The Sacred Art of Eating

A friend was having a buffet party for her birthday, before we all headed into town dancing. I offered to make a small contribution.

• Nutella Pancakes

We had thought, a long time ago, that we might do this pudding in honour of World Nutella Day and Shrove Tuesday which surprisingly coincide. However, a key ingredient, Frangelico, to be provided by an Italian friend with access to such things, proved difficult to pin down and so we held off.So I made these at a birthday party the other night. I’d hoped I’d get a photo of me, in the kitchen, cooking whilst wearing my mother’s fancy tango dress (proof if ever it were needed that I am my Father’s daughter)(cooking in smart clothes, not wearing my mother’s dresses!) but none came. It was quite exciting, cooking against the clock in a foreign kitchen. The Birthday Girl was too busy fielding guests to be able to point me in the direction of bowls/spatulas/whisks, although her mum was a great help. Generally I managed though.

These are easy peasy and, particularly if you can source some Frangelico (just happen to have a bottle lurking in the booze cupboard after an ill-advised purchase many years ago, perhaps,) definitely worth doing. The express way is to use crêpes out of a packet but it’d be lovely to spend a morning making crêpes in advance for these too. If you made them yourself you’d want to up the number of pancakes used, unless you have a particularly big pan in which you make your pancakes!

I would agree with Nigella that the frangelico whipped cream ought to be pretty lightly whipped and floppy. I had it just right, but then unfamiliarity with the stick whisk I was using meant in both cases I took the cream a bit further than I would have liked. I don’t think any of the eaters minded though! Similarly I was worried that the crêpes came out of the oven looking a bit burned, but it was more that the edges of the pancakes effectively get fried in butter, and so these darker bits are almost the best bit. A very handy low faff but high ‘ta-dah!’ pudding.Now I shall have to make it for Dougal, who missed out :o(

Actually, I wish it would. More like Arctic drafts!

• Caribbean Creams

Another recipe completed, and with it another chapter finished!

I had had these Carribean Creams in mind for my old work colleague Gareth, as they feature coconut yoghurt, which he was ever so fond of. It used to be an annual, holiday-to-France treat for him, and then we got a Waitrose in Edinburgh and with it Rachel’s Organic Yogs readily available…he’s probably scunnered himself to the stuff now. Sadly we could not pin him down so it was just the two of us for these.

Anyway, I was going to make these for Gareth because, I must confess, the idea of coconut yoghurt did not greatly appeal to me. Coconut is a flavour I have a very shaky relationship with. Thankfully we didn’t have to buy any Malibu for these; friends donated a jam jar full. We have quite a bit left over as we only used 7.5ml (!) so perhaps I can try it in a cocktail and maybe get a taste for it.

I made up these puds this morning and they melded away in the fridge while we were at work. Despite me using the same ramekins as pictured in the book (we all know them- empty Gu pots!) I had too much, and ended up doing two mini overflow puds. Luckily my mum popped in for a cup of tea tonight, and so I gave her them away for her and my dad to enjoy tonight. (I’m not sure Dougal knew that!)

For an avowed coconut avoider, I really enjoyed these. Using posh coconut yog (does any other kind exist in the UK?) probably helped a great deal; there were little bits of coconut in it and the taste seemed fresh and not synthetic at all. The melted-in sugar on top was scrummy too. I could have gone a little more banana  and would perhaps make these in tumblers next time- using more banana but therefore also have room for the full portion of cream mix.

The only thing I would say is that I can’t honestly imagine what the Malibu must have added. Admittedly a tablespoon between four portions (and I only made two portions, but they split between four dishes) is bugger all. If you wanted these to feel a bit more grown up a decent whack of booze wouldn’t go amiss!

These are apparently inspired by Nigella’s Barbados Creams from Domestic Goddess. This is not a book I’ve got, and whilst everyone on the internet wants to rave about the Barbados version, noone seems keen to tell me what the difference is. I’d certainly be keen to investigate! What kind of booze goes in a Barbados Cream? Rum? And which fruit? I can’t think pineapple would work, surely too acidic?

Another salad dressing. I can’t see it entering my repertoire though!

• Golden Honey Mustard Dressing

I made a half volume of this dressing, as 330ml seemed a lot to have to hand! As it is we still have a jugful, and I’m not sure what to use it in. This dressing was very golden (despite my not using rapeseed oil which I avoid on principle as it tastes of bleedin nuffin and what’s the point in putting that in a dressing?) but didn’t taste of much. I had an abortive attempt at making it last night too, up till the point that I realised we’d actually no dijon mustard in the house, and then decided to throw caution to the wind and just dress my salad with lemon juice, oil, salt and pepper. That simple dressing was a lot more interesting than this namby pamby affair. You simply couldn’t make out the individual flavours.

