Scones

Long time no see. I haven’t been cooking at all recently as I’ve been living off whatever Mummy Duggers deems fit to stock the fridge with. (Unfortunately this isn’t lamb shanks, rabbit or quail. Unless it’s for the cats of course…) This is because I quit the Scary New Job which had become the I Want To Kill Myself Every Morning Job.

Unemployment is liberating and wonderful, though not stress free. Every time I get a letter from Lloyds I am convinced that as soon as I open it bailiffs will suddenly appear at the front door. Also coming up to Christmas it’s quite depressing to realise that your account balance is -£9.47.

I suppose that I’m technically freelance, though what I’m freelancing in is a bit of a mystery. I have been doing a couple of week’s work at a new iPad magazine, mainly getting the editor sandwiches as everyone is still trying to work out why I’m actually there and what I should really be doing.

Unneeded last week I raided the cupboards after finding a scribbled recipe for scones I must have got from somewhere. This didn’t take too long as all they are is:

300ml of milk (I used skimmed as this is all we ever have)
450g of self-raising flower
80g of unsalted butter
3 tablespoons of caster sugar
A pinch of salt

Cut the butter into little cubes. Weirdly this is something I really, really enjoy.

Sieve the flour, sugar and salt together and rub in the butter until it all looks like breadcrumbs. This takes a while but it’s so, so satisfying. My friend Alex has an odd phobia of getting things on her hands. She can’t touch flour. It’s very strange and completely irrelevant but I thought I’d mention it just in case you’re the same. If you are then you’ll have to live with shop-bought scones. I’m sure there is a way of rubbing butter into flour without actually doing it but I’ve no real idea.

It’s a very short journey from my favourite bit to the bit I find mind numbingly boring. With a knife mix the milk in splosh by tiny sposh. And when I say tiny splosh I mean tiny splosh. I made these again yesterday and my first batch was soaking. The dough ended up being like superglue and covered my hands when I picked it up to see if I could roll it into a ball. I honestly thought I’d be stuck there for an hour until Mummy Duggers got back from Tesco. Though I’d like to make it clear that I don’t actually know if this was because I added the milk too quickly. It could just be that I’m a bit of a moron and mucked it up God knows how.

Your mix ends up looking like lots of little bits of dough that will never come together until that magic last drop of milk at which point the whole thing will feel like mixing a big ball of cement.



Get your hands in and squish it into a ball. You can stick this in the fridge over night or start rolling it out immediately. I was worried that my dough was far too wet. It felt really sticky and I felt a little tantrum coming on. I stuck it in the fridge hoping that this would somehow suck the moisture out (no, I don’t know why I thought that either). Turns out it was fine, so don’t start chucking utensils through the microwave door just yet.*



Heat the oven to 220°c and flour a work surface. I find this an absolute pain in the arse. However neat I am I always end up finding flour underneath the kettle or neatly piled behind the toaster three weeks later.

Don’t roll out the dough too much – around an inch thick is about as thin as you want to go. While I expected these to rise an awful lot they, well, they just don’t. Use a scone-sized cutter. I’ve no idea what size mine is but it looks scone-sized. The dough is incredibly stretchy and elastic, which in my childish way I really enjoyed.

Once you’ve cut your scones out grease a baking tray and stick them in the oven for about 14 minutes or a bit longer if you’ve got a rubbish oven like mine, until the scones are golden brown on top.



Let these cool and eat before they go stale, which is unfortunately in about two or so hours.



*Obviously this isn’t the case with yesterday’s super-glue batch…

Pumpkin update

I think it's time these went in the bin.

Halloween

Not really a cooking post but Charlotte came round last night and we totally knifed some pumpkins.

Mine was hideously uninventive.


Unfortunately Charlotte's was rock solid and took forever.




But all fine in the end.

Alcohol abuse and lasagne

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. The demon drink. The evils of alcohol. After last weekend and my hideous behaviour at and after an anti-Bestival brunch I suddenly understand why drinking is bad for you. This revelation has nothing to do with the shakes that lasted until Tuesday or the kettle drum that boomed away behind my eyes but more to do with the huge scratch across my BlackBerry screen and the fact I am no longer in possession of an iPod*.

After heavy drinking on Friday with my ex-boss and people I used to work with, I rolled up late to the Windsor Castle in Notting Hill. It’s a lovely old pub but if you sit all day topping up your blood-alcohol level with bottles of Prosseco its tiny doors and steep steps prove difficult. They also seem to only have one ice bucket so knocked us up a makeshift one during a warm-wine emergency.


