February 2021: Sweet and Sour Pork; Wild Mushroom and Hollandaise Pizza; Choc and Ginger Nut Slice

◘ THE STARTER ◘

The book: Chinese Food Made Easy (Ching-He Huang)

The recipe: p24, "Sweet and Sour Pork"

Our opener for this month's Random Menu may sound like a main course, but let's talk quantities for a moment. "Serves 2", the recipe says, before describing a dish involving two pork loin steaks, a bit of sauce, and "salad leaves or steamed jasmine rice" to accompany. I'm sorry, but a thin cut of pork each and some salad leaves is a starter, not a main. At the very least, it's intended as part of a selection of dishes, and so I'm happy to interpret it as a first course for the purposes of February's Random Menu.

(That said, I double the quantities anyway. I'm permanently hungry these days, and the pork steaks come in a pack of four and I'm not going to use them for anything else. Any excuse really.)

The recipe and the photo on the opposite page make it clear that this is not "sweet and sour" in the conventional British sense, i.e. horrible gloopy red sauce out of a jar. It's still not especially photogenic, though, so you won't be getting many snaps of this one. Not that that usually stops me, I know.

Anyway, I start by whizzing some dry-roasted peanuts (a recipe-given alternative to roasted soya beans that I'm happy to grab with both hands), dried chillies, sea salt and white pepper in the food processor "until coarsely ground".

Probably went a smidge beyond coarse, but oh well

The pork steaks are pressed down into this mixture until thoroughly covered, then wok-fried on both sides until nicely browned.

Nice: check. Brown: check.

In the meantime, I've also used the food processor to zoom together some pineapple chunks, pineapple juice and lime juice. This is meant to result in a "paste", but it's definitely still more of a liquid. I'm going to thicken it down in the next stage, though, so no biggie.

I'm instructed to pour this sauce into the wok that I've just done the steaks in, reduce it down for a few minutes, then add light soy sauce, a dash of rice wine and/or ground white pepper "if required". I'm not sure how I'm supposed to judge what's required or not, so I add them all, because they're all flavours that I like.

At this point I'd like to stress that the recipe does not ask me to wipe the wok first, and so I assume the sauce is supposed to pick up all of the good oils and fats and slightly burny bits that have been left behind from the frying process. I soon realise this probably isn't the case, however, because the sauce in the photo accompanying the recipe is pineapple-yellow and mine is... not.

It wouldn't be The Random Kitchen without a photo of some brown gunk in a bowl

But here's the thing: poured inelegantly over the pork steaks to serve (you really don't need to see what that looks like), the end result is actually very flavourful. It's deep, it's spicy, it's nutty, there's a bit of pineapple sweetness poking through - all rather satisfying. To be honest, it tastes more like a modified satay sauce than anything else, and with the peanuts dominating the flavour of the pork coating, I think that would be the case even if I'd begun the sauce stage with a clean wok.

"This is my simple and healthy version of sweet and sour pork and will be unlike anything you have tasted in a Chinese restaurant," the blurb begins. Well, that's not inaccurate, since this is almost entirely unlike sweet and sour pork. But it is really nice and I can see myself making it again as part of a main meal, so that's not a bad start.

One-word verdict: Accidentalicious.

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

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

The recipe: p340, "Wild Mushroom and Hollandaise Pizza"

In the same way as every bloke who thinks he's shit-hot in the kitchen has a chilli recipe with some kind of "special ingredient" that he's only too keen to bend your ear about at a friend's BBQ, there is a whole culture around home pizza-making whose appeal eludes me somewhat, I must admit. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's great satisfaction to be had in finding and perfecting the use of just the right pizza stone or even an entire pizza oven, but given the cost and effort that involves and the time it takes to get a pizza dough going in the first place, I'm always going to scratch the pizza itch by just giving Mamma Dough a call instead (yeah).

Still, even in my pizza-hipster-cynical state, I wouldn't particularly expect a Good Housekeeping cookbook to be the home of an authentically Italian creation, so I'm curious as to how this one will turn out - especially as it involves a slightly improbable topping too.

I have the ingredients for the topping laid out on the work surface thusly:

...when Sam walks into the room, eyes up the cubes on the plate and says "ooh, cheese!". "No," I say, "that's butter for the hollandaise sauce." "Where's the cheese?", he asks. "There is none," I say.

"," he replies.

