More pheasant tonight. Hopefully

An rotw rather than a Simon tonight; a pheasant recipe adapted from a Guardian one by Hwsgo. Weight 168.8lbs; a loss no less, probably brought on by all that walking around London yesterday (I still have the high-heels blisters from it).

Meanwhile, since I've been recording my weight every day, I couldn't resist a graph of each month (thank you, Matlab): here's January.

No cooking

Another day of being fed by other people who can cook. Weight steady at 170.8lbs. Food 1 bowl specialk + milk; 2 institute coffees, 1 plate veg&beef; 1 bite yummy marzipany cake, then 1 coffee and half a portuguese cake in a cool EEnd cafe (Coffee@ Brick Lane) before hwsgo cooking pork in a yummy piquant leek-and-pink peppercorns-and-stuff sauce 'to make sure I'm fed'.

I'm a bit late to arrange to go anywhere this weekend, so I'm toying with buying some Rhubard and making the mother (yeast starter) from the Beyond Nose-to-Tail cookbook. This needs 5 days of fiddling with the mother every day, so this may be my best change to do it for several weeks.

1 recipe: Risotto Alla Milanese (page 179)

And so to something that hwsgo cooks extremely well: risotto. I'd bought saffron and blackish truffle in Granada, and I had an excuse to use one of them, and to tidy up some shallots and parmesan that had been hanging round the kitchen too long.

First, the shallots. I have two sizes of shallots in my kitchen at the moment; golfball sized, and something that would fit snugly in the palm of my hand. I'm not sure which one I should be using, but in the end the large ones won. And the saffron; I soaked it in hot water as instructed, and it smelt so good that I was tempted to taste the liquid on its own. But I didn't, and dutifully poured in into the rice along with chicken stock (organic kallo stockcube, for want of anything made the long way). I also wasn't sure how long to cook the shallots or the rice, so I did the shallots until they changed colour (hwsgo does them until they're clear I think), and the rice for a while just to be sure. The result? Beautiful, egg-yolk colour, texture, and taste almost (I made scrambled quails-eggs once; a little like that), but the shallots were a little undercooked, although they did give an interesting crunch to the result. I'd go back and check again, but I've promised to save some for hwsgo, and I fear I'd accidentally eat the lot.

Otherwise, a 'good'ish day. 1 bowl specialk + milk for breakfast, then a meeting breakfast (obligatory bacon rolls, honest), 2 specialk bars (to avoid the biscuits with coffee) , 4 cups - or maybe 5, I lost count- research coffee (strong, warm, left close to my elbow), 2 chocolate biscuits, risotto and a pint of water. Hwsgo and I have made a vague pact to not drink alone or during the week (except maybe the odd beer when necessary), and despite my lodger being around I'm trying to stick to it. And speaking of beer, I popped into the Hogsback Brewery on the way home. The house now boasts 4 bottles of Wickwar's station porter, 1 of Peroni Gran Riserva, 1 Kwak and 1 Orkney Brewery Dragonhead.

Risotto today?

170.8lbs. A whole pound overnight, and just desserts for my cupboard-snorkling yesterday. So that's it: back to the routine, back to breakfast-small lunch-Simon dinner and a couple of low-calorie bars if I'm starving. I ran to the pub on the hill and back again this morning (25 minutes), and I think I know what's wrong with my exercise routine too. I've been expecting to do everything (fitness, fat, toning, strength, flexibility) every time, and although Bodypump is good like that, I can't always get to the class. Which I've been using as an excuse not to to do all the other things I should, like running for fitness/fat, weights for toning/strength and pilates for posture/flexibility. I haven't been mixing my exercise, and I have indeed become a very dull girl. I've also been a bit scared of overtraining; understandable after cfs, but c'mon - 25 minutes: how much damage is *that* going to do? Anyways, back to it... I have endless coffeebreaks and a lab lunch to survive.

Thinking about risotto

I have all the ingredients for saffron risotto, and will be cooking it soon, but... well, my freezer has reached the limits of how much stuff a freezer should reasonably be asked to hold and it desperately needed rescuing. Hwsgo has offered a pheasant recipe as rotw which should make a reasonable-sized hole, I've eaten a stored chilli-based rotw to make another, and he's going to show me how easy smoked salmon pate is to make, which should take care of the 7 packs of smoked salmon in there (they're quite flat, but they do seem to have taken over everywhere). I'm not sure how this has happened, except maybe wandering past the wrong shelves in the supermarket at the wrong time can be just a little too tempting, and it's difficult to make things like soup for just one person without having to freeze some. Right; excuses over... normal cooking will be resumed after I check out a certain research establishment's catering output...

Oh, weight? 169.8lbs. See, if I say it quickly it doesn't sound too bad. Let's just say that I've gone back a bit (a week of comfort eating) and have some work to do to get back. Of course, tidying up the last of the milk chocolate bar isn't the best way to do this, but at least it's beyond temptation now. Onwards...

Another weekend away

No Simon cooking again: a weekend away at my parents instead; weight-wise, my mother's desire to feed me properly is fighting determinedly against my father's desire to get me fitter. Arrived to find Mum with a cookbook out: she said it was one of the first recipes she'd used. I know she had cookbooks as I grew up, and I think we may have cooked from cake recipes together, but I can't remember her using books; she just knew what to cook, knew how to cook it and just did it. I guess that's all part of the learning-from-your-mother cookery that seems to have died over here, and is about to die in France too.

Saturday lunchtime was mushroom soup and smoked salmon with salad; evening was goulash, made from the slowcooker recipe book. I enjoyed it, I agreed with my father that it was a bit sweet (my parents don't do spicy anymore), but it was good nonetheless. Meanwhile, my father took me to the club to work on his boat (6-berth yacht), and spent a happy time removing the middle line of paint from round the hull (and accidentally dying myself smurf blue in the process). Tammie (real name Tamahine: mother thinks this is polynesian for beautiful girl, which it is, but the boat was built at the same time as a famous naughty movie of the same name) looks like she's had a long season moored on the river, complete with scratches from a nearby bush, but she's a lovely girl and will scrub up well one she's painted. Oh, and mum and I had 1.5 bottles of wine (piat d'or, or "pee on the floor" as d describes it) and a lovely long chat about life, love etc.

