In my despair yesterday over the underdone fried chicken, I failed to say properly how staggeringly good the chicken is, when it's been cooked through. After the Raw Disaster, I put it back in the oven for 15 minutes, then re-heated it for another 20 minutes the next day.
And, oh my God... it was just fantastic. Crunchy, tasty coating, juicy, juicy chicken underneath. It's like a magic trick (even when executed in a particularly sloppy way, re-heated crudely), this brining lark, and I urge all of you to try it, at least once, just to be in on the joke.
We're so excited about it, that we're making it for a dinner party for 10 people on Wednesday. The amount of brine we'll need makes my eyes water, but we'll all be in KFC heaven.
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Saturday, 13 February 2010
How not to deep fry chicken
Well, the chicken was delicious, no thanks to me. Or, rather, no thanks to the deep-fat fryer, which has signed its own death-warrant thanks to it behaviour last night.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Last time, on Recipe Girl:
I was making deep fried chicken according to a recipe from Thomas Keller's excellent 'family-style' cookbook, ad hoc at home. I'd made the rather complicated brine, had several moments of worry regarding weights and measurements, but in the end been rescued by my deeply-felt sense of slapdashed-ness, going at it half-arsed and unprepared and hoping for the best.
This resulted in some lovely organic free-range chicken thighs and drumsticks in this complicated brine, sitting on the floor of my larder for most of yesterday.
[Opening credits - some kind of haphazard music plays, with a montage of me dropping things and crying and being caught unawares drinking deeply from a bottle of cooking marsala.]
At about 6.45pm - a mere 7hrs and 45 minutes of brining time, not the 12 recommended hours - I fished the chicken out, patted it dry and then set about flouring it and 'dredging' it in buttermilk (Keller's words, not mine), before sending it off for its glory time in the deep fat fryer.
The coating, or flouring meant adding to plain flour:
1 tsp paprika
2tsp garlic granules
1 tsp cayenne pepper
salt and black pepper
and then dividing it between two bowls, set either side of a bowl of seasoned buttermilk.
Each chicken piece was coated in flour, then dipped in the buttermilk, then coated in the flour again and then left to rest on some greaseproof paper.
Then in the deep fat fryer they went, three-by-three. And they came out looking gorgeous, really crispy yet plump. I made a salad (green beans with shallot-and-mustard dressing, figs, pecorino, walnuts) and set it all out, called for Giles to come and have a look, took a photo, sat down, poured wine, bit into a drumstick and... red. Really red and bloody and almost raw in the middle. Also staggeringly juicy and flavoursome with no hint of dryness at all - but undercooked. But the deep fat fryer SAID only put it in for 8 minutes. Yes yes you're all laughing your arses off now, I'm sure - who would only cook a bit of chicken with bone in it for 8 minutes? But it SAID IT ON THE THING - 8 minutes for chicken. I know, I know - Keller himself says 11-12 minutes but what does he know? I thought to myself. HE doesn't do it in a deep fat fryer.
But we were starving. And I didn't want to take everything away and ram it back in the deep fat fryer. So we ate around the scary bits, telling ourselves that raw chicken per se is not dangerous and these, being as high-quality as they were, were unlikely to have salmonella. But I felt pretty bad and pretty sheepish after all that time and effort and drum roll and poncing about to dish up raw chicken.
And here's what makes it worse: when you live with the world's most observant, unforgiving and quick-witted man, who makes a living making and breaking chefs, it's not, funnily enough, mean words that you fear.
Giles in a bad mood? Ha! I eat his black looks for breakfast. I laugh in the face of his gimlet-eyed asides, I drop ice cubes down the back of his crushing one-liners. It rolls off me, under me, past me; it's like a knife through water.
No - what kills me, what floors me for days, what sends me wobbly-lipped to hide under my duvet, is when I make a ginormous mess of something - and he is kind.
"Poor you," he said. "All that work. It was so delicious, though, honestly - it just needed a couple more minutes."
And I crumbled.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Last time, on Recipe Girl:
I was making deep fried chicken according to a recipe from Thomas Keller's excellent 'family-style' cookbook, ad hoc at home. I'd made the rather complicated brine, had several moments of worry regarding weights and measurements, but in the end been rescued by my deeply-felt sense of slapdashed-ness, going at it half-arsed and unprepared and hoping for the best.
This resulted in some lovely organic free-range chicken thighs and drumsticks in this complicated brine, sitting on the floor of my larder for most of yesterday.
