Udon noodles with walnut and miso
Udon noodles with walnut and miso
Worm noodles with walnut and miso
This meal exceeded all my expectations, it really did. Unsurprisingly I couldn’t find Kombu, dashi, miso paste or even mirin at the supermarket. I would happily support my local Asian grocer if only it were on my way home from work and open at 9pm. I’m lucky enough to live in a place where I could probably get my hands on most ingredients the world has to offer with relatively little effort so I should try harder, but try telling me that at dinnertime. Forget heart and mind: the belly rules in my household.
Udon noodles are lovely big squidgy worms – the kind of thing I like to eat – and despite flinching while pouring in a whole tablespoon of sugar at the end, I loved the taste of the sauce. Instead of miso paste I just poured in a packet of instant miso soup. The other ingredients I left out. I haven’t cooked with garlic and ginger for a while and had forgotten how splendid they taste together.
Also a bit of a revelation as far as food prep is concerned: I cut my spring onions into actual (kind of) julienne things! No idea where this sudden bolt of patience sprang from but let’s hope it sticks around for a while.
Conclusions:
- Top marks for this one, cheers Yotam.
- Deep-fried aubergine is bloody lovely and heatproof tongs (thanks Ads) are good for turning the cubes over in crackling fat as if roasting chestnuts on a fire – albeit with none of the cosiness, but you take what you can get in bedsitland.
One more day of backcombing and fish
Top of tonight’s shopping list is a giant bottle of conditioner. My hair has remained in a matted beehive for three days now, slightly morphing in shape dependent on the position I slept in (Cliffhanger last night, for those of you who bought the magazine this week – I stayed over with a friend and the Heimlich would not be appropriate).
Today’s outfit has mostly been provided by Harriet and involves a long denim dress gaffer taped up underneath to make it thigh-length.
The beehive has been bobby-pinned within the bounds of Monday morning social acceptance and the Mary-Quant-visits-a-burns-unit make-up was rejected entirely this morning. I pretended to myself that the reason was my being in a rush to catch the train to work, but the truth was I’m too scared to come into the office looking that odd. Maybe if I’d been here a year I might be more adventurous, or if everyone knew what I was really up to, but at the moment I’m trying to retain a sense of reliability when defending my deletion of a semi-colon. I don’t want my colleagues staring at my eyes trying to work out whether I’m having an allergic reaction or am just an Adam and the Ants fan. It’s not fair on other people.
Jump to it
Frump to it
Fried herring
Fried salmon
Conclusions:
- Even in a creative office, there are limits to how ‘interesting’ you can look – work is work. This fashion shoot was quite funny to try out at the weekend but it’s definitely one for the leisure time.
- No fresh herring in the supermarket, so I allowed myself some nice but boring salmon instead and boiled a couple of kippers to try for good measure. I always imagined I wouldn’t like a flat, Simpson-yellow oily sea creature that smelt of concentrated fish, but in fact I thought it was delicious. That’s butter for you. Unfortunately I returned Harriet’s borrowed clothes to her reeking of kipper – bad manners.
The big match #1
Ahoy there me hearties!
Although my foot has not yet returned to its former high-functioning glory and Homerton Hospital has viciously banned me from running or wearing high heels until mid-February, I am out of the boot, and able to walk and carry my own shopping. Life has returned to normality… or had.
I now find myself sitting on my best friend’s bed wearing a skintight double-denim ensemble with a backcombed La Roux quiff and pink lipstick smeared over my eyelids.
Guardian Girl is back.
I hate rollmops (I know this without ever having to eat them) and it was Liv’s 30th today so pickling herring was, as ever, far from my mind. I bought an orange, a tub of ready-rolled mops straight out of hell, some bread, some soured cream and some cider. It’s not very River Cottage but then what really is, other than the River Cottage?
Conclusions:
• I have managed to get my consumerist mitts on an iPhone at long last, but I’m still getting the hang of it. Expect general confusion for a fair while, plus late additions of captions, weblinks and italics.
