The Sacred Art of Eating

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!

Sunday proved to be the first hot day of the year. As such an informal and laid-back dinner was called for.

• Halloumi Bites (this time with pictures!)
• Mexican Scrambled Eggs
• Irish Cream Tiramisu

The sharp-eyed and keen-witted amongst my readers will recall that we did, in fact, make the halloumi bits right back at the beginning of the challenge; the first ‘friends for dinner evening’. However, at the time we forgot to take any piccies, and seeing as we’d both enjoyed it so much felt quite prepared to cook it again ‘in the interests of completeness’.

This time it was made with bona fide garlic oil, as opposed to just some garlic fried in oil. Presumably this added to the flavours; I think if anything it masked the lime juice and over all this was a little on the greasy side, compared to last time. Perhaps I am just remembering wrongly, of course.

The mexican scrambled eggs were chosen specifically for being a bit of an easy-going sort of dish. Of our guests, Le C we basically just know through blogging (although curiously she is one of my best friends’ best friends!) and we don’t know her boyfriend at all. So Dougal felt an informal tea was called for; no need to get the good china out! On the other hand it was a bit of a gamble; whilst we’d asked them if there was anything they didn’t eat, Dougal and I agreed later that someone could really hate scrambled eggs but never think to mention it if asked!

Between the halloumi and the eggs, this was a ‘make lots of little bowls up in advance and then fry with guests in the kitchen’ sort of meal. Added nicely to the relaxed vibe. For all I talk about liking having folk in the kitchen whilst I cook its not actually something I often do.

Generally the eggs were pretty good. My mum makes awesome curried scrambled eggs, with tomato and spices in it and coriander on it; these eggs were pretty similar but without the curry and with the curious addition of fried strips of tortilla. I’m not sure if these oughtn’t have been a bit crisper- the oil wasn’t really hot enough when we fried them, bloody electric cooker- which might have made them a bit more obvious. As it was they added a bit of structure but I’m sure the dish wouldn’t have been weakened in their absence! As suggested in the pre-recipe blurb (but not as an actual recipe) we made a meal of the eggs by serving frigoles refritos with them. We’d neither of us made really-fried beans before (I’d only ever had them out of a can before) but we can report that made with tinned borlotti beans (soak overnight?…hah!) they are quick to make and most hearty and satisfying.

Pudding was chosen specifically for Le C, as the dish that pretty much got her through fourth year of her Part One in Architecture. She used to blog about it on regular occasion. I’d forgotten, but D had spotted the recipe in the book and said we have to make that for Le C. Whilst it tasted absolutely delicious and had the decency to serve beautifully and not fall apart on application of a spoon, as previously noted the proportions in the recipe seemed all wrong. We are currently eating our way through the remaining sponge fingers (very nice they are too) and you saw what happened to the coffee and baileys! Thing is, it’s not just that there was too much, as we ran out of mascarpone at about the point we would have expected. We probably could have soaked the sponge fingers a little more too, but not enough to use all that coffee mixture up!

Either way, it worked out very well, and was also most acceptable the following day when we invited HarveyNick over to help us polish off the leftovers.