My First Interview!

It's amazing how quickly this blog has taken off. The press is overwhelming. I was actually interviewed by Stephen Fry last night! A dream come true. Here's a clip:

I'll let you know when the whole show goes to air.

Bucket Of Mussels With Prawns On The Side OR Socialization

No, I didn’t miss a day. I was out. I still cooked though! A lovely friend and I met up with a big pot of mussels and a few handfuls of prawns. We didn’t really have a recipe. It went something like this

Bucket Of Mussels With Prawns On The Side

1 big bucket of mussels, well cleaned
2 handfuls of prawns

An unholy amount of garlic, chopped
An obscene amount of butter
A bottle of white wine

Divide the garlic and butter between a pot with a lid and a small frying pan. Use your judgement. (Clue: more goes in the pot.) Gently saute the garlic until soft and fragrant. Dump the mussels in the pot, pour in half the bottle of wine, and cover. Start drinking the other half of the bottle, obviously. Dump the prawns in the frying pan and keep stirring until lovely and pink.  Check to see if the mussels are opening, it shouldn’t take more than six minutes or so. Throw out anything that hasn’t opened and pour the mussels and the lovely winey broth into bowls. Stick the prawns on a plate and wish you'd bought more, because those mothers shrink like nobody's business.

Eat everything with a large amount of crusty white bread. Suggest buttering the bread and shamelessly stare your friend down when she gives you a horrified face because “there’s all the butter already everywhere all over everything!” and just go ahead and butter it. Dip your buttered bread into the buttery sauce.

No vegetables were harmed in the making of this dinner. An undisclosed further amount of wine may have been consumed.

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After our extremely healthy seafood dinner, we headed out to see a play that was entirely in a language I don’t understand. It was fascinating to try and figure out what was going on just from facial expressions and gestures and tone of voice. I don’t think I’ve ever paid such close attention to a play. I was sitting forward in my seat and staring, and it occurred to me that this may be why small babies look so bugged out all the time. “GIVE ME SOME CONTEXT, GUYS!!!” I enjoyed it. Didn't understand a single word, but there were a few puppets and a couple of minor explosions and really that’s all it takes for me to call it a good night out.

The boys of the group were heading to a bar, but my pal and I were feeling lazy and full of seafood, so we may or may not have stopped at the off licence for another bottle of wine before heading back to her house. She offered me some of her Reese's Pieces and suddenly the only thing to do was to watch E.T. So we did exactly that, after purchasing an undisclosed further amount of Reese's Pieces. I have to say I do not suggest pairing Reese's Pieces with a young Cabernet Sauvignon. Both elements suffer somewhat.

As homesick as I am right now what with the broken heart and the holidays coming up, it might not have been the best choice of film. We were just getting to the really sad part of the movie and were sniffling sad peanuty/winey scented sniffles when the boys arrived back in. If they had shown up five minutes later I am pretty sure they would have found us weeping into the carpet. They kind of ruined the last ten minutes with their ceaseless mockery, but that is probably just as well. 

Oh Grumpy Cat, You Make My Life Better

We spent the rest of the night talking and laughing and making plans for projects, and when I fell asleep on their couch it was as a slightly less broken-hearted girl. Loving yourself is easier when you take the time to see and appreciate how much other people love you.

Butternut Squash Stuffed with Self-Esteem

And so the experiment begins.

I headed out to the grocery store with a heavy heart and a light wallet. Breaking up hurts in more ways than one. I wanted to cook something cheap, but it had to be nice, seeing as this was my first date with myself and I’m not that easily impressed. (Amused, yes. Impressed, no.)

Since my stomach is only partially on message with this whole project, I wanted something comforting and gentle. But it needed to have flavour as well, or I was never going to be interested. I kind of wanted ravioli, but that was too easy. I am sure I will eat my bodyweight in pasta over the next year, but I wanted to start off right.

I seized on butternut squash. It’s a childhood favourite of mine, but someone wasn’t fond of it, so it’s been a while since I’ve cooked it. So it was a good choice, for a number of reasons. A nice stuffed squash. Okay. I pondered the squash on offer, picking up an especially deformed one and briefly thinking melodramatic thoughts which I am afraid may have been an analysis of my life expressed in the ugliness of, well, squash. Then I snapped out of it and picked up the most beautiful squash there. Because I love myself, and I deserve gorgeous vegetables, damn it.  

