The Wednesday Gourmet

In this episode, I, The Wednesday Gourmet, creator-in-chief of Gourmet Wednesday (scroll down for what the heck all that means) shall attempt to cook the delectably sounding Lacot, which is what I call the dish that is made from Linguine, Anchovies, Capers, Olives and Tomato, but it sounds a bit more exotic than simply naming the ingredients. There’s garlic and parsley involved too but they’re quite basic ingredients and there was no room for them in the name; no-one is going to want to eat Catplog.

To begin: mix a zero or a plus alcohol drink. Take a sip. Good? Good. Take a small pot and place on a low heat. Into this pot, put 2 cloves of chopped garlic and 5 chopped anchovies. Keep the heat low on them til they mix nicely, like the drink.

Then add your chopped black olives – kalamata are best as they are nice and salty but its not a total kalamata if you can’t get them; any black olives will do but you might want to add a touch more salt in the final seasoning. Next, fire in the teeny little capers, the can of tomaytoes – the chopped kind are better than plum in this dish as they mix better throughout. Add salt and pepper. This needs about 25 mins all a-simmer.

Have another sip of the drink. Mmm. Lovely.

Put a large pan on a medium heat with lots of boiling water in it. Add a pinch of salt and a drop or three of oil. When properly boiling, add in your linguine and cook without a lid til al dente. Say 12-15 mins all told. Keep a half cup of the pasta water and drain. Toss your sauce with your pasta, adding pasta water as you see fit. Table that beautiful bomb. Start chewing. And remember, 25 minutes from start to finish; this is faster – and healthier – than ordering from the local take away. Your arteries will thank you.

Hello. Time for another installment of Gourmet Wednesday from this savoury cursor. (Gordon the tv chef is the suavery curser.) When trying to knock the stuffing out of a week that seems never-ending, I – The Wednesday Gourmet – find that cooking a special meal later on a Wednesday evening for yourself and your special one, does the trick. Ease off the throttle, step out of the rat race, cool one’s jets awhile. A mixed drink or a glass of wine occasionally feature. Pretending to be your favourite celebrity chef (this time I’m Keith Floyd) makes the whole thing more fun, which takes the pressure off, so to speak; the less serious you take yourself when you’re cooking, the easier it is. You are allowed to fail the fish-pie exam, you can make a horse’s collar of the collar of beef, or, difficult as it may seem, a mess of the mash (too milky or too lumpy).

For any Gourmet Wednesday meal you will need:

• To send the kids / teenagers / live-in relative to the comfortably renovated attic / shed / or, if its a warm summer’s night, and you have one, the greenhouse; one can only imagine the Saki-like hilarity that would ensue if they all ended up in the same place
• possession of the undisturbed, peaceful kitchen to yourselves
• to prep (make a serious mess),
• cook (burn and / or undercook)
• eat (just about stomach) a lovely meal, together, more similar to the people you were when you first met than opportunity now affords
• decide whether and if so what to drink and how often: before and/or during and/or after, dining

And how apt to begin this evening’s episode with a really tasty meal which I had tried previously with limited success, that on, this, second attempt, made an even worse job of; haddock goujons with roasted new potatoes, side of broccoli. On paper, its a yum winner.

The previous attempt was taken from a book but this one is a tad different in that the batter is of the simplest tempura, rather than the, sometimes-too-much, breaded kind. You’ll find recipes for tempura all over the net, but I went the easy-peasy route: sparkling water, ice, plain flour, corn flour – mix. Before you do this, though, slice the haddock – 1 large fillet / 2 small ones should do you both – into bite-sized pieces. Before you do THIS, though, heat the oil. And before you even do THAT, heat a tablespoon of sunflower oil in an oven-proof dish and when suitably hot, chuck in your sliced new potatoes to roast for about 20 minutes. If you prefer to do things in the correct order, unlike me, follow these complicated instructions:

