Alternatively, you could just scroll down to the bottom of the post to view the Gallery Of Ken in all his glory – the complete collection of every Cross-Dressing Ken Cake that I’ve ever made and managed to get a photograph of.  Enjoy!

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For the icing

For the agar jellies

Now what will you do with it?

If you are planning to make your own agar jellies for this, I recommend starting them a day or two before.  They keep for months, really, though they tend to get sticky over time.  But the important thing is that they work best if they get 24 hours to dry out at room temperature.

Start, then, by soaking your agar in a largeish saucepan for at least twenty minutes, or until you remember you left it there.  I use this time to make my citric acid solution (easiest to do in large batches – it keeps indefinitely and can be used for many other kinds of confectionery, or just to make things taste fizzy), and to measure out all my other ingredients.

Bring your agar solution to the boil and simmer gently for a couple of minutes until it is allegedly clear or you are tired of waiting for it to become so.  Pour in the sugar, raise the heat, and let the whole thing boil merrily until it reaches 105°C.  Do keep an eye on it – there’s a reason I told you to use a largeish saucepan, and that reason will become messily apparent if your saucepan is too small and your heat too enthusiastic.

When the solution reaches 105°C, remove it from the heat and stir in the glucose syrup.  Let it stand until the temperature of the syrup reduces to 65°C.  You need to do this because if you add the citric acid too soon, the jellies won’t set.  You can use this time to line four 15cm square containers (or as close to an area of 225cm squared as is practicable) with baking paper, and getting out four bowls for the four flavours (need I say that this is, of course, much simpler if you decide to make one or two flavours from a batch, rather than four?  Though you then do wind up with a terrifying amount of jelly).

Add the citric acid to the agar syrup, and stir well.  Divide between the four bowls – you should have about 250g per bowl.  For each bowl, stir in one of the collections of flavours and colours.  Make sure the colour is good and bright (pastel agar jellies impress nobody), and taste to check that the flavour is right, before pouring your jelly into its container to set.  Leave for 24 hours to set and dry out – it will actually set much faster than this, but the longer you leave it out at this stage, the better chance you have that the agar won’t return to goo before you want it to.

When the agar jellies are set, sprinkle them with caster sugar, and put more caster sugar in a shallow bowl.  Then take to them either with a knife to cut out squares or diamonds, or use nifty miniature cutters to make hearts, circles or stars.  Drop the individual jellies into the bowl of caster sugar as you go, toss them to coat properly with sugar, and then set aside ready to use!

Now make the cake.  Preheat the oven to 170°C, fan forced if possible, or this cake will take forever.  Put one of the racks at the lowest point in the oven, and remove the other from the oven entirely.  Get out a flat tray and put it on the oven rack, ready to hold the Dolly Varden tin.  (Trust me, balancing the Dolly Varden tin on the oven rack directly is a fool’s game – it’s amazing how easily those things tip over, and then you have the most appalling mess imaginable.) Grease the Dolly Varden tin and line the base with baking paper.

Get out four bowls – maybe even the same ones you used for the jellies yesterday! – and prepare your flavouring and colouring ingredients, because once you get to the point of adding them, the baking powder and self-raising flour will already be working, and the faster you get the batter in the oven, the better.  So, zest your lemon into one bowl and your lime into another, and push your raspberries through a seive into the third bowl.  Have your colourings and blue curaçao on standby.

Bring your butter to room temperature or warmer by whatever means available to you.  Beat it with the sugar and vanilla until creamy, then add the eggs, one by one.  Stir in the almond meal, baking powder and self-raising flour, and then the milk, so that you have a nice dropping consistency.

Ken contemplates his fate. And turns to drink.

Now, working quickly, divide the mixture between your four bowls.  You want to wind up with blue, green, yellow, and reddish purple colours, so once you have added the various flavours, add a suitable amount of colouring to get the tint you want.  The blue curaçao (in bowl four) brings its own tint.

Layer the four colours into your Dolly Varden tin and put it into the oven.  Bake for about 1 1/2 hours, or until it passes the skewer test.

Be warned – it could take a lot longer than this.  Or less time.  I have no idea why this recipe is so inconsistent, and have my suspicions about the cake tin.  Let it rest in the tin for a few minutes, then loosen with a spatula and turn out.  Leave to cool.

