Recipe Rifle

Peanut butter brownies

2012-01-27T14:18:00.001Z

I have been really down in the dumps recently. Not clinically, but I'm just SO BORE-DUH of everything. Especially my face - man alive! If I have to look at that stupid beaky ruddy beady gingerish freckled fat mish-mash of shapes once more I will scream.

It has been made worse by a girl I know having had a baby a few months ago and having a MARVELLOUS time with it. And she's not lying either. She really is just finding the whole thing okay. And she and her husband are terribly relaxed and on days off just wander into town and have lunch and the baby sleeps when it sleeps and not when it doesn't. My friend has not decided to confine herself to the house during naptimes and never finds herself sitting on the stairs outside the nursery picking her fingers, rocking to and fro hissing "go to fucking sleep go to fucking sleep", which is what I spent basically the first 10 months doing with Kitty.

And when her husband says "Shall we go out for brunch on Sunday", my friend doesn't scream, like I do, "Are you MAD?!! She will fall asleep in the CAR on the way BACK and then WAKE UP when we get home and it will be a disaster!!!!!"

I had thought that my experience of new motherhood was quite normal, quite widespread, but now I feel like I have sort of deliberately backed myself into a hellish little corner of parenting philosophies and to-the-minute timings because, basically, I don't think I deserve to have a nice time.

So I went to the hairdresser and got all my hair cut off. And do you know what, it has made me feel much better.

I also thought I should make some karmic amends by being nice about a recipe for a change. The last time I was really mean about a recipe it was one out of Waitrose Food Illustrated and the editor, William Sitwell, told me at a party the other day that I'd upset everyone, (not him, he doesn't seem to give a fuck, because editors never do), and my name is now dirt in their office.

I was slightly outraged at this and called him all sorts of foul names.

(This might have been because I was sitting next to Sara Parker-Bowles and had gone a bit berserk with the effort of not grabbing her by the throat and screaming "What is the Duchess of Cambridge like?!?!?!!? What does she smell like?!?!?!?! PLEASE TELL HER THAT IF WE MET SHE'D REALLY LIKE ME!!!!!!"

Instead I had been pretending that I've got no idea about anything ("Queen who? Prince what?") because it's so, so rude otherwise, but the effort of appearing nonchalent drives you a bit demented after a while.)

Anyway where was I? Oh yes, karma, so I thought I would correct this imbalance by being terribly nice about a thing out of My Daddy Cooks. I was mean about Nick's microwave chocolate pudding the other day and he didn't say a word. Didn't complain, didn't object, nothing. I think that is immensely cool, so I must big up to you now his peanut butter brownies, which I made last night and are terrific.

Peanut Butter brownies from My Daddy Cooks

This is not the exact recipe because I don't like vanilla essence and I didn't have enough chocolate chips. Don't worry too much about the amount peanut butter. I didn't have quite enough of that either and it still worked.

Preheat oven to 180C

200g butter
200g brown sugar of any sort
6 tbs peanut butter
3 eggs
a few drops vanilla essence
250g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
100g-ish chocolate chips (Waitrose sell them)

1 Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the peanut butter and mix until smooth

2 Mix in the eggs, followed by the vanilla, flour and baking powder

3 Stir in the chocolate chips

4 Flop into a greased/lined tin (20x20cm if you can be arsed to measure) and bake for 40 mins. Maybe 30-35 if using a fan oven

Monkfish curry

2012-01-25T12:35:00.000Z

I have become obsessed with a book called French Children Don't Throw Food. I'm sure you've heard about it; it's by an American journalist called Pamela Druckerman who moved to Paris, had children and wondered why they were such snarling brats compared with the quiet little bonbon-ish children of her French counterparts.

She did some investigating and turned her findings into this book, which, if like me the two things you find most abhorrent in the world are badly-behaved dogs and badly-behaved children, is utterly gripping.

The secret, she says, is that the French just sort of ignore their children and let them get on with things by themselves. They are not constantly in their faces, trying to entertain them They do not rush over to their child at the first squeal of frustration. They practise "La Pause", which is the moment where you stop and think "Is that a cry of distress? Is my child actually hurt, afraid or upset? Or is she annoyed because she can't get the star-shaped wooden thingy into the square-shaped hole and will recover herself in a moment? And should I therefore just continue to hang up this washing and not run over there?"

They also don't really tell their children off that much. When they do, they make it count - but they don't tell them they are naughty. They say something along the lines of: "NO! We do NOT lick shoes. Non, non, non!" and they consider it part of the toddler's education, teaching them not to lick shoes because they are dirty, rather than a terrible curtailment of their freedom of expression - or as discipline.

Anyway, I could go on but I won't because we'll be here all day. But the upshot is that I have been implementing this advice as much as possible and although I can't say that Kitty is now a model child, at the very least I have ceased to feel even remotely guilty when I leave her bumbling around alone with her toys for 45 minutes while I lie on the sofa eating mini-eggs.

On an entirely separate note, I made the other night a really fantastic monkfish curry and it was terribly easy. I had a lot of monkfish knocking about from a trip to the farmers' market over the weekend and it felt like a curry night.

It utilised a curry paste from Jamie's 30-Minute meals, minus a few things I didn't have. We are eating a lot of fish and vegetables at the moment because my husband and I have both got terribly fat in the last few months and seeing as we're neither nice people nor useful to society, the least we can do is be thin.

Monkfish curry

2 monkfish tails (or any other firm white fish), cut into chunks
1 knob fresh ginger
1 red chilli seeds in, don't be pathetic
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 heaped tsp tomato puree
1 tsp tamarind paste (if you have it)
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 mini cans cocnut milk (you can get these from Waitrose, or 1 large one will probably do)
1 tsp coriander seeds, (if you have)
2 tbs groundnut oil

1 Put all the ingredients for the curry paste into a whizzer and whizz. In 2 tablespoons of groundnut oil fry off the paste for about 5 minutes.

2 Add the monkfish chunks and some sad old veg (baby corn/sugar snap peas etc) you have hanging about if you need to get rid of it. Stir this round until the monfish looks opaque on all sides, but don't cook for longer than 8 or so minutes.

3 Add the coconut milk and simmer for about 5 minutes until everything is very hot. If you had some fresh coriander, you could stir this in or sprinkle over at the end, but who ever has fresh coriander?

Staff announcement

2012-01-24T09:40:00.000Z

For no other reason than I feel like it, I have decided to appoint a girl I met off the internet, Emelie Frid, as editor-at-large of Recipe Rifle. (You will remember her from her Jamie's Mince Pie Cookies post, which was such a success.) And when I say "at large" I mean that she lives in Letchworth.

The title of editor-at-large doesn't really mean anything, except that she will (when she feels like it) post here. And if she should ever find herself one day in the future doing drugs in the bathroom of a London private member's club, it's something to say, isn't it? I say that having no idea if she's ever done drugs before - we don't really have those kinds of chats - but in my experience, people doing drugs in bathrooms of private members' clubs are almost exclusively editors-at-large of media outlets. ("It's called Jazzhole. It's a cross between The Spectator and i-D. We're based in Bow. It's really cool actually.")
Anyway, as it's an entirely unpaid position, and Emelie is about to have another baby, the chances of her getting off her redheaded pregnant butthole and doing a post more than twice a year is probably quite slim.

And that's the kind of work ethic I like around here.

So here we go, French Toast Creme Brulee by Emelie Frid.

This is an American breakfast recipe. Now, I’m a confirmed sugar junkie regularly laughing in the face of certain diabetic coma, but I personally would find this a little too sweet to eat first thing in the morning. So I served it as dessert instead, which worked very well indeed. It’s almost like bread and butter pudding! However, if I WERE to have it for breakfast I would serve it with bacon. I’m healthy like that.

The recipe uses corn syrup. In Letchworth, where I live, it’s easier to find the Grail than corn syrup, so Esther gamely schlepped to the post office to send me an unopened bottle she had sitting in the larder. I don’t know how easy it might be to source corn syrup elsewhere – I mean, Letchworth is not exactly the centre of the universe. More like the armpit. If you can’t find it for love nor money, I have seen it suggested that maple syrup would work very well as a substitute. Or perhaps golden syrup?

For approx six servings you will need:

6 slices of white farmhouse style bread, about ½ inch thick. Or you could use whatever bread you fancy here – panettone? Brioche?

115g butter
200g brown sugar
2 tablespoons corn syrup
4 eggs
350 ml milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Grand Marnier or other orangey booze (full disclosure: I didn’t have this, so I chucked in some orange zest instead. It worked out great)
¼ teaspoon salt

HEADS UP: you have to prepare this in advance, as it needs to chill for at least 8 hours before going into the oven.

1. Melt butter in a small, heavy based saucepan on a medium heat. Mix in sugar and corn syrup and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Pour into a 9x13 inch baking dish

2. Cut the crusts from the bread (or leave on – up to you) and arrange on top of the sugar and butter mix in the baking dish, in a single layer. You want them to have a tight fit.

3. Whisk together milk, eggs, vanilla extract, Grand Marnier and salt. Pour evenly over the bread.

4. Cover with cling film and chill for at least 8 hours, or overnight if serving this for breakfast.

5. When ready to use, preheat your oven to 175C. Remove the dish from the fridge and bring to room temperature.

6. Bake uncovered in the preheated oven, until it’s puffed up and browned, approx 35-40 minutes. Don’t be afraid to bake this until properly browned – you don’t want it too soggy in the middle.

I served this with fresh fruit – banana, berries, kiwi – and a dollop of Greek yoghurt. And not that I would presume to tell you what to do with your children, but I gave a little bit of this to my young daughter, the feral Goblin, and was still trying to peel her off the ceiling an hour later. So next time she’s just getting the fruit and the yoghurt, no matter how imploring she looks when she holds out her fat little hand saying “Mmmmmmm, tack, tack?!”

Peach and whiskey chicken

2012-01-19T15:48:00.000Z

This really ought to be called Chicken in Jam, because that's what is it. I made it following a medium amount of fuss about its excellence on Twitter and I'm really not sure about it. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say I actually didn't like it. Sorry, yet another bum recipe from me. What can I say? It's an unlucky streak.

It's a recipe from a wildly popular American blog called The Pioneer Woman, who is on her SECOND cookbook by the way. If I never hear about another blogger who's got a flaming bookdeal it will be 8 million years too soon.

Anyway and in this recipe she covers a lot of chicken in whiskey and jam and sticks it in the oven for 1.5 hours. The thing about Americans - and I say this with the proviso that I really, really like Americans - is that they don't half eat a truckload of chicken. And I think they think it probably gets boring, so to liven it up they do things with it like cover it in jam. It's terribly French. The problem with this recipe is there's not much to counter-balance the overwhelming sweetness - there's no sourness and no heat. So what you're left with really just is chicken in jam.

But if that kind of thing sounds right up your street, it is a terrific recipe.

Peach and Whiskey Chicken (aka Chicken in Jam)
8 chicken thighs
about a wineglass full of whiskey
1/2 a jar of peach jam (Tiptree do one, available from Waitrose)
1 bottle of barbeque sauce (I used one by Paul Newman because I LOVE Paul Newman)
some garlic cloves
1 large or two medium onions
groundnut oil and butter for frying

Preheat your oven to 180C

1 Melt some oil and butter together in a pot - (the Pioneer Woman recommends a "big ol' pot", which just made me hate her, I'm afraid) - and brown your chicken in it. Ho hum, what a boring thing this is to do. But make sure they are nice and brown.

2 Remove the chicken to a plate. Chop up your onions and fry these off for about 5 minutes. Add the booze and cook down for about 3 minutes. Then add in the barbeque sauce (I wondered here why I wasn't just making barbeque chicken) and then spoon in half the jar of peach jam. The recipe says the whole jar but, like, fuck that. Whisk this all together with a few garlic cloves.

3 Put the chicken and the resting juices back in the pot, cover with a lid and cook for 1.5 hours. My husband said it was nice and went back for seconds but what the hell does he know. I had two pieces and then developed a terrible headache.

Microwave chocolate sponge pudding

2012-01-14T13:06:00.002Z

Broadly-speaking, I don't really put recipes on here that don't work because I don't think there's any point. Why do you want to know about something that you aren't going to make? But I think there is some relevance in including recipes here that don't work if I think you are in danger of coming across them and making them and getting yourself into a pickle - hence the Jamie griddle waffles of the previous post.

This is another recipe that isn't that great, although it's not from Jamie. It's a chocolate sponge pudding that you make in the microwave from a book called My Daddy Cooks and if you had the book and came across it and like chocolate you'd definitely be in danger of having a crack at it.

I really don't want to give the wrong impression about this book, as it's generally good-looking and inspiring and I very much recommend it, especially but not exclusively if you've got children. On reflection, I've been a bit unfair, maybe, cooking this - it could never be that terrific. I think it's the lack of eggs that does it, you end up with quite a dry thing. Although it's perfectly amusing to make a cake in the microwave, I wouldn't make it again.

Microwave chocolate sponge
Makes a huge amount - for 4 starving adults or 6 starving children

55g butter
200g self-raising flour
170g caster sugar
55g cocoa powder
180ml milk
a few drops vanilla essence
110g soft brown sugar

1 In a large non-metallic bowl melt the butter for about 30-40 secs (depending on how warm it was when you started).

2 Sift in the flour, add teh caster sugar, half the cocoa powder, the milk and the vanilla extract and stir it all together well until you get a cake batter

3 Mix the brown sugar and the rest of the cocoa powder together and sprinkle over the top

4 Pour over 275ml boiling water but don't mix in. It will look an utterly mad and disgusting mess by now, which is normal

5 Put it in the microwave for 7 minutes. Leave to cool for a bit but then eat straightaway because on cooling completely this will collapse and turn into rubber.

Jamie's griddle waffles

2012-01-13T14:26:00.000Z

I'm rather sad to report on the first Jamie recipe I've encountered that has fallen short of expectations. I tried out his new genius-looking idea for making waffles in a griddle plan this afternoon and everything went fine until I had to flip the waffle to cook the underside and:

it was more or less impossible. The recipe also calls for 2.5 tablespoons of baking powder, which is all very well but it doesn't half make your waffle taste like baking powder (not good).

By all means give them a crack if you fancy it, though. You may be more dextrous than me at the old flipping - it wouldn't take much.

Jamie's Griddle Waffles

2 eggs
300ml milk
100g butter, melted
2.5 tablespoons baking powder
225g self-raising flour
1/4 tsp salt

1 Whisk the eggs and the milk together, then add the salt and the baking powder. Sieve in the flour (this is important because otherwise you will get lumps) and whisk to combine. Then dribble in the butter in stages and stir in. Rest for 30 mins (yes you must do this).

2 Get your griddle pan very hot and melt over a large knob of butter. Pour in the batter - you might have to spread it around a bit because the batter is quite thick - then turn the heat down to medium and cook for 8-10 minutes. Flip it over (yeah, right) and then cook the other side for another 8 mins.

Full details are here

St Lucian mac and cheese

2012-01-05T12:47:00.000Z

Last night I wasn't feeling very well and so Kitty's nanny, Shura, who is from St Lucia, made Kitty's dinner instead. It was mac and cheese the St Lucian way and it was really, really delicious. It is made without a white sauce, which cuts down the hassle factor by about two thirds and it contains onion, which works wonders. This might actually be a perfectly normal and widely-used method of making macaroni cheese but I've never come across is.

By the way please don't hassle me about having a nanny, okay???, it's too boring. She's not here every day and when she's here I don't laze around eating bonbons - well, not ALL day - so just cut it (as Shura would say).

St Lucian mac and cheese

1 small handful Annabel Karmel baby pasta shells
1 knob butter
1 small sloop semi-skimmed or whole milk (probably about two eggcup-fulls)
1 small sloop cream (if you have it, about one eggcupful)
1 handful grated cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon of very finely chopped or grated white onion or shallot

Preheat the oven to 180C

1 Boil the pasta as normal. Drain and return to the dry pan. Over a medium heat, add the knob of butter and stir until melted, then add the milk and continue to stir.

2 Throw over the cream if using and the onion, then the cheese and stir until completely melted. Turn out into a small oven-proof dish and stick in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

Goat's cheese and roasted tomato tart

2012-01-04T10:29:00.001Z

Last year I learnt:

1 Why people wear coloured socks. It's not, as I previously thought, because they are insufferable optimists, looking to display their sunny personality through their jazzy footwear. Rather, it is so they don't end up wearing odd socks (one black sock does look so much like the other one and yet they are alwas fundamentally different in size and texture). And there is something really massively unsatisfactory about wearing odd socks. So I now have a lot of very colourful socks, and always wear matching pairs, and very zen I feel about it, too.

2 I cannot control events with the power of my mind. When I went to see Dr O with my nervous breakdown, I explained to her that I feel very superstitious about my anxiety. "I believe that if I worry enough about something, then it will not happen," I said. Dr O looked at me. "So what you are telling me," she said, "is that you can control events just with the power of your mind?" "No!" I shrieked. "It's more complicated than that." But it wasn't. That is what I believed. I don't believe that any more, and I am much less anxious. But I worry that I am less interesting.

3 I am not good at being flexible. When Kitty was very tiny I lived my life and hers by the clock. I'm talking to the second. From the outside it probably looked really mad but I was terrific at it and it worked. I never had to fret over whether she was hungry or tired because she was never hungry or tired because she was fed before she was ravenous and in her cot before she was hysterical. But now Kitty is nearly one and she's more of a real person rather than a blob and some days, like the rest of us, she is more tired or more or less hungry than others. So now I have to do a thing where I have to make about a million little decisions, from day to day, about whether this is one of those days that she needs to go back to bed at 9.45am for a little kip, or whether she can make it until lunchtime. And just between you and me, I hate it.

4 Being a lazy shitbag is okay only for so long. I am a quitter, through and through. I hate making an effort at anything, it causes me genuine pain. I don't like doing exercise, or "sticking at" things. When I think about having to put my clothes away at night I want to cry, so I don't and they pile up on the chair next to my bed until on morning, usually on a Sunday, it even repulses me so much that I do something about it. But last year, I had to persevere at some stuff. I couldn't give Kitty up for adoption, because everyone would know what I'd done and be SO unsympathetic. And I had to keep wearing my stupid fucking teeth braces to correct my teeth because both my husband and my dentist, Handsome Richard, made such an almighty fuss about me giving up. But now Kitty is so much less of a hassle than she was and my teeth are near as damnit straight that I now, with great reluctanct, admit that perseverence might not just be for massive square martyrish losers after all.

And so it is with dinner. The past few months have seen me so incredibly uninspired about food in general and dinner that I am just doing the same old things over and over again. It was mostly because I couldn't be BOTHERED to think about it. I would mull over our dinner options for about three minutes and as soon as I had settled on an old favourite I would just go with that.

But on the way to the shops yesterday I really thought about it and came up with a couple of things we really haven't ever had before, or hadn't had in ages. They don't comply with my husband's usual cry for things to be purchased from the Ginger Pig, or to be carb-free, but there's no time for that kind of dicking about this year. We must have variety, and vegetables, or we will all go mad.

So I did a very obvious dinner thing last night that was nonetheless really nice. It was very lazy pub-starter stuff - just a slab of ready-made puff pastry flattened and goat's cheese and roasted tomatoes on top. But, you know, it was really terrific and terribly easy and I'll be doing it again. If I can be bothered.

Goat's cheese and roasted tomato tart

2 packs Capricorn goat's cheese
1 slab ready puff pastry (I get Waitrose own, which comes in two slabs. One of those, rolled out a bit, is enough for 2 people.)
1 string of baby tomatoes on the vine
1 egg
some mint, if you have
salt and pepper
semolina for dusting

1 Shove the tomatoes in the oven for an hour at 180 with olive oil and salt at some point during the day.

2 When ready for dinner roll out the puff pastry to a longer-ish oblong. Dust a baking sheet with semolina to stop the pastry from sticking. Beat an egg in a bowl and brush the pastry all over with about a third of the eggwash.

3 In a bowl combine the torn-up goat's cheese (rind on or off, it's up to you), the tomatoes, some mint, salt and pepper and the rest of the beaten egg. Then pile up in a fat straggly line along the centre of your oblong (as it cooks it will melt and spread out and you don't want it to slop over the edges of the pastry).

4 Shove in a 180 oven for about 20 minutes. We ate this with Polpo's courgette salad (also on this blog).

Yes yes I know a lot of you will be rolling your eyes at the obviousness of this, but as my husband always says "The perfect is the enemy of the good".

Jamie Oliver's mince pie cookies - GUEST POST

2011-12-12T13:19:00.001Z

A real treat today, Recipe Riflers. A guest post from one of my favourite readers, Emelie. We met online, like all the coolest people NOT; I had a small, sick, teething baby - she a feral toddler and a dog that looks like a polar bear. She is also Scandinavian and what with Scandis being so fashionable at the moment, (they are the new gays), I'm mostly friends with her because of that.

Anyway here you go and if you're on Twitter she is @emfrid and terrific value.

I will cheerfully defend Jamie Oliver to all and sundry. Granted, on occasion he can come across as the culinary world’s more earnest answer to Bono. And those Sainsbury ads makes my teeth hurt. But, as far as I’m concerned that is all easy to forgive. Because, his recipes? They. Always. Fucking. Work.

Like, for example, these mince pie cookies. I got the recipe from Jamie’s Christmas Special magazine, and they are rad. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of pastry, which is probably why I prefer them to actual mince pies, but I’d wager that even pastry fiends will like these. They taste like Christmas! They are also very easy to make - it took me less than half an hour to get them in the oven, and that was while I was simultaneously trying to shake off the semi-feral toddler clinging to my leg and prevent the dog from digging a hole through to the neighbours. So give them a go.

For about 30 or so cookies you will need:

250g unsalted butter, at room temperature
140g sugar
1 egg yolk
Grated zest of one clementine/satsuma/mandarin/whatever you prefer
300g flour
One 411g jar of fruit mincemeat (WHY do they come in 411g jars? Why not 420g? Why so specific?!)

1 Preheat your oven to 180C/gas 4 and put greaseproof baking parchment on a couple of baking trays.

2 Beat butter and sugar together until creamy. Add the egg yolk and your citrus zest and beat to combine.

3 Sift in the flour and then fold through MOST of the mince meat (you want to hold some of it back to put on top of your cookies before they go in the oven). Stir until it all starts to come together. I used my hands here – easier.

4 Pull biscuit-sized lumps from the dough, put them evenly across the trays and then press down on each one to shape into cookies. Don’t put them too close to each other – they will run out a little while in the oven.

4 Dot some of your saved mincemeat on top of each cookie, and then put them in the oven for about ten minutes. You want them to be golden, but still a bit doughy and chewy in the middle. I found that my oven needed about 15 minutes for this, but hey, ovens are famously different.

The mince pie cookies are lovely warm – with mulled wine – but the ones you don’t eat straight away can be stored in an airtight container, or frozen.

Turkey

2011-12-08T10:11:00.000Z

One very good reason for not doing a practice-run Christmas is that it leaves you in absolutely no mood for actual Christmas. I've had enough of Christmas, now. And certainly had enough of leftovers. God turkey is such nasty stuff.

It doesn't help that it was buggered and all my fault. We brined it, you see, and I bumptiously insisted that the quantity of salt doesn't matter and just poured a lot into the brine willy-nilly. Some ghastly chemical reaction must have taken place because it was dry as a bone.

brine ingredients

Although what we did learn from it, is that it doesn't matter if your turkey is dry, because once you slap it on a hot plate and cover it with a lot of gravy (which you will have) and a lot of bread sauce (ditto) it doesn't matter.

But, as my husband said, there's no point in it actually being dry, so if you are going to do a brine this year, make sure you do the exact measurements the recipe recommends. For example Nigella says 6 litres of water and 250g sea salt, like Maldon or 125g table salt, like Saxo. Then other flavours you want to add to the brine are up to you - parsley, bay leaves, allspice berries, mace blades, garlic, whatever. Nigella, again, recommends a star anise but just personally I think it makes everything taste like a Chinese takeaway.

And then beyond that, with turkey, it all just gets too mind-bending what with the Shall We Cook The Legs Separately Or Not? question. And the How Much Longer Should I Cook It If It's Got Stuffing In It? conundrum and THEN there's the thing about temperatures and whether or not you've got a fan oven. And by then, I have to confess, I feel like I am back in double History before lunch and can barely keep my eyes open.

So really the purpose of this post is to say: it's anyone's bloody guess. Have a fair crack. Try not to get bogged down in detail. Don't be scared because even if it's burnt to a crisp the gravy and bread sauce will save the day.

I told you I was bored.

Cranberry sauce, bread sauce

2011-12-02T11:34:00.002Z

So, let's dispense with the cranberry sauce first, because it's a piece of cake. There are more complicated recipes you can use, but this one is just fine and takes about ten seconds.

250g cranberries
100ml fresh orange juice
100g light brown sugar

1 Put the sugar and the orange juice in a pan and bring to a bubble. Tip in the cranberries and simmer for about 8 minutes - until some of the cranberries are still round and the rest have burst open and are all gooey.

Decant this into an airtight container, chuck it somewhere cool and forget about it until Christmas. The sauce will thicken on cooling so don't worry if it looks a bit runny.

I was all ready to make a similarly simple bread sauce but my friend Henry forced upon me a complicated one from his mother. As he was coming to dinner and gave me a magazine that the recipe was printed in I felt like I really couldn't not make it.

Henry

As it turns out, it is absolutely amazing. You could just eat it, on its own, spooned out of the tin. So I really recommend it, despite it being a bit of a faff. Do it up to three days ahead of time.

Aromatic brown bread sauce

1 large onion
150g wholemeal bread, crusts on
6 cloves
4 cardamom pods
some nutmeg
salt and pepper
75g butter
900ml milk - whole or semi
300ml double cream yikes

Preheat your oven to 130C. Did you notice that said 130C and not 180C?

1 Chop your onion up VERY small. I chopped mine up normally and it was too big, so next time I do this I will chop it up normall and then go at those chunks with a knife to bash the bits up tiny. Do not be tempted to put it in the food processor as you don't want it a sludge.

2 Tear the bread into small pieces - about the size of a 50p coin and put in an ovenproof dish with the onion

3 Put the cloves and the cardamom into a small piece of muslin or cotton, tie with string and chuck into the dish. This is an annoying instruction and I'm not sure you couldn't just throw the pods and cloves in free and then fish them out later.

4 Grate over a generous sprinkling of nutmeg, salt and pepper and dot with butter. Mix the milk and the cream together and pour over the bread and onion. Cover tightly with foil or a lid and then cook for 2 hours(!). Stir once or twice during cooking.

Really worth doing if you can be arsed. Everyone said how nice it was at our practice dinner, even a French girl who is normally rude about everything. Henry said it was a pretty good imitation of his mother's sauce but then ruined it by asking if my stuffing was out of a packet.

Jamie Oliver's get-ahead gravy

2011-12-01T11:29:00.000Z

We had our trial-run Christmas lunch yesterday. Except we did it a dinnertime. And I'll tell you this about Christmas: it is a fucking hassle. I can't quite believe I've got to do all that all over again in 3 weeks' time. And I was only on pudding, sauces, relishes and decorations - my husband had the real sweat on doing the turkey and all the rest.

But what are you going to do? It's just life, innit. Like I was complaning on and on and on to my single Hot Career friends J- and E- the other week about how I thought I'd be a wife and mother as a bit of a retro-laugh and now I'm right in it and marvelling what a hilarious joke I seem to have played on myself. I was expecting a tidalwave of sympathy, because I am a moaney old cow, but they both just looked at me blanky and boredly and said "Yeah, life is vile."

Since then I've tried to complain a bit less about everything.

Anyway look, for god's sake, if this isn't already in your repertoire, do Jamie Oliver's get-ahead gravy if you're lumbered with Christmas this year. It's a ruddy life-saver. Do it this weekend and freeze it.

This is not Jamie's exact recipe. The real thing is easily sourced on the internet.

Jamie Oliver's get-ahead gravy
Makes 1 litre, enough for about 8 people

8 chicken wings or wings or stock bones or whatever
2 carrots, quartered
1 small onions, quartered
2 sticks of celery, trimmed and, you guessed it: quartered
fresh sage leaves - about 5?
fresh rosemary - two sticks?
3 bay leaves
1 star anise IF YOU WANT. I, personally, didn't think the Chinesey flavour this imparted was very appropriate, although it's nice
4 rashers streaky bacon, snipped
4 tbs plain flour
1 tbs cranberry sauce
some olive oil

1 Tip everything except the flour and the cranberry sauce into a roasting tin, slosh some olive oil over it, salt and pepper, turn it all around to coat and put in a 180C oven for 1 hour

2 Take it out and bash everything up in the pan. Jamie recommends using a potato masher but I found stabbing everything with an assortment of wooden items, such as a spoon and then a rolling pin, was easier

although I took this photo at the masher stage

3 Put the pan on the hob on a low heat and sprinkle over the flour a spoonful at a time, mixing well in to the mixture after each snowfull

4 Now pour over two litres of water, just cold from the tap, mix together and boil briskly for ten minutes and then simmer for 25. It will reduce by roughly half

5 Strain the gravy. I found this easier to do once through a colander and then once again through a sieve - although this does create more washing up.

6 Now put in tupperware and forget about it until Christmas Eve. Don't bother skimming the fat now because there's something about the freezing/thawing process that draws out the fat from the gravy more effectively.

