The Basics

I was recently reading the latest news and recipes from Hong Kong, courtesy of my good chum Lucy. She is in the process of preparing Number One Son for living out of Halls of Residence in September and, remembering my own days living with students, (I was working then, having failed to get the qualifications needed to go to uni and spend three years drinking!) thought I would give three basic recipes that should be easy enough to follow.

As a starter, have cheesy mushrooms. Buy a large box of value mushrooms, they may need the ends of the stalks trimming and a quick wipe to get rid of any earth. Cook in some butter with some garlic, salt and pepper. Once cooked, add a big spoonful of cream cheese. You could leave out the fresh garlic and get garlic and herb cheese. Stir it in until melted, serve in small bowls with hunks of crusty bread.

Everyone should know how to produce a pasta bake. They are so easy to make, can be done ahead of time, are filling and can be very cheap, depending on what you throw in. This recipe does not even have quantities, just rely on instinct young grasshopper!

This should produce enough for four very hungry rugger players lining their stomachs before a good night out or six people just wanting some supper.

Chop two onions, some garlic and a pack of bacon. Streaky works best. Put in a pan with a dollop of oil or butter, on a medium heat to stop it catching. If you have the budget pop in some diced chicken thigh, it is cheaper than breast and won't dry out in the same way. One thigh per person should be fine.

At this point you can also add peppers, frozen veg, courgettes etc to bulk it all up.

Add a splash of wine, don't tell me students don't have wine, and two tins of tomatoes. Check the seasoning and add any herbs and spices that take your fancy.

Cook until the veg is soft. Turn off the heat. Don't worry if there is a lot of liquid, the pasta will soak it up in the oven.

Add two to three double handfuls of what ever pasta you have to a pan of boiling, salted water. Once cooked, drain and throw into the pan with the sauce. Give it a really good stir and put the whole lot in an oven proof dish. Sprinkle with cheese and pop in the oven. If you are leaving it until later, leave off the cheese until you put it the oven. The bake will be ready when the cheese is golden and the sauce is bubbling.

Garlic bread will be great with this. Take a pack of butter out of the fridge in the morning. Finely chop 4 cloves of garlic and a handful of fresh parsley. Don't worry if you don't have the herbs, butter and garlic will be fine. Slice a baguette three quarters of the way through. Each slice should be about an inch and a half apart. Fill each cut with the butter, wrap in foil and pop in the oven for 20 minutes. A bowl full of salad would add some crispness and cut through the garlic and heavy pasta if needed.

An easy pud to follow is Eton Mess. Buy some ready made meringue shells and break into bitesize pieces. Stiffly whip half a pint of double cream and stir in the same amount of greek yoghurt. Chop loads of strawberries and add to the cream with the meringue pieces. Bung the whole lot in a bowl and serve. You could drizzle strawberry sauce over the whole thing for added colour! Tinned strawberries are not nearly as nice to look at as fresh, but as the are all mixed together and broken up, they will be fine in this.

There you go, a cheap, reasonably easy to produce, three course meal, suitable for people on a budget, those who are hesitant in the kitchen and those wishing to line their stomachs!!

Enjoy!

Choices

There was so much to watch and read about the Queen during the recent Jubilee celebrations that our DVD recorder was working overtime and I still have a pile of supplements to wade through. Last night we watched All the Queen's Horses, a fantastic show, combining music and dancing and horses and dancing horses from all over the world. Interspersed throughout each act was a huge amount of footage of the Queen in various countries throughout her reign. Seeing some of the footage of her in Australia and the subsequent display by the Queensland Mounted Police reminded me of my first ever career discussion. I was to be a mounted policeman when I grew up.

I was about six and living in Melbourne when this mammoth choice about my future was made. I would sit proudly atop my magnificent steed, meting out justice to the criminal types and protecting the honour of fair maidens, whether in distress or otherwise. The fact that asthma prevented me from going within half a mile of a horse conveniently did not feature in any conversations about my choice. Clearly I was being humoured, however I am thankful for that. I think that fantasies should be allowed and even indulged in the young. It encourages a certain imagination and freedom of spirit that can be so lacking nowadays. Both Freddie and Fenella have settled on being teachers. I think Freddie's sudden u-turn from piracy revolved around wanting to be like his older sister. Fortunately her days of being a ballerina were over long before this adoration started!*

I have told myself repeatedly that whatever they both end up doing will be fine with me, as long as they love what they do and it makes them happy. I only hope that I can keep my promise to myself when stuntman, shark wrestler or lap dancer appears on their business cards!

