengthy line as we entered the equestrian park through the Royal Maritime Museum, and there were a great deal of people inside enjoying a brief spell of sunlight in an otherwise dreary July. The cross country went well, or at least the two jumps I could see from my seat in the main stand didn’t challenge anyone particularly; the presence of Wills, Harry, Kate and a handful of lesser Royals rendered my little sister into her usual gushing mess, the beer was expensive, the food more so, but it was a fantastic day out and I feel like I did my bit to egg on Team GB to the silver medal they were awarded today on the podium in Greenwich.

I think it’s hard not feel a little patriotic when thrust into the breach of such a spectacle, however cynical you may have been about it before hand, and there was a lot of that going around. There are those who think the money should have been put to better use, re-building our flailing economy for example; there were certainly parts of the opening ceremony that I thought could have been omitted, It was a little peculiar that the NHS, already understaffed, were able to spare several hundred active nurses to dance around some children whilst their patients back at Holby were forced to call the Police for a glass of water. Although on the whole, I thought it was highly entertaining.

We need entertaining at the moment; it gets the endorphins going inside of us and heightens the serotonin in our bodies. It does exactly what exercise does for the athletes, stimulates our body and invigorates the mind. So if you think about there has never been a better time to have a party as right now – don’t mope around resigning to the national negativity and cynicism that’s been seeping into us; call up Bassline Productions and hire a massive sound system, play Chariots of Fire, run around in slow motion and award yourselves a medal. www.basslineproductions.co.uk



Ingredients: (Serves 4)

For the salmon marinade -
4 salmon filets
150ml whiskey
3 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
Freshly ground black pepper
1 red chilli, finely chopped

For the noodles -
3 bunches of soba noodles
4 florets of brocolli, roughly chopped
1 romano pepper, finely chopped
8 baby corns, halved lengthways
2cm fresh root ginger, crushed
1 clove garlic, crushed

For the cooking sauce -
5 tablespoons whiskey
4 tablespoons dark soy
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 red chilli, finely chopped
3 tablespoons runny honey
2 tablespoons hot water
6 spring onions, white ends finely chopped, save green ends for cooking
1 clove garlic, crushed
1cm fresh ginger, crushed
Small handful of fresh coriander, roughly chopped

Chives, finely chopped

Vegetable oil for frying

Plain flour for dusting



Method:

1. Mix the ingredients for the salmon marinade together and submerge the salmon in it for a minimum of 2 hours.

2. In a bowl thoroughly mix all the ingredients for the cooking sauce together and set aside.

3. Boils the Soba noodles for between 5 and 7 minutes, strain and set aside. In a wok heat some oil and fry up the brocolli, baby corn, pepper, ginger and garlic and stir fry for a few minutes till half cooked. Take off the heat and keep warm.

4. When the salmon has marinaded take it out, pat it in the flour, and chuck it - skin side down - into a frying pan. Cook the filets for a few minutes then pour in the cooking sauce, it will sizzle quickly and the honey will caramelise and bubble. Turn the filets over and cook for 2 minutes, before flipping them back skin side down. Make sure to toss them in the reduced sauce, the whiskey will be burning off and the sauce will reduce by over 3/4.

5. Whilst the salmon is cooking add the noodles to the wok and toss the vegetables through it, add a little soy and some sesame oil if needs be to add extra flavour.

6. Plate up the noodles with the salmon on top, chuck some chives and coriander around and about. Serve up.

Beetroot, Potato and Thyme Gratin atop a Smoked Kipper, Mustard and Celeriac Fritter with a Grilled Béchamel Stuffed Paprika Portobello and a Romanesco Cauliflower, a Serious Mouthful

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone on February 29^th 1876; Ja Rule was born on the 29^th February 1976. These two events have nothing in common except the date they took place on, exactly a century apart. With this in mind (rather strangely), I marched off to Waitrose to find a completely random collection of ingredients with no immediate thought as to what would come together in the kitchen. Now you may say that it’s impossible to select completely at random because to a degree everything you do has to be pre-meditated, and I agree; so let me rephrase. I marched off to Waitrose to find a collection of ingredients that I hadn’t used, or at least used together before, to make the evening’s meal more of an adventure to prepare.

