Note to self: Lard is BAD

Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad! Oh god, so so very bad. I'm still not sure why I even had lard in the fridge (I bought it months ago thinking I needed it for a recipe only to get home and find - thankfully - that I didn't need it after all. I never threw it out, and that was my first mistake. Well, no, actually, the first mistake was buying the damn stuff in the first place, so keeping it would be the second horrifying error in judgement). Tonight's dinner was meant to be homemade fish and chips, and for some mysterious reason (akin to the judgement call which left me with half a pound of lard in the fridge) I decided to try deep fat frying on the stove top. We were very late getting dinner underway though, and it wasn't until I went to start the process that I realised I didn't have enough vegetable oil. It was then that mistake no. 3 took place...a tiny all-knowing voice in my head chirped 'use the lard'! Genius.

Oh god. The smell. The revolting nostril-gagging smell. It smelt like dead animal carcass. No, worse, it smelt like many rotting animal carcasses. In fact, it smelt like the rendering department of a freezing works factory (a smell that no good person should ever have to know).

I went through the motions and fried the chips and battered fish, but I just couldn't bring myself to eat them...fish should not taste like rendered hog fat. It just shouldn't.

In the end we dashed 2 doors down the street and got a curry...the strong Indian-food smells have helped to weaken the lingering lard stench - that and some scented candles, having the doors open all night (even though we've had snow on and off all day) and brewing some strong coffee are starting to make the place smell slightly more livable again. But only slightly...

I may never eat pork again.

Bits and Pieces including Popcorn

I don't know if I've mentioned this or not, but I'm attempting to give up crisps. Crisps for me (sorry - I do mean chips...I was brought up in NZ for crying out loud, but I'm a language mimic and am forever inadvertently changing my speaking and writing habits when I'm around new accents and the likes. Hence I now call them crisps 'coz that's what they do here in the UK) are like cigarettes are for smokers. I know they are bad for me, I know I have too many of them and I know I should give them up, but time after time I find myself throwing a family sized bag of the bastards into my shopping basket and then guiltily devouring them once I'm home. The worst part is that my lad isn't a crisp/chip eater. He can and does avoid eating them which just makes it worse because I know without a doubt that I will eat the entire contents of said family sized bag of crisps/chips. I brush the chip dust and salt from my top like a smoker does ash from their sleeves and feel ashamed that I am unable to kick this nasty habit.

Anyway, much like a smoker, I routinely decide I'm going to 'quit' crisps and go cold turkey...it'll be better for me in the long run, I cry! I can just munch on raw vege and fruit if I'm hungry, I boldly claim, convinced that I have the will power to do this. Yet, time and time again I fall off the crisp wagon and find myself licking the salt from my fingers with an almost fiendish delight. This week, like so many weeks before, I decided to stop eating crisps. This time the sobriety attempt was sparked by bloody Mark Bittman's book - apparently crisps are not only no good for me but apparently the environment also suffers from my obsession. Sigh.

Today is day 4 of the cold turkey attempt and it hasn't been so bad thus far. The major difficulty for me is finding something to replace crisps. Logically I realise that I could eat 3 baked potatoes with butter for the same calorific content as a bag of crisps but A. I don't really give a shit about calories and B. baked potatoes are nice and all, but not really conveniently portable in the same way a bag of crisps are. Yesterday when I was at home I made popcorn* so that satisfied the salty, crunchy cravings, but today I'm in the office and despite my little containers of chopped fruit and nuts, I yearn to hit the vending machine and grab a bag of salty crispy joy...

Help me stay strong folks...what can I eat in lieu of my beloved crisps?? The environment needs me to stay on the wagon....!!!

Ok, on a different note, how FREAKING cute is my new lunch bag? Seriously, c'mon! You know you're jealous of its cute, Louis Vuittonishness! I am loving both its cuteness and practicality...it's currently keeping my delicious lunch of Moroccan vege and lamb cous cous and my can of diet cola (look, I've given up the crisps, leave me some sinful joy, won't you?!) chilled to perfection! It's my new favourite thing!




(it has a big lunch box with a fitted chiller pad, and 2 wee boxes which fit inside the big one and a-top the chiller pad. Ingenious AND cute!)


