A post mortem of sorts
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
"Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so." Douglas Adams
As usual I forgot to take any pictures of yesterday's lunch, and no that is not our debris, but I just wanted something to show that lunch was a success and this picture inside the back cover of Ixta Belfrage's book Meczla sort of says it all really. A good time was had by all.
So I thought that for once I would give a rundown of the various dishes I had chosen - and written about in my previous post - and how they turned out.
As I said, I had made this before - for a family gathering and it was given 4 1/2 stars. I should have taken a picture because one thing about this dish is that it's easy to make it look good. I served them on a long white platter which was actually just the right size.
I see that I wrote in the book Shelf Love from which it comes that there was too much of the tomato base. I did not listen to myself, and there was indeed too much - enough to serve as a base for tonight's cheating pizzas. Cheating because they are using leftover foccacia as the base.
I will also add, that my cherry tomatoes were a little large really - so much so that some of the slices of toast only had one cherry tomato on top. Perhaps next time - and there will be a next time - I shall either cut the tomatoes in half - which might mean I lose some of the juices - or buy smaller cherry tomatoes. You can get mini ones these days. But yes - to reiterate my daughter-in-law saying on that previous occasion that she loved the garlic - it's the fried garlic that really makes it. I wonder whether I shall listen to myself about too many tomatoes next time particularly if they are as expensive then as they are now.
Chicken, bacon and spring onion skewers with stroganoff sauce
3 1/2 stars - maybe 4? It was pretty simple to make and also to make it look good. However:
This is a dish supposed to be made with boned chicken thighs with the skin on. Impossible. You can no longer buy thighs or breasts with skin on - with or without bone. Definitely not with the bone in. For that you would have to buy whole chickens. Which in this case would have meant two chickens as there are only two thighs on one bird - which leaves you with two chickens bereft of half of their legs and two detached drumsticks. Obviously not an alternative. So I made do with skinned ones.
The skewers were easy to assemble, the shredded spring onion tops for the final garnish being a bit of a faff, although I have now discovered it's easier to flatten out the tops with scissors, before shredding. The sauce was eventually very tasty. I say eventually because it completely dried out in the baking dish under the chicken. Maybe I cooked it for too long - because I had forgotten to put the Aldi frozen french fries into the oven at the right time, so had to wait for them. So there was no sauce to which to add the yoghurt. So I added some water to the tray as well which I then heated over a gas flame, and scraped away at the leavings - like making gravy. And it did taste good eventually but was not nearly as smooth as it should have been.
This is however, a dish worth doing again, and I think it might be better to marinade the chicken in the sauce prior to cooking and baste it as it cooks. That's certainly what I would try next time. The bacon was an excellent idea by the way. I also see from the picture that it might have been a good idea to provide each 'customer' with a wedge of lime to squeeze over their skewers, rather than just pouring the squeezed juice over the whole dish.
As for the frozen french fries. I'm sure making my own very thin ones would have been better, but they were perfectly ok. Maybe it's worth tossing them in a bit of oil and salt before cooking? I have to say they did go well with the dish.
Easy to do mostly in advance, though I left charring the beans and assembling as the chicken finished cooking. Nice - not astoundingly so but different and worth doing again as a standby side or salad, for a barbecue or some such. 3 stars perhaps, although that sounds a little bit mean. There are a very few leftovers which are going to be chopped up and added to tonight's pizzas.
Three pictures - one from Ottolenghi's book - Comfort, the second from The Guardian and the third from his website - which seems to have forgotten the topping of toasted hazelnuts even though they're in the recipe. I think mine were somewhere between the second and third - but it obviously depends on how long you cook them in your oven. 5 stars - yum, yum, yum and so easy to do. I made the pancakes the day before, the mascarpone filling in the morning, and the assembly just before we ate them. They did not take long to cook. The star of the show.
But the main joy of the occasion was catching up with good friends whom we had not seen for a while due to this and that.
"Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour." Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
Our lunch became dinner as it lingered on and - much longer than an hour - it was early evening when they left - but then I think Talleyrand's dinners would have been longer as well. His cook was Carême. I doubt he just sat down to an omelette.
Long lunches are indeed a pleasure - good friends, good food that's a pleasure for the cook to prepare, and good wine - A Margaret River chardonnay and a very special Penfold's Bin 28 Kalimna from 1998 for those that are red drinkers. Although on this occasion I had some too - probably a little too much.
Surprisingly there was not too much washing up either. Well maybe my lovely husband did it all so discreetly I didn't notice.
Next time I do something like this I'll try to remember to take pictures.
YEARS GONE BY
April 4
2025 - Black bottom oatmeal pie
2023 - The wonderful world of ramen
2022 - The end of summer
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Hot cross buns
2018 - I love my granite benchtops
2017 - L'Osteria, Fitzroy North
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