7 On the day, either just heat this up and finish off with some cranberry sauce and serve OR add the juices from the turkey roasting tin. You are supposed to add the turkey juices, but you will probaby be feeling utterly mental and a bit tearful by this stage and won't be arsed to be adding no damn juices to sauces. So I'm just telling you now that if you want to serve this gravy straight up without turkey juices no-one will notice.

Gumbo

2011-11-28T19:14:00.000Z

I decided today to end my new-recipe drought and cook something I liked the look of that I found in a colour supplement this weekend. It was a prawn and okra "gumbo" and it looked like my kind of thing. Stealth vegetables: tick. Spicy: tick. Easy: tick.

So after raiding Waitrose, I potato-sacked Kitty into her cot at 1pm, waved cheerio and thundered back to the kitchen with more enthusiasm than I've had in... months and months... to set about cooking this thing.

And it was - it still is, sitting down there greasily in its pot - DISGUSTING. It is like an orange glue-soup studded with chunks of raw onion and warmed-up red pepper. And the thing about red peppers is that they're fine raw and they're fine cooked long and hard, but anything in between is tastes like a microwaveable pizza from a service station.

Is that what gumbo is supposed to be like? Does anyone have a good gumbo recipe? I like the sound of it, mostly because the word "gumbo" is good. But this was just a travesty.

I'm racking my brains, here. I followed the recipe - from a staggeringly famous, usually terrific chef. I didn't shirk or get impatient or skip anything out. Just a bad, bad recipe. Maybe an error? A few of you may have seen it this weekend. Don't bother with it. I mean, like, FUCK I could have been asleep this afternoon! And what if I didn't have an alternative dinner?! What a waste of time and money; literally all going to go on the compost.

I'm in a simply foul mood about the whole thing. But at the very least you may as well benefit from this horrible misadventure, because I certainly haven't.

On a lighter note these are amazing. No, they didn't send me any freebies, but if they'd like to, it would cheer me up enough to prevent me from sending Yotam Ottolenghi his gumbo back to him in the post. On fire.

Christmas and fish pie (again)

2011-11-23T16:31:00.000Z

I wouldn't say that I was panicking about Christmas - Dr O has put paid to the worst of my anxieties (and at only £120 an hour! Bargain!) - but I would say that it was definitely on my mind.

We are having everyone here. And when I say everyone I mean two sets of parents, two sisters, two infants, two cousins an aunt and an uncle. It adds up to 14 people. The fact that we don't have enough chairs for that many people is the least of my problems. I don't think we have enough glasses, either. Or cutlery.

We're so worried about the food that we are having a practise run on November 30th. We are doing the whole thing - brining the turkey, bread sauce, roast potatoes, the lot. I might even take the opportunity to put up a few Christmas decs to see how they look. I'm going for a very barnyard theme this year - all brown twine and chipped red jingle bells - you know the sort of thing I mean No tinsel, perhaps a bit controversially. I hate tinsel.

So I will report back after November 30th with top tips on how it all went.

For now, because I promised, I wanted to run through a childrens' fish pie recipe for a reader who requested it.

People make a lot of fuss about giving children fish pie - they think it's so marvellous and middle-class; but I do think that some children don't like it. Or at least don't like some elements of it. Very fishy fish, like salmon, is often not especially appreciated. And a proper fish pie is made with smoked haddock, which is very salty - so you might want to leave that out if you're touchy about stuff like that.

Personally, I make mine as bland as possible. When I was little I never, ever had to eat anything I didn't want to. I literally lived on baked beans, alphabites, scrambled eggs and spaghetti bolognese. My mother has a theory that small children can't digest brassicas (spinach, broccoli) very well and so that's why they don't like them. I'm not going to say anything pathetic like "It never did me any harm" because who knows?! But certainly I am very grateful to my mother for not being an "eat up your veg" nag. And I don't have a problem with vegetables now.

Anyway, I'm drifting.

Any fish pie is simply fish poached in a white sauce and covered with mashed potato or pastry and that's it. Anything else you add is entirely up to you and frankly, although it's not for me to tell you what to do with your child, I would be guided by any preference my child shows - eg parsley or no parsley, egg or no egg. I don't think you're supposed to give babies shellfish under a year but thereafter you could chuck in some brown shrimp. Yummy.

So the contents of a fish pie might look like this:

(makes several freezable portions)
1 quantity of white sauce (for recipe see "How to make a white sauce" - on this blog) - about 3/4 of a pint
1 quantity assorted white fish, eg haddock/cod/scallops - smoked fish if you want, salmon if you want
a few mushrooms if you like
2 eggs

1 Make the white sauce.

2 Chop up the fish into small chunks - about the size of dice (depending on child's age of course) and then plop into the white sauce. Let this stew together over a low flame for 15 minutes.

3 Hard-boil and chop your eggs, if using. Dice your mushrooms, if using, and throw those in too.

4 Decant this mixture into your bowls for freezing and top with either pastry or mashed potato. On re-heating defrost and cook for a good 25 minutes.

Gingerbread Porridge

2011-11-22T17:11:00.001Z

I was sitting on the kitchen floor the other day with my iPad, half-in and half-out of the doorway to get some of the feeble WiFi reception that dribbles down from the modem upstairs; my husband was nearby, pushing tiny strips of fish finger into Kitty's sparrow-mouth followed by a spoonful of beans.

"Na naaaaaaaaa," said Kitty, her mashed-up food slowly collapsing from its position on the roof of her mouth to flop onto her tongue. She then keeled forward gently to rest her forehead on her highchair tray, her fat grubby hands splayed on the plastic either side of her face. She's been doing that a lot recently; I don't know what it means.

Then an email arrived from someone I used to work with at The Times, called Claire. That makes me sound terribly grand, doesn't it? Like we used to write long witty pieces about the increasing popularity of traditional parlour games at Notting Hill dinner parties. In reality I worked part-time on the Times Magazine's reception desk and she was the chief sub-editor, which meant that if everything went perfectly no-one thanked her but if anything went wrong it was all her fault.

It wasn't the easiest place to work, the Magazine, especially not when you were a) the receptionist and b) part-time; it made you officially the lowliest person at the entire newspaper because at least the messengers got a bit of paid holiday and knew their way around.

And there were some horrible people. Not horrible, horrible - people always think working at newspapers is like All The President's Men and working at magazines is like The Devil Wears Prada but in actual fact it's just some grubby open-plan office with towers of dusty paper and the faint smell of lick.

Most newspaper or magazine offices could be anywhere. And the horrible people were just boringly horrible. They didn't make catty, arch, comments that sent you racing to the ladies' to sob, they just sort of refused to acknowledge you because you were so lowly and shit.

But Claire was always lovely to me. She looked me right in the eyes when she talked to me and never did a thing where I'd say something and she'd look at me as if my chair had started talking. Among other people who were nice to me were Hannah Betts, (with whom I became obsessed and started copying the way she dressed), and my husband.

I only spoke to my husband once on the phone when I was working at The Magazine - when he had so much post that I had to send a parcel van to his house to take it all and had to ring him to ask when he'd be at home to receive it. We had an unexpectedly nice chat. He is terribly friendly, my husband - much friendlier than you think he's going to be and I was astonished at his bothering to make jokes on the phone. When you work on reception and send people their post, no-one bothers to waste jokes on you or or tries to be charming. And when they do, you notice.

So I hunted him down and married him. Ha ha! (No, seriously.)

Anyway, so Claire emailed me and said Hiya, I'm working in PR now - do you want some free stuff? I usually absolutely catagorically say no to any freebies because it makes all this feel far too much like work. And it feels so self-important and crass to mouth off in some kind of superior way about what I think about this brand of biscuits or that kind of oat-free snack.

But you remember people who were nice to you when you were really little and shitty and want to do them a favour, for what it's worth.

So: Dorset Cereal's Gingerbread Porridge is actually pretty excellent. It comes in a chic brown box with a cute picture of a runaway gingerbread man on it. In the box are 10 sealed paper sachets of porridge that you can mix with milk and cook in the microwave or on the stove. I thought it was delicious and I don't even really like porridge.

Although it says it's limited edition, which probably means that it is only available in a few select branches of Waitrose within the M25.

That's the thing about PR: 50% of it really works - you just don't know which 50%.

Amy I haven't forgotten about your request for child-friendly fish pie. Coming soon. Like, tomorrow.

Shepherd's pie

2011-11-09T19:19:00.003Z

My least favourite thing that people say to me is that they are tired. "I'm so tired," they say. Or, worse, "I'm just so tired." It's that "just" that really fucks me off.

I never tell anyone that I'm tired. Ever. Or ill. I keep it to myself. If you are tired, go to bed earlier. Take a sleeping pill. Inhale some lavender, bang yourself smartly on the head. Be really glitzy and hire a private doctor to dose you with propofol. Just don't tell me about it - because I don't care.

(Unless you have a small baby, in which case we will keen and wail together and I will make you tea and say there there.)

My second least favourite thing people say to me is "I'm so busy." Because when you say that, what I hear is "I am incredibly disorganised, I do not know how long an hour is and I don't know how to say 'No'. I am probably also late all the time, but think it makes me seem glamorous."

I do not respect that. I spend my whole life being the fucking bad guy, saying "No, I can't" because I know how long things take; I know what you can reasonably achieve in one day. And it's not very much.

But these days, I sympathise a bit more with people who describe themselves as being a "busy mum". I seem to be in a screaming spin all the time just now, (even though I hate my own guts for saying that), constantly patting my pockets for my keys and racing back into the house five times for bottles, nappies, wallets, shoes. I always seem to be in the car at traffic lights, revving the engine saying "Come on, are you fucking dead or what???!!!!" to the car in front.

Last night I went up to bed - although I didn't actually get into bed and go to sleep - at 8.30pm in order to re-create the kind of idleness I took for granted before I had a baby.

The thing is, Kitty is eating proper food now. Fish fingers and beans, peas, baked potatoes, fish pie, chicken. The whole lot. Nyum nyum nyum, she goes. So I can no longer get away with surviving on cheddar, own-brand chocolate mousse and tea, while spooning shop-bought puree into Kitty's weeny petulant mouth and doing no cooking beyond peeling the lids off takeaway. I have had to hit the stove again. And while I'm cooking for her, I might as well cook for me. Which is good because it means I eat something. But bad because it means I'll probably get fat again. And it's so fucking time-consuming.

Anyway, that's a long way of saying that it's nursery food a go-go around here right now and today it was shepherd's pie. I've only ever made one once and I muffed it by thinking that I was making a bolognese and adding canned tomatoes, which doesn't work at all.

So here we go, shepherd's pie. Take 2.

Serves about four I'd say.
2 packs lamb mince - about 500g each
1 stick rosemary
2 bay leaves (optional)
2 small onions, chopped
some celery, chopped
1 carrot, diced
2 large potatoes
chicken or veg stock if you have it - about 300ml
red wine if you have it - about a large glassful

1 Fry the onions, celery, rosemary stick, bay leaves and carrot together very gently for about 15 minutes. I say this every time because there's always ONE person out there who is very impatient and puts their onions on a really high heat and burns them and wonders why their dinner tastes horrible. Once the onions look translucent and sort of soft around the edges, throw in your glass of red wine and then turn up the heat high and bubble the wine down.

2 In another pan, fry off the lamb mince, then combine your lamb and veg and stock and simmer on the hob, very low, for 45 minutes. Chuck in some salt and pepper.

3 Now you can, of course, just boil and mash your potatoes, but if you steam (25 mins) and rice the potatoes instead, you will get a delicious crunchy potato topping. You can fashion a steamer out of a colander over a pan of boiling water. If you haven't got a potato ricer or a mouli legume then I suppose you're a bit stuffed.

4 Put your lamb mixture in a baking dish and cover with your potato, dot with butter and bake at 180C for about 25 mins.

Then go to bed, for fuck's sake.

Hamburger buns

2011-10-20T14:37:00.000+01:00

A long time ago I thought that this blog would be about me testing out recipes I found in books and then telling you if they worked or not. But then I discovered that it was much more fun writing about me, me, me and my various problems and then tacking a recipe for, like, beans on toast at the end and hoping that no-one would notice that I wasn't really fulfilling my brief.

It became like a sort of free therapy, except that it didn't work and I went mad anyway and am having to get some very expensive therapy in Central London administered by a woman we'll call Dr O.

I went to see her for the first time today. I was ten minutes late because I couldn't find her bastard office and made a small joke about me not being anxious about being late because of all people who would be understanding it would be her. She gave me a pleasant but uncomprehending smile and I realised suddenly that she has no sense of humour. And what the fuck was I doing trying to make my therapist laugh anyway? Grow up.

That's beside the point. My point is that I found in the Hawksmoor cookbook a recipe for hamburger buns, which declared that the secret was to use custard in the dough.

"Awesome!" I screeched. "Custard!!! What fun. I will go back to my roots and test this out and say if it works or not."

And it's the stupidest bloody recipe I've ever done. And I've now decided that I HATE cookbooks especially restaurant cookbooks because they're always written by people who've been cooking for 8 million years and assume all sorts of things about the domestic cook and the recipes are never tested properly and they're always shit.

Say what you like about Jamie Oliver but he's got some proper recipe-testing going on. He doesn't just sling the recipes out to various relatives in a huge panic 5 days before the book goes to the printers, all of whom say they will test the recipes and then don't and lie and say they did and that they're fine causing ME to WASTE MY TIME making stupid hamburger buns that are crap and at least 50% less nice than if I'd just had a crack, blindfolded, at making them off the top of my head.

I mean... *legal panic*...not that I'm saying Hawksmoor doesn't test their recipes properly, I'm just saying that Jamie Oliver does.

Anyway, shall I bother with the recipe? I don't think I will actually. You can have the photo because I know how you all like a photo, but it was such a silly recipe, so lazily done, so inaccurate and unhelpful and rotten than I don't think I'll do it the service of even copying it out here.

Custard! I ask you... Dingbats.

Black pudding and lentils

2011-10-18T13:21:00.000+01:00

I rarely bother writing about "assembly" dinners (i.e. you take a lot of nice things and cook them and have them on the same plate and that's that) because I reckon you can probably work that kind of stuff out for yourself. But I was moved to write about this farewell dinner my husband made for me on Sunday night before disappearing for another week's filming.

We have in this house, I think, quite an odd diet. We don't eat pasta or potatoes except in emergencies and limit fish to very special occasions.

We also rarely - like, never - eat steak or fillet or any prime cuts of anything. Not even free-range organic stuff. We mostly eat the offcuts - belly, shin, cheeks, wings, beaks, feet, ears etc - to assuage our complex feelings about eating animals. By living off these odds and ends we are not the ones driving intensive farming and the slaughter of animals, (killed primarily for "prime" cuts like steak), we are merely mopping up the leftovers, giving a home to the scrag ends that would otherwise go in the bin.

But then this weekend because we were feeling out of sorts my husband bought from the farmers' market some really properly luxe fillet steak. And it was FUCKING AMAZING. We bought too much and roasted it with half a baked potato each (just to keep our spirits up) a couple of marrow bones and a parsley salad and then had the leftovers in sandwiches the next day.

From the same butcher (Twelve Green Acres, if you are interested) we also bought some fantastic black pudding and my husband made it for dinner on a bed of lentils and popped a coddled egg on top. And it was as nice as the fillet steak - just in a slightly different way.

Black pudding and lentils, by Giles

For 2

2 eggs
100g (dried weight) green lentils
1 onion
salt and pepper
1 or 2 discs (each) of the best-quality black pudding you can get your hands on
oil for frying
(We had some tired tomatoes hanging about so roasted them for 30 mins, but by all means leave them out.)

1 Boil your lentils until very soft - about 25 minutes in salted water.

2 In a frying pan fry the chopped onion gently in oil for about 15 minutes. If you had some chorizo knocking about you could fry a few cubes of that alongside it, but it's not essential. I have not included garlic because my friend Henry, who is a chef, said the other day that he's stopped automatically adding garlic to everything he cooks because he thinks it's lazy and makes everything taste the same. But you are free to add garlic if you fancy it.

3 Add the lentils and heat through. Shift the lentils and onions to one side when done and fry off your discs of black pudding in the same pan to save on washing up.

4 If you have an egg coddler, do two eggs in that. If not, poach if you're able to. If not, just fry the buggers.

5 Assemble your dinner by putting down a layer of lentils, then the black pudding then the egg on top.

How to save a stew

2011-10-15T10:10:00.002+01:00

There are in my life perhaps five people (not counting immediate family) I would consider to be my friends. I used to have a lot more than that, but over the last few years I have succeeded, both intentionally and accidentally, in shouldering off all but the most hardcore, trusty lot.

These five are my dead prostitute friends: that is, people I would call if I woke up in a hotel in Las Vegas and there was a dead prostitute in my room.

Three of them - Simon, Slang (girl) and MH (boy) - are criminal barristers. Julia Churchill, who often makes cameos on this blog, is a literary agent and Arnold (girl) is a television producer.

Arnold - a master of logistics - would spirit me out of the hotel and get me a fake passport and a rented flat in Havana, the criminal barristers would keep me from the chair if the feds ever came knocking and Julia would secure me a sweet book deal whatever happened.

They are also terrific in non life-or-death situations, too.

For all sorts of reasons I have been thinking about my DP friends recently and I realise that I've learnt something about friends in the last ten years: it doesn't matter how many you've got. Even if you've only got one: as long as they'll be on the next flight out to Nevada to save your skin, that's all you need.

Speaking of saving things, my husband performed open-heart surgery on the goulash that I had lovingly prepared for him and then BURNT and saved it from the bin.

What happened was this: I made the goulash (q.v.) in the normal way but made it in much too big a pot, so the water bubbled away leaving a trailing mess of burnt pork and peppers.

"Fuck." I said, looking at it.

"No it's fine," said my husband. He scooped out everything except the most burnt stuff, mashed it up in a different, smaller pot, poured over a wineglass of water and then heated it all very gently for about 20 minutes. Then we had it with a lot of buttery macaroni, sour cream and parsley and it was really actually quite nice.

"You can do this with anything that you've burnt a bit," said my husband. "I mean, not completely to a cinder, but the secret is not to disturb the most burnt parts, get out the stuff that isn't burnt and then rehydrate it elsewhere."

So there we go: how to save a stew.

And if you commit any more serious crime than that, in your kitchen or elsewhere, I know some great lawyers.

Sherry and tonic

2011-10-13T13:45:00.000+01:00

The more I think about it, the more I think that maybe not doing much cooking recently is only partly to do with anxiety and more to do with the fact that I've run out of things to cook. It's just good old-fashioned lack of inspiration.

Among duty cooks, (i.e. the person in the household who does dinner on dreary weeknights - as opposed to performance cooks, who do nothing for months and then roast beef for 18 for Sunday lunch), this is known as "cooking fatigue". If left unchecked it can go on indefinitely and result in you alternating roast chicken with spaghetti bolognese for 16 years. At which point your children leave home and you eat soup and cheese every night for the next twenty years. Then you go into an old people's home. And I'll leave it there.

My husband has been away filming for the last few days and I traditionally like to welcome him home from these trips away with something nice for dinner. I say I LIKE to welcome him home with something nice for dinner but usually what happens is he comes home to find Kitty with a cold and the kitchen full of fruit flies.

So this time round I want to nail it. But what, what, what to cook? I can't do fish, because there isn't a fishmonger within my reach who has the correct green cred for my husband. Roast chicken is just a massive cop-out, we're always eating bloody curry, ditto my two vegetarian recipes. My latest "special" (yet easy/impressive) thing is slow-roast pork belly, but we've had that about three times in the last month.

While I mull it over, I may help myself to a sherry and tonic, which is my new favourite drink. It's closely related to the Seventies cocktail-hour favourite, white port and tonic, but sherry works just as well.

Next-eldest sister introduced me to this and we've been drinking it ever since. It's milder and sort of fruitier than a gin and tonic, it's a thirst-quencher, it's festive and doesn't get you instantly hammered [insert weary thing about how marvellous getting very hammered very quickly is here].

As documented, I can't drink these days - I just can't do it. And when I say "drink" I mean drink a lot - (and by a lot I mean so that you say slightly ill-advised things at the time, wake up to pee and take nurofen in the night and then feel a bit green the next day). It's a thing I've decided that I used to do when I didn't have anything else to do. Next-eldest said to me once "You can do it all - you can work and have children and go out. But you have to sacrifice getting pissed."

But once Kitty's a-bed and whatever scrabbled-together dinner we're having is on the go it does seem a shame not to have a weeny drinky. And this is the answer.

It's also a terrific, unusual and very practical thing to offer as a cocktail for a party because it looks nice - fizzy tumblers of pale drinky with clattering ice. If you want to be really fucking classy, add a strip of lemon peel.

You can use any sherry you like, fino or manzanilla. (I'm pretty sure they sell all sorts in Waitrose. Only Schwepps Indian tonic water will do.) If you once had fino sherry and found it to taste like pencil shavings, give this a go anyway because the tonic takes the edge off. And if you don't like tonic, well - I give up.

This post was brought to you by the letters S and C and dedicated to my friend Emelie Frid (@emfrid), who loves sherry and who has been having a shit time because her baby isn't well.

By the way, I wish I had post-natal depression, as some of you have thoughtfully pointed out. But alas, I've always been a jumble of nerves for as long as I can remember. I'm feeling much better now, as it happens, and think back to the dark days of the last fortnight with amusement, wondering if maybe I imagined the whole thing.

But I won't think about it too hard. It will only make me anxious.

Soy-braised tofu with butternut squash

2011-10-10T20:40:00.001+01:00

You've got no idea how time-consuming suffering from crippling anxiety is. All the space that I used to occupy is now occupied by anxiety. There is no room for anything else. That is all there is left of me. All I can do is perform tasks to a very basic level and respond by turning my head when someone says my name. But my eyes are glassy. There's very little left of the person at home.

There is a TS Eliot poem, most of which I don't understand, (I don't understand any poetry, let alone anything by TS Eliot), that says something along the lines of this is me and I am here and everything else is not everything else, rather it is simply everything that is NOT me. Well right now everything in the whole world is only a thing in relation to my anxiety.

I went to see the doctor. My husband politely suggested it might be a good idea. I went with one sole aim: to not cry in his office. I had a shower and washed my hair. I put on non-mad clothes. I put plasters on my fingers where I had been attacking my cuticles and they were sore and bleeding. I put blusher on to hide the fact that I hadn't eaten or slept much recently.

But I cried anyway. Because you do. When you're anxious or depressed and you go to the doctor to ask for a referral to get your head examined (again) you cry. It's just the rules.

This is a long way of saying that I haven't been cooking much. When you suffer from chronic anxiety you tend not to be that interested in food. I've never been that bothered about food, just generally, in life, that's why I never learnt to cook until I had to feed a family. Left to my own devices I would (and have) live off McDonalds and pre-prepared macaroni cheese.

But once my anxiety (trembling hands, multiple night-wakings, constricted throat, leaden weight in the chest, nausea, clenched teeth, clearly hearing my child's cry in my head) has dragged on for a week and I have exhausted all permutations of takeaway, baked potatoes, dinners out and things my husband has cooked I have to return to the stove. And once I have run through my entire repertoire and Recipe Rifle hasn't been updated for nearly three weeks, it's time to hit The File.

The File is a stained purple cardboard file in which I occasionally shove torn-out recipes I mean to test out. Except that I don't always put the torn-out recipes in The File because I quite often lose The File and so shove the torn-out recipe somewhere else and then lose them.

So when I turn to The File, there is often not much interesting in there and always five or so recipes that I know I am never going to try (twice-baked souffle? Sorry, Xanthe Clay, can't be arsed) but am too superstitious to throw out.

Anyway this time I thought it would just pick something at random and cook it. It happened to be soy-braised tofu and butternut squash with spinach.

And it goes something like this:

For 4

1 pack cauldron tofu from Waitrose, about 350g
1 butternut squash
2 star anise
1.5 tbsp soy sauce
thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced
2 tbsp soft brown sugar
250g spinach OR some baby bok choi
1 red chilli, sliced
500ml water

1 Peel and chop up your bastard butternut squash. I have had such bad experiences with butternut squash remaining rock hard after several days' sauteeing that I nuked this fucker in the microwave for about 5 mins before cooking. I advise you do the same. (Chop, place in plastic container with 2 tbsp water. Balance a lid on at a jaunty angle. Toy for the 500th time with putting something metal in there too, just to see what happens. Reject idea, despite living very near a fire station. Press 5 min and hit Go.)

2 Get tofu out and stick it between two chopping boards and then put something heavy on the top to squish all the water out. Leave it for about 15 mins then dice into 3cm-ish cubes.

3 Fry off the tofu in oil and set to one side. Then sautee your butternut squash for 10 minutes (which will be enough if it has been prepped in the m/w).

4 Throw over the squash the ginger, soy, star anise (which I personally don't like, but works fine here so any haters can approach with confidence), sugar and water and the tofu and boil all this briskly for about 15 minutes. The sauce ought to reduce to a syrupy consistency and the squash out to have relaxed but not be complete mush.

5 Take off the heat, add the spinach/bok choi, sprinkle over the red chilli and serve.

Giles loved this but I wasn't that crazy about it so I wouldn't bother with it if I were you.

Go to McDonald's instead.

Paella

2011-09-26T17:11:00.000+01:00

I always - always - look an absolute fright. And as I get older it's less easy to conceal with the virtue of youth. I've concluded that my Hennes addiction is partly to blame, so I have decided that I am no longer allowed to go in. Not even to have a little looky-look.

Although thinking about it, my looking a fright might also be because of my wonky teeth and fat hamster face or my cheeks, which are ruddy like a farmer's son or my fat hands and picked-at cuticles. And my stupid hair, which I wish would just do something consistently. Like even if it was very flat and thin at least it would be consistently flat and thin. Or mad and curly at least it could be consistently mad and curly. But instead it veers in completely random non-wavy directions and really whatever I do with it, by 6pm it's almost always shoved up in some kind of straggly, unflattering bun, which really shows off my double chin to full effect.

I'm being disingenuous; my double chin is receeding, thanks to a combination of a fucking hideous Nazi diet and also every time Kitty gets ill (about once a month) I completely freak out and can't eat anything for 48 hours, which does wonders for shifting "un-shiftable" post-baby blubber. Exercise? Please. If you want to be thin you have to STARVE.

Where was I? Oh yes, right, so I'm back in my pre-pregnancy jeans now. I am secretly hoping to over-shoot past my dream weight (9st 3) and plummet down to, like, 8 and a half stone. Ideally, people will be whispering to each other about how worried they are about me. Eldest sister was so thin at Christmas that is was all we talked about and I was terribly jealous, being as I was then packing about three extra stone.

I've lost my original thought again. Clothes! Ok clothes clothes. All mine are shit. I've just done a purge of loads of drab depressing Hennes clothes so now I open my drawers and see about 40 mulchy Top Shop vests, a kaftan, a brown Zara poloneck and a terminally unflattering breton top from Uniqlo. Then I open my wardrobe and see two hideous check shirts, a flowery shirt with a big rip in it I bought in the South of France three years ago, eight party dresses from 2006 when I had to go to a lot of parties and a pink size eight bodycon skirt from Topshop.

I think starting next month I am going to buy ONE really nice thing per month from Net A Porter (price within reason) and when on the loose in Brent Cross, (fatal), I will write on my hand before I go "DON'T GO INTO HENNES".

For my husband, watching television shows like Come Dine With Me is the equivalent of buying a lot of clothes from Hennes. He prefers instead to pick a film neither of us have ever heard of from Pay Per View, watch two thirds of it, start yawning and say "this isn't really doing it for me". We then discuss whether or not to kill it for about ten minutes. We always do. Then we go to bed. It's almost always about 9pm.

But the other night I managed to persuade him to watch an episode of Father Ted and then Come Dine With Me and someone on it made a paella.

"Paella," said my husband. "Now that's a thing we could eat."

Then we had a short discussion over whether we ought to pronounce "paella" "pie-ay-ya" to avoid sounding like we were addressing the third child of Wayne and Waynetta Slob. We concluded that pronouncing words the local way is just too embarrassing, so pie-ellar it remained.

So he made one, although we didn't have any paella rice, or saffron, or prawns, and we used chicken stock instead of fish stock. So it was sort of a risotto. But it was also very much like a paella. And it was TERRIFIC. We were still talking about it the next day.

This is how he did it, in his own words:

"brown four cooking chorizo in a big shallow pan as much like a paella dish as you have (a wok is a top substitute but any big pan will do) on quite a generous slick of olive oil (this is spanish food so it's meant to be a bit oily) and slice later when they're firm (or slice dried chorizo and fry off, or if you have neither then some pancetta or lardons but you must have some cured pork in there one way or another).

