I mean, if you call being ill and the size of a house a HOLIDAY.
But I'll be back in 2011 with:
MACAROONS!
STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING!
HOME-MADE PASTA (MAYBE)
COMPLAINING!
A BABY!
SOME OTHER STUFF!!!!
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Ginger Snaps
Few things make your house smell like festive holidays as much as the delicious baked treats fresh out of the oven. Made with fresh ginger, crystallized ginger, Christmas spices, molasses, maple syrup, these ginger snaps are packed with flavours and a great reminder of Christmas. Recipe adapted from Cook's Companion by Carole Clements and Essen und Trinken
To all my friends and readers, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas with Good Mood, Real Food and Love!
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- Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Prepare 3 baking trays with parchment paper. Whisk together the flour, baking soda, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, and salt in a mixing bowl.
- Beat the golden caster sugar and butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add in egg, molasses, maple syrup, and fresh ginger.
With the mixer on low, slowly add the flour mixture to the butter mixture. Beat until incorporated. - Fold in the crystallized ginger. Cover with a plastic film and chill for 1 hour. Shape the dough into 1-inch balls. Roll the balls in the sugar, and place about 2-inch apart on the prepared baking tray.
- Bake until the cookies are just firm to the touch, about 12 minutes or 15 minutes if you prefer them crisp. Transfer the ginger snaps to wire racks and let cool completely. Store the cookies in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks.
Christmas special #13: The morning after
And so we come to the end, on the arbitrary number #13, of my series of Christmas Specials. There were going to be more, but I'm now ill *cough cough* and as good as snowed in, so more cooking is out of the question.
But I thought we'd finish sort of where we started, with a detailed guide that may be either useful or grossly patronising, depending on what state of mind you're in.
I want to talk about BRUNCH, which is something you may be called upon to provide on Boxing Day, or New Year's Day.
Newspaper colour supplements are falling over themselves to suggest that you do kedgeree, turkey soups or exotic duck salad things for your various brunches. When in actual fact, what most of us will reach for is the humble fry-up.
But I disagree that a fry-up is simple. I think a fry-up ranks next to a roast in terms of a thing that seems simple, but is in fact fiendishly hard to get right. And I know it's hard to get right because I've pretty much never been at a domestic fry-up situation for more than 2 people that's gone smoothly.
I mean, unless I'm in charge.
The trouble comes with the multiple elements of the fry-up. Every family is different; you may have a strict no-bean or no-mushroom tradition. Sauces might be utterly verboten on the breakfast table - alternatively HP and fried eggs may verily be the taste of your childhood. But the fact remains that there are a lot of things to co-ordinate and there's inevitably not be quite enough of something, or a couple of things reach the table stone cold.
So the first thing to do when you're contemplating doing a fry up for brunch, is to take complete charge. Don't let other people interfere - I mean, in the nicest possible way - unless it's minor tasks like putting stuff on the table or making tea, because only you can hold all the various timings of things in your head - no-one else. Two people doing a fry-up always equals cold beans.
Then you ought to do things in the following sort of order. This will enable everyone, including you, to sit down roughly at the same time without having to leap up muttering "butter", only to leap up three seconds later, muttering "teaspoons".
I mention the various elements of my preferred brunch fry-up but mentally delete those abhorrent to you as you go along and add in whatever else you're into (fried bread? tomatoes? black pudding? mmmm). Don't let anyone tell you that with a fry-up you've "gotta" have sausages or you've "gotta" have ketchup. Fuck them! It's your brunch.
Allow 30 minutes to get all this done - although it may take 45 if you are doing this for more than 4 people.
So here we go.
1 Fill the kettle and turn it on. Get the butter out of the fridge so it has a chance to be spreadable. Switch on the oven to a plate-warming temperature and then put in
- plates
- a flat dish for bacon/sausages
- a deep round dish for beans
2 Get out a frying pan and a saucepan, with a little oil in the frying pan. Put them both on the lowest available heat.
Some portion control advice:
- Allow three rashers of streaky or two rashers of back bacon per person.
- (Egg advice coming in a minute)
- If you are having sausages, best dig out an extra pan to do them in. My advice is to do chipolatas, as they cook fast. Allow 3 per person. If you insist on doing big bangers, allow 2 pp and leave at least 40 mins for them to cook properly.
- Allow 1/2 a tin of beans per person. I know it sounds like a lot, but it'll all go.