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Butternut Squash Stuffed with Self-Esteem (and Spinach)

1 medium butternut squash, cut lengthwise in half
1 knob of butter (let your conscience guide you. I have no conscience when it comes to butter.)
Freshly ground sea salt and pepper
3 tbsp water

small handful of pine nuts
another knob of butter (you know the drill)
½ onion
½ red pepper
a few big handfuls of baby spinach

100g feta cheese, crumbled

Take your biggest, strongest knife, and slice your squash neatly in half. Try not to be reminded of the way your heart was recently severed in a similar fashion. Then stab each half repeatedly and with gusto. You might find this therapeutic, but don’t go overboard.. Scoop out any seeds in the little cavity at the bottom and discard. Put a little bit of butter in each of the depressions (the depressions in the squash, silly. Leave your depression out of this.) and smear the rest of the butter all over the squash. Season well with salt and pepper. Lay the squash in a baking dish and add the water to the dish to keep it from drying out. Stick it in the oven at 150c for about half an hour, or until tender. Go on, you can stab it some more to check.

About 15 minutes into the cooking, heat a frying pan on high. Scatter in the pine nuts and toast gently in the dry pan until golden. Make sure you keep stirring them, because they’re expensive and they taste terrible burnt. When done, put them aside and return the pan to the heat. Add the rest of the butter, the onion and the peppers. Cook, stirring briskly, and allowing them to char a little (only a little). Dump in the spinach and cook it down until it’s completely wilted and dark and the excess water has boiled off. Remove from heat.

To assemble, place ½ the squash on a plate. (set the other one aside to eat some other way tomorrow. It will make a good lunch base.) Use a fork to break up and fluff the squash inside its rind, and scatter with ½ the feta cheese. Scoop the veg mixture over the squash and top with the rest of the feta cheese, the pine nuts, and more salt and pepper. Serve. (Yourself.)

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I have to say, it was a success. I was actually impressed. All the colours together were almost offensively cheerful. Everyone knows that the tang of feta goes well with spinach, but it was also great partner to the sweet mellow taste of the squash. It was a big dinner, but I ate it all. I felt virtuous because I am pretty sure I got all my five-a-day in one go, but it was actually really delicious.

Edit! A friend made the recipe and took a picture! I'm so proud I could burst. This marks the very first time someone other than me has made one of my recipes! Isn't it pretty?

The Last Lamb Shanks OR The Saddest Food Blogger In The World

A week ago today, my fiance called it all off.

It wasn’t a total surprise. It was a long and difficult relationship, and this wasn't its first iteration. We’d been struggling. I didn’t think we were finished trying. He did. Anyway, on that day it felt like a total surprise. I guess it always is when something finally ends.

Earlier that afternoon I’d gotten off work with a few hours to spare. It was freezing cold and raining and the most November-miserable day imaginable. Before going home, I decided that today would be a great day for cooking lamb shanks. Old fashioned, rich, slow-cooked, nourishing and comforting. I hadn’t ever made them before, but in my head it was a perfect wintery wet day dinner. I did a bit of googling, synthesized some idea of a recipe in my mind, and headed out to the shops. I trotted around to the butcher, the wine merchant, and the grocer, (Yes, I live in Quainty McYuppieville) joyfully and recklessly slinging ingredients into my bag. I may even have been humming. I felt like a very competent little housewife with a serious case of the warm fuzzies already, and I hadn’t even opened the wine yet.

I got home and started chopping and mixing and cooking and tasting, full of love and hope. Sure, things had been tough. Sure, there was work to do. But we loved each other so much. We had couples therapy scheduled later that night, and I knew when we came home from that, these lamb shanks would be a metaphor for all the good things we still had going for us, for a future full of warmth and deliciousness and good smells. When he tasted these lamb shanks, he’d be inspired to do whatever it took to get us to that future. I was supremely proud of myself, envisioning how much praise and affection I would get from my man when he got home and tasted what I had wrought. I put the casserole into the oven with a self-satisfied glow. Now it just had to cook for three hours.

Well, in those three hours, my world fell apart. After some very, very, very, very unpleasant scenes, which I will spare us all, he reheated some lamb shanks. By all reports they were incredible. I couldn’t eat. In what I think was an attempt at humour, he asked if he could have the recipe.

In the fog of red wine and snotty crying and passive aggression that followed, I typed this up:
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The Last Lamb Shanks
(Adapted from this less emotional recipe)

4 lamb shanks
Fresh ground salt and pepper
Glug olive oil
2 bay leaves
3 sprigs fresh rosemary

1 large onion (sliced)
4 stalks celery (roughly chopped)
2 large carrots (sliced into ¼ inch rounds)
8 cloves garlic (minced)

2 bottles of red wine (one for the recipe, one for you)
2 cups beef stock
3 tbsp soft brown sugar
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Season the lamb shanks with huge amounts of salt and pepper and sprinkle all over with flour. Brown them in the oil in a frying pan over medium high heat until well browned and sealed. Think about the past. Open one of the bottles of wine, and pour a large glass.

Move the shanks to a large casserole dish and forget about them for a while. Forget the past for a while, too. If you are having trouble, pour another glass of wine and neck it.