[Opening credits - some kind of haphazard music plays, with a montage of me dropping things and crying and being caught unawares drinking deeply from a bottle of cooking marsala.]
At about 6.45pm - a mere 7hrs and 45 minutes of brining time, not the 12 recommended hours - I fished the chicken out, patted it dry and then set about flouring it and 'dredging' it in buttermilk (Keller's words, not mine), before sending it off for its glory time in the deep fat fryer.
The coating, or flouring meant adding to plain flour:
1 tsp paprika
2tsp garlic granules
1 tsp cayenne pepper
salt and black pepper
and then dividing it between two bowls, set either side of a bowl of seasoned buttermilk.
Each chicken piece was coated in flour, then dipped in the buttermilk, then coated in the flour again and then left to rest on some greaseproof paper.
Then in the deep fat fryer they went, three-by-three. And they came out looking gorgeous, really crispy yet plump. I made a salad (green beans with shallot-and-mustard dressing, figs, pecorino, walnuts) and set it all out, called for Giles to come and have a look, took a photo, sat down, poured wine, bit into a drumstick and... red. Really red and bloody and almost raw in the middle. Also staggeringly juicy and flavoursome with no hint of dryness at all - but undercooked. But the deep fat fryer SAID only put it in for 8 minutes. Yes yes you're all laughing your arses off now, I'm sure - who would only cook a bit of chicken with bone in it for 8 minutes? But it SAID IT ON THE THING - 8 minutes for chicken. I know, I know - Keller himself says 11-12 minutes but what does he know? I thought to myself. HE doesn't do it in a deep fat fryer.
But we were starving. And I didn't want to take everything away and ram it back in the deep fat fryer. So we ate around the scary bits, telling ourselves that raw chicken per se is not dangerous and these, being as high-quality as they were, were unlikely to have salmonella. But I felt pretty bad and pretty sheepish after all that time and effort and drum roll and poncing about to dish up raw chicken.
And here's what makes it worse: when you live with the world's most observant, unforgiving and quick-witted man, who makes a living making and breaking chefs, it's not, funnily enough, mean words that you fear.
Giles in a bad mood? Ha! I eat his black looks for breakfast. I laugh in the face of his gimlet-eyed asides, I drop ice cubes down the back of his crushing one-liners. It rolls off me, under me, past me; it's like a knife through water.
No - what kills me, what floors me for days, what sends me wobbly-lipped to hide under my duvet, is when I make a ginormous mess of something - and he is kind.
"Poor you," he said. "All that work. It was so delicious, though, honestly - it just needed a couple more minutes."
And I crumbled.
Friday, 12 February 2010
Brining chicken day
It's only 0935 and today has already gone off the rails. It's my fault, which I'm quite surprised about. I'm pretty organised, you see - it's one of my great qualities. I don't lose things. I know my National Insurance number AND my passport number off by heart. I'm never late. It's just sad that these qualities are offset by my monstrous laziness and the fact that whatever I'm doing, I'd so much rather be in bed reading a book or eating an egg sandwich with a lot of salt on it, or watching back-to-back episodes of Glee.
I am mostly really organised and efficient so I get all the neccessary shit done so that at my earliest convenience I can jump back into bed with Nicholson Baker, or get those eggs in a pan, or take a running jump onto the sofa and fire up the V+ box.
But today it's all slipped out of my grasp. Tonight I am making for Giles some Thomas Keller fried chicken, which I've been boring you all about. It's a long process, which involves brining the chicken in a salt-and-herb mixture for 12 hours. Well, that's out of the window immediately, because I didn't do it yesterday and so I had to do it this morning. But by 8am, it was already 12 hours before dinner. And I hadn't made the brine yet, which you have to boil and then ALLOW TO COOL. Damnit all to hell. Why didn't I read the recipe more carefully yesterday?
So now it's cooling down in the kitchen. And my 12 hour soak is being reduced to a 10 hour soak. Will it matter? Will it all just be a terrible waste of time? And then, I was pretty loose in my interpretation of Keller's brine instructions.
Standing blinking and barefoot in the kitchen in front of the ad hoc cookbook, having thrown a teaspoon out of the window at that horrible black cat who always does huge poos in our nice fern garden, (and usually I love cats), I was brought up short at the ingredients for "2 gallons" of brine. O I hate Americans and their stupid strange measurements - cups and gallons and sticks - blast you all! So I took a deep breath and just winged it. I filled a medium sized stewing pot about 4/5 full of water and threw in an approximation of Keller's brining ingredients which were:
3 lemons, halved
One head of garlic, cut across the equator
Bunch of thyme (which I got out of the freezer and just plunged into the pot, refusing to contemplate the idea that it was going to go brown and die - like plunging a lobster into boiling water)
About ten bay leaves
Bunch of parsley
Peppercorns
200g salt (!!!!!!)
