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!

Actually, I wish it would. More like Arctic drafts!

• Caribbean Creams

Another recipe completed, and with it another chapter finished!

I had had these Carribean Creams in mind for my old work colleague Gareth, as they feature coconut yoghurt, which he was ever so fond of. It used to be an annual, holiday-to-France treat for him, and then we got a Waitrose in Edinburgh and with it Rachel’s Organic Yogs readily available…he’s probably scunnered himself to the stuff now. Sadly we could not pin him down so it was just the two of us for these.

Anyway, I was going to make these for Gareth because, I must confess, the idea of coconut yoghurt did not greatly appeal to me. Coconut is a flavour I have a very shaky relationship with. Thankfully we didn’t have to buy any Malibu for these; friends donated a jam jar full. We have quite a bit left over as we only used 7.5ml (!) so perhaps I can try it in a cocktail and maybe get a taste for it.

I made up these puds this morning and they melded away in the fridge while we were at work. Despite me using the same ramekins as pictured in the book (we all know them- empty Gu pots!) I had too much, and ended up doing two mini overflow puds. Luckily my mum popped in for a cup of tea tonight, and so I gave her them away for her and my dad to enjoy tonight. (I’m not sure Dougal knew that!)

For an avowed coconut avoider, I really enjoyed these. Using posh coconut yog (does any other kind exist in the UK?) probably helped a great deal; there were little bits of coconut in it and the taste seemed fresh and not synthetic at all. The melted-in sugar on top was scrummy too. I could have gone a little more banana  and would perhaps make these in tumblers next time- using more banana but therefore also have room for the full portion of cream mix.

The only thing I would say is that I can’t honestly imagine what the Malibu must have added. Admittedly a tablespoon between four portions (and I only made two portions, but they split between four dishes) is bugger all. If you wanted these to feel a bit more grown up a decent whack of booze wouldn’t go amiss!

These are apparently inspired by Nigella’s Barbados Creams from Domestic Goddess. This is not a book I’ve got, and whilst everyone on the internet wants to rave about the Barbados version, noone seems keen to tell me what the difference is. I’d certainly be keen to investigate! What kind of booze goes in a Barbados Cream? Rum? And which fruit? I can’t think pineapple would work, surely too acidic?

The second birthday of the year, and yet again, ice cream and peanut fudge sauce had a starring role.

• Prawns with Maryam Zaira Sauce
• Red-Leaf, Fig and Serrano Ham Salad (this time with Figs!)
• Lamb Cutlets with Chilli and Black Olives
• Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundae

Well, it was my birthday. What was I going to do apart from invite some good friends round and cook for them till we all burst?

I’d aimed to start with Scallops-on-the-Shell but the fishmongers of Leith let me down. Instead I bought in a truckload of prawns with their tails on, fanned them out all pretty in my Phil Revells (last birthday’s present) and gave everyone pots of Maryam Zaira sauce to dunk in. Dougal provided faintly saffron-y bread and all in all it was a grand wee starter.

Main course saw us re-visit a salad that we made way back when on the 1st of January. However, at the time we were missing a key ingredient- the Figs! Right now they are in season and there are heaving shelves of them in Waitrose. I was really impressed by how they brought this salad together- a lump of fig flesh with some serrano ham is a gloriously sweet and salty combination.

The high point of the main course was an awesome feast of tasty garlicky (oh my!) chilli seasoned lamb cutlets- 12 in all- fried on the hob. I was really impressed that this didn’t fill the kitchen (and my guests) up with smoke. We left the meat marinading while we ate our first course and then I set to frying whilst the table got re-organised and folks chatted away.

For pudding I pulled out the big guns. I’d commissioned ice cream from AC’s granddad (he makes it for her parent’s chippie and Italian restaurant) and thus, as much as a birthday present to myself as as a grand dessert for my guests, I was able to serve up the Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundaes. These were wonderful; the salted peanuts on top really worked a treat and the three types of ice cream were definitely necessary. The only thing that wasn’t necessary was my doubling the volumes for the Peanut Butter Fudge Sauce. We had far too much- the amount specified for four sundaes would surely have done the trick. Sadly this means poor Dougal and I are on left-overs duty all week. It’s a hard life.