- Allow 1 portobello mushroom or 1 generous handful of button mushrooms
- Allow 1 disc of black pudding pp (unless you know someone is a real black pudding fiend)
- Allow 1 fried/grilled tomato pp, cut in half
3 Get this all on the go and then congratulate yourself - you're 70% of the way to a very well-organised brunch. Celebrate with a cup of tea.
4 Leave the sausages, beans and bacon and whatever else all cooking very gently. I can't stress enough the importance of having everything on a very low or medium heat. You don't want anything to be sizzling fast and giving off billowing blue smoke - that way lies panic and burnt things. Bacon needs to cook very slowly in order to be lovely and crispy - I'm talking 20-25 minutes - because the fat needs to render and then crisp up. Chipolatas mostly don't care what's done to them but if you cook them slowly, there'll never be a situation where something's burning and scaring the pants off you.
5 Now is the critical time to dump knives and forks, mugs, glasses, milk, butter, jam, juice, sugar, teaspooons, mustard, tongs, HP, pepper, ketchup, whatever, on the table. Just pile it up in the middle any old how. Don't bother to set places. Where do you fucking live? Buckingham Palace?
6 If possible, move the toaster, if you have one, and the bread very close to the table where you'll be eating. Or on it, if there's room. Toast is a fiendish little minx and needs to jump straight onto the plate or it'll go cold and horrible. To have the toaster close to the table will cut down on that frustrating time lag between getting your fried egg and tucking in.
7 Things ought to be quite calm in the kitchen at the moment. You could give the beans a stir if you felt like it. Stare at the table and rack your brains for anything anyone might irritatingly request just as you've sat down. Marmalade? A side plate?!
As soon as the beans or anything else looks ready, transfer it to the waiting warm dishes in your oven. No element of your fry-up should ever touch a cold plate or dish. People ought to be drifting into the kitchen by now, drawn by the smell of bacon. One of them could be charged with making a pot of tea/coffee. As soon as the kettle has been emptied, fill it to the brim and get it boiling again. I know - not very environmentally sound, but reassure yourself that you don't normally do this.
8 When your bacon and sausages look done, transfer to more waiting warm dishes in oven and continue to feel *SMUG* at how prepared you are. Now take the frying pan off the heat and set about your eggs. You ought to allow one fried egg for girls and two for boys. PLEASE don't go nuts and accuse me of sexism, it's just a rule of thumb.
I would go as far, here, as to suggest that you don't attempt scrambled eggs, as however many thousands of eggs you scramble, there will never be enough to go round. I don't know why that should be, but it is.
The secrets of great fried eggs are:
1 Crack them into the frying pan while it's off the heat
2 Use a non-stick pan
3 Cook gently. The eggs ought never to make that squelching, popping sound that they do in Ghostbusters when they start frying on Dana Barrett's counter.
4 Cover with a lid to cook the egg tops, so you don't have to flip them, which always results in broken yolks and stress.
If you don't have a lid big enough to cover the pan, get the biggest one you've got and balance one edge against one side of the pan and the other against a wooden implement bridged horizontally across the opposite pan sides.
9 Now is the only point where you have to move fast. A fresh pot of tea might need to be made (but this will be a doddle as you've already filled and boiled the kettle, see?) Anyone who hasn't arrived for brunch ought to be summoned. Hot plates need to be transferred to the table and the first round of toast ought to go down. When the eggs are looking done, get someone else to transfer stuff waiting in the oven (the beans will need a stir) to the table and start dishing out eggs. Leave everyone to help themselves to bacon, sausages and beans and to ask the person who's ended up sitting next to the toaster to stick more toast on.
10 Here you may have to make a second panful of eggs, depending on how many people you're catering for. But that's okay - what with your brilliant plate and dish-warming, some people can get their eggs a few minutes later and still have all the elements of their brunch piping hot.
So that's it. The End. I hope I've made sense. If not, just copy everything off Jamie Oliver - it all works and it's all delicious. I don't know why anyone bothers looking elsewhere.
Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for sticking with me this year, I know I'm not always easy to have around.
But I thought we'd finish sort of where we started, with a detailed guide that may be either useful or grossly patronising, depending on what state of mind you're in.
I want to talk about BRUNCH, which is something you may be called upon to provide on Boxing Day, or New Year's Day.
Newspaper colour supplements are falling over themselves to suggest that you do kedgeree, turkey soups or exotic duck salad things for your various brunches. When in actual fact, what most of us will reach for is the humble fry-up.
