Passion

This started out being a post about Eggs Benedict, and now it’s not.

I don’t watch very much television, in fact for most of the last 5 years I’ve lived without one. Currently we are staying with some relatives of mine, who love their TV and who virtually never switch it off. For the majority of the time this just winds me up, sometimes it even makes me want to throw things through the screen as a way to bring an end to the inane bullshit that I’m subjected to. Even if I don’t watch it, I can hear the bloody thing wherever I am in the house. Why people watch utter drivel that doesn’t even really interest them is beyond me, but millions of people seem to, so maybe it’s me who is odd.

Despite the fact that I think the majority of stuff on TV is a pile of crap, there are moments when it inspires me. Most of these moments are to do with food, this evening was the final of masterchef on TV, and watching the kitchens working and the dishes coming out of them in some 3 Michelin starred restaraunts had me close to tears. This is how we should be cooking and eating, this is food as art, this is beautiful. It was seriously beautiful, and I say that without even tasting or smelling the food.

The ingredients, the thought, the skill and most of all the passion being poured into the dishes coming out of these kitchens leaves me in awe. I don’t mean the diluted American sense of the word, I mean real awe: an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like.

If we don’t aspire to that kind of level, if we don’t want to cook and to eat food like that, then who are we to call ourselves foodlovers, or cooks, or ‘foodies’, or ‘gourmets’ or any of the other terms that people love to apply to themselves.

The best food in the world has the power to make us laugh, or cry. The best food in the world can make us aroused. That’s the food that I want to eat, and that is the food that I want to produce. That is what I’m going to do.

Why do we settle for throwing frozen crap down our throats when there are such fantastic ingredients available out there, why do people eat anything that involves a microwave when it is so simple to create real fantastic food without it taking hours or costing a fortune.

I’ve had it with mediocre crap, I’m not eating it anymore. Why should I waste my time?

This is the 4th or 5th day of this blog, and having just looked through what has preceeded this post, I realise just what a load of bollocks it is. It’s not about passion, or how I feel about food. It’s not about me at all, it’s me trying to be clever, trying to show off, googling for the history of a classic dish, then throwing a very simple recipe at the end of it, and thinking that I’m clever and am educating people about food. That’s not what this was supposed to be about, and from here on in, it’s not going to be. The existing posts will probably stay here, if for no other reason than to remind me what I shouldn’t be doing (that isn’t to say that they won’t get a substantial edit though).

From today though, there will not be any more of that kind of posting on this blog. That’s crap, anyone can google and find a hundred recipes for Hollandaise sauce, or the history of the Lardy cake.

What you will find here is a diary of my progress towards my dream. It’s a dream that grows more concrete by the day, by now it involves certain chairs, a certain colour of candles, the kernel of a menu, and the realisation of just how far there is to go, and how much of me there it to be thrown into creating the atmosphere and the food that I want to serve in it.

Mimosa (Bucks fizz to the English)

Bubbles, bubbles, little tiny dry citrusy bubbles rising up and exploding at the top of the glass, or preferably on your tongue as they pass it by.

I’m sitting and writing this with what I normally think of as a very breakfasty drink in front of me. The truth is though, that’s just when I drink it most often, but acutally it’s fantastic anytime.

Being English I always thought that if you mix champagne and orange juice together, then what you end up with is Bucks Fizz. It’s only quite recently I realised that in the rest of the world it’s called a Mimosa.

Whichever name you know it by, it’s a great combination. The orange juice really heightens the flavour of the Champagne, it’s refreshing, and feels somehow decadent as it slides down your throat. There’s the extra bonus that not only does it taste fantastically good, but it’s also fantastically easy. Double the joy!

Take a champagne flute, or whatever other glass you have to hand, it doesn’t really matter but the champagne flute is best aesthetically because you can watch those gorgeous little bubbles rising up through it.

Into this pour a mixture of three parts champagne to two parts orange juice.

If you either can’t afford or just don’t want to spend money on Champagne then you can substitute any dry sparkling wine, the drier the better and made in traditional method, i.e. not carbonated artificially. There are a lot of very good Spanish cavas (right now I’m using Marques de la Sardana), which also taste great.

Apart from that about the only thing to think about is making sure that both the wine and the orange juice is really well chilled.

The Mimosa was apparently invented at the Ritz hotel in Paris sometime around 1925, but after you’ve had a couple you probably won’t be too bothered about it’s history.

If you are feeling highly extravangant, then you can always whip up a Grand Mimosa (also called Morning Glory), which is the same thing, but with a tablespoon of Grand Marnier added.

