Yesterday I had the startling realisation that since May Blossom has dropped down to just two breastfeeds a day — in the morning and after dinner — I should probably no longer eat like Mr Creosote. This is, quite frankly, completely shit. I don’t really like eating for one. So in honour of all the not-eating-cake-every-day that I am about to embark upon, I would like to share with you some excellent and delicious things I have eaten.
As you can see, this is a very ordinary photograph of some bacon in a bain marie. Why would anyone put such a bad picture on their blog, you may be wonder. The answer is simple: this was the best bacon ever. It was the bacon served at my grandmother’s 100th birthday brunch in Denver two years ago. This was the amount left after fifty or so guests had served themselves a modest portion. Then my husband, father, older brother and I stood there and ate the rest like it was a bowl of potato chips with lime. This bacon was salty, crispy and the very essence of porcine perfection. I can’t explain why it was so good. Some things defy explanation. This bacon was such a thing.
This is the Ottolenghi roast eggplant dish I mentioned recently. We have eaten it three times in the last fortnight. Once you’ve made the effort to source a fresh pomegranate, it’s very easy: roast eggplant slices in the oven, sauce with a mixture of yoghurt, saffron (which I think you could omit, though it is pretty), lemon juice and crushed garlic, and sprinkle with toasted pine nuts, pomegranate seeds and torn basil. I may keep posting about this until I am sure you have all tried it. I’m an Eggplant Evangelist.
This is a blurry iPhone picture of another star player in my repertoire of pork dishes: we call it ‘Cheesy Pig Figs’. You take a ripe fig, cut a deep cross into it, stuff it with goats’ cheese, wrap it in prosciutto, and grill or bake in the oven. Then you eat it. Repeat one dozen times.
These sausage rolls are from the Berry Sourdough Bakery. They are made with beef and pork, and they could take on any other sausage roll in the world in an illegal sausage roll streetfight and they would win. You would do well to try them. These particular rolls were bought by Ellie the Great the day before my wedding, which happened to be her birthday. She took a break from preparing the rehearsal dinner for one hundred people (yes, on her own birthday) and drove an hour from my parents’ farm to the bakery, where she treated herself to Eggs Benedict and bought up most of their sausage rolls to bring back to the hard-working folk who were arranging flowers and flipping out about the rain.
Gusto claims that for a blog named after her, I don’t talk about her enough. Here then, is her contribution to this post: this was one of Gusto’s favourite meals. It was the normal extortionately expensive Science Diet Grits for Fatties that she has every day, only on the day in question she knocked the tin over and ate as many as she wanted, instead of the two measly scoops that are usually rationed out to her morning and night. I like that even though she binged, but she binged out of her bowl. Very civilised.
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