"Probability not possibility"

"Hell, it's only food.  Just enjoy it."  Jill Dupleix

I have a long list of ideas for blog posts in my little notebook, and of late I have been making an effort at getting rid of some of the older ones. This one comes from one that I called 'Confidence/reality - Rachel Cooke' -Rachel Cooke being a most thoughtful contributor to The Guardian, and actually the daughter of Katherine Whitehorn - one of our favourite columnists of the 60s. Alas Rachel died recently - last year I think. The article in question was about being kind to yourself in the kitchen - Cut yourself some slack as she put it.

I picked it out because of last night's dinner - which looked a bit like this one. A chicken pilaf. It was alright I guess, but bland and I had tried hard to make it especially tasty.

Remember all those peppers? Well this pilaf included a sauce that I made from one of those roasted red peppers. I blended it - skin and all but not the seeds with a whole lot of other stuff - a preserved lemon, parsley, coriander and fennel - stalks and all, olive oil, tomato purée, garlic, some red vinegar, paprika - there was even a bit of Ottolenghi harissa in there. And I used at least four tablespoons of the stuff to flavour my chicken which I had fried a bit with some sliced onion and fennel. Home-made chicken stock for the liquid as well. I had high hopes. Which were dashed as I took my first bite. The texture was great so at least I got the method right, but honestly - pretty tasteless. And there are enough leftovers for another meal. Every now and then today I ponder on how I can beef up the leftovers.

So it was good to read of a couple of misses that Rachel Cooke had made - sausage pasta which ended up with far too many chilli flakes because the lid fell off the jar as she was about to put in a few, so that a whole lot tumbled out. Or Nigella's Marzipan loaf cake that she had taken as a gift for Delia Smith when she was sent to interview her. The cake had not risen and "resembled nothing so much as a house brick wrapped in foil" but later learnt that Delia had loved it, and even when offered it with the apologies, Delia had kindly said: "You used good ingredients. It will still taste nice.”

I guess we all have disasters in the kitchen. I was reminded of one of my worst at my Italian class's lunch the other day. My chosen gnocchi were not good - they were very rubbery in texture and tasteless, but one of my companions - Italian by birth and an immigrant at the age of 7 told me that hers were the exact opposite and often half disintegrated as she cooked them. Which I agreed often happened to me. But it also reminded me of a disastrous dinner party dish of my executive wife days. I decided to make quenelles - a kind of fish gnocchi. I think the recipe was from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and to be fair the recipe did say that if the quenelles disintegrated whilst cooking, then just scoop it all out, drain and pack into a dish before heating as a mousse which could then be turned out. I should have taken that advice as a warning that quenelles were tricky. Of course they disintegrated, so I tried the mousse trick - which alas also completely collapsed into a beige mush when I turned it out. My audience of husband's customers and work colleagues jovially laughed - in an attempt at kindness I think. But I was mortified.

A disaster - which has in later years been a funny story to tell over other dinners. And it is true that most dishes can be salvaged. "Nearly everything is edible, in extremis." says Rachel Cooke - and yes, we did eat it. I cannot remember what it tasted like. What did I learn from it? Well life goes on I suppose but I have never attempted quenelles again. Today when my gnocchi start disintegrating, I scoop out the still solid bits before it's too late. Then I either cover them with a sauce and bake them off in the oven or fry them in butter and sage, telling myself how light and fluffy they are.

I have often said that I cannot understand how people can say they can't cook, but maybe it's fear that drives them. Rachel Cooke has something to say on this as well:

"how can we ever match what we see or read? We know in our hearts that these people (at least some of the time) fake it to make it, and yet we dread improvisation ourselves."

Those glossy, arty - even glorious photographs that fill our favourite cookbooks are indeed not quite real. For a start they are being photographed by a professional with an awesome amount of equipment, assistants and years of experience, not to mention pure talent. Then there are the stylists, and art directors who have acquired just the right plate to serve it on and so on. It takes hours to set up a photograph like this. Somebody sources that piece of cloth, the spoon and the dish and then fiddled with it. I found this one on Google images - together with a number of different versions of the same thing.

