Omelette Arnold Bennett

Consider Arnold Bennett.

He's a famous Victorian novelist I'm reliably informed, although I'm not sure I've ever read any of his novels.. I note from Wikipedia that he wrote for Tit-Bits, although I thought that was something else.

I do know of him though.

Whether he cares now how he's remembered, least of all how he's remembered by me we will never know, but if you mention Arnold Bennett to me around about dinner time, I know I'm in for an eggy, fluffy, fishy treat. I have a faint recollection that this recipe was something to do with the Savoy, where novelists back in his day used to go and stay to write their books. Clearly the advances from publishers you could get in the first part of the 20th Century were pretty tasty; either that or the Savoy used to be a lot cheaper.

An Omelette Arnold Bennett has got it all going on, but is really only eggs and some other bits and pieces, so is perfect flow chart fodder. It's presented above in glorious monocolour for your - and especially Yvonne's - delights.

It's especially nice with a light green salad.

Fish Pie, with a Saffron twist

As a result of overwhelming demand, I've decided to keep going with the blog. I've recreated a recipe in a similar style as before, this time for a Fish Pie which is given a little exotic spin by adding a pinch of saffron. Don't use much or it'll take over.

I'm aware that there small wars are fought over whether you should use cheese as part of your sauce in a Fish Pie, but it's been left out of this recipe. Cheese + Saffron = Yuk in my book. Normally though, Gruyere is where it's at.

Cottage Pie Recipe - Flow Chart stylee

Hello everyone.
Not only my first blog here, but my first blog anywhere, as long as you discount the ill-starred web page I once wrote entitled 'Cheeses I have loved'. I think you might figure out quite why that didn't make the light of day. In my defence, I was a little younger then.

I've long had an idea that many people are intrigued by the idea of cooking reasonably challenging recipes, but simply lack the confidence to tackle them.

It was during the course of preparing a Christmas lunch for the extended family that I became acutely aware of the chaos which had enveloped the kitchen, and it started me wondering whether a more structured way of helping the ambitious - and not so ambitious - home chefs might be useful. It certainly would have been for me then. And so an idea was born.

When I look at a recipe, the instructions are obviously an essential part, but can sometimes appear a little daunting, and I've lost count of the number of times I've prepared one part of a recipe, only to find I should have also been working on something else simultaneously. And how does that course fit in with the vegetables I'm trying to prepare. And when on earth do I start pudding?? Ok, I admit a good read-through of the recipe beforehand might have helped, but I'll leave that to the Perfect Ones. There are times when I can barely remember my own name, let alone that I needed to have a brown roux ready to add to the sauce Espagnole to create a demi-glace.

A background in process design, coupled with the observation that it can be helpful to illustrate and explain ideas using flow charts, led me to put some recipes together in a more structured way. I've stuck one of them top right. Each of my recipes shows all the different elements of the cooking process as steps in a flow chart. This one is for a lovely cottage pie.

Hope you enjoy it!