It's true - this is a pizza with no tomato or white sauce base and no cheese on top. I figure you wouldn't bother putting this in a cookbook if it was as pointless as that makes it sound, though. Well, you'd hope, at least.

Either way, it begins with making a simple pizza dough. Flour, salt, yeast, olive oil and warm water are slowly persuaded to take shape, and while we don't own an oven with a proving drawer (owning a house first feels like more of a priority), we do have a heated clothes airer that means there's a nice warm corner of the kitchen I can use for the purpose. Between that and having the patience to knead it properly, my dough actually rises for once - and then some. Hurrah!

In the 45 minutes it's taken for that to happen, I've made the topping. "Wild mushrooms" were always going to be a bit of a stretch given we're still getting supermarket deliveries and restricting ourselves to minimal extra shops (bring on normality, eh?); the recipe talks about "chanterelles, trompettes-des-morts, oyster mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms" et al, but I have to make do with a couple of packs of shiitake and a handful of chestnuts to make up the numbers. Not exactly exotic, but it all ends up largely the same once it's been sliced and briefly sautéed in butter and garlic like it is here.

Hollandaise isn't something I've made before, and I didn't really know what went into it. Turns out it's basically just an egg yolk, that aforementioned pile of butter cubes, and some lemon zest and juice. This is slowly cooked and combined in a glass bowl over some simmering water and is supposed to have "the consistency of mayonnaise" by the time I'm done. It's somewhat thinner than that even after I add the chopped coriander required by this recipe - surely not canon? - but I figure it might thicken as it sits. (It does, a bit.)

Attractive

So, here's what I find a bit odd about this recipe. Once the dough is risen, I'm asked to roll it into a 25cm circle - as you'll see, we'll have to settle for "imperfect" on the shaping front - and then crimp up the edges.

The base is then baked "as is" for "about 20 minutes, or until golden brown and cooked". So, no topping added yet. Okay.

I check it after 13 minutes and it's already looking pretty golden (and feeling pretty rock solid).

Since it's going back in the oven again once the topping is added, I take the executive decision to skip to that stage right now, lest the crust need the hammer and chisel treatment at the end of it all.

This involves folding the mushrooms into the hollandaise, and then... pouring it on top. I guess that's why I had to crimp up the edges of the pizza base - it'd go everywhere if I hadn't.

Further baking follows, and even with the three-dimensional crust edge to prevent disasters, things get somewhat buttery. It's not quite swimming in the stuff by the time it's done, but there is definite greasy seepage.

Still, it looks more or less like a pizza, so that's something! Oh, this "serves 4", by the way. [pause for raucous laughter]

As expected, the base is pretty tough. I realise the blind baking phase is intended to stop the greasy sauce from making everything soggy, but a bit of sog (that's a word now) actually mightn't have hurt. The topping is quite nice; that's about as far as I'll go, but you can't stray too far with garlic and mushrooms and lemon and the like. There's obviously nothing remotely Italian about it but it's a pleasant enough eat, just nothing to write home about. (Enough to write a blog about though, amirite? #content #iscooking #hashtag)

The biggest issue, though, remains with the butter content of the hollandaise. Because it's leaked into the pizza base...

...and beyond...

...the crust is extremely oily. It actually reminds me of eating fried bread, of all things. And as welcome as that may be as an occasionally indulgent add to a breakfast plate, it's not really what I want from a pizza.

So, yeah. Not a failure, but not a massive success either. I think I could do a better job on this by approaching it differently next time: no blind baking, less butter in the sauce, and maybe some cheese on top to glue it all together. Though I suppose if I added any more caveats, I'd be making an entirely different recipe...

One-word verdict: Disjointed.

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: 101 Cheap Eats (BBC Good Food)

The recipe: p208, "Choc and Ginger Nut Slice"

After all that faff, a mercifully simple sweet treat to finish - essentially the kind of no-cook traybake they might teach you how to make on Blue Peter. Although I still manage to fuck it up.

As is so often the case, I begin by melting butter, plain chocolate and syrup in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. 

You know what that looks like, but here's a photo anyway!

 
Meanwhile, I take a packet of ginger biscuits and bash them into crumbs.

This flimsy bag does not survive the rolling pin assault...

...but the result is fine. Imperfect, but that doesn't matter.

The biscuit crumbs and some toasted and chopped hazelnuts are stirred through the melty chocolate mixture, then the whole thing is pressed into a sandwich tin.