*The popcorn was rather a coup, actually. I cooked it in a pot with butter (I have no time for air-popping...the salt doesn't stick! What's the point?!) and I threw a crushed clove of garlic into the sizzling butter before adding the corn. Then I salted it before it popped (I think this is essential - it pops the seasoning right into the corn rather than just having it on the outside) and then ground over some freshly cracked black pepper before eating. Delicious garlicky buttery peppery popcorn! Who knew?!

Last week's lunches

Seems a shame to get rid of all of these mini-posts, so I guess I'll pop them up here as a separate post. Last week's lunches were:

Monday 22 March: a mashed avocado with lime, spring onion and salt (margarita guacamole?) transported to my delighted mouth by means of half a family-sized bag of tortilla chips. The nasty fluro orange kind. Oh, and half a mango.

Tuesday 23 March: large pile of raw vegetables, spicy Moroccan hummus and 2 emmental and pumpkin seed crisp-breads (the inherent healthiness that this denotes was neither desired nor deliberate!)


Wednesday 24 March: rice noodle stirfry with ginger, garlic, spinach, baby corn, mushrooms, mung beans and cashews for protein. Was v good and I rather wish I made double...

Thursday 25 March: broth-like soup with chickpeas, potato, zucchini, onion/garlic, tomatoes, parsley, and the homemade stock I had in the fridge. Nice but would have been infinitely more satistfying with a wodge of crusty bread along-side.

Friday 26 March: am working so lunch had to be transportable. Made noodle "salad" with remains of last night's asian braised chicken and stirfry vege and some rice noodles. Is actually v average and would benefit from a brief microwave zap. Still, it will sustain me until gin-o'clock!

Ugly food tastes the best

Michelin-starred chefs might well think it's all about delicate fronds of herbage artistically draped across tiny, symmetrical portions of inedibly (and impronouncibly) fancy food, but I think unattractive, imperfect food tastes better. Think about it - your homemade bread and baking treats are almost always weird looking, slightly lumpy and certainly asymmetrical, but they always taste incredible!

Home made bagels are the epitome of this phenomenon. I don't know how the supermarket brands get their bagels so shiny and smooth and perfectly shaped, but how ever they do it, they also seem to suck the flavour and texture out of the bagels at the same time. Homemade bagels are just odd looking, but their texture and flavour is infinitely superior to anything store bought.

So, as you might guess from this lengthy intro, I made bagels this weekend! The very best ones have to be boiled before baking - that's what gives them the dense, chewy quality. And a wee trick I've learnt allows them to stay rounded and plump - you bake them for the first 7 mins sitting on a damp tea towel, and then very gently flip them over, egg wash and bake until golden. You don't have to do this, of course, but that keeps them round rather than flat bottomed.

Today's lunch then, was eggs benedict with homemade bagels, smoked salmon, poached free-range eggs, blanched spinach and homemade hollandaise. Not too shabby! It's the first time I've ever made hollandaise and it was much easier than I thought it would be. I've always had a deep set fear of making hollandaise for some reason, but it worked out well. I heated the butter in the microwave until it was bubbling and then gently trickled it into beaten egg yolks (with lemon and dijon) all the while beating with my electric beaters. It was a tense few mins while I made it - I kept expecting the egg yolks to utterly reject the butter and split horribly, but nope!

Supermarkets and Michelin starred chefs be damned...I'll take my homemade lumpy weird bagels any day over visual perfection in food!

Practising what I preached...

I finished Food Matters yesterday and while I still think it could have been more soundly written from a scientific point of view, that's not really the point of the book. Bittman provides enough information to those who are uninitiated in this whole 'food matters' debate that they can be convinced of his arguments' merits, but his focus is really on showing you how to make changes to your eating habits which he insists will benefit you, your pocket and the environment. So whereas Michael Pollan is all about science and fact, Bittman is all about the food. I think the books complement each other in that respect: if you've read In Defence of Food, you could then use Food Matters to help you actually make some real changes.

Now, as we know, I'm not very good at using new recipes - I read them, and ponder on them and enjoy having them around me, but I often do little more than that. Last night for dinner we were scheduled (yes, I make a weekly meal plan) to have meatballs and spaghetti. This is one of my standard meals, and in general it is one which I think fits with Bittman's overall approach - you make a smallish quantity of meat go a lot further and by serving wee balls on top of pasta, you actually need less of the meat to feel satisfied. I do have my own recipe for meatballs which I've honed for years and which both the lad and I really like, but Bittman has another version in his book, so I thought I ought to give that a try last night. I have altered his quantities and spices a bit, and the resulting recipe is below.

