The Sacred Art of Eating

I tend to be of the ‘leftovers’ school of risottos, where any lone vegetables, final scrunts of salami or roast meat in the fridge or end-of-bags-of prawns in the freezer find a happy and multicoloured home together. I have been known in the past to make a mushroom risotto but such deviations tend to be short-lived.

I was round at Shona’s the other night and she served this WI tomato-flavoured risotto topped with rocket and roasted butternut squash. I liked it so much I cooked it myself, within the week!

The risotto itself ‘contains’ no vegetables or flavours, it is a simple fried up onion/stock cooked rice affair with tomato purée and bay leaf adding colour and subtle flavours. It is topped with fresh rocket (you can stir it through but I served it just draped on top as this was prettier) and roasted butternut squash. Preparing butternut squash is one of the dreariest jobs in the world and our knives weren’t very sharp at the time so I used half a bag of pre-prepped butternut squash and sweet potato. I always grab these at Waitrose when they are on reduced to clear and sling them in the freezer as for bulking out curry or serving with pasta they are worth their weight in gold in terms of convenience. We didn’t top with toasted pine nuts as Dougal is a) unsure about butternut squash at the best of times and b)not so keen on dishes with scatterings of pine nuts and I felt to combine the two might be a bit mean!

However the rocket on top is not to be omitted- we used lovely locally grown stuff picked up at The Village Store, although this week we’ve been on a bag of Lidl British Grown Unwashed Rocket and it’s pretty powy too. I have friends who grow it in their garden who say it is easy peasy, so why not give it a try yourself?
We are growing some little herbs from seed, including rocket, although I think they are sown too thick at the moment. But they are very pretty!

I was rather impressed with this dish. Easy (and pretty quick, for a risotto!) and tasty with interesting flavours. I think I’ll revisit this.

I appear to be amassing a collection of recipes (mostly from my Dad although some by my request) on my desktop, ‘to be cooked’. Perhaps as a mini challenge for the month of August I shall cook all the recipes he (or others) has ever sent me that I’ve never previously blogged. That might be fun!

What do you call scrambled eggs with left-over pasta mixed through? The internet is covered with references to it but no good names. I thought perhaps it might turn out to be authentically Italian but no. In any case, the other weekend at bunch-ish time, I was going to make some curried scrambled eggs, but noticed that there was a (small) amount of spaghetti sitting from the night before. It seemed logical to combine them.

Not exactly beautiful, but oh-so moreish. I fried up some garlic and spring onion, and softened a chopped tomato with the two. Then in went the snipped up spaghetti to heat through, and some warming, rather than ‘curried’ spices- tumeric, cinnamon, cumin- and several well beaten local organic free range eggs, seasoned with salt and pepper. Topped with ripped-up coriander and parsley, this was an excellent way to use up an insubstantial quantity of pasta and set us both up nicely for the rest of the day!

This time in the form of some pigs cheeks, sold by Waitrose as ‘forgotten cuts’. Also known as Bath Chaps, the fashion seems to be for braising them. These had sat in the freezer for A LONG TIME. I bought them on impulse (they were very cheap) not long after the end of the challenge, but it turned out that we had a busy schedule that week, so they went in the freezer. Once or twice I looked online for recipes (having been surprised to discover they didn’t get a significant mention in Meat) but didn’t really feel inspired.

However, Dougal insisted recently that it was high time we tackle them. Suddenly there seemed to be a myriad recipes online. The Waitrose website even had one, which I suppose makes sense if they are going to sell them, but they do rather spoil the point of  a lovely cheap cut of meat by then suggesting you serve them with scallops on top!

In the end we followed this recipe, braising our cheeks in cider. When it came to unwrapping them they were much larger than I’d remembered!

We loaded all this into the pan; browning the meat first before giving it a fizzy bubble bath in cider and whacking it in a lowish oven for an hour and a half.

The house filled with wonderful smells- very French. We shared out the remaining cider and prepared to tuck in to our meat with some buttered tagliatelle on the side. It looked a bit watery but we’d followed the instructions exactly (well, okay, apart from using onions instead of shallots and chestnut mushrooms rather than button) so we decided to give it a go.

The wateriness meant this really wasn’t a very beautiful dish. But Oh My! did it ever taste good. The meat was meltingly soft like a slow cooked stew, and the combo of flavours took me back to chalets and snow and French bread.

However we both agreed that it was generally too wet for our tastes. The following night we ate the leftovers with rice having first added more mushrooms (the other half of the original packet we’d bought) and then vigorously boiled it down to reduce the juice. Not very green but exceptionally tasty and a great improvement. I shall be looking out for pig cheeks again!

Yet again we’ve been at Leith’s Village Store, and yet again come home with some scrummy goods:

Broad beans, more peas in pods, and beetroot- this time the right colour! We scrutinised the beets on sale and noted that some were very pink skinned, whilst others were darker purple with the colour continuing up the stem, rather than green stems. The latter did not disappoint! But I digress.

I have never in my life cooked with broad beans. I figured the internet would see me right, and it did! In the end I arrived at the Good Food Website and baked Ainsley Harriot’s Broad Bean and Lancashire Tart. I’d only really bought broad beans to do for two, and this was a full sized tart, so we supplemented the beans with the fresh peas. I couldn’t get lancashire in Leith on a Sunday night, so opted for Wensleydale instead- I say opted but it was more a case of what there was in Co Op.

We invited LeCabinet and El Ferd round to share this with us; they brought some lovely cold white wine and didn’t mind at all that we were running a bit behind schedule. I’d not made pastry nor blind baked a tart case in about eight years (apart from a couple of abject failures recently) so this was a little testing at times, but turned out just scrummy. Left overs went into packed lunches the following day: delish.