Staff announcement

For no other reason than I feel like it, I have decided to appoint a girl I met off the internet, Emelie Frid, as editor-at-large of Recipe Rifle. (You will remember her from her Jamie's Mince Pie Cookies post, which was such a success.) And when I say "at large" I mean that she lives in Letchworth.

The title of editor-at-large doesn't really mean anything, except that she will (when she feels like it) post here. And if she should ever find herself one day in the future doing drugs in the bathroom of a London private member's club, it's something to say, isn't it? I say that having no idea if she's ever done drugs before - we don't really have those kinds of chats - but in my experience, people doing drugs in bathrooms of private members' clubs are almost exclusively editors-at-large of media outlets. ("It's called Jazzhole. It's a cross between The Spectator and i-D. We're based in Bow. It's really cool actually.")
Anyway, as it's an entirely unpaid position, and Emelie is about to have another baby, the chances of her getting off her redheaded pregnant butthole and doing a post more than twice a year is probably quite slim.

And that's the kind of work ethic I like around here.

So here we go, French Toast Creme Brulee by Emelie Frid.

This is an American breakfast recipe. Now, I’m a confirmed sugar junkie regularly laughing in the face of certain diabetic coma, but I personally would find this a little too sweet to eat first thing in the morning. So I served it as dessert instead, which worked very well indeed. It’s almost like bread and butter pudding! However, if I WERE to have it for breakfast I would serve it with bacon. I’m healthy like that.

The recipe uses corn syrup. In Letchworth, where I live, it’s easier to find the Grail than corn syrup, so Esther gamely schlepped to the post office to send me an unopened bottle she had sitting in the larder. I don’t know how easy it might be to source corn syrup elsewhere – I mean, Letchworth is not exactly the centre of the universe. More like the armpit. If you can’t find it for love nor money, I have seen it suggested that maple syrup would work very well as a substitute. Or perhaps golden syrup?

For approx six servings you will need:

6 slices of white farmhouse style bread, about ½ inch thick. Or you could use whatever bread you fancy here – panettone? Brioche?

115g butter
200g brown sugar
2 tablespoons corn syrup
4 eggs
350 ml milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Grand Marnier or other orangey booze (full disclosure: I didn’t have this, so I chucked in some orange zest instead. It worked out great)
¼ teaspoon salt

HEADS UP: you have to prepare this in advance, as it needs to chill for at least 8 hours before going into the oven.

1. Melt butter in a small, heavy based saucepan on a medium heat. Mix in sugar and corn syrup and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Pour into a 9x13 inch baking dish

2. Cut the crusts from the bread (or leave on – up to you) and arrange on top of the sugar and butter mix in the baking dish, in a single layer. You want them to have a tight fit.

3. Whisk together milk, eggs, vanilla extract, Grand Marnier and salt. Pour evenly over the bread.

4. Cover with cling film and chill for at least 8 hours, or overnight if serving this for breakfast.

5. When ready to use, preheat your oven to 175C. Remove the dish from the fridge and bring to room temperature.

6. Bake uncovered in the preheated oven, until it’s puffed up and browned, approx 35-40 minutes. Don’t be afraid to bake this until properly browned – you don’t want it too soggy in the middle.

I served this with fresh fruit – banana, berries, kiwi – and a dollop of Greek yoghurt. And not that I would presume to tell you what to do with your children, but I gave a little bit of this to my young daughter, the feral Goblin, and was still trying to peel her off the ceiling an hour later. So next time she’s just getting the fruit and the yoghurt, no matter how imploring she looks when she holds out her fat little hand saying “Mmmmmmm, tack, tack?!”

Peach and whiskey chicken

This really ought to be called Chicken in Jam, because that's what is it. I made it following a medium amount of fuss about its excellence on Twitter and I'm really not sure about it. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say I actually didn't like it. Sorry, yet another bum recipe from me. What can I say? It's an unlucky streak.

It's a recipe from a wildly popular American blog called The Pioneer Woman, who is on her SECOND cookbook by the way. If I never hear about another blogger who's got a flaming bookdeal it will be 8 million years too soon.

