Pineapple curry, anyone?

Last night, Martin made pineapple curry.

Perhaps you think of fruit exclusively as dessert. (Personally, I think of fruit as irrelevant, because I’m a small carnivore with a short digestive tract and vegetable matter has never held much allure for my species.) In fact pineapple and other fruit curries regularly feature on the dining tables of Southern India and Sri Lanka (if they have dining tables there. They may just eat from bowls on the floor, like I do.) Of course, meals in South Asia often consist of many small helpings of different dishes, and I doubt whether anybody ever sits down to a massive plate of pineapple curry and chips.

M told me curried fruit reminded him of his earliest exposure to ‘Indian’ food when he was little. His mum would make something called ‘curry’ with left-over roast chicken and raisins in peppery gravy, serving it in the centre of a ring of boiled rice. His dad, who was terrified of the slightest piquancy and believed in fruit as defence, would go through an elaborate ritual of peeling and slicing bananas and apples at the table as he waited for his dinner. He’d be wiping beads of sweat from his brow before the dish even made it through the serving hatch, and as soon as the stuff was before him, he’d throw his sliced fruit over it, take a timid mouthful and make exaggerated exclamations of the "pheewwhatascorcha" variety.

How times have changed. Hardly anybody has a hatch these days.

Pineapple curry
1 medium pineapple
1 small onion, chopped
6 curry leaves
½ tsp each chilli powder, turmeric, mustard seeds, fennel seeds
About 20mls coconut milk
Oil, salt
Peel the pineapple and slice it into rings. Remove the core if it’s tough and woody. Cut the rings into chunks.
Fry the onion in hot oil until transparent, add the curry leaves and the mustard seeds until the latter start to pop, add the pineapple, chilli powder and turmeric and stir-fry for a few minutes. Now add the coconut milk and taste. Add required salt and simmer for about five minutes, depending on how hard the pineapple is. Add the fennel seeds and let the curry bubble away for another minute or two. It’s ready. You might want to strew a few sliced fresh chillies and some coriander leaves over the top.

Winter Warmers

It's not particularly cold this week, but it is dark and miserable. At this time of year the temperature in the house lurches between extremes, as Annie regularly turns up all the radiators only for Martin to turn them all down again. It can get quite disconcerting for an old cat. On the food front, I am still enjoying my new diabetic dinners, while M has gone all old-fashioned and wintery. High points over the past few days have included ribollita, the Tuscan soup made with cannellini beans and cavolo nero, and devilled kidneys on toast.

For a big pot of the former, soak about 200 grams of cannellini overnight. Sweat finely chopped onions, carrots, celery, leeks and garlic in olive oil, then add tomatoes (tinned are usually the best), the beans and a head of chopped cavolo nero. (M keeps a handful of the dark green leaves back and adds them two-thirds through the cooking time to provide extra texture, but that isn't traditional.) You can add herbs (oregano, thyme, rosemary) and a dried chilli or two if you fancy them, but don't put in any salt yet. Cover with water and cook for about 40 minutes in a pressure cooker, or 90 in a casserole dish. Check the beans - they should yield to the tooth but remain whole - and put some salt in. Cook a little longer if the soup needs it, and serve it with fresh bread. This is a dish that improves with keeping; "ribollita" means "re-boiled", so it's quite appropriate to bring it back to the table a few times, adding a bit of this and that (a potato, a glass of wine, fried bread) over subsequent days.

As for the kidneys, you devil them by mixing a little flour with some cayenne pepper and dried mustard powder in about equal proportions. Add salt and pepper. Slice lambs' kidneys in half, remove the hard white bits with scissors or a sharp knife and discard, then toss the cleaned kidneys in the flour, pepper and mustard mixture. Fry them in butter on a medium heat for a couple of minutes each side, until they're brown and crusty in places. Splash on some Worcestershire sauce and a bit of white wine, stock or water. Cover and simmer for a couple of minutes before serving on toast, with some mashed potato, or perhaps polenta.

Other than these winter warmers, there have been a few sausage dinners recently, a nice prawn curry, plenty of black pudding (one cooked with fried apples in a cream and mustard sauce that was sublime) and tonight was a Chinese hotpot of veal with peppers. As I write this, it's nearly time for Heston Blumenthal on the telly. He's making pizza tonight, and I expect M will be inspired to try all manner of molecular experimentation involving flour, yeast and, if Mr. Blumenthal's previous programmes are anything to go by, napalm. I fear the worst.

Acarajé.

