So it turns out that a shoulder of goat goes a reeaally long way – the two of us were eating that thing for a week. As much as it was great braised and stuffed into pitta bread, there are rules about cooking leftovers, most of which involve frying, adding chilli, or plopping a wobbly egg on top.

Tacos are handy for using up leftover roasted meat, which can be chopped and pumped with extra flavour (in this case chipotles in adobo sauce). We’re still getting the hang of making the fresh ones, as you can see. Now now, don’t laugh; we didn’t add enough water to this batch so they came out somewhat thick and raggedy. More practice needed.

You can buy tacos from Mex Grocer if you want the authentic corn jobs – entirely different to those weird, gummy wheat versions. The flavour is amazing, and when made properly, they’re not dry or hard in the slightest. When I went on a taco tour of Tijuana in Mexico last year, I found that most places actually give you two tacos as a bed for the fillings, they’re so floppy and soft.

We sizzled the leftover meat with a mixture of chipotle, ancho, guajillo and arbol chillies, to get some complex smoke and fruit flavours going on. There’s cumin, coriander, garlic, red onion. Look, it’s not a timid recipe, m’kay? The sour creamed corn is just BOSS too, a tangier version of the regular creamed. Dangerous stuff which finds its way into your mouth by the spoonful.

Chipotle Goat Tacos with Sour Creamed Corn

Leftover goat or other roasted meat
2 chipotles in adobo sauce, chopped
1 each ancho, guajillo and arbol chilli, rehydrated and chopped
1 small red onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
Pinch each of cumin seeds, coriander seeds and black pepper, ground together or smashed in a pestle and mortar

Fry the onion in a tablespoon or so of oil and add the garlic and spices. Cook gently, stirring for a few minutes, then add the goat and chillies. Allow to cook, stirring regularly, for around 15-20 minutes, maybe longer depending on the fattiness of your meat. Play it by ear. Season.

For the sour creamed corn:

1 tin sweetcorn (regular size, whatever that is)
25g butter
1 tablespoon flour
75ml soured cream

Melt the butter in a small pan, stir in the flour and blend well. Add the corn, sour cream and salt and pepper. Cook over a medium heat untl thick and lovely.

Quick pickled red onions:

Finely slice red onions and mix with three tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons cider or white wine vinegar. Leave for an hour or so, stirring every now and then. Makes a great topping on loads of things.

Serve with tacos (available online) plus coriander and lime wedges.

I sit here stroking my weary ribs, which have only just stopped jiggling after I read your comments on my food confessions post. It seems that we’re all secretly hoofing back corned beef and salad cream sandwiches, washed down with buckets of instant coffee (mainly to annoy people with beards, apparently). There’s a time and a place though, guys. Just been dumped? Grab the Cheesestrings. Hungover? Anything goes, frankly – the world is your pickled onion Monster Munch cheese toastie.

Sunday lunch though, that’s sacred turf. One cannot be messing around with Gregg’s steak slices and cheap Cheddar on the Official Day of Long, Slow Cooking.

Goat is now becoming more mainstream in the UK, not found only in Caribbean takeaways. It’s not that easy to get down here in Peckham or Brixton actually, with most places selling you mutton instead. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen dedicated suppliers like Cabrito become known, and Turner and George are selling goat from Tailored Goat Company (based in Cumbria), which is how I got hold of this shoulder.

It’s fantastic meat, with a flavour not unlike mutton (hence the substitution), but without that ‘slightly high’ kiff you often get with lamb. The best way to cook a shoulder is to braise it in liquid for around 4 hours (I once tried to cook it entirely on the BBQ – total cock up, it’s too lean), after which time you’ll have meat tender enough to pull apart.

We decided to go Greek, and it went into a roasting tray with garlic, onions, about ten bay leaves (I’m all for silly amounts of bay) and half a bottle of retsina, which we had to beg off the staff at a local restaurant who thought we were the council trying to stitch them up. It’s a classic ‘stick it in the oven and forget about it’ job, with serious springtime Mediterranean vibes.

We ate it with toasted pitta, a salad of blood orange and olives (Greek, obvs), some quick pickled red onions, and Feta which I whipped up because that is what we do with Feta now, don’t ya know. It turns into a sort of fluffy paste when mixed with cream cheese or yoghurt, great for spreading inside little goat-y sandwiches. They really do take some bleating.

