BAD COOK
Esther Walker
Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by The Friday Project 2013
Copyright © Esther Walker
Esther Walker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © March 2013 ISBN: 9780007515721
Version: 2017-08-17
D is for Daddy
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
How to Stay Married
Lamb Shank Curry
Connie’s Mango Salsa
Osso Buco
Why I Hate Myself Part 1
Note: How to Be a Good Host
Meat Fear Part 1
My Husband the Eighties Hero
Are You an Alcoholic?
The Shitty Food Diet
Note: What You Need in Your Kitchen
Toad in the Hole
Offal
Home Alone
Cheat’s Mayonnaise
Baba Ganoush
Advice
Things No-one Ever Tells You About Cooking
Valentine’s Day
Poached Pears in Marsala
Brain Fail
How to Make a White Sauce
Fig and Goat’s Cheese Salad
Juicing
Who Needs Friends?
Choritzo
Where I Get Pregnant
Where I Go on About Being Pregnant Quite a Lot
… Pregnancy Chat Continues …
Being Pregnant Becomes Tedious
My Mother
Padrón Peppers
Julia Churchill
Banana Bread Part 1
Where I Get Depressed
A carrot cake with a frosting of mascarpone and orange by Nigel Slater
My Very Own Chicken Pie
Here Come the Gays
Opinions
Christmas Sausages
Macaroons
January
The Best Curry in the World
Roast Garlic and Camembert
Fat
Fish
Interlude: Things to Make Sure You Have Done Before You Bring a Baby Home from Hospital
Courgettes
Golabki
Auntie Hannah’s Courgette Thing
Meat Fear Part 2
WWKMD
Falling Asleep in Cars
Small Things
Please Do Not Invite Me to Your Party
What the Hell to Do with Red Mullet
The Time I Went on a Date with Jason Orange
I Hate Summer
Worst Holiday Ever
You Can’t Fake a Family (AKA Worst Holiday Ever Part 2)
Premature Middle Age
How Not to Look a Fright
Where I Finally Go Completely Mad
An Obligatory Cocktail Recipe
Dead Prostitute Friends
Just So Tired
Gumbo
The Perfect is The Enemy of the Good
What Makes a Perfect Kitchen?
Make-Amends Brownies
Life Stoves My Head in with a Plank
Banana Bread Part 2
Cullen Skink
Meat Fear Part 3
Kitchen Gadgets
How to Cater for a Lot of People Without Going Insane or Having to Be a Very Good Cook
Kitty’s Jersey Royal Hash
Breaded Scallops
Interlude: How to Talk to a Butcher
Making Dinner, Night after Night, Without Going Insane
A Mouse
A Ham is Not Just for Christmas
Meatballs
Welsh Cakes
Nasi Goreng or Dirty Rice
Scones
Asian Baked Salmon
Treacle Tart
Tex-Mex Chicken
A Pork Pie
Note: How to Clean Your Kitchen
Epilogue
Keep Reading
Appendix: Pastry
Recipe Index
Thank You
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
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.
– I interrupt.
– I give my husband death stares.
– I am a sluttish washer-upper.
– I sometimes only empty half of the dishwasher and then wander off to do something else and forget to unload the rest.
– I throw money (his) at any problem.
– I leave the area around the toaster a mess, attracting ants and wasps.
– I don’t make the bed.
Here are the nice things that my husband does for me:
– He doesn’t make me go and get a job.
– He does my tax.
– He takes out all the bins and deals with the compost.
– He sorts out the cars, the tax for the cars, the maintenance of the cars.
– He doesn’t make me see people I don’t like.
– He’ll make any phone call for me that I’m too scared to make.
– He cleans all my hair out of the trap in the shower.
– He can fix almost anything in the house that has broken.
– When I have been devastatingly amusing about someone, he doesn’t declare that I am a ‘bitch’.
Here are the nice things that I do for my husband:
– I hang up the bathmat.
– I always make sure there is enough deodorant, shampoo, shower gel etc in the bathroom.
