Well, it's Valentine's Day - time for another lonely dinner. They are the best kind.

My workmate Ewan Ratbird brought in a haystack-load of rosemary he'd trimmed off the bush in his garden, so I thought I'd have another go at René Redzepi's Aromatic cauliflower in vinegared whey with warm butter yoghurt and horseradish cream but this time without the cheese. And with the whey.
I served it up to myself with a fried pork chop, pan-roasted mushrooms and, best of all, microwaved, frozen mashed potato. The shame (thanks ex-flatmate Peter).
Yumsk!

Pity, when I planned the meal, I hadn't considered how very brown the thing would be. A sort of Anti-Valentine Day Dinner if you like.

Meanwhile, I've finally used up the last of my (un-frozen) haggis. Plus the last few scraps of my gold leaf to decorate a particularly scabby looking Golden Haggis™ Mark II.
Not my finest hour!


On a slightly more colourful note...
It's been time once again to scrub the 707s ready for their next season of sailing. I decided to make a Thermos of soup to take along, and remembering how Rachel once said she'd like to try some borscht I thought I'd give that a go.
Make the most of it girl - once you get yourself a boyfriend you'll be back to doing all your own cooking!

  Gag His Sadder Oats mashed on Burns Night
    

Is what I'd put, if I were a crossword-puzzle writer.

It's offal time again - seems to come around earlier every year!
Since the yacht club turned down my home-made haggis for their Burns' supper, I had to entertain myself and a few chosen friends with a supper of our own.
Some friends have sturdier constitutions than others - and better late than never eh Aidan & Jude?

Anyway, this year's piece of resistance was the one, the only, the fabulous Golden Haggis™.
I had the idea last year, but didn't get round to making any haggis then, so this year it is. It takes a bit of time (and money) tracking down decent gold foil and it's damn tricky to work with too. I doubt I'll be getting much practice with it. I imagined it might go on smoother than it did - the Golden Haggis looked a teeny bit scabrous.
Still bloody magnificent though - the yacht club's loss I reckon.

As usual despite my detailed itinerary - I had a bit of a struggle getting everything ready at the same time, what with fiddling decorating the Golden Haggis and all.
Making (and cooking up) the haggis itself only took me an evening after work though. Say 5 hours. So no excuses for the rest of you.
Must investigate ways of keeping mashed potatoes (and neeps) warm without drying them out. It would make life a lot easier
Be sure to keep those potato skins too - you can fill them with haggis, top with potato, cover with cheese and bake them as a little haggis snack.
When later you have enough haggis to feed an army and no army to feed.

That is one of the drawbacks of making haggis. You have to make sooooo much! Thank God it's only once a year.

Apparently this is a victory for feminism.

Personally I think that any feminist who finds themselves siding with the Taliban in dictating to other women what they can and cannot (mostly cannot) be allowed to do with their bodies needs to seriously re-examine their personal philosophy.
But hey that's just me.

Well, it's leftover Christmas week month. As usual.
Not only do I have my own leftover cheese to eat up, but this year I've also got Flora's. And her leftover sprouts.
Yippee!

Flora kindly donated a tub of salmon pâté, an overripe Chaource and one of the rare and relatively short-seasoned wooden tubs of Vacherin Mont d'Or. It was absolutely fabulous scooped straight out of its box with hunks of bread, but unfortunately a little too ripe to bake. Consequently I revisited a couple of my staple cheese-guzzling recipes - tartiflette and cheese risotto.
I made the tartiflette with the Mont d'Or I couldn't manage to guzzle raw, the Chaource sans greying, stinking rind and the salmon pâté and very nice it was too. So you don't need to restrict yourself to Reblochon, whatever those Savoy cheesemakers' aggressive PR agents might want you to believe.

I also revisited another couple of dishes from a previous mustard feast this week for our West Coast Charter Reunion Dinner. After the success of our original charter holiday we thought we'd enter the expedition log into our yacht club's annual competition. Which was all the excuse we needed to get together and eat and drink whilst pretending to write it up.

I had another go at getting a crispy crust on the intriguing oyster-stuffed saddle of lamb (distinctly rubbery the first time around - and I promised myself I'd take another run at it), and getting the timing right for the complementary butternut squash gratin. The secret there being to cook it for an hour longer than you thought it could possibly take. Still a bit too much of an onion-string-vest vibe about it for my taste though. Might be worth a re-re-visit.

Evidently sauerkraut and mushroom pierogis are a Polish Christmas Eve staple, so I thought I'd give them a go as this year's starter with a piscine twist.

I decided this year we'd also try a spiced cranberry and apple stuffing as recommended by Mum and Delia Smith. What could go wrong?

