Sunday Dinner

This is the Anglicised Involtini, which is one of the “Six Ideas for Kitchen Suppers” from the Dinner chapter. So far, I’ve done three of the six, (including the involtini) and they’ve all been great! The others I've tried are the One-Pan Chicken and the Tagliatelle with Chicken from the Venetian Ghetto.

24. Breadcrumbs (Basics etc.)

Lucky for me, the list of ingredients included breadcrumbs, which gave me an opportunity to cross another recipe off my list. We don’t tend to get breadcrumb-friendly bread at our house – it’s either dense, dark, intensely grained bread, sweet egg-bread (like challah) or super-plastic WonderWhite supermarket bread. So on Friday I picked up a small white block loaf from Baker’s Delight, cut the crusts off half the slices and let them dry out for a couple of days. Saturday night I whizzed them up in a processor, and let them dry out in that round metal dish you see there…


Fresh Breadcrumbs

After hiving off the two tablespoons required for the recipe, I put the rest into two zip-lock glad bags and chucked them in the freezer.

25. Anglicised Involtini

Nigella has a few versions of this – griddled eggplants rolled around a filling. There’s the “Soft and Sharp Involtini” from Nigella Bites, the “Involtini” in Feast, and the “Eggplant and Feta Rolls” in Forever Summer. I’ve done the Soft and Sharp, and the Eggplant and Feta Rolls, and can heartily recommend both of them!

You make this in stages. Firstly, griddle some thinly sliced eggplants. Then make the filling, roll the eggplant slices around the filling and arrange snugly in a dish. Pour over tomato passata and arrange some thinly sliced mozzarella over the top. I did the griddling and filling this afternoon and let them sit in the fridge until dinner time. I got fourteen rolls out of the mixture, even though Nigella says you’ll get 12. I think I just wasn’t as generous as she is with the filling, so could stretch it over more eggplant slices. (By the way, I griddled more slices than Nigella suggested because I absolutely love eggplant and wanted to munch whilst cooking).

The filling itself has Lancashire/Provolone cheese (see below), breadcrumbs (see above), pine nuts, raisins, basil, parmesan cheese, garlic, olive oil and an egg. It smells brilliant!


Assembly Line


Ready to go in the fridge

Now, about ingredients… Nigella calls this an “Anglicised” involtini because she suggests Lancashire cheese instead of Provolone, as Lancashire is apparently easier to find in the UK. Well, this is Australia, and Italian cheeses are much more readily available, so Provolone it is. I found mine at my favourite Greek deli in Box Hill. I think it’d be a bit of a mission to find Lancashire; I’d have to trek down to Victoria Market or the Richmond Hill Café and Larder or something… Furthermore, I used ordinary mozzarella instead of buffalo, as it’s cheaper. And you only need a few slices, so I didn’t want to feel guilty about having leftovers.

So at around 6:30, I preheated the oven and finished off making the dish. The recipe specifies 150ml tomato passata, but I didn’t think this was enough so added quite a bit more to get a generous blanket of red. Nigella says to arrange the slices of mozzarella down the centre “like a snowman’s buttons”, but I was thinking more like Santa Claus…


Mmmm....

Ooh, Nigella also says to drizzle with olive oil, and to add salt and pepper before baking it, but I forgot. I thought it tasted great, and I already found it quite oily as it was, because of all the cheese. But maybe you should try it with the olive oil. My friend DG has made the Feast involtini before, and said, "I think it's the olive oil that makes it in the Feast recipe, it melds with the tomato sauce and is gorgeous".

Unusually, even though the recipe serves four, my parents and I almost finished the whole thing. I didn’t make a proper side dish, just a few crunchy salad leaves, which worked really well.

This was so delicious! We all loved it, a lot. This is definitely a keeper. I think you might have noticed a pattern with my dad – he’s quite effusive and no matter what I cook, he’ll automatically say “This is good”, “this is really nice”, “you’re good at cooking”, before he decides whether he actually likes it or not. But this one, he really, really, truly loved.

Dad: This is so perfect. Today I was just thinking to myself, “I’d like lasagna for dinner”, and you’ve made something so similar. Better, in fact!

Aww… thanks Dad!

Dad had a glass of cabernet sauvignon to go with, and my mother a New Zealand sauvignon blanc. Now, my mum’s not much of a drinker. However, she desperately wanted me to say that she had a whole glass of wine with her dinner. This is, of course, testament to the fact that she enjoyed the meal, and not the start of a secret drinking problem…

Sunday lunch for my brother and his mate

My first porky recipe!

I bought pancetta the other day, in preparation for making this pasta. Carbonara is one of my brother’s favourite dishes, so I was excited to make this for him! Last night a friend of his crashed at ours after a night out, and they woke up at around 1:00pm. So, I started cooking for them, chatting all the while as they sat in the kitchen, shaking themselves out of their stupor with orange juice and tea. The recipe makes enough for two, "I incline towards two for lunch and one for dinner"... so with two eaters, there were no no leftovers, thank goodness.

23. Spaghetti Carbonara

Yurgh, pancetta is so feral! It smells grosser than bacon, in my opinion. You have to cut it up in cubes, and cook it in a pan with oil. Then you add white wine and let it reduce, add butter, toss through some cooked spaghetti and then a mixture of eggs, cheese, pepper and nutmeg. Nigella says you don’t have to add cream, because “this takes it away from being something one can get together with ingredients to hand”. However, I happened to have some cream in the fridge, so I added a couple of spoonfuls.


Carbonara in pot


2 huge bowlfuls!


Ben & Pasta


Eating

Quotes:

Ben: This is good.
Sarah: Thanks, you know the recipe says this could serve one person!
Ben: Is it an American book?

Daniel: This is good, but I think the pancetta needs to be in smaller pieces, and cooked more crisp.

Haha, I have no idea how to cook porky stuff… I hope they don’t get sick!

So I guess the verdict is that this is a good recipe, as long as you cook the pancetta correctly! Obviously I didn't try any... Daniel said it tasted good, but wasn't quite creamy enough. So there you go.

