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Hoo boy. Guys, I hope you're all doing well out there and staying safe.

Not too long ago I wrote my New Year's resolution for 2020. It was:
"I just want to enjoy every day for what it is. That means no more worrying about what tomorrow might bring."
2020 is making that pretty bloody hard right now!

My goodness. When I started this blog fifteen years ago (and, actually, when I started my life a few decades before that) I did not once think I would end up blogging about the apocalypse. But apparently that's just how things go sometimes.

For future Janine (when you decide to reread this as part of a trip down memory lane) this is the coronavirus aka COVID-19 aka worldwide pandemic edition. You, future Janine, probably don't remember all the details of this time, so I'm going to write them down.

For the rest of you who aren't future Janine (meaning you are neither me nor from the future) I apologise for all these words before we get to the good stuff. This is a food post, I promise. (Just pretend you're reading a normal food blog, where you have to read the person's life history before you get to the cake.)

So, when I wrote my last food post at the end of February, I must have known that coronavirus was a thing. I was probably having to start doing things like washing my hands more often and disinfecting things at work. But things have changed so much between then and now that I can't really remember. Back in February coronavirus was scary but not yet a pandemic. I thought we'd have some tough times, but in no way did I forsee that our whole way of life would change, or for so long.

Future Janine, what's it like where you are? I mean, I'm hoping you're there in the future, somewhere. Have things gone back to normal? Do you even remember what normal is? Have things changed for the better? Or for worse? Or has everything reverted back to the way it was, so neatly that 2020 feels like it was a fever dream? Is the thing you're worried about most the fact that you need to write a report for work but you haven't had the time to do it yet? (aka as things were in 2019?) Is that the extent of your stresses? I hope so. (If not, then these words from your past self are probably not making you feel great. So, um, stop dwelling on what I'm saying and pull yourself together. This is a food post for God's sake.)

In March the tempo of the spread of the virus picked up in the UK. Things stayed kinda normal for a bit. Some meet-ups with friends were cancelled, but some weren't. I went to visit Steve and Heather in Bristol. Nick and Eva came over from Amsterdam and we watched Nick run the Bath half marathon. It was nice to see friends and chat and go for a Sunday roast in a pub. But even then these things were starting to feel strange, like we were only pretending at being normal. It was growing hard to buy toilet paper. James and Eppa couldn't come along because their son had a fever (unrelated to the coronavirus, I might add). I saw my friends but I couldn't hug them. I COULDN'T HUG THEM.

Maybe I shouldn't have gone to Bristol. The train there was only half full. Lots of runners at the marathon had pulled out. But I was content to follow government advice, which at the time advised staying home only if you had a cough or a fever. Government advice changed rapidly the next week when they advised everyone to practice social distancing, regardless of symptoms. By the following Friday unessential businesses were closed and almost everyone was working from home, and by the Tuesday after that the country was officially in lockdown, meaning you could get fined for leaving your house without a good reason. And that's where we are now.

Was it too late? The day after returning from Bristol I developed a mild cough. It was, I might add, ridiculously mild: so mild that I feel bad calling it a cough. But was it the virus? Had I unwittingly passed it to everyone in Bristol and Bath and on the train while I was asymptomatic? Maybe. As soon as I felt ill I isolated at home for seven days, as per the government guidelines, so at least I wouldn't have passed it on to anyone else. Looking back, I find it hard to think that such a mild cough was COVID-19, but you absolutely can't take chances with this thing. And I don't normally get coughs in March, especially when they come with no runny nose or cold-like symptoms. Future Janine, do you ever find out if you had this thing?

Before I went to Bristol people had started panic-buying toilet paper, so there was none in the shops. When I came back from Bristol and went into isolation, people had started panic-buying food. That was the hard part. That scared me. I had grown up, privileged me, with food security, so even the slightest wobble in that food security was suddenly an eye-opener. To think that only days before the panic-buying I had made the dishes that I am going to discuss in this post and my biggest worry then had been that the supermarket might not have pistachios! Suddenly I found myself worrying that the shops would have no food at all. In a panicked haze wondered if I could use the cornflour in my cupboard to make bread. I wondered how much vitamin C I could get from the candied peel I'd used to top cakes.

Being in isolation made it more scary. I couldn't go to the shops myself, so I was only receiving reports from others. "I was able to buy tomatoes and broccoli today," said my boss in a phone call, "tonight I'm going to dine like a king." I had visions of completely empty shelves. Folks who live in the UK, is that the way it really was?

Unfortunately I went into isolation on the day I'd normally do my weekly food shop. I only had a bit of store-cupboard stuff left and that was it. Online delivery from supermarkets was laughable in its unavailability. I cursed everyone who was receiving deliveries when they weren't in an at risk group and had the easy means to get to the supermarket. A colleague offered to drop food round to my house if I couldn't get any online, and I felt like crying at the kindness of the offer.

In the end I didn't need my colleague's help. I eventually found a local corner shop who delivered through UberEats and my food arrived 20 minutes after I ordered it. Thank you, local corner shop, you star. I felt like crying when the delivery guy arrived. I feel like crying now.

God, how first-world-problems this is. HOW PRIVILEGED I AM that even this slight blip in food security drove me to tears. There are people out there who live with this fear from week to week to week. The absolute worst-case scenario that I would have faced would have been having to order takeaways for a week instead of cooking my meals. That's it! Yet there I was, morosely watching "MasterChef" and being astounded at all this food that was being made just for a TV show instead of being made to feed and nourish people.

I feel a bit changed by the experience, but even now my attitude to food is returning to normal. Panic-buying has slowed and now the only thing it's hard to buy is flour. I am no longer in isolation, so each week I get the confirmation of seeing supermarket shelves laden with food. But I need to make sure I don't forget that fear I experienced; not entirely. Don't ever forget, future Janine, how privileged you are to eat well every single day. Don't forget that fear of an empty cupboard. Remember the people who experience it time and again. Do what you can to make sure that no-one has to feel that way.

So. The world is changed. Everyone who can stay at home is doing so. I haven't seen friends or family or colleagues for weeks, but I video call people every day. I leave the house maybe once or twice a week, so I am taking vitamin D supplements and doing YouTube workouts. I would like a hug, but it might be a year before I get one.

These are strange strange times, but staying at home is important right now. Nearly 28,000 people in the UK have died of COVID-19, maybe more. Nearly 240,000 people in the world have died of it. But, for the UK at least, we've passed the peak. Numbers are decreasing, and all we have to worry about now is making sure they don't start rising again. What will happen to the economy and life as we know it in the coming years is less certain, but maybe I should go back to my New Year's resolution on that one: "I just want to enjoy every day for what it is. That means no more worrying about what tomorrow might bring."

So, that was a long and rambling example of WRITING THINGS DOWN FOR POSTERITY. The main point for you guys who aren't future Janine is to let you know that this will be the last food post for a while. (Or the last post on any subject for a while, probably, because what is there to photograph and talk about?) Panic-buying has stopped and supermarket shelves are stocked, but they're not fully stocked. There are still quite a few things that it's hard to get hold of, and it's difficult to know, until you're in the shop, what those hard-to-get-hold-of things are actually going to be. I don't want to waste my recipe fun on weeks when I can't find half the ingredients. How can I possibly complain about having to make two tablespoons of ginger juice if I find out the supermarket doesn't have any ginger? It would sadden me to have to half-arse these recipes any more than I normally do, so I'm going to put them on hold until I can be more certain of getting the things I need. And who knows when that will be?

I am still cooking; don't worry. And I'm even trying out new things, but I'm seeing recipes as loose guidelines rather than things to follow precisely, and loose experiments are not really what I want to post here. (That's not to mention the fact that I can't do any baking at the moment, because I can't share the bakes with my colleagues, and I definitely can't eat that much cake all by myself.)

As an aside, I have to say how much cooking has helped my family through this lockdown. Every day we are sharing photos and videos of what we've made. Some videos have been silly and some have been sensible. My aunt and uncle shared video instructions on how to make their traditional curry, and half the family followed along and made the curry in their own homes on the same day. Almost every day I video call my Mum while cooking, so she and I can cook in our own kitchens together. It's lovely that we all have this shared hobby to bring us joy.

Future Janine, you'd better not be crying again. Have you done any baking recently? Why not? Put some effort in, godammit.

And so, in true food blog style, now you've had my life story, it's time for the food.

Jordan Bourke's creamy avocado pappardelle with pine nuts
Making this recipe was when I first started to realise that the world wasn't normal any more. I was going to make this for a visit from Deborah (she's a vegetarian who likes Italian food) so I bought vegetarian hard cheese instead of Parmesan. The recipe is actually for tagliatelle not pappardelle, but when I got to the pasta aisle in the supermarket there was very little pasta left: there were two types of expensive pasta, including this fancy pappardelle that I used here, and there were lasagne sheets. And that was it. A whole section, just blank. After I'd bought the ingredients, Deborah cancelled the visit. She didn't want to take crowded public transport to get to mine, which is completely understandable. So I made this just for me. It wasn't too hard to make, but anything involving a zester, toasting nuts, and using a food processor is more work than I really want to put into a bowl of pasta. In taste it was lacklustre. It was ok, and perfectly fine: lemony, cheesy, basil-y, pine-nutty, but for that amount of washing up afterwards I wanted it to be amazing. To be honest, all it was missing was a bit of sweetness. Add in a touch of sugar or some fried onions and it would have been wonderful. And, I tell you what, I may not want to spend £5 on 300g of pasta in normal circumstances, but my God it was really good pasta. In some things you can't taste a price difference, but in this you apparently can.

Beef, beetroot and butter bean stew with Stilton dumplings
Where the previous dish was lacklustre, this was everything I could want. You've got a bit of sweetness from the veg, but there's also savouriness from the beef and the stock (I left out the wine, as usual), and the green beans add a nice piquance on the side. And those dumplings. Those dumplings! They are to-die-for! I always love dumplings, but I don't normally like Stilton. Yet the Stilton in these dumplings counters the sweetness of the stew perfectly, and having gooey cheese ooze out of them was great. I do have a few issues with the dish though. The green beans are a faff to make, and even though they're nice, I'm not quite sure that they go fully with the stew; they feel a little at odds with it somehow. I've never made dumplings in the oven before, so I didn't know if you had to cover the oven dish to cook them or not. I decided to cover it, which meant my stew didn't reduce at all and was runnier than it should have been. My biggest issue, however, is that the original recipe (which I scaled down) says it serves eight people but only asks you to make twelve "walnut-sized" dumplings. I know dumplings expand, but they don't expand that much! Especially not with cheese inside! Who wants to have their stew with only 1.5 tiny dumplings per portion? That's sad, and it made me sad too.

