Not a foodie blog – just pretending to be (insert fave cook). Today I’ll be Mrs Beeton.

Hi. I’m the Wednesday Gourmet. “The who?” I hear you ask. I am the inventor of Gourmet Wednesday, an event designed to break the back of the week by cooking a gourmet meal for the over-worked partner who cooks most of the meals, looks after most of the kids’ stuff, holds down a job, does virtually all the laundry and needs not to do dinner on Wednesday as well. It’s an event that allows the lesser-worked partner to feed the kids, pack em off to bed and serve up an un-rushed menu to be enjoyed by two adults uninterrupted. No need for candles but wine is a good idea.

“Yah, that sounds to me like a cheapnik date-night, fella,” I hear you say. Bingo, that’s what it is. But this is EVERY Wednesday without fail. It is also not to the exclusion of ACTUAL date-nights – book a baby-sitter, book a restaurant, polish-up good, leave the house etc. And when I say EVERY Wednesday, that’s EVERY Wednesday. Manpool United v Barcedrid FC in the Champion’s League clash? Too bad. Watch the highlights.

All you need are any or all of the following: cook books, mags or newspapers and the ability to read them (carefully), tv programmes and the ability to write down recipes, or the internet and search for online help in still or video form.

Remember

1. Look up the recipe at the weekend to allow time to buy the ingredients.
2. Read the recipe, fully, at least twice, before you start. I have not always done this. I have more than once missed a significant piece of the instruction, e.g. the meat needs to be marinated for a minimum of 4-hours or better still, from the day before, but no-one puked and no-one died because of the sub-30-minute panic-marination I was forced into.
3. You can copy your favourite tv/media chefs and pretend you’re them.
4. Drinks are important – aperitifs, wines, digestifs, all mixed together in a jug if you feel like it – you’re the chef, you might invent a new thing.
5. This is a mid-week pause.
6. There’s no prize but no-one will curse at you and you won’t die of stress. After the first two or three. Just give yourself time. The Champion’s League tie would have wasted the guts of 2 hours. Instead, you’ll be serving up the guts (haggis to go with the neeps and tatties for Burns night, for example) of a really tasty, specially prepared, with-love, dinner for a pair of knackered adults.
7. When Thursday dawns, there’s only two days of the week to go, and the next one is Friday! Unless you’ve overdone the liquoring the night before giving Thursday a 36-hour day feel. Don’t over-dabble the booze.
8. Take a photo of each meal and big-up yourself.

I saw the light about Gourmet Wednesday sometime in 2019, when I decided to cook something special for just me and my lady. I’m no cook / chef / sweary Gordon Blue but I am curious about food from anywhere and everywhere. I also enjoy learning to cook something for the first time. Gathering up and learning about unusual spices, sauces, and herbs that combine with fish / meat / veg in crazy ways to create vastly different dishes. For the first effort, I pulled a book off the shelf that I had never used before, called Essentials of Slow Cooking. I wandered through its glossy pages and feasted my peepers til I hit upon The One.

The First Gourmet Wednesday

Pork chops and mushrooms in cream sauce

I bought the fat, juicy bone-in pork chops, the mushrooms and the leeks. I bought all the other stuff too, that would chemically alter the first three things into a meal that would take our taste-buds to outer space.

My first attempt at pretending to be a chef could begin. Kids: fed, tv’d and sent to bed? Check. Wine chilling? Check. Ingredients prepped? Check. Small G’n’T for focus? Check.

My wife, who we shall call Helen, even though that is her real name, had gone out for a walk to leave me with the total uninterrupted command of forgetting to do bits of the dinner at the right time or in the correct order. So I cleverly started doing what the book told me to do. Brown the chops in butter, remove; sauté the leeks, add the mushrooms; Simp City!

Helen arrived back from her walk with a friend of ours, who we shall call Talia, for that was not her name. Talia, out of respect for the pretend-chef, said she’d leave us to get on with our dinner. So we kindly dismissed this idea, gave her a glass, opened the wine and started chatting.

Meanwhile, I added Blandy’s Duke of Clarence Madeira to the veg, who enjoyed getting loaded on the island’s fabled sweet wine, fortified by heat, history and age. Madeira is a bit on the expensive side, but can last for decades before going off. Even a small bottle will go a long way. Back to the hob – in go a tablespoon each of Worcestershire sauce and fresh tarragon, a herb I’d never used and had possibly heard of (unless I’m mixing it up with Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings). Unlike Aragorn, tarragon smells and tastes quite like anise, looks a bit like rosemary, and it seems the French version is the one most used for culinary purposes.

This heady brew is stirred further; softly, lovingly. We sipped our crisp white wine, chatting. The spuds were boiling gently, the asparagus would join them shortly. I kept stirring, sipping, chatting (you can see where this is going), keeping the heat down nice-and-low so as not to over-cook these chops from heaven. I began to believe this would be recorded as a great success. I had a sip of the white that would cut through the fat of the chops nicely. We bade Talia farewell some time later. Only then did the horror, the horror, the horror reveal itself to us. So tranquilised by the chatting, the sipping and the stirring were we, that all sense of time had evaporated, as had quite a bit of the sauce. We realised that the chops, which had been bathing in their magic juices for a considerable duration longer than directed – and were begging us to end their hot-pan purgatory – would be ruined. I should never have attempted such an ambitious pursuit. I served them up. I got away with it. They were sensational. Gourmet Wednesday was born.