Random Kitchen is away

Creative batteries need a recharge, so taking a little break. Sorry!

Hopefully back soon to blend more raw ingredients into beautiful bloggy goodness.

Um...

...yum?

Lockdown Edition Week 18: Prawns with Rice and Fennel

The book: Good Housekeeping New Step-by-Step Cookbook

The recipe: p136, "Prawns with Rice and Fennel"

We're back in reliable old Good Housekeeping territory, which usually translates to "nothing spectacular but nothing terrible either". The very worst kind of thing to blog about, in other words. Just what you want in the hottest week of the year when motivation is already at a sweat-drenched low to begin with. Hurrah!

Last time round, at least there was the novelty of me having to handle duck for the first time. Here, even that kind of pleasure is spared: I already have a bit of a thing for fennel, not least thanks to the devil's fennel recipe from The Silver Spoon that I've mentioned about twenty million times already, while prawns are a rare-ish but by no means unprecedented treat in this household. And as for rice... well, I make this the fifth Random Kitchen selection in the last eight weeks to involve it in one form or another. (Six if you include the teaspoon of rice that Madhur bizarrely got me to add as seasoning to her noodles a few weeks ago.)

Still, random.org will have its way - and for all a recipe name like "Prawns with Rice and Fennel" sounds unambitious, I'm certainly not against any of the concepts involved - so it's off to the shops I go...

The prep: Straight away, I have a decision to make and a compromise to contemplate. The recipe wants me to buy shell-on prawns, peeling, beheading and de-veining them before using them in the recipe with their tails still on. Not only would this be a right old faff (as if Lewisham Asda is going to give me "real" prawns to work with anyway), there's nothing in the method to suggest any benefit to doing it this way, so I take the lazy/easy route and buy some raw peeled ones.

Asda isn't exactly known for its high-grade fennel either - seriously, just look at the reviews - and indeed, what I encounter in-store is fairly pitiful in size and quality. I've had significantly better in a £1-a-scoop bargain haul from the market in front of the Lewisham shopping centre, and I end up buying two weedy Asda specimens just to hit the "1 large bulb" requirement of the recipe - but as I keep on saying, I'm still very much in a "minimal unnecessary journeys" mindset at the minute, so the fact I've found fennel there at all (and dill too!) is good enough for me. Beggars can't be choosers.

The recipe also calls for two large courgettes (we've all had nights like that). As it turns out, this week's veg box delivery has given me these slightly battered big bois that need using up. Imperfectly perfect!

The making: For once, we have a recipe in which the order of the instructions makes good sense! I suppose that's the kind of crazily practical approach you get from Good Housekeeping as opposed to, ooh, let's say someone whose name rhymes with Bovelli.

What I mean specifically is that I start by cooking some brown rice as per the instructions, giving me exactly the time I need to prepare all the other ingredients: dicing the courgettes, "thinly slicing" the fennel (I don't really have the patience to do this with any degree of elegance, but my haphazard slices are good enough for the purpose), crushing some garlic, measuring out some butter and some vegetable stock, and chopping "2 tbsp" of dill. Obviously that means more like 4 tbsp because I'm half-Swedish and dill is awesome.

 

The recipe wants me to cook the rice for "about 30 minutes until tender". I reckon it's basically done enough after 22 minutes or so - even for brown rice, doing it for longer would seem excessive since it's going to be cooked a little more at the end of proceedings.

Here's the tender coming

Next up, then, it's time to get my wok-slash-frying pan heated to a high old temperature before adding oil. The prawns are thrown in and stir-fried very briefly until they turn pink, then they're removed and set aside.

I then heat some more oil in the same pan and stir-fry the fennel slices for three minutes, then I add the diced courgette and give that a minute or two as well. This doesn't seem like an especially long time, and I also seem to have a lot of vegetable here for a dish that's meant to serve 4 people (which, as we've established, tends to correspond to "me and Sam with maybe half a portion left over")...

 

...but who am I to argue? Next, the rice (having been drained and rinsed) goes into the pan along with some seasoning. Then it's time to add back the prawns and the stock, which I "bring to the boil and cook gently for 3-4 minutes".

Except it's quite hard to bring 150ml of liquid to the boil when it instantly disappears into a huge mass of fennel, courgette and rice. Still, I keep cooking and stirring for the required time and everything seems to be basically heated through, so I guess that's good enough. Finally, right before serving, a knob of butter is stirred through along with the garlic and the dill, and we're ready to roll.

Speaking of serving, I decide it might be a nice idea to hold back a bit of dill to sprinkle on top of the finished dish. Unfortunately, this just makes it look like our dinner has gotten dangerously close to someone mowing the lawn. Oh well.

