Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Ready Steady Cook Challenge:

Thought I might give myself an interesting culinary challenge and encourage a bit of interactivity with the readership (surprisingly more people than I thought!).

On the show ‘Ready Steady Cook’ chefs are challenged to prepare a two-course meal using only a few quid’s worth of ingredients (plus store cupboard staples). What I’d like to do is for you – ‘the readers’ – to challenge me to prepare a meal using only five or six key ingredients specified by you.

To make it reasonable I’ll be able to use store cupboard ingredients such as cooking oil, spices, lemon juice etc – basically what is in my small store cupboard (I won't make any special purchases).

Also – the selection of ingredients has to have reasonable variety. Its no good suggesting a pasta, rice, and potato dish. The ingredients should be affordable too – no lobster and foie gras please.

I won’t look on the internet for ideas, nor will I consult my recipe books. I’ll give an honest assessment of how tasty the dish is…

Send your ideas by email to the usual address, or put them in the comments section.

Saturday

Hot cross buns and yesterday’s tiffin start the day. The hot cross buns remind me of the bread in Guyana, where all the regular sandwich rolls are sweet like hot cross buns. It not as nice as it sounds, although it did at least encourage me to learn how to make my own bread.

We go to see ‘Tsotsi’ (www.tsotsi.com) at Screen on the Green in Islington. It’s a lovely independent cinema with squishy seats. Mrs Jiffler observes that even middle-class twats don’t seem to know how to behave in cinemas. The film itself is an interesting story, well told, although with slightly limited cinematography (budget I guess). It does a good job at demonstrating the poverty gap, and decoupling this from racial politics The clever people who write for the broadsheets disapprove of this apparently, and prefer the more facile racial argument for this polarisation between the rich and poor. If only it were that simple.

After the film we wealthy wazungu adjourn to the ‘Masala Zone’ on Upper Street for a Thali – an assortment of curries. Masala Zone is kind of like a Wagamamas for curry in that it is fairly cheap and cheerful (although £3.15 for a small bottle of Cobra is daylight robbery). The food comes on large metal platters and includes our choice of meat curry (Lamb Rogan Josh for me, Chicken something-or-other for Mrs Jiffler which has a Burmese-style coconut and tomato thing going on), and an assortment of chutneys, vegetable curries, dhal, half (?) a poppadum, a mini-chapathi, and rice. We also order a side dish of Sag aloo, which turns up looking more like Pesto Genovese.
Its fun enough, and an education if one is under the impression that curry only comes in orange, brown, red, or yellow, accompanied by rice and too many naan breads. Compared to what is on offer in my local curry cafes (I’m privileged enough to be living in the Northern Quarter…) its really quite unremarkable. The breads at Café Marahaba cost a third of the price of the rotis at Masala, and are larger and better by miles.

Playing catch-up again…

Thursday

A meeting after college means limited time in the kitchen. There is some chicken stock and a few bits and pieces so I go for a Tom Yam Gai style-soup.

My mind is a bit preoccupied with work while I’m preparing the soup and I throw things in at random, pour it over the noodles, and sit down in front of telly to tuck in. I should have paid more attention to what I was doing because the soup presses all the right buttons – and is as good as the Tom Yam Gai I had at Ken Hom’s place in January. Its Zen cooking I guess…

Friday

A moderately successful presentation and quick meeting, then I’m on the Pendolino down to London fairly earlyish. As I’m a bit skint at the moment I’m hoping for a fairly frugal weekend in Islington.

Mrs Jiffler and I pop over to Waitrose (yeah, they’re posh on the Holloway Road) and pick up a rotisserie chicken, a bag of salad and a packet of garlic bread. I spot some massive Mediterranean tomatoes and Mrs Jiffler agrees we can have one as long as it comes with mozzarella. This is about as pre-prepared as I get with food without hyperventilating, and as it turns out the chicken is lovely – heavily flavoured with rosemary and thyme, the flesh melts in the mouth. Well done Waitrose.

