Dave's Free Press

Steak tartare

For each person, 8 oz of steak, a teaspoon of capers, half an onion, an egg yolk, salt, pepper, parsley, and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Finely chop everything that can be chopped, mix it all together, leave to moulder for half an hour or so, and serve on toast.

Recent kitchen adventures

I went to Wing Yip recently, cos it's the cheapest and (more importantly) most convenient place for getting kitchen stuff. I needed a sharpening stone and a sieve. Of course, I was seduced by some of their many frozen delights, and filled a drawer in my freezer full of fish balls, pre-cooked prawns, a duck, etc

I need to empty that drawer so I can fill it with bits of Edmund's pig, so as well as turning the duck into smaller more compact and easily storable pieces, I've been cooking with prawns recently.

First, a nice healthy dish. Toss your prawns (fnarrr) in lime juice and chili. Serve with a salad of warm parsnip chunk with spring onions and tomatoes.

Second, marinade your prawns in lemon juice, cider vinegar, tamarind sauce, garlic and chili for a few hours. Parboil some chunks of butternut squash and then roast 'em with a chopped chipotle chili. Chop and fry a red onion, adding several teaspoons of Pataks* curry sauce. Combine everything in the pan with coconut cream. Just before serving, add coriander leaves and chopped up baby pea pods and stir through. If you have any coconut cream left, have it in your after dinner coffee - it's OK, not as good as real cream, but worth trying at least once.

I've still got some prawns left, but the bag's now small enough to squeeze into another drawer. Success! I have room for bits of pig!

* this is not cheating. Well, it is, but it's authentic Indian-housewife-style cheating!

Pub review: The Woolpack Inn, Eskdale

I'm on my way to Oop North, and decided to take a rather round-about route via the Lake District. This was partly because driving over Wrynose and Hardknott passes is Fun, and partly Just Because.

After coming over those passes, I arrived at the Woolpack Inn, and the western end of Hardknott pass, in the late afternoon, gagging for a pint, and after ascertaining that there was a room available for the night I went to the bar. Now, one of the reasons that I stopped at the Woolpack instead of carrying on into the village of Boot was that the Woolpack has its own brewery - the Hardknott Brewery - advertised in big black letters on the pub and easily visible from the road. Surprisingly, they only had two of their own beers on tap, although there's one more in bottles. Of the two I tried, the Mild was somewhat disappointing, but the "Wooly Fusion" I tried next was really very special indeed. It's a light hoppy bitter with a bit of ginger in it - very nice indeed to drink outside in the sun. Unfortunately it's not available in bottles. If it had been, I'd have got a crate of the stuff to take home with me.

The bar has ten hand pumps, all of which were selling beers I'd not seen elsewhere, from local breweries, and those others that I tried were all very good. In particular the "Stout Ollie" from the Ulverston Brewery is excellent. While there are three lager taps, they're all tolerably decent lagers - none of the usual Fosters/Carling swill here. The soft drinks are also somewhat unusual - Fentimans lemonade, for example, instead of the usual carbonated sugar-water, and there's Dandelion and Burdock.

There's also a fairly extensive whisky menu. None of the bottlings are particularly unusual - although it's good to see a non-Scottish malt on the list (Connemara, from Ireland) and the only recently available Ben Riach - but there are a lot of them. 29 of them.

And finally the food. The menu was short and sweet, concentrating on local produce served in imaginative ways. For example, as a starter I had smoked trout with a herby sorbet. Yes, sorbet. It was very nice, and I shall try to replicate it when I get home. For dessert I had a Thing which had a biscuit base, with a generous helping of a local mild blue cheese on top, all coated in dark chocolate. That's another that I shall try to replicate, and will also see if I can figure out a way of serving it with the cheese hot. I knew I'd find a way of using a soldering iron in the kitchen! You may notice that I don't have much to say about the main course - it was competently done and well-presented, but not as special as the others. That's not to say that it was bad, merely that it was only good compared with the very good starter and dessert.

Can you tell that I liked it? I commend this pub to you!

Meatster Eggs

Brace yourselves, for I have invented a Thing that is sooooo stupendous that it out-stupendises everything that has happened before. It is even more stupendous than me!

I give you ... the Meatster Egg.

