Cookalong with Gordon Ramsay

I'm a fan of a lot of the food Gordon Ramsay makes even if I don't approve of his potty mouth. So I was excited when I saw the ads for a cookalong programme. I looked up the menu on the Channel 4 website and wrote out a shopping list.
Some of the ingredients I bought elsewhere but the majority came from Sainsburys. It soon became clear why the food was going to taste so good when we got to the checkout. We spent more on the ingredients for that one meal than I would usually spend on feeding us both for a week.

I reminded myself that it was a one-off and drew a deep breath.

Friday quickly rolled around and I laid out my ingredients, got out my saucepans, preheated my oven, chopped my tomatoes etc. I wanted to be prepared as we don't have a tv in the kitchen so I knew there'd be a lot of running back and forth. Luckily I also printed out the recipes on paper so if I missed something I could look.

The menu was as follows:

Scallops with a tomato and basil salsa. This was really easy and quick. You just heat up tomatoes with some herbs and olives etc. while you fry the scallops over a high heat. I wasn't sure about my tolerance for scallops but ate them anyway. Turns out I am allergic to them but it wasn't too bad - took plenty of medication to counteract the negative results. Just to check it was the scallops that made me ill, I tried the leftovers again on Saturday. Yes, it's definately the scallops. Pah!

Next course was steak with 'chips' and salad. The salad was really good - rocket leaves with a light dressing and some shavings of parmesan. Knowing I am definately allergic to that I lightly microwaved mine before eating and it was still nice and peppery. Will definately be cooking that again.
The 'chips' were just potato wedges, which I make all the time so that was simple. I was glad I remembered to pre-heat the oven or they would never have cooked in time!
The steaks were quite plain, just seasoned and fried in groundnut oil. Just before they were taken off the heat we added some butter so they were really rich. I have finally had to admit how important resting the steaks is. They had about 10 minutes on the side before we ate them and they were sooooo juicy and yum. I will have to get some restraint and let my steaks rest more in the future. In fact that course was so good I forgot to get a photo until half way through eating it!!!


The dessert was a lovely chocolate mousse. Who doesn't enjoy a spoonful of rich chocolatey-goodness, right? Well by that point we were a bit tired so dessert was much more thrown together. The nice touch was some mashed up Crunchie bar pieces. They were delicious. Having eaten about 1/4 of my steak I couldn't manage more than a few mouthfuls of dessert so it's still in the fridge waiting for me. All in all, it was a fun night in but definately not something I would do regularly unless I got a tv installed in the kitchen (which I don't plan to).