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.

Meat fear

I have become the kind of person who plummets into a deep panic when surrounded by a lot of raw meat.

I don't know how it happened, but I think it started after I learned how to drive and was able to take myself to Waitrose. It was the meat aisle that did it. All those rows and rows of plastic packets of formerly happy bouncing lambs and docile cows and perky chickens. And I felt dizzy and ill and every time I go there now, I have to rush through.

Giles has very little sympathy for me on this. His argument is that you should always, always go to a local butcher whose meat comes from little farms and isn't sold in plastic cartons. I agree with him, but the butcher doesn't also sell deoderant and light bulbs and bok choi. And even then, butchers have started freaking me out too. I'm finding it increasingly hard to prepare a chicken for the oven without feeling just awful and guilty and SAD. What is wrong with me? I don't want to be a vegetarian, I really don't. I don't think it's neccessary.

It's not like I don't buy absolutely the most expensive, premium, grass-fed, free-range stuff I can. But my uncle used to have a farm and it was an excellent small farm in the Welsh hills, where old-fashioned husbandry was practised. Fresian cows, free to roam the blustery hills, patted and cared-for, used to hang their heads over the garden wall and look at you with their big brown eyes; we hunted for hens' eggs in the wood where the chickens scratched and buck-buckawed. And the process of slaughtering the animals was still fucking barbaric.

So I don't know what to do. I think the answer is to buy less meat. Or get therapy.

Roast vegetables the non-crap way

Above is a picture of the roasted vegetables I made for lunch today. I'm sorry that there haven't been many photos recently. It's because my camera isn't very good and I'm a terrible photographer. I blame my mother for this, who is the world's worst at taking pictures, which is completely insane, seeing as she has a degree in Fine Art. But honestly, she cannot take a photo to save her life. I also blame her for the persistent frog in my throat, my itchy ears (TORTURE) and weak veins. My anxiety and tiny black pinprick eyes I get from my Dad.

There hasn't been very much video either because after I record one, I watch it back and just think "OMG! Boris Becker in a WIG!!" and can't bring myself to post it.

But I've had a complaint from someone very grand and I'm nothing if not craven and cowardly so, voila, a picture.

I wanted to talk about this because I have discovered the secret of good roasted vegetables and that is: par-boil them first. All of them. I used butternut squash, turnip, celeriac, onion, garlic, white cabbage and a head of garlic because Giles likes roast garlic, although I don't. I boiled them for 4 minutes in salted water and then turned them into a roasting dish with some olive oil, groundnut oil, butter and salt and cooked them for 1hr 15m at 180 C. I also shook over some dried thyme and about 1hr into cooking, sprinkled over some fresh parsley. Neither of which is essential.

I'm sure that almost everyone else got the hang of roasted veg years ago, but I never did. What always happened to me, (and I've seen it happen once or twice to other people), is that I'd cut up the veg too small and they'd shrivel up and burn to black in the oven and taste okay but look pretty awful. Or I'd cut them up too big and they'd still be hard in the middle after six hours.

So, for the last two people out there who haven't cracked roast vegetables: chop them up big-ish, and by that I mean about 2 x 1in, boil them for 4mins and then cook for an hour or so.

I would say "Job done" but then I'd have to kill myself.

I'faith, a crumpety challenge

I have been challenged - yes challenged, practically with a glove-swipe to my face - to make crumpets. On Twitter no less. And when I say crumpets, I mean those porous, slightly rubbery things, rather than floury, cut-them-in-half, english muffins.

"Will you make them?" said my Twitter challenger. "I want to make them but I don't know if it's worth it," she said. "If you do it, I'll know if it's hard or not because you're, you know, quite lazy and slapdash, and if they turn out fine I'll know whether to bother or not." Okay, she didn't say that last bit, because she is too nice. BUT IT WAS WHAT SHE WAS THINKING.

And thus my role in life became clear. I don't have a job, you see. So I can spend a lot of time making recipes and getting them wrong. I am not a chef, I have no training and very little knowledge of the science of food. I don't know what yeast does. I don't understand why flour makes things thick. I really REALLY don't understand why you have to "rest" meat (but I know you must). I am as clueless in the kitchen as it's possible to be. So if I can make something, you can. If I say it works, it does; if I've made it, it is officially idiot-proof, and you can devote a few hours of your weekend to making whatever it is, in confidence.

So off I went to make crumpets, like a little avatar, merely an extension of the whims of my readers. The only thing I had to buy was a couple of egg poaching rings (usually I avoid recipes that I need to actually buy special equipment for - see "Very lazy salted caramel ice cream" - but I thought I would make an exception for these egg rings). You can also, I reckon, use a round metal pastry cutter.

