Lockdown Edition Week 2: Crunch Lunch Cod and Mash

The book: Ainsley Harriott's Meals In Minutes

The recipe: p85, "Crunch Lunch Cod and Mash"

Obviously it's Ainsley. Who else could come up with a recipe name that's equal parts ludicrous and irritating? I've actually put on some Chopin, courtesy of the Berliner Philharmoniker's own lockdown edition, in the hope that a dose of high culture might offset some of the lows I'm having to endure here.

The random selections from Ainsley's repertoire were a mixed bag last time out, from some vegetable burgers that were pretty brilliant to a tarte tatin that definitely bloody wasn't. Looking beyond the titular tweeness, it turns out that the slightly unprepossessing "cod and mash" hides a more interesting prospect - the accompanying photo is colourful and attractive, while the blurb provides some useful lockdown wiggle room with its opening statement that "you can buy all manner of smoked fish". Why yes, yes I can! So let's hotfoot it over to Asda (while keeping a safe distance) and see what we can rustle up.

I'm still a bit sceptical about the "crunch" part though. If your fish is crunchy, doesn't that just mean you've forgotten to debone it?

The prep: Not many of the ingredients are already in the house (just potatoes, milk and breadcrumbs), but there's nothing in here that appears too problematic, and so it proves. Black olives are hidden away in an unlikely corner of the shop, while basil is only available in a pot, but that's fine - what else are kitchen windowsills for? Meanwhile, the free choice of smoked fish ends up with me picking up two fillets of basa, that recent(-ish) supermarket staple for the undiscerning consumer who can't really tell the difference between types of bland white fish anyway. Hey, that's me!

The making: "Serves 4", the recipe says. Normally this is where I laugh and make the full quantity in the knowledge that it'll just about be enough for the two of us. In this case, though, two basa fillets each would be a bit OTT, so I'm halving everything. Well, everything except the potatoes, which are staying more or less as is. My excuse is that this "lunch" is actually going to be our dinner, but let's be honest, it's also because potatoes are lush.

I grease an ovenproof dish then whack the fish in there. The white parts of several spring onions are chopped and scattered over the cod, the green parts being reserved for later. Sliced tomatoes are then arranged on top (one tomato per fillet, folks), ditto a handful of sliced olives. I then drizzle on some olive oil and sprinkle on some torn basil leaves, thereby defacing the only plant (of sorts) we're allowed in this hay fever-cursèd household.

Next, I'm asked to take more basil leaves and toss them with some breadcrumbs. Well, okay, but basil isn't exactly moist and sticky, so I don't really see how this will achieve anything. Indeed:

Sigh.

Anyway, this "mixture" is scattered over the fish, and then there's another drizzling of oil. This recipe does involve a great deal of scattering and arranging and layering for something that's - I quote - "snappy and ready to serve in a flash". Still, the outcome isn't unpromising:

...and into the oven it goes "for 15 minutes until the fish is cooked". (More of an either/or statement than Ainsley makes it sound, but I'll allow it.)

Meanwhile... ah. It's time a return for one of my biggest recipe bugbears! Meanwhile, you see, I'm supposed to be boiling some chopped potatoes (the recipe never asks me to peel them first, but I'll let common sense prevail) for 10-15 minutes, draining them, putting them back into the pan, adding some milk, mashing them, pushing the mash to the side of the pan, adding some butter, melting the butter, chopping the green parts of those spring onions I mentioned earlier, adding them to the pan, frying them, then stirring them into the mash. All of this needs to happen in the 15 minutes the fish will be in the oven, even though the potato-boiling part alone might take up to 15 minutes. Can anyone spot the problem here?

Having read ahead, I start the potatoes off five minutes before the fish goes into the oven, and it all turns out fine as a result - but seriously, cookbook authors, could you please stop springing surprises on us and expecting us to warp the laws of physics in order to achieve the desired outcome? "Meanwhile", my arse.

Anyway. Once I've got everything ready more or less simultaneously, I divide the mash between two plates - adding a side of some roasted asparagus, since it happened to be in this week's veg box and I thought a bit more substance wouldn't hurt. The mass o' mash is already less elegant than it looks in the book, partly because I've made a bit more than I should and partly because I completely forgot to cut down on the number of spring onions when I was tweaking my numbers earlier. (And they weren't exactly small ones, either.) Ah well, it's all good.

What's green and lumpy? (Write your own punchline.)

All that remains is to carefully remove the fish from the dish and slide it on top of that indoor ski slope of mash, then "spoon around the fish juices". Um. What fish juices? Maybe I cooked it for a few minutes longer than I ought to have - not that there's any sign of that in the eating (spoiler alert) - but even with fish, tomatoes and olive oil in the equation, there's basically nothing left to add to the finished dish other than some rogue spring onions (yes, more of the bastards).

Between them and the mash that's spilling out from underneath due to my portioning decisions, the end result is a wee bit more rustic and, well, tall than in the book, but it's reasonably pleasing on the eye all the same.

 
Even if it does look faintly reminiscent of one of those legendary 70s dinner party cards. You know the kind of thing I mean.

The eating: Hey! This isn't bad, you know? It's a little bit confusing - the tomatoes, basil and olives give the top half of the assembled dish a bright, Mediterranean flavour, while the mash (which would have a lumpy consistency even with the right quantity of spring onions) is reminiscent of colcannon, rumbledethumps or one of those other winter staples from these fair isles. It could also be a little more decadent - I'd add more butter to the mash next time. Still, the flavours go together pretty well, the fish is lovely and juicy (told you), and every bite has plenty going on to keep you interested. It's a good dish, Brent.

