Cook The Books

Men Love Pies, Girls Like Hummus by Simon Rimmer: The Review

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:26:03 +0100

Rimmer and his mates #ladsontour

I was at a working lunch recently with a woman from another company, and the conversation, as ever, turned to boys. Specifically our boyfriends.

“I like all his friends, except one,” she said, swigging her Viognier. “I just don’t like the way he talks about women. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a feminist or anything….”

At this point my eyes bled into my slow roast pork and my brain melted in a raging fury (not that I did anything but smile sweetly, obv). How can somebody, in 2013, who has had everyone from Caitlin Moran to Jameela Jamil waving the flag for feminism in their faces, not identify with the cause? “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in equal rights or anything.”

We’ve come a long way since feminism was thought of as a bad thing, surely? Back in 1996, when my first piece of published “journalism” appeared in The Times, my disparaging moue against the sisterhood was evident in my prissy last line.

But that was before feminism had been rebranded and, anyway, the Spice Girls weren’t to happen for another three months. We all know better now, surely, and don’t casually toss gender stereotypes and aspersions around?

Except here, in TV-chef-Simon-Rimmer’s new book, Men Love Pies, Girls Like Hummus.

Hashtag moronic book titles dot co dot uk

At first, I thought the title was a joke, an ironic aside in a post feminist world. But then I remembered that white middle class men don’t get to make ironic asides about traditionally oppressed groups and found that the book was peppered with such gems as:

“This chapter is full of recipes to cook for the ladies in your life, even if that’s your mum and your sister or if you’re a girl too.”

It’s presumably the same sort of tired male banter (“manter”?) that forms the backbone of Sunday Brunch where Rimmer has made his name, but I wouldn’t know as I’ve never watched the show – Sunday mornings are for hangovers and looking balefully at all the dirty wine glasses by the sink and repeats of Friends (I love it when Christina Applegate calls Monica “Crazy Plate Lady” in that Thanksgiving episode) (Of course, when you think about it, Friends is sexist too, as all the women just want clothes and a boyfriend and all the men are commitment phobes who only date hot women…oh God, sexism really is everywhere).

But it’s just so….aged. Since when has gender defined our tastes? Chefs such as Skye Gyngell, Anna Hansen, Angela Hartnett and more recently Florence Knight have all held their own in the kitchen for years, so how can some male cooks think casual sexism is even relevant?

Anyway, to see if there was any truth behind Rimmer’s claim in the book’s title, I invited two girls over, who would hopefully love hummus, as it was the first course.

His version of the fabled hummus, pleaser of women everywhere

Mint and Pine Nut Hummus was so easy to make – I’m sure even the tiny mind of a girl could manage it (joke! I was channelling Rimmer, yeah? Lads!) – just a bit of tahini and chickpea and mint blended up in a liquidiser. But oh God it was delicious. And oddly green.

My hummus. Green = healthy, right?

And Rimmer was right. The girls liked it. And so did the gays. If only we’d had real men there to find out if they liked it too.

Judging by the conversation during the starter, this is what else girls like:

Dating
Talking about dating
Showing pictures of boys they’re dating
Sheryl Sandberg (srsly. One of them had Lean In in her bag)
Wine

And this is what they don’t like:

Boys they meet on Guardian Soulmates who suggest going to secluded woods for first dates
Boys who don’t pay for any drinks when meeting their girlfriend’s family
When boys Facebook profiles have high security settings
Empty wine glasses.

Rimmer would have killed for this sort of study.

And onto the main course, a pie for the men. Shepherd’s Pie with Cauliflower Cheese Top to be precise.

Rimmer’s pie

Confusingly, the girls liked it too. I don’t know what to think about gender differences anymore. But then, how could they not? It was, as the name suggests, a shepherd’s pie on the bottom, all rich lamb stew and buttery mash, with rich, hearty cauliflower cheese on top. May my tastebuds ever encounter something this dreamy again.

And my version. It pains me how good it tasted

Judging by the conversation during the main course, men also love:

Asking girls incredulously about the useless men they’re dating
Talking about people they all know and slagging them off (I refuse to believe this is just a gay thing)
Wine

And this is what they don’t like:

Not being offered seconds of pie
Being asked when they’re going to marry each other
Empty wine glasses

Seeing as the book title didn’t specify what the different sexes like for dessert I had to guess. His Raspberry Brownie and Caramelized Banana Eton Mess was apparently created for his 14 year old daughter, for when he “needs to win her round” (women, eh?) and seeing as her and I probably have the same music tastes it felt like a good fit.

Rimmer’s Eton Mess

The brownie bit was divine. Chewy and gooey and full of chocolate. The caramel sauce was a slightly bitter foil and everything else was just dressing. But the quantities, oh the quantities. Rimmer had allocated two bananas per person, two meringue nests per person, a ton of brownie. Even tasting this good, there was so much leftover I could have fed a whole army of adolescent girls.

Yes, it looks gross, but that brownie was incredz

Which is more than can be said for the wine – every drop drained, bottles stacked up in the recycling. Perhaps that could be the name of my first cookery book: Girls and Gays Like Wine. As groundbreaking a title as Rimmer’s.

Cost of ingredients: £39.72 (not including items already in store cupboard)

First course * * * * *

Main course * * * * *

Dessert * * * *

Overall: 9/10 for recipes, 0/10 for concept, execution, and general cunt-facery.

Men Love Pies, Girls Like Hummus (Mitchell Beazley, £16.99) is out now. Original photography by Emma Lee

The Great Northern Cookbook by Sean Wilson: The Review

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 21:50:53 +0000

It’s only bloody Martin Platt off Corrie!

I thought I knew how this would go. I chose The Artist Formerly Known As Martin Platt’s cookbook because I expected it to be lolz. Known for having played a man who was married to Gail, Coronation Street’s Gerbil of Doom, he’s only gone and reinvented himself as a foodie.

And so I imagined that we’d open with this nice little anecdote about Rita:

Barbara Knox (Rita Fairclough) was seated next to me and I asked her what she was eating. She immediately said, “Oxtail soup and chips!” “Together?” I asked. “Oh yes,” she said demurely. “Have you never tried soup and chips?” Hmmm. I tried it, but I still prefer my Oxtail soup with a large chunk of brown bread. I do like a woman who knows her own mind though.

And then we’d be filled with wonderment about the story in the intro where Helen Worth, aka The Actual Gail Platt, apparently introduced Martin to Simon Hopkinson, (the foodie’s favourite chef, whose Baked Papardelle with Porcini and Pancetta is legit to die for), and gasp as we remember that Dame Gail is allegedly as posh as Pam St Clement in real life.

And then I’d make the food, and we’d all be like “well, that was actually quite good and weren’t we wrong to pre-judge him on his former soap status and didn’t we all learn something about popular culture and reinvention and, more importantly, ourselves?”

But no. I learnt nothing about myself, except that I still get embarrassed when serving up dreadful food to people who I’ve invited to dinner. Even after all the practice.

Will was away, and as he’s normally in charge of cocktails I let Martin Platt take control. His recipe for Newkie Brown Punch apparently always got the party started, and how could something which sounded this wrong not be right? Even though, as Joe pointed out, “a Brown Punch doesn’t really sound like something you’d ever want.” The book doesn’t have a picture, so you’ll have to make do with the ingredients list which, frankly, will create a hellish enough mental image anyway.

It was filling, didn’t taste of booze, and each mega-cal mouthful felt like a delivery of diabetes. Mine got compared, variously, to the following:

Bananas
Vanilla pudding
Starbucks eggnog latte
Banoffee pie
A bowl of congealed sick

But to give Martin his due, it kind of did get the party started. It was drinkable, a talking point, a mild diversion from the glasses of fizz and entry-level small talk. And, as Lizzy said: “I can’t believe you’re adding a whole can of condensed milk.”

Martin’s Spring Vegetable Soup With Lettuce

We sat down to the starter, Spring Vegetable Soup With Lettuce. “I think this is probably going to be the best course,” I trilled nervously. “You can’t really go wrong with a soup, can you,” said Peter, my friend Joe’s boyfriend, who I had never met before but who I had just forced to drink something that was the colour of Emily Bishop’s hair.

My version. Cute mini Le Creusets, right?

But whilst you can’t go wrong with soup, you can go awry. It was….ok, a fresh and slightly crunchy bowl of vegetables in a slightly creamy liquor. But the addition of the juice of one whole lemon sent it over the edge – what could have been a zingy twist overpowered the soup base with a breathtaking sharpness. Joe left most of his. “I’m always a bit funny with food,” he demurred politely, despite having told me before he had no special dietary requirements. He would be in for a rough ride.

Martin’s Lancastrian Hotpot. Looks delicious. If only.

For bubbling away in the oven was, of course, a Lancashire Hotpot. And, whilst trying to say encouraging things about the starter (“so much of your five a day”) I already knew it wasn’t going to be a rich, thick jus just like Betty RIP used to make. Half an hour earlier Martin’s recipe had made me add yet another 650ml of vegetable stock to an already pale and watery pan, diluting it to be thinner than the current plot about Nigel Havers and Gail Platt. (As if that silver fox would ever go near the copper hamster.) (We love you Audrey! xoxo)

My version. At least it was steaming hot

“I think hotpots are a Lancastrian myth – I’ve never seen one,” Peter said, his family from the North. “Not like this, anyway,” I thought, staring at the limp bowl of soggy potatoes. “Still, at least the meat is quite tender,” I practically sobbed.

We drank more wine. “I’m so sorry about this, I am actually a really good cook,” I found myself bragging sadly, dreading the monstrosity that was coming for dessert.

Martin’s Jam Roly-Poly

It was meant to be the pinnacle of all puddings, a custard-covered comfort to soak up the champagne. Instead it looked like this:

Oh FFS

“It’ll probably taste nice,” said Joe, hopefully. The poor boy had barely eaten all night.

“At least your custard looks good,” added Peter, stirring my thick jug of Birds as I almost wiped away a tear.

And it actually wasn’t too bad. There was simply no way the quantities of liquid Martin suggested could have made a pastry that would roly into a poly. So, if you pretended it was just a big rock cake, it almost wasn’t a disappointment, the prestige raspberry jam from Melrose and Morgan almost saving the day.

We drank more, moving onto spirits, filling our empty stomachs with an entire Rovers worth of booze. “Can I get a bit more of that bread?” Peter asked. We all hacked off a chunk.

Then we remembered the leftover Newkie Brown Punch. And this happened:

Cue Coronation St credits. The end.

Cost of ingredients: £42.78 not including items already in storecupboard

Starter **

Main *

Pudding ** (the custard and jam were nice)

Overall 2/10 (for lol factor about the cocktail)

Published by Hodder and Stoughton. Original photography by Amanda Haywood

Cooking For Real Life by Joanna Weinberg: The Review

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:01:07 +0000

Joanna Weinberg. The woman whose recipes work.

“He’s going to come a bit later, he didn’t want to be the first one to get there,” my friend explained of her husband on a recent night out. “I suppose I can understand, he doesn’t want to hang out with my friends all night. If it was with his friends, I’d probably show up at last orders.”

“And I’d probably have a massive strop and not show up at all,” I replied.

“They’re so lucky to have us, aren’t they?”

Much as I genuinely love my boyfriend’s friends, many of whom have become friends of my own (hi guyzzzzzz!), it’s always a little bit more effort to drag myself off the sofa, away from Take Me Out, to see his chums rather than my own. (It’s an effort to see my friends, too. I really do love Take Me Out.)

I’ll try everything. “Do you reeeeeeally want to go?” I’ll ask, stretching languidly. “Yes,” he’ll reply. I won’t say anything for a bit.

“I’m not sure that I reeeeeeeally want to,” I’ll eventually say, as if he hasn’t guessed. He’ll look at me sternly. “Philip! We’re going.” I’ll pout. Maybe harrumph a couple of times. But it never works.

And so I go and stand in the corner and feel miserable and drink slowly and check my watch not very surreptitiously and eventually Will will let me go home and he’ll stay out and go to Heaven and roll home at 6 in the morning and I’ll feel smug that I had a good night’s sleep and bang around the kitchen really loudly with no sympathy for his hangover. Again, he really is lucky to have me.

But to try and trick him into thinking that I’m not actually all bad, sometimes I’ll do something so selfless, with so little griping, that it hopefully tips the scales back into my favour. Like cooking a three course meal for six on the Friday night of the first full week back at work after Christmas.

“You really fucking owe me for this,” I hissed, hunched over Tesco Online, nursing the last of the festive port, and none of the leftover Christmas spirit. “All I want to do is crawl into a ball and die and you’re making me cook a whole dinner?”

