Kimchi, part 1

Usually when bloggers get book deals the results are underwhelming. Publishers know that the successful blogger has a wide enough readership to ensure that the book will sell and the blogger has usually been harboring fantasies about being recognized for their talent, using their hobby to pay the bills, becoming rich and famous, blah blah blah and gets sucked into their own hype. Not that there is anything wrong with any of that, but the two mediums of blogging and book are rarely compatible.
Bloggers usually start out bursting with passion for their subject with random stream of consciousness posts. You get a glimpse into their lives and the personality really comes across, there is little censorship and it's all incredibly genuine. All of this tends to get smoothed out in the editing process and the resulting books, in my experience, are a little bland, generic and overall flat.
I'm not trying to be an asshole, writing is hard, especially when you put yourself out there for internet trolls like me to judge, but I have seen some of my favorite bloggers produce meh sort of books and it's depressing.
The worst is this guy, I fell in love with him and used to have dreams about big surly men in black suits. His writing was absolutely beautiful, but by his own admission, he put no effort in the book and it was unrecognizable as his work.
The Tipsy Baker is probably my favorite blog, it's the reason I started using my cookbooks and writing about them. I waited to buy Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, so afraid that it too would be afflicted with the blog-to-book curse. And all of my fears were unfounded, Jennifer Reese is a professional charmer. Plus this book is small enough to carry on the tube so I could read it for a bit of escapism on my commute every morning (I one point I was so obsessed with this guy that I printed out about 30 pages of his archive material so that I could read it when I was away from my laptop. Sad, sad girl).
More so that the style, I like the premise of the book. I identify with the practice of spending a quarter of your salary in equipment for a hobby you might or might not take up (possibly sausage making, probably not beekeeping), I want to be self sufficient in the kitchen, I hate buying products with weird additives.

The first thing I settled on was kimchi, so that I could late try her recipe for amazeballs sounding kimchi quesadillas. Latino Asian fusion is a big thing in LA, apparently.
The recipe calls for a cup of whey to promote the fermenting process, which I'd never considered doing before because I usually expect pickles to be vegan, but it would be interesting if it would have any kind of extra tang. For the heat I used Gochujang from New Loon Moon Supermarket, which I am obsessed with.
So anyway, I merrily set it all up and went on my way to the boyfriend's mum's house for the prescribed 5 days. This is what I got when I returned.
I'm sure a person like my dad would just scrape all the fur off and tuck in to the stuff underneath (it did smell pretty good), but unfortunately not me. Maybe next time

Meat Cooked with Cardamom, Cauliflower with Ginger, Stuffed Baby Aubegines

There is a market in Shepherd's Bush Market that I didn't know existed, duh. Last Saturday my dad drove me there, past the throngs of people heading into Westfield, to buy a new foam mattress for the day bed in the spare room. Very glamorous, but let me ask you how much a bushel of lemons, a head of cabbage, a bag of potatoes, three cauliflowers and a bag of baby aubergines would cost you anywhere else - £4.50? Yeah, me too.
I didn't really need so many vegetables, it was an impulse purchase, something I have been trying to curb, but which is a beast that cannot be tamed. I was going to make some pasta for dinner and went to a local store for spaghetti and came out with a kilo of bone in lamb neck and a bottle of carob syrup. It feels too pathetic to say that I haven't bought myself any clothes since before Christmas and almost didn't pay my phone bill this month because I spend all my money on food. Is there like a support group I can join? And would I want to hang out with any of those losers?
On Saturday night I made some recipes from 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi. I actually have an enormous collection of Indian cook books, and only the most rudimentary understanding of how to make Indian food because somehow I have always lived near an amazing curry house (Everest Spice in Drayton Park and Curry Garden in Arnos Grove). But interestingly enough I had all of the ingredients required in my spice cabinet. There are a few recipes in this book that call for things like mango powder or cocum, which you would have to go out of your way to buy, but overall this book is very accessible.
I made the interesting sounding Meat with cardamom out of the lamb which calls for grinding 33 green cardamoms, and them boiling in water with the meat and some other spices. Panjabi describes this as 'very delicate' but it was entirely too bland with no discernible cardamom flavour. On Monday I took some for lunch at work and ended up with this beautiful display of bone fragments.
To go with it I made cauliflower with ginger which is steamed in it's own juices and delicious, worth the price of the book. I defile all of my books now with notes on the recipe's success and there is a wonderfully hyperbolic note next to this one.
Also stuffed baby aubergines which are very cute, didn't do it for me on the night but are amazing as leftovers.
Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be on the soup diet, ooops!