But I disagree that a fry-up is simple. I think a fry-up ranks next to a roast in terms of a thing that seems simple, but is in fact fiendishly hard to get right. And I know it's hard to get right because I've pretty much never been at a domestic fry-up situation for more than 2 people that's gone smoothly.
I mean, unless I'm in charge.
The trouble comes with the multiple elements of the fry-up. Every family is different; you may have a strict no-bean or no-mushroom tradition. Sauces might be utterly verboten on the breakfast table - alternatively HP and fried eggs may verily be the taste of your childhood. But the fact remains that there are a lot of things to co-ordinate and there's inevitably not be quite enough of something, or a couple of things reach the table stone cold.
So the first thing to do when you're contemplating doing a fry up for brunch, is to take complete charge. Don't let other people interfere - I mean, in the nicest possible way - unless it's minor tasks like putting stuff on the table or making tea, because only you can hold all the various timings of things in your head - no-one else. Two people doing a fry-up always equals cold beans.
Then you ought to do things in the following sort of order. This will enable everyone, including you, to sit down roughly at the same time without having to leap up muttering "butter", only to leap up three seconds later, muttering "teaspoons".
I mention the various elements of my preferred brunch fry-up but mentally delete those abhorrent to you as you go along and add in whatever else you're into (fried bread? tomatoes? black pudding? mmmm). Don't let anyone tell you that with a fry-up you've "gotta" have sausages or you've "gotta" have ketchup. Fuck them! It's your brunch.
Allow 30 minutes to get all this done - although it may take 45 if you are doing this for more than 4 people.
So here we go.
1 Fill the kettle and turn it on. Get the butter out of the fridge so it has a chance to be spreadable. Switch on the oven to a plate-warming temperature and then put in
- plates
- a flat dish for bacon/sausages
- a deep round dish for beans
2 Get out a frying pan and a saucepan, with a little oil in the frying pan. Put them both on the lowest available heat.
Some portion control advice:
- Allow three rashers of streaky or two rashers of back bacon per person.
- (Egg advice coming in a minute)
- If you are having sausages, best dig out an extra pan to do them in. My advice is to do chipolatas, as they cook fast. Allow 3 per person. If you insist on doing big bangers, allow 2 pp and leave at least 40 mins for them to cook properly.
- Allow 1/2 a tin of beans per person. I know it sounds like a lot, but it'll all go.
- Allow 1 portobello mushroom or 1 generous handful of button mushrooms
- Allow 1 disc of black pudding pp (unless you know someone is a real black pudding fiend)
- Allow 1 fried/grilled tomato pp, cut in half
3 Get this all on the go and then congratulate yourself - you're 70% of the way to a very well-organised brunch. Celebrate with a cup of tea.
4 Leave the sausages, beans and bacon and whatever else all cooking very gently. I can't stress enough the importance of having everything on a very low or medium heat. You don't want anything to be sizzling fast and giving off billowing blue smoke - that way lies panic and burnt things. Bacon needs to cook very slowly in order to be lovely and crispy - I'm talking 20-25 minutes - because the fat needs to render and then crisp up. Chipolatas mostly don't care what's done to them but if you cook them slowly, there'll never be a situation where something's burning and scaring the pants off you.
5 Now is the critical time to dump knives and forks, mugs, glasses, milk, butter, jam, juice, sugar, teaspooons, mustard, tongs, HP, pepper, ketchup, whatever, on the table. Just pile it up in the middle any old how. Don't bother to set places. Where do you fucking live? Buckingham Palace?
6 If possible, move the toaster, if you have one, and the bread very close to the table where you'll be eating. Or on it, if there's room. Toast is a fiendish little minx and needs to jump straight onto the plate or it'll go cold and horrible. To have the toaster close to the table will cut down on that frustrating time lag between getting your fried egg and tucking in.
7 Things ought to be quite calm in the kitchen at the moment. You could give the beans a stir if you felt like it. Stare at the table and rack your brains for anything anyone might irritatingly request just as you've sat down. Marmalade? A side plate?!
As soon as the beans or anything else looks ready, transfer it to the waiting warm dishes in your oven. No element of your fry-up should ever touch a cold plate or dish. People ought to be drifting into the kitchen by now, drawn by the smell of bacon. One of them could be charged with making a pot of tea/coffee. As soon as the kettle has been emptied, fill it to the brim and get it boiling again. I know - not very environmentally sound, but reassure yourself that you don't normally do this.
