A Date With A (few) Dish(es)

Here I am ready to start my second attempt at explaining just how much love and joy and excitement I get from my large collection of cookery books and having flicked through the morning's Metro on the way to work I read an article that pesto maker, Sacla, had polled 2,000 adults about their own cookbook collections.  It seems that out of these 2,000 (randomly?) polled adult individuals, the average number of cookbooks owned is approximately ten and of these most of them gather nothing but dust because when we purchase them we have the best of intentions but most of us just end up being intimidated by the complexity of the recipes inside.

Well, it's true that they do end up being a dust magnet, but then I own approximately 100 of them…. Not quite Nigella Lawson Land here, but then I barely have enough shelf space in my kitchen for them all.  Nigella, domestic goddess that she is, has a room alone dedicated to them in her humble abode.  I should be so wealthy.

I must introduce you all to David (my partner of 16 years and counting and most definitely the "chef" in the family).  This morning he excitedly called me back into the bedroom to watch a segment on Good Morning which promoted Timothy Ferriss' new book, the "4 hour chef" which attempts to break down, via the art of cooking, the simple skills that you are required to master in order to become an expert culinary master.  His main premise?  That cookbooks actually fail to teach you ALL of the main skills required to be able to become a master of the subject.   His method?  To break down the cooking process into five simple achievable steps:

1.  You need to be able to shop.  If you cannot actually understand and purchase the ingredients listed, you're kind of doomed from the very outset.
2. You need to be able to prepare.  Taking the time to actually gather and prep the ingredients that are required for a recipe is just as important as actually cooking them, and this can sometimes be the most time consuming part of the whole cooking process.  Remember, most chefs have mini versions of themselves that do all this chopping and peeling for them.
3. You need to be able to cook.  This means that you understand which pot or pan to use and what will work as a substitute if you do not own an entire professional kitchen set (which, let's face it, unless you ARE married to a very wealthy man, or just have oodles of cash to spare, you're not going to EVER have the full set of equipment that will be listed as "essentials" in nearly every cookbook.  You also need to be able to understand the language of cooking.  What is the difference between frying and sautéing?  And IS there even a difference (yes to the uninitiated, but more of that much much later).
4. You need to be able to host.  My mind's eye picture of the smiling goddess who oozes comfort and joy whilst cooking is not just a pretty picture of sexism – it is ESSENTIAL that you actually love what you are doing.  Everything you do is infused with who you are, how you feel and what you desire the outcome to be.  If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love ANYONE.  Similarly with any task that you perform – if you hate the task, the results will be nothing but lack-lustre and mediocre at best, at worst, it will be nothing but a pile of poo.
5. Finally, you need to be able to clean up.  Again, most chef's will have some dish-pig that will do this dirty work for them, and even for those of us who have a dishwasher there is a certain amount of grunt work that is required by us prior to stacking all those dishes neatly in their place.  I have never forgotten my Home Ec lessons on how to do the dishes, in fact, I am somewhat obsessed by it.  Just ask David.  My OCD is TOTALLY visible in this process.  There is no other way to do the dishes as far as I am concerned, and I'm sure Mrs Jenkins and Mrs Foster completely agree with me.  I have owned a dishwasher, but at present, that mechanical device is me (and sometimes David, although I'm rarely happy with his efforts and often find myself compelled to re-wash them….)

Okay, so I probably haven't done Ferriss justice here, there is probably a lot more in the £20+ volume available on Amazon– if you're interested in actually purchasing this tome here's a link.   Personally I kind of agree with him, although within my 100 + collection of books on cooking I have more than a few of the above steps covered.  Ultimately, the trick to be successful at anything "new" is to start small and start simple – we all want to make sweeping changes to our lives and often start new regimes by TOTALLY transforming our routines – only to watch our good intentions shrivel up and die a week or so later when we realise we just don't have the strength to see such convictions through – but back to the Sacha survey…. so we're intimidated by complex recipes?  Perhaps many of us are.  Perhaps many of us honestly think that buying that Domestic Goddess book will ACTUALLY make us a little closer to becoming one – a little like the older lads sporting a Bieber hairstyle and thinking that makes them sexy (it doesn't make you sexy EVEN if you're Bieber, so why….?  Oh, I'm so digressing... never mind… moving on.

