On an eerily similar note to Dev’s latest entry, my week was overshadowed by a cookbook Jeff gave to me for my Christmas. Not for me the completely awesome-sounding Meat Book but instead Nigel Slater’s excellent Kitchen Diaries. It works as a kind of seasonal-by-default cookbook, where he describes the food he has cooked or eaten on each given day.
Unlike Devon, my knowledge of/zealotry towards responsible eating (decent treatment of animals, vegetables that are actually in season and not shipped thousands of miles from wherever is hot enough to grow them) is woefully lacking, and so I’m mostly treating the Kitchen Diaries as an informal recipe book. I was flipping through April and came across a description of a risotto-type thing that looked interesting. There was no recipe, just a bare-bones, almost off-hand description of a meal cobbled together from the remnants of a post-holiday fridge and I thought “Right then: let’s have a go at that.”
Unintentionally in the seat-of-the-pants spirit of things, by the time I got to the shop I had forgotten the ingredients and settled for garlic, onion, leek, chorizo and rice. (In the end, it turned out that I’d replaced spring onions with the normal onion and the leek, so not as daring as I might have hoped.) I chopped up the garlic and onion and left them frying gently, then added the leek and the chorizo as I finished chopping each one. After everything had softened up a bit, I put in a couple of handfuls of rice and about a cup of vegetable stock which I topped up as the rice took it up.
It was ready in about ten minutes, and it was, in fact, mouthwatering. It’s the best thing I’ve made this year. And best of all was the mostly improvised nature of it – I’ve never really learned how one cooks difficult stuff like whole chickens or anything involving separate sauces, and I realised that I’ve at least come to the point where something improvised but simple like this is almost second nature. Truly, I can wave hello to middle-age.
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No, no! See, you have acheived it! Its not about the chicken (which is easy, by the by), but when you can do the stuff more or less by instinct, knowing that you can trust your brain– if not to remember spring onions exactly, to at least remember something green and oniony, hence the leek + onion combination. Well done! And I really enjoy Kitchen DIaries, as well (I think Neil has it, but I am the only one here who reads it). And you can have a borrow off the Meat Book, if you like.
An entire book about meat! Perhaps I’ve been wrongly agnostic all these years.
If either of you guys is planning on killing (and cooking) a fatted calf anytime soon I’d be most interested in sharing in the festivities. You see, I am NOT a vegetarian but must confess to pretty much living off beans on toast for the past few weeks and this distresses me so (although admittedly it is great for losing weight and cheaper than the Orlastat my doctor prescribed me).
Anyway, I have many fig,capers and artichoke recipes (enough already with the vegetables) and my beef bourg is legendary. Bring on the meat!
Oh yeah, and well done Keith on your recent efforts. I do believe I’m correct in saying improvisation is a judging category on Masterchef.