What it isn't, despite Ainsley's "charming" title, is crunchy. I suppose the crunch is supposed to come from the spring onions (which do still have a bite to them) and the breadcrumbs (which have been drizzled in oil so are hardly going to crisp up much given a mere 15 minutes in the oven). I'd consider just whacking on a whole load more breadcrumbs next time, or maybe even tossing the tomato slices in oil and breadcrumbs so that they form a proper top layer.

What it also isn't is a "meal in minutes", frankly. I'm no slouch in the kitchen - I peel potatoes for speed, and if some perfectly usable bits of spud get sacrificed along the way, so be it - but even I need 30 minutes of preparation time here (the recipe confidently claims 15), and we've already talked about the whole cooking time issue. I suppose you could prepare pretty much everything in advance and just whack it all in the oven as lunchtime approaches - even the mash could be made ahead and reheated that way, at a pinch - but it hardly satisfies the "lightning-fast food" criterion of the book series. Just call it a dinner and be done with it.

It's a very decent dinner though. Two weeks into this lockdown project, and things have turned out pretty well so far. To the extent that Sam utters the immortal words: "I hope we get something really shit soon!" Careful what you wish for...

Two-word verdict: Decidedly un-shit.

Lockdown Edition Week 1: Ice Cream Cake

The book: Nigella Express

The recipe: p222, "Ice Cream Cake"

Now now, don't roll your eyes and give up on me already. I understand that part of the appeal of Random Kitchen - perhaps even the bulk of the appeal - lies in the terrible and ludicrous things I end up having to cook and eat. As such, an ice cream cake might seem disappointingly tame. Pleasant, even. But this is Nigella we're talking about. Last time round she gave us a tagine that used a whole bottle of wine and no stock and a chowder that tasted of self-defence weaponry, so there's no telling how she'll manage to mangle even a straightforward treat like this.

As the finger of fate lands on this particular dessert, it strikes me that I don't really know what an ice cream cake is. I mean, obviously the clue is in the name to an extent, but I have visions of something like... a cheesecake, perhaps, with a biscuit base and a layer of ice cream on top? The photograph in the book suggests an even simpler beast, however, with "cake" referring to the shape as much as anything else. I suppose you get cakes of soap, after all, and it's not like they come with a layer of digestive crumbs unless something's gone very wrong at the factory.

The prep: I'll say one thing - this is a most useful choice for the first week of a lockdown project. If I'd been tasked with tracking down obscure Italian cheeses or a serrated bundt mould while minimising unnecessary journeys, I might have had a low-key strop and abandoned this project before it even began. But vanilla ice cream and a bunch of stuff to go on/in it? That's something even the Asda in Lewisham can manage.

In fairness, at no point does Nigella say that the ice cream has to be vanilla. It's implied by the photographs and the general concept, though, so that's what I go with. Similarly, there's no real consensus as to what I should be using for most of the other ingredients. "You can choose different biscuits, different nuts and nobbly bits to mix in", the recipe says - and that's probably for the best given that one of the suggested ingredients is something called "Nestlé swirled milk chocolate and peanut butter morsels", which:

The internet suggests that this is an American product - v. helpful in a cookbook whose price tag is unquestionably in pounds sterling - so I go with the "chocolate chips of your choice" option instead.

All of this is quintessentially Nigella, somehow managing to complicate what is essentially "stirring some stuff into some ice cream you've bought from the shop". However, it does give me scope in terms of catering for Sam's aversion to peanuts, so it's not all bad news.

The recipe also requires one or more hot sauces, the ingredients for which are miraculously all to be found in my cupboards already, as is the springform tin we'll be using once everything's been assembled! Hey, a win's a win.

The making: First things first: while I am, of course, following the recipe slavishly (within the parameters of the options provided), I make a unilateral decision to scale things back a bit. There's no real need for an ice cream cake that serves 8-10 (sorry Sam), especially knowing Nigella's penchant for richness and indulgence, so I end up doing about 60% of what the recipe calls for. My receptacle is a bit smaller than it's meant to be (as the bishop said to the actress), so it should all work out okay.

I leave the ice cream to soften in a bowl while I channel my inner Flo Capp and take a rolling pin to, in turn, a handful of honey-roasted mixed nuts (a sop to minimising the peanut content), a Crunchie bar, and several Bourbon biscuits. Along with the chocolate chips, these all get mixed into the ice cream once they've been smashed and smushed. At first this process seems like it's going to be difficult - you don't want the ice cream to melt too much, as it'll end up all crystallised and gritty when you refreeze it, but it needs to be soft enough to actually take on board what you're trying to stir into it. Eventually, though, working the ingredients in with a couple of spoons produces something with the malleable properties of a wet dough, and it turns out to be similarly satisfying to work with. Even if it does look a bit like coronation chicken.

Floured bap, anyone?

The springform tin is lined with clingfilm (bottom and sides) and the ice cream mixture is added. At this stage, we have at least progressed from "baked potato filling" to "fruit cake" in the appearance stakes.

The top of the "cake" is then smoothed with a spatula and into the freezer it goes, until it's ready to be eaten! (Not a great deal later, it must be said. Working with ice cream and chocolate gives you quite the appetite for ice cream and chocolate.)

Carefully extracted from the tin and placed on a plate, it actually looks all right. The cling film marks down the side are a bit inelegant, but they're there in the photo in the book too, so they would appear to be unavoidable. If there's one criticism, it's that my version of the cake does look a bit squat, but that'll be because I cut down on the quantities. And let's be honest, it's going to be plenty rich as it is.

