Post the Seventy-first (in which our heroine muses on a rant)

So, I was having abit of a bad day there a week or so ago and posted an impromptu rant on Facebook about the things that were particularly bothering me at the time.  I was expecting a bit of a backlash against it, but instead it generated mostly agreement.  So I thought I'd flesh it out a bit here, mostly as an exercise to see if these things are still annoying me just as much today, on a Friday, when I'm feeling remarkably more zen about the world as a whole.

1. People who can't spell. I'm being visually assaulted from all sides of my Facebook newsfeed. Buy a fucking dictionary already.

God, this drives me mad.  The internet/social media has an awful lot to answer for with regards to the dumbing down of an entire generation.  Dis, dats, dese and dose everywhere.  Wat, youse, shud of, I seen, I been - it's endless.  And not only can these people not spell, they actually seem perversely proud of the fact.  It boggles my mind, it really does.  Have they any - any - idea how unutterably stupid they appear? Prbly not.

2. News outlets reporting speculation from other news outlets as actual news. Oh, so the Indo said that Sean O'Brien is on the verge of signing for Toulon? Better stick it in our next bulletin, so.

Spin 1038 actually did this, in an actual news report.  "The Irish Independent has reported that Sean O'Brien is likely to sign with French side Toulon later today."  That's not news!!!  That's just you passing on someone else's opinion.  Jesus wept.

4. The Book Depository. Gimme my poxy books, now.

They've all since arrived, two of them about an hour after I'd written that post, and the third the following day, so it's all good.

5. People right-onning Gabourey Sidibe. I've no time for internet trolls, but let's not kid ourselves that she's some kind of role model for positive body image.

Ooh, this is a biggie for me.  If you're not familiar with the background, Gabourey Sidibe, a morbidly obese actress drew a lot of flack online after the Golden Globes for her appearance.  She allegedly responded "To the people commenting on my weight, I'm just going to go cry in my private jet while I fly to my next job" and the quote, predictably, was everywhere in the following days with people going "Boom!" and "You tell them haters!" and "You go girl!".  Now, while I think that professional internet trolls are the lowest of the low, I really don't think anyone should be holding Sidibe up as a role model for positive body image.  Glorifying either end of the weight spectrum is a bad idea.  It doesn't really matter how "happy" Sidibe is, the fact of the matter is that she's staring down the barrel of some major, major health problems.  Cheerleading that is downright dangerous.

6. This week.

Which is now last week.  But yeah, it was a bad 'un.  Assignment hell, destitution, cabin fever.  Actually, now that I think about it, this week isn't all that different.

7. Motor tax.

My car is eight years old.  It is worth approximately two grand.  It is not fancy, or flash, or high-performance in any way.  I taxed it for three months last week, plus a month's arrears, and it cost me €257.

My friend K's car is one month old.  It's worth approximately forty-eight grand.  It is extremely fancy, and flash, and gorgeous in every imaginable way, and I would date it if I could.  She taxed it for the entire year last week, and it cost her €200.  You can see the reason for my annoyance, I'm sure.

8. Idiots who can't park.

Forget the zombie apocalypse, the major plague that seems to be spreading across the nation lately is the inability to park.  It's DEFINITELY getting worse.  Why that is, I don't know.  A symptom of the fact that people just have absolutely zero consideration for others these days?  Perhaps.  But regardless, here's a tip for those of you who might find it slightly challenging:  those lines on the ground provide a handy guide as to where your car should actually end up.  Have a fucking look at them once in a while.

9. Whichever genius thought 700 metres was sufficient distance between two of the busiest exits on the M50.

Namely the Red Cow and Ballymount.  I actually find it hard to even write about this, it annoys me so much.  Suffice to say that traffic queuing to get off at the Red Cow regularly backs up the full 700m to Ballymount, so that people trying to get on from Ballymount can't go anywhere.  And nor can anyone else, because the entire rest of the mainline gets snarled up with people trying to get over into the exit lane.  Slow clap to whoever came up with that design.

10. Men.

Oy vey.  That's a topic for a whole 'nother day.  I've harshed my Friday mellow enough.

So, onwards with the budget feeding.  I know I already said it, but I really am sorry that this is taking so long.  What actually happened is that I had them all made and photographed and ready to go.  And then I somehow managed to delete all the photos, so I had to go and cook them all again.  Which is taking forever because I've been up to my mincers in college work for the past couple of weeks.  The bad news is, the last two recipes are going to be even longer in coming as I won't be cooking again til Monday.  Forgive me, please!

Anyway, today's recipe is a slightly more grown-up version of bangers and mash.  Don't be put off by the thoughts of the apple; they're a classic combination with pork.  In fact, my mother will attest that I used to regularly have a sausage with an apple for breakfast when I was younger and have a bite of each at the same time.

