The Sacred Art of Eating

When cooking for people with allergies, it pays to think carefully about what you are cooking.

• Frittata Party!
• Chocolate Croissants
• Lazy Loaf

Our old flatmate, the dearly loved O2, is up in Scotland for a wee golfing holiday with Tadge, another flatmate and friend from home. They were setting off for the hills late-afternoon on Saturday, so, eyeing an opportunity to finish off the breakfast chapter,  I invited them and some other friends for brunch. This was to include KK, a uni friend of mine.

We kicked off with Buck’s Fizz. Not sure how that came about but it was a nice touch and one that probably helped save face against the issues that followed.

Now my plan was to do the frittata party (of all the recipes in the breakfast chapter, this instruction for four different types of omelette to be cooked to order for friends hanging out in a kitchen was the one that I felt was least reasonable for Dougal and I to just do on our own to get it out of the way) but as KK is allergic to eggs (and fish, and tree nuts) knew I had to come up with other dishes that would suit her. The chocolate croissants would be fine, but I decided to add in the lazy loaf to bolster recipe numbers. It seemed fairly breakfast suitable.

The first ‘uh-oh’ moment came as I was egg-washing the chocolate croissants…but thankfully I realised in time to keep a stash separate for KK. The bigger ‘uh-oh’ came mere moments later when Dougal realised, to no little horror, that the Lazy Loaf was choc full of KK-unfriendly ingredients.

Lazy Loaf isn’t a proper loaf of bread with rising and working the dough and shaping the loaf etc. You make up the mix, using about the 2/5 museli and 3/5 brown flour, as well as yeast, and then put it in a low oven for an hour where effectively it rises. After that you turn the heat up and bake it properly. We’d managed (almost by chance) to find the specific museli suggested by Nigella in the book which has no fewer than 23 ingredients. Including Hazelnuts. And all sorts of other nasties handled in the same environment as nuts. It was spot on for the Lazy Loaf- lovely big chunks of dates and apricots, and nice crunchy nutty bits, but seriously unsuitable for KK.

I liked the frittata but really they needed an audience of perhaps three or four avowed omelette-likers, each willing to take a turn cooking. And a cheap source of top-notch eggs. We only made one each of the fillings which struck me as a shame, and I ended up cooking all of them. So we now have quite a lot of extra filling in the fridge (perhaps I will do a little omlette for breakfast tomorrow!).

The chocolate croissants (puff pastry with dark choccy rolled up inside it) were pretty good but suffered from my not having ready-rolled puff pastry. I don’t think I rolled the pastry out thin enough, and so consequently these were a bit small (made fitting the chocolate inside tough!) and the bottom layer seemed a bit doughy. Ultimately though the combination of buttery pastry and chocolate is pretty hard to mess up so there weren’t any complaints about these!

The other place we went wrong on Saturday was underestimating the popularity of and demand for Dougal’s bread. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to ask D to make any- it wasn’t needed for the meal, and anyway we’d have the lazy loaf (which went most admirably with my mother’s raspberry jam or honey). However there were practically howls of disappointment when we said that no, there was no homemade bread, and we were told in no uncertain terms that there was to be proper bread next week when the same gang all come back for lunch!

Anticipating feeling a little fragile (in fact I felt relieved and energised) on Friday night, I asked Dougal for a no-commitment Friday night in front of the TV with easy to handle food.

• Roast Poussin and Sweet Potatoes
• Wasabi Lime Dressing

As Nigella boasts in the pre-amble to this dish, the great thing about this is that you can construct it with very little effort, fling it in the oven whilst you watch some high quality TV (spoilers!) , and then eat it in front of the telly too. We worked in a salad dressing too, because Nigella said the meat and taters were good with watercress and lime, and because this salad dressing was touted as going well with a salad of watercress and avocado and plain simple foods. The only let down in the end was that the avocado failed (it out and out refused!) to ripen in time so could not be included.

I made the decision to halve the number of poussins from one each to one between two. They seemed like quite a large meal for one! Whilst Dougal would say this was the right decision, I personally could have done with more meat. The sweet potato, basted in wok oil, cumin and cinnamon was right up my street- I’d do them again.

Although I’d have preffered a stronger lime kick, the salad dressing did indeed go well with the meat and potatoes, packing quite a punch. Not so great a punch, though, as the English mustard which Nigella stipulates is essential with this. I think she’s missing a trick not just having a highly wasabied up salad on the side.

Lip smackingly slurpily wonderful curry, which tasted like it had been cooking for hours…yet took less than half an hour from start to finish, and I got to sit down with a beer and some pistachios during that half an hour!

• Curry in a Hurry

I had been anticipating feeling a bit low last night, and so decided that comforting food and comfortable company were the way forward. This recipe advertised itself as something you could cook after work for friends (have everything in the freezer or cupboard and pick up the chicken on your way home kind of idea) and so seemed to fit the bill.