Booze flowed, cigarettes were smoked at an alarming rate, I knocked over two full glasses. Everyone else enjoyed their food but my burger was mediocre though that’s probably because all I could taste was the fur on my tongue. After at least two romantic indiscretions (mine) were accidentally revealed it was time to go. Unfortunately it wasn’t time to go home, it was time to go on to an old school friend’s where I proceeded to drink yet another bottle of fizz while everyone else sobered up. I think this is where I crossed the line from ‘annoying drunk’ to ‘please, when is she leaving?’

Lesson learnt. Sort of.

Anyway, this is where lasagne comes in. Benaisha, Cookie and Katie decided to whip up some dinner – I was far too much of a mess to do anything apart from really badly peel some squash so just got in the way and took photos instead.

Butternut squash and goat’s cheese lasagne
I’ll warn you now that most of this is guess work, ingredients gleaned from looking at the (mostly blurry) pictures. I wasn’t really in any sort of state to take notes.

Stuff you need:

A lasagne dish or similar
Pasta sheets or whatever they’re called
Passata
Goat’s cheese
Spinach
A butternut squash
Garlic (I’ll be honest, I have no real idea what they did with this so I’m going to improvise)
Salt and pepper
Parmesan

Heat the oven to (maybe) 180°c while you peel your squash, hopefully a bit better than I did. Scrape out the seedy bit in the middle – shown here in case you do this wasted and can’t remember where the seeds are…


Cut this into chunks and toss in some olive oil with salt and pepper. I think that the garlic, finely chopped, was thrown in here as well.



Stick this in the oven for about 20 minutes. I’m not sure what the green is – do whatever you think best.


Once this has cooked wilt a few good handfuls of spinach. It’ll seem like loads but it’s not, IT’S NOT!


Now comes the exciting bit. (It was all quite exciting for me, I was hammered and listening to Magic FM.) Start your first lasagne layer. It doesn’t have to be neat or tidy. Cookie realised later that you’re meant to semi cook the pasta first but it was fine so those instructions were clearly absolute bollocks designed to take up time that could be spent doing something more fucking interesting than half boiling pasta.


On top of the pasta shove on some spinach, some squash, a generous dollop of passata and a bit of crumbled up goat’s cheese.


More pasta.



Once you’re all layered up cover the top with some more pasta and then a big duvet of parmesan.


This went into the oven for about 20 to 25 minutes. I think. Anyway when it looks cooked it probably is.



*iPod has now found its way home though someone has clearly been listening to my “ironic” goldmine of novelty Cuban pop.

Egg fried rice

After a long absence brought on by spending all my time in a little house on Eel Pie Island being wined and dined by a lovely man, I put up an absolute flurry of blogs (four) only to go off radar again straight afterwards. I think my post on Sadness Cake explains most of this but another side to it is that cooking can be expensive and I need to save all my money for liver-damaging activities. (As I type this I am tucked into a corner of the pub one of my friends from school, Benaisha, works in, desperately trying to find someone to come and stop me looking like a lonely alcoholic.)

One thing that can definitely be made on the cheap though is egg fried rice. I love the bloody stuff but always found it a bit lacking when I made it myself. Then at work I stumbled across a recipe for a fancy version. As I’m completely disorganised and just generally not particularly good at forward planning I forgot to print it out and had to have a go from memory.

The original recipe suggested stirring in some chicken but as Mummy Duggers is a veggie I had to save that for another day.

You need enough rice for around two people, I used Uncle Ben’s boil in the bag long grain white rice. Classy as ever.
You also need some cooked frozen peas – maybe around half a cups worth.
And, duh, eggs. Three medium ones worked for me.
Little extras are soy sauce and a few spring onions.

Boil up the rice and heat up a nice large wok. Use nut oil to grease it as its tasteless – if, like Charlotte, you’re massively allergic to nuts and don’t love egg fried rice enough to risk your life over it go for wok oil.


Very finely chop a few spring onions, I think I used two or three, I think a couple more would have been a bit better. When the wok is hot enough stir-fry these for a couple of minutes before adding the rice.


Swish this around with a couple of good glugs of soy sauce. It’ll seem like too much but trust me, it isn’t.

