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!

Week 50: Chowder with Asian Flavours

The book: Nigella Express

The recipe: p164, "Chowder with Asian Flavours"

This recipe is a disappointment. That's not a spoiler - as if I'd give the game away this early in proceedings - but come on. Nigella is the kind of person who peppers her food writing with words like "rebarbative" and "subfusc", yet here we're expected to be satisfied with "Asian Flavours"? I know I was criticising Ainsley for his twee recipe names just last week, but if Nigella can't deliver a bit of casual pretentiousness, qui le peut?

Despite this, I'm looking forward to chowing down on Nigella's chowder. (Oh, behave.) As often, her introductory words contain a lot of provisos and excuses - apparently true foodies would have legitimate issues with her omission of a roux and, god forbid, the use of coconut milk instead of milk milk - but considering I'm ignorant enough that my only available Mallett's Mallet answer for "chowder" would be "clam", I'm more than willing to be carried along by this Lawsonian wave of culinary sacrilege.

Plus it's midweek and we've just got back from holiday via a traumatic experience involving buses, December weather and Croydon, so a warming and easy dinner - sorry Nigella, not a supper - ought to hit the spot nicely.

The prep: Just when I thought I might get away with it, the Random Kitchen requires me to buy yet another jar of spices I'll end up using once or twice then forgetting about at the back of the cupboard.

Overkill

Yes, it's mace, a word I associate more with self-defence sprays than any particular kind of cuisine, but apparently it's required here, as are lots of vegetables - potatoes, leeks, baby corn and tinned sweetcorn, for a start, many of which might have been in our veg box delivery if I hadn't cancelled it this week (d'oh). The stars of this particular chowder are fish (Nigella wants fresh cod, but it's a soup, for god's sake - generic frozen white stuff will do) and prawns (where frozen is fine, apparently).

There are a few standard ingredients here - coconut milk is already in the cupboard, red chillies are already in the freezer - but otherwise there's quite a lot to buy in (and I haven't even got to the coriander yet). I suppose that's in keeping with the bright, fresh and hopefully quick nature of this particular flavour combo, so I can take a bit of a hit in the wallet department.

The making: There's lots of peeling and chopping buried away in the ingredient list to make the method look more straightforward. Sneaky sneaky.

Anyway, I start by bringing some chicken stock ("not instant") to the boil in a medium-sized pan, before chucking in some chopped potatoes, leeks and baby corn and cooking them for ten minutes along with a couple of bay leaves and a generous teaspoon of ground mace.

Stock photo

Next up, a tin of coconut milk is added, along with 600g of cubed "cod" fillets and a generous glug or ten of lime juice. This concoction is brought back to the boil and simmered for a minute until the fish is obviously starting to cook a bit.

A bag of frozen prawns and a drained can of sweetcorn are added, and back to the boil it all comes once again - for an "express" recipe, this one does seem to require a lot of standing around waiting for things to start bubbling - before we're ready to season and serve. Suffice it to say that this involves two of my favourite ingredients:

Yay

And the chowder is duly bowled up, garnished, and sent tablewards. Since it seems quite substantial in its own right, I even manage to refrain from serving it with a hunk of white bread. Suppressing one's inherent northernness is tougher than it may appear.

The eating: To my surprise, the portion sizes here really are substantial, actually. For once, "Serves 4" means what it says!

It's a decent enough eating experience, with the veggies retaining their bite, the coconut milk adding a hint of creamy decadence, and the coriander/chilli delivering the requisite freshness. Of course, there are complaints too. (There are always complaints.)

Firstly, the texture. I get that a chowder is always going to be a bit "stuff swimming in liquid" (and it's not like Nigella doesn't have history on that front), but this seems a bit more watery than it needs to be, which detracts from the potential luxuriousness of the dish somewhat - or at least from its visual impact, which isn't altogether unimportant.

Glub

And secondly, the seasoning. The chowder is overly salty, but that's fine - it comes with the territory with fish dishes, and it's easily tweaked next time round. What's less excusable is the mace. I don't get it and I don't get what it's doing here. All it seems to add to proceedings is a slightly, well, dirty taste and a generic numbness of the tongue, both of which could surely have been better achieved with more chilli and/or conventional seasoning. As it stands, there's an overwhelming tingly mace-ness to the whole thing that rather overshadows the subtlety of the fish and prawn flavours. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find something do to with the rest of the jar.

The dish as a whole isn't at all bad, though. It introduces some much-needed bright and striking flavours to the darkness of winter solstice week, and while the cooking time and the (not-so-)hidden instructions mean it's an awful lot less "express" than Nigella would like it to be, it's certainly not a complicated or difficult meal to prepare. Coconut milk aside, it's even quite healthy, yet it still manages to feel like a bit of a treat.

Definitely happy to try this again some time, in other words. Just, y'know, I might go easy on the mace.

