Tag: sort

Duck and pancake (sort of)

I spent almost my entire first pregnancy worried about how much harder and worse it would be to be pregnant with a toddler in tow.

Of course, I was right to be worried. It’s absolutely horrible. I have also got much fatter and stiffer quicker this time and am out of breath and feel queasy and faint at any sort of physical effort. Bending down makes me feel dizzy and lightheaded and if I pick Kitty up I feel like my bum is going to fall off.

But in some ways, being pregnant the second time around is easier. No-one pushes you around. No-one lectures you about how shit/marvellous having a baby is. Basically no-one really cares and it is great.

I also now know how long nine months is. It’s a fucking long time. So you might as well take your coat and shoes off and arrange all your stuff around you nicely and get comfy because you’re going to be in this state for a flipping age. My friend AC compares it with flying long-haul, economy. Just when you think you can’t stand it any more, it turns out you’re only in Dubai and you’ve got another huge slog left.

Mistake #1 that I am not going to make with this pregnancy is to look like a horrible slob. Last time around I just slopped around in disgusting denim jeggings and filthy Converse and ugly jersey tops, thinking that money spent on maternity jeans, or tights or new shoes or underwear or anything was a waste.

No fear. Not this time. I went out and bought, on the advice of my wardrobe guru Becky B, a pair of J Brand black skinny jeans for £185, which the nice girl in the shop, (Trilogy in Hampstead), sent off to get turned into a pair of maternity jeans. Then after you’ve had the baby, they turn them BACK into a pair of normal jeans! Let no-one say I am not thrifty. Although frankly they are probably going to be so knackered by next May that won’t be much left to turn back into normal jeans.

And I’ve got a dress from Isabella Oliver, and ankle boots and a Zara tweed jacket with leather sleeves (I know! I AM fashion!), and some smart harem trousers and THREE new pairs of maternity tights and loads of these t-shirts from Top Shop, which are an absolute life saver.

Giles hates all of it. But as Becky B said as she saw me hesitating over the harem trousers “Don’t ask yourself whether Giles will like it. He will only think you look nice if your arse and boobs are all hanging out.” Becky B is Scottish via Blackheath and I always do whatever she tells me.

But I am, basically, doing all this for Giles. Because the person who really suffers during my pregnancy frump-outs is him. But it’s not for him, him – if that makes sense – because he is a bit wary of all these rather @ManRepeller new clothes, but for other people, looking at him. I don’t want people in restaurants to go “Oh look, there’s Giles Coren and there’s his…. really frumpy… dowdy…. fat… wife… urgh,” I want them to say “Wow Giles must be really cool to be married to someone who wears harem pants!!!”

Mistake #2 I am going to try not to make this time is to get incredibly fat. I’ve already put on a stone, in the first trimester sugar/carb/neausea feeding frenzy – but I am wondering if all the eating I did last time in my 2nd and 3rd trimesters wasn’t done out of self-pity and boredom, rather than actual hunger. I don’t mean going on any sort of diet, I just mean when I’ve got a raging thirst I might try to quench it with sparkling water first, rather than a giant thing of Coca Cola.

(I once read in a pregnancy magazine, by the way, a thing that said “By five months, your jeans might be feeling a little tight.” A LITTLE TIGHT??! Fucking hell, in both pregnancies I was in stretchy waistbands at EIGHT WEEKS. I wanted to set fire to the magazine but it would have made a terrible smell.)

What gives me hope is that I’m not as in to full Sunday roasts and lots of carbs as I was first time. All I really want is sushi. Sashimi, nigiri, california rolls, spicy tuna rolls. Maybe a seaweed salad? Cheeky little hot sake? It’s all I can think about. Large bits of roast meat, creamy things, sticky, rich things all turn me green.

But that’s still what my husband likes to eat, so I bought for his dinner the other day some duck breast. And then it sat in the fridge for days as I found excuse after excuse not to cook it because I just couldn’t face it.

Then I came up with an idea, which was to use it in a sort of ersatz duck-and-pancake thing. I didn’t hold out much hope for this as I only had fajita wraps for the pancake and a bottle of bought hoisin sauce for the sauce and duck breasts for the duck rather than leg.