About 2 tbsp of honey
I was going to throw in some cloves, but I've tried to be clever in the past like that, with terrible results. So I just left it at that. Then I put the lid on and put it on the scariest burner on my stove and boiled it up, stirred it to dissolve the salt and then left it to cool down. I've just stuck my finger in it and it's almost there. So, I may be able to sneak a 10-hour-ish brining time out of it.
And then there's nothing to do but wait. To kill the time, I could tell you the story of the deep-fat fryer. We got it as a present - or rather, Giles got it as a 39th birthday present. I thought it was quite a funny gift. I didn't know if the present-giver was taking the piss, Giles being a bit of a health freak and everything. But it seemed quite a large and expensive present to give as a joke. Anyway, I was quite pleased with it. For a few months we had regular fried chicken nights (although not working to Thomas Keller's recipe), until it became very obvious that we were going to have to change the oil, which was a quite traumatisingly gross process.
I don't like to think of myself as a squeamish person, but unfortunately I think I might be. I'm not crazy about other people's blood, or being stuck in traffic behind a rubbish van, or our own compost bins, or pulling out all that crap that collects in the kitchen sink plughole strainer. And changing the oil in the deep fat fryer scored about a 7 on a scale of yuck. And then I didn't know what to do with the old oil. I didn't want to throw it down the sink, or in the bin, so I drove it all the way to the dump and put it in the special oil-disposal unit.
Well, after that the deep fat fryer's days were obviously numbered. I'm not doing that more than once a year. Or ever again, frankly. So into a cupboard it went. And I really must get rid of it, now, because it's taking up valuable space that I need for all sorts of other kitchen equipment that has fallen out of favour and needs a half-way-house between the counter top and the shelves of Oxfam.
But I thought that seeing as I now have this ad hoc cookbook with the best fried chicken recipe in the world, I ought to give the old thing a last workout before it finds a new home among the patrons of the Oxfam shop of Kentish Town Road.
9hrs 45min possible brining time left. And I'm not sure what to do with myself for the rest of the day. Glee may be featuring strongly.
I am mostly really organised and efficient so I get all the neccessary shit done so that at my earliest convenience I can jump back into bed with Nicholson Baker, or get those eggs in a pan, or take a running jump onto the sofa and fire up the V+ box.
But today it's all slipped out of my grasp. Tonight I am making for Giles some Thomas Keller fried chicken, which I've been boring you all about. It's a long process, which involves brining the chicken in a salt-and-herb mixture for 12 hours. Well, that's out of the window immediately, because I didn't do it yesterday and so I had to do it this morning. But by 8am, it was already 12 hours before dinner. And I hadn't made the brine yet, which you have to boil and then ALLOW TO COOL. Damnit all to hell. Why didn't I read the recipe more carefully yesterday?
So now it's cooling down in the kitchen. And my 12 hour soak is being reduced to a 10 hour soak. Will it matter? Will it all just be a terrible waste of time? And then, I was pretty loose in my interpretation of Keller's brine instructions.
Standing blinking and barefoot in the kitchen in front of the ad hoc cookbook, having thrown a teaspoon out of the window at that horrible black cat who always does huge poos in our nice fern garden, (and usually I love cats), I was brought up short at the ingredients for "2 gallons" of brine. O I hate Americans and their stupid strange measurements - cups and gallons and sticks - blast you all! So I took a deep breath and just winged it. I filled a medium sized stewing pot about 4/5 full of water and threw in an approximation of Keller's brining ingredients which were:
3 lemons, halved
One head of garlic, cut across the equator
Bunch of thyme (which I got out of the freezer and just plunged into the pot, refusing to contemplate the idea that it was going to go brown and die - like plunging a lobster into boiling water)
About ten bay leaves
Bunch of parsley
Peppercorns
200g salt (!!!!!!)
About 2 tbsp of honey
I was going to throw in some cloves, but I've tried to be clever in the past like that, with terrible results. So I just left it at that. Then I put the lid on and put it on the scariest burner on my stove and boiled it up, stirred it to dissolve the salt and then left it to cool down. I've just stuck my finger in it and it's almost there. So, I may be able to sneak a 10-hour-ish brining time out of it.
