The Sacred Art of Eating

The end of an era.

• Scallops-on-the-Shell
• Griddled Venison with Pink Gin Apple Sauce and Roast Pencil Leeks
• Tarte Fine Aux Pommes
• Champagne

A little lunch, to see the Challenge off in a fitting style. Four friends around the table (there were so many more I would have liked to have had there) who had each contributed to the colour and shape of our eating this year, while they may not realise it.

A meal, straight out of the Razzle Dazzle chapter. Champagne to end it all. Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your attention.

Everything tasted wonderful and everything was easy to make.

Very confusingly, I am posting the last few recipes dated by when we cooked them. Which means there are new posts appearing before this entry, and before the one where I say we’ve only got four recipes to go. So seek, and ye shall find!

A fantastic party atmosphere as the Hares muck in and learn to do sushi!

• Gravlax Sashimi

Now, let’s be honest. There is probably nothing authentic or legit about curing salmon, gravlax style, (albeit with sake and wasabi,) and using it in sushi. This did not mean we did not enjoy making it or eating it. Sometimes there’s a lot to be said for ignorance!

The curing mix consisted of sugar, salt, wasabi paste and sake. This was then smeared on the skinned (by me) salmon, and the whole lot sealed in cling film and weighted down in the fridge for a few days. I’ll admit, it did take a little trust (for all that I’m a chemist in many ways) to accept that this would come out of the fridge ‘cooked’ rather than stinking and rotten.

However, apart from some interesting markings, it came out of the fridge beautifully!

We made a party of this meal by ‘doing’ sushi properly (ish!). Firstly, we ate some of the salmon as straight up sashimi, with just pickled ginger, wasabi and soy. This was delicious and the best way to appreciate the full flavours of the salmon. The closest description I can come up with for it was smoke-less smoked salmon, which makes sense when you think about it.  When we repeat this we’ll probably use more Wasabi in the curing mix, as this was a bit lost in the end product.

To go with the sashimi, and in case anyone got raw-fish overload (although as I said, it was so much like smoked salmon in texture that I needn’t have worried) we decided to have a full participation Maki Party. With a bit of research on VideoJug we found out how to make sushi rice and swotted up on Maki Rolling, something we’d done only once at Keri’s birthday, over a year ago. We prepared the rice in advance and served up slivers of red and yellow pepper and avocado. I demonstrated first, and then we each took it in turns to make maki for the whole table. There was a healthy degree of competition in choosing one’s filling and in the trimming and presentation of maki and a grand wee time was had by all. Even better, I have introduced my parents to the joy of sushi!

A great wee meal to do with friends and family, and honestly, far easier than you might expect. None of us, apart from maybe me, I can’t remember, had ever rolled maki before but our results looked and tasted great. What a party!

Honestly, have a go at doing sushi some time. The kit is easy enough to pick up if you have a large supermarket or asian foodstore nearby, and the two videos I’ve linked to above show you everything you need to know. Avocado, cucumber and peppers make lovely fillings so you don’t need to go down the sashimi (raw fish) route at all. With some wasabi and soy for dipping and some pickled ginger you’ve got a really different starter. Please try it.

You lot don’t know this yet, as I have been horribly remiss in my blogging (hey, it’s Christmas!)* but we only have FOUR recipes to go.

*(and I’m back dating all my posts so they’ll cleverly fall into place before this entry and confuse you all!)

What a way with Turkey! I think this could become a Festive Favourite.

•  Turkey Tonnato

There is always a great scrabble to come up with new ways with Christmas leftovers. I don’t know if she can take full credit for it or not, but here Nigella takes a traditional Italian dish (one which is a favourite of my parents) and converts it to use cold roast turkey.

Fine slices of turkey are taken off your princely carcass, and fanned oot on a plate.

On top of the meat, a Tonnato is spread- just like in Vitello Tonnato this is a sauce of blended mayonnaise, tuna fish, lemon juice, paprika and garlic. Perhaps because we used a food processor rather than a blender, the sauce was quite thick rather than the runny affair you see in photos. Otherwise though, I think you’ll agree it looks just awesome!

