Spanish omelette frittata thingy

Last year I was seeing an absolutely amazing cook. I would sit in front of the telly while he threw something wonderful together in the kitchen before serving it up with a beer and a kiss. It was brilliant. Especially as he used to make tonnes of stuff I loved even if he wasn’t a fan.

Ever so often though he would surprise me with something, trying to get me to try new things and stop being such a pain-in-the-arse fussy eater. One of these was a Spanish omelette frittata thing. It was delicious and I’ve always wanted to give it a go.

There is a recipe for Spanish omelette in my lovely new Nigella Express but I went a bit off-piste with this one.

I used:
7 eggs – which seems like an awful a lot but you need to fill up the frying pan
500g of new potatoes – mine were the Waitrose miniature ones and were weeny!
3 or 4 fat slices of chorizo
6 small or 3 big spring onions
A handful of grated cheddar
Half a red pepper
Half a handful of chilli flakes or two bird’s eye chillies chopped very fine
And hey, whatever the hell else you want

Boil the new potatoes for fifteen or twenty minutes and once they're done heat the grill.

Chop the chorizo and the pepper into chunks, finely round the spring onions and halve or quarter the new potatoes. Beat the egg and mix everything in to it, throwing in the cheese and the chilli, seasoning with salt and pepper.

Heat a frying pan on the hob and melt a bit of butter and a drop of oil in there. Pour everything in and give it a good shake so that all the bits and bobs in it even out rather than bunching together in random bits of your omelette.

Cook this for five minutes on a gentle heat before moving it to under the grill. After ten minutes it should be nice and golden on the top. If it’s still a bit wibbly in the middle don’t worry as it’ll keep on cooking after you take it out.

Turn it upside down on to a plate and let it cool until it’s nearly room-temperature.

Lemon sole goujons and halloumi bites

I am finally the proud owner of my very own cookbook. Nigella Express is now bristling with a dozen fluorescent Post-It notes waiting for me to get in the kitchen and make a mess.

Yesterday I roped in two friends to come and eat whatever horror I managed to serve up. Charlotte sensibly claimed that she couldn’t make it until supper but Alex’s unwavering loyalty meant she was stuck with my cooking for two full meals.

For lunch I decided to attempt lemon sole goujons and halloumi bites – little picky things rather than a big spread.
Gulp.

The morning saw me braving the packed aisles of Waitrose, ramming young children out of the way with my trolley and loudly swearing at old people blocking the potatoes with their tartan shoppers. I emerged into the drizzle thinking that I may have taken on slightly more than I could chew.

Alex arrived, shoved a beer in my hand to calm me down and I started on the goujons.

I used the amounts given in Nigella’s recipe for things like the breadcrumbs and cornflour but ended up with an awful lot left over. Next time I do this, as well as making my own breadcrumbs, rather than weighing and measuring I think I’ll do it by eye.

You need:
2 skinned fillets of lemon sole
Cornflour
Breadcrumbs
2 eggs
250ml or so of groundnut oil or enough to cover the goujons in the pan
Salt and pepper

Cut the sole into strips – mine were a wonderful array of different shapes and sizes. As someone who doesn’t eat much fish never mind cook it I had a little cry when I found a ladder of bone in one fillet.

In a bowl beat the eggs, in another season the cornflour with salt and pepper and in a third, shallow bowl dump the breadcrumbs. Mine were from a handy bag and seemed a bit big so I took great satisfaction in bashing them about until they were slightly smaller.

Dip each goujon in the cornflour, then egg and lastly the breadcrumbs. Rather than doing the goujons one by one it’s far easier to do them all in the cornflour first before starting to dip them in the egg etc. It’s a bit messy but good fun. If you don’t want them right away you can freeze them for a posh fish finger snack another time.

Leave them to rest for a while you heat the oil in a frying pan. Once it’s hot enough fry them until they’re golden brown. There were enough for three people but would serve a few more as a starter.

To go with these I made dill mayonnaise which is so simple even I couldn’t possibly mess it up. You just finely chop some dill and mix it in to the mayonnaise with a small squeeze of lime and some pepper.



The halloumi bites were incredibly easy.

Around 250g of halloumi served three people. Cut this in to 5mm thick slices
For the dressing you need:
80ml of garlic oil
2-3 tablespoons of lime juice
A good handful of chopped parsley
Pepper

Mix these all together in a dish while heating a griddle or frying pan. Dry fry the cheese until it’s golden, flipping it over to do the other side.

Throw these in to the dressing, toss about and serve. These were really tasty and went really well with a bit of salad.



Both were wolfed down by Alex and my mum who were astounded that I’d actually managed to make something that tasted like food.

To be honest...

I do realise that this blog doesn’t really help anyone cook at all. In all honesty it’s totally pointless. But I love to see someone fail and I hope that other people do too. If anyone is as crap a cook as me I think that it’s slightly heartening to realise that you’re not the only one who has no idea how to baste, sauté or caramelise and who doesn’t own a food processor. And it’s easy to get incredibly frustrated and feel like a tit when even the (seemingly) simplest of recipes go wrong.

