Roast lamb for idiots.

The weekend before Christmas I was invited to an early, not very festive lunch - which I cooked. I was supposed to only be doing a pudding (which I’m clearly an old hand at) but our elected chef cancelled a few days before. I stood up and decided to take the main-course bullet. “I’ll get the take-away menus out then” joked our host and oh! how we laughed. Until I threatened to lynch his pug. Which surprisingly wasn’t a euphemism.

I decided to cook slow roasted lamb, roast potatoes and veg with pigs in blankets. I know they’re supposed to go with chicken but they really are my favourite bit of Christmas. I spend weeks desperately waiting for December to start so I can start wrapping pigs in pigs. They just don’t taste as good at any other time of year.

I popped to the meat counter in Waitrose because I couldn’t make it to the butchers and got a shoulder of lamb as I really can’t stand fatty meat. My old flat mate used to love having a fry up with me as I’d spend five minutes carefully cutting all the fat off my bacon which I then dunked on his plate.

I’ll admit I bought ready-made pigs in blankets but they’re very easy to make. I think small, plain sausages are best, with smoked streaky bacon. If you wrap a sprig of rosemary with the sausage it gives them quite a nice flavour. The Waitrose website has quite a good recipe for a honey, Tabasco and bourbon glaze. You mix two tablespoons of bourbon, 10 drops of Tabasco and four tablespoons of clear honey together and you’re done. And a bit drunk.

Maris Piper potatoes are one of the best for roasting as they’re waxy. There’s a very good reason this is good but I can’t for the life of me remember it. Par boil the potatoes for ten minutes in slightly salty water (science bit: salt makes the cells break up quicker which helps the crunch factor). If you swish them around in a colander it roughens the surface giving you more crunchy bits. Some people dust potatoes in flour to help them stay crisp when they’re out of the oven. I’ve never bothered with anything like that as mine are usually in my tummy before they have a chance to soften.

While I pre-heated an oven at 150°c, though it might have been 180°c as all the numbers had worn off the dial, I used a knife to poke some holes through the lamb – while gleefully pretending to stab a tiny little person - which I then stuffed with quarter of a clove of garlic and a lot of rosemary. I did this after having a little cry about the blood that was in the packaging with the lamb. God, I really am suited to this cooking lark.

I then wrapped the lamb in some tin foil and stuck it in the oven for an hour. After a few very limey cosmos I unwrapped the meat and stuck the potatoes in for another hour and a half. If you turn them half way through this stops the bottom sticking to the baking tray and gives you more crispy bits.

Anyway in the words of someone doing a really rubbish Jamie Oliver impression: bish bash bosh, all done, pukka me old china. Laaaahvly!

Antipasti of Mozzarella, Chilli and Lemon Crostini

This is supposed to be a starter but I found it really filling so would recommend it as a slightly fancy snack instead.

Ciabatta bread
1 clove of garlic
Extra virgin olive oil
Buffalo mozzarella
Salt and black pepper
1 red chilli
Basil
Lemon zest

Before you start deseed the chilli and slice it very, very thin. It’s a quick recipe so you may as well faff around with that first rather than half way through making it. I’ll admit I cheated as the note on the chilli that said ‘DO NOT HANDLE WITHOUT GLOVES’ scared me. Rather than using the fresh stuff - and risk doing something idiotic like rubbing my eyes - I threw a load of dried chilli seeds in the olive oil and let them sit in there for a bit instead.

You need to heat a griddle pan – which I actually have for once – as hot as you can and dunk however many slices of cibatta you want in it for a minute or two each side until they’ve charred slightly.

Cut the garlic clove in half and rub each slice of ciabatta with it before drizzling them with some olive oil. Place some torn mozzarella on each and add as much salt and pepper as you like. Now artily sprinkle over the chilli, basil and lemon zest and a tiny bit more olive oil. Done!

Pesto and Hummus

I am an incredibly fussy eater which has made it difficult for me to find anything - that isn’t some sort of biscuit - to cook that I will eat.

