As you get older, the years go faster, and so, I decided to utilise the spare time that I generally waste writing overly long emails and looking up books and kitchen gadgets that I can’t afford (at the moment) by writing up my escapades in the kitchen as a novice cook (on a sliding scale from Unable to boil water to Michelin Star; novice appears about a third of the way up, from the bottom).
Firstly, some notes about what appears on these pages.
i) I use an absurdly large amount of brackets. I can’t exactly state why this is although I suppose it could be down to being unable/unwilling to avoid tangential stream of thought from being noted down. It is a bad habit that I am trying to give up. Patience and tolerance are always appreciated.
ii) I am a self-diagnosed super taster. I have no medical evidence to back up this claim but I did the blue food colouring test and found that I have an unsightly number of taste buds per capita. There are certain foods that I tend to balk at eating because of this. However, I frequently eat spicy food and am currently trying to re-educate my taste buds into accepting the more unusual food groups. I keep telling them ‘Resistance is futile’.
iii) The point of this website is to share my cooking experiences with others but also to try out recipes from well-known cookbooks to test their reliability. Of course, no recipe is entirely fool-proof: the governing factors are myriad. Fluctuating ovens, quality of pans used, quality of ingredients used, weighing methods etc. I have, however, come across some recipes that have needed more than the odd tweak here and there. For example, when making broad bean cakes (from Gennaro Contaldo’s fabulous book of Italian cooking, Passione), I found myself having to add several ounces of flour than the recipe called for to get the mixture into workable dough. The cakes were delicious and well worth making, if only once a year (they are labour intensive enough to warrant a two week cruise around the Mediterranean afterwards). The main thing to remember is that you are cooking for you and a few choice guests, whose gourmet palates, more often than not, you will be used to pleasing. If it tastes good to you then it will taste good to your guests.
iv) I do not have a huge collection of age-old crockery and I often prepare a meal in one of those disposable square tin-foil cases to avoid additional washing up. The pictures might not always be pretty but they will be an honest representation of how these meals really do look when replicated from cookbooks. And, as Aesop wrote: “It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds”.
v) These notes may not be updated regularly. And to be honest, I’m lucky if anyone is really interested in my replication of a Nigella Lawson recipe, much less the preparation of a Pot Noodle for lunch.
The first step to being a competent cook, without wanting to sound too alliterative, is confidence in your own skill and, to strip it down to an even more base level, your ability to read a recipe, to follow instruction and then to follow your own taste buds. I always compare cooking to the practical science lessons at school when we got to light Bunsen burners and set fire to all sorts of chemicals, except with cooking you get a prize at the end of it, and hopefully not a burnt one.
The “popular” cookbooks that I use the most are usually by Tamasin Day-Lewis or Nigel Slater. When I’m in an Italian mood, I find that Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan and Passione by Gennaro Contaldo are indispensable and for French moments, of course the two Elizabeth David tour de forces: French Country Cooking and French Provincial Cooking. I have a love of old cookery books and pamphlets which goes a long way to explaining my heaving bookcases and nuclear fall-out of a bedroom floor. The Pillsbury Bake-Off books, particularly those from the 1950s, are fun without being too kitschy and the recipes, with a little bit of gentle tweaking, are still usable and tasty today. Finally, there is Gourmet magazine. For intellectual food speak, issues of the legendary American food magazine, first published in 1941, are indispensable. MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Samuel Chamberlain, Louis Diat, Ray Bradbury and Laurie Colwyn have all penned articles for Gourmet. Today it is an altogether glossier affair, relying on the restaurant goers rather than the stay at home foodies so I prefer the older issues. Copies are available online on a regular basis although they will generally be sold in the US rather than the UK. Sadly we have never produced such a scholarly AND entertaining magazine about food. There is a great compilation of Gourmet articles compiled under one cover called Endless Feasts.
Here follows some snippets from my cookery diary, reprinted here for fear of forgetting/losing the recipes. Some of them are too good to forget though.
17th February 2024, Aubergine Moussaka. Slithers of Aubergine fried until browned, then simmered with chopped tomatoes, ten cloves of garlic, cinnamon, allspice, onions. Lovely dish. We ate it straight from the frying pan with a fresh loaf of bread that we tore chunks off to mop up the fragrant juices when all the bulk had been consumed. As I don’t like lamb, this is a perfect solution and just as substantial although some might balk at the garlic content. You could reduce it but the garlic is put it whole so can be easily picked out and only adds a hint of its distinctive aroma to the dish rather than beat you around the head with it. I share a fully vegan recipe on my blog, here.
18th Feb 2024 Busy sunday cooking for the week. Feeling experimental so along with the Featherlite potato rolls, I also made some Liptauer (taken from Nigella Bites), a gloriously 50s looking dish, paprika pink vegan cream cheese and dotted with caraway seeds, capers and cornichons. Delicious on bagels but I like it best on oatcakes.
I also churned out some low-cal onion soup which I reheat the next day for lunch with it’s obligatory cheese-topped croutons. Roasting the onions really does take it to another dimension although I find I have to simmer it for longer than the 20 minutes suggested in the book.
