Jubilee Coronation chicken (for Harriet)

Yes I know I've done coronation chicken before, but it was at the end of a long boring post about me having a mental breakdown and I didn't use a picture so I feel I didn't really do it justice.

So this time, things are going to be more upbeat, okay? Ready?

This is also a special devotional post for my sister, Harriet. You haven't seen much of Harriet here. She is my eldest sister: blonde, mysterious, powerful in ways no-one in my family really understands. She has a degree in physics. She has two children and Kitty is always so excited to see her that she SCREAMS at the top of her tiny little tinny baby voice. Harriet is a master of not only Play-Doh but Mega-Bloks.

Anyway so Harriet is knocking about in North London quite a lot these days as she is waiting for her youngest, Emily, to start nursery in September and has sort of had it with all that swings/Rhyme Time/zoo crapola. So she mostly comes round to my house and sits in my new giant scary, over-bright kitchen extension and we talk about soft furnishings while Emily teaches Kitty about "sharing".

As we sat there gently photosynthesising, she mentioned that she has a flipping great shitload of people turning up at her house this Jubilee weekend and was pondering what to cook.

"Coronation chicken!" I cried.

"Is it on your blog?" she said, flicking through the Osborne & Little collection on my iPad.

"Yes but I must re-do it," I said.

And I thought maybe some of you also have a flipping great shitload of people turning up at your house like gannets, pointing at their mouths and expecting to be fed and you are quite at a loss of what to do. 

So - do this.

Take a large serving dish and arrange a lot of salad leaves around the edges, dollop a lot of coronation chicken in the middle (recipe below), and serve with mini baked potatoes. It is important that the baked potatoes are MINI, not big ones so that people don't think they are being given a JACKET BLOODY POTATO for their lunch and just think "my word, these potatoes are quite delicious".

This is not my recipe, this is courtesy of Julia Churchill and I am grateful to her for allowing me to reprint it here not once but twice

Julia Churchill's Coronation chicken
This makes enough for 4 people and the leftovers are really wonderful

I know I always say this, but please try not to be put off by the long list of ingredients, they are all readily available.

1 small chicken
4 large tablespoon dollops of mayonnaise
3 heaped teaspoon dollops of mango chutney
1 fresh red chilli (seeds discarded in only a slapdash way) or a pinch of chilli flakes
1 handful of chopped coriander
1 medium onion
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp black onion seeds
1 tsp tumeric
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp curry powder
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 cardomom pod
1 clove
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 lemon for juicing to taste
salt and pepper

1 Roast your chicken as you normally would - I'd say at about 180C for about 1hr15-30 depending on the size of your chicken. Leave to cool and then strip until you have a bowl of chic

2 Chop and fry the onion very slowly until quite dark - this will take at least 20 minutes.

3 Mix together your spices, including the chilli then scatter over the onion and cook on a medium heat until your kitchen is smelling like the Taj Star. Let it cool.

4 Mix together the mayonnaise and the chutney and then add your spice mix. Give it a good stir. Stand back and admire it a bit. Throw in the coriander and then add the lemon juice, salt and pepper until it tastes nice. Combine with the chicken.

I used biggish Jersey Royals for my baked potatoes. Prick them all over and put them in a 180 oven for 45 minutes. It is VITAL that you prick them all over because otherwise they will explode in the oven, as one of mine did the other night. I'm sure you all know this already but I didn't and it was quite a shock when the potato blew up.

I believe in overcatering when it comes to carbohydrate so allow 4 potatoes per person.

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!!!

Welsh cakes

I fear I am turning into a moany old cow. On and on I go, whinge whinge whinge, with no good reason. Either life is so boring, yawn, isn't motherhood a drudge, I've got no work on, I'm a total failure - or !!! everything is chaos !!! Kitty is ill!!!! and I haven't a MINUTE to myself and GOD MAN ALIVE if only someone would HELP ME.

I'm worried that it's all getting a bit samey, that I'm starting to repeat myself, going on, getting boring. And I also think I might be starting to repeat myself.

That reminds me of my mother's favourite story about the Queen Mother, which goes like this:

The Queen Mother is visiting an old people's home and she says to an old dear: "Do you know who I am?" The old dear smiles and points a trembling finger yonder: "Oh, if you don't know who you are, you go and speak to that lady over there."

Then my mother cries with laughter.

I am jolly lucky that my mother is alive, in good nick and living just up the road. She is catnip for toddlers, my mother. She lets them make a terrible mess and break things, pick food off her plate and put marbles in their mouths. When children reach a certain age, (about two and a half), she takes them out collecting sticks and then they bring them back to the house and set fire to them.

