I have never felt less like cooking than right now

379. Loin of pork with bay leaves
380. Rhubarb custard

These two recipes are from the first menu in the Dinner chapter. There is supposed to be a Casesar salad as a starter, but I was tired and it was cold, and I couldn't be bothered going out to buy fresh free-range eggs for the dressing (they're supposed to be eaten almost raw, so really fresh eggs are necessary).

I cooked this all after I returned home from work.

The pork loin is rubbed with a mixture of olive oil, bay leaves, peppercorns and garlic. (Mum, thankfully, went out to buy the pork for me during the day - I am so grateful.)


marinated pork

Then you place thinly sliced onions around the pork, and bake it at 200C until done.

While it was baking, I made the rhubarb custard - the final of How to Eat's many rhubarb recipes. The recipe says to stew some fresh rhubarb, but I had a bag of frozen pulp in the freezer, which I defrosted for the recipe. To make it, you whisk up eggs, egg yolks and sugar, then add pour over warmed milk and the rhubarb pulp. Pour it into a dish, and it needs to be baked in a waterbath at 160C for 1 hour (or until set). I did this in our rickety old microwave convection oven (which lives in the pantry and is hardly ever used for the oven purpose).


raw custard

So this is the cooked pork... mmm... golden and crunchy.


cooked pork

As it was resting, I made the side dish - tinned butter beans (Nigella says to soak and cook pulses from dried, but I was seriously not in the mood), warmed through with oil and garlic. Then I made the sauce by deglazing the pan with white wine and water.

You serve the pork slices with sauce drizzled over and surrounded by bay leaves.


pork slices


butter beans

Dessert time. This is what the rhubarb custard looks like when cooked.


cooked custard

Now, although it seemed quite set and not-liquid when I shook the dish, when we cut into it, most of the inside was still liquid.


mmm soupy

The edges, however, were set, and the liquid centre was warm and tasted like ordinary pouring custard (i.e. DELICIOUS), with the soft fragrance of rhubarb permeating through. It was quite lovely indeed.

Pecorino and Pears

378. Pecorino and Pears (Weekend Lunch)

This isn't really a recipe, which I discovered upon actually reading it, but I'd already bought the pecorino and the pears, so I'm counting it.

This combination is a suggested alternative to the sticky chocolate pudding in one of the menus in the Weekend Lunch chapter.

A sharp, crumbly wedge of pecorino cheese, and slices of sweet, crunchy pear. You might not think it, but it's a taste sensation.



I made this in the afternoon, not to eat, but simply to photograph and count in my recipes. Mum and I ended up eating all of that pear and about half that cheese. I wasn't even hungry. It's that good.

Hot Jewish Potato Pancakes

Here is what Mum and I had for lunch today.

374. Char Siu 1
375. Char Siu 2
376. Latkes (Basics etc.)

Nigella has 2 recipes for char siu (AKA glazed roast pork loin, Chinese style) in the Low Fat chapter. She suggests making up char siu in advance, slicing it, and stashing it in the freezer to use when you want to add some meat to your low-fat supper. (e.g. soup noodles etc). I made both char siu marinades last night, and let the pork loins marinate overnight.

The first marinade contains:
- soy sauce
- tomato ketchup
- hoisin sauce
- sweet sherry
- honey
- dark muscovado sugar

I had all these ingredients in my pantry.


Marinade ingredients (1)

The 2nd marinade seems to just be made up of random shit that Nigella had lying around her fridge. It contains:
- soy sauce
- prune juice
- mushroom ketchup (huh??)
- miso
- mirin
- sesame oil
- garlic
- light muscovado sugar

I used regular ketchup instead of mushroom ketchup, and coca cola for prune juice (it was a long shot, but I just wanted something sweet. And hey, it worked for the ham).


char siu marinade (1 on the left, 2 on the right)

Today, I put the loins in the oven (200C for 15 minutes, then 160C for 30 minutes), and got on with the latkes. I do realize the total inappropriateness of having latkes (i.e. a hot Jewish potato pancake) with roast pork… but I just really, really need to get through these recipes right now. Besides, a latke is a “hot Jewish potato pancake” – there is nothing I don’t like about that description. How could I resist?

