The Sticky Toffee Pudding King

This week is meat week. You may be thinking that we've had meat weeks before, which is true, but this week we have been focussing particularly on steaks of various kinds: beef steaks (fillet, rib-eye), a cut from beef skirt which Hervé favours, and which was particularly delicious (it's a French thing), ostrich, and on. Various game birds were also thrown in for good measure (partridge, pigeon) and then there was a special appearance this morning from Jade, of whom more later, when we've cooked her. She's in the fridge at the moment.

Hervé spent a good few hours hacking around with a bull's chest cavity on Monday, carving out various attachments for us to use. On Tuesday Lizzie kind of threw the remaining ribs and backbone at me and said "Frank, just make some stock out of that will you?"

A word of advice at this point: always make sure you have a pan big enough to take the bones before you start roasting them to make stock. I learned the hard way, roasting them in the oven and only then wondering how I was going to submerge them in water. I ended up losing half a stone hacking them around before they would fit in the pan, and burning myself in the process - even man-mountain Butcher Graham gave up on me half way through.

On Friday of this week we have our "creative meat" assessment, which is a 3 course dinner of which one course has to feature meat. Not particularly challenging, the sort of thing you do every Sunday at home no doubt. However, I spent Tuesday evening calculating all the homework I have to do over the next 10 weeks or so, and it is frightening! We have the various assessments to prep for, our portfolio of 5 starters and 5 mains to plan, prepare and photograph, a business plan to put together (20-25 pages of write-up, plus profit and loss and cash flow forecasts), a food writing course submission, revision for our wines & spirits intermediate exam, and planning and organisation for our diploma lunch (have you had the email, would you like to come?), among the major tasks. It's a good job the football season is drawing to a close.

Today we cooked various meats: all those mentioned above plus corn-fed chicken and beef skirt were to hand. Lizzie had been banging on about using lettuce in ways other than salads, so I thought I'd give it a try, given that I am planning to do a Greek dish using lettuce in a casserole for Friday's assessment, and this was a good chance to suss things out.

We also did a pudding. Now I'm not a pudding person, as most of you will know. However my sticky toffee pudding was, to quote my partner Sam, "A Real Crowd Pleaser". So much so that not only were the two portions put out for assessment devoured in an instant (Ian, the boss, ate most of both portions), but when I brought the rest of the (large) dish to the table that disappeared very quickly also. You've got to remember here the amount of food that ends up on our average lunch table, and that people are generally groaning under the weight of calories. Yesterday Butcher Graham's chair collapsed when he attempted a last mouthful of coconut cake. Anyway, it was all eaten, and I am now officially the Sticky Toffee Pudding King.

TARRAGON CHICKEN WITH FENNEL AND LETTUCE RISOTTO

This dish is nice and simple, but tastes fresh and delicious. Try it.

Serves 1 (or 2 for light lunch)


1 chicken breast
fresh tarragon
butter
2-3 oz risotto rice
2 shallots
1 clove garlic
small piece fennel
fennel seeds
1/2 glass white wine
chicken (or veg) stock (about 1/2 pint)
1/2 cos lettuce, finely shredded
1 tbl parmesan, grated
salt and pepper

1. mash the butter (and a little salt if required) with the tarragon to make - you guessed it - tarragon butter.
2. Make a split in the chicken breast and stuff with tarragon butter. Rub a little tarragon butter on the outside of the chicken, sprinkle with tarragon leaves, salt and pepper and leave to rest in the fridge for a hour or so
3. Gently fry the finely chopped shallots, garlic and fennel in a little oil and butter. Do not brown.
4. Add fennel seeds for a few seconds, then rice, and stir until opaque (2 mins)
5. Add white wine (it should sizzle a little). Turn heat to low.
6. Gradually add stock, allowing each ladle to be absorbed, covered. Takes 30-40 minutes.
At this point you can stop if you are not ready to serve - just reheat the rice when required
7. Put a few cocktail sticks through the chicken to hold it together. Pan fry the chicken in hot butter and oil, until browned. Put in baking tray in medium oven, covered, for 15 minutes to finish.
8. When rice is al dente, remove from heat, stir in parmesan, lettuce and knobs of butter. Season.
9. Remove cocktail sticks from chicken, slice diagonally into (ideally) 5 pieces
10. Serve risotto with chicken on top, and an extra knob of tarragon butter to guarantee a heart attack (that's two heart attacks in two blogs!).