Two things I love however are pesto and hummus. I actually get cravings for Strada’s pesto bread. Whenever I eat there I shovel down a whole basket of the stuff and then have no room for my main. And a favourite snack of mine is brown toast smothered in hummus. Mmmm hot and yummy.

So it seemed obvious to give them both a whirl and see how they turned out. I started with pesto and I think I got the recipe from the Jamie Oliver website.


Pesto

Half a clove of garlic
Sea salt
3 big handfuls of fresh basil leaves, chopped up
1 handful of pine nuts, very lightly toasted
1 generous handful of freshly grated Parmesan
Extra virgin olive oil

Take the garlic, a little sprinkle of salt and the basil and put them in to a food processor and pulse, or use a pestle and mortar and pound them up. I don’t have either of these things so I used my improvisational talents and put a bit of cling film over the end of a rolling pin and hoped for the best. I bashed away and after a while had a nice basily mush which smelt amazing. Of course because I seem to have an actual disability when it comes to reading ingredients I managed to put in a whole clove of garlic rather than half.

I heated a frying pan and tossed the pine nuts about for a while even though I have no idea what they should look like when they’re toasted. Turns out they go brown. They went in my make-shift mortar and got crushed nicely, which took a while but was quite fun and satisfying.

Tip everything out in to a bowl and add half the Parmesan, stirring it in gently and adding enough olive oil to bind it all together. Season with salt and pepper, add the rest of the cheese (why you have to halve the Parmesan is beyond me) and then some more oil, have a little taste and keep adding cheese and olive oil until it meets your pesto standards.

Mine, I think, needed far more basil and a bit less garlic, but is still quite yummy. And I had lots of fun making a pestle and mortar so bonus points for that.


Hummus (no idea where I got this from)

125g dried chickpeas soaked in water overnight
The juice and zest of one lemon
2 tablespoons of tahini
2 cloves of garlic
120ml of extra virgin olive oil
A pinch of salt

I cheated with the chickpeas and rather than being terribly middle class about it and soaking dried ones I was just a bit middle class about it and bought a tin of organic ones from Waitrose and used those instead. For anyone who doesn’t open tins of chickpeas very often be warned that they smell a bit like cat food.

I stuck them in the blender, though you should use a food processor, and added the garlic, lemon zest and the juice, a little bit of salt and the tahini. For anyone like me who’s never really been near any fancy ingredients (which is definitely what I class this as) tahini is sesame seed paste. I completely forgot to buy any when I was shopping and so after an emergency call to someone in Tesco I ended up with what looks like very thick and creamy tahini dressing, and may in fact be just that. Though to be honest for all I know that’s exactly what tahini looks like.

Anyway, whiz everything up together and pour in the olive oil while the blender/food processor is on.

You want the hummus to be smoothish so if it’s still a bit lumpy add some cold water, again while it’s still blending.

Stick your finger in – when the motor is off, obviously – and have a taste. If it’s a bit bland add a tiny bit more salt.

My hummus turned out very, very lemony and a bit runny, I think I’d use less olive oil and only half a lemon and see how that goes but other than that it quite impressively seems like something I would drown pitta bread in.

Thought of the day...

Something completely unrelated to cooking, but close to my heart: I really think there should be a watershed for emails with penises in them.

Before 10am seems like a no go for genitalia you’re not already familiar with. There's nothing worse than spitting cornflakes all over your keyboard because the editorial assistant at FHM decides to share the magazine's inbox with you.

Why are people so weird?! I mean whoever sent that email, not Sarah from FHM. I’m used to her penis emails now. I don’t think I’ve ever ‘stumbled’ across some weird grot on the internet and thought it would be a great idea to forward it on to anyone - and definitely not to a whole office full of people I don’t know. And no one believes you found that by accident. I can barely find my own emails, never mind a photo of a man in tights with his one-eyed explorer hanging out.

Turkish delight

While I’m not too fond of Turkish delight my dad adores it. Every year for his birthday and for Christmas my mum would send him a box of it from me as I was too young and then too lazy to do it myself. This hasn’t happened for a good few years now so I thought that it would be quite nice to try and master it this month in time to send some over to him for the 25th.