Saturday Dinner #2

It seems that Saturday night has become the “Sarah & Mum eat alone at home” night, as Dad and Daniel are always working. So again, I looked to the One & Two chapter for inspiration…

22. Pasta with Unpestoed Pesto

This is one of the sidebar suggestions from the One & Two chapter, which I chose to make because we happened to have basil sitting in the fridge – I used about three quarters of it, and the rest is going in the Anglicised Involtini for tomorrow’s lunch.

It’s basically all the ingredients for pesto – basil, pine-nuts, cheeses, garlic and olive oil – tossed through cooked pasta, linguine in this case. The recipe says to grate in parmesan and shave in pecorino, but “frankly, it doesn’t matter if you use parmesan for both grating and shaving: who wouldn’t?” Answer: me! I have both pecorino and parmesan sitting in my fridge all the time, and love any excuse to use them. Mmm…


Pasta with Unpestoed Pesto

It was so super-easy to make, and didn't require lots of effort. In fact, it took me less than half an hour in total, straight after a huge gym session. And I just did it relaxedly, singing and dancing to Missy Elliot. I could see me making this regularly for quick, tasty, gratifying midweek meals.

This was fabulous, so tasty! The only problems were that it was just a tiny bit oily and could have had a bit more basil. This was my fault, as Nigella doesn’t specify quantities, so I just winged it. (200g pasta for both of us, plus random amounts of the other ingredients).

Mum: Ooh my lips are moisturized!

Saturday Lunch #2

20. One-Pan Chicken (Dinner)
21. Basic French Dressing (Basics etc.)

There’s really not that much to say about the chicken, apart from that it’s easy to prepare and very delicious. High rewards for little effort! Also, as Nigella says, the quantities are a guide rather than a strict stipulation, so you can be relaxed about how much you use of each ingredient. I went by eye and only used as much as I thought we could eat, and would be able to fit into two large trays (hence only 2 capsicums and about half the potatoes).

Nigella said... I used
1.5 kg chicken, cut into 8... 1.3 kg chicken thighs
1kg new potatoes... About 500g new potatoes
3 red onions... The same
16 cloves garlic... 1 head garlic
3 red peppers... 2 red peppers
Coarse Sea Salt... Maldon (from my Living Kitchen blue salt pig)
Bunch flat-leaf parsley... Oh shit, I forgot the parsley!

I don’t think the lack of parsley detracted from lunch in any way, it was great! It got a bit soggy though, because it finished cooking before my parents came home, so I left it sitting in the warm, turned off oven for about 20 minutes.


French Dressing – it’s good! It complements the salad leaves without being invasive.


Salad


Colourful - I just realised, it's called one-pan chicken but you have to use two pans.


Saturday Lunch... surprisingly sunny and it’s the middle of June

Quotes:

Dad: Thanks for lunch, this is really, really good!
Mum: I love squishing the soft garlic. And roasting the capsicum makes it so sweet.
Daniel: Ah... then roasting capsicum is like making love to a woman. And this chicken’s good. It tastes good, and is tender and juicy. Juicy… moist…sweet… tender… juicy… (Oh shut up Daniel)

Which lead us to start singing…

Daniel & I: It’s the juice… that makes it juicy
It’s the fruit that makes it fruity
It’s the funk that makes it funky
It’s the junk that makes it junky

Rock out.

Friday Dinner

Due to my terrible, terrible exam yesterday and the awful days of study leading up to it, my fridge was quite empty this morning. So my dad and I went to Box Hill in the morning and came back loaded with bags and bags of food to keep us going this week. We got quails, cabbage, chicken, capsicums, onions, garlic, eggplants, various cheeses and a whole bunch of other delicious stuff. Fantastic!

Last week, my diet consisted mainly of caffiene, Diet Lime Coke and sugar, so I thought it was high time for a nutritional, nurturing meal. (This is also in anticipation of the onslaught my body will be receiving in preparation for my next, and final exam, one week from today.)

18. Lacquered Quail (Low Fat)
19. Japanese Flavoured Sour-Sweet Cabbage (Low Fat)

Do you know how fun it is to spatchcock quails? You can just use kitchen scissors because their little bones are not strong at all. Just shove the scissors in and cut on either side of the backbone. It's very therapeutic! I actually bought eight quail, but my brother was working and not joining us for dinner, so I shoved two of them in the freezer for a future low-fat solo dinner.


Adri (my friend who saw this photo): omg the quails DO look like they are dancing

This is really, very very easy and quick. You have to boil up some pomegranate molasses and soy sauce in a saucepan, then pour it over the waiting, flattened quails and shove them in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Easy peasy! Whilst they're cooking, you can make the cabbage, which is shredded cabbage stir-fried in a bit of sesame oil, with mirin, soy sauce and rice vinegar. Nigella says "sprinkle over some Japanese seven-spice mixture if you've any to hand". What a silly thing to say, "IF you've any to hand"... we've always got it! I'm terribly addicted to it! It's called shichimi togarashi or nanami togarashi in Japanese, and it comes in a small glass cylindrical container with a red lid. Fabulous stuff.


Quail & I - Nanami Togarashi on the right

You know, this meal didn't taste low fat at all. It was delicious, filling and gratifying! Ooh and I just realised it was low carb too! Go me for eating super-healthy! (And more to the point, go Nigella for writing a fab recipe!) For some reason, I found it easy to eat two quails, but my parents had one and a half each, and were already full. Bizzare. Well at least now we've got a leftover cooked one sitting in the fridge with some leftover cabbage. That is SO my dinner tomorrow night.

One thing to note though, quails are hard to eat. We tried with knifes and forks at first, but there were so many little bones in there that after about 30 seconds we gave up and started ripping the poor creatures apart with our hands and teeth, Shrek style. I guess this is another reason why they're good for low-fat eating - because they're just too difficult to eat in huge quantities!


Aftermath (this was all our quails, not just mine!)

A day off...

Oh my god, how bad was my exam today!? It was so so bad, there's a high chance that I failed it. Seriously. Oh well. Too late to do anything about it now. I just need to move onwards and upwards.

