A Year In My Kitchen: Brown paper packages tied up with string…

Birthday feast number three.

My Favourite Crunchy Squid with Lime & Chilli Mayonnaise

Unbelievable Root Vegetable Salad

Grilled Chilli Dressing

Homemade Ice Cream

Plus a Pink Velvet Cake (not Jamie though!)

I think I’ve mentioned I’ve been taking orders and Ween had baggsed the crunchy squid recipe a while ago, so of course it had to be done for her birthday. And thanks very much Jamie for recommending serving the crunchy squid with the root vegie salad which apparently goes really well with the grilled chilli dressing. Hello menu choices made.

First of all I made the lime chilli mayo – mayo with chopped fresh chillis, lime and lemon zest and juice and S&P. Very zingy.

I then sliced the vegies for the salad. I sharpened my Global knife, got in position and got stuck in. There is nothing more therapeutic than concentrating on finely chopping vegetables, especially when you’re knife is sharp, the music is loud and the vegies are varied. I had carrots, fresh beetroots, fennel, witlof, celery and radishes. A veritable rainbow of root vegies! They looked fantastic and I had a lovely chopping time. It was all quite Geena Davis a la The Long Kiss Goodnight – don’t you just love the scene where her previous life as an assassin first starts to shine through and her husband and kid start throwing her all kinds of things from the crisper and she just keeps on chopping like a highly skilled and trained killer. Oh wait, that’s what she is! Well, I’m no spy or assassin, but I don’t mind a bit of knife skill in the kitchen!

Once the chopping was done, I made the dressing. Jamie gives two options for grilling the chillis. Either hold the whole chillis with tongs over a naked flame on the gas stove, rotating them til they’re chargrilled all over (pricked a few times with a knife so they don’t burst. Could you imagine?! Firey.)OR as with me, if you don’t have a gas stove, pop them under a hot grill for a few minutes. Once done, put them in a bowl and cover with glad wrap for 15 minutes, so they soften in their own steam. Then I peeled them, scraped out the seeds and finely chopped. Add olive oil, lemon juice and finely chopped mint. Dressing done.

Finally the squid. Unlike the norm of scoring then slicing then cooking, this time it was scoring, cooking then slicing. So I got my oil nice and hot, I scored the squid (tubes flattened out, but whole – I’m not even sure that makes sense, but you know what I mean right?!), dipped them in seasoned flour then dropped them into the oil. They curled into long tunnels of curly squid and once they were cooked, I sliced them into curly strips of squid. There was no real flavour to the squid except for the little bit of S&P in the flour, but once it was served up with the lime chilli mayo and the sensational salad and grilled chilli dressing, it was perfection.

And finally, the birthday cake! I ventured outside of Mr Oliver’s bubble and went for a classic AWW cake. Until recently, when I ate one of Weens specialty Red Velvet cupcakes, I actually had no idea what red velvet was all about, but Ween’s cupcakes were so spectacular, that when I saw a recipe for a quadruple-decker Pink Velvet cake, I knew I had to make it! And you know what, it looked exactly like the picture! This may not be the best way for me to gauge success in the kitchen, but it’s a big part of it for me. If it looks like the picture I’m aiming for, then I can be so happy about that, I don’t even care about the flavour. Sad. Luckily, in this instance, it was satisfying on both fronts!

I served the cake up with the homemade ice cream that I’d made on the weekend, which being rock hard, had several sessions in the wave to soften it up, before we could break through with the scoop. But the flavour? Just like ice cream!

I’ll admit I was surprised by this, coz Jamie’s ice cream is quite simply custard (cream, milk sugar, vanilla, eggs) cooked, cooled and frozen. Though I can’t imagine normal ice cream is as simple as this (hence the doubt), it can’t be too far off, coz the homemade was almost as good as the Blue Ribbon.