8 When your bacon and sausages look done, transfer to more waiting warm dishes in oven and continue to feel *SMUG* at how prepared you are. Now take the frying pan off the heat and set about your eggs. You ought to allow one fried egg for girls and two for boys. PLEASE don't go nuts and accuse me of sexism, it's just a rule of thumb.
I would go as far, here, as to suggest that you don't attempt scrambled eggs, as however many thousands of eggs you scramble, there will never be enough to go round. I don't know why that should be, but it is.
The secrets of great fried eggs are:
1 Crack them into the frying pan while it's off the heat
2 Use a non-stick pan
3 Cook gently. The eggs ought never to make that squelching, popping sound that they do in Ghostbusters when they start frying on Dana Barrett's counter.
4 Cover with a lid to cook the egg tops, so you don't have to flip them, which always results in broken yolks and stress.
If you don't have a lid big enough to cover the pan, get the biggest one you've got and balance one edge against one side of the pan and the other against a wooden implement bridged horizontally across the opposite pan sides.
9 Now is the only point where you have to move fast. A fresh pot of tea might need to be made (but this will be a doddle as you've already filled and boiled the kettle, see?) Anyone who hasn't arrived for brunch ought to be summoned. Hot plates need to be transferred to the table and the first round of toast ought to go down. When the eggs are looking done, get someone else to transfer stuff waiting in the oven (the beans will need a stir) to the table and start dishing out eggs. Leave everyone to help themselves to bacon, sausages and beans and to ask the person who's ended up sitting next to the toaster to stick more toast on.
10 Here you may have to make a second panful of eggs, depending on how many people you're catering for. But that's okay - what with your brilliant plate and dish-warming, some people can get their eggs a few minutes later and still have all the elements of their brunch piping hot.
So that's it. The End. I hope I've made sense. If not, just copy everything off Jamie Oliver - it all works and it's all delicious. I don't know why anyone bothers looking elsewhere.
Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for sticking with me this year, I know I'm not always easy to have around.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Beetroot Risotto
Risotto is really delicious at any time of the day and the addition of beetroot makes this pretty much a super-food, as beetroot are a rich source of potent antioxidants and nutrients. Next time I am going to scatter some
- 200 g Cooked beetroot
- 1 tbsp Olive oil
- 1 Shallot, finely chopped
- 1 clove Garlic, minced
- 130 g Risotto rice
- 80 ml White wine
- 400 ml Hot vegetable stock
- 2 tbsp Parmesan, finely grated
- Handful of arugula
- Puree half of the cooked beetroot and cut another half into small pieces. Ser aside. Heat the olive oil in a pan. Tip in shallot and garlic, then stir until translucent. Stir in rice until well-coated with oil. Pour in the white wine and beetroot puree. Simmer until all is absorbed.
- Pour in a third of the hot vegetable stock and set the timer to 18 mins. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the stock has been absorbed, then add half the rest of the stock and continue cooking and stirring until that has been absorbed.
- Add in the rest of the stock, stir, then simmer until cooked. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in most of the Parmesan, arugula and the diced beetroot through the risotto. Serve with Parmesan and arugula scattered on top.
Christmas special #12: Performance winter salad
If you want a great, easy winter salad, see my post on Jamie's Winter Coleslaw. It's delicious and very straightforward.
This is slightly more of a performance, hence its poetic name. It's a salad I nicked off Jacob Kennedy, who is head chef at Bocca di Lupo, which is an Italian restaurant in Soho.
I was at school with Jake but I don't think I ever spoke to him, not once. I don't know why. He wasn't in any of my classes, I suppose. Anyway, he's always very friendly now - maybe he feels guilty about never having spoken to me. So I hope he'll look the other way now I've left it 12 years to copy his homework.
This radish and celeriac salad is my favourite thing that Bocca di Lupo does, which is odd for me, because usually the thing I like most on a menu is the thing that is crispiest and covered with the most salt.
I recreated it at home the other night and although it requires quite a lot of ingredients, once you've got them, you can turn this into a really massive salad and it will, I promise, impress all your friends. When you read the ingredients list you'll probably go "yuk" but honestly, honestly, this is a really exciting thing.
You will need:
1 celeriac
1 pack radishes. Little red ones, or those big black ones, if you can source them
1 pomegranate
juice of 1/2 a lemon
some olive oil
some white truffle oil (from Waitrose. Not cheap but lasts for ages and comes in v useful for all sorts of things.)
salt and pepper
pecorino or manchego cheese
some rocket or arugala
1 Peel and slice the celeriac (you may only need 1/2 or a third depending on how big you want to do the salad) as thinly as you can. You may want to cut the celeriac slices further into strips. Slice the radishes equally thinly. (This is basically a recipe invented to make use of a Japanese mandolin). Shave the pecorino.
