Husband has again left me on my own to visit his family. I took him to Heathrow earlier today and despite all my efforts to stay strong, I did burst into tears just a little bit as I watched him walk through to the security. And then I fairly hysterically bawled my eyes out in the ladies toilets where I always go to hysterically bawl my eyes out when he goes. This is the price we pay for the multicultural extra spice in our marriage. We visit our families together a lot also, but it just doesn't work every time. I know in the end the month will fly by, but now it seems like an eternity.

The other piece of upsetting news this week was that I'm not as fit as in my deluded mind I thought I was. We had these free health checks available at work evilly arranged by HR as a revenge to anyone who had dared to enjoy Christmas. I did mention to my HR business partner that I thought this was a particularly cruel thing to do to people right after Christmas. But since it wasn't mandatory, I can only blame myself.

So just to warn you good people, who actually are interested in the chicken recipe, this whole post is a completely self-absorbed piece of navel gazing. Literally. So feel free to just scroll directly to the recipe or bounce away to cheerier web content if hormone fluctuation induced belly fat production is not your thing.

I actually wasn't planning to do the stupid health check. On the day, we were in an all day meeting and just having our lunch. I was happily and succesfully ploughing my way through the delightful cheese and crackers platter. I think it's an awesome idea to have cheese and crackers in meetings. I also had a couple of breaded deep fried prawns and a mini pizza or two just to make sure that I kept my diet varied. Then my boss decided to "encourage" us all to go and get ourselves checked. He'd had his health check done in the morning and was bragging about his metabolic age (one of the results you got from the check) which was almost 10 years lower than his real age. He doesn't have a particularly streamlined contour, every time I see him eating lunch there is a pack of crisps and with the amount of cakes and biscuits he gets through in most of our meetings I don't see how he is not metabolically 85. Whereas I have had one biscuit in the entire time I have worked for this company. Nine months and one slim little chocolate finger. But there you go, life's not fair. So off I shuffled with a couple of equally or even more reluctant colleagues to get our healths checked.

The results were not great. The only positive result was my height which had stayed the same. My metabolic age was the same as my biological age, which was disappointing, I would have loved it to be 28 for instance. My blood pressure was within the limits, but a bit higher than I thought it was, because I have always had low blood pressure. But I blame that on the boss, who had engaged us all in "healthy" debates all morning which he does all the time and then forced me to undergo these experiments against my wishes. Which were to stay with the cheese platter.


Most upsettingly I was heavier than I thought I was. And no, it wasn't muscle because my fat percentage was up there with the Arizona Quadruple Bypass Burger.  I must say I have been eyeing my midriff for the past 8-10 months wondering what exactly is going on there. I have never had a washboard stomach exactly, but not a proper muffin top either. I have been running like a maniac, or at least 3 decent runs a week for pretty much all of 2019, plus doing some gym work and the occasional slightly stiff and awkward yoga move. So I am pretty pissed off at this unwelcome buoyancy belt that has all of a sudden decided to materialise around my midsection.

I told husband about these unexpected results, obviously not scaring him with any actual numbers, but just generally sharing the unwelcome news that his wife actually was fatter than anyone would have thought.

Although maybe they do think. The last time I met with my ex-colleagues they were all wondering how my husband manages to stay so slim with my cooking (they see a lot of my culinary goings on on my FB page) but no one was particularity dumbfounded by my physique.

So anyway, loving and loyal as ever husband told me I have an amazing body and that he loves it. God bless him forever for that, because it was genuine and I know he absolutely means it.

So as always in a crisis situation I did a lot of research and found out that in peri-menopause because of the hormonal changes the female body inexplicably and not at all helpfully all of a sudden decides it's a good idea to form a bit of a Fleischkuechle underneath ze bellybutton. Why doesn't anyone warn us about this, we just smugly go about with our reasonably collaborative tummies, stupidly worrying about our bums, until one day, whoosh, hello, the menopause belly or the menopot as it's affectionately known arrives.


Now that I know what is going on I have told my uninvited little paunch and the accompanying free-of-charge side handles to start packing.  I have read a lot about diet, not dieting, but things that I can tweak in my daily food habits to particularly target the pot. And also what I can change in my exercise regime since my running doesn't seem to work anymore as well as it used to. I started yesterday with a gruelling but shortish high intensity interval exercise session, did another slightly longer one today and I mean to go on this way. Even though my thighs and buttocks are burning and I can barely sit down or get up and the fleischkuechle is snug and comfortable as ever.

Food-wise there will be no massive changes, I will continue to eat lots of high fibre veg, but I will make sure to eat more protein and maybe not just cheese, but fatty fish, eggs, lean meat and tofu. And then let's see who is the winner, me or the menopot.

Our Friday dinner was a good example of a healthy menopot busting meal, but the main reason I did it was because husband loves chicken and this was our last meal together until he returns. This is an easy Greek inspired chicken and veg tray bake. Feel free to add other veg or cut down the amount of potatoes or leave them out completely if you want to further limit your carbs.


