The Sacred Art of Eating

Yes, it has been very quiet here. I have been rather busy. We have been cooking, but often not blogging. There has been the small (but painful) matter of a lack of internet connection (yours at a cost of £19.50 a month!).

However, there is a new post for you below, and there will be a new post for you tomorrow (I can say this with some certainty as I have already written it) and there may even be a further new post for you on Thursday. Just now though I have to get back to writing change of address cards, or *some* of you will no doubt complain!

An almost-restaurant-posh main and a pudding reminiscent of childhood sweeties; contrasting but fabulous, and most of all over a month ago!

• Tuna Steaks with Black Beans
• Rhubarb and Custard Gelato

This meal has the dubious distinction of being one that I cooked whilst absolutely sozzled (under the watchful eye of two dashing young men, I might add!). We had gone out after work to celebrate members of my lab getting permanent posts. I’d said I’d only have one…that turned into three and then I got a phone call from Dougal saying ‘Rory is already here and you have all the food so shift!’… at which point I giggled my way home.Nevertheless the meal was a resounding success; affirmation if ever it were needed that the recipes in Nigella Express are easy peasy. The tuna steaks were just thrown on the hot griddle, requiring so little time to cook that in fact you needed to prepare your plates before hand. The black beans, straight from a can then tossed in a garlicky limey dressing were gorgeous and a stylish instant salad that I will repeat. As suggested I’d made some slow roast tomatoes the night before; these added liquid to the dish which alongside the fish and beans was important and I was sad I’d not made more (but I’d not had the foresight to buy lots of tomatoes in).The final touch was the application of a lime wedge on the plate. I wouldn’t have bothered, even though it was in the illustration in the book, but the poor plates looked half full without them. Brilliant.

Pudding sounds quite grand but was basically Rhubarb and Ice Cream. However it shouldn’t take much to convince you all that Rhubarb and Ice Cream is a pudding fit for kings and thus deserving of a grand name. I served it in whisky tumblers which looked okay but not as pretty as the sundae glasses in the book. I should very much like to know how Nigella managed to make hers so pink though- not real rhubarb I don’t think!

This being a year-long challenge, we will have two birthdays to see in Nigella Express style. The first of them went very well…

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry
• Ice Cream Cake

The curry felt a bit like cheating at cooking, in that I used pre-cubed butternut squash, sweet potato and mango, as well as shelled and cooked king prawns. In fact, all I had to slice was a spring onion although I did fry that in hand-made, slaved over wok oil (I then burnt the spring onions). The flavour came from curry paste (red thai) and coconut milk and really I did nothing. This was pretty gorgeous though, despite my managing to over cook it and the butternut melting away to nothing. Clearly it is an Express recipe seeing as most curries really do benefit from a good hour of bubbling away slowly.

As suggested in the preamble to the recipe I served this with noodles tossed in toasted unsalted peanuts. The peanuts were very hard to track down- not in the wholefoods section of the store but with the salted/dry roasted peanuts as a ‘healthy alternative’. I forgot to go to the chinese supermarket before it closed to sent D out on a wild goose chase for wide rice noodles which were not to be found but normal egg noodles did the trick just fine. Slurpily wonderful.

Pudding, however was the real icing on the cake, even though this cake had no icing at all. I felt my man deserved an all out pudding for his birthday so I went for the ice cream cake from the swanky Razzle Dazzle chapter. This was a cinch to make; I wouldn’t and couldn’t get the called for Nestle ‘peanut butter and chocolate chips’ so I used a mixture of white, milk and plain chocolate chips as well as butterscotch chips sourced from my pal Ariana’s Italian restaurant. Brill.

I made the cake up the night before and then at tea prepared the TWO sauces that were to go with it. Then, a quick bit of strewing the top with chocolatey rubble and a drizzle or two of sauce (more of a slick than a drizzle as the sauces could’ve done with cooling a bit more) and we were, collectively, in ice cream heaven.

