This is the usual pivot-post. Ease you in with some games, teach you how to bake, and finish up with some light food criticism. Bon appétit

It (still) Takes Two?

Yes, we are still playing It Takes Two. It also takes enough time that we’ve got plenty more to play. I have been slightly side-tracked by other games (Returnal, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33) and the other half by Skyrim. It turns out it takes two people playing the same game on the same console. This isn’t to minimise how great It Takes Two is.

It’s a beautifully designed game requiring co-operation at every turn. I grew up with local co-op games where one player could compensate for the other if there was a major discrepancy in ability. That is not the case here. Sure you can hand the controller over at particularly tense points, but there are many bits that require you both to hit a minimum level of skill. Who knew a game about divorce could stress a relationship?

Bread

My breadmaking has eased into an easy rut, with dough mixed on Friday night for a Saturday morning bake. The no-knead rolls are exactly that. Simple. Easy. Fast. And delicious, of course. They’re also great if you have a five year old who wants to be involved in anything and everything in the kitchen. The recipe started out from this one (introduced to me by my mother) but evolved to be even more simple. I suspect I’ve detailed it before, but I’ll rehash it once again:

No Knead Bread Rolls

Ingredients

600g of white flour (strong white, plain, or anything you damn well please) plus a quarter cup or so

2 tsp salt

1 tsp fast acting yeast

450g water (room temperature or cold)

1 egg beaten

Sesame seeds

Method

(Start the night before if you want to bake in the morning, or that morning if you’re baking in the evening)

1. Mix the dry ingredients (flour, yeast, salt) in a large bowl. A whisk can be helpful here.
2. Add the water and stir the mixture until everything is combined well. (It will look sticky and kind of gross, but don’t worry. The magic happens when you’re not looking)
3. Cover the bowl with a tea towel (or clingfilm or anything you feel would do an adequate job of covering some dough, without being too precious about it) and leave it for the bulk rise overnight (I usually leave it around 10 hours)
4. Do not be alarmed. You will be looking at an even larger, stickier mess than the previous evening. Put about a quarter cup of flour onto your counter and dump the dough onto that. Use a dough scraper or similar to fold the dough up and ensure it’s well coated. Fold the dough over a few times and add flour to stop it sticking as necessary.
5. Cut the dough into 12 equal(ish) pieces. I usually start by cutting the big lump in thirds, then each third into quarters. It works well…sometimes. (You can weigh each one but that defeats some of the convience of the process.)
6. Take each piece in turn and fold the dough over, turn, and repeat. Do this until you’ve built a little tension in the dough, then place them seam down onto a baking tray.
7. Stick your oven on as hot as it can go (or to 200 degrees fan, depending on how daredevil-ish you’re feeling)
8. Allow the rolls to prove for twenty minutes. They won’t appear to rise much, but this is an important step.
9. (Optional) Glaze with a beaten egg then sprinkle with sesame seeds.
10. Turn down the oven to 200 degrees Celsius, fan. Bake the rolls for 15 minutes, then rotate the tray and bake for another 5 minutes. Take the rolls out when they are golden brown.
11. Place the rolls on a wire cooling rack and allow to cool a bit before serving. If you slice them when they are too freshly out of the oven, you will get a doughy cut surface regardless of whether they are cooked through or not.

This recipe goes up to 11.

Once more with Gusto, please

Despite a burst in enthusiasm towards the end of January, I have been in a slight cooking funk since Christmas. It’s easy to get out of the habit of meal planning, and stuck in the “grab things from the cupboard and fridge and make anything” phase. This approach is fine to a point, and I am much better at creating meals out of relatively little these days, but coming up with a coherent dish after a long day at work and battle with a small child can be rather wearing. Enter meal kit delivery services. We have tried both HelloFresh and Gusto in the past, and they were decent.

There were some recipes that worked really well. Some, not so well. Some consisted of “Put chicken in oven. Put potatoes in oven. This is your chicken with potatoes”. I jest, but only slightly. I know they aren’t aimed at developing skills beyond the basic but some of the approaches are nonsensical. We avoided them in the wake of Covid-19 when the supply of decent ingredients dried up, but we are back on Gusto to inject a bit of excitement into the week.

First up, BBQ chicken, sweet potato mash, and dressed green beans. The method of breadcrumbing the chicken was bizarre, and didn’t really work as predicted. It involved beating butter with BBQ sauce, then spreading it over chicken. If you have ever tried to butter raw chicken (If you have, please see yourself out. I can wait. The door is over there.) then you can understand that it doesn’t really work. Moreover, sprinkling panko breadcrumbs on buttered chicken does not a coating make. The chicken was a bit squeaky too, and not the most appealing.

Next up, chicken katsu bao with smashed cucumber quick pickle and a soy-sesame rice. This time the chicken breading made more sense, and involved a traditional approach of dipping the chicken in flour, then mild, then breadcrumbs. An egg added would have worked better, but I suspect they were trying to minimise the number of required staple ingredients for those who do not necessarily stock eggs.

The rice was unnecessarily heavily seasoned. With this sort of meal, plain rice would have been fine, but adding sesame oil and soy sauce distracted from the other flavours. The katsu worked well and the curry sauce was excellent considering how it was made, but the buns toughened as they became a bit cool. And who the hell knows what was going on with the cucumber. Preparation involved hitting it with a rolling pin, presumably to emulate that “cucumber I forgot about for three weeks in the salad drawer” feel. Oi muchim, the Korean cucumber salad, would have been a much better choice and is a superior side dish to “slightly sad smushed-cumber”.

I couldn’t help but make a few tweaks with the leftover chicken, and served it over plain white rice with the remaining Japanese curry sauce, with sides of edamame beans, quick pickled carrots, and oi muchim. If you’re looking for a recipe, Gusto, you know where to find me. I know bao buns are trendy, but a rice bowl is hard to beat.

I was quite impressed by the cod with pea risotto and prosciutto. Unusually for a supposedly quick meal, it involved making a risotto. If you are familiar with the process, it is not quick, and it is not convenient. It involves standing over a pan, adding a small amount of stock, stirring, waiting for it to absorb, then repeating….about a thousand times.

So yes, the risotto was good because risotto IS good. The cod was wet. I know it’s a fish, but it seemed more watery than usual. The parsley panko crumb (can you see any themes emerging?) was nice but fell off almost immediately. The baked prosciutto (I will learn the spelling, damn it) was a perfect touch, and something I will be nicking for future risottos. So I will give you that one, Gusto.

Fourth meal incoming. Pork with roast potatoes, onion gravy, and spring greens. This one worked really nicely. It was straightforward but a great combination, although some of the steps weren’t entirely logical. I added the juices from the pork steaks to the gravy to boost it, and spent a lot more time reducing the gravy than the recipe suggested. You will find that you can skip and combine steps, including starting one ingredient cooking while preparing another. The recipes are designed to be as simple and as linear as possible but the reality of cooking is that it is flexible and you can change quite a lot while still achieving a similar result.

And the last was a sweet potato and corn curry. This one was fine but it felt like a poor imitation of the spicy peanut chicken stew over at BBC Good Food. There’s only so much you can do when you are confined to a limited cooking time, so it was good for what it was. It was not, however, photogenic hence the lack of a picture.

So was it worth it? We’ve got a few more ideas for combinations and better ways of doing things, and it got us out of the habit of repeating the same meals over and over again. I appreciated that more of the packaging is recyclable than in the past, too. Some of the choices were weird, and clearly done to turn a simple side dish into a named “thing”. I am here to say it’s okay to have a simple dish. Not everything has to be a “thing” or be a “smokey crispy thing”. It can be food, and that is perfectly fine with me.