I keep my promises (most of the time) - and so normal service is duly resumed with a Random Menu for September that features two of our favourite authors from editions past, and a dessert from a book that I didn't think would contain any.
The randomness in my new kitchen starts about as uninspiringly as it possibly could, however: with a recipe entitled "Savoury Avocado Snack".
Let's just bask in those words for a moment.
Savoury. Avocado. Snack.
"Snack", that's a packed lunch box component as far as I'm concerned. A Club bar or some Dairylea Lunchables, that sort of thing. And as for the need to stress that this is a savoury avocado snack, as opposed to all those sweet avocado dishes you famously encounter...
So who could be behind such a flat and dull recipe name? You guessed it...
◘ THE STARTER ◘
The book: How To Boil An Egg (Jan Arkless)
The recipe: p55, "Savoury Avocado Snack"
Actually, we shouldn't be too harsh on old Jan. After all, How To Boil An Egg was published in 1986 - a time when, at least in my northern experience, most people mainly encountered avocado as a bathroom suite colour option. And yet here she is, giving the students of the mid-80s not one but three avocado recipes, including avocado stuffed with various fillings and even - gasp - a method for preparing avocado on toast. (Don't tell the Daily Mail comments section.)
Where the book does show its age is by referring to "avocado pears" throughout - I realise that's (still) a perfectly valid descriptor, but it does come across as a little quaint now.
Anyway, the first "S" of this particular SAS could easily have been "Simple" rather than "Savoury", because there's not a great deal of work involved. Or nothing complex, at least. Which is very much Jan's shtick. I require: an avocado (pear), a little cheese, 1-2 rashers of bacon, a little butter, and the rather non-specific "chunk of French bread". I suppose it's a question of your appetite and what you happen to have in the house. "Bread (to taste)", if you will.
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| Blimey, that's a lot of plastic |
I'm doubling the quantities to make this a starter for the two of us, and I'm using smoked bacon medallions rather than rashers because... well, because they're better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The first step is to fry that bacon over a moderate heat until it's crisp. Meanwhile, the avocado is de-stoned, peeled and sliced - no specifics on dimensions - and the cheese, too, is "grated or sliced". (I go with grated because I'm using pre-grated cheese from a bag, and forming slices out of that would seem a little counter-productive.)
I cut the French bread in half lengthways and spread the butter onto it. Next, I'm called on to "arrange layers of the avocado and bacon on the bread" before topping it with the cheese. Again, no real instructions on how to do this - not that it's hard, but this book does famously include an explanation of how to boil an egg, so I might have expected more hand-holding.
One of my avocados hasn't sliced especially well on account of being very ripe, so I do a mix and match, using some of the squishier avocado more like a spread and then heaping up the bits that did actually slice properly. It's not going to look elegant, but I don't think Jan is expecting it to, so we're fine.
Next comes the first test for the grill in our oven - often a temperamental component of rented houses (is it any better with brand-new ovens?), but this one seems to do the job well enough and soon my cheese is "golden, bubbling and melted".
"Eat at once", Jan says, so we do.
And hey, it's okay! It's nothing stunning, obviously, but in terms of ingredients and preparation, it's already at the "ambitious" end of anything I actually rustled up during my three years of self-catering at Aston University plus a year abroad in Hamburg - I think the poor kids from my Gastfamilie there are still traumatised by the sheer number of supermarket own-brand pasta ready meals and frozen pizzas I got through during my time living with them.
Come to think of it, haven't I basically just made a variation on this?
Only, you know, less cardboardy. No wonder I enjoyed it.
File under: Would easily sell for £6.50 in an artisanal South London café
◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘
The book: Meals In Minutes (Ainsley Harriott)
The recipe: p88, "Citrus-Crusted Cod with Cajun Spuds"
Since we're talking titles, this has a very tame one by Ainsley standards. Not least since it sits opposite a recipe called - I kid you not - "Rocky Road Potato Cod". (It's not actually a chocolate traybake with bits of fish in it, but nothing would surprise me with Ainsley.)
At the risk of sounding like an "AIBU" Mumsnet post, I have to start by making a little point. So the concept of Meals In Minutes is - as you'll have gathered - quick and easy dishes to rustle up at the end of a long day's work. "Preparation: 10 mins | Cooking time: 20 mins" is the boast at the top this particular recipe. Which is why it's a little galling to find, buried away in the ingredient list next to the titular potatoes, the word "cooked". That's right: I'm expected to have cooked the potatoes before cutting them into wedges, seasoning them and popping them into the oven. And somehow boiling the potatoes magically doesn't count as part of the preparation or cooking time, because... we all have cooked potatoes just lying around the place? Oka-a-a-ay.
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| Potatoes that have very definitely been prepared |
Fortunately time is on my side today - and in any case, the accompaniments aren't the important part of this particular dish. So rather than dwell on the "Cajun Spuds" - they're fairly standard oven-cooked potatoes, as you'll gather from the "before" photo above - or the accompanying steamed broccoli, I'm going to focus on the "Citrus-Crusted Cod".
I almost never buy cod to eat at home. It's a restaurant treat, or if nothing else, a Gosforth Chippy treat (which is better than most restaurants anyway). I suppose that's a bit silly really, because even if it has got pricier over the years, it's not that much more expensive than the various white fish alternatives - basa, pollock, etc. - that the supermarkets have felt the need to come up with to fill that entry-level gap in the market. And it is noticeably better. It's the "if a pint of Carling is £5, I might as well pay £6 for something actually nice" logic, and I should remember to apply it more often.
It's certainly nice to be handling some good meaty chunks (oo-er) here, because the first step is for me to spread sun-dried tomato paste over one side of the cod fillets. Due to in-store shortages of some items for some reason or other, the paste is home-made and involves decent quantities of garlic - it's my party and I'll ward off vampires if I want to.
