The Sacred Art of Eating

Dougal and I had a couple of nights of culture this week at a two-part performance of His Dark Materials trilogy at the theatre. The plays were long and so had an early 7pm kickoff- tricky for me to get home from work for, if we were to eat before hand. So we decided to eat afterwards!

This scrumptious dish is a Lady Claire MacDonald/Scotsman recipe which came to me via my dad. I had spied the note that it could be prepared entirely in advance and then grilled at the point of eating, so I made this on Wednesday night. It is pretty easy to prepare although I ought to have allowed myself a little more time- I ended up squeezing out rather hot water from the blanched spinach!

On Thursday, Dougal took it out of the fridge after work to come up to room temperature, and after the play we bunged it under the grill before wiring in with glee. If we’d had it at a proper tea we would probably had some other vegetables or salad or maybe some of D’s bread on the side; as it was it was half past ten and so we just scoffed (most of ) it au naturel.

It was lovely; the baby spinach still tasted very fresh and green (I’ve never actually cooked with spinach myself before so my main experience of it is cooked to death in saags); the eggs (as instructed) were in that lovely squishy place just beyond soft-boiled but not yet hard-boiled (I wish I had a picture!) and the cheese sauce was tart and added piquancy to it all. I had been a little sceptical of only using cheddar in the cheese sauce, but it was a nice Canadian mature and it seemed to do the trick. Finally, there was grilled cheese (cheddar and parmesan) on top too, which as we know is the mark of a classy dish!

Let me tell you, it was bloody brilliant cold the next day at work, too.

I really miss the Challenge, so I do. Don’t get me wrong, it was a pain at times, and there were times we (I) really resented it- and more than a few tears in Waitrose, but hey, I have incontinent eyes- but I genuinely miss the variety it gave to our cooking and eating.

Of late we’ve been a little stuck in a rut. There’s not been much blogging because there’s not been a great deal of novel eating going on. We had pasta with a variation on soffritto or roasted veggies -or a combo of both- I think, three, nights in a row last week? Don’t get me wrong, it was gorgeous. But it was throw it together out of the fridge cooking and somehow didn’t merit blogging.

Last night I put together a tea that was 100% Nigella-inspired. A proper legacy for us. It was nowt more than a simple thai (red) curry. Thai curry pastes were something I’d experimented with but not had any luck with pre-Nigella. This dish was mid-way between the Red Prawn and Mango curry that I did for D’s birthday last year (could the rapidly approaching next birthday have anything to do with my having revisited both of the dishes from his birthday meal?) and the Curry in a Hurry from the Storecupboard SOS chapter at the end of the book.

The butternut squash and prawns were straight out of the Red Prawn curry- I had a half packet of prawns in the freezer as were the some ready-prepped butternut squash I’d bought once to make up the third part of a 3for2 deal. On the other hand, the meat (Turkey in this case, again a half packet out of the freezer) soya beans and peas were straight out of Curry in a Hurry.

Cooking with Turkey, soya beans or to some extent, butternut squash or coconut milk, would never have happened pre-Nigella. The thai pastes were Nigella-empowerment and the Wok Oil that was the base of the dish was 100%  Lawson. It’s only right that a year of cooking one book might change the way I cook- send me off down a different evolutionary path to my parents, in cooking terms- and given the hot and yummy tea we had both last night and tonight I think that’s no bad thing!

On Sunday we hosted the second of what we hope will be a long running event, Potluck and Prose. The idea is simple; in these recession-hit times (did I really just write that?) sharing and swapping is cool, so: bring a book, bring a dish and bring a bottle!

The first P&P was hosted by Bex, the lovely evil genius mastermind behind all this. I took some standard issue Delia’s Oven-Roasted Ratatouille, which went down brilliantly as always. Great staple for parties that one. We had got the wrong end of the stick about its start time so I don’t think D brought any bread, and further to that no pictures were taken, how sad. However, we did offer to host the second swap.

So, one month later and I had really enjoyed Timoleon Vieta Come Home whilst Dougal had failed miserably to make any headway into Swallows and Amazons, much to my disappointment. The impetus of having 12 or so strangers turn up at our house (we only really know Bex and Dave, although we’ve met most of the others at repeated parties!) did amazing things to our getting the front room finally shipshape (with some sterling help from Ken who attached the bookshelves to the walls!) and all that remained was to do some cooking!