I had almost no sleep last night, got up early this morning and spent the morning studying at uni. After the exam in the afternoon, I came home and collapsed in bed for a few hours. Of course, there was no cooking tonight. But just for interest, here's what I ate...

- Couscous from Tuesday dinner
- Steak, spinach and potatoes from Wednesday dinner


Dinner

Jet to let you know, that's ONE new potato squished in half, not two full sized potatoes. I am greedy, but I am not THAT much of a guts.

That was it. Not a cleverly thought out and opportunistic new dish created from old elements (e.g. Sunday Night Chicken Noodle, Pasta with Butter and Stock Cube Juices etc), not a clever postmodern recombination of existing elements to create new systems of meaning (a la Tarantino & Kill Bill), not a considered challenge of existing culinary generic paradigms (a la Coppola & Apocalypse Now, The Godfather) - I just chucked random stuff into a bowl and hoped for the best (a la Be Cool). Good God that film sucks. But this dinner was edible, a bit dry, but edible.

One week down... Wednesday Dinner

I have my Business and Economy in South East Asia exam tomorrow. I’m so tired! I got 5 hours of sleep last night, then went to uni in the morning and studied all day in a café there. I came home at about 5pm (to beat the traffic), and collapsed in bed for an hour. I was almost contemplating giving up on cooking tonight… I’m sorry guys, been studying all day, so tired, 3 coffees already… but felt a huge pang of guilt because I’d promised my dad steak and sent my mum out to get all the ingredients.

17. Steak Mirabeau

Nigella took this recipe from Leaves from the Walnut Tree, (apparently the Walnut Tree was Elizabeth David's favourite restaurant), which I want to get my hands on, as Nigella praises it immensely. From what she says, it seems to be one of those classic culinary tomes for the contemporary home cook - very instructive, no pictures, lots of words. Sound familiar at all?

This is the last recipe from the Fast Food chapter. Surprisingly, it was actually quick to cook!! And despite my total stretched out, frazzeled tiredness, it was not a drama putting it together at all.

You fry the sirloin (aka Porterhouse in Australia) in butter and oil, and top it with a criss-cross of anchovies and olives. Then you mush up some anchovies in the pan juices and reduce it with red wine to make a sauce. Mmm... I absolutely LOVE anchovies, and so does my entire family! And they're sooo fab with meat! The good thing about steak, unlike chicken breasts (grrr!), is that it cooks really quickly, and they don't have to be done all the way through!


Ooh, it's the 1970s!


Steak 2 - served as per Nigella's suggestion, with boiled new potatoes and spinach

I cooked the spinach in a big pan with a bit of butter and nutmeg. It was so fantastic, the perfect foil for the rich and salty steak. The recipe calls for 4 steaks, but Mum bought a couple extra because she thought there wouldn't be enough. I thought she was being extravagant, but she was right!! I only had one, but my greedy family wolfed them down like no tomorrow.

I was surprised that it was possible to cook something so fancy so quickly. It was very rich though, I'd have to cut down on the butter next time... I can feel it coating my throat and making its way down to my arteries...

Tuesday Dinner

I came home from yoga at 6:30 and got cracking on dinner. Thanks to the pea risotto, and the fact that everyone in my house was working or studying, my kitchen was still a mess. Crap.

15. Chicken with Spring Onion, Chilli and Greek Yoghurt
16. Cherried and Chick Pea’d Couscous (Variation)

So, dinner. Fast Food chapter, again. It was grilled chicken breasts, with a tzatziki-like sauce. You can serve it with couscous, a green salad or a tomato salad. I had initially thought to just do a green salad, but got at the last minute got scared that there wouldn’t be enough and did the couscous as well.


Couscous

The couscous is very easy to do, as you would expect, and it can be made with items that we always have lying around (couscous, chickpeas, pine nuts, cumin, stock granules, butter). It actually comes from a different menu in Fast Food, where it's served with lamb racks. If you do it with the lamb, Nigella says to add dried sour cherries and cinnamon. I'll let you know what that one's like when I make it.


Chicken

But oh my god, the bloody chicken breasts. It’s all my fault, I chose the largest breasts I could find, but was too lazy to pound them thinner, and they took ages, and when I got them on the table, some weren’t cooked! Grrr… so I let my family start on the decent ones. The uncooked ones I sliced lengthwise, ran back to the grill pan and kept cooking them, with my tummy rumbling all the while.


Dinner!

Verdict: It was ok. Not stunning, but not crap either. I’d say they were the low side of good. I mean, it all tasted nice, and the yogurt was well tasty, but there just wasn’t that “WOW” factor that so many Nigella recipes have. If, however, I felt like chicken and couscous, I’d probably do Nigel Slater's grilled (or fried) chicken, which tastes absolutely incredible, and have Nigella's yogurt as an accompaniment.

Pea Risotto

I fully realize the idiocy of embarking on this project right in the middle of the exam period. It’s not that I’m on an incredibly tight schedule with these recipes. I could easily take a couple of days off, and still be on track. Theoretically, I should be able to fit in my cooking around all the study that I have to do. The problem, though, is that now I have an excuse not to study. With the cooking, and the blogging, I’ve just opened up another, enormous outlet for procrastination.

With that in mind, here is what I had for lunch today.

14. Pea Risotto

This risotto serves 2, and is, appropriately enough, from the One & Two chapter, even though the quantities “might be nearer those ordinarily specified for four”. I halved the recipe for myself, with no side dish and no dessert.

It's pretty straightforward, you just cook some peas in butter, and puree half of them with butter, parmesan and nutmeg. Then you cook the rice in the ordinary way, adding the whole peas halfway through and the pea puree at the end.

I used a Living Kitchen 1 Litre measuring jug, which I got for my birthday this year, to pour the stock in. Love it.


Risotto + Living Kitchen 1L Jug

The thing about risotto, when I cook it at least, is that it always takes much longer than the recipe says, and I almost always need to add extra water from the kettle. I think Nigella was being optimistic when said about 20 minutes, because it took me 45, even with halved quantities. This happens even when I keep the stock at simmering point on a nearby hob, as I usually do, so I don’t think it’s because of the temperature of the stock. Hmm…

And here it is, in all its green, fresh, Springtime glory.

