Egg White

You read food writers like Nigel Slater who talk gaily of pulling out some lone ingredient they've found in their fridge, like, totally randomly, one Sunday afternoon, and hey presto, they've turned it into a blanquette de veau for two complete with the right wine. For years I used to read those types of foodie stories the way I used to think about Cinderella getting her man - nice for a fantasy, ain't never gonna happen in the grim real world. But stealthily and slowly, and without me actually noticing, I have started to do this. Except I have no boundaries, it turns out. Yesterday I came home from a particularly protracted and bitter commute through some particularly appalling weather. I lurched into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and found a bowl full of egg white. I have no memory of putting this egg white in the fridge. Until very reently I would have tipped it down the sink, even a reconstructed foodie like me. But this lot went into the fridge, and on an impulse, I pulled it out. I leafed desultorily through some cookery books but in my head I already knew that this was going to be about Meringue. I whipped the lot up in a classic meringue recipe and tipped the lot onto a tray, spreading it out with a spatula. An hour later I took it out of the fridge, and contemplated it. I had no cream in the house so a Pavlova was out of the question. I did have a bar of Galaxy, however. I melted it, and drizzled it in a cross cross pattern across the meringue. Then I foraged some more and found an old pack of shelled pistachios. I toasted them. Chopped them up. And scattered them over the meringue. Honestly, I could have dispatched the lot myself in seconds. As it was, Family was more than happy to do most of the dispatching. But inexplicably, I hadn't worked the egg white thing out of my system. I got out another few eggs, separated them, whipped the yolks up with butter, whipped the egg whites to peaks, threw together flour, vanilla, rum and melted dark chocolate, combined the lot and poured it into a cake tin. Took it out 40 minutes later, moist and chewy looking. Melted more chocolate with some butter, turned out the cake upside down, and spread the chocolate all over the top and sides. Mixed a bit of coffee into the chocolate icing. Pulled out a bar of white chocolate. Cut it into shards. Threw them over the top. Put the cake in the fridge. All this before I'd even thought about what we were going to have for dinner. Awwwww! It's  like that moment when you've been learning a language for years and finally one day you wake up and realise you have just had your first dream in Sanskrit (or whatever the language was). This was all the proof I needed, that I had metamorphosed into Nigel Slater. Only a slightly more obsessive version.