The Sacred Art of Eating

It’s been a year since I finished The Challenge. I spent lots of time last year saying ‘this will definitely be cooked again’- so, one year on, what have we gone back to?

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry -a great many meals inspired by this, as well as ‘proper’ repeats.
• Caramel Croissant Pudding - about three times! Including just last night, in celebration of the acquisition of some bourbon.
• Rhubarb and Custard Gelato - when I found some pink rhubarb, and I even blogged about it!
• Steak Slice with Lemon and Thyme -at least once!
  
• Flourless Chocolate Brownies, and
• Hot Chocolate Sauce -when my cousin and her man came for dinner. Very well received :o)
  
• Goujons of Sole with Dill Mayonnaise- I am fairly sure we did this but perhaps without any dill. But I remember frying!
• Mango Split
• Home-made Instant Pancake Mix, - absolutely loads. It is our standard recipe for ‘breakfast’ pancakes now. We even did it for D’s parents and Granny on Christmas morning this year.
• Blueberry Syrup for Pancakes- sometimes, but not always, when we make the above. Ridiculously easy, ridiculously good!
• Maple Chicken ‘n’ Ribs- still can’t get them as sticky as I want. Still meaty and good.
• Moonblush Tomatoes
• High-Speed Hamburger with Fast Fries- fast fries, certainly. Not sure about the burgers.
  
• Tuna Steaks with Black Beans- yup, although we couldn’t get pinto beans in Leith, funnily enough!
• Nectarine and Blueberry Galette-right here!
  
• Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundae- well the sauce anyway. Tis gorgeous!
• Chowder with Asian Flavours
• Rapid Ragù- winter warming fare.
  
• Jumbleberry Crumble
• Doughnut French Toast
• Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies- they don’t hold their own weight though, so are not to be advised for taking to parties!
  
• Potato Cakes with Smoked Salmon- we haven’t re-cooked these. But D bought smoked salmon today. And the night is yet young!
• Duck Breasts with Pomegranate and Mint- again, I have not yet re-cooked. But I do have two duck breasts sitting in the freezer waiting specifically for the right occasion.
• Ice Cream Cake- for a party, it went down very well! So fast, in fact, that I got no pictures of the finished product!
• Mexican Hot Chocolate 1 2 Properly- Essentially whenever we have any kahlua!
  
• Rocky Road Crunch Bars- a LOT
  
• Sesame Peanut Noodles- quick, easy and very satisfying. Plus once you’ve bought beansprouts you might as well make a massive amount.
• Snowball- repeated a couple of times and then it dawned on me, the reason I didn’t rate it was that I don’t like lemonade! How obvious! Dougal has since introduced me to drinking advocaat with ginger ale. Much better!
• Festive Fusilli- is only festive if you serve it at a feast. Otherwise is sunblush tomato, vodka and mascarpone pasta!
• Marshmallow Crispy Squares- at least once. I needed to use the rice crispies up! And they are scrummy.
• Garlic Oil- eventually it dawned on me to use a food processor to cut the garlic up. We need a new bottle now, in fact.
• Salade Niçoise- even with the inclusion of anchovies!

17% repeat rate. I predicted at least 10 at dinner tonight, so I suppose I’m not wrong. Looking through the list tonight it is clear that I like making sweet things! I think the recipes we repeated were probably more representative of low-faff rather than those recipes we were most excited about last year. This might be because the biggest surprises came from recipes I would never normally have bothered with before…and which apparently I am not inclined to go back to! A revision of the list tonight was good though- now I have some fresh ideas for 2010!

A wee Thursday night party. Ah, the life of the young professional!

• Mouclade
• Flan

We were delighted to have K&B over for mussels the other night. We’d put out a request on Facebook for friends to go halfers with us on a couple of kilos of mussels…unfortunately all the responses we got were from people outside of Scotland, but our Edinburgh friends didn’t realise this, and assumed we’d had takers. A bit of idle pub chat the other night revealed that this was not the case and the date was set!

We got our mussels from the lovely George Campbell and Sons Fishmongers on Ferry Road. We had to debeard them ourselves, which was a cold job, but otherwise they were in very good nick with only a couple failing to open on standing in cold water.

 

The broth the mussels are cooked over contained madras powder. I’d been a little worried these would be ‘curried mussels’ but it was more that you were left with a pleasing tingling on the lips. What looked like a vast pile of mussels was rapidly demolished, leaving impressive piles of shells. We mopped up the winey creamy juices with a stack of D’s baguettes and had a grand old messy time of it.

