Cooking for the world's SCARIEST food critic
Married to brilliant, but rather waspish, food critic Giles Coren, and with her own extensive knowledge of London’s restaurant scene, it would be quite reasonable for Esther Walker to have an elitist view of eating.
But she’s charmingly no-nonsense about food. So much so that she’s written a book, The Bad Cook, on how to make gastronomic delights without getting yourself all in a fluster. The book is an offshoot from her popular blog Recipe Rifle, which she started when she found herself with extra time on her hands after leaving her job as a features writer. ‘I began to learn to cook, and sharing recipes on a blog gave me a sense of purpose for it,’ she explains.
Esther is vibrant, unpretentious and witty – the kind of girl you would love to be your friend, as you know she would be oodles of fun. In her party-heavy 20s, she says vodka was the only thing she routinely kept in her freezer, but now the drawers are stuffed full of organic butter just poised for the next dish. Her skills are self-taught (bar a bit of help from expert friends, Leon founder Henry Dimbleby among them), and they’re clearly not too shabby if they’re keeping Giles Coren happily fed and watered.
I was invited along to her north London home with its light and beautiful Nigella-rivalling kitchen to learn how to cook an easy threecourse dinner menu. Esther’s approach is refreshing and realistic. It’s designed for those who have jobs, relationship dramas and a million other more important things to think about, but still want to whip up a nice meal from time to time.
She is adamant that food does not have to be perfect to be impressive. ‘At one of the best dinner parties I ever went to, the host served spaghetti bolognese made with heaps of ketchup,’ she reveals. ‘But it was brilliant fun because he was so relaxed. The most important thing when you’re giving a dinner party is to make sure you’re not stressed when your guests arrive.’
For this reason she has devised a menu for me that can be prepared predominantly ahead of time, so all I have to do is come home, beautify myself, and add the few final touches to the food while my curls are setting It sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. Esther has scribbled a list to keep us on track (‘always a good idea if you’re doing more than one thing at once’) but apart from that, it’s all wonderfully slapdash. We drizzle olive oil over some chicken thighs before whacking them in the oven, and at the same time have some red wine reducing (a fancy word for ‘simmer’, I discover) on the hob.
Meanwhile, I master some knife skills. ‘If I’ve learnt anything in the last five years,’ says Esther, ‘it’s that cooking is basically about chopping things up.’
Vegetables diced with new-found finesse, they sauté away while I get to work on the white sauce. It’s a multitasker’s dream but, astonishingly, it doesn’t feel like I’m stretching myself. Esther is all about relaxing while you cook.
Despite her claims of being a cooking laywoman, she is full of tips to help you stay in control. Have all your pans heating up from the word go; make white sauce off the heat; if in doubt, add more salt.
‘Restaurants take a lot of shortcuts and so should you. You’ll notice that starters are often cold, and puddings are slices of things they’ve made that morning.’
Fiona Hicks, our very own Nigella
We use ready-made pastry on top of our chicken pie, and while that is cooking we assemble the starters. Nibbles on sticks are always a hit, so we experiment with the ratio of blue cheese to grape, melon to Parma ham, and mozzarella to tomato.
Threading grapes on to sticks is strangely therapeutic – just the thing to put you in a Zen place before your guests arrive. They’re delicious, too.
We have created an entire three-course meal – starter skewers, chicken and vegetable pie, ice cream with spiced red wine sauce – in under two hours, without a moment’s panic. What’s more, we’ve done it all at once: at home, the pie and pudding can be whipped up the night before.
The pie is slightly oozy round the edges, the cubes of blue cheese are imperfectly shaped and the ice cream is rather haphazardly scooped, but it still looks scrumptious. Moreover, it tastes all the more delicious because it’s not trying to be fussy restaurant fare.
Esther’s final tips for an excellent evening include decking your house with lots of pretty flowers and candles, and ensuring there is plenty of wine flowing. After all, dinner parties are more about the atmosphere than the food. I leave with my passion for entertaining reignited.
I am, however, terrified to discover that Mr Coren himself will be eating my chicken pie for lunch. ‘Oh, no need to worry about that,’ says Esther, ‘he’ll eat anything.’*
The Bad Cook will be published as an eBook by The Friday Project on 28 March.
*Giles later admitted that this pie was ‘better than anything in any restaurant in the world’. I assume he was referring to mine…
On food: ‘The food was terrible… bowls of brown cloacal waste. The sick of an infant who lives on Dairylea Lunchables. Why cubed? The meat here was always big pieces on the bone; skin, fat, all that. Now it’s rhomboids from giant rectangular chickens reared on Mars and cut by machines undreamt of in Bernard Matthews’s most foetid nightmares.’
On waitresses: ‘A wall-eyed gargoyle of a waitress… [her] breath alone took three years off my life in the short time it took her to say the word “soup”.’
On chefs: ‘A chef whose signature pigeon and chocolate dish I can only assume to have been some sort of elaborate suicide note.’
