Only one allowed in each category.
I CAN COOK – white sauce. Despite any number of recipes telling of the pitfalls, I’ve never had a problem. I think it comes from a book my Mum gave me “Cooking In A Bedsitter” by Katherine Whitehorn (see link) – I recall her saying that once you’ve added the flour “cook for several minutes, otherwise it will taste REVOLTINGLY of raw starch”. And also, when you start adding milk “OFF the heat is best”. I’ve followed that advice all my life and I can make a brilliant macaroni cheese (as I just did tonight, which made me think of it), or white sauce for moussaka, or whatever.
I CAN’T COOK – scrambled eggs. I just don’t get it. It’s either an omelette or it’s not. My wife does great scrambled eggs. She says the key is cooking them slowly. And I believe her, and I love the results. But I CAN do poached eggs, and boiled eggs, for which my kids are always asking for the method, often via text at all hours of the day and night (for the record – bring water to the boil, add eggs, cook for for 4 mins exactly).
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/17/british.vegetablesrecipes
Re scrambled eggs ,take off well before cooked as continue to cook in own heat.
Sir fry – rather effective. Not too many ingredients, dont, overfill wok,less oil and adda bit if necessary rather than too much from the start, smaller pieces and a nice corn flour and stock sauce.
What can’t I cook -where to start. OK – Grilled salmon. Always too overcooked and dry or undercooked and flesh wont separate. Mrs Wells gets it right everytime.
Poached eggs are easy. I assume your method above is for boiled eggs. I’ve never tried your waybut my method works perfectly too. Add eggs to pan of cold water, bring to boil, boil for 3 minutes exactly. Perfect.
I don’t think I have ever made a white sauce and I have never baked anything. I’m good at all the domestic stuff though. Just this morning, I have made a tuna pasta salad and chilli con carne.
Just remembered, scrambled eggs have milk added, whereas an omlette has a little water added.
I never add water or milk to eggs although my mum did. Scrambled eggs, as above: slow, stir constantly, remove from heat while still soft. Poached eggs: don’t have the water boiling, just barely simmering.
I can cook loads of stuff that is “one pot” but Chili is probably my best.
I’m hopeless at fish, especially Tuna, which is a shame as I love Tuna steak.
Vinegar in water for poached ? Mrs Wells heats a BIG pot of water ( so it retians sufficient heat) then takes off boil, plonks eggs in and lets them sit until ready. Seems to work.
Yeah, white wine vinegar. Helps the whites coagulate and form around the yolk. Brown vinegars produce scum, white spirit vinegar doesn’t but is too strong.
A big big pan of furiously boiling water with a glug of vinegar and a lot of salt, stir the water to form a strong vortex once it’s boiling (again, helps the eggs form nicely and not spread out). The vortex should be nearly carrying the wooden spoon around with it. Tip in your eggs, 2 minutes exactly. Fish em out with a big, flat slotted spoon and gently tip excess water off them so as not to soggy your toast. Don’t be impatient – let ’em drain.
It’s impossible to have anything but perfect poached eggs with this method.
I will now shut up. I’m a horrendous kitchen nerd and could bore on about this stuff til the last trump sounds.
Haha! Disagree strongly!
No vinegar, no salt and no vortex.
An inch of water boiling in a saucepan. Turn to a simmer whilst putting eggs in or you’ll burn your hands. Each egg should be poured in from a low angle sided dish gently. Trying to pour them in from a mug causes them to fall in the water too quickly, therefore spreading all over the pan, causing disaster. Turn heat back up a little and cook for 3 minutes exactly. Lift with slotted spoon to drain water. Perfect. I do it every day!
This is the Delia method more or less, only she says to leave them 10 minutes off the heat afterwards, before serving. There’s also a requirement to buy a Delia-online pan, which can be ignored. She scathingly dismisses the mystical whirlpool and vinegar skullduggery in her inimitable fashion. The distress of fragmenting whites is avoided.
http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/occasions/mothers-day/mothers-day-breakfast/poached-eggs
Nooooo. Scrambled eggs are just eggs and butter and seasoning, cooked over a barely-there heat for a few minutes and occasionally turned over and pushed through gently with a spatula. They want to be pretty wobbly before the last stir, and the last stir should come seconds before it’s plated. Milk is a sin. 😉
And I’ve never added water to an omelette either. Why would you?
