Slowly but surely my, or rather my cute landlady Aline's, fridge-freezer is dying.
It started with one of the shelves cracking and breaking, scattering broken glass and jam all over the floor, then I noticed that my gin is no longer coming out of the freezer compartment as syrupy as I like it, and that my beers aren't cooling quickly enough while I wait for my baths to run. Then the freezer failed to make sorbets for the Hobbes' crew's Mexican Meal, and now it's all dark in there.
It might be the lightbulb, or it might be the little button which is supposed to pop out to turn the light on when you open the door, but is all cracked and broken on my fridge, and sometimes pops out, and sometimes just gives you an electric shock when you accidentally touch the exposed metal terminals inside.
Well, at least it still has power!

So I'm in the process of inventing ways of using up all my frozen food before the fridge turns itself off or explodes.

I'm just back from a loooooong 10 days voyage onboard Erin. We started out with the race to Orkney, which we abandoned in favour of getting on with our holiday due to boredom and a general lack of wind, putting in to Wick harbour for a night of rest, relaxation and scallops. Or rest and relaxation anyway. Aidan scored two dozen great big fresh scallops straight off an unloading fishing boat for a tenner, and I learnt how to open them by holding them with the flat shell uppermost, getting your sturdy sharp knife into a handy gap and cutting the flesh away from the top shell, slicing from the scalloped edge inwards, until the shell opens at the hinge (unlike opening an oyster where you crack open the hinge first). Then you can use your thumbs to pop away the skirt with any grit and black organs to leave the meaty white muscle and the orange/grey coral, which you can cut free and quickly rinse.

Unfortunately I also learnt that you should never attempt a barbecue without using just as much charcoal as it will physically hold.
So we will speak of half-barbecued, leathery scallops no more.

Next stop Stornoway where we picked up our holiday supply of Charles McLeod's most succulent and delicious black pudding. We were a bit worried after a previous disappointing experience with a Stromness butcher's dry and tasteless Orkney black pudding but we needn't have worried. The black pudding of Lewis fully earned its reputation.
I had been charged with the task of developing Erin's signature West Coast dish, and rather fancied attempting a stack of

• black pudding,
• caramelized apple rounds, or possibly baked parmesan disks
• pancetta (BACON!),
• scallops
• lime-butter or Mornay sauce

We now had the black pudding, the apples, the limes and of course the bacon, but totally failed to acquire any more fresh scallops on our trip, so this dish is still just a distant dream!
In any case, wouldn't Erin's true signature dish be rather more Dolmio oriented?


And so we munched our way around the Outer Hebrides:
- Lunching on Stornoway hot-smoked salmon whilst anchored off the Shiant Islands where we watched Guillemots harrass Golden Eagles attempting to feast on their children.

- Visiting Tobermory and enjoying both the deep-fried scallops from the (quite rightly) Les Routiers award-winning Fish and Chip Van on Fisherman's Pier and the night life at the Mishnish (Hi Alyson Filth! If that's your real name. That's the name I have in my phone anyhow.)

- Stopping off in Lismore to visit Luke's Grandparents and have an idyllic barbecue (using enough coals this time), giving me the chance to snag a bunch of Grandad's herbs and (thanks Luke!) Grandma's fennel kedgeree recipe, and giving Judith a chance to completely block their toilet with an enormous poo.

- Finishing up in Oban, on the sunniest day I've ever seen there, we lunched at EE-USK whose shellfish is just fabulous (More Scallops!), accosted a nice girl heading off to Belfast on the Jubilee Trust's Lord Nelson rust bucket, er, schooner (Hello Emma! If that's your real name).
We finally got the hell out of Dodge in Gus's (if that's his real name) shiny new BMW, sadly constrained by the number and speed of trucks, lorries and FUCKING CARAVANS.