Whisk up the eggs and then stir in. I thought for a good few minutes that I’d used one too many as I seemed to have a lot of very runny egg coating absolutely everything. It takes a while for it all too cook, far longer than I thought it should, but it was really, really tasty. Chuck in the cooked peas at the last moment as this leaves them tasting nice and fresh.


What I like about this is that you can just shove a load of veg in the wok with it to make a proper meal rather than a side dish.

Keaton Henson

Keaton Henson and I have been friends since I was 13 - nearly eight years.

When I was 15 and he was 16 we went out for a disastrous period that was mainly me being a stroppy, awful, shouty girlfriend and mainly him bringing me Skittles for breakfast while constantly being wonderful. One particular day sticks horribly in my mind: Keaton, terribly ill, after an argument – one of many - dragged himself to my house in the pouring rain to make up. I told him to turn around and go home and I can still picture him perfectly as I closed the door and stomped off. Years later and I’ve found out he remembers this pretty well too.

While we don’t see each other very often now he is still someone I consider to be one of my greatest friends. In the time I’ve known him he’s gone from being a gangly teenager with awful Charlie-from-Busted highlights, to a gangly young man with facial piercings, to what he is now: a hard working, incredibly talented illustrator, designer and songwriter (still gangly).

Last year he played me the song linked here for the first time and it is honestly the loveliest, most wonderful gesture anyone has ever shown me.

His album is out soon (I’ll update this with actual details when I have them) and I urge everyone to buy it as it really is astounding. Written for someone and never meant to be heard by anyone else it’s a melancholy love letter that I think we’ve all wanted to write at least once. So much of Keaton has clearly gone in to each song.

The album is a beautiful piece of work; musically and physically. There will be 120 CDs to buy, each with a case handmade by Keaton. The sleeves have been numbered and designed by him, even stitched together by the clever boy himself with each different copy featuring it’s own sketch. Mine will be something I treasure forever.

I know this post has been quite vommy but, with a risk of sounding patronising, I am so proud of the person Keaton has become and I’m incredibly glad to count him as a friend.


Sarah Minor by Keaton Henson

My personal favourites:
Nests
and You Don't Know How Lucky You Are by Keaton Henson


www.KeatonHenson.com

Sadness cake

If, like me, you tend to answer questions about your hobbies with “not applicable” then you’ll know how nice it is to find someone with actual interests who you can spend time with and who gets you involved. Or at least makes you leave the house more than once a week. But sometimes you don’t get enough time with that person to even put them off you, which is annoying as that’s one of my key skills (some people would say I really don’t need that much time but I would say to them: “it’s my blog, shut up.”). Absence makes the heart grow fonder but that only really applies when there’s an end to the separation, and when there isn’t it’s sad. So I’ve decided to make chocolate mousse cake my Sadness Cake.
All together now: Ahhhhhh.

I originally made this as a test run for a birthday cake for Ben, but when you’ve filled up someone’s kitchen with Spurs cakes and shortbread you start to worry that they’re going to think you’re trying to give them diabetes or are, in fact, a creepy feeder.

I found the recipe on the BBC food website and as it seemed like a trained ape could do it I went out and bought the following:

300g of dark chocolate
6 medium eggs
55g of caster sugar
150g of unsalted butter (softened)

You’ll also need a cake tin with a removable bottom.

The best bit of this for me was cracking the chocolate in to lots of little pieces. If you’re making this as a sadness cake I suggest therapeutically smashing the bars on the kitchen counter repeatedly, primal screaming optional.

Actually there’s lots of smashing in this recipe, as you need to break the eggs and separate them. Though I’d probably stick to doing this gently to try and keep bits of shell in the mix to a minimum. Then again they’re pretty sharp so depending who you’re making it for maybe leave them in as a sort of organic powdered glass…

ANYWAY for anyone as dim as me when it comes to cooking you separate the yolks from the whites by pouring them both back and forth between the two halves of shell, the whites run off into a bowl and you’re left with the yolk which you need to dollop in another.

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a bowl big enough to fit over a pan of simmering water without taking a swim. I think if it’s in the water it’ll crack and being the ever-cautious person I am I used a casserole dish just in case. Give this a bit of a stir once in a while.


Now it’s time for the boring, or depending how rubbish your life is, fun part: whisking the egg whites. You absolutely have to do this with an electric whisk or you’ll end up like this guy. It takes an absolute age to get them into stiff peaks but as soon as you think it’s not working they suddenly magically happen and you realise you do have a reason to live.