Looks worryingly like it ought to

It needs 5-10 minutes to soften before it'll slice easily, so I sprinkle some more chocolate chips and biscuit shards over the top as per the recipe, then use the remaining time to quickly prepare what Nigella describes as the "crowning glory" - not one, but two hot sauces to dribble lazily over the top (her filth, not mine). And I do mean "quickly" - the butterscotch sauce at least involves two steps, but the chocolate sauce is literally some dark chocolate, double cream, Camp coffee and golden syrup melted together simultaneously, and the result is... well, let's be generous and call it gloopy. Even heated extremely carefully, the double cream in particular means it ends up closer to a seriously rich chocolate mousse more suited to being applied with a trowel than anything you could dribble, drizzle or drool.

The first line of this recipe reads: "I don't think a cook's job should be to deceive". I'll say no more.

The butterscotch at least resembles a sauce, however, so I get to dribble it on just the way Nigella likes it.

One sauce, one cement

The eating: I mean, obviously it's pretty good. Like with every Nigella recipe I've encountered to date, the problem is there's just TOO MUCH of everything.

I recently re-made the sausage, halloumi and pepper dish from the original Random Kitchen with half as many sausages, minimal added oil and a ton of brown rice to offset the excess, and it was so much better that way. Similarly, the chocolate chips or equivalent here, both in and on the "cake", are superfluous when you've already got some nice chocolate biscuits in there, and there's really no need for more than just the butterscotch sauce, crowning glory or not (especially since that particular sauce is seriously good in its own right).

Sam ventures the opinion that vanilla ice cream with the other ingredients strewn on top would be no less nice, and he may have a point. I do think the texture makes this worth the effort, but it's not like you can't buy ice cream with stuff in it these days (someone needs to introduce Nigella to two gentlemen called Ben and Jerry, for a start).

If I was making it again (and let's be honest, I probably will), I'd throw in at least another Crunchie bar, go easy on the chocolate chips, and definitely not bother with the hot chocolate gloop. Indeed, since the recipe offers plenty of wiggle room on the ingredients anyway, I think the best thing to do with anything like this is treat it like Rocky Road in ice cream form - just add the stuff you like best and let the freezer do the rest.

Which begs the question: is that really enough to constitute a "recipe" in the first place? I'm not so sure it is. Still, if nothing else, this experience has taught me how easy it is to make a decadent butterscotch sauce. Which is useful. Dangerous, but useful.

Two-word verdict: Deceptively excessive.

Random Kitchen: Lockdown Edition

"By popular demand" is a loaded phrase, but I can't deny what's right there in black on white.

On Sunday I innocently posted a photo of my dinner on Instagram like the Instatwat I am. Almost before I knew it, the possibility of Random Kitchen making a return had been firstly raised, then swiftly endorsed by several of my friends.

I issued a weak protest or two, of course. Sourcing the necessary ingredients (and sometimes even the necessary implements) for Random Kitchen had been a pain in the arse the first time round, and that was before we were living under lockdown rules and I'd limited myself to one big weekly shop, rather than the daily stroll around Lewisham's finest stores that I'd previously permitted myself as a homeworker lacking on the human interaction front. In other words, this would clearly involve more planning than I'm used to, not to mention a healthy slug of improvisation along the way. I would also need a right of veto for those dishes containing ingredients that can't be reasonably substituted (but then I always did have one of those where live lobsters were concerned, say).

Still, I can't deny that my cookbooks have been gathering dust again since 2016's original Random Kitchen adventure - even the two (two!) new additions in the meantime, Rachel Khoo's The Little Swedish Kitchen and Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's Jerusalem, haven't been getting the use they ought to. And there are still countless pages of recipes, good, bad and ugly, across the 25-ish tomes in my collection that I've never even looked at, let alone considered making. So why not fire up random.org and spin the wheel again?

Truth be told, I'd been idly thinking about it anyway. After all, what else am I going to do while we wait for things to return to some kind of normal? I'm only too aware of the pitfalls - making your own lockdown life more difficult with a self-imposed cookery challenge is one thing, but there's also that slightly eerie feeling you get from doing something frivolous while the world around you is going through something horrendous. On the other hand, times like these are about finding ways of preserving your sanity too.

Or preserving other people's sanity by undertaking ridiculous tasks for their entertainment. Whatever works.

So let's do it. I'll unleash the finger of fate before our next big Asda shop. A cookbook will be chosen at random, a recipe will be chosen at random from within that cookbook, and we'll see how it all pans out in terms of actual feasibility. The less feasible, the more entertaining, I suspect. It's all good.

I am not doing live Random Kitchen sessions on Zoom though.

Well, perhaps some celebratory meringue swans when we're all finally released from captivity...

Anyway. Random Kitchen: Lockdown Edition. Bring it on! I think...

Meringue Swans

The book: Everyday Novelli (Jean-Christophe Novelli)

The recipe: p74, "Swan Meringues"

Well, it had to happen. Ever since my first post about the world's least accurately named cookbook, Everyday Novelli, the standout recipe for swan meringues (or meringue swans, as I'm calling them here because that's how we've come to know and love them) has been hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles. And with four whole days of Easter at my disposal, what better time to finally let the thread snap and embrace my inner culinary ornithologist?

So I did it. Or at least, I tried to do it. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: Everything about this "recipe" is designed to frustrate, from imprecise (or missing) instructions right through to the flawed nature of the entire bloody concept in the first place.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. First, let us all share in the avian goodness, for Novelli has been kind enough to publish the recipe on his website for all to enjoy. You may wish keep this to hand as I proceed. You may also wish to note Novelli's opening words: "This is one of the most therapeutic dishes to make."

