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.