Other – Page 4 – ¡Comemos!

Everyone has shit days. Some of us combat that with a nice, long bath. Some go for walks, inhaling the fresh air. Others just curl up in bed.

All I want to do is bake. It’s what makes me happiest and is the perfect distraction.

Yesterday afternoon I went a bit mad and decided to complete 9 bakes one after the other. I don’t think I initially realised that this was going to take me a solid 7 hours from 4.30pm to 11.30pm, and had I known, I might’ve stopped myself, but sometimes not knowing what you’re getting yourself into is a blessing in disguise. After all that hard work, you reap the rewards – in my case, staring at 9 delicious sweet and savoury treats, ready to feed to everyone around me.

My supermarket run was slightly OTT and this isn’t including the ingredients that I already had at home. Does 5 packets of ready rolled puff pastry seem slightly excessive?

Bake number 1 was a BBC Good Food recipe for naan bread – something that I can easily freeze ready to defrost as a tasty side dish later down the line. The dough seemed to go to plan, and seeing it grow in size was incredibly satisfying.

I still can’t really believe how easy the naan was to make. Simple ingredients mixed together into a dough and kneaded and then dry fried and rubbed with butter. They smelt amazing, and looked exactly as they would from a restaurant or supermarket.

The nigella seeds give a really subtle yet tasty flavour, and these were softer than any naan I’ve ever had before ( and that was the day after they were baked). I highly recommend trying this recipe out yourself so you, too, can marvel at how surprisingly straightforward it is!

Next up we have a semi-failure. I tried a recipe from Nadiya Hussein’s new cookbook ‘Time To Eat’ and was aiming for a Banana Tarte Tatin with Malai Ice Cream. Let’s have a look at how it went down…

So not a complete disaster! The caramel was the main issue. It didn’t quite come out right (to be fair I’ve never tried to make it before…), and it saturated the puff pastry base with its seeping syrup. In terms of flavour I loved it, the bananas were tasty, the caramel was delicious and the chopped hazelnuts were a worthwhile addition.

The ice cream fuck-up, however, was most definitely my fault. I’d forgotten that the point was to whip the cream so when I ran out of cream I added some greek yoghurt as a substitute. This then meant that it wouldn’t actually whip to the point of forming soft peaks, but I decided to freeze it anyway and see what happened. It has set to an extent, and actually tastes lovely with its hint of cardamom, but it’s not quite what I’d call ice cream.

Moving on to one of my favourite images of the 7 hour bake. Another BBC Good Food recipe and this one’s for mozzarella stuffed crust pizza, to which I chose to add chorizo and basil. Like the naan, the dough was really easy to make, although it didn’t puff up like the naan. It was quite tricky to try and seal the edges of the crust to hold the mozzarella in but these seemed to stick down once they were baked.

Not quite as photogenic once baked, but it is all about the taste really. More mozzarella and less tomato would’ve been good but the dough was so fluffy and delicious. The mozzarella in the crust seemed to disappear slightly so I’d pack that in a bit more if I were to bake it again.

Switching right back to sweet, and returning to Nadiya, we have the choc bar puffs. Simply put, a square of chocolate encased in puff pastry and sprinkled with cocoa powder. There really isn’t anything more to it than that. Super quick to make and couldn’t be any easier.

They were really tasty, but nothing mind-blowing.

Now on to one of my absolute favourite bakes. We’re sticking with Nadiya (because she is wonderful) and it’s her meatloaf roll. Inside we have beef/pork mince with hard boiled eggs lined up throughout and all that wrapped up in puff pastry.

Cutting through the crisp pastry to see the eggs perfectly lining the centre was so unbelievably satisfying. Not only that but the flavour was beautiful. Before wrapping the whole thing up, the pastry is painted with slightly diluted marmite – I only tried marmite for the first time last week and found it very odd-tasting, but the watered-down flavour brushed onto the pastry tastes amazing, and you’d never know what it was.

We now come to one of the ugliest bakes of the evening but by no means the worst-tasting. This BBC Good Food recipe was slightly dodgy in terms of making the pastry from scratch (or it’s just me…) but the filling was beautiful. Ignoring the burnt, mismatched crust, the centre of the pie stayed wobbly and gooey. It is ridiculously indulgent but such a delicious treat – so delicious (I hope) that a lovely user from the Olio App (anti-food waste app) came to collect half of it to take home for himself.

Can you believe I’m still going at this point? No? Me neither, but we’ve only got 3 left. And this one was cute. I love Le Creuset kitchenware, and I also love anything miniature so this tiny individual dish has always been a favourite of mine. I used it to create a BBC Good Food Pork, Apricot and Pistachio Pie. I have to admit, this is the only thing I haven’t yet tried, and it’ll be my dinner this evening, but it did smell wonderful. I love the combination or pork, apricot and pistachio, with the sweet dried fruit and crunchy nut combo. I have confidence that it’s going to be a very enjoyable meal…

Penultimate dish! We’re going all out now with triple chocolate cookies, dark, milk and white all in one. Now these were supposed to be gooey, but they struggled to set at all with the quantities of ingredients the recipe suggested, so whilst they are delicious, they’re pretty messy and fall apart quite easily.

……………………………………………..

Picture this. It’s half 11, I’ve been on my feet rushing around for 7 hours, the kitchen looks like a bombsite, and 7 hours of cooking has produced sweltering heat. Then finally, I take my last bake from the oven, I wait patiently for it to cool, before topping it with buttercream and the honeycomb I’d made 6 hours earlier.

