The Sacred Art of Eating

When it’s raining outside and you’ve been wishing to return to bed all day, what you really need from your evening meal is a thick, hot soup.

• Minestrone in minutes

And Minestrone in Minutes takes about as long as it does to cook plain pasta, so it really does happen when you need it to happen. But it was also a bit of a disappointment, possibly because the ingredients we used were all slightly inappropriate. The pasta was too small, the pre-cooked beans weren’t really cooked properly, and so the result was not everything it could be.

I also think that a long slow cook would have warmed up the kitchen more. Maybe I should have been baking at the same time to take the chill off our bones. Still, it looks great, doesn’t it?

Both Dougal and I were convinced this recipe had peanuts in it. But there are none!

• Rib-Sticking Stir-Fry

The name of this dish and the picture are to blame in equal measure we feel. Firstly, the illustration in the book makes it look as though this is a peanut heavy mix up, when in fact the little creamy ovals are cannelini beans. Secondly, we both felt the name suggested a sweet, peanut buttery sticky sauce for the noodles (like the Sesame Peanut Noodles from the On the Run lunches chapter) when in fact the sauce is quite loose and liquid, almost soupy.

I’d not been looking forward to this dish especially, perhaps because I’d read some negative reviews of it online. I wonder if in fact these other cooks had been disappointed not by the dish itself but by its failure to live up to their preconceptions of it.

I have to say this slipped down a treat as far as I was concerned. There wasn’t much to it- a pretty standard stirfry but using cannelini beans as an express alternative to cooking noodles. I don’t personally find cooking noodles to be such a bind- takes much the same time as frying a stirfry- but I am going through a bit of a beany phase at the moment and enjoyed their soft slight chalkiness in contrast to the succulent (free range) turkey.

This is the sort of thing I will doubtless cook again, but most likely without recourse to the recipe- who needs instructions to cook a highly basic stirfry?

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!

We had a DIY project to tackle, so I felt we needed a good start to the day to put us on fine form.

• Chopped Fruit Salad
• Green Eggs and Ham

I settled on two breakfasts as the idea of just having fruit salad seemed a bit pious. Even if it did have yoghurt in it.

The fruit salad I made exactly as the recipe suggested; Nigella makes it clear that you should just use up whatever you have in the fridge, but I reasoned that we wouldn’t have any fruit in the fridge (or elsewhere for that matter) and so I laid in the strawberries, mangoes and blueberries specially. Annoyingly it wasn’t until later that it dawned on me that we had two zested but otherwise tip-top condition oranges in the fridge, ho hum.

Our glasses weren’t quite big enough so I had to cut back on the blueberries, but these were pretty much as per the protocol. I’d miss out the seedy topping next time though; they simply stuck in your teeth and added little in terms of flavour or for that matter health, I’d have thought. I could be persuaded into scattering some pomegranate seeds on, another time.

Green Eggs and Ham is a romantic name for a slice of ham served up in a pesto pancake. I figured these would be good but I hadn’t really thought through just how good. A doddle to make, they managed to taste so much bigger than a plain pancake, even one with ham in it. Dougal and I both ate one at breakfast with the fruit salad and saved our second one for lunch. I reckon these would travel well too though, and might revisit them for lunch (perhaps with a little smear of mayo) in the future.

Absolutely bloody marvellous Friday night tea. Tasted fantastic, and zero effort to put together which is what you need after a long week!

• Scallops and Chorizo
• Chickpeas With Rocket and Sherry

I had been looking forward to this dish for ages- scallops, chorizo, chickpeas, rocket and cumin (in the chickpeas) are five of my favourite foods/flavours- but I think I’d held back because I feared it couldn’t possibly taste as good in reality as it did in my head.

How wrong I was. The scallops (small, and then halved to give many  thin discs) were perfectly cooked and still managed to hold their own against the powerful chorizo which was hot and spicy and just the right kind of greasy. The chickpeas provided an earthy contrast and the wilted leaves helped you kid on you were getting a vegetable. I’d just use plain rocket next time, rather than rocket salad, but believe you me there will be a next time (perhaps even this year!).

The kind of dinner you eat whilst swilling beer (we did) and singing drinking songs (we didn’t!)

• Sausages with Sauerkraut

For a dish so strongly associated with Germany, Sauerkraut is, it seems, only available in Polish stores in Polish packaging. The same can be said for the smoked sausages- with the exception of Mattesons (‘boiling ring’) every single one I saw for sale was Polish. Equally, even Lidl failed to supply us with German Beer Mustard (or any German mustard at all) which surprised the Lidl shop assistant as much as it surprised us.

