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.

A Day of Crapulence

 

It all crystallized in a moment of morose acceptance - my lunchtime soup (‘lunchtime’ being seven minutes to three in the afternoon) would not have that perfect dollop of yoghurt in it because said yoghurt had been polished off at third breakfast (or second elevenses if we’re being antipodean about it). This is when I realized, my day has, and in all likelihood will continue to be, a day of crapulence. Not one to do things by halves, I have now embraced the mission for today. Eat. Everything.

Defrosting soup that’s been in the freezer for at least four months, toast, more toast, tea til there’s no more tea bags, teaspoons full of honey, raisins, an attempt at eating porridge oats straight from the box, yoghurt and bran flakes, pudding from last week… A day of grazing is what it all adds up to, and in the light of my very heavy-eating week last week, grazing is not quite what the food doctor ordered. Enslaved by my own weakness and exuding apathy and sloth from every pore, I shuffle around the kitchen in pyjamas overlayed with other people’s clothes (it’s too far to go up two floors to get any of my clothes), taking care to tuck my pyjama bottoms into my (sorry, not my) socks for that final flourish of mad-lady chic. I start plotting an article I shall write for Vogue titled ‘The Allure of the Pyjama Pant - a study of a British woman’s obsession’.

The day started out so full of potential. Brisk alarm at seven am, porridge and coffee as any weekday would have it. Carefully steered away from ensconcement in distracting activities like the paper or the news by conversation with brother, I was ready for a day of mind-expansion at the library. And yet somewhere between leaving my porridge bowl on the upstairs landing and watching five episodes of ‘Rev’ on iPlayer before 10.30am, the day all went horribly wrong.

So here I sit, the remnants of past eaten meals strewn around me. It could almost look like I had a great Friday night party and just haven’t got round to tidying it up yet. But no. It’s just me, eating, on my own, for seven hours straight.

As I was desperately trying to spur myself to action and going through the list of productive things I could do with my day, cooking did come up: easily achievable goals; a product to call one’s own at the end… But this only prompted a philosophical thought train of how cooking could be some kind of therapy for recovering addicts or people with PTSD. Meanwhile I turn to the larder, deep in thought about converting the Twelve Steps into twelve levels of cooking and drafting my letter to Jamie Oliver asking if he’ll spearhead the whole operation, to open yet another mini pack of Korean biscuits. It should be worrying that I actually have started to enjoy looking ever more fetid as the crumbs collect on this somewhat bobbly jumper I’m now wearing. It should be.

So there you have it. Validation of this Lazy Student Cook’s mission statement if ever there was one. I haven’t even cooked. No, no wait – I added nutmeg to my porridge. And that’ll have to do.

A Tale of Two Pots

The past 24 hours have seen me embracing the ‘stick it all in a pot’ method of cooking. I must hold up my hands and say this is something I have castigated my brother for doing (“heating up things in a saucepan does NOT make a meal”). I mean, I have Standards. I have Cooking Ethics. I Cook Meals. A dinner plate must be pretty, or at the very least have identifiable food-stuffs on it. Elsewise it must needs represent a lack of self-respect - nay, self-worth (if I’m feeling particularly pontificatory).

But OH HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN.

Last night was an excusable and utterly righteous ‘stick-it-all-in-a-pot’ occasion. In the first place it wasn’t really a pot, it was a pyrex bowl. Second, I was making trifle. (*********resisting all trifle-related puns/wordplays here*******ow this physically hurts*******). Making trifle is now one of my top favourite things to do. For some reason I have bad memories of trifle in my younger years. It may be that I never actually ate any and I still have a residual three-year-old resistance to Things That Are New. Anyway, now, it’s the best. I began to construct a Fort of Cake inside the pyrex bowl. First the foundations, well cemented with sherry; then the walls of Cake Fortress; more sherry; an incredibly satisfying round of crushing amaretto biscuits (I like to think this was akin to some kind of grouting for The Great Cake Castle) over the top. More sherry. By this point I'm not calling it 'sherry' any more but 'shereeeeeeeeeeeeee'. Just in case it's escaped anyone, yes I do talk to my cooking ingredients.

