The Sacred Art of Eating

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.

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!

We recently had cause to celebrate: our Lovely Canadian Friend recently became Dr Lovely Canadian Friend MD. To celebrate her impending (then) graduation we laid on the best weather Scotland had (then, 30th May) seen in months, chilled a bottle of Champagne, and produced a fancy cake. Yet again Nigella comes up trumps, the Malteser cake was as scrummy as last time, despite my having got impatient with the folding in, beaten it with a whisk, and watched as the whole thing went flooooomp and lose about 50% of its volume.

Last Thursday night was possibly the hottest I ever remember in Edinburgh. Not so much the heat at the peak of the day- in fact if I recall correctly it wasn’t that spectacular at lunch- but the way that when I left work at 6pm the wall of heat as I stepped outside was like being in the Mediterranean. We walked home from a trip to the pub at midnight and then it felt like 4pm temperature. I am loving this whole ‘actually getting a summer’ malarky- and I don’t care that every day of sunshine seems to need to be followed by torrential rain :o)

As it was so hot there was no way I was cooking, so I cast my mind back to a recipe that Dougal and I last ate the nights we both Graduated. June 2005 had some similarly hot nights; on both days we’d eaten huge lunches but wanted a little something to see us through to bed time. I happened upon the Gary Rhodes short cut recipe for Gazpacho- tinned or bottle roasted peppers, tin of tomatoes, some chopped up cucumber and garlic and bread crumbs all blitzed up in the food processor with some olive oil and red wine vinegar. Chill, and serve with all the requisite bits.

We didn’t have this quite as cold as it ought to have been (the problem being that all the ingredients were at room temperature, which on Thursday was more like blood temperature) and this time I felt the flavours were a bit intense. Perhaps a handful of ice cubes would have cooled it down and lessened the over powering nature of the flavours. Either way this has been a great hot night meal in the past and I’m sure we’ll come back to it in the future!

A lovely little tea but one which requires good smoke extraction!

The other night we had a little tomato sauce left over from Dougal’s pizzas (I don’t know what he puts in his pizza sauce but it is gorgeous!) and I fancied something a bit italian. I grabbed my wee cast iron griddle pan (50p in a house clearance, best culinary bargain known to man!) and sliced some thin discs of courgette and sides of red pepper. A wee coating of garlic oil and much smoke later and we had some lip-smackingly good griddled veggies.

Then I threw together a batch of pancake batter- feeling italian I used Mary Contini’s recipe for Crespelle from Dear Francesca (more on that book, at some stage I’m sure) but I think in future I’d stick to the Usborne Kids cookery book recipe. These seemed to stick particularly badly in the pan which made cooking them a little fraught.

We served the pancakes with a couple of pieces of griddled veg inside and the remainder of the pizza sauce. Rolled up, topped with parmigiano and served with a big salad with lots of tomato and rocket and avocado this made for an interesting and different tea. Perfect summer eating!

…make really awesome chocolate chip muffins?

I made these muffins (and brownies and also fresh cream cakes) for Dougal’s birthday for him to take to work (he was too busy to make it own, although normally he would). The muffins looked awesome (it all looked awesome) but Dougal tells me that they were somewhat lacking. The recipe was a Nigella, from her website, and was dead easy to make, so I’m sad they disappointed. Can you improve?

The cream cakes were also a little disappointing but I’m going to insist on a wee cake masterclass from my mum to fix that. The brownies, on the other hand, were gorgeous, but there were my special recipe, from the Usborne Kid’s Cookery Book, Sweet Things, circa 1988…which takes some beating (and which I might share if you ask nice)!

As part of Challenge 2008, Dougal and I agreed that last year would be the year we both got to grips with anchovies. It hasn’t been totally sucessful- I still find them a little overwhelming- but I am now cooking with them and not shying away from dishes in restaurants merely because the little fishy bastards are mentioned.

In light of this, my Dad recommended this Nigella dish (again, from Feast) as an anchovy-rich dish which didn’t taste too fishy! Simply called Pasta with Sauce (we went for Linguine, in the absence of Bigoli or Bucatini) Nigella advises telling your guests it is ‘Venetian Sauce’ if you don’t want to fess up to the main ingredient.

