The Sacred Art of Eating

One necessary ingredient substitution, but nevertheless a highly sucessful evening’s pudding.

• Banana Butterscotch Muffins

Which were in fact Banana Dark Chocolate Chip Muffins. Even Waitrose couldn’t sell me Butterscotch Morsels. I could’ve gone online; I might yet, one day. However, Ms Lawson suggests dark chocolate chips as a suitable alternative and we would agree, very suitable indeed. If anything I feel they may make a superior muffin. I’m not sure that with butterscotch morsels these wouldn’t be too sweet.

These were dead easy to make and an excellent use of our otherwise completely useless one-week-overripe bananas. They probably count as fairly healthy too, what with being made with vegetable oil, and not a huge amount of sugar (apart from that in the bananas!).

Very yummy and just the sort of thing you could confidently knock up if you had a friend coming round for morning coffee and wanted something easy and reliable to feed them. Technically they are from the Lunch chapter, but that’s fine as we have ample left over (we ended up with 19 instead of the suggested 12 muffins- perhaps because we used fairy cake not muffin cases) and so will be taking them for lunch tomorrow.

I realise it may sometimes seem like all I do here is rave about how good the food has been. Not always, I hope.

• Spaghettini with Prawns and Chilli

Don’t get me wrong, this dish wasn’t unpleasant or anything. I just didn’t feel like it was any greater than a sum of its parts. The blurb in the book had bigged it up to some degree and I’d been looking forward to the dish for a couple of days.

Perhaps the failure was in the substitutions. Don’t tell anyone, but we used spaghetti instead of spaghettini. Stone the crows! More significantly, I didn’t manage to get sun-blush tomatoes (I stayed at work tonight till after half six and then there was an offer of a lift home…too good to pass up just to go to Waitrose rather than Somerfield) and so I used sundried toms instead. Now my dad’s always complained that most sundried toms you can buy aren’t proper sundried toms, so I’d hoped it was an acceptable subsitution, but in reality they were probably a bit robust, both in texture and flavour, for the dish.

The chilli kick was noticeable but I didn’t feel it added much. The prawns were big and a bit chewy. Perhaps I should’ve used little prawns; these were king prawns and tiger prawns being ‘used-up’ from the freezer (in preparation for our hopefully impending house move). They didn’t seem to be a part of the sauce; needed a longer slow cook, perhaps.

What else can I say? The flavour of the rocket gets completely lost, in all the heat and chilli and prawn. The fresh parsley on top, on the other hand, was authentic and alive and definitely not to be forgone.  All in all, however, a bit of a let down.

I’m glad there are some let downs to be honest; otherwise I feel I’d only ever be deciding to definitely cook things again. To be able to write certain recipes off gives me a bit of space and freedom for the future.

I’ve been ill and it was a wintry –snowy even– weekend, so we had to go for a proper comforting wintry pudding:

• Jumbleberry Crumble

Individual portions of crumble, made with frozen summer fruits (much cheaper in Somerfield than in Waitrose, let me tell you!) and home-made crumble kept in the freezer. These were easy peasy to make up, quick to cook, and, unlike last week’s pudding looked beautiful and appetising at service.

With a little forward planning you could have a bag of the crumble stashed in the freezer along side a bag of fruit….mix the fruit with a little cornflour and maybe sugar, top with crumble, bake for a bit and hey presto it’s a proper grown up, like mum made, pudding!

We had ours with ice cream and tea and honestly, my only complaint would be that there weren’t any left overs. Yum!

To start a new tradition, we needed a properly ‘traditional’ start, a real puddings’ pudding, if you will.

• Roly Poly Pudding

There were a few minor disasters along the way, but the end result was a sweet, gooey, fudgey delight of a pud that went very nicely with our pot of tea.First off was the use of the ready rolled short crust pastry. This is one of the few recipes which doesn’t call for ready made All Butter pastry, so I’d been able to get the pastry locally. I took it out of the fridge at the allotted time, and as I began to unroll it, a thin strip broke off down the side. Alarmed, I fished out the instructions: To avoid splitting, take out of the fridge at least 40 minutes before use it intoned, solemnly. Then the buzzer went, our guests arriving 20 minutes earlier than expected.There was little I could do about the pastry, so in the end I ended up clumping it all back together and rolling it out the traditional way. Of course then I failed to come up with the required 18cm by 32.5 cm (!!- presumably this is the precise size of the packet ready-rolled stuff Nigella uses) and began to feel more and more stressed. Not quite what you’d expect cooking from a chapter called Instant Calmer.My next gripe regards Nigella’s continued insistence on specifying weights of golden syrup. The syrup was to be spread onto the pastry, so it wasn’t even that I could weigh directly into a pan. No matter what, I had to dirty a bowl, and in doing so, lose syrup along the way. What do you do, measure out extra and write it off as collateral damage? As it was, I probably had less syrup than I should have. On the other hand, my sheet of pastry was a bit raggedly looking (I’d rolled and re-rolled it so many times I was sure it would shrink to a tiny chewy mass) so I figured a little too little syrup wouldn’t harm anyone.