Put all the veg and bay leaves and rosemary into the pan you were browning the lamb shanks in, and consider all of your possible failings and how they have led you to this sorry state of affairs. Remember to include things that you did by accident and things that you did long ago when you were young and f*cked up. Wonder if having been omniscient would have changed things. Give up, because there are no rhetorical questions in this recipe.

Check if the onions and stuff are caramelizing. If they are then pour in the whole bottle of wine you haven’t opened yet. Resist saving some for yourself. You already have a bottle. If you really want a drink, pour another glass from that first bottle. If you run out, the off-license is open until ten.

Add the beef stock, sugar and vinegar. Let it all boil gently for a few minutes to think about its sins. Think about your sins. Drink.

Is there any wine left in the first bottle? Drink it. You should probably go to the liquor store. Because this shit has to cook for three hours and that’s a long time. Despair a little bit. Stir the stuff in the pan for a very long time but not as long as the years you have invested in this relationship. Don’t think about that if you can help it. If you can’t help it then drink the rest of the first bottle or if it’s already gone, come back from the off-license with a new one and open it. Drink.

Are you back?
Okay, pour all this stuff over the lamb shanks in the casserole dish.

Put it in the oven at 160c and cook that shit for three hours, turning occasionally.When the meat falls off the bone, your relationship and the lamb shanks are finished.

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Okay, it was dark, but it made me laugh a little bit. I couldn’t believe that I was laughing in one of the worst moments of my life.

The next few days were a blur of vodka and cigarettes and apartment hunting and relationship autopsies and moving all your shit around in your new ex’s car in black plastic bags and crying very quietly in your new rented room and all the other usual grotesque fug of a break-up. I didn’t eat. Couldn’t eat. Was not interested in eating.

Eventually I had to eat. Lightheadedness, irritability and headaches all add depth and authenticity to the broken-hearted experience, but eventually the body rebels and tells you to get a grip and put some food into it before it gives you something to REALLY cry about. I went and got some food. Stupid, tasteless, crappy cheap food that I didn’t have to waste any time preparing. (I had a very busy schedule of misery planned, you see.) I shoveled it into my mouth resentfully, choking it down, with a hateful kind of pentameter chanting in my head:

Get IT in YOUR face YOU useLESS butt-HEAD
Eat THE stooPID food. (YOU will DIE aLONE)

And so on. Rinse/repeat every meal. That’s kind of how it's been all week, up until now. My friends (and therapist, natch) have all been amazing. They all have variations of the same great advice, that advice that you generally hear after breakups. One friend stated it particularly well:

“I wonder what you could accomplish if you redirected that passion into caring for yourself...you need to give yourself the love that you’ve been giving to other people, and you need to give yourself the space to learn how to do that.”

Which, yeah, makes a lot of sense. But to be honest, I just couldn’t think of HOW, practically, you’re supposed to go about that. I can’t just order myself to love myself. I could sit in front of the mirror and declare my undying devotion and adoration for myself, but I would feel stupid. I can’t sit beside myself on the couch and hold myself close, whispering sweet nothings into my own ear. The more I thought about it, the creepier and more insane and useless it all started to feel.

And then, a little voice said: food.

To which I said: shut up. Haven’t I already made it clear that I am not a comfort eater? That sadness makes my stomach crunch up into an angry bald ferret, twisting itself over and over with fury, biting its tail and spitting bile through its jagged little yellow teeth? I don’t WANT food, stupid. Food won’t make me feel loved. And just because I am turning thirty next month doesn’t make me Bridget Jones. So shut up.

And the little voice said: food. Just think about it, okay? And no one has mentioned your age, or Bridget Jones. Anyway, she was eight years older than you.

Which was nice to hear and made me feel a little better.  

So I did think about it.

I thought about how I’ve always made a joke about how much I hate cooking for one, that there’s no fun in it. How I’ve sneered at “Cooking for One” books, smugly shaking my head, thinking: Sad.

When I have no one to cook for, I eat yogurt and potato chips and cereal from the box. Not a whole lot else, really. Toast sometimes. 

Sad.

I thought about the passion and joy that I’ve always brought to cooking for people that I love. The thrill of planning it, preparing it, and serving it. The love and forgiveness and hope for the future that I had poured into those f*cking lamb shanks last f*cking Wednesday.

And I didn’t even eat them. 

How’s that for a metaphor, self? Got it? 

Okay then. I’ll cook for me. That’s how I’ll show myself how much I love myself. Every night that I am home, for the next, say, six months, I will plan and cook and eat a proper dinner. With proper ingredients. And I will eat it.

And I every day I will write about it, because that’s what I do. And because my sister told me to, and my sister is smart.

Bon appetit, self.