The really nice thing about hosting a pot luck supper is that, contrary to ones instincts, there is no need to spend the day cooking frantically! A dish or two will do it. Dougal did a double batch of bread (some lovely sesame seed plaits, displayed beautifully here in his new hand-made basket) whilst I opted for a savoury and a sweet dish, just to ensure we had something of each, regardless of what the other contributors brought.

My main course was lifted entirely from a scrummy but faulty salad I had when my very kind father took me out for lunch a fortnight ago (rescuing me from the horror that was the prospect of a Ginsters sandwich for lunch for the second day running). We went up to the Dean Gallery where I had a salad of puy lentils, slow-cooked red onion, beetroot, goats cheese and rocket. It was delicious but seriously let down by the rubble-like puy lentils. Call me unsophisticated but they just weren’t cooked!

I decided to recreate the salad, using Merchant Gourmand pre-cooked Puys in order to avoid any rubbley issues. Altogether it worked pretty well; I oven-roasted my red onions for ease, rather than standing over a hot stove, but otherwise stayed pretty faithful to the original as I remembered it. Bex even recognised it from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (the sister gallery to The Dean)! My only regret is that I forgot to add any garlic; I think beetroot goes so well with lashings of garlic that if anything it was lacking in its absence (to me, at least!).

For pudding I had planned in advance- I’d got up promptly on Sunday and made Nigella’s Ice Cream Cake from the Razzle Dazzle chapter of NE- you will recall I made it for D’s birthday last year.

The making of this beaut of a cake is easy peasy- you soften some ice cream and then mix in a good quantity of scrummy things: honey roast peanuts (have faith!); chocolate chips of a variety of colours; butterscotch chips if you can lay your hands on them; broken up bourbon biscuit and smashed up Crunchie. Then the whole lot goes into a clingfilm lined springform tin and back into the freezer until just before serving. Then, the cake is topped with more bourbon and choccie chip rubble, before being sliced and served with both butterscotch sauce and a hot chocolate sauce (with a dash of Camp Coffee to give it a dark kick). Now I am absolutely certain that, having topped the cake, I turned to look for my camera to take some pics. But clearly I didn’t get that far. You’ll have to make do with the pics from last year!

The cake went down a storm; we all politely had a delicate slice each, with Dougal slicing, me pouring sauces, and Richard providing much-needed assistance catching the drips of sauce with a spoon before passing plate&spoon onto the grateful guests. After 14 portions, we reached a problem. There was a decent sized chunk left, but pretty much everyone wanted some. The solution was simple and inelegant; slather the cake with the two sauces and just let everyone wire in with spoons. It was a feeding frenzy! The on-lookers took pictures with camera phones but all that came out was a blur. Success!

Last weekend, while we were doing the below-mentioned painting, Dougal put together a batch of spelt bread. He tells me that spelt was the main cereal crop of the Romans, and I was happy to believe him because I had read elsewhere only that day about wheat being a tricky crop to grow in parts of Italy.

With the glorious sunshine flooding into our kitchen at tea time, we had bread and cheese and accompaniments for tea. Dougal felt wine was not the order of the day, so we switched to a light lager instead. We were a bit short on vegetables so our salad consisted of leaves, celery and tomato. The celery must have been really fresh as it managed to taste nutty and light and fennel-y, making for a quite extraordinary salad. I added a cut up apple to the table too, to counter the richness of the cheeses (camembert, manchego and caerphilly) and although I barely ate any of it, there was also chorizo and serrano ham.

The bread itself was very dense, not especially risen, but nevertheless not heavy. The spelt flavour was almost walnutty and was particularly suited to the cheeses but I daresay would go very nicely with nature’s finest cream cheese too. We initially went for quite doorsteppy slices, but as the bread held together very well, slimmer worked fine too, in fact I think I preferred it that way.

Next time D reckon’s he’ll work a proportion of normal white bread flour in too- a bit more gluten in the mix will give a better rise and might make for a slightly more ‘everyday’ loaf- plus one which is easier to handle on the way into the oven (these ones looked awfully close to just suddenly sinking into a heap!).

When you’ve got up on a Sunday morning and painted a wall of your living room, what do you need for lunch (breakfast in D’s case)? Fried stuff!!

The following Saturday, when you’ve done much the same with a second wall? Head off to the lovely Roseleaf with fab friends and have The Leafer for lunch, a glorious vegetarian cooked breakfast (but for good measure, topped with a slice of black pudding!) with a pint of guest ale Golden Hare (from Bath Ales, how appropriate).

The potato scones in the shot above were made with the previous night’s mustard mash. Sadly the mustard was not discernible in the potato scones, I’d rather hoped it might have been.