Potato Pizza, Aubergine and Carrot Salads

I had a potato pizza at Story Deli in Shoreditch once. This isn't it. Story Deli serves their paper thin crusts topped with a few slices of potato, rosemary, pine nuts and dried apricots, it's really incredible. Silver Spoon wants you to cover the generous topping of potato and rosemary with an obscene amount of pancetta and plenty of creamy cheese. It's very nice too, but not life changing. The biggest issue I have with it is that the crust turns into a cracker and is redundant to the whole thing, but I suppose a recipe for just potato slices covered in bacon and cheese wouldn't make it into the Silver Spoon (and if it had I wouldn't be making it) that's how they get you.

Baby aubergines get you too. They're nature's great joke, absolutely beautiful and very tempting when raw, and brown and muddy when cooked. But I can't resist buying them every time I see them. I made the Warm Aubergine Salad from Harumi's Japanese Cooking, which takes less then 10 minutes to make since all the cooking is done in the microwave. The taste is grown up, (that's a euphemism for there's booze in the dressing) smoky, nutty and a little sweet. I doubt that I will make this or the Carrot and Tuna Salad from the previous page again, but I love Harumi. All the recipes in this book are easy and she gives substitutes for hard to find Japanese ingredients. This is something I would have bristled at a year ago - I mean, how inauthentic! But now I appreciate as both of these salads were assembled from ingredients I didn't have to travel all over London to find, I already had them.

I don't know if it's a sign of maturity that I now deign to follow recipes that have less than 10 ingredients. Maybe it's being the main bread winner, or general exhaustion but I just can't face dishes that take a week to plan, layzeeass. I'm doing everything I can to snap out of this funk.

Bacon Roly-Poly

No I'm not dead after eating all those maggots, better luck next time!

I have been busy lately though, what with celebrating the shit out of my birthday, and then paying for my overindulgence. But I'm back in business and will hopefully be a lot more regular in posting about my gastronomic journey of self discovery. Food is so interesting, and you end up learning so much about a culture from the food they eat. For example, I wasn't born in England, and first time I went to a friend's house and their parents gave me a boiled pudding to eat, I thought they were cracked. But if I've learned anything it's that first impressions are always wrong, and Spotted Dick is not as nasty as it sounds.

I borrowed this little book from the boyfriend's mum, and if ever there was a tool conceived to lure the many bacon fetishists away from their favorite foodstuff, it might be this. The thin volume includes a guide to purchasing the bacon, curing methods, history and appropriate accompaniments, followed of course by the recipes. "Not just bacon & eggs!" boasts the back cover proudly, and proud it should be as stuffed into a mere 70 pages are recipes that fit into the following categories - Breakfast, Lunch, Tea Time, Supper, Party Bacon and Outdoor Bacon. Cold Pressed Bacon, anyone? How about Crusty Bacon? No, not in the mood? Strange. Nothing a few Bacon and Pineapple Kebabs won't fix, I wouldn't worry about it.

My Bacon Roly Poly sits in the Lunch section, but check out what happens at Tea Time in the illustrator's house.
'Helloooo there! Got any bacon spare for me and my horse?'

OK, fun is fun, but lets get down to business. For some bizarre reason I couldn't find suet in the supermarket. What, are you trying to say it's not a popular ingredient? Apparently you have to be considerate as to the age of the recipe when buying suet, real ye olde cooks would render their own from a giant hunk of beef fat, but the pellets of ready made stuff you can find in dry form on the shelf has flour added to make it stable so you might need to adjust the amount of flour in the recipe. None of this applies to me because I have to make do with vegetarian suet made from palm oil.
So, cooked bacon mixed with raw onion (which of course was a lot of fun to grate), and a miniscule amount of dried herbs, rolled up in a mixture of flour, water and palm oil pellets.
I didn't have any pudding cloth so used foil to wrap my little baby, and after boiling it looked like this
Now, I'm not the brightest tack, but my general rule is - when food has turned black that's a bad sign. Lets see how accurate the omen was.
Result: Well, what did you think it was going to taste like? Salty
And also, for something that's been boiling for an hour and a half it's surprisingly dry. Maybe I should have used less flour, or real suet, or a better recipe.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that the resoning for putting raw onion as opposed to cooked into the mix is to keep as much of the sharp overpowering taste as possible so that the strong sweetness of the onion can battle with the saltiness (and nothing else) of the bacon in your mouth.
If like me you don't find such sensory assaults pleasant then pile your plate high with vegetables, drown the whole thing in gravy and take a big sip of cider after each bite. Seriously, the more you drink, the better it tastes. I can't explain why, I'm not a scientist, but after 2 litres - right about when pronouncing 'roly poly' becomes a challenge - it be some tasty stuff.
Peace out, blud.