The Sacred Art of Eating

We’ve had a foodie-fun rich old week here at Caledonian Place, but I’ve been so busy I’ve blogged none of it. I haven’t yet told you about: our exquisite Monday night supper; my first Nigella Failure on Tuesday; our brilliant Valentine’s Meal featuring a little cooking from the good lady’s repertoire but from Feast not NE; another Friday Night Supper which was rather less successful than some or about this evening’s fantastic tea.

I promise you, I am working on the matter…

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!

This post ought to have been entitled Love Me Tender as we’d cooked Ed’s Tender Rump, but I’m more of a Beatles fan than an Elvis Fan.

• Steak Slice with Lemon and Thyme

This is the first recipe I’ve cooked from the Workday Winners section of the book; odd given that workdays account for 5/7ths of the week. Anyway; I got home from work not really hungry as there’d been sweeties in the office, so Dougal and I headed out too look at some flats for sale (dull) and returned, ravenous, to cook at about 9.

This recipe has the great advantage of all cooking together in a very straightforward fashion. Whilst the meat’s frying, you make up the post hoc marinade. Whilst the meat is marinading, you cook the silly broccoli. (The ones with the very long stems). Whilst you slice the meat, the broccoli get tossed about in the now-meaty marinade. The whole dish was on the table in less than 20 minutes, start to finish.

Let me tell you, it was wonderful. We went with Nigella’s advice re it tasting good cold, and cooked a whole 550g of rump steak between the two of us. Sadly I hadn’t bought extra broccoli so we didn’t get any of that cold. (The silly broccoli were scrummy- the stems tasted almost like asparagus- and greatly enjoyed by both of us, so not silly at all.) The leftover meat went back in the marinade overnight and then into mayonaisey pitta breads the next day for the most awesome sandwiches my mouth has known for some time. The broccoli tasted just magic, all zingy in their lemony thymey coating, and the meat was meaty and tender and soft.

My only complaint, and this is a fault of mine rather than the recipe’s, was that the meat was actually a bit cold by the time we ate it. I think the combination of being marinaded in a cold ceramic dish, with chilly olive oil and fridge-cold lemon juice, and then being sliced rather slowly by an entirely inept carver (me) meant it wasn’t piping hot as it ought to have been. Next time we’ll warm the marinading vessel and maybe also warm our olive oil slightly.

Because believe you me, this meal will be repeated. We were discussing the economics of the meal; the meat had cost nearly eight quid from Marks & Spencer, which seemed (was!) a lot. However, it did two of us two meals each, working out at £2 per serving. Given that without the left over meat, one of us at least would have ended up eating a (boring) packaged sandwich at £2.50 odd, that seems a pretty good deal to me. Did I mention that as well as being good value it tasted AMAZING???

We finished off with some ice cream and butterscotchy sauce, for good measure. And lots of rump jokes!

Well. We’re not quite back into the swing of things post my-holiday, but I was concerned that we were letting the side down on the gastronomic adventures front, and thought I’d share with you our little Breakfast Party this morning.

We had genuine French chocolate brioche (bought in Dalry, Edinburgh); cafe au lait from bowls (okay so the milk was cold but we did have to get to work) and zingy citrus juice (orange, tangerine and mandarin, if I’m not mistaken). And we had good chat, and we practised finger spelling over breakfast. Now to work!