Anyway and in this recipe she covers a lot of chicken in whiskey and jam and sticks it in the oven for 1.5 hours. The thing about Americans - and I say this with the proviso that I really, really like Americans - is that they don't half eat a truckload of chicken. And I think they think it probably gets boring, so to liven it up they do things with it like cover it in jam. It's terribly French. The problem with this recipe is there's not much to counter-balance the overwhelming sweetness - there's no sourness and no heat. So what you're left with really just is chicken in jam.

But if that kind of thing sounds right up your street, it is a terrific recipe.

Peach and Whiskey Chicken (aka Chicken in Jam)
8 chicken thighs
about a wineglass full of whiskey
1/2 a jar of peach jam (Tiptree do one, available from Waitrose)
1 bottle of barbeque sauce (I used one by Paul Newman because I LOVE Paul Newman)
some garlic cloves
1 large or two medium onions
groundnut oil and butter for frying

Preheat your oven to 180C

1 Melt some oil and butter together in a pot - (the Pioneer Woman recommends a "big ol' pot", which just made me hate her, I'm afraid) - and brown your chicken in it. Ho hum, what a boring thing this is to do. But make sure they are nice and brown.

2 Remove the chicken to a plate. Chop up your onions and fry these off for about 5 minutes. Add the booze and cook down for about 3 minutes. Then add in the barbeque sauce (I wondered here why I wasn't just making barbeque chicken) and then spoon in half the jar of peach jam. The recipe says the whole jar but, like, fuck that. Whisk this all together with a few garlic cloves.

3 Put the chicken and the resting juices back in the pot, cover with a lid and cook for 1.5 hours. My husband said it was nice and went back for seconds but what the hell does he know. I had two pieces and then developed a terrible headache.

Microwave chocolate sponge pudding

Broadly-speaking, I don't really put recipes on here that don't work because I don't think there's any point. Why do you want to know about something that you aren't going to make? But I think there is some relevance in including recipes here that don't work if I think you are in danger of coming across them and making them and getting yourself into a pickle - hence the Jamie griddle waffles of the previous post.

This is another recipe that isn't that great, although it's not from Jamie. It's a chocolate sponge pudding that you make in the microwave from a book called My Daddy Cooks and if you had the book and came across it and like chocolate you'd definitely be in danger of having a crack at it.

I really don't want to give the wrong impression about this book, as it's generally good-looking and inspiring and I very much recommend it, especially but not exclusively if you've got children. On reflection, I've been a bit unfair, maybe, cooking this - it could never be that terrific. I think it's the lack of eggs that does it, you end up with quite a dry thing. Although it's perfectly amusing to make a cake in the microwave, I wouldn't make it again.

Microwave chocolate sponge
Makes a huge amount - for 4 starving adults or 6 starving children

55g butter
200g self-raising flour
170g caster sugar
55g cocoa powder
180ml milk
a few drops vanilla essence
110g soft brown sugar

1 In a large non-metallic bowl melt the butter for about 30-40 secs (depending on how warm it was when you started).

2 Sift in the flour, add teh caster sugar, half the cocoa powder, the milk and the vanilla extract and stir it all together well until you get a cake batter

3 Mix the brown sugar and the rest of the cocoa powder together and sprinkle over the top

4 Pour over 275ml boiling water but don't mix in. It will look an utterly mad and disgusting mess by now, which is normal

5 Put it in the microwave for 7 minutes. Leave to cool for a bit but then eat straightaway because on cooling completely this will collapse and turn into rubber.

Jamie's griddle waffles

I'm rather sad to report on the first Jamie recipe I've encountered that has fallen short of expectations. I tried out his new genius-looking idea for making waffles in a griddle plan this afternoon and everything went fine until I had to flip the waffle to cook the underside and:

it was more or less impossible. The recipe also calls for 2.5 tablespoons of baking powder, which is all very well but it doesn't half make your waffle taste like baking powder (not good).

By all means give them a crack if you fancy it, though. You may be more dextrous than me at the old flipping - it wouldn't take much.

Jamie's Griddle Waffles

2 eggs
300ml milk
100g butter, melted
2.5 tablespoons baking powder
225g self-raising flour
1/4 tsp salt

1 Whisk the eggs and the milk together, then add the salt and the baking powder. Sieve in the flour (this is important because otherwise you will get lumps) and whisk to combine. Then dribble in the butter in stages and stir in. Rest for 30 mins (yes you must do this).

