Jenny's week: Goat, orange blossom, almond & pomegranate

The orange blossom and almond connection came about by dint of two quite unconnected things.

Firstly, I was offered a half leg of 3-4 month old kid goat. Yes, goat.

Secondly, Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest t.v. offering “Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feast” started. If you’ve not caught any of this series, you can catch up with it via 4OD.

Never mind all your simpering t.v. chefs wafting around their kitchens asking you to make use of leftover bread by investing in lamb steaks – this is real food t.v. Yotam Ottolenghi is little more than a god in my eyes and his ability to match flavours is instinctual and inspiring.

During one of these programmes, he made a barbecued leg of lamb with an almond sauce, which immediately caught my attention. After all, the advice with regard to the kid goat was to treat it like spring lamb in the cooking – so the flavours should be extremely compatible.

I roasted the kid goat quite plainly, except for char grilling it to begin with to get that barbecued flavour. The meat is very sweet, with no hint of the “goatiness” you find with goat’s cheese and milk. It is somewhere on the veal/pork/spring lamb spectrum of flavours, but oh so delicate.

Our piece of kid goat had some beautifully tender pieces, whilst other areas of the joint were slightly tougher. However, it was amazingly lean and I was glad I’d roasted it under cover to prevent it drying out.

Now the kid goat was nice enough, but when coupled with the Almond Sauce the combination was just so surprising – and in the most pleasant of ways.

Do bear in mind though, that I got the texture of the Almond Sauce completely wrong. The recipe (which is available here) states to use a food processor to break the almonds down.

If you decide to have a go at this recipe – use a pestle & mortar or a plastic bag and a rolling pin, not a food processor. All that happened with my almonds was that one half turned to almond paste and the other, bigger, lumps just span around laughing at the blades.

Consequently, whenever I added lemon juice, it was absorbed by the almond paste and just disappeared.

Getting back to the recipe and assuming that your almonds have been fried, cooled and crushed satisfactorily, you then add lemon zest, lemon juice, runny honey, orange blossom water, salt & pepper, olive oil, fresh mint & coriander.

For those of you who have never come across Orange Blossom Water before, I can only describe it as “intensely and surprisingly floral” or alternatively, like something that you’d use to make soap smell good.

I hasten to add that it doesn’t taste soapy – but just a teaspoonful in conjunction with all the other flavours was enough to transport me to happy land. It is one of those things that you definitely don’t want to be heavy handed in the use of!

I have, quite seriously, never tasted anything like that Goat with Almond Sauce. I love it when I discover a new flavour and to discover three in quick succession – kid goat, fried almonds and orange blossom water – was a real revelation.

So that left me with a bottle of Orange Blossom Water sitting in the larder cupboard, having used one teaspoonful. Needless to say, my subconscious brain started working on “things I could use that with”.

Now in the meantime, I’d picked up a bottle of Pomegranate Molasses – which is another Ottolenghi inspired flavour and one I’d been after for a while.

Again, it is the most surprising flavour – being sweet, sour and intensely fruity. Very similar, in lots of ways, to the tamarind that gets used in curries.

I was pondering on what to make for a Sunday dessert. Sunday is really the only day I make a dessert, if we have dessert on any other day it will be some yoghurt or a fruit mousse.

Hubby would be cooking a roast chicken, which meant that I could make something in the space after lunch and before he started on the roast dinner. So, enter Raymond Blanc. I know – I watch far too much food television.

Raymond had recently made a Cherry Clafouti, which I very much liked the look of. It didn’t seem too difficult, either – which is always a bonus.

Cherries being out of season at the moment, I pondered on what I could use instead – and decided on some red plums. Being autumn, plums are very much in season and can be cut to a cherry size, so as to cook properly in the time available.

But just plum wasn’t good enough. Oh no. Not when you’ve got Pomegranate Molasses and Orange Blossom Water in the cupboard, looking for something to do.

So, I diced up the plums then added two tbsp of runny honey, 1 tbsp Pomegranate Molasses, 1 tsp Orange Blossom Water and stirred until each piece of plum was coated. Then tasted. Oh boy, oh boy, that worked and worked SO well!

It was thereafter a simple matter to mix up the batter (very similar to a pancake batter) and pour it over. 35 minutes of baking in the oven later and we had the best dessert I’ve made in a long time.

Meat and two veg. has its place, but I’m so happy I’ve become open to exploring new flavours. These were all new flavour sensations for me and apart from the goat, are fairly inexpensive. They have opened up a whole new avenue of thought, where cooking is concerned.