In other exciting news I got some heart shaped cookie cutters for my birthday so at least one more recipe is now in our sights! My parting shot is Nick, illustrating the theme of Ice Cream Sundae through the medium of interpretive dance…

Some of the more exciting dishes we have done recently are fish based. We don’t otherwise eat a lot of seafood. It’s been a marked change in our diet, when we’ve suddenly started doing all these fish recipes because they need to be done. I’ve now met two of our local fishmongers. One of them complained about people coming in with requests for “fancy foreign fish” for recipes “written in London”… so he’s probably not the first port of call for the more exotic recipes we’ll be doing later.

At the business end I’ve cut up squid for calamari and now I’ve cooked a whole fish and filleted it once cooked. That was exciting.

• Saké Sea Bass with Wilted Greens

The fish itself was amazing. You can see from the photos that it was a big beastie, with dorsal fins that you could fan out in a most fascinating fashion. Unlike the original Billy Bass this one was not in the mood for singing – but then maybe sea bass aren’t singers?

The fishmonger gutted Billy here and I filled up the insides with shredded spring onion. Doused in soya and saké and popped in his little silver pastie, er, foil pouch.

(The saké will apparently be used for another recipe soon, though I can’t remember which one. I was greatly troubled at point of purchase – do I go for the ordinary-looking bottle or the swankier bottle of dry saké? Would dry be bad? They were 5p difference but in the end I went for the plain bottle with the plain contents.)

Once cooked in the oven I had to remove the skin. I had no idea what to do but Helen suggested “start at the tail”. This was definitely the way to do it – otherwise I would still be there, peeling off a scale at a time. I wasn’t able to completely remove all the bones because the fishmonger had cut some of the ribs away from the spine when he filleted it. Fish bones are a real pain, but that’s the price you pay for such lovely meat.

And it was very tasty, though quite plain as Nigella admits in the blurb. Given the choice I would add something extra to the side when making this dish. Her wilted greens were too wilted to really make much impression, I thought. So, what do I have to carve up next?

Things we have learned this week: Dougal managed to go 25 years of life without realising that Brambles and Blackberries were the same thing.

• Blackberry Crisp

Of course Bramble is a much better word. Why? Well partly because whenever I try to say Blackberry I find that Blackcurrant comes out and that just leads to guests being surprised at the first mouthful. But also because the word Bramble is reminiscent of tramping across autumny hillsides and munching on fruit as you find it and that is good.

This pudding hit the spot in a similarly autumny way. Although we halved the quantities and we also over cooked it a bit, it managed to seem rich and wintry and warm and abundant in all the right ways. The topping, instead of being a crumble, has oats and almonds in it which give it crunch and the cinnamon gives it that winter’s eve flavour.

All in all a good ‘un- easy to construct and, most importantly, left-overs for tomorrow.

Felt like a proper grown up having six lovely friends round for lunch this Sunday.

• Layered Salad with Roast Quail
• White Chocolate Mint Mousse

However, whilst the intention had been to get through more recipes, and the table was heaving with food, as you’ll see we only managed another two recipes. The rest of the food was still Nigella inspired, taking the form of three dips from the Mezze Feast for 10-20 in Feast and some Richard Bertinet flatbreads to wipe all the slurpy bits up with.

To start with, the layered salad with quail. I enjoyed the salad more than I’d expected to; I’m not normally that impressed by radishes but they added colour and were inoffensive; the cucumber and red pepper added crunch and the dressing was straight forward and tasty- mostly honey and lemon juice, the same mix as basted the gorgeous little quail. There were twelve of these little guys- I wished there’d been sixteen cos they’d have looked better on the plates- and I now have 12 souls hanging heavy in my heart. For dear Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-It-All says in Meat that Quail are now often as badly abused as cheap chicken and ought to be avoided. However he is also quite pro-Waitrose (commenting favourably on their openness regarding sourcing and the very fact that they have policies) so I am going to go back and check out the provenance of the birdies wot I bought and see whether I need to repent my wicked ways, or merely wipe my brow that I got away with it this time.

