Runny Thoughts

Cock-up (leekie)

The leek is a marvellous thing. And I’m not even Welsh.

There were two of them in the fridge. I lopped off the tops, rinsed said tops cursorily in running water, and bunged them into the stockpot with a chicken carcass (it’s a fairly pointless exercise without one of these or equivalent, to be honest), a carrot, salt, and water to cover. I could have put in a bay leaf and some parsley and all the other usual gubbins, but what can I say? I’m a rebel. I live on the edge.

The rest of the leeks, the main attraction so to speak, were sliced into ticker-tape thin ribbons, rinsed rather more thoroughly and thrown into a lidded pan - I’d removed the lid temporarily to avoid littering the floor with ticker-tape thin ribbons of leek - with some butter, the water that clung to the rinsed leeks, some more butter, a lick of salt, and, what the hell, just a smidge more butter.

Set phasers to low, captain. Mr. Spock gets antsy if there’s any chance of his leeks sticking.

That is not a euphemism.

Leeks go wonderfully with eggs, I find. On this occasion I asked the Flame-Haired Temptress, as she came in from work, “what shall I do with the eggs? Scrambled? Poached? Omelette?”

I was treated to the weary look of one who simply doesn’t care, but who is wondering why the hell the food isn’t on her plate NOW.

I answered my own question.

“Poached then.” You know that thing that happens when you want to have water boiling at what the professionals call a ‘quiver’, so you boil up some water in a pan and it’s boiling at what the professionals call a ‘rolling boil’, so you turn it down and then it goes off the boil when you put the things in that are supposed to be being boiled, so you turn it up a bit and put the lid on and then it goes up to a rolling boil again and water spits out of the sides and goes everywhere, putting out the gas, so you have to relight it and by that time the water’s unrolling again and you coax it back to a quiver but then it somehow starts rolling again even though you thought you had it just right and your eggs end up being what the professionals call inedible kack?

Well, that.

The leeks were nice though.

I Say Old Bean

DISCLAIMER: Despite the unpromising beginning, this post is NOT about football. Keep going. You’ll get to the bit about food soon enough. If, on the other hand, you prefer football to food, you might want to read the opening paragraph and stop there.

So. Hats off to the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea on a feisty defeat to Brazil in their World Cup opener last night. Funny how the countries that are keenest to show off their democratic credentials in the name of their country are the ones least qualified to do so.

Still, they played as if their lives depended on it.

In fact, come to think of it...

Anyway, their performance was in stark contrast to Spain’s. They seemed to think that if they just kept passing the ball eventually one of the passes would go into the net.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about vegetables.

And before you jump to the inevitable conclusion, I have indeed steered the subject away from football and am not referring to the England team.

Ba-boom-ching. Thangyouveddymudge.

There’s been a certain amount of self-sufficiency in the Runny household of late. Why, only last night, the Flame-Haired Temptress and I partook of our own radishes, dipped in someone else’s salt; followed by our own potatoes, chives and spinach, paired with someone else’s butter, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and raisins.

A veritable feast.

Peas are on their way, too. And we’ve got more herbs than the annual meeting of the Tijuana Brass Appreciation Society.

All of this has appeared from nowhere, it would seem, lovingly nurtured by the soothing hand of the F-HT.

It was different back in the day. When we first started growing veg, I was the instigator.

Our garden wasn’t big. Nor was it accessible, as we occupied a first-floor flat.

So starting a veg garden was not an undertaking to be embarked on without serious consideration.

I sourced, ordered and bought raised beds, compost and seeds, not making much of a fuss about how clever I was being.

And then, with a great deal of huffing and puffing, I planted and nurtured them.

There came the time for thinning out, the process whereby dozens of healthy pre-pubescent radishettes would be sacrificed to the merciless God of Waste in order that the fittest of the species be given a little Lebensraum.

It’s not for the faint of heart.

After several weeks’ consultation with the sage of all things horticultural, Dr. D.G.Hessayon, I took a deep breath, armed myself with tweezers and set about my grisly business.

The procedure was executed with surgeon-like delicacy and accuracy.

For about five minutes.

