As I seem to keep banging on about cooking on here and enjoy it so much (as anyone who has been round to our house for dinner will know), I thought it was a good opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and film something.As usual with these things I totally failed to plan anything and so didn’t record enough of some things and did others in the wrong order, but I managed to cobble something together that should do the job. Thanks to youTube now only allowing videos to be 10 minutes long I’ve had to split it in two.

Next time I’ll make sure I keep it under 10 minutes.

Let me know what you think and if you try it, or if you’ve got any personal tweaks you make to your own Chili’s that I could try out.

Finally, please no-one mention to theWife that I obviously didn’t clean the top of the cooker before I started filming. Although in my defence I dropped some ot the things on it because I was trying to cook with one hand and film with the other!

Recipe part 1 . . .

Recipe part 2 . . .

This morning on the train I read a tweet from someone saying that Patrick Swayse had died . . . very sad and all but my only connection to him is a couple of, let’s be honest, somewhat crappy movies that I like (Road House and Point Break). About 2 hours later, and via another tweet, I discovered that Keith Floyd had also passed away and that one hit me a bit harder.

After a little introspection I think the reason is that the way I cook and generally muck about with food was clearly influenced by him. After a quick shuffle over to his page on Wikipedia I discovered that his first TV show, Floyd on Fish, was broadcast in 1984 and on my birthday as well. That would have made me 11 and I vividly remember watching it.

Floyd cooking on TV seemed to be a world of chaos. From ordering a handheld camera wielded by a poor bloke who Keith always thought was pointing it in the wrong direction, “not at me, at the food!”, to occasional spills, the odd missing ingredient, the general feeling that not a whole lot of planning had gone into the actual making of the dish and, of course, a generous glug of wine.

Throughout all this I always got the impression that the man really knew what he was doing. Ingredients weren’t just being thrown in for the sake of it, he knew tastes, he knew his palette and he knew that right now what this dish needed was a little touch of this . . . what I got from his programs, apart from a few laughs (and if I remember rightly some damn fine scenery) was that you didn’t have to follow a recipe like a maths formula, just go with it, create and enjoy

For one or two other view on the late great Keith Floyd you should head over to The Grauniad and check out what a few professionals think.

Keith Floyd, RIP

theWife: What do you fancy for dinner?
me: (shrug) dunno, what do you fancy?
theWife: don’t know . . . something chickeny, with lots of vegetables!.

And with that my brain starts ticking, my taste-buds start tingling and I know we’re in trouble.

That was a  conversation we had at about 7 o’clock yesterday and after a quick mooch through the kitchen cupboards I hopped into the car and drove down to Sainsbury’s. On the way down there I was thinking about making some sort of stuffed chicken breast but quickly decided that that would take a bit longer to knock up than we had without eating at midnight.  I could just buy some chicken kievs but a) that’s cheating and b) I’m on a diet

The stuffed thought stuck with me and, upon walking into the store I saw some nice looking large sweet peppers . . . a couple of those stuffed with a herb Ricotta cheese mix would be very nice and tick all the boxes (veg, diet, tasty).  I picked a couple of other bits of veg, fine beans and a leek while deciding that I could part-boil some of the slightly tired potatoes we had at home before slicing and quickly dry-frying the to make some healthy chips.

That still left me with a decision as to what I should do chicken-wise. In our local Sainsbury’s just after the veg is the start of the deli counter, and first up is all the hot foods.  Whole roast chickens, bbq ribs and the like. Also in there sometimes, but not today, are Southern Fried Chicken pieces . . . basically KFC.  Now there’s no way I could take a KFC or anything like it home (we only eat that after we’ve drunk far too much) but maybe I could knock up something similar but healthy. I collected a pack of chicken breasts and headed home.

After deciding that Cous-cous would be better than some fake chips I sorted the veg (fine beans, leek and cauliflower), mixed the ricotta with some herbs (Oregano and Basil) and stuffed it into the seeded peppers I got two bowls ready and wondered what I was going to do with the chicken.

I grabbed out meat tenderiser and hammered a couple of the chicken breasts to a nice even thickness, a little under a centimeter so that they’d cook fully and evenly.  I cracked an egg into one bowl and added salt, pepper, some Tabasco sauce and Lea & Perrins, whisked it all together and dropped the now flat chicken in to soak. In the second bowl I first added a packet of buffalo wing mix (I brought this in America last years and it’s really not very good) to act as a base.  To that I added Cumin, Paprika, salt and pepper, one oxo cube and a couple of handfulls of breadcrumbs.