Pistachio and cardamom cake with mango-saffron jam and Italian meringue buttercream (recipe from "Baking with Kim-Joy: Cute and Creative Bakes to Make You Smile" by Kim-Joy, which was a Christmas present from Mariya)
Look. At. That. Beast. Look at it! Maybe this picture doesn't do it justice. It had four layers and came to nearly 30cm tall. I had to buy a cardboard cake box and a cake board to transport it to work in, because none of my plastic boxes would fit it. The cake board nearly buckled when I lifted it! Why am I making a cake so huge! I've never made a cake so big before! (This, guys, is why I take cakes to work and don't eat them all myself.) A lady at work asked me if I was practising for a wedding (the recipe says you can decorate it elaborately or go for this uncoloured version with pistachios and flowers - I chose rose petals, because that's what I had to hand - on top). The answer is: no wedding, I just torment myself for fun. So, you ask, what's it like making the biggest cake you've ever made? An experience, is what I will say. You can see from the shoddy plastering (and the fact that I think it is called plastering; I've never covered a cake with buttercream before) that I don't really know what I'm doing yet. It was made more of an experience because on both days when I was making it (I made the jam one day, the cake and buttercream the next) the plumbers working on the flat upstairs told me they had to turn the water off in the whole building for two hours. On two consecutive days! On the first day they gave me five minutes' warning. On the second day I must have looked so upset and distraught that they decided to halt proceedings for an hour so I could at least get two of the sponges in the oven. Argh! I had legit booked a day off work to make this cake; I wasn't going to let some plumbing miscommunication stop me in my tracks. The sponges themselves were a pain to make. You have to roast pistachios, grind cardamom pods, use an electric whisk to add all the ingredients together including, for some reason, yoghurt, and then you have to separately whisk egg whites and fold them in! It didn't help that I refused to purchase the two extra cake tins needed to take me up to the required four, so I made and baked the cakes in two batches. I can see why the cake needed whisked egg-whites plus baking powder and self-raising flour though. The sponges didn't really rise at all; or rather, mine rose a bit, then sank back down. I think it's all the pistachios in the mixture weighing it down. The result was a cake that, while not being doughy and uncooked, was still dense. However, the flat cakes made it much easier to stack them on top of each other. Then you have to make your own mango, cardamom and saffron jam which, no big deal. Oh god. I made a half-hearted blueberry jam for macarons once and then made marmalade another time and both came out too runny. Because I didn't want runny again, and because the recipe explicitly asks for it, I bought myself a sugar thermometer. Now things couldn't go wrong! You would think. But the resulting mango jam was so runny that, once the cake was cut, the jam ran out of the cake, onto the cake board, through the gaps in the corners of the cardboard cake box, and all over the staffroom table. Great! I don't know what went wrong. Either mango (even unripe mango, like the recipe states) doesn't have enough pectin to make it set, despite using jam sugar, or the recipe misses out an important step, or I need a lot more practice in learning how to read sugar temperatures. I think it might be the latter. You then have to make the buttercream, which you use to sandwich the sponges together with the jam, and also to cover the cake. The recipe points you to two buttercream recipes that you can choose from: American buttercream (mix butter and icing sugar; job done) or Italian meringue buttercream (difficult, and requires a stand mixer or will become a living hell). I, of course, chose the Italian meringue buttercream. Look, there's method in my madness. I knew I wanted to try the Italian meringue buttercream at some point, so why not exorcise that demon immediately instead of having it loom over you? Plus, I know that American buttercream is often too rich for me, so I thought the Italian meringue buttercream might taste nicer. The Italian meringue buttercream recipe made a huge amount (it covered my cake and I still have half left-over in the freezer; when I'm going to be able to use that I don't know, because that amount of buttercream absolutely requires taking the results in to work) and the recipe was also terrifying. You start by weighing egg whites. I've done this before and I hate it. Separating eggs is always scary and I don't want to have to do it with up to eight eggs! (In fact, if you include the egg whites for the sponges, I separated even more eggs than that. Honestly, I was worried that someone in the supermarket would be worried that I was stockpiling eggs and butter when I bought the ingredients for this cake. At the time I thought the idea of stockpiling eggs was unrealistic and ridiculous; little did I know.) Then you whisk the egg whites while adding sugar slowly, while simultaneously also boiling a sugar syrup until it reaches precisely 115°C. You have to time these tasks so that you finish whisking the egg whites and boiling the sugar syrup at exactly the same time. I failed at this, and stopped whisking my egg whites while I still had 20 minutes or so to go on the sugar syrup, but I didn't notice any issues. You then taking the boiling hot sugar and pour it in a very thin stream into the egg whites while whisking constantly and trying not to spray boiling sugar over yourself (in that I was successful: I only sprayed it over the kitchen instead). Then you whisk the mixture for 30 bloody minutes until it cools down. And then you whisk in a mountain of butter. These instructions expect you to have a stand mixer, so that you have two hands free to deal with the sugar. I DO NOT HAVE A STAND MIXER. I used an electric hand whisk, so I had to keep putting it down to check on my sugar syrup. And then pouring in the boiling sugar while whisking was... Look, I had the whisk in my good hand, which meant I had the boiling pan in my weak hand and WHY DO I HAVE A HEAVY-BOTTOMED PAN. I kept getting tired and having to put the pan down, but the hand holding the pan wasn't near a heat-proof surface, so I kept having to do some complicated contortions to put the pan back on the hob. My God! And then, when you've done that and have successfully not blinded yourself with boiling sugar, you have to whisk the resulting mixture for 30 minutes. NO THANK YOU. The whisking is meant to help it cool down faster (can't add cool butter to hot meringue). In the end, I managed to keep whisking (my arm was so tired) for 15 minutes. At that point, the poor motor in my whisk seemed to actually be making the meringue hotter, so I left the meringue to cool down by itself. Then more whisking while you add shitloads of butter, ok. At this point my mixture curdled a little, I think because it was too warm for the cool butter, but a quick and frantic Google told me to keep on whisking, which I did, and I eventually ended up with something light and fluffy in texture that held its shape very well. The final step was to whisk in vanilla. Once all the cake components are complete (cake, jam, buttercream) and you're on the verge of a breakdown, all you have to do is put them together! This is why my final cake in the photo looks a bit rushed. It was also lopsided and had a bit of a jam-leakage issue, where my buttercream "dam" hadn't held on one of the layers. Despite the fact that my finished cake doesn't compare to the beautiful cake in Kim-Joy's book (I mean, I've never crumb-coated a cake before, so this is learning all the way) I am pleased with the result. And the cake seemed neat enough that the folks at work were impressed (or maybe that was just the size). The Italian meringue buttercream was a right pain to make, but it sets into perfect layers, which means that the cake looks great when you cut into it (and ignore the jam oozing everywhere). In taste it was absolutely delicious! There are lots of flavours there: pistachio, cardamom, saffron, mango, vanilla (even rose on the top of mine) but they all worked together. The buttercream wasn't too rich and actually tasted a lot like vanilla ice-cream, even if the amount of butter in it made it feel like you'd put lip balm on. Eating a whole slice was quite a challenge, because it's four layers high. But yes. It tasted great and it looked ok and I feel very proud of myself that I've achieved something like this. In a way, I'm glad this was my last recipe before lockdown, partly because I was able to end on a high, and partly because it was so exhausting that I had no desire to cook anything for a long time afterwards.

Stay safe, guys. I'll see you on the other side.

Welcome to the first food post of the future (aka 2020). Let's start this year as we mean to carry on: by eating.

Simmered chicken legs with sugar garlic sauce (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
The actual title of this recipe should say "rock sugar garlic sauce" but I couldn't find rock sugar, so I used caster sugar instead. I also left out the Shaoxing wine as is my usual way. This is now the second chicken leg recipe from "Chicken Leg" that starts with making a caramel. You then add marinated chicken legs, some water and let it simmer away (I went for 50 minutes of simmering, instead of the 30 minutes the recipe stated). The recipe also thinks that simmering this dish while covered will make the sauce thicken; unsurprisingly, that didn't happen. Regardless of consistency, the caramel turned the sauce and the chicken a lovely golden colour. I don't really like sugar in my savoury dishes, but due to the amount of sauce diluting the sugar, it was only after eating almost a whole chicken leg that I began to think the amount of sugar was slightly too much. This makes sense: rock sugar is meant to be less sweet than caster sugar, so if you actually used rock sugar in this dish like you're meant to, I think the level of sweetness would be perfect. In taste, the dish was sweet, garlicky and a little savoury; nothing to write home about, but pleasant enough.

Meatball, spinach and tomato risotto
There's a lot of cheese sprinkled on top of this risotto, which makes it look rather beige. Despite the cheese, the taste of the risotto was bland and beige too. I normally love risotto to pieces and, sadly, I think this is maybe the most boring risotto I've ever made. Oh, it was ok, but it was lacking in flavour. There didn't seem to be enough stock, cheese, sausage or salt to make it tasty. The tomatoes added some flavour, but spinach is so watery that I think it washed the other flavours out. If you're going to go to the trouble of making a risotto, and all the stirring that that involves, don't bother with this one.

Creamy chicken, tomato and chorizo pasta bake
Here we have another lacklustre Italian-style dish from the Tesco website. How can a recipe with three types of cheese in it manage to be boring? Somehow this dish does it. Again, we were lacking in umami and depth of flavour. All I could really taste was tomato and basil. But then maybe I shouldn't be surprised: chicken doesn't have a strong taste and I've never been a big chorizo fan. Some bacon, or the pork sausages from the last recipe, would have been much better. Or even some onions? Why aren't there any onions??? But maybe it's my fault: instead of adding one tin of cherry tomatoes and one tin of chopped tomatoes, I read the recipe wrong and added two tins of cherry tomatoes and no tins of chopped tomatoes. Would following the recipe correctly have resulted in a tastier dish? (Probably not, to be honest.)

Hainanese fried chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
A lack of flavour absolutely wasn't an issue here. Eating this dish (which is commonly known as Hainanese chicken chop; thanks Google) is like an umami punch to the face. But oh boy. Oh wow. What a lot of work to get to that end result. I'm coming close to the end of "Chicken Leg" (I'm cooking the recipes in order, front to back, did I say?) and this one feels like it ought to be the very last recipe in the book. It contains almost all the difficult parts of previous recipes; so much so that it feels as if this is the final boss battle you have to win to finish the game. "Everything you have learned so far will be put to the test, young squire." It took me like four hours. Oh God. You start by having to create two tablespoons (two tablespoons!) each of ginger juice and shallot juice. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY SHALLOTS YOU HAVE TO GRATE TO GET TWO TABLESPOONS OF JUICE? No, I didn't know either, resulting in me seriously over-buying shallots. The juice goes in the marinade for the chicken. After marinating, the chicken is floured (or at least I guessed it should be; the recipe called for three tablespoons of tapioca flour but didn't at all tell me what to do with it. So I decided to coat my marinated chicken in flour, but I used cornflour because I couldn't find tapioca flour). The chicken is then deep fried, which I am too scared to do, so I pan-fried it and finished it off in the oven. But don't rest yet. Now you have to make a sauce, which inexplicably contains potatoes, tomatoes and bacon. (The recipe also says the sauce should contain mixed peas. What the hell are mixed peas? I used frozen peas, and it was only when I later studied the picture accompanying the recipe that I realised that "mixed peas" seems to be the Malaysian term for frozen mixed veg: you know, peas, sweetcorn and carrots.) Finally, the sauce is thickened with cornflour (of an amount you have to guess) and then poured on top of the fried chicken. The only difficult thing the recipe didn't include was shrimp paste, and for that I'm very glad. Seriously; I was exhausted at the end of it. I felt like I deserved some kind of reward for turning out a presentable dish. But do you know what? The reward is in the taste. It was absolutely delicious! The chicken was crispy and had a lovely ginger and shallot flavour (that juicing works, guys; it works). The potatoes had cooked in a sauce made of chicken stock, soy sauce, oyster sauce and sugar, and so were sweet and tasty. And the bacon and the tomatoes in the sauce took it to another level. As to what the dish tastes like altogether? (Because it's impossible to tell from the picture alone.) It tastes, unnervingly, like a British roast dinner. It's chicken, peas, potatoes and gravy, only with a few extra things (plus deep frying) to make it extra crispy and tasty. I was very confused to find a British roast dinner in a Malaysian cookbook until I looked it up and discovered that this dish was first invented by Hainanese chefs in Malaysia for their colonial British employers. Well, what do you know? The effort involved means I won't be making this again, but I'm so glad I made it just once (even if I would prefer it without the peas; I'm not a pea fan). When this cookbook gets it right, it gets it really right.