Smoked Kipper: I don’t think I’ve ever eaten one of these, my lasting memories are of my father having them for breakfast a lot when I was a child, most probably a straight fortnight after a visit from the mobile monger.

Beetroot: Pretty colours, rich in flavour.

Celeriac: People are always waffling on about celeriac purée on Masterchef, for some reason they’ve become rather popular. I’ve only ever cooked one once so it seemed like a fresh choice.

Portobello: Sounds trendy, is trendy.

Romanesco Cauliflower: This is a beautiful looking thing that is half way between broccoli and cauliflower in taste, with a gloriously nutty edge.

I’m not the cleanest of cooks at the best of times, when I know what I’m doing that is. So when I’d finished this evening the kitchen looked like some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland that would have Thomas Stearns Eliot reaching for his quill. However this didn’t bother me in the slightest, there are ‘thems who cooks and thems who cleans’. I am the former.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

The ingredients are grouped into their respective components

2 smoked kipper filets

1 large potato, desiree will do, peeled and chopped into 2” cubes

1 celeriac, peeled and chopped into 2” cubes

3 rashers of oak smoked bacon

Handful of fresh chives, finely chopped

4 shallots, finely chopped

1 tablespoon of English mustard

40g salted butter

1 tablespoon crème fraiche

3 large potatoes, desiree again, peeled and very finely sliced

6 fresh red beetroots, peeled and finely sliced

2 tspns fresh thyme leaves, finely chopped

1 large pot double cream

Butter for greasing

4 Portobello mushrooms, stalks removed

Butter for grilling

1 heaped tablespoon of plain flour

50g butter

Semi-skimmed milk

100g Wookey Hole cheddar, grated

Smoked Paprika

Grated Nutmeg

1 Romanesco cauliflower

Salt and pepper for whatever needs it.

Method: (Pre-heat the oven to 180°C)

1. Grease a medium sized baking dish, 3” deep, with butter. Place a layer of thinly sliced potato on the bottom and then a layer of thinly sliced beetroot on top, sprinkle with a pinch of thyme, a pinch of salt, and a couple of turns of freshly ground black pepper. Repeat this till you have 3 layers, then finish with a final layer of potato on top, season with salt, pepper and a little thyme, then pour over the whole pot of cream, slowly, so that it seeps down through the layers. Put in the oven for an hour.

2. Put the bacon under the grill till crispy, take out and chopped into bits.

3. Whilst the gratin is cooking in the oven, put the potato and celeriac chunks into cold salted water and bring to the boil. Cook them until soft, take them off, add 40g butter, a tablespoon of crème fraiche and some seasoning and mash it roughly. Spoon it into a blender and add the smoked kipper before pulsing a few times so the fish breaks up into the mixture.

4. Spoon the mix into a bowl and add the chives, mustard, uncooked shallots and bacon bits and stir it all through. You will need to be fairly liberal with the seasoning and in particular the salt; there are some very strong flavours that need to be brought together and Salt, the most important ingredient in the kitchen, is the thing for the job.

5. Make a béchamel now by melting 50g of butter in a saucepan and adding a heaped tablespoon of plain flour and stirring it in till it gets lumpy. Add a little milk at a time stirring it in with a whisk till it thickens, keep doing this until you have a relatively thick sauce. Melt the Wookey Hole cheddar into the sauce, season with plenty of pepper and a little nutmeg, and take off the heat.

6. In a griddle pan (frying pan if you don’t have one) chuck a knob of butter in over a high heat, cook the mushrooms on both sides till they get a nice colour, a couple of minutes should do it. Take them out of the pan and chuck them on a baking tray bottom side up so they make a little shroom bowl, now scoop some of the cheddar béchamel into the mushroom and sprinkle some paprika over the top, before sliding them under the grill for 5 minutes so the spices infuse into the sauce.

