Portobello Mushroom and cheddar crumble

Hi again,
a short post this time as I don't really have time to write up the recipe in full tonight. I do want to soon though as I had some comments on it that I wanted to share. This is more a post to prove that I did in fact cook this meal and that I'm not cheating on crossing off recipes from my list on my personal Cooking Challenge for 2012.

Bye for now,

Lettie
xx

Cooking Challenge update 22.02.12 Roast tomato soup & soldiers

Hi, sorry it's been a while since I've been on blogger to update anything.
Truth be told I've been spending a fair bit of my free time working on a present for Tom that I'm making (I decided pretty much at the last minute to do it, so there was no way I was going to be able to finish it in time for Valentine's day so he got a home made card (which is very cute if I say so myself) and a steak dinner, and then because he wasn't feeling very well on Valentine's Day itself I also did a nice dinner last Sunday :)

I shall reveal what I've been making when it's ready (and if I deem it of acceptable quality to share with the internet, hehe).

Anyway, I have still been cooking recipes off my list, I just haven't updated the totals, or written anything up.
Last week, sometime, I have actually forgotten when it was (probably on a weekend though), I made another soup recipe from Ravinder Bhogal's Cook in Boots book, the Roasted Tomato Soup with Ham & Cheese Soldiers recipe from the Comfort Food section. I wasn't in a depressed mood or anything, it just sounded (and looked) delicious, plus as I mentioned Tom wasn't very well at the time, and didn't have a huge appetite so thought he might appreciate it. See, I can do considerate too.

This one was again pretty easy, but I have to admit it's the one time I wished I actually had a proper blender rather than my hand blender. It did a good job, but I think the soup would have been even more delicious if I could have got it that little bit smoother, but then nothing is perfect in life so I try not to beat myself up about things like this :D

This recipe made a fair amount of soup for both of us to have a serving and a bit more on the night, and I still had enough to take it to work in a flask two days in a row, and still have a mugful left at the end. Now that's a sure sign of a good soup recipe in my book!

I'll give a quick overview of the recipe for those who are interested, but I really can't recommend buying the book enough (I should be on commission!); the photos are gorgeous and feminine (even to someone like me, who practically growls every time my mother suggests I try to be more 'girly'), the choice of recipes and structure of the whole book is great (each chapter serves a specific purpose in a woman's life), and the range of ingredients is varied enough to be interesting, but not so exotic as to be impossible to come by in a less ethnically diverse environment. Ok, now you're all going to think I AM on commission - honestly I'm not, I just love this book.

Anyway, here's what I used and what I did for Roasted Tomato Soup with Cheese & Ham Soldiers:

Ingredients (serves 6, or 2 with lots left over)
1 kg ripe tomatoes, halfed - I used a mix of normal vine tomatoes and cherry tomatoes that were reduced in the Co-Op and needed rescuing :)
4 garlic cloves, chopped
3 sprigs of thyme
2 red onions, sliced
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 litre vegetable stock
dried basil (I didn't have fresh)
creme fraiche, to serve

For the soldiers (I adjusted the proportion to be enough for 2 people rather than 6)
20g melted salted butter (I don't normally bother with butter but this stuff was made by the Food processing unit at the College where I used to work, with milk from their top-notch dairy herd!)
4 slices white toasting bread
1 heaped tsp English mustard (I spread it thinly as I don't like it that much but thought I'd give it a go anyway)
100g double Gloucester cheese (also from my old workplace)
4 slices wafer thin ham

Method

1. I preheated the oven to 220c, and arranged the halved tomatoes in a roasting tin with the cut side facing up.

2. I then scattered over the thyme leaves, sliced onions, and the salt and pepper to taste.After that I sprinkled over the sugar and drizzled it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

3. I then popped it in the oven for about 35-40 minutes (a bit longer than the original recipe stated as I didn't think my oven was quite hot enough. The smell was just divine....