We make a quick stock to reaffirm some of our DIY credentials, and Mrs Jiffler gets busy making a fridge-cook tiffin from digestive biscuits, chocolate, raisins, honey and syrup… mmm.

Monday, March 27, 2006

Friday

A moderately successful presentation and quick meeting, then I’m on the Pendolino down to London fairly earlyish. As I’m a bit skint at the moment I’m hoping for a fairly frugal weekend in Islington.

Mrs Jiffler and I pop over to Waitrose (yeah, they’re posh on the Holloway Road) and pick up a rotisserie chicken, a bag of salad and a packet of garlic bread. I spot some massive Mediterranean tomatoes and Mrs Jiffler agrees we can have one as long as it comes with mozzarella. This is about as pre-prepared as I get with food without hyperventilating, and as it turns out the chicken is lovely – heavily flavoured with rosemary and thyme, the flesh melts in the mouth. Well done Waitrose.

We make a quick stock to reaffirm some of our DIY credentials, and Mrs Jiffler gets busy making a fridge-cook tiffin from digestive biscuits, chocolate, raisins, honey and syrup… mmm.

Thursday

Playing catch-up again…

Thursday

A meeting after college means limited time in the kitchen. There is some chicken stock and a few bits and pieces so I go for a Tom Yam Gai style-soup.

My mind is a bit preoccupied with work while I’m preparing the soup and I throw things in at random, pour it over the noodles, and sit down in front of telly to tuck in. I should have paid more attention to what I was doing because the soup presses all the right buttons – and is as good as the Tom Yam Gai I had at Ken Hom’s place in January. Its Zen cooking I guess…

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Wednesday 22nd

Still trying to get rid of the winter food stores, I decide to modify, or ‘jiffle-up’ a recipe nicked from the Grauniad, or maybe it was the Observer. A dead simple, warming potatoey thing.

The spuds in the box by the cooker are of the multipurpose white variety, and have weird little fingers growing out of them. I trim the fingers, wash the spuds, and cut into slices a bit thicker than a pound coin. The slices go into a pyrex oven proof dish (a bit of butter around the dish to keep things from sticking) in layers with some salt and pepper and a hefty sprinkling of the organic dried dill that I bought in the weird organic anarchist place around the corner when I was a bit hungover and it seemed like a good idea etc etc…

While all this potato fun is going on there is a little pan full of chicken stock on the stove gently chugging away with some chilli and a bashed up spear of lemon grass in. The fragrant hot stock goes into the dish with the spuds so that the spuds are just peeping over the top, then it goes into the oven for nearly an hour.
Spuds in stock – that’s it. I know it was in the Guardian, but my mum used to make this sort of thing when I was a kid. Yeah – we didn’t have stuffed tortellini in rural Wales when I was a nipper… I cheat a bit when it comes out of the oven and throw in a few torn up slices of roast ham that has been hanging around in the fridge for a bit. It is pure comfort food, and almost makes me regret my; ‘summery foods’ plan.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Laptop is fixed

Its been a while, due to the laptop being repaired. Apparently it had ‘Dead Pixels’ which I originally heard as ‘Dead Pixies’. Imagine that. There has been a general amount of hard work going on as well…

Food-wise, the last few weeks have been a bit variable to be honest. I can’t say I’ve been eating particularly healthy as I’ve been trying to run down the stocks of ‘heavy foods’ in my cupboard and freezer so that I can, this week hopefully (perhaps when the clocks go forward) break out some lighter summery recipes that will hopefully help reduce some of my summer ‘padding’.

Anyhow, highlights of the last couple of weeks have been a couple of low budget Chinese meals, a buffet at Salford University’s ‘International Party’, which featured stuffed vine leaves (a treat that I haven’t had for years) and a surprisingly seasonal selection of salad leaves (mostly one gets iceberg and lettuce and rubbery tomatoes at these things).

The buffet lunch at an Environmental Conference was more disappointing. Apparently it was all fair trade food – well done – but it lacked variety and… er… taste. One highlight was the girl who was dishing out mini-cheese and onion pasties… only they were Cornish pasties (my first ever fair trade Cornish pasty! What next? Fishfingers?). It actually took quite a while for some of the assembled vegetarians (many, since this was an environmental conference) to twig that they were eating meat. It took two pasties in the case of one woman - probably the best thing she’s tasted in a good while…

Why they always give you stodgy food that makes you sluggish and flatulent at conferences?

