Last night, I was cooking dinner.
I took a large celeriac in a plastic bag out of the fridge and asked my wife whether she wanted it with our meal. With a look of surprise on her face, she said “What’s that, a human head?”.
As if I normally keep my severed heads in plastic bags in the fridge!
Normality in the Rosam household.
Wow! My habitual and usually fruitless searching for Ridgways Organic Leaf Tea hit the jackpot in Tesco in Shoreham yesterday.
I bought six packets, just in case Tesco gets bored with stocking it again.
Something I invented this evening, method based on Chicken with Nutmeg from River Café Cook Book Easy, a favourite recipe in the Rosam household.
1.5kg organic chicken
4 pickled lemons
Pack of fresh thyme
1 head of garlic
125ml dry vermouth
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
Serves 4.
Heat the oven to 190 deg C or Gas 5.
Open up a pocket between the breast skin and meat on each side of the chicken. Chop up the pickled lemons roughly.
Put half of the lemons and one-third of the thyme into each pocket. Then put the remaining thyme and the garlic in the body cavity.
Rub the chicken all over with good quality olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
Place the chicken breast-side down in a roasting pan and put in the pre-heated oven. After 30 minutes, add the vermouth, and cook for a further 60 minutes. Turn the chicken over for the last 20 minutes.
Let the chicken sit for 20 minutes before carving. Reserve the pan juices.
Pour off any fat from the pan juices, and bubble to reheat. Stir to incorporate any roasted or sticky bits, adjust seasoning and pour over the carved chicken.
Serve with a mashed root vegetable – celeriac, swede or potato – and a steamed green vegetable. Take the roasted garlic from the chicken’s cavity and squeeze two or more garlic cloves into the vegetables during mashing.
A few weeks ago I bought a real cookbook – The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This is a huge tome, with 200 pages of background before you get some recipes. These days, I’m increasingly hungry for theory and detail, rather than lifestyle – although Meat is perhaps more fundamentally about lifestyle than anything by Nigella Lawson.
Meat is written with passion, and the recipes look great – I haven’t cooked much from it, but I think I know a good book when I see it. I really want to invite some friends round and cook some meat.
But what has annoyed me is the duff indexing. I wanted a recipe for lamb shanks, so I went straight for Meat. Nothing under Lamb, shanks. Poo! So I spend some time looking for a recipe amongst my other books. Do you know, even with several shelves populated with the things, I couldn’t find one recipe.
Then I had a flash of inspiration. Perhaps it’s under Shanks, lamb. Of course it is. But not the recipe – only the anatomical and cooking theory of the lamb shank. But on that page, it tells me there’s a recipe on page 300.
It’s called Citrus-braised Lamb Shanks. Are you one step ahead of me? Of course, it is in the index, under Lamb… But would you really look for Citrus-braised Lamb Shanks, rather than Lamb, shanks, citrus-braised or Lamb shanks, citrus-braised?
The art of indexing has really gone out the window. Most are put together automatically with software and tags, with no view to how people will actually use the index. If the index turns out to be consistently that bad, the book will get far less use than if it had a good one.
It’s not only Web sites that fail usability tests.
Bacon sandwiches!
Especially when you didn’t realise there was any bacon in the house.
Does this bode well for Easter?
Seems that bread exhibits fractal characteristics. Somehow I missed out on that little factoid.
And just to prove it:
Midwood Chaos: The Fractal Dimension of Bread
So what’s it doing on Dangerous Thinking? Well, I’ve been reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s second course of writings about food Was it something I ate? (it’s just as essential reading as his first, The man who ate everything) and it kind of got dropped in the man’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable prose.
Does this man have my ideal job? I wonder…
I very seldom eat in Brighton. Not that there’s anything wrong with the restaurants there, as a whole, but we have some nice ones within walking distance here in Worthing.
But last night we went to celebrate a friend’s birthday. She chose a place called the Cactus Canteen, a Tex-Mex restaurant just off the lanes.
Please make a note of that, in case you’re tempted to eat there.
The food was of poor quality, the service slow, and the prices high for the ingredients used and the lack of skill demonstrated by the kitchen – one of our number had to send back her ribs because they were so fatty and unpleasant, my main course Chimichanga was fried to crispy oblivion, and I’ve been physically sick overnight.
Do yourself a favour and find somewhere else to eat.
I’ll make a note of this, while I think of it.
It’s a kind of evolution of Jamie Oliver and other pasta recipes I’ve made recently, incorporating all the things I’ve liked best from them.
For two
Half a pack of rigatoni
A splash of olive oil
A red onion, thinly sliced
Pack of cubed pancetta
Half an organic red pepper, sliced fairly small
About four pieces of sundried tomatoes in oil, roughly chopped
About ten black Greek-style olives, stoned and cut roughly into four
Six sage leaves, finely chopped
About a tablespoon of good quality balsamic vinegar (must be a sweet, flavoursome vinegar)
Freshly ground black pepper
Fresh Parmesan to serve
Put a large pan of salted water on to boil. Add the rigatoni when it hits a rolling boil
While the rigatoni cooks, start frying the onion in a little olive oil. As the onion starts to soften, after about two minutes, add the pancetta and fry over a medium heat. Add the red pepper just as the pancetta starts to colour. Continue cooking until onions are caramelised and pancetta is crisp. Remove from the heat.
Once the rigatoni is cooked, drain and return to the pan. Add the pancetta, onions and red peppers, plus the olives, tomatoes and sage. Stir. Sprinkle in the balsamic vinegar and stir. Add a good grind of black pepper and check seasoning. It shouldn’t need any salt.
Serve with a good grating of Parmesan and a green salad.
Wandering around Tesco in Hatfield last weekend, I found a bottle of Leffe Blonde/Blond Belgian beer, with a champagne-type cork, complete with metal basket.
Today is Friday, so it’s time to open it. And it’s great, with a flavour that only comes with Belgian beer.
I have told you about my theory that the Belgians have had one over on us?
You know how boring the place is, don’t you? I think it’s a conspiracy so they can keep hold of their great food, chocolate and beer!
A little experimentation over the past few days when good old Blighty has had some nice weather for a change has shown how the posher the establishment, the worse its ability to deliver cold drinks – be it alcoholic or soft.
Take the Crowne Plaza Hotel, London St James, in Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1, just around the corner from our good Queen’s central London pied a terre, for example. On Friday afternoon, Mark Pruul of MarkOne Creative Consultancy and myself found ourselves in the hotel’s rather beautiful courtyard, complete with fountain and assorted flunkies.
The Kingfisher beers we ordered were cold (just), but nowhere near the tonsil-freezing level the ambient temperatures demanded. We asked if they had any other beers that were colder. ‘No’, was the response. So we asked for a Vodka and Tonic and Rum and Coke with lots of ice. They thought lots of ice meant four tiny ice cubes. We scrounged some more from another bar, paid our bill and left.
The pub around the corner solved nice cold drinks at a fraction of the price and had a wonderful dog (a kind of white Alsatian-like creature) to stroke, too. Must go back there – unfortunately, the name of the establishment escapes me.
And pubs have been on the ball all weekend, too. Maybe they can start freezing the glasses like they do in the States…
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