I would absolutely agree with Nigella’s suggestion that a baked potato goes well with this. The simplicity of the potato against the mixture of flavours in the dish. Also, without the taters, this would be a cold dish, in the middle of winter. As it is, the oven was on for over an hour and although it was dark and bleak outside it was warm and familial in our kitchen.

Brilliant, brilliant tea, and not fiddly to make at all.

The trouble with Christmas Day is that the meal is pretty much set down for you. Okay, there’s a bit of leeway, but most people cook a bird of some kind, and the roast potatoes, stuffing, bread sauce, sprouts and so on are all set out for you. What’s to do? Brunch, that’s what.

• Swedish Salmon
• Sweet and Sour Cucumber Salad
• Warm Potato Salad

The Christmas day plan is one meal with my parents and another with Helen’s parents. The first meal of the day is officially a “champagne breakfast” but, out of two attempts in two years, we have never made it to their house before 11am. This year we didn’t eat until after one…

I started making this before going to bed the night before, and we drove to our home town the next morning, with a poached salmon and a cool bag filled with foreign Nigella ingredients. The salmon poaching is really easy, though you’ll need a large container if you want to cook a whole salmon at once. We had one side of a small salmon which was more than ample for four. You bring your water to the boil and then simmer the salmon in its flavoured water for ten minutes, before leaving it.

Overnight it cools down and the next morning it tastes moist and delicious. Draining a salmon of cold water is not a pleasant job but you get a lovely meal in return.

The salads were miss and hit respectively. Cutting a cucumber so finely that all the crunch disappears is not the right approach to take. You just end up with limp wet tissues, and no amount of interesting dressing will make up for it. Hot new potato with seedy mustard, on the other hand, is suitable for nearly all occasions. Take it to the races! Eat it for breakfast! At the cinema! Lovely stuff.

Probably the only recipe in the entire book where I won’t actually be tasting the finished product.

• Steeped Christmas Fruits

A thought which makes me feel rather guilty now, seeing as I alone have tasted every other recipe in the book. Dougal missed out on the first recipe in the book, Smoked Cod and Cannellini although as you’ll recall at the time I didn’t think he was missing out on much! On the other hand, I’m not sure he’s forgiven me yet for missing out on the Nutella Pancakes!

The Steeped Christmas Fruits are a variant on that foodie Christmas gift, Dried Fruits in Quality Booze. I can recall my dad doing Prunes in Armagnac a few years back, and Nigella talks about past Christmasses of Rum and Raisin and so on. Goes very well over ice cream but a distinctly grown up taste!

This recipe calls for Mixed Dried Fruit (such as you might put in fruit cake) and posh, Pedro Ximenez Sherry. We baulked at paying over ten pounds for the delivery of Nigella’s preferred brand (found by googling and with the help of Nigella.com) and settled for Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference variety. It is rich and thick and sweet smellling and I will most probably be taking Nigella up on the suggestion of just having a glass of it neat over ice cream for a really express pudding.

My problem is that I’m not a huge fan of the steeped dried fruit genre.  I’d go as far as to say that Dougal isn’t a fan at all, so making a jar of these for us seemed frankly silly. So I made two as gifts, one for each set of parents. Like I said, grown up tastes. D’s Mum has reported that she is greatly enjoying hers over yoghurt, which sounds practically healthy!

I also took Nigella’s suggestion (which I swear is in the book but I cannot find it any more, no matter how hard I look) or varying this recipe by using mixed sweetened cranberries, raisins, sour cherries and blackcurrants and steeping these in Pama, the pomegranate liqueur. Illogically, this D and I both fancy, so in addition to the two jars we did for friends, we may make a further portion for ourselves.

A ‘traditional’ Christmas Eve Supper, with some drinks and a spiced pudding.

• Snowball
• Rouge Limonade
• Seafood Pot
• Holiday Hot Cake with Eggnog Cream

We had my maw and paw over on Christmas Eve; my mum left us her car so we could drive home on Christmas Day and in return we cooked them a ‘traditional’ Christmas Eve supper. Not my tradition- although it was so good we could probably start it- but apparently it is very much the done thing to have fish on Christmas Eve.

