Steak and Chips

The highlight of today has been a visit to Farmer Palmer's, a fun farm in Dorset whose main audience is the toddler in all of us.  I had a blast playing with tractors, bouncing on inflatable cows, racing go-carts, climbing straw bails and sliding down slides.  All of this activity was in the interest of entertaining my son and my niece.  At no point was I having fun or enjoying myself (honest).

There was also the farm element with feeding and milking demonstrations, animal handling and goats who were akin to a crack team trying to escape from Stalag Luft III.  Two pigs in particular were keen to make our acquaintance, almost vaulting out of their pen to say hello.

The educational aspect of the day wasn't lost on me.  Teaching children where their food comes from is important if we are to break away from our convenience food culture and get back to respecting what we put on our plates.  So having seen Kate, a five year old cow, delivering three gallons of milk in under five minutes I had an urge for beef.

Kate was not harmed in the posting of this Blog.

Steak and chips is an almost elemental meal.  So simple and yet so fulfilling.  It is still high on my last meal list and is the go to meal for birthdays.  For personal preference I like rump, medium rare, with bearnaise sauce and skinny chips (french fries) but I'll take the Pepsi challenge and have what ever is on offer.

The real treat tonight was to see the two cousins devouring their food.  They had spent the day running / toddling around the farm and had really built up an appetite.  Children, sat quietly in restaurants, in front of clean plates, are the best type of children.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

We have all seen the moment in The Lady and The Tramp when the two dogs share an intimate, romantic diner, in an alleyway strewn with rubbish.  Even if you haven't seen the film, the iconic imagery of the love stricken pooches nosing meatballs at each other and sharing a stolen kiss is embedded in our collective minds.

The scene was already messy, with dumpsters and cardboard boxes littering the floor, before the hounds inevitably smothered the place in tomato sauce.  I can lose my eyes and picture the alleyway behind the restaurant with pasta up the walls.  I can see remnants of the meatballs trampled under foot.  I can even  see cutlery at the other end of the alley next to a tomato stained bib.  Hold on, somebody has changed the channel.

I'm no longer sat in my local multiplex, popcorn on my lap, bucket of generic soft drink by my side.  I am sat at my brother's dining table where my son and niece have just finished their evening meal of Spaghetti and Meatballs.  The similarities between the film and real life are staggering.

My niece is older than my son and she was keen to show him how to suck the individual stands of spaghetti in one go.  The resulting last flick of sauce from the pasta had a different trajectory each time.  Noses, foreheads, cheeks, tables: you name it, nowhere was safe.  Toddlers know how to be messy at the best of times, but there is something about spaghetti.  It lets them go the extra mile.

For the record, there was no kiss between the cousins.

The Wedding Breakfast

I am now of an age where most of my friends are either married or having children.  I have therefore been to a fair few weddings and no two of them have been the same. 

I've run across London not to miss the ceremony.  Watched Z stand on a street performer's chest whilst he was laid on a bed of nails.  There was the obligatory fight on the dance floor.  The chief bridesmaid was evicted from the building after she was caught letting herself into the hotel cellar and liberating a couple of bottles of wine (the cheap stuff too, some people have no class).  These events were all at separate weddings, I was at them all, and none of them were mine (I hope).

The process of getting married, for those of you that haven't or won't, is extraordinary.  The day itself is over in a flash.  I was told to take time out, stand back and try to take in as much as I could.  I only wish I'd taken that piece of advice more seriously.  The months of planning on the other hand seemed to stretch on for ever.

Choose a wife.  Choose a church.  Choose a minister.  Choose a great big venue.  Choose toast racks, pottery, DAB's, crockery and cutlery. Choose flowers, cake decorations and a colour scheme. Choose a car sent by lorry from the other side of the country. Choose your guests. Choose your family and friends. Choose evening wear and matching luggage.  Choose marriage . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that?  There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got a menu to select?*

We spent a great evening at our chosen venue going through the dishes we could serve to our guests. We'd already crossed half the options off the list due to prior knowledge of our guests allergies and foibles. Great Aunt So-and-so, doesn't eat thingamy (not after you-know-what) but the chefs weren't to know and it was free as part of the package.

We picked what we thought was a well balanced three course meal, one that would soak up the pre-meal booze and yet not hinder the post-meal indie-disco.

I'm the one in the middle in the skirt, not the white one.

Today I have been to yet another wedding and I can now count cars, coaches, double decker buses, boats and trains in my wedding modes of transport list.  The hovercraft is still to be achieved!

Over these various weddings I've eaten three course meals, finger buffets, pizza, hog roasts and chips from a port-side vendor.  I have also managed to live the dream of drinking champagne whilst stood on the footplate of a route master double decker bus.

I am not about to become a food critic and tell you blow-for-blow about the meal I have just eaten, unless I have cooked it, that's not what Tonight's Menu is about.  I'm not going to run my fork of truth through dishes I've eaten in restaurants and friend's houses.  I want to tell you the stories behind what I'm eating and today I had the pleasure of eating a Wedding Breakfast.

If you are planning a wedding don't get bogged down but do pay attention to everything, try watching Father of the Bride (I forced the In-laws to watch it) it breaks the ice.

To Jane and Andrew, congratulations. May all of your dreams come true.

*Kinda Trainspotting, but you knew that.

Steak and Kidney Pudding

At last, a holiday, some time away from the day-to-day.  A chance to see some of the family and be free of the concerns of work.  When we book a holiday, we tend to book a flat in which ever city we are visiting.  They normally work out cheaper per night.  The breakfast is always better, who in their right mind is willing to shell out €12.00 a day for a stale croissant and a slice of ham while staying in the middle of Paris?  The place is crawling with boulangeries selling freshly baked croissants, filled baguettes and good coffee for a fraction of the hotel prices.