Then into the nice meaty red paprika-y fat, chuck a quite finely chopped green pepper, finely chopped onion, three fat cloves of garlic finely chopped, low heat, maybe five mins, till soft but not brown. at this point i chucked in five or six big chunks of left over cold roast chicken, you could pre-brown four nice thighs first if you haven't got leftovers, but you do need some white meat (the original valencian paella has rabbit instead of chicken, but then it has snails instead of shellfish, which NOBODY wants).

okay, then when the chicken has relaxed into the dish, toss in about 200 grams of rice (this will serve three to four people in the end, or two with leftovers - it's better the next day) and toss that around until all the grains are nicely oiled (now, i didn't have paella rice, i had only risotto rice, but Esther said risotto gets its consistency from all the stirring, not the arborio itself, so i went with a bit less stirring and it worked beautifully).

add some paprika at this stage. mild or hot, doesn't matter, it's mostly for colour, and some chilli flakes or crushed dried chilli, not too much. if you have saffron, now is the time for that too. i didn't. and didn't miss it. i used a bit of tumeric for yellowness (but the bright yellow of a costa del sol paella is all food colouring so don't make that your benchmark unless you have a pot of E102 in the cupboard).

so, fry, fry, fry, um, oh yes, two to four nice firm tomatoes, de-seeded (but i didn't bother to skin, the rolled up skins looked a bit like the missing saffron stamens), chopped as small as you can be bothered. stir, stir, stir. i think that's that stage done.

no, wait, then a big glass of white wine or sherry, in, bring to boil and cook off the booze.

so now you have a couple of pints or so of chicken stock (or better still a prawn stock, but i couldn't get prawns) nice and hot on the stove (always use stock hot in things like this becasue it saves everything cooling down and slowing the whole faff down even more - you cd even get away with boiling water), poor about half of it on, so the rice is covered, about the amount that cd get the rice to almost cooked but not quite. and bubble away a a simmer, not stirring, but maybe poking a bit to make sure all the rice is under, for about ten minutes, by now it should taste pretty good (assuming you've had the nouse to salt it according to your own taste) but still the grains too hard and starchy.

now is the time to lob in a big handful of clams and one of mussels, bought that morning and scrubbed hard under the tap. push them into the top of the rice hinges down so they open gaping upwards and look pretty, and also one nice big squid (emptied and the horn removed obviously) sliced into rings, and the crown of tentacles halved. poke these down into the rice a bit, then cover with foil or a lid, and cook for another ten minutes or so, so that the shells are open, the squid has turned white and opaque and the rice is done. (if you've got prawns then put them in at the same time as the other shell fish but just fry them off for a couple of minutes first).

serve on plates, picking out all the shellfish and making sure it gets eaten becasue it is not so stellar in the leftovers, and garnish with chopped parsley. eat it with a cheap rioja topped up with a splash of lemonade.

i've probably forgotten a couple of things. [Like: he chucked a handful of samphire over it, which you can do if you want or not if not.] it's basically a cross between a jamie, a delia and an anthony worrell-thompson that all come up on the first page when you google 'paella' - but ignore all the websites with "spain" or "spanish" in the name, because that's just wankers going on about authenticity."

Caramel sauce

2011-09-19T13:32:00.002+01:00

It came to me - like Kubla Khan - this morning as I lay somewhere in between waking and sleep.

"Don't look down," I heard. "Don't look down."

It only came to me later what it meant. "Don't look down" may as well be my (rather oblique) personal motto. I try never to look down, never to think about what my other options might be - especially if I am stuck somewhere. Because if I really thought about it I might completely fucking freak out. And that wouldn't help anyone or anything.

I am stuck as this mum person. And it was my choice. And sometimes it's okay but sometimes it's extremely not okay. And so I have decided that my general attitude will be not to look down. Not to check the clock when I know for a fact it's hours until bedtime. Not to attempt to go out and get drunk - ever. Not to seek out the company of people who don't have children. Not to attempt to go anywhere that isn't child-friendly. Not think about anything but what's happening in the next two hours. Not to try to do anything but creep along this ledge I find myself on, slowly, hand over hand, all the while not looking down.

Refusing to look down is a thing I quite often do in cooking, as it happens. Although it works for me in life on a larger scale, in cooking this attitude often means that I will go at a recipe unprepared and rather blindly, assuming it's easy unless I'm told otherwise. And often there are disastrous consequences.

Like this weekend, I wanted to make a caramel sauce to go with a pudding (don't get excited - bought) and I had to go through 3 different recipes before I found one that didn't pretty much explode or set like concrete. I didn't investigate, you see - I didn't read up on what might go wrong. And what might go wrong, if you're me, is that you turn the stove up as high as it will go, nuke everything and make a terrible mess.

But this recipe works as long as you don't excitedly overcook it and caramel sauce is a terrific thing to be able to make. I was mostly excited about being able to decant it into one of my squeezy bottles that I bought from Pages last year and have yet to really find a use for. I drizzled it, without really thinking (naturally), in a zig zag pattern across the plate and brought it to the table to gales of laughter and jokes about the pudding being from 1986.

What can I say? I didn't look down.

Caramel sauce
enough for about 6 people

100g light brown soft sugar
50 butter
200ml double cream

1 Put the sugar and butter in a pan and melt on the lowest possible heat until everything has melted and combined. This may take up to 10 minutes. Be patient.

2 Take the pan off the heat and gently whisk in the cream. If you want to return the pan to the heat that's fine, just make sure it's a gentle one.

Damson jam

2011-09-12T12:06:00.000+01:00

I think I became truly middle-aged the day I got home from university. What I reallly wanted, I decided, was some fucking peace and quiet, Radio 4 and something baking in the oven. I became obsessed with storage solutions, even though I didn't have anything to store, and bookmarked Lakeland and Farrow and Ball.

I had recently got into the West Wing and while I went wibbly like everyone else over the general smart-arsery and political blah-blah (like the easily impressed fool I am) I also fell in love with the sets. That plush, wholesome Americana thing. Tobacco-coloured lamps on polished wood. Rugs on floors. Wide-striped wallpaper. Plantation shutters. Comfort. Quality.

I think it was around about then that I first started having - admittedly rather lateral - thoughts that maybe I ought to learn how to cook. It didn't really happen because I tried one or two things and they didn't work out, so with typical determination and perseverence, I gave up.

But the feeling lingered. That middle-aged feeling, (despite being 22), and for a long time, whenever autumn rolled around, I wanted to make jam. But because I lived at home, which has no fruit trees, and then subsequently in a high-rise flat on Kensington High Street, if I wanted to make jam I would have to buy the fruit to make it, from a shop. And even I knew that there was something not quite right about that.

So I never made jam. But I always wanted to. I made marmalade a few years ago to test out a recipe for a cookbook and in fact it turned out to be quite easy.

Then I went to stay with next-eldest sister in Oxfordshire who suggested I make some jam from then damsons weighing down her tree and using a mash-up of my own bumptiousness and Delia, made some damson jam that worked out really quite well. Alas, in the chaos of packing up for Kitty for even one night I forgot the flaming camera, so there are no dreamy photos of the damson tree in autumnal light.

I can't give you exact quantities, because I didn't weigh anything, but this is the idea of the recipe. Exact quantities can be found on Delia Online.

Damson jam

A quantity of damnsons - about a big saucepan-full
water
A 2 kg bag of caster sugar - you won't use the whole thing but you might as well buy a huge bag just in case

1 Put the damsons in a large pan and fill with water until just covered. Stew for about an hour.

2 Pass the resulting mixture through a colander to get rid of skin and stones. Don't do it through a sieve because you'll be there all week.

3 Set your strained mixture on the highest head you can on the hob. Now, here I added sugar to taste. I don't like a really over-sweet jam and wanted to keep some of the tartness of the damsons. So I shook in as much sugar as I wanted to flavour it. You can do that, or you can follow Delia's quantities religiously, if you don't feel confident going off-road.

4 Now boil the shit out of it. For about 45 minutes, I'd say. My sister turned down the heat after about 25 minutes because the jam was bubbling and "going everywhere". But it still set. To test if your jam is ready, put a small plate in the fridge and after about 40 minutes' boiling dab a blob on the plate and leave it. The coldness of the plate hastens the cooling of the jam and you can only tell whether jam is set when it's cold.

You can sterilise some jars by putting them in a 180C oven for about 5 minutes. Then pour in the jam while it's still warm and runny.

Label artistically and pretend you are a lady novelist living in a river cottage in Sussex.

Coronation chicken sauce - BEST EVER

2011-09-02T10:14:00.004+01:00

So. First holiday as a family. DONE. It was sort of ridiculous. In London, I have a bit of help during the week so I can drive randomly around town playing very loud music and screaming intermittently. But in Sussex there was no-one. Although my husband is a terrifically hands-on kind of guy, it wasn't a situation where I could shout "Bye!" at the door and piss off for two hours.

And it does concentrate the mind. I did spend rather a lot of time thinking about why people have children. Why? I howled this question particularly loudly to myself in my head as I fed a damp, bored and miserable Kitty a bottle in the pouring rain, hiding under a tree in the grounds of Petworth House, which we'd visited because you've got to do something between 2pm and 6pm other than singing "Row Row Row Your Boat" and looking at the clock, or you'll go mad.

Why? It's just so stupid. There you are, having a perfectly nice time and then you completely fuck your whole life up. For ages. I have become one of those people who devours anything written by anyone who is either desperate to have a baby or by someone who regrets not having had children. I can live on that shit for a week.

I always come to the conclusion - as I think everyone does - that the whole sorry business is all just selfish. For example, by having children I hope to achieve two things:

1) To go home. I want so badly to be at home again, in my bedroom with my stuff and my sisters around and my mum downstairs and my dad behind a newspaper somewhere. Adult life frightens me. I don't like things like clubbing very much, or achieveing things in an office environment, or going to smart parties, or acting on the spur of the moment. I just want to go home and potter about. I really like my parents, they are really nice people. I never had a yearning to get out and forge my way in the world. My parents had to evict me at 25. And because I can't go home (my little sister has taken over my old bedroom) the closest thing I can do is make a duplicate, an offshoot like a spider plant, and cross my fingers that it will, somehow, like a metaphorical Dr Sam Beckett, Quantum Leap me back.

2) To have the life my mother has now. God my mum has a great time. Four daughters, none of who turned out to have a drug problem or decided to move permanently halfway across the world, (I always think that says something), who each ring her for a major gossip at least once a week, who deliver her grandchildren she can fuss over - then hand back - and bring to our house life. Life.

When we were little there was an apocryphal tale about my mother leaving next-eldest sister in the bath and she "nearly drowned". With the poisonous cruelty that little children are sometimes capable of, we always used to hold this up as an example of my mother's blatant imperfection.

I remembered this story the other day when I left Kitty propped up with cushions on the sofa for a few minutes to fetch something. The thing I had not realised is that when it happened, my mother's first husband, the father of next-eldest and eldest sister, would have been either dying or already dead from leukemia. My mother would have been about 34. And for a long time, until she met my father, she was all alone. With two small children. Of course she left next-eldest in the bath for a second or two! Eldest sister was probably screaming. Or there was a hammering on the door. Or she smelt burning. Or maybe she just needed to get a towel. And there was no-one else there.

So to have a full house, to have people there, is all my mother wants. And she is wise for it. As I hardly have any friends, and have never been able to do that thing where the few friends I have just come and hang out in my house, there is no question of having some kind of modern "urban" family with lots of glamorous homosexuals scattered about. If I am going to have any sort of family life, I am going to have to make one myself. Literally grow one. And there's no easy way of doing it.

To misquote Madonna: There are no shortcuts to being a family.* So occasionally you just have to fucking suck it up.

As it happens, there are no shortcuts to making a brilliant Coronation Chicken sauce. You can do a pretty grim one with curry powder and mayonnaise and raisins but it's not very nice.

A really serious one was brought round for me by Julia Churchill and it disappeared so quickly and I was so dazed from 4 weeks' solid childcare that it didn't cross my mind to take a photo. And I certainly haven't had, like, four seconds to myself to re-create it. So you're just going to have to do without a snap and simply take my word, on faith, that it's out of this world. Which is it. Really fantastic.

(NB: I am going to the countryside this weekend to see next-eldest sister - who didn't drown - and she has a glut of damsons. So in order to make it up to you, I will take a lot of whimsical pictures everyone can feel all autumnal about.)

I emailed Julia for the recipe and this is what came back. I always think it's best to let people deliver recipes in their own words and these are hers.

"Finely chop an onion and cook slowly till very dark. Add in spices - quite a lot of mustard seed, black onion seed, pepper, cardomom, (spelling?), tumeric, cumin, coriander seed, fennel seed, chilli flakes (loads. I have decided quite recently that food should hurt from time to time), teaspoon of curry powder for that familiar note, tiny bit cinnamon and clove - almost not there. Cook it. Let it cool and mix it with mayonnaise and [mango] chutney and squeeze in some lemon juice if it's cloying. Salt. Chopped coriander at the end. Oooo. Was there anything else? I think that's it.

xxx"

*"There are no shortcuts to being Madonna".

Giles' featherblade stew

2011-08-19T20:05:00.001+01:00

So here we are in Sussex. I am not especially touched by the number of you telling me to merrily enjoy my holiday and not to bother posting. So I might write a hugely long and boring thing (what's new?) to punish you all.

If only because I know next-eldest sister subscribes to this via email and what with three children under 5 I know she's got nothing better to do than read my old cack for 2,000 words.

Here she is:

(That's Kitty, rather than one of hers. Although hers are sweet, you should see them. You know next-eldest sister from previous posts such as "Ginger Cake" and "Aunty Hannah's Courgette Thing". Adrian Gill once talked to me for an entire starter course about how "pretty" her nose is. This is not the first time that's happened to me. So I think that's all you need to know about her.)

Kitty is entirely recovered, you'll be relieved to know. I paid a private GP £8,000 to come to my house and tell me that she needed antibiotics, because no NHS doctor in a million years will tell you anything needs antibiotics even if it is livid with bacteria. Anyway Dr Abelman gave me some amoxycillin without batting an eyelid and Kitty was on the mend within hours.

(And he ALSO, as those of you who follow me on Twitter will know, gave me painkiller suppositories for Kitty. A lifeline with an infant throat infection, which menas they won't swallow the wretched fucking Calpol. He gave me some Nurofen ones he found in Tel Aviv but I went straight out and bought 2 packs of paracetamol ones at £18 a throw. I would now launch into a very long thing about how completely insane it is that infant painkillers aren't available in suppository form wider and more cheaply in this country, but I fear I would bore you. Further. And also elicit awful tedious jokes about suppositories and the French, which I don't want to hear. I no longer think suppositories are remotely funny.)

Sussex is very nice. I chose the house on the basis that it has WiFi and a tumble drier. The only downer is that I think the woman who owns it used to interrogate people for the Stasi because the lighting concept is absolutely fucking terrible! 100 watt horrors shining right in your eyes or hideous energy savers. Brrr.

The house is also close to Cowdray Park Farm shop, which is like Waitrose with only the top 5% of the poshest things available and you can buy things like REN skincare and really delicious takeaway quiche for £5. But in all seriousness, the butcher there is first-rate and my husband is practically hysterical with relief because although he claims to be all folksy and down to earth he is terrified of the dark English countryside where there is only a Spar and local boys tear around on dirt bikes.

The weather has turned slightly and it is very sunny but really quite cold. My packing has let me down a bit, although I have learned from past mistakes and now abide by these packing rules:

1 Do not pack things you never wear at home because you think you might wear them because you're away. You're away but you're still YOU.
2 Do not pack your shittiest clothes because you're away and so it doesn't matter
3 Allow for one very cold day
4 Allow for one very hot day

5 Allow for one very wet day

6 Pack your entire medicine cabinet

7 and the iPad

I did all that but I didn't quite pack enough warm clothes. I'm not one of those people who always anticipates being freezing and packs fleeces and UGG boots because I am not a sticky fashion person who is always cold because they are so THIN living as they do off handfuls of bombay mix and miso paste. But now I do miss my UGG boots. (Although they are not UGG boots, they are called Celt Boots and they are the most marvellous rip off and available here: http://www.celtic-sheepskin.co.uk/) I also miss my Crocs. Why didn't I bring them. I fucking love my Crocs. I won't hear a word against them.

Where was I? Oh yes, the butcher at Cowdray Park. The other day, in the third hour of some pretty heroic childcare, my husband made, while Kitty crashed around the kitchen in her walker, a stew from some featherblade, which is a kind of steak cut from the shoulder. I think. I'm never quite sure about cuts. Anyway the butcher said to cook it for 4 hours, which is the kind of instruction we like in this family, so that's what we did.

And it was terrific and very simple.

Giles's featherblade stew
for 2

2 featherblade steaks

1 medium white onion, quartered (which is just a normal onion, rather than a shallot or whatever)

1 carrot, halved
1 fennel bulb, quartered (leave this out if you don't like fennel)
1 kohlrabi, quartered (this tastes like turnip)
1 large strip of orange peel
1 strip of lemon peel
3 bay leaves
5 peppercorns
1 stick of rosemary
some stock - about 150ml
1 glass red wine

Preheat the oven to 150

1 Brown off the steaks in some veg oil for about 5 minutes until brown all over

2 Put in a pot with a lid with all the other ingredients

3 Cook in the oven for 4 hours with the lid on

Recipe Rifle is away

2011-08-17T12:51:00.000+01:00

I'm in Sussex on "holiday" (DON'T bother burgling me, I've got builders in and a friend staying) and I've forgotten the lead that joins my camera to my laptop. So I can't post any photos. And I know you can't abide a post without a photo so I haven't done anything.

But it's a bit of a shame because it's quite pretty round here and my husband is making some kind of daube of beef thing that I think might be worth writing about.

Should I drive into the local village, Midhurst, and see if someone will sell me this essential cable? Or more likely round here I will have to swap something for it like my shoes, or a pair of Levis or something.

Gravy

2011-08-07T19:14:00.001+01:00

It is 1am and I am lying on the single bed in the nursery staring at the ceiling, listening to Kitty's shallow breathing in the cot next to me. She has just fallen asleep.

She is very ill. Strep throat, a doctor will say two days later. She was boiling - boiling - to the touch with fever when I arrived at her bedside. I got myself ready to adminster some life-saving Nurofen but she didn't want it - gagged and vomited a little bit down herself in protest. So I jammed as much in her mouth as I could, changed her pukey sleeping back, walked her round, waited for her to nod off and then lay down braced for a sleepless night listening to her whimper.

It's a terrible noise, a baby whimpering in its sleep.

And as I lay there in the dark listening to the whimpering and to the nursery clock ticking and the aircon whirring I thought for the first time in a long time "At least I'm not in Australia."

That is my thing, my "At least I'm not..." thing.

I ended up in Australia in the late summer of 2001. I went out with no clear idea of what I was going to do but my sister was out there for a year and I was bored, so I went. My sister was working in some snazzy bar and going out with a very posh Australian - yes they do, in fact, exist - called Jimmy. He was terrific, Jimmy - he was hilarious. Tall with dark hair and long dark eyelashes like a girl. He was always stealing his flatmates' food - usually dinky little take-out pots of spicy asian-fusion salads - late at night when drunk and peckish.

"Hmm..." he would say, his head in the fridge. "What's Polly got in here? A little snacky-snack for Jimmy before bedtime?"

Anyway you get the idea.

I couldn't stay in Sydney with them so I took off up the East Coast. It was boring. I had a shit time. There was one okay week where I worked on a cattle farm and I should have stayed there mucking out the horses and working in the bar, but I moved on in the wrong belief that there was more to see.

What happened instead was that I unwittingly became a thief.

It happened like this:

I was sitting about in some hostel or other with a girl who was going home soon. "Just going," she said "to have a quick rummage round lost property for some flip flops. Mine are broken."

"Is that a thing you do?"

"Yeah there's always great stuff in hostel lost properties. These Miss Sixties?" She said, pointing at her jeans. "Alice Springs. This bag...?" etc.

So off we went to the lost property box. There was nothing that fascinating except a shitty brown t-shirt with red Japanese writing on the front that I thought looked quite unusual. I tucked it under my arm and thought no more about it.

Three days later I was sitting in another dull, depressing hostel somewhere hot and crappy, wearing my scavanged t-shirt, and an angry Irish girl stormed up to me.

"Where did you get that t-shirt?" she demanded. "It was stolen out of my bag. Why have you got it?"

And here is where it went wrong. Why didn't I just say "Found it. Lost property in X. Is it yours? Have it back!!"?

I don't know why not. What I did say, however, was "My sister gave it to me."

Why did I say that? WHY?

Maybe I thought she wouldn't believe the story that I'd found it in lost property and scream "Thief!" at me. I can't be bothered to recount exactly what happened in the days that followed but it was nasty. The angry Irish girl and her friend accused me to everyone they could find of having stolen her t-shirt. And the Eastern Coast of Australia turns out to be a very small place. I somehow kept up with my lame story that it was mine.

They followed me up the coast for three days, telling everyone at every hostel that I was a thief. Hissing at me as they passed me that I was pathetic. Then one day the angry Irish girl's friend came up to me and said that they'd called the police. By then I had lost all sense of perspective and couldn't see that it was obviously total fucking rubbish. I'd had enough. I hadn't eaten for about three days or really slept. I am an anxious person, you see, and being accused of being a thief is something I can't really style out.

I went to my rucksack and took out the t-shirt. "If I give this to you," I said. "Do you promise to leave me alone and never speak to me again?"

I saw, on the girls' face, a flicker of doubt that she and her angry Irish friend were right.

"I'm not an arsehole, you know," she said.

"Sure," I said, and handed her the t-shirt.

Then that night, in the middle of the night, I split. I took a taxi to a hostel well off the beaten tourist path, filled with cattle station hands and middle-aged women travelling cross-country to see newborns. And that was that.

It's bothered me for years, that incident - although with hindsight I didn't really do anything that bad. Just really thick. But still, I have never told anyone that story. Not. A. Soul.

(A week later I arrived back in Sydney and went straight out and got a tattoo. I've always wondered if the two things are connected.)

The day before I flew back to London the twin towers collapsed. (It was interesting getting on an international flight via the Middle East on 12/09/01, I tell you.) Then about three years later, Jimmy killed himself. I won't go into how. And I simply don't know why. Oh, and someone gave me fucking chlamydia.

So that's why however crumby things are, I'm glad I'm not in Australia.

Although I think I am one of the few people to have enjoyed the film.

I have newly fallen back in love with my husband. Not that I was ever out of love with him but in the last few days I have been crawling around after him screaming "I love you! I worship you! Please marry me!"

The thing is, he comes into his own when there's something wrong with the baby and I am simply vomiting in a corner with anxiety, ringing NHS Direct and crying. My husband takes charge, shooes me out of the nursery, won't let me near the baby monitor and makes me dinner.

All we had in the house was some beef, which he decided to roast - "Although I know we're not celebrating or anything," he said. "I know we're all in mourning because Kitty's got a cough."

And he wanted to make a gravy to go with it.

Gravy is something that can appear daunting but actually it's okay if you give yourself a bit of time.

For gravy, you need:

1 The pan that something has roasted in

2 Some shitty alcohol (even this is optional, really)

3 Some flour or cornflour

4 Some stock or vegetable cooking water

Roughly to make a gravy, take the roasting pan and "de-glaze" with shitty cooking wine. This means you place the pan over a medium flame and pour in some alcohol, about half a wine-glass full I'd say. Then you scrape at the pan and get all the roasty bits and sticky bits off the bottom.

Then reduce this until it becomes glossy-ish round the edges. Reduce the heat and take the pan off the flame. Sprinkle over some flour - about a tablespoon. With the pan off the heat, mush this all round until it is a paste.

Now add some of your liquid - either stock or some veg cooking water - to the pan still off the heat. Mix this round until vaguely combined.

Then put the pan back on the heat and add some more sloops of stock or cooking water. Simmer it briskly until it starts to thicken thanks to the flour.

Pour over your roast dinner.

Then take a Valium. Or three.

Nigella's mexican lasagne

2011-08-03T13:04:00.000+01:00

I once read in a magazine - I forget which one now - a problem on the problem pages that went something like this:

Q. My husband refuses to pick his towel up off the bathroom floor. It drives me demented. How can I punish him?

A. Instead of wanting to punish him, why don't you think to yourself, as you pick the towel up off the bathroom floor, of all the nice things he does for you without you asking? It is little act of devotion like these that keep marriages going.

Here are some of the annoying things that my husband does:

- He doesn't pick up the bathmat off the bathroom floor

- He clears his throat in quite an annoying way

- He steals my car key because he can't be bothered to find his, then accuses me of having used, and lost his key (thus forcing him to use mine).

- He will turn to me and say "Shall I have a shower? Or not?"

- If the TV is on and he wants to say something, rather than finding the remote and pausing the programme he will shout "PAUSE!", which is my cue to find the remote (under his bum, usually) and pause the programme for him so he may deliver his opinion.

- He will suddenly decide that the house is a mess and pick things up randomly (an unopened letter, a pair of flip flops, a baby's toy) and say "What's the story with this? Should it be here?"

- He will walk into his own kitchen and wonder aloud where we keep the knives, forks, salt, pepper, plates and so on

Here are some of the annoying things that I do:

- I pick at my cuticles. Constantly.

- I clear my throat in a nice way. But I do it ALL the time

- I never open my post, particularly anything that looks financial

- I interrupt all the time.

- I give my husband death stares

- I am a sluttish washer-upper

- I call the baby "Kitty-Cookan-TIS"

- I sometimes only empty half of the dishwasher and then wander off to do something else and forget to unload the rest

- I throw money (his) at any problem

- I leave the area around the toaster a mess, attracting ants and wasps.

- I don't make the bed

Here are the nice things that my husband does for me:

- He doesn't make me go and get a job

- He does my tax

- He takes out all the bins and deals with the compost

- He sorts out the cars, the tax for the cars, the maintenence of the cars

- He doesn't make me see people I don't like

- He'll make any phonecall for me that I'm too scared to make

- He cleans all my hair out of the trap in the shower

Here are the nice things that I do for my husband:

- I hang up the bathmat

- I always make sure there is enough deodorant, shampoo, showergel etc in the bathroom

- Ditto for the kitchen

- Ditto stamps, birthday cards and wrapping paper

- I sort out dinner, pretty much every night

- I will fire anyone that he feels too guilty to fire

- I don't give him shit about going out and getting drunk

- I don't give him shit about his swearing or bad taste jokes

- I don't give him shit about doing more childcare

Whenever my husband has done something annoying and I feel enervated, I always run those lists through my head. It's what my marriage balances on, like a fat elephant on a plank of wood on a ballbearing. But a few years ago, I realised that my husband was NOT aware that there was this careful balancing act going on. He did not think, as he ignored my throat-clearing, cuticle-picking, death-staring grotesqueness, that he was simply keeping up his end of the bargain. He believed that he was bearing the brunt of marital irritation, while I sailed through life blithely un-irritated. One day, things exploded in a terrible row about me not making the bed.

I won't lie, there were tears.

Then I explained about the list. About the importance of acts of devotion. And he got it, more or less.

And that's why I'm always sorting out dinner; it's part of the deal. It's why I try to find new things to cook, rather than just doing a roast chicken or pasta over and over again. If it's going to be my area, I might as well having a big repertoire. It makes everything easier.

Which explains why I tried out this slightly weird Mexican Lasagne, by Nigella. I thought it looked fun. It is, like many Nigella recipes, not very subtle. And like everything that used canned tomatoes, it ends up tasting a lot like canned tomatoes. But it's a good one to have up your sleeve to pull out when things are getting a bit samey.

This is not Nigella's exact recipe but it is close enough. The exact one can be sourced easily on the internet.

Mexican lasagne

Serves 4 hungry people, or 6 less hungry, with a salad

1 pack flour tortillas

2 cans chopped tomatoes

1 can sweetcorn

1 can black beans

2 red chillies

1 large onion

2 cloves garlic

1 small bunch coriander

2 tsp mild chilli powder

salt

1 red pepper, roughly chopped, or a jar of peppers in oil, chopped

two big handfuls cheese - manchengo, monteray jack or cheddar

Preheat oven to 180

1 Chop the onion, garlic, chillies and red peppers and sweat in a pan with some veg oil for about four minutes, then sprinkle over the chilli powder and cook for a further 10 minutes over a low flame. Then add the tomatoes and chopped coriander and simmer for about 10 minutes.

2 In a separate pan put the black beans and the sweetcorn, heat up and mix around.

3 Now layer the tomato sauce, bean mix, grated cheese and flour tortillas (2 per layer) to make up a lasagne. I'll leave you to decide the best way of doing it, but it's good to finish off with a layer of tortillas and then cheese for a bubbly brown top.

4 Bung in the oven for 30 minutes.

You can eat this with yoghurt or guacamole or any other Mexicany-type thing you can think of, while you ponder the secrets of martial bliss.

action shot

Tofu curry

2011-07-27T13:14:00.001+01:00

God I fucking hate summer so much.

I know I've said this before, but it's worth saying again. Hate, hate, hate. I would try and blame it on my parents somehow, in the way that I manage to blame everything else on them, but I think summer may be my problem.

Where did it all go wrong? We had pretty dreamy summers as children, I think. Big garden, swing, making mud pies, all that. It was in my teens that things took a turn for the bad.

I often thought that working might be a good idea before I learned that London in August is a cauldron of awfulness and every day that you are there you feel a bit self-conscious, like you really ought to be on holiday. I always felt that the city was looking at me in mild curiosity the way that people do when you go back to school after you've left sixth form. "What are you doing here? Why are you here?"

And nothing happens. It's so boooorring. Day after day of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. If I do anything for my child it will be to send it to get tennis lessons, so it will have something to do in the summer. I have already started trying to make friends at Kentish Town city farm, so Kitty's got somewhere to go when I boot her out of the front door on summer holiday mornings, light a fag and shout "Don't come back til it's dark."

The only solution is to go away for as long as financially feasible in August. If that means staying in the UK, so be it. We went to France last year and were eaten alive by mosquitoes the size of kittens and rained on for 1 week solidly. So this year we are going to Sussex to see if anything happens there.

Now, don't laugh at me about this tofu curry. I haven't turned into a hippy, I was just curious about tofu. I have never cooked with it before and thought I ought to rectify this because I always eat it in Chinese restaurants and think it is nice. So the other night I made a tofu curry and it was really fantastic and I was very pleased with it.

