The Sacred Art of Eating

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!

A recipe that we simply wouldn’t have considered had it not been for the challenge. Fabulously, wonderfully successful.

• Goujons of Sole with Dill Mayonnaise

Why would we not have considered this? Well, it seemed a bit of a fankle. Get fish (skinless). Cut into funny strips.

Array some corn flour (seasoned), some egg and some funny foreign bread crumbs. Dip. Rest.

Make some mayonnaise with dill (bleh). Array a plate with lettuce and some cornichons (yum). Ignore the fact that cornichons taste of dill (I’m not sure that bit was in the recipe).

Fry fishy strips. Drain of oil. Serve. With beer.

You see? Horrendously complicated. Worst of all, I took the Nigella Express long view and made a double quantity of the goujons, so that next time we will need only fry these. Ten minutes of frying (and the purchase of some more cornichons) is all that stands between me and succulent, crispy, sweet, tart, easy going laid back (retro) heaven. Thank you, Mr Sowden. You have introduced me to dishes I would have written off for years.

A salad which could have been so good, and could have been so bad. Which was it?

• Chef’s Salad

This salad started out well, with ingredients I enjoy: iceberg lettuce was something of a favourite when I was a child; the ham was good stuff sliced thickly at the deli counter in waitrose; emmental, whilst not as good as gruyere, is an alright sort of cheese, and oh man, I love avocado…

But then, stone me, some eejit went and put a whole load of sweetcorn in it! Bleh! (It should be noted that I am perfectly happy to eat sweetcorn on the cob. Off it is just plain wrong!) Good grief what are we to do do it for the sake of the children challenge grumble grumble grumble grumble.

And do you know what? It was fantastic. Really moreish. As Nigella says in the book, the range of textures really works, as do the contrasts in flavours in each mouthful. Dare I say it, the sweet sweetcorn worked well against the plain lettuce and the salty ham. It was huge- too big to mix in the serving bowl so we had to resort to the bread bowl- but we almost finished it between us.

This recipe is from the Retro Rapido chapter; you can really tell, it didn’t feel at all like any salad you would get served in the UK at present. Much of the chapter feels old and dowdy, like my mum’s 1970’s edition of the Good Housekeeping cookery book. And yet Chef’s Salad felt firmly like the kind of thing I would expect to be served in France- in a home if not in a restaurant. The same can be said for much of the Retro Rapido chapter: Oeufs en cocotte; Mouclade; Crepes Suzette; the fondue and probably even the chicken liver salad are all French or French cuisine-inspired. I’d say that italian eating has influenced much of the cooking of my formative years, basil and rocket and olives and parma ham. Why then has the introduction of Italian ideas driven out French food- once so trendy (I grew up using the words Cordon Blew to mean posh cooking without knowing why) to the point that it now seems faded and out of touch?

Last night didn’t particularly call for a starter, but last night was when the avocado ripened!

• Avocado Crayfish Cocktail

Actually, having a starter last night was quite handy, as when I got in (late) from a ‘quick’ after-work drink with the girls, Dougal needed fed, quickly. This rustled up in no time at all.

And didn’t it look grand! Not bad for two mins in the kitchen. This recipe in particular has made me very happy I decided to buy sherry vinegar. I’ve oft said that Nigella Express could bankrupt me through the purchase of condiments alone, but I think the unusual vinegar really made this. Yummy!

An invitation to a film about France, food and love. Time to wheel out the French classics.

• Oeufs en Cocotte
• Chicken Liver Salad

Those of you scrutinising our progress statistics closely (I’ll post them later, if you’d like to see) will have noted that, whilst we are steaming through the challenge, there are areas where we are doing less well than others. We’ve cooked lots from Instant Calmer but rather less, which is to say nothing from the Retro Rapido chapter. (There is another glaring absence but I’ll come back to that.)

I will confess that part of the problem has been that the recipes appeal a little less to me in this chapter than others. I mean really, a salad with iceberg lettuce and tinned sweetcorn? But one or two or the recipes have been on my to do list for a while and I was glad of the chance to cook them on Friday night. I was taking Dougal’s Mummy to see a French film, Hunting and Gathering, as she’d given me the book for Christmas. The book is strongly about food, so it seemed right to cook some French recipes.

I started with Oeufs en Cocotte. I have now a set of four glass ramekins (good old Gü puddings) and we’re working on some plain white ceramic ones, so I was able to present these properly. In fact, because I’d followed Nigella’s suggestion of having asparagus to dip (which required me to come up with a makeshift asparagus steamer, I think a did rather well!) the presentation of these wee pots of creamy eggy goodness was pretty gorgeous. I’d do this again as a starter as it was dead simple and looked and tasted very special.

To follow I made the Chicken Liver Salad, also from Retro Rapido. I’d been meaning to make this for supper for some time, not least of all because even Organic Free Range Chicken Livers from Waitrose are dead cheap- I bought 400g of them for less than two quid. Somehow though I’d not quite got round to it.

They looked beautiful as they cooked, whilst I arranged the salad and made up the sublime smelling maple syrup and sherry vinegar (I finally cracked- this woman is going to bankrupt me through condiments I swear) dressing. After the prescribed seven minutes of cooking I deglazed the pan with the dressing, served the meat and drizzled about the dressing. I forgot the sprinkling of wanky sea salt but I don’t think anyone noticed.

Sadly, Dougal didn’t enjoy his livers at all, and I’m not sure his mum was particularly keen either. For the most part I did really enjoy mine although there was one amongst them which felt kinda chalky and a bit too mousse-like. I only had Nigella’s seven minutes, turning frequently instructions to go on, so perhaps I did cook them all wrong. Nevertheless, I was a bit saddened that this somewhat rare venture of mine into proper, foodie cooking, with foodie, thrifty ingredients was not a Regards to the Chef success. It looked beautiful though!