March 2021: Prawn Balchao; Korv Stroganoff; Cheats' Eton Mess

◘ THE STARTER ◘

The book: Indian Food Made Easy (Anjum Anand)

The recipe: p80, "Prawn Balchao"

We begin this month with what Anjum Anand describes as "an accompaniment rather than a main dish", making it something I'm happy to co-opt as a starter for Random Menu purposes. There's no photo accompanying the dish, but it seems to be a dry curry that ought to suit being served like a bhuna on a puffed-up puri - a reliable "feels a bit 80s but still dead tasty" Indian restaurant choice as far as I'm concerned.

Prawn Balchao is a Goan dish, so I'm not surprised to learn from Wikipedia that we're missing a diacritic and it should really be the more Portuguese "Balchão". Wiki goes on to explain that this is as much a pickle as it is a curry in its own right, and indeed Anjum herself describes it as "how those living on the southern coast take advantage of the fresh, seasonal and cheap prawns that come their way before the monsoons set in and their supply run dry". As you're probably starting to gather, there's a lot of context for this recipe - so much so that the blurb is longer than the method. Which at least suggests it'll be simple enough to make!

I start by making a paste out of some ginger, garlic, dried mild red chillies (a misreading means I'm using fresh ones, but it doesn't really matter) and a whole load of spices - cloves, peppercorns, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, turmeric - plus a splash or two of water.

Appetising start

Next, I heat some vegetable oil in a saucepan before frying a chopped onion until golden brown. Meanwhile, I prepare two medium tomatoes and a green chilli...

Not like that, you child

...and add them to the onion, frying for 10-12 minutes "until the mixture becomes a deep burgundy colour".

Attempts to document this colour prove initially unfruitful.

This is the standard of photography you come here for

But eventually we get to something acceptable and, I guess, approaching burgundy in colour?

(For the eagle-eyed among you, yes, there is an extra chopped red chilli in there - I decided I'd been a bit stingy on the chilli front when making the paste, Anjum having given me some wiggle room in the shape of the phrase "depending on your tolerance".)

After this, the spice paste goes into the pan too and is fried for another five minutes "until the oil leaves the masala". I'm not sure this ever really happens (or indeed exactly what it means), but I give it five minutes anyway before adding some sugar, some salt... and several tablespoons of malt vinegar. So this is where the "tangy" part of the recipe comes in. It's certainly potent on the nose, and remains so even after the prawns are added and the whole thing is cooked for a couple more minutes until done.

Prawns in a pickle

Inevitably, it's not the most attractive dish - throwing in some coriander or curry leaves would have helped in that respect - but it looks and smells pretty promising to me. 

Despite what I said earlier about serving it with a bread as a starter, I actually end up using it as part of a curry main meal instead. (I realise this also breaches the Random Menu ethos somewhat. I'll be handing out refunds at our front gate; form a socially distanced queue.) This makes the visual presentation even less impressive - is there any elegant way of plating up curries and rice if you don't own a thali set? - but it does at least allow me to use the Prawn Balchao as an accompaniment and a pickle, just like the recipe suggested.

The height of style

And hoo boy, in that role it is good. Exactly as the recipe promised, in fact - spicy, sharp, and full of flavour. It probably would be all right on its own as I originally envisaged, but paired with a slightly milder main, rice and bread, it's an excellent team player and, frankly, the highlight of the plate. "The gravy is moist and clings to the prawns as an envelope of flavour", apparently. There's certainly plenty inside that envelope, anyway.

If I were making it as a curry in its own right, I'd probably use king prawns to make it feel a bit more substantial - and indeed a Google image search for Prawn Balchao suggests that I'm not the only person to feel that way. But "small" prawns are what's called for in the context of a pickle-slash-accompaniment, and this is spot on. I will definitely be making it again (by which I mean I'll forget all about it until I stumble across this blog post in three years' time and think "oh yeah, that").

One-word verdict: Niiiice.

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

The book: The Little Swedish Kitchen (Rachel Khoo)

The recipe: p122, "Korv Stroganoff" (Smoked Sausage Stroganoff)

We didn't get off to a great start with this book, and you'll be pleased to hear that Rachel Khoo's "changing perfectly good Swedish recipes for no reason" tendencies make themselves known right from the start here, too.

As she says in the introduction, this smoked sausage stroganoff is a Swedish comfort food classic - the kind of thing you'll encounter at home or in a workplace canteen, but hardly the stuff of high-end restaurants. As such, she seems to feel the need to put her own stamp on it by making a couple of basic tweaks to the recipe and serving the thing with pasta instead of the usual rice. 

Fine. Okay. I'll try to be open-minded and withhold my wrath (for now).