Then I got fed up and just ripped the buggers out willy-nilly.

Or left them where they were.

Surely, I thought, they can sort it out for themselves? It can’t make that much difference.

You live and learn.

Time passed and vegetables (some of them, at least) grew.

Then, disaster.

Slugs and snails appeared. Puppy dog tails probably weren’t far behind.

The best thing to do, I was assured, was to nail them at night.

Manfully, and again with the minimum of fuss, I donned waders and sou’westers (it was a wet spring) and strode into the fray. Eschewing all offers of sustenance, and protected only by the trusty torch of truth and the kitchen scissors of slug-murder, I dispatched them to all four corners of our small plot.

It only encouraged them.

If you’re not a gardener you may not appreciate the determination and downright evil exhibited by the average group of guzzling gastropods.

Think Simon Cowell crossed with Genghis Khan.

Still, eventually, we had a crop of sorts.

Modestly accepting the loving applause of an admiring throng, I made a very small meal of some very small potatoes with a couple of very small leaves of spinach on the side.

The slugs opened an ‘all you can eat’ buffet round the corner.

The next year we were moving, so the garden went by the wayside.

Now, established in the new place, where the garden is more accessible, we have enough room for the following:

A shed.

A dried-up pond (large enough for frogs to breed, but not large enough for them to hide from Felis Catus).

A vine.

A faux palm tree (Felis Catus likes to think he can climb it. When he is halfway up, he thinks again).

A couple of raised beds.

It is in these raised beds that we are nurturing the stuff of food fads.

You know how it goes. Every couple of years the foodie community rejoices in a new, painfully chic, fashion ingredient.

Never mind that said ingredient has been in plentiful supply and gone unnoticed for years. This year it is the thing.

Delia started it years ago with those blessed cranberries. One moment you couldn’t buy cranberries because nobody stocked them; the next you couldn’t get them because they were sold out.

Pomegranates, blueberries, Alfonso mangoes, rocket, chard, butternut squash, Jersey Royals, asparagus, artichokes, salsify, polenta, pea shoots, carnaroli rice, argan oil, etc etc. They’ve all had their moment in the sun, leading to some truly horrendous culinary disasters as amateur cooks chuck them willy-nilly into everything they cook, based purely on the fact that Nigel did a feature on them in The Observer last Sunday.
Pomegranate risotto anyone?

Thought not.

You’d have thought that we’d exhausted them all.

I beg to differ.

Broad bean leaves.

Rip them off, wash off the black fly (for black fly there will be), and wilt them in oil with garlic.

They look a bit like baby spinach, but taste like broad beans, which is a little disturbing.

But they are worth a go. At the very least they are more plentiful and require less patience than broad beans themselves, which always look so promising in their plump pods, but which invariably yield a crop barely big enough to coat the bottom of an eggcup.

All I ask is this: if broad bean leaves turn into the next superfood fashion, just remember where you read it first.

Pointless Food.

I don’t consider myself a picky eater. Oysters, tripe, sweetbreads, giant marine cockroaches (well what else would you call a lobster?), Ginster’s pasties - all part of a long list of potentially dubious foodstuffs that have passed my lips at one time or another. I hope that I would give anything the benefit of the doubt at least once.

Alas, ’twas not ever thus. Just ask my mum. Apparently I ate nothing but Grape Nuts and hard-boiled eggs between 1970 and 1976, only making the breakthrough to more sophisticated fare on a family holiday in France. I had inured myself to the lack of cereal and salad cream on restaurant menus, falling back on a restaurant diet of omelette followed by melon. Or possibly melon followed by omelette. I forget. In the 1970s, anything was possible.

Anyway, there we were, in a hotel a stone’s throw from the Bayeux tapestry, an exhausting day of Olympic 50km walking reenactment on Arromanches beach behind us. My family waited patiently while I surveyed the menu. Which would it be? Melon then omelette? Omelette then melon? Or perhaps a melon omelette?

I laid the menu aside. If I had been in possession of a pince-nez, I would probably have taken it off, tapped it thoughtfully on the table a couple of times and tucked it in my shirt pocket.

