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!

Anticipating feeling a little fragile (in fact I felt relieved and energised) on Friday night, I asked Dougal for a no-commitment Friday night in front of the TV with easy to handle food.

• Roast Poussin and Sweet Potatoes
• Wasabi Lime Dressing

As Nigella boasts in the pre-amble to this dish, the great thing about this is that you can construct it with very little effort, fling it in the oven whilst you watch some high quality TV (spoilers!) , and then eat it in front of the telly too. We worked in a salad dressing too, because Nigella said the meat and taters were good with watercress and lime, and because this salad dressing was touted as going well with a salad of watercress and avocado and plain simple foods. The only let down in the end was that the avocado failed (it out and out refused!) to ripen in time so could not be included.

I made the decision to halve the number of poussins from one each to one between two. They seemed like quite a large meal for one! Whilst Dougal would say this was the right decision, I personally could have done with more meat. The sweet potato, basted in wok oil, cumin and cinnamon was right up my street- I’d do them again.

Although I’d have preffered a stronger lime kick, the salad dressing did indeed go well with the meat and potatoes, packing quite a punch. Not so great a punch, though, as the English mustard which Nigella stipulates is essential with this. I think she’s missing a trick not just having a highly wasabied up salad on the side.

It’s true, Dr McGowan. Nigella is a big fatty. Even I can’t countenance the fat and sugar content of this pudding!

• Caramel Croissant Pudding

This pudding is suggested as Monday night supper (essentially with no first course beforehand) to use up a pair of stale croissants. This should have given us an idea of how filling, calorific and down right fatty it was to be.

However we were more distracted by the general premise. What kind of person has spare stale croissants? Who in their right mind has croissants and then fails to eat them? We were boggled and perplexed. Then I saw many packets of croissants reduced to clear as they were out of date and realised how it could be done.

Firstly we ate some croissants, and then we ate some more. The remainder we left out on the sideboard overnight to stale up nicely. Having not committed this recipe to memory I had rather over-bought on the out of date croissant front. Unable to throw croissants out when the very intention of the recipe was to avoid this, we decided to scale up the pud, inviting my brother and his new flatmate round to help us eat it.

They were unable to join us. This has left us with about ten portions of super eggy, creamy, boozy (honestly there isn’t that much rum in it but man it hits you!) squidgy pud. It’s pretty awesome but you have to eat it in small portions. Not like the ones below.

I like this a lot because it’s basically a bread and butter pudding that tastes a bit of croissant. If I were to make it again I would scale it differently though: firstly I would realise that three times the volume of ingredients means you DO have to increase the baking time (raw egg anyone?) but secondly I would probably not scale all the wet ingredients proportionately. I would use much less sugar and rum, and probably rein in the egg, milk and cream too.

We are still eating this….if you ring the bell and we take a long time to answer, it’s because we have succumbed to wretched obesity….

A favourite of mine….but would it stand up to the Express effort?

• Quick Calamari with Garlic Mayonnaise

This recipe was on the ‘must do’ list long before the challenge came into being (and with it the dumping of 189 recipes on the ‘must do’ list) because calamari is one of my all time favourite foods. After a hot day on the beach or doing tourist sights I could eat this stuff with cold beer, squirted with lemon juice and dunked into aioli until the cows come home. The idea of being able to bring these delights to my own home, to dreich and dreary Scotland, made me near giddy with expectation!

Alas I was, for many months, unsucessful in finding frozen squid tubes. I kept being promised that fresh squid were available in Sainsbury’s but having no luck in actually purchasing them. All this changed last Friday, and the plans were set.

Much slicing and tossing in seasoned flour later, and we were ready to fry.

Because we don’t have a deep fat fryer, and didn’t want to burn the house down, we did the calamari in wee batches in a small saucepan of oil. It took a long time to fry up the whole batch (we also had oil temperature issues part way through) and consequently by the time we came to eat (with lemon wedges and garlic mayo which is practically aioli!) much of it was already cold.

Calamari isn’t really meant to be eaten cold. It goes a bit rubbery and yet also at the same time overly crunchy. The garlic mayo starts to dominate and feel a bit greasy. The inconsistencies between our inexpertly fried batches were a bit too noticable.

Perhaps all this would change if I had more practice at deep frying. I don’t really feel though, that deep frying is a skill I need or want to cultivate. So for the foreseeable future, I’ll save my Calamari cravings for sunny summer holiday, little cafes with cold lager and the sound of the sea nearby.

We followed Nigella’s instructions to the letter here, and made an evening off it with a posh bottle of rosé. It was lovely!

• Crab and Avocado Salad with Japanese Dressing
• Butterscotch Fruit Fondue

Starting with a little aperitif of Japanese Chilli Crackers set the party mood instantly.

Suitably refreshed, I headed to the kitchen and put together the salad. It wasn’t at all difficult to construct; some light mixing of crab with dressing and chilli, before the crab meat was artfully mounded on mixed leaves with some dollops of perfectly ripe avocado. The japanese dressing was sweet, but the chilli added a fierce little kick. All we needed was a little more of it!

The recipe suggested 200g of crab as a starter for four, or to halve the amounts and use it as supper for two. I don’t think that suggestion was quite right; really it ought to have been 200g crab for 4 starters or 2 main courses. Either way, it left us with plenty of room for pudding!

For pudding we revisited properly a dessert we’d tried out a few months back, the Butterscotch Fruit Fondue. This time I’d invested in some blackberries, strawberries and rasps, and we made a wee feast of it. A decadent end to a very special Wednesday night tea.

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!