Lockdown Edition Week 6: Hot Smoked Salmon Salad with Gravlax Dressing

The book: The Little Swedish Kitchen (Rachel Khoo)

The recipe: p92, "Hot Smoked Salmon Salad with Gravlax Dressing"

Being the product of a half-British, half-Swedish family, the wave of interest in all things Scandinavian over the past decade has left me curiously conflicted. The TV-propagated idea of the European north as a dark, moody, crime-ridden place scarcely tallies with my summer memories of lazy lakeside days, and "lifestyle choices" like hygge and lagom really are just words, first and foremost. So yes, it's wonderful that all those foods I grew up with, from Kalles Kaviar to filmjölk, can now be obtained simply by visiting the wonderful Scandinavian Kitchen in person or online - but when the mighty meatball is ubiquitous and everyone seems to be knocking out cinnamon buns left, right and centre, the selfish little kid in me feels a bit miffed that, well, it's all a bit less special than it used to be.

Not that I wasn't pleased to be gifted The Little Swedish Kitchen, you understand - it looks like it's got some lovely stuff in it - but reading Khoo's introductory text immediately got my hackles up in quite a similar way. The obligatory mentions of Pippi Longstocking and Abba, midsummer and fika, and several disclaimers ("I did not set out to write a definitive guide to Swedish food", "I'm no expert in Swedish cooking") didn't exactly bode well - and my prejudices threatened to be confirmed when I checked out one of the recipes, for the smörgåsbord staple mysteriously known as Jansson's Temptation, only to find that Khoo's version contains carrots (!) and beetroot (!!).

Now, I'm not saying this "I'll do things my way, not the traditional way" attitude is definitely going to be relevant to this week's blog, but let's say there's a hint of foreshadowing here.

Nevertheless, I can't deny that letting the book just fall open always reveals something I'd like to make, whether in an "improved" version or by digging out an original Swedish recipe, so I'm glad random.org has sent me in this direction. I'll just have to hold my tongue as I navigate my way around yet more patronising interludes about just amazing Swedish bakery culture is (get a grip, woman, it's literally coffee and cake).

The prep: Now, here's a thing. Sometimes you see the name of a recipe and only later realise you're parsing it wrong. So when the finger of fate lands on page 92, I immediately think "oh, warm salmon in a salad sounds interesting!" But no: this is not a salad with "hot | smoked salmon", it is a salad with "hot smoked | salmon". There's a reason the grammar gods invented the hyphen; it would have saved me a misunderstanding here, for a start, and I'll be using it throughout the rest of the blog by means of protest.

Hot-smoked salmon is, as the name (now) suggests, salmon that's been smoked at a higher temperature than normal, giving it a more cooked feel and making it a bit chonkier and flakier, rather than the kind of thing you serve as thin slices. Obviously, getting hold of something truly authentic during lockdown is going to be an issue - Scandinavian Kitchen currently have a backlog of at least two weeks, for a start, and I'm not sufficiently committed to the cause to wait - but the recipe suggests I could replace it with "regular smoked salmon, smoked trout or even cold roast chicken" (ah, chicken, my favourite fish) so I reckon I'll be OK with what the Lewisham Asda can give me on the that front.

I'm actually a little sceptical as to whether the aforementioned supermarket will have fresh dill in stock, but my scepticism proves to be misplaced as there's plenty to go round. Which is good, because dill is fairly central to the Swedish food experience. (I mean, savoury-wise, at least. They don't put it in the prinsesstårta. Although Rachel Khoo might.)

The making: Everything else being fairly standard stuff, it's time to begin! Which I do by first preparing the salad. This involves shredding a cos lettuce - although the accompanying photo suggests more of a "torn leaves" approach, so I split the difference with an approach I call the Chunky Shred (also the name of my next ska-punk band). Eight radishes are thinly sliced and added to the mix, as is a carrot which I do my best to peel into attractive ribbons, or at least attractive bits of what might once have been ribbons.

So far so colourful

Next up, it's time for the "gravlax dressing", and this is where the alarm bells start ringing. I'm asked to mix together two heaped tablespoons of mayonnaise, the zest and juice of a lemon, a healthy quantity of chopped dill, a pinch of salt - and two tablespoons (again, heaped) of grainy mustard.