As you can see there were plenty of bits and pieces to go with the salad and quail: a warmly spicy kidney bean and lime dip; freshly baked flatbreads for tearing and sharing; a goats cheese, walnut and basil dip; water to drink which had been flavoured with slivers of cucmber and chunks of strawberry and which was in exactly the right fruity, foreign, slightly exotic but basically accessible register for the rest of the meal. Wow, I just used the word register when talking about food. I fear I may be turning into Nigella.

Pudding came without any guilt of the ethical variety and merely with guilt of the calorific variety. The white chocolate mint mousses are meant to be served in very small volumes. Serving glass size dictated I went a little larger, but any bigger and my guests would have had to have been rolled down the stairs. Fabulously sweet and creamy with it, these were a delicious little pocket of naughty puddingness at the end of the meal.

I made these somewhat on the hoof- after our friends had arrived and in fact after we’d started eating the main spread- which meant that the white chocolate had started to solidify and these had little nuggets of chocolate dotted through them. I’m not sure it didn’t add a little something, to be honest. As I tried to explain to Martin at the time, white chocolate doesn’t behave like real chocolate, going from molten through a gently increasing range of stiffnesses to solid- it rather crystallises so that it goes from thickly gooey (it never really gets runny) to having a three dimensional structure rather too quickly. Like I say though, this didn’t detract. There was quite a bit left over; planked into ramekins, Dougal and I have been enjoying the wickedness nightly since Sunday!

Simple fish paired with very fancy noodles for a high class Chinois dinner.

• Seared Salmon with Singapore Noodles

Pushing the boat out for Wednesday tea meant some proper speciality shopping this week- dried shrimp from the Chinese supermarket. My mum was telling me that ‘back in the day’ she and my dad had a couple of recipes up their sleeves that used dried shrimp so I shall have to probe them for these to use up the rest of the bag.

But back to the food. The fish was fried hot in a sugary madras rub with some garlic oil. Perfectly cooked and very balanced flavours.

And then the exciting noodles. Vermicelli (I bought normal vermicelli and then discovered it should have been rice vermicelli, d’oh!) with chinese leaf, bean sprouts, baby corn and shrimp tossed through it, along with some Chinese wine, soy sauce and more madras powder.

All served up with some Tiger (from Singapore, naturally) and some TsingTao. Excellent stuff. Felt very fancy- the sort of dish that would impress any friends that happened to have popped by. Friends: feel free to pop by for dinner (next year!) but bring your own salmon steaks.

We followed Nigella’s instructions to the letter here, and made an evening off it with a posh bottle of rosé. It was lovely!

• Crab and Avocado Salad with Japanese Dressing
• Butterscotch Fruit Fondue

Starting with a little aperitif of Japanese Chilli Crackers set the party mood instantly.

Suitably refreshed, I headed to the kitchen and put together the salad. It wasn’t at all difficult to construct; some light mixing of crab with dressing and chilli, before the crab meat was artfully mounded on mixed leaves with some dollops of perfectly ripe avocado. The japanese dressing was sweet, but the chilli added a fierce little kick. All we needed was a little more of it!

The recipe suggested 200g of crab as a starter for four, or to halve the amounts and use it as supper for two. I don’t think that suggestion was quite right; really it ought to have been 200g crab for 4 starters or 2 main courses. Either way, it left us with plenty of room for pudding!

For pudding we revisited properly a dessert we’d tried out a few months back, the Butterscotch Fruit Fondue. This time I’d invested in some blackberries, strawberries and rasps, and we made a wee feast of it. A decadent end to a very special Wednesday night tea.

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…