The Sacred Art of Eating

I was walking towards the door of Waitrose in Glasgow the other night, on the hunt for something I wouldn’t get in Leith (I think it might have been thick sponge wipers, how pathetic!) and through the big window spotted their smoked mackerel in the end of a chiller cabinet. I was sold!

We used to have mackerel fairly often when I was a little ‘un and I really like it but for some reason it isn’t really on my internal shopping list. Perhaps because I never really make it to the fishmongers (and our lovely, lovely fishmonger on Ferry Road appears to have closed!).

Dougal and I feasted like Kings on this for lunch at the weekend. Brilliant in a toasted bagel with Southfield Dip, lemon juice and parsley.

Sadly I forgot to take it for lunch on Monday or Tuesday so I think the final fillet (of four) may have to go in the bin. I know it’s smoked and all but how long does it last once the packet is opened? It’s not been handled at all. Who’s to say. I shall sniff….

For dinner Santa brought Dougal a rather lovely little plate, described as a tapas plate. Santa also brought him a Waitrose mixed spanish cured meats platter as Santa has ever such discerning taste, so she does.

On Friday we did our own attempt at Tapas in order to do these components justice.

I didn’t use any especially authentic recipes, more just what I got a feel for from reading around online. But the dishes comprised, clockwise from bottom: Champiñones al Ajillo; Cured Meats; Gambas al Ajillo; Chorizo a la Sidra.

All tasted and looked pretty stonking. The prawns were slightly marred by this being a last-minute-planning meal. The best Leith could come up with on a Friday evening was teeny frozen prawns. Not very substantial, hardly the big beady eyed beasts I’d envisaged. But truth be told it didn’t matter as the flavours were there- it was just a bit like eating weirdly meaty popcorn! The chorizo in cider wasn’t quite in the Oh my days! league of when I had it with Uncle John and Anna in Muswell Hill in London in 2000, but sometimes you can never recreate the first time!

I sent Dougal to the Chinese Supermarket the other day to pick up a new bottle of Nam Pla (he came back with Cock : Fish Sauce) and golly but didn’t he come back with dumplings too. We cracked the packet open the other night.

So they look a bit plain and uninspired on the outside but by golly these pork and coriander babies were good. We dipped them in soy sauce and sesame oil (our best imitation of Chop Chop eating) and served with a Ken Hom Chinese Broccoli salad (vast improvement on the rubbish Thai one the other day and a bit of a favourite at my Mum and Dad’s) and some simple oniony noodles.

For pudding (it had been quite a light tea) I threw in a bit more Chinese theme. Which is to say I had ice cream (not at all Chinese) but I topped it with crystallised stem ginger. A topping I absolutely love but not one I eat often as Dougal despises these sophisticated golden orbs of joy!

Neat little meal and the great thing is there are loads more dumplings in the freezer. They are as easy to cook as filled pasta and are also local. Judging by the address on the back of the packet these are from the team that now also run Chop Chop and make dumplings for Sainsbury’s. I wonder whether they are the same dumplings only in communist-style packaging at proper Chinese prices?

It’s true, sometimes we do cheat. Eat, you know, ready meals. Somehow filled pasta doesn’t feel too much like cheating but supermarket curry certainly does. But someone pointed out to me that really it’s not so different to buying a takeaway. So I don’t feel so bad.

Anyway, over Christmas, D and I picked up one of those ‘Meal for Two’ deals at a supermarket- two tubs of thai curry (one ‘thai green’, the other ‘thai red’- quality stuff, natch), two spring rolls and some sticky rice. Which constitutes way too much food for us, so we planked one of the curries in the freezer to come back to. The thai green was pretty good, spring rolls fine, sticky rice a disappointment as it acquired all these nasty spikey hard bits when warmed by baking.