Into the oven it went, and I joined my guests. After the half an hour, Dougal brewed the tea, I fished out the ice cream and I pulled the sweet smelling pud from the oven. It didn’t look like much. In the book it is a rich and glossy golden colour. This was pasty and white, a bit dry on top with a puddle of milk around it. It improved on serving, I’ll give it that; the melted syrup swam out and melded with the milk, and in cross section the pudding looked soggy in all the right ways and had a lovely gooey squidgy consistency.

Our ice cream, for reasons I don’t fully understand, was the consistency of chocolate mousse, and so unfortunately all but melted on contact with the hot pudding. This was a bit of a shame as you did need it to cut across the all-but-overwhelming sweetness of the pudding. Melted away it wasn’t as potent a contrast. We checked the freezer though, and it seems okay. Duff batch of ice cream?I’m not quite sure why Roly Poly Pudding didn’t have the good looks of the recipe version. Perhaps, in light of the other shortcomings, I ought to have cut down on the milk a little. Perhaps the top of the pud would have coloured up nicely had I poured the milk over the top as well as down the sides as instructed. Who knows. Either way, I’m not writing this dish off. It fills a good niche of stodgy wintry comfort food pudding, like a sticky toffee pudding, and was dead easy to make, albeit with a fight with the pastry (but once I’m a grown up I’ll be able to throw together my own short-crust pastry in a flash, right?). Lovely for a Sunday night, just not a showy-offy dessert.

Dougal, my hunch was right. We are way behind on puddings. In fact, whilst we are over 20% of the way through the challenge, at about 20% of the way through the year, we are a pitiful 13% of the way through the puddings. In fact, if we want to get through all the remaining Puddings, Cookies and Muffins (not to mention the Hot Drinks and, heck, the Cocktails) then we will have to do a Pudding every week from now until the end of the year. Some weeks we’ll need to do two!

Indeed, of 54 treats in the book, we have managed only 7. This is probably mostly down to feeling there ought to be an occasion for a pudding or cake, so we’ve managed it when we’ve had friends over for dinner but almost never gone to the effort for just the two of us. After all, it would be a waste to make some of these dishes and not share them! In fact, looking at the stats, we’ve never made a pudding for just the two of us. It’s always been when we’ve had friends round or when we are going out to friends.

We had been talking of introducing a Sunday night ‘Pudding and a Pot of Tea’ tradition, to see more of our friends and help us through the challenge. This may be more necessary than we’d thought!

An invitation to a film about France, food and love. Time to wheel out the French classics.

• Oeufs en Cocotte
• Chicken Liver Salad

Those of you scrutinising our progress statistics closely (I’ll post them later, if you’d like to see) will have noted that, whilst we are steaming through the challenge, there are areas where we are doing less well than others. We’ve cooked lots from Instant Calmer but rather less, which is to say nothing from the Retro Rapido chapter. (There is another glaring absence but I’ll come back to that.)

I will confess that part of the problem has been that the recipes appeal a little less to me in this chapter than others. I mean really, a salad with iceberg lettuce and tinned sweetcorn? But one or two or the recipes have been on my to do list for a while and I was glad of the chance to cook them on Friday night. I was taking Dougal’s Mummy to see a French film, Hunting and Gathering, as she’d given me the book for Christmas. The book is strongly about food, so it seemed right to cook some French recipes.

I started with Oeufs en Cocotte. I have now a set of four glass ramekins (good old Gü puddings) and we’re working on some plain white ceramic ones, so I was able to present these properly. In fact, because I’d followed Nigella’s suggestion of having asparagus to dip (which required me to come up with a makeshift asparagus steamer, I think a did rather well!) the presentation of these wee pots of creamy eggy goodness was pretty gorgeous. I’d do this again as a starter as it was dead simple and looked and tasted very special.

To follow I made the Chicken Liver Salad, also from Retro Rapido. I’d been meaning to make this for supper for some time, not least of all because even Organic Free Range Chicken Livers from Waitrose are dead cheap- I bought 400g of them for less than two quid. Somehow though I’d not quite got round to it.

They looked beautiful as they cooked, whilst I arranged the salad and made up the sublime smelling maple syrup and sherry vinegar (I finally cracked- this woman is going to bankrupt me through condiments I swear) dressing. After the prescribed seven minutes of cooking I deglazed the pan with the dressing, served the meat and drizzled about the dressing. I forgot the sprinkling of wanky sea salt but I don’t think anyone noticed.

