My Mother’s Birthday Cake

Right now, my kitchen kinda looks like a citrus tree vomited in it. In the feel-good blue colander are my Seville oranges, there are blood oranges in the white bowl, and in that fab silver fruit bowl are some regular navel oranges and mandarins. (By the way, there is another fruit basket in the kitchen, with even more mandarins, bananas and kiwi fruit). My dad’s addicted to mandarins, you see, so we’re always well-stocked.


Citrus-Frenzy

47. A Moorish Cake

Last night, after the difficult day of looking for supplies, I started on Mum’s birthday cake. The Moorish Cake is in the Basics Etc. chapter, and is basically an orange-flavoured almond sponge with an orange syrup poured over after baking.

You have to start by mixing icing sugar and egg yolks, beating until pale and creamy. I thought that this was going to be hard work, but the sugar almost instantly dissolved in the yolks, so only a light beating was required. However, once you add ground almonds and orange zest, it gets extremely thick and is really difficult to stir. (I used blood orange zest from the three reddest oranges, and it was amazingly easy to grate off!)

Then you whisk up some egg-whites, which I did in a Kitchen-Aid, and slowly fold them into the thick, thick almond-egg mixture. It was so thick that I had to go very slowly, only folding in one large spoonful of whites at a time. It was only after about 5 spoonfuls that I could tip in the rest of the whites without fear of them collapsing under the dense weight of the almond and eggs.

I was about to grease up my mum’s old rum baba mould, when she rang…

Mum: Sarah, I see a ceramic brioche-type tin, only $14.95. Do you want it?
Me: Yes please! But where are you?
Mum: Cozhina on Whitehorse Rd… this is about 5 minutes from our house
Me: Oh right.

So she came home, 5 minutes later, tin in hand. I’ve heard horror stories about the Moorish cake getting stuck in tins, and breaking up when taken out, so I was very careful, and buttered the tin very generously, and then sprinkled it with castor sugar – just in case.


lubed-up tin, recipe and whisk in background

And… PHEW! After the stipulated hour of baking, the cake came out fine.


Relatively clean tin



As you can see, the cake is quite flat, so perhaps not as immediately impressive as I’d hoped, but a wide and flat cake will be easier to share amongst 11 people than a tall and thin one.

I left the cake to cool overnight, and did the syrup today, in the afternoon. I have since realized that you’re supposed to pour the syrup over the cake as it cools, rather than once it’s completely cold, but it’s too late to do anything about it now.


Blood-orange halves – very soft and easy to squeeze


The carnage. Yesterday I cut my finger opening a tub of creme fraiche, and whilst I was squeezing the oranges today, some juice came into contact with the cut. OWWWWW!

The syrup is just sugar, blood orange juice and a cinnamon stick, which you boil for about ten minutes until reduced and syrupy. Once it’s cool, you add lemon juice.


Impossibly Scarlet Syrup –very, very tasty… I tried some, it’s gorgeous.

Yesterday at Victoria Market, Mum stumbled across these lovely strawberries, so I used them to decorate the cake. And I brushed them with some leftover syrup to get that shiny-gleam thing happening.


The cake

I know it smelled brilliant coming out of the oven, and I hope it tastes good... but for now I gotta get back to preparing tonight's special birthday dinner!

Does nobody make their own brioche any more?

It’s my mum’s birthday tomorrow, and I’m cooking the “Mildy Wintry Dinner for 8”, with a Moorish Cake instead of the suggested pudding. So today Mum and I went all over town to try and find supplies.

Today was sooooo rough!

First, it’s cold. I mean really cold. In Melbourne, “cold” means a bitingly icy wind which will penetrate any number of layers of clothing, dry out your skin and turn your fingers blue.

Secondly, no-one in all of Melbourne seems to stock a full-sized brioche tin, let alone a non-stick one! (You need a brioche tin for the Moorish Cake, to make it look fancy). We started off in all the homeware shops in Camberwell, then in Hawthorn, then finally we went to Cuisine World in the city. They all only had these poncy little tins, and all the shop assistants looked at me strangely when I asked for a large one. By the time we left Cuisine World, still tin-less, I was almost in tears, and thinking despondently, "Does nobody make their own brioche any more?". I think now, that I will use one of those fancy ring tins that my mum has had since the seventies. Either a rose jelly mould or a rum baba tin.

Then we went to Victoria Market – none of those fishmongers have monkfish! Again, I got funny looks when I asked for it. On the plus side, though, I stumbled across blood oranges! (These will make an “impossibly scarlet syrup” for the Moorish Cake). And more importantly, I also found SEVILLE ORANGES! I had no idea we could get them here! Any Nigella fan will know why I got so excited, because Nigella is obsessed with them. I immediately snapped up 2.5 kilos.

Grocer: Er… do you know what these oranges are for?
Me: smiling and nodding extremely enthusiastically… YES!
Grocer: You know, not for eating, for making jam and stuff.
Me: still smiling nodding extremely enthusiastically… YES!
Grocer: Ok sweetie! I just didn’t want to get into trouble.
Me: No worries! still smiling, but thinking, "JUST GIVE ME THE DAMN ORANGES!"

