One Day a Year - and Quite a Few Others

It's not exactly a national scandal that pancakes now seem to be ghettoised to their own Tuesday and nothing else. But it is bloody silly.

I love them. Cheap, tasty, light or substantial, sweet or savoury, American or crepes (will someone tell me how to do accents?), innumerable fillings opening up gastronomic potential. What's not to love?

We had the thin French-ish ones as a makeshift pud last night. I regularly do the fluffy American version taught me by a US-based friend for breakfast.

When I said to my son they were something I had to teach him before he flies the nest he joked about buying ready-made mix. Apparently hanging 17-year-olds upside-down from an upper floor is frowned on by the authorities.

You hear blokes boasting about being able to do their 'signature dish,' quite often a green Thai curry. As intelligent as saying you have got your time for sex down below a minute. Rather than learn one fancy dish to be repeated for friends ad nauseam, between times re-heating ready meals, it seems far more intelligent to learn a few core dishes. Pancakes - certainly the thin ones - should be one of those.

I don't bother to measure the ingredients these days, blending an egg, flour and milk (with a big pinch of salt, sometimes a tsp or two of sugar, and a slick of melted butter) with an electric mixer until the consistency of single cream. It's best left in the bowl for 30 minutes or more (I am not sure of the science, but it works) before frying in a non-stick pan greased with butter.

It made me wonder what are the other 'core' dishes or similar? A stew I guess. A simple soup. A curry (green Thai or otherwise). Salad dressing. Roast chicken. A tomato-based sauce for pasta. Chops various (technique same but degree of cooking different depending on meat). Work a few variations for each and you won't have to live on ready-meals. And gentlemen should never boast about sex - though I have my time up to over a minute. Cue old Woody Allen joke for fans of his earlier films.

The More the Merrier - Within Reason

Earlier this week we had a short break in Anglesey, taking a tiny cottage for four nights. One night was supposed to feature a pub meal, but lovely though the seaside village was its two central pubs were less than inviting: in one you seemed to be near the toilet wherever you sat, not a great boon to appetite; the other could have made a Hammer Horror setting - dark, empty, silent, creepy.

So with few supplies to hand it was make-do time in the kitchen. That great stand-by the omelette provided the first course, made with two peppers, some garlic, and a load of chorizo. It got me thinking about how certain dishes are so amenable to kitchen sink cookery - the stew and the curry to name but two. The pizza is another obvious contender.

But as so often in cookery, there is an indefinable but readily appreciated limit beyond which a dish shifts from interesting to messy and confused. Had I added another meat - ham say - that omelette would have indeed been messy. Another vegetable - onion or potato - would have worked. Why is that? Am I judging by a standard of meals eaten in my past? Or do the putative ham and actual chorizo clash?

The pizza case is an intriguing one here: we eat four thin home-made ones on our regular pizza nights. Put too many ingredients on one and it doesn't work at all. But it seems fine to have cheese and tomato and anchovy on one, chicken and sweetcorn on another, peppers, pepperami, ham and garlic on a third, etc etc. All the ingredients end up mixed in ones stomach. Eaten slice by slice the different toppings follow one another closely. So is this just a question of taste, keeping flavours more or less discernible, and a momentary question at that?

Finger Fun

I have posted before about not liking recipe books, or rather of much preferring food books that focus on the history and culture of food. It's not just that the recipe ones are dull - and they are - but that I don't believe (other than in very exceptional circs) that a recipe is ever 'done'.

My continual tweaking of the pizza recipe given to me by Ron Mackenna is a case in point. The basics (for four thin crust bases) are still there - 500g flour, 325ml water, 13g salt, 7g yeast - but I have added two tbsp of olive oil to make the dough more elastic. And I now put the naked pizzas in the oven as it is turned on, giving them 10 minutes pre-cooking to ensure they cook through once the toppings are added, and by forming a skin the toppings don't soak in as much. And the flour is now 200g plain 300g white bread flour, the plain making the cooked base crisper.

The toppings have evolved too. I use a tin of toms mashed up and cooked so some of the liquid is steamed off. That's enough to coat two bases, the next stage being to cover the tomato with loads of grated Parmesan. This has the double boon of making the paste dryer still, so it doesn't ensoggify the bread, and is an excuse for using the world's greatest cheese.