Sadly, Dougal didn’t enjoy his livers at all, and I’m not sure his mum was particularly keen either. For the most part I did really enjoy mine although there was one amongst them which felt kinda chalky and a bit too mousse-like. I only had Nigella’s seven minutes, turning frequently instructions to go on, so perhaps I did cook them all wrong. Nevertheless, I was a bit saddened that this somewhat rare venture of mine into proper, foodie cooking, with foodie, thrifty ingredients was not a Regards to the Chef success. It looked beautiful though!

Organic Spare Ribs, Happy Chicken Drumsticks, and Posh Apple Juice. What a marriage!

• Maple Chicken ‘n’ Ribs

This recipe was one of the very first to catch my eye in Nigella Express, back in the innocent, pre-Challenge days. The idea of having a hearty meal that, at the point of getting in from work, needed only arrangement in a tray and then bunging in the oven for an hour whilst I went off and faffed around/had a big Gin appealed greatly. The other night I saw organic free range pork spare ribs in Waitrose and I knew the time was right.

As suggested in the book, these were dead easy to put together. The chicken (drumsticks in our case, it was supposed to be thighs) and pork goes in a bag or bowl, and over the top go lots of tasty flavours; maple syrup, posh apple juice (ooo, I think I’ll have a glass now), star anise, garlic, cinnamon….and then the whole lot melds for 24 or 48 or so hours. Then, hot oven, wee wait, and then smashing hands-on tea.

I didn’t quite get my big drink as planned; in fact whilst these were cooking I did the ironing (good deed in a naughty world) and put together a wee italian salad (spoiled by cheap mozzarella and the avocado being not quite ripe enough). I gave the meat an extra wee blast at the end because I didn’t think they seemed quite sticky enough…a bit too wet really.

In all, whilst this was a scrummy meal, I would say I was a little disappointed it wasn’t a bit stickier. I suppose for that you either have to use some fake stickiness in your glaze, or endlessly baste the meat whilst it is cooking, which is not the point at all! Or maybe more maple syrup. You couldn’t really taste it, after the star anise and ginger, so perhaps doubling that would be a step in the right direction.

It should also be noted that this meat was most delectable cold.

I fancied something light for tea tonight, and those mushrooms just looked so good!

• Garlic Oil

Yup, I decided to put the Garlic Oil through its paced by grilling a big box of little portabella mushrooms with some wanky salt and a generous dosing of the pungent oil. I served them on toasted rustic bread (generic supermarket stuff) with a good squeeze of lemon juice and loads of parsley.

Surprisingly, whilst I used quite a good slug of the oil, it was the lemon juice that provided the dominant flavour. The garlic was present but you didn’t get that really satisfying garlicky hit. On the other hand, I won’t deny that we do probably both stink right now!!

Yes…they were as good as they look.

I don’t know how many else of you ever look at The Challenge page of this blog, but I am finding it quite exciting this week. The recipe counter is moving into a new phase, no longer a teeny number down, massive number to go….but somehow quite a sizeable number already under our belts!

Last night we were made the gift of a small jam jar of Malibu; a vital ingredient in at least one recipe but not something we were ever keen to buy. Jam jars of brandy, bourbon, frangelico and pama all also gratefully received. I should have a wish list somewhere.

Coming along nicely, yes….

Sometimes you have to admit defeat and invite friends for tea and cake.

• Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

As any of your that read my (other) blog or Dougal’s will know, we are currently flat-hunting (with a view to buying) and it is getting us down. I won’t explain why; there is quite enough navel gazing going on at the aforementioned sites and it doesn’t generally relate to food. However, last night we were both feeling so fed up of being perturbed and of thinking of nothing but flats flats flats that we decided to invite Na and James over for tea and cake to occupy our minds for the evening.

The Totally Chocolate Choccy Chip cookies seemed ideal as they were even from the chapter entitled Instant Calmer. A big pot of tea (three bags of Clipper tea, one bag of Equal Exchange Earl Grey) and a milk jug and some leftover sticky chocolate gingerbread…and not too much talking about flats. It helped.

The cookies were pretty amazing. Dead moist. I liked the measuring out with an ice cream scoop idea; I always feel a bit overwhelmed being asked to make 12 equal sized portions from a big bowl of mix and having a set measuring device helped. In the end we had more like 14 (or was it 16) cookies but they were by no means too small. I took advice and froze half, so that we are now only ever 19 minutes plus hardening up time away from more chocolate nom.

My only change, for next time, would be to halve the salt. I don’t mind a little salt in a cookie, I think it is important, even, but these were a little on the salty side. Also…350g of chocolate chips is a lot. We had 325g and you get several in every mouthful. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a crime to cut down on these. Although I suppose you might have to rename them Fairly Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies which might not cut it.

I took one to work today, and bought a 200ml bottle of milk (full cream, it’s all there was) to have with it. The combination was perfect. And as my mother will tell you, I don’t like milk.