The Sacred Art of Eating

I realise it may sometimes seem like all I do here is rave about how good the food has been. Not always, I hope.

• Spaghettini with Prawns and Chilli

Don’t get me wrong, this dish wasn’t unpleasant or anything. I just didn’t feel like it was any greater than a sum of its parts. The blurb in the book had bigged it up to some degree and I’d been looking forward to the dish for a couple of days.

Perhaps the failure was in the substitutions. Don’t tell anyone, but we used spaghetti instead of spaghettini. Stone the crows! More significantly, I didn’t manage to get sun-blush tomatoes (I stayed at work tonight till after half six and then there was an offer of a lift home…too good to pass up just to go to Waitrose rather than Somerfield) and so I used sundried toms instead. Now my dad’s always complained that most sundried toms you can buy aren’t proper sundried toms, so I’d hoped it was an acceptable subsitution, but in reality they were probably a bit robust, both in texture and flavour, for the dish.

The chilli kick was noticeable but I didn’t feel it added much. The prawns were big and a bit chewy. Perhaps I should’ve used little prawns; these were king prawns and tiger prawns being ‘used-up’ from the freezer (in preparation for our hopefully impending house move). They didn’t seem to be a part of the sauce; needed a longer slow cook, perhaps.

What else can I say? The flavour of the rocket gets completely lost, in all the heat and chilli and prawn. The fresh parsley on top, on the other hand, was authentic and alive and definitely not to be forgone.  All in all, however, a bit of a let down.

I’m glad there are some let downs to be honest; otherwise I feel I’d only ever be deciding to definitely cook things again. To be able to write certain recipes off gives me a bit of space and freedom for the future.

Meals that suit vegetarians, don’t contain mushrooms and which we haven’t cooked already; it was tough from the start!

• Mozzarella with Crazy Gremolata
• Lentil and Walnut Salad
• Butternut and Sweet Potato Soup
• Flourless Chocolate Brownie and,
• Hot Chocolate Sauce

So. Best friend (vegetarian) and best friend’s boyfriend (fussy) coming for tea. I went into work half an hour late, having spent a goodly while over breakfast pouring over the entire book looking for vegetarian recipes. There weren’t many! We’d cooked at least half of them already, another third were soups (I didn’t want to do soup because I wanted a side salad, which hardly goes with soup), others were too distinctly summery or christmassy… which didn’t leave very many. I was, then, delighted, when I spotted Pappardelle with Escarole, a sort of Italian pasta with wilted greens and chillies and herbs affair. It sounded fairly nice, would go well with my planned starter of mozzarella, and not be so filling that we wouldn’t have room for our brownies and ice cream.

No we will not be on the internet!!

Only I couldn’t get my ingredients. I had to compromise on pasta, going for tagliatelle rather than pappardelle, because the only pappardelle that Waitrose had in stock was fifteen pounds per kilogram. Fifteen; I kid you not. And most of it was broken because the packaging was fancy but inadequate. It was a compromise I was happy to make.

Less easy to compromise on was the total lack of suitable lettuce. Waitrose could not sell me a head of escarole, nor any of the suggested alternatives. The various bags of salad on offer all seemed to be too sweet- I suppose you probably don’t sell many bags of salad labelled as ‘bitter’ but I did think I’d at least be able to get endive. Wikipedia, you’ll notice, barely differentiates between them.

At this point I had to admit defeat on the sophisticated Italian pasta and resort to plan B, which was one of the soups from the Instant Calmer chapter. I’d been carrying around a note of the ingredients for some time, as I thought it’d be a good easy tea on a night Dougal wasn’t going to be in- he’s not a fan of either butternut squash or sweet potato. The starter and side salad, rapidly morphed into ‘two little salads on the side’ and I crossed my fingers that the pudding would be really really good.

The side salads were both very tasty and were pretty quick and easy to construct. I was surprised, actually, by how well the Lentil and Walnut salad went down; I’d worried it might be a bit wholesome. Similarly, the mozzarella was lovely, surprisingly easy to eat, given all the raw chilli on it. I did however, feel a little tired at having another of the endless variations on ’season with olive oil and lemon juice’.