So…pretty, but a bit dull and a bit disappointing.

 A stress-free feed with old friends, plus my first ever (intentional) cooking with fire.

• Cheese Fondue
• Crêpes Suzette

Both recipes from the Retro chapter of the book, which was nice as it served as an occasion for which to get my friends together. Without occasions I fear they’ll get going-to-Helen’s-for-dinner fatigue.

The night before, Dougal whipped up a pair of pain de Campagne. One was cut into chunks and left out all day to stale up. I also gave the chunks half an hour in a low oven just to really be sure.

We gathered around seven, and Dougal made folks a retro-cool White Lady to sup on while we ate cashews, chatted, and I made the fondue. By eight, the fondue was bubbling and brought to the table.

To dip in our cheesey pot we had the aforementioned pre-staled bread, as well as chunks of Granny Smith and batons of chicory. These were suggested by Nigella, and as one of the gang said, you know you’re doing a Nigella Challenge when you just happen to have some chicory in the fridge! We all had a grand time dipping into the thick bubbling cheese, dribbling juices across the table and then gobbling up the hot mouthfuls. One loaf of pain de campagne was the perfect amount, and we had just enough cheese to satisfy without weighing ourselves down too much.

A marvellous feast. The gorgeous fondue pot in the picture belongs to my parents, and may even have been a wedding present- although I may equally be making that up as I am something of a romantic fantasist. Regardless, it is a properly retro piece of kit. I enjoyed this meal (and enjoy fondue, generally,) so much that I will seriously consider investing in my own fondue dish in the future- perhaps when we have somewhere to store the blighter.

After a suitable mid-meal break (and a few games of Hangman and Pictionary on the blackboard) I got on with preparing the crêpes suzette. The (shop bought) crêpes were layered in a pan whilst I made an orangey syrup to souse them with. This syrup is not for those in the least bit concerned with their general health. What can I say, retro meal means retro health attitude?

Yes, that is a whole packet of butter…

Making the syrup took longer than expected but I think part of that was that I was expecting the juice to seem syrupy in the pan. I cooked it for easily twice as long as suggested in the book, but I think had I let it cool after the first fifteen mins it would have proved itself adequately syrupy. As it was, it didn’t fully penetrate all the crêpes, which may mean I had over thickened it. Horrors!

Once the crêpes were warmed in their sauce, it was time to add a little pazzazz to the mix. I heated up some Cointreau in the syrup pan and then poured it over the hot crêpe pan and then lit it with the blow torch, for want of anything better. Woomph! Up went the flame, the syrup pan went up too, and then, like that, it was gone. You can’t really tell in the photos, partly because Dougal claims I didn’t give him adequate warning, and partly because we got the lighting wrong. If you look closely though, there’s a blue tinge round the pan.

These weren’t especially pretty once served, but by golly did they taste good. This is not really surprising, given the volume of butter involved! Rich and creamy and zingy with orange. Definitely worth repeating. However, we have since had a look at the Delia Smith (1982) recipe for Crêpes Suzette….she uses about a third of the amount of butter. So perhaps we could rein it in a bit next time. For the good of our health!

Actually, I would. These were really good!

• Mini Meatloaves

We didn’t make these as early in the year as we might have, as one of the flavourings used to bind the meat together is A1 Steak Sauce. This stuff is readily available in the US and cheap as (stuff you’d put on your) chips; in the UK as far as I can tell it retails at a little under the per litre price of printer ink. A quick look on Google will show you a lot of people looking for it to make Nigella’s Mini Meatloaves (who, me?) but also various ‘Mercans discussing what to use when shipwrecked in Old Blighty and looking for an alternative. HP sauce seems to win, so I duly nicked some sachets from a service station and thus, we were ready.

In the making, these were not so pretty. And let me tell you, I got very cold hands mushing together the mince, sausage meat and egg with the sauce and oats.  It didn’t take long though, and pretty soon these babies were ready for the oven.

The next day, having been up too late to make these into sandwiches, we had them in our tea. We had some baguettes of Dougal’s, and we took Nigella’s advice and had these with pickles, ketchup, mustard, mayo…generally we played around with the flavours. I liked these best with mayo and a fruity chutney while Dougal favoured the gherkin approach. The only downside was that cold meat pieces do not a November supper make, and we ended the meal frozen and seeking a cup of tea.

