The Sacred Art of Eating

Felt like a proper grown up having six lovely friends round for lunch this Sunday.

• Layered Salad with Roast Quail
• White Chocolate Mint Mousse

However, whilst the intention had been to get through more recipes, and the table was heaving with food, as you’ll see we only managed another two recipes. The rest of the food was still Nigella inspired, taking the form of three dips from the Mezze Feast for 10-20 in Feast and some Richard Bertinet flatbreads to wipe all the slurpy bits up with.

To start with, the layered salad with quail. I enjoyed the salad more than I’d expected to; I’m not normally that impressed by radishes but they added colour and were inoffensive; the cucumber and red pepper added crunch and the dressing was straight forward and tasty- mostly honey and lemon juice, the same mix as basted the gorgeous little quail. There were twelve of these little guys- I wished there’d been sixteen cos they’d have looked better on the plates- and I now have 12 souls hanging heavy in my heart. For dear Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All says in Meat that Quail are now often as badly abused as cheap chicken and ought to be avoided. However he is also quite pro-Waitrose (commenting favourably on their openness regarding sourcing and the very fact that they have policies) so I am going to go back and check out the provenance of the birdies wot I bought and see whether I need to repent my wicked ways, or merely wipe my brow that I got away with it this time.

As you can see there were plenty of bits and pieces to go with the salad and quail: a warmly spicy kidney bean and lime dip; freshly baked flatbreads for tearing and sharing; a goats cheese, walnut and basil dip; water to drink which had been flavoured with slivers of cucmber and chunks of strawberry and which was in exactly the right fruity, foreign, slightly exotic but basically accessible register for the rest of the meal. Wow, I just used the word register when talking about food. I fear I may be turning into Nigella.

Pudding came without any guilt of the ethical variety and merely with guilt of the calorific variety. The white chocolate mint mousses are meant to be served in very small volumes. Serving glass size dictated I went a little larger, but any bigger and my guests would have had to have been rolled down the stairs. Fabulously sweet and creamy with it, these were a delicious little pocket of naughty puddingness at the end of the meal.

I made these somewhat on the hoof- after our friends had arrived and in fact after we’d started eating the main spread- which meant that the white chocolate had started to solidify and these had little nuggets of chocolate dotted through them. I’m not sure it didn’t add a little something, to be honest. As I tried to explain to Martin at the time, white chocolate doesn’t behave like real chocolate, going from molten through a gently increasing range of stiffnesses to solid- it rather crystallises so that it goes from thickly gooey (it never really gets runny) to having a three dimensional structure rather too quickly. Like I say though, this didn’t detract. There was quite a bit left over; planked into ramekins, Dougal and I have been enjoying the wickedness nightly since Sunday!

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