4. Shortly before removing the tomatoes I put the stock on to boil in my awesome Alessi stockpot (I love that pot so much, it was made for making soup...), and once the tomatoes were looking blistered, wrinkled and split on the edges, I took the roasting tin out of the oven and added the whole lot to the stock.

5. You're then supposed to cook at the same temperature for 5 minutes while mushing the tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon.

This was the bit I found a little bit difficult as they didn't seem to want to break up all that easily and it was quite hot working around the steaming stock. I'd definitely recommend wearing an oven glove or something similar at this point. I suppose if you actually HAVE a blender then it doesn't matter so much how you much you mush up the tomatoes as they'll get blended properly later on. In my case though I suspected that the hand blender wouldn't quite suffice, so was trying to mush them up as best I could. I almost gave in and used the potato masher, but then I remember you're not supposed to use metal spoons or utensils with tomatoes as the acids react with the metal and end up giving the food a nasty after-taste.

6. Once I was happy with the mashing job I'd done by hand, I reduced the temperature to a low-ish simmer, got out the hand blender and blended it in the pot for about... hmmm.... probably a good 5 - 10 minutes, but maybe more, until I was happy I gotten rid of the worst of the bits. It'd probably take much less time in the blender.

The thing to remember with hand blenders is that the powerful ones will suck your hand and therefore the blades towards the bottom of the pan, so if you've got a good quality pan with a non-stick coating then you'll want to take it easy with the blender so as not to scratch the surface. But at the same time you need the blending hood bit to be beneath the surface of your liquid or it might spray hot soup all over your hands/face/kitchen! Safety warning aside, they are a lot of fun to work with though, and I certainly won't be getting rid of mine anytime soon :)

7. I then left the soup on the back-burner on the lowest gas mark while I made the soldiers.

[Basically the soldiers are very similar to a croque-monsieur which is a very common French snack food (literal meaning is crunch-mister, so doesn't make a lot of sense), and which you might find under the ''Petit Creux' section of the menu. This means 'little hollow', as in I've got a little hollow space in my stomach that needs filling with something like a Croque Monsieur i.e. I'm peckish. I love the expression 'petit creux' so much that I use it over here in Britain all the time. In fact I've got a 'petit creux' right now]

Anyway....I heated my griddle pan until very hot as instructed, and brushed one side of each slice of toasting bread with the melted better.

8. On two of the unbuttered sides of the bread, I spread a teeeny thin layer of mustard, and then layered it with the cheese and ham, and topped with another slice of bread (so that the buttered sides are on the outside).

9. I then griddled each sandwich on both sides until the cheese started to melt. In my case I think the pan could have been a bit cooler as the cheese took a while to melt, and the bread was at risk of burning.

10. Once they were cooked, I cut each one into 4 soldiers and poured out two big bowls of tomato soup. I added a heaped teaspoonful of creme fraiche and stirred it into the soup and served with the soldiers as below (apologies for the shoddy picture, I was too hungry at that point to fiddle around with the phone camera settings to get a decent image!)

So there you have it, another recipe to tick off the list, and another recipe that I shall most definitely be trying again, although I have to admit I think I'll probably leave off the mustard as I didn't love it. The soup tasted really good without the creme fraiche when I took it to work, but it did certainly add something to the soup, so I'd recommend trying it both ways and just seeing what you prefer.

So that brings the current tally to:
 9 completed recipes, 63 recipes remaining and 44 and a bit weeks left.

It sounds like a lot, but I've got more recipes to write up so we are getting there, albeit somewhat slowly! Plus I've got a few birthdays coming up, so that gives me more opportunities to get the sweet stuff out the way (and not just eat it all myself!).

Bye for now,
Lettie
xx

Cooking Challenge update 12.02.12 Cardamom biscuits

Another 2 recipes to tick off the Cooking Challenge list - yippee!

Last night I made pasta, chorizo and cannellini bean soup (click here for the full recipe), which was really really tasty, and today my friend Amy came over and we baked cardamom biscuits (another one from Ravinder Bhogal). I had tried to make the biscuits previously but since I didn't have gram flour (otherwise known as chickpea or besan flour) at the time, I wasn't sure if they'd turned out right or not so I didn't want to tick them off the list without giving them another go.