He also told me that they’re only in season for a month… so stay tuned for a Seville orange cooking bonanza!

I did feel a bit Nigella-like as I was walking through the market, because I happened to be wearing a long black skirt and sneakers. (Of course, wearing the skirt-sneaker combo was all about getting in the cooking mood, and had nothing to do with the fact that my jeans are getting tight...)

Then we went to Canal Fishmonger on Nicholson Street in Fitzroy. Still no monkfish, so I took the fishmonger’s advice and got rock ling as a substitute. We stopped off at Laurent on the way home and I picked up some sourdough baguettes (for crostini) as well.

Phew! Ok, so here’s my lunch. As soon as I came home, I made a coffee, and then lunch for my mother and I. Nigella says that leftover upmarket mushy peas make a wonderful soup, and she was right. I added some boiled water from the kettle and half a stock cube to the peas, heated them up, and slurped it down hungrily with some of that baguette.


Soup + Baguette - yes, that IS a red kitchen aid and two Living Kitchen 3L storage jars in the background

After lunch, I walked up to the corner store, got some porcini mushrooms and some more almond meal, because when I went to Nut King yesterday, they, despite their name, only had 218 grams of the stuff. Hmph! Nut "King" my butt.

Well, now the shopping’s done… all I’ve got to do now is actually make the stuff! Sigh…

Monday Dinner

45. Anna’s Chick Pea and Pasta Soup
46. Roast Cod with Upmarket Mushy Peas

The chick-pea soup (which serves 8, but I did it in half-quantities) is from the Cooking in Advance chapter, and the cod is from Fast Food. I was initially going to have them as dinner on separate nights, but looking at the soup in the pot, I thought it wasn’t going to be nearly enough, so I combined both dishes into the one meal.


Soup with tea strainer

Nigella says to cook the soaked chickpeas with some rosemary in a popsock, muslin, or tea strainer. I have neither (clean) popsock nor muslin, so tea strainer it was. And I’ve just, joyously, discovered that we have rosemary growing wild in our garden. Also, with the chickpeas, Nigella keeps saying that they take ages to cook, (1.5 – 4 hours), but on both occasions I’ve cooked them from scratch, they took less than an hour. But keep in mind that I usually soak them for ages, forgetting when I started soaking and losing track of when I’m supposed to be using them. These ones probably soaked for like 48 hours in total.

Then you add tomatoes and pasta. You’re supposed to use fresh tomatoes and skin them yourself, but I just used tinned whole ones and mashed them with a potato masher. Yeah, I’m lazy. And it was too cold to go to the shops in the morning.


Soup

The fish and peas are easy. Just boil some garlic cloves, remove their skins, add peas and peeled cloves to the boiling water. Once they’re cooked and drained, you whiz it all up in a processor with butter and double cream. On the advice of my friend DG, I added parmesan cheese – an inspired choice.


MUSHY PEAS – SO VERY GREEN

With the cod, you dredge the fillets in flour, sear them on both sides and then bake them for about 10 minutes. The fish was very tasty, but disappointingly pallid – I should probably have had the pan hotter to get them browned.


Roast Cod & Upmarket Mushy Peas

So I put the fish in the oven as we sat down to the soup, and then pulled it out when the oven dinged.

Ok, so the soup was amazing! So perfect for a freezing night like tonight. It was so good, in fact, that I had to keep reminding everyone, “Stop eating so damn much, there’s more food coming!”.
The peas were great. I don’t know if you think it’s strange that I get so excited over mushy peas – I think they’re exotic and cool. We don’t do mushy peas in Australia, and my mum certainly never cooked traditional English stuff as I was growing up. The fish was nice too. It’s really good even just to try other fish, because lots of the time if we don’t know what to have for dinner, we’ll get salmon. And I’m sooo over salmon!


Mushhhhhing up some peas in soup... well tasty

I just realised, I had peas for lunch and dinner. I eat a lot of peas.

Oh yes, one more thing. Nigella suggests having a "Quickly-Scaled Mont Blanc" after the cod and peas... but after three days straight of being on dessert trolley duty at work, I just couldn't face anything sweet. I'll make that another time.

Lunch today...

This was my lunch today. It's the salmon fishcakes again, but these ones weren't crumbed. In the recipe Nigella says that she sometimes has them just dredged in flour rather than crumbs, so when I made them, I left a few uncrumbed to make a comparison.

Verdict: These were still delicious, but crumbs are better. Go the crunch factor.

I had this at home for lunch alone, watching (again) Arrested Development on DVD. Damn, I love that show.

Sarah Discovers How to Eat on the Tram

I went to work today, on the tram as usual. I don't have a novel to read, I'm over magazines, and I was sick of listening to the voices in my head, so I took How To Eat. Does this mark a change in me from "avid" to "obsessed"...? Can I now function without this book? Is there even a short moment in my day when I'm not contemplating recipes or planning future dining extravaganzas? Is this a healthy relationship to be having with a book? Hmm... at any rate, it's probably best not to dwell.

