The Sacred Art of Eating

I tend to be of the ‘leftovers’ school of risottos, where any lone vegetables, final scrunts of salami or roast meat in the fridge or end-of-bags-of prawns in the freezer find a happy and multicoloured home together. I have been known in the past to make a mushroom risotto but such deviations tend to be short-lived.

I was round at Shona’s the other night and she served this WI tomato-flavoured risotto topped with rocket and roasted butternut squash. I liked it so much I cooked it myself, within the week!

The risotto itself ‘contains’ no vegetables or flavours, it is a simple fried up onion/stock cooked rice affair with tomato purée and bay leaf adding colour and subtle flavours. It is topped with fresh rocket (you can stir it through but I served it just draped on top as this was prettier) and roasted butternut squash. Preparing butternut squash is one of the dreariest jobs in the world and our knives weren’t very sharp at the time so I used half a bag of pre-prepped butternut squash and sweet potato. I always grab these at Waitrose when they are on reduced to clear and sling them in the freezer as for bulking out curry or serving with pasta they are worth their weight in gold in terms of convenience. We didn’t top with toasted pine nuts as Dougal is a) unsure about butternut squash at the best of times and b)not so keen on dishes with scatterings of pine nuts and I felt to combine the two might be a bit mean!

However the rocket on top is not to be omitted- we used lovely locally grown stuff picked up at The Village Store, although this week we’ve been on a bag of Lidl British Grown Unwashed Rocket and it’s pretty powy too. I have friends who grow it in their garden who say it is easy peasy, so why not give it a try yourself?
We are growing some little herbs from seed, including rocket, although I think they are sown too thick at the moment. But they are very pretty!

I was rather impressed with this dish. Easy (and pretty quick, for a risotto!) and tasty with interesting flavours. I think I’ll revisit this.

Yet again we’ve been at Leith’s Village Store, and yet again come home with some scrummy goods:

Broad beans, more peas in pods, and beetroot- this time the right colour! We scrutinised the beets on sale and noted that some were very pink skinned, whilst others were darker purple with the colour continuing up the stem, rather than green stems. The latter did not disappoint! But I digress.

I have never in my life cooked with broad beans. I figured the internet would see me right, and it did! In the end I arrived at the Good Food Website and baked Ainsley Harriot’s Broad Bean and Lancashire Tart. I’d only really bought broad beans to do for two, and this was a full sized tart, so we supplemented the beans with the fresh peas. I couldn’t get lancashire in Leith on a Sunday night, so opted for Wensleydale instead- I say opted but it was more a case of what there was in Co Op.

We invited LeCabinet and El Ferd round to share this with us; they brought some lovely cold white wine and didn’t mind at all that we were running a bit behind schedule. I’d not made pastry nor blind baked a tart case in about eight years (apart from a couple of abject failures recently) so this was a little testing at times, but turned out just scrummy. Left overs went into packed lunches the following day: delish.

For the third week running we visited the newly re-launched Leith’s Village Store on Saturday. In fact, last weekend we were there as volunteers, selling locally grown potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, peas, rocket, chard, lettuce, radishes, courgettes to the people of Leith. Each week there are more customers and therefore more stock for the following week. When we were selling we ran out of eggs (twice! We even sourced an extra dozen but they went in a flash) and so this week they had stacks of the things!

We also had the task last week of securing this beautiful hand-painted sign. It’s on paper (?lining paper) with strings through reinforced corners….but there’s nothing really at the Drill Hall to attach it to, so we had to use a lot of parcel tape to stick the strings to the stone….and hope….

Despite being a very blustery day it survived, yay!

Back to this week. I was pleased to see, for the first time, bunches of very fresh looking beetroot. (Frustrating that I was thwarted in my attempts to buy beetroot last week, but such is the nature of things). We also got some local grown rocket- 40g to be precise, how nice to be able to grab it by the handful and take as much or as little as you need! – as well as courgettes, broccoli and chestnut mushrooms.

On Saturday night we decided to roast the beetroot to have with pasta. I cast about on the internet for timings and came across this delightful VideoJug vid on how to cook beetroot. We didn’t have any thyme but basically followed their instructions. (I was also on the hunt for an Ottolenghi recipe for beetroot with maple syrup and sherry vinegar without success…found sweet potato though, will have to assume is the same!)

