Domestic Science

Domestic science lets me down: dishwasher failure

The dishwasher has broken.  In a scary overheating and blowing circuit in kitchen way.  This is a disaster as the kitchen is completely designed around having a dishwasher.  No draining board, sink size of puddle. 

This dishwasher is already the second in 6 years.  The first one we bought had the controls built into the top of the door, so they were hidden when the door was shut.  Very cool, very prone to water getting in to the circuit board.  When the electronics failed for the second time we replaced it with this cheaper and (so we thought) more robust version.  When this one too developed electrical issues, we planned to repair it - it's wasteful to keep buying new ones. However:

Cost of repairing dishwasher: approx £250
Cost of new dishwasher: £330

This can't be right!?

At least the new one has a 5 year warranty for parts and labour so we won't have to replace it for a while. 

In quest of dumplings

When I was little, we used to have stew and dumplings.  The stew was sometimes good, sometimes terrible, but the dumplings were always tip-top.  Big fluffy balls of tasty goodness, filling and comforting but not stodgy. 

I've been trying to make dumplings like that every since I left home, and I just can't do it.  Everybody, even quite experienced cooks, has a few culinary Waterloos lurking, and that's one of mine.  (Other cooking tasks I will go out of my way to avoid include poaching an egg, icing fairy cakes, and carving pretty much anything in public).  It's odd that I can't make dumplings, given my suet puddings and suet crust on pies are acknowledged to be pretty damn good.  But there it is.

Then today I decided to have another try.  It was so horrible and cold this weekend, so I made a big pot of beef stew and it was crying out for dumplings to go with it.  So here we go. 

The first recipe I tried was from Nigel Slater - he proposed plain flour, half as much suet as flour, and salt, and cold water to mix, then add to a pan of stock at a rolling boil.  I wasn't going to risk my pot of stew (past horrors of dumplings dissolving into the gravy and ruining the whole pot put me off that idea) so I boiled a pan of water.  The dumplings sank straight to the bottom, but did eventually rise to the top, and acquire some lightness. 

But, you'd definitely call this batch stodgy.  NOT the light and fluffy dumplings of my childhood.  I remembered that in suet pastry I always add baking powder, so I tried again (luckily a few dumplings are very cheap)
with baking powder this time, and there was a definite improvement.  But, during the boiling phase, two of the dumplings practically dissolved, and the survivors were still a bit soggy round the eddges. 

At this point my other half strolled into the kitchen (no doubt wondering what was holding up the delivery of his stew, given all that was usually involved was ladling it out into a bowl), and mentioned he always balanced his dumplings on top of the stew to steam them.  I did spend a minute trying to remember the last time that he cooked dumplings, or stew for that matter, but gave up and admitted he was probably right.  You steam suet puddings, rather than boil them, at least I do, so it makes sense.  I'm still not ready to steam them in my stew though - I think I might try a steamer basket or sieve first. 

At least the second batch today were edible, if a bit on the damp side - which was fortunate because I was too hungry at that point to make any more. 

The search for the perfect dumpling continues. 

Old school

It’s funny how things can turn out to be an unexpected success.  An old friend was visiting last weekend, so I made this an excuse to send the other half into Crouch End for a really decent piece of pork for dinner.  It’s just as well I said get a large loin, as by the time we sat down to eat the party had gone from three to six diners.  Luckily I’m never knowingly under-catered, and with the addition of a first course of some Serrano ham, olives and hummus, I got away with it.   

Luckily, too, I had planned a pudding that would easily stretch - rice pudding and stewed fruit.  The pudding rice has been knocking around the cupboard for months and I decided it needed using up.  Since a ridiculously small amount of rice makes enough pudding for three to four people, it wasn’t really testing my resources to make a second pudding.  You just get a nice pudding bowl or small casserole or other oven proof dish.  Into it, you weigh 60g pudding rice.  The you add about a pint of milk, a few tablespoons of sugar, and a teaspoon of vanilla essence.  Add a big knob of butter and put in a low oven - about 150 degrees centigrade.  After an hour, stir the butter into the milky rice.  Leave for a further 1-2 hours.  By this time a rich brown crust will have formed on top, which you either love or hate - if you hate it, you can just dig out creamy rice from underneath and leave it for you grateful friends who do like the skin on rice pudding.  Should you need to, you can make it early in the day or probably even further ahead than that and then reheat in a low oven. 