2 Start the salad with a bed of rocket, then interleave the celeriac, radishes and cheese. Halve the pomegranate and then turn over and whack the back with a wooden spoon so that the seeds fall out, over the salad.
3 Dress with lemon juice, olive oil and truffle oil. Sprinkle over salt and pepper.
Goes nicely with most things, especially anything really rich.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Christmas special #11: Ginger cake
I really did genuinely once believe that pregnant women were just making a bloody fuss about nothing. And then I staggered into the seventh month of my own pregnancy and realised that: IT'S THE WORST THING IN THE WHOLE WORLD.
This is what I did yesterday:
- Wake up to feeling the baby press its hands and feet - clearly simply for sport - into some really weird corners of my insides
- Stagger off to the loo. Pause in front of the mirror to do some silent screaming/hand-clawing down cheeks. Then make happy lunatic face with head on one side.
- Spend 30 minutes trying to find some clothes that still fit. Realise I have put pants on inside out. Cannot face the bending involved turning them right way around. Drive to Waitrose. Walk round Waitrose incredibly slowly, rolling from side to side like overweight, post-menopausal bag lady, from one painful swollen foot to the other, buying most of the shop. Wonder if my pale blue Nike Air Maxes are so unfashionable that they might soon become fashionable again.
- Start to leave Waitrose carpark but receive important phonecall from next-eldest sister and so park diagonally across three spaces near entrace to take call.
Her: "In answer to your question, you can get maternity pads from Boots."
Me: "Thanks"
Her: "How are you?"
Me: "FUCKING SHIT."
Her: "Mmmm. Yes. Don't worry it'll be over soon. I'm weirdly envious. Having a baby is amazing."
Me: "Whatever. I'm like a cat. I can't really fathom what's going to happen."
Her: "It'll be fine. Having a baby is fine. Although, Edward woke up at 1am this morning and screamed until six. Patrick's got the runs. He's doing poos all up the back of his nappy."
Me: "Fucking hell."
- Talk like that for a while. Get home. Put shopping away. Wave goodbye to husband, who is going out for lunch with a minor member of the royal family.
- Lie on the sofa. Consider vomiting. Reject idea. Make ginger cake. Lie back on sofa. Fall asleep to recorded episodes of Gossip Girl. Wake up at 5pm as husband comes back, stinking of booze and Agent Provocateur. Greet him coldly. Swerve attempted hugs. Feel partially mollified by excellent gossip he has brought home, like a cat dragging in a sparrow.
- Make dinner. Go to first NCT class. Lie about my thoughts on pain relief during labour. Leave NCT class, swearing never to go to another one. Make exasperated lunatic face by sucking in cheeks and dilating nostrils and eyes.
- Get home. Pick huge fight with husband prompted by tasteless joke made in NCT class, find myself standing at one end of the kitchen, hurling cocktail sticks at him, which he fields. Drink large glass of red wine and eat leftover cold dinner and a slice of ginger cake. Feel bilious. Go to bed. Have neurotic dreams about being given 0/10 for an essay for the NCT class and then telling the teacher to go and fuck herself, but then getting stuck in the door because too fat.
At least the ginger cake turned out really well. A reader alerted me to the niceness of this as a home-made thing. It's a cross between Jamaican Ginger Cake and Golden Syrup Cake (that come in those foil packets, know the ones I mean?) only lighter and more velvety.
This qualifies as a Christmas Special post because it's a seasonal alternative to fruit cake, which not everyone is that crazy about. And when I say everyone, I mean ME.
It's also a doddle - the only fiddly bit is getting the golden syrup and treacle out of the tins without glueing yourself to the kitchen floor.
[NB a reader (below) has alerted me to the trick of submerging the tins in warm water for a moment or two to loosen up before spooning out.]
Anyway, here we go:
Stem ginger cake with lemon icing
This will fit a cake tin roughly 22cm across and 7cm deep.
225g self-raising flour
1tsp bicarb soda
1 TBSP ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground mixed spice
115g butter, cubed
115g dark muscovado sugar (or dark soft brown sugar, or light brown sugar, doesn't matter really)
115g black treacle - US readers can sub molasses
115g golden syprup - US readers can sub corn syrup
250ml whole milk
85g preserved stem ginger, sold in Waitrose in a jar, labelled as Chinese stem ginger. Find it near the jams and marmalades.