Bread of Heaven

Feed me 'til I want no more, the song continues.

I think I've had enough now.

The first two days this week were on "specialist breads". This was however not bread as you know it, Jim, but croissant, bagels, danish pastry, pate feuillettée (puff pastry to you), brioche. Basically, things the French eat every day which contain a minimum of 90% butter. Why the French don't all look as if they are made from those party balloons magicians bring out out children's parties beats me. It must be balanced out by the red wine, or something.

Photo above: croissant
Photo left: brioche

I really enjoyed our specialist bread making. The one thing I'd always wanted, but failed to, cook at home was bread, and to now be able to do it consistently is very very satisfying. OK, so croissant doesn't really count as bread, but you know what I mean. Some of these delicacies, you may be interested to know, take an awful long time to produce. In the case of pate feuillettée, it took 2 days, because of the folding, chilling and refolding process. Basically, Jus Rol have the market in a bag.

I have to confess I made a slight error on the croissant front: we were working in pairs, and Boston Kate had done all the measuring out of ingredients. I was making up the mix for croissants and Danish, which was the same up until a certain point, then the mix was split in two and the individual recipes followed. At this point I incorporated the whole quantity of butter into half the mix I was using for croissants. Somehow I got it to blend in, and somehow, it cooked ok! The croissants, I have to say were delicious, but I could probably be held to book for the creation of a weapon of mass destruction in terms of an instant heart attack.

Photo right: bagels

Today we recommenced our business course at Edinburgh Napier. Having concentrated on the creativity and innovation side last time, we focussed in on the more practical aspects of starting a business today, and for the next two days. It really is an excellent course, and if the ongoing available facilities and support are as promised, it will be a superb source of advice and encouragement to all of us wanting to branch out and do our own thing. The range of ideas presented by people today was truly excellent, from a flavoured white spirit bar to a mobile pudding van to a [ready-cooked ha ha] seafood restaurant in a Northern Cumbrian port. Having signed a confidentiality agreement (yes I'm serious) I can't reveal any more details about these potential ventures. My own, however, will be called "Wild in the Pantry" as you may have guessed. I revealed the concept of the business, without mentioning the name, and it got a reasonably good reception. Over the next few weeks we will have a chance to produce a business plan, workshop it and present it to the group, and more importantly, the tutors. I got the impression nobody else has got as far as registering their domain name - yes, you can click on www.wildinthepantry.co.uk if you wish! At the moment it is a "parked domain", which means the adverts that appear are automatically generated as being related to the profile of the site - I don't really have an opinion on restaurants in Chichester (but I might get 10p if you click on the link).

It's All Kicking off!

So I'm away for a week and all hell is let loose on two fronts.

I've had a stream of texts from Boston Kate, who is suffering what sounds like a much worse physical (and come to that, mental) illness than I've had. Interestingly, Kate and I have shared a workstation for the last few weeks but I think that's probably coincidence given her symptoms. Kate by her own admission has become delusional, and has started to imagine the class is falling into two camps, at war with each other. She places me firmly on her side of the barricades, although admits I am something of a "dark horse" to most people. I think this all stems from her getting a certain amount of stick from one or two people, and also from her being permanently stressed up to her eyeballs doing the course whilst trying to hold down 3 jobs to pay the fees. Anyway, Uncle Frank will have a word in due course, once I've sussed out exactly what has been going on in my absence. As Kate quite rightly points out, there are quite a few people who need to grow up a bit.