I naturally did my fair share of cooking onboard, getting quite inventive with lime (there are always limes aboard - for the GinAndTonics don't you know) and bovril, foolishly attempting a roast dinner and finally making a nice beef stew on time, so I can now pass on Erin's simple shipboard cooking rules:

1. All food must be ready to eat the instant the crew is hungry.
2. There shall be no food ingredients used onboard unknown to Dolmio. A small jar of mixed herbs provides all the adventure cuisine requires.
   1. Corollary: Dishes too Eastern, too Southern, too vegetarian or just too bloody foreign are not to be trusted. Irish stews, stroganoffs, goulashes and (certain) pasta dishes are acceptable, curries, tagines, and kebabs are not.
      Beans (unless of the baked variety when they are compulsory) and, bizarrely, flour are largely frowned upon.
      Spice is a terrifying prospect to be treated with extreme caution.
3. Each meal is required to include a goodly portion of meat.
   Meat consists of beef, chicken, pork or sausages.
   Lamb, duck or venison are dubious alternatives.
   Mutton, veal, horse, whale, emu or any kind of offal are not meat and are prohibited.
   1. Corollary: Vegetarians must bring their own food.
   2. Corollary: Seafood is prohibited aboard the boat. (I know, boats float above a convenient and endless supply of fish, lobsters and scallops. Go figure.)
4. There is no possible higher culinary achievement onboard than chicken with peppers and onions in a jar of Dolmio sauce. This may be served over rice or pasta.
5. Crunchy, firm, Al Dente, tangy, zesty and tart are all terms synonymous with undercooked.
6. All dishes must contain bacon.

Actually the bacon one is my personal rule, I find a generous supply of bacon in their diet acts much like Valium on the crew mood. Or it did before the VEGETARIAN arrived! (Hi Maggie! If that's your real name)
Despite these explicit restrictions, it is sometimes nice to break out of the Dolmio straitjacket, smuggle some garlic, balsamic vinegar, flour or (shudder) spices on board and just go wild. So for those moments of madness I give you my recommendations for an easy life Cooking On Boats:

• The pressure cooker is your friend
  You can reduce the cooking times for stews or root vegetables by a factor of three or four. It isn't enough to simply have dinner ready for a planned time; once the skipper notices that you have started cooking he will expect dinner in the time it would take to warm Dolmio sauce. Therefore either start cooking while everyone's busy so they don't see what you're up to (and prepare to field questions such as What's that awful smell?) or COOK FAST.
• Keep It Simple Stupid.
  The Dolmio principle - one big pot of protein and another of starch is the place to start; stew and boiled potatoes, sauce and pasta, goulash and rice kind of thing. Make sure that what you're making can be abandoned at any stage, to put up a spinnaker for example, or will happily wait for the crew to come to table if they are delayed by circumstances well within the skipper's control. Over-boiled potatoes make perfectly acceptable mash by the way, if mixed with enough butter.
  Once you're feeling adventurous, go for an extra side pot of green vegetables. But make sure you boil the fuck out of them. Crunchy vegetables are not to be trusted.
• Treat It Tidily Stupid
  Organise your dishes so that everything cooks sequentially going into pots, pans or the oven as you prepare the ingredients - so choose recipes wisely. This avoids the disaster of an unexpected tack (unexpected to the cook, obviously everyone on deck knows perfectly well what is going on, but to them you slave in an invisible magic kitchen) dumping all your bowls of lovingly prepared components into the bilges.
  The best way to arrange this is to have one large pot for browning/crisping/frying and a large warming dish securely lodged in the sink. Cook each batch of ingredients as soon as they are prepared in this pot, then decant to the warming dish when done, freeing the pot for the next batch. Return everything from the warming dish to the pot at the end for their final simmering/stewing/burning.
• Too much visible effort is not to be trusted
  Cook food you can prepare, set cooking then leave alone while you clean up, do the washing and set the table for an unhurried and effortless final delivery.
• The oven is not to be trusted
  It is useful for keeping things warm, baking sausage rolls or pastries or even cooking things securely wrapped in tin foil but don't even think about using it to roast a dinner.
  Something I learnt on this last trip - if the skipper randomly brings aboard a bunch of parsnips, telling you he enjoys them roasted and is a particular connoisseur of their quality, lose them overboard at the first opportunity.
  It takes an hour to successfully roast par-boiled vegetables even in a reliable oven, and your ship's oven will randomly half-burn both you and the vegetables and cover the galley in a thin film of grease.
  The skipper will certainly notice both the grease, and the fact that his dinner was not ready two hours ago, but will completely fail to notice the quality of your parsnips.
• The sea is not to be trusted
  On days which show any sign of getting rough, cook a big pot of stuff early and set it to one side so you can quickly reheat and serve it in less time than it takes to become ill.
• Be inventive
  The ingredients (officially) on board to cook with are very limited, so be adventurous with what you have. Fruit will enhance most dishes and is surprisingly undetectable, and those bottles of port and blackberry Genever that've been hanging around since the last New Year jolly can be smuggled into sauces quite easily. But be warned, flambéing is STRICTLY PROHIBITED. If seen.
• Salt is your friend
  This one's for Aidan (that IS his real name). Who hates and fears salt.