1 egg
1 Preheat oven: fan 160C, normal 180C
2 Assemble flour, bicarb soda, and spices. Either sift or put in bowl and give a swizzle with a whisk.
3 Cut butter into dry ingredients and rub into flour. Yawn. Quite boring.
[NB a reader has suggested that you can melt the butter along with everything in Instruction 4 and you get the same result without tedious rubbing-in]
4 Heat sugars, syrups and milk together in a pan gently until all melted. Don't worry too much if you over-scoop and get a bit too much of either syrup or treacle into the pan because you can't get it out again and so there's no point in fretting.
5 Chop the preserved ginger as finely as you can be arsed to and add to flour. Pour warm sugars over flour. Mix with wooden spoon and then crack in egg and continue to mix thoroughly. Mixture will lighten in colour just perceptibly.
6 Pour into tin (greased and lined if you're feeling holy) and bake for 50 mins.
For the icing
50g icing sugar
finely-chopped zest and juice of one lemon
1 Add lemon juice to icing sploosh by sploosh until you have a just-runny icing that is still opaque. Add zest. Drizzle or spread on cake. I used one of my new clear squeezy bottles, which was brilliant fun - a shiny beacon of joy in my otherwise shitty life - except bit of zest occasionally blocked up the nozzle.
I just want to be thin again. Thin and drunk.
 |
| My Nikon has finally stopped working altogether, so this is the best I could do with my old Canon |
I really did genuinely once believe that pregnant women were just making a bloody fuss about nothing. And then I staggered into the seventh month of my own pregnancy and realised that: IT'S THE WORST THING IN THE WHOLE WORLD.
This is what I did yesterday:
- Wake up to feeling the baby press its hands and feet - clearly simply for sport - into some really weird corners of my insides
- Stagger off to the loo. Pause in front of the mirror to do some silent screaming/hand-clawing down cheeks. Then make happy lunatic face with head on one side.
- Spend 30 minutes trying to find some clothes that still fit. Realise I have put pants on inside out. Cannot face the bending involved turning them right way around. Drive to Waitrose. Walk round Waitrose incredibly slowly, rolling from side to side like overweight, post-menopausal bag lady, from one painful swollen foot to the other, buying most of the shop. Wonder if my pale blue Nike Air Maxes are so unfashionable that they might soon become fashionable again.
- Start to leave Waitrose carpark but receive important phonecall from next-eldest sister and so park diagonally across three spaces near entrace to take call.
Her: "In answer to your question, you can get maternity pads from Boots."
Me: "Thanks"
Her: "How are you?"
Me: "FUCKING SHIT."
Her: "Mmmm. Yes. Don't worry it'll be over soon. I'm weirdly envious. Having a baby is amazing."
Me: "Whatever. I'm like a cat. I can't really fathom what's going to happen."
Her: "It'll be fine. Having a baby is fine. Although, Edward woke up at 1am this morning and screamed until six. Patrick's got the runs. He's doing poos all up the back of his nappy."
Me: "Fucking hell."
- Talk like that for a while. Get home. Put shopping away. Wave goodbye to husband, who is going out for lunch with a minor member of the royal family.
- Lie on the sofa. Consider vomiting. Reject idea. Make ginger cake. Lie back on sofa. Fall asleep to recorded episodes of Gossip Girl. Wake up at 5pm as husband comes back, stinking of booze and Agent Provocateur. Greet him coldly. Swerve attempted hugs. Feel partially mollified by excellent gossip he has brought home, like a cat dragging in a sparrow.
- Make dinner. Go to first NCT class. Lie about my thoughts on pain relief during labour. Leave NCT class, swearing never to go to another one. Make exasperated lunatic face by sucking in cheeks and dilating nostrils and eyes.
- Get home. Pick huge fight with husband prompted by tasteless joke made in NCT class, find myself standing at one end of the kitchen, hurling cocktail sticks at him, which he fields. Drink large glass of red wine and eat leftover cold dinner and a slice of ginger cake. Feel bilious. Go to bed. Have neurotic dreams about being given 0/10 for an essay for the NCT class and then telling the teacher to go and fuck herself, but then getting stuck in the door because too fat.
At least the ginger cake turned out really well. A reader alerted me to the niceness of this as a home-made thing. It's a cross between Jamaican Ginger Cake and Golden Syrup Cake (that come in those foil packets, know the ones I mean?) only lighter and more velvety.
This qualifies as a Christmas Special post because it's a seasonal alternative to fruit cake, which not everyone is that crazy about. And when I say everyone, I mean ME.