And then there's nothing to do but wait. To kill the time, I could tell you the story of the deep-fat fryer. We got it as a present - or rather, Giles got it as a 39th birthday present. I thought it was quite a funny gift. I didn't know if the present-giver was taking the piss, Giles being a bit of a health freak and everything. But it seemed quite a large and expensive present to give as a joke. Anyway, I was quite pleased with it. For a few months we had regular fried chicken nights (although not working to Thomas Keller's recipe), until it became very obvious that we were going to have to change the oil, which was a quite traumatisingly gross process.
I don't like to think of myself as a squeamish person, but unfortunately I think I might be. I'm not crazy about other people's blood, or being stuck in traffic behind a rubbish van, or our own compost bins, or pulling out all that crap that collects in the kitchen sink plughole strainer. And changing the oil in the deep fat fryer scored about a 7 on a scale of yuck. And then I didn't know what to do with the old oil. I didn't want to throw it down the sink, or in the bin, so I drove it all the way to the dump and put it in the special oil-disposal unit.
Well, after that the deep fat fryer's days were obviously numbered. I'm not doing that more than once a year. Or ever again, frankly. So into a cupboard it went. And I really must get rid of it, now, because it's taking up valuable space that I need for all sorts of other kitchen equipment that has fallen out of favour and needs a half-way-house between the counter top and the shelves of Oxfam.
But I thought that seeing as I now have this ad hoc cookbook with the best fried chicken recipe in the world, I ought to give the old thing a last workout before it finds a new home among the patrons of the Oxfam shop of Kentish Town Road.
9hrs 45min possible brining time left. And I'm not sure what to do with myself for the rest of the day. Glee may be featuring strongly.
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Recipe testing
I've spent today - well, part of today - making a green curry. It's to test a recipe for the new Leon cookbook (which I may have mentioned 80 or 90 times), which is out in September.
I asked if I could write about it, because I like nothing more than sneak previews, and they said hell yes! Write about it! But don't include the recipe. And I thought, oh right. Um. So I've done some really blog-worthy cooking but I can't give you the details.
But I think I can get around it by saying that if you were to add three good lumps of green curry paste to about 200ml of coconut milk and stir in strips of chicken and some bamboo shoots and a slug of nam pla - or fish sauce - and some soya beans and then cook it for about 10 minutes you might get something really delicious. I have changed the recipe very slightly so this is NOT the one from the Leon cookbook, but it may very well bear similarities.
I have also today been reading up on Thomas Keller's deep-fried chicken that was so out of this world, which I'm going to make tomorrow night for the deep fat fryer's last hurrah before it goes to Oxfam.
The secret, I read, is to brine the chicken in a salty mixture for 12 hours before cooking. I really don't know what the rule is about copying recipes out on blogs. I've done it before and no-one seemed to care, but Keller is American and therefore I fear he may be wildly litigious. Anyway, I'm just going to go for it and hope that it's just totally fine. Or that no-one notices.
I asked if I could write about it, because I like nothing more than sneak previews, and they said hell yes! Write about it! But don't include the recipe. And I thought, oh right. Um. So I've done some really blog-worthy cooking but I can't give you the details.
But I think I can get around it by saying that if you were to add three good lumps of green curry paste to about 200ml of coconut milk and stir in strips of chicken and some bamboo shoots and a slug of nam pla - or fish sauce - and some soya beans and then cook it for about 10 minutes you might get something really delicious. I have changed the recipe very slightly so this is NOT the one from the Leon cookbook, but it may very well bear similarities.
I have also today been reading up on Thomas Keller's deep-fried chicken that was so out of this world, which I'm going to make tomorrow night for the deep fat fryer's last hurrah before it goes to Oxfam.
The secret, I read, is to brine the chicken in a salty mixture for 12 hours before cooking. I really don't know what the rule is about copying recipes out on blogs. I've done it before and no-one seemed to care, but Keller is American and therefore I fear he may be wildly litigious. Anyway, I'm just going to go for it and hope that it's just totally fine. Or that no-one notices.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
ad hoc
I sat down at my desk this morning feeling gloomy and despondant, as I am wont. It was snowing AGAIN, little flakes of hell drifting down from the sky making everything cold, making Spring seem even further away. I had woken up in the night feeling monstrously sick (am I dying again? Or was it the 18 drinks + massive supper + red velvet cupcake that did it?) and spent a few sleepless hours listening hard, straining my little ears, for burglars.
