The Sacred Art of Eating

Anyone make a really great beetroot salad? When I spent a summer in France in 2004, I discovered that my enjoyment of beetroot could extend beyond one recipe and one alone (coming soon to a blog near you, I hope). This was an important discovery; prior to this I had rather avoided it on menus and certainly never cooked with it. Now it is one of my favourite veggies.

The recipe which changed everything for me was a simple beetroot salad; cooked beetroot (from your garden or a packet, whatever is possible) finely diced and mixed with loads of garlic, and dressed as a salad. I have tried to recreate this several times myself and yet feel I am missing something. Perhaps it is just that the original salad was eaten on a scorchingly hot day; that it was made by someone else, not me; that I probably had a beer in my hand as I ate it; I might even have spent the afternoon surfing flailing about on a surf board and building up an appetite. At the very least I was somewhere else and that can do amazing things for flavours.Nevertheless I wonder if there’s a simple fix. Do I use too much garlic? Should I use a different kind of vinegar? No vinegar at all? Is there anyone out there who can help me?

I’d been flicking through a long-discarded-by-the-bed Waitrose Recipe Booklet recently, and then a day or two later, saw some really lovely portabello mushrooms on sale.

• Mushroom and Spinach Bundles

I’ll confess, however, that I made a mistake regarding the spinach. There had been some in the fridge, we’d eaten it, I’d forgotten. So our mushroom bundles featured mixed baby leaf salad, cos one green leaf is a lot like another, right? On a similar vein, the called-for thyme looked mysteriously like parsley in ours. Who could tell?

These looked just a-mazing going into the oven, and the filling smelled pretty good too.

However, they did not survive the baking well :o(

They tasted fine- no, they tasted fantastic- but this wouldn’t be a dish you’d be serving to someone you wanted to impressed with your food styling. Possibly we didn’t tie the parcels tightly enough, so that when things began to melt and blanch the overall height changed too much. Possibly the use of household string meant the bundles sat at a slight angle, where a fine thread would have allowed them to rest flat. Who knows.

In any case it didn’t matter at all as it was just D and Me and a big pile of buttery, parmesany linguine, and divine cheesey mushroom goodness on top. Well worth the slight fiddle of making I’d say!

I was in the big useless Scotmid at the bottom of the hill last week and spotted a pack of six slices of black pudding for something like 70p. Typically we only have black pudding for the once-in-a-blue-moon fried breakfast but I was reminded of something else. Helen’s dad once cooked some kind of delicious stew for her birthday, which included slowly cooked black pudding in with everything else. I only have the vaguest recollection of what else was in the stew, so I decided to reinvent it with what I had anyway.

In the end I used

• two small onions
• a handful of spring onions
• a dozen-or-so thin slices of chorizo
• a tin of plum tomatoes
• about a pint of weak vegetable stock
• a courgette
• six slices of black pudding

The whole thing was built up in a sturdy pan in fairly short time as I was heading out the door shortly. I cooked the onions down a fair bit; not quite to the stage where they’d be suitable for onion soup but more caramelised than I usually have them. The spring onions and chorizo went in for a few minutes and then the liquid, tomatoes and courgette, cut into thick coins and then halved. The plum tomatoes were a good find, as they rarely seem much use and we always end up with more in the cupboard than is really necessary.

I brought everything to the boil while I quartered each slice of black pudding. Then I just dropped all the slices of pudding in, the lid went on and I turned the heat off completely. I came back to the house two hours later to the most amazing smell. :-) I gave it some gentle heat to move things along and made some rice alongside. Helen was late home from Glasgow that night and I think this was the best welcome home!

Leftovers the next day were eked out with a garlicky peppers concoction. I don’t think salad is the right word but I don’t know what is. It was very lovely though.

I am on my own for lunch today: Dougal is taking his mammy for a well-earned treat in the form of lunch at Calistoga (I am sad to miss out but a)she’s not my mum and b)I have work to be getting on with!) but my mother is in Italy so gets no special treatment today.

I am currently writing up a big project we’ve just finished- using Rapid Appraisal to perform a community diagnosis of the area of Anderston in Glasgow. We had to look for signs and symptoms- by interviewing people, looking at statistics, making observations, make a diagnosis of the health or otherwise of the community and then come up with what is essentially a ‘treatment plan’ for the area. We presented this as a group on Friday to an audience of our peers and some medical educators. Now I am cooped up in my wee study trying to write 2000 words on the subject. Which isn’t really enough and I’m wondering how to approach the matter. I’m not clear that the same structure as worked for a 10 minute presentation will work for the essay.

For a quick lunch giving me brain power, I cooked up some spaghetti and whilst it was on the boil, frizzed up some cooked prawns (oot the freezer) in an indecent quantity of garlic. I then tossed through some mulched up sundried toms, and at the point of mixing it all together threw in lots of toasted pine nuts. Scrummy….if a little antisocial!

Aesthetically it could have done with some green, I feel. Rocket? Basil? Had neither to hand, in any case.

I had a great wee breakfast today, sat at my kitchen table looking at sunny Leith and the still-snow-dusted Ochill’s in the distance. I had three slices of D’s finest white loaf- tasting rather French at the moment- spread with my mammy’s marmalade, raspberry jam and nutella, respectively. All washed down with two cups of keemun tea, bought at the fabby Tea Tree Tea Cafe and made in my groovy little built in strainer teapot. I almost managed to pretend that actually I was on a skiing holiday and just about to hit the slopes (this being almost the only time I have bread and jam for breakfast).

No skiing, only an essay to write. But that’s okay.

Posts with actual pictures etc returning soon. Hopefully when I’m on Spring Vacation soon I can actually do some cooking too!