I declined the swimming-with-dad challenge before saturday dinner and went for the run-in-the-morning option. Dad is very good at working out how much an unfit lump like me will take: on fitter days, he's been known to run me repeatedly up a big hill to broaden my training, but today we went for a 'flattish' run out on the heath. Which of course meant hills and more mud than the average assault course. Dad fell into a stream we were jumping over, and I checked the depth of the black bog across the path for him: it's up to my knees apparently, which he found as amusing as I found his impromptu dip. Then down to the boat to paint the wood we'd rubbed down on Saturday, and a row back up the river against the tide for some more light exercise.

Sunday breakfast was fried complete with small sausages; lunch was more salmon followed by roast beef with all the trimmings. Mum overdid the yorkshire puddings, but they were lovely and crisp and kept their shape even when filled with gravy. Then a sleep upstairs (I always sleep well at my parents; this time it had something to do with the lunchtime champage) and a quick session chopping and moving logs (albeit only a few logs) outside with dad before crumpets for tea. I think I may sleep well tonight as well: I'll certainly not need supper, especially since Mum wouldn't let me travel without an emergency banana. Back to Simon and the diet tomorrow, I think... and to keep up the running as well (although maybe without the thick black mud this time).

Cave Souris (The Mouse Cellar)

I'm been meaning to document the contents of my wine rack. I know there's wine in there, I can vaguely remember its colour/origin, but I have no idea what it is. So, from the top...

• Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Rioja, 1998
• Vina Albina Gran Reserva Rioja, 1998
• Robert Mondavi Heritage Zinfandel, 2005
• Berberana Rioja, 2003
• Howcroft Cabernet Merlot, 2004
• Howcroft Cabernet Merlot, 2005
• Ulysse Haut Montravel, 1995
• Cuvee Henri Alsace Riesling, 2006
• Hardys Crest Cabernet Shiraz, 2006
• 12 bottles of beer (it happens)
  

Hmmm... not a lot there; must be about time I went to France again...

Old ROTW: Winter Chicken

ROTW from 19th November 2007

Organic corn fed chicken of around 3 lbs
8 rashers dry-cured bacon or Parma ham
1 lb potatoes, peeled
2 bulbs of garlic in cloves, peeled
1/4 lb gruyere or mixed gruyere and emmenthal
white wine, butter, cream

Preheat your oven and an appropriately sized roasting tray to 190. Clean the chicken cavity. Stuff the garlic into the chicken. Boil your potatoes in salted water until almost cooked. Drain and allow to cool. Slice the potatoes into discs, season with salt and black pepper. Cut the cheese into thin slices and layer between the potatoes in a dish that can go into the oven.Place the chicken on the tray and cook for 40 minutes.Remove from the oven, cover the chicken in the bacon or ham, deglaze the pan with white wine, and cook for another 15 minutes. Put the cheesed off potatoes in the oven at this point too. When its all done, remove the chicken from the pan and rest for 5 minutes. Meanwhile deglaze the pan again with white wine, a knob of butter and a small pot of cream and serve the result as a sauce. Remove the potatoes, carve the chicken and serve with wilted spinach.

Old ROTW: Gnocci with Tomato Sauce

ROTW from 22nd October 2007

Chop and onion finely and fry in olive oil until just turning golden - make sure you get all the pieces translucent. Take a tin of good chopped tomatoes and add to the onions. Add any tomatoes you have lying around that need using up - you don't need fresh ones but you can use them if they are to hand. However you do need either 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar or one glass of red wine. Any wine you have to hand is good - don't open a bottle especially. Reduce hard stirring well until the volume has approximately halved or more.

The next step is painful but completely necessary. Sieve the sauce through a coarse sieve. Push the sauce through the sieve with a wooden spoon, and scrape the outside to ensure you have the stubborn bits of sauce that won't fall off. The resulting fluid should be thick and jammy. If not, reduce some more. Taste and if it's not really thick and satisfying, consider adding a dash of balsamic vinegar or some tomato puree. If you had good tomatoes to start with this should not be necessary, but it can rescue less good ones.

Once done, add pepper and just a little salt.

Boil water and do the gnocchi. Meanwhile grate some parmesan and tear half a dozen basil leaves. Add the leaves to the sauce, drain the gnocchi and serve, pour over the sauce, and add the grated cheese on top. You should not need much sauce as it's so thick and yummy. The rest freezes well.

Old ROTW: Goat's cheese, beans, bacon

ROTW on 21st November 2007

Cut bacon into pieces. Fry in butter and olive oil until crisp. Then add a can of beans or lentils (green lentils or flageolet beans ideally) and warm them through in the pan. Stir in the goat's cheese cut into pieces, and add the greens at the last moment. Serve on rosemary bread toast: freeze any excess.

Cigar infusion

Hwsgo made Tobacco Old-Fashioneds at christmas. I couldn't manage more than a sip with the tobacco infusion in, but it was (albeit briefly) very good, and the tobacco-free version was pretty tasty too. The recipe we used is here.

Old ROTW: Salmon with basil infused butter

1. Make basil sauce. Chop 2 shallots finely.
Sweat with 1oz fine butter. Do not allow the butter to burn, and continue until the shallots are translucent.
Deglaze the mixture with 50ml pastis and cook until reduced by at least half. Add 120ml of fish stock (you can buy this in a tub in a good supermarket) and again reduce by half.
Cut 15 good size basil leaves into thin strips and add.
Add 60ml double cream and bring gently back almost to the boil.
Stir in 1oz of fine butter cut into small cubes and take off the heat. Do not allow to boil.

2. Take 2 250g or thereabouts fillets of line caught organic salmon (Alaskan is good). Season each piece with salt and pepper. Dry fry in a non stick pan over a high heat for 90 seconds per side. Make sure the pan is very hot before the fish go in and don't move the fish around too much before turning.

Season with more pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice, the pour the sauce over the fish.

Serve with lightly braised leeks and/or new potatoes. A great White Rhone, Grand Cru Meursault, or semillon driven White Bordeaux would be good with this. Older Ozzie Semillon would do at a pinch.

