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.