Coconut and rum cake

Now THIS is a fucking brilliant cake. I made a Nigella chocolate cake the other day and wasn't that impressed. All that ganache and stuff. Eugh. Didn't like it.

This, on the other hand, is absolutely wonderful. Light, crumbly, moist, coconutty. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's also an absolute cinch to make, as long as you've got a food processor or an electric hand whisk.

The recipe is from The New Penguin Cookery Book by Jill Norman, which along with Delia's Complete Cookery Course, is a real must for the novice/amateur cook.

So here we go:

200g butter

200g sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 eggs

75g cornflour

150g plain flour

3 tsp baking powder

100g dessicated coconut

2 tbs rum

1 Heat the oven to 180C and grease your cake tin. You'll need a normal-sized one (don't roll your eyes, you know what I mean. Not a massive one and not a tiny loaf tin, okay?)

2 Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk with a hand whisk, or power round with a food processor for about 2 mins.

3 Turn the mixture out into your tin and bake for 1 hour. I know, seems a rather long time, but that's how long it takes.

4 For a very lovely, boozy icing, combine icing sugar with rum instead of water and pour over

Spiced pork belly

This is a nice thing to do with pork belly, as it can be quite rich and the spiciness of the coating cuts through the fat and the gloop and is really quite delicious.

So, get a boned piece of pork belly with the skin scored (again, you might have to venture to a butcher for this - but probably only the butcher counter at Waitrose).

Make up a spiced paste that consists of:

1 2cm piece of ginger

2 cloves garlic

3 tablespoons sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon of dried red chilli flakes (or more if you like it really spicy)

1 tablespoon honey

Chop roughly and then pound to a pulp in a pestle and mortar, or grind the whole thing up in a processfor for a bit. Put the pork skin-side up in a roasting tin and spread with the paste.

I bunged my bit of belly in the oven at 220C for 20 mins and then at 180C for 50 minutes with ten minutes' rest. If I hadn't had the paste on the top, which I didn't want to burn the shit out of, I'd have roasted it full pelt for maybe 30 minutes and then rested for 20 or something.

We had this with stir-fried long-stemmed brocolli, tossed with oyster sauce and it was a pretty cheerful protein-and-greens dinner.

Lamb sweetbreads

Continuing my occasional series on offal, today I'd like to talk about sweetbreads. Lamb sweetbreads in particular. These are the pancreas (I think) of a lamb and if you fry them and serve them with a parsely salad, I think you'll be very happy.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, because first you actually have to get hold of some sweetbreads, which isn't that easy. They don't, alas, do them in Waitrose, so if you want some you have to haul ass to a butcher. But they may very well not have any either, so you'll have to ring ahead and check.

I got mine, purely by chance, from Frank Godfrey, a butcher with two shops in North London http://www.fgodfrey.co.uk/. I went in for something else and they had sweetbreads on special, so I got some because they are Giles' absolute favourite. They do them at Tom Pemberton's place, Hereford Road and they are delish.

Once you have tracked down and purchased your sweetbreads, it's all quite easy. They have to be poached and skinned before frying, which I must say isn't an especially lovely job - it's for pretty hardcore animal-lovers only who are so pleased to be eating in such a nose-to-tail way that they can feel only love and gratitude for the piece of animal before them. Me? I just felt a bit queasy and Giles had to do it.

Anyway, you do this by washing and then placing the sweetbreads in some fresh unsalted water, bringing to the boil and simmering for 5 minutes only. Drain the sweetbreads and leave to cool - or at least cool enough to handle.

Then go over the sweetbreads, pulling off bits of grossness, grisle, connective tissue and all that other stuff. You can remove the thin membrane that covers the whole thing if you like, or leave it on. Hugh F-W recommends leaving it on but to be honest I can't really see what difference it makes.

If you encounter an especially large sweetbread you can cut it in half to cook.

This is what they look like raw and skinned. They smell faintly of fish. But don't let any of this put you off. Cooked, they are creamy and interesting and luscious.

There are a number of ways of cooking sweetbreads, but the way we did it was to coat the meat in heavily seasoned flour (just salt and pepper) and fry it for about 4-5 minutes in very hot oil until golden and crispy.

We ate it with a parsley salad that consisted of:

1 large bunch parsley

1/2 shallot, finely chopped

capers

lemon juice

Baba Ga-who?

I've started thinking that cooking is a bit like getting dressed. You CAN just wear a pair of jeans with a white t-shirt and some flip flops. Or you can wear a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt and some Christian Louboutins. OR you can wear jeans, white t-shirt, Louboutins, massive necklace, sunglasses and, like, a Kelly bag or something.

But that doesn't mean to say that you looked any the less fabulous in your plain jeans and t-shirt outift. It looks good, it's simple and it basically sends the same message.

I take this approach in the kitchen quite often these days. If I'm making something and I don't have all the ingredients specified in a recipe I just sort of gloss over it and make a more basic version of whatever the recipe is suggesting. Similarly, if I'm making something and I happen to have a jar of kaffir lime leaves, an avocado, or some sour cream hanging about, whatever I'm cooking takes on a more spruced-up, Louboutins-and-Kelly-bag attitude.

And so it went last night while making baba ganoush, which as you all know perfectly well is a mediterranean aubergine dip made with mashed grilled aubergines and tahini. But I didn't have any tahini. So I stood there looking at this damned aubergine that had been sitting in my larder for ages and needed to be eaten *somehow* and thought "Maybe I ought to just to a jeans and white t-shirt thing with this".