One-word verdict: Tingly.

Week 49: Cheese 'n' Onion Tarte Tatin

The book: Ainsley Harriott's Meals In Minutes

The recipe: p45, "Cheese 'n' Onion Tarte Tatin"

You're on the internet, so there's every chance you're familiar with this image:

It's clumsily executed, but you know what it's getting at - a thoroughly decent human being he may be, but Ainsley is an easy figure of fun, and he does himself no favours with recipe titles like "Cheese 'n' Onion Tarte Tatin". I mean, seriously. What's so wrong with the word "and"? What degree of jollity and merriment is actually injected into proceedings through the use of that abbreviation? It's a tarte tatin, not a children's birthday party, so stop making balloon animals and let me start cooking for fuck's sake.

You may think I seem a little grouchy, but my mood is immediately lifted when I inspect this week's recipe in greater detail - for there it is, right in front of my eyes:

Oh glorious, glorious fate.

Anyway, all frivolity aside, this sounds like my kind of dish (who doesn't like a mouthful of tart?) and I could use something relatively quick and easy on this particular weekday evening. Besides, with the Random Kitchen having forced me to make all kinds of "pies" that are little more than a collection of stuff in a casserole dish with a leaf of flaky pastry on top, it'll be nice to conjure up something with an actual base for once. Alors: on y blooming well va!

The prep: Being a speedy recipe, we're in Jus-Rol territory as far as the shortcrust pastry goes, which is fine by me - I'm sure I'll try making my own one day, but not right now. Onion-wise, the recipe calls for three large red ones, which I deem to be roughly equivalent to the four medium-sized ones the local Asda is willing to surrender up to me.

The cheese we normally have in the house is of the low-fat variety, but I figure the bonding properties of regular Cathedral City might come in handy for this particular dish. Meanwhile, the suggestion of a "mixed salad, to serve" is neatly covered by this week's veg box delivery, so that's useful.

There's also the small matter of dark muscovado sugar...

Cake tin, sugar, cheese. Inget konstigt alls.

...which is a minor extravagance just for the two tablespoons I need here, but it's nearly Christmas biscuit season, so I suspect I can find a use for the rest.

The making: Butter and oil are combined and heated in a frying pan, then the onions - already thinly sliced - are cooked until softened. This being a quick meal, Ainsley wants me to do this for a mere 5-8 minutes before proceeding. I've got some time in hand and I know from recent experience that onions only benefit from a bit of the slow and gentle treatment, so I probably give it closer to 20 minutes before adding in the sugar and some balsamic vinegar and cooking the mixture for a wee while longer until it's nicely caramelised.

Getting a distinct sense of déjà oignée here

This suspiciously gravy-base-like mixture is spooned into the bottom of a cake tin, then most of the cheese is sprinkled on top. Next, I roll out the pastry into a circle slightly larger than the circumference of the tin, then press it over the filling and tuck down the sides lightly but assertively. I expect this to be awkward, but it all goes well, leaving me to prick with a fork to my heart's content.

Comprehensively pricked

That done, the tin goes into the oven for 25 minutes, then comes out to sit on the side briefly before the real fun begins: inverting it and turning it out onto a serving plate. This can only go smoothly.

And yet, to my shock, it kind of does. There is definitely now a savoury tarte tatin on a plate on the side in my kitchen, with only minimal slop and spillage around the sides. That, in itself, is a good thing, and I quickly sprinkle over the rest of the cheese to finish off the recipe before anything goes wrong.

What's less good is my dawning realisation that - having naïvely imagined this as an easy dinner option - there really is nowhere near enough food here. I mean, it's quite calorific what with being pastry and cheese and all, but it's not especially substantial. And pairing it with a salad is hardly going to help matters. All told, dinner might be a bit on the light side tonight.

"Serves four", the recipe claims. Four what - dormice?

Prick with a fork...

This sense of impending dread notwithstanding, there's little else for it but to plate up and see what happens. So that's what I do:

Sam: "It looks like chocolate pizza."

The eating: Hm. Substantial or not, I'm expecting this tarte to be tasty and a little bit naughty, yet somehow it's neither of those things.

For one thing, the trouble with the title's jocular focus on "cheese 'n' onion" is that you imagine the filling will have a flavour to match. I mean, I'm not expecting a grab bag of Walkers crisps or anything, but still - there should be far more cheese and far less onion going on here. "Onion 'n' onion" would have been closer to the mark. Or just, y'know, "caramelised onions on a shortcrust pizza base", because that's all this really is.

It's all very basic, basically.

It disappears quickly, and not just because there's not much of it - it is perfectly okay - but even in its natural habitat as part of a lunch buffet involving chicken legs and pasta salad (say), this still wouldn't be close to the star of the show. More pressingly, I have definitely bollocksed up the "providing a filling dinner" part of my househusbandly duties this evening.