So while I’m here I thought I’d tell you how a couple of the things I have made turned out after I wrote about them.

First off is Turkish delight. My post on this makes it seem as if it worked. It didn’t. I took that batch to my ex-boyfriend’s and he bravely tried a chunk. Rather than being deliciously springy the sugar had crystallised I think and it had gone all crunchy. The tub I brought it in was still full, sitting on his table a few weeks later.

I tried again, this time spending aeons letting the sugar dissolve before adding the gelatine. This seemed to work and I took it in to work to see what the boys thought. Zoo’s entertainment editor was the only person to try any and when he bit in to it rather than having the consistency of a Jelly Baby it was far too soft. While this is a marked improvement on stalactites of sugar it still needs some work. Which I think I may do tonight.

Next up are the flapjacks. The day after I put that post up I came home from work and attempted to remove them from the tray. They were rock solid. Harder than a drunk 15-year-old from Romford. Trying to get them free resulted in a lot of swearing and banging of the upturned baking tray against the kitchen top. When they finally swooshed free there was a thick, greasy layer of yellow Anchor butter on the bottom. It was foul. Though that didn’t stop me chipping bits off the top to angrily chew. I said I would try these a third time but I definitely won’t be using this recipe; Delia’s or my changes to the weights.

I am usually the sort of person who gives up as soon as something goes slightly wrong. Though - apart from the cheesecake and the orange and ginger ‘biscuits’ which made me cry - I have been quite calm when I mess up in the kitchen, vowing to give it another go until I get it right (not the flapjacks). I have lots of ideas about branching out and cooking interesting things but always seem to end up baking as I’m picky and my only taster, Mummy Duggers, doesn’t eat meat. But I am hoping to start spending most weekends cooking something new for friends. And if it does go wrong then I can at least say I tried.

Cooking with middle class students

I’ve just finished the first week of my scary new job so decided to finally write about the last thing I cooked as I was too lazy to do it before.

After leaving Zoo on the 12th I was technically unemployed for a week. I had decided to spend my time preparing for my new position and trying out a lot of recipes but instead I went to Manchester and gave myself a two-day hangover.

My friend Asha is in her third year of a drama degree there and is currently in the middle of her dissertation. So obviously I thought that this would be the best time to go up and demand all of her attention. Intent on giving the poor student a taste of the high life I crashed through her front door with four bottles of champagne and expected to be knee-deep in Pot Noodle and empty pizza boxes. In actual fact I was greeted with a fridge full of fresh food, green tea and fancy cook books. In the end I was the only real student there at all: drinking beer at the crack of midday, watching two week’s worth of Neighbours on the internet and eating chips for breakfast.

I arrived on Shrove Tuesday and the plan was to make pancakes for lunch. To relax before this challenge we cracked open a bottle of Bollinger and I helped Asha learn some lines. I absolutely love doing this and get far too in to it. Unfortunately I went mental and was unable to do my crap American accent for one of the characters so did the whole thing in my crap Australian accent instead. I realised it was time to stop once Asha told me she was ready to punch me in the face. By now we were well and truly squiffy and pancakes were replaced by a trip to Pizza Express, washed down with a bottle of their rose cava. After dinner we weaved our way to a fundraiser for Asha’s play where within two minutes I had paid £3 to have a penis drawn on my hand - which only came off on Thursday evening. After a few more drinks we trotted home where it seemed essential to open another bottle of bubbly while Asha taught me when to use ‘who’s’ and ‘whose’. I thought I’d mention this as a word of warning to anyone else who thinks leaving school at 14 might be a good idea. There really isn’t anything more embarrassing than reaching 21, still not knowing and having to ask your friend to explain it.
Apart from the two of you then Googling ‘whom’.

Wednesday was a bad day for the both of us. Having managed not to be sick Asha sloped off to a rehearsal and I decided the best thing for my hangover was to drink four cans of Coke. I was wrong and spent most of the afternoon twitching and unable to concentrate on the high-brow documentary I was watching (http://snipurl.com/uf8wp). Later we recovered enough to make it to the cinema where we saw A Single Man. I cried through out most of it and I’m still unsure if that’s because it was very sad or my body was just doing anything it could to get all the alcohol out of my system. Cooking had once again fallen foul of the demon drink.

Waking up with a (vaguely) clear head on Thursday meant it was finally time for pancakes. In to a bowl went 100g of plain flour, a pinch of salt, one egg and 300ml of milk. It started to look like batter once Asha snatched the bowl from my grasp and beat it properly. Out of the corner of my eye I had seen her hovering by my shoulder, hopping from foot to foot, itching to say ‘shall I do that?’ so prolonged her agony for as long as possible. We had planned to go shopping that morning but after our slightly undercooked breakfast lazing on the sofa all day seemed a much better idea.