We kicked off with drinks and nibbles (some left over Maple Pepper Pecans from the pairty); a Snowball for Lizzie and I, a Rouge Limonade for Dougal. Nigella’s recipe for a snowball isn’t really any different to any other you will have had. I’m still not sure I’m a fan but my mum likes them so it was a treat to be able to offer her one. The rouge limonade is a sort of red wine spritzer- lighter than wine, probably quite good if it were really hot (like at a busy party) and you need chilled down, but nothing fancy. I’ve drunk things like it in France- perhaps it is suited to warmer climes!

The main event was the Seafood Pot. Our fabulous fishmongers, George Campbell & Sons on Ferry Road in Leith, had furnished with monk fish, salmon fillet, squid and surf clams. These are very simply cooked up, with butter and sherry and lots of steam. We served it, as suggested, with a fennel salad, which sadly I halved in size at the last minute in a fit of miscomprehension of my guests! The combination was lovely and made me realise that fennel is a flavour I need to make more of in my cooking. The finishing touch was a couple of lovely baguettes made by Dougal, which were just perfect for mopping up the juices.

Pudding, as suggested in the book, was Holiday Hot Cake with Eggnog Cream. The cake is made by pouring boiling water over a spiced cake batter and then baking the unappealing result! My solid tin wasn’t quite as deep as suggested and I was worried about fitting the water in, so we went for a springform tin. This may have been part of the reason that we lost some liquid to the inside of the oven, resulting in some bad burnt caramel smells! The other problem will probably have been that I failed to preheat the oven properly (which is to say, I set the temperature but didn’t turn the oven on) so it went into a cold oven, which may not have helped.

As a consequence, the finished product was a bit thin and lacking in bounce. The recipe was supposed to do many more people than we had, but in fact just went round the five of us (my little bro having turned up at this point for pudding and a lift to my Mum & Dad’s). Still, the flavours were good and the eggnog cream (cream with advocat whipped in it!) was a tasty accompaniment. Just not quite the steaming success I’d hoped!

An attempt at socialising.

• Mincemeat Parcels with Bourbon Butter

We have been meaning, pretty much since we moved to our new place, to invite ‘the stair’ (that’s the inhabitants of the other seven flats in the close, for those of you not native) in for home made goodies and drinks. And it has just kept being put off and put off. We’d meant to invite them the weekend before the Christmas Party, but somehow never got round to it- a good thing, as it turned out, as poor D had probably norovirus and so our flat was no place for guests.

In the end we invited them all the Tuesday before Christmas, but put the cards through everyone’s doors with frankly far too little notice for December. We got a card from one neighbour, apologising for his absence. A little before 8 the bloke from the flat opposite popped in with a posh bottle of wine and gave his apologies. 8pm came and went and no one came, and I actually didn’t mind. I reasoned that the notice was too short, that it wasn’t anything personal, and revelled slightly in the thought of an unexpected free evening stretching ahead of me (with the added bonus of mulled mine and mincemeat parcels, which I’d already made).

Then, at about twenty past eight, came a knock at the door! The young couple from Gf1 had come up, bringing their sleeping six month old baby with them. They must have thought I was a right eejit at first as I was grinning ear to ear, so touched and pleased that someone had come! Dougal put the finishing touches to the mulled wine, I arrayed the Mincemeat Parcels on a plate, and we had a nice evening just the four (five!) of us, getting to know one another a bit and sharing ‘newly moved’ stories.  The wee one woke up after about forty minutes and gave us a lovely show of cooing and looking around and dribbling and generally being a pretty wee thing.

On the food front, Mincemeat Parcels with Bourbon Butter: definitely a good thing. Easy to throw together, even in a hurry, and pretty fancy to give to guests too. I didn’t have ready rolled puff pastry but managed just fine rolling it myself- I also didn’t have a square pastry cutter so I suppose the uneven edges of my pastry mattered less.

