Week 42: Banana Split

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

The recipe: p180, "Banana Split"

The random.org selection of the student cookbook from the very first week of the Random Kitchen project prompts an immediate but not unwelcome LeAnn Rimes earworm, because that's how my brain works. At least that's a good start.

First impressions suggest that this week's recipe is going to be insultingly simple, not only because of the book it's taken from, but because, well, it's a banana split. We're not exactly talking haute cuisine here. Still, I'm lagging behind a bit following a long weekend in Sofia, and while this probably wouldn't be the first thing on my wishlist after four days in a country where even the coffees are desserts...

My lovely chocolate lumps

...I am emphatically on board with the "simplicity" part of the equation.

And come to think of it, it must be years since I last had a banana split. It wouldn't be my first port of call when it comes to ice cream treats nowadays (and I suspect my childhood encounters with Chinese restaurant banana fritters have scarred me by association - hot oil and sugar, yum), but it's something I'm willing to welcome back into my culinary life for the purposes of this project, so let's see how the student-/idiot-friendly Jan Arkless version pans out.

The prep: I am confused. Jan claims to have written How To Boil An Egg "specifically for the person who knows absolutely nothing or very little about cooking", explaining "the simple things that one is supposed to know by instinct". Why, then, is she so reluctant to actually tell me what to use in this recipe? I'm supposed to buy ice cream (no flavour specified), chopped nuts (no variety specified), and have free choice as to whether to buy chocolate sauce or use Jan's home-made variety from the previous page - which, it transpires, involves melting a "chocolate bar" (cooking/regular chocolate not specified) with a little cold water.

You're supposed to be making life easy for the kitchen novice, Jan, not introducing unnecessary layers of choice and complexity. Get it together.

(In any case, I went for posh vanilla, almonds, and cooking. Since you didn't ask.)

The making: The bananas are split in half lengthways. Even with a sharp knife this proves problematic, with some undesirable crossways splittage also occurring, but I suppose it won't be too noticeable once everything's been squidged together.

I'd arrange the banana pieces in a boat if I had one, but a regular shallow bowl will have to do instead. Jan wants me to "sandwich the banana halves together with spoonfuls of ice cream". I get the idea - make it so the banana, its footprint duly widened, stands up nicely in the bowl - but in reality the ice cream doesn't have the desired adhesive effect, and it would have made more sense to just let the banana halves lie splayed and pile the other ingredients on top. Ho hum. Maybe a boat-shaped receptacle would have helped.

Anyway, once the banana sandwich is vaguely intact and upright (albeit slowly starting to fall apart), the chocolate sauce à la Jan is spooned on top - or "glooped", more like, since her non-starter of a recipe yields a product with the displeasing consistency of mud.

Next, I am supposed to "decorate" the split with thick cream - again, with no indication as to what I should actually do. Thick spooning cream being what it is, I have little choice but to follow the "unattractive dollop" school of decoration. None of which matters all that much, since the above sins are promptly masked by a scattering of nuts and sprinkles. (Hang on - it's "nuts or sprinkles", according to the method. Yet the ingredient list calls them both "optional". STOP CONFUSING ME, ARKLESS.)

Fuck's sake. Anyway, guess what - a basic recipe with a flawed concept and little guidance in terms of ingredients or method ends up looking pretty crap.

The non-sticky sticky stuff

At least give me the option of camouflaging the edges of the rapidly diverging banana halves with squirty cream or something. That's just miserable.

The eating: You know what it tastes like, so I'm not going to insult your intelligence by describing it any further. It's nice. It's fine. It's a banana with ice cream, cream cream, and some toppings. It's a banana split. Fin.

I just can't get over the sheer futility of the endeavour. Even allowing for the kitchen n00b focus adopted by How To Boil An Egg, I have no idea how this "recipe" is meant to benefit anyone - it doesn't impart any useful kitchen skills or ingredient insights, and if your imagination is so limited that you can't come up with a way of serving fruit and ice cream without needing to be talked through it (and come up with a better way than this, frankly), then maybe you need to accept that ready meals and Just Eat are your future.

Am I being cruel? The book is from 1986, after all, and I get that we weren't quite as sophisticated in our tastes back then, but even as a 7-year-old I'm quite sure I managed to invent more interesting desserts armed only with an ice cream scoop, a can of squirty cream and copious quantities of those tooth-destroying silver balls. It's not hard. Unlike the balls. (Ouch.)