Next, I melt the remaining chocolate.

Hang on.

There was meant to be remaining chocolate?

Honestly, Martin, read the fucking recipe. I was supposed to have used just 100g of the 185g of chocolate in the first stage. Instead, the body of my traybake is almost twice as chocolatey as it's meant to be, and I have to quickly melt a little bit more chocolate to basically serve as glue for the remaining hazlenuts.

Still, as long as it sets, "too much chocolate" is always better than "not enough chocolate", and so into the fridge it goes.

And indeed - after chilling it for 3-4 hours instead of the suggested 1 hour, just in case - the end result looks fairly acceptable!

The idea is to cut it into slices at this stage and serve it to 8 people, but since the events of the past year have rendered laughable the very idea of seeing 8 people, we just keep it in the fridge and work our way through it over the next few days.

It's undoubtedly rich - my fault, obvs - but the kick of some decent-quality ginger biscuits (I bought branded for once, admittedly only because I couldn't get own-brand in this week's online shop) swiftly cuts through the chocolate overload and the hazelnuts give it a bit of texture too.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is ridiculously simple and I can't claim it's any kind of radical departure from the kind of thing you all know how to make already. But after a "sweet and sour" recipe that was neither and a brutally inauthentic pizza, isn't it nice to end on something that does exactly what it says on/in the tin?

One-word verdict: Pleasing.

January 2021: Hot Apricot Flan

In case you missed it, you can read all about the starter and main course from the January menu here. In that post, I talk about how the third and final element of the meal merited separate attention. I stand by that assessment - and so we now turn to:

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: Everyday Novelli (Jean-Christophe Novelli)

The recipe: p119, "Hot Apricot Flan"

Yes, to no one's great surprise, it's a Novelli creation that demands a post of its own. So far, Everyday Novelli has delivered us liquidy, garlicky hummus, the prospect of porridge-fed mussels, a surprisingly good dinner that would have been significantly less good if I hadn't intervened and refused to use an entire litre of double cream in its preparation... oh, and there was something about swans too.

Accordingly, my hopes are not high when the random finger of fate lands on our friend Jean-Christophe again. Especially since the introductory paragraph to this "hot" dessert concludes with the instruction "Serve hot or cold". With this level of attention to detail, I can already sense it's going to be one of those days.

I'm going to start with a confession here: I skim-read the recipe, saw flour among the ingredients, and idly assumed this "flan" would be of the "sweet tart with a base and a rim" variety. Reader, it is not. In the absence of condensed milk or a preponderance of egg yolks, however, neither it is a pudding in the sense of a crème caramel/custard/birthday flan. Quite what it is supposed to be, I'm still not entirely sure even now I've made the thing, to be honest.

Anyway, we kick off with a bit of preparation: Canned apricot halves are drained, placed in a bowl, and left to macerate in a little kirsch for an hour. Or they would be if we had any kirsch in the house, but there's no obvious reason we would and I'm not sourcing a whole bottle of the stuff during a lockdown just so I can sprinkle a thimbleful over some apricots, so I use sugar and a splash of wine to approximate a similar softening effect.

Once that's done, I can prepare my flan tin. Novelli calls for a 22cm tin. The two circular dishes I own - a regular deep pie/quiche dish, and a loose-based metal tin - are both around 28cm in diameter, so either way the end result here is going to be a bit shallower than what J-C has in mind, but it should be easy enough to tweak the cooking time if necessary. Since I'm still working on the assumption that this will be a pie-like creation that might benefit from being turned out onto a plate once it's done, I opt for the metal tin.

This is greased with butter and left to chill in the fridge for five minutes. It then gets taken out, greased with more butter, then dusted with a mixture of caster sugar and cocoa powder before being returned to the fridge for a further 20 minutes.

Seems like a lot of effort, but okay

What's going into that lovingly prepared tin, anyway? Let's see. I mix together some demerara sugar, vanilla, a little softened butter, a pinch of salt, 100ml of honey and four eggs. I then sift in 250ml of flour and beat it all together until it has a batter-like consistency.

To me, that already feels like the kind of thing you could pour into a dish and bake until it's nice and set and wobbly. So I am beyond bemused when the next step requires me to add 600ml of milk and 400ml of double cream.

I'll say that again: a litre of liquid.

This is the exact moment at which I become aware that: (a) this is not going to be a pie; (b) this is going to be fucking terrible.