So to make latkes, you need to grate up a few potatoes (using a processor, natch)…


grated potato

...then drain the potato pieces, and mix them with some chopped onion, flour (or matzah meal), egg and salt.



Then you just gotta fry the pancakes in hot oil for about 5 minutes a side. I love frying food, it is just so much fun.


I believe I can fry


Latkes!!

Here’s the char siu. Both marinades were pretty decent, even the weird one with the coke in it. I wouldn’t ever use them as a substitute for the real, red-glazed, deliciously greasy char siu that you find in Hong Kong BBQ shops, but for the purpose they were intended (addition of protein to low-fat meals), they are fine.


char siu

Ooh, but those latkes! They’re fantastic! So crispy and oily and totally compulsive.


Lunch

They’re good plain, but I also served the latkes with cream cheese and smoked salmon, which was brilliant. Cream cheese + fried potato and onion = the same flavour combo as in sour cream and onion flavoured chips. In other words, I was in flavour country. It’s a big country.


smoked salmon on latkes

Check it out, I folded the smoked salmon pieces just like I used to at my old job at the buffet restaurant. Man, I remember having to fold hundreds of pieces of salmon a night, and arranging them on huge expensive glass platters to feed the greedy greedy crowds. It was such a crap job.

But onto dessert - the lemon balm and Sauternes jelly which I made last night. After lunch, I unmoulded the jelly, and ate it with my mum. We drowned it in cream, and it was lovely. Very refreshing and light. However, it was unexpectedly alcoholic, which is why I think it didn’t set very hard. Maybe next time I’ll use more sugar syrup and less alcohol. Either way, it tasted good.


sauternes and lemon balm jelly

Cooking on a Tuesday Night

As of 6:15pm tonight, I officially finished classes for the semester! Yay!

When I came home, I just ate what my mum had cooked - rice and stirfried veggies, and then got on with ploughing through more recipes.

372. Sauternes and Lemon Balm Jelly (Dinner)
373. Good, thick winter pea soup

The soup appears in both the Cooking in Advance chapter, and in the Weekend Lunch chapter. Basically what you have to do is save any stock you have from boiling a ham, and boil it with split peas, a potato and some leek to form a soup. I used a tub of frozen stock I had leftover from the ridiculously salty ham in cider, (watered down substantially) and let the whole thing bubble away as I got on with the jelly.

First step is to make a syrup with sugar and water, and steep some lemon balm (or lemongrass) in it.


syrup

Next, you strain the liquid into a jug, and add some Sauternes. Then you dissolve gelatine leaves in some extra, warmed, Sauternes, and pour that into the jug. Finally, you add lemon juice to make up the volume. I was almost worried that we wouldn't have any lemons (we renovated and expanded our kitchen 3 years ago at the expense of our lemon tree, and now I never remember to buy them), until I saw this...


do we have enough lemons?

My dad has a guitar student, "Reese", who has a grandmother, who has a very fertile lemon tree. She offloaded a whole bunch of them to my dad last week. How lovely and generous of her!

Nigella says to use a 2-pint ring mould, but I only made a half-quantity of the jelly, and decided to use the randomly sized mini-mould that my Aunty Anne gave me.


jelly in moulds

The jellies are now in the fridge; they need to set overnight. Check back tomorrow for the verdict!

And here's the thick pea soup. I basically let it keep cooking until it looked like the picture of the yellow split pea soup in the New Years chapter of Nigella's latest book, Feast. It smelled pretty good too. And I think some sliced frankfurters (proper German ones, from a deli) would be lovely in it.


a good thick winter soup

I tasted it, and it was nice, but still ridiculously salty. I probably should have poured some of the stock away at the beginning, rather than adding water and then letting it bubble back down to its original saltiness. Whoops. I watered the completed soup down, and put the whole thing in the fridge. So now the soup is not too salty, but it's watery, and not "good and thick". If I can be arsed tomorrow, I'll boil up some more split peas in water and then add that to the soup.

I think it defeats the purpose of this soup if it's not like one of those "wonderful grainy, tobacco-tinted purées eaten in Amsterdam - thick, puddingy... smelling of sausage". Although I don't remember ever seeing soup like this on my trip to Amsterdam. To be fair, however, I don't remember much of my trip to Amsterdam at all.

