Not my finest hour. My newest and probably most important lesson is that you don’t have to add offal to everything. By offal in this case I mean rehydrated pig’s blood and by everything I mean a delicious pasta sauce.
After eating quite a lot of meat lately (obvs offal), Daz and I had a lovely vegetarian lunch and were meant to continue that theme with a nice pasta sauce for dinner for my hard-working other half. I got some tomatoes and an aubergine and had ideas to add chilli and smoked paprika. All was going well, untill the ill-fated thought of “oh I should offal this up” …
LUCY – YOU DON’T ALWAYS HAVE TO ADD OFFAL TO THINGS!
At this point I was frying onions, garlic, aubergine and anchovies together. Getting it all to meld until I added some tinned tomatoes and turned down the heat for some simmering time. Between this and the following photo I thought, yes, what this needs is some dried pig’s blood.
Then I added the blood. (One 50ml shot of the powdered blood and then 6 more shots of water.) And two tins of tomatoes. I think that actually looks quite delicious. The downfall, the bunker of my demise was in forgetting that blood actually has quite a lot of flavour. When you cut yourself, and suck the wound (I don’t make a habit of this, but I am by nature supremely clumsy), you can taste the metal. Anchovies, also, have a strong taste.
Does blood + anchovy = delicious?
I think you can see both the hope and trepidation in this face. Have I gone too far? Is this going to be an offal mess? Would Hugh F-W look disapprovingly at me?
If truth be told, I didn’t make the most delicious dinner I’ve ever attempted. I also managed to overcook the pasta and the cheese was a bit corner shop generic cheese. Also, perhaps cheese and blood aren’t the best supper-partners either? I think I just got a bit over-excited. Not even did some last minute tomato paste improve conditions. Basically I was struck down by my own inventiveness.
After about half my bowl, I turned round and said I didn’t really like it. Daz manfully struggled on a bit further, with his bigger bowl, before bowing out. Admitting when you are wrong is a kind of wisdom though, isn’t it?
offallygood 