The Sacred Art of Eating

The challenge states that there are 189 recipes in Nigella Express. However on close reading, there are in fact a few more. The preamble to some of the chapters, and indeed some of the recipes (more on that later) is a great hiding place for a sneaky wee recipe suggestion.

The White Lady is a classic cocktail- I may have enjoyed on at Tigerlilly only this year- but until we acquired some fancy glasses and a bottle of Cointreau it hadn’t been a drink we’d considered at home. It was amazing:

In fact Dougal made this with a recipe he found online. Nigella states one part lemon, two parts gin, four parts cointreau. Firstly, don’t make the mistake I did of assuming that a ‘part’ equals a measure, otherwise you’ll end up with one hell of a cocktail! Secondly, we reckoned the online recipe had a nicer balance, so we shall amend to: 25ml lemon juice, 25ml gin, 50ml cointreau and remember boys and girls, this is still a generous drink.

In addition to cocktails, Nigella suggests some dips to use as easy starters to turn a meal into a party. I made both of these at our recent flatwarming: garlic mayo was good in principle but you really don’t need very much garlic! On the other hand whilst the hummous+greek yog+cumin+lemon juice+ drizzle of lemon juice was a yummy dip, Nigella’s suggestion of scattering a few pomegranate seeds on top really put my friends off. They just didnae dip! Dougal said he thought people probably assumed the dip was in some way sweet. So chaps, unless your pals are into sophisticated Georgian dining, avoid the pomegranate seeds (pretty as they were).

With RandomAndy staying, it seemed an ideal opportunity to work through a good number of recipes and have a proper big dinner.

• Anglo-Asian Lamb Salad
• Brandied-Bacony Chicken
• Potato and Mushroom Gratin
• Instant Chocolate Mousse
• Chocolate Mint Cookies

There was quite a lot of food in this meal, so I shall try not to waffle and to cover only the salient points!

The Anglo-Asian Lamb Salad was just smashing. It was sweet (redcurrant jelly) and acid (rice vinegar, soy sauce) and hot (chilli and spring onion) and moist (the lamb got to sit in a little bag of foil after being fried) and crisp (salad leaves a-plenty). This added definite posh factor to the meal and, what with it being really easy to make (you assemble the dressing whilst the meat is frying, and then basically mix it all together) will definitely be going on our ‘to be cooked again’ list.

The roast chicken and accompanying gratin were a bit of a let down, mostly because they gave away the fact that I apparently cannot carve a chicken. At all. Part of this is a dire need for a decent sharp knife (to be bought with the house move next month!) but a lack of basic skills and wisdoms didn’t help either. Instead of bringing a marvellous roast chicken to the table or presenting everyone with their cuts of choice, we ended up with a rather sad little plate with one or two slices of meat and then some shreds. As for the gratin, I found it a bit wet. However Dougal had let the milk that the potatoes were cooked in catch and as such a lot of it got left in the pan; we added a bit more to compensate but perhaps over did it. I like the concept though, of a mushroomy potato bake, so I may try this again.

The instant chocolate mousses, shelved the previous week on account of containing non-vegetarian marshmallows, were pretty good despite possibly being subject to abuse at the construction stage. You melt the marshmallows and chocolate and butter together and then fold this mixture into vanilla’d whipped cream. I suspect I ought to have let the chocolate mix cool more so that it was a similar consistency to the cream. As it was I was attempting to fold hot and runny into stiff and cooler, with predictably poor results.

Nevertheless, the dark little pots ended up quite foamy in content and looked pretty smart in our wee white ramekins. (Not smart enough for Dougal who felt the need to adorn his with Barbie Sprinkles.) We had quite a bit left over; over and above the six ramekins called for we had a further two whole and two half portions left over.

The chocolate mint cookies served as a high cal, high chocolate chip after dinner mint. I’d kept the pudding deliberately small to give me the opportunity to cook these cookies which have been on my ‘excited about’ list for some time. Mint chocolate is one of my all-time greatest weaknesses. These are in fact simple double chocolate chip cookies which are then glazed with a highly minty chocolatey glaze. They were pretty potent and, on account of being deliberately small (ish-I’d make them smaller next time) very easy to put several away of!

However, most curiously, by the following day, all the mint flavour had gone. GONE, I tell thee! Eaten up by the angels, it’s the only likely explanation. Most upsetting and more than a little perturbing.

We all went to bed heaving and stuffed. All, that is, except me. I had to make a start on preparing breakfast…

We received an impromptu invite for dinner on Saturday, the one night our weekend house guest wasn’t with us. Seemed only reasonable we took a little something and continued our journey through the book.

• Eton Mess

This recipe doesn’t deviate a great deal from the traditional Eton Mess make-up, although it is Nigella, so naturally there are pomegranates involved. In this case the (dull, early April) strawberries are steeped in pomegranate juice whilst you whip the cream -by hand, because we still haven’t bought an electric whisk- which really helps bring the flavours out.

Perhaps we could’ve whipped the cream a little more; perhaps it was in fact perfect. In the event this wasn’t the most beautiful of dishes, but then perhaps this is rather the point. Whatever the case, is tasted pretty damn fine!

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.

This post ought to have been entitled Love Me Tender as we’d cooked Ed’s Tender Rump, but I’m more of a Beatles fan than an Elvis Fan.

• Steak Slice with Lemon and Thyme

This is the first recipe I’ve cooked from the Workday Winners section of the book; odd given that workdays account for 5/7ths of the week. Anyway; I got home from work not really hungry as there’d been sweeties in the office, so Dougal and I headed out too look at some flats for sale (dull) and returned, ravenous, to cook at about 9.

This recipe has the great advantage of all cooking together in a very straightforward fashion. Whilst the meat’s frying, you make up the post hoc marinade. Whilst the meat is marinading, you cook the silly broccoli. (The ones with the very long stems). Whilst you slice the meat, the broccoli get tossed about in the now-meaty marinade. The whole dish was on the table in less than 20 minutes, start to finish.

Let me tell you, it was wonderful. We went with Nigella’s advice re it tasting good cold, and cooked a whole 550g of rump steak between the two of us. Sadly I hadn’t bought extra broccoli so we didn’t get any of that cold. (The silly broccoli were scrummy- the stems tasted almost like asparagus- and greatly enjoyed by both of us, so not silly at all.) The leftover meat went back in the marinade overnight and then into mayonaisey pitta breads the next day for the most awesome sandwiches my mouth has known for some time. The broccoli tasted just magic, all zingy in their lemony thymey coating, and the meat was meaty and tender and soft.

My only complaint, and this is a fault of mine rather than the recipe’s, was that the meat was actually a bit cold by the time we ate it. I think the combination of being marinaded in a cold ceramic dish, with chilly olive oil and fridge-cold lemon juice, and then being sliced rather slowly by an entirely inept carver (me) meant it wasn’t piping hot as it ought to have been. Next time we’ll warm the marinading vessel and maybe also warm our olive oil slightly.

Because believe you me, this meal will be repeated. We were discussing the economics of the meal; the meat had cost nearly eight quid from Marks & Spencer, which seemed (was!) a lot. However, it did two of us two meals each, working out at £2 per serving. Given that without the left over meat, one of us at least would have ended up eating a (boring) packaged sandwich at £2.50 odd, that seems a pretty good deal to me. Did I mention that as well as being good value it tasted AMAZING???

We finished off with some ice cream and butterscotchy sauce, for good measure. And lots of rump jokes!