If you've never cooked with tofu, don't be scared. The secret is prepping it. So you get a block of it in a packet (I used some by Cauldron from ... all together now... WAITROSE!), take it out, drain it, wrap it in kitchen towel and then press it between two chopping boards weighed down with something heavy [insert joke about my fat ass here].

I did this for 10 minutes, but I think next time I will do it for 20. It makes the tofu tighter and more likely to take on colour and texture when you fry it off, which you do in a pan with some oil in. It takes a while to fry off - about 20 minutes to do a really good job.

As with all veggie curries, this requires a lot of ingredients, but it is worth it. And it'll give you something to do to pass the time until summer's over.

Esther's tofu curry

For the curry paste

2cm knob fresh ginger

1 chilli, seeds in or out, up to you

1 tsp tamarind paste (don't worry if you haven't got it)

2tsp soy sauce

1 tsp fish sauce

2 kaffir lime leaves (if you have)

2 cloves garlic

2 spring onions

1 heaped tsp tomato puree

1/2 tsp runny honey

1/2 bunch coriander (if you have)

then,

1 block tofu

1 large can or two small of coconut milk

and any combination of

sugar snap peas

beansprouts

bamboo shoots

baby sweetcorn

baby pak choi

1 Prepare the tofu as described and chop into chunks. Put all ingedients for the curry paste in whatever manner of whizzing machine you possess and whizz.

2 Fry off the curry paste for about 5 minutes over a medium flame. Fry off the tofu, add to the curry paste and stir. Add the coconut milk and stir further, being careful not to mash up the tofu blocks. Let this simmer for a few minutes.

2 Drop in your other veg and let the whole lot simmer for 5 minutes. If you're using pak choi, put a lid on your pan to help it all steam.

NEW! Follow by email

2011-07-20T09:50:00.000+01:00

Please note the new "Follow by email" button to the right of this post.

I think it means when I put down the baby, the laundry, my phone, my diary, the grouting tool and a washing up sponge and sit down to write a sporadic new post, you will be alerted by email.

Please note that I do not understand how this works so if something goes wrong, like you don't receive it, or you receive it 8 times, you are welcome to email me to complain, but I probably won't be able to do anything about it.

Apple and raspberry crumble for AC

2011-07-19T09:38:00.000+01:00

Listening as I was to Magic FM in the nursery the other day, I was reminded of a thing that I always forget about, which is that in 2004 I went on a date with Jason Orange from Take That.

It happened like this: I was working at The Week, which as I'm sure you all know is a news digest magazine, and their offices used to be on Westbourne Grove, Number 90 - next to Sainsbury's Local. The combination for the keypad was 2589 and last time I walked past the building and keyed it in, it seemed they hadn't changed it. Next time you're walking past, why not try it?

Anyway, there were always famous people wandering past the office, because it's Westbourne Grove and the famous people who don't live in Primrose Hill live in Westbourne Grove or thereabouts. I saw loads, all the time: Brett Anderson from Suede, Jason Donovan. All sorts.

One day our buzzer rang, which was unusual because we never really got any deliveries or any visitors. I picked up the intercom but couldn't hear the person at the other end. So I went downstairs and there was Jason Orange.

"Hello," I said, wondering if he was lost.
"Hi, are you The Week?" he said.
"Yes we are," I said.
"I was wondering... can I have a look at one of your magazines? Only... I've heard good things about it but can't find it in any of the shops."
"Oh yeah," I said. "It's mostly subscription only. Come in and wait for a sec and I'll get you some copies."

So I left Jason Orange standing awkwardly in the cheese-smelling foyer of Number 90 Westbourne Grove while I went upstairs and got him some back copies of The Week. I didn't want to take him upstairs because I didn't want to expose him to the prying eyes of my colleagues. He seem guileless, naive, unaware that he was INCREDIBLY FAMOUS, but I knew if he came into the office it would be a piano-stopping moment. So I left him down there, like a pair of dirty shoes.

I came back with about 18 old copies of The Week.

"Thanks very much," he said, charmingly.
"The number to ring if you want a subscription's just there," I said, pointing to the number for subscription enquiries written in red, that no-one ever seemed to notice, always ringing us in the office to complain that Issue 435 hadn't arrived and this was the second time it had happened.

I waved goodbye to Jason Orange from Take That and went back to my photocopying. Then two days later he rang the office and asked me out on a date.

I wish I hadn't gone. I wish I'd just said "I'm sorry, I've got a boyfriend." It was true, I did have a boyfriend and I said I did. But I said I'd go for a drink with him anyway. Out of sheer bloody, morbid curiosity. Take That are incredibly popular and famous again now, but back then they were toxic dodos. I wanted, to be honest, to see how fucked up he was. The answer was: not really. I think I'm probably more fucked up for wanting to see how fucked up he was. It caused a terrible row with my then boyfriend. But he ran off with another girl two months later anyway, so I choose not to feel too bad about that.

Anyway on balance I don't think it's a very good idea to be in a boy band.

My friend AC has just had a baby and I am going round there to deliver her my baby death alarm, which is a thing you put under a mattress that tells you if the baby's stopped breathing. It's very useful, if you can work out how to stop it from going off all the time for no reason. I'm also taking round a crumble I made from actual fruit out of our garden, where it is currently raining raspberries and apples. I made it into one of those crappy foil take-away tins you can get from a certain sort of hardware shop because a) I can't spare a pudding tin (I'll never see it again, let's face it) and b) it means she doesn't have to do any washing up.

You can use whatever fruit you like for this, it doesn't have to be apples and raspberries. The interesting thing about this crumble is the topping, which is not a crumble crumble but a sort of flapjack lid, which is far superior, in my view.

Whatever fruit you're using, just stew gently in a pan for about 15 minutes with a splash of water and add sugar later if you think it needs it.

I have written about this before, but I get the feeling some of you weren't listening, so I think we'd better go over it again.

I'm going to be bold and say that quantities for this don't really matter. You need about 4 parts rolled oats (Scots porage oats will do), to 2 parts butter and brown sugar plus a large pinch of salt. Yammer it all up in a processor. You ought to get a soft and cohesive rubble, which you press all over your fruit and shove in a 180C oven for 20 minutes. If your mixture is not soft and cohesive (with some fly-away bits, obviousy), then add more butter.

I know that this is out of character for me, who is such a stickler for recipes, but I did it a few times, just by eye and it worked out. And I'm a fucking cack-handed moron, so you should be okay.

Jamie's Thai Red Curry

2011-07-18T16:19:00.001+01:00

I had to take this photo on the hoof with my crappy Nokia, which is why it's so bad. I mean, I sort of wonder why I'm bothering with it, but you do all make such a fuss if there aren't pictures every ten seconds. If you want a nice picture, you can find one here

My husband used, for a long time, to go out with Katie Razzall off the Channel 4 news. She is very grand, Katie - tall and blonde and looks like you'd never find her hunched in a corner picking her cuticles with anxiety about having to take her 5.5 month old baby to Norfolk for the weekend. For example. She is married to a terrifically handsome actor called Oz, who is the sort of person that people having a party feel very relieved to see coming up the path.

They invited us round for dinner, which was very exciting because no-one ever invites us round for dinner, ever. I think it's because they are worried about cooking for my husband but my husband thinks it's because everyone hates us. As with everything in life, I think it's probably a combination of the two.

Katie made this Thai Red prawn curry out of Jamie's 30 Minute Meals and it was really storming success. My husband ate so much that he woke up in the middle of the night with a tummy ache and a sweat on.

We briefly talked about how Jamie's 30 Minute Meals don't take 30 minutes, which I always get very upset about because they DO take 30 minutes to actually make but he means 30 minutes with all your ingredients and all your chopping boards and everything already to hand. So no, from a cold standing start in an empty kitchen, they don't take 30 minutes BUT HE NEVER SAID THEY DID. I didn't say any of this at all because my policy in public these days is just to smile and say nothing controversial.

My husband has other ideas and wound everyone up all night by saying how terrific he thinks Rebekah Brooks is. I silently agreed because I have been on the receiving end of a Rebekah Brooks love-bomb and I've still got hearts and little tweeting birds circling round my head.

So, this is Jamie's Thai Red Prawn Curry, for 4.
It can be found on p.132 of 30 Minute Meals.

2 stalks lemongrass
1 fresh red chilli
2 cloves garlic
bunch coriander
2 red peppers in oil (you can get these in a jar from waitrose)
1 heaped tsp tomato puree
1 tbs fish sauce
2 tbs soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
2cm piece fresh ginger
8 large unpeeled raw tiger prawns
200 sugarsnap peas
220g small cooked prawns
1 400g tin coconut milk

1 Put everything except the prawns, coconut milk and peas into a food processor and give it a good whizz. This is your curry paste.

2 Heat some oil in a pan and fry the tiger prawns for about a minute. Then add a tablespoon of the curry paste and fry for another minute. Tip all this into a dish and put in a 200C oven for 8-10 minutes.

3 Put your prawn pan back on the heat with more oil. Add the peas and the small prawns. Tip over the rest of the curry paste and stir round for a minute or two then add the coconut milk, stir and leave to simmer on a low to medium heat for 10 minutes.

You serve the prawns on the side with some lime wedges and rice and a finger bowl is useful, too.

It's tremendous, really - with all sorts of fish, I imagine not just prawns.

Moules Mariniere

2011-07-16T13:08:00.001+01:00

I suppose now's a good a time as any to tell you about the time that I refused to go to school for a year when I was eight.
I hated school – I mean really hated it. It was a total chore and twice a day they shoved you into a freezing cold playground and at lunchtime you had to eat some gross cling-film tasting cheese and pickle sandwiches you’d brought with you, which had been festering in a warm corner of the lunch room all day.

Lunchtimes, in fact, were the worst of the worst. It was the smell of the lunchroom, for a start. All the kids who had a hot lunch went first and they always made such a giant, disgusting mess. Whenever you went to sit down, there was always a big smear of gravy somewhere, or a little puddle of mashed potato. It made me feel utterly sick. And then there were my own gross packed lunches.

It was always cheese and pickle sandwiches and a box of sour own brand orange juice and, like, a Penguin or something. Once when I was trying to get the gross smell of cheese and pickle out of my lunchbox, I thought it would be a good idea to spray some perfume inside it, so I sprayed some of my mother’s Anais Anais into it. It totally didn’t work. But instead of saying to my mum, oops – please can I have another lunchbox? I just kept using it, day after day, this gross, perfume-smelling lunchbox rather than telling her. And so my sandwiches were not only gross cheese and pickle, but they also tasted of perfume. If I close my eyes and think hard I can smell it now.

I don’t know why I didn’t tell my mum. It’s not like she was scary and horrible or anything – she is mostly a total pushover. Perhaps that’s just what you’re like when you’re little, you just don’t think to tell people things. Like those kids that you always get at school who’d rather wee in their knickers that ask the teacher if they can go to the loo.

So it all got too much and I started throwing up every day before I was supposed to go to school. I can’t remember if I made myself sick or I genuinely vomited with fear and anxiety each day, but I remember knowing that I wasn’t really ill. I remember knowing that I was faking it. Most of all, I remember feeling envious of those lucky little shits who got nosebleeds. Imagine! Imagine having something so real and obvious wrong with you! Something that people absolutely could not dispute – actual blood coming out of your head! Undisputable.

Eventually the battle to get me to go to school got too much for my mother and she and dad decided that I ought to be taken out of school and taught at home.

And so for a year, I didn’t have to go. I had a tutor, three times a week. It must have been terrible for my parents, and annoying for my sisters, who were twelve and fifteen at the time, who both had to go to school as normal. But I loved it. I was in heaven. And I did pretty well at home with the tutor, who was nice to me and patient and taught me everything I needed to know about everything.

For that whole year, I knew that there wasn’t really anything wrong with me. I just didn’t want to go to school and no-one was inclined to force me.

But ever since then, I’ve been fearful that people might think I’m faking it when I’m ill because I spent a whole year faking it. I assume everyone knows all about that episode on my life – that I would make myself sick and refuse to go to school just because I didn’t want to go.

And it means that even when I’m ill – really, really, ill – I feel like I don’t deserve to be ill. I’ve used up all my ill allowance. And on top of that ever since then I've been off-kilter, the weirdo, the one who doesn't fit in. I was the girl who didn't go to school.

But rather than trying to make myself as normal as possible and blend in with the crowd (not easy when you've got red hair and teeth the size of tombstones) I decided to say Fuck You Yeah so what, Yeah, I'm the weirdo, what of it?

This was a mistake. And I've only learnt too late in life that most of the time, you just want to be taken for another face in the crowd.

My general recalcitrance has extended to certain foodstuffs. For example, I have always refused to make moules mariniere because everyone bangs on about how easy and marvellous it is, which has always made me think "Well then, I will not make what it is you scumbags are having. I will make a PORK PIE because I am that special and cool."

But I decided the other day that I reallly ought to give it a go. And I did and it worked very well and it is now pretty much our Sunday night dinner staple. You do need very fresh mussels though, do try and avoid anything shrink-wrapped or anything that smells suspiciously bad. Like, say, cheese and pickle sandwiches with a hint of Anais Anais.

Moules Mariniere for 2

Enough mussels for 2 - a good fishmonger, which is where I hope you will purchase your mussels, ought to be able to guide you.
1 medium onion or 2 shallots
butter, about 50g
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 large glass shitty white wine
1 handful parsley
a sloop of cream, if you want

1 Scrub and de-beard your mussels, discarding any that are open. [NB mussels open when they are warm, so make sure you apply your Is This Open? technique to cold mussels.] WHAT a tedious fucking job scrubbing them is. Hateful. Get someone else to do it if you can. The "beard" is that feathery bit of grossness that emerges from between the two halves of mussels I suppose that attaches the thing to its rock. Anyway, pull it off, give the whole thing a scrub and dump it in a bowl. *Clang*

2 In a pan on the hob, large enough to hold all your mussels, melt 25g of the butter and some veg or olive oil sautee very gently the onion and garlic for about 10 minutes. Then pour in your large glass of shitty wine and bring to the boil.

3 Sling in the mussels then put a lid on and cook on a high heat for a good 4-5 minutes. If you are very daring you can cook them for less long and just scoop them out as they open. But I like my seafood cooked properly, so I do them for 5. Discard any that have remained closed. [You know, I think it might be this open/closed discarding thing that's always put me off mussels. Just too confusing.] Put the mussels somewhere to keep warm.

4 Strain the cooking liquid through a sieve into another pan. Giles always thinks this is unneccessary but I think it is nicer not to have chunks of onion everywhere. You can do what you like. Boil the cooking liquid hard until it has reduced by about a third. Keep tasting it until it turns from winey and gross to tasting like something you might find in the bottom of a bowl of moules mariniere. Take off the heat and stir in some cream if using.

5 Scoop out some mussels into a bowl, pour over some of the cooking liquid and scatter with parsley. Eat with bread and butter and dread Monday morning.

Red mullet with black olives

2011-07-08T18:29:00.001+01:00

I can't do parties anymore. I used to be really good at them, but I just can't anymore. I can't drink, I can't make conversation and I can't stay up late.

It makes me feel like such a dick. I used to love a party. Though I was never, let's face it, the first or the last one on the dance floor or the one swept out with the fag butts at 5am, I went, I drank, I laughed, I had a good time.

Now when an invitation drops on our doormat I make a face. My husband and I argue briefly about whether or not we should go and we always decided that we probably ought to because otherwise we will just go mouldy sitting at home watching Californication.

I think about what to wear three minutes before we leave and end up putting on the same plain back jersey dress I have been wearing to parties for about 5 years, "jazzed" up with whichever necklace I bought from Anthropologie most recently. Then I put on eyeliner (but not mascara because it's such a pain to get off) while my husband puts the baby to bed.

I open the door to Kate, our teen babysitter who lives a few doors away, who is so thin and beautiful that I'd refuse to have her in the house if she wasn't so nice. I talk to Kate for a bit, wishing I was staying in watching telly with her, not least because her mum brings her dinner round and it always sounds really nice. But then we leave, driving (because I won't get pissed) and arrive unfashionably early. I gratefully suck down one aperitif, feel a bit dizzy, poke my dinner around and start wanting to go home at 11pm.

The other night we went to a party and the wife of a very famous person came to talk to me. We'd met before a few times. She was very drunk. "You've got suchajewish name," she slurred. "The MOST JEWISH NAME EVER," she shrieked. I stood there, with my hands in the pockets of my Topshop maternity jeans that I am still wearing and felt self-conscious in the not-very-me Gharani Strok blouse I bought from TK Maxx and gave her the smile I give to drunks and lunatics.

At least, I thought to myself, I am not wearing the black jersey thing.

"Do you smoke? Do you wanna fag?" she said. No, I don't smoke, I said. But I'll come and keep you company outside. "Do you wanna do a line?" she said and giggled. I blinked a few times and looked at her, feeling more square, I think, than I have ever felt in my life. I towered over her in my stupid clumpy Boden wedges. "I can't," I said. Which was not true. Of course I could. I just didn't want to. I should have just said that. "No thanks," I ought to have said. "I don't really want to." But instead I said something about having to get up early.

Then instead of vanishing as soon as her head was turned (drunks never notice when you do this) I actually accompanied her out into a street and stood there while she smoked a cigarette. I felt like I was back at school, hovering at the arm of the coolest girl in my year who will occasionally suffer my presence. There were a lot of people on the street from the party also smoking cigarettes, sucking up to the woman I was with because she is married to this very famous man and I felt like even more of a hanger-on and a wanker. But I didn't slip away back into the party. I just stood there, unable to think of anything to say. She finished her cigarette and we went back into the party. I walked in behind her and made my alarm face and frantic jazz hands at my husband behind her head.

She turned and suddenly threw her arms round me and blew a raspberry on my cheek and hissed "I don't like your husband much. My husband loves him. I don't really get it." Then she made a beeline for the bar.

It being 11pm, I insisted to my husband that we leave immediately.

This has been bothering me ever since. She has some children and a job, that woman. But she goes to parties and gets drunk and does drugs and makes a complete fucking mad spectacle of herself but she doesn't care and just carries on with her life regardless. Whereas I have one tiny baby and no job and I've decided this means that I can't ever drink again. Maybe I'm just using it as an excuse. Maybe I never enjoyed parties or drinking in the first place and domesticity is just a key to unlock my inner square and let her run free.

Olives are a thing that people always tell you to put with fish and I'm sceptical. But the other night we roasted a red mullet with lemon, parsley and black olives and it was terribly nice and worth doing if you can get your hands on a really fresh red mullet from somewhere.

I think this is from the River Cafe cookbook, which is always telling you to do things like put a fish in the oven covered with olive oil and a few select herbs and then charge £200 for it.

Red mullet with black olives

1 red mullet
about 20 black olives, roughly chopped
a large handful of parsley, roughly chopped
one lemon, halved
olive oil
salt

1 Preheat your oven to 180C.

2 Wash the fish and put it in a roasting dish or tin. Sprinkle over salt, drizzle over a good sloop or two of olive oil, scatter over the parsley and olives and put the halves of lemon, cut side down either side of the fish.

3 Roast in the oven for about 20 minutes.

I think we had this with new potatoes. Or it could have been sourdough. At any rate, it was really very nice. And I hate fish.

Mutton in Port

2011-07-03T21:08:00.002+01:00

Often it's not big things that can really make your day, like being proposed to, getting a new job that will allow you to maybe actually tell your shitty bastard boss to Fuck Off on your last day, finding out you haven't got that life-threatening disease you thought you had, or waking up thinking it's Monday and then remembering that it's Saturday.

Sometimes, it's the little things. Finding in your drawer a spare weirdly-shaped battery for that clock whose second hand has been twitching backwards and forwards for two months, for example. Or going to the shops to buy a microwave and finding that it fits exactly in the space you need it to, despite having forgotten to take any measurements. Or getting in the car to find that someone else has filled it up with petrol.

Or finding something to do with the clattery collection of vegetables that have been staring at you accusingly for the last week.

We are inundated with vegetables at the moment because my husband has become obsessed with the Saturday farmer's market at Parliament Hill. We used to go together and he would skulk about behind me saying "What about a cabbage? What about some tomatoes? What about some mussels?" all of which I'd say no to, because all I wanted to do was buy a chicken, get a sausage sandwich from the sausage sandwich van and go home. (Sometimes I see people at the market pretend to come and do their weekly shop, but actually all they've really come for is a sausage sandwich.)

Now I send my husband off on Saturday mornings by himself and he loves it. With no limits on his enthusiasm or spending he goes perfectly nuts and buys everything. He once took Kitty and came back with her slung over his shoulder like a sack of carrots because the buggy was full to brim with haunches of venison, racks of lamb and eighteen different kinds of vegetables.

It's all very marvellous, but the vegetables don't half sit about looking glum after a week or two. My inclination is to throw the whole lot in the compost, put it down to bad judgment and swear never to buy kohlrabi again, but my husband decided that this was the wrong attitude, and instead turned the whole lot into a stew using a leg of mutton he had purchased from someone at the market. We're not eating lamb anymore. We've decided that it stinks the house out. And lambs are cute. Although I know that's pathetic.

Anyway so here we go, an entirely original recipe, by Giles. This is excellent, although it takes 4 hours to cook.

Mutton in Port

Pre-heat your oven to 130C

1 leg of mutton. Purchasable, probably, at your local farmer's market or at a nearby butcher. Not sure if Waitrose does it
2 onions, chopped
2 bulbs garlic, chopped
4 sticks of celery, chopped
1 kohlrabi, or turnip, or celeriac or swede or any other root vegetable giving you the eye from the corner of your veg box
3 small carrots, left whole
1/2 a bottle of the cheapest port you can find. Real piss. You can sub red wine
1 mugful of stock, packet is fine
oil for sauteeing, salt, pepper
As many herbs as you can lay your hands on: bay, parsley, sage, thyme, rosemary, oregano (not mint) tied up together with string. Any combination of these, or none at all, is fine.

1 In a large casserole brown the mutton all over thoroughly, for about 20 minutes, over a medium flame, in some veg oil. Sunflower or groundnut will do. Please not olive oil because it will burn and taste horrible. Set to one side on a plate

2 In the same casserole sweat over a low flame the onions and celery for about ten minutes. Sprinkle over a good pinch of salt to stop the onions from burning. Towards the end of the cooking time, add the garlic and the herbs so they, too, don't burn and taste bitter.

3 Pour in your half bottle of pissy plonk and mug of stock. Cook off the alcohol but don't worry about reducing it right down. About 2 minutes fast simmering ought to do the trick. Then add in the mutton, carrots and any other root veg. Cook in your oven with a lid on for 4 hours.

4 When it's done, remove the whole vegetables and the joint and strain the cooking water of the herbs, onions, garlic and celery. Then leave the cooking liquid to settle for half an hour and skim off the good 1/2 inch of fat that will appear. If you're making this to eat the next day (which is a good idea, because it's superb re-heated) leave the cooking liquid in the fridge overnight and scoop out the fat even more easily.

We ate this with a lot of buttery macaroni, which sounds like a weird thing to have with it but it worked very well.

Mumsnet

2011-06-29T19:34:00.002+01:00

You may often notice and appreciate that I don't have much extra stuff on this blog. There isn't any advertising, flashing lights, signs telling you that I am number #457 on the Urban Spoon index of food bloggery, or links to Ocado, or Amazon, or other people's websites, or hit rate counters or links to my Twitter feed.

I pretend it's for a reason. I pretend that in this hyper digital age of techno-wackery, my blog is purposefully the most lumpen-footed, analogue and luddite. I pretend that I want it to be as limited in usefulness and snazzery as reading something on a piece of paper. Because, of course, I wish I was still at a newspaper but no-one will hire me.

The real reason, of course, is that I don't really know how to do any of that stuff. And I think my ranking on Urban Spoon really IS #457 so why would I want anyone to know that? And no-one wants to advertise on my blog anyway. At least no-one cool. If Krispy Kreme called me up and said "How bout it?" I'd say "Where do I sign, Mistah????!!" But they haven't. And I don't link to other blogs because I'm not really friends with other bloggers and don't read them and anyway they make me depressed because they all have more followers and cooler shit on them than mine.

But then Mumsnet rang me. Actually it wasn't Mumsnet, that would be weird. What would that sound like? Would you pick up the phone and thousands of cross-ish sounding voices all talking in unison would come down the line? Anyway it wasn't that. It was my old boss at The Times, who is now a mega cross-media troubleshooter-type headhunter asking me if I wanted to be part of the new Mumsnet blogger network. Or something called something similar. I don't really understand the details.

"They've got 1.6 million unique users," said Gill.

Fuck! I thought to myself. ONE of those users must work for Krispy Kreme!!!!!!

So I said yeah yeah yeah where do I sign, Mistah? And Gill said "It's not really like that. They won't pay you or anything. But from the 4th July there'll be a link to your blog on Mumset and we'll promote you on Twitter."

And then I stopped fantasising about all the free Krispy Kremes I was going to get out of this and started worrying hard about all those MASSIVELY FUCKING TERRIFYING Mumsnet users all reading my blog and leaving angry yet devastatingly accurate comments using a string of acronyms that would baffle Enigma.

But then I thought "Yes but they are probably your demographic anyway - esp now you've got a baby."
And then I thought "Oh god but they'll find out that I only breastfed for 5 weeks and come round my house with pitchforks."
But then I thought "I don't think they're that bothered about breastfeeding actually. I think it's Gina Ford that's the problem."
And then I thought "Okay well if there's an outside shot of some Krispy Kreme action I'd better do it. And the Mumsnet offices are just round the corner from my house, so if it goes bad, I can go and ring on their doorbell and then run away."

Part of the deal is that I have to carry a sort of Mumsnet insignia, which I've been given permission to hide at the bottom of the page. So, that's what I'll be doing, once I've worked out how. And this is by way of explanation as to what it's doing there.

Coming soon I PROMISE is a very excellent mutton stew by Giles Coren. (Mumsnet enemy #1, I'm told. Let the good times roll.)

Aubergine stew

2011-06-22T12:55:00.001+01:00

I spent quite a lot of 2000 and 2001 trying and failing to sleep in cars. Or in fields. Or in tents. Or on a drunkenly-constructed bed made from beanbags. I also spent some of it trying to turf drunks out of my bed, or being turfed out of someone else's bed, across which I was drunkenly splashed.

I went to Bristol University, you see, and everyone just had to have a 21st birthday party. And everyone seemed to live in the countryside. So they'd put up a big tent in their garden and drag some chairs and tables in and serve up dry chicken and fruit mousse and then put on loud disco music and everyone would jiggle about like stupid tossers and then at about 3am everyone had to find somewhere to sleep.

They always ended at sort of 3am, those parties. No-one really took drugs, you see, which I hear is what you need to get you past that 3am stage. Drink will get you so far and then you need help. At Bristol, only weirdos took drugs. Normal people just drank. And drank. And drank.

Anyway, one day I decided that enough was enough. I wasn't going to go to any more parties where I couldn't be guaranteed a bed. I was too old, I reasoned, at 21, to do this any more. It was undiginified and stupid. I wanted a bed in the GOOD part of the house, I would say. Not in the living room or in an obvious first-floor location.

I wanted to know where they were hiding the good shit, the reserved alcove which would be kept sweet and clean and slumbersome - no room that might be stumbled upon by eight drunk engineering undergraduates for an impromtu de-bag and radishing session. And don't you dare put me in with a notorious snorer, you fucker!!! I know your tricks.

It worked. Every single party I went to from then on I got a bed in the inner sanctum boudoir. But I put my foot down too late because there was only one 21st left - and it was mine.

So I've decided to learn from my mistakes and get in early when it comes to aubergines. I've always salted aubergines and it's such a pain in the arse. I've never tried to skip this step because so many people (I'm talking about you, Delia) make out like if you don't do it, the whole world will collapse.

But I had my mind changed the other day by one of my favourite readers, Ian Brice. He scanned in and sent to me the recipe for an aubergine stew, with Mrs Brice's annotations, which clearly indicated that one was not to bother naffing about salting OR peeling the wrectched aubergines. So I decided to put my foot down that very day and henceforth never salt an aubergine again.

And it worked out just fine. I have changed the recipe slightly - it called for red wine, which I didn't have and garlic, which I willfully simply decided I didn't want in it, and I added mozarella on the top, because I'm just fucking crazy like that.

Provencal aubergine stew.
Serves 4 with a salad or bread or something.

3 aubergines
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 large onion
bay leaves, thyme, oregano, rosemary - or any combination of those you can get your hands on
1/2 bottle red or white wine
mozarella - about 2 cheeses
olive oil
salt and pepper
1 tsp sugar

1 Chop the onion and sautee gently in whatever pot you're going to do the whole thing in

2 Chop your aubergines into rounds, then heat up some olive oil to a medium temperature and start frying them off. They drink olive oil, aubergines. So don't worry to much about it, just ladle it on when you think the pan is becoming unacceptably dry. The aubergine rounds will be ready after about 5 minutes each side and they have taken on some colour and have started to collapse slightly.

3 Once the onion is soft-ish (about 10 minutes) throw in whatever herbs you've got and toss around a bit until you start to smell them. (I also at this stage added a chopped courgette and browned it - but you don't have to.) Then pour in a half or a third of a bottle of wine, turn the heat right up and let it bubble almost completely down to just a thin layer of liquid.