When the cake is cool, prepare the icing.  Don’t worry, you’re on the home stretch!  Soften the butter and beat it until smooth, then sift in the icing sugar.  Beat well, adding enough almond milk to get a nice, spreadable consistency.  Add colourings or flavourings of choice, then using a palette knife if you have one or a butter knife if you don’t, spread onto the cake.  It will make a fairly thin layer, but the coverage will be good.  Incidentally, spreading the icing away from you gets you a smoother finish, usually.

Use a sharp knife to cut a hole in the top of the cake – about 2 inches deep and 1 inch round is right, but basically, look at the base of your Ken’s torso, and make a hole that shape.

Stick Ken into the cake.  Congratulations, you have made a Ken in a dress!

Now decorate Ken with all those lovely agar jellies if you made them, or with anything else that takes your fancy if you didn’t.

Add any finishing touches, such as edible glitter, a headpiece of some kind, and maybe some Mardi Gras beads and voila!  You have Eurovision Ken…

… complete with costume-reveal marble cake!

(And that, O my readers, is how I spent my weekend…)

Variations

In terms of food allergies, this cake works just fine with cow’s milk or soy milk if you can’t eat almonds (just use 400 g self-raising flour and skip the almond meal and baking powder).  It’s easily made dairy free with Nuttelex, and a good gluten-free flour mix will make it gluten-free.  If you don’t use raspberries, it will also be low-fructose, but you might want to add a different flavour in for your pink cake section.  Though there is nothing wrong with vanilla, of course.  Vegans might want to use the lemon and coconut cake from Veganomicon as a base – I don’t think this cake would veganise all that well, due to all the eggs.

In terms of flavours, if you don’t want to mess around with all the different colours (and you really don’t need to), you can make this as a plain vanilla cake, or add the lemon and lime zest to the cake as a whole.  Alternatively, you could substitute in up to 100 g cocoa for the self-raising flour (again, I’d up the baking powder to 1 tsp or 1 1/2 tsp in doing this) for a chocolatey version.  You could even add orange zest or tangerine oil to that for the jaffa variety!

In terms of decorations, the world is really your oyster.  The one I did last week, I covered with white chocolate ganache, and then used two boxes of white fondant icing for the dress – half a box was tinted pink, rolled out into a half oval, and ‘embroidered’ with coloured cachous (I needed to stick them on with water), then stuck to the front of the cake.

The rest was tinted green, rolled out thinly into a circle and flung over the entire cake, to drape as an overskirt, then pulled back to show the pink section.  If I had been super-clever, I would have actually made a slit up the front of the green layer, so that I could drape the sides back more effectively.

Another favourite Ken is Carmen Miranda, who wears fruit jellies, or sometimes jelly fruit, all over his skirt and piled up on his head, and two cherries around his neck.  He’s all class.

Though Leather Ken, with his licorice whip, shiny red chocolate ganache skirt and black icing (from a tube) latex bustier is possibly even classier.

Really, the possibilities are endless, provided you have absolutely no taste and even less shame.  Go wild!

Eurovision Ken 2011

Ken, Queen of the Desert, with bus.

Ken relaxes after a busy evening

NB: Now that I have this marvellous Gallery of Ken, I will continue to update it as more generations of Ken appear to us.  If anyone has a photo of the original Carmen Miranda Ken, or of Fairy Queen Ken (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream a few years ago), do please let me know – I’d love to have a copy for the gallery…

This morning’s breakfast was, accordingly, an apple and a glass of water, this being about all I could face.

It was a very nice apple.

Incidentally, in case you haven’t fully appreciated just how much sweet stuff there was last night, let me tell you that I took a whole box of Ken cake, tahini caramels, sparkly almond and cocoa butter balls and chocolate tart into work with me to share with my scientists, and felt absolutely no inclination to sample any of it myself.  Though I did, at one point, have to ask one of my postdocs how old he was when I caught him carefully picking agar jellies off the cake and leaving the cake…

Lunch today – after healthy yoga! – was leftover lentilly chilli from last night.  There is no photographic evidence of this.  It was that sort of day.

Dinner was more leftovers – this time the chicken tagine from Saturday, with red rice to accompany it, just for a change.  And the last of the zucchini salad thing.