Anyway, I read the whole low-fat chapter in the hour that I was on the tram. Through Nigella's eloquent writing, I was really inspired to eat healthily, to look after my appearance, to incorporate the "templemode" approach to eating in my daily diet. To eat healthily on a day-to-day basis, so that I could allow myself the occasional small-portioned indulgence, judiciously chosen from the wide selection offered in How To Eat. That is, of course, until about ten minutes later, when I actually rocked up to work and realised that I was on dessert duty. This means I had to get my restaurant's desserts from the hotel's pastry kitchen, set up/restock the buffet and sort out our dessert fridge.

Well, I'm only human. You can imagine what happened. During my 8 hours on dessert duty, I found the opportunity to wolf down a few cream horns, some chocolate petit-fours, and more mini lemon tarts then I'd care to remember... and I've come to a conclusion.

August is the Low Fat month...

A Comforting TV Dinner

44. Salmon Fishcakes

These fishcakes are from the Feeding Babies and Small Children chapter. I actually made them a couple of weeks ago and stashed them, as Nigella suggests, in the freezer. Tonight, when I came back from Mount Martha, I couldn't think of what to make for dinner for my mother and I, so we had these. I made 4 for my mum and only 3 for me (having just eaten a chocolate-cream Krispy Kreme donut which my brother brought back from Sydney for me, and a piece of toast). So we've got more sitting in the freezer for future speedy-suppers.

I actually found the recipe a bit confusing, and I flour-egg-breadcrumbed them before freezing them, but I think Nigella means for you to freeze them uncrumbed, and just crumb them before frying.

Anyway, you take them, "stonily unthawed", fry them for a couple of minutes on either side, and put them in a 120c oven for 20 minutes to an hour, by which time they'll be warmed through.


Frying cakes


Peas and fishcakes

These fishcakes make a re-appearance in Nigella Bites, in the Comfort Food chapter. And eaten with peas and tomato sauce, they were perfect for an armchair-bound dinner, slumped in front of the TV watching Arrested Development on DVD.


Salmon Fishcakes on TV table

They're really, really yummy. Not too stodgy either, which I believe is due to their small size. They're crunchy and soft and full of tasty fishy goodness! I could eat them by the truckload, which is why I'm glad I only made 3 for myself! The amount you can eat is obviously limited by the amount you choose to fry and bake. My greed is only exceeded by my laziness - even if I could eat more, as if I'd be arsed frying more and then waiting around for another half hour...!

Highly recommended.

I'm back!

On our second morning in Jess' holiday house in Mount Martha (which I've discovered is only an hour away, so definitely not the country), I made breakfast.

43. Pancakes

I got up early while my friend Jess was still asleep (and by "early" I mean 10:30am) and got started on the batter. I couldn't find a set of scales, so I just guest-imated the quantities of flour and milk. As Nigella says, "a batter is a batter is a batter", so I don't think you need to be too concerned about exact quantities. I mean, you'll just end up with a slightly thinner or thicker batter. (According to the recipe, you need - 125g plain flour, 300ml milk and 1 egg). We only had self-raising flour, so I used that.

Pancakes were actually the first thing I ever learnt how to make - when I was 7, standing on a stool at our stove. Aww... memories!


Production Line

I know the first one is supposed to screw up, which gives you a chance to wolf one down whilst you cook the other ones. Actually, by following all of Nigella's directives (hot pan, small amount of batter, small amount of oil), the first pancake didn't screw up. I still wolfed it down though. With lemon juice (from a yellow plastic container) and some thick granulated sugar. Just like in the English childhood I never had!


Pancakes

Mmm... we ended up with about 12 pancakes, and we ate them with lemon and sugar. With my second pancake I had banana and greek yogurt, but lemon and sugar is definitely the superior choice.

I haven't made pancakes in ages... I'll definitely be repeating this for a weekend brekky. Yum!

Time for a holiday!

Almost! I'm going to the country for four days, for a bit of relaxation and restoration. (Well, actually it's just Mornington, but I consider pretty much anywhere outside public transport zone 1 to be "far away").

I'm staying at a girlfriend's holiday house, and we'll definitely be cooking - but I don't think she has internet there, so no blogging, unfortunately.

Be back on Thursday!

xox Sarah

Saturday Lunch + Post-work Snack: Chicken & Chick-Pea Tagine

42. Chicken & Chick Pea Tagine

I cooked this tagine, from the Cooking In Advance chapter, in advance. This was the first time I’d ever used dried chick peas – soaking, then boiling always seemed too much of a palaver to me. But Nigella has tried it with both dried and canned, and it is better with dried. So I went for the soaking option.

Nigella also says, “There seems to be a conspiracy to misinform you about chick peas: I cannot believe the number of times I’ve read that 45 minutes will do, when it takes double that time to cook them”.

Um… ok, what conspiracy?

I started them soaking on Tuesday night at 2am, drained them on Thursday at 4pm (so 38 hours), set them boiling, took a one hour nap, got up and checked the chickpeas – they were cooked! Almost overdone, even! I was lucky, but I think the fact that they were recently bought and had a long soaking time helped.