The best bit about the ice cream cake might well have been that, unlike other cakes, we couldn’t give our Birthday Tea guests a slice each to take home with them….it just had to go back in our freezer, mwahahaha!

Yes, we’ve been somewhat quiet over here at The Sacred Art of Eating. Moving house has rather occupied us- my utmost respect to Helen at One Year Project who last year managed to cook and blog a Rachel Ray recipe every day of the year whilst simultaneously fitting in not only moving house but also giving birth. Kudos.

We have been cooking- both before the move (we had a ridiculously social week the week before we got the keys…seems like ages ago now!) and since and we have meals in the pipeline. As Dougal’s stats post shows we are pretty far behind now, so we will have to up the rate of cooking. This means some planning ahead of meals. There are at least three recipes planned for the coming week but that may need to become four or even five. Watch this space!

A salad which could have been so good, and could have been so bad. Which was it?

• Chef’s Salad

This salad started out well, with ingredients I enjoy: iceberg lettuce was something of a favourite when I was a child; the ham was good stuff sliced thickly at the deli counter in waitrose; emmental, whilst not as good as gruyere, is an alright sort of cheese, and oh man, I love avocado…

But then, stone me, some eejit went and put a whole load of sweetcorn in it! Bleh! (It should be noted that I am perfectly happy to eat sweetcorn on the cob. Off it is just plain wrong!) Good grief what are we to do do it for the sake of the children challenge grumble grumble grumble grumble.

And do you know what? It was fantastic. Really moreish. As Nigella says in the book, the range of textures really works, as do the contrasts in flavours in each mouthful. Dare I say it, the sweet sweetcorn worked well against the plain lettuce and the salty ham. It was huge- too big to mix in the serving bowl so we had to resort to the bread bowl- but we almost finished it between us.

This recipe is from the Retro Rapido chapter; you can really tell, it didn’t feel at all like any salad you would get served in the UK at present. Much of the chapter feels old and dowdy, like my mum’s 1970’s edition of the Good Housekeeping cookery book. And yet Chef’s Salad felt firmly like the kind of thing I would expect to be served in France- in a home if not in a restaurant. The same can be said for much of the Retro Rapido chapter: Oeufs en cocotte; Mouclade; Crepes Suzette; the fondue and probably even the chicken liver salad are all French or French cuisine-inspired. I’d say that italian eating has influenced much of the cooking of my formative years, basil and rocket and olives and parma ham. Why then has the introduction of Italian ideas driven out French food- once so trendy (I grew up using the words Cordon Blew to mean posh cooking without knowing why) to the point that it now seems faded and out of touch?

Here’s an update on how things are going:

Everyday Easy         3/ 13 =  23%
Workday Winners       7/ 14 =  50%
Retro Rapido          3/ 12 =  25%
Get Up and Go         5/ 11 =  45%
Quick Quick Slow      4/ 15 =  27%
Against The Clock     4/ 11 =  36%
Instant Calmer        8/ 15 =  53%
Razzle Dazzle         1/ 16 =   6%
Speedy Gonzales       6/ 11 =  55%
On The Run            5/ 14 =  36%
Hey Presto            7/ 15 =  47%
Holiday Snaps         3/ 23 =  13%
Storecupboard SOS     7/ 19 =  37%

Totals               63/189 =  33%
Time passed         149/366 =  41%

You can see we’re behind schedule now. If we want to catch up within the next week we need to do seventeen more recipes. We’re going to need about a dozen flatwarming parties… ;-)

Sincere apologies to regular readers for the glaring lack of updates of late. Those of you in the know will know that Dougal and I are currently mid-house move. We paid for our first ever flat on Friday, spent the weekend decorating, and will be moving in this coming weekend. All this means that blogging has suffered, somewhat.

Rest assured there has still been some cooking going on, albeit not as much as there ought to have been, and so I shall return with tales of salads, steaks (of the fishy variety) and sundaes.

