Esther Walker - Bad Cook

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by The Friday Project 2013

Copyright © Esther Walker

Esther Walker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Ebook Edition © March 2013 ISBN: 9780007515721

Version: 2017-08-17

D is for Daddy

Contents

Title Page BAD COOK Esther Walker

Copyright

Dedication D is for Daddy

Prologue

How to Stay Married

Lamb Shank Curry

Connie’s Mango Salsa

Osso Buco

Why I Hate Myself Part 1

Note: How to Be a Good Host

Meat Fear Part 1

My Husband the Eighties Hero

Are You an Alcoholic?

The Shitty Food Diet

Note: What You Need in Your Kitchen

Toad in the Hole

Offal

Home Alone

Cheat’s Mayonnaise

Baba Ganoush

Advice

Things No-one Ever Tells You About Cooking

Valentine’s Day

Poached Pears in Marsala

Brain Fail

How to Make a White Sauce

Fig and Goat’s Cheese Salad

Juicing

Who Needs Friends?

Choritzo

Where I Get Pregnant

Where I Go on About Being Pregnant Quite a Lot

… Pregnancy Chat Continues …

Being Pregnant Becomes Tedious

My Mother

Padrón Peppers

Julia Churchill

Banana Bread Part 1

Where I Get Depressed

A carrot cake with a frosting of mascarpone and orange by Nigel Slater

My Very Own Chicken Pie

Here Come the Gays

Opinions

Christmas Sausages

Macaroons

January

The Best Curry in the World

Roast Garlic and Camembert

Fat

Fish

Interlude: Things to Make Sure You Have Done Before You Bring a Baby Home from Hospital

Courgettes

Golabki

Auntie Hannah’s Courgette Thing

Meat Fear Part 2

WWKMD

Falling Asleep in Cars

Small Things

Please Do Not Invite Me to Your Party

What the Hell to Do with Red Mullet

The Time I Went on a Date with Jason Orange

I Hate Summer

Worst Holiday Ever

You Can’t Fake a Family (AKA Worst Holiday Ever Part 2)

Premature Middle Age

How Not to Look a Fright

Where I Finally Go Completely Mad

An Obligatory Cocktail Recipe

Dead Prostitute Friends

Just So Tired

Gumbo

The Perfect is The Enemy of the Good

What Makes a Perfect Kitchen?

Make-Amends Brownies

Life Stoves My Head in with a Plank

Banana Bread Part 2

Cullen Skink

Meat Fear Part 3

Kitchen Gadgets

How to Cater for a Lot of People Without Going Insane or Having to Be a Very Good Cook

Kitty’s Jersey Royal Hash

Breaded Scallops

Interlude: How to Talk to a Butcher

Making Dinner, Night after Night, Without Going Insane

A Mouse

A Ham is Not Just for Christmas

Meatballs

Welsh Cakes

Nasi Goreng or Dirty Rice

Scones

Asian Baked Salmon

Treacle Tart

Tex-Mex Chicken

A Pork Pie

Note: How to Clean Your Kitchen

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Appendix: Pastry

Recipe Index

Thank You

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

I always skip over prologues in books because it’s almost always the boring author, boring on about some dreary yet grand schema they have for their dismal little work. But this isn’t going to be boring!! I promise!! And you need to read it to understand what follows. I need to explain just what the hell is going on. So, ready?

In 2009 I walked out on my job as a features writer on the Independent . Being a features writer was my dream job, until I started doing it and realized that I was no good at it. Worse, the paper was running at a massive loss with a miserable shortage of staff, money and morale. They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them and the whole thing was a terrible disaster. I left with no job to go to, but I lived with my rich boyfriend and I thought that with my experience and the few friends I had in the industry, I could get myself some sort of freelancing career.

But about two months after I went, Lehman Brothers collapsed, the housing market swiftly followed and the world sank into a recession, which seems ongoing. This, coupled with the fact that as chance would have it I am not only the world’s worst features writer, I am apparently also the world’s worst freelance journalist, spelled disaster for my career.

I just could not get it together. Getting a piece published suddenly seemed to be a horrific task of unimaginable difficulty. Faced with trying to get something published in the Daily Mail or going back to get the Aegean stables really spotless, I promise you, had he known what was involved, Hercules would have gone for his mop and Marigolds in a trice.

Being the sort of person with no inner reserves of courage or backbone I did the only sensible thing and slid into a deep depression. I couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time. What on earth was I going to do with myself? What was to become of me?

Reasonably quickly I realized that in the first instance I had to earn my keep in my boyfriend’s house. We were not yet married; my situation was precarious. So I thought I really ought to learn how to cook in order to make myself indispensable. Hitherto, my cooking for my boyfriend – or anyone else – had not been good. I refused to follow recipes, as I had heard that with cooking what one must do is simply express one’s personality and experiment. Of course, as I realized in time, this only applies if you are already an amazing cook. If you are not an instinctive or experienced cook, you have to learn how to do it, like you learn how to drive.

So I started at the beginning. I learnt how to make a white sauce that was not grainy and floury. I started, tentatively, on stews and pies, then moved on to conquer things I have always found delicious when cooked for me by other people: American-style pancakes, muffins, potato dauphinoise, slow-roast pork belly, scotch eggs, pork pies. And because I am not a cook, I am a writer, I needed to write about it. I wasn’t going to ‘keep a diary’ because I had been doing that since I was eight and was bored with it – and with people finding it and reading it and leaving comments in the margins. So I did what a lot of people seemed to be doing at the time, which was to start a blog. (Although this was well before the phenomenon of celebrity bloggers, back when blogging was still a bit weird and pathetic, done by crazy people in their underwear.)