The road to Liberation is hard

Last night, stars must have been aligned and the moon in the seventh house: I finally succeeded in making a really tasty pan of teriyaki chicken. The problem with making this particular meal is that a friend of mine used to cook it and I’d only ever watched her making it her way. I liked her version, and so shunned what the great and vast internet might be able to tell me on the subject. 

It is one of my many faults that I believe I can get the jist of how to make something by just sitting at an adjacent table and occasionally glancing towards the stove amid conversation or table laying.(Similarly on journeying to visit my sister’s house for the first time, I was convinced that I didn’t need to look at a map to find where she lived – I thought I’d just intuit it. As it happens, I did manage to drive around her town long enough to accidentally pass by the bottom of her street and so I felt vindicated in my confidence. This story will not have a happy ending.)

The process as witnessed in that kitchen up a hill eight months ago was the following: oil (can never remember if this was veg/olive) goes into a pan. Chopped up garlic, ginger and dried chilli are added to oil to flavour it. A spatual-ed nudging of the garlic and ginger to the side of the pan and then chicken (always on the bone) is put in skin-side down. At some point, a certain amount (I’ve had to experiment) of soy sauce is slowly added to the pan, and then spoonfuls (see prev. parenthesis) of sugar sprinkled over the lot. I missed the next bit but the chicken always emerged from the oven so, in light of the laws of physics, it must get put in there at some point before we eat it. Yes. I think that’s right.  

I have tried again and again to replicate the above, always producing something not quite right, not quite the same and on a number of occasions, bitter and burnt. This in turn would leave me feeling bitter and, in my eagerness to taste and see whether I’d managed it this time, often somewhat scalded on the tongueandwhilewe’reonthesubject how is it right and just in this world that the only way of checking whether the food you’ve just made is gross or heaven is to force yourself to try some boiling hot sauce that will burn your tongue and give you a questionable impression of the dish as a whole anyway and then you can't even enjoy the food if it's decent because your tongue's like a carpet??! Grrr.

Frustration, then, was mounting. But lo! chiaroscuro as sunlight hit the dark clouds of my culinary depression - I made a break-through. As is always the case, I made a small change or two. I resolved to remove the garlic and ginger from the pan after their aromafying of the oil as they tended to burn if the heat was to high but if the heat was too low, the chicken didn’t brown. Full steam ahead, chicken went in and I resolved not to be impatient but Just Let It Brown This Time. And it did – GLORY. Well most of it. I’ll get better at being patient I’m sure. Then I tried a new set of measurements and proportions for the soy/sugar. Five dessert spoons of soy (new kikoman soy sauce which is meant to be the best) and four of golden caster sugar YES it sounds a lot when you put it like that but you’d eat it in a restaurant wouldn’t you WOULDN’T you so just pipe down.

Heat under the pan went low as the soy went in since it tends to be petulant about over-heating (hence the burnt taste). Chilli and garlic returned to the pan. As soon as froth started happening aroundybout the chicken, it all went in a pyrex dish and into a high-heat oven. Boom. Rice. Purple-sprouting broccoli and lime, cos there weren’t no lemons in the fridge. Splendid. Better than splendid. Divine. Crispy, sweet, salty, chickeny, ricey, yummy goodness. This is the one dish I’ve repeatedly tweaked and now that I have the recipe, timing and method in my head (although it could still improve), I do feel a bit like its really mine, and more so than a meal from a recipe. 

Liberation after the long-struggle against the oppressor Cook Book!

Five Against One: The Question of Taste

I have a memory of a Masterchef episode where the standard stringy contestant was being berated for a lack of attention to detail when it came to presentation. One could make a number of cruel remarks on the irony of this coming from two men who are clearly somewhat overly concerned with their own presentation – with questionable results. I shan’t make any such comments. Cruelty is deeply unattractive (another lesson learned from TV: would you want to go out with the nasty commentator on ‘Come Dine With Me’?).

Presentation, then, is something to be reckoned with. And I agree it’s important - up to a point. It’s what separates home-cooked from restaurant-eaten. It enhances the whole experience if you can not only see but also identify the different elements of your meal, and know that they have been individually and creatively christened by whoever is charged with making the menus in these places (I wonder if it’s a high or low status job? I wonder if it could be a permanent job? I wonder if it could be my job). If you are like me, you lack the impulse or patience to take such extreme care in the construction of your evening’s edible art.