It's also a doddle - the only fiddly bit is getting the golden syrup and treacle out of the tins without glueing yourself to the kitchen floor.
[NB a reader (below) has alerted me to the trick of submerging the tins in warm water for a moment or two to loosen up before spooning out.]
Anyway, here we go:
Stem ginger cake with lemon icing
This will fit a cake tin roughly 22cm across and 7cm deep.
225g self-raising flour
1tsp bicarb soda
1 TBSP ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground mixed spice
115g butter, cubed
115g dark muscovado sugar (or dark soft brown sugar, or light brown sugar, doesn't matter really)
115g black treacle - US readers can sub molasses
115g golden syprup - US readers can sub corn syrup
250ml whole milk
85g preserved stem ginger, sold in Waitrose in a jar, labelled as Chinese stem ginger. Find it near the jams and marmalades.
1 egg
1 Preheat oven: fan 160C, normal 180C
2 Assemble flour, bicarb soda, and spices. Either sift or put in bowl and give a swizzle with a whisk.
3 Cut butter into dry ingredients and rub into flour. Yawn. Quite boring.
[NB a reader has suggested that you can melt the butter along with everything in Instruction 4 and you get the same result without tedious rubbing-in]
4 Heat sugars, syrups and milk together in a pan gently until all melted. Don't worry too much if you over-scoop and get a bit too much of either syrup or treacle into the pan because you can't get it out again and so there's no point in fretting.
5 Chop the preserved ginger as finely as you can be arsed to and add to flour. Pour warm sugars over flour. Mix with wooden spoon and then crack in egg and continue to mix thoroughly. Mixture will lighten in colour just perceptibly.
6 Pour into tin (greased and lined if you're feeling holy) and bake for 50 mins.
For the icing
50g icing sugar
finely-chopped zest and juice of one lemon
1 Add lemon juice to icing sploosh by sploosh until you have a just-runny icing that is still opaque. Add zest. Drizzle or spread on cake. I used one of my new clear squeezy bottles, which was brilliant fun - a shiny beacon of joy in my otherwise shitty life - except bit of zest occasionally blocked up the nozzle.
I just want to be thin again. Thin and drunk.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Christmas special #10: Roast potatoes
There are two really key elements to getting roast potatoes right. And when I say right, I mean crunchy and brown on the outside and fluffy and creamy on the inside.
The first is to use the right kind of potato. You might be rolling your eyes at this, but I have met otherwise very good cooks who don't know what you need to use a floury potato for roast potatoes. I simply can't assume anything.
So, you need to use a floury potato, as opposed to a waxy potato. If you use a waxy potato for roasting you will end up with a tray of small, brittle cannon balls.
But what is a floury potato? In the shop, they will be labelled King Edward, Maris Piper or Desiree. If you are going to the shops for your floury potatoes and don't know off the top of your head which one you're supposed to be getting, write it down - because it won't say "floury" or "waxy" on that label thingy and what will happen is that you will get there and suddenly forget and be baffled by choice and I guarantee you will come home with the wrong potatoes.
I, personally, would allow 2 large or 3 smaller potatoes per person, because one should always overcater, especially when it comes to carbohydrate.
The second tip for good roasties is to par-boil them properly. Ideally, if you can, steam them rather than par-boil them in water. If you don't have a steamer, you can fashion one out of a colander and some tin foil for a lid. If this just seems like too much of a hassle then just boil them for 6-7 minutes. But steaming does, I promise, make a huge difference.
So here we go. Some recipes say to use butter or olive oil to roast your potatoes - but I say that really is for vegetarians only. Use duck or goose fat for best, driest, crunchiest results.
Roast potatoes (with thanks to Jamie Oliver)
1 quantity of floury potatoes
1 or 2 tablespoons of fat
1 bunch sage
2 large cloves garlic, roughly chopped (optional)
salt and pepper
1 Peel the potatoes and cut each into six - or four if you want them bigger and aren't as much of a crunch fiend as me. Rinse under a tap to get rid of the starch and then parboil for 6-7 minutes or steam for 20-25. What you're looking for is some give around the edges of the potato, but still basically raw inside.
2 Once they're done, rattle the potatoes around in whatever container they were cooking in to rough up the edges. Leave to cool down for about 10 mins.
3 Meanwhile, turn the oven on to 190C and bung in a baking tray with 2 tablespoons of fat in it to melt. Once that's melted, put in your potatoes and then shift them around carefully to cover in the fat. Season generously - two or three big sprinkles of sea salt and eight twists of the pepper grinder - and bake for 30 mins.