I did a bit of research and found out that Tesco's sold Gram Flour so while my car was in the garage getting MOT'd yesterday I popped to Tesco's to get some. Unfortunately I didn't check how big the bags were so when I eventually found it I was a bit shocked to see it only sold in huge 2kg bags - the recipe only needs 50g per batch (!), so I think I'm going to have to find some more recipes that use gram flour...oops!

Anyway, as there were two of us baking I thought we may as well make two batches, so that we could each have some to give to our respective partners, and also colleagues, although in my case that might depend on how hungry Tom is when he gets back from work...

The last time I tried this my main issue with the recipe was that the biscuit mix seemed to be very dry and crumbly, so it was quite difficult to get it to a point where it was all coming together to be able to knead it into a good dough, but I wasn't sure if maybe the lack of gram flour was to blame for this. I think in the end I added a bit more oil and an egg to try to get it to bind better and they turned out ok in the end. But I was interested to see whether using gram flour made any difference or not this time.

Anyway, preamble over, here's what I used and how I did it:

Ingredients (made approx 26 small biscuits)
120ml - 150 ml sunflower oil, plus extra to grease (original recipe used 100ml vegetable oil, but I found it was too floury and wasn't binding so added more)
200g plain flour
50g gram (chickpea) flour
75g icing sugar
1/2 tsp crushed cardamom seeds
14 pistachios, shelled and cut in half lengthways

Method (NB. Just because we split the tasks doesn't mean this recipe can't be done very easily on your own!)
1. We preheated the oven to 180c and I greased a couple of baking sheets with some of the sunflower oil and some greaseproof paper.

2. While I was doing this, Amy ground up the cardamom seeds in the pestle and mortar (that she got me for my birthday as it happens), and I shelled the pistachios. If you've not used cardamom before, it normally comes in a jar of pods, so you need to split them open with a sharp knife and remove the seeds (ideally separating them from the inner bit that they are attached to), and then just grind them in a pestle and mortar.

3. Then I sifted the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and stirred them together with a whisk, while Amy halfed the pistachios for me.

4. Then we added 100ml of sunflower oil to the mix and Amy started mixing it with her hands. When we realised it just wasn't binding we added a little more oil and it seemed to do the trick. It was a lot easier to bring together, and then we could start kneading it into a firm dough as the recipe had told us to.

5. Once the dough was ready we took heaped teaspoons of the dough (my measuring spoons are like mini ice cream scoops so they were perfect for this!) and rolled the dough into a ball in our hands.

6. We then flattened each ball ever so slightly so it was still domed (the recipe said to flatten into a disc, but we made the first batch like this, and they didn't look right), and then pressed a pistachio half into the middle and popped it on the baking tray. I think the first batch we made yielded about 25 biscuits and the second one did about 27.

Second batch ready to go in the oven. I love the colour of pistachios.

7. Once we'd filled both the trays and used up all the mix we popped the trays into the oven. Now the recipe said to bake for 25 minutes until the biscuits are a nice golden brown. The first time we did this we set a timer to turn the trays around and swap the shelves after ten minutes, giving them twenty minutes in total, but I'm not sure if my oven is just a bit wonky, but the first batch definitely seemed a bit overdone and dry. So the second time, I set the timer for 7 minutes to swap them around, and then gave them another 7 minutes. After this point, i.e. 14 minutes, the larger tray of biscuits looked the right colour, but the smaller tray wasn't quite there so I gave them another couple of minutes in the hotter part of the oven. I think the key is to just keep checking them to make sure they don't overbake!!

8. When I took them out of the oven they were an even light golden brown colour, and cracked on top, and when I used the spatula to take them off the tray they seemed to be a tiny bit soft still, but they crumbled a little bit on the edges if we weren't careful, so I took that to mean they were done. NB. Don't try to use your fingers to transfer them to the cooling rack, as the biscuits will be flipping hot and you'll just end up burning yourself...trust me, I know.