Greek chicken and vegetable tray bake

8 pieces of chicken, thighs and drumsticks with bones and skin on
2 cloves of garlic
2 small red onions
Small bag of baby or new potatoes
Juice and zest of a lemon
4 tsp of dried greek herb mix (or 2 tsp dried thyme and 2 tsp of dried oregano)
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Asparagus spears
Small vine tomatoes
Olives
70 g feta (optional)
Fresh herbs and lemon slices to for garnish

Place the chicken pieces or a large oven tray. Grate the garlic and quarter the onions and add to the tray. Add the potatoes, juice and zest of a lemon, herbs, salt, pepper and a good splash of olive oil. Mix everything, rubbing the herbs and seasoning well into the chicken pieces. Make sure everything in spread evenly on the tray and bake in 200C oven for 30 minutes

Add the asparagus, tomatoes, olives and cubed feta and bake another 10-15 minutes until the asparagus is done but still a bit al dente and the chicken is done. Check by cutting into a piece of chicken at the thickest part. If the juices run clear the meat is done. If you want you can sprinkle some fresh herbs on top and add a few lemon slices or wedges onto the tray.

Husband is going away for a month to visit his family. A month is a long time but he does have a lot of family. I can't go with him this time because of work, but I will go and see my family while he is away. I will go for 4 days which is proportionate to the size of my family.

I have been missing him this week already although he hasn't even left yet. I was even sniffing his T-shirt one morning after he'd gone to work. He really pissed me off yesterday though, so there has been no sniffing of any kind today. Actually we have made our peace. The argument was not that serious after all. It was about my car's heating / air con. I know it's not working properly and I happened to mention this to His Highness, the Automobile Overlord. I know the system is not working because I drive the stupid car everyday whereas his hypothesis based on fuck all is that I don't know how to use it.


It is quite complicated after all for a little lady like me. There is this on/off button which you have to press and then you have to choose your temperature. Like OMG all these numbers, what do they all mean! Anyway, we are on friendly terms again, so I made him this lovely seafood lasagne which is also easy for him to heat up for lunch next week when I'm in the  office.

Super simple seafood lasagne with shrimp, salmon and sea bass 

Serves 6

1 yellow onion
1-2 cloves of garlic
2 stalks of celery
1/2 fennel bulb
1 courgette
Small bunch of fresh dill (or other herbs)
Salt
Lemon pepper
1 chicken or fish stock cube

Approximately 800g seafood, I had:
- 2 salmon fillets
- 4 sea bass fillets
- 1 pack of raw king prawns
Zest and juice of a lemon

1 litre milk
60g plain flour
1 cup grated parmesan
1 cup grated cheddar / mozzarella or a mixture
250g wholewheat (or white / green) lasagne sheets
Chop the onion, celery and fennel. Grate the garlic and chop the herbs.

Heat a splash of vegetable oil in a large non-stick sauce pan. Add the onion, celery and fennel onto the pan, season with salt and lemon pepper and sauté on medium heat until the vegetables start to soften. Add the garlic and  herbs and continue to cook for another minute.

Prepare the seafood. Devein the prawns and remove skin and any bones from the fish and cut into cubes. Add zest and juice of a lemon, sprinkle with salt and lemon pepper and mix.

Cut the courgette into 1 cm chunks.

Add the flour into the vegetable mix, keep stirring for a minute or so. Pour in the milk and add the stock cube. Keep stirring and bring to simmer. Add about half of the cheese. Check the seasoning and adjust if needed. Add more milk or a splash of water if the mixture seems too thick. Add the courgette and the seafood. Take off heat and start assembling the dish.

On the bottom of a rectangular baking dish add a layer of the fish sauce. Add lasagne sheets on top and then add a generous layer of the seafood sauce. Add lasagne sheets, then a layer of seafood sauce and keep going until the sauce is finished. Finish with a small layer of seafood sauce on top. Sprinkle the rest of the grated cheese on top.

Cover the dish with foil and cook in a 180C oven for 25 minutes. Remove the foil cover and cook for another 10-15 minutes until the pasta is cooked and the cheese if golden and bubbling.

Seafood pasta is one of my absolute favourite foods and I can't believe I got through the entire Christmas period without cooking it once. I have many different recipes and versions. I love a simple garlicky pasta with just some prawns, or a light lemony smoked salmon one. Although to be honest I usually chuck in everything including 5 types of seafood and the kitchen sink. This also was a more robust and creamy one all based on the two crab shells full of brown and white crab meat I had in the fridge. I bought them because I didn't have any crab shells and clearly had to fix that gap in my serving dish portfolio. For instance on Christmas Eve I made crab thermidor but had to serve it from scallop shells because I didn't have any crab shells.

So to use the crab meat I did this scrumptious and creamy seafood pasta clearing out some seafood from my freezer as well since I am in a clearing mood.

January is supposed to be about resolutions, fresh starts and all that. I'm not much of a resolutionist, but I am keeping true to my "Eat-more-fish-eggs"-promise and prepared a little pot with roe, dill, sour cream and onion to take as lunch to the office one day this week. I made it with spring onion so as to not to stupefy colleagues with my fish&onion breath although should have tried if that would have stopped the boss chucking projects my way for 5 minutes.