Why add water? Because it results in a better omelette. It’s what they do in Paris Brasseries and they know a thing or two about cooking good omelettes (only requires a small amount).
I am the Master of Curry – any main ingredient, any style Indian, Thai,Malay, anything, I Am King.
Being a hip kind of guy I have been trying to make Sourdough bread on and off for a couple of years now. Failed every single time.
Ah sourdough is a bit of a bugger. You’ve got to have the right starter, and if you don’t, it won’t work. For ages I tried doing the full-on from-scratch method of fermenting my own grapes to culture the yeast, but it was never strong enough to actually raise bread and more often than not it died. So I just used bought yeast to get the starter going and have never looked back.
I, being a hip kind of guy, have so far resisted buying already-started starter but I’m coming to the conclusion that living in the middle of vineyards brings me all sorts of natural yeasts which are just too damn strong for the purpose.
I’ve just bought a book entitled Sourdough full of pretty pictures and bakers with hipster beards – what can go wrong?
Assuming you have your starter, your only barrier then is not letting up on the prove. Overnight, even 24 hours sometimes to get that vital lift when you get it in the oven.
Done all that, rested in the fridge etc etc but I repeat the very air I breathe is full of all-sorts of wild, capricious yeasts all doing their own thing and trying to tame those fuckers is proving just a tad difficult.
I’m not great at cakes, but possibly because I don’t like them much. Everything else I can cook. I love to cook. When I was married, I was the main cook in the house, and I was raised by a professional cook, so it’s always been something I love to do.
I’ve never been able to figure out globe artichokes, though. I bloody love them, it’s just I always end up with spiky inedible foliage and nothing else. So I buy them pre-prepared cos life’s too short.
I am pretty good at cakes – I was delegated to do my daughter’s birthday cake last week. I did her a chocolate cake with a ganache topping, but if I was baking for myself I’d do my favourite date and apple cake with a salted caramel glaze. Bleddy ansum, it is.
Proper job, my lover.
I’ve always done boiled eggs by putting them in cold water, bring to the boil, turn off heat and leave with lid covering pan for ten minutes. I shall experiment with the Mousey method tomorrow.
Other than boiled eggs, I never cook.
Just tried the @Mousey method of cooking boiled eggs. Awful. Rubbish. Won’t be doing that again.
Sorry to hear that. You obviously like them hard boiled.
The snake in the ointment for boiled eggs, in QLD at least, is that you have to keep the eggs in the fridge, so you either have to start two hours before breakfast or use cold water, which makes the timing a bit tricky.
My latest technique for hard boiling eggs is to set them off from cold then completely forgetting about them, resulting in burnt eggs (appalling smell) and a completely fucked saucepan.
Yep, hard boiled deffo my preference, Mousey. As for fridge, that’s nay prob. I like to boil up six eggs then eat them two a day. That’s my protein supplement as I tend to go long periods without meat.
I make a mean cottage pie (has to contain Worcestershire sauce). I struggle to get steaks cooked nicely indoors. The only time I did them perfectly (medium rare of course) smoke alarms were going off all over the place and we were close to needing a full evacuation of the apartment.
I made cauliflower cheese tonight, as it happens @mousey. To yours and KW’s instructions I would add, For God’s sake put enough cheese in. Too much is way preferable to too little.
As for scrambled eggs, I would say that if you can’t tell the difference between them and omelettes, you’re not doing it right. As you seem to realise. How fortunate that Mrs Mousey can. I am the Mrs Mousey in our house, as it were. I take ages, but woe betide you if you’re not at the table at the exact moment they’re ready. Needing a pee is no excuse.
My strengths, apart from what I’ve already bragged about, are curries, risottos, stews (especially vegetarian), frittatas.