Don't you love fritters made from pulses? Hot, crunchy little nibbles made from beans or peas which have been soaked, ground into a paste, formed into balls, patties or ovals, and deep fried? Things like falafel (chick peas), taamiya (from broad beans) and dahi vada (urid daal)? Couldn't you just eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day?

Well not me, because I'm a cat. However on Sunday Martin made a version that even I might enjoy, as it contains ground dried shrimp along with the pulses. It comes from Bahia in northern Brazil, it's very much a black (i.e. African-Brazilian) thing, it's based on black-eyed peas and it's called acarajé. Soak a pound of the peas overnight, and then soak 2 ounces of dried shrimp (available from Chinese supermarkets in the UK) for half an hour. Put the soaked peas and shrimp through a blender together with an onion and a little salt until you have a smooth paste. Form walnut sized balls (or flatten into patties) and deep fry. Fantastic with any spicy seafood stew, and especially anything flavoured with dênde (unrefined palm oil), such as the following môlho de acarajé.

For this, soak 2 ounces of dried shrimp for 30 minutes, then blitz in a blender with an onion, plenty of dried red chillies and a bit of salt. Heat 3 tbs of dênde in a small pan and add the paste, fry for a few minutes and serve with the hot acarajé. Spicy, fishy Bahian street food that will even get an old diabetic cat like me licking his little lips.

Britain's favourite.

My favourite dinner at the moment is diabetes-friendly tinned cat food, but for humans in Britain the number one dish is apparently chicken tikka masala. At the weekend Martin cooked a version of this that was quite extraordinary. It came from The Cinnamon Club Cookbook by Iqbal Wahab, founder of the Cinnamon Club restaurant in The Old Westminster Library - and one of the first Indian restaurateurs in London to get a Michelin star.

Now I'm only a cat, but even I know that chicken tikka masala is a made-up mongrel of a dish. In the book, Wahab tells an (apocryphal) story of its origins in the 1970s, when a British diner in an Indian restaurant ordered chicken tikka. The ignoramus was dismayed to be presented with a dry, grilled dish and demanded sauce, whereupon the chef opened a tin of tomato soup, warmed it through and poured it onto the chicken.

The Cinnamon Club version, Old Delhi Style Chicken Curry, is vastly superior. Marinate chicken (thigh meat, no skin or bone) with some garlic and ginger paste, a little salt, some chilli powder and lemon juice, for twenty minutes or so. Then add some yoghurt mixed with garam masala and leave for at least the same time again, while heating the oven to 220 centigrade. Roast the chicken until brown (or better, do this in a tandoor or over barbecue coals). Meanwhile put plenty of tomatoes (tinned are probably best, though Wahab doesn't say this) in a pan, and bring to the boil with some crushed ginger, garlic, whole cardamoms, cloves and a bay leaf. Simmer until the tomatoes are broken down, put through a blender (and a sieve if you want to be really smooth) and reheat, beating in a lot of butter until you get a glossy sauce. Put the cooked chicken and any juices in, simmer for five minutes, add more ginger, some cream, some crumbled dried methi leaves and garam masala and check the seasoning. You might (OK, you will) want to put some chillies in, too.

This is a spectacularly good dish. As you eat it, you're aware that it's a complete fabrication and has almost nothing to do with Indian food, but you don't care because it tastes like heaven. It's incredibly rich, though. I only had a pawful, and that was enough.

Sorry....

….but I haven’t been keeping you up to speed on the day-to-day dinners at our house, have I? Well, to be honest, they haven’t been particularly eventful. Personally, I’m doing fine on the feline-diabetes-friendly tinned food – in fact I’m loving it, and am feeling much better since I’ve been on it, thank you very much for asking.

As for human food, Martin has been revisiting a few old favourites this week. Sunday was faisanjan, an easy Persian dish that makes the most of pomegranates, which are still in season. To make it, you brown pieces of chicken (about a kilo of thighs with skin on and bone in, on this occasion), then fry some sliced onions with roughly ground walnuts (about 100grams). Remove the skin and pith from a pomegranate and put the seeds in the blender, whiz to a pulp and add to the browned onion and walnut mixture with the juice of a lemon and about 2 tsps of brown sugar (or honey). Replace the chicken and add stock, white wine or both to cover (the wine’s not traditional but helps the flavour), bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer until the chicken is ready. Sprinkle with some freshly chopped green herbs (coriander, flat-leaved parsley, dill, mint, whatever) and serve with your vegetables and carbohydrates of choice – M went for salad and mashed potato this time.