The sausage that's central to the dish is typically a classic Swedish falukorv. I haven't done a Scandinavian Kitchen order since the back end of the first lockdown, when the initial hoarding instinct slowly gave way to that need to find something to treat ourselves with even when we weren't actually allowed back on trains yet. (I mean, personally I consider stocking up on Bilar and Kalles Kaviar and Leksands Knäcke to be a very essential journey, but I suspect the law would view things differently.) 

So we're not going to be getting falukorv today, but having used it extensively over the years in one of those "even you should be able to manage this" dishes my mother armed me with when I left for university - a "Hungarian" sausage sauté that's probably nothing of the sort, it just has paprika in it - I can testify that the trusty Mattessons smoked pork sausage you get in every British supermarket is a pretty decent substitute and I'm happy to go with that here.

Other minor compromises I'm having to make: a medium-strength Polish mustard (actually not too far from its Swedish counterparts flavour-wise) instead of the Dijon called for in the recipe; and regular capers, which the recipe permits as an alternative to its preferred "eldercapers" (basically pickled elderberries, which: nope, not likely). Otherwise it's all mercifully standard stuff.

I begin by bringing a pot of salted water to the boil; it's later going to be used to cook some tagliatelle, though apparently pappardelle would work just as well too. (If I were already committing Swedish culinary sacrilege by using pasta instead of rice, I would reel it in when it comes to being picky about the pasta required, but there we go.)

Meanwhile, I take that pile of smoked sausage and dice it "very finely" before frying it with an chopped onion in plenty of butter. This is another of those deviations from the usual Korv Stroganoff approach - as with the Prawn Balchao, a Google image search clearly shows that fairly big chunks or strips of sausage are typically used. The dicing is fiddly and time-consuming - as an all too relevant point of reference, it takes about as long as a big pan of pasta water needs to come to the boil - but as the cooking process continues, I start to appreciate the benefits of doing it this way: more sausage surface area coming into contact with the butter and heat means more browning and more flavour.

Once I'm happy with how "golden" everything is, I add some tomato purée, mustard, paprika and single cream, stir it all together and let it simmer - on a very low heat, or else it'll burn - for a further five minutes while the pasta is cooking.

I'm terrified of absent-mindedly messing up the next step, which involves reserving a "small mugful" of the pasta water while draining it, but mercifully I remember and all is well. (A small mugful, incidentally, is described as "around 80ml". Bloody small mug, that.)

The pasta water is added to the sausage sauce - or more accurately, the pasta water is what makes it a sauce, as previously it was just some rapidly drying sausage in the bottom of a pan - then two tablespoons of capers are stirred through and it's time to plate up!

For once, my preferred method of just chucking everything together in a pan even if that makes it look horrible is what I'm actually supposed to do. Hurrah! So I toss the sauce through the pasta until it's all well coated, I sprinkle over a "handful" of chopped chives, and we're ready to eat.

As predictably unphotogenic as the results are, there's no denying the taste here. The tiny sausage pieces were a pain in the arse to prepare, but they give the whole thing a deeper flavour than it would have had otherwise, and using a mixture of cream and starchy water for the sauce means it's less cloyingly rich than it might have been.

Even the capers or "eldercapers" - neither of which feature in a standard Korv Stroganoff recipe - win me over, and I find myself grudgingly admitting that adding something tangy to cut through the more comforting flavours is a good call. 

 
The recipe says that this "serves 4", which usually means there'll be just about enough for the two of us - but no, we even end up with a reasonable quantity of leftovers for once.

And like a lot of good comfort food, it's possibly even better second time around as a quick microwave lunch. Giant bra!

One-word verdict: Hearty.

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: How To Cheat At Cooking (Delia Smith)

The recipe: p235, "Cheats' Eton Mess"

It would be far too easy to begin this section with a wry comment about how we're all living in an Eton Mess nowadays...

...so I won't.

Anyway, we remember "How To Cheat At Cooking", right? It's where Delia Smith makes shortcuts to classic recipes that aren't really much of a shortcut and that make the recipe a little bit less good than it ought to be in exchange for no real benefit.

Not that I'm foreshadowing anything here.

It may not be summer yet, but the clocks have gone forward and the weather is showing distinct signs of turning, so that's a good enough excuse for a berry simple dessert. And Eton Mess is always a favourite - although surely it's not so difficult to make that it requires significant corner-cutting? 

Delia's cheats this time: using Greek yoghurt instead of whipping up some cream (certainly a time-saver, definitely an indulgence downgrade), and using pre-made meringue nests instead of making your own. I'll be honest, Delia - I wouldn't do the meringues from scratch even if I was making a non-cheats' Eton Mess, and not just because I have history with the genre.

Anyway, this does make for a delightfully simple ingredient line-up:

And we begin by [checks notes]... oh. By taking half of those strawberries and puréeing them with a spoonful of icing sugar, apparently. That seems a little off-piste, but okay.