Tomato Soup with Two Fennels

Good God do I hate fennel, sweet baby Jesus is that aniseed kick nasty. I was going to also say that fennel tastes like the Devil's arsehole, bit this is a cooking blog after all.
Isn't it funny, my favorite blogger described the taste of this soup 'like eating hot tinned tomatoes', and it's actually got fennel in two forms, veg and seed, but I'm still making it. As I was shopping for the two tins of tomatoes after work I got very depressed at the prospect of eating this when I got home, but it's still on the menu. In life, you see, you have to force ourselves to do things we don't want to do. Life isn't an endless parade, someone has to walk behind the elephant and pick up the poop.
OK, that's really unkind. This soup isn't that bad.
It does totally taste like hot tinned tomatoes, undercooked and thin, but I'm very forgiving of that because it reminds me exactly of the pasta sauces I used to make before I really know what I was doing. It's thick and watery at the same time, but tastes pretty fresh, very sweet and the flavour of fennel is just a background note.
I like the taste, but I know that the reason I like it is because I have a fondness for bad pasta sauce. I would never dream of giving someone a recipe for this, but I would tell people who've decided to make it to sprinkle some nice salty feta on top.

Pea and Pesto Soup, twice

The one thing I was really up against when I started this soup project was seasonality. Soup is essentially a winter food, nobody wants to eat hot soup in July, but that exactly the time when the most ubiquitous soup ingredients are in season. Tomatoes, peppers and most of all peas, are at their best in the summer and I refuse to buy them in the winter, so when I was looking through my cookbook collection to select the soups I was going to make I immediately disqualified the recipes that called for those ingredients.
Oh my God, it's so hard to stop yourself to from buying fresh tomatoes, it's not until you make a point of avoiding them that you realize that they are in all of your favorite food (I'm allowing myself canned tomatoes because logically they are usually manufactured in the summer when tomatoes are cheap and plentiful). I love that supermarkets list the country of origin to make it easy for you to feel guilty about shopping, but once you make a commitment to eat locally and seasonally it's hard to ignore them. 'You're just finding another thing to be neurotic about' says the boyfriend, and little crossly. Too late, we're engaged now so he can't escape.

So this recipe is pea and pesto soup, but it's allowed under my amazing rules because Nigella Lawson specifies using frozen peas and premade pesto 'from the fridge section of the supermarket'. You are allowed to use jarred pesto, but there is a slight undercurrent of judgement about doing so.
For a recipe that calls for all of 4 ingredients I had to make a surprising amount of trips to the shops, peas and spring onions were easy enough to find, but the 'fresh' pesto eluded me at two Sainsbury's and one Asda. Very annoying, and very surprising given how easy pesto is to make . In the end I made the soup on two consecutive nights to compare how the abhorrent jarred pesto measures up to freshly made.

Night One:
I think I used an own brand jar of pesto (has anybody noticed that I've stopped taking a photo of all of my ingredients? You'll just have to trust me that this is pea soup), but this is barely a recipe. You boil some peas and spring onions in water with a few drops of lime juice and a couple of spoons of pesto for 7 minutes, puree and eat. This leaves you with a barely juiced lime that now needs to be employed in some other way and less than half a jar of pesto that will probably sit in the fridge until it gets mouldy and I get to throw it away.
The result is fairly nice, fresh and surprisingly flavourful for a soup made on a water base, but I didn't taste the spring onion's and lime's contribution at all. And Linda Blair comes to mind, which is a mark against this soup.

Night Two:
I made the pesto recipe at the beginning of Silver Spoon, it took all of 2 minutes to grind together the basil, oil, cheese and pine nuts (no garlic in this version) which mad me wonder why Nigella would deem fresh pesto a shortcut worth taking. About half of the resultant mixture went in the soup and the result was a lighter, greener looking puree that tasted a lot of peas and not at all of pesto.
If only Nigella had suggested garnishing your soup with a big dollop of your freshly made pesto. The result is a gloriously savory soup with subtle fresh flavors of basil, cheese and olive oil, the peas lift this with their sweetness and you get a very satisfying, simple soup.
There is no comparison between using fresh and bought pesto, but if all you have in the house is frozen peas and a jar of pesto it's still possible to have a nice dinner in under 10 minutes. But lets face reality, if that was really all you had in the house, you'd go out instead.