Oh well. Fine.

One-word verdict: Superfluous.

Week 41: Courgette, Tomato and Basil Pie with Goat's Cheese

The book: Masterclass (James Martin)

The recipe: p22, "Courgette, Tomato and Basil Pie with Goat's Cheese"

You've noticed it too, right? It's very much the elephant in the room: the Random Kitchen project just keeps on bumping into pies and pastry products. There are clearly a lot of them nestled among my 22 cookbooks.

Maybe it's a reflection of my interests, maybe it's down to the limited imagination of cookbook authors, or perhaps it's simply because pies are the kind of thing that can look quite impressive without necessarily requiring that much effort, hence making them ideal cookbook fodder.

In any case, here we are again, with another "pie" that isn't actually a pie pie, more "some stuff assembled in a dish with a sheet of puff pastry layered on top". Still, it's a properly vegetarian recipe (subject to how the goat's cheese is made, I suppose) and that's something we don't encounter too often on this blog, so let's give it a go!

Paj time, it's paj time, paj moment

The prep: Despite my pie fatigue, I'm so eager to get going that I find myself at the Lewisham Shopping Centre a whole quarter of an hour before the shops actually open. (Oops.) Fortunately, the trusty café in the central holding pen is already open for business, so I settle in and nurse an Americano while people-watching and listening to the greatest misses of Eurovision.

The recent demise of our fridge-freezer meant all those lovely leftovers of Jus-Rol pastry from previous Random Kitchen adventures had to be consigned to the great dustbin in the, er, backyard - so ready-made puff pastry is the first thing on my shopping list, along with the various vegetables that we don't have in the new and mercifully functional fridge. Among them are "banana shallots", which cause me a moment of panic before I do a Google image search and realise that's what they are.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note at this point that the actual name of this recipe ends "...with Dorstone Cheese". James Martin kindly explains that Dorstone is a cheese he "came across once at a farmer's market", so the chances of me getting my hands on it in Lewisham are predictably low, but he adds that any "firm goat's cheese" will suffice - "even a French Crottin." (No, me either.) In any case, I expect the local Sainsbury's to only stock the soft and spreadable variety, so I'm pleasantly surprised when it yields a firm block of St Helen's Farm that appears ideal for the job at hand. Hurrah! 

The making: The courgettes are topped, tailed and sliced lengthways. Next they're oiled, laid on a baking tray and popped in the oven until browning slightly, whereupon they're removed and left on the side to cool.

A drained jar of sunblush tomatoes, the chopped shallots, a couple of cloves of garlic and half a dozen large basil leaves (torn) are mixed in a bowl and seasoned. The baked courgettes are then added. (This is where the first bit of confusion sets in: at no point does the recipe ask me to chop the courgettes into smaller pieces than the long lengthways strips that went into the oven, but the image accompanying the recipe and basic logic both suggest that they need to be sliced crossways too, so that's what I do.)

The goat's cheese is crumbled over the top of this mixture (the crumbling process requires a bit of pre-slicing too, or I'd be there all night), then the whole lot is tipped into an ovenproof dish.

Next, the pastry is rolled out a bit thinner so that it's 2cm wider than the dish all round. The edges of the dish are brushed with beaten egg, then the pastry is laid on top and pressed down onto the rim. The excess pastry is "trimmed away" and is presumably meant to be discarded, but again there's a disconnect between the text and the accompanying picture, in which the leftover pastry has clearly been shaped into a flower-like formation that adorns the middle of the pie. My kitchen skillz don't quite stretch that far (although, in retrospect, I could have used one of my animal-shaped cookie cutters - no elephants though), so I make do with a rudimentary five-pointed star.

The top of the pie is comprehensively brushed with the rest of the beaten egg, then into the oven it goes:

Arty angle betrays urgent need for oven cleaning

And out of the oven it comes:

Overhead view betrays historic kitchen surface charring incident

You'll have noticed a certain degree of... let's call it "egg pooling" on the surface of the finished pie. (That's what you get when the content of the pie is lumpy rather than saucy.) It is set and solid, but not quite as much as it ought to be, and it's not especially pleasing on the eye. A few minutes longer in the oven would have fixed that, but then the edges would have been burnt, so you know, it's undercooked swings and carcinogenic roundabouts.

