Gourmet Cooking

Posted on 2008/08/31 16:13:53 (August 2008).

[Tuesday 26th August]
I was not in the greatest of moods at work this morning. It had turned out while I was on call yesterday there had been a relatively serious failure of our system, which I hadn't been able to deal with as I was at Kew - I'd followed the appropriate procedure to pass it on to the next person in the chain, but in the end nobody else picked it up, and it wasn't until I'd got home yesterday evening that I ended up fixing it after all. Given the number of times I'd jumped in to help my fellow engineers when I'm not on call, I was a bit annoyed about this.

To compound this, the vegetarian offering at lunch at the cafe in the office today was not really up to much (I've been having words with the catering staff about this recently). So I decided I needed to get out of the office for a while, and have some "me" time. I wandered to the nearby Italian restaurant I'd been to with Chie once before (Oliveto) and enjoyed a nice relaxed lunch there by myself, with a copy of the Guardian. The pizza was fantastic as always, and it was really nice to get out of the office for a change, and be surrounded by different people - I must do that more often.

I also made a very "gourmet" sort of a dinner this evening. It appears the season for wild mushrooms has now started, and they had some girolles in Waitrose yesterday. So I picked up a box, and had spent the intervening time thinking of how to serve them.

Finally I settled upon sautéeing them in a little butter and crushed garlic, and serving them on a potato rosti, along with some grilled pear and Somerset camembert. It did end up rather a lot of effort, for not a particularly huge dish, but it's the sort of thing I'd happily have paid handsomely for in a restaurant.

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