It all came together very quickly. Fry some spring onions, add secret magic ingredient thai curry paste (ours doesn’t look quite like the picture because we had just the right amount of red paste in the fridge vs absolutely no green curry paste, as called for, c’est la vie!) brown the chicken and then fling in coconut milk, chicken stock and interesting veg out of the freezer. I had never eaten a soya bean in its native state before, and yet curiously despite seeming quite exotic are readily available from Mr Bird’s Eye at the grim Scotmid at the foot of Leith Walk. Not what you would expect. They didn’t taste especially exotic, I must confess, more like a pea but with lots of flesh- quite satisfying in a mouthful.

We had this with steaming rice from the oven and a generous squeeze of lime juice over the top. Yes, our noses were streaming by the end but it was absolutely worth it. The chicken thighs had a lovely texture which I think I probably preferred to breast meat. That said I reckon with a bit of subsitution of broccoli and veg stock this would make an excellent veggie curry too.

We finished up with pudding; Nick did terribly well by professing to prefer the pink ice cream to the white without being forewarned that the pink was homemade No-Churn-Pomegranate wheras the white was shop bought vanilla (although it was the very finest Luca’s can offer!).

The left-over sauce from this (very liquid and with all the chicken gone) made an excellent high-mess soup for lunch today, with extra soya and fine beans thrown in and a nest of egg noodles stirred through. Fab!

Some of the more exciting dishes we have done recently are fish based. We don’t otherwise eat a lot of seafood. It’s been a marked change in our diet, when we’ve suddenly started doing all these fish recipes because they need to be done. I’ve now met two of our local fishmongers. One of them complained about people coming in with requests for “fancy foreign fish” for recipes “written in London”… so he’s probably not the first port of call for the more exotic recipes we’ll be doing later.

At the business end I’ve cut up squid for calamari and now I’ve cooked a whole fish and filleted it once cooked. That was exciting.

• Saké Sea Bass with Wilted Greens

The fish itself was amazing. You can see from the photos that it was a big beastie, with dorsal fins that you could fan out in a most fascinating fashion. Unlike the original Billy Bass this one was not in the mood for singing – but then maybe sea bass aren’t singers?

The fishmonger gutted Billy here and I filled up the insides with shredded spring onion. Doused in soya and saké and popped in his little silver pastie, er, foil pouch.

(The saké will apparently be used for another recipe soon, though I can’t remember which one. I was greatly troubled at point of purchase – do I go for the ordinary-looking bottle or the swankier bottle of dry saké? Would dry be bad? They were 5p difference but in the end I went for the plain bottle with the plain contents.)

Once cooked in the oven I had to remove the skin. I had no idea what to do but Helen suggested “start at the tail”. This was definitely the way to do it – otherwise I would still be there, peeling off a scale at a time. I wasn’t able to completely remove all the bones because the fishmonger had cut some of the ribs away from the spine when he filleted it. Fish bones are a real pain, but that’s the price you pay for such lovely meat.

And it was very tasty, though quite plain as Nigella admits in the blurb. Given the choice I would add something extra to the side when making this dish. Her wilted greens were too wilted to really make much impression, I thought. So, what do I have to carve up next?

This is just eggy bread right? So it can’t taste *that* much better than eggy bread, which is pretty awesome, right? Wrong!

• Doughnut French Toast

This is a recipe I’d wanted to make for ages, largely so that I could surprise Dougal by presenting its sweet indulgence to him one night unannounced and have him think me ever so cool. Two things went wrong: firstly, we are at crisis stage with this challenge and so everything is being meticulously planned (we have a special Google Calender for it!) and there is no impromptu any more; secondly, I really thought this ought to be made with pain de mie, particularly as we never have sliced loaf in the house, and that meant asking Dougal to make one.

Somehow I thought this was just going to be like French-style eggy bread (whaddaya mean, French Toast) just sort of eggy and sweet. However, the addition of the milk and the vanilla essence lifted it into a sort of custardy carby plane of uber-indulgence. Yes, it was horrifically calorie and fat laden, but we had had an incredibly pious dainty portion of vegetable only stir fry for our main and it had been very windy so hard work on the bicycle that day….and I enjoyed it so much I don’t care if you think I’m a fatty pie. Did I mention that we had three bits each? Our bread was only small!

We went with Nigella’s suggestion of having this with hot chocolate and I can tell you, this fit the Instant Calmer bill very nicely. I’ve had a fraught fortnight or so (who am I kidding, last two months) and last night I needed this soothing sweet pudding. It didn’t let me down.

It’s a veritable linguistic feast today!

• Grilled Cheese
• Sandwich Slaw

Grilled cheese, it turns out, is a cheese toastie – if you’re from the United States. (I always thought it was another funny term for cheese on toast, like roasted cheese.) Strangely, there’s no grilling involved in making grilled cheese. Wikipedia also attests that slaw, as a term for coleslaw, is used in the southern US. So this is quite an American dish – in as much as a cheese toastie ever could be.

We normally make our coleslaw with a grater, but this recipe asked for slices, so that’s what I did. But it really wasn’t the Express way.  If you tackle this one, just use the damn grater. Frying them on the griddle was fun work, with the sandwiches weighted down with tins of beans in a frying pan. I think we waited slightly too long to turn them, or maybe the griddle was just too hot, because the sandwich had an even well-done-toast colour rather than elegant stripes.

In future I would make this on a bigger scale: big slices of bread, lots of cheese and tomato, and just keep making them until one or other diner admits defeat.