“I think I’ll have the quail.”

I’m surprised nobody punched me on my smug eleven-year-old nose.

I can’t remember how they tasted, but those quail gave their lives in a good cause. For there began a gastronomic journey that, over the years, has encompassed all the foods mentioned above and many many more. I can remember my first artichoke, my first dim sum and my first scotch (swiftly and disastrously followed by my second). From McDonald’s to Le Manoir, KFC to Chez Bruce, I’ve led a privileged and gently foodistic life. A sprinkling (and sometimes more) of junk, the occasional visit to foodie palaces, and a whole lot in between. There have been staggeringly good meals, dismal ones, surprisingly wonderful-but-dirt-cheap-ones and disturbingly expensive ones. Chips doused in malt vinegar while watching Oxford United plummet to another heavy defeat; scallops wolfed down at the stall in Borough Market while surreptitiously nudging Japanese tourists into the gutter; enough chocolate to quell the Eyjafjallajokull volcano once and for all. Each has its place, and success or failure often depends merely on your state of mind and level of hunger at the time of consumption.

But in all those meals I don’t think I’ve ever come across an ingredient that I regard as utterly pointless. I’ve eaten bad food, for sure - meals that have made such an appalling mess of perfectly decent raw ingredients that after eating them you want to grab the perpetrator by the lapels, drag them to Jeremy Clarkson’s house and leave them there as punishment. Sometimes I’ve been the culprit and have had to give myself a stiff talking-to.

But those meals have always been disgusting either because of miserable ineptitude on the part of the chef, or because the raw ingredients have been sub-par.
Even if I’ve not liked an ingredient (oysters, for example, don’t do it for me) I can see why other people might.

Until now.

Behold the kohlrabi.

I call him Helmut Kohlrabi, or The Chancellor. He looks quite sweet, doesn’t he? I particularly like his smiley face. So inviting.

Don’t be fooled, though. He’s a tough little bugger, is The Chancellor, and full of surprises.

There are usually leaves sprouting out of the top that make him look like some sort of space veg, but in actual fact he is a brassica, and thus related to everyone’s favourite vegetable, the brussels sprout.

Unlike that fine and much maligned beast, though, I have been unable to find a suitable purpose for Helmut.

The taste of the kohlrabi remains, to me at least, unaltered whatever the cooking method. I’ve boiled, steamed, roasted, sauteed, mashed, gratinated, finely-sliced-and-dressed-with-olive-oil-and-lemon-juice the beggar, but he remains resolutely...well, you know...sort of...meh.

Even the tried-and-tested ‘add a slab of butter the size of Maidstone’ technique failed.
The only thing I haven’t done yet is rolled the bastard in melted Mars bar and batter and deep fried him.

Beyond the taste, or lack thereof, there’s the woodiness. He has woody bits that run through him as if he were a stick of rock, and that give your teeth a good flossing, whether they like it or not (they don’t).

So why do I try, I hear you cry?

Good question, albeit a little too Dr. Seuss for my liking in an adult blog.

Well you know, they just got delivered in our we-don’t-use-air-freight-so-weren’t-affected-by-the-volcano organic box, so we felt we had to eat them. But after a while, we gave up, hit the don’t-ever-give-me-this-again button, and made do with more normal veg.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, the driver made a mistake and gave us someone else’s box.
Helmut and his cousin Herman sat there staring dourly up at us like a pre-debate Gordon Brown.

I tentatively gave Herman a good mashing with butter and nutmeg.

Bleuurrggh.

Helmut has lurked at the back of the fridge ever since, save the two minutes necessary for the above photo shoot. He’s still quite perky, even after a couple of weeks.

His fate is in your hands.

Come up with a really good way of cooking him. I will pick the best and report back.

Just don’t expect me to like it, that’s all.

Higgs Boson a la CERN

It’s a commonly held misconception that the creation of a Higgs Boson particle is the province only of the professional particle chef. But it’s quite simple to rustle one up at home. Here’s one of my favourite recipes.

