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 fantastic party atmosphere as the Hares muck in and learn to do sushi!

• Gravlax Sashimi

Now, let’s be honest. There is probably nothing authentic or legit about curing salmon, gravlax style, (albeit with sake and wasabi,) and using it in sushi. This did not mean we did not enjoy making it or eating it. Sometimes there’s a lot to be said for ignorance!

The curing mix consisted of sugar, salt, wasabi paste and sake. This was then smeared on the skinned (by me) salmon, and the whole lot sealed in cling film and weighted down in the fridge for a few days. I’ll admit, it did take a little trust (for all that I’m a chemist in many ways) to accept that this would come out of the fridge ‘cooked’ rather than stinking and rotten.

However, apart from some interesting markings, it came out of the fridge beautifully!

We made a party of this meal by ‘doing’ sushi properly (ish!). Firstly, we ate some of the salmon as straight up sashimi, with just pickled ginger, wasabi and soy. This was delicious and the best way to appreciate the full flavours of the salmon. The closest description I can come up with for it was smoke-less smoked salmon, which makes sense when you think about it.  When we repeat this we’ll probably use more Wasabi in the curing mix, as this was a bit lost in the end product.

To go with the sashimi, and in case anyone got raw-fish overload (although as I said, it was so much like smoked salmon in texture that I needn’t have worried) we decided to have a full participation Maki Party. With a bit of research on VideoJug we found out how to make sushi rice and swotted up on Maki Rolling, something we’d done only once at Keri’s birthday, over a year ago. We prepared the rice in advance and served up slivers of red and yellow pepper and avocado. I demonstrated first, and then we each took it in turns to make maki for the whole table. There was a healthy degree of competition in choosing one’s filling and in the trimming and presentation of maki and a grand wee time was had by all. Even better, I have introduced my parents to the joy of sushi!

A great wee meal to do with friends and family, and honestly, far easier than you might expect. None of us, apart from maybe me, I can’t remember, had ever rolled maki before but our results looked and tasted great. What a party!

Honestly, have a go at doing sushi some time. The kit is easy enough to pick up if you have a large supermarket or asian foodstore nearby, and the two videos I’ve linked to above show you everything you need to know. Avocado, cucumber and peppers make lovely fillings so you don’t need to go down the sashimi (raw fish) route at all. With some wasabi and soy for dipping and some pickled ginger you’ve got a really different starter. Please try it.

The trouble with Christmas Day is that the meal is pretty much set down for you. Okay, there’s a bit of leeway, but most people cook a bird of some kind, and the roast potatoes, stuffing, bread sauce, sprouts and so on are all set out for you. What’s to do? Brunch, that’s what.

• Swedish Salmon
• Sweet and Sour Cucumber Salad
• Warm Potato Salad

The Christmas day plan is one meal with my parents and another with Helen’s parents. The first meal of the day is officially a “champagne breakfast” but, out of two attempts in two years, we have never made it to their house before 11am. This year we didn’t eat until after one…

I started making this before going to bed the night before, and we drove to our home town the next morning, with a poached salmon and a cool bag filled with foreign Nigella ingredients. The salmon poaching is really easy, though you’ll need a large container if you want to cook a whole salmon at once. We had one side of a small salmon which was more than ample for four. You bring your water to the boil and then simmer the salmon in its flavoured water for ten minutes, before leaving it.

Overnight it cools down and the next morning it tastes moist and delicious. Draining a salmon of cold water is not a pleasant job but you get a lovely meal in return.

The salads were miss and hit respectively. Cutting a cucumber so finely that all the crunch disappears is not the right approach to take. You just end up with limp wet tissues, and no amount of interesting dressing will make up for it. Hot new potato with seedy mustard, on the other hand, is suitable for nearly all occasions. Take it to the races! Eat it for breakfast! At the cinema! Lovely stuff.

A very special meal in honour of two very special friends who have recently got engaged to be married.

