Cooking With Richard

While I watch the f-word on Channel 4. Today Gordon is cooking rabbit which is one of my favourites, and something that these days I can rarely find to eat.

These are shiso leaves from our garden:

These are oyster mushrooms from Sainsburys. I hate Sainsburys. Every time I go there it seems like they (somehow) have less and less actual food, never mind good food that you might want to eat. The Sainsburys up the road in Apsley is particularly grim, full of the fat ugly English lower middle class with no sense of taste at all. It’s everything that’s bad about living in England.

This monster of a book comes in at 884 pages and it’s all about food & science - for instance why eggs go hard when they’re cooked and why fruit goes brown when chopped. I got it after reading an interview with Heston Blumenthal where he says that he became fascinated with the science of cooking after reading this book, and naturally started to experiment.

(Not our photograph)
This not so little fella, the European House Spider is living in our house. There’s only one so he’s not a plague. I rather like him but I think he’ll be inclined to bite me if I take the love that dare not speak its name too far.
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Anywhooo he’s about 1.5″ across … pretty large. And he strolls across our floor rather nonchalantly - for a spider.
Unaware that I could end his arachnid life by a messy stamping of my foot.
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I suppose you’ll want to know how this ends. In truth I grabbed him with a bunch of tissue papers and launched him from the window. He’ll survive the fall, but him being a house spider I imagine our swords will soon cross again.

I bought a blowtorch from an Amazon seller, in preparation for this blowtorched dish (apologies for sucky website).
It does look a little like a dalek/(more reputable link). I will exterminate an’ all that.

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vs. this

I hope in the style of Bill Viola, a processed photograph of Yuka. I took the original photo and then took and retook that photograph 8 times to make this. To get this pop-art/as-shown-on-TV effect.

That is what I want to eat. An Indonesian curry and a simple banana and ice cream dessert from Kampung Cafe in Bali, Indonesia.
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This is what I’m actually eating.

It’s not that this isn’t nice to eat, but it is hard to cook for one. So I made this vegetarian chilli which I can chill in the fridge and eat over the next few days!

Sardines in tomato sauce, on rice. Simple, tasty, healthy!

These sausages are also from Browns of Stagsden and the ciabatta(!) is from Waitrose. Yes, it was what I had left in the fridge.

Update:
I was glad to see that the US-centric Google[1] couldn’t “define sarnie”. Sarnie is the English word for Sandwich, itself an English word named after the Earl of Sandwich[2] who invented sandwiches.

[1] I have to be nice about Google because I’m on several of their unreleased software programmes.
[2] Don’t believe Wikipedia by the way - they obviously can’t be trusted if they let people like me edit it.

Blandford Fly is a light ale spiced with ginger, tasting somewhere between ginger and cloves. I’m sending a bottle to N-sama’s dad.

I might try their recipe for ginger cake.

Update: This is how the ginger cake turned out.

I had to cut off the top which burned slightly. The recipe says to cook it for an hour, but next time I’d be inclined to reduce that to 45-50 minutes. The result is pleasant - the taste is rather too much treacle and not enough ginger or spice. That may be to do with the fact that I made the “mixed spice” up (I just added mace, allspice, cinnamon and ground coriander in mostly equal proportions); and I used quite a lot of ground up fresh ginger instead of using ground ginger.

Are Portugal any good? Apparently we beat them 10-nil in 1947, but perhaps they’ve improved in the meantime. Sven thinks we can go all the way. I might be looking forward to this match … secretly.