Bear with me here, because I swear I'm not just hating on Rachel Khoo for the sake of it. But have a quick look at a Google image search to see exactly the kind of thing we're meant to be replicating here. Do you see any mustard grains? I do not see any mustard grains. This is not meant to be made with grainy mustard. And I certainly don't see anything that looks like this:

While not unattractive, this "dressing" turns out to be at least two things: too grainy and too thick. Tasting it also suggests a third issue, namely that it's way too strong to be put anywhere near a light summery salad.

Nevertheless, the recipe is the recipe, so I continue by spreading a tablespoon of the dressing on each plate:

This is a nice way of making sure the flavour is distributed throughout the dish, actually, plus it's fun to do. Score!

I then arrange the salad on top before flaking the smoked salmon over the whole thing, a little haphazardly (just for a change).

That would seem enough, but - joy of joys - I am also to "drizzle over" the rest of the dressing. There's nothing about the consistency of this dressing that would allow it to be drizzled (and even the photo next to the recipe suggests more of a "multiple dollops" approach), but I do my best within the means available to me - this blog has never been about attractive food presentation, after all - and our cold-but-hot-smoked salmon salad is ready to go!

The eating: Let's cut to the chase here. The mustard and lemon content of the dressing makes it absolutely overpowering, and it wrecks the whole thing. Used sparingly alongside some good forkfuls of chunky salmon, it could work quite well - and I'm certainly not averse to strong taste contrasts in general - but when the bulk of this dish is some rather delicate salad vegetables (and it's not like salmon is an especially dominant flavour either), this is basically like forcing horseradish up your nose while chewing on something crunchy. None of the other flavours come through at all - not even the dill, and as you can see from the smeared plate above, there was plenty of dill in there.

It's weird, it's wrong and, worst of all, it's so easily avoidable. These are simple ingredients and they shouldn't go this badly awry, but while the smear of dressing on the plate alone might have been survivable, there's no way back from the extra dollops on top. We grudgingly make our way through about two-thirds of what's before us before picking out the salmon and giving up on the rest

The leftovers, dressing included, get stirred into a much bigger bowl of salad I've already got on the go in the fridge. Duly diluted, the mustard, lemon and mayo are far less offensive to the senses and actually make for quite a nice combo. But that's not really the point. The point is there's already a perfectly good way of making a Swedish-style dressing for salmon that's milder but still punchy, and messing with it only ends up here: in a waste of everyone's time.

Still, I said that dipping into this book has given me inspiration to try out new things, and regardless of this disappointing experience, I would quite like to attempt this again some time only with better salmon - and, obviously, actual gravlaxsås. Ideally made by people who know what they're doing.

Two-word verdict: Woefully misguided.

Lockdown Edition Week 5: Smoked Haddock Kedgeree

The book: Deeply Delicious (WeightWatchers) 

The recipe: p12, "Smoked Haddock Kedgeree"

Ah, my WeightWatchers cookbook. You can take your jokes about lockdown weight gain and shove them, because anything that gets us through this weird time is frankly to be commended, even if that thing is several metric tons of Cadbury's Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy (try saying that with a mouthful of Cadbury's Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy).

Anyway, this book was underused before the original Random Kitchen series and remained underused even then, cropping up just the once as part of a near-endless run of pies and pastry. I'm pleased it's come up so soon this time - and random.org has dictated that we're in the "Start The Day" chapter, which should give us something a bit different to work with.

Except it doesn't really, because in this crazy world of ours, the category of "breakfast dishes" is deemed to include kedgeree. You can thank those enterprising Victorians, whose desire for cultural appropriation extended to taking the staple Indian khichdi and bastardising it into... a weird fish and egg concoction, apparently. (Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.) Still, I can't entirely blame the Victorians here - the opposite page of Deeply Delicious offers up a bacon and mushroom risotto, which seems... even less breakfasty? Not actually breakfasty in the slightest?

Ah well, never mind. I could have been making banana muffins, I could have been preparing what the book optimistically describes as a "big brunch" (essentially some potato and beetroot with a slice of cooked ham - be still, my beating heart), but instead we're diving into the cuisine of the Raj, kind of. Only in a healthy and - because recipe book titles never lie - "deeply delicious" form.

I decide we're going to have it for lunch, of course. Partly because that seems more sensible and partly because I'm hardly going to spend an hour in the kitchen first thing in the morning when my belly is calling out for cornflakes.

The prep: Obviously the first thing I need to buy is the titular smoked haddock. Constrained by Asda's pack sizes, I get a bit less than the recipe wants, but then this is supposed to feed four people (albeit four calorie-counting people) so scaling things back probably isn't the worst idea. Basmati rice is something I do have in the house even in lockdown shortage mode, and there are eggs in the fridge that need using up soon-ish, so it's just a question of buying some parsley, a tub of fromage frais (this feels a bit retro in a way I can't quite put my finger on?), and some saffron.