9. I then left them to cool on a rack (I figured if they were a little soft in the middle that they'd set as they cooled).

Pretty, high contrast photo ;)

Having left them quite to cool while I typed up these two recipes, I've just tried one now, and they do taste better than the first batch (i.e.not overdone), however they are still a little bit too dry for my taste. I'd definitely need a cup of tea or something to go with them, but then I think I've always liked to have a drink with biscuits, so maybe it's just me!

I think if I tried them again I would maybe experiment with reducing the amount of flour slightly and adding a tiny bit more icing sugar and perhaps a bit more crushed cardamom, just to up the flavour a little bit. Don't get me wrong, they were nice and crumbly and had a gentle, subtle flavour, not too sickly sweet or overpoweringly aromatic, but I think personally, they could do with a tiny bit more sugar and just a wee bit more cardamom, but I suppose that's down to personal taste. Now I think about it, I'm sure I read somewhere that gram flour can come in a paste form so perhaps if I had gram flour in this format the mixture mightn't be quite so dry... hmmm, food for thought!

To round up, that takes the cooking challenge 2012 totals to:

8 recipes completed           64 recipes to go       46 weeks remaining

Anyway, I better get some other food in the oven now - Mum gave me some chicken, bacon and mushroom in the fridge to use in a stew / to roast so better get cracking!

Bye for now!
Lettie xx

Pasta, chorizo, and bean soup

Hi there,
I'm aware I've not been including the full recipes for a lot of the dishes I've been cooking in the Cooking Challenge, (mainly because of the time to properly write each one up), but this one was nice and easy and very, very tasty, so I wanted to share it in full.
This recipe came from Ravinder Bhogal's Cook in Boots cook book (I really would highly recommend it), and was really quite easy, and once you've got your veg chopped it really doesn't take very long at all. I doubled the proportions as I didn't see the point in using half a tin of beans or half a carton of passata.



Here's what I used and how I did it:

Ingredients (makes 4 servings)

2 tbsp olive oil
Approz 100g chorizo, chopped (the original recipe said to use uncooked chorizo, but I couldn't find any so used the normal stuff from Aldi's)
1 large smoked garlic clove (or 3 normal sized cloves, finely chopped
2 small red onions, finely chopped
2 celery sticks, trimmed and roughly chopped
1 and 1/2 tsp dried rosemary (I seem to have terrible difficulty getting hold of fresh rosemary lately)
1 x 500ml carton of passata
800ml chicken stock
1 x 300g tin cannellini beans, drained and rinse
60g dried fusilli or any other kind of pasta


Method
1. I heated the olive oil in a large pan (I used my favourite Alessi Stockpot) and fried the sausage until it started crisping up and the oil started to turn orange with the paprika. Mmmm, I looove paprika... :)


2. Then I added the chopped garlic, onion, and celery and sauted until the onions started to go translucent.


3. I then added the dried rosemary at this point and continued to fry for about a minute.


4. After that, I poured in the passata and the chicken stock, and added the drained and rinsed cannellini beans and gave it a good stir. Then I brought the whole thing to the boil, popped on the lid, reduced the heat and let it simmer for 5 minutes.


5. After the 5 minutes was up, I then added the pasta, turned up the heat to a brisk boil, and let it cook in the soup for 10 to 12 minutes, stirring every now and then, and checking the pasta to see how it was progressing. When I was living in France I remember my older sister advising me to cook pasta separately if it's going in soup as it gets too starchy sometimes, but with this soup it would have been too thin and watery without it. Once the pasta was properly cooked the soup was a much nicer consistency and I'm sure made it that bit more filling!


6. Once the pasta was cooked I ladled it into bowls and grated over some parmesan cheese. Yummy!

I even managed to convince Tom to have some (he's got a pretty nasty cold / flu so hasn't got much of an appetite right now) and he ended up having seconds, so even with doubling the recipe it didn't last very long! It was very easy though, and the chorizo gave it such a delicious flavour, so I'll definitely try making this again for lunch at work.