You'll be pleased to know that I also made both marinades for Nigella's low-fat char siu recipes. The pork loins are defrosting as we speak, and I shall cook them tomorrow.

Night night.

Raspberries and Cream

362. Raspberries and Cream

I've been um-ing and er-ing about whether or not to include this recipe in my list of recipes. It's a suggestion, right in the back of the Fast Food chapter. Nigella says to serve beautiful fresh raspberries with double cream as a dessert (this definitely would not count as a recipe). She also adds a variation, to use if "raspberries aren't absolutely as they should be at the moment", which is all the freakin' time in Australia.

She says to mash up some frozen raspberries, and to fold them through whipped cream, with icing sugar. A crumbling of shop-bought meringues is optional. (But obligatory for me). It's a very simple recipe, no? So like I said, I wasn't sure whether it counted as a proper recipe. However, I remembered that back at the start of my project, recipe number 7 was the obscenely simple vanilla ice-cream with pulverised dark chocolate, also a dessert from the Fast Food chapter. So to cut a long story (somewhat) short, it's being counted.

I chose to make it because Mum and I were in alone tonight, and I happened to have all the ingredients stashed in various places around the kitchen - a tub of double cream, half a packet of frozen raspberries, icing sugar, and the last meringue from a packet I bought months ago, covered in the sugary crumbs of its departed brothers.

I made this during the always too-short news break just before Desperate Housewives, taking heaps of shortcuts. I mixed the still-frozen raspberries with the unwhipped but delectably thick cream, and some sifted over some icing sugar. Then I scraped it into 2 champagne glasses and crushed the meringue on top. I let them sit on the kitchen bench until the first ad-break, by which time the raspberries had thawed sufficiently to be eaten.


raspberries and cream

What a treat! I adore the raspberry & white choc combination, and the similar combination of raspberries and cream works really well - sweet, rich cream against the tart berries. It was super-easy too, and a rather classy dessert to be eaten whilst we were sofa-bound and doona-covered.


one delectable spoonful

And to answer the most important question... Desperate Housewives was awesome - Gabrielle had a catfight with Sister Mary, a nun. It totally rocked.

The falling leaves… drift by my window…

Or not, as the case may be. Even though today was the day I designated for Nigella’s DEEPLY AUTUMNAL DINNER FOR 8, and it’s been bitingly cold for the past 3 weeks, today we were blessed with clear skies, bright sun, and unseasonable warmth. Dang.

DEEPLY AUTUMNAL DINNER FOR 8

344. Chestnut and pancetta salad
345. Roast venison fillet with apple purée and rosemary sauce
346. Quinces poached in Muscat

The venison is served with peas, and a potato and celeriac mash, whilst the quinces are served with lemon ice-cream.

This dinner is for 8 - I halved all quantities to feed myself, my parents, and my very good friend Frances.

So this afternoon, I poached the quinces. You peel, core and quarter them first, reserving the peel and trimmings (this will help the syrup thicken, you see). To make the syrup, boil up some muscat with water, sugar and spices. Then you put the peel and cores in an ovenproof dish, cover with the quince quarters, and pour the syrup over. They need 2.5 hours cooking, well covered, in a 160C oven.


raw quinces


In the oven - don't worry, I covered them with foil.

After cooking, they should look like… well… Nigella describes this point with the singularly most disgusting image I have ever read: “When you take them out, the quinces will be the colour of old-fashioned Elastoplast”.

EEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW. When I read that, all I could think of was manky old bandaids, all dirty and wet and peeling off injured fingers. How disgustingly munting.

Thank goodness, then, that they actually looked pretty good.



After they cool properly, they go a bit darker.


deeper and darker coloured

While they were cooking, I marinated the venison fillet. The marinade consists of red wine, celery, carrot, onion, juniper berries, peppercorns, thyme and bay leaves. You boil the whole lot up, let it cool, and dunk the venison in it.


marinating venison

I did this early in the afternoon, and then went to uni to hand in an assignment, (2 days late, whoops). But after I came home, there was still sooo much shit to do! I still had to make the rosemary sauce for the venison, the apple sauce, the mashed potato and celeriac, the peas, salad and syrup for the quinces! This is when I realized what a high-effort menu this really is.