Pea Risotto

It was fantastic. I found it to be great comforting food for a solo meal in front of the TV, but it wouldn't be out of place at a casual lunch party, a formal dinner party, an intimite supper, anything. I think it would make delicious arancini, but don't count on having leftovers. It was stodgy enough to fuel my exam-time need for more carbs, but thanks to the peas and parsley, light and fresh enough not to weigh me down intolerably with guilt and bloating. About parsley, Nigella says, “the lack of it won’t give you any grief”, but it adds a really nice touch, counterbalancing the heaviness of the rice, and enhancing the green freshness of the peas.

I think, though, that the taste depends a lot on the type of stock you use. I used a Massel Vegetarian Chicken Style stock cube, which I like, but it would probably taste even better with homemade stock. (By the way, homemade stock is on my list of things to make, so we’ll definitely be seeing a repeat of this recipe sometime soon... and yes, I might even share it around next time!)

You know what, I think I’m eating a lot better than my fellow students stuck in study mode who buy from Union house – sandwiches, sushi, soup, focaccias, kebabs, wraps, 2-day old brownies & cookies etc. Well, the sushi’s pretty good actually, but the focaccias and wraps? ICK!

Phew! With that done, I can get back to revising the crisis of cheap labour in South-East Asian economies! But wait, I think I'll make myself a coffee first...

A little correction...

I was just going over my list of recipes, trying to decide what to cook this week, when I realised that the "Vanilla Ice-cream with pulverised Chocolate" suggestion that we had Friday night actually does count as one of my 385 recipes... so I've gone back through my posts and corrected my numbers. I've done 13 so far, including the ice-cream and chocolate thing.

By the way, I didn't cook tonight (gasp!) because I had a Japanese exam and an essay due today... throw me a frikkin bone here! Dad made some seafood pasta instead. Not from a recipe, just from his brain.

Pasta with butter and stock cube juices

I woke up yesterday to find my computer dead. It was stuck – just restarting over and over, but never opening Windows. ARGH! And my half-completed cinema studies essay, due in the next day, was trapped inside.

So I sent my brother out to try and fix it, and spent the morning studying for today’s Japanese exam. At about 12:45pm, motivated not by hunger but by apathy, I headed over to the kitchen and started making myself lunch.

12. Pasta with butter and stock cube juices
13. Dijon Mustard Dressing

The pasta, from the One & Two chapter, is a last-minute, store-cupboard adaptation of the Italian way of making pasta sauce from leftover roast meat pan juices. Nigella says to melt butter with oil, garlic, rosemary, and ½ a stock cube, before adding wine, water and more butter. So I started it off, and was about to crumble in the stock cube, when “ding!” a light went off in my head and I realised that it would be a better idea to use the leftover jus from yesterday’s roast chicken that we had sitting in the refrigerator. Because if this recipe was a store-cupboard version of pan-juice, wouldn’t using actual pan juices result in a vastly superior dish? So I left out the stock cube, and put half of the jelly-like, wobbly jus into the pan with the other ingredients, and let it melt before boiling up and swilling in some tagliatelle (also leftover from Friday dinner).


Pasta and salad

I had a salad because I decided I needed something green, for extra vitamins, you see. The dressing is from the Low Fat chapter. And yes, I do realise that it might seem pointless to have a low-fat salad dressing with pasta drenched in butter and chicken fat, but I was more interested in its taste, than its nutritional properties. (Also, we had all the ingredients for it lying around). I really liked it! The mixture of Dijon mustard, soy, orange juice and balsamic vinegar provided a nice, zingy change from the really common oil and vinegar combination.

The pasta was so, so good! The sauce doesn’t look like much, but it is incredibly flavoursome. It thinly and drippingly coats the slippery tangle of pasta, with the tastes of the wine, butter and chicken permeating through. I even got some toast to mop up the extra juice, as I couldn’t bear to waste a single drop. I don’t know how good it would be with stock cubes instead of proper pan juices, but I’ll probably give it a go sometime in the year. Or of course, someone else could just try it and post me a review!

I suppose this pasta is the Italian version of the traditional English combination of bread & dripping. Well, at least I imagine it’s traditionally English from reading Enid Blyton. I always used to think that dripping would be gross – because the only version of dripping I knew of was those big margarine-like tubs that sat in the supermarket dairy case, blaring out “DRIPPING – RENDERED ANIMAL FAT” in big block letters. Feral. Real dripping, from a proper roast chicken, on the other hand, is fantastic. You could also stir it through rice, as per my mum’s suggestion.


Jus - dripping - winey wobbly jelly - gravy

Luckily for me and my essay, however, after lunch my brother came to the rescue, and following some nifty work with a USB stick, a screwdriver and a friend’s computer, we retrieved my essay and I continued typing it up on his laptop.

I was so impressed with the pasta and dressing that I had the exact same thing for dinner, whilst studying. Boiled more pasta, washed more salad and finished off the remaining chicken jus and salad dressing.


At my desk

The utter fabuliciousness of the pasta is beyond comprehension, and far be it from me to attempt to convey it to you through words. Just make it yourself, and eat it. I almost felt bad for not sharing it with anyone, because I knew my mum would have loved it. But all this solitary studying and essay writing has me in a selfish kind of mood, you know, like Ciara... My goodies, my goodies, my goodies, not my goodies...

Sunday Night Chicken Noodle

Dinner tonight came from the One & Two chapter. Nigella opens this chapter with a quote, and correspondingly, I will open this post by quoting her quote. Oh the postmodernity!

“‘Don’t knock masturbation,’ Woody Allen once said: ‘it’s sex with someone I love.’” (Lawson, 1998, p. 134).

References to masturbation. How fantastic! I knew this book was going to be right up my alley.

The One & Two chapter is devoted to recipes for one or two to eat. Tonight, it’s Saturday night, both my father and my brother are working, and it’s just Mum and I at home. Ordinarily, I would also be working, but I took time off work to study. (And the essay’s coming along, I promise!)