The resulting dip was so unbelievably delicious, although again apologies for horrible-looking photo - that I urge you to make it very soon, as soon as the sun comes out again.

Yes, okay, salting aubergines is boring but it's not labour-intensive and it's worth it.

1 aubergine makes more than enough dip for 2 people. I've split the ingredients up into things that are essential for this dip - the jeans and white t-shirt, if you like - and the added extras that will turn heads.

Jeans and t-shirt

1 aubergine

2 glugs olive oil

salt

lemon juice

paprika

Jeans, t-shirt and Louboutins

1 tablespoon yoghurt

1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

Jeans, t-shirt, Louboutins and Kelly bag

garlic clove
small bunch parsley
small bunch mint

1 So, you've got to salt your aubergines now - bad luck. I cut mine into rounds, but you can cut them lengthways if you like. Sprinkle both cut sides with salt, sandwich them between 2 chopping boards and then pile a few heavy cookbooks on top of the boards. Leave them for as long as you like, minimum 35 minutes.

2 Now grill your aubergines. I fried mine on a griddle, but you can also stick them under a grill. It should take about 20 minutes for them to be soft all the way through and burnt and sticky on the outside.

3 The recipe I was working to said to take the skins off but this was too fiddly, so I just chucked them in, skins and all, to a food processor with all the rest of the ingredients. If you do it, you may find that you need to add more or less of certain ingredients depending on how much you like paprika and raw garlic.

Not strictly baba ganoush, but totally great. And, hey - if Patricia Field taught us anything, it's that there are no rules in fashion.

Mushroom quinoa with goat's cheese

At a loss of what to make for lunch, I had to resort to re-creating a thing I had last night, which was mushrooms with melted goat's cheese on top. Anyway, it worked out quite well, with the addition of some quinoa to bolster it all up a bit. I didn't use garlic for this recipe because I didn't feel like eating it, but you can if you like. Sorry, crap photo again (although my manicure looks pretty good) but it was v tasty.

So, for one robust, practically carb-free lunch you will need:

1 handful of interesting mushrooms (I used shitake), roughly chopped

1 bunch parsley

1 shallot, chopped

butter

a round of goat's cheese

about 40g quinoa

1 Boil up the quinoa in some salted water for 15 minutes

2 melt a knob of butter in a frying pan and cook the shallot gently for about 10 minutes, then add the mushrooms and cook until soft

3 drain the quinoa and throw in with the mushrooms. Snip or chop in some parsley and stir round. Season.

4 Turn it out in to a small gratin dish and place disks of goat's cheese on top. I cut mine too thin and they dissolved in a boring way. I reckon you should aim for disks about 1 cm thick.

5 Slide under a very hot grill until the cheese is bubbling

Home alone

Giles has gone skiing until Sunday and I'm in the house all by myself. Actually, he hasn't gone skiing because he doesn't like skiing, he's just gone with some people to Switzerland who are skiing and he's vowing to stay inside and read books. But he also took some emergency ski kit with him. No, I don't understand either.

It's always the way when Giles goes anywhere: I rather look forward to having the place to myself without his constant clattering, singing, shouting, cackling and raging, conducting his professional feuds and world-domination strategies in his massive office next door, fielding phone calls and hammering away at his laptop, which always sounds, when he is in full-cry, like a troop of teenaged boys galloping down the stairs.

He leaves the house after consulting me eight times about every single thing he's packing "Are you sure? Are you sure the red socks and not the striped ones? Sure? They're going in... Sure?" and looking briefly miserable on the doorstep. After I close the door I punch the air and shout "YES" and vow to leave the bed unmade, do no washing up, watch Judge Judy all day and drink the kind of cheap white wine that burns holes through carpet.

Within an hour I'm a gibbering wreck, wide-eyed at my spooky, silent house and jumping at small noises.

And I don't don't know what the hell to eat. Working withing Giles' strict things-we-can-and-can't-eat thing means a trip to Waitrose is a logistical assault. Nothing non-organic, basically no fish at all because it's all endangered, nothing processed, nothing from abroad. It's why we're constantly eating roast chicken. Sometimes I think to myself "Gosh, wouldn't it be easy to go shopping if I didn't have to cook for Giles and all his arseholish ways" but then I GO to Waitrose as I did just now and I can't find, or think of, anything that I might want to eat. Not one thing.

So I'm going to make a chocolate cake instead. Definitely something I can't do with him around.

Last night

I sat open-mouthed through the whole of The Delicious Miss Dahl last night. I think she's lovely and she's only trying to have a career for God's sake - but was any of that show her idea? Was all that stuff about the mozzarella and saying "luscious" every ten seconds and that Fifties frock and all that really, really what she's like? If so, then I guess that's all just fine.

But I suspect from the way that she giggled in a slightly embarrassed way after delivering some of the more risque lines that there was a producer off screen going "Sorry, sorry - this is supposed to be a SELFISH day. Can you say selfish and indulgent a bit more, please? Thanks."

I don't know, there was just something a bit contrived about it, like telly people can't fathom that you could just have a show called "Cooking with Sophie" where she makes some stuff and says "This is quite nice for breakfast." It has to be a massive themed performance, like a giant fancy-dress birthday party with clowns and a bouncy castle and a present table, rather than just jammy dodgers and crisps and a run round the garden.

And the worst thing about it was that she doesn't know how to pronounce "bruschetta", which just made me feel sad.