So. Step one, prep the beetroot.

Um…what?

I’ve seen stripey beetroot before. Looks dead exciting raw but if you cook it with regular beetroot it gets dyed and the effect is lost. I’ve seen golden beetroot before (although now I think about it I’m not sure what colour its skin is. Brown?) But white ?

It should be noted that externally, all these beets looked exactly the same. Very pink, compared with most beetroot I’ve seen, but nevertheless kinda normal. The first one I sliced into was tiny, about the size of a cherry tomato, and when I saw the white inner I thought “b***er, I’ve bought blimen’ radishes!’. But they smelled of beetroot. And when I hit a striped one I was more reassured. So we ploughed on regardless.

We roasted them in the oven glazed in, essentially, salad dressing. The smell that wafted through when D checked the oven at half time was glorious. Served over a bed of buttery spaghetti and some of the rocket, it all tasted fantastic.

Visually, we’d have been better with normal, red, beetroot. It looked a bit like roasted garlic or perhaps parsnip. Not the glorious contrasting colours I’d originally envisaged. Had it not been for the rocket this would have been close to a one-colour-meal. But it was just the two of us and it tasted great. And now I know; beetroot can be pink on the outside, white on the inside. And I wonder….is it really normal to be red, or have I simply been brainwashed by the supermarkets and the force of consumer expectation? Ach, it’s always been red when I’ve seen Ken dig it up out of the garden!

Two meals, two nights in a row, to give Dougal something to look forward to when studying and keep me engaged in the kitchen.

• Feta, Tomato and Pesto Tartlet
• Nigella’s Nectarine and Blueberry Galette

As you might be able to tell, I’d bought a packet of all-butter puff pastry but wanted it to do two nights. Seemed a bit much to scoff it all in a one-er!

The tartlets I created based on a bit of reading around on the internet. Pesto seemed to be the done thing to line the tart with, and we had a massive basil plant at the time, so I blasted some up in the food processor with pine nuts/parmesan/garlic/olive oil, which did the trick nicely. Then some halved baby plum tomatoes, loads of feta, and into the oven for a bit. Came out looking pretty foxy I think- I especially like the cutting on the diagonal!

Tasted pretty smashing too!

The following night, for pudding, I revisited Nigella’s galette, a hastily flung together pud, no poshness involved. Half the size of last year which made it look rather cute- but also the kind of thing you could polish off between two just fine! (I think we did still spin it out to a couple of sittings though).

We had no apricot jam (I think for the challenge I bought it specially, can you imagine?) but just the day before my mother had presented me with two jars of made-the-day-before raspberry jam (my favourite!) which I felt could hardly hurt the thing. So, pastry lined with a mixture of fabby dabby mummy jam mixed with cream, scattered with slices of fab nectarine (Waitrose Perfectly Ripe) and some blueberries out of the freezer. Again, bake for a bit and serve, well, however you like. We might have gone for greek yoghurt, I honestly can’t remember!

Which is the name of the album Dougal put on after tea and really nothing to do with the authenticity of our eats çe soir.

My dad had kindly gifted us some Gorno’s Merguez (the original and best, as far as I’m concerned) and it seemed fitting to serve them with something cous cous-y. I know nothing about cooking cous cous (I do occasionally have it for lunch but generally just make a crunchy salad, lots of peppers and cucumber and what not, and mix that through cous cous) so deferred to the internet. This apricot and almond couscous was really nice; despite starting out proper boot-leather chewy, the apricots were tender but still a bit meaty (probably literally, seeing as it will have been the addition of chicken stock which redeemed them!) and the toasted almonds added texture and crunch. Sadly we were missing mint which would have really lifted this but the lemony-ness helped.

The sausages were just grilled and tasted great. Some lemony courgette slivers on the side were a vague but directionless attempt at an appropriate vegetable- nice but not really the right result, and not enough of them either!

We finished up with a simple fruit salad of alphonso mango and scottish rasps. It may not be remotely North African but let me tell you, it takes some beating.