“Pip, I’m not making you do anything. We can go to the pub if you like.”

“Humph,” I harrumphed. There was no chance of that. One of the guests was Will’s ex girlfriend and her husband (so modern) and the last time we’d been to their house they’d done something amazing with steak and scallops, so I had our honour to protect. Plus I literally love playing the martyr.

But seeing as it was the first week back and I was battling with a crushing depression bigger than the hole left behind by the Christmas tree, I went for a book I kind of knew would work. “Where’s the fun in that?” I hear you cry. “We love it most when you serve up raw potato!” But January is not a time for uncooked tubers, and boyfriend’s ex-girlfriends are not the sort to whom you should be serving them.

And so I chose Cooking For Real Life by Joanna Weinberg. Disclaimer – I know Joanna. She is lovely, and has written recipes for me at both Sunday Times Style and Red, and they have always been easy, delicious and included unexpected twists of flavour. And she’s polite, oh how polite! One August I descended on her home and dressed it for Christmas and made her light a Christmas pudding constantly for two days and she never complained once. I kind of love her a bit. (That was for a shoot, by the way. Not some weird hostage situation.)

The only problem with her recipes? So simple were they that I barely got a chance to have a stress at Will whilst cooking them.

Joanna’s Parma ham with elderflower poached rhubarb and burrata

Take the starter – Parma ham with elderflower poached rhubarb and burrata. I poached the rhubarb the night before with some elderflower cordial, and as the guests were arriving I simply drizzled it over the ham and cheese. If it hadn’t been so delicious I’d have almost felt cheated.

And mine. Weird yellowy-ness not present at time of photo. I blame January light

The Spiced butterflied leg of lamb with cucumber raita nearly denied me the chance to hiss too, but luckily I found the opportunity. “Do you want to check the meat?” Will asked as I was clearing the plates. “Sure,” I smiled sweetly, keen to make it clear to Will’s ex girlfriend that we had the perfect relationship.

Top: Joanna’s lamb, followed by her salad

(At this point, it might be wise to point out that they dated for about two months nearly a decade ago, and she’s been married for five or six years, and neither of them have ever given me any cause to think there is anything other then friendship between them. BUT STILL.)

My version. The pitta bits were Joanna’s idea. Guess what? They totally worked.

“I don’t know if it’s done, you check if it’s done, meat is your job,” I snarled into his ear by the oven. “Well, has it been in as long as the recipe said?” he asked “Isn’t that the rule?” It had been, and it was, to perfection; Joanna’s Courgette, fresh pea and ricotta salad making a light, zingy, welcomingly Spring-like accompaniment to the spices of the meat.

J-Wein’s trifle

Then finally came the Eastern Trifle, which again I’d made quietly and unfussily the day before. “You seem very calm, and everything tastes wonderful,” Will’s ex girlfriend said as I spooned dessert out unceremoniously into the bowls. “Oh, well, the recipes were really good, which helps,” I smiled. She’s so sweet. – he really does have good taste in partners.

And mine

And the trifle didn’t disappoint. It was like a regular one, only with the base soaked in Earl Grey and some orange blossom water adding a touch of exoticism. Everyone liked it, even if it did look like a grey mess by the time it made it to table.

The guests left early – it is January, after all, and whilst no one was on a detox, people still had vague resolutions to somehow be better about their drinking. “Thanks so much for cooking for my friends,” Will said, loading the dishwasher.

“They’re my friends too,” I replied, full of goodwill to all men. “And it totally wasn’t a bother.” See? He really is lucky to have me.

Cost of ingredients: £42.68 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter * * * * *

Main course * * * * *

Dessert * * * *

Overall 10/10 and not just because I know the author. It is sublime.

Cooking for Real Life by Joanna Weinberg (Bloomsbury, £25) Original photography by Jill Mead.

Leon Cookbook Book 4 – Family and Friends – The Review

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 08:01:00 +0000

They make their own wacky fun over at Leon

The restaurant chain Leon has a very idealised view of what friends and family are like. According to their latest cookbook – which is called Friends and Family, and is all about friends and family, and what you might cook for your friends and family if your life was a bit more curated and your family didn’t only eat things that have been boiled or baked until very soggy and/or grey all the way through because that’s what they’ve always done and that’s how your Dad likes his veg and aren’t steamers just a bit too modern? – friends and family are a rag tag bunch who, as photo-documented here, take long walks together and go rock pooling and sometimes ride donkeys on beaches in assorted vintage swimwear. The last time my friends went to Brighton one of them threw up after too many cans of Red Stripe, but it’s nice to believe that we could have gone shrimp catching. Next time, must remember the nets.

Generally, my friends are a collection of people who are very nice but mainly just meet up because it’s more fun than drinking alone, so it’s very hard not to buy into Leon’s seductive and alternative world view.

But then everything about Leon is designed to reel you in. Hey, their special brand of almost non-branded branding says, we’re young and cool and hip and healthy and if you eat our always slightly unsatisfying wraps and salads then you, too, can be young and cool and hip and healthy, and hey, there’s definitely room for you in the Leon Family, because we’re all really just friends and family aren’t we, so come in and relax and take one of the comfy chairs and let us nourish you and make you feel better about the world and maybe you won’t notice as you hand over at least a fiver for a few lentils that you definitely could have made yourself but don’t worry about that because look, isn’t this all lovely? It may have all been dreamt up in a marketing room filled with whiteboards, but it was probably a really lovely marketing room, with those nice Balhsen biscuits and sparkling Hildon water, and everyone would have loosened their Gieves and Hawkes tie at least half an inch.

And who am I not to wish my life was a bit more like Leon’s? I was having a group of friends over who are notorious for their heavy drinking and coarse language. I wrote about the last time I cooked for them, and the conversation was mega-NSFW. So perhaps bit of Leon’s magic might rub off on us and we might instead don vague approximations of some sort of theme costume and all stand around looking awkward, like the Leon lot do here:

Oh, Leon.

But what to cook? The book isn’t conveniently split into categories such as Starters, Mains and Desserts because that wouldn’t be kooky enough. Instead they’re broken down to fit how Leon live their lives, in chapters such as “Weekend Blow-Outs” and “After Lights Out” and “A Walk in the Park”, which includes Chicken and Tarragon Casserole and Joyce-Ann’s Jamaican Curried Lamb Shanks. Neither of which I’ve ever eaten before, on, or after a walk in the park, but that’s because my life doesn’t live up to the Leon dream.

Their Mackerel Skies Salad

After flicking back and forth about million times through every page, and cursing whoever edited the book for this infernal ordering of recipes, I settled on a Mackerel Skies Salad from the Speedy Lunches chapter as my starter. “We’ve included it as a lunch, but Kay often serves it as starter,” the book chirrups. I don’t know who Kay is. Prolly one of my would-be friends and family were I in the fictional world of Leon.

And mine. A lot less red. I don’t why.

It was essentially a coleslaw with no mayo, and a dash of dressing and mackerel flaked over the top. It was easy, tasty, and with a bit of a tang from the orange juice in the sauce.

“You’d pay about £4.50 for this in Leon,” I said happily, as if that was a benchmark of quality.

“I wouldn’t,” replied one of my guests.

Their Storecupboard Daube

For the main course, I’d found a recipe called Storecupboard Daube hidden away in the famed “A Walk in the Park” section. By this point, we’d drunk more than three bottles of fizz between the five of us, talked about special mouth guard masks you can get to make giving head more hygienic, and bitched sourly about a mackerel salad which was actually fairly good - about as close to a walk in the park as we were ever going to get.

The book claims that the recipe was “born from Kay’s storecupboard, the fridge and the little patch of herbs on the roof.” I wish Kay really was my friend, maybe I, too, would have herbs on my roof. And no cock talk at the table.

I’d prepared the meat and vegetables calmly two nights earlier, so all I had to do was bring everything to the boil and pop it into the oven. But reader, here I struggled. The rules of this blog state I have to follow everything exactly, to not deviate from any ingredient or instruction. The book told me to pop the daube in the oven for about two hours, but at no point had it told me to heat the oven to a given temperature. Yes, the Leon book was telling me to put it in a cold oven for two hours and then serve it up. And ps what the eff is a daube?

And mine. Heated. Against the rules. But delicious.

I just couldn’t do it. Kay wouldn’t have done it, I reasoned. And I wanted to be more like Kay, whoever she may have been. I set the oven to 180 and was able to serve the most wonderful, thick, glorious stew I’ve ever made, the brandy and anchovies in the sauce adding a hearty richness to the final taste. All five of us had seconds. Thanks, Kay.

Their Spiced Cranberry and Apple Crumble

Finally, nestling in the chapter called Christmas and Boxing Day, I found a Spiced Cranberry and Apple Crumble, one of the very few sweets in the book that wasn’t a cake. Again, I made the crumble in advance, adding all the zest and spices, and then only had to layer the apples and cranberries on the night. It was easy, tasty, unremarkable.

And mine.

“Considering I don’t like cooked apple, it’s actually not too bad,” said one of the guests, picking around all the apple-y bits, before getting stuck back into the Prosecco, putting another empty into recycling. Ah, my friends. They may not be as wholesome as Leon claims their’s are, but they’re a whole lot more fun.

Cost of ingredients: £28.62 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter * * *

Main * * * * * so, so good

Pudding * * fine, but not wonderful. A bit like a high street chain of healthy fast food restaurants.

Overall 5/10

Leon Family and Friends (Conran Octopus) is out now. All original photography by Georgia Glynn Smith.

Kitchen and Co by French and Grace: The Review

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 18:49:00 +0100

The eponymous French and Grace, just casually mixing up some flavours in some cute garden somewhere.You literally couldn’t get more current.

There has never been a better time to be a binge eater in Britain. On practically every street corner is a boutique baker selling designer doughnuts, or organic artisan hawking their high class hamburgers. “I’m just queuing for the latest must-have marshmallow,” people merrily tweet, congratulating themselves on snaffling out the latest fashionable foodie secret, the post-recessionary equivalent of a Mulberry bag.

As a result of our newfound culinary obsession, overeating has become a national sport. It’s ok to indulge in 133% of your recommended daily allowance of calories if it comes in the form of the Mac and Cheese from Spuntino (yes, it really is that bad for you). It’s fine to eat an entire loaf in one sitting if you bought it from St John and Instagrammed the process at least seven times, including a graphic aerial shot of the butter and jam you got to go with it from Melrose and Morgan.

There’s definitely a new air of snobbery and one-upmanship. “Oh, you mean you’ve not tried Heston’s meat fruit/Bea of Bloomsbury’s Eggs Benedict/that random thing I saw in ES magazine and haven’t tried myself but read enough about to try and blag my way through?” is usually accompanied with a stare as withering as a week old vine tomato from Whole Foods. Extra points are awarded for the effort it takes to track something down - tiny companies selling small amounts of produce in undesirable parts of the country are particularly well-respected.

French and Grace are profiteers of this new dawn of discovery, when foraging means a trek to Brixton Village to feast on their wares. The pair are getting write ups everywhere from ES (of course) to Saturday Times Mag, who are all lauding them for their skills at combining flavours to create something truly amazing, and for turning their tiny supper club (so now!) into a tiny cafe in South London (even more now!). I’m trying to get them do an exclusive feature for a publication I work for, but they’re loathe to tie themselves down for, as they told me when I popped into their gaff for dinner and the chance to try and persuade them into it, “there’s a lot of buzz about us at the moment.” It’s true, there is.

And quite simply it’s because their recipes work. “You don’t look very stressed,” my friend Rachel said when she arrived, clutching an aging sausage dog called Nellie who looked at me with disdain. And unusually for me, I wasn’t – the dessert had taken seconds to make that afternoon, the main not much longer, and the starter could be whipped up in moments once everyone had turned up and been given some booze.

Their version of Cucumber and Carrot Salad with Sesame and Chilli

Of course, that doesn’t mean my boyfriend got off totally without being hissed at. “Peeling these carrots is making me want to die,” I whispered violently at him whilst making the starter. The guests were drinking Sipsmith’s Summer Cups (ten foodie points to me for that one) and talking about how strangers in the street will try and pet the sausage dog but Nellie will just bite their hands, and I had just peeled four carrots to ribbons, with two more to go, as well as two cucumbers. “What are we having?” asked Kat, another guest, stepping into the kitchen. I just about managed to stop myself from replying: “A meltdown.”

And mine. If I had a Magimix peeler I would deffo make it again

But it tasted incredible. “Delicately balanced,” said Rachel’s boyfriend Jim thoughtfully, helping himself to a bit more of the dressing. The mint and coriander, mixed with the sesame oil and soy sauce, gave the vegetables a bit of bite, a slightly acidic edge. It was divine.