With this one completed the new total is 7 recipes down, 65 to go! We're getting there...


Lettie xx

Being a book worm....

I've just finished yet another great book, The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls. Whilst it really was a very good story (and surprisingly a true story), but I'm actually quite glad it's finished now as I've been staying up late reading a lot lately and I hate feeling groggy in the mornings...not great since I've just started a job in the book selling industry, which is the first step into what I hope will be a successful book-related career.

It's funny, but the last three (non- Dean Koontz) books I've read have all been about the lives of children and their families, particularly children who are growing up in unusual or unfamiliar circumstances.

The first book was Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman about a young and ingenuous boy Harrison who moves to England from Ghana with his Mother and teenage sister, and who must learn about 'growing up' in a curious and at times violent place, without the guidance of his father who has stayed in Ghana with the rest of the family until they can afford the plane tickets, and without much intervention from his mother who works long hours as a midwife. It's a brilliant story told through the eyes of an naive outsider in a world that is both exciting and and full of wonder - every day it seems Harrison, like a sponge, absorbs some new information about his new home and the people in it - but it is also a dangerous world, full of corrupting influences and 'role models' as Harrison struggles to maintain his christian and moral values as the temporary 'man of the house' at the same time as trying to fit in with his peers. I don't want to spoil any of it but some of it is quite sad as it deals with violence and what seems like senseless crime, but in spite of his somewhat grim surroundings, Harrison is such a cheerful, family-oriented boy who rejoices in the small things in his new life, things that others don't necessarily appreciate, like the way his baby sister shouts his name over the phone back in Ghana, making footprints in wet concrete, running in the rain with his eyes closed, and chatting to the pigeon who comes to perch on his balcony, even though everyone else tells him it's nothing but a filthy bird. I suppose what's most sad about Harrison's story is that, although a lot about England is unfamiliar and unusual to him, the story of gang violence in deprived areas and the struggle of immigrant families is all too familiar in the UK...

The second book that I read recently about a child in unusual circumstances is Room, by Emma Donaghue. This is quite simply one of the best books I've ever read. It's told from the perspective of Jack who is 5 years old and has spent his whole life locked inside an 11ft squared room with his Ma and knows nothing else of reality. The language used by both Jack and his mother reveals bit by bit the life that they have built inside their little 'planet'; furniture and household items, such as Rug, Blanket, and Meltedy Spoon all have special significance for Jack and become characters of their own in this strange but creative world. Despite the circumstances of their existence, which becomes apparent as the story unfolds, Jack's Ma is able to create a happy and educational routine for Jack out of the meagre resources available to her, making toys out of leftover egg shells, like Snake who lives under Bed, telling him wonderful stories where he is the main character, singing along and dancing with Jack and his friend Dora who lives in TV, and every day or so playing Scream - stacking furniture up on Table underneath the skylight and shouting as loud as possible - as Ma cryptically says, 'just in case'. Every night Jack is tucked up to sleep inside Wardrobe with the doors shut tight, always before the door beeps to signal Old Nick coming in...

I read this book in one day, I was absolutely, 100% absorbed in it, so compelling was the story, but also the language. For about two weeks after I'd finished it I was still capitalising items of furniture in my head. So imagine what it must be like for little Jack who has known nothing else but Room and all his friends in it, to suddenly find out that there is an Outside. With this life-changing discovery he has to try to comprehend why all his wonderful friends in Room, why everything he has ever loved is no longer enough for Ma, and what that means for their future. Again I don't want to reveal anything too specific about the story, but it is just brilliant. I've lent it to my Mum right now but I think I'll read it again when I get it back, or give it to Tom to read, and then read it again.