NB. This will make a GIANT quantity of meatballs. Seriously - from 500g of meat you will have enough to easily feed 8 people for dinner. Throw a salad and some garlic bread on the side and you could probably stretch it even further. With the recipe below, I made 66 decent sized meatballs last night. My freezer is literally packed full of the leftovers! Plus using bulgar instead of breadcrumbs (which is the normal approach) means that you add fibre to the mix and that has the overall function of lowering the fat. I was a wee bit dubious about how the texture of the meatballs would be, but they were really nice and very tasty. Win, win, win, win!


Bittman and Bain's Meatballs
500g ground meat (he says turkey, but that's a v American vibe. I used half pork mince and half beef...both welfare approved, obviously).
1 cup bulgar wheat (here's where we vary. He said to use 2 cups of bulgar for half the above quantity of meat. That would make them wheatballs and they wouldn't stick together. He also doesn't list whether that should be dried or soaked. So, I soaked 1 cup of dried bulgar for 30 mins in boiling water, drained it throughly and used that amount for the 500g meat. These are good proportions)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, diced very finely
2 cloves garlic, very finely chopped
spinach - as much as you've got but anything between 250-500g will work
1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary and thyme
2 tsp salt
black pepper
1 free-range egg

Soak the bulgar as described above, drain and add to the meats. Heat the olive oil and saute onion and garlic until soft. Add spinach and cook until wilted. Add this mixture along with the egg and seasonings to the meat and bulgar. Mix thoroughly with your hands until kneaded/combined. At this point I fried a small mini-meatball in the pan I'd used for the onions, to test the seasonings.
Roll into balls, place on baking sheet and bake at 200g for about 20 mins. Eat in whatever style you prefer. We had ours with tomato sauce - I simmered the baked meatballs for about 5 mins in the sauce before serving over spaghetti.

If you have used meat that hasn't been pre-frozen, you can then freeze the uncooked meatballs. If it was frozen already (as in my case) then cook them all, and freeze them cooked. To freeze, place separated meatballs on a lined baking tray in the freezer overnight. In the morning transfer the frozen balls to a bag and voila - free-flow meatballs for the next month! :-)

Catch up

Hmm...can't remember the last thing I cooked that felt worthy of being blogged about. But, for all that, I do cook in some form or another, every day. Obviously that involves dinner, but my lunches are often more fun. I love lunch dearly - I think it's the meal I look forward to most every day in fact! When I'm working (ha!) from home, I tend to treat myself, making something rather delish and putting a bit of effort into it. Well, either that or I lie prone on the sofa shovelling corn chips from a bag into my mouth until my tongue feels raw from the excess salt. That happens quite a bit too, truth be told. So, anyhoo, I've added a new wee feature - my daily lunching efforts are now on a panel down the right-hand side. I feel keeping up with this is a more realistic goal than blogging about major kitchen triumphs every day (because that would require such bold victories as much as anything, and really, I'm seldom bold), and maybe having to confess my eating habits will make me stop with the corn chip diet. Probably not though...

I'm reading a couple of really interesting books at the moment (I'm actually reading 4 interesting books at the moment, but only 2 pertain to food stuffs. One of the others is a historical fiction tome, and the other is the Feminine Mystique. That does sort of deal with cooking in the sense of a housewife having dinner on the table for her husband the second he walks in the door, but that's not really a favourable discussion of such concepts! Great book, but unrelated to the focus of this blog...). So, the two food related books I'm currently reading are Julia Child's My Life in France (the other half of the Julie/Julia tale) and Food Matters by Mark Bittman (food columnist for the New York Times).

