From Poles To Poles (With Musk Ox And Pierogi)

One day perhaps, when my restaurant is booked up months in advance, but right now Yachting Monthly is not exactly top of my magazine subscription list.

But it caught my eye this week because of a feature article about two lads of my own age from West Sussex who recently arrived at the North Pole after seven days of dog sleighing. That sounds like enough of a feat in itself, but the pair are about to set off on a ten-month pole-to-pole journey - walking, skiing, cycling and sailing 20,000 miles to the South Pole. Rob Gauntlett and James Hooper became the youngest Britons to climb Everest last year. Now I'm really into the idea of young people setting high targets, but I felt exhausted just reading about this.

Then I spotted the following in the article: "Their Inuit guides have been shooting Muskox for food". "Aha", I thought, "here's where I may be able to help". A quick scour of the internet produced 'Canadian Embassy Recipes' (well, where else would you go for arctic haute cuisine?) and their recipe for "Musk ox rib eye with wild rice, wild vegetable ragout and spruce tip sauce". Now I'm no expert on North American fauna and flora and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can find vegetables and spruce trees in the arctic but the wild rice might just be a bit of a problem. A search for "arctic wild rice" generates one too few results for a Googlewhack. As far as I can tell, the native habitat of wild rice is the Great Lakes Region and west - Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana. So sorry, guys, but you may have to send some of those Inuit guides south to the border for the starch ingredient. I'm not really into recipes, but this one sounds fantastic. If I ever find any musk ox in Borough Market I'm definitely going to cook this. If anyone is both fortunate and bold enough to be able to try, please let me know how it went. Especially if you had to catch your own musk ox. Musk ox rib eye with wild rice and wild vegetable ragout and spruce tip sauce (serves 4) (with thanks to the Canadian Government)

Ragout Ingredients: 1 cup wild rice, cooked 1 cup fiddlehead ferns, par-boiled 1 cup cepes mushrooms, cubed ½ cup wild asparagus, par-boiled ½ cup onions, diced ½ cup heavy cream ¼ cup white wine 2 tablespoons unsalted butter 2 teaspoons garlic, minced 1 teaspoon jalapeño, chopped 1 teaspoon parsley, chopped 1 teaspoon sage, chopped

1 teaspoon rosemary, chopped 1 teaspoon thyme, chopped Salt and pepper to taste Musk Ox Ingredients: 1 large musk ox rib eye, cleaned 1 tablespoon canola oil Salt and pepper Spruce Tip Sauce Ingredients: 1 cup reduced veal stock, or demi-glace 2 tablespoons pickled spruce tips, chopped

To Prepare The Musk Ox: Preheat oven to 400 F. Season musk ox rib eye liberally with salt and pepper. Place a non-stick sauté pan on high heat until it almost smokes. Add canola oil to pan, and then sear the rib eye on all sides to a deep brown color. For medium rare, roast in preheated oven for 15-17 minutes. Remove and let stand for 10 minutes covered with tin foil. To Prepare The Ragout: Cook ½ cup of dry wild rice in 8 cups of boiling water until the grains open up and become tender. Strain and set aside. Clean fiddlehead ferns in cold water, repeat until all sand or grit is gone. Parboil in salted water until al dente. Remove from salt water into an ice bath. Reserve the salt water to par-boil the wild asparagus tips until tender. Remove to the ice bath. Remove the fiddleheads and asparagus tips from ice bath, pat dry on paper towel and set aside. On high heat, melt 1 tablespoon of unsalted butter and sauté the cubed cepe mushrooms. Lightly season with a pinch of salt and pepper, remove from pan and set aside. In a large pan, melt the remaining 1 tablespoon of butter over medium heat. Add onions and cook until translucent, about one minute. Add garlic and jalapeño and cook for another 20-30 seconds, being careful not to brown or burn garlic. Add wild rice, fiddleheads, cepes, wild asparagus and toss. Add white wine and reduce until almost dry. Add cream and herbs and reduce until cream thickens, or coats the mixture and starts to bind it together. Season to taste. To Prepare Spruce Tip Sauce: In a saucepan, reheat veal reduction or demi-glace over medium-low heat. Add chopped spruce tips and season with salt and pepper to taste. To Assemble: Place a generous portion of vegetables in the center of the plate. Thinly slice the musk ox against the grain, and fan out 4-5 pieces on top of the vegetables. Drizzle spruce tip sauce around the plate.

And now from two Poles to 600,000 Poles. I read that Britain is being overwhelmed with demand for Polish food - which has seen the fastest takeup for a new ethnic food in British culinary history.

With the inflow of an estimated 600,000 migrants from Poland since EU enlargement in 2004, hundreds of Polish food stores have been opening all over the country. Tesco reports a 10-fold growth in demand for supermarket tinned borsch, pickled vegetables and salty bread sticks in just six months and diners are flocking to newly-opened Polish restaurants to sample the delights of pierogi, golabki and paczki. At this point I must stick my hand up in embarrassment and admit that I have neither cooked nor even eaten any Polish food in my life (unless you count latkes). So I shall be remedying this situation shortly and reporting back my findings.

After all, what sort of British chef am I going to become if I have no knowledge of Polish cuisine to add to my French, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese and other traditional British cooking?