And maybe a margarita avocado shot to wash it all down.  Hey, I didn’t say I was off sugar for life…

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today was a very bad day for nutrition in the house of Cate.  And it was also a very bad day for photographing anything that didn’t have sugar in it, because lunch got eaten in the midst of stewing tomatoes, putting away vegetables and making margarita mousse shots, and photography was forgotten as it was too late.  Dinner was just as bad, only this time the excuse was wanting to get back into the living room to watch more Eurovision.  But you’ll be glad to know that all the desserts were lovingly photographed from multiple angles.  Because that’s where my priorities lie…

Breakfast, then, was a reprise of yesterday’s delicious rhubarb pizza, and I’ve just realised that there is nothing in the house for breakfast tomorrow except apples and cake and leftovers.  Oh dear.  Maybe I should make some pancake batter or something?  Anyway, it was just as good cold as it had been hot, and a very pleasant start to the day before we zipped off to the Farmers’ Market to buy an awful lot of vegetables.  But that’s a story for another day.

I had choir this morning, and eight people coming for tonight’s Eurovision finale, not to mention a Dessert Challenge to win, so by lunchtime things were getting pretty busy in my kitchen.  I realised I had a pizza base with a nearby expiry date, so we followed our rhubarb foccacia for breakfast with tomato and oregano pizza for lunch.  And, as I said, there is no photographic evidence of this due to the aforementioned baking.

The baking took up all afternoon, largely because it had gotten a bit out of hand.  A Cross-Dressing Ken Cake is pretty much a necessity for Eurovision, and I’d actually made the cake base yesterday, using self-raising flour, almond meal, white sugar, icing sugar (I’m out of caster sugar!), and of course eggs, almond milk, and a lot of things like lemon and lime zest and various colours which I promise I will tell you all about in the recipe.

I’d decided that a true Eurovision Ken cake should also be covered with alcoholic agar jellies, and it just so happened that my pantry contained white sugar, agar agar, glucose syrup, citric acid and a range of dreadful food colourings and flavourings as well as liqueurs like blue curaçao, cherry brandy, rum and tequila.  I feel secretly rather chuffed that three weeks into a pantry challenge my pantry still just happens to contain all the ingredients to make a large batch of confectionery.

Except – it didn’t!  I made the whole batch and then realised that I actually needed caster sugar to roll the jellies – icing sugar is too fine and white sugar and brown sugar just don’t work.  So I had to borrow half a cup of sugar from Elise to finish the jellies off…  and then I had to cut them out in fancy shapes, because I am totally INSANE.

In between doing all of this, I decided that really, one lurid dessert wasn’t enough, so I also made raw linzertorte, with hazelnuts, almond meal, cashews, dates and a jam made of raspberries with honey and chia seeds.

That also wasn’t sufficient, so I made raw margarita mousses in little shot glasses, too – another raw recipe, involving avocado, lime, the last of my agave nectar, the last of my coconut butter and more tequila.  And a little salt.  Incidentally, these were truly amazing.  And then, on a whim, I made more sparkly balls with the last of my cocoa butter, more almond butter (which I seem to have been stockpiling in the fridge), and some maple syrup.

And then Hailey texted me that she was bringing sparkly moose biscuits (made from a genuine Swedish recipe) and it occurred to me that I’d better get started on the savouries.

I figured we needed something sober and sensible and wholesome to soak up all that sugar, so I made baked potatoes and my vegetarian chilli, except that by now I don’t have any dried red or white beans, just lentils and a few tinned red beans.  I also don’t have burghul, but I did have wholemeal spelt couscous, so I used that instead.  I didn’t have any tinned tomatoes or tomato juice, but I had three kilos of tomatoes from the farmers’ market, so I made my own.  And I’m running out of chipotle chilli and cumin – I used the last up on this meal.

This was accompanied by guacamole and I then wanted to make that lovely corn, mango and black bean salsa from Green Kitchen, but of course I had no black beans.  Or shredded coconut.  And mangoes weren’t available anywhere.  Oh, and onions were forbidden for this particular dinner.  But it turned out that I did have a tin of diced mangoes stashed away in my pantry, along with three little tins of mixed beans.  And fennel works rather well instead of onion in this context.  And as for the coconut – well, yes, I really did go and buy a whole coconut and take a hammer and screwdriver and the back of a heavy knife to it until I could get it open and chop up some flesh.  It wasn’t a very good coconut, but it sufficed.  And the salad really was good.

Of course, Gillian then turned up with spanakopita (which was probably a good thing, in the circumstances), and Elise upped the ante on desserts with this rather spectacular effort.

