Are you one of the lucky ones who, with the more you eat, the less you weigh? Or are you one of the silent masses, where every tasty morsel stretches the old leather belt running through the hoops on your off-the-rack charcoal grey suit?

Well I’m one of the the great unwashed. I just look at an iced bun and that old belt starts to groan.

Normally, well, I just don’t give a toss. But not right now.

Right now I have to lose weight. A lot of weight. We have a holiday event coming up that involves ‘beachwear’. But as the kids may read this I cannot go into specific details. Suffice to say swimming trunks will be involved. And no one enjoys watching a man in his forties blubbering around in a pair of trunks with a muffin top that would put a z-rated reality TV show celebrity to shame.

So what to eat? Well yes I’m on a diet. That involves eating bugger all. Long time readers of this blog may know that I regularly ‘diet’ but generally that is bullshit. I eat one low calorie meal and then get the steaks out.

But this time it’s serious. Personal even. So what to eat? Well I’m eating bugger all at present but that won’t stop me blogging about recipes I’ve been storing up during the winter (fat-boy) months.

And here is one particularly delicious creation – Pork and Apricot Parcels…

If you took away the pork and the butter this would be diet food. Oh and lose the filo…

Ingredients

• olive oil
• 1/2 chopped onion
• 1/2 carrot, grated
• 1lb pork, minced
• 5 dried apricots
• 1 tsp chopped rosemary
• filo pastry sheets
• 50g melted butter

First off fry the onion on a low heat until soft. Grate the carrot:

Add the onion, rosemary and pork and mix:

Create eight balls of porky gloop:

Now heat the oven to 180 centigrade (basically normal setting if you use farenslight or whatever it is). Lay out a sheet of filo pastry. Brush one side with the melted butter and fold over:

Place one of the porky balls at one end of the pastry and fold it thus:

Brush with more butter and seal, repeat seven more times:

For some strange reason I managed to create 11 not 8:

Brush with more butter and bake for 20 mins:

Serve with horseradish:

This is the great thing about food blogging – you can salivate over your past creations whilst quietly munching on a stick of celery (and a nice big glass of wine – no fat in that badboy)!

What am I going on about? Work. People at work who define their importance/brilliance/superiority by the number of meetings they have booked into their ‘diaries’ (in the UK we call them diaries – everywhere else its a calender).

Frankly it gets on my tits (which, BTW, are slowly evaporating as I am on yet another diet). I mean I don’t give a shit how many meetings you have, you still don’t deliver the goods and I need that Powerpoint presentation NOW!).

Anyway I am busy. Lots to do. Deals to make. Presentations to present. And I also need to prepare family-friendly fare that will be eaten at home and not shoved round the plate like the last stale custard cream on the plate at a particularly tedious strategy meeting.

So I decided to try out the French version of Shepherd’s Pie – Lamb Parmentier. It’s so easy – lamb, potatoes, stock. Period.

There doesn’t seem to be a specific recipe for Lamb Parmentier on the wonder-web. In fact there doesn’t some to be a defintive defintion of parmentier potatoes. But that doesn’t matter; for this creation I nicked a recipe from the Sunday Times Magazine:

• 1 shoulder of lamb
• salt and pepper
• 1 tbsp honey
• 2 carrots
• 3 onions
• 1 litre chicken stock
• 1 kilo potatoes
• milk and butter

First off put the carrots and onions in a roasting tin:

Place the lamb on top and sprinkle on salt and pepper. Drizzle with honey:

Pour in 500 ml water and cover with foil. Cook in the oven at 150 centigrade for 2 and 1/2 hours:

Remove from the oven; you should be presented with some pretty irresistable looking lamb. Don’t eat it yet:

Take the lamb out of the tin. Ignore the veg (not needed) and pour the juices into a jug. Put the jug in the fridge to cool and then skim off the fat. Meanwhile strip the meat off the bones:

Put the meat in an oven dish. Note – no veg – no carrots, no peas, no bloody onions. Shepherds Pie this is not. Now get the jug of juice and pour into a saucepan. Add the stock and boil down until it gets a bit thick. Not too thick, just a bit.

