History of my culinary creations

My partner suggested that I do a post on some of the various meals that I've made in the past, so here it is.

Now, I did do a cooking course.  I was essentially taken to Hull College and forced to sign up on a "Can't Cook Will Cook" cooking for beginners course that I did in the autumn of 2009 (I remember the year because I missed the last two weeks due to my son being born).  The reason why I was taken to do the course was because of "the soup".

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of "the soup", but my other half had been making some vegetable soup one afternoon, and left me to finish the soup off.  Now the thing you must understand about me is that when it comes to food, I like to muck about with it and experiment.  Not all these experiments work, admittedly.  But some do - when I still lived with my parents I made a curry that included sausages and the vinegary purple water that was in a jar of pickled beetroot (after the beetroot had all been eaten) and that was lovely.  Yes, the sausages were purple, but it still tasted good.

Anyhow, I decided this soup needed something, and what I elected to put in it was a tin of peas.

The peas overwhelmed the other vegetables, and gave me basically a pea and vegetable stew, which wasn't what I'd been aiming for.  So I added mint sauce instead.

The final product was basically a minty pea soup with an occasional other vegetable thrown in.  If you're thinking of trying it - don't.

So I attended a cooking course, which I have to say was really good.  And from there I went on to make many other creations, some of which I'll touch on below.

The first creation that I remember was my jaffa cake jelly.  Not the most subtle of creations, this was a bowl with twelve jaffa cakes in it, and they were set in jelly.  Very nice although my other half did point out that there was somewhere in the region of a 1000 calories in it.

Okay - it doesn't look that great.  But we ate it.

The first meal that springs to mind was my evil carrots.  These were created out of necessity, the necessity being that I wanted chips, but I didn't want to chip and cook potatoes (this was before we bought the air-fryer - an amazing piece of kit for cooking potatoes) and I couldn't leave the house because I was looking after my son, and he had chickenpox and so was infectious.  This was on a lunchtime and I was shocked to find that no takeaways delivered before 3pm.  There was one exception, Dominos, but they were very expensive to get one pizza delivered - not so bad if you wanted two but I didn't have the appetite for that amount of cheese, meat and bread and at the time my son wasn't really into pizza (he'll have a little bit now occasionally).

So, I chopped up a load of carrots, coated them in curry powder, and fried them.

Mmm.. carrots?!?

But I wanted to return to my dessert success.  So I got a packet of weightwatchers cookie mix, and instead of making a dozen cookies, I made two.

Two BIG cookies.

Which shape do you prefer?

These were baked on oven trays, so were basically the size of two pizzas.  It took a while to eat them, and needed the aid of a number of relatives, but we got there.

More recently I made corned beef piccadilly masala - that went very well over a couple of meals.

Thinking about that one, I do have a bit of a weakness for vinegar, not entirely sure why, but I do like when having chips to have enough vinegar on them that you choke a bit when you breathe in whilst leaning over them.  (Vinegar in this case obviously must be accompanied by salt).

And just a couple of days ago, I made a curry with a dozen Scottish meatballs, four cubes of frozen chopped chillies, and an entire pot of Mr Huda's Tandoori Paste.

I tried using a plastic spatula to begin with, but the spices melted it.

The meatballs were defrosted, cooked in a pan with the other ingredients, and then baked in an oven for twenty minutes to finish them off.  I mashed them up a fair bit too so that the chillies and Tandoori Paste could really get into them and infuse their flavours.  The Tandoori Paste is supposed to be coated on as a marinade, or a few teaspoons full in a curry, so I wondered if I'd be able to actually eat this when it was ready.  It turned out amazing, with most of it eaten last night with some Uncle Bens Peshwari Rice (that's really nice too - I almost always go for one flavour of Uncle Bens Express Rice or another) and the rest for lunch today.  A sprinkling of grated cheese doesn't hurt either.

And for tea I defrosted a Turkey Curry I made ages ago, and had it with chips and scraps!  Delicious! (but perhaps not overly healthy I admit)

Let me know your favourite cooking inventions, drop me a comment.

While I'm blogging, this is the last call for questions for my fortune telling video that I'm doing on Tuesday.  If you don't know what this is, I'm going to be answering questions about peoples futures with the aid of the Internet, books, and mainly a box of Vitasia Fortune Cookies - apparently they're called Gluckskekse in German?  Anyhow I've got seven or eight questions but I have ten fortune cookies so I can maybe answer a couple more.  If you do have a question leave it as a comment, or email me at mike.raven@gmail.com.  If possible it'd be great to have your name and if you have a blog or website or YouTube channel please include it and I'll include a link in my video.  Thanks!