There has been a lot of black pudding consumed this week as well. Thankfully its all gone now. I had some the other night with slices of Williams Pear gently fried in butter. Trust me, this is a marvellous combination if you’ve got an odd link of pudding and fancy a quick lunch. It’s the sort of thing that you’d get charged eight quid for as an ‘unusual’ starter somewhere swanky.

Lastly I was in Hull for 50 minutes changing trains after visiting the planning office in Beverley (I know, living the dream). I was secretly glad to have such a long stop-over in Hull as I’ve never been there before and I thought it would be nice to have a pootle around, check out the unique white phone boxes, and maybe buy some fish. See I thought that with Hull being by the sea (or on the estuary at least), and having something of a seafaring heritage, that there would be a fine choice of seafood on offer to a passing jiffler.

Sadly not. Only one proper chippy as well and that was closed. Plenty of places to buy pies and pastry products – a veritable buffet city. Bugger all in the way of fish mongers though, even on Fish Street…

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

The Broken Laptop

My laptop has broken. Funny white lines across the screen mean 'the screen is knackered' according to the man on the phone. Anyhow, its gone off for repair for at least a week. Fortunately I'm in the middle of experiments and reading, rather than any writing up so I can live without it for a bit.

So no blog, or not very much anyway. I've pretty much forgotten what I've been eating... there was a nice corn-fed organic chicken on Friday night accompanied by a bitter salad and copious amounts of Chilean wine. There have also been sausages and black puddings from the farmer's market in Piccadilly, and a sugary apple pie.

Due to the Tabasco immunity I've taken up drinking Thai sweet chilli sauce. Lovely on bits of cold chicken.

The weather is grim at the moment, and I seem to have been comfort eating too much in the last month or so - too much soup/risotto/bangers and mash/whole chickens. With this in mind I've resolved to start eating less stodgy foods as soon as the clocks go forward. Roll on summer...

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Wednesday 8th

Little to report since there has been much business with a college project amongst other things. This weeks kitchen activity has mostly revolved around cooking pasta, and adding cheese, or fish or something, and maybe a bit of creme fraiche. This isn't considered cooking in my book, and is more fuel than food.

Today was a different matter, with bangers and mash cooked in the usual way, with gravy made from French lager (the marsala bottle is empty). Not bad. Add some cream. Better...

Monday, March 06, 2006

Saturday 4th

In the fishmongers buying an octopus another crab leaps into my shopping bag. The octopus is going in the freezer for some fun I have planned in a week or so (freezing tenderises the meat).

Extracting the meat from the crab provides an entertaining 20 minutes or so in the kitchen, and I decide to use most of it too make a crab linguine. The best crab linguine I’ve tried was in a restaurant in Liguria about four or five years ago, it had a garlic and chilli hit which added some excitement to the soft sweetness of the crab. My attempt to emulate this manages to push the right buttons where the flavour is concerned, but the consistency seems to be a little too dry. A swift google reveals that good chefs (Locatelli in this case) are fond of reducing a good glug of white wine with the meat and chilli mixture before introducing it to the linguine.

An excuse to buy a crab and some wine!

Friday 3rd

Pub. Chip Barm. Snow. Curry.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Thursday 2nd

A couple of pints after college, and I’m ready for something quick and filling. A chicken and mixed veg stir fry, with plenty of rice fills me up. There is some rice leftover to make a salady thing for tomorrow’s lunch. There are still some Tabasco tasting issues. Perhaps I should put it to the back of the cupboard for a bit.

Short but sweet, but at least I’ve caught up…

Wednesday 1st March

Blimey, St David’s Day already. They will be partying on the streets of Llantwmffat tonight. There is a leek in the kitchen, perhaps I should go and beat an Englishman up with it. You can do some damage with a leek. No, I think I’ll save it for a cheesy pasta dish later in the week.