Yum

That done, we enter more familiar territory: The meringue nests are broken up "into small pieces" in a large mixing bowl, the rest of the (halved) strawberries are added and the yoghurt is folded through.

Next, Delia wants me to take most of the strawberry purée and carefully fold it through the mixture "to give a sort of marbled effect".

A little less "marbled", a little more "bloodied"

So yeah, that's not a massive success. No matter how carefully I fold it, the purée starts blending with the yoghurt (it's full-fat, I didn't make that mistake this time), and I'm quickly left with a bowl full of what I can only describe as off-pink mush.

In fact, I don't really see how you'd escape the sloppiness factor here - using yoghurt instead of whipped cream and adding a load of berry juice all but guarantees it. What's more confusing is the photo accompanying the recipe shows no signs of purée, marbled or otherwise, just some strawberries resting on a couple of meringue chunks and a glob of unsullied white yoghurt. So even the publisher's design team clearly thought this was a stupid idea.

Oh well, time to plate up and make the best of it, anyway.

Yep - it's already basically disintegrated into one big old bowlful of mush, not helped by the requirement that the rest of the purée be spooned (not even "drizzled") on top. Lovely.

It eats fairly well - it's sugar in various forms, how wrong can it be? - but the liquid content from the yoghurt and fruit makes it feel more like an Eton Mess-flavoured smoothie with lumps in it than a dessert-time treat.

Not especially authentic, not all that much of a time-saver, not Delia's finest moment.

One-word verdict: Bleh.

February 2021: Sweet and Sour Pork; Wild Mushroom and Hollandaise Pizza; Choc and Ginger Nut Slice

◘ THE STARTER ◘

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

The recipe: p24, "Sweet and Sour Pork"

Our opener for this month's Random Menu may sound like a main course, but let's talk quantities for a moment. "Serves 2", the recipe says, before describing a dish involving two pork loin steaks, a bit of sauce, and "salad leaves or steamed jasmine rice" to accompany. I'm sorry, but a thin cut of pork each and some salad leaves is a starter, not a main. At the very least, it's intended as part of a selection of dishes, and so I'm happy to interpret it as a first course for the purposes of February's Random Menu.

(That said, I double the quantities anyway. I'm permanently hungry these days, and the pork steaks come in a pack of four and I'm not going to use them for anything else. Any excuse really.)

The recipe and the photo on the opposite page make it clear that this is not "sweet and sour" in the conventional British sense, i.e. horrible gloopy red sauce out of a jar. It's still not especially photogenic, though, so you won't be getting many snaps of this one. Not that that usually stops me, I know.

Anyway, I start by whizzing some dry-roasted peanuts (a recipe-given alternative to roasted soya beans that I'm happy to grab with both hands), dried chillies, sea salt and white pepper in the food processor "until coarsely ground".

Probably went a smidge beyond coarse, but oh well

The pork steaks are pressed down into this mixture until thoroughly covered, then wok-fried on both sides until nicely browned.

Nice: check. Brown: check.

In the meantime, I've also used the food processor to zoom together some pineapple chunks, pineapple juice and lime juice. This is meant to result in a "paste", but it's definitely still more of a liquid. I'm going to thicken it down in the next stage, though, so no biggie.

I'm instructed to pour this sauce into the wok that I've just done the steaks in, reduce it down for a few minutes, then add light soy sauce, a dash of rice wine and/or ground white pepper "if required". I'm not sure how I'm supposed to judge what's required or not, so I add them all, because they're all flavours that I like.

At this point I'd like to stress that the recipe does not ask me to wipe the wok first, and so I assume the sauce is supposed to pick up all of the good oils and fats and slightly burny bits that have been left behind from the frying process. I soon realise this probably isn't the case, however, because the sauce in the photo accompanying the recipe is pineapple-yellow and mine is... not.

It wouldn't be The Random Kitchen without a photo of some brown gunk in a bowl

But here's the thing: poured inelegantly over the pork steaks to serve (you really don't need to see what that looks like), the end result is actually very flavourful. It's deep, it's spicy, it's nutty, there's a bit of pineapple sweetness poking through - all rather satisfying. To be honest, it tastes more like a modified satay sauce than anything else, and with the peanuts dominating the flavour of the pork coating, I think that would be the case even if I'd begun the sauce stage with a clean wok.

"This is my simple and healthy version of sweet and sour pork and will be unlike anything you have tasted in a Chinese restaurant," the blurb begins. Well, that's not inaccurate, since this is almost entirely unlike sweet and sour pork. But it is really nice and I can see myself making it again as part of a main meal, so that's not a bad start.

One-word verdict: Accidentalicious.

