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September 22, 2005

Creamy tarragon sauce

So the other day I decided to try eating something other than ready meals and takeaway — I made chicken and bacon in a creamy tarragon sauce, to a recipe made up pretty much as I went along. It was quite nice, though not the greatest meal I've ever tasted, but I'm recording the recipe for posterity so I can tweak it next time. It's dead simple, so if you try it and like it I'd be interested to hear. If you try it and it's vile, or it gives all your friends food poisoning, contact my lawyer instead

Ingredients

• Some chicken breasts, boneless and skinless. About 1 breast per person is about right, but adjust according to size and appetite. Accordingly, I cooked 1.
• A couple of rashers of bacon, or a few slices of ham would work just as well.
• A small tub (I didn't notice the size on it, but it was the smaller of 2 sizes available in Sainsbury's) of créme fraiche. Bear in mind this is just about all the volume of the sauce, so you need as much cream as you want to have sauce!
• Some tarragon.
• Other herbs essentially at random. I think I threw a bit of basil and "mixed herbs" in, but not a lot. Salt and black pepper too.
• Pasta! (Or rice, if you like)

Method

1. Cut the chicken into chunks, maybe 1-2cm³ or so. Small mouthfuls. I recommend doing this with a decent pair of kitchen scissors rather than faffing about with a knife. The lazier may wish to buy pre-diced chicken, I guess.
2. In a deep frying pan, or broad saucepan (is this what a skillet is?), fry the chicken in a little bit of oil. Don't worry about it being cooked through at this stage, just make sure it's sealed. If you're using bacon, throw that in at some point, and make sure it's nice and crispy, then turn the heat down to cook the chicken through.
3. Pour (well, scoop) in the cream. Stir. Cook gently for as long as it takes to sort the pasta out. If you're using ham instead of bacon, add it now.
4. Add lots of tarragon, ideally freshly chopped. Then add other herbs as desired.
5. Keep the heat low and stir often, while you cook the pasta.
6. Serve, with a bit of parsley sprinkled on the top for the look of the thing.

Next time, I'm going to bear the following things in mind:

• It tasted quite watery, which might be the fault of the half-fat creme fraiche I picked up. Would something like double cream have improved this? Or not cooking the cream for as long? I've never used cream to make sauce before, generally I use milk and flour to make white sauce, so I'm new to all this. I might go back, but at least cream doesn't have lumps of uncooked flour :-)
• I actually added a couple of sun-dried tomatoes, but don't bother. Really.
• The dish is shockingly lacking in vegetables. Maybe some onions in the sauce, or a spot of garlic, wouldn't go amiss?
• You could do this with pre-cooked chicken, say what's left on the carcass after a roast dinner. In which case, I'd say fry the bacon first, add the cooked chicken to that to warm up, then add the cream and continue as normal.

Posted by James at 01:36 | Comments (2)
Tags for this entry: cooking food

September 20, 2005

A revolving gilded statue

I know this Alaskan bridge thing has been blogged to death already, but does anyone else think it's just a matter of Don Young trying to follow in the glorious footsteps of the great Turkmenbashi? I expect to see plans for a revolving gilded statue on the bridge supports any day now, and an ice palace at one end. Although in Alaska, that may be a little too practical...

Posted by James at 23:57 | Comments (0)
Tags for this entry: politics turkmenbashi alaska

September 11, 2005

Drink-sodden Armageddon

In a smidgeon under 3 months time, the law in the UK regarding licences to sell alcohol, to put on various forms of entertainment, and to sell hot food/drink after 11pm (late night refreshment) will be changing. The 6 separate current licensing schemes will be brought under a single banner, and in the process the current statutory limits on when a licence to sell alcohol can apply will be relaxed. This isn't to say a licence won't be needed (it certainly will), or that licences will all be 24-hour (they most certainly won't!), but there will be the potential for 24-hour drinking across the UK. Which for some reason has upset people.

Admirable as upsetting the Daily Mail editors might be, it's slightly scary to think that we might be plunging towards a drink-sodden Armageddon. But are we really? Lots of other European countries trust their citizens with the right¹ to drink alcohol at just about any time of day they choose, after all, and we're told they don't suffer from our "yob culture" — I suppose the question is, do we need a shift in our culture before we can have late night drinking, or do we need late night drinking before we can have a shift in our culture? And if it's the former, how else do we go about causing this change?

I personally don't think people in general will drink more at a time, more frequently, or more in general, under the new licensing regime. What they will do is get just as insanely drunk as now at a bigger variety of times to normal (making them easier to deal with?), and perhaps start their nights out later. People also won't feel rushed to squeeze as many pints in as possible between the end of Eastenders and last orders, so we should see fewer people getting drunker than they planned, and fewer people throwing up outside pubs/takeaways. Bonus!

The "late night" part of the new licensing rules is just one aspect of the act, anyway. More significant to me is the reduction in bureaucracy for places that currently need multiple licences, and the introduction of distinct "personal" and "premises" licences, which makes sense in a whole bunch of ways, and ought to save licensees a whole bunch of court appearances in the future. For one thing, anyone working for a pub chain as a "relief manager" will simply be able to have a personal licence, and be the Designated Supervisor for any premises in the chain whenever they need to be. At present, I understand every relief manager would need to make a court appearance to be made the temporary licensee at the new premises every time they went to a new pub, although I'm willing to stand corrected on this one.

Some new licensees will face significant problems of course, since currently kebab shops and burger vans don't need a licence to operate at night, and will soon need one to sell anything hot after 11pm. The reasons for introducing these requirements (as explained in that article) are pretty sound, though.

Something else those complaining about the new laws don't seem to realise is that people can already drink until silly hours of the morning if they so decide — pubs I've worked in have had "lock-ins" previously which extend well beyond the hours they've applied to extend their licence to under the new regimes. I can think of at least 2 pubs locally where drinking to 3am or so isn't unheard of, but I can't think of any that have applied for a licence beyond 2am. I suppose some nightclubs in the city centre may have applied for more hours.

So to conclude, the new licensing laws will piss off Daily Mail editors, reduce city centre violence, reduce occurences of vomiting on pavements near pubs, shut down dodgy backstreet kebab shops, regulate the surviving ones better, and allow people to drink legally later avoiding the need for things like lockins, while reducing paperwork for publicans. Sounds good to me.

¹ I don't mean to imply that 5am-drinking is some kind of fundamental human right, here, just that some countries allow their citizens to do it.

Posted by James at 23:05 | Comments (4)
Tags for this entry: drinking questions politics pubs beer

September 06, 2005

How big's a barrel?

Everyone knows oil comes in barrels. The price of crude is something like $60 a "barrel", and among its other horrendous effects, Hurricane Katrina has reduced world oil production by a couple of million barrels a day. But, almost none of this oil ever sees a barrel, instead being transported/stored in tanks, or via pipelines. Barrel is just a macro for "35 gallons".

Beer, on the other hand, almost always comes in barrels. In beer land, a barrel refers to 36 gallons, but in the cellars of most pubs you'll mostly find barrels of just 11, or maybe 22 gallons. Except casks of ale, which tend to be 9 gallons or multiples thereof.

I hereby propose that people stop using "barrel" as a unit, and just use it as a term for a type of container. Right now. Thanks! Anything else is just too firkin complicated.

Posted by James at 01:34 | Comments (0)
Tags for this entry: rants pubs units