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.