The Sacred Art of Eating

Things we have learned this week: Dougal managed to go 25 years of life without realising that Brambles and Blackberries were the same thing.

• Blackberry Crisp

Of course Bramble is a much better word. Why? Well partly because whenever I try to say Blackberry I find that Blackcurrant comes out and that just leads to guests being surprised at the first mouthful. But also because the word Bramble is reminiscent of tramping across autumny hillsides and munching on fruit as you find it and that is good.

This pudding hit the spot in a similarly autumny way. Although we halved the quantities and we also over cooked it a bit, it managed to seem rich and wintry and warm and abundant in all the right ways. The topping, instead of being a crumble, has oats and almonds in it which give it crunch and the cinnamon gives it that winter’s eve flavour.

All in all a good ‘un- easy to construct and, most importantly, left-overs for tomorrow.

A recipe we’ve cooked many times but never quite close enough to the recipe for us to write it up.

• Noodle Soup for Needy People

As I said, we’ve made this slurpy ramen-style noodle dish at least three times, on cold evenings when one or other of us has been feeling flat. But along the way the right noodles, or the right mushrooms, or pak choi or some other vital aspect has always been missing and I’ve held off telling you about it.

This evening we got it pretty right. I had to subsititute Chestnut Mushrooms for the specified Shitake mushrooms; not quite the desired texture but nevertheless adding colour and flavour. It was also particularly punchy this evening as I didn’t have any fresh ginger; using ground but not reducing the volume meant it had quite a kick!

However, as with previous incarnations of this dish, I felt it was still a bit lacking. Nigella says in the preamble to the recipe that whilst you could add some cooked chicken or some slivers of raw tuna or salmon, she doesn’t think that protein is what you need. I disagree entirely. Protein is what is missing from this dish- something that was absolutely confirmed for me this evening when I found myself thinking ‘If it even just had some more mushrooms it’d be much better’.

So let it be known. When I am needy I need proper chicken noodle soup. Yes, you can add masses of pak choi and beansprouts and sugar snap peas- and please do- but don’t forget the sustaining stuff too.

A Storecupboard SOS recipe….for which I had to buy in pretty much every key ingredient. Ho hum!

• Salade Niçoise

Another adventure into the world of nasty little fishes! This salad was a sped-up take on a standard Tuna Niçoise, with croutons replacing boiled potatoes and ’sun drenched’ tomatoes creeping in to add some moisture and softness.

All in all I was really pleased with this salad actually. The flavours came together nicely; I even managed to eat all my anchovies, although there was a little strategic loading of forks going on (…if I add a bit of Tuna it’ll already taste fishy…then some olives will mean it’s already salty…) and the tomatoes were gorgeously soft and melty. The dressing of tomato-steeping oil, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and sugar was surprisingly punchy and the iceberg lettuce added structure and simplicity in amongst all the other fancy bits. Speaking of which, exceptional tuna was sourced at Kember and Jones in Glasgow (although immediately after Waitrose got their act together and started selling interesting stuff) but was not the really expensive variety as seen on the inside sleeve of Nigella Express. The NHS will have to start paying scientists considerably better if I am to be willing to pay £7.20 for a (larger than average) tin of tuna, exceptional or not!

Next time I might up the egg count to two between three- only getting four quarters seemed a bit mean, but then perhaps I’m just a pig as Dougal only ate three of his. Also, I was very impressed by the frozen fine beans; they cooked up a treat and now I have veg in my freezer for when the notion next takes me. Excellent.

Knowing that I’d be going to work early on Monday morning, and by bus (rather than my usual bicycle) I made these on Sunday night to ease my early rise the next day.

• Breakfast Bars

I really enjoyed my Sunday evening domesticity, stirring together the veritable goodness that goes into these, adding a good dollop of badness (in the form of condensed milk!) and then baking slowly so that the house filled with warm milky smells. I also made some flapjack for work and cooked the Italian sausages in hot tomato sauce and polenta and felt the right Domestic Godess.

As for the eating, these were very much up my street. We omitted the coconut from the recipe and upped all the other ‘flavours’ (the craisins, the mixed seeds and the peanuts). However for Dougal this meant they were a bit too seedy. (He likes to keep it clean!) I like my fibre rich chewy bars…but I expect that when I make these again I would probably err less on the side of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and more on the side of nuts…maybe some almonds or some hazelnuts.

I am happily munching my way through these; with morning coffee at work or on the bus if I’m doing an early start. And do you know what- they’re just like posh cereal bars, only I made them.

Because unexplained sex reversal has been on my mind at work this week.

• Black Pasta with Red Mullet

or, in our case… Red Pasta with Black Bream.

What can I say, we had sourcing issues. The fishmonger said that you only get Red Mullet in supermarkets- he’s probably right as it is a Mediterranean fish. Nigella suggested Red or Black Bream as an alternative so we got bream….it doesn’t look especially red so we assumed it was black, and agreed we’d be having Black Pasta with Black Fish….very emo!

But then Waitrose let me down. They definitely used to do fresh squid ink tagliolini, but there was none to be had today. I did my best not to cry in the chilled aisle (it had been a crummy day) and then got the bit between my teeth and thought, well, if we’re having black fish then why not red pasta? And thus it was born.