So the news is: crumpets work. If you make this recipe, you will get slightly rubbery crumpets with those holes in the top that taste boring and doughy by themselves but are so delicious they'd instantly pacify a demented rottweiler when covered in butter and jam OR marmite OR honey.

The only thing you have to be careful with is that they burn quite easily at the bottom. Giles and his friend Ed, who ate three burned-bottom crumpets apiece for tea yesterday, said that the burnt bits actually added to the flavour, but not everyone will agree.

The burning problem is this: in order to cook the batter all the way through a) the pan has to be hot and b) cook for about 4-5 minutes. But if the pan is too hot, the crumpet bottom will burn. But if it's not hot enough, the top won't cook properly and you won't get those little holes.

My only recommendation is to experiment with different thicknesses of crumpet. I would say, personally, that the optimum thickness to aim for is about 1cm, which would mean about 2-3 tbsps of batter in each crumpet-ring. This is thinner than a shop-bought crumpet but comparisons of this sort are not good for morale.

Making the batter is very easy. There is slightly more faff to it than making, say, a pancake batter, due to the inclusion of yeast, but it works so in my mind, it's worth it. The crumpets vanished within 1.5 hours in my kitchen, but I imagine that if you made a batch they would keep for 24 hours in tupperware and would revive nicely under a grill or in a toaster.

This is good because if you wanted to have a tea party, you'd possibly want to keep the inevitable blue-ish smoke and on-fire smell that comes from this kind of pan-frying away from your smart guests and their party dresses.

So here we go. This recipe can be found in Delia Smith's Complete Illustrated Cookery course, p. 504 and is also available online here: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/sweet/home-made-crumpets.html

For 12 (halve the quantities if you're not feeling in the mood for that many)
275ml milk
55ml water
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tbsp dried yeast
8oz plain flour
1 teasp salt
butter or oil for greasing
some egg poaching rings or round pastry cutters

1 Heat the milk and the water in a pan until it is "hand hot". This just means slightly warmer than warm, not actually "ouch" hot - or you'll kill the yeast that you're about to put in it

2 Pour the milk/water into a jug and sprinkle over the sugar and dried yeast, stir, and leave in a warm place for 15 mins. The yeast will clump up and stick to the sides and generally look unappealing - don't worry, it sorts itself out and after 15 mins will be all frothy on top.

3 Sift the flour and the salt into a bowl, make a well in the centre and pour in your 15-minute yeast-and-milk stuff. Mix in first with a wooden spoon and then beat with a whisk until it's a smooth batter. One or two little lumps aren't the end of the world.

4 Then leave it in a warm place covered with a tea towel for 45 minutes, during which time you can put on the kettle and ring everyone you know, telling them to come round for crumpets.

5 To cook the crumpets, grease your egg rings or pastry cutters well with either butter or groundnut/peanut oil. This is really important, even if you've bought non-stick egg rings. Then lightly oil a non-stick pan or oil more heavily a not non-stick pan and get it QUITE hot - the aim is just before smoking point.

6 Place the ring or rings in the pan and then blob in your now-frothy batter. I didn't find a way of doing this without making a massive mess, but you might. I'd aim for about 2 or 3 tablespoons but definitely experiment with different amounts. Keep an eye on them. First bubbles will rise to the top and then as it cooks, the bubbles will pop and you'll be left with the little holes in the top.

7 When the tops of the crumpets look fairly dry, lift away the ring with tongs or whatever you've got and flip it over for a few seconds to cook the top. If you re-use the same ring, make sure to re-grease it. If you've greased the ring and the batter STILL sticks the side, you can loosen it by running round the outside with a knife.

And there will be your crumpets, ensuring you ever-safe from demented rottweilers.

Canteen

Last night, at about 7.30pm, I was just up-ending a stale, but cold, bottle of white wine into one of our least broken glasses, when the doorbell rang.

"Ding dong". Or rather "BEEERRRRRRRRIIINGNGNGNGNGNGNGNGNGNGNGNGNGN!!!!!" is more like it. We have the loudest and most unnerving doorbell in North London, that just goes right through you. You know - the sort that can be heard in outerspace.

Anyway, who should be at the door but Dominic Lake, he of Canteen fame. It's that restaurant you might have seen that seems to be, alongside Leon, taking over the world. There's one in Spitalfields, one in Baker Street, one on the ground floor of the Royal Festival Hall. I think there are others, too, but I'm too lazy to look them up.

This doesn't happen to me very often, restaurateurs popping by at dinner time. Henry sometimes comes round when he's been invited and we've had 6 months to plan what to give him for dinner. But off the cuff visits are more rare.

Dom hadn't come round for dinner, (although I stuffed him full of Hugh's Mango and Steak salad thing and some salted caramel ice cream anyway), he had come round to drop off the new Canteen cookbook, called Great British Food. Giles has written the foreword and Dom was bringing a book round to say thank you.