   

We followed up with Flan, an express’ed up Mexican version of Crème Caramel.We were a bit worried as we made the caramel for this. We weren’t sure how fiercely to heat the sugar or whether to stir it. We consulted the two other recipe books we have with recipes for Crème Caramel and discovered…..that James Martin nicked his recipe from Delia Smith. They are practically verbatim copies. That said, both books are copyright BBC so maybe it doesn’t count as plagiarism!

The additional reading gave us the confidence to make the caramel and we successfully attained the colour of maple syrup (Delia: two shades darker than golden syrup. James: two or three shades darker than golden syrup. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the Pantone syrup kit!)

   

The ‘crème’ was added-evaporated milk, condensed milk, eggs and vanilla essence- and it all baked in a dish of water in the oven for 45 mins. After a night in the fridge, it was ready to serve. It took a little persuading to come out of its dish, but when it did it really looked the part.

   

The texture was firmer than any of us really expected- set quite firm, like cheese almost. Whether this was because of its express construction or whether we’d over-cooked it slightly I’m not sure. Suffice to say it did not detract! We all thought this was pretty fabulous AND went back for seconds. The firm texture also meant Dougal was easily able to take a slice to work the next day, which might not have been possible with a wobblier set.

Yum!

A Mini Mexican Fiesta and not a Burrito or a Fajita in sight!

• Chopped Ceviche and Mexicola
• Mexican Chicken Salad with Tomato and Black Bean Salsa
• Margarita Ice Cream
• Buñuelos

And if four recipes from the Speedy Gonzales chapter is not an undertaking enough, we also cooked (for a second time!) the Roquamole (previously cooked here) and the Sweetcorn Chowder with Toasted Tortillas (see here) in order to ensure the vegetarians in our party didn’t end up with ‘Fish on Toast with No Fish’ followed by ‘Chicken Salad with no Chicken’.

First up were dips and canapes with Mexicola- tequila and coke with a fancy name.

   

Believe it or not, with enough lime in the glass tequila is quite palatable and certainly slipped down with the fishy fancies quite a treat. These little toastadas topped with fish were excellent. The fish (monkfish in our case) is steeped in lime juice to denature the proteins (that’s cooking, in lay terms!) and then mixed up with lots of coriander and chilli and served on the finest bread your boyfriend will provide (toasted up with olive oil). Not only did these look very sophisticated they tasted smashing. The monkfish wasn’t cheap from the fishmongers but for a starter for eight (with roquamole on the side) it wasn’t extortionate. Perhaps it would be worth seeking out a cheaper substitute if you wanted to do this on a larger scale.

For the main we served up steaming bowls of the Sweetcorn Chowder with Toasted Tortillas and a huge Mexican Chicken Salad with Black Bean Salsa. The soup wasn’t as good as I’d remembered it being. This may be because we simply didn’t have a big enough pan to cook it all in, so in the end I didn’t add the full complement of veggie stock and consequently it was a bit thicker than it ought to have been! I still enjoyed it, but previously I’d remembered it being really good. The chicken salad was okay, but again not particularly something I’ll come back to. We hadn’t sourced the magic ingredient, jicama, a hard mexican vegetable like a cross between an apple and a turnip. In the end we used a mixture of two of the suggested subsitutions, Granny Smith apples and water chestnuts. I think this was the source of the problem I had with it. The appley flavour pushed me too far in the direction of Waldorf Salad; I kept expecting walnuts to appear and they didn’t! Otherwise, my main complaint was that there wasn’t nearly enough lettuce in it.

 

We nearly served this dish as our main course in its own right and it was only fears of my vegetarian best friend being hard done by that swayed us; I’m awfully glad as I think this salad would have been a bit of a let down on its own. On the other hand, the topping for this salad (what kind of salad needs a garnish?) was powy and wonderful and will be revisited. The black bean and tomato salsa was very straightforward to make yet had very deep flavours going on- the rich pulses against the fresh tomato worked particularly well. This was very hot, and yet should have been hotter- it hadn’t even crossed my mind that doubling up the quantities would mean I’d need more than a jar of red jalapeño peppers. If I made it again I’d probably rein the chilli in a bit, although perhaps not much. This was really, really good and if I were looking for salsa to go with tortilla chips and a dvd, or to serve with fajitas I’d certainly pull this one out. Crikey, with a good dollop of sour cream it’d practically be a fajita filling in its own right!