Carrot Broth

Well it's the end of the month and I don't have any money to spend on fancy things like eggs or parsley, so today's soup is made from the junk at the bottom of my vegetable drawer.
I'm actually really really pleased to have this book, it's a little photocopied collection of recipes from a cookware 'club' which sold pots and pans to housewives, dated April 1977. There's a preface, introducing the club ethos, all about how nutrients are lost if you cook things with the lid off or boil veg in water, so all of the equipment sold is cast aluminium wooo and has tight fitting lids ahhhhh.
If I was a housewife and had nothing to do during the day while my husband was at work, I would go to a club like this to meet other women and buy frying pans. I wouldn't have any friends because we'd just moved to this neighbourhood, in the suburbs, and after I've made him breakfast in the morning and tidied the lounge I would have 4 or 5 hours free before I had to start making dinner (not this soup, my man likes a real meal). We got all sorts of useful things as wedding presents, so I don't really need the casserole dishes and frying pans with domed, well fitting lids that the Club sells, but it's nice to feel a part of it all. Hmmm, one day.
This is the recipe, so basic, so beautiful. Season with seasoning. I used ham stock because I was extra hungry today.
Believe it or not, a soup made with onion and carrot is very sweet, but nice. It's not blended, rustic and hearty. Next time I would add a bayleaf, celery, something savoury.

Update and Cream of Celery Soup

So I got engaged on Valentine's Day! The bf (now he's just f, but I'm not going to call him that)
He bamboozled me, I told him that it was a really cheesy thing to do to propose on V Day and he agreed, and then he did it! I came home and made him his favorite dinner and he gave me a beautiful ring he designed himself.
I'm very very happy, and what better way to bring me back down to earth than to start my wedding day diet again.
I bought this book in a charity shop ages ago because I'm weak! I can't help collecting sets of things, and already had the Winter Puddings Cordon Bleu book, so you know... I've never cooked from it because it's so dated. Dated how, you ask? This celery soup is thickened with roux, cream and egg yolk, to make it luxurious? Cooked celery doesn't have that much flavour, so all you're left with is thick, mild chicken stock that's slightly green.
Look, I put it in my fanciest bowl and it's still very uninspiring.
But I'm engaged! I'm walking around on clouds, from now on I'm only making positive comments. So this soup is perfect to give for dinner to someone who likes their food quite plain. I like spicy food, so sometimes it's hard for me to empathize with people who don't, but now I can at least have them round for a meal. Serve with one plain piece of white bread.

Paella Rice with Red Mullet and Roasted Pumpkin

I haven't posted anything for a while because I've been working on a new project. It' early days, so I'll see how it goes over the next couple of months, in the mean time I will do my best to keep this blog - my pet poodle - going. I've honestly missed the stream of consciousness confessional nature of writing here, never again!
Paella, by Alberto Herraiz is one of the books I got for Christmas, I saw a review for it here and put it on my wishlist on a whim, it's that kind of impulsive behavior that makes so charming you see.
My bf (who is also my bff) is half Spanish and I invited his mother over to borrow her paella dish and to get her hyper critical view on the validity of any of the recipes in this book. It's a very interesting selection, there are multiple recipes for stocks and sauces, a section of paellas made on the stove and in the oven, some to be made on a grill outdoors and even some sweet options. Some are very very traditional, some are quite... experimental. I chose red mullet because it's seasonal and there aren't any hard to find ingredients (did you know that Morrisons sells own brand paella rice now? Like ain't nothing but a thing!). You are meant to buy your mullets uncleaned and use the livers as a base for the rice. I got mine from Jonathan Norris's stall which is two minutes walk from my office. The first time I walked past him I thought he looked familiar, and then I realized that he's the guy from season 3 of Come Dine With Me!!!! So amazeballs, is it cool that I'm excited about that? Anyway, he was happy that I didn't want my fish cleaned and I feel like we really bonded.
Buying the fish was the best part of making this recipe, it will kill you. Here are some status pictures my stepmother took.
The result is beautiful and perfectly tasty, but a little too sweet from the pumpkin for me. It was also nothing like any paella Maria Isabel has ever heard of, but that's kind of the point of a paella, its a receptacle for any old junk you have lying around. And actually an insane amount of work. Why would you clean and fillet six red mullets, make a extraordinarily delicious stock, cut up pumpkin into two different sizes of cube, blanch, roast and puree half and assemble your 4 hour paella when you could just go down the road to your favorite Spanish restaurant and get something just as delicious for a lot less money. There are a lot of skills to master, and if that's your bag, this book is perfect.

Anyway, here's another thing I'm doing, it's a charming thing for charming people to do. Pick up the book closest to you, turn to page 45, the first sentence describes your sex life. This is a great game to play with cookbooks. Here's the result from Paella "There are differences of opinion when it comes to black rice", which describes my sex life exactly.