Affronted by Recipes

Against my better judgement, on Sunday (Easter Day) I  cooked 2 recipes that were in the paper and I find that my long-held animosity to newspaper chef recipes is ...  FULLY JUSTIFIED! Yes! My poor family.

Firstly there was a silly recipe for fancy roast lamb. Look. I have cooked perfectly good roast lamb many and many a time, with no need for marinading it first in a ridiculous mixture of roughly torn mint leaves, vinegar, brown sugar and sliced onion. As you can probably imagine, this was NEVER going to work. Slices of onion take about 5 mins to cook, whereas lamb leg takes some 30 mins per pound. Thus smoke and a vile smell of burning soon emanated from the oven and the onion had to be removed and discarded. 

Don't tell ME those bits of onion have been in the oven as long as the lamb. They aren't even burnt.
This was the picture accompanying the ridiculous Lamb recipe.

The resulting lamb was just as nice as usual, but there was no HINT of mint in the flavour and the addition of costly vinegars and sugar was a pure waste of money. The pan was also ruined due to burnt-on sugar studded with incinerated mint and onion. The recipe had advocated lining the pan with foil but that is a stupid idea as you can then not make the gravy in the roasting pan, so I left it out. I also added some garlic, thank goodness, because the newspaper chef had forgotten (I presume) to put it in. Also the fool had forgotten to dictate the oven temperature, which did not really matter as I would have ignored his advice anyway. I was able to manipulate the heat as I pleased. "Do till Done" is the best way of cooking and is far more reliable than obeying some bossy idiot who has not cooked such a dish and is only trying to submit copy in order to get paid. Really the cookery pages in the Times are a wicked waste of paper and they get away with it most of the time because no-one in their right mind attempts these recipes.

Having suffered the repeated sounding of the fire alarm siren while the lamb was being cooked the family had more to assail them when I followed the lamb with a "Luscious Lemon Pudding" which far from being "a cross between a soufflé and sponge with a heavenly texture and gooey succulent base, intensely lemony, light and rich, good hot or cold, does not require cream with it" as claimed by the Times, was in fact a lump of burnt-topped, heavy, dry, dull-flavoured nasty cake which no-one wanted any of. And who can blame them? It was not for want of effort either. This recipe demanded that you 'microplane-zest 2 lemons or remove the zest in paper-thin sheets and chop small'. Not being in possession of a microplane-zester (or knowing what one is actually) I just scraped the lemon on the fine grater. It then made you separate 3 eggs and beat the yolks and the whites separately. Now look here, Times, I don't do THAT lightly I can tell you.  I'm a busy woman, with hymns to play and dishes to cover.*  The cost of beating yolks and whites separately is extremely high in human suffering, washing up, valuable drinking time, and various other amenities. The only recipe I am willing to beat yolks and whites separately for is Aunty Pat's Lemon Whip (trustworthy recipe with consistently excellent results). Finally, it was recommended that when cooked it should be turned out of the dish and served up side down. Remember that the recipe writer had claimed that this was a soufflé type of thing. She had either forgotten that by the time she got to the end of writing the recipe, or she does not understand what a soufflé  is or how it works. 

Certainly they are a forgetful lot the cookery writers. The lamb one, as mentioned, forgot to tell us what temp the oven should be. Often they list something in the ingredients which then never turns up in the method, or, in the method they suddenly say 'Stir in the beans' leaving you going 'Eh? What beans? How many? What sort?' etc. and proving thereby that the recipe has not been read through let alone tried out.  Also they are profligate and impractical, making you use about 30 different bowls and utensils etc. where one would do, and telling you to do pointless, impossible things which don't work. It is highly irresponsible, specially when people are so short of money and time.

The lemon recipe here described had the cheek to write at the end, "Make this and send a photo of the finished dish to food@thetimes.com". What a nerve! I will send them a picture of my fiasco if they like, but they won't thank me for it. Still, they ought to be confronted with the consequences of their instructions.

Fiasco, or Luscious Lemon Pudding? I think we all know the answer to that.

Menu for next Easter will be the usual Lamb Done till Done, and Aunty Pat's Lemon Whip. I can not think what got into me this year. 