And one evening this week we went out for dinner with some workmates and I had a lovely Spaghetti alla Bottarga con Vongole, spaghetti with dried mullet roe and clams in the lovely Sardinian restaurant Sabatini in Newcastle quayside. It was very nice.

But on top of the fish egg pledge I have one other thing that I will try this year.

Part of my packed lunch, roe with sour cream, onion and dill.

See, I want to buy some new spring clothes and I need to make space for them And also generally our house is not very Feng shui or KonMari, and I can only blame myself. 95% of the crap in the house is mine. Husband is actually a very tidy little soul.

I may not be a totally deranged hoarder, but I am not good at chucking away things. I am reasonably good at buying though, so you can see how a problem can develop here. Particularly clothes seem to accumulate. I still have a few coats I immigrated to this country with 18 years ago, one of them has a cigarette burn hole in the sleeve. One I just tried on to see if it could be binned, there were tube tickets from 2012 in the pocket (which I binned!), but the coat still looked pretty good to me, so back to the wardrobe it went.

I always think things might come back into fashion and that one day I will be desperate for a green corduroy jacket with frills around the shoulders, or a purple one (good to have a choice of colours), or 10 pairs of trousers with outrageously flared legs and of course several pyjama pants at various stages of shapelessness. I also believe it is entirely possible that my size will change at some point dramatically and that the white trousers that always made me look fat one glorious day won't or that the shoes that have been too uncomfortable to wear will one morning just miraculously fit. Particularly considering the current bunion development this is extremely unlikely.

What doesn't help is that binning things for me is a multi-stepped process. I think this should be Lean Six Sigmaed. My new boss is obsessed with Lean Six Sigma, I pretty much fall asleep at the Lea. After initially being identified for bin which is not easy, like this pair of boots I have been eyeing for a while because they are probably about 10 years old and the soles are coming off, there is a couple of weeks' cooling off period before the item is either pardoned or moved into an actual bin bag, or most likely just forgotten about. After being sentenced to the bin bag, before actual final binning the bin bag will sit in the corner of the guest bedroom for an additional couple of weeks. Sometimes items can still receive pardon even at this stage. It is rare but not unheard of. We must remain merciful after all.

This reminds me of a funny story. My then sister-in-law (she went on to cruelly divorce my amazing little brother, not because of this incident, but in retrospect she completely deserved this) was doing a seasonal swap of things in the wardrobe and had packed all her winter boots and quite a selection of handbags in a large bin bag to be taken to the basement for summer storage. She left the house (probably to buy some more shit - the materialist & shopaholic) and in the meanwhile my brother decided to make himself useful and take out the rubbish. Including the bin bag full of shoes and bags. Obviously it was the day for the bins to be collected, so before my ex-sister-in-law got back home her stuff was on its way to the landfill. Divining power of Karma.

For my current dilemma a friend pragmatically suggested maybe it's easier to find something from my husband's wardrobe that I could get rid off to make space, but I feel as I already utilise most of our wardrobe space, it is only fair I look at my own clothes for clearing out opportunity. And he is pretty good at this, I sometimes save things he's chucked and sneak them back to his wardrobe because I think they are still perfectly fine or if they are beyond that I repurpose them as attractive nightgowns or gymware for myself. Like this morning, when he wanted to throw away a T-shirt that apparently is itchy. I am not as delicate, so into my sportsware shelf it went. So that doesn't help me with my wardrobe space.
But I draw inspiration from one of my friends. I bet we all have one in our circle. This person's house is always clean and tidy, there are no piles of clothes on the floor next to the bed, no 10 pairs of shoes blocking the way to the door. They know where all their hair bands are and don't have to run around the house like a mad person on a bad hair day. Their bookshelf actually has only books and not random piles of crap piled on top of the books. Their kitchen surfaces are clear apart from one  rustic ceramic bowl full of heirloom tomatoes. They regularly go through their neat stacks of magazines taking the ones they don't think they will read again to their mother or recycling. Or they might give some to a friend who will keep them for the next 7 years.

They do a regular seasonal culling of their wardrobe ruthlessly chucking away anything they haven't worn in 6 months. I have stuff I haven't worn in 15 years, but still remain quite fond of, like this pretty Monsoon top that I had to stop wearing because Tomasina Miers was wearing it in her cooking program for about a year non-stop. They always have tasteful flower arrangements instead of bunches of supermarket carnations that died two weeks ago and smell like the morgue. I can kind of live with all of the above, but what is hard to take in comparison to one's own chaotic ways is that these people organise their knitting yarns in large retro glass jars by colour.

But as the excellent 80's heavy metal band Samson says, Don't get mad, get even: every New Year these inspiring people make us think we can be like them. Like this Christmas break I was full of steam, but also quite self-aware and determined not to trip because of unfeasibly ambitious plans. So I was aiming to get rid of a few pairs of old shoes (I still have my 3 previous pairs of running shoes, because what if my current pair and the two previous pairs self-destruct, what will I run with then, and also one pair has the paw mark of our beloved family labrador, who passed away 3 years ago, so how could I ever throw that away, it was a muddy run and at some point she stepped on my shoe) and clothes, and maybe organise a couple of cupboards in the kitchen. Like do one thing every day, one shelf or one drawer. In the entire 14 days of leave I managed to clean one cutlery drawer throwing away a couple of wooden spoons that had seen better days. One drawer. Not exactly a KonMari-achievement to write a blog post about.


