Cooking Challenge (and life in general) update 28.03.12

While Tom takes advantage of the nice weather to clean his bike and re-spray the exhaust, I thought I'd take advantage of the laptop being free and update the old blog! It's certainly been a while... Hi!

Since the last time I came on here I've been to look at a few (a lot) of wedding dresses with Tom's sister Jess and other bridesmaid Becky, and have been on the hen party for Jemma and Steve's wedding in a couple of weeks. I've also started to get a cough and am losing my voice bit which is definitely nicht gut for the wedding singing plan...I'm taking effervescent vitamin C tablets again to try and fix things before this weekend as I'm going back to Droitwich to do a girly dress rehearsal for our hair and make-up, but also hopefully to show Jem some of the songs we've been working on.

Hen party was loads of fun though, and was surprisingly beneficial as it gave me much needed bowling practice for a night bowling with work colleagues (including some very senior people from Europe) last night - whilst I sucked at bowling on the weekend I didn't do too badly at all last night and managed to hold my own on the men's team - I even got a strike or two! Yippee!

Anyway, back to the Cooking Challenge. I've managed to tick off a few other recipes but I have to honest I don't think I didn't a very good job on some of them so I'll be trying them again at some point to really try and get them right!

At the time of my last post (ten days ago I think) I started prepping everything for Ravinder Bhogal's Goan Sausage Burgers with Masala Chips and Chilli Pineapple Salsa, but as I'd left it too late I decided to just put it on hold and carry on the following night. Unfortunately the burger mixture got pretty soggy over night in the fridge so it didn't hold together very well when I did cook them following evening. The masala chips were really yummy though, although a bit sickly towards the end. I'm going to try to remember every thing I did to actually write this one up this time. This recipe had quite a few components so bear with the long post (also explains why I tried to make it over two nights!)

Ingredients (serves 6)
As usual I made this in smaller proportions for just the two of us and I can't quite recall what those were now, but I'll try my best to remember what I used to compare with the original recipe.

Goan Sausage Burgers
3 fat garlic cloves, roughly chopped (I used 1 really fat one)
1 thumb fresh root ginger, peeled and roughly chopped (I cheated and used a couple of tsp pre-chopped ginger which probably contributed to the mince getting too wet)
500g lean pork mince (I used roughly 350 - 400g)
1 small red onion (I used 1/2 white onion) finely chopped
1 red chilli (deseeded), finely sliced (I used 1/2 a chilli)
1 tsp each cumin and coriander seeds, both toasted in a dry pan and crushed (as I've mentioned before I dislike cumin and coriander so don't have seeds, so instead I just used a tsp each of the ground spices)
1 tsp mild Madras curry powder (I used 3/4 tsp)
zest and juice of 1 lemon (the lemons I had were a bit soft so didn't zest very well, so I decided to just add all the lemon juice which proportionally would have been too much for just the two of us, so again probably didn't help the mince mixture)
6 tbsp chopped fresh coriander (I think I probably just 1/3 of a bunch)
1 egg, beaten
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
a little vegetable oil for shallow frying

As I could tell the burger mix was getting a little wet even from the start I added some crushed up Jacob's Crackers (as in Jamie Oliver's burger recipe) to try to get it to bind a bit better.

For the pineapple salsa
1 small pineapple (I cheated and used 1/2 tin of pineapple rings)
3 tbsp chopped fresh mint (I just used a couple of shakes of dried mint)
1 red chilli (deseeded), finely chopped (I used half a chilli)
3 tbsp copped fresh coriander (I don't think I bothered this time!)
Juice of 1/2 lime (I used bottled lime juice, approx. 1.5 tbsp)
1 tsb mango powder (I left this out as there's nowhere near me that sells it!)

For the masala chips 
6 Desiree Potatoes, peeled and cut into thick wedges (I used about 5 large new potatoes)
100g jaggery or palm sugar (I used muscovado sugar sugar instead)
3 tbsp white wine vinegar
Groundnut oil for deep-frying (it uses a lot!)
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2.5cm knob fresh root ginger, peeled and finely grated (I just used a couple of tsp of the pre-chopped stuff again)
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp chilli flakes

Phew! That's a lot of ingredents. Do you see why I didn't have the energy to attempt this in one night now?
Here's the method now:

Method 

1. Start with the burgers. Put the garlic and ginger into a food processor and blitz to a fine paste. Mix the paste in a large mixing bowl with the pork mince, onion, chilli, ground cumin and coriander, curry powder, lemon zest and juice, and chopped coriander. Combine well and then add the beaten egg to bind. At this point I whizzed up 3 or 4 Jacob's Crackers into crumbs in my mini-chopper and added them to the mix to try to get it to stick together better.

