RECIPE TEMPLATE

(Serves two) Ingredients 1 Poussin 2 Courgettes (Zucchini) 1 Carrot 6 Spring Onions 400g Chorizo 1 Ciabatta Olives (stuffed with Pimentos) Feta Cheese Tamed Jalapeños 1/2 Lime Smoked Paprika Sea Salt Fresh Ground Pepper	Instructions MAKING THE STUFFING 1.Set the oven to the max (240C) 2. While the oven is heating up, cut two slices ciabatta thinly and place in the oven to dry out. DON'T FORGET THEY ARE THERE. This is for breadcrumbs for the stuffing. 3. Chop the chorizo, olives, jalapenos and spring onions into smallest pieces. 4. Drizzle olive oil into a small frypan and chuck the chorizo in first on medium heat. Cook gently about 2-3 minutes while stirring. The chorizo will generate a lot of oil. Chuck in the olives, then the jalapenos, and finally the spring onions for 1 minute. Drizzle juice of half a lime onto the mixture and turn off the heat. 5.In the meantime (ITM) check out the ciabatta and see if it is dried out and golden brown. I ready take it out and crunch into breadcrumbs using a pestle and mortar.  Season with a pinch of sea salt and pepper. 6. Allow the  mixture to cool. Crumble the feta but do not combine yet. PREPARING THE POUSSIN 1. Remove the end of the legs. 2. Lay the poussin with the breast side up, and using your biggest knife, cut in half down the middle of the breastbone. Force will be required to do this.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Your Old Man Cooks is a combination of thoughts, tips, recipes, and utilities to help you cook. There are chapters that you can follow sequentially, as if you are reading a book, or not. Feel free to rummage about, comment, copy, suggest, opine. Just type in a word into the search function and you will see what comes up. Like much of cooking, or indeed life, I am pretty much making it up as I go along, so join me.


Eating is one of those things in life, along with s****ing and sleeping, that you know you are going to be doing up until the day you pack it in, so don't be in a hurry to become a good cook. Take a little bit of knowledge here and a little bit there. Sample the goods. Go away. Come back. Try something new. Fail. Realise that every day is going to be a little different, every ingredient going to behave a little bit differently than the last time you tried. Don't follow recipes other than as a general guide. Learn how to do, not how to follow. Most of all, have fun, and learn. Cooking is one of the few things in life that you get to enjoy the benefits the very second you finish. It will, quite literally, keep you alive in more ways than one.

D Eric Pettigrew

An introduction to the difference between the sexes

Start before the beginning with the right tools

Chapter 2-TOOLS OF THE TRADE

You wouldn't go out to play golf without a good set of golf clubs, would you? And you know, as if by combination of instinct and vanity, that if you buy crap equipment, you will get crap results. Of course, none of us will ever be Tiger Woods (unless he happens to be reading this) but one of the most important requisites of a craftsman, whether it be a carpenter or a golf or a desk jockey with a computer, or a budding cook, are his tools.

And if you are doing something for the first time, how the hell do you know what you need? The answer is that you don't, and you certainly don't need to get the latest gizmo. A poll was done to see what the most important cooking utensil was, and the surprise winner wasn't a Cuisinart or a special griddle...it was a wooden spoon.

That just shows you don't have to wear fancy jodphurs to ride a horse, but you do need a saddle. Keep things simple, but buy smart, and start before the beginning.

The process of any craft involves a few necessary steps, steps I call THINGINGS. The list is exhaustive. In general these are the following:

Thinking or Dreaming
Provisioning

Preparing

Executing

Monitoring

Adjusting

Presenting

Enjoying

Cleaning Up

Reviewing

Thinking or Dreaming (again)

The purpose of cooking, you would think, is to get to the step called enjoying or doing. At least this would seem to be the point of the whole exercise.

You might be surprised though, that the other parts of the process: the thinking, the dreaming, the choosing, the chopping, the samling, the screwing-up, the painting of a plate, and yes, even the cleaning-up, might all become just as enjoyable.

But only if you have the right tools.

So what is the very first thing you should get if you are starting off?

The most important step, or at least one of the first steps which matter is preparation, and a good deal of preparation involves sharp implements. So in my opinion, the very first thing you should invest in is a fine knife, and you might as well go for the best. Believe me, it will be worth it. Don't namby pamby around. Buy yourself a 9" Global Chef's Knife, a chopping board, and a whetstone to keep the thing sharp sharp sharp.

Check them out here: http://www.globalknives.uk.com/

You may thing that the outlay of £60 or so is a little excessive for what might only be a hobby to start with, but hey, a new driver will cost you north of £250. Nuff said. And what happens if you decide not to be a chef? So what, you can also use it to defend your property, or cut off your fingertips if you get frostbite (see Sir Ranulph Fiennes). What are you going to do with a 5-yr old Calloway.