At about 5:45 this afternoon, I decided to get dinner happening. We had a roast chicken carcass leftover from lunch, some coriander and noodles from Wednesday dinner , and some choi sum sitting in the fridge…

11. Sunday Night Chicken Noodle

Now, I didn’t follow the recipe EXACTLY, but I’m still counting it as one of the 385 recipes. As Nigella says in the preface “Cooking is not about just joining the dots, following one recipe slavishly and then moving on to the next” (Lawson, 1998, p. viii). With this particular recipe, destined for solo eating on a quiet night, I think it’s more the idea than the actual ingredients, weights and measurements that are important. (And, as you’ll notice, I threw caution to the wind and made this on a Saturday night, not Sunday.)

If following the recipe properly, you would marinate a sliced chicken breast in sake, mirin, soy, dried chilli and garlic, then stir-fry the strips, before adding them to cooked noodles and soupy stock. I, instead, flavoured the stock with mirin, soy and chilli (we’re out of sake). I also soaked some dried shiitake mushrooms in there to boost flavour and add more meatiness, as the leftover chicken carcass was only scantily clad with meat. In our bowls I put briefly cooked noodles, choi sum and mushrooms, ripped up the leftover chicken, and covered it in the flavour-boosted stock. If you’re interested, it was Massel chicken flavoured vegetarian stock, which is wonderful, and MSG free. I garnished it with chopped coriander, on the suggestion of the recipe. We also added Japanese seven-spice pepper and had freshly chopped chilies in soy sauce on the side. This is the required side dish for any Chinese-style noodle dish. No arguments.


For one...


And for two...

Mum and I ate our wonderfully tasty, comforting and light dinner, as you can see, in front of the TV, watching Club [V]’s Top 10 Weekend Urban countdown.

4. Mariah Carey – We Belong Together
3. Mariah Carey – It’s Like That
2. Ciara – Oh
1. Amerie – 1 Thing

These songs and clips all rock. Amerie, especially, is gorgeous.

And then there was a re-run of the Ricky Jervais interview on Parkinson. I love Ricky Jervais! It was hilarious, we pissed ourselves laughing, and I have to get my hands on his Flanimals book!

I suppose I need no further justification of my deviation from the recipe, as the noodles tasted great, and I could easily eat them again. And again. But just in case, I present you with another Nigella quote: “real cooking, I can’t help feeling, always starts from leftovers” (Lawson, 1998, p. 460). I can’t help feeling that the goddess herself would be proud of our dinner tonight.

Saturday Lunch

For our first weekend lunch from How To Eat, what better than the first lunch from Weekend Lunch?

BASIC NO-EFFORT SATURDAY LUNCH

Contrary to the title, there is a little bit of effort (or at least time) involved in putting this together. But it’s not difficult by any stretch of the imagination. And I think that once you get into the swing of roasting chickens on weekend mornings, this would be a quick no-brainer lunch to put together.

8. Basic Roast Chicken (Basics Etc.)
9. Plain Salad Dressing (Basics Etc.)
10. Summer fruits and cream or ice-cream (Weekend Lunch)

This morning, Dad & I went to Rendinas butcher to pick up the chicken. Rendinas is the most fabulous butcher in the whole of Melbourne, and just around the corner from our house!

And here she is. A 2 kilo Glenloth Genuine Guaranteed Free Range Corn Fed beauty. Nigella says to rub it with a small amount of olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and shove half a lemon into the cavity.


Raw Chicken

I'm sad to admit I got a bit happy and excited whilst this lovely creature was in the oven, browning up. I was smiling, I was singing, (David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, thank-you, not an "I Love Chicken" song or anything...), I was saying to my family, "Oh my god guys, will you look at this wonderful chicken? You gotta see this chicken!"

Whilst this was cooking, I decided to melt some of the excess chicken fat, which I had virtuously removed from the bird, and extravagantly used it to roast some potatoes. When I’d cooked duck last week, all I could think of staring at its pool of melted fat was roast potatoes. Chicken fat is probably not as lovely as duck fat, but it’s better than oil, and less feral than lard (which is what Nigella suggests – yurgh).


Rendering Chicken Fat


Roast Potatoes – potatoes, chicken fat and rosemary, cooked with the chicken for the last hour of cooking time.


Salad with plain salad dressing – sparing amounts of lemon, oil and salt, tossed vigorously.


Basic Roast Chicken in all her burnished glory. It went a bit speckly because I squeezed some lemon juice over it during the last 30 minutes of cooking, but this didn’t hamper the taste.

Once it comes out of the oven, you make a thin gravy/jus thing, for which you boil up the pan juices with some white wine and water. I can't tell you how good this is. It's something so simple and easy that you'd think you could leave it out and the lunch wouldn't be affected. I'm telling you now, you can't.

This was a very nice, homey lunch. As I couldn’t be arsed cutting up the chicken (what, and mess the bench up even more?!), I shoved it on a plate and we hacked at it with our forks and knives, much like how we’d do it if we’d bought a Red Rooster chicken.


Hacking at chicken

After eating, Mum kept picking at the remains of the chicken, whilst Dad curled up on the couch (yes, we have a couch in the kitchen), saying, “I’m so full!”

Me: Mum, you’re just going to keep eating that chicken until we take it away from you, aren’t you?
Mum: Yup.
Me: Ok, let’s clear up then. I’ll get dessert happening. It’s berries and cream.
Dad: Oh, only a little bit of cream for me… aw man… I’m so full!


Summer Berries & Cream

Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Open a packet of frozen mixed berries, and pour out in a shallow layer on a tray or plate. Do this before you start on the chicken, obviously, as they need time to thaw. Then sprinkle with sugar, liqueur (half a mini-Cointreau, in our case), and some orange zest. The orange zest I harvested from the orange skins leftover from my healthy fruit salad breakfast.

You do have to be generous with the sugar, as I know from my flambée experience at work. Whilst customers look on in horror as I dump spoon after spoon of sugar on their berries, I remind them, “Yes, you see, the natural berries themselves are quite tart, so you need a little bit of sugar to counter that”. Of course the butter and brandy we add is just pure indulgence.

