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!

A driech dark night, almost the shortest in the year.

• Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie

This recipe had us flummoxed for most of the year, requiring as it did individual pot pies. Nigella asks for 300ml pots, although says bigger are okay, and indeed the ones she uses in the picture are 500ml. Eventually, after much wailing to the internet, Ruth came good and loaned us a couple of possibilities. We went with the deep terracotta dishes.

The pie filling smelled excellent as I cooked it up; the bacon tasted fantastic and everything else melded together in a rich sauce.

The recipe doesn’t call for the tops of the pies to be glazed or egg washed, but in the future I think I would do so.  In the absence of shiny tops these didn’t look quite so bonny as in the picture.

Former flatmate Mike was over for tea and we gobbled the pies down with a wee tomato, feta and pine nut salad. This was a good contrast to the creamy rich pies.

I liked these pies a lot for what they were- hot and filling on a dreary night- but I didn’t especially rate the seasoning. For some reason the thyme flavour bothered me the whole time, and in future I think I’d just leave it out altogether. If you are using nice bacon and happy chicken there are enough other tasty flavours going on without having to add more.

Helen and Dougal decided to host a glamorous and exclusive cocktail party, with mixed results.

• Green Apple Martini
• Ginger Pom
• The Instant Canapé: Quick Crostini with Avocado and Green Pea Hummus
• Tuna and Crab & Avocado Wraps
• Butterfly Cakes

The plan was to have a short, sharp event - two hours of little nibbles and heady drinks, then a round of butterfly cakes for a finale. That even left time for people to hit the town afterward, should they be up for that kind of thing.

The two cocktails were pretty good, though requiring ingredients that were unusual enough that the local off-licence couldn’t meet our demands. But Peckham’s has quite a serious selection of interesting liqueurs.

By contrast the wraps were pretty disastrous. No matter how clever it sounds, wrapping things in tortillas is a recipe for tears well before bed-time. Not to mention how ridiculously over-filled the wraps would have been if we’d followed the recipe exactly. I was liberally applying cocktails sticks through all angles of rolled tortilla in an effort to hold them together but they looked pretty ridiculous. And fell apart the instant they left the serving plate.

The pumpernickel crostini were elegant and simple, though not to my taste. I’m not a great fan of rye bread, and there’s nothing more seriously rye than pumpernickel. I also made a batch of breadsticks, trying out another couple of recipes from Richard Bertinet’s Dough: sesame and aniseed breadsticks, and olive, parmesan and herb breadsticks. I’m not a great fan of olives either, but these latter were really good. Naturally they were the more difficult of the two to make but I guess that’s why you put in the extra effort, eh?

I don’t want to dwell too much on the party itself. In short, we had too many cancellations. But I hope our guests left with happy thoughts, as they got butterfly cakes with coloured cream just before we wrapped up for the night.

Alas, even the cakes were not a complete success. Would you believe that a significant number weren’t even cooked when they came out of the oven? Helen turned round after ten seconds and found a bunch of them had collapsed inwards like some kind of exuberant diamond mining operation had started up.

We might have to pay some proper attention to the temperature of our oven if the cakes really were so underdone. I’m not sure what we’d need to do to measure the temperature in the oven that won’t - as the guys at Kamikaze Cookery managed to do - melt the thermometer.

I hope our guests don’t think too badly of us. The drink was mixed in a good way, the food was mixed in a bad way, and maybe the invited friends felt a bit awkward. But the one thing everyone agreed was the Pama (that’s a pomegranate liqueur, m’lud) is the bees knees. Get some.

The second birthday of the year, and yet again, ice cream and peanut fudge sauce had a starring role.

• Prawns with Maryam Zaira Sauce
• Red-Leaf, Fig and Serrano Ham Salad (this time with Figs!)
• Lamb Cutlets with Chilli and Black Olives
• Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundae

Well, it was my birthday. What was I going to do apart from invite some good friends round and cook for them till we all burst?

I’d aimed to start with Scallops-on-the-Shell but the fishmongers of Leith let me down. Instead I bought in a truckload of prawns with their tails on, fanned them out all pretty in my Phil Revells (last birthday’s present) and gave everyone pots of Maryam Zaira sauce to dunk in. Dougal provided faintly saffron-y bread and all in all it was a grand wee starter.

Main course saw us re-visit a salad that we made way back when on the 1st of January. However, at the time we were missing a key ingredient- the Figs! Right now they are in season and there are heaving shelves of them in Waitrose. I was really impressed by how they brought this salad together- a lump of fig flesh with some serrano ham is a gloriously sweet and salty combination.

The high point of the main course was an awesome feast of tasty garlicky (oh my!) chilli seasoned lamb cutlets- 12 in all- fried on the hob. I was really impressed that this didn’t fill the kitchen (and my guests) up with smoke. We left the meat marinading while we ate our first course and then I set to frying whilst the table got re-organised and folks chatted away.

For pudding I pulled out the big guns. I’d commissioned ice cream from AC’s granddad (he makes it for her parent’s chippie and Italian restaurant) and thus, as much as a birthday present to myself as as a grand dessert for my guests, I was able to serve up the Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundaes. These were wonderful; the salted peanuts on top really worked a treat and the three types of ice cream were definitely necessary. The only thing that wasn’t necessary was my doubling the volumes for the Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce. We had far too much- the amount specified for four sundaes would surely have done the trick. Sadly this means poor Dougal and I are on left-overs duty all week. It’s a hard life.