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

The book: Good Housekeeping New Step-By-Step Cookbook

The recipe: p340, "Wild Mushroom and Hollandaise Pizza"

In the same way as every bloke who thinks he's shit-hot in the kitchen has a chilli recipe with some kind of "special ingredient" that he's only too keen to bend your ear about at a friend's BBQ, there is a whole culture around home pizza-making whose appeal eludes me somewhat, I must admit. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's great satisfaction to be had in finding and perfecting the use of just the right pizza stone or even an entire pizza oven, but given the cost and effort that involves and the time it takes to get a pizza dough going in the first place, I'm always going to scratch the pizza itch by just giving Mamma Dough a call instead (yeah).

Still, even in my pizza-hipster-cynical state, I wouldn't particularly expect a Good Housekeeping cookbook to be the home of an authentically Italian creation, so I'm curious as to how this one will turn out - especially as it involves a slightly improbable topping too.

I have the ingredients for the topping laid out on the work surface thusly:

...when Sam walks into the room, eyes up the cubes on the plate and says "ooh, cheese!". "No," I say, "that's butter for the hollandaise sauce." "Where's the cheese?", he asks. "There is none," I say.

"," he replies.

It's true - this is a pizza with no tomato or white sauce base and no cheese on top. I figure you wouldn't bother putting this in a cookbook if it was as pointless as that makes it sound, though. Well, you'd hope, at least.

Either way, it begins with making a simple pizza dough. Flour, salt, yeast, olive oil and warm water are slowly persuaded to take shape, and while we don't own an oven with a proving drawer (owning a house first feels like more of a priority), we do have a heated clothes airer that means there's a nice warm corner of the kitchen I can use for the purpose. Between that and having the patience to knead it properly, my dough actually rises for once - and then some. Hurrah!

In the 45 minutes it's taken for that to happen, I've made the topping. "Wild mushrooms" were always going to be a bit of a stretch given we're still getting supermarket deliveries and restricting ourselves to minimal extra shops (bring on normality, eh?); the recipe talks about "chanterelles, trompettes-des-morts, oyster mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms" et al, but I have to make do with a couple of packs of shiitake and a handful of chestnuts to make up the numbers. Not exactly exotic, but it all ends up largely the same once it's been sliced and briefly sautéed in butter and garlic like it is here.

Hollandaise isn't something I've made before, and I didn't really know what went into it. Turns out it's basically just an egg yolk, that aforementioned pile of butter cubes, and some lemon zest and juice. This is slowly cooked and combined in a glass bowl over some simmering water and is supposed to have "the consistency of mayonnaise" by the time I'm done. It's somewhat thinner than that even after I add the chopped coriander required by this recipe - surely not canon? - but I figure it might thicken as it sits. (It does, a bit.)

Attractive

So, here's what I find a bit odd about this recipe. Once the dough is risen, I'm asked to roll it into a 25cm circle - as you'll see, we'll have to settle for "imperfect" on the shaping front - and then crimp up the edges.

The base is then baked "as is" for "about 20 minutes, or until golden brown and cooked". So, no topping added yet. Okay.

I check it after 13 minutes and it's already looking pretty golden (and feeling pretty rock solid).

Since it's going back in the oven again once the topping is added, I take the executive decision to skip to that stage right now, lest the crust need the hammer and chisel treatment at the end of it all.

This involves folding the mushrooms into the hollandaise, and then... pouring it on top. I guess that's why I had to crimp up the edges of the pizza base - it'd go everywhere if I hadn't.

Further baking follows, and even with the three-dimensional crust edge to prevent disasters, things get somewhat buttery. It's not quite swimming in the stuff by the time it's done, but there is definite greasy seepage.

Still, it looks more or less like a pizza, so that's something! Oh, this "serves 4", by the way. [pause for raucous laughter]

As expected, the base is pretty tough. I realise the blind baking phase is intended to stop the greasy sauce from making everything soggy, but a bit of sog (that's a word now) actually mightn't have hurt. The topping is quite nice; that's about as far as I'll go, but you can't stray too far with garlic and mushrooms and lemon and the like. There's obviously nothing remotely Italian about it but it's a pleasant enough eat, just nothing to write home about. (Enough to write a blog about though, amirite? #content #iscooking #hashtag)

The biggest issue, though, remains with the butter content of the hollandaise. Because it's leaked into the pizza base...

...and beyond...

...the crust is extremely oily. It actually reminds me of eating fried bread, of all things. And as welcome as that may be as an occasionally indulgent add to a breakfast plate, it's not really what I want from a pizza.

So, yeah. Not a failure, but not a massive success either. I think I could do a better job on this by approaching it differently next time: no blind baking, less butter in the sauce, and maybe some cheese on top to glue it all together. Though I suppose if I added any more caveats, I'd be making an entirely different recipe...

One-word verdict: Disjointed.