I mean, 3 separate wine-based reductions? (In the venison marinade, rosemary sauce, and the quince syrup). Ahem!

Anyway, getting back to it… the rosemary sauce is pretty similar to the marinade, but with the addition of beef stock and some different vegetables. You boil it all up, reduce it, and then add some of the marinade before boiling it again.

The apple sauce involves simply peeling and coring apples, and cooking them until pulpy with butter, sugar, cloves and lemon juice. Maybe I could have just used a SPC jar of apple sauce…

For the venison, you take it out of the marinade, sear it all over, and then put it in the oven for 20 – 30 minutes. It needs to rest for about 30 minutes, so remember to factor that into your timings.

While it was cooking, I peeled, chopped and boiled the potatoes and celeriac for the mash.


Celeriac – what a funny looking vegetable!

It was at about this time that Frances, my dinner guest, arrived. And as a short digression, look at this lovely gift she bought me, prefaced with the comment, “I hope you appreciate the joke”. (I did).


elderflower cordial

You can get it at freakin’ Ikea!!! So yeah, I really didn’t need to get my elderflower elderflower concentrate shipped from Tasmania. D’oh.

I was so tired by this stage, and I hadn’t even made the peas yet. Dammit.

Me: Frances, you don’t really want peas tonight, do you?
Frances: Ooh, I love peas!

Ok, ok. I boiled some peas.

The last thing I made was the salad, which involved frying up pancetta until crisp, then tossing in some chestnuts (thawed frozen, saved from Christmas) and warming it through. Then you toss it through lettuce with a Dijon mustard and vinegar dressing. Boom boom, done.

I didn’t bother serving the salad as a first course, but just plonked everything down on the table together.


pile of mash


venison slices


peas and sauce


chestnut pancetta salad


applesauce


applesauce and meat

This menu, despite all the work, was great! I loved the unusual tastes of everything. The highlight of the menu, for me, was the salad - the mealy and sweet chestnuts contrasted fabulously against the salty pancetta. The flavour of the venison was very unusual but not unpleasant, and was lovely and tender. But that mash was really delicious! There was heaps leftover (as expected), and I’m very excited about eating it for lunch tomorrow with leftover rosemary sauce. And even though I nearly gave up on the peas, I'm glad I made them because they really enhanced the menu, visually and taste-wise. (Imagine how brown everything would have been without them!)

And here’s dessert. To finish it off, you have to strain the liquid away and boil it until thickened, then pour it over the quinces. (See, that’s the 3rd wine-based reduction in this menu).


poached quinces

I served it with the lemon ice-cream, which worked out well, as Frances’ favourite flavour is lemon. Nigella recommends half a quince per person, but we were satisfied with a quarter each. This was a lovely dessert, and finished off the meal perfectly.


quince and ice-cream

Overall, I really enjoyed this menu. But if you were to make it for company, make sure you make it for people who you can count on to appreciate the time and effort and expense. (Like Frances, of course).

Leftover quinces are going to become breakfast, with yogurt. Woohoo!

“Serves 4 fat bastards”

The choucroute garnie and syllabub form Nigella’s SERIOUS SATURDAY LUNCH FOR 8 – NO HOSTAGES. I added the crostini to the menu because I wanted to use up some gorgonzola which I had lying around.

338. Gorgonzola, Marsala and Mascarpone Crostini (Dinner)
339. Choucroute Garnie (Weekend Lunch)
340. Quince Syllabub (Cooking in Advance)

I have to admit, choucroute garnie, (AKA a big fat German stew), counts as one of those recipes which I’ve been avoiding due to, well, everything. I mean, it’s the pig-heavy ingredients (frankfurters, bratwurst, gammon knuckles), the fact that I’d have to do some special shopping to find them all, and simply because I couldn’t imagine what it would look like or taste like at all. Anthony Bourdain has a recipe (and photo!) of it in his fabulous Les Halles Cookbook, which gave me an idea of what it should be like, and eased my nerves a little bit. However, his recipe is different from Nigella's in that it's more cheffy (naturally) - he tells you to plate it up prettily, specifies smoked pork loin, salted pork belly and boudins blancs, and includes a duck confit and foie gras variation. Ahem. His recipe also has a lot more swearing in it. For instance, the Anthony Bourdain choucroute garnie "serves 4 fat bastards".