• People really seemed to like the La Roux effect in the end. I’m surprised and a bit pleased.
• There’s never an excuse for herring.
Lean on me
But not too hard, as this pose is slightly precarious and my core stability is not what it once was
Cider vinegar and orange rollmops
Far too much cider (not pictured), an orange and some rollmops
Eggs, flour, crutches
A report on the end of last week, shortish on words and longish on pictures.
First, a miraculously tasty and mechanically successful two-course dinner that also provided Liv and I with a Eurostar picnic on Friday: Yotam’s delicious and not that tricky Crespéou omelette mountain followed by Dan Lepard’s bananarama tropicana cake, which was alive-tasting (not in a cannibalistic way), like a lardy version of a piña colada only less saccharine. Mine was a little uncooked in the middle and overcooked – perhaps even burnt – on the top, which I think means I need to get more involved with foil.
Crespeou
Crasspeou
Tropicana banana cake
Botty-rama banana cake (I despair of this caption as much as anyone, yet can't stop finding the word 'botty' funny)
Next: finally a fashion photo that reveals my new, cutting-edge space boot:
A walk on the wild side
A limp on the mild side
As I traversed Antwerp in this get-up, Liv consistently got the hysterics about how small my other foot looked compared to the hopalong foot. It made me know how the dog feels when the humans laugh at its ear, which has turned itself inside out.
And finally: the results of a tired, late-night interiors styling session. Check out my cosy open fireplace in particular.
Glass extension
Arse extension
Black interior
Slack, inferior
Raising eyebrows
Erasing eyebrows
Now a few boring sentences I feel obliged to write for the sake of structural consistency. I wouldn’t bother to read them if I were you.
This week’s first impressions are affected by two significant factors.
1) I was in Antwerp having a wonderful time all weekend so I didn’t buy the paper – Adam is saving me a copy and I checked it out online on Monday instead.
2) I have very little cash this week so I suspect that shipping actual tons of dried fruit and brandy into my flat to bake stuffy Christmas foods that nobody much likes anyway will be low on my agenda, as will buying £250 bottles of men’s fragrance. I’d like to try to make at least one xmas treat as it’s nice to turn up bearing foodie gifts for one’s family and take some of the culinary strain off the hosts, but we’ll have to see how practical it turns out to be this week. I wonder how many Guardian readers pulled their fingers out on Sunday and actually baked xmas cakes.
I notice that the Measure sends mulled wine and minced pies up the list this week so perhaps I’ll be more likely to get in some shopmade delights and eat them instead. Liv is taking me and my busted foot shopping at Tesco’s in her little blue van tonight so I’ll ask her hallowed advice on the matter.
The fashion spread on Hitchcock heroines is one of my favourite looks and I’d usually be in my element, but I imagine the spaceboot will undermine most of the glamour of a pencil skirt.
Conclusions:
- I love Yotam, I do.
- Cakes are just as good as they were last time I tried them.
- Fashion is hard enough to achieve with an average paycheck and an average girth, but just you try adding a leg brace and crutches to the equation.
- While we’re here, it’s amazing how many people stare at you when you’re in this condition, and even more amazing how many burst into laughter directly afterwards. You get used to it pretty quick. I have of course swiped at a few select people with my crutches in response, which is something I learned in an assertiveness workshop.
- Interiors schminteriors. ‘Tis is the season of just trying to keep warm.
A farl cry from Hugh’s recipe
I’m getting well into the warm fracture booty now but it doesn’t half take ages to get everywhere. Last night I damn near broke my neck and wasted years of my life transporting flour and potatoes to Phoebe’s house for a wee dinner party with Nin and Liv. Not that it was a waste of time to go – it was lovely. I’m just used to racing everywhere in a huff rather than taking time to admire the empty fried chicken boxes and soggening leaf mulch of London’s streets.
I cooked us all a fry-up, which was supposed to incorporate Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s potato farls but ended up starring gluey mash instead. The bonus was that mashed potato is bigged up in the Measure this week, so I was inadvertently succeeding at one of this week’s to-dos while failing at another.