Anyway, back to our dessert. I probably could have been a bit heavier with the sugar today. I used about 3 tablespoons for the 500g of berries, but we like it sour… I guess if you prefer things properly sweet, you’d just have to add more, tasting as you go. I divided the, berries between four bowls, and had a little teaspoon of cream for my dad, and more generous dollops for the rest of us. Normally we'd go for vanilla ice-cream, but it was cold today, and I think we're all a bit over vanilla ice-cream at the moment. The cream was surprisingly good. I know that berries and cream are a classic combination, but I’m just not used to having cream as a dessert, so I wasn’t convinced of how good it would be. But the tart berries, made fragrant with the orange zest and liqueur, the fatly rich cream, the one spoon – fabulous.

Dad: Can I have more cream?

And 4 minutes later, as he gets up with his bowl…

Dad: What?! There’s no more berries?!
Me: I thought you were full!
Dad: I was!

Success.

Friday Dinner

Uh… sorry for the panic attack in my previous post... I'm a bit of a drama queen. Luckily, instead of crawling under my bed, I decided to go to the gym. And after a hardcore session on the cross-trainer, I’m fine now. And full of renewed vigour to try all these recipes.

So back to the food. I woke up this morning with a text message from my friend Frances, who is studying in Italy at the moment.

Hi! I’m staying in a hostel in Verona tonight –13.50 euro – bargain! Had Tortellini and Octopus tonight, squid & polenta in Venice yesterday – so good!

How fabby! We had squid last night! And tonight, by sheer coincidence, I had planned to cook a Venetian recipe… one of the “Six Ideas for Kitchen Suppers” from the Dinner chapter. I will have to cook this for Frances when she comes back.

6. Tagliatelle with Chicken from the Venetian Ghetto


Sometime in the afternoon, I got a message from my brother…

Dan: Yo. What’s happenin 4 dinner 2nite? Is it ok if Stacy comes along?
Me: Yeah, sure.

It technically serves 4 “abundantly”, and Nigella recipes are always quite generous anyway, so I wasn’t stressed about the extra person at all. In fact, I was feeling quite happy. "Wow, that's really nice of my brother to ask before bringing people for dinner... I've trained him well..."

This recipe involves roasting a chicken, then ripping it up and tossing it through cooked tagliatelle, sultanas, pine nuts and rosemary. I chucked the chicken in the oven, went to the gym, came home, took it out of the oven and continued cooking.


Roast chicken – it smelt so good it was almost a shame to rip it up! La Ionica brand – that’s the chicken I’m pickin!

At about 6:30, Daniel comes home with Stacy… and Adeline! That’s right, TWO friends! “Hi Sarah, thanks for having us over!” Grrrrrrrr!! Yeah, thanks Daniel, that’s just great. Anyway, I just added an extra handful of pasta, pine nuts and raisins and hoped for the best.

It was fun making it too – Mum, Adeline and I hacked at the chicken with our hands whilst Daniel and Stacy danced around like maniacs to a South American house CD…


Tagliatelle - in my Living Kitchen serving platter

And it turned out to be so yummy! I would have never thought to put fresh rosemary in a pasta sauce but it worked beautifully. I absolutely love pine nuts and raisins as well.

The pine nut and raisin combo makes an appearance in several wonderful Nigella recipes, such as her Roast Chicken Salad, from Feast, and her Pappardelle with Courgettes and Sultanas, from Forever Summer. I'd also done a homespun version of this pasta last year, after seeing it on Nigella Bites but forgetting the actual recipe.

And thank goodness, there was heaps of food for all of us.

I wasn’t going to prepare a dessert, but it was so nice sitting around chatting with everyone that I hastily pulled a suggestion out of the “Reminders of and Ideas For Hasty Improvisations” from the Fast Food chapter – vanilla ice-cream with pulverized dark chocolate.

7. Ice-cream with Dark Chocolate


Ice-cream

After eating we just continued talking in the kitchen. This period of time also unfortunately included me hoovering down the rest of the pulverised chocolate. Shhh....! (It's ok though, I went to the gym today!)

Time for a re-count

Look at that little "About" section above my picture on the right. When I first typed up my list of How To Eat recipes, I came up with 340. 340 recipes in 365 days... sounds so achievable, right? Well, I was wrong! Last night I did a recount, including more of Nigella's sidebar suggestions, and numbering them properly.

For example, previously, I had organised my list like this...

6. Meringues
a) Macaroons
b) Langue de Chat

18. Basic Vanilla Ice-cream
a) The World's Best Chocolate Ice-cream

... which is fine, until you realise that Meringues, Macaroons and Langue de Chat are three separate recipes, not one! Ditto for the Basic Vanilla Ice-cream. So, after including more of the suggestions AND separating the variations into separate recipes, my list now contains 385 recipes. 385, dammit!! How the hell am I going to do this?

And don't mention the fact that my exams start on Monday and I've barely started preparing.

Excuse me while I go crawl under my bed and have an anxiety attack.

Thursday Dinner

4. Squid with Chilli and Clams
5. Ricotta with Honey and Toasted Pine Nuts

I made that clam thing tonight. Except I still couldn’t find any sodding clams – so I substituted pippies. I didn’t end up going to Victoria Market, as I got held up at home watching The Godfather on DVD (research for my essay). So I just got some pippies when we went to Box Hill for lunch today. They were superfresh – still alive and squidgily moving! And it was so ace, if you rap them on the shells, they close up, with a squidgy “woozzh” sound. Multiply that sound by 3 dozen if you shake the colander up. (Which I did, repeatedly).


Pippies in my sink

Ok, so these recipes were again from Fast Food, and unlike last night's duck, these were do-able in less than 30 minutes! But tonight, ironically, I was actually not in a rush at all, and took my time preparing the food, whilst listening to Lush’s Lovelife and flicking uninterestedly through my Business and Economy in South East Asia reader.

This is really, really easy to prepare, just chuck everything sequentially in a hot pan and leave to steam for 5 minutes.


