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.

We’ve been a bit better, lately, at getting out to the Farmers’ Market which takes place every Saturday in Edinburgh. When we lived in Dalry we walked up their at least once a month, drawn by the lure of porridge or ostrich burgers for brekkie, but the thought of trekking across town on the bus of a Saturday makes it less appealing. And D doesn’t have a bike.

On a recent trip (who am I kidding it was ages ago!) we got some fresh ricotta, made by Italian/Scots couple Gabriele Caputo and Adriana Alonzi (yes, there is a distant connection to Ariana!) down at Yester Mains Farm. No website, but there’s a wee article from the Herald here and (possible related) an awesome photo set  by photograher Gary Doak here. We felt, as it was our first experience of cooking with properly fresh ricotta, that we oughtn’t overwhelm the flavours, so served it with spaghetti and herbs. (This may have been on the advice of Mary Contini although I don’t recall). It looked gorgeous.

If anything, it didn’t quite taste of enough for my liking. Perhaps I am unsophisticated. Perhaps it was a little too wet? In any case it wasn’t expensive, so I think we shall continue to experiment. As an aside, both the mozzarella and smoked mozzarella from this stall are gorgeous too!

The following day we knocked up a recipe I’ve been meaning to make ever since Kate carefully transcribed it from the book for me, Jamie Oliver’s One pan Sweet Cherry Tomato and Sausage Bake. Kate and Ben cooked this for us back in January and it was *gorgeous*. I adore the J&M Craig tomatoes (from Carluke) available from the market- they taste the my mum and dad’s, straight off the plant and hot from the sun. It seemed correct to make the two meet in the middle.

You do need a LOT of toms though. But that’s all good with me.

It did seem rather wrong, this recipe, in that tomatoes are at their best at precisely the time of year that you don’t want to be roasting things in the oven (half the reason it tasted so good in January!). However, this is Scotland, and even in the spring and summer there are always grim, miserable days (like, ooh, as I write this!) where having the oven on is just fine. Slurp it up!

So, what was I up to? Well my dear friend Ari  is leaving our team at work to join our sister lab, and these were a little homage to her in her last week.

Ariana lives in the ‘burbs, and is very attached to her car, which causes problems when she heads out to be seen in Edinburgh’s stylish cocktail venues. If she has the car, she’ll have a raspberry vodka and lemonade at the beginning of the night, and nothing thereafter. So, in her honour, these cakes are called

Just the one for me, thanks, I’ve got the car!

The cakes are lemony, with a rasp or two hidden inside; the icing is buttercream coloured and flavoured with the juice of half a dozen or so rasps pushed through a sieve. Makes for a rather soft buttercream, but that’s okay. I prefer not to eat hard icing anyway.

I adapted the recipe for the Orange, Raspberry and Yoghurt Cupcakes for these, although along the way I was very much inspired by Alauna’s Lemon-Raspberry cupcakes.  As you can probably tell I attempted to emulate the look of hers, although I should probably have stretched the batter to 18 rather than 12 cakes, to give flatter tops, if I’d wanted the elegance of hers. I’d also not handled a piping bag in about ten years, so my icing was verging on the pink poo! Practice makes perfect I guess.

I decided against a hidden blob of raspberry jam as I only have a little of my mum’s excellent jam from last year left- I didn’t want to finish it all up on cupcakes for other people. And it’s lost its intense red colour with age so I thought it might let the aesthetic down, even though it still tastes wonderful. However as I said, these cakes are still in beta, so perhaps the next attempt will take the rasps *out* of the cake and put some jam *into* the cake.

There was also the discussion of whether, to be truly authentic, there ought perhaps be a single shot of raspberry vodka in the icing. My concern is that at the moment it tastes wonderfully fresh and natural and the vodka might push it into the synthetic. (I’m sure Absolut will lynch me for suggesting their Raspberry Vodka is made with synthetic flavourings, but you know what I mean!)

