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.