Attempts are made. Seeds are scattered. Salad leaves (when I splash out on the bagged salad – happy days!) appropriately plumped. Oils and sauces careless and carefully drizzled. But I’ve found there are some things that just cannot be made to look nice. Anything that’s a one-pot-stop, for example, if it lacks the essential useless herb frond stuck on top. I can’t quite justify buying quantities of basil, parsley, coriander and mint every week just so that I might have these fig-leaves of the dinner plate, and so, the one-pot meals do end up looking vaguely similar and utterly unsophisticated. Or noodles. Unless your stir-fry has a green in it, it’s going to look like worms. That’s just what soy sauce does.

As with so much I am in awe of The Great Ottolenghi in this respect. They have some real challenges when sorting the photography for their cookbooks. The inside of a grilled aubergine scraped out and mashed up ain’t pretty. Even hummus – indistinguishable from drywall – needs help, in spite of its popularity. Yet page after page featuring such aesthetic underwhelmers as endive, frittata and brown lentil prompt sighs of longing and a rumbling in the belly after they’re through with them. If you don’t own their books, it’s worth a trip to Waterstones as long as you’re going directly on to a hot meal.

But I challenge even the great Yotam to make Savoy cabbage look good on a plate. With one’s eyes shut, the Savoy is irresistible. One of The Five, and 80p a pop which will get you six servings. But open up and the aesthetic hunger vanishes. And it only gets worse the further in you go. There must be something in our DNA that puts us off eating pale greenish yellowy things. Same goes for blue soup. Never going to look good.

So then, here’s my attempt. Note: salmon artfully and diagonally placed on airy bed of fragrant rice; skin has been glazed with a combo of chilli, garlic, ginger, soy and honey. As I tuck in I close my eyes and feel a peaceful transcendence and the relief of dinner being satisfactorily compassed. But then I have to open my eyes. A sullen bank of crinkly yellow-green stares back.

Sod aesthetics – my five other taste-centres are satisfied. Happiness is in the pursuit of perfection, after all.

Austerity Cooking

The word ‘austerity’ is weightier than it used to be - isn't it? Where it might have once summoned up images of ration books, dour Scottish aunties and paintings of seated men resting hands on a passing Dobermans, today I find myself settling on different images: the EU flag; the colour grey; middle-aged Greek women in tight knee-length skirts holding black hankies to their care-worn faces; George Osborne's face; David Cameron’s face; a particularly grotesque cartoon depicting David Cameron as a big pink high-speed train; the coffee cup I used this morning; a particularly eye-popping Mary Katrantzou dress; my future career as fashionista….

My attention span is short.  

But no matter what the associations (and no matter where they lead us), January is always going to be a particularly sucked-in month and this year maybe there’s just no way of making lemonade out of the broken eggs. Some people get creative and start inventing new ways to twist the arms of their pennies (perhaps you’ve gone beyond pinching). Me, I give up and give in. In a very pro-active, determined and deliberate way, mind. One substantial shop when I returned to the barren wasteland that is Oxford in early January and my freezer was full - there was no further need of releasing any more of my borrowed cash into the world. Why spend what you haven’t got, when you cannot spend what you haven’t got, eh? But it was only later I realised I was planning on cutting back not just my eating out, but all my culinary creativity too. It’s at these sorts of times when I really relish The Plain Bowl Of Pasta dinner, The Lump Of Cheese And Apple lunch and, of course, the eventual consumption of Thing In The Freezer I Didn’t Ever Really Feel Like Eating In The First Place. With the echo of Austerity all about us, and drummed into me on a daily basis by the supremely depressing Today programme, I too imagine myself feeling the burn of economic downturn and, as a result, turn down a path of truly dire meals.

Except, they’re not really dire meals at all. I just like the idea of them being dire in their no-frills, near-masochistic lack of seasoning selves. Tonight, for example, a perfectly lovely vegetable and chorizo concoction that technically comes under the heading of ‘Things In The Freezer I Didn’t Ever….’ etc etc. Instead of wasteful and waist-expanding amounts of rice or potato, I thought bread and thinly-spread margarine might make a good accompaniment, as well as chiming with the times. 

 

Many squirm at the thought of margarine. And I was one of them up until 31^st of December 2011, but now we’re in Austerity Month, it’s ok and I’ve even remembered why I used to like it so much. It was another one of those normal things you take for granted in your childhood. It tastes of after-school hunger being sated in front of Newsround. Now I think about it, ever since I read the description of Miss Honey giving Matilda tea, margarine has had a romantic attraction. BUT only if thinly-spread.

