h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It being the first day of NaJoPoMo, of course we switched the oven on, which naturally short-circuited the house, which OBVIOUSLY blew the complicated electronic mind of the broadband modem, so who the hell knows if I am going to be able to post? To fall at the first fence, alas, alas, the shame.

Scrumph is fiddling with the damned thing as I type (I end up fighting not to pronounce damned 'damNED', Elizabethan style, because I am so very precious and like to pretend I am not), and dinner is resolutely in the oven anyway - given we blew the house circuit for it, this dinner had better be fabulous.

And what is this dinner, that may (or may not) have wrecked NaJoPoMo for me before it even began?

Baked things.

(Well, OBVIOUSLY. You turned the oven on).

Don't nag. They could've been ROAST things.

I had some chicken pieces that needed eating up (this is the sort of thing that usually inspires my flights of cookery). I had some leeks. I had some chicory. I had rather a lot of cream. So I put them all in the same dish and slammed in the evil house-fusing oven.

No, I didn't. I'm a fussier cook than that. I steamed the chicory and leeks before-hand - if you put raw chicory especially in the oven covered in cream, it will release about five pints of bitter water and the cream will curdle into little lumps and the result will look sorrowful and repellant (incidentally, this is why you should always pre-cook cauliflower when making cauliflower cheese too (why yes, I learnt that the hard way. Why do you ask?)). I buttered the bottom of the dish (actually a small roasting tin, quite deep), and put the chicken pieces in a single layer. I poured a little cream over them, and scattered them with a little ground nutmeg, a little powdered smoked paprika, some grated hard pecorino cheese and a pinch of herbes de Provence. I then put the lightly steamed chicory heads (halved) over the top, and the roughly chopped and also steamed leeks on top of that. More cream, more paprika and nutmeg, and a hearty layer of more grated pecorino (superior to parmesan, I find. Elizabeth David agrees with me). And then put it in the oven (180 C) for 40 minutes.

This could all go horribly wrong, you know.

….

Nope, it's actually quite nice. A bit soggy (too much cream (sacrilege! No such thing!), perhaps I should've steamed the chicory a bit longer), but it tastes good.

And Scrumph has made the modem behave! Hurrah!

Your link worked! Yay! I have never seen herbe de Provence in the USA, but my German roommate used when we lived in Brazil. I'm glad your dish turned out well.

I have never blown all my fuses with the oven, but I have done so with the microwave. I can't use it, the toaster and the coffee maker at the same time.

Chicory and I are happy not to share the same county. I would have used kale or spinach. But your dish sounds delicious otherwise.

And hooray for Scrumph!

Chicory? Reminds me of some nursery rhyme 'hickory...' *checks dictionary* ....uh, leaves or root?

Heh, had a fuse failure once when I was baking a new kind of cake (one of those pass-it-on-to-a-friend sourdoughs in the 80ies) - I was just checking how it was doing in the oven when the oven went dark. Didn't realise at first what was wrong, it was so perfectly timed with me peeping inside.

Yay for S.

I got a lump of pork, and roast that with parsnips, carrots, a courgette and some potatoes. Today being a public holiday here, a Sunday lunch-type meal seemed in order.

The whole thing was rather dry, as I spent the hour it was in the oven reading everyone's journals here. I poured a red wine sauce on it and served lambs lettuce with a yoghurt dressing to start.

I've done chicken pieces in a cream with various vegetables like you did there - apples go well in that, too.

Herbes de Provence you can mix yourself - I think they include rosemary, thyme, sage, and possibly marjoram. Whatever's in the garden. They're more subtle than Italian herbs.

*looks at his beans on toast, looks at the recipes above*
wanders off muttering, wish I could bl**dy cook.

I know I shouldn't laugh, but you had me at "ROAST things"

Oh dear, glad you got the internet fixed.

Incidentally I made very tasty cheesey bacon on toast (and on potato scones) earlier.

We had planned to do our Hotdog and Bacon Pasta with Red Sauce And added Sweetcorn (student food), but it's probably a little late now, and the baconey cheese on toast really filled me up!

Oh well we can make it tomorrow, or there is still about 2 litres of soup in the freezer.

mini

mini, how come you can easily come up with stuff like that in a comment, but not in your journal? This is in no way meant as critisism, just food for thought for approaching your journal from a different aspect?

Ouch, that didn't come out quite as I meant it to, I'll go hide under a rock and contemplate.

Because I'm a silly mouse and wrote my initial journal post in a panic during the Skype meeting.

I should have waitied, but it seememd to be going on forever.

Ach well, I shall know for next tuesday!

mini

It all sounds lovely Ag, apart from the blowing the fuses and all that cream - me and cream don't agree very well.
Last night it was MC cooking up a chilli con carne type of thing with some left over turkey from sunday (one drumstick and it's done for sunday dinner, butties for me and a chilli, bargain ). She used a very small amount of one of the ripe Bhut Jolokia chillies we have. OOOH, that added fire to it

"one of those pass-it-on-to-a-friend sourdoughs in the 80ies"

Ooh, we got one of those off Mrs. D's mum a little while ago. We've worked out that if we keep a bit for ourselves when we get to the passing on stage we'll effectively have Infinite Cake Forever.

Pelamini for us. It's what we eat when we have forgotten that someone needs to cook. A sort of Russian ravioli.

Yay Scrumph!

*passes the fortified to mini*

it sounds, Ag. The food - not the blowing of fuses or broadband modems...

We (being both the adults in the house) keep forgetting that the microwave and the electric heater can't run for more than about a minute and a half at the same time. The plus side to the forgetting regularly is that I don't need a flashlight when I go outside to turn the circuit breaker back on...