The Julia Child book is lovely - so evocative of 1940s/50s Paris (well, it evokes an all-too-clearly imagined Paris of that era. Having never been to Paris either in this century or the last, I couldn't actually say if my vision is accurate or not). I've come to realise I can't read this book in bed at night though, because the descriptions of Parisian dining and Julia's cooking efforts are much too delicious-sounding and I end up having to do a late-night raid on the fridge in desperation. In London I share an office with an American woman who actually met Julia once - it's quite a sweet story. She was at college and attending an event in commemoration of women getting the vote, and there were some speakers organised. She came in late to one of these events and sat in the back, and shortly after she arrived, a very tall older woman came and sat next to her. Apparently the woman kept leaning over and making comments about the speaker's speech in my friend's ear all the way through, and she was getting rather annoyed. She was on the verge of telling the older woman to be quiet when the event ended and the woman up and left. My friend had no idea that the noisy whisperer was Julia Child herself until a colleague told her! Having seen Julie/Julia, read both books and watched Julia's videos online, I can all-too-clearly imagine her making opinionated remarks all the way through someone else's speech! Wonder what she would have said if my friend had shhhed her!

The other book, as I said, is Mark Bittman's Food Matters. I've only just started it, but it's already making an impact. It's not necessarily well-written, but interesting nonetheless (the style is a bit repetitive and disjointed - I think Michael Pollan has a much nicer writing style, but this book has an important message irrespective of writing standards!). It is a call for Americans (particularly Americans, although I think the same call could apply to anyone living in a 'western' country) to change their eating habits. Eat less meat and better meat. Eat whole grains and more fruit/vege. Stop eating products with vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup in them. By doing all of this, Bittman argues, you will (inadvertently) lose weight and become healthier, but more importantly for him, you will make a very real difference to climate change. Evidently livestock production contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions every year than global transportation does - accounting for 1/5 of total emissions!! That's a hell-of-a carbon footprint! In fairness, the vast majority of livestock production in America is in the form of disgusting factory farming with practices that make me nauseated to think about, and this is not standard practice in other countries. But, Bittman makes the point that meat consumption patterns globally (in developed AND developing countries) are on a very clear upward trajectory and the only way to fill that increasing demand, is to continue factory farming. I personally find that idea abhorrent, as does the author, so he's calling for people to change their eating habits. Most people eat too much meat anyway and some of his stats regarding that are pretty startling. So, I've bought his book (which includes a bunch of recipes) and we plan to make a more concerted effort to eat more 'greenly'. I do think that we aren't that bad anyway - I don't waste meat and tend to make a little go a long way. We often have meat-free meals, and I tend to be VBD...vegetarian before dinner. Not always, but generally. I had a period of about 5 years when I didn't eat any red meat (typical teenage stuff, you know), and as a result I discovered that I actually really like vegetarian food. Quite often when we are at restaurants, I order the vege dish. But, teenage hiatus aside, I do like meat. Like Bittman though, I think you can eat meat in a respectful way and that has a positive impact for not just our figures and our budgets, but the globe too! Hell, back in the ol' days, farmer's families would have a roast on Sunday and then make the leftovers last through till the next Sunday, probably resorting to fish on a Friday and meat-free food on the Saturday. Meat was scarce and expensive so you valued it. Now we squander meat and it's killing both us and the planet.

Ok, now I've wandered off into a diatribe, and I didn't mean to. I just rant so easily about this stuff! Must stop such impassioned ranting! Anyway, I just wanted to recommend both books and share them with others!

Happy reading and eating!

A very English afternoon snack

It's really not that much fun eating when you have a head-cold (my earlier chest cold has migrated northwards and is currently encamped in my sinuses where it seems unwilling to move despite many Vicks assaults) because you really can't taste anything. Plus your throat hurts. And if you're me, when you get a bloody cold your mouth will also simultaneously fill with horrible giant throbbing ulcers, so what you can taste tends to feel pretty torturous as you chew. Anyways, despite all of this, you still get hungry when you're sick, obviously, and this afternoon I felt like something starchy and warm and soothing. Nothing came to mind as quickly as cheese scones: starch laden with fat...the very best kind! Plus scones have the added benefit of being bland to begin with so the whole tasting thing isn't an issue.

Well, I'm rather proud to say that I think I made the best scones of my life today! I usually make ok scones, but they're often a bit heavy and I think I've worked out why. I'm always light-handed with the baking powder for fear of making them taste soda-ish (you know that horrid tang when you put too much rising agent in?) but today I followed the instructions exactly and they worked out swimmingly - hurrah! Light, fluffy, slightly flaky and just perfect. They went down particularly well with several cups of hot, strong, sweet tea - completing my very English afternoon tea!

