SIGN WITH AN E

We might still be wearing shorts and sandals, but it becomes cleverer by the day to carry an extra layer with you, just in case. (Of course some of us are clever in that way all year round – or paranoid). Mornings are darker, and when the sun does announce itself, it comes with an icy underlining. Just between yesterday and today one of our basil plants has gone from a wondrous green mass to a rather pitiful brown stem with some scrawny leaves hanging on for their dear basil-ness.

Anyway, we are prepared. In fact, you’d think we were in the deep of winter with the kind of feasts that have graced our kitchen table in the last week or so. First there was Glen with his duck. One great can of confit straight from France:

If you look carefully, you’ll see the legs brimming in their own fat in the background. And here’s a mess I made of the same kind of can a few years ago, which really was a mess, but you get the idea of the kind of meat we’re talking about:

Glen’s duck the other night was rather more… intact. And damn fine. Perhaps more especially fine were the frites that went with the duck, twice fried in duck fat. Crispy, salty, frite-heaven.

Our sailor has a thing for duck. I do too, but not to the extent of imagining it in ice cream. I kid you not. In fact, imagine any form of food, and Glen will imagine a duck-version of it. I think it may be the dual influence of the ice cream machine which we did that righteous stout number in, and me forcing him to watch Heston Blumenthal. Heston would be proud of Glen’s ideas.

The next day we had slow-baked ribs, by yours truly. In a gingerbeer barbecue sauce, with a hunk of cornbread and a dollop of mighty spicy beans.

For Sunday lunch we enjoyed leftovers while a batch of brownies was doing that chocolatey thing they do in the oven and to the whole house. For dinner the philosophe cooked a Thai chicken curry that Glen ate three portions of, and then we tricked him into having his sixth brownie for dessert. He was still eating frozen brownies yesterday (and to be fair, so were the rest of us).

Today after lunch I meant to come back to work, but I’ve had another of Glen and my hairbrained schemes churning (!!) about for a few days, and it was time to engage: rice pudding ice cream. I believe there are recipes out there – and our first brain hurricane involved a kulfi-type number, flavoured with cardamom and pistachio – but once I started making the rice pudding, I couldn’t get my favourite childhood flavour off my fantasy tastebuds. When my mother made rice pudding for ris-a-la-mande, the Danish Christmas pudding (cold, mixed with almonds and cream, eaten with hot cherry sauce), my treat was to have a bowl of the hot stuff with a blob of butter and a generous sprinkling of cinnamon sugar (which is also how thousands of Danes eat the stuff when it’s not for Christmas Eve).

I had a bit of a Heston moment myself, trying to figure out how to get the taste of melted butter and cinnamon sugar into an ice cream. I needed something between burnt butter and caramel. So I put some sugar in a pan and melted that down till it started getting dark, then added butter and let that cook until the whole thing started smelling as if it was about to burn, then a splash of cream and a couple of teaspoons of cinnamon, and let all that simmer until it was nice and thick.

There’s no point in modesty here. This stuff is perfect. It’s so good it’s naughty. Tomorrow we churn.

So I’m sitting here pretending to work, but really scheming about what to make for dinner, and I end up reading a recipe on MaverickEats for pasta with sardines and goat’s cheese (how I got there is one of the great things about interwebbing and social networking – I’m mentally scanning through what’s in the kitchen, I know I want to make pasta, and I’m keen on using the tin of sardines in the cupboard, then I remember there’s goat’s cheese too, which I love, but can goat’s cheese and sardines work? Has anyone else out there been brave enough to try? Go google, and there you go: I’m not crazy after all!).

Anyhow, so the recipe looks good (I haven’t yet decided if it’ll work for the Philosophe, though usually when I assure him I didn’t invent it myself he loses his fear of some of my wierder concoctions), but it’s important to read comments too. Here’s the first one, from “costa rica”:

‘This article is fantastic; the information you show us is very interesting and is really good written. It’s just great!! Do you want to know something more? Read it… Glass Bongs and Bong featuring Herbal Smoke, water bongs, bongs online head shop, Marijuana Alternative,glass water bongs, Hashish, Ganja, homemade bongs, Smokeshop, cannibis, legal smoking alternatives for herbal highs and aphrodisia. http://www.headshopinternational.com‘

The second comment is in Chinese, so there’s no intel to be had on the sardines and goat’s cheese combo. Now I just have a head full of bongs. I guess the philosophe will have to be brave tonight.

Something really strange happened to me last night. The philosophe was out of town for the night, and Mogwai and I were looking forward to sharing a nice big girly bowl of popcorn in front of the box, like we often do when we’re alone.

I put the kernels in the pot, turned on the stove, poured myself a glass of wine, and then I stopped. And looked at dinner:

I was unmoved. Truly and deeply unmoved. Which is a sad state to be in before you eat.

