I only spend an entire day in the kitchen for people I really love

A technical hitch has meant the blog has been a bit erratic of late -- fear not, my laptop is better and usual Sunday service will resume after this week. Something which did not have a technical problem, though, was my ice-cream maker. I had lined up the arrows on the back incorrectly, although in my defence the lovely lady at Lakeland did say a lot of people had been making the same mistake. So after I had finished listening to her lovely Cumbrian tones, I made strawberry gelato (see pic for it swirling away, despite my technical incompetence!).

I heard a very interesting edition of Radio 4's Food Programme with the chomping-extra-loudly-so-you-know-she's-eating Sheila Dylan recently, in which they explained the difference between gelato and ice-cream: basically ice-cream is made with egg yolks and cream and gelato is made without egg yolks, rather less (or no) cream, and less sugar. If you've been to Italy, you'll know how good it is. As a child of the flavouring and colour fuelled 1980s, I thought I hated strawberry ice-cream for years, and would regularly swerve the pink stripe in Neapolitan cartons (remember them?!). This version had a lot of actual fruit in it, and tasted very nicely of real strawberry, rather than that sickly, bubblegum-like fruit approximation called 'strawberry flavour'.

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So, now to an effort which has made a not inconsiderable dent in my total: tapas. I had a day free to just cook, so off I went. Readers who have been checking in since the very beginning will remember I started this blog by making mayonnaise, and it didn't exactly work -- yesterday, though, I successfully made its Spanish cousin, aioli. It was very nice, although I'm sure Sam, A and C (who joined us for dinner) and I will be exuding garlic till next weekend. I roasted some potatoes and made some Spanish bread to dip into it. Somewhere along the way I missed that this bread recipe was enough for 12 servings, so was somewhat surprised when the dough wouldn't fit in my mixer; horror of horrors, I had to knead it by hand...Despite some light singeing, which I scalped off, this recipe worked brilliantly. I usually find whole loaves of bread tricky, but this was great.

Of course I wasn't calmly cooking all these in turn -- I had things proving, marinating, cooling, and cooking at the same time: chaos. There weren't any witnesses to this, but I'll share this non-sequential photo with you anyway!

The dish which needed marinating was chicken wings with cumin, lemon and garlic. These were easy enough and pretty tasty, but not wildly special. I often think that the meat on a wing is not really worth the awkward eating required -- these were just about worth the effort, but weren't the dish of the day (I think that was the aioli, actually). The other meaty offering was chorizo al vino. Dead easy is how I'd describe this, and it smelled lovely, although I didn't like it (this was maybe because I cooked it and witnessed the fat oozing out of the sausage). However, those I was feeding liked it and there were no leftovers.

Some recipes I undertake for this task are easier than others, and sometimes I make it easier for myself -- I'm not really a masochist. The quail eggs meant I covered both these bases: the salt I made to go with them simply involved a bit of grinding, and I didn't bother boiling the eggs myself. (In my defence, not only would raw quail eggs be rather hard to find in Leeds, but the idea of peeling 12 tiny eggs [I made half quantities] did not appeal.) Despite my middle-class cheat of ready cooked and peeled eggs, they were very good.

The above dishes were served up with some grilled haloumi and roast veg, and it all went down very well. I even tidied up! (See picture.)

I cannot serve a meal for beloved friends and not make a pudding -- it feels like I've made half a dinner -- so I made my Mum's mille-feuilles. Or rather my version of this dish, because when I rang up to find out how to make it there was 'no recipe, I just made it up to use up some pastry'. What I did was this (it made 8): I carefully divided up a piece of pre-rolled puff pastry into sixteen (using a tape measure so I got evenly sized pieces); oven-cooked the pastry for 5 minutes; microwaved a handful of raspberries and a handful of blackberries with some sugar to make 'jam'; sighed when the oven warped the pastry into different sizes; whipped some cream and halved 16 raspberries; carefully split each piece of pastry into two pieces; and then assembled them. This involved putting a layer of 'jam' on top of one pastry slice, adding cream and a halved raspberry, and finishing with a lid sprinkled with icing sugar. This is C's elegant hand enticing with you with the pudding of the day.

