Steak

How I cook it. If you don't like this, then tough. I'm right, you're wrong. One day you will realise I am right and agree with me.

How to do it:

1. Buy a steak. I just get whatever's reduced-to-clear in Waitrose (their meat is very good, and extremely cheap if reduced). Ribeye is a fantastic cut. Look for fat marbling in the meat, that's good. "Braising" and "Frying" are not good for this type of cooking. Tell the butcher what you're going to do, and he'll let you know if the meat you're buying is right for it. Try to get it relatively thick, unless you're cooking fillet, when you want it practically spherical.
2. Rub some olive oil onto your steak. Don't be afraid to touch it, it's just meat.
3. Grind black pepper onto the steak. Maybe a bit of salt. You could add your favourite herbs or spices if you liked. I have some cajun stuff I sometimes add. You can't go wrong with just salt and pepper though, unless you oversalt. Leave it for a bit. Ideally your steak should be at room temperature when you start to cook it.
4. Get the pan really freakin' hot. I'm talking like sixth circle of hell kinda hot. Add a little oil.
5. Introduce the steak to the pan. Let it sit there, sizzling for a bit. Flip it over, the cooked side should be nicely browned, with some darker brown bits. If it's not, turn it back. If it is, let the steak sit on its back for a while. If you have a particularly thick steak (e.g. fillet) then you might want to use a pair of tongs to hold the steak on its side and fry the edges. All in all, you want the entire outside of the steak cooked really well, but the inside to be raw. No, that's not a typo. Raw, as in completely uncooked. 
6. Put it on a warm plate, in a warm place for a couple of minutes to rest.
7. Take the pan off the heat, and pour some red wine into the pan. This will immediately boil. Swirl it around and collect all the juice from the pan.
8. Serve it with chips, and salad. Pour all that lovely winey stuff over the food, wherever you please. Make sure some goes on the meat though.

Notes

• Steaks do not need to be cooked through, they just need the surface cooked. Germs cannot get inside the meat, just onto the surface, where you annihilate them with heat. If you've got really good quality meat, you don't need to cook it at all, and can make steak tartare.
• "If you cut me do I not bleed?" Well, yes, if you're a misquoted Shylock, but not if you're a good steak. A "bloody" steak is a crap steak. If it's good quality meat, there shouldn't be any blood in it at all, even if you cook it "bleu" as described above. If you cut it and it bleeds, it's crap, and hasn't been hung properly. Don't buy from that shop again.
• There is no point in buying a very expensive steak if you're just going to cook it into leather. You might as well start with something cheap if you're going to have it well-done and save your money. A cheaper steak will probably have more flavour anyway because it's a more well-used muscle, which makes it tougher (when rare), but more flavourful. 
• If you want it better done, you're wrong, because all you're doing is removing flavour and texture from your expensive food, but if you insist just turn the heat down a little bit, and let the meat sit on a lower heat for a bit longer. You can tell how cooked it is by how hard it is. Harder is cooked-er.
• Serve with a nice red wine. A Gran Reserva Rioja, perhaps, if it's a special occasion, which it is, because you're eating steak. Make whatever wine you choose heavy, rather than light.

Carbonara

Very easy recipe. Very simple recipe.
I like to cook this when I want something hearty, but I can't be arsed to cook anything "proper". It doesn't take long at all. I don't know why most books have really complicated recipes for this with millions of (sometimes bizzare) ingredients, it's not complicated. It's a frickin' fry-up with cheese and pasta. It was invented by Italian coal miners (hence carbonara). Imagine a Geordie coalminer inventing some scran, it's not "haute-cuisine", it's just fantastically tasty and simple. Just because it's got an Italian name doesn't make it posh or difficult to cook.

Don't use cream, whatever you do. It will make the dish unnecessarily rich. It's already rich, you don't need to add cream. You wouldn't put cream on a fry-up, so you don't need it here. Carbonara recipes with cream are recipes written just in case idiots who can't be trusted not to poison themselves with undercooked cheap shitty eggs use them. You're not an idiot, are you? No, so you don't need cream. If you've been using cream before, you've been duped. This is better. Trust me.

Four ingredients:

• Pasta (as much as you want to eat, you don't need me to tell you how much that is)
• Eggs (cooking for one, I use 2. For 2 people, 3 is probably right)
• Pancetta/bacon (enough of it. about a handful of bits)
• Parmesan (a nose-sized bit, grated finely)

Notes on ingredients: 