Steamed chicken thighs with mashed ginger and mandarin peel (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
No chicken legs! My supermarket didn't have any chicken legs in stock so I had to use thighs instead! When I started this book, I thought I would have lots of difficulty finding chicken legs, but this is the first time the issue has occurred, three years in. But that's not the only thing I've changed about the name of the recipe. The recipe is actually called "Steamed chicken legs with mashed ginger and dried tangerine peel". I couldn't find dried tangerine peel, which I wasn't surprised about, but I was surprised to find that my supermarket had run out of fresh tangerines. I ended up buying mandarins, because that's what they had in stock. The mandarins were then peeled and and the peel shredded, but I didn't bother soaking the peel first (which is what the recipe had said to do with the dried tangarine peel) because that seemed a bit of a redundant step when you have fresh peel. I left the Shaoxing wine and glutinous rice wine out of the marinade, and I steamed the chicken for 50 minutes instead of the 25 minutes I was told to. In essence: I'm not sure there's any part of my dish that was cooked the way the recipe intended. The result was... God, steamed, skin-on chicken does not look appetising to a Western audience does it? Looks aside, it tasted orangey and a bit gingery (NO-ONE IS SURPRISED). I'm not normally a fan of fruit in savoury dishes, but orange chicken is always pleasant, and that's what this tastes like.

Happy 2020, all! How are you? Are you good?

I was going to do a round-up of the last decade but, really, what is there to say? Am I supposed to sit here and pretend that I remember it all? Well. Let's see. I lived in four different places, including moving back to London, for my sins. I worked in four different organisations, learned things and met people. I was able to clear up my mental health problems to a very satisfactory degree. I travelled to Asia for the first time. I started trying out new recipes and discovered a hobby that wouldn't let me go. I lost several grandparents and an aunt. They will be much missed.

In essence: time has passed and things have happened. I am happier now than I was, but that's down to the mental health stuff mentioned above. Honestly, if the next decade continued on much like the last (excluding the deaths in the family), I'd be very content.

My New Year's resolution this year is an attempt to cling onto that contentment. I don't want to do anything big or special; I just want to enjoy every day for what it is. That means no more worrying about what tomorrow might bring. If something is worrying me, then I'm going to set aside a time to plan for it, and sort it out then. I shall worry no more. If at the end of each day I am alive and fed and have a comfortable place to sleep, then there's nothing else I need. I will have done some enjoyable things that day, and I will have helped other people to have an enjoyable day too (even if just in the smallest of ways), and that's all I need to focus on.

So, thinking of enjoyable things: I went to visit my parents over Christmas. I'm not normally with them for so many days, so it was nice to have some quality family time. We watched lots of TV ("Moana" was very enjoyable, "The Goes Wrong Show" less so). We ate lots of snacks (all the snacks; so many snacks). And we saw some friends. We also visited my Dad's side of the family on Boxing Day for an enjoyable buffet, including my uncle's excellent samosas. Then on the Sunday after Christmas we went on a country walk with my Mum's side of the family (the mud! So much mud!)

Returning back to London, I went to see Deborah for New Year's Eve, and Esha came too. There I partook of more snacks, a visit to a local pub, and shameless karaoke pretending to use remote controls as microphones. The less we say about our attempt at "Despacito" the better.

As is traditional, let me show you my presents:

Lots of Christmas cards. The one at the top with the swans came from one of my uncles. I have never seen so much glitter come with a card before! It just poured out of the envelope! I don't think my flat will ever be free of glitter again.

Edible presents, including library tea from Mariya and some lovely chocolates from Asia. The medal is a large chocolate coin and is from my uncle. At the end of our family walk in the country, he handed one out to everyone. It was unexpected and silly and much appreciated.

Books and notebooks, including a signed Kim-Joy cookbook from Mariya. I am going to get stuck into those recipes soon. Every bake in the book looks so cute, and I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be able to recreate that level of cuteness in the slightest. I foresee some terrifying attempts coming out of my kitchen in the future. Be warned.

Toiletries, all from my parents. More wash-bags, because the ones I received for my birthday weren't entirely big enough for my needs (I don't travel light); a new perfume to try out (it smelled very nice in the shop); and the grey pouch is a tissue-holder, which was hand-made by one of my Mum's colleagues.

Finally, we have category: other. Featuring a lovely scarf and cute mouse purse from Mariya, and a photo frame from Deborah. The beige top is from my parents and the frog was found in my cracker; it's my friend now.

Not pictured is the scratch card I was given by my cousin (he bought a roll and gave one out to everyone). I won £2! Now I'm rich! No wonder I'm enjoying the start to this decade.

Have a good one, all!

As we draw closer to Christmas, I find myself thinking excitedly of Christmas foods: Yule logs, crispy roast potatoes, mint chocolate selection boxes, Cheeselets in the shape of Christmas trees, panettone. What I'm actually eating, however, is chicken legs. Are you surprised? Of course you're not surprised.

Steamed chicken legs with ginger and lime juice (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
This recipe was actually called "Steamed chicken legs with ginger flower and lime juice", with ginger flowers being the edible flowers from a certain type of ginger plant. I couldn't find ginger flowers at all, so I left them out. I didn't substitute the flowers with root ginger because there was already plenty of root ginger in the recipe. But do ginger flowers even taste like root ginger? Perhaps I will never know. Without the ginger flowers, the main ingredients we have are root ginger, chillies, shallots (the recipe asks for red shallots, but I never know what they are so I always use regular shallots) and lime juice. You're meant to whizz them all up in a blender (I don't have a blender, so used a food processor, which left my ingredients a little chunky), then use the paste to marinate the chicken, which is finally steamed (for 25 minutes according to the recipe; I went for 50 minutes to cook it thoroughly). The end result was not particularly tasty. Steaming the ginger and shallots leaves them with a sharp, almost-raw taste; nothing like the caramelisation you'd get from frying or baking them. Add in the sharp lime juice and all you can taste it sharpness and a bit of heat. Not my favourite thing. Would the ginger flowers have saved it? Who knows?

Apricot cashew granola (recipe from "The London Cookbook" by Jenny Linford)
I've never tried making granola before. How shameful. How on Earth can I claim to run a (mostly) food blog without having my own go-to granola recipe? So I was excited to give the recipe a try, and I was interested to know what the dried apricots and cashews would add to it, because I've never had granola with those in before. There are also sunflower seeds and sesame seeds in this recipe. The result? Look, this starts like most granola recipes (I had to research other ones in a fit of panic halfway through cooking) in that you heat honey and oil, mix it in with the other ingredients and bake it all in the oven. Only, most granola recipes seem to call for a baking time of 30 minutes or so, while this recipe says to bake it for 2 to 2.5 hours. The oven temperature in this recipe is really low at 140°C, but it's not actually that low against other recipes. I cooked mine for 2 hours as per the recipe (in case that's where the magic lay) but I reckon my granola was done by the 45 minute mark. After two hours, my granola wasn't blackened or burnt, but it was pretty dark and there was a slight burnt aftertaste that I could have done without. So, if I made this again, I wouldn't bake it for so long. But would I actually make it again? It was nice. It was an ok granola. But given the effort, and the fact that all those seeds, nuts and apricots are quite expensive, it's honestly so much easier and cheaper just to buy your granola ready-made. Oh, you might say, but if you make it, you know what's gone into it. Exactly, I reply. I know that a whole load of oil and honey has gone into this; it's not healthier than the shop-bought version. (Unless you buy the chocolate curl version from Waitrose, which isn't healthy in the slightest but boy will you enjoy every mouthful.)

Thailand baked chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
These are so tasty! They're the complete opposite of that last chicken leg recipe. There are too many ingredients in this recipe to name, but highlights include fresh coriander, fresh garlic, curry powder, kaffir lime leaves and oyster sauce. There's also fresh galangal, which I can never find fresh, so buy in paste form instead. And then there's the fish sauce. When mixed in with all the other ingredients, the fish sauce gave this dish a really appetising, savoury smell and taste. (The appetising smell will linger in your tiny flat - ok my tiny flat - for at least two weeks afterwards, but at least it's appetising.) You're meant to marinate the chicken legs then bake them in the oven for 30 minutes. I went for 50 minutes as per usual, which dried up the marinade a little but didn't make it any less tasty. It was salty, savoury, rich and fragrant. A win all round.

Classic fry-up (recipe from "The London Cookbook" by Jenny Linford)
It seems a bit weird to have a recipe for a fried breakfast. Surely you just cook all the components you want and then put them on a plate? I get the feeling that maybe this cookbook is aimed at an international market. But, well, I decided to follow the recipe anyway and see what it taught me. I do admit to side-eyeing the choice of ingredients. I know that a fry-up can be as individual as the person making it, but do you dare to call it a "classic" fry-up and not include sausages? And if you were going for the full English (which, admittedly, this recipe doesn't claim to be) I would put some fried mushrooms in there. But, you know what, I rarely have sausages in a fried breakfast when it's not a special occasion, so maybe I shouldn't complain. I was also side-eyeing the instruction to serve it with "lashings of brown sauce and ketchup". Ok, that's a normal thing to do, but it's not for me. I struggle with eating tomatoes and eggs together (something about the sweet tomatoes with the greasy, sulphurous eggs makes me feel a bit nauseous). I will allow myself to have the two on the same plate in a fry-up but the thought of adding extra sweet sauce, of either the ketchup or brown sauce variety? No thank you! (To be honest, I don't really like a fry-up much. It's too greasy for me, I'm not a fan of eggs, and I dislike starting my day with nausea. I'm also far too lazy to make one for breakfast, so I only eat them when visiting people or when I have guests.) But wait. Do you, gentle reader, see what I've done? I appear to have said, "This recipe is silly because it doesn't cook the dish the way I normally have it, but I also dislike the way I normally have it." Hmmm. So, it turns out that I really enjoyed the dish that resulted from this recipe. (Egg on my face, much?) I'm normally far too impatient to cook my bacon long enough for it to go crispy, so this bacon was some next-level stuff. I never season a fried egg or cook it in butter either, which makes the flavour better and not as salty as I was scared it would be. Fried bread is something I haven't eaten in decades, so that was a wonderful addition (although I could happily have had another slice, or maybe some toast on the side to fill me up). And it turns out that adding ketchup and brown sauce really works! I didn't eat them with my egg (don't be ridiculous) but they helped to give the beans and tomatoes an extra sauciness, and the sharpness helped to combat some of the grease that I normally have problems with. Lessons have been learnt here. My worldview has changed. In 2020 I'm going to have to have a serious think about who I am and what I believe in.

I haven't tried out too many recipes since my last post (instead I've spent ages working out what to do with that shrimp paste I had left over). Here are the few recipes I've given a go:

Enwezor's pumpkin and sunflower biscuits (recipe from "The Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking" by Linda Collister)
This is a recipe for pumpkin seed and sunflower seed savoury biscuits with a red onion chutney. Enwezor was one of the contestants in the 2014 "Great British Bake Off". He was eliminated in week two, so you might not remember him, but he was made infamous by using shop-bought fondant rather than making his own (cue horrified gasps. Mary wasn't impressed, and I wouldn't be either, if I actually knew what fondant was.) Anyway, I wasn't sure about making a recipe from someone who left the competition so early; would it be any good? The recipe looked suspect too. You're meant to roll the biscuit dough into a flat sheet, bake it, flip the sheet over, bake it on the other side, then cut out the biscuits using a biscuit cutter and bake them some more. It sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. I was worried about flipping my sheet of dough over to bake it on the other side, but actually it was quite strong and didn't show any signs of collapsing when I manhandled it. This became more of a problem when I went to cut out the biscuits because my biscuit cutter wouldn't go through the dough at all. It was so solid! In the end, I followed the recipe's alternative instruction of cutting the biscuits into rectangles with a knife (this was still a tough job, but I like that it used all of the dough without any of the waste that circular cutters would have left). The reason for all the nonsense with the baking makes sense when you bite into the biscuits. They are so crisp! And the taste is great too: as well as the seeds, there's rye flour, chives, mustard and sun-dried tomato purée in those babies. The recipe recommended eating the biscuits with cheese, but honestly the biscuits were so savoury and tasty by themselves that the cheese didn't add anything to them. Coming into this recipe I thought the biscuits would let me down, but it turns out that the part I didn't like was the chutney. I didn't add the red wine to my chutney, which is maybe where I went wrong. As well as red wine, red wine vinegar, and caraway seeds in the chutney, there is also blackcurrant squash and 50g sugar. The end result was too sweet for me. It tasted quite a lot like Branston pickle, which is also too sweet for me. Perhaps I could have stomached the chutney in smaller quantities, but with four large onions, I was left with tonnes of the stuff. In conclusion: the biscuits are a faff to make but are fabulous; just don't bother with the chutney.