It’s so white and tasteful on the outside, and then you cut it.  Oh dear…

Next year, we are going to collaborate.  Or perhaps the proper term is collude…

Of course, next year, we may draw the line somewhere before seven different kinds of dessert for eight people.  But at least my little scientists look like having a pleasingly sugary start to their week…

And as for Eurovision – well, I did like Denmark, but I’m still a bit sad that Greece didn’t do better (though I imagine they really didn’t want to win).   But my true favourite was and always will be Romania.  That dress!  Those… alarmingly naked dancers!  And that voice – especially the part where he goes up an octave, and just when you think he’s going to stop, he goes up *another* octave, just because he can.  Fabulous.

Ken thinks so, too.

Apparently, Ken managed to get on TV, too, though I sadly missed it. Still, he has had his five minutes of fame, and that’s something!

Fortunately, though, I still have *lots* of edible glitter and a wide range of dreadful, lurid liqueurs, which is really what Eurovision desserts are all about.

Also fortunately, I now have a copy of Practically Raw Desserts, by Amber Shea Crawley, which means that I got to give my sugar and flour the day off today, while I played with (and ran myself out of) coconut butter, coconut flour, cacao butter, cacao powder, almond butter and agave nectar…

For breakfast this morning, we celebrated the end of the dreaded fruitbread with Johanna’s glorious rhubarb and berry focaccia, which rises overnight and is going to become part of my weekend breakfast repertoire.  This used bread flour, olive oil, and sugar (fortunately not very much of it!) from the pantry.

Lunch was a bit of a disaster – I entirely forgot to photograph it, and I did actually have to buy bread rolls, even though I technically could have made them myself, if I had been totally insane, but today was busy enough!  It was those sausages which got accidentally de-frosted and then couldn’t be wasted, with bread and onions.  Unexciting but tasty.

Dinner… look, I had these Great Plans for a Swedish-themed series of Eurovision dinners, but with fluctuating numbers of guests and dwindling supplies of key pantry ingredients, as well as a disinclination to miss Eurovision by being in the kitchen, I decided to go with a chicken and tomato tagine.  The tagine used up the last of my saffron, sesame seeds, and fresh pistachios, and also involved honey.  I served it with black rice, which turned out to be an amazing find – Andrew bought it by accident a while back, and I’ve never used it, but it has this intriguing smoked flavour which, by a happy accident, complemented the tagine beautifully.  There was also a side-dish involving zucchini with ricotta, mint and basil.

And then there was dessert.

My initial plan was to make tonight my healthy dessert night, since tomorrow is when Elise and I go all out to make the most lurid Eurovision desserts ever, so I decided to start with some of my new raw dessert recipes.  The tahini caramels looked pretty fascinating, and used both tahini and coconut flour, as well as honey, though they were perhaps a trifle sophisticated and tasteful for Eurovision.  I decorated them with a single silver cachou, and rather wish I had thought to add a few drops of orange flower water to the mix – they were rather halva-like, and very pleasing.

Then I made a raw chocolate tart, because I have cocoa butter approaching its expiry date, as well as cacao powder and coconut butter.  In fact, I chose this tart because it fitted my pantry requirements so well – I also got to use up some coconut, almond meal, and agave nectar.  That looked way too sophisticated too, so I went at it with colourful star sprinkles.  And creme de cacao, which kind of ruined the shiny look, but tasted great – sort of like alcoholic, gourmet chocolate crackles…

This was clearly not enough dessert, and besides, I wanted to play with more cocoa butter, so I made Amber Shea Crawley’s beautiful raw white chocolate and vanilla truffles, involving almond butter, cocoa butter, agave nectar and vanilla bean.  And then I spoiled the entire healthy effect by mixing together bright pink and bright purple sugar crystals and rolling the truffles in them.

Now *that’s* a Eurovision dessert.  Really delicious, too, though I honestly couldn’t tell you just what they tasted like – not white chocolate, at least not to my mind, but creamy, with a hint of praline.

