Fried halloumi with runner bean salad
Last night had to be the most successful evening of cooking so far. First of all the fried halloumi with runner bean salad turned out absolutely lovely. The ingredients were easy to find and not too expensive. I was able to follow each step faithfully rather than leaping up them two at a time, coat tails flying in the wind. There were no feelings of frustration or inadequacy. I love Rosie Sykes for this. I also defrosted and heated through my previous beetroot salad and raspberry tarts with great success, making a full-on Guardian meal of loveliness for my bezzer mate and I.
Fried halloumi with runner bean salad
Fried halloumi with runner bean salad! Nailed it!
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I feel a bit like a school kid saying goodbye to a really lovely supply teacher. ‘Miss Sykes, why can’t you write recipes for the Guardian every week?’ (I know she used to. Maybe they could get her back if they offered her a payrise?)
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The ingredients for this one managed to be tasty and unusual enough to warrant writing about, but not hard to find and not too pricey. Even though there was a fair amount of preparation involved, none of it was too fiddly or complicated
Potted & cured river trout
My festival version of potted & cured river trout…
Potted & cured river trout
Takeaway fish & chips
Conclusions:
- Batter is better
Two cheated recipes and a cheated make-up look
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
Carrot and cumin burger buns
I took the ingredients for Dan Lepard’s carrot and cumin burger buns to my friends’ house the night before Latitude festival and cooked them by way of saying thanks for looking after my cat. They must’ve been chuffed, eh.
I’d got round there late and we started on some wine while I began my prep (more tearing, scraping and stirring than chopping, peeling and kneading). The recipe called for a considerable amount of rising time, which didn’t suit our appetites one bit, so in the end I just poured in rather more yeast than was required and hoped for the best. I forgot to bring butter so I simply poured in a randomly selected quantity of olive oil instead. I left the dough balls, which looked more like bhajis than buns due to my haphazard and occasionally dangerous chopping style, to rise for about 45 minutes, which was the length of time Adam and Thomas could bear to distract themselves with Youtube clips and yet more empty-stomached wine drinking before they fainted. The ‘buns’ went into a muffin tray followed by a hot oven and came out 25 minutes later resembling cakes. Why does everything I cook turn into a cake? I’m like a slightly rubbish, less rich version of King Midas. According to DL the buns should’ve been bouncy, soft and moist. Moist was pretty much the only one I managed to nail this time. They actually tasted pretty good – if a little yeasty – filled with some herby burgers that were on special offer and a bit of wilting rocket out of the boys’ fridge. They were surprisingly filling, too, which is pretty much my number-one criterion for food.
Here’s how they should’ve looked:
Carrot and cumin burger buns
And here’s the result, photographed in a drunken state as my stomach digested itself in anticipation. As you could see I couldn’t even muster the energy to slice it properly at this point. I just tore at the thing with my claws until it sort of divided in two.
Carrot and cumin cakes
Conclusions:
- Where on earth Sainsbury’s keep their sesame and poppy seeds I don’t know. They must have them
- A point of interest: while I was looking for the seeds, a man standing next to me piped up: ‘Excuse me, do you know if you can make icing sugar by putting normal sugar in a food processor?’ I replied that I had no idea and had never considered it before, to which he replied: ‘Oh well, my cooking has so little hope of turning out right, there’s really no point worrying about it.’ If he’d been within 40 years of my age, I would’ve married him on the spot. Imagine the dinner parties!
- Olive oil seems to work nice in buns
- The further I get from following these recipes, the more fun I have
- Yeast probably isn’t among the many ingredients you can throw into the mixing bowl with gay abandon
Beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish
I hobbled into Sainsbury’s last night. Why was I hobbling? a) I’d walked 11 miles that day b) I had my toes crossed. Why did I have my toes crossed? a) Because just crossing my fingers that there’d be no raw beetroot in Sainsbury’s and I’d have to buy ready cooked wasn’t enough. I was buying the ingredients for Yotam Ottolenghi’s beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish. Luckily my crossing worked and I bought four packets of the shrink-wrapped, boiled stuff.
Arriving home I switched the radio on, famished after the usual long and Forrest Gump-inspired day, and had a proper look at the recipe. I’d thought it was a salad (relish executed with my minimal chopping style) and that it would take minutes to throw together but alas, the recipe called for blackening peppers and reducing tomatoes. I was sorely tempted to be properly lazy, just chop everything up, put it in a bowl, take a quick snap and get to work on the eating bit, but I felt this was excessive cheating – plus I’ve done the pepper-grilling trick before and it makes them so much nicer. I used more fresh herbs than the recipe called for because I didn’t want to freeze the remainder in little bits. This worked out nice. I can never find preserved lemons but I used the juice from the fruit I zested into pastry a few days ago – industrious huh.
As I began toiling over the hot grill, a show came on my favourite station Resonance FM in which two people blew up 99 balloons, intermittently reading balloon-related facts, over a background soundtrack of 99 Luftballons by Nena, slowed down to last an hour. The effect, when combined with a large dish of beetroot, was a bit round and red but the tie-in was pleasing.