The eating: Hey, it's not bad! I know that's probably to be expected considering I like all of the ingredients, and I might have expected the chunks of goat's cheese to have melted a bit more than they have, but their mild yet robust flavour is a great accompaniment to the olive oil antipasti vibe of the vegetables, and the basil is a tangible enough presence to merit its status in the recipe name without ever threatening to overwhelm.

Since we're doing this as an evening meal, I serve the pie with some side veg that are also selected largely at random (tarragon carrots and oven-roasted asparagus, for the record).

Contents: Incoherent.

While far from an error, this mishmash of flavours ends up detracting from the inherent pie-ness of the pie. This becomes apparent when we go back for the inevitable seconds - it's much better on its own, which leads me to believe that the filling would be more successful if deployed in individual tarts (with actual bases ffs) and served at room temperature in a lunch context.

Still, it's a pretty successful kitchen experience all round. Relatively simple preparation (partly because it's not a proper pie, obviously) yields a satisfying outcome and a hearty bit of vegetarian fare - even if the recipe does require some reading between the lines and some outright leaps of faith. James Martin's promise to "make your home cooking easier" really shouldn't give him carte blanche to just leave stuff out altogether...

Eleven more weeks of this ridiculous project to go. How many more pies and pastry products do you reckon we'll encounter between now and the end of the year? (And could one of them be a dessert, please?)

One-word verdict: Paj.

Week 40: Kale, Chorizo and Potato Hash

The book: Riverford Farm Cook Book

The recipe: p230, "Kale, Chorizo and Potato Hash"

This post would have turned up sooner, but let's be honest, there's no way I was going to fire up the Random Kitchen number generator in its usual Sunday afternoon slot after having run the Royal Parks Half Marathon in the morning. Especially when the prospect of heading straight to Byron for some burger- and milkshake-shaped refuelling was raised instead. Readers, there are times when arcane blog-based cooking concepts simply have to wait.

A few days later and finally ready to face the kitchen again, we encounter a book in serious need of redemption after cursing us with the legendarily bad Spiced Cucumber back in Week 17. This time round, things are looking up right from the first glance at the recipe name, chorizo being famed for its ability to improve any dish. At the same time, I hear the faintest tinkling of warning bells at the mention of kale, an ingredient that tends to challenge my oh-so-Guardianista credentials with its inherent bitterness and toughness, much as I acknowledge its healthy nutritional properties.

And for all I may be a fully paid-up member of the 48%-er liberal elite (and a proud citizen of nowhere), I'm still a northerner, so the Riverford insistence on describing this as a "supper" dish rankles somewhat. Nevertheless, we plough onwards, boosted by the prospect of some hearty potato and chorizo to lift the post-race spirits and soothe those still-tired legs.

The prep: Feeling exceedingly lazy, I buy pre-diced own-brand chorizo instead of the picante Revilla chorizo ring I'd normally grab from the supermarket cooler shelves. (This will turn out to be an error.) Curly kale is abundant and affordable right now, while the fridge is already overflowing with potatoes and onions (thanks, Lewisham Market).

The recipe also makes a serving suggestion that meets with my approval, namely topping off the dish with an egg each. It neglects to include eggs in the ingredient list, however, so I endup overlooking this when doing the shopping. Fortunately, Sam is happy to pop out to the local Tesco Express while I'm in the middle of the cooking phase, returning mere minutes later with half a dozen eggs, a Crunchie and two Wispa Gold. Now that's efficient.

#rungry

The making: The recipe calls for cooked potatoes (cut into 2cm dice), so I start by boiling up a pan of spuds then leaving them to cool on the side.

Pre-chopped as it is, the kale is briefly blanched in a pan of boiling salted water, drained, refreshed in cold water, drained again and squeezed out until it's about as dry as it's ever going to get.

Next, olive oil is heated in a large frying pan and the diced chorizo is added and cooked for ten minutes until lightly browned on all sides. Alarm bells are already ringing here: if there's one thing I know, it's that you tend not to need to add oil to a type of sausage that's only too happy to give up its own, and indeed the pan is positively swimming in the stuff by the time the ten minutes are up.

The chorizo is set aside and a chopped onion and some garlic are cooked in the "chorizo fat" (even the recipe is basically admitting the oil is superfluous now) before the diced potato is added. The heat is turned up so that the potato gets some nice colour in it, and when the chorizo is subsequently returned to the pan, I can't deny that things are starting to look quite promising.