I cooked the rest of the tagine on Thursday night. You just brown some chicken thighs, then cook some onion, garlic and celery. Add batons of carrot, flour and spices. Return the chicken to the pan, cover with stock and wine, and let cook for an hour. I don't own an actual tagine, unfortunately, so a huge red Le Crueset had to do.

One reason why I chose to make this was because it gave us an excuse to have the cherried and chick-pea’d couscous again! (Minus chick-peas, though, duh).


Tagine and Couscous

My parents and I had it for lunch today. I was in a total rush, coming home at 1:00pm from the slow-as-all-hell Optus World (but I got a new phone, yay!), and having to leave at 2:00pm to get to work. Luckily it only takes 5 minutes to make couscous!

This was a huge success. Huge, huge success. I was a bit worried when I saw the tagine in the pot straight after cooking, as it seemed too heavily spiced, was so watery and looked slightly greasy. (Bringing back bad memories of the time I made Nigella’s Lamb Shank Stew from Nigella Bites, with which I was disappointed). But when we ate the tagine, two days later, it was fantastic. The chickpeas were grainy, nutty and full of chick-pea goodness, and the meat was very tender, but not disintegrating. This impressed my chicken-curry-cooking mother greatly. And my dad loved it, despite his aversion to both couscous and casseroles. He said the appeal of dish was all in the flavour. Wahoo.

And after work, I came home starving and wolfed down another bowl with some rice. (Silly parents ate all the couscous while I was away). Dee-licious and satisfying. 7 hours with no meal-break? Chef, you must be crazy!

Sarah Discovers How to Eat – Progress Report #1

Facts and figures

To get through 385 recipes in 365 days, I need to be going at a rate of 1.05 recipes a day. It’s been 30 days, and I’ve made 41 recipes. This means I'm averaging 1.37 recipes per day, so I’m ahead of schedule. The Fast Food, Weekend Lunch, and One & Two chapters have been the most profitable so far, but now that I’ve got more time, I’m drawing a lot more from Cooking in Advance.


Hits vs. Misses

I love Nigella recipes (can you tell?), as do my family, so it’s no surprise that so far we’ve found almost everything she suggests in How to Eat to be nice, or at least edible. However, here are the ones that we weren’t overly impressed with, and thus that I’m not going to make again. They weren't shit, they just weren't great.

Chicken with Spring Onion, Chilli and Greek Yoghurt
South Beach Black Bean Soup
Chambéry Trout
Squid with Chilli and Clams

Naturally though, the hits outweigh the misses. And like I said, we tend to like Nigella’s recipes on the whole, so all the “hits” I mention are real hits – ones that brighten up people’s faces, that they can’t stop eating, that they can’t stop talking about, that they keep bugging me to make again, and that make people wonder why the hell I’m not married yet.

Fish & Porcini Pie
Basic Vanilla Ice-cream
Steak and Kidney Pie
Meatballs in Tomato Sauce
Cinnamon-hot Rack of Lamb
Cherried and Chick Pea’d Couscous
Anglicised Involtini
Pea Risotto
Pasta with Butter and Stock Cube Juices
Tagliatelle with Chicken from the Venetian Ghetto
Duck with Orange Salsa
Noodles with Spring Onions, Shitake Mushrooms and Mangetouts


How I’m feeling

So far, I feel that it's going well. I'm still excited about the whole project, and most importantly, I'm still enjoying reading How To Eat! I’ve been cooking a lot more since exams finished, but I think I’m going to have to work hard if I want to stay on schedule, as I’m now back at work, and I'm planning on taking university seriously next semester. Remember how this project started off as the "Sarah Discovers How to Procrastinate" blog?

This leads me to another problem… this is soon to become the “Sarah Discovers How to Get Very Fat” blog if I’m not careful. It’s not the recipes themselves that are so bad for you, (well, some are, especially in Nigella-quantities), but my greed and general laziness. I mean, how much of that Chocolate Surprise Pudding did I eat? I used to have exams as an excuse, but not anymore. I also tend to graze at work – a few pieces of fruit or cheese here and there, and desserts too. Why, oh why do so many of our desserts have to come in individual miniature serves? They’re just too easy to eat! I obviously can’t be on a “diet” whilst doing this project, you see, and when I’m not on a regimented diet as such, I find it difficult to limit myself. I just can’t say no. And I haven’t been going to the gym much these past couple of weeks. I’ve been sleeping late, sleeping in, going online, watching DVDs and going out.

I was really tempted to make July the low fat month, drawing exclusively from the Low Fat chapter, but have been advised to save this for later on, especially with dozens of cakes, creamy sauces, pies, crumble, jellies, puddings, stews and biscuits all still to come.

But I don’t think this necessarily has to become a problem. I’ve just got to go to the gym more (I’m so motivated, I even bought sports bras), and make a rule about food: If it’s fattening, and it’s not from How To Eat, I’m not eating it.


