It stands to reason that curry goat is best made with goat, but goat meat can prove difficult to find.
I scoured nearly every butcher I knew in the hope of finding it, from my normal, trusted shop right through to the tiny halal places in the back streets of Bradford.
Nobody had goat. Nobody could get goat. Nobody could help me.
I was about to give up and substitute lamb, which would have been OK, but nothing new, when I chanced across a Caribbean freezer shop in a market. I found out that, yes, they stocked goat, but they only get a delivery on a Monday, and that they were likely to have sold it all by Tuesday morning. If I wanted goat, I had to be there on Monday.
So I was.
This recipe is Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall’s, and he describes how curry goat recipes differ wildly. Curry goat, it seems, is one of those things that no two people cook the same.
The first thing to do is to pack the meat with some Caribbean flavours, and that means getting it into a spice mix and leaving it there for a long, long time.
More goat here…
Everybody has words and phrases that just put them inexplicably on edge, and the wonderful world of food writing seems to be blessed with more than its fair share of mildly irritating little pieces of language.
You see these words everywhere…on websites, in adverts, on the TV, in cookbooks, on menus. Sometimes, they just come out of nowhere, like those odd management phrases that instantly become popular in the office and disappear even more quickly (my favourite right now is wordsmith…you don’t edit any writing anymore, you wordsmith it. Yes, I do laugh at people who say it).
These are the management speak of food writing, the ten words that should be banished completely from all food writing, for ever:
Top 10 below…
On rooting through the freezer, I found a pack of mixed game – pigeon breasts, venison and rabbit – right at the back.
Now, I must make it clear that, whilst the fact that I’ve got game meat in my freezer sounds quite grand, I’m not some sort of country gentleman who shot this meat on his own estate. I’m a resolutely urban dweller, who just happens to have been given a pack of meat about a year ago, froze it whilst trying to decide what to do with it and promptly forgot about it until the kids demanded fish fingers for tea, causing me to stumble across it again.
Anyway, I let the meat defrost so that I’d be forced to come up with something to cook.
I eventually decided on a game pie, a more countrified take on the classic pork pie.
The method is exactly the same – hot water pastry, big chunks of meat bound together in a rough pate with minced pork, a heavy hand with the herbs and seasoning, topped up with jellied pork stock.
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On something of a whim, I bought a couple of live crabs from Kirkgate Market in Leeds.
When we got home, I tipped the crabs into the empty sink and left them there, scaring Jen half to death when one made a determined bid for freedom before she’d noticed its presence.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them – I’ve always bought conveniently dressed crabs before – but a few judicious tweets and a bit of Googling provided me with everything I needed to know about dispatching and cooking the pair of them.
There’s no real consensus on the best method of killing and cooking a crab. Some people go for the traditional plunge in a boiling pan as an appropriate and humane way of killing the fish, whilst others prefer killing it outright before boiling it.
Methods of physically killing the crab before cooking vary widely, with the most gruesome involving simply removing the whole shell from the side with a cleaver, something that strikes me as unnecessarily brutal that I wasn’t about to do.
So, this is how I did it.
Read more….
The other evening, we had a Chinese takeaway.
As normal, it was great. Spare ribs, prawn toast, wontons, sweet and sour, salt and pepper chicken, all delivered conveniently to our door from the Chinese round the corner and down the road.
All was good.
But at four AM the next morning, I woke up, feeling thirsty.
Not thirsty in the ‘just woken up and feeling a bit groggy’ sense, but thirsty like I was stranded in the middle of the Sahara and hadn’t touched a drop of water for a week.
After three glasses of water, I still felt thirsty.
I’d had a normal day…a few cups of coffee, a glass of orange juice, several cups of water at work and a glass of wine. I hadn’t been running or gone to the gym, and the temperature wasn’t too hot.
The only thing out of the ordinary was the Chinese takeaway.
Googling around in the morning, I realised that I had probably suffered from a bizarre condition widely known as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.
What is Chinese Restaurant Syndrome? Find out here…