  

The eating: There's something missing here, and we can't quite work out what it is. The quantity and the crispness of the vegetables actually works well, despite my earlier reservations, and the prawns are nicely cooked for once (I'm a bugger for overdoing them out of paranoia). Not having to pick them up and remove the tails as we go is, if anything, a bonus. And even the slight excess of dill turns out to be just right. As a whole, though, this is... well, there's no escaping it: it's quite bland.

What with the prawns and the crunchy veg, Sam likens it to a Thai curry, only without any of the spice or flavour. My "yes, and" is to compare it to a risotto without the cheese (and hence most of the fun). In any case, the lack of ambition indicated by the recipe name is reflected in what comes out at the other end.

Between the ingredients and the general safeness, it feels a bit like eating the 1980s. It's not that the Good Housekeeping cookbook - published in 1993 and revised in 1998 - is so sturdy and reliable that it doesn't dare to feature any dishes you'd describe as contemporary even now; there's a fairly convincing-looking take on ceviche nearby, for example. But this? It's all a bit Findus Lean Cuisine.

Still, it's not bad at all - there are good and interesting ingredients in here, and plenty of flavours I like generally, so it was never going to be a total wipeout. It just could have been a whole lot more adventurous.

Two-word verdict: Ruggedly solid.

Lockdown Edition Week 17: Bacon Kebabs on Mushroom Rice

The book: 101 Cheap Eats (BBC Good Food)

The recipe: p30, "Bacon Kebabs on Mushroom Rice"

Kebabs again! And unlike last week, not the pseudo-burger variety but "actual" kebabs, by which I mean various bits and pieces threaded onto skewers!

Not that you'd know it from the title, which - in keeping with what we've previously encountered in this pair of compact BBC cookbooks - doesn't really tell the whole story. The skewers will also feature some vegetables and even sausages, it's just that they'll all be wrapped in bacon, hence that particular ingredient being promoted to the title.

Which is probably for the best, because the idea of a kebab consisting solely of bacon is a bit weird. Though I'd definitely try it.

The prep: The Random Kitchen week doesn't start well: just as I'm crossing Loampit Vale on the way to Asda, a bird shits on my head. I'm going to assume it's a seagull, since there's a lot of the loud bastards around at the minute despite Lewisham being quite clearly inland. Anyway, once my initial surprise and disgust have subsided, I figure I've probably done quite well to make it to 41 years of age without previously suffering this ignominy - and so, one extremely thorough clean-up session later, I try again. And they say it's a face covering you need to shop safely...

You won't be surprised to learn that this week's ingredients are all quite standard, since that goes hand in hand with the Cheap Eats ethos. The kebabs will involve herby (i.e. Lincolnshire) sausages, flat mushrooms and leeks, while the side dish requires long-grain rice, dried thyme, crème fraîche and - yes - more mushrooms. All are easily obtained.

I even have skewers to hand, since I keep several packs of wooden ones in the shed at all times. (I use them in our flower beds to keep the fucking squirrels off my plants.)

Worth the effort though

Funnily enough, the only issue I have is with the titular bacon. The recipe calls for streaky bacon (understandably enough, since we're using it to wrap stuff so it needs to be nice and stretchy), whereas all Lewisham Asda will give me on this particular Wednesday is thicker rashers of back bacon. In all kinds of quantities, smoked or unsmoked, posh or less posh, even located in two different parts of the store - but all back, no streaky.

I already know this is going to make a difference to how this week's dish turns out, but I'm also not about to go round every shop in the area looking for exactly the right kind of bacon, not least in case another seagull is lurking.

The making: This is one of those crafty little recipes where some of the instructions are smuggled away in the ingredient list, so before we really get to the "making" part, I've already chopped two medium leeks into four pieces each, cut the bacon rashers into thinner strips, and halved four of the sausages vertically. (I'm also supposed to have melted some butter, but I figure I can do that when the time comes.)

Some heckin' chonkers

What I don't do is follow the very first instruction in the method, which is to blanch the leek pieces in boiling water for 3-4 minutes before draining them. Don't ask me why; I just overlook it completely for some reason. Instead, I skip to the part where I'm told to cut three of the flat mushrooms into quarters (Asda calls them "jumbo mushrooms", but they ain't that big, honey). The remaining mushroom is chopped up into small pieces - or rather the remaining three mushrooms, since I bought a pack of six and I love mushrooms so I figure putting more of them into the rice won't hurt.

