Oct 12 2008
An October-ish Picnic Lunch
An indoor picnic on a gorgeous October Saturday.
- Buttermilk Roast Chicken
- New Orleans Coleslaw
- Cloudy Lemonade for a Sunny Day
- Pineapple Upside-Down Cake
Former flatmate O2 was back in Edinburgh for one last half a day (in fact we’d been out the night before for food and drinks) so it was time for a good meal as a send off. It had to be lunch, but that was fine as this trio from the lunch chapter were crying out to be done together. I was sad I’d missed the chance to do them on a summers day but October pulled a blinder and produced a nicer day than I remember us having any weekend this summer.
The roast chicken and the coleslaw go together, not least of all as to make them together uses exactly two standard cartons of buttermilk. However, I feel certain that greek yog would be a fine substitute, certainly in the coleslaw and almost certainly for the chicken. Both also had maple syrup in the mix which added a faint hint of sweetness without dominating. The chicken was gorgeously succulent and is shaping up to be pretty good cold the next day too.
We served with this Cloudy Lemonade for a Sunny Day- a sort of bog standard home made lemonade except that the addition of sparkling water made it slightly fizzy. Dougal and I had joked that we would re-brand it Sunny Lemonade for a Cloudy day but in fact this was not necessary. We had trouble making this- even in very small batches (less than max volumes) this made my food processor leak. In the end we blitzed up the lemons with no water, and then mixed it all together at the end. I felt that ultimately whilst this looked the part, it was basically lacking in both lemon and sugar- i.e. it was a little too much like plain fizzy water! It would probably be fine on a really hot day if you were dead thirsty but as an accompaniment to a meal it was lacking. So while I might use fizzy water again, I’ll stick to the old recipes, thanks.
For pudding we swung into Retro mode and knocked up a classic Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. It is testament to how express a recipe this is (generally, not just Nigella’s version I feel sure) that I was able to put this together and bake it between the main course and eating it, and without it really feeling like we were all being kept waiting. Dougal and I managed to get it out of the tin without disaster and it basically looked the part.
It tasted much as you would expect- pineappley on the bottom, the glacé cherries as red and garish as ever. (I could have bought posh non-traffic light glacé cherries in Waitrose but it wouldn’t have been the same!) The sponge was light and tasty although I think I would have preffered there to have been a bit more of it. Still, a light pudding was welcome after such a scrummy meal.