After this feast we all had to sit for a bit! There was no way any of us were ready for pudding. However this provided ample opportunity to decorate the blackboard with a suitably Mexican theme. Despite it being many moons ago now, this party was actually a birthday celebration for me, and our guests did us proud with their Mexican Halloween costumes. Sadly D and I were so busy cooking that our outfits were somewhat lacking (D hadn’t been able to source facepaint so in the end he didn’t even bother getting changed!) but we had managed a little Mexican decoration- some awesome cards with mexican art; genuinely mexican candles and also some candles in the shape of cactii- and even some real cactii to complement! Perhaps the piece-de-resistance was our decorating our Clip Clock with a colourful array of chillies….looks fab!

       

For pudding we pulled out some frankly gorgeous Margarita Ice Creams. Dougal served these very elegantly, a single scoop in the bottom of a martini glass, decorated with a sprinkle of lime zest. The portions could have been bigger, but that far into our fiesta we did not need more! (Better still, the small portions mean there is still some of this in the freezer!)

Then we moved on to coffee, alongside which we served little sweet doughballs called buñuelo. These ought probably have been deep fried at the point of serving but we were nervous about doing so in front of our guests, after we’d been drinking etc, and so we’d prepared them in advance. Neither Dougal or I felt we’d got the oil temperature quite right as they seemed to come out overly brown on the outside, but nevertheless these got wolfed down by our friends. I suppose if you don’t have an idea of how a think ought to taste you are easier to please!

All in, a really groovy birthday tea. Great friends, some great costumes, and some great food along the way.

Guest post written by Dougal Stanton.

Wednesday night is our “night off”, when tradition dictates we have a drink and cook something a bit interesting for tea if possible. As it happened, Helen was home quite late and too exhausted to enjoy herself much. I think I also managed to knock her for six with a rather potent Mudslide.

• Quick Chilli

So I did this one while Helen sat on the sofa snoozing over Espedair Street. You start off by chopping up a half-length of chorizo sausage, which is about as mouthwatering a job as any meat eating cook could hope for. Obviously, I had to do several quality control checks on that sausage. It would have been simply terrible if we had been using substandard sausage.

I’m sorry for the action-shot (ie blurry) nature of the photos, but I’m obviously a bit cack when it comes to photography. This was before the cocktail, too! After the sausage has sizzled and the mince browned, everything else comes straight from a tin, as is the way with this book, so it was dead easy. The only problem was when I discovered we had very little rice to go with it.

 

A nice meal: quick and reassuringly spicy. Excellent heated up for lunch the next day, too!

Sunday proved to be the first hot day of the year. As such an informal and laid-back dinner was called for.

• Halloumi Bites (this time with pictures!)
• Mexican Scrambled Eggs
• Irish Cream Tiramisu

The sharp-eyed and keen-witted amongst my readers will recall that we did, in fact, make the halloumi bits right back at the beginning of the challenge; the first ‘friends for dinner evening’. However, at the time we forgot to take any piccies, and seeing as we’d both enjoyed it so much felt quite prepared to cook it again ‘in the interests of completeness’.

This time it was made with bona fide garlic oil, as opposed to just some garlic fried in oil. Presumably this added to the flavours; I think if anything it masked the lime juice and over all this was a little on the greasy side, compared to last time. Perhaps I am just remembering wrongly, of course.

The mexican scrambled eggs were chosen specifically for being a bit of an easy-going sort of dish. Of our guests, Le C we basically just know through blogging (although curiously she is one of my best friends’ best friends!) and we don’t know her boyfriend at all. So Dougal felt an informal tea was called for; no need to get the good china out! On the other hand it was a bit of a gamble; whilst we’d asked them if there was anything they didn’t eat, Dougal and I agreed later that someone could really hate scrambled eggs but never think to mention it if asked!

Between the halloumi and the eggs, this was a ‘make lots of little bowls up in advance and then fry with guests in the kitchen’ sort of meal. Added nicely to the relaxed vibe. For all I talk about liking having folk in the kitchen whilst I cook its not actually something I often do.

Generally the eggs were pretty good. My mum makes awesome curried scrambled eggs, with tomato and spices in it and coriander on it; these eggs were pretty similar but without the curry and with the curious addition of fried strips of tortilla. I’m not sure if these oughtn’t have been a bit crisper- the oil wasn’t really hot enough when we fried them, bloody electric cooker- which might have made them a bit more obvious. As it was they added a bit of structure but I’m sure the dish wouldn’t have been weakened in their absence! As suggested in the pre-recipe blurb (but not as an actual recipe) we made a meal of the eggs by serving frigoles refritos with them. We’d neither of us made really-fried beans before (I’d only ever had them out of a can before) but we can report that made with tinned borlotti beans (soak overnight?…hah!) they are quick to make and most hearty and satisfying.

