The Sacred Art of Eating

Horrid nasty wet day; my man in late from work. The way to his heart?

• Rapid Ragù

Everyone at work on Monday was feeling low (except for me, but try as I might it was rubbing off a little!). Outside the fierce winds lashed rain against the windows and the sky was a photocopier grey. I realised, even before leaving work, that I needed to make something solid and satisfying for dinner. I had in my mind the illustration for this dish and a quick squint at the BBC website revealed that a little shopping would see me right.

This is a thick tomatoey, lamby stew, with lentils (I used puy) to give it extra body and bite, and a wonderful richness of flavour imbued by using caramelised onions (out of a jar) in the mix. Unlike Nigella, we felt it a bit decadent to eat straight from the pan, so we had some rice too, and plates, fancy!

The cheese on top turned out to be a vital part of the mix, a lovely counterpoint to the other flavours. If you are looking for an easy wintry night stew, this comes highly recommended. (Recipe on the BBC Food pages, don’t say I’m not good to you.)

It might have blended, had we had a proper blender.

• Pea and Pesto Soup

Last week, Dougal’s Mum and Dad announced that they wanted to take us out for lunch. However, that same evening we were due to go for a pre-theatre dinner for my Dad’s birthday, and so in order to limit the scale of our repast, we invited them over for lunch Chez Us.

We were both keen to use the opportunity to cook something from the lunches chapter. Dougal proposed the Pea and Pesto Soup, and whilst I’d been harbouring fantasies of sending him off to work with a flaskful of steaming soup, the lack of thermos and the fact that I leave considerably after D meant I had to concede we were as well to just cook the recipe.

I dunno whether Nigella hand peels her peas before cooking, or whether ‘proper’ blenders really are different to food processors (we even used the liquid blending attachment this time!). Either way, this is the second blended soup we’ve made that has rather failed to cut the mustard. It was a bit thin- some stock wouldn’t have gone amiss- and the pesto was too distant a flavour. I was rather sad to have given this to D’s Mum and Dad, particularly when they could have had the delights of the Chowder from the other night. Such is life, I suppose.

At long last guys, with whipped cream, grated chocolate and all, I present to you…

• Mexican Hot Chocolate

As you may have noticed this has become quite a hit with us. This may have more than a little to do with us having a bottle of Kahlua needing finished, but is it also a treat in its own right. We always make it with cocoa, rather than posh hot chocolate. And our mugs ain’t that fancy- in fact they say ‘coffee’ on them. Pah!

This time we finally went the whole hog and did the fancy topping. Cream on the nose, brilliant!

Whilst it might seem like we’ve been a bit quiet this week, we’ve actually been working on a secret project…

• Garlic Oil
• Wok Oil
• Chilli Oil

As well as making these Storecupboard Supplies for our own Nigella-Kitchen, Dougal and I decided to make a bottle of each of these for my Dad, as part of his birthday present. I decided I wanted to give him a copy of the Nigella Express long before I was challenged and had been keeping schtum about the book to him. What with him now fully knowing about the book it seemed fair to make the present a bit more interesting.

Each of these oils involved slicing up the constituent flavours, and then letting it all steep for 48 hours in the oil of choice. In the past week, I have sliced up: 36 cloves of garlic, 18cm worth of ginger and 15 chillies. My word. The day we decanted the garlic oil was a bit scary; the hit of garlic was so strong and we could still smell it the next morning when we got up!

Trepidation about over-pungent pongs aside, I’ve now used the garlic oil, and it seemed to work. Smelled nice when the pancetta were frying in it, but no dominating flavour. We shall see if it becomes our new kitchen staple!

Feeling funny on a Sunday night, I went for a soup from the Instant Calmer chapter. It sorted me right out, and no mistake.

• Chowder with Asian Flavours

This soup has many things going for it. Firstly, it was dead easy to make. There was a little initial standing around chop-chopping, but thereafter all the prepping of ingredients took place whilst previous stages were cooking. I made things more difficult for myself by not having pre-skinned smoked cod fillets, but even with the additional effort of skinning the fish, this was easy peasy.