On the whole, I quite enjoy cooking within the restraints of a small galley, challenging conditions and limited resources, but that enjoyment is not always shared by my crewmates.

I've been crewing on a terrific little Projection 762 called Hobbes for Kip Regatta and Scottish series, and for Kip I had to wheedle myself two separate B&B's to stay in since the tiny town fills up apparently considerably earlier than I thought to book accomodation.
Anyhoo, since I have no full-length mirrors in my flat (I hold them in the same regard as TV) I was horrified to discover as I caught sight of my reflection heading for my shower in the Langhoose, that I have mysteriously developed Man Boobs.
Time for a diet methinks.

See that Raw Food Diet? I invented that. They stole it from me.
Waaaay back in the 80s, before everyone and their daughter had jumped on the raw food bandwagon, I invented the raw food diet on the simple principles that:

1. Cooked or processed food is effectively pre-digested. It must take more energy, and more time to digest raw food. The longer it takes to digest your food, the longer it will take to get fat on it. The more work you have to do to digest it, even raising it to body temperature (don't sneer) the less energy there is to make you fat.
2. All the stuff I like to overindulge requires cooking.
   It's just not possible to overfill on potatoes, butter or even cream without the sausages, bread and cake to go with them. Honest. Thus eating only raw food also enforces a balance of diet.

and it really did work for me, the only downside being that it takes several weeks to see the effects.
To be fair though, that may have something to do with the fact that I also allowed myself

• pasteurised milk (well, you try finding untreated milk these days - our society is terrified of cows. They're mad you know!)
• cheese (hmm, debatable - cheese could be made without cookery)
• alcohol (yeah, that's just cheating)
• and according to Doctor Jenny, Pringles (c'mon everyone knows they're raw)

as part of my temperature-controlled diet.

So normally, I'd be right back on the salads, but these boobs look like they might actually require exercise to eradicate, so since I'm taking the next two weeks off work to get in all my year's unused holidays before the rollover, I will be adopting a strict regimen of fruit juice, soup, exercise and NO BEER.
Expect bad-tempered posts to follow.

First, though, I need to use up all the goodies in my pantry, suffer one of Erin's incredibly filling barbecues, and finish up all the leftovers.

So for her last night on earth, er I mean in my flat, Flora demanded a warming stew for dinner at 9 pm. Precisely at 9pm. On the table.
So I made a nice beef daube for 9pm. Precisely. Too bad she didn't turn up.
Other plans apparently. Though she did offer me a present. I hope it's not another fucking duck.

Oh, just one thing worth noting -
Despite how marvellous it tastes this casserole gives me the most astonishing squits. Strange really - it was definitely properly cooked and everything, but there seem to be certain combinations of fat which just give me the runs. Probably you'd be fine. Probably Flora would have been fine.
I have the same problem when I make real French Mayonnaise with egg yolks and virgin olive oil. Straight through me!
If I use whole egg, or add in some other oil then everything's fine.
It's probably just me.
Probably.

Girls are funny. They need instant feeding. INSTANT.
So it's a pity Flora wasn't here last week when I made Jenny's birthday cake to take to her Birthday Dinner at The Tail End Fish Bar. But Jenny took care of the leftovers from that!
Fortunately Flora is mostly happy to nibble on cheese while I work. Which has been known to take some time...

This time I was working on a Chicken and Leek Pot Pie recipe from Delia, partly 'cos I fancied a chicken pie, and partly 'cos I needed a chicken carcass to make stock to add to my collection. (I already have a very good beef stock in the fridge from the bones from my last dinner)
Of course then I needed a dish to use up those leftover legs too.

Annick very kindly invited me to help paint anti-fouling onto the hulls of the Port Edgar Yacht Club's 707s, and since she seemed underwhelmed by my peace offering of a bacon roll as I sailed merrily off into the river in my Laser, I decided to pop into my favourite butcher in nearby Uphall and score another of their delicious prime ribs for an apologetic dinner.

The nice butcher man trimmed me a beautiful 2kg (4lb 4oz to be exact) single prime rib for a mere £24.80 with a nice length of protruding bone for ease of handling (and a generously filled a bag of shin bones for stock).

