It's Christmas time in Hollis Queens,
Mom's cooking chicken and collard greens...

There seems to be a bit of a division between those who like risotto al dente or beyond that, when I cook risotto I cook it to al dente, add the extra ingredients - frozen peas, chicken, cooked mushrooms, etc - then some more stock to reheat them, and season to taste; by this time the risotto is slightly past al dente but has bite. You don't want risotto like spaghetti cooked for ten minutes.

I've been listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony lately, and less for the famous second movement than for the third, and the melody which has sustained trumpet(?) while the other musicians play. Genius. It reminds me a bit of Wagner's Tannhauser overture, especially the last three minutes, best played LOUD!

I was looking at the library catalogue to borrow 'The Land of Green Plums' by Herta Muller, but all the copies are out. She won the Nobel Prize for literature this year, so everyone must be running to the library to borrow her books. Bunch of sheep I tell you, jumping on the trendy bandwagon.

I made what to me are perfect roasties this evening: roasted in duck fat with a few cloves of garlic, still in the skin, and chopped rosemary thrown in around forty minutes from the end.

I did this the other day after dinner.

I went for a swim this afternoon, since last week I've found myself able to swim twelve lengths instead of my usual eight, and I could probably do more. Also I can swim a length on my back, like a backstroke but without moving my arms, up to now I could do around three-quarters of the pool before having to roll and stroke. Tara st pool at two o'clock is nice, there's something about a virtually empty swimming pool. I remember swimming in the morning in Westwood a few times, the pool nearly empty and the light coming in through the windows.

I just made moules mariniere for lunch, and had it with crusty sourdough bread and a small glass of red wine. Mussels are €2.50 a kilo (I thought this was a mistake at the fishmongers) so I'll be making lots of mussel recipes in future, I'm looking forward to clam chowder, from Tamasin Day-Lewis' book, it doesn't need a tin of clam juice like most clam chowder recipes, which you can't get on this side of the water. I don't think I'm allergic to mussels, but I'm not really sure yet. It's funny how well you can eat on little money, I spend on average sixty to seventy euro a week all in for two, I don't know how that relates to other people. Next week I'm making Jamie's sausage casserole, huevos rancheros and polenta, meatballs and garlic bread. I borrowed Rick Stein's French Odyssey from the library, it's an excellent book and every recipe in the book is within my abilities, but it seems like too much effort for just me and the aul fella. I wouldn't mind making the lamb and haricot bean stew for Christmas Day, I don't bother with the traditional endurance test that is Christmas dinner. He also has a rich chocolate and chestnut cake I'd like to make, but by rich you can read gooey, so it needs a predictable oven, or else it'll be overcooked and shrunken, or undercooked and soupy. Rick Stein's French Odyssey is a great cookbook, a good cookbook should be a reference manual for cooks, and he includes a few pages of French potato accompaniments, a conversion chart for weights and oven temps, a few pages of classic French fish recipes, etc.

I always feel that the mark of a decent cook is to able to cook vegetables well. This along with tuscan bean soup are almost as good as a fat juicy steak.


Turlu Turlu
Feeds 4

4 baby turnips, halved
3 large potatoes, cubed
1 onion, cut into eighths
6 whole garlic cloves
1 fennel bulb, quartered
1 beetroot, cubed
1 carrots, cut into thick diagonal slices
1 aubergine, halved then cut into thick slices
2 courgettes, cut into thick slices
1 tbsp whole coriander seeds
Half tsp allspice
3 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
Salt and pepper
Fresh coriander

For the sauce
1kg cherry tomatoes
3 whole garlic cloves
Rapeseed or olive oil
1 tin of chickpeas