• Potato Cakes with Smoked Salmon
• Lamb Shanks with Beans
• Blackberries in Muscat Jelly

We kicked off with a little non-Nigella, a round of Bellinis made with some posh Peach Nectar my parents had bought me.    The starter was potato cakes topped with smoked salmon and served with some ice cold Polish wodka. The potato cakes were made with Smash, of all things, but you mustn’t let that put you off. The mixture was a bit thick to dollop and it was therefore hard to judge whether the potato cakes were the right size. However they cooked up a treat and tasted fantastic. Fabulous Rory then stepped into the kitchen for a bit of dancing round the cooker but also to array the salmon and dill atop the pancakes. In the end we used half of the salmon called for but the amount seemed just right when we were eating them.          We couldn’t source enough shot glasses to go round and so half of us had our vodka from espresso cups! I had been prepared to grimace as I knocked my vodka back but was pleasantly surprised to really enjoy the combination. Clearly, served properly cold and with suitable accompaniment, vodka can be tasty!

The main course was Lamb Shanks with Tuscan Beans. Super Rory had braved the foul weather on Saturday to pick up happy lamb from the Farmers Market and then cycled it down to us in order that we could get it marinating. (Not only did he pick it up but he then refused to accept any payment for it. A truly gentlemanly gesture and greatly appreciated.)    These roasted up a treat and made the kitchen cosy and rich-smelling. We served a multi-coloured tomato salad on the side, layers of red and yellow tomatoes- some from Carluke, home of the great DI Drain- presented beautifully in the glass bowl I bought for the Quail with Layered salad which has served me well since. These added a juicy freshness alongside the earthy rich flavours of the meat and beans. A blob of my mother’s finest redcurrant jelly on the side and we were truly spoiled!

Pudding was something particularly special. I was really excited when K&B chose this part of the menu (I’d given them lots of menu options and they made the final selection)  as the dish in question not only appealed greatly to me, but deserved a properly special occasion. I am indebted to K&B for providing me with such an occasion.Blackberries in Muscat Jelly included another Nigella Express-led first for me; cooking with leaf gelatine.

The Muscat wine is heated up with vanilla sugar; the pre-soaked sheets of gelatine are melted with some hot wine and  then the whole lot is mixed together to give your jelly mixture. After a little cooling the jelly was poured over the fruit (much like the West Barns Primary School Dinner Hall only without the tinned pears) in posh glasses. At this stage I noticed lots of little bubbles collecting round the edges of the brambles. Not only did these spoil the aesthetic (I knew they’d burst before the photoshoot) but every good microbiologist knows that bubbles in your agar get in the way of good growth…they had to go. A bunsen burner I did not have, but I made light work of the pesky blighters with my cook’s blow torch. To think Lawrence mocked me for owning one!

These sat quietly in a carefully emptied fridge (you try fitting eight martini glasses into your fridge!) all afternoon, ready to be pulled out at just the right moment, a ready prepared jug of cream on hand to accompany. We all fell into one of those lovely silences as we ate these.Nigella says they are a very soft set (presumably on account of the alcohol) and during the post-preparation washing up I’d found that the mug I’d melted the gelatine sheets in had a solid lump of jelly at the bottom, so I’d been really worried these wouldn’t set at all. However they were actually as firm as you would expect any jelly to be. A little softer wouldn’t have gone wrong at all- perhaps next time I’d use a tiny bit less gelatine.

We finished up with coffees and M&S chocolates, just the thing. All in all this evening was a fabulous success. Great company (one notable absence but it wasn’t to be,) and fabulous food which will certainly be repeated. Both the potato cakes with salmon (and vodka!) and the blackberry jellies had really good faff : fancy ratios- not too fiddly to make, preparable in advance, and then just amazing at the crucial moment.Good stuff. (With apologies that the post’s been so long coming)

A tea that I’d been greatly looking forward to but which to my mind, missed the mark.

• Lamb, Olive and Caramelised Onion Tagine
• Ginger Passionfruit Trifle

I’d been looking forward to this tagine as I like olives and I like caramelised onions, and the idea of bringing them both together with succulent slowly cooked lamb to give a rich hearty stew was very appealing. Dougal had already made clear his intention of making another batch of the Bertinet Spicy Moroccan Rolls to go with this dish. We went all out with organic free range Mrs Hamiltons Lamb (diced gigot) bought at the Edinburgh Farmers’ Market and chose family favourite Co Op’s Primitivo Sangiovese to fill the role of ‘75cl bottle red wine’ for the meat to cook in.