The final, most recent book that I read is The Glass Castle, which is the true story of the dysfunctional and impoverished upbringing of Jeannette Walls and her three siblings by her highly intelligent and aspiring, but alcoholic father Rex, and her artistic and at times immature and irresponsible mother Rose Mary, who are constantly dragging their children around the country as they do the 'skedaddle' from one place to the next. In spite, or perhaps because of, her chaotic childhood, Jeannette is determined to make a success of herself, which she eventually achieves as a well-known journalist and columnist in New York, but she later struggles to reconcile her new lifestyle and successes with her roots, feeling guilty and ashamed about her swanky apartment in Park Avenue, while her parents are sleeping rough on park benches.

My own mother is the polar opposite of Rose Mary Walls - my Mum was (still is) a feeder, who I believe has an addiction to food shopping, and while I was at uni she used to insist that I had a friend (preferably of the large, male, rugby-playing variety) to walk me across the large and well-lit open space of Great Court at night, just in case some pervert had managed to sneak past the porters (Cambridge-speak for ex-army security). I always used to joke that he'd have to be the flattest pervert in the world to hide amongst the well-cut lawns of the courtyard, but at least my mother didn't abandon me to the prying hands of actual perverts, or spend all her money on paint instead of clothing her children, or leave us to feed ourselves from rubbish bins at school. Although there are some moments where you feel the love that Rex in particular has for his daughter, and you can appreciate what they were trying to achieve in the 'education' and life experience, in particular the appreciation of nature, that they gave their kids, this book made me feel damn grateful for everything my Mum (and Dad) have ever done for me, and makes me even more keen to make sure I do well in this job, so that I can eventually pay them back (not necessarily financially) for everything they gave me.

Although I absolutely loved each of these books, lately I do feel as if I've read too many brilliant books too quickly and in too quick succession, which I think is why I want to read Pigeon English and Room again, to give them the time and respect they deserve individually. I've been a bit of a book worm of late, which I think is an apt description of how I've been reading. I'm not normally a reader of bestsellers, as my personal tastes are a bit 'different' to the mass-produced consumer market, but it's fair to say I have certainly 'consumed' a lot of literature over the last couple of weeks. Like I said about the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it's not always a good idea to read books too quickly, and since I hate the idea of books as a 'consumable' item, to be discarded as soon as you've 'used' it once like so many things in today's society, I think I'm definitely going to read some of these books again. I may or may not intersperse them with some Dean Koontz, just to balance out the brilliant-trashy book ratio :)

Ok, it's getting late and I've needed to go to the bathroom for about half and hour now, so I think that's enough rambling book talk for one night. I'll leave you with this, which makes me smile every time.

Goodnight everyone!
xx

Cooking Challenge update 08.02.12

Hi all, hope everyone is doing well.
It's been quite icy lately in the UK so I hope you're all wrapped up warm and being careful on the roads when you do go out. I don't know about anyone else, but my old car takes ages to defrost in the morning so I've taken to covering the rear-window with a proper plastic frost sheet, and covering the windscreen with some massive sheets of bubble wrap that have been in the back of the car since we moved house I think. I admit I did feel pretty damn stupid the first time I did it, but then I was laughing the next morning when it took a fraction of the time to get going for work, which equals more time staying wrapped up warm in bed! Yippee!

Anyway, speaking of staying warm, I'm home alone tonight as Tom's gone off to the climbing wall, so faced with the prospect of cooking for myself I had planned on just slobbing it with some simple pasta with leftover veg and Philadelphia cheese - I don't know why but I can never think of what to cook when it's just me eating - but as I started frying up the mushrooms and garlic and boiling the spaghetti I realised that I wasn't far off one of the Ravinder Bhogal recipes that is on my list for the Cooking Challenge. So the Philadelphia went back in the fridge and I ended up with my very improvised (I only glanced at the recipe really to use as a guideline) and not at all exact version of her 'Zesty Angel Hair Spaghetti with Garlic and Chilli'. Although it was completely fudged, it actually turned out quite nicely and even looked quite pretty :)

All I did was this:

1. I just cooked some spaghetti as per the pack instructions (I wasn't going to go out and buy angel hair as it's supposed to be a cheap recipe), and in the meantime, fried up some leftover mushrooms and a load of smoked garlic (about 3 or 4 normal sized cloves - mine were huge so only used 2) that my mother brought me from France for Christmas (she knows me so well).

