L'Ouef Monstrueux

I can think of few things worse than turning up to a friends house for dinner to be confronted with a full head of cauliflower on a platter, looking at you. Sitting at the table, mouth watering unpleasantly in anticipation. Wondering when your host lost their marbles so completely & what purveyor of Mutant Vegetables sold them that big, bastard cauliflower. Mentally composing a letter to the Times that begins, 'Dear Madam, I can no longer remain quiet on the subject of GM Foods..'

But then, what's this, your host leans forward with the knife to serve slices of cauli to all & it seems to be sliding through a little easily for a knife through a cruciferous vegetable. And what ever is that bang of sulphur?

Say hello the enemy of anyone who's a 'little funny' about their eggs, who'll eat them, but only if they themselves prepare them. Who avoids the egg mayonnaise sandwiches at a buffet like a slug avoids slug pellets....

L'Ouef Monstrueux.

8 egg yolks, poached in a plastic bag & topped with beaten egg whites. Then popped in the oven for a short period of time for a proper egg-meringue pie effect. Officially the only food in the world worse than a whole head of boiled cauliflower. Monstrueux indeed.

Blogging away at www.how-much.ie, soon will resume taking pictures of eggs wearing hats

I did not mean to be so rubbish at blogging so soon after starting. I have about as much blogging focus as I'd imagine a Savoy cabbage to have at the moment, but I am spending an awful lot of time bullying insurance brokers into blogging for me at www.how-much.ie lately, so in a way I am still blogging. Really lazy post coming this weekend...

Lemon Pigs

Ah, Lemon Pigs, I've spent way too much time thinking about making you and feeling red hot guilt pangs because I never have time and I never buy lemons. This is the first Saturday in a long time that I have neither plans nor a hangover you could batter down walls with so it's time to stick some pins into some lemons!

This recipe popped up in the Citrus Fruits edition of Craddock Cookery, something to amuse the chizzlers with as you spend an entire week boiling oranges, playing with your new Canelle Knife and making stupidly complicated decorative centre pieces that look like oranges dancing round a May Pole. (I sneer but if it didn't require buying said 'Canelle Knife' to make the May Pole ribbons I'd be all over this)

To start out with you need a Lemon, a glace cherry (evil things), 3 pins & 4 'spent matches' trimmed of their burnt ends. Because I am an unabashed wastrel, who was able to buy 6 boxes of matches in Tesco for about €1.16 and probably isn't as worried as Fanny Craddock was about waking up one night and not having a match to light my bedside candle, I will be using unspent matches.

It was here that, in my slightly hungover state, I made my first mistake and cut off way too much of the pointy end of the lemon. This will be a very flat faced piggy indeed. Then came many minutes of trying to curl a '1/10 of an inch wide strio of lemon peel round into a spiral' and pin it into place. Whoever it was made the original lemon pigs had an awful lot more patience than I do and fingers that aren't useless fat sausages. My piggy ended up with a bit of a fail-tail. I do like the look of it for cocktail garnishes though! If you were super careful not to swallow back the pin

Once you have the tip of the snout off you use it to make 2 itsy bitsy pig ears. Which you are then supposed to insert into slits on his head. This is im-bloody-possible. You can't poke delicate bits of lemon peel into slits on lemons, they break, they refuse to stay in place and fall off, they generally make you feel like the most clumsy handed sausage-finger out there. I nearly gave up & threw lemon out window at this bit


Afterwards comes a flurry of sticking in little pin eyes, mashing on a 'sliver' of glace cherry mouth and poking in legs 'north, south, east & west' of his little pig's belly. Then you step back admire your work. Which in my case was a bit of a Frankenpiggy. I dunno will I be rushing out to make these for all of my friends



Unfortunately for my piggy I wasn't feeling up to making the slightly-too-real looking trough of pig swill in the picture, the ould tummy isn't up for putting together moist, brown food first thing in the morning.



Should really have just made the effort & popped into Hickeys for some black pins. Red eyes + big sticky red smile + pig = Amityville = not being able to sleep tonight if this fella is still in my flat. If his belly wasn't full of match head he'd be ending tonight in a Gin & Tonic. (I have a feeling that's where Fanny's original piggy ended up, she was very specific about cutting all the burnt bits off your matches before using them, mmmm Gin & Piggy)




Next up: Banana Delights

Lemon Pigs - A Placeholder

I have become the Guinness World Record holder for Forgetting to Buy Lemons. I can't count the amount of shops I have walked out of in the last 2 weeks sans a lemon but avec some other crap I didn't intend to buy (tube of anchovy puree anyone?) I also started a new job this week which is fabulous but makes me very forgetful when it comes to anything non-job related.

