Biryani with Onions

Let me set the scene for you: It was a grim Sunday afternoon, there was no food in the house, and I was probably hungover. But even under these difficult circumstances one must still clothe and bathe oneself, answer the telephone and make dinner. So in an effort to make do and mend, loose lips sink ships and I want YOU for the US Army, I scoured the cupboards and amazingly found the ingredients to make the dish below without too much effort or any substitutions.
Now, I watch The Simpsons, I know very well that you don't make friends with salad, but I also remember that when I was not too much younger, there was certainly a time when we didnt have meat every day. In fact, in my day! meat was considered something of a special treat, you ate what you were given, and if there were any leftovers they would appear in front of you at every subsequent meal until you stopped being such a little madam and ate up all your supper!
So with that in mind I was entirely prepared to enjoy the vegan friendly, economical, lowfat, simple Biryani with Onions.

To be honest, I am never really convinced by Westeners doling out recipes for any kind of ethnic food, the locals are always bound to do it better, right? However this is quite a handy book to have, who needs authenticity when you can have the essence (by that I mean semblance, not a real taste) with only a fraction of the calories! This text doesn't seem to have an author, by the way, so I'm instilled with even more confidence in this thing I'm about to cook and eat.

OK, here's the stuff. I wonder if the contestants of Masterchef were presented with this sorry collection they would be able to come up with anything on a par with what I have coming my way. Notice the super cheap Tesco peas, the stock I DIDN'T make as suggested on page 31, the cauliflower I chopped up to conceal the mouldy bits I had to hack off. The bayleaf is from our garden, but I doubt it will be enough to redeem this dish.

Presto chango and everything goes in the pot. At this point I guess there are a few people who will go 'mmmmmmmmm, a scene to gladden the heart and set my mouth a-watering!'. I'm not too jazzed about having this to eat yet, so I'll just keep calm and carry on and while I'm on the World War II slogans, how about 'Save kitchen waste to feed the pigs!' - Thanks!

Result: Two main observations here, firstly something entirely un-Indian should have suggested itself to me by the conspicuous absence of chilli from the ingredients list. This doesn't taste like any Biryani I've had before, but you can just about 'sense' the other spices. Which is actually the second point, you are told to fish out and discard the cinnamon, cardamon and cloves - how are you meant to do that short of shoving both mitts in and digging around for the 20 or so offending inedibles? I decided not to bother devising a method 'What is this dish called,' asked my brother 'Twigs?' HA HA, bring your dry sarcastic wit to my next dinner party!
If I had to describe this meal, I would call it - savoury (despite the sweet onions on top which were actully really nice), but that would diminish the most important thing about it - look at how it looks exactly like it's supposed to! This is the first recipe I've followed that provides a picture to aspire to, so as far as I'm concerned, I've done it PERFECTLY!!!

Besugo al Horno

OK, well today's effort is from Fish by Sophie Grigson and some other guy.
I'll be honest, this is my mum's book and I've never been tempted to expand our library of Sophie Grigson cook books. This one has been much used and is easy to follow, but I'm just not a fan of her style. The prevailing memory I have of the last reruns of her cooking show (the one with loads of pictures of her and her famous mother in the opening credits to remind you of her gastronomic provenance) is of a recipe of a sandwich spread that called for a stick of butter blended with some tuna and a few capers, I think, and spread into an entire loaf of bread. Or maybe I'm making that up. And I think I also remember some toyboy lurking around in some of the episodes, you know, to help her cook wink wink. That's not really fair, the dubious recipe and pornographic innuendo is pretty mild stuff by Nigella's standards...

Anyway, the dish is Besugo al Horno, in the little intro to the recipe Grigson says that this is the thing to eat on Christmas Eve in Spain. I asked the boyfriend and he told me that he had never heard of it - but maybe it's a region thing.

The ingredients list called for one Sea Bream and one big potatoe, I had to make 4 fish and 'somebody' bought me baby potatoes but you know, that's not really an inconvenience for an experienced chef ;)

I've got pretty low-rent, loser palate so I'm not a big fan of saffron, i think it tastes dusty. But I'll play along with this little game in order to capture that authentic Spanish flava. Bish bash bosh and it goes in the oven.

OK, I'm not sure if I should blame Soph or my oven, but after 4o minutes the potato slices on top are still hard and solid and the lower layer has fried in the olive oil that has pooled to the bottom of the tray. By the way, it's now almost 10pm so I make the executive decision to throw the fish on top and cross my fingers.

You know when you're cooking for others which is stressfull in itself, and everyone is sober and you're really hungry and you sort of start thinking 'fuck it, I'll just eat it' but then you have to consider that others won't necessarily turn a blind eye to the raw potatoes and lukewarm fish. So finaly I let it ferment under the grill for another 20 minutes and then decided to end the ordeal.

Result: The Sea Bream is delicious, but considering that I only put salt, pepper and lemon juice on it I am inclined to believe that's down to the quality of the fish rather than the technique. I guess I'm not really selling this thing, it was ok. The potats were a little greasy but cooked all the way though and if it wasn't for the wierd orange color they turned you wouldn't even notice the saffron.The point is that I know that fresh fish tastes best when it's cooked in a simple way, and I appreciate only having to mess about with one dish that everything is cooked in, but I like having my horizons broadened, you get me?

The overwhelming opinion is - Meh...

