Delia Smith's a Bitch
We had my parents come visit us on the Bank Holiday weekend and so it was time to put on the apron and do some cooking. I'd decided the food for the day had to be MEAT, spelled with a capital MEAT, and so I hit Borough Market on the search for some short ribs for a bit of braising.
Could I find any? Could I buggery. Nobody had any, with the main butchers saying they'd been hit by a huge number of restaurant orders and were having trouble getting their stock together. So instead I settled for a rack of beef ribs and wandered back home.
A quick google search for likely recipes came up with Deliah Smith's recipe for a roast. I guess I should have spent longer looking for my copy of Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall's bumper book of MEAT (which is an absolutely fantastic book, by the way, if you are even slightly interested in cooking) but it's been buried somewhere in the growing pile of boxes and so Delia had to suffice.
A bit of an explanation as to the guests who would be eating. As well as my folks, Nat's parents, her brother and her sister-in-law, Ana, were also coming for a nosh. Nat's mother, Michelle, and Ana are continental types (French and Spanish respectively) and so as far as they're concerned if they don't get spat in the eye with a gush of blood when they put their forks into their animal-based food product, they're not happy. "Rare" doesn't begin to suffice as an adjective in describing their preferred level of cooking. "Mooing" is probably mopre accurate. This meant that to make everyone happy I was aiming for a medium rare finish so that those more English amongst us could at least nibble on the crusty outside layer whilst the more primal carnivores could get down and dirty with a barely cooked piece of MEAT.
Anyway, Delia's ideas as to correct cooking temperatures and times are... how can I put it... utterly shite. Following her recipe to the letter, using an oven thermometer to make sure the temperature was correct, weighing the ribs on a digital scale etc left me with a scientifically exact notion as to how long I should leave the oven going in order to create the perfect roast. What I ended up with was something so brown it could have won a best newcomer award in the MOBOs. Oh well, at least the celeriac mash came out well enough, even though by the time I'd finished the kitchen looked like someone had tossed a grenade in and slammed the door shut just before it went off.
Ana ended up trying her best to push the food around on her plate and then made excuses about having a big lunch. At least Michelle admitted that, although she hated the thought of the damn thing, the food itself was rather nice, which it was. Finding a premium piece of beef which had been hung for five weeks definitely paid off and the roast was lovely. My parents couldn't give a monkey's and being proud Manchester folk polished the lot off and had seconds, all the while bemoaning how the rest of Europe didn't know how to use fire properly anyway.
So the moral of the story is always test your recipes before you make them in a live environment. Either that, or never trust an inebriated cow with an unhealthy interest in extremely bad football clubs. One of the above, for sure.
Could I find any? Could I buggery. Nobody had any, with the main butchers saying they'd been hit by a huge number of restaurant orders and were having trouble getting their stock together. So instead I settled for a rack of beef ribs and wandered back home.
A quick google search for likely recipes came up with Deliah Smith's recipe for a roast. I guess I should have spent longer looking for my copy of Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall's bumper book of MEAT (which is an absolutely fantastic book, by the way, if you are even slightly interested in cooking) but it's been buried somewhere in the growing pile of boxes and so Delia had to suffice.
A bit of an explanation as to the guests who would be eating. As well as my folks, Nat's parents, her brother and her sister-in-law, Ana, were also coming for a nosh. Nat's mother, Michelle, and Ana are continental types (French and Spanish respectively) and so as far as they're concerned if they don't get spat in the eye with a gush of blood when they put their forks into their animal-based food product, they're not happy. "Rare" doesn't begin to suffice as an adjective in describing their preferred level of cooking. "Mooing" is probably mopre accurate. This meant that to make everyone happy I was aiming for a medium rare finish so that those more English amongst us could at least nibble on the crusty outside layer whilst the more primal carnivores could get down and dirty with a barely cooked piece of MEAT.
Anyway, Delia's ideas as to correct cooking temperatures and times are... how can I put it... utterly shite. Following her recipe to the letter, using an oven thermometer to make sure the temperature was correct, weighing the ribs on a digital scale etc left me with a scientifically exact notion as to how long I should leave the oven going in order to create the perfect roast. What I ended up with was something so brown it could have won a best newcomer award in the MOBOs. Oh well, at least the celeriac mash came out well enough, even though by the time I'd finished the kitchen looked like someone had tossed a grenade in and slammed the door shut just before it went off.
Ana ended up trying her best to push the food around on her plate and then made excuses about having a big lunch. At least Michelle admitted that, although she hated the thought of the damn thing, the food itself was rather nice, which it was. Finding a premium piece of beef which had been hung for five weeks definitely paid off and the roast was lovely. My parents couldn't give a monkey's and being proud Manchester folk polished the lot off and had seconds, all the while bemoaning how the rest of Europe didn't know how to use fire properly anyway.
So the moral of the story is always test your recipes before you make them in a live environment. Either that, or never trust an inebriated cow with an unhealthy interest in extremely bad football clubs. One of the above, for sure.