Bombay butter chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
This dish smells so good. It smells like proper curry. Maybe it's the tomato and shallot base? (The recipe calls for red shallots but, as always, I don't know what those are so I just used normal shallots.) The tomatoes and shallots are meant to be whizzed up with cashew nuts in a blender to make a paste. I don't have a blender, so used my food processor instead, which resulted in a chunky paste. Then you're meant to fry the paste, add the chicken, seasonings, butter and water, cover with a lid, and simmer "until the chicken legs are cooked and the gravy is thick". I honestly don't know what it is about this book and thinking that sauces are going to reduce with the lid on. My sauce didn't get very thick, but I didn't mind it soupy. It turns out the only thing I did mind was that this recipe calls for 50g butter per portion. 50g! I think you can see the butter floating on top of the sauce in my picture. The resulting sauce was really tasty but incredibly rich. I couldn't eat much of it because it was so rich I actually found it sickly. Reduce the amount of butter however (to half a tablespoon or something) and you'd end up with a really excellent curry.

Petits fours (recipe from "Mother's Little Book of Home-Baked Treats")
As the name suggests, these are meant to be really dainty and pretty. I think you can tell from the picture that my "pretty" icing job on the top left a lot to be desired. The cake itself is a cherry chocolate brownie (and the brownie crust on top means there's no way to cut it prettily either). I'm not normally a fan of fruit in my brownies, but these brownies were so chocolatey that the cherries just added a nice moistness and didn't detract from the chocolate at all. The cherries were actually meant to be soaked in brandy, sherry or Marsala, but I ignored that part (because why would I ruin my chocolate with fruit and booze?) I found that the bake time stated in the recipe was off. You're meant to cook the brownies for 15 minutes at 170°C. Maybe it's because I couldn't find a 6.5 inch square tin as stated in the recipe and used a 6 inch one instead, or maybe it's because most other brownie recipes call for them to be baked at a higher temperature for longer, but after the baking time given in the recipe, my brownies were still pure, liquid batter. I mean, sure, maybe these brownies are meant to be fudgy, but I still don't think they're meant to slop out of the tin. So I shoved mine back in the oven and tested them every now and again until a skewer test suggested they'd be mostly done but still a bit fudgy. That turned out to be 30 minutes in total. I think I made the right call there, because these brownies were moist, dense and intensely chocolatey. Oh, they were good. Where I let myself down (as you can tell) was the decoration. The icing is a dark chocolate ganache, and I have never had any problems with ganache UNTIL NOW. The ganache was meant to be piped in pretty rosettes, but I don't think anyone can tell that I actually piped these. Basically, my ganache split when I was making it (in hindsight, I think I started stirring too quickly without letting the cream warm the chocolate first). I frantically Googled how to save split ganache and was told to add a little warm milk. Doing this did indeed save my ganache (hurrah!) so I left it to cool while I had a chat to my Mum on the phone. Alas, when I came back to the cooled ganache, I found that it had split again in my absence. So, I angrily heated it again and added more warm milk to save it for a second time. At this point I should have left it to cool for another hour or so, but I was so worried that it would split again when cooling (and I also thought that perhaps I'd made it more runny now anyway, with all that extra milk) that I waited for it to cool for only 15 minutes before I gave up and piped it into those pretty rosettes you see above. (Turns out that it didn't split again and it did firm up nicely in the fridge, but you live and learn.) The toppings are a mixture of candied ginger, candied orange peel, silver balls (the recipe asks for silver "dragees" which the internet seems to tell me are silver balls) and crystallised roses. I couldn't find the recommended additional gold dragees or crystallised violets. Come to mention it, I couldn't find crystallised roses either, but I improvised with a tub of dried rose petals, some egg white, and sugar. My rose petals took longer to dry than various recipes would have me believe, so perhaps submerging them in the egg white, rather than brushing it on with a paintbrush, was a bad idea. Still, they turned out crunchy, tasting strongly of rose, and nobody died of raw egg white poisoning (which is always a bonus). So, to sum up: these little brownies (they're like an inch square, guys) were not the pretty, dainty things that the name "petits fours" suggests, but my God did they taste good. Thankfully brownies are very forgiving; that much chocolate can never go too wrong.

Chicken legs simmered with galangal (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
This dish was rather underwhelming. It may be due to the fact that I couldn't find half of the ingredients: I was meant to include galangal (I could only find galangal paste, so that's what I used), rock sugar (I used caster sugar instead), a head of smoked garlic (I used a normal head of garlic, which I peeled, and then added some liquid smoke as well), and preserved red bean curds (I had no idea what I could use in place of these, so I just left them out). Hmmm. The cooking method is slightly odd. This is the only savoury recipe I've found where you start by melting the sugar to make a caramel. What?? You then add the other ingredients, 500ml water, chuck the lid on and simmer it all for 30 minutes. I simmered mine for 50 minutes to fully cook my chicken, but the gravy still wasn't thick like the recipe suggested it should be by that time. Am I getting déjà vu? I was worried that the resulting dish would be too sweet, even if it did smell good when cooking. It turns out that the 500ml water diluted the sweetness to make it bearable, and it also diluted the other flavours so you couldn't taste them much at all, not even the galangal. I'm wondering if the 500ml water was a typo, because you'd have to boil that much water with the lid off for a long time to get the sauce to thicken in any way. So this dish was edible, but not at all as tasty as it could have been. Was it the water or was it the missing preserved bean curd?

Last week I ventured into the countryside for a walk with my parents. Surprisingly, the weather refused to rain and it wasn't too cold either. We started the walk in cloud but the sun was shining by the time we were done. This walk involved some fields, some woods, some views, and a lane full of old farms. Also mushrooms everywhere!

I love getting out into the countryside. London can feel stifling if you don't get away once in a while.

I've been cooking a lot recently, so there are quite a few recipes to talk about today.

Blueberry, pecan and feta salad
This dish gets A* on presentation. The colours work really well together. The actual taste of the salad? Not for me. I normally side-eye nuts in salad, and I side-eye fruit in salad even more. Strangely, the pecans and the blueberries in this salad weren't actually the worst part. In fact, both added a necessary mellowness to the dish. My problem was that the feta was too salty (feta always is for me; I'm not a fan) and the raw onions and raw garlic were overwhelming with their strength and heat (and there are chilli flakes too, just for that extra hot kick). The first couple of mouthfuls had a nice balance of flavours, but a whole portion of this salad was too much for me.

Melaka stewed chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
Melaka is palm sugar. Other exotic ingredients in this dish are ketchup manis and coriander root. I was able to buy a bottle of ketchup manis; it's a thick, sugary version of soy sauce and where has it been all my life? Coriander root is more difficult to buy. I didn't even know you could eat coriander root! My supermarket didn't sell any coriander root, so I bought a living coriander plant and dug it up. The roots from my plant were probably smaller than the ones I was meant to use, because I couldn't taste it in the finished dish at all. Oh well. Digging around in the soil of a pot plant was kinda fun anyway (said pot plant then died two days later; I'm not surprised). So, the recipe says to simmer the chicken legs for 25 minutes, but I went for 50 as usual. The overall result? Meh. I was expecting the taste to have a really sweet, salty kick, but actually the taste wasn't very strong at all.

Rendang chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
I had never had rendang curry before. (Google tells me that the version served in Malaysia, like this one, is more saucey than the drier, original dish from Indonesia.) I was a bit worried that this curry was going to be too hot for my tastes. It contained five dried chillies as well as curry powder, and all for just two portions. I needn't have worried. It was hot, but more of a pleasant heat than an overpowering one (maybe that's because I deseeded my dried chillies to make it more bearable). The recipe calls for several things I couldn't buy: chicken curry powder (I used normal curry powder); turmeric leaves (I used extra kaffir lime leaves instead); chicken powder (??? I assumed it meant a chicken stock cube, because that's what I used); candlenuts (I used cashew nuts); and kerisik. Kerisik, it turns out, is grated coconut, which is toasted. And so I bought some coconut, grated it and toasted it. The smell when toasting coconut is gorgeous, by the way. The recipe says to simmer the chicken in the sauce for 30 minutes, but I went for 50 minutes as per usual (my chicken came out oddly tough, which I think must somehow have been an error on my part rather than the recipe). In terms of flavour, this dish has it all. Call me a rendang convert! It is rich, warming, creamy, tangy and full of flavour. My only problem is that texturally it was not fun. You're meant to use a blender to make the curry paste, but I used a food processor, which left my paste more chunky than it should have been. Add to that the kaffir lime leaves which are shredded (not finely enough on my part, clearly) and you end up with a mouthfeel that's mealy, chewy and lumpy. Not great, but the taste more than made up for it. The taste was also worth the inclusion of the fresh turmeric, which has, once again, left everything in my kitchen yellow.

Marinated mozzarella salad
This salad was nice but didn't wow me as much as it was meant to. The mozzarella is marinated in pesto, and then added to the tomatoes and basil, along with lemon zest and fennel seeds. I don't really know what the lemon zest and fennel seeds were doing in there; they were nice, but I think their flavours detracted from the main basil, tomato, mozzarella thing going on. Seriously, basil, tomato and mozzarella is a classic and excellent flavour combination; don't mess with it. Two additional points: the recipe said to serve the dish with one slice of toast, but I like my dinner to actually fill me up, so I added a second slice. Also, the recipe doesn't say what to do with the vine tomatoes. My vine tomatoes were far too large to use whole, so I chopped them into wedges.

Taiwan style five spices chili chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
This recipe could have been really good. It was so close to being absolutely delicious, but unfortunately it veered slightly into disaster territory. The theory: the chicken is simmered in spices for 20 minutes, then drained, deep-fried and finally covered in a spice powder. I dislike deep-frying, so after I had simmered my chicken, I shallow-fried it for a bit, then stuck it in the oven. That was all fine. The sauce for simmering the chicken contained star anise, cinnamon, garlic, soy sauce and rock sugar (I couldn't find rock sugar, so used caster sugar instead): this is pretty much a flavour dream-team and makes for both delicious chicken and a lovely smell while cooking. The spice powder dumped on the chicken at the end contained chilli powder, Chinese five spice, sugar, salt and pepper: also dream-team - it's salty, sweet, hot and fragrant. All of this added up to a dish that was nearly perfect. The only problem? In that spice powder (for only two chicken legs) is two teaspoons of salt. That's one teaspoon per serving. My God! Do you have any idea how salty that is? It makes me sad, because if you had only a quarter of the salt, this would have been amazing. That spice powder would be the best thing; I reckon you could have sprinkled it on anything (chips?) and it would have been really good. Just with less salt, please.