The absolute relief. The satisfaction. The pride. I felt everything. I was excited and couldn’t really believe what I’d just done. And the last one was pretty good to be fair…

We’re finishing back with Nadiya, but this is from her earlier cookbook, ‘Nadiya’s Family Favourites’. It’s a banana sponge with peanut buttercream and honeycomb. The honeycomb struggled to set properly so it’s sort of improvised but still tastes good.

This is one of the lightest, most moist sponges I’ve ever managed to make and that’s impressive considering by this point my scales had had enough and would no longer even turn on. I therefore had to guesstimate all the quantities but looks like I got it pretty spot on.

I did then, suddenly find myself looking round the room thinking ‘What on earth have I just done?’. But I felt good, I felt productive, and I had well and truly taken my mind off of the less pleasant things that I had to think about.

Whatever works for you, find it and run with it. When you have a bad day, throw yourself into whatever makes you happy, whatever calms you, whether it’s active, indulgent or just plain lazy.

The kitchen is my therapy. What’s yours?

¡Comemos!

You may or may not have heard about the latest foodie review app out there.

EATEN.

So, what’s new? What’s unique? Well, as opposed to many typical reviewing sites which tend to review restaurants on the whole, Eaten gives you the opportunity to offer individual reviews for each dish you have tried, including drinks.

For me, the idea of reviewing individual dishes instead of the restaurant/café/bar on the whole is so much more effective. How many times have you been somewhere and had an amazing main and average dessert, or something along those lines? What do you do in that scenario? Give the place a middle-ground rating? 3/5?

If you still don’t really know that it’s all about, this post will take you step by step through all the app’s interesting features, so without further ado, here’s my breakdown of everything you need to know to get you started.

First we have the ‘Explore‘ page. Here you’ll be able to view the latest posts, and most popular dishes.

You can see from the top menu bar that we also have a ‘Feed’ tab. This will show you all the reviews posted by accounts that you have chosen to follow.

‘Search’ shows you your current location, highlighting restaurants, cafés and bars around you that have received reviews, and it also presents a generic search bar to seek out specific restaurants.

You can change the location to select where you want to view dishes from. I currently have this set to ‘The World’ so that I can see every review that is uploaded, but you can choose a specific city if you wish.

You also have the option to select whether you follow a specific diet, with the options being vegetarian, vegan, halal, kosher and gluten free. If you have selected one of these diets, only dishes that fall into that category will appear on you Explore page.

Once you come across dishes you like the look of, you can save them to your wishlist, and these will be shown on your Explore page as well.

Now we come to your profile. You can choose a profile photo and background image and below that the app will display your rankings locally and globally. I think this is based on the number of reviews you have written but don’t quote me on that.

Next up all your reviews are listed below, starting with the latest.

Below that is one of my favourite features. Your reviews are categorised by the type of dish they fall into. You can see that ‘dessert’ is my most frequently reviewed category as that comes at the top of my page. Once you click on a certain category, all your reviews are shown ranked from best to worst, and these ranking equate to a score for each dish.

Your local/global rankings even extend into specific categories i.e. ’13th in London for dessert’

Each dish must be ranked ‘Amazing’, ‘Really good’, ‘Pretty good’, ‘Just ok’ or ‘Not for me’.

The fact that the ‘worst’ category is entitled ‘Not for me’ says a lot about the kind of reviews the app wants to generate. It is not designed for people to berate establishments unnecessarily, and the ‘not for me’ category implies that you may not have enjoyed a dish, but in the sense that it wasn’t to your personal taste. There is no ‘awful’ category, as we well know that our opinions are entirely subjective.

Having said that if you have been massively disappointed, you do have the opportunity to justify your low ranking and explain why in a comments section which you can see below.

When uploading a new review the screen appears like so.

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You first select a photo (some people haven’t uploaded a photo but these reviews tend to get ignored). To make life a million times easier for us foodies, there is an option to import your images directly from Instagram, and if you have tagged the location on Instagram already, this will automatically be filled in in the ‘restaurant’ section.

Then you must select the name of the dish, and then which category it falls into, i.e. sushi/pizza/ice cream etc.

Date eaten is automatically filled in from when the photo was taken on your phone but you can alter this.

Then comes your rating in one of the 5 categories. You can also rank dishes within the same category, for example, if you have 5 pizzas under ‘really good’, you can change the order to show which of those 5 was the best.

Finally you can add comments and hashtags, although this is not compulsory. For me, I do always prefer reviews that have at least one comment, as it explains the thinking behind how that person has graded their dish.

The last part of the app to cover is the restaurants’ personal pages. The vast majority of restaurants etc will have a page even if they don’t yet have reviews. The person to be the first to write a review for that location is said to have ‘discovered’ it as you can see to the right.

You’ll see the location of the restaurant, the number of reviews it already has, how many different dishes these reviews cover and the average rating taken from those dishes.

Scroll down and you will find the reviews themselves.

So that’s pretty much it. I have had this app for just about a week now but I’m already obsessed. It’s still in its early stages so the number of people using it definitely hasn’t peaked yet.

I really urge any foodie out there to engage with it and add their reviews. The more people review, the more useful the app is on the whole. It’s super easy to use and has already extended my ginormous list of places I want to try, and more specifically, dishes I want to taste.

So look no further for your latest foodie fix and…

¡Comemos!

Category: Other

Kitchen Therapy

Been there, EATEN that.