Pour the sauce over the meat:

Hopefully you will have also put the spuds on to boil, mashed them and added butter/cream/milk, salt and pepper. If not you’d better get on with it. Now carefully layer the potato over the gravy-infused meat:

Pop back in the oven (at about 180 centigrade) for 20 mins to get the potato golden and the filling warmed up. Serve, straight up, maybe with some mustard:

Simple honest food for when the pressures of everyday life start getting to you!

Well no, not really. We acquired a genuine slow cooker recently. And I have never used a slow cooker. Its got a ceramic bowl that sits in an aluminium shell that warms up. There are three settings – low, high and auto.

How difficult can it be? Difficult. Painfully so. You see there are, I learned later on, some rules to cooking with a Slow Cooker. We’ll get to those later on. For now lets take a look at the cooker:

What could be easier? I decided to try a beef pot roast. Simple. The Ingredients included

• Beef Brisket
• Beef stock
• Carrots
• Onion
• Mustard
• Mushrooms
• Red Wine
• Bouquet Garni
• Tomato Puree

I also made some dumplings. For that recipe look here.

It started off simple enough.

I browned the beef off and put in the cooker. Then I added the carrots and onions.

Poured in the stock and added some mustard and the bouguet garni and the wine. Then on went the lid and I put the setting to low. I guessed 8 hours so I basically left it alone all day:

Now after 8 hours it looked the same as it did after 8 minutes. So I stuck it on for another 8 hours. Seriously I did. And after another 8 hours? It still looked the same as it did after 8 minutes.

Not to be dissuaded I stuck the dumplings in (along with the mushrooms and tomato puree):

Then I took the ceramic pot out of the cooker and stuck it in the oven to get the thing boiling a bit. BIG mistake. I left the lid on and this happened:

I melted the lid handle. Oh yes. They don’t call slow cookers ‘slow cookers’ for nothing. Anyway I quickly removed the lid once I realised my mistake and left the pot in the oven to brown off the dumplings:

After a while I served up. This thing had been cooking for something like 3 days, on and off.

So I think a post-mortem is needed:

1. Don’t try brisket beef in a slow cooker. I am reliably informed it doesn’t work very well. You need to cook it for so long it goes a bit funny (tastes a bit weird).
2. Don’t add too much liquid – use a third of what you would normally use. I drowned my beef and it never really got cooking properly until…
3. Don’t put your slow cooker in a real oven. The lid will melt and seeing how the designers never thought anyone would be stupid enough to put the slow cooker in an oven that is fair enough (I owe my wife’s grandmother a big, massive apology. And a slow cooker)

Nevertheless I’m not beaten. Oh no. I will try again, I’m just not sure what I will actually cook in this mysterious contraption….

We’ve got some flowers there, of course, some really rather delicious chocolates from Hotel Chocolat (really nice), and champagne, with a strawberry. The strawberry really does go well with the bubbly.

The eagle-eyed among you might notice that although we are using champagne flutes, they look a bit…strange. Well they’re plastic. We don’t have a good track record with glass glasses in this house so we stick to the plastic variety. And the champagne didn’t suffer for it.

Now whilst sipping (maybe slurping) my champagne I was reminded of the book I am currently reading – ’1000 Years of Annoying the French’, by Stephen Clarke; a Briton living in Paris. In it he describes in entertaining detail the roots of the reasons why Anglo-French relations are always a little ‘tense’.

Not that I personally have any interest in annoying any one specific group* – in fact my sister-in-law is French and my in-laws spend half the year in Aix en Provence. And a very nice place that is I can tell you.

*(I prefer to target individuals, based on some petty, presumed slight or imaginary insult)

Clarke expounds a theory that shakes one of the oldest accepted facts about food and drink to it’s core. France is not the place where Champagne was created. In fact its worse than that – the man regarded as the creator of champagne – Dom Perignon – actually was trying to NOT make champagne!

