A Return to Form

In 1987, when I was 17, I went to live in Paris for a year to study music at the Ecole Normale de Musique.  I was no stranger to living away from home, having been in boarding school since the age of 9.  However, life at boarding school is very cushy: all the cooking and laundry is done for you.  In Paris, I was to be on my own, living in a studio apartment on the Rue Collette.  The apartment had no washing machine, but it did have a small kitchen area.  My mother had a quiet word with the concierge, who agreed to do my washing and ironing once a week for a small fee.  (No doubt she also asked her to keep an eye on me.)  But as for the cooking, I was on my own.  And so at the beginning of my adventure, my mother presented me with an early 18th birthday present: Delia Smith's recently published One is Fun:

The occasion must have struck Mum as important, since she inscribed the book very formally:

The premiss of the book is that those who live on their own, but who like to cook, are often frustrated by the fact that recipes in cookbooks are typically designed to feed four or six people, and it is not always a straightforward matter to cut the recipe down.  What do you do if the recipe for (e.g.) spaghetti carbonara for four people called for one egg?  So Delia Smith set out to write a cookbook catering specifically to single people.

Thus, it was somewhat ironic that in preparing dinner for Katherine and me I found myself doubling Delia's recipes.  I say 'recipes' in the plural, because we ended up doing two.  The main one was the recipe for Cider-braised pork chops with cream and mushrooms:

The subsidiary one was for stir-fried red cabbage:

We also did baked potatoes.  In fact, they went in first:

While they were doing, I started the chops.  They were browned, and then onion and mushrooms sautéed in the same pan.  Then cider is poured all over.  Now, when I say 'cider', I mean what in America is called 'hard cider', i.e. the alcoholic drink ('apple beer', as the nice man in Claridge's Liquors  helpfully suggested).  In the pan, it all looked like this:

Notice how the onion and mushroom mixture is piled on top of the chops as they braise in the cider.  The sauce was reduced and finished with cream before serving.  Meanwhile, my beautiful assistant was chopping ingredients for the cabbage:

Apples and onion first:

Into the pot they went:

Then the red cabbage:

And then spices (cinnamon, ground cloves, and nutmeg):

That was cooked in the Dutch Oven for ten minutes or so, and vinegar was added at the end.

When all the elements were ready, it looked pretty good on the plate:

That was my plate (two chops and a delicate amount of butter on the potato).  Here was Katherine's:

Notice the large dollop of sour cream on the potato. We drank a nice bottle of our trusty Rhône red with it:

It was pretty much the perfect home-cooked dinner.  Tasty, seasonal flavours, and a straightforward recipe which was hard to ruin.  Our experiment with the cookbooks was back on track!