Porridge Topping Du Semaine

Bananas - such a versatile word; I'm going a bit bananas over here; yer man got bananas drunk last night; that child is pure bananas; your ring tone is driving me bananas. The fruit - nyeh, I wouldn't be wild about it. It seems something of a treat-substitute to me, since it's so sweet and soft and sugary. I never see why you should overburden yourself with healthy substitutes for things when the thing you're substituting it for isn't exactly crack cocaine. It can be a significant part of some yum desserts and makes seriously tasty bread, but the only reason I am ever compelled to grab a 'nana is post-exercise, if there is a significant time barrier between me and my next meal. My cousin Sheila has diabetes and when we were kids she was constantly having bananas forced upon her like there was a banana famine on the way (a banamine, if you will), resulting in a loathing of them. That has also reinforced my view of them as pure pointless sugar. They are frequently cited as a favourite porridge topping, however, and I'll take whatever I can get on the inspiration front in my weekly quest to put something new atop my stirabout.

Dinner For Dummies

Funny how the recipes I always gravitate towards in Jamie magazine are the ones that are either short and snappy or, em, for small children. Rather ironically (I hope that it's ironic in the actual proper dictionary definition sense, rather than in the Alanis Morrissette sense - that song was a hit during my formative years and did some lasting damage as I now get very confused by irony), for someone who goes on and on and on when writing about food on this blog, I am very much drawn to recipes that are simple, straightforward and summed up in a few lines. In the back of every issue of Jamie magazine he has a cute illustration-led recipe that is succinct and light on words. The current issue has a recipe for the Creole classic Jambalaya, a carby-meaty comfort dish that was perfect for restoring heat to my bones after a Sunday morning run up Trooperstown Hill in Wicklow. 

Fishy Friday

Yes, before you ask, I was still hungry after I ate this, I'm pretty sure I ate a load of bread or chocolate or something as soon as I had wolfed it down, but it really was delicious. And, to be fair to it, even if I had doubled up on quantities, chances are I would still be hungry afterwards and find excuses to insert more food into my gob. So, don't let that put you off - it's a thoroughly filling dish for a normal human being. It's also speedy and comforting, deliciously creamy and full of flavour. I know that it looks like a very simple plate of scrambled eggs but it is, in fact, oeufs brouillés au haddock *haughty sniff*. So, scrambled eggs with fish, then. See, I was having a think about nutrition and how I need to eat feed my body responsibly in order to ensure that it doesn't protest at my relatively high exercise levels by packing in altogether. When I was upping the ante with my running initially, the immense sugar cravings took me by surprise, and I did what any normal human being would do under the circumstances - I took to the biscuits with religious fervour (chocolate caramel digestives, mainly), followed by a Haribo chaser if I was feeling indulgent. After a while the novelty of behaving like a small child who finds itself without authority and decides to eat chocolate buttons at every meal wore off, and I started to feel the need for some grown-up behaviour (kind of like Kevin in Home Alone, if you will). I increased the amount of carbohydrates in my diet and laid off the biccies. A little. Now recently I have been training even more, particularly since I'm preparing for my first marathon, and figured that I should perhaps be eating more red meat than I have been. Who better to instruct in the eating of meat than the French? Off I trotted to the library to source a suitable cookbook that might instruct me in my mission.

Mincing My Words

Nowt like a bowl o mince when you fancy a lil somethin-somethin - know what I mean? Ask any small child what they want to eat for dinner, and once you've fended off the usual chance-their-arm attempts to get sweets, cake, biccies, chocolate and ice-cream out of you, chances are they'll request a mince-based creation. And why not - it's nice and manageable in terms of shape and texture, it usually comes with a yummy sauce on it that makes it nice and squidgy, and it can also make veggies taste un-objectionable to those who refuse to eat things that are not either brown or white in colour. In the main, mince will crop up as part of an Italian dish, generally with a strongly tomato-y vibe - spag bol, lasagne and meatballs being the most obvious examples, as well as that Irish mammy staple the shepard's pie, chilli, and the inexplicably trendy burger (I do love a good burger, but is it really such a revelation that one can *gasp* make them oneself? And they are *OHEMGEE* nice and cheap? Don't get me started on the epidemic of self-consciously 'funky' burger restaurants either. Though I will quickly add that I love Jo Burger. Ok, rant over.). I must say, the rash of 'lets all get down with mince as a cheap n cheerful foodstuff' recipes that appeared when the recession was in its early days grew tiresome rather quickly, and I was at a loss, myself, to come up with a new way of making it interesting, so in my own bid to lower my grocery bills I chose to go down the route of eating more veggie-based food. Then along came Nigella's Kitchen to rock my greedy, face-stuffing little world and introduce me to a fabulous substance of radioactively unnatural bright colour called Gochugang in her Korean Keema recipe. Apparently this is originally an Indian dish, and the word keema simply means minced meat, but Nigella adapts it here to make her own speedy creation with this SUPER Korean hot pepper paste. Any excuse, frankly, to wander through the aisles of the incomprehensibly marked packaging in the Asian supermarket. I'm not the brightest spark when it comes to figuring out what's what in those places, so it took me a while, but eventually I managed to get my mitts on this tub of wonderousness. Right in time to make a spicy Sunday night bowl of pure comfort. 

Porridge Topping Du Semaine

I would say that the only thing that I don't like about figs is when people write about them and feel compelled to crack horrendously lame 'jokes' about not giving a fig. There'll be none of that here; no, when I tell you all about the grilled figs that I've been putting on my porridge this week I'll be too busy oo-ing over 1) the taste, 2) the smell and 3) the price to resort to such over-trodden paths of pun-ness. 

Choc It Up, Choc It In, Let Me Begin

A rather frequent culinary dilemma that I face is the shop-dessert-or-homemade-dessert dinner guest offering. My preference would, of course, lie in the direction of homemade, but time doesn't always comply. Of course, people always appreciate whatever you bring, I find (though, in general, I like to think that I have particularly nice friends). Also, when you're the hostess it's always nice when someone texts to let you know that you have one less course to think about, whether that was slaved over at home or grabbed from a shop on the way. But I think that if your host or hostess is going to the trouble of cooking dinner, then it's nice to reciprocate with a homemade offering of your own. The lovely Fiona, she of much neighbourousness, had invited me over for dinner last Thursday evening, and, in between getting home from work and completing some essential household tasks, I figured there was just enough time to conjure up a sweet concoction for dessert. This was a job for Ravinder, and wowsers did she come up trumps with her chocolate ice-cream pie.

Fishy Friday

Holy smoked mackerel, it's my weekly rose-tinted-edible-side-of-Catholicism slot! Except this beetroot, potato and smoked mackerel salad is WAY fancier than the fish fingers of my youth, and yet deceptively simple. This nutrition-packed gem is from the latest Jamie Oliver magazine. I love the Jamie mag, it's chock-full of recipes, as well as some lovely articles and travel features. It's also groaning under the weight of his own cooking utensils, tableware, etc - but it's so very lovely, and, indeed, Jamie himself is so very lovely, that I can't find it in me to mind. In fact, I almost want to be one of his Jamie At Home sales ladies, like the greedy girl's answer to an Avon lady. Almost. But not quite.