Cannon and Bubble

Annie was working late last night, and with only himself to feed, Martin made do with left-overs. Clearly the better the left-overs, the better the resulting dish, and M’s mixture of mash with curly kale was excellent. Fluffy organic orla spuds had been pushed through a ricer and enriched with butter and Wensleydale cheese to accompany chicken at the weekend. The bright green, strongly-flavoured kale had been briefly blanched, then dressed with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice. Last night, M mixed the remainder of each dish together and fried the combination in a small non-stick pan, combining the smooth, creamy texture of colcannon with the crispy texture and pleasantly bitter flavour you get from the almost-burned bits of bubble & squeak. He ate it with a fried egg and a bit of salad, and then watched Heston Blumenthal cook steak on the telly.
When I say on the telly, I don't mean that Mr. Blumenthal literally placed the meat on top of a television set and allowed it to absorb heat from the appliance, but as he put it in an almost-cold oven for 24 hours, he might as well have done. He started by blow-torching the surfaces of a huge forerib of beef, then placed it in a 50 degree oven overnight (helpfully adding that "if your oven won't go down this low, you can always prop the door open".) This virtually imperceptible "cooking" apparently breaks down the molecular structure of the joint while retaining the maximum moisture content, the result being meat that is incredibly tender and juicy, but equally full of flavour, thanks to it being taken from happy longhorn cattle fed on corn in an idyllic Herefordshire glade, and hung for four weeks to develop the faintest odour of blue cheese. He then took the meat off the bone, sliced it into thick steaks, and seared it quickly in a very hot pan, let it rest for a bit and served it with butter that had been kept “very close to some Stilton, so as to absorb the aroma but not the taste” (I’m not making this up), some mushroom ketchup, the making of which involved the nocturnal extraction of pure juice from said funghi, and a salad of decidedly retro-chic iceberg lettuce. Martin and I watched with a mixture of envy and incredulity as Heston tucked into what looked suspiciously like lukewarm, possibly bacteria-ridden and yet somehow perfectly delicious beef. "What are the chances of that, then?" we said to each other, in our best Harry Hill voices.
Come to think of it, Heston Blumenthal does look rather like Harry. I wonder if by chance they may be related?