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: 101 Cheap Eats (BBC Good Food)

The recipe: p208, "Choc and Ginger Nut Slice"

After all that faff, a mercifully simple sweet treat to finish - essentially the kind of no-cook traybake they might teach you how to make on Blue Peter. Although I still manage to fuck it up.

As is so often the case, I begin by melting butter, plain chocolate and syrup in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. 

You know what that looks like, but here's a photo anyway!

 
Meanwhile, I take a packet of ginger biscuits and bash them into crumbs.

This flimsy bag does not survive the rolling pin assault...

...but the result is fine. Imperfect, but that doesn't matter.

The biscuit crumbs and some toasted and chopped hazelnuts are stirred through the melty chocolate mixture, then the whole thing is pressed into a sandwich tin.

Next, I melt the remaining chocolate.

Hang on.

There was meant to be remaining chocolate?

Honestly, Martin, read the fucking recipe. I was supposed to have used just 100g of the 185g of chocolate in the first stage. Instead, the body of my traybake is almost twice as chocolatey as it's meant to be, and I have to quickly melt a little bit more chocolate to basically serve as glue for the remaining hazlenuts.

Still, as long as it sets, "too much chocolate" is always better than "not enough chocolate", and so into the fridge it goes.

And indeed - after chilling it for 3-4 hours instead of the suggested 1 hour, just in case - the end result looks fairly acceptable!

The idea is to cut it into slices at this stage and serve it to 8 people, but since the events of the past year have rendered laughable the very idea of seeing 8 people, we just keep it in the fridge and work our way through it over the next few days.

It's undoubtedly rich - my fault, obvs - but the kick of some decent-quality ginger biscuits (I bought branded for once, admittedly only because I couldn't get own-brand in this week's online shop) swiftly cuts through the chocolate overload and the hazelnuts give it a bit of texture too.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is ridiculously simple and I can't claim it's any kind of radical departure from the kind of thing you all know how to make already. But after a "sweet and sour" recipe that was neither and a brutally inauthentic pizza, isn't it nice to end on something that does exactly what it says on/in the tin?

One-word verdict: Pleasing.

January 2021: Hot Apricot Flan

In case you missed it, you can read all about the starter and main course from the January menu here. In that post, I talk about how the third and final element of the meal merited separate attention. I stand by that assessment - and so we now turn to:

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: Everyday Novelli (Jean-Christophe Novelli)

The recipe: p119, "Hot Apricot Flan"

Yes, to no one's great surprise, it's a Novelli creation that demands a post of its own. So far, Everyday Novelli has delivered us liquidy, garlicky hummus, the prospect of porridge-fed mussels, a surprisingly good dinner that would have been significantly less good if I hadn't intervened and refused to use an entire litre of double cream in its preparation... oh, and there was something about swans too.

Accordingly, my hopes are not high when the random finger of fate lands on our friend Jean-Christophe again. Especially since the introductory paragraph to this "hot" dessert concludes with the instruction "Serve hot or cold". With this level of attention to detail, I can already sense it's going to be one of those days.

I'm going to start with a confession here: I skim-read the recipe, saw flour among the ingredients, and idly assumed this "flan" would be of the "sweet tart with a base and a rim" variety. Reader, it is not. In the absence of condensed milk or a preponderance of egg yolks, however, neither it is a pudding in the sense of a crème caramel/custard/birthday flan. Quite what it is supposed to be, I'm still not entirely sure even now I've made the thing, to be honest.

Anyway, we kick off with a bit of preparation: Canned apricot halves are drained, placed in a bowl, and left to macerate in a little kirsch for an hour. Or they would be if we had any kirsch in the house, but there's no obvious reason we would and I'm not sourcing a whole bottle of the stuff during a lockdown just so I can sprinkle a thimbleful over some apricots, so I use sugar and a splash of wine to approximate a similar softening effect.

Once that's done, I can prepare my flan tin. Novelli calls for a 22cm tin. The two circular dishes I own - a regular deep pie/quiche dish, and a loose-based metal tin - are both around 28cm in diameter, so either way the end result here is going to be a bit shallower than what J-C has in mind, but it should be easy enough to tweak the cooking time if necessary. Since I'm still working on the assumption that this will be a pie-like creation that might benefit from being turned out onto a plate once it's done, I opt for the metal tin.

This is greased with butter and left to chill in the fridge for five minutes. It then gets taken out, greased with more butter, then dusted with a mixture of caster sugar and cocoa powder before being returned to the fridge for a further 20 minutes.

Seems like a lot of effort, but okay

What's going into that lovingly prepared tin, anyway? Let's see. I mix together some demerara sugar, vanilla, a little softened butter, a pinch of salt, 100ml of honey and four eggs. I then sift in 250ml of flour and beat it all together until it has a batter-like consistency.