Digestives (recipe from "The Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking" by Linda Collister)
I made these just in time for the start of the new series of the "Great British Bake Off". (How's that for timeliness?) Thankfully they were an easy bake and not a "technical challenge". I hadn't even considered before that digestives were a thing you could make yourself; I thought they just came in packets. These didn't taste quite like the shop-bought version; the homemade ones are slightly less salty, slightly less sweet and significantly more buttery. The butteryness is nice, although it makes the biscuit texture quite short and crumbly to eat. According to the recipe, I should have made 20 biscuits, but my mixture only stretched to about 16. I might not have rolled them thin enough. The biscuits are big too. You're supposed to use a 7.5cm diameter biscuit cutter, but my cutter was about 7cm diameter instead. Turns out I needn't have worried, because the baking powder in these makes them grow in the oven (which, stupidly, I wasn't expecting). They came out huge! My finished biscuits were about 8-9cm in diameter. I'm not complaining.

Chicken legs simmered with chili shrimp sauce (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
I had been in fear of this recipe ever since I Googled "shrimp sauce", as listed in the ingredients, and discovered that it probably means "shrimp paste". Previous recipes in the book have asked for belacan, which looks to be a dried brick of shrimp paste, so I imagine that the "shrimp sauce" specified here is used to mean a more liquid type of shrimp paste (which more-liquid version is the only version I can actually buy anyway). I am not a fan of shrimp paste. It is an acquired taste that I still haven't acquired yet, and I can only stomach it if it's masked with lots of other strong flavours. That's why this recipe scared me: there weren't many other ingredients listed, and one of those ingredients is the only-slightly-less-pungent fish sauce. Oh no. Oh no! Couple that to the fact that it's been a few months since I last used either shrimp paste or fish sauce so I had forgotten exactly how strong they smell; opening the jar to the shrimp paste was not a fun reminder! So, I duly marinated the chicken, then steamed it (only I steamed it for 50 minutes, instead of the 20 stated in the recipe). The smell didn't mellow during cooking. It smelled bad. It smelled heinous. I wasn't particularly hungry that night (the result of an overly-large breakfast earlier in the day) and the smell wasn't doing anything to whet my appetite. Oh my God. I'm pretty sure that cooking a dish and setting it on the table shouldn't be followed by a wave of anxiety; I actually had to take a couple of minutes to steel my nerves before I started eating. But, do you know what? The taste wasn't anywhere near as bad as the smell. I've said that I can only stomach shrimp paste when it's masked with other strong flavours, and that's exactly what the copious amounts of chilli and garlic in this recipe do. All the shrimp paste did was give the chicken a salty, savoury taste in the background. I mean, it's still not my favourite dish ever, but it wasn't the horror I expected it to be. Thank goodness for that.

I had a birthday recently. Unlike last year, there were no deaths in the family on my birthday this year, so I'm counting that as a positive. Even if I am now technically closer to 40 than to 30. (But, I mean, turning 30 was great, so who's to say the upward trend won't continue when I reach my next big birthday?)

My parents visited the weekend after my birthday. We stuffed our faces with burgers and then went to admire a National Trust property. I love visiting big, old houses; they're so pretty. (Although I'm aware that my ancestors wouldn't have been able to go anywhere near them, except as servants.)

I got some nice cards:

Only two cards contained cats this year. But one was a Dutch cat!

I also got some lovely presents. Here I must give a shout-out to Mariya who sent me a package of gifts all the way from the States, only to have it go missing in the post. I'm so sorry it got lost, but I appreciate the sentiment regardless! (Mariya is always so good to me <3) My own little theory is that the parcel is sitting alone in some post office in the UK (without the post office having notified me about it) and that in a couple of weeks it will be returned to sender. We'll see.

Here's a rundown of the other gifts I was given.

Food and kitchen gifts, including sweets, a vegetable-washing brush (I didn't even know that was a thing, but apparently it's really good for removing the soil from celery), and a meat thermometer. I am particularly excited about the meat thermometer. My current method for checking that chicken is cooked (and you know I cook a lot of chicken) is to poke it with the tip of a knife to see if the juices run clear, then be uncertain as to whether the juices are actually clear or not, and then hack it open further. Meanwhile my current method for checking that beef steaks are cooked is to cook them for far too long. It's not big and it's not clever, and my new thermometer should change all that.

Books: all ones that I am looking forward to reading immensely, and only one of which I asked for specifically! The Queen Victoria book comes from Nick and Eva. Thank you! I had wondered why you were spending so long in Waterstones! The other two books were from my parents. The Medieval Women one sounds right up my street, and the Anne Lister diary is the book I requested. Did you guys watch "Gentleman Jack"? It was so much fun. I wanted to learn more about Anne Lister and her various girlfriends, so I thought her diaries would be a great way to go. It should also have some general information about the period too, which is always interesting.

You might see that there's a bookmark in the Anne Lister diaries. I've already read the introduction, and I'm going to start reading the diary entries proper on Wednesday (14 August) because, get this, the first entry in the diary is Wednesday 14 August 1816. Almost exactly 200 years ago and the days of the week even align too! My plan is to read each diary entry on the day it was written and so follow the romantic intrigues in real-time. Is that idea inspired or stupid? Who knows, but it'll take me about 4 years to get through it. I'm here for the long-haul! (To be honest, it was the only way I was going to allow myself to start reading the book immediately when I've already got so many other books on the go.)

Finally, we have everything else: socks, flamingo wash bags, and the blue bag contains a tiny heart necklace that my Mum got for herself but which didn't fit her. I don't mind a second-hand necklace, especially not if it means I get to think of my Mum each time I wear it.

Not pictured on the present-front are the following:
- Lottery ticket from friend-of-the-family John. He always gets everyone a lottery ticket for their birthday (which is a tradition started by his late-wife, Jackie, who used to work in a shop that sold lottery tickets). Unsurprisingly, I didn't win anything.
- 3 courgettes fresh from my parents' garden. I couldn't photograph them because I'd already fried them up and eaten them with pasta and pancetta. Yum yum.
- Money from my parents. I meant to pay it into my current account so I could spend it on something nice (which something had yet to be determined), but I accidentally paid it into a savings account instead. Whoops. Looks like I'll be saving it then!

Thanks all for the birthday wishes! Here's to a good year to come. (And, if you ask me, a year filled with chocolate and books is bound to be a good one.)

A little while ago I went on holiday to the south of France with Deborah and Claire. It was a rather last-minute thing, which I don't recommend, because the prices of the flights will sting you!

It's been about 15 years since I was last in France, and it's been even longer since I'd learnt to speak any French, so my ability to communicate was very clunky. To be fair, most people spoke English, but I still gave some French a go (and when that didn't work, I had a terrible habit of saying English words in a French accent, because my subconscious mind seemed to think that was just the same as speaking a foreign language????)

So, the holiday was nice, but not without some hiccups. They were, in order:
- Claire missing her flight out, and having to pay for another flight the next morning.
- Claire getting heat exhaustion of her first day in France because she hadn't slept well at the airport (see above).
- A freak wave on the beach catching Deborah's phone and Kindle. The phone later came back to life (I have yet to hear about the fate of the Kindle).
- Deborah missing her Eurostar home because her train to Paris was hugely delayed due to forest fires.

Forest fires! Yup. We went to France during the heatwave. Thankfully this was only a heatwave in the 30s, and not the ridiculous above 40C temperatures France has had on other weeks.

Despite everything, we had a fun time. It was great to eat well and enjoy each other's company. (Turns out Basque food is tasty. Gateau Basque, oh my.) We stayed in Biarritz, which is on the Atlantic coast in the Basque region. Biarritz has all the quaint little streets you could ask for, some old-school jet set glamour, and lots of surfing (and even if you don't surf - we didn't - it's still fun to watch the surfers try to catch the waves).

This is the view from our hotel balcony. The hotel wasn't air-conditioned, which made sleeping very difficult. It was such a relief to step out onto the balcony in the cool of the morning and enjoy the view over a leisurely breakfast.

There are quite a lot of beaches in Biarritz. This is the Grand Plage, which was the best beach for watching the surfing. Alas, this is also the beach where the wave/electronic device disaster struck.

I preferred this beach, called Port Vieux. It's smaller and so more manageable, even if the sand is stonier. Plus, on the right-hand side you get a view of the Virgin Mary statue on the Rocher de la Vierge.

Near Port Vieux beach is the Port Vieux area. As the name suggests, this was the old port (historically the town was known for whaling, before the tourists moved in). No whales are caught any more, but there must still be some fresh fish coming in because the Port Vieux area has some great seafood. My tuna salad was delicious!

Behind the harbour you can look up to see the church of St Eugénie, which was built in the 19th Century. We could see the distinctive bell tower from our hotel balcony.

The other thing you could see from our balcony is the lighthouse. Great, you might think, unless your bed is by the window and the flashing light is stopping you from sleeping (poor Deborah and Claire; I slept around the corner). For a small price you can climb up the lighthouse to the top. It's quite a climb, and the stairs get very narrow at the end. The view is worth it though. This photo is looking towards the Grand Plage.

Speaking of views, the sunsets in Biarritz were so beautiful that I took several photos.

<3

After the conclusion of my last food post, I have now been altering my oven temperature according to my oven thermometer. I can confirm that things come out a lot less burnt if you cook them at the right temperature. Not that everything has been successful, mind; it's just that I can't blame any mistakes on the oven any more.

Ugali (recipe from "The Groundnut Cookbook" by Duval Timothy, Jacob Fodio Todd and Folayemi Brown)
This is not a meal in itself, but a widely-eaten side dish from East Africa. Ugali is made from maize meal, which I think is polenta. At least, I used polenta, hence the yellow colour (the picture in the recipe book suggests that maize meal is paler than polenta). Most ugali recipes I've seen show it moulded into a mound by using a bowl. This recipe instead wants you to lovingly create quenelles. Having never quenelled anything in my whole life before, especially not solid polenta, I ended up with the "rustic", lumpy photo above. In taste, ugali is bland, like unseasoned polenta, because that's exactly what it is. The neutral taste makes it great for stews though. I had it with a curry, and while I failed at the attempt to eat it with my hands and use it to scoop up the sauce like you're supposed to, I can see how this could be a great comfort food. As a bonus, cooking this recipe has taught me that if you cook polenta on a very low heat, you don't get the chaotic bubbling that sprays polenta onto everything within a metre radius.

3-ingredient savoury cheese scones
Do you know I had never made scones before? I was beginning to feel rather foolish because of it. Time to set things right! What I learned is that making this scone dough is stupidly easy. I also learned that even if your oven is the correct temperature, the scones might not be fully baked when the time is up. How do you check for doneness in scones? I don't know. Mine were golden on the top but still a bit squidgy in the middle. I think they were probably underbaked, but the squidgyness could also have come from the cheese. There is a tonne of cheese in these scones, making them dense but very tasty.

Smoked chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
I fudged this recipe a little. Ok, a lot. You're meant to simmer the chicken legs in water with a number of spices, and then put the cooked chicken in a wok and smoke it by burning a mixture of sugar, tea leaves and star anise. Setting things alight in my kitchen sounded like more risk than I was willing to take for a piece of chicken, so I didn't. Instead of smoking the chicken, I bought liquid smoke, which I added in with the spices when cooking the chicken; and then when the chicken was cooked (I left it simmering for 50 minutes, rather than the 30 minutes stated in the recipe) I rubbed a little more liquid smoke onto the outside of the chicken for good luck. What I didn't realise is that liquid smoke isn't pure smoke, but has other flavourings added, like onion and things. Seeing as the liquid smoke I'd bought contained almost as much salt as soy sauce, and seeing as there was already a lot of soy sauce in the recipe, I went a bit light on the liquid smoke. The resulting salt levels were fine, but the resulting smoky taste was lacking a little. All in all, the chicken tasted ok, but it's probably a long way from what the original recipe intended.

