Dec 06 2008
Festive Friends
A school friend was making a flying visit to Scotland this weekend, and kindly agreed to let us cook for her and some other old friends.
- Broccoli and Stilton Soup
- Festive Fusilli
- Quickly Scaled Mont Blanc
All three recipes out of the Christmas chapter, and why not, I’m starting to feel festive. We didn’t quite get Tijuana Christmas out (sorry, Gem, I had to link!) because we don’t have our decorations up get, but I was feeling a bit Christmassy last night.
The soup was a little disappointing to be honest. In the book it looks, and is described as being thick and inviting. Ours was a bit on the thin side- you can see in the pictures that the garnish of chilli sank right in! On the other hand the broccoli flavour was lovely and fresh, although the stilton was a bit too far in the background for my tastes. This was so easy to make though, so perhaps I’ll repeat the effort, but tinker with the stock and cheese proportions to oomph the final product up a bit.
The main course was far more successful, for me at least, and it’s all I can do just now not to run to the kitchen and nom the leftovers. Festive Fusilli is a straightforward tomatoey pasta dish with the added touch of some vodka and mascarpone. The ’sun blush’ toms (some whole, some chopped up) are steeped in the vodka (and herbs, sugar and salt) from the beginning, which was nice as I was able to get all that ready in advance, and just put the pasta on to cook while we ate the starter. When the pasta was ready, you stir through the mascarpone and the steeping tomatoes, and serve with lots of parmesan and parsley. To my mind, fantastico- richly tomatoey but also slightly creamy. I couldn’t really tell what the vodka added but perhaps it was a subtle nuance we’d have missed had it not been there. The only downside to this dish was that both Gem and Shona left quite a pile of whole tomatoes on their plate- clearly I need to spend more time with them both to get a better idea of their tastes!
My only sadness with the pasta was that I didn’t bring it to the table in a big steaming serving dish. That would’ve felt very festive and homey but I was having containment issues merely mixing the pasta and flavours in the pan, so it probably would have been dangerous folly to have attempted to have transferred the lot to another dish to take it to the table!
Pudding was nearly a disaster; at one point I considered abandoning it altogether, and it was only that it was already half made at that stage that kept me from giving up. The Quickly Scaled Mont Blancs comprise layers of: finely chopped dark chocolate; sweetened chestnut purée; whipped cream with broken meringue and then a final dusting of meringue shard.
I’d picked up a teeny tiny tin of sweetened chestnut purée months ago- possibly before we even began the challenge!- in a deli that was on my walk to work before we moved. However, to do this recipe for seven I needed a full-sized tin. I’d not had time through the week, so on Saturday afternoon skipped off to the deli to pick up more. To my horror and surprise, the deli has (in December) given up opening on Saturdays.
Visions of no pudding danced before my eyes. I’d previously had an alternative but it was too late in the day to make it, as cooling time was required. On a hunch, I tried Harvey Nicks, and to my joy, there it was! Clement de Faugier purée des marrons!
It wasn’t until after I’d chopped the chocolate and arrayed it in the glasses, and whipped the cream to a light and floppy mix, that I noticed that I’d bought unsweetened purée. It was nothing, in fact, apart from chestnuts and water. Not only that, but it was set solid, unlike the little tin which had the consistency of glossy ketchup. Firstly I contemplated sweetening up the purée myself. It was just rock solid though (and thoroughly unappealing smelling, which is odd as I do actually like chestnuts!) and there was no way it would combine with sugary syrup. The guests were due, I panicked a bit, and then contemplated giving up on pudding altogether. I’d just serve ice cream and chocolate sauce and it would be fine.
But I already had glasses with chocolate rubble in them. And a bowl of whipped cream. So I decided to make do. Each glass got a rounded teaspoon of the proper chestnut paste (about a sixth of what each glass ought to have had) and then I layered on the cream as normal.
And it was just fine. I think a little more chestnut wouldn’t have gone amiss- you couldn’t always taste it- but we agreed that six times as much might in fact have been too much! I think I’d aim for about double next time, perhaps two heaped teaspoons each, or one 100g tin for four puddings. Despite the various moments of agony these desserts were elegant and tasty- not so much a quick scaling as a send out search and rescue sort of event, but well worth it in the end. Hurrah!