So that's 55 dishes down and 56 to go: next week I'll flop over the halfway mark, like the baby whale I am becoming -- expect mung beans and air on next week's menu -- and remain on track for not having to cook a thing over Christmas! Phew, and thank you so much if you read to the end of this outsize post.

Food for the body and soul

The healthy eating continues this week, in part at least. Wednesday saw another dinner, the focal point of which was to be the country's favourite grumpy millionaire and his troupe of wannabes scratching each other's eyes out for a £250 million investment in a business of their choice. I'd been longing for halloumi for some days so H visiting for supper was a perfect opportunity to try a new way of serving it (as well as preventing me from eating an entire block!). H is also a halloumi fiend, so the fact that we ate the entire block of cheese between us renders this Halloumi with chickpea salsa and couscous rather less healthy than indended.

So, more couscous this week, and flavouring it with herbs, oil, red wine vinegar, and stock almost made it flavoursome; I wonder whether or not the work to make it nice is worth it? I shouldn't moan: this was a good supper, particularly as it featured chick peas, which are another pet love of mine (expect to see more of them here, as Sam and I are currently on a strict poverty diet). It was light, filling, quick and easy to make, and, had we not eaten double the recommended amount of cheese, it would have only racked up 489 calories. The balance of flavours here is also very good, despite the use of vinegar and the saltiness of the haloumi. I believe H could even taste it through the cold she is currently harbouring.

So onto something once again from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, and definitely not part of my current eating regime: blondies. These little delights are the white chocolate counterpart to brownies, and I made them for a bake sale at work for the MS Society, a cause close to my heart. So if not good for the body, they were good for the soul, and could in the long term do someone else some good.

The recipe for these wasn't too tricky at all. I will say this though, or rather ask it: is it normal for white chocolate to split when you melt it? Mine looked most peculiar -- it definitely wasn't seizing, but some odd chemical reaction was taking place (probably serves me right for buying own brand chocolate instead of the finest Green and Blacks). Despite the alarming appearance of the melted chocolate, I added the sugar, beat in the eggs, and all of a sudden it looked normal!

They are very nice (Sam and I had to carry out some quality control tests before I could possibly think of donating them). As I think I've mentioned before, I can't really eat chocolate; I can have the white stuff, but generally I do find it a bit sweet. Because of the pecan nuts in these, though, they don't become sickly.

Next week I'll have a tot up and see how many dishes there are to go, but I reckon I'm still on course! And a note to C, who commented last week: I am looking into no-fun, wheat-free, gluten-free, sugar-free cakes, and will make one, but you have to come up and do some tasting!

Of Human Error and Technical Hitches

So, another week, another three recipes tried, and, without wishing to sound like a Big Brother contestant, I'm learning more and more each week. This was week number two of our healthy eating regime, so recipe one was soup. I'm afraid this is another green soup, and looks not unlike the herb soup I made back in January, but I assure you this summer soup is quite different. I have to own up to changing some of the ingredients. The well-known supermarket who deliver to Kirkstall Towers every week failed to bring me watercress and brought rocket instead: the horror. Also, I had some asparagus in the fridge which I concluded would be tastier, and would go off sooner than the peas in my freezer, so I switched half the amount of peas to asparagus.

I served it with Nigel Slater's lazy loaf: admittedly not a new recipe, but it was a weeknight, so there. HR came round for some supper and a dose of Lord Sugar and his embarrassing underlings. I'm hesitant in saying this, as I did enjoy it, and HR and Sam made noises that indicated they did too, but I think that, like herbal tea, it smelled much nicer than it tasted. That said, no one used seasoning, it took 20 minutes to cobble together, and it was a filling, low salt, low calorie supper.

Recipe number two is a side dish. I have been experimenting with couscous for many years now, and generally find it bland and not worth chasing round my plate. However, I decided to make a tapenade style version of it, to accompany a roast chicken. I didn't have a tin or jar of anchovies to hand, but this is my recipe (I tell you because it was delicious, though I do say so myself).

