Orange Bread

I've been watching a lot of Great British Bake Off (who hasn't), and while I always assumed that it was a great motivator to get in there and 'experiment' in the kitchen. But honestly kittens, I don't think I have the personality for it. This is why I will always cook from recipes.

I made Orange Bread from Caribbean Cooking which was easy, cheap and tasty. I'm not a fan of very sweet sweets, so the slightly challenging, sophisticated (lets face reality) bitter taste of the orange rind is a winner for me. I actually used lemon rind instead, but that is as far as I'm willing to 'customise' the recipe. After the forth or fifth loaf I got cocky and attemted to swap out the orange juice and rind for strawberry pulp and powder - nasty. I can't eb bothered to type out Lambert Ortiz's recipe, but a ery similar method is here, with pictures.

Also, I'm taking some time off, I need to focus on a couple of other projects which frankly means I've stopped cooking. I might come back once in a while to give a scintillating account of some bloody sandwich I ate for dinner, but don't count on it.

Steamed Chicken Salad with Sesame Dressing

I wrote a somewhat vitriolic version of this post dealing with food intolerances, and the nerve people have, daring to dislike certain ingredients. But honestly, I don't care. What happened was that this weekend I served some food that could have made someone sick, but didn't. That's why there are no pictures, I'm not proud of this.
My stepmother is on quite a strict diet, so I'm always on the lookout for recipes that conform. I came over to their house this Sunday arms laden with dishes I though were safe, but was blindsided by their house guest.
I made sesame dressed chicken salad from Harumi's Japanese Cooking, Uzsca-which are dumplings filled with beef and mushrooms, tomato salad and herb bread from Theodora Fitzgibbon's Making the Most of It.
Harumi uses the microwave as the primary method of cooking almost everything, which I found incredibly annoying because I have issues and can't shake the feeling that that's 'cheating' and also because my microwave was purchased at a car boot sale in 1995 and I'm always expecting it to explode and splatter me with microwaves? Having said that, it's undeniably incredibly efficient - you bone some chicken thighs and cook on a covered bowl (Harumi thinks this should take 4 minutes, but was more like 15 for me) then make a dressing using the chicken juices, tahini and soy sauce. Serve with cucumbers. It's delicious, unfortunately soy was one of the things my parent's friend couldn't have - a fact she chose to disclose at the end of the meal, wtf?

The herb bread is also good, I've made this so many times this week that I actually have a picture of it - see? You mix a decidedly unfrugal amount of milk and butter into the dough, sprinkle with dried rosemary, fennel seeds and dill seeds (delicious), and serve to someone who is secretly freaking lactose intolerant.
Next time I'm just staying in bed.

Vegan cookies

God I'm tired - and lazy - its very difficult in the warm summer months to move beyond some kind of pasta to be eaten from the pot, prostrate on the sofa. A lot of birthdays this month, also I went on some kind of Amazon frenzy and didn't quite leave myself enough for interesting food this month.
My brother's birthday was a bit of a quiet affair - he's observing a religious fast and could only have vegan food. Are vagetables shorthand for quiet? Lets say they are. I made the plov from Veggiestan which I though was super bland (it's really supposed to have lamb in it) but which mysteriously disappeared between the 6 of us. Some stuff from Moro East, I think, shallots in sherry and mushrooms with rosemary, and the most celebratory tomato salad I could muster. Meh. For dessert I made this chocolate cake which is brain numbingly simple to do, but unexepctedly delicious.
I'm actually developing a pretty solid repertoir of vegan desserts, in a way inventive sweets are more difficult to come up with, especially if you don't have any fruit lying around. I have one or two vegan cookbooks and they rely very heavily on delicious things like strawberries or disgusting things like soy cream. I've tried a few egg replacers over the years and they're all pretty grim prospects. I used to have another, terrible, blog for a while and did a taste test with batches of cupcakes and you could absolutely tell that some sinister, synthetic ingredient had been added to the batter - in some cases the cupcake would not cook all the way through, in some cases it would collapse in on itself or crumble away like an old weathered brick and they were all disgusting. There are also some homespun version of egg replacer (flax seeds, mashed banana etc.) but I've always found that fucking around with an existing recipe is not as good as making something that was specifically developed to be egg and dairy free.
A surprising source of thrifty, vegan recipes are WWII cookbooks, I have a few Marguerite Patten compilation books (it's where I got the idea for vegan lemon curd) and the recipes are mostly terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. Snoek.
A book that is kind of languishing at the bottom of my Wishlist is Ratio which aims to take the guesswork out of substituting ingredients, which makes total sense. The thinking is that once you know what proportion of fat to starch to sugar to use, any baked good can be endlessly adapted, the only downside is that it takes the responsibility for a dish's success or failure away from the recipe writer and onto me!
I made WWII carrot cookies using vegan margarine and honey cakes from Cretan Cooking using olive oil. It's interesting that while I've found the Russian brand of Orthodoxy to be focused on denying yourself the little pleasures, and treating the fast as a time of quiet reflection, Greek Orthodox work around limitations and have developed a range of recipes for cakes and pastries that fit the specifications (on another note, apparently octopus is not considered to be an animal and is fare game during fasts!).

Both of these are fine, but you couldn't describe them as moreish or decadent, you can definitely taste some kind of an agenda in the slight blandness and dryness. Maybe the message is that if you want delicious biscuits, don't go on a fast.