Higgs Boson a la CERN (feeds 0)
For this recipe you will need:
Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics
A Window
Most Of Switzerland
A Great Big Bag Of Cash
1 Large Hadron Collider
1 Linear Particle Accelerator
1 Proton Synchrotron Booster
1 Super Proton Synchrotron
1 Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster
6 Particle Detectors: ATLAS ((A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), TOTEM (TOTal cross section, Elastic scattering and diffraction dissociation Measurement), ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), BOB (Big Old Bugger), CAROL (Crap AcROnym Lunacy), TED (TEDious list of stuff)
Some Particles
A Rubber Spatula
A Lot Of Very Clever Men Probably Wearing White Coats

1. Take Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics.
2. Throw it out of the window. Make sure window is open first.
3. Make sure you have your Great Big Bag Of Cash ready.
4. Take Most Of Switzerland. You don’t need to be that careful with it - it stands up to rough treatment, especially if you dip into your Great Big Bag Of Cash.
5. Dig up Most Of Switzerland and build a very big Circle Line.
6. Install your Large Hadron Collider in the Circle Line you have built.
7. Fire that baby up.
8. Oh.
9. Ah.
10. Magnetic quench in your superconducting bending magnets. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
11. Fire that baby down.
12. Set aside for a year or so to cool.
13. Fire it up again.
14. You need to prepare your particles for injection into the Large Hadron Collider. First pass them through the Linear Particle Accelerator, then through the Proton Synchrotron Booster, then through the Super Proton Synchrotron, and finally through the Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster.
15. Now the particles are ready for collision. This is the fun bit.
16. Crank ‘em up and smash ‘em together. You are looking for a force of up to 7 TeV.
15. Don’t ask me what TeV means. I thought you were the particle physicist. It’s a lot anyway.
16. At this point there is a danger that the particles may curdle and that the entire known universe will be sucked into a black hole, meaning the end of existence as we know it. There is no need to panic, though. Simply take your spatula and carefully fold the particles back into the collider. Adding another egg yolk may help stabilise it, too.
17. You should now have a Higgs Boson particle. As it will only be in existence for a fraction of a nanosecond, serve immediately.

The Rewards of Culinary Incompetence

We’ve all done it. Don’t pretend you haven’t.

In a fit of brazen chutzpah (is there any other kind?) you imagine you know better than the recipe. A professional food writer has shared the knowledge and experience garnered over decades of hard work, but you look at their offering and think ‘pah! What do you know, Simon/Hugh/Delia/Nigella/Jamie/Albert/Marco Pierre/Heston (delete as appropriate)? I can do this standing on my head. Where you say butter, I will use sunflower oil. Where you say fifteen minutes, I know very well you mean thirty-five. Where you ask for the juice of half a lemon...well I’ve got all these lemons in the basket and they’re going to go off soon - I’ll chuck three in.’

For this recipe you will require:

Fillet of salmon. For eight. Three of whom are ill and have cancelled.

Some potatoes - neither the same amount nor variety as in the recipe.

Purple sprouting broccoli.

Those lemons.

Garlic. Plenty.

Fat of some kind. Whatever you have.

A chisel.

1. Check the recipes. Salmon wrapped in foil with lemon juice - piece of cake. Grated Golden Wonder potato cake - no problem. Steamed purple sprouting with garlic and anchovies - duh.
2. Put the books back on the shelf. You won’t need them again.
3. Peel and grate the potatoes. Some of them go a bit brown. That’s ok, they’ll be brown once they’re cooked anyway. Add the cloves of garlic, crushed, to the potato gratings.


4. Lay the salmon fillet on oiled foil.


5. Squeeze the lemon(s) over the salmon.


6. Pick the lemon pips out of the salmon.


7. Wrap the salmon parcels.


8. Foil torn. Start again.


9. Once that’s done, turn your attention to the potatoes.


10. They really have gone quite brown, haven’t they? And you haven’t started cooking them yet.


11. Heat the fat and add the potato/garlic mixture.


12. So far so good. Relax and watch a bit of cricket.


13. Shot!


14. What’s that smell?


15. Ah.


16. This is why you need the chisel. Hack the potato from the bottom of the pan. Remove burnt-but-not-actually-inedlble crust and set aside. Put the rest of it back in the pan and return to the heat.