Rack of lamb (WITHOUT a herb crust)

When did it suddenly become mandatory to add a herb crust to a rack of lamb? You don't seem to be able to order one in a restaurant, or go round to someone's house for dinner (usually a single man who rather fancies himself as a chef) without encountering a rack of lamb with a herb crust.

And I, too, was about to reach for my blender in order to whizz up some parsley, mint, garlic, breadcrumbs and whatever the hell else there is to a herb crust on Sunday when we were cooking a rack of lamb. But then I was struck with the very clear sensation that this was peer pressure, pure and simple.

So, feeling very defiant I - (and when I say I, I mean Giles) - just roasted a seasoned rack of lamb, a snip at £34,000 from the farmer's market, in a 220C oven on a bed of rosemary and lemon for about 10 minutes, 10 minutes at 180C and then 10 minutes' rest. Giles says that if he was going to do it again he'd lightly brown it first. But there was nothing wrong with it.

We had with it baked leeks, which were very easy. I parboiled some leeks for 5 minutes in salted water and then put them in a gratin dish, poured over a modest amount of extra thick single cream and a lot of grated gruyere and baked in a 180C oven for 25 minutes. They don't look very nice in the photo but they were great.

Then we ate it dancing around the kitchen a bit to Cheryl Cole, who'd come on the radio. And when I say we, I mean I.

How to talk to a butcher

Marrow bone and parsley salad

This is the kind of thing that I would never in a million years cook if it weren't for Giles and his not-scared-of-anything eating. It's a recipe from Fergus Henderson's seminal cookbook Nose to Tail Eating, which was published in a tiny print run in 1999.

It's a perfectly terrifying cookbook, advising on how to cook brains and brawn and pig's heads and other parts of animals you'd previously thought were totally un-eatable. Its saving grace for the amateur cook is how charmingly its written; you can tell that Fergus is a nice guy and just wants for you to do well and live a long and happy life. His exortation in his recipe for boiled gammon and carrots with parsley sauce that the sauce must be served in a jug so that guests can "express themselves" is an editorial tick that has entered into our daily cannon.

Anyway, on Saturday we went to the vastly overpriced farmer's market near us and found a butcher who was selling marrowbones for about tuppence each. (Butchers often throw them out, or give them to people to feed to their dogs, but don't let that put you off. You might be able to pick some up for free if you're more charming and brave than I am.)

We took them home and roasted them in a slightly too-hot oven for about 20 minutes. If you do this, I would advise you set your oven to about 200C and fashion little foil cups to sit the bottom of the bone in because otherwise stuff leaks out everywhere, which is a shame. Depending on the size of the marrow bone, people can eat three or four little ones and two or three big ones. You can tell the marrow bone is ready because the marrow will be sort of bouncy and slightly melted but hasn't entirely disappeared.

You serve these roasted bones with toasted sourdough and also a parsley salad, which goes like this:

1 large handful/bunch parsley, roughly chopped

small handful capers, chopped or not, up to you

half a shallot, chopped

You then dress this salad with a large squeeze of lemon and a splash of olive oil. The idea is to spread the toast with some marrow, top it with parsley and eat.

This isn't a meal, obviously, for anyone frightened of salt or fat as it's very greasy and an overindulgence can quickly make you feel queasy. But it IS delicious, modern and economical. And, I daresay, gives you a very shiny coat.

Duck and beetroot

Sometimes I surprise myself with the recipes I decide look nice. For example, this roast duck and beetroot thingy, which I picked out of Waitrose Food Illustrated the other day and tried out on Saturday, looks totally weird (doesn't help that I've put it on a black dish... should have used a white one to show up the colour). But something about it appealead to me. Often I think I'm lacking a vitamin supplied by an ingredient in the recipe. For a whole year, I went crazy for any recipe with eggs in it and I'm convinced it was because I was starved of B12.

Anyway, this is a Gordon Ramsay recipe, although these days I think when things are said to be by Gordon Ramsay they've actually been rustled up by an ambitious sous-chef and given the okay by GR via an iPhone video link.

But whoever made it up, this is jolly easy but looks pretty amazing. The sauce with the beetroot is quite sweet. Either just go with it, or reduce the sugar by a third.

For 4

800g beetroot, trimmed and peeled
100g butter
150g soft brown sugar
150ml sherry vinegar
75g sultanas (I didn't have any, so didn't use them)
4 duck breasts with skins on. All duck recipes make a huge song and dance about Gressingham duck, but Waitrose only have them smothered in all kinds of digusting sauces so I just used normal free range duck.


1 Cut the beetroot into thin slices. Melt the butter with the sugar and vinegar in a pan. When the sugar has dissolved, add the beetroot and toss to coat. Season then cover with crumpled piece of greaseproof paper. Simmer gently for 45 minutes.

2 Stir in the sultanas if using and cook for another 10-15 minutes, until the beetroot is just tender (which, with beetroot, means a bit of bite still left). If you want the sauce really syrupy, remove the beetroot and boil the liquid until it's like chocolate sauce.

3 Score the skin of the duck breasts with a sharp knife in a criss-cross pattern and season. Place skin-side down in a dry frying pan and cook gently for 8 minutes. Don't be tempted to use a non-stick frying pan because the skins won't go as crispy. Turn up the heat after the initial 8 minutes to give the skin a chance to really crisp up.

The duck breasts will stick like glue to the bottom of the pan. This is annoying, but all it means is that you have to take a slim fish slice and really get under the breasts to separate them from the bottom of the pan. If you're genuinely spooked by stuff like this you could, before you put the breasts into the pan, brush the skins with the MEREST HINT of oil. And really, I mean a tiny cat's lick.

