Bad Cook

Kitty’s Jersey Royal Hash (#litres_trial_promo)

Breaded Scallops (#litres_trial_promo)

Interlude: How to Talk to a Butcher (#litres_trial_promo)

Making Dinner, Night after Night, Without Going Insane (#litres_trial_promo)

A Mouse (#litres_trial_promo)

A Ham is Not Just for Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)

Meatballs (#litres_trial_promo)

Welsh Cakes (#litres_trial_promo)

Nasi Goreng or Dirty Rice (#litres_trial_promo)

Scones (#litres_trial_promo)

Asian Baked Salmon (#litres_trial_promo)

Treacle Tart (#litres_trial_promo)

Tex-Mex Chicken (#litres_trial_promo)

A Pork Pie (#litres_trial_promo)

Note: How to Clean Your Kitchen (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendix: Pastry (#litres_trial_promo)

Recipe Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Thank You (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue

I always skip over prologues in books because it’s almost always the boring author, boring on about some dreary yet grand schema they have for their dismal little work. But this isn’t going to be boring!! I promise!! And you need to read it to understand what follows. I need to explain just what the hell is going on. So, ready?

In 2009 I walked out on my job as a features writer on the Independent. Being a features writer was my dream job, until I started doing it and realized that I was no good at it. Worse, the paper was running at a massive loss with a miserable shortage of staff, money and morale. They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them and the whole thing was a terrible disaster. I left with no job to go to, but I lived with my rich boyfriend and I thought that with my experience and the few friends I had in the industry, I could get myself some sort of freelancing career.

But about two months after I went, Lehman Brothers collapsed, the housing market swiftly followed and the world sank into a recession, which seems ongoing. This, coupled with the fact that as chance would have it I am not only the world’s worst features writer, I am apparently also the world’s worst freelance journalist, spelled disaster for my career.

I just could not get it together. Getting a piece published suddenly seemed to be a horrific task of unimaginable difficulty. Faced with trying to get something published in the Daily Mail or going back to get the Aegean stables really spotless, I promise you, had he known what was involved, Hercules would have gone for his mop and Marigolds in a trice.

Being the sort of person with no inner reserves of courage or backbone I did the only sensible thing and slid into a deep depression. I couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time. What on earth was I going to do with myself? What was to become of me?

Reasonably quickly I realized that in the first instance I had to earn my keep in my boyfriend’s house. We were not yet married; my situation was precarious. So I thought I really ought to learn how to cook in order to make myself indispensable. Hitherto, my cooking for my boyfriend – or anyone else – had not been good. I refused to follow recipes, as I had heard that with cooking what one must do is simply express one’s personality and experiment. Of course, as I realized in time, this only applies if you are already an amazing cook. If you are not an instinctive or experienced cook, you have to learn how to do it, like you learn how to drive.

So I started at the beginning. I learnt how to make a white sauce that was not grainy and floury. I started, tentatively, on stews and pies, then moved on to conquer things I have always found delicious when cooked for me by other people: American-style pancakes, muffins, potato dauphinoise, slow-roast pork belly, scotch eggs, pork pies. And because I am not a cook, I am a writer, I needed to write about it. I wasn’t going to ‘keep a diary’ because I had been doing that since I was eight and was bored with it – and with people finding it and reading it and leaving comments in the margins. So I did what a lot of people seemed to be doing at the time, which was to start a blog. (Although this was well before the phenomenon of celebrity bloggers, back when blogging was still a bit weird and pathetic, done by crazy people in their underwear.)

At first no-one read it and no-one cared. And one miserable January day, I deleted it. Stupid thing. What am I doing? What sort of journalist writes for free on the Internet? A few hours later a girl got in touch with me over Twitter, also still in its infancy. ‘You don’t know me,’ she said, ‘but I used to read your blog and I enjoyed it. Where has it gone?’ Well, I am one of those sorts of people who can live on the slimmest sliver of attention, let alone an actual compliment, for weeks. I blamed the disappearance of the blog on a technical fault, reinstated it and never looked back.

And, like I said, I am a writer and not a cook and so inevitably I ended up sneaking in tracts of what I thought was magnificent and literary prose, mostly about me, at the top of a post and then linking in some desperate way to a food topic and then sticking a recipe for something or other at the end.

Still people stayed and read on and told me I was funny. They contacted me to say that they had just read every single post on the blog, one after the other. ‘I am addicted to your blog,’ they would say. ‘I am obsessed with it. I am your stalker.’ Some of them even tried out the recipes and – this always made me fall about laughing – would ask me for cooking advice. Friends would email and text, bright with furious envy. ‘I met someone,’ they would shriek, ‘who reads your blog. They say it’s brilliant.’ I was delirious. This was TERRIFIC. I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted to. I was making people jealous.

What you have in your hands is the essence, if you like, of Recipe Rifle. It is no longer called Recipe Rifle because Recipe Rifle is such a terrible title, chosen in a moment of desperation. It should have been called The Bad Cook all along, but it’s too late now. Some posts are chosen by me, a lot are chosen by my readers. I thought hard and fretted long about how to stuff this into some sort of story arc but in the end decided that was stupid. This is just the best bits of the blog, with the occasional new bit thrown in to make my publisher happy.

How to Stay Married

I once read in a magazine – I forget which one now – a problem on the problem pages that went something like this:

Q. My husband refuses to pick his towel up off the bathroom floor. It drives me demented. How can I punish him?

A. Instead of wanting to punish him, why don’t you think to yourself, as you pick the towel up off the bathroom floor, of all the nice things he does for you without you asking? It is little acts of devotion like these that keep marriages going.

Here are some of the annoying things that my husband does:

– He doesn’t pick up the bathmat off the bathroom floor.

– He clears his throat in quite an annoying way.

– He steals my car key because he can’t be bothered to find his, then accuses me of having used, and lost his key (thus forcing him to use mine).

– He will turn to me and say ‘Shall I have a shower? Or not?’.

– If the TV is on and he wants to say something, rather than finding the remote and pausing the programme he will shout ‘PAUSE!’ which is my cue to find the remote (under his bum, usually) and pause the programme for him so he may deliver his opinion.

– He will suddenly decide that the house is a mess and pick things up randomly (an unopened letter, a pair of flip-flops, a baby’s toy) and say ‘What's the story with this? Should it be here?’

– He will walk into his own kitchen and wonder aloud where we keep the knives, forks, salt, pepper, plates and so on.

Here are some of the annoying things that I do:

– I pick at my cuticles. Constantly.

– I clear my throat in a nice way. But I do it ALL the time.

– I never open my post, particularly anything that looks financial.