I don’t know if I mixed in too little flour or what but hell, I think mash goes with pretty well anything and I was more than delighted to eat it with fried eggs, sausages, bacon, beans and toast.
I forgot to ask the girls to take my photo before I was dropped home by kind Phoebe and there was no Guardian farl snap for the day anyway, so this post is sadly unillustrated. Therefore I’m going to keep it short and sweet.
Tomorrow you can expect: booty (not that kind), omelette skyscraper, cake and possibly a home improvement feature – but let’s not set our goals too high. I have to do a mammoth cook tonight to get my tasks done before I head to Antwerp tomorrow.
Conclusions:
- Consistency is key but when it comes to fry-ups you just have to be grateful for what you’ve got.
- There’s arguably little point in walking around in an unflattering outfit all day in the name of the blog if I then forget to photograph it, but I can tell you it’s still quite pleasant being told what to wear of a morning. I missed that during my recent break and pretty much went around in little black dresses every day. It was boring.
You ain’t seen muffin yet
I undertook another another mission last night as I had to get a cab from work to A&E via Bezzer Liv’s house to collect my moral support and then have my crummy foot checked out again. An evil nurse made me feel so silly for even being there (“we’ve already told you clearly there’s nothing wrong, so why are you here again?”) that I secretly cried a little bit after she’d gone. Luckily Liv saved the day by finding the nicest lady in Homerton Hospital and asking her what we should do. Nice lady instantly got a doctor to have a quick, kind word with me, and he checked the x-ray and made me an appointment at the fracture clinic for this morning. Turns out the bone is in fact cracked and I’m now in a space-age fracture booty device for the next six weeks. That’s going to put a whole lotta spanner in the Guardian Girl works – unless they happen to base the next six weeks of fashion shoots around pseudo-ski style and/or neu-medical hip.
Such is my renewed dedication to the Guardian cause that, even though I didn’t get home from The A&E Experience (“watch your crutches on that puke on the floor. Actually, is it a turd?”) until past 11pm, I still made a batch of muffin mix, let it rise while I had my bath and then cooked them while I dried off. They were less satisfying to make than yesterday’s crumpets and I totally fonzed up the mixture by using self-raising flour instead of plain and putting too much water in so the dough resembled PVA glue. I also coated them in actual semolina rather than the suggested semolina flour, because it was what I had in the cupboard. I thought they’d be disastrous but in fact they came out looking more or less like muffins, albeit slightly fecal as ever, and they tasted pretty good but a bit bland. Actually, to be totally honest about it half of them tasted like washing up liquid. There’s a good reason for this. After crumpetgate I washed my frying pan by pouring water and washing up liquid into it and leaving it on a hot hob until it boiled away. Dunno why it did it but by the next day I’d forgotten I had. The frying pan looked lovely and clean so I started cooking the muffins without rinsing it. I suppose I might produce some extra oestrogen as a result but that’s unlikey to do me much harm. Three breasts are better than two.
I think the muffins are meant to be split and served with butter or the like (marge?) but I’m trying to be slightly calorie aware as I’m getting zero exercise with my injured paw, and we know what happens when you eat Guardian food every day. It tends to supersize a girl. I got away with it slightly more when I was walking or running 4-12 miles a day but arguably that’s what gave me the cracked foot, and one must pay attention to the body’s cries for help apparently.
I could sue the Guardian for making me chubby and further adding to my distress by suggesting I wear small fashions. Or I could thank them because the surgeon told me I have good strong bones, which I attribute to all those pies.
So the crutches made it into yesterday’s fashion and the booty is soon to become a regular sight. Dunno if I can wear it with a platform heel on the other foot. I suspect the answer to that is fairly obvious. So much for xmas party glam.
No muffin shots but here’s another underwhelming fashion shot of yours truly outside Horrorton Hospital.
Studs or sequins
Stubby deliquent
Conclusions
- I’m pretty sure my captions are going downhill.