I used Esther Walker’s recipe (http://reciperifle.blogspot.com) rather than one that made it seem like I needed industrial kitchen equipment and a degree in biochemical engineering.

Stuff what it’s made of:
25g of powdered gelatine
255ml of water
4 teaspoons of rose water
450g of caster sugar
3 to 4 drops of red food dye
Icing sugar to dust the finished product with

I measured out 450g of caster sugar on my rubbish scales. And then realised how truly rubbish they are. Because the bag was 500g and when it hit 450 it was empty. So I poured what I hoped was 50g back and prayed. Then I hit my first real hurdle (I can count in tens so Sugar-gate doesn’t really count). How much was in the sachet of gelatine?! The box said 70g, there were six sachets in the box, was that 70g a sachet or the whole box? Oh GOD. Then I read the back; a whole sachet set half a pint of water and with my mind skills I worked out that I needed half a sachet. When I say mind skills I mean I filled up a pint glass with water, measure it in a jug and realised that 255ml is just over half a pint. So I poured the water in to a pan and added half the gelatine. Then I stirred it a bit and realised I’d put the whole pint of water in. So that went down the drain with a whole lot of hot water which I hoped meant it wouldn’t set in the pipes.

Once I’d put the right amount of water and gelatine back in the pan and added the sugar I put it on a low heat and stirred continuously until it all dissolved. At least I think it did, it took so long I gave up after about twenty minutes. It was really quite hard to tell if it was still grainy because it was a murky brown colour, a bit like stock. In hindsight I think this was because I used organic caster sugar which is a lot darker than the normal stuff.

Then I turned the heat up and brought it to the boil without stirring. I was a bit disturbed by the scummy froth that came to the surface and stuck all round the sides because this made me remember that gelatine comes from the inside of cow’s feet and… pig’s skulls… or something equally disgusting.

Then for twenty five minutes I let it simmer and probably ruined it by smoking a fag over it and stirring it several times because doing that made me feel slightly more in control.

After my buzzer cocked up and didn’t go off after twenty five minutes I took the pan off the stove and tried to add the food colouring. The huge flaw with those little bottles is that they don’t come with some sort of pipette. It just pours out so I think I added about a spoonful rather than a few drops. It also went all over my hands making it look as though I’d spent the day in an abattoir which just made me think about the origins of gelatine again.

I’d greased a cake tin with groundnut oil earlier and let the mixture cool for a few minutes before pouring it in. I was worried that it would all leak out of the loose base so I stuck it on a load of kitchen roll. I realised that if it did seep out of the tin this would all stick to the countertop so as an extra measure I made a little fort out of tinfoil. ‘Ingenious!’ I hear you cry but I’m modest so I’ll pretend I didn’t notice.

The Turkish delight should set in twenty four hours after which you cut it up and cover it in icing sugar. And then shove it all in your mouth and not let anyone else try any.

Unfortunately mine was the consistency of yoghurt and had leaked everywhere. The only place for it was the bin. I was strangely Zen about this and rather than just shout and give up as usual I decided I’d make another batch.

This time I used just under a whole sachet of gelatine and used normal, battery farmed caster sugar. It was a much better colour and a lot thicker just before I boiled it than the first lot. And unlike the first lot the mixture went mental as it was simmering. I gave it a stir and a huge amount of white foam reared up and nearly came out of the pan. I probably didn’t help matters by poking it quite a bit so I could giggle and gawp when it reacted and bubbled up.

I left this one to set in a greased dish as my cake tin was still covered in my first attempt and hoped that this time I had cracked it.

I hadn’t. It looked quite promising but when I tipped the dish a bit it slowly oozed everywhere. There was no way it was coming out so I had to spoon most of it in to the bin before boiling the rest off it off the sides. Again I calmly greased the now clean cake tin and started from scratch.

With the phrase ‘third time lucky’ ringing in my ears I decided on a new approach. I weighed out all six sachets from the box of gelatine and realised that they were 70g all together, which works out as nearly 12g a sachet. This of course could explain the slop I made before. This time I used two sachets. I also decided to not stir it at all as it simmered. Around ten minutes after being dunked in the tin it was already quite stiff.