The hit of the anchovies is tempered by the base of the sauce, slow cooked minced onion with a little sugar and milk to sweeten. Lashings of flat leaf parsely add a strong herby tone and the overall flavour is rich and onion-y, more than anything. Dougal ate a heap and came back for seconds-quite a rarity.

Nevertheless I was a bit out of my comfort zone. I found the texture a bit fazing, you could feel the little spiny prickles of the fish, even though the fillets had been stirred and fried into mushy oblivion.  I didn’t go back for seconds- very unusual for me where pasta is involved- and the left overs languished, ending up in the bin.

I honestly wonder how much of my discomfort was to do with my preconceptions. If someone else had handed me a plate of pasta, told me it was Onion Sauce, would my initial happy chomping persisted to the end of the plate? Hard to know. Must keep trying!

After a dull week- not a single foodie photo went onto the camera, and we ate a lot of snatched pasta + butter + parmesan type meals, we decided on Sunday to take the time to follow a recipe. We have also been feeling, acutely, the loss of society and friendship the Challenge gave us. In 2008 barely a week went by without us having a friend or two over for food. Sometimes we cooked for different friends multiple times in one week. This year, NOT ONCE have I had friends over for dinner. We cooked for a big group when we had our weekend in Galloway (perhaps more on that later) and I’ve thrown together food for my family a few times, which has been brilliant…but over all we’ve really let the 2008 side down.

This won’t do! Aiming to recreate the early 2008 ‘Pudding and a Pot of Tea’ idea, we invited a bunch of folk over for Monopoly and Chocolate Cake. In the event, only stalwart HarveyNick could make it (although LeCabinet didn’t get the message until days later and followed up with an invite to hers for dinner, so not all bad!) but that just meant more cake all round.

This glorious beastie is the Malteser Cake from the Chocolate Cake Hall of Fame in Nigella’s Feast. Feast is a gorgeous book and whenever I browse it (it’s a properly browseable tome) I find myself thinking  ‘oooh, I must make that…and that….ooh, and that’. Needing to act on such notions and because I like Maltesers a lot meant this cake was an obvious choice.

Both the cake and the butter icing have Horlicks through them, which gives the cake a lovely malty warmth. The actual choccy sponges are very light and spongey, almost rubbery but not in a bad way! It simply means that despite a hefty load of butter icing you don’t feel too sunk after a two- or three-malteser slice.

There’s a new cake club thingy started at work; once a fortnight people bring in cake and people pay per slice, with the money going to work to support Burmese refugees on the Thai border. In the winter it is soup every Tuesday, and this cake thing is a new effort for summer. I never contributed to the Soup Club as 8L of soup is a bit of a liability to carry by bike or by bus. However a couple of tins of cakes & biccies should be manageable by bus. I reckon I’ll include one of these Malteser Cakes in my first effort, just after Easter.

Nothing like a bit of late night last minute cooking to really add the edge to a birthday gift. Last year I sliced garlic and chillies and ginger for the flavoured oils, and this year D and I decided to make Biscotti for my Dad’s birthday. The rational was that the recipe said they went very well with Limoncello (in fact it provided a do-it-yourself recipe). I knew my Dad really likes Limoncello and so there was a fair chance there’d be some in the house; failing that he was about to head to Italy for a skiing holiday so any absence could easily be remedied!

We used James Martin’s recipe for Apricot and Nut Biscotti. The great bit is the recipe is on the BBC Food Site (albeit with a slightly different name) so I can share it with you!

The instructions seemed a little faffy and vague, but in the event turned out to exactly describe what we did. Starting at approximately 10:45pm, you make up a slightly wet biscuit dough, and bake it in fat sausages. These flatten out in the oven to give long oval biccies. At about half eleven you then slice these into dead authentic biscotti shapes, and bake for a second time.

A little after midnight they are ready to cool, and then, by morning, eat-dead hard and crunchy but not inedible, and packed with fruit (apricots, dates, dried strawberries!!) and nuts (pistachios, almonds and hazelnuts). We’ve bits and pieces of ingredients left- half packets of nuts and so on- so I think we’ll probably make another batch with a more random mix of flavours to finish these up before they go stale. The recipe does yield a LOT of biccies though, so we might half the quantities. Or take some to work.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this recipe. As I said we went in blind, late at night after a third of a bottle of wine with no real idea of what we were doing, and the results were just dandy. And don’t they look the part? Perfect gift food!