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279. Kale with Chorizo and Poached Egg
280. Chick Peas with Sorrel

These two recipes are some of the last remaining recipes from the One & Two chapter. They've been left this long primarily because of the impossible-to-find ingredients - kale and sorrel. However, after much googling and sleepless nights, I found out exactly what kale and sorrel are, and what other vegetables I could substitute for them.

Kale is like collard greens: a thick, dark cabbage-like leaf with a "distinctive" flavour, apparently. Luckily for me, Nigella herself suggests a substitute for kale in the recipe - baby spinach and watercress. Watercress is only available in Australia occasionally, and I regularly substitute peppery rocket for watercress in recipes, which is what I did today.

About the sorrel, google told me (via a friend), that watercress is an acceptable substitute. Again, I used rocket. But having looked at the recipe again, I see that Nigella's inspiration for the chick pea and sorrel recipe was the "Middle-Eastern way with chick peas... sour with lemon juice and thick with spinach". So if you feel like making this recipe (and I do believe it is well worth it), you could use spinach and lemon.

Nigella doesn't suggest that these two recipes be eaten together; rather she designates them (in smaller quantities) for solitary suppers. But seeing as the whole family was home for lunch today, and I thought we'd all like these dishes, I made both, in bigger quantities.

Neither is too complicated - for the chorizo dish, you chop it up and cook it in some oil, then stir in your green vegetable of choice until wilted, and top with poached eggs. As you can see from my photo below, I'm not a highly-skilled egg poacher, but they turned out edible and decent-looking nonetheless.


chorizo eggs

For the chick peas, you cook some onion, garlic, cumin and dried chilli until soft, then wilt your green leaves in the onion mixture, before adding some chick peas and stirring until warmed through.


chick peas

As I said, Nigella doesn't say that these two dishes should accompany each other, but they do make a good pair - the rich and highly-flavoured chorizo works well against the slightly bland graininess of the chickpeas. They only took about 30 minutes in total to make, and were very delicious.

I'm not sure what real kale and sorrel taste like, but eating these dishes, even with the substitutions, didn't feel like we were missing anything at all.

Wreck the Casbah

245. Golden Root-Vegetable Couscous with Chorizo
246. Harissa
247. Great Aunt Myra's Moroccan Orange and Date Salad

This stew is a previous incarnation of the Tunisian lamb ball stew with couscous that appears in Feast. Having made the Tunisian stew before, and liking it very much, I was looking forward to this one.

I got up at 11 this morning, and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast of fresh bread with the parentals. After that, I slowly started working on today's lunch, which ended up taking more time than expected. However, we were all sufficiently carboliciously satisfied to last us until lunch was ready, so there was no rush or pressure to get lunch out fast. It was an enjoyable process.

To start the stew, cut up all your vegetables. Well actually, if you choose to soak your own chickpeas, then you will have to start the day before by soaking them. I did this, and started cooking them whilst we were eating breakfast.

But back to the vegetables - there's zucchini, butternut squash (what on earth is a kabocha squash?), parsnip, swede, turnip, carrot and onion.


prepared veggies

Cook the onion in oil, then add spices and garlic, followed by the vegetables. Then pour in stock and 1/2 a tin of tomatoes. (I was halving the quantities, and thought that 1/4 tin of tomatoes was a stupid quantity, so I substituted with a large splash of tomato passata, from the half-used bottle in the fridge). After this comes the chickpeas, some raisins, orange zest and harissa.

Speaking of the harissa, I made it whilst the stew was simmering. Nigella's harissa recipe consists of dried chillis, soaked in water, pounded with garlic, salt, and dry roasted spices before having vinegar and oil added. Nigella says to use 60g of dried chillis, but to remove the seeds. I could not be arsed removing the seeds, so just left them in and reduced the quantity. Mum and I were sneezing like crazy as I chopped them up. Warning: Harissa is powerful stuff. One small teaspoonful makes the whole stew hot. It turns it up a notch. BAM!

Ok, so onto the couscous. Rather than the usual soak-in-boiling-water method, Nigella says to soak and then steam it. I'd never tried this method before, as it seemed too fiddly. You have to soak the couscous in cold water for 10 minutes, then drain it, and steam it for 15. I put it in a metal dish, dotted butter on top, stuck it in a bamboo steamer and put the whole lot on top of the simmering stew. (It is Nigella's suggestion to dovetail the whole operation).


Couscous

Whilst the couscous was steaming, I sliced up the oranges for the salad and assembled it, and cooked the chorizo.


cooking - there's the stew in the silver pot, with the couscous on top. Chorizo are cooking in the frying pan on the left, and the syrup for the orange salad (see below) is boiling in the silver saucepan at the back.

To cook the chorizo, you seal them on all sides in a pan, throw in a glass of wine, and let it cook for 10 minutes until the wine has evaporated.

And then finally... lunch was served!


Stew - I love the warm red sauce and the golden colour that the saffron imparts.


Lunch


Harissa - it looks less red than you might imagine because I used a smaller quantity of chillies, but because all the seeds are included, it's as fiery as you'd expect, if not more.

Dad: Hey Mum, you should try this sauce. It's good... but fuck me it's hot!

Aah, my dad talks like me too!


my plate

The couscous is a wonderful, plain blanket against the strongly spicy flavours of the stew, chorizo and harissa. Having never had proper Spanish chorizo before (the ones I used for the Spanish Stew were disappointingly inauthentic), I can say conclusively that they totally rock. And I am glad to be back to pork.

The quantity I made was supposed to feed 3, but it would have easily fed 5 or more. I dunno, maybe we have bigger zucchini in Australia.

I don't know much about Great Aunt Myra, but I do know that she makes a mean salad. (Remember the pea, mint and avocado one?) Check out my gratifyingly 70's-style presentation.


70's salad

Great Aunt Myra's Moroccan Orange