2 Get your griddle pan very hot and melt over a large knob of butter. Pour in the batter - you might have to spread it around a bit because the batter is quite thick - then turn the heat down to medium and cook for 8-10 minutes. Flip it over (yeah, right) and then cook the other side for another 8 mins.

Full details are here

St Lucian mac and cheese

Last night I wasn't feeling very well and so Kitty's nanny, Shura, who is from St Lucia, made Kitty's dinner instead. It was mac and cheese the St Lucian way and it was really, really delicious. It is made without a white sauce, which cuts down the hassle factor by about two thirds and it contains onion, which works wonders.  This might actually be a perfectly normal and widely-used method of making macaroni cheese but I've never come across is.

By the way please don't hassle me about having a nanny, okay???, it's too boring. She's not here every day and when she's here I don't laze around eating bonbons - well, not ALL day - so just cut it (as Shura would say).

St Lucian mac and cheese

1 small handful Annabel Karmel baby pasta shells
1 knob butter
1 small sloop semi-skimmed or whole milk (probably about two eggcup-fulls)
1 small sloop cream (if you have it, about one eggcupful)
1 handful grated cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon of very finely chopped or grated white onion or shallot

Preheat the oven to 180C

1 Boil the pasta as normal. Drain and return to the dry pan. Over a medium heat, add the knob of butter and stir until melted, then add the milk and continue to stir.

2 Throw over the cream if using and the onion, then the cheese and stir until completely melted. Turn out into a small oven-proof dish and stick in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

Goat's cheese and roasted tomato tart

Last year I learnt:

1 Why people wear coloured socks. It's not, as I previously thought, because they are insufferable optimists, looking to display their sunny personality through their jazzy footwear. Rather, it is so they don't end up wearing odd socks (one black sock does look so much like the other one and yet they are alwas fundamentally different in size and texture). And there is something really massively unsatisfactory about wearing odd socks. So I now have a lot of very colourful socks, and always wear matching pairs, and very zen I feel about it, too.

2 I cannot control events with the power of my mind. When I went to see Dr O with my nervous breakdown, I explained to her that I feel very superstitious about my anxiety. "I believe that if I worry enough about something, then it will not happen," I said. Dr O looked at me. "So what you are telling me," she said, "is that you can control events just with the power of your mind?" "No!" I shrieked. "It's more complicated than that." But it wasn't. That is what I believed. I don't believe that any more, and I am much less anxious. But I worry that I am less interesting.

3 I am not good at being flexible. When Kitty was very tiny I lived my life and hers by the clock. I'm talking to the second. From the outside it probably looked really mad but I was terrific at it and it worked. I never had to fret over whether she was hungry or tired because she was never hungry or tired because she was fed before she was ravenous and in her cot before she was hysterical. But now Kitty is nearly one and she's more of a real person rather than a blob and some days, like the rest of us, she is more tired or more or less hungry than others. So now I have to do a thing where I have to make about a million little decisions, from day to day, about whether this is one of those days that she needs to go back to bed at 9.45am for a little kip, or whether she can make it until lunchtime. And just between you and me, I hate it.

4 Being a lazy shitbag is okay only for so long. I am a quitter, through and through. I hate making an effort at anything, it causes me genuine pain. I don't like doing exercise, or "sticking at" things. When I think about having to put my clothes away at night I want to cry, so I don't and they pile up on the chair next to my bed until on morning, usually on a Sunday, it even repulses me so much that I do something about it. But last year, I had to persevere at some stuff. I couldn't give Kitty up for adoption, because everyone would know what I'd done and be SO unsympathetic. And I had to keep wearing my stupid fucking teeth braces to correct my teeth because both my husband and my dentist, Handsome Richard, made such an almighty fuss about me giving up. But now Kitty is so much less of a hassle than she was and my teeth are near as damnit straight that I now, with great reluctanct, admit that perseverence might not just be for massive square martyrish losers after all.

And so it is with dinner. The past few months have seen me so incredibly uninspired about food in general and dinner that I am just doing the same old things over and over again. It was mostly because I couldn't be BOTHERED to think about it. I would mull over our dinner options for about three minutes and as soon as I had settled on an old favourite I would just go with that.

