Week 34 - Food or Drink - Andrew

Picture the scene. It's 4pm Sunday evening. The fear of work is seeping through the air of your living room. Spiritually, you, and anyone you love are a spacemen, drifting without a tether, further and further away from the world. 

Here is my solution, in two meals from one supermarket shop. It's a roast dinner, amped up to bring you back to earth. 

Ingredients:

1 Chicken, 1600g. The best you can get at 5pm on a Sunday. Like, you would probably buy a better chicken at a farmers market on a Saturday morning, but this is a dinner of healing and comfort, not inadequacy. Buy a chicken, feel good about it.

Garlic, you'll need a lot - at least a whole head.

Fresh Thyme - I grow and kill those supermarket fresh herb plants. This is because I want to be the sort of person who grows fresh herbs. Instead, I am an architect of herbal genocide.

A lemon - no notes, just buy a lemon. Lemon and thyme and garlic is probably an ancient remedy for unease and depression.

Two sticks of Celery

A carrot

a couple of small onions.

Salt

Pepper

Olive Oil

Potatoes. Take as many as you think you should eat, multiply by the number of people and add more.

Some Goosefat - it keeps forever, buy a jar, use it when you make roasts, ignore it the rest of the time. If you ever make duck, keep the fat in a clean jar and use that here. If you don't want to do this, use olive oil. Remember, this is a dinner for comfort.

Peas, frozen. (I'm not going to mention these again, just do them per the bag, boil them up and throw them on a plate. If you're really feeling bereft, mid-boil, strain the water out of the pan, then throw a half-teaspoon full of butter back in with the peas.)


Now, you're back from the shops. You should be ready to go. Take a minute, make some tea. If you're sensible, you bought some sort of fizzy water, or a coke, or something cool and non-alcoholic while you were in the shop. Drink that, and think about the task ahead of you. This will be all right. It's a comforting job. People have done this for millions of years. Look at your loved ones. They are, much like you, in a state of chaos. 

Preheat the oven to 200. You've begun!


Potatoes

1) Peel the potatoes. That's the worst part, and now it's done.

2) Bin the peels, cut the potatoes in half, and chuck them in a microwave-safe bowl, with a half cup of water in the bottom, cover and nuke them for 5 minutes.

3) Heat the goosefat in a roasting tray.

4) When the potatoes are nuked, take them out of the bowl, let them steam for a moment, then put them into the roasting tray. Shake them around, to cover them in the oil - then, bam, back in the oven.

Chicken

1) Roughly chop your carrot, celery and onion. You're not going for fancy, just a pile of cubed vegetables. Make the veg into a pile in the roasting tray. You'll put the chicken on top of this, presently.

2) Cut your lemon in half - around the equator. Stab one half of the lemon with the tip of a knife. Over and over again. Smell it. Zest the other (non stabbed) half. You might go ahead, and chop that into bits, and throw it into the bottom of the roasting tray. Why waste anything?

3) Chop, or press, or mush, or grate your garlic. I have a grater, use what you want. Throw that in a bowl, with a load of salt, a good chunk of thyme leaves, the lemon zest and some pepper. Pour in some olive oil, and stir it to make a paste of deliciousness.

4) Rub the paste all over the chicken. Jam a lemon up its arse, jam some of the thyme sprigs up there while you're at it. Look at it, all tied up, covered in oil with a lemon up its hoop. More comforting than it should be, right?

5) Put the kinky chicken on the pile of veg, and put it in the oven.

6) Here's how I do it, but lots of people do it differently. 20-25 mins at 200, then down to 160 for an hour. The chicken on one shelf, the potatoes on the shelf below.

7) Once the chicken is done, take it out. Take it out of the roasting tin, cover it with foil, and it let it sit. I bet it smells amazing.

Finishing up

1) Jam the temperature way, way up on the potatoes. They will be creamy and delicious in the middle. Going in at a high temperature now will just add a final colour and crisp to the outside.

2) After ten, fifteen minutes, start to carve the chicken. This is easy to fuck up, but here's what you're looking for at the end:

- 2 wings
- 2 drumsticks
- 2 Thigh joints
- 2 large breast pieces (you can half these)

You'll need a really sharp knife. To start, cut the wings off, then the legs (at the hip joint). Separate the drumsticks and the thighs (the knee). Here's the hard part. Run your knife up the spine. Then cut the breasts off. Go as deep as you can, before you hit bone.