I don’t seem to be much good at stir fries – always seem to end up an oily mess.
Stir fries were introduced due to an oil shortage. Tells you something.
Certainly over here in North America the texture of scrambled eggs is very similar to omelettes. Different beast altogether to the British/French version.
When friends drop in unexpectedly, I always fall back (quite literally on occasion) on my famous Egg Mess. You will need:
1 Egg/s (any quantity)
2 Some other stuff to put in the eggs
This, Raymondo, is what you do:
Break eggs into bowl or pan (nb not onto plate – you haven’t cooked them yet)
Depending on how they break:
1 With yolks intact – you have fried eggs. Heat briskly over a stove or toaster and add bits of other stuff, taking care not to puncture yolks. When cooked, scrape out onto plate, neatly breaking yolks. Mash into undifferentiated tissue with a spoon. Serves one. Or eight.
2 If yolks break – you have a delicious and nourishing omelette. Bother the eggs with a fork until the admixture of white and yolk is pleasing to the eye. Tip into a pan which you have left over full heat for a few minutes. Throw in other stuff (food-based! – Lego doesn’t work too well – trust me on this). Stir vigorously while whole thing shrivels to black bubbly lace, scrape onto plate. Then straight into bin.
Chocolate cake. Quite hard to get wrong, as long as you don’t over-mix. Mary Berry’s easy chocolate cake recipe is very good, as is Nigella’s old-fashioned chocolate cake (although the latter must be terrible for your arteries). Mmmm, tasty butter. Baking is one of the most therapeutic activities ever.
Not bad at soup but again, hard to get wrong: stick in blender, plenty of herbs and/or spices, done.
My attention to detail is generally not great so unless I am very focused everything turns out kind-of-OK but never great. Weirdly I’m really bad at things you just stick in the oven e.g. pizza; invariably wander off into a daydream and burn stuff.
Luckily I am in a house picky eaters (and carnivores) so my sub-par slop is prepared only for me.
My daughter does Mary Berry’s Chocolate cake really well. Clearing up after her however, oh dear…..
Heh. My son ‘helps’ me which seems to consist to cracking the eggs (and getting shell in the mixture) and then licking the spoon/bowl. I don’t mind that, essential childhood experience (see also Christmas pudding micture bowls of childhoods past).
I’m good at one pot stuff making use of whatever is in the fridge – stews, soups, curries. I’m no good at baking which is a regret, especially as my grandad was a baker and I’d like to think it was a genetic skill.
I’ve no idea if I can cook an egg or not as it wouldn’t occur to me to eat one, unless it was in a cake which as we’ve already seen is beyond my skill set. Once in a rare while I’ll do a microwave mug cake, and then I’ll use chick pea flour mixed with water or soya milk in place of the egg. It works very well.
Mince and Tatties.
Brown the minced beef with some onions. Drain. Add some carrots and then some Bisto (other brown meat powders can also be used – including Oxo – but really shouldn’t. It’s not as if Bisto is difficult to find) and water and then simmer for about 20 minutes or so. In parallel, peel and boil some “potatoes” (as I believe you hoity toity English call them). Don’t mash the “potatoes” once boiled, they should only be mashed in situ with the mince. Brown sauce can be added according taste on serving.
Drain????
I had a hankering you might be of Scottish stock. Obviously not hehe!
Draining is getting rid of the tastiest part. If you didn’t drain, there’d be no need for brown sauce.
Fair point! but then again my mum never drained and I added the brown sauce anyway. My brother too. I think it could be a generational thing, I’m sure my parents would never have added brown sauce.
I should point out that the first time we sent overseas on holiday, to Yugoslavia (don’t bother looking for it, it’s not there anymore) in the mid 80s, on a self catering trip, my mother tried to make mince and tatties using ingredients from the local supermarket.
I can cook:
Steak and Kidney Pie
That’s my job. Can’t cook much else, but I’ve achieved some form of consistent (almost) perfection with this one.