1. Use a long thin pasta if possible (linguine, spaghetti, whatever), it works better as the sauce coats it nicely. More complicated shapes tend to make it a bit claggy, as the egg clumps up around it.
2. Use free range. Not only are barn eggs horrendously produced, and liable to salmonella, they're also not as tasty. When eggs are your main ingredient, they need to be tasty, and FR aren't much more expensive. Make sure they're fresh eggs. Put them, uncracked, in a load of water. If they float, they're not fresh, and should probs be chucked. Ignore the date stamped on them, it's nonsense. Float-test is the way to check. Your eggs will last way beyond the date stamped on them. If you keep your eggs in the fridge, use warm water to check. This will just make the eggs warm up a bit to room temperature and cook better.
3. Bacon or lardons is fine, the difference is subtle at best. If you're a vegetarian (or even if you're not), shitake mushrooms sliced thinly, 2-3mm, and fried in butter until crispy make a seriously delicious alternative.
4. Parmesan is best, but it's expensive. If you're really strapped for cash, use Grana Padana. Don't use cheddar(etc.), it won't work properly as the fat content is wrong, and you'll end up with lumps, plus it doesn't taste right. Don't buy pre-grated parmesan cos it's a) shit, you might as well use sawdust b) about 4 times the price per kilo of a lump. £15-£18 per kilo is probably the cheapest you'll find parmesan lumps.

Summary:

1. Cook pasta
2. Add whisked eggs to hot pasta
3. Add parmesan and bits of fried bacon

You see, that's really easy. Now for a bit more detail.

How to make it:

1. Boil a load of water in the kettle. Loads.
2. Get your heaviest saucepan. I use a cast iron, fake Le Creuset casserole dish. The heaviness is important, as you need to hold heat in the metal. More weight = more heat (not temperature though).
3. Pour all the boiling water in to your heavy pan and add some salt. Bring it to the boil.
4. Once the water is boiling and not before, add your pasta and cook for the length of time it says on the packet. Use a timer, the packet doesn't lie. Don't cook it to a mush. Spaghetti in tins is not the right consistency. You should need to use your teeth to eat it, rather than just your tongue.
5. Whilst the pasta is cooking, crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk them with a bit of ground black pepper). Grate the parmesan onto a plate or something. Fry the pancetta/bacon.
6. When the pasta is cooked, drain off the water, quickly, and put the pasta back in to the still-hot pan.
7. Pour in the whisked eggs, quickly, and stir the pasta together with the eggs. This is the only difficult-ish bit, it's where the heat of the pan is important. The retained heat cooks the eggs very quickly, but shouldn't make them claggy (like scrambled eggs). Keep stirring until the eggs are cooked. If they still look like whisked eggs, with big bubbles in, then they're not cooked. If you're in doubt, or haven't used a particularly heavy pot, put the pan on a very low heat and keep stirring. You want it to have the consistency of cream. As soon as it looks creamy, take it off the heat. This is why crappy recipes have cream in. They make you cook the eggs too much and add cream to get the right texture. You are a good enough cook not to need cream. Don't tell me you're not.
8. Once you got the eggs bit right, add the parmesan and mix it all in, then add your fried bits of pancetta/bacon/mushroom.
9. Put it on a plate and eat it. Maybe grate a little more parmesan on top, and grind some pepper onto it. If you're feeling generous, share with a friend.

Notes:

Don't try to cook too much of this at once. It gets difficult to coat all the pasta with egg, and make sure it's all cooked. I'd suggest cooking for 2 or 3 at the most. Also, the pan gets too full, and it's just a chore to do.

The first time you cook this, just make it for yourself.

If you do end up with claggy eggs, don't worry too much, just try again next time. Claggy eggs just aren't great texturewise. 

If you don't understand something, leave a comment, or email me. It's not difficult, so I've probably just not explained well.

Stuff I've Cooked

Decided to make a blog of stuff I've cooked. I'm a PhD student at the moment, and as an undergrad I was bought several "student" cooking books. Most of them were written as if cooking was something really difficult and grown-up, that a poor little 18 year old would need gently guiding in to. I saw one student cookery book that literally told you how to make a cheese sandwich, step-by-step, and then on the next page, how to make a ham sandwich, with all the steps repeated again.

Students aren't idiots. They've managed to get at least a couple of A-levels, so are perfectly capable of holding information in their heads. Cooking is easy. At the very basic level, you get stuff and make it hot. That isn't hard. Sometimes you don't even need to make it hot.

The only difficult thing about cooking is clearing up afterwards, when you're full of food (or if you're a student like my housemates and I were, clearing a big enough space in the week-old washing-up on the side to work in).

So, here we go. Recipes you might actually want to eat, done properly. If you don't like it, or have a better idea, great, do that instead. A recipe is just a suggestion in most cases anyway. You can generally substitute most things with something that you've just managed to get hold of, for example, a recipe for risotto will work whether you use chicken, fish or mushrooms, but you might want to change the added flavourings slightly.

There are very few things that are a must-have, as most things can be substituted, or improvised. If in doubt, use your noggin. You obviously can't make an omelette without eggs, but you could make a cake using granulated rather than caster sugar. It might not be perfect, but who cares, you still get cake at the end. Likewise with utensils, if you haven't got a whisk, use a fork or something. If you haven't got a saucepan, use a frying pan. If some particular piece of equipment is important, I'll tell you, and why.