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 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.

I fancied something light for tea tonight, and those mushrooms just looked so good!

• Garlic Oil

Yup, I decided to put the Garlic Oil through its paced by grilling a big box of little portabella mushrooms with some wanky salt and a generous dosing of the pungent oil. I served them on toasted rustic bread (generic supermarket stuff) with a good squeeze of lemon juice and loads of parsley.

Surprisingly, whilst I used quite a good slug of the oil, it was the lemon juice that provided the dominant flavour. The garlic was present but you didn’t get that really satisfying garlicky hit. On the other hand, I won’t deny that we do probably both stink right now!!

Yes…they were as good as they look.

Whilst it might seem like we’ve been a bit quiet this week, we’ve actually been working on a secret project…

• Garlic Oil
• Wok Oil
• Chilli Oil

As well as making these Storecupboard Supplies for our own Nigella-Kitchen, Dougal and I decided to make a bottle of each of these for my Dad, as part of his birthday present. I decided I wanted to give him a copy of the Nigella Express long before I was challenged and had been keeping schtum about the book to him. What with him now fully knowing about the book it seemed fair to make the present a bit more interesting.

Each of these oils involved slicing up the constituent flavours, and then letting it all steep for 48 hours in the oil of choice. In the past week, I have sliced up: 36 cloves of garlic, 18cm worth of ginger and 15 chillies. My word. The day we decanted the garlic oil was a bit scary; the hit of garlic was so strong and we could still smell it the next morning when we got up!

Trepidation about over-pungent pongs aside, I’ve now used the garlic oil, and it seemed to work. Smelled nice when the pancetta were frying in it, but no dominating flavour. We shall see if it becomes our new kitchen staple!

Meals that suit vegetarians, don’t contain mushrooms and which we haven’t cooked already; it was tough from the start!

• Mozzarella with Crazy Gremolata
• Lentil and Walnut Salad
• Butternut and Sweet Potato Soup
• Flourless Chocolate Brownie and,
• Hot Chocolate Sauce

So. Best friend (vegetarian) and best friend’s boyfriend (fussy) coming for tea. I went into work half an hour late, having spent a goodly while over breakfast pouring over the entire book looking for vegetarian recipes. There weren’t many! We’d cooked at least half of them already, another third were soups (I didn’t want to do soup because I wanted a side salad, which hardly goes with soup), others were too distinctly summery or christmassy… which didn’t leave very many. I was, then, delighted, when I spotted Pappardelle with Escarole, a sort of Italian pasta with wilted greens and chillies and herbs affair. It sounded fairly nice, would go well with my planned starter of mozzarella, and not be so filling that we wouldn’t have room for our brownies and ice cream.

No we will not be on the internet!!

Only I couldn’t get my ingredients. I had to compromise on pasta, going for tagliatelle rather than pappardelle, because the only pappardelle that Waitrose had in stock was fifteen pounds per kilogram. Fifteen; I kid you not. And most of it was broken because the packaging was fancy but inadequate. It was a compromise I was happy to make.

Less easy to compromise on was the total lack of suitable lettuce. Waitrose could not sell me a head of escarole, nor any of the suggested alternatives. The various bags of salad on offer all seemed to be too sweet- I suppose you probably don’t sell many bags of salad labelled as ‘bitter’ but I did think I’d at least be able to get endive. Wikipedia, you’ll notice, barely differentiates between them.

At this point I had to admit defeat on the sophisticated Italian pasta and resort to plan B, which was one of the soups from the Instant Calmer chapter. I’d been carrying around a note of the ingredients for some time, as I thought it’d be a good easy tea on a night Dougal wasn’t going to be in- he’s not a fan of either butternut squash or sweet potato. The starter and side salad, rapidly morphed into ‘two little salads on the side’ and I crossed my fingers that the pudding would be really really good.

The side salads were both very tasty and were pretty quick and easy to construct. I was surprised, actually, by how well the Lentil and Walnut salad went down; I’d worried it might be a bit wholesome. Similarly, the mozzarella was lovely, surprisingly easy to eat, given all the raw chilli on it. I did however, feel a little tired at having another of the endless variations on ’season with olive oil and lemon juice’.

The soup was less of a success. I felt like I was cooking it forever-I served tea over an hour later than planned. It seemed to use an awful lot of stock (I’d bought one carton of posh fresh vegetable stock, but ended up having to use two stock cubes too, so I probably needn’t have bothered). It required blending; we went against advice and used our food processor (we don’t have a blender!) and it didn’t come out anything like as smooth as in the book. That said, we have a really small blender (about 1L capacity) so maybe I was being impatient and not blending enough. We also didn’t have buttermilk to garnish it with; I used creme fraiche but it didn’t have the same artistic effect.

It tasted okay, but it wouldn’t have won any awards, not one. We didn’t finish it and I’ll let you into a secret and tell you that D and I chucked the leftovers away, something we rarely do (you’ll find out why in a subsequent soupy post).

Pudding, however, improved matters entirely. The flourless chocolate brownies were fudgy and warm and gooey although they probably would have benefited from cooking in a tinfoil tray rather than my usual brownie tin. The sauce was gorgeous- much better than the one for the Chocolate Pear Pudding- and survived to the following day without losing its capacity to melt to a lovely free flowing sauce again. The best bit is that we are still, a week later, eating the brownies (but then we have also had Dougal’s fabulous Sticky Chocolate Gingerbread to eat).

