How utterly utterly ridiculous of me to flag up Hugh FW's wonderful-sounding mango and steak salad thing and then wander off and not make it, like the fool I am. I haven't made it yet because a) it's raining and b) my car has broken down and c) I keep getting drunk and being really hungover the next day, which makes me really really not want to put on my welly boots and walk to Sainsbury's in Camden Town. I am scared of the Camden Town Sainsbury's. It's the place where all the crazy people in North London like to hang out.
But people quite rightly want to make this damned thing now, so I thought I'd post up the recipe, untested. It looks pretty straightforward and if anyone wants to try it out and email me what they think about it I'll post it up here. And then one day, when my car is fixed, I might make it for myself.
So, it's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe for Mango, Avocado and Steak Salad from p. 57 of Saturday's Guardian Magazine and available here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/20/fairtrade-recipes-hugh-fearnley-whittingstall
N.B. I did make this in the end and it went really well. Easy and yummy. The only thing I would say is that there is WAY too much garlic (unless you're a real garlic fiend). There was so much that it kept waking me up in the middle of the night. If I was going to make this again, I'd halve the quantities all round - maybe leave the raw stuff out of the dressing altogether.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Sunday, 21 February 2010
100!!!
I was all ready to write a long dirge wondering why I get the Sunday blues so badly when I haven't got a job and my life is pretty much one long moment waiting to take something out of the oven, interspersed with periods of wondering what it was I came upstairs for.
But then as I shuffled onto the blog to have a big moan, I saw that I've got 100 followers!!! This calls for some serious celebration, but I can't think what. Maybe I'll just get incredibly drunk this evening, starting in 8 minutes' time (it is 17.49, 18.00 being officially Booze Time in our house) for a) festivity and b) to forget my Sunday blues.
I was thinking a lot about steak today. Hugh FW wrote in the Guardian magazine yesterday about steak salad and it got me to thinking about why I never, ever cook steak. And I think it's because it feels a bit to me like cheating. Cooking a steak is a piece of piss. You just COOK it and then leave it for ten minutes and then eat it with salad. Fine, you can pour over 15 different kinds of sauces and blah blah but basically steak is nice and I don't need to do something creative with it. All things being equal, I'd just buy fillet steak all the time and serve it with very crunchy, salty, thin chips. I'm also so much of a po-faced, no-fun protestant that steak always seems to me magnificently profligate.
It's the same with pasta. Pasta is just delicious no matter what you do to it, so don't give me an interesting recipe for it, okay? Because when it comes to pasta, I don't need help.
This doesn't include, by the way, that recipe for posh mac and cheese because that's strictly - to my mind - a solution to a dinner party problem, rather than an interesting thing to do with pasta.
The recipes I really like are ones which take a 5 week-old stick of celery and the cheapest part of a chicken (gizzard) and turn it, with the help of a garlic clove, stock and some stale bread, into an interesting thing.
But then I saw Hugh FW's exotic-looking steak salad and thought that maybe I'm being too much of an inverse snob. The recipe was for a mango, coriander, chilli, avocado and steak salad, along with a marinade and a dressing, (which always look complicated but never are), and it got me thinking that that might actually be worth doing. I can't just serve ceviche as a starter forever. I need a new trick and this might be it. And anyway, 3 lumps of rump steak are probably cheaper than a whole lot of top-quality firm white fish, if we're going to be all Oliver Cromwell about it.
I haven't made it yet but when I do, I'll report back. I've got a good feeling about it.
Until then - congratulations to us on our centenary!!! Where's the bottle opener?
But then as I shuffled onto the blog to have a big moan, I saw that I've got 100 followers!!! This calls for some serious celebration, but I can't think what. Maybe I'll just get incredibly drunk this evening, starting in 8 minutes' time (it is 17.49, 18.00 being officially Booze Time in our house) for a) festivity and b) to forget my Sunday blues.