Their Creamy Chicken, Leeks and Tarragon with Crunchy New Potatoes

The Creamy Chicken, Leeks and Tarragon with Crunchy New Potatoes was less successful – but only structurally. “The potatoes are nice, but not very crunchy,” commented Kat’s boyfriend James. “And the casserole’s liquid is very thin,” said Rachel.

And mine. Halve the liquid amounts, or serve with a straw

“You should have just fricasseed that shit right up,” added Jim as we licked our plates clean – depressingly literally in the case of my boyfriend. With a litre of chicken stock, large glass of wine and 150ml of double cream there was enough left in the pot to make a pleasingly hearty soup the next day – but not the thick bubbly gloop depicted in the book.

Their Mascarpone Cheesecake with Nutmeg and Maple Syrup Caramel. Doesn’t the thought of those flavours make your mouth water?

Dessert was equally structurally unsound – there was no way the specified 75g of butter could have held that much biscuit base together – but again the flavours were bang on. Maple syrup sauce over a vaguely tangy filling? The precursor to double strength vodka lemonades (made with Truffle Vodka, obvy) doesn’t get much better than this.

Yeah, well, it all goes down the same way

As the conversation turned to skullfucking (don’t ask) and the nude pics of Lorraine Kelly that litter the internet (don’t Google them, I beg you) the sheen of rustic sophistication lent by the recipes crumbled faster than the cheesecake’s base, but we finished the evening feeling smug that we’d eaten the creations of two of the new stars of the foodie world. And let’s face it, other than the enchanting sensation of devouring delicious dinners, that smugness is what the new foodie obsession is really all about.

Cost of ingredients: £27.63 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter * * * * *

Main * * * * A bit of flour would have thickened it up a treat

Dessert * * * * Just a touch more butter and the base would have been perfect

Overall 9/10

Kitchen and Co by French and Grace (£16.99, Kyle Books). Original photography by Laura Edwards

Mr Wilkinson's Favourite Vegetables by Matt Wilkinson: The Review (Kinda)

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 22:28:32 +0100

Actual Awwwwww

“I’m never fucking doing Cook the Books again,” I shouted at my boyfriend, before storming into the bedroom. “I’ve had e-fucking-nough,” I added, yanking off my tie and throwing it on the floor for effect. It was the night before I was due to be cooking from Mr Wilkinson’s Favourite Vegetables, a paean to plants and produce from asparagus to zucchini. I’d chosen the book because it seemed gentle, calming, easy, and began with the following inscription:

Thank you so much for picking up this book and reading it. I have many cookbooks and not one person has thanked me for buying, reading or using them – so thank you. I hope that as you read it, you will be inspired by the same love of good food that inspires my every day.

As sweet as puppies, lambs, and that moment in Top Model when Tyra tells the contestant she’s just booted off that they just have to believe in themselves and they’ll be able to smize their way to the top or whatever, how could anyone’s heart not be melted by that? It’s printed on gorgeous paper stock, full of sun-drenched photographs, and has a dedication which includes the author’s dog. This was meant to be a sure fire success.

It had started easily enough. I’d ordered the ingredients off Tesco.com and was at my Book Group the night before delivery and eventual cooking. We had all been tasked with reading Fifty Shades of Grey, so obviously had to get wasted to get past the horror of 500 pages of Anastasia Steele and her incapacity to do anything without biting her lip. “Can I borrow your computer to change something on my Tesco order? I’ve just remembered I need to add washing powder and it’ll be too close to the delivery time to add it when I get home,” I asked the host, flipping between the sordidness of Christian’s Red Room of Pain and the banality of domestic life as casually and unskillfully as EL James does all the way through the novel. “No,” everyone cried, as dominating as our fictional hero. “You can’t do something so dull in the middle of Book Group – Book Group is for talking about boys and booze and, in this case, sado masochism.”

By the time I got home, it was too late to amend the order, but I logged on blearily, just in case. “Fucking hell,” I hissed at my poor boyfriend, who was quietly watching television. “I’ve only gone and set it to the wrong address, to be delivered to that place I organised the hen party at two years ago. Fuck! And now I’m going to have to actually go to the shops myself tomorrow, and traipse all the way up the aisles, and carry all these shitty vegetables home, and then cook them, and fucking entertain people, whilst you do nothing to help.” And then for emphasis, the line so angstily dramatic, so over the top, so pointless, that it had Fifty Shades written all over it: “I’m never fucking doing Cook the Books again.”

I’d calmed down once my hangover had cleared and the guests arrived the next night. I’d forgone trekking to the big supermarket and bought everything from the Tesco Metro on the corner. I’d had to compromise a couple of times, which was technically against the rules, but it’s not like I’d signed a contract with Christian Grey and anyone was going to insert beads in me for going against my own dogma.

Our guests seemed disappointed. “Have you had your drunken meltdown yet?” Camilla asked, almost the second she was through the door. “I’ve read the blog, I know there’s always at least one.” “Well, Will’s still at work, and I’ve been by myself all afternoon, so there’s been no one to shout at,” I admitted. “Strops are no fun if there’s no one there to indulge them.”

Mr Wilkinson’s Salad of Cauliflower, Smoked Salmon and Strawberry

Three drinks down and the Salad of Cauliflower, Smoked Salmon and Strawberry was a hit. It had literally involved nothing more than chopping a couple of vegetables, sticking them in a big bowl, and letting a slosh of lemon juice do the talking.

My version. Tesco Metro didn’t have pea shoots either

“The only thing I would say,” said Andy thoughtfully, “is that perhaps the recipe should have included shallots instead of onions. It would have been sweeter, less overpowering.” Seeing as each dish is technically an experiment for a blog I’ve got used to swallowing as much carefully judged criticism as I do Riesling, but this one particularly stung. I didn’t have the guts to admit that the recipe had actually called for shallots, and my local Tesco had been out of them. “Yeah, I’ll bear that in mind,” I mumbled, topping up my glass.

Mr Wilkinson’s Smoked Baked Garlic With A Simple Good Old Roast Chook

The local shop had let me down on the main course, too. Smoked Baked Garlic With A Simple Good Old Roast Chook had seemed easy enough, and when I couldn’t find Smoking Chips in my “convenience” outlet I thought I could fudge it somehow and that you, the reader, would never find out. (Soz and all, but I tried two places and could still taste last night’s Prosecco on the back of my furry tongue, there was no way I was hiking into town.) Back at home I realised the smoking chips were the main ingredient – used to give the garlic a delicious, well, smokiness, and make it the star turn of the dish. Unsurprisingly, in a book about veg, the chicken was just dressing, cooked as simply as banging it in the oven with a little oil. “Fuck,” I didn’t bother screaming allowed, as there was no one around to hear it, and just reached for Maria Elia’s Full of Flavour off the shelf. Her Slow Roast Paprika chicken, which had been so ace in my first ever Cook the Books, would come to the rescue once again.

My bastardised version of Maria Elia’s Slow Roast Paprika Chicken. Bloody hell, it’s a good recipe

Much as Mr Wilkinson’s book is a lovely feast for the eyes and soul, the very essence of its being means that it doesn’t do desserts. I still had some rhubarb in the freezer so I made that into a fool, thinking that at least I’d have reviewed two of Wilkinson’s recipes and been able to pass judgement.

My made-up rhubarb fool - the weird brown bits on the top are crystallised ginger. They were good.

We drank through the disappointment of not having done a proper three course Cook the Books. At one point the Port came out, and I declared the book a success anyway. “We’ve had a lovely evening, and it contains lots of lovely pictures – what more does any book need?” I cried. Had Anastacia Steele been at the table, she’d have definitely rolled her eyes.

Cost of ingredients: £28.76 (not including items already in store cupboard, or not bought because Tesco Metro didn’t stock them)

First course: * * * * * I have to give it the benefit of the doubt, seeing as I didn’t use shallots and it still tasted all fresh and summery

Main course: * * * * * Maria’s chicken came through for me once again. I’m sure Matt Wilkinson’s would have done the same. He thanks the reader for buying the book. Who cares if the recipes actually work?

Pudding: * * * * * My own-recipe rhubarb fool was a triumph, thanks for asking. I can just about remember it through the Port…

Overall: 8/10 The paper feels divine Mr Wilkinson’s Favourite Vegetables by Matt Wilkinson (£20, Murdoch). Original photography by Jacqui Melville

Gok Cooks Chinese: The Review

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:53:53 +0100

That’s a whole lotta Gok

Gok Wan is somewhat of an easy target. With all his hair flicking and shrieking of “you can do it, babes,” and grabbing of middle aged women’s breasts and forcing of housewives to get their thread veins lasered off, throwing casual insults his way is easier than taking your bra off and walking down a makeshift runway in a shopping centre outside Hull. For starters, he calls his fans Gokettes, and pictures of them in his glasses on his website form part of a Gokette’s Gallery. You’d think this blog post would write itself.

But I take people on face value, and having never seen more than ten minutes of How To Look Good Naked - and his new cookery show having not aired at time of writing - I have to judge ol’Gockles on the three times I’ve met him. I use the word “met” as casually as you might idly pick up a pair of his Specsavers specs, glance at their lilac frames in your hand and cast them aside, for on none of these three occasions would I have even registered on his consciousness.

The first was in Bristol, in 2006. I was on the cider boat with some friends, and after three pints of 7% Festival Proof Scrumpy the subject turned to one Mr Wan, who had recently become a TV phenomenon. “I can’t stand him,” I sneered, despite having never seen the show, though to be fair after that much Scrumpy I’d have held the same opinion of my own grandmother. Moments later, walking out into the sunshine, we were confronted with Gok standing on a street corner, looking long and lean and louche. “Hi,” I simpered, hoping he’d not been on the boat and heard my drunken diatribe. He beamed beatifically back. And that was the first time we “met”.

Then a few months ago at the Soho Hotel he held the door open for me with the sort of passive aggressiveness I thought only I was capable of. “Come on then,” he said meanly, tutting and sneering as I sheepishly held him up by walking through the doorway, past his angrily tapping foot, delaying him by a whole second and a half.

But only a couple of weeks later he flirted with me in the queue at Sainsbury’s. I got ID’d for wine (Best. Day. Ever) and he jokingly suggested he hoped he’d get the same treatment, and I made some remark about how hey, if they were asking me my age they clearly needed to visit his line of glasses in Specsavers, and he said that not at all, I looked very young, and we both laughed and smiled, and was that a frisson that passed between us? and all the time I was thinking about how he had been so rude when he’d held the door for me that other time and that all this charm was too little too late, but ooh, perhaps he was actually quite nice, and that well, I just didn’t know where I stood on whether I liked Gok or not.

But fortunately he has conclusively provided me with a concrete way to judge him – yes he’s got his own cookbook, entirely based on the Chinese food his dad, Poppa Wan, served in the family restaurant Gok worked in throughout his teenage years. “At last,” I cried, as it landed on my desk. “I’ll finally know whether I should flirt back next time I bump into him at the supermarket.” But just like my previous ”meetings” with the man, the results don’t determine a thing.

Gok’s Sesame Prawn Balls with Stir-Fried Cucumbers

Sesame prawn toasts are one of my favourite things in the world. They’re greasy and toasty and salty and surely make up at least half the wine glass full of fat that I once read in Metro is in every Chinese takeaway, but Gok’s version does away with the bread base and adds some stir fried cucumbers. It is also totally impossible.

Not pictured: the stir fried cucumbers, which by this stage I couldn’t be bothered with, or indeed any actual prawn balls

I followed the recipe to the letter. I chopped the prawns and water chestnuts finely, stuck them in a bowl with the sesame oil and mixed it all together. On Gok’s command I went to take an eighth of the mixture to form into a ball to roll in the sesame seeds…and it fell apart in my hands. “For Gok’s Sake!” I screamed. “This is the worst moment of my life!” My guests, over from Canada and expecting some top quality cuisine, rushed to help. “But there’s no binding agent,” they agreed. “There is no way this recipe could ever work.” I forwent the cucumber, cursing the name of Gok, and fried the prawn mixture as one. We ate it with a spoon, off one plate. Worst appetiser since the raw potato.

Gok’s Hot and Sour Soup

However, his Hot and Sour Soup was incredible. “Opposites attract!” begins his intro about why the two flavours work together, also neatly explaining why we would never get beyond the flirting-in-Sainsbury’s stage. With our glasses, love of scarves, and self esteem issues, The Gokster and I are as one. I might marry him for this soup, however.

My version. Tasted as proportionately unlike vomit as it looked similar

Rich and dark, full of mushroomy goodness and tangier than Haribo, we all four licked our bowls clean. “And he doesn’t really even like mushrooms,” said my female guest about her boyfriend, staring at his empty bowl.