For five people (one guest is a non dairy person) I made two puddings, which should have served 6-8.  We managed to eat the lot - they fell on it like they were starving, despite having already disposed of the snacky starter and all of the pork along with greens and baked potatoes.  No one seems to make these old school puddings any more, which is a shame as they are so easy.  To posh things up a bit, I did some poached apples along side - dessert apples cut into wedges but not peeled, which helped them to keep their shape and also turned the juice a lovely rose pink.  Once I’d cooked them through in water and sugar and a cinnamon stick, I lifted out the apples and reduced the juices a bit so it was more like a syrup.  I then added a slug of bourbon and poured the juice back over the apples.  It was handy I’d planned on doing the apples otherwise the no-dairy friend would have got no pudding at all.  And the leftovers were jolly nice for breakfast this morning with American style pancakes and a splodge of Greek yoghurt.

How to Open Packets

This evening on BBC2, Delia may have unforgivably alienated her core fan base:  “When you are buying Pesto sauce always check the label.  Make sure it’s been made in Italy, because, really, you don’t want pesto sauce that’s been made in Surbiton.”

What’s wrong with Surbiton that they can’t make pesto there?   Assuming they start with good basil, proper pecorino, fresh pinenuts, quality olive oil, why can’t it be as good as pesto flown in from Italy?  Why is Italian origin a guarantee of quality?  Are all Italians so honest they would never try to fob off cheap ingredients onto a nation despised for drinking cappuccino after 11am? 

If I was going to have a stab at setting up a UK pesto factory, I think Surbiton might be a good bet - at least you’d have a fair chance your employees would know what they were making.  Though only someone who has lived in deepest Suffolk for 39 years can still picture Surbiton as a likely place to set up a factory, particularly one that turned out low-rent pesto. Did she never watch The Good Life?

Personally, I think ladies who suggest that mixing a jar of tomato pasta sauce with a tin of mince and onions and calling it ragu Bolognese is cooking, should think twice before getting sniffy about UK-made pesto.  There’s cooking, and there’s cooking with a few short cuts, and then there’s opening packets.  It’s difficult to spot exactly where the line is, but I think we can safely agree Delia has crossed it.

Inconvenience food

I was reading Observer food monthly, and noted I’m not the only one who’s concerned about the need for bigger and bigger kitchen storage. Lynn Barber notes that “you would need a cupboard as big as a house” to cope with Delia Smith’s new cheating  approach to cooking, where you stock your kitchen with things like frozen mash, ready chopped onions, and sundry other semi-prepared ingredients, and stand by to rustle up dozens of exciting recipes at a moment’s notice.  I just don’t have the room.  My freezer isn’t that small, but after I’ve fitted in the usual things like frozen peas and oven chips, mince and prawns, and a few boxes of leftover pasta sauce and soup, there’s not really room for a stack of frozen mashed potato discs.  Same with the cupboards - I don’t know how it is, but what with the tins of beans and tomatoes, the bottles of soy and packets of flour, jars of jam and emergency supply of Illy espresso, I haven’t got room for fancy bottled peppers. 

Since most of these clever ingredients can only come from Ocado rather than my local Tesco, and as I try to only use Ocado once a month - particularly since they virtually eliminated free delivery, I’d need to find room for a few packets at a time.  And if I can’t get it at Tesco or Ocado, forget it.  This is something that drives me nuts about those ‘tried and taste-tested’ features in magazines - the one they score top is always the one from the supermarket I never go to.  It’s no good telling me that Asda pilau rice is the tops.  I have no idea where my nearest Asda is - and I’m not about to get the car out and drive halfway across North London to get my hands on the world’s best microwave rice.  A couple of years back, Good Housekeeping ran a feature on how to  get your entire Christmas dinner ready-made - pre-stuffed turkey crown, frozen roast potatoes, the works.  But if you looked closely you’d have had to visit seven different supermarkets to get their recommended configuration.  Hardly convenient.  Now if they could tell me which supermarket was best for the whole meal, taking all the bits into account, that might be some use. 

And it’s not just a problem of sourcing just a few things.  You flick through the pages of these convenience books and there are dozens of things you’d need to keep on standby to whip up these convenient concoctions - count up how many times Nigella Lawson says she’s ‘never without…’ whatever ingredient, and you’ll understand why her larder on the set of Nigella Express is the size of a small bathroom.  It costs a bomb, and you waste so much, too. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve bought some wonder ingredient for one recipe and never used it again until it got chucked out two years after the use by date. It’s much better to have a few standbys that you use all the time - for me, it’s ready chopped garlic, and ready grated ginger - I loathe grating ginger.  I’m also a big fan of frozen ready grilled peppers, and chuck them into lots of things - soups, stews, noodle things.  But that’s pretty much it.

The trick you end up falling for is to imagine you should be able to stagger through your front door and whip up a different high-speed dinner every night of the week - no planning ahead needed.  You gratefully adopt this new approach, and then realise that you’ve now landed yourself with an even tougher task of keeping your kitchen perennially stocked with the makings for about 100 different dishes.