Tomato and corn salad
This recipe was a great success. It's super easy: chop, mix, done. And the taste is bright, fresh and sweet; really yummy. I always love anything with lime and coriander in, and this was no exception. The raw spring onions added a nice flavour without being too overpowering and the chilli (I couldn't find red, so used green) was not too hot (in fact my chilli was bordering on too mild, because I could barely taste it). A lovely side dish and perfect for summer.

Tandoori chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
Look! Look at that! It is red. This time I bought bake-stable red food colouring and I am so happy with the way it came out (I had to use quite a lot of the food colouring to get a bright colour, but it's completely worth it for that proper tandoori look). After marinating the chicken, it is baked at a high heat (250°C). The recipe said to bake it for 30 minutes, but I left it in for 50 minutes so the chicken could cook fully. Normally this extra cooking leaves me with properly-burnt chicken on the outside, but now that I can adjust my oven temperature correctly, I only had mildly-burnt chicken! Thankfully tandoori chicken is a recipe that should look a little blackened on the outside, so I'm counting this as a win. In taste, this dish tasted just like tandoori chicken should; I was very impressed. Plus, the melted butter in the marinade means that it smells gorgeously buttery while cooking.

At the end of May I went on holiday to Scotland.

The first stop was Edinburgh. I travelled up with Helen and John and their kids, and then Emma, Mitch and their kids drove up to meet us. We stayed in a really big Airbnb flat in the New Town. The flat itself was really nice. Here are some pictures.

Despite the flat being nice, the stairwell of the building looked a) really dilapidated and b) had so so many steps to climb. When we first entered the building we had no idea what to think! Thankfully the flat was nice inside.

We were in Edinburgh for Susan and Adam's wedding, which was really lovely and had some great food. The wedding also had a ceilidh, which was both fun to watch and fun to dance in. We were exhausted at the end of it though.

After the wedding, Emma, Mitch, Helen and John all went back home. I hung around Edinburgh for a few hours (stopping to watch the "Tolkien" film while I was at it) and then I met my parents, who had travelled up on the train. Together we went to Airbnb number two, which was also in the New Town, and also in a flat with a tall, dilapidated stairwell. (These stairwells are so interesting to me. It looks like these early-19th Century buildings were all purpose-built as apartments. In other British cities, most 19th Century blocks of flats were once single homes that have since been converted to flats, so the stairwells are more plush, having once been inside someone's home. The bare, echo-y stairwells of Edinburgh reminded me more of buildings I've seen on the continent. Is this somehow related to the tenement situation that was in Edinburgh before the New Town was built?)

My room in Airbnb 2. The bed wasn't nearly as comfy as Airbnb 1.

The view from the living room was rather lovely though.

My parents and I spent our time in Edinburgh walking around and learning about the history of the Old Town. It's a very pretty place.

The Royal Mile.

A close-up of the sundial on John Knox House.

Most of the buildings in the Old Town are now 19th Century, but the street pattern they're built on is very old and very steep. Off of the Royal Mile are tonnes of little alleyways called closes. I loved them.

Here is a typical close, seen looking up towards the Royal Mile.

Some buildings must have been older than the 19th Century though, because I came across some old plaques.

The Old Town historically used to be two separate towns. Within the city walls was Edinburgh, and outside of the city walls, between Edinburgh and Holyrood Abbey (later Holyrood Palace), was Canongate.

Here is the Mercat Cross of Canongate.

And here is the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh.

The Mercat Cross of Edinburgh stands outside St Giles' Cathedral. There's also a statue of Charles II outside the Cathedral.

This was outside the Cathedral, but I don't remember what it is. Some statue?

Keep walking up the Royal Mile and you get to Edinburgh Castle.

Turn around and walk back down the Royal Mile and you get to Holyrood Palace.

We didn't go in either the castle or the palace (both looked expensive), but we did go into Holyrood Park and had a go at climbing Arthur's Seat.

Three crows on a bush with Arthur's Seat behind them. Is this ominous?

Here is Arthur's Seat in all his glory. Perhaps the crows were an omen, because we didn't manage to climb all the way to the top. We went pretty high, and were only a few feet from the top, but it had turned from a walk into a scramble, and none of us wanted to do that when it had just started raining. (Actually, it rained quite a lot throughout our trip to Scotland. It wasn't warm either; I was in a winter coat and scarf most of the time. Is this normal for May in Scotland or were we just unlucky?)

Still, even if you don't reach the top of Arthur's Seat, you still get to enjoy some good views.

While wandering about the Old Town we came across this statue of famous 19th Century dog Greyfriars Bobby. I love how is nose is shiny from all the people that have touched it (it was too high for me to reach though!) What a good dog.

All in all, I really liked Edinburgh. It's very old and very grand, just as a capital city should be. Yet for all that, it feels like a friendly and welcoming place. The atmosphere is lovely.

After a few days in Edinburgh my parents and I hopped on a train to Stonehaven and checked into Airbnb 3.

Here's my room.

The place we were staying in was right on the harbour, so you got great views. I loved this little nook with a rocking chair and a big window.

Here is the view from the living room on the top floor. Whenever we were inside we spent most of our time staring out of the window and watching the world go by.

The harbour is just as pretty when you head outside and take a wander round.

Old sundial.

Lifeboat.

Boats boats boats.

Look at that view.

The historic part of Stonehaven is clustered around the harbour. The town was extended in the 19th Century along the beach, which connects the historic town with an equally-historic fishing village called Cowie.

We sat on the beach and had a deep-fried Mars bar. Stonehaven is actually the birthplace of this confection! I wasn't too keen on the thought of it, but I knew I had to try one in its home environment. Turns out, a deep-fried Mars bar is much better than it sounds. It's not disgustingly greasy, like I was worried it would be. Instead you have this really pleasant textual contrast: you've got this hot, melted, gooey, sweet Mars bar, surrounded by really crisp and crunchy batter. I want another one.

We also took a walk up the hill next to the harbour and went to Dunnottar Castle, which is a gorgeous place.

The castle in the distance. This was a bit of a rainy walk. But it was even more rainy on the way back!

Walking to the castle, you go past the town's war memorial, which is very poignant up on its lone hill.

Here's the castle from the side. It's on a promontory out in the sea, which is connected to the mainland by a narrow land-bridge. Stunning! On the right-hand side of this photo you can see the medieval tower house, which is one of the oldest parts of the castle (other than the chapel in the middle of the site). On the left-hand side is the 16th Century palace, which was built more for partying than defence.

Here you can see the land-bridge between the mainland and the castle (please ignore the raindrops on my camera lens). To get there you have to walk down a lot of steps and then walk back up a lot of steps. How they ever managed to transport provisions to the castle, I don't know.

Once you've paid to go in the castle, you get good views out to sea.

Inside, the castle is pretty ruinous. It's hard to imagine what it would have looked in its heyday.

Dunnottar Castle is a beautiful place; I would highly recommend it. Stonehaven was lovely too. After time in Edinburgh, it was really nice to come to a quiet town where the only thing you have to do in the world is to sit back and enjoy the view. If only it had been warmer, it would have been perfect.

I tell you what, I have learned so much in this latest round of cooking. So much. (Read: several errors have been made and I am now enlightened.)

Sichuan style simmered chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
This recipe didn't actually tell you what to do with half the ingredients (the ginger, garlic, spring onion and chillies), so I just dumped them in the pot with the chicken and let the thing stew away. The recipe says to simmer the chicken, covered, for 30 minutes, but I left if for 50 minutes, as always. Once the time is up, the recipe said the sauce would be thick, but it has said this before on previous recipes and, honestly, no thickening happens when the lid is left on, so I wasn't disappointed when I ended up with a thin sauce. In fact, I wasn't disappointed at all. This dish is really tasty. The star anise, sugar, Sichuan pepper and soy sauce make a great taste when combined with the other ingredients. Absolutely delicious. There is a lot of chilli in the dish though; not enough to be super uncomfortable, but enough to make me choke a few times when I was trying to eat too quickly (but it was too tasty to eat slowly, so what could I do?)

Chickpea egusi-style soup (recipe from "The Groundnut Cookbook" by Duval Timothy, Jacob Fodio Todd and Folayemi Brown)
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Are those pumpkin seeds on top? They're looking pretty burnt." Well, ok there, Mrs Observant. Thanks for noticing. Let's deal with those two observations separately, shall we? Firstly, they are indeed pumpkin seeds. Egusi is a soup made with seeds of the egusi melon. I couldn't find egusi seeds, but I heard that pumpkin seeds could act as a substitute, which is why I've only called this recipe "chickpea egusi-style soup" rather than just "chickpea egusi" as it is labelled in the recipe book. The recipe also said to use scotch bonnet peppers, but the supermarket had run out, so I substituted with normal red chillies. The resulting dish was probably less hot than it should be, but with the paprika in there too, it was hot enough for me. Having made a few recipes from this book now, I am coming across a fair number of editing mistakes. This recipe calls for 3 teaspoons of salt. Halfway through the recipe it says "Add [...] the other 2 teaspoons of salt." But not anywhere does it say what to do with the first teaspoonful! However, seeing as 2 teaspoons still feels like a lot for four portions (in my opinion) I left the third teaspoon out, and that was just fine for me. As for the pumpkin seeds being burnt, you were supposed to roast them in the oven for 12 minutes; I did just that, which led to mine turning this colour. Oh dear. Half the roasted seeds are ground up and added to the soup base, while the rest are sprinkled on top. This gave my soup a bitter, burnt undertone, which actually wasn't as unpleasant as you might think. Maybe the reason it wasn't unpleasant is that, burntness aside, this dish is super delicious. Really great! It is sweet and warm, rich from the seeds, and so fresh! The sweet tomato base really helps with the fresh taste, but then adding in red pepper and spinach at the end just ramps up the freshness to another level. Really delicious, really lovely. If I hadn't burnt the main component, this would be stunning.

Caramel macarons with caramel cream (recipe from "I ♥ Macarons" by Hisako Ogita)
Ah yes. It's that time of year where I attempt to make macarons and then rue the decision. So stressful! Why do I do it? Why do I give myself the stress? But then everyone at work happily ignored that these weren't perfect and gave me lots of compliments so... that's why. Despite the compliments, I'm not sure I'm improving when it comes to macarons. This is the fifth(?) time I've made them, and they still don't look like the really pretty ones on all the macaron-centric food blogs. One day! One day I will get there! This time I had issues with the feet. You can't really tell from the picture (because I hid the really ugly ones) but a lot of the feet were non-existent. They pretty much all had feet in the oven, but the feet then collapsed when I took them out of the oven :( Frantic Googling tells me that this is because they came out of the oven before they were fully baked. I had issues with the bake on these, because I was worried about overbaking them (see burning the pumpkin seeds above) and subsequently underbaked them. When I first put them in the oven the feet were growing like crazy and the top was browning like crazy, so I turned down the oven and put foil on top. Alas, I don't think I increased my bake time enough to match the new low temperature. Something else was maybe at work too. The recipe book blithely says that you can make caramel macarons by adding caramel powder to the macaron batter. Sounds cool, right? Until you realise that caramel powder isn't a thing you can buy; it's a thing you have to make. Basically, you melt sugar to make a caramel and then crush it to make a powder. No big deal. It's not like making caramel is the thing that always goes wrong on every cooking contest ever or anything. Actually, my caramel powder came out fine. What didn't come out fine was my food processor. It turns out that thick, hardened caramel is so hard that it will dent your food processor's blades. Here is learning point number one in this post (ding ding!) Have some mercy on your food processor! Don't chuck hardened caramel in there! Anyway, my caramel powder was fine, but I wonder if essentially adding more sugar to the mix made the macarons more liable to getting overbaked on the top while still being liquid enough (when baked) to collapse in on themselves and ruin the feet? It's just supposition at this point, but I'm looking for a scapegoat to blame for my lack of feet. For the caramel cream used to sandwich the macarons together, you make yet another caramel and this time add cream to it (I am so tired of anxiously watching pans of sugar heat up!) My caramel cream was a bit on the runny side (maybe I didn't heat the sugar enough) so it did tend to dribble out of the sides of the macarons when left unattended. Oh well. Things have happened, lessons have been learned. Will my food processor ever deign to chop anything again? Who knows? But the taste of these macarons was good. Very very sweet (as expected from all that caramel) but decidedly good. Hence the lovely comments from the folks I fed them to.