17. Back to the cricket.


18. Got him!


19. Bugger. Fish.


20. Oh God when should I put the broccoli on?


21. Not now.


22. Idiot. You’ll regret that.


23. Potato doing nicely, fish ok.


24. Consider making broccoli puree instead.


25. Realise that success of dish depends on people being at table at the right time. People sadly not in evidence.


26. The potato is burning again. Never mind. Crunchy bits are good.


27. Assemble plates, cutlery, food, wine, people.

It was all so simple. And, despite your best efforts, absolutely delicious. Pat yourself on the back and thumb nose at food writers. Consciously or not, you knew better all along.

Recipe Shmecipe

You know what I want? What I really really want?

A cookbook that tells it like it is.

The marvellous writer Julian Barnes has written very entertainingly on the subject of recipes, the frustrations inherent in trying to follow them, and how they fail to meet the expectations of one who wants to be told exactly what to do. If you don’t have this book, I thoroughly recommend it.

My beef is a bit different.

I have yet to read a cookbook that accurately represents the experiences of the normal cook.

I would love, just once, to read a recipe like this (with apologies to The River Cafe, from whose blue book this is first extracted, then distorted):

Penne with Tomato and Balsamic Vinegar

Serves between 3 and 6.

If 3 you will have far too much and will pick at the leftovers for the rest of the afternoon, finally succumbing and finishing it off because let’s face it there wasn’t enough left for a whole portion by that stage.

If 6 you will realise when it comes to serving time that there isn’t enough and will try to salvage it with a tub of double cream or some bread on the side.

You will need:

2 tablespoons olive oil. Bugger, none left. Butter then (scrape the jam off first. Actually, leave it on - it adds a pleasant sweetness.)

2 garlic cloves, peeled and cut into slivers. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Allow at least ten minutes for this bit, mostly for getting the papery bits off the second clove. There will still be a little bit attached and you’ll have garlic under your fingernails.

A sharper knife.

A handful of fresh basil. But only if the pathetic little plant you bought from Sainsbury’s hasn’t died. Otherwise forget it.

1 x 800g tin peeled plum tomatoes. Or 2 x 400g tins. That’s the normal size in a normal kitchen. We’re not all the bloody River Cafe you know, our larders groaning with catering size packets of everything, and our scouts constantly on the lookout for the most authentic, used-by-actual-Ligurian-peasants-you-know-but-actually-grown-on-the-Contessa-di-Vecchio-Prosciutto’s-fifty-thousand-acre-estate, unbelievably expensive and exclusive olive oil.

Some sticking plaster handy for when you cut yourself opening the tins.

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. No sea salt? What kind of foodie are you? Sod it, Saxa will do.

250g penne rigate. Or fusilli. Or farfalle. Or, come to think of it, a mixture of all three because that’s all you have left. And 250g, by the way, serves 2, not 6. Chuck the whole lot in.

75g butter, cut into pieces. Yeah right. Make that an indeterminate-sized lump of butter plus a little bit more. Oh go on then, another little bit.

4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar. Now where was it? Somewhere in this cupboard. Oh here’s some white wine vinegar. Will that do? Hmm. Looks a bit manky at the bottom. Sell by...oh. Ah. Never mind, in it goes anyway. How much? 4 tablespoons. Oh look, just slosh in a good glug.

Oops.

120g Pecorino cheese, freshly grated. Ok so nobody has pecorino. Use parmesan. Yes you have. Have another look. It’s in the scrunched up foil package at the back. There you go. A bit dried up, but it will do.

More sticking plaster for when you grate your fingers trying to eke out the parmesan dog end.

Heat the olive oil/butter/whatever oil you managed to lay your hands on in a pan that is either far too big or just too small. Answer the phone and come back to find that the oil/butter/whatever oil you managed to lay your hands on has burned.

Clean the pan and start again, this time with a more suitably-sized pan.

Fry the garlic slivers until light brown. Leave them for half a picosecond too long. Burn them.