Next up, I'm supposed to stretch the bacon with the back of a knife before wrapping it around the various chunks of mushroom, leek and sausage. As expected, not being streaky and hence not being stretchy, my bacon starts to break up as soon as I attempt to manipulate it in this way, so I just have to make do as best I can. This is initially OK - most of the vegetable and sausage pieces at least get "wrapped" to some extent, albeit not especially tidily - but by the time of the fourth and final kebab, I basically end up just wedging a bunch of bacon bits in between each of the other items. Hey, all ends up in the same place, right?

Stay classy

And yes... not having blanched the leeks does make it a tiny bit problematic when it comes to threading them onto wooden skewers. Wooden skewers that have been soaked in warm water to stop them from burning under the grill, no less. If you're imagining an equation that goes something like "bendy wooden skewers + raw leeks = splits, splinters and swearing", you'd be along the right lines. Still, for all the process is fiddly (and I can't blame the recipe, since it's my own fault for not softening the leeks), it's not too bad all in all.

Speaking of overlooking instructions, I almost miss the next one, too - which would be a real shame, because it involves melting that butter I mentioned, adding thyme and lemon juice, and brushing this mixture over the kebabs. As well as being a Good Thing in terms of flavour, this makes them look a whole lot more promising than they did just a minute ago, though they're still pretty messy.

According to the recipe, these would then go under the grill for ten minutes while I cook the rice. I know better than to expect that kind of optimistic timing to work, so I put the kebabs to one side and give the rice my undivided attention for a while. This means... well, yes, it first means cooking the rice as per the packet instructions and draining it. I then melt some more butter and add the mushrooms and thyme, cooking until the mushrooms are nicely softened. Finally, I add 200ml of crème fraîche before stirring through the drained rice. The end result is... predictably sticky.

We've had a lot of this kind of thing lately, haven't we? I'm talking about rice with things added that are inevitably going to make it claggy - e.g. Ainsley's creamed coconut (not a euphemism). I'm not sure I really get the appeal, but never mind.

Back to the kebabs, anyway. You know George Foreman grills, and how the entire point of them is they allow the fat and other bad stuff to run off, leaving you with a healthier meal? Well, we appear to own the one model of Foreman where the grill plates aren't tilted forward in any way, so instead the fat just pools underneath whatever it is you're cooking.

Lovely

As well as depriving me of the pan juices I'm meant to stir through the rice before serving, the added moisture slows down the grilling process somewhat, but eventually we reach a point where I'm happy enough with what's been produced. The bacon isn't crispy because it's the wrong kind of bacon, the leeks aren't especially soft because ahem anyway moving swiftly on, but everything has reached the point of plateupability (it's a word, I have decreed it) - so up-plate it I do.

I even go with the original portion sizes to start with: this is intended to serve four people, i.e. one skewer and one dollop of rice each, so I figure we'll try that first before laughing and having some more.

Bacon kebab "on" mushroom rice

The eating: I believe Aristotle is said to have originated the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Well, 'Stots, old buddy, if you're reading this then you might want to look away now.

Not that there's anything wrong with the dish at all - it just is its parts, no more, no less. It's some bits of grilled meat and vegetable, and a rice side where the constituent elements haven't really formed any kind of coherent whole - the mushrooms are only just about present even though I've used three times as much as the recipe called for, and you can actively taste the crème fraîche (and find yourself thinking "that's weird, this really tastes of crème fraîche") rather than it having come together with the rice to any extent.

As well as being undercooked (yes yes, my bad), the leek chunks are too big, and that's definitely down to the recipe (it calls for "medium" leeks and mine were firmly in that ballpark). The mushrooms work really nicely with the bacon, though - and would be even better with bacon that actually crisped up and didn't still look weirdly pink. In fact, I'd be tempted to say that you could eliminate the leeks altogether and just use more mushrooms, perhaps with a slice or two of onion interspersed for a bit of bite. Although the leeks do add some colour to proceedings, so maybe not.

Anyway, this is obviously perfectly decent - as Sam says, it's basically pigs in blankets (with some leeks and mushrooms that have snuck into bed along with the pigs), so you can't go too wrong. It's just, well, not very exciting.

Where it does score is on the "cheap" front. I went with "own-brand but not value-brand" ingredients, as I tend to do generally unless there's a good reason not to, and a fag-packet calculation tells me this one worked out at about £1.50 a portion. Which is pretty bargaintastic really. Obviously this is immediately undermined by the Marjorie Dawes logic we apply in this household - it's half the price, so you can eat twice as much! - but prepared as the "lazy Sunday brunch" for four people suggested by the recipe blurb, it probably is nicer than the price tag would indicate, and that's not bad going.

Two-word verdict: Plainly decent.