Arriving back in in Edinburgh this evening, I went upstairs in search of Gill, my landlady, who is back in England briefly, because a large white van had appeared in the driveway where I normally park. I just wanted to know whether I could squeeze my car in, given I will be away narrow boating for a few days and didn't want to incur the wrath of the demon traffic wardens. We had a long chat about life, the universe, and doing up chateaux in France, which is Gill's role in life at the moment. Somehow Gill then got onto the subject of "Her!" (frowning and pointing downstairs furiously). I gathered she was talking about Click.
"I've never seen anything like it," she growled, "The state of that room! I emptied 10 buckets full of rubbish from the floor into a pile on her bed. I stuck 12 post it notes round the room. Some of the things I found you would not believe. I'm just not having it!"
I politely enquired whether it had been confirmed that the missing glassware had been in Click's room.
"All of it. Unwashed. Hidden in a drawer." I thought she was going to throw up at this point, such was her expression. "I've told Mrs Syrup to check her room regularly, and I've told her that if Her room needs cleaning again Mrs Stirrup will do it and I'll charge Her for it. I'm not having it. Rats and mice and everything. Disgusting."
Her finger swung round and pointed at me. I cowered. "And I'm not having Her up here. I know about thing with the keys. I know how often she forgets to take her own. If she comes up here she'll leave the front door wide open."
I assured Gill that I was a trustworthy keeper of the spare set of house keys in her absence and made to leave.
"Oh Frank, one other thing." I stood, transfixed. She smiled. "If you'd like to move the van round to the side road you can park your car in the yard." A clever move this I now know, as it turned out that the van, or pantechnicon in disguise as I now know it to be, needed to execute a clearance of the gate posts to such a fine margin that our old friend Werner Heisenberg would have been proud of me. Uncertainty Principle - you bet.

Heisenberg and Me

Whilst sitting at home in Sheffield, recuperating from a rathern nasty bilateral nasal infection (not to be confused with a mere man cold) I have decided to tackle the knotty issue of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and its relationship to life in general and blogging in particular.

Werner Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist, born in Germany in 1901, the year Barrow AFC was founded, no coincidence surely. The Uncertainty Principle for which he is best known states that, when attempting to measure the properties of a sub-atomic particle, it is impossible to know all of them accurately at the same time. So if you manage to measure the mass of the particle, you cannot simultaneously accurately know its momentum. To put it another way, at that level the clumsy macroscopic act of measuring, itself affects what is being measured (aka the Observer Effect).

So how does this apply to the humble blog? When I decided to write a blog, I didn't know anything about blogging, and so decided on two basic principles: a) write about one topic at a time (ok, so sometimes I write about two which are in some way connected); and b) don't write in detail about anyone who is likely to read the blog. The question is, are the "properties" of the blog affected, either consciously or sub-consciously, by the readership, the "measurers"? The answer is a resounding yes on both levels.

There are people who I know read the blog, people who I know who I suspect read the blog, and people who I don't know who I know read the blog. Its the old "known, unknowns, unknown knowns" thing (courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld). I write to try to entertain everyone who I think might read it, which is interesting in itself, because when I started I didn't have any concept of entertaining anyone, just writing whatever came into my head, so that is the first sub-conscious way in which the blog has been affected by the "measurers".

People often give me feedback, and I either think "That's good, I'll write some more of what they like, or "Hmm, maybe I'll steer clear of that in future." That's the conscious side of it.

And I'm often asked whether anyone who appears in the blog knows about it. The answer is as far as I know "No", and if they did, I couldn't write it as I do. I don't feel guilty about anything I've written, but I know it would be different, or more probably I would stop writing it, if the characters I'm writing about were to know about it. Thinking about it, this situation would not only affect the blog, but would almost certainly also affect the behaviour of the people concerned - towards me at least! A kind of reverse Uncertainty Principle. Of course it is possible that they do already know about it, and are acting out some sort of play which I am reporting on, and the real joke is on me. This brings us onto the nature of reality, which I'm not going to go into at this point, although I am tempted to throw in Schrodinger's Cat for good measure.

