Them's Fightin' Words

As some of you guys may know, I recently became a dad, which now means that I have changed things up from handling about 30% of the duties around the house to 80%.

I have no issue whatsoever with this marked increase in householdly responsibility because of the simple fact that J-Rab is on baby duty 100% of the time. It’s a full-time job and one that she’s way, way better at than me.

My evening routine now consists of baby-washing, dish-washing, food-preparing, food-eating, general tidying and occasionally clothes-washing, clothes-drying, clothes-folding and clothes-putting-awaying.

From time to time though, colossal fuck-ups creep up on you just to add a little extra spice into the already spluttering, boiling, churning cauldron of responsibilities, deadlines and daddy-duties that becomes your life.

Last night I decided to try a new recipe. It was for “Toad-In-The-Hole”. I know, that should have been my first clue right? Don’t try to make recipes that inspire mental images of slimy amphibians lurking underground.

I ploughed on regardless though because as it turns out, the “Toad” from the recipe title is not a toad at all, but rather a pork banger and hoo-weee! I LOVES me some pork bangers!

So I gathered all the ingredients and began.

Step 1 was to fry the sausages which I excelled at. Step 2 was to sieve flour into a mixing bowl and make a “well” in the centre, which I also thoroughly enjoyed doing. Making wells is fun, like when you’re a kid at the beach.

Distant alarm bells began ringing in my head regarding the depth of my well in relation to the large quantity of eggs (eight) I’d be cracking into it, but I dismissed them entirely because so what if the well overflows a little? No biggie right?

I got cracking (da dum. Tssh). By egg no. 2 my well was starting to take strain. There are Kardashians deeper than my well was. There are inspirational Facebook quotes deeper than my well was. By no one’s standards was the well I had created deep in any way.

Egg no. 3 was the first to schloomf out of the well and make a total mockery of everything I was trying to achieve. Eggs 4 – 8 just rubbed more salt in the wound and left me wandering why I’d even bothered with a well in the first place.

I threw in the rest of the ingredients and began in earnest to whisk it, thus forming a “smooth batter”.

At first, things seemed to be going well. I found it a little tricky to get the yellows of the eggs to pop but eventually managed and was left with a pleasant, runny, light-yellow mixture.

The “runny” part was bothering me though. Where on God’s green earth was the flour?

I decided to change my whisking technique from shallow circling to deep-thrusting and immediately wished I hadn’t.

The flour came bobbing to the surface in gigantic lumps like bodies from a capsized boat. God help you if your batter reaches this point. This is the point of no return for batter. Nothing, nothing you do will get those motherfucking lumps out of the motherfucking batter.

Being the eternal optimist (hopeless tard) that I am, I opted for the “smooshing” technique which involves smearing the lumps up against the side of the mixing bowl with a tablespoon.

I had marginal success using this method, but after a solid 10 minutes of smooshing, the batter was still lumpy as month-old milk left in the sun.

It was then that I had the genius idea to re-strain the batter through a sieve, thus catching all the lumps which I then pulverised with the whisk. This worked like a mother-flippin’ BOMB. Feel free to try it if you ever have lumpy batter issues, it’s too legit.

From there I got a baking pan-thing ready, added the BANGERS (hoo-wee!) and batter and shut that bad boy in the oven at 220 degrees, as per the recipe.

It said to give it 10 minutes, then turn the heat down to 180, but after 5 minutes I became acutely aware that the batter was growing into some kind of hellish creature because it’s upper appendages were reaching so high, they were burning on the element at the top of the oven.

This didn’t look right. My batter was doing things that could give a small child nightmares. An intervention / exorcism was necessary. I called J-Rab.

“What the shit is going on here?” I asked. “Is this normal?”

“Um, I think so… looks like it’s ready, you should probably take it out.”

“But the recipe says bake for 10mins at 220, then 25 – 30mins at 180. It’s only been six minutes.”

“Ok. Then leave it in a bit longer, but definitely turn the heat down, I think the smoke’s going to asphyxiate the baby.”

So I turned it down, moved the baking tray as far down in the oven as possible so as not to inhibit the growth of the “Toad’s” upper appendages and hoped for the best.

Yeah. Here’s how that turned out:

Let’s just do a quick side-by-side comparison shall we?

What was great about my recipe was that the centre was still all soft and gooey, so it served the dual function of being supper and dessert.

What I ended up with was more of a “pork banger soufflé” than a “toad-in-the-hole”, but it was still edible if you count being able to chew and swallow something as “edible”.

The lesson here kids is that reality very seldom lives up to expectation.

The other lesson is that if you’re making toad-in-the-hole, the toad should never sit in more than two inches of hole.

See what I did there?

Me neither.

-ST