Diet time

So, I'm on a diet. I'm getting married at the end of next month and I've just realised that the reason people get really thin before they get married is because they go on a diet. I thought the weight just miraculously fell off due to stress or something.

But no, actually you have to stop drinking and go for a run and stop eating rounds of toast covered in Nutella while you watch 12 back-to-back episodes of Judge Judy that you recorded on the V+ box. For example.

Yesterday I went shopping and bought diet food. That is, I bought cheese and a lot of vegetables like kale and spinach and bok choi and broccoli and some artichoke hearts in a jar. And I also bought some chicken livers and chorizo. Carb-free - that's the secret to upper arms like Sandra Bullock when you're 40. I am so pleased Sandra Bullock won an Oscar. I don't know why but I just think she's nice and is probably deserves it after all her hard work in movies like 28 Days, Speed and Miss Congeniality.

Anyway so last night I had my first diet dinner of grilled chicken thighs and a broad bean salad.

When I was younger, I always thought that the easy thing to cook was chicken breasts, under a grill. But it turns out that they are as dry as cotton wool and boring as hell if you grill them. The things to grill are chicken thighs, which stay juicy, but they are still relatively quick to cook - about 25-30 mins under a hot grill. And a broad bean salad can be cheered up with some feta, broccoli and artichoke hearts and a lemony, salty dressing with mint and dill.

It's still freezing outside and this is rather a summery dinner but I just don't want to eat anymore GOD DAMNED stew.

So here we go:

For 2

4 chicken thighs

two large handfuls of broad beans

about eight small florets of broccoli

8 or so artichoke hearts

100g of feta, cubed

olive oil

salt

pepper

thyme

lemon juice

mint

dill

There are a lot of herbs here, I know - I use herbs more when I'm on a diet to liven up boring diet food and bought a lorry-load especially on Monday morning. None of them are especially compulsary, this would still be okay without them. You might also notice that I haven't included any garlic - this is because I don't eat raw garlic, but feel free to add it in to the dressing or to the chicken marinade if you do.

1 - Turn on the grill and marinade the chicken thighs (if you've got time) in some olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper and thyme. If you're just putting the chicken straight under the grill, sprinkle a bit of salt on the skin so it goes crispy. Grill these for about 25-30 minutes and check they're done before serving. I know, stupid thing to say, but I am constantly being caught out by slightly underdone chicken. It doesn't help that often in a pack of 4 chicken thighs, 2 will be enormous and 2 will be tiny, meaning differing cooking times.

2 - Boil the broad beans and broccoli for about 5 minutes each and drain.

3 - Mix together the oil, lemon, salt, pepper, mint and dill in a dressing according to your taste. If you're using a very grassy olive oil, you might like to mix in some ground nut oil as well. I hate it when recipes say "according to taste" but, genuinely, you might hate mint and love lemon - or something.

4 - Put the broccoli, beans, artichoke hearts and feta in a salad bowl, pour over dressing and toss together.

5 - Let the chicken thighs rest for 10-15 minutes to avoid post-cooking rubberiness. You may want to squeeze over the chicken some extra lemon, as Giles is doing in the picture above.

How not to make hot cross buns

So, here they are in all their burnt glory: my hot cross buns. Thanks a bunch, Delia.

Ok fine. It's not Delia's fault, it's my fault. I've got a fan oven and I always forget to adjust the temperature down by about 10-20C to prevent the oven setting fire to whatever it is I'm baking.

I also blithely igored her warning not to use easy-blend dried yeast, which I think may have contributed to the rather hard outer-shells of my buns. So nul points to moi.

Despite being burnt and rock-hard, these are mega-tasty. They take about 2 hours to make and if you've got any interest in trying them out, this is a very good recipe, flavour-wise. They really do taste just like hot cross buns.

You can find the recipe here: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/sweet/hot-cross-buns.html

Just remember to turn the temperature down a bit if you've got a fan oven...

Egg poaching for dummies

I can't poach eggs. I just can't - it's like I can't cook rice. It just doesn't work for me. Please don't tell me that I need to make sure the eggs are really fresh or to put vinegar in the water or swirl it round and make a vortex or any of that, because I've TRIED IT and it doesn't work. I think it takes a steadier hand, or more patience, or something, but it's just not in my nature. Maybe it's because I'm a Taurus.

So I was intrigued when I was flicking through Peter Gordon's latest cookbook, fusion, by a recipe where he poaches eggs in a little cling-film parcel. I doubt it's because he, like me, can't poach eggs, but because he's poaching them with black vinegar (I had to look this up - it's a kind of Chinese rice vinegar), truffle oil, chilli and spring onion.

It's a pretty neat idea and it works (although the above picture is of just a plain egg poached in cling film, without the chilli and other exciting things) - kind of. I found that the 8 minutes cooking time PG recommended was a bit too long, but that, at a guess, was because my eggs weren't hot-off-the-hay-fresh.

Anyway here is the recipe for the poached eggs, found on p. 26 of Peter Gordon's excellent and exotic book. He serves the egg as a sort of starter-thing, on a bed of parmesan mashed potato and it goes like this:

1 egg

1 tsp black vinegar (you can get it from Waitrose...)

1 tsp white truffle oil

1 spring onion, chopped

1/2 red chilli, de-seeded and chopped

1 - Unroll about 40 cm of clingfilm and fold it over on itself to make a double thickness. Line a teacup with the film and put in the tsp of vinegar and the truffle oil.

