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!

When cooking for people with allergies, it pays to think carefully about what you are cooking.

• Frittata Party!
• Chocolate Croissants
• Lazy Loaf

Our old flatmate, the dearly loved O2, is up in Scotland for a wee golfing holiday with Tadge, another flatmate and friend from home. They were setting off for the hills late-afternoon on Saturday, so, eyeing an opportunity to finish off the breakfast chapter,  I invited them and some other friends for brunch. This was to include KK, a uni friend of mine.

We kicked off with Buck’s Fizz. Not sure how that came about but it was a nice touch and one that probably helped save face against the issues that followed.

Now my plan was to do the frittata party (of all the recipes in the breakfast chapter, this instruction for four different types of omelette to be cooked to order for friends hanging out in a kitchen was the one that I felt was least reasonable for Dougal and I to just do on our own to get it out of the way) but as KK is allergic to eggs (and fish, and tree nuts) knew I had to come up with other dishes that would suit her. The chocolate croissants would be fine, but I decided to add in the lazy loaf to bolster recipe numbers. It seemed fairly breakfast suitable.

The first ‘uh-oh’ moment came as I was egg-washing the chocolate croissants…but thankfully I realised in time to keep a stash separate for KK. The bigger ‘uh-oh’ came mere moments later when Dougal realised, to no little horror, that the Lazy Loaf was choc full of KK-unfriendly ingredients.

Lazy Loaf isn’t a proper loaf of bread with rising and working the dough and shaping the loaf etc. You make up the mix, using about the 2/5 museli and 3/5 brown flour, as well as yeast, and then put it in a low oven for an hour where effectively it rises. After that you turn the heat up and bake it properly. We’d managed (almost by chance) to find the specific museli suggested by Nigella in the book which has no fewer than 23 ingredients. Including Hazelnuts. And all sorts of other nasties handled in the same environment as nuts. It was spot on for the Lazy Loaf- lovely big chunks of dates and apricots, and nice crunchy nutty bits, but seriously unsuitable for KK.

I liked the frittata but really they needed an audience of perhaps three or four avowed omelette-likers, each willing to take a turn cooking. And a cheap source of top-notch eggs. We only made one each of the fillings which struck me as a shame, and I ended up cooking all of them. So we now have quite a lot of extra filling in the fridge (perhaps I will do a little omlette for breakfast tomorrow!).

The chocolate croissants (puff pastry with dark choccy rolled up inside it) were pretty good but suffered from my not having ready-rolled puff pastry. I don’t think I rolled the pastry out thin enough, and so consequently these were a bit small (made fitting the chocolate inside tough!) and the bottom layer seemed a bit doughy. Ultimately though the combination of buttery pastry and chocolate is pretty hard to mess up so there weren’t any complaints about these!

The other place we went wrong on Saturday was underestimating the popularity of and demand for Dougal’s bread. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to ask D to make any- it wasn’t needed for the meal, and anyway we’d have the lazy loaf (which went most admirably with my mother’s raspberry jam or honey). However there were practically howls of disappointment when we said that no, there was no homemade bread, and we were told in no uncertain terms that there was to be proper bread next week when the same gang all come back for lunch!

Knowing that I’d be going to work early on Monday morning, and by bus (rather than my usual bicycle) I made these on Sunday night to ease my early rise the next day.

• Breakfast Bars

I really enjoyed my Sunday evening domesticity, stirring together the veritable goodness that goes into these, adding a good dollop of badness (in the form of condensed milk!) and then baking slowly so that the house filled with warm milky smells. I also made some flapjack for work and cooked the Italian sausages in hot tomato sauce and polenta and felt the right Domestic Godess.

As for the eating, these were very much up my street. We omitted the coconut from the recipe and upped all the other ‘flavours’ (the craisins, the mixed seeds and the peanuts). However for Dougal this meant they were a bit too seedy. (He likes to keep it clean!) I like my fibre rich chewy bars…but I expect that when I make these again I would probably err less on the side of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and more on the side of nuts…maybe some almonds or some hazelnuts.

I am happily munching my way through these; with morning coffee at work or on the bus if I’m doing an early start. And do you know what- they’re just like posh cereal bars, only I made them.

We had a DIY project to tackle, so I felt we needed a good start to the day to put us on fine form.

• Chopped Fruit Salad
• Green Eggs and Ham

I settled on two breakfasts as the idea of just having fruit salad seemed a bit pious. Even if it did have yoghurt in it.

The fruit salad I made exactly as the recipe suggested; Nigella makes it clear that you should just use up whatever you have in the fridge, but I reasoned that we wouldn’t have any fruit in the fridge (or elsewhere for that matter) and so I laid in the strawberries, mangoes and blueberries specially. Annoyingly it wasn’t until later that it dawned on me that we had two zested but otherwise tip-top condition oranges in the fridge, ho hum.

Our glasses weren’t quite big enough so I had to cut back on the blueberries, but these were pretty much as per the protocol. I’d miss out the seedy topping next time though; they simply stuck in your teeth and added little in terms of flavour or for that matter health, I’d have thought. I could be persuaded into scattering some pomegranate seeds on, another time.

Green Eggs and Ham is a romantic name for a slice of ham served up in a pesto pancake. I figured these would be good but I hadn’t really thought through just how good. A doddle to make, they managed to taste so much bigger than a plain pancake, even one with ham in it. Dougal and I both ate one at breakfast with the fruit salad and saved our second one for lunch. I reckon these would travel well too though, and might revisit them for lunch (perhaps with a little smear of mayo) in the future.

