Jul 27 2008
Since acquiring Dough by Richard Bertinet (on the recommendation of Lawrence), Dougal has been making a lot of bread. Fougasse, bread shots, focaccia, sesame plaits, gruyere and cumin loaf, pain de mie, baguettes and more, it has been a delight to eat each and every one thus far. I don’t have the words to describe this lovely bread. Here are some pictures instead.
Jul 25 2008
You might think that one of the aims of any flatwarming party we might have had would have been to get through more recipes. In fact, I managed only one.
In my mind this was sort of two recipes, as the preamble to the instructions contains an alternative route, using lamb instead of beef, and I made both.
I got 1 kilo of rump steak and 1 kilo of leg of lamb from Ian Proudfoot, the butchers near my work. They offered to dice it for me and I agreed, asking for largeish dice. The recipe actually called for 2.5cm dice and most of the bits provided were a bit on the big side- next time I will either know my requirements or do it myself!
The meat marinaded overnight: the beef in garlic oil, red wine vinegar, horseradish cream, rosemary and port; the lamb much the same but with cumin instead of horseradish.
On the day of the party I threaded these onto skewered and griddled them. Nigella called for bamboo skewers, pre-soaked in water; mine were FSC certified wood and specifically indicated that they ought not to be soaked. I was therefore not best impressed when they started burning and falling to bits where they contacted the edge of the griddle pan. It is a tiny wee pan, not best for cooking a large vol of meat (I’d thought about borrowing my parents’ big griddle but never got around to asking) so perhaps it was never going to work out well. It did mean some of the meat was on elegant long skewers whilst some was on stubby short bits!
The dip for the beef comprised crème fraîche, horseradish cream, chives and lemon juice and was yummy and fairly popular. The dip for the lamb was hummous, greek yog, olive oil and a scattering of those damned pomegranate seeds which put all my eaters off. Shame. Whilst I was worried about the kitchen being full of smoke when my guests arrived, the extractor seemed to work well (either that or the open window did) and I (and the kitchen) survived unscathed.
Jul 24 2008
A wee pre-taster of doing one of the puddings properly.
Back in June, I made the Ice Cream Cake for Dougal’s Birthday Tea. You will recall that this cake takes two sauces to top it, one of which is the butterscotch sauce from the above recipe. Even though we tried very hard (Dougal even got artistic, see below) we simply couldn’t finish these sauces up at the same time as the ice cream cake.
One night, I had some strawberries and I had the butterscotch sauce- it would have been wrong of me not to try the two together, right?
I can tell you now: I am really looking forward to doing this recipe for real!
Jul 23 2008
I’m on holiday now (a long weekend in Croatia starting tomorrow but with a day off first today) so to celebrate we had cocktails last night:
However it was only a Tuesday night, so they were in fact Virgin Cocktails- Gentle Sea Breezes to be precise. Going the whole hog with the crushed ice and the sprig of mint on top meant you got all the sensory aspects of a cocktail- woo, colours!- but without sliding gently under the table later on.
Dinner was inspired by a gift from my boss, JPW, who appeared at work with a bag of micro potatoes for me and a growing pot of Sarriette. This was a herb I had never come across (although the smell was familiar, in a herby way) and shock horror, there was no Wikipedia entry for it! A bit of further digging suggests that its English name is in fact Summer Savoury. In any case JPW suggested that it was best had with beans; as we had some green beans needing used up in the fridge that’s what I did.
So, tea consisted of: gruyère and cumin bread; fabulously melty camembert; teeny tiny anya and charlotte potatoes dressed in walnut oil, white wine vinegar, chives, salt and pepper; fine beans in sarriette and butter and some vine tomatoes. It felt like a right proper party! I even wore a dress while I cooked it all. We both agreed that the only thing wrong was that we were not enjoying it all on a verandah some where in the warm summer air. Such is life- the sunset was still gorgeous.
Jul 23 2008
161 Days left in the Year.
114 Recipes left in the Challenge.
We may need a new approach….
Jul 23 2008
Yikes, we cooked this so long ago that my dad was able to say to me- this is good, you should try it, but we had!
I had been looking forward to this dish a great deal; it seemed super easy to mash up a can of beans with some garlic oil and serve with hot meat. However we didn’t feel this quite lived up to expectations. I suspect I over cooked everything: whilst I cooked the meat to the prescribed 90s a side it was well done, not really our way, and similarly the beans came out a bit dry which Dougal found hard to stomach.
However my mum and dad greatly enjoyed this but fessed up to having used a bit more oil in the beans- a visual glug rather than a careful measure. So perhaps that’s the ticket. I still reckon this meal has potential, so I expect we’ll revisit it. It was so easy, how could we not?
Jul 22 2008
The challenge states that there are 189 recipes in Nigella Express. However on close reading, there are in fact a few more. The preamble to some of the chapters, and indeed some of the recipes (more on that later) is a great hiding place for a sneaky wee recipe suggestion.