I was thinking a lot about steak today. Hugh FW wrote in the Guardian magazine yesterday about steak salad and it got me to thinking about why I never, ever cook steak. And I think it's because it feels a bit to me like cheating. Cooking a steak is a piece of piss. You just COOK it and then leave it for ten minutes and then eat it with salad. Fine, you can pour over 15 different kinds of sauces and blah blah but basically steak is nice and I don't need to do something creative with it. All things being equal, I'd just buy fillet steak all the time and serve it with very crunchy, salty, thin chips. I'm also so much of a po-faced, no-fun protestant that steak always seems to me magnificently profligate.
It's the same with pasta. Pasta is just delicious no matter what you do to it, so don't give me an interesting recipe for it, okay? Because when it comes to pasta, I don't need help.
This doesn't include, by the way, that recipe for posh mac and cheese because that's strictly - to my mind - a solution to a dinner party problem, rather than an interesting thing to do with pasta.
The recipes I really like are ones which take a 5 week-old stick of celery and the cheapest part of a chicken (gizzard) and turn it, with the help of a garlic clove, stock and some stale bread, into an interesting thing.
But then I saw Hugh FW's exotic-looking steak salad and thought that maybe I'm being too much of an inverse snob. The recipe was for a mango, coriander, chilli, avocado and steak salad, along with a marinade and a dressing, (which always look complicated but never are), and it got me thinking that that might actually be worth doing. I can't just serve ceviche as a starter forever. I need a new trick and this might be it. And anyway, 3 lumps of rump steak are probably cheaper than a whole lot of top-quality firm white fish, if we're going to be all Oliver Cromwell about it.
I haven't made it yet but when I do, I'll report back. I've got a good feeling about it.
Until then - congratulations to us on our centenary!!! Where's the bottle opener?
Friday, 19 February 2010
Marmalade
I made marmalade yesterday. I have to write that down because I'm still really quite surprised about it. Although everyone who makes something a bit complicated, like marmalade or a pork pie or a souffle, has to say it out loud to make it real, and they always look a bit stunned when they tell you. "I made my own chocolate out of raw cocoa beans," they might say, apropos of nothing, and then look shocked, as if someone else is using their mouth to speak.
So, yes - I made marmalade, out of a grapefruit, some limes and some lemons. I've always shied away from jams and marmalade - and really anything that requires a specific chemical reaction to take place, (in this case, for the stuff to set firm-ish), because I don't like to fail. And trying to make jam seems like just setting yourself up for heartbreak and dismalness.
And the recipes don't half bang on and make it sound impossible, what with preserving pans and jelly bags and sterilising jars and all that crap. And then who wants 5 litres of jam anyway? You can't give it to people as a gift - you really can't. The recession simply isn't that bad. Well, you can if it's really amazing. But it's never that amazing, I find. Home made jam, unless it's home-made BY A CHEF is always a bit un-set, too sweet or rammed full of skin and pips and string and all kinds of weird stuff that you really don't want on your toast first thing.
So I've never done it. But then I had to yesterday, for reasons I won't go into. The recipe I was working from, I must say, wasn't very good. It was badly-written and weird and I had no faith that it would work. I stood in the kitchen, stirring my acid-smelling slop despondently, angrily re-writing the recipe in my head to make more sense and wondering how I was going to dispose of 1 litre of marmalade.
And then an amazing thing happened. It actually worked. It WORKED! I blobbed a teaspoonful of the mixture onto a cold plate and it set. It f***ing SET like... like... JAM. And I was so excited that I didn't care about the faff of sterilising the jar in the oven (170C for 20 mins) or about the fact that I have got 1 litre of marmalade that I'm never going to eat. And I just had to tell you that it works.
So here we go. This is a recipe for grapefruit, lemon and lime marmalade. It makes one litre but you can halve the quantities if you like.
You will need:
One large-ish casserole pan
One saucer
Some muslin, about one foot square - you can get this from most cooking departments or a material shop.
