My Giant Pot of Shame

Oh dear, what a horrible night.  Let me set the scene.

Honeycomb Cannelloni with Vegetable Ragu

It seemed simple enough.  Whip up a vegetable ragu comprising diced carrots, celery, onions, leek, mushrooms and tomatoes, throw it in a pot with dried cannelloni tubes and white sauce and end up with a "Bloomin' tasty" pasta bake.  Why do you lie to me Jamie Oliver!?!?!

It's 6 o'clock.  After finishing work late I finally get home to start cooking.  I'm fairly excited about this dish after thinking about it for the last week.  And to help share in my excitement I invited my fellow intern Joy over for dinner (after promising to help set up her mobile broadband).  Having bought all my ingredients the previous night I lay out all my veggies on the table ready to start slicing the dicing.

Hold up: I don't know how to dice vegetables.

Yes that's right.  In 24 years on this earth (almost 25, only a few more weeks people!) I haven't learnt to dice vegetables properly.  As a consequence, it takes me an hour to dice up 3 carrots, 4 sticks of celery, 1 red onion, 1 leek, 2 cloves of garlic and 5 Portobello mushrooms.

So there I stand in my tiny kitchen surrounded by piles roughly chopped vegetables (sorry guys I forgot to take progress photos),  reading up on the next step, when it dawns on me that it'll take at least 45 minutes for the crap to reduce down to a nice thick ragu.  Shit.  Then I read a little more ahead and saw that it would take another 45 minutes to bake the pasta in the oven.  Fuck.  It's 7 o'clock and dinner is still at least an hour and a half away.  What the hell did I get myself into?

Joy arrives while my ragu is simmering away, and joy oh joy, she's brought Rice Paper Rolls!  We spend the next half hour revisiting my Vietnamese roots, me proudly showing off my pro rice paper rolling skills (prawns on the outside people!).  For a Canadian-Chinese she makes a mean dipping sauce.

I check on my pot periodically and give it a good stir.  After 45 minutes it hasn't really thickened up as much a I'd hoped, and there's a worrying burnt smell emanating from the depths of the pot.  Merde.  Joy (obviously a much better cook than me) starts helping me out while I whip up a quick white sauce made up of cream, creme fraiche, parmesan and anchovies(?).  Meanwhile another Jamie Oliver twist is waiting to screw me over.

The interesting part of this dish, which I forgot to mention before, is that the cannelloni tubes are placed in the pot standing upright, thus giving it a honeycomb appearance.  I somehow managed to procure a pot with the exact dimensions he suggests in the recipe, probably my only success of the night.  We place the tubes in the pot on a bed of wilted spinach then begin to pour the ragu over it.  Disaster.  My shoddily chopped veggies have made the whole thing a little to chunky.  Like fitting crappy square pegs into delicate little round holes, we struggle to get the mix down into the tubes.  However by some miracle it all goes down eventually and, after topping with the white sauce, goes into the oven for the final leg.  It's 9 o'clock.

The kitchen is a mess, like someone came along and vomited diced carrots and celery all over it.  Various sized bowls are stacked up nowhere in particular, knives and chopping boards are hanging precariously over the kitchen bench.  And Joy, being the amazing future wife that she is, starts to wash my dishes!  Despite all my protests (OK, so maybe I didn't protest THAT much) my kitchen is spotless without me having to scrub a single plate.  Essentially, I have invited Joy over tonight to feed me and wash my dishes.  She didn't even bring her laptop over for me to set up her internet!  How useless am I?

Anyway, the pot finally comes out around 10 o'clock.  Joy is long gone so I plate up a serve and sit down to watch the rest of the soccer.  It smells good, it looks like mush, it tastes...not too bad.  Definitely a good, hearty, vegetarian dish.  It was lacking a little kick to make the whole thing pop but that was probably more my doing.  And the texture was just wrong.  I'm not exactly sure how cannelloni is meant to turn out, but I'm sure 'rubbery' isn't right.  The upside is I've made enough pasta to last me the week, so it'll be another while before I put up another dish on this blog.  Let's all be thankful for that!

A couple of days later I was craving a salad (what?) so I decided to try my hand at at Beetroot and Pear Salad with Feta Cheese and Lemon and Oil Dressing.  Thinking ahead this time, I looked up how to matchstick beetroots and 'acquired' some gloves from the hospital so I wouldn't stain my hands.  Smart!  Let's see how it turned out.

It was very...red.  The beets stained all the pear bits so it wasn't as colourful as I would have liked.  I realised there are different coloured beets out there, but not in Horsham.  Also, texture was again a problem, with the pear being all mushy and the beets not quite as crunchy as I thought they would be.  The dressing was nice and the feta really brought everything together.  I still have a mixing bowl full of this stuff so it looks like I'm stuck with it for the next few days.

I suppose the most important thing I've taken out of all this mess is the importance of planning and preparation.  I obviously had no idea how long it would take me to prep and cook my cannelloni, and I really should have diced all my vegetables the night before if I wanted any chance to have dinner at a decent hour.  I suppose from now on I'll have to calculate my prep and cook times (because Jamie Oliver doesn't make those explicit, boo).  Worst case scenario is I call Joy over again to bring me food.  Not such a terrible idea.