7. Cook the Romanescos in boiling water for 5 minutes until tender, strain.

8. The final thing to do whilst the cauliflowers are cooking is to make small patties of the celeriac mix and fry them on both sides for a couple of minutes so they brown a little. Serve up the fritter with a slice of the beetroot and potato gratin on top, with the mushroom on one side with the beautiful Romanesco sat proudly on the other. You could dollop a little extra béchamel on for extra sauce, however the flavours of the creamy beetroot and sharper celeriac, along with the spectacular combination of smoky kipper and bacon, the nutty cauliflower, and rich mushroom covered in mature cheese, are plenty enough for your pallet. A success. RULE BABAAY! 

Chicken Satay Momos

In June last year I had a near death experience; several near death experiences actually. All of which happened whilst travelling around the mountainous Northern echelons of the sub-continent in the back of a more than questionable bus, driven, or perhaps more aptly – hurtled, around the most indescribably terrifying passes on earth. They say that Bolivia is home to the world’s most dangerous road, they call it ‘El Camino del Muerte’; the road of death. Around 26 busses packed with tourists and locals alike plunge over the edge every year into the precipice of doom, not to mention the droves of thrill seeking cyclists who over shoot on any one of the 130km of unforgiving bends. It is a truly bone chilling experience that would have even the most hardened of atheistic nut cases reaching for the nearest edition of the King James. I know as I spent the best part of 50 hours stuck between two landslides on the very same road whilst journeying towards the Amazon basin.

The statistics speak for themselves; however I believe the title of ‘World’s Most Dangerous Road’ only applies because the Bolivians are actually keeping count of the lives claimed every year. The road, if you can call it that, between Leh, India’s Northern most town and final outpost before Tibet and Manali deep in the heart of the Parvati Valley, claims as many lives in a month as ‘El Camino del Muerte’ does in a whole year. The reason the deaths aren’t documented is because the Himalayas are so high that when a bus disappears over the edge, it is lost forever along with the doomed souls within.

Having stopped for a yaks milk hot chocolate at the highest service station on earth; no more than a handful of Tibetan yurts at well over 5000 metres above sea level, I climbed back into the bus and held on for dear life as we climbed further still to the world’s highest drivable pass at nearly 5600 metres, 1000 metres higher than anywhere in continental Europe. Even when we’d reached our highest point the mighty Himalayas loomed dramatically above us pushing well past the 7000 metre mark; nowhere on earth does one get such a humbling feeling of perceptive enormity.

We began our descent out of the sub zero summer temperatures into more temporal climbs, dramatic waterfalls cascaded out of the clouds down the valley walls and out of sight into the caverns below. We passed a large group of motorcyclists roaring up the gravel track astride their Enfield 500s, bellowing as they tore up on the inside line. The final biker misjudged the corner and flew past in front of our bus; as if in slow motion I panned across and watched in dumb founded horror as he disappeared over the edge drifting weightlessly away from his saddle and out of sight.

“Stop the bus”, I screamed.

The driver who hadn’t quite registered what had happened slowed down and drove aimlessly toward the edge.

“Stop the fucking bus”, I shouted even louder.

I pulled back the door and jumped out, running towards the edge and looking down into a ravine with a fast flowing stream gushing over sharp glacial rocks. It took me a few moments to focus on him, but when I did I saw two leather clad legs protruding from underneath a 200kg motorcycle; he was face down in the water with the bike lying on top of him.

With the adrenaline coursing through my veins I jumped off the edge into two feet of scree and slid manically down the fifty or so feet to the water’s edge, before clambering up the steep incline through the gushing torrent to where the bike lay with the man beneath it. The machine weighed next to nothing as I picked it up and threw it off him; by this time two of his riding partners had descended down the other side of the gorge and together we pulled him out of the water and onto his back. His eyes were in the back of his head, blood was pouring down his forehead and there was white froth coming from his mouth.

Did the froth mean he was breathing? Was it his last breath leaving his lifeless body? Had I just seen someone die right in front of me?

His eyes rolled forward and water spluttered from his mouth, he was delirious, but he was alive. I stepped back to give him some space and let his friends take care of him. They thanked me for reacting so quickly and I clambered back up the slope to where my terrified girlfriend stood next to the bus; by this time a hoard of apathetic locals had gathered to look on, some with apparent amusement, at the scene which had unfolded below.