A bit more whisking now, this time the egg yolks and the sugar. A hand-whisk is fine for this as it doesn’t take too long for the two to go the lovely pale yellow you’re after.


By now your chocolate and butter should be a delicious runny mix that would be perfect to do all that food-and-bedroom stuff with except that no one really does it as midnight machine washes and sleeping on a bare mattress is hardly the end to a perfect evening. And anyway if you had someone to do that with you wouldn’t be making a sadness cake, you’d just be rubbing it in for the rest of us.


Add the depressing chocolate mix to the yolks and sugar and stir it in before gently folding in the egg whites. I thought this had gone hideously wrong, as it looked revolting.


Soon though it looked like proper moussey cake mix and I patted myself on the back. Pour this into the (greased) cake tin and put in a pre-heated oven at 180°c/gas mark 4 for 20 minutes.

This picture should explain why I made two:


My big mistake was taking the cake out of the oven after 20 minutes, sticking a knife in it and panicking when it came out goopy. So I shoved it back in for another ten minutes. Then another. Then another. The cake rose so much it was in danger of escaping the cake tin when I gave up. I ended up with a slightly burnt chocolate moonscape.


This collapsed in on itself on one side while I left it to cool. I instantly bashed out another, which I whipped out after exactly 20 minutes, but my mum accidentally took the first go into the office to get a verdict before I made it for Ben and he didn’t get to see his 32nd birthday. Weirdly everyone loved it.

My taster for the second cake was my friend Asha who gave it a big thumbs up, and the girl knows chocolate. She sensibly stuck to tiny slivers but I devoured a huge chunk.

These were happier times for my sadness cake but after extensive research I can report it works wonders with a pint glass of Freixenet, Lost In Translation and a fast-growing mountain of sodden tissues.

Buttercream icing

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEN!

As I’m a nice person or something I decided to make Ben some Spurs-themed cupcakes. And thankfully after working at a men’s magazine I have an address book full of Real Men I could email to double check that Tottenham’s colours are (sort of) white, blue and yellow.

The last time I tried to make buttercream icing it wasn’t great – I had to add a load of milk and it was so soft it was more like mousse. But whenever I make cupcakes I worry that they taste like Ryvita, so I decided to try again. I dug out my mum’s The Dairy Book Of House Management (1969) which, as a guide to life, has everything from rules to training your budgie to wheat wine (mmm delish), seemed like it would be able to talk me through combining sugar and butter. And guess what? IT DID.

You need:
4oz of unsalted, softened butter
8oz of icing sugar

As I also added food colouring (and after trying a bit some vanilla essence) so stuck in another tablespoon of sugar.

Put everything in a bowl and shove an electric whisk in there. At first everything looks a bit weird and lumpy, like it will never work:


But soon it’ll look like actual icing, which for someone like me is astounding. I found it easiest to spread the icing on the cupcakes with a knife and then artistically sculpt it into what I can only describe as a rustic style.

Chocolate Cupcakes

As the owner of several bras I like chocolate. I also like cake. Especially tiny cakes that fit in my mouth whole. So the word ‘chocolate’ coupled with ‘cupcakes’ gets my attention pretty well.

The BBC food website churned up a recipe for some easy looking chocolate cakes which handily only needed ingredients I already had lying around.

These were:
1 egg
50g of softened, unsalted butter
8 tablespoons of milk
150g of caster sugar
125g of plain flour
25g of cocoa powder
1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder

After you’ve stuck the oven on at 180°c (gas mark 4) sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder together into a big bowl. In goes the butter and the sugar and then you beat this until you’re arm falls off or everything is well combined, whatever happens first. If it’s the former I’d like to inform you all that anything tried off this blog is done at the reader’s own risk.

Whisk in the egg and a couple of spoonfuls of the milk. Once that’s all mixed together add in another couple of tablespoons and whisk again. Keep this up until all the milk is in. I used skimmed but I think this left the finished product a bit dry so use semi at least. Your batter should be smooth and thick by this point. Mine was a bit lumpy but I’m not claiming to be Mr Kipling.


Spoon the mixture into some cupcake cases – probably around a tablespoon and a half or so. Too much and they’ll look like melted mini Quasimodos like my first batch.



These go into the oven for around 15 to 20 minutes and are done when they’re spongy to the touch or pass the skewer test (stick one in and it comes out clean: cooked cake).