This culinary MARVEL consists of a tasty chocolate shell, shaped as unto an egg, and filled with tasty MEAT.

I shall endeavour to buy a mould tomorrow and make one.

Gratuitous LOLcreature

Ill

I am ill. I've been ill since Thursday, with a cold. You're meant to be able to cure a cold with [insert old wives tale remedy here] in 5 days, or if you don't, it'll clear itself up in just under a week. So hopefully today is the last day.

So what have I done while ill?

On Friday I became old (see previous post), and went to the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was good. You should go.

Saturday was the London Perl Workshop. My talk on closures went down well, and people seemed to understand what I was talking about. Hurrah! I decided that rather than hang around nattering and going to a few talks, I'd rather hide under my duvet for the rest of the day.

I mostly hid on Sunday too, and spent most of the day asleep. In a brief moment of productivity, I got my laptop and my phone to talk to each other using magic interwebnet bluetooth stuff. I'd tried previously without success, but that was with the previous release of OS X. With version X.5 it seems to Just Work, so no Evil Hacks were necessary.

The cold means that I can't taste a damned thing, not even bacon. So now I know what it's like to be Jewish. Being Jewish sucks.

And today, I am still coughing up occasional lumps of lung and making odd bubbling noises in my chest, although my nasal demons seem to be Snotting less than they were, so hopefully I'll be back to normal tomorrow.

Using up odds and ends

[originally posted on 21 Nov 2008]

I had some parsnips that were beginning to look a bit sad, so ...

Slice three parsnips thinly, and parboil. Remove from the water and leave to dry a bit in a sieve. Chuck some frozen broad beans into the water and leave to simmer on a low heat. Heat some oil in a frying pan. When the parsnips have finished dripping, chuck them in, along with some finely chopped bacon. Fry until the bacon is done. Drain the broad beans and add them to the frying pan, with a little bit of mustard - just a litle, you don't need much. Stir and mix and stir and mix. Chuck it all on your plate in a lovely steaming heap of tastiness.

Now fry an egg. Put it on top.

Eat. Make sure that when you break the yolk you mix it all in. Feel your arteries clog.

Worship my culinary skills.

update: 22 Nov 2008: next time I think I'll see what happens if I mix in some onion marmalade too, or some chili jam.

Mulled cider

To half a gallon of strong sweet cider, add half a lemon, half an orange (both chopped into tiny bits, as unto those who are naughty in the lord's sight), some sugar, cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg. Bring to a boil, and simmer for a couple of minutes.

Whisky icecream

• 12 fl oz double cream
• 8 fl oz milk
• 1.5 fl oz Glenlivet
• three heaped spoonfuls of sugar

Mix. Put in freezer. Wait until half frozen. Stir. Put back in freezer. Wait. Eat. Yum yum.

A brilliant idea

I have had a brilliant idea.

Take a bottle of gin. Drink half of it. Then fill the bottle with biltong. Let it sit for a coupla weeks, pour through a coffee filter into another bottle, and you have meat-flavoured booze! And alcoholic meat! Huzzah!

Abuse of Booze

Whisky toddy made with port-casked Bowmore tastes weird. Nice, but weird.

(look, I've run out of my normal cooking whisky, OK?)

Support Iceland's Whalers

A bunch of hippies have come up with a publicity stunt where they will try to raise money from unthinking sheople and spend it to "save a whale's life" by bribing Icelandic whalers to not hunt it.

I'm in favour. If stupid people want to give away their money and have it go to the whalers who they believe to be the Great Satan, I'm going to sit on the sidelines and laugh.

Please donate!

But this does raise an interesting point. The hippies aim to support Iceland's whalers by paying them money. I'd like to do the same. However, I won't need £95,000. I'll need just £311. That's £105 for a return ticket to Reykjavik, £166 for a hotel, and £40 for a plate of nice tasty whale in a restaurant. Any surplus will be donated to Icelandic charities.

Note to self

Milk from the corner shop always goes off really quickly. In future, buy genetically modified hormone enhanced irradiated milk from Tescos. Longer life through superior technology!

Weird dreams

Last night I dreamt that an eskimo was advising me on how best to cook camels. Apparently cross-dressing camels taste best.