Chocolate icebox cookies (recipe from "I ♥ Macarons" by Hisako Ogita)
These cookies used up some of the egg yolks I had left over from the macarons. They look better than last year's attempt at the vanilla version of the same cookies. The dough was less crumbly than the vanilla version and easier to work with, which may just have been due to mixing it more than I did last time. Unfortunately the taste was... Look, the people at work were very kind about them, but the cookies tasted bitter to me. They're not a very sweet cookie in the first place, so there wasn't quite enough sweetness to stand up to all that bitter cocoa powder. Also, how do you know when chocolate biscuits are cooked? I have no idea, which means I think I left them in the oven too long. They don't look burnt, but the bitter taste was suspiciously similar to a burnt taste.

Simmer cha xiu chicken leg (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
Believe it or not, this insipid-looking thing was meant to be a rich red colour. Red. You add red food colouring to the dish to give it that cha xiu look. I added a lot of red food colouring, and was left with only the slightest hint of it, just enough to make the chicken look worryingly pink. (The chicken was fully-cooked though. I simmered it in the sauce for 50 minutes, rather than the 20 minutes given in the recipe.) Here we have learning point number two in this post (ding ding!) If using food colouring in cooking, make sure the label says it's bake stable. I had actually used the same red food colouring for macarons a while back, and had been disappointed when they turned out to have brown, rather than red accents. At the time, I blamed it on my baking skills, but now I know better. The food colouring I had bought proudly proclaimed itself to be natural colouring (I don't care about that; I bought it because it was the supermarket own brand, so cheaper than the branded version). I have since learned that artificial colours are the more stable ones. At which point you get a rant from me, because why sell food colours that aren't stable? Why do all products sold have to be "natural"? Natural doesn't mean it's better for you, and artificial doesn't mean it's bad for you. Natural means that it has been distilled in a laboratory from some kind of plant/animal product rather than being created in a laboratory from base chemicals. That's it. Your body doesn't care if it's natural or not; your body only cares if it's safe to eat. Many natural things can be poisonous and many artificial things can be completely harmless. Anything that's sold as a food product (in the UK at least) is harmless and safe to eat. So why are we forced to use "natural" things that don't work half as well as the artificial versions? Because the western world is currently full of rampant chemophobia that is, at best, annoying, and at worst actively-harmful (see anti-vaxxers). Seriously, guys. Chemicals aren't bad. You are literally made of chemicals. All matter in the whole universe is made of chemicals. What part of chemicals don't you like? I just want to buy some food colouring that actually works godammit! Rant aside, this dish is meant to be a chicken version of cha xiu pork. It's tasty! Sweet and salty, and simmering it in the marinade leaves it really moist. Not quite as good as cha xiu pork (is anything as good as cha xiu pork?) but still nice to eat. Just ignore the goddamn colour.

And finally
There's one more learning point in this post that I haven't mentioned yet. After burning my pumpkin seeds for the egusi-style soup, and having my macarons brown too quickly, and then burning the icebox cookies, I started to put two and two together. I added another two when I remembered that I had been fiddling with the oven thermostat recently, after it came loose when I cleaned the oven a few weeks back. And so, thinking that maybe my oven was a little on the hot side, I did as all the macaron blogs recommended and bought an oven thermometer. This is learning point number three (ding ding!) Buy an oven thermometer. It's a game changer. When I tried it out I discovered that my oven is too hot by 40°C. That's over 100°F! Like I say, I had been fiddling with the thermostat, so I think my oven was out by far more than other ovens would be, but still. No wonder. No wonder my stuff in this post was burnt to a crisp! Given the odds I was fighting against, I'm seriously impressed that I was able to turn out macarons at all. I haven't really tried out my oven since this new knowledge has been imparted to me (does a frozen pizza count?) but hopefully baking is going to get a lot less stressful from here on out.

Hi again! Let's have a food post.

Radishes (recipe from "The Groundnut Cookbook" by Duval Timothy, Jacob Fodio Todd and Folayemi Brown)
Ok, it's a real stretch to call this a "recipe". This dish is what it says it is: radishes. Just radishes. The recipe book basically says: "Have you considered eating radishes as a side dish? They're great. Chop them in half and eat them." And, do you know what? I hadn't considered eating radishes as a side dish. In fact, I rarely ate radishes; they'd never really made it into my food repertoire (probably because I tried them as a kid and disliked the pepperiness). It turns out that radishes really do make a great side dish. They're fresh and crunchy, and I'm always fond of side dishes that don't require any cooking whatsover (after all, some evenings I just want to bung stuff on a plate then shove it in my mouth in 5 minutes flat). I am now a convert and have been eating radishes almost every other week since.

Sage pork with potato and apple mash
I cooked this on Valentine's day as a little romantic treat to myself. Alas, as treats go, this one isn't very indulgent or inspiring. Part of that is my fault: I don't cook pork often, so I'm not very good at getting it fully cooked without being overdone. I didn't want pink pork, so I fried it for longer than the recipe stated, but that led to the breadcrumb coating getting a little burnt. But then, part of the boringness of this dish is the recipe's fault too. You are told to cover the pork and let it rest after cooking. Resting I can understand, but covering it? For this recipe? Basically, covering the pork while resting it meant that all the steam made the breadcrumb coating turn from crispy to soggy. Does anyone want to eat a soggy breadcrumb coating? No they don't. And the breadcrumb coating wasn't even that tasty. I mean, you could taste the mustard and the fennel seeds, but I wasn't getting much sage. And when it came to the mash, I could barely taste the apple at all (I just used whatever apples I had lying about, so I obviously picked the wrong type for this dish). Plus the mash wasn't anywhere near as creamy as I like it. Basically, this recipe involves quite a lot of faff, none of which is worth it. I mean, the dish is ok; none of it is horrible. But if I wasn't following a recipe, I could have probably made something nicer :/

Indonesian baked chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
Look, I'm not even going to attempt to blame this one on the recipe. This disaster was all on me. STOP LAUGHING. As I say, this recipe had all the makings of a really tasty dish before I got my hands on it. You marinate the chicken in this really thick sauce, which includes coconut milk, coriander, lemongrass, garlic and turmeric among other things. (By the bye, it's been long enough since I last cooked with fresh turmeric that I had entirely forgotten how catastrophic it is. Things that became stained yellow included my food processor, my fridge, my kitchen work surface, my chopping board, my hands, MY TOOTHBRUSH, and a long line of tea towels. I'm not sure I'll ever own a tea towel that's not yellow ever again, even though I'm using industrial amounts of stain remover in my washing machine.) The marinade also asked for candlenuts, which I couldn't find, so I substituted with cashew nuts. When it was all mixed together, the marinade smelled great. Alas, I wasn't thinking. The recipe calls for the chicken to be cooked for 30 minutes at 250°C. I know from experience that my chicken legs only come out fully cooked if I give them 50 minutes. The problem is, that's normally 50 minutes at 200°C (and even then the topping comes out burnt more often than not). 50 minutes at 250°C was basically incineration o'clock. I mean, my chicken was still nicely cooked inside, but most of the taste from the marinade was gone; it was just carbon (well, carbon and yellow staining everywhere).

The groundnut stew (recipe from "The Groundnut Cookbook" by Duval Timothy, Jacob Fodio Todd and Folayemi Brown)
Here we have one of the ugliest photos in this post to accompany one of the best recipes. This is the dish that the Groundnut Cookbook takes its name from. The cookbook was born from a supper club, which was called The Groundnut Supper Club. The blurb alongside the recipe tells us that this is a recipe from Duval Timothy's family and is basically the reason why the three of them started the supper club together. I CAN TELL WHY. This is a gorgeous dish and perfect for this time of year: warm, rich and comforting. That's not to say that it's easy to cook! The hardest part is, without a doubt, the chicken. You see, the ingredients list blithely calls for "1 chicken, skinned and chopped into 8 pieces". That sounds so easy! Unfortunately, if you have zero experience in butchery, plus a knife that's not really sharp enough, you are going to struggle. Honestly, there was one part, where I was busy trying to saw off a leg, that I felt like a living incarnation of Judith beheading Holofernes. It was carnage. And to have to skin it as well as butcher it; my God! I'm sure an experienced cook could do it in five minutes. It took me an hour. Then the recipe says that you have to sear the chicken before making the stew. Doing that in batches (because I have a small pan) took almost another hour. By this point I was worried that my chicken had been sitting at room temperature, half-cooked for a long time. I made sure to cook the final stew for longer than the 25 minutes the recipe says, because I wanted to make sure the chicken was fully cooked. (In some cases 25 minutes may be fine, but when I checked my stew at the 25 minute mark, parts of the chicken were still merrily oozing pink juices.) There are two more issues with this recipe, one of which is an error on my part, and one of which is an error on the recipe's part. My error was to take the scotch bonnet pepper out too soon. The recipe says to pierce the pepper and let it cook with the stew, with the caveat that you can take it out whenever the stew is getting too hot. I had never cooked with scotch bonnet peppers before, and I was worried they were going to be way too spicy for me. Fairly early on in the cooking, the pepper got so soft that it split open; I panicked at this and removed the pepper before the seeds could go everywhere. This left me with a stew that didn't have any heat at all. Note to self: leave the chilli in next time. The recipe's error is a typo: the ingredients list says to use groundnut oil, while the recipe instructions say to use olive oil. It was only once I'd used olive oil in the dish that I realised the ingredients list said something different. The dish still tasted great with olive oil, but the smoke point is too low if you're searing cuts of meat; I think groundnut oil would have been better. Ok, all that aside, this dish was almost worth the effort. It tasted so rich! Sweet onions and creamy peanut butter in this thick sauce with moist chicken (and I say this as someone who doesn't care much for peanut butter in normal circumstances). The groundnut stew is comfort food at it's finest. So so tasty. The only reason why the dish isn't fully worth the effort is because it would be so much easier to just buy a pack of chicken drumsticks and use them instead of all that butchery. But if you go down the drumstick route then it would be well worth the effort. Your tastebuds will thank you.

Figs with honey-cream and pistachios (recipe from "Nigellissima: Instant Italian Inspiration" by Nigella Lawson)
I wasn't sure what to expect from this dessert. 1) I'd never eaten fresh figs before, and I'd always found dried ones kind of lacklustre. 2) How exciting can baked fruit really be? But I was wrong. I WAS SO WRONG. This dish was easy to make and amazing to eat. My figs were small, so I used more than the recipe says and baked them for less time. I might still have baked them for too long, because you can see how one has just collapsed at the back there. Still, who cares if it doesn't look that pretty when it tastes so good? I felt like I was eating a fancy restaurant desert. The mixture of the olive oil, cream and honey on the figs made it so rich and creamy, and the pistachios were the icing on the cake. I am astounded that a dish that's 90% fruit can be this indulgent. It was gorgeous.