Old ROTW: Carrot Cake

ROTW from 5th November 2007

Beat 4 egg yolks, 200g brown sugar and the rind of an unwaxed lemon together. Mix in 250g finely chopped carrots, the juice of the lemon, 200g of coarsely chopped walnuts, and 2 tablespoons of self-raising flour. Beat 6 egg whites firmly until very stiff. Put the whites into your cake tin and fold in the mixture. Bake at 180 for 45 minutes in an 8 inch tin.

For the icing, beat 125g icing sugar into 250g young goat's cheese (philadelphia will do if you can't find a good young cheese), then add the juice and rind of another lemon.

We made this with Slipcote cheese, and it was absolutely delicious.

Old ROTW: Posh beans on Toast

ROTW on 6th September 2007 was a modification of a Jamie Oliver recipe.

Soak your beans if need be.

Take one large peeled potato, a good handful of parsley, and 350g of white beans (chickpeas, haricots, cannellini it doesn't really matter). Separate the leaves from the stalks of parsley but keep the stalks, and tie them together. Simmer the beans, potato, parsley stalks and two cloves of peeled garlic until done but for at least an hour - with canned beans you will need a very slow
simmer: with dried beans it will take longer, you can turn it up, and you may need to add the beans at different times depending on what you have: dried chickpeas will take longer to cook than cannellini beans.

Remove the potato, garlic and parsley stalks and discard.

Finely chop the parsley leaves, two medium chillies and a pinch or two of fresh rosemary. Add a few leaves of chopped basil if you have it. Add the herbs to the beans along with a good glug or three of olive oil and the juice of half a lemon. Roughly crush some of the beans to make a paste with a fork and serve smeared thickly on toast.

Old ROTW: Cheescake

ROTW from 18th September 2007

Base:
60g unsalted butter plus extra for greasing
125g digestive biscuits

Filling:
250g Ricotta cheese
250g Fresh young goat's cheese
250ml soured cream
100g caster sugar
2 large free range eggs
2 large or 3 medium unwaxed lemons

Fresh raspberries to decorate or on the side

Preheat the oven to 160C
Grease a 22cm rubber dish. Diameter is not crucial.
Melt the butter on a low heat or blat in the microwave.
Crush the biscuits with a rolling pin. Add the melted butter and mix well. Tip into your dish and push down flat. Put in the fridge to chill while you do the next pit.

Put the ricotta and cream in a large bowl. Cut the cheese into small cubes and add. Crack the egg yolks into the bowl and mix well then add the sugar and whisk together. Keep the whites separate.

Grate the lemons and add the zest to cheese/egg mixture. Squeeze the juice into the mixture and mix well.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff. Fold into the mixture and add the lot to the base.

Bake for an hour then turn off the oven without opening the door and leave to cool. After another hour you can remove it.

Serve with fresh berries.

ROTW tonight: Seabass wrapped in Ham

Hwsgo has been showing signs of jealousy lately, that recipe- of- the- week (ROTW) has been supplanted in my affections by the Sara-Simon project. Well ROTW, I still love you, I still want you, and just to show my absolute adoration of you, I'm going to cook you tonight. And tonight's ROTW is:

Sea Bass wrapped in Ham

* gutted and deheaded sea bass of 700g or so
* parma ham
* really good olive oil (Ed: not Spanish oliveoil then...)
* green beans
* lemon juice
* salt and freshly-ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 200C
2. Wrap sea bass tightly in parma ham. Leave no gaps.
3. Drizzle with a little olive oil and bake for 15 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, blanch some green beans for a few minutes in boiling water and then refresh in iced water.
5. Toss the beans with plenty of lemon juice, olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper. An edgy alternative is to use preserved ginger intended for sushi.

It took me 3 supermarkets to find the ingredients for this recipe. First I tried my local Waitrose; yes, they had seabass, both heads-on and filleted, but after hanging round the counter waiting to be served, I gave up and went to Tesco at Gatwick. Now the big T is usually pretty good: decent wine selection, lots of choice in most sections. But the fish counter: urrgh. I could smell it from the next aisle: it wasn't pretty, and neither were the sad grey lumps pretending to be seabass. So unwilling to backtrack to W, I went to the slightly-smaller Tesco between my work and my house. And found exactly what I was looking for: two fresh, headless lumps of seabass. You don't always have to travel to get what you want, although I may re-try this recipe on a weekend when I can get down to one of the fish suppliers on the coast. I'm a little sad about the beans though. They're from Zambia, the only other choice in W today being Kenya. I really dislike upping my food miles, so I'll just have to add green beans to my allotment planting scheme, and wait until they come into season again. So how did it taste? The beans were wonderful; spiced without being spicy, and curiously tasting slightly minty. The fish was firm and subtle, but I really wasn't sure about the combination of bass skin and ham, and I did spend a lot of time picking out bones: I suspect something a little less blokey and a little thinner-skinned, like cod perhaps, would work better in this dish. I think I may have to try this again.

Meanwhile, weight this morning is 168.6lbs. A small rise, but considering the amount of food and alcool consumed over the weekend, not much to write home about. Unlike the tapas. We spent a happy hour or so bouncing from bar to bar in the Tapas street in Granada, having plates ranging from fried fish to ham to seafood arrive with every drink whilst working our way through all the local beers we could find. True foodie happiness, and a wonderful foil to the elegant dinner in Seville the night before. Today's food intake is a little more mundane than that: 1 bowl SpecialK and milk, 2 SpecialK bars, 1 bag baked crisps, 1 machine hotchocolate and 3 machine coffees. But then, I am trying to lose weight whilst working my way through a cookbook, and needs must...

Absolutely no cooking today

Today is Going To Andalucia day; specifically, to Seville, the home (probably disputed by at least 2 other Spanish towns) of Tapas, or Pintxos as they're called in the Basque Country. Not a chance of me cooking then, but I will be spending a few days sampling as much yummy healthy Spanish food as I can: we have a reservation (which can mean anything in Spain from "we've saved you a good table" to "reservation, what reservation?") at a resto with partridge on the menu, and I'm particularly looking forward to that... the resto, not necessarily the partridge: I'll see how I feel when I get there. Some days are meat days, and other days are vegetable ones, and there's no real pattern for which is which.