4 Add the tomatoes and then the aubergines once they've all been cooked off. Give the whole thing a stir and put on a very low heat for 45 minutes. After that time taste it then sprinkle over 1 large pinch of salt and 1 teaspoon of sugar (which takes the edge off the horrid sourness of tinned tomatoes). Add more salt if you think it needs it.

5 At this stage I layered on slices of mozarella, let them melt and then put the whole thing under the grill to brown. But you don't have to do this.

I actually haven't had any of this yet. I made it for my husband's dinner last night, while I went out and got drunk with my old friend Will. But Giles said it was delicious, and he wouldn't say that if he didn't mean it. I, meanwhile, now have a retro-hangover like it's 2001, with the additional burden of a full day of childcare.

At least I got the best bed in the house last night. And I didn't have to salt any bloody aubergines.

No food today

2011-06-09T10:06:00.000+01:00

Last night I made a kind of asian duck salad thing with dirty rice (which is rice with onions and peas and bits and bobs in it) but I made the whole thing with brown rice so it was an entirely brown dinner so I didn't take a photo of it.

But the duck worked really well so I will write about it another time.

Meanwhile, I'd like to share with you today an email a reader sent me, which was so funny I just have to post it here for you.

NB the previous sentence was talking about tedious "lifestyle" food TV.

"...who watches that shit ? I know I do, I can’t help myself.

Funky lady bakery telly is ruining my lazy Saturday mornings in bed not to mention the paintwork as I hurl the nearest object at the gogglebox ( remote control, vibrator) I just don’t know any women who have lives like that !? Or the time or inclination to think of recipes to match your mood (Sophie Dahl) what does melancholy even mean ?

I have 3 moods:
I’m fine
I’m fucked off
I’m hungover Pizza and Pinot works for all three.

Maybe the truth is I’m just jealous of their lives. Maybe I want my heart to skip a beat when I walk past a flowering zuchinni plant. This Sunday for instance I spent 3 hours making meringues with gorgeous summer fruits and raspberry coulis. Then I sliced my hand open cutting the meringues …it’s officially the gayest injury ever.

Too scared to go hospital I went to the rough as balls pub across the road, but first with the use of one good hand finished the coulis, put on some lipstick and took the pavlova with me.

Imagine their faces at the tavern… “Hi neighbour! I made you all a delicious pavlova, and check out this flesh wound wrapped in bog roll ! I’ve lost half my hand and I’m going to pass out !”

As it turns out I had access to the best medical advice from the landlord, a builder, a Jamaican barber and a gal who works for the Red Cross ( admittedly in marketing but good enough for me) I don’t doubt that they’ve all seen worse, and the general consensus was I could get away with no stitches.

My medical team fixed me right up with Germolene, plasters, cheap Red Wine and Johnny Cash on the jukebox. The local Alkies lapped up the Pavlova and told me their life stories…now that’s a cookery show!

Happy Days. Please excuse the punctuation and grammar I’m typing with one hand."

Isn't that tremendous? I feel like I ought to retire. Or she ought to take over Recipe Rifle, in a Dread Pirate Roberts-style reincarnation.

Out.

Spanish omelette

2011-06-08T10:06:00.000+01:00

Well you all went perfectly nuts for the vegetarian idea and I was inundated by your favourite vegetarian recipes. I mean... there must have been at least 10!!!!

I haven't cooked any of them yet because I haven't had a chance to go to the shops again for the ingredients - mostly more butternut squash and a large sack of lentils by the looks of things. But such is the life of a duty cook that when the evening rolled around again I had to make supper for my hungry husband with no vegetarian option available.

In times of stress such as these, I like to ask myself "What would Judge Judy do?" But this isn't very helpful in the kitchen because I imagine what Judge Judy would do would be to get a Chinese takeaway. Or have her own personal chef knock up a pizza. (She is worth $90m, Judge Judy. Ninety. Million.)

So instead I asked myself, what would K-Mid do? There was a lot of talk around the royal wedding of what an excellent short order cook the Duchess of Cambridge was at university. Short order cooking, for those of you who don't know, is stuff like macaroni cheese, bacon and eggs and shepherd's pie - simple kitchen suppers. So I asked myself "What would K-Mid do?" and the answer came back to me that she would probably make a spanish omelette.

It so happened that in Waitrose the other day I stumbled across a cooking chorizo by a company called Unearthed, who - if I'm not mistaken - are new to the shelves of Waitrose. And I like to investigate new things in Waitrose. So I had some chorizo and I had a potato and I had some eggs and I had some onions and off I went.

And it was great, as Spanish omelettes always are.

Not meat-free, but I never made any promises. I never signed anything.
Judge Judy would approve.

Spanish omelette for 2 hungry people, or 4 less hungry with a salad

5 eggs
6 Unearthed cooking chorizo sausages, cooked and diced. Or really any chorizo you like
a long sloop of cream if you have it but don't worry if not
1 large onion
butter
olive oil
groundnut oil
1 large baking or waxy potato
some fresh oregano and sage if you have it
salt and pepper
monteray jack or cheddar cheese - this is optional if you think it's a calorie too far

1 Peel and chop your potato and then if you can, steam it for 25 minutes. I really advise the purchase of a steamer, I use mine all the time. It's Le Creuset. I love it. If you don't have one, you can balance a colander over a pan of boiling water and chuck any old lid that fits on top

2 Chop and sautee the onion in a sloop of groundnut oil, a sloop of olive oil and about 25g butter. Do this in a pan big enough to take the entire omelette. It doesn't have to be non-stick because this has got quite a lot of oil in it so shouldn't stick to the bottom too badly. But use a non-stick if you like.

Sprinkle over a large pinch of salt, which stops the onion burning. Don't know why so don't ask - and don't CARE so don't tell me. Throw in the sage and the oregano if using.

3 Cook and dice the chorizo. Incidentally, my husband is something of a tapas and Spanish food enthusiast generally and says that this chorizo is very good. You can either cook it in the oven or in a frying pan. It will leak orange gunk everywhere. I'm sorry about this, but it's just the way with chorizo.

Put on your grill to full bongos.

4 Whisk up the 5 eggs in a separate bowl with cream if using and season cautiously as the chorizo is quite strong.

5 Add the potato and the chorizo to the onion and shift around carefully so's not to mash the potato up too badly. Then pour over the egg mixture and give the whole thing a shake. Turn the heat up to medium and keep an eye on the pan. Little bubbles ought to start coming to the surface after about 4-5 minutes.

When you reckon the bottom's firming up (oh how I wish my bottom would firm back up) grate over some cheese and slide it under your redhot grill for another 3-4 minutes or until you reckon it's done.

Depending on your pan, you may not be able to turn the whole thing out, but you certainly ought to be able to cut triangles directly out of the pan without too much bother.

We ate this with a very crunchy salad, a lot of Tabasco sauce and some beer.

Why are children so keen on The Gruffalo? I read it for the first time this morning and it was okay, but its cult status is baffling. Mog the Forgetful Cat or Six Dinner Sid or The Tiger Who Came To Tea are surely more moving, generally. You will note a strong feline theme. I did call my child Kitty, after all.

Butternut squash pie

2011-06-07T09:45:00.003+01:00

I have been the executive decision-maker in this house for some time now.

Famous decisions I have executed executively have been to switch to quilted bog roll, to convert the loft, to stop giving Kitty baby rice and to buy a family diesel estate.

They've all been very successful decisions and riding the crest of this success-wave I have now decided executively that we need to eat less meat in the house.

For one, I don't like buying meat. Since Kitty was born, I haven't been able to eat lamb anymore. First, I've decided that it stinks. And second, I feel like I may as well go up to the nursery and hack one of my child's limbs off as eat a leg of lamb.

Every time I walk down the meat aisle in Waitrose in the back of my mind is the terrible worry that all these animals had a ghastly time, that they died in pain, that I am a monster. This is despite me buying only the most faithfully organic and free-range farm-based meat I can.

But my range of vegetarian cooking - that isn't pasta - is pitiful. I can cook a very good spanakopita but that's it. So recently I have been casting round for interesting vegetarian recipes.

This butternut squash pie is a sort of made-up thing inspired by a pie I saw in the Cranks Bible, which is a vegetarian cookbook, but which I mostly don't find that exciting. It's full of fucking SOUP and you know how much I hate soup. But there is this pie in it. The other ingredients I added because I thought they might be fun. It is also based on the spanakopita principle of using filo pastry as a casing.

I mostly fucking hate butternut squash. It dates back to the time when I was on the Atkins diet and ate it all the time. I grew sick of the sight of it. But once in a while, it's fine, especially when combined with a lot of cheese and spinach and pastry.

This worked very well but it is very rich and I would advise that you eat it with an extremely sharp, cold cucumber or tomato salad. This makes enough for 4-6 people and I used a 25cm flan dish.

So here we go.

Esther's butternut squash pie

1 butternut squash
4 sage leaves
some butter
1 bag baby spinach leaves
1 pack dolcelatte (about 150g)
some olive oil
filo pastry - about 8 sheets
salt and pepper
walnuts
3 eggs
some cream if you have it but don't worry if not

Preheat the oven to 180C

1 Peel and chop your butternut squash and then cook it gently in a frying pan with a lid on for a good hour with the shredded sage leaves in some olive oil. Butternut squash seems so hard and unforgiving that you may doubt that it will cook down in this time, but it will.

2 Meanwhile wash and wilt the spinach in 0.5cm of water for about 5 minutes

3 Lightly toast the walnuts in a dry frying pan and chop

4 When the buttenut squash is mostly soft, combine it with the dolcelatte (torn up by you) the spinach, the walnuts, the eggs and the cream - if using. Sprinkle over a very large pinch of salt and about 10 turns of the pepper grinder.

5 Lay about four sheets of filo pastry in whatever dish or tin you're going to cook this in. Brush olive oil between the sheets so they stick together. Pile in the fillling and then lay more sheets of filo on top. Bung in the oven for 20 minutes.

p.s. if you have any favourite vegetarian recipes that aren't pasta, potato or risotto-based email me: esther.walker@gmail.com or leave a comment.

Winner's Dinners

2011-05-20T09:55:00.000+01:00

I had dinner at Michael Winner's house the other night. This kind of stuff occasionally happens to me - occasionally - and it's always so surreal when it does that I tend to forget all about it. But I remembered just now that I had been because I was thinking about dinner parties.

I had better be discreet about Michael Winner's house because I'd want some shitty half-arsed blogger to be disscreet about mine but I can definitely say that it was extremely grand with a lovely garden. As you'd expect. And Michael Winner is a very charming person and Geraldine is a hoot. But I've always thought that. People think that Michael Winner is some kind of monster because his columns are a bit brisk but they don't understand that he's only joking. There was another guest at dinner who did an outrageous impersonation of Michael pretty much all evening and Michael seemed to think it was funny. Or at least didn't mind, which I think speaks volumes.

The really interesting thing about the dinner was the dinner. There is, thanks to programmes I guess like Masterchef and Come Dine With Me, to attempt to make dinner at one's house like a restaurant experience. And I really thought that was what would happen at Winner Towers.

But actually what we got was the definition of a kitchen supper, which is all any of us ought to aspire to when making dinner for friends in our own home. There were some fantastic canapes, (mini spanakopita, thai pork somethingorother wrapped in lettuce, roast beef on crostini etc) and some really good smoked salmon as a starter.

THEN there was a choice of chicken in a kind of tarragonny cream sauce or beef stroganoff with salad and either white or brown rice. And you were allowed to help yourself!! There is nothing more terrifying or kind of un-jolly than someone else deciding how much you want for dinner. Then there was some cheesecake so amazing that I still regret not taking the leftovers home. But I didn't know if Michael was joking or not when he said that I could.

I hope you don't think I'm bragging telling you about this. I don't mean to. I just thought it was interesting and instructive that what Michael Winner wants to eat is moreish canapes, excellent smoked salmon and a good honest plate of stroganoff with rice.

So next time you're sitting there going "fuck, fuck, fuck" at the prospect of cooking for six people, just bear this in mind. People aren't coming to a restaurant, they're coming to your house. Don't even bother with something as elaborate as a roast.

Keep it simple and everyone will be happy; someone might even impersonate you for the whole evening. Imagine that.

Thai pork patties

2011-05-16T13:56:00.000+01:00

Babies really fuck up your life.

But it's not for the reasons that you might think. It's not really the sleeplessness, or the back-breaking feeding, changing, washing, washing, washing, feeding, scrubbing, washing, folding, folding, shh shh, folding, washing, or the constant worry that they are bored, or hungry, or sleepy, or not sleepy, or understimulated or overstimulated or constipated, or not constipated enough.

Those are just details. They are just the sort of slightly tedious minutiae that litter any kind of job. And looking after a baby is - as is well-documated - a full-time job. (No weekends off or anything, as I was surprised to discover when my first Friday night as a mother rolled around.)

No, they fuck up your life because even though looking after them is a grind that at times you worry might send you completely out of your fucking mind, if you attempt to leave them in the care of someone else for more than 20 minutes, you start to feel weird, then sick, then heartbroken, then demented. You desperately want to let go. But you can't.

About a month ago, looking after Kitty full-time was getting to me a bit. I was getting depressed. I just wanted to walk out of the door and keep walking, without having to tell anyone where I was going or what time I was going to be back.

What we need, I declared to my husband, is a part-time nanny. One was duly sourced, poached off another family and roped in to drop in once or twice a week and play with Kitty while I wrote, or cooked, or went for a walk, or went to Waitrose.

And she is lovely. Posh, charming, friendly, biddable and knows a lot about babies. And yet I hover over her like a dark cloud when she's here. While she is feeding Kitty or waving Sophie La Giraffe at her and saying "Peepo!" I am NOT doing any cooking, or writing, or running any errands. I am hopping from foot to foot, waving at Kitty from corners of the room or fetching the nanny tea.

"This is fun!" said Nanny A brightly and not unkindly the other day. "I get to play with you while Mummy waits on me hand and foot!"

I took the hint and managed to go next door to read a cookbook for a whole twenty minutes.

My husband doesn't want to know. "There is no point," he said in his serious voice, "having a nanny if she's just here to help you play with Kitty. Go out. Do things. Do some fucking exercise so you can stop moaning about your belly. She's just getting to know Kitty just the way that you had to, that I had to, that Shura had to. Let her get on with it."

I narrowed my eyes at him and sidled out of his office and went to curl back up in the corner of the bedroom to do some more rocking backwards and forwards.

The cookbook I managed to read was a new one by a boy called James Ramsden, who is a very modern sort of cookery writer. He's one of those cooks and writers who attitude is "It's only dinner." His new cookbook is called Small Adventures in Cooking and it is available for purchase here. Despite the fact that it won't lie flat on a worksurface and doesn't have enough pictures for a cook with as shit an imagination as me, it's very jolly and I recommend it to you.

I cooked from it the other day some Thai Pork Patties.

These are excellent for a light supper wrapped in lettuce (James recommends Little Gem but I am so fucking sick of Little Gem I can't tell you so I used iceberg) and dipped in chilli sauce. They are also absolutly fantastic cold, so make too many, is my advice, and have them for snacking on in the fridge.

For 2 as a light supper with plenty left over for snacking
this is not James' exact recipe but it was nice anyway

500g best minced pork
1 large red chilli or some dried ones, whatever you've got, chopped finely or crumbled
1 stalk lemongrass, chopped finely
1 small bunch coriander, chopped
2 sprigs mint, chopped
salt and pepper
2 handfuls breadcrumbs
2 eggs
2 spring onions, chopped
groundnut or peanut oil for frying

1 Combine everything well in a bowl sprinkling over 2 or 3 generous pinches of salt and a good 6 or 7 twists of black pepper

2 Form into pattie-shapes. I like mine small-ish - finishable in two large bites, but you must do yours however you like. Then turn on your extactor fan, stuff a teatowel under the kitchen door and fry off your patties in some medium-hot oil for about 3-4 minutes each side. If you can, fry them in a pan that has a lid otherwise your house will smell like the back end of a chippy all night and for most of the next day.

Eat as quick as you can and then rush back to your 24-hour cotside vigil.

Dinner party poussin

2011-05-03T12:41:00.001+01:00

Sorry, this turns out to be a bit blurry. But you can get the idea.

One solution to a dinner party crisis - especially if you are not a magnificently confident cook (who is?!) - is to throw a lot of money at the problem.

I don't like doing this, because I have been brought up to think that if I do not buy all my clothes from H&M and make dinner out of half a loaf of stale bread and some turnips then I am wretched and profligate and will probably go to hell. Although when you're from a family as protestant in thought and word and deed as mine, hell is a far too good, interesting and racy place for sinners.

This is why I'm always cooking cabbage.

But it is a fact that you can just go out and spend a lot of money and throw an impressive dinner party. Like doing this Lucas Hollweg thing I found in the Sunday Times the other week. I don't have much time for Lucas Hollweg normally - partly because he says things like "I cooked this for my book group and they loved it!!!!!" but mostly because he's got a fucking wicked job and I am not big enough NOT to hate him for it.

Nigella's always going on about how marvellous poussin are for a party and my objection has always been meanness. "£3.99 each?!?!" I find myself screaming silently to myself. "Absolutely not. They can have boiled ham and carrots."

But if you are half-minded to unload some cash, poussin are a good idea - as everyone gets one each, so you don't have to do any tedious carving and they're more festive, somehow. The idea is to pile up the poussin in a bowl and everyone helps themselves in that modern, faux-naif, nauseatingly bourgeois way.

Lucas does this with a sort of middle-eastern marinade thing, which works pretty well and smells great. It also means that you can do this with a salad and couscous, rather than dicking about with a lot of veg.

This is not his exact recipe, but it's kind of the same idea.

For 3 poussin you need the following quantities for the marinade:

4 tbs olive oil
1 tbs groundnut oil
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tbsp paprika - any sort
3 crushed garlic cloves

Soak the birds in this mixture for as long as you can. Ideally for a few hours, but even one hour makes a difference. If you've got a lot of poussin, increase the quantities of your marinade accordingly.

Then sprinkle over with salt and roast at 180C for 35-40 mins.

If you're doing this with couscous, add to it some lemon juice, coriander, salt and pepper, chopped cucumber and toasted pine nuts. We also had this with some minted yoghurt, which was just a lot of fresh mint chopped up and added to Greek yoghurt with some salt and pepper.

V nice. If pricey.

Bread and cabbage soup

2011-04-28T18:12:00.000+01:00

It's really hard when you have a baby and none of your friends do, to not be a massive arsehole about it. I mean doing that thing where when they say something like "I was in the shower the other day..." and you respond with "A SHOWER!!!!! I haven't washed since 1978!!! You can't when you've got a BABY YOU KNOW. WHEN YOU HAVE A BABY YOU'LL UNDERSTAND!!!!"

Or similar responses to tales of mini-breaks, lie-ins or trips to the cinema.

I'm mostly pretty sanguine about stuff like that. Whatevs. I chose to have a baby. And I'm pleased about it - mostly because I'm bored with mini-breaks and trips to the cinema. And Kitty sleeps now so I get to have my lie-in. I mean, until 7am.

But the other day someone suggested that they might come round for lunch. Not that they might bring round lunch for us all, but they might come round for lunch. That I would make for them to sit down and eat.

Lunch. Now lunch is something I haven't cooked and eaten in my own home for a long, long time. I've got other shit to do. Even on the weekend. And that's fine - I've always thought lunch was boring as hell. Now I eat cheese sandwiches at 12.45pm and very happy I am with it, too. But the suggestion that I am going to cook, on a weekend, lunch for other people? Are you. Fucking. Out. Of. Your. Mind?

I did not say this. I kept it to myself. They don't understand - and that's okay. One day they will understand and by then Kitty will be about 10 and making ME fucking lunch and mixing me gins and tonic and I'll laugh until I'm sick.

But, as I said, Kitty sleeps now and goes to bed at 7pm sharp. So dinner - now dinner is a thing that we're getting back on track. (I mean, not for other people - one step at a time, pal.) And the other night, in my ongoing obsession with cabbage, (I do not understand it, but it is a fact), I made Jamie Oliver's Italian cabbage soup and it was out of this world. Really, really amazing - I can't recommend it highly enough.

I did this for 2, so the quantities are quite small, but don't fret too much about exact amounts if you are doing this for more people, because it's only a soup for god's sake

Jamie's Italian cabbage soup, for 2

6 savoy cabbage leaves - not the horrid leathery outer ones, stalks removed and roughly chopped
2 handfuls of curley kale or cavolo nero
5 or 6 slices of 1in-thick sourdough - or you could use ciabatta. Is that sourdough? I'm never sure
1 large clove garlic
4 rashers bacon or pancetta, chopped
4 anchovies - please, picky eaters, do not leaves these out. It won't taste like fish I PROMISE, it'll just taste savoury
2 pints chicken stock - you really need actual chicken stock here
2 handfuls parmesan
2 handfuls pecorino - Jamie's recipe specified fontina but Waitrose didn't have it so I used pecorino and it was very nice
1 stalk rosemary, leaves picked
3 sage leaves
some olive oil
salt and pepper

1 Bring the chicken stock to a simmer and cook the greens until soft - about 3 mins. Then remove to a bowl, leaving the chicken stock in the pan.

2 In a casserole dish heat about 3 tablespoons of olive oil and then fry the bacon and anchovies until the bacon is coloured, then add the rosemary leaves and the sage and cook for another 2 minutes

3 Then put back in the greens, toss them about and then put back in the bowl

4 Lightly toast your sourdough and then rub one side of each with the cut face of the garlic

5 To assemble your soup, put 1 or 2 slices of bread on the base of the casserole pan, then some cabbage, salt and pepper, some of each cheese and a drizzle of olive oil. Then repeat until all your bread, cabbage and cheese is gone - finishing off with bread sprinkled over with cheese.

6 To finish pour your stock in and shove in a 180C oven for 30 mins. I did 15 mins with lid on and then 15 mins with lid off because I didn't want the top to burn and it worked out really well.

Just don't expect me to make it for you for lunch.

Auntie Hannah's Courgette Thing

2011-04-18T16:44:00.002+01:00

DON'T say anything, okay? We only had an iPhone to snap it with

It all started back in January when my husband was invited to the last dinner at El Bulli before it closes down forever.

"Do you want to go?" He said. "It's 52 courses."
"Thanks, I won't," I said, thinking about all the babyweight I was going to have to be losing once April rolled around. I told him to take X, my brother-in-law instead - a roaringly good eater of food, swiller of wine and maker of jokes. Just the fellow.

Some phone calls were made and plans were hatched. Then my phone rang.

"What the FUCK do you think you're doing?!" screamed my sister down the phone. "Why did you tell Giles to take X to Spain? Do you think it's FUN being alone with three children under 4? You fucking, fucking, fucking bitch. You'd better get your fat fucking useless arse down here and help me, as it's YOUR fault I'm on my own."

Okay, so she didn't say that. But I could tell it was what she wanted to say to me when she suggested that, as my husband and her husband were out of town, I might like to spend Sunday night with her in her house in Oxford. She can say a thousand words just with her tone of voice, my sister - all of them quite threatening. But unless you've lived with her for 18 years, to talk to her she's charming.

So I drove down on Sunday morning at 4,000 miles an hour in our brand new diesel family estate with Kitty illegally strapped into the front passenger seat (airbag) and arrived at about 9am.

I found the 4 year-old dressed as a spaceman standing in a patch of dead daffoils, the 2 year-old in the hallway chewing a battery and the 9 month-old sitting quietly in the kitchen, humming to himself.

"Don't want to," said the 2 year-old.
"Don't want to what?" I said.
"Don't... wannnn... tooo," he said and sidled away with his battery.

Anyway, the weekend continued like that for a while and then on Sunday night after we'd both stopped banging our heads against the kitchen table - having put 4 children under 4 to bed -and drunk 2 litres of Tio Pepe and tonic water apiece, my sister decided that she was going to make courgette pasta for supper.

I have heard positive things about courgette pasta but have never believed it could possibly be much good. But it is! The courgettes add a kind of subtle, crunchy freshness. At least, I think they do, we put so much cream and parmesan cheese all over it that the courgettes may have got a little bit lost.

I'm writing about this, despite believing strongly that no-one ever needs to be told what to do with pasta, just because the addition of mint made quite an interesting twist. This is, to my mind, a very chic thing to have with a salad as a spring lunch for a lot of people.

Courgette pasta
for 2

As much pasta - linguine or spaghetti I'd say - as you want
1 courgette
100mls cream - any sort
1 large handful of parmesan and a smaller handful for sprinkling
a small bunch of mint, chopped
salt and pepper
1/2 a lemon
some olive oil
30g butter

1 Grate the courgette on a big-holed grater.

2 Boil the pasta and dress with some olive oil

3 Add all the other ingredients and stir.

This is why I don't really suggest pasta recipes.

Stuffed cabbage or Golabki

2011-04-12T20:59:00.001+01:00

I'm always most thrilled by recipes that transform dull things into exciting things. Culinary alchemy - that's what I'm on the hunt for. I don't need to know what to do with caviar, or salmon, or fillet steak, or really fresh egg pasta. You just eat it. I want to know what to do with 1 kg of slightly past-it tomatoes, or a really old bunch of coriander, or an entire celeriac.

Or, for example, a savoy cabbage that's seen better days and some beef mince that's going to go off TODAY!!! if we don't eat it.

The answer is stuffed cabbage. Or, as they say in Poland, golabki. I don't think it's pronounced "gol-ab-kee" because it is written with all manner of flourishes and flounces on the letters. It is probably, in fact, pronounced "dumplings". Anyway, I just love this; it presses all my buttons - it is incredibly cheap, tasty and resourceful. It's not very spring/summer, I admit, but as I've said before, that's all for massive losers. There's nothing more comforting on a chilly spring evening that's followed an unseasonably warm spring day, than a bowl of golabki. Sorry, I meant dumplings.

Fans of Mamgu's Sausage and Cabbage Hotpot will not be disappointed.

This was made for me by my husband the other day, by way of an apology for coming home drunk, falling asleep and snoring, then becoming irritated when I scuppered his crapulent quest to urinate in my wardrobe at 1am.

He sourced the recipe from a book, which enjoys something of a cult status among aged North London Trots, called Old Polish Traditions in the Kitchen and at the Table. As well as golabki, there is also a recipe in there for "Ox Tongue in Grey Sauce", which just between you and me, I won't be trying - but it's the kind of thing that dusty old Commies do so love.

Okay, so the principle of this is that you use the smaller, daintier cabbage leaves (as opposed to the giant leathery outer leaves) to wrap parcels of meat-and-rice mixture in like a kind of Soviet dim sum.

Really, one ought to use pork mince but we didn't have any, so this is with beef mince. If you're going shopping specially for this, probably get pork mince - why not? We also used brown rice for this, when the recipe specifies white. I mean personally I just can't get enough of camargue rice, but if you want to use white, do.

Golabki with rice and mushrooms
For 4

You will need:

1 Savoy cabbage
1 packet of beef or pork mince - the ones at Waitrose usually come in at about 500g
Some dried mushrooms - about three tablespoons dried measurement
100g rice
1 large or two small-ish onions or shallots or whatever you've got knocking about, chopped
some stock - about 1/2 pint... actual stock rather than something out of a cube is probably essential here, and you know how slapdash I am about things like that
salt and pepper

1 Cut out the cabbage stump and then simmer the whole thing for 15 mins. Set aside to cool.

2 Boil and drain the rice. The good thing about this recipe is that you can be the world's shittest cooker of rice (like me) and it doesn't matter.

3 Sautee the chopped onions for a while - a good 10 minutes I'd say. Also rehydrate the dried mushrooms in about 300ml of boiling water. When rehydrated sieve the mushrooms (reserve the rehydration water) and chop.

4 In a bowl combine the mince, onion, mushrooms, rice, salt and pepper. Here feel free to add other things if you're feeling racy. Some chorizo, maybe - or a few herbs. Chillies? A dash of Lea & Perrins?

5 Line a casserole dish with the scraggy outer leaves of the cabbage. Then use the smaller inner leaves like wrapping paper, putting a ping-pong ball sized amount of the stuffing in the centre of the cabbage and parcelling it up, then place in the casserole dish on top of the scraggy leaves. My husband is very good at stuff like this, so it's possibly fiddlier than he made it seem. Anyway, it looked fun from where I was standing.

6 Once you've used up all your stuffing mixture, pour in the mushroom water and top up with some stock. It's not an exact science, you just want there to be liquid coming up about a third or a half up the sides of the golabki.

7 Bake in a 170C oven for 2 hours. It's one of those things that's very nice when re-heated.

Family conference

Aunty Shura's Courgette Thing

2011-04-11T14:51:00.001+01:00

It doesn't look much, but it's really very nice

You know how there are those people in your life who are good for only one thing? Like the friend who is excellent value only when you are at a party, or the one who is only good at deeply-felt heart-to-hearts, or the one who is only good for a massive bitch about a mutual acquaintance (you literally cannot find anything else in common to talk about). Or the one who is willing to be friends with you when you're single and depressed but once you're married and happy, forget it... and don't expect so much as a fucking CARD if you go and have a BABY!!!!!

I mean, for example.

The courgette is the one-trick-pony-friend of the the vegetable world. They are really only good for a couple of things and this recipe is one of them. It was brought into my life by a woman called Shura, who has been helping me out with the baby. And when I say helping me out, I mean she has been hammering Kitty into a routine that would be the envy of ghetto-born Russian ballerinas and Japanese piano-playing prodigies, while simultaneously preventing me from committing suicide.