I still do not have a lemon and it's too manky out this morning to run down the shops on a lemon-hunt so I tried to make do with what was in the fridge...




which as you can see failed horribly (although I did get to eat that spoon of lemon curd [after first removing its little pin eyes] - score!)

Actual Lemon Pigs coming this week! Which I shall be purchasing black pins for cos the red ones are a little too Amityville looking when you use them for eyes and I'd like to be able to fall asleep without little red eyed horror pigs popping up everytime I close my eyes

Angry Chinese Egg Men

When I first brought home the foot-thick wedge of 'Craddock Cookery' magazines from Chapters I was a very bad new-purchase Mammy indeed. They stayed, unloved & un-looked at, in their paper bag for a long enough time that a thick crust of dust formed on them. Then one day, after hoovering off the crust, I pulled a random one out for a goo. My eyes fell upon this photo

and instantly I was hooked, never to be more than arms reach away from my trusty bottles of harmless blue & green food colouring again. What were these little racist egg pie things? Why would anyone make them? How old were these magazines that putting little snouty 'Chinese' faces on eggs was still an acceptable thing to do?

My little eggy friends are from the 'Specially for Small Fry' cook-a-long with Mammy section (along with many other amazingly unappetising looking treats like Lemon Pigs & Pastry Bears and surprisingly tasty looking Stuffing Ducks).


To make your own angry chinese egg man (and let's face it, who isn't gumming for a hard boiled egg sitting in a puddle of green mayo) you will need

• 1 ig
• Splodge of Mayo
• Tomato
• 'Harmless Green Food Colouring' & 'Harmless Blue Food Colouring'
  
• 1 pastry case (or the glass lid of one small dessert dish stolen from the Moevenpick in Berlin in my case)

Start out by hardboiling your egg. I'm not great at eggs and figured it would be a wobbly disasterfest of escaping yolks and egg men collapsing in on themselves if it was underboiled so I pretty much stuck it in a pot of boiling water for the morning. Rock solid it was.

In a little dish mix together your green food dye & the mayo to make the 'grass' for your egg man to stand on

Slice a thin layer of egg from the bottom of your hard-boiler (the instructions specify 'very thin', I ignored this to the detriment of my poor egg's hat)

Cut a hat from your tomato (a nice slice of the end of the 'mato)

Using a 'fine writing pipe' (or a biro shaft if you're me and aren't 100% on what a 'fine writing pipe' might be) to poke little circles out of your egg slice to decorate the tomato. My egg slice was too thick (oh faily faily faily) and so my egg got a shite hat. Sorry egg. These bits of egg will stick AS IF BY MAGIC to your bit of tomato. That was a lesson learned, egg white & tomato are friends.




Now - pop egg in mayo (flat end down, clearly) and grab yourself a skewer or toothpick & a bottle of gel food colouring dab on 2 little racist slanty eyes, a mouth and a pair of 'gloomy whiskers' . Some of the egg men in the photos had a little racist snout thing so I decided to go all out. Only I accidentally put my snout under my whiskers, resulting in angry egg men with severe facial deformities. I Also forgot the mouth. Maybe he's so angry because he has to be fed intravenously. Maybe the smell of toast has tormented him his whole life.





Crown your egg with his hat and 'there you have a very unusual kind of hardboiled egg tartlet which you can eat up when you have admired your own work sufficiently' (This bit should be read in the piping BBC English tones of the great Fanny C. herself)


Puzzling me right the way through this is the fact that not once, in the whole page of instructions on dying mayonnaise and piping it into pastry tartlets, was the over-riding mushroomishness of the whole thing mentioned. He's even standing in grass mayonnaise. Are Chinese people known for wearing red, polka-dotted hats and standing in grass? Did they just not see it? Or did someone with a penchant for pulling their eyes out slanty at dinner parties and embarrassing their wife with crap jokes vandalise a tray of 'mushroom tartlets' just before the photos were taken. Hmm.

Next up - Lemon Pigs