We debated for some time whether the cloves of garlic (one head’s worth) should go in peeled or not. The picture in the book suggested unpeeled but I’m sure somewhere else in the book Nigella describes garlic as ‘unpeeled’ so we went with peeled here.

I suspect we were wrong with the garlic as once cooked, this had very little of the range of colours the picture in the book suggested it would. In fact it was pretty much black. Perhaps I’m attributing too much power to garlic skin but I wonder whether it might have sequestered some pigments along the way, allowed a range of colours to shine through.

As you can see above, this stew was also too watery. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that there was a bottle of wine in it, but I think it needed reduced and sauced up a bit. In any case the couscous and chickpeas we served alongside (intentionally quite plain but just a bit dull as far as I was concerned) really failed to soak up all these juices. Nothing about the bits of this dish from the recipe was appetising or appealing to look at. Nor was it especially great on the palate. The lamb was dry (how???) and for all that there were lots of flavours in the mix (cumin, coriander, capers, caramelised onions, garlic!!) this had quite a thin, layer-less flavour. Dull, dry and overly watery.

Thankfully we had D’s scrummy bread which was great for mopping up sauce. We discovered rather too late in the day that we had never replaced the commercial Ras-El-Hanout spice mix he’d used for these previously. After Dougal had a dismal trudge around North/East Edinburgh in the weeing rain with no spice acquiring success, we consulted the internet and made our own spice blend. The over all effect was less potent than with the Bart’s stuff but by no means disappointing. And we had great fun measuring out all the bits! Check out the flickr version of the mix picture to see what each of the colours is.

For pudding we dipped into the Razzle Dazzle fancy-schmancy chapter (and also back into my parent’s booze cupboard) for the Ginger Passionfruit Trifle. I think I’d always meant to make this for my mum and dad as my dad really likes his passionfruit and my mum really likes her trifles: frankly I’m not sorry I didn’t save it for them as it wasn’t a patch on any trifle my mum’s ever made.

Yes, it looked pretty cool. All that passionfruit shining out from the cream. But the madelines, despite a good soaking in Crabbie’s Green Ginger (no Stone’s here, thank you, we’re in Edinburgh) were a bit dry, and, astonishingly for a Nigella recipe, there didn’t seem to be enough cream. The biggest issue, though, was that there was no custard.Whoever heard of a trifle without custard? I know this is Nigella Express, but my mum makes making Bird’s look like no effort at all and I feel quite certain that it would have been absolutely within the spirit of the book to call for a carton of fresh supermarket custard to layer into this. Waitrose fresh vanilla custard is a pudding in its own right (damn you Na for introducing it to us!) and would fit in just nicely here, I’m sure.

So yes, it was bonny. But this trifle was a disappointing end to a frankly below-par meal. My apologies to my poor old best friend from school who had to suffer it as her birthday tea; she and her man were too polite to do anything other than make appreciative noises but I know we could have done better for them. Next time, perhaps.

There came a point where we just couldn’t keep buying all the boozes Nigella asked for. Amaretto is a drink neither of us have much desire to drink, but I knew some was hiding in my parents’ booze cupboard.

• Coq au Riesling
• Amaretto Syllabub

The occasion of this sweet little supper was a visit from afar (Aberdeen) of Em & El. Such glamorous guests have not graced Leith Walk for some time! (I might be kidding, I might not. You just don’t know!)

We started out with Coq au Riesling, Nigella’s very pared back version of the Retro Classique. Again, this used chicken thigh meat and again, the effect was juicy and tender and gorgeous. We served it with buttered pappardelle (as akin to Alsation ‘noodles’ as I could envisage) and slurped it all up. There was quite a bit left over which I have frozen; I am VERY much looking forward to the day I get to come home to this.

Pudding felt properly fancy and I suppose that really, it was. Amaretto syllabub, using the specially requisitioned Amaretto and lined with amaretti morbidi (soft amaretti biscuits) from the fab Sicilian shop up the hill, then served in our lovely martini glasses with a couple of amaretti on the side.

The folks round the table took a lot of convincing that these weren’t seriously alcoholic. In fact there was only 20ml of Amaretto per person, so barely a shot. However, clearly in melding with the cream this stuff increased in potency…you would not want to try and eat two of these! We all fell into something of a stupor after pudding and couldn’t be perked up even with a pot of tea! Glamorous, but no stamina, what can I say?