The other night I pulled the other curry (thai red- are you keeping up?) out for dinner. As it was such cheating I decided I ought to do nice sides to cheer things up, and prove I still know how to work the cooker. I found a recipe for Thai Broccoli Salad online. This was not good. I should’ve twigged from the sheer quantity of peanut butter in the recipe but I’d been thrown by measuring the broccoli in cups (which I tried to do but perhaps I got it wrong and this was my downfall)(‘Mercan readers- how do you measure something with such poor packing algorithms by volume?). I’ve not linked to the recipe because I would hate anyone to think I was endorsing it. Sweet and sticky to all the wrong degrees. It is unusual for this girl to leave broccoli on her plate but there was no question of finishing it.

Apologies but there’s not much I can do to make curry photogenic without pulling out props!

The rice worked out much better. A chance meeting with the lovely Ferdia on the train the other night (not so chance-we cross paths maybe once a week and end up sitting together once a month) put me on to the idea of cooking rice in coconut milk. I googled about a bit to work out logistics. Some people say you need to do all sorts of precise measuring and part boil/part bake/stir-stir-stir shenanigans. Other people seemed to imply that you just substitute water for rice and go!

I can tell you that if you cook rice by the 1xrice2xboilingwater-bring to boil-20mins180ºC technique that I was brought up on then it works absolutely fine to use 1 cup water and 1 cup coconut milk. The rice looks a bit weird when it comes out of the oven but it was still perfectly cooked. And so, so moreish. We didn’t quite finish it all at the time and the following day I was fantasising about it at uni.

So I expect that I’ll be doing that again. Although maybe not so soon. A couple of days later healthy diets came up at uni; on the Healthier Scotland website there were tips about improving takeaways and on the Thai page it said ’switch coconut rice for plain steamed rice’….booo.

Cripes, it was ages ago now, but we had my family over on the 2nd (prior to seeing the excellent Off Kilter at the Fezzie Theatre- catch it if you can) for a big lunch and an afternoon of Monopoly.

It being the depths of snowy winter (actually, by the morning of the second it had all melted)(the evening was another matter though!) I wanted to make something simple and warming, where the brunt of effort could be carried out in advance so that I was calm on the morning. Lasagne seemed the obvious choice.

I decided to follow a recipe on the grounds that to do lasagne off the top of my head would be to try and emulate my mother’s lasagne, and let’s face it it’ll never be good enough (for me) will it? So I turned to Hugh F-W. His recipe for lasagne was published in the Guardian in Nov 08 and, in true Hugh style, has about a million ingredients. Beef mince plus bacon plus chicken livers plus milk in the sugo? Wow! (The internet has just informed me that milk is an addition typical of Bologna, interesting). But apparently it is not a Hugh original. Seems he got it (probably via his mum) from Katie Stewart. Which wasn’t a name that jumped out at me until Dougal pointed out that she is the author of his Young Cook’s Calendar, from whence our fabby flapjack recipe comes.

Like all good sugo, this requires a long cook- three hours. It smelled and looked amazing after just one! I decided that if I were going to follow someone else’s recipe I might as well go the whole hog, infusing my milk with bay and onion to make the béchamel and then weighing the ingredients (rather than just doing it by the light of day). I bought fresh egg pasta lasagne sheets (which have the advantage of being big and square, which is nicer than the quick cook dried ones you get). I also bought a 500ml tub of beef stock from Waitrose. I wasn’t going to go for the expense, but we didn’t have any beef stock cubes, I wouldn’t really have wanted a whole packet of beef stock cubes, but most compellingly, when I picked up the tub of stock in the shop it wobbled. It was abundantly clear that this tub was chock full of protein. The real shizzle. So I bought it. As I heated it up to add to the sugo it smelled wonderful. Definitely worth going for it you need a decent stock base for something, even if it costs a lot more than stock cubes (but less than a bit of beef to roast for bones!).

All in the lasagne definitely came up to scratch. It was warm and rich and lovely, with some baguettes on the side and a wee warm courgette salad. We were stuffed and had to go and play monopoly to work up an appetite for pudding!

Dougal had made a wonderful chocolate stout cake from the Green and Black’s Chocolate Recipe Book. I’d seen Nigella’s recipe before in Feast, but this is a slightly different beast. It was black as anything and looked as if it would be quite heavy but was in fact very light and easy to eat, but with a really silky rich flavour. Gorgeous!