This was a nice straightforward dish to cook- almost quick enough to merit a slot in the Against the Clock chapter and certainly what I would call Everyday Easy although I realise my ideas about everyday cooking are somewhat skewed by an upbringing with two excellent foodie cooks. The fish is firstly fried in garlic oil and spring onions and then you poach it in some rosé wine. You then remove the fish, make a sauce with the wine and some capers and tomatoes and butter and combine it all with pasta and basil. Delish! The fish was beautifully cooked, delicate to the bite yet richly flavoursome. Lipsmackingly good stuff this. Sadly there is only one portion for lunch tomorrow…

Some friends popped by after they’d been out for dinner….I went the whole hog and shucked another pomegranate to get seeds for decoration….we used fancy glasses….it was fiddly to scoop….

• No Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream

It tasted pretty darned fantastic. Light and fruity but also creamy.

I could easily have gone another bowlful and I don’t think I was alone in feeling that way. Next time we eat this we will try getting it out of the freezer very early to see if that lets you scoop without fracturing. But even if it doesn’t, we won’t mind!

In an attempt to blitz a few recipes the easy way, we are even doing the salad dressings this week.

• Anchovy Red Wine Dressing

This used up the anchovies I’d bought for the Turkey with Gherkin, Anchovy and Dill the other week. However, unlike that dish these anchovies were raw and undiluted (well, apart from the oil and vinegar). The fishy flavour was fairly potent, and I kept expecting the salad to be hiding chunks of tuna. Sometimes though it was a little too fishy in an evil anchovy, non-tuna way.

We took Nigella up on her suggestion that this dressing was well suited to dressing flame grilled peppers by adding some to the salad but I’m not sure I saw what she was getting at. Perhaps she means if you grilled some peppers yourself this would be a good topping, not unlike a recipe for Piedmont Roasted Peppers from Delia Smith’s Summer Collection that is a particular favourite with my parents.

I think the rest of this sauce might be quite good on pasta though- fusilli, perhaps with something through it-and so the remainder of the dressing is in a jar in the fridge. So perhaps the little salty bastards are winning me over after all.

This ice cream is supposed to be express, as you just squeeze, stir, bung it in the freezer and go. This does not hold when you whip the cream by hand!

• No Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream

It’s funny that, given that this is Nigella Express, that she calls for whole pomegranates here. I’d have thought those little packets of seeds from Waitrose would be far quicker than de-seeding your own fruit. I’d never de-seeded a pomegranate before and so foolishly believed the internet that it just involved bashing my halved pomegranate with a wooden spoon. Instead it was a rather laboured process of inverting the fruit and worrying out the individual seeds.

As for ‘just stir’….whipping half a litre of cream and fruit juice by hand is no mean feat. We take some comfort though, in the knowledge that we will have burned a great many few calories by doing so and that makes the ice cream a little less sinful.

So right now the ice cream is in the freezer. Tomorrow we get to eat it and you shall hear from us how we got on. Preliminary reports from the bowl-licker indicate that this will be a big hit at the polls on Wednesday!

If we’d done the challenge in a steady state, evenly along the way, our rate of recipe progress would have been 3.65 recipes per week. However, we are no longer in steady state mode. We have a big backlog. Thus, much like paying off bad credit card debt, we have to do more than the minimum per week (4) otherwise we are making things worse. And really, unless we do five or six each week, we can’t even pretend to be making head way.

Last week I tried for four recipes, and managed three (the minestrone, the sausages and polenta and the breakfast bars). The ice cream didn’t make the cut (it was simply too hot in the kitchen on Sunday night to be whipping cream) but is in the freezer now….heavens knows when we’ll eat it.

This week, not counting the ice cream, we have done one recipe. Another is coming tomorrow. We’ve essentially finished the breakfasts chapter- everything not eaten has a date set- so that means evening meals and lunches. And a target of perhaps seven. Except that I’m out on Friday and we’re out on Saturday. Oooh eck.

And yet failure doesn’t feel like an option, nor, at the moment, an inevitability. I wonder how Mike is getting on with his side of the challenges?

My Italian guru, Ariana, assures me that whilst polenta is quite trendy in the UK, it is somewhat looked down on in Italy as mere peasant food.

• Italian Sausages in Hot Tomato Sauce with Polenta

However our meal could not be classed as Peasants’ Fare, as we used very fine Valvona and Crolla peasano (damn!) sausages, taking it back into foodie realm. It simply wouldn’t have been right with any other sausage.

What makes this dish express is that, rather than slaving over a hot stove making a rich chilli-hot tomato sauce, you simply brown your sausages, add some marsala, and then throw in a jar of posh tomato sauce for pasta. I know, twice in one week, what is happening to me? This recipe called for seriously high end pasta sauce and I had wanted to use the organic Seeds of Change range but ended up shopping for this at closing time on Sunday night in our local Scotmid. It’s a huge shop but man do they have uninspired stock.

So we ended up with Lloyd Grossman Tomato and Chilli Sauce- I was particularly impressed when I bought it that the ingredients list read much as it would were you constructing such a sauce in your own kitchen. And do you know, I was actually really impressed. After a 20 min cook with the sausages in it, it really did taste as if I’d chopped garlic and chilli and made the sauce myself (admitedly opening a tin of tomatoes isn’t laborious). It was probably a horrendous waste of money (don’t tell my Granny but I have no idea what it cost) but as an express route to a tasty meal it was just fine.

On a final note; neither of us had eaten polenta in living memory before. It was a bit odd whilst we were cooking it, trying to work out what it would be like, and we had settled on grainy mashed potato. So you can imagine we were a bit surprised when it turned out to firm up! Nevertheless we were both quite enteretained by it and would eat it again, I’d imagine.

A good cold night meal all round.