It seems really it’s the Austerity mind-set that appeals to me: and perhaps others too? Lucky am I in my ivory tower and I wouldn’t want to be glib about real and horrible economic fan-hittings. But it is nice to feel at one with the nation, nay Europe, as you reach for the 5kg pack of pasta and a saucepan.

A time for tightening belts – and golly gosh doesn’t it taste good!

What is it about the beginning of a New Year? Once the usual feeling of anti-climax post-new year’s eve had been cleared up, slept off and packed away for next year, an unmistakable fizz of excitement began to percolate from brain down to somewhere in the stomachy region. A New Year – woohoo!

So there I sat on the 2^nd of Jan, all giddy with excitement at the prospect of tackling my inevitable but by no means irreparable pecuniarily-challenged status. “I shall buy – NOTHING!”, I announce to the wall.

“I shall spend – NOTHING!” (tautologous, perhaps, but I was feeling emphatic).

“I shall eat…. – NOTHING!” which is the sort of stupid thing I will say out loud, esp if trying to find things that fit in the sales has been particularly difficult after the lard-fest that is Christmas.

“I will delay paying all bills and subsist in a limbo-like state and hope the bank forgets all about little ol’ moi”. Hurrah! Plan.

But once reason and a rumbling tummy kicked in, I did have to grant myself just a morsel or two to keep my brain ticking over (first deadline of the year lurching up speedily). I had a fair amount in the cupboard and a brand new and innovative cookbook or two. I settled on potato curry – a meal that isn’t really a meal, but is a meal and costs about 2p to make (as long as your spices haven’t run out). Only needed to get a few items and, following the instinct of scrimpage, I shunned the easy Sainbury’s and ventured to the ‘Tahmid Stores’.

If ever I needed confirmation that chain supermarkets are the enemy of all impoverished souls, the glorious Tahmid Stores provided it. Three onions = 99p says the dreaded S-bury’s? Tahmid says 32p! Three garlic heads = £1 says S***bury’s? All-wondrous Tahmid says 45p! But gloating over my receipt later, it was the chilli, a beacon of hope and fierce flavour that was the real kicker. A large red chilli, which s**ing, p***ing Crapbury’s would have sold you in a packet with other heatless, soppy shadows of a chilli for a pound was only 9p. Independent stores, Tahmid or otherwise, win.

So a thrifty 90p spent on my dins I set about it. While the onions and garlic softened up, spices were sourced (the ground coriander had run out), and potatoes chopped. Also turned out I didn’t have any tomatoes to put in with the curry but eh, you can’t have all chips crunchy and fluffy in this world. In fact it made a nice change not to eat food that was orange (other creations over Christmas all entertained the orange hue - bacon and lentil soup, Moroccan spiced chickpeas and a prawn and tomato thingy) and opt for a nice fluoro-yellowy-green instead, which is precisely the colour the potatoes took on after I added most of a tin of coconut milk.

While all that was bubbling away, I was searching my new Flavour Thesaurus for a way to use up the fresh bunches of mint and coriander that hadn’t flavoured and fragranced previous meals and so, had joined me journeying back to Oxford. Blow me down there’s something called ‘Salambal’ which uses coriander, mint with fresh chilli and a bit of lime juice. Whizzed up in my faithful processor, the combination of these flavours added the upper notes of heaven to an already headily satisfying dinner. I can’t wait to have it all over again tomorrow….

 Poverty Wins.

His Rt. Hon. Kale

Some kale was impulse bought yesterday. It was being talked up over the weekend and I’m a curious sort of cat so, as so often happens, I was moseying with little intent around the covered market and the urge to buy this really rather extraordinary green leaf just sprang on me. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling, gentle reader. No?

I head back to the homestead tomorrow and today has a feeling of last-day-of-school about it. With a moderately productive half-day under my belt, interspersed with the odd Google recipe search for things with kale in, I headed off to the kitchen with a post-it scrawled with the recipe for ‘kale, chorizo and potato hash’. Praises be, I actually had all of the ingredients; quite a feat considering I’ve been trying to Finish Things Up before I head off – the fridge does look very forlorn but upshot is END of soya mince bolog, END of carrot and celery soup, No More Sad Cheddar stuck at the back and an entirely used up pot of baking powder (not that that will go off, but it’s gone nonetheless).

