I thought it might be interesting to learn what your favourite, top meals and desserts are. (You can say why if you want).
I am suggesting 3 in each category (though up to you). Could include a runners up list.
1. A good roast dinner - e.g. goose or duck, with lots of crunchy roast potatoes (done in goose or duck fat), carrots, green beans and a lots of rich gravy.
2. A deluxe meat pie (organic beef) with a flaky pastry top.
3. Fish and chips, i.e. haddock with tartare sauce .... (what can I say, I am British!)
(Runners up: Lasagna, Fish Pie, Paella)
Desserts
1. A Boozy Deluxe Trifle with white rum-soaked stale fruit cake, mangoes, bananas, real vanilla custard and whipping cream. Topped with flaked, toasted almonds and maraschino cherries. (Not fussed about the jelly).
2. Black Forest Gateaux
3. Tiramisu
(Runners up: Italian icecream, Apricot Tart [creme patisserie base] and Almond bakewell tart)
I don't think I have any serious preferences. What I DON'T like are kippers, bananas and, try as I might because I know it's good for me, kale. I would like to love soft goat's cheese because the recipes sound delicious but I can't bear the smell. There is a British hard goat's cheese called Ribblesdale which is lovely but the soft stuff is dreadful. It tastes like goats smell
Thinking hard about it the like side -
1. Anything caramel. My guilty secret is that I can eat Carnation Caramel by the spoonful so I don't keep it in my store cupboard - I wouldn't have the strength of will to leave it alone. I just buy it when I need it for a recipe.
2. Following on from 1. above, my mother's millionaires' shortbread - shortbread biscuit covered with caramel and chocolate on top
3. My mother's (which is now mine) trifle. None of these current apologies for trifle that tv chefs produce. A proper trifle with a layer of sherry soaked cake and ratafia biscuits, next a layer of fruit (I like a mixture of fresh peaches and raspberries), a layer of chopped jelly on top of that (some people pour the melted jelly on top of the cake and fruit and let it soak in and set - bleuch!) then a layer of thick custard (my great-grandmother, who handed this trifle down to us, would have used a home-made egg custard but I like Bird's Custard). The custard has to be thick enough to set - no problem with Bird's and it has to have rum in it (a nursery pudding this is not!). On top of that a thick layer of whipped cream and decorated with glace cherries, silver balls and hundreds and thousands. You have to start it the day before you want it because of letting the various layer set.
I did once devise a Caribbean trifle that involved ginger cake, mangoes & tropical fruit jelly, custard, cream and a
lot of rum and decorated with crystallised ginger and it was very good but not the same as the original.
Runners up - custard cream biscuits, baked rice pudding, porridge with golden syrup or demerara sugar
So that sorts out the sweet stuff.
As for savoury -
1. A really good bacon butty (English slang for a sandwich) on white bread with the bread dipped in the bacon fat in lieu of butter.
2. Roast goose for Christmas (forget the boring old turkey, you haven't lived until you've had a roast goose!)
3. "Birds" pork pie. (Nothing to do with Bird's custard.) The raised pork pies are made and sold in their own shops by a family firm called Birds in the area around Nottingham and Derby in England. If you haven't had a Bird's pork pie you haven't had a pork pie worth the name. They are absolutely devine!
Paella was my runner-up too. In fact it was almost a running mate for the bacon butty. I must also put brussels sprouts on the runners-up list. Love 'em.