Anyway, back to the salad. It tasted very pleasant. By now I’d completely dispensed with the idea of it being a relish, though.
As well as the main dish, YO suggested frying the beet tops with creme fraiche, oilve oil, caraway seeds and garlic. Obviously I didn’t have any beet tops so instead I simply fried the flavourings, including garlic sliced and crisped in the oil like onion bits from the Harvester, stirred in the creme fraiche and ate it like a heart attack soup while I waited for my peppers to char. I feel slightly embarrassed by this and mention it only because it was very tasty and would make a nice dip. Maybe for radishes, to keep with the theme.
I froze the salad I couldn’t eat (whether this will work is a concern for the day it comes out of, not goes into, the freezer), proudly putting it next to the previous day’s remaining raspberry tarts. One day I’ll be receiving guests and will be able to casually defrost beetroot relish (I’ll revert to its proper, more exotic title especially for the occasion) and fruit tart for dessert. They won’t even notice the ring around the bath.
Beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish
Beetroot and yoghurt salad
Mine looks like a dish of kidneys.
Conclusions:
- It would be really helpful if these recipes included one bunch of something rather than four heaped tablespoons of something, but that’s what freezers are for
- Even in Yotam’s picture, ‘relish’ is pushing it a bit. It’s a salad isn’t it? You can have whole sweetcorn kernels in a relish but beetroot halves is borderline petulance
Raspberry tarts
Last night was the grand finale for fruit tarts, perhaps luckily for my increasingly indistinct waistline, although sadly for my pastry-loving tastebuds. Hugh sure does put a lot of cholesterol in his recipes. I look upon this as a good thing but perhaps I should have undergone a series of Supersize Me-style tests before and after this project. Too late now ( I’ll tell myself). I’ve got a bit cocky by now about the success with which I’m not taking these recipes very seriously, and these raspberry tarts followed the same happy pattern. I keep finding that Hugh’s pastry recipes come out too dry (it’s hilarious to hear myself write that – WI here I come) so I always add extra eggs, water, cream or whatever is to hand, which I think is why I keep ending up with cakes more than pastry. I also realise that the dryness is more likely to be due to my lack of scales than his bad recipes, although I have been using an ace French measuring jug that has marks up the sides for each ingredient by weight, for example Farine 100g etc. You just pour in the flour, sugar or whatever, shake it around a bit and pour it in. I love this jug so much I use it despite it being full of cracks. I’m scared I won’t be able to find a replacement. Terrified. I suppose I should just look in the shops.
Anyway, I did channel my inner pâtissier(e?) at Hugh’s suggestion and glazed the tart/cake shell things with jam before filling them with the homemade pastry cream and berries. They were delicious. Really, really great, and the pastry cream was simple to make as I ignored such words as ‘clean’, ‘gently’, ‘strain’ and ‘chill’, none of which I have in my vocabulary. My flat filled with acrid smoke when I preheated the oven because yesterday’s supplementary tart filling had bubbled on to the floor of the cooker and was burning, to which my shameful solution was to open the oven door and all the windows, and let the goo mostly burn away before putting the tarts in regardless. They only had a slight taste of industrial fires about them. I’ll sort the oven out mañana.
Raspberry tarts
Raspberry barfs
Mine could do with a bit more snow, hey? And those neat little turrets around the edge. And some distressed floorboards underneath.
Conclusions:
- Learning a bit more about pastry has been really fun, very tasty and surprisingly successful
- All those tubs of cream, packets of butter and cups of sugar don’t go well with the fashion. Hypocrites! I knew it! I’m writing in
- I think there might be more pies next week but tomorrow I finally get a salad, thank you Yotam
Go your own way #3: Gold dust
An unrecreatable look with my wardrobe. I haven’t gone down the harem-pant route, which i suspect of leading to a fiery inferno. I have only one pair of jeans that fits at the moment. Hugh! Salads! I don’t look like Stevie Nicks. It just isn’t happening. Here, nonetheless, is my attempt.
Gold dust
Old rust
Conclusions:
- With most of these fashion stories, each look really does rely heavily on a key piece, such as harem pants or a feather skirt, without which you have no hope of recreating the intended atmosphere, even if you were Ekat, 34-24-32
- A blunt fringe is like a bold accessory and totally changes the way stuff looks
Cherry tart
Last night I baked Hugh’s cherry tart recipe.
It was Sunday and I spent shop opening hours searching for summer boots and maxi-dresses, so I missed the big supermarkets. Another peril of this aspirational lifestyle thing – you have to be very organised, and have far more than 24 hours in each day, or no friends.
Tesco Metro had only one punnet of cherries left and no fresh apricots so I threw caution to the wind and decided to put whole dried apricots in there instead. Hugh would probably be cringeing as I reached for the very packet, but he wasn’t there so I chucked them in the basket. There were no ground almonds so, get this, I opted for a big bag of mixed nuts and dried fruit, which I decided to mix into the pie filling whole. Daring. Tesco had no kirsch, strangely, so I subsituted that with a slug of rum. This magazine following lark is all about bold substitutions, I’ve decided – advice I’d like to share with all those who write into the paper complaining that the ingredients are too hard to find. Just get on with it! Put something else in instead! With that in mind, however, I might have to change this blog’s subtitle to ‘following the Guardian lifetstyle not quite to the letter, but more with a slapdash and arguably pointless level of commitment’.