The soup was less of a success. I felt like I was cooking it forever-I served tea over an hour later than planned. It seemed to use an awful lot of stock (I’d bought one carton of posh fresh vegetable stock, but ended up having to use two stock cubes too, so I probably needn’t have bothered). It required blending; we went against advice and used our food processor (we don’t have a blender!) and it didn’t come out anything like as smooth as in the book. That said, we have a really small blender (about 1L capacity) so maybe I was being impatient and not blending enough. We also didn’t have buttermilk to garnish it with; I used creme fraiche but it didn’t have the same artistic effect.

It tasted okay, but it wouldn’t have won any awards, not one. We didn’t finish it and I’ll let you into a secret and tell you that D and I chucked the leftovers away, something we rarely do (you’ll find out why in a subsequent soupy post).

Pudding, however, improved matters entirely. The flourless chocolate brownies were fudgy and warm and gooey although they probably would have benefited from cooking in a tinfoil tray rather than my usual brownie tin. The sauce was gorgeous- much better than the one for the Chocolate Pear Pudding- and survived to the following day without losing its capacity to melt to a lovely free flowing sauce again. The best bit is that we are still, a week later, eating the brownies (but then we have also had Dougal’s fabulous Sticky Chocolate Gingerbread to eat).

So, not our most successful dinner for friends so far, a few disappointments along the way, but a great pudding, to be repeated.

Lunch: brought to you by the denaturing power of Lemon!

• Tuna and Beans
• Linguine with Lemon, Garlic and Thyme Mushrooms

Both of these recipes were firmly in my ‘not so sure about these’ category, and so it might seem odd that I cooked them so soon in the year, or indeed when we had friends coming for lunch. Their crime was, in both cases, containing an ingredient about which I am firmly sceptical- or downright negative.

In the case of the Tuna and Beans, this was the red onion. I am not a fan of raw red onion. In a restaurant I will sit and pick out slivers of red onion from salads in what I am sure is a most irritating fashion. However I decided to press on with the dish because a) I liked the general premise of beans and tuna fish, very Italian, and b) the onions had to steep in lemon juice for some time and that can make raw onion edible (think of the ones you put on poppadoms).

Whilst eating it, I enjoyed the salad. Dougal wasn’t a fan; the borlotti beans fell into his category of beans which don’t seem properly cooked (too firm with tough skins). Unfortunately, the onion was simply too raw. I spent the rest of the day burping horrendously and complaining of indigestion. So I think we’ll give that one a miss in future (unless I’m asked to do a salad for a barbeque, because I do think this is a salad other people would enjoy).

I was sceptical about the pasta because it calls for mushrooms but then does not cook them. Raw mushrooms are in fact used by the CIA as an implement of torture. They are just wrong, wrong, wrong. However, I went along with it, partly because Helen at AOYP (fellow challenge-ee) has made it and enthused, and because I reasoned that if I sliced my mushrooms very finely perhaps the heat from the pasta really would cook them adequately.

What I hadn’t reckoned on was the power of the lemon juice over the mushrooms. The finely sliced mushrooms got a wee bath in some lemon juice and olive oil and hot damn if that lemon juice didn’t ‘cook’ the mushrooms nicely. Nigella suggests that the mushrooms in their juice might make a nice salad and I’m inclined to agree.

I do wish though that I had had fully faithful ingredients for this. Despite the lunch date being planned a fortnight in advance I didn’t get round to planning the meal till the morning and so shopping was done locally. I would have liked to have had proper linguine (I find the shape very satisfying to eat) rather than spaghetti, and whilst Nigella says not having Chestnut Mushrooms is not an excuse to not make this dish, I’m annoyed I didn’t. Without cooking, button mushrooms are somewhat insipid in colour. Chestnut mushrooms would have made this dish generally more appealing on the eye. Nevertheless, a surprise hit.

You can see some of Dougal’s yummy little rolls (from Feast by Nigella Lawson) by the side.