GASP! Les horrible! Indeed, but according to this worthy tome Dom (to his mates), the monk, was trying to figure out ways of getting rid of the natural bubbliness of the brew because it kept blowing up the bottles.

We Brits, on the other hand, loved the bubbles in the booze and because we were able to make better, thicker, bottles, actively encouraged producers to make it as bubbly as possible (by inventing the process of adding sugar)  – while the French were trying to flatten it. In the end we won out because we bought so much the producers just went on bubbling it up!

So it’s simple – the British invented champagne. Americans love champagne just as much as anyone else. However unless champagne is produced in the Champagne region in France, it is not allowed to be called ‘Champagne’, and this is written into international law and has been since the end of the First World War. Everyone sticks to this law, even the North Koreans.

Well everyone except the Americans – you lot take no notice of such things. You have ‘Californian Champagne’! It pisses the French off big time. If we created ‘Cornish Champagne’ we’d get booted out of the EU, invaded by a French-backed peacekeeping force (just like William did back in 1066) and I’d be trying to right this blog in a language I never bothered to learn at school – ooh la la!

You know when Elmer Fudd goes mad with a double-barrel shotgun during Rabbit-Hunting Season? Well it’s just the same in ‘Big Corporations’ during Strategy Season – little Fudds stride the corridors of power with PowerPoint slides in hand, hunting for strategies that will see them through to next year.

And what, you may well (and rightly) ask, has all this got to do with Goulash? Not a great deal, but given the amount of time I am currently spending on PowerPoint, recipes need to deliver results that satisfy my short-term strategic objective (that is: feed me, I’m hungry) whilst also satisfying the time-poor nature of the day-to-day.

My longer term aspiration (stop feeding me, I’m on a diet) will be satisfied in the second stage of the development cycle, which will begin when my waistline fails to align correctly with my suit trousers and I enter a corporate condition known commonly as ‘you fat bastard’.

Until this stage is reached there is Goulash.

Goulash originated in Hungary. I’ve done some market research, identified the primary competitors, shortlisted the key elements of the product and realised that, in reality, no one really knows what a goulash is (except it has paprika in it) and settled on a recipe from the BBC.

The ingredients are simple:

• 3 beef cheeks
• cooking chorizo
• olive oil
• garlic
• 2 onions
• red pepper
• green chilli (optional)
• salt and pepper
• 2 tbsp tomato purée
• 1 tbsp flour
• tin tomatoes
• 7fl oz beef stock
• 3 tbsp paprika
• bay leaves
• parsley
• chives
• soured cream

First off get the cheeks ready – chop into inch size pieces. See those ribbons of sinew? After slow cooking they melt like butter…

Fry in a casserole in two batches until well browned:

Set the meat aside and then gently cook the onion, chilli and garlic until softened. Add the flour and paprika

Add the stock, wine, tomatoes and puree and stir well. Pop in the chorizo and bay leaves:

Put in the oven at 160 centigrade for 2 hours. Leave alone! Take out the oven and add the peppers. Put back in the oven for another half hour:

Finally stir in the chopped parsley:

Serve with decent bread, sour cream and chopped chives:

Finally, a shot of the beefy interior:

So there you have it – sustenance for Corporate Fudd!

But there was something a bit sad about this particular restaurateur. He missed his parents and even Gordon couldn’t be that shouty at him, although the meatballs that were being served had been frozen for longer than an Eskimo’s dangly bits.

So I warmed to Gordon and decided to search the archives for a Ramsay-inspired creation, and found this - Smoked Haddock Soufflé Pancakes.

It’s straightforward enough – cheesy fish pancakes with whipped up egg whites. But they are very light and utterly delicious!