Some string
1 grapefruit
3 unwaxed lemons
2 limes
1.5 litres water
900g granulated sugar (eek)
1 Wash the 3 lemons and 1 lime, cut in half and juice. Set to one side the rind and all the pips (picking out all the pips is a bit fiddly, I apologise). Keep the juice also to one side.
2 Cut the rind into strips. These don't have to be gorgeous as you're going to boil the shit out of them later, so just vertical strips, the best way to can see how. Don't worry if they've still got strings of flesh attached, it all goes in. Put your strips into your casserole pan. If you're reading about marmalade on an amateur cookery blog I'm assuming you don't have a preserving pan. But if you DID, put the rind in there instead.
3 Peel the skin from the grapefruit and the other lime - a potato peeler works fine -and set aside, for use in a minute. Carve the pith away from the flesh of the grapefruit and set aside. Cut the grapefruit into quarters and take out any pips you find (I didn't find any, but you might) and add the flesh only to your casserole/preserving pan. Put the peeled lime, the grapefruit pith and your painstakingly picked-out pips (tongue twister!!!!) into your 1 square foot of muslin and tie it at the top with string. (Feeling very much like someone in 1875.)
4 Chop up the grapefruit and lime skin - my recipe said 'into thin strips' but that would have taken me about four hours, so I just smashed them up a bit with a long sharp knife and it was FINE. Add your skins to the casserole/preserving pan, then plonk in the muslin bag and then pour over the 1.5 litres of water. Simmer gently for 1.5 hours with the lid off.
5 Turn off the heat under your almost-marmalade and, using a variety of improvised implements in your kitchen, devise a way of lifting out and squeezing as much of the contents of the muslin bag out into your pan as possible. Those of you who are wide awake will notice that this is tricky because it's BOILING HOT and you can't just squeeze it with your hands, unless you are the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four. I did this by picking the bag out with one pair of tongs and then squeezing it as best I could with another pair of tongs. If I was going to do this again I would enlist Giles - or probably a grandchild, by the time I need to make more marmalade - to hold it up with the tongs and then I would use both hands with another pair of tongs to really squeeze the bag hard. The stuff in the bag is full of pectin - the setting agent - so the more of it you squeeze out of the bag the better your chances of your marmalade setting.
6 Put a saucer in the freezer for later. You ought to have about 1 litre of gunk by now, but measure it out just to make sure. Add 450g sugar for every 500ml of marmalade mixture. Then put the pan back on the heat and bring it to a rolling boil, stirring every so often. The recipe I had said to start testing your marmalade for readiness after 15 mins. You do this by blobbing a bit on a cold plate and then pushing at the side with your finger and if it wrinkles up like it's set then it's set. I must say that this was very dispiriting as it didn't work after 15 mins, 20 mins or 30 mins and I threw things across the kitchen in a rage. I would just advise that you just boil this for 45 minutes straight and then put a blob on your cold saucer and watch it set like magic.
Then work out what the hell you're going to do with a lifetime's supply of marmalade.
....
I'd like to add as a P.S. to this that to my surprise, it's actually really lovely having this much marmalade around the place. It's delicious on toast, looks nice and other people really like its homemade-ness (even if it DOES have bits of string in it) Definitely one of my top-five things I've ever made.
So, yes - I made marmalade, out of a grapefruit, some limes and some lemons. I've always shied away from jams and marmalade - and really anything that requires a specific chemical reaction to take place, (in this case, for the stuff to set firm-ish), because I don't like to fail. And trying to make jam seems like just setting yourself up for heartbreak and dismalness.
And the recipes don't half bang on and make it sound impossible, what with preserving pans and jelly bags and sterilising jars and all that crap. And then who wants 5 litres of jam anyway? You can't give it to people as a gift - you really can't. The recession simply isn't that bad. Well, you can if it's really amazing. But it's never that amazing, I find. Home made jam, unless it's home-made BY A CHEF is always a bit un-set, too sweet or rammed full of skin and pips and string and all kinds of weird stuff that you really don't want on your toast first thing.