Monday night, they finished off the crab-cake mixture from Saturday (see Sunday 12th November for recipe), but without chips, it not being the weekend. Tuesday was a kind of bubble-and-squeak thing - as I wrote in my last post – Wednesday a bit of chicken curry was stretched out with some mushrooms (good combination) and then last night, M came home to find that neither the bratwurst nor the carne en salsa he’d taken out of the freezer had thawed, so he threw together some puttanesca sauce (see September 22nd for recipe) and boiled some pasta, as Annie was in a hurry to go to her Spanish class. Tonight it'll be one of the icy specimens that didn’t make it to the table yesterday, I would imagine.

Here’s a picture of spaghetti a la puttanesca – possibly one of the most impressive things you can make and serve from store-cupboard ingredients in less time than it takes to open a tin of cat food.

Before I sign off, I’d like to say “hi” to Zero, a cat from Cologne in Germany who left a comment on my blog back in September. Entshuldigung, Zero, dass ich vorher etwas nicht gesagt habe, aber heute war das ersten Mal dass ich deinen Komment gelesen habe. Vielen Dank, und es tut mir leid dass mein Deutsch so schreklich ist. (Aber vieleicht nicht so schlecht fur einen Katz, ja?)

Cannon and Bubble

Annie was working late last night, and with only himself to feed, Martin made do with left-overs. Clearly the better the left-overs, the better the resulting dish, and M’s mixture of mash with curly kale was excellent. Fluffy organic orla spuds had been pushed through a ricer and enriched with butter and Wensleydale cheese to accompany chicken at the weekend. The bright green, strongly-flavoured kale had been briefly blanched, then dressed with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice. Last night, M mixed the remainder of each dish together and fried the combination in a small non-stick pan, combining the smooth, creamy texture of colcannon with the crispy texture and pleasantly bitter flavour you get from the almost-burned bits of bubble & squeak. He ate it with a fried egg and a bit of salad, and then watched Heston Blumenthal cook steak on the telly.
When I say on the telly, I don't mean that Mr. Blumenthal literally placed the meat on top of a television set and allowed it to absorb heat from the appliance, but as he put it in an almost-cold oven for 24 hours, he might as well have done. He started by blow-torching the surfaces of a huge forerib of beef, then placed it in a 50 degree oven overnight (helpfully adding that "if your oven won't go down this low, you can always prop the door open".) This virtually imperceptible "cooking" apparently breaks down the molecular structure of the joint while retaining the maximum moisture content, the result being meat that is incredibly tender and juicy, but equally full of flavour, thanks to it being taken from happy longhorn cattle fed on corn in an idyllic Herefordshire glade, and hung for four weeks to develop the faintest odour of blue cheese. He then took the meat off the bone, sliced it into thick steaks, and seared it quickly in a very hot pan, let it rest for a bit and served it with butter that had been kept “very close to some Stilton, so as to absorb the aroma but not the taste” (I’m not making this up), some mushroom ketchup, the making of which involved the nocturnal extraction of pure juice from said funghi, and a salad of decidedly retro-chic iceberg lettuce. Martin and I watched with a mixture of envy and incredulity as Heston tucked into what looked suspiciously like lukewarm, possibly bacteria-ridden and yet somehow perfectly delicious beef. "What are the chances of that, then?" we said to each other, in our best Harry Hill voices.
Come to think of it, Heston Blumenthal does look rather like Harry. I wonder if by chance they may be related?

Maryland Crab Cakes

I like crabs, I do. I've always fancied going to the seaside and playing with the little crabs that get stranded in rock pools at low tide. Unfortunately, being largely confined to the house for my entire life, I've never had the opportunity.

The nearest I ever came to realising this particular ambition was when Martin bought a couple of lobsters home from the fishmongers and put them in the bath, hoping to keep them happy until dinner-time that evening. Of course as soon as they hit cold, fresh water, they were revived from their torpid state and started banging around the avocado suite like there was no tomorrow. Which for them, there wasn't. Realising he was going to have to dispatch them fairly sharpish, M put a big pan of water on the stove. Meanwhile, my sister and I kept an eye on the vicious brutes, which continued to flip, flap and ping about the bathroom. Fortunately they had little elastic bands holding their claws shut, or I might have lost a whisker, or worse!