So I was tired, bilious and grumpy as I turned on my laptop. And I had run out of things to say. The cupboard was bare. I had an inkling of an idea to write about making choux pastry, as I'd seen a thing in the paper about how eclairs are the new cupcake but then I thought "Urgh, more pastry, more sweeties, more sugar - do not want."
I was all ready to leap from my window in despair when two things happened.
The first was an email from my very stylish former colleague at the Evening Standard, Sophia, who now works in Dubai, to say that I now have international readers! And to also say her friend Katie had made the quinoa risotto and it had been a success.
Well, what can I say? I cheered up immediately.
And then there was a ring on the doorbell. And it was a nice man with a package for Giles. So I opened it and it was... dun dun.... Thomas Keller's new recipe book from his Napa Valley restaurant ad hoc! It's called "ad hoc at home". For some reason Keller's not crazy about CAPITAL LETTERS (his New York restaurant is called "per se").
"What is it?" called Giles from upstairs.
"Nothing!" I shrieked. "Just an Amazon thing for me." And I scurried back to my room, cackling, with the cookbook under my sweater.
So, Thomas Keller - he owns the French Laundry, that very smart, very modern restaurant, also in Napa Valley; it constantly wins all those Best Restaurant in the Universe prizes. Only we went two years ago and had a terrible time. Just awful. And I don't mean that in a "posh-food-is-all-rubbish" way, I just mean that we didn't have a nice time.
The fact that we were practically in this man's HOUSE, eating the world's most famous food, paying through the nose to do so, only made the whole thing so much worse. There was just too much food. There - I said it! TOO MUCH! There were something like 24 courses and I wanted to kill myself after course #12. I started to sweat and gibber, and nod off at the table. I had to go outside into the cool American night air to walk around the gardens and slap myself round the face in order to go back for course #13.
I know. Don't say it! I am aware of the ingratitude, of the philistinism of saying that there is "Too much food" at the French Laundry, but that's just how I felt. How I still feel.
But THEN we went to Ad Hoc, sorry - ad hoc - Thomas Keller's other Napa Valley restaurant - it's the kind of restaurant that Americans describe as "family style", which I think roughly translates as "relaxed". And Ad Hoc is relaxed, in that way that Americans do "relaxed", which means that the service matches any of the best restaurants in London and everything is spotless, chic and fun.
We had fried chicken, which had been marinated all night in a herb lemon brine and then dipped in buttermilk (obviously) and was just unbelievable. They also do a thing at ad hoc where the vegetables are all really interesting and the salads are practically as tasty as the hot, fatty, salty chicken.
And, the ultimate accolade - it's where Thomas Keller is most often seen off-duty. So there you go, we agree with each other on something.
So, as you can imagine, I'm pretty excited about this cookbook, and it'll probably make a few appearances here. I'm at that stage in my life where a cookbook full of the most artfully created "family-style" cooking in the world does wonders for a bad mood.
So I was tired, bilious and grumpy as I turned on my laptop. And I had run out of things to say. The cupboard was bare. I had an inkling of an idea to write about making choux pastry, as I'd seen a thing in the paper about how eclairs are the new cupcake but then I thought "Urgh, more pastry, more sweeties, more sugar - do not want."
I was all ready to leap from my window in despair when two things happened.
The first was an email from my very stylish former colleague at the Evening Standard, Sophia, who now works in Dubai, to say that I now have international readers! And to also say her friend Katie had made the quinoa risotto and it had been a success.
Well, what can I say? I cheered up immediately.
And then there was a ring on the doorbell. And it was a nice man with a package for Giles. So I opened it and it was... dun dun.... Thomas Keller's new recipe book from his Napa Valley restaurant ad hoc! It's called "ad hoc at home". For some reason Keller's not crazy about CAPITAL LETTERS (his New York restaurant is called "per se").
"What is it?" called Giles from upstairs.
"Nothing!" I shrieked. "Just an Amazon thing for me." And I scurried back to my room, cackling, with the cookbook under my sweater.
So, Thomas Keller - he owns the French Laundry, that very smart, very modern restaurant, also in Napa Valley; it constantly wins all those Best Restaurant in the Universe prizes. Only we went two years ago and had a terrible time. Just awful. And I don't mean that in a "posh-food-is-all-rubbish" way, I just mean that we didn't have a nice time.
The fact that we were practically in this man's HOUSE, eating the world's most famous food, paying through the nose to do so, only made the whole thing so much worse. There was just too much food. There - I said it! TOO MUCH! There were something like 24 courses and I wanted to kill myself after course #12. I started to sweat and gibber, and nod off at the table. I had to go outside into the cool American night air to walk around the gardens and slap myself round the face in order to go back for course #13.