But on the way to the shops yesterday I really thought about it and came up with a couple of things we really haven't ever had before, or hadn't had in ages. They don't comply with my husband's usual cry for things to be purchased from the Ginger Pig, or to be carb-free, but there's no time for that kind of dicking about this year. We must have variety, and vegetables, or we will all go mad.

So I did a very obvious dinner thing last night that was nonetheless really nice. It was very lazy pub-starter stuff - just a slab of ready-made puff pastry flattened and goat's cheese and roasted tomatoes on top. But, you know, it was really terrific and terribly easy and I'll be doing it again. If I can be bothered.

Goat's cheese and roasted tomato tart

2 packs Capricorn goat's cheese
1 slab ready puff pastry (I get Waitrose own, which comes in two slabs. One of those, rolled out a bit, is enough for 2 people.)
1 string of baby tomatoes on the vine
1 egg
some mint, if you have
salt and pepper
semolina for dusting

1 Shove the tomatoes in the oven for an hour at 180 with olive oil and salt at some point during the day.

2 When ready for dinner roll out the puff pastry to a longer-ish oblong. Dust a baking sheet with semolina to stop the pastry from sticking. Beat an egg in a bowl and brush the pastry all over with about a third of the eggwash.

3 In a bowl combine the torn-up goat's cheese (rind on or off, it's up to you), the tomatoes, some mint, salt and pepper and the rest of the beaten egg. Then pile up in a fat straggly line along the centre of your oblong (as it cooks it will melt and spread out and you don't want it to slop over the edges of the pastry).

4 Shove in a 180 oven for about 20 minutes. We ate this with Polpo's courgette salad (also on this blog).

Yes yes I know a lot of you will be rolling your eyes at the obviousness of this, but as my husband always says "The perfect is the enemy of the good".

Jamie Oliver's mince pie cookies - GUEST POST

A real treat today, Recipe Riflers. A guest post from one of my favourite readers, Emelie. We met online, like all the coolest people NOT; I had a small, sick, teething baby - she a feral toddler and a dog that looks like a polar bear. She is also Scandinavian and what with Scandis being so fashionable at the moment, (they are the new gays), I'm mostly friends with her because of that.

Anyway here you go and if you're on Twitter she is @emfrid and terrific value.

I will cheerfully defend Jamie Oliver to all and sundry. Granted, on occasion he can come across as the culinary world’s more earnest answer to Bono. And those Sainsbury ads makes my teeth hurt. But, as far as I’m concerned that is all easy to forgive. Because, his recipes? They. Always. Fucking. Work.

Like, for example, these mince pie cookies. I got the recipe from Jamie’s Christmas Special magazine, and they are rad. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of pastry, which is probably why I prefer them to actual mince pies, but I’d wager that even pastry fiends will like these. They taste like Christmas! They are also very easy to make - it took me less than half an hour to get them in the oven, and that was while I was simultaneously trying to shake off the semi-feral toddler clinging to my leg and prevent the dog from digging a hole through to the neighbours. So give them a go.

For about 30 or so cookies you will need:

250g unsalted butter, at room temperature
140g sugar
1 egg yolk
Grated zest of one clementine/satsuma/mandarin/whatever you prefer
300g flour
One 411g jar of fruit mincemeat (WHY do they come in 411g jars? Why not 420g? Why so specific?!)


1 Preheat your oven to 180C/gas 4 and put greaseproof baking parchment on a couple of baking trays.

2 Beat butter and sugar together until creamy. Add the egg yolk and your citrus zest and beat to combine.

3 Sift in the flour and then fold through MOST of the mince meat (you want to hold some of it back to put on top of your cookies before they go in the oven). Stir until it all starts to come together. I used my hands here – easier.

4 Pull biscuit-sized lumps from the dough, put them evenly across the trays and then press down on each one to shape into cookies. Don’t put them too close to each other – they will run out a little while in the oven.

4 Dot some of your saved mincemeat on top of each cookie, and then put them in the oven for about ten minutes. You want them to be golden, but still a bit doughy and chewy in the middle. I found that my oven needed about 15 minutes for this, but hey, ovens are famously different.

The mince pie cookies are lovely warm – with mulled wine – but the ones you don’t eat straight away can be stored in an airtight container, or frozen.