We'll see about that.

The prep: At this point it's worth saying that I've never actually made meringue before, which probably isn't a great starting point. Regardless, I diligently acquire a piping kit with various attachments:

...and I'm basically ready to go on the equipment front, having mercifully already invested in an electric whisk earlier in the Random Kitchen project. (Seriously, how did people ever come up with things like meringue in the days when hand-beating was required? Wouldn't you just give up and do something better with your time instead?)

Ingredient-wise, the standard meringue ingredients (eggs, sugars) are supplemented by dark chocolate for the creepy swan eyes, and a "selection of red fruits" for decoration. Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that the swan in Novelli's picture also has a pink beak, but no mention is ever made as to how this should be achieved. Similarly, those green-apple "wings"? There's nothing in the ingredients or the method to suggest that they even exist. And don't get me started on that dollop of squirty cream that looks like it's holding everything together, yet remains conspicuous by its absence from the recipe.

This could be a long day.

Except it's going to be more than a day, because Novelli's interpretation of "everyday" cooking involves making the swan body parts then leaving them to set for 24-36 hours. As if this whole thing wasn't ridiculous enough already. I suppose I understand why - if you baked them, even on a low temperature, they'd go that meringue-y yellow-brown colour and that's not especially swan-like or elegant - but come on, this claims to be a book "full of recipes that look and taste delicious but are easy to recreate". Like waking up in the middle of the night to feed porridge to mussels, a 36-hour lead time for some meringue limbs is not my definition of "easy to recreate".

The making: I whisk up a storm with five large egg whites, then add in the caster sugar and a pinch of salt. So far, so meringuey.

Icing sugar and a little cornflour are then sifted and carefully folded into the glossy mixture until any lumps have been incorporated. This is quite hard to achieve without inadvertently beating the air out of the mixture, thereby defeating the point of all that whisking, but I just about get there in the end.

Next, I'm asked to "line a baking tray with greaseproof paper". Considering this recipe makes 15 swans, which corresponds to 15 necks and 30 wings, I think I'm going to need more than "a" baking tray, J-C.

A first batch of the meringue mix is stuffed into a piping bag with a plain nozzle, and I begin the onerous task of piping some swan necks. Which, as it turns out, isn't so onerous - they're basically just an elongated "S" shape, after all. I'm told to pipe "one beak on each end, so that if one breaks off, you can use the other", but at no point am I told how to actually pipe a beak, so I just go with a blob-like dollop of meringue that's a bit thicker than the rest of the neck.

Piping hot

I'm going to reproduce the next line of the recipe in full for your enjoyment:

"It doesn't matter if the quantity of meringue produces more necks than you need since it is difficult to remove them from the greaseproof paper without breaking and this will give you some room for error."

I may not have done a literature degree, but even I can tell that's some serious fucking foreshadowing right there.

Nevertheless, I continue by refilling the piping bag (this time with a star-shaped nozzle) and piping the wings. How do you pipe meringue wings, you might ask? Why, you do one half "using a left to right motion" and the other half "using a right to left motion". That's more than enough in the way of instructions, right?

Fuck's sake.

Anyway, since Novelli is determined not to help me any more than the minimum (and barely even that), I try to loosely recreate what's shown in the accompanying photo. The "tails" of my wings aren't remotely long enough, but I've never done this before so frankly I'm delighted to have anything at all to show for my efforts. In due course, I end up with several baking trays full of not altogether terrible swan parts.

And some day you will bake like I bake

I assume they're the right size because, of course, Novelli hasn't given me any guidance on that front either. In any case, they're duly left to set "in a cool dry place (not the fridge) for 24–36 hours".

It's the next day now, and some careful prodding and poking in non-obvious places suggests that the wings aren't really setting terribly well (I daren't even think about the necks). Which kind of makes sense - neither heat nor cold are being applied to the meringue limbs, so why should they react in any useful way? To give myself some options for later in the day, I stick one batch in the fridge to see if that helps at all (spoiler: it doesn't).

I watch a film, I go for a 15km run, I make a big pot of curry for dinner, but eventually there's no avoiding the task at hand - it's time to assemble the swans.

Predictably, this is where it all goes wrong.

I start by melting some dark chocolate and applying the "eyes" with a cocktail stick. They look beady and rustic, but broadly effective. Next, it's the turn of the beaks, which - in the absence of any mention of ingredients or method - I endeavour to recreate by brushing on a bit of pink food colouring. This makes my swans look like they've been punched in the face or are just really bad at applying lipstick.

Hello sailor

Still, I'm sure they'll be fine once they've been removed from the greaseproof paper, which I'm supposed to achieve "using a palette knife, being careful not to break the meringue" (you don't fucking say).

Joy of joys, none of the parts are properly set yet. The wings are incredibly delicate and only too keen to crack and disintegrate at the merest touch...

Oh good

...but eventually Sam does manage to successfully loosen a couple of them without breakage. Their undersides may still have a decidedly soggy consistency, but they're usable, and that's the main thing.

By now, I am sceptical as to the prospect of any of the necks making it off the paper in one piece - their narrow shape is brittle by its very nature, after all - and about four necks are duly sacrificed before we finally, miraculously, manage to loosen one intact. (Meanwhile, the ones I put in the fridge have basically turned to mush, which is an unexpected yet somehow entirely unsurprising turn of events.)