But it basically worked. Which makes me think that if you could actually get some duck pancake pancakes from somewhere (one of you smartarses must know where?) you’d be really sorted.

I also discovered a very good way of cooking duck breasts, which gives you a really crispy skin and doesn’t fill the kitchen with blue smoke.

1 Score the skin of the duck in a diamond pattern and then place on some kind of grill or grid suspended over the skin then pour 1/2 a kettle-full of boiling water over them.

2 Dry the duck very well and then put in the fridge to dry out completely – all day is great but 45 minutes will make a difference.

3 When you are ready to cook the duck, season with salt and pepper and five spice (if you want) and then put in a dry frying pan skin side down.You don’t need any oil or anything because the duck is going to leak a lot of grease. If you have a skillet that will go in the oven use this. Cook this very gently for about 10 minutes, until the skin is brown and the pan is full of duck fat. Then turn the duck over and cook the bottom for 4 mins.

4 Now put in a 180C oven for 8 mins for medium and 10 for well done.

And that’s it. Eat with your sliced up cucumber and spring onion with plum or hoisin sauce on whatever pancake type thing you can lay your hands on. Close your eyes and you could almost be in Chinatown.

Incoming search terms:

https://gordon-ramsay-recipe com/preparation/duck-and-pancake-sort-of html

Patatas Bravas – Fierce Up Your Fries

I always thought Patatas Bravas meant “brave potatoes,”
which seemed a little strange since what was supposed to be so brave about
them? Amazingly delicious, yes, but valiant, fearless or courageous? I don’t
think so. Well, apparently my translation skills were lacking, and come to find
out it actually means “fierce.” Now that makes sense.

These are, as advertised, fiercely textured, fiercely
flavored, fiercely presented, and fiercely enjoyed. How fierce is really up to
you and your inner Spaniard. There are as many patatas bravas recipes as homes
in Spain, and this is nothing more than my latest rendition.

As long as you boil them
first, fry crisp, and season earnestly, the rest is open to wild
experimentation. I’ve used all sort of blanching liquids, spice blends, and
sauces, and never been disappointed.

My control around food is generally decent, but I am no
match for a plate of these. Once you start with the toothpick, you’ll be
impaling and eating potatoes until they’re gone. If you are making these for a
group, just do in batches and keep warm in the oven until you have enough. Just
don’t salt until the last second, or they can get soggy. I hope you give these
a try soon. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 4 portions:

2 pounds russet potatoes

For the boiling liquid:

2 quarts cold water

1 tbsp salt

1 tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp cumin

2 bay leaves

For the sauce:

1 cup mayonnaise

garlic to taste

1 tsp tomato paste

1-2 tbsp sherry vinegar

1/2 tsp smoked paprika

1/4 tsp chipotle powder

cayenne to taste

For the spice blend (makes lots extra):

2 tbsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

1 tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp chipotle powder

chopped parsley

Incoming search terms:

Chickpea, tomato and cucumber salad

My husband has gone to Canada to make a television programme for the W Network and is away for most of two months. He is back for two weeks in the middle but then away for three, so we’re all saying to ourselves that he’s away for 2 months because that’s pretty much what it amounts to.

He went away once before, for a week, when I was pregnant with Sam and it was entirely fine, although I had been dreading it. I missed him, of course, but in fact quite enjoyed myself. I ate dinner with Kitty at 5pm every night and then after she had gone to bed I gorged on bad telly and very small, watered-down glasses of wine and rang people I hadn’t spoken to for years and had long gossips.

This time it is not as amusing. The house is empty, spooky and creaky. I feel strangely exposed and vulnerable here on my own – I do not look forward to the long, silent evenings at all. There is nothing I want to watch on TV and I can’t think of anything to gossip about. I feel like some sort of doomed Lord of the Rings character; stricken, frozen, pale by a small stream in some lonely dark forest waiting, waiting, waiting for my husband to return.

I keep the house tidier than I normally do even when he is here, I have grimly adopted his chores, devotionally taking out the compost, doing the recycling, putting shoes away, switching off lights, asking no-one in particular why the milk is out of the fridge, closing doors, locking windows. I have already cleaned and edited the fridge twice, even though my husband is the only one who cares what state it is in. We are suspended, set in aspic. Waiting.