But because I am a determined and resilient individual I have ploughed on and this week binned a pair of boots (the ones with the soles coming off) and quite a few pieces of clothing. I have two bin bags, one for the actual bin and one for a charity shop, they are both half full already.  I am getting rid of my fat jeans, because I don't want to put on weight and have to wear them, and it's a good incentive to not have any clothes and potentially have to walk around naked with your extra kilos. Also anything I haven't been able to fit into in the past 5 years will go. And anything made of polyester. I hate polyester almost as much as I hate raisins. I think it should be made illegal, evil fabric. It makes me smell like a Finnish deep fried meat pie.

And I cleared my knicker drawer just now. I refuse to wear anything uncomfortable, sorry husband, so all of the tinier models had to go.

I am also throwing away things I come across in other parts of the house. Today I binned (immediate binning!) two old empty spice jars with broken lids, some work papers from my previous job and an Italian magazine, because I don't speak Italian. Excellent work!

I will continue my clear-up on a daily basis, just a couple of things every day. I realise baby steps will always work better for me than blindly following some scary Japanese chick and her obsessive minimalist ways.

To clumsily link this pasta recipe to the theme, it's quite good because you can use any seafood that you might have in your freezer and also any pasta shape will work if you need to clear something off your pasta shelf. But mainly I'm sharing it because it's easy, quick and absolutely delicious. While still eating my pasta (third helping), I was already thinking about how after tipping the leftovers into a container for husband to heat up the next day I would leave a bit in the pot, add a couple of dashes of tabasco and scrape the rest into my mouth. I think I may need to pardon the fat jeans after all.

Creamy crab meat pasta with prawns, scallops, fennel and dill

200-250g brown and white crab meat
About 400g other seafood, I had 150g scallops, 150g prawns and 100g smoked salmon.
Vegetable oil
1 leek
1/2 bulb of fennel
2 cloves of garlic
1/3 cup of chopped dill
1 lemon, zest and juice
1/3 cup of white wine or prosecco
Lemon pepper
Salt
1 cup of water
1/3 cup of single cream
1 heaped tbsp plain flour
2 tbsp creme fraice or sour cream (or you can just add a bit more single cream)
1/2 cup of grated parmesan or pecorino

350g dried brown spaghetti (or pasta of your choice, about 400-450g if using fresh pasta)
Water

Fresh dill and pecorino or parmesan to garnish

Cut of the dark green end of the leak and the bottom. Cut into half lengthwise and wash thoroughly. Slice thinly. Chop the fennel.

Add oil into a large non-stick sauce pan. Add the leek, fennel and a sprinkle of salt and sauté for a few minutes. Mince ro grate the garlic and add to the pan. Chop the dill and add to the pan with the zest and juice of one lemon, some lemon pepper and white wine or prosecco.

In the meanwhile bring your pasta water to boil. Add a good sprinkle of salt and the pasta and cook until al dente. Drain and keep warm.

Keep cooking your pasta sauce until the wine has reduced to half. Add a cup of pasta cooking water. Mix the flour with the cream and add to to sauce. Add the creme fraiche or sour cream if using.

Check the taste and add salt and lemon pepper if needed. Add the seafood and let cook on low heat until seafood is cooked through, this will only take a couple of minutes.

Grate some pecorino or parmesan and mix into the pasta.

Add the sauce into the drained pasta and mix. Make sure it is piping hot. Eat it all immediately!

Or maybe I should say Fenno-Emirati style, not because I added dill, but for some of the other little tweaks I did, like substituting white rice with brown to keep it healthy.

I actually desperately wanted to add dill. I already had a bunch in my hand, but showing great strength of character I put it away. My favourite middle-eastern rice is Persian shivid polo, rice with saffron, dill and garlic and it goes really well with lamb, so I bet it would work perfectly in this biriani. I will try it sometime, but I wanted to keep this as authentic as possible so as not to always bastardise husband's favourite foods, but to delight him particularly since I recently tortured him with some oven baked mackerel fillets. He didn't seem to mind them too much, but I thought they were just vile. Not sure exactly what went wrong there, but wrong it went.

It's been a while since my last food mishap. And not even the best of us win every time. My sister who is a very competent cook, but maybe too experimental for her own good proudly WhatsApped me pictures on her Georgian Khatchapuri pies going in the oven looking amazing. And then a few hours later a summary: "A shit pie."

And I am not exactly sure about her sourdough rye breads that she made a few weeks ago. They looked very impressive, but when I asked if they were nice, her answer was: "Sour and tough like Finland". I suppose this meant that they were as they should be, but hard to say. My sister is a woman of few words. And many of them unpublishable.