So I've never done it. But then I had to yesterday, for reasons I won't go into. The recipe I was working from, I must say, wasn't very good. It was badly-written and weird and I had no faith that it would work. I stood in the kitchen, stirring my acid-smelling slop despondently, angrily re-writing the recipe in my head to make more sense and wondering how I was going to dispose of 1 litre of marmalade.
And then an amazing thing happened. It actually worked. It WORKED! I blobbed a teaspoonful of the mixture onto a cold plate and it set. It f***ing SET like... like... JAM. And I was so excited that I didn't care about the faff of sterilising the jar in the oven (170C for 20 mins) or about the fact that I have got 1 litre of marmalade that I'm never going to eat. And I just had to tell you that it works.
So here we go. This is a recipe for grapefruit, lemon and lime marmalade. It makes one litre but you can halve the quantities if you like.
You will need:
One large-ish casserole pan
One saucer
Some muslin, about one foot square - you can get this from most cooking departments or a material shop.
Some string
1 grapefruit
3 unwaxed lemons
2 limes
1.5 litres water
900g granulated sugar (eek)
1 Wash the 3 lemons and 1 lime, cut in half and juice. Set to one side the rind and all the pips (picking out all the pips is a bit fiddly, I apologise). Keep the juice also to one side.
2 Cut the rind into strips. These don't have to be gorgeous as you're going to boil the shit out of them later, so just vertical strips, the best way to can see how. Don't worry if they've still got strings of flesh attached, it all goes in. Put your strips into your casserole pan. If you're reading about marmalade on an amateur cookery blog I'm assuming you don't have a preserving pan. But if you DID, put the rind in there instead.
3 Peel the skin from the grapefruit and the other lime - a potato peeler works fine -and set aside, for use in a minute. Carve the pith away from the flesh of the grapefruit and set aside. Cut the grapefruit into quarters and take out any pips you find (I didn't find any, but you might) and add the flesh only to your casserole/preserving pan. Put the peeled lime, the grapefruit pith and your painstakingly picked-out pips (tongue twister!!!!) into your 1 square foot of muslin and tie it at the top with string. (Feeling very much like someone in 1875.)
4 Chop up the grapefruit and lime skin - my recipe said 'into thin strips' but that would have taken me about four hours, so I just smashed them up a bit with a long sharp knife and it was FINE. Add your skins to the casserole/preserving pan, then plonk in the muslin bag and then pour over the 1.5 litres of water. Simmer gently for 1.5 hours with the lid off.
5 Turn off the heat under your almost-marmalade and, using a variety of improvised implements in your kitchen, devise a way of lifting out and squeezing as much of the contents of the muslin bag out into your pan as possible. Those of you who are wide awake will notice that this is tricky because it's BOILING HOT and you can't just squeeze it with your hands, unless you are the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four. I did this by picking the bag out with one pair of tongs and then squeezing it as best I could with another pair of tongs. If I was going to do this again I would enlist Giles - or probably a grandchild, by the time I need to make more marmalade - to hold it up with the tongs and then I would use both hands with another pair of tongs to really squeeze the bag hard. The stuff in the bag is full of pectin - the setting agent - so the more of it you squeeze out of the bag the better your chances of your marmalade setting.
6 Put a saucer in the freezer for later. You ought to have about 1 litre of gunk by now, but measure it out just to make sure. Add 450g sugar for every 500ml of marmalade mixture. Then put the pan back on the heat and bring it to a rolling boil, stirring every so often. The recipe I had said to start testing your marmalade for readiness after 15 mins. You do this by blobbing a bit on a cold plate and then pushing at the side with your finger and if it wrinkles up like it's set then it's set. I must say that this was very dispiriting as it didn't work after 15 mins, 20 mins or 30 mins and I threw things across the kitchen in a rage. I would just advise that you just boil this for 45 minutes straight and then put a blob on your cold saucer and watch it set like magic.
Then work out what the hell you're going to do with a lifetime's supply of marmalade.
....