It must have been difficult being a theoretical physicist in the early years of the 20th century, and I imagine Heisenberg was made only too aware of the difficulties of measuring the useful properties of an object (namely himself) when tackled by his wife:
"What are you doing today?" I imagine her demanding of him, arms folded.
"Erm... thinking about tiny little particles that nobody knows if they exist or not, and if they do, whether you can actually know very much about them anyway, dear."
"Well, that's not getting the bloody ironing done, is it?"

Heisenberg died in 1976, at home, suffocated when a large pile of slightly damp laundry fell on top of him.

The Beautiful Game

This post will only appeal to a small percentage of my readership, aka men, but here goes anyway. It is prompted by a complaint from a loyal reader (Phil Mac) that I don't put enough in about our beloved Barrow. The fact that this blog is about my experiences in Edinburgh doesn't seem to wash with Phil.

I've just returned from the pub where I watched a deflated Liverpool capitulate to that bunch of Southern softies known as Chelsea in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final. Good atmosphere in the pub, at least until Chelsea scored their third.

Football is a wonderful game, or to qualify that it is if you didn't lose your last match. Fortunately, having lost at home to relegation rivals Woking last Saturday, Barrow partially redeemed themselves with an away point at Kettering yesterday so, for now, football is wonderful game.

Champions League is all very well, but "grass roots" football is the real thing. I was reminded of this by the daily newsletter email I received today from a guy called Ralph, who lives in New Zealand, such is our fan base and widespread appeal. It contained (as it always does) a look back at a match from Barrow's long and inglorious history, which I faithfully reproduce below along with rough translation:

December 3 1988, Bacup Borough 0 Barrow 0, Lancashire Cup* First Round

Bacup Borough: No team details.$

Barrow: McDonnell, Higgins, Hulse, Harrison, Gordon, Reach, Doherty, Gilmour, G. Gill£, Lowe, Burgess (Chilton). Sub: Skivington%.

Ref: n/a. ** Att: 77. $$ Harrison sent-off. %% Match abandoned after 90 minutes, no floodlights. ***

* even less important than our usual matches
$ we can't even be bothered to produce a team sheet
£ we may or may not have another player called Gill, if we do he's not playing tonight but we want to be very clear which one we are talking about because that's the sort of anoraky people we are
% the poor sod had to sit out the whole match and didn't even get a kick
** ref "not applicable" - says it all really
$$ Players, player's wives, player's mothers, groundsman, tea lady, small boy, dog
%% lucky sod
*** interesting that nobody noticed this for 90 minutes! I assume they finished the match, were due to play extra time as it was a draw but it was by then too dark. Now then, don't you think someone should have thought about this possibility in advance? Presumably they then had to rearrange the match, or even just play the extra time, on another date. Or perhaps they just tossed a coin in the bar afterwards and the unlucky losers went through to the next round.

For those few of you who have never been to Bacup, the ground is on a steep slope on the outskirts of the town, where the wind whistles down off the Pennines across a bleak and barren landscape, peppered with depressing rows of dirty terraced housing. And that's me talking the place up.

Ah, non-league football, its what life's all about.

DEPORTATION UPDATE... DEPORTATION UPDATE...

Alex is reprieved! He had his interview with the immigration department at Edinburgh Airport yesterday and they were feeling in a good mood, so he got a 3 month extension. He even turned up to today's business course wearing a suit. This is probably because he packed all his things up on the expectation they were going to tell him to jump on the next plane back to Malaysia,but fortunately for him it didn't come to that.
Gill told us the news this morning as we arrived for the start of the business course at Napier University.
"Alex says its good news," she said.
"He's being deported," replied Stepan, drily.