I know. Don't say it! I am aware of the ingratitude, of the philistinism of saying that there is "Too much food" at the French Laundry, but that's just how I felt. How I still feel.
But THEN we went to Ad Hoc, sorry - ad hoc - Thomas Keller's other Napa Valley restaurant - it's the kind of restaurant that Americans describe as "family style", which I think roughly translates as "relaxed". And Ad Hoc is relaxed, in that way that Americans do "relaxed", which means that the service matches any of the best restaurants in London and everything is spotless, chic and fun.
We had fried chicken, which had been marinated all night in a herb lemon brine and then dipped in buttermilk (obviously) and was just unbelievable. They also do a thing at ad hoc where the vegetables are all really interesting and the salads are practically as tasty as the hot, fatty, salty chicken.
And, the ultimate accolade - it's where Thomas Keller is most often seen off-duty. So there you go, we agree with each other on something.
So, as you can imagine, I'm pretty excited about this cookbook, and it'll probably make a few appearances here. I'm at that stage in my life where a cookbook full of the most artfully created "family-style" cooking in the world does wonders for a bad mood.
Monday, 8 February 2010
Valentine's Day
When I was younger and always had boyfriends who didn't like me, I was forced to dismiss Valentine's Day as something that didn't matter.
On about February 6th, whichever boyfriend who didn't like me I was with would say: "You don't actually want to DO something for Valentine's Day do you? I mean, do you actually want flowers?!" And I would say "No! Don't be stupid" and then I would be crushed when they really didn't do anything. And I would sit at work on Valentine's Day and watch as all the other girls, (who had been clever and threatened their boyfriends with castration if they didn't get onto Wild At Heart pronto and cough up BIG BUCKS), graciously and coyly receive bouquets of flowers so huge they interfered with their keyboards.
And then I got a nice boyfriend, and his name was Giles. And I confessed to him everything. I said "The thing is that it's not like I'm a spoilt cow and want presents all the time and stuff, but when you're sitting at work and everyone gets flowers except you it's just so *sniff* SO HORRIBLE *HOWL* and you feel SO UNLOVED *waaaaah*." And he said "Okay I'll send you flowers on Valentine's Day."
That year I got a bunch of flowers so ginormous that they prevented me from typing anything for two days and everyone complained about them for the three months I kept them on my desk.
But my point is that Valentine's Day matters. I have a feeling that I'm preaching to the converted, but I want every girl to be able to say to their boyfriend or husband without fear of recrimination "Valentine's Day matters. It might not matter to YOU, but it matters to ME." Not paying heed to Valentine's Day because it's "so commercial" or "so fake" or whatever other excuse they come up with not to put their hands in their pockets, is like refusing to buy Christmas presents. What are you left with? Nothing. £40 (MINIMUM) that you'll only go and spend on drink.
On about February 6th, whichever boyfriend who didn't like me I was with would say: "You don't actually want to DO something for Valentine's Day do you? I mean, do you actually want flowers?!" And I would say "No! Don't be stupid" and then I would be crushed when they really didn't do anything. And I would sit at work on Valentine's Day and watch as all the other girls, (who had been clever and threatened their boyfriends with castration if they didn't get onto Wild At Heart pronto and cough up BIG BUCKS), graciously and coyly receive bouquets of flowers so huge they interfered with their keyboards.
And then I got a nice boyfriend, and his name was Giles. And I confessed to him everything. I said "The thing is that it's not like I'm a spoilt cow and want presents all the time and stuff, but when you're sitting at work and everyone gets flowers except you it's just so *sniff* SO HORRIBLE *HOWL* and you feel SO UNLOVED *waaaaah*." And he said "Okay I'll send you flowers on Valentine's Day."
That year I got a bunch of flowers so ginormous that they prevented me from typing anything for two days and everyone complained about them for the three months I kept them on my desk.
But my point is that Valentine's Day matters. I have a feeling that I'm preaching to the converted, but I want every girl to be able to say to their boyfriend or husband without fear of recrimination "Valentine's Day matters. It might not matter to YOU, but it matters to ME." Not paying heed to Valentine's Day because it's "so commercial" or "so fake" or whatever other excuse they come up with not to put their hands in their pockets, is like refusing to buy Christmas presents. What are you left with? Nothing. £40 (MINIMUM) that you'll only go and spend on drink.