Part of the reason it tasted so good was that we had amazing chicken stock to use. (The first step is cooking up leeks and potatoes in chicken stock). We’d followed the advice of the mighty Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All (a god amongst mortals) on stock making, which included the note that Nigella says it’s not worth making stock with only one chicken carcass, and so to save them up in the freezer until you have plenty. We had the leftover carcass from a roast pre-christmas and some well picked at chicken wings. Also in the freezer were the un-cooked bones and skin from my making Dougal butcher six chicken thighs into thigh fillets for the Pollo Alla Cacciatore, and the fat trimmed off the beef for Steak Slice with Lemon and Thyme. I gave the various raw bits a blast in the oven with some garlic, olive oil and thyme, and then the whole lot went into the stock pot. Let me tell you, the results were awesome!

I didn’t deviate much from the recipe. I had no baby corn, as they’d been on special offer in Somerfield’s and as such had sold out. The recipe also called for small/medium prawns; I had a bag of king sized prawns in my freezer and wasn’t going to buy more prawns when they were available. And anyway, I’m from by the seaside, and where I come from chowder is a tricksy dish! All calm across the surface, a little glimpse of potato or sweetcorn here, but what lies beneath? The first spoonful might bring up a whole mussel! Then a huge langoustine, eyeing you in its beady way! I felt, therefore, that my upgrading of the prawns was entirely justified.

What a soup this was. Warm and filling in its own right, easy to make, largely speaking pretty healthy, and with a lip tingling glow provided by the generous sprinkling of fresh chilli and coriander on top. This was a huge hit here at Caledonian Place and will certainly feature again.

Meals that suit vegetarians, don’t contain mushrooms and which we haven’t cooked already; it was tough from the start!

• Mozzarella with Crazy Gremolata
• Lentil and Walnut Salad
• Butternut and Sweet Potato Soup
• Flourless Chocolate Brownie and,
• Hot Chocolate Sauce

So. Best friend (vegetarian) and best friend’s boyfriend (fussy) coming for tea. I went into work half an hour late, having spent a goodly while over breakfast pouring over the entire book looking for vegetarian recipes. There weren’t many! We’d cooked at least half of them already, another third were soups (I didn’t want to do soup because I wanted a side salad, which hardly goes with soup), others were too distinctly summery or christmassy… which didn’t leave very many. I was, then, delighted, when I spotted Pappardelle with Escarole, a sort of Italian pasta with wilted greens and chillies and herbs affair. It sounded fairly nice, would go well with my planned starter of mozzarella, and not be so filling that we wouldn’t have room for our brownies and ice cream.

No we will not be on the internet!!

Only I couldn’t get my ingredients. I had to compromise on pasta, going for tagliatelle rather than pappardelle, because the only pappardelle that Waitrose had in stock was fifteen pounds per kilogram. Fifteen; I kid you not. And most of it was broken because the packaging was fancy but inadequate. It was a compromise I was happy to make.

Less easy to compromise on was the total lack of suitable lettuce. Waitrose could not sell me a head of escarole, nor any of the suggested alternatives. The various bags of salad on offer all seemed to be too sweet- I suppose you probably don’t sell many bags of salad labelled as ‘bitter’ but I did think I’d at least be able to get endive. Wikipedia, you’ll notice, barely differentiates between them.

At this point I had to admit defeat on the sophisticated Italian pasta and resort to plan B, which was one of the soups from the Instant Calmer chapter. I’d been carrying around a note of the ingredients for some time, as I thought it’d be a good easy tea on a night Dougal wasn’t going to be in- he’s not a fan of either butternut squash or sweet potato. The starter and side salad, rapidly morphed into ‘two little salads on the side’ and I crossed my fingers that the pudding would be really really good.

The side salads were both very tasty and were pretty quick and easy to construct. I was surprised, actually, by how well the Lentil and Walnut salad went down; I’d worried it might be a bit wholesome. Similarly, the mozzarella was lovely, surprisingly easy to eat, given all the raw chilli on it. I did however, feel a little tired at having another of the endless variations on ’season with olive oil and lemon juice’.