Drunk on the power of being able to crush amaretto biscuits with the mere flexing of my fingers*, and certainly not drunk from the fumes of the shereeeeeeeeeee, I deviated from the internet recipe and decided, since its Christmas, to add in some cheeky cranberries. 

*As a general note, I can recommend the crushing of amaretto biscuits for anyone who feels the odd twinge of self-doubt – one feels like some great potentate in whose palms lie the fates of all, ready to be duly crushed. Yes. Yes this is a healthy chain of thoughts to have repeatedly.

Raspberries atop them, more crushing (DIE BISCUITS, BEHOLD YOUR MASTER AND TREMBLE), rest of cranberries and some flaked almonds. By now Cake Castle Of Doom looked a bit like this.

To make this an extra healthy pudding, add a pint of custard, one and a half pots of double cream syllabub-ed with more sherry and obscene amounts of sugar, grated chocolate, more almonds and orange zest (healthy to the last, you see).

A truly magnificent pudding in a pot. Hurrah!

But tonight. Oh tonight. I sunk low. I didn’t even decorate my dinner with a provocative and tender sprig of some herb. It was boiled carrots, to which got added the soya mince bolog (it has mellowed in the freezer and has stopped tasting offensively processed), to which got added the washed up has-beens of the cherry tomatoes, to which got added freezer peas. 

Dinner in a pot. 

May the pantheon of cooks-on-high forgive me.  

Pon de replay

 The wonderful things about being an obsessive, which I only have a mild claim to be, is eating the same pudding for four, five, maybe even six days straight, is not something of a hardship. Now, it would definitely be more fun to spend oodles of time cooking lots of different things, having them consumed by a table-ful of hearty farmers (n.b. could be male or female farmers) come in from a day's work, kicking mud off their boots at the door and smelling of the nice parts of the countryside (elderflower hedges, blue sky and lark's breath - that sort of thing), smacking their chops and slapping their bellies as all recline post-chomp-fest in their reclining kitchen chairs (someone seriously needs to invent those). Perhaps someone would pick up a folksy instrument and begin playing a song of ye olden times. We would hum and remember Old Betsy, Harrowing Dan and Bob the fishman, gone on to a better place. Whole days could be spent planning these idyllic e'entime dinners - huge pies, majesterial roasts, gigantic tarts (singger) and all with LASHINGS of Double Cream. There would also be an aga. I would have rolled up sleeves and a permanent streak of flour on my face, just to show that I too was a hearty member of the scene.

But, alas, this is not my life. But if anything were to be a consolation, it would be this chocolate cake. A fairly standard flourless affair but containing some of the top things in the World. Chocolate, Butter and, when I serve it, Extra-Thick Double Cream (heart-attack, I hear you say? I have a method for off-setting, like carbon emissions offsetting. It's about as logical as offsetting anyway). 10 seconds in the microwave and a scattering of pomegranate seeds and Ooh, heaven is a place on earth.

In other news - success on Soya Mince Bolognese number II!

Amazing what can be done with coriander. I used to hate it so much and then - Lo! - the light, the truth, the glory and all things in the world manifestly well-ordered. Granted it may have been its strong flavour that made soya mince rise up from the depressence of cardboard-tasting death and masked the STILL persistent taste of pot noodle. But it done good, and esp with the fresh chopped up cherry tomatoes (evidence of my own megalomania, I've started believing what I wrote about cherry tomatoes below, and now can't quite look at them in the same way. I'm pretty sure it was guilt I was feeling when I was chopping them up. Or maybe that was just memories of bygone festival antics triggered by the EVER PResent smell of bastard pot noodle...).

Did a lack of parmesan this time make all the difference? I think perhaps so. I wonder if anyone else regards parmesan as a social nicety rather than very much the Requirement for all pasta-type dishes?

(soya mince is improved)