Do you remember communal living, student-style? At Uni I shared a house with 5 guys and 2 girls. It was a Victorian house with 8 bedrooms that had been converted to a series of bedsits, so rather than having one big kitchen it had three miniscule ones. What this meant in practical terms was that the guys could rotate kitchens, creating apocalyptic destruction in each one before moving on to the next. The guys were on a strict culinary schedule that ran something like Fishfingers on a floury bap / Richmond sausages with beans / chicken thighs. Peas were the only vegetable allowed. Meanwhile the girls lived on cheap chardonnay.
Our standards of tidiness and hygiene were pretty low and I am still scarred by finding behind a chair at the end of term a mug. This mug had a floating ecosystem on the top of it, making it hard to work out what was underneath, which turned out to be stale tea (including teabag) with a rasher of bacon floating in it. Niiiiiiice.
Anyway it is with the bacon-tea-mould cuppa in mind that we cleaned out the fridge and made Everything Soup:
mushrooms - these are in fact a kind of mould and so it's a slight misnomer to call a mushroom mouldy. Nevertheless these had descended into the slime phase. bin
radishes - interestingly these shrink when they go off, rather than go mouldy. Small knobbly ones bin. ok ones soup.
fennel. brown but edible. soup
potatoes. Never let a few sprouts sticking out the side prevent you from sticking it in the soup.
broccoli. AOK soup.
peppercorns. bought fresh from the Thai supermarket Thai Smile, when they go off they just dessicate into black peppercorns. soup.
Aubergines. I would quite like to be catholic because then I could legitimately say 'sweet jesus holy mother of god'. bin.
Tarka Dhal leftover from takeaway curry. sustaining well. save.
Spinach. back half of bag frozen solid, front half of bag looking good. save.
to make: put everything in a pot with stock, boil, blend, eat. Garnish with whatever you fancy - in this case, back sesame seeds and some leftover coconut sambol from a takeaway curry.
Thursday night. Dinner with two friends who like wine. Start with Martinis. Drink lots of wine. Drink Calvados. Get Scooterman home. Mr Scooterman is very nice and interesting, originally from Afghanistan, makes me realise how indescribably fortunate I am in so many ways to be a woman living in England in the 21st Century. He is a liberal guy, got dumped by his last girlfriend when he encouraged her to continue her education and have a career. His sister back home wasn't allowed to stay in education beyond 16. He thinks this is wrong and can't believe it when people have education and opportunities on a plate and choose to be lazy. He's right. Ironically half of his job is driving people who have drunk too much home, so I can't be the first person to be embarrassed by my alcoholic (and general) indulgence.
Friday night, friends are coming round, who also love wine. Note to self: never schedule dinner two nights in a row with wine buffs. The state of me from the night before means that my ideal menu would be as follows:
1. to start. popcorn (salt), with marmite bruschetta
2. main course. spaghetti carbonara with mashed potato, and maybe garlic bread.
3. pudding. butterscotch Angel Delight with Mr Kipling's French Fancies on the side.
A scientific look at the menu above leads me to believe that I crave carbohydrate, salt, sugar and fat when I am hungover. Also Vitamin b (in marmite) which I believe is depleted after a right pissup.
Now, I thought that might be a slightly embarrassing menu (although I wonder if it might be received with secret enjoyment) so I altered it as follows:
1. to nibble: Marmite cashews. awe. some.
2. to start: porcini risotto. Still has key elements of seriously unhealthiness, but is dressed up like a posh dish. recipe below.
3. main: tiger prawns a la plancha (grilled on a disposable BBQ) with home made mayo and potato salad and green salad. This is an interactive dish, I can reliably inform you that a kilo of prawns for four people takes approximately 1.5 hours to get through and is probably slightly too many prawns.
4. pudding. chocolate and cherry tart with almond pastry. Actually this was quite nice. recipe below.
Porcini risotto
Dried porcini mushrooms are just as good as the fresh ones and about a zillionth of the price. In fact I wonder if they might even be better as they lack the slight sliminess that real porcini can get (maybe I have been shopping at the wrong places). And the added bonus is that when you pour boiling water over dried porcini to rehydrate them, you get a readymade stock.
