Gaz Cooks Crap

Before being too old/too dead to do so, Mick Jagger and David Bowie once sang how summer was here and therefore the time was apparently right for dancing in the street. Which is plainly idiotic - if summer is here, it's hot and therefore the last thing you want to be doing is physical activity outside. Granted, "summer's here and the time is right for gentle exercise (if well hydrated) in an air-conditioned gymnasium" is a bit less catchy, but then I'm not the one flapping about outside sweating profusely just because 2 middle-aged rockers doing a Motown cover gave me some questionable advice about suitable  al fresco activities to do in warm weather. Anyway, instead of hastening the onset of heatstroke, another option of something to do when summer is here is cool off with a lovely cold ice cream. But wait! Ice cream also melts in the sun, and then goes all dribbly and sticky and is a disaster. Now, I'm aware that some people quite like ice cream when it g...

So since I last posted, I thought I was moving house, then I wasn't, then my cooker broke. Hence I've done buggerall for weeks. Hooray! But enough about me - you just want to see someone gagging on something unpleasant without the risk of having to type 'video of someone gagging on something unpleasant' into Google, and then having to run an exceedingly lewd gauntlet before finding what you're after. This week, what with it allegedly being summer (note: as I type this, it is of course pissing down) I didn't fancy cooking much so thought I'd branch out into refreshing, light summery desserts. Only in the case of this blog, the branch I've branched out onto has a terrible case of Dutch Elm disease and is about to fall off. So here, for your rancid entertainment, are some variations on everyone's favourite slightly better than the crappy Ski yoghurts we had as a kid but still not actually THAT great curdled milk product: fruit corners. Ingredients:...

Well I hope you all had a lovely Easter, celebrating the day when...er...a chick came back to life as a giant bunny, and left chocolate eggs for all the girls and boys? Or at least I think they were eggs - in hindsight a chocolate egg would probably look a lot like the excrement of a huge magic Watership Down escapee, which puts a whole new fetishist spin on 'egg' hunts. Anyway, I was on holiday in Cyprus on the not so big day (let's be honest, it's not Christmas is it? It's barely better than Pancake Day, and that's just a load of greasy hot batter). I mention this not to boast of my jet-setting lifestyle, but because on Easter itself we came back to our villa to find a bowl of eggs left by the owner. Real hens eggs, dyed red. We had no idea whether we were supposed to eat these or smash them up in offering to some egg-hating deity or what, or even if they were raw or cooked, so we just left them. Which in hindsight probably wasn't a great idea as we'...

Many years ago, I had the misfortune to observe a friend of mine being sick after getting very drunk indeed. This would have been fairly unpleasant at the best of times, but on this occasion it was far worse as, prior to being sick, said friend had drunk-binge-eaten 10 creme eggs. Now, if you've ever been sick (and if you haven't, by reading this I think you're increasing your odds of breaking your 'puke duck' by some considerable margin), you'll know that the whole process involves getting a large volume of material up and out as rapidly as possible with scant regard for where it lands - the bodily function analogue of serving soup using a miniature trebuchet. And as it turns out, thick sugary fondant and chocolate isn't the ideal form of matter for expediting this process. The only way I can describe what I witnessed is that it was like watching someone give birth to a lava lamp out of their face in slow motion while making a noise you might hear coming ...

People (specifically, idiots) often argue about whether a Jaffa cake is in fact a cake or a biscuit. This, despite the fact it has the word 'cake' in the title and goes stale like a cake not soft like a biscuit when you inadvertently leave the packet open a bit and ruin the next day's tea break. Both fairly substantial clues - particularly the former, given the manufacturer is literally telling you it's a cake on the packet. I mean, what more do you want - a confession written in blood from Mr Kipling? Sure, you may eat them in the same manner as you eat biscuits, but then you'd probably eat a Victoria sponge-sized biscuit by the chunk like a cake - it's more about size than anything inherently biscuitesque as to why there's even any discussion in the first place. Observe: a giant bourbon is still a bourbon - it doesn't metamorphose into a black forest gateaux once it passes a certain girth. To put it another way, even if you sellotape wheels to a po...

Hello! Well last week I had a cold and so didn't feel like cooking anything in the end, let alone something unusual. But now I'm feeling acceptably human again it's time to reward my body by filling it with a load of experimental nonsense. Kill or cure, and all that. From the title you might assume that this week I'll be eating some form of sturdy footwear. And in making that assumption you'd be quite wrong - I may make up stupid recipes, but I'm not really looking to push the boundaries of omnivorism into the realms of eating anything that I can lay my hands on. Or rather my feet, in the case of wellies. No, this week we're tackling an issue that's vexed me for some time: why is it that beef has the monopoly on being wellingtoned? For those who have never heard of it, beef wellington is a dish where you get a perfectly good (in fact, usually a very nice) bit of beef, smear it in an awful mushroom paste and then cover it in puff pastry and pretend ...