His Braised Aubergine with Pork

And then his Braised Aubergine with Pork fell somewhere in the middle. Served with his aromatic Wok Fried Beans it had an earthy flavour that came from the soy sauce and anchovies, but there wasn’t enough sauce – it lacked the oomph you’d expect from a man who talks to women about their breasts all day. “Yeah, this is fine,” everyone agreed, damning with faint praise.

And mine. Roughly as appetising as it looked

Of course, Gok being a former fatty there were no desserts in this book. We served ice cream and more booze instead, just like we were in a real Chinese restaurant. And that’s the problem with Gok’s endeavours. Flicking through it now, staring at recipes for Crispy Duck Plum pancakes and egg fried rice, I just want to order straight in from Deliverance, rather than make any of these things myself. It’s better than your average celeb-turned-cook cookbook, but he should have had the foresight to see that in an era where everyone’s a foodie, we really do need more than that. Perhaps he should have gone to Specsavers.

Cost of ingredients £27.35 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Appetiser * Shanghai Surprise, and not in a good way

Starter * * * * *

Main * *

Overall 5/10 It looks nice, and most of the recipes pretty much work…

Gok Cooks Chinese (Penguin, £20) Original Photography by Jemma Watts

Martha Stewart's Pies and Tarts: The Review

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:26:18 +0100

I spent longer making the bloody pudding than either of these two spent in jail

I know a lot about life in prison. Not only have I had a cocktail in the Courthouse Kempinski Hotel – which used to actually be a jail, folks, so how’s that for journalistic research? – but I also watched all eight series of the surely-almost-wholly-factual prison-set drama Bad Girls. I know that prison guards are called screws and – according to Bad Girls lore – will fake their own pregnancies and miscarriages if it means keeping their job as chief of staff. From the same source I know that murderous bisexual prostitutes are just misunderstood sweethearts who had a tough childhood, and that you can have a same-sex affair with the Wing Governor in the library if you take an adult literacy course as a façade.

I also know that, apart from anything you’ve managed to smuggle in via your lady parts, all you really have in prison is time. Buckets of it. Gallons. Entire oceans stretching forward for as long as your character keeps getting re-commissioned by the series editors. Which can be the only excuse Martha Stewart has for coming up with the excruciatingly time-consuming recipes in her latest opus Martha Stewart’s Pies and Tarts.

Her time in the slammer is well documented – in fact it’s all she’s really known for in the UK; famous for being the Queen of Daytime TV who painted herself as the original Bree Van Der Kamp and then got put away for fraud. Presumably anyone who can outdo Ricki Lake in the ratings can also rise up the ranks to being Top Dog of their wing pretty quickly, so once she’d done that she must have used her endless days to devise these endless recipes.

I started out cheerily enough. “It’ll all be nice and carby,” I thought, flicking through the entirely pastry-based book. I’d invited two colleagues over – both beauty editors, both of whom seem to be able to deal with the mountain of cupcakes they get sent daily by PRs without gaining an ounce. If anyone could cope with Stewart’s stodge it would be them. Starting at 2pm I thought I’d be finished by 4 and have enough time to use some of the products my guests had given me over the years to make myself look fresh for their arrival.

Dead on the dot of 7pm, my first guest showed up, whilst I was still in a pastry-based panic, a flurry of flour, a full on Martha Meltdown. I’d stopped at 6pm for two minutes to pour myself a large glass of white port, desperately needing a break from all the kneading, but other than that I’d been working solidly for five long, painful hours.

The other guests arrived, and I got my boyfriend to make us all cocktails whilst I carried on with the starter. I necked my Cosmompolitans gratefully and with speed – I could see why housewives turned to the bottle as my day had been harder than any I’ve ever spent in the office.

It wasn’t that the recipes were difficult, exactly – nothing I had to do was out of the realms of possibility. It’s just that every stage had a gazillion steps, and every step involved some kind of slow drawn out process. Each dish became like a torture, a punishment that presumably Martha inflicted on her cellmates if they dared to question her authority.

And to add insult to injury, by the time it came to the eating I’d had so much medicinal booze I can barely remember how the meal turned out. I do recall thinking it was all fine, but probably wasn’t worth even half the amount of time spent on them. I also remember someone hooking the TV up to Youtube and us all screaming drunkenly for video requests, the five of us singing along happily – or more appropriately merrily – to this. I vaguely remember having a massive strop at my boyfriend when the guests had gone home and I was doing yet more washing up, about how I felt like nothing more than a scullery maid, and you know what, I just couldn’t wash another fucking thing, before slamming the bedroom door. And I have very strong recollections of being sick the next morning, my body fighting to deal as much with Martha’s carbs as with the amount of vodka I’d poured into it.

Martha’s Leek and Olive Tart

But the food? Here’s what I can recall.

The Leek and Olive tart was, erm, nice? It was the only recipe which didn’t call for me to make the pastry from scratch, which means it was my favourite by far, but I think the flavours lacked a little punch.

My version. Looks a lot more exciting than it tasted

The parmesan crisp around the side was a good touch, but I had to drizzle it in balsamic glaze before my champagne-soaked tongue even recognised there was any food in my mouth.

Her Mini Chicken Potpies with Herb Dough

By the time I’d got to the end of the zillion-stepped recipe for the Mini Chicken Potpies with Herb Dough I was also at the end of my tether – and didn’t bother with the herb garnish that you can see in the official picture. I think the result was….nice?

And mine. Roasted vegetables: Stylist’s own

The filling was really good as heated up leftovers the next day when I could finally manage food – a buttery mix of leek and chicken and mushroom and thyme and all my favourite things – but the recipe had required that I boiled the chicken for an hour, left it to cool, stripped the meat from the bones, sweated the vegetables, made the pastry, left the pastry to sit for an hour, and so on and so on until the only solution was another glass of white port. And I think shop bought pastry would have tasted better.

The life sentence that is Martha’s Butterscotch Praline Cream Pie

As for the Butterscotch Praline Cream Pie, I just checked with my boyfriend and he said “I seem to remember it was alright, but a bit too nutty, and a bit too creamy.” For a dessert that took longer than I’d have got for manslaughter, I’d hope for a little more. I have a vague memory of being disappointed that the butterscotch tasted a bit too authentic, and not enough like Butterscotch Angel Delight – now that would have been a speedier and more satisfying dessert – and also of throwing the unserved half down the waste disposal in a pique of rage once the guests had gone home, but those are all the details I can give you.

I’m amazed I could still take a photo at this point

The short end of this long tale is that Martha’s recipes are her way of inflicting imprisonment on all of us – enslaving us in the kitchen for hours at a time. I’d rather have done Community Service.

Cost of ingredients £29.02 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter * * Nice but dull

Main * * * It just took sooooo long to make

Dessert * Am now craving Angel Delight

Overall 3/10 Life’s too short to make your own pastry, as Delia might have said.

Martha Stewart’s Pies and Tarts £16.99, Clarkson Potter. Original photos by Johnny Miller

Home Cooking Made Easy by Lorraine Pascale: The Review

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:39:00 +0100

Pot. So 90s.

I love the 1990s revival so much more than I loved the actual 1990s. Back then I sat in my room listening to Tori Amos albums over and over, marking passages in Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson about the beauty of true love, and getting frustrated about the episode of My So Called Life where Angela had a meltdown because she had one spot on her otherwise perfect visage. One spot. One tiny, almost beautiful spot. I should have been so lucky to have had only the one spot.

So with all these big 90s names making a comeback – Damien Hirst, Clare Danes, Faye Tozer – it’s nice to be able to actually enjoy them from my now relatively outward-looking maturity, rather than to be letting them pass me by as I sat at home making necklaces out of self-consciously kooky plastic beads I’d bought in Brighton, wailing along to The Cranberries.

And my favourite 90s star to have suddenly popped up is Lorraine Pascale. True, no one had actually heard of her back then – the internet had hardly been invented so how did anyone really know about anything – but she walked in a couple of Versace shows, shot a couple of fashion campaigns, and was probably once ignoring the canapés at the same party as Cindy Crawford, so all her press cuttings happily refer to her as a former supermodel and it’s convenient to pretend that that is what she is.

For on TV she’s natural, charming, unpretentious, un-smug about her perfect kitchen, perfect cooking, perfect life. You want to eat her food, be her friend, have her lovely smooth skin (some personal aspects of the 90s really will haunt me forever). She cooks easy food that looks almost as scrummy as her, serving it up at the end of each episode to a couple of pals, a less raucous and more current version of Jamie O.

But I interviewed her once on the phone. It was the day after the airing of the first episode of her second series, the viewing figures were in and she’d had something like 5m of us glued to her brand of easy domesticity. “I just can’t believe that many people are watching me,” she said timidly, overwhelmed by the sudden attention, as if she’d not covered billboards just a few years ago (which, actually, she might not have done. Who knows?) “I don’t really have friends over for dinner,” she then went on to add, shattering the carefully curated image of her show. But I loved her all the same. Anyone who adds gorgonzola and breadcrumbs to pasta and calls it “Glam Mac and Cheese” is alright in my book.

And as I knew I’d be cooking for four on the morning after two consecutive nights of larging it (as they said in the 90s), I needed recipes to be as simple as possible. With her second book entitled Home Cooking Made Easy, I trusted she’d be my saviour.

And she was, disappointingly. I know this blog is much more interesting when the recipes all fuck up like here and here, but Lorraine was as good as her word – this book was, well, home cooking made easy.

The most painful part of the process was when my alarm went off at 7.45am. We had been at Attitude Magazine’s 18^th birthday the night before – it had been free booze from 7pm and one of the last things I remember is an unapologetic Harry Derbridge from TOWIE spilling a drink all down my boyfriend’s arm. Totally non-sober myself, Will had to forcibly prevent me from marching up to him to, in my words at the time, “fucking sort him out.” Will really is the yin to my yang.

Anyway, the pork had to go in the oven where it sat for six hours, leaving me time to make the starter, pudding, complain about feeling queasy and generally blame my hangover on my boyfriend, whose only crime was to ask innocently from the sofa if I needed any help.

Lorraine’s Herby Scotch Eggs

The Herby Scotch Eggs were vaguely fiddly, yet not remotely difficult. Hard boiled eggs covered in sausage meat, rolled in breadcrumbs and baked for my American readers (howdy) Luscious Lorraine (as no one is calling her)’s idea was to splat the sausage meat on some cling film (that’s Saran Wrap, y’all), stick the egg in the middle and bunch up the cling film to encase the egg in meat. Much tastier than they sound.

My version. On a hangover, you can’t really expect more

And it almost worked, too – only two of the four split open in the oven, and by the time we ate them, having smelt the pork wafting gently out of the oven for six long hours, it wouldn’t have mattered what they’d looked like.

LP’s Really Slow-Roast Pork With Crispy, Crispy Crackling and Garlic Roast Vegetables

As for the Really Slow-Roast Pork With Crispy, Crispy Crackling and Garlic Roast Vegetables, it was incredible, a piggy triumph, a silk purse out of a sow’s shoulder. “Pip, come and look at this,” Will said seriously from where I’d made him carve. “The meat is literally just falling apart.”

And mine. Phwoar

It tasted as succulent as it looked, and the addition of pears to the roast vegetables were a genius twist on apple sauce. Serving it up with Lorraine’s Red Cabbage with Pears and Garlic (a pair of pears, if you will), the lesbians we’d had over for lunch were suitably impressed. “It tastes like it has been sent from heaven,” said one, as if she knew anything about porking (boom boom). The crackling was as crispy as the double-use of the word in the title implied - so crunchy LP named it twice - and its fennel seed topping was deliciously bittersweet.

Lorraine’s Frozen Raspberry Ripple Parfait ‘Ice Cream’

Finally, after we’d lain in a meat stupor for an hour or so, rubbing our satisfied tummies for long enough to have massaged some room into them, I brought the Frozen Raspberry Ripple Parfait ‘Ice Cream’ from the freezer where it had nestled all day. My last memory of it has been cursing the tediosity (fuck you, you annoying squiggly red line,that should sooooo be a word) of pushing the raspberries through a sieve to make a puree, and the noise of the electric beaters hitting the exact same frequency as the wine-related roar in my brain as they whipped the cream and egg whites, but the drama was all forgotten as we gorged on this vaguely adult take on a childhood classic, as smooth and sweet as Lorraine herself.

My chopping board may not be as aspirational, but not bad, right?

So go on, follow another 90s trend and actually buy this book, as opposed to just googling for the free recipes online because you’ve gone all modern and stuff. It does exactly what it says on the tin.

