The first thing I have to say is, all of you are rubbish for not putting down your death row meals after the last post!

Now, following up yesterday’s post, I have found some rather macabre sites which tell us about the real death row meals. The nicer one, where you don’t have to read details about the crimes is here. So it seems that cheeseburgers are popular and so is fried chicken. I suppose it reflects on the kind of person who’d be there.  If your absolute favourite food in the whole world is junk food, then it’s quite likely you came from an underpriviledged family I guess.

I prefer the meal choices from the foodies on the BBC food board . There are some good ideas there.

Sometime during the next two weeks, Andy is probably going to fall off a mountain. He’s going on a holiday in the Austrian Alps which apparently involves climbing vertical ice walls and crossing 2000 foot deep gorges supported only be a 20 inch wide plank of wood nailed into the cliff wall. Even better, he’ll be accompanied by his acrophobic mother and will have merely 12 hours each day to journey from one shelter to the next before fierce storms set in.

Daft bugger. Rather him than me.

Even worse for him, the hostels where he and his family will be staying serve up some really poor quality slop for dinner.  It doesn’t seem fair to let a man go to his death without some proper food inside him so I offered to cook him his last decent meal.

I gave him almost free choice with one condition: it had to be blog-able. Typically, Andy couldn’t choose. After an investigation into what I already had in the fridge he decided he wanted to try some proper chorizo. He also hadn’t had chicken in a while. At least that made things easy. Chicken and chorizo paella it was, after all, my paella is pretty damn good.

All of you Londoners, I would like to recommend that on Saturday you go straight to Borough Market and get some of Brindisa’s picante chorizo. This stuff is absolutely lovely. I gave it a quick fry in olive oil and red wine before adding it to the paella and it was delicious. I’ve already got a paella recipe up here, which i’ll tweak soon to reflect how I made it this time. 

Now I would like to conduct a little survey. I know people are reading this- I can see you hitting the site!

Would you umm and err like Andy and then say ‘Uhhh….what have you got?’ or do you have a favourite meal you’d be craving in your last hours? 

I’m really interested in this, especially after some tv programme asked the same question and the top answer was ‘fish’. It’s insane. Fish? Any fish? Obviously-it must have be any fish because cod and tuna taste exactly the same.  Answers via the comments box please! 

Incidentally, Andy must really think he’s going to die, because he brought round a £25 bottle of Rioja to have with our meal. We didn’t even finish it! Half of it is sitting in my room. There’ll be more for me later.

At least not the one I used last night. Remember how I said the Murdoch Press book ‘Home Food’ was great? I was wrong. It’s great for inspiration and contains plenty of things a good cook should have in their repetoire, but as far as the actual recipes go, I’m not at all convinced.

I think I’ve already mentioned the disastrous kedgeree recipe which I followed two years ago. To be fair, if I hadn’t looked in that book, I’d never have heard of kedgeree, but I’m certainly never going to use it’s recipe again. Last night I had a similar experience.

The dish in question was farfalle with tiger prawns, horeradish and lemon. So you’d think it would be a zesty and powerful dish with a real kick to it, right? Wrong! It was stiflingly bland. I added extra horseradish and lemon but it didn’t help much. In the end I added a bit of dijon mustard, which turned out to be a very good thing indeed. After that the pasta was alright, not great,  but at least it had some flavour. 

I n general, I’m not the type of cook that follows recipes to the letter. I tend to look over them and then invent my own dish based loosely around the suggested flavours. Last night’s cooking reminded me why. Everytime I faithfully follow instructions things don’t work. This doesn’t bother me particularly as I find it’s much more fun to be creative in cooking and the results are always better, but I know lots of people who will slavishly copy what it says in the book. I wonder how they cope. Maybe this is why some people claim they can’t cook- they’re following recipes which, frankly, don’t work.