2. Let the mixture rest for about 30 minutes to allow the mince to absorb all the flavours. Don't add the salt or pepper until you're about to fry as apparently this draws the moisture out of the onions and makes it go soggy. As my mixture was quite wet already I didn't bother salting mine at all in the end, and it still had some really good flavours.

3. While that's resting, make your salsa. Peel and finely chop the pineapple, or in my case, pineapple rings. Combine with the mint, chilli and coriander if using. Add the lime juice, season, mix well and if sprinkle over the mango powder if you are using it.

4. Now it's time to make the wedges. These really were yummy so I might make them to go with other meals or as a snack, but not too often mind - they were deep fried after all!

Run the potatoes under water  to remove some of the starch and stop them sticking together, then wrap them in a tea towel or use kitchen roll to dry them off - this is important when deep frying as if they're too damp the oil will spit like crazy and you could get some nasty burns. I once had hot oil spit in my face as a child, and trust me, it is utterly horrible, so really make sure you dry off those potatoes as best as you can!

5. You won't be parboiling the potatoes, as they're meant to be firm when you cook them in the sticky chilli sauce, but you can pop them in an oven to keep warm while you cook the burgers like I did.

6. Soak the muscovado sugar in the white wine vinegar and keep mixing until it's pretty much all dissolved.

7. Add enough groundnut oil to a deep-ft fryer or a wok, so that your food will float in it and not touch the bottom. Heat until a dice sized cube of bread goes brown in 1 minute and then you can start deep frying the wedges, in small batches in best, until they are golden brown and cooked through. Drain the wedges on kitchen paper. I then popped mine in the oven at about 100c just to keep warm while I cooked the burgers as I knew it might not be that simple...

8. Heat a little vegetable oil in a frying pan (I think I probably used too much) and shape your sausage burgers into patties, by taking handfuls of the mixture, shaping into a ball and the flattening it slightly into a burger shape. I could have used the burger making kit and it might have bound together a bit better but then the patties would have been a lot thinner, and I wanted to at least try it by hand.

9. Fry for 4 - 5 minutes on each side over a medium heat to make sure they're cooked through but not overcooked. Once they're done, keep them warm while you finish the masala wedges (you can just swap them in the oven).

10. In a separate pan or wok, eat the vegetable oil and fry the garlic and ginger with the cinnamon until golden and fragrant. Mine might have turned out differently if I'd used fresh root ginger, but to be honest it still tasted great and the consistency was fine so I didn't really notice much of a difference this time. Pour in the jaggery (or muscovado) and vinegar and heat over a medium temperature. Let it bubble until almost most of the vinegar has evaporated, sprinkle in the chilli flakes, mix once, and quickly throw in the wedges and move them around to coat in the sticky sauce.

11. Serve at once with the burgers and the pineapple salsa.

I'm afraid I made the mistake of serving these on dark plate and when pretty much everything you're cooking turns out brownish, the photos come out pretty awful, but when I make this again I'll try to take a better picture!

I liked my potatoes a bit softer to Ravinder's recipe so mine definitely looked darker than the ones in her book (although the different sugar could have made a difference as well), but I still think they were really nice.

I wasn't mad about the salsa initially but then the masala wedges were pretty sweet so it was nice to have something refreshing to tone that down a bit. Although the sausages didn't stick together all that well, they did still taste really good, so I will try this again, but I'll try to get it right this time!!

In addition to that I've also made hummus, falafel, and vegetable bhajis, so that's another 4 in total crossed off the list, but I'll right those up separately, if I get the chance.

That brings the challenge stats to:

19 recipes done,  53 left,  and 39 and a half weeks to do it!

That's all for now! All this writing about food has made me hungry!!
Laters,
xx

Cooking Challenge update 18.03.12

Sorry I've been a bit lame about keeping this updated lately. Tom and I have been working in earnest on learning and practising wedding songs for our friend's Jemma and Steve's wedding in April so I've not had much chance to sit down and write, but also Tom's needed to use the laptop to check out guitar music etc. Looks like I might have to dust off my old laptop if I'm going to keep on top of everything I want to be writing about!!

Lack of updates aside, quite a few recipes have been completed and crossed off the Cooking Challenge list since my last cooking update on 22nd Feb.