The paste then serves as the "glue" for a mixture of breadcrumbs, fresh parsley, lemon rind, lemon juice, salt and pepper, which is pressed into the paste-covered fish to form a crust of sorts.
Though of course the crust won't be crusty until it's been cooked, and that's where I'm a little cynical: I'm expected to cook the fillets breadcrumb-side down in a frying pan for three minutes before flipping them over - without everything falling apart in a big old pile of disaster - and baking them in the oven for a further 8-10 minutes until cooked. Uh-oh.
But to my great surprise, it works! I possibly go a little long on the frying pan phase out of fear that my crust won't be crusty enough - it ends up closer to the burny end of the spectrum, but not in a way that impairs the flavour in any way. In any case, nothing falls apart, disaster is averted, and the dish is ready to go into the oven.
While it's in there alongside some tenderstem broccoli (steaming is for people who own steamers), I assemble the final element of the meal, a rather optimistically named "salsa" that mainly comprises deseeded chopped tomatoes, sliced spring onions and some oil and lemon juice. Hm.
As unconvinced as I am about the salsa, I'm really happy with how the fish looks when it comes out of the oven, and the eating only reinforces this impression. It's an effective combination of powerful flavours that pairs well with the meatiness of the white fish - and I include the salsa in that, even if the recipe generates far too much of it (what you see on each plate here is about, ooh, one-eighth or so of the whole thing, and I've done double portions of the fish because we're hungry bois, so you get the idea).
Potato preparation gripes aside, I absolutely cannot complain about this one, then. Good work, Ainsley. Even if an awful lot of your recipes do seem to fall into the category of "fish/chicken with something on top and a vegetable on the side". Still, if it ain't broke...
File under: Genuine (suburban) restaurant quality (circa 1998)
◘ THE DESSERT ◘
The book: Chinese Food Made Easy (Ching-He Huang)
The recipe: p150, "Fruity Sticky Rice with Toffee Sauce"
"Steaming is for people who own steamers", he says, just as random.org picks out a steamed rice dessert for this month's menu. Ho hum.
I have to admit, I was expecting to have to re-spin the wheel here, because Chinese Food Made Easy didn't feel like it'd be overflowing with dessert options. That comes from a slightly stereotypical view born of the British Chinese restaurant menus of my childhood, all deep-fried banana fritters in syrup and not a great deal else. Which is fine by me, really - I'm happy to skip a dessert if it means more room for crispy duck. Nevertheless, this book does indeed offer a short but perfectly formed "Desserts and Drinks" section, containing magnificently named recipes like "Great Wall of China Green Tea Ice Cream with Candied Walnuts" and - wait for it - "Empress Dowager Cixi's Longevity Peach Pudding".
Of course I don't get to make any of those. Instead, prepare yourself for what basically amounts to a Christmas pudding only with rice instead of flour. Great.
It's quite an interesting one to make, though. First, I take some pre-cooked glutinous rice...
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| Pre-cooked by someone else |
...and briefly wok-fry it in butter with some chopped dates, "dried golden raisins and cranberries", orange zest, caster sugar and ground cinnamon until the ingredients are all nicely combined.
The reason for the sarcastic quote marks above is that golden raisins end up eluding me on my shopping travels (though hindsight and Google tell me that Holland & Barrett might have done the trick). As a nod to the spirit of the recipe, I adapt an Ottolenghi trick from a past random recipe and soak some regular raisins in freshly boiled water for ten minutes or so to make them a bit softer and less gritty, at least. It doesn't make them any closer to "golden", but it's a step in the right direction.
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| Mmm, murky raisin water |
The wok-combined ingredients are then spooned into ramekins (or small bowls in this case), which are filled right up to the top. Since I'm going to have to turn these out later, I make sure everything is nicely squished down.
The rice bowls are then put aside until I'm ready to cook them - which, yes, is meant to involve a bamboo steamer. Thankfully, Ching gives me an "If you do not have a steamer, see page 173" option, which requires me to deploy a baking tray, tin foil, some boiling water and a hot oven.
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| Hey, if it works, it works |
Whatever the method, the plan is for the steamed sticky rice to slide seamlessly out of the buttered ramekins/bowls onto a plate. I'm always sceptical about this kind of thing, but lo and behold...
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| Ta-dah! |
And actually, if we stopped here, this would be fine as it stands. You have to like dried fruit and Christmassy flavours to be into it - Sam isn't, I just about am - but it does what it's meant to do fairly well, and it looks quite cute.
What's weird is that the recipe then calls for me to make an incredibly rich and sugary toffee sauce and pour it "around the steamed rice pudding as well as over the top"... and also sprinkle some chocolate-covered raisins around the dessert to finish.
I mean, okay?
Way to make the whole thing look like various small animals have had accidents on and around it.
You'll have gathered from my tone that, as well as ruining the look of the dessert, this wrecks the eating side of things too. There's absolutely no need for all this rich buttery sugary sauce when the rice is already full of flavour and texture - it just swamps whatever fruitiness is left in a bunch of fruit that's already been dried to peak sugar density anyway. And as for the chocolate raisins: weird. Just weird.
So yeah. I don't really get this at all. As a series of cooking techniques it's quite fun, and I'd be tempted to repeat the whole "steamed sticky rice with sweet stuff in" experiment with some flavours that I think would work better, because it presents nicely (as long as you don't throw poo-coloured things at it) and you can prepare it ahead of time - both of which are definitely Good Things. As it stands, though, this is not making me at all confident about the quality of the other dessert recipes in this book. Not even Empress Dowager Cixi and her peach pudding.
File under: Send it back to the chef and order some more duck and pancakes
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