"There's more salad...?" I venture when we're done. This earns me A Look.

There's only one thing for it.

Second dinner

Sorry, Sam - I guess that's what happens when your boyfriend is a prick with a random cookery project. 

One-word verdict: Bemusing.

Week 48: Gillygate Bean Casserole

The book: My green recipe folder

The recipe: no. 16, "Gillygate Bean Casserole"

I feel a bit sorry for food stylists. I mean, obviously it's kind of hilarious that there's a profession called "food stylist" in the first place, but still, it must be a thankless task at times. For every glistening summer vegetable to show off in all its colourful glory, there's an unforgiving meatloaf or a lumpy slab of grey fish. And for every luxurious chocolate mousse or succulent, juicy burger, there's a bean casserole.

All I'm saying, folks, is don't expect too much on the visual front this week.

We're back with the recipes my mum armed me with when I first moved to Germany, and this week's random.org choice is exactly the kind of undemanding, cheap and hearty dish you might expect a recent student to welcome with open arms. So what do you reckon - did I ever get round to actually making it during my five-year stint in Mainz and Hamburg?

Maybe it's the name. Gillygate is a pleasant if unassuming thoroughfare in York, and I was exploring the world of Rheinstraße and Jungfernstieg at the time. Besides, it's easy to be lazy about cooking in a country where currywurst and döner are available on every corner.

Why is this recipe named after Gillygate, anyway? The street has shops, of course, but no bean emporiums as far as I'm aware. I have to assume this is something my mum randomly snipped out of a local paper many moons ago (and subsequently typed up), because literally the only reference I can find on the entire internet comes from the October 2013 edition of Open Field, "the monthly publication of the parish of Laxton & Moorhouse". Which sounds like it should be supplying the headlines for the missing words round on Have I Got News For You, let's be honest. Anyway, it seems someone made it for a WI bake-off that month and it went down well (helped, perhaps, by being actually vegetarian, unlike the leek pie which "contained beef" - ahh, country life).

Anyway, the provenance of the recipe may remain a mystery but anything that gets the nod from the WI sounds promising to me, so let's see where this blast from the past takes us...

The prep: Never mind Nigella and her belief that we all have merguez, halloumi and flame-roasted peppers on standby at all times - this is the epitome of a "store cupboard meal", so much so that I barely have to buy any of the ingredients at all. It helps that there's a certain degree of freedom on the bean front - I opt for some black-eyed beans and a tin of "three-bean salad", though haricots or anything else would be fine really. Other than that, I need to get some chutney in (which is fine, since there's never a bad time to have caramelised onion products in the house) and blitz some old bread to make some wholemeal breadcrumbs, and that's about it.

Thus, with the beans duly drained...

Good for your heart

...we're ready to get started.

The making: Butter is melted in a saucepan and a large onion is sweated down "for about 6 mins or until soft". I double that, if not more, because (a) I'm not in a rush and (b) yum. Wholemeal flour, potent mustard and some ground ginger are stirred in, then milk is gradually added until a "smooth sauce" emerges - smooth but very thick, let it be noted.

This is then supposed to be poured over the beans in a casserole dish, but pourability is not high on the attributes of this particular "sauce", so I stir the beans into the pan instead.

Vomitastic

Herbs (oregano, thyme, basil) are stirred into the mix along with some brown sugar and the aforementioned chutney, then the whole lot is slopped into a dish and topped with a mixture of grated cheddar, parsley and breadcrumbs.

And that's your lot, more or less - it goes into the oven for 35 minutes and comes out looking like this:

...which is about as "stylish" as this particular food stylist is going to manage on this occasion.

The eating: Inspired by vague childhood memories (and possibly also by the "leek" casserole in Open Field), I decide we need to add some meat to proceedings, so I haphazardly grill some frankfurters as an accompaniment of sorts. They look a bit sad alongside the served-up casserole, which predictably takes on the appearance of pigswill, but so be it.

Wurst. Styling. Ever.

The main thing is it tastes good. And it does - really good, actually. It's nothing out of the ordinary, but the filling manages to feel quite decadent and creamy even though it doesn't contain any cream, while the crunch of the topping and the wholemeal herbiness of the contents gives it a rustic appeal that - now that I think about it - really ought to be tailor-made for a Nottinghamshire WI group.

That's not one of the more obvious compliments I've ever paid a recipe, but let's roll with it.

So, yep. Not a sophisticated meal by any stretch of the imagination, but a hearty, filling and dead simple one that anyone could make (why isn't this gracing the pages of How To Boil An Egg, really?). If your kids are of or approaching university age, you could do far worse than pack them off to pastures new with this recipe in their arsenal. They might even get round to making it one day. Then again...

One-word verdict: Substantial.