It was actually a bit of a fiddle to make- you have to beat 100g of cocoa (clue: a lot ) into 400ml of Guinness which is hard going- next time we’d pour the Guinness at least an hour in advance to get rid of the head. But it was well worth his effort I feel!

This morning Edinburgh was bathed in dazzling sunshine- and another 4 or 5 cm of snow, which fell last night. I decided there was nothing for it but to stride out and appreciate the views at the Botanics.

We packed up a lunch of Dougal’s bread and my mum’s New Year Ham- with mayonnaise and dijon mustard- and I filled my brand new thermos with hot chocolate. Really pushing the boat out, I used the left over blue milk I’d bought for yesterday’s lasagne. We took the last two stroopwafels from my stocking (The Leith Santa is well aware that Helen expects a stocking rich in foodstuffs!) and also pocketed D’s new hipflask, to complete the road test.

By the time we made it to the Botanics the bright winter sunshine had gone and the skies were grey. Nevertheless we enjoyed stamping around; we ate the sandwiches atop a hill and felt like kings. Cold Kings.

We had taken our squeegee with us and cleared the dedications from about two dozen memorial benches. There is one dedicated to my Granddaddy Hare at the Botanics, although I’d no idea where, and I had a fanciful idea we might find it. In any case I really like memorial benches and the idea of clearing their dedications tickled me.

Lo and behold, we found my Granddaddy’s bench! Off the main strip, so a bit more peaceful than some, and just behind the UK’s largest fossilised tree, which wins him Geek points too. This seemed a fitting time to crack open the hot chocolate (we declined to sit down- the snow was frozen to the benches so even with squeegee they were pretty unappealing) and eat our biccies.

The hot chocolate was creamy and wonderful, but best of all, steaming hot- hot enough to form a skin, and hot enough to need blown on before drinking. We shared two cupfuls before our feet began to freeze on the uncleared path, at which point we moved on. Down at the new entrance way (which I watched being built as I cycled to and from work since we moved to Leith) we had the pleasure of bumping into John and Julie and the weans. There was also a smashing exhibition of craftspieces made from a Wych Elm which had had to be felled at the botanics- although sadly, for an exhibition about a wood with a fantastic grain, you weren’t allowed to touch anything.

A lovely, lovely day out. New Year’s Resolution is to take a full thermos out whenever walking is anticipated!

The ice, more than anything, kept us from our invited shindig on Hogmanay. That and the aforementioned rubbish buses. So we decided to have a party for two!

We put our party gear on…

…watched the fireworks from beside our lovely tree…

… we even had our own fireworks!…

..there was Champagne, and scrummy nibbly bits- D’s finest pain de campagne, parma ham, smoked salmon, sundried tomato stuffed olives, cornichons…

…there was no standing in the slushy snow, but plenty of lolling on the sofa…

…and in the morning it was an easy skip to the kitchen for a New Year’s Breakfast of Irn Bru, Coffee, Pancakes, Bacon, Maple Syrup and Lizzie’s raspberry jam…magik :o)

If anyone hadn’t noticed, in September I quit my job to go to university. You know, for a second time. I had two leaving do’s, to allow for maximal food consumption.

For my formal do, the lab all went to the frankly marvellous Calistoga for a Wine Tasting Dinner. We’d opted for a Snazzy tasting (as opposed to the shorter Snappy option- they’ve all been renamed now however) which gave us 75 mins in which to be talked through five wines (and a mystery wine at the end to try and identify!) with canapés along the way, before going on to a three course dinner with coffee. My boss very kindly offered to buy wine for dinner, based on our group’s favourites from the tasting. Luckily for him none of the wines we tasted came in too pricey —although we did all love the mystery wine which retails at £20 (or the bargainous 2 for £25, not sure why I haven’t been back to pick two up!)—and they sell their wines in the restaurant for retail+£5.