India may have made this the world famous dish it is today, the hyderabadi biriani maybe the most famous of them all, but the dish most likely originally came from Iran. It is very popular throughout the region and it's the national dish of husband's homeland United Arab Emirates, at least according to some sources, I'm not sure if there is an absolute official list somewhere. But anyway Emirates was where I learned to love this dish sitting very uncomfortably on the floor surrounded by his brother's family.

It is a true celebration dish, often served in weddings on huge platters and there is often a chicken and a lamb version available. But you may want to be quick, in the last wedding we attended in Dubai he was taking pictures of the food and the guests and when he finally picked up his spoon the lamb was gone and only rice was left. Luckily the rice is very tasty too. And he can take his time with anything, so I can't blame his tablemates. (I was in another table with his nieces, otherwise would have of course saved some lamb for him.)

Biriani in an Emirati wedding. Next to it Harees, which is also sometimes called the national dish of UAE, a type of dip mad of cracked, ground wheat and meat, a mild but delicious starter dish.

This was the second night of the celebration, this time a more modern setting, again we had some harees and biriani, but also grilled meats.

Biriani is also often eaten at home with family. We have been served it many times by husband's family and it is always just amazing. You could just eat it forever.

The Emirati biriani tends to have a bit of a kick. It's not super spicy, but there is definitely some chilli in it. I make mine reasonably mild, since husband is not into very hot foods and then just add tabasco on mine at the table. Tabasco is not the national dish of UAE.

Table is set.

Next time we are over in UAE or Iran I must ask one of husband's family to cook biriani with me, so that I see how it's really done. But I have made it many times and studied lots of different recipes. I try to make it like we have eaten it in Dubai and Iran. I don't use sultanas or any of that shit. I hate raisins and sultanas, what a waste of perfectly good grapes.

Fattoush

Laban - yoghurt, mint and lemon

Lamb biriani

For the meat and marinade:
About 800g-1kg boneless lamb chunks
1-3 garlic cloves, finely minced
Thumb sized piece of ginger, grated
1 tbsp tomato paste
5 heaped tbsp plain yogurt

And so this was Christmas, another year gone. Tomorrow is first day back at work, yikes.  We took all the Christmas decorations down today, very disciplined we are. Well, technically we are not, husband is. But I did all the work inside the house, took down the different lights around the house and packed away the other decorations, stripped the Christmas tree and folded it back into it's box. We have an artificial one you see, because as much as I love a real tree and the smell of it, it makes me too sad to kill a real tree and then just discard it after Christmas. So artificial it is and it is quite pretty and has served us 7 or 8 Christmases I think. Every year it seems to be harder to get it back into it's original box. I don't think it wants to go.

And husband took down all the decorations outside. It's important we have very clearly agreed areas of responsibility, because he is very stubborn when it comes to the methodology and order he wants to proceed and he doesn't take my (excellent) advice at all. So during our years together we have learned to do our separate bits and just occasionally help the other who has got completely tangled in wires. Otherwise we keep to our individual areas. Apparently lots of passers by stopped and told husband how much they had enjoyed our lights while he was working there in our front garden in his cute bright red reindeer Christmas jumper. The man is always dressed up for the occasion.


I am determined not to feel sad about this or dwell in thoughts about how much I was looking forward to the break, all the plans I had and how happy I was at the prospect of two weeks of freedom and cooking. No, none of that. I will look forward to the longer days, summer and BBQ season.

Luckily we've been relatively sensible this holiday season and I've managed to squeeze some running and gym in, so I am not the size of a house. That's a comfort.

Nevertheless I still wanted to do a light dinner today. We ate a lot yesterday. We met up with my old work colleagues, we were 10 adults and 3 kids and we had a very noisy and fun day. We met in Henley-on-Thames where one of the group lives to have dinner at his house, but first met for lunch in a local pub, The Little Angel. service was a bit haphazard and slow, but food was very good. It was soup of the day for starters for both of us, husband had chicken for his main course and I had a prawn and chorizo linguine, which was very nice.

We then had a walk around the pretty town centre and by the river where there was a little play area for kids and a coffee shop with tea for husband. And we then slowly made our way to my friend's house where we were given drinks while he and his wife started preparing the most amazing Asian food. Their family roots are in Hong Kong, so they cooked a few things from different Asian countries. There were Korean vegetarian dumplings with a dipping sauce, Chinese lettuce wraps with two different fillings - a vegetarian tofu and a turkey mince one, Vietnamese fried spring rolls, Chinese aromatic duck pancakes, Japanese Gyozas and a very clever noodle salad made with sweet potato noodles, which thank God they hadn't done themselves from scratch. There was enough cooking genius there to make anyone feel inadequate already. Although I had no time for such thoughts because I was busy stuffing my face.


The dessert was perfect too, after all the spices and tastes, some fresh melon and mango and a delicate and not too sweet mango swiss roll. Our hostess is actually a trained pastry chef, so it was faultless.


Husband loved it all too and was going on about the spring rolls all the way from Henley back to London. So I asked my friend for the recipe and he send me this one. They had substituted pork with turkey mince, because several of the party don't eat pork and also used spring roll pastry rather than rice paper wrappers, which gives me confidence. I once tried vegetarian spring rolls, but they came out all wrong, they sort of exploded a bit, so they looked awful, but they also tasted horrible and the texture was all wrong. So not a roaring success really. I'm sure was the rice paper.

