The Sacred Art of Eating

Pancake day! Whoop!

We were out at the movies (i wouldn’t bother) on Pancake day, and so didn’t have time for a full savoury fillings, sweet fillings bonanza. Instead we headed straight to the sweet stuff.

After sating myself with lemon and sugar (I’m a puritan at heart) I began to experiment. The above creation, is half Nutella (but of course) and half Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce, à la Nigella Express. In the folded together image you can see that the nutella (top fold) is slightly more opaque than the fudge. Flippin’ brilliant it was!

Dougal recently told a friend that he thought the best recipe in Nigella Express was the Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce. He did come up with this rather hastily, but while I would guess I’d disagree about it taking the Gold Award, it probably does feature in my top ten. A Top Ten that I really ought to get round to compiling and sharing with you all…

The following blog post is not safe for children. Totally safe for work though!

• Ice Cream with chocolate sauce, raspberries and a raspberry biscuit sandwich

Dougal and I had a discussion recently about not taking advantage of our ‘grown-up’ status often enough. As a kid you dream of all the things you’ll do when you’re a grown-up, be it never having to take a bath, or my own memory, serving just cake mix, raw for pudding.

You spend all this time fantasising about what to do when there are no rules, but then, when you are an adult, you are so used to the rules and why they exist you forget that now there’s nothing stopping you from breaking them.

In honour of this, the other day, Dougal and I decided to have ice cream for breakfast. It was pretty cool! Of course, it was fairly grown up ice cream- Luca’s Vanilla, quite a dark chocolate sauce, some fresh rasps (out of the freezer and defrosted for as long as the ice cream, so still slightly cold!) and topped with scrummy heart shaped biscuits that D had made the day before- a pair, sandwiched together with my mummy’s finest raspberry jam. Definitely not for kids.

So. My challenge for you now, dear readers, is to go forth this week and take advantage of being a grown up. Have pudding first. Or make jelly that looks like boobs. And then blog it, or comment here.

What can I say, we’ve not been eating much of note recently. I promise I’ll try and come up with something interesting to eat on Wednesday- the next point we’ll be eating a normal tea at home.

or you might call it sheer gluttony…

• Burgers on toasted home made bread with cold roast belly pork, gruyère, tomatoes, cucumber and condiments

They had some neat little organic beef fresh mini beefburgers marked down in Waitrose this evening. We had a little left over roast belly pork from Sunday but not enough to make a meal of. There were two of the rolls D had baked before work on Monday languishing in the bread bin; not yet stale but going that way and not worth eating as bread tomorrow.

So: we fried the burgers in a wee drop of olive oil. They smelled fantastic. Kudos to Waitrose for clearly putting good meat into their ready made range.  The rolls got split and very lightly toasted-little more than warmed. I discarded the crackling from the meat and sliced it finely, and did the same with some gruyère, plum tomatoes and cucumber.

The resulting constructions weren’t exactly what you’d call graceful. They were pretty inelegant to eat, as you might expect. But wowee did they taste good. Back to salad tomorrow!

Dougal and I felt very grown up doing our own wee Sunday roast this weekend.

• Roast Belly Pork with mashed potatoes, wintry apple sauce and broccoli

Of course you might argue that were we proper grown ups we’d have managed lunch at, say, lunch time rather than more like mid afternoon, but it’s a small point that I hope you’ll overlook.

I’d picked up a bit of belly pork for almost no money from waitrose. I’d planned to roll it and roast it à la Hugh but hadn’t thought far enough ahead to arrange for there to be fresh herbs in Leith on a Sunday morning (or stale bread for crumbing taken out of the freezer in time). I looked around for other recipes, including a Jamie Oliver belly pork recipe which I think is from the current tv series. There’s also a recipe in The River Cottage Meat Book. In the end I took vague inspiration from each and then ignored the lot, albeit using the timings from Meat.

We scored our pork skin (none of our knives really did the trick, perhaps it is time to invest in a stanley knife!) and then rubbed salt in, before seasoning the meat side with loadsa salt and black pepper. It then went, skin side up, into a HOT oven for half an hour, before roasting for a further hour a bit cooler.

At Hugh’s suggestion that there was already enough fat in the dish, we had mashed potatoes on the side (although they had butter and cream in them so hardly virtuous!) and the apple sauce (with a grate of orange zest and a generous squeeze of orange juice) from the recipe in The Meat Book.

All in all it was gorgeous. Sadly I over-cooked the broccoli, but it wouldn’t do to be a fully fledged grown up too soon!

Proper tea for a proper cold night in February- and courtesy of Nigella, would you believe!

• Sausages with Onion & Cider Gravy
• Heaven and Earth Mash

A recipe from Feast that I’ve cooked in the past and fancied coming back to. The sausages weren’t anything fancy, just decent ones from the supermarket. Pork and apple, I think.

This is a great meal if the house is icy cold and needing warmed up, as Nigella advocates cooking the sausages in the oven. Having the oven on for 45 mins made out kitchen habitable on Friday! Whilst this might seem like a long wait for the bangers, the 45 mins is taken up nicely with prepping the potatoes and boiling them, and then adding apples to the boiling tatties- hence ‘Heaven and Earth’ mash. Standing at the cooker softening the onions and then stirring the gravy gave me a rock solid excuse to stay close to the oven too, brill.

The warming effect doesn’t stop there. There’s nothing like a mash-containing-meal to really warm you to your core. All the more so if there is gravy involved. Nigella suggests this combo as part of a Christmas Eve lunch, easy-going with all the family around (the recipe is for ten eating!) but I reckon it goes just fine on any cold day.

Bitterly cold nights might not suggest ice cream for pudding- but with the right sauce it works just fine. This was a revisit of Nigella’s pudding from the Everyday Easy chapter, so-called rhubarb and custard gelato.

When we cooked this for the challenge back in May, I was disappointed that our authentic Scottish rhubarb with its green bits and red bits made for a rather brown sauce, not the girly candy cane pink in the Book.  So when I spotted all pink rhubarb in Waitrose last week I jumped at the chance to make this yummy vanilla-stewed rhubarb again.

For two nights we had this over Luca’s ice cream. Very decadent, beautifully pink, and remarkably hot on a bitter winters night….

I popped down to York this weekend, for a piss-up Reunion of Old Blowers, the alumni society of my old uni band/orchestra, Edinburgh University Wind Band. We had a grand old time, drank a bit too much, worried our parents, that sort of thing.

When in Yorkshire? Eat Yorkshire pudding!

Band had toured to York 11 years ago, and at that time a bander’s parents owned a pub in Rillington, by the name of The Coach and Horses. The night has gone down in history somewhat- I think they ended up having a lock in, and much imbibment took place. So the plan was to revisit this legendary place and perhaps re-enact somewhat. Thankfully this time there was no ‘lying down in the road outside’ and we (mostly!) made it home for 1am, very sedate.  The food was lovely pub grub, and a vast improvment on the appaling, microwaved before our very eyes trash we had at Fiesta Mehicana the night before (shame we hadn’t seen that page!). And to think we could have been at El Piano!

Simple but effective.

• Pan-fried panko fish with tomato sauce, fennel salad and leaves

I saw some fennel in the shops the other night and wanted to revisit the fennel and fish combo we had on Christmas Eve. We were in the supermarket getting stuff for tea anyway and so I selected some nice looking haddock fillets.

We did the seasoned flour, egg, panko thang, and then quickly fried these. To accompany the fish I whipped up a lovely tomato sauce, á la ma Mère. On the side, a fennel and lemon juice salad, some normal mixed leaves with toms and olives, and a steaming pile of fragrant rice. It was a rare treat!