Cooking With Richard

You decide …

For years I’ve been boiling up potatoes and mashing them. The trouble with that recipe is that the flavour in the potatoes disappears into the water.

Heston Blumenthal to the rescue: we bake the potatoes instead of boiling them, so we don’t lose any flavour and we get browning reactions and the taste of the skin. These potatoes were baked for 1.5 hours, which is probably not quite long enough:

I skinned them and mashed them, with some warmed milk, butter, garlic chives from yesterday, and pepper. Perfect!

Compared to boiled mash, the taste is a revelation.

East Meets West with this Chinese-style pork belly, mash, minted peas and brocoli:

Note to self

This broad bean bruschetta looks interesting.

This is my second attempt to make pad thai.

In this version we went to great lengths to get the right ingredients and in fact I managed to source everything except the rather obscure banana flower. The garlic chives in particular were something of a revelation, tasting as they do of actual garlic.

I used three eggs instead of one. I used real Thai tamarind sauce and fish sauce. I made and used much more crushed peanuts. And I adjusted the noodles to match the number of people.

The result was a big improvement on the first attempt but not exactly like pad thai from the Faltering Fallback.

It’s my lunch:

I decided to compile a very personal list of some of the best postings (in my opinion) on CWR.

It’s in the category “best” in the right margin.

Not as good as it looked.

The recipe is promising, but: I should have used far less noodles (2 bunches are enough), less chilli, more peanuts (don’t fry them), and more than one egg.

Update

Pim’s pad thai photo story.

An Unazukin riding a snail, while an ant heroically holds up a leaf umbrella with a droplet of water on it and a caterpillar walks on the snail’s shell. Could this one image end all the world’s unhappiness?

Previously:
bathtime for snails
knitted snail
more snails

… a bottle of white wine and a head of garlic.