Skins

So we were watching Come Dine With Me the other night*, when I saw one of the hosts preparing asparagus. Fine, I thought, we all know presentation is everything with food nowadays, no doubt she wants to form it into a model of the Eiffel Tower or something equally fatheaded. But it was worse than that. This bizarre woman was peeling it.

Asparagus.

How do you even do that? Isn't it like peeling grass?

I've been thinking for some time that the cult of "peeling" has been gaining ground. From sensible beginnings - eggs, swedes and onions, for instance, probably should be peeled before serving in most recipes - it's overtaken potatoes and carrots, before striking east into mushrooms and north into tomatoes, cucumbers and capsicums.

(Heck, it's getting hard to buy chicken breasts with the skin still on. I've sometimes wondered what happens to the skin from all those breasts. Maybe it goes to the same pet-food factories as the cheap cuts of meat from organic cattle. Seriously, with the exception of mince, anything lower-grade than "sirloin" just doesn't appear in the shops. There's no such thing as "organic" topside or stewing steaks or offal. It's weird.)

And now... asparagus?

What's next? Peeled broccoli, aubergine, courgette?

Just stop it. Apart from the waste, you're throwing away the tastiest part of the food.

Mushroom skins are delicious. Just wipe or wash the loose dirt away, they're good to go. Carrots and potatoes likewise, unless you're mashing them. Skinning cucumbers and tomatoes is a fetish, there's no other explanation.

And as for chicken or fish: repeat after me: "Fat is the channel through which flavour flows". Yes, the skin is fatty, but that doesn't make it bad. If you belong to the tiny, tiny fraction of the population that really shouldn't eat the skin for your health's sake, then there's really no reason to eat chicken at all. Try tofu. For the rest of us, skin is part of the meat.


* It's a reality show. Don't judge us. At least, not until you've spent a year watching New Zealand television.

Cooking tips

I'm a big fan of efficiency. My boss calls it "laziness", a virtue that he respects enormously - the ability to get results with the minimum possible investment.

Nowhere is this skill more important than in the kitchen. Despite the addition of our lovely Danske Møbler sideboard, space is still at a premium and we only have two saucepans. And when Susan starts to get hungry, her normally sunny disposition starts to cloud over, and getting calories into her becomes a time-critical exercise. I dread to think what she'd do if she were dining in Hell's Kitchen.

Thus it came about that last night, when I'd put the rice on and realised I hadn't hard-boiled the eggs as I'd intended, I came up with the bright idea of popping the eggs in with the rice. After all, I reasoned, it's all boiling water, isn't it? And rice requires ten minutes of simmering plus five to ten minutes of standing - that's surely enough time to get a nice hard-boiled result, yes?

For the record, it is. The eggs were perfect. There were only two drawbacks.

The first became apparent when the time came to hook the eggs out of the bed of quietly steaming rice. A spoon did that job nicely, but it also hooked a non-trivial amount of rice out with them, which immediately stuck like glue to the shell. I don't know why rice (Basmati, in case it makes a difference) is so adhesive to eggshell, but take it from me, there is an affinity there.

The second struck me when I contemplated the smooth, shiny whiteness of the freshly peeled eggs. Each egg showed a distinct patch of yellow to one side. Deprived of the tossing motion of the more conventional rapid boiling, the yolks had settled to one side. Not a disaster, merely a minor suboptimality.

I offer this finding in the spirit of furthering human understanding. My training as a process engineer tells me that your less brilliant ideas are just as worthy to be recorded as the best of them; that way, you (and others) will know, next time, without having to do the experiment again.

You're welcome.

Responsibilities

It's challenging, being a householder. We don't even complete the deal for another two months, and already I'm dropping behind in my commitments.

Local by-laws, at my place of employment, dictate that someone who makes such a major commitment as buying a house (or getting married, giving birth etc.) is required to bring in a celebratory cake for the rest of the team. Local by-laws in my own household stipulate that any such cake must be home-made, not shop-bought.

But what kind of cake? The laws are silent on that.

Anything with chocolate and/or cream is too much like hard work. Ditto anything that requires obscure or specialised ingredients, such as - well, anything I don't have in the apartment at the moment. I've never got the hang of meringue.

For my last birthday, I made Westmorland pepper cake, which went OK but not favourite. I'm thinking something sweeter, perhaps something quite unlike what you can get in any corner bakery. After dredging my childhood memory, I hit on: cardamom cake, with lemon glaze.

Hey, I never claimed to be a great cook, it doesn't have to be imaginative. But on the web, even simple recipes can become complicated...

Most cardamom cake recipes I can find involve random other ingredients - orange, pear, apple, pecan, you name it, all of which would I'm sure be delicious but they're not what I'm looking for. The closest I can find is this one, which stipulates when to use a food mixer (quite unnecessary), and actually forgets to put the cardamom in at all, and then smothers the whole thing in a thick lemon icing, rather than a thin transparent glaze. Not confidence-inspiring, but let's give it a try.

So I settle down to it, inserting spice where it seems to make most sense, doing the beating by hand Just Like Mother Taught Me, making the glaze with just lemon and sugar. The result isn't bad, but needs more cardamom.

Trying again, I suffer 'second-attempt syndrome'. This is what happens when you don't follow the recipe closely enough any more because you think you can remember it, only you can't, not in the right order anyway. We're eating through the results of that now.

I'll get it right later this week.