To the making of this hash then. I’ve really been trying to Do Recipes properly recently. Quite possibly this is because of the almighty and depressing messes that needing to finish things off seems to necessitate in my case. Anyway, I went all out and even timed things. First thing to do was begin heating up two pans of water – curses on this crap slow-heating electric cooker – while I quick peeled a potato and cut it into 2cm dice (I did not use a ruler). Now, for reasons unknown to man, child or beast, I had envisaged the drawing out of the kale from its plastic bag as a magisterial moment amidst the bustle of my cooking  – it’s just so expansive and its stems so sure of themselves –  a moment that in fact was slightly disastrous as the fronds, still wet from the market stall, flicked cold water everywhere and into my eye. Eyes recovered, the huge stalky Kale was definitely worth a moment of contemplation. Deeply Green and with an aura of health about it, and yet surprisingly tasty. Most certainly a vegetable that commands respect, without there even being a reason why. I felt humbled yet encouraged by its strength.

Post-reverie, kale branches got cut off and squashed into the now boiling water to be blanched for but one minute. Meanwhile, olive oil was being heated, chorizo chopped, chorizo plopped (into oil) and the electric orange ooze of paprika beginning to spread itself around the frying pan. Out of the pan comes the kale, quietly and powerfully steaming, and it is duly drained. Recipe required it be ‘refreshed in cold water’, like some Roman nobleman moving from hot baths to the frigidarium for an invigorating cold rub down by his manservant Grumio.

A subordinate smirk on my face, Refreshed it was and left to drain again. Chorizo by this point was crisping pleasantly. Post-it called for it to be removed from the pan with a slotted spoon but I, slotted spoon-less, did the old tip the pan towards you and flick the stuff you don’t want covered in oil into a bowl the other side, type method. I find this not only works but also adds a hint of jeopardy to the proceedings; in my opinion, just the right amount of jeopardy when it comes to hot oil. Hot pan then hosts the onion and three squashed garlic cloves (the end of the garlic was beginning to sprout, but this meant it was so very easy to peel – hoorah for squidgy garlic!), softened up, then add boiled potato cubes and chunks of crispy chorizo. The final task was squeezing water out of the refreshed kale (surprisingly not at all soggy) and chopping finely. Into the pan, mixy mixy, et bon. We have a Hash.

Quite a large plate of hash too…. On tasting I found lemon juice liberally swizzled over the lot did wonders. I’m definitely making this one again. In the spirit of the sort of calm that comes before the holidays, so my lunch-making process was gloriously hassle free. Plus, my saucepans got to be introduced to something that’s basically vegetable royalty – Kale. Long Live the Kale!

It might look wrong, but it's oh so right

 [WARNING. This Blog Post Contains Beans. If you are a Bean-o-phobe, step away from the computer. Dial for your local IT specialist and go out to buy a nice hot chocolate or serving of mashed potato. The beans will not follow you.]

Tonight’s dinner was Totally Siiiiick. Sick like ‘yeaah sic blud init whaaaa. F’real’, not sick like ‘Well That's Not Very Tasty’.

For some time now, I’ve been planning to have beans on toast. Any number of reasons for making such a plan, but in particular I thought it good to revisit that most archetypal of student foods, the humble bean. It has, as it happens, bean a long time since I’d opted the Big Bz n Tz. It hadn’t really tickled my fancy. I like to think it's because I'm more interested in seeking out meals that are easy but do require going that extra mile in their creation, just to make it all worth looking at, eating, thinking about pre and post the cooking event itself and, occasionally, writing about…

Ok then, I’ll admit it. I have bean a Baked Bean Snob. Time was I had beans on toast on the regular – it was a straightforward solution to lunch. Let it be(an) known, if you’ll grant me a digression, that I HATE lunch. It’s so awkward. Just when you’ve got into the swing of the day, along comes the social compulsion to luncheon, forcing you to stop, slave to our stomachs that we are, seek out, consume and in due course, turn away from the memory of something edible. It’s just rubbish – it can’t be too complicated to make nor be too heavy lest post-prandial somnolence ensue, thereby ending hope of all productivity for at least three hours. I resent the lunch hour as much as the lunch. You don’t have a chance to properly settle into the planning of lunch, nor enjoy the sinking satisfying feeling after its duly bean consumed, perhaps nursing a glass of something refreshing and stretching out one’s legs knowing there’s not really much else to be done with the day, as is the case with dinner (oh glorious dinner, second only to the indulgent breakfast/brunch of a workless weekend).

