Day 16 – Corned Beef Hash

People who are scared of flying go on specially organised flights to help cure their fear. Those scared of spiders go to the zoo to meet tarantulas. I decided to make a dish out of corned beef to get over my tinned meat phobia.

The dish I made is Corned Beef Hash, the kinda thing people used to eat on camping trips huddled under tents in the rain. It is not the most elegant looking dish but is great comfort food…

• 1 tin of 340g corned beef
• About 700g of potatoes
• 2 medium onions
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes

How to cook:

Preheat oven to 200° C

Boil the potatoes and mash

Chop the onions and saute in a little oil till soft.  Add the tin of chopped tomatoes and simmer till reduced – about 20 or 30 minutes

Break the corned beef into small pieces and add to mashed potato. Then add the tomato mixture to the potatoes.

Transfer the potatoey-beefy mix to a small baking dish then serve.

You could grate some chedder cheese on top and put in the oven till it creates a tasty crust.

Day 15 – Don’t drink the neon fluid

 

When I think about about my top ten of places around the world I’d like to visit, most are cities famous for their neon lights from Tokyo to Las Vegas. Maybe its the city girl in me but there’s something irresistible about bright colourful lights. So when the opportunity came up to have my own little light show on my wrist I grabbed it. The pound shop had special offers on glow stick bracelets left over from Halloween. I was going to see Arcade Fire in concert that weekend so thought it was the perfect opportunity to wear them.

To activate the glow stick you have to snap it. On the bus to the gig I tried to snap my sticks but it didn’t seem to work so I decided to bite it. Ewurggheewwwwwwwww. In my excited haste I managed to bite through the plastic and my mouth was filled with vile neon fluid. My friend asked me if something was wrong since I was chocking and making gurgling noises. I tried to spit but nothing happened. It was as if some small gremlin had crawled into my mouth and sucked out all the saliva and then sprayed his acid-like pee around my mouth. It stung and I thought maybe the pound shop had killed me after all. It even tasted worse than the other supposed food product I had bought from the pound shop: Fray Bentos pies. Then my body’s defences kicked in and before I knew it I had thrown up by the side of my seat.

Isn’t it great how your body knows its in trouble and does its best to save you even though its owner is stupid enough to bite into a glow stick?

Day 14 – Tinned Fish

My recipe for Salmon Fishcakes. It goes without saying that I used tinned salmon but rather than this being a disadvantage, most recipes for fishcakes actually specify to used tinned fish. In fact the master of tasty and unpretentious dishes Mr. Nigel Slater has this to say:

Tinned-fish fishcakes
Lovely. Canned salmon and sardines make deeply flavoured fishcakes. You will need the same quantity as fresh fish, and you will have to drain them of their oil or water. Squeeze wedges of lemon over.

Appetite by Nigel Slater (2000)

The recipe:

• Half a tin of pink salmon (about 200g)
• 1 medium potato, peeled and grated
• 2 tablespoons plain flour
• some olive oil
• one medium onion chopped finely

How to cook:

Mix the salmon, potato, flour, onion and a little salt and pepper together in a bowl.

Heat some olive oil in a non-stick pan.

Take a palm sized amount of the mixture and shape into a ball and then flatten.

Pat fishcake with some flour to coat lightly.

Fry for 4-5 minutes on each side under golden.

Serve with my sweet chilli dressing – recipe to follow shortly…

Day 13 – Baked Bean Soup

 

Just don’t eat this before a date or there could be some embarrassing Blazing Saddles moments (video below).

• 2 cans of 400g baked beans
• 900ml chicken stock
• 2 medium onions
• a little olive oil
• some Worcestershire sauce

How to cook:

Cook the onions in a little oil till soft but not brown. Add the stock and baked beans. Bring to the boil then reduce the heat and cook for 20 minutes or so. Its really tasty and would be especially nice with chopped up sausages or chorizo.

Adapted from a recipe in A Celebration of Soup by Lindsey Bareham.

Day 12 – Irritable Jelly Babies

Jelly Babies – enjoy all the pleasures of cannibalism without the social stigma.

I spent the day feasting on sweets (the pound shop is never short of these) rather than try and cook today. I’ve become addicted to sugary foods over the past 12 days and as a result increasingly irritable. God help you if you try and take the red jelly baby….

 

Day 11 – Soup Attempt #2 (with coffee creamer)

• One 400g tin of butter beans 
• one medium onion
• 2 garlic cloves
• 500 ml water mixed with about 20 or so tablespoons coffee creamer
• 500 ml of beef stock
• some olive oil

How to cook:

Mix water with coffee creamer until the water is as creamy as possible. 

Heat a little olive oil in a pan. Thinly slice the garlic and onions and add them to pan cooking for about 5 minutes – don’t let them burn or go brown – until soft.

