Bad Cook

5 A set of scales. Vital if you ever want to make a cake but just generally very useful if you are starting out and want/need to follow recipes very carefully. Quite quickly you learn how much 50g of butter is or 500g of bananas – but at the start, if in doubt, measure it out. The slimmest, lightest electronic scales are best, especially if you don’t have a lot of counter space, rather than those ridiculous old-fashioned ones with weights on one side and a bowl on the other. Who’s got a foot square in their kitchen to lose to a whopping great set of scales? Not me. And my kitchen is fucking huge.

Toad in the Hole

This is a really very easy and excellent thing to cook for a relaxed Saturday lunch or something. You can make an onion gravy and batter well in advance and then half an hour before you want to eat you whack the sausages in the pan, pour over the batter and it’s done.

Don’t worry – or rather, you ought not to worry – that this is perhaps not a very sophisticated thing to cook. Everyone will be beside themselves to get toad in the hole for lunch and cooking lunch at home for friends (if you have some) is not about sophistication; it’s about you not screeching around the house, bright red, going ‘shit shit shit the roulade is FUCKED’ and then sitting down, taking two mouthfuls of dry beef and wailing ‘This is horrible – no-one eat it!!!!!!’

Not that I speak from experience or anything.

Toad in the Hole

Batter makes enough for 4–6.

Allow 2 sausages each for girls and 3 each for boys. I’m not being sexist and trying to make out that girls have tiny tummies and eat nothing because they’re all on diets to get thin, thin, thin so they can marry a rich man because that’s all they’re good for – I’m just saying in general, girls eat two and boys eat three.

Of course, one girl will eat only one and another girl will have three. One boy will have only two and one girl has one and the other girl will have four. It’s just a rule of thumb, okay? Just so that you don’t go mental and buy 50 sausages for six people.

For the batter

120g plain flour

½ tsp salt

1 egg

1 egg yolk

300ml milk

For the toad

sausages, nice ones

3–4 tbsp vegetable oil or, ideally, beef dripping – about 25g

1 Preheat the oven to 220ºC. Whisk together the batter ingredients. You’re less likely to get lumps if you half-mix the eggs and dry ingredients together before adding the milk. Rest the batter if you feel like it.

2 Put the fat in a roasting pan and stick it in the hot oven for 3–4 minutes until it’s melted, then add the sausages.

3 Put the sausages back in the oven in the fat for 8–10 minutes. Now this is really important, so stop daydreaming and listen to me: the fat must be SMOKING hot before you pour the batter in. When you open the oven and blue-ish smoke billows out, that’s when it’s time to pour the batter in. (I was always a bit scared of getting the fat this hot in the oven because I thought it would catch on fire or something. But turns out it doesn’t. This same principle applies to Yorkshire puddings. The fat must be SMOKING and then they will puff up gorgeous; if not, they will be shit.)

4 Take the pan out of the oven when the fat is SMOKING and pour the batter around the sausages. Turn the oven down to 180ºC.

5 Put the pan back in for 30 minutes, but check on it after 20 just to make damn sure it’s not alight. It’ll be ready when it’s all puffed up and golden brown.

There is a school of thought that says that one ought to cook the sausages for 15 minutes then take out HALF the sausages, pour over half the batter, put back in the oven for five minutes, then add the rest of the sausages and batter, so that you get sort of layers of sausage and batter. Personally I think that sounds like a recipe for total disaster, but you must do what you think is best.

Eat with cabbage. And maybe a nice onion gravy, if you can find a half-decent recipe.

Offal

I reckon I’m a pretty wide-ranging eater, but there are certain things I won’t touch and I will not have people judging me for it.

For example, I won’t eat raw garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, lemon puddings, aniseed or kidneys. And I’m not wild about tongue, either. And the attitude you get from people! It’s as if you’ve announced you’re a vegan. At least people probably don’t give you shit for being a vegan because they assume that you’ve got enough problems as it is.

A thing most people don’t want to eat is offal and I absolutely defend anyone’s right not to want to eat it without being labelled a white-bread-eating food weakling. Offal really isn’t that nice, most of the time. Kidney! ACK! Gag me with a spoon. It’s just about tolerable cut up into minute chunks then cooked for about three days then put in a pie with gravy and steak and topped off with a slab of buttery pastry. Any more real than that and I break out into a sweat.

But some offal is okay. Lamb sweetbreads: tick. Especially served with some kind of very sharp parsley and barley salad thing. Calves’ liver, with bacon and onions and mash: tick.

Chicken liver, turned into a paté OR cooked in a rich sauce of tomato and paprika: tick. Giles does a very nice sticky thing with chicken livers that goes something like this:

Giles’s Mittel Europe Chicken Livers

For two

1 onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves

1 400g packet organic chicken livers (or closest to 400g you can find), washed and sorted for gross bits of sinew or any green bits (gall bladder! Augh!)

1 tbsp paprika

a splash of chicken stock (if you’ve got it)

2 large squeezes of tomato purée or a couple of long squeezes of tomato ketchup

salt and pepper

about 100–150ml Marsala, or white wine. Or red wine, really.

spinach or salad leaves

some lemon juice

some parsley if you’ve got it

1 Sweat the onions gently for about 10–15 minutes and then throw in the garlic. Cook that until you start to smell garlic and then throw in the livers.

2 Turn up the heat a bit and cook for about 4 minutes. Then add the paprika, chicken stock, tomato purée, salt and pepper and cook for another 1 minute

3 Pour over the wine then turn the heat down a bit and simmer for about 4 more minutes with a lid on, stirring occasionally until the wine reduces a bit and you get a kind of tomatoey sauce.

4 ‘Arrange’ (i.e. plonk) some spinach leaves on a plate and then spoon over the livers and any juices left in the pan. Squeeze over some lemon juice and scatter parsley over the top.

Instead of having a brownie afterwards, I had an apple. *SMUG*

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