20th Feb 2024 Classic veggie sausages braised in red wine with puy lentils for supper. One of our favourite dishes, the red wine sauce let me down as for some reason it refused to reduce down to the salty, savoury unctuous sauce that it normally produces. Stupid cheap plonk. Still, the lentils are scrumptious and I eat them out of the pan whilst waiting for the sausages and dull my appetite irreparably. The sausages were my usual favourite brand, Richmond plant-based. We manage 6 sausages between the two of us and a large panful of the lentils. We eat jelly and coconut whipped cream for an old-fashioned treat.
It is often said that our taste buds develop as we get older. The sheer intake of sweet things that you consumed in your schooldays must have dulled them. In my early teens I could devour those triple layer Sarah Lee mousse-like chocolate cakes that you had to wait an unfeasibly long time to defrost in one sitting, followed by a tube of Twiglets and egg and chips. I used to think that Butterscotch flavour Angel Delight was to die for. I wouldn't touch tomatoes or mushrooms back then though.
21st Feb 2024: Lunch: The best cheese and tomato sandwich in the world. Sometimes the simplest things taste the best. Particularly when you’re starving hungry you begin to crave anything and even the packet of stale, rubbery crispbreads sounds appetising if you haven’t eaten for, well, more than a couple of hours. Today was one of those days. I had been gorging myself on digestive biscuits and my tastebuds were crying out for something deeply savoury to counter the sickly sweet residue left in my mouth. As usual we didn’t have much in our cupboards but I had already decided on the lunchtime taste sensation: a cheese and tomato sandwich. Yes, it’s giving supermarket meal deal but forget those mean, thin white sandwiches, spread with layers of acrid margarine, and the cheese is slimy from the insipid tomato, all pips and leathery skin but with no flavour.
Whilst a few of those old elements remain: the sliced white bread and the mild cheddar (Cathedral is my new favourite vegan), I now use salted Flora plant-based butter. I use vine tomatoes and preferably baby ones. Other tomatoes really are too bland and their skin too tough to make this sandwich purely enjoyable. You want that juicy, resonant ‘POP’ in your mouth. So, with the bread buttered, and lumpily so, as I forgot to take the butter out of the fridge earlier in the day, I start adding thin slices of the cheddar, add the sliced tomatoes, and they must be vine tomatoes, and almost on the point of being overly ripe for maximum flavour, a sprinkle of white pepper and some sea salt, the tiniest sprinkle of white sugar (trust me), add the top lid of bread and eat. Don’t bother to cut it in half, just dive in.
21st Feb 2024 Dinner: Winter Pasticcio. Intrigued about the meaning of Pasticcio, I discover that it is the plural of pastiche. Figures. It also means something in Italian like a muddle or a mess. This would somewhat the idea of the dish which is a hearty combination of penne pasta and roasted vegetables melded together with a paste made from whizzed up olives, basil leaves, olive oil, and garlic, topped with the same Cathedral veg cheese.
I omit the fennel from the roast vegetables as I have been unable to stomach anything remotely anise scented since 2001 when I guzzled down a whole bottle of the green fairy, and I don’t mean washing up liquid. Absinthe. Just to type the name makes me shudder. A foul tasting concoction if ever there was one, quickly evokes a pleasurable “under the influence” feeling. However, it has a short lifespan (approximately 2 – 2.5 hours from first imbibe) before unconsciousness sets in and the hangover - a whole day extracted from your life no less! – is truly not worth it. Green vomit and a headache that makes a migraine seem like a mere tickle. Of course, we had to give it one more go just to see if it was because we hadn’t eaten much before hand. It wasn’t. Absinthe really is the drink they will give you in hell. Probably explains why Ernest Hemingway devised an absinthe cocktail called Death in the Afternoon.
Recommended Reads (affiliate links):
What I’ve been watching/listening to lately:
The Basketball Diaries - Jim Carroll (also read by Jim), Audible
One More Croissant for the Road - Felicity Cloake, Audible
And the Band Played on - Randy Shilts, Audible
Succession - HBO. Very dark, funny and simultaneously tragic.
True Detective Seasons 1, 3 and 4 (skip season 2, it’s dreadful). - HBO. Just wrapped up Season 4 last night, quite sad as a new season won’t be out for ages.
Hereditary - Prime. Ari Aster’s masterwork; tense, chilling with real jump scares and a bizarre family dynamic that isn’t fully explained until the terrifying conclusion. I prefer Midsommar for its ambience, but Hereditary deserves multiple watches for the bits you miss first time around.
The Invisible Man - Prime. Genuinely edgy thriller/horror that is more a meditation on a relationship with a truly narcissistic partner and the lasting impact that can have, long after that person has left your life.
I’ll be Gone in the Dark - HBO. Fans of true crime, unsolved murders and the community that has grown and grown over the last 20 years will find this story gripping, if slightly overlong, with a tragic twist.
Reruns of the Geraldo show on YouTube. I can’t get enough of how melodramatic and somewhat exploitative these shows were back then. He had Michael Alig and the NY club kids on three separate occasions, and it seemed like he was a curiously huge fan of them, despite the main audience being extremely dubious of it all.