Leave these to cool and then eat six in quick succession until you realise you need a lie-down.

Simple French dressing

That’s right! Sometimes I eat salad!!

I’m not sure how close to real French dressing this is (maybe honey and mustard’s bastard Gallic baby?) but it’s so easy even I can’t muck it up.

As I’m so laid back and intuitive I don’t really measure any of this out and have also recently been making it in a tumbler but here are the measurements from the recipe I adapted it from:

3 tablespoons of a good extra virgin olive oil
1 ½ tablespoons of red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon of runny honey
Freshly ground black pepper

Whisk everything up together. Tricky I know, but I’ve got a lot of faith in you and think you can handle it.

Learning

The learned and delightful Esther Walker has taught me how to do hyperlinks! I now feel like a proper modern person.

Ben's Boiled Eggs

This, I’m sure, will surprise no one. If it does then I’ll take it for granted that they’ve never read any of this before.

I’ve no idea how to boil an egg.

If you think back through the rain you’ll remember we had that steaming hot weekend way back when. And what better weather could there be to sit in a park drinking cold beer and eating homemade food? I’ll tell you what better weather: COLDER WEATHER. If you have ever run around a house blow-drying your hair while cooking frittata-thingy and then only when you are going out the door realise the heating is on on a 25°c day before having to stomp around Waitrose, carry 30 beers in and out of nearly every sodding shop in Twickenham looking for ice and then spend ten minutes shouting at people down the phone trying to track them down in a park you will understand.

But anyway what I am trying to say is that we had a picnic!!

The division of labour was decided in the pub and while Alex reeled off a long list of delicacies she was going to bring Ben and I plumped for said frittata and the boiled eggs Charlotte demanded someone make for her boyfriend Henry.

As the morning sun blazed down on Eel Pie Island we stood in Ben’s little kitchen wilting in the heat from the stove (and the bloody radiator) while I wondered how long it would take for me to drown if I jumped in the Thames to try and cool down. Peeling me off the window Ben managed to get my attention and started to talk me through the technical process of egg boiling.


How long does it take for a hard-boiled egg? “Six minutes? Not sure. I just wing it.” Hot. I love a man who lives on the edge.

One of the eggs cracked slightly when it was dropped in the pan but it turns out that is TOTALLY FINE! It just meant it was a funny shape. After six or seven minutes our eggs were done. And tasty! Apparently. I hate the things so really wouldn’t know.


Henry complimented Ben on the softness of the yolk. That’s good, right?

Barbecued quail

Wow I’ve been a bit rubbish at this over the past month or so, haven’t I? The last thing I posted wasn’t even about me wrecking a recipe either; it was simply a picture of an egg. Jesus.

While I’m going to lie and claim that my hectic schedule and whirlwind social life are to blame for the silence it’s actually just due to my inherent laziness and inability to do anything more than flap my arms about and complain in hot weather.

Anyway! Many moons ago I had a barbecue to celebrate the fact it had finally stopped raining and 2010 being the year I try to make a real, half-hearted attempt to expand my palate I decided to give quail a bash.


I found a recipe for barbecued quail on Nigella’s website – yep, that one again – which had a lovely sounding marinade. I decided to forgo this as a) I forgot to take a list of ingredients with me to the supermarket and b) I just wanted to see what plain old quail tasted like.

After cooing over the ostrich egg I popped off to find some quail. Nestled in between the chicken and grouse were pairs of little birdies, snuggled together in their dinky plastic trays. I threw a couple in the trolly and trundled off in a happy little daze, glad that everything seemed to be going my way. When I got home and read the packaging I could have kicked myself. My quail had grown up in a shed. In my strange little brain I had decided that they must be free range as it’s posh food. I have no idea how I came to this conclusion but was both scared and comforted by the fact Alex, Charlotte and my mum shared my warped view. Anyway, deep breaths etc.

Promisingly the first step of the quail recipe – spatchcocking the birds – contained the words ‘very easy’. Unfortunately this was a lie.
With a tiny naked bird on the chopping board I advanced with the sharpest kitchen scissors to 'cut along both sides of the backbone'. This was not ‘very easy’. This was very fiddly, very stupid and very annoying. And also very crackly as I snipped through its bones. Eventually I managed to cut its spine out and squished it all down. And then realised MOST OF ITS INSIDES WERE STILL INSIDE!!! After a bit of shrieking I realised I was actually okay with this and poked around with a knife trying to work out what everything was. I still have no idea but wow it sure beat a game of Operation. Unfortunately the next three birds didn’t go so well and in the end I just cut them in half and hoped for the best.