- Every time I try to type “conclusions” I type “cobclusions”, which is not only irritating but also reminds me of my dead house rabbit Cobbie, who I really loved even though he bit the crotch of every male who went anywhere near me, no matter whether their intention was to kiss me or or hand me my change. He had a pink lead and used to go everywhere with me, which I think might be why he was so irritated all the time. I feel a bit guilty now but I did give him lovely fresh veggies every day and he lived a mollycoddled, free-range life.
- Don’t forget to clean the detergent from your pan before you heat food in it, will you.
Crumpets and Mickey Mouse ears
Yesterday was my first day back on the case and, of course, it turned into the inevitable rollercoaster that comes with taking a magazine’s lifestyle template and Pritt Sticking it directly on top of your own week in spite of its total ludicrousy given the fact that you can barely walk due to messing up yer foot, and have spent all your money on cabs around London, and cream cheese and salt beef bagels to make yourself feel better. Today’s post is going to be a string of extremely long, pompous sentences and you’re just going to have to deal with it. I’ll get back into the swing of being brief and personable soon enough.
The lowest trough last night was hobbling through Camden on a deformed bruise of a foot in the howling wind after a long day at work trying to get to Hackney in time to buy crumpet rings, have my photo taken, see my bezzer mate, phone the bailiff to tell them I don’t owe the council any money (I don’t) so can they please stop threatening to seize my valuable goods (not sure whether 20 threadbare Ikea rugs, a collection of owl portraits, a roasting tin, the Dallas Season 1 DVD boxset and a dribbling but well-meaning cat would add up to the value they say I owe anyway), have a bath, epilate my legs before I have to return to A&E and risk terrifying the doctors yet again with my hirsutism, and finally actually cook myself some food. The average busy evening is made far more stressful by having your maximum speed capped at 0.00005mph, I’ve discovered.
A higher peak arrived later though, steaming-skinned after a hot bath and standing over the stove watching bubbles rise through golden homemade crumpets. It’s a big grumble hauling myself back on to the Guardian wagon and whipping the old ‘orse back into action but it’s always been those moments when a recipe you’d never have thought of cooking yourself turns out to be beautifully simple and impressive that it really is worth the effort.
I used egg rings, whatever they are – I suppose they’re so greasy-spoon owners can make sure their fried eggs are worth £6.95, or people in really clean slippers on polished wood floors can give their kids a nice neat breakfast – but they were on sale in Sainsbury’s and did the trick perfectly for the recipe.
Globbing the batter into the rings and watching it turn into actual, professional-ish looking crumpets was very satisfying, although it got boring after a while and I cracked out the Ladyshave while I was waiting for each batch to cook. Here’s a lesson I’ve learned: plucking the toe hairs out of a swollen, purple foot is not the most pleasant way to spend time and in hindsight I don’t really know what I thought I was doing, even with these tasty teatime treats as light at the end of the tunnel:
Crumpets
Crummypets
As for yesterday’s outfit, I don’t have any Mickey Mouse ears and just putting myself in the position of my colleagues for a moment, if the new person at my work rocked up in Disney fancy dress on day six of their employment, I wouldn’t be thinking kind thoughts. If they also happened to look a bit self-conscious, crack weak jokes every two minutes and walk on crutches, I’d wonder why the hell they’d even bothered with the ears if that’s the way they approached life.
I went for a headscarf teamed with a brilliant sequined sweatshirt my friend Hamburg Emily bought me for my 30th and I felt just dandy. I think sequins in the office is fine, totally fine. Disney in the office is totally not fine, of course, and we must fight back.
Liv kindly took my photo later that evening. She got some good shots but in the end I prefer this accidentally long-exposed one because it fits with the supernatural theme of several earlier photos on this blog.
Hang Tough
Dang rough
Conclusions:
- You liderally can’t look chic on crutches, or cool, or anything other than injured.
- Imagine if you were on crutches and wearing Mickey Mouse ears. It’d just make life miserable wouldn’t it.