Then I did the most doctoral thing I may have done yet. Calm, but swiftly, and with surgical precision I rolled a cigarette, lit it, had a sip of wine, went to the fridge and got out a side of lightly smoked salmon that happened to be lurking in there, along with some salad leaves, little crunchy cucumbers, peppadews, and horseradish. I put a pan on the stove and let it get nice and smokin’ hot and then I seared that salmon until it was perfectly cooked and moist.

I lifted it out to rest and deglazed the pan with a touch of wine and a dollop of horseradish, a squeeze of lemon and a touch of maple syrup. Then I had another drag and a sip, and went about arranging the greens and reds in my bowl, which I topped with the flaked, now cooled salmon, and that delicious dressing.

If there was a satisfacto-meter to measure how you feel after eating a meal, I’m sure that salmon salad would have scored a righteous 10, while a bowl of salty nothingness couldn’t have gotten past a 5. I saved that night.

I’m not sure what to do about the popcorn, which I’ve had a special relationship to for the longest time. Maybe it’s time to say goodbye. Or maybe it was just that salmon calling me in the fridge.

Tonight will have to tell: I ate the rest of the salmon for lunch, and after that the fridge is pretty much empty. (Well, except for cheese and salami, which can be combined in all manners of goodness, like pasta, or toasted cheese…)

Will the popcorn get me yet? I don’t like cricket either, or reggae…

(Mogwai remains hopeful. But we both wish the philosophe would hurry up and come home).

It is a curiosity of contempoary media that things get recycled all the time (how eco-friendly!), even when it clearly ain’t “news” – which is often enough doubtful anyway, but at least some stuff published is actually “new”. So today the Telegraph had a sidebar slideshow on “Religious Imagery in everyday life” for no apparent reason. We’ve all seen the Turin shroud – ‘the grandaddy of all holy apparitions’ (!!!) – the famous grilled cheese sandwich…. in fact what is up with the holys appearing in food? Check out this aubergine:

(That says Allah!)

and this egg:

(That says Allah too!)

And here is the Virgin Mary in a window:

Wow… Hello!!! Do these people really believe that if a fictional virginal mother of a fictional saviour of the world were to appear to them, that she would assume the most easily replicable iconic image – ie. a line drawing – of herself?

Come, Feuerbach, speak:

‘But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signifed, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence … illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proporation as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.’

That’s Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach on The Essence of Christianity, 1841.

1841. That’s 168 years ago. What progress mankind has made! Such progress, evidently, that some of the really dim even believe that their religions are threatened: tired of hearing chefs go on about Kosher salt, some fool has now started to market Christian salt. “This is about keeping Christianity in front of the public so that it doesn’t die,” he said, “I want to keep Christianity on the table.” Well, good luck to you, Rev. Saltshaker, I’m sure your salt is going to change the world.

Meanwhile, I just enjoyed a piece of cheesecake that looked like Micheal Jackson’s nose on a bad day. It was delicious. Happy Friday.

Years ago, I used to cook for people all the time – anyone willing to eat, really, as long as I didn’t have to. Cooking was a way of being around food without the scary business of having to ingest it.

Fortunately those years are long gone, and I continue to cook, but now I cannot serve food that I have not tasted myself. (Come to think of it, going to chef school was the turning point for that: it was quickly drummed into us that we have to taste everything we cooked – ugh, I still remember the chewy softness of thymus glands, known more commonly and euphemistically as sweetbreads. Like tripe, they are probably not bad, but the idea is too much for me.)

So last Friday, after the fiasco of grilling my cake the day before, I was forced (hands tied and all) to have a piece for for breakfast, just to make sure it would still do to serve to people. It did well enough, particularly once smothered with a good layer of chocolate. Before 9am, I had also enjoyed the sticky sweetness of the plum coconut cake (just in case anyone was allergic to chocolate, you see).

This morning breakfast was what came out of the oven yesterday afternoon: peanut butter cookies, and a slice of lemon-and-thyme cake, very light and moist, as it was made with olive oil instead of butter.

The truth is, I love cake for breakfast. And how much better is a good piece of cake than a crap piece of pastry, or a boring slice of toast with peanut butter?

I particularly love the times I have to martyr myself for my friends: just the other day I spent the early morning making truffles for a friend’s birthday. Well, “truffles” is perhaps less accurate than “seriously boozy pernod balls” (made with a leftover aniseed cake). Think rumballs made with pernod. And when you make cake balls, it’s important that they have 12 hours (at least) to sit and firm up, and for the flavours to “mature”. Still, a busy day ahead meant I had to breakfast on the still slightly soggy (= seriously boozy) mixture. It was delicious, and it turned out to be a fine day indeed. (Obviously).