Food associations

The other day we watched “Celebrity Masterchef” on BBC1. They had a round in which the contestants were asked to produce a dish showcasing their favourite ingredient. This made us stop & think. What would we say were our favourite ingredients?  For a contest with the strictures of time this programme has, I suppose I would have to go for either chicken or salmon. To mind both can take on so many other flavours, be cooked in so many different ways. The Fox, too, came to the conclusion he would say chicken for similar reasons. Maybe it was partly that we were talking about this as we drove over to the butcher to buy a chicken for roasting today, so we had chicken on our minds.

Last night’s episode the contestants were asked to prepare a dish that encapsulates something about someone special too them. I thought about this. Maybe it’s partly because of the chicken I’m cooking today, but I couldn’t help thinking of roast chicken. My mother’s method almost seems to be guaranteed to produce a moist bird with a golden skin. And that’s the method I’m doing tonight. The Fox’s mother’s method was slightly different but equally as successful but I’m more confident of my mother’s method. It’s the one I grew up with.

My other thought concerned the Fox’s mother. The dish that epitomised her cooking was her Weiner Schnitzel. I’ve still not worked out how she managed to keep the breadcrumbs on the pork fillet slices without so much as a bit of beaten egg to encourage it. (It makes me green with envy as the Fox seems to have the same talent. The breadcrumbs just come off for me.) Her pork was always so tender it was like slicing through butter. But this wasn’t at the price of flavour. It was far better than any Weiner Schnitzel we tried in Austria.

Whilst mentioning food, another food memory was brought to mind yesterday. The Fox made us a mushroom risotto, using pearl barley rather than rice. I associate pearl barley with soups, especially scotch broth, & casseroles. The first time I ever thought of having pearl barley as the carb part of a meal was when we had a delicious meal in St Malo. I couldn’t work out what this item was & duly asked. As the waitress explained in French, I suddenly realised it was pearl barley &, what is more, it had added a wonderful nutty additional flavour to the salmon meal.