The Sacred Art of Eating

I’ve been ill and it was a wintry –snowy even– weekend, so we had to go for a proper comforting wintry pudding:

• Jumbleberry Crumble

Individual portions of crumble, made with frozen summer fruits (much cheaper in Somerfield than in Waitrose, let me tell you!) and home-made crumble kept in the freezer. These were easy peasy to make up, quick to cook, and, unlike last week’s pudding looked beautiful and appetising at service.

With a little forward planning you could have a bag of the crumble stashed in the freezer along side a bag of fruit….mix the fruit with a little cornflour and maybe sugar, top with crumble, bake for a bit and hey presto it’s a proper grown up, like mum made, pudding!

We had ours with ice cream and tea and honestly, my only complaint would be that there weren’t any left overs. Yum!

To start a new tradition, we needed a properly ‘traditional’ start, a real puddings’ pudding, if you will.

• Roly Poly Pudding

There were a few minor disasters along the way, but the end result was a sweet, gooey, fudgey delight of a pud that went very nicely with our pot of tea.First off was the use of the ready rolled short crust pastry. This is one of the few recipes which doesn’t call for ready made All Butter pastry, so I’d been able to get the pastry locally. I took it out of the fridge at the allotted time, and as I began to unroll it, a thin strip broke off down the side. Alarmed, I fished out the instructions: To avoid splitting, take out of the fridge at least 40 minutes before use it intoned, solemnly. Then the buzzer went, our guests arriving 20 minutes earlier than expected.There was little I could do about the pastry, so in the end I ended up clumping it all back together and rolling it out the traditional way. Of course then I failed to come up with the required 18cm by 32.5 cm (!!- presumably this is the precise size of the packet ready-rolled stuff Nigella uses) and began to feel more and more stressed. Not quite what you’d expect cooking from a chapter called Instant Calmer.My next gripe regards Nigella’s continued insistence on specifying weights of golden syrup. The syrup was to be spread onto the pastry, so it wasn’t even that I could weigh directly into a pan. No matter what, I had to dirty a bowl, and in doing so, lose syrup along the way. What do you do, measure out extra and write it off as collateral damage? As it was, I probably had less syrup than I should have. On the other hand, my sheet of pastry was a bit raggedly looking (I’d rolled and re-rolled it so many times I was sure it would shrink to a tiny chewy mass) so I figured a little too little syrup wouldn’t harm anyone.

Into the oven it went, and I joined my guests. After the half an hour, Dougal brewed the tea, I fished out the ice cream and I pulled the sweet smelling pud from the oven. It didn’t look like much. In the book it is a rich and glossy golden colour. This was pasty and white, a bit dry on top with a puddle of milk around it. It improved on serving, I’ll give it that; the melted syrup swam out and melded with the milk, and in cross section the pudding looked soggy in all the right ways and had a lovely gooey squidgy consistency.

Our ice cream, for reasons I don’t fully understand, was the consistency of chocolate mousse, and so unfortunately all but melted on contact with the hot pudding. This was a bit of a shame as you did need it to cut across the all-but-overwhelming sweetness of the pudding. Melted away it wasn’t as potent a contrast. We checked the freezer though, and it seems okay. Duff batch of ice cream?I’m not quite sure why Roly Poly Pudding didn’t have the good looks of the recipe version. Perhaps, in light of the other shortcomings, I ought to have cut down on the milk a little. Perhaps the top of the pud would have coloured up nicely had I poured the milk over the top as well as down the sides as instructed. Who knows. Either way, I’m not writing this dish off. It fills a good niche of stodgy wintry comfort food pudding, like a sticky toffee pudding, and was dead easy to make, albeit with a fight with the pastry (but once I’m a grown up I’ll be able to throw together my own short-crust pastry in a flash, right?). Lovely for a Sunday night, just not a showy-offy dessert.

Sometimes you have to admit defeat and invite friends for tea and cake.

• Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

As any of your that read my (other) blog or Dougal’s will know, we are currently flat-hunting (with a view to buying) and it is getting us down. I won’t explain why; there is quite enough navel gazing going on at the aforementioned sites and it doesn’t generally relate to food. However, last night we were both feeling so fed up of being perturbed and of thinking of nothing but flats flats flats that we decided to invite Na and James over for tea and cake to occupy our minds for the evening.

The Totally Chocolate Choccy Chip cookies seemed ideal as they were even from the chapter entitled Instant Calmer. A big pot of tea (three bags of Clipper tea, one bag of Equal Exchange Earl Grey) and a milk jug and some leftover sticky chocolate gingerbread…and not too much talking about flats. It helped.

The cookies were pretty amazing. Dead moist. I liked the measuring out with an ice cream scoop idea; I always feel a bit overwhelmed being asked to make 12 equal sized portions from a big bowl of mix and having a set measuring device helped. In the end we had more like 14 (or was it 16) cookies but they were by no means too small. I took advice and froze half, so that we are now only ever 19 minutes plus hardening up time away from more chocolate nom.

My only change, for next time, would be to halve the salt. I don’t mind a little salt in a cookie, I think it is important, even, but these were a little on the salty side. Also…350g of chocolate chips is a lot. We had 325g and you get several in every mouthful. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a crime to cut down on these. Although I suppose you might have to rename them Fairly Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies which might not cut it.