- Crumpets are something you can make at home cheaply, quite healthily and quite quickly, and they have the proper holes in and everything! It might just be me being a philistine but I’d never have guessed this.
Banana caramel cream pie and a week off consuming
On Friday night I cooked the remaining recipe for last week: Dan Lepard’s banana caramel cream pie.
Sainsbury’s was out of bananas but for a load of very green ones or a massive multipack of fairtrade ones, which I bought. When I got them home I realised there was no weight on the packet so I had no idea how many to use. I plumped for one in the sauce and another sliced up under the meringue. I added a very, very liberal amount of rum and brandy, and used a mixture of thick chantilly cream and mascarpone. I made the meringue properly (good girl, no slacking) with my hand blender, which worked a treat.
Liv arrived a bit later, we finished off the labneh with celery sticks (and she pronounced it delicious), then we tucked into the pie in front of a DVD. After one slice each we were pretty tipsy – not sure if this could really have been the pie’s doing alone, as we were drinking the remaining brandy with 7up as an accompaniment. It was delicious anyway, however intoxicating, and a spoonful of mascarpone on top cut through the sweetness a bit. As much as I complained when I had to eat pie every day, you can’t really beat a good one, and this was that.
Banana caramel cream pie
Rum and brandy pie
I woke up the next morning to discover that I was 30 years old, so the rest of the pie made a good celebratory breakfast before I popped out to buy the paper. To my delight I discovered the whole mag is given over to a retrospective of the noughties this week, which means no cooking and no shopping all week – just outfits. It was a much-appreciated birthday present. Off I trotted to the pub in my party dress, and there I stayed, with all my pals, for a very long time. What a brilliant night – I have yet to recover. Here follow this week’s outfits so far:
Carrie Bradshaw
Barry Bradshaw
Skinny denim
Chubber denim
The It bag
The nosebag
Bling is the thing
Grim is the bling
-
Alco-pie: a grand foodstuff.
-
Labneh: gets nicer with time.
-
A week off cooking, reorganising furniture and searching for elusive garments: sublime.
-
Being 30: yes.
Labneh with olives and pistachios
Dinner: Yotam Ottolenghi’s labneh.
I didn’t strain my own yoghurt to make cheese.
I did this sort of thing with goat’s milk when I was inhabiting an iron age hill fort for a few months and I tell you what, it was foul. I also find that everything you need to know about straining is contained within its name. Leaving something to drip might not require much effort but it’s all those clean cloths and string and thinking about things 24 hours in advance that I find so offensive. I was out for dinner the night before I wanted to eat the labneh so I didn’t even have time to get the ingredients and begin the process.
I might have started off on the wrong foot but I ended on a right one, of sorts. I got a pot of natural yoghurt and a whorl of soft goat’s cheese and mixed them together in a big bowl, then I stirred in most of the other ingredients, including some sunblush tomatoes but excluding lemon zest (I looked at some lemons for a good five minutes, thought about the pile of washing up in front of the cupboard door where I keep my grater, and concluded I couldn’t be bothered), fresh oregano (where do you get this? Paxos?) and chilli flakes (I’d now reached a state of total unmotivation).
Anyway it made this surprisingly tasty dip. I got two crusty loaves – one granary and one white – and tried a bit of each with it. Really quite nice and the whole thing took me about ten minutes.
Labneh with olives, pistachios and oregano
Lavvy with olives and pistachios
I’m sorry about the unimpressive presentation – it looks like an unappetising mess and I hope this does not bring too much shame upon me and my household.
Tomorrow I will not only buy the paper as usual and plan out my next week, but I will also become 30. Expect a new, epic and entirely appropriate level of commitment to perfection.
Conclusions:
- My bastardisation of this recipe makes a big, tasty dip to share with people. I’m going to have the remainder with Liv tonight before cooking banana caramel pie à la Dan Lepard.
- With dips, you’re supposed to pay attention to the presentation to avoid that “waste product” effect. Another thing to add to the list of lessons learned from the Guardian: the importance of garnish. I’ll put some herbs on the leftovers for Liv’s benefit.