A sandwich of duck breast, pomegranate and mint, on home-made (for the bruschetta) pain de campagne. No, I wasn’t sharing!

With K and K staying over after our Saturday night dinner do, I needed a suitably swish breakfast to keep up the illusion of domestic godessliness.

• Breakfast Bruschetta

I nearly made two recipes for this breakfast, but felt one would suffice. Either I was grossly wrong or it was very good, as I ended up making two batches! What makes these breakfast bruschetta isn’t very clear, but we ain’t quibbling. They were yummy for breakfast, with a big cup of coffee.

 Dougal had hand-crafted some pain de campagne specially (including overnight ferment to make the sour dough) and I had hand-selected some lovely ripe fuerte avocados in waitrose. The addition of some olive oil, and good tomatoes, and lime juice and parsley for the avocado ones, and we had a highly sophisticated brekkie. It’s not always like this at our place, I promise!

When staying over at my parents, I might as well say thank you with an awesome breakfast, right?

• Orange French Toast

Last weekend saw D and I head to Dunbar to give two school friends a good send off as they move to the New York for two years. HarveyNick came down with us too, to help out with the dancing-men being always in short supply at ceilidhs- and so it seemed right that I used the opportunity to make a proper breakfast for us all.

I had to start by drying out my mum’s fabulously fresh bread a bit first. Eggy bread really calls for stale loaf but gosh darn we only had fresh. So I sliced the bread up first and laid it out in the sunshine for a bit.

The bread is soused in the standard eggy mixture, but with the luxurious addition of some full cream milk, cinnamon and orange zest. Thereafter it is cooked as normal, but then served drenched in a potent orange syrup of freshly squeezed orange juice and one’s Mother’s finest marmalade.

In the absence of one’s Mother’s finest, we think Golden Shred would be the best bet (Nigella recommends Tiptree but we all think that’s dull!).

Serve with lashings of tea, preferably in a fabulous tea cosy that matches the dish.  Enjoy!

Creating an unusual breakfast treat for your still-slumbering house-guest before dashing off to work? It must be Nigella Express!

• Pear and Ginger Muffins

Our house guest was due to take a train back to Nottingham on Monday morning; we both had to be at work as usual that day. I didn’t think I could abandon him in the house with nothing to eat and this recipe spoke promisingly of being largely preparable the night before- wet ingredients jug in the fridge, dry ingredients on the side.

For the most part this was true, and you basically did just have to add pear, mix the whole lot together and spoon the contents into muffin cases. (Note to self: buy proper muffin cases to go with the nice big muffin tin re-acquired from home!) However you’d probably be surprised to find how time consuming peeling a couple of pears and filling paper cases actually is. I was consequently a little late for work.

Lateness aside, this were a simply divine breakfast treat; light and moist and warmly but not dominantly spicy. They were so good, in fact, that I made them again three days later for a colleague’s bring-a-dish leaving lunch at work.

We have an old uni friend staying this weekend, so you may notice we’ll be cooking quite a lot. Starting with our fabulous breakfast this morning.

• Home-made Instant Pancake Mix
• Blueberry Syrup for Pancakes

I should probably start by admitting that whilst we have made these pancakes several times before (they are pretty standard issue large thick pancakes) we haven’t ever gone down the suggested route of making up a jar of the dry mix to keep in the cupboard like Betty Crocker mix to be flung together when we occasionally fancy a party at 7am.  I  don’t think this matters but perhaps you will write a letter to the Man in Charge and he will say I have to take this recipe off the list because I haven’t done it properly.

But really. It’s not that hard to fling into the food processor flour, bicarb, baking powder, salt and sugar at the same time as eggs and milk. Particularly not when your boyfriend does it as you are in bed with the sinus headache from hell, working your way through the second box of tissues of the week. But I digress.

Whilst this was not the first time we’d made these pancakes, it was the first time we’d gone the whole hog and made the accompanying blueberry syrup too. It’s made of blueberries and maple syrup, an inspired but not unorthodox combination. I’m not an out and out maple syrup fan- often I find it a bit cloying- so I was pleased that this turned out as quite a sharp, very fruity sauce. It almost felt healthy!

With a whole chapter of breakfast recipes and a boyfriend who rarely eats breakfast, sometimes you have to bend the rules…

• Croque Monsieur Bake

In my defence I did make this masterly dish at breakfast time; it then sat in the fridge all day, rather than overnight, and we had it as a rather fine Wednesday supper. Apparently, according to the book, if you eat it for supper you are supposed to do so in your dressing gown. Whoops!

I was initially worried that it called for rather a lot of mustard but once spread across six slices of bread it seemed about the right amount. Eating it you did occasionally get the odd Dijon-y mouthful, but certainly wasn’t overwhelming.

This was pretty filling, probably because of the six eggs! Other wise it was just a ham and cheese piece, right? Per person it worked out at two slices of bread, two slices of cheese, a slice of ham, two eggs and a mouthful of milk. Having it sitting in the eggy milky mixture all day made for a lovely squidgy consistency with the ham a nice firm contrast. It made a fantastic noise when I took it out of the oven, spitting and crackling away. I tried to film it but as it was an impromptu decision the lighting was all wrong and the focus out, so I shan’t share it with you!

Probably a bit of a hefty dish for brunch, I’d have said. Maybe if you’d been out living the high life the night before.