2. I then squeezed out the juice of one already zested lemon that I'd had wrapped in clingfilm in the fridge since I baked a lemon drizzle cake a while ago and hadn't figured out what to do with it yet (I just love using up leftovers!), and then added a small amount of chopped red chilli to the mushrooms and garlic to cook.

3. Once that had had a little while to infuse the oil, I added the lemon juice and let that cook for about a minute while I drained and rinsed the pasta in cold water, then adding it to the pan of garlicky, lemony, chilli oil (it wasn't very oily to be fair but then again I didn't take note of the measurements from the recipe so I probably used too little), making sure it was all mixed in well so that the oil coated the pasta completely.

4. I then just popped it on a plate and topped with some grated Parmesan cheese (maybe a little too much this time ) took a photo and flopped down on the sofa, whacked the TV on and tucked in!

It took absolutely no time at all, and really didn't involve many ingredients (I just added the mushrooms as they needed using up) so I think it's one I'll be doing again, although I'll try to follow the recipe a bit more carefully next time.

That brings the current count to:

Recipes completed: 6  Recipes remaining: 66 Weeks remaining:46ish

We're not doing badly, eh? And I didn't even plan to cook much 'proper food' this week because of trying to save money :)

Anyway, I'd better finish up now as the battery on the laptop is about to go and I've got washing in the machine that needs to be hung up to dry (ah, domesticity...).

'Til next time,
Lettie xx

The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

Hi there.

I hope you're all having a pleasant weekend? I've been having a lovely Sunday just chilling out at home with Tom (we've not got many days off together now I'm back to working 5 days a week).

 As I may have mentioned previously one of my favourite books is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon in the original French) by former Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a stroke in 1995 which left him mentally intact, but entirely speechless and completely paralysed with the exception of his left eye. This is what is known as 'locked-in syndrome'. The entire memoir was composed one letter at a time by the blinking of Bauby's left eye to indicate which letter he wished to select as a partner or nurse slowly read them out to him. He died two days after the book was published in France in 1997. If you haven't read it before, I cannot recommend it enough.

The only thing I would say is please don't read it too quickly. It might not be very long superficially, but it took 10 months to write, with Bauby composing the sentences in his head and then 'dictating' them over a four hour period every day. On average one word took two minutes to dictate, so every one of them is precious.

Anyway, I had the thought about a week ago of drawing or painting something to do with the book, so having 'pinned' lots of images of diving bells and suits on my Pinterest page for inspiration, I went out and got some sketching pencils (bizarrely the only ones I had in the house were weird bendy ones which were no good for anything) and have spent the last couple of hours happily sketching away and getting my hands covered in graphite :)

I'm not an artist at all, parts of it are wobbly or not quite evenly sized, and I can't draw smooth circles to save my life (as you can see), but I'm relatively happy with how this first attempt turned out given that I probably haven't drawn anything properly since I was about 17 or 18. I know it'll take a lot of practice to get something that I'm genuinely happy with, but so far I'm having fun trying, which is what really matters.

The eventual plan is to try to create something a bit like the 'Livres d'artiste' that became popular in the early twentieth century, with perhaps a few different pieces with images inspired by the book either next to or overlaid by excerpts or quotes from the text. But like I said I want to practice a lot before getting to that point.

Bye for now.
xx

Cooking challenge update 04.02.12

Hi all,
sorry I've not updated on the Cooking Challenge in a little while, it's been a bit of a busy week at my new job, and I went up to Liverpool straight after work on Friday to see Reel Big Fish (it was awesome by the way!) so not had a chance to update on cooking progress until we got back a little while ago.

