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!)