Honey-mustard chicken with potato rosti and green beans; mocha pudding with ice cream
Firstly, and most importantly, I hope mothers and mother figures everywhere have had a lovely day. For that matter, I hope non-mother figures had a good day too: mum’s church gave little bouquets of flowers to every woman in attendance, and sent one home to me even though I don’t even identify as female. My bunch and mum’s are now in a jug on the fireplace base (I’m sure there’s a proper name for it but my weary brain can’t dig it out of the over-stuffed filing cabinet that is my brain1) and looking as attractive as the arrangement style Just Shove It In A Container ever looks.
While mum was at church I finally made a start on my long-promised and long-procrastinated-over cookbook. I didn’t do much more than set up the layout and write the first two paragraphs of the introduction, but at least I did start. Now I just need to start codifying my recipes, where my tendency is to add a bit of this, a bit of that, then possibly a bit more of this or that, ending up with something delicious that I can never recreate and certainly can’t tell anyone else how to recreate.
Tonight’s dinner is a case in point: for mum’s Mother’s Day dinner I marinated the chicken in a marinade of some English mustard, some honey, some oil, some soy sauce for colour, and I think a splash of vinegar to cut the sweetness. The marinade didn’t impart much flavour to the chicken – I think I should have pierced some holes in each drumstick before putting it in the marinade – but it did give it a sticky, shiny glaze, and reduced down it made a nice sweet-savoury sauce with a hint of mustard heat at the back-end.
The rosti came frozen in a bag from Iceland, with the cooking instructions saying it takes 10 minutes to cook. Maybe if all the strands of potato are separate that’s true, but mine had frozen into one big lump and it took more than the whole of the stated cooking time just to defrost enough for the lump of potato to disintegrate. That made dinner even later2 than it already was, having been delayed by mum going out with a friend for the evening dog walk. I didn’t join them as my legs have resumed their default status of being painful while simultaneously feeling like they don’t belong to me, the latter of which proving useful when the dog repeatedly stood on my feet in her efforts to persuade me and mum that she never gets any attention or love from her humans, so we should make up for it.
The effort was eventually worth it: the chicken was succulent, the sauce sweet and sticky, the beans fresh and green-tasting, and the rosti crunchy and tasty although, as I said to mum, crunchy fried potato can’t not be good.
Pudding was a similar process: generally making it up as you go isn’t a good idea when baking, but somehow it worked out. It’s my first genuinely original creation since I started this blog, and I can give you only the loosest approximation of how to make it: 220g (ish) each of self-raising flour and sugar, 60g (ish, I think), one tsp baking powder, all stirred together. 100g (ish) melted butter, two eggs, a generous shot of very strong coffee (about a serving of espresso-worth, I think?), stirred together. Stir the liquid into the dry until no dry mix is left. Roughly chop some dark cooking chocolate and stir the bits into the mix. Bake until risen and cracked in top, and a skewer / other utensil comes out clean.
It’s quite a dense cake, as chocolate cake often is, but it’s not heavy, with a good crumb thanks to the baking powder. The pieces of chocolate give it patches of sticky chocolatey-ness, and there’s a slight but discernible coffee scent and taste (if I make it again I’ll use more coffee, even if I currently don’t know exactly what ‘more’ looks like).
Today started early as mum was still confused by the change to the clocks: I always say I don’t mind being awakened at zero dark hundred, but when my body is insisting it’s zero dark hundred minus one hour I find it hard to maintain that pretence. And so I will leave things there for tonight, without proofreading and with apologies for the resulting uncorrected typos. Sorry, and goodnight.
- I’m a keen quizzer – or at least I was when I could still get out to pubs regularly – and often pull correct answers out of my hoard of stored knowledge, but it does mean that things I actually need to know are buried somewhere in the stacks. ↩︎
- By mum’s standards, anyway: she likes to eat her evening meal around 5pm, I prefer 8pm, so we compromise on 6ish. ↩︎
Is it pineapple sponge today? 