Normally, Colin loves my cooking. Normally, Colin says he doesn’t have a sweet tooth. Normally, this isn’t entirely true.

Normally, I’m a messy cook. Normally, I’m quite disorganised in the kitchen. Normally, Colin tidies up after me. Normally, Colin doesn’t have man-flu.

The menu was to be:

Purple-sprouting broccoli with hollandaise sauce

Scallops

Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, vegetables and gravy

Lemon tart

The hollandaise sauce split. I ditched it because I hadn’t got very far with it, although it was a tremendous waste of butter and the egg. I was a little dubious about the egg to start with because, whereas it didn’t smlee when I cracked it, I did manage to crack it when I was simply holding it. I’m sure that’s not supposed to happen. So, I put another batch on. This batch turned out ok, except that the recipe says it’s fine to leave it over the pan of water for up to half an hour, but it wasn’t. That was a lie. When it was done, I took the pan off the heat, and put the broccoli on to steam. During that time, the hollandaise split. The recipe said if it split, to put the bowl is icy cold water and whisk like billy-oh. I did, but it didn’t work, so out came the electric mixer. That didn’t help, so I just left it. When I next looked, the cold water had caused the sauce to solidify – but at least it had re-emulsified. I put the bowl back over the heat, and stuck the elctric mixer in it. It seemed to have recovered well. By this time, the broccoli was done, so I plated it up, and stirred the sauce before pouring it over. That simple act of stirring caused it to curdle again. Still, Colin guzzled it – a good sign.

The next course was a diversion from tradition and was the main course instead of the fish course, because the sauce had took so long and the meat was ready before I knew it. There was no time to do any veg, although if I’d thought, I could have stuck some frozen peas on while I was doing the gravy. Anyway, that course was really very nice, with the meat being done to perfection, thanks to Colin’s ability at sums. Colin gets annoyed when I ask him to work out how long the meat will take, so I proved to him that it was best that way: I worked out it would take over 20,000 minutes.

Next was the fish course. It was scallops and garlicky butter with toast because I forgot to put the bread in the oven and the garlic was slightly more browned than desired. Still, it was nice.

Dessert was an unmitigated disaster. If I hadn’t been quite so hungover on Saturday after being out dancing till four in the morning, I might have had the sense to make tarts then, so at least they’d have been set. As it was, they weren’t, despite having been in the freezer for quite some time. Also, they were “too big” and “too sweet”. It didn’t get eaten, which just shows how horrible it was deemed. The cat liked it, though.

What’s more is that I’m a terribly untidy and messy cook, not cleaning up after myself like Colin does and tells me to do. Usually, I cook and he cleans up. Not this time, however: he came down with man-flu in time to not be able to do it. Hence the kitchen looks like someone’s been cooking in there for a year and never washed up so much as a fork in all that time. I’m really only writing this entry because I’m putting off cleaning it up: I don’t even know where to start.

categories: Food and Drink
tags: Colin, Domestic Goddessery, Dusty, events, making things