Anyway, back to crabs, which are like lobsters but even tastier, I think. Last night M made Marlyand Crab Cakes from a recipe given to him by his friends Vinny and Robin, who live in Maryland (Annapolis, to be precise), so should know what they're talking about. Vinny is one of M's best friends and so according to the anthropomorphic conventions they often use when they're talking to me, he's "my uncle". The recipe has been provided to Doug Hill at Lupe Pinto's deli (for all things Mexican, American and Mexican-American) who is meant to be publishing it, but there's no sign of the book yet, so make the most of this.

1 lb Jumbo Lump crabmeat (that's American specifications for you. We can't be so choosy over here, so fresh is best and try not to break up the chunks too much).
Saltine Crackers (8-10 crumbled) or 3 sliced white bread torn into fresh breadcrumbs
1 egg beaten
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 tbsp Old Bay Seasoning (see below)
1 tbsp baking powder
1tsp mustard
1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leafed parsley
"In a large bowl combine the egg, mayonnaise, Old Bay Seasoning, baking powder, mustard, and parsley. Mix in the crumbled saltines or fresh breadcrumbs. Carefully add the crabmeat trying not to break up the lumps while mixing it with the wet ingredients. Shape crabmeat mixture into six cakes. These can be cooked one of three ways: Sauté in olive oil until browned on both sides, broil (that's US for grill) until browned, or deep fry until browned. We find sautéing to be the best but that depends on personal tastes. Serve with tartar sauce or cocktail sauce. These are also excellent as sandwiches."

Old Bay Seasoning (if you can't find it ready-made)

1 Tbsp Celery Seed

1 Tbsp Whole Black Peppercorns

6 Bay Leaves

1/2 Tsp Whole Cardamom

1/2 Tsp Mustard Seed

4 Whole Cloves

1 Tsp Sweet Hungarian Paprika

1/4 Tsp Mace

In a spice grinder or small food processor, combine all of the ingredients. Grind well and store in a small glass jar.

Invalid food turns out to be rather good....

Excellent news! My new diabetic dinner is fantastic! I just can’t get enough of the stuff, which is just as well because if I didn't like it, I'd die.

I confess that when they told me I was going on a medically approved diet, I imagined some bland, tasteless pap; you know, like the never-quite-specified gruel-type things they feed to invalids in Victorian novels. So imagine my delight when I saw the rich, dense, moist meat in my bowl! I wondered if they'd made a mistake and given me rilletes de porc instead.

To be more accurate, the meat is more like the wild boar pate Martin bought the last time the French market was in Glasgow. However, my diet can keep me alive indefinitely - or at least until the next bit of my ancient anatomy gives up the ghost - and I don't think you could say the same for wild boar. And my food is only about a pound for a tin, rather than £4 for a chi-chi little jar. Be honest, which would you choose?

You're stuck with me a bit longer...

...as it appears I'm not quite ready for the big litter-tray in the sky! The vet 'phoned today and the blood tests show that I don't have kidney failure! The bad news is that I do have diabetes, just like Martin's mum. (She's eighty and I'm only seventeen-and-three-quarters, but I am in fact older than her in cat years; about a hundred and something, I think. Not that I know what a year is, really, what with not having a firm grasp on the concept of time.)

Anyway, I'm delighted I've got a few more months of head-butts, purring, spider-chasing and inexplicable, doomed attempts to shag my sister ahead of me. Not to mention the wonderful prospect of all those hours and hours of sleep. Unfortunately my diet will be curtailed a little - they're going to try me on some special diabetic catfood. It looks like I've had my last Mars bar.

Intimations of mortality.

Oh dear, I’ve not been well. Not well at all. By Tuesday, I hadn’t eaten anything for two days and I was behaving very oddly. I kept thinking I wanted a drink, going over to the water bowl, and somehow forgetting I was thirsty. Then I’d just stare at my reflection like Narcissus, feeling confused. I’d stopped talking as well, hardly emitting so much as a mew all day, and I was a bit wobbly on my feet. Martin took me to the vet, who wasn’t optimistic. I got the usual thermometer up my bottom and blood tests, and then some great drugs that fair perked me up. By the time I got home I almost felt like my old self, and tucked into a small bowl of sardines in tomato sauce with some gusto. However, I understand this improvement may be a temporary reprieve - they’re waiting for the test results, you see. I’m afraid I may not be able to entertain you on this blog for much longer….

But let’s not be morbid. Martin’s cooking vindaloo tonight! I saw the pork going into its spicy, vinegary marinade yesterday evening, so it will be maturing nicely in the fridge ready for him to slap it in the pan when he gets home.