Week 47: Sichuan Orange Beef

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

The recipe: p. 42, "Sichuan Orange Beef"

Age and achievement are a funny thing. While I'm still reeling from my own 38th birthday, Wikipedia informs me that Ching-He Huang was born exactly nine days earlier than me in that fine autumn of 1978. And sure, she may have "become the face of Chinese cookery internationally through her TV shows, books, tableware range and involvement in many high-profile campaigns and causes" - but does she have a blog in which she uses a random number generator for the purposes of wilful culinary self-harm? I think not.

If my memory (OK, my search function) serves me right, we haven't delved into the pages of this book since way back in Week 6, where it delivered a punchy lunchtime treat. This time round we're in main course territory, and Ching introduces her recipe with evocative talk of "dried tangerine peel and the citrusy-numbing hot Sichuan peppercorns" and the delicious flavour they bring to Sichuan cooking. Sounds pretty promising - let's see how it equates to the plate, shall we?

The prep: I'm initially concerned, as the ingredient list suggests that a trip to the local Chinese supermarket might be required - and on the day in question, the local Chinese supermarket is still firmly on the wrong side of this:

Oops.

To my surprise, however, there's nothing that can't be obtained at Lewisham Sainsbury's, including shiitake mushrooms and the "optional" (ahahaha) jasmine rice - though it probably helps that I've still got Shaohsing rice wine in the cupboard from those Week 6 adventures.

Otherwise all I need to do is select my preferred interpretation of the recipe's "frying steak or fillet steak". Fillet seems a bit of an extravagance for a meal like this, plus the previous day's "dinner" was an endless supply of Virgin East Coast sandwiches, muffins, biscuits, muffins, crisps and muffins, so something more substantial seems advisable. As such - and since, dear reader, I like big butts and I cannot lie - I settle on a couple of rump steaks, thin enough to absorb the flavours and allow for quick cooking but thick enough to satisfy.

The making: Being a BBC tie-in, the recipe is available right here, although there are slight differences in terms of both ingredients (white pepper here, black pepper in the book) and method. Since the Random Kitchen is all about my underused cookbooks, I'm sticking with what it says on the printed page, natch.

I start by mixing the rice wine with some light soy sauce, runny honey, orange juice (I'm assuming smooth not bitty) and freshly ground pepper, before adding the beef and leaving it to marinate for what ends up being about 20 minutes.

An absorbing sight

In the meantime, I cook the jasmine rice, dish it up and leave it in the oven on a plate-warming temperature - the recipe will later require me to cover the cooked steaks to keep them warm while finishing off the other ingredients, but I know from bitter experience that cold plates and hot steaks are a disappointing combination, so this seems a more promising approach. (Plus the rice is already sticky by definition, so a few minutes at 100-ish degrees will hardly change much.)

That done, a frying pan is heated until highly hot. I add oil followed by my substantial rump, which I've halved for ease of handling. The meat is cooked as preferred - a couple of minutes on either side in this case, for a medium-rare finish that'll be nicely medium by the time it's been kept warm for a bit.

#gaysteak #instarump #speedomeat

The remaining marinade is added for the last few seconds, bubbling up before reducing down, then I plate up the beef with the rice and pop it back into the warm oven.

The final stage is to cook the shiitake mushrooms in the same pan, so that they soak up all the remaining juices from the marinade. Once the mushrooms are softened, I throw in the "garnish" for a couple of seconds too, since I think it could benefit from absorbing some of the same flavours. The garnish in question is a peeled and segmented orange - the photo in the book suggests that the segments themselves should also be peeled, which I file firmly under "life's too short" - and a sliced spring onion (optional, but duh).

This is then assembled along with the steak and rice to produce a dish that looks uncannily like a chunk of beef smothered by various Asian and not-so-Asian toppings.

Colourful though

The eating: Broadly positive noises all round, though Sam is happier than I am. The impact of the honey/orange marinade is a bit sickly for my taste, failing to really cut through the flavour of the meat, but we're agreed that the mushrooms and spring onions work nicely (and that the orange segments are, well, a bit odd). For the most part, though, the dish seems to work mainly because it's a decent cut of meat cooked just right, and not because of anything Ching's recipe has added to proceedings.

This is when I realise what's missing. The intro to the recipe waxes lyrical about the tang of orange peel and the spice of peppercorns, so why aren't they used here? Anything along those lines - heck, even just some garlic or chilli - would offset the sweetness and give the dish a far more satisfactory kick. I'm not asking for it to be spicy per se, merely something other than only sweet. As it stands, though, it's just a fairly bland and uneventful steak and rice dish with some nice mushrooms on top.

Which is fine in itself - and it's a quick and easy dinner that certainly suits the "Made Easy" claim of the book's title - but I was expecting something a little more interesting after Week 6's taste explosion. I'd say "maybe next time", but time is something this project is rapidly running out of...

One-word verdict: Perfunctory.