I managed to kill two birds with one cauliflower so to speak as I made both the Macaroni Cauliflower Cheese Bake and Cauliflower Cheese Soup with one cauliflower in one week (both from Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food).
I'm afraid I've had too many sleeps since I made those so won't really be able to write down the recipes from memory, but they were both very tasty, albeit not very healthy. Not good for the pre-wedding  weight-loss plan. If I make them again any time soon, I promise I will make a note of what I did so I can write it up properly at a later date!

The cauliflower cheese soup was actually really delicious and surprisingly filling for a soup, so I'll definitely be trying that one again, although maybe after the wedding now as I'm at my target weight now so want to maintain it. It did 3 servings on the night I made it and then I think I took it to work three days in a row and I think Tom had some another night in the week, so it really did last a fair while.

The only thing with cheesy recipes like this is that the longer you keep them simmering on the stove, the more the fat separates and starts to float on the surface. It doesn't make a difference to the taste but it just doesn't look very nice. If you don't think you could cope having so much cauliflower in one week, then you could always portion out the soup into freezer bags and just defrost as and when you fancied it. [NB: I've not tried this yet so don't know how well it would thaw but you never know until you try :)]







The Macaroni Cauliflower Cheese Bake was also really nice so I hope I'll get a chance to make that one again sometime soon after Steve and Jem's wedding!


Other than that, I've also had a go at Jamie's Vanilla Cheesecake, which Tom's Mum has made quite a few times before - it's actually quite a citrus-y cheesecake thanks to the citrus zest so I think vanilla is a bit of a deceptive description. I love citrus flavours though so made me happy! I made it for the first birthday party of my friend's baby Ffion (I can't believe she's one already!) and everyone said it was nice, but you know I have high standards, so I'm always going to be self-critical. Whilst I was making it I felt that it was quite easy, but as I hadn't tried it before I wasn't really sure whether I was deluding myself or not! The one thing I wasn't 100% sure about was whether I was toasting the rolled oats too long or not - the recipe says to toast them in a frying pan until they turn a darker colour, but mine took absolutely ages to change colour and when they did they started smelling quite strongly, which made me worry that they were just burning slightly.

Yummy, but a bit too crumbly...

 The end product turned out ok but not as nice as the one's Tom's Mum has made in the past - the base was a bit crumbly when we cut it - but the topping was really tasty in fairness. Tom's Mum did suggest not bothering toasting the oats and she also suggested putting the cream cheese mixture through a sieve to get rid of any lumps before adding the whipped cream. I might try it that way if I make it again (so many other recipes to get through first though!!

One of the other recipes I've tried lately is Jamie's Chicken Chow Mein. I've not made much (if any!) Chinese-style food from scratch so this was quite a new experience to me. The main comment I have about it is that it really should be made and served pretty much straight away as otherwise it can dry out a bit and everything starts to stick together. Jamie's tip of reserving some of the water you cook the noodles in was definitely useful for loosening up the chow mein, but then you have to keep tasting to make sure you're not diluting the flavour too much. I had to keep adding soy sauce and lime juice every now and then to make sure it kept its flavour.
The other thing I would have done differently is sliced or chopped up the water chestnuts a bit before adding them to the wok - the ones I bought were quite huge, and although I have memories of loving water chestnuts when we had takeaways as a child, eating them whole felt a bit odd. It must be something to do with the texture, as I can't think of any other way to describe why it was a bit strange!

And finally I also made some Breakfast Burritos from Ravinder Bhogal's Cook in Boots (I think last weekend). One of my friends has recently bought a couple of chickens for eggs so we've had quite a lot of fresh eggs lately, and since we always have tortilla wraps in the house it seemed like a perfect excuse to try out this recipe. I added in some sliced mushrooms when I was frying the chorizo just cos I love them (maybe also because I needed to use them up!). I'll post a proper write up of the recipe if I can soon. This post has already gotten a bit long without actually providing much useful content I'm afraid! I'll try to rectify that soon!

That's all for the Cooking Challenge update so far, although I have been cooking other things besides!

The current totals are as follows!

Recipes completed: 15        Remaining: 57     Weeks remaining: 41

Next challenge is Goan Sausage Burgers (which means I get to use the burger making kit again! Yippee!) with chunky masala chips and pineapple salsa! Pork mince is defrosting as we speak so hopefully I can update on how that goes sooner rather than later!

Bye for now!
xx

The Art of Love and Intimacy (article)

On a related note to my previous post about my (very much belated) Valentine's Day gift ideas, I've been wanting to share a link to an article on here for a while about relationships - I was going to put it up around Valentine's Day, but I've been kind of preoccupied with stanley knives and pritt stick and lots of teeny bits of paper - from a blog I discovered a few months back through Stumble Upon about the difference between Love and Loving.