"I'm ready for my close-up now"

The kale is also added at this stage and the mixture is cooked slowly for a further ten minutes until everything is thoroughly heated through.

While this is happening, I turn my attention to the eggs. "Poached", the recipe says. "Bollocks to that", I reply. Like many people, I simply cannot poach eggs. None of the techniques recommended - vortexes of simmering water, the addition of vinegar, Delia's "just take the pan off the heat for ten minutes and let them cook by themselves" approach - have ever resulted in anything other than a disastrous mishmash of water-infused yolk and spindly tendrils of egg white that, while notionally edible, score a big fat nul points on the visual presentation and mouthfeel front.

So fried eggs it is. (One sunny side up, one over easy, just because.) Same end result in terms of the yolky goodness that should hopefully end up running its way through the finished product.

And that's it - the warm contents of the pan are plated up, the eggs are carefully slid on top, and we're ready to fill our bellies.

The eating: Mixed reviews, I think it's fair to say. More so than for almost any Random Kitchen experiment so far. While I wouldn't claim to love it (it's a fairly simple - ahem - suppertime dish, after all), I must be firmly in post-run recovery mode because I'm happy to shovel it into my gob unquestioningly. And then Sam raises several salient points that I find myself unable to dispute:

• It's really quite salty. This is not unconnected to the fact that there's a lot of chorizo in the dish and it doesn't taste of a great deal other than salt. My bad for being a lazy B'Stard and indulging in inferior procurement techniques - back to the Revilla next time.
  
• The kale is really quite bitter. This is a problem I acknowledged right from the get-go, and in the recipe's defence, it does note that any kind of cabbage or even Brussels sprouts would be an acceptable alternative.
• The whole thing doesn't really hang together. OK, it's a hash, so it's always going to be basically "some stuff thrown together in a pan" (actually, this really is just pyttipanna, isn't it?), but some kind of binding ingredient - a bit of grated cheese, something closer to a sauce than mere chorizo oil, or even a "stickier" vegetable such as sliced and soft-fried leeks - would make it feel more coherent.

Even the egg on top is a bit "meh", with the meagre yolk yielding little in the way of the indulgent stickiness I hoped it would. Maybe I should try poaching next time after all - at least that'd give us some visual LOLs.

Steamy fraternal twins

Having said that, Sam does suggest his antipathy might simply be because he's going off chorizo a bit. No, really. He actually said that.

In any case, a mixed bag, all told. Like with the other Riverford recipes I've used outside of the Random Kitchen project, there's a certain basic rusticness to this that manages to be both a positive and a negative. It could do with being more decadent, in other words - I'm thinking a sprinkling of parmesan, at the very least - but it could also do with me buying better ingredients in the first place, so I'm willing to give it another chance with those wrongs righted.

And hey - it's still a damn sight better than the Spiced Cucumber, plus we've got Crunchie and Wispa Gold for afters. Life's okay.

One-word verdict: Polarising.

Week 39: Braised Beef with Bacon and Mushrooms

The book: Good Housekeeping Easy To Make Complete Cookbook

The recipe: p146, "Braised Beef with Bacon and Mushrooms"

Spoiler alert: the recipe says "Serves 4". It did not.

The last few weeks of the Random Kitchen project have thrown up some, shall we say, more traditional fare. Perhaps this reflects the sadly unadventurous nature of my cookbook shelf?

In any case, while shepherd's pie or side-dish couscous have certainly been known to crop up in my standard kitchen oeuvre, I tend to have neither the desire nor the patience to bash together a slow-cooked beef casserole of any variety, so I'm not going to complain about this week's opportunity to make further use of the heavy-duty kitchenware I purchased for Nigella's stuff floating in wine a couple of months ago.

Once more, this turns out to be something of an exercise in creative title-writing - as you'll see, there's no real reason why the mushrooms and bacon should be promoted to lead billing ahead of any of the other supporting ingredients here. But hey, who cares as long as there's plenty of beef?

Um, Google, I said beef...

The prep: The recipe allows smoked pancetta as an alternative to the titular bacon, so that's an alternative I grasp with both hands, because who wouldn't? The ingredient list is otherwise quite plain and hearty - an onion, a couple of carrots, a couple of parsnips, a couple of leeks, some chestnut mushrooms - and there's not much else I need to buy in for the occasion.