In the intervening years between law abiding superhero and puberty, I can only recall one other choice and that was being a duck billed platypus. The less said about that the better!! When the time came for serious career discussion, my school at the time had invested in rather a smart computer programme that, after inputting serious answers to serious questions, came out with very silly choices, well at least for me. My father was somewhat distressed that such an investment into my education could produce refuse collector as a career choice. I found it rather amusing at the time, however with the benefit of hindsight and the added responsibility of being a parent myself, I can now see the error of my way!

I had always been interested in cooking, did a bit at school and at home and enjoyed the appreciative murmurs from around the table when my food was had. I went to the local sixth form college to do cooking with the ambition of turning into the next Marco Pierre White. There was something about him in his youth, the wild hair, crazy hair and the cigarettes always on the go, that made him somehow god-like to a fresh faced wanna be chef. Two years later, I left college with a distinction (the only one of my career) and an unshakable desire to never set foot in an industrial kitchen again. I have the utmost respect for chefs, the hours, the heat, the pressure that they endure everyday can be hell. What I did leave college with was an understanding of ingredients and the work that goes in to turning them into a first class dish. I love working the front of house, I need the constantly changing faces and relish the challenges of finding solutions to the myriad of problems that can trip you up.

I have worked in a number of different places around the world and have loved pretty well all of them, my gap year did produce some shockers, and I continue to be amazed at what chefs can produce. It is a definite form of alchemy, a kind of wizardly ability to turn the mundane into the glorious. I recently went to Galvin at Windows on the 28th floor of the London Hilton to say good bye to a long term colleague and very close friend. The meal was out of this world and one of the highlights was a banana milkshake. I know, I know, it doesn't sound much, but the flavours and textures in one small glass were phenomenal. I don't know what, other than banana, had gone into it and I don't want to, as to analyse it too much would be to remove the shroud of mystery that surrounds this kind of thing. It needs to appreciated, not questioned.

I adore cooking and do as much as I can at home. I love just creating out of a cupboard and fridge full of bits. I tend to only use recipes for puddings, preferring to create from scratch suppers, lunches and snacks. Most of the time I am successful, however I have fallen down as well. Tors I don't think will ever forget my homemade pesto. I blended up pine nuts, basil, olive oil and garlic, added a load of grated Parmesan and mixed it into the cooked pasta. She was brilliant, pretended that it was wonderful and soldiered on through a couple of mouthfuls. I had never eaten pesto before and thought it was a might overpowering but stuck with it. After a couple of minutes Tors gave up. "Have you cooked this?" "No" "So, raw garlic." "Yes" "How much" "A whole head" "And how much of the pesto is left?" "None" I realised then that half a head of raw garlic on a handful of pasta might be overdoing it a tad! We still laugh about it, well I do, Tors usually just shudders! I now buy jars, it is safer that way. But making mistakes is what enables us to learn and grow. I am not saying that I encourage mistakes, more that they should not be punished, as long as they are learnt from and not repeated.

I shall leave recipes until my next blog, it has been one of those weeks and have lost the will to be creative, so I am sorry to say that it is just my musings this week. I hope they have not sent you all to sleep?

Have a great weekend.

*Freddie announced this morning that he now wants to be an ambulanceman, fireman and policeman all rolled into one. Teaching is apparently only for sisters. He has also told me that at weekends he will be a pirate called Blackbeard, but with a red beard! I am sure he will change his mind again before I actually press the submit button on this post! 

Ready, steady, rant!!!

I am not usually one to get wound up, however there are three things that are guaranteed to get me going. Just like a battery toy, push the button and let me go!! I shall take you through them one at a time and you can make your own mind up if I am being highly over dramatic or not.

I do get upset when basic manners go missing. I consider myself to be polite and even a little chivalrous. I will open doors for pretty much every one, stand aside for the elderly, pregnant ladies, prams and wheelchairs and even walk on the road side of the pavement in case a rogue car should jump the curb. For anyone taking notes, I should point out that in certain large cities you should actually walk on the inside of the pavement, it being thought more likely that you will be mugged from a doorway than run over by a car!

I am not perfect by any means and I certainly do not expect the rest of the country to open doors for each other (if they did, who would be left to actually walk through them?) but what I do expect is some common courtesy. If you walk through a door that I am holding open, say thank you. It is not my job, and even if it was, why should you not say thank you? Do we not say please and thank you when asking for something in a shop, when paying in or taking out money in the bank, when buying a ticket for the cinema, bus or train? I am encouraging my children to use the magic words at every opportunity and get cross when they don't. Tragically, I fear I may be in a minority.