So last night I wanted to introduce our son, Zack, to a vegetarian dish from the world of Sarah Brown.  Now this is what I call intimidation - trying to sell lentils to an 18 year old sport obsessed man who is, I have discovered over the years, perhaps a little 'fussy' when it comes to food.  Zack has never really 'lived' with us before, although certainly not because we didn't wish he did.  Circumstances, like us being on the other side of the globe to him never really made that very easy.  Anyway, he's here living with us now and having him in our home is more than a little exciting for David and I.  He is, (how can I put it without embarrassing him?), one of the most beautiful spirits I have ever had the joy of loving, and love him I do.  There, I'm sure that's embarrassed him greatly.  Never mind – onto the cooking.

So I decided upon a recipe where the lentils were the background ingredient and not the main dish.  Zack had never tried them before – possibly because of the vegetarian hippy association.  The mother of one of my daughter's used to sign off her letters with "Love, light and lentils" during her hippy dippy days so I'm hardly surprised at the reticence that most non-vegetarians feel towards that particular legume.  I did have 4 small chicken drumsticks that needed cooking, so I made sure Zack understood that there "Would be chicken!" and David chimed in by equating them to "baked beans" (something I hadn't quite considered before – of COURSE every Australian lad is aware of what a legume is….. and precisely what happens in your gut after you consume them (a myth, of sorts, but I won't go into that right now).

Anwyay, one of my favourite savoury lentil recipes has got to be Sarah's famous Spanish inspired dish – Baked Eggs with Lentils.  The joy of this recipe, which is basically just adding 100g of dried lentils to a pan of water until tender and then frying up an onion with some peppers (I also added a small green chilli that was sitting by the spices….) then adding the cooked lentils to this and a can of tomatos and a bit of parsley.  Once all the flavours have combined, you pour this into a baking dish and then using sherry (or vermouth, as I don't actually own any sherry) and a tablespoon, you create little indentations in the mix, and crack eggs into it.  Into the oven it goes for 20 mins or until the whites have firmed up.  Delicious.

Of course no meal is complete without either potatoes, rice or pasta (a little clichéd, but not a bad rule of thumb to remember when feeding hungry lads and the meat quantities are a little on the lean side) so I decided upon Potatoe á la Dauphinoise.  This was sounding awfully French (and I'm sure I'll go into more detail as to where I really learned of this dish later on in the blog), I turned to the obvious cookbook to give me the most classic recipe available – Larousse's Gastronomique.  Back in Julia Child's day there was no English version of this classic encyclopaedic tome – but since the 1968 thanks to Nina Froud and a company of other women this has been available in English of us half-hearted Francophiles. 

 Sure enough, the simplicity of the recipe (in fact, I seem to recall that when I originally learned this recipe, there was quite a bit of cream in it… but there was no cream in the original it seemed.  I thinly sliced (approx 3mm) 750g of potatoes and placed them in a large bowl as was suggested.  I then microwaved on a high setting (850w) 2 ¼ cups of milk in a large pyrex measuring jug for approximately 5 minutes, checking every minute or so and stirring, to ensure that temperature had just reached boiling point, but never quite boiled over.  Pouring this over the potato slices in a bowl along with some grated edam (the recipe called for Gruyere and although I would have preferred some Emmental or other Swiss variety, for some reason David brought me home a Dutch cheese!  Ne'er mind.  Probably my local Tescos didn't stock it and cheese is cheese, nicht wahr?  So in it went with a hefty dose of salt and pepper and two whisked eggs and then, realising too late that I'd forgotten to baste the potatoes with crushed garlic I then started wondering why I had bothered to do all this mixing in a separate bowl anyway – it seemed like I had just one more thing to clean up now that I was carefully (well, sort of carefully, given the fact that the potatoes were laying in a milky soppy mess) layering the potato slices in a casserole dish and then pouring the sloppy milky eggy cheesy mixture over the top of them.  This was to go in the oven for 45 minutes on a low heat, so clearly I had made this mixture up prior to cooking the lentils, but hey, I'm working backwards through my mind as I recount this for you (for some reason).

