Ding dong ding dong

Okay so the plan was to get you a photo of me and Giles cutting the wedding cake. But the thing is that someone texted the photo to me and I can't work out how to get it off my phone (even though I've got all the appropriate cables) and onto this blog.

So no photos until the photographer - an upsettingly handsome young man called Roo - has deleted all the ones of me looking huge-toothed and red-faced and sent both useable photos to me. This is a shame as I bored you all to death so comprehensively with the wedding that I felt the very least I could do was to offer some kind of exclusive footage.

Anyway it all went very well. I told Giles that he was strictly not to use the word c*** or f*** in his speech, which meant he only used both words once.

Now, after a very, very tense half an hour looking for my passport, I'm going to pack for my honeymoon Greece, where the weather appears to be 16C and drizzling - but you can't have it all.

But before that, we are going for lunch at L'Artista, the pizza place under the Golders Green tube station railway bridge where Giles and I first met.

The carbs are back. Hooray!

Still no food

Okay, so the volcano didn't eat my wedding after all. Airspace opened and there's been another flurry of emails and phone calls to confirm that, yes, they're all going to be there.

But I'm still not doing any cooking. So instead here are some pictures of Hatfield House, where I went this morning.

How Eyjafjallajökull ate my wedding

So, there probably won't be much in the way of FOOD here this week.

a) my wedding is this Saturday, for those of you who for some insane reason aren't crossing off the days on your wall calendar, and so my diet has shrunk to emergency rations only and

b) the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, has stranded over 10% of the wedding guests abroad, meaning that I have to spend the majority of this week pacing up and down going "Fuck!" and not much time in the kitchen

Anyway, I didn't want anyone to think I had given up. I'm just on bridal high alert.

Slow roast pork belly and chinese dipping sauce

If there's one thing I love, it's a solution meal. You know what I mean? One of those recipes where you go "Oh my god - YES. Perfect for a snack/breakfast/lazy lunch. Not too many ingredients... not too complicated..." And then there are other recipes where you go "Yes looks nice but I'm never going to make it in a million years."

Well, this afternoon I came up with one of those. It's a delicious thing, to be sure, but it's no real use. It's too complicated to have a starter and it's too salty to have as a main. So here it languishes in my kitchen, occasionally picked at by me - waiting for Giles to come back from filming and demolish it.

It came about because I've been having trouble with my belly - my pork belly that is. The last few times I've cooked it, it hasn't been right. I've done a short, hot roast thing and it's not for me - I wanted to try out a long slow roast so I picked up £3-worth from the butcher and slung it in the oven, just rubbed with some salt, for 20min on 220C and then 2 hours at 170C. It worked! Which was a relief becuase everyone  bangs on about how easy it is and I've never found it so. The pork is even "melting", which I've never got it to do before. Although only as "melting" as pork ever gets.

To go with it, just for a laugh, I made some dipping sauce out of King Jamie's magic Chinesey ingredients, which were:

2 tbsp runny honey
4 tbsp soy sauce
1 2cm x 5 cm knob of fresh ginger, chopped chunkily
2 large cloves garlic peeled and halved
1 large red chilli de-stalked and chopped roughly - seeds and all
1 teaspoon Chinese five spice

I put all these in a pan with a large wineglass of water and then boiled it for about 20 minutes until it was reduced to a runny sauce. I then passed the sauce through a sieve to get rid of the scary chunks of chilli, garlic and ginger and was left with a spice-infused rich, brown... thing.

Delicious. But pointless.

The diet gets serious

I've started to get a bit hardcore about my diet. I thought I would never do anything as vain and silly as diet hard before my wedding but then suddenly your wedding's happening and you suddenly find yourself saying No Thanks to mashed potato and deciding not to purchase your usual walk-from-the-tube packet of Haribos.

It's probably because there are only about 10 days left to my wedding and after that I can cram bread and pasta and rice and pudding for the rest of my life. Or until I'm too fat to turn on the telly. Maybe it's because there's not much else to do right now. The wedding's done - thanks to Giles mostly - the replacement hot pink slutdress has arrived and so my remaining challenge is to see how much weight I can lose between now and the big day without passing out or getting osteoperosis.

So, dinner last night was steak and celeriac remoulade. Sorry, half a steak and celeriac remoulade. Even Giles, who at home is Spartan in his eating habits (what would he dine on in hell? I often wonder), was pretty alarmed at the sheer self-denial of dinner.

But by the same token it was really delicious. There's something about celeriac remoulade that goes really well with steak. And this was a nice steak bought, again, from our farmer's market - the Twelve Green Acres stall. But also purchaseable from their website: http://www.12-greenacres.co.uk/shop.htm

The shop section is down just at the moment, but do visit them another time if you're interested.