Anyway, enough of my problems, just thought I'd share those with you. I don't wanna do a Bree Vandercamp / Stepford Wife and try to deceive you into thinking it's all effortless (how 1970s would that be!). There is effort, but right now I'm feeling confident that I will reach my goal, and I'm enjoying the process. Hope you're all enjoying the blog!

xox Sarah

Clementine Cake Verdict

Cake

It's fantastic. It's very fragrant, the smell of the clementines fills the kitchen and creates a really homey atmosphere. It was actually difficult not to dig into it the first day. Nigella says it improves with sitting around.


Cake inside - I love how brightly yellow the centre is.

On Wednesday night, my parents went out for dinner with Uncle Francis and Aunty Wendy, who are really cool (and who, incidentally, gave me How To Eat for my birthday this year), and they came back around 10 o'clock for coffee and cake. I had tea with my slice.

So the cake! Very yummy. It's so super-moist, as Nigella says, it's like one of those cakes that has been drenched in syrup, even though there is no syrup with this cake. And the flavour of the clementines is really pronounced, but not overpowering. My mum loves flourless orange cakes, so she was ecstatic with this. Mum and I had one and a half slices each. Uncle Francis had two slices. I'm pretty sure Dad and Aunty Wendy liked it.

In all honesty, it doesn't taste markedly different from the normal flourless orange cakes you can get at more upmarket bakeries here, but it is so easy to make that it seems pointless to buy one. And if you buy it, you don't get that feeling of self-satisfaction and accomplishment that comes with baking a cake. I was so excited with it I even brought a slice to my computer to show to friends overseas via webcam... unfortunately I couldn't actually give them any cake, so I just had to eat it for them whilst they watched. Shame.


How to Eat Cake

A Comforting Lunch for 4

It’s Melbourne, it’s June, it’s freezing. A really dense fog descended on the eastern suburbs last night as we were coming home on the freeway. In fact, it was so foggy we could barely see 3 metres in front of us. Scary stuff. Thankfully the fog cleared by morning, but it was still well cold… the perfect weather for a comforting lunch.

41. Fish and Porcini Pie

To make this pie, you start by poaching some fish in milk, fish stock and porcini mushroom soaking liquid.


Poaching fish – the recipe asks for cod, salmon, and smoked haddock, but Nigella says, “You can change the fish as you want”. I went with salmon, flake, smoked cod, because cod was the only smoked fish I could find, and I thought the colours were so pretty together.


Fish in dish

Then you use the poaching liquid and mushrooms to make a white sauce. You put the fish, then the sauce, in a dish, top it with mashed potato and bake it.


Ready for oven

During baking time, the filling got a bit excited and erupted over the sides and onto the floor of the oven. Whoops.


Dirty oven


Peas and Pie


One plate

This was well tasty! It was so good, definitely a keeper. You'd think it'd be a bit rich, what with all the butter and full-fat milk and potatoes, but it was just perfect. Smooth, lush, and very flavoursome. (By the way, I used milk and butter in the potatoes instead of double cream). My dad loved it, and he usually doesn't go for this type of stodgy English nursery food.

Dad: Make this again. Are you going to make this again? You have to make this again. I don't care if you don't put it up on the blog. You going to make this tomorrow?

You know how Nigella recipes are usually extremely generous in portion? When we first looked at my pie we didn't think we could finish it, but it was so delicious and easy to eat. We could have easily finished the lot, but restrained ourselves for the sake of our collective waistline. It was so yum my brother even got some leftover challah from the kitchen bench to come and mop up the juicy sauces.

But dessert, oh my god the dessert! As per Nigella's suggestion, it was ice-cream, cherries (Morello from a jar), flaked almonds (Lucky from a packet) and chocolate sauce.

I made the ice-cream yesterday, and did the chocolate sauce after we ate my pie. The chocolate sauce recipe comes from Nigella’s Poires Belle Hélène, so doesn’t count as a separate recipe. It’s very easy, you melt 2 blocks of dark chocolate with sugar and coffee and stir through some double cream in the end.

Daniel: Eats one spoon of ice-cream without sauce… This is orgasmic! Orgasmic! Orgasmic!

Dad: Oh my god this ice-cream is so smooth! You don't need the chocolate sauce with this, this ice-cream is fantastic by itself!

The sauce was lovely, but extremely rich! We’ve got heaps left over… what am I going to do with it?

Dad: Don’t worry, I’ll eat the chocolate sauce.
Me: But I thought you said you just wanna eat my ice-cream by itself, that adding stuff would interfere with the taste…?
Dad: Yes yes, but I’ll put the chocolate sauce on the cheap ice-cream we've already got. That ice-cream NEEDS chocolate sauce!

Ice-cream


Choc sauce and cherries - the ice-cream is in that jug on the right


Best ice-cream ever! The most important thing, I think, is just to use the best ingredients - a proper vanilla pod, fresh eggs, good cream. I love its golden richness, and the little vanilla seed flecks all the way through. It's sublime. I'm a total ice-cream junkie, and this was just heaven. And I definitely recommend adding the extra double cream when you make it. Bliss!

Go Nigella!

See, this is one of the reasons I'm glad I started this project - I probably wouldn't have even tried making the pie otherwise (like I said, we don't go for this type of food much as a family), and that would have been a real shame. Because it was a joy to eat.

