Welcome to the table
Featuring Virginia Woolf, chocolate cake and air-fryer vs deep fat fryer chicken
Welcome, readers! If you’re here, I imagine that you probably like food, and to cook when it doesn’t feel like a chore. You might like dogs and books - Cold Comfort Farm, Mapp & Lucia - and perhaps re-reading the Narnia series every so often (except for the Last Battle, which can get in the bin.) You wish you had more time to read and to garden, and are most likely a fan of the Mitford sisters. (The nice ones, not the fascist ones.) Perhaps you like to choose the flowers yourself for parties, and if not, you like the idea that you might – I used to send my husband and daughters up the road to buy them, but now all my flower budget goes on live plants for the garden, with the hope that I might grow enough cosmos to cut enough for the house.
I’ll kick off with chocolate cake, because I made one last week, and am eating the last slice as I write. It’s such an easy cake that I melted the chocolate, olive oil and dark brown sugar together for it while the girls had breakfast, stirring through the eggs, cocoa powder, rye and plain flour while they played afterwards. It was in the oven by the time the Waitrose man came in – he threw a ball for the dog and helpfully watched the baby while I unpacked the food. ‘My girls don’t eat much’, I said, ‘but I’ve got three boys visiting later.’ He looked at the kitchen counters, barely visible under several kilos of organic chicken, veg, beef and potato waffles. ‘Yep,’ he said, ‘you might have enough.’ It would, I thought after he’d left, be a novelty to cook for children who actually wanted to eat, and with the baby down for her nap, I settled in for a good long session in the kitchen.
People often ask if I enjoy cooking on a day off when it’s not for a cookbook or column, and the answer is yes, particularly if I’ve had time to browse cookbooks and plan an interesting menu, rather than the rush of getting kids tea on the table for 5.30 pm, fending off one child who wants to play under my feet between the oven and the hob, and the another who either wants to ‘help’, read a book or play Dinosaur Guess Who – usually at the same time.
The menu I’d planned was this:
Thursday tea
Chocolate cake, iced gingerbread, carrot & cucumber sticks, breadsticks, hummus
Thursday dinner
Buttermilk fried chicken, broccoli & cauliflower mac & cheese, fresh coleslaw (with kimchi for the adults)
Friday dinner
All in one beef chilli with chocolate, avocado, sour cream & cheese,
Potato waffles for the kids, fancy tortilla chips for the adults
Apparently, my friend’s children asked why I wasn’t just making dinner from one of my books. Where’s the challenge in that? With two hours nap/prep time, I marinated the chicken in garlic and buttermilk, and made a seasoned, spiced flour* to dredge it in. I’d wondered the previous day if I should buy a deep-fat fryer (on my long-term wishlist) before remembering air-fryers. Which everyone asks if I’m going to do a book about. Let’s just say after reading several recipes for air-fryer fried chicken, I added three litres of sunflower oil to the online shop, and fished out my biggest stockpot.
With an hour of prep time left, I was congratulating myself on my efficiency, slicing carrots, cabbage and red onions into neat julienne for coleslaw, pausing only to whisk two trays of broccoli & cauliflower mac & cheese from the oven. (Recipe below.) Then, as payback for being smug, the ganache for the chocolate cake split. ‘You can remedy this’, I blithely advise in one of my books, ‘by whisking in a little cold milk’. It’s always worked before, but reader, this time it did not. It was a ganache on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but I used it to ice the cake anyway, masking the dodgier bits with a finely chopped chocolate topping. It wouldn’t have made the cover – or even page 29 – of Ocado magazine, but it did go down extremely well later with the five children under 7; the crudités and coleslaw, less so. The fried chicken, done the old-fashioned way, was a triumph. (Even if I still haven’t tackled the stockpot of oil on the hob, 3+ days later.)
Here is the mac & cheese recipe below from the 30 minute dinner section of the Green Cookbook with my cheat’s ricotta, mascarpone & cheddar sauce - I doubled it for our guests, but even so this makes tonnes.
Existing Penguin newsletter subscribers who have joined, forgive me if this is recipe is one I’ve shared with you before - my post-Christmas memory is shot to pieces. My added value is to suggest you improve the topping by adding a few heaped teaspoons of shichimi togarashi**, mixed nuts and seeds along with the cheddar and panko breadcrumbs - it’s a lovely grown-up twist.
*The fried chicken spiced dredging flour is something like a heaped teaspoon each of smoked paprika, garlic powder, oregano, thyme, ground ginger and salt, mixed with 30g each of plain, cornflour and gluten-free flour. The gluten-free and cornflour give the fried chicken a wonderful crunch - like the outside of a perfect roast potato.
**Shichimi togarashi is such a useful spice mix to have in the cupboard - an instant lift for buttered tenderstem or roasted cauliflower or baked salmon, and helpful when you realise you’ve used ras-el-hanout on repeat for four of the last five nights.
Thank you so much for reading, and do comment, hit ‘subscribe’ and the heart button below for more if you enjoyed the chat. Until next week!
This is the best news! Welcome - and yes re gardens and the (nice) Mitfords!
Oh hurrah! You are here! I love your books and your writing. I would literally be dinner-less half the time without you. xx