Celebrity corner

I went to a book signing of Supper Club at the Big Green Bookshop near my house last night and finally got to meet one of the people who inspired me to start this blog.
Ms. Marmite Lover talked about her background, family and motivations and I totally felt like a creepy stalker because I'd already read about most of the stuff on one of her blogs. I asked her the very bloggy question about what kind of camera she uses and she doesn't have a fancy one, just some cheap Canon! Take a look at the pictures on her site and tell me what you think.
The book is very luxurious, chintzy and dotted with pretty little drawings, I like that more than a third of it is tips, autobiography and research - ultimately I could probably find all of the recipes on the internet for free if I wanted to, but this extra effort is really worth the price. It's so personal and juicy! And obviously I'm planning to cook from it.
I should probably have asked politely if I could take a picture, focused and framed it properly, but then I remembered that I'm really shy, pulled out out my Blackberry and then ran away. Loser!

Congolese Chilli Peanut Chicken

Oh dear, moving house, settling in at work, couple of holidays, all that stuff.
I'm back in the saddle though, for the last couple of months I've been reading a lot of exciting recipes and definitely realised how calming and enjoyable cooking is for me. Yes, it looks like I'm stressed out when I'm chasing the boyfriend out of the kitchen with a knife, or setting my hand on fire, but no, it's very calming.

The area around my new office is very picturesque, posho yummy mummy territory and has an insane concentration of charity shops. Last week I had some kind of crisis and ended up buying six cookbook for about £20, a very good deal I think, all almost new and one with an RRP of £45. More about that later, the one I'm really excited about is this
About a year ago I got into some kind of a charity cookbook frenzy and decided that I really wanted this title. Lets face reality, nobody is going to learn how to cook by reading cookbooks. You probably Google a recipe or your mum teaches you how or you force yourself to learn by trial and error somehow. Cookbooks are fun with pretty pictures, and in the case of charity cookbooks you get 'celebrities' throwing their pearls of wisdom before us swine. I'm planning on making a couple of things from this book, but lets start with something easy.

When I was younger I used to watch a lot of Changing Rooms, it was so retarded but I didn't know any better. Basically a pair of neighbours or friends or whatever would pick a room in their house and allow a 'designer' to redecorate it overnight. The priority was always on doing some kind of weird paint effect on the walls and ruining the room as irreversibly as possible. The homeowners would be asked if there as one feature they would like to keep in the original room, and that was always the first thing that was ripped out or painted.
Anyway, one of the designers was Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.
I thought for sure he was gay, the Little Lord Fountleroy outfits were only the first clue. I'm not prejudiced, this was just something so absolutely apparent from his appearance and mannerisms that it never even occured to me that there was a possibility he wasn't.
And then I saw his wife on TV, a chubby, sexy blond. I'm telling you, this rocked my world. I had a very sheltered childhood.
And this is her recipe, based on the food that she used to have when she lived in Congo as a child. It's very simple, onions, chillies, chicken, tomatoes and peanut butter. The peanut butter, of which there are two jars, is not in the ingredients list. A simple mistake to make, but very annoying. And two jars? I used one jar only and this is the result
A pot of bubbling molten lava, with a thick sheen of melted peanut oil on top. The taste is ok, but not amazeballs, and I can think of a better way of getting 1200 calories into my system.

Bacon-Rap'd Scallops and Simon Says Salmon

I've been a bit of a layzeeass recently, and have been putting off writing up the last two of Coolio's recipes that I've tried but until I do it I can't move on to other things so hey ho, lets go.
Bacon Rap'd Scallops is one of the first dishes in the book, the legend goes that when Coolio started his catering company a client requested bacon wrapped scallops, Coolio doesn't eat pork so he improvised with 'beef bacon' which I used my incredible Google-fu skills to discover is an approximation of bresaola.
The other recipe is for baked salmon, and is meant to be made with your kids. Cute. Here's some photos.
Result:
The scallops are very good. Salty and sweet and garlicky and expensive to make.
Salmon is super plain, even though it looks kind of gross in this picture, the garlic and onion sprinkled on top are almost uncooked but the whole flavour is subtle and nice. For someone who damn near drinks chilli sauce from the bottle, it's a nice change of pace.
Coolio is cool, the book is pretty good. Next.

Cooking with Coolio: Finger-lickin', Rib-stickin',Fall-off-the-bone-and-into-your-mouth Chicken

Yes, this is my new book and I don't feel the need to explain my decision.
But I will say this - you know when you get really drunk and wake up the next day covered in bruises, or next to some random dude, or to find that your facebook status says something like KJJJ/R#'23-8923JM9HSDJK. Well I bought this cook book, so lets just get past it.
At the risk of sounding redundant, Coolio is so cool. I had no idea that he had his own catering company or book until I saw him on Market Kitchen a few weeks ago, the book is uber-rad - when Coolio is not referring to himself in the third person he's cooking dishes that makes women's underwear disappear and tastes better than your mother's nipples (I swear to God you guys, srsly!!!).
Now, tell me, what common dish these random ingredients all feature in?
I couldn't find any chicken wings in the supermarket so had to get thighs instead, chopped up a couple of peppers, garlic and an onion, and started weighing out the wet ingredients. I've never bought cream of chicken soup before and in the can it looked like this
-like fricking custard! And you know what? IT TASTED LIKE CUSTARD TOO!!!!
Anyway, you mix all that stuff up and shove it in the oven for a while.
Result: The sauce was way too water, it didn't thicken up at all, if anything it got more and more diluted which I think happened because thighs have more fat than wings would have done. Oh, and it makes your whole house reek of vinegar.
The taste is very nice, but more so the next day when you can smear a piece of toast with the jellyfied sauce and make yourself a chicken sandwich.
Just in case you were wondering, I checked, and my panties did not dissolve from eating this. I asked the boyfriend if it tasted better than nipples and he said no. So there you go, as comprehensive as you can get. Here's Coolio cooking the dish and messing about with some fat kid.