To me, that already feels like the kind of thing you could pour into a dish and bake until it's nice and set and wobbly. So I am beyond bemused when the next step requires me to add 600ml of milk and 400ml of double cream.

I'll say that again: a litre of liquid.

This is the exact moment at which I become aware that: (a) this is not going to be a pie; (b) this is going to be fucking terrible.

Under normal circumstances I'd assume the recipe to be correct - people do test and proofread these books, right? - but we have very recent evidence of a Novelli recipe that quite clearly involved way too much cream to be edible and no one appears to have picked up on the error, so there's every chance the quantities are off here, too. Should it be 60ml and/or 40ml? Maybe it should. The trouble is - unlike with a savoury meal, where I'm experienced enough to make an executive decision and do things differently - I'm not brilliant with desserts so I can't really improvise and know for sure that I'm still going to end up with something that's in keeping with the spirit of the recipe.

So instead I beat in a litre of milk and cream.

Great

This goes into the fridge to "rest" for 20 minutes. I have a faint hope that this might thicken the mixture somewhat, but of course it doesn't. I'm not sure even freezing it would do much to thicken it, frankly...

Next it's time for assembly before my "flan" goes into the oven for 15-20 minutes. (Incidentally, Novelli wanted me to preheat the oven before doing all of the above. I remain convinced that cookbook authors are in cahoots with power companies to drive up their profits.)

My suspicions about the accuracy of the quantities are further confirmed when it becomes evident that there is way too much liquid here to comfortably fit into my tin, even though it's 6cm wider than the one Novelli recommended. Not only that, but the recipe also calls for me to "spoon in" the filling. Mine doesn't require any kind of spooning; it can be poured. So, yep - definitely a bit sus.

Now, remember those apricots from earlier? They're in the recipe name, so it's about time for them to become relevant again. I grab the bowl in which they've been macerating and toss them in 30ml of honey before arranging them on top of the filling. Why the honey? Allow me to quote from the recipe: "This coats the fruit and helps to prevent it from sinking."

Bear that in mind as I share this next photo:

Have a close-up for good measure:

There's not much "arrangement" involved here, for fairly obvious reasons. As well as enveloping the apricots entirely, you'll note that the liquid nature of the filling means some attractive globs of coagulated cocoa powder have floated to the surface, so that's delightful too.

If the apricots had been sat nicely atop a thick batter at this stage, the next thing would have been to brush them with a little oil before putting the dish in the oven. Since they're barely visible and drowning a milky death, however, that feels like something of a moot point. I figure it's time to just shove this bin fire into the oven and see what happens.

And that's when I notice the filling starting to leak out of the tin.

Well that's just terrific

Now, again: If it wasn't already abundantly clear that this was going to go wrong...

You can't beat a bit of optimism even at this late stage, though, and I figure that maybe if I get it in the oven ASAP, it'll start to set around the edges before too much of the filling escapes.

That'll be a no, then. (Still, at least the fucking apricots are visible now...)

Cursing the name of Jean-Christophe Novelli loudly enough to be heard halfway to Hither Green, I decide there's nothing else for it. I quickly salvage whatever I can and unceremoniously decant it into that pie dish I mentioned earlier:

...and finally my "flan" can start baking in earnest.

By this point I have absolutely no idea what's going to come out the other side. It's clearly not going to be what the recipe thinks it's going to be, but that's been evident for a while now. Even with whole eggs and not just yolks involved, maybe it'll be something close to a giant baked custard after all? Or perhaps more of a soufflé... only with, erm, apricots in it? 

Whatever it is, the sheer volume of what I've created here means the "15-20 minutes" of oven time ends up being more like 35-40 before it's sufficiently set to safely come out again. As for the end result, here it is:

To be honest, I'm just delighted it's baked enough to resemble something it might be possible to slice up. And cutting it open does reveal some kind of structural integrity, even if it's not necessarily the most appealing of cross-sections.

Whether it's edible remains to be seen, of course.

"Allow to cool for 15-20 minutes", the recipe says - again, I would remind you that this is called "Hot Apricot Flan" - then serve "with scoops of vanilla ice cream".

Can do.

What to say about this month's dessert, then? Well, despite everything, it's not terrible. It's got cream and sugar and eggs in it, after all - how bad can it be? 

The problem is you can tell the proportions are all off: it's not sweet enough, what with the sugar having been diluted by so much dairy, and the consistency is more gloopy than springy, making it borderline unpleasant after a few spoonfuls. If anything, it's reminiscent of stodgy 1980s school dinners, and that cannot possibly be what's intended. Still, you can conceal a multitude of sins under a dollop of ice cream, and I have to report that we do end up eating the whole thing over several days. Just not necessarily with vast amounts of enthusiasm. As Sam puts it, "it's fine, but you wouldn't serve it to someone...".

