well, i've been getting quite a bit of abuse from my "myriad of special acquaintances" about lack of updates. my excuse is that i've been doing very little of interest, so have nothing to post about... but maybe a post about nothing is slightly better than nothing at all (-hah! no maybe about it for all of you out there with desk jobs, eh?)
so, what?
well, i cooked a roast last weekend... nothing special to you perhaps, but it was a heroic endeavour for me for many reasons: 1)i've never done a roast before in my life, 2)i usually only do one-pot cooking that doesn't require synchronisation, 3)the occasion was the inviting of some work colleagues over for the first time, and i wanted to be able to serve them an edible dinner (stress!), 4)i did it all by myself (NB-including grocery shopping, but excluding gravy), 5)i got the recipe confused and cooked the meat for almost 3hours, instead of 1 and 1/2hours, and 6)i was cooking for 8 people.
a marathon effort indeed. baking a "how-to-win-friends-with-Lish" cake (an awesome cake - see recipe below) beforehand took my total cooking time up to 6 hours straight.
matters were also not helped by the fact that while i was cooking for 8, we unfortunately only have 6 chairs in our house, including hash and claire's wheely desk chairs. so we had to drag folding chairs up from the garage and chock our guests up to table level with pillows. this was such a poor effort that one of our guests opted to sit on claire's gym-ball all night
instead:)
but all that aside? i made a FAN-BLOODY-TASTIC roast (or roasts - did a beef AND a chicken roast)... i have no qualms whatsover in saying my dinner rocked - no-one even spoke for the first half hour cos they were too busy eating. we had to save our conversation for afters:)
Delicious.
How To Win Friends With Lish
155 g butter
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cups S/R flour
3/4 cups cocoa
3 eggs
1 mystery ingredient
3 hairs from sham beard
1 big bag dried mango
time (to burn)
180 degrees C*
*as you might be able to tell, this is not exactly how you make the cake... but it is faithfully copied down from how Lish wrote it on my shirt back in 2003. i don't use the hair or the dried mango or quite as much butter, but i DO use a whole orange, orange & mango juice and dried peaches. work out what you want to do yourself!
