Tag: house

Spare ribs

I occasionally go on, what is known in our house as, “The Shitty Food Diet.”

The Shitty Food Diet is very simple and very effective – if what you want to do is lose a lot of weight very fast and don’t really care about the impact on your health.

What you do is eat INCREDIBLY shitty food – but hardly any of it. So on the downside you get quite hungry, but on the upside, you’ve got some sort of disgusting, shaming treat waiting for you and the thing about diets is that they’re all about morale.

So a typical day’s menu might go like this:

Breakfast: 1 latte with chocolate croissant

Lunch: nothing

About 2pm: McDonald’s double cheeseburger and small coke

6.30pm: 1 packet peanut M&Ms OR 1 Krispy Kreme OR 2 Jacob’s cream crackers

Dinner: 3 small glasses of oaky Chardonnay and 2 handfuls of crisps

This is the kind of menu I find myself eating quite often and I am thin as a rake. People say to me “You are so thin, what diet are you on?” and I say “The Shitty Food Diet” and they go “Ha ha ha, no really.”

Except next-eldest sister. She said “You are so thin, what diet are you on?” And I said “It’s called The Shitty Food Diet.” And she said “Ooh really – what does one do on that?” But my sister lives in Notting Hill – nothing surprises her.

So this is what I do on my own time, but on my husband’s time, it’s a different story.

But as it happens, we are getting a bit slack about provenence in this house. My husband’s strict rules about what, exactly, one is allowed to buy and eat basically allow for us to eat almost nothing except kale and roast chickens. He doesn’t want to buy, from a supermarket any fish that isn’t mackerel or any meat that isn’t produced by Duchy Originals. So if we haven’t been to the farmer’s market recently (where one can buy, guilt-free, anything one wants), the menu round here gets a bit samey.

I used to observe these rules faithfully but recently I’ve got a bit loose around the edges with it. The other day I just wanted some spare ribs, damn it. We’d just been to a restaurant called Sonny’s Kitchen in Barnes, which was AMAZING – just the best food I’ve had for a really, really long time and worth a trip if you’re anywhere near it.

You would think that being married to my husband I get to eat a lot of amazing food, but it isn’t so. A lot of new restaurants we go to aren’t very nice and if you order wrong, well: yuk. Sonny’s Kitchen genuinely stood out.

So anyway we had these spare ribs, which were like, out of this world and I wanted to re-create them, although nothing like as spectacular. But I couldn’t find any free range organic spare ribs in Waitrose so I just thought – fuck it – and bought the essentials ones.

And they turned out gorgeous, drowning in a barbeque sauce, which contained the following:

5 tablespoons tomato ketchup
3 heaped teaspoons English mustard
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1tsp chinese five spice
the zest of 1/2 an orange if you have it
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3 tablepoons veg oil to loosen
1 tablespoon vinegar, any sort

1 Mix together the sauce ingredients and leave the ribs to marinade for as long as you can – all day for preference but even 30 mins will make a difference.

2 Put in the oven at 180 for about 25 mins.

Halloween gingerbread house – Italian Cuisine

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In a bowl, combine the flour with spices, salt and baking soda.

Separately, work the eggs with molasses, sugar and butter, then also incorporate the flour mixture.
Wrap the dough with cling film and let it rest in the fridge for 1 hour.

Take back the pastry, roll it out on the floured surface in a 4-5 mm thick sheet, then cut out the 6 pieces of the house.
Prepare the decorations with the leftover pastry, then arrange everything on the baking sheet lined with parchment paper (I used 2 different baking sheets) and bake for about 15 minutes at 180 ° C, in a pre-heated ventilated oven, then let it cool.

Once the biscuits are completely cold, prepare the royal icing by working the egg white with the sugar until the mixture is smooth and fairly thick.
Divide the icing into various bowls to prepare it in different colors with the food coloring you have chosen (I used black, orange, purple and green).

Start decorating the pieces of the house first, so that they have time to dry before assembling them.

Prepare a tray or serving plate on which you will place the house and start assembling the house, using the glaze as glue.
Before mounting the roof, wait for the walls to be solid.
Finally, dedicate yourself to the decoration of the additional elements.

Once the frosting of each individual element is perfectly dry, your Halloween gingerbread house will be ready.

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Christmas house of sandwiches – Italian Cuisine

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First of all overlap 4 slices of bread and cut out a small rectangle in the center, as you can see in the photo: it will be the entrance to your cottage (keep the cut piece aside).

Spread the first slice with mayonnaise, stuff with salami, add a second slice of bread, season with mayonnaise and ham and repeat with the other 2 slices.
Take a fifth slice of bread, cut 1 cm to the right and 1 cm to the left (keep these two strips as well) and overlap it, in the center of the last cut slice, in order to start building the attic.

Also add here (on the cut slice) a layer of mayonnaise and salami.
Take a sixth slice and cut it in half, then overlap the previous one, stuffed with mayonnaise and ham, add the second half, stuffed with mayonnaise and salami.
On top of everything, place the two 1 cm strips cut from the fifth slice.

Spread the edges of the roof structure with mayonnaise and place 2 slices of bread on top, one on each side, to create the sloping roof, also combining them with the mayonnaise.
Take back also the pieces of bread cut to create the entrance: with 1 piece you create the door; take the other 3 pieces, cut off a part diagonally and attach them with the mayonnaise both between them and to one of the slopes, so as to form the chimney.

The Christmas house of sandwiches is ready: decorate to taste with rocket and pink pepper and serve.

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