Anyways, weight is 168.2lbs (steady, but then I haven't done any exercise for days), have eaten 1 bowl SpecialK and milk, and can confidently expect to be eating 1 machine hotchocolate, 1 machine coffee, 1 SpecialK bar, two plates of sushi and possibly, just possibly, a beer or two. Espana, here I come...

Cooking off-piste again: Olive oil mash

I have new toy: hwsgo brought me a beautiful shiny big industrial-specification magimix for my birthday. Did I also mention terrifying? It's been lurking in its box for weeks, and I've gone from temptation to peek to fear that I've just invited into the house something with more buttons than a space shuttle and instructions that take at least a year to master, with the inherent risk of the thing exploding and raining plastic-coated food all over the kitchen. But I have a recipe (page 131, Olive Oil Mash) that calls for a food processor, so that's what I'm going to use.

But I'm not going to follow the recipe exactly: there's only one of me, I'm off on The Weekend In Spain tomorrow and although I like mash lots, I really couldn't eat enough for eight. So a smaller version (and I'll cook it properly later, honest). Now today is another lots-of-things-happening-day (bad: I may have to move just as I've finished the kitchen; good: at least I won't repeat the non-cook mistakes I made designing this one), and to add to the pressure I've been up til late on the Great Noisy Radiator Project and getting ready to go away. But I'm still going to cook, I need to cook: I need the focus today.

So what can I say? The magimix is an excellent tool, and it has only 3 buttons (on, off and pulse) but it's probably a good thing to carefully check that all the polystyrene bits are out of it before attempting to squish potatoes in it: the polystyrene held, so none of it went in the food, but I did have to clean potato off places it really wasn't designed to go. Like inside the blade-holders. The Magimix instructions are very French: pictures, but no real explanation of how to use the different-sized bowls that it came with. And the result of squishing the potatoes is definitely not mash; it's a creamy, acrylic-paint-like, smooth sauce-but-congealed that I wasn't sure whether to use a fork or spoon with. It tastes of potatoes and olives and herbs all at the same time, and I thought it was quite good until I put some of the chicken stock onto it. And the chickenstock blew it away by comparison. That really was one heck of a chicken recipe, but I'm not sure I'd take the time to make the mash again. Apart from the time that I need to tick it off on this blog.

Weight today is 168.2lbs; a rise, probably triggered by getting drunk on French beer and pigging a whole box of (not very nice) chocolates. Men eat kebabs; women, when left to their own devices with large amounts of alcohol, eat chocolate. Then have to get back onto the diet pronto before it becomes a habit. Food intake today: 1 bowl SpecialK and milk, 1 bowl soup+ 1 small bread roll, 1 SpecialK bar, 1 bag baked crisps, 1 chocolate biscuit (Sara saved some from the boys at work for me), 1 plate chicken+mash with stock, lots of water, 1 machine coffee and 1 espresso (side benefit of hiding out near the directors' area).

No cooking today

It's the cook's day off. Either that, or someone's left a huge chicken in the kitchen, ready to be eaten up. So... a few steamed vegetables (baby carrots, peas, broccolli stalks) later, I can confirm that the chicken is just a delicious cold as it is hot. And the herby-buttery sauce is still to die for. Usually I'm the one stealing vegetables in the kitchen after supper; today, I'm picking bits off the underside of the chicken just to get a bit more of this taste. I guess this Simon person really has something in the cooking recipe stakes. And yes, there are other types of recipe, but you really really really don't want to go there: I showed my flatmate the commercial firework that nearly killed/maimed me earlier, and suddenly realised just how stupid setting off very large quantities of explosives next to me -for fun- was. Fun, but not a game for the long-lived.

So in the absence of any cooking, I'll talk about the beer that I'm drinking with my meal. It's a Maitre Kanter La Reserve blonde that I have to drink up because it's only 2 months off its sell-by date. Honest. It's a robust French beer; peppery and malty and smooth all at the same time. And I have 75cl if it, oh yes. Maitre Kanter isn't just a beer: it's a chain of Alsatian restaurants across the northeast of france (mainly Brittany). I used to work in Brest a lot, and the very first place I ate there was Maitre Kanter in the town centre. I fell instantly in love. With the fishtanks up the stairs (look and eat), the huge high ceilings, the proper peasanty food (imagine German food that a good French chef has corrupted with sauces and taste: that's Alsatian...), the totally laid-back atmosphere. Of course it had to be a laid-back atmosphere because I managed to order a plate of Choucroute (saurkraut but tastier) for starters and main course and it took me most of that afternoon to finish, but there I was, totally in foodie love. And there I went almost every time I worked in Brest. I'm considering suggesting a weekend roadtrip there to Hwsgo, but I'd probably have to sweeten it with an accompanying trip to the proper French resto round the corner... somehow, I can't see him having quite the same reaction to Saurkraut, even if it is French... and no, I have no idea why there are so many Alsatians in Brittany (there are), and neither, having asked them, do they. It's just nice that they're there, and cooking choucroute.

Today's weight is holding at 167.6lb. Foodwise it's been a bit of a disaster til this evening; I got stuck at the Post Office and didn't even have time to collect something for lunch, so the tally is 1 bowl SpecialK and milk, two machine hotchocolates, two bags baked crisps, 3 SpecialK bars, two coffees and 3 pints of water. I considered a chocolate bar from the machine, but managed to resist long enough to get home to the real stuff.

1 recipe completed: Roast Chicken (page 36)

Today is chicken day: the recipe of the book. It's currently in the oven doing its high-heat for 15 minutes thing. I would have smeared the butter all over said bird, but it was a straight choice between leaving lumps of butter everywhere and scraping the skin off with it, so I've more part-smeared, part-placed the butter on it. And I had a lemon crisis until I found one hiding in the fridge. I would go to the local shops for one, but the town I live in is currently gridlocked, and there's a 2 mile traffic jam and a half-hour run between the chicken and my car. But at least I got a run in today; and tomorrow, to retrieve the car... weight is holding steady at 167.6lbs; food so far is 1 bowl SpecialK with milk, 2 SpecialK bars, 1 bag baked crisps, 1 soup with small roll. I considered eating one of my leftover birthday cakes but got distracted by work; by the time I remembered, the boys had saved me from having to make the decision to eat chocolate or not (none of them have the decency to get fat on a chips and chocolate diet, which is truly deeply annoying sometimes). But I had 5 small bad chocolates from a box at home later...