Annoyingly I didn’t take any pics of the fully iced batch, and despite a great deal of care being taken one or two did fall over in the tin on the bus to work on Thursday, after which they were not so photogenic. And there are none left. So you will just have to imagine their over all glory. Perhaps version 0.2 will be fully catalogued from conception to execution!

I was up to past midnight the other night, experimenting. I don’t have time to tell you all about it just now, so here’s a wee sneak preview. Can you guess what I was up to?

There has been quite a bit of cake-making of late.

First up, D’s birthday was a fortnight ago, and it wouldn’t be right to have a birthday without a chocolate cake, would it? I assumed Delia would see me right but in the end I turned to Nigella for a Classic Chocolate Cake. It wasn’t as easy to make as it could have been; if your food processor is big enough you just pour all the cake mix ingredients in the top and press go. My food processor has a pretty small capacity so I made this the long route, creaming butter and sugar etc…

I was pleased with the outcome: looked a lot like a chocolate cake, tasted a lot like a chocolate cake!

Dougal needed cake to take to work too, as the choccy cake was going nowhere, so I whipped up a quick batch of simple vanilla cupcakes (made with vanilla sugar and a splash of vanilla extract) topped with raspberry icing and raspberries- the icing is made with raspberry coulis rather than water. Ecstatically pink and rather tasty!

These got eaten on the day. Next up was his ‘party’; on Friday night a bunch of people came over for beer and a bit of food. Inspired by the true Queen of Cupcakes, Miss Carpico*, I made some cocktail cupcakes- White Russians, of course! These babies had kahlua and sour cream in the mix, and were iced with a kahlua, sour cream and white chocolate icing. The recipe book I used had them decorated with a fine dusting of cocoa and a rice paper rose; this I felt was *all* wrong. Surely the White Russian cupcake is an angular, masculine, 1980s dude-abiding cupcake? I went for a chord of thick cocoa across each cupcake and thought they looked damn fine. So I am gutted that the one and only photo I took of them ended up corrupted and gone :o( Just have to make more I guess.

The following week we made it down to Dunbar to see Dougal’s parents and granny for his birthday. Sadly, his brother (having come all the way home from China to Scotland recently) was in fact in Glasgow for the weekend. Such is like. So, it not being a birthday without cake, I made another batch of cupcakes, using the recipe that Ari reckons is the best of all. These beauties are almost muffins, being made with oil not butter, but they differ from muffins from containing quite a bit of ground almond and Greek yoghurt. The is orange zest and orange juice for flavour, and there are a pair of sneaky raspberries hiding in the middle of each cake. The icing is made with more Greek yog and of course, topped with a rasp. Moist and scrummy plus the surprise fruit is always good for giggles.

*Miss Ariana Carpico thinks nothing of whipping up 100 cupcakes for afternoon tea, “because that’s only four batches”. Armed with her shiny red kitchen aid and a formidable volume of icing sugar, she recently made over 260 cupcakes for a charity tea party held by her mum, raising thousands of pounds for Cancer Research UK along the way. This lady has taken the Nigella Express Challenge ethos and is busily applying it to her cupcake book (but missing out the biscuits, because biscuits are bo-ring!)(I see this as an oversight but hope to talk her round yet). The pictures that follow below are from her first tea party, to raise money for The Eve Appeal which raises money for gynaecological cancers.

Last week we were expecting a visit from our ex-neighbours, who have just sold the flat opposite ours and moved elsewhere with a new baby. Right, I thought, we need some nice home-made biccies! I tried making Scrummy Chocolate Swirl Shortbread from Green & Black’s Chocolate Recipes but it failed miserably.

I tried again this week, because I still had many of the ingredients prepped — I had roughly chopped 100g of dark chocolate and cut some greaseproof paper to size and, well, I wasn’t going to be defeated by shortbread. Using Delia’s methods for the shortbread and the original recipe’s method for everything else worked quite well:

It’s basically just two colours of shortbread, one made plain and the other using a bit of cocoa instead of part of the flour. You lie one on the other, sprinkle the inside with shards of chocolate and roll it like a swiss roll before slicing.