When I got home from work the next day the whole thing was ready to come out of the tin. Sort of. I managed to get the bottom out with some effort (and a satisfying squelch) but I was left with a big ring of Turkish delight stuck to a metal base. I covered a chopping board with icing sugar to stop it gluing itself to that, got a spatula and eased the whole thing off slowly. Very slowly. Now I set to work chopping it up. The chunks I’ve got weren’t really the perfect shape as my cake tin is quite wide, so rather than nice cubes I’ve got funny little rectangles. I doused them in more icing sugar, stuck them in a tub and voila! Turkish delight.

I still need to perfect this a bit as there was a bit of froth on the mixture when I poured it out and this had hardened into a bit of a sugary crust on some parts– which sounds oh so appetising but isn’t really too awful. It’s a little bit chewy but I think I’m nearly there.

Shortbread

Shortbread only has three ingredients so it seemed like something I might be able to make. I got a recipe from the Channel Four website for vanilla shortbread that should make twenty four biscuits. It also gives you the nutritional information which I in my neurotic way quite like. Per serving they are 124kcals, 4.6g of saturated fat and 15.5g of carbohydrates. While that’s not that great it’s good to know.

I love the fact that this recipe only has a few ingredients and they are:
1 vanilla pod
100g of caster sugar and a tiny bit extra ‘for sprinkling’
200g of unsalted butter. I used Anchor mainly because I still have fond memories of the adverts with cows. You also need a bit more for greasing
300g of plain sifted flour and again some more for dusting

First off scrape the seeds from the vanilla pod and mix them in to the butter with a wooden spoon. Channel Four includes the handy tip of storing the vanilla pod in a jar of sugar to flavour it. Thanks Channel Four, tell me that now. Because the seeds are sticky you really need to spend some time stirring it all up so they separate and you don’t just have big brown lumps floating about.

You need to mix the sugar and the butter until it’s lightly creamed. The butter should be softened but mine was just room temperature and sweet Christ did it take an age. With all this mixing I’m going to have the muscular right arm of a fifteen-year-old boy.
Once this is done add the flour and a tiny bit of salt and mix it together to form a soft dough. Mine started to look a bit like breadcrumbs so I got my hands in there to blend it together. I don’t know if you should do that or not but it seemed to work and was strangely relaxing. After this wrap it in clingfilm or use a sandwich bag like me and stick it in the fridge for an hour or overnight.

The website now says ‘store the shortbread in an airtight container in a cool place for up to three days.’ I wasn’t sure if this meant you were supposed to leave it for a few days before you cooked it or was just a suggestion for storing the actual biscuits. So I ignored it.

As the whole recipe was quite simple while my vanilla dough was chilling in the fridge I made another batch of just plain old shortbread. After an hour or so I took the first lot of dough out of the fridge and it was rock hard, like Play-Doh left out for a week. There was absolutely no way I could roll it out so I kneaded it for a bit until it was more malleable. When I threw a bit of flour down and went at it with the vaguely virginal rolling pin it cracked but after squeezing it about a bit I managed to get enough dough to stay together in the middle to roll it out to about 5mm. To get twenty four biscuits you should use an 8cm round fluted cutter – apparently – but I’ve got no idea what size the one I bought today is but its biscuit sized at least. I managed to get forty four. Bloody hell. Leave them sitting for ten minutes before baking.

The shortbread should take around fifteen minutes in a preheated oven at 160° on a greased baking tray. Mine took around twenty to twenty five minutes to get a nice golden brown. Once I’d taken them out I shoved them on a baking tray to cool. And… wait for it… They tasted great! Like actual shortbread! As there were so many of them I put one half in the oven first and the second half went in as those were cooling.

My plain shortbread dough was a bit softer than the vanilla but still needed warming up slightly when I took it out of the fridge and still cracked a bit when I rolled it out. But I managed to get forty eight biscuits out of it and they turned out bloody good too.

I’m actually amazed which is a bit sad seeing as these biscuits are basically just butter, sugar and flour. But still, I managed to bake something!

