The Sacred Art of Eating

A hearty mid-week roast.

• Butternut Squash with Pecans and Blue Cheese

One of those dishes that you can use in place of Turkey as the Veggie Main at Christmas Dinner, but which equally is nice just to eat, for tea one night after work. It has in its favour its relative ease in construction- although you do need a sharp knife to easily prepare butternut squash. On the other hand, pecans and blue cheese don’t come especially cheap, so as veggie meals go it ain’t a bargain.

It looked quite pretty to start with, but once the cheese and nuts were mixed through the roasted squash, lost its beauty somewhat. The squash may have been a little over-roasted, which wouldn’t have helped.

I quite enjoyed this- I really like butternut squash- but I’m not sure it was great as a meal in its own right. The pecans would have benefited from a little toasting, and as a meal, it needed something else going on. Not a bad side dish though, I’d say.

Nigella claims to be no big drinker. However she likes her boozy recipes-this one overwhelmed us a bit!

• Seasonal Fruit Salad

The term ‘Salad’ is a bit mis-used here. This recipe wouldn’t have the 5-a-day brigade convinced at all! Yes, there is fruit in it, but the alcohol content rather cancels it out.

Beautiful to look at, but rather hard to stomach. We both agreed that a spoonful or two over ice cream would be nice, but that you’d have to be a seasoned drinker to eat this straight. One of the clementines I’d used had been a bit dry and dull, and it ended up particularly dangerous, having sooked up even more alcohol than the rest of the fruit.

I can’t imagine a context where I’d cook this again, elegant on the eye as it was. Seems a little sad, but there we go.

A driech dark night, almost the shortest in the year.

• Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie

This recipe had us flummoxed for most of the year, requiring as it did individual pot pies. Nigella asks for 300ml pots, although says bigger are okay, and indeed the ones she uses in the picture are 500ml. Eventually, after much wailing to the internet, Ruth came good and loaned us a couple of possibilities. We went with the deep terracotta dishes.

The pie filling smelled excellent as I cooked it up; the bacon tasted fantastic and everything else melded together in a rich sauce.

The recipe doesn’t call for the tops of the pies to be glazed or egg washed, but in the future I think I would do so.  In the absence of shiny tops these didn’t look quite so bonny as in the picture.

Former flatmate Mike was over for tea and we gobbled the pies down with a wee tomato, feta and pine nut salad. This was a good contrast to the creamy rich pies.

I liked these pies a lot for what they were- hot and filling on a dreary night- but I didn’t especially rate the seasoning. For some reason the thyme flavour bothered me the whole time, and in future I think I’d just leave it out altogether. If you are using nice bacon and happy chicken there are enough other tasty flavours going on without having to add more.

I was lucky enough to get a food fan as my recipient for Secret Santa at work this year, so I put together a couple of Nigella recipes for them. This also coincided well with Na’s birthday- bonus!

• Spiced Peaches
• Chocolate Pistachio Fudge

Both were really very easy to make. The peaches are cooked up in their own syrup and some vinegar with a seasonal smelling selection of spices. They smelled yummy but sadly I bottled up the lot and haven’t had an opportunity to try them yet. They looked so pretty though and the Christmassy aromas were ever so tempting- and the thought of trying them with roast ham, oh!- means I will almost certainly make another batch before Christmas.

The chocolate fudge isn’t really proper fudge in that it is essentially just butter and chocolate melted into condensed milk. You don’t boil it or anything, and to be honest I was sceptical it would turn out anything like fudge. I decided to go with the suggested ‘grainy’ version which is kept in the freezer to firm up.

It’s okay. It tastes chocolatey and is fudgy in texture, but it isn’t fudge as my mother makes. It’s more like slightly over-cooked chocolate sauce allowed to go hard. Which isn’t all bad! As for the pistachios, well, they look beautiful and so I’ll commend them for that. But with the fudge being so soft I found their hardness a bit unpleasant (something which, ironically, wouldn’t have been a problem in a firmer fudge) and I am only partly convinced regarding the flavour. I like my pistachios salted, really.

I reckon they made pretty neat presents though.

A wee Thursday night party. Ah, the life of the young professional!

• Mouclade
• Flan

We were delighted to have K&B over for mussels the other night. We’d put out a request on Facebook for friends to go halfers with us on a couple of kilos of mussels…unfortunately all the responses we got were from people outside of Scotland, but our Edinburgh friends didn’t realise this, and assumed we’d had takers. A bit of idle pub chat the other night revealed that this was not the case and the date was set!

We got our mussels from the lovely George Campbell and Sons Fishmongers on Ferry Road. We had to debeard them ourselves, which was a cold job, but otherwise they were in very good nick with only a couple failing to open on standing in cold water.

The broth the mussels are cooked over contained madras powder. I’d been a little worried these would be ‘curried mussels’ but it was more that you were left with a pleasing tingling on the lips. What looked like a vast pile of mussels was rapidly demolished, leaving impressive piles of shells. We mopped up the winey creamy juices with a stack of D’s baguettes and had a grand old messy time of it.