So as you can imagine, the last ten weeks living at my mother's house has been like paradise for Kitty. She calls my mother Gagu (pronounced Gah-gee), which is a mutation of the Welsh for granny, "Mamgu".

"GAH-GEE?!" shrieked Kitty every morning. "GAH-GEE! GAH-GEE! GAH-GEE!" We are back home now and Kitty wanders the echoey rooms saying "Gah-gee?" sadly.

Living in my childhood home has made me start to really fetishise childhood in a way I never thought I would. There are millions of children at my mother's house, all the time. Never fewer than two, under five. So there is Play-Dough smelted against almost every surface, boxes of Lego, Charlie and Lola videos and an audience of stuffed toys wryly watching the action in every room.

Now Kitty is walking and talking I've turned into one of those mothers who wants to preserve their child's "innocence" and bang on to myself about wanting her to be able to be "free" to "be a child".

I'm being an idiot, though. I remember clearly the grim games of "grown-ups" that used to go on in the playground, my own yearning from about nine years old, to be several tens of years older than I actually was. Being small feels so unimportant. You are liable to be laughed at by grown-ups, they just won't take you seriously - it's dementing. You long to be older so that people will treat you with some fucking respect.

But I still plan to forge ahead with manufacturing a neat little cosily conventional childhood for Kitty, (even though it's actually for me), with Peppa Pig box sets, tea at 5pm, strict bedtimes, bucket and spade holidays, picture books, rocking horses, baking fairy cakes, wellies with frog eyes on the front. All that crap.

And I could do worse in my quest to shape Kitty's memories to my liking, than getting to be a dab hand at Welsh cakes, verily the taste of my childhood. They are also known as, I think, drop scones or griddle cakes. It's basically a sort of scone batter cooked in a dry frying pan. They are as delicious as they sound.


You cannot buy these, they do no exist commercially - and what I mean by this is that you CAN buy things that claim to the Welsh cakes on the packet, but the whole point about them is that they have to be eaten about half and hour off the griddle, still warm, with salted butter. Once they are not freshly made, piping hot, they cease to be Welsh cakes. At least that's my view.

They're alright the next day but not as good. My mother makes a batch when there is about to be an extra large kiddie invasion and we all stand at the kitchen counter at 3.15pm shoving them in our faces with both hands, before swinging on the curtains, daubing ourselves with mud and fighting each other with sticks.

Please note the self-raising flour.

Mamgu's Welsh cakes
Makes about 20

8 oz self raising flour
4 oz butter
2 oz caster sugar
2 oz currants
1 egg

1 Put the flour, butter and sugar into a bowl and then cut in the butter (this is easier if the butter is soft. Yes I know this is a pain in the bum, but butter only takes 30 mins to soften up in a room temperature kitchen, so go away and fold some laundry or something).

2 Rub the butter in with your fingers until it looks like breadcrumbs.

3 Beat the egg, add in and mix until there is a pliable dough.

4 Roll out to a thickness of 1cm and then cut with a pastry cutter

5 Fry in batches in a hot, dry frying pan for about 4 minutes each side, or until golden brown, and then transfer to a cooling rack. My mother claims to have seen these baked on a hot hoe over an open fire in a field, but I think she might be having me on. You can never quite tell with her.

Lemon Posset

There is nothing more boring than a blog post that starts "Sorry you haven't heard from me for a while, it's all just been so busy...."

It's as boring as settling down to read someone's diary and the entries go:

"2nd Feb...
... Dear Diary, gosh it's been so long since my last entry!...."

"5th July...
... Dear Diary, gosh it's been so long  since my last entry!....."

So I won't start this blog post like that. And anyway, I'm not sorry. It's a miracle I update Recipe Rifle at all, what with my chronic heartburn and never making a penny out of it and being totally and utterly fed up with both cooking and writing.

If you are looking for some sort of explanation then it's because at first I couldn't think of anything to say. All I could think was how annoying Kitty was being, but that was what the last post was about. And then whenever I was about to sit down and do something, awful things would happen. Like Kitty got really ill. And I mean REALLY ill this time, a temperature of 104 and terrible eczema all over her and I had to see about a million different doctors and urgh, I feel quite ill myself thinking about it. AND my husband was away in America and the whole thing was so stressful I was sent running into the arms of a strip of Valium I nicked off my Dad. It was really Seventies.