Elise retaliated by making a whole lot of Adriano Zumbo macarons and putting them on ice-cream cones on a stick with lollies.  She definitely gets the Eurovision lurid prize for tonight.  I’ll have to up my game tomorrow…

(fortunately, my pantry, while depleted, still had the entire ingredients list for making alcoholic agar jellies.  My turn will come…)

As for Eurovision itself, what can I say? There certainly are some fabulous entries this year, though sadly, Europe persists in failing to understand that Eurovision is *supposed* to be tacky.  I was sad to see that Montenegro‘s astronauts, Croatia‘s beautiful uniformed Klapa singers, Serbia‘s cracktastic what-were-they-thinking-and-can-we-watch-it-again song and Slovenia‘s dancing Ned Kellys failed to get through the first semi.  And tonight – oh, how could they not put through Latvia, who were like Jedward only with more sequins and better singing?  Not to mention Bulgaria‘s amazing drum duels (lots of drums this year.  Lots of goddess arms, too…), and Macedonia, which was another ‘what were they thinking’ moment, with the two singers apparently doing two entirely separate songs in completely unrelated keys…

Still, if we couldn’t have Serbia, we still had Finland filling the all-important tacky costumes and lesbian not-at-all-subtext slot.  And we had Romania (who was dressed as a cross-dressing Ken cake and had a rather spectacular counter-tenor voice!). Greece was just plain fun, and Azerbaijan‘s shadow dance with the box was just beautiful, as was the singer – really a gorgeous performance.  And I liked Ireland‘s drummers, though I didn’t see much point in the singer.  And Belarus certainly understands what a Eurovision song is meant to be about – silly dancing and lots of tassels.  Denmark had a penny whistle and drummers and surprisingly enjoyable music.  And Ukraine gets an honorable mention for the giant carrying in the maiden at the start, as does Moldova, for that dress.  I’m also glad that *someone* with science fiction hair got through, since Montenegro didn’t.  And, good grief, the Netherlands fielded a rather wonderful alto, and she actually got through to the finals!

