Why the raisins?

Since I had a certain amount of cooked chicken to dispose of, I chose to use some of it in a chicken and avacado salad (p176). Also convenient to this plan was the fact that avacados are in season at the moment and therefore really cheap.


It's a simple dish to make: toss your avacado in lemon juice, add chopped chicken, slices of orange, raisins and chopped celery. Mix everything together with some mayonnaise and pile it all on a bed of lettuce leaves.


I really should have knocked another recipe off my list by making the mayonnaise myself (p184), but there will be other recipes which require mayonnaise, and I was too hungry to bother.


Since I was only making the salad for myself, I ignored the given quantities and used very precise measurements of 'some', this method resulting in proportionally way too much celery and mayonaise.


It didn't look anything like the picture. For a start, the one in the picture wasn't drowning in mayo. This particular recipe is an exception to something that's usually great about the Edmonds book: since there are hardly any pictures, you don't feel disappointed when your recipe doesn't come out looking as good as the picture.

But that doesn't mean it didn't taste good. I'd leave out the raisins next time, or possibly substitute walnuts or sunflower seeds. I liked the chewy texture against the crunch of the celery, but the flavour was a bit weird. It's not that I don't like raisins, just that I think one fruit per salad is enough. Unless you're making fruit salad, obviously.

The celery was a bit overpowering, but I did put in about 3 times as much as I should have, which would explain it. I'll also moderate the mayonnaise usage next time.

What I really liked about this salad was the "on a bed of lettuce" thing. Being the messy eater I am, I abandoned my fork and folded the lettuce leaves into little parcels to eat with my fingers. Excellent.


So next time you have some leftover chicken, have a go at this. If you leave out the raisins and get the proportions right, it'll be pretty good.

On reheated self-saucing pudding

Frankly, it's not great. If you leave your leftover pudding to eat the next day, the sauce congeals and the pudding dries out. Edible only if reheated to a temperature suitable for melting the ice cream you then pile on top. Or you could try drenching it in cream: I've found milk works too if you want a less artery-clogging, if also slightly blander, version.

So here's my advice: if you're like me and can't eat the whole "six servings" (yes: supposedly six servings. That must be someone's idea of a joke) on the day you make it, then make a half mix. Of course, half of one egg is a bit challenging, but, as a singleton, I have a bit of experience in splitting recipes.


Here's how you do it: crack the egg into a bowl, break the yolk with a fork and whisk it up slightly until the yolk's mixed in. Then pour about half of it into the pudding mixture and use the rest for something else. Like tomorrow night's pudding.

Delicious?

I decided to ease myself into this challenge by starting with one familiar recipe and one totally unfamiliar one.

For the unfamiliar recipe, I chose chicken delicious (p137). How can you go wrong with a name like that? Deliciousness is practically guaranteed. It's basically a roast chicken with a sort of sweet and sourish type sauce.

For the familiar recipe, I selected the ever-popular chocolate self-saucing pudding (p207) The stains on this page of the cookbook are testament enough to the number of times I've made it. I had some qualms about the hot pudding as the day got warmer and warmer, but in the end I decided to stick to my original plan.


I hit my first hurdle when it came to the ingredients. My book was printed in 1999, and since then, they've changed the way chickens are sized. Chicken delicious is one of several recipes in the poultry section which specify a no. 8 chicken. These days, a size 10 is about as small as chickens get, and those are really really tiny.


My immediate reaction was to consult Google. Sadly, this repository of not-quite-all knowledge couldn't find me any info on old vs new chicken sizes. I dare say it's there somewhere if you know which question to ask. So I took the next obvious step and asked Mum. She didn't know either, but in a flurry of text messages suggested possible ways to estimate the correct size. Then Dad stepped in with the highly practical idea of checking the same recipe in a more recent edition.

With this in mind, I headed to Pak N Save. I passed through the produce section in typically clumsy fashion, and, trying to look like I wasn't leaving in my wake half a dozen red onions rolling on the floor, headed to the baking section. Here I found the current printing of the Edmonds book. Turning to the poultry chapter, I found the recipe for chicken delicious... which still states a no. 8 chicken. So I guess Edmonds aren't up to date with chicken sizing.

I fell back on Mum's suggestion, which was to go by serving sizes. The chicken delicious recipe serves 4-6, so I looked for a chicken marked 4-6 servings. I ended up with a size 14, which, according to the label, serves 5-6.

 

Some hours later, when consulting the Edmonds book for roasting instructions, I found, in the introduction to the poultry chapter, a chart listing all chicken sizes by weight. I should have known that my trusty Edmonds book wouldn't let me down! Of course, it would have been quite useful if I'd found that yesterday... never mind. As it happens, I'd bought a slightly smaller chicken than a no. 8, but that's probably for the best - it's still heaps for one person!

