Jul 09 2008
Dull Dinner
This recipe looked so good in the book, but somehow didn’t come together as it should have.
- Smoked Cod and Cannellini
I was having my best friend from high school over for supper before the two of us went out to see a French film. This dish seemed like the sort of elegant straightforward supper a chic girl might serve to her chic girlfriend, clink some rosé spirtizer over and generally be effortlessly cool with. What follows is the first recipe in the book and I was really looking forward to eating it.
I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter- I was, believe it or not, nervous cooking without Dougal about- and I think this may be why this turned out a bit wet and unappealing. The fish is poached with white wine and celery and bay leaves and so on, then removed and the beans warmed through in a small volume of the poaching liquid. Rather than measure the ‘about 60ml’ suggested I went with the visual ‘enough to cover the beans’ and probably over estimated. This left a lot of wetness behind, as well as lots of peppercorns. These got everywhere and made eating the dish anything but elegant- we kept having to pause to fish them out of our mouths.
Altogether I felt let down by this dish; it was neither as pretty nor as easy to eat as the recipe suggested. Ach, I suppose Nigella Express can’t be the wünder-buch all the time, can it?