2 - Scatter in some of the spring onion and chilli. Then crack in one egg.

3 - Gather up the sides of the cling film and tie at the top with a rubber band or a freezer bag tie. Here PG is keen you should leave no air bubbles inside (I guess so that the egg doesn't just float to the top of the pan when it's poaching, although I must have left some air in because mine did this, although it didn't affect its cooking much).

4 - Drop the egg bag into some boiling water and rapidly simmer it for 8 minutes if your egg is really fresh and a bit less if more mature. To unwrap the eggs, snip the tied-up top with some scissors if it's easier.

This method allows you to scatter all sorts of things that don't need a lot of cooking (or actually, even cooked things, little snippets of crispy bacon?) in with the egg and then poach it altogether in a little parcel, which looks pretty cool and clever. Which, come on admit it, is what we all long to be.

Nothing to do with food...

.... just a really nice sunset (although with Giles' head slightly in the way).

Flossie the Hamburgler

So, there are a few changes to Recipe Girl. It's no longer Recipe Girl, for starters, but Recipe Rifle. It's all my sister's fault (that is her in the picture above). My sister is called Florence and she is 21 and she is the only computer nerd I know who wears Marc Jacobs. I bought her a pair of Louboutins for her 21st birthday and I now really regret it. I should have got her a Beano and a tube of Pringles and kept the shoes for myself.

She said to me the other day in the brutal, but matter-of-fact way she has: "Your blog is really lame. You need more photos and a search button and a sitemeter." She gave me a bored look as she casually re-directed $0.001 off the paycheque of every United States citizen with a social security number into her Barclays student current account. Then she popped another brownie into her mouth and said "and the name is just stupid. You're nearly 30. Just call it Recipe Rifle. I mean, that's a crap name too, but better than Recipe GIRL." She looked me up and down in that judgmental way that thin people or French people do. I mean, she's not French, but you get my meaning. She is thin, though. For such a giant asshole, she is very thin indeed.

So there we are - it's a bit different. I must say, it's spooky to be able to see where all my differnt visitors are coming from. Or actually, maybe it's nice. It means you are real, not just figments of my imagination.

Florence has a hamburger recipe that she wants to share with you all, which is good timing because I wanted to do something - now barbeque weather isn't out of the realms of imaginations - on burgers. So when she gets off her fat lazy student butthole and passes it on to me, it will, verily, be yours, too.

Good reason to buy an apple corer

I had forgotten all about baked apple puddings until I came across this recipe in a newspaper. My mum used to make a lot of baked-apple puddings and they were always my favourite.

This works very well. All the sugar melts and escapes out into the roasting pan, but when you put the apples onto the plate or bowl, you can spoon the melted sugar out and heap it over the top.

(for 6)

6 cooking apples
120g butter
6 tbsp raisins
4 tbsp brown sugar

1 - Heat oven to 190C. Core the apples and score with a knife around the equator of each apple.
2 - Stuff sugar, raisings and a knob of butter into each apple
3 - Bake for 25-30 mins and serve with cream or creme fraiche

Yes.

Bad mood buns

I am in a very bad mood. I won't bore you with the details because I don't want you to slip into a coma and die. But if I DID tell you the story you'd be like "Oh yeah that would put me in a really bad mood, too."

So I'm in this bad mood, and I'm raging my way back home, on the tube, off the tube, past the stupid Kentish Town Forum "No I don't want tickets to fucking Groove Armada, go away AND DIE!!!!!" And I stamped into the house after flicking a V sign at the horrible black cat who shits in our garden and aimed a kick at it, but it took off (I wasn't REALLY going to kick it) and threw off all my clothes until I was down to leggings and a vest and my apron and did two things.

1) I started to cook a stew (at 9.15pm at night)
2) Started to comfort eat

Both of these things were surprising to me. Most of the time, I feel like my role as a cook-foodie-person is completely bogus. I don't *really* know the first thing about food and couldn't give a rat's ass for bumming Borough market or finding a supplier for the most "marvellous BURRRRAAAAAATA darling" and at pretty much any time of the day if you said to me "Shall we go to McDonald's" I'd say "Start the car, I'll go and put on some stretchy trousers."

But on the tube on the way home, raging away, all I wanted to do when I got home was to sit down with a large stack of cookbooks. Maybe make some pancakes. DEFINITELY do a stew with those lamb shanks before they get a bit tired. And it was then that I thought that maybe I'm not a total fraud. Again and again, I return to the stove. Not usually to eat, but to bash pans, chop, stir angrily, slide something into a roiling oven.

But then I started comfort eating aswell - a worrying turn of events. I don't comfort eat. Ever. I eat when I am hungry and stop when I'm not. I'll eat some chocolate because I fancy it. I never eat just because I'm pissed off - but I did tonight. FOUR BROWNIES. And a fifth isn't out of the realms of possibility. I wonder what it all means?

Anyway, I was supposed to make hot cross buns ages ago but keep being distracted by stupid pointless things that take up all my time and piss me off. And I've just looked at the recipe and I haven't got two really significant ingredients, so a flour-based celebration of the crucifixion and reurrection of Jesus Christ is just going to have to wait until I can get down to Waitrose for some mixed peel.