I realised whilst preparing this meal that, for the course of this challenge, my friends will have to learn that “just supper, nothing fancy” only goes as far as to mean we’ll be wearing jeans, and they won’t be given cocktails. Beyond that, anything goes.

• Halloumi Bites
• Moonblush Tomatoes, and
• Slow-roast Tomatoes, Goat’s Cheese and Mint Salad
• Pollo alla Cacciatora
• Budino di Cioccolato
• Chocolate Macaroons

Two friends for supper, to really grasp the challenge by the horns, and to get some recipes under my belt as insurance for the working week ahead. I think managing five (six!) was pretty good going. The only pre-planned part of the meal was the salad, which you can currently see gracing the banner of this blog. I’d bought the special soft goat’s cheese on the 31st, intending to make this salad for my folks on New Year’s Day, but then I forgot to put the tomatoes on to cook in advance.

Not to be beaten a second time, I merrily (very!) prepared the tomatoes on Friday night, a little after 1am, after we got back from Fife. Easy peasy- heat the oven up, slice toms in half, sprinkle with good things, bung in oven, turn oven off, go to bed. I was concerned that the measurements were going to be a problem- I would personally have used half as much salt and twice as much olive oil- but decided to Trust Nigella.

The following evening, I scattered my salad leaves on the plate, dolloped about the goats cheese, and arrayed the now Moonblushed Tomatoes. Instant show-off salad!

(Instant- apart from the mint. My local supermarket failed me on fresh herbs. Thankfully our guests were able to bring us some and I’m really glad I decided to ask, as the mint really lifted the flavours and added that important je ne sais qois.)

All the other dishes were chosen on the basis of what I might feasibly find ingredients for in our local, small and grotty supermarket. I’ll pretend that I was doing the cooking in the true Express ethos, but actually I just couldn’t be bothered shopping the day before and left it till two hours before our friends arrived. Perhaps that is the true Express ethos anyway. I chose reasonably well too, seeing as the only ingredients I couldn’t get were the aforementioned fresh mint, and some fresh rosemary for the Pollo alla Cacciatora.

The Hunter’s Chicken was nice enough, but no great shakes. We had (over-)faithfully followed the recipe with Dougal boning chicken thighs for fillets (it was the only way I could get free range chicken, and anyway the recipe called for thigh fillets. The bones and skin will make great stock!). Nigella describes this as a dish she can construct from scratch in comfortably under half an hour; we had more time and so cooked it for longer, reasoning that no stew ever suffered a bit of slow simmering. It was nevertheless a bit thin (needed reduced) and just not very exciting. But I reckon I’d be happy enough with it after a lousy day at work, so I’ll not write it off altogether.

Perhaps the chicken seemed dull because it had followed on from such a fabulous starter. A starter which I’ve just realised I took no photos of; damn, I’ll just have to cook it again. Halloumi is one of my favourite nibbley foods, in the whole world and there are TWO recipes using it in this book. This was dead straightforward: dry fry your cheese and then toss it in citrus juices, oil and herbs. My only complaint was that I couldn’t eat the whole lot myself.

For pudding we served Budino di Cioccolato with Chocolate Macaroons; the macaroons use the two egg whites left over from the egg yolks that go into the choccy pots. I nearly didn’t make the macaroons, thinking them unnecessary additional effort, but the fact that they only need baked for 11 minutes spurred me into action. I’m glad I did as they were perfect; chewy and chocolatey and really good for dipping into the pots. I don’t feel so glowing about the Budino themselves, despite them turning out really well. Perhaps this is the fault of our lousy electric cooker, or perhaps it was the recipe, but Nigella’s cooking and whisking for about 3-4 minutes until the mixture thickens took well over half an hour for me. This took me firmly out of Express zone and into argh, why am I wasting so much time making sure the pudding doesn’t burn (the macaroons were finished and out of the oven by this point). I would also quibble with the illustration on the book, which was clearly taken before the things had been chilled. Mine weren’t quite so exquisitely shiny, but I think my take on her serving suggestion was pretty funky, in a cute and modern way.