Being a bit pressed for time, I decided to cheat a little with the chips (steak needs chips!) and deep-fry some potato wedges from par-boiled potatoes, which turned out pretty damn fine I have to say, so after after rushing home with my shopping I put some small unpeeled King Edwards on to par-boil whilst I threw together a mushroom salad, and started to prepare a fairly quick side dish of lemony green beans.
I also made up the reduction for a half-quantity of béarnaise sauce (chips need béarnaise sauce!), preheated the oven, cut the par-cooked potatoes into quarter wedges, and started warming up some clarified butter that I had rather fortunately made earlier. So things were nicely underway by the time Annick arrived.

Unfortunately, things went slightly downhill after that - women are sooo distracting - I'm not even sure they should be allowed in the kitchen. I got the steak frying nicely and set off all the smoke detectors, then once the rib was in the oven I managed to curdle the béarnaise sauce by rushing it (probably I shouldn't have bothered trying to get it nice and warm in the double boiler after whisking in the melted butter and should have been satisfied with the result I had), but managed to rescue the situation by whisking up a new egg yolk over the boiling water in a clean bowl and whipping the curdled mixture back in.
The result was just fine though - I would have challenged anyone to tell the difference.

I stuck the sauce in a warmed thermos, put a pan of groundnut oil and a pan of water on to heat then when the oil was hot enough did the first round of deep-frying.
I was determined to get the meat as rare as I like it this time, and decided to ignore official temperature recommendations (and the guides on my meat thermometers) that claim beef is rare at 140°F/60°C (which is fucking nanny-state nonsense by the way) and aim for a more realistic ruby-red temperature of 120°F/50°C. Yumsk!

Once the steak was cooked and resting I got the beans on and did the second round of potato wedge frying whilst Annick waded in and laid the table.

And everything arrived together!
Though the mushrooms were a bit over-garlicked and I forgot to add oil to the beans, the fat chips were magnificent, the sauce was delicious and the steak - oh the steak - was bliss on a bone.

Annick asked me if I had mustard - so I introduced her to my meager collection of 7 varieties (I have a shelf in the fridge and a compartment of my cupboards devoted to mustards), but once she tasted the béarnaise sauce the pot stayed closed.

So there's validation for you.

Two weeks after Burn's night and I'm almost out of Haggis.
Thank Christ.

It seemed that my Haggis dinner made no recognisable impression in the massive quantity of haggis I turned out this year, so I've pretty much been living on it ever since.
I adapted a very nice keema recipe to get rid of a pound or so of the haggis, and invented a couple of nice curries to use up the leftover mashed neeps and tatties, which took me through a couple of dinners.
I also extended my curried neeps to use up a leftover half-turnip from the dinner in a tasty chunky turnip curry, and of course no blistering leftover curry meal would be complete without a yoghurt sauce to cool it off.

All of which means that after freezing a lump of haggis to send to my brother, and persuading Jenny to take a gift box of haggis away with her, I am now left with only another ten pounds or so to get through myself.

So here are some other ideas you might want to try to use up your leftover haggis:

• haggis burgers
• haggis rissoles
• haggis omelette
• haggis macaroni and cheese
• haggis toasties
• haggis lasagne
• haggis ravioli
• haggis pakoras
• haggis samosas
• haggis (OK, chicken) Balmoral
• haggis tacos
• haggis stovies
• haggis mushrooms
• haggis Creggans (apparently a creamy Velouté soup laced with whisky)
• haggis pizza
• haggis wellington
• fill potato skins (leftover from your tatties) with haggis, top with mash, cover with grated cheese and bake

Well, it's time to roll up my regular babysitting visits to Rachel's house, they have been becoming quite a habit, if not exactly a tradition.
And it seems like now would be a good time to put a bit of a brake on them, what with the family just about to trek off to Mexico to catch up with their absent father and all.
Not that I'm never going to see them again or anything. Just not on such a regular footing. In fact I already had my arm twisted to promise Georgina another stuffed chicken dinner and a sushi evening for Sophie, but I did extract from them the price of getting their Dad's famed ceviche recipe.

It seemed pretty appropriate to end on a traditional note so we whipped up a batch of Scottish tablet, and a tray of Scottish shortbread.
They both turned out edible enough, but since it was my first attempt at both recipes, the could definitely have been done better.
The tablet not quite as mouth-wateringly smooth as most Scottish Grannies seem to manage, and the shortbread definitely undercooked.
I'll get them next time!