I finally made it last night, and served it up to some family friends who I knew would appreciate the effort, even if the food sucked.

We had Uncle Mike and Aunty Helen over, (who have had roast goose, Blakean fish pie, rhubarb crumble, steak & kidney pie and banana custard with us before), as well as Uncle Francis and Aunty Wendy. I haven’t cooked for them before, but they’re really, really cool. In fact, it was Uncle Francis who bought me How to Eat for my 21st birthday last year!

Ok, so here’s the meat. We got it all at Prahran market on Saturday. There’s bratwurst, frankfurters and some ham knuckles. I used less meat than Nigella suggests – she says it doesn’t matter how many sausages you use, as long as everyone can get a piece of each sausage. So you can use less and cut them into smaller pieces.


pile of meat

The choucroute garnie sounds fiddly, but doesn’t really involve that much effort. To start, I softened finely chopped onion in goosefat, then added carrots, the ham knuckles and a bouquet garni. Nigella says to use a popsock to make it, but I only have very very dark ones, and didn’t want a Bridget “dickhead” Jones blue soup happening. I just used a tea strainer.


bouquet garni

So you chuck the bouquet garni in the pot, then add sauerkraut, stir it up, top it with more goosefat, and let it simmer slowly for 2.5 hours.


Pot

While that was simmering, I made the syllabub. You’re supposed to make it a couple of days in advance, but I was short on time and did it all today. The recipe says to steep lemon zest and juice in the alcohol for a day, then strain it, before mixing it with cream and sugar and whipping it up. Once you’ve spooned the mixture into individual glasses, you can leave it in the fridge for 2-3 days. What I did was steep the lemon zest in the morning, and finish it off while the choucroute garnie was cooking. I used a mixture of rosé and quince liquer, which resulted in a lovely dusky pink mixture.


syllabub table

Next, I did the crostini topping, which just involves mixing gorgonzola, marsala and mascarpone (I actually used crème fraîche, because I already had some). This can be stashed in the fridge until it is needed. For the bread part of the crostini, you need to slice up a baguette, brush the little slices with olive oil, and toast them in the oven. They need to be cool before putting the topping on.

So all that was left to do was to boil some potatoes as an accompaniment, and to finish the choucroute garnie. In the recipe, Nigella says that you have to remove the ham knuckles and slice the meat off, but I found that after the 2.5 hours simmering, a gentle prod with a wooden spoon was all that was needed to remove the meat. Then I had to grill the bratwurst and add them to the chourcroute garnie with the frankfurters. 30 minutes gentle simmering later, and the sausages are all heated through and the choucroute garnie is done.

And it was dinner time!


Gorgonzola, Marsala and crème fraîche crostini

These were pretty good. Even my dad liked them, despite the includion of blue cheese.


choucroute garnie

Mmm... it smelled great, and tasted good too. It was pretty salty and sour, but not inedibly so. I think I was supposed to rinse the sauerkraut before adding it (well, Anthony Bourdain says to), but Nigella's recipe doesn't say to do so, so I didn't. If I were to make this again, I'd definitely rinse the sauerkraut. The stew was really rich and tasty - those frankfurters were delicious! I now understand why the German woman at the deli recommended them to me so enthusiastically.

As I said, the stew was really salty, but it went well with the bland potatoes - unbuttered boiled potatoes sprinkled with crushed juniper berries.


Potatoes

Uncle Mike: The potatoes are delicious!

We all ate 1-2 potatoes each, but Uncle Mike greedily ate at least 5 of them. Tsk tsk.


Plate

I brought out the syllabubs (or should that be syllabi?), after dinner, and they looked suitably impressive.


quince syllabi


Quince syllabub - check out the lovely pink colour!

It tasted good, despite the short steeping time. And they're good for dinner parties as they're easy, impressive, tasty, and can be made in advance.



After dinner, Uncle Francis had a flick through my How to Eat book...

Uncle Francis: I think we're going to have to book ourselves in for this "Deeply Autumnal Dinner for 8"... it sounds good... chestnut and pancetta salad, roast venison fillet...

Usually when I have my friends over, we watch DVDs after dinner, but tonight they pulled out a guitar and started playing. Aah, those wacky adults!


guitar time