Cost of ingredients: £32.34 (not counting items already in store cupboard)

Starter * * * (but it tasted a lot better than it looked)

Main * * * * * (I can eat this every day, yes?)

Pudding * * * * * (Ditto)

Overall: 10/10 Please marry me, Lorraine

Home Cooking Made Easy by Lorraine Pascale is published by HarperCollins (£20). Original photography by Myles New

Livwise by Olivia Newton-John: The Review

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:16:00 +0100

Disclaimer: After writing this up I suddenly spotted the bit about how all the proceeds from this book go to the Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre in Melbourne, so you should probably ignore any mean things I say and buy it anyway. The curry recipe alone will more than make your charitable good deed worthwhile.

Look at me, I’m Gwynnie P…

Every Sunday afternoon, from the age of about nine until 12, I watched Grease. I loved it. Adored it. Even invited my Year Six girlfriend over once to watch it too. I wonder if, as I sang all the words to Summer Loving, she guessed we wouldn’t stay together forever? Of course, I didn’t understand most of the film – that Rizzo got preggo went over my head, that Kenickie’s broken insurance policy was actually a worn-out condom, not an expired certificate from the RAC, was a subtlety I missed.

But one thing I caught was Sandy’s amazing transformation. She taught me there was hope for us all. Like her I was a suburban goodie two shoes, desperate to break out, rebel, act like all the cooler kids. If someone who was mocked so badly by Rizzo, the most laughable “teen” to ever enrol in high school, could become cool, perhaps I could, too. (I eventually bought a leather jacket in Brighton, aged 16. That afternoon I got my friend Gemma to push a blunt silver stud through my left ear, and wore both along the sea front. The strut was pure post-makeover Sandy.)

But Olivia Newton John’s latest metamorphosis is one I’m less thrilled about. Yes, she’s doing a Gwynnie. “People often ask me what my secret is and want to know how I manage to stay slim, active and healthy at my age,” she trills, as if anyone ever asks her anything other than whether she still has those leather trousers, or if Stockard Channing was a bitch. “Even though my passport says so, it is hard for me to comprehend that I am 62 years young!” Sigh.

The secret, of course, is not eating anything very delicious. Like Gwyneth, she swears by agave syrup, wholegrains, raw food. So far, so celebrity cookbook – and this one comes with the scrotum-clenchingly bad name of Livwise. Still, one of the sub-headings is, naturally, “Let’s Get Physical,” so perhaps it wouldn’t be all bad.

With my boyfriend out of town on a rainy Easter Monday I invited my ex boyfriend (no judgement, babez) and two of my best friends over for lunch. “We’re doing Olivia,” I inform them as they arrive, one by one. “I love Grease!” they each say in reply, as if the poor woman doesn’t have an entire back catalogue of other work to go alongside it. Like, um, that one about that thing… *imdbs furiously*… Xanadu!

Olivia’s Pumpkin and Beetroot Salad with Mustard Dressing (pumpkin = butternut squash, apparently. They’re cray cray Down Under)

Like Gwyneth, Livvy’s starters are mainly salads, and mainly involve beetroot. The hardest part of her Pumpkin and Beetroot Salad with Mustard Dressing was peeling the butternut squash. “There is something very homey and earthy about root vegetables,” claims the ghost writer pretending to be ONJ at this point (later revealed to actually be two women, both with scarier coifs than when Frenchie’s goes pink). “This recipe is easy and brings out the best of these vegetable flavours – scrumptious!” And actually, attributed authors Kristine Matheson and Karen Inge APD FSMA FSDA (to give her her full title) are not wrong.

My version. I was lucky enough to get two halves of one of the curiously specific eight cherry tomatoes

I thought the amount of oil used to roast the squash - half a tablespoon - wouldn’t be enough, but it was. I thought that wrapping the beetroots individually in foil would be a faff, but it wasn’t, and they roasted perfectly. The honey and mustard dressing worked perfectly with the toasted walnuts to help everything feel fresh and tangy. “I don’t even like lettuce, but I love the dressing,” claimed one guest, going in for seconds. Conversely, the ex boyfriend left most of his. “I don’t like the dressing,” he admitted, eventually. Considering that, when we went out, the only vegetable he liked was broccoli, this actually shows personal growth.

Liv’s Balinese Chicken Curry

“Collaborators” Kristine and Karen didn’t bother with a pithy summation of the Balinese Chicken Curry, but that was probably because they were too busy licking the saucepan. It was incredible. All it took was to whizz up the curry paste ingredients in the blender, then add them to the pan of coconut milk and chicken. Coconutty, zesty, creamy, all the things a good curry should be. “And it must be healthy, or it wouldn’t be in the book,” claimed one guest, and you can’t fault that logic. Liv might admit at the beginning that she’s not a cordon bleu chef or nutritionist, but all the initials after Kaz Inge’s name must mean something.

Lots of sauce, but no complaints. I would drink the stuff, and gladly.

So far, so good. Perhaps I was too quick to judge, I thought, smugly clearing away four empty plates.

Her Cashew, Macademia and Raspberry Tart

And then I got the Cashew, Macademia and Raspberry Tart out the freezer, where it had sat for two hours.

My version. Beware, the impostor cheesecake. Also, v expensive.

It had been a fiddle to make. Nuts don’t like to be blended, I learnt. Blenders are annoying to wash, which I had to do between blitzing each layer. On the way from worktop to freezer I’d dropped it, spilling almost half the middle bit on the floor. “Will!” I’d almost screamed before remembering he was away, blaming my boyfriend being my default setting. I sighed instead, cleaned it up quietly, cursed the Beauty School Dropout in the Sky.

And then here it was, looking like a cheesecake, smelling like a cheesecake, almost with the consistency of a cheesecake. But it tasted like a Jetson’s version of a cheesecake – something that was there to simulate cheesecake but without actually being it. The biscuit base was made with blitzed macademia nuts and dates, the cheesy bit was actually blended cashews, lemon juice, coconut oil and agave syrup (obvs). The raspberry topping was sweetened by dates. It wasn’t bad, as such, it just wasn’t cheesecake. It felt like a con – the nutty flavour unexpectedly where a sweet lightness ought to be. “This is not the one that I want,” I said, at last putting to good use what I’d been hoping to drop in all lunch time. “I’d rather have the real thing. That nobody asked for seconds was telling.

I guess in Ms Newton John’s life, however, there is never any left, for she doesn’t say to store in the freezer. I placed the remains in a pot in the fridge, and left it there for later. With no setting agent, it wasn’t long before it looked like this:

Oh Olivia. Perhaps I won’t be Hopelessly Devoted to you after all.

Cost of ingredients: £42.37 (not including items already in store cupboard) The million bags of nuts for that wretched pudding were bank.

Starter: * * *

Main * * * * * ( I would happily eat it every day for ever, and ever, esp if I still got to look as good as Livia tells the world she does at 62)

Pudding * * (Well, it wasn’t technically dreadful)

Overall 6.5/10 A lot of the ingredients are too pricey to eat every day, a lot of the notes too preachy

Livwise by Olivia Newton John and some other people was out last week, Murdoch Books, £16.99. Original photography by Michele Aboud/Natasha Milne

Notes From My Kitchen Table by Gwyneth Paltrow: The Review

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:16:41 +0100

I’m not sure if it’s the resemblance that is frightening about this pic, or something else I can’t put my finger on

There’s a story doing the rounds of the London media about how, at Philip Green’s party on some exotic island recently, Gwyneth Paltrow was quietly jogging down the beach when she happened to run past Kate Moss, eating crisps and smoking fags on a sun lounger. “God, why are you running?” Kate is supposed to have asked sneerily, laughing with her Mean Girls gang of friends. “Because I don’t want to look like you,” Gwynnie allegedly replied. One version of the tale claims Kate then threw her crisps at her, another that they had to be kept separate for the rest of the party, but one fact is clear. Despite what you may imagine, our Gwyn has sass.

And for that reason, I love Gwyneth Paltrow. But it’s not an easy thing to do. For every time she’s seen jiggling her non-existent jelly with Jay-Z there’s a moment where she says “I first had a version of this [recipe] at a Japanese monastery during a silent retreat—don’t ask, it’s a long story.” For every far-better-than-the-show-itself cameo on Glee she’ll counter it by saying “One cold wintry day in London, I was dreaming about salad nicoise—one of my favourites.” And it’s hard to recall just how fun and bubbly she was on Graham Norton when, on another occasion she drones on about how, “during the strict macrobiotic chapter of my life, I ate miso soup every day for breakfast and sometimes with dinner as well.”

All three of the above examples are taken from her cookbook, Notes From My Kitchen Table, in which she opens her perfect life unselfconsciously for all of us to stare at. And stare we did – having gawped at Goop, her so-bad-it’s-incredible website, every newspaper rushed to serialise it, every fashion hound was suddenly spotted toting a bottle of agave syrup around town. No one cared whether the recipes were any good – they were written by a film star, and nothing else really mattered, right? With ingredients such as sautéed dandelions, and an entire section devoted to what to do with the wood burning pizza oven in your garden, this book was not for actually cooking from, but for gaining a greater insight into everyone’s favourite caped crusader.

Captain Gwynnie to the rescue - no more unhealthy suppers for us!

Until I decided to put her to the test, and serve up a Gwynnie Special for six last Friday night. Astonishingly, I managed to buy all the ingredients in Tesco – I avoided any recipes which sounded too outlandish – and could cook them all in my boyfriend’s kitchen – even though it doesn’t have its own pasta maker, or Oscar sitting above a sous vide machine.

Gwyn’s Ivy Chop Salad

And actually, everything was pretty straightforward. Because my boyfriend was still at work when I started the prep there was no one around to shout at, so instead I just calmly got on with it all. The Ivy Chopped Salad, which The Goopster name droppily says is “inspired by the famous vegetable grilled salad at the Ivy restaurant in Los Angeles,” was a summery mix of lime juice, lettuce, grilled courgettes, salmon and beetroot. “You can’t beat the beets,” one guest claimed, which was when I noticed the empty bottle of vodka which had been full when people had arrived just an hour before.

My version. I don’t know why the salmon looks like chicken, but it tasted ok

You see, my boyfriend loves to play host. He’s happiest when mixing up extra-strength martinis, or Cosmopolitans with double shots in them. As people got stuck into Will’s fourth, fifth, maybe even sixth round of drinks, we started to have the sort of fun that probably never happens in the Paltrow household, the sort which only follows twelvety glasses of my boyfriend’s special shock-tail. We began a photo shoot, copying the earnest shots of Gwyneth in the book as an homage to the great actress.

Note that her and I have the same olive oil. We’re Oily BFFs!

Yes, that’s little girl Gwyn second in from the left

Yes, that’s Elle Decoration’s Designer of the Year Lee Broom second in from the left

“Gwyneth is out of control,” claimed one guest, quite rightly, when we came across the shot of her throwing all her actress-y pretentions out the window and thoughtfully smelling some cherry tomatoes.

Unlike Gwynnie, I don’t grow my own basil

But back to the food, which in Gwynnie’s case no one ever really cares about – what we all want to know is why she fell out with Madonna, and what her and Beyonce actually talk about.

GP’s Duck ‘Cassoulet’

Her Duck ‘Cassoulet’ (inverted commas are all hers) was fine – the bean mixture was quite tasty but the duck could probably have been cooked a little longer, and the caramelised Brussel Sprouts, which she claims have converted many a “sprout cynic” were simple and surprisingly tasty.

My version. Slightly raw duck never hurt anyone, right?

Her Blueberry Pavlova, however, was superb. I’ve never made meringues before – my mother makes such a big deal about how much of a fiddle it is every year when she’s wheels out her Raspberry Pavolva at Christmas that’s I’ve always assumed it was impossible.

Her Blueberry Pavolva

Maybe my mum’s doing it wrong – or I’ve just proved where I get my skills at playing the martyr in the kitchen – but this recipe was such a doddle, and produced the lightest, fluffiest, most perfect meringues ever.

And mine. Despite drunken photography, deffo worthy of a Foodie Oscar

The next day, I woke up, still feeling drunk. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so mocking of Gwyn’s lifestyle diet after all.

Cost of ingredients (not including items already in store cupboard) £48.44

First course * * *

Main course * * *

Dessert * * * * *

Overall: 6/10 – minus a point for “A lecture from Leonardo DiCaprio (when he was nineteen and I was twenty-one) about how such animals are kept and processed, made me lose my desire for factory farm pork and beef right there.”

