The Final Lunch for this blog!

Hello everyone. Well, the time has finally come. Today is the last day of my project!

THE SUNDAY LUNCH

Now, I'm sure that many people out there have negative memories associated with the ritual of "The Sunday Lunch". I've read Toast, I've seen Eat Drink Man Woman, and I've read lots of articles in culinary and trashy magazines on this subject. However, I think the negative connotations surrounding the Sunday Lunch are more about familial pressures and obligations, rather than the food itself. (Although having read Nigel Slater's wonderful descriptions of not-so-wonderful food in Toast, this is not always the case). And thankfully, I was not brought up with the idea that it was a Good Thing to have the family sitting around the table at a regular time every week, regardless of inclination or hunger. I admit that I am extremely lucky in that, more often than not, eating day-to-day meals together with my family was a natural, enjoyable, and desirable experience. It was especially great that we could have the entire family (Dad, Mum, Daniel and myself) home today to eat this special lunch.

393. The Roast Beef
394. The Gravy
395. The Yorkshire Pudding

I served it with roast potatoes (they don't count as a recipe, as I've made them heaps of times before), and baby beans (from a freezer packet).

In the book, Nigella writes out a Sunday Lunch timetable - for a meal like this, with so many elements that require precision timing, you really have to plan everything out like a "military operation". However, by this stage in the project, I've made over 350 recipes, dozens of dinner parties and lots of lunches. It may be immodest of me to say, but I was confident that I could just wing it, and everything would be fine.

This is our beef, check it out. It's an aged piece of rib-eye, about 2.45 kg. Mum bought it at Rendinas (where else!), and the butcher assured her it was a lovely, lovely piece of meat.

I cooked it at 210C for 90 minutes in total. Whilst it was in the oven, I boiled the potatoes, and made our dessert. I've actually already made all the desserts in How to Eat, so I decided to revisit one of my favourites, the rhubarb meringue pie. As I've made it before, I won't tell you how it was made. (Click on the above link if you're interested, as you should be - it's an amazing pie). One thing I do want to show you though, is Nigella's amazing pastry. Her freezer-processor method is a very valuable tip that I've learnt from this book, which almost always results in a fabulously easy to roll pastry.

This the the excess pastry - just look how elastic and pliable it is!

I cooked the rhubarb meringue pie in our microwave convection oven in the pantry, to leave the big oven free for all the hardcore meat and potatoes cooking.

Next was the gravy. You start off by cooking a thinly sliced onion until soft, then adding sugar and Marsala, and letting it cook slowly until caramelized and very, very soft. (Note: I'd recommend using a large onion, and doubling, or perhaps even tripling quantities. Gravy is good.) Then you add some flour, and then beef stock, stirring it well, and letting it simmer for about 20 minutes. At this point, you can push it through a sieve or put it in a processor, and then leave it on the stove until it's time to eat.

Once the beef was cooked, I took it out of the oven, and let it rest, covered in foil, on Mum's big carving board. Then, I put the potatoes in the oven, made the yorkshire pudding (same method as the sweet yorkshire pudding, but with added salt and pepper), and added it to the oven for the last 20 minutes of cooking time. Whilst they were cooking, I boiled my beans and added the pan juices to the gravy.

And then it was time to eat!!!

Check out that lunch! I'd describe all the dishes, but I think the photos speak for themselves. Mmm... everything was delicious. Nigella's gravy recipe is fantastic, as is her roast potato one.

We sat around the table talking, laughing and eating. We only got through about half of that food, but considering that I'm in study mode and not going to be cooking for a while, this is a good thing.

While Mum, Dad and Daniel were cleaning up the kitchen, I finished off the pie.

Here's what it looks like baked. I really, really wanted to decorate it with some words, so as it was cooling, I melted a bar of dark chocolate, scraped it into a zip-lock glad bag, snipped off the corner and piped out some free-form words onto parchment paper (not very neatly, I'm afraid). I let them set in the fridge, and then arranged them haphazardly on top of the cooled pie to form a kinda Louis Vuitton graffiti pie. (Yes, I'm sticking to the "Louis Vuitton graffiti" description, and not, for instance, "a hyperactive 2-year old's art project").

Again, I don't really need to describe the pie. Y'all know I love pie, and the rhubarb meringue pie is my favourite pie out of the whole book. I'm sure you can deduce that I loved eating it. I should just add that rhubarb and dark chocolate is a winning combination.

