The Sacred Art of Eating

With Dougal swotting for a qualification at the mo (CCNA if you’re interested) I have agreed to be super-supportive by making tea every night whilst he gets his head into the books from 6:30-7:30. This has the bonus for me that, having got stuck in a rut somewhat with cooking (you might have noticed by the lack of blogging!) I feel some impetus to cook originally again. Follow recipes, that sort of thing.

This beetroot salsa recipe came from the BBC Good Food website. I didn’t serve it with ‘firm white fish’ (which, if the picture is anything to go by means something like cod) but with lemon sole, as it was reduced to clear at the fish counter and about a quarter of the price of anything else. Can’t fight economics. I also didn’t use ready-cooked beetroot, but peeled and cooked my own. (I clearly haven’t been looking after my hands of late; there are now clearly visible dry patches stained brown by the beetroot juices!)

The composition wasn’t quite as the recipe suggested; I halved the recipe, meaning it to only do the two of us, but then forgot or didn’t halve the beetroot amounts- in fact I probably used more than was called for. The pieces weren’t as small as they might have been either, as I was cutting it up hot whilst in a hurry as the fish was ready. So this was probably more of a beetroot salad than a salsa.

It was yummy, in any case. Went great with the fish (just panfried after dipping in seasoned flour) and I took the advice of a commenter on the recipe page and served mashed potato on the side. I might pare back the spring onion in future, but that’s only because raw spring onion increasingly seems to upset my insides. If you were a raw spring onion fan I don’t suppose it would be a problem.

I just, on Dougal’s suggestion, made myself a drink by the recipe on the back of a bottle of sugar syrup. Now I deviated somewhat, in that while it was a bottle of Monin Sugar Syrup, Dougal had just refilled the bottle with home made sugar syrup. Equally, whilst called for Monin Elderflower Syrup I used regular Thorncroft’s Elderflower cordial. 20ml sugar syrup, 10ml elderflower, a squeeze of lemon juice and top it up with tonic water.

It tasted like bitter lemon! It was very sweet- not surprisingly- and yet also very bitter and tart, almost savoury. I’d only used a 150ml can of tonic and I reckon a bit more could easily have gone in (need to check which type of glass it was I was supposed to be topping up with tonic!) and probably a whole measure of lemon juice. Regardles of these tweaks it was refreshing and tasty…and now, Gone!

No piccies as a)it didn’t look like anything and b)I didn’t expect it to turn out so noteworthy!

Dougal and I had a couple of nights of culture this week at a two-part performance of His Dark Materials trilogy at the theatre. The plays were long and so had an early 7pm kickoff- tricky for me to get home from work for, if we were to eat before hand. So we decided to eat afterwards!

This scrumptious dish is a Lady Claire MacDonald/Scotsman recipe which came to me via my dad. I had spied the note that it could be prepared entirely in advance and then grilled at the point of eating, so I made this on Wednesday night. It is pretty easy to prepare although I ought to have allowed myself a little more time- I ended up squeezing out rather hot water from the blanched spinach!

On Thursday, Dougal took it out of the fridge after work to come up to room temperature, and after the play we bunged it under the grill before wiring in with glee. If we’d had it at a proper tea we would probably had some other vegetables or salad or maybe some of D’s bread on the side; as it was it was half past ten and so we just scoffed (most of ) it au naturel.

It was lovely; the baby spinach still tasted very fresh and green (I’ve never actually cooked with spinach myself before so my main experience of it is cooked to death in saags); the eggs (as instructed) were in that lovely squishy place just beyond soft-boiled but not yet hard-boiled (I wish I had a picture!) and the cheese sauce was tart and added piquancy to it all. I had been a little sceptical of only using cheddar in the cheese sauce, but it was a nice Canadian mature and it seemed to do the trick. Finally, there was grilled cheese (cheddar and parmesan) on top too, which as we know is the mark of a classy dish!

Let me tell you, it was bloody brilliant cold the next day at work, too.

There are several of us at work who periodically pick up the recipe cards in Waitrose; as you know Dougal and I have had mixed results with them of late, but generally I find them fairly trustworthy. A friend picked up a Spring/Easter special which I felt was generally a bit dull over all, but which contained an apple pudding which caught my eye.

Jazz Apples, with their rosy skins still on, are sautéed in butter for a bit, before being baked in the oven in a sweet floury, eggy batter, a bit like a pudding Toad In The Hole.