The Jones's suddenly felt out of their depth in Oxford Street

I read a blog recently about most and least favourite words. It was a wonderful mixture of the weird and wonderful, offensive and cuddly, cringe making and soothing. I added my thoughts on the subject, was abused for my troubles, I mean honestly, what's wrong with rumpy-pumpy (sorry Amanda!) and I now find myself thinking that maybe I should have included please and thank you. Politeness and courtesy costs nothing, it is free so I implore all the Neanderthals out there, in this day and age of austerity and general gloom embrace that which costs nothing and be nice. You, after all, would be the first to plant a fist in my face if I let a door swing in to yours.

Fun, what do mean you're having fun!?

Another thing that does tend to get me going is other people's problems. I have a sympathetic ear and regularly have it open to listen to friends' woes and can often be found actually trying to offer help and support. However uninvited conversations are just wrong and often totally mis-judged by the narrator. We recently enjoyed a day out at Legoland. Being in the hospitality trade I can have the unfortunate habit of judging people and places with the same standards that I have used throughout my career, a tad unfair perhaps to judge Legoland by Michelin standards, however there are some basic rules that apply across the spectrum. Leave your troubles at home, don't bore the customers and most importantly, don't slag off your employer, however aggrieved or pissed off you may be! We were coming to the end of the day, waiting for one of the many attractions and happened to be at the front of the queue. The rather jolly girl asked if we had had a good day, a reasonable question to which the answer was most definitely yes. I then asked her if she too had had a good day. I was expecting a happy yes in reply. How abso-bloody-lutely stupid and naive of me! What followed was five minutes of her troubles, why Legoland wasn't all it was cracked up to be and, don't ask me how this one came in to the conversation, why she sometimes turned to her partner, whilst in bed, and told him to sit down and get in line!! Why, oh why, did I need to know that, more to the point, why did my children need to know that? Fortunately the children had switched off by this point. I have never wanted a ride to start so badly as I did then, however it wasn't going to because the man at the other end hadn't pushed the button and isn't it always the man's fault! If she hadn't told me she was leaving at the end of the season I might have seriously considered never returning to Legoland!



The last point I shall bang on about is a general state of happiness that seems to be devoid in a number of places. If you can't be arsed to smile at work, I can't be arsed to to be nice, polite, jolly or even, indeed, to return to your place of work and put more money in the tills, thus ensuring your continued employment. Smile or you could become redundant!! Now, there's a slogan for a tee-shirt if ever I saw one. I also get very wound up by cashiers who not only have been born without the happy gene, but the speech one seems to be absent as well. I tend to get very silly when a supermarket cashier expects me to hand over money without telling me how much I owe. I am expected to read the display, give my money and get change and a receipt all without a word passing between us. I will ask them how much I owe, some will tell me but some will either just point at the register display or, if I'm really lucky, grunt that the total is displayed for my viewing pleasure! When I ask what is meant by "every little helps" I only get a blank stare. Clearly sarcasm and irony is also missing from their lives!

All I ask is that people smile and remember (or maybe learn) to be polite. It's not rocket science!

Now that my rant is over, I shall concentrate on the true message of my blog. Food. In all the excitement of the Jubilee I failed to enjoy and appreciate our fleeting Summer properly. Now that Autumn has arrived I feel obliged to share one of my favourite sandwiches in the whole wide world. It warms and fills the tummy as well as being damn good comfort food.

Get the following ready.

Two slices of thick and crusty white bread.

Plenty of sliced cheddar. Don't use grated, it goes everywhere.

Sliced tomatoes.

Beaten eggs with a dash of water or milk, salt and pepper and finely chopped parsley. One egg per sandwich.

Butter and vegetable oil for frying.

Put the sandwich together, layered like this, bread, cheese, ham, tomato, cheese, bread. You don't need to butter the bread.

When the sandwich is assembled, pour the egg mixture into a flat dish or tray. Put the sandwich in and let the bottom slice of bread soak up a good amount. You can either flip the sandwich over or just spoon the rest of the egg mix on the top slice.

Whilst the bread is soaking up the egg, put a pan on a high heat, put some butter and a small amount of oil in to melt and heat up.

With a great deal of care, lift the sandwich from the tray and put in the pan. Let it get hot enough on each side to melt the cheese and go a nice golden brown. When cooked to your liking, pop on a plate, slice in two and serve with a salad for a great lunch or just have a bag of your favourite crisps instead!



I recently made rather a good smoothie which I think would make a healthy addition to the not so healthy (but very tasty) sandwich. The great thing about a smoothie is that there is not hard and fast recipe, just throw in what you have lying around. I used a banana, loads of strawberries and raspberries and a good glug of tropical juice, one with pineapple, mango, orange and passion fruit. The whole lot tasted wonderful and was not too thick, although with more or less banana, you can easily adjust the consistency to one the suits. My personal preference is to stay away from blueberries. I am not keen on them at the best of times, but when they are blended up they somehow manage to make the resulting drink look like one of those bug smoothies celebrities have to consume in the jungle! This also has no points value for Weight Watchers, but manages to fill you up, so the holy grail of diet foods!