OMG as I would say were I not far too old mature. This has become a recipe. So to sidestep that fate I'd ask a question: is there any better finger food than pizza? Anyone eating pizza other than in a restaurant too posh for pizza anyway should be shot for using a knife and fork with this. It's meant to be eaten with the hands. The bread cools more rapidly than the topping (a generalisation but like most generalisations, including this one, true) so you can hold the thing without burning, but get a hot mouthful. With the basic cheese and tomato version you have a balanced mini-meal with carbs/protein/veggie fibre, anything else being a dietary bonus.

All that said, my home-cooked version is still not up to the standard of a good pizzeria pie. My wife frowns on the idea of spending £500 on a pizza oven for the garden. So the next step is to invest in a pizza stone as an approximation. And if that doesn't do the trick, I'll try the man-stuff route and see if a mate or two will help me build my own with fire-bricks and clay. Or we could walk down the road to Checco's.

How Much Garlic is Too Much?

I'm a great reader of old cookery books. Or maybe food books is a better description - I find those with a succession of neatly laid out recipes and no intellectual exploration dull in the extreme. If you read any from the 1970s and earlier you'll see garlic given as an optional ingredient 'if liked'. We like.

Yesterday I roasted a chicken (not one of our garden variety) atop a whole bulb of the stuff, each clove carefully skinned before use. It was garlic as vegetable (eventually incorporated in the whooshed sauce) rather than flavour enhancer. As I wet roasted the bird the cloves softened in the liquid, leaving them incredibly sweet without caramelising at all. The bottom floor had a nice garlicky aroma, but this morning that had gone as you'd expect, and none of us had garlic-breath, that maybe you wouldn't.

In my extremely late thirties health and food have become closely linked. A friend with whom a fortnightly pint was shared died suddenly last summer, bringing such matters into stark perspective. I often wonder about our diet - wide variety of styles and ingredients, nothing deep fried, moderate drinking (though while we're on the topic, which bastard thought up Dry January btw?), lots of home-produced veg, etc etc. Garlic is one thing I have upped since such thoughts became more focussed. As garlic is supposed to work wonders on the blood, and on blood pressure, I'd love to know the before and after BP readings for the three of us - but save me from becoming Glenn Gould - he kept a diary of his, genius and madness near neighbours there.

Rich and Austere

When early in the day offered the choice of an evening meal based on bangers and mash with onion gravy, or pasta with meatballs (made of the defrosted sausages) SC chose the latter. I wanted to do something different - see Serendipity and the Death of Creation - so ended up making Pasticcio. And bloody lovely it was too.

Thanks to the divine HFW for the basic recipe, though I have eaten this before (in Greece rather than Italy as might be expected), and made it a year or so back.

It was a great example of really good food not costing a fortune: meatballs were made from the meat taken out of £2 of Sainsbury's Taste the Difference sausages; £1 packet of salami; two cloves of garlic, an egg, shallot and some Parmesan. Two 35p tins of toms and some onions, a carrot plus herbs from the garden and more garlic made a rich tomato sauce; 70p of milk and butter plus pennies of flour (and some onion, herbs and a bit of carrot for the infusion) made a bechamel. Two thirds of a 90p pack of penne provided the pasta.

What it did cost was the time I was happy to give it, breaking up my writing for magazines, and what it could have cost had we not possessed a dishwasher was my marriage. Pan for infusing milk for bechamel. Pan for bechamel. Pan for tomato sauce. Griddle for tiny meat balls. Huge pan for assembling the lot: al dente pasta pre-mixed with bechamel on the bottom, tomato sauce with meatballs in the middle, another layer of pasta and bechamel, then a load of cheese (end of some cheddar, about 75p of Parmesan, and a 55p basics mozarella.

Tot all that up and it comes to about £7.00, quite a bit for a midweek supper. But there was enough to feed at least six people, eight if they were polite. Except it was so good three of us demolished the lot. I will do it again without leaving it a year, same quantities, but to feed friends as well as us - as it looked great too which is important when being hospitable. I was glad that I did it in the wide pan with just those three layers, rather than building up what sounds like seven in HFW's recipe - everybody loves cooked cheese and that gave us plenty.