4 After 30 mins, check out the fat situation. There should be about a 1-2mm layer in the bottom of the pan. If there's more than that, pour it off. Now take the back of a spoon or a potato masher and very gently press the potatoes. What you're looking to do here is increase the roughness of the edges and the surface area so you get a lot of crunchiness. You're not looking for mashed potatoes. If this kind of thing freaks you out, it's not essential, so give it a miss.
At this stage you may well feel a bit despondent about your potatoes. You might look at them and think "soggy". But don't worry - they'll turn out okay.
Again, carefully rearrange the potatoes around in the fat to re-coat and sprinkle over sage and the garlic. I'm not actually too sure about the garlic. My husband says they're brilliant garlicky, but if you're not certain about introducing such a strong Frenchie flavour into your Christmas lunch/dinner, leave it out and they'll still be delicious.
5 Stick the tray back in the oven for 40 mins, but keep an eye on them and open the oven door to have a look after 30 mins.
You can leave these to drain on greaseproof paper if you like, but I didn't find it neccessary with mine.
 |
| Photo by Elena Heatherwick |
The first is to use the right kind of potato. You might be rolling your eyes at this, but I have met otherwise very good cooks who don't know what you need to use a floury potato for roast potatoes. I simply can't assume anything.
So, you need to use a floury potato, as opposed to a waxy potato. If you use a waxy potato for roasting you will end up with a tray of small, brittle cannon balls.
But what is a floury potato? In the shop, they will be labelled King Edward, Maris Piper or Desiree. If you are going to the shops for your floury potatoes and don't know off the top of your head which one you're supposed to be getting, write it down - because it won't say "floury" or "waxy" on that label thingy and what will happen is that you will get there and suddenly forget and be baffled by choice and I guarantee you will come home with the wrong potatoes.
I, personally, would allow 2 large or 3 smaller potatoes per person, because one should always overcater, especially when it comes to carbohydrate.
The second tip for good roasties is to par-boil them properly. Ideally, if you can, steam them rather than par-boil them in water. If you don't have a steamer, you can fashion one out of a colander and some tin foil for a lid. If this just seems like too much of a hassle then just boil them for 6-7 minutes. But steaming does, I promise, make a huge difference.
So here we go. Some recipes say to use butter or olive oil to roast your potatoes - but I say that really is for vegetarians only. Use duck or goose fat for best, driest, crunchiest results.
Roast potatoes (with thanks to Jamie Oliver)
1 quantity of floury potatoes
1 or 2 tablespoons of fat
1 bunch sage
2 large cloves garlic, roughly chopped (optional)
salt and pepper
1 Peel the potatoes and cut each into six - or four if you want them bigger and aren't as much of a crunch fiend as me. Rinse under a tap to get rid of the starch and then parboil for 6-7 minutes or steam for 20-25. What you're looking for is some give around the edges of the potato, but still basically raw inside.
2 Once they're done, rattle the potatoes around in whatever container they were cooking in to rough up the edges. Leave to cool down for about 10 mins.
3 Meanwhile, turn the oven on to 190C and bung in a baking tray with 2 tablespoons of fat in it to melt. Once that's melted, put in your potatoes and then shift them around carefully to cover in the fat. Season generously - two or three big sprinkles of sea salt and eight twists of the pepper grinder - and bake for 30 mins.
4 After 30 mins, check out the fat situation. There should be about a 1-2mm layer in the bottom of the pan. If there's more than that, pour it off. Now take the back of a spoon or a potato masher and very gently press the potatoes. What you're looking to do here is increase the roughness of the edges and the surface area so you get a lot of crunchiness. You're not looking for mashed potatoes. If this kind of thing freaks you out, it's not essential, so give it a miss.
At this stage you may well feel a bit despondent about your potatoes. You might look at them and think "soggy". But don't worry - they'll turn out okay.
Again, carefully rearrange the potatoes around in the fat to re-coat and sprinkle over sage and the garlic. I'm not actually too sure about the garlic. My husband says they're brilliant garlicky, but if you're not certain about introducing such a strong Frenchie flavour into your Christmas lunch/dinner, leave it out and they'll still be delicious.
5 Stick the tray back in the oven for 40 mins, but keep an eye on them and open the oven door to have a look after 30 mins.
You can leave these to drain on greaseproof paper if you like, but I didn't find it neccessary with mine.
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