Put 100g of couscous in a pan, cover (only just) with  boiling water and stick the lid on. Next, get your blender out and put the following things into it: the juice of half a lemon, 90g of olives, a dessert spoon of capers, and 2 1/2 tablespoons of the oil from a jar of sun-dried tomatoes and whizz till you have a coarse paste. When time on the couscous is up, loosen it with a fork and stir through the tapenadey sauce, adding a little more oil if you think it needs it.

This made a really good side dish to accompany a basil roasted lemon chicken. It was tasty and tangy, but didn't upstage the chicken (it is my own personal belief that few things can upstage a whole roasted chicken). And boy did the tapenade make boring couscous interesting.

Lastly, I made ice-cream. My mum has always been most generous with practical gifts and I got an ice-cream maker this week for my birthday. A combination of mechanical failure and my own incompetence has meant that I ended up churning by hand (the churning was what had put me off making ice-cream before: seemed like a lot of effort!). I thought that this recipe for double honey ice-cream was a suitably flash debut for my ice-making efforts.

Good Food rates this recipe as 'moderately easy'. I'm not sure who--certainly not those breaking their duck as an ice-cream maker--would find it anything other than 'slightly tricky'. The custard mix requires lots of attention and careful tending to ensure that there are no curdling or egg scrambling issues. I was successful in making it and it tasted good. Then I double-checked that my ice-cream maker was good to go and realised that the bowl of my ice-cream maker had to go in the freezer for 14 hours before it would freeze anything. Rookie error.

I froze the bowl over night and re-commenced this morning. I started by making the honeycomb. Now, Good Food usually produce flawless recipes, but the instructions for the honeycomb, which I think is essentially cinder toffee did not tell me how hot the sugar should go. I heated it until, to me eye, it was honey coloured, added the bicarb, swirled, tipped it into my baking tray, and wham bam made some rather unpleasant, sugary, chewy, sticky stuff. As I started with a very clean pan and measured my ingredients carefully I can only assume it was the temperature.

The next hitch in my quest to produce ice-cream was that having frozen the bowl and assembled the ice-cream maker, its motor didn't work. So elbow grease was deployed and, even with the fumbled cinder toffee making and the failure of the machine, I produced some pretty delicious ice-cream. (N.B. I know that strictly speaking the ice-cream fails the healthy eating test, but two out of three ain't bad, and it was my birthday last week!)

It doesn't have to be unhealthy

I appalled my friend AP last weekend with the revelation that I had used an entire, although small, bottle of olive oil in a week's cooking. This revelation followed a protracted whinge about how all this cooking has taken a toll on my waistline -- there's no escaping it, I'm fatter than I was in January. AP then astutely pointed out that the food for this project does not have to be elaborate and rich, just new.

Sam and I were away last week, and came home laden with Italian nibbles and keen to catch up with friends A, H and M. So as part of my new not-eating-myself-to-death regime I decided to do a meal that started with salad, continued with a main, and had no dessert (the last part of that decision hurt me). For the main I dipped into Happy Days with the Naked Chef and made chicken in salt with fennel, thyme and lemon. At this point I should tell you that you don't eat the salt -- it's discarded after cooking -- so I haven't fallen at the first hurdle of eating better!

Now, burying a bird in salt takes slightly longer than you'd think. Allow half an hour to make your salt coating and stuff and bury the bird. Also, the measurements in the recipe seem to be incorrect. Firstly, you do not need three kg of salt. In fact, you can tell from the pictures in the book that nothing like that much is used. I used one and a quarter kg to create a crust that looked identical to the pictures, and was as thick as they requested. Also, you do not need eight heaped tablespoons of fennel seeds. You just don't: eight tablespoons is more than a tub! I used six heaped teaspoons and we still tasted it in the meat. Anyway, having painted the chicken in a (thin) layer of olive oil, stuffed it with herbs, and buried it in salt, it looked like this.

