The Sacred Art of Eating

We had a wee crowd of friends over the other night, for eats and hanging out. I’d asked Dougal to pick up meringues and double cream as I already had strawbs (and in the freezer, raspberries and ‘mixed fruit’) and had in mind some sort of foxy eton mess.

This plan didn’t bear out: we were all too full of other yummy foods (cornichons and pickled onions, greek salad, Ken’s funky beetroot, roasted tomato tart and Dougal’s pizzas) to face pudding. So the ingredients stayed put in the fridge.

The following morning, not wanting the strawberries to go to waste, I improvised. It turned out Dougal had accidentally bought extra thick double cream, so no whipping was needed. A meringue in the bottom of the bowl, topped with a heap of strawberries and a blob of cream made for a really simple Eton Mess. The piece de resistance, however, was the idea of snipping across the top some of the left-over mint I’d bought for the Greek salad. That mint goes well with summer fruits is one of those ideas you know that you know…but which is nevertheless pleasantly surprising to rediscover! This tasted fantastically fresh and I would definitely repeat the minty addition in future.

As part of Challenge 2008, Dougal and I agreed that last year would be the year we both got to grips with anchovies. It hasn’t been totally sucessful- I still find them a little overwhelming- but I am now cooking with them and not shying away from dishes in restaurants merely because the little fishy bastards are mentioned.

In light of this, my Dad recommended this Nigella dish (again, from Feast) as an anchovy-rich dish which didn’t taste too fishy! Simply called Pasta with Sauce (we went for Linguine, in the absence of Bigoli or Bucatini) Nigella advises telling your guests it is ‘Venetian Sauce’ if you don’t want to fess up to the main ingredient.

The hit of the anchovies is tempered by the base of the sauce, slow cooked minced onion with a little sugar and milk to sweeten. Lashings of flat leaf parsely add a strong herby tone and the overall flavour is rich and onion-y, more than anything. Dougal ate a heap and came back for seconds-quite a rarity.

Nevertheless I was a bit out of my comfort zone. I found the texture a bit fazing, you could feel the little spiny prickles of the fish, even though the fillets had been stirred and fried into mushy oblivion.  I didn’t go back for seconds- very unusual for me where pasta is involved- and the left overs languished, ending up in the bin.

I honestly wonder how much of my discomfort was to do with my preconceptions. If someone else had handed me a plate of pasta, told me it was Onion Sauce, would my initial happy chomping persisted to the end of the plate? Hard to know. Must keep trying!

A rather foxy little tea, comprising a Tuna Niçoise-inspired salad and some haloumi over lentils.

I must have had a good day at work as I came home and threw together a couple of really scrummy little salads. The haloumi was a two-parter. Firstly I made a base, frizzing up chunks of yellow and orange peppers and courgette in garlic oil, before stirring through some ready-cooked puy lentils (smashing things!) and chunks of avocado and seasoning the whole lot with a good squeeze of lime juice and a liberal sprinkling of cayenne pepper. On top was griddled thick-cut haloumi, seasoned with lots of lime juice, and a sprinkling of parsely.

The main part of the meal was a Helen-style Niçoise salad: sweet romain lettuce; mixed baby leaves; boiled potatoes; boiled eggs, sundried tomatoes; fine green beans; wanky albacore tuna; a smattering of anchovies (we’re getting there!) and a mustardy dressing. I can’t remember, there might also have been black olives on my side of the plate.

Either way it was fab. We ate it all with a really cold, crisp New World White- I wish I could remember what- and talked ourselves, pink-cheeked, into the night. I am dead excited about this transition into spring and summer, the opportunities now to eat salads for tea and not feel empty and cold at the end. When the clocks change we’ll be able to have the blind open and sunlight at tea time- and it’ll feel like it did when we first moved in. Magic!

There are several of us at work who periodically pick up the recipe cards in Waitrose; as you know Dougal and I have had mixed results with them of late, but generally I find them fairly trustworthy. A friend picked up a Spring/Easter special which I felt was generally a bit dull over all, but which contained an apple pudding which caught my eye.

Jazz Apples, with their rosy skins still on, are sautéed in butter for a bit, before being baked in the oven in a sweet floury, eggy batter, a bit like a pudding Toad In The Hole.

I can see why the recipe asked for the skins to be left on- you can see the pretty pink colour has seeped into the surroundings of the apples- but they did make eating this a bit hard work. The batter and apple flesh were very soft but the skins remained pretty tough, even though I’d cooked the apples for probably longer than I ought to have.

The flavours were all there- sweet carby base, fruity apple notes- but the total effect was a bit lacking. Similarly, this tasted good cold but did end up unappeallingly rubbery. I was almost tempted to hide it when I took leftovers in for lunch at work!

This has encouraged me to explore further into appley puddings though. Anyone got a nice recipe for apple sponge? I might explore the apple charlotte recipe in Delia’s Complete Cookery Course. Or perhaps I ought to get a proper pastry lesson from my mum and also learn to make proper apple pie!