Her gift is to acknowledge that both Kitty and I are only babies. "Chile," she'll say to me, "you've got yourself overtired. It's time to go to bed now."

And you know, she's always right.

She taught me how to cook this thing, which is really one of the only 1 or 2 interesting ways in the world to treat courgettes. It's very easy and is a really fantastic accompaniment to chicken or fish. It's also very nice on toast.

Aunty Shura's Courgette Thing

For 2 people (with some left over for spreading on toast)

4 courgettes
a LOT of olive oil
salt
pepper
6 garlic cloves, crushed - do not, please, freak out at this mammoth quantity... yes it is quite garlicky, but it's all cooked so it's aromatic rather than scary.

1 Chop up the courgettes into pieces about the size of a 5p piece. However you want to do this is okay by me. I chop mine in half lengthways, then each half in half again and then chop along the lengths so you get little quarters

2 Dump into a saucepan and cover with olive oil. What you're looking for here is all the bits of courgette to be coated with oil and for there to be a small pool - or rather, actually, a thin layer - of oil along the bottom. The courgettes will give out a lot of water during cooking, so they don't need to be drenched, just robustly slathered.

3 Sprinkle over a very large pinch of salt and about 6 turns of the pepper grinder.

4 Throw in the crushed garlic and then cook this over a low heat for 1 hour with the lid on at a jaunty angle. That really is all there is to it.

Back in May. Ish.

Recipe Rifle is on maternity leave

2011-03-02T16:19:00.000Z

Okay I admit defeat.

I was going to just stagger along pretending that I hadn't had a baby. But the thing is that she's so DEMANDING. And in the ten minutes per day when I'm not:

- feeding her insatiable little mouth
- wiping her shitty bum
- washing her pissed-on clothes
- expressing
- ordering 8,000 nappies (size 2 already) from Ocado
- staring at my stomach in the mirror thinking "any smaller today?"
- saying "I wouldn't throw a cup of fucking tea back in your face, you know" to my husband

...I am leaning at a 45 degree angle with my forehead against any available wall, making my tragic lunatic face by pulling down the corners of my mouth and rolling my eyes up into my head as far as they will go.

We haven't cooked anything for days. We are surviving on a box of cheese from Neal's Yard and stale crackers. Occasionally I will swipe a handful of dried fruit out of the larder, while my husband tells me for the 6th time that there's more sugar in dates than in sugar (eh?)

So continuing this, for the moment, is just madness. Unless you don't want recipes anymore and just want my thoughts on Infacol vs Colief, NCT classes, Bugaboo vs iCandy and how to get the little buggers to sleep through the night? No? Thought not.

But we're going to have to come to some agreement about maternity leave. Because I know people like you, you're all like "Essssthherrrrr... we valueee yooooooooou. Go and have a good time with your baby and we'll ALL still be here when you come back. We are committed to supporting working mothers and a fair maternity package."

Yeah, like, whatever and then behind my back you'll all be saying how Cupcakes and Cashmere is a way better blog and the thing about Eat Like a Girl is how dedicated she is and how Liberty London Girl never asks for shit like time off.

And I'll come back, all shaky and traumatised and shy from being locked up with my baby for 6 months and suddenly you'll all be friends with different people and having different things for lunch and have formed all kinds of new political alliances that it'll take me months to unravel and I'll be fucked.

But I've got to take some time off, despite all that. So shall we say two months? From now? I'll aim to be back at work on 2 May, the day after my 31st birthday.

This all reminds me of one of my Dad's favourite stories from his days as a high powered City suit.

"Bob and Jim are leaving the office and they're waiting for a lift," my Dad says. "It's Bob's last day at the company and he turns to Jim and says '... and just think, in four weeks everyone will have forgotten about me.'

And Jim says: 'Four weeks? Four weeks?'"

Then Dad usually laughs until he cries.

Salt

2011-02-23T12:46:00.002Z

There are some things in life that are just okay to do.

We might beat ourselves up about it in the chilly dawn as we feed our tiny, trusting babies Infacol in the hope that wind is what's making her kick her legs and screw up her face and go "MmmmmmmmmmmNNNNNNNNNN!!!!! EEERrrrwwwwwwww!!!!!! *snuffle snuffle* pause HHII - EEEEEEEEE!!!!!!" when she is supposed to be asleep.

But in fact, we should all just relax.

Like it's okay to pay your tax bill a bit late. And it's okay to feel a bit sick when you see the amount.

And it's okay to still, at 30, raise your eyes to the sky and say "Please, please" when you're at the cash machine, in the hope that the machine will give you money, rather than tell you that you've got "insufficient funds".

It's okay to occasionally let your baby fall asleep on your shoulder and then put her down for her mid-morning nap, rather than take her to some far room, close the curtains, put her down while still sort-of awake and then let her cry herself to sleep.

It's okay to not do any laundry for, like, two weeks.

It's okay to hate people more successful than you.

And it's okay to salt your food.

A lot of people really don't think that's okay, though. It's mostly people of a certain age, who grew up thinking that salting your food was the equivalent of churning through 60 a day. Too much salt is bad for your heart, you see.

But what do we mean by too much? The recommended daily allowance of salt for adults is 6g. That's a lot - (see photo above with box of Infacol for scale) - but only if you don't eat any, or much, processed food. For example, a KFC wing contains 1g of salt. One whole gram. Six of those and you're done for the entire day.

I eat barely any processed food because my husband gives me such hell for it, so that means I merrily cover my food with salt. And if you know that you don't eat much processed food either, you ought to be salting your food, conscience-free. Because salt is what makes food tasty (something KFC knows only too well).

So bear that in mind. And next time you're standing at your stove, taking a sip off something off the end of a wooden spoon and feeling baffled as to why it tastes of nothing, reach for the salt - and be brave.

Because, *shush shush*, it's okay. It really is.

Henry's tit bread

2011-02-20T14:39:00.006Z

This isn't going to be the start of a descent into a lot of baby chat, I promise. I am aware that a lot of you don't have children, or don't want them. Or have them and don't like them and don't want to hear about anyone else's. So I'm wary of mentioning mine.

Just like I'm not going to mention my cleaner ever again. I mentioned my cleaner last time and "Brian" left a comment saying "Why don't you get off your lazy arse and clean your own house like the rest of the real world." [No question mark.]

I'm lucky - I don't get much stuff like that. So at first I deleted the comment and my aim was to forget about it. But it bothered me.

My husband thinks I'm being silly.

"She's not your cleaner," he said, "she's my cleaner. When you had a job you had a cleaner. You haven't got a job anymore but I do. And professional, working people have cleaners - and X is mine. If you want to fire her and do it yourself, I'll pay you. But you'd be so shit at it I'd have to fire you for incompetence and re-hire X. And I don't have the energy for all that."

As die-hard fans of this blog know, my dad is a former Oxford History lecturer and the author of an academic text on Karl Marx (available for purchase here). So if anyone is going to be very bothered by the question of whether or not I am lazy for having a cleaner, it's me.

I rang Dad to ask what he thought about all this, but as it was 8.30am on Sunday morning, he was too busy working to talk. So I texted my sister, The Hamburgler, instead, because she knows all about this stuff, too.

Me: Would Karl Marx believe that my cleaner is oppressed?
The Hamburgler: He wouldn't believe it, he would know it. But he also 'knew' that chairs were 'really' the exploitation of man. Fucking idiot. It's a chair.

I don't know about you, but that made things no clearer for me. I would like to say something like "I'm not going to fire my cleaner, who has her own family to support, just so that people like "Brian" don't think I'm lazy. Because out of my cleaner and "Brian", guess whose good opinion I'd rather have?"

But that's just me being defensive. And I suspect that not wanting to starve their workers was the main self-defence cry of 19th Century mill-owners. "Put them out of work?" they'd cry. "But who, pray, would feed their children?"

I could fire my cleaner and do it all myself. Do I not because I am lazy? I don't think I'm lazy. But maybe I am. My cleaner is great and she would find other work. But I don't think that's the point. I think "Brian"'s point is that he thinks being a cleaner is demeaning. He thinks it's a shit job and that anyone who hires someone to do a shit job is a shitty person. But I don't think being a cleaner is a shit job.

Perhaps what "Brian" would like me to do is ring all X's clients and get her fired from everything, then she would see the light and go to university and become a lawyer. Or a buyer for Topshop, or some other suitable job for a young woman that isn't cleaning people's houses.

After a lot of thinking like this, I have come to the conclusion that, on balance, it's just best if I pretend my cleaner doesn't exist.

Anyway, I digress.

As I said, I won't go into the foul details, but I had cause the other day to be brought some "breastfeeing bread" by my friend Henry. It is supposed to... how to put this nicely... help things along. I don't think you need to know any more. Or is coyness extra revolting?

Anyway when he turned up with it I was slightly horrified, as it smells a lot like curry because of the fenugreek seeds in it: fenugreek being the active ingredient in aiding... supply. "Oh God," I thought, "curry bread? This is going to be horrid."

But it wasn't. It was fantastic. I mean really, like, "wow" delicious. It's like a very rich soda bread, only better. Superb with any kind of jam and, I suspect, really nice with baked beans. Definitely excellent with cream cheese and salmon, as I ate it just now.

Do not fear: if you don't happen to be breastfeeding, it won't make you spontaneously lactate. And if you find fennel seeds or fenugreek really disgusting leave them out. They are only essential to "nursing mothers" (vomit) but if you're not in that social category and don't like them, don't put them in.

[NB if you ARE breastfeeding and need a bit of help, this does actually work, despite sounding a lot like a load of old hippy cack.]

I must admit to you now that I haven't made this myself, yet. Henry assures me that it is easy and although he's no bullshitter, he is a chef - so his level of competence unevens the playing field a bit.

Anyway, here goes. This is copied word for word out of the first Leon cookbook - this is where my 100wpm touch-typing comes in handy - which is why there isn't any swearing in it.

Makes a 1kg loaf

soft butter
330g strong wholemeal spelt flour
170g strong white flour
5g fast-acting easy-blend dried yeast
2 tsp crushed sea salt
1 tsp aniseeds
1 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp fenugreek seeds - ground
4-g pumpkin seeds
40g sunflower seeds
2.5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
300ml warm water
15g extra sunflower and pumpkin seeds for the top
40g pine nuts

Smear a 1 kg loaf tin with butter. Mix all the dry ingredients (except the pine nuts and seeds for the top) together in a bowl large enough to knead the dough in. Add the oil, then the water, stirring until the mixture sticks together. Knead in the bowl for just a few minutes until smooth. You can add a little flour if it is too sticky, but remember the maxim - wetter is better. It doesn't matter if a little sticks to your hands.

Shape, then put into the tin. Cut a pattern in deep gashes on the top and sprinkle the reserved seeds into the gashes; slighty push the pine nuts into the surface and sprinkle a little extra spelt flour (or bran if you have some to hand) all over.

Put the tin into a large plastic bag that can be tucked under the tin to leave the loaf enclosed with plenty of air. Leave until the dough has doubled in size. This will take about 2-2.5 hours in a warm kitchen.
Bake in a preheated oven at 230C for 20 mins then turn down to 200C for another 20 minutes.

Osso buco

2011-02-18T12:45:00.000Z

The best thing about working at the Evening Standard, which I did from 2005 to 2007, (although for fuck's sake don't tell the Student Loans Company that - as far as they're concerned I was missing presumed dead in western Namibia and therefore do NOT owe them any money for that tax year), was my boss.

He was so great because he'd always say "well done". It didn't really matter what you'd done, he'd always just say "well done". I mean, not if you'd done something bad. If you'd done something bad he'd say "oh dear". And then when you put it right, he'd say "well done".

Call me simple as a drooling gun dog, but that worked on me. Although I'd had nice bosses in the past, none of them had said "well done" with the frequency and fervour of Sebastian.

"Seb I got you a sandwich," I'd say.
"Oh well done," he'd say.

"Seb I rang Antonia Fraser about that thing," I'd say.
"Oh, well done. What did he say?" he'd say.
[She almost always said "fuck off", by the way]

"Seb I forgot to put through all those payments," I'd say.
"Oh dear," he'd say. "Can you do it now?"
"Yes I'll do it now," I'd say
"Oh, well done," he'd say.

You get the picture. On Fridays, I used to get us both chicken shwarmas from Ranoush Juice, just opposite the Evening Standard's offices in Kensington. Ranoush Juice is one of a chain of Lebanese places that will be familiar to Londoners, and not to anyone else. We'd eat the sandwiches at our desks, stinking the place out. On Fridays at the Standard there was nothing to do after about 1pm because there was no paper until Monday. So at about 3pm Seb would say:

"Okay, well done, you can go home now." And off I'd go. You see? I literally hadn't done anything, and he's say "well done". Awesome. It did wonders for my productivity. I would write 100 or maybe even 200 words a week in that place. Phew!
A note: our Friday lunches only lasted until Ariel Sharon had that heart attack; it turned out that his favourite food was chicken shwarma and Sebastian didin't want any after that.

Needless to say, I cried tears of genuine sadness when I left the Evening Standard to go and work at the Independent. And in the 12 months that I worked at the Indy I don't think anyone ever said "well done" to me. Not once. Ever.

As you can imagine there were no tears of sadness when I got the hell out of there.

But I had been infected with the habit of saying "well done" to everyone, about everything. It's a great motivator. I do it to my husband all the time.

"I put a wash on," he'll say.
"Oh WELL DONE," I'll say.

Recently, my husband has been mostly making dinner and I find that, even though before I had the baby he promised he would do a lot of cooking, it's vital to say "WELL DONE THIS IS DELICIOUS WOW WOW WOW" when we sit down. And it works because he's really kept at it.

Last night we had Osso Buco, which is one of those things that has a mystifying name but is really quite a simple thing. It's basically veal shin stew and it incorporates bone marrow, which makes the whole thing very glossy and sticky. Osso buco means "bone with a hole", which is a pretty unromantic description - but that's the Italians for you.

Sorry no photo but Kitty was freaking me out all night and the picture somehow never happened. But it's super-tasty, trust me.

When you go to a butcher to get your meat for this, you can ask for either some veal shin (you want rose veal, obviously) or if you like, "osso buco", which is the name of the cut. I know it sounds a bit like going in and asking for some "spaghetti bolognese", but it isn't.

This is a mash-up of Hugh FW and Claudia Roden in that Hugh does not include tomatoes and Claudia Roden does.

This is a pretty rich dish so you really only need one slice of veal shin per person. It is traditionally eaten with a risotto and gremolata but I won't go into that here because Kitty's only just gone to sleep and I need to go and have a shower before the cleaner gets here. I love my cleaner, but why does she always want to come at lunchtime?

Osso buco
For 2

2 slices veal shin
1 large handful, or about 50g plain flour, seasoned with salt and pepper
some veg oil for cooking, plus a large knob of butter
2 garlic cloves, chopped finely
2 medium onions (i.e. not massive, white onions), chopped
2 celery sticks, chopped
1 carrot, chopped - do not be tempted to be clever and use more than one carrot here because too much carrot makes everything very sickly sweet
1 large glass white wine, doesn't matter what
250ml ish light stock - pork, chicken - if you've got a bit less than that you can top up with hot water, do not fret
3 tomatoes (if you want, don't if not - I think they're nice though), skinned. You do this by making a cross in the bottom of the tomato with a knife and then putting them in boiling water for 2 mins and then the skins come off. The riper the tomato the easier this is
salt and pepper

1 In a large pan or casserole dish that goes on the hob, heat together a long sloop of veg oil and the knob of butter. Dust the veal shin in the seasoned flour and brown all over then set aside.

2 To the pan add the garlic, onions, celery and carrot and cook gently until soft. I find the best way to do this without burning everything is to cook it on the lowest possible setting for at least 15 minutes. You may have a better way of doing it, in which case don't let me stop you.

3 Put the veal pieces back in the pan - flat side down so that the marrow doesn't all fall out, then pour in the glass of wine, turn up the heat and sizzle until it's reduced by about half. Add your stock, topped up with water from the kettle if you need to - (mine has a fucking LEAK, it's so annoying... need a new one... any recommendations?) - and some salt and pepper, bring it all to a very gentle simmer, put a lid on it and cook for 2 hours.

4 And that's basically it. Turn the meat once or twice during cooking and keep an eye on the liquid level - if it looks like it's drying out, throw in some more stock or water. After 2-ish hours take the lid off, turn the heat up and bubble to reduce the sauce a bit.

Duck with pineapple, chilli and soy

2011-02-13T18:10:00.004Z

I have lately started to do a thing that I call Russian Roulette shopping, where I go to Waitrose and just hurl whatever the fuck into my trolley. I don't want to make any boring sweeping generalisations about pregnancy and new motherhood, but it is just a fact that for the last three months I haven't been going to the shops with as gimlet an eye and as sharp a purpose as I might have done, say, six months ago.

So as I roll round the joint, cracking open huge yawns, I'm all, like celeriac? Sure, why not. Five aubergines? SURE. Some pigeon? WHAT THE HELL? Then I come home and look at it all and think "Oh God alive, what am I going to do with all this?

But something always emerges from the chaos in the end.

Rightly, this ought to be called Ready Steady Cook shopping. But Russian Roulette Shopping sounds better, even though the parallel doesn't work one bit. What do you want? I gave birth 10 days ago and I think my baby girl might be coming down with a cold and she's definitely got a hurty tummy. Leave me the fuck alone.

Last week, Russian Roulette shopping scored a real home run. In amongst the okra, dragon fruits and sugar snap peas, I had somehow purchased two duck breasts and a large pineapple. Do I remember buying them? No. Perhaps it ought to be called Amnesia shopping.

As luck would have it, my husband found a recipe for duck and pineapple in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Meat cookbook and set about it, like the trooper he temporarily is. He always turns to Hugh in moments of crisis because he believes the River Cottage Meat Book to be butch despite beating Hugh soundly at pool about 2 years ago. My husband is the most terrible hustler never trust him.

I was sceptical about the recipe. Duck and pineapple? Surely absolutely gross? No. Absolutely fantastic. Like something you would get in a very, very upmarket Chinese place. We ate it sort of laughing, going "I can't believe you made this," and "No I can't believe I made this, either. Cheers!"

We ate this with red rice (obviously) and some creamed cauliflower. But in truth, this would have been better with white rice and some broccoli sauteed with nam pla or oyster sauce.

So here we go:

Duck with pineapple, chilli and soy

This recipe can be found on p.366 of the River Cottage Meat Book

For 2
2 duck breasts
1/2 a pineapple
3 tbs dark soy sauce
1 tsp soft brown sugar or honey
3 garlic cloves, chopped
golfball sized bit of fresh ginger, finely sliced (we didn't have any and it was great anyway, but if you had some, that would be a bonus)
1 fresh red chilli, chopped. Seeds in or out. Up to you.
2 spring onions, chopped
few twists black pepper

Preheat your oven to 220C

1 Cut 2 slices from your pineapple half 2cm thick, cut into chunks and set aside. Chop up the rest and get the juice out, somehow. HFW says squeeze it with your fist. We have a juicer so FINALLY there a use for the enormous buggery thing, but if you are not stupid credulous twats like us and do not have a jucier, just do it the best way you can see how.

2 Make a marinade out of the pineapple juice (there ought to be about 3-4 tbsp) and the soy, sugar/honey, garlic, ginger, chilli and black pepper. Make some slashes in the duck breast and leave in the marinade. Ideally for a few hours, but 10 mins will make a difference.

3 Wipe the marinade off the breasts and sear them quickly in a hot pan in some veg oil. They need about 2-3 mins each side, just to brown the underside and crisp up the skin.

4 In a small roasting tin, make a bed out of the spring onions and lay the breasts on top and then pour over the marinade. The idea is that the breasts poach in the marinade so you need a roasting tin or oven proof dish that's quite small otherwise the marinade will just wash out everywhere and won't do an effective poaching job.

5 Roast these in your hot oven for 8-10 mins then remove from whatever they were cooking in and leave to rest somewhere warm. Do not chuck out the marinade.

6 In a small pan with some veg oil fry the pineapple chunks, turning occasionally so they get some colour. Sieve everything that's sitting in the duck-roasting-receptacle into your pineapple-chunk-frying pan and sizzle to reduce to a syrupy sauce. Poke the pineapple pieces around so they coat well.

7 Return the duck to the pan and turn a few times to coat. I always find it much more clement to slice things like duck breasts before eating, so you don't spend your evening sawing through a huge thunk of meat. Spoon over the sauce and pineapple chunks before serving.

Here is a picture of (part of) the baby because you know you love it you soppy fools.

Beef Stroganoff

2011-02-09T07:26:00.001Z

Beef Stroganoff is one of those things that is almost always referred to as a "classic" dish, because "classic" is what people call things that were eaten a lot in the Seventies. I get the feeling menu turnover was a lot slower in the Seventies than it is now (although if I never see another chicken liver parfait with toast on a menu it will be 8 million years too soon) and so I think most of England lived on beef stroganoff from 1970 to 1979.

And like most "classic" dishes, beef strog is entirely brown and made mostly from cream.

My husband made this for me last night. He is very "classic" - i.e. he was made in the Seventies. Actually, he was made in 1969, but that's beside the point. He does this very well and isn't stingy with the cream.

I've got no idea how close this is to a "classic" classic beef stroganoff, but I find that there is always some terrifying and mad ingredient in "classic" classic recipes for slightly bygone things, like a pint of mustard, or tripe or sambuca or 18 anchovies.

Anyway, this is a lovely thing. I'm always very into meat with a slightly sour accompaniment, like pot roast chicken and gherkins for example. The sour cream in this fulfills that purpose, but you do need to know that there is a sour element to this because that might not be your bag at all.

We ate this with red camargue rice.

Beef Stroganoff by Giles
For 2

2 steaks - rump, fillet, whatever, just make sure it's suitable for frying
2 big handfuls of mushrooms
1 large while onion, or a lot of shallots (nice) or 2 medium onions, chopped finely
1 long sloop of tomato ketchup
1 large glass shitty white wine, or vermouth, and about half a glass of brandy
salt and pepper
1 small tub sour cream - that's about 100 - 150 ml.
1 dried chilli (if you fancy it, it's not essential)

1 Sautee the onions and mushrooms gently over a low flame in some groundnut oil. If you wanted this extra-rich, you could put in a knob of butter, too. But don't use butter only because it will burn. I like Nigella's thing of sprinkling some salt over the onions to help them sautee rather than burn. It works - just a generous pinch sprinkled over will do the trick.

2 Slice up your steak into strips and then get another frying pan really nice and hot and fry that off. It's important to do this in a separate pan because the onions and mushrooms will leak a lot of water and if you try to cook the steak in it, it will just sort of steam and be gross. Frying it in a separate pan fast and hard will give the surface of the steak a chance to char, which will make it damn tasty.

The cooked-ness is up to you. My husband has totally gone off very rare meat and now thinks that the trick to keeping steak tender is to cook it fast and hot until done sort of medium and then rest it.

3 Turn back to your onions and mushrooms. Turn up the heat and pour in the brandy. My husband got this to set light, which I wasn't expecting and scared the shit out of me, I don't mind telling you. I don't think you have to set light to it if that kind of thing freaks you out (and what normal person isn't freaked out by flames leaping to one's kitchen ceiling?) just cook off the alcohol. Then throw in your glass of shitty white wine and cook that down too.

4 Scrape the onions and mushrooms in with the steak and set that on a medium heat. Add the ketchup - just a long squirt - and mix that in - then add in the sour cream and stir in. If you don't have any sour cream, you can use normal cream with some lemon juice in it. My husband added the juice of a whole lemon and said that was too much, so you could try with the juice of half a lemon instead.

Eat, feeling nostalgic.

And there you were thinking that I was going to be writing all about the baby.
Ha ha. Joke's on you.

If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake....

2011-02-05T19:14:00.000Z

... but I didn't, so I got you a baby instead.

Kitty Coren

It's funny. I've been secretly worried out of my mind for the last 30 years that I'll be a terrible mother. Just like I didn't learn how to drive until I was 28 because I was so worried about being a shit driver, about driving absent-mindedly into lamp posts, or when drunk.

But then I finally learnt how to drive and it turns out that I'm a fucking brilliant driver. Like, seriously great. I can even park.

I mean, it's a bit early to tell whether babies are easier or harder than cars, but at the very least I'm not scared anymore. And you've got to start somewhere.

So, welcome to Recipe Rifle, Kitty cat. It's kind of like quite a shit food blog - but it's all yours.

(Back soon,

E xxx)

You, my crazy readers

2011-02-02T09:28:00.002Z

Last night I made a St Clements pudding, which is a steamed sponge thing involving clementines and it didn't really work out - although don't think for one second that I am not eating some right now at my desk at 0925.

Anyway, I found myself this morning with nothing to write about. I didn't help that I had the major hormonal preggy sweats all night and had bad dreams about being chased by Jamie Redknapp (why didn't I just stop and ask him what he wanted? And then ask him out ON A DATE? Although I wouldn't do that because I think Louise Redknapp looks like a really nice person.)

But then I looked at the comments that had come in overnight - a record-breaking NINE - and was tickled by all of them, which were unusually bonkers, as well as being unusually plentiful but was extra-specially amused and charmed by this mad-but-endearing comment below.

Dear Esther, for no reason at all I've decided to take a closer look at your home page photo- the one of you holding saucepan (rather menacingly). Questions: is that a mirror splashback above stove? Isn't it crazy to keep clean? Why would one have mirror at that height and there? Is it a Cath Kidston reflected, near the Roberts radio? In addition to being expensively teethed and large bosomed, are you also very tall? Your island work-height appears low in relation to your hips, so presumably, you are either 1. very tall, 2. average in height but long-torsoed, 4.island is very low, or 3.you cook in Louboutins ala Nigella? I have a tiny kitchen and am envious of your light & spacious kitchen, that you did not have to stick units above worktop; I'm long in body so find most workheights too low for me (like to stack chopping boards) and also envious of big boobs :) I would like sone Invisalignbay some point in the future. I am feeling very nosy today I don't know why! Love LS xx

And so because I've not got much else to do or say, I thought I'd answer this in full, in a post.

1 Yes, that is a mirror splashback. It's actually not crazy to keep clean - it rarely gets dirty unless you cook something very greasy and spitty and then it's just a question of deploying the Windolene. It also helps that I have a cleaner

2 The mirror is that height and there so that you have a nice view of the garden while you are bent, barefoot and pregnant over the stove cooking your husband's dinner. Also, when you live with someone as naughty and sneaky as my husband, it's handy to have eyes in the back of your head. This mirror is a way of achieving this without a complicated operation.

3 That is indeed an item of Cath Kidston reflected near the radio, but it's not mine, it belongs to my sister, who is behind the camera.

4 I am not tall and I do not cook in Louboutins. I don't think Nigella does either, judging by how often she's seen in her FitFlops. I am exactly five feet six and one half inches. It's my sister who is tall and the angle from which she took the photo makes the island look lower than it is. The island is exactly 90cm, or 35 and one half inches off the ground. It comes up to about 2 inches below my belly button. It is not unusually low. But, as it happens, I do have quite a long torso.

Yes my kitchen is pretty nice. There are no cupboards because I insisted on building a larder on the side of the kitchen, which stores all foodstuff and lots of odds and ends. I actually redesigned and built the kitchen as a kind of devotional act to my husband; when we started going out he was the cook and I was a mere bystander. But then when it was finished I thought it was too nice and too lifestyle for him to do any cooking in it and quickly appropriated it for myself.

Cauliflower gratin

2011-02-01T18:25:00.000Z

I always look a fright. No matter how carefully I get dressed, I always end up looking crumpled and baggy and I don't know how I manage it.

I've turned my mind to this because I've been thinking recently about the future and daring to consider all the clothes I packed away last June. And I can't help but remember with a slow, blinking awareness that despite my blurry remembrance of my thin self being terribly glamorous - that I always looked a fright.

I generally blame it on my mouth. My mouth is enormous and my teeth are big and square, like a set you might find champing on a bit just before the 3.40 at Newmarket, and there's one sticking-out snaggle one that I'm spending months and a small fortune trying to correct.

And I always forget about my ginormous mouth and when I laugh I don't got "titter titter" like I think girls are suppose to laugh - I go "Waha ha ha hack hack hack hack" and look like I'm about to swallow the room like the bit in The Little Mermaid when Ursula creates a swirly vortext in the water that sucks in all the ships. Then I have a coughing fit.

I think it's also because I've got quite big boobs. I mean, we're not talking Lola Ferrari, but neither are we talking a discreet handful. And when you've got big boobs, no matter how thin the rest of you is, you're always going to look a bit fat and sloppy if you're not careful. I often wish I was a different shape so that I could wear things for flat-chested people - chic little dresses and t-shirts with high necks or floaty baggy things. But I end up looking like an overstuffed sofa. With wonky teeth.

Angelina Jolie has the same problem as me - one of the few things we have in common, I'll wager -: but we both certainly have giant gobs and indiscreet bosoms. It's why she's lost all that weight, to get some ballast off her front and off her mouth. But it won't work!!! They'll still be there getting in the way no matter how much weight you lose, dear. Not that I think Angelina Jolie looks a fright, or anything.

Anyway, it's why I always wear the same thing - jeans and a top with some kind of v-neck thing to it. And I really ought to just get over it and realise that's what I look best in and stop buying flapper dresses and high-neck t-shirts. The truth is that jeans and a v-necky top are my secret weapons in my war not to look a fright.

A secret weapon in the war against actual fatness rather than perceived boob-created fatness is the gratin.

