Here are a few recipe ideas for when you are in the bath late on Sunday morning and you hear the doorknocker being applied to the surrounding woodwork with startling vigour. First wait for your partner to poke his head round the bathroom door and hiss that the people he had invited for next week (neither of whom you have met and one of whom is a vegetarian) have turfed up a week early.
Pull hard on a contemplative cigarette you happen to have on your person and do a quick inventory of all the meatless comestibles you have stashed around the place.
Creep damply upstairs and apply four inches of "No, No It's Lovely That You Were Able to Make It Today" by Esteé Lauder, whilst trying ineffectually to light another cigarette with your lipstick. Throw lipstick at cat and set fire to nose, having now found lighter, but forgotten you have taken the cigarette out of your mouth. So easily done.
Arrive downstairs with gracious smile blu-tacked to space where nose and mouth used to be and spend five minutes with guests chit-chatting about this and that in frantic attempt to find out what sort of vegetarian you are dealing with. Decide quite quickly that needs must and cut rudely across earnest conversation about company marketing strategies and say "So do you eat dairy, or what?" and on discovering that the answer is yes, float effortlessly into kitchen pausing only to extract a lipstick from the cat's ear.
First things first. Make a pudding. I strongly recommend (and believe I have done before now) that you keep at least one half pint carton of Long Life double cream in the fridge. It has a shelf life of - oh weeks - and is indistinguishable from the fresh when whipped with a small amount of caster sugar and some vanilla extract. The quickest thing I know is a proper Swiss Roll.
- 4 eggs
- 6oz caster sugar
- 5 oz self-raising flour
Heat oven to GM5 or equivalent. Have shelf one slot above centre.
First, line a Swiss roll tin or baking tray with cling-film wrap - make sure it's not the non-PVC type. For emergencies, since one shouldn't do it too often, it saves a huge amount of time; not only do you not have
to line the tin with specially-cut greaseproof paper, but once you have eased the cling-film from the tin and tipped the Swiss roll out onto some paper or a teacloth sprinkled with sugar (to stop it sticking) the film peels off the cake like magic. Or you can line the tin with mitre-cut greaseproof paper if you prefer.
Separate the eggs. Beat the whites to a meringue, add half the sugar, beat again until thick and glossy. Add the remaining sugar to the egg yolks and beat the crap out of it, until pale and thick. If you hold the bowl almost sideways once the mixture has thickened, you will get more air over the beaters and hence into the mixture – it's amazing how much the volume increases. Mix the two gently together. Sift in the flour and fold in gently. Put the mixture into the tin, level it out, give the tin a sharp rap on the work surface to break any air bubbles and bake for about 10 minutes.
Meanwhile make something else.
I decided to fry a couple of onions with garlic and mix them with some steamed vegetables, made a strong cheese sauce, added some dill and some smoked paprika and mixed the vegetables with half the sauce. I kept the other half covered with cling-film to stop a skin forming and let the vegetables cool. Then I made eight large pancakes. I smeared the pancakes with a handy jar of red pepper tapenade (Tesco's 'Finest' range and extremely nice) then plonked a generous spoonful of vegetables mixture in the middle, wrapped up the pancakes and put in a large serving dish with the rest of the sauce poured over the top, gratineéd it quickly with the cheese and put it in the bottom of the oven, the heat now turned up to GM7. I also put a handy punnet of cherry tomatoes on a baking sheet, drizzled them with olive oil and roasted them near the top of the oven.
While this was going on I filled the now cold Swiss roll some apricot jam, topped with the whipped cream, flavoured with sugar and almond extract. I kept about 2oz cream back from a 10oz pot.
Cherry tomatoes were poured into a dish, a can of rinsed borlotti beans added, some torn basil leaves and a few rings of finely sliced raw onion, plenty of seasoning and some vinaigrette were mixed in.
Some of those incredibly useful half-baked breads were slung in the oven - they take eight minutes and Sainsbury do some Italian ones that are not much thicker than outsize breadsticks - delicious and interesting.
The pancakes were removed from the oven, drizzled with the remaining cream and some more dill tops and served with the hot bread and the roastedtomato and borlotti salad. It all went perfectly.
If only I had realised I had my skirt tucked into my knickers.
