So, for the second post of the blog - the first actually involving any cooking - I decided to take Tana Ramsay's 'Real Family Food' for a spin. Mrs Chef has borrowed it from the library, along with the Hairy Bikers’ ‘Mum Knows Best’, so I think I’ll use these before we have to give it back. I had high hopes for Real Family Food – Tana Ramsay must have learnt something from Gordon?! Can you imagine trying to cook your own thing with a chef that good about?
“How did you like the mash Gordon?”
“It was good, really good. Well done sweetheart. I probably would have added a touch more salt and pepper myself, and you’ll find that adding a hint of saffron really lends flavour to an otherwise bland accompaniment”
“Oh right… Can you get some saffron from work for me? And while you’re at it, COOK IT YOUR F***ING SELF NEXT TIME”
You get the idea.
I decided on a bit of a Chinese banquet courtesy of Tana’s recipes – Sweet and Sour Pork, and then prawn toast on the side, served with Jamie Oliver’s ‘Ministry of Food’ rice. We checked we had all the ingredients in, made a trip to a new supermarket that has opened up, and came back. I quickly made the prawn toast filling while Mrs Chef started knocking up some Cupcakes for any visiting trick or treaters. All seemed well…
We got a bit delayed with the Cupcakes and before you know it, I was trying to fit making the Sweet and Sour in with finishing off the Cupcakes and Chef Junior’s bath. To the first part of the recipe – chop onions and garlic, and fry in Oil. Get the onions from the fridge… and they aren’t there. Who doesn't have onions?! We are also missing five spice. It’s a Sunday evening in the small town I live in. Chances were not good for getting five spice at 6.30 in the evening. I went down, got onions and mixed spice – it might be the same as five spice, right? Wrong. Its for cakes. To cut a long story short, I ended up making my own five spice using this recipe. I’m not sure what effect this had on the final dish but I’m sure its fair to say things were not going to be quite right. Especially as it was done with a Mortar and Pestle. The real lesson I learnt making this was – ‘Star Anise does not crush in a pestle very well’. I also decided to substitute the 3 tbsp of Sweetcorn, for half a tin of Water Chestnuts that I had spare from the Prawn Toast mixture (I made a half batch of the Toast).
Eventually I get finished. This included deep frying the prawn toast (in a frying pan, hazardous at the best of times). I settled down, shattered, went for the first forkful – and was slightly disappointed to be honest. The Sweet and Sour seemed quite bland. To be fair to Tana, it did say in the introduction that this dish was designed as an introduction to Sweet and Sour, but I was left underwhelmed. Jamie Oliver’s MoF recipe was so much tastier – maybe his use of Balsamic rather than Malt vinegar makes the difference. Or maybe it was my dodgy five spice. The Prawn Toast was much more successful. It goes against my goal of cooking to budget but I used King Prawns as we had them in the freezer, and I was able to spread this on the toast really thickly. The recipe worked like a charm and was very tasty stuff.
I’d have to say that although I wasn’t entirely happy with the outcome of the Sweet and Sour recipe, this test wasn’t exactly fair, and so far I would give Real Family Food the benefit of the doubt. If I had proper five spice and was a bit more organised maybe things would have turned out a little better. Further testing is needed with this one.
