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Sunday 9th November
Ok, I admit I haven't actually cooked very much from I want chocolate
cake and I want it now. I want to be tempted by recipes
subtitled I want to go home but I don't want to live there and
my favourite soup was cancelled and replaced with football
highlights, but as they are for meatloaf and a toasted cheese
sandwich respectively, we just don't click. It is a sweetly entertaining
little book, though, and I have certainly been cooking in this spirit...
Lentil soup: because it's bonfire night but I have a stinking cold and
can't go out? Apple whisky custard: because my boyfriend went to Paris
without me? Yeah yeah - self-pity cooking.
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Friday 31st October
I can thoroughly recommend this book. The pics are gorgeous and the
recipes are sensible and easy. Since the potatoes, I've made a very sound
caesar salad, and some very well-behaved Spanish
meatballs with a lovely tomato sauce full of peppers and olives.
Finally (though to be honest I could stick with this one for weeks)
caramel salmon which was a resounding hit. The salmon is
caramelised in small pieces in brown sugar with chilli, ginger, lime juice
and other Thai-things - astonishingly this didn't turn into jam - and
tossed with spring onions, hand(s-)ful of coriander and roughly chopped
peanuts (deviant version: cashews).
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Monday 27th October
Ah, after fiddling with finger food and struggling to decipher the great
classics of French cuisine (two of my very favourite kitchen-based
activities, don't get me wrong) it is something of a relief to stroll back
into to the sweet, modern, loudly-illustrated simplicity of Jill Dupleix.
Today we had skate with warm potatoes with capers - waxy potatoes
tossed while warm in a mustard vinaigrette enhanced with spring onions,
dill and capers. I love brown butter and caper sauce, but this was just as
sharp and tangy, while being less time-critical and probably (these things
do cross my mind occasionally, believe it or not) less artery-hardening.
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Saturday 25th October
We had a bit of a party - C's off out into the real world - so I plundered
Le Cordon Bleu: Régions de France, and made
canapé-sized quiche lorraine (puffy) and clafoutis aux cerises
(boozy). And madeleines. But they wouldn't let me make teensy-weensy
croques-monsieur. Nothing went drastically wrong (unless you count the
puffiness) so I must have understood most of what I was reading... I have
learnt a lot of new words, though. For some reason school lessons never
covered 'tamiser la farine', and 'fouetter les oeufs'.
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Sunday 12th October
We can't leave Italian food without visiting pasta. We had lovely wild
mushrooms so salsa di funghi alla Veronese. It starts as you'd
expect, onion, garlic, mushrooms fried in oil so that they soak it up and
sweat out their water. ED adds a little flour and then loosens with
butter. Finish with flat leaf parsley (and if you could get that in the
fifties...)
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Thursday 9th October
Everyone, says ED, should try the 'highly original' spinach and cream
cheese stuffing. It is, of course, the lovely light spinach and ricotta we
are nowadays so familiar with - a little nutmeg, a little parmesan, one
egg to bind them... ED doesn't permit cannelloni to be covered in tomato
sauce before baking, but I felt it was too well-established a convention
to ignore. It does keep the pasta much nicer - it takes more butter and
cheese than our ration cards allow to prevent school-dinner-type
chewiness, otherwise.
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Tuesday 7th October
Skipping quickly over Classic Mediterranean by Jacqueline Clark
(boring), and promising to return to Real Chocolate by Chantal
Coady (expensive), we find ourselves at the Blessed Elizabeth David's
Italian Food. It is wonderfully readable, for the period detail
as much as the recipes: she was writing in the early Fifties, when pasta
came in tins and olive oil, notoriously, from the chemist. Today we had
costa di maiale alla griglia - grilled pork chops. The idea of
marinating meat in oil was novel: as she says, it does not 'as might be
supposed, make the meat greasy'. But nothing new, as they say; pork with
garlic, fennel and juniper may be old enough to be my mother, but it
tastes as modern as you like: specifically, it has a distinct touch of the
Jamie Olivers about it.
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