And then we went on holiday for a bit, which was lovely but I wasn't going to blog from THERE. And now my husband's in trouble again for saying something or other on Twitter, which I won't go into because it's too dementing.

Anyway I am as I write this waiting for him to finish off some work before we go out for a Chinese to drown our sorrows in spring rolls and neon orange sauce, and I'm pacing about and worrying about him and feeling sad that it's all gone bonkers (again) and vaguely wondering if he can ever be persuaded not to say just exactly precisely whatever's in his brain .... and I realised with shock that Recipe Rifle is now an entire month out of date and as it so happens I've got something to say about lemon posset.

I don't like lemon puddings - at all. I've said it before. The acid of the lemon combined with the sweetness and sugariness of other ingredients reminds me powerfully of vomit. But there's something different about lemon posset, maybe it's the really serious creaminess of the thing.

We had this at my sister's house in Oxford over the weekend, made by a terrific fellow called Rory Dorman. Ah yes, the weekend, back when life was still nice and Twitter hadn't fallen on our heads. It seems a golden time, the one sunny day we've had for ages. Maybe the memory of it and the deliciousness of the posset will change my mind about lemon puddings for ever. But I suspect not.

Lemon Posset by Rory Dorman
For about 6 or 8

500ml double cream
lemon and zest of 2 lemons
100g sugar

1 Bubble the cream in a pan gently for 3 minutes

2 Add the sugar and your lemony stuff and whisk

3 Pour into ramekins or glasses and chill for 3 hours

We had ours with raspberry coulis and little posh french biscuits and it was delicious.

Kitty's Jersey Royal hash

I have, many times, been in bad relationships. Relationships where the boy just flat out didn't like me and treated me badly and made me miserable. But I never left because I used to be one of those people who secretly loved the drama of it all and because when you are with someone who gets you accustomed to being treated badly, when they do something nice you are ten times more overjoyed than you should be. You nurse little scraps of affection. I'm not proud of it.

I have been thinking about this a lot because Kitty is being a bit of a pain in the arse at the moment. She is 14 months old and still can't walk and her molars are coming through and she's got a cold and she's just being unusually unbearable.

She wants EVERYTHING. She wants to be picked up, no put down, she wants to sit on this narrow windowsill and play with the catflap. She wants the cat - SHE WANTS THE CAT! PLEASE I WANT THE CAT. Now she wants to get down and walk, walk, stumble, walk walk. Now she wants to stand at this cupboard and open and close the door. Open, close, open, close, open, close. Open. Close. Now she wants to take out and smash the china PLEASE LET ME SMASH THE CHINA I WANT TO SMASH THE CHINA. Now she wants to be picked up! Down! Up! Down. She wants to run after the ball and kick it but she can't run or really kick. Now she wants to screw and unscrew the lid on this tube of moisturiser but she doesn't understand how the screw mechanism works. RAGE! Now I want to be picked up and go somewhere to do something but I CANNOT EXPLAIN WHAT IT IS SO I AM JUST GOING TO GO RED AND GO "EEEEEEEHHRH? MMMMMMOOOO?! EHHH EHHH EHHHHHHH?!"

And that represents probably less than five minutes in the life of Kitty Coren at the moment. It's pretty dementing. My friend R encapsulated the same experience that she is having with her otherwise impeccably-behaved toddler, who is 16 months old. "It drives me a bit mad. Endless pointing, pointing, pointing. Ehhh, ehhhh, ehhh. Never happy. Thank god for bedtime," she says. Another friend, L, who has three children, says "Yes it's that angry Japanese tourist thing that toddlers do. It's miserable."

And while all this made me feel a lot better - my child is not peculiarly awful, she is just entering the famously nightmarish toddler stage - it has brought back to me the experience of having a really shitty boyfriend.

As with a bad boyfriend, I continue to coo at her and say "come on then, pumpkin, what's up with you?" in the hope that she will be mollified by my dote. And, as with a bad boyfriend, when she does something - anything - nice: crawls on my lap to bash her snotty face against my cheek in the parody of a kiss, or decides after two months of spitting Calpol out that she is going to sip it nicely from the spoon and say "num num" afterwards - I am beside myself with joy.

"What a good girl you are!" I shriek. And I feel such a fool.

Anyway I made this for her lunch today - not that she would suffer to eat more than a few spoonfuls of it, the ingrate - and it was terrific and a great thing to do with the new Jersey Royals that are coming through at the moment.

Babies like this (she did eat quite a lot in the end) or it's a brilliant starter or brunch.