Anyways, one chicken. Which was with 200g of the correct weight for the recipe, and I had exactly enough butter in the cupboard too. The only worry is that I forgot to put any salt on when I seasoned it. Until recently, there was no salt in the house; a combination of arthritis and supposedly healthy living kept it at bay, and sometimes I forget to use it. Right now, its starting to smell gorgeous, and it's only been cooking for 15 minutes...

...and now it's done. And eaten. The chicken was truly excellent. When I pulled it out, I looked at the shrivelled legs and thought I'd massively overcooked it, but it was plump and firm, and lemony-herby without being citric. I don't usually eat just meat, but I could happily have just had a plate of this chicken. Although I didn't of course: I served it with fresh peas and a little bit of leek. Peas and well-cooked chicken: mmmm.

Chicken, but not yet

Today is my birthday. And to celebrate, I've lost yet another pound in weight; the scales tip in at 167.6lbs: under 12 stone, and the point at which any further weight loss should start to show in all the places that are important on a non-nudist beach (people don't tend to look much at each other on nudist beaches, so extra poundage isn't so important there). I know, it's a bit fast, so I moved the scales around and cross-checked, but it's definitely 167.6; the only other possible explanation is water retention, which could have happened; after all, I'm drinking enough of the stuff now. Food today: 1 bowl SpecialK plus milk. I machine hotchocolate, 2 machine coffees, 1 1" square of chocolate cornflakes, 1 bowl carrot&coriander soup, 1 large bread roll. 3 small horrid chocolates, 1 square G&B organic 72% chocolate (thanks Amanda), 1 slice bread+butter, 1 small bowl chilli&rice. I've been to BodyPump class to counteract all those chocolate hits today.

Today's plan is to cook the roast chicken from the book's title. Hwsgo picked the recipe for this week: he seemed to spend quite a lot of time muttering "not that one, I want to try it" under his breath as he flicked through the book.

So chicken it is, but first to find the chicken. I'd heard about a local farm shop that sold, amongst other good things, game. And it was nextdoor to the yard that I needed to buy some building supplies from. So off I went, and... no farmshop. To be fair, the farm runs a pet-your-food-before-you-eat it attraction from march to november, so I may have just gone there out of season, but I couldn't even find evidence of a shop having been there. On the plus side, if I ever need to find a geophysical survey company, there's one hiding in the farmyard; on the minus side, I still had to find a chicken. So it being my birthday, I dropped in at the supermarket starting with S. A duck, lots of inorganic chickens, and a space where the organic happy chickens would be if they had any. I hadn't realised just how small my local Sainsburys was until that point. I couldn't face Tescos in rush hour, so home I went to spend some quality time with the washing-up. And spotted '1 chicken' on the freezer list. Voila: one free-range organic chicken of almost exactly the right weight, on the side defrosting ready to be cooked tomorrow. It must be my birthday.

No Simon today

...collecting newly-married bro from the airport and then off to the seaside with hwsgo before he too flew off somewhere -erm- colder and less interesting. Did find a fish supplier though: the town quayside at Newhaven has a small fish shop stocking local catch; we bought 4 glassy-eyed sardines, then took them home, cleaned them (more bloody yuck) and ate them with salt rubbed on one side, and 1/3 each oil, balsamic vinegar and white wine vinegar rubbed into the other (hwsgo cooked today), with watercress and tiger bread on the side. The fish was lovely, tasty and fresh, and I've made a personal promise to go back and rescue the friends of the lovely large lobster we saw in the shop too. I think the fishmonger was Bickerstaffs, 01273 517890. I should also check out a slightly more local fish shop soon too.

Weight today is 169.3lbs; below the 170 (just), and another pound lost to the ether. Other food consumed: 1 Delice de France Pain au Chocolat, a large machine cappucino (petrol station special), two pints of water and the last pair of the endives.

2 Recipes completed: Braised Endives and Endives au Gratin (Page 89)

Today is finally Endive day. Hwsgo should be here later (it is only midnight, after all), and I may just throw in a celebratory chocolate pudding recipe as well. I'll see later how much damage the chips did to my waist, and add in some appropriate exercise to counteract it and the chocolate (either cycling or running to where I've left my car; I'm not sure which yet). The book has an interesting double- cooked chips recipe: I may have to find a 10K race for the day that I cook those...

Holding steady at 170.8lbs today: will see if a little exercise will bring me past the magic 170. Today's food so far is 1 bowl SpecialK with milk, 1 machine hotchocolate, 1 machine coffee, 1 bag low-fat baked crisps (Walkers).

Some big stuff has happened this weekend, so I can't entirely remember yesterday's meal. I know that it took a long time to prepare: I started at roughly 5pm and we were eating by roughly 8:30. Part of this was my own fault; I was doing two recipes (braised endives and endives au gratin) back-to-back; the first needed the endives to cook for two hours, and the second needed a sauce making, starting with steeping the milk for at least half an hour before finishing the sauce and pouring it over the finished baked endives. Had I noticed that small detail, I could have started the sauce an hour earlier and cut 40 minutes from the preparation time, to give 2 hours 20 to 2 hours 30 as an estimated start-to-table preparation time. The result of all this preparation was delicious, as I'm told were the middle stages; hwsgo is on a fairly strict diet, was ravenously hungry by the time the meal was only halfway cooked, and therefore sampled parts of it as they came past him in the kitchen. The Far Neinte was lovely too; again, I can't remember much about it, although the 14 percent proof can't have helped much in this regard either.

No cooking today...

...I'm off to town (London) with Sara and Sara. There will probably be plenty of drinking, though the chances of me being able to type afterwards is - well, actually not bad, I'm one of those annoying people who can text with perfect grammar and spelling even when I can't quite speak. Actually, no, it's not quite as uncivilised as that: we're off to see Cirque de Soleil at the Albert Hall, and are trogging round the galleries and museums (interspersed with a little light shopping) before we go. Although I may post some wine review comments later.

