I have arrived

No Blog entries for a long time because my cooking has become so routine ! I now have a number of recipes that I know work, I don't have the spectacular failures and I no longer need to start preparing at 2 in the afternoon to eat at 6.

This week started with chicken breast stuffed with pesto and wrapped in bacon served with broccoli and salad. Tuesday was cheat day so it was tuna pasta bake with the sauce from a jar and served with salad. Wednesday was going to be grilled trout but when I went into town to buy the trout (at 4:30pm - hows that for calmness !) the fish shop was closed. So I went into the supermarket and bought some mixed fish (salmon, cod and haddock) for a fish pie.

Now the next bit is a first - I didn't follow a recipe for the fish pie but made it up as I went along (apart from the white sauce which BBC Food helped me with). I served it with carrots and salad and the result was really good - my very first meal made up by myself.

So I have decided to share this recipe so that others can enjoy it and have decided to use the same style of the inaccurate, misleading, assuming, ambiguous, complicated recipes I have mostly struggled to follow to date.

Ingredients:
A handful of potatoes
300g of mixed Melanogrammus aeglefinus, Salmonidae and Gadus
A slosh of olive oil
A bag of leeks
A twidge of seasoning
A bottle of milk of the size that used to be delivered to your door years ago
Beurre
Flour

Method:
Wrap the poisson in baking foil and place in the fridge gas mark 5, electric 200 degrees c or fan assisted washing machine 180 degrees and cook until the timer goes ping. The setting for the timer is the number of books in the New Testament minus the number of the shirt Roger Osborne wore when he scored the winning goal for Ipswich in the 1978 FA Cup final

Simultaneously, make the white sauce

Place the leeks into one of those metal things, add water that has been passed by the management and cook for a little while

Sorry - forgot to say that the potatoes should have gone on 5 minutes before you started anything else - whoops - sorry

Now - add the fish into the oven dish, cover with leeks, cover with potato and smother with white sauce

Take the potato and white sauce back out again - my mistake. Put  the white sauce back in again over the leeks and fish then mash the potato and spread on top. Add the grated cheese which wasn't one of the original ingredients

Place back in the fridge and cook until The Consort arrives home from her exercise class - simple !

Spice up your life

"We need a bit more spice" The Consort urged and before I could make some helpful suggestions she went on to say that although the food I was preparing was very nice etc etc it lacked some bite sometimes, and why didn't I attempt a curry.

Hiding my disappointment I agreed that I'd give the curry a go. I stuck to a boring Chicken curry but it did go down very well with The Consort and worth a repeat at some time.

Say cheese :-)

The Consort isn't from these parts so isn't fully aware of the local customs and traditions - such as packaged cheesecake from Tesco for less than a pound. You add butter to make the base and then add milk to make the topping. Make it look good by grating some chocolate on top and hey presto, a quick, easy and cheap second course.

So when we finished the main course and I presented my cheesecake, her mouth dropped in amazement that I was capable of creating such a well presented and tasty dessert. I kept it going for as long as I could but my face gave it away and eventually confessed - but it really does taste very good !

Pretty maids all in a row

So we had some people for dinner and The Consort was very fortunately in charge of the cooking but my role was to prepare the Strawberrys and then dip them in chocolate. The problem was how to store them while they dried. Just the sort of problem I like to solve so a "washing line" was constructed in the kitchen and each strawberry pegged and allowed to drip dry - simple !

Hands off my Leeks

After watching lots of the latest Masterchef series, I now see why presentation of food is so important and any food can taste better than it actually is by being nicely prepared. So when I decided to try a recipe of Frozen Bassa with rice, lemon and garnished with leeks (inevitably), the stylish (!) presentation involved cutting the leeks length-ways and placing alongside the fish to make it look nice. OK - not exactly sophisticated but a start and at least I'd thought about it.

The Consort arrived home from work and while I was busy taking the fish out of the oven, she very kindly started serving up the Leeks. I couldn't help it - before I could stop myself I was shouting out "Hands off my Leeks" and then had to quickly explain that they were the focal point of the presentation and had to be carefully laid onto the plates after the rice and fish had been served.

Think I'm starting to take this all too seriously !

Think I'll stick to flowers

No blogging recently because there has been nothing to report. Just repeating food I've prepared before like the Cauliflower Cheese with carrots, baked potato and salad leaves in the picture above which I served up on Tuesday.

So following a very kind encouraging comment from The Consort's sister and another "prompt", I decided to try my hand at baking today.

I meet with a friend most weeks for tea/coffee (me/him) and we mostly discuss our latest disasters in the world of investment and give each other hot tips about the next big thing we can lose money on. As we left the coffee shop yesterday, he said he would call in at the market to get some flowers for his wife. I was on my bike so buying flowers for The Consort wasn't an option as they would have been decimated by the time I got home. Unfortunately, we'll be meeting with the friends this evening for our monthly "film evening" and there is no doubt at all that he'll mention the flowers to make sure I am embarrassed and left with nothing but excuses as to why his wife got flowers and The Consort didn't get any from me.

So when The Consort left for work this morning and mentioned that maybe I could try some baking (Banana and Apricot Bread) for this evening, I feigned a lack of interest but here was my "get out of jail free" card. When my friend mentioned the flowers he'd bought for his wife, I could respond with a winning riposte of how I'd spent the day preparing the food for the evening. Gotcha !!

So I followed the recipe precisely, carefully measuring everything out, mixing it all up well and cooking for the prescribed 20 minutes at the exact temperature. I let it stand for 2 minutes as instructed and then started slicing it up. The end just collapsed and a load of gooey uncooked mixture oozed out so I put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes and tried again and it was still very runny. I turned the oven up by a further 10 degrees and gave it another 5 minutes and the result can be seen in the picture above. I've got a strong feeling that it will be inedible and The Consort will end up cooking another one when she gets home from work.

Got to go now, need to visit a florist !

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Its been a while since my last post because I've needed time to recover from the cooking trauma that I've been through recently. It had all started so well and I think a false sense of security kicked in about how easy this all was. The praise, the adulation from the mass of people around the world, the easy successes. Surrounded by people who don't want to speak the unpalatable truth about the disaster all around that has been created  - I think the term "giddy with perceived glory" is apt together with "believe your own publicity" and its no surprise that the effect of the so many failures are still being felt by so many.

Anyway, enough about the Thatcher years and back to the cooking trauma I've been through recently.

The Good

The Good was what I think is my best food so far - Sausages in a sticky sauce.

The Bad

"These look good - you could easily cook these for us" enthused The Consort one Sunday Morning as she browsed through the Sunday "Style" supplement. She enthusiastically tore the page out and I have to admit that it looked good - Sprats in a spicy batter. So a few days later when I was strolling through Tesco and saw Sprats for sale I immediately knew what to do for the evening meal.
This was definitely the hardest thing I've cooked so far as it was all so fiddly and I had to cook the Sprats in 3 batches and then try to keep it all hot.
The Consort and her son were both very kind and said that it tasted good but the truth is they were disgusting - I've decided that my cooking was absolutely not to blame and that this particular fish really are only good for catching Mackerel.

The Ugly

The kitchen was an absolute disaster area by the time it was all over and it took lots of Labour to sort it out afterwards - which takes us right back to the Thatcher years.