To Serve Man

The Seventeenth of April Two Thousand and Twelve. Tuesday.

Oh, man I'm going to have to clean my microwave. My porridge is beginning to taste like the vegetarian hot dogs I regularly zap therein. Why is cooking so hard?

Nacho kit, why have you forsaken me?

I'm going to have to learn to cook properly, aren't I? It always seems like a really hard thing to do. Thank goodness the best cooks are attractive women!

I've already detailed my failed romance with Katy Ashworth.

She caught me borrowing her boots, and then it was all downhill from there. Yeah, that's right. She's got unexpectedly large feet. Stop trying to point out the implausibility of my story. Nobody likes a smart alec.

So I got out the Yellow Pages (the book - I'm having nothing to do with Yell.com after they let me down with my last enquiry) and looked up attractive female cooks and got hold of the email of Rachel Khoo off of The Little Paris Kitchen.

We began to correspond and she kept sending me recipes to try out. This one sounded good: oeufs en cocottes.

I got into all sorts of a panic! I couldn't find my ramekins! I knew I'd seen them recently but for the life of me I couldn't find them. I started to lie to Rachel, saying I was making stuff when I was really just knocking back the pot noodles (pots noodle? (actually they're not pot noodles, they're Golden Wonder 'The Nation's Noodle' cos they're on offer at Tesco. They've gone up a bit now, but a couple of weeks ago it cost £1.10 for one and only £1.00 for two! How mad is that? (and here's a bonus: the last one I had had two sachets of mango chutney in it!))). There was no way I was going to be able to knock up Nids de Tartiflette! What was I thinking?

I did have a go at the oeufs en cocottes but somehow I ended up with egg in soup like Doctor Sanchez makes in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, my Sixteenth Telly Recommendation.

 'Here, let me cut up your pork pie...'

Anyway, I think she's cottoned on to my mendacity cos she doesn't respond to my emails anymore. And she's blocked me on Twitter. And then there's the restraining order...

But one of the things I do enjoy about British Cuisine is that we are spoiled with the largest selection of crisp flavours of anywhere in the world. Depending on my mood I can dine on a Prawn Cocktail crisp butty or a Roast Beef Monster Munch sandwich. Maybe I don't have to clean that microwave just yet.

More soonliest.

Next day bonus edit! In an example of the sort of synchronicity you get in these blogs the Radio Times posted a gallery of Rachel here. Bit disappointed about the lack of crisp butties.