SORRY.

Retsina Braised Shoulder of Goat with Whipped Feta

This method looks long but every stage is about as simple as it gets. I reckon this would easily serve 6 people. It kept us going for a week… more on that soon. 

1 x 2.5kg shoulder of goat
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 head of garlic, cut in half
2 onions, peeled and roughly sliced
10 bay leaves
1/2 bottle retsina (standard wine bottle size)

Preheat the oven to 160C. Place the shoulder on top of the onions in a roasting tray and rub with the oil. Season with salt and pepper. Add everything else to the tray, cover with foil and cook for 4 hours, or until very tender.

For the blood orange salad:

3 blood oranges, segmented
10 kalamata olives
Soft lettuce
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1.5 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon honey

Mix olive oil, lemon juice and honey in a jar. Add salt and pepper. Put lid on and shake until combined. Set aside. To assemble the salad, mix the orange segments, olives and lettuce and mix with a enough of the dressing to coat.

For the whipped feta:

140g feta cheese
80g cream cheese
Parsley, chopped

Crumble the feta into a food processor and blend. Add cream cheese and blend again. Taste and season with pepper, garnish with parsley.

For the quick pickled red onions:

1 red onion, finely sliced
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
Large pinch of salt

Mix all the ingredients together and leave to pickle. Stir occasionally.

Serve the goat with toasted pitta breads and the rest of the bits and pieces.

Peckham is now so trendy it’s no longer cool. I haven’t even lived there for four years, yet just the other day I got a letter from the clothing brand Anthropologie addressing me as M. Peckham. Even they still think I own the place. I will always love the area, (I’m just down the road in Camberwell now), but the edges are softened, the archways fluffed. I can smell beard oil. Nigerian restaurants such as Delta Tavern have been replaced by hip spots like Pedler, all pineapple prints and jam jar glasses. I will miss their gelatinous cow foot stew and cans of warm Stella.

What I’d hate to see is the closure of those little West African restaurants on Choumert Road, the ones where you can catch a breath-snatching fug of scotch bonnet peppers three hours before they open for lunch. I once tried to approach one of these restaurants for an article and they basically told me to Do One, which was funny and made me love them more. I adored what Peckham used to be, however much I was guilty of romanticising it.

A lot of people used to ask me (and still do) where they should go for Caribbean food in Peckham and I would reply that I’m sorry, but it’s not really a thing. The Nigerian population is much larger than the Caribbean, or Tasty Jerk in Thornton Heath. People ask me mainly about jerk chicken, but not so much curry goat.

Mutton is a fine substitute, just as long as you ask for some bony pieces which are important for the flavour and also that general ‘I’m eating curry goat’ feeling. I use peppers with the onions at the beginning which cook down to a sweet base, and then I finish the dish with a quick pickled sauce of lime juice, sugar, more chilli and spring onion. I think this really lifts it. Rice and peas are brilliant but I often just go with plain basmati rice, a fluffy, bland cushion for the sauce to soak into.

Curry Goat

Serves 4-6

1 kg goat meat (or mutton), diced into large chunks (get the butcher to do it)
2 tablespoons mild curry powder
350ml veg stock
1 onion, finely chopped
1 small green pepper, finely chopped
1 small red pepper, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed or grated
1 x 3 inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped
8 allspice berries
Small sprig thyme
4 spring onions, green parts sliced
4 tablespoons vegetable or groundnut oil
1 scotch bonnet chilli, pierced

For the pickle

1 scotch bonnet chilli
1 spring onion
Juice 2 limes
2 level tablespoons sugar
Large pinch of salt

In a bowl, combine the meat and curry powder. Add the thyme, stripping the leaves off and then lobbing the stalks in too. Mix thoroughly and leave to marinate for at least two hours, preferably three or four.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan (with a lid). Cook the onions and peppers over a low heat for a few minutes, stirring, then add the goat mixture. Stir, turn the heat down very low, put the lid on and leave for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. The meat will make its own juice inside the pan.

