The perfect match: roast beef and a Chelsea victory!

Now let’s see, the beef weighs 2.5 kg and the Chelsea game kicks off at 3pm. That’ll do nicely.

So 1.5 kg in pounds is 2.2 plus 1.1, so just under three and a half pounds, at 20 minutes a pound plus your extra bit, that’ll be ... but no hang on. There’s the Yorkshire pudding to consider.

Aha.

When they’re scattering my ashes they won’t be debating whether I could write or not. They’ll be talking about how I supported Chelsea FC, and that I made a decent roast dinner.

So lucky me, when I can combine the two. Happily, putting together a roast dinner is an incredibly simple process, perfectly designed to be wrapped around a Chelsea game.

In the morning I do all the prepping. Carrots and green beans are ready to go, and normally I’d have the spuds peeled and ready to parboil, but not today, not when there’s a Yorkshire pudding to cook.

Roasting meat is a process of cooling down. Start with a very hot oven, and then reduce the heat all the way, but when you’re cooking a Yorkshire pudding, you’re going to need a burning hot oven in the last half hour of cooking.

Lacking the discipline to follow recipes, I’ve never actually measured the flour I sieve into the bowl. Does that look right? Hmmm, just a bit more. Yeh, that’ll do. Dump in two room temperature eggs and then whisk in a half pint of what we used to call ‘milk’, but now has to be described as Full Fat Milk.

Absolutely none of those grey insipid liquids in yer Yorkie, for goodness sake.

A hit of salt, a twist of pepper and because I have testicles I count 100 whisks this way, 100 whisks that way, a few more because life is chaos and not order, and whack the mix in the fridge to do its stuff.

A quarter of an hour to kick off, heat the oven to 220, slap the heavy-bottomed skillet on the hob and fetch the beef from my bedroom. It’s been out of the fridge to loosen up for a couple of hours, stashed at the back of the house so as not to torment the dog, or inadvertently feed the dog 1.5kg of raw beef!

Hold the meat down into the hot skillet and seal it up until it’s caramelly and smelling almost burned on the outside all over. All those juices are locked in and there’s the lovely outside that makes roast beef extra yummy.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.