The above news may or may not explain the exchange of texts I've just had:

UNKNOWN CALLER: Hey up 4 a drink morow? Hope not 2 busy after course
ME: Who is this please?
U. C.: r u Frank boddy?
ME: Yep
U. C.: Ur terrorist. lol
U. C.: C u morow sheffield navy.peace from d guerilla samboanga teritory.

Answers on a postcard please.

The Don't Give a Monkey's Approach, Parts 1 & 2

TDGaMA Part 1

We've had a week's break from school, but are back with our noses to the pepper grinder now in what is rather haughtily called the Second Semester. From what we've been told today, it will be quite different to the First, which was concerned with basic techniques across the (chopping) board. This semester is the serious stuff, the stuff that counts towards our diploma, and it includes such things as a business course (which starts this week); more Wines & Spirits certification; a food writing course (restaurant reviews, that sort of thing); putting together a personal portfolio of dishes, all of which must be cooked, photographed and presented in a binder (the photos, not the food); and the final diploma lunch, at least 5 courses, served to at least 8 friends and family. I could see the colour draining out of many people's faces as Lizzie went through the details.

But today we got back into the swing of things by refreshing our knife skills, and repeating the basic recipes which "you should all know without looking at your recipe books by now" according to Lizzie, who was in a foul mood all day. Anyway, I managed two kinds of bread rolls, sweet pastry, savoury pastry, white sauce, and even meringues without breaking sweat. Why meringues are considered a "basic recipe" I have no idea, but fortunately they only have 2 ingredients and so this is not a huge problem.

The secret to meringues, I have discovered, is not to give a monkey's about them. Just whip them up until they look something like, mix the sugar in until it kind of dissolves, put the oven on... oh... low-ish, bung them in and forget about them until lunch is ready. Perfect. I have decided this is probably the answer to all life's problems.

The thing is, the week off has given me time to reflect and consolidate what I have learned through the simple process of letting it roll around inside my head for a while until my brain decides there is nothing to worry about and everything sort of settles somewhere comfortable. Topped off by cooking what turned out to be a fairly decent meal last Friday night for friends Annabelle and Stuart, as well as the family. This was made all the more successful by a) baking some very fine buttermilk and caraway seed rolls to go with it and b) concluding I had not actually poisoned Margaret who fell ill the next day (but nobody else did). So with those confidence boosts, I have returned to the school with a much more upbeat approach and relaxed attitude. So ends the "First Semester Report".

TDGaMA Part 2

There was a bit of catching up to do on our return to school. James appeared to be still recovering from the hangover he got the Thursday before breaking up. Graham ("Hunter")'s broken wrist was still a major topic of conversation... for him. We had a new starter in Morag, who did her first 3 months last year, but had to drop out unexpectedly at that point. Boston Kate had been to Spain, been ill, and spent most of the time sleeping on the floor because of a bad back. And Alex, yes Alex, has been given 48 hours to come up with a reason not to be deported.

We all sometimes wonder how Alex has got this far in life. It turns out that he came to the UK from Malaysia on a 3 month tourist visa, and never bothered to tell the authorities he was on a course. So even while he was negotiating with the school to extend to do the final 3 months of the course (which we all told him he shouldn't do because it would be too difficult for him), and trying to raise the money to do it from a Malaysian bank, it never dawned on him he should apply for a new visa. Apparently he was stopped at Glasgow airport on his way to Poland last week... woah, stop. This is a guy who has no money, and when asked what he was going to do during the break told us he wanted to see more of England. So... he was on his way to Poland, with an expired visa, and he got hauled up and told he had 48 hours to come up with a good reason he should be allowed back into the country. Even at this point he didn't tell them he was on a course! Oh, Alex.

Alex brought each of us a little present of a keyring from Poland. "Something for you to remember me by. You might not see me again very soon," he said to me earnestly, punching me playfully in the ribs. On Wednesday we shall know.