Why Gillian McKeith pisses me off

With such a title, this could very easily become a hugely long essay.

Miss (or Mrs – I have no idea) McKeith is fond of frequently proclaiming that ‘you are what you eat’. Yes, Gillian, this would explain why you are so impenetrably dull and boring, just like your recipes.

Talk to people don’t preach at them

Oh Gillian, why can’t you ever just advise people on how to eat, or leave things open to discussion, give them some options? Instead of this, you dictate and preach, all with that horrible smug attitude. It drives me nuts!

More than 2 million copies in print

Yes, there are more than 2 million copies of ‘You are what you eat’ in print. I wonder how many people actually ever refer to it though. I have a copy that I bought in a second hand shop, because it was cheap and I was curious. I have looked through it twice, and apart from that it just takes up space on the shelf.

Gillians success gallery

Yes, it’s true, Jaqueline does look much better in the after photo than the before photo. This is only partly due to the fact that she has lost some weight though, and hugely aided by the facts that she has a better background, is wearing a better bikini, is standing with better posture, has a better haircut, and is smiling. If we are going to have before and after shots, maybe we could keep at least one variable the same?

The questionable doctorate

If you want to obtain a PHD via a correspondence course from an US University that is not recognised or accredited by anything, then don’t later feel that it gives you the right to use the title ‘Dr’ as a symbol of your authority and presume that you can lecture the rest of the world as if you were the world’s greatest authority on the subject. The Advertising Standards Authority also agree with this point of view, which is why everything that is now published cites the author as ‘Gillian McKeith’ without the Dr prefix.

The bizzare “scientific facts”

Gillian tells us repeatedly that chlorophyll is a fantastic thing, that it is “high in oxygen” and will “oxygenate your blood”. Unfortunately, it’s really quite dark inside the human body, and chlorophyll only produces oxygen in the presence of sunlight. She also states that DNA is only present in growing cells, I’m no biologist, but even I know that this is utter rubbish.

I’m going to stop now, before I descend even further into a long rant, because it’s not only that I don’t agree with many or her food principles, think she is rude and arrogant, and am not impressed by anything in her food books. No, apart from all of that, there is the simple and overriding fact that she just irritates the hell out of me.

I fear that this may be only the first in a regular series of anti-GM articles.

Yummysoup! – Mac software

I have a fairly large collection of books about food, and also a couple of folders of things photocopied, printed and handwritten, from friends, the internet and my own creations.

In amongst the thousands of recipes contained in that lot there are some that I love, some that I think need a bit of work, and some that I can easily dismiss, either having cooked and not been impressed by simply not needing to.

In order to make some sense of all of this, I’ve been looking for a piece of recipe management software. Something that will let me enter details of all my favourite recipes, edit them as I experiment, and then sort and search through them in a way much easier than pulling book after book off the shelf and flicking through the indexes.

Just a quick note: I use a Mac, so if you are using a PC then you might as well stop reading this post now (or a better option, go to the apple store and switch).

So far I’ve tried out three options, Dishbase, MacGourmet and Yummysoup! Of the three, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind which is the best. Yummysoup! offers some additional features which can’t be found in the other programs, i.e. a fantastic web import interface that makes it stupidly easy to import your favourite recipes from any site on the web. As well as this it gives you a good looking and intuitive user interface, and is very simple to learn and use. The full screen recipe view is very handy, but I would prefer it if I could turn the picture off, and have just the text.

Yummysoup! is available at hungryseacow.com, for $20 (about £10.50), and you can download a free 15 day trial, I’d highly recommend giving it a go.

Of course the ideal solution would be to create my own database using something like the fanstastic Bento and tailor it exactly to my needs, but at the moment I just don’t have the time. Until I do, yummysoup! does pretty much everything that I ask of it.

Don’t faff about with Coq au vin!

A proper Coq au vin is a thing to be savoured, it’s the type of food that makes you happy and warm inside, on depressing grey days it can lift you up and out of any misery. Shared with family and friends and accompanied by a bottle of wine or three, it’s about as close to a perfect way to spend some time as I can imagine.

BUT……..

All of that is dependent on the quality of the dish, the ingredients that have gone into it, and the effort and time (especially time) that has gone into preparing it. It depends on it being real.

