The Sacred Art of Eating

Anchovies. Yes indeed.

• Turkey Fillets with Anchovy, Gherkin and Dill, and
• Mustard Caper Sauce for Broccoli

The big fat shameful secret of my foodie existence is that I do not like anchovies. I had always hoped that the time would come, that I would turn into a grown up and suddenly discover a taste for them. They are on the exclusive list- possibly in Gold position- of the three foods I would not thank you for feeding me (Melon and Baked Beans take the other two slots). Dougal shares this aversion to the small salty things.

However, there are three recipes in the book (plus a salad dressing) which use anchovies, and so Dougal and I agreed that 2008 might be the year that we come to appreciate them. Last night was our first attempt.

If truth be told, I probably didn’t give the anchovies a true chance to shine in this dish. The turkey is flash fried in olive oil that you have first cooked some anchovies in, but my pan was a bit too hot when I added the anchovies, and so I reckon its possible I cooked all of the fishy flavour out of them. You got wee wiffs when eating, but otherwise they only added meatiness. Of course, there is a chance that that is all they were meant to add.

Over all, whilst a bit fiddly to make, this was a very tasty and relatively easy to put together meal. There are lots of bits of measure out- anchovy, gherkin, dill for the turkey, butter, mustard, lemon juice, capers for the broccoli- plus you have to marshall the boiling of potatoes and the cooking of broccoli alongside it all. However, I think the effort would definitely be worth it if a)there were two of you cooking or b) you were cooking for friends.

Dill and Gherkins are my flavours du jour at the moment, and as predicted in Nigella Express contrasted well with the plainer turkey. The capery broccoli was nice but I reckon I’d add a bit more lemon juice in future. We still have turkey in the freezer and anchovies in the fridge, so I guess we’ll revisit this sooner rather than later.

So…one anchovy down…some more to go.

A wee pre-taster of doing one of the puddings properly.

• Butterscotch Fruit Fondue

Back in June, I made the Ice Cream Cake for Dougal’s Birthday Tea. You will recall that this cake takes two sauces to top it, one of which is the butterscotch sauce from the above recipe. Even though we tried very hard (Dougal even got artistic, see below) we simply couldn’t finish these sauces up at the same time as the ice cream cake.

One night, I had some strawberries and I had the butterscotch sauce- it would have been wrong of me not to try the two together, right?

I can tell you now: I am really looking forward to doing this recipe for real!

I had been pretty sceptical about this dish, which Dougal prepared for me a while back. But actually it worked out just fine.

• Salmon Escalopes with Watercress, Sugar-Snap Peas and Avocado

It’s basically a simple summer salad and fish malarky; I was sceptical because I’m not a huge fan of watercress on its own, and in addition the sugar-snap peas weren’t even to be cooked!

But you know, this Nigella Lawson lassie kens whit she’s doing. Provided you have a lovely ripe fuerte avocado (can’t stand those hass ones, myself) then the crunch of the sugar snaps is a fresh and juicy contrast to the creamy avocado and the succulent salmon. There’s not a great deal going on, but over all it works. The portion size, we felt, was a bit on the mean side for a main meal- probably fine for lunch- so some boiled new potatoes wouldn’t go astray, but remarkably, this dish was a hit with us.

This recipe looked so good in the book, but somehow didn’t come together as it should have.

• Smoked Cod and Cannellini

I was having my best friend from high school over for supper before the two of us went out to see a French film. This dish seemed like the sort of elegant straightforward supper a chic girl might serve to her chic girlfriend, clink some rosé spirtizer over and generally be effortlessly cool with. What follows is the first recipe in the book and I was really looking forward to eating it.

I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter- I was, believe it or not, nervous cooking without Dougal about- and I think this may be why this turned out a bit wet and unappealing. The fish is poached with white wine and celery and bay leaves and so on, then removed and the beans warmed through in a small volume of the poaching liquid. Rather than measure the ‘about 60ml’ suggested I went with the visual ‘enough to cover the beans’ and probably over estimated. This left a lot of wetness behind, as well as lots of peppercorns. These got everywhere and made eating the dish anything but elegant- we kept having to pause to fish them out of our mouths.

Altogether I felt let down by this dish; it was neither as pretty nor as easy to eat as the recipe suggested. Ach, I suppose Nigella Express can’t be the wünder-buch all the time, can it?

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!