So foodwise it's a quiet day. Although I've already chalked up one mug coffee and a water biscuit to get me back to sleep at 5am. I've had another quick look at the book: it may be more doable in the time than I thought because there are lots of mash recipes which can accompany other main dishes and at least 20 yummy puddings which can follow said mains, albeit at a discreet distance and with an accompanying increase in my running plan.

I also got curious about how many other people are cooking their way through an entire book. I made a rough estimate of 524 (possibly even that many starting this year), but haven't found that many yet... there are 6 in an Amy Sherman article on EpiLog, for instance:
* The Julie/Julia project (obviously)
* The French Laundry Cookbook by French Laundry at Home
* Maida Heatter's Book of Great Cookies by My Little Kitchen
* Mexican Everyday by Mark
* The Gourmet Cookbook by Teena and Melissa Hruby Bach
I've looked, but I can't find any more yet; there doesn't seem to be a master list anywhere, and a trawl through the boards hasn't raised any more names, although I know they're probably out there. Meanwhile, what I did find was an interesting blog on 18th century French cooking and a whole page dedicated to umami.

Ah yes: today's weight is 170.8 lbs. A whole pound; a minor victory, but a victory nonetheless and 7% of the way towards my goal. Oh, and add to the food today list: 1 bowl specialK with milk, 1 SpecialK bar, 1 necticot, 2 1" millionaire shortbread squares (Dean's birthday cakes), 1 machine hotchocolate, 4 pints water, 1 small M&S sushi, 1 bag M&S low-fat baked crisps (horrible, much worse than Walkers' version), 2 orange juices, 1 chicken panini with salad and fries, 1 coffee with amaretto and 8 scoops cream and icecream stolen from the top of Sara's sundae (she doesn't like the cream on top, but forgets to ask the restaurant to omit it).

I made the mistake of steering the girls into a good cheap bookshop near the V&A. So I've bought the second Roast Chicken book (More Helpings of Roast Chicken) and Book 2 of St Johns' Nose to Tail, just to get the yeast recipe for Hwsgo's favourite sourdough bread. I think I prefer the first Roast Chicken to the second: whilst the quality and passion is still there, the first book seems somehow more complete, more rounded, a well-planned 3-course gourmet pub lunch compared to a pick-n-mix French cafe menu in Knightsbridge. Which is only fair I guess, since authors rarely start the labour of love also known as their first book with the intention of writing a whole series. I'll see what Hwsgo thinks; he has a good eye for these things.

Not Endives, but Partridge Soup Instead

Hwsgo has made a special request to eat my cooking at the weekend. I am deeply touched; very few people who eat my home-cooking ever come back for me. Except my best friend Marcus, who has spent years searing his tastebuds with Midlands curries, and is probably immune to anything with a low Scoville rating. The upshot of this is that, having missed the partridge and peas, he's determined not to miss the endives, so no endive recipe tonight. On the up side, i got home from late and would have been up til late cooking the endives anyway, and wouldn't have been able to do anything with my leftover partridge. So today's recipe is partridge soup, very very loosely based on the Grouse Soup on page 101 (so loosely that it counts as guidance rather than interpretation).

I don't have: grouse, carrots, celery, flat shrooms, brandy, port, juniper berries, redcurrant jelly or pearl barley; I do bizarrely have everything else on the (22-item) ingredients list. So I've done a little bit of substitution (I will go back and do this recipe properly later, honest); 1 whole partridge plus 1 partridge carcas instead of grouse, 2 big potatoes cubed instead of carrots and celery, 1 1/2 packs of local chestnut mustrooms instead of flat black mushrooms (portobello?), more red wine to cover the deficit of brandy and port (port never survives very long in this house; it has a half-life that's only just longer than chocolate) , and no juniper berries, redcurrent jeely or pearl barley at all. But I've followed the steps in the recipe as closely as I can.

It's strange how a dish mutates over time. It starts off as raw ingredients together in a pan; sometimes yummy, other times inedible; then goes through a cooked-enough to be yummy again (just before the wine went in) stage, then back to inedible (post wine), then eventually if you're lucky, to yummy again. The temptation to eat at an early stage of yumminess can sometimes be astounding. Which is my excuse for licking cooking bowls after making puddings; it's maybe the only thing that stops me diving onto the mixture before it's cooked. Oh yes: the red wine. It's a Richard Dreys Dornfelder which has been hiding in the understairs cupboard since hwsgo found it in the wine rack and laughed at how I had such bad wine taste that I even deliberately chose a german red. It was either that or one of the bottles of pre-made mulled wine that have been lurking there with it. I haven't quite had the courage to try a glass of it yet, and am currently finishing off the remains of yesterday's white.

I'm spending an hour waiting for the soup to boil and produce scummy bits on top. And this project is strange. I've kept diaries, and blogs on topics of interest before (and really must post some more on creativity and fusion sometime), but this coming home and cooking is strangely calming. It's bringing a structure to my evenings that I didn't know was missing. Usually I collapse in front of the TV, or read a book, or crawl into bed; now I'm working to a timetable every evening, and have breaks like this that I can actively do something (in between skimming off scum) with. I thought I might thoroughly resent the tyrrany of having to cook, but I find it strangely comforting. I think Julie did too. Although I must point out again that I am somewhat less kooky than her, even if that might be by a relatively small margin.

It's good soup; meaty, a posher version of oxtail broth. The wine isn't bad either; fruity and not a bad foil for the soup. The floury white bread roll goes well with it too.

Endives

Today's recipe involves endives and two recipes from the book; the first, a two-hour roasting to beat the endives up enough to fit the second recipe; the second, another roasting but this time wrapped in ham and other good stuff. which, apart from the existence of gouda and cream in my fridge ready for the recipe, is about all I can remember about it. It's going to take time, so I may just put the endives into the oven and go off to the gym in the meantime.

Meanwhile, I'm still 172lbs (no nice surprises yet, so apparently writing about food doesn't automatically make you lose weight), and the food intake today has been 1 30g bowl SpecialK with semiskimmed milk, 1 SpecialK bar, 1 bag mini-cheddars, 3 machine coffees, 2 pints of water, 1 necticot (nectarine/apricot cross, provided by my friend Sara; not to be confused with my other friend Sara or all of the Saras I seem to correspond regularly with), half the vegetables from last night's recipe, and the meat from half a partridge. I like meat, I like the taste of meat, but I'm really not keen on eating lots of it at once.