Pudding was chosen specifically for Le C, as the dish that pretty much got her through fourth year of her Part One in Architecture. She used to blog about it on regular occasion. I’d forgotten, but D had spotted the recipe in the book and said we have to make that for Le C. Whilst it tasted absolutely delicious and had the decency to serve beautifully and not fall apart on application of a spoon, as previously noted the proportions in the recipe seemed all wrong. We are currently eating our way through the remaining sponge fingers (very nice they are too) and you saw what happened to the coffee and baileys! Thing is, it’s not just that there was too much, as we ran out of mascarpone at about the point we would have expected. We probably could have soaked the sponge fingers a little more too, but not enough to use all that coffee mixture up!

Either way, it worked out very well, and was also most acceptable the following day when we invited HarveyNick over to help us polish off the leftovers.

A three course meal for a vegetarian friend….oh heck, no, marshmallows ain’t veggie…

• Red Pepper Hummus
• Sweetcorn Chowder with Toasted Tortillas
• (Slow Roasted Tomatoes, Goat’s Cheese and Mint Salad)

So yes, this would have been a three course meal, but about an hour and a half before our guests arrived I remembered that marshmallows aren’t vegetarian. You’ll have to wait and see (as will we!) to hear how the Instant Chocolate Mousse I’d had planned goes down.

The red pepper hummus was our starter, and I served it with standard cruditée accompaniments; thin slices of red and yellow pepper, fine green beans and batons of cucumber. As by then I knew the pudding was going nowhere, I added some wedges of freshly toasted pitta bread. I wasn’t as excited by this as I’d expected to be; home made hummus can taste really fantastic! Either it wasn’t peppery enough (because I’d had to combine two jars and couldn’t therefore just drain off the oil but had to decide what proportion of a jar constituted enough extra pepper) or it was because I used red and yellow peppers not just red. Or perhaps I didn’t squeeze on quite enough lime juice, to lift it up. Either way, whilst it was entirely pleasant and rather lovely to look at, it didn’t push all my buttons.

However, I followed it up with our first definite success from the soups in the book. The sweetcorn chowder, essentially pulped sweetcorn, garlic and spring onion cooked up in vegetable stock was blinding, in no little part because of its topping of cheesey toasted tortilla chips and chilli. It looked gorgeous, even in the absence of arty earthenware bowls, and was warm and filling. A little too warm; we all burned our mouths!

I accompanied the soup with a big plate of the Slow Roasted Tomatoes, Goat’s Cheese and Mint Salad. It was every bit as lovely as when I made it back at the beginning of the challenge. I am definitely a fan. We saved pudding (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) by serving the remaining Banana Butterscotch /Chocolate Chip muffins (this was the day after we’d made them). Most respectable and an excellent end to the meal.

At long last guys, with whipped cream, grated chocolate and all, I present to you…

• Mexican Hot Chocolate

 

As you may have noticed this has become quite a hit with us. This may have more than a little to do with us having a bottle of Kahlua needing finished, but is it also a treat in its own right. We always make it with cocoa, rather than posh hot chocolate. And our mugs ain’t that fancy- in fact they say ‘coffee’ on them. Pah!

This time we finally went the whole hog and did the fancy topping. Cream on the nose, brilliant!

This morning I had a rather unsettling dream, which centred around being in a museum shop and suddenly discovering that I didn’t have my bag; that I had put it down on the floor to look at something and some bastard had nicked it. This was distressing for various reasons- I wouldn’t have my wallet to go on holiday with (something of a theme for me) and also my camera had been in my bag so that would be gone too.

However, as I consoled myself in the dream: The camera only had one meal on it, the Quesadillas. It won’t be too much effort to repeat them…

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Blogging will be light this following week as I am off to the slopes of France to carve up some powder fall over comically. Dougal could cook some stuff, but he’d have no camera to record his endeavours with, so it wouldn’t be official. I shall maybe pick up some ingredients in France; expect cooking to resume with renewed enthusiasm come February!

Easy Mexican madness, but a little heavy on the chillies!

• Quesadillas

We had half a packet of fajhitas in the freezer and prosciutto was half price in Somerfields. It seemed only right that we dived into Nigellas recipe for Mexican Cheese Toasties with suitable enthusiasm. Generally these were a hit but Nigella used three whole slices of pickled Jalapeño in each and that was just too much for me. I wanted to taste the ham, the huge volume of coriander. My only other complaint was that, as these seemed a lot like snack food, we ate them very fast and then suffered for it! Also…it did fill the kitchen with smoke, but we don’t have a decent extractor.

This was a repeat purely for photographic purposes….not that we have the whipped cream or requisite wanky mugs yet….Not just because we liked the Kahlua…

• Mexican Hot Chocolate