Squid with Chilli and Pippis

There it is. We had it, as Nigella suggests, with basmati rice cooked with cardamom pods. We all love basmati rice, its fantastic aroma wafting through the house always incites shouts of "Mmm... that smells good! When's dinner?" from my family.

Unfortunately, though, the dish itself didn't taste brilliant - in fact it was pretty bland. I’m not sure exactly why, but the mixture was very watery – too watery. It was edible, but not outstanding. We doused it in tabasco and I sprinkled liberally with Maldon salt. Lots of. Perhaps it would be better cooked at a higher heat, more garlic, more chilli, and perhaps in fish stock instead of water?

Anyway, I'm glad I started the How-To-Eat project with the (fantastic) duck instead of this!

Dessert, you'll be glad to hear, was much, much better. It's ricotta cheese, cut thinly and put on a plate, doused with honey and sprinkled with toasted pine nuts. When my dad saw it he wasn't very excited, but once he had a bite he really liked it, and even suggested I make it for dinner parties. (Uh, I don't think so! I've got, like, a hundred dessert recipes to go through! No repeats yet, unless they're absolutely amazing!)


Daniel (my bro) looks happy!

I'm really glad I tried this suggestion, but I prefer it with vanilla ice-cream instead of ricotta. This was a nice change though.

And it begins... Wednesday Dinner

I was going to kick off the How-To-Eat-Nigella-A-Thon with Squid with Chilli and Clams followed by Ricotta with Honey and Toasted Pine Nuts for dessert, from the Fast Food chapter. I had been going on about it for ages to anyone and everyone who would (or wouldn't) listen. And today, loads my friends were saying to me, “Ooh…looking forward to the clams? How’s the squid?”. I even got an email from England, "was thinking about your squid with clams all the way on the other side of the world, mmm!!". And so on. The plan for today was to go to the library at 9am, study all day, take the 3:30pm train to Box Hill to meet my mum, casually pick up all the ingredients for the weekend, and be home by 5, with plenty of time to spare before the 30 minutes (according to Nigella) required to make the dinner.

Hrmph.

Well, the study bit went according to plan (no, really!), mainly because none of my friends rocked up until 11 o’clock. And after an extended lunch and an unproductive, gossipy and giggly post-lunch study-session, I got the train, and arrived at Box Hill in a timely fashion. The only problem - NO FRIKKIN CLAMS. AT ALL. We went everywhere - Coles, Safeway, Fish Pier, the two Asian fishmongers - but couldn't find any! We managed to get the more obscure stuff on my list - like figs in a jar and duck breasts - but no clams. The figs we found at Athens Greek Deli, (I seem to have been developing a taste for Greek recently...), and we got duck breasts at a poultry shop. They normally don't sell breasts separately, but the butcher cut them out of two whole ducks, sold them to us at a bargainous $20/kilo and generously chucked in the carcasses for free. I'm already salivating, dreaming of the stock they'll make...

So two whole hours after arriving at Box Hill, finally our shopping was done, and we could come home. Of course, without the clams, I went to Plan B, which meant cooking what I'd planned for Thursday night's dinner instead...

1. Duck with Orange Salsa
2. Noodles with Spring Onions, Shitake Mushrooms and Mangetouts
3. Icecream with stem ginger or figs

Like the squid & clams, tonight's menu also comes from the Fast Food chapter, which means it's (allegedly) doable in 30 minutes. No such luck, I'm afraid. I wasn't really measuring - but I listened to Daft Punk's Discovery one and a half times whilst cooking - so just over an hour in total. The lengthiness of the whole procedure is mainly due to lots of fiddly chopping. It's not difficult, but it is time consuming. 5 chillies, 6 spring onions, 1/2 a red onion, 100g mangetouts (aka snowpeas), 240g shitake mushrooms, 2 oranges, fresh coriander and mint. PHEW! Nigella says it's "serenely manageable", but after a huge day of study and stressful shopping, I wasn't feeling very serene.

Thought to self whilst chopping: "Dammit, I'm starving, Dad's back from work, the duck's already done... and I get PAID to do this crap at work!"

Anyway, the chopping paid off in the end. Dinner was delicious. It seemed like a really strange combination on paper, but on the plate, and in the mouth, it all made perfect sense. Smoky mushrooms, crisp snowpeas, dense duck meat, the sharp and refreshing salsa... Mmmm... I was also concerned about 250g of noodles for 4 people - but it ended up being the perfect amount. Duck breasts are so rich and filling that less starch is required.


Noodles


Salsa


All-together - check out the colour combination! It brightened up my (cold and overcast) day!


Dessert

Sara Lee French Vanilla Icecream with random-Greek-brand green figs. Upon opening the jar, I was really hesitant about the figs, their incredible leathery blackness, sitting in thick sugary syrup, and was rehearsing apologies for my family in my mind... "It wasn't my idea, it was all Nigella... maybe figs in England are different from the ones we have here..." But those excuses were all uneccessary. The ice-cream was really good, and the figs were surprisingly edible. Well, more than edible - desirable, tasty, chewy, sweet, yum. Dad was really impressed. He said they tasted like some Malaysian candied fruit from his childhood.


Icecream with figs (By the way, they are green figs... if you hold them up to the light...)

As Nigella says, the figs and ice-cream are "just, delightfully, right after the zingily salsa'd duck".

I'm heading down to Victoria Market tomorrow. I need to get my hands on those damn clams!

Recipes I've Already Tried

Well, I've had the book for a whole month... I couldn't resist trying a couple of recipes first. These are mainly from the Low Fat chapter. But I am going to remake them during my How To Eat year, so that I actually do cook all the recipes in the space of a year... (not that I wouldn't repeat them anyway, they're delicious!)

-Thick Miso Dressing for Beans
-Vegetable Curry in Vegetable Sauce
-Fine Pasta with Crab
-Canned Pulses (a fabulous suggestion in the Fast Food chapter, p. 182, which I did with cannellini beans and chickpeas, and replacing the bacon with anchovies)

PS, having miso (fermented bean paste) for lunch, and a vegetable curry for dinner before going to a pilates class is DANGEROUS!!!