Recently I’ve seen on numerous tv programs and in books and magazines, dishes which claim to be coq au vin and simply aren’t. Don’t make the mistake of using any of these recipes and thinking that you know what coq au vin is, as a general rule if it hasn’t taken at least an hour to prepare and cook there is no way that it is the real deal. It is also not even close to what it should be if it contains such bizarre additions as olives or orange juice. Chicken in a tomatoey sauce with olives, is something more like Chicken Cacciatore, it’s not coq au vin! Lastly if it contains a splash, or a glass of wine, then it isn’t going to taste the way it should. A bottle of a rich red wine reduces down to give this dish its fantastic flavours, a ’splash’ only gives it a hint of its real character.

Coq au vin is essentially just a chicken stew with red wine in it, but it’s a classic recipe for a reason. If you are going to make it then stick to that classic recipe and you will see why. It isn’t something that needs to be changed or modernised or reinvented, it is perfect just the way it is.

Don’t bugger about with it, don’t try to cook it faster than it should be, and don’t cut corners.In fact don’t do anything to faff about with coq au vin, it’s just too good to be degraded like that.

Do cook it with the care and love it deserves, serve it with simple boiled potatoes and/or a lovely fresh bread, eat it on a cold evening by candlelight with friends, and wash it down with plenty of red wine.

There is only recipe that I always use when I make coq au vin, and I have never found anything else that comes close to it, either in a recipe book or a restaraunt. You can find it here: Nigel Slaters classic coq au vin recipe

Tempura – Better batter?

IMPORTANT NOTE: TEMPURA IS NOT A JAPANESE CREATION!

Yes, we all think they made it up themselves, but actually Tempura was introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the mid 16th century. Any history book will probably tell you why there were there, but to be honest I have no interest at all. I am however very glad that took tempura with them, and that the Japanese have stuck with it and exported it back to the rest of us.

For anyone who not only didn’t know that it wasn’t Japanese but also doesn’t have a clue what it is, traditonal Tempura is a deep fried vegetables or seafood in a crisp fluffy batter. Personally I’d make tempura with just about anything, bugger the tradition, I would say that you could throw in just about any kind of veg or seafood, and why not meat as well. Whats in the middle doesn’t really matter, because to me the important thing about the dish is the batter.

Tempura batter is light, fluffy, and crisp, and I love it. As part of lunch today I had tempura vegetables, they were in a less than spectacular chain of pubs in the UK, and yet they managed not to bugger them up and they tasted great. They did this because apart from tasting great, Tempura is stupidly easy to make.

There are any number of recipes for Tempura batter on the web, and as yet I really can’t pick out one to recommend over all of the others, the best thing would be to google and have a look.

There are however three things that are very important when making Tempura whatever recipe you use:

• The water used in the batter must be VERY COLD, preferably iced.
• The batter must not be overmixed. Just use your fork (or chopsticks) for literally a few seconds to combine the ingredients. Lumps are fine and perfectly normal, overmixing so that gluten is released and your batter goes sticky is not, as this will make your tempura greasy.
• Only make the batter when you are ready to fry it. Tempura batter is not like pancake batter which will be much better if it is left alone for half an hour after mixing. If you don’t use the tempura batter straight away then it will lose all of its fluffiness and become thick and heavy.

Assuming you follow these three rules, pretty much any recipe will do. If you don’t like the first one, then pick another and try again.

I’m going to experiment with using different ingredients in my tempura, and I’ll add some of my conclusions to this post later.

Hollandaise

I know that many people consider it to be the most important meal of the day, but I often skip breakfast, or end up eating just a slice of toast or a pastry.

It’s a habit that I want to change, so I’m experimenting with some classic breakfast recipes. You can’t get much more classic than this mornings dish of eggs benedict, which is quick, easy and is just a fantastic combination of flavours.

The thing that makes eggs benedict special, and not just a bit of ham and egg on toast is the hollandaise sauce. It’s also the only thing that makes the dish remotely tricky to prepare.

A classic Hollandaise is an emulsified sauce, made of egg yolks, butter, and lemon juice. It is one of the five ‘mother sauce’ in French cooking, as they were defined by Mr Escoffier.

Some modern recipes use white wine vinegar in place of the lemon juice, and any vinegar would probably work (with the exception of malt vinegar), although this will obviously completely change the flavour.

I stick with the lemon juice, and since I don’t bother to measure it but just throw it in, I probably use too much, but I really like the freshness and citrusy flavour.

There are (as with everything) a number of variations on the basic recipe, like Foaming Hollandaise, which involves adding egg whites, which have been whipped to form soft peaks, to the finished sauce.

