The Sacred Art of Eating

Just after my exams and term finished, at the end of May, I had the pleasure-finally- of attending Taste of Edinburgh. Previously house moves and holidays have kept me away, but I was not to be beaten a third year running.

Those of you with keen memories will recall my excitedly posting that I could now blog from my mobile…and then falling mysteriously silent. Well the excitement had been partly at the thought of live-food-blogging, a dish by dish account, from Taste. It wasn’t to be. Wordpress, sort yer iPhone app out!

Lots of things happened at Taste, mostly revolving around eating free samples. However, partly to escape the cold, the girls and I ended up watching a cookery demonstration. It was given by Annette Sprague of Redwood in Stockbridge. Now those who know me well will know I am a big fan of Calistoga- was there to be room for a second Californian restaurant in my life?

Annette was a very endearing chef to watch, largely because she clearly wasn’t a seasoned pro in giving demonstrations. She was a wee bit chaotic and thrown by the kit available to her. I liked this; she reminded me of me. The recipe she made, for a Californian salad, seemed not-so-appealing as we watched her cook it on a dreich May day. It poured with rain just after she finished. However, I was intrigued, and, when the sun came out a few nights later, made it for D.

This is a Chicory, Asparagus and Proscuitto Salad. Or, to give it its proper name and a link to the recipe, Shaved Asparagus Salad with Chicory, Crispy Proscuitto & Lemony Vinagrette- how awesome they are for publishing this!

It has raw asparagus in it. Somehow, despite growing up in a home which grew its own asparagus, I had somehow never eaten it raw. Annette used chicory (with a lovely story about a Kurdish friend fighting with her sisters over who got to eat the heart, ‘the sweetest bit of the thing’ yet the very bit we throw away as bitter) a leaf I’ve always been a bit wary of- I mean, it’s so unergonomic! However the idea here was to slice it to much the same shape as the asparagus, which you could julienne with a mandoline if you had such a thing but if not, slice into very slim lengths. Harder than you might think!

The dressing has more ingredients than I’d ordinarily use- olive oil, vinegar, mustard, honey- I’d probably use one of those flavourings with oil- and Annette taught us a neat trick of using a bit of salad leaf to test the dressing- like dipping a bit of chicory in to see if the seasoning is okay. So obvious but sometimes you need told these things.

The other oddness to this recipe was the addition of a microplane-grated hard-boiled egg to the salad dressing. I don’t know where she gets this from either! But wowee it works.

All in- despite weird egg additions and excess veg in forms I’m not sure about, this pushed all of my salady buttons. I ended up making it when the girls from DGS came over for dinner again a week later. Now the asparagus season is done, and I shall have to wait another year. Counting down the days! Perhaps in the meantime I’ll have to check out Redwood…just don’t tell Calistoga!

I’d been flicking through a long-discarded-by-the-bed Waitrose Recipe Booklet recently, and then a day or two later, saw some really lovely portabello mushrooms on sale.

• Mushroom and Spinach Bundles

I’ll confess, however, that I made a mistake regarding the spinach. There had been some in the fridge, we’d eaten it, I’d forgotten. So our mushroom bundles featured mixed baby leaf salad, cos one green leaf is a lot like another, right? On a similar vein, the called-for thyme looked mysteriously like parsley in ours. Who could tell?

These looked just a-mazing going into the oven, and the filling smelled pretty good too.

However, they did not survive the baking well :o(

They tasted fine- no, they tasted fantastic- but this wouldn’t be a dish you’d be serving to someone you wanted to impressed with your food styling. Possibly we didn’t tie the parcels tightly enough, so that when things began to melt and blanch the overall height changed too much. Possibly the use of household string meant the bundles sat at a slight angle, where a fine thread would have allowed them to rest flat. Who knows.

In any case it didn’t matter at all as it was just D and Me and a big pile of buttery, parmesany linguine, and divine cheesey mushroom goodness on top. Well worth the slight fiddle of making I’d say!