The Parameters

This is a bit exciting, my counter (look right) has gone up significantly since last night! That's fast. I wrote a post about this little project on the Nigella.com forum, and got lots of very encouraging responses from the lovely people who post there. This is good, because now that lots of people know about this project, I won't be tempted to throw in the towel if it all gets too much.

FYI, I'm using a paperback edition of the book, published in 1999.

OK, so I made a list of all the recipes in the book, and came up with 340 recipes. There are more, if you count all the suggestions in the sidebars of text, but so far I've just done the recipes with headings, and the more instructive sidebar suggestions. For instance, the Mushroom Steak Sandwich (p. 136), has made the list. whilst Twiglets in 25g packets (p. 415), has not. But I do think that I will end up trying most of the sidebar suggestions, even the ones that haven't made it on the list... they all just sound too good. (Not the Twiglets, though).

It's divided into the following chapters:

1. Basics etc.
2. Cooking in Advance
3. One & Two
4. Fast Food
5. Weekend Lunch
6. Dinner
7. Low Fat
8. Feeding Babies and Small Children

I'm going to work pretty randomly through the book, depending on what's in season and what we feel like eating. I'd also like to cook in context as much as possible. In Fast Food, Weekend Lunch, and Dinner, Nigella suggests entire meals - main, sides, desserts etc, and I'd like to try all the suggested menus. For instance, her "Bolstering Saturday Lunch for 6" is a golden root-vegetable couscous followed by coconut crème caramel. Mmm...

Also, many of the recipes in Basics etc make appearances in other chapters, such as Bernaise sauce in a Steak Bernaise, stock in risotto, pastry in pies and so on. So it shouldn't be too difficult (fingers crossed) to get through a lot of the recipes in the one go.

Now, to tell you about us. There are four of us at home, my parents, my brother and I. We live in Melbourne, Australia. My dad is a teacher (Monday-Wednesday) and a singer (weekends), my brother and I are university students and we both do part-time jobs. My brother Daniel works at a cinema and as a waiter, and I work in a kitchen at Crown on the weekends (don't worry, I'm just a casual... not a real professional cook by any stretch of the imagination). So we all work weird hours and don't get to eat together a lot, and definitely not during the weekends! A Sunday lunch on Sunday is definitely out of the question as my father and I both work. Basically, the current plan is to do at least one full menu from Weekend Lunch, Fast Food and/or Dinner each week, and fill the rest of the week with recipes from other chapters. (Especially from the Low Fat chapter, for the sake of my waistline!)

Luckily for me, my family are very adventurous when it comes to food, and are willing to try anything! They're also super-supportive of any my culinary endeavours, which is good for me. (Thanks Dad for the KitchenAid! And the Nigella Cake Tins!) And my mum's already asking me when she can invite her friends over! Fab. And Daniel, bless him, is happy to just eat what I'm cooking, regardless of its source.

Me: Hey Dan, I wanna cook all the recipes from this Nigella book this year, what do you think?
Daniel: Yeah Ok. Isn't that what you normally do anyway?
Me: Uh yeah, kinda. Ok yeah, you just eat.
Daniel: OK.

One thing though, I don't eat pork - ICK! (This includes bacon, lardons, pancetta, anything from a pig). My familiy does though, and I have many pig-happy friends who I'd love to cook for. I haven't totally decided what to do about the recipes that have pork in them... I mean, for some of them it'd be easy to just leave out the pork, but what about a loin of pork without the pork? Pointless much? I might just make them for my family/friends and go and sulk in the corner with a low fat vegetable curry. Because even though I wouldn't want to eat the pork ones, I'd still like to know how to cook them, and see how they turn out. And I'm definitely doing the Caesar Salad and Spaghetti Carbonara - two of my brother's favourites!

But if I come across any porky recipe that I really, truly cannot handle making, I think I'll delegate them to a friend overseas with a digital camera... hmm... we'll see.

Can't wait to start!!

Ooh, a new project!

‘If you could have just one food book this year, make it How To Eat.’ Time Out

I've started a new blog to document my new culinary project - this year I'm going to make all the recipes in How To Eat. 340 recipes in 365 days. Of course, that quote from Time Out was written back in 1998... but I'm sure it will still be fine. Especially seeing as it's Nigel Slater's 'book of the decade'.

Let me explain. For my 21st birthday in April this year, I received Nigella Lawson's first book, How To Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food. I am a huge, huge fan of Nigella, and have been since 2002, when I found Forever Summer at Readings and would spend many an afternoon flicking through its gorgeous pages before I finally took the plunge and bought it. Since then, I gradually added all of her other books (bar How To Eat) to my collection, which I love to pieces and cook from over and over again.

I think the main reason why I hadn't gotten How To Eat earlier was that I wanted to enjoy the other books first, and not be totally innundated by recipes and culinary advice. I also knew that once I got my hands on this book, many hours would be devoted to reading and cooking from its gargantuan 526 pages, and any hope of concentrating on university work (hah!) would be lost. And yes, I do know that exams start in 10 days... but I'm not going to let that bother me at this stage.

This project also is indicative of my rampant desire, nay, compulsion to try everything that this world has to offer.

But... what do I hope to achieve?

Well firstly, there are no pictures of the recipes, despite the fact that it won the British Book Award for Illustrated Book of the Year in 1998. I mean, there are pictures, but they are of random kitchen objects - a tupperware container, a cabbage, a stick of rhubarb, a jar of rice etc. With no photos, descriptions of the food are left to Nigella's considerably literary prowess, much like Macbeth performed without props. I'm curious and excited to see what form these recipes will take once I have cooked them. And of course, I will be posting photos up here for your viewing pleasure.

Hopefully, by forcing myself to cook a wide range of different recipes and foods, including some that I normally wouldn't, I will improve my cooking skills and vastly increase my repertoire.

‘The domestic bible for the millennium generation.’ Spectator

So perhaps, this will completely revolutionize our eating lives and our dramatically change our approach to food, cooking, eating and entertaining.

Or of course, we could just end up eating very well for a year. And how could I say no to that?

On June the 1st it begins... brace yourselves!