The Sacred Art of Eating

Quick, easy and satisfying. With Lurid Peas.

• Gammon Steaks with Parsley

Another of the ‘Against the Clock’ recipes from Nigella Express, which seem to be designed to come together so quickly that you really have to be absolutely ready to eat from the moment you put the first ingredient in the pan. We are learning though, so had our wee potatoes cooking in advance.

Then, as my gammon steaks fried, all I had to do was overcome a lifetime’s prejudice open a tin of processed peas, heat them up and serve. A little dressing and some pan juices later and we had a proper feast. And the peas turned out to be actually quite nice.

Given that August seems to be the new Scottish word for rain, this was just what we needed.

Yikes, we cooked this so long ago that my dad was able to say to me- this is good, you should try it, but we had!

• Flash-Fried Steak with White Bean Mash

I had been looking forward to this dish a great deal; it seemed super easy to mash up a can of beans with some garlic oil and serve with hot meat.  However we didn’t feel this quite lived up to expectations. I suspect I over cooked everything: whilst I cooked the meat to the prescribed 90s a side it was well done, not really our way, and similarly the beans came out a bit dry which Dougal found hard to stomach.

However my mum and dad greatly enjoyed this but fessed up to having used a bit more oil in the beans- a visual glug rather than a careful measure. So perhaps that’s the ticket. I still reckon this meal has potential, so I expect we’ll revisit it. It was so easy, how could we not?

An almost-restaurant-posh main and a pudding reminiscent of childhood sweeties; contrasting but fabulous, and most of all over a month ago!

• Tuna Steaks with Black Beans
• Rhubarb and Custard Gelato

This meal has the dubious distinction of being one that I cooked whilst absolutely sozzled (under the watchful eye of two dashing young men, I might add!). We had gone out after work to celebrate members of my lab getting permanent posts. I’d said I’d only have one…that turned into three and then I got a phone call from Dougal saying ‘Rory is already here and you have all the food so shift!’… at which point I giggled my way home.Nevertheless the meal was a resounding success; affirmation if ever it were needed that the recipes in Nigella Express are easy peasy. The tuna steaks were just thrown on the hot griddle, requiring so little time to cook that in fact you needed to prepare your plates before hand. The black beans, straight from a can then tossed in a garlicky limey dressing were gorgeous and a stylish instant salad that I will repeat. As suggested I’d made some slow roast tomatoes the night before; these added liquid to the dish which alongside the fish and beans was important and I was sad I’d not made more (but I’d not had the foresight to buy lots of tomatoes in).The final touch was the application of a lime wedge on the plate. I wouldn’t have bothered, even though it was in the illustration in the book, but the poor plates looked half full without them. Brilliant.

Pudding sounds quite grand but was basically Rhubarb and Ice Cream. However it shouldn’t take much to convince you all that Rhubarb and Ice Cream is a pudding fit for kings and thus deserving of a grand name. I served it in whisky tumblers which looked okay but not as pretty as the sundae glasses in the book. I should very much like to know how Nigella managed to make hers so pink though- not real rhubarb I don’t think!

I had the gals round from work on Monday, and made for tea a simple dish from the lunches chapter, along with an easy but effective pud.

• Sesame Peanut Noodles
• Nectarine and Blueberry Galette

And the good ladies brought me flowers. What stars they are, the lot of them.It is fair to say that a great deal of Nigella Express is not Halal. Particularly when I’d lost my nerve in the halal butcher’s at the weekend (the man behind the counter was all grumpy with me!) and so was essentially looking for a vegetarian recipe; something I’ve bemoaned the lack of in the past. However, approaching the lunches chapter with an open mind presented to me these fabulous sticky noodles which I will certainly be making again.As it is supposed to be a lunch dish and supposed to be made in the morning before eating at a later stage, the noodles were supposed to be pre-cooked (I just used normal ones) and none of the veg is cooked at all. I had misgivings about the raw mange-touts but they were fine. Crunchy and sweet and an important crisp and fresh contrast to the sweet peanut sauce. The sauce comprised peanut butter (Skippy, bought specially for another recipe!), soy sauce, garlic oil and lime juice. There was also supposed to be sweet chilli sauce but I clean forgot about it! We didn’t think it was a glaring omission.

This was pretty tip-top and both D and I enjoyed it for lunch the following day. However I would say that Nigella clearly eats less at lunch than we did at tea, as after five of us had eaten it needed added to in order to spin it out to two further lunches. The recipe said it would give eight portions. Eight not very hungry people.

After we’d crunched and slurped our way through our noodles, I set to on pudding. I could not source ready-rolled all butter puff pastry (and having compared the ingredients of the ‘normal’ puff pastry and the all-butter puff pastry there is no doubt in my mind as to which I ought to buy) so I rolled out my slab of puff pastry; made the little frame and painted on a mixture of apricot jam and cream. It should be noted that apricot jam mixed with cream is a fabulous combination and one I would happily eat very day! This was then scattered with blueberries and nectarine and baked.

Not only did it look foxy it tasted scrummy too. Whilst the nectarine started out under-ripe, once blasted in the oven it was soft and its piquancy was a lovely counter to the sweetness of the base and blueberries. Dougal and I have since agreed that in the future we would use more fruit in this. All round though I would recommend this galette as an easy peasy way of knocking up a most impressive looking pud (but not one for you Mike- this definitely gets away with looking messy!)

