"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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| *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. |
(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?
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| Erm |
One-word verdict: Exhausted.
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