1 - Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C, GM6.
2 - In a large roasting tin, combine all of the vegetables except for the courgette with the allspice, coriander seeds, salt and pepper and oil.
3 - In another roasting tin, combine the cherry tomatoes with the garlic and oil.
4 - Place both in the oven. Roast the cherry tomatoes for 30 minutes, remove then blitz to a sauce. Pour into a saucepan and keep aside.
5 - For the vegetables, roast for 20 minutes then turn. Roast for a further 20 minutes then put in the courgettes for a further 10 minutes roasting.
6 - Heat up the sauce, taste for seasoning then add the chickpeas.
7 - Serve a good mixture of the roasted vegetables with a good scattering of fresh coriander and a few spoonfuls of the sauce. For authenticity, drizzle on a little yoghurt which has been salted.

http://bookthecook.blogspot.com/2007/07/vegetarian-crime-scene.html

Rick Stein in an episode of Rick Stein's French Odyssey yesterday on Saturday Kitchen made a lamb and haricot bean stew. He said that years before he had eaten the same meal with baguettes and a 'rough' red wine at a student diner, tres bien. The french are always associated with good food, but this was actually a political move after the fall of the monarchy, liberty, equality, fraternity and bonne nourriture. Nowadays France is McDonalds second fastest-growing territory after America, and bistros are closing all over France; Sarkozy apparently doesn't care for food. Lyon is France's foodie capital, but they're very food of offal... Rick Stein's French Odyssey is on the shelves at Charleville Mall library, I'll pick it up during the week. The lamb and haricot bean looks like a nice stew, I'll leave the lamb in big chunky pieces for a change. I made a French Onion Soup yesterday, a classic soup, and easy as well.

This looks good as well actually:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/rackoflambwithbeangr_85570.shtml

Sad news, Sean McDermott st swimming pool is closing at the end of this year. The cleanest pool in Dublin, and for my money, given that it's 25 meters, the best. As it's not a privately owned pool the staff don't have their heads up their own arseholes, which makes a refreshing change.

I'm listening to Bob Marley (Uprising, great album), so it only makes sense to post this from boards.ie

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=3492149&postcount=15

This place looks pretty sweet, although it's a bit out of the way.
http://www.coffeeshop.freeuk.com/Kashmir.html

As does this, and it's across the road from a hotel, more importantly it's not in the red light district.
http://www.coffeeshop.freeuk.com/Crush.html
And here's the hotel
http://www.hotelfreeland.com/home.en_US.html

The all-important map:
http://www.coffeeshop.freeuk.com/Map.html

As imaginary holidays go, it's not bad!

I was in Amsterdam for a quick visit and wanted to get the full Amsterdam experience in the shortest time possible. So I talked to a hooker about VanGough while shoving tulips up her hole.

I thought it was funny, but the other people in the Anne Frank house.....
Neil Delamere

I'm going to make onion soup tomorrow, a classic. I'll be using this recipe:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/frenchonionsoup_90985.shtml

It's also a great recipe if you have a lot of onions.

I'm trying to make one roast meal per week, last week it was roast chicken, this week it's roast pork (a tenner a kilo down butchers). Roast dinners are fairly easy, once everything's in the oven you forget about it. It's not as fast as frying obviously but it's grand for reading a book while your dinner is cooking. My favourite meal though is still steak medium-rare, with a small amount of wine sauce on top of the steak, with potato gratin and fried tomatoes. This is a restaurant-quality meal that is very easy to make at home, the key is to have good beef, and try to avoid freezing it to eke out that extra bit of freshness.

I bought the Wicklow guidebook the other day, the climb 'Expectancy' looks good, with its hardest move being 3c, and what looks like gear placements aplenty, but bear in mind that it's 21 meters, the highest routes from ground to top in Dalkey are around 18 meters, so it's kewl... 'High Exposure' looks great as well, but it's 5a so there's a big jump from 3c. That'd be a wobbly leg I'm sure. I'd be more than happy bouldering, but occasionally a part of me likes altitude.

I made a fry-up the other day which had eight elements: rashers, sausages, eggs, black and white pud, mushrooms, baked beans, potato chips and fried bread. The best way to make a fry-up is to use two pans, in the first go the sausages, black and white pud and mushrooms, when they're nearly done the rashers go in the second, then the bread, and in the first throw in the eggs when the rest is on the plate.