We followed up with Flan, an express’ed up Mexican version of Crème Caramel.We were a bit worried as we made the caramel for this. We weren’t sure how fiercely to heat the sugar or whether to stir it. We consulted the two other recipe books we have with recipes for Crème Caramel and discovered…..that James Martin nicked his recipe from Delia Smith. They are practically verbatim copies. That said, both books are copyright BBC so maybe it doesn’t count as plagiarism!

The additional reading gave us the confidence to make the caramel and we successfully attained the colour of maple syrup (Delia: two shades darker than golden syrup. James: two or three shades darker than golden syrup. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the Pantone syrup kit!)

The ‘crème’ was added-evaporated milk, condensed milk, eggs and vanilla essence- and it all baked in a dish of water in the oven for 45 mins. After a night in the fridge, it was ready to serve. It took a little persuading to come out of its dish, but when it did it really looked the part.

The texture was firmer than any of us really expected- set quite firm, like cheese almost. Whether this was because of its express construction or whether we’d over-cooked it slightly I’m not sure. Suffice to say it did not detract! We all thought this was pretty fabulous AND went back for seconds. The firm texture also meant Dougal was easily able to take a slice to work the next day, which might not have been possible with a wobblier set.

Yum!

We had a teeny tiny amount of the Broccoli and Stilton soup left over from last night’s tea. Not enough for a full portion, but we’d no more broccoli to eke it out with either.

So I made us a little amuse-bouche. Brill.

I honestly can’t believe we’ve only got 26 recipes to go. We’d have been a couple of months in to the challenge before we’d got that many under our belt, and yet it seems like so few to go. I’ve been wondering for a couple of days when in December we’ll get back to more than a day per recipe remaining; I suspect we may not (apart from perhaps just after our party) as it looks like we may plan to finish on 31st December, with a posh lunch with friends. Those three recipes would mean we’ll be ‘behind’ to the very end. Still…it’s exciting, knowing how close we are.

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!

Nigella throws us a curveball by publishing a recipe with small portions.

• Merguez with Halloumi and Flame-Roasted Peppers

We’d been looking forward to this as it contains four of my favourite things (merguez, halloumi, roasted peppers and garlic) and because it was practically a zero effort tea; open packet, open jar, cut up cheese, put all in roasting pan, bake 20 mins. It took us until December to make this because Edinburgh has no reliable source of trust-worthy merguez. And I am picky about these things. We’d been just about to crack and order them from Nigella’s suggested online purveyor, when we took a little trip to that well known foodie mecca, Aberdeen. There, we found an ‘international street market’, where I was able to say ‘des merguez, s’il vous plait’ to a hairy frenchman and feel smug. We nearly left them in Aberdeen (technically, we did leave them in Aberdeen, but they were couriered down on the train the next day) but finally, on Friday, we got the chance to tuck into them.

It was the ideal occasion; we had an evening engagement (celebrating the PhD-Viva-passing of an old friend) to get out too promptly, but it was bitterly cold outside so we were looking for something warming and hearty to take the chill of us.

Trouble was, it felt a bit insubstantial. Nigella asked for eight sausages for four people; the way our packet split, we had five sausages, but it still wasn’t enough. They did shrink doon to skinny wee things, which can’t have helped- perhaps better quality bangers would’ve held their size and filled us up more. As we’d halved the recipe we used less than a full jar of peppers and only half a packet of halloumi- and we really wished we’d just gone the whole hog with both. We served this up with a warmed up ficelle Dougal had made the night before, which was good for mopping up the juices, but not enough.

The sausages were great- juicy and meaty- and the peppers and halloumi went really well with them. There just wasn’t enough. Not a situation we’d expect Nigella to get us into!

In the end there was nothing for it but to supplement the meal with a pudding of ice cream and chocolate sauce. I even threw a bit of peanut butter into the sauce, because Nigella has had that effect on me. And no, while you ask, I didn’t look up a recipe.

Finally made these, after holding out in vain for an elusive ingredient.

• Lunchbox Treats

Nigella calls for one of those ‘London Ingredients’ in this recipe; Rice Malt Syrup. It’s made by Clearspring (presumably amongst others) and Waitrose stock lots of Clearspring products: no joy. You also get Clearspring in various Hippy Shops but we had no joy there either. Internet-fu suggested Asian Supermarkets but they looked at us like we were a little crazy. The end of December was looming, so we died a little inside and just went with Golden Syrup.

Let me tell you, Rice Malt Syrup must have some amazing stick-things-together-whilst-not-sticking-to-you properties. Because Nigella suggests rolling these treats into walnut-shaped balls, which was just not possible for us. I ended up with hands totally coated with sticky cereals, which steadfastly refused to clump together at all. We conceeded defeat and started putting them in petit-four cases and fairy cake cases instead.

The mini treats in the petit-four cases looked brilliant and would be a dainty thing to serve with coffee at the end of a dinner party, not a use I’d thought of for them. However I didn’t get to eat a single one as D took them all to work. The bigger ones, however, were really cracking with a big mug of strong milky coffee. We’ve not quite finished them yet. They taste kinda nutty, which is presumably down to the sesame seeds, and with this far more sophisticated than they ought, being as they are basically crispie cakes. They were easy to make (once we gave up on balling them!) so I’ll probably do these again, the next time we have a bring-a-cake day at work. Perhaps next time I’d supplement the chocolate with some maltesers, to make up for the absence of the malt syrup.