So, not our most successful dinner for friends so far, a few disappointments along the way, but a great pudding, to be repeated.

The phrase ‘be generous with the sauce’ can sometimes, it seems, be taken too literally.

• Chocolate Pear Pudding

So. This week has been one of missed opportunities- Pancake Day and World Nutella Day on Tuesday when we didn’t do the Nutella Pancakes (Storecupboard SOS), followed by the Chinese New Year on Thursday when we didn’t do Crispy Duck (Quick Quick Slow). We decided instead to do the Crispy Duck on Sunday night and duly invited a couple of friends over to share our ducky with us.

Only, on inviting them, it turned out they’d already begun preparing a Wild Goose for Sunday’s dinner, and would we perhaps like to join them for that instead. Well, we’d not yet bought our duck, so this seemed a jolly good idea. We negotiated the bringing of a pudding (something we seem to be tackling less well in the Challenge) and Dougal made two loaves of bread not one, in order to take them one as well.

We chose the Chocolate Pear Pudding as our dish because it was relatively straightforward, even if we wanted to assemble and cook it at theirs, and because it felt warm and comforting in a way that we needed as the mists swirled around Edinburgh on Sunday. We resisted the urge to use real pears and bought pears in tins (a first for me) and took a food processor-full of spongey batter round with us.

Our hosts had done us proud, with a menu on the table, candles, and even place settings. The carrot and corriander was possibly the best I’d ever tasted (contained positively buckets of coriander, I’d wager) and a fine accompaniment to D’s bread. The goose was perhaps a bit dry for me, but the stuffing was gorgeous and they’d done parsnips which is a very good way to curry favour with me!

The pudding cooked up satisfactorily, and we made up the sauce suggested by Nigella within the blurb to the recipe. Perhaps the ingredients alone (170g evap’d milk, 150g golden syrup (that’s a lot, by the way), 100g dark chocolate, a touch of coffee) should have warned me off greedily telling Dougal to ladle harder… The sauce, whilst spot on for the sponge pudding, was cloying and thick and very, very sweet. Really it needed more pear (to provide some much needed water) and maybe some vanilla ice cream, to balance it all. And just generally less sauce.

I would have some lovely pictures of the glossily coated spongey fruity goodness to show you, only my trusty little camera let me down, and ran out of battery about five pictures into the evening. Clearly I used it more on holiday than I’d appreciated. If a certain camera phone owning someone is reading this then a copy of the photos taken would be greatly appreciated….nudge wink…In the mean time you have to put up with a bien arrosé shot of your host for the year!

This tea came about on one of those evenings when neither of us could be bothered cooking and both were almost contemplating takeaway.

• Golden Goat’s Cheese

We didn’t have it with the suggested lentils because we’d none pre-cooked and wanted tea NOW rather than once some pulses had cooked. We also deviate a little from the instructions. Not having Japanese Panko (not likely round here!) wasn’t a problem as we had two remaining little rolls from the weekend which were beyond eating but perfect for breadcrumbs. We also took issue with the volume of cheese suggested- 25g per person seemed measly and anyway that’s not the sizes they sell in our shop, so we just made it up. The end result wasn’t as beautiful as in the book; the photographed ones must have been fried rather than baked, giving them their deeper colour but also getting them cooked before they burst and oozed.

Not that it mattered. With a hefty plate of salad this was yummy, albeit cheese overload. Would definitely consider it again.

In pictures….

A flat-warming party with a delightful theme, and an opportunity to try out two further recipes:

• Marshmallow Crispy Squares
• Party Popcorn
• Wok oil (ish)

The crispy squares were a cinch to make; we couldn’t get mini-marshmallows but found that full sized ones worked equally well. The advice regarding using vinyl gloves to push the mix into the tin was greatly received (not least of all because we had some of said gloves) as this is one sticky mixture. We didn’t have time to order edible disco glitter online, and being the 3rd of January, our local cake decorating shop wasn’t open. So our sparkle came from a jar of , and, whilst rather more Clyde built than Nigella’s efforts, fitted the bill perfectly.

The party popcorn was also a big hit. In essence you cook your popcorn as normal but in some tasty oil* and the, once popped, shake it in a paper bag with a spicy melted butter mix. We wondered at the actual need for the paper bag, but decided that a less substantial bag might stick to itself and prevent the spice mix from being distributed through the popcorn. As it was we could have done with a warm paper bag (or something!) as lumps of the buttery sugary spice solidified rapidly on the paper, which was a shame. However, whilst on first munch the popcorn was a bit too subtle, my hand kept going back to it…ultimately, this one was a hit with me! We made half quantities, for the party we were going to, and I’m sure it wasn’t finished. I can’t imagine the scale of party Nigella herself is catering for!

*Whilst I didn’t go so far as to make actual Wok Oil for this recipe, infusing garlic and ginger in a sesame and vegetable oil mix for 48 hours, I prepped the oil before I went to work. I threw some veggie oil and a bit of sesame oil into a jug, crushed in a clove of garlic and grated in some fresh ginger. It won’t have been as powwy as it ought to have been but I’m sure it will have made a difference, contributed to the general ’savoury’ flavour. Once I’ve bought some nice bottles I’ll make up all three of the infused oils properly.