– Ditto for the kitchen.
– Ditto stamps, birthday cards and wrapping paper.
– I sort out dinner, pretty much every night.
– I make sure there’s always enough cash for the cleaner, ditto cleaning products.
– When we go on holiday I cancel the papers and the milk.
– At parties, I whisper names he has forgotten in his ear.
– I don’t give him shit about going out and getting drunk.
– I don’t give him shit about his swearing or bad taste jokes.
Whenever my husband has done something annoying and I feel enervated, I always run those lists through my head. It’s what my marriage balances on, like a fat elephant on a plank of wood on a ball bearing.
But a few years ago, I realized that my husband was NOT aware that there was this careful balancing act going on. He did not think, as he ignored my throat-clearing, cuticle-picking, death-staring grotesqueness, that he was simply keeping up his end of the bargain. He believed that he was bearing the brunt of marital irritation, while I sailed through life blithely un-irritated. One day, things exploded in a terrible row about me not making the bed.
I won’t lie, there were tears.
Then I explained about the list. About the importance of acts of devotion. And he got it, more or less. And that’s why I’m always sorting out dinner; it’s part of the deal. It’s why I try to find new things to cook, rather than just doing a roast chicken or pasta over and over again. If it’s going to be my area, I might as well have a big repertoire. It makes everything easier.
Which explains why I tried out this lamb shank curry. Yes, fine, it’s just another bloody curry, but the appealing thing about this to me was that it is tomato-based and therefore unusual and new and exciting.
Connie’s Mango Salsa
Let’s go now. Let’s fly you and I away from this gloomy now, to a different time, back six years, to when I was working on Londoner’s Diary, which as I’m sure you know is the gossip page of the Evening Standard.
One day a new girl appeared in the editor’s office. The editor liked to have a lot of girls around and she was very mean to all of them. She thought she was in The Devil Wears Prada or something and that being mean to your assistants is terribly glamorous, but we knew that we were actually in a scummy daily newspaper office in West London and that people who are mean to their assistants are bitches who will rot in hell.
The editor’s girls didn’t usually last. They all had office affairs eventually, which then went sour, then they went on sick leave, then never came back. But Connie, or ‘Beautiful Connie’ as she quickly became known, was different. She was smart. She couldn’t have been less interested in the skinny boys on news or any of the grizzly bears on the back bench. Her boyfriends were always incredibly tall mega-Sloanes she’d known since she was six, who thought journalists were dismal little people. Yet there was a steely glint in her sleepy brown eyes, a hard edge to her long blonde hair and a no-nonsense air about her flower-patterned mini dresses.
The editor had finally met her match.
Connie was my best – and, sometimes, only – friend at the Standard. I would often poke my head into the editor’s office, where she sat drinking pot after pot of fresh ginger tea that was so strong that when you drank it, it felt like your whole face was on fire. She would shriek, quietly: ‘ESTHER!! Oh my God I’ve just eaten an entire Bounty and TWO packets of Maltesers!!!’
I have been thinking about Connie recently because I came across a mention of a mango salsa, which she used to make for me in the weeny galley kitchen of her top floor flat in Notting Hill. Roasting hot in summer and freezing cold in winter (‘I think another bad January might finish me off’), Connie’s flat was a miracle of survival, like those plants you get in the desert, or 100,000 miles under the sea.
Anyway she almost always has the ingredients in her kitchen for this spicy mango salsa, and it’s quite, quite delicious. I realize the above whimsy makes it sound like Connie is now dead, but she isn’t. She’s still there, in that same deathtrap flat, training to be a shrink.
My husband and I had this with a very rich jerk pork belly, which didn’t work at all; it was too rich and gacky and yuk. It would be very good instead with some plain steak, or a tuna steak (although these days one cannot really eat such things) or a plain white fish like turbot or pollock.
