Welcome to the first food post of 2021. I want to start the year as I mean to go on: trying to cook tasty food, with vastly varying levels of success.

Crispy honey-roasted sprouts
Before we get into it, let it be known that I hate sprouts. I hate sprouts! There aren't many vegetables that I wholly dislike, but sprouts are one of them. They're like bitter balls of nastiness. But, welp, it was Christmas, and everywhere was advertising sprout recipes so I thought I'd try one. I managed to burn the sprouts (you can tell) because I left them in the oven for 25 minutes without checking on them. But actually, the burntness didn't add any bitterness that wasn't already there from the sprouts themselves. In fact, the hazelnut praline thing was sweet enough to combat the bitterness from all corners. It's surprising! I don't like sprouts and I don't like savoury food that's too sweet, but the two actually cancel each other out. These were edible! Edible as they were, this recipe could be improved by removing the sprouts altogether. That buttery hazelnut praline would be divine sprinkled on a dessert.

Potato and parsnip al forno
This Jamie Oliver recipe was a lot of effort for something that was, essentially, bad. It sounded so promising, and it looked really good when it came out of the oven all bubbling with the yellow melted cheese on top. But, for me, the taste was all wrong. It was far too sweet, and I've already mentioned how I don't like too much sweetness in my savoury dishes. You had sweet parsnips and sweet onions and sweet chestnuts all together. There was not nearly enough cheese and garlic to counteract all that sweetness. Plus, Jamie says to leave the skins on the potatoes and parsnips, but that just meant that the dish was horrible texturally as well, because amongst the soft creaminess of the vegetables you'd occasionally nearly choke on a long string of potato skin. Maybe if you like very sweet savoury dishes (and eating string), you'll like this one. But for me it was absolutely not worth the effort.

Mary Berry's Yule log
Faced with a sudden and unexpected Christmas by myself, I realised that I was now in charge of the Christmas food. And so I decided I was going to make the most of it and actually have a Christmas dessert that I like. My family normally has Christmas pudding after their Christmas dinner, which is not for me, and so I normally sit it out. Not so this year! My Christmas = my rules. And my rules say that the best Christmas dessert is a chocolate log. I chose this Mary Berry recipe because I figured that you probably can't go wrong with Mary. I was entirely correct! This recipe left me singing Mary Berry's praises oh my God. It contains fresh cream, and there's only one of me, so I was left eating this dessert after every meal (including breakfast) for a week, and yet I still looked forward to every serving. I made two changes to the recipe. One was that I could not find any caster sugar, so I substituted with granulated sugar; this didn't seem to affect the recipe at all. The other was that I forgot to make a note of what type of dark chocolate I was supposed to buy, so I ended up using 70% dark chocolate instead of the 40% given in the recipe. This would come to haunt me. Mary says to make the ganache topping in a rather unusual way by adding the chopped chocolate to the hot cream, rather than the other way around. I did as she said, but didn't stir it for long enough to melt my chocolate fully (which was more solid than hers anyway) because I was terrified of the ganache splitting in a hot pan. (The last ganache I made split terribly, and now I have ganache issues, or... gannissues.) So I was left with a ganache that was a bit lumpy. Mary then says to cool the ganache in the fridge so that it's thick enough to pipe. Alas, I did not realise I had used a more-solid chocolate than Mary, and so was very surprised when my ganache solidified completely in the fridge. Nevertheless I struggled on by putting the solid ganache in my piping bag and trying to warm it with my hands. This was a resounding failure: the ganache refused to become liquid enough to pipe and all the chocolate chunks left in it blocked up my piping nozzle anyway. In a fit of rage and panic, I took the ganache out of the piping bag, shoved it in the microwave to liquify a little more, then spread it on the cake with a palette knife and, as per Mary's alternate instructions, used a fork to create a bark texture. It turns out that little mistakes can become massive successes. Just look at the bark on that cake! It looks much more branch-like than it would have done if I had piped the ganache properly. And the little chocolate chunks, which had been the bane of my piping nozzle, actually helped to give a rough texture! Resounding success! In taste, Mary knows what she's doing, oh my word. The chocolate sponge was unbelievably moist and light, the whipped cream paired with it beautifully and the accidentally too-dark chocolate meant that this dessert wasn't too sweet (which can sometimes be an problem with these things). Instead it was a dessert that was light and rich with an almost-solid chocolate coating that was oh so chocolatey. It was good. I actually miss this cake now it's gone! I'm seriously going to have to consider making it again next Christmas, regardless of who's in charge of the food.

Barbecue tofu ramen
This recipe was a bit of a mission to make. To me it feels quite "chefy", meaning that it's one of those recipes that requires lots of multitasking. Almost every component of this dish was cooked separately, yet simultaneously, and with short cooking times so you don't have much time to think as everything is happening. I'm sure it's an easy dish to make if you're a chef and are used to these things. For me, I was "rabbit in the headlights"ing for a lot of it. Do you know what though? It's worth it. I was wondering if, as a vegan dish, this might be lacking in umami flavour, but not so. The broth is rich and savoury and creamy, the toppings lift it, and the tofu is super tasty (plus the charred, fried texture of the tofu makes it feel quite satisfyingly meaty). Disclaimer though: my dish wasn't fully vegan, because I bought a BBQ sauce that has honey in. My only complaint is how you're supposed to eat it. This is a dish for chopsticks. It's clearly not a dish for a knife and fork. So how am I supposed to eat that massive lump of pak choi? I tried picking it up and biting it, but because it was only charred it was still quite stringy and chewy. Not clever. I had to have a brief interlude with a knife and fork to cut the pak choi into chunks for chopsticks. Once I'd done that though, this dish was great. Takes a lot of effort, but makes a very good vegan dish.

Vegan mushroom carbonara
This recipe was written by the same guy as the previous one and I can tell. This one isn't quite as "chefy" but it's still clear that the person who wrote this doesn't care how many pans they use. What do you mean I have to put my sauce in a blender and then I have to put it into a fresh saucepan? Why? Is an absolutely chunkless sauce really worth cleaning another pan? (It is not.) My other issue with this recipe was the timing for the mushroom bacon. It may be because I greatly reduced the recipe from six servings to one, but my mushrooms got really overcooked in the oven. After 30 minutes they were husks of charcoal. I did them the next day for 20 minutes and they came out perfect. As for the taste of this recipe, it was ok. It was nice enough, and the mushroom bacon is a perfect substitute for the little bacon chunks you get in a carbonara, but the sauce wasn't right. I don't have a blender, so whizzed my sauce up in a food processor; I thought this might leave me with texture issues, but actually the tiny chunks in the sauce did a good job of replicating the egg you'd get in a normal carbonara. My problem with the sauce was actually taste rather than texture: the taste was fine, but it wasn't the creamy, umami explosion you'd expect from a carbonara. Without being able to use Parmesan, this dish was never quite going to be a normal carbonara, I suppose. But did we really need to make a roux for the sauce? The richness that you'd normally get from the cream wasn't there, because the creamy texture just came from flour instead. Is there not some kind of vegan cream substitute that could be used? (I have no idea, but it feels like there should be.) Anyway, this was good and all, but don't serve it to non-vegan folks and call it a carbonara because they will be disappointed. It must also be said that I'm not a fan of peas, and I left out the wine. Would this dish have been perfect if I had just taken out the peas and added the wine? No-one knows.