In other exciting news I got some heart shaped cookie cutters for my birthday so at least one more recipe is now in our sights! My parting shot is Nick, illustrating the theme of Ice Cream Sundae through the medium of interpretive dance…

This is just eggy bread right? So it can’t taste *that* much better than eggy bread, which is pretty awesome, right? Wrong!

• Doughnut French Toast

This is a recipe I’d wanted to make for ages, largely so that I could surprise Dougal by presenting its sweet indulgence to him one night unannounced and have him think me ever so cool. Two things went wrong: firstly, we are at crisis stage with this challenge and so everything is being meticulously planned (we have a special Google Calender for it!) and there is no impromptu any more; secondly, I really thought this ought to be made with pain de mie, particularly as we never have sliced loaf in the house, and that meant asking Dougal to make one.

Somehow I thought this was just going to be like French-style eggy bread (whaddaya mean, French Toast) just sort of eggy and sweet. However, the addition of the milk and the vanilla essence lifted it into a sort of custardy carby plane of uber-indulgence. Yes, it was horrifically calorie and fat laden, but we had had an incredibly pious dainty portion of vegetable only stir fry for our main and it had been very windy so hard work on the bicycle that day….and I enjoyed it so much I don’t care if you think I’m a fatty pie. Did I mention that we had three bits each? Our bread was only small!

We went with Nigella’s suggestion of having this with hot chocolate and I can tell you, this fit the Instant Calmer bill very nicely. I’ve had a fraught fortnight or so (who am I kidding, last two months) and last night I needed this soothing sweet pudding. It didn’t let me down.

It’s a veritable linguistic feast today!

• Grilled Cheese
• Sandwich Slaw

Grilled cheese, it turns out, is a cheese toastie - if you’re from the United States. (I always thought it was another funny term for cheese on toast, like roasted cheese.) Strangely, there’s no grilling involved in making grilled cheese. Wikipedia also attests that slaw, as a term for coleslaw, is used in the southern US. So this is quite an American dish - in as much as a cheese toastie ever could be.

We normally make our coleslaw with a grater, but this recipe asked for slices, so that’s what I did. But it really wasn’t the Express way.  If you tackle this one, just use the damn grater. Frying them on the griddle was fun work, with the sandwiches weighted down with tins of beans in a frying pan. I think we waited slightly too long to turn them, or maybe the griddle was just too hot, because the sandwich had an even well-done-toast colour rather than elegant stripes.

In future I would make this on a bigger scale: big slices of bread, lots of cheese and tomato, and just keep making them until one or other diner admits defeat.

A recipe we’ve cooked many times but never quite close enough to the recipe for us to write it up.

• Noodle Soup for Needy People

As I said, we’ve made this slurpy ramen-style noodle dish at least three times, on cold evenings when one or other of us has been feeling flat. But along the way the right noodles, or the right mushrooms, or pak choi or some other vital aspect has always been missing and I’ve held off telling you about it.

This evening we got it pretty right. I had to subsititute Chestnut Mushrooms for the specified Shitake mushrooms; not quite the desired texture but nevertheless adding colour and flavour. It was also particularly punchy this evening as I didn’t have any fresh ginger; using ground but not reducing the volume meant it had quite a kick!

However, as with previous incarnations of this dish, I felt it was still a bit lacking. Nigella says in the preamble to the recipe that whilst you could add some cooked chicken or some slivers of raw tuna or salmon, she doesn’t think that protein is what you need. I disagree entirely. Protein is what is missing from this dish- something that was absolutely confirmed for me this evening when I found myself thinking ‘If it even just had some more mushrooms it’d be much better’.

So let it be known. When I am needy I need proper chicken noodle soup. Yes, you can add masses of pak choi and beansprouts and sugar snap peas- and please do- but don’t forget the sustaining stuff too.

Both Dougal and I were convinced this recipe had peanuts in it. But there are none!

• Rib-Sticking Stir-Fry

The name of this dish and the picture are to blame in equal measure we feel. Firstly, the illustration in the book makes it look as though this is a peanut heavy mix up, when in fact the little creamy ovals are cannelini beans. Secondly, we both felt the name suggested a sweet, peanut buttery sticky sauce for the noodles (like the Sesame Peanut Noodles from the On the Run lunches chapter) when in fact the sauce is quite loose and liquid, almost soupy.

I’d not been looking forward to this dish especially, perhaps because I’d read some negative reviews of it online. I wonder if in fact these other cooks had been disappointed not by the dish itself but by its failure to live up to their preconceptions of it.

I have to say this slipped down a treat as far as I was concerned. There wasn’t much to it- a pretty standard stirfry but using cannelini beans as an express alternative to cooking noodles. I don’t personally find cooking noodles to be such a bind- takes much the same time as frying a stirfry- but I am going through a bit of a beany phase at the moment and enjoyed their soft slight chalkiness in contrast to the succulent (free range) turkey.

This is the sort of thing I will doubtless cook again, but most likely without recourse to the recipe- who needs instructions to cook a highly basic stirfry?

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.