Swear lightly. This is authentic and entirely in keeping with the provenance of the dish.
Add a few of the basil leaves. Throw some of the others on the floor by mistake. Leave them there to steep with the garlic slivers that fell off the chopping board when you were ‘slicing’ (hacking) them ‘thinly’ (misshapenly).

The basil leaves appear to have disappeared. Plunder the plant again. The stalks contain more nutrients apparently.

Add the tomatoes. Stir and cook gently for 30-40 minutes.

Yes, 30-40 minutes. Should have read it before you started, shouldn’t you?

It’s cooking too fast. Turn it down.

Too low now. Up a bit.

Make some toast while you’re waiting.

Put some water on to boil. No not that pan. Nor that one. Bigger. Bigger. Is that the biggest one you’ve got?

When the water is boiling remember that you should have salted it. Salt it. Throw the pasta in.

The pan boils over. That’s why you need a larger pan.

Relight the gas. Mop up the water.

Cook the pasta. Realise that the fusilli need nine minutes and the penne thirteen. Never mind. Just boil them all until they’re lightly dead.

When the pasta is cooked, realise that you need a colander.

Walk from cooker to sink with saucepan full of boiling water and pasta in one hand, colander in the other.

Vitamin E is good for burns.

Drain the pasta in the colander. Rescue those pieces of pasta from the sink.

Realise you should have rinsed the sink first.

Return the pasta to the saucepan with the butter.

Add a bit more. Can’t do any harm.

Add the vinegar and coat the pasta thoroughly.

Now add the tomato sauce. Realise that you should have stirred it while it was cooking. Scrape the burned bits off the bottom of the pan and mix them in thoroughly with the rest of the sauce so that nobody notices.

Now is the time to throw in the double cream.

Serve.

Realise that the reason they specify balsamic vinegar is because it tastes horrible using anything else.

Grate a lot more cheese over it in a doomed effort to cover up the acid taste of stale vinegar that pervades the dish.

Next week: overcooked roast lamb with undercooked roast potatoes.

Tasty Bit of Crumpet

A hitch this morning.

Me to The Boy: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

The Boy to Me: ‘Crumpets’.

Now this has been a habitual breakfast dish for The Boy since The Flame-Haired Temptresss birthday party just before Christmas. It was an ‘open house’ type affair, starting at 2. We had laid in several packets of crumpets with the idea that, come teatime, people, and especially children, might like a break from the champagne that they had been drinking for, ooh, all of forty-five minutes. The plan was that we would tuck into crumpets and grape jelly (genteelly but with vim and gusto).

That was the plan.

How do you make God laugh? Tell Him your plans.

So it’s been crumpets for breakfast for the last three weeks.

But now they have run out.

‘That’s ok', I offer cheerily. ‘I’ll make some'.

A seriously impressed silence from my family.

Now then. The crumpet is one of those foodstuffs that you imagine has always been bought from the corner shop, isn’t it?

There they are, next to the loo roll and man-size Kleenex: Malt Loaf. Swiss Roll. Crumpets.

All these things come from the corner shop and that's the end of it. Nobody, but nobody, has ever made them at home. It would be like trying to rustle up some after eight mints by yourself by fusing a bar of Bournville and a tube of Colgate over a Bunsen burner. There is a technique involved that is simply not available to the home user.
And even if there were, why would you bother? Just nip out to the corner shop.
So now panic sets in. I saw a recipe some time ago. Where was it? Oh yes. Guardian.

Of course.

Flour. Check.

Milk. Check.

Water. Duh.

Yeast, salt, baking powder. Check-check-checkeroo.

Crumpet rings.

Oh.

Ah.

Improvisation will clearly be called for.

We ended up with one tester crumpet (burnt on the bottom and gooey in the middle), one real crumpet (massive but really rather tasty) and a lot of pikelets (some of which were forgotten about in the bread bin and resurfaced a few days later - once you scraped off the green stuff they tasted fine).

Back to the corner shop for me next time.

Taking the fishcake

Toast and sarnies for the first half of the day.

Guacamole and crisps followed by the other fishcake for the second half.

Pret choc bar at half time, with one of those pomegranate drinks that didn't seem to exist two years ago.

