Gorgonzola Rice Croquettes

Gorgonzola is a veined Italian blue cheese, made from unskimmed cow's and/or goat's milk. It can be buttery or firm, crumbly and quite salty, with a 'bite' from its blue veining. It has been made since the early Middle Ages, but became marbled with greenish-blue mold only in the eleventh century. It is frequently used in Italian cooking. The name comes from Gorgonzola, a small town near Milan, Italy.

• 2 cup Cooked short-grain rice
  
• 200 g Gorgonzola
  ©angiesrecipes
  
• 2 Eggs, medium
  
• 1 cup Fresh bread crumbs
  
• Vegetable oil for deep frying
  

1. Beat eggs lightly with chopsticks until they are just combined. Gently stir in rice until thoroughly incorporated, taking care not to mash the rice. Dice the Gorgonzola.
   
2. Scoop up 1 soupspoon of the rice mixture, place a cube of Gorgonzola in the center and top with another spoon of rice. Form into a ball with your hands and roll them in bread crumbs. Refrigerate them for 30 minutes.
   
3. Heat the oil in a deep pan until hot. Fry the rice balls 5 at a time, about 5 minutes until they've turn golden brown. Serve immediately on a bed of salad.

Mackerel

I spoke too soon, now I'M ill. There'll be a hot toddy tonight, no fear. Not drinking doesn't extend to this kind of emergency.

So, last night, I had a disaster of epic proportions, involving over-salting a thai pork thing to such a degree that even Giles, the salt monster himself, half-man, half salt-lick, went "Burlagh!!" when he tasted it. What a waste. Whither my cooking mojo, damnit?

So I approached the kitchen feeling depressed as hell at lunchtime today and stood for a long time staring at a shrink-wrapped packed of mackerel fillets (oily fish! So good for you! AND SO SCARY) and wondering whether to just end it all with my Victorinox paring knife.

But I didn't. Instead I boiled up some quinoa and mixed it in with some baby spinach leaves, dijon mustard dressing and shredded mackerel and ate it feeling holy. As diet food goes, it's pretty hardcore. But I'm nothing if not a show-off.

Oolong Tea Rolls

In Chinese tea culture, semi-oxidised oolong teas are collectively grouped as qīngchá (Chinese: 清茶; literally "clear tea"). Oolong has a taste more akin to green tea than to black tea: it has neither the rosy, sweet aroma of black tea nor the stridently grassy vegetal notes that typify green tea. It is commonly brewed to be strong, with the bitterness leaving a sweet aftertaste. Several subvarieties of oolong, including those produced in the Wuyi Mountains of northern Fujian and in the central mountains of Taiwan, are among the most famous Chinese teas.

Dough	Filling
100 g All-purpose flour 40 ml Hot Oolong tea drink 2/3 tbsp Tea leaves, brewed 25 ml Cold Water	100 g Ground pork 2. 5 g Sesame oil 1 g Salt 1 g Chicken powder 1/2 tbsp Soya sauce 1 tbsp Water

1. Brew a cup of Oolong tea with 5 grams of tea leaves. Reserve 40 ml tea drink and 2/3 tablespoon of brewed tea leaves. Set aside for later use.
   
2. Chop the tea leaves very fine and mix with the ingredients for the filling. Cover and store in the fridge.
   
3. Sift the flour in a mixing bowl, pour in the boiled Oolong tea (use a microwave to warm up if it is cold), use the chopsticks to stir, then add 25 ml cold water in 2-3 times until a smooth and soft (like your earlobe) dough forms.
   
4. Cover with a plastic wrapper and let stand for 30 minutes. Portion the dough into 10-11, each about 16 grams.Place the portioned dough on a lightly floured board, press flat and roll out thinly with a rolling pin, place a tablespoon of filling on it, roll up and form into a roll like a pencil. Again roll it into a circle about 3-4 cm in diameter. Let stand for 30 minutes.
   
5. Heat a frying-pan wok over a medium flame. Put the pancake into the pan and cook it until golden brown at the both sides.

Oolong Tea Rolls

March cold cure-all

Everyone seems to be ill at the moment, except me. So I thought I'd post a reminder to everyone that the best cure for a nasty cold is a hot toddy and 12 hours in bed.

This is how my mum used to make them for me. (That is my mum, above, in the pink Crocs).

Take:
1 bottle whisky
1 lemon
1 bowl sugar
1 hot kettle, about 5 mins off the boil
1 mug or glass

Stand next to the kettle and surround yourself with the ingredients. Start with a finger of whisky and half a spoonful of sugar, a squeeze of lemon and a slug of hot water.

Mix artistically. Taste gingerly. Add ingredients as neccessary until you have something hot, sweet and lemony with a boozy kick.

Whether or not you choose to take two painkillers of your choosing with this is entirely up to you. Obviously, I would never recommend mixing painkillers with alcohol, because it is dangerous.

Anyway, drink this and then go to bed for 12 hours. Everyone always laughs at me and calls me a weakling when I go to bed as soon as I've got a sore throat but my great Uncle Jim always did it and he was in the army and lived until he was 100, so if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me. And you.

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.