Under normal circumstances I'd assume the recipe to be correct - people do test and proofread these books, right? - but we have very recent evidence of a Novelli recipe that quite clearly involved way too much cream to be edible and no one appears to have picked up on the error, so there's every chance the quantities are off here, too. Should it be 60ml and/or 40ml? Maybe it should. The trouble is - unlike with a savoury meal, where I'm experienced enough to make an executive decision and do things differently - I'm not brilliant with desserts so I can't really improvise and know for sure that I'm still going to end up with something that's in keeping with the spirit of the recipe.

So instead I beat in a litre of milk and cream.

Great

This goes into the fridge to "rest" for 20 minutes. I have a faint hope that this might thicken the mixture somewhat, but of course it doesn't. I'm not sure even freezing it would do much to thicken it, frankly...

Next it's time for assembly before my "flan" goes into the oven for 15-20 minutes. (Incidentally, Novelli wanted me to preheat the oven before doing all of the above. I remain convinced that cookbook authors are in cahoots with power companies to drive up their profits.)

My suspicions about the accuracy of the quantities are further confirmed when it becomes evident that there is way too much liquid here to comfortably fit into my tin, even though it's 6cm wider than the one Novelli recommended. Not only that, but the recipe also calls for me to "spoon in" the filling. Mine doesn't require any kind of spooning; it can be poured. So, yep - definitely a bit sus.

Now, remember those apricots from earlier? They're in the recipe name, so it's about time for them to become relevant again. I grab the bowl in which they've been macerating and toss them in 30ml of honey before arranging them on top of the filling. Why the honey? Allow me to quote from the recipe: "This coats the fruit and helps to prevent it from sinking."

Bear that in mind as I share this next photo:

Have a close-up for good measure:

There's not much "arrangement" involved here, for fairly obvious reasons. As well as enveloping the apricots entirely, you'll note that the liquid nature of the filling means some attractive globs of coagulated cocoa powder have floated to the surface, so that's delightful too.

If the apricots had been sat nicely atop a thick batter at this stage, the next thing would have been to brush them with a little oil before putting the dish in the oven. Since they're barely visible and drowning a milky death, however, that feels like something of a moot point. I figure it's time to just shove this bin fire into the oven and see what happens.

And that's when I notice the filling starting to leak out of the tin.

Well that's just terrific

Now, again: If it wasn't already abundantly clear that this was going to go wrong...

You can't beat a bit of optimism even at this late stage, though, and I figure that maybe if I get it in the oven ASAP, it'll start to set around the edges before too much of the filling escapes.

That'll be a no, then. (Still, at least the fucking apricots are visible now...)

Cursing the name of Jean-Christophe Novelli loudly enough to be heard halfway to Hither Green, I decide there's nothing else for it. I quickly salvage whatever I can and unceremoniously decant it into that pie dish I mentioned earlier:

...and finally my "flan" can start baking in earnest.

By this point I have absolutely no idea what's going to come out the other side. It's clearly not going to be what the recipe thinks it's going to be, but that's been evident for a while now. Even with whole eggs and not just yolks involved, maybe it'll be something close to a giant baked custard after all? Or perhaps more of a soufflé... only with, erm, apricots in it? 

Whatever it is, the sheer volume of what I've created here means the "15-20 minutes" of oven time ends up being more like 35-40 before it's sufficiently set to safely come out again. As for the end result, here it is:

To be honest, I'm just delighted it's baked enough to resemble something it might be possible to slice up. And cutting it open does reveal some kind of structural integrity, even if it's not necessarily the most appealing of cross-sections.

Whether it's edible remains to be seen, of course.

"Allow to cool for 15-20 minutes", the recipe says - again, I would remind you that this is called "Hot Apricot Flan" - then serve "with scoops of vanilla ice cream".

Can do.

What to say about this month's dessert, then? Well, despite everything, it's not terrible. It's got cream and sugar and eggs in it, after all - how bad can it be? 

The problem is you can tell the proportions are all off: it's not sweet enough, what with the sugar having been diluted by so much dairy, and the consistency is more gloopy than springy, making it borderline unpleasant after a few spoonfuls. If anything, it's reminiscent of stodgy 1980s school dinners, and that cannot possibly be what's intended. Still, you can conceal a multitude of sins under a dollop of ice cream, and I have to report that we do end up eating the whole thing over several days. Just not necessarily with vast amounts of enthusiasm. As Sam puts it, "it's fine, but you wouldn't serve it to someone...".