I was listening to Bartok's string quartets last night, the fourth movement of the fourth string quartet is all pizzicato, including a type of pizzicato where the string is plucked so hard it whacks off the fretboard (or whatever it's called on a violin). The instruments in the recording are from the court of Louis XV or something, they're over 300 years old, boing... The skill involved in making something that can last so long is hard to imagine. There's a distinctive kind of elastic sound from them as well.

I'm listening to 'Exodus' by Bob Marley, the man the legend. Wikipedia tells us about 'No Woman, No Cry':

'Though Bob Marley may have written the song,or may have written the melody, songwriter credits were given to "V. Ford". Vincent Ford was a friend of Marley's who ran a soup kitchen in Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica where Marley grew up. The royalty checks received by Ford ensured the survival and continual running of his soup kitchen.'

I'm still reading Philip Hensher's 'The Northern Clemency'. He writes beautifully, this is from page 434:

'She paused at the kitchen and switched its light on. In the dark house, the strip-lighting had the same metallic sour quality of a glass of water drunk on waking at four in the morning.'

I'm looking up cookware online and reading various comments on amazon, and I can't really understand why people are so fussy, once a pot has a thick base so food won't burn easily you're away, I think it's mainly to show off. I like stainless steel myself. Anyway, this is what I want for myself, but I'd have to buy lots of hooks to hang them off.

http://www.metrokitchen.com/product/M-6560-01

I need new lids on mine, and they're grand. More expensive cookware won't cook food any better. You do need to spend around €200 on a set (the '€' sign on my keyboard only works when you hold the alt key and type 0 1 2 8, mad), but they'll last forever, and after a few years you'll want an excuse to change them.

Actually, this is what I want for Christmas:

http://www.weaponmasters.com/shopping/Glamdring-The-Sword-of-Gandalf-p-16913.html

I think my favourite stew type is Goulash, even more than wine-based stews like beef bourguignonne.

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-make-braised-beef-goulash

The way I make it is very similar to the one above, except I add the red pepper at the start, and a teaspoon of caraway seeds toasted and ground. Goulash wouldn't be goulash without the dollop of sour cream at the end.

My favourite stewed meat (the only person who would give a shit will be the person I'm cooking for) will probably always be ossobucco. The only drawback is you need to order it from a butcher, as they usually take the meat off for stewing beef. I even use an egg spoon to scoop out the marrow. Actually ossobucco is meant to be veal but I use beef shin, there's more on them, and veal is hard to find. I want to make a rabbit stew soon, there's a butchers on Wicklow st that sells rabbit. I'll use something along the lines of this recipe:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/wildrabbitandmorelst_92455.shtml

It's a bit disillusioning, after you've made enough different types of stew you see how they all cook in basically the same way. Dredge your meat in flour, sear, remove, add onion, soften, add garlic, add carrots, potatoes, beetroot, turnip, whatever, a tin of chopped tomatoes and half that amount of stock or wine, cider or guinness, or no tomatoes and all liquid, meat back in and simmer for upwards of two hours. For a classical wine stew you marinade the beef in wine overnight, dry it with kitchen towels, sear it, etc, adding the flour at a later stage. I like to dredge the meat in flour at the start if I can as it adds a black crust to the bottom of the pot after searing, which melts into the stew as it cooks, or so I read. Stews are good to cook if you live in Ireland, where the weather's shite most of the time ('Autumn, Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' - Keats had obviously never been to Ireland, the wanker).

I was going to make Borscht, but chickened out after viewing this recipe. Chunky. Hearty is one word for it, a lovely mouthful of beetroot and turnip, earthy, yum yum. I don't mind if it is blended, but otherwise...

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-make-hearty-borscht-soup

I'll make beetroot and chocolate cake instead I think.

For downloading tv shows, especially US, this is the shizz. Booya.

http://eztv.it/

William Orbit - My Oracle Lives Uptown - possibly too cool. If you don't know what it is, I can't tell you what it is.