This being a year-long challenge, we will have two birthdays to see in Nigella Express style. The first of them went very well…

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry
• Ice Cream Cake

The curry felt a bit like cheating at cooking, in that I used pre-cubed butternut squash, sweet potato and mango, as well as shelled and cooked king prawns. In fact, all I had to slice was a spring onion although I did fry that in hand-made, slaved over wok oil (I then burnt the spring onions). The flavour came from curry paste (red thai) and coconut milk and really I did nothing. This was pretty gorgeous though, despite my managing to over cook it and the butternut melting away to nothing. Clearly it is an Express recipe seeing as most curries really do benefit from a good hour of bubbling away slowly.

As suggested in the preamble to the recipe I served this with noodles tossed in toasted unsalted peanuts. The peanuts were very hard to track down- not in the wholefoods section of the store but with the salted/dry roasted peanuts as a ‘healthy alternative’. I forgot to go to the chinese supermarket before it closed to sent D out on a wild goose chase for wide rice noodles which were not to be found but normal egg noodles did the trick just fine. Slurpily wonderful.

Pudding, however was the real icing on the cake, even though this cake had no icing at all. I felt my man deserved an all out pudding for his birthday so I went for the ice cream cake from the swanky Razzle Dazzle chapter. This was a cinch to make; I wouldn’t and couldn’t get the called for Nestle ‘peanut butter and chocolate chips’ so I used a mixture of white, milk and plain chocolate chips as well as butterscotch chips sourced from my pal Ariana’s Italian restaurant. Brill.

I made the cake up the night before and then at tea prepared the TWO sauces that were to go with it. Then, a quick bit of strewing the top with chocolatey rubble and a drizzle or two of sauce (more of a slick than a drizzle as the sauces could’ve done with cooling a bit more) and we were, collectively, in ice cream heaven.

The best bit about the ice cream cake might well have been that, unlike other cakes, we couldn’t give our Birthday Tea guests a slice each to take home with them….it just had to go back in our freezer, mwahahaha!

A miserable Monday night, and a desire for something better than takeaway.

• Naan Pizza

I’d been skeptical about this recipe, I will admit. Whilst Nigella claims they are okay (or at least superior to shop-bought pizza bases,) I am not a huge fan of shop-bought naan bread. Equally, the foodie in me is ashamed to admit to finding the texture of bottled or tinned mushrooms (something of a staple in mountainous Italy) to be a bit weird…I have been known to be fazed by them. On the other hand, I do really like fontina cheese…mmmm, trainers!

Despite my misgivings, I have to say this was a resounding sucess. To do these again I’d need to choose a different tomato base, as the bruschetta mix I chose from Waitrose had an over-abundance of olive slices for Dougal’s liking (spot on for me!) but otherwise I’d repeat them in a flash. Very, very Express (at most, seven mins easy prep followed by five mins in the oven) and yummy to boot.

I was going to argue that it wasn’t a cheap meal- you’d probably need to buy all the ingredients (naans, tomato topping, mushroom antipasti, fontina cheese)- but per portion it probably still came in at less than extortionate, utterly not worth it Dominos/Pizza Hut/name-a-chain pizza. And it looked cool too.

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…

On a cold and windy winter’s night you need something hot, meaty, and with a little kick to warm the belly and soothe the soul. This did the trick nicely.

• Mustard Pork Chops

This dead straightforward meal made for an excellent Friday night supper. I picked up the chops from the butchers near my work on the way home (Pigs from Garvald, and outdoor pigs too) and so felt all pious for my local sourcing.

The recipe called for some cider, but was very quick to cook, so I portioned off the required cider and then Dougal and I headed to the living room for crunchies (sea salt and balsamic vinegar crisps) and the remainder of the bottle. Very civilised!

After a relaxing chat, we headed to the kitchen and put tea together. I’d pre-sliced my courgettes and crushed some garlic (in the absence of having yet made any Garlic Oil) so once we started, the food was on the table in 10 minutes.

I loved this dish; the mustardy creamy meat with the stodgy gnocchi and the contrast of the courgettes (although in retrospect I’d have loved some salad or peas in addition- I just can’t get enough veg). I suspect Dougal didn’t like the gnocchi so much, he’s not enjoyed them in the past and I don’t really know how to cook them. Still, quick and easy- you could stick some rice in the oven before going for drinks and it would work equally well. Will probably find itself repeated!