Lockdown Edition Week 4: White Onion Soup with White Bread Rolls

The books: A Soup For Every Day (The New Covent Garden Food Co.) and Masterclass (James Martin)

The recipes: p96 of the former, "White Onion Soup"; p186 of the latter, "Basic White Bread"

An intervention takes place almost immediately this week. Not because there's a problem with the randomly chosen recipe - an onion soup sounds nice enough, even if there's something faintly offputting about the word "white" here - but because it's likely to be a bit, well, straightforward. I'm fine with conjuring up paragraph after paragraph about nothing much, but some content doesn't hurt, so a decision is made to go Full Lockdown and make some bread to accompany the soup.

Although it could be seen as an omen that the weekend omnibus of Come Dine With Me mocks me even as I'm putting the ingredients together.

Despite the lockdown, there are no sourdough starters being tended in this house - and indeed there's no flour other than plain white, so as much as I'd like to do something with wholemeal or (especially) rye, that'll have to wait for another time. Now you'd think it'd be easy enough to track down a recipe for a basic white loaf in one of my recipe books, but going through them at random - always on-brand, here - firstly throws up a bunch of sweet Swedish breads with cardamom or saffron involved, which, fine, but not today. Next book, and there's a couple of promising enough breads in there, but they all require a bread maker. One of them even requires the reader to look up the instructions for their bread maker and follow them. That's, um, not a recipe...?

Anyway, we eventually track down a white bread recipe in the pages of James Martin's Masterclass - which, while intended for a loaf, should make perfectly decent buns for dunking purposes. James is somewhat cagey about how easy this will be, concluding: "The best advice I can give you is to lock the door, turn on some music and spend a day practising." That approach might work for teenage boys on lockdown, but I've got a soup to make here, so I'm just going to get on with it and see how it all pans out. How hard can it be?

The prep: Like I say, for the bread I'm working with what flour I already have in the house. This is probably for the best since Lewisham Asda only has white flour in stock anyway - and no own-brand stuff, only Be-Ro, which I swear I haven't seen since the era of this cookbook. I've got some dried yeast in the cupboard already and it's only slightly past its best-before date, so that's fine. Can't be too choosy when there's a lockdown on. Otherwise we're grand on the bread front.

Onions are no problem either - we get a weekly veg box delivered, of course we have too many onions - so all I really need to buy in is some single cream (to deliver the titular whiteness), some fresh parsley, and some white wine. I don't even dare suggest using some of Sam's weekly sauv blanc ration for a purpose as frivolous as cooking, so I grab a Diane Abbott portable special instead, and we're ready to go.

Zylindrisch. Praktisch. Gut.

The making: Between the proofing and the baking, the bread is going to need about two hours, so I start with that. Flour, dried yeast, salt, olive oil and warm water are mixed into a soft dough and kneaded for 10 minutes "until smooth and elastic", then left for an hour to rise and double in size. I then shape the dough into the smaller buns I'm going to be baking (for less long than the loaf recipe says, obviously), and they get another 30 minutes on a baking tray to rise a bit more. They also demand a dusting of flour before they go in the oven, which seems a bit superfluous to me, but who am I to argue with a Masterclass?

(Hey, I never said they were going to be geometrically sound. They're only dunkers.)

Meanwhile... well, shit. It's only now that I notice the "1 hour 40" preparation time on the soup. Seriously? For some onions floating in water? Gah. Well, OK. This is entirely my fault for not reading things properly before I started, and the bread will probably survive a slightly longer proofing than it needs, so best get the paring knife out and whip up some oniony tears before any real ones form.

I begin by finely slicing three medium onions and adding them to a pan along with some butter, some olive oil, and "one" clove of garlic.

The onions are cooked over a low heat for 30 minutes with the lid on, then for another 30 minutes with the lid off. The idea is to sweat and steam them first then gradually cook off the moisture so that the onions are "greatly reduced, but still very pale". I'm not convinced about the "very pale" part, but they're certainly reduced and nicely gloopy by this stage.

