The Sacred Art of Eating

A sandwich of duck breast, pomegranate and mint, on home-made (for the bruschetta) pain de campagne. No, I wasn’t sharing!

With K over from Canada, we needed a properly celebratory dinner. Cocktails and three courses were the order of the day!

• Duck Breasts with Pomegranate and Mint
• Mellow Meatballs
• Cherry Cheesecake

Our salad starter, seared duck breasts on a bed of rocket and chard, scattered with pomegranate seeds, pan juices and mint leaves, has to go down as one of the great unexpected sucesses of the challenge so far. I honestly hadn’t expected it to be much cop; it seemed little more than an array of individual ingredients with nothing to tie them together.

How wrong I was. The juices from the duck and pomegranate dressed the salad beautifully, and the contrast between the fruity seeds and the ripped up mint was heavenly. As an added bonus this was really very easy to make in advance. Itwas a great start to the meal, served alongside an overflowing bowl of sesame plaits and poppyseed stars made by my resident bread chef Dougal.

The meatballs didn’t, to my mind, turn out all that differently to the Red Prawn and Mango Curry I did for Dougal’s birthday. I suppose both use Red Thai curry paste and coconut milk ( and I did forget to add the honey to the meatballs) but I was a bit unimpressed. They weren’t very mellow either. Filling though, which was good on a wet night, but not the sophisticated main I had half-fancied serving everyone.

Pudding was a definite first for me- a genuine chilled cheesecake! Generally it worked well, although there was no way I could have made five digestive biscuits cover the base of my tin, so I doubled that up. The tin also turned out to have a lip in the base (perhaps I had it the wrong way up?) which made serving rather tricky and inelegant!

Over all this cheesecake was nice, it did definitely taste like a bona fide cheesecake, but I felt the topping was lacking. We used the specified Rhapsodie de St Dalfour cherry conserve, but I wouldn’t get it again. I think it needed to be sweeter. Clearly Nigella Lawson and I disagree here, as she says basically any cherry topping with no added sugar will do.

All in, quite a sucessful little dinner party, if not quite as glamorous as it might have been!

You might think that one of the aims of any flatwarming party we might have had would have been to get through more recipes. In fact, I managed only one.

• Juicy Beef Skewers with Horseradish Dip

In my mind this was sort of two recipes, as the preamble to the instructions contains an alternative route, using lamb instead of beef, and I made both.

I got 1 kilo of rump steak and 1 kilo of leg of lamb from Ian Proudfoot, the butchers near my work. They offered to dice it for me and I agreed, asking for largeish dice. The recipe actually called for 2.5cm dice and most of the bits provided were a bit on the big side- next time I will either know my requirements or do it myself!

The meat marinaded overnight: the beef in garlic oil, red wine vinegar, horseradish cream, rosemary and port; the lamb much the same but with cumin instead of horseradish.

On the day of the party I threaded these onto skewered and griddled them. Nigella called for bamboo skewers, pre-soaked in water; mine were FSC certified wood and specifically indicated that they ought not to be soaked. I was therefore not best impressed when they started burning and falling to bits where they contacted the edge of the griddle pan. It is a tiny wee pan, not best for cooking a large vol of meat (I’d thought about borrowing my parents’ big griddle but never got around to asking) so perhaps it was never going to work out well. It did mean some of the meat was on elegant long skewers whilst some was on stubby short bits!

The dip for the beef comprised crème fraîche, horseradish cream, chives and lemon juice and was yummy and fairly popular. The dip for the lamb was hummous, greek yog, olive oil and a scattering of those damned pomegranate seeds which put all my eaters off. Shame. Whilst I was worried about the kitchen being full of smoke when my guests arrived, the extractor seemed to work well (either that or the open window did) and I (and the kitchen) survived unscathed.

This being a year-long challenge, we will have two birthdays to see in Nigella Express style. The first of them went very well…

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry
• Ice Cream Cake

The curry felt a bit like cheating at cooking, in that I used pre-cubed butternut squash, sweet potato and mango, as well as shelled and cooked king prawns. In fact, all I had to slice was a spring onion although I did fry that in hand-made, slaved over wok oil (I then burnt the spring onions). The flavour came from curry paste (red thai) and coconut milk and really I did nothing. This was pretty gorgeous though, despite my managing to over cook it and the butternut melting away to nothing. Clearly it is an Express recipe seeing as most curries really do benefit from a good hour of bubbling away slowly.

As suggested in the preamble to the recipe I served this with noodles tossed in toasted unsalted peanuts. The peanuts were very hard to track down- not in the wholefoods section of the store but with the salted/dry roasted peanuts as a ‘healthy alternative’. I forgot to go to the chinese supermarket before it closed to sent D out on a wild goose chase for wide rice noodles which were not to be found but normal egg noodles did the trick just fine. Slurpily wonderful.

Pudding, however was the real icing on the cake, even though this cake had no icing at all. I felt my man deserved an all out pudding for his birthday so I went for the ice cream cake from the swanky Razzle Dazzle chapter. This was a cinch to make; I wouldn’t and couldn’t get the called for Nestle ‘peanut butter and chocolate chips’ so I used a mixture of white, milk and plain chocolate chips as well as butterscotch chips sourced from my pal Ariana’s Italian restaurant. Brill.