Notes From My Kitchen Table by Gwyneth Paltrow (Boxtree, £20) Original photography by Ellen Silverman, homage shots by Charles Rudgard and Polly Broderick

The Little Paris Kitchen by Rachel Khoo: The Review

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:39:00 +0000

“Nothing here is styled”

By now, you’ll have had the perfect life of Rachel Khoo rammed down your throat by the BBC. Fancying herself as Croydon’s greatest export since Kate Moss, she uses her TV show and new book to swan around her home of Paris on her bicycle, buying baguettes, drinking coffee, probably having winsome affairs with existential poets she happens to meet on the Montmartre. She so carefully and contrivedly markets her slice of the good life that she makes Amelie look like she should star in her own ITV2 show When French Bitches Go Bad.

But I’ve seen One Day. I know you can go to Paris a disillusioned teacher and emerge as a best selling author. Perhaps this former nanny really had become a domestic goddess, and her carefully-styled floral dresses and cutesy kitchen (“Nothing here is styled,” she claimed disingenuously to a journalist recently) really were part of a perfect life. And with my parents meeting my boyfriend’s parents for the very first time, I needed all the help I could get.

Of course, I knew they’d get on. Parents have an endless capacity to talk about gardening, and what plays they’ve seen lately, and when they’re planning to retire. There are so many pleasantries to exchange that there need never be a quiet moment with parents around – they’ll talk about anything so long as to avoid the blatant fact that the their respective sons get naked with each other.

“This is the worst idea you’ve ever had,” I rounded on my poor boyfriend, as the dessert, which I was making first, with two hours before arrival of the guests, became apparent it was going to be a lumpy mess. “Who cares if our parents ever met, why does it even matter?” “I thought it would be nice,” he replied lamely, staring at the brown sludge which was meant to be a light, fluffy mousse. “Stick it in the fridge, perhaps it will look better once chilled?”

My parents arrived just as I was putting the main course in the oven, his parents were moments later. The dads stood on the balcony and discussed all the London landmarks which could be seen across the skyline, the mums stood in the kitchen and talked about films they’d seen at the cinema. “I thought The Artist was ten minutes too long,” said his mother. “Oh, we loved it,” replied mine, and so on.

Meanwhile, I was slicing up the pears and potatoes thinly for Rachel Khoo’s Potato and Pear Gallette. “Is everything ok?” Will asked, putting his hand on my hunched shoulder. “Don’t talk to me,” I hissed, shrugging him off. “Take my dad out that coffee. For God’s sake.” You can see why he wants me to move in.

Rachel’s Potato and Pear Gallette with Roquefort

But actually, there was no need for much stress – all the gallette required was to place raw slices of potato in the oven with chunks of pear and cheese crumbled over the top. “This is a slightly more sophisticated French homage to my humble childhood favourite of baked potato and melted cheese,” Khoo blithers in what you imagine she thinks is an adorable way. Perfect for an informal but impressive lunch then, you’d suppose.

My version. And hers wasn’t styled, apparently

As the first forkfuls were eaten, silence fell for the only moment so far. “I’d give this one five out of ten,” my mother in law eventually said, diplomatically. “Perhaps the potatoes could have done with a touch more in the oven,” my own mother ventured, with tact. She wasn’t wrong. Almost raw wedges of potato, it turns out, is edible – just – but not enjoyable. “I think the flavours might need a little bit of something,” said Will’s dad. “Yes, but it was a very light starter and I don’t feel too full, which can sometimes happen with these things,” Will said optimistically, demonstrating his ability to find the silver lining in every cloud, and one of the reasons I love him.

Rachel’s Duck a l’Orangina

Khoo’s Duck a l’Orangina was more successful in that the duck, which had marinated over night, was perfectly cooked and full of a lightly spiced flavour. However her Orangina sauce, which could only have been easier if it had been poured from a jar, essentially bubbled away into nothing. Duck a l’Orange is covered in a gooey marmalade-y jus.

And mine. The sauce you can see was actually fat from the roasting pan, desperate as I was for something to drip over it

This was like eating cooked meat without any condiments – nicely flavoured but missing that vital last kick. “Well, the meat is very tender, much better than the starter,” said my dad, appreciatively, as the polite conversation about his new job faltered for a moment.

Khoo’s Chocolate Mousses

It was time for the dreaded dessert. Khoo’s Chocolate Mousse had sounded fiddly – and with every stage there was more possibility to go wrong. Her crème patissiere (one component of the mousse) was lumpier than a bowl of sugar cubes. “Give it a whisk with a fork to break make sure it is smooth”, her recipe had advised, but it was like stroking a vat of hardened cement with a feather. When I eventually managed to combine it with the cream and meringue it took on the texture of school custard, so I covered it with nuts like she recommended and consigned it to the dustbin of TV “chef” recipes – all style, but the only substance coming from the nobs of chocolate-y cornflour in her dessert.

Hmm

“This has a lovely texture,” Will’s dad said, incredibly, dousing his mousse in cream. “Yes, the lumpy bits are real chocolate!” I lied, taking another swig of wine. It did taste good, if you pretended to yourself you weren’t chewing on dry powdery lumps, that perhaps they were stray nuts from the topping, or real bits of Green and Blacks. “Yes, well done,” everyone else chimed in. “A delicious way to end dinner.” It was fundamentally a sham, of course, but I had just about managed to pull it off. Any parallels between that and Khoo’s Parisian perfection are merely coincidental.

Cost of ingredients: £25.47 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter *

Main course **

Dessert * (unless you pretend it was meant to be like that, in which case it tasted good enough to get a charitable * * * *)

Overall 1/10 Well, she’s nice to look at.

The Little Paris Kitchen by Rachel Khoo, published by Michael Joseph. Original photography by David Loftus

Seasonal Spanish Food by Jose Pizarro: The Review

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:40:18 +0000

Artful artichokes resting on some tiles. Who cares why?

Sarah Beeny may be wrong about a lot of things – you don’t always need to be preggo on TV, you don’t always need to offer the death stare whenever anyone disagrees with you and you don’t always have to back people into submission (something she once did to me terrifyingly down the phone. She tried to convince me it was ok for her house to appear in Style after it had been in Hello, and I agreed with her gravelly voice of authority even though I knew my editor demands exclusivity. I then cowardly emailed her PR afterwards to say it was a no goer, feeling like that family on Property Ladder who put cladding on the house when they promised Sazzer B they wouldn’t). However, she’s right about one thing – you really do need to knock down all your walls and build a kitchen/diner/whatever, especially if you’re going to cook from Seasonal Spanish Food by Jose Pizarro.

After all, if there’s one sure fire way to lose points at Come Dine With Me – apart from falling asleep and dripping your hair in your avocado like Dawn from Preston – it’s when the host is constantly in the kitchen. “As the host was always in the kitchen, I’m giving him a……4” some drunk will slur in the back of the cab, holding the number card the wrong way up. Also, finishing off the dinner means that you miss out on all the action.

Some of the snippets I just about overheard going on at the dining table were:

“Was it worse than the time you accidentally shagged a junkie in his crack den?”

“Happiness is not meant to feel this way.”

“His penis is too big for that position.”

And by the time I was back in the room, serving up one of the many tapas courses (of which there were five) the conversation had moved on. So thanks, Jose. Because of your recipes I’ll never know when large becomes simply too much.

Let me explain. I’m in a book group – three girls, two gays, one book every six weeks or so. We probably spend about five to ten minutes each time on the book which only most of us have usually read, the rest of the evening is for drinking fizz, discussing boys, and eating food. But oh, the food! Since we’ve started we’ve had summer roasts, homemade pavlovas, even quails – it’s almost got competitive. With Jose’s two restaurants on Bermondsey Street being my favourite places at the moment I thought his new book would be ideal to uphold the standard.

But of course, I didn’t get home until 6.30pm and with guests arriving at half seven it didn’t give me much time to set the table, fluff the cushions and pick the perfect playlist – and pull together five courses.

I’d started the pudding the night before (it required part of it to rest 12 hours in the fridge) but everything else had to begin from scratch. Calmly rolling up my sleeves (there’s no point having a meltdown if my boyfriend’s not around to be at the receiving end, and the third rule of Book Club is that boyfriends are deffo not invited. The first is that you do not talk about the book at Book Club, and the second…well, you guessed it).

Jose’s Courgette Soup with Cheese

The soup was incredibly easy. Boiling some courgettes with chicken stock and then blending it with cream cheese, I began to think the evening was going to be ok. “This is delicious,” everyone cried, slurping it up in seconds. But then it was 8.50pm, and there were already three empty Proseccos nestling in my Recycling.

My still relatively-sober version

“Excuse me,” I cried, jumping up to head back to the kitchen. “Don’t talk about anything interesting!” The croquetas are practically Jose’s signature dish at the restaurants, so I was worried mine wouldn’t live up to his. I needn’t have – the recipe was straightforward, if time consuming.

Jose’s Ham Croquetas

The leek and ham innards had to rest in the fridge for an hour (they were the first thing I made after the playlist) but the dip n dunk approach to rolling them in breadcrumbs was fun – or about as much fun as being stuck in the kitchen can be when everyone else is swapping stories about dating Brazilian doctors (that was the most detail I ever really gleaned on that).

My version. Just pictured: The Book: Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher, in makes-a-surprise-appearance-at-Book-Group shocker

“Don’t take this the wrong way, because I really like them, but they taste like an upmarket Findus Crispy Pancake,” said one guest. “Can I be really uncouth and ask for ketchup?” said another. It was 9.30, we were all pissed, of course she wanted ketchup.

Jose’s Deep Fried Goat’s Cheese With Orange Blossom Honey. If only mine had turned out like this

I blame the alcohol for ruining the next course. It was all going a bit too well - the recipes working just that bit too perfectly. I’d fried my beetroot crisps like I was meant to and then chucked the goats cheese into the pan. It turned into a white, sloppy mess. “Oh, shit!” I shouted, re-reading the recipe. “I was meant to cover them in breadcrumbs.”

What necking two bottles of bubbles turns it into

Still, deep fried cheese goo with beetroot actually tastes pretty good, especially if it’s 9.55pm and your insides are sloshing with Champagne (we’d moved on to the good stuff by now).

Jose’s Pan Fried Pimenton Chicken with Mashed Potato.You want to dive in, right?

The chicken was easy, too. The only bit that took any time was peeling the potatoes (“He left me to go and be sick and then came back and carried on with the date” I heard at this point, as I snarled to myself, feeling left out). Doused in paprika and sherry they had a syrupy glaze which meant we ate them even though we were drunk-full, because they simply were that good.

Ah, the main reason for the book - as a placemat

“When are we going to get something green?” one of my guests asked, not outside of her rights of expectation. Fortunately the spinach, which I’d stirfried so sloppily that most of it littered my hob, was light and delicious.

Jose’s Apple Pie

I don’t remember much about pudding, other than it had to be prepared in three stages, and then took half an hour in the oven. Forcing it down at 11.30pm, I only remember that it tasted incredible, really vanilla-y, and that the pastry had kind of broken up as I’d heavy handedly rolled it on the only bit of my worktop not covered with dirty bowls.

And my version. See also: empty wine glasses

Eventually, at midnight, the guests left – drunk, full, and far more aware of each other’s gossip than I was. All the recipes were straightforward, successful (except when mixed with booze brain) and relatively easy. The only problem is that they all required immediate serving, so unless you have staff to cook them for you don’t really make good dinner party fare. Or simply get an open plan kitchen – something my boyfriend has, and I’m moving into his in two weeks! Did I mention that? Sorry, but I feel like I have to talk about my news now, seeing as I barely got to last night. So there you have it, Jose’s recipes. Perfect for people who actually have nothing to say to their guests.

Cost: £34.02 (not including items already in store cupboard

Soup * * * *

Croquetas * * * * *

Cheese * * (admittedly, not Jose’s fault)

Chicken * * * *

Apple pie * * * * * (probably - who can remember?)

Overall: 9/10 for delicious recipes, 4/10 for suitability for dinner parties. Maybe just go to his restaurants?

Published by Kyle Cathie. Original Photography by Emma Lee

What's For Dinner? by Fay Ripley: The Review

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:38:53 +0000

Her easy recipes are the reason Mumsnet don’t go to Iceland, apparently

For members of Mumsnet there are no grey areas. Life is divided into two distinct groups - things they love and things they abhor. In the first set are Bugaboos, cafes which allow breastfeeding breeders to wop their waps out, and haranguing women who go back to work after giving birth. Things they hate include, according to recent posts, spreadable butter that “just isn’t fricking spreadable”, low rise jeans and the presenter on a CBeebies show called Iconicles.