Pancakes

• 50g (½ cup) plain flour
• 2 large free-range eggs
• 175ml (¾ cup) milk
• ½ tsp salt
• oil for frying

Soufflé

• 2 fillets undyed smoked haddock
• 300ml (1 ¼ cups)  milk
• 1 sliced onion
• bay leaf
• 40g (3 tbsp) unsalted butter
• 40g (½ cup) plain flour
• 2 egg yolks
• 100g ( 1 cup) Gruyère cheese
• 3 egg whites
• butter for greasing
• 284ml (1 ¼ cups)  carton double (heavy) cream
• 50g (½ cup) grated Parmesan

First make the pancakes: combine the flour and salt, eggs and milk in a bowl with a whisk. Rest for 5 mins (but you don’t need to).

Make the pancakes and stack on top of each other with paper towels to separate them until needed.

Take the skin off the haddock by laying it flat, grabbing the tail and then sliding a serrated knife under the flesh in a sawing motion.

Although it’s undyed smoked haddock it would seem some undyed smoked haddock can be more smoked than others…

Get a frying pan and pour in the milk. Add the bay leaf, onion and fish and bring to the boil. Then take off the heat and leave to cook through for 5 mins with a butter wrapper covering it to help.

Remove the fish and flake with your fingers. Pass the milk through a seive.

Make the sauce by melting the butter in a pan and stirring in the flour with a wooden spoon. Remove from the heat, stirring, then put back on the heat and cook for a minute. Add the milk a bit at a time, stirring all the while.

Whisk in the egg yolks and then the gruyère.

Then fold in the fish carefully, making sure the flakes don’t break up. Season.

Whisk the egg whites in a metal bowl, then fold into the sauce. Butter your dishes.

Lay a pancake in each dish so that it is hanging over one side.

Fill each dish with the fish creation:

And then fold the pancake loosely over.

Finally make the topping by heating up the cream, whisking in left over gruyère and seasoning. Pour the sauce over the pancakes and sprinkle on the parmesan.

Put in the oven at 180 centigrade bake for 15 minute until they have risen and gone golden and lovely.

An inside shot is of the creation is traditional on this blog but with this dish it’s not as good to look at as the external shot – as soon as you break into this deliciousness it starts to collapse under the weight of it’s own creamy cheesiness….

Recommended!

That took me back to my Geography degree (dead useful a geography degree in my current role as a corporate development ‘professional’ in a software company) and the time I studied the explosion of Mount St Helens.

Where the hell is this going? Oh yes, that infamous event reminded me of my latest creation – a ‘Steak and Kidney Pudding’. Why? Let’s take a look:

Here’s a steak and kidney pudding; note the collapsing outer wall, the innards spewing forth. And here’s a shot of Mount St Helens:

Note the similarities – the collapsed outer wall, the innards spewing forth….

Now it’s just possible I’m being slightly melodramatic here. I mean comparing a meat pie to one of the most catastrophic natural disasters of the 20th century. Seriously. Nevertheless baking, pies, meat – it’s not an easy combination to get right. And this is how it happened…

Steak and Kidney Pudding is a decadently rich pastry encrusted delight comprising steak, kidney, suet pastry…and not much else.

Ingredients

• 2 lambs’ kidneys
• 1lb braising steak
• 3 tbsp plain flour
• salt and pepper
•  sunflower oil
•  Glass of red wine
•  Thyme
•  Bay leaf
•  Beef stock
•  1 tbsp tomato purée

For the suet pastry

• 12oz self-raising flour
• 6¼ shredded suet
• ½ tsp sea salt
• butter, for greasing

You will also need one big (or two small) pudding basins, string, greaseproof paper and silver foil.

First off make the pastry; combine the flour, suet, salt & pepper with some water. Roll out to about 1/2 cm thickness.

Cut out a circle of pastry big enough so that it will line the inside of your pudding basin(s). Grease the basins with butter. Press the pastry circle into the basin, making sure you remove any air bubbles..