After the chicken had been roasting for 40 minutes, I poured over a sauce made from apple juice and cream of chicken soup mix. To this I added chopped onion, bacon, capsicum and tomato. The recipe specifies that the tomatoes are to be blanched and chopped - which was quite fun since I'd never blanched anything in my life - but I think canned tomatoes would work just as well.

 

I adjusted the cooking times to my smaller chicken, and before I knew it, my chicken delicious was ready. It happened so quickly I wasn't quite ready for it. Wanting to get my pudding in the oven immediately so as not to waste electricity, I madly threw together the pudding mixture while the chicken was resting and the sauce thickening. Luckily chocolate self-saucing pud is quite quick to make, but even so, my chicken was slightly cold by the time I'd made a salad and sat down to eat.

And what did it taste like? Delicious? Well, it was really quite tasty. But 'delicious' might be a bit of an overstatement. If you want to make this, keep an eye on the old 'juices run clear' test. My chicken was only a little bit smaller than it should have been, but it cooked in a lot shorter time than stated in the recipe. Nobody likes dry overcooked chicken!

 

As for the chocolate self-saucing pud, do I really need to say anything? We all know it, we all love it: Gooey chocolatey comfort food - not really appropriate to a sweltering Autumn day, but a favourite nonetheless.

Before I begin

Let me state from the outset that I am not a good cook. This may surprise some of you, as I have managed to acquire a reputation in some quarters for being quite good in the kitchen. But I assure you it's not true: If I cooked for you every day, you'd soon learn that I can be a complete disaster. When it comes to baking, I'm on slightly firmer ground, but any successes I have had in that area are certainly not the result of superior culinary knowledge or experience.

I'm not into flashy cookery: give me Alison Holst over Gordon Ramsay any day. I'm interested in basic, practical recipes that won't take forever to make, with ingredients that I might conceivably have in my cupboard, and won't cost the earth to buy if I don't. So that's where the Edmonds Cookery Book comes in.

Kiwis tend to take the Edmonds book for granted. It seems so natural that there should be a standard, inexpensive cookbook filled with basic recipes and helpful cooking information: a book that you find in every single kitchen throughout the country. We say things like "oh, it's just an Edmonds recipe" - 'just' in this sense referring to something commonplace and not terribly special.



But when you think about it, the Edmonds book really is something special. Have you ever tried describing it to someone from another country? I have, and they just don't get it. In other countries, there just isn't a single basic cookbook that everyone has. Americans usually equate it to "The Joy of Cooking", which, while very popular, is also (from what I understand since I've never seen it) massive and quite expensive. So no, not really the same thing.



What I'm saying here is we're lucky to have the Edmonds book. But aside from checking those tricky questions like "how many grammes in 1/4 pound?" or making the tried and true scones and pancakes, how much do I really use it? How many of these recipes have I made? Answer: not many.



I was flicking idly through my Edmonds Book the other day and saying to myself, "That looks tasty" or "I should make that sometime". All the while a little voice in the back of my mind is saying, "Yeah, but when will you ever make it?". For some reason I was reminded of the movie Julie and Julia and I thought to myself, "How COOL would it be to do the Edmonds Book?"



This might have remained just an idea, except I stupidly mentioned it to several people, all of whom were enthusiastic about the idea. It gathered further momentum when I posted my idea on Facebook and got a huge number of comments. Unfortunately - since my plan was merely to do the cooking and maybe post a few photos of my efforts - many of those commenters were insisting on a blog.



So here I am, about to tackle the Edmonds Cookery Book, blog and all. I am not setting myself the 1-year deadline, this basically because I'm only feeding myself and I can't eat that much in a year, but also for the sake of my sanity/waistline/wallet. I'm doing this for fun, and it won't be fun if it's stressing me out. I do intend to cook several recipes each week, but I'm not going to set firm ground rules about that either.



I should acknowledge the fact that this is by no means an original idea. I've stated quite plainly that I got the idea from a movie, but I'm also not the first to think of doing the Edmonds book. Check out debbiedoesedmonds.blogspot.com for one woman's truly stellar achievement in getting through her 1967 edition in 365 days. There's also "Cooking the Edmonds Way" at edmondscooking.blogspot.com, which is a group blog by a handful of people cooking recipes randomly drawn from the Edmonds book each week.



And what do I hope to get out of this? A lot of things really: An increased repertoire and a wider knowledge of cooking, but also a solid re-grounding in the basics; less apprehension about tackling unfamiliar areas like preserving and jam making; a habit of cooking at home and relying on takeaways less often (not that I buy takeaways all the time, just more often than I should) and above all, a lot of tasty food!



So keep an eye on what I'm doing (especially all you sods who insisted on the blog!). Tomorrow I'll select my first recipes and head to the supermarket for the ingredients. I'll keep you posted.