So it matters, it matters to ME. And although there's so much stuff about it and it all gets quite boring, I am going to add my own little devotional act here in anticipation of the great day. So I've got for you one recipe for Red Velvet cupcakes and one plug for a Valentine's Day cookie service.
And for anyone who's still lingering on the edge of Valentine's Day sceptisim, this year it falls on a Sunday, so if nothing happens, there's no-one to see.
Red Velvet Cupcakes
I first came across these when I was working on the features desk of a newspaper. Someone on the desk was writing about the ten best cupcakes and for a week, we were besieged with giant boxes full of massive foamy cupcakes decorated with more and more outlandish sparkly whatnots, little high heels made out of sugar and plastic butterflies. I ate so many (neatly spitting out the plastic butterflies when one accidentally went in) it nearly put me right off sugar. But only nearly.
One day during this onslaught, when we were all lying around on the floor groaning with our hands clutching our tummies, a box arrived from the Magnolia Bakery and we opened it and all went "?"
Inside was a box of bright red cupcakes with white icing. "Red... Velvet... cupcakes..." someone read out from the note attached. I bit into one and it was like biting into... I don't know... I suppose it was like biting into red velvet. It was like cake, but made of silk. And it was red, red, red, with a creamy white icing. It was like a cupcake from outer space. But then I Googled "red velvet cupcakes" and it turned out that they weren't from outer space, they were from America.
Like most delicious things from America, they are made with buttermilk. We don't really cook with buttermilk in this country, which is a shame, because it makes all kinds of really excellent things. They cook with it a lot in Ireland - which is probably, now I come to think of it, how it got over to America in the first place. I understand buttermilk is available pretty much everywhere in Ireland. Here, the only place I've found it is in my local organic wholefoods shop, Earth, on Kentish Town High Street - but I think St Ivel do a version you can buy in larger branches of Waitrose.
You can also make your own, using lemon juice and milk; to one tablespoon of lemon juice you add enough milk to make 225ml in total of liquid and then let it stand for five minutes. I think you need the milk to be at room temperature before you start. I must say that I haven't actually tried this, but I'm reliably informed that it works fine, althoug I think it does go sort of lumpy so don't throw it away in horror if this happens.
Other than the blasted buttermilk, the only other nasty surprise in this recipe, which is from the Magnolia Bakery itself, is the quantity of red food colouring required - it needs 6 tablespoons, which works out as being nearly two of those little bottles of food colouring you can buy.
And try not to be frightened of the vinegar-and-baking powder mixture that happens about half way through the recipe - your cupcakes will not taste like vinegar! I have absolutely no idea what this reaction does to the baking process, but it seems to be quite vital.
Alas, this recipe didn't really work out for me. Neither did the icing. But I have faithfully written out the recipes as they stand - so attempt them at your own risk...
(Makes 24)
500g plain flour
165g unsalted, soft butter
500g sugar
3 large eggs
6 tbsp food colouring
3tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
1.5 tsp salt
330ml buttermilk
1.5 tsp cider or white vinegar
1.5 tsp baking soda.
1 - Preheat oven to 180C/gas mark 4. In a small bowl, sift the plain flour. Set aside. In a large bowl cream the butter until smooth by hand or with an electric whisk. Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about three minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
2 - Whisk together the red food colouring, cocoa powder and vanilla. Add to the batter and beat well.
3 - Stir the salt in with the buttermilk and add the resulting liquid to your red batter in three parts, alternating with flour. With each addition, beat only until the ingredient that you have added has disappeared, in a kind of folding motion.
4 - In a small bowl, stir together the cider vinegar and baking soda and add to the batter and mix well. The vinegar and baking powder will fizz up like mad so don't freak out if this happens.
5 - Divide the mixture into cases, then bake for 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean.
Cool the cupcakes in the tins for 15 minutes. Remove from the tins and cool completely on a wire rack before slathering on the icing.
For the icing:
6 tbsp plain flour
440ml milk
450g unsalted butter, softened
450g sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
The recipe I've got forgot to include a method for the icing, but I'd imagine you cream the butter and then add the other ingredients and it'll come out as icing. Alas, I decided to be clever and make a marscapone cheese icing and it went horribly wrong - it tasted fine but started leaking this sort of watery sludge, so we'll skip over that.
Cookie plug
If your arms sore as hell from cooking and can't face all that beating, but you'd still like to give an edible Valentine's Day present, Millie's Cookies are offering a service where you can order a 12-inch heart-shaped biscuit with a personalised message on it (up to 20 characters). It takes 2 hours and costs £14.99; you can ring ahead to your nearest store and collect it when it's ready.