Here's the first food post of 2019! January evenings are dark and cold and bleh, so I've been cooking a lot to liven things up. I also treated myself with some new baking trays (one was faulty, though, and has had to go back to the shop...) and I defrosted the fridge-freezer. Woo! Productivity! (But mostly I just want to huddle under my duvet and sleep.)

Savoury biscotti
I'd never made biscotti before, but it turns out it's quite easy. Mix ingredients, shape into log, bake, slice and bake again. Done! And not a rolling pin in sight! So, cooking them was easy, and the taste was... Look, if you eat one of these on its own, it's a great punch of flavour: slightly sweet from the sugar, and then tonnes of salty savouriness from the sundried tomatoes, olives and parmesan. If you have one on its own, you're like, "Yes please. Thank you very much. Yum yum yum. Maybe one more for the road." If you (I mean me; I can't speak for you personally) eat more than, say, two, you will begin to feel a bit sick. I am not great with the greasy taste of cooked cheese, or with sweet and savoury together, which meant that I got overwhelmed when I ate too many of these. Basically, I only managed four of the biscotti in this photo, because I had to stop due to imminent nausea. But, you know, with the caveat of requiring strict portion control, these are a great little snack.

Green beans and sesame (recipe from "The Groundnut Cookbook" by Duval Timothy, Jacob Fodio Todd and Folayemi Brown)
These are so quick to make. You're basically just adding sesame oil, salt and toasted sesame seeds to cooked green beans. The only faff involved is in toasting the sesame seeds beforehand. Well worth it though. Do you love sesame? I love sesame. These are super tasty. (Where have they been all my life?)

Butter crispy chicken legs (recipe from "Chicken Leg" by Hoe Yee)
Yep. You read it right. That's fried chicken topped with a sauce made out of butter (and evaporated milk)! As per usual with my chicken legs, I didn't deep-fry them as I was meant to, but instead shallow-fried them and then put them in the oven. I also had to change up the batter for the chicken, because the recipe calls for tapioca flour and wheat starch, among other things. Tapioca flour and wheat starch are complete strangers to my supermarket, so I substituted with cornflour and plain flour. The sauce contains curry leaves in with the butter and five (five!) whole bird's eye chillies. It was a hot sauce! I'm really excited, though, to have been able to purchase proper curry leaves. I've never been able to find them before and have always had to make do with kaffir lime leaves instead. Let me tell you; the two are not identical! I would put the lime leaves down as being citrussy, while the curry leaves have a more savoury taste (they remind me, oddly, of bacon-flavoured crisps). Turns out I love the taste of curry leaves to pieces. As a result, this was a tasty tasty dish (I couldn't bring myself to eat the chillies though; it was hot enough as it was).

Spicy chicken burgers
This burger was massively tall. It was almost impossible to fit it all in one photograph, which is why the angle in this photo is so weird. The burger tasted good, what with the chicken, and that great coleslaw, and the brioche bun. I have a bone to pick with the recipe, though, which told me that my chicken breast would be cooked through after five minutes on each side (lies!) The extra chicken cooking time meant that it got burnt on the outside a little, which actually added a nice smoky flavour to the burger. Woo!

Chicken fajita sweet potatoes
This recipe is so on-trend with those sweet potatoes. The only thing it needs to bring it truly into 2019 is to be vegan (use vegan cheese and replace the chicken with tofu perhaps? idk. I won't personally be trying a vegan version when there's a chicken option out there.) Now, I have even an even bigger bone to pick with this recipe than I had with the last one. The cooking time for the sweet potato was waaay out. I don't normally bake potatoes in the oven and I'm not used to cooking sweet potatoes at all, so I have no idea if the recipe was wrong or if my sweet potatoes were super huge mutants (but, to be fair, the recipe does call for large sweet potatoes). Basically, my sweet potato was nowhere near cooked after only 30 minutes (it was, instead,a big, hard, orange brick) and it needed at least 45 minutes to an hour in total to turn soft. Do you know how disappointing it is to discover that you will have to wait an extra 30 minutes for dinner when you're already hungry? (Very. Is the answer. Very.) Once that was all sorted out, though, the end result was good. The taste verged on being too sweet for me (I'm not a fan of sweet potatoes for that very reason) but the combination of the cheese, fajita-seasoned chicken, and lots of lime juice, really helped to make the sweetness bearable.

I've read a few books recently (three actually) that I wanted to talk about, so I thought I'd do it all in one post.

***

"Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch

I got this book for Christmas 2017. Emma mentioned that she'd like to hear my opinion on it, so here goes:

I enjoyed it.

Wait. There's more. This book is a bit odd, because it's trying to do several things at once. First is an innovative supernatural story about the history of London. Second is a police crime thriller that is clearly gearing up to be a series. And third is something strange and tropey involving a posh guy with a cane and a Japanese-style vampire maid. While the mix is weird, it does at least make for a plot that is interesting to read.

I found the main character, Peter Grant, to be likeable. He's clever enough and fallible enough that you want to cheer him on. The other characters were enjoyable too. I particularly liked the supernatural ones (barring, you know, the bad guy).

The plot was a good read, if the resolution did leave a few parts unanswered in an unsatisfying way. But the best part was exploring the supernatural world (or should I say: supernatural London) that the characters inhabit.

This book loves London (modern London and the history of London) and it is so clearly written by a person that loves London too. The London in the book feels right. And there's a huge expanse of London covered in the book; it was so much fun to see multiple places I recognise show up in the plot. This is what makes the book so enjoyable to read. The setting is so well-envisaged that it could be a character in its own right.

And there's a set-piece near the end of the book, where Peter Grant chases the bad guy through the streets of London, that is worth the price of the book alone. I won't tell you what happens in that scene, but it is marvellous!

I do, however, agree with Emma's criticism of the book containing "endless performative heterosexual nonsense". This book is full of the male gaze. I think it's meant to make us relate to the main character more easily, but that's based purely on the incorrect assumption that all readers of the book are male. However, because the story is written in the first-person, the male gaze doesn't feel too out-of-kilter. That doesn't make it necessary, mind you (I actually don't care what that lady's arse looks like. SHE'S A WITNESS IN A MURDER INVESTIGATION.) Sigh. But it is a failure in 90% of modern media, so I'm not going to be too harsh on this one instance.

In summary: the book has its flaws, but if you want an interesting plot that revels in London and the history of London then this one's for you.

***

"The Angry Chef" by Anthony Warner

This non-fiction book is astoundingly good. I recommend it to absolutely everyone because it has the potential to make so many people happier in the long run.

I first came across the angry chef via his blog: angry-chef.com

For a good while before discovering the blog, I had become concerned by how much bullshit there is in the world of food. You come across a lot of it if, like me, you enjoy browsing food blogs, food videos on YouTube and food photography on Instagram. For a while, I thought I was going mad, because I was certain that things such as juice cleanses and low-carb diets and clean eating were all nonsense, but so many people seemed to be taking them seriously. (I should state here that I am no expert on diet, but my background in biochemistry does maybe make it easier for me to discount some types of nonsense.)

I was so glad, therefore, when I stumbled across the angry chef and found someone who was willing to stand up and denounce this bullshit for what it is: bullshit.

Now, the blog is good, but the book is even better, because the book is structured in a way that's easy to follow. Not only does the book systematically list some of the main pieces of bullshit and explain why they're bullshit, but it also gives guidance on how to spot bullshit and why we're tempted to believe it in the first place. That guidance is so great and really useful. Suddenly, navigating the world of food blogs becomes a lot easier when you can quickly spot if someone's spouting nonsense or not (say it with me: anecdotes aren't evidence!)

Honestly, I can't recommend this book enough. If more people read it, it'll be a lot harder for ridiculous (and sometimes dangerous) food fads to take hold. And if we, as a society, stopped following food fads we'd all be a lot happier (seriously, cutting carbs isn't the way to health, it's just the way to sadness); plus there'd be far less chance of even more dangerous fads (like chemophobia) taking hold.

***

"Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees

I found this book on my parents' bookshelf and immediately picked it up because I remembered Emma having mentioned it on a list of books that inspired "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell".

Unsurprisingly, it's a fantasy novel, but where "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" is low-fantasy, "Lud-in-the-Mist" is very much high-fantasy. But here's the thing, in this instance the two aren't so very different when it comes down to it.

When we think of high-fantasy, we usually think of the whole faux-medieval sword and sorcery thing: there have to be elves and dwarves and trolls and goblins and stuff. This idea has all come from Tolkien, and I'm not knocking it at all, because I adore Tolkien, but you have to admit that a lot of fantasy published in the last 50 years has been very derivative.

How refreshing, then, to read a book that was published before "The Lord of the Rings" and so isn't influenced by it in the slightest! "Lud-in-the-Mist" is high-fantasy because it's set in the entirely fictional world of Dorimare (of which Lud-in-the-Mist is the captial city), but Dorimare is about as far from dwarves and trolls and epic medieval battles as you can get. In fact Dorimare is very domestic and has all the small-town politics and sensibilities that you might find in a George Eliot novel. This, in fact, drives a lot of the plot.

Now, the similarities with "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" are immediately obvious: Dorimare is a world that was once more magical than it now is. Centuries before the book is set there used to be a lot of interaction between Dorimare and neighbouring Fairyland, but since the rise of a governing middle class, that interaction has been severed so forcefully that even mention of it is taboo.

The plot follows the reintroduction of communication between the two countries by the smuggling of fairy fruit. There is also a long-lost ruler, the mysterious and almost-mythical Duke Aubrey, who might one day return.

The parallel between Duke Aubrey and "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell"'s Raven King is impossible to ignore. Both are integral to the history of their worlds and to the magic of those worlds, and both dance almost invisibly along the edges of the plot. That said, they're not entirely identical, because while both characters are morally ambiguous, Duke Aubrey most definitely comes down on the "utter bastard" side of the line.

Despite the similarities between the two books, "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" is a read that is thoughtful and humorous, but "Lud-in-the-Mist" is a read that is thoughtful and dark. I mean, it doesn't immediately come across as dark, but as you get into the plot, you get this feeling that not everything is right. Fairyland doesn't just seem to be a land of lost knowledge or lost imagination; it's a land of something else as well. The characters' reactions to fairy fruit and other items from Fairyland are like the reactions of people suffering from drug addiction or from mental illness. To encounter Fairyland is to open the door to the fanciful, but it also seems synonymous with strange yearnings, unfulfilment, and unexplained unhappiness.

This all makes the book very odd. "Lud-in-the-Mist" reads very much like a morality tale, but what the moral is, I'm not quite sure. It is clear that the placid, yet unequal, domesticity found in Dorimare, combined with the blinkered view of the ruling middle class (who would rather immerse themselves in legal fictions than acknowledge the world around them), is not a satisfactory one. But how embracing fairy fruit and the amoral world of Duke Aubrey can help this, I'm not certain.

Can someone please explain this book to me? I would be grateful.

Regardless of the confusion it generated, I found the book a very enjoyable read. The writing style, particularly the language, is wonderful. Despite how practical the Dorimarites are meant to be, they sit within a story that is both poetic and whimsical in tone. There is something rich in the language: round and bright and luscious. Part of it is in the names of things and people, like the rivers the Dapple and the Dawl, or characters called things like Dreamsweet and Moonlove. Part is also in the descriptive nature of the text. Here's an example:

And the Dapple itself, stained like a palette, with great daubs of colour reflected from sky and earth, and carrying on its surface, in autumn, red and yellow leaves which may have fallen on it from the trees of Fairyland, where it had its source - even the Dapple might be considered as a flower growing in the garden of the Chanticleers.

I've never read anything like it before. It's vivid and lush and captivating. It takes you to a different, more magical world. And for that reason I highly recommend this book. I'm still not quite sure what the plot was telling me, but I know that I enjoyed it very much.