After you flip the breasts, the recipe says to cook for another 3 minutes. This 8 min + 3 min cooking time doesn't give especially rare meat. If you want it rarer, I'd say cook for 6 + 2 mins. I guess commercial recipes don't want to recommend rare cooking times because they don't want to be accused of poisoning people.

4 Spoon the beetroot and cooking juices into the centre of a plate or onto a large serving dish. Slice the breasts up quite thick and arrange them over the top.

White sauce - experienced cooks look away

It took me years to master a white sauce. I was shown at an early age by my mother how to do it, but when trying to replicate it, it always went horribly wrong. Lumpy, floury and gross.

My mother, in her haste to make food for 4 children, while repairing a wall that had fallen down in the middle of the night and fixing the car, had left out two quite important steps when she was talking me through it, which I later discovered when reading a cookbook. Can't remember which.

So here we go, this is a white sauce. I'm not including exact amounts, because they don't really matter. The important thing is that you get the hang of the method and the idea.

Take a knob of butter, approximately 50g and melt it gently in a pan

Now take the pan off the heat (this is very important) and sprinkle over a tablespoon of flour. Stir in with a wooden spooon until there are no lumps. Add flour bit by bit until you have made a sort of butter-and-flour paste. Stop when it is still on the creamy side, rather than stiff and dry.

Now add about two glugs of milk and with a wooden spoon or whisk (still with the pan off the heat) mess it about until it seems more or less mixed in. A couple of little lumps don't matter.

Put the pan back on the heat and pour in the rest of the milk - eg. probably about 3/4 of a pint if you were doing a macaroni cheese for about 4-6 people.

Heat it all over a medium flame, stirring often with a whisk or a wooden spoon - or a combination of both. About three or four minutes into this, you ought to find that the sauce starts to thicken. At this point you can add cheese if you are making a cheese sauce. Either way, throw in a pinch of salt and a few twists of pepper.

After the sauce has thickened and you've added your extra ingredients cook the sauce for a bit - maybe 4 or 5 minutes or even more - over the lowest flame you've got, stirring all the time. This extra bit of cooking is what prevents the sauce from forming that horrible grainy floury texture that happens so often.

If you wander off for a minute and then come back and it's formed a skin, don't worry, just stir this all in. If for some reason your sauce turns out much more thick than you wanted it, you can add more milk.

And that ought to be that.

Flexible gratin

So I made it to Waitrose in the end and actually had a pretty nice time. I stopped to look at a cookbook I always see there, which is called "Do-Ahead Dishes for the Dinner Party Diva" or something. I had always thought it looked like my least favourite kind of cookbook - swirly cartoon drawings of stick-thin women on the front and then crappy boring recipes for roast chicken and salad dressings on the inside.

But actually, it was quite good. I flicked through and happened to land on a recipe for Pork and Ginger potstickers, which sound from the description like little Chinese dumpling things, which I've always been curious about. So, to hell with it, I thought - this book can't be that bad and I tossed it into my trolley.

Anyway, back to lunch. I decided to make a gratin. I love making gratins because they are a way of eating a meal consisting of mostly vegetables without wanting to hang yourself. I'm not one of those girls who thinks that fat and dairy are bad for you. I eat no processed food, nor do I often eat meals where carbohydrate is the focus (pasta, baked potato, rice), so I feel blithely entitled to cover everything I do eat in cream and cheese, fat and salt.

This particular gratin was a variation of one in Nigel Slater's Tender. He describes it as being a white cabbage gratin with cheese and mustard, although he then forgets to include the mustard in the recipe or the method. But it's okay, I forgave him. I'm not so mojo-less that I can't add a bit of mustard to a damned white sauce.

My take on Nigel's gratin was white cabbage based, but also included spinach, mushrooms and a lot of chopped up left over roast chicken covered with a pecorino/parmesan cheese sauce and topped off with two generous handfuls of breadcrumbs.

So, here we go:
1 pointed cabbage
6 chestnut mushrooms, chopped
2 large handfuls of spinach
chopped up leftover roast chicken (or anything if you have it and not if not)
pecorino and parmesan
salt and pepper
2 large handfuls breadcrumbs
enough white sauce to cover the lot. Have we talked about white sauce? I kind of assume that if I can make it, anyone can - but if you can't, just shout.

1 - Boil the cabbage for 2 mins in salted water
2 - melt some butter in a pan and briskly toss round the chopped mushrooms and spinach until wilted but not totally surrendered
2- Make up a white sauce, using about 300ml of milk and then throw in a very large handful of chopped or grated pecorino and two large pinches of parmesan, salt, pepper and some cream if you've got it
3 - Add a level teaspoon of dijon mustard and stir until the cheese has melted
4 - spread the cabbage out on the bottom of a gratin dish, then arrange over that the spinach and mushrooms, then over that the chicken if using, then the white sauce and finally the breadcrumbs.
5 - shove in a 180C oven for 20-25 mins

Cooking fatigue

Ok, I lied. I AM bored with writing this blog. Or, rather, I'm bored with cooking. Bored as hell. I think it might be because I had a couple of things go wrong and there's nothing more dispiriting than failure. I've simply lost my mojo.