Not too many songs I actually want to sing this year, I must say. Usually I get a few stuck in my head, but not this time.  Except for “Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol is free!”, but I don’t think that counts.  Ah well.  At least I still have a few horses in the race – remember Europe, this is Eurovision!  Vote for costume reveals, silly dancers and sequins!  We here in Australia are relying on you!

~~~~~~~~~

Served with a strawberry and raspberry sauce spiked with a bit of kirsch and cacao butter, and white chocolate grated over the top.  Yum.

What am I saying?  It was amazingly, fabulously exciting, because at breakfast, we FINISHED THE GLUTEN-FREE FRUITBREAD!!!  I’m making Johanna’s overnight rhubarb focaccia for breakfast tomorrow to celebrate this.

Lunch was split pea soup with spiced cauliflower.  Remember that?  I’ve had at least one comment indicating that people are impressed because I cook fresh food every night.  Allow me to reassure you.  In fact, I cook fresh food more like four or five nights a week – which I realise is more than some, but less than others – and I overcater drastically so that I can stash things in the freezer for later meals.  Like this one.  Oh, and we do have takeaway sometimes, but given that I can’t bring myself to give up baking cakes all the time, my concession to healthy eating is to try to limit this…

Dinner, speaking of takeaway, was a pub meal with my lab colleauges – we’re celebrating exciting new papers published and new grants received, both of which are good things.  I was tempted by the parma – I’m always tempted by the parma – but since this weekend is going to be a positive carnival of horribly lurid and sweet desserts, I felt it was wisest to go with their rather excellent beetroot salad with roast pumpkin, fresh ricotta, and halloumi (Naughtons has moved up in the world since my undergraduate days).  Which was, as always, gorgeous.

Oh, and stop press – we weren’t going to have dessert, because our original Eurovision party guest couldn’t make it, but we’ve just acquired two more, so it’s ON!  And just the right number of people for trying out that chocolate and chilli pasta I bought at the market a few weeks ago.  Served with berry sauce and grated white chocolate, of course…

(you’ll have to wait until later for the photo – I have Eurovision to watch now!)

(it’s not that it tastes bad, but it really is quite heavy and nutty in flavour and hard work to eat on a tired morning)

I left for work all dressed up, believing that I’d be spending the evening out at the opera, and therefore started defrosting a serve of pasta sauce so that Andrew could have dinner alone, but discovered mid-morning that the opera was not to be, so I rang Andrew and asked him to put the sauce back in the freezer and take out sausages to defrost so that I could make broccoli & sausage pasta after choir instead.

In the meantime, lunch was leftover tandoori chicken and spicy eggplant with rice.

The eggplant had, if anything, become even spicier.  But there really are only so many clothes that one can reasonably take off at work, so I went for a walk to the post office instead, using the route that would take me out into the cold for as long as possible.

We will draw a veil of discretion over all the highly alcoholic liqueur chocolates that I ate this afternoon in an attempt to anaesthetise myself from the insanity of trying to put together an entire grant in under 24 hours.  I do think it would be nice if more funding bodies would write instructions that bore at least some resemblance to what they put on their forms, though.

Dinner, post choir, should have been the aforementioned pasta, but the sausages hadn’t had time to defrost.  So I looked in the fridge and the freezer and the pantry and came up with a slightly schizoid meal of beef bourgignon pies, broccoli and pomegranate salad with sunflower seeds and dried cranberries, and potato chips.  Because a pie with potato chips may be odd, but a pie with rice or pasta would be even weirder.  And there was no way I was adding gluten-free fruit bread to the dinner menu at this stage…

I really should write up the recipe for yesterday’s Ken Cake, but I’ve just noticed the time, so I think I’ll go to bed instead…

I must admit, I’m getting nervous about my cake-making supplies.  I am almost entirely out of cocoa now (though since I still have spiced cocoa, raw cacao, cocoa nibs and cocoa butter, not to mention chocolate, I am probably just fine).  I’m also getting quite low on sugar – I’ve broached my spare self-raising flour and my spare brown sugar, and am completely out of caster sugar and plain cake flour.  I’m getting low on white sugar, too, though I still have a fair bit of icing sugar.  I also have honey, of course, and agave nectar, though I’m all out of maple syrup and golden syrup and am virtually out of treacle.  With Eurovision and a fundraising morning tea coming up in the next week or so, I’m going to have to be quite creative.  Fortunately, my copy of Practically Raw Desserts arrived today, so if I have enough nuts, I should be fine…

The pasta, rice and couscous situation is still healthy, probably because I bought all that fresh pasta last market, which may, in retrospect, have been cheating, and I really could stand to eat more legumes and experiment a bit more with barley.  Though I’m making progress on both.  It’s definitely time to use some lentils, anyway – I have at least two packets of puy lentils, and so far I haven’t touched them.

Breakfast was once again the gluten-free fruitbread.  I’m beginning to think I should have halved the recipe… It’s quite good, but we are both getting tired of it.

Lunch today was leftover gnocchi from Monday night.  And I even remembered to photograph it!

Dinner was very early today, due to the fact that my friend Anna had her official book publication date today!  Yay, Anna!  This was obviously an occasion which called for cake, and since her hero spends a significant chunk of the book dressed as a woman, there really only was one possible cake that I could make…

Ken is wearing a cake composed of self-raising flour, cocoa, eggs, butter, orange juice, brown sugar and probably a few other things I’ve forgotten, accessorised with white chocolate ganache and fondant, as well as quite a bit of food colouring etc.  I must admit, I bought the fondant though it technically counts as a pantry item, on the grounds that not even professional cake decorators and confectioners make this from scratch, and it just isn’t the sort of thing I keep in my pantry.  I could have decorated this cake without it, but it wouldn’t have been quite so gorgeous…

Ken, incidentally, is having a very busy week, because in addition to his gig at Anna’s book launch, he also intends to make an appearance at Eurovision.  Because Eurovision is just fabulous, and so is he.

So yes, there was cake at proper dinner time, which meant onion soup for an early supper, served with toasted bread and cheese.  And it was more than sufficient.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

So breakfast was dried apples and dry biscotti with fennel seed – my standard minimum for medicine that must be taken after a meal on an occasion when the last thing one wants to do is eat.  And then I went back to bed.

Lunch, since I was at home, was my favourite no-brain lunch thing: an omelette, chopped capsicum, cucumber and tomatoes, and a few boiled potatoes with cheese.  This is especially nice when I’m not feeling up to much, because in the first place it counts as comfort food (I love both eggs and potatoes), and in the second place, one can make the salad early, and have the potatoes ready to go, and then go and have a nap before making the omelette.  And omelettes only require a minute to cook.  And did I mention that I really love eggs and potatoes?  Because I really, really do.  Yum.

Dinner, on the other hand, was entirely baroque.  You see, about a week ago, I discovered a yen for Indian food.  I’m not very good at Indian food, because I don’t make it very often, so I’d planned a little feast for last night – chicken marinated with tandoori masala and yoghurt and lemon, and eggplants with a spicy filling that involved dried chillis, cashews, coriander seeds ginger, onion, garlic, coconut, brown sugar, and tamarind paste, among other things.  Except that the chicken wouldn’t de-frost on time, so we had gnocchi instead.

But while the gnocchi was cooking, I *did* make the stuffing and sauce for the eggplants, and I *did* make the marinade for the chicken, so that all I had to do this morning was put the chicken in the marinade, and all I had to do this evening was bake everything and cook some basmati rice to go with it (I considered black or red rice, but decided to be conventional, and also to save some of the weird stuff for the end of the challenge).

The chicken, incidentally, was wonderful.  The eggplants… well, they made Andrew happy alright, but even reducing the number of chillis from 4 to 2 was a bit much for me.  My eyes watered.  My nose ran.  My face went red.  It was so hot that I wound up pulling off my long-sleeved top and finishing the meal wearing just a bra and a skirt.  I’m still far too hot, actually.  But my sinuses are very, very clear, and I’m guessing my circulation is working just fine! And it was very nice not to have to cook… (I did like the flavours, as far as they could be discerned under all that heat, but my, there was a lot of heat…)