I quickly retrieve a pre-chilled plate from the freezer and set a scoop of ice cream in the middle of it. You'd think Jean-Christophe might impart some great secret for assembling the finished swan, but no - the sole instruction is "Carefully press the swan’s wings on to the ice-cream, then add the neck and head." Aha. And how exactly am I supposed to "add" the neck? I'm using soft scoop ice cream, but we've just established that the meringue parts are incredibly fragile and liable to break apart at the slightest pressure, so shoving the neck into the ice cream is out of the question. The photo accompanying the recipe provides little to no assistance, since it shows the neck apparently miraculously floating in a sea of cream.

So I cut a slit in the ice cream and wedge the neck in that way.

It may not be elegant, but it just about works - our solo swan is battered and bruised but basically upright.

Now it's time for the "decoration", starting with a couple of miserable wings, since I happen to have a green apple available:

Probably a bit thick, but they're not even supposed to exist so hey

...and continuing with a scattering of berries, none of which especially want to sit on the swan (maybe that's where the never-mentioned cream comes in) so they'll just have to sit near the swan.

And we're done. Or as near done as we're ever going to be.

Ladies and gentlemen, a meringue swan.

Ta-fucking-dah

It's not great, is it? But at this stage in proceedings it feels like an absolute bloody triumph.

We even feel emboldened enough to try and loosen another set of wings and one of the few remaining necks from the greaseproof paper, only for disaster to strike at the assembly stage:

It hurts so greatly

A valiant attempt to use ice cream as neck glue fails to have the desired effect:

...and so one of us is going to have to make do with consuming some deformed swan parts rather than a coherent meringue bird. A deconstructed swan, if you will. So be it.

All the other body parts I've made are either already broken or a load of useless mush, and my nerves are basically frazzled by this stage anyway, so fuck it. Let's eat.

The eating: It tastes like ice cream, meringue and fruit. Like Eton Mess, in other words. Which is precisely what I'll be making with the rest of the body parts.

Swan graveyard

So that's just terrific, you know?

Honestly, words cannot begin to express the sheer disparity between the effort involved in making these swan meringues and the pleasure of eating them. I do not understand how anyone could consider there to be any justification for ever undertaking a project like this.

To put it another way: I ended up making 7 swan necks and 8 sets of wings. We got one intact swan out of that. ONE SWAN.

There was a point in the process, after I'd piped the necks and wings, when I found myself quite enjoying the whole thing. Sure, my piping work wasn't great, but with a bit more practice I could do better in future, and assembling the swans didn't feel like it could be that hard.

And then, well, you know the rest.

 

At the end of the day, I maintain that I never stood any real chance of success here. The instructions provided are inadequate, the assistance given is minimal, and the whole concept is fatally flawed. Ultimately, this isn't really a recipe at all, it's just Jean-Christophe Novelli saying "making meringues into swan shapes sounds like a nice idea, why not try that? Good luck! [muffled laughter]"

But y'know, we got one meringue swan out of it. So there's that.

I hope you're all happy now.

"I will never forget," a teary-eyed Jean-Christophe recalls in the introduction to the recipe, "making this on my daughter Christina's first birthday." I can understand why. As if a one-year-old's birthday party isn't a terrifying enough prospect without voluntarily putting yourself through this while trying to placate a mob of screaming infants. No wonder he can't purge the experience from his memory.

J-C, you have my deepest sympathy. Now swan off.

One-word verdict:

A year of nonsense

"Grandpa, Grandpa! What do you remember about 2016?"
"2016? It was a traumatic time. Old certainties vanished. New, grim realities emerged. Sometimes it felt like your faith in everything good and right in the world was being tested to its very limits. And that was just the Spiced Cucumber..."

It's probably best I don't have kids really.

We're nicely into the new year now, and I've experienced my first Sunday without a Random Kitchen recipe to tackle, not to mention my first midweek workday without the subsequent blogging obligations. How does it feel? It's a curious mixture of relief and regret, truth be told. I'll miss the sheer terror of "having" to make, photograph and taste-test a new recipe every week - but it's nice being allowed to cook what I want, too. And I was running out of things to say by the end of it all.

For all I intend to occasionally return to the world of the Random Kitchen whenever I'm feeling culinarily uninspired, I couldn't let the "weekly instalments" phase of the project gather dust without a final post or two. And yes, there will be a non-random visit to the swan section of a certain Novelli cookbook in due course. But first there's the small matter of how best to sum up and commemorate twelve months - fifty-two weeks! - of self-imposed kitchen nonsense.

I suggest we approach it category by category, in the vein of an awards ceremony. The "Swannies", if you will.

Most popular post
The Random Kitchen was never created with popularity in mind - the next Zoella I ain't - but it's been interesting to track the hits for each post and see what's captured people's imagination (and/or presumably turned up in the odd Google search result).

Third place is basically shared by the Seafood Vol-au-Vent that wasn't, Week 30's sinful Paneer Makhani and - for some reason - Jan Arkless's necessarily basic Roast Pork recipe. Some way ahead of them in second place is the Cappuccino and Walnut Cake I ended up sharing among my fellow parkrunners. But our clear winner, perhaps inevitably, is my rant about Everyday Novelli and Jean-Christophe's peculiar mussel/porridge obsession.

People seem to enjoy seeing me angry, basically.

Don't get me started...

Least popular post
Conversely, there were some weeks where even I couldn't really be bothered, and that was often reflected in reader numbers, especially when the recipe name wasn't enticing enough to pull people in. Funnily enough, the heroic Braised Beef stew from Week 39 didn't get much love - I suppose it was always going to be boringly uneventful - but the wooden spoon clearly goes to the perfectly fine but fundamentally uninspiring Cauliflower Cheese and co. from Week 12. Can't say I blame you all, really.