Kitty's potato hash

However many new potatoes you want per person
1 egg pp
handful peas pp
handful cheese pp
double cream, just to slop over
salt and pepper

Pre-heat your oven to 200C

1 Boil your Jersey Royals for 20 mins then tip into a baking dish and lightly crush with a fork.

2 Defrost some peas in the bowl with boiling water for a few minutes and add to the pan.

3 Scatter over cheese and drizzle over some cream until things are wet but not soaking. Season and stir together.

5 Crack in your eggs and bake in the oven for about 10-15 mins or until the eggs are set.

The sky's the limit in terms of ingredients, here. Chop in some bacon if you like, or mint, or chorizo or mushrooms or anything. Then make an appointment to get yourself sterilised.

Measuring cups

I try hard not to buy kitchen gadgets, I really do. They are mostly a waste of space and money - a one-way ticket to disappointment and self-loathing.

But for every Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker, (impractical), rice cooker (pointless) and juicer (amazing but hell to clean), there is the Dr Brown bottle brush (life-saving), openy-closey bright yellow lemon squeezer (I love you), Japanese mandolin (mmmm) and Cuisinart steamer basket (couldn't live without it).

The trouble is: how do you know? How do you know a set of poach pods isn't going to revolutionise your life? How do you know that you don't need, now, this particular silicon spatula?

I mostly try to resist, until my fingers, literally with a life of their own, reach for the chopping board that folds in on itself, or the banana hanger, or the toaster bag. Then I get them home and hide them from my husband, who partly despairs at my gadget-madness but also partly loves it, as he can say "Do we have something that will slice this apple into neat segments and section off the core?" And I will say "Why yes, and it also has soft rubber grips so you don't hurt your hands!!!"

Anyway today I caved in, having not bought anything for months and months (mostly because I've GOT IT ALL), because I saw these measuring cups in Waitrose, which I really think might change my life. My set of little metal measuring spoons rule the roost in my kitchen and there's no reason why these babies shouldn't occupy a similar topspot in the kitchen pecking order.

They measure not only in ml but also in cups - that maddening American instruction - so you can be all transatlantic about your cooking. They are also reassuringly practical and utilitarian - this craze for neon silicon cannot end soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I seem to remember Nigella saying how much she loves her set of measuring cups, which she bought in America. (I may have made that up.)

But now a set can be yours for £9.50, from your nearest Waitrose with a kitchen utensil section. Now I just need something to cook.

Holstein Schnitzel

I continue to be deeply troubled by meat-eating. It never used to be a thing with me. I laughed at vegetarians - a lot. Silly people. Silly, silly. But in the last few years it's crept up on me, this horror of meat - accelerated by the arrival of my child, I'm sure (although having a baby hasn't made me a nicer person in any other regard; HM Revenue & Customs officials, John Lewis nursery department floor salesmen, Barclays Bank telephone banking jessies and National Health Service receptionists London-wide will attest).

What keeps coming back to me, again and again, is a bit in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There are these horrible aliens, the name of which now escapes me, who live on a planet with these gorgeous sort of deer-creatures with shining eyes and angelic temperaments and have antlers made out of fine filigree - or something. And the horrible aliens treat these deer-creatures abysmally and kill them for meat and ride them until their backs break and eat their children and so on.

That's me - that's us. It's only really just occurred to me that that was the moral of the story. We are the disgusting aliens. And sometimes when I hear people talking about how they are going to cook meat I feel as revolted and perverted as if I'm listening to a conversation about how to cook and eat children, or people. How can you salivate over the cooking of a dead creature! It's so terrible! Isn't it? Isn't it awful? And wrong?

But I don't want to stop eating meat, because it's too complicated. My reasons are too pathetic. And I never, ever eat meat that hasn't had a better life than mine. I spend an extortionate amount of money on quality meat and I dress myself in rags. Does that make it alright? I just don't know.

Anyway, sorry. I'm sure a lot of you think this sort of soul-searching is boring and stupid. It's just taken me entirely by surprise. I just didn't think I was that kind of person.

Nothing troubles me more than veal, except lamb. And chickens I suppose. Buck buck buck! It's all awful. But we purchsed some (rose) veal escalopes from the farmer's market the other day from the Twelve Green Acres farm stand, which is a small organic farm in Dorset. http://www.12greenacres.co.uk/

We spend so much money there that the bloke practically breaks into a jig when we slope up, requesting this week's happiest and most indulged creature that died of natural causes for us to worship for a while before cooking ritually and eating while murmuring prayers.