Add all ingredients

Bring soup to boil, then reduce the heat and then simmer for an hour or so.

Turn off heat and season to taste.

Notes: After my first attempt at a soup ended with something very bland and tasteless, I thought I’d try again. Without cream or butter though, I wasn’t sure how I could create a soup with a nice creamy texture. I made myself a coffee to mull over the problem and ah-ha! in my hand was coffee creamer, the milk substitute I’ve been using. So I filled a 500ml jug of water and kept adding coffee creamer till the result was something resembling cream. Then I made my butter bean soup again this time with my ‘cream’ and it tasted great! Who’d have thought it? Not me.

Day 10 – Non-refrigerated margarine

Chef and cookery writer Anthony Bourdin got it right when he picked out butter as an essential ingredient in cooking:

In a professional kitchen, we sauté in a mixture of butter and oil for that nice brown, caramelised colour, and we finish nearly every sauce with it (we call this monter au beurre); that’s why my sauce tastes creamier and mellower than yours. Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I can.                                                                                     Kitchen Confidential (2000)       

And so Mr. Bourdin, this is why my sauces at the moment will taste bland and anything but creamy compared to yours. Most recipes and certainly all those that I am considering attempting for Saturdays dinner, start with cooking something in butter. Oh glorious butter. You, like my good friend Salt, make everything taste better from bread to potatoes to little cheese crackers.

But of course butter being a refrigerated item and the pound shops distinct lack of a fridge mean that I will have to think of a crafty alternative to butter.

What I need is something that I discovered in Kenya last year. Blue Band margarine. Whenever I travel abroad, one of my essential trips is to the local supermarket to stock up on nice food to take home. I’m always on the lookout for new and unusual things to try. In Italy it was anchovies (so much better than those you can buy here. Who knows why?), In Spain it was a new type of goats cheese.  In America it was Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix (to mix with sour cream and make the best dip in the world).

So on my scouting trip in a Nairobi supermarket I spotted an entire six shelves dedicated to various sizes of margarine. I was fascinated as doesn’t this stuff have to be in a fridge? Apparently not. Made by Unilever it has been developed to maintain its consistency even in the hottest of temperatures. Described as ‘the perfect household magarine’, it is a deareated and a nitrogen entrapped fat which it means it doesn’t have to so much as wink at a fridge. Something like that can only mean bad things for your health surely. But oh could I do with some of that bad boy come Saturday….

Day 9 – A wholly pointless soup

My recipe for Butter bean soup (borrowing a little from Raymond Blanc) using – you guessed it  – only ingredients from Le Magasin de Livre Sterling. 

•  One 400g tin of butter beans 
• one medium onion
• 4 garlic cloves (yes you can buy garlic. not fresh but under oil)
• 1.5 litres water
• 4 large pinches of ground white pepper
• some olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• some bay leaves if you can steal them of a tree in someones garden

How to cook:

Heat a little olive oil in a pan. Thinly slice the garlic and onions and add them to pan cooking for about 5 minutes – don’t let them burn or go brown – until soft.

Add all ingredients except salt and stir together.

Bring soup to boil, skim the frothy bits off, reduce the heat and then simmer for 50 minutes.

Add salt then continue to simmer for 10 minutes.

Now you’ll taste the soup and find, as I did earlier when I tried this recipe, that it is very bland and a bit pointless.  It needs jazzing up a little. I’d suggest some chopped bacon. Or if you too are without refrigerated goods maybe some corned beef? I have a phobia of meat you can only access with a key and so added a few more handfuls of salt to my soup. Salt makes everything taste better. 

Day 8 – The pound shop will not kill me…

 

I spent £7 in the pound shop on anti-disease vitamins. I think I have all bases covered…

Day 7 – Guinea Pigs with Scurvy

Friends have been rightly concerned for my health on a pound shop diet. Hell, I’m concerned.

So I have started doing some research into Scurvy. Yes scurvy the condition that is rarely seen in modern western society but might be resurrected in Holloway. Basically it is a deficiency disease that results from insufficient intake of vitamin C. Sailors were susceptible to it as they were on ships for long periods without fruit or vegetables. They were cured with barrel loads of citrus fruit.

Are you ready for the symptoms? Those of a sensitive nature may wish to skip the next paragraph.

Scurvy leads to the formation of liver spots on the skin, spongy gums, and bleeding from all mucous membranes. The spots are most abundant on the thighs and legs, and a person with the ailment looks pale, feels depressed, and is partially immobilized. In advanced scurvy there are open, suppurating wounds and loss of teeth.

Oh. My. God. I think I could manage without my teeth but seeping wounds?

Interestingly, Guinea Pigs also lack the gene that makes vitamin C and so can contact scurvy if not supplemented with the vitamin in their diet.

Soundtrack to this blog entry: OK With My Decay by Grandaddy