Firmly in the “Love” camp is Fay Ripley, former star of Cold Feet, now advertising stooge for the National Lottery and reinvented saviour of all those busy mothers who feel strongly (as they do about everything) that they shouldn’t just buy ready meals from M&S but that, after a busy day bitching about the au pair over an organic extra-caff latte in Kensal Green, they just don’t have the energy for anything much more advanced. Fay’s last book was awarded Mumsnet’s coveted Best Cookery Book 2011, and What’s For Dinner, out March 1^st, looks set to win the same. It is aimed at that mythical moron who reads Grazia and actually says “OMG” out loud whilst reading about Jen’s romantic failiures, and then rushes out to buy every It shoe in the “Look! 20 New Must-Have Heels! Scream!” feature trailed on the magazine’s cover.

“It has to be said that a new handbag can lift my spirits for a week or so” warbles Fay in the intro, posing with glossy hair and what looks like a stale herby rock cake.”Obviously my children bring the usual surges of love that, in between nit combing and turning nagging into an Olympic sport, provide me with that warm glow of wellbeing.” See! She’s just like us! Only with more expensive highlights! “However, the glue that sticks it all together, that turns a moment spent smiling into a memory for life is….food.”

Oh no you dittn’t!

Anyway, her recipes are all well easy – the sort of thing anyone can follow, even those whose brain has been addled by spending entire afternoons alternating between reading the Gruffalo to their child and poring over the Daily Mail Online. And it pains me to say that they’re all actually crammed with good ideas.

Fay’s Comforting Rice and Garden Veg Soup

The aptly named Comforting Rice and Garden Veg Soup was like a risotto, only slightly more soupy. She sticks the rind of the parmesan into the soup during cooking, fishing it out at the end like an errant toy dropped by a naughty child, which gave it a wonderfully cheesy piquancy. No seasoning was needed at all – these are family friendly recipes after all – and it was ready in minutes.

My version. Also pictured, my bread maker which hasn’t been used since I went off carbs two months ago

The most tiresome part of the Crusty Pistachio and Cranberry Salmon was shelling the pistachios. Literally, all you had to do was blend them with some cranberries, rosemary and garlic, slather them on the fish fillets with honey and bake them for 20 minutes.

Fay’s Pistachio and Cranberry Salmon

The taste? Well, the honey was a bit too sweet and the sprig of rosemary per person a bit overpowering, but the idea itself was pretty nifty, and so easy that for the first time ever I managed not to have a cooking-induced meltdown at my boyfriend, innocently watching the rugby in the living room, as I brought the meal together.

My version. Ok, so I’ve not given up ALL carbs.

In fact, the Easy Lemon and Raspberry Tart was so, well, easy that I even had time to think about my relationship. We’ve been dating for a little while, the subject of living together has come up but I’ve been putting it off. We live less than ten minutes walk from each other, see each other all the time, but twice a week it’s nice to be able to lie diagonally across my own bed. “Don’t throw away the chance to move your relationship forward for two nights lying diagonally across your own bed,” my friend Ella counselled. “There’s so much more to life than that.” True, she has a point, but then she’s not over six foot, and going out with someone whose shoulders are broader than that crappy fake Manc accent Fay Ripley used in Cold Feet.

Fay’s Easy Lemon and Raspberry Tart

But over the dessert – whose pastry was a bit soggy and whose filling could have done with being slightly less tarmac-like in consistency – I began to think Fay was right. Food does bring us all together! It does turn a moment spent smiling into a memory for life! Imagine if I got to eat dinner with Will every night of the week, and smiled and made life memories every single day?

My version. I’m sure that in her pic her food stylist didn’t use the lemon rind, which made it look all messy. What a fake!

“I’d like to move in,” I said, as he was bashing his way through the lemon filling. He smiled (creating his own life memory, I’m sure) and said he’d love it if I did. We looked at each other shyly. We looked away. “We’re going to be a family,” I just about resisted from saying, as we beamed big lemony across the table.

So thanks for bringing us together Fay. Your recipes may need some minor tweaks here and there, but you have helped create one of my most happy life memories to date.

Cost of ingredients: £20.38 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter: * * * *

Main * * *

Dessert * *

Overall: 6/10. So easy to use, so quick to make, but so unrefined. Take it as inspiration for fast recipes and fiddle with the flavours.

What’s For Dinner by Fay Ripley, (Collins, £20) Out March 1^st. Original photography by David Munns

Gordon Ramsay's Great Escape: The Review

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:05:23 +0000

Oh, Gordon. I wish you’d bat for my team

Oh Gordon, you big, sexy, sweaty hunk, you. You hulking Easter Island rockface, you domineering, sweaty man-beast, with legs as thick as a walnut tree, face as grooved as a walnut itself. You’re everything I could possibly want in my fantasy figure – you’d shout me into submission, call me a snivelling twat, throw a lumpy white roux all over me and storm out swearing at the cameras.

But you don’t make it easy for me to love you.

There’s that open letter you wrote to your mother in law. The constant gurning after the Beckhams. The dreadful Ramsay’s F word. And now…your book, Gordon Ramsay’s Great Escape. The cast list – including Mark Sargeant who wrote the recipes and Emily Quah the text – is longer than one of your Marathon training sessions. What did you actually do here, Gordo, (can I call you that?) other than hop around the Far East, playing cricket with the locals, posing for dreadful portraits like this one, above?

But then, what does it actually matter? You’ve long been merely a figurehead, off eating undressed spinach leaves with Eva Longoria, letting Stuart Gillies and the team at Gordon Ramsay Holdings quietly go about creating brilliant new restaurants like the awesome Bread Street Kitchen. Why should you, a cook, be expected to actually cook? You’re the heavily-lined face of this brand, not the workhorse who has to carry the load. Have another game of cricket, eh Gordy? Who needs to sweat above a stove?

And actually, the recipes were delicious in spite of your non-involvement – no wonder you were happy to take an expensable jolly around Mumbai in their honour. I don’t even like Indian food that much Mr Ramsay, sir, as I always find the smell of the spice comes out my hair follicles the next day. You probably know that feeling too, what with your lovely luscious locks. What shampoo do you use, by the way? Tell me you’re the secret softie we both know you are deep down. Tell me it’s Johnson’s No More Tears.

But I’m getting off the track, something your crashingly unsubtle charisma often causes me to do. Not only were your team’s recipes tasty, they were easy too. Not once did I have a meltdown at my boyfriend, which is customary in these proceedings, not once did I have to tell the guests to eat another cheese dorito as dinner wouldn’t be for another three hours. Not once did I have to curse your name, and everything you’ve ever put it to (even those awful pasta sauces) – this was simple Sunday cooking at its best.

Gordon’s (team’s) Spiced Tomato and Coconut soup

Yes, the soup was a little on the thin side, but the creaminess of the coconut milk cut through the chilli to perfection.

And my version. Not quite so inspiring without the styling, is it?

As for the butter chicken, I’ve never eaten such a delicate dish.

The Ramsay Holdings ideal of Butter Chicken

So perfectly smooth and subtle and mild, like your pillow talk probably is, when it’s just the two of us and you can drop your hard-man image.

You like my courgette, Gordie?

And you should remember to congratulate your team on this fruit salad, too – it was as easy to prepare as it looks:

Team Ramsay’s Fruit Salad with Spiced Syrup

One guest even favourably compared the spiced syrup to Red AfterShock – “in a good way” – which I could only take as a compliment.

Healthy AND delicious. A winning combo. Just like you and me, bbs.

Thanks Gordon my old friend, your team really turned out another blinder. Look me up next time you’re in town, you can swear at me any day. And give my love to Posh!xx

Cost of ingredients: £22.73 (not including those already in store cupboard)

First course: * * *

Main Course: * * * * *

Dessert: * * * *

Overall: 8/10 – gains points for easy recipes and raw animal sex appeal, loses them for cheesy portraits

Gordon Ramsay’s Great Escape (Harper Collins) Original Food Photography by Emma Lee, Reportage Photography by Jonathan Gregson.

carved from a walnut stone, hair fashioned from

The Intolerant Gourmet by Pippa Kendrick: The Review

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:46:00 +0000

Regina George: 120 calories and 48 calories from fat. What percent is that?
Gretchen: Uh, 48 into 120?
Regina: I’m only eating foods with less than 30 percent calories from fat.
Cady: It’s 40 percent. Well 48 over 120 equals X over 100 and then you cross multiply and get the value of X.
Regina: Whatever, I’m getting cheese fries.

Regina’s attitude to food could, quite neatly, be used to sum up what happens in the Sunday Times Style office. We’re as faddy as Gwyneth Paltrow, one day swapping all sugar for agave syrup, another eating nothing but beef and milk (yes, really), but then a caseload of Hummingbird Bakery cupcakes will be delivered and we’ll all fall face first into the frosting. Self-denial is just too hard. We’re competitive, egging each other on (with albumen substitute, obvs) to avoid even more supposedly unhealthy ingredients, or try some new natural diet aid just in from the States. We have good intentions – wanting a healthier body, mind and spirit - but the problem is that we simply love food too much, and our schemes rarely last past the 4pm tea run.

So when The Intolerant Gourmet by Pippa Kendrick - out this coming Thursday - landed on my desk it appealed to the desperate dieter in me. Geared towards people who can’t handle dairy, or gluten, or – in my case - the temptation of a box of Krispy Kremes, the pictures with every recipe looked salivatingly seductive. I don’t know whether gluten or dairy is actually bad for me, but if someone is going to be cutting it out of their diet then I want in on that action, too.

The problem is that, traipsing around my local Tesco on a snowy Sunday morning, I couldn’t find such delights as oat cream, gluten free flour, or xantham gum. “Whatever, I’m getting the regular sort,” I said with my best Regina George hair toss, loading up my basket with as much dairy and gluten as I could find. Yes, fine, I know this breaks my own rules about cooking exactly as the book suggests, but having stayed over at my boyfriend’s the night before and not brought sensible snowy footwear, I was wearing his hiking boots that were two sizes too small, and mildly crippling my feet. So that makes it ok, right?

The official Butternut Squash, Coconut and Chilli Soup

Anyway, the Butternut Squash, Coconut and Chilli Soup couldn’t have been easier. Roasting the squash with some spices, and then blending it up with the coconut milk and some stock I didn’t have to deviate from the recipe at all. “I can totally do the Intolerant thing” I said, scoffing the Sweet Chilli Kettle Chips my boyfriend’s sister and her boyfriend had brought over. And it tasted divine. The squash had become all caramelised, the coconut milk added a creamy nuttiness. “I don’t know what those lactose-avoiders complain about,” I thought, stacking up the bowls, which had all be drained of their last drop. “This is easy.”

And my version. Tolerably Intolerant

The main course was similarly simple. A chicken and mushroom base with a potato topping – like a poultryfied Shepherd’s pie, and therefore the best thing in the world ever. Sure, I used real butter in the potato instead of Pure Sunflower Spread, and regular flour in the roux instead of gluten free, but what are you gonna do? Even Intolerants have to slip up sometimes, amiright? What’s crippling stomach pain compared to the joy of perfectly creamy mash?

The book’s Chicken Pie. You just want to take that spoon and dive in. And who’d blame you?

In fact, the incredibleness of the pie was so great that you wondered why no one had ever thought to do it before. Next time I’d add tarragon instead of thyme, use white wine and milk to make the sauce, but it was undeniably ace.

My pie. Phwoar, etc

After all, it was chicken, mushroom and potato. That’s the holy trinity, the ultimate Sunday lunch, the meal which actually prompted my sort-of sister-in-law to ask when I was moving in with her brother. “Um, anyone for a top up?” I asked, grabbing the wine, before suddenly becoming very busy with the sauce for the pudding.

Their Sticky Toffee Puddings

Of course, my Intolerant Sticky Toffee Pudding was made intolerable for Intolerants by the addition of normal flour, regular cream, and actual eggs. But it tasted awesome – the dates working as the substitute to actual toffee, the high level of sugar enough to send the Style office into a frenzy (but it was sanctioned by the book, so presumably not unhealthy. That’s how it works, yeah?). The individual desserts didn’t quite come out of their pots in one piece as the book implied, but with a dousing of sauce you could barely tell.

And mine. Not suitable for Intolerants, or anyone on a diet

“So, how are you finding this whole Cook the Books thing?” my sort-of sister-in-law asked, as she got the last scraping of sauce off her plate.

“Well, there is a moment shortly before the dishing up of the first course where Pip has a meltdown and shouts at me,” my poor boyfriend said sadly, harking back to the time earlier in the day when I’d asked him to mash the potatoes and he’d suggested doing it in the dirty roasting tin, of all places “but that’s ok because it means it’s nearly time to eat.”

I’m so lucky he’s more tolerant than those the recipes were intended for.