I can’t cook:
Fried bread
Never get the right balance of oil quantity, heat and timing.
Either undercooked or burnt to a frazzle
(Why don’t people just have toast instead?)
I’m great at one-pot wonders: pilaffs, jambalayas, chills, curries, bolognaise variants et al, anything where you start with chopped onions and a great big pan. What I call them depends on more on what goes in, as it depends on the fridge and larder contents. Same recipe with different ingredients really.
As I had ultimately had proven last night, I’m shit at barbies.
My wife and daughter are vegetarian so I’ve had to learn to cook a few veggie recipes.
Here’s a good one and it’s dead easy.
Carrot and lentil soup.
Heat some olive oil in a sturdy pan.
Grate 4 carrots and fry them in the oil.
Break up a vegetable stock cube in a jug of boiling water and add to the carrots.
Scoop in some red lentils.
add a shake of chilli powder and a shake of cumin.
Boil for 15 minutes. It will dry out so add more water if needed.
Puree with a hand blender directly in the pan ’til it’s smooth.
Serve with some hunks of crusty bread. Delicious.
Since we’re allowed to brag: I’m an amazing cook. If I can eat it, I can cook it. Same with baking, no problem. The only thing I struggle with (but I really haven’t tried it that much) is Asian cooking.
The main problem is that I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to make it without following a recipe, and I don’t like cooking from recipes. I enjoy getting a sudden wild idea and begin to chuck things in that weren’t supposed to go in that dish when I started to cook it. The only downside to that is that I rarely manage to replicate my best experiments (I still mourn an unbelievable pasta sauce I made once thirty years ago!)
I slavishly follow recipes for complicated things like curries (ie curries where you don’t just lob in a tablespoon of curry powder), because I figure all those ingredients are there for a reason, even if I can’t tell what it is.
But I mostly just cook. I have an ace chicken and black bean stew with smoked paprika that I made up out of my own brain that’s become one of my – ahem – signature dishes. It’s slightly different every time (and you can leave the chicken out, of course), but that doesn’t seem to matter, and all stews start out pretty much the same way anyway. Turns out that there are thousands of chicken and black bean stew recipes on that there internet, but mine’s the best, obviously.
I can cook most things, but with young children, it’s mostly pasta and tomato sauce, which isn’t really cooking – more heating. One thing I cook for them regularly is Friday pancakes and the 3 year old is a very willing helper – cracking eggs, stirring into flour, adding just enough milk at a time to make a smooth batter (in my dreams, but she does watch and observe, so I’m guessing she’s picking up good techniques.
The one thing I can’t cook is fat-free, wheat-free, gluten-free (there is a difference), dairy-free vegan pancakes – I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. No, as a assistant cook in a US residential retreat and we tried to cater for all tastes. Needless to say, the sticky, corn-based mess I deposited on the hot plate sat and festered until I scraped the thin burnt layer, flipped it, burned the other side, then dribbled the sludge on to a waiting plate. The assorted faddy eaters, I mean intolerant dieters, oh I don’t know what I mean – anyway, them lot, were ‘grateful for my efforts’
Quakers, eh? There’s no displeasing them.
I do a mean coq au vin. The secret it to really brown the shallots. Using red wine – a light Loire ideally – is a good trick too.
I can do the classic bed sit one pot as good as the next person – chilli, spag bol….
I used to be famous for my smoked sausage in cheese sauce over penne until such joys were denied me for dietary reasons (there’s no reason not to eat it but ooooh the calories).
I can’t and don’t want to cook anything poncy involving gelatine. Bleagh.
I thought that was going to be the old sausage in cider one there for a moment.
My repertoire was somewhat limited – I could cook a chilli and fry a reasonable steak. Pretty much everything else was beyond me. So I did a 2 day course in cooking basics, just for men (called “Gentleman’s Relish” – yes, I know …)
I’ve been able to repeat successfully a few things we were shown there – cauliflower soup, mackerel on toast and beef stew with dumplings, and I’m even finding it fun. I’m on the lookout for videos or written recipes that would suit newbies – any recommendations?