Fab little supper this evening of baked potatoes (always good to have an excuse to have the oven on for an hour and a half in February) with Eggs Florentine (recipe via my Dad, Happy Birthday!) and a wee tomato salad (complete with nasty interlopers, as far as D was concerned)(M&S Mixed Marinated Olives, as far as I was concerned).

Now heading out for Tea and Mr Pilflod’s Chocolate Guinness Cake. Excellent.

I had hoped that leftover risotto would turn out to be really slurpy and tasty, like eating cold rice pudding with savoury flavours. In fact it was stodgy and a bit dull, but there was too much left in the pan to just chuck it out.

 The internet said make arancini, so I did. I used what I had to hand for the fillings: cheese, prawns and peas. A bit eclectic but I was running short for time. You’ve got to have non-stick hands to do this properly — make a little hemisphere of rice and fill it with whatever you choose, before capping off the end with more rice to make a beautiful ball. Obviously the aim is to get as much filling in there as possible which is pretty difficult.

My attempts were quite heavy on rice and light on  filling. They get breadcrumbed and deep fried, which gave me a chance to use my new candy thermometer. This will come in handy for later experiments.

 The result was tasty and the cheese worked very well, but it needs more practise!

For dinner Santa brought Dougal a rather lovely little plate, described as a tapas plate. Santa also brought him a Waitrose mixed spanish cured meats platter as Santa has ever such discerning taste, so she does.

On Friday we did our own attempt at Tapas in order to do these components justice.

I didn’t use any especially authentic recipes, more just what I got a feel for from reading around online. But the dishes comprised, clockwise from bottom: Champiñones al Ajillo; Cured Meats; Gambas al Ajillo; Chorizo a la Sidra.

All tasted and looked pretty stonking. The prawns were slightly marred by this being a last-minute-planning meal. The best Leith could come up with on a Friday evening was teeny frozen prawns. Not very substantial, hardly the big beady eyed beasts I’d envisaged. But truth be told it didn’t matter as the flavours were there- it was just a bit like eating weirdly meaty popcorn! The chorizo in cider wasn’t quite in the Oh my days! league of when I had it with Uncle John and Anna in Muswell Hill in London in 2000, but sometimes you can never recreate the first time!

It’s true, sometimes we do cheat. Eat, you know, ready meals. Somehow filled pasta doesn’t feel too much like cheating but supermarket curry certainly does. But someone pointed out to me that really it’s not so different to buying a takeaway. So I don’t feel so bad.

Anyway, over Christmas, D and I picked up one of those ‘Meal for Two’ deals at a supermarket- two tubs of thai curry (one ‘thai green’, the other ‘thai red’- quality stuff, natch), two spring rolls and some sticky rice. Which constitutes way too much food for us, so we planked one of the curries in the freezer to come back to. The thai green was pretty good, spring rolls fine, sticky rice a disappointment as it acquired all these nasty spikey hard bits when warmed by baking.

The other night I pulled the other curry (thai red- are you keeping up?) out for dinner. As it was such cheating I decided I ought to do nice sides to cheer things up, and prove I still know how to work the cooker. I found a recipe for Thai Broccoli Salad online. This was not good. I should’ve twigged from the sheer quantity of peanut butter in the recipe but I’d been thrown by measuring the broccoli in cups (which I tried to do but perhaps I got it wrong and this was my downfall)(‘Mercan readers- how do you measure something with such poor packing algorithms by volume?). I’ve not linked to the recipe because I would hate anyone to think I was endorsing it. Sweet and sticky to all the wrong degrees. It is unusual for this girl to leave broccoli on her plate but there was no question of finishing it.

Apologies but there’s not much I can do to make curry photogenic without pulling out props!

The rice worked out much better. A chance meeting with the lovely Ferdia on the train the other night (not so chance-we cross paths maybe once a week and end up sitting together once a month) put me on to the idea of cooking rice in coconut milk. I googled about a bit to work out logistics. Some people say you need to do all sorts of precise measuring and part boil/part bake/stir-stir-stir shenanigans. Other people seemed to imply that you just substitute water for rice and go!