The following day we repeated the exercise in pitta breads for lunch at work; most respectable. The mushy meat feels a bit like the rubbish you get in packet sandwiches, except in this case it was butcher-bought and hand worked. Not fine or sophisticated eating but very satisfying and an excellent source of protein.

Today we fished a couple of cooked mini meatloaves out of the freezer a couple of hours before lunch. They’d defrosted a treat (we gave them a few mins at 50°C in the oven right at the end, just to be sure) and went delightfully with the spare pain de Campagne left over from the bread Dougal made for our Fondue. We have another six still in the freezer and I’m sure they’ll come in handy for making hearty work lunches when the fridge is looking a bit barren.

A pudding that felt like an effort to eat and a mis-use of the ingredients.

• Peaches in Muscat

This recipe is exactly as the name suggests; peaches served in a glass of muscat wine. You let the two meld together beforehand, for flavours, but otherwise it is basically just fruit in wine.

Which is kinda weird. The wine was a bit overpowering (there was probably too much per person, we kinda ignored the proportions as we’d a half bottle of Beames de Venise left over from the Blackberries in Muscat Jelly) and the fruit didn’t seem to have been greatly improved by the wine. Neither of us were especially sure what to make of the serving suggestion either- we added some cream to the mix but it didn’t really work. Dougal gave up after the fruit and while I manfully finished mine it was a bit of an effort.

The other serving suggestion- ice cream- got us thinking. We agreed that if you used a good bit less wine, did the steeping bit, but then served it over a scoop of ice cream, it might be pretty good. Failing that, some peaches and cream, with a toty glass of dessert wine on the side!

Tonight we finally tackled a recipe which has been on the cards for months.

• Pappardelle with Escarole
• Clafoutis

Pappardelle with Escarole has been on the menu for sometime as an easy peasy vegetarian island in a sea of meaty recipes. However it has been off the menu for all of this time on account of it being nigh on impossible to source Escarole in Edinburgh. This lettuce is part of the endive family (Cichorium endivia var latifolia) and will in fact grow in Scotland- if only we’d thought when we first moved to this flat. It is possible we could have found one at Earthy but for my sins I’ve still never been there. I’d even had offers from friends to look for Escarole in London. In fact, it is so hard to find interesting lettuce in Scottish supermarkets or grocers that I couldn’t find any of the alternative lettuces that Nigella suggests.

The other day I spotted chicory in Waitrose, labelled as ‘also known as endive’. And I thought- that’s what I want! Turns out I was wrong. Same Genus, different species- chicory is in fact Cichorium intybus. Balls. Still, it seemed to work.

This pasta was interesting- undoubtably Italian- but not really to my tastes. It packed a potent chilli kick, which it needed seeing as it didn’t really taste of anything else. The white wine sauce was wetter than I would have liked and the parmesan melted together in big clumps. So while it looked fab at point of serving, and fitted the bill as a vegetarian main course, I don’t think we’ll be back here. If need be I’d be inclined to stick to a regular Spaghetti all´aglio, olio e peperoncino if I need something simple and meatless.

Clafoutis was a very easy pudding to make; mix it all together and off you go (cherries from a jar, so no stoning required). This is an express version, baked quickly at heat. It would have been pretty much perfect had I not put it too high up in the oven. It rose up and got stuck amongst the grill element. Oh No! Thankfully I was cooking for Dougal and my best friend from uni; a more sympathetic audience I don’t expect you’ll get so instead of swearing and weeping there was (swearing and) much laughter, as we used a wooden spoon to hold the top down as we pulled the dish from the oven. I’ve never ruined a dish so quickly!

Thankfully it hadn’t actually burned badly; once dusted with icing sugar who would know? However the wooden spoon shenanigans did mean it was in pieces on top, not exactly exquistite. However, once portioned up you couldn’t tell (sadly I didn’t take any portion sized pieces) and with a good slosh of cream (leftover from the over zealous allocation for the previous day’s Butterfly Cakes) this was cherry heaven. The recipe said this served 6-8. Technically I didn’t have enough cherries (I think I’d been planning on halving the quantities) but I felt the cherry to custard ratio was fine. We made it go three portions plus a second helping for two (four equal sized portions, in short). Heaven forbid this is restraint on Nigella’s part!!

I’ll do this again. Perhaps even as individual portions next time, for ultimate silliness?

Helen and Dougal decided to host a glamorous and exclusive cocktail party, with mixed results.