I can’t recommend Nigel Slater’s “Appetite” enough. One of the few books where I think I’ve cooked everything in it at least twice, and lots of the recipes way more than that. He’s a great, unfussy cook and writer. No bullshit, really good food that you can cook any day. His two-volume “Tender” is amazing too.
Nigella’s “Kitchen” is equally good. I’ve never had one of her recipes turn out bad. I like “Nigella Bites” too, but that’s less versatile.
Bill Grainger is always good value too. “Bill’s Everyday Asian” (which is not, repeat not, porn) and “Bill’s Italian Food” are great.
(On the flip side, Simon Hopkinson’s “The Good Cook” was recommended to me and I’ve found it absolutely fucking useless. One of those “you can find unicorn jizz in powdered form in any local Atlantean grocer” books. I still see it recommended a lot and I’ve never made anything worth eating from it. Similarly, the Peyton and Byrne baking book is extremely hit and miss. I used their brownie recipe the other day, and was super sceptical as I was making it. Should’ve trusted my instincts: they were bloody awful.)
I too like Nigel Slater, unfortunately his books are of course Anglo-oriented so his fish recipes, for example, don’t relate to Australia. But I like him, and his TV shows etc
Nigella – hmm. She’s good.
Bill Grainger – he’s an Aussie, very internationally ambitious, we have one of his cookbooks which is OK, but he’s more of a compiler than a cook. But good recipes.
I do two pasta dishes, brilliantly:
Beef Fillet with Tagliatelle –
Put a large pan of water on to boil.
Finely chop a small red onion.
Chop a teaspoon of fresh rosemary.
Finely chop a clove of garlic.
Chop 2 celery sticks.
Frying pan or wok, to a med-high heat.
Add tablespoon of olive oil.
Add the above ingredients and soften.
Cut 200gm beef fillet into thin strips (get the tail-end from a butcher – it’ll be cheaper.) Once sliced, season lightly with salt and pepper.
Brown the sliced beef in the onion, rosemary, celery and oil.
Once the beef is that browny/grey colour add a tin of good quality chopped tomatoes (Cirio Tuscan Tomatoes are widely available and were recommended by the chef)
Add 150ml of good Italian wine, stir well and leave to simmer for about 10-12 minutes.
Take 200gm of Tagliatelli (if dried, it probably needs 10 minutes. Whatever it says on the packet for al dente, take off a minute.) add to the boiling water. Add salt.
Once the pasta is cooked, drain it (I want one of those pasta baskets that fits in the pan – you just take it out and all the delicious pasta water and starch stays in the pan) but save some of the pasta water.
Add the pasta to the meat & tomato mix, add a ladle or two of the pasta water and stir well (or ‘flip’ off the side of the pan, if you’re flash) and season well, tasting constantly.
Add 50gm of unsalted butter and some chopped parsley, stir until butter is melted, and serve.
It’s a Theo Randall recipe from either My Simple Italian or his book Pasta. I love his recipes because they only have 6 or 7 main ingredients. That one takes 20 minutes from start of prep to plate.
The other dish is also from the books, is similar but uses Italian sausages as mince – you squeeze the sausagemeat, in little lumps, out of the skin, which is strangely satisfying. It is done with onion, rosemary and sausage, as above, tin of tomatoes, 200gm of penne rigate. Once you’ve added the pasta to the sauce, stir in 2 tablespoons of double cream. It is bloody lush.
I love the look of the new Jamie book, so I’ll be trying a few dishes from that.
We watched the Jamie programme on Channel 4 last night. The Sesame Tuna looked great, actually it all looked good.
I do Jamie’s chicken and chorizo paella regularly for our Saturday night dinner. I add some smoked pancetta at the start and I cheat by using cooked chicken. At the end I add prawns and mussels. Delicious!
It’s easy peasy to make but be prepared to stand over the cooker for half an hour.
Jamies recipes are all pretty reliable, once you ignore the nonsense around 15 or 30 minutes and are prepared to work for an hour or so.
