The Sacred Art of Eating

The phrase ‘be generous with the sauce’ can sometimes, it seems, be taken too literally.

• Chocolate Pear Pudding

So. This week has been one of missed opportunities- Pancake Day and World Nutella Day on Tuesday when we didn’t do the Nutella Pancakes (Storecupboard SOS), followed by the Chinese New Year on Thursday when we didn’t do Crispy Duck (Quick Quick Slow). We decided instead to do the Crispy Duck on Sunday night and duly invited a couple of friends over to share our ducky with us.

Only, on inviting them, it turned out they’d already begun preparing a Wild Goose for Sunday’s dinner, and would we perhaps like to join them for that instead. Well, we’d not yet bought our duck, so this seemed a jolly good idea. We negotiated the bringing of a pudding (something we seem to be tackling less well in the Challenge) and Dougal made two loaves of bread not one, in order to take them one as well.

We chose the Chocolate Pear Pudding as our dish because it was relatively straightforward, even if we wanted to assemble and cook it at theirs, and because it felt warm and comforting in a way that we needed as the mists swirled around Edinburgh on Sunday. We resisted the urge to use real pears and bought pears in tins (a first for me) and took a food processor-full of spongey batter round with us.

Our hosts had done us proud, with a menu on the table, candles, and even place settings. The carrot and corriander was possibly the best I’d ever tasted (contained positively buckets of coriander, I’d wager) and a fine accompaniment to D’s bread. The goose was perhaps a bit dry for me, but the stuffing was gorgeous and they’d done parsnips which is a very good way to curry favour with me!

The pudding cooked up satisfactorily, and we made up the sauce suggested by Nigella within the blurb to the recipe. Perhaps the ingredients alone (170g evap’d milk, 150g golden syrup (that’s a lot, by the way), 100g dark chocolate, a touch of coffee) should have warned me off greedily telling Dougal to ladle harder… The sauce, whilst spot on for the sponge pudding, was cloying and thick and very, very sweet. Really it needed more pear (to provide some much needed water) and maybe some vanilla ice cream, to balance it all. And just generally less sauce.

I would have some lovely pictures of the glossily coated spongey fruity goodness to show you, only my trusty little camera let me down, and ran out of battery about five pictures into the evening. Clearly I used it more on holiday than I’d appreciated. If a certain camera phone owning someone is reading this then a copy of the photos taken would be greatly appreciated….nudge wink…In the mean time you have to put up with a bien arrosé shot of your host for the year!

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