Back on the bus we drove for another 20 minutes till we reached a plateau with a Chai shop, I sat down with a cup of tea and unashamedly shed a few tears. I’ve never felt so shaken in my life.

When we finally arrived in Manali another 20 hours and several peaks later I slept like a baby, never have I felt so happy to have my own two feet on the ground. The next day we sat in a café all day writing about our experiences, gazing out across the misty river valley, and eating some of the most delicious Tibetan food in town. Which brings me round, finally, to the Chicken Satay Momos.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

You’ll need a Chinese bamboo steamer for this, or a vegetable steamer

1 cooked rotisserie chicken, all the meat shredded

1 large red onion, finely chopped

3cm root ginger, crushed

1 red chilli, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, crushed

6 spring onions, chopped into 3cm lengths

2 tablespoons smooth peanut butter

2 tablespoons light soy sauce

3 cups plain flour

1 - 2 cups of water

4 tablespoons Sweet chilli sauce

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

Ground nut oil for frying

 Method:

1. In a bowl make a well in the flour and pour in the water, mix well into a dough (as for bread making), knead for 5/10 minutes until not sticky any more. You will need to dust your work surface with flour so your dough doesn’t stick. When you’ve done kneading it whack it in a bowl and cover it with a wet tea towel and set aside for half an hour.

2. In a frying pan add a slug of ground nut oil and fry the onions, garlic, chilli and ginger for a few minutes till the onions soften. Chuck in the chicken and mix well, then add the peanut butter and melt it through. Finally add the soy sauce and stir well, fry for another couple of minutes and take off the heat.

3. Now get the dough and roll it into a long sausage about 3cm thick, cut this into lengths about half the size of your index finger and roll each segment out into a thin circle about 10cm across, making sure that the dough is thinner at the edges. This is because when you come to twist them together they aren’t too thick and doughy on top.

4. Place a heaped dollop of the chicken satay mix into the middle of each dough circle, and pull up the edge over the top in a clockwise direction till the mix is covered, twist them closed. Do this to all of them and put them in the top segment of the Chinese / vegetable steamer. Pour a couple of inches of water into a wok and put the steamer on top. Cook them for 10 – 15 minutes or until the dough is dry to touch and not sticky. Then chuck in the chopped spring onions and drizzle a little soy over the momos, steam for a further 2 minutes and take off the heat.

5. Serve with the dip made from the sesame, sweet chilli and dark soy.

Spicy Chapatti Flour Chicken Goujons with Sweet Potato Pakora in an Indian Red Pepper Salsa

It was a scary weekend for several reasons; on Saturday I endured a full seven hours of relentless children’s games in the kids chain of Ralph Lauren on New Bond Street, I hasten to add that I am gainfully employed by a legitimate company to do so and wasn’t simply hanging around. Usually the parties only last two hours and leave you bordering delirium through onset of fatigue, so you can imagine that keeping a hoard of six year olds on a sugar rush engaged and enthused from midday to soirée was somewhat draining. I left at 7pm half the man I was earlier on in the day, my head battered and bruised from a game of “catch the big smelly rat” (me) that turned violent, my wrist nigh on fractured having executed an imperfect “worm”, and my face painted like an evil skeleton for the second time that day having lost the first coat in a round of unsuccessful apple bobbing. I needed a drink.

Picking up a bottle of Vodka en route to a friends I became hot and flustered, this meant disrobing on the tube to a point of public acceptability whilst preventing my face paint from sweating off, I managed this with some dignity and made it to my destination visage intact. That particular bit wasn’t scary, just a contextual precursor as to the geography of the developing yarn, what happened next though was frankly spine chilling. My girlfriend came over to talk to me as I was sifting through music on itunes and completely by accident knocked a glass of the host’s lethal and sticky “Booger” punch all over the host’s laptop, and we’re not talking a £300 colourful little Dell, oh no, it was a brand spanking new 17” Macbook Pro specced up to the nines worth in excess of £2000. It turned itself off. Gulp.