My today's salad is not pretending to be a completely classic Nicoise salad, but utilises most of the same ingredients. I had some string beans but they were looking a bit sad and past their best before date, so I left them out. And I used quail eggs rather than normal eggs, because I happened to have some. Not that I am the kind of person who just happens to have quail eggs lying around any time, but I bought some for Christmas and hadn't used them.

I served the tuna from the pan rather that on top of the salad to keep it warm, but particularly if you leave it quite raw, it's nice to slice into strips and serve on the salad platter.

Pan seared fresh tuna steaks on Nicoise salad bed

Tuna:
2-3 tbsp olive oil
4 sustainable tuna steaks
Zest and juice of half a lime
Juice of half an orange
Splash of soy sauce
1 tsp dried oregano
Salt
Pepper
Vegetable oil and a knob of butter to fry
Lemon wedges to serve

Baby lettuce, romaine or iceberg lettuce
Rocket
Handful of small heirloom tomatoes or 2-3 large ones
2-3 spring onions
1 cucumber
Black olives
1 tbsp Cappers
5-6 anchovies
12 quail eggs or 4 chicken eggs
16 small salad potatoes (or new potatoes)
Fresh herb of choice, basil would work nicely, I used dill.

Dressing:
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
Salt and pepper


Place the tuna steaks on a plate or bowl and add all the marinade ingredients. Make sure all steaks are evenly covered with the marinade. Leave to sit covered in the fridge for at least  a couple of hours.

To prepare the salad slice or chop your tomatoes and cucumber, you can core the cucumber if you like. Thinly slice the onion, pit the olives and chop the herbs.

Boil your potaoes in salted water until you can easily pierce them with a fork. Drain, drizzle with some olive oil and sprinkle on a pinch of the chopped herbs. Cover with kitchen towel to soak up the steam and keep warm until serving. You can add the to the salad whole or slice, half or quarter. I left mine whole because I wanted them to keep warm.

Hardboil the eggs. Bring water to boil and place eggs in water carefully with a spoon. Quail eggs take two and a half minutes and chicken eggs 10 minutes. Drain and leave for a minute then cover with cold water for a short while. Peal and half if using quail eggs, quarter if using chicken eggs.

Heat the oil and butter on a pan and sear the tuna steaks on high heat to your desired doneness. Tuna is supposed to be server raw inside, so it only needs a quick sear on both sides.

Assemble the salad on a large platter the way you like, either in layers or sections. Mix the dressing ingredients and drizzle over the salad. Cut the tuna into strips and serve on top of the salad, or serve as whole steaks from the pan.

I say easy and healthy way, of course Iranian food is not particularly unhealthy to begin with, it's only the amount of white rice that disagrees with my glucose maintenance ideology, so the main health swap here is substituting white rice with brown. Iranian food is also not particularly fiddly or complicated, but I have seen some recipes with more steps than mine, so just as a disclaimer here, this might not be how your beloved Iranian grandmother used to make it, but I think it tastes pretty authentic having had some cooked by natives.

My favourite Persian rice is shivid polo, the one with dill. Obviously. Put dill in anything and I will love it. So I often serve this chicken with the dill rice instead of the traditional pairing of barberry rice, which would make this dish Shivid polo ba morgh.

I like posting my Persian exploits on my personal Facebook page. There is always this one Iranian "friend" who has an interesting comment to make. Like the first time I made Ghormeh Sabzi, the amazing herb stew, I was so proud and husband who knows his Persian food announced it tasted authentic and amazing, this friend's comment was " Don't even try it". What! Why? Because I'm Finnish I can't stew a few herbs with chunks of lamb but am eternally doomed to boiling potatoes and making coffee out of tree bark? I bet he doesn't know how to make coffee out of tree bark. Hah.

The rich tomato sauce to be ladled over your chicken and rice

I also make awesome abgoosht, again husband who might not be my severest critic supports me on this one. So on one of my abgoosht images this friend commented "That is not Abgoosht" because we dared to eat it with rice instead of flatbread. Well my friend, you will find abgoosht actually translates as meat soup (or water & meat) in English, so even if I eat it with Karelian pies or haggis the stew itself is still bloody abgoosht.

I am always really excited if someone is interested in Finnish or Scandinavian cooking and tries a recipe, even if they make some adjustments or don't get it completely right. I think it's an honour that someone from a different food culture would like to try something of ours.

But luckily I don't care, although on the surface it might seem that I do since I'm whining about it here publicly. Either way I am determined to continue to delight husband with Middle-Eastern treats that remind him of his childhood and included some on our Christmas menu as well.

Just to clarify, Christmas for me lasts for two weeks, it started on Friday 20th December which was my last day at work and will continue until 5th Jan. That's why there has been a lot on the menu. I object to this British 1 day Christmas. It is cruel and doesn't make any sense.

