Cooking With Richard

The dog meat was just generally nicer. The meat came right off the bone and tasted very good – mild, sweet and delicious.

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.

My peposo.

It needs good meat and richer tomatoes, but the basic concept is good.

Mmmm kippers.

Peposo is a traditional Tuscan beef stew which is cooked for anything up to 12 hours (the recipe shown takes a mere 4-5 hours to prepare). Next time I have 10-12 people coming round, this is what they’re getting. Here is a 12 hour overnight version.

Welcome to the DANGO-MUSHI’S WORLD! 見おわったら、そとにでてダンゴムシとあそびかわいがってすてきなダンゴムシつかいになってください。

Pelican eats pigeon in St James’s park.

In the photo the pigeon looks a bit unconcerned, but apparently it flapped and struggled as it took twenty minutes to pass down the pelican’s throat. Onlookers were, according to the MSM, “shocked” (yeah, right).

Updates

Times article with a more disturbing photo.

The pigeon was still alive as it reached the pelican’s stomach says the Daily Mail rather obviously, which is exactly the reason we eat organic meat from animals that we prefer to see slaughtered.

(In case anyone didn’t get it, I made the pasta from scratch)

This review of McEwans Champion sums it up really – bad head, becomes better once it settles and as you drink it.

This is a recipe from John Campbell’s Formulas for flavour.

The pasta is made with 6 egg yokes, 125g plain flour, 125g semolina, and 4 tablespoons of water. This is (rather obviously) much richer than the previous pasta recipe, and handled well.