Whilst I was a little surprised and disappointed that this included only one round of canapés it was nevertheless great fun and well received by everyone. We discovered that some people really like Shiraz where others do not, that Austin can spot a Zinfandel at twenty yards, and that yes, you can taste the difference in a well chosen bottle of expensive wine. We all also agreed that we’d be happy to pay fifteen or twenty pounds for a bottle of wine (circumstances prevailing) if only we knew it would be nice when we got it home. The biggest fear with spending that kind of money is that you’d get something unpalatable.

Dinner was scrummy too although by the end I had consumed rather too much to really taste my pudding- one of Calistoga’s famous pancake cheesecakes. I was then thrust into the spot light for a speech….I had taken some refreshment at this stage, so I fear was rather rambling. However I am told I said lots of really nice things about the lab, so I came off okay!

After that they indulged me with dancing at the Citrus Club. I was wearing uncharacteristically high heels (enough for Pink Justin to not recognise me ‘that looks like Helen- but Helen’s not that tall’) and had drunk an uncharacteristic amount so danced like no-one was watching and had to be held up at times. It was wonderful and I was ever so touched that one special friend managed not to let slip all evening of her disgust for the place (some months later, in passing conversation ‘and then they decided to go to the Citrus Club, and you know how much I hate that place’) and also that so many of my colleagues stayed out dancing into the wee small hours. 80s tunes for the win!

The following week, on my last day proper, we had a Molecular Genetics Lab Bring-a-Dish Picnic.

It wasn’t a full house as a lot of people were on holiday- hence the early leaving party- but there was still an admirable feast of food. Dougal (on special request) made two types of breadsticks. Dorsy made tablet. Hayley made brie and cranberry filo parcels. Ari made an Italian chickpea and rocket salad. Corinne made chocolate boobs (or perhaps they were nipples). Donna L made frickin amazing banofee pie. Jon made a huge caprese and a massive platter of salami and cured meats. I can’t remember what I made but I can remember that no one cared as much about it as they did that did that D had made bread. Spurned!

And then they gave me presents! I was la bunny le plus happy du monde, to steal a phrase from dear old Harv.

When we went down to Dunbar to visit my folks about a month before Christmas we were met with an instruction- make a Whisky Sours wi’ this!

This was the reserved juices from a selection of citrus fruits which Ken had used that day to make glacé peel. The glacé peel would end up in the Christmas Cake; the juices in our belly that evening. Preparations had begun- some whisky had been added for a starter- but then the drinks makers had lost their nerve and it was agreed to wait for Dougal, maker of the Whisky Sour.

The educated opinon was that more whisky was needed; more was added, this was shaken, and shared between the grown ups. Quality stuff- highly recommended- never to be repeated- probably needs a new name! Whisky Marmalade?

While I was at work on Hogmanay (so busy that I ended up playing Who’s in the Bag with my boss and the service manager!) D was on holiday, and took the time to rustle up a hearty meal for a wintry night, Chilli Black Bean Stew. This was most definitely needed as the wintry weather (black ice all ower the joint in Edinburgh) and the road closures for the Hogmanay parties resulted in it taking me 1hour40 minutes to get home from work, bah!

This is a recipe I’d torn from a Waitrose magazine last year, from a section entitled Winter Vegetarian. One of my best friends is a veggie but I always feel slightly as if I am letting the side down in my cooking for her. I thought the recipes in this section were without fail promising, yet somehow failed to ever cook any of them!

Dougal had to improvise slightly; no where in Leith sells black beans on Hogmanay (and certainly not tinned ones- there was no time for soaking) so kidney beans sufficed, and tinned plum tomatoes had to substitute for tinned cherry because, frankly, where apart from Waitrose sells tinned cherry tomatoes?!? Fresh chillies were not to be had so he used some jalapeños out of a jar. Oh and he forgot the apricots, even though we had some really good ones left over from the biscotti.

Nevertheless it was blimen wonderful; these concerns do not matter and merely give us an ideal excuse to repeat the recipe, to see how it ’should’ have tasted. I thought the flavour was really interesting- the heat didn’t appear till right on the point of the swallow, so you got real depth of flavour without being hot-bombed. Perhaps with fresh chillies the heat would permeate the whole ‘length’ of the taste?