Alex loves food - and by that I don’t mean she’s a chunker - but when I excitedly shoved a quail in her face, beaming manically (me, not the quail) she looked a bit sick and told me she didn’t think she could try it as basically it was weeny and that made it cute and that made her feel bad. I stared at her blankly for around, ooooh, five minutes until she cracked and agreed to taste a bit.


After the throw-away barbecue was (unsafely) lit on top of our rusty, unused, real barbecue (and I’d put out the fire caused by the cardboard packaging) on went the birds. They took around fifteen minutes or so though in all honesty for all I know they were still raw. I’ve got no idea what quail should be like but they seemed pretty done.

After carefully eyeing up the quail Alex manned up and took a bite. And then proceeded to eat three. Charlotte and I watched on in wonder as she packed it away. “I know earlier I said I wouldn’t try rabbit stew if you made it but sod that! I’m going to eat everything from now on, however fluffy.” I’ll take that as a culinary success.

Personally I thought they were lovely. I was expecting them to have a very strong gamey flavour but they were beautifully delicate. While making sure I didn’t crunch down on a bit of tiny bone was a bit of a bore I would definitely do these again, maybe roasting them next time.

Ostrich Eggs

Honestly, I love Waitrose. I can’t imagine where else you could trot down an aisle and find this:


I didn’t buy it as I wouldn’t really know what to do with something approximately the equivalent of 25 large hen’s eggs but I did read the cooking instructions on the box.

For a soft boiled ostrich egg you need to cook it for around 50 minutes, an hour and a half for a hard egg. God knows what you’d cook it in though as it wouldn’t even fit in my largest pan. Or you can scramble the thing and feed an army.

On another note this evening I came out with what is possibly the most middle-class sentence ever:
“Oh no! I bought battery-farmed quail!” (Which is another story for another time...)

Roast duck

A friend of mine, Daisy (in the middle), is currently living in Madrid and popped over this week to celebrate her 21st with a rather wonderful party. To say thank you and hasta luego I decided to do some sort of duck dish. Unfortunately I didn’t plan it very well at all and ended up doing a roast lunch on the warmest weekend 2010 has seen so far.

After rejecting a neat little oven-ready duck (it felt too much like cheating) I ended up with a giant, free-range bird that looked quite daunting. Especially scary were the little stumps of feathers left poking out of its wings… or whatever those bits were. I’m still not quite sure.

When I shoved the squidgy carcase onto a chopping board to prepare it I got a bit of a shock. The duck had TROUSERS on. I imagine these used to be it’s legs but it’s wings were so massive I freaked out slightly and started to get a bit hysterical, imagining that these extra bits of skin were bum flaps or something.


My little friend also came with giblets. As these are usually in a bag shoved inside I grabbed a trouser leg in each hand and had a look. There was just a big lump of red flesh with the spine in it (I’m not really selling this, am I?) and I realised I was going to have to get its insides out myself. After jumping around manically laughing for five nervous minutes I whipped out some latex gloves and prepared to get my hands metaphorically dirty. Thankfully as I tentatively poked my fingers where no fingers should go I felt plastic. I thanked whatever higher power was looking down on me that day and pulled out a little bag of ducky innards.

With the oven preheated to 200°c I plonked Daffy (see what I did there?) onto a roasting rack in a roasting tin and with the tip of a knife pricked the skin all over.

Obviously the times change with the weight of the bird but my duck needed to be roasted for about two hours. An hour in I took it out of the oven to drain the fat. There wasn’t too much in the tray but this was because it had all collected in the cavity. With the help of an oven glove, some tongs and my mum this ended up in a measuring jug, ready to be sloshed over the roast potatoes with a bit of olive oil.

Sixty minutes later a gorgeous, golden duck came out of the oven and after letting the meat rest for ten minutes I set about carving. And then gave up. In the end I just sort of tore it apart with a knife and fork. I had been unsure what to do gravy-wise and ended up buying a Waitrose shallot and red wine sauce which was lovely.


While this whole post makes it sound rather horrid it was one of the nicest things I’ve ever cooked. The nicest thing if you ask Charlotte. I would go as far as saying delicious. But as a complete novice in the kitchen I still get nervous around uncooked meat so it’s nice to know what you’re up against.