Bangers, Pudding and Mash with Caramelised Onion - serves 4

8 jumbo sausages                              1 black pudding, cut into 12 slices
2 onions, finely sliced                       6 medium potatoes, peeled & quartered
1 tsp sugar                                         1 tbs mustard
2 knobs butter                                    Oil, salt & pepper
1 apple, peeled, cored, quartered and finely sliced

1. Melt one kob of butter with a little olive oil in a pan and gently sweat your onions with a lid on for 15 minutes, until nice and soft.

2. In the meantime, boil the potatoes til nice and tender, then drain and leave to steam dry for 5 minutes.  Stick your sausages and pudding under the grill.

3. Add the apple and sugar to the onions, toss to mix, then leave the lid off and cook on a slightly higher heat til everything is nice and golden.

4.  Return the potatoes to the pot and mash with the other knob of butter, the mustard, a splash of milk and plenty of salt & pepper.

5. When your sausages & pudding are cooked on all sides, divide the mash between four plates, place two sausages and three slices of pudding on top and heap with the caramelised apples and onions.

Suggestions:  As you can see, I added a pea puree to this.  The colour really adds to the look of the dish, pea & pudding are a classic combo, and it's always nice to up the veg quotient in any dish.  Anyway, it couldn't be easier to make.  Cook 500g of frozen peas, drain (but reserve a tablespoon or so of the cooking water) and blitz in a food processor with a tablespoon of mint sauce, loosening with the cooking water if needs be.

The other great thing about this dish is that if you are cooking for fewer than four people you can just cook what you need, and keep the extra sausages and pud for a cooked brekkie at the weekend.  Happy days.

Post the Thirty-sixth (in which our heroine returns to education)

So, you know it is.  You're 16, you're filling out your college application forms and you don't really have a clue what you want to do with your life cause, y'know, you're 16.  So you apply for a B.Sc. in Biotechnology, thinking it sounds kind of cool, picturing Professor Weeto types teaching the course.  You go to college.  You correct the lecturer's spelling of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in your very first lecture.  You fail your first maths test miserably.  You realise you have absolutely no interest whatsoever in Biotechnology.  You drop out.  You decide to work for a year while you figure out what you *do* want to do in college.  Twelve years later, you're still working.

Or is that just me?

Anyway, the plan was always to go back to college eventually.  The problem was that, having bought houses and cars and whatnot in the intervening years, giving up work to go back full-time wasn't really an option.  And the kind of courses that are available in the evenings never appealed to me - all business-related.  Our heroine was despairing.  And then, lo!  Along came the Oscail programme at DCU - a distance-learning initiative that allows you to do your degree from home.  And lo!  They actually had a few Humanities degrees on it.  So our heroine now finds herself embarking on a B.A. in English and History and realising that she won't be able to coast through this on recall alone as she did with the Leaving Cert.  I'm actually going to have to - gasp! - study.  Something I have never done in my life.  Two hours a night, on weeknights, until my first two assignments are submitted.  It's all very alien to me, I have to admit.

Anyway, as my evening pottering-around-the-kitchen time is now severely curtailed, I'm tending to make big pots of stuff that will look after dinner for two or three nights in a row.  I'm sensing a lot of soup, stew and chili in my short to medium-term future.

Which brings us to the first (I think) soup recipe of the blog.  It's a Jamie Oliver one - English (as opposed to French) Onion Soup.  It's a really hearty, filling soup which, with a few sausage rolls on the side, makes a meal in itself.


English Onion Soup - makes 8 bowls

5 red onions, sliced                         3 large white onions, sliced
2 leeks, washed & sliced                3 shallots, diced
6 cloves garlic, crushed                   Large bunch fresh sage, chopped
2 litres beef stock                           8 slices crusty bread
200g grated cheddar                      Worcestershire sauce
Glug of olive oil                               Generous knob of butter
Salt & pepper

1)  You need a fairly massive pot for this, be warned.  Heat the olive oil & butter over a low heat.  Add the sage & garlic and allow the butter to melt.  Add the onions, leeks & shallots, season with salt & pepper, give everything a good stir to coat and then sweat gently with the lid on for 50 minutes.  Remove the lid for the last 20 minutes.  Stir occassionally to make sure nothing's sticking to the bottom.

2)  When your onions are lovely and silky and slightly golden, add the stock.  Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and allow to simmer for 15 to 20 minutes.

3) Preheat your grill to full whack and toast the bread on both sides.  Taste the soup and correct the seasoning if needs be.  Ladle into 8 deep bowls and bung a slice of toast on top of each - tear it up to make it fit, if you have to, and feel free to dunk it into the soup a bit.  Top the bread with some grated cheese and a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce.  Place the bowls on a baking tray and flash them under the grill until the cheese is golden and bubbling.  Very carefully remove the tray and bring to the table, remembering to warn your guests that the bowls are absolutely hopping!  Serve with warm sausage rolls - see below.