I’ve recently adopted a simpler approach.  On Friday night or Saturday morning, I sit down with my notebook, and plan dinner for every night of the week.  Then I nip out to Tesco (or if I’m feeling energetic, to the better shops in Crouch End) and buy the things I need for the week ahead.  Job done.  And if I feel like throwing in some ready made stuff I will, but at least I know I’ll use it up.  The wonderful thing is, I no longer get home really tired and end up drinking too much wine while I stare at overflowing cupboards, overwhelmed by choice and desperately trying to think of something to cook.  I just consult the list and get on with it. 

I can’t claim this as a totally spontaneous conversion.  On a recent holiday to Canada. I ended up watching Canada Food Network perhaps more than is good for anyone (well I had a cold…) and saw a rather fab programme called Fixing Dinner.  The chirpy mother-of-seven presenter sorted out various badly-fed families by teaching them to plan their meals a week ahead.   I won’t be adopting her recipes (tuna casserole made with tinned soup?  Ick!) but the principle was just what I needed to get my kitchen back under control.

Cheating at a price

Hurray! Delia Smith says it’s okay to cheat at cooking.  And introducing the world to frozen mashed potato, a product I had hitherto never heard of.  I make do with instant mash powder, should I end up desperate for mashed spud and be right out of real potatoes.  If I have real potatoes I just peel them (enough for two people isn’t exactly time-consuming), microwave them, and bash them to bits in my Kenwood Chef using the K beater.  Nigella Lawson bakes ready washed baking potatoes and scoops the middles out.  Even lazier, but with a longer lead time.  And rather cheaper.  At Ocado today, four baking potatoes cost 99p and you could get 2.5kg of white potatoes for £1.19, whereas a packet of Auntie Bessie’s frozen mash is £1.69 for 650g.

That's one of the big problems with Delia’s cheats - they come at a price.  For example, lets assume you are planning to serve a really fancy fish pie for a dinner with friends.  You don’t really cook so you aren’t likely to have much in the fridge.  You decide to tackle Delia’s salmon and quail egg pie.  So you go off an buy your ready cooked salmon and ready peeled quails eggs and frozen mash, cheese sauce, ready grated cheddar and parmesan and dill, cornichons, capers…by my reckoning you will have spent about £20 and generated a range of random leftovers you are unlikely to use again given that you can’t really cook.  Ocado offer you a range of fish pies and even if you buy two of the most expensive, to feed your mates in quantity and style, you will only spend £16, avoid a fridge full of half used ingredients, and waste rather less packaging.  You want to hide your cheating from your mates?  Well don’t expect Delia to save you - those rounds of frozen mash are completely obvious, even under the blanket of cheese.

To be fair, I costed up the same recipe as though I’d made it all from scratch and it came in at about £16, same as buying ready made pies (though significantly cheaper than Delia's version, enough for a bottle of wine to go with it).  But then, if you insist on putting quails eggs in a fish pie you are going to end up splashing out  People who can cook a bit will put in what fish is on special offer that day to save even more, and won’t waste quails eggs under a pile of cheese sauce.

For more workaday feasts, Delia offered us Shepherd’s Pie.  Made with a tin of mince and onions - which brought back ghastly  memories of student days until Delia reassured us that it had 75% meat and really tasted alright.  So far, so cheaty, until she whipped out a packet of ready diced root veg and proceeded to fry those up on the stove before adding them to the mince.  If you are going to mess up a pan,  you might as well fry the mince and onions while you are at it.  Then having scattered on the statutory frozen mash discs, she proceeded to rinse and slice a leek - surely one of the most annoying vegetables to prepare, with all that hidden grit - and sprinkle it on top of the mash.  So what we got was how to cheat at a relatively labour intensive pie (assuming you can locate the ingredients - Ocado don’t sell tinned beef mince, which I take as a bad sign), when in the same time and the same number of dirty pans we could have made a straightforward one with raw ingredients.

I won’t be rushing out to buy the book.

My kitchen is a war zone

The other half has started the new year by declaring war on mice.  We live in a Victorian terrace, and mice are as inevitable as cracks in the plaster.  You just make sure your food is inaccessible, and live with the wee furry critters.  However, the dratted beasts have been more active than usual in recent weeks, making a complete mess in the under-sink cupboard, and running around the kitchen in full view of dinner guests. 

Which is why, whenever I’ve gone into the kitchen today, I’ve found the other half stalking them under the units with a Maglite, mixing up ever more enticing baits from peanut butter and chocolate, and constantly moving the trap to new locations.  His currently favoured spot is just in front of the bin, where I run the risk of treading on it whenever I put any rubbish out.

