The Sacred Art of Eating

This being a year-long challenge, we will have two birthdays to see in Nigella Express style. The first of them went very well…

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry
• Ice Cream Cake

The curry felt a bit like cheating at cooking, in that I used pre-cubed butternut squash, sweet potato and mango, as well as shelled and cooked king prawns. In fact, all I had to slice was a spring onion although I did fry that in hand-made, slaved over wok oil (I then burnt the spring onions). The flavour came from curry paste (red thai) and coconut milk and really I did nothing. This was pretty gorgeous though, despite my managing to over cook it and the butternut melting away to nothing. Clearly it is an Express recipe seeing as most curries really do benefit from a good hour of bubbling away slowly.

As suggested in the preamble to the recipe I served this with noodles tossed in toasted unsalted peanuts. The peanuts were very hard to track down- not in the wholefoods section of the store but with the salted/dry roasted peanuts as a ‘healthy alternative’. I forgot to go to the chinese supermarket before it closed to sent D out on a wild goose chase for wide rice noodles which were not to be found but normal egg noodles did the trick just fine. Slurpily wonderful.

Pudding, however was the real icing on the cake, even though this cake had no icing at all. I felt my man deserved an all out pudding for his birthday so I went for the ice cream cake from the swanky Razzle Dazzle chapter. This was a cinch to make; I wouldn’t and couldn’t get the called for Nestle ‘peanut butter and chocolate chips’ so I used a mixture of white, milk and plain chocolate chips as well as butterscotch chips sourced from my pal Ariana’s Italian restaurant. Brill.

I made the cake up the night before and then at tea prepared the TWO sauces that were to go with it. Then, a quick bit of strewing the top with chocolatey rubble and a drizzle or two of sauce (more of a slick than a drizzle as the sauces could’ve done with cooling a bit more) and we were, collectively, in ice cream heaven.

The best bit about the ice cream cake might well have been that, unlike other cakes, we couldn’t give our Birthday Tea guests a slice each to take home with them….it just had to go back in our freezer, mwahahaha!

Yes, we’ve been somewhat quiet over here at The Sacred Art of Eating. Moving house has rather occupied us- my utmost respect to Helen at One Year Project who last year managed to cook and blog a Rachel Ray recipe every day of the year whilst simultaneously fitting in not only moving house but also giving birth. Kudos.

We have been cooking- both before the move (we had a ridiculously social week the week before we got the keys…seems like ages ago now!) and since and we have meals in the pipeline. As Dougal’s stats post shows we are pretty far behind now, so we will have to up the rate of cooking. This means some planning ahead of meals. There are at least three recipes planned for the coming week but that may need to become four or even five. Watch this space!

A salad which could have been so good, and could have been so bad. Which was it?

• Chef’s Salad

This salad started out well, with ingredients I enjoy: iceberg lettuce was something of a favourite when I was a child; the ham was good stuff sliced thickly at the deli counter in waitrose; emmental, whilst not as good as gruyere, is an alright sort of cheese, and oh man, I love avocado…

But then, stone me, some eejit went and put a whole load of sweetcorn in it! Bleh! (It should be noted that I am perfectly happy to eat sweetcorn on the cob. Off it is just plain wrong!) Good grief what are we to do do it for the sake of the children challenge grumble grumble grumble grumble.

And do you know what? It was fantastic. Really moreish. As Nigella says in the book, the range of textures really works, as do the contrasts in flavours in each mouthful. Dare I say it, the sweet sweetcorn worked well against the plain lettuce and the salty ham. It was huge- too big to mix in the serving bowl so we had to resort to the bread bowl- but we almost finished it between us.

This recipe is from the Retro Rapido chapter; you can really tell, it didn’t feel at all like any salad you would get served in the UK at present. Much of the chapter feels old and dowdy, like my mum’s 1970’s edition of the Good Housekeeping cookery book. And yet Chef’s Salad felt firmly like the kind of thing I would expect to be served in France- in a home if not in a restaurant. The same can be said for much of the Retro Rapido chapter: Oeufs en cocotte; Mouclade; Crepes Suzette; the fondue and probably even the chicken liver salad are all French or French cuisine-inspired. I’d say that italian eating has influenced much of the cooking of my formative years, basil and rocket and olives and parma ham. Why then has the introduction of Italian ideas driven out French food- once so trendy (I grew up using the words Cordon Blew to mean posh cooking without knowing why) to the point that it now seems faded and out of touch?