But even more exciting than pie (and it's not often you'll hear me saying that), I finally opened that big brown mysterious envelope I received last month! And guess what it was! A signed photo of Nigella!!!!!!!!! Omg omg omg Yay yay yay!!!!! It is totally like the most awesomest thing ever!!

And just in case you were wondering what I wrote on top of the pie...


















Thank-you everyone!

Happy Birthday Me!

So like I said, on Saturday night I went out drinking to celebrate my 22nd birthday. However, Sunday was my real birthday, and this was the night of my enormous Nigella-based feast. (How else would you expect me to celebrate?). I went a bit nuts with the food, because I forgot how many people I invited, and kinda just kept telling my friends to “come, come and eat, it’ll be so fun!”. I was a bit paranoid that I wouldn't have enough food, so kept adding more.

The whole menu was…

2 roast chickens, with a mushroom and breadcrumb stuffing
Onion Sauce
Roast Potatoes
Beef sausages
A large rump steak (what the hell, it was already marinated and in the freezer, so why not)
Proper English Trifle
Hazelnut Cake
Chocolate Raspberry Pudding Cake

So in addition to the trifle and hazelnut cake, which I’d made in advance, I added the following 3 recipes to my list.

349. English roast chicken with all the trimmings – plus some
350. Onion sauce
351. Chocolate raspberry pudding cake

The first thing I made in the afternoon, was the stuffing for the chickens. Nigella’s recipe include bacon, but a few of my mates don’t eat pork, so I left it out. What you do for the stuffing is cook onion (and bacon, if you’re including it) in oil, then set it aside, and cook finely chopped mushrooms in the same pan. Once everything’s cooked down and fragrant, you mix the onions and the mushrooms with breadcrumbs, parsley and thyme.


stuffing

2 of my mates, An and Jess, were spending the day with me, so whilst I was making the stuffing, I delegated the task of peeling 2 kilos of potatoes to them. I then parboiled them in readiness for roasting later that night.

Next thing to do was the chocolate raspberry pudding cake. This can’t be made in advance because it needs to be served warm. And although microwaving the finished cake back to warmth it is an option, it’s easy enough to be made on the night of your dinner itself. To start, melt butter, raspberry liqueur, sugar, dark chocolate, and coffee in a pan until smooth and combined. Next, beat this liquid into sifted flour and cocoa, followed by two eggs. A warning: this mixture is extremely tasty, so don’t be too pedantic about scraping it into your cake tin.


choc raspberry pudding cake mixture

Speaking of which, you pour half the mixture into a lined and greased springform cake tin, cover with raspberries (I used cheaper frozen berries to no detrimental effect), and then the rest of the cake mixture.


choc raspberry pudding cake raw, in tin

Then it needs to be baked for 45 minutes. Now, another word of warning – the mixture is extremely runny, and Nigella advises not to panic or to add more flour. But that’s not the problem. The problem, for me, using my Nigella Lawson Living Kitchen 23cm springform cake tin, was that the bugger leaked on me!! Cake mix was dripping through the sides of the tin and onto the floor of my oven. Luckily, crisis was averted when I shoved a baking tray directly underneath to catch all the drips. And after about 10 minutes in the oven, the cake had firmed up enough to stop dripping, so not too much mixture was lost. Phew!

I should add here, that all the time I was cooking, it was my parents who were cleaning up the house and making it presentable for company. Thank-you!

As soon as the cake was done, I shoved the stuffed chickens into the oven.


raw chickens

The trifle needs some finishing touches a couple of hours before you eat it. You cover it with whipped cream, and a caramel made by boiling orange juice with sugar, and some flaked almonds.

And I started on the onion sauce. It’s a béchamel sauce, with the water used to boil some onions added, as well as the chopped boiled onions themselves. It was at about this point that my friends started arriving.

Here’s Bonnie helping out with the sauce.


Bonnie - "I'm cooking"


roasted chickens

Aren’t they gorgeous? I shoved the potatoes in the oven as soon as the chickens came out. I think roast chickens are such a great food for entertaining - they're easy, delicious, and impressive. Every one of my guests commented on the warm and inviting smell of roast chickens as they entered my house.

And while the potatoes were in the oven, I grilled a steak and some sausages.


why not add a steak?

As might have been expected, my dinner was running a bit late - people started arriving at 7, but we only ate at about 8:30. Sorry guys! At least they had Big Brother to keep them entertained.