So, for this risotto I fried some finely sliced leeks in a butter/olive oil mix and also friend the arborio rice with the leeks, for about 5 minutes. This 'toasting' of the rice pops the starch in the rice and makes it more receptive to the liquid when added. Then, pour in the mushroom-stock gradually, every time continuing to stir until the liquid is absorbed, then topping up with more. After about 15 minutes, maybe more depending on the rice, it's cooked. Add the rehydrated porcini, chopping finely first. At this point you add in as much grated parmesan, butter, salt as your conscience will allow. You can also add all sorts of other things - shelled broad beans are particularly good, petit pois, oregano, whatever according to your taste but probably not tomatoes which would upset the creamyness.
Chocolate, cherry and almond tart
Ingredients (sorry I always forget to list ingredients, am not a very accurate cook).
For the crust:
120g ground almonds
100g caster sugar
110g plain flour
175 cold butter cut into cubes
1 egg yolk
a splash of water
Put all these ingredients in a food processor and whizz until combined into a slightly cohesive (but not a ball) of pastry. Press into a springform tin at the base and up the sides and bake at about 180 degrees for about 20 minutes to get your pastry case.
For the filling:
cherries
200g dark chocolate
4 eggs
75g butter
50g plain flour
80g caster sugar
De-stone the cherries, you could pre-soak in booze if you like. Plop them on the bottom of the pastry case.
Melt the butter and chocolate together. Ideally you should do this in a bain-marie )in a bowl hovering over a saucepan of boiling water, don't let the water actually touch the bottom of the bowl). BUT you can sneakily do this in the microwave, just underplay it so that the chocolate is only just starting to melt. a minute will be more than enough.
Mix the butter/choc with the rest of the ingredients, give it all a good beating with a wooden spoon, pour over the cherries and cook at 180 degrees for about 20 minutes. It might be a bit gooey on the inside which is not necessarily a bad thing. If you test it with a fork, as I did, then please note that the fork marks stay as you can see from my photo.
Enjoy and I hope your hangovers are better than mine!
you need: courgettes, an egg, some milk, self raising flour, baking powder, frying pan, self control.
For the easiest courgette fritters ever that taste like mini little souffles, just do this:
1. Grate as many courgette as you fancy. three small ones go with one egg.
2. look up courgette in the dictionary and find that it is the crazy English word for Zucchini.
Get the pile of grated courgette and squash either a dishcloth (clean and dry, but not precious) on top to squeeze out lots of moisture. For the less green version of this, use kitchen roll to extract the moisture.
3. mix self raising flour with the dry-ish courgette mixture, until it has a light coating all over. For three courgette this corresponds with a sort of two-liberal-shakes-of-flour type quantity. Honesty it probably doesn't matter if you are over or under.
4. Shake some extra baking powder over the top. Quantities? pah! whatever you fancy although maybe not less than a teaspoon, nor more than a tablespoon. Bicarbonate of soda activates with heat to produce little bubbles, so will make your fritters fluffier but if you overdo it they might taste a bit weird.
5. Add a selection of herbs/chilli/salt and pepper/cubes of cheese according to your taste. Slightly stale blue cheese works well, it's v salty though so watch that.
6. Separately, in a jug, mix an egg and a generous splosh of milk. Add this to the courgette mixture and stir through until it is a solid courgetty batter without a pool of runny batter at the bottom. If there is a runny batter at the bottom, again it doesn't really matter that much.
7. heat a thick bottomed pan with a little olive oil and butter (as we know from previous posts the combination of a little of each is best as the oil stops the butter from burning and the butter stops the oil from smoking). put a spoonful of the batter in the pan for each fritter and cook for about 5 mins on each side.
8 Try really hard not to eat them all, because when your husband gets back from wine tasting (where he promises he will have used the spittoon), he might want one. Then accidentally eat them all and pretend you made up this blog rather than ACTUALLY cooking them tonight.