A little light Tuesday afternoon cookery

39. Clementine Cake (Basics, etc.)

Clementines, I’m told, appear in England only at Christmas, which is one reason why this cake is a fixed item in Nigella’s Christmas repertoire. Being both seasonal, and English, I wasn’t sure if we could get them here at all. I mean, these English cookbooks I love reading are full of strange words like “clementine”, “damson”, “greengage”, “gooseberry”, “elderflower”... exotic items that I’ve heard of, but never seen in the flesh. (Actually, though, when I went to England last year on holiday, I had the pleasure of trying fresh gooseberries, and the misfortune of trying elderflower cordial. Yurgh.) Back here in Melbourne, most of these foods remain firmly stuck in the literary realm, not the culinary one. However, the other day at Safeway, what did I see but a huge pile of CLEMENTINE MANDARINS! Score! It’s Clementine Cake time!


Clementines

Nigella says to boil the fruit for 2 hours, purée them and mix them with eggs, sugar and almond meal. But, following a tip I picked up on the Nigella.com forum, I just microwaved the fruit in water for about 8 minutes in total, turning them over every couple of minutes. It was so much easier and faster!

Such a shame - you're supposed to bake this in a 21cm springform tin, and I wanted to use one of the Living Kitchen springform tins that I got for my birthday, but there isn't a 21cm one!! There's 20cm, 23cm and 25cm. Dang. So I pulled out an old and extremely battered 21cm springform from the bottom of my drawer, and lined it extremely carefully with Glad Bake. (Such fabulous stuff, I couldn't bake without it!)


Batter

I'd also heard horror stories on Nigella.com about the cake being too moist, needing longer cooking and leaking out everywhere, but luckily nothing of the sort happened. This was one of the reasons why I was so anal about using the right size tins. But also, I think you've just got to be careful and measure out the correct weight of clementines, as opposed to going by number of clementines.


Cake cooling in tin - It smells heavenly…

Whilst the cake was baking I started on some ice-cream.

40. Basic Vanilla Ice-cream (Basics etc.)

Nigella’s vanilla ice-cream is just her custard, with a lot more sugar (apparently freezing things kills the flavour). And you know what, after all my worrying about making custard, there were no dramas with it. I used a different pan, a very large, wide one with a thick base – which I think made all the difference. After about 10 minutes cooking, it didn’t get super-thick like powdered custard gets, but it had thickened, and did smell custardy, so I stopped cooking at that point, and let it cool it in the sink.


Custard – cooling in the sink


Cream in custard – Nigella suggests adding 300ml double cream, if you want it creamier. I wasn’t too fussed about how creamy it was, but I added the cream so that I’d end up with more ice-cream! Double-bonus!


Yummmm

It was so delicious… after putting the ice-cream into the freezer, I skipped yoga and spent the next half hour licking out every bowl, pan, spoon and utensil that had come into contact with the lovely, lovely custard….

I don’t have a verdict yet for the cake, as we haven’t eaten it yet. Apparently it gets better if you leave it. But we will eat it tonight – my parents are going out for dinner with their friends, and will come home for cake…

Carpe Custard - Seize the Custard

My inability to make custard (see my semi-failed attempt at banana custard) is going to be a problem. You see, there are at least 12 recipes for custard in How to Eat, including Real, Quick Foolproof, Sauternes, Rhubarb, Marsala Muscovado… which all sound divine, if it weren’t for my complete custard-making-ineptitude. And these don’t even begin to include all the pudding recipes for which a custard would be the perfect accompaniment, quickly and effortlessly whipped-up by a beaming domestic goddess.

My previous experiences with custard have been either scrambled eggs, or lumpy and thin soup. My custards, which I stir constantly and obsessively, on the lowest of heats, go from “runny liquid” to “almost curdle”, totally bypassing the delectable “voluptuous gloop” stage of proper custard.

Making custard should be a simple thing! I can bake cakes, I can fry steaks, I can make meringue, I can make risotto, I can even make pastry! PASTRY, dammit! I’m a professional, I get paid to prepare food. So why can’t I make bloody custard? I’ve been told that it’s due to various factors – too many egg-yolks make for an unstable mixture, if the heat is too hot it will curdle, thin liquid (e.g. milk instead of cream) means the mixture won’t thicken as quickly, flour or cocoa in the mixture stabilises it (which explains my unprecedented successes with chocolate custards…), and so on.

I have to face my fears and jump over this hurdle ASAP, for the sake of this project. You see, it’s not only the custard recipes that are at stake, but all the recipes with custard as an accompaniment, and all of the menus which have a custard component. For example, I have my eye on the Fish and Porcini Pie from Weekend Lunch. Looks simple enough, and the ingredients aren’t too exotic, even by Australian standards. The only problem is that the suggested dessert is ice-cream (recipe provided in Basics etc. chapter), cherries, flaked almonds and chocolate sauce. But what is home-made ice-cream? It’s nothing more than the frozen form of the dreaded custard. So this whole fish pie idea is screwed if I can’t get a custard right.

