Today I had possibly the worst cooking day I've had in a long time. I was so looking forward to cooking dinner today...and it went wrong in quite spectacular style.
First I cooked the pork. Rather than my usual lion of pork I brought a rolled piece of pork that had stuffing in the middle. I used my usual tricks to get the skin to crackle, but for some reason it didn't.
Then I made a smashed potato dish that has 1/2 a head of roasted garlic in it. I've made this potato dish before, but rather than traditionally roasting the garlic like I usually do, I decided to use a trick I had read about; nuking the garlic in the microwave. First I blasted some oak smoked garlic we picked up at the Good Food Show...well this turned to dust , thinking the odd reaction was due to the age of the garlic I tried the same trick with some fresh garlic. This time it went rubbery. Rapidly running out of garlic I had to use garlic paste which doesn't taste anywhere near the same. Lesson learnt - never try and cheat on recipes, it'll always go wrong!
Thinking everything was back on track I cooked the Yorkshire puddings and started to quickly boil the purple sprouting broccoli. Just as I was about to serve the food, Hubby carved the pork only to find it still pink in the middle. I shoved everything back into the now switched off oven to keep warm while we pan fried the pork. 5 min later we sat down to over-cooked broccoli, dry Yorkie puds, fried pork and fake garlic potato...nothing like I had originally planned
Thankfully, to help rid the glut of cherries Hubby brought earlier on the week, I had made some mini clafoutis. These saved the evening from disaster. I just prey my cooking bad luck is out of the way as I'm planning to cook Hunters Pie tomorrow, something I've never cooked before
Mini Clafoutis
Serves 2
14 cherries, stoned
2 tbsp ground almond
1 tbsp plain flour
1 small egg
40g vanilla caster sugar (or normal caster sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract)
80ml milk
pinch of salt
icing sugar
1) Preheat oven to 190oc. Butter and flour two ramekin dishes. Place 7 cherries at the bottom of each ramekin
2) Whisk all of the remaining ingredients (apart from the icing sugar) together until smooth. Pour over cherries. Bake for 15-20 min until risen and golden. Allow to cool for 5 min before eating. Dust with icing sugar.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
How NOT to cook a roast dinner & the redeeming clafoutis
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Been there, done something very like it - better luck next time ... and great that you felt able to blog about it :)
ReplyDeleteJoanna
isn't it always the way - everything goes wrong...sounds like the pudding saved the day though
ReplyDeleteI think we all have days like this, so frustrating. Least you had pudding though (like any true Domestic Goddess!), I would have been sending Fred out to the shop if I'd gone wrong with dinner.
ReplyDeleteDid you cover the garlic in cling film while you nuked it. Clingfilm makes steam, steam cooks. Also what power was it on? Medium power is so useful for slow(ish) microwave cooking, especially now microwave oven are so more often 850 - 900 watt rather than the old 650's.
ReplyDeleteYou can buy temperature probes in most cooking shops now. Invaluable & fail safe - I use mine all the time. Pork should be about 73oC, chicken I like nearer 80 oC, beef and lamb about 55oC, duck about 58 oC. Crackling that doesn't crackle can be cut off the pork & shoved under a hot grill for a minute or so - instant crackling.... also can be microwaved (if you dare) which we used to do when I worked in a bistro.
The upside of getting things wrong is you know what not to do next time.....
Wow - never mind the garlic, that clafoutis looks spectacularly good!
ReplyDeletejoanna - I'm not ashamed of my cooking failures. It's kind of therapy writing about it!
ReplyDeleteCarolyn - puddings always make things better.
Ginger - I don't always do puddings with Sunday Dinner, but I'm so glad I did!
James - The instructions I had were very vauge. It certainly didn't mention cling film. Let's just say I won't be doing it again! After the pork incident I've decided to invest in a meat thermometer. Hubby did take a blow torch to the cracklin, but it still didn't work well. As you say, I will have learnt what doesn't work.
aforkfulofspaghetti - it certainly made up for the dire main course!
ReplyDelete