Freezing herbs: don't do it
I don't usually like to write about disasters - unless it's in the context of being useful. For example, I don't think you need to know that the other week I made a fillet of pork with figs and marsala, and that it was bland, pointless and bad, unless I was also going to write about a recipe for pork fillet that was delicious and handy.
But I undertook, for the sake of this blog, an experiment with freezing herbs at the beginning of last week and I thought I would share the massively disappointing results with you. It all started when Giles mentioned casually to me the other week that his mother used to make a lot of gravalax and kept bags of dill in the freezer to make it with - and a small light went on over my head.
The ebb and flow of herbs through my kitchen occupies me greatly. From my garden I can harvest Savoury, which is sort of like thyme but not quite, and Sage, which I have to scrub in hot water to get rid of the strong smell of cat wee (there are approximately 2.5 cats per house in our street and collectively their favourite place to crap and piss, and murder song birds, seems to be our garden). From Sainsbury's up the road I can get parsley and sometimes coriander - but they only come in those pots, which I don't want because you get one handful out of them and then they sit next to the sink slowly dying, despite my best efforts.
For anything more exciting - mint, dill, scented thyme - I must go to Waitrose.
And herbs are vital because they make boring things interesting. Cous cous with tomato and cucumber: boring. Cous cous with tomato, cucumber, parsley and mint: interesting. But as I stand, hungry, in larder doorway, knowing that what is going to really liven up my lunch is a packet of fresh mint, I am not going to actually get in the car to go and fetch some. So the idea of freezing herbs seemed just marvellous - I would have an array of magic leaves at my fingertips to snazz up a bowl of grains.
I was cackling with joy as I drove to Waitrose on my mission to buy a range of herbs to freeze. I thought I would grow famous as the woman to bring a frozen herb revolution to the UK. I could write a cookbook "Cooking with frozen herbs".
But, alas, there's a reason why people don't freeze herbs and that's because when you take them out of the freezer they collapse and die in a brown, stinking heap. Well - mint and coriander do anyway. I've still got bags of dill, sage and thyme in the freezer, which I now don't dare release from their frozen idyll. I really, really thought it was going to work because when I looked at the frozen herbs in the packet they looked fab - caught at their most fresh and perky, but the freezing process seem to do unspeakable things to them, once you release them from the sub-zero clutch.
So that's that. Don't you feel depressed now? Because I do. That's why I try not to write about disasters.
But I undertook, for the sake of this blog, an experiment with freezing herbs at the beginning of last week and I thought I would share the massively disappointing results with you. It all started when Giles mentioned casually to me the other week that his mother used to make a lot of gravalax and kept bags of dill in the freezer to make it with - and a small light went on over my head.
The ebb and flow of herbs through my kitchen occupies me greatly. From my garden I can harvest Savoury, which is sort of like thyme but not quite, and Sage, which I have to scrub in hot water to get rid of the strong smell of cat wee (there are approximately 2.5 cats per house in our street and collectively their favourite place to crap and piss, and murder song birds, seems to be our garden). From Sainsbury's up the road I can get parsley and sometimes coriander - but they only come in those pots, which I don't want because you get one handful out of them and then they sit next to the sink slowly dying, despite my best efforts.
For anything more exciting - mint, dill, scented thyme - I must go to Waitrose.
And herbs are vital because they make boring things interesting. Cous cous with tomato and cucumber: boring. Cous cous with tomato, cucumber, parsley and mint: interesting. But as I stand, hungry, in larder doorway, knowing that what is going to really liven up my lunch is a packet of fresh mint, I am not going to actually get in the car to go and fetch some. So the idea of freezing herbs seemed just marvellous - I would have an array of magic leaves at my fingertips to snazz up a bowl of grains.
I was cackling with joy as I drove to Waitrose on my mission to buy a range of herbs to freeze. I thought I would grow famous as the woman to bring a frozen herb revolution to the UK. I could write a cookbook "Cooking with frozen herbs".
But, alas, there's a reason why people don't freeze herbs and that's because when you take them out of the freezer they collapse and die in a brown, stinking heap. Well - mint and coriander do anyway. I've still got bags of dill, sage and thyme in the freezer, which I now don't dare release from their frozen idyll. I really, really thought it was going to work because when I looked at the frozen herbs in the packet they looked fab - caught at their most fresh and perky, but the freezing process seem to do unspeakable things to them, once you release them from the sub-zero clutch.
So that's that. Don't you feel depressed now? Because I do. That's why I try not to write about disasters.
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