I think this is might be what they call cooking fatigue, although it's more commonly experienced by working mothers of three than by lazy freelancers who can't be bothered to go to Waitrose. It's also maybe because of my diet. I rarely find exciting recipes that conform to my diet plans that aren't things you've heard about before: quinoa, broad bean salad, ceviche. Yawn.

Or what happens is that I decide to "make things up", which are almost always disgusting because while I'm an OK cook, I'm no kind of chef. Maybe this is it? Maybe this is the end of my cooking "journey"? Now I know that if I follow a recipe it'll probably turn out okay and I've conquered (mostly) my fear of mass catering all that's left is to sit about eating leftover roast chicken until I die.

But before I flake out completely I scoured Waitrose Food Illustrated and today's the table, which if you don't know is the Times' new food section thing and found some food that I can be almost bothered to slop downstairs and put my apron on for:

Barbequed squid
Roast pork with a muscovado crust
Lamb tagine

All that's missing are all the ingredients. Do they sell mojo at Waitrose?

Kale with garlic and chilli

I didn't die, or get bored with writing the blog, or drink too many hot toddies and then drive into a lampost, while aiming for Waitrose. I went to France - the South of France. To Nice where it is nice. To kvetch about the wedding in French. "Sacre bleu! La robe! La robe N'EST PAS FINI!" And also, it felt like, to eat nothing but baguettes and cheese. Although there was one cheese that was so uric that it tasted exactly like I imagine pissy knickers might taste.

A lot of the cooking was done by my friend Julia Churchill, a brilliant home cook who really ought to be writing about cooking but she's too busy being some kind of high-powered literary agent. Fact about Julia: she once cooked a vegan lemon tart for Lou Reed.

So I came back from France late on Sunday night and dived back into my no-booze all-greens diet. Whoopee!!

Above is some of Monday night's supper (out of shot is a huge, meltingly roasted chicken) and what you're looking at really is the green stuff, which is kale not the carrots, although they were nice too.

I've cooked kale before but I was doing it wrong - I'm pretty sure I just boiled it and plonked it on a plate and it was absolutely disgusting. Beyond disgusting. Giles is a huge greens freak so I grudgingly bought some more last week but was secretly hoping that it would just sit in the larder and go gross and we'd eventually throw it away. But the game was up and he insisted on cooking it last night properly.

This meant me pinching yet another idea off Henry, who braises kale with chilli and garlic. G heated some oil in a large heavy frying pan-thing and added lots of chopped chilli and garlic. Then he added the kale (no water or anything!) and cooked it until it all sort of wilted down like spinach, for about 5-10 minutes. And then we ate it, feeling like such good little citizens and it was actually really nice. Not as good as a hot toddy, but much better than pissy French cheese.

Mackerel

I spoke too soon, now I'M ill. There'll be a hot toddy tonight, no fear. Not drinking doesn't extend to this kind of emergency.

So, last night, I had a disaster of epic proportions, involving over-salting a thai pork thing to such a degree that even Giles, the salt monster himself, half-man, half salt-lick, went "Burlagh!!" when he tasted it. What a waste. Whither my cooking mojo, damnit?

So I approached the kitchen feeling depressed as hell at lunchtime today and stood for a long time staring at a shrink-wrapped packed of mackerel fillets (oily fish! So good for you! AND SO SCARY) and wondering whether to just end it all with my Victorinox paring knife.

But I didn't. Instead I boiled up some quinoa and mixed it in with some baby spinach leaves, dijon mustard dressing and shredded mackerel and ate it feeling holy. As diet food goes, it's pretty hardcore. But I'm nothing if not a show-off.

March cold cure-all

Everyone seems to be ill at the moment, except me. So I thought I'd post a reminder to everyone that the best cure for a nasty cold is a hot toddy and 12 hours in bed.

This is how my mum used to make them for me. (That is my mum, above, in the pink Crocs).

Take:
1 bottle whisky
1 lemon
1 bowl sugar
1 hot kettle, about 5 mins off the boil
1 mug or glass

Stand next to the kettle and surround yourself with the ingredients. Start with a finger of whisky and half a spoonful of sugar, a squeeze of lemon and a slug of hot water.

Mix artistically. Taste gingerly. Add ingredients as neccessary until you have something hot, sweet and lemony with a boozy kick.

Whether or not you choose to take two painkillers of your choosing with this is entirely up to you. Obviously, I would never recommend mixing painkillers with alcohol, because it is dangerous.

Anyway, drink this and then go to bed for 12 hours. Everyone always laughs at me and calls me a weakling when I go to bed as soon as I've got a sore throat but my great Uncle Jim always did it and he was in the army and lived until he was 100, so if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me. And you.

Liver and spinach

I reckon I'm a pretty wide-ranging eater, but there are certain things I won't touch and, damnit all, I won't be judged for it.

For example, I won't eat raw garlic, roast garlic, jerusalem artichokes, lemon puddings, aniseed or kidneys. And I'm not wild about tongue, either. And the attitude you get from people! It's as if you've announced you're a vegan. At least people probably don't give you shit for being a vegan because they assume that you've got enough problems as it is.

A thing most people don't want to eat is offal and I absolutely defend anyone's right not to want to eat it without being labelled a white-bread eating food weakling. Offal really isn't actually that nice, most of the time. Kidney! ACK! Gag me with a spoon. It's just about tolerable cut up into minute chunks and then cooked for about three days and then put in a pie with gravy and steak and topped off with a slab of buttery pastry. Any more real than that and I break out into a sweat.