3) Take your potatoes, peas, and chicken. Put them on a plate, and give them to people you love. You'll start to feel human. This is home. You are alive. Everything is ok.

Postscript.

Do this right, and you'll be left with a chicken carcass. That chicken died so you could eat it. You owe it to the chicken to eat every single bit of it. Even if it was a weird Tesco battery chicken.

Here's what you do:

Get your biggest pot.

Take your chicken carcass, and that vegetable mountain that you had, and any juice lying around the bottom of the roasting tray, and throw them in the pot.

Grab some fresh herbs, throw them in the pot. Cut up an onion, throw that in there too. Salt and pepper. Any garlic you have around, give it a wallop with the side of a knife and throw it in. A glass of white wine, if you have a bottle open, will do nicely - don't open one especially though.

Fill the pot with water, stick it on a low heat until you're about to go to bed. Then strain it. Voila, chicken stock.

Tomorrow evening, saute an onion and a grated carrot, pour in the chicken stock, throw in some of the leftover chicken and a handful of noodles. Simmer the lot of it until the noodles are soft. That'll cure you of the worst of a Monday.

Week 8 - Andy - Recipe

I cook a lot. Maybe obsessively.  I would really like to become good at it. Really, classically, years of humiliation and discipline, good. I don’t just want one or two signature dishes, or be able to cobble together something delicious from the fridge. I want to be able to produce perfect, photogenic golden chicken breasts from copper pans in the french countryside.

At this point, I’m a little part of the way there. I can confidently knock up a sauce that will hold together on a plate, I can deliver a well cooked piece of fish, on top of a salad that will make you forget that you’re on a diet. I can plate up a decent meal from a few different national cuisines, and I’m finally happy with the way I roast a chicken. Also, I can make a beautiful rose from a tomato skin.

One - potentially concerning -  aspect of this obsession is that I’m mostly doing it alone. Without a mentor, I’m trying to learn how become  a classical chef from books. I’ve learned that most cookbooks follow a standard formula - probably set down by Julia Child. She explains how to cook, and encourages anyone to follow suit. Her recipes are complicated, and unforgiving, but she’s helpful, and through the prose, you have the sense that she wants you to succeed.

But I don’t really believe that i’ve learned anything until it’s been humiliated and drilled into me through failure - nothing worthwhile ever comes easy. Jamie Oliver grinning and gently reminding me to throw a glug of olive oil onto a pan while I’m knocking up ‘Jamie’s Gorgeous Slow Cooked Duck Pasta’ doesn’t give me the full operatic range of emotions I’m looking for.

Last year, I found a book - or maybe it found me - called The New Complete Techniques, by Jacques Pepin.

Jaqcues Pepin is a french chef. The inside jacket of his own book (his own book!) says the following: “Jacques Pepin is universally lauded as the grand master of culinary technique”. The Complete Techniques is 734 pages of step by step techniques to produce exactly the kind of precise, perfect food that I’m looking to feed to people I like. It isn’t just recipes, but basic skills, like how to Prepare Marrow or how to Eviscerate a Chicken or Other Poultry. (For when you have someone coming over in twenty minutes, and only a pigeon full of viscera in the fridge)

Pepin has made me a better cook. This book has provoked huge changes to our small apartment kitchen. Brunch went from bacon sandwiches to eggs benedict, with homemade hollandaise. Duck breasts went from intimidating to perfectly seared. Chickens were boned, apples cored and carrots were julienned in ways and at speeds never before seen.

Pepin is the printed mentor I’ve been looking for. When I’m making a dinner, always, I’m thinking ‘What would Pepin do?’ Am I skimming my coq au vin correctly? (by the way - skim your coq au vin, trust me - actually, don’t trust me, trust Pepin!)

But like every good mentor, he’s not just looking to help me cook better. He’s trying to help me grow as a person.