I can tell you that if you cook rice by the 1xrice2xboilingwater-bring to boil-20mins180ºC technique that I was brought up on then it works absolutely fine to use 1 cup water and 1 cup coconut milk. The rice looks a bit weird when it comes out of the oven but it was still perfectly cooked. And so, so moreish. We didn’t quite finish it all at the time and the following day I was fantasising about it at uni.

So I expect that I’ll be doing that again. Although maybe not so soon. A couple of days later healthy diets came up at uni; on the Healthier Scotland website there were tips about improving takeaways and on the Thai page it said ’switch coconut rice for plain steamed rice’….booo.

Cripes, it was ages ago now, but we had my family over on the 2nd (prior to seeing the excellent Off Kilter at the Fezzie Theatre- catch it if you can) for a big lunch and an afternoon of Monopoly.

It being the depths of snowy winter (actually, by the morning of the second it had all melted)(the evening was another matter though!) I wanted to make something simple and warming, where the brunt of effort could be carried out in advance so that I was calm on the morning. Lasagne seemed the obvious choice.

I decided to follow a recipe on the grounds that to do lasagne off the top of my head would be to try and emulate my mother’s lasagne, and let’s face it it’ll never be good enough (for me) will it? So I turned to Hugh F-W. His recipe for lasagne was published in the Guardian in Nov 08 and, in true Hugh style, has about a million ingredients. Beef mince plus bacon plus chicken livers plus milk in the sugo? Wow! (The internet has just informed me that milk is an addition typical of Bologna, interesting). But apparently it is not a Hugh original. Seems he got it (probably via his mum) from Katie Stewart. Which wasn’t a name that jumped out at me until Dougal pointed out that she is the author of his Young Cook’s Calendar, from whence our fabby flapjack recipe comes.

Like all good sugo, this requires a long cook- three hours. It smelled and looked amazing after just one! I decided that if I were going to follow someone else’s recipe I might as well go the whole hog, infusing my milk with bay and onion to make the béchamel and then weighing the ingredients (rather than just doing it by the light of day). I bought fresh egg pasta lasagne sheets (which have the advantage of being big and square, which is nicer than the quick cook dried ones you get). I also bought a 500ml tub of beef stock from Waitrose. I wasn’t going to go for the expense, but we didn’t have any beef stock cubes, I wouldn’t really have wanted a whole packet of beef stock cubes, but most compellingly, when I picked up the tub of stock in the shop it wobbled. It was abundantly clear that this tub was chock full of protein. The real shizzle. So I bought it. As I heated it up to add to the sugo it smelled wonderful. Definitely worth going for it you need a decent stock base for something, even if it costs a lot more than stock cubes (but less than a bit of beef to roast for bones!).

All in the lasagne definitely came up to scratch. It was warm and rich and lovely, with some baguettes on the side and a wee warm courgette salad. We were stuffed and had to go and play monopoly to work up an appetite for pudding!

Dougal had made a wonderful chocolate stout cake from the Green and Black’s Chocolate Recipe Book. I’d seen Nigella’s recipe before in Feast, but this is a slightly different beast. It was black as anything and looked as if it would be quite heavy but was in fact very light and easy to eat, but with a really silky rich flavour. Gorgeous!

It was actually a bit of a fiddle to make- you have to beat 100g of cocoa (clue: a lot ) into 400ml of Guinness which is hard going- next time we’d pour the Guinness at least an hour in advance to get rid of the head. But it was well worth his effort I feel!

While I was at work on Hogmanay (so busy that I ended up playing Who’s in the Bag with my boss and the service manager!) D was on holiday, and took the time to rustle up a hearty meal for a wintry night, Chilli Black Bean Stew. This was most definitely needed as the wintry weather (black ice all ower the joint in Edinburgh) and the road closures for the Hogmanay parties resulted in it taking me 1hour40 minutes to get home from work, bah!

This is a recipe I’d torn from a Waitrose magazine last year, from a section entitled Winter Vegetarian. One of my best friends is a veggie but I always feel slightly as if I am letting the side down in my cooking for her. I thought the recipes in this section were without fail promising, yet somehow failed to ever cook any of them!