That evening we pulled our socks up and planned a lovely farewell dinner. We picked an invention of Asha’s based on a Nigella Lawson recipe.

I suppose you would call it a Thai red chicken and mango curry. Apart from the fact it isn’t red. The list of things you need seems rather long but when you’re as middle class as Asha most of the ingredients are in your kitchen anyway. And they are:

1 tablespoon of wok oil
1 spring onion, finely sliced
½ - 1 red chilli, deseeded and finely sliced
Diced chicken
2-3 teaspoons of red Thai curry paste
2 cloves of garlic
200ml of coconut milk
250ml of chicken stock
2 teaspoons of fish sauce
Assorted veg (we used mange tout, baby corn, courgette and broccoli)
The juice of half a lime
Diced mango
Fresh coriander

Heat the wok oil in, surprisingly, a wok and add the spring onion, chilli and garlic. Brown these off and add the curry paste.

Throw in the chicken and give it around five minutes to start to cook properly.



Pour in the coconut milk, chicken stock and fish sauce before bringing to the boil. Chuck in whatever vegetables you’re using and simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, adding some coriander five minutes before it’s done.

Squeeze the lime juice over everything, add the mango and give the curry another five minutes or so for it to soften. Serve with some more fresh coriander on top. I would have uploaded a picture of it but I took it on my phone and it looks a bit unappetising.

I realise that this was very, very long and I could have just skipped straight to the curry but this saves me having to repeat what I did on my week off to anyone who bothers to ask.

Flapjacks - just about

I think my favourite part of baking recently has been taking what I make in to work and having the boys in the Zoo office swarm around a cake tin stuffing their faces.

Sadly I only have nine days left working with all these great people before starting a new job at the end of February. I’ve been at Zoo for over two years and it’s going to be very tough to leave. And to make sure most of them remember me in a vaguely positive light I’m going to be baking my arse off until I go.

Tonight I decided to give flapjacks a go with help from Delia Smith. I say help but I’m not sure they’ve turned out very well and I might give these another try before feeding some hungry journos.

Delia says you need:
4oz/110g light brown soft sugar
6oz/175g unsalted butter
1 dessertspoon golden syrup
6oz/175g porridge oats
Almond essence

I say you need:
At least double all of the above apart from the butter which I think you can take about two ounces off.

Stick a medium-sized saucepan on a low heat and stir the butter, sugar and golden syrup until the butter has all melted and you get a lovely brown sticky sauce that smells amazing. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the oats with a few drops of almond essence. Grease a square tin – I used a roasting tray – and pour the mixture in, pressing it down.

Shove it in the oven for forty minutes. When I first took mine out there was lots of boiling butter floating on top, you need to let it cool for ten minutes before cutting it in to rectangles and during this time the butter sinks in. The first batch I made was terribly greasy and most of this butter ended up sloshing around the bottom of the tin.

Cutting it up is where mine fell apart, literally. It was still quite crumbly when I tried to slice it and I had to squidge some bits back down.

Before you take the flapjacks out you need to let them cool completely. The greasy first try fell apart but I used more syrup in the second lot and they seem to be sticking together a lot better but I have yet to try and take them out of the tin...

As with the Turkish delight I am weirdly zen about this going a bit wrong. I’ll give them another go tomorrow and if they don’t work I’ll try them for a third and final time next week giving me a chance to churn out a load more cupcakes.

Plain and simple lamb stew

This is the world’s most bog-standard stewy/casserole thing and while I realise that it sounds very plain and boring it’s actually rather tasty and great to just pull out of the fridge to heat up after a long day.

I usually use leg stakes as they’re just really easy but my favourite thing about stew is you can chuck absolutely anything in and it doesn’t matter.

Sooo…
Lamb
Carrots
New potatoes
An onion
Garlic
Lamb stock
Herbs of your choice (because I’m generous like that)

Heat the oven at 150°c and roughly chop up half an onion and three cloves of garlic. If, like me, you love the stuff - or you’re just worried about Dracula touching you up in your sleep - shove in a bit more. Though if you’re like me after a glass of cava and just want anyone to touch you up at all use a bit less. Either way brown these quite well in a pan and throw them in a casserole dish.

Handy tip that may not work: I weirdly find that if I wash my hands in cold water rather than hot the smell of garlic pretty much disappears rather than lingering around for the next three weeks.

Cut the lamb in to biggish chunks and brown these in the pan really well too.

Round the carrots and half the new potatoes and these go in the casserole dish with everything else.

I only use a small amount of water when I dissolve the stock cube as the meat seems to be tenderer if there’s less liquid. This goes in the casserole dish with the herbs and then the whole thing goes in the oven for three or four hours.

I tend to put the lid on my casserole dish askew so that there’s a bit of a gap. It doesn’t seem to dry up but the lamb seems softer and the whole thing a bit thicker.