But some offal is okay. Lamb sweetbreads: tick. Especially the way Tom Pemberton does them at Hereford Road, with some kind of parsley and barley salad thing. Calves' liver, with bacon and onions and mash (not allowed on my diet alas): tick.

Chicken liver, turned into a pate OR cooked by Giles in a rich sauce of tomato and paprika: tick.

The photo above doesn't really do this dish justice but it's DELICIOUS.

And here's how he does it:

1 packet organic chicken livers, washed and sorted for gross bits of sinew or any green bits (gall bladder! Augh!)

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon paprika

about 100-150 marsala wine, or white wine. Or red wine, really

some lemon juice

a splash of chicken stock (if you've got it)

2 large squeezes of tomato puree or a couple of long squeezes of tomato ketchup

salt

pepper

spinach or salad leaves

some parsley if you've got it

1 - Sweat the onions gently for about 10-15 minutes and then throw in the garlic. Cook that until you start to smell garlic and then throw in the livers.

2 - turn up the heat a bit and cook for about 4 minutes. Then add the paprika, chicken stock, tomato puree, salt and pepper and cook for another 1 minute

3 - pour over the wine and then turn the heat down a bit and simmer for about 4 more minutes with a lid on, stirring occasionally until the wine reduces a bit and you get a kind of tomatoey sauce.

4 - "arrange" (i.e. plonk) some spinach leaves on a plate and then spoon over the livers and any juices left in the pan. Squeeze over some lemon juice and scatter parsley over the top.

Instead of having a brownie afterwards, I had an apple. *SMUG*

How not to drink

As well as being on a diet for the wedding I'm not drinking. Well, I'm drinking LESS.

I'm always a bit freaked out by those "Are you an alcoholic?" surveys, because whenever I do them, and answer them honestly, it always turns out that I ought to get myself to the Priory immediately. Do I drink by myself? Yes. Do I drink to forget my problems? Of course. Do I find it difficult to stop after one drink? Who doesn't? Do you scour the house in a rage for alcohol after a particularly trying day? (Ok I made that one up. But the answer is yes.)

There are two times in my life when I've realised that I am going to end up actually an alcoholic if I didn't stop drinking immediately. There are alcoholics on both sides of my family, so I'm as "at risk" as a ming vase on the M4.

The first one was when I was about 23 and working in a seriously lowly job and then my boyfriend ran off with another girl. Which I was doubly pissed off about because before he went out with me he was GAY - running off with a boy I could take but a girl was just beyond the pale. I would come home to my parents' house from work and sit at our kitchen table while my father, god bless him, would pour red wine down my throat until I passed out. I must say, it worked, because I didn't feel nearly so much like killing myself when I was drunk.

In fact, I wrote 40,000 words of a really excellent comic novel, mostly in those evenings when I was drunk. Well, I say it's excellent but the first agent I showed it to hated it and the second didn't even write back. Bastard. And the restraining order means I can't EVEN push a molotov cocktail through his damn letterbox.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, then one day my parents went on holiday and I was left in the house by myself. I wasn't so crazy about cooking and shopping back then and so after three days there was no more alcohol left in the house and I RAGED around it trying to find something to drink. As I stood in the laundry, contemplating a bottle of cherry brandy, I realised I needed to stop immediately.

The second time was when I was working as a reporter for the Londoner's Diary, which is the gossip column in the Evening Standard. I was, for weeks at a time, either drunk or hungover. When I found myself slipping out for a Bloody Mary the second the afternoon edition had been sent (back when the Standard had different editions) I thought I should stop.

I mean, I was hardly Anne Robinson, or George Best, but you don't need to hit rock bottom to be drinking too much, or too regularly. Anyway, my point is that stopping drinking is really boring, but I learnt that it's basically all about replacing the FIRST drink of the evening. (Not a new concept, but I'm pleased with how well it works).

If you want to have an alcohol-free evening, all you need to do is replace the first drink you would normally have of the evening with something else. The plain fact is, I'm normally just thirsty. I'm not one of those people who drinks 18 pints of water a day. I would, but I'm too busy drinking 18 cups of tea. So, my dummy evening drink is usually a virgin Mary or a plain tonic water with ice and lemon.

My brain is so incredibly stupid that it totally thinks it has been given a little drinky and Giles' stash of Chardonnay is left untroubled. If I can just stop Giles from pounding down the stairs at 6pm, rubbing his hands together, doing a little dance and shouting "Let's have a BEER!!!" then I might even make it to the altar sober.

Diet time

So, I'm on a diet. I'm getting married at the end of next month and I've just realised that the reason people get really thin before they get married is because they go on a diet. I thought the weight just miraculously fell off due to stress or something.

But no, actually you have to stop drinking and go for a run and stop eating rounds of toast covered in Nutella while you watch 12 back-to-back episodes of Judge Judy that you recorded on the V+ box. For example.

Yesterday I went shopping and bought diet food. That is, I bought cheese and a lot of vegetables like kale and spinach and bok choi and broccoli and some artichoke hearts in a jar. And I also bought some chicken livers and chorizo. Carb-free - that's the secret to upper arms like Sandra Bullock when you're 40. I am so pleased Sandra Bullock won an Oscar. I don't know why but I just think she's nice and is probably deserves it after all her hard work in movies like 28 Days, Speed and Miss Congeniality.

Anyway so last night I had my first diet dinner of grilled chicken thighs and a broad bean salad.