I'd like to add as a P.S. to this that to my surprise, it's actually really lovely having this much marmalade around the place. It's delicious on toast, looks nice and other people really like its homemade-ness (even if it DOES have bits of string in it) Definitely one of my top-five things I've ever made.
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Ceviche
As I sit here, bleary-eyed and covered with a thin but pungent layer of vegetable oil and chicken fat, recovering from an all-star Fried Chicken Nite, I can't believe that I haven't written about ceviche yet.
What was I thinking? Perhaps that I ought to seek out new and complicated recipes to make a mess of and mis-type out here, sending you all off to make the wrong pancakes, like Isola Bay (I still feel really bad about that) or too-much-cheese-too-little-cream-mac-cheese like Fay Schopen. Although Fay and I go way back and we had a Faceboook consultation about what went wrong and I think it's all cool now.
In reality, I ought to just be talking about things that work, that are simple but new, uncomplicated, fresh and delicious. And there is nothing more like that than ceviche.
I'm pretty sure that ceviche is just a generic term that refers to 'cooking' fish in acid - i.e. citrus juice or vinegar. I'm not talking battery acid here. You can do it all kinds of different ways, but I first came across this in Nigella Express, (my first ever cookery book, which you may or may not guessed by the number of appearances it makes here), where she makes it with monkfish cooked in lime juice and decorated with coriander, spring onions and chilli.
"Yah" said Henry, when we were talking about it the other day. (Henry is REALLY posh) "Yah ceviche is wonderful, but you need some sweetness in there. I add avocado."
I nodded blithely (and then tucked that piece of information away in order to steal it and try to pass it off as my own another time).
So here were are. What follows is a sort of hybrid of stolen recipes, jammed together without even the guts to pass it off as my own.
This works best, I find, as a starter, served with nachos. Henry thinks nachos are common. But I think worrying about being common is common, so I always serve ceviche with about 6 bagfuls of the cheapest nachos I can find.
I'm sure none of you is frightened of raw fish but if you are - don't be. I was a bit apprehensive about just chopping up a load of raw monkfish and squid and serving it to people but I was wrong. People LOVE IT. Just get nice fish, I guess. Giles refuses to get it from Waitrose, (although I think that would be fine), instead driving purposefully to a titchy fishmonger in Hampstead in order to pay 8 times as much. But they are real fishermen, covered in tattoos and everything. Not very friendly, but I guess that's all part of the reason you go to some tiny indie meat or fish vendor - to get fleeced and treated like crap, to assuage your huge guilt at being happy and middle-class.
Ok, so here we go. This gets you enough for 8 people as a starter-with-nachos.
1 large pack lightly salted pack of Doritos
1 monkfish tail or equivalent size of turbot or seabass. If you're not sure how much that is, just say to the fish guy "I need enough to feed 8 as a starter" and they're usually quite helpful. If brisk.
2 large handfuls of squid - with tentacles or not depending on how much they gross you out
2 red chillies and 2 green chillies - deseeded and chopped finely
2 spring onions or one shallot, chopped up
the juice of 3 limes
1 large or two small ripe-ish avocadoes
1 large handful of coriander
large pinch of salt
1) Chop up the monkfish (or turbot, or seabass) and the squid FINELY. Yes, it's a pain in the arse, but you really have to chop it up into bits the size of your thumbnail (unless your hands are REALLY HUGE, in which case, the size of your index finger nail). This especially applies to the squid, which can be chewy.
2) lay the fish out in a shallow dish and pour over the lime juice. Swizzle it around a bit and then leave it for 8 minutes - no more than 10.
3) drain off the lime juice, then pour over and stir in one tablespoon of olive oil to stop the fish sticking together, which it will insist on doing
4) add to the fish, which now ought to be opaque, the chopped chillies, onion, chopped avocado and coriander and then season. You will probably need more salt than you think - although bear in mind that there will be an extra hit of salt in each mouthful from the nachos
The really great thing about this is that you can never make too much. Whatever you have left over put in the fridge - the next day flour it and fry it off and then eat with chopsticks. The chopsticks, I find, are essential.