Paneer and Vegetable Curry

The boyfriend and I went to a Hindu wedding a couple of months ago and were fed  the best Indian vegetarian food I have ever had. I came away with a craving for Paneer, the firm, non melty Indian cheese, which luckily a lot of supermarkets sell now. The incredible Pakistani restaurant near our house makes their own and it's sublime, I normally love a challenge but I'm a few steps away from that at the moment.

There was a surprising dearth of paneer recipes in my all my curry cookbooks, in fact the only two I found were in Keith Floyd's book of curries. I went for the more substantial Paneer and Vegetable Currry, and should have listened to my misgivings when I realised that the only vegetable called for was peas.

Mummy's very angry and doesn't want to look at you at the moment!
Why must I continually write 'bland as balls' next to all of my recipes?

Roasted Garlic Polenta with Sauteed Tomatoes

I always find it interesting that vegans are portrayed as hemp wearing, salad eating bitches, I've known some pretty hefty vegans, believe me - it's a myth. I've also met some who use veganism as an excuse for picky eating (chips and ketch, beans on toast).
The problem is that it always seems boring and austere, even I'm guilty of it - I was getting brownies for the office once at the local coffee shop and was told that all their brownies were vegan, even though I know better I immediately assumed that this was at the cost of omitting some delicious ingredient.
But vegetables have so much flavour and texture, as long as you don't append the dreaded V word to your dish, it;s entirely possible to enjoy a meal of 'side dishes'.
I'm pretty feeble though, I have to ease myself in, like getting into a hot bath. Here I'm using polenta and tomatoes as a vehicle for the leftover roast beef. I hate heating roast beef because I usually have it quite rare and hate to overcook if for leftovers.

I need to give this book a few more goes before saying something cruel like how boring and thoughtless instead of how safe and approachable it is, but The Joy of Vegan Cookery isn't really killing it so far. It doesn't have any pictures, which isn't very joyful and doesn't help to explain how 125g of polenta is meant to serve 4 people. You sprinkle the polenta, eccentrically, through your fingers into some boiling water and cook while two heads of garlic roast. Then mix half of the garlic into the polenta and the other half into a freaking kilo of tomatoes! and sautee, long enough for the tomatoes to release their juices and turn into a watery mess, but not long enough to cook down and thicken. Serve.

I don't know if you can tell, but I was disappointed. There were two of us, but had I planned to feed 4 people it would have to be with a sad solo tablespoon of polenta swimming is a sea of tomatoes. Flavor wise this would have been ok without the beef, but on the strength of this recipe, I'm not buying it!

Tentacles of Surrealism

So for the last three weeks I've been manically preparing for the Alternative Press Fair, because lets face it, it's only fun to do things when you give yourself an impossible deadline and have to shun all social interaction in order to research, write and illustrate a whole freaking book (booklet).
The fair was pretty cool, I'm not really in the 'scene' so the organizer very kindly put me on a table next to my friend David Greene. I remember when I first started going to zine fairs and felt really out of place with my little comic book, but in this environment I felt comfortable enough to come out of the closet and let everyone know that my sexual preference is cookbooks. Here's my little baby, a book of recipes by or based on the Surrealists.

Someone very interesting came up to talk to me, and something very exciting happened, but I don't want to jinx it by saying anything yet.

One of the recipes in the book is from Carolyn Burke's Biography of Lee Miller, Coca Cola and Marshmallow Ice Cream. I'm totally obsessed with Lee Miller, she's what started me on the idea of doing a whole book of surrealist food.
The ice cream, by the way, is very nice and easier than the usual humiliation that I go thorough with my Fisher-Price-esque ice cream maker. It tastes exactly like coca cola, and if you substitute Coke Zero, sugar free marshmallows and single cream in this recipe, it's practically good for you.
While doing research for the book I discovered that there is already a Lee Miller cookbook in the works written by her son Anthony Penrose and friend Johnny Scott, the PR for this thing is terrible, as far as I can tell it'll be out in 2012, or 2013, or whatever, but I can barely wait!!!

And now to bring this thing full circle, yesterday my dad and brother came round and I made them roast rib of beef from Sunday Lunch, the book Johnny Scott co-wrote with Clarissa Dickson Wright. Gooood, so good.

Busy

I've been insanity busy with a project for the last two weeks, only allowing myself time off to go and watch some Olympic football which in my (wrong) opinion is more interesting than Premiership football.
Here's what I managed to cook before I lost my mind and delegated the kitchen to the bf.

Southern Fried Chicken, from the I Love Elvis Cokbook

Maybe I do love Elvis, but this was gross.

Tuna Empanada from The New Spanish Table via Tipsy Baker

This was better than good, although at the bf's insistence I omitted the raisins. He brought a piece to his Spanish mother and she gave it the ultimate seal of approval, this one is getting copied into my sacred recipe book.

French 75, again via Tipsy Baker

Incredibly delicious and makes cheap Cava seem decadent, a fine way to use up some turpentinesque Gordons gin we had left over from a party, can't wait to try it with a nicer spirit.

I also ordered the Mourad cookbook because Tipsy Baker featured it and I'm curious about the fig leaf ice cream. So curious that I've already identified the neighborhood tree I'll get the leaves from and met the neighbor who's permission I need.
I'm completely obsessed with Tipsy Baker, in case anyone hasn't noticed. Jennifer Reese has the exact same taste I do, if she makes a recipe or recommends a book I'm on it like a car bonnet (really). Her blog made me want to start my own blog - not for notoriety, but to document experiments, broaden horizons and keep track of dishes I like.
I also like the fact that she occasionally submits articles to Slate, comparing things to other things. Love