• Green Apple Martini
• Ginger Pom
• The Instant Canapé: Quick Crostini with Avocado and Green Pea Hummus
• Tuna and Crab & Avocado Wraps
• Butterfly Cakes

The plan was to have a short, sharp event - two hours of little nibbles and heady drinks, then a round of butterfly cakes for a finale. That even left time for people to hit the town afterward, should they be up for that kind of thing.

The two cocktails were pretty good, though requiring ingredients that were unusual enough that the local off-licence couldn’t meet our demands. But Peckham’s has quite a serious selection of interesting liqueurs.

By contrast the wraps were pretty disastrous. No matter how clever it sounds, wrapping things in tortillas is a recipe for tears well before bed-time. Not to mention how ridiculously over-filled the wraps would have been if we’d followed the recipe exactly. I was liberally applying cocktails sticks through all angles of rolled tortilla in an effort to hold them together but they looked pretty ridiculous. And fell apart the instant they left the serving plate.

The pumpernickel crostini were elegant and simple, though not to my taste. I’m not a great fan of rye bread, and there’s nothing more seriously rye than pumpernickel. I also made a batch of breadsticks, trying out another couple of recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough: sesame and aniseed breadsticks, and olive, parmesan and herb breadsticks. I’m not a great fan of olives either, but these latter were really good. Naturally they were the more difficult of the two to make but I guess that’s why you put in the extra effort, eh?

I don’t want to dwell too much on the party itself. In short, we had too many cancellations. But I hope our guests left with happy thoughts, as they got butterfly cakes with coloured cream just before we wrapped up for the night.

Alas, even the cakes were not a complete success. Would you believe that a significant number weren’t even cooked when they came out of the oven? Helen turned round after ten seconds and found a bunch of them had collapsed inwards like some kind of exuberant diamond mining operation had started up.

We might have to pay some proper attention to the temperature of our oven if the cakes really were so underdone. I’m not sure what we’d need to do to measure the temperature in the oven that won’t - as the guys at Kamikaze Cookery managed to do - melt the thermometer.

I hope our guests don’t think too badly of us. The drink was mixed in a good way, the food was mixed in a bad way, and maybe the invited friends felt a bit awkward. But the one thing everyone agreed was the Pama (that’s a pomegranate liqueur, m’lud) is the bees knees. Get some.

A sweet little pudding and the last recipe in the book. Perhaps we ought to have saved it till the end?

• Vanilla Apples with Sweetheart Croûtes

We’d been meaning to make this pudding for ages. Back in the old flat, in the days before Dougal made bread, I even went as far as buying some pan bread when I saw it reduced in Somerfields late one night. What held me back though, was that I did not own a heart shaped cookie cutter. I had a star, and at first thought that would do, you know, “Sweet Star Croûtes” but ultimately realised it had to be done proper.

Thankfully, at my birthday, the boys done me proud. I say boys, as both Dougal and my brother bought me a range of cookie cutters, both including hearts. This is very exciting!

So, I commissioned D to make me a pain de mie (a high class sliced white loaf) and off we went!

I had great fun stamping heart shapes out of the bread, and you’ll be pleased to hear we blitzed the edges up for breadcrumbs and froze them for a later date.

Despite having been looking forward to this probably since I got the book, since before the Challenge began, I was amazed by how much I enjoyed this recipe. I suppose you can’t really go wrong with good bread, fresh apple, butter, sugar and good vanilla extract but I really can’t say how lovely this was. A proper treat. We’ll be back, I know it.

And Dougal had a cold. And I was cold. The only sensible option was to try out the following recipe.

• Hot Toddy

To my mind a hot toddy is firmly made with whisky, most probably Grouse. I’ve had a toddy made with Malt before, when there was nothing else to be had, and it was pretty special too, but a waste of the good stuff and an expensive habit to get into!

Nigella, however, calls for bourbon for these toddies, with rum as an alternative. I don’t own any bourbon; it’s all pretty expensive and I wouldn’t want to spend that kinda money without some authoritative advice. Nigella is a fan though- more than once she implore readers to get in some bourbon- so perhaps one day I will try it out.

Despite being made with the wrong spirit these hit all the right hot toddy buttons. Warm and spicy. Perhaps not enough lemon, but the curl of lemon zest held together with a clove ’stud’ added a zing as you drank down the glass.

Perhaps my only complaint would be that these were a bit small. Total volume of 130ml meant these drinks would’ve looked lost in a mug, so I served them in glasses (sadly not fancy hot drink glasses!) but really they could’ve done with being a bit bigger. Winter is a time of indulgences after all!