Dougal had to improvise slightly; no where in Leith sells black beans on Hogmanay (and certainly not tinned ones- there was no time for soaking) so kidney beans sufficed, and tinned plum tomatoes had to substitute for tinned cherry because, frankly, where apart from Waitrose sells tinned cherry tomatoes?!? Fresh chillies were not to be had so he used some jalapeños out of a jar. Oh and he forgot the apricots, even though we had some really good ones left over from the biscotti.

Nevertheless it was blimen wonderful; these concerns do not matter and merely give us an ideal excuse to repeat the recipe, to see how it ’should’ have tasted. I thought the flavour was really interesting- the heat didn’t appear till right on the point of the swallow, so you got real depth of flavour without being hot-bombed. Perhaps with fresh chillies the heat would permeate the whole ‘length’ of the taste?

I made tea last week; Dougal’s been doing most of the cooking of late and I felt I owed him a night off. I had some lamb steaks in the freezer so looked online, found a promising looking recipe with good reader comments, and cooked. It was awful. Such a waste of lamb, so much so I don’t even want to tell you about it, and thoroughly demoralising to someone who is feeling out of the loop with cooking and missing her mojo.

This week, Lisa posted on facebook that she’d cooked a Nigel Slater Lamb Recipe. I’d come across this recipe when looking last week but had thought it seemed to summery, not suited to a dreich winter’s evening. (Two posts in a month using the word dreich, can you tell it’s November?) But Lisa’s enthusiasm for the recipe made me give it a second look. I reasoned that with mashed potatoes it might be just the ticket. We had some more lamb chops in the freezer (lamb packs had been on three for a tenner in the supermarket!) and I grabbed some fresh herbs in Roots, Fruits and Flowers on Byres Road in Glasgow, near uni. (I could have gone to the new proof that Glasgow is okay really Waitrose, which is next door, but you have to shop local, right? Plus the packs were the same price and although not stating their actual contents, I reckon the packs in RFF (from ScotHerbs, so more local-ish, presumably) were a shade bigger). D got the feta, lemon and some veg to keep me happy, and we were away.

The premise is a bit like Ed’s Tender Rump- griddled meat plus tasty dressing- although without any post-cooking ‘marinading’, you simply dress the hot chops in the oil-lemon-feta-oregano-thyme-pepper mixture. I’d maybe use a wee shade less feta next time (I think it’s easy to over do) but otherwise even though it looked a little like omg my lamb is covered in bits of plant! more was generally good, regards this dressing.

Indeed, this was absolutely scrummy. I highly encourage you to cook it! Ken, I’m thinking of you seeing as you have oregano and thyme in the garden! (Plus your woody stemmed thyme is far easier to pick the leaves from than supermarket stuff!) Also, any spare dressing is excellent stirred through the mashed potato.

Delighted to have made a small return to form. And to the kitchen. :o)

Don’t know where the time goes, sorry. Had an absolutely fantastic tea tonight: yesterday had got sausages out of the freezer with the intention of doing bangers & mash and then last night happened upon Maggie’s write up of Nigel’s recipe for just that!

I had the necessary additives in the fridge- cream, mainly- and went with the Dijon mustard rather than the parsley flavouring for the mash. Even though a tablespoon of mustard seems like loads the mash was only very, very mildly piquant. I’d use at least double next time, I reckon. Of course perhaps my mustard has gone past it….and I’ll get used to using loads and then one day open a new jar and blow Dougal’ and my tastebuds to kingdom come!

Scrummy scrummy meal though, unctuous creamy mash, tasty sausages (from Asda’s happy pigs and apples of unknown mental wellbeing) masses of runner beans (which tasted dead buttery despite the addition of no butter at all!).

It made me want to get back to blogging. So I shall try, a little harder, again. My sincere apologies to my parents who will think I waited for them to go on holiday before beginning a deluge of posts. Deluge. You may not get to hold me to that!