When I was younger, I always thought that the easy thing to cook was chicken breasts, under a grill. But it turns out that they are as dry as cotton wool and boring as hell if you grill them. The things to grill are chicken thighs, which stay juicy, but they are still relatively quick to cook - about 25-30 mins under a hot grill. And a broad bean salad can be cheered up with some feta, broccoli and artichoke hearts and a lemony, salty dressing with mint and dill.

It's still freezing outside and this is rather a summery dinner but I just don't want to eat anymore GOD DAMNED stew.

So here we go:

For 2

4 chicken thighs

two large handfuls of broad beans

about eight small florets of broccoli

8 or so artichoke hearts

100g of feta, cubed

olive oil

salt

pepper

thyme

lemon juice

mint

dill

There are a lot of herbs here, I know - I use herbs more when I'm on a diet to liven up boring diet food and bought a lorry-load especially on Monday morning. None of them are especially compulsary, this would still be okay without them. You might also notice that I haven't included any garlic - this is because I don't eat raw garlic, but feel free to add it in to the dressing or to the chicken marinade if you do.

1 - Turn on the grill and marinade the chicken thighs (if you've got time) in some olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper and thyme. If you're just putting the chicken straight under the grill, sprinkle a bit of salt on the skin so it goes crispy. Grill these for about 25-30 minutes and check they're done before serving. I know, stupid thing to say, but I am constantly being caught out by slightly underdone chicken. It doesn't help that often in a pack of 4 chicken thighs, 2 will be enormous and 2 will be tiny, meaning differing cooking times.

2 - Boil the broad beans and broccoli for about 5 minutes each and drain.

3 - Mix together the oil, lemon, salt, pepper, mint and dill in a dressing according to your taste. If you're using a very grassy olive oil, you might like to mix in some ground nut oil as well. I hate it when recipes say "according to taste" but, genuinely, you might hate mint and love lemon - or something.

4 - Put the broccoli, beans, artichoke hearts and feta in a salad bowl, pour over dressing and toss together.

5 - Let the chicken thighs rest for 10-15 minutes to avoid post-cooking rubberiness. You may want to squeeze over the chicken some extra lemon, as Giles is doing in the picture above.

How not to make hot cross buns

So, here they are in all their burnt glory: my hot cross buns. Thanks a bunch, Delia.

Ok fine. It's not Delia's fault, it's my fault. I've got a fan oven and I always forget to adjust the temperature down by about 10-20C to prevent the oven setting fire to whatever it is I'm baking.

I also blithely igored her warning not to use easy-blend dried yeast, which I think may have contributed to the rather hard outer-shells of my buns. So nul points to moi.

Despite being burnt and rock-hard, these are mega-tasty. They take about 2 hours to make and if you've got any interest in trying them out, this is a very good recipe, flavour-wise. They really do taste just like hot cross buns.

You can find the recipe here: http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/sweet/hot-cross-buns.html

Just remember to turn the temperature down a bit if you've got a fan oven...

Egg poaching for dummies

I can't poach eggs. I just can't - it's like I can't cook rice. It just doesn't work for me. Please don't tell me that I need to make sure the eggs are really fresh or to put vinegar in the water or swirl it round and make a vortex or any of that, because I've TRIED IT and it doesn't work. I think it takes a steadier hand, or more patience, or something, but it's just not in my nature. Maybe it's because I'm a Taurus.

So I was intrigued when I was flicking through Peter Gordon's latest cookbook, fusion, by a recipe where he poaches eggs in a little cling-film parcel. I doubt it's because he, like me, can't poach eggs, but because he's poaching them with black vinegar (I had to look this up - it's a kind of Chinese rice vinegar), truffle oil, chilli and spring onion.

It's a pretty neat idea and it works (although the above picture is of just a plain egg poached in cling film, without the chilli and other exciting things) - kind of. I found that the 8 minutes cooking time PG recommended was a bit too long, but that, at a guess, was because my eggs weren't hot-off-the-hay-fresh.

Anyway here is the recipe for the poached eggs, found on p. 26 of Peter Gordon's excellent and exotic book. He serves the egg as a sort of starter-thing, on a bed of parmesan mashed potato and it goes like this:

1 egg

1 tsp black vinegar (you can get it from Waitrose...)

1 tsp white truffle oil

1 spring onion, chopped

1/2 red chilli, de-seeded and chopped

1 - Unroll about 40 cm of clingfilm and fold it over on itself to make a double thickness. Line a teacup with the film and put in the tsp of vinegar and the truffle oil.

2 - Scatter in some of the spring onion and chilli. Then crack in one egg.

3 - Gather up the sides of the cling film and tie at the top with a rubber band or a freezer bag tie. Here PG is keen you should leave no air bubbles inside (I guess so that the egg doesn't just float to the top of the pan when it's poaching, although I must have left some air in because mine did this, although it didn't affect its cooking much).

4 - Drop the egg bag into some boiling water and rapidly simmer it for 8 minutes if your egg is really fresh and a bit less if more mature. To unwrap the eggs, snip the tied-up top with some scissors if it's easier.

This method allows you to scatter all sorts of things that don't need a lot of cooking (or actually, even cooked things, little snippets of crispy bacon?) in with the egg and then poach it altogether in a little parcel, which looks pretty cool and clever. Which, come on admit it, is what we all long to be.

Nothing to do with food...

.... just a really nice sunset (although with Giles' head slightly in the way).