Stevie Wonder

Many chance occurrences can change the way we eat - dishes discovered on our travels, health fads, finding intriguing new ingredients. We had a strange one this weekend.

One of our two chickens (the third suddenly turned up its toes several months back), named Steve as a homage to her youthful tendency to do a runner (think The Great Escape), after not having tried to make a break for it since November disappeared completely after we left her foraging for worms for a few minutes. We have foxes over the brook at the bottom of our garden, so after ages searching we figured one way or another she was a goner. With no signs at lunchtime on Sunday we went and bought two replacements. At four, checking on the newbies, Ruth found Steve happily pecking at the lawn.

So now we have four, and are averaging three and a bit eggs per day. Poached egg for breakfast is always a winner, but not every day. Thus I am thinking about ways to use the surplus creatively: I made onion bread (half a pack of dried onion per big loaf) two days in a row, using an egg to enrich the dough, the results very tasty and with a lovely pale yellow crumb. We may end up as we have previously giving some away, if only to avoid cholesterol poisoning. But I'm loath to do so - the eggs are so much better than any supermarket organic version, and offer so many fine dishes.

Best of all these is the simple omelette. Simple if you get it right, which for me means using great eggs (no problem there then), nice unsalted butter in which to fry them, and if adding any flavourings erring on the side of caution as regards quantity. The cheese, for example - Parmesan always a favourite - is there to enhance the flavour not dominate.

It was, as I have said before, reading An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David that was a turning point in my culinary life. My life. The eponymous essay is a joy to read still, and full of good sense - keep things simple, use good ingredients, and find great matches like those two. With a green salad and some decent bread a six egg omelette (and a glass of wine) is a perfect midweek supper in the warmer months. At Sainsbury's half-a-dozen large free range eggs cost £1.75. Add a few pence for butter, £0.50 for half a cos lettuce, a few more pennies for oil and vinegar, and £0.80p for a small loaf of crusty bread, and supper for three would be about £3.25. Now here comes the even smugger than normal bit - if you have your own hens, make bread, and grow lettuce, the cost for the same meal would be about 75p. Worth thinking about. Especially as it leaves more to spend on buying a half decent wine to top it all off.

Gravy - Artform and Austerity Weapon

At first blush there is nothing austere about a rolled rib of beef joint that cost £25. And very delicious it was too. But the gravy that accompanied it is another matter.

Our national inferiority complex about food has, happily, been weakened over the last two or three decades. We still tend to think though of e.g. French sauces as things of artistic beauty, and dismiss gravy as very basic and unworthy of consideration. Nonsense, a well made gravy is a joy. It lifts the potatoes that go with a roast, and moistens the meat if it needs that treatment. Given the basis is what you scrape off the roasting dish it gladdens the austerity heart too.

I cheat a bit, using a tsp of Bovril to add extra meatiness. Yesterday's version had a cm of white wine left from the previous day to loosen the thickened juices and de-glaze the dish, then some vegetable water, and included a finely chopped shallot for some texture. For me, though the meat was very good (farm shop, a proper mature brown not pink), the gravy and mash were the best bit of the meal.

Later in the week I'm going to do bangers and mash. Again a gravy will make the thing moist and interesting, and as it will be onion gravy an extra vegetable will be smuggled in - my onion gravy involves very slow melting of four or five finely chopped onions until they start to caramelise. It takes a good 25 minutes or more, but it's worth the wait. Thickened thereafter with plain flour, then made into a luscious liquid with potato water and that magical tsp of Bovril added to give extra flavour, it's not far off very thick French onion soup by the end.

Six fat 'taste the difference' sausages from Sainsbury's cost £2 the other day; spuds for the mash maybe 50p; onions 25p; with in all likelihood peas and steamed carrots for more veg the lot will come to at most £3.25 for three of us. Which makes £25 for the beef joint a little less painful (though it must be said the leftover meat will make hot beef sandwiches tonight - my own bread, some lettuce and cucumber piled on top, thin raw onion rings, and a knife full of mustard). And just one slice saved for another day will make a starter of lentil and beef salad with gherkin and raw onion chopped in, so the £25 does stretch to three meals).