Anyway so the steak was properly hung and all that clever stuff and it really was spectacularly tasty, even more tasty than steak usually is, despite (becuase of?) there not being very much of it.

The celeriac remoulade went like this:

1 small celeriac, grated in a food processor
3 large dollops of mayonnaise
1 dollop of Dijon mustard
juice of one lemon
salt and pepper

I also added a carrot that needed eating, but it wasn't neccessary.

Make your own curry paste

The only reason I don't make my Keralan curry (http://reciperifle.blogspot.com/2009/11/curry-without-bleurgh.html)  twice a day for lunch and dinner is that if I did, I'd have nothing to write about. But in order to make it even easier to reach for this stunning supper staple, I've hit on the idea of making up a boat-load of paste in advance and storing it in oil in an airtight jar.

That way, on those days when there's just too much excellent stuff backed up on the V+ to even think about going shopping, all I need to do is defrost some chicken and supper does itself.

Keralan curry paste (in advance)

200g coriander with the toughest stalks removed
1 2cm x 4cm knob of fresh ginger, chopped a bit
2 fresh red chillies, halved and mostly de-seeded (depending on your hotness threshold)
4 cloves garlic
150ml groundnut or light olive oil
zest of half a lime
juice of one lime

1 Whizz up all the coriander in a blender (you'll probably have to do this in two batches). When it's all ground up, put it back in the blender with the other ingredients but only half of the oil and give another whizz.

2 Decant into an airtight container. If you want to sterilise the container beforehand, put it in the oven at 170C for 30 minutes. Pour in some more oil as a seal over the paste.

To use, fry off a couple of heaped tablespoons of the paste, add the meat and fry off. Add about 100ml stock and a small can of coconut milk, simmer for 10-15 mins and eat.

Lancashire meatballs

Oh okay. You got me. These are not Lancashire meatballs. In fact, I don't think there are such things as Lancashire meatballs.

No, I might as well come clean. These are faggots. Ok? Great big fagging faggots. A bunch of faggots. So let's all have a good titter, like we do when poor old Roger Boyes in the Times has to write about sex scandals in the Catholic church and everyone forwards the link to everyone they know with the line "Look at what this article is about and then LOOK AT THE NAME OF THE GUY WHO WROTE IT?! Ha ha wtf is this a joke??"

But is the fact that these have a funny name the reason for their fall from popularity? Or is it their offaly-ness? For these are things of great and bountiful offal. Mostly pig or lamb's liver but also pretty much anything you can get your hands on: heart, "lights" (lungs), kidneys, spleen - anything. Offal, despite being fashionable again, isn't yet popular. Probably because it's less easy to get hold of and people don't know how to cook it anymore. And, to most people, a pizza is just nicer than dealing with this:

Faggots certainly taste liver-y and therefore challenging if you're not really into that stuff, but the tinny liver taste is softened with the added breadcrumbs, fat, salt, sage and onions - so then end up tasting a bit like giant balls of stuffing. Mix them in with some veg and some gravy and they're getting on for delicious.

Anyway I thought I'd give this a go because good old Tina Bricknell-Webb of Percy's includes it in her cookbook and I thought at least one of her readers ought to give it a go as a reward to her for being as brave as to attempt to popularise such a massively unpopular thing.

For this, I used a lamb's heart and half a liver, purchased from the Parliament Hill farmer's market, which is open from 11am-2pm every Saturday. I also used some bacon to jolly things along a bit.

So here we go. This recipe can be found on p.26 of Percy's, by Tina Bricknell-Webb. I promise this is the last recipe I use from here, for everyone out there who is as bored as hell with hearing her name.

510g meat - pig or lamb's liver/ kidney/spleen/lungs/heart and a bit of bacon if you like
3 medium onions
140g fresh breadcrumbs
100 suet
1 tbsp chopped sage
salt and pepper

1 Mince your meat in a mincer - or if you're not a professional butcher and haven't got a mincer, you can bash it around a bit in a food processor. You can can reduce it to a smooth paste or have it a bit rougher - up to you. Mince or blitz the onions quite finely.

2 Put all this in a bowl with the breadcrumbs, sage and suet. The farmer's market butcher said that he usually adds an egg to bind it all together. I forgot - but that's something you could do if you felt like it.

3 Mix all this around and then shape into balls and put in a greased roasting tin. Cook at 175C for 30 minutes.

When these are cooked, you'll find there's a bit of fat and grease floating around in the bottom of the tin. I turned this into an okay gravy by sprinkling about 1tbsp flour over the fat and mashing in to make a roux and then adding about 200ml stock (from a cube), 0.5 glass of red wine and some salt. Then I transferred the whole thing to a sauce pan and boiled the shit out of it until it was a gravy. You can also add some butter to make it glossy if you like.