Retro Chicken Gorgetastic

This is one of the few dinners I make that relies heavily on processed ingredients. I’m a disgrace, I know, but the resulting dish is so comforting and delicious that it’s worth the slip in standards.

My mum got this recipe on a cooking course in the 1970s. I think the original has celery in it but I can’t stand celery so I’ve always used sweetcorn. It also used to have a more prosaic name but a housemate of mine christened it Chicken Gorgetastic about six years ago and so it has been called ever since.

New (to me) Irish food blogs

Answering some comments here reminds me I’ve been remiss in adding some of the newish Irish food blogs I’ve come across to the sidebar. (Cannot bring myself to use the word blogroll. That is one ugly word.)

First up is Deborah, aka the Humble Housewife, who is a lovely lady (NOT an American!) living in Offaly. I like her blog a lot and don’t think she should be humble at all. I am also in awe that she is even contemplating buying a fresh truffle.

Next is Abulafia at Eat Me Drink Me. Like that Alice in Wonderland reference although you’re putting the likes of me to shame by curing your own bacon!

And then there is Laura at Eat Drink Live, who is a baker in Limerick. Damn, some of her creations look good, including the Chocolate & Guinness muffins with Irish Whiskey Cream.

There is quite a merry band of food bloggers in Ireland now. Some day, we shall have to have a food bloggers’ convention and all eat lots of cake. Yay.

Sweet and sour pork

Those two pork chops were making me feel guilty. They were on the small side and languished in the freezer for weeks because every time I saw them, I’d think, ‘That’s not enough meat for the two of us’.

So they had to be used up. ‘I know,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll make sweet and sour pork and throw in loads of vegetables to bulk it out. Healthy and efficient.’

The thing is, I’ve never made sweet and sour anything from scratch before. That is how I found myself with cornflour in my hair, cement-hard balloons of batter on the ends of all my fingers and four messy plates on the counter top.

The smellier the better…

Planning holidays to the south of France at the moment and to get in the mood, I bought a headily ripe wedge of Brie de Meaux this morning. As a result, the car smells like an old man farted in it but it’s worth it. The Brie is at that stinky melting stage where you can just schmear it on crusty white bread and gorge.

I ate half of it. The other half is in the fridge. The husband will have my guts for garters when he comes home and catches the wanton stench of it (which will be at the end of our street, probably).

I had a quick look online for recipes involving brie but I’m not sure that anything beats the combo of brie and crusty French bread. Mind you, a turkey, brie and cranberry toasted sambo is pretty good too.

Incidentally, this site says Brie de Meaux goes perfectly with champagne, which would have made for a very decadent solo lunch had I known earlier.

Cooking with Bertie

Was watching MasterChef Goes Large on BBC2 this evening. The three finalists had to cook a meal in Downing St for Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and assorted hangers on.

There were lots of shots of Bertie and Tony having chats over the food. The main course was Venison Wellington (fillet of venison wrapped in puff pastry).

Bertie – all knowledgeable like – leaned into Tony and informed him that the secret of getting venison tender was to marinate it. “What about the pastry?” asked Tony. “Ah, I can’t do pastry”, said a rueful Bertie.

Patrick’s Day tips for Epicur(ious)eans

Goodness, just realised that I’ve gotten a lovely shout-out from Tanya at Epicurious.com. I’ve been visiting that site for years so I’m most chuffed with the mention. Hello to anyone who has arrived here from there. As it’s quite likely you might be American, I thought I’d give you a few tips for March 17th.

First of all, and I hate to be the one to break it to you, Irish people do not eat corned beef and cabbage. That’s an Irish-American thing. We eat bacon and cabbage, although we don’t necessarily do so on Patrick’s Day. I seem to remember we used to have roast lamb (meltingly tender Irish spring lamb, of course) for Patrick’s Day when I was a kid.

Neither do we consume green beer, green cake or any other green stuff on St Patrick’s Day, apart possibly from peas, broccoli, cabbage or other things that are supposed to be green, like the mint sauce for the lamb.

Furthermore, we do not dye the rivers green or dress entirely in green. Surprised? To see how odd the American version of Patrick’s Day seems to us, have a look at this article from one of yesterday’s Irish newspapers on the bemusing experience of being Irish in America on March 17th.

I can’t think that we eat anything else special on the day, although as children we were always given a day off from our Lenten fasting so we used to chow down on lots of sweets and chocolates. I don’t do Lent any more so that’s immaterial.

What will I eat on Saturday? Probably some lovely Irish salmon with spring vegetables and new potatoes, so the plate will be vaguely green, white & orange. Well, I have to make some sort of effort to honour the national holiday…

The world’s my Victoria sandwich

I am spring-cleaning with a vengence these days. While going through a plastic bag full of old utility bills, I found the March 2005 copy of Good Food magazine. I cut out a few recipes that caught my attention and then came to a recipe for Victoria sandwich, with eight variants on the next page. Eight sorts of cake. Mmmmmmm. Mmm, mmm, mmm.

This is my sort of recipe – easy and easily adaptable. I was happy when I found the recipe, happy when making the first variant I tried (Coconut & Lime cake), happy admiring the finished product yesterday afternoon and really indescribably happy eating it.

I’m possibly turning into some sort of sub-Jo Brand here but I really do love cake. Particularly homemade cake. Especially cake made by me. And now that I have discovered how to make buttercream frosting, the cake world is my oyster. Or my Victoria sandwich.

Note on the recipe: I got creamed coconut in the English Market. Not sure where else you might find it. I didn’t add Malibu to the frosting. I can think of no inducement that would convince me to have a bottle of Malibu in the house, not even as a finishing touch for this cake.

Getting the veggies in: chilli beef stirfry

Total health kick going on around these parts so I’m on the constant hunt for recipes that allow you to bung in as many veggies as possible. Today I went with this one: Chilli Beef Stir Fry by Ching He-Huang, who has a show called Ching’s Kitchen on UKTV Food, although I can’t say I’ve seen it.

I left out the baby corn, used green beans instead of mangetout and added half an onion, half a yellow pepper and some carrot batons. Oh, and used sesame oil as I seem to have run out of groundnut.

Not only was it easy and tasty but once eaten, left us feeling all healthy and virtuous. Super-smug, basically. This was despite the fact that I was rushing a bit, misread the recipe and glugged in too much soy sauce and rice wine so the resulting sauce was rather runny.

It occurs to me that downing two glasses of wine after this stir-fry probably cancelled out all the smug-making healthiness. Oops.