Work tomorrow, so I’m brewing up some soup.  New year, resumed healthy eating regime.  We failed to eat up all the root vegetables over Christmas, so it’s curried parsnip on the menu, with some of that bread I made yesterday that somehow failed to rise.  At least, it rose before I put it in the oven but then sort of deflated in the oven.  It tastes fine, but just looks a bit flat. 

Queen Nigella

Nigella Lawson might be the most annoying celebrity on TV, but the woman can cook.  I couldn’t watch her last series - Nigella Express - as it made me want to throw things at the TV.  Although watching the wife of a millionaire do an impersonation of her former hard-pressed boho working girl self, in her Petit Trianon on the South Circular, was rather tragic.  The poor woman has so lost touch with the ordinary world that she thinks a larder the size of a corner shop, a giant fridge stocked daily by unseen hands, and nipping to Waitrose in a black cab, are perfectly normal aspects of life. 

Never mind.  She still turns out fantastic recipes.  I was given Nigella Express for Christmas and it is fabulous - full of lovely recipes that are quick without resorting to packets and bottles of dubious ‘convenience’ food.  She never lectures at you about where your food is from (like lots of cooks these days) or tries to make you feel guilty for occasionally grabbing a packet of unhappy pig from Tesco on the way home.  She is still the TV cook that is closest to how I really cook - bottled lemon juice and all. 

My new Nigella reminded me of a recipe I’ve been meaning to cook for ages, from her Feast book.  Its a sort of stuffing-flavoured roast chicken tray bake, with sage and onion.  You just get a chicken and cut into 10 pieces (or get 10 thighs or 5 legs or similar) and marinate with olive oil, lemon juice, English mustard, dried sage, and onions. When it’s time to cook, you tuck in a dozen sausages, and season with salt and pepper, and shove in the oven for about an hour.   I made it for dinner on Friday as we had friends over to plan our snowboarding trip to Canada.  It was delicious, all the flavours of roast chicken and none of the carving. I couldn’t do the easy-looking potato gratin she suggested, as one of our friends doesn’t eat dairy - so I made boulangere potatoes instead - layers of potato and onion with butter, baked in chicken stock for about 90 minutes.  Only I used some of my goose fat instead of butter.  It was the best boulangere ever. 

Oh and  if you were wondering, my soap turned out just fine.  I’m hooked now.  I’ve ordered a book on how to make your own cosmetics.  Cooking without calories.  Perfect way to start the New Year.

Cosmetic cookery

I bought myself a craft book, before Christmas.  It’s full of nifty ideas for turning old ties into purses and knitting iPod cases, but the idea that really hooked me was a recipe for soap.  I love those dinky little handmade soaps you get in nice shops - the sort that have rosebuds stuck in the top and scratchy grains for an exfoliating effect.  The idea that I could make my own from things you can find in the supermarket was irresistible. 

It is pretty much cooking except that you don’t eat the results.  You mix up lye from caustic soda (this is the scary part as you need goggles and gloves), and you make up a oil mix according to a table that says what oils to use and in what proportion, and then you stir the two together and watch as the form a lovely soapy batter.  Then you add essential oils for it to smell nice, and leave it to sit.  And sit.  And sit.  And wonder why it hasn’t turned into soap yet.  It’s been there for three hours now, and while it’s heated up a treat, It hasn’t started to set. 

I might go back to baking cakes, it’s less of a worry.

Our goose is cooked

Not only cooked, but eaten, leftovers and all.   We had the last of it in a pie for dinner yesterday.  It’s true what my friend said, thee isn’t as much meat on a goose as you’d think.  Our 4.6 kg goose would have fed 6 for Christmas dinner, but there wouldn’t have been much in the way of leftovers.   As it turned out, we were only two for Christmas day so we had a feast then, a second feast for Boxing Day dinner, microwaved with roast potatoes, red cabbage and even gravy, and enough left for a generous pie for two.

But of course, the goose lives on an the form of four jars of goose fat, enough to keep us in roast potatoes for some time to come.  Two jars were rendered from the fat I pulled from inside the goose, in a low oven to create the purest, whitest fat imaginable.  The other two jars were siphoned out of the roasting tray while the goose cooked and left to go cold in a bowl.  These aren’t so pure white, the fat has more of a golden tinge.  But I’m sure the roast potatoes they make will taste just as good.  Definitely worth investing in a big basting pipette, to get the fat out of the tray during roasting, before it reaches dangerous levels.  Until you have tried it, you just won’t believe how much fat comes out. 

In case you were wondering, the goose was delicious.  I don’t know if I cooked it right (I followed three different roasting tables and took the average), but after three hours it came out soft and tender fleshed, and very crispy skin.  Kind of like Peking duck.  I might try roasting a duck on a similar basis for a less expensive treat.