*  reference to superhero 'Cling Film Arm'. Cling Film Arm has one of his forelimbs replaced surgically with a roll of cling film and leaps into kitchens going "Stand back, Ladies! I've work to do - dishes to cover."

Estate Agents and their Shortcomings

We have just sold our house and bought another one. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of Estate Agents as we were forced to do. Our ones were called F*x and Sons. I leave you to insert the vowel of your choice but I can confirm it was not A, E or I.

We only used them because they were selling the house we wanted to buy, and we thought the lure of 2 sales commissions would motivate them to action. What fools we were. F*x and Sons stayed in their office with their feet on the desks, filing their nails throughout the whole process and stirring themselves only at the last minute, to serve us a huge bill with more alacrity than they had shown during the whole rest of the proceedings.

I made particular enemies of 2 of their operatives, known to us as 'Mrs Assertive' and 'Supercilious Man'.

We should have known from the start that there would be trouble because it took three phone calls from us before they arranged to show us round the house we wanted - and when they did they did not bring the keys for the outbuilding which I particularly wanted to see, and thought I was a nuisance for wanting to do so. Mrs Assertive offered to make another appointment so that we COULD see the outbuilding, but made it clear I was being unreasonable. No matter that it had been an utter pain organising for our family to be available to look round the house at the time arranged and I had no wish to do it all again.

They lied and dissembled repeatedly, made us show our prospective purchasers round, never rang back when they said they would, always claimed to have been discussing our sale/purchase that very morning, various people were always "out of the office" and would be back "early next week" (they never were) and essential repair works which we demanded be done on pain of our backing out of the purchase, were always "in hand" but never got done. 
Furthermore the particulars they wrote for our house were of very low quality and negligible literary merit so that we were ashamed to distribute them. I wrote one of my own which was far better than theirs, and I am not even being paid for my pains.
In their description of the house we were buying, they called the kitchen "a real 'hub of home'". This is a wicked thing to do and has resulted in our family saying such remarks as "I've left the wine in the Hub of Home." We can't help it. Once heard (read) one can not forget something like that; and there is a constant danger that the neighbours might hear us. Imagine if your new neighbours were overheard referring to something as 'hub of home' - you'd be horrified and you wouldn't yet know them well enough to realise that they were exercising sarcasm at maximum setting. Assertive Lady is suspected of being the perpetrator of the phrase.

We were made fun of for not wishing to move into a house with an active flood from some of the plumbing. They told total fibs to our purchasers and sent round people who particularly wanted a house with a garden for their dog to cavort in (we hadn't got one) and told them we used to have a dog, which we had not, because the property was not suitable for dog husbandry.

A selection of dogs none of which, sadly,
live or have ever lived at our old house.

Further dogs that have not lived at our house. I'm sorry but there it is.

I planned to do some revenge when their bill was to come in; I was going to say we'd been talking about it that very morning, and that my husband was away until early next week and I would get him to phone them when he got back, to tell them the payment of the bill was in hand and in the post, to make fun of them for wanting to be paid what they were entitled to, and to inefficiently date the cheque Jan 2015 (a perfectly understandable mistake as it was the beginning of Jan 2016) and to make it payable to Mrs Assertive and Supercilious Man. In the event however, Supercilious Man was so unpleasant when we went in to pick up some more keys that had come to light, that I decided I wanted nothing further to do with him or any of F*x's hateful Sons, and therefore sent off the enormous, utterly unjustified cheque to his head office without comment. I had thought of including a covering letter remarking how DELIGHTED I was to be ending my dealings with them but I could well imagine them using  ' "Delighted" - Mrs M Carroll' in their testimonials, so I didn't. Also as mentioned, the less you have to do with people of this sort, the better.

We are now receiving by every post, brochures and so on from firms of whom we have never heard, much less informed of our activities, congratulating us on our move and offering various services for which we have no desire. We must assume that the Sons of F*x have been selling our details to the open market.

We must throw off the yoke of these appalling parasites. Every bad thing you have heard about Estate Agents is true. Should you wish to sell your house do it on one of those online selling sites. Together we can expunge Estate Agents from every High Street in the land, and the world will be for ever in our debt.