Next I took the chicken, piece by piece, from the egg and covered it in the spicy breadcrumb mix making sure it was totally covered and put it into a medium heat frying pan that had a little butter (ok, margarine) in flipping it a couple of times until they were golden brown (around 10 minutes).

No books, no recipes, (and no photo’s because I hadn’t thought of blogging about cooking at that point) just an idea or two about what I wanted to do an no fear of making a mistake (I actually threw the first batch of spicy breadcrumb mix away because it just wasn’t right). Cooking like this won’t always work, and the really maddening thing is that sometimes, when it does, you can’t actually remember what you did but I find playing with cooking is just damn good fun

PS. the chicken was bloody nice (even theWife said so) and next time I’m going to try and figure out what was in that buffalo wing mix and do it fully from scratch (although looking at the packet it’s basically a bunch of e-numbers and paprkia)

I should probably back up a bit at this point and enlighten you all with some background facts. I’m 35 years old. I weigh, or at least at the start of this weighed, 19st 1lb and I have arthritis. The reason I mention the arthritis isn’t some cheap attempt to garner sympathy be simply a way to explain why I can’t just go and run the weight off like a lot of other people might.

Now even being slightly less mobile that some you still dint get to be nearly 20 stone without getting somewhat comfortable and that’s exactly what’s happened over the last few years. Add that to the fact that I enjoy good and interesting food as well as enjoying cooking good, interesting and often large food and you’ll see how I arrived at where I now find myself.

I have very successfully been on the WeightWatchers diet before and thought it was very good. In that system all food is assigned a number of points based on the amount of calories and saturated fat in it. you are allocated a certain number of points that you are allowed to eat a day (determined by your height, weight and gender) and off you go.

While the diet is great in that it stears you nicely towards healthy foods by assigning them 0 point (free food w00t!), the problem lies in calculating the number of points and keeping track of them. Points tracking and logging of everything is only available on the WeightWatchers website – something you have to pay £10/month to access. And even if you wanted to track things using paper and pen (why not, it’s only adding a few numbers together) you still need to know how many points are in your food. You’re then back to the website or you have to buy one of the WeightWatchers calculators. As far as I know WeightWatchers haven’t revealed the formula behind calculating their food points and, as it seems to change slightly every year as they update their system, they’re not likely to.

The final problem I have with the WeightWatchers is that once you’ve entered your information into their system it’s trapped.  You have no way of getting that information out to either reuse or to show to someone else. It’s a closed system that you have to pay to use and that provides no additional benefits.

The system I’m not using really takes dieting back to basics as it’s just calorie counting, if you eat more than you use you put weight on, the other way round and you lose weight  You should therefore already have some clue about healthy eating to get the best of of this but it’s OK if you don’t because the free to access website Livestrong.com has plenty of advice.  The two sites are actually very similar (other than one being free) in that they do offer help, advice, recipes and the like but I feel that Livestrong.com has two crucial differences.

The first is that when the website is calculating how many calories you are allowed it not only asks you for height, weight and gender but also how fast you want to lose the weight. The faster you want to lose it the fewer calories you’re allowed . . . obviously! Because you’re just counting the calories which are printed on almost everything you can track things really easily, but what I really like (being a total geek) is that they’ve also published an iPhone app that hooks into your website account. This allows you to search for foods, enter amounts of exercise you’ve done and to view how you’re doing on today and previous days. What I like about this the most is that it’s available all the time . . . you can’t forget to add something in later.

The second difference is that livestrong.com gives you multiple ways to get your information back out. You can access your food diary as either an Excel or CSV file, as an RSS feed or you can go straight to the website. So my food diary is available here, http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/diary/who/jodrell/

So what’s the point? Well, firstly it allows you to take a copy of all your information, allowing you to take it somewhere else if you wanted to or to just have a backup or a paper copy (should you want to take it to the doctors for instance. However for me the best thing is that other people can see what you’re eating and ‘keep an eye on you’. I like to think it’s part of the support network, and that even if no-one is reading it and no-one does actually comment on it, they might. It make me think twice about what I’m eating because I’ve got to log it and therefore someone else will be able to pick me up on it.

So far it’s working . . . with the exception of 1 evening where I’d forgotten that I’d arranged a beer and a curry before the diet started I’ve been at or under my allowance every day for the last 2 weeks.  In week 1 I lost 4 pounds and I’ll find out how much I’ve lost in week 2 when I weigh-in tomorrow morning.  The strangest thing . . . I’m quite enjoying it?!?

However Christmas is a little different as it’s traditionally Poultry time.  4 years ago for our first married Christmas I cooked a Goose. I’d never done one before but I figured it can’t be that hard, it’s just a bird.  As it happens there are one or two tricks to getting a Goose right, mainly to ensure that the skin is nice and crispy, but it’s easy enough and we’re having one again this year.