Where to find food in Sussex

I live in what even its inhabitants would describe as a low-rent town. It's fun, it has a whole mix of cultures and lots of green space and surprises, but it's never going to be a creme-de-menthe hotspot. And its foodstores cater for what the people want. There are 4 supermarkets nearby; Tescos (3 of, varying sizes), Sainsburys, Asda and Waitrose; these are all good for basics. Closer to, there is a small local shop (mainly tinned goods) , garage (most types of things, but not much variety) and Coop (it's there somewhere, but I can't find it without a very good map). Which has left me with a little bit of an ingredient-sourcing challenge. Luckily, out in the neighbouring villages is an amazing array of brilliant little shops. The ones I've found so far are:

• The Crown Roast Butchers, 18 High Street, Lingfield. A brilliant place; carry very good steaks, all well hung in a variety of darknesses, excellent game (it's where the pheasants came from) and their own smoked bacon. The guys behind the counter are always friendly, always helpful even to the catering-challenged; I can't praise them enough.

• Pips & Stones Greengrocers, High Street, Lingfield. An excellent foil for the Lingfield butchers; good selection of vegetables and fruit, lots of otherwise difficult-to-find local produce.

• Allan Martin Meats Butchers, Maypole Road, Ashurst Wood. Difficult to find, but recommended by the Crown Roast when I couldn't find a whole duck after christmas (for an experiment with mandarin pancake) . Very earthy; was met with a healthy round of swearing from the back of the shop as I entered it, but also very very helpful. Patiently answered all my questions about the meat they stocked, and even provided a useful baked duck recipe when I confessed my complete lack of cooking skills.

• Tablehurst biodynamic farm, Forest Row. A truly excellent place to buy meat and poultry; also does fruit and vegetables in season. And it's fun to drive down the tracks past the orchards to the farm shop. Only open Thurs, Fri, Sat, but definitely worth a visit.
  

• Brick Lane Market (not to be confused with Spitalfields Markets). Okay, I know this isn't in Sussex, but hwsgo lives nearby, and they have much much better and cheaper produce than I've managed to find out in the countryside. Londoners, you are truly blessed in the food department: cherish it.

I haven't yet found a good fishmonger, but I have great hopes of finding one near Brighton. And since I have an allotment, I'm starting to plan for growing some of the more difficult-to-find vegetable ingredients, provided the pigeons, slugs and mice don't get to them first. Which is yet another story for another day...

1 Recipe completed: Roast Partridge with braised lettuce, peas and bacon

Page 155, adapted from the Roast Pigeon with Braised Lettuce, Peas and Bacon recipe.


Oh, the shopping! I had a partridge; I needed streaky smoked bacon, wine, butter, button onions, little gem lettuce, peas, thyme and watercress. First I tried the local garage shop (it's local; I'm trying to do my bit on the small-shopkeeper/ travelling miles front); wine, butter, big lettuce but no peas at all. So I had to go to the supermarket. Which is huge. And I decided to buy the ingredients for the Braised Endives whilst I was there. I thought I knew the place, but what I really knew was all the places to find the food that I usually eat, plus the interesting exotic shelves that come with living near a major airport. So, after an hour, I have the ingredients; okay, the onions are technically (actually) shallots but I'm not going to tell them this, and I've accidentally bought two different types of thyme, but it's there. The hard part, as always now, was choosing a wine; hwsgo knows more than anyone else I know about this and I can't ever justify just picking up cheap plonk anymore. But in the end, it was La Foret Hilaire, a cheap semillon sauvigon that won. It appears to be drinkable...

Blood pouring from a bird's cavities is one of the truly deeply yuck things of the food world. I'm not sure if I can get used to it, but it does take remarkably little time to go from yuck to 'I could eat that' in the bird-roasting world.

I'm reducing the stock, using a pan instead of the cooking dish because I have nothing small enough that can go from oven to hob (one more for the shopping list). Trouble is, the wine kept evaporating from the '1 glass of' whilst the birds were cooking, I missed the pan and poured half of it over the cooker and now I'm a little wobblier than usual. I could blame the exercise class and lack of food. It's a good thing that I'd done all the chopping as soon as the birds went into the oven.

So now the veg is in the oven and I can relax for 20 minutes. I can't find hwsgo anywhere (he's probably asleep; he had a long night), so I'll let my fingers run away with me here. If I'm to survive this challenge, I need to be very very careful about my diet and exercise or I fear I'll balloon. I'm currently 1 stone overweight (something of a small victory, having started out at 3) at 172lbs aka 12st 4lb (in case you think I'm overoptimistic, I'm a british size 10 - american size 8 - at 162lbs aka 11st 4lb) and I really don't want to get heavy again. Hence the gym. And keeping a food diary. Put your fingers in your ears if you don't want to read this bit. Today, I ingested: 2 pints water, 1 machine hot chocolate, 2 machine coffees, apparently half a bottle of wine, 40g of special k cereal with semiskimmed milk, 2 special k snack bars, 2 bread rolls (no butter), 1 fennel bulb with parmesan and milk and 2 rashers of bacon. And I should soon eat one of the partridges and veg, with some watercress. This is far too much for one person to eat in a day, even if there is no chocolate involved. But if I record what I eat every day, then eventually I should, possibly out of shame, eat less, in the same way that recording what I spent made me spend less. So here it is: full disclosure. And you can take your fingers out of your ears now, I'm back on the cooking.

It's all out of the oven, it smells delicious, I've photographed the food, sat down to eat and -botheration- the birds aren't cooked. They should be; they've had 20 minutes in the oven, but a quick stab and there's blood coming out of the breast. They're back in the oven now, I have no idea how long for, but they're getting another 20 minutes at least, just to be sure. In the meantime, I'm hungry now and the vegetables are utterly delicious.