Best new kit
I've always prided myself on having a reasonably well-equipped kitchen, so the one thing I didn't expect from this project was that I'd need to buy so much new bakeware, so many new gadgets and all manner of other stuff just to be able to accurately reproduce the recipes in the first place. If I'd known, I'd have proposed to Sam in late 2015 purely so we could do a John Lewis gift list and get it all for free.

Still, the kitchen stockists of Lewisham have benefited financially from the Random Kitchen project and I've picked up some good stuff along the way, so I'm not complaining. It's about time I owned a proper heavy casserole dish, after all, and it's testament to my low-level baking skills that I hadn't wanted or needed an electric hand mixer until now - but the Swannie has to go to the ridiculous bundt pan that I probably ought to have bought sooner, but which finally took pride of place in my home just in time for me to summon up the ghost of the 1980s.

Ominous

Most pointless technique
That'd be James Martin getting me to poach haddock in a roasting tin precariously balanced on top of a hob flame. One of the year's few real excursions into Proper Food, the resulting dish was very tasty (yay!) and didn't poison Sam's mum (double yay!), but cooking the fish that way took bloody ages, and what did it really add to proceedings?

Special mention to The Silver Spoon for its inventive application of risotto cooking techniques to spare ribs, of all things.

Most overused condiment
Salt, ffs. I didn't realise how sensitive I was to salt - or at least how relatively low-salt my diet must be - until I kept encountering chefs using the stuff left, right and centre. And not only Madhur Jaffrey, though lord knows she was consistently the worst offender.

Most overused GIF

Our favourite recipes
Having made him suffer for 52 long weeks, I had to let Sam have his say on the next two categories. For the first one, we each picked our five favourites from the year as a whole, and there wasn't actually all that much overlap.

That's partly because I ended up choosing some less spectacular concoctions that I know I'll return to regularly - the Goan-style dal curry from Week 14 and the recent semolina "cake" in all its gaudy glory - and neither of those were ever likely to knock his socks off. I also went for the excellent Chinese-style bacon "salad" from early in the project, which I'm looking forward to making for friends sometime.

Meanwhile, Sam picked out the aforementioned creamy paneer curry, the flavour-packed seafood vol-au-vent that wasn't actually a vol-au-vent (although the seafood was seafood), and the leek and ham galette that I had a strop at for being far too big for any normal person's freezer.

We did agree on two favourites, though - the amazing slow-cooked beef stew from Week 39 and the ridiculously decadent take on sausage, onion gravy and mash from Week 44.

Amber knows

Basically what we're saying is the Random Kitchen was good when it forced us to eat large quantities of meat-heavy comfort food. That figures. 

Our least favourite recipes
Ainsley's tarte tatin was just some chutney on a measly shortbread base, Anjum Anand's aubergine dish went toe-curlingly, yoghurt-curdlingly wrong, and Barbara bloody Kafka insulted everyone's intelligence with the now-legendary Vegetables For One.

Despite strong competition like this, however, picking the very worst of the year involved three simple steps. I turned to Sam; I said "it's the Spiced Cucumber, isn't it?"; he replied "God, obviously, yes."

I still have nightmares, swear down.

*sigh*

Most bare-faced lie
When I shared this blog on my football forum, one friend commented that he's rarely owned a cookbook that he's got more than 3-4 regular recipes from - and although this year-long process of random selection has ably demonstrated that most recipes are at least fundamentally okay, I suspect that ratio will continue to hold true for me in terms of what I'm inspired to return to and make again.

Part of the problem is that cookbook authors are freaking lazy. There's so much padding in most books (or at least most of the books I own), with countless variations on a theme of "put stuff in a dish topped with flaky pastry and call it a pie", for example - not to mention lots of so-called "recipes" that even my friends started to pick holes in:

Even when a randomly selected recipe has been complex enough to actually merit the name, it often ends up being ridiculous in other ways. I'm reminded of Nigella's insistence that a vat of wine will suffice in a stew instead of stock or water, or Barbara Kafka's microwave take on apple sauce that somehow seemed to complicate rather than simplify proceedings.

But for sheer meanness of spirit, I'm going to award the final Swannie to the revered Delia Smith, whose "Avocados with Prawns 2 Ways" wanted me to prepare the titular avocados and prawns not two ways, but either one way or the other.

Huh.

I think Wilfred says it best:

Fifty-two-word verdict
One of the great pleasures of the Random Kitchen project has been finding a single word with which to conclude each post, a term that neatly encapsulates that week's cooking and eating experience. Logically, then, as we draw to the end of this review of the year, revisiting my one-word verdicts should provide an accurate insight into how I perceived the Random Kitchen experience as a whole.

Being an awful middle-class wanker, I have chosen to express this insight... in haiku form.

*clears throat*

Hearty. Tangy. Tart. Acceptable. Pointless. Fine. Moreish. Nobbly. Cheese. Retro. Tangible. Wholesome. Smashing. Summery. Polarising. Paj. Sloppylicious. Fun! Vegetastic. Everyday. MANLY. Stressful. Hic! 'Arriba'. "Healthy". Perfunctory. Bittersweet. Satisfactory.

Rich. Bemusing. Ribbed. Rewarding. Superfluous. Sloppy. Vegetables...? Tingly. (Used that twice.) Satisfying. (Also twice.) Adequate. (Ditto.) Lazy. Substantial. Holey. Celebratory. Apocalyptic. Tortuous. Mundane. Final one-word verdict, then: "Overwhelming"? YES.