Add the ginger, garlic, stock, allspice, scotch bonnet and spring onions. Simmer on very low heat for two hours with the lid on. Remove the lid and simmer for a further hour to reduce to sauce. Season to taste and serve with plain rice (or your choice of rice) and the pickle.

To make the pickle, just combine everything and leave it for an hour or so while the curry is cooking.

Tagines have always been something I’ve viewed as having great potential to be really tasty, but I’ve never eaten a good one. What I imagined in my head to be a thick, rich, aromatic stew with complex flavours always arrived as a thin, watery bowlful bearing way too much dried fruit.

Because I am a spoiled and lucky girl, I received a magnificent tagine for Chrimbo; a chance to turn things around and make the tadge I’ve always wanted, Peckham style.

The tagine is heated on a little metal thing that looks like a ping pong bat with dimples in it, which helps to distribute the heat evenly across the base. It’s important that the tagine is heated slowly, otherwise it will crack and spoil all your fun before you’ve started.

The base was thickly covered with a bed of onions, the idea being that they would cook down, becoming silken and lush and absorbent of everything above. This being Peckham (bruv), the meat had to be goat, which is very easy to come by here. Its ballsy mutton like flavor is perfect (you could obviously substitute mutton if you can find goat) and it loves long cooking to become properly tender. For veg, some of those little white baby aubergines, which also need a good simmering into submission (they remain stubbornly bitter otherwise) and some small turnips, diced.

For the fruit, which for me is potentially the making but most commonly the breaking of a good tagine, I bought dried fruits from Persepolis, ending up with a kind of Moroccan/Persian hybrid recipe. There are many similarities between the cuisines. In went a dried lime, which the Iranians add mostly to stews where they bob about, gradually releasing a flavor which is like a lime essential oil, emerging at the end shriveled and spent. Apricots went in too, but not those horrible overly sweet and sulphurous supermarket ones but fragrant perfumed Persian fruits. A few scarlet barberries flecked the top, adding sourness, like tart cranberries.

For heat, I couldn’t help whacking a scotch bonnet in. I’m sorry. If I didn’t I’d be betraying Peckham. It was left whole though and just pierced, to contain heat but leach flavour. Having impulse bought a bag of African hot peppers, a couple of those went into a spice paste with loads of garlic, two types of paprika and a shed load of ras el hanout. It could have blown our heads off but didn’t; a bit on the hot side for a tagine, but with an enjoyable slow build.

After three hours of simmering and steaming what emerged was the tadge I’d always wanted; deep and complex, sweet then spicy then sour, lips were sticky from slow cooked onions and goat fat. A scattering of mint and spring onion freshened things up at the end.

This is, as you would imagine, even better the next day and again the day after that. I served it with flat bread and Sally Butcher’s Borani-ye Esfanaj (spinach with yoghurt – from Persia in Peckham), which is one of my favourite yoghurty arrangements of all time.

Peckham Goat Tagine

(serves 6)

500g diced goat meat (or mutton)
4 small turnips, peeled and cut to the same size as the aubergines
6 small white aubergines, halved
3 onions, sliced
1 scotch bonnet chilli, left whole but pierced
250ml water
1 dried lime
5 dried apricots
1 scant tablespoon barberries
Mint leaves, finely sliced
1 spring onion, finely sliced

For the paste

5 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon salt
2 African hot pepper dried chillies (optional)
2 tablespoons ras el hanout
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1 teaspoon smoked paprika (smoky paps)
1 tablespoon water

Ideally I would have marinated the goat overnight in the paste then added it straight to the tagine without browning. I didn’t because I wasn’t organised enough so I’ve set out the method below as I cooked it.

Start by heating the tagine slowly. Add some olive oil, the onions and scotch bonnet chilli. Let the onions cook down gently while you brown the meat.

Cover a plate with flour and season it with salt and pepper. Dust each cube of the goat meat in it. Heat a frying pan and add some oil. Brown the meat on all sides. This will need to be done in several batches. Add this to the tagine, followed by all the other ingredients, including the paste. Season with salt and pepper and cook on a lowish heat for three hours, stirring every now and then after the first hour or so. After two hours, I’d advise you pick out the scotch bonnet chilli, because it’s only a matter of time before it bursts and you get a lot more heat than you bargained for.

Scatter over the mint and spring onion and serve with plenty of flat bread for dipping.