I delegated the task of chopping the chickens to my mum - she's an expert.


The key to remaining goddess-like


chicken inside


Chicken chopped up Hainanese style

My mum very cleverly chopped up the chickens into small pieces so we all could get some. Only my Malaysian mates realised this though.

Georgina: Hey, it looks like Hainan chicken rice!
Mark: Yeah! Your mum rocks, she chopped the chickens Chinese-style! Where's the rice and the soup and the cucumber?

Here's the spread.


the spread


Onion sauce - it looks like a vast bowl, but trust me, it gets eaten!

Toni: Can I get the recipe for this sauce?


Sausages


Stuffing


Roast potatoes - not quite as brown as I would have liked, because I pulled them out of the oven slightly early. But we were hungry, dammit!


It's a buffet!

I can't believe it, almost ALL the food got eaten. This hardly ever happens with Nigella-portions. I think we had, like, 3 pieces of chicken, 2 potatoes and half a sausage left at the end of this meat-and-carb orgy. I see now that I forgot to add any vegetables, but no-one seemed to mind. I was pretty stuffed at the end of the meal though.

And here are the desserts. I really loved how they all looked together, similar in shape, yet different in colour, taste, and presentation. In fact, it kinda reminded me of my days working at that buffet restaurant, but without the creepy co-workers.


3 desserts


finished whole choc raspberry pudding cake


hazelnut cake, finished


finished proper English trifle


Inside of choc raspberry pudding cake

The raspberries look fab, glinting red inside the dark cake. But I'd suggest using more raspberries than you think you need - they seemed to become a bit sparser after baking.

This is my dessert plate below, but don't worry, even I wasn't able to finish the whole thing.


one big plate

All the desserts were delicious! We cut the cakes into teensy-weensy pieces so we could all share them and try some of everything. The hazelnut cake was gorgeous, nutty and fragrant, and my dad particularly loved it. He had 3 pieces. The chocolate cake was also beautiful - deep and rich and chocolatey. The trifle went down particularly well, especially amongst my Jewish, challah-loving friends, who were really excited at the prospect of a challah-based dessert. It wasn't too alcoholic, too rich, or too sweet. It was just right, a big bowl of cream-and-berry-swathed deliciousness.


Friends

What a lovely way to celebrate my birthday!

What a magnificent rump

Tagliata, or versions thereof, were my dinner party staple, B.P. (that is, Before Project). It’s so simple and delicious, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be everybody’s dinner party staple. A huge piece of steak is marinated overnight, then quickly grilled, allowed to rest and then sliced into delicious rags of meat. I used to make it with the Thai-influenced flavourings of Jamie Oliver’s carpaccio recipe (Return of the Naked Chef), and serve the meat on a bed of mixed lettuce.

316. Tagliata (Dinner)

This recipe is hidden away as a suggestion in the MIDSUMMER DINNER FOR 8. Nigella’s recipes involves marinating a large rump steak in olive oil, lemon zest, peppercorns and thyme. I got my mum to buy steaks for me, and she came home with these two magnificent (and massive) steaks...


magnificent rump

I thought they might be a bit much for just the two of us, so I marinated them both and stashed one in the freezer for future consumption.


one for the freezer

I marinated them late on Thursday night, and grilled them for lunch on Friday.


grilled steak

While the meat was resting, I made a thin sauce by deglazing the pan with marsala and water. Then I sliced the meat, arranged it on a plate, and drizzled it with the sauce.


sliced tagliata

I served them with oven-baked fries (not a contradiction, I'm sure), and some mixed lettuce.


Lunch

Ordinarily, at this point I'd provide my opinion of the dish, but I think in this instance, words are unnecessary. Just look at the total gorgeousness of our lunch!


Beautiful!

Friday Lunch

Nigella must really love garlic-roasted potatoes. They appear at least 3 times in this book, off the top of my head, and I'm sure there are more references to them scattered throughout. They also reappear in Feast, and probably in many of her New York Times and Delicious Magazine columns. I've made one of the How-to-Eat-versions already - for a dinner party in which the garlic potatoes accompany a butterflied, marinated leg of lamb.