What was I thinking? Perhaps that I ought to seek out new and complicated recipes to make a mess of and mis-type out here, sending you all off to make the wrong pancakes, like Isola Bay (I still feel really bad about that) or too-much-cheese-too-little-cream-mac-cheese like Fay Schopen. Although Fay and I go way back and we had a Faceboook consultation about what went wrong and I think it's all cool now.
In reality, I ought to just be talking about things that work, that are simple but new, uncomplicated, fresh and delicious. And there is nothing more like that than ceviche.
I'm pretty sure that ceviche is just a generic term that refers to 'cooking' fish in acid - i.e. citrus juice or vinegar. I'm not talking battery acid here. You can do it all kinds of different ways, but I first came across this in Nigella Express, (my first ever cookery book, which you may or may not guessed by the number of appearances it makes here), where she makes it with monkfish cooked in lime juice and decorated with coriander, spring onions and chilli.
"Yah" said Henry, when we were talking about it the other day. (Henry is REALLY posh) "Yah ceviche is wonderful, but you need some sweetness in there. I add avocado."
I nodded blithely (and then tucked that piece of information away in order to steal it and try to pass it off as my own another time).
So here were are. What follows is a sort of hybrid of stolen recipes, jammed together without even the guts to pass it off as my own.
This works best, I find, as a starter, served with nachos. Henry thinks nachos are common. But I think worrying about being common is common, so I always serve ceviche with about 6 bagfuls of the cheapest nachos I can find.
I'm sure none of you is frightened of raw fish but if you are - don't be. I was a bit apprehensive about just chopping up a load of raw monkfish and squid and serving it to people but I was wrong. People LOVE IT. Just get nice fish, I guess. Giles refuses to get it from Waitrose, (although I think that would be fine), instead driving purposefully to a titchy fishmonger in Hampstead in order to pay 8 times as much. But they are real fishermen, covered in tattoos and everything. Not very friendly, but I guess that's all part of the reason you go to some tiny indie meat or fish vendor - to get fleeced and treated like crap, to assuage your huge guilt at being happy and middle-class.
Ok, so here we go. This gets you enough for 8 people as a starter-with-nachos.
1 large pack lightly salted pack of Doritos
1 monkfish tail or equivalent size of turbot or seabass. If you're not sure how much that is, just say to the fish guy "I need enough to feed 8 as a starter" and they're usually quite helpful. If brisk.
2 large handfuls of squid - with tentacles or not depending on how much they gross you out
2 red chillies and 2 green chillies - deseeded and chopped finely
2 spring onions or one shallot, chopped up
the juice of 3 limes
1 large or two small ripe-ish avocadoes
1 large handful of coriander
large pinch of salt
1) Chop up the monkfish (or turbot, or seabass) and the squid FINELY. Yes, it's a pain in the arse, but you really have to chop it up into bits the size of your thumbnail (unless your hands are REALLY HUGE, in which case, the size of your index finger nail). This especially applies to the squid, which can be chewy.
2) lay the fish out in a shallow dish and pour over the lime juice. Swizzle it around a bit and then leave it for 8 minutes - no more than 10.
3) drain off the lime juice, then pour over and stir in one tablespoon of olive oil to stop the fish sticking together, which it will insist on doing
4) add to the fish, which now ought to be opaque, the chopped chillies, onion, chopped avocado and coriander and then season. You will probably need more salt than you think - although bear in mind that there will be an extra hit of salt in each mouthful from the nachos
The really great thing about this is that you can never make too much. Whatever you have left over put in the fridge - the next day flour it and fry it off and then eat with chopsticks. The chopsticks, I find, are essential.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Fried chicken night
So, this is what I've been doing all day - coating and frying chicken. Ok fine, not ALL day. For the last hour I have been watching movie gag reels on YouTube. But definitely all morning. Above is a photo of the production line in full cry.