And let's not forget the skill of the person who has actually cooked the dish.

How on earth can we expect to cook something so perfect even if it is something as simple as this Crisp omelette from Ottolenghi. Just two ingredients really - eggs and potato crisps.

It must be a bit of a tightrope for cookbook publishers however. The aim is to get somebody to cook your dish. Ottolenghi, in a substack newsletter about his latest book said:

"A whole generation has learned to scroll through food before they’ve ever tasted any of it - recipes judged in a fraction of a second. We eat with our eyes before anything else, and a brilliant photo of a dish is almost do or die: it holds the greatest power there is in capturing a food’s story, more than the words ever manage on their own."

But if you make it look too perfect one might be daunted. Or if the photograph doesn't appeal then you might not give the dish a go.

The real problem is to try and instil enough confidence in people to have them try. After all every day somebody has to cook dinner. Well I guess you can buy ready-cooked meals from the supermarket - or prepared ones that only need heating up. And you can also get takeaway or go out for a meal but all of those things cost money and the poor - the ones who need to make 'something from nothing' most definitely do not possess the confidence to do just that. They also do not have enough money to buy cookbooks - they are expensive.

They could pick up a free supermarket magazine though and both of them - besides recipes - usually have lots of general advice on how to improvise. Below three possibilities from Coles - Black pepper, beef, asparagus and celery stir-fry - a dish I have made a few times now - delicious and super easy and quick, although I guess it's not cheap. Greek-style roast chicken and garlic rice the leftover chicken from which can be made to make Garlic drizzle chicken pizzas - both of which meals are relatively cheap and pretty easy to make.

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Nevertheless I guess the real problem is getting people to cook something confidently without a recipe but according to what they have to hand. How do we do this? I have friends who flatly tell me that they cannot cook, and do not like to cook. To which I have yet to find an answer that convinces. Even if you bought them the right cookbook, Nigel Slater's Eat, Alison Roman's Something from Nothing, anything from Jamie Oliver ... there are plenty more of the simple, easy and flexible variety - I doubt that you could convince them to try. "We have enough masterpieces, what we need is a better standard of ordinariness."  says Jane Grigson, although she was writing a long time ago and these days there are indeed places where you can find 'a better standard of ordinariness' beginning with those supermarket magazines. In fact these days you are more likely to get Rachel Roddy's message of "[I] had a go which is almost always a good idea."

So I shouldn't get downhearted about my chicken pilaf. I was perhaps expecting too much. Disappointment is not disaster. I should take these two similar pieces of advice from two of cooking's godesses - Delia first - "Cooking isn’t about perfection, it’s about achievability" and then Elizabeth David: "It is for us to exercise our common sense in selecting what is within our powers."

I know before I begin tonight's dinner - pizza - that it won't be perfect. I am not good at pizza, even if I know that I always too much on top. But my dough is never right, no matter whose 'fail safe' recipe I try. It's always soggy. And yet for some reason I keep on trying. Maybe the combination of hot tomato, bubbling cooked cheese and a touch of salami is just too hard to resist. And there's always a glass of wine to dull the disappointment. At weekends anyway.

A PAINTING - I was blown away by today's desk diary painting - A bowl of fruit by Caravaggio - the master of dark and light. But this is so light - apparently the only painting of his with a light background. So realistic to be almost a photograph, and with leaves almost perceptibly shifitng and moving. Painted around 1593-1594. Now there's perfection. Except the thing that most critics talk about is the fact that most of the fruit is by no means perfect.

So maybe there is comfort in the fact that maybe somehow your imperfect chicken pilaf, is in its own way perfect - because I guess it shows that I tried.

YEARS GONE BY

September 27

2025 - Nice food, nice lady

2024 - You've got to eat a peck of dirt before you die

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Good things = kippers

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Nothing

2017 - A word from Bert Greene

2016 - Food courts