I highly recommend this article to anyone who is in a relationship, whether it is blissful, difficult, or just carrying along as it always has done, but also for people who might have had relationships end because one or both of them felt that they were no longer in love. I think this article has some really helpful advice and suggestions, not just for people going through martital / relationship difficulties (and I know a few people who are going through this right now), but also for couples who just need a gentle reminder about how to keep their relationship a loving one, how not to take each other for granted, not to get in a rut, and so on and so.

In fact the blog in general has tonnes of articles on different aspects of relationships so it's well worth a browse if you're even vaguely interested in relationships, or if there's something in particular that's bothering you about your relationship, or a friend's relationship.

One thing that my mother always says (and my mother is right about everything, as I'm sure your's is too), is that trying to share love across multiple relationships is similar to a blood transfusion. Just as one person only has a limited amount of blood available to give in a blood transfusion at any point in time, the amount of love that we have to give to others at any point in time (in intimate relationships, I'm not talking about friendship or familial love here) is limited to a certain extent. If one person in the couple starts spending time with and thinking about someone else, if they start giving their love and affection to someone else, then it also drains the love from the first relationship. Having been in a long term relationship where eventually it became apparent that the other person quite clearly had feelings for someone else, I can wholeheartedly say that for me at least this analogy rings true.

There's nothing so painful as feeling like you are giving everything to a relationship, but that your affections and even your presence is unwanted, that ultimately there just isn't enough love between the two of you to keep it going. But equally, I have been on the other side of the situation in the past, and I know what it feels like to have feelings for someone else when you are already in a relationship, and to see your feelings for the person you care about slowly ebb away as you get caught up in the excitement of something new. What the article above helps you realise is that when people say they are no longer in love with someone, it actually means that they are not actively loving that person. As the article states, there is a very, very important difference between claiming that you love someone, and actively loving them.

Once we're settled in a relationship it can be almost too easy to say 'I love you' to our partners, but to actively love them - by doing something thoughtful or considerate, making them their favourite meal, or making them a gift  - that takes a bit more effort. Instead of just repeatedly telling our partners that we love them, perhaps we ought to be asking if we are being loving, if our actions make them feel loved.

These are just some of the thoughts I've had on the subject since reading this article, but I can honestly say that it's encouraged me not to take love for granted, and to make sure that I continue to put effort into my relationship, because that is what is going to make sure it lasts.

I hope you find the article (and perhaps my thoughts on it) helpful too.

Bye for now,

Lettie xx

(Belated) Valentine's gift idea: The Story of Your Relationship

Hi there,

I know I've not been updating the blog (especially the Cooking Challenge stuff) very regularly lately and that's because I've been working a lot on Tom's belated Valentine's present in the evenings when he was out climbing, and on weekends when he was at work, but it's finally finished (in the sense that I'd done as much as I could do) and although it took many, many hours (and involved a bit of cursing) I'm really pleased I stuck with it.

Cutting that window and lining up the photo required a lot of patience

Basically it's a scrap book of our relationship (soppy I know) but I read about getting a book made in a print shop of your relationship, and saw a video about making art out of old books so I thought I'd just combine the two ideas. I didn't know who the poet was whose book I was butchering, but I wanted a nice looking, sturdy hardback, that someone else had written notes in, and at £2 from the market in Welshpool, this was perfect. I may well add a 'title' of some sorts over Cowper's name on the front at some point in the future, but for the time being I'm happy with it. I've filled it with our background story (condensed version: we met at high school and liked each other, but never got together, stayed really close friends, and eventually got our act together 8 years after we first met), photos, poems, and memorable moments from our past as friends and since we got together, like concerts we went to, when we moved into our house, and so on. The idea is that as time goes on, I'll add more things to it, hence why it was never going to be finished in the proper sense of the word, as that would imply our relationship was over!

I'm not going to include pictures of everything I included because, well, it's personal, but I just wanted to share the idea as I really enjoyed coming up with all the different things to include and different ideas of how to present them. It's a little bit messy in places as I kept changing my mind about how much writing to include, and how to include the writing over the original typed text, but it gradually became more like a diary summary over the past two years so I needed to write more. To do this I cut out pages of my current journal and just glued them over the book pages, and wrote in them like a normal diary (I used my journals to remind of dates etc). I also made use of some nice paper that I got free with a load of craft magazines I bought when I was researching the industry for a job interview back in November, but I didn't want to make it too girly, because it was supposed to be a gift for Tom, although I couldn't resist a bit of vintage floweriness in places(see below).