So naturally I included things that I know that we both love, but also husband's favourites like lamb shanks. I also asked him if there was anything in particular that he would like me to cook for us during these two weeks. His answer was Chicken. That classic festive favourite. Oh well, the man loves his chicken. Simple homecooking, was another wish, which means no crazy experiments. Which to be fair to me I haven't done recently. Most of the food that I cook I know how to cook and it comes out pretty ok. Gone are the early days of tough or inedibly salty steaks and incinerated bilberry pies.

So the Zereshk polo ba morgh was my gesture of I'm hearing you dude and not just feeding you weird pickled Nordic things with scary looking wild mushrooms and juniper berries. I also made another batch of the lovely saffrony legs with dill rice and a Khoresht-e bademjan - a Persian chicken and eggplant stew. But still last night when I heated him a left over chicken leg with some shivid polo, after a very long and satisfied sigh after clearing the plate he said "you can cook this, but still you do all that other stuff".

I was of course very happy that he would love something I cooked so much, but also questioned if he could eat the same thing every night. He said not every night, but more frequently would be entirely possible. I feel we are not completely chronologically synchronised. I have proof (in my excel menu worksheet) that he has been given Persian chicken 3 times plus some leftovers in the last couple of weeks.

He does like my other food too, he complains about the amount of fish I try to get in him, because it's healthy, but every time I cook fish he really likes it He just has a very special relationship with chicken which as a loving wife I fully support and respect.

A clever reader may notice that these are not barberries at all, they are cranberries, My barberries had expired in a very dramatic way growing some weird black stuff around them. I thought it is Christmas after all so dried cranberries are an appropriate substitute.

Persian saffron chicken with rice

Saffron water:
A good pinch of saffron fronds
4 tbsp boiling water

Chicken:
Vegetable oil
800g -1 kg bone-in chicken legs
Salt
Black pepper
1 tbsp saffron water

Sauce:
Vegetable oil
1 brown onion - chopped
1 bell pepper - chopped
2 carrots - chopped
1 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp of saffron water
Salt
Black pepper
3 tbsp of tomato paste
1 1/2 cup of low salt chicken broth

Barberries:
2 tbsp barberries
1 tbsp water
pinch of sugar
1 tbsp of saffron water

Rice:
2 cups of white or brown rice
Plenty of water, amount depends on whether you use a rice cooker or not
Salt
1 tbsp saffron water

Grind the saffron fronds in pestle and mortar and add 4 tbsp of hot water from the kettle on top. Leave to one side.

Season the chicken with salt and pepper. Rub the seasoning all over the chicken pieces including rubbing it between the skin and the meat.

Chop the onion, carrot and bell pepper.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the chicken on the pan skin side down. Cook on medium heat turning around a few times until it is nicely browned on both sides. Once you are happy with the colour of the chicken flip all the pieces skins side down on the pan and add one tbsp of the saffron water. Tilt the pan and make sure all of the chicken pieces get a nice colour from the saffron, turn the pieces around to get the saffron colour on that side as well.


Remove the chicken onto a plate. Add some oil in the pan if necessary and add the onion, bell pepper and carrot on the pan. Fry on medium heat for 2-3 minutes. Add turmeric to the pan and mix well.  Add a tbsp of the saffron liquid. Add the tomato paste and continue to cook for another minute or two. Add the chicken stock, bring to boil and season to taste.

Pour the vegetable and tomato sauce mix in an oven proof dish. Place the chicken on top. Cover the dish and place in a 200C oven for 35-45 minutes depending on the size of you chicken legs. You can also cook this on the stove, I just find it easier in the oven. You can baste the chicken with a sauce a couple of times. Remove the lid for the last 5-10 minutes of the cooking.

While the chicken is cooking prepare you rice. Please refer to this recipe in how to cook Persian rice. Nowadays we always do brown rice using a rice cooker, it just needs a bit more water and takes longer to cook than white rice.

To prepare the barberries, just mix the ingredients and let sit for 10 minutes.

Once your chicken is cooked remove the pieces on a serving dish and keep warm. Sieve the tomato sauce into a separate bowl pushing the vegetables against the sieve with a spoon to get most of the tasty sauce out. Discard the vegetables.

When you rice is ready take half a cup of the cooked rice and mix it with the remaining saffron water. Spread the rest of the rice on a serving platter and place the yellow saffron rice on top. Sprinkle the barberries on top.

Serve with a nice fresh fattoush or shirazi salad.

The best way in my opinion to enjoy fish roe is by mixing it with finely chopped onion, sour cream and fresh dill. A tiny grating of lemon zest, splash of lemon juice, sprinkling of blackpepper or lemon pepper might not hurt, but are not necessary. You don't want to mess with the beautiful taste of the roe itself.

We don't actually have it that often with husband, I always have it visiting my parents in Finland, where we usually eat it with blinis as a light supper and have the left over dip at breakfast next morning with toasted bread. They like it on white toast which is more traditional and accepted, I like it on sourdough rye bread which some think is too strong for the delicate taste of roe, but, well, I don't. And it's actually not that delicate, it's bloody fishy and combined with raw onion it can very well take a bit of sourdough bread.