Ultimately, I would be fascinated to know what is wrong with this recipe - specifically, exactly how much milk and cream should be involved - because there's clearly a decent idea in there somewhere, it's just been thoroughly bludgeoned by a lack of care and attention. Much like everything else I've tried from Everyday Novelli so far.

Sam's conclusion is that I should just give the book to a charity shop, considering how badly things go every time I dip into it. But I don't think I can. Firstly, I secretly quite enjoy these kitchen disasters and the sheer disdain I feel towards Jean-Christophe Novelli as a result. And secondly, I'm not sure I could sleep easily knowing that someone else was having to suffer like this...

One-word verdict: Fucksake.

January 2021: Oven-Roasted Tomato Tartlets and Mellow Meatballs

New year, new concept! And the introductory Random Menu for January throws up an interesting-looking combination right from the off: a veggie starter, a meaty main, and a dessert that... well, we'll come back to the dessert another time, actually. It deserves a post of its own.

So let's begin by turning our attention to the first two courses - starting, as well one might, with:

◘ THE STARTER ◘

The book: Deeply Delicious (Weight Watchers)

The recipe: p14, "Oven-Roasted Tomato Tartlets"

I usually have to go straight on the defensive where this Weight Watchers cookbook is concerned - by and large, it does a decent job of providing seriously calorie-counted versions of familiar dishes, albeit sometimes with so much of the joy removed that you find yourself thinking "why not just have the regular version but less often?".

In any case, the idea of roasted tomatoes encased in filo pastry feels like a suitably light first course in anyone's book - so let's see where the joy can be sucked out of this one, shall we?

The ingredients list is already suspiciously short: store-bought filo pastry, tomatoes, olive oil, basil leaves, and seasoning. (The basil is even down as "optional"! There's no such thing as optional basil where tomatoes are concerned, if you ask me. Besides, it's not like it adds any calories, so...)

I immediately encounter an issue with the tomatoes. Given the nature of the dish, that's... not a great start. Basically, the recipe calls for plum tomatoes, which I already know our Asda don't have in stock fresh. I think about using baby plum tomatoes, which they do have, but I suspect they won't have the desired chunkiness after they've been the oven, so I end up opting for the heftiest available vine tomatoes.

(It's worth noting that the recipe also calls for a whole kilogram (!) of tomatoes, an idea which I nix immediately. Two 300g packs looks like plenty to me.)

First up, then: The tomatoes are halved, arranged cut side up on a rack, sprinkled with salt, and slowly roasted for an hour at 140°.

If you're thinking this doesn't sound like enough to do much to them, well... you'd be right. While we're not looking for "sundried and shrivelled" here, the photo accompanying the recipe makes it clear that the toms should have crinkled skins and be nicely reduced in size by the end of this hour - and they most definitely are not. It would probably have helped if I'd been asked to brush the tomatoes with olive oil before they went in the oven, but that devilish extra tablespoon of oil might have tipped the recipe into "unhealthy" territory, and we couldn't possibly have that, could we?

So instead - since the oven is getting turned up a few notches for the pastry anyway - I up the temperature and make sure the tomatoes have a chance to do a bit more. (Apparently plum tomatoes are known for having a lower water content - would that also make them roast more quickly? Maybe it would. I don't really do food science. Ah well.)

Meanwhile, the pastry. That accompanying photo I mentioned also shows an illustrative tartlet: a filo pastry base containing about four tomato halves. My tartlets are going to look different, by which I mean they're going to be smaller. This is mainly because I don't own "eight individual tartlet tins" as per the recipe (does anyone?), so I'm cobbling together a workaround involving a 12-hole muffin/Yorkshire pudding tin.

I need eight 15g sheets of filo according to the recipe, and I need to halve them before brushing them with oil, reassembling them, and... well, anyway. This is all a bit of a moot point since my filo packet is a different weight, has a completely different number of sheets, and I'm not working with eight tartlet tins in the first place. So I improvise something that I feel closely approximates the spirit of the recipe: using 120 grams' worth of filo, I take two smaller pieces of pastry and stick them together with some oil, ease them into the holes of my muffin tin, and "scrunch up the edges with my fingers" as requested by the recipe.

Well, okay, there could have been more scrunching...