I took one to work today, and bought a 200ml bottle of milk (full cream, it’s all there was) to have with it. The combination was perfect. And as my mother will tell you, I don’t like milk.

Horrid nasty wet day; my man in late from work. The way to his heart?

• Rapid Ragù

Everyone at work on Monday was feeling low (except for me, but try as I might it was rubbing off a little!). Outside the fierce winds lashed rain against the windows and the sky was a photocopier grey. I realised, even before leaving work, that I needed to make something solid and satisfying for dinner. I had in my mind the illustration for this dish and a quick squint at the BBC website revealed that a little shopping would see me right.

This is a thick tomatoey, lamby stew, with lentils (I used puy) to give it extra body and bite, and a wonderful richness of flavour imbued by using caramelised onions (out of a jar) in the mix. Unlike Nigella, we felt it a bit decadent to eat straight from the pan, so we had some rice too, and plates, fancy!

The cheese on top turned out to be a vital part of the mix, a lovely counterpoint to the other flavours. If you are looking for an easy wintry night stew, this comes highly recommended. (Recipe on the BBC Food pages, don’t say I’m not good to you.)

Feeling funny on a Sunday night, I went for a soup from the Instant Calmer chapter. It sorted me right out, and no mistake.

• Chowder with Asian Flavours

This soup has many things going for it. Firstly, it was dead easy to make. There was a little initial standing around chop-chopping, but thereafter all the prepping of ingredients took place whilst previous stages were cooking. I made things more difficult for myself by not having pre-skinned smoked cod fillets, but even with the additional effort of skinning the fish, this was easy peasy.

Part of the reason it tasted so good was that we had amazing chicken stock to use. (The first step is cooking up leeks and potatoes in chicken stock). We’d followed the advice of the mighty Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All (a god amongst mortals) on stock making, which included the note that Nigella says it’s not worth making stock with only one chicken carcass, and so to save them up in the freezer until you have plenty. We had the leftover carcass from a roast pre-christmas and some well picked at chicken wings. Also in the freezer were the un-cooked bones and skin from my making Dougal butcher six chicken thighs into thigh fillets for the Pollo Alla Cacciatore, and the fat trimmed off the beef for Steak Slice with Lemon and Thyme. I gave the various raw bits a blast in the oven with some garlic, olive oil and thyme, and then the whole lot went into the stock pot. Let me tell you, the results were awesome!

I didn’t deviate much from the recipe. I had no baby corn, as they’d been on special offer in Somerfield’s and as such had sold out. The recipe also called for small/medium prawns; I had a bag of king sized prawns in my freezer and wasn’t going to buy more prawns when they were available. And anyway, I’m from by the seaside, and where I come from chowder is a tricksy dish! All calm across the surface, a little glimpse of potato or sweetcorn here, but what lies beneath? The first spoonful might bring up a whole mussel! Then a huge langoustine, eyeing you in its beady way! I felt, therefore, that my upgrading of the prawns was entirely justified.

What a soup this was. Warm and filling in its own right, easy to make, largely speaking pretty healthy, and with a lip tingling glow provided by the generous sprinkling of fresh chilli and coriander on top. This was a huge hit here at Caledonian Place and will certainly feature again.

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.

Not what you’d call the traditional recipe. But smashing, easy peasy to make, and really good cold too.

• Macaroni Cheese

This is not at all traditional macaroni. There is no roux, no white sauce. Look away now, sophisticated cooks, for it was made with evaporated milk and eggs and I didn’t even grate the cheese, I let the food processor do that for me. (Which if I didn’t have a dishwasher would be a distinct downside to this dish- it wouldn’t be so speedy if you had to grate first.)

The result was eggy and rich. It suited my (ahem, hungover) hungry and tired brain greatly. I munched on the leftovers this evening and the result was like a sort of spanish omelette made with pasta- akin to but an improvement on lunches I used to ‘create’ as a fourteen year old which involved cooking pasta, frying it in egg and topping with cheese.

So. It needs a different name, but otherwise it rightly deserves its place in Nigella’s ‘Holy Trinity of Cheese-Rich Comfort Foods’.

This evening we realised we’d not taken anything out of the freezer last night as planned. So Dougal flicked through NE before I got home, sent me out for a couple of ingredients, and then we flung together a meal.

• Cheddar Cheese Risotto

This comes from the Comfort Food chapter, and rightly so. It was thick and cheesy and by no means whatsoever could be classed as healthy…but it’s almost zero out there, and blowing such a gale that the Forth Road Bridge is closed with structural damage…so it was spot on. I can still feel it sitting in my belly. It is, in fact, probably the only reason I am still warm enough, an hour after we finished eating.

The recipe called for baby leeks- these are WONCAS ingredients (waitrose only, no chance at somerfield) so I went for smallish leeks rather than the suggested substitution of fat spring onions. I have a strange relationship with spring onions and don’t always appreciate their inclusion in recipes; I wasn’t willing to risk their ruining the meal.

Not only did the rice cook nicely in the prescribed time, but the flavours did meld convincingly. I’m not a total devotee of the ‘cheese in risotto’ camp but this worked really well, perhaps because it was suitably far from my personal impression of what risotto ought to be like.

Went very nicely with a cheeky glass of white wine, I must say. Not a sophisticated meal, but a most satisfying one :-)