Five stars for effort

This has been a very slow week for cooking as theres been loads on. My prodigal brother just came home from 2 and a half years on the road (queue plenty of baking from my mother), my dressmaking class, booking somewhere to stay in New York and queueing for a hug have also kept me really busy. So in the absence of a recipe or review heres a story about possibly the most amusing date meal I ever had.

As you may have guessed I enjoy cooking but its far better cooking for (or with) someone else. Every boy I have ever gone out with has been spoiled rotten by cakes and dinners. Some of them have tried to spoil me back but none with such disastarous endings as the boy who made me Lemon Chicken.

The boy in question spent a good week telling me how he was going to cook dinner for me and had been trawling through recipes on the Internet until he found one he thought might be easy enough to make. Now, like some (stressing the word some as its not all) other Irish men that I know this boy was not too good in the kitchen. He comes from the school of thought that doesnt use washing up liquid because he has a dishwasher and "sure, doesnt water do the job". The same fella once asked me what the raw chicken breast I was chopping was as he had never seen a raw chicken breast before.

Needless to say this was all enough to scare me into eating something before leaving home for fear I wouldnt get to eat real food again for a while (either because of hospitalisation from food poisoning or the fact that I was unable to eat his food). When I arrived at his place he was exhausted from his day of cooking and served me up a plate of food with much flourish and the one clean knife and fork in the house. Much as my Grandfather would have loved it was a good round Irish meal of meat and two veg. Mashed potato, carrots (mashed) and lemon chicken (not mashed).

The poor boy however had no implements for squeezing lemons and given that the recipe called for 2 cups (US recipe) of lemon juice which he was roughly equating to 8 lemons (to make the 2 Irish sized mugs) he had a wander around the supermarket to find a substitute.

Said substitute turned out to be undiluted sugar free Lemon Miwadi which for those not in the know is a cordial that you dilute with water prior to drinking. Ill let you imagine just how sweet and full of aspartame the Lemon chicken was.

Boys, dont try this at home. 2 points from this - cups are not equal to mugs and lemon juice cannot be subsituted with cordial.

Go buy yourselves a cookbook, in really desparate cases this book is a good one to try.