It's a fantastic book. More than anything else, it's such a lovely thing to HAVE. It's a great size, not quite A4 and not quite A5, not dauntingly long and, with a bit of pressure, will sit open flat on your worktop.

I don't think, funnily enough, that some chefs realise the importance of this when it comes to producing their cookbooks. Or maybe THEY do, it's the publishers and the designers - all eating nothing, or M&S ready-cook meals only - who produce impractical cookbooks, which are great to look at and useless to use.

Nigel Slater, for example, is brilliant but his books, practically-speaking, are a disaster. Real Fast Food is like a paperpack novel, which you have to keep picking up and opening and muttering "two hundred grams" to yourself, before putting it back down. Real Cooking is better, because it's a short-ish book that you can lie flat on a surface. But Tender is just a nightmare. There are so many wonderful things in there that I just don't cook because the book is about 500 pages long, weighs a ton and you can't keep it open, not even on a cookbook stand.

Now, Nigella's got it sorted. How To Eat is a bit unwieldy - again, with the not-staying-open problem, unless you're really brutal with it and mercilessly break the spine, but her others are great. My Nigella Bites, Nigella's Christmas and Nigella Express are all food-spattered and dog-eared from use. And why? Because they LIE FLAT on my counter tops and they've got lots of pictures.

It's so simple.

The Canteen book is like that. Its brown-paper, Wartime Chic design is just so lovely and it does that stiff upper lip, Yay-We're-British! thing nicely without being cloying or too Cath Kidston.

I'm going to be making potted duck and Lancashire Hot Pot. And that's just FOR STARTERS. There's also a great section at the back for all those basics that you often have to hunt through other recipe books to find - Hollandaise, Mayonnaise, Onion Gravy, all that.

Pip pip. Hurrah for us!

Very lazy salted caramel ice cream

I am quite beside myself with excitement about this salted caramel ice cream recipe. It's because I think I invented it, although in all likelihood, I probably didn't. There is doubtless another one out there just like this one. But I'm not going to go looking for it because this is the best thing that's happened to me for a while and, you know, when you're not achieving much with your life you don't want to go looking for reasons to feel like a chump.

I don't even know why I decided to make ice cream. I've got really sensitive teeth, like REALLY sensitive. I went to the dentist the other week and he sprayed some slightly-too-cold water on my gums and I shrivelled up like a spider on fire. (I've never seen a spider on fire, I must add, before anyone thinks I am cruel to animals.) And Giles doesn't really eat puddings.

I suppose I'm just curious. And recipes for it seem quite complicated and require special machinery, which always gets my hackles up and makes me want to find a way of doing it in 5 minutes with your bare hands.

So, I found a recipe for salted caramel and then stole half a no-churn ice cream recipe off Nigella, via www.notquitenigella.com, and mashed them together to create this weird but amazing salted ice cream confection.

Now, I think this is a triumph and totally delicious. But be warned, it is a slightly bonkers flavour. There are three quite major things happening here: sweet caramel, salty stuff, yoghurty, cheesy stuff and creamy stuff. It doesn't taste like something Ben and Jerry's make, it's not creamycreamysweetsweet, it's more like... something else. If I was being very self-complimentary, I would say that it was very "grown-up".

But if that sounds like your kind of game, it goes something like this.


(I made quite a small amount, just to test it out, but you can double the quantities.)


For the salted caramel:
100g caster sugar
50g cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes
50ml double cream (or whatever you've got)
3 pinches salt


For the ice cream:
300ml whipping cream
112ml natural yoghurt


1) put the sugar in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. I used a non-stick one, which I was quite pleased about, in the sticky end. Put the pan on a medium flame and cook the sugar until it melts into a runny, clear syrup. This takes about 3 or 4 minutes.

2) add the butter and turn the heat up a bit. It'll bubble around and go crazy. Stir it all up until it's the colour of, well, caramel. This takes about another 3-5 minutes. Don't worry if it all separates and goes gross.

3) take the pan off the heat and add the cream. It'll go bubbly and wild but then calm down and turn into glossy caramelly caramel.

4) add the salt. I recommend using sea salt crystals because it means that you get some sugary bits and then the occasional burst of saltiness. I added 3 small pinches to my caramel, but you might want to add more or less depending. Leave the caramel to cool.

5) whip up the cream until it's fairly stiff and then fold in the yoghurt. Pretty much whatever temperature the caramel is now, throw it into the cream and yoghurt and fold round. The caramel will go sort of lumpy and stringy, which is fine - just fold it in and around the cream/yoghurt until it's well distributed.

6) turn out into a plastic tub (one that's flat and shallow rather than tall and thin), and put in the freezer. Put it in the fridge to soften up a bit about 40 mins before you want to eat it. If I was feeling really inventive, I would bash up a Crunchie bar or some maltesers and sprinkle them over before serving.