I can see why the recipe asked for the skins to be left on- you can see the pretty pink colour has seeped into the surroundings of the apples- but they did make eating this a bit hard work. The batter and apple flesh were very soft but the skins remained pretty tough, even though I’d cooked the apples for probably longer than I ought to have.

The flavours were all there- sweet carby base, fruity apple notes- but the total effect was a bit lacking. Similarly, this tasted good cold but did end up unappeallingly rubbery. I was almost tempted to hide it when I took leftovers in for lunch at work!

This has encouraged me to explore further into appley puddings though. Anyone got a nice recipe for apple sponge? I might explore the apple charlotte recipe in Delia’s Complete Cookery Course. Or perhaps I ought to get a proper pastry lesson from my mum and also learn to make proper apple pie!

There was a fair bit of swearing went on during the construction of these buns, but they turned out okay in the end!

Dougal made the buns, as they are bread-based. However, the bread is then accessorised with a big dollop of ricotta and a generous peppering of blueberries. The last time he made these, the blueberries kept bursting and popping out of the dough and generally rolling across the tabl, so this time he took the alternative suggestion of using frozen blueberries (which are much cheaper anyway!).

Let me tell you, the air turned blue when my boyfriend added them blueberries. As you might expect, with hindsight, the frozen berries completely killed any life in the dough.

He must have persevered though, as the next thing I knew, fabulous smells were wafting through the house and then I was presented with these beauties:

Dougal took most to work, but we also took some to our signing group and they were well received everywhere. It probably helps that they look so beautiful, to start with. The arty paper wrappers aren’t an affectation either; we just used normal paper muffin cases the first time and they stuck like made but with the baking parchment squares they were neat and eating-in-public friendly as you could like.

So perhaps forewarned is fore-armed, as it seems the frozen fruit weren’t such a problem after all. Which is a good thing, as there are more in the freezer!

Phew! It appears Waitrose do actually have more than one nice recipe! (The first recipe being this nice variation on the ol’ stuffed peppers theme.)

• Waitrose Vegetarian Chilli with beans

This is a slightly cheaty chilli which tastes fabulously home made and wholesome. The cheating comes from using a can of kidney beans in chilli sauce; however chilli powder is still added and I’m sure if you fried a fresh chilli at the beginning and used a tin of toms later on it would work fine.

Rich and hearty and absolutely loaded with vegetables this did us for a couple of meals and lunches. It was especially good with a baked potato, and a blob of sour cream was an excellent garnish. To accompany, as if more veg were needed, a huge steaming pile of buttery cabbage- heaven!

It looked so nice in the picture! I’d been keeping the card since December! Bah!

• Waitrose Veal Ragu

As I said, I picked this card up in December and thought I could cook this next year! The ingredients were reasonably straightforward and happy, British veal is very reasonably priced, so I was keen to give this a go, even if it meant waiting.

I put this together on a Thursday afternoon. I had a half day for a meeting with an interior designer, which meant I was able to get it cooking nice and early to give it plenty time to bubble away and for the flavours to come out. It looked quite alarming, yet pretty, as it simmered, the wine and red onions contributing a purple tinge to the liquor whilst the something else, not sure what, lent a green shade to the bubbles!

The problem with this was in the recipe, and I should have spotted it sooner. The dish contained 450g of meat, plus some onion and other veg. I then had to add over 600ml of liquid- wine and veggie stock. Then I was to simmer to reduce slightly.

Reducing slighty meant that the meat was swimming in liquid. Even though we realised this and gave it a good boil later to reduce it down, the dish still felt thin and watery. It was difficult to bring it together with the pasta (saffron tagliatelle was called for by the recipe, although normal pasta would have been just fine) and you ended up chasing watery bits round the plate. Very dissapointing, and enough to shake my confidence in Waitrose recipe cards.

Dunno if it was a poor recipe or overly-authentic ingredients, but this dish was near-inedible!

• Good Food Calendar 2009- January

It looked scrummy in the picture. Chicken with a glossy soy glaze and asian greens, crunchy vs succulent. It looked dead authentic on the plate, with an ice-cold Asahi beer on the side and some rice for starch.

It tasted of soy sauce. Cloyingly salty. Sticky and thirst-making. Unusually for me, I couldn’t finish it.

The problem may well have been that the recipe called for light soy sauce and we used dark. Further to this, whilst it is only Amoy, our soy sauce comes from a Chinese supermarket and we’ve commented before that it is blacker than any soy we’ve seen before. So perhaps it was simply the wrong condiment to cook with. To be honest though, this meal was so poisonous I won’t be going back to find out!