Ultimately, I would be fascinated to know what is wrong with this recipe - specifically, exactly how much milk and cream should be involved - because there's clearly a decent idea in there somewhere, it's just been thoroughly bludgeoned by a lack of care and attention. Much like everything else I've tried from Everyday Novelli so far.

Sam's conclusion is that I should just give the book to a charity shop, considering how badly things go every time I dip into it. But I don't think I can. Firstly, I secretly quite enjoy these kitchen disasters and the sheer disdain I feel towards Jean-Christophe Novelli as a result. And secondly, I'm not sure I could sleep easily knowing that someone else was having to suffer like this...

One-word verdict: Fucksake.

January 2021: Oven-Roasted Tomato Tartlets and Mellow Meatballs

New year, new concept! And the introductory Random Menu for January throws up an interesting-looking combination right from the off: a veggie starter, a meaty main, and a dessert that... well, we'll come back to the dessert another time, actually. It deserves a post of its own.

So let's begin by turning our attention to the first two courses - starting, as well one might, with:

◘ THE STARTER ◘

The book: Deeply Delicious (Weight Watchers)

The recipe: p14, "Oven-Roasted Tomato Tartlets"

I usually have to go straight on the defensive where this Weight Watchers cookbook is concerned - by and large, it does a decent job of providing seriously calorie-counted versions of familiar dishes, albeit sometimes with so much of the joy removed that you find yourself thinking "why not just have the regular version but less often?".

In any case, the idea of roasted tomatoes encased in filo pastry feels like a suitably light first course in anyone's book - so let's see where the joy can be sucked out of this one, shall we?

The ingredients list is already suspiciously short: store-bought filo pastry, tomatoes, olive oil, basil leaves, and seasoning. (The basil is even down as "optional"! There's no such thing as optional basil where tomatoes are concerned, if you ask me. Besides, it's not like it adds any calories, so...)

I immediately encounter an issue with the tomatoes. Given the nature of the dish, that's... not a great start. Basically, the recipe calls for plum tomatoes, which I already know our Asda don't have in stock fresh. I think about using baby plum tomatoes, which they do have, but I suspect they won't have the desired chunkiness after they've been the oven, so I end up opting for the heftiest available vine tomatoes.

(It's worth noting that the recipe also calls for a whole kilogram (!) of tomatoes, an idea which I nix immediately. Two 300g packs looks like plenty to me.)

First up, then: The tomatoes are halved, arranged cut side up on a rack, sprinkled with salt, and slowly roasted for an hour at 140°.

If you're thinking this doesn't sound like enough to do much to them, well... you'd be right. While we're not looking for "sundried and shrivelled" here, the photo accompanying the recipe makes it clear that the toms should have crinkled skins and be nicely reduced in size by the end of this hour - and they most definitely are not. It would probably have helped if I'd been asked to brush the tomatoes with olive oil before they went in the oven, but that devilish extra tablespoon of oil might have tipped the recipe into "unhealthy" territory, and we couldn't possibly have that, could we?

So instead - since the oven is getting turned up a few notches for the pastry anyway - I up the temperature and make sure the tomatoes have a chance to do a bit more. (Apparently plum tomatoes are known for having a lower water content - would that also make them roast more quickly? Maybe it would. I don't really do food science. Ah well.)

Meanwhile, the pastry. That accompanying photo I mentioned also shows an illustrative tartlet: a filo pastry base containing about four tomato halves. My tartlets are going to look different, by which I mean they're going to be smaller. This is mainly because I don't own "eight individual tartlet tins" as per the recipe (does anyone?), so I'm cobbling together a workaround involving a 12-hole muffin/Yorkshire pudding tin.

I need eight 15g sheets of filo according to the recipe, and I need to halve them before brushing them with oil, reassembling them, and... well, anyway. This is all a bit of a moot point since my filo packet is a different weight, has a completely different number of sheets, and I'm not working with eight tartlet tins in the first place. So I improvise something that I feel closely approximates the spirit of the recipe: using 120 grams' worth of filo, I take two smaller pieces of pastry and stick them together with some oil, ease them into the holes of my muffin tin, and "scrunch up the edges with my fingers" as requested by the recipe.

Well, okay, there could have been more scrunching...

That'll do. The remaining oil - there isn't much left by now - is brushed over the edges of the filo, and the tin goes into the oven alongside the tomatoes for 15 minutes or so, until the pastry starts getting some colour about it...

(well, sort of. It's crispy, anyway, even if it might not look it)

 ...and it's assembly time!

Because my tomatoes were a decent size in the first place and haven't really shrunk much at all, there's even less chance of me wedging several of them into each filo nest than I initially anticipated. I was thinking I might at least get two in there, but nope: it's one tomato half per filo receptacle, and that's your lot. Ho hum.

