The Sacred Art of Eating

It’s been a year since I finished The Challenge. I spent lots of time last year saying ‘this will definitely be cooked again’- so, one year on, what have we gone back to?

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry -a great many meals inspired by this, as well as ‘proper’ repeats.
• Caramel Croissant Pudding – about three times! Including just last night, in celebration of the acquisition of some bourbon.
• Rhubarb and Custard Gelato – when I found some pink rhubarb, and I even blogged about it!
• Steak Slice with Lemon and Thyme -at least once!
  
• Flourless Chocolate Brownies, and
• Hot Chocolate Sauce -when my cousin and her man came for dinner. Very well received :o)
  
• Goujons of Sole with Dill Mayonnaise- I am fairly sure we did this but perhaps without any dill. But I remember frying!
• Mango Split
• Home-made Instant Pancake Mix, – absolutely loads. It is our standard recipe for ‘breakfast’ pancakes now. We even did it for D’s parents and Granny on Christmas morning this year.
• Blueberry Syrup for Pancakes- sometimes, but not always, when we make the above. Ridiculously easy, ridiculously good!
• Maple Chicken ‘n’ Ribs- still can’t get them as sticky as I want. Still meaty and good.
• Moonblush Tomatoes
• High-Speed Hamburger with Fast Fries- fast fries, certainly. Not sure about the burgers.
  
• Tuna Steaks with Black Beans- yup, although we couldn’t get pinto beans in Leith, funnily enough!
• Nectarine and Blueberry Galette-right here!
  
• Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundae- well the sauce anyway. Tis gorgeous!
• Chowder with Asian Flavours
• Rapid Ragù- winter warming fare.
  
• Jumbleberry Crumble
• Doughnut French Toast
• Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies- they don’t hold their own weight though, so are not to be advised for taking to parties!
  
• Potato Cakes with Smoked Salmon- we haven’t re-cooked these. But D bought smoked salmon today. And the night is yet young!
• Duck Breasts with Pomegranate and Mint- again, I have not yet re-cooked. But I do have two duck breasts sitting in the freezer waiting specifically for the right occasion.
• Ice Cream Cake- for a party, it went down very well! So fast, in fact, that I got no pictures of the finished product!
• Mexican Hot Chocolate 1 2 Properly- Essentially whenever we have any kahlua!
  
• Rocky Road Crunch Bars- a LOT
  
• Sesame Peanut Noodles- quick, easy and very satisfying. Plus once you’ve bought beansprouts you might as well make a massive amount.
• Snowball- repeated a couple of times and then it dawned on me, the reason I didn’t rate it was that I don’t like lemonade! How obvious! Dougal has since introduced me to drinking advocaat with ginger ale. Much better!
• Festive Fusilli- is only festive if you serve it at a feast. Otherwise is sunblush tomato, vodka and mascarpone pasta!
• Marshmallow Crispy Squares- at least once. I needed to use the rice crispies up! And they are scrummy.
• Garlic Oil- eventually it dawned on me to use a food processor to cut the garlic up. We need a new bottle now, in fact.
• Salade Niçoise- even with the inclusion of anchovies!

17% repeat rate. I predicted at least 10 at dinner tonight, so I suppose I’m not wrong. Looking through the list tonight it is clear that I like making sweet things! I think the recipes we repeated were probably more representative of low-faff rather than those recipes we were most excited about last year. This might be because the biggest surprises came from recipes I would never normally have bothered with before…and which apparently I am not inclined to go back to! A revision of the list tonight was good though- now I have some fresh ideas for 2010!

Pancake day! Whoop!

We were out at the movies (i wouldn’t bother) on Pancake day, and so didn’t have time for a full savoury fillings, sweet fillings bonanza. Instead we headed straight to the sweet stuff.

After sating myself with lemon and sugar (I’m a puritan at heart) I began to experiment. The above creation, is half Nutella (but of course) and half Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce, à la Nigella Express. In the folded together image you can see that the nutella (top fold) is slightly more opaque than the fudge. Flippin’ brilliant it was!

Dougal recently told a friend that he thought the best recipe in Nigella Express was the Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce. He did come up with this rather hastily, but while I would guess I’d disagree about it taking the Gold Award, it probably does feature in my top ten. A Top Ten that I really ought to get round to compiling and sharing with you all…

Absolutely bloody marvellous Friday night tea. Tasted fantastic, and zero effort to put together which is what you need after a long week!

• Scallops and Chorizo
• Chickpeas With Rocket and Sherry

I had been looking forward to this dish for ages- scallops, chorizo, chickpeas, rocket and cumin (in the chickpeas) are five of my favourite foods/flavours- but I think I’d held back because I feared it couldn’t possibly taste as good in reality as it did in my head.

How wrong I was. The scallops (small, and then halved to give many  thin discs) were perfectly cooked and still managed to hold their own against the powerful chorizo which was hot and spicy and just the right kind of greasy. The chickpeas provided an earthy contrast and the wilted leaves helped you kid on you were getting a vegetable. I’d just use plain rocket next time, rather than rocket salad, but believe you me there will be a next time (perhaps even this year!).

Another of Nigella’s super-quick dishes, with dinner on the table before you realise you’ve started cooking!

• Chicken Schnitzel with Bacon and White Wine

Day Two of our ‘Cook Nigella Express Every Night’ Week and we had this simple supper- only four ingredients. I had been putting this easy peasy recipe off for some time as chicken escalopes are called for, and I couldn’t find them in the shops. I could’ve asked in a butchers but I always worry about how to pronounce the word escalope and so wimped out! Funnily enough Waitrose do turkey escalopes but not chicken. In the end I bought organic chicken mini-fillets and they seemed to do the trick.

This was easy peasy to cook although if I made it again I would a)use more bacon and b) not reduce the wine that the pan is deglazed with quite so much, as it needs to be a bit saucy. We had this with green beans (not enough!) as suggested but added in basmati rice for some starch. I could have eaten about three times as much but Dougal ate his fill.

The following day we took Nigella up on the suggestion of snipping the leftovers into some cream and parmesan, warming through and stirring through spaghetti. Schnitzel with noodles, ja!

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.