Cooking, but not cooking

On Tuesday I had a super busy day with a shoot in Oldham which meant me rising from my bed at a very unpleasant and dark 6am. The car was thick with ice and the sky was black all the way to our initial meeting at the Sainsbury's cafe at 8am where I had a surprisingly tasty and welcomingly warm bowl of porridge. Then it was out in the cold to shoot (in a photographic sense) a gang of architects, designers and other clever folk outside the Art Gallery and then a few more locations which took us up to a still chilly 3pm. On the way home I was mentally planning a delicious tomato and onion based seafood pasta dish - nice and quick, nice and satisfying, and after recovering from the day's exertions, the cooking began. Then it stopped very quickly as all the electricity went out and we were plunged into darkness and silence. After some detective work, it turned out that our oven and hob or the oven or the hob had died a death and taken all of our electricity with it. That was Tuesday, today is Friday and we have no means to cook and we have a friend coming for supper. The obvious thing, I appreciate is to go out for supper, but after the abandoned seafood pasta we popped to the excellent Persia Grill, the next day we had a splendid and surprisingly un-greedy take away from the excellent Great Khatmandu and last nights disappointing first time visit to Green Tea (Chinese), I really didn't want to eat out again. So after much consideration I took myself off to a brand new and literally very shiny Waitrose to carefully choose my ingredients for my no cook supper.

To start:
Salmon and smoked salmon terrine served with rocket and brown toast - yes I know that I could have made this very easily myself, but it was reduced and I could't resist!)

Main:
Spicy couscous (only a kettle needed) with lots of coriander and mint.
Coronation flavoured cold roast chicken (I say flavoured because there will be more chicken than sauce), using a cold roasted organic chicken to be shredded and mixed with pots of Waitrose coronation chicken as I couldn't cook onions and garlic to go in my own, I plan to loosen it a bit with yoghourt and tart up the zing a bit with some mango chutney and extra spices.
Delicious little green French olives.

Pudding:
Gu chocolate mouses - any excuse for a Gu.

I think it sounds yummy - I hope it will be enough.

(Edited to add)

Yes, it was enough, there's loads left. The chicken and cous cous were delicious and we were all very happy!


This is the first picture on the blog from my new camera which I really haven't used yet - I must get back in to the habit of photographing my food like I used to. The restaurants we've been to recently have had such appalling lighting that the photos have been utterly unusable.

The weekend will remain a hot food free zone. We're out with chums for lunch on Sunday at the Knutsford Wine Bar where we haven't been for a million years since we were very friendly with the former owners and I used to work for them for five minutes.

I miss my porridge and boiled eggs for breakfast!

The engineer is coming on Tuesday or hopefully on Monday and will poke the hob and no doubt tell us that it's not mendable and we'll have to spend a small fortune on a new one. Apparently the oven is okay as the first engineer came on Thursday and poke and prodded it and plugged it into things and proclaimed it good.