Liver and spinach

I reckon I'm a pretty wide-ranging eater, but there are certain things I won't touch and, damnit all, I won't be judged for it.

For example, I won't eat raw garlic, roast garlic, jerusalem artichokes, lemon puddings, aniseed or kidneys. And I'm not wild about tongue, either. And the attitude you get from people! It's as if you've announced you're a vegan. At least people probably don't give you shit for being a vegan because they assume that you've got enough problems as it is.

A thing most people don't want to eat is offal and I absolutely defend anyone's right not to want to eat it without being labelled a white-bread eating food weakling. Offal really isn't actually that nice, most of the time. Kidney! ACK! Gag me with a spoon. It's just about tolerable cut up into minute chunks and then cooked for about three days and then put in a pie with gravy and steak and topped off with a slab of buttery pastry. Any more real than that and I break out into a sweat.

But some offal is okay. Lamb sweetbreads: tick. Especially the way Tom Pemberton does them at Hereford Road, with some kind of parsley and barley salad thing. Calves' liver, with bacon and onions and mash (not allowed on my diet alas): tick.

Chicken liver, turned into a pate OR cooked by Giles in a rich sauce of tomato and paprika: tick.

The photo above doesn't really do this dish justice but it's DELICIOUS.

And here's how he does it:

1 packet organic chicken livers, washed and sorted for gross bits of sinew or any green bits (gall bladder! Augh!)

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon paprika

about 100-150 marsala wine, or white wine. Or red wine, really

some lemon juice

a splash of chicken stock (if you've got it)

2 large squeezes of tomato puree or a couple of long squeezes of tomato ketchup

salt

pepper

spinach or salad leaves

some parsley if you've got it

1 - Sweat the onions gently for about 10-15 minutes and then throw in the garlic. Cook that until you start to smell garlic and then throw in the livers.

2 - turn up the heat a bit and cook for about 4 minutes. Then add the paprika, chicken stock, tomato puree, salt and pepper and cook for another 1 minute

3 - pour over the wine and then turn the heat down a bit and simmer for about 4 more minutes with a lid on, stirring occasionally until the wine reduces a bit and you get a kind of tomatoey sauce.

4 - "arrange" (i.e. plonk) some spinach leaves on a plate and then spoon over the livers and any juices left in the pan. Squeeze over some lemon juice and scatter parsley over the top.

Instead of having a brownie afterwards, I had an apple. *SMUG*

How not to drink

As well as being on a diet for the wedding I'm not drinking. Well, I'm drinking LESS.

I'm always a bit freaked out by those "Are you an alcoholic?" surveys, because whenever I do them, and answer them honestly, it always turns out that I ought to get myself to the Priory immediately. Do I drink by myself? Yes. Do I drink to forget my problems? Of course. Do I find it difficult to stop after one drink? Who doesn't? Do you scour the house in a rage for alcohol after a particularly trying day? (Ok I made that one up. But the answer is yes.)

There are two times in my life when I've realised that I am going to end up actually an alcoholic if I didn't stop drinking immediately. There are alcoholics on both sides of my family, so I'm as "at risk" as a ming vase on the M4.

The first one was when I was about 23 and working in a seriously lowly job and then my boyfriend ran off with another girl. Which I was doubly pissed off about because before he went out with me he was GAY - running off with a boy I could take but a girl was just beyond the pale. I would come home to my parents' house from work and sit at our kitchen table while my father, god bless him, would pour red wine down my throat until I passed out. I must say, it worked, because I didn't feel nearly so much like killing myself when I was drunk.

In fact, I wrote 40,000 words of a really excellent comic novel, mostly in those evenings when I was drunk. Well, I say it's excellent but the first agent I showed it to hated it and the second didn't even write back. Bastard. And the restraining order means I can't EVEN push a molotov cocktail through his damn letterbox.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, then one day my parents went on holiday and I was left in the house by myself. I wasn't so crazy about cooking and shopping back then and so after three days there was no more alcohol left in the house and I RAGED around it trying to find something to drink. As I stood in the laundry, contemplating a bottle of cherry brandy, I realised I needed to stop immediately.

The second time was when I was working as a reporter for the Londoner's Diary, which is the gossip column in the Evening Standard. I was, for weeks at a time, either drunk or hungover. When I found myself slipping out for a Bloody Mary the second the afternoon edition had been sent (back when the Standard had different editions) I thought I should stop.

I mean, I was hardly Anne Robinson, or George Best, but you don't need to hit rock bottom to be drinking too much, or too regularly. Anyway, my point is that stopping drinking is really boring, but I learnt that it's basically all about replacing the FIRST drink of the evening. (Not a new concept, but I'm pleased with how well it works).

If you want to have an alcohol-free evening, all you need to do is replace the first drink you would normally have of the evening with something else. The plain fact is, I'm normally just thirsty. I'm not one of those people who drinks 18 pints of water a day. I would, but I'm too busy drinking 18 cups of tea. So, my dummy evening drink is usually a virgin Mary or a plain tonic water with ice and lemon.

My brain is so incredibly stupid that it totally thinks it has been given a little drinky and Giles' stash of Chardonnay is left untroubled. If I can just stop Giles from pounding down the stairs at 6pm, rubbing his hands together, doing a little dance and shouting "Let's have a BEER!!!" then I might even make it to the altar sober.

Diet time

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here we go:

For 2

4 chicken thighs

two large handfuls of broad beans

about eight small florets of broccoli

8 or so artichoke hearts

100g of feta, cubed

olive oil

salt

pepper

thyme

lemon juice

mint

dill

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

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

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

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

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

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

How not to make hot cross buns

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egg poaching for dummies

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

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

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

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

1 egg

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

1 tsp white truffle oil

1 spring onion, chopped

1/2 red chilli, de-seeded and chopped

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing to do with food...

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

Flossie the Hamburgler

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

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

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

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