BBC Good Food Dead Good Spaghetti Carbonara

The worst thing about coming home from holiday is that after a long journey, you can't just relax.  There's no food in the house, and there's a mountain of unpacking, washing and ironing to be done.  In my case, I have to also write an eye-wateringly huge cheque to the local doggery to get my pooches back (two weeks = £408!!).  And then there's the post-holiday diet that needs to be addressed too.

So I'd planned that yesterday and today we'd have two last treats to soften the blow of an epic 12-hour car drive home (without any diversions back via North Berwick or Bempton Cliffs).  But because I'd left the blog on auto-publish and was too plain cream-crackered last night, the posts have come out the wrong way around.  So what we ate for dinner last night has become today's blog.  And today's breakfast is yesterday's post.  People who work in IT (as I do) and use technology?  A sure recipe for failure :o)

A deconstructed ham and cheese sandwich

Tea on the last night of holiday (ie the day we come home) is traditionally Chinese takeaway and I honestly wanted nothing else when we got in.  But I have a blog that needs a new recipe so I went with a simple spaghetti carbonara.  It's something that I've only ever made the husband once, back when he was still boyfriend (if that's the correct term for a 37-year-old) and that was using a tub of fresh sauce from Sainslebobs which I then proceeded to add more ham and cheese to and it still tasted vile.

It was a shame, because he basically lives on ham and cheese sandwiches so it seemed like a perfect addition to his limited eating repetoire.  I never thought about making it from scratch again until a fit of desperation when looking for simple, family friendly recipes for our holiday eating.

I was therefore sold on this recipe for two reasons.  #1 I could pick up the ingredients in an M&S Simply Food on the motorway services on the way home when we stopped for Miss A's babyccino fix.  #2 It had 'Dead Good' in the title, which is usually the sign of a winning recipe from Olive Magazine.  And, as a bonus, it used white wine which meant there was a welcome spare glass at the end of cooking.

Really simple, everyone liked it.  Just a shame that it's so fattening - a whopping 900 cals per serving, excluding garlic bread and wine - so it's definitely off the menu for the foreseeable future.

You can find the recipe here.

Strawberry and Rhubarb Pavlova

I've just been reprimanded by my mother for licking my plate.  She actually slapped me.  I'm thirty-five years old and taller than her.  And she still slapped me and called me a savage.  She then threatened to post about it on Facebook so I am trying to beat her to the jump and admit to it on here instead.

Plate-lickingly good

A few weeks back, I asked her if she would allow me to bring a Jubilee Bundt and if I could make a pavlova for Sunday lunch.  Unfortunately, my grandfather scuppered that plan by not paying attention to the meal timings, and turning up six hours early.

I'd originally intended to make it a bit of a tropical affair but then foraging in mother's garden yesterday, I happened across some rhubarb.  With some inspiration from Olive Magazine on the BBC Good Food Website, the plan was amended to individual strawberry and rhubarb pavlovas.

To make it even more English, we abandoned the Dutch Esalanta strawberries and went to a local Pick Your Own with Miss A to get some 'gawbies'.

I was really pleased with the combination of flavours - I'm not normally a fan of meringues as I find them too sweet and only picked the recipe as a technical challenge but the sharpness of the rhubarb and the mellow vanilla cream really balanced the sweetness out.  Will definitely be making this again - probably as a full size pavlova next time.  And I'll most definitely be licking the plate again.

Freshly foraged

Recipe - Serves 6 (adapted from Olive Magazine)

• 4 extra large eggs (mother buys these from a local eggery)
• 200g caster sugar
• 1 tsp white wine vinegar
• 1 tsp cornflour

• 400g young rhubarb, cut into 2 inch chunks
• 100g caster sugar
• 200g small strawberries, halved.
• 3 tbsp grenadine

• 568ml pot double cream
• 1 tsp icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste

Picking gawbies

1. Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan/350F.
2. Draw circles with a diameter of around 15cm onto two sheets of baking parchment, sized to fit baking trays.
3. Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff and will not fall out of the bowl when it is inverted.  Whisk the sugar in one tablespoonful at a time until the meringue is thick and glossy.  Then whisk in the vinegar and cornflour.
4. Use a tiny bit of meringue to secure the corners of the baking paper to the baking tray to stop it slipping around.
5. Place the paper upside down on the meringue blobs (so the pencil markings are face down on the tray).  Spoon a layer of meringue onto each circle and shape to fill the diameter of the circle.  Divide the rest of the meringue between the six circles.  Make an indentation into the middle of each circle then use a palette knife to build up the sides of the pavlovas.
6. Turn the oven down to 120c/100c fan/250F and bake the meringues for 1 1/2 hours. Remove from the oven and leave to go cold.
7. Meanwhile place the rhubarb and sugar into saucepan with a tablespoon of water and simmer until the rhubarb is softened and the sugar is syrupy.  Leave to cool.
8. Heat the grenadine in a small saucepan until reduced by half.  Take off the heat, stir in the strawberries and leave to go cold.
9. Put the cream, icing sugar and vanilla into a large bowl. Whip until slightly thicker than clotted cream then refrigerate until ready to assemble.
10. When ready to plate up, fill the centre of the pavlovas with generous spoonfuls of the cream. Top each with some rhubarb compote and strawberries then pour over the remaining grenadine syrup.  Serve immediately.

