Bad Cook - Esther Walker

Скачать книгу

Chardonnay and 2 handfuls of crisps.

      This is the kind of menu I find myself eating quite often and I am thin as a rake. People say to me ‘You are so thin, what diet are you on?’ and I say ‘The Shitty Food Diet’ and they go ‘Ha ha ha, no really’.

      Except next-eldest sister. She said ‘You are so thin, what diet are you on?’ And I said ‘It’s called The Shitty Food Diet.’ And she said ‘Ooh really – what does one do on that?’ But my sister lives in Notting Hill so nothing surprises her.

      So this is what I do on my own time, but on my husband’s time, it’s a different story.

      But as it happens, we are getting a bit slack about provenance in this house. My husband’s strict rules about what, exactly, one is allowed to buy and eat basically allow for us to eat almost nothing except kale and roast chickens. He doesn’t want to buy, from a supermarket, any fish that isn’t mackerel or any meat that isn’t produced by Duchy Originals. So if we haven’t been to the farmers market recently (where one can buy, guilt-free, anything one wants), the menu round here gets a bit samey.

      I used to observe these rules faithfully but recently I’ve got a bit loose around the edges with it. The other day I just wanted some spare ribs, damn it. We’d just been to a restaurant called Sonny’s Kitchen in Barnes, which was AMAZING – just the best food I’ve had for a really, really long time and worth a trip if you’re anywhere near it.

      You would think that being married to my husband I get to eat a lot of amazing food, but it isn’t so. A lot of new restaurants we go to aren’t very nice and if you order wrong, well: yuk. Sonny’s Kitchen genuinely stood out.

      So anyway we had these spare ribs, which were like, out of this world and I wanted to re-create them, although nothing like as spectacularly. But I couldn't find any free-range organic spare ribs in Waitrose so I just thought – fuck it – and bought the essentials ones.

      And they turned out gorgeous, drowning in a barbecue sauce, which contained the following:

       5 tbsp tomato ketchup

       3 heaped tsp English mustard

       1 tbsp soy sauce

       1 tsp Chinese five-spice

       the zest of ½ an orange if you have it

       2 garlic cloves, crushed

       3 tbsp vegetable oil to loosen

       1 tbsp vinegar, any sort

      1 Mix together the sauce ingredients and leave the ribs to marinade for as long as you can – preferably all day but even 30 minutes will make a difference.

      2 Put in the oven at 180°C for about 25 minutes.

      Note: What You Need in Your Kitchen

      The novice cook will often find herself held back from making certain things because she hasn’t got the right gear. But, on visiting a cookery department, it is easy to get totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of pastel-coloured dishes and silicon utensils – it’s like Barbara Cartland has exploded – and come away empty-handed.

      You can, of course, use whatever you like when you are cooking. If you want to cook in high heels, using only lilac-coloured implements while wearing a flowery apron that’s your business. But that’s not what most cooks do. Most cooks wear shitty old aprons and wipe-clean shoes and cook with a range of dented, industrial kitchenwear that looks like it started life in a prison.

      Like me. Some people have gardening clothes, I have cooking clothes – ratty old T-shirts and ancient jeans. And I must, must have Capital FM on somewhere.

      Here are some things that I couldn’t cook without, that I rely on and use every day and now have many multiples of, so that even if two or three are in the dishwasher I still have at least one to hand. They are all functional and ugly and that’s the way I like them.

      1 A timer. Back in the days when I thought cooking was easy, I never timed anything. I had been encouraged to believe, through the casual watching of cookery shows, that timers were unnecessary – for wimps and cowards – and the thing to do was intuit using some innate power when things were ready. As a result, everything I cooked was underdone, or charred and alight. Now I time everything, even pasta, because you can just stick the flipping thing on and then wander off and really relax into another task rather than glancing at the clock every three minutes and then losing track and letting your pasta boil dry.

      2 A plastic chopping board that will go in the dishwasher. I refused to use a plastic chopping board for ages because – and this is how shallow I am – I thought they didn’t look very nice. But then I came to a point when I thought that if I had to wash up one more wooden board and breathe in the old garlic-and-onion fumes coming off it I thought I might be sick. So now I have about eight plastic boards, which I boil the shit out of in the dishwasher and which are thus always fragrant.

      3 Stainless steel mixing bowls. These are light and unbreakable and hygienic and easy to clean. I have three but would like more.

      4 A Victorinox paring knife. Once you are doing a lot of cooking you can purchase for yourself at vast expense a cook’s knife from Global or Sabatier but in the meantime, a fantastic multipurpose knife is a little one with serrated edges from Victorinox – the same people who do Swiss Army Knives. They cost about £15 from John Lewis and I have four. The only knife with which to slice tomatoes, but it has many more uses than that. After buying one you will quickly find yourself roaring ‘Where’s my little knife?!’

      5 A set of scales. Vital if you ever want to make a cake but just generally very useful if you are starting out and want/need to follow recipes very carefully. Quite quickly you learn how much 50g of butter is or 500g of bananas – but at the start, if in doubt, measure it out. The slimmest, lightest electronic scales are best, especially if you don’t have a lot of counter space, rather than those ridiculous old-fashioned ones with weights on one side and a bowl on the other. Who’s got a foot square in their kitchen to lose to a whopping great set of scales? Not me. And my kitchen is fucking huge.

      Toad in the Hole

      This is a really very easy and excellent thing to cook for a relaxed Saturday lunch or something. You can make an onion gravy and batter well in advance and then half an hour before you want to eat you whack the sausages in the pan, pour over the batter and it’s done.

      Don’t worry – or rather, you ought not to worry – that this is perhaps not a very sophisticated thing to cook. Everyone will be beside themselves to get toad in the hole for lunch and cooking lunch at home for friends (if you have some) is not about sophistication; it’s about you not screeching around the house, bright red, going ‘shit shit shit the roulade is FUCKED’ and then sitting down, taking two mouthfuls of dry beef and wailing ‘This is horrible – no-one eat it!!!!!!’

      Not that I speak from experience or anything.

      Toad in the Hole

      Batter makes enough for 4–6.

      Allow 2 sausages each for girls and 3 each for boys. I’m not being sexist and trying to make out that girls have tiny tummies and eat nothing because they’re all on diets to get thin, thin, thin so they can marry a rich man because that’s all they’re good for – I’m just saying in general, girls eat two and boys eat three.

      Of course, one girl will eat only one and another girl will have three. One boy will have only two and one girl has one and the other girl will have four. It’s just a rule of thumb, okay? Just so that you don’t go mental and buy 50 sausages for six people.

      For the batter

       120g plain flour

       ½

Скачать книгу