But she’s charmingly no-nonsense about food. So much so that she’s written a book, The Bad Cook, on how to make gastronomic delights without getting yourself all in a fluster. The book is an offshoot from her popular blog Recipe Rifle, which she started when she found herself with extra time on her hands after leaving her job as a features writer. ‘I began to learn to cook, and sharing recipes on a blog gave me a sense of purpose for it,’ she explains.
Esther is vibrant, unpretentious and witty – the kind of girl you would love to be your friend, as you know she would be oodles of fun. In her party-heavy 20s, she says vodka was the only thing she routinely kept in her freezer, but now the drawers are stuffed full of organic butter just poised for the next dish. Her skills are self-taught (bar a bit of help from expert friends, Leon founder Henry Dimbleby among them), and they’re clearly not too shabby if they’re keeping Giles Coren happily fed and watered.
I was invited along to her north London home with its light and beautiful Nigella-rivalling kitchen to learn how to cook an easy threecourse dinner menu. Esther’s approach is refreshing and realistic. It’s designed for those who have jobs, relationship dramas and a million other more important things to think about, but still want to whip up a nice meal from time to time.
She is adamant that food does not have to be perfect to be impressive. ‘At one of the best dinner parties I ever went to, the host served spaghetti bolognese made with heaps of ketchup,’ she reveals. ‘But it was brilliant fun because he was so relaxed. The most important thing when you’re giving a dinner party is to make sure you’re not stressed when your guests arrive.’
For this reason she has devised a menu for me that can be prepared predominantly ahead of time, so all I have to do is come home, beautify myself, and add the few final touches to the food while my curls are setting It sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. Esther has scribbled a list to keep us on track (‘always a good idea if you’re doing more than one thing at once’) but apart from that, it’s all wonderfully slapdash. We drizzle olive oil over some chicken thighs before whacking them in the oven, and at the same time have some red wine reducing (a fancy word for ‘simmer’, I discover) on the hob.
Meanwhile, I master some knife skills. ‘If I’ve learnt anything in the last five years,’ says Esther, ‘it’s that cooking is basically about chopping things up.’
Vegetables diced with new-found finesse, they sauté away while I get to work on the white sauce. It’s a multitasker’s dream but, astonishingly, it doesn’t feel like I’m stretching myself. Esther is all about relaxing while you cook.
Despite her claims of being a cooking laywoman, she is full of tips to help you stay in control. Have all your pans heating up from the word go; make white sauce off the heat; if in doubt, add more salt.
‘Restaurants take a lot of shortcuts and so should you. You’ll notice that starters are often cold, and puddings are slices of things they’ve made that morning.’
Fiona Hicks, our very own NigellaWe use ready-made pastry on top of our chicken pie, and while that is cooking we assemble the starters. Nibbles on sticks are always a hit, so we experiment with the ratio of blue cheese to grape, melon to Parma ham, and mozzarella to tomato.
Threading grapes on to sticks is strangely therapeutic – just the thing to put you in a Zen place before your guests arrive. They’re delicious, too.
We have created an entire three-course meal – starter skewers, chicken and vegetable pie, ice cream with spiced red wine sauce – in under two hours, without a moment’s panic. What’s more, we’ve done it all at once: at home, the pie and pudding can be whipped up the night before.
The pie is slightly oozy round the edges, the cubes of blue cheese are imperfectly shaped and the ice cream is rather haphazardly scooped, but it still looks scrumptious. Moreover, it tastes all the more delicious because it’s not trying to be fussy restaurant fare.
Esther’s final tips for an excellent evening include decking your house with lots of pretty flowers and candles, and ensuring there is plenty of wine flowing. After all, dinner parties are more about the atmosphere than the food. I leave with my passion for entertaining reignited.
I am, however, terrified to discover that Mr Coren himself will be eating my chicken pie for lunch. ‘Oh, no need to worry about that,’ says Esther, ‘he’ll eat anything.’*
The Bad Cook will be published as an eBook by The Friday Project on 28 March.
*Giles later admitted that this pie was ‘better than anything in any restaurant in the world’. I assume he was referring to mine…
Giles Coren's poison pen
He is one of our wittiest food critics – but here’s why you should never, ever serve Giles Coren a bad meal…On food: ‘The food was terrible… bowls of brown cloacal waste. The sick of an infant who lives on Dairylea Lunchables. Why cubed? The meat here was always big pieces on the bone; skin, fat, all that. Now it’s rhomboids from giant rectangular chickens reared on Mars and cut by machines undreamt of in Bernard Matthews’s most foetid nightmares.’
On waitresses: ‘A wall-eyed gargoyle of a waitress… [her] breath alone took three years off my life in the short time it took her to say the word “soup”.’
On chefs: ‘A chef whose signature pigeon and chocolate dish I can only assume to have been some sort of elaborate suicide note.’