Things were not helped by Kitty almost immediately coming down with a nasty virus that gave her a temperature close on 104F and a weird blotchy rash, which wouldn’t have bothered me especially, but nursing her through it while hefting super-clingy, whine-machine Samuel “Grabby” Coren and his massive fat arse around at the same time drove me fair out of my wits.

Anyway Kitty recovered remarkably quickly, (whatever sort of virus can survive a temperature of 104F, it wasn’t this one), and I have had time to reflect how often I kid myself that I am the one in charge of this house, of this family. My husband is in fact the one who keeps things together, sorting out boring stuff like leaks, infestations, rings on the doorbell after 9pm, stolen cars and emergency dashes to the hospital with floppy infants.

The only thing I seem to be responsible for in this house, it turns out, is making sure everyone has clean pyjamas and pants. (And sometimes even that falls to piss.)

And dinner, I suppose I do most of the dinners. But without my husband here I am absolutely adrift when it comes to evening meals. I know from experience living on my own that you really do need to do something for dinner because otherwise you end up drinking too much and eating a lot of salty snacks, which is fine one or two evenings a month, but as a daily dinner plan it won’t do. But when I start to think, at about 3pm, what I am going to have for dinner that night, my heart really plummets in a way it never does when I think about what Giles and I might have. I can just think what would Giles like?

And I can look forward to Giles asking me “What’s for dinner?” so I can say “IT’S A SURPRISE” and then present him with something he either really loves, a boring old trusty tummy-pleaser, or something new and crazy. Sometimes the surprise is that HE is going out to get a takeaway. And occasionally, if I am feeling sadistic, I make something he doesn’t like but that he has to eat anyway because I made him his freaking dinner.

But me, what would I like? God, I don’t know. A pizza? A dozen Krispy Kremes? I don’t know.

I have been ordering a lot of takeaway sushi and picking up Franco-Viet treats from Cardigan Club Cafe at the top of my road. And anyone who wants to see me, I immediately invite them round for dinner. I have decided that I am going to give each faithful pilgrim to my lonely look-out post a roast chicken (I can survive on the leftovers for the rest of the week) with a healthful salad that can be knocked up in 3 minutes – something where the heavy lifting is mostly in the shopping.

What makes a salad delicious? To my mind it’s crunch, moreishness, zing and mild spice. And an element of… you know… ballast. We eat a lot of leaf-based salads in this house because, we just do. But a leafy salad with a vinegary dressing, it’s so Seventies! Plus eating a large leafy salad can be so aesthetically awkward, levering spiky fronds into the gob – so reminiscent of a cat eating a large spider.

To come across as a really electric, fascinating and modern cook, one also only needs to use a lot of fresh herbs, (such a bore to get hold of), and maybe scatter some pomegranate seeds here and there and people whisper to each other at parties “She does this amazing salad”. But in fact I don’t have a failsafe wow salad, (which is in fact just an assembly job). The thing I do when I want to knock people’s socks off is Jamie Oliver’s Winter Coleslaw which is terrific, but a right fucking pain in the bum to put together I tell you.

Moro is a restaurant to which I have never been, can you believe it? But I am assured that it is the sort of place that one gets a showstopper salad. Sam and Sam Clark have obligingly written many books containing recipes for these creations and I am grateful to Anna Bateson for drawing my attention to, and personally recommending, this one.

Chickpea, tomato and cucumber salad, from the first Moro book
For 2 as an accompaniment

This is not the exact recipe, this is how I did it:

1 400g can organic chick peas, de-canned and rinsed
small bunch mint
small bunch coriander
1 tbsp vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
juice 1/2 lemon
salt
1/2 garlic clove, grated or crushed
1/2 tsp grated onion
1/2 tsp dried chilli flakes
4 medium tomatoes – the best you can find – de-seeded and chopped
1 small cucumber or half a large one, chopped – and peeled if you like

1 Chop the tomatoes and cucumber up reasonably small, aim to get the pieces absolutely no bigger than 2cm x 2cm and if you can get them smaller than that, great!

2 Whisk together the olive oil, lemon juice, chilli flakes, vinegar, salt, garlic and grated onion

3 Put the tomatoes, cucumber, chick peas and herbs on a plate and scatter with the chopped herbs and then pour over the dressing and serve