Day 13: The Happiness Project
Is it okay to repeatedly use food and cooking as my noted moment of happiness?
Admittedly, whatever I make tends to be intertwined with a lot of other factors so it’s not such a one-note wonder as it initially seems. The frittata and the mustard were so much more than just a frittata and a few jars of grainy, spicy mustard.
Like yesterday’s experimental Scotch eggs. You know, those big, solid balls of egg, meat and breaded crust. I think they deep fry them traditionally. Super stodge, mildly spiced. Easy to carry on a picnic. I never really liked them because they were a bit too bland and heavy for me. Also, there’s the fact that the first few years I lived in the UK back in the 1990s, I was still a stubborn vegetarian. They weren’t exactly high on my list, though I did half heartedly nibble a few foisted on me by the adamant old ladies I looked after in my care-work job in London.
However, I wanted to give them another try. I wanted something sturdy and filling for our little no-crap-foods diet that we are on this month and I thought it might be, um, interesting to make a sane version of something previously thought to be insane.
I found a basic recipe for baked scotch eggs here but had to do a lot of tweaking as we didn’t have most of the ingredients.
Like ground pork. We couldn’t find any anywhere. So we bought a bunch of pork steaks and dutiful husband ground them up roughly in the 1940-era heavy duty hand-cranked meat grinder that we normally use as a book-end for our cookbook shelf, then chopped them into a fine mince with the cleaver. This is a man who once made jiaozi from scratch- and I mean scratch: even the wrappers were hand made from fresh dough.
And the pork rinds for the coating. Do the English not like fried pig skin? Never mind- neither do I. Instead, I blitzed an appropriate amount of mixed hemp, flax and onion seed and used that instead. It worked beautifully and didn’t contain deep fried pig epidermis.
And most of the herbs and spices noted in the recipe. I just threw in a few tablespoons of pureed garlic, a bit of tarragon and a bit of sage (I pinched it from the packets so didn’t exactly measure what went in- maybe a tablespoon each?), a few spoonfuls of Turkish pul biber (red pepper flakes) and a spoonful of sour-sweet Turkish sumak and smooshed it all together. Dutiful husband molded the meat onto the hard boiled eggs and I did the egg and seed dip.
Result?
Best scotch eggs ever. Seriously. I actually liked them.
A lot.
Also, in case you didn’t notice, this was all done with a 9 week old baby in the house. Part of the time he was strapped to my chest, part of the time he was on his mat on the floor.
Things are becoming a bit more flexible and possible.
