Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

This is more a record for myself than anyone else. But it does come with pictures. Start with a dorade stuffed with butter and lemon, you know, for dressing.

Get some giant king prawns.

Compare them to the size of your head.

Fill a pan with water, then add an arbitrary amount of salt to it and bring it to boil. Throw your giant king prawns in and bring it back to boil, then turn it down and let it simmer for around eight minutes.

Once cooked, run them under cold water to stop the cooking process.

Serve.

In honour of Yorkshire Day, I made some puddings. It was the first time I’ve tried it, but obviously being from Yorkshire, I’m born with a genetically inherited ability to make them.

Last weekend, I had the parents over for dinner, which seemed a good excuse to do something other than meat and wedges, thrown in the oven for 20 minutes and then consumed. So we headed down to the market to pick up some fresh fish.

Langoustines, which are used in scampi, were dead easy to prepare. All I did was drop them in a pan of boiling water and leave them for four or five minutes until the flesh turned from a translucent colour to an opaque white.

We got a whole red snapper, that we had cleaned when we bought it (which means removing all the guts) and then rinsed it when we got home. I then stuffed it full of ginger cut up into small cubes, several slices of lime, dill and a block of butter.

We also got a whole trevally jack, which was probably the nicest one of the two, again had it cleaned, and then stuff it with lemon slices, parsley and another slab of butter. I then cut a few slits in the sides, rubbed a little salt in the wounds and wrapped them both in tin foil and stuck them in the oven for about thirty minutes. Seemed to work quite well.

Following August Wendy House, it was time for the usual fry up club which I stepped up to cook this month.

All in all, I was reasonably pleased with how it went, it didn’t help that I’ve never cooked eggs before so I delegated that to George, but everything else seemed reasonably editable once served, and nobody died, so I think we can chalk that one down as a victory.

Recently, I bought a fish from the market. Like a whole fish. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to do any Finnish fish, so I had to settle for a Norwegian one instead. It was alright, I decided it was too mean to tease Viki in the end, so I just settled for cooking and eating it.

On Thursday I hosted a New Year’s Eve midnight dinner party which seemed to go down a storm. It just goes to show that cooking while intoxicated, even to the level where you can’t string a sentence together, it is safe and successful idea.

As part of my aim to try new things, I gave some kind of new foodstuff a go today. It’s some kind of weird green thing that the nice lady in Co-op informs me is known as a “vegetable.” How very quaint.

Combined with the tomato ketchup I had I believe that counts as two of my five a day.

I have to say I’m really getting into this cooking thing. I’ve just made myself another Pot Noodle and the other day I purchased a frozen pizza and put it in the oven for a period of time before removing and and then consuming it. I’m still not completely sold that it is a better alternative to microwave meals but it’s certainly a novelty.

Sunday being Galileo Day we decided to celebrate in the traditional way with a Galileo Day Feast. Sunday would have provided far too much time to prepare so we held it on Monday night on which I didn’t get home until 6:30 so eating at 8pm wasn’t bad at all.

Tuesday night saw the A-Soc members’ dinner party to welcome in the new acamedic year and say thanks to our existing members for sticking with us before the intake of fresh faces arrives.

No less than eighteen people turned up to sample the “delights” – a modest four courses by comparission to our last dinner party but never the less when you scale that up to that many people that is rather a lot of food to cook. Luckily Liz and Michelle very kindly contributed dishes, as did Tesco.

The real hero of the night was Fonze however who battled his way through the various dishes and a mountain of washing up alongside myself for the entire night.

I haven’t really had a debrief with most people as I didn’t get chance to get that much chatting done on Tuesday night though most people seemed to enjoy the food – I got no less than three adjectives in Paul’s thank you text message. I’m still fairly convinced the rice was awful and the soup was stone cold but for now everyone is at least pretending the food was edible.

And, as with last time, nobody died (that I know of), so perhaps we can chalk this one down as another success.