*bows deeply*

(There were two image-based verdicts too, but I couldn't decide how many syllables they ought to count for. Sorry, Liz.)

Shut up, Martin
All told, I wrote a lot of words last year. Nearly 52,000, appropriately enough for a 52-week project - and that's not including photo captions, which were often the most fun part, quite frankly. We're approaching book-length territory with that figure, I suppose - albeit a weird book that nobody in their right mind would actually want to buy. Still, though: I wrote a short book in 2016! #IsWriting! #NaNoWriMo! #OrSomething!

Anyway, because a haiku wasn't enough wankery already, I thought I'd conclude this post(-mortem) by generating a wordcloud from the entire sprawling project in order to see if we can identify any overarching themes.

Hm. "Cheese" aside, not really.

Still, I suppose it's quite pretty, if fundamentally useless. And I find it hard to imagine a more suitable epitaph for the Random Kitchen than that.

Thank you so much for reading it all. It's been a blast. May I propose one final toast to the swans?

Erm

One-word verdict: Exhausted.

Week 52: Farmhouse Supper

The book: How To Boil An Egg (Jan Arkless)

The recipe: p102, "Farmhouse Supper"

And so... the end is near...

I can't quite believe it, but here we are. It's very nearly the end of 2016, and this post marks the fifty-second time I've used an online random number generator to pick a recipe from my underused cookbooks for me to make and subsequently blog about. A final summary post or two will follow, of course - but for now let's just give ourselves a hearty pat on the back for getting this far.

And while random.org doesn't always exhibit a sense of occasion (still no meringue swans, folks!), it does seem rather apt that we're ending this project where we began it, namely with Jan Arkless and her timeless guide to solo student cuisine. Even though this inevitably means a fairly pedestrian bit of cuisine for me to wax lyrical about.

Underwhelming though this conclusion to proceedings may be, the chosen recipe this week, "Farmhouse Supper", still feels like something of a bullet-dodge considering what other delights haunt the pages of How To Boil An Egg, from "Quick Kidney Special" and "Pork In A Packet" to, well, this:

I'm not sure whether to be more offended by the concept of "Potato Bolognese" or the concept of people who don't like pasta...

Whereas this final dose of randomness appears to be a reasonably tame weeknight concoction that - in addition to actually involving the titular eggs (albeit not boiled) - might actually require a quantum of skill and result in a hint of flavour. That'd certainly be a step forward for Jan.

Not that one

The prep: With How To Boil An Egg being aimed at students cooking for themselves on a budget, the first thing to do is double the quantities of everything so that it actually feeds both of us.

Jan describes this dish as a "tasty way of using up cooked potato", so the next thing is to cook some potatoes ("3-4" each - I go for 4, natch) then pretend they're leftovers. I also buy some smoked back bacon ("1-2 rashers" each - I go for 2, natch), a green pepper, and some eggs ("1-2" each - I go for 2, natch).

Other than that, it's all stuff I have in the house, as I suppose one might reasonably expect from this tome. Being outfoxed by a student cookbook would be an ignominious end to the random year and no mistake.

The making: Right from the start there are two things I like about this recipe (insofar as something so straightforward can even be called a recipe). Firstly, it lets you cook things in stages so only one pan and one dish are required - student kitchen-friendly, see? And secondly, the method starts with all the peeling and chopping instead of burying it away in the ingredients list in order to give the impression that things are a lot simpler than they actually are. Good on you, Jan.

I start, then, by slicing and dicing the potatoes, peeling and chopping the onion, de-rinding and dicing the bacon, and coring and chopping the pepper. And that's just the first two-line paragraph.

Ready and waiting

Oil is heated in a decent-sized frying pan and the bacon is fried gently for a few minutes before being removed to a saucer. I then fry the onion and pepper in the oil and bacon fat until they're starting to soften...

Superfluous illustration

...before adding the potato and sautéing (not that Jan calls it that, because that'd be too complex) until browned. The contents of the pan are then combined with the bacon and transferred to an ovenproof dish.

Next, a knob of butter is melted in the same pan and the eggs are fried. I make sure they're barely set before taking them off the heat, since I know the next step is to carefully slide them on top of the vegetables in the dish. Grated cheese is sprinkled on top - I go for Red Leicester solely because it's what we happen to have in the fridge, although it also adds a nice touch of colour - and the whole thing goes under a hot grill for a few minutes until the cheese is bubbly and welcoming.

I may have gone past "bubbly" to "slightly burny". Typical student.

And there we have it. Fifty-two weeks of random cookery, and the very last dish ends up being simplicity itself. Despite my earlier care, the eggs still end up more set than I'd like, but otherwise everything is as it should be. It's essentially a variation on bubble and squeak, a breakfast hash but served in the evening. And why not? It's about as much "cooking" as I ever managed in four years of university.

The eating: For some time now I've been concerned about, well, running out of words to describe food. Not that the Random Kitchen project has become a chore per se, but there's only so many times you can use phrases like "mouthfeel" or "pleasing texture" or "stuff swimming in other stuff" before it starts to get a bit samey.

So all I'm going to say about this is it tastes exactly as you'd expect it to.

Mm, farmhouse-y

It's deeply unambitious, as we've come to expect from Jan, but I suppose the teenagers of 1986 had less experience of exotic concepts like seasoning. If nothing else, nowadays you'd surely chuck in some cubed chorizo or another shop-bought ready ingredient to brighten things up a bit.