If my mum and dad are very lucky I might just make this down at theirs one day!

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!

Some friends popped by after they’d been out for dinner….I went the whole hog and shucked another pomegranate to get seeds for decoration….we used fancy glasses….it was fiddly to scoop….

• No Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream

It tasted pretty darned fantastic. Light and fruity but also creamy.

I could easily have gone another bowlful and I don’t think I was alone in feeling that way. Next time we eat this we will try getting it out of the freezer very early to see if that lets you scoop without fracturing. But even if it doesn’t, we won’t mind!

This ice cream is supposed to be express, as you just squeeze, stir, bung it in the freezer and go. This does not hold when you whip the cream by hand!

• No Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream

It’s funny that, given that this is Nigella Express, that she calls for whole pomegranates here. I’d have thought those little packets of seeds from Waitrose would be far quicker than de-seeding your own fruit. I’d never de-seeded a pomegranate before and so foolishly believed the internet that it just involved bashing my halved pomegranate with a wooden spoon. Instead it was a rather laboured process of inverting the fruit and worrying out the individual seeds.

As for ‘just stir’….whipping half a litre of cream and fruit juice by hand is no mean feat. We take some comfort though, in the knowledge that we will have burned a great many few calories by doing so and that makes the ice cream a little less sinful.

So right now the ice cream is in the freezer. Tomorrow we get to eat it and you shall hear from us how we got on. Preliminary reports from the bowl-licker indicate that this will be a big hit at the polls on Wednesday!

A family supper with most of the work done in advance. Marvellous. And a sore wrist. Less so.

• Crispy Duck
• Forgotten Pudding

My parents bagsied the Crispy Duck recipe right back at the beginning of the challenge. With the general release of Wall•E (D and I saw it at the Edinburgh Film Festival, la-di-dah! but were more than happy to see it again) it seemed an ideal opportunity to get the family together and take advantage of my lovely new kitchen.Nigella sells the duck recipe as fuss-free cooking- you even get someone else to open the Hoisin- but I spent most of the afternoon fraught with worry that the duck was going to be completely dried out and dinner ruined. Perhaps because of this fear, I didn’t serve the duck directly to the table but whisked it away to extract the meat myself. I rather wish I hadn’t now; the meat looked rather sad and small on its plate where the duck had looked magnificent, in a brown sort of way. Also, apparently you are supposed to serve the skin too, which I didn’t realise. And I didn’t make a very good job of the ‘going at the meat with a pair of forks’ serving style, perhaps just because I lacked confidence.

In any case people seemed to enjoy making up their little parcels of spring onion, cucumber, hoisin and duck, and it certainly wasn’t a labour-intensive dish, so perhaps I shall come back to this again. The next time I see a duck at half price in Sainsbury’s! (An added and unexpected bonus this weekend).

Pudding was more generally successful. Forgotten Pudding, so called because you switch it in the oven at bedtime, turn the oven off, and forget about it, worked really well. It was huge- the meringue mixture filled our ‘it’ll probably be too big’ swiss roll tin more than adequately but let me tell you, whipping six egg whites by hand is no joke. Must buy electric whisk. And I’ve just missed the clearance in John Lewis too.

After the main course, I whipped the family into action (groan) and got them to take turns whipping cream to top the pudding, which I then scattered with passion fruit, strawberries, and unusually but most sucessfully, brambles. It tasted about as amazing as it sounds! Because there was cream of tartar* in it the base was squidgy like marshmallow rather than brittle like meringue; apart from adding less salt than Nigella suggests (I reckon a mere pinch rather than the called for quarter teaspoon) I think this takes some beating. However, as Suburban Mum previously discovered, this is emphatically not one to make if you are a devotee of oven cleaner…rather too delicate a flavour!

*Go and read the Wiki page on Cream of Tartar and marvel, as I did the other night, at the thought process that goes “perhaps if I take the clear bit only of this egg and whip it up a lot, it will do something interesting…ooh, it does! … and perhaps if I scrape these totally unknown crystally things off the inside of this barrel of wine I’ve been making, and add it to the whippy eggs thing…and bake it really slowly and gently…oooh, yes, yummy squidgy outcome…” I mean, really? Could olden-days scientists not afford Sigma Chemicals or somthing?