I did some online trouble shooting and learnt that spillages are not covered by the Apple warranty, and not only that but there is no way you can feign ignorance or bend the truth of circumstance, as of 2008 Macpro laptops are all fitted with liquid strips below the keyboard that change colour as soon as they come into contact with said substances. Financially this could quite possibly be disaster falling halfway between Greece and Enron, fingers crossed.

The 305^th day of the Gregorian calendar chilled the marrow in my bones further still, as I embarked on a journey to darkest Gloucestershire to conduct another two hour stint of juvenile revelry at the back end of beyond. The party was actually a huge success, the bulk of which I owe to my valiant cohort Tamara and her un-quashable enthusiasm. It was the following trip to Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College to visit my fresher little sister (see lemon posset and pana cotta) that really sealed the weekends infamy with a big, sloppy, sambuca flavoured kiss. Tunnel vision.

You may fail to see where I am going with this, and to be quite honest so am I, my only logic then is to say that I have been hanging out of my arse all day and desperately needed some comfort food after the two and a half hour journey home. This is what conspired.

Ingredients: (Serves 2)

For the chicken:

2 chicken breasts, cut into strips lengthways

1 bowl breadcrumbs

6 heaped tablespoons of chapatti flour

Semi skimmed milk

3 tspns hot chilli powder

Salt and pepper

1 litre of rapeseed oil for deep frying

For the red pepper salsa:

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon chilli oil

1 large red pepper, chopped

1 large onion, finely chopped

3 cloves garlic, crushed

3 tomatoes, chopped

2cm root ginger, peeled and chopped

2 tablespoons of tomato purée

6 curry leaves

1 tspn ground mace

3 tspns medium chilli powder

1 litre of water

For the sweet potato pakora:

1 sweet potato, peeled and grated

1 flat tablespoon of corn flour

1 flat tablespoon of plain flour

3 tspns garam masala powder

A slug of semi skimmed milk

Enough rapeseed oil for shallow frying

Chopped spring onions and cherry tomatoes for garnishing

Handful freshly chopped coriander leaves

Method:

1. Start with the red pepper salsa – heat the olive and chilli oil in a pan and add the onion, pepper and tomato and fry for 5 minutes until softened but not browned. Add the garlic, ginger and tomato purée and stir through for a couple of minutes. Now add the mace, chilli powder and curry leaves, along with the water. Simmer uncovered for 15 – 20 minutes over a low/medium heat, stirring occasionally. Take it off the heat and blend it into a smooth salsa, season to taste and keep warm.

2. Whilst the salsa is simmering mix the grated sweet potato in a bowl with the corn flour, plain flour, garam masala powder, and enough milk to make the mixture sloppy but NOT gooey like dough. Do this by adding a little bit at first and then add more, if the mixture is too thick it will turn out like bread and if it’s too thin it wont hold. Heat 2cm of rapeseed oil in a thick bottomed frying pan till it is very hot (test with a breadcrumb), then add small patties of the mix carefully to the pan. They may feel like they’ll fall apart in your hands but as soon as they hit the oil they will hold. Fry and turn until crispy and brown, remove and drain on kitchen towel, keep warm.

3. Heat 1 litre of rapeseed oil in a deep saucepan until very hot. Whilst the oil heats up mix the flour in a bowl with enough milk to give it the consistency of double cream, then add the chilli powder and mix through. Bring the batter mix and the breadcrumbs up to the cooker and set up a production line, we’re going Henry Ford. Batter – Breadcrumbs – Oil – Draining Plate. Dunk the chicken strips in the batter, coat with breadcrumbs, carefully drop into the oil and deep fry for a few minutes until golden brown and crispy, remove and drain on the plate. When you are done take the oil off the heat, put a lid on it and leave it cool overnight, you can then pick out any bits and return it to the bottle to re-use a couple of times.

4. Mix the salsa in a bowl with the pakora and the chopped coriander and plate up, place the spicy chicken goujons on top and drop some chopped spring onions and cherry tomatoes over the top. Warm and filling.