The Sacred Art of Eating

Fab little supper this evening of baked potatoes (always good to have an excuse to have the oven on for an hour and a half in February) with Eggs Florentine (recipe via my Dad, Happy Birthday!) and a wee tomato salad (complete with nasty interlopers, as far as D was concerned)(M&S Mixed Marinated Olives, as far as I was concerned).

Now heading out for Tea and Mr Pilflod’s Chocolate Guinness Cake. Excellent.

I had hoped that leftover risotto would turn out to be really slurpy and tasty, like eating cold rice pudding with savoury flavours. In fact it was stodgy and a bit dull, but there was too much left in the pan to just chuck it out.

 The internet said make arancini, so I did. I used what I had to hand for the fillings: cheese, prawns and peas. A bit eclectic but I was running short for time. You’ve got to have non-stick hands to do this properly — make a little hemisphere of rice and fill it with whatever you choose, before capping off the end with more rice to make a beautiful ball. Obviously the aim is to get as much filling in there as possible which is pretty difficult.

My attempts were quite heavy on rice and light on  filling. They get breadcrumbed and deep fried, which gave me a chance to use my new candy thermometer. This will come in handy for later experiments.

 The result was tasty and the cheese worked very well, but it needs more practise!

Last week we were expecting a visit from our ex-neighbours, who have just sold the flat opposite ours and moved elsewhere with a new baby. Right, I thought, we need some nice home-made biccies! I tried making Scrummy Chocolate Swirl Shortbread from Green & Black’s Chocolate Recipes but it failed miserably.

I tried again this week, because I still had many of the ingredients prepped — I had roughly chopped 100g of dark chocolate and cut some greaseproof paper to size and, well, I wasn’t going to be defeated by shortbread. Using Delia’s methods for the shortbread and the original recipe’s method for everything else worked quite well:

It’s basically just two colours of shortbread, one made plain and the other using a bit of cocoa instead of part of the flour. You lie one on the other, sprinkle the inside with shards of chocolate and roll it like a swiss roll before slicing.

In future I would try for a tighter coil and smaller chunks of chocolate. In fact, chocolate chip-sized lumps wouldn’t be too small, and would make it easier to roll the dough and cut it too. I would also try to bake them longer. I went over the allotted time but they’re still a wee bit blond and slightly chewy in the middle.