Cheese Scones
2 cups of self-raising flour (or plain flour with 6 tsp of baking powder. This is the way I did it because I'm never organised enough to have 3 kinds of flour at home. And yes, it does sound like an extreme quantity of rising agent, I know. But it works. Trust me!!)
1 tsp salt
25g butter
1/2 cup grated cheese (I used a mixture of cheddar and pecorino)
1/2 cup milk
1/4-1/2 cup water

Mix flour and rising agent and salt, rub in the butter, stir through cheese and then add the milk and the smaller quantity of water. Cut/mix through until damp - don't overmix! Be gentle with your lovely soft scone dough - it will reward you for your care later. Add extra water if it looks like it'll need it (in my case I needed all the liquid, but flours are all different). Turn onto a floured bench and sort of schmoosh/press into an oblong about 20cm long. Cut into 9 pieces, place on lined baking tray and bake at 220degC for 10-12 mins or until risen and golden. A trick to check if they're cooked: my Grandma always places them close enough together on the tray so that when they rise, they sort-of rise into each other and you can just pull them apart to check that they're done in between. I leave about 1.5cm between them I think? It's much easier than having to try and open a scone to see if it's done in the middle. Oh, and a wee sprinkle of paprika on top will make them look positively cafe-quality.

Best enjoyed warm from the oven, split and lashed with a generous helping of butter. Because what starch isn't?!

Gummy worms have healing powers

Ok, maybe gummy worms don't actually have healing powers, but they taste good and when you're feeling like a pile of crap warmed up, then you take your comforts where you find them.

I thought I ought to apologise for my lack of posting recently. Last week we had a serious of Major Events here and so we ended up eating out or getting takeout most of the week (hmm. Wonder if that sequence of bad eating has led to my current state of poorliness?) so there wasn't much to write about there (although I will say that my tomato-based curry is INFINITELY better than the revolting, sweet, orangey slop we got from the Indian restaurant the other night. My god it was bad). And this week I've been struck down by an evil chest-cold virus so the very last thing I feel like doing is cooking. Instead, I feel and sound like a creepy male stalker who smokes 50 cigarettes a day and to be honest I don't think I look much better.

Instead of cooking, then, I am lying on the couch, slathered in Vicks (I feel like a mentholated Christmas turkey), sipping orange juice and shovelling giant gummy worms down my poor scratched up throat. I probably should be eating the soup I managed to throw together yesterday, but if I'm perfectly honest, it's not very nice. It's pea and potato, but I overdid the peas so it really just tastes like super-mushy peas. Also lurid green is not a comforting colour when you're not feeling great.

I finish teaching in a couple of weeks, so from then on in, I plan to cook quite a bit. But for now I must get back to my gummy worms and the joys of post-modernism. Stay tuned Friends.

Cough, cough, hack hack hack, sniff. sniff.

Of baking, butterscotch bananas and sugar burns

I've had three bananas in the fruit bowl for a good 3 weeks now. They started out under-ripe (because a certain someone in this household will only eat bananas that are bordering on green. Any sign of brown on the skin and they're a step too far. Makes buying them to keep a giant pain in the arse. But I digress...) and for the past week could tastefully be described as ready for the compost heap (if I had such a heap. Which I don't. I'd like to, but we have no space to put the compost once it composts. I digress again). Anyway, we've ALL had the overripe banana situation to deal with many many times, and naturally banana cake, banana loaf, banana muffins and/or banana smoothies are normally the way to go. I'm bored of all of those options. I mean, banana cake etc is lovely and all, but it's a bit same old same old and lacking in imagination. My friend Kat (who also blogs and is one of the only readers of this one! Hi Kat!) has been doing some rather inspirational baking of late and it has inspired me to venture beyond the tried and tested. So today I've made butterscotch banana cake in lieu of straight up banana cake. The main difference between this cake and the norm is that you make a caramel sauce and then add the overripe bananas to it before stirring that mixture into your cake mix (the cake mix in question being made with 2 types of flour and oil/yoghurt, not butter).