This is the basic Hollandaise recipe:

• 250g unsalted butter
• 3 large egg yolks
• juice of 1/2 lemon

Melt the butter in a saucepan until it is nice and hot, but before it starts to cook and darken in colour. Whilst it is foaming, use a ladel or metal spoon to scoop off the foam and scum from the surface and discard it.

Take a bowl and set it over a pan of gently simmering water. Put the egg yolks and lemon juice into this bowl and whisk them together, until the mixture thickens slightly and starts to turn paler in colour.

If the egg and lemon juice mixture starts to grainy, the add a very small amount of ice cold water, and keep whisking.

Pour the melted butter into the mixture slowly and steadily, whisking all the time.

When all of the butter has been incorporated into the mixture, remove it from the heat, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Lardy cake

I’ll freely admit that it doesn’t sound like the greatest of ideas, and it definitely doesn’t fit into a vast array of healthy eating diets, but a (good) Lardy cake is fantastic.

Lardy cake is a very British recipe. It’s from Wiltshire, the pig keeping capital of England (where they have plenty of lard to go round). There are also a number of very similar dishes from other areas of the country, like Fourses cake or Lardy Johns.

I’ve tried to find the history of the Lardy cake, but it seems almost impossible. The dish just seems to have been made in Wiltshire as long as people have been living there.

I’m sure I remember them being much easier to find than they are now, every reasonable bakery seemed to offer a Lardy cake (although good bakeries also seem harder to find). Now, probably largely due to recommendations from people like Gillian McKeith and others like her they seem to have largely disappeared. I’m not advocating stuffing kilos of lard down your neck on a regular basis, but I do sincerely believe that you can eat just about everything in moderation and still remain fit and healthy. Lardy cake is no exception.

I trawled through a lot of recipe books, and googled for a while, but just like the finished products, Lardy cake recipes seem a bit thin on the ground.

If you are really concerned about the fat content then you I guess that you could substitute butter (which is hardly low calorie itself), but it will be nowhere as good as the real thing. If you are considering substituting margarine or anything else, then you would be well advised to just skip the whole thing completely.

I’m trying out a few different recipes and making some adjustments. As soon as I find one that I am happy with, I’ll add it on here. Until then, look elsewhere or just admire your unlardy shape and think about the calories you are saving.

What’s going on

So, this is the first post on my new “blog”, I have blogged before, but never managed to keep it going for very long before other things took over my time, and it just became a bit abandoned. This time, I’m determined that it is going to be different, and that this is a longer term project.

I found it very difficult to think of an appropriate title for this article. I ran through a huge number of cliches, including such gems as ‘new life resolution’, dismissed them for obvious reasons, and ended up with the above.

This is a blog about food, buying it, cooking it, eating it, and most of all loving it.

More personally than that, it’s a blog about my decision to change my life, about coming to the realisation that what you do isn’t what you care about, and about turning a dream into reality.

A brief introduction would probably be a good idea.

I’m John, I was born about 30 years ago in the south of England, and have since then lived and worked in 7 different countries, doing various different things. My day job is nothing to do with food, but it does pay the bills, and until now I still didn’t really know what I wanted to be.

Over the course of the last year and a bit I’ve been spending a lot of my time feeling sorry for myself and down because I hadn’t realised what the two things (as opposed to people) that I could become passionate about were until a long time after colleges, universities and career paths had to be thought about and decided upon. Having finally realised what they were, it was depressing to think that there was very little that I could do about it, that my life was now set in a mould, and that I would spend the next 30 years going to an office everyday and doing something that really doesn’t mean all that much to me at all.

The time has come to do something about that, to make at least one of the things that I care about the thing that I spend the biggest part of my life doing. That is where the food comes in.

Food is of huge importance to me, food has the power to make me obscenely happy. Not only eating fantastic food, but also preparing it, watching peoples faces when they put something that tastes fantastic in their mouths.

So, here begins a journey. It’s a journey that will take a few years, that will take most of my free time, a lot of effort, and virtually all of our disposable income, but one that I feel I have to take. I’m going to make my way along a hugely steep path between enthusiastic and reasonably skilled home cook to owner and head chef of a restaurant which creates food that is better than sex, the kind of food that makes you grin, makes you inexplicably happy, and makes you eat far more than you should .

In the immediate future, this involves a number of things. It means being highly successful and therefore well paid at what I currently do, it means a lot of time developing my culinary skills and learning how to manage a restaurant, it even means a haircut.

It’s a huge challenge, but it is what I feel that I have to do. If you want to read about all of my adventures in food along the way, then just stay tuned to this blog.