I've been having fun with a new cookbook recently. I wonder if you can tell.
Crispy pork noodle salad
This is another Jamie Oliver recipe. I have made enough of his recipes now that I am wary about the balance of flavours. Will it be too sweet? Will there be enough umami? Thankfully this one was nice! The pork and the peanuts added a nice umami flavour, and the sweetness of the teriyaki sauce, sweet chilli sauce and lime juice worked well. If I were to tweak it, I might add some soy sauce for a bit more umami, purely because stir-fries without soy sauce feel a bit weird to me (the dominant flavour here is lime rather than soy). I have only two proper complaints to make to Jamie. 1) How on earth is 150g noodles meant to feed four whole people? It's not enough! I felt almost full after eating, but I was then hungry again in an hour or so. 2) Why do I simultaneously have to use two frying pans? This is hard. I burnt myself in the frenzy. Who even owns two frying pans? (Me, I suppose, but one is really old.) Honestly, this was such a chefy thing to do. Home cooks are not as au fait with multitasking as you, Jamie. Please be gentle with us.
Smoked salmon and avocado on toast (recipe from "Nosh for One: Unique Meals Just for You!" by Joy May, which was a present from my parents)
This recipe was very easy and very delicious! My only issue is that it's hard to eat. The lettuce, which separates the avocado from the salmon, slides all over the place when you're trying to cut into the thing, which results in the salmon going all over the plate, instead of onto the toast and into my mouth where it belongs. There's lemon juice and olive oil in with the salmon, which tastes really nice, but I personally think that 1 tbsp olive oil per person is a bit much when you have rich salmon already.
Sardines on toast (recipe from "Nosh for One: Unique Meals Just for You!" by Joy May)
I haven't had sardines on toast for decades, so this was a lovely piece of nostalgia for me. I'd never eaten sardines on toast with added tomatoes, basil and lemon juice before, but they made a really nice addition. The only complaint is that putting all that stuff on the toast makes the toast cold, so it's not quite like the warm, tomatoey, buttery deliciousness that I remember from my childhood.
Spicy avocado on toast (recipe from "Nosh for One: Unique Meals Just for You!" by Joy May)
You are welcome to laugh at my poached egg. I freely admit that it is one of the worst poached eggs I've ever made. I don't poach eggs often so I always have to look up how long to poach them for. This recipe doesn't give a time; it just says "Leave until the egg is set". Seeing as, from the introduction, the book seems to be aimed a beginners, I thought "well clearly you don't have to time it; just leave it until it looks set". So I left my egg until the whites looked white, but boy it wasn't set. I picked the egg out of the water with my slotted spoon, only for the yolk to fall through the slots in the spoon and disintegrate into the water below. It tried to salvage what yolk I could, but it was not very pretty. That said, the recipe is delicious. Who doesn't like avocado and poached eggs on toast? There's lemon juice and chilli in the avocado to give it a big of zing, although my chilli wasn't very hot so I couldn't taste that much.
4 comments
Comment from: Emma Visitor
Comment from: Janine Member
Secondly, all these recipes look like cookbook photos. I am just in awe.
Thank you! I have realised that for me 70% of the joy of making a food post is the cooking and eating, but the other 30% is the food photography. So comments like this give me life.
(I understand that entire national cuisines are built around the concept of savory peanuts, but while I wish these national cuisines well and admire their ingenuity, I Simply Cannot.)
I think we may have talked about this before, but I am the complete opposite. I grew up with peanuts and peanut butter being seen as a savoury thing, and the thought of including them in sweet things still squicks me a little. I mean, I am growing used to it now and will happily choose a peanut cookie or peanut granola bar, but I still always think “Sweet peanuts?? Brave choice!” (I can remember watching with horror when my Dad first bought a Reese’s peanut butter cup from some speciality shop and ate it. I was like “ewwww how could you!” Several years later I ate one myself and understanding blossomed.)
I am so sorry that you had an avocado drought recently. The trials of 2021 have truly touched us all. (No really. That must have been annoying. I’m glad things are getting back to normal now.)
Your horror at sardines on toast is amusing me greatly. If it helps, when I was little I knew them as the even more uncool name: pilchards on toast. I’m sure there are lots of British people who wouldn’t be into it, but I am old enough to have grown up with it as a staple. Pilchards come in tomato sauce here, so mostly they taste of tomato with a slight tuna-y fish taste. That mixture of tomato sauce and butter and hot toast is lovely.
Pilchards on toast was one of the few times I ate fish as a child. We just weren’t really fish eaters, especially a few decades ago. Generally fish came in cans. You would have:
Canned tuna - eaten with mayo in a sandwich, and occasionally with tomato sauce (not mayo) and pasta if you’re feeling fancy
Canned salmon - eaten with cucumber in a sandwich (very fancy)
Canned pilchards in tomato sauce - eaten on toast
Cod or haddock - eaten as part of fish and chips only
(I have just realised that most of these are sandwich-based dishes. I don’t know what that says about us.)
Ah. Thank you for all your comments! It has been a joy!!
Comment from: Nick Visitor
I think you’re better at poaching eggs than we are. Always a disaster!
Comment from: Janine Member
Oh thank goodness it’s not just me. They are far too picky. I need to get a set of moulds like my Nan had in the 1980s; make a little dome of poached egg.
Well, first of all: FOOD POST!!!!!
Secondly, all these recipes look like cookbook photos. I am just in awe.
The crispy pork noodle salad is extremely glamorous, but again with the peanuts. (I understand that entire national cuisines are built around the concept of savory peanuts, but while I wish these national cuisines well and admire their ingenuity, I Simply Cannot.)
The various avocado toasts look absolutely delicious! However! I’ve gone through a long corridor where there weren’t any avocados in the grocery store at all, and then there were some but they cost 5x as much as usual (we are approaching avocado normality now), and these recipes are a sight for sore eyes. Also, your poached egg doesn’t look bad to me at all. I always overcook eggs, out of a fear of contracting salmonella, and also I only poach eggs in granny molds anyway. So. You get 10/10 for effort, as far as I’m concerned.
The sardines on toast!!! What in the name of the lord! “Warm, tomatoey, buttery deliciousness!” What! What!!! The only sardines I’ve ever seen are packed in oil (yuck), mustard (yuck), or hot sauce (yuckkkk), and I can’t imagine them being constitutive of happy childhood memories under any circumstances. Clearly this is another thing like the Full English Breakfast, designed to fascinate and confuse foreigners.
Honestly, though — it all looks super-delicious, and I’m so incredibly happy to finally see another FOOD POST!!!