The White Lady is a classic cocktail- I may have enjoyed on at Tigerlilly only this year- but until we acquired some fancy glasses and a bottle of Cointreau it hadn’t been a drink we’d considered at home. It was amazing:
In fact Dougal made this with a recipe he found online. Nigella states one part lemon, two parts gin, four parts cointreau. Firstly, don’t make the mistake I did of assuming that a ‘part’ equals a measure, otherwise you’ll end up with one hell of a cocktail! Secondly, we reckoned the online recipe had a nicer balance, so we shall amend to: 25ml lemon juice, 25ml gin, 50ml cointreau and remember boys and girls, this is still a generous drink.
In addition to cocktails, Nigella suggests some dips to use as easy starters to turn a meal into a party. I made both of these at our recent flatwarming: garlic mayo was good in principle but you really don’t need very much garlic! On the other hand whilst the hummous+greek yog+cumin+lemon juice+ drizzle of lemon juice was a yummy dip, Nigella’s suggestion of scattering a few pomegranate seeds on top really put my friends off. They just didnae dip! Dougal said he thought people probably assumed the dip was in some way sweet. So chaps, unless your pals are into sophisticated Georgian dining, avoid the pomegranate seeds (pretty as they were).
Jul 22 2008
I had been pretty sceptical about this dish, which Dougal prepared for me a while back. But actually it worked out just fine.
It’s basically a simple summer salad and fish malarky; I was sceptical because I’m not a huge fan of watercress on its own, and in addition the sugar-snap peas weren’t even to be cooked!
But you know, this Nigella Lawson lassie kens whit she’s doing. Provided you have a lovely ripe fuerte avocado (can’t stand those hass ones, myself) then the crunch of the sugar snaps is a fresh and juicy contrast to the creamy avocado and the succulent salmon. There’s not a great deal going on, but over all it works. The portion size, we felt, was a bit on the mean side for a main meal- probably fine for lunch- so some boiled new potatoes wouldn’t go astray, but remarkably, this dish was a hit with us.
Jul 21 2008
A family supper with most of the work done in advance. Marvellous. And a sore wrist. Less so.
My parents bagsied the Crispy Duck recipe right back at the beginning of the challenge. With the general release of Wall•E (D and I saw it at the Edinburgh Film Festival, la-di-dah! but were more than happy to see it again) it seemed an ideal opportunity to get the family together and take advantage of my lovely new kitchen.Nigella sells the duck recipe as fuss-free cooking- you even get someone else to open the Hoisin- but I spent most of the afternoon fraught with worry that the duck was going to be completely dried out and dinner ruined. Perhaps because of this fear, I didn’t serve the duck directly to the table but whisked it away to extract the meat myself. I rather wish I hadn’t now; the meat looked rather sad and small on its plate where the duck had looked magnificent, in a brown sort of way. Also, apparently you are supposed to serve the skin too, which I didn’t realise. And I didn’t make a very good job of the ‘going at the meat with a pair of forks’ serving style, perhaps just because I lacked confidence.
In any case people seemed to enjoy making up their little parcels of spring onion, cucumber, hoisin and duck, and it certainly wasn’t a labour-intensive dish, so perhaps I shall come back to this again. The next time I see a duck at half price in Sainsbury’s! (An added and unexpected bonus this weekend).
Pudding was more generally successful. Forgotten Pudding, so called because you switch it in the oven at bedtime, turn the oven off, and forget about it, worked really well. It was huge- the meringue mixture filled our ‘it’ll probably be too big’ swiss roll tin more than adequately but let me tell you, whipping six egg whites by hand is no joke. Must buy electric whisk. And I’ve just missed the clearance in John Lewis too.
After the main course, I whipped the family into action (groan) and got them to take turns whipping cream to top the pudding, which I then scattered with passion fruit, strawberries, and unusually but most sucessfully, brambles. It tasted about as amazing as it sounds! Because there was cream of tartar* in it the base was squidgy like marshmallow rather than brittle like meringue; apart from adding less salt than Nigella suggests (I reckon a mere pinch rather than the called for quarter teaspoon) I think this takes some beating. However, as Suburban Mum previously discovered, this is emphatically not one to make if you are a devotee of oven cleaner…rather too delicate a flavour!
*Go and read the Wiki page on Cream of Tartar and marvel, as I did the other night, at the thought process that goes “perhaps if I take the clear bit only of this egg and whip it up a lot, it will do something interesting…ooh, it does! … and perhaps if I scrape these totally unknown crystally things off the inside of this barrel of wine I’ve been making, and add it to the whippy eggs thing…and bake it really slowly and gently…oooh, yes, yummy squidgy outcome…” I mean, really? Could olden-days scientists not afford Sigma Chemicals or somthing?
Jul 20 2008
Dear Helen. Buy an electric whisk. You have been promising yourself one for eleven months. Love, Helen.
Written after putting together a meringue-based pudding (containing six egg whites) entirely by hand (at almost midnight).
