The Sacred Art of Eating

It’s been a year since I finished The Challenge. I spent lots of time last year saying ‘this will definitely be cooked again’- so, one year on, what have we gone back to?

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry -a great many meals inspired by this, as well as ‘proper’ repeats.
• Caramel Croissant Pudding - about three times! Including just last night, in celebration of the acquisition of some bourbon.
• Rhubarb and Custard Gelato - when I found some pink rhubarb, and I even blogged about it!
• Steak Slice with Lemon and Thyme -at least once!
  
• Flourless Chocolate Brownies, and
• Hot Chocolate Sauce -when my cousin and her man came for dinner. Very well received :o)
  
• Goujons of Sole with Dill Mayonnaise- I am fairly sure we did this but perhaps without any dill. But I remember frying!
• Mango Split
• Home-made Instant Pancake Mix, - absolutely loads. It is our standard recipe for ‘breakfast’ pancakes now. We even did it for D’s parents and Granny on Christmas morning this year.
• Blueberry Syrup for Pancakes- sometimes, but not always, when we make the above. Ridiculously easy, ridiculously good!
• Maple Chicken ‘n’ Ribs- still can’t get them as sticky as I want. Still meaty and good.
• Moonblush Tomatoes
• High-Speed Hamburger with Fast Fries- fast fries, certainly. Not sure about the burgers.
  
• Tuna Steaks with Black Beans- yup, although we couldn’t get pinto beans in Leith, funnily enough!
• Nectarine and Blueberry Galette-right here!
  
• Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundae- well the sauce anyway. Tis gorgeous!
• Chowder with Asian Flavours
• Rapid Ragù- winter warming fare.
  
• Jumbleberry Crumble
• Doughnut French Toast
• Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies- they don’t hold their own weight though, so are not to be advised for taking to parties!
  
• Potato Cakes with Smoked Salmon- we haven’t re-cooked these. But D bought smoked salmon today. And the night is yet young!
• Duck Breasts with Pomegranate and Mint- again, I have not yet re-cooked. But I do have two duck breasts sitting in the freezer waiting specifically for the right occasion.
• Ice Cream Cake- for a party, it went down very well! So fast, in fact, that I got no pictures of the finished product!
• Mexican Hot Chocolate 1 2 Properly- Essentially whenever we have any kahlua!
  
• Rocky Road Crunch Bars- a LOT
  
• Sesame Peanut Noodles- quick, easy and very satisfying. Plus once you’ve bought beansprouts you might as well make a massive amount.
• Snowball- repeated a couple of times and then it dawned on me, the reason I didn’t rate it was that I don’t like lemonade! How obvious! Dougal has since introduced me to drinking advocaat with ginger ale. Much better!
• Festive Fusilli- is only festive if you serve it at a feast. Otherwise is sunblush tomato, vodka and mascarpone pasta!
• Marshmallow Crispy Squares- at least once. I needed to use the rice crispies up! And they are scrummy.
• Garlic Oil- eventually it dawned on me to use a food processor to cut the garlic up. We need a new bottle now, in fact.
• Salade Niçoise- even with the inclusion of anchovies!

17% repeat rate. I predicted at least 10 at dinner tonight, so I suppose I’m not wrong. Looking through the list tonight it is clear that I like making sweet things! I think the recipes we repeated were probably more representative of low-faff rather than those recipes we were most excited about last year. This might be because the biggest surprises came from recipes I would never normally have bothered with before…and which apparently I am not inclined to go back to! A revision of the list tonight was good though- now I have some fresh ideas for 2010!

As regular visitors may have noted, I (and Dougal) am currently being spammed to hell in the comments. So, as an attempt to stem the flow I have switched on comment moderation. In theory those of you who have already commented sucessfully in the past may get to skip this step; who knows.

In any case I really need to write something first before I can reasonably expect comments. Having a lovely couple of relaxing days at my mum and dad’s just now; would post pics of wonderful Christmas Dinner only the SD card in my camera died on Boxing Day with the loss of all my xmas photaes. Which is awfy sad for you guys.

I had two visitors to my blog the other month who had googled Mike Sowden….not quite what they were after, I’d wager.

What can I say, we’ve not been eating much of note recently. I promise I’ll try and come up with something interesting to eat on Wednesday- the next point we’ll be eating a normal tea at home.

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).

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!

Very confusingly, I am posting the last few recipes dated by when we cooked them. Which means there are new posts appearing before this entry, and before the one where I say we’ve only got four recipes to go. So seek, and ye shall find!

You lot don’t know this yet, as I have been horribly remiss in my blogging (hey, it’s Christmas!)* but we only have FOUR recipes to go.

*(and I’m back dating all my posts so they’ll cleverly fall into place before this entry and confuse you all!)

I honestly can’t believe we’ve only got 26 recipes to go. We’d have been a couple of months in to the challenge before we’d got that many under our belt, and yet it seems like so few to go. I’ve been wondering for a couple of days when in December we’ll get back to more than a day per recipe remaining; I suspect we may not (apart from perhaps just after our party) as it looks like we may plan to finish on 31st December, with a posh lunch with friends. Those three recipes would mean we’ll be ‘behind’ to the very end. Still…it’s exciting, knowing how close we are.

Those of you keeping a close eye on The Challenge Page will have noticed that we have reached a dark hour. For the first time in the whole challenge- even after our grim, practically cooking-free July and August- we have more recipes remaining than we do days in the year. 32 recipes to 29 days, to be precise. We were still in the game on Friday when I did the Nutella Pancakes (below) but then foolishly we took a weekend off to head to Aberdeen and act like rock stars and do no cooking at all. So now we are behind.

Arguably we’ve been behind since we got to the ‘third of the way through the challenge, half way through the year’ stage, but recently our personal benchmark for success has been that we’ve still more than one day per recipe remaining.

However, all is not lost. We will probably manage two recipes today, and we have the wherewithal now for another dish that had been eluding us. We are still stuck for 300ml-500ml ovenproof pots, for making individual Chicken and Bacon Pies in, if anyone can be of assistance. And then there’s the Christmas Chapter, which means swathes of recipes we can knock down at the Christmas Party or as gifts.

It’ll be FINE.

How’s that pudding going, Mike?