Inspired by a recent trip to The Delauney, London's latest swankhole from Jeremy King and Chris Corbin (The Wolseley, The Ivy etc) we made veal schnitzel Holstein. Have I got that right? It's breaded veal escalope with a fried egg on top.

It goes like this.

2 veal escalopes (must cost at least £4bn each)
medium matzoh meal YOU CAN GET IT FROM WAITROSE but don't get one that is kosher for passover, which is swilling about at this time of year, because it is considerably more expensive than the normal stuff and you will be needing to watch your pennies having bought your veal
seasoned flour
oil for frying
4 eggs


1 Set out three bowls, one with seasoned flour - and by this I mean heavily seasoned, three big pinches of salt, twelve turns of the pepper mill - one with the matzoh meal and one with two beaten eggs. Season the matzoh as well for good measure.

2 Dip the escalopes once in the flour, then in the egg and then in the matzoh. Set aside - I find I cake cooling rack most effective.

3 Heat up a lot of veg oil in a pan - about 1/2 a cm deep - preferably one that comes with a lid, until it is hot (but not smoking and going crazy) and fry the escalopes quickly, really just 2 minutes each side or less. Keep the lid hovering over the pan to stop your kitchen from smelling like the floor of a kebab van.

4 For the perfect fried egg, crack in the egg off the heat and fry gently - the egg ought never to pop or spit. Just as the edges of the egg look done, hover the lid again over the eggs so the steam cooks the top - that way you get a cooked albumen without having to flip the egg with yolk-breaking anxiety.

We ate it with broccoli. And a side order of GUILT.

Spinach roulade

We've had spinach roulade twice now while we've been staying at my parents' - it's very nice. Quite a Seventies throwback, I'd guess (without having done any research). But it's not nearly as troublesome as it looks.

My mother leapt on this as a dinner solution when she and Dad were in their manic Atkins diet phase. My father is obsessed with his weight because he has been tremendously thin for most of his life. Really, one of those very tall, very skinny, bony giraffe people. Then he hit middle age and his love of dinner and sweeties was no longer a thing to be celebrated. He was no longer a furnace of a young man who merely converted millions of calories into dinner party conversation, spying on the Soviet Union and long legs: he was getting fat.

So when the Atkins diet came along (second time around) he fell on it literally like a starving man and we all ate nothing but bacon and eggs and ran screaming from potatoes for about two years.

And for anyone doing Atkins, this is a great thing to have. You can stuff it with all manner of things - I have had it once with smoked salmon and creme fraiche and once with mushrooms (just diced and fried with butter, thyme and cream).

I will just go through how to do the roulade thing here as the filling is really up to your imagination.

Two eggs per person
A large handful (cooked amount) of spinach
salt and pepper

Set your oven to 180C

1 Cook down very low some spinach until you have a handful of very surrendered leaves. This is going to be mixed in with beaten egg whites so it needs to be finely shredded. Take a pair of scissors to it if you fancy.

2 Separate your eggs, keeping the yolks somewhere safe. Beat the eggwhites until large, light and fluffy but not stiff (we're not making meringue).

3 Mix the shredded spinach with the yolks and season. Add this to the eggwhites and stir to combine but try not to overmix, (I hate this phrase - of course I'd never knowingly overmix something you stupid cow/bastard, why tell me not to? - but you know what I mean).

4 Spread this mixture onto a sheet of greaseproof paper - you're aiming for a thickness of about an inch. Bake for 8-10 minutes until soft and springy.

5 Spread with your filling and roll up as above. Easier than it looks if you're careful. Although my mother does have a degree in fine art.

As it happens I'm having a simply ghastly time. I'm rowing with everyone (what's new?), suspicious that my operation hasn't actually worked, ratty from post-operative pain, discomfort and inconvenience, neauseous from the post-op antibiotics, furious at hobbling myself by pulling at a bit of loose skin on my heel and carving a deep trough in my foot, which is sending shooting pains up my leg, maddened by my camera's shitty attitude, demented with anxiety about having to go on three separate family holidays - two of them foreign - apprehensive about the amount of time between now and September that my husband is going to be abroad for work, wretchedly poking at a huge under-the-skin chin zit I thought had gone away and despairing over the fact that our builder cut through our central heating pipes (by accident) this morning, sending a fountain of water gushing into the living room.

I would say that I want my mummy except that she's downstairs and it doesn't make a blind bit of difference. AND she absent-mindedly ate the rest of my lunch, which I had briefly abandoned to take a phonecall (about central heating pipes).

If things don't improve I'm going to have to start casting around for someone to fire. That always cheers me up.