Orange and cinnamon butter biscuits

Cheesecake knocked me down but I got up again. And made biscuits.

I got the recipe for lemon butter biscuits off Jamie Oliver’s website. I took his advice and decided to make them a bit more festive by replacing the lemons with oranges and adding cinnamon.

You need:
125g of butter
100g of caster sugar
1 egg
200g of plain flour
The juice and zest of two lemons (or one orange)
¼ teaspoon of baking powder
A pinch of sea salt
Plain flour, for dusting afterwards
3 tablespoons of demerara sugar
And cinnamon if you’ve making orange biscuits

And I actually managed to put all the ingredients in this time!

Put the butter and the sugar in a bowl and use an electric mixer to whoosh it all up until it’s creamy. I’ve never used the electric whisk before and it was terrifying. It should come with heavy-duty earmuffs and an arm rest - I’m actually so lazy I got tired using a machine. Beat in the egg until the mixture is fluffy and light. Then add the flour, the lemon or orange juice and zest, baking powder and salt and mix it in until your poor arm aches. At this point you’re meant to have a ball of dough but mine was a bit like very thick cake mix. It already wasn’t looking good. I started having terrible cheesecake flashbacks but managed to cover the dough and stick it in the fridge for two hours.

My ‘dough’ came out of the fridge quite firm. That tiny seed of hope nestled at the very bottom of my heart blossomed. Until I tried to get the sloppy goop I was planning to bake out of the bowl. My hands were covered in the stuff. You could plaster walls with it. I dunked half a bag of flour down on the surface and coated my rolling pin (new today!) in it. I managed to form a large ball from the dough and things seemed to be looking up. Until I rolled it out. It stuck, fast. Rather than denting the work top and then my skull with my rolling pin I persevered, cutting some lovely biscuit shapes out. With a tumbler. Trying to tug the glass up sounded like pulling your leg, minus one expensive welly, out of a marsh. My uncooked biscuits were not to be moved. In the end I scooped the whole lot up and shoved it on a greased baking tray. I used a cake slice to smooth it out to the required ½cm and sprinkled on the demerara and cinnamon (no cinnamon if you’re doing lemon biscuits) and stuck it in the oven at 180°. If you managed not to bugger the whole thing up like I did you can take your lovely biscuits out after 10 to 12 minutes. I checked on my giant sugary thing after ten minutes and realised it would probably take around double that time as the middle had grown to about two inches thick. I broke a nice brown bit off the edge for an early taste test and it wasn’t that bad. Twenty five minutes later it was still cooking. After ten minutes more I took The Blob out of the oven and shoved it on a rack to cool.

While the whole thing looked like a gingerbread man had been sick it actually tasted okay. Not brilliant, Jamie Oliver would have been very disappointed in me, but edible. When I started cooking I thought I’d take the result in to the office and get everyone’s verdict but I think I’ll wait until I manage to make something that actually looks like food.


I am quite disappointed I couldn’t even make biscuits – something any self respecting six-year-old has mastered. I’ve managed to make a mess of everything I’ve made so far but I am going to keep trying. Cooking is really quite fun if I ignore the massive tantrums I’ve thrown when things go wrong.

Raspberry Mules

To go with my absolutely atrocious cheesecake I decided to make raspberry mules, which I drank while waiting for the cake to cool, rather than as a delicious accompaniment to the world’s worst flour and cream cheese dish.

I dunked a tin of raspberries, with the juice, and some fresh ones in the blender with some mint leaves, the juice of one lime and a gargantuan slosh of vodka - whizzed it up and then topped up with ginger beer. Yummy.

Cheesecake

Today I decided to do something stupid. That stupid thing was to make a cheesecake.

I got the recipe off the Waitrose website which handily let me know that Philadelphia cream cheese is the best thing to make this with. I won’t bore you with the Waitrose cooking instructions as I found them more confusing than a Pynchon novel. I have read them about nine times and I still have no idea what they’re telling me to do.