You can turn almost any scary vegetable that you'd really rather not eat (but you have to replace carbs with something, damnit) into something totally palatable by covering it in cream and giving it a crispy top.

The wetter the vegetable, the less likely it is to want to be gratinated. So, aubergine, tomato, courgette, spinach etc, aren't that wild about it, although it does work. But broccoli, fennel, leek, cauliflower, squash love it. Although - having said spinach, you can of course steam it and then add it to another veg and gratinate the whole lot together.

Generally, I would do a gratin with a white sauce. But no matter how good you are at making a white sauce (and I am probably one of the best in the country. No, seriously) it's a bit of a faff. So instead of making the white sauce, you can just cover the whole thing in a lot of cream, butter, salt and cheese and scatter breadcrumbs over the top. It's totally low-carb - let's not split hairs about the breadcrumbs shall we? - and totally cheerful.

Cauliflower gratin, for 4

1 cauliflower
about 170ml cream (double or single, up to you) and you could use more if you felt like it
3 large handfuls of cheese
- mix and match the cheese as it is available to you. You can absolutely use cheddar for the whole thing, it's just that it will taste a lot of cheddar. You could also use blue cheese and cheddar, or gruyere and parmesan or anything you like, as long as there's plenty of it.
2 slices of bread
1 clove garlic or some garlic oil
some parsley if you have it
about 50g butter
salt
pepper
some olive oil

Preheat your oven to 180C and butter whatever dish you want to have your gratin in. You might have some butter left over from doing this - that's fine.

1 Break up the cauliflower and steam or boil until it is soft. Steaming takes about 12 minutes, boiling less long. If you were doing the cauli in a white sauce, you don't have to cook it for as long, because when you finish it off in the oven, it will continue to cook. But without a white sauce, the cauli won't do any more cooking, so you need to get it as soft as you want it in the first instance.

2 In a food processor, whizz up the bread, parsley, a big pinch of salt and a few twists of pepper, and your garlic clove or slug of garlic oil. If you wanted to add some chilli, you could.

3 Once the cauli is cooked and soft put it in a large pan and bash it about a bit so that there aren't any massive great tree trunks. Then pour over your cream and chuck in any leftover butter from buttering the gratin dish. Now add about 2/3 of whatever cheese you're using and give it all a stir until it's melty. It strikes me now that a tiny splash of truffle oil might be nice here. What do you think? Throw it in if it seems a good idea. Season all this with salt and pepper. This is an occasion to use white pepper, if you have bought some for something else and are now wondering how the hell to use it up.

4 Turn all this out into your gratin dish and sprinkle over your breadcrumbs and press down. Then cover this with the remaining cheese. Add more cheese if you feel like it. Dot with butter and stick in the oven for about 20 minutes or until the top looks yummy.

Eat with a clear conscience and plan your spring wardrobe.

I have already purchased a beige trench coat in a size S from Uniqlo and I'm very pleased with it.

Feta and chilli salad

2011-01-28T09:55:00.002Z

You've all gone perfectly potty for the idea of low-carb recipes. I had no idea that that was the way to your hearts. I had thought you liked my swearing, my slap-dash cooking instructions and my amateurish photographs.

But it turns out that you all just want to be THIN and want nothing more than ideas for low-carb stuff that isn't grilled chicken and broccoli. Whether you are preparing for weddings, or losing babyweight, or just trying to shift general blubber you all want to be SKINNY and to hell with all those fattie know-it-alls, who try and tell you about being a "healthy weight" and having a balanced diet.

"Fuck you!" you scream. "I don't need BOTH kidneys and heart failure is a small price to pay for being 7.5 stone."

So anyway, not that I'm really craven or desperate to please or anything, but I'll have a care to feature more low-carb things. I mean, it's going to be all you get once I'm on a diet too, so we might as well start now.

But I need to clarify what I mean by low-carb. I don't mean carb-FREE; I think as long as you cut out:

refined sugar (i.e. not fructose, so you can eat fruit)
bread
pasta
potatoes
rice

weight will come off. Cutting out those things is hard enough, without also dodging stuff like butternut squash, fruit and whatever else randomly has carbs in it. Carrots, or whatever. I also don't think it's neccessary (unless you're feeling really hardcore) to cut out alcohol.

And I think a very occasional square of high-percentage cocoa solid chocolate is okay. That is, as long as you can ration yourself to 1 or 2 squares and aren't one of those people who ends up eating the whole bar. Which I think might possibly be everyone.

So, this chilli feta salad is a thing I pinched off Nigel Slater. We had it for dinner last night and although I almost never reach for a salad at dinner - way, way too depressing, especially in January - this was actually really great. As with all these things, I think you can get away with having it with some rye toast or a wholemeal pitta bread. Note I said A wholemeal pitta bread, not 6 wholemeal pitta breads plural.

Chilli and feta salad
for 2

1 packet feta
1 chilli, seeds out, chopped
1 lime
olive oil
3 spring onions
coriander
1 avocado, sliced
2 tomatoes, sliced
chopped coriander
mixed lettuce - I used chicory and little gem

It's pretty self-explanatory but I'll go through it anyway.

1 Cook in some groundnut oil over a very low flame the chilli and spring onion for about 6 minutes. Squeeze over some lime juice and scatter in some zest. Turn the heat up and add the block of feta and leave to cook for about 4/5 minutes each side on a medium-high flame.

2 Arrange the salad-bit on a plate and dress with olive oil, lime juice and salt. Plonk on top the cooked feta and scatter over the chilli, spring onion and coriander.

Eat while looking at a photograph of Megan Fox, and chant "THIN THIN THIN".

Jamie's cherry vanilla affogato

This I'll just mention in passing, seeing as I know a pudding isn't really what you want to know about right now. But I made it so you might as well know about it.

This is from Jamie's 30-Minute Meals and I thought it looked like a clever, sweet idea - and it is. Although the very expensive tin of organic black cherries I bought tasted of absolutely nothing at all. Really nothing. They were more of a texture than a taste. So this is only really worth doing if you can get your hands on some cherries that actually taste like something.

1 Mix up some instant espresso powder (you can get it from Waitrose, it's called "Percol" and it's just like very strong instant coffee - perfectly nice) - with a teaspoonful of sugar. For one cup, you only need about a shot's worth, so for, say, six people you'd need about a cupful.

2 Crumble some shortbread into the bottom of an espresso or small coffee cup

3 On top blob a ping-pong-sized ball of vanilla ice-cream and a tablespoonfull of cherries. Sprinkle over some flaked dark chocolate if you like. Just before serving, pour a shot-sized sloop of coffee over the whole lot. V nice, makes the shortbread go cakey and peps up the vanilla ice cream. And the cherries, if you can find some nice ones, will add extra mystery.

Roast halibut with vinegar sauce

2011-01-27T10:15:00.000Z

I made an executive decision last night that we were going to have fish. We hardly ever have fish, except the odd bit of squid for ceviche, because we both feel so strongly that one shouldn't eat it, because there's hardly any left in the sea. But I decided yesterday that it was time.

So I went to the world's least friendly fishmongers, who are - conveniently for me - located in North London. I have tried and tried and tried with those men and all I can say is that they are simply impervious to charm. So I don't bother smiling, or saying hello any more.

"What's newest in?" I said to a man with tattoos on his face, who may or may not be an actual fisherman, but is always in a foul mood.

"ALLIBUT" he said.

"Okay," I sighed. "Two fillets please."

I handed over abaout £20,000 and left.

Anyway, things didn't go that smoothly with the dinner as a whole. There was quite a lot of dropping things and swearing coming out of the kitchen. I won't bore you with what went wrong, because hearing about a series of cooking fuck-ups - unless they are REALLY BAD - is about as interesting as hearing about a bad tube journey.

But the actual fish and the sauce I made up to go with it, against all the odds, turned out very well. So I'm going to tell you about the fish as I ought to have done it.

So here we go:

Roast halibut with vinegar sauce

for 2

2 fillets hallibut

50g butter

1 sloop groundnut oil (about 2 tbs)

1/2 sloop olive oil

salt

pepper

cream

1 tsp vinegar

1 tsp capers, rinsed

scattering of parsley (if you have it, don't go out specially for it)

1 glass shitty white wine

3 bay leaves - if you have

1 Preheat your oven to 220C. On a board, skin-side up, season the fish generously with salt and pepper.

2 Put a roasting tin, big enough to take your fish, on the hob and in it melt the butter and oils together. Add the bay leaves and heat until foaming.

3 Add the fish - skin-side down - and cook for 2 minutes. Then flip the fish over so it's now skin-side up and put in the oven for 7 minutes. It ought to be cooked by then but you'll have to be the best judge.

4 After this time, remove the fish somewhere to keep warm. This is the tricky part because for some reason fish goes stone cold really quickly. I am incredibly spoilt and have a double oven. If you don't, you could try leaving the fish on dish, pre-heated in your 220C oven, and then cover it with foil.

5 Put the roasting tin back on the hob, pour in your glass of shitty white wine and let it bubble down - (careful because it will spit everywhere, it got me in the eye from about 3 feet away) - for about 3 mins, stirring occasionally.

When this looks like it has reduced a bit, turn the heat right down and add a long sloop of cream (about 5 tbs), the vinegar and the capers. Here I also added some broccoli cooking water to lengthen the sauce, but you could just as well add a few dribbles from the kettle.

6 Cook this all round for a bit over a gentle heat and then at the last minute scatter over some parsley if using.

Ham, cheese and spinach fritatta

2011-01-26T04:47:00.000Z

My mind, in the last fortnight, has turned to diets. Specifically the diet I intend to hit once this baby is finally out. One of the worst things about being up the duff for me has been the fatness. Fat face, fat legs, fat arms, fat bum, fat BACK, fat HAIR, fat EYES fat FINGERS. Fat fat fat.

Horrible. I'm not a fattist, or one of those people who finds fat people repulsive. But I DO, now, wonder how those who choose to be overweight can stand it. When you are overweight, everything is such a major hassle - from tying your shoelaces and walking upstairs to getting dressed. And your feet hurt all the time.

And I don't believe that getting fat involves some kind of moral choice. I just hate being fat. I don't carry these 3 extra stone well. Some people put on weight and look glossy and curvy. I look like a pudding. It all goes on my face, under my chin and on my arms and I look just awful.

Other people say to me "Yes but give yourself a break.. you'll be really hungry when you're breastfeeding and being pregnant is like a bomb going off and you'll probably take 18 months to get back to normal and yah yah yah noise noise talking talking talking boring boring not listening..."

I know it is shallow but I can't help it. I just want to be thin again. I say thin, I mean slim - I've never exactly been Nicole Ritchie. But I'll do pretty much whatever it takes to get this blubber off. And once I'm back to my old weight I am never, ever going to do that thing where I complain about being "fat" - I had NO IDEA what being fat meant until I got pregnant. I will just be thankful every day that I haven't got three chins. Until my husband demands another baby, of course.

But losing weight and keeping it off takes a considerable mental shift. Ever since I put on 1.5 stone at university and then lost it all on a semi-Atkins diet, I've never eaten just whatever the hell I liked - I was permanently running away from pasta and potatoes and screaming in fright at Krispy Kremes. But for the last 9 months I have been eating anything - pies and cakes and cream and stodge and coca cola and whatever else to keep my spirits up. But soon carbs will be out, protein and vegetables will be in.

So I thought I'd start re-flexing my no-carb cooking arm again in preparation, with this frittata. It's marvellously easy and more interesting, somehow, (despite being basically the same thing), than an omelette. You can chuck in whatever you like - cooked bacon, mushroom, finely-chopped courgette, different sorts of cheese, tomatos, peppers - whatever. Just no potatoes.

Ham, cheese and spinach frittata
For 1 hungry person, or for 2 with a salad

3-4 eggs
1 handful cooked chopped ham
1 handful any cheese you like
1 handful steamed chopped spinach
salt and pepper
1 tbs cream or sour cream (if you have it knocking about)
some butter for cooking

1 Preheat your grill to a medium-high heat. Beat eggs, salt, pepper and cream in a roomy bowl then add all the other ingredients, except the butter.

2 Heat the knob of butter in a non-stick pan until it's foaming and then pour in the egg mixture. Cook this over a medium heat for about 3-4 minutes, then slide pan under the grill to finish off the top. It's ready when it's light and springy to the touch and a weeny bit wobbly in the centre - about 2-3 minutes.

Roast garlic and camembert

2011-01-25T08:56:00.003Z

There were a lot of alarming things about my husband's house when I first moved in. He lived in it like a little lonely bat shivering in one corner of a huge creaky, dark forest. The front door was chipped and turquoise, the number of the house printed out onto A4 paper and sellotaped to the glass-bit over the door. There was a roll of kitchen paper in the downstairs loo.

He didn't own a cafetiere despite having a moderately serious coffee-drinking habit; the convection hob either boiled everything dry or only heated up to baby-breath temperature, the thin grubby blue carpets left over from the previous owners (who moved out 6 years previously) wouldn't get clean with any amount of vacuuming, the canary yellow paint in the living room made everything look jaundiced, the lino was curling and wan and for some reason almost every picture he owned was hung in just one room.

But the most freaky thing was that there were no clocks. I know I have got a sort of mania for clocks, but even so. There were so many rooms, but no clocks. Not even in the kitchen.The first thing I unpacked was my bedside clock, a large retro silver thing with bells on top and a handle. At first he scoffed at it but I quickly found him in the mornings looming over from his side of the bed to squint at the time. (Just like he scoffed at the idea of a thermal cafetiere, but now declares it his favourite thing in the house.)

Now there are clocks everywhere. Kitchen (1 - huge one) bedroom (2) bathroom (1) living room (1) my room (1), the nursery (1). His study - zero - because he seems to be happy telling the time off his computer. Me? I need a clock.

And I need lists. I need lists like I need air. I don't even do very much with my time but I need lists in order to organise the nothingness, otherwise I will categorically not send my niece a birthday card, or ring the curtain man or write about bottarga or invoice that newspaper for my £95 kill fee.

When something is on a list, the liklihood of it getting done increases by a factor of 10. I used to write lists down on post it notes and stick them to things, or on scraps of paper and balance them in prominent places on my desk. Now I have a clipboard. It is red and it sits to the right of my laptop and serves the dual purpose of list-holder and mousepad.

Clipped to the board is a lined sheet of A4 paper, divided into 2 by a vertical pencil line. One column is for scribbling down things when I am on the phone, or off websites. The other column is The List. When the A4 page is full, another is clipped over the top, so that any vital notes made or things left undone don't get thrown in the bin, they merely move another layer down.

I love my list. But sometimes I fear I may have come to rely on it too heavily. If something isn't on the list, I instantly forget about it, meaning if it occurs to me that I have to do something, I often find myself racing to the list to write it down before I forget about it and the baby arrives home from hospital and there are no nappies.

I think this Lorraine Pascale girl looks to me like a list person, too. In the first episode of Baking Made Easy, she declares a love of online shopping, which I'm also mad for. I always think that making lists and a devotion to online shopping are two sides of the same coin.

She made the other day roast garlic and baked camembert, which struck me as a totally genius dinner idea, so I re-created it at home the other night and it went terribly well.

Lorraine Pascale's roast garlic and camembert
For 2

2 bulbs garlic
1 camembert in a wooden box
3 bay leaves
some thyme
50g butter
salt
a bit of olive oil

1 Lop the tops off the garlic bulbs. Having first smeared butter on the base of whatever tin you're going to roast the garlic in (so it doesn't stick and have to be chipped off) put the garlic bulbs cut-face down on the butter. Chuck on top the rest of the butter, herbs and sprinkle over some sea salt. I also drizzled over a bit of olive oil.

2 Shove this in the oven at 200C for 45-50 mins. 20 mins before time is up, unwrap the camembert and peel off the sticker that'll be on either the upper or lower side. Then slide back into its box, without the lid, make a large cross in the top and put in the oven to cook for the remaining time. Eat with toasted rye or sourdough or whatever you fancy.

Giles

2011-01-24T15:04:00.000Z

Ack! There are suddenly loads of you who've been directed here by my husband, Giles. I wish he'd warn me when he's about to do that on Twitter because otherwise I'm all unprepared for new visitors and am still in my dressing gown with a face mask on as you ring at the doorbell going "I was told there was a great food blog here...?"

And I go "Oh yes... yes... hang on a sec, let me just... put my face on..."

Anyway, welcome. It's not that great a food blog, really, it's just that it means Giles gets cooked for at home, which as you can imagine, is a status quo that's in his best interests to maintain.

Bottarga

2011-01-24T14:04:00.001Z

Sorry if I'm sounding a bit freaked-out today, it's just that I went to see Black Swan last night. People suggested that it was scary but I thought "Please, how scary can a film be about ballerinas?!?!"

Incredibly fucking scary, it turns out. I kept waking up running with sweat having seen, in my nightmare, Natalie Portman creeping round the side of my bedroom door in a black tutu. Brrrrrr.

Anyway, today is about Bottarga. Bottarga, if you don't know, (and there's no reason why you should), is the dried roe of grey mullet that tastes strong and smoky and fishy. You can also get tuna bottarga, but obviously none of you buy tuna in any form these days because it's so monstrously ethically unsound.

Bottarga is sold vacuum-packed and looks like this:

and it's most commonly eaten grated onto linguine, because people in Italy and Sardinia (the country bottarga is usually associated with) don't have much imagination.

"Hmmm, what is? New fishy thing. Let's put it on.... pasta!!"

It's not that easy to get hold of. Even in London, I've only seen it in Panzer's, in St John's Wood or in Selfridges Food Hall. But it's worth poking around in your local fishmonger or deli snazzhole, if such a thing exists round your way, to see if you can source some.

People tend to bang on about how expensive it is, but it's not really; 70g, which will set you back about £10, is enough, served on pasta, for about 15 people.

It's best, to my mind, done as a rather chic and exotic starter. Some people saute it with chilli, which I think is a bit of a shame as the chilli takes over. But do do that if you want to.

The way I did it the other night was like this:

1 Allow 50g of linguine per person and when cooked dress with salt and good olive oil.

2 Turn out onto a pre-heated serving dish and grate over a generous amount of bottarga. You really do just grate it, with a grater, like this:

You can also shave a few bits off, too.

Then sprinkle over chopped flat-leaf parsley and lemon juice if you want. If you really want to taste the fishiness of the bottarga, leave out the lemon as it can overpower it.

Orange tiramisu

2011-01-21T14:34:00.004Z

It is noticeable how you don't really give your own childhood much thought until you're faced with having a child of your own.

And the more I think about it, the more I think that the way I was brought up was quite weird. There were no bedtimes, for example. I never had to brush my teeth or do homework.

I did, of my own accord, but I didn't have to. There was no pocket money - each purchase was individually negotiated - no "curfew" later on as a teen and no question of doing chores or duties. I was never told to tidy my room. For one entire year I didn't go to school because I didn't want to.

I knew it was weird at the time, I suppose. I knew it was odd that I didn't have my own bedroom until I was about 8 - kipping down merrily until then in a huge bed with my parents - or that there was no such thing as compulsary pre-dinner handwashing or anything said about finishing everything on your plate. I distinctly remember feeling a bit sad that I didn't get a bedtime story like children on telly adverts did. But then I got to stay up late watching telly with my parents until I nodded off. Who else got to do that? Eh?

Up until quite recently I was baffled by this sentimental attachment that a lot of peoople seem to have to a bath before they go to bed. "I think I'll have a bath and then go to bed," people always say.

"Why a bath?" I always wondered. "Why not a shower?" Then I became vaguely aware of parenting routines and realised that bath-and-bed is a way that parents have of getting their children to go away and go to sleep at 7pm. Later on in life it seems to remain a treasured bedtime sleep trigger.

Some people, I'm sure, probably think that it sounds like quite an enviable childhood. And despite the chronic laziness, inability to take criticism, latent agoraphobia, filthy temper, crippling heartburn, weak veins, antisocial tendencies, stubbornness, foul language and fear of the dark, I think I escaped pretty much unharmed.

I truly believe that I invented this orange tiramisu, but that can't be possible. It's not really a tiramisu either, but I don't like the word "trifle".

Anyway, I made it because I can't get enough of oranges at the moment and so I thought this would be a nice thing to do with them. It's not really cooking, more of an assembly job, but it's a nice thing to have around about this time of year as it straddles the light and summeriness of impending spring, but also the orange booziness of winter just passing.

I made a small one, which would do about 4 people. My camera has been fixed so I went mad with the photos, but I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Esther's Orange Tiramisu (until someone tells me otherwise)

2 oranges
300ml whipping cream
5 tablespoons Cointreau
1 handful hazelnuts, chopped
4 trifle sponge fingers from Waitrose
2 vanilla pods (optional)

1 Peel your oranges with a sharp knife and cut them into small, spoonable chunks. This is my new favourite way of peeling oranges because it means you don't get skin and pith stuck under your nails and orange juice in your eye.

2 Arrange a layer of sponge fingers in whatever bowl you're using.

... it doesn't have to be neat

3 Pour over 1 tablespoonful of Cointreau per sponge finger, plus one for luck. So in this case, 5. Those in AA can substitute the same quantity of freshly squeezed orange juice.

4 Then arrange over that your orange chunks

5 Whip some cream - with the seeds of 2 vanilla pods if you want. I found adding vanilla seeds a bit of a faff and it didn't make anything taste especially vanilla-y, but you might feel different.

6 Scatter over the chopped hazelnuts...

7 ... dust with cocoa powder...

And then have yourselves a great weekend. Don't forget to wash behind your ears.

The Cuisinart soup maker

2011-01-20T14:44:00.004Z

I'll wager that even the most dedicated of my husband's fans are unaware that he writes a monthly column for a technology magazine called T3. It's one of those magazines that has models in bikinis on the front holding small items of new gadgetry made of brushed aluminium. Every month we are sent a piece of technology that he has to write about.

The joke being that my husband has a nervous breakdown if you suggest he so much as uses the "search inbox" function on his email. I can completely fuck his life up by setting his phone to Silent, because he won't notice or be able to put it back.

He was once sent a replacement mobile phone that wasn't a Nokia and hated it. But rather than ring up and send it back and get a Nokia, he drove himself into blurry fits of hatred and confusion and semi-tearful wobbles of frustration and despair trying to make it work. Every tantrum ended with a wail of "Why can't it just be 1930?" (Answer: because war would break out in 9 years and we'd all die.")

Anyway, he was too much of a tech-retard even to go onto the Nokia website and just buy himself a new sim-free Nokia. So after four months of this and of me finally snapping and screaming "Shut the FUCK UP up about how much you hate your stupid fucking phone!!" I went onto the Nokia website and bought him one myself.

Anyway, this is the kind of man we are dealing with, here. He hated the iPhone we were sent, and the 3D TV, and the XBox Kinetic. The Tom Tom HD traffic was more of a success, although the novelty C3PO voice got on his nerves after a while.

And then this arrived, the Cuisinart Soup Maker. Surely the most pointless and silly thing ever to have been invented by man. It's basically a blender that looks like it's been re-designed by Tim Westwood and it chops and cooks - yes it COOKS - your raw ingredients before whizzing them into soup

But soup is ridiculous. A slurry of mushed-up things, the first spoonful of which is nice but then you have to plough through the rest for what feels like years.

And in order to make it interesting you end up eating 16 slices of bread and enough Cheddar to fell an oak tree, when the whole point of eating (drinking?!) the soup in the first place was to lose a bit of weight while you consider doing the Tracy Anderson Mat Workout DVD that you completely forgot that you had bought on Amazon until it arrived at your door.

But when I unpacked the soup maker, from where my husband had dumped it after its arrival and had been nervously skirting around for the last week - like it was a dead body - it turned out to be rather an impressive beast.

And it came with a handy cookbook, which revealed I had been prejudiced and wrong to think that this sucker can only do soup. Not so! It can also do:

Thai fish cakes
Spiced apple chutney
Tikka Masala sauce

... some other stuff...

...as well as all manner of soups such as carrot and coriander and broccoli and stilton. You know the drill. It'll take a lot to convince me that it's worth spending money on, though - let alone the critical cupboard space sacrifice.

I haven't tried it out yet, as I'm a bit busy at the moment complaining about the size of my swollen ankles and lumbering off to the doctor to be stabbed in the arse with massive needles. But I will soon - otherwise my husband won't get round to it because he'll be too scared and will have to write the whole column without having actually taken the piece of technology out of the box. Plus ca change.

Quick southern chicken

2011-01-13T09:26:00.001Z

This is basically a massive cheat for anyone looking for a bit of Anglo-Tex-Mex in their lives. But it's brilliant and incredibly tasty and doesn't feel or taste like a cheat.

Using thigh meat for this, instead of breast meat, and then the fry/bake method reduces both the time and hassle involved in making a normal flat chicken/chicken schnitzel thing. But it also means that the chicken doesn't dry out, because thigh meat has more ballast.

The great thing about this is that you can prepare it ahead by doing the frying-off in advance and then the final bake before you dish up.

Don't be put off by the use of garlic granules - they might sound like an abomination, but once cooked off they're really tasty and fabulous.

This will feed 2 hungry people for dinner with a side salad, or 4 people with an extra side, such as macaroni cheese or some short corns on the cob. Yee haw!

Esther's quick southern chicken

4 skinned thigh fillets
3 slices of bread, any sort except rye bread, crumbed
2 tablespoons of medium matzoh meal (not essential)
3/4 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon mild chilli powder
1 tablespoon garlic granules (availble from Waitrose, you can also use onion powder)
2 dried chillies, crumbled (not essential either)
Some flour for dredging
2 eggs, beaten
vegetable or groundnut oil for frying

You could also throw in some black pepper, if you wanted, or cumin or cayenne pepper.

Pre-heat your oven to 180C

1 Unfold your chicken thighs and with a sharp knife slice them at a 45 degree angle on the horizontal (does that make sense?) until you've got 2-3 pieces out of each thigh. Each piece of chicken ought to be no more than about 4in x 2.5in. Some little ones are fine.

2 Assemble your crumb mixture by putting the breadcrumbs and all spices into a bowl and mixing round.

3 Dredge each piece of chicken in flour, then the beaten egg and then in the breadcrumbs. It'll get messy. Some people swear by doing that thing of putting the dredging stuff in a freezer bag and then putting the meat in and squishing round. I think this actually makes the mess worse - but do it however you fancy. It's your dinner.

4 Heat up your veg oil - about 1cm deep - to a medium heat in a shallow pan. Bear in mind frying in veg oil can make your house stink and ruin everything, so take the precaution of putting on the extractor fan in advance of frying and if there's a door to your kitchen, close it and plug the gap underneath with tea towels. I also keep a see-through lid on my frying pan when I'm doing this.

Fry off your chicken pieces in batches. They won't need more than about 2-3 mins each side, just to get a bit of colour and oil on them. There should be a modest amount of bubbling happening at the edges of the pieces of chicken, but not violent deep-frying. If you see blue smoke, your oil is too hot.

5 Once all the chicken pieces have been fried off, arrange on a baking sheet then bung in the oven for 25 minutes.

Even though a really nice man in Hampstead fixed my good camera yesterday, I was too excited about eating this to run upstairs and get it, so I took a really shite picture with my little camera:

Sorry. But you get the idea. We were watching Zen on the V+ if you're interested.

Whoopie pies

2011-01-12T18:04:00.001Z

I had another go at macaroons, because I'm that needy for achievement and they went wrong again. So that's it for me and macaroons. It's over. It was never going to be love but now it's, you know.... a bit awkward and embarrassing to be honest.

So I turned to Whoopie Pies instead, because I'd heard that they were more accommodating, less tricky and demanding, less... French.

And if you are into a bit of performance bakery, these are definitely worth the effort.

I strongly recommend using a piping bag for this, as it will reduce the mess you make and the accuracy of your Whoopie discs by a factor of 10. But, unlike HATEFUL BASTARD MACAROONS they will probably work if you just carefully dollop out the cake mixture.

So here we go, Whoopie Pies, recipe courtesy of Lorraine Pascale. These are chocolate, but you could take out the cocoa powder and they would just be a sort of vanilla sponge. For the filling, I chopped up some hazelnuts and added it to the buttercream with a splash of Frangelico, which if you don't already know, is a hazelnut liquer.

But fillings and flavours are up to your imagination, really. Orange buttercream might be nice? For that you'd add the juice and zest of half an orange to the buttercream. Or maybe some chopped pistachios? Anyway, you get the picture.

The quantities below make about 20 discs, or 10 pies.
I halved the quantities and indeed made 5 pies.

For the pies:

120ml milk
190g demerara sugar
120ml sour cream
180g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
55g cocoa powder
pinch salt
1 egg plus one egg yolk (I just used one egg and it was v nice - if I was using these quantities, I'd use 2 eggs plus whites. I can't be buggering about with separating eggs in my condition.)
2 drops vanilla essence
115ml sunflower or groundnut oil

Preheat your oven to 170C normal and 150C fan. Grease and line as many baking sheets as you can fit into your oven in one go. Yes, you must do this.

1 Warm the milk in a pan and then pour in the sugar. Mix this round for 2 minutes and then take off the heat and add the sour cream. Set to one side to cool down to lukewarm - it won't take long.

2 Meanwhile, swizzle together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, bicarb and salt.

3 Once the milk-and-sugar slurry has cooled down, throw in the eggs, oil and vanilla. Give it all a gentle whisk until it has all combined. Then add this to the flour mixture and fold round until it's mixed it. It will be quite runny and will have some lumps in - this is normal.