I'm initially a little sceptical as to whether the local Asda will stretch to the latter, and it feels like a bit of an indulgence considering the recipe only calls for a pinch - but I find what I need, so I make a mental note to justify the purchase by knocking out some Swedish saffron buns just as soon as I can get my hands on more flour.

Introducing the band

The making: Spoiler alert: This recipe involves more faff than is strictly necessary. For example, I start by placing the haddock fillets skin side up into a pan of milk with some bay leaves and peppercorns. The milk is brought to the boil then left to cool, after which the fish is soft enough to be easily flaked. Which is fine, but all this really does is make it lose some of its lovely yellow smoked colour - no notable flavour is imparted. Could've just skinned it and chopped it up really.

Anyway, next up I'm required to coat a frying pan or wok with that WeightWatchers staple, low-fat cooking spray. (In fairness, I'm a big user of it too. Mostly to rescue roasted vegetables that are drying up and sticking to the tin, but still.) I also appreciate the "wok" option here, as my wok - a TK Maxx random find, like most things in our kitchen that aren't from IKEA - is a German take on the classic oriental design that is easily as thick as a frying pan. (What was that I was saying about cultural appropriation?) This misses the point of a wok somewhat, but makes for an ideal implement for today's task. Swings and roundabouts.

Some onions get slowly fried in said wok/pan hybrid, then the rice, the saffron (having been soaked in a little bit of boiling water for a couple of minutes) and a tablespoon of garam masala are added. I stir to mix, then add 700ml of "chicken or vegetable stock" - I go with a mixture of both - and bring it all to the boil.

You can probably imagine how appetising this looks, can't you?

Deeply Delicious

And things only get better when I realise the recipe wants me to strain the milk I used to poach the fish in, then add it to the wok. Which:

Please sir, I want some more gruel

Yeah. Now I understand why the recipe calls for a large bunch of parsley - anything to detract from the grim grey-brownness of what's emerging here. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to judge a recipe before the main ingredients have even been added, so I continue.

Continuing means adding the fish and parsley "after about 15-20 minutes, when the rice is just cooked and most of the liquid absorbed". Even after 20 minutes, there are no real signs of full-on absorption here. It might have helped to rinse the rice first (Madhur would be fuming), but the recipe didn't call for that. Anyway, in go the stars of the show:

...and actually, other than being a bit on the soggy side, that isn't looking too terrible, not least because the saffron has finally given the dish some much-needed yellow colour by this stage (again, if I hadn't poached the fish...).

So of course now is when the recipe tells me to add 200g of fromage frais. Because what this needs right now is more liquid. "Very low fat fromage frais", no less, so it's going to be even sloppier than its full-fat cousin. Still, the cookbook never lies, so I proceed with the inevitable wok-based disaster zone:

Yep, that looks every bit as elegant as I expected from the instruction. Which is terrific, because that is also the dish finished and ready to serve. Hurrah!

All I need to do now is prepare a garnish by quartering some hard-boiled eggs and wedging some lemons (yes, I'm using "wedge" as a verb, what of it?), and then it's time to find some way of dolloping this up that doesn't make an actual "thwulp" sound when it hits the plate.

The eating: I'm doing the recipe a disservice there, actually. By the time I've plated up, the rice has sucked up even more of the liquid and we're at a point where you can actually make out the individual grains again. Not that this allows me to present the dish with any degree of style - and how exactly does one "garnish" a pile of rice slop anyway? - but still, it's recognisably something you might want to attack with a fork without a sense of actual concern.

The Korean flag, kedgeree-style

The memory of the grim onion water from earlier in the process is firmly banished, let's say that much for it. And the eating... the eating is pretty good. The texture is still a bit clarty, as we say where I'm from, but there's just about enough flavour in there to satisfy, even if "deeply delicious" remains a wild claim.

It's taken a bit too much fuss to reach this point, and there's still a lot more that could have been done with the spicing and seasoning - watching your weight is no reason to make things actively boring - but the flavours are decent and it's a reasonable meal, albeit one that I have no particular desire to repeat. And certainly not for breakfast, for heaven's sake. The Victorians may have achieved a lot, but I wouldn't trust them in the kitchen.

Two-word verdict: Deeply acceptable.

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...