Russian Roulette. One of them is actually a pepper! (Not really.)

Sprinkle on some "optional" basil, grind over some black pepper, and the end result is... reasonably pleasing on the eye, I suppose?

So. Taste-wise, this is exactly what you'd expect (assuming you've ever eaten tomatoes and basil and pastry before, anyway). Even with insufficient oven time, the tomatoes have actually picked up plenty of flavour from the Maldon salt and the roasting process, but the rest of the dish is a bit - that word I feared at the start - joyless. Still perfectly decent, you understand, but that's a fairly low bar to set.

As expected, it's the "healthy" shortcuts that are the Achilles heel here. Using minimal oil means the pastry just gets a bit brown rather than becoming golden and crispy, and the whole thing is crying out for a grating of parmesan or a couple of mozzarella pearls or just something to make it a bit more interesting.

But hey - it's a starter on a three-course menu, it's not necessarily meant to blow you away. And in that respect, it does its job well enough.

Out of curiosity, I put the excess tomatoes back into the oven and let them soak up all the residual heat as it cools. This...

 
...is closer to what I imagined (burny bits aside). They barely make it to the fridge before being eaten up.

One-word verdict: Austere.

 

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

The book: Nigella Express

The recipe: p369, "Mellow Meatballs"

I'm doing this one in the same post because - as the Nigella Express concept promises (and, for a change, lives up to) - it's a really straightforward dinner dish that doesn't involve too much preparation or complexity.

What it is, however, is a bit of a weird concept. Put it this way: What do you think of when you hear the phrase "Mellow Meatballs"? If your answer is "Swedish-Thai fusion cuisine", well, you're lying. And yet that's basically what we're dealing with - you can see the recipe for yourself here.

To be fair, Nigella talks in the blurb about buying "organic beef mini meatballs" from her supermarket, but at no point does the recipe itself specify exactly what type of meat or, indeed, what type of meatball to use (other than "mini"). It could just as easily be Italian-Thai fusion, is what I'm saying. But when your local Asda goes to the trouble of stocking vaguely authentic ready-made köttbullar, well, the only way they're going to keep stocking them is if I buy them...

"Swedish meatballs made in Sweden for a true taste
of Sweden" would have been even better

 
I'm actually going a bit less "express" than Nigella wants me to here, because I can't find a bag of pre-diced sweet potato and butternut squash as required by the recipe. There was a squash in this week's veg box, though, so buying a sweet potato and doing the peeling and dicing myself really isn't much of an inconvenience. 

Hey guys! Hey Gunter! Hey Hans!

 
Indeed, I have time to do it during the first stage of cooking, which involves heating the meatballs in a mixture of vegetable oil and Thai red curry paste:

Behold my oily balls

 
After sprinkling on some ginger and cinnamon, things quickly pick up pace. I add a tin of coconut milk, a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tin of chickpeas (drained), mix it all together a bit, then stir through the diced squash and sweet potato, a squeeze of honey and 500ml of stock. I then bring the whole thing to the boil so it can simmer for 20 minutes.

Now, if you're thinking that seems like a lot of liquid, well... you'd be right.

Glub

We've had this kind of issue with Nigella before, haven't we? Maybe she's secretly northern, and as soon as the cameras are off she mops up every meal with several slices of supermarket own-brand white bread. I do hope so.

Anyway, there is going to be something to offset all this liquid - "serve with rice" is the instruction, so while the meatball pot is bubbling away, I make a pan of bog-standard white rice to accompany.

Some coriander is chopped as a garnish (I'd have stirred it through instead, but the recipe is the recipe, even when the recipe is wrong), and that really is all there is to it - my Mellow Meatballs are ready to be nibbled.

And at least it does reduce down a bit.

OK, so. Even with plenty of rice as a sponge, there is definitely still too much liquid here. I think the tin of tomatoes is the tipping point - you could easily replace them with a squirt of tomato purée (and maybe a handful of cherry toms) and there'd be no tangible difference to the end result other than it being less of a swimming pool of food.

But... it's really nice! The silky texture of the meatballs paired with Thai flavours is definitely still a bit weird, don't get me wrong - and I'm not sure what's especially "mellow" about it, since it's decently hot even with all that liquid (perhaps I just used a paste with a decent kick to it, I don't know). But it's tasty, it's filling, and it's an interesting take on a curry-but-not-quite-curry dish that turns out to be a perfectly timed midwinter warmer for us to enjoy while easing ourselves into the new Eurovision season.

The first Norwegian semi-final, since you didn't ask

Plus it's really quick and simple to rustle up. "Express", you might even say. Folks, I actually think this one will be finding its way into my rotating cast of regular meals (or to give it its full title, "meals I keep meaning to make more often but end up only doing every few months because tuna pasta is easier"). Hurrah!

One-word verdict: Jätteดี.