Bad Cook - Esther Walker

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milk

      For the toad

       sausages, nice ones

       3–4 tbsp vegetable oil or, ideally, beef dripping – about 25g

      1 Preheat the oven to 220ºC. Whisk together the batter ingredients. You’re less likely to get lumps if you half-mix the eggs and dry ingredients together before adding the milk. Rest the batter if you feel like it.

      2 Put the fat in a roasting pan and stick it in the hot oven for 3–4 minutes until it’s melted, then add the sausages.

      3 Put the sausages back in the oven in the fat for 8–10 minutes. Now this is really important, so stop daydreaming and listen to me: the fat must be SMOKING hot before you pour the batter in. When you open the oven and blue-ish smoke billows out, that’s when it’s time to pour the batter in. (I was always a bit scared of getting the fat this hot in the oven because I thought it would catch on fire or something. But turns out it doesn’t. This same principle applies to Yorkshire puddings. The fat must be SMOKING and then they will puff up gorgeous; if not, they will be shit.)

      4 Take the pan out of the oven when the fat is SMOKING and pour the batter around the sausages. Turn the oven down to 180ºC.

      5 Put the pan back in for 30 minutes, but check on it after 20 just to make damn sure it’s not alight. It’ll be ready when it’s all puffed up and golden brown.

      There is a school of thought that says that one ought to cook the sausages for 15 minutes then take out HALF the sausages, pour over half the batter, put back in the oven for five minutes, then add the rest of the sausages and batter, so that you get sort of layers of sausage and batter. Personally I think that sounds like a recipe for total disaster, but you must do what you think is best.

      Eat with cabbage. And maybe a nice onion gravy, if you can find a half-decent recipe.

      Offal

      I reckon I’m a pretty wide-ranging eater, but there are certain things I won’t touch and I will not have people judging me for it.

      For example, I won’t eat raw garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, lemon puddings, aniseed or kidneys. And I’m not wild about tongue, either. And the attitude you get from people! It’s as if you’ve announced you’re a vegan. At least people probably don’t give you shit for being a vegan because they assume that you’ve got enough problems as it is.

      A thing most people don’t want to eat is offal and I absolutely defend anyone’s right not to want to eat it without being labelled a white-bread-eating food weakling. Offal really isn’t that nice, most of the time. Kidney! ACK! Gag me with a spoon. It’s just about tolerable cut up into minute chunks then cooked for about three days then put in a pie with gravy and steak and topped off with a slab of buttery pastry. Any more real than that and I break out into a sweat.

      But some offal is okay. Lamb sweetbreads: tick. Especially served with some kind of very sharp parsley and barley salad thing. Calves’ liver, with bacon and onions and mash: tick.

      Chicken liver, turned into a paté OR cooked in a rich sauce of tomato and paprika: tick. Giles does a very nice sticky thing with chicken livers that goes something like this:

      Giles’s Mittel Europe Chicken Livers

      For two

       1 onion, chopped

       2 garlic cloves

       1 400g packet organic chicken livers (or closest to 400g you can find), washed and sorted for gross bits of sinew or any green bits (gall bladder! Augh!)

       1 tbsp paprika

       a splash of chicken stock (if you’ve got it)

       2 large squeezes of tomato purée or a couple of long squeezes of tomato ketchup

       salt and pepper

       about 100–150ml Marsala, or white wine. Or red wine, really.

       spinach or salad leaves

       some lemon juice

       some parsley if you’ve got it

      1 Sweat the onions gently for about 10–15 minutes and then throw in the garlic. Cook that until you start to smell garlic and then throw in the livers.

      2 Turn up the heat a bit and cook for about 4 minutes. Then add the paprika, chicken stock, tomato purée, salt and pepper and cook for another 1 minute

      3 Pour over the wine then turn the heat down a bit and simmer for about 4 more minutes with a lid on, stirring occasionally until the wine reduces a bit and you get a kind of tomatoey sauce.

      4 ‘Arrange’ (i.e. plonk) some spinach leaves on a plate and then spoon over the livers and any juices left in the pan. Squeeze over some lemon juice and scatter parsley over the top.

      Instead of having a brownie afterwards, I had an apple. *SMUG*

      Home Alone

      Giles has gone skiing and I’m in the house all by myself. Actually, he hasn’t gone skiing because he doesn’t like skiing; he’s just gone with some people to Switzerland who are skiing and he’s vowing to stay inside and read books. But he also took some emergency ski kit with him. No, I don’t understand either.

      It’s always the way when Giles goes anywhere: I rather look forward to having the place to myself without his constant clattering, singing, shouting, cackling and raging, conducting his professional feuds and world-domination strategies in his office next door to mine, fielding phone calls and hammering away at his laptop, which always sounds, when he is in full-cry, like a troop of teenaged boys galloping down the stairs.

      He leaves the house after consulting me eight times about every single thing he’s packing:‘Are you sure? Are you sure the red socks and not the striped ones? Sure? They’re going in … Sure?’ and looking briefly miserable on the doorstep. After I close the door I punch the air and shout ‘YES’ and vow to leave the bed unmade, do no washing up, watch Judge Judy all day and drink the kind of cheap white wine that burns holes through carpet.

      Within an hour I’m a gibbering wreck, wide-eyed at my spooky, silent house and jumping at small noises.

      And I don’t know what the hell to eat. Working within Giles’ strict things-we-can-and-can’t-eat thing means a trip to Waitrose is a logistical assault. Nothing non-organic, basically no fish at all because it’s all endangered, nothing processed, nothing from abroad. It’s why we’re constantly eating roast chicken. Sometimes I think to myself ‘Gosh, wouldn’t it be easy to go shopping if I didn’t have to cook for Giles and all his arseholish ways’ but then I GO to Waitrose as I did just now and I can’t find, or think of, anything that I might want to eat. Not one thing.

      So I’m going to make a chocolate cake instead. Definitely something I can’t do with him around what with his terror of sweeties.

      This is a really fantastic chocolate cake. Like something you might buy in a shop, which is my highest accolade. It’s dark and rich but also springy and light at the same time. Bliss.

      Chocolate Cake

       225g plain flour

       350g sugar

       80g cocoa powder

       1½ tsp baking powder

       1½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

       2 eggs

       250ml milk, any sort

       125ml

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