Chicken a la Marengo

There is an absolute glut of Italian cook books out and about, ooh a bit of tomato,mozzarella and pasta and you have a light and nutritious lunch! Yum yum! Yeah and it's all along the same lines, which is when I saw " Not only spaghetti!" in a charity shop my first thought was 'No shit!'

It was written by 'a family cook in Italy' in 1980 so you know there's probably a Mafiosi connection! Exciting stuff.

The recipe is for a dish that was allegedly a favorite of Napoleon, he first 'visited' Italy a few days after his wedding to old Josephine, but you know, on his own.

I'm cooking at the boyfriend's this time as a kind of a romantic gesture. I explained to him that my old mate Bonaparte had pretty plain tastes and this isn’t going to be necessarily conducive to any particular amorous pursuits - more like a big bit of gristle. He was game and even volunteered to sponsor the purchase of the Madeira that his recipe requires. Supermarket own brand £2 sherry would have been just as good (probably), but now we're stuck with a nice bottle of Duke of Clarence Rich Madeira.

This thing is called Chicken a la Marengo and is truly fit for... an Emperor of the French. Seriously, this requires the use of three separate pans to prepare something that consists of 4 main ingredients. No thank you. I used dried mushrooms because i though they would have more of a concentrated flavour, instead of soaking and frying them I just soaked them and added them to the chicken later. There are no measurements in this recipe, it's probably meant for fairly experienced cooks who know exactly what measurement 'add dry white wine' refers to. I confess, I wasn't 100% sure and thus the resulting chicken bath.

I then took the chicken out to create the sauce (ignore the lumps of flour - all cats look the same in the dark) before combining all the ingredients for a final few minutes.

Result: I love Napoleon. Local boy done good, 'A throne is just a bench covered in velvet' and all that stuff... He famously had pretty basic, peasant tastes and maybe that's the reason this dish looks and tastes a bit like a plate of mud. I'm not sure what the Emperor would have as a side dish in Italy, but I've decided to serve it with Rigatoni. The chicken is pretty much fried chicken with an earthy, warm flavour of mushrooms and Madeira. It's thick because of the flour but still feels really light, I found it delicious. I would make it again maybe to use up the rest of the Madeira, however I would balk at using almost half a bottle of wine for cooking instead of drinking ;)

Saliq Dajaj

Alright? So this is my er... exciting journey into the unknown. I suppose I'm a competent cook, but not particularly adventurous. I stick to a few things I know how to cook, and depend on the staples in the cupboard for the usual tomato sauce/stew/risotto/pastabake kind of dishes. I wonder if I can pick up some new culinary skills by you know, using cookbooks. I can't really bake either, but that's totally not my fault, out oven is 'not really good'. Will I learn? Can an old dog change their spots? Are you calling me a dog?

I suppose people who don't cook very often can follow cookbook instructions to the letter, but I'm always tempted to make substitutions or additions to the ingredients list and have my own special way of timing everything. I'm now mature enough to know that all that stuff is there for a reason, and who the hell do I think I am to try and improve it? Anyway, so here is the first fairly cautious experiment. It's from the Middle Eastern Cookbook by Maria Khalife, I've Googled her and she is now a life coach in Bahrain, so she must know what she's talking about. The dish is Saliq Dajaj from Saudi Arabia. I doubt whether I will ever have the opportunity to visit the region personally, what a shame! But at least this should be a fairly authentic sample of the kinds of delights that await if I finally decide to run off with a genuine Mills & Boon sheik.

This looks pretty simple, everything is cooked in one pot and there are only 10 ingredients (I forgot to buy butter). Because I'm not sure anyone will join me for the forthcoming gastronomic treat I've decided to substitute the chicken for a small poussin and halved all the other ingredients.

Everything goes in the pot and we play the waiting game. It smells quite nice, I guess, but I'm a little worried that I've used too much water and the stock will not have enough flavour, especially since I'm drowning the whole thing in milk later on too. Well whatever happens I will have to take it with me to work for lunch tomorrow, and if it really doesn't taste of anything I can always put buttloads of Tabasco on it...

I tried the stock and it would be fair to call the taste MILD! If I was cooking for someone else at this point I would be tempted to throw a bunch of salt and other condiments in, but that would be cheating and just so arrogant! Lets see how it turns out.

Result: Soupy kind of rice pudding with chicken. Next time I would definitely not halve the spices and add a lot less liquid, but the poussin has a lot of flavour and overall it's not as bland as I thought it would be. Maybe a better word is 'delicate' and I only have reservations because I'm so used to burning the roof of my mouth off with very heavily flavoured food. My bother called it very nice, like Thai Green curry diluted in a pan of water. The boyfriend is a muy caliente Spaniard so this is pretty far from the kind of thing he would choose to eat. It's so frustrating when you have to prick and prod a prude to eat something that looks not even that bad! Anyway, he finished a bowl, and when I went to pack some up for lunch the next morning there was barely a portion left. The rice had soaked more of the liquid up overnight and it was more of a risotto than a soup, the taste was also intensified, I guess that's the benifit of leaving the bits of seed and bark floating around instead of fishing them out at the end of cooking. I also don't get the point of pouring melted butter on top to serve, the dish was already greasy enough thanks to all the schmaltz that came out of the poussin during cooking. So yeah, the punchline is that I would make this again, it's super easy and now that I have a half a kilo bag of cardamom seeds, should be a pretty cheap midweek meal.

And nobody got sick!