Turkish beans & Roman fried chicken
My fear of failure, how I deal with it and more recipes from you
I have been on the road for three weeks now - Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, US and Canada - with one week to go. I am visiting different cities with my one-man show Crowd Pleaser, where I cook on stage and share my food ideas and anecdotes, alongside basic principles that, I think, are useful to make you a better cook, i.e. a crowd pleaser.
I must confess that I dreaded going on this tour. With two weeks to go, I started feeling performance anxiety, a fear of not being able to hold it all together on stage, of making a massive hash of it all. It’s a bit ironic, since one of the fundamental issues I address on stage is people’s anxieties around cooking, which is, essentially, the same thing: fear of failing to live up to a standard, your own or someone else’s; fear of not doing well enough, of disappointing; fear of being exposed as a bad cook.
To deal with my anxiety, I realised that I need to have an open dialogue with the audience, that I should open up to them and also open the door for them to open up to me.
And so, with the aid of technology, I ask the crowd at the start of every evening to share with me their innermost shameful experiences cooking. I want to hear everything! And in return, I tell them about my worst performances and about my own failures.
I’ve collected an incredible number of anecdotes, such as this one: Mum tied a Peking duck to the ceiling fan in order to “speed dry” it. It turned into weaponised poultry. Took weeks to scrape the sauce off the walls.
You have to wonder...
Some confessions really touched me, like this one in Auckland, New Zealand: Every time I cook it’s shameful… my husband is a wonderful cook and I always feel ashamed when I have to take a turn and cook some awful, basic thing. Meh.
The brutal honesty!
Reading it out, everyone, even very confident cooks, could relate. We all suffer from insecurities, we’re all scrutinised by others and, worse, by ourselves, and we all know what it feels like to serve a meal we’re just not happy with.
Such confessions are the ultimate icebreaker. They remind me that I am in a safe environment and that everything is alright. The rest follows on naturally.
I find people’s experiences with food, particularly non-professionals, a constant source of both emotional inspiration and practical knowledge.
Last year, I featured recipes that came out of the Ottolenghi-inspired Housewives group on Facebook - my favourite place on the internet. Since then, ideas kept coming. Messages, stories, photographs of what people were cooking in their kitchens.
Today, I’ve got two more dishes that come out of this incredibly lively Facebook group. Roman fried chicken, inspired by Kate Holdsworth’s, which she first made with her mum in 1981 and served at her 21st birthday party. And Burcu Karincaoglu’s borlotti beans, cooked the Turkish way - zeytinyağlı, which means “with olive oil” - a dish that tastes better the day after it’s made, eaten slowly with good bread.
Thank you for the food, thank you for the honesty - please keep them both coming!
Roman fried chicken with tomatoes and crisp oregano
We added freshly cooked tomatoes with some vinegar and crisp oregano to a delicious family recipe I got from Kate (@madebykatehx). It’s a nice balance of salty, sharp and sweet. The original recipe was made in 1981, at Kate’s 21st birthday party, served with tagliatelle tossed with peas and butter and garnished with lots of toasted flaked almonds, plus the inevitable 80’s Italian “classic” - garlic bread.
Braised borlotti beans with charred Çarliston peppers
Burcu (@wooptonight) grows borlotti beans in her allotment and uses them for Zeytinyağlı Barbunya, a Turkish dish where beans are slow-cooked in plenty of olive oil with some peppers (we tried elongated green and red peppers and both worked) and pepper paste, making them soft and rich. You can use fresh or pre-cooked beans, but in our version, inspired by Burcu’s, we used tinned, for ease. Ideally, serve the dish a day or two after it’s cooked, once everything’s had time to settle into itself. Eat it just warm or at room temperature, with some bread for soaking up the sauce.