With husband it's usually just Christmas time I tend to do it. I am not sure why. Maybe my New Year's resolution will be to eat more roe. I've never really made many resolutions, but this might be one to go with. More roe. And also maybe the simplicity theme touched upon in my recent hummus post. When cooking I shouldn't always chuck in all possible ingredients that might somehow fit the dish, but think about what is the essence of the dish and the main ingredient and only surround it with what it absolutely needs to make it shine. But that sounds a bit boring, so I think as New Year's resolutions go I will go with Eat More Roe.


My favourite is vendace roe, these beautiful small eggs are just divine. So what about the famous Russian caviar, you may ask! I haven't had enough of this black sturgeon roe to say whether it is as special as people claim or whether it is a bit of an emperor's new clothes kind of a thing where silly people pay a fortune for a mother-of-pearl spoonful of something that is no more special than the easily available everyday equivalent. I think I had caviar once on a business trip to Moscow in mid 90's but at the time I was more interested in the vodka, so I may now have to invest in some just for research purposes as a serious food blogger. But I have heard it mentioned that Finnish vendace, burbot and whitefish roe are actually better than caviar. Admittedly most of this anecdotal evidence comes from websites selling Finnish fish eggs. But there is also historical factual evidence to prove that it takes 10 Russian sturgeon eggs to beat one Finnish freshwater fish egg.

Vendace roe is not possible to come by here in UK. Interestingly, assuming you are as into the topic of fish as I am, there are some vendace in a couple of lakes in the UK, relics of the last ice age, or rather their descendants, but they are very much fighting on the brink of local extinction so neither them or their eggs make it to the supermarket fish counters. In Finland vendace is plentiful and my parents' local fisher guy, will often have some in his car boot when he does the rounds around the village selling his morning's catch. As a member of the salmon family vendace is a fatty fish and superbly tasty panfried or smoked.

The other roe favourite of mine comes from vendace's larger cousin the European whitefish. Also not easily found here, although fascinatingly similar to vendace there are some of these silvery guys flapping about in the British waters, but again very much endangered alas. Canada exports a lot of whitefish roe, I have bought it in Finland, so I don't see why it couldn't make its way here. I have seen many Canadian people here. I lived with two in a flatshare in Stratford in 2003.

Of course in Finland there is lots of indigenous whitefish roe since wild whitefish is quite common in Finnish lakes and it's also farmed nowadays. You can easily find the fish and the eggs in the better supermarkets. Another impartial Finnish website said Finnish whitefish roe is much better than Canadian. And I'm too patriotic to argue against this, but I will say that the Canadian roe from lake Erie whitefish is very good also.

So for this New Year's Day brunch we had some well-travelled Canadian whitefish roe with shop bought blinis. These are not real blinis of course, but almost like little tasteless pancakes. I couldn't face making them from scratch, I didn't have buckwheat flour and we had been out celebrating New Year till 5am. Pretty good going for two old farts.

We had a fantastic time drinking prosecco (gone are the pretentious pre-mortgage champagne days) wondering why pretty young people would wear such awful unflattering clothes and so much make up, whether the ladies footwear was very sensible - it was a bit nippy outside!, and if they all were actually old enough to be out without their parents that late. Also at one point in the ladies toilets three very lovely looking (although a bit too made-up and self tanned) young girls were taking a pouty selfie and exclaiming what bad light it was and how awful they all looked. I just smiled at them benevolently like the fairy godmother that Cinderella gives the bowl of milk to (before the godmother's transformation into the glamorous Helena Bonham-Carter),  patted some powder between the folds below my eyes (still not very Helena B-C) and thought to myself that there will come a time when any light is bad light. But mercifully the eyesight starts failing at the same time with your face so you don't see the entire catastrophe, otherwise you might never leave your house again.



Next time I think I will make the blinis myself, these shop bought ones are no good. They perform faultlessly as vessels to transport the roe from plate to mouth, but real blinis actually add to the taste equation. My sister who always outdoes me in the cooking efforts - like the other day when I was very proud of my granary loaf, she'd done half a dozen sourdough rye breads with an over 100 year old starter which she got from a work colleague (apparently I can have some of the starter next time I visit) or when I'd done a beautiful and delicious salmon coulibiac with home-made quark pastry, she had done a fucking Kalakukko (an eastern Finnish traditional delicacy of fish baked in a loaf of sourdough rye bread obviously made from scratch with an ancient starter) - she was serving the same New Year's brunch to her husband, but needless to say with fresh home-made blinis. So next time I will make a bit more of an effort and make the blimming blinis.

Sour cream caviar dip

100g fish roe
Around 100ml (3 heaped tbsp) sour cream
Third / half a small brown onion (you could use red onion or shallot for milder onion taste, but I prefer it stronger)
1 heaped tbsp finely chopped fresh dill
Squirt of fresh lemon juice
(Usually the roe is already well salted for preservation purposes, but check the taste and add salt if necessary)

Mix all ingredients, this is not exact science, the amounts are a suggestions, I normally just go with gut feeling, add a bit more sour cream if if feels like it needs it etc.

The dip is good to eat immediately, but benefits from letting it sit in the fridge a couple of hours so the flavours blend and develop, the onion also looses some of its sharpness. Serve with toasted bread or blinis.