The white wine is added to this onion base - I give it a quick go on a high heat to burn off some of the booziness straight away - and some chicken stock follows, because it couldn't be a vegetarian onion soup, could it? A further half-hour of simmering later, and we're finally ready for the last stages. These involve removing half of the soup, blending it until smooth then returning it to the pan - an instruction I interpret as "use a hand blender in the pan, just for half as long as you would normally" - then adding the single cream, a spoonful of sugar and a fistful of chopped parsley, and heating it all through until it's ready to serve.

Which it is, along with the bread rolls that I've finally got round to baking in the meantime. They look nice enough, albeit misshapen (and that flour on top is still pointless).

Let's call them "rustic"

The eating: The trouble with recipes that call for slow cooking, the thing I really, really hate about slow cooking... is that it works.

The soup is seriously good, and as much as my lazy soul would like it to be the case, you can't replicate that sheer depth of flavour by giving the onions a quick five minutes on a high heat. Although the addition of wine and cream doesn't exactly hurt on the flavour front.

Still impossible to photograph appetisingly though.

The whiteness of the soup is more of a creamy golden yellow by the time everything's been added, which is probably for the best, because it was starting to feel like a MAGA rally around here. The bread rolls, however, are undeniably white and - as I feared when I had to let them prove for longer than I'd have liked - a bit stodgy and unsatisfactory. (Apparently not everyone can do homemade bread after all.) Still, with butter added while still warm, they're more than good enough for mopping up what little of the soup is left in the bottom of our bowls. I just wouldn't necessarily serve them up to anyone I was trying to impress.

So what have we learned? Mainly "when life gives you something simple, don't make matters difficult by overcomplicating things, fucko". Oh, and read the recipe first. Nice soup though.

Two-word verdict: Deep, man.

Lockdown Edition Week 3: Spinach and Mushroom Salad

The book: The Silver Spoon

The recipe: p585, "Spinach and Mushroom Salad"

Ah, The Silver Spoon. The queen of Italian cookbooks. Nearly 1,500 pages long and practically overflowing with classic Italian cuisine - hearty pasta, meat and fish dishes, decadent cheesy risottos, giant vol-au-vents, live spiny lobsters, it's all in there.

So of course the random number generator gives us a fricking spinach and mushroom salad.

Now, be honest, you've been waiting for this. Outright kitchen disasters are one thing, but part of the appeal of the original Random Kitchen lay in me having to dredge up a thousand words about something so mundane it barely even qualified as a recipe. If that's your particular strand of fandom, then this is your lucky week.

In fairness, I am at least a bit intrigued by this "recipe", since spinach and mushroom don't strike me as an obvious combination to be eaten raw. Sautéed and stirred through a big pan of penne, absolutely, but I'm not imagining them having the nicest texture in the world in salad form. So without further ado, let's find out!

The prep: There really isn't much ado involved at all this week, as it happens - the ingredient list stretches to a whole six lines, two of which are olive oil and seasoning.

I am at least required to make a minor decision on the spinach front. This particular recipe simply calls for 300 grams of "spinach", but an adjacent recipe for a spinach and scallop salad (that sounds like real food why can't we have that instead please) specifies "young spinach leaves, tough stalks removed". Properly big, farmer's-market spinach leaves do feel like they would be too chunky for a simple salad, so a bag of Asda's finest* organic baby spinach gets the nod. Other than that, I pick up a lemon, some pine nuts and the titular mushrooms, and that's that.

And yes, I really do go through a whole bag of spinach leaves - baby spinach leaves, no less - and remove (most of) the more prominent stalks. This is lockdown, folks, you have to take your entertainment wherever you can get it. At least now I understand why the recipe claims a preparation time of 25 minutes for a mere salad. It's not lying.

The making: The mushrooms are thinly sliced, placed in a salad bowl and sprinkled with some of the juice from the lemon. Right from the moment I read the recipe, I've been concerned about the relative quantities involved - there's a lot of spinach and not much of anything else - and nothing I'm seeing so far indicates that this interpretation is wrong...