Things we (re-)learned this Christmas:

• Sauerkraut and mushroom stuffed filo pastry parcels are much too fiddly for a Christmas starter.
• Mum's favoured spiced cranberry and apple stuffing is far too tart and practically inedible in any quantity. Just goes to show you can't trust anyone these days. Maybe next year I'll have a go with a potato-based stuffing for a change?
• Kurt's new gas oven still cooks a 10lb (pre-stuffing) goose in under 4 hours.
• Kurt really needs a meat thermometer.
• You can leave the crusts in your bread sauce, but I still say it's a bit weird.
• Don't forget to add the leftover goose to the pilaf - it's the whole bloody point!
• No one eats liver paté at Christmas - no matter how seasonal it is.
• You can never have too much bacon.
• You can have too much cheese.

Paul and Rosy came by to help me eat up the last of my pre-Christmas leftovers, and to trial potential Christmas starters.

I'd originally planned to test pumpkin and amaretti ravioli as part of my annual pumpkin fiesta (as a possible Christmas starter), but didn't get around to it, so we had them today. Along with a first run at sauerkraut and mushroom file parcels - the eventual winner.

A big pot of tarragon-flavoured mussels handy since I needed some mussel stock for the file parcels! and home-made vanilla ice cream with cocoa-meringue to follow completed the meal plan.
You wouldn't believe the washing up, though my flatmate Peter now does. Must be the difference between a three- and four-course meal.

Things I learned today:

• Don't feed almond biscuits to someone who's told you they have a nut allergy. Idiot!
• If you have a lot of leftover mussels and sauerkraut, you can do worse than cook them up with some pasta

Now if you'll excuse me - I have a lot of baking to do before Christmas...

I had a lot of seasonal leftovers to eat up, what with Christmas coming and all. Pumpkin mostly. Lots of pumpkin. Plus some Cavolo Nero.
So today I had a quick dinner of homemade (defrosted) herb sausage with a rich onion gravy, onion and cavolo nero with horseradish and cream, and boiled potatoes dressed with sage butter to keep me going.
Yumsk.

    Pumpkins retire
    as Fall fog rolls in from the Forth,
    my desire is always to save some.
    Oh cull of Hallow's Eve.
    

Having secured my annual pumpkin collection before the stroke of midnight on Hallowe'en I was equipped to raise the ghosts of pumpkins past in the shape of yet another Pumpkin in a Chicken in a Pumpkin™.
I repeated the tasty stuffing I used in my Classic Pumpkin except that I processed up hazelnuts instead of the chestnuts. To be honest I thought them too grainy despite being chopped quite small (which seems to be a persistent feature of the nut) and as usual the stuffing ended up unnaturally soggy.

I'm starting to think that next year I might approach the whole thing from a more pot-roast direction - after all it ain't really a roast chicken, so much as a poached one. I should stop fighting this, I suspect it's where the moist succulence of the chicken all comes from anyway, and abandon traditionally stuffing the chicken at all (I could always cook a stuffing separately which is usually better anyway). Perhaps surrounding the chicken with vegetables and stock, or just sticking in a few bits of fruit - apple chunks maybe? It would stop me worrying so much about the build-up of liquid in the pumpkin. Though it's a good idea to keep it to a minimum lest the squash split and spill liquid all over your oven.

Anyway, it all turned out nicely enough - Alex One and Caroline kindly came around to help me eat it. I served it with mashed herbed potatoes, glazed carrots with sage Nice! and creamy mustard Cavolo Nero which I bought to have another stab at kale and pumpkin soup with my anticipated leftovers.
They also tried out my liver dates with a garlicky mushroom salad. They really liked the salad!

Things I re-learned about making Chicken in a Pumpkin:

• Chicken cooked in a pumpkin is fabulously moist.
• You can keep the excess liquid to a minimum by leaving off the pumpkin lid for most of the cooking time - perhaps put it on at the beginning and the end.
• Occasionally suck out surplus fluid from inside the pumpkin with a turkey baster and use it for the gravy.
• It's not the end of the world if the chicken is too small for the pumpkin. It will poach all the same just don't try to fill the gap with stuffing, it'll just turn soggy.
• It's just impossible to tell how much space there will be inside a pumpkin until you've opened it up. Buy extra!

Well, I've been feeling a bit liverish this past week.
That may have something to do with the 2kg of frozen livers I've had to consume after first deciding, while staring aghast at a ludicrous £2 charge for 100g of Port and Liver pâté in my Local Fucking Supermarket™ on a shopping trip for lunchtime sandwich fillers, that I really needed to try making my own.

So I started trawling for chicken livers amongst the butchers of Musselburgh, where I work. For my sins. On the plus side there are actually three butchers here - a minor miracle considering the rate at which poundshops are breeding but unfortunately only one of them seems to do any actual butchering. As far as I can tell the others simply re-sell prepared cuts of meat which they buy in bulk. Much like my Local Fucking Supermarket™. So really, what's the point? When I once suggested to one of these ersatz meat shop-keepers that I intended to cure my own bacon he responded with disbelief. I think he genuinely didn't know it was possible to obtain bacon by any means other than in industrial quantities from a factory in Denmark.
Anyhow, this actual butcher regularly but infrequently supplies one of his customers with chicken livers, and happened to have frozen some in anticipation. Unfortunately this customer buys them in 2kg batches (for what the butcher didn't say), so that was the only option on offer.