Rumours that I also demolished a honey sandwich are speculative, scurrilous, and absolutely true.

A make-do-and-mend kind of day, foodwise. Running late for lunch so I throw together tuna and sweetcorn sarnies for us all. It's one of the few things we're all guaranteed to eat, and time is short. The linseed bread helps lift it from the 'staggeringly mundane' category.

This evening is haphazard too. There seems to be, as so often, a lot of bitty food that needs eating up. Four avocados, each at a different stage of squidge; a couple of cold sausages; the last fishcake; several bundles of foil, each giving no clue as to the contents. The foil parcels can be tackled another day, when I'm feeling stronger. I have a feeling they are mostly the Christmas cheeses.

Improvising an edible meal from cold sausages and a fishcake would be beyond even the most Charlie-Parker-esque of kitchen extemporisers, so The Wife and I agree to go our separate ways: she will tackle the sausages, while I will attempt to give the fishcake a good talking-to. We are united by a hastily-mashed guacamole with kettle chips. So far, so dippy.

The main course of this two-course extravaganza is less successful. Let's be honest: the fishcake is a dowdy invention. One cannot imagine it as the signature dish of any aspiring chef, for example, no matter how much they might drizzle it with deconstructed tartare sauce or tower it upwards, surrounded by finely minced lemon zest and ginger. It is a relentlessly unglamorous concept. The ones that have been in the organic free-range dolphin-friendly carbon-neutral don’t-you-dare-put-that-pesticide-anywhere-near-my-food delivery box every few weeks for the last six months or so are always a huge disappointment. They'll be light and crispy, I think to myself; moist and tender; accompanied by green beans, they'll make a simple but wholesome supper dish, washed down with a lightly chilled glass of chenin blanc.

Pah! they may be wholesome but blimey o'reilly do they let you know it. 'I am good for you', they seem to cry, as you force down each dry and mealy mouthful. 'Don't even think about enjoying me.’

The crust formed is barely rizla-thin, the fish has been mashed to within 2.54cm of its life, and each cake is about 35% too big. It's a bit like reading Steve Waugh's autobiography: dense, worthy and interminable. Come to that, not totally unlike one of SW's innings.

I try to liven it up with some ketchup, but it's no good. Finish it and move on.

Splat

Breakfast: the two slices of toast with the thinnest spreadings of the butter and the grape jelly. This was the first thing I had eaten for 36 hours. Yum.

Lunch: the fishcake and the sweetcorn. Oh and the some chips.

Supper: the rescued bowl of soup followed by the scrambled eggs on the toast.

A couple of Penguins may also have passed my lips on occasion.

The Rescued Bowl of Soup

Well. It was all going so smoothly. A gnomic butternut squash and a slightly fatigued sweet potato, each yielding a disproportionately large pile of peelings. The inevitable goose fat. Some two-day-old roast potatoes that were lurking in a bowl in the fridge, added to the roasting tin at the last minute to revitalise them. Another spoonful of goose fat (I think it's breeding in there) for onion and garlic, heated slowly until temptingly glossy. Plenty of thyme, ripped roughly from the sprigs. A bag of the goose stock that I froze yesterday, and then the roasted vegetables into the stockpot.

Blender.

A winter soup, delicious and warming, enough to stave off the snow that they say will arrive tonight.

Whizz. Whhiiiiizzzzzzzz. Phhhhzzrrrrrrrrrr.

And then, as I lift the blender jug off its spindle, the bottom of the jug gets all stubborn. Displaying admirable loyalty, it remains attached to the main body of the food processor, which has treated it so well over the years. The top of the jug displays a more adventurous spirit, striking out on its own. The soup within the jug can’t make up its mind.

A token amount lands in one of the bowls, and some on the worktop. But mostly on my clothes and the floor. I am tempted to squeeze out the cloth into a bowl, just to salvage some of the precious golden gloop. But then I realise that the cloth in question is the one that hasn't been washed for, ooh, let's pretend it's only a week.

Scrambled eggs then. And that, as anyone who has ever ruined them (and let's face it, we all have) is another story.