I’m going to use up some of the controversial minced lamb instead. Some of it goes in the freezer for a later spag bol or something another day – not even I can eat a pound of minced lamb.

I’ve loads of fresh coriander so I chop up far too much and mix in a bowl with some chopped spring onion and garlic, then knead this mixture into the minced lamb. There is still a little too much lamb, so I divide it into two cricket balls and press them out into burgers. They go in the pan on a low-ish heat until I’ve completed the Guardian sudoku, turning once, so that the centre is just about cooked. The burgers are a tight fit for some wholemeal pitta, with ketchup dripping out of the corners. Some sautéed veg rounds things off, with an accidentally over the top dash (actually more of a slosh) of Tabasco which for some reason I can’t taste later on. I wonder if, given my penchant for Tabasco sauce in small quantities, I’ve become immune to its heat…

Tuesday 28th

Back in Manchester on the Pendolino and there is time before lunch to fill up the cupboard after last week’s frugal living. Tescos provides the usual yoghurt and fruit juice type basics, but today also involves a trip to the butchers, fishmong and fruit and veg stall. Normally I appreciate the general interaction this involves, but today the bloke in Gabbots farm annoys me by refusing to mince up less than a pound of lamb (I had asked for 300g – a quantity I have had minced at Gabbots farm before). Faced with the prospect of a return visit to tescos for some minced lamb in a plastic box, I make the fecker weigh out exactly a pound of lamb. 454g exactly please, no more no less.

Luckily the fishmong is friendly as usual, and the money that was going to go on a piece of steak as a lunchtime treat goes on two scallops and a whole crab.

Mrs Jiffler has been hinting a bit about scallops, so I wanted to investigate, especially since I’ve never cooked the big fat ones before. They are in season now, so should be good (although they cost a quid each).

They go in browned butter for a few minutes on either side, followed by a drizzling of fresh butter (I nearly used the browned stuff out of the pan!), garlic, and parsley. I could get used to this sort of living, scallops for lunch. They spit like scallys (Scallop scallys!) in the pan though, so its best not to wear a good shirt.

My neighbours invite me round for pancakes, so I take the crab with me for fun. There’s a lovely selection of savouries including spinach and mushroom, and bacon and avocado, as well as the crab meat, followed by a couple of mini-pancakes filled with banana and dark chocolate. I think my favourite is bacon and avocado – as always I can’t resist an avocado – but I reckon crab and avocado might be one to try as well.

On the way home I nip into SPAR for some milk and see a bottle of JIF pancake mix by the till. It is half full with ‘mix’ and you add milk to top up the bottle, shake it up, and fry it. The instructions on the back advise you to flip the pancake ‘if you’re brave enough’. I can see a potential court case here…

Bloody hell, how many brand names have I mentioned in the last couple of blogs? I wonder if I could get corporate sponsorship from Heinz or something. If I get enough hits I might get enough free baked beans for everyone.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Monday 27th

Mrs Jiffler has the day booked off work so we embark on a lengthy walk around North London, stopping to look at interesting things along the way. Our route takes in Holloway road, archway, Highgate, Hampstead Heath, Hampstead, Primrose Hill, a bit of the canal, and Camden, before having a look at the new developments around Kings Cross (Kings Cross Central – it looks like it will be massive) and heading up to Upper Street, and back to Holloway.

Foodwise we stop to have a nibble here and there. We munch organic plums from a little shop on the Holloway road while making our way up Highgate hill, past the monument to Dick Whittington’s cat outside of the Whittington hospital. Amongst other things we pass the former home of Joe Meek (record producer responsible for ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados) and a book shop in Hampstead where George Orwell used to work – inspiration for ‘Keep the aspidistra flying’. Its now a pizza delivery place… I wonder what Orwell would have made of that. At a café nearby we order overpriced pastries and coffee and sit and do both Sudokus in the Café’s newspaper, just to get our money’s worth out of them.

Hampstead and nearby Belsize Park have some lovely grocers and delis, but the area is just too expensive to live. We don’t spot any celebrities in Primrose Hill, which is where they all live according to Mrs Jiffler.