On Thursday I cooked Ravinder Bhoghal's Hanoi Poached Chicken with chilli dipping sauce, which was in the 'Skinny Food' chapter. As the recipe was originally for 6 people and therefore used 6 chicken fillets, I just used 2 fillets for the two of us and kept pretty much everything else the same. I think one of the reasons it might have been a 'healthier' meal is that the amount of rice it called for probably wouldn't have gone very far between 6 people, but as I cooked the recommended amount of rice for 6 we actually had plenty and a bit leftover for work the following day, which is always good by me :)

Now, I have to admit I was a little bit sceptical about how nice it would turn out, as in my experience healthier food tends to lack flavour, but fair play to the girl, this meal was absolutely Delicious (yes, with a capital D!)

The final dish with some of the chilli and garlic sauce on top

It's actually quite a simple recipe and not expensive either if you can get hold of relatively decent quality frozen chicken fillets which I can at Aldi's, although I may well get some from the Meat Man in town once we've cleared some space in the freezer as they've often got good deals on local meat. Basically the (defrosted) chicken is poached in chicken stock with some sliced ginger root and spring onions and then kept warm while you fry the rice with garlic and a small amount of oil and then cook it in the chicken stock. The chicken comes out beautifully tender and very flavoursome without having seen any oil or fat, but it's the rice that was the surprise winner for me.

I have never tasted such good rice before, and mixed in with a little of the chilli sauce (which was just a couple of chillis and some garlic whizzed in a food processor and then mixed with soy sauce, lime juice, a tsp of caster sugar, and some of the leftover stock) it was downright superb. For me, rice is normally one of two things - plain and dull but a handy (i.e. cheap) carb component of a meal, or it's tasty but expensive and unhealthy takeaway special fried rice with egg, shrimp and other bits of meat and veg. This rice on the other hand was simple, healthy, and beautifully flavoured. Even the cold leftovers at work the next day were mouthwatering.

I guess if someone were to take a very critical standpoint they could point out that rice cooked in chicken stock is going to have a fair bit of salt in it which is possibly not that healthy in the long run, but right now I'm personally more concerned about not eating overly fatty and sugary foods, so as in my opinion, it was a blooming good meal and definitely one I'll cook again I'm sure. The only thing to watch out for with this recipe is that if you are buying cheaper chicken fillets is that they're probably less likely to be of similar size or thickness so some of them might take longer to cook than the others.I suppose you could try to flatten some of the thicker fillets so that they're all roughly the same thickness but it's not really a big deal if you need to pop one back in the pot if it's not quite done in the middle.

All in all, it was a (surprisingly) fabulous recipe and definitely one I'll be cooking again for us and probably also for friends, but if anyone would like the recipe just let me know.

The other recipe I managed to tick off the list was the Oat and Hazelnut bites from the Rosie's Pantry book, which I also cooked on Thursday as I wanted to take them up to Liverpool with me to share out between the four of us who were going to the concert.


Now this one wasn't quite as healthy as the chicken dish, but to be fair it was pretty simple, and if it hadn't been for the fact that I was trying to cook the chicken at the same time it would have been easy peasy! The only thing I did wrong was forget to add the milk in at the right place, but I remembered eventually so no big deal. It just made the last stirring bit a bit more hard work, but certainly doesn't qualify as a 'Kitchen Disaster'.

The recipe I followed said it made about 30 cookies, but I managed to get quite a few more out of it, so I think next time I'll make each one a little bigger and see how we go. This was a perfectly nice, crunchy, cookie recipe and when they came out of the oven they were just a little bit soft in the middle which I thought was really yummy, although Tom said he thought they were even tastier cold.

Next time we might experiment and try to make a plate of half-baked cookie dough and see how it comes out.... I've just finished the last one now as I write and already I'm craving more! Oh dear...

Anyway, I'm starting to get really chilly typing this so I'm going to wrap this up so I can wrap myself up and get snuggled up on the sofa with a blanket and cup of tea.

The current Cooking Challenge 2012 recipe count is as follows:

Recipes completed: 5 Remaining recipes: 67 Weeks remaining: 47

It was really quite frosty and windy up in Liverpool today, and it's been snowing quite a lot at home so the sofa is calling me!

Bye for now!
xx