Trim the pastry around the edge, leaving a small lip. Now add the chopped up beef and kidney…

Pour in some stock, wine. Add the tomato puree and herbs and ‘season well’…

Now wet the rim of the pastry. Roll out the remaining pastry and cut out lids. Place over the top of your meaty creation and trim your rim…

Now get a sheet of greaseproof paper and create a fold in it. Place over the top of the pudding…

Do the same with a sheet of foil…

Now secure the foil with string…

Put the puddings in pans (resting on upturned plates) and fill the pans with water to half way up the basins. Simmer for 3 hours (make sure the water doesn’t boil away)…

Meanwhile you can make some gravy if you fancy. Mine was heavily influenced by red wine…

After several hours of simmering the pudding will look like this…

Ready to blow…

Remove the coverings…

Ease the edges of the pudding away from the basin…

And tip out on to a plate…

It’s kind of holding together. But what happens if we cut into it…

As we saw earlier it starts trying to collapse!

But anyway if you let it cool down it looks a bit more solid…

However I like to serve my Steak and Kidney Pudding straight out the basin, with extra gravy, in a big gloopy mess!

Honestly it may look messier than a volcanic eruption but it tastes a lot better (I’m reliably informed by no one).

A while back I tried doing a series entitled ‘Around the World in 80 Beers’. I did 8 and then got bored (not of drinking the beers, I’ve drunk thousands, just writing about it: ‘Hey, I drank some beers, got drunk, fell asleep watching Family Guy; that’s it’).

The key to creating ‘Chinese Chicken Curry for People Who Are So Lazy They Can’t Even Pick Up The Phone And Order Take-Out’ is getting your chicken to take on the texture of take away chicken. You know, all soft and wet and squashy. You don’t want firm fibrous chicken that has the chewiness of real meat.

No, you need the kind of chicken you get at 3am from the local Mr Wong after a night out, amorphous gloop that is undifferentiated from the soggy onion and floppy green peppers. You also need, and I cannot over-stress the importance of this, ‘Goldfish Chinese Curry Sauce’. You really need that.

So to get to the rub, so to speak:

For the chicken-like-you-eat-from-a-take-away..

• two chicken breasts, skin removed, cut into chunks
• 2 tbsp cornflour
• 2 egg whites
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp oyster sauce

For the sauce

• 1/2 tub of ‘Goldfish Chinese Curry Sauce’
• 1 red pepper
• 1 green pepper
• 1 punnet mushrooms
• 2 onions

First put the chicken in a plastic tub and add the cornflour, egg whites, soy sauce and oyster sauce. Mix thoroughly. Marinate for at least an hour (preferably four). The marinade helps to moisten and soften the chicken, just like your local take away used to make (or still does).

When you’re ready get the curry paste out of the pot:

The contents of this pot aren’t important right now. Best just to say there are a few ingredients in there that you won’t have in your ‘dry ingredients’ itinery in your cupboard. Put the paste in a jug and add boiling water to get it to your desired consistency: I like mine thick and glutinous.

Mmm…..gloopy!

Chop up the vegetables:

Stick them in a wok and start frying:

Hard to believe but this is our kitchen, not ‘My Old China’s’

Now add your marinated chicken:

Looking good. Now add the sauce:

You know this isn’t going to win MasterChef but you just don’t give a monkey’s…

Let that bad boy simmer.

It’s blowing little bubbles like a mud volcano…

Serve with rice. And wine.

Okay we need a close-up to make sure you can see just how exactly the same this is to a take-away Chinese Chicken Curry:

After 4 pints of Stella Artois you wouldn’t know the difference. 3, yes. 4, no!

These are a pair of hands of a child (you might want to keep them attached to the relevant child, preferably your own).

Secondly you will need one of these:

This is a jar of cupcake ingredients. It has everything you need to create chocolate brownie cupcakes (except the butter, eggs, and the icing sugar for the  frosting). It’s dead easy to make these things. First you pop off the lid and remove the chocolate chips and put them in a bowl:

Ensure the child doesn’t eat the chocolate chips during this critical transitioning process – do not leave the chocolate chips or the child unattended at any point. Add some butter to the chocolate chips and melt over a pan of simmering water:

Now add all the dry ingredients to a big bowl:

An egg (and some vanilla essence, forgot to mention that earlier) is required at this point:

Then we add the chocolate creation. I reckon at least 90% of it made it into the big bowl…

Next some serious stirring is required. We don’t own a KitchenAid, or a even a decent electric whisk (it burned out I think). What we do own is a child with solid arms and a wooden spoon. It’s all you need!