Lemony mushroom base

Anyway, a buttload of spinach and a handful of pine nuts are added to the lemony mushrooms, then I whizz together the rest of the lemon juice with a healthy slosh of olive oil and some salt and pepper. This dressing is then used to - you guessed it - dress the salad.

A little like with last week's breadcrumbs that refused to stick to some basil leaves because that's how the laws of physics work, diligently tossing this salad isn't going to make it look any less like isolated mushroom slices marooned in a sea of spinach, so here you go, we're done:

Yeah.

The eating: In fairness, this obviously isn't meant as anything more than a side salad to a main meal, or even one of lots of dishes on a table full of goodies, so it would be unfair to expect it to be particularly fascinating.

We do at least endeavour to treat it as a (slightly sad-looking) lunch in its own right, though:

And hey - it's actually quite nice! The acidity of the lemon juice softens the mushrooms a bit without making them slippery and unpleasant, and the spinach leaves, while proportionally dominant, allow you to get a proper forkful of food each time you go in. The flavours are all good, and there's a chewiness and volume to it all that I wasn't really expecting from the kind of ingredients you'd normally use as an excuse to classify a vat of pasta and parmesan as a "healthy dinner".

Nevertheless, if this is going to be remotely substantial enough to keep us going until teatime (well, until our mid-afternoon chocolate break), there's only one thing for it - it's time to call in the reinforcements...

I've never been so happy to see you guys

These duly added, what results is a decently substantial and flavourful lunch that we're both perfectly happy with. It's a cheat, of course - almost everything in life is improved by the addition of cheese, and we're meant to be judging the actual recipe here. But still, it's good to know that the (to me) seemingly unlikely combination of spinach and mushrooms works really nicely as the base for a salad with relatively little preparation involved. (Other than all that stalk removal, of course - but you could get away without that if you're not too fussed about how it looks.)

Plus you can do what The Silver Spoon does - supplement the dish with its Italian name, namely insalata di spinaci e funghi, and kid yourself into thinking you're getting something far more exotic. Just don't look elsewhere on the double-page spread that houses this particular recipe, or you might shed a quiet tear at the cruelty of the random gods.

Two-word verdict: Surprisingly okay.

Lockdown Edition Week 2: Crunch Lunch Cod and Mash

The book: Ainsley Harriott's Meals In Minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two-word verdict: Decidedly un-shit.

Lockdown Edition Week 1: Ice Cream Cake

The book: Nigella Express

The recipe: p222, "Ice Cream Cake"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Floured bap, anyone?

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

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

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

Looks worryingly like it ought to

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

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

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

One sauce, one cement

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

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

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

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

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

Two-word verdict: Deceptively excessive.

Random Kitchen: Lockdown Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meringue Swans

The book: Everyday Novelli (Jean-Christophe Novelli)

The recipe: p74, "Swan Meringues"

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

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

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

We'll see about that.

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

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

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

This could be a long day.

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

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

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

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

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

Piping hot

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

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

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

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

Fuck's sake.

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

And some day you will bake like I bake

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

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

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

Predictably, this is where it all goes wrong.

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

Hello sailor

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

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

Oh good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ladies and gentlemen, a meringue swan.

Ta-fucking-dah

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

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

It hurts so greatly

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

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

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

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

Swan graveyard

So that's just terrific, you know?

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

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

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

And then, well, you know the rest.

 

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

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

I hope you're all happy now.

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

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

One-word verdict:

A year of nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People seem to enjoy seeing me angry, basically.

Don't get me started...

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

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

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

Ominous

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

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

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

Most overused GIF

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

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

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

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

Amber knows

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

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

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

I still have nightmares, swear down.

*sigh*

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

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

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

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

Huh.

I think Wilfred says it best:

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

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

*clears throat*

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

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

*bows deeply*

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

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

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

Hm. "Cheese" aside, not really.

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

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

Erm

One-word verdict: Exhausted.