These geographical variations did not, over all, detract. The wine was still German (Naked Grape Riesling, very nice it was too)(we drank some the next day) and surely that’s what matters, right?

I think this ended up wetter than it ought to have done, perhaps because we used a ceramic dish rather than a roasting pan and so didn’t start by bringing it to the boil on the hob before baking. That said, I can’t imagine where all that wine is supposed to go (it’s not going to soak into the Sauerkraut, in any case!) so perhaps it is a naturally wet dish.

The heavy wine load meant that eating a mouthful of just sauerkraut was a bit unpleasant, to be honest- heavily boozy and sharp. However, a carefully loaded fork with a bit of sausage, cabbage, potato and a smear of mustard (we just used French’s American in the end, and let me tell you it was fine) and all the flavours came together fabulously. Hot and filling and juicy with a bit of a kick. Went down very well, helped along with some authentic German Weissbier.

  Prost!

We now have fewer recipes left to go than we have thus far cooked. And only two months overdue!

Simple fish paired with very fancy noodles for a high class Chinois dinner.

• Seared Salmon with Singapore Noodles

Pushing the boat out for Wednesday tea meant some proper speciality shopping this week- dried shrimp from the Chinese supermarket. My mum was telling me that ‘back in the day’ she and my dad had a couple of recipes up their sleeves that used dried shrimp so I shall have to probe them for these to use up the rest of the bag.

But back to the food. The fish was fried hot in a sugary madras rub with some garlic oil. Perfectly cooked and very balanced flavours.

And then the exciting noodles. Vermicelli (I bought normal vermicelli and then discovered it should have been rice vermicelli, d’oh!) with chinese leaf, bean sprouts, baby corn and shrimp tossed through it, along with some Chinese wine, soy sauce and more madras powder.

All served up with some Tiger (from Singapore, naturally) and some TsingTao. Excellent stuff. Felt very fancy- the sort of dish that would impress any friends that happened to have popped by. Friends: feel free to pop by for dinner (next year!) but bring your own salmon steaks.

Another of Nigella’s super-quick dishes, with dinner on the table before you realise you’ve started cooking!

• Chicken Schnitzel with Bacon and White Wine

Day Two of our ‘Cook Nigella Express Every Night’ Week and we had this simple supper- only four ingredients. I had been putting this easy peasy recipe off for some time as chicken escalopes are called for, and I couldn’t find them in the shops. I could’ve asked in a butchers but I always worry about how to pronounce the word escalope and so wimped out! Funnily enough Waitrose do turkey escalopes but not chicken. In the end I bought organic chicken mini-fillets and they seemed to do the trick.

This was easy peasy to cook although if I made it again I would a)use more bacon and b) not reduce the wine that the pan is deglazed with quite so much, as it needs to be a bit saucy. We had this with green beans (not enough!) as suggested but added in basmati rice for some starch. I could have eaten about three times as much but Dougal ate his fill.

The following day we took Nigella up on the suggestion of snipping the leftovers into some cream and parmesan, warming through and stirring through spaghetti. Schnitzel with noodles, ja!

It’s true, Dr McGowan. Nigella is a big fatty. Even I can’t countenance the fat and sugar content of this pudding!

• Caramel Croissant Pudding

This pudding is suggested as Monday night supper (essentially with no first course beforehand) to use up a pair of stale croissants. This should have given us an idea of how filling, calorific and down right fatty it was to be.

However we were more distracted by the general premise. What kind of person has spare stale croissants? Who in their right mind has croissants and then fails to eat them? We were boggled and perplexed. Then I saw many packets of croissants reduced to clear as they were out of date and realised how it could be done.

Firstly we ate some croissants, and then we ate some more. The remainder we left out on the sideboard overnight to stale up nicely. Having not committed this recipe to memory I had rather over-bought on the out of date croissant front. Unable to throw croissants out when the very intention of the recipe was to avoid this, we decided to scale up the pud, inviting my brother and his new flatmate round to help us eat it.

They were unable to join us. This has left us with about ten portions of super eggy, creamy, boozy (honestly there isn’t that much rum in it but man it hits you!) squidgy pud. It’s pretty awesome but you have to eat it in small portions. Not like the ones below.

I like this a lot because it’s basically a bread and butter pudding that tastes a bit of croissant. If I were to make it again I would scale it differently though: firstly I would realise that three times the volume of ingredients means you DO have to increase the baking time (raw egg anyone?) but secondly I would probably not scale all the wet ingredients proportionately. I would use much less sugar and rum, and probably rein in the egg, milk and cream too.

We are still eating this….if you ring the bell and we take a long time to answer, it’s because we have succumbed to wretched obesity….