I consider replacing the requisite redcurrant jelly with lingonberry jam, best known in this country as the cranberry-esque accompaniment to IKEA meatballs, since our fridge always contains a jar of it in case of köttbullar emergencies. In the interests of accuracy, though (and because it's only 80p), I splash the cash on the good old-fashioned British variety, which we'll no doubt soon be exporting to a grateful France.

When it comes to the meat, I decide to take a punt and go one step lower than the humble braising steak called for by the recipe. If we're slow-cooking it anyway, let's see how some supermarket value-brand frying steak holds up. (Sustainability in farming, you say? What is this?)

The making: Shamelessly ignoring the very first line of the method, I hold off on heating the oven for now, as it's clear the pre-oven steps will take a while even allowing for having prepped the vegetables in advance. Anyway, the pancetta is fried until golden, then the leeks are added for a couple of minutes. This mixture is removed and set aside, then the sliced beef is fried in some olive oil until coloured and sealed on all sides. Then this is also set aside - see what I mean about the pre-oven steps? - and a chopped onion is fried in the residual oil and meat juices before the chunkily-sliced carrots and parsnips are added for a few minutes, during which time I finally set the oven going.

The beef is then returned to the casserole and heated through, with a tablespoon of flour added "to soak up the juices" (though there aren't really any left at this stage since they've all been picked up by the veg, which I suppose is a good sign). Next, 300ml of red wine and 300ml of water are added along with a couple of rounded tablespoons of the redcurrant jelly, and the whole thing is seasoned and brought to the boil. Lid firmly secured, the casserole is now ready to go in the oven for two hours at 170 degrees - not slow-cooking in the day-long sense, but not exactly rushing things either.

Once those two hours are up, the leek and pancetta mixture (remember that?) is stirred into the pot along with the mushrooms (halved rather than sliced, for further chunkiness), and back into the oven it all goes for a further hour. And that's it - the dish is ready to serve, so I yoink it out of the oven and prepare to garnish with chopped flat-leaf parsley as the recipe recommends.

That's my dinner, then - what are you having?

Unlike the tasty but time-consuming galette from way back in Week 9, this recipe really does satisfy the "Easy To Make" element of the cookbook's title. Sure, there's quite a bit of peeling and chopping to begin with, but we're not exactly talking about skilled labour here, and after that it's as straightforward as you like. Top marks on that front, then. But what about...

The eating? Well, first things first: the cheapskate beef is a triumph, lovely and tender and ready to fall apart at the slightest hint of contact with a fork, so fuck paying more, frankly.

That's not what makes this dish really work, though. What elevates it beyond your average beef casserole is the interplay of the flavours, from the subtle richness that comes with using a sensible quantity of wine (I'm looking at you, Nigella) to the smoky infusion from the pancetta (and the pancetta fat that's melted away into the sauce, natch) combined with the sweetness of the parsnip - and of the redcurrant jelly too, I suppose, not that you can particularly taste the latter, but that's probably a good thing.

It only strikes me afterwards that no stock is used, so it's not overly salty - often the Achilles heel of stews and casseroles. And the quantities of liquid involved mean it's not overly saucy either, unlike the aforementioned Nigella aberration, yet the ingredients are still cooked to tender perfection.

For all this may not be sophisticated cuisine, this is basically entirely heroic in pretty much every respect, and it makes me wonder why I don't make this kind of thing more often. I work from home, after all, so I have both time and a sturdy casserole dish on my side. Though I suppose there is the small matter of the long-term waistline impact...

Welcome to Braised Beef. Twinned with: itself.

While the recipe doesn't make any serving suggestions (as the above photo neatly illustrates), if I were making it again - and I will - then I suppose it could benefit from being paired with some crusty bread \o/ or a green vegetable, or you could chuck in some potato to flesh things out a bit.

Alternatively, you could do what we did and essentially accompany it with itself. Braised beef with a side portion of even more braised beef, followed by second helpings of braised beef. The perfect menu.

Serves 2, in other words - and only if you're quick.

One-word verdict: YES

Not that this meat-heavy recipe helped much, but I'm currently carb-loading for the Royal Parks Half Marathon, which I'll be running to raise money for Parkinson's UK and all the excellent work they do. It's nearly race day and I need all the support I can get, so if you're enjoying The Random Kitchen, I'd be superbly grateful if you'd consider donating to my fundraising page. Thanks!