I’ve seen Delia make custard on her How to Cook programme. Didn’t look too difficult, and if it’s been made on How to Cook, it’s definitely within my reach. Don’t fret, I’m not a Delia fan, and despite this custard situation, I’m not a complete moron, so I don’t need her How to Cook books to teach me how to cook. To turn to Delia’s How to Cook for help at this stage would be an admission of failure – my failure, as a cook, as a provider, as a woman, as a human being. But this still doesn’t solve the custard problem…

Oh fuck it. I have 500ml single cream sitting in the fridge, and I don’t want it to go to waste. Carpe diem. Or carpe custard. I’m making the ice-cream this week!

Deep breaths, deep breaths… Watch this space…

Monday Night Dinner - Pasta with Butter and Stock Cube Juices (reprise)

Did you see the little gravy boat of sauce from lunch? I heated it through in a pan with butter and rosemary (from our garden, no less), to form the sauce for the pasta you see below. Delish.


Pasta - mmmm...

The last time I made this I was in essay-writing hell, and was too stressed and selfish to make anything more than a single serving. Today, however, I was feeling warm and generous and maternal - so quadrupled the quantities (from the One and Two chapter if you're interested, and you should be interested) and we all ate it. And by sheer coincidence, my dad had bought a baguette from Laurent this afternoon, so we ate it with the pasta. SCORE!

Monday Lunch

38. Basic Roast Chicken

Those of you with sharper memories will remember that I made this same, wonderful roast chicken for lunch not too long ago. So why, I hear you ask, am I making it again and counting it as yet another recipe in my list? Well, firstly, this time I made it slightly differently, with all the little extras that Nigella suggests (see below). But the main reason I'm counting it again is because it appears twice in the book (Basics etc. and Weekend Lunch), and I didn't realise this when I was typing up my recipe list. So, it accidentally appeared twice in my list of 385 recipes.

By the way, I have a numbered list, 10 pages long, in size 12 Times New Roman font, which I typed up in Microsoft Word, and printed out in blue ink because I ran out of black. I'm crossing off recipes as I go. So now you know.


Basic Roast Chicken with roast garlic and shallots, and jus

This chicken is easy, and fills the house with the aroma of a Good Home. You shove half a lemon up the chicken, anoint it with a teensy bit of extra virgin olive oil, and bake it at 200C for 20 mins per 500g plus 30 minutes. I'm not sure why though, but I never need the extra 30 minutes - maybe it's because I have a stronger, fan forced oven??

Things that are different from last time:
- I added whole unpeeled garlic cloves and shallots to the pan (Sooooo good, we ate ALL the garlic and shallots! Normally that stuff just gets left on the plate...)
- I sprinkled chopped flat-leaf parsley and toasted pinenuts "to make this basic recipe feel a little less basic" (This is a fabulous touch, and there was a bit of a scramble between us to get to the last nut!)

But the most exciting thing about making this chicken is the jus/gravy/sauce, that is made by cooking up the pan juices with some water and wine, which means... Pasta with butter and stock-cube juices for dinner tonight! Yeah baby, yeah!

Friday Dinner

A couple of my friends had their last exams yesterday, so we decided to celebrate by going out dancing. They came over for dinner first, the menu for which came from the Weekend Lunch chapter.

THE SLIGHTLY MORE THAN BASIC SATURDAY LUNCH FOR 6-8

36. Lemon Chicken
37. Sticky Chocolate Pudding

The chicken is "a not too anglo version of the Greek kotopoulo lemonato", which means chicken pieces roasted in the oven with wine, water and spices. According to Nigella's recipe, you have to fry the chicken first, to brown it.

WARNING: It splatters a lot. Don't do this in a brand new sleeveless top.

Once it's cooked, you strain the juices off, and beat them with eggs and lemon juice in a double boiler to make avgolemono, a lemon sauce.


Me making Avgolemono – check out my new shoes!


Me with chicken - I don't mean to turn this into a "oh-my-god-look-at-me-I'm-so-fabulous" blog, but usually when I cook, I'm in no fit state to be photographed. Which means I'm in trackies, with greasy hair and no makeup. And anyway, I love this platter!


Lemon Chicken - Living Kitchen serving platter and 1L Living Kitchen measuring jug for extra sauce

This was nice. The chicken was a bit tough because it was cut very small, but the sauce was well tasty. I served it with basmati rice (done in the rice cooker). Nigella suggests having salad or peas as well, but it was too frikking cold for salad, and I was too lazy to cook peas. The sauce-and-rice combo is fabulous.

I started making the pudding after we finished eating. Nigella suggests pecorino and pears for dessert if it's summer, or this pudding in "more customary English warmth". Well, it's Melbourne winter now, which means it's bloody freezing. So pudding it is. I haven't made a Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding (which is what we call this in Australia) since Year 9 camp, when my best friend Frances and I would make it every time it was our turn to cook. Easy peasy. You mix up the batter, pour it into a buttered dish, sprinkle over cocoa and sugar, then pour some recently boiled water over. During baking time, this sinks to the bottom, forming a gooey sauce beneath the sponge layer.

Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding is a really common Australian sweet (like lamingtons, lemon delicious, golden syrup dumplings, Anzac biscuits etc), so it surprised me that English food writers seem to make such a big deal of it. I remember seeing Nigella make this very pudding on Nigel Slater's Real Food program, and Nigella was about to pour the water over it, and explaining the sauce-forming process to Nigel, as if it was some huge miracle, and he said, "I don't believe you". And I was thinking, "Oh my god, get over it, just make the pudding, make the pudding, make the pudding, make the pudding..."


Sticky Chocolate Pudding - I cooked it for 15 minutes longer than the recipe stipulates, because when I took it out, the liquid-to-sponge ratio was too high for my liking.


1 serving - with fridge cold cream.


Molten - I love how gooey and soft it is.

The pudding was so intense and rich, too rich. That one little bowl I had was way too much. I nearly felt ill by the end of it. It's nice, but we just couldn't handle so much chocolate at once. "Geared towards 6" my buttocks. 6 of us ate it, by the way, with lots leftover. But pepped up on sugar and chocolate, we were ready to party...

(But despite my complaining about how rich this pudding was, I actually managed a second smaller bowl after I came home from the club. Shhhh....)

School-Dinner Lunch for 6-8

This was our first time having people over for food since I started the How To Eat project. This menu, from the Weekend Lunch chapter, looks to be typically English, so I invited Uncle Mike and Aunty Helen - Mike is my mum's ex-boss from BHP, a Cambridge man, very proper and very, very English.

34. Steak and Kidney Pie
35. Banana Custard

The filling is basically a stew of vegetables, mushrooms, steak, kidneys and stout. Of kidneys, Nigella says, "unless you've got a good butcher [kidneys] can be bitter and somehow sawdusty and rubbery at the same time". I, thankfully, do have a good butcher, so got my steak and some fab lamb kidneys from Rendinas (and wahoo, it was only $10 for all of it!) Lamb kidneys were only 50 cents each, and the steak was about $17 a kilo. I got field mushrooms from the local greengrocer, and my Guinness from the bottle-o up the street. Support local business!

I cooked the filling on Tuesday in a red Le Crueset pot (I think it's a Dutch Oven..?), and let it sit on the stove, off the heat, until this morning. It's winter now, it didn't need to go in the fridge. On Wednesday, I went shopping, and got a ceramic Maxwell & Williams pie dish from The Ware House on Bridge Road (only $14.95), and put it all together this morning. The recipe asks for a 20cm pie dish, but I couldn't find any. "This looks pie-sized, doesn't it?", said the shop-assistant, as he pointed to a 26cm one. It indeed did look pie-sized, so I took it.

Unfortunately, Rendinas didn't have any suet, (apparently no-one uses it these days...) so we had to go to another butcher, who scraped up the 100g I needed. I've never used proper suet (aka solid beef fat) before, but it was easy to use. You grate it up, or chop it into teensy-weensy pieces, and stir it into the flour with some water. Easy peasy. It looks rough and ramshackle, but I think that's the look we're going for here. It's extremely easy to work with.

The filling made the perfect amount to go in the pie dish. Fab!

Pie - I didn't put an "upended egg cup" or pie funnel in, but it was fine. The filling's super-sturdy anyway, so there's little chance of it collapsing. There was also some pastry leftover, so I got all creative with my Living Kitchen cookie cutters and wrote "EAT THIS PIE" on top, with a love heart too.


Me with Pie - Domestic Goddess moment anyone?


Lunch


My plate


Uncle Mike: "I like this pie because there are lots of kidneys in it! The first mouthful I had was an enormous chunk of kidney."


Too much mash? (We barely made a dent in it - I'm going to make Salmon Fishcakes with the rest.)


Nearly there


Done! This was the perfect amount for the 6 of us, but we were all very full at the end. I think it would have been fine for 8 people too.

This pie is so delicious! The filling cooking in the oven on Tuesday night filled the house with the most gorgeous aroma, and the pastry is amazing. Even Aunty Helen said she loved the pastry, and she's quite exacting when it comes to food standards. The pastry is light, flaky, crispy and filling, all at the same time. Nigella says you don't necessarily need mashed potatoes because of the pastry, and she was right - the pastry is very substantial. (I, of course, panicked at the idea of there not being enough food, so did mash as well). The peas are just ordinary frozen McCain's peas, boiled, with nothing added. Love 'em.


Banana Custard

You know what? I can't make custard. It's one of the kitchen skills which I have yet to acquire, let alone master. I either end up with scrambled eggs, or a thin, pallid soup. Today, I ended up with a cross between the two! Perhaps the heat was too high. It still tasted good, but was a bit lumpy, and didn't develop a skin. Argh, I dunno. The only custard I have been able to make properly is the chocolate custard, which is used in the Chocolate Cherry Trifle (Feast) and the Gooey Chocolate Stack (How to be a Domestic Goddess). But that one has flour in it to stablilise. Well, there are, like, a dozen custard recipes in How To Eat... hopefully I'll get the hang of it before too long!