These were, of course, particularly good because of the mincemeat that went in them. The recipe stipulates ’superior mincemeat’ meaning ‘good stuff from a jar’; however we used homemade by HarveyNick Cranberry Studded Mincemeat- one of Nigella’s own recipes, no less. This was *totally* worth it (and I’m sure she’d agree her own mincemeat is superior!) and while you might think it’s not very express to have to make your own mincemeat, I’m sure you could do so days or even weeks in advance so it needn’t be a chore on the day.

The only change I made to Nigella’s recipe is that I egg-washed the tops of these before baking. I already had a beaten egg, as one is used to stick the layers of pastry to each other, and I had felt that the Chicken, Bacon and Mushroom Pies were lacking in their dull tops (where the ones in her picture were shiny). This was absolutely the right decision- it didn’t take two ticks to do, meant less potential wastage of egg and resulted in lovely glossy parcels. Fantastic!

Also: Bourbon Butter hits the spot, it does.

A sparkling Christmas Party, in every way.

• Christmas in a Glass
• Pomegranate Bellini
• Martini Olives
• Maple Pepper Pecans
• Cocktail Sausages

Quite a list! We also did a couple of platters of sweet petit fours, revisiting the Lunchbox Treats (in mini cases), Rocky Road and Marshmallow Crispy Squares as well as finishing off the Chocolate Pistachio Fudge. The Party Popcorn, previously prepared for a party in January was a roaring success. And of course Dougal provided two types of fantastic Bertinet Bread: Pecorino, Olive and Herb bread sticks and Cranberry Stars (an amalgamation and reworking of two recipes). Ruth helped with the pre-party damage limitation (washing up!) while the ever-lovely Mat also stepped into the breach, and made some of Nigella’s Star-topped Mince Pies and Apple Pies from Feast (although not as mini pies, sadly) using HarveyNick’s homemade Nigella’s Cranberry-Studded Mincemeat (also from Feast). And the whole night was kicked off with Jamie Oliver’s Mulled Wine, which was lovely. So it was truly a food fest. Would I have any other kind of party?

Sadly, we are a little short on pictures, largely because we were having too much of a good time to think about stopping and photographing food. However, here are some construction shots, just to give you an idea of the thing!

Of the two cocktails, the Pomegranate Bellini was my favourite. I found the Christmas In A Glass (Pain d’Epice syrup plus prosecco) a bit on the sweet side. I think most people agreed it was an instant winner on mouthful number one but that you didn’t really want to finish your glass. We made our Bellinis with pomegranate syrup rather than purée, as it seemed overkill to buy 1kg of purée for one party. I slightly regret this decision though, just for reasons of fanciness. However I think the pom syrup may take a serious beating in cocktails over the coming year so if we feel the need to repeat these at Christmas next year buying in new product will be an option anyway.

Of the new party nibbles, the olives were the least successful, with the sausages coming second (for being fabulous but not especially unusual in their premise) and the maple pepper pecans topping the podium for audacity and pep. My complaint with the Martini Olives is that they simply weren’t boozy enough. Not like Nigella to hold herself back! I’d hoped these would be a little dark and dangerous but in fact most people didn’t notice they weren’t just olives straight out of a jar.  When I said they were a recipe people asked if I’d stuffed them myself- hardly very express!

The sausages were sticky and sweet and yummy and I would highly recommend them for a party. Nuff said.

The Maple Pepper Pecans were an interesting case. They start out sweet and buttery and then, right at the end, wham! the cayenne pepper hits you. Various people said ‘why the f**k would you put cayenne pepper on them, man, …. oh, but they’re brilliant, I’ll just have another’ -consistently strangely critical for something they all seemed quite happy to munch away at.

Mince pies were all fab and I would highly recommend the Feast Recipes, both for the pies (lovely pastry) and the mincemeat, which has the added bonus of not being too overly dry-fruity, for those that don’t like. Oh yeah, and Jamie Oliver’s Mulled Wine is *fantastic* -if you didn’t see the programme with him cooking it on the week before Christmas, you clearly weren’t watching any telly. I don’t think I will ever make mulled wine any other way.

Merry Christmas Chaps!