~~~~~~~~~~~~

OK, let’s be honest, here.  This is neither a risotto, nor is it from the swamp – though I did just have to check on Wikipedia whether you can actually grow sorrel in swamps.  It turns out that you can’t.  It also turns out that sorrel is poisonous in large quantities, because it contains oxalic acid.  So now I’m feeling rather nervous.

But because I love you all and would really rather not poison you (it’s too late now for Andrew and me, clearly) I’m writing this post on Sunday, and scheduling it to go up on my blog on Tuesday.  So if there is a post on my blog on Monday, you can assume that we are alive and well and that this recipe is safe to cook.  That, or that we are very hardy indeed, and possibly from the swamp ourselves.

(OK, I shared my findings with Andrew, and he made me look up actual quantities.  He’s such a spoilsport.  Anyway, it turns out that we  would have to work a lot harder to poison ourselves with sorrel, though eating it every day isn’t recommended, and it isn’t the best for people with dodgy kidneys.  So please do take a bit of care if that’s something that affects you.)

Right, that’s probably enough morbid humour for one blog post.  Let’s get back to this stew, which really does look as though it comes from the swamp – sorrell turns out to be a leafy green that goes a truly grim khaki as soon as it wilts.  But the flavour is delicious – light and tangy and acidic, and just the thing to eat at the end of a weekend full of (let’s face it) far too much rich food…

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Now what will you do with it?

Put your barley in a largeish bowl, and pour boiling water over it to cover it.  Leave for at least ten minutes, or the amount of time it takes you to wander off and read some things on the internet and forget all about making dinner.

Drain the barley.

Heat the butter and oil in a largeish saucepan.  Chop the onion and shallots finely, and add them to the butter, cooking for a few minutes until they are soft.  Add the barley, and cook for a few more minutes, stirring to coat.  Season with salt and pepper.

Heat the tinned tomatoes and stock to simmering point in a small saucepan.  Add to the barley, a ladleful at a time, stirring often until everything is absorbed.  This will probably take 20-30 minutes.

While this is going on, bring another small saucepan of water to the  boil (or, if you were brighter than me, you could have done this before adding the stock to the saucepan) and add the broadbeans.  Boil for a few minutes, and then drain and refresh with cold water.  Slip off the skins and set aside.

Wash the sorrel and chop it coarsely.  When the barley is nearly done, add it to the saucepan and stir slowly until it wilts and goes swamp-like.

Add the broad beans and stir again.  Let cook for another minute or so.

Crumble in the feta, stir a final time and serve in all its tangy deliciousness.

Variations

You could make this with almost any leafy green instead of sorrel (though if it’s the oxalic acid that worries you, spinach is actually not much better), and just add some lemon juice at the end of cooking for a similar flavour.

This recipe is vegan if you leave out the feta, and I really think it’s hardly needed.  It’s also nut-free, of course, but not gluten-free.  For a gluten-free version, you could, of course, revert to your favourite risotto recipe with actual rice and just use these flavourings.  Oh, and it’s fairly low GI, because that’s how barley swings!  Woohoo!

It still looks like it came from the swamp, though.

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