Boxing day this year will be a bit different though.  There’ll be 7 of us for dinner so we’ll obviously need something a little bigger.  I could have just got a large Turkey but I always like to experiment and try new things out. With that in mind I’m building a 4 bird roast.  I’ve done something similar just twice before but with only 2 birds in each.  A Ducken (a Duck with a Chicken inside) and a Phearkey (a Turkey with 2 Pheasants inside). This year I’ll be cooking what we have christened a Duphearkenridge which consists of a Duck (for a nice crispy skin outside) stuffed with a Chicken, a Pheasant and a Partridge.

Each of the two previous times I’ve cooked one of these people ask me how difficult it is.  The answer is that the preparation is more time consuming than difficult.  There are plenty of instructional pages on the Interenet telling you how to debone birds but once you’ve done it you shouldn’t need to look again.  It’s more tricky and a little fiddly than difficult.

You obviously have to be pretty careful with whichever bird is going to be going on the outside as that’s the one that’s got to look good, but life is made somewhat easier as you don’t have to bebone the legs or wings of that one.  The inside birds you can then be a little rougher with a they’re just filling.  You should still get them as whole as possible as it make the rebuild easier, but a few nicks in the skin are fine.

Once it’s all rebuilt you’ve then got to stitch it back together and this is probably where you’ll need some help.  Either that or you’ll need to grow an extra pair of hands.

The actual cooking is then doen to a certain amount of guesswork as you’ve now got a solid lump of meat, rather than a bird with a hollow cavity.  I tend to go off similar cooking times as for joints of Pork but I also use a meat thermometer when cooking these.  The last thing you want to do is cut your magnificant creation in front of your guests only to find out that it’s not done.

A final little tip for the cooking.  As the Duck, in this case, will be exposed to the heat for a lot longer than normal it will have a tendancy to dry out, particularly the lovely crispy skin. The trick here is part way through cooking, lay some streaky bacon over the bird.  This will add some extra fat onto the outside during cooking keeoing things crispy and moist

More pics of the creation of this years bird can be found here on my Flickr page . . . expect a few more once it’s all cooked and keep your fingers crossed that I get the cooking times right!

Thai Green Curry, rice and Spicy Prawn Crackers

After a trip off to Al Amin for supplies, dinner tonight consisted of a rather warm Thai Green Curry, rice and freshly cooked Prawn Crackers.

I’ve cooked the curry many times before and they really are pretty easy to knock together, but I haven’t cooked prawn crackers for years.  They’re good fun really.  Just heat up a pan of oil, drop them in and fish them back out 10 seconds later.  Chuck em into smoe sweet chilli dipping sauce and munch away all night

We actually cooked far far too many so we’ve stored them ready for munchies later . . . and later might just be tomorrow.  While at the store I also picked up a Papaya so that we can chuck together a Papaya salad for lunch tomorrow . . . mmmmmmmm

juice all made and bottled, ready for transport

Last week my when we met brother-in-law, Steve, we were donated a carrier bag full of unwanted apples . . . it would seem that their new house has several apple trees in the back garden and they aparently have more apples than they know what to do with.

They’re cooking(ish) apples so they’ve spent the whole time just sat in the bag waiting for us to get round to doing something with them.

theWife is out riding around on her horsey’s so I decided to use the free time (interspresed between watching crap TV and killing anything that moves on GTA IV) to make some breakfast juice.  The basic receipe is as follows.

• some Apples
• some Pears
• half a Lemon
• 1 fresh Chilli
• any miscellaneous veg you happen to have the you want to use up

The first ingredient is obvious . . . the second is probably not a surprise and maybe not even the third (the lemon helps make the juise taste fresher, less thick) but I always get a raised eyebrow when I mention the chilli and the vegetables.

This time I’ve chucked some somewhat bendy celery, and that actually has more taste then most raw juiced veg, but it’s not unusual for me to use brocolli and especially sprouts.  They all have plenty of vitamins in and you can barely taste them alongside the fruit.

The secret ingredient however is the Chilli.  Now don’t go silly putting in handfulls, you just need one decent sized medium chilli . . . just trust me that if you add this one thing into your juice, 5 minutes after drinking it it will feel like someone has flicked a light switch on inside your head. Real full on wake up juice

Finally a word of warning about handling Chillis.  Juicing them should normally be OK, particularly with mild to medium chillis, as you never open them but either way always wash your hands well after handling them. Rubbing your eyes after cutting chillis is extreemly painful and scratching your nose was probably best described by Mitch Benn as ‘the closest you can legally get to a 5 year coke habbit!’