Rhubarb rhubarb

No, I'm not talking utter rubbish - I am talking rhubarb. I love this vegetable that masquerades as a fruit - a splash of pink lusciousness in the bleak early months.

Today I made rhubarb crunch for pudding, to follow on from roast gammon, potato gratin, vichy carrots and spring greens with garlic. The recipe came from 'Gori in the kitchen', and it was lovely.

There was a slight aesthetic issue where the syrup rose, amoeba-like, up the sides of the dish, but I suspect that this was because I forgot to grease the dish.

This is something that I will make again - the tartness of the rhubarb works very well with the sweetness of the crust - and with a drizzle of cream it was lovely.

Another of my favourite things to make with rhubarb is rhubarb custard cake - originally posted on rec.food.recipes by Barb Schaller many years ago, and somewhat anglicised by me seeing as we can't get the boxed cake mixture needed.

Cake:
150 g / 6 oz butter, softened.
150 g / 6 oz caster sugar
3 large eggs
150 g / 6 oz self raising flour
1 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt


Topping:
450 g / 1 lb rhubarb, sliced
225 g / 8 oz caster sugar
600ml / 1 pint whipping cream.

Preheat the oven to 180C / 350F. Grease a pan - roughly 9 * 12 inches.

Make the cake: cream the butter and sugar together, then gradually beat in the eggs and vanilla. Gently mix in the flour and salt, then spread into the greased pan.

Scatter the sliced rhubarb over the cake, then sprinkle with the caster sugar. Finally, pour the entire pint of cream over the surface.

Cook for between 45 and 60 minutes, until the top springs back when pushed gently with your finger. The custardy nature of this means that the traditional toothpick test won't work.

Allow to cool for half an hour or so, eat with more cream, and call your cardiologist. This serves 8 people, and any leftovers are very good straight out of the fridge for breakfast (not that I'd ever contemplate doing anything like that ... honest).

Irritating

It's so annoying to cook something that turned out really well, photograph it, eat it, and then discover that the pictures you've taken are rubbish.

Anyhow, if you fancy making some spicy chicken wings with a difference, this is one way to do it:

16 whole chicken wings
6 tbsp dark soy sauce
juice of a lime
1 tbsp sugar
1 inch chunk of ginger, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 thai birdseye chillies, finely chopped
3 spring onions, finely sliced.
1 tbsp sesame oil

Joint each chicken wing, discarding the tip. Actually, if you've bought good chicken wings - free range or organic - don't discard them. Put them into a pot with a couple of pints of water and whatever aromatics you've got lying about, and simmer for a couple of hours - you'll get a pint or so of decent stock out of them. Stab each of the other pieces a couple of times with the tip of a knife.

Mix all of the remaining ingredients together, add the wings and marinade for at least 6 hours, turning them over in the marinade a couple of times.

Heat your oven to 220C / 450F, drain the wings from the marinade and arrange them in a single layer on a baking sheet. Cook for 25 minutes or so - you want them to be crispy.

I served this with coconut jasmine rice and stir fried broccoli with shitake mushrooms and garlic - others may prefer to eat them with beer!

Garlic Prawns

Dinner for one tonight, thanks to parents' evening. Hence, it's less of a recipe, and more of a general method. I take the opportunity whenever it presents itself to cook the foods that I love, but DH dislikes - in this case, prawns.

You will need to buy as many shell-on prawns as you think you (alone, or for a group) are likely to want to eat. I usually buy them with the heads on, as there's so much flavour to be sucked out of the heads, but they were sold out.

Put a dollop of butter per person into the base of a large saute pan. Add another dollop (or two) - this isn't health food, and you will want plenty of juices to mop up with crusty bread later. Chop some garlic. If you like spicy food, also chop up some fresh chilli. I used a whole thai green birdseye chilli, as I wanted the heat. If you're not so keen, you could use one of the fat, red, mild ones, or none at all.

Put the saute pan on to the hob over the lowest heat possible. As soon as the butter starts to melt, add the garlic and chilli, and let them slowly infuse into the butter as it melts. You want to make this stage last for as long as possible for maximum flavour extraction. When the pan finally starts to sizzle gently, whack the heat up to full, and add your prawns in a single layer.

Once the prawns are pink on one side, turn them over and immediately squeeze over some lemon juice, then season with salt and black pepper. Bubble the mixture until the prawns are pink all over, then serve immediately with a spinach salad drizzled with a spoonful of the cooking juices (if it's still hot enough to wilt the spinach a little then that's a good thing!). Have some crusty bread on hand to mop up the juices - instant garlic bread - and apologise to any of your nearest and dearest who will have to suffer from your garlicky presence for the next 12 hours.

Pasta with cauliflower, walnuts and feta

Well, I did make this for dinner tonight - just for the two of us as the kids had already eaten. I followed the recipe fairly closely, but halved the quantities of everything. I also added the garlic a little sooner than called for, given that I hadn't chopped it particularly finely.

I added a little sprinkling of flat leaf parsley to brighten it up - it's been a bit of a grey day outside, and the finished dish is a little, well, beige.

The verdict? Well, I really liked it - the saltiness of the feta and sweetness of the toasted walnuts work very well with the vague bitterness of the cauliflower. DH wasn't so taken with it - he's not a cheese fan so I had put very light sprinkling of feta on his, which may not have been the best strategy in terms of overall impact.

The leftovers are now in the fridge, waiting to come to work with me tomorrow. Yum!

A beginning

I cook. I cook a lot, and I love it.

I also spend a silly amount of time reading blogs, seeing what other people are cooking. Quite often, I'll try out their recipes. Some are good, while with others I ignore the warning on the original blog, and make them anyway.

For example, over the Easter weekend I made a bean and bacon gratin found at A Forkful of Spaghetti. It's not something I would ever have been likely to pick out of a cookbook, but seeing the writeup made it seem like a perfect lunch for a day that was meant to be springlike, but where the snow flurries just kept coming. It was very, very good - devoured by the whole family with a garlicky spinach salad and a warm baguette.

I also had a go at making pear and chocolate crisp, from Food, Glorious Food. I ignored the warnings that it was very sweet, and it was, indeed, too sweet. That said, I seem to be the only person who minded - my husband and children polished theirs off in short order.

Then, for supper last night, after the children had gone to bed, I made Korean beef as inspired by Cookbook Catchall. This was a real winner, and I will make it again - tender, flavourful beef, crisp cabbage and the comforting blandness of steamed basmati rice to soak up the juices.

Now I'm trying to decide what to make tonight - Smitten Kitchen's pasta with cauliflower, walnuts and feta sounds like a good prospect.