Gordon Ramsay books are also good and doable.
Jamie’s Italy has a chilli prawns in white wine/sun-dried tomatoes sauce over spag (I prefer wholemeal) – never fails and delicious. I buy double the prawns needed as I nibble them as I cook.
Fish & beans.
Fill half a plate with fillets of fish. Almost any fish will do. Mackerel, salmon, trout, cod, haddock, basa all work very well. Pilchards and sardines not so much. Cover with another plate & start cooking in a microwave on full power for 4:30.
Drain and rinse a tin of beans. Almost any beans will do. Butter, black-eyed, kidney, cannelloni, broad, baked beans, mushy peas, chick peas and sweet corn all work very well. With 3 minutes to go, remove the fish from the microwave. Fill the remaining half of the plate with the beans, re-cover and continue cooking.
When time is up, grind plenty of black pepper all over the fish & beans. You can vary by using chilli flakes, piri-piri, dried garlic, lime or lemon juice instead.
Serve with bread and butter. Or toast.
Delicious, nutritious and ridiculously easy. I can live on this for weeks.
Hmmm … interesting
Sounds lush. We do a butter bean and Toulouse sausage casserole which involves chilli flakes which is fab in the winter, ideally with olive ciabatta.
Yes, I make something similar.
I consider myself a good cook but only because I read the recipes and clean up as I go. I quite enjoy putting together a good roast meal for the family and the oohs and aahs make it worthwhile on the occasions when it all comes together OK.
My nemesis is the gravy. I find draining the fat really hard and sometimes forget to do it. I just chuck some conflour in the roasting tray with the juices until it becomes a sludge. Then I use the water from the vegetables and hopefully achieve some form of consistency that resembles a reasonable gravy. My wife reckons using stock cubes is the devil’s work, so I don’t do that – but sometimes I feel like rebelling.
What I can do is a roast beef, pork, lamb…chicken or turkey if I’m pressed but I just find them annoying to carve and serve. Specially the taters (too easy), and the gravy. And BC, if you’re making the sludge, don’t put it on the heat till you’ve worked the sludge into the liquid and it’s smoothed out, then turn the heat on. The trick with the gravy is never stop stirring it till it reaches the boil, then you can ease off. I use a whisk or a dessert spoon making sure the back of the spoon is mashing anything that looks like a lump.
On a related matter, sage and onion stuffing is my favourite substance in the known universe. Better than beer.
What I can’t do is baking – cakes and breads are a dark art for me. I always bugger it up.
BC…that’s actually how you make gravy, though I prefer to use flour rather than cornflour. Takes longer but tastes better, IMHO. And if there’s a little bit too much fat in it, well, it’s not health food.
This!
I might occasionally pour off the thinnest of the fat, but the pan leavings are the soul of a good gravy. For me there are two kinds of gravy: proper British, and a sort of thin but explosively tasty jus type deal. For the former, I’ll chuck in a tablespoon or so of plain flour and get the fat and caramelised pan bits scraped together to form the sludge. Then a little bit of veg water, whisked in pretty hard with a balloon whisk so you get something that looks more like a traditional roux. Then keep adding the water til you get a nice smooth gravy. Sometimes I’ll add stock (Marigold bouillon is the greatest stock powder in the history of civilisation). Gravy browning is the devil’s work.
For a pan juice type deal, I do get rid of much more fat (pouring off more or less everything that *will* pour, using a slotted spoon to stop any good bits escaping, and I use a much smaller amount of flour, just to bring the pan bits together. Then a load of wine which you bubble furiously to reduce it a bit while whisking like a bastard. This works particularly well with a lemony, garlicky roast chicken (which, as we all know, is the best roast dinner available).
I was forced to learn the basics of cookery about 7 years ago when I moved into a flatshare and discovered (blushes) there was no microwave. I learnt from reading student cookbooks, and especially recommend an excellent series called Nosh For Students. Brilliantly, they have a photo of every dish described in the book so you have a decent idea of what the hell the finished item is meant to look like.