The soup was less of a success. I felt like I was cooking it forever-I served tea over an hour later than planned. It seemed to use an awful lot of stock (I’d bought one carton of posh fresh vegetable stock, but ended up having to use two stock cubes too, so I probably needn’t have bothered). It required blending; we went against advice and used our food processor (we don’t have a blender!) and it didn’t come out anything like as smooth as in the book. That said, we have a really small blender (about 1L capacity) so maybe I was being impatient and not blending enough. We also didn’t have buttermilk to garnish it with; I used creme fraiche but it didn’t have the same artistic effect.

It tasted okay, but it wouldn’t have won any awards, not one. We didn’t finish it and I’ll let you into a secret and tell you that D and I chucked the leftovers away, something we rarely do (you’ll find out why in a subsequent soupy post).

Pudding, however, improved matters entirely. The flourless chocolate brownies were fudgy and warm and gooey although they probably would have benefited from cooking in a tinfoil tray rather than my usual brownie tin. The sauce was gorgeous- much better than the one for the Chocolate Pear Pudding- and survived to the following day without losing its capacity to melt to a lovely free flowing sauce again. The best bit is that we are still, a week later, eating the brownies (but then we have also had Dougal’s fabulous Sticky Chocolate Gingerbread to eat).

So, not our most successful dinner for friends so far, a few disappointments along the way, but a great pudding, to be repeated.

Valentines would generally seem to be a celebration of a love of food, rather than anything else, in my flat. What with my recent return from an excellent skiing hol in La Savoie with a whole Reblochon it seemed fitting that we had a Tartiflette. Properly warming for a nasty February night.

It took me a while to find a recipe I liked- most seemed to include crème fraîche or cream which seemed all wrong- and in the end my dad came up trumps. We had a nice little bottle of (not French) rosé Cava- in lieu of pétillante de Savoie, which, let’s face, I wasn’t going to be able to find in Edinburgh- and a walnutty french salad.

It was, though I say it my self, smashing. Fitted beautifully in my bigger Phil Revell dish. I should have cut up the top half cheese, as it wasn’t a particularly young cheese and so the top rind was a bit tough. Otherwise though, no faults.

Dougal was in charge of pudding and he did not let the side down. He turned to Nigella, but to an earlier book, Feast (which I bought him for our anniversary three years ago). He made the Sticky Chocolate Gingerbread, and although we discovered as the shops were closing that we did not have enough icing sugar to do the full thick and unctuous layer called for, I’d say it was pretty perfect. We’re still eating it (he made a roasting tray-full!) and it is getting stickier by the day.

Lovely!

In case anyone hadn’t noticed, there are way more pictures of most of our meals (including lots of works in progress images) over at my (now Pro!) Flickr account. We take far too many to put on the blog, but some of them are rather fun. Check out my Flickr Account here.

Well it had to happen at some point. A Nigella recipe that did not work.

• Hokey Pokey

I have a friend, from whom I borrowed a jumper to get home on a cold night. In December. I felt I owed her a little something to say sorry for hoarding her jumper for such a long time, so, in addition to inviting her and her fella for dinner, I decided to make her some Hokey Pokey as Nigella describes it as being good as a gift.

The instructions for this Cinder Toffee/Honeycomb creation were pretty short (in fact, in true express style, I made the stuff whilst simultaneously emptying the dishwasher and making my breakfast) and I wonder whether I could have done with a bit of micro-managment and hand-holding.

The end result was a rather flat slab of very chewy, not very bubbly, toffee-like stuff. Jaw breaking. I suspect that I did not fully appreciate the importance of one use of the word immediately and over whipped the mixture- removing all air. Either way it’s been quite nice to chew on, but wouldn’t have been much use as a gift. I may try it again at some time. Perhaps using a smaller pan and slightly warmer golden syrup to start with.

On Monday night, a propos of nothing in particular, apart from having a genuine Savoyarde saucisson in the cupboard, we had a little supper in the French gourmande fashion. Or so I like to think. It wasn’t really an Assiette Savoyard as there were no gerkins and the cheese was from Normandy, and my olives were distinctly Mediterranean. The bread was home made… only, in Scotland. But I strayed from my usual balsamic ways and did a walnut oil and dijon mustard dressing for the salad, and we drank red wine on a Monday so I feel we were reasonably French, if not wholly.