Cost of ingredients: £19.71 (not including ingredients already in store cupboard)

Starter * * * * *

Main * * * *

Pudding * * * *

Easiness * * * * *

Overall: 9/10 (as long as you substitute the suggested ingredients for the real thing, and aren’t actually intolerant)

The Intolerant Gourmet by Pippa Kendrick. Published by Collins. Official photographs by Jan Baldwin

Mini Review: Chase Marmalade Vodka

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:56:31 +0000

Getting home after date night, having shared a bottle of wine and losing that boozy buzz on the tube, I had an insatiable urge for a nightcap.

#danielradcliffeproblems

“Why don’t we open the Marmalade Vodka?” my boyfriend asked, as I slumped on his sofa, scrolling through all the Twitter I’d missed during dinner. That reminded me - @ChaseVodka had tweeted me earlier in the week to suggest drinking it with ginger beer and bitters, which is basically an official recipe, so following it was like doing a mini Cook The Books, yes?

Adding ginger ale: officially not an epic fail

Predictably, it was delicious. The orange tang of the British-made potato vodka and the, well, bitter of the bitters cut through the sweetness of the ginger, turning three very simple ingredients into something you’d fawn over at the Riding House Cafe. “Shall we have one more?” I asked, as the first slipped down almost immediately. “Oooh, and let’s watch Madonna’s Music video.”

“What, the new one?” he asked, mixing the second round. “No, Music. With Ali G and the cartoon bit in the middle.” I don’t know why – I’d just ingested a triple strength vodka in about ten seconds, who has time for reason? Perhaps it was because, years ago, I had a fantasy about having a boyfriend and debating the weighty issues, such as which was his favourite era of Madonna.

“What’s your favourite era of Madonna?” I slurred intensely, as we clinked glasses, again.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged disappointingly, missing the importance of the question. “But this drink is really, really good.”Well, at least we agreed on something.

(For the record, I like the sleekness of Ray of Light, but also the brazenness of Blonde Ambition. And you?)

The Fabulous Baker Brothers: The Review

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:07:00 +0000

Which one is the hot one, again?

I read an interview with Delia in the 1990s where she moaned that whenever she went round to someone’s house for dinner they always cooked something fancy, trying to impress her, and all she really wanted was fish and chips or something.

#firstworldproblems

But when I invited my friend the renowned-food-and-drinks-writer Douglas over for dinner, I knew how Delia’s mates felt. (Sidenote: does Delia actually have mates? She seems too robotic to have anything other than football players whom she patronises, in both senses of the word). But as Douglas is a man who knows his claret from his Beaujolais, I had to wanted something a bit special. So I picked the new Fabulous Bakers Brothers book off my desk – it had a chapter called “Things Men Like to Make,” and Douglas was a man, so it was a sure fire winner.

I’ll admit, I’ve not seen any episodes of their new Channel 4 show. I’ve meant to – they’re all stacked up and waiting on my Sky box – but, well, watching Shipwrecked has been prioritised over them (ohmygod! Anna! whaddabitch etc). Anyway, Caitlin Moran, head of that sixth form girls-esque group who rule Twitter, has already proclaimed them the worst human beings who have ever lived, so forming my own opinion on them seems pointless and obsolete. Anyway, at least one of them is quite fit (I’m never quite sure which one).

I began cooking three hours before Douglas, our friend Jo, and my boyfriend arrived. As a starter I chose their Fish Finger Sarnies with Tartare Sauce, which comes with the pleasing directive to “eat whilst looking at a rainy window and thinking the world isn’t so bad when you’ve got a fish finger sarnie.” We didn’t do that – we ate with a glass of Sunday Times Wine Club Champagne (which expert Douglas assured me “smelt pretty good”) and constant proclamations from me about how fun and easy they were to make, and gasps from everyone else how about awesome they were.

The Baker Boys fish fingers. To be eaten looking at the rain, apparently

And they were actually pretty good. “Who bothers to make their own effing fish fingers?” I grumbled to myself as I laid out a plate of flour, a bowl of milk and egg, and a plate of breadcrumbs as my action station. But the process appealed to my obsessive nature: roll, shake, dip, roll, repeat until you have eight fish fingers ready to shallow fry just before serving. As for the homemade tartare sauce, all it took was to chop a couple of capers, mix them with some gherkins, herbs and mayonnaise, and you had Douglas claiming it was the best tartare sauce he’d ever tasted. And he eats out for a living.

I felt like a proud dad. They worked! And were easy! And I almost ruined them by running out of butter and covering the bread in Utterly Butterly!

But then the night went downhill. “I’m following the book exactly,” I’d explained to Douglas and Jo as they arrived. “So anything that goes wrong is their fault, not mine. Of course, if it goes right, I’ll take the credit too.” Sadly, the good name of the Fabulous Baker Brothers got besmirched over the event of my Beef Wellington.

Their version of Beef Wellington. Mmm, meaty stuff that men like to cook…

It sounded easy enough. You seared the meet – that was fine, even when a bit of blood spattered on my fluffy white alpaca slippers – and then wrapped it in the leaves of a savoy cabbage with some wild mushrooms before encasing it in the pastry. “Don’t leave any holes in the cabbage casing,” the book warned, “that’s what will ruin the pastry!” It was impossible not to leave holes – the leaves just didn’t stick to each other. I bunged the whole thing in the oven anyway, forgot about it, and then nearly had a meltdown as I had to serve up a disintegrating mess. The meat was uncooked at the 1 hour time directive – I had to break my own rule about how I’m not meant to break any rules. “You can’t serve it this raw, you’ll poison them,” said my boyfriend as he hacked of thick chunks and quick fried them in a hot pan. The meat was tough and stringy. The pastry soggy and limp. The whole thing looked like a pile o’crap, or deconstructed, if you will. “Your broccoli is nice,” Douglas said gallantly, as I poured another glass of fizz.

My Beef Wellington. Meaty stuff that men don’t like to eat

The Rhubarb Queen of Puddings fell somewhere in the middle. The filling, poached with vanilla, sugar, orange zest and rosemary, was possibly the tastiest version of rhubarb I’ve ever had – and it smelled incredible whilst cooking. The base was fine to begin with, although the command to cook for 10-20 minutes, or until golden, actually meant it had to stay in the oven for 40. The Italian meringue was pretty good too – prepared by melting the sugar in the water until it got to 121C, and then pouring it into the beaten egg whites. With one hand on the electric whisk and another on the thermometer I had my second meltdown of the night. “Will!” I shouted at my boyfriend, who was busy getting drunk with the others in the living room. “I need you to hold this!” Thrusting the thermometer into his hand whilst I carried on beating the eggs, he looked at it rationally as it stuck at 106C. “It’s not going to get any hotter – it’s water,” he explained calmly, as if talking to an infant.

Their Rhubarb Queen of Puddings.To be fair, it does look pretty gay

Following a verbal tirade I accepted he had a point and poured the liquid into the eggs – it created the glossiest, smoothest meringue I’ve seen. The whole thing went into the oven happily. “Well, the pudding will be a success,” I boasted.

It tasted a lot better than it looked. The base would have made a nice cocktail, maybe?

“Why is the base so watery?” Jo asked 20 minutes later, looking at her meringue-covered rhubarb soup. “Can I have more of the topping?” Verdict: it tasted good, but looked like sick. Ah, but at least one of the Fabulous Baker Boys is hot.

Cost of ingredients, to serve 4: £37.87 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter: * * * * *

Main: No stars

Pudding: * * (for the meringue and aromatic rhubarb)

Easiness * *

Overall marks: 4/10 – the fish fingers were excellent, some of the bread recipes look good, and one of the Brothers is kinda pretty.

The Fabulous Baker Brothers: As Seen on Channel 4 by Henry Herbert and Tom Herbert

Published by Headline. Official photographs by Chris Terry.

Full of Flavour by Maria Elia – The Review

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Maria’s chicken. How hard can a spatchcocking be?

“You need to spatchcock the chicken. Calm down, it’s not as scary as it sounds!” begins the recipe, complete with its own friendly exclamation mark, for Slow-Roasted Paprika Chicken with Butternut Squash, Smashed Butter Beans and Tomatoes. Obviously I panicked. The vague instructions spoke about cutting off the wing tips with scissors and then chopping out the backbone. Mid-meltdown, I made my boyfriend do it. “Shall we watch a video on youtube?” he asked. But that’s against the rules – the plan is to cook every recipe exactly as the book says, using only the book and no initiative, to judge how good it really is.

Fortunately my boyfriend is made of sterner stuff, and with the chicken now as spineless as me I was able to make the simple marinade and stick it in the fridge overnight.

The next morning, hungover, and with guests arriving in three hours for lunch, the act of cooking felt like too much. You know when you’ve drunk too much and everything is an effort, and why is there no Lucozade in the house and who are all these new characters in Hollyoaks? Yes, that. Anyway, I took to my bed in a fit, bemoaning that preparing the parsnips three different ways for my Truffled Parsnip Salad starter was more than I could bear. In fact, two hours later, showered and almost without the sicky feeling the previous night’s wine had caused, it wasn’t. Cubing two and frying them in a lake of butter, roasting two more in the oven (the book said for ten minutes, or until golden brown – this actually took 30) and turning two more into a puree was as difficult as the whole meal got. Every stage was simple, the flavours in each – truffle oil with the cubes, sage with the roasts, milk in the puree – seeming like they could never be anything but delicious.

Maria’s Truffle Parsnip Salad. Everyone loves a good threeway

My replica. Liderally as amazing as it looked

And the chicken couldn’t have been easier too. Slowly roasting for two hours with the butternut squash, there was nothing to do but baste it every half hour, then add the beans at the very end. Obviously, post-strop, I was behind schedule, and our two guests arrived, on time, once it had been cooking for 30 mins. “Who turns up punctually to a Sunday lunch?” I bitched to my long-suffering boyfriend as Matt and Mark arrived with two bottles of prosecco and a bunch of lillies. “Lovely to see you,” I said cheerfully. “Hope you’re not hungry, dinner won’t be for aaaaaaages.” As the whole flat filled with the smell of paprika-y goodness we broke out the cheese Doritos. They’re practically a palette cleanser, right?

My chicken. Almost the same, right? Note the lack of crushed beans. Bitch gotta work for them

The best thing about this dinner was that there was now nothing I needed to do, except wait. We drank the fizz, had a chat, and opened another bag of salt and vinegar Kettle chips – it was the most relaxed and non-stressful three course Sunday lunch ever. The meat was tender, juicy, full of flavour, the squash and beans the perfect accompaniment. It was a dish that looked impressive, smelt amazing, and yet you felt almost sheepish for how easy it was – spatchcocking notwithstanding. The only difficulty came when the book said to mash the butter beans in the roasting dish – but they were all mixed up with the tomatoes and butternut squash, and a pool of incredible juice. I half heartedly managed to crush a few but as they started to make a mush with the tomatoes I gave up and served them whole.

Maria’s trifles. Sweet. Yes, really.

My mother never swears, instead using “Rhubarb” as a cuss word. We don’t know why, we’ve stopped questioning it, just one of those things mums do like ironing old wrapping paper to be re-used after Christmas, or recording Songs of Praise. To me, though, rhubarb is the most perfect ingredient, so tasty and easy and versatile. The Rhubarb, Rosewater and Ginger Trifle didn’t let me down – the whole course took just a few minutes to make after I’d put the chicken in the oven and tasted as creamy and perfect as a pudding can be. Obviously, mine didn’t look as neat as the ones in the book’s picture, but then it still goes down the same way, amiright?

And the homemade version. Not *too* shabby

Every plate of every course was returned clean, and after my unnecessary strop, which I’m blaming on the hangover rather than the recipes, it was easier than pouring another glass of wine. “I’m going to buy this book,” said Mark, leafing through it over coffee after lunch, stopping at a Middle Eastern Inspired Eton Mess which mixes Turkish Delight into the meringue. And I would recommend you do the same.

Cost of ingredients, to serve 4: £28.73 (not including items already in store cupboard)

Starter: * * * * *

Main * * * * *

Dessert * * * * *

Easiness * * * * (Spatchcocking? Really?)

Overall marks: 9.5/10

Maria Elia: Full of Flavour

Published by Kyle Cathie. Official pictures by Jonathan Gregson.

Coming Soon: Full of Flavour Maria Elia

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:37:52 +0000

Full of Flavour is one of those books that, hungover, you leaf through bemoaning the fact that nobody is on hand to make any - just one - of the recipes, all of which look amazing, and truly what you feel like right now, and why are they all such an effort and how come there isn’t any Lucozade left, and oh, God, perhaps you’re not quite ready for food yet after all…

Well, this Sunday I’m going to pick a starter, main, and pudding, and make all three exactly as I’m told. And there is every likelihood that yes, I’ll be hungover.