After a dull week- not a single foodie photo went onto the camera, and we ate a lot of snatched pasta + butter + parmesan type meals, we decided on Sunday to take the time to follow a recipe. We have also been feeling, acutely, the loss of society and friendship the Challenge gave us. In 2008 barely a week went by without us having a friend or two over for food. Sometimes we cooked for different friends multiple times in one week. This year, NOT ONCE have I had friends over for dinner. We cooked for a big group when we had our weekend in Galloway (perhaps more on that later) and I’ve thrown together food for my family a few times, which has been brilliant…but over all we’ve really let the 2008 side down.

This won’t do! Aiming to recreate the early 2008 ‘Pudding and a Pot of Tea’ idea, we invited a bunch of folk over for Monopoly and Chocolate Cake. In the event, only stalwart HarveyNick could make it (although LeCabinet didn’t get the message until days later and followed up with an invite to hers for dinner, so not all bad!) but that just meant more cake all round.

This glorious beastie is the Malteser Cake from the Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame in Nigella’s Feast. Feast is a gorgeous book and whenever I browse it (it’s a properly browseable tome) I find myself thinking  ‘oooh, I must make that…and that….ooh, and that’. Needing to act on such notions and because I like Maltesers a lot meant this cake was an obvious choice.

Both the cake and the butter icing have Horlicks through them, which gives the cake a lovely malty warmth. The actual choccy sponges are very light and spongey, almost rubbery but not in a bad way! It simply means that despite a hefty load of butter icing you don’t feel too sunk after a two- or three-malteser slice.

There’s a new cake club thingy started at work; once a fortnight people bring in cake and people pay per slice, with the money going to work to support Burmese refugees on the Thai border. In the winter it is soup every Tuesday, and this cake thing is a new effort for summer. I never contributed to the Soup Club as 8L of soup is a bit of a liability to carry by bike or by bus. However a couple of tins of cakes & biccies should be manageable by bus. I reckon I’ll include one of these Malteser Cakes in my first effort, just after Easter.

Sometimes a girl just gets a notion to make a real swanky, like-I-paid-for-this breakfast for herself. This porridge (oatmeal, for my North American readers) was such a breakfast:

Unusually, I made the porridge with milk rather than water. To top, I toasted some more oats, and then scattered with some recently defrosted rasps (for that slightly cold bite!) and a glug of double cream. It tasted as good as it looked.

Unfortunately I did then have indigestion for most of the rest of the morning. Such indulgences are not to be taken on trivially, it seems!

Nothing like a bit of late night last minute cooking to really add the edge to a birthday gift. Last year I sliced garlic and chillies and ginger for the flavoured oils, and this year D and I decided to make Biscotti for my Dad’s birthday. The rational was that the recipe said they went very well with Limoncello (in fact it provided a do-it-yourself recipe). I knew my Dad really likes Limoncello and so there was a fair chance there’d be some in the house; failing that he was about to head to Italy for a skiing holiday so any absence could easily be remedied!

We used James Martin’s recipe for Apricot and Nut Biscotti. The great bit is the recipe is on the BBC Food Site (albeit with a slightly different name) so I can share it with you!

The instructions seemed a little faffy and vague, but in the event turned out to exactly describe what we did. Starting at approximately 10:45pm, you make up a slightly wet biscuit dough, and bake it in fat sausages. These flatten out in the oven to give long oval biccies. At about half eleven you then slice these into dead authentic biscotti shapes, and bake for a second time.

A little after midnight they are ready to cool, and then, by morning, eat-dead hard and crunchy but not inedible, and packed with fruit (apricots, dates, dried strawberries!!) and nuts (pistachios, almonds and hazelnuts). We’ve bits and pieces of ingredients left- half packets of nuts and so on- so I think we’ll probably make another batch with a more random mix of flavours to finish these up before they go stale. The recipe does yield a LOT of biccies though, so we might half the quantities. Or take some to work.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this recipe. As I said we went in blind, late at night after a third of a bottle of wine with no real idea of what we were doing, and the results were just dandy. And don’t they look the part? Perfect gift food!

There was a fair bit of swearing went on during the construction of these buns, but they turned out okay in the end!

Dougal made the buns, as they are bread-based. However, the bread is then accessorised with a big dollop of ricotta and a generous peppering of blueberries. The last time he made these, the blueberries kept bursting and popping out of the dough and generally rolling across the tabl, so this time he took the alternative suggestion of using frozen blueberries (which are much cheaper anyway!).

Let me tell you, the air turned blue when my boyfriend added them blueberries. As you might expect, with hindsight, the frozen berries completely killed any life in the dough.

He must have persevered though, as the next thing I knew, fabulous smells were wafting through the house and then I was presented with these beauties:

Dougal took most to work, but we also took some to our signing group and they were well received everywhere. It probably helps that they look so beautiful, to start with. The arty paper wrappers aren’t an affectation either; we just used normal paper muffin cases the first time and they stuck like made but with the baking parchment squares they were neat and eating-in-public friendly as you could like.

So perhaps forewarned is fore-armed, as it seems the frozen fruit weren’t such a problem after all. Which is a good thing, as there are more in the freezer!