See you soon!

Guest post written by Dougal Stanton.

Wednesday night is our “night off”, when tradition dictates we have a drink and cook something a bit interesting for tea if possible. As it happened, Helen was home quite late and too exhausted to enjoy herself much. I think I also managed to knock her for six with a rather potent Mudslide.

• Quick Chilli

So I did this one while Helen sat on the sofa snoozing over Espedair Street. You start off by chopping up a half-length of chorizo sausage, which is about as mouthwatering a job as any meat eating cook could hope for. Obviously, I had to do several quality control checks on that sausage. It would have been simply terrible if we had been using substandard sausage.

I’m sorry for the action-shot (ie blurry) nature of the photos, but I’m obviously a bit cack when it comes to photography. This was before the cocktail, too! After the sausage has sizzled and the mince browned, everything else comes straight from a tin, as is the way with this book, so it was dead easy. The only problem was when I discovered we had very little rice to go with it.

A nice meal: quick and reassuringly spicy. Excellent heated up for lunch the next day, too!

I had the gals round from work on Monday, and made for tea a simple dish from the lunches chapter, along with an easy but effective pud.

• Sesame Peanut Noodles
• Nectarine and Blueberry Galette

And the good ladies brought me flowers. What stars they are, the lot of them.It is fair to say that a great deal of Nigella Express is not Halal. Particularly when I’d lost my nerve in the halal butcher’s at the weekend (the man behind the counter was all grumpy with me!) and so was essentially looking for a vegetarian recipe; something I’ve bemoaned the lack of in the past. However, approaching the lunches chapter with an open mind presented to me these fabulous sticky noodles which I will certainly be making again.As it is supposed to be a lunch dish and supposed to be made in the morning before eating at a later stage, the noodles were supposed to be pre-cooked (I just used normal ones) and none of the veg is cooked at all. I had misgivings about the raw mange-touts but they were fine. Crunchy and sweet and an important crisp and fresh contrast to the sweet peanut sauce. The sauce comprised peanut butter (Skippy, bought specially for another recipe!), soy sauce, garlic oil and lime juice. There was also supposed to be sweet chilli sauce but I clean forgot about it! We didn’t think it was a glaring omission.

This was pretty tip-top and both D and I enjoyed it for lunch the following day. However I would say that Nigella clearly eats less at lunch than we did at tea, as after five of us had eaten it needed added to in order to spin it out to two further lunches. The recipe said it would give eight portions. Eight not very hungry people.

After we’d crunched and slurped our way through our noodles, I set to on pudding. I could not source ready-rolled all butter puff pastry (and having compared the ingredients of the ‘normal’ puff pastry and the all-butter puff pastry there is no doubt in my mind as to which I ought to buy) so I rolled out my slab of puff pastry; made the little frame and painted on a mixture of apricot jam and cream. It should be noted that apricot jam mixed with cream is a fabulous combination and one I would happily eat very day! This was then scattered with blueberries and nectarine and baked.

Not only did it look foxy it tasted scrummy too. Whilst the nectarine started out under-ripe, once blasted in the oven it was soft and its piquancy was a lovely counter to the sweetness of the base and blueberries. Dougal and I have since agreed that in the future we would use more fruit in this. All round though I would recommend this galette as an easy peasy way of knocking up a most impressive looking pud (but not one for you Mike- this definitely gets away with looking messy!)

Last night didn’t particularly call for a starter, but last night was when the avocado ripened!

• Avocado Crayfish Cocktail

Actually, having a starter last night was quite handy, as when I got in (late) from a ‘quick’ after-work drink with the girls, Dougal needed fed, quickly. This rustled up in no time at all.

And didn’t it look grand! Not bad for two mins in the kitchen. This recipe in particular has made me very happy I decided to buy sherry vinegar. I’ve oft said that Nigella Express could bankrupt me through the purchase of condiments alone, but I think the unusual vinegar really made this. Yummy!