Olive Magazine Spaghetti Puttanesca

The last two days have been yet another two very busy days in the crazy life that is mine.  I met two new and very different groups of people - both sets of whom got bored to tears with the story of how my blog came about (and my tendency to waffle endlessly when writing - also demonstrated verbally whilst describing the blog!)

Freestanding fork

First set of people were work colleagues who were on a Presentation Skills course.  I've been on several variations of this course over the years with my previous history as a trainer so for me it was a refresher more than anything.  I did, however, learn two new things which are kind of food related and will hopefully stick.  The first is that apparently there is an onion-related theme running throughout the Shrek films.  I've only seen Shrek 1 twice and Shrek 2 once.  I didn't notice this so I know what Miss A and I will be doing this weekend.

Second thing was SUMO.  Food related, because I am becoming rather sumo-shaped from all this over-indulgence and a lack of running thanks to the hacking cough that's still plaguing me.  More appropriate than the fat-bloke reference however (and no, I don't wear black nappies!), was the meaning of the acronym.  Shut Up and Move On.  I'm sure you're thinking that right now!

On to the second group of people.  The Bath Clandestine Cake Club.  What a lovely bunch of people!  Held in a secret location near Bath, with people whose names I can't reveal because I'd have to kill myself, the first meeting of cake club was a great event.  Of course, what's not to like about people that like cake?  Everyone was really friendly.  I felt a bit bad with my over-showy raspberry and lime cake with Swiss meringue buttercream (I got carried away - see yesterday's blog for the proof) and that was why I bored them all to tears about my blog in an attempt to justify getting carried away.

Aside from meeting lovely people, I also ate some fantastic cake.  Most memorable for me were a blueberry cake with cream cheese frosting and a malt vinegar cake (yep, that's right!).  I was also in awe of a beautiful cherry and almond cake where the cherries had been dusted in gold glitter - that one's still in my cake tin, awaiting consumption.

Note the cut off head to preserve Clandestine-ness

The meeting was held in a public place (hopefully I won't get shot at dawn for revealing this) and some people who happened to be nearby came to see what we were up to.  We gave one lovely gent some cake to take home to his wife of 48 years and he very generously made a donation to charity after he wouldn't take the cake away as a gift from the bakers.

A huge thanks to SJ for organising this and I'm really looking forward to the next one!

On the downside, I spent most of yesterday mainlining coffee (I don't know why I do this when I'm on a course) and then after no tea last night, I consumed an exponential amount of sugar.  Consequently, with a 20-woodbines-a-day smokers cough, I was still awake at 3am worrying about the Victoria sponge I'd planned to bake at 5.30am to cover the blog and the subject of my final presentation.

By 4am I'd managed to replan my final presentation to be about how I justify things economically (see the following post where I've talked about this before), thus ensuring that Short and Sweet made an appearance as a visual aid.  I then hit BBC Good Food to find a store cupboard recipe and came back with this one.

I bought a tin of anchovies three years ago to make some salsa verde to go with steak and homemade chips.  I can't remember why I didn't make the sauce, but that tin of hairy little fish has been staring me in the face every time I open my cupboard ever since.  Tonight it was opened, and I finally braved eating the little blighters.

While the sauce was cooking, I honestly didn't think I'd like it.  The flavour just seemed completely wrong and I couldn't work out what was missing.  There was saltiness from the very finely chopped anchovies, a little more from the olives.  A weird tang from the capers. Heat from the chilli flakes.  But I couldn't put my finger on what was missing.  So I soldiered on, fearing I'd end up with a rubbish tea after a long sleepless night and an even longer day.  The final step was to mix in parsley with the spaghetti and sauce.  And bang.  There was the missing ingredient.

I still continue to be amazed by how much just one element can make or break a dish.  Sometimes you can leave something out and it doesn't make much difference.  But for me, the parsley was an absolute must.

Bringing me nicely back to another point I picked up about planning.  Must, Could, Should.  I think it has a life application and definitely relates to cookery.  I was going with that theme for my presentation on the Vicky Sponge.  You must use equal weights of eggs, butter, self raising flour and sugar.  You must use jam to sandwich it together.  You should use vanilla to lift the flavour of the sponge.  You could use fresh cream or butter cream.  But it's not essential (and frowned on by the WI).

So my Must, Could, Should for the next week is as follows.  I must eat more healthily.  I should keep my promise to bake my mentor a banana cake - seeing as how he asked so nicely about three weeks ago.  I could try to make two or less Dan Lepard recipes.  But I'm not making any promises.

In the meantime, I'm loving the puttanesca and will be using this as a quick tea for me on many an occasion in the future.  You can find the recipe here.