Connie’s Mango Salsa
Makes enough for 2–3
1 mango – diced
juice of 1 lime
small handful fresh coriander
a sprinkling of fresh mint
1 chilli – chopped finely, seeds removed
1 avocado, diced
salt
1 Put everything in a bowl and mix.
Osso Buco
The best thing about working at the Evening Standard, where I was from 2005 to 2007 (although for fuck’s sake don’t tell the Student Loans Company that – as far as they’re concerned I was missing presumed dead in western Namibia and therefore do NOT owe them any money for that tax year), was my boss.
He was so great because he’d always say ‘well done’. It didn’t really matter what you’d done; he’d always just say ‘well done’. I mean, not if you’d done something bad. If you’d done something bad he’d say ‘oh dear’. And then when you put it right, he’d say ‘well done’.
This worked on me. Although I’d had nice bosses in the past, none of them had said ‘well done’ with the frequency and fervour of Sebastian.
‘Seb I got you a sandwich,’ I’d say.
‘Oh well done,’ he’d say.
‘Seb I rang Antonia Fraser about that thing,’ I’d say.
‘Oh, well done. What did she say?’ he’d say.
[She almost always said ‘fuck off’, or something like that, by the way.]
‘Seb I forgot to put through all those payments,’ I’d say.
‘Oh dear,’ he’d say. ‘Can you do it now?’
‘Yes I’ll do it now,’ I’d say.
‘Oh, well done,’ he’d say.
You get the picture. On Friday lunchtimes, I used to get us both chicken shawarmas from Ranoush Juice, just opposite the Evening Standard’s offices in Kensington. Ranoush Juice is one of a chain of Lebanese places that will be familiar to Londoners, and not to anyone else. We’d eat the sandwiches at our desks, stinking the place out. On Fridays at the Standard there was nothing to do after about 1pm because there was no paper until Monday. So at about 3pm Seb would say ‘Okay, well done, you can go home now.’ And off I’d go. You see? I literally hadn’t done anything, and he'd say ‘well done’. Awesome. It did wonders for my productivity. I would write 100 or maybe even 200 words a week in that place. Phew!
A note: our Friday lunches only lasted until Ariel Sharon had that heart attack; it turned out that his favourite food was chicken shawarmas and Sebastian didn’t want any after that. He briefly accused me of trying to kill him with greasy sandwiches, but I think he was only joking.
Needless to say, I cried tears of genuine sadness when I left the Evening Standard to go and work at the Independent. And in the 12 months that I worked at the Indy I don't think anyone ever said ‘well done’ to me. Not once. Ever.
As you can imagine there were no tears of sadness when I got the hell out of there.
But I had been infected with the habit of saying ‘well done’ to everyone, about everything. It’s a great motivator. I do it to my husband all the time.
‘I put a wash on,’ he’ll say.
‘Oh WELL DONE,’ I’ll say.
I often find that even though my husband is a good and enthusiastic cook, I find it important to issue a strongly motivational yawp, in the manner of ‘WELL DONE THIS IS DELICIOUS WOW WOW WOW’ when we sit down to eat dinner. It really works.
When my husband is really feeling particularly uxorious, he will make Osso Buco for us, which is one of those things that has a mystifying name but is actually quite simple. It’s basically veal shin stew and it incorporates bone marrow, which makes it very glossy and sticky. Osso buco means ‘bone with a hole’, which is a pretty unromantic description – but that’s the Italians for you.
When you go to a butcher to get your meat for this, you can ask for either some veal shin (you want rose veal, obviously) or, if you like, ‘osso buco’, which is the name of the cut. I know it sounds a bit like going in and asking for some ‘spaghetti bolognese’, but it isn’t.
This recipe is a mash-up of Hugh FW’s and Claudia Roden’s in that Hugh’s does not include tomatoes and Claudia Roden’s does.
It’s a pretty rich dish so you really only need one slice of veal shin per person and traditionally it is eaten with a risotto and gremolata, a finely chopped salad of parsley, lemon zest and garlic. I like to go pretty easy on the garlic as if you’re not careful it can really keep you up at night.
Osso Buco
Serves 2
some veg oil for cooking, plus a large knob of butter