One disturbing thing I noticed as I stirred up the tablet, was the appearance of lots of little black dots in the bubbling mixture.
They turned out to be bits of Le Creuset's non-stick coating, which seems to be now non-sticking to the pan.
This, obviously, is hugely disappointing in a pot which is only a year old. And by no means cheap.
A call to Le Creuset might be in order, eh Rachel?

I have discovered that babysitting goes better with cookies.
It certainly beats trying to force-feed them fish (yeuch!), olives (yeuch!) or anything you wouldn't find in a jar of Dolmio pasta sauce.
Or at least, it does once the sugar rush has worn off.

Mum bought Rachel's girlies a cookbook for Christmas, and the girls were keen on the recipe for American brownies, so we had a stab at it. Went pretty well I thought.

It's Tuesday. It's the 25th January. It's Crackerjack!


OK, it's not Crackerjack, but it is Burn's Night, so time to wheel out the old Haggis recipe for one more spin.

It seems to be getting harder and harder to find all the bits of sheep you need to make the haggis these days.
This time I had to visit three different butchers before I had everything - no one seems willing or able to sell a complete pluck any more, then I thought the liver I got first was a bit skimpy so went back out for more, and then I had to fight to get hold of any lungs.
On the plus side though, whilst butcher hopping I did score a very nice extra lamb's heart for my aprés offal dinner that night.

Part of the problem with getting all the bits from different butchers (never mind different sheep) is that the quantities end up a bit unbalanced, and vary every time you make this stuff.
This time I had a huge kidney that looked like it might have come from a camel, and that extra tiny liver that I didn't really need.
Which is how come I ended up with a simply unbelievable quantity that was too big for any mixing bowl I possess this time around, and kept me in haggis for the next two weeks.

However I had an interesting discussion with my lung guy about whether he thought it was worth bothering with them at all: I told him how after I'd finished picking all the capillaries out there never seemed to be much left to eat, and he told me that he didn't have that trouble at all after boiling the lungs for 2 hours.
I thought that sounded a bit excessive - considering it might be nice to have some flavour left in the buggers, but I think he was probably right - I boiled mine for an hour this time (double that from last time) and there certainly was a great deal less picking out of capillary to be done. Just the main big fat ones really, and they pulled out a lot easier too.

So this time I simmered the hearts, liver and kidneys for about half an hour first, then took everything out and put the lungs into the same pan for an hour.
This left some offaly nice :) stock after straining which I used to cook the barley and to moisten the heart and lungs when I whizzed them up in the food processor to make mousse (which my food processor did not enjoy - indicating it's unhappiness with clouds of smoke). And in fact this time, I used up all of my cooking water. Probably because I didn't need so much of it cooking the lungs separately.

Though I got the spices better balanced than last time (frying up a sample to taste as you go saves the day), on the whole I didn't like the flavour as much, maybe because there was too much kidney?
Although the earliest Haggis-type recipes like the medieval For hagese, published in Liber Cure Cocorum in (probably) Lancashire around 1430 A.D. are happy to use kidney (and in fact, that recipe doesn't seem to have any liver), later references such as Gervase Markham's mention of haggas or haggus in his 1615 publication The English Huswife often seem to skip the kidneys, and it now doesn't seem to be all that common an ingredient.

Not that it tasted bad or anything - just a bit stronger than I like.

As usual I did my best not to over-pack the ox socks, firmly packing the end of the bag, then rolling the haggis back out again along the whole length so it was only half-stuffed, but as usual I failed, and once again my Haggis did not survive the boiling process un-split.
It's a real shame too - it made it right up to the third hour before finally going, but the trouble is when they split it happens in a real gush, so you don't have very long to rescue the situation and wrap them in tin foil. If you see the warning sign of a thinning patch, like a ladder in a stocking, or an actual hole, then don't hang about - wrap the haggis immediately in aluminium foil.
So back to the drawing board on my packing skills - I really must stop worrying about under-filling the casings no matter how limp they look, since the stuffing swells massively during cooking, and maybe I should think about double-wrapping the haggises in an extra ox cecum?

I actually remembered to weigh stuff as I worked this time so at least I have an idea of what went in - I think next time I would use a bit less liver maybe 2lb, and a lot less kidney - say 8 oz?
Oh, and this year's secret ingredient? Armagnac. Though I did wonder about adding a touch of mint. Those medieval recipes liked to use quite a lot of herbs, which seems like an idea worth resurrecting.