Ah yes. Dinner! It was, like, totes sick. I found myself getting more and more excited as it was be(an)ing cooked. These ideas started coming to me – like shooting stars from heaven - “No! Not just beans on toast. Beans, BACON and toast!”. The Devil is always in the detail. “Ha HA!” I thought “Butter AND marmite on the toast, phwooooarr”.

Beans, beans, how could I ever have doubted you? Your flavour is profound, your texture light, your appearance…. rather jolly. As a final crown to this sumptuous feast - cheese. But wait! Could I…? Might I…? Should I….?

Yes I did. I grated the cheese on top and then put the whole lot under the grill. Toasted cheese on top of baked beans, bacon and toast. This Is a Righteous Dinner.

 (Your mum is one of my five a day)

On Vegetables

It would be a lie to say that I tried to eat healthily. An attempt to do something requires at least a vague idea of what the task at hand might involve. To pluck an entirely random example from the ether, trying not to buy any more clothes before the New Year is just one such known entity; to me at any rate. The mornings peering into an evermore depressing wardrobe; the slightly nauseous, sweaty feeling whenever I get too close to the high street and temptation; the obscenely gratifying stolen moments with retailers’ websites (I know I’m safe there. Paying online is so much faff – I mean how many digits am I meant to type in? Thank goodness I’m incapable of memorising 16 digit sequences). Yes, the attempt to stave off end-of-year self-regulatory financial supernovae is, in my case, a well-known and well-trudged one.

But this here ‘healthy eating’ is somink else. Calorie counting, Regular exercise, and avoiding sugar, cream, fat, butter, joy, Carbs, Processed Things, Refined Things, Fast Food – these are the concerns, I believe, that do a healthy eater make. Always one to (over?)analyse, my questions about healthy eating all start with ‘yes, but…’. Yes, but what about Carbs before 6pm? What about one’s calcium intake? What about the poor cows that’ll go out of business if I stop buying cream for my coffee?

One of my bigger concerns is regarding vegetables. They are a Good Thing, verily. But when does a vegetable stop being a vegetable? You hear terrifying things about vegetables losing most of their vitamins within FIVE MINUTES of them leaving the safety of the vine/stem/root/earth/home. Then if you take off the skin, well then, you might as well buy yourself a bacon double cheesburger for all the good that be-picked, be-skinned ex-healthy article will do you. Add to that the inevitable loss of Good Things in the Good Vegetable that happens when you reheat or coat in a Bad substance like tomato passata that has some sugar in it or, no, please no, some salt (god forbid). I find myself at an impasse – often holding a packet of Maldon Sea Salt in one hand and five 100g packets of 85% chocolate in the other – stuck in aporia and thinking ‘Well What Is the Bloody Point?’.

This all came to a head, as is so often the case, as I was contemplating some carrot and celery soup.

Lots of carrots (skin on), lots of celery (most mud washed off), three or four onions, garlic and stock – surely this should be a Very Healthy Thing? Yet I can’t help feeling doubt. Is this bowl of soup one of The Five? Really?? And even then, aside from the health making properties inherent in a carrot-with-skin-on in a soup, it is a sad fact that said soup inevitably comes with hot buttered toast. Buttered toast probably cancels out whatever one of The Five there was in the skins of the carrots I so earnestly safeguarded in the soup-making. My brow was furrowed. I needed more evidence.

After a truly wicked evening with a Dominos Pizza, I approached the task of the following day’s dinner like a sinner after Confession, filled with the desire to lead a spotless and healthy culinary life henceforth. Stir-fry with All The Vegetables In The World.

But then, what with the soy sauce (it has so much SALT in it and SALT is BAD), oil (OIL IS BAD), and the excessive cooking in a wok (it was a stir-fry ended up being rather too big for a single wok and so dividing of the stir-fry had to occur – the necessary faff led to many a squidgy carrot and over-cooked French bean), surely all those lovely vitamins must have run away to join the Circus or something. 

 Foiled again.

More vegetables featured in this evening’s supper. I could swear the courgette with its back to us is giving me a reproachful look ("I mean WHITE Rice – what on earth was I Thinking??"), its soggy seeded interior collapsing in on itself in defeat as all the Good Things evaporate away.

With the Christmas season upon us and the weight of society telling me that binges on chocolate by the advent calendar is ‘just what happens this time of year’, what is to stop a poor unfortunate and uneducated soul like myself leaping from this veggie-ledge and plunging into chocolate-soaked, butter infused depravity?

I could ask for an appointment with a nutritionist for Christmas, I suppose. But I’ve heard they make it all up anyway.