A little note - if you're as clumsy as I am (which is to say, considerably), then you need to be very careful and maybe wear long sleeves while making the caramel. Two tiny splatters of caramel on the delicate skin of your inner arm will sear with the fire of a thousand flames and leave nasty red welts that will alarm anyone who sees them. But sugar burns aside, this really is a delicious cake...rich, moist and intensely banana-y. Definitely a step up from the usual banana standbys.

Ingredients
250g caster sugar (I didn't have caster so just used regular. Seems to be fine)
250g banana flesh, chopped into 2cm pieces
1 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
175ml sunflower oil
2 large eggs
150g plain flour
75g spelt, rye or wholemeal flour (I used spelt because I happened to have it!)
2 level tsp mixed spice (I didn't have mixed spice, so used 1 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 tsp of all spice)
2 level tsp baking powder
½ level tsp bicarbonate of soda
50ml plain yoghurt

Line a cake/brownie tin with non-stick baking paper. Tip 150g of the caster sugar into a frying pan with 25ml water, bring to the boil, then cook over a high heat until the sugar turns to a dark reddish caramel (don't stir - just sort of swirl the pan occasionally). Add the banana pieces, butter and vanilla, and simmer until the bananas break up in the caramel and the mixture is thick.

Scoop into a bowl and leave to cool. Beat the remaining 100g sugar with the oil and eggs until thick and slightly aerated, then beat in the bananas and the yoghurt. Sift the flours, spice, baking powder and soda together two or three times (throwing the bran back in), then fold this through the banana mixture.

Spoon the mixture into the tin, heat the oven to 180C (160C fan-assisted) and bake for about 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

I think this would be really good warm with icecream - or the banana caramel mix would be good with icecream by itself! The cake is good too.

Why bother?!

After yesterday's laziness I felt that today I should perhaps put a bit more effort into things. To that end, tonight's main meal was Thai Massaman beef curry made from scratch (including the curry paste, thank you very much!). Well...PAH! The potatoes were meant to go soft and absorb the curry flavours - instead they turned hard and nasty tasting. I misjudged the level of concentration in the tamarind paste and put too much in so the whole thing had a distinctly unpleasant 'twang' and of course, the damn mess caught on the bottom of the pot so all in all, a rather unpleasant meal. My boy was far too polite to say anything negative, but I don't think I'll be so mean as to make him eat the leftovers tomorrow night. So, you see, it just goes to show that making no effort at all really does tend to have a bigger pay off - on all levels!

That's better than a bought one...

In keeping with the slovenly theme of the day, an easy dinner seemed called for tonight. So, to that end, I made my homemade fish burgers. Well, I suppose you'd call them burgers, although to be honest I prefer to have the fish in baguettes or similarly crusty bread rather than flabby (typically stale) burger buns (sorry British readers - burger 'rolls'). What I do is flour, egg and crumb pieces of white fish*, fry, and tuck the pieces inside crusty bread with plenty of garlic mayonnaise and some crunchy iceberg (much like Nigella, I'm an unashamed iceberg fan!). Easy! But the trick to making this a really great meal is to flavour the crumbs (which have to be either homemade, or if you're lucky enough to have access to them, panko crumbs) with garlic, parsley and sometimes parmesan (which makes the crumbs deliciously crispy) and/or lemon zest. You can make your own garlic mayo, and I often do, but on a day like today I just add minced garlic and parsley to good-quality (read: free range egg) bought stuff.

So there you go. Easy, delicious and waay better than popping out for a takeaway burger!



*For those who are interested, I used whiting fillets tonight. I'm sure the following will horrify any British reader, but I am not at all a fan of the beloved cod that is everywhere here. It's completely unsurprising that cod stocks are perilously low - you can't get away from the damn stuff, and for the life of me I can't work out why the British seem to love it so much. It's bland, watery, expensive and generally not fresh when you buy it. Whiting is about half the price of cod and we found it infinitely nicer - reminiscent, in fact, of the wonderful blue cod we used to get back home in Invercargill.

A Saturday slattern

I'm having one of those days filled with thoughts that begin, 'I really ought to...'. I really ought to clean the bathroom, for example. The carpet in the living room is looking a little dire, so I really ought to vacuum. I did a load of laundry earlier that I really ought to hang out. There are dishes from dinner last night still sitting in the sink, so I really ought to do them, and if I am completely honest with myself, I really ought to do some lecture prep for Tuesday. Despite this catalogue of things I ought to be doing, I am instead snugly ensconced on the couch with a ever-so-slightly-trashy novel half-listening to the sounds of Michael Caine command Spitfires to British victory over the Channel (A is watching the Battle of Britain).