1. Set oven to 180
2. Put 2 tablespoons of sunflower oil in an oven-proof dish in that oven
3. After 10mins add the new potatoes to that oven-proof dish
4. Heat about 500 ml of sunflower oil in a wok / saucepan
5. Chop the fish into 1-inch bites
6. Make the tempura so its cold when the fish goes in
7. Boil or steam the broccoli for 6 minutes only so they’re not bleh
8. Deep fry your goujons – don’t crowd them – at high heat for 3 mins each
9. Release the roast potatoes from their oven
10. Eat, drink and be merry

Or, in my case, fume at the duff result; the oil for the fish wasn’t hot enough so the tempura was in too long and came out WAY too crunchy (another word for it would be ‘burnt’); the beautiful new potatoes didn’t roast (unless soggy is another word for roast); and I forgot to actually cook the broccoli; luckily, the ginger cooler was delicious.

So there you have it. Not taking yourself seriously can sometimes shank your carefully-planned and terribly executed weekly dinner date. Whatta ya gonna do? Correct! Pay more attention next time. We ate what I’d cooked but it was Wednesday Gourmet’s darkest hour; a Wednesday Dismet, if you will.

In case you missed the first ‘explainer’ post that outlines what this is about…I am The Wednesday Gourmet, creator of Gourmet Wednesday, an opportunity to break the week in half by commandeering the kitchen to cook your partner a tasty meal while enforcing a None-Shall-Pass-Who-Are-Not-Me-and-My-Wifehusbandpartnerspouse door policy on offspring or live-in anyones. It is a chance to slow-pedal for an hour or two, drink a glass of wine, drop the pace and realise that the day after tomorrow is already Friday.

Gourmet Wednesday is also the place where you pretend to be your favourite tv chef or, like me, various ones. Its up to you. As for recipes, you just need to know how to read. And allow yourself to make a bags of it, occasionally. Soon, I’m going to pretend to be Antony Worrall Thompson, super-chef de television and The Greyhound restaurant and co-author of a great cookbook for people who need to watch their GI numbers; plus I own a greyhound too, a retired runner called Loughty Joy.

But first I’m going to drop in a Saturday Salad – because the warmer weather beckons. For the salad I shall temporarily pretend to be me.

I’ve had famous run-ins with unfortunate serving staff in eateries around the world; one in particular left a poor waiter in Sausalito utterly stumped. He sat us down – we were three – handed us menus and gave us the run-down on the day’s Specials. It included a choice of Soup or Salad. I thought it was an American dish, so I said “I’ll have the Super Salad, please.” Yeah. Thankfully, one of the party explained the misunderstanding before the guy, quite justifiably, punched my lights out.

To the business at hand. This beautiful mouthful seemed like the only option last Saturday as the temperature hit 18°, which leads Irish people to declare a heatwave and run around without appropriate clothing on. Me, I’m cold-blooded reptilian by nature, and can turn blue at 16°, so I just took off my Big Eagle cardigan.

The slap-up salade I went for is essentially a variation on the Niçoise / Mediterranean / Greek smorgasbord . It involves raiding the fridge and pantry for whatever can be found hiding there, with the basic essentials of eggs and fish being non-negotiable. I found (tinned) Atlantic peppered mackerel, a pair of organic eggs, four sunstream tomatoes, and rocket; all were Irish home-grown and, presumably, fished, in the case of the mackerel. The rest were from sunnier climes – roasted red pepper from, um, Lidl, anchovies from FAO87*, black olive tapenade from the Republic of North Macedonia , Peruvian jalapeños and just to be sure, a dash or three of Frank’s Redhot Original Cayenne Pepper sauce – from the land of my birth, the good ole US of A. It was yum and it looked like this.

*FAO87 is the South East Pacific Ocean, generally, as ordained by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. So it does cross my mind that this simple little salad’s carbon foot-print includes anchovies from there, avocados from Mexico and sauce from North America. Food for thought.

This ain’t no foodie blog – it’s a pretend-to-be-your-favourite-chef blog. Today, I’m being Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

So last time we drowned pork chops in Madeira and cream. And they were good. While we’re sticking with pork again this week, we’re going down-market but arguably more up-flavour if, like Scoob, you dig rausages. This week, its the tale of the Ragu, Bologna-style.