Sensing my reluctance at such an over-purchase (the pâté recipe I had in mind called for 350g) the butcher reduced his already-ridiculously-low price from £5 to £4, and eventually I just didn't have the heart to say no.
Since then I've been cooking and eating quite a lot of liver ;)

I've had liver sandwiches for lunch every day for the past two weeks, and for dinner; liver and baked potatoes, and more varieties of liver and pasta than I care to remember. I even went so far as to drag in my accommodating new flatmate Peter.
Welcome aboard Peter.

It turns out that a good liver pâté is dead easy to make and liver parfait makes quite a good topping for baked potatoes.

A Dufour 425 optimistically named Pollyanna to be precise.

We, or rather Peter Mackie's and Sam Peckers, organised her charter out of Dunstaffnage and through the Sound of Mull for a nice long weekend of cooking, eating and sailing for six of us.
Thanks guys!

As the designated ship's cook on our four-day, three-dinners-with-two-on-board voyage I paid particular attention to my universal rules for successful Cooking On Boats while developing our menu. Even the rules I broke.

The Sea Is Not To Be Trusted
Thus our first meal aboard consisted of my own interpretation of a seafood chowder prepared at home and sealed into my large stock pot with Sellotape. Or sticky backed plastic as it is inelegantly known to a generation of Blue Peter viewers. Don't forget to remove the Sellotape before reheating!
For dessert I also pre-made a baking-tin-load of individual sticky toffee puddings that only required reheating in the oven. The main difficulty they presented having successfully driven them across the country, was transporting them intact aboard the boat. There was a definite point on the pontoon when I was seriously afraid the whole tray was about to blow out of my hands, to the great amusement of the rest of our heartless crew. A situation not improved by my careful fashioning of a cling film aerofoil covering.

I must admit to defying another cardinal cooking rule by accompanying the chowder (rather well, I thought) with an oven-baked loaf of soda bread:
The Oven Is Not To Be Trusted
Fortunately soda bread is quite forgiving of temperature and rises with the activation of its bicarbonate of soda content more reliably than do fickle yeast cells. I also reheated my sticky toffee puddings in the oven, but reheating is specifically allowed, so that's alright then.

Meal number two needed to actually be prepared on the boat, so I followed the best practice:
Treat It Tidily Stupid
Beef Bourguignon lends itself perfectly to this kind of single pot preparation - I served it with mashed potatoes which I first baked in the oven (which makes for richer, tastier mash and avoids the need for another giant pot of boiling water rolling around the galley).
And some green beans which I cooked in a giant pot of boiling water.

Handily both meals also followed an essential rule for shipboard harmony:
All Meals Must Contain Bacon
Actually this is rather more of a personal rule, perhaps not quite so applicable to vegetarian voyages. Perhaps.

Absolutely NO Flambéing on board in the Skipper's Presence
On reflection, the proximity of that porthole's curtains should have argued against having flaming rum bananas with butterscotch sauce for dessert. Fortunately the sauce was very well received and the skipper didn't notice a thing.

Always Have a Backup
Since The Sea Is Not To Be Trusted it's a good idea to have at least one backup meal in case you run aground, or get blown out to sea. I chose a pasta with smoked salmon and cream cheese dish, all the constituents of which keep reasonably well. Of course, when it proved surplus to requirements, as the designated chef I was able to take the ingredients home and try the dish out for myself. It would have been delicious!

My favourite non-cookery related bit of the sail was helming Pollyanna between Lady's Rock and Lismore island in an unreliable easterly wind against a stiff tide running Northwards. A much stiffer tide than any of us had managed to predict from the tidal atlases aboard.
As I admired the astonishing disagreement between the chart plotter's Heading and COG tracks I gave some thought to how often I'd been in the position of having to pick the best course through a narrow channel or entry, and what would be a better strategy than just aiming for the middle and hoping for the best. It occurred to me that navigating to avoid the worst-case outcomes might be a smarter plan. In this case the place I definitely didn't want to end up would be being forced to tack mid-way through the gap and risk losing way while being swept energetically towards Robert Stevenson's lighthouse on Eilean Musdile!
Accordingly I made sure to hold the passing tack until I was almost on the skerry before bearing away - much to Scot's consternation.
Hopefully no one else noticed our anxiety!

Other things I learned on this trip:

1. Don't attempt to berth sideways onto the end of a narrow pier lest you crush your less agile crewpersons - approach sternwards.
2. Don't let women cook your breakfast or you'll be waiting for it one bacon rasher at a time.
   Later you might get an egg.