But honestly, for all it's necessarily straightforward, I'd have been happy enough to come up with something like this even as a late-90s student. It looks decent and feels substantial, there's even some actual nutrition hidden away in there, and you wouldn't especially need the grilling phase as the cheese melts into the whole thing anyway, so it's essentially an easy one-pan dinner. And even my more developed 38-year-old palate welcomes this as a basic interlude between the rich excesses of Christmas and NYE.

So while I'm not denying it's a bit of a downer on which to conclude The Random Kitchen in some respects, I'm happy enough. This project has always been about going with the flow and taking things as they come, after all - such is chance.

And hey, worse things have happened in 2016 than a "Farmhouse Supper".

Now that's what I call a happy ending.

One-word verdict: Mundane.

Supplementary words of reassurance: Regardless of whether I continue The Random Kitchen next year or not (and if I do, lord knows it won't be on a weekly basis - I am greatly looking forward to being allowed to cook what I want again!), I couldn't possibly allow this blog to peter out without a final visit to the pages of Everyday Novelli for a non-random encounter with some meringue birdlife. It will happen. Of course it will. Just give me a few days to work up the courage...

Week 51: Savoury Semolina Cake

The book: Indian Food Made Easy (Anjum Anand)

The recipe: p25, "Savoury Semolina Cake"

I'm going to be honest, "Savoury Semolina Cake" is not a collection of words I expected to encounter in a Random Kitchen context (though I probably should have, considering this is a project that's given us "Spiced Cucumber" and "Vegetables For One"). And yet I'm instantly sold on the concept.

I mean, just look at it. What do you mean you can't? Being from a BBC series and all, the recipe is right here. And it looks very much like My Kind Of Thing - more bread than cake really (and I've been wanting bread to come up again for a while), attractive to look at yet still faintly ludicrous in the execution. I absolutely approve.

Plus it's two days to Christmas when I spin the random wheel and there's going to be no shortage of rich and, well, very English food in the week ahead, so why not try something authentically Indian? At least I assume it's authentic; the introduction in the book likens it to something called handvo, but that comparison is absent in the online version of the recipe. And in fact various sites suggest that handvo contains lentils and/or paneer and/or, at the very least, appears to be something similar but fundamentally different. So perhaps this isn't all that authentic after all - there is a "purists beware" warning attached, I suppose. Hm. Oh well, I'm sufficiently culturally ignorant to proceed regardless. Let's loaf!

The prep: I have an ideally sized tin for this particular bit of baking (thank you, Jane Asher and Poundland), which comes as something of a relief since I've spent all week battling with various recipes for gluten-free Christmas cookies, so any way in which Anjum can live up to her claim and actually make things easy is extremely welcome at this stage.

To my surprise, there's also very little I need to buy in. The titular semolina is missing from my cupboards, of course - I'm not a school dinnerlady in the 1980s, so why would I need that particular retro horror in my life? (Still, it could be worse: it could be frogspawn tapioca.)

I also pick up some fresh green beans even though frozen would be fine (the decadence!) and some proper Greek yoghurt with actual fat in it, since I'm keen to avoid a repeat of the curdling episode that dogged Anjum's first appearance in this blog.

The making: You can see the recipe for yourself, as noted above, but I'll summarise the steps anyway. To begin, onion is chopped, carrot is peeled and grated, green beans are "roughly broken up" (I do love a vague instruction), and petits pois are allowed to defrost slightly. These vegetables are then combined with the semolina, yoghurt, ginger, chopped chillies, chilli powder, turmeric and salt to form a fairly thick batter.

So far so easy.

A healthy dose of vegetable oil is then heated and some mustard and cumin seeds are briefly fried until fragrant and a-popping. The seeds and oil are stirred through the batter, followed by the bicarbonate of soda, and... oh. That's all! It's ready to go into the tin and, from there, into the oven.

Does look a bit like vomit though

Wait wait, I almost forgot something. The online version of the recipe (which I'm working from in writing this post at the in-laws' over Christmas) lists sesame seeds in the ingredients but doesn't expressly tell the reader what to do with them, implying that they should be toasted along with the other seeds. Yet the book version definitely tells me to scatter them over the contents of the tin before it goes into the oven for 35-40 minutes. I'm not sure why Anjum changed her mind or what version is supposed to be the definitive one, but it certainly comes out looking nice(r) with the sesame seeds atop the "cake":

Cracking loaf, Gromit

And just look at those slices. Colourful to the point of ridiculous - who wouldn't want to sink their teeth into something so riotously vivid?

"Green-studded radioactive orange" is my favourite colour of food

I am entirely serious here, by the way. That is absolutely the kind of thing I always want to be eating. Heck, if anything, it looks nicer and moister than the version from the TV show, which seems a bit flat and sad by comparison. Win!

The eating: This basically goes exactly as I predict: Sam is ambivalent whereas I really quite like it. It's not spectacular - how could it be with those simple ingredients? - but its humble slices are home to a pleasing blend of vegetable crunch, soggy semolina (soggy semolina) and a slow-building rustic spiciness. All in return for minimal difficulty and minimal outlay - "Indian Food Made Easy" indeed.

It's still hard to know exactly what it's for, admittedly. I think the key, from an ignorant western perspective, is to look past the c-word of the title and treat this as something closer to a bread. Not the kind of bread you'd butter and use in a sandwich, obviously - but a couple of slices are enough for a decent lunch option or, frankly, a quick and moderately healthy breakfast jolt to the tastebuds. Has to be better than another turkey sandwich, right?

Added to which, less the two slices we taste-tested, it's even a perfect fit for our tupperware.

OCD-tastic!

Definitely a success, then. I may not be wasting any of it on Sam, but I will absolutely be making this again in 2017 and beyond.

One-word verdict: Fun!