I made the cake up the night before and then at tea prepared the TWO sauces that were to go with it. Then, a quick bit of strewing the top with chocolatey rubble and a drizzle or two of sauce (more of a slick than a drizzle as the sauces could’ve done with cooling a bit more) and we were, collectively, in ice cream heaven.

The best bit about the ice cream cake might well have been that, unlike other cakes, we couldn’t give our Birthday Tea guests a slice each to take home with them….it just had to go back in our freezer, mwahahaha!

• Roquamole
• Red-leaf, Fig and Serrano ham salad
• Spanish omelette

New Year’s Day saw me inadvertently begin The Challenge (Mike didn’t lay out the details until the 3rd) when, on Hogmanay, I had a Nigella-like moment and ‘discovered’ I had people coming to supper.

The situation was thus: my mum had mentioned her and my dad popping in on the first, and us all going for a walk up the Union Canal before taking in a movie and perhaps food at Chop Chop, our nearest (and best in Edinburgh) Chinese Restaurant. However, whilst I was at work on the 31st, a flurry of emails revealed that Chop Chop was to be closed on the 1st. I gaily offered to ‘do food’.

Theoretically, whipping up some sort of light bites for my family, particularly when any empty stomachs could be filled with ice cream at the cinema afterwards, was not a demanding undertaking. But I was heading into the beginning of a rubbish cold, and Waitrose was heaving as I made my way round at 3pm. Heaving, but pretty light on stock. I felt bewildered and overwhelmed by ingredients and recipes and possibilities; I’d not made any plans for what precisely to cook and as such didn’t really know what I was doing. However, I had read through some of Nigella Express by this stage and so I had an idea of what to make, grabbing ripe avocados and manchego cheese (eek it was expensive) and soft goat’s cheese. I had a vague notion of doing some salads and some dippy-crisps thing.

The roqualmole was an almost resounding success. Dougal made it up, rather than me, but I think it was fairly straightforward to create. We let the side down slightly by not having any of those sliced jalapeno chillis to put through it and give it oomph, but nevertheless the ingredients were good and the result was flavoursome. My family ate it with gusto, my brother announcing that it was really good, ‘like guacamole but not quite’… unfortunately the very moment I revealed that its secret ingredient was blue cheese, he magically lost his taste for it. Even at 21 he can be a total child sometimes. Sadly we couldn’t manage blue tortilla chips (we barely managed real tortilla chips, but I was resolute that I would not have it with doritos!) even though I have eaten them in Scotland before so they must be available somewhere in Edinburgh.

The serrano ham salad was something I’d known I wanted to make when I walked into the supermarket, and as such I’d shopped specifically for the ingredients I needed. Sadly, I was let down by the lack of deliveries/frenetic panic buying of the other shoppers, because try as I might I could not get any redder than average salad leaves. In fact, in Waitrose I couldn’t get any salad leaves at all and had to buy them in Somerfield when I got back to the flat. I didn’t include any figs in my salad because I’ve only knowingly eaten fresh figs once in my life and wouldn’t know where to start when buying the things. Also, we didn’t have any sherry vinegar, so I used a mixture of cooking sherry and white wine vinegar. Whether this was to the detriment of the dish I doubt I’ll ever know, as I’m not sure there is really room in my life (or my condiments cupboard) for sherry vinegar. Lastly; I think Nigella must have a sharper potato peeler than I do because I found that only 1/2 of my manchego slices had an artistry to them. The others had chunks at one end. I enjoyed this salad (cheese AND ham in the one dish, hurrah!) but I think I’d better make it again, for so as not to be accused to failing to take the challenge seriously enough. And also because I’d like to eat it again.

The spanish omelette was a last minute addition to the menu and suffered a little a lack of planned shopping. We had no caramelised peppers in the house and so I made a hopeful New Year’s Day trip to the corner shop at the end of our road. It has always seemed quite big; however I discovered that in fact most of their stock is alcohol and dogfood. Further to that you can buy anything as long as it is in a tin or pickled. (Except for jalapenos!). So the spanish omelette was in fact made fairly traditionally in that there were no caramelised peppers in it. However, despite misgivings, I used only the weight of new potatoes the recipe called for, and used them halved (as directed) rather than sliced any smaller. I felt that there was rather too much space between the potato, that the omelette lacked structural integrity. One certainly wouldn’t have sliced a wedge off and taken it in one’s lunchbox, for it would only have fallen apart. Perhaps it would have been better with slices of potato, or perhaps it merely needed the addition of the magic 75g of peppers to bulk it out. Either way I was a bit disappointed by this one; I’d have made an equally good, if not better, spanish omelette without taking her advice on the matter.

Sadly I don’t have proper photos of the above, as we didn’t start out photo taking in earnest until the challenge had been laid down. However we made the same salad a couple of days later (although in a bowl rather than artily on a plate) so you get that picture.

The finishing touch to our little New Year’s Day supper was a tray of Neapolitan cakey things I’d picked up from the Italian cafe across the road. Perhaps now my dad will be convinced to come and take me out for coffee! Pastry filled with sweetened ricotta and cream and crystallised fruit… brilliant, and suitably decadent for a festive occasion.