And this photo above is of the evil deep fat fryer (although it's done such great work today, that I'm thinking of granting it a pardon and merely relegating it to lifelong imprisonment in the cellar).
And this photo, above, shows the final thing: 32 pieces of deep fried chicken, all ready to be finished off in the oven just before dinner.
If I ever get the smell of KFC out of my hair, it'll be a miracle.
I promise to write about something other than deep fried chicken soon.
Monday, 15 February 2010
Jazza
I can only feel huge sympathy for Jasper Gerard. Foodie blogs are alive with talk that Jasper, who is the restaurant critic of the Daily Telegraph, offered a restaurant/hotel in Ludlow, called Mr Underhill, a review in exchange for free accommodation for him, his wife and two children. Jasper denies all of this and, having met Jasper a couple of times and done a bit of work for him when I was a work-experience girl at the Sunday Times, years ago, I can't believe it's true.
But I can see how you could, as a restaurant critic, get into trouble, despite being innocent, over this kind of thing. Poor old Giles spends most of his life pleading with people to stop offering him freebies. It's not just that you can't give somewhere an honest review if you are someone else's guest, it's that the staggering fuss that gets made over you if a hotel or restaurant knows that you're coming is horribly overwhelming.
In some restaurants or hotels, where Giles has booked in advance under a fake name, or in a hotel where we are staying just for a holiday - and yet he has been 'busted' - I become reluctant to ask for anything or where anything is. If you ask where the ladies is, someone will practically follow you in there. If you're in a hotel you have to hide in your room to avoid being leapt on by staff who want to know why you're not smiling. If you ask for a glass of water you get 18 questions about what exact temperature you'd like it at, how fizzy, how still, what percentage of filtration and if I'd like a sous-chef to be ritually sacrificed at the table. I have seen grown men shake as they pour wine or take an order and laugh until they cry at completely unfunny jokes. The food arrives cold and 20 minutes after it would if you'd been anyone else, because the chef goes mad and keeps throwing platefuls in the bin because he thinks Giles will be annoyed if his medallion of beef isn't EXACTLY 1.5inches across. Eight different people will come and ask you if the food is okay, while you are in the middle of a really, really exciting argument.
None of this is a criticism: I would be the same - probably worse - if I spied Giles, or any other rezzy critic, stamping into my place of work, pissed off from not being able to park, with a slight cold on the way, ready to sit down and do some serious judgment-passing on the establishment that pays for my childrens' shoes.
All I mean is that if you are a normal person and not some delusional freak, once you've experienced this level of over-service, over-attentiveness and frightened kow-towing, you learn that you want to limit it as much as possible. That's all.
No food today: I've got two overwhelming food projects on at the moment - brining and frying enough chicken for 10 on Wednesday and two different sorts of quite complicated chutney and marmelade to test out for the Leon cookbook. But I thought I ought to write something because otherwise you'll all get bored and wander off. And I'd really miss you.
But I can see how you could, as a restaurant critic, get into trouble, despite being innocent, over this kind of thing. Poor old Giles spends most of his life pleading with people to stop offering him freebies. It's not just that you can't give somewhere an honest review if you are someone else's guest, it's that the staggering fuss that gets made over you if a hotel or restaurant knows that you're coming is horribly overwhelming.
In some restaurants or hotels, where Giles has booked in advance under a fake name, or in a hotel where we are staying just for a holiday - and yet he has been 'busted' - I become reluctant to ask for anything or where anything is. If you ask where the ladies is, someone will practically follow you in there. If you're in a hotel you have to hide in your room to avoid being leapt on by staff who want to know why you're not smiling. If you ask for a glass of water you get 18 questions about what exact temperature you'd like it at, how fizzy, how still, what percentage of filtration and if I'd like a sous-chef to be ritually sacrificed at the table. I have seen grown men shake as they pour wine or take an order and laugh until they cry at completely unfunny jokes. The food arrives cold and 20 minutes after it would if you'd been anyone else, because the chef goes mad and keeps throwing platefuls in the bin because he thinks Giles will be annoyed if his medallion of beef isn't EXACTLY 1.5inches across. Eight different people will come and ask you if the food is okay, while you are in the middle of a really, really exciting argument.
