Saturday 12 January 2008

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.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's the target? 150? Just so I know how many glasses of Far Niente to allow you of course...

Sj said...

The target is 158. I've only been less than 155 once since I was 18, and it made me really rather ill. At 158, I'm a british size 10-12. At 155, I'm a very fit size 10. I've been weight-training since I was 18, so I think it may be something to do with muscle weight... either that, or I'm secretly a bloke and nobody's bothered to tell me...

Anonymous said...

The Far Niente was a gorgeous blend of buttery mushroomy complexity like a Grand Cru Meursault and something fruitier and slightly more acid. It didn't have the grandeur of a great white burgundy but it was complex and deeply satisfying. But even its gorgeousness paled in front of the glory that was your endives. They were truly endivicious.