When I first noticed that I was sliding dangerously into watching food programmes on the telly, I fell in love with the romance of River Cottage and its inventor, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I bought a few of his books and tried quite a few of his recipes over the years (e.g. baked ham with spiced figs, saffron and garlic mash, washed down with strawberry water-ice gelato) way before Gourmet Wednesday. He was also inspiring in relation to the bit of back-yard gardening I do; spuds, tomatoes, peas, herbs and so on – the relatively easy stuff. I had to draw the line at chickens, however. My 50% survival rate with plants is one thing, letting half a flock-of-fowl die would be way too flocking much for the latent Buddhist in me. Nor did I dig the rising-before-dawn-and-crunching-through-the-frost reality of ACTUAL small-hold farming aspect. My skillset lies more in the region of armchair husbandry.

On this occasion, though I am pretending to be HFW, I shall describe a dish I copied from one of the many iterations of my current favourite, Rick Stein. Whether Porsching across France, Land Rovering around Cornwall or spending long weekends anywhere from Iceland to Greece and a hell of a lot in between, Mr. Stein, it seems, finds virtually everything amazing. This is infectious. Though there are a few things I mightn’t share his enthusiasm for, his ragu is a total winner. Having picked the stereotypical home of Spaghetti Bolognese for one of his Long Weekends, he showed us how to make this ragu. You will need tagliatelle , sausage meat and a few herbs and spices, some wine and some cream.

I decided to have a crack at making home made tagliatelle too. We’d been given a gift of a pasta-maker many moons ago which was the obvious thing to use. The only problem with the pasta-maker was that we’d looked at it so often and threatened so many times to use it, and hadn’t, that we’d given it away. But no hassle. A rolling pin and a knife is all you need to make home made pasta. So I gave it a shot. Its time consuming, but you feel like, well, Jamie Oliver. Plus, its quite fun; like playing with morla, only it tastes WAY better when you eat it.

Anyway, the best bit about this ragu is that – for Irish people, of course – you can use your fave sausage meat, whether that’s SuperValu’s Superquinn, Rudds, Hicks etc or best of all, your local butcher’s own recipe. All you have to do is squeeze the sausage meat out of its skin – great job to give the kids – and hey presto, cheap, tasty pork. I would not recommend doing this with sausages from any other country, for what the Irish regard as a sausage rarely compares. Don’t get me wrong, I’d kill for a bratwurst with German mustard on it right now, come to think of it. But it’s a different thing. As Keith Floyd would say to his cameraman when he focused for a second too long on the food Floyd was in the process of cooking, ‘Back to me!’, and in this case, the ragu.

So I fried the rausage meat for about 10 minutes, threw in some onion, celery, rosemary, chilli and garlic (I ditched the fennel seeds that Rick uses; I like fennel, but its a strong flavour and I wanted to keep this a bit plainer to allow the sausies to dominate). At this point, I decided to taste the Italian pinot grigio bought for the recipe; it wouldn’t do to ruin a delicious meal by pouring the wrong wine into it. It passed the test over the course of the fifteen minutes that the veg and the pork were communing gently over a medium heat.

One final slug of the pinot and in went about 150mls of the stuff as well as the same amount of cream and stock. The ragu needed about 30 more minutes bubbling gently on a flame, to turn it into a piece of art you could sink your teeth into. By now I was salivating like Pavlov’s very own Scooby-Doo.

It was time to talk to the pasta and see how he was doing. He was doing well, close to being ready to pop in a pot of boiling agua. (I didn’t tell him about the water, he was just relaxing there on the back of the chair and the chopping board and I didn’t want to harsh his buzz.) The advantage of fresh pasta, however, is that it needs way less time to cook than the packet stuff. So 25 minutes later, in went the tagliatelle mio (he just drifted off to sleep, peacefully) for about 4. You could leave it in for 5 or 6 if you don’t like plenty of al denty pasta with your meal. The result, if I say so myself, was non troppo male; pretty good.