Another one of the things I thought I ought to do, was post about my spaghetti carbonara experiments. You probably thought I had forgotten (in fact, I seldom forget about things like this that I'm supposed to do, but rather am particularly adept at burying my head in the sand and pushing such thoughts to the very back recesses of my brain. I know they're there - they sit there along with all the other things I'm meant to be doing and am not; building up enough strength in numbers until their presence is so large that I wake at 5am panicked at their sheer volume and realise I must attend to one of them. Anyway...) I had not, in fact, forgotten. I have made a few versions of said carbonara since I first posted about it, and I've come to a number of conclusions about the dish and the process:
#1. Spaghetti is better than linguine for carbonara (linguine is delish but lacks the texture necessary for as heavy a sauce as carbonara)
#2. A mixture of pecorino romano and parmesan is best for flavour - pecorino alone lacks the oomf of parmesan.
#3. Purists might disagree (or gasp in horror) but I think a clove of garlic added to the meat when it is nearly done lifts things considerably. Equally, I think some chopped parsley lightens the dish ever-so slightly and I like that.
#3. If I let the drained pasta sit for a minute in the pot (which I have sitting on the chopping board) before adding the sauce mixture, I can avoid the curdling issue.
#4. I don't really care for pancetta. I think, should I make this again, I will use British smoked streaky bacon. There's just something about Italian cured pork products which just doesn't taste good to me. I can't quite put my finger on what that taste is, but it is not something I like. Has anyone else ever noticed the same thing?
#5. Eating carbonara makes me acutely aware of my arteries and cholesterol levels.
#6. If I'm completely honest...I'm not entirely sure I like carbonara enough to keep at this experiment!!

So there you have it. Turns out it wasn't so much the curdling issue keeping me away from Spaghetti Carbonara, it was the dish itself! It's just so rich but also, I think, fairly one-dimensional in flavour (I've been watching Masterchef, so have come to know all about fancy/silly cheffy things like one-dimensional food. It's a bad thing, in the culinary world...or at least that is what John and Greg would have us believe!). Sad, perhaps, but if I hadn't tried this out, I guess I would never have known.

Just so that you don't think I've spent the entire day on the couch - I have also planted potatoes today, and repotted my rosemary and mint (both of which were in dire need of such attentions). And now I think I shall return to that book. And perhaps the rest of the bag of Doritos that are sitting on the bench...

Spring...is that you?!

It's March 1st and it looks suspiciously spring-like outside. Admittedly, it has been quite a while since we saw anything other than winter, so it might be that I don't recognise it, but the sun is shining, there's a frost and clear blue skies...sounds like spring to moi!

As the days get warmer, my inherited gardening genes start to kick in. Now, I've only ever lived in rented accommodation with generally limited (or no) gardening space, so sadly my annual efforts tend to be limited also. This year, too, I only have a balcony, but it's a substantial one and it has given me keen desire to plant, grow and harvest!

We braved B&Q yesterday for some seed raising mix and my window sill now proudly sports a seed tray full of:
Spring onions
Spinach
Tomatoes
Courgettes
Garlic chives
Oregano
Parsley
Coriander
Greek mini basil
Purple basil
Alpine strawberries (which I've never heard of but look super cute and apparently make an excellent addition to hanging baskets of herbs)
Nasturtiums (for colour and also because they're edible)
and several trays of microgreens (because oddly I had seeds sitting around for that!)

I also have dwarf runner bean seeds, but will wait til spring has confirmed its presence before sowing those, and I've got mesclun salad leaf mix (basically a bunch of random salady bits) but they get planted straight outside. One of the outdoor pots already has several heads of French garlic a-growing, and today I ordered online the seeds that I couldn't get yesterday - Swiss rainbow chard (coz it's so pretty!) and miniture culy kale, as well as 2 varieties of potato which I plan to attempt growing in bags. Crikey - that's quite the vegetable garden, isn't it?! I wonder if there will be room to actually sit on the balcony once I've planted all of that...

I'm so excited by the idea of having all of these things growing! Just think of the delicious summer feasts to be had...