For the chicken, I turned to one of my more expensive cookbooks, not that I paid more than a couple of quid for it, which is pretty usual for me as I am a great lover of second hand bookstores.  I saw drumsticks and all I could think of was "fried chicken".  Now nobody does chicken better than a Southern American gentleman, but considering that the man probably stole that recipe from a black woman (well, seriously, did we ever really believe that the best fried chicken was invited by a southern white man??) I immediately reached for Freda De Knight's "Date With a Dish". 

 This is one of those cookbooks that I treasure dearly.  I had very little experience with Black culture prior to my coming to the UK (I'd like to say that having been born in Australia I just had a different experience of black culture, but unfortunately the racism inherent in Australia never really allowed this white boy born to German parents to truly ever connect with the indigenous population – I mean, I honestly believed (and was never taught otherwise) that Australian Aboriginals actually wanted to live in the Desert.  It was only years later that I learned, to my horror and shame, that the only reason they didn't live in the coastal regions where all our white cities and settlements existed was because the Australian forefathers had wiped them off the face of the landscape through what can only now be seen as a genocide.  But I digress…. Again….!

Freda's book is a classic tome that has collected over 700+ recipes from the American Black Community that she had been collecting since she was a little girl.  I've seen reviews on this book that says that every black woman should own this cookbook, almost as a rite of passage.  The book was published in 1948 and my copy is dedicated to "Toni and Wife" and is signed by the author herself.  I like to think that Toni is a woman (well, the spelling is feminine is it not?) and that Freda was as hip as all the black women I've been befriending since hitting these UK shores, but I'm just chuffed to be actually able to own a signed copy of this marvellous treasure trove of Black American Gastronomy.  I have since researched and found a couple of copies selling on Amazon for over £100, so you can see why I refer to this as one of "the more expensive cookbooks". 

 She has 2 recipes for fried chicken, and I went for the more simpler "No. 1", and then accidently mixed up the cooking methods and cooked it as per the other recipe listed.  In a pyrex dish with a lid I added 1/3 cup of flour, salt, pepper and great deal of paprika.  I then added the drumsticks and shook everything rather violently until the chicken was coated with the floury mess.  I then shallow fried them, turning them regularly, in a rather large amount of frying oil on a medium to high heat.  I should have actually deep fried them, but there I was, dodging the spatter, and after a splash of oil had splooshed up like a fountain and seared my left wrist, David pointed out what that large round wire mesh thing that hung in our kitchen was actually for.  I shallow fried until thought the drumsticks could take no more – the recipe called for 45 minutes of frying – and although I admittedly was reading the wrong recipe by that stage, I still hadn't quite cooked the chicken through properly (David cut into one and blood came out…..!)  So into the oven they went to finish off along with the potatoes and the lentil dish.

And what did I do whilst everything was being baked up?  Why all that cleaning up that you need to master in Step 5 of Ferriss' rules of being a master chef and by the time I had finished doing that it was nearly time to eat. David had prompted me to start cooking at around 6… and it was nearly 8:45 by the time I started serving things up, so clearly I had failed Step 4 of this process – in future I must remember to (a) start prepping earlier or (b) stop dawdling in the kitchen!!! 

 The outcome was a bit of mixed bag – the lentil and egg dish was lovely (although perhaps the eggs were a little overcooked?) whilst the potato dish LOOKED divine, but I'd used semi-skimmed milk hadn't I? So the consistency wasn't quite the creaminess I had initially hankered for, and some of the potatoes could have stayed in the oven for an extra 15 mins or so to fully cook them through (they weren't inedible or crunchy, but just short of being cooked to perfection).  The chicken tasted quite nice – Zack got two drumsticks and ate them with what seemed like relish.  I felt they tasted a bit fatty, but, golly, it is FRIED chicken after all.  I found that mixing the tomatoey lentils with the semi-creamy potatoes really worked a treat, and we all polished off our plates pretty much to the last morsel.

So, the real answer you're all waiting for is did Zack like the lentils? 

Yes, he did.

He actually did. 

 Success!!!!!!