None of this is a criticism: I would be the same - probably worse - if I spied Giles, or any other rezzy critic, stamping into my place of work, pissed off from not being able to park, with a slight cold on the way, ready to sit down and do some serious judgment-passing on the establishment that pays for my childrens' shoes.
All I mean is that if you are a normal person and not some delusional freak, once you've experienced this level of over-service, over-attentiveness and frightened kow-towing, you learn that you want to limit it as much as possible. That's all.
No food today: I've got two overwhelming food projects on at the moment - brining and frying enough chicken for 10 on Wednesday and two different sorts of quite complicated chutney and marmelade to test out for the Leon cookbook. But I thought I ought to write something because otherwise you'll all get bored and wander off. And I'd really miss you.
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Shrove Tuesday
Everyone knows how to make normal pancakes - or crepes, as I guess they are technically known. It's about 200g flour, an egg and enough milk to make it into a batter. Heat pan, pour in, flip, flip, onto a plate, lemon, sugar. Fine lovely and wonderful.
But I think Shrove Tuesday, which is this coming Tuesday 16th February, is THE time to branch out and make naughty pancakes, or American pancakes. I know I'm doing a lot of American stuff here, but I do have a real thing for their kind of food.
Anyway, this recipe can be found on p.93 of Nigella Lawson's excellent Nigella Express. I halve the quantities, but her recipe in full goes like this:
600g flour
3 x 15ml tablespoons baking powder
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
4og sugar (I tend to leave this out)
1 egg
250ml milk
Shake or stir the dry ingredients together. You can leave this mixture in a jar until you're ready to use it.
For each 150g of flour mixture, crack an egg into it and half mix it with the flour, then add the milk (or if you want to be really authentic, buttermilk) and whisk to combine to a thick batter. Then cook in blobs, as large or small as you'd like and serve with butter and maple syrup and, if you're really not worried about your heart, crispy bacon.
From these you get those fluffy, light, yet creamy pancakes that always hit me right in the temporal lobes. I usually have to be restrained from leaping to my feet, still chewing and, saluting an invisble flag with my fork, launching into Amazing Grace.
NB. Thanks and huge apologies to Isola Bay (see below) who pointed out that my first posting on this was very misleading. And when I say misleading, I mean completely and utterly wrong. I guess it just goes to show that you can only be SO creative and slapdash when it comes to cooking and get away with it.
But I think Shrove Tuesday, which is this coming Tuesday 16th February, is THE time to branch out and make naughty pancakes, or American pancakes. I know I'm doing a lot of American stuff here, but I do have a real thing for their kind of food.
Anyway, this recipe can be found on p.93 of Nigella Lawson's excellent Nigella Express. I halve the quantities, but her recipe in full goes like this:
600g flour
3 x 15ml tablespoons baking powder
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
4og sugar (I tend to leave this out)
1 egg
250ml milk
Shake or stir the dry ingredients together. You can leave this mixture in a jar until you're ready to use it.
For each 150g of flour mixture, crack an egg into it and half mix it with the flour, then add the milk (or if you want to be really authentic, buttermilk) and whisk to combine to a thick batter. Then cook in blobs, as large or small as you'd like and serve with butter and maple syrup and, if you're really not worried about your heart, crispy bacon.
From these you get those fluffy, light, yet creamy pancakes that always hit me right in the temporal lobes. I usually have to be restrained from leaping to my feet, still chewing and, saluting an invisble flag with my fork, launching into Amazing Grace.
NB. Thanks and huge apologies to Isola Bay (see below) who pointed out that my first posting on this was very misleading. And when I say misleading, I mean completely and utterly wrong. I guess it just goes to show that you can only be SO creative and slapdash when it comes to cooking and get away with it.
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