That'll do. The remaining oil - there isn't much left by now - is brushed over the edges of the filo, and the tin goes into the oven alongside the tomatoes for 15 minutes or so, until the pastry starts getting some colour about it...

(well, sort of. It's crispy, anyway, even if it might not look it)

 ...and it's assembly time!

Because my tomatoes were a decent size in the first place and haven't really shrunk much at all, there's even less chance of me wedging several of them into each filo nest than I initially anticipated. I was thinking I might at least get two in there, but nope: it's one tomato half per filo receptacle, and that's your lot. Ho hum.

Russian Roulette. One of them is actually a pepper! (Not really.)

Sprinkle on some "optional" basil, grind over some black pepper, and the end result is... reasonably pleasing on the eye, I suppose?

So. Taste-wise, this is exactly what you'd expect (assuming you've ever eaten tomatoes and basil and pastry before, anyway). Even with insufficient oven time, the tomatoes have actually picked up plenty of flavour from the Maldon salt and the roasting process, but the rest of the dish is a bit - that word I feared at the start - joyless. Still perfectly decent, you understand, but that's a fairly low bar to set.

As expected, it's the "healthy" shortcuts that are the Achilles heel here. Using minimal oil means the pastry just gets a bit brown rather than becoming golden and crispy, and the whole thing is crying out for a grating of parmesan or a couple of mozzarella pearls or just something to make it a bit more interesting.

But hey - it's a starter on a three-course menu, it's not necessarily meant to blow you away. And in that respect, it does its job well enough.

Out of curiosity, I put the excess tomatoes back into the oven and let them soak up all the residual heat as it cools. This...

 
...is closer to what I imagined (burny bits aside). They barely make it to the fridge before being eaten up.

One-word verdict: Austere.

 

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

The book: Nigella Express

The recipe: p369, "Mellow Meatballs"

I'm doing this one in the same post because - as the Nigella Express concept promises (and, for a change, lives up to) - it's a really straightforward dinner dish that doesn't involve too much preparation or complexity.

What it is, however, is a bit of a weird concept. Put it this way: What do you think of when you hear the phrase "Mellow Meatballs"? If your answer is "Swedish-Thai fusion cuisine", well, you're lying. And yet that's basically what we're dealing with - you can see the recipe for yourself here.

To be fair, Nigella talks in the blurb about buying "organic beef mini meatballs" from her supermarket, but at no point does the recipe itself specify exactly what type of meat or, indeed, what type of meatball to use (other than "mini"). It could just as easily be Italian-Thai fusion, is what I'm saying. But when your local Asda goes to the trouble of stocking vaguely authentic ready-made köttbullar, well, the only way they're going to keep stocking them is if I buy them...

"Swedish meatballs made in Sweden for a true taste
of Sweden" would have been even better

 
I'm actually going a bit less "express" than Nigella wants me to here, because I can't find a bag of pre-diced sweet potato and butternut squash as required by the recipe. There was a squash in this week's veg box, though, so buying a sweet potato and doing the peeling and dicing myself really isn't much of an inconvenience. 

Hey guys! Hey Gunter! Hey Hans!

 
Indeed, I have time to do it during the first stage of cooking, which involves heating the meatballs in a mixture of vegetable oil and Thai red curry paste:

Behold my oily balls

 
After sprinkling on some ginger and cinnamon, things quickly pick up pace. I add a tin of coconut milk, a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tin of chickpeas (drained), mix it all together a bit, then stir through the diced squash and sweet potato, a squeeze of honey and 500ml of stock. I then bring the whole thing to the boil so it can simmer for 20 minutes.

Now, if you're thinking that seems like a lot of liquid, well... you'd be right.

Glub

We've had this kind of issue with Nigella before, haven't we? Maybe she's secretly northern, and as soon as the cameras are off she mops up every meal with several slices of supermarket own-brand white bread. I do hope so.

Anyway, there is going to be something to offset all this liquid - "serve with rice" is the instruction, so while the meatball pot is bubbling away, I make a pan of bog-standard white rice to accompany.

Some coriander is chopped as a garnish (I'd have stirred it through instead, but the recipe is the recipe, even when the recipe is wrong), and that really is all there is to it - my Mellow Meatballs are ready to be nibbled.

And at least it does reduce down a bit.

OK, so. Even with plenty of rice as a sponge, there is definitely still too much liquid here. I think the tin of tomatoes is the tipping point - you could easily replace them with a squirt of tomato purée (and maybe a handful of cherry toms) and there'd be no tangible difference to the end result other than it being less of a swimming pool of food.