Dotted throughout the book, Pepin has decided to stick in photos of himself, overlaid with hints and tips. This isn’t sensible, Julia Child advice - ‘Make sure all the ingredients for your mayonnaise are the same temperature before beginning’. These are small sermons from Pepin, instructing the reader on living a better life. For instance, under Pepin’s recipe for Fast Brown Stock, he says "Any good cook knows that good cooking and good health are inseperable".

So, with Pepin ringing in my ears, I have been trying to jog more. I’ve found that taking exercise every day, either walking to the train, cycling to work, or going for a jog has allowed me to be more focused and clear. This translates into the confidence with which I pan fry a sea bream.

Pepin is quick to praise and criticize, encourage and discipline - after all, in his own words: “There is nothing more exhilarating than a great chef in action. There is nothing so frightening as a bad chef in charge of the stove”.

Even when I’m pouring milk onto cereal, I can feel Pepin looking at me, and i wonder if he’s exhilarated, or frightened.

And then, sometimes, Pepin’s advice seeps into my real life. When I’m cycling, or talking to a client at work, or If i’m thinking about changing the brake pads on my car, I can hear Pepin. Most of his advice is very clearly based on one principle. Learn the basics. Build on a strong foundation. In fact, in Pepin’s words - “You may be very imaginative and creative in the kitchen, but you cannot take advantage of those qualities if you don’t know the basics’.

And then, on one page, Pepin casually gave me advice I would nearly have tattooed across my back, on how to deal with the chaos of a difficult year - Advice I came back to again and again. Pepin’s version of ‘Keep on keeping on’.

"Creation in the kitchen follows your mood. Somedays are clear and sunny, some dark and cloudy. The only control is technique."

PS - Pepin had the following to say about Thing a week: To have talent in the kitchen without technique is like being a great writer without possessing the mechanics of language - an impossible struggle.

Pepin is saying that I need to re-read Elements of Style, and study up on story structure before throwing together another chapter on hitmen in run-down hotels.

Week 8 - Laura - Recipe

Sara tasted Huguenot Torte for the first time on our honeymoon, in a fancy restaurant on a former slave plantation in South Carolina. She declared herself in love, before quickly qualifying the declaration by explaining that falling in love with food was an entirely different thing and wouldn’t affect her love for me at all.

I still remember the number of bookshops we had to trawl through before we eventually found a cookbook with the recipe in a marketplace the day before we left.

I can’t think of Huguenot Torte without thinking of Sara. She couldn’t wait to try her hand at making it as soon as we got home, and after that first successful trial it became a Kirwan family favourite. ‘Huge No Tart’ Beth used to call it when she was a little girl, trying to twist her tongue around strange words. But like father like daughter, she always welcomed the dessert with the same wildly enthusiastic ‘yes please’ that I did.

The ten weeks since Sara died is the longest I’ve gone without Huguenot Torte in 23 years. There’s been no place for its sweet stickiness, even if I knew how to make it. I’ve been falling from the awful emptiness of one day without Sara to the next, living - no, just not dying- on a mixture of Cornflakes and Domino’s.

It’s been 66 days since I’ve seen Beth. Like me, she’s been wrestling grief alone. She went back to college the day after the funeral. She tells me during stilted conversations on the phone that the end of semester is a busy time, but assignments and exams never stopped her coming home for the odd dinner before.

She’s coming by tonight. She says it’s just a quick stop to pick up some textbooks, but enough of the fog has lifted for me to know I have to do something to stop losing her too.

Being more au fait with football than food, I’m not sure my attempt at dessert has been very good. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to do. Sara would know whether unsalted butter was strictly necessary, or whether cheating with the regular kind was ok. My translation of what a quarter cup of all-purpose flour is was a rough guess at best. I’ve no idea what a two quart baking dish looks like, and I know I added some tears that the recipe didn’t call for into the vanilla extract.

The sound of the back door opening jolts me from my reverie and suddenly Beth is in the kitchen. Looking straight past me, she sees my attempt at Huguenot Torte sitting on the hob.

‘Oh Dad, it never looked like that when Mum made it,” she whispers tearfully, allowing herself to fall into my desperate hug.

As my tears fall into Beth’s hair I know that I’ve lost Huguenot Torte and Sara forever. But I think I’ve just found my little girl again.