With RandomAndy staying, it seemed an ideal opportunity to work through a good number of recipes and have a proper big dinner.

• Anglo-Asian Lamb Salad
• Brandied-Bacony Chicken
• Potato and Mushroom Gratin
• Instant Chocolate Mousse
• Chocolate Mint Cookies

There was quite a lot of food in this meal, so I shall try not to waffle and to cover only the salient points!

The Anglo-Asian Lamb Salad was just smashing. It was sweet (redcurrant jelly) and acid (rice vinegar, soy sauce) and hot (chilli and spring onion) and moist (the lamb got to sit in a little bag of foil after being fried) and crisp (salad leaves a-plenty). This added definite posh factor to the meal and, what with it being really easy to make (you assemble the dressing whilst the meat is frying, and then basically mix it all together) will definitely be going on our ‘to be cooked again’ list.

The roast chicken and accompanying gratin were a bit of a let down, mostly because they gave away the fact that I apparently cannot carve a chicken. At all. Part of this is a dire need for a decent sharp knife (to be bought with the house move next month!) but a lack of basic skills and wisdoms didn’t help either. Instead of bringing a marvellous roast chicken to the table or presenting everyone with their cuts of choice, we ended up with a rather sad little plate with one or two slices of meat and then some shreds. As for the gratin, I found it a bit wet. However Dougal had let the milk that the potatoes were cooked in catch and as such a lot of it got left in the pan; we added a bit more to compensate but perhaps over did it. I like the concept though, of a mushroomy potato bake, so I may try this again.

The instant chocolate mousses, shelved the previous week on account of containing non-vegetarian marshmallows, were pretty good despite possibly being subject to abuse at the construction stage. You melt the marshmallows and chocolate and butter together and then fold this mixture into vanilla’d whipped cream. I suspect I ought to have let the chocolate mix cool more so that it was a similar consistency to the cream. As it was I was attempting to fold hot and runny into stiff and cooler, with predictably poor results.

Nevertheless, the dark little pots ended up quite foamy in content and looked pretty smart in our wee white ramekins. (Not smart enough for Dougal who felt the need to adorn his with Barbie Sprinkles.) We had quite a bit left over; over and above the six ramekins called for we had a further two whole and two half portions left over.

The chocolate mint cookies served as a high cal, high chocolate chip after dinner mint. I’d kept the pudding deliberately small to give me the opportunity to cook these cookies which have been on my ‘excited about’ list for some time. Mint chocolate is one of my all-time greatest weaknesses. These are in fact simple double chocolate chip cookies which are then glazed with a highly minty chocolatey glaze. They were pretty potent and, on account of being deliberately small (ish-I’d make them smaller next time) very easy to put several away of!

However, most curiously, by the following day, all the mint flavour had gone. GONE, I tell thee! Eaten up by the angels, it’s the only likely explanation. Most upsetting and more than a little perturbing.

We all went to bed heaving and stuffed. All, that is, except me. I had to make a start on preparing breakfast…

Guest post written by Dougal Stanton.

Sometimes I think Nigella Lawson has such a reputation for the kooky kitchen stuff that she gets given daft things just because she’s actually likely to use them. There was honestly no way we were buying a burger press just for the sake of two beef patties. That just wasn’t happening.

• High-Speed Hamburger with Fast Fries

For some reason it’s a lot easier to make good burger photographs than it is to make good burgers. Think of how disappointing a McDonald’s meal is compared to the photograph. Finding good burger buns is particularly hard; most of those in our nearest supermarket were very sad. Even Nigella’s baps looked a bit disappointing (rimshot).

And then, for such a simple meal, making burger meat is so very messy. The burger technique outlined here was simple and clean by comparison. I’m sure if there had been a burger press handy I would not have needed to dirty my hands at all. A few minutes each side on the griddle and you’re well on the journey to meaty heaven.

If you’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, now it’s time to re-enact it in your own kitchen. The chip-making process is hilarious and gives you good excuse to wield a rolling pin like you’ve just discovered the wonder of tool-making. You literally bash the potatoes into little broken bits. Monolith and triumphant soundtrack not included.

This is the kind of meal you could look forward to making after a hard day.

Guest post written by Dougal Stanton.

The thing about most of Nigella Express is that it’s supposed to be good food made easily. Which generally translates to “with as little fuss as possible”. Sometimes she achieves this aim of “easily” by making the fuss more concentrated.

• Mirin-Glazed Salmon

This dish appears in the chapter called Against The Clock. She means it this time. It’s one of those dishes that requires hundreds of little bowls with sauces and dips and marinades and such, all prepared and ready to go. Then at the last moment — like when your girlfriend gets back from the gym — you frantically soak it and throw it in the pan and oh-my-god-it’s-burning! what’ll-I-do-now? quick-panic!-panic!-panic! it magically all comes together.

I am becoming better at organising myself with the relaxed pace of most of Nigella’s recipes but this had me completely terrified. Inevitably I’m halfway through doing three things at once when I realise there’s no salad or whatever, and by that stage there’s nothing I can do about it.

The result was pretty good though, and the spring onion shreds really made a nice flavour contrast.

There’s a certain relaxed familiarity that comes with experience. I don’t know what it is, but something in the back of your mind that lets you concentrate on background tasks as well as the main task. I am still at the stage where, when things get tough, all my multitasking ability goes out the window.