Olive Magazine Roast Lemon and Thyme Lamb

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been staying with my mum and asked if she might be so kind this weekend as to let me cook roast lamb for the family sunday lunch.  I've mentioned before that I have an aversion to eating lamb products.  It's not really anything to do with any veggie tendencies, more that I was probably scarred for life in the eighties by Bernard Matthews' Lamb Roasts.  I blogged about this trauma a while back so won't repeat it again, but if you're interested, you can read about it here.

Lunch. Mum's roasties are ace :)

The need to do this was akin to the cravings I had when I was expecting Miss A.  I never craved anything really random but I'd be struck by moments when I absolutely had to eat something - the one I remember is my grandmother's homemade scotch eggs - but by the time I got said food, it made my stomach roil.  It was the same with the lamb.  When I made Dan Lepard's Perfect Plain Pita the other day, the idea of stuffing it full of cold roast lamb, tzatziki and salad got me all excited.  Yet this morning, when I was faced with having to remove a couple of kilos of lamb leg from its bloody resting place and stab it full of holes to stuff with lemon and thyme, my stomach persuaded my brain it wasn't such a bright idea.

I'm one of those meat eaters who will eat meat so long as it doesn't look like the thing it came from.  The easiest way to turn me veggie would be to demand that I look at a picture of the cute fluffy thing it once was before tucking in to my dinner.  My mother traumatised me further as a child (as if the Matthews roasts weren't enough) by once chasing me round our lounge with a fish that still had its head on, beady eyes staring balefully at me, before taking it into the kitchen and cleaving its head off in one clean move with the massive butchers knife she kept for such occasions.  After that I'd only eat fish fingers because with the logic that only a six-year-old can have, they quite clearly won't made from fish.

Oven ready

Anyhow, once I got over myself and cooked the lamb, and rejoiced in being allowed to make the matching gravy rather than using good old Bisto I got to sit down to a really lovely roast lamb lunch that I would happily eat again.  Well I would cook it again if I'd not had to drive back over Salisbury Plain watching all the sad, bedraggled lambs trying to gaily skip through quagmires.  I'm not sure if I'd feel more guilty eating a lamb who lived through this miserable spring or one who had the fortune to gambol amongst daffodils during one of our rare, sun-shiny Springs.

When I was small and we used to go out in the car, my grandfather taught me to shout 'mint sauce' when we passed a field of sheep and 'Yorkshire puddings' on passing cows.  When I realised what he meant, I went through a phase of only eating peanut butter sandwiches and eschewing any meat that wasn't mechanically recovered (six-year-old fish finger logic at work here).  Miss A was happily bleating from the rear of the car today every time we passed a field of sheep.  I am in no doubt that the child who happily ripped the head from the dog on her birthday cake (and swallowed it in one bite) will have any problems with whether or not to eat meat when she's older.

Back to the lamb, it got rave reviews from all the family so it wasn't sacrificed in vain.  I only hope it's other legs were treated so kindly in the afterlife.

As far as I know, my mum just normally shoves her lamb in the oven completely 'naked'.  It then gets slathered with mint sauce (something else I can't stand after overeating it as a child).  So the idea of giving my fussy grandfather lamb with lemon in it, no mint sauce and gravy that wasn't Bisto was quite daunting.  But he ate it, had seconds and even commented that he'd liked the lemony bits.  Result!

Resting before dinner

My mum enjoyed it so much that she asked if she could comment on the blog when I'd written it.  So hopefully she won't be too mad at me for revealing my childhood traumas to all and sundry.  And she'd told me I'm even allowed to go back again if I cook a Sunday roast like that again.  She'll have to wait another few months for that yet because I've still got around 150 posts to write for this blog.  She's going to be subjected to Beef Wellington next time.

Oh and we ate the rest of yesterday's Cinnamon and Blackberry cake for pudding.  Kept really well in the fridge overnight - wasn't covered up and still just as soft as yesterday.  Top eating weekend had by all.

Recipe - serves 6 From Olive Magazine

• 3 onions cut into large rings
• olive oil
• 1 lemon , zest peeled off and cut into 15-20 pieces
• 3 large sprigs thyme , broken into 15-20 small sprigs
• leg of lamb about 1.75kg

1. Heat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Put the onion rings and garlic halves in a roasting tray with 4 tbsp water. Sit the lamb on top and rub the surface of the meat with oil.
2. Stab the skin side of the lamb 15-20 times with a small, sharp knife, twisting to make small holes. Stuff the lemon zest and thyme sprigs into the holes. Season well.
3. Roast for 1 hour 15 minutes for medium rare, 1 hour 30 minutes for medium, 1 hour 45 minutes for medium-well done and 2 hours for well done. Baste the lamb 3-4 times with the juices in the base of the tin as it cooks.
4. Once cooked, rest on a plate or board for 20-30 minutes under foil. 

For the Gravy

Pour excess fat from the tin, then sit it on the hob over a high heat. Stir 1 tbsp flour and 2 tbsp redcurrant jelly into the onions until the jelly melts. Add 175ml red wine. Boil for 30 seconds, add 350ml stock. Bring to a simmer and cook for 2-3 minutes until thickened slightly. Season then strain through a sieve.