But... it's really nice! The silky texture of the meatballs paired with Thai flavours is definitely still a bit weird, don't get me wrong - and I'm not sure what's especially "mellow" about it, since it's decently hot even with all that liquid (perhaps I just used a paste with a decent kick to it, I don't know). But it's tasty, it's filling, and it's an interesting take on a curry-but-not-quite-curry dish that turns out to be a perfectly timed midwinter warmer for us to enjoy while easing ourselves into the new Eurovision season.

The first Norwegian semi-final, since you didn't ask

Plus it's really quick and simple to rustle up. "Express", you might even say. Folks, I actually think this one will be finding its way into my rotating cast of regular meals (or to give it its full title, "meals I keep meaning to make more often but end up only doing every few months because tuna pasta is easier"). Hurrah!

One-word verdict: Jätteดี.

2021: The year of the Random Menu

Let's have another crack at this, shall we?

I'm still not entirely sure why my creative juices ran dry somewhere in the middle of last August. Partly it was a sense that - while the low infection numbers in the summer months allowed us to at least approximate some aspects of normal life - my internalised impetus for resurrecting The Random Kitchen had run along the lines of "OK, I'll do this while we wait for parkrun/theatre/unproblematic foreign travel to come back", and contrary to initial foolish hopes, none of those things were showing any genuine signs of returning. Could I really persist with a weekly blog called "Lockdown Edition" if what I'd actually committed to was an "Until We Return To Normality Edition" and there was no hint of normality on the horizon?

Combine that with a general lack of drive and concentration ever since the unpleasantness first began (I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to my bandmates for my near-complete inaction on the music front, too), and a couple of relatively underwhelming recipes with limited "fun content" potential was probably all it took to finish me off.

(There was actually an unwritten Week 19 post. It would have involved this:

 

 

...and, well, yeah. There's really only so much mileage you can get out of a wrap.)

But I do love writing The Random Kitchen.

Or perhaps it's fairer to say that I love having written it. It's a bit like running, in a way: reaching the end point is absolutely worth it, even if the things you need to do along the way can be a bit of a pain sometimes.

Plus (and believe me, I am not a humblebragger by nature, but) some of you have said the loveliest things about the blog and how you hope it comes back at some point. Never with any pressure attached, of course - and don't worry, such feedback only ever makes me feel motivated, hence really wanting to get things back on the road in some form.

So I sat down and had a think about how I could make a 2021 edition of The Random Kitchen happen, with all the fun and bewilderment that underpins the project but without it feeling like a weekly task that "has" to be checked off the to-do list, no matter what else is going on.

And here's what I came up with: The Random Menu.

The main change is that it'll be monthly instead of weekly, giving me a bit of wiggle room in terms of when I get round to doing it and writing about it. But to make up for that, there'll be more content each time, and hence more potential for hilarious kitchen disasters.

I'll be firing up the trusty random number generator as always - only this time I'll be using it to find us a starter, a main course, and a dessert. I'll then cook this three-course meal and blog about it as usual, including all the unappealing photographs of beige mush that keep you coming back to this page.

Of course, if any of the three recipes are particularly outlandish or ridiculous, I can and will give them their own separate post - there's little more fun than giving a cookbook author the kicking they deserve - while anything that's a bit on the dull side can just get a few paragraphs as part of a longer blog, rather than me having to pretend like I have any new and exciting insights to share about grilled chicken.

I mean, I couldn't even be bothered to focus the thing properly

In the interests of honesty, I cannot claim that I will necessarily make all three recipes on the same day - as much as we're boys with an appetite, there's still only two of us in this household - but it'll always be over the course of the same weekend or so, to ensure reasonable verisimilitude. Either that or I'll have to start look for willing local victims to help us out with the leftovers...

Incidentally, after this week's food shop (in which I'll pick up the ingredients for the January menu), we intend to switch to online grocery deliveries for a while. Whether this is still the case by the time of the February blog remains to be seen, largely depending on whether the newest restrictions succeed in making the outside world feel a bit less scary. But if it is, you can expect the "hunting in Lewisham Asda for alternative ingredients" element of the Random Kitchen experience to be replaced by "what entirely inexplicable substitutes will I be given in my delivery this time?". Fun!

Happy New Year to you all. Let's eat some weird stuff.

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.