The Sacred Art of Eating

Normal service will be resumed shortly. I had fallen into my traditional January-ish hole (getting in from work, eating tea, and then wanting only to go to bed and sleep until tomorrow) and was just crawling out of it when I got some sad news and that knocked the stuffing out of me slightly.

Fear not, dear readers, for it takes a lot to steal my appetite, and so the cooking adventures are continuing apace. Keep coming back. There’s one recipe already below (back-dated).

Never let it be said that I don’t occasionally balls things up in the kitchen. I had made some pancake mix by the light of day, proceeded to cook it in what was probably not a hot enough pan, and this is what happened:

I tinkered with the mix slightly, and then perhaps with better judgement regarding the pan, Dougal produced this:

We all have off days, eh?

Clearly I am being tempted by the yellow label brigade. I got all these lovely pork, rosemary and honey chipolata sausages, which should have been £5.99/kg, for the princely sum of 39p!

It’s not a bargain if you don’t want it though- but we needed tea that night and the leftover sausages went well in pieces the next day. Similarly I can assure you that you will never find me driving from supermarket to supermarket in search of the best price for tuna for the cat…I know how economy works and it ain’t like that!

Phew! It appears Waitrose do actually have more than one nice recipe! (The first recipe being this nice variation on the ol’ stuffed peppers theme.)

• Waitrose Vegetarian Chilli with beans

This is a slightly cheaty chilli which tastes fabulously home made and wholesome. The cheating comes from using a can of kidney beans in chilli sauce; however chilli powder is still added and I’m sure if you fried a fresh chilli at the beginning and used a tin of toms later on it would work fine.

Rich and hearty and absolutely loaded with vegetables this did us for a couple of meals and lunches. It was especially good with a baked potato, and a blob of sour cream was an excellent garnish. To accompany, as if more veg were needed, a huge steaming pile of buttery cabbage- heaven!

It looked so nice in the picture! I’d been keeping the card since December! Bah!

• Waitrose Veal Ragu

As I said, I picked this card up in December and thought I could cook this next year! The ingredients were reasonably straightforward and happy, British veal is very reasonably priced, so I was keen to give this a go, even if it meant waiting.

I put this together on a Thursday afternoon. I had a half day for a meeting with an interior designer, which meant I was able to get it cooking nice and early to give it plenty time to bubble away and for the flavours to come out. It looked quite alarming, yet pretty, as it simmered, the wine and red onions contributing a purple tinge to the liquor whilst the something else, not sure what, lent a green shade to the bubbles!

The problem with this was in the recipe, and I should have spotted it sooner. The dish contained 450g of meat, plus some onion and other veg. I then had to add over 600ml of liquid- wine and veggie stock. Then I was to simmer to reduce slightly.

Reducing slighty meant that the meat was swimming in liquid. Even though we realised this and gave it a good boil later to reduce it down, the dish still felt thin and watery. It was difficult to bring it together with the pasta (saffron tagliatelle was called for by the recipe, although normal pasta would have been just fine) and you ended up chasing watery bits round the plate. Very dissapointing, and enough to shake my confidence in Waitrose recipe cards.

Dunno if it was a poor recipe or overly-authentic ingredients, but this dish was near-inedible!

• Good Food Calendar 2009- January

It looked scrummy in the picture. Chicken with a glossy soy glaze and asian greens, crunchy vs succulent. It looked dead authentic on the plate, with an ice-cold Asahi beer on the side and some rice for starch.

It tasted of soy sauce. Cloyingly salty. Sticky and thirst-making. Unusually for me, I couldn’t finish it.

The problem may well have been that the recipe called for light soy sauce and we used dark. Further to this, whilst it is only Amoy, our soy sauce comes from a Chinese supermarket and we’ve commented before that it is blacker than any soy we’ve seen before. So perhaps it was simply the wrong condiment to cook with. To be honest though, this meal was so poisonous I won’t be going back to find out!

We had a smashing little supper yesterday, in what might be described the style of Nigel Slater. Yummy rye-ish bread (à la D) topped with happy chicken softly scrambled eggs, through which I stirred some hastily roasted baby toms (a good glug of garlic oil, a sprinkling of wanky salt and ten or fifteen minutes in a very hot oven (which was on anyway)), some chopped fresh basil and some baby mozarella balls which needed using up. Gorgeous!

To be honest the mozarella got a bit lost (the occasional intersting fudgy bit, nothing more) but the basil and roasted toms were gorgeous with the egg. Easy peasy fine fare.

We are just settling down to watch a film. The miramax icon has faded from view, the closing strains of the fanfare still fading from the speakers. And D pipes up… Actually, I probably ought to be doing something to my bread just now, you know.

Not complaining, of course. (He was very quick about it. But I fear we will still be pausing the film later on.)

Ought I be worried that the very first thing I cooked in 2009 was a recipe from Nigella Express? I whipped up a batch of the breakfast pancakes, albeit only with maple syrup, not blueberry maple syrup.

We had the leftover pancakes with savoury fillings (parmesan, parma ham, rocket, roquefort etc) as rather high class sandwiches for lunch!

A Challenge:

to choose a cookery book - any one you like, as long as it’s not a tiny cookery pamphlet or Larousse Gastronomique - and prepare every single recipe in it before December 31st 2008

and, 366 days and one second, 190 recipes later, we are done. It might be the effect of Annie Lennox on Hootenanny, but I did just cry a wee tear as I put that final finishing touch to The Challenge Page, as I changed the count to zero. It’s been quite a year. More thoughts on that, tomorrow perhaps. In the time being, I’ve written bloody loads in the last few days, so away an read something. And Happy New Year to you all!