I hope you all have a good week and manage to stay dry! 

Red, white and blue.

I am feeling very patriotic. I am sure I am not the only one. The mood across the country is encouraging 17th and 18th century feelings. If it wasn't already on Google Earth I would be sorely tempted to don a sola topee, pack a jar of Shipham's paste and a small, yet practical knife and go forth to claim vast swathes of undiscovered land in the name of Queen and country. Huzzah!

You could barely move in supermarkets without seeing a Union Jack. They were on everything from biscuits and bread to washing powder and a certain yeast product that shall remain nameless! I even saw Union Jack loo paper, although wiping ones backside on the national flag might not be quite the message that being conveyed last weekend!!

I went into the weekend feeling very prepared. Oodles of red, white and blue. Shoes are all three, I have shorts in each colour, shirts as well, a jolly three toned belt and a can of hairspray in each colour. I wore a different outfit every day of the long weekend and still stay true to Blighty's colours!

I love the fact that the country has reacted in this way. This sort of show of nationalism is usually reserved for large football tournaments and normally goes very quiet and disappears once we have been reminded (yet again) that we can't actually play the game very well on the world stage. Just wait until Euro 2012 and tell me that I am wrong! The Diamond Jubilee was a chance for all of us, not just the sporty ones, to get inflated with national pride and to get behind one person. One of the joys is that it is not a competition, at no stage was the Queen out done by anyone. It was her weekend, her year, her chance to get showered with adoration. God save The Queen! If I am doing anything other than sitting in a armchair, blanket over my knees and drooling at her age I shall declare the occurrence of a miracle!

On Saturday we did all the mis en place for the rest of the weekend.

Having spent the week looking at the weather forecast, I knew Sunday was not looking too promising, but we Brits are nothing if not resilient! The programme for the fun day advised that one could get wet on the obstacle course so my Union Jack shower hat will be very handy should the heavens open!! My heart went out to all the people taking part in the Thames pageant in open boats. The sheer scale, splendour and reason behind the weekend kept the spirits up even if the weather kept the brollies up!


This is soooo good and very easy to make!

We spent the day partaking of the local village fun day with my parents. I prepared a picnic, including a recipe from the wonderful ladies at Crumbs for a fantastic sounding picnic pie, slightly adapted to include quail's eggs. I also made a vat of Coronation chicken, I wonder how many tons of it were consumed over the weekend? There was also a very jolly cupcake competition that I, somewhat rashly, decided to enter. I was somewhat hesitant as I am no baker, however recently discovered a fantastic cake recipe that translates very well in to cupcakes and even I can manage. The cupcakes were to be judged on taste, texture and decoration. The first two were whatever they happened to be as my skills are no where near being able to alter those. The third, however is where I hoped to triumph. I produced Union Jack cases, silver balls to go on the top and crowns made from tuile paste in red, white and blue. Surely victory must be mine!! Oh, the enthusiasm of youth. I walked in the tent and before I had even set the plate down, I knew in my heart of pessimistic hearts that I was doomed! The results an hour later confirmed it. I shall not give up. I shall continue baking, continue to be laughed at and with luck, improve, well I cannot get any worse!

On Monday we went to Tors' parents and spent a most enjoyable day in the almost sun at a street party. I have never sat in the middle of a street eating and drinking, well maybe I have in my youth, but certainly not without car horns blaring. It was rather a nice change.

I hope that we will still see the odd Union Jack still flying now that the Jubilee celebrations are over. I fear that once the excitement of the weekend is over we will forget the National identity that we have become so proud of in recent weeks. I adore the Queen and the Royal Family, the monarchy in general, however I love England just as much and maybe we should celebrate our country as well as the Monarch.

Having eaten more than my fair share of not very diet friendly food, I have to get back on track. I recently discovered Philadelphia with Cadbury's Diary Milk. Lord have mercy, not since bread and butter have two things meant to be together more than these two. An inspired combination! And relatively low in naughtiness! So, being creative in the kitchen area I have thought up the following recipe.

Mix 150g Cadbury's Phily with 150g low fat fromage frais. This should do for four people.

Toast some nuts, any will do, in a dry frying pan and when browned add a couple of teaspoons of caster sugar, let it melt and pour out on to greaseproof paper and allow to cool. 

Pop a spoon of choc mix in the bottom of a glass, then a spoon of fromage frais and continue until you have a pretty layered pud.

Chuck some raspberries and toasted nuts on top and tuck in.

A nice glass of something sticky will match very splendidly indeed!

Have a great weekend!