Guardian Girl

Another condensed post containing some rather poor attempts at following the Guardian step-by-step.

First of all, the recipe I was supposed to cook for my friends the night after returning from a festival, after a long day at work and not much sleep. As you can imagine, popping to the butcher to buy the ingredients for slow-cooked pork cheeks, crushed Jersey Royals, broad beans & grain mustard sauce wasn’t top of my agenda. However I did try to cobble together something resembling the intended dish.

I wasn’t too fussed about the prospect of buying a pig’s head, what with animal slaughter having been a fairly prominent theme throughout my life. It also would have been highly entertaining to turn up to my friends’ beautifully neat and stylish home brandishing the thing with a murderous look in my eye. I once returned home swinging a floral handbag from which I produced an enormous calf’s tongue, much to the horror of my boyfriend at the time. It still had a big, tough root thing attached and I had to boil it, then peel off the fractal-looking tastebuds, which made a loud rasping sound. We feasted on it for days and quite enjoyed it, although the gristly bits were slightly sickening. Anyway, I digress very far from the path of pig cheeks. As I keep pointing out, I’d been away for the weekend and had to make do with popping to the Tesco Metro near my friends’ home. They had run out of or didn’t stock: pork of any kind but chops, onions, carrots, leeks, thyme, broad beans and mint. What a rubbish shop. Still, they had wine, so I bought some of that, lamely improvised the other ingredients and went round to see Adam and Thomas. What we ended up with was sausages with mashed potato and butter beans. It ain’t pork cheeks, is it. Tasty though.

Slow-cooked pork cheeks, crushed Jersey Royals, broad beans & grain mustard sauce

Let's call a spade a spade: sausages and mash

Last night I stayed late at work and was then supposed to return home to make Cotswold mess, which involved dissolving gelatine and piping mousse among other incomprehensible tasks. I couldn’t wait three hours for meringue to cook or I’d be sugar rushing at bedtime, I have no piping bag (who does anyway?) and I frankly just could not be bothered to tackle this behemoth of a dessert. Emily Watkins obviously enjoys a faff but, as has already been established, I really don’t. I bought a packet of meringue nests, a Rowntree ready-made jelly and an Onken mousse, plus a punnet of raspberries, and arranged some of these ingredients in two glasses  to take the photo. Then I emptied it all into a trough and ate it up before me evening bath. Lovely. By the time I was slumbering happily between the sheets, Ms Watson would still have been greasing her piping bag. I think we all know who the winner is in this situation.

Cotswold mess

Mess

As usual, apologies for the low-rent photography. My logic was: if I don’t have time to make meringue, why waste precious moments turning the flash off?

My final cheat to confess to so far this week was with Lauren Luke’s steel blue eyes look. I tried it out at the festival, but I hadn’t actually taken my blue eyeshadow with me. I know, I know, I’m impatient is all. I did everything else she said and it looked much nicer with black eyeshadow anyway. Trust me, I tried the blue one when I got home and I didn’t even look like I was off to an Abba party or anything. I just looked like that girl at school who’s two sandwiches short of a picnic, cuts her own fringe and is slightly sexually provocative.

Steel blue eyes

Steely glance

Conclusions:

• Those recipes left me looking forward to trying Rosie Sykes’ dishes instead. Simpler, tastier looking, much less effort
• Braised pig cheeks are probably delicious, but why bother when you could fry a packet of sausages? The average chipolata probably contains plenty of pig cheek anyway, mashed in with the trotters and snouts and eyeballs and abattoir floor-scurf
• Arranging pre-bought mousse, meringue and jelly into glasses and laying them out all nice is pretty fun as cooking goes, although my lack of kitchen curtain and the close proximity of my neighbour made me feel a little vulnerable. Imagine the sadness you’d feel if you saw the girl next door carefully arranging two little raspberry-topped puddings on a plate, laying two spoons next to them, taking a photo and then eating both alone. And then, even sadder,  imagine if that girl was you
• Blue eyeshadow is a bad invention