308. Fillet of Beef with Red Wine, Anchovies, Garlic and Thyme (Dinner)
309. Garlic roast potatoes (Feeding Babies and Small Children)

These dishes aren't intended to be paired together, but following on from that dinner party, I thought meat and roast potatoes would make a good combination. (Indeed, garlic roast potatoes with anything makes a good combination). I started off by making the potatoes - chucking potato chunks and whole unpeeled garlic cloves into a baking dish, covering with oil and then shunting in a 200C oven for 45 minutes. While they were cooking, I did the beef.

The fillet of beef sounds very fancy on the page, but is more homely and simple on the plate. (And no less lovely for that). What you do is cook some aromatics - shallots, garlic, anchovies and thyme - in olive oil and butter, and then remove them from the pan. In the fragrant oil you sear a fillet of beef, and pour brandy and red wine over, letting it bubble up. Then you return the aromatic garlic-thyme mush to the pan, cover it, and let the beef cook on either side for about 10 minutes. In this way the beef is "braising, frying and steaming all at the same time; as it cooks it breathes in flavour".

Once the beef's done and it's resting, you deglaze the pan with a bit of water and butter, before adding the beef juices that have seeped out of the beef. Slice up the meat, pour the sauce over, and it's done!


meat and potatoes


Meat - the sauce turned out a bit chunkier than I'd serve to company, so if you're planning this for a dinner party, don't be lazy like I was. Pull out your processor and get the shallots minced fine.

I served it with some designer lettuce for a lovely lunch.


plate

It's quite obvious why Nigella loves garlic roasted potatoes so much - they're delicious! I improved on them from last time, cutting them slightly larger so that they wouldn't be so tooth-breakingly hard.

The beef and sauce had a really deep flavour, thanks to all those anchovies and the red wine. The flavours really complimented the beef well, and infused into the meat itself because of the cooking process. It was quick to make as well. I highly recommend this dish, this combination of dishes, for a casual-yet-special family lunch, for a dinner party, for any occasion!

Steak Béarnaise

Of steak, Nigella writes...

The essence of eating for two exists in just one word: steak... there's something solid, old-fashioned and comforting about the two of you sitting down and eating steak.

I made a steak béarnaise for lunch today, which is the last remaining steak recipe in the book. Upon making it, I realised that I've never actually made a steak for 2. When I made the low fat steak, it was for 3 of us, and when I made steak au poivre, I made it, greedily, for myself. And today's steak béarnaise was for the whole family. But I'm so glad we all got to eat it, because it was certainly the most delicious out of all the How to Eat steaks!

75. Steak (Low Fat)
126. Steak au Poivre

302. Steak Béarnaise (One & Two)
303. Béarnaise sauce (Basics etc.)

A steak béarnaise, made well, is one of life's great pleasures. Bérnaise sauce is similar in method to hollandaise sauce, but with different ingredients.

You start off by reducing white wine vinegar with shallots, tarragon and peppercorns.

reduction

Then you strain out the bits, and whisk the liquid with some egg yolks and water in a double boiler. After this, you whisk in softened cubes of butter, one cube at a time, until it is all thick and emulsified. I fried our sirloin steaks while this was going on. In the recipe, the only instructions Nigella gives are to fry a steak "as a steak is fried". So, I used the method I recently saw Giada De Laurentiis use on her program, Everyday Italian. That is, you oil and season the steaks, and then fry them for a 5 minutes a side on a very high heat, thus giving the steaks a delicious brown crust on the outside. And I let them rest as I finished the sauce.

To finish the sauce, you add some lemon juice to the emulsified mixture, followed by more fresh chopped tarragon.

sauce

The traditional accompaniment for steak béarnaise is french fries, but Nigella suggests baguette with salad, which is a fine accompaniment. Besides, home-baked chips are pretty gross, as are the chips from the fish and chip shop around the corner.


table

I really cannot describe how lovely this lunch was. The steaks (thank-you Rendinas!) were great, and the béarnaise sauce was just incredible. The method for the béarnaise may be very close to the hollandaise, but the flavour is just on a completely different level.

We kept on using our bread to scrape up the remaining sauce, long after the steaks were finished.


plate

Daniel: Thank-you Sarah, that was brilliant!

Late-Summer Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding for 8

This menu is, obviously, intended for entertaining. The main event is a cold roasted beef fillet (AKA eye fillet). Nigella suggests up to 2.5 kilos of beef for 8 people. Eye fillet is $40 a kilo. Ahem. Now, you know that I do love to entertain, but I am also a poor student. There are very few people who I love enough to spend that much money on. There are also very few people who I can count on to appreciate this food. Luckily, I know some very special people who fall into both these categories. And 3 of these very special people live right under this roof.