Flossie the Hamburgler

So, there are a few changes to Recipe Girl. It's no longer Recipe Girl, for starters, but Recipe Rifle. It's all my sister's fault (that is her in the picture above). My sister is called Florence and she is 21 and she is the only computer nerd I know who wears Marc Jacobs. I bought her a pair of Louboutins for her 21st birthday and I now really regret it. I should have got her a Beano and a tube of Pringles and kept the shoes for myself.

She said to me the other day in the brutal, but matter-of-fact way she has: "Your blog is really lame. You need more photos and a search button and a sitemeter." She gave me a bored look as she casually re-directed $0.001 off the paycheque of every United States citizen with a social security number into her Barclays student current account. Then she popped another brownie into her mouth and said "and the name is just stupid. You're nearly 30. Just call it Recipe Rifle. I mean, that's a crap name too, but better than Recipe GIRL." She looked me up and down in that judgmental way that thin people or French people do. I mean, she's not French, but you get my meaning. She is thin, though. For such a giant asshole, she is very thin indeed.

So there we are - it's a bit different. I must say, it's spooky to be able to see where all my differnt visitors are coming from. Or actually, maybe it's nice. It means you are real, not just figments of my imagination.

Florence has a hamburger recipe that she wants to share with you all, which is good timing because I wanted to do something - now barbeque weather isn't out of the realms of imaginations - on burgers. So when she gets off her fat lazy student butthole and passes it on to me, it will, verily, be yours, too.

Good reason to buy an apple corer

I had forgotten all about baked apple puddings until I came across this recipe in a newspaper. My mum used to make a lot of baked-apple puddings and they were always my favourite.

This works very well. All the sugar melts and escapes out into the roasting pan, but when you put the apples onto the plate or bowl, you can spoon the melted sugar out and heap it over the top.

(for 6)

6 cooking apples
120g butter
6 tbsp raisins
4 tbsp brown sugar

1 - Heat oven to 190C. Core the apples and score with a knife around the equator of each apple.
2 - Stuff sugar, raisings and a knob of butter into each apple
3 - Bake for 25-30 mins and serve with cream or creme fraiche

Yes.

Bad mood buns

I am in a very bad mood. I won't bore you with the details because I don't want you to slip into a coma and die. But if I DID tell you the story you'd be like "Oh yeah that would put me in a really bad mood, too."

So I'm in this bad mood, and I'm raging my way back home, on the tube, off the tube, past the stupid Kentish Town Forum "No I don't want tickets to fucking Groove Armada, go away AND DIE!!!!!" And I stamped into the house after flicking a V sign at the horrible black cat who shits in our garden and aimed a kick at it, but it took off (I wasn't REALLY going to kick it) and threw off all my clothes until I was down to leggings and a vest and my apron and did two things.

1) I started to cook a stew (at 9.15pm at night)
2) Started to comfort eat

Both of these things were surprising to me. Most of the time, I feel like my role as a cook-foodie-person is completely bogus. I don't *really* know the first thing about food and couldn't give a rat's ass for bumming Borough market or finding a supplier for the most "marvellous BURRRRAAAAAATA darling" and at pretty much any time of the day if you said to me "Shall we go to McDonald's" I'd say "Start the car, I'll go and put on some stretchy trousers."

But on the tube on the way home, raging away, all I wanted to do when I got home was to sit down with a large stack of cookbooks. Maybe make some pancakes. DEFINITELY do a stew with those lamb shanks before they get a bit tired. And it was then that I thought that maybe I'm not a total fraud. Again and again, I return to the stove. Not usually to eat, but to bash pans, chop, stir angrily, slide something into a roiling oven.

But then I started comfort eating aswell - a worrying turn of events. I don't comfort eat. Ever. I eat when I am hungry and stop when I'm not. I'll eat some chocolate because I fancy it. I never eat just because I'm pissed off - but I did tonight. FOUR BROWNIES. And a fifth isn't out of the realms of possibility. I wonder what it all means?

Anyway, I was supposed to make hot cross buns ages ago but keep being distracted by stupid pointless things that take up all my time and piss me off. And I've just looked at the recipe and I haven't got two really significant ingredients, so a flour-based celebration of the crucifixion and reurrection of Jesus Christ is just going to have to wait until I can get down to Waitrose for some mixed peel.

Meat fear

I have become the kind of person who plummets into a deep panic when surrounded by a lot of raw meat.

I don't know how it happened, but I think it started after I learned how to drive and was able to take myself to Waitrose. It was the meat aisle that did it. All those rows and rows of plastic packets of formerly happy bouncing lambs and docile cows and perky chickens. And I felt dizzy and ill and every time I go there now, I have to rush through.

Giles has very little sympathy for me on this. His argument is that you should always, always go to a local butcher whose meat comes from little farms and isn't sold in plastic cartons. I agree with him, but the butcher doesn't also sell deoderant and light bulbs and bok choi. And even then, butchers have started freaking me out too. I'm finding it increasingly hard to prepare a chicken for the oven without feeling just awful and guilty and SAD. What is wrong with me? I don't want to be a vegetarian, I really don't. I don't think it's neccessary.

It's not like I don't buy absolutely the most expensive, premium, grass-fed, free-range stuff I can. But my uncle used to have a farm and it was an excellent small farm in the Welsh hills, where old-fashioned husbandry was practised. Fresian cows, free to roam the blustery hills, patted and cared-for, used to hang their heads over the garden wall and look at you with their big brown eyes; we hunted for hens' eggs in the wood where the chickens scratched and buck-buckawed. And the process of slaughtering the animals was still fucking barbaric.

So I don't know what to do. I think the answer is to buy less meat. Or get therapy.