Once reasonably mixed, transfer the chocolate gloop into cupcake liners, thus:

Transfer to the oven for 15 mins or so (turn it on first):

That one in the bottom left corner looks a bit sad but it turned out just fine….

Once cooked remove from the tray and leave to cool.

Prepare the icing – a block of butter (good grief) and the same weight of icing sugar (that’s basically half a pound each!). Combine both (we used the half-dead electric whisk for this stage):

Transfer the creamy badness to a piping bag:

Now carefully pipe the cream on top of the cakes. Or rush it – we need to eat these things quick before the cookie monster gets them:

Finally sprinkle on the hundreds and thousands provided (cleverly enclosed in the top of the jar):

Now it just remains for us to test out our cupcake creations:

Chewy moist chocolatey delights. Not bad at all, while we wait for petit4chocolatier to return from it’s (hopefully short) haitus – that blog was the Queen of cupcake creation – where has it gone?!

I could be making all that up but still it makes you think. It doesn’t? You must be pissed. Or you want to holiday in North Korea. Seriously what is the problem with those people.

Anyway I was watching some food-related programme when up pops Raymond Blanc. He’s great because he doesn’t seem to hate the English. I know only one other French person who likes England and she is my sister-in-law.

Monsieur Blanc proceeded to show me how to do something fantastic with some humble ‘in season’ veg. He created a dish that looked like some kind of weird other-world life form. But it looked that good I had to try it out…

Now what the hell is that? Well apparently it’s a winter vegetable salad. To create it (and I should point out at this point that it is well worth it) you will need:

For the pumpkin slices and the pumpkin puree and the beetroot

• 2 tsp olive oil
• 250g/9oz pumpkin
• salt and pepper
• ½ tsp extra virgin olive oil
• baby beetroots
• vegetable stock
• red wine

For the sauce

• 3½fl oz port
• 3½fl oz red wine
• 1 star anise
• caster sugar

For the mushrooms

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 3½oz mushrooms
• squeeze lemon juice
• salt and pepper
• flatleaf parsley, chopped

For the garnish

• slivers of parsnip, covered with olive oil, baked in the oven
• a few pickled silverskin onions

First off get the pumpkin ready. Peel the sucker. It isn’t easy, but it has to be done…

Now before you cut it in half chop the top off:

Get a food ring and ram it (and you do need to ram it) into the big solid bit of pumpkin:

Then slice the pumpkin tube into three:

Meanwhile chop the remainder of the pumpkin. And also shave the edges of the pumpkin slices to round them off. Fry the pumpkin slices in olive oil and the rest of the pumpkin in a pan:

Start the sauce. Get a small pan, add the port, wine and star anise and bring to the boil:

Back to the pumpkin slices (this creation is pretty full on): put them on a baking tray and let them brown up a bit:

Get the beetroot ready; put them in a pan with some stock and a splash of red wine and let them simmer:

Lastly the mushrooms (getting tired now it’s 1am and I’ve run out of wine). Fry them hard in a pan with all the other ingredients – I think I forgot the parsley…

Now by some miracle we are ready to plate up! You will have, by now of course, mashed the chopped up pumpkin. Spread it on a (preferably rectangular) plate. Then put two slices of pumpkin at either end of the plate.

Put some beetroot on top of the mashed pumpkin, alternated with mushroom.

Pour a drizzle of sauce around the edge and then place some mushrooms and onions on top. Finish with those parsnip shavings I mentioned…

Was it worth it? Hell yes! Mind you a big thick fillet steak wouldn’t have hurt…