This is a fabulous dish to bring to the table when you have people over. The eggs used in mixing the salt coating cause it to harden and form a crystal-like crust -- it peels away in huge sheets. The chicken itself was delicious. The herbs, lemon and fennel all permeated the meat (actually, so did the salt underneath the chicken, but it wasn't unpleasant). The meat was incredibly tender, with not a hint of the dryness that a roast chicken sometimes has. I have a fan oven and cooked it for an hour and 45 minutes on 180 degrees C. Here are pictures of my beautiful bird. Common sense shows the way with the recipe mistakes, and I'm still counting this one a winner. Thanks Jamie!

Getting healthier still, on Tuesday this week I grilled fresh mackerel. Fish hasn't yet appeared here: Sam and I tend to avoid it, as ethically caught fish is hard to come by. Although mackerel are fine to eat in terms of fish stock levels, the ones I bought disappointed me, as they were caught by pelagic, mid-water trawling -- while this doesn't damage the sea bed, it is still liable to catch other creatures, like dolphins. For more information on fishing techniques, Greenpeace have a good site on it. (I'll climb off my soapbox, now, it's giving me vertigo.)

Anyway, the fish was bought, so it had to be cooked. I didn't bother with a recipe for this, although I took a hint from a James Martin recipe and spread my fillets with wholegrain mustard before I shoved them under a hot grill for between five and ten minutes (sorry, I forgot to time it). AP told me that a healthy plate of food should be 50 per cent vegetables, 25 per cent protein and 25 per cent carbohydrates (I should mention, here, that she is qualified to give advice on the topic). I served the fish with some boiled new potatoes: putting them into a bowl after cooking, I stirred them roughly with a fork and added a squeeze of lemon juice, a drop of olive oil, and some ground pepper and a tiny bit of salt. The combination of potato starch and lemon and olive oil made a creamy coating on the potatoes, and I recommend this to you. I also served with tomatoes (nice for cutting through the oil in the fish) and asparagus. It was a lovely meal, which we felt very smug eating in front of the telly watching Supersize vs Superskinny.

Butter will definitely be taking a back seat in my kitchen for a while: despite the fact that it makes everything taste so nice, I really don't want to end up the size of a baby hippo. Forty-two down.

Better late than never.

This project has seen my prowess as a bread maker improve at least 20 fold, and on every attempt, so far this year, I have turned out edible and, even dare I say it, nice bread. A few weeks ago I was inspired further after paying a visit to the nice man who runs the Artisan Bakery in Headingley (go there if you are ever round these parts, no-one in Leeds makes finer bread!). Sam and I lunched on a very nice (entire) loaf of his tomato bread and I was keen to have a go at some strongly flavoured bread of my own, when I happened upon this recipe for some ultra-olivey 'olive and sesame bread'. 'Ah ha', I thought, I too can be an artisan baker.

I should say at this point that I created olive and poppy seed bread, as those were the only seeds I had in my kitchen cupboard. I was suspicious of this recipe as the kneading was so light, only 10 seconds at a time, and I was worried that I was about to produce something with the density of a brick, which I duly did. I could have built myself a very nice barbecue if I'd had a few of them. Now, I won't be quite so hasty as to blame the recipe, I wasn't quite well when I made it; it is very dense though, if you prefer a softer loaf, it probably isn't worth the waiting time. However, Sam and I ate the entire thing in a day, and it was much improved with toasting. The nice baker in Headingley can sleep easy, though...

I can now report back that the sticky toffee muffins with salted caramel buttercream won out in the vote a couple of weeks ago. This was a recipe from last month's Olive Magazine, and was billed as an update to traditional sticky toffee pudding, think a dense sponge cupcake made with dates and topped with slightly salty caramel icing. The topping has dulce de leche in it, so you can't go wrong! I'm often suspicious of cupcakes and have found a number of them to be dry sponges topped with sickly icing, made for aesthetics not taste. Carrie Bradshaw has a lot to answer for.

However, making your own does mean that you can eat them fresh and keep the icing in proportion. These were very good, and the flavour of the sponge strongly resembled sticky toffee pudding. The salt in the icing stops the whole thing from being over sweet, as well as being trendy.

So this brings me to 40 recipes, and I am about where I should be to complete by the end of the year! I have some mackerel fillets for this week, and I have no idea what to do with them, let me know if you do.