By the time I got home I was a bit cranky and hungry and all things considered didn’t feel like chilling pastry. I felt like eating pastry. So I skipped that step, sorry. I did everything extra-hamfisted this time, and it came out bloody delicious. I squashed the pillowy dough (which I flavoured with vanilla essence cos El Metro didn’t have pods) into a loaf tin like a kid at the Play-doh and pre-baked it with no beans while I mixed up the filling with a George’s Marvellous Medicine spirit. It came out looking like a bowl of lumpy sick, if you’d been eating emeralds and rubies and opals – those were pistachios and cherries and lumps of unsieved (sorry again) icing sugar. I poured half the mix into the shell, which was really more like a small cake by now as I’d made no attempt to get the pastry thin. Half was left over, so I snacked on a bit of it and decanted the remainder into a baking tin to cook into a sort of floury, lumpy pancake thing. When the ‘tart’ came out of the oven 40 minutes later it looked like a fruit loaf and tasted gorge-ous. Gorgeworthy. Not surprising given that it contained pretty much an entire packet of butter. I ate a fair amount and then packed the spare filling into the cavity, put it in a carrier bag and headed off to see some friends. The verdict from everyone was very positive, although my friend Liv also detected the trademark raw dough taste (I haven’t yet learned my lesson on the oven temperature thing). On our way home we bumped into another mate, Martin, who stuck his thumb in and pulled out an apricot, which had soaked up some rum and butter and gone all delicious. Turns out they weren’t a bad addition at all, although they weren’t the best bit. The best bit was the fluffy, crumbly, cakey pastry.
Conclusions:
- If you can’t find the right ingredient, buy the wrong ingredient and throw that in instead. You’ll either regret it or you won’t, but it won’t matter tomorrow, God willing
- Vanilla essence is another good pastry ingredient
- Put rum in stuff
- It doesn’t always matter if you’re impatient – even with tarts. You just end up with a cake instead, and who could complain about that?
Blueberry Galette
It’s another pie, isn’t it, but this time it’s called a galette.
I managed to get all the ingredients this time. The pastry was somewhat raw again, but with the addition of lemon zest it was far more palatable and I experienced an only mildly stomach upset this time – well worth it! I discovered that if you don’t have a rolling pin, Hugh’s suggestion of putting pastry between sheets of baking parchment works a treat as you can do the GBH approach without getting your fists sticky. God that sounded awful. I still didn’t use the hand blender, although I got it out of the cupboard and felt happy staring at it for a while. I took a good, long look inside myself and discovered that my reticence to use the blender is the result of a previous trauma with a bowl of egg whites. I’ll ask a friend to help me with the speed settings and then get back on the horse next time.
Blueberry galette
Blueberry regret
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Add lemon zest to pastry for a happy life
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I obviously need to turn my oven up a bit hotter than Hugh says
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Who needs rolling pins, except as an apron-related style thing?
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I have to face my hand blender issues before they begin to rule my life
Clotted cream shortcake
Last night was my first attempt at the recipe side of all this and I had high hopes, what with two tubs of cream being involved. The ingredients cost me about seven quid. Unfortunately neither patience nor precision are my strongest points, which already causes me problems because I’m a sub-editor. Turns out I’m not only ill suited to my chosen profession, I’m also ill suited to the life of a baker. I forgot to buy baking powder. I forgot to buy baking parchment. I forgot that I don’t have a baking tray. I didn’t measure the ingredients, which I already know to be the cardinal sin of baking. Basically anything with ‘baking’ in it went wrong. Nevertheless I mixed up a bowl of crumbly yet gluey dough, greased a muffin tray with a rancid butter wrapper I’d put in my fridge when pretending to be domestic, squashed the dough on to the tray and smacked it absentmindedly until the edges started to squidge off. Then I put it in my oven, which burns one half of any given circular object and leaves the other half raw (i’m thinking particularly of pizzas) and left it in there for 15 minutes while I ate most of the strawberries I was supposed to fill the shortcake with. I couldn’t be bothered to get the hand-blender out just to whip some cream, which does make me wonder what I think it’s meant to be for, so I just shook the tub until I got bored. Don’t try this – it doesn’t work. Then it was time for the shortcake to emerge, looking gloriously golden on one side and pallidly similar to this week’s make-up look on the other. I broke it in half, shoved it on a plate, put the strawberries on, poured over the double cream and hurriedly took a photo before squirrelling the plate away to my room like a Freaky Eater. It was mostly raw inside, I admit, but if you made sure each mouthful had enough cooked bit and plenty of cream, it was pretty nice.
Here’s what it was supposed to look like:
Clotted cream shortcake
And here’s my attempt at culinary mimicry:
Clots who love cream can't bake
I like the way the photo has an element of the paranormal.
Conclusions:
- I need scales
- I need patience
- Raw dough tastes fine as long as it’s sweet
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 
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