For the crust you need:
50g of caster sugar
150g of plain flour
Grated zest from ½ a lemon
Seeds from ½ a vanilla pod
1 large egg yolk
125g butter, diced

Typing this out I realised I put in 150g of butter and forgot the lemon zest.

For the filling:
600g of cream cheese
180g of caster sugar
1 tbsp of plain flour
Grated zest of one orange
Grated zest of one lemon (it’s good I forgot this in the crust as I only bought one lemon)
Seeds from ½ a vanilla pod
2 large eggs and 1 egg yolk. I used the white left over from the crust, but I’m sure that’s fine…
2 tbsp of double cream


To prepare the crust you need to put the flour, caster sugar, lemon zest (whoops) and vanilla seeds into a food processor and ‘pulse briefly’. I don’t have a food processor so I used a bowl and a spoon and nothing but man power. I knew how to get the seeds out of the vanilla pod from watching Something For The Weekend most Sundays with a hangover. But I didn’t realise that they’re really quite sticky and you’re more likely to slice through your thumb than do this easily. For any one who doesn’t know; you have to slice the pod in half and scrape the seeds out with the blade of the knife. Well, that’s what I did anyway. By this point I was swearing a lot and decided to put Queen on to drown myself out.
Now add the egg yolk and the right amount of butter and use your fancy-pants kitchen equipment or be a man about it and use elbow grease to combine it.
This ends up as a big sticky lump that you then need to squash into a disk, cover in clingfilm and stick in the fridge for an hour. I had a fight with the roll of clingfilm and used a sandwich bag instead.

I used this hour to glare and mutter at the evil roll of clingfilm, drink a beer and text the Best Friend ‘I’m making a cheesecale!’. Always double check predictive text. And cooking instructions.

Next up is the filling. Put the flour, caster sugar, vanilla seeds and zest in a bowl and mix together until smooth. My cream cheese was straight out of the fridge which made this a bit tough at the beginning and while grating the lemon I got some juice in my eye, but you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. Add the eggs and the yolk/white one by one and make sure you blend it all together properly after each egg and then add the cream. My huge bowl of off-white gunk started to smell and look a bit like cheesecake at this point which was weirdly satisfying. Though I’ve just remembered that I forgot to put any cream in… Bugger.

Take the crust out of the fridge and roll half of it out until its 3mm thick. I suddenly realised that I don’t own a rolling pin so washed my beer bottle from earlier (look at me recycling) and used this. Every time the bastard stuff got thin enough it tore and then stuck to the kitchen surface even though I’d sprinkled flour absolutely everywhere. I finally got it done and shoved it on the base of the cake tin. You’re meant to use 20cm-diameter springform tin but I made do with a twenty one(!) cm diameter shallow cake tin with a removable base.
Once you’ve covered the bottom of the tin put it in a pre-heated oven at 200°c for ten to fifteen minutes until its set and a nice golden brown colour then leave it to cool on a rack.

When my little cakey base was cool I tried to put it back in the tin but it had grown a bit and cracked all round the edges. I ended up just forcing it in and covering any gaps with the crumbs which wasn’t very neat. Once you’ve got the bottom in the tin you need to line the sides with the remaining crust-dough stuff. I cut mine in to strips and overlapped the sides and then covered any holes left at the bottom with small bits of the dough, then trimmed the top to fit. Once you’ve done this you need to pour the filling in. It looked as though there was far too much for my tiny tin but it fit perfectly. Level the top and then put in the oven at 140°c for an hour.

Even though the filling was exactly the right amount I had loads of dough left over which was a bit strange and quite annoying.

After letting it cool and then sticking it in the fridge for a bit I took it out of the cake tin. The bottom was stuck to the base and the whole thing looked quite greasy. The cake itself was a bit soggy, rather than firm and spongy and the crust around the sides looked half cooked. I had half a mouthful which I couldn’t swallow as all I could taste was soapy flour but Sous Chef Mum had two slices. The whole thing took hours and the end result definitely wasn’t worth it. I’m sure that that’s down to my baking skills rather than the recipe though. I imagine that leaving out several ingredients didn’t help but boo to Waitrose recipe cheesecake. If anyone knows where I went wrong please do let me know.