 Ok, so these are more home-assembled than home made, but they're still excellent.  And, in my defence, I did make proper home-made ones last week, and these were actually nicer (not to mention a hell of a lot easier), so I'm sticking with them in future.  By the way, I'm aware that the quantities in this recipe are a bit vague, mostly because I'm terribly disorganised and never bothered to write down the weights on any of the packaging, but for what it's worth, the sausages and the puff pastry I use for these are both from Aldi.

Home "made" Sausage Rolls - makes about 30

Packet of good-quality cocktail sausages               Packet of puff pastry
50ml olive oil                                                        50ml Worcestershire sauce

1)  Place your puff-pastry sheet on a large chopping board.  I use the Aldi one, which is a bit thick, so I generally go over it with the rolling pin once or twice to flatten it out a bit.  The other advantage of this is that you get more sausage rolls out of one sheet :-)

2) Pour the oil & worcestershire sauce into a small bowl and give it a good whisk.  Brush the sheet of pastry with a good layer of this.

3)  Snip your sausages into singles and place a row of them across the top of the pastry, leaving a gap of about 5mm between each one.  Cut the pastry into strips lengthways, so you have several long strips of pastry with a sausage at the top of each.  (I really should have taken some photos of this process...)

4) Roll the pastry over the top of your sausage so that it's fully covered, but only just.  Cut the pastry, then repeat this process until you run out of either pastry or sausages.  To form each roll, press & pinch the edges of the pastry together to seal.  Don't worry about the gaps at the sides; when the pastry puffs up during cooking, these will close.

5)  Place the sausage rolls on a baking tray and brush again with the oil/worcestershire sauce mix.  Bake in the oven at 210C until lovely and golden-brown.  Allow to cool on wire rack for 5 minutes, then serve.  Try not to eat the entire batch in one sitting.

You can also freeze these before cooking - put them on the baking tray, brush with the oil mix, then put the whole tray into the freezer - this will stop them sticking together as they freeze.  Once they're frozen you can chuck 'em into a freezer bag to store.  Cook straight from frozen, but at 200C and for approx. 25 minutes.  Again, they're done once they've puffed up and turned golden-brown.  Enjoy!

Post the Seventeenth (in which our heroine bemoans her lack of photography skills)

So, I've decided that the weakest part of this blog is the photography.  I read a lot of food blogs, and pretty much all of them seem to have the most amazing photographs.  They can't all be professional photographers, right?  So what the hell am I doing wrong?  After much comparison I've come to the conclusion that it's my camera.  All the photos I like have this cool dual-contrast thing going on where the food in the foreground is lovely and sharp but everything in the background is out of focus.  My camera doesn't seem to do that, you just point and click.  Although, I will confess that I never RTFM, so it's entirely possible that my camera does, in fact, do that, but I just have it set to Tomy My First Camera mode.  Perhaps it's time to start playing around with it a bit.

Another thing that has become clear to me over the course of this blog is how difficult it is to shoot brown (for want of a better word) food in a way that makes it look at all appetising.  This will become all too obvious in the next few minutes.  Food stylists and photographers must be crapping themselves when they're hired to do a curry cookbook.

Lastly, it has become increasingly clear to me that there is a definite trade-off to be had between styling your food and photographing it well, and actually eating your dinner while it's still hot.  At the moment, the gourmand in me wins out every time, but that may change over time, we'll see.

And so, to last night's impossible-to-photograph-appealingly dinner:

Venison & Puy Lentil Casserole - serves 2

6 venison sausages                          150g puy lentils, rinses & drained
2 pints chicken or veg stock            150ml red wine
2 onions, chopped                          150g bacon lardons
2 tbs fresh sage, chopped                2 tbs fresh rosemary, chopped

1. In a large casserole, brown the sausages lightly in a little olive oil.  Add the onions, lardons, sage & rosemary and cook for 5 minutes.  Deglaze the dish with the red wine, making sure to scrape up any nice burnt-y bits from the bottom.  Turn off the heat & cover.

2. At the same time, have the lentils boiling in the stock.  When they begin to soften, drain them & reserve the cooking liquid.  Add the lentils to the casserole with about 200ml of the stock.

3.  Cover the casserole and bake in the middle of an oven preheated to 140C for two hours.  Check it every 45 minutes or so to make sure it's not drying out - add a little more of the reserved stock if it looks like it is.

4.  At the end of cooking, season with lots of black pepper, but no salt (the stock & bacon are salty enough).  Serve on its own or with a big dollop of creamly, garlickly mash.  It's also excellent with green beans.

You'll be seeing lots of casseroles and hot-pots off me over the coming weeks, as the autumn draws in and the evenings get shorter.  I'll be shot for saying this, but I really look forward to this time of year, and can't wait to light the fire for the first time.

Today's Top Tip:  Don't waste money buying expensive binoculars. Simply stand closer to the object you wish to view.