In future I would try for a tighter coil and smaller chunks of chocolate. In fact, chocolate chip-sized lumps wouldn’t be too small, and would make it easier to roll the dough and cut it too. I would also try to bake them longer. I went over the allotted time but they’re still a wee bit blond and slightly chewy in the middle.

I sent Dougal to the Chinese Supermarket the other day to pick up a new bottle of Nam Pla (he came back with Cock : Fish Sauce) and golly but didn’t he come back with dumplings too. We cracked the packet open the other night.

So they look a bit plain and uninspired on the outside but by golly these pork and coriander babies were good. We dipped them in soy sauce and sesame oil (our best imitation of Chop Chop eating) and served with a Ken Hom Chinese Broccoli salad (vast improvement on the rubbish Thai one the other day and a bit of a favourite at my Mum and Dad’s) and some simple oniony noodles.

For pudding (it had been quite a light tea) I threw in a bit more Chinese theme. Which is to say I had ice cream (not at all Chinese) but I topped it with crystallised stem ginger. A topping I absolutely love but not one I eat often as Dougal despises these sophisticated golden orbs of joy!

Neat little meal and the great thing is there are loads more dumplings in the freezer. They are as easy to cook as filled pasta and are also local. Judging by the address on the back of the packet these are from the team that now also run Chop Chop and make dumplings for Sainsbury’s. I wonder whether they are the same dumplings only in communist-style packaging at proper Chinese prices?

How do you make Flapjack- a non-seasonal goodie by all accounts- into a Christmas Gifting-worthy present? You ice snowflakes on top! Go me, I thought of this all by my self. And it tasted brilliant.

Also, following on from its warmly received debut in February, I made a metric crapload of Biscotti for Christmas Gifts this year. So far it has gone to three recipients and there is one more to come. At that point D and I can stop eating the slightly over-baked or broken bits and really lit rip with the good stuff. Although my parents may ask for a top up!

Stirring 1.5 volumes of mix was pretty hard going-I had to get D to brace the bowl (note gorgeous Nigella bowl!) for me :o)

It cannot be all bad, spending a rainy weekend writing an essay.

Flapjack from the recipe Dougal made it by as a child, from A Young Cook’s Calendar by Katie Stewart. Yum.

A fortnight ago now (at least; I’m losing track of time) one of Helen’s cousins came up from London with her boyfriend, so we had them round for dinner on Saturday night. Helen spent the day doing medical student stuff so it was largely up to me to prepare the meal.

I pulled out The River Cottage Meat Book and chose Beef in Stout, because it could be made ahead of time, with minimal active involvement, and it is just the kind of dish I’ve always wanted to make.

Up to a certain point, Leith provided everything I needed. Although I was refused the beer at Co-op for looking under-age. I didn’t have any ID because my driving licence was away to get the address changed. This is Murphy’s Law, but I’m not bitter. I just went elsewhere. Helen had to pick up some lardons on her way back from the library but everything else was available locally.

The inclusion of two types of mushrooms — whole button mushrooms and thick slices of open cup mushrooms — really lifted the whole meal for me. I also made some simple mash to go with the stew, and home made bread too. We had beer from Bath Ales, and Helen even got the guilts about not doing any cooking, so did a Nigella sticky chocolate brownie pudding.

I halved nearly all the quantities for the stew recipe (originally for 8 to 10) but it still managed to make about 9 servings. (The recipe in the link has been halved already, and is a fairly accurate picture of what I put in the pot.) We eked the final leftovers out by adding boiling water and noodles, to make a beef and mushroom soup.

I will definitely be doing this dish again, especially if we need to serve a full table of people this winter. Fantastic warming meal.