- You’d perhaps have thought that yoghurt mixed with goat’s cheese would be a bit bleurghy but I thought it was pretty nice.
Leek terrine
What a night.
The leek terrine was the least interesting thing about it.
The rest will probably be frightfully dull for you but I’ll press on anyway.
First I had a bath and listened to Resonance FM, on which there was a most brilliant Wavelength/William English interview with a man called Captain Maurice Seddon. I recommend you click on that link and listen to it. He’s an eccentric gentleman who owns at least ten dogs and several freezers filled with food six years out of date, which he eats will no ill effects. But it’s his charm and his relationship with the interviewer that make it worth listening to. It was just a really good radio moment.
Then these two fellows came on pretending to be old men, as far as I could make out. The fact that they were preceded by an actual old man, and a very engaging one at that, set them back. They totally bombed really. I wasn’t too keen on the Brian Gittins character. But the Angelos Epithemiou dude was very funny.
There was one really good line in it (“I don’t like how you’re wearing your belt – why don’t you use the loops?”) and they also reminded me what a great tune Jellicle Cats is. I haven’t heard it since I was six. The rousing key changes! The sitcom-lite bassline!
Then I made the terrine.
It was easy – you boil leeks, put them in a clingfilm-lined loaf tin with a load of feta and some mint, and leave it for a while. I nearly didn’t bother with the clingfilm but my conscience got the better of me.
Then I watched the third episode of last year’s Criminal Justice. Then I watched the fourth. Then I turned out the terrine, at which point I was thankful I’d used the clingfilm. If I hadn’t, the whole structure would’ve fallen apart. I downloaded it on to a plate, stood back and felt dead chuffed with myself. The leeks made very attractive pale green lined patterns around the outside of the loaf, and it looked like a real thing. An Achievement. It was now about midnight, and I took some of the terrine with me to watch the final part of Criminal Justice, even though I was tired and it was a school night, because I couldn’t physically or mentally bear the suspense. I can’t believe telly can be this good. It’s also given me a highly inconvenient crush on Ben Whishaw, who is not a useful person to have a crush on for any number of reasons. I’ll allow myself to Google Image him only once today. Then I must move on. I haven’t had an embarrassing and inappropriate celeb crush since I accidentally brainwashed myself into being in love with Joaquin Phoenix while watching Walk the Line. That lasted a year, during which time one half of my brain genuinely believed I was going to marry him while the other half looked on in semi-disgusted pity. It was a confusing time for me and I hope this Ben Whishaw nonsense clears up quicker.
If you can get hold of the DVD of that Criminal Justice you have to watch it. Pete Postlethwaite rules in it to. It’s just so much better than leek terrine.
Oh yes, the terrine. I should have squeezed all the water from the leeks before packing them into the tin as it went a bit soggy. I also thought it wasn’t worth bothering with the cider vinegar drizzled on top but that was a mistake. I have plenty of terrine left over so I’ll finish it another time with some of the thyme cider vinegar that has sat around being ignored in my kitchen since I made it months ago. I like the way Hugh F-W explains so carefully in the recipe how to slice the terrine. But even following his instructions it all fell apart for me, as is plain to see:
Leek terrine
Freak terrine
Conclusions:
- Although this constitutes a highly exciting evening by Guardian Girl standards, I realise in instant hindsight that it must sound much like a boring evening in to most other folks. I felt like an Amish kid in Disneyland.
I've always found it funny when people write letters to the Guardian's Weekend magazine complaining that the recipe ingredients are too middle class and the fashion only looks good on thin people. After all, it's just a magazine. Or is it? I decided to follow its recipes, fashion and lifestyle advice as closely as possible, to see if the aspirations promoted therein can really be achieved by the average reader who is not especially wealthy, not necessarily model thin and is obliged to work regular office hours. This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the Guardian but I link to the Weekend magazine website for the purposes of illustration. 
Guardian Girl 
leave a comment