20 minutes later, and the partridge is unbloodied, and, well, a bit like chicken. Which is not a slur on all partridges; we have had excellent gamey pheasants from a local butcher, but this supermarket version is - well- a bit bland. I want it to be strong, gamey, balanced against the peas and lettuce, but it's just a little way past insipid. I hope it wasn't farmed; I used to work next to a pheasant farm and although the cages were sufficiently large, the birds didn't have space to fly, to exercise, and spent most of their time wandering around the ground looking fat and dejected. But I suspect it is; we brits have lost so much of our ability to judge food for ourselves, have abdicated our responsibility for our own tastebuds to the mass marketeers and large chains, that a truly gamey bird would do nothing more than shock its consumers and unleash a plague of complaints onto a supermarket. Thank goodness for small game dealers. Which is a topic in its own right.

On finding an Endive

Hwsgo suggested that I try the Endives au Gratin (p89) as my first recipe. I agreed, then ran off to look up endive in the dictionary. It's a type of daisy: yes, really. Except it looks very much like chicory to me. Except the chicory in wikipedia looks like a daisy. Somehow in my web search, I formed the belief that an endive was a big green curly football of a plant, as seen in a good greengrocers over the weekend. And off I went to Tescos to look for it.

No dice. Nothing in the vegetable section that was big green and curly and labelled as an endive (although I was nearly desperate enough to reclassify some of the winter greens). But aha! I was in a supermarket and had a cookbook in my hand (and was ready to explain at the tills that it wasn't sold by them honest). All I had to do was find an ingredient, then look it up and voila - all bar the cooking, an instant win on the supper front. I found a partridge. I've tracked down several good game dealers near me this winter, and hwsgo and I have eaten several pheasants in the name of good cooking, but I hadn't seen any partridges yet and this one wasn't going to get away (being dead and wingless would help with not getting away, but it wasn't going to get away from me). And to my second problem: no partridges in the cookbook. Chicken, pigeon, grouse, rabbit, but no partridge. Tonight, I was going to have to eat off-piste again.

I called my local oracle and told him about my tribulations. He suggested Waitrose for the endives, and using a pigeon recipe for the partridge; specifically, the roast pigeon with braised lettuce, peas and bacon from page 155. It was too late to go shopping again, so I raided the fridge, chopped two fennel bulbs into quarters in a roasting dish, poured milk and flaked parmesan and laid three slices of home-cured bacon (Lingfield butchers) over the top, put the dish into a 200C oven (200C so that I could put some part-bake rolls in too) and promptly forgot about it whilst I watched television. Some time later I remembered to go into the kitchen and this became supper. Tomorrow, the ingredient hunt continues.

On inspecting the book

And so to the book, to read what I've just got myself into. Organised by food type; good, it has a chocolate section; not so good, it has a brains section too. Hwsgo has excused himself from eating anything involving offal, so there should be several midweek posts on delicacies such as Gratin of Brains with Sorrel. Luckily my father likes offal, so I might just excuse myself from some of the yukkier offerings (I said I'd cook all the recipes; I haven't mentioned anything about eating them. I will try though; even if I have to blindfold myself first). There's also good news on the game (lots of it) and killing-things front (although SH mentions how to kill and cook a crab, it isn't officially part of a recipe). Everything in the book looks yummy, easy to find ingredients for, and possible to cook.

On choosing a book

And so the hunt for a book started. Julie chose a book that was representative of her country, of her childhood, of her mother cooking; I wanted to choose something that was British without being stodgy, classic without being Prawn Cocktail, challenging without being impossible. Hwsgo had ensured that I had a good stock of classic books; Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking and French Provincial Cooking; Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef, Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories, Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking, volumes 1 and 2, Nigel Slater's Appetite and Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book. He did soften a bit for Christmas though, and bought me two books closer to my own strange style: Nobu's Cookbook, and Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook (you can look, but I think he found me the only copy for sale in England; yes, he really is that lovely...).

And there we have the candidate list. Not Julia: already done, not really in the British canon and involves killing things. Not the Davids: too difficult to find the ingredients, even if I can catch a ferry to France from here (here being West Sussex in SouthEast England). Not Nobu or Vegetables: lovely though they both are, I'd probably rebel. Which left a trio of blokes, and the one book that I sometimes flick through just to pass the time: Roast chicken and... I like the recipes in it. I could eat the recipes in it. And Hwsgo says it had the advantage of being short and should leave me with a stock of good recipes for life, which is a high recommendation from someone who knows what to do with an artichoke without having to look online for ideas.

So here we are. I don't know who Simon Hopkinson is (beyond him writing a food column for, I think, the Observer), but I like his book and although we don't almost share a name, it does give a nicely alliterative title to this blog. I'm hoping he doesn't mind me doing this, but I'm pretty sure he'll never find out. So here it is. One book, 169 (approx) recipes, one - well, let's not be too tight on the timing here but I'll try- year(ish). Me versus the (recently finished, as in finished the last bit last Sunday) kitchen: bring it on...

On choosing a project

Welcome to the Sara-Simon project. No, really; you're welcome here, all 1 of you, to watch as a famously terrible cook (with a 5-star chef sister, someone had to have the corresponding lack of talent) attempts to interprets recipes from a reasonably well known cookbook. Ah yes, but you've heard it all before: the Julie-Julia project, with its blog and book and wonderfully crazy writer who makes me feel sane by comparison (which is no mean feat, as you may later discover). And this blog is unashamedly derivative. Not because I want to become another Julie, famous, feted, yadda, yadda, but because the basic idea of learning to cook everything including the yukky and difficult bits, with no excusing excuses, really appeals.

A little background, then enough about me; my much-cherised partner (aka he who sometimes gets obeyed) is an excellent cook. Puts meals together from scratch everyday, wouldn't recognise a packet meal even if he did happen to stray from the fresh section of the local supermarket (and buys as much as he can at the local market) and understands the true meaning of words like reduce and blanche; in short, a complete kitchen saint, of the kind normally found in France in the 1950s. Me, I start most meals with a tinopener, have a detailed knowledge of asian packet foods and usually eat whatever I've put in the fridge, often without bothering to put it together in any catering sense other than 'on the same plate'. So with his usual didactic patience, hwsgo has been sending me a recipe to cook every week for the last 6 (or is it 8?) months. Which has been a great deal of fun, especially the recipe when I was travelling on Eurostar that started with 'obtain bag of nuts; order champagne'; and since we live some distance apart, I love the connection of cooking with him by proxy.

And then he bought me the Julie/Julia book, and I started to wonder "could I do that?". "Should I". So here I am. And enough about me; on with the food...