While you are at it , buy yourself a couple of other knives: a paring knife and a breadknife (serrated). These will be cheaper, but still buy the best. So now that you have a knife (knives) the next thing to do is learn how to use them, for learning the correst way will save time, reap rewards, and make you feel like a samurai master.

Your chef's knife will be used for a variety of jobs, including chopping, dicing, slicing, cubing, julienning, crushing, mincing,filetting, trimming, peeling, coring, deboning, hacking,shaving etc.. (but NOT stabbing, prying, or screwing. Would ou use your drive as a crowbar? Not likely).

If these uses seem a bit excessive, rest assured you will be doing them all. They are part of the vast universe of THINGINGS. Cooking is no more than the cumulative product of each ING.

Learn the fundamentals, or else you will feel like you have just wandered onto the first tee at St. Andrews, never having seen a golf club or ball, much less swung one.

Chapter 1- PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE

Most great chefs are men. Most great cooks are women. Why do you suppose that is? In both cases there is no less passion, and probably no less talent. But traditionally, perhaps the greatest difference is that most women cook because they have to; and the men who cook do because they want to. Great chefs don't follow recipes; they create them, just as great artists don't paint by numbers. Now before you get all feminist on me, this is not some savage attack on women, nor is it an hommage to male superiority, which God knows is an oxymoron. It is merely a statistical observation. Are Delia Smith and Julie Child or Elizabeth David any lesser than l'Escoffier or Paul Bocuse or Jamie Oliver? No, of course not.

In any case, the point of this book is not to debate the relative merits of one sex vs. another, or even to consider the human condition. Nothing as grand or noble or high falutin' as that. Nope.

The point of this exercise is to approach cooking from a male perspective, the same perspective as a man who decides to take up golf, or do some carpentry, or I dunno, change the oil in his car or put together an IKEA bookshelf.

Men and women are profoundly different (no shit Sherlock!) but the way a woman approaches cooking is entirely different from how a man approaches the same subject. Let me illustrate this by referring to a principle which I call percussive maintenance.

Imagine if you will sticking some change into a vending machine and having nothing come out. Your reaction will no doubt stem from whether you are a man or a woman. Think I am wrong? You tell me.

If you are a woman, your first reaction will be frustration. You will press buttons. You will read the instructions. You will look for the telephone number of the company who owns or services the machine. You will formulate plans to get your money back. You might even put more money into it as if it was your fault and you may have inserted it incorrectly.


If you are a man, however, that first similar reaction of frustration will last no more than a millisecond, no longer than the expression of blank incomprehension which will come over you face. This will immediately be replaced by blind rage and an almost guaranteed reaction. You will feel like beating the shit out of the machine, and then you will proceed to do so. Bam! Bam! Bam!

This is what as known as percussive maintenance, and this is why there are generalissmos instead of generalissimas, wars instead of peaceful and rational discussions over tea, and Aussie rules, ice hockey, Thai kick boxing, or American football instead of competitive ballet.

The difference between the sexes is as old as the hills. For documentary proof, you need look no further than that accurate chronicler of prehistoric Stone Age life: The Flintstones. It was no accident that Fred and Wilma's offspring were called Pebbles and Bam Bam: Pebbles, the sweet little girl who was happy to play with her stones (read jewels) and Bam Bam, who loved to go around busting things up, ie. practising percussive maintenance, right from the get-go.

Now, what has this difference got to do with cooking?

Men, as a general rule, are impulsive doers who value learning by doing (or even messing up) over learning first, then doing. They are more like watered down versions of Thomas Edison, who said he never failed, he just tried 1000 ways that didn't work. They are much more likely to to follow the adage: Ready Shoot Aim, rather than Ready Aim Shoot. And men are notoriously poor at following (or indeed even asking for) directions.

These characteristics extend to cooking. Until recently, the standard books for teaching people how to cook were done by women (The Joy of Cooking in the US in the 50s and 60s, Delia Smith in the UK). These were books written by women for women, bringing a generation of young wives up to scratch from scratch,, if you catch my drift.

However, the paradigm has shifted. You are just as likely now to peer into a house and find the same person whose hands moments before were scraping grass out of the lawnmower now in the kitchen preparing dinner.

This book is an attempt to help that person along the way to be a competent and creative cook, without sacrificing any of the impulsiveness, the experimentation, and the competitiveness which characterises those on the male side of the Great Sex Divide.

Of course anyone might benefit from it. Even those women who have read this, shaken their heads, and muttered under their breath: Men!