I tried to include as many pictures in the book as I could but when I took my original batch of photos to Boots to develop, I realised that it would have been absurdly expensive to print them all, so I had to cut back and just print the ones I thought were most appropriate. I also experimented with creating windows in the pages with glued in photos showing through the gaps, but the pages turned out to be quite difficult to cut without tearing and making a mess. Even with brand new Stanley knife blades it posed quite a few difficulties.

When I first started the project I also purchased a glue gun with the idea of sticking in photos, or glueing pages together with it etc, but it proved to be far more hassle than it was worth. Maybe the equipment I bought was too cheap, or maybe I didn't allow the glue to warm up sufficiently, but it just came out really thick and then seemed to dry and harden ridiculously quickly, so it was pretty much impossible to use. I initially stuck the front cover image on with the glue gun glue but it very quickly lost it's stick, so in the end I just used god old reliable Pritt stick!!

 I love this poem by Carol Ann Duffy (Poet Laureate) from her collection Rapture; in fact it was this collection of poems that got me thinking about a special Valentine's present in the first place. The bit didn't quite turn out as tidy as I wanted, but I basically wanted the verses of the poem to stand out as being on top of the original type (which was itself the first poem of the original book), and going round the edges of the journal paper with a black felt pen actually gave it quite a nice, almost reverse-emboss effect, it just could have been a bit tidier. I might go over it one day if I get round to it.

One of my favourite parts of this project was cutting the photos into different shapes and sizes to fit with the words I wanted to include. Once I got the hang of the Stanley Knife it was really quite easy and weirdly satisfying slicing through the photographic paper. What wasn't quite so easy was the mini-project I decided to do at the last minute and which took absolutely forever to finish.




I'd read another poem by Carol Ann Duffy in Rapture called 'Finding the Words' a few months previously and just felt that it completely reflected what I felt when Tom and I eventually got together. I'd been really hurt by my ex and had been in a place where I could see myself becoming really cold and emotionless about guys I was dating before Tom and I started going out, and this poem just seemed to convey what it was like to find that I could love and be loved again.

Because of the name and nature of the poem I wanted to try to compose this copy of the poem with words 'found' and cut out of the original typed text, but this proved to be a mammoth task. I had to cut out pages and pages from the back of the book (I didn't want to use the Stanley Knife directly on the book itself as I was afraid of tearing the old paper) and ended up learning an awful lot about this Cowper chap through repeatedly scouring his letters for the words of the poem. In the end I had to construct some words out of other words. I became disproportionately excited when I found a word I could use (a certain Mr Palmer very kindly donated the 'palm' and Wordsworth lent his 'Words'. The letters for the title I managed to glean from the headers of his letters, and 'Oxford University Press' lent it's letters towards 'Our Story' at the very front of the book. This might seem sad, but having set myself this stupid task I was damned if I wasn't going to finish it, so every new discovery was a small victory of sorts.

I particularly liked this idea of drawing a calendar page for a memorable occasion, although again, I'm sure someone with more natural artistic talent than myself could achieve much better results. On this day for example we drove up to Manchester to see The Hold Steady and it was one of the most fun concerts ever. Afterwards, we chilled out in the Thirsty Scholar (the pub under the railway lines at Oxford Road station), and then I drove us home with cool music on the stereo and we saw in Valentine's day on the journey home. It might not seem like much, but it was just the coolest experience.

 I subsequently decided to add the little calendar pages over photos I'd already stuck in as another scrapbook-style element.

Like I said I didn't want to include too many personal elements of the book (some of it is copied from old diary entries), but I just wanted to show some of the different ideas I had. As a first attempt I'm really pleased with how it came out (even with my silly stick drawings illustrating the first night we kissed!), but I'm looking forward to adding to it, and developing techniques and other interesting ideas for other projects as they come along. I really enjoyed going back through my journal and sharing thoughts and feelings that I might not otherwise have shared with Tom.

I'm not going to lie, it was a little scary including some of my most private thoughts in the book, and though I'm definitely a believer in maintaining hobbies and doing some things as individuals (basically not becoming one half of a relationship) that it's still important to share your feelings, hopes, fears, and dreams with the ones we love the most.


Anyway, this has already become a pretty long post, so I don't want to harp on. Hope this has been interesting in some way!

Bye for now,
xx