This is not one of those occasions.  We are now travelling around England and popping into Wales, seeing family and staying in Hotels.  For the foreseeable future Tonight's Menu is more or less in the lap of the Gods.  I can only hope that the Gods of my travels are feeling generous in their hospitality and not vengeful at my desire to be in my own kitchen.

To add to the mockery that the Gods are serving up I have offered to baby sit tonight so that Z can have some quality time with her family.  This means that I have eaten with the boy, much earlier than usual.  Our hotel has a bar (yey) but no restaurant or bar snack menu (boo).  This left us wandering around looking for somewhere to eat.  We all ended up in a pub which saw children as valid customers and I scanned the menu for something that we could share. 

My eyes landed on steak and kidney pudding and between us we devoured the lot.  I now have a goal for when we get back home.  I need to learn how to make suet puddings and convince Z that offal makes great gravy.

Chilli con carne

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

It's an old saying and people have read into it various meanings.  To me it reads as a recipe, don't let the glut you have go to waste.  I know it is probably meant to be read as 'make the most of a bad situation' but that would surly lead to making lemoncello not lemonade.

Thank you Clemens

So when my colleague gave me one or two chillies I had to make chilli con carne.  Its one of those stand by recipes that we all have knocking about our own cookbooks of the mind.  We all have our own tweaks that make our chilli better than everybody else's.

Although, I don't think I have ever made the same chilli twice.  Different spices and heat levels.  Additional vegetables that have needed using up.  I also use different cuts of meat, from different animals.  It depends on what I can lay my hands on and how much time I have.  If I have plenty of time I prefer to use some beef skirt or shin or even some belly pork (the traditional dish uses pork not beef).

Due to my current experiment in only buying meat once a month, I can only use what I have in the freezer.  So Tonight's Menu contains; minced beef, onions, peppers, celery, garlic, a tin of tomatoes, a tin of kidney beans and plenty of time.  Herbs and spices include; coriander, cumin, cinnamon and oregano.

There will also be a whole load of chillies in a number of forms.  Dried, fresh, powdered and sauce.  They all add different flavours as well as adding heat.  Balancing lots of them is much more fun than adding shed loads of one type and much tastier.

Broccoli and Cauliflower Bake

I think I may have chosen an odd week to start a daily food blog.  Normally, I do the "big" food shop over the weekend and then shop for "bits" the rest of the week.  This is pretty standard.  This week however, the bits have taken a knock on the head in favour of emptying the fridge before we go to a family wedding in the Midlands.  I hate wasting food so I'll be spending the next couple of days making cake and soup.  These will last longer than the bananas and carrots that are already threatening to walk out of the fridge.

Next to the carrots in the crisper sits a full head of broccoli and half a cauliflower that also need some attention.  My mind starts to wander but I can't shift the idea of a huge mound of delicious Cauliflower Cheese.  Mixing both brassicas won't be a problem, I'll just cook the broccoli for less time than the cauli before adding the sauce and baking.

My dilemma comes in the form of the cheese sauce. Importantly, which cheese to use.  For a Cauliflower Cheese I always use the sharpest Cheddar I can lay my hands on.  Broccoli however, goes so well with blue cheese that it's almost a moral duty to combine them.  Recently, for one reason or another, I have been having lots of conversations about blue cheese and so subliminally my mind is made up.  Stilton it is, and plenty of it, there is little worse than an uncheesy cheese sauce.

I love cooking.  Selecting the ingredients, chopping and peeling veg (including onions).  Judging the quantities and tasting to get the seasoning just right.  All culminating with the satisfaction of giving someone you love a well deserved good meal regardless of the occasion.  The gratification of a satisfied look, conversations stopping and a cleared plate, drive me to cook.  I am honest enough however, to admit when a little help is needed or to bow to a better chef.  Cheese sauce is one of the things in the kitchen that I will readily admit that Z can make so much better than me, that it's not worth me bothering.  Thank you for my gorgeous meal.

Gnocchi in Tomato Sauce

I first cooked fresh gnocchi a few years ago after a bumper harvest of potatoes from the allotment.  We had six varieties from first earlies, salad spuds, roasters and my favourite, a variety called Picasso, presumably because all the eyes are on one side*.

We already had two bags of potatoes in the cellar when the fourth and fifth varieties were harvested.  So I started to scratch around for something that I could cook and freeze using the potatoes, which wasn't soup. 

That was when I found gnocchi.  Making them is as simple as mixing mash with half as much flour then cutting the dough into small pillows.  This was also when I bought one of my favourite kitchen gadgets, the potato ricer.  If you haven't come across one before, think garlic crusher on steroids.  To freeze the gnocchi, lay them on a baking tray so that they aren't touching each other and place in the freezer.  Once they are frozen you can pop them into a bag and they wont clump up and turn into one massive potato dumpling.

You really can serve gnocchi with any pasta sauce that you fancy (I know purists have rules about pasta shape and sauce combos but I don't care).  Tonight I fancied a tomato sauce to which I added a few bits and pieces from the fridge, including some of the leftover pork shoulder from Sunday. 

I won't tell you how to suck eggs, or make tomato sauce for that matter however, I think that a pinch of chilli flakes instead of black pepper when seasoning your sauce makes all the difference.

*Joking aside, Picasso is a great variety of early main crop potato.  If you are wondering what to grow next year, give them a pop. http://www.alanromans.com/p-1670-picasso.aspx