I halved the quantities of this extravagant lunch, and made it a special one, just for the family.

LATE-SUMMER ROAST BEEF AND YORKSHIRE PUDDING FOR 4

294. Rosemary-Infused Oil
295. Cold Roast Fillet of Beef
296. Rosemary and Anchovy Mayonnaise
297. Warm Cannellini or Borlotti Beans with Garlic and Sage
298. Tomato Salad
299. Yorkshire Pudding with Syrup and Cream

This menu is pretty simple to put together. The first thing I did was soak the cannellini beans overnight in water. Then in the morning, I drained them and boiled them in water for 1.5 hours with an onion, a carrot and some sage leaves.

While they were boiling, I made the rosemary oil, which both anoints the beef, and goes into the mayo. All you need to do to make this is sizzle some rosemary needles in olive oil…


rosemary oil

…and then strain out the rosemary needles.


rosemary oil

You could either rub the rosemary oil onto the beef by itself, or add some mashed anchovies to the oil before rubbing it on. I adore anchovies, so there was no question about my taking this option.


This is a $40 piece of meat.

After being rubbed, it goes into a 210C oven for 10 minutes per 500g plus 10 minutes.

Then I made the mayo. This mayo has pounded anchovies added to the egg and garlic mixture at the start, and also includes a potion of rosemary infused oil.


start of mayo

As you probably know, making mayonnaise is a really annoying process. You need to slowly and patiently whisk the oil, drop by painstaking drop, into the egg mixture, taking care not to get too enthusiastic with the pouring, lest it curdle. I have to admit that I only bothered with about half the quantity of oil before I gave up on the idea, and left the mayo-sauce as it was. With only half the required quantity of oil added, the “mayo” was rather thin and runny, but still tasted good.

And here is what the beef looked like when it came out of the oven.


cooked beef

While it was resting, I made the batter for the sweet Yorkshire pudding. It has three ingredients – eggs, milk and flour. First you whisk the eggs and milk together, and let it sit for 15 minutes before adding the flour. The pudding has to be cooked at the last minute, so I left the completed batter to the side until we finished eating.


batter

After this, I finished off the beans by draining them, removing the vegetables, and stirring it over a low heat with olive oil, garlic and sage. I then made the tomato salad, (sliced tomatoes sprinkled with salt, oil and vinegar) and sliced the beef.


sliced beef


"if you weren't looking I'd be licking the board"

All the components of the lunch were thus completed, and it was time to serve.


lunch


tomato salad


close up of beans

That beef is awesome! It was rare and gorgeous and meltingly soft. The flavour of the anchovies really complements the beef well, and the sharply salty mayo was an addictive accompaniment. The tomatoes were ripe and full of summery tomato goodness. As for the beans, the sage-garlic flavour was very nice, but I didn’t cook them very well and they were still quite tough. Overall, I thought the menu was lovely as it was, but my dad said he would have liked some lettuce or green salad to go with.

The logistics of the pudding requires a bit of precision timing. You see, the pudding needs 20 minutes in the oven, and has to be eaten as soon as it comes out. Furthermore, both the oven and the baking dish need to be very hot when you pour the batter in. I did it like this: as we were eating, I turned the oven up to very hot and put in the oiled baking dish to get very hot. When we finished eating, I poured the Yorkshire pudding batter into the sizzlingly hot dish, and let it bake for 20 minutes as we cleared up the kitchen.

Despite the total simplicity of this pudding (3 ingredients, a bit of light whisking, a very hot oven), it smells divine and looks totally impressive. I couldn’t believe how much it rose! It’s so cool; you can actually see it rising, millimetre by millimetre, in the oven. I was really happy with the way it turned out – it looked just like the drool-inducing one that I saw Nigella make on the Nigella Bites program a while back.

I set out all the possible accompaniments on the table – honey, golden syrup, maple syrup and vanilla ice-cream.


yorkshire pudding

On that program, Nigella described the pudding as, “a cross between donut and pancake… which is my idea of heaven”. She was right!

Check it out! Did someone say, FOOD PORN?


sweet yorkshire pudding

The crunchy sides are the best part of the pudding. As for accompaniments, I do think that cold vanilla ice-cream is definitely the way forward. I personally like maple syrup the best, but my mum preferred the thick gooiness of the golden.