Now, as far as cooking goes, I definitely have my limitations. I’m pretty comfortable with soups and stews (I feel I can accurately season goo), but beyond that things start to get rather hit-and-miss.
Earlier last year, a couple of friends and I came up with a good way to try and
improve our skills, get out of our cooking comfort zones, and have oodles of fun: the
A-Z Three Course Challenge.
The principle is simple: each week get together, take a course each (rotating each
week), and put yourselves together a nice three-course meal. We chose to structure
it around the alphabet. For example, we started with Aubergine Soup (taste good,
look bad), Afghani Korma (richly spiced goodness), and Almond and Apple Cake
(sweet heavenly mouthfuls of delight), moving on to Bruschetta (simple elegance),
Beef Wellington (good beef, shame about the pastry), and Bread and Butter Pudding
(old school fun), and so on.
Along the way, we attempted some fairly tricky stuff: a goat’s cheese soufflé (rose
beautifully, but didn’t taste of much); duck with raspberry sauce (worked a treat in the end); and an incredibly involved recipe for southern fried chicken (artery-
hardening magnificence). There were hits (spicy king prawns, bitterballen, Eton
mess, gateau), and misses (sticky Guinness pudding, gumbo), mixed with a couple
of recipes that went straight in to the regular rotation (fishcakes, jumbo cheese straws).
From A-K, there were no outright disasters.
We were beginning to feel like cooking immortals: invincible, indestructible,
incapable of failure. But fate was saving up a culinary calamity in luscious lemony
form – the classic lemon tart.
The details are still too painful to recount at length, but the outcome – a biscuit,
loosely trapped in partially cooked scrambled eggs – will live on in infamy.
Cooking disasters are inevitable and humbling, but that doesn’t make them any
easier to swallow. The emotional scars run deep, but I feel after a couple of months
of healing that I’m just about ready to attempt to address this fruity farrago.
So, dear readership, what tips can you pass on to ease my way through the lemon
tart mine-field? I feel I need to build up a groundswell of support before my next
attempt.
Should I seek sponsorship and donate the proceeds to other sufferers from lemon
tart trauma syndrome or other epic food failure disorders?
All thoughts welcomed.