Down in Camden we’re in more familiar territory. We’re here to see Jim Noir play an acoustic set at Fopp by Camden lock. I saw him play in Manchester on Monday, but he and his band all had the flu so were a bit dopey. We all sit cross-legged on the floor as if in a school assembly, while the band breeze through half a dozen songs. It goes well, and finds a few new fans I think. I accidentally buy a signed copy of his new single, along with a King Tubby boxed set. I keep accidentally buying things in Fopp, I wonder if I can take out insurance.

Its quieter in Camden during the week, and the crackheads are a bit more obvious without the weekend crowd to hide in. We move on quickly to try to get to Kings Cross before it gets too dark. Tasty Corner, purveyor of brightly coloured Chinese food, is undergoing some sort of refurbishment, presumably to try to keep up with the rather swish looking oriental place that has opened up just a few doors down.

Upper Street is busy as always, and we slip off behind the antiques market to poke around the back streets a little before reaching our destination on Essex Street: the S&M Café.

S&M stands for ‘Sausage & Mash’ of course, which is pretty much the staple of the menu at this café, which doesn’t appear to have changed much since the war. They do have a couple of pies on the menu, but we’re here for the main event. We both go for a plate of plain mash with gravy and London Traditional Sausages (there are many more on the menu, but we’re beginners at this place), two cups of tea, and a bowl of minted peas to share.

Mrs Jiffler – a mash aficionado if ever there was one - immediately approves of the mash, which was smooth, yet still yielding to the even textured gravy. The sausages are perfectly done, tight in the skin, while still juicy inside. Our side of minted peas is as near to perfect as they get.
There are a variety of condiments on each table – in jars and bottles not those horrid little sachets. I’m pleased to see that each table has a jar of Coleman’s original mustard, along with some HP, as it should be, but also intrigued by the selection of mustards made by Gordon’s fine foods of Surrey. The high standards set so far encourage me to taste of few of these. The wholegrain is fine, despite not having quite the fire and crunch of Coleman’s wholegrain. The sweeter Mustard with wildflower honey would sit nicely with a spicy sausage such as a Lincolnshire or Cumberland ring. Finally the Dijon Mustard with Chablis mixes nicely with the mash and gravy. Its not quite true to the Dijon recipe as it lists spirit vinegar rather than verjuice on the label, but the addition of the Chablis brings things into line a bit.

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday is house party day, which means balloons and a trip out to Morrisons in the car to buy crates of booze and crisps. Apart from the usual crisps and nuts, there is a big bag full of sweets including Parma Violets, and some weird little sugary balls made in New Mills. Mrs Jiffler adds a touch of class by rustling up a large batch of her popular Chocolate Orange Cookies for the revellers, while I pre-prepare some late night savoury mozzarella and red pesto crostini (posh mini cheese on toast).

Our tea is a big bowl of tagliatelle carbonara to soak up the booze. I’m not sure why, but I’ve been having tagliatelle cravings lately… The party goes well, with nobody really disgracing themselves. I tried the new Badger First Gold, which is up to the brewery’s usual fine standards: http://www.badgerbrewery.com/beers/index.asp

Cookies go down well, as do the crostini.

Sunday:

Hungover, as one might expect. A much needed fry up is rustled up by Mrs Jiffler for overnight guests, one of whom accidentally makes a cup of coffee using bisto gravy granules. I’m in need of air and some sort of sweet fizzy drink, so nip out to Waitrose for supplies.

A roast chicken seems appropriate, but I’m too lethargic to cook a full roast dinner. The chicken itself, stuffed with lemon is no problem, its just all the rest of the faff that goes along with it. Instead I accompany the chicken with a bag of salad (yes, yes the evil chlorinated variety, but we’re talking hangover here) which seems to be mostly watercress along with some unidentifiable green and red leaves, and a home-made honey and mustard dressing which is more honey than mustard. Some French bread (Arrghh French Bread! Super Furry Animals Fans…) helps to mop up the plate.