4 Now the hard bit - piping out the mixture. I find that the best way to get mixture into a piping bag is to stand the bag in some kind of jug with the icing bag hanging over the sides like this:

Then pour or spoon in your mixture like this:

Then it won't go everywhere. I mean, it will go everywhere, but not as much as it might.

I think a small-ish Whoopie, and by that I mean no more than 3 inches diameter when cooked, is best because the sponge is quite rich and if you wolf down one any bigger than that you might be sick. This means getting a disc of mixture no bigger than 2in on the baking sheet and in the oven. This is a bugger because you think you've got the right amount out and then the mixture splurges out all over the place.

I ended up squeezing out the mixture of the piping bag at a slow, steady rate and counting "one, two, three" to myself and stopping when I got to three. That seemed to produce discs of about 2.5-3in. Leave at least 1 in between uncooked discs and between the discs and the sides of your baking sheet/tin.

Yes it IS a bit of a pain, but unlike BASTARD MACAROONS, you get the hang of it quite quickly.

If you're feeling unconfident about your sizing, do one and bake it to test it out - they only take 10 mins so it's not a total hassle.

5 As above, bake these in the oven for 10 mins. Do NOT use a skewer to test for readiness as then you'll have an ugly great hole in the lid of your lovely Whoopies. Just gently pat the top of the sponge with a finger and if it feels firm-ish, it's done. The cake will firm up as it cools, so err on the side of bouncy.

For the buttercream icing

200g butter at room temperature - it really must be, I'm afraid
400g icing sugar
1 tbsp milk

Beat together the butter and icing sugar. If you've never done this before and you're doing it with an electric handwhisk, I ought to warn you that it's quite an alarming process. First the icing sugar goes everywhere and then nothing seems to be happening and then after about 3 minutes with scary speed the whole thing gels and turns into buttercream. Once this happens, slosh over the milk and beat that in. Then add whatever extra flavourings you're into, or leave it plain.

Spread the buttercream between two Whoopie discs and sandwich together. Go easy on the buttercream because it can be a bit sickly.

These will keep in tupperware, somewhere cool, for up to 3 days. If you do want to store them, make sure they are interleaved with greaseproof paper because what they really like to do is stick to things.

Me and Alastair

2011-01-11T14:43:00.003Z

I was nodding off at my desk the other day, when I got an email.

I was excited. I don't get that many emails. It was from Alastair, who is a boy who runs an in-your-own-home cookery school who wanted to teach me how to make pasta. Okay not a boy, he is 29.

He's more handsome than this in real life

But he really does run his own cookery school. He comes round your house with all the stuff and teaches you how to do it all, without you having to put your shoes on or anything.

"I saw on your blog you wanted to make pasta so I'll come and teach you how to do it," he said. My heart sank slightly at the prospect that I might have to do something, but then lifted slightly when I realised that what I could sneakily do was get him round to my house, feign exhaustion from pregnancy and get him to make me lunch.

"Ok," I said grandly. "But I get very tired. So we'll have to keep the lesson to one and a half hours."

Alastair arrived at 10am on his motorbike with all his kit. Then I talked about myself solidly for 3 and a half hours, while eating all the filling for the ravioli and all the cheese for the cheese sauce. He made the pasta, which I managed not to eat until it was actually cooked.

I'd explain how he did it but the thing is, it was quite complicated. Best get him round to your house to teach you how to do it. Or if you're doing a no-carb thing, he can teach you how to chop things, or fillet fish, or make sushi! Sushi-making is his most popular class and more details can be found here. I tried to persuade him to do a class in macaroons and one in whoopie pies, because that's all anyone seems interested in making these days. Apart from sushi.

If you don't have a pasta machine, you're not going to make pasta, probably. And if you do have a pasta machine, you're already going to have a good pasta dough recipe. But one or two of you have complained about Jamie Oliver's pasta dough recipe, so if you want Alastair's, which worked out great, here it is:

400g 00 pasta flour
2 whole eggs
4 egg yolks
2 pinches salt
1 tsbp olive oil
semolina flour for dusting
water

So we made the dough. Or rather, Alastair made it and I sat at the other end of the kitchen eating crackers and going "Uh huh, yup, yup."

I insisted that Alastair teach me (i.e. do and I watch) hand-made ravioli because I thought it would be nice for my readers to be able to make some pasta thingy without having to buy a pasta machine. But it would take you about 8,000 years to make a lot of ravioli by hand, because you have to roll out the dough so bloody thin, so we skipped over that quite quickly to rolling it out with a machine.

Alastair says that Kitchencraft make a good pasta machine for about £20. But he also said don't buy one on eBay because sometimes they're rusty.

So this is a ravioli tray-thingy, that Alastair bought from a cookshop called David Mellor, apparently not the former Minister for Fun who had an affair with Antonia de Sancha. You have to sprinkle a LOT of semolina in it to stop the wretched pasta from sticking.

Then you lay a super-thin sheet of pasta dough on the ravioli sheet, wipe water over the whole thing to stick it together and then add your filling (in this case butternut squash, pancetta and shallot, sauteed for 20 mins and then mashed) in little blobs. The you put another sheet over the top and press down. Sprinkle the top with semolina flour and with a rolling pin, sort of squish down on the jaggedy lines and then turn the whole thing upside down so it all come out, like the picture above.

The first trayload of these will be a disaster, and will get steadily better. By the end I, and by that I mean Alastair, was doing it like a pro.

The ravioli was boiled for 4 minutes and served with a pasta sauce made from melting some cream and the last scrap of dolcelatte that I didn't eat straight out of the packet with my fingers and some toasted walnuts (ditto) together and pouring over, finishing off with some basil leaves.

And here it is! It was fantastic. Even yummier for my barely having lifted a finger in its creation. That isn't normal, said Alastair. Usually his students are a lot more involved than me. I scowled. "But they're not pregnant obviously," he said hurriedly, as I posted a large spoonful of blue cheese sauce into my mouth and then shooed him out of the door so that I could have a nap.

I've got a limited number of promotional discount cards here, so if anyone wants a visit from Alastair (although he can't go much outside London on his bike), or to give a class as a gift, drop me an email and I'll post one to you.

Or if you'd like to pay full price, because that's the kind of person you are, email Alastair directly on contact@cookeryschool.com or join up at the website at http://www.cookeryschool.com/.

The best curry in the world

2011-01-10T15:39:00.000Z

A thing I swore I'd do, when I decided to learn to cook was to stock up on stuff. You know what I mean - all those ingredients that you never have, like fenugreek, tamarind paste, white pepper and fish sauce. It would make the difference, I reasoned, between staying within a limited zone of recipes I could attempt, and really going wild.

Even then, I still hesitated often at the spice rack in Waitrose over a glass jar of coriander seed, or turmeric, thinking "Am I really going to buy this? I'll only use it once, probably."

But eventually I bought it all. I've even got some star anise, although I'm not sure when I'll use it. They all sit in my "Curry Box", which is a large tupperware box I put all my curry spices in so that they don't stink the place out or lose their zing.

And I'm so pleased I do have my vast collection of spices, because it meant that when I came across Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe for Murgh Makhani (that's Butter Chicken to you and me) I had absolutely eveything I needed to make it, despite the jaw-droppingly long list of ingredients and the instruction to marinade stuff overnight (BORING!)

And my GOD GOD GOD this is an amazing curry. Yeah, fine, my Curry without the Bleurgh is perfectly okay if you're looking for a quick, simple spice hit of a weeknight.

But in fact, this is what you really want.

This is what you're craving in those moments when you really, really want a curry. This is like the kind of curry that arrives at your door on a wet winter's night from the slightly-more-expensive curry place round the corner and you carefully lift up the white lid from the aluminium tray while someone else runs to the kitchen for plates and cutlery and beer and you look at what's inside and you think "Oh my god... this is going to be special."

So my advice to you, if you like curry that is, is to use making this as an excuse to go out and raid the spice rack of your local supermarket, because basically once you've got all you need to make this, you can make pretty much any curry there is, probably. And this curry is so gorgeous, so rich and aromatic and cosy and pleasing that you'll want to make it again, loads and to hell with whatever Madhur Jaffrey thinks she's got to say.

So here goes. Ready? Try not to be scared. Have lots of sits-down and drinks of water. This sauce makes enough to cover an entire chicken, or 2 small pheasants. But don't fret about making too much, because you can freeze the leftovers to have with lamb or beef or some more chicken or whatever some other time.

If you're using chicken, get a lot of boneless thigh and breast pieces, because you don't really want to de-bone them after they've been roasted because they'll be covered in curry marinade. Alternatively, leave the bones in and eat round them. Anyway, you get the picture, you're a grown-up. I'm just limbering up to patronise a child for the next 40 years.

For the Tikka Marinade:

1 tsp salt
2 tbsp plain yoghurt
1 tablespoon lime or lemon juice (this is about half a lime/lemon)
2 tablespoons garam masala (you can make your own, or buy it)
2 tsp chilli powder
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp mixed spice
2 tsp fenugreek
1 golfball-sized piece fresh ginger, grated
1-2 tbsp groundnut/sunflower oil
3 fresh chillies, finely chopped. Seeds in or out, up to you

Tired yet? Bit more to go...
For the Tomato Sauce:

2 x 400g tins chopped tomatoes and their juices
thumb-sized piece fresh ginger, grated
2 garlic cloves, squashed
2 fresh chillies, chopped, ditto thing about the seeds
5 cloves
1 tsp salt
175ml water

Last lap...

For the Makhani Sauce

125g butter
2tsp ground cumin
2 tsp tomato puree
4 tsp honey
150ml double cream OR yoghurt
1 tablespoon fenugreek
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 tsp black pepper

PHEWEEEEE. But please, please, I'm begging you - don't be put off. I know it's a lot of stuff but honestly, that really is the heavy-lifting over and done with. The rest is just an assembly job and it's an AMAZING curry.

So here's how it's done (if you're using chicken, I recommend taking the skin off first, because this is quite a rich dish anyway and you don't want the skin schmaltzing everything up).

1 Make up the tikka marinade and leave your chicken pieces in it all day or overnight.

2 Put the chicken in a roasting pan, marinade and all, cover with tin foil and roast for for 5 mins at 220C and then 20 mins at 200C

3 While that's happening, make up the tomato sauce and simmer on the stove for 20 mins

4 While THAT'S happening, melt the 125g butter in a pan or casserole big enough to hold all your chicken pieces, then add the 2tsp ground cumin and leave to foam gently.

5 Pass the tomato sauce through a sieve directly onto the butter-and-cumin mixture. Once the chicken's had it's turn, switch off the heat but leave it there while you finish off pushing the tomato sauce through the sieve.

6 Now add to the tomato-and-butter mixture the rest of the Makhani sauce ingredients and simmer together for 5 mins. Now take your chicken out of the oven and add that, tikka marinade and everything, to the tomato sauce. Cook all this gently for another 8-10 minutes.

Then congratulate yourself. You have just made one of the world's greatest curries.

Polpo's courgette salad

2011-01-07T14:24:00.000Z

I don't like courgettes. Not usually unless they are deep-fried and covered in salt. Otherwise, they are just water in fancy dress.

But this salad really makes the best of them and it is really very delicious. I pinched it off Polpo, which for those who don't know, is like a tapas-y style Venetian restaurant in Soho, which is very hip at the moment. Raw and cut into strips, the courgettes retain a meaty, interesting flavour that you kill almost immediately if you boil them.

And (although my photo is typically shit, I'm getting my other camera fixed soon, I promise) it looks pretty, if that's your thing.

The ingredients look quite unpromising, but altogether they make a very delicious thing, which is simple to assemble and everyone likes it.

Polpo's Courgette Salad for 2

1 large courgette
about 20 parmesan shavings (you could also use pecorino)
the juice of half-to-3/4 of a lemon
salt
the best quality olive oil you can get your hands on

1 Cut the courgette into strips using a speed peeler or a japanese mandolin

2 Put in a serving dish and pour over a few glugs of olive oil, the cheese, salt and lemon juice. Mix around to combine - it's easiest to do with your hands although you do get them totally covered in olive oil

This is really nice with something rich, maybe a rose veal chop, or chicken schnitzl.

Rabbit with yoghurt and mustard

2011-01-06T08:43:00.001Z

Yikes, sorry - this is surely a competitor for all-time worst photo on Recipe Rifle

What with me being the size of a small South American country and liable to fall asleep at any second, my husband has been doing quite a lot of cooking.

You always get something a bit bonkers when he cooks. He'll set off for the shops with a cheery wave, planning to get a few simple ingredients for supper and, after returning two or three times because he's forgotten his keys, or his wallet, or his shoes, he'll make it to the shops and come back brandishing a pig's head, or a side of venison. Or, like the other day, some rabbit and pheasant.

More about the pheasant later, but with the rabbit he turned to Nigel Slater. That's what he does, my husband, he comes home with something weird and flicks through recipe books until he finds a thing to do with it. I, on the other hand, flick through recipe books and then go shopping for whatever it is I need. I'm not sure whose method is better. We're probably both idiots.

Anyway, I was a bit wary of the rabbit. I'm a bit wary of game in general. I don't like the occasionally pooey, ferrous tang much. But this was great. And not at all rubbery as rabbit can sometimes be. My husband claims this is from the resting.

So here we go - Nigel Slater uses cream, but we didn't have any so we used yoghurt (a danger of reading recipes post-shopping), but it was delicious anyway. Using cream would have resulted in a "longer" sauce, but I thought the yoghurt added an interesting tartness to everything. Either is good. You can also do this with chicken. I mean, not instead of the yoghurt, instead of the rabbit.

4 rabbit joints (we ended up using boned rabbit chunks from Waitrose that were reduced)
3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp French mustard - one of Dijon and one of grainy if you can
olive oil
about 150ml of yoghurt or cream

1 Mash together the garlic and mustard with some salt and pepper. Stir in olive oil to make a thin paste (about 2/3 glugs). Rub the mixture over your rabbit.

2 Place in a shallow baking dish, drizzle over some more oil and bake at 190C for about 25mins.

3 Take the dish out of the oven and pour off most of the oil. Tip the yoghurt/cream over the rabbit and shift it all around so it's evenly coated. Bake for another 20 mins.

We ate this with buttered noodles. Then my husband went to play Fives and I watched 3 episodes of House back to back and painted my nails.

Chicken liver pate

2011-01-05T10:35:00.001Z

Why does everyone go on about how much they hate January? I love January. It's my favourite month. There are so few expectations of joy and happiness that I, personally, love it. I can be as depressed as I like. No-one invites you out for dinner, or to a party, or anything. It's great!

And I always find the run-up to Christmas a tiny bit like the run-up to the end of the world. Quick, quick, quick... got to get everything done by this looming deadline. And you hold your breath and do it all and sort of expect the sky to fall on your head. But then January 2 and 3 and 4 roll around in the usual fashion and you feel like you've been given a second chance at life.

My mistake in the past with January has been to leave Christmas decorations up. Now I take them down with great relish - all of them - on January 2. I throw away the cards, put everything else in a cardboard box, stash it away and forget it ever happened. And this year, we bought a living tree so we don't even have that sad throw-out-the-tree-carcass moment. It's just been moved outside in its little pot for next year.

My next move will be to go out and buy a lot of hyacinths, which I will do just after I've finished writing this and just before I go out and get a flu jab. My mother, who usually sounds surprised to hear from me when I ring, like: "Oh yeah! I thought there was another child somewhere. Which one are you again?", has gone mad and rung me every day for the past week asking if I've had my shot yet because she's worried about the baby. Not about ME, you'll notice.

Anyway, hyacinths are a key element to feeling good about January, if for some MENTAL reason you don't already feel good about it. Go and get some with your remaining pennies that you have not spent on cheap tat and mulled wine.

And then cook something frugal! Like this chicken liver pate. Easy peasy and very cheap.

In its most basic form, chicken liver pate is chicken livers cooked and then pulverised with melted butter and seasoned. That's it. (That's why it's always a starter in restaurants, because each serving costs the rezzy 50p to make, max, and then they flog it to you for £7.95).

Any extra seaonings besides salt and pepper are up to personal imagination. Below is a list of the stuff I usually put in my pate, but you can add extra things (mace? MUSTARD?) or leave things out if you don't like them/haven't got them.

1 400g packet chicken livers - I get mine from Waitrose, obviously
About 180g butter
3 shallots, chopped
salt
pepper
some thyme - 2 sprigs, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic
some brandy, about 2 glugs
some sage - 5 leaves, roughly chopped

1 Wash and sort through your chicken livers for any green or grey bits, which are gall bladder and will make you fucking gag and ruin the whole thing if any gets in your pate. Err on the side of caution and snip out anything that looks even vaguely suspect.

Heat some veg oil in a pan and gently cook your livers for about 4-5 minutes, turning often. You're looking for brown on the outside and pink on the inside - but not red. Snip the livers in half if that makes it more manageable. If you're a bit squeamish about offal, cook them for longer, bearing in mind that the longer you cook them, the more grainy your pate will be.

2 Sling your livers in a food processor and then fry the onions, garlic and any herbs you want together in the same pan on a very low heat for a good 10-15 mins. If you want a really garlicky pate, keep back one garlic clove and chuck it in raw later.

3 While this is happening, melt the butter - about 180g. Yeah, it is quite a lot. I've never really been able to get the hang of clarifying butter, but in theory if you melt it really slowly what ought to happen is that the clear part of the butter floats to the top and the milky part of the butter sinks to the bottom. That much butter takes about 10-15 mins to melt.

4 Once the onions and garlic are done, add them to the livers in the food processor. Then pour about 2 tablespoonfuls of brandy into your pan and turn up the heat to full bongoes. Cook this down and scrape at the bottom of the pan to get all the gack off and swizzle it into the brandy for about 2-3 minutes and then add it to the food mixer. Chase this with about 2 tablespoons of your melted butter. If you want it garlicky, add your raw garlic clove now.

5 Whizz all this up. Taste. Season. You will need quite a lot of salt, about two or three big pinches, and about 8-10 turns of the pepper grinder. It is normal for warm, pulverised chicken livers to smell a bit scary and pungent. You may wonder just what kind of hellish mess I've got you into. Fear not, when chilled this horrifying mixture will be unscary and tasty.

6 I like my pate quite rustic and don't mind the odd corner of onion, but if you'd like yours more of a smooth parfait, pass it through a sieve. This is messy and annoying and quite tough on the old triceps, but it's what you have to do. Decant, seal with a layer of melted butter and chill. If you're feeling artistic, gently press a sage leaf into your clarified butter lid.

My advice is to decant the pate into a number of small ramekins and top each with a layer of butter, rather than putting the whole thing into a large container, so that you can use one small ramekin of pate at a time and still have some fresh in the fridge, rather than feeling under pressure to eat a huge cereal-bowl-sized wodge of pate at one sitting.

Eat with toast and cornichons, while pretending that the letter from the bank about your overdraft that you just threw in the bin in fact got lost in the post.

Keeps for about 10 days (butter-seal unbroken) in the fridge.

I hate macaroons

2011-01-04T09:41:00.001Z

Just marvel at how shit these are

A lot of you have been bothering me about macaroons - for months. How can you make them? What's the best recipe? The best method?

And my answer to you individually has always been: BUY THEM FROM A FUCKING SHOP. Because there some things that you ought to buy from a shop - turkish delight is one of them and the other one is macaroons. I'm sure there are other things. Croissants. Cheese. Gelatine.

The problem, people, is sugar. Sugar is hard to work with and although as a general rule I am quite disdainful of those who think that cooking is complicated, there are people who train for, like, days to become pastry chefs and chocolatiers. And when they come to make things like macaroons they have all the right kit - sugar thermometers and icing bags and silicon trays and special ovens and flavourings and all that shite that one doesn't neccessarily have in a domestic kitchen.

So I'd always say: buy them from a shop. They are a treat. They are not humble home-cooked fare - they are multi-flavoured, layered and coloured, designed for precious fashion gizmos and fizzy PR girls to send to each other and squeal over. They are not for the likes of you and me to knock up on a lazy afternoon.

But you're all such nags. Maybe you ought to give that up for January, yeah? Leave a poor pregnant girl alone. But despite making me hate you, the endless, endless pestering and nagging worked because like a chump I ordered some instant macaroon mix from some online shop and gave them a go. After all, not everyone, I reasoned, lives near a Laduree concession stand.

And it was, genuinely, the most boring and disappointing experience of my brief cooking career. Sometimes things that are a bit of a faff are worth making because they are, at the same time, fun and they work. But these things were both not fun to make and didn't work. I mean just look at them - cracked, discoloured, thin, wonky. Crap. CRAP!

Some of it was my fault (the whisk attachment on my food processor broke; I don't have an icing bag) but some of it was also the instant mix's fault (they didn't specify enough water but when I added more I added too much and it went sloppy; the food colourings I bought from the same online shop were cack and dull and actually came with a warning on the label that they might have "an adverse effect on attention and behaviour in children").

However the flavour was just excellent, as industrially-processed things containing Guar Gum, Silicon Dioxide, Lactic Acid Esters of Mono- and Di-glycerides of Fatty Acids usually are. So if you think you can do better than me, instant macaroon mix is available here.

Anyway, after that disaster I thought no more about the whole thing and wasn't even going to bother writing about them, until I had a nightmare last night about macaroons. It went on for ages - it really did. Don't tell me that in actual fact it only went on for three seconds or whatever, because I kept being woken up by my husband dithering about listening to the cricket and whenever I went back to sleep I'd still be dreaming about bloody macaroons. So it's a sign. I'm going to have to make them and master them. That, it seems, is my curse. Luckily I've found a couple of straightforward enough-looking recipes to have a go at. All I need is an icing bag. And some food colouring that isn't POISONOUS.

I hope your Christmas and New Year were okay and if you're back at work, I'm sorry. I don't even have a job and I'm depressed as hell that the holidays are over.

I was ill throughout all festivities. The highlight was when my husband got incredibly drunk on New Year and dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool and scraped his nose on the bottom and now he looks like he's been in a fight.

The next morning, (I was asleep at the time of the incident), I said: "Ha ha, you're such a dick" - and variations on that theme - throughout breakfast, until someone else said "My God - you could have broken your neck!"

I looked at my husband and felt more strongly than ever that my marriage is like an episode of The Inbetweeners - except that we are both that posh know-it-all one.

Recipe Rifle is on holiday

2010-12-21T11:35:00.000Z

I mean, if you call being ill and the size of a house a HOLIDAY.

But I'll be back in 2011 with:

MACAROONS!

STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING!

HOME-MADE PASTA (MAYBE)

COMPLAINING!

A BABY!

SOME OTHER STUFF!!!!

Christmas special #13: The morning after

2010-12-20T10:50:00.000Z

And so we come to the end, on the arbitrary number #13, of my series of Christmas Specials. There were going to be more, but I'm now ill *cough cough* and as good as snowed in, so more cooking is out of the question.

But I thought we'd finish sort of where we started, with a detailed guide that may be either useful or grossly patronising, depending on what state of mind you're in.

I want to talk about BRUNCH, which is something you may be called upon to provide on Boxing Day, or New Year's Day.
Newspaper colour supplements are falling over themselves to suggest that you do kedgeree, turkey soups or exotic duck salad things for your various brunches. When in actual fact, what most of us will reach for is the humble fry-up.

But I disagree that a fry-up is simple. I think a fry-up ranks next to a roast in terms of a thing that seems simple, but is in fact fiendishly hard to get right. And I know it's hard to get right because I've pretty much never been at a domestic fry-up situation for more than 2 people that's gone smoothly.

I mean, unless I'm in charge.

The trouble comes with the multiple elements of the fry-up. Every family is different; you may have a strict no-bean or no-mushroom tradition. Sauces might be utterly verboten on the breakfast table - alternatively HP and fried eggs may verily be the taste of your childhood. But the fact remains that there are a lot of things to co-ordinate and there's inevitably not be quite enough of something, or a couple of things reach the table stone cold.

So the first thing to do when you're contemplating doing a fry up for brunch, is to take complete charge. Don't let other people interfere - I mean, in the nicest possible way - unless it's minor tasks like putting stuff on the table or making tea, because only you can hold all the various timings of things in your head - no-one else. Two people doing a fry-up always equals cold beans.

Then you ought to do things in the following sort of order. This will enable everyone, including you, to sit down roughly at the same time without having to leap up muttering "butter", only to leap up three seconds later, muttering "teaspoons".

I mention the various elements of my preferred brunch fry-up but mentally delete those abhorrent to you as you go along and add in whatever else you're into (fried bread? tomatoes? black pudding? mmmm). Don't let anyone tell you that with a fry-up you've "gotta" have sausages or you've "gotta" have ketchup. Fuck them! It's your brunch.

Allow 30 minutes to get all this done - although it may take 45 if you are doing this for more than 4 people.

So here we go.

1 Fill the kettle and turn it on. Get the butter out of the fridge so it has a chance to be spreadable. Switch on the oven to a plate-warming temperature and then put in

- plates
- a flat dish for bacon/sausages
- a deep round dish for beans

2 Get out a frying pan and a saucepan, with a little oil in the frying pan. Put them both on the lowest available heat.

Some portion control advice:

- Allow three rashers of streaky or two rashers of back bacon per person.
- (Egg advice coming in a minute)
- If you are having sausages, best dig out an extra pan to do them in. My advice is to do chipolatas, as they cook fast. Allow 3 per person. If you insist on doing big bangers, allow 2 pp and leave at least 40 mins for them to cook properly.
- Allow 1/2 a tin of beans per person. I know it sounds like a lot, but it'll all go.
- Allow 1 portobello mushroom or 1 generous handful of button mushrooms
- Allow 1 disc of black pudding pp (unless you know someone is a real black pudding fiend)
- Allow 1 fried/grilled tomato pp, cut in half

3 Get this all on the go and then congratulate yourself - you're 70% of the way to a very well-organised brunch. Celebrate with a cup of tea.

4 Leave the sausages, beans and bacon and whatever else all cooking very gently. I can't stress enough the importance of having everything on a very low or medium heat. You don't want anything to be sizzling fast and giving off billowing blue smoke - that way lies panic and burnt things. Bacon needs to cook very slowly in order to be lovely and crispy - I'm talking 20-25 minutes - because the fat needs to render and then crisp up. Chipolatas mostly don't care what's done to them but if you cook them slowly, there'll never be a situation where something's burning and scaring the pants off you.

5 Now is the critical time to dump knives and forks, mugs, glasses, milk, butter, jam, juice, sugar, teaspooons, mustard, tongs, HP, pepper, ketchup, whatever, on the table. Just pile it up in the middle any old how. Don't bother to set places. Where do you fucking live? Buckingham Palace?

6 If possible, move the toaster, if you have one, and the bread very close to the table where you'll be eating. Or on it, if there's room. Toast is a fiendish little minx and needs to jump straight onto the plate or it'll go cold and horrible. To have the toaster close to the table will cut down on that frustrating time lag between getting your fried egg and tucking in.

7 Things ought to be quite calm in the kitchen at the moment. You could give the beans a stir if you felt like it. Stare at the table and rack your brains for anything anyone might irritatingly request just as you've sat down. Marmalade? A side plate?!

As soon as the beans or anything else looks ready, transfer it to the waiting warm dishes in your oven. No element of your fry-up should ever touch a cold plate or dish. People ought to be drifting into the kitchen by now, drawn by the smell of bacon. One of them could be charged with making a pot of tea/coffee. As soon as the kettle has been emptied, fill it to the brim and get it boiling again. I know - not very environmentally sound, but reassure yourself that you don't normally do this.

8 When your bacon and sausages look done, transfer to more waiting warm dishes in oven and continue to feel *SMUG* at how prepared you are. Now take the frying pan off the heat and set about your eggs. You ought to allow one fried egg for girls and two for boys. PLEASE don't go nuts and accuse me of sexism, it's just a rule of thumb.

I would go as far, here, as to suggest that you don't attempt scrambled eggs, as however many thousands of eggs you scramble, there will never be enough to go round. I don't know why that should be, but it is.

The secrets of great fried eggs are:

1 Crack them into the frying pan while it's off the heat
2 Use a non-stick pan
3 Cook gently. The eggs ought never to make that squelching, popping sound that they do in Ghostbusters when they start frying on Dana Barrett's counter.
4 Cover with a lid to cook the egg tops, so you don't have to flip them, which always results in broken yolks and stress.

If you don't have a lid big enough to cover the pan, get the biggest one you've got and balance one edge against one side of the pan and the other against a wooden implement bridged horizontally across the opposite pan sides.

9 Now is the only point where you have to move fast. A fresh pot of tea might need to be made (but this will be a doddle as you've already filled and boiled the kettle, see?) Anyone who hasn't arrived for brunch ought to be summoned. Hot plates need to be transferred to the table and the first round of toast ought to go down. When the eggs are looking done, get someone else to transfer stuff waiting in the oven (the beans will need a stir) to the table and start dishing out eggs. Leave everyone to help themselves to bacon, sausages and beans and to ask the person who's ended up sitting next to the toaster to stick more toast on.

10 Here you may have to make a second panful of eggs, depending on how many people you're catering for. But that's okay - what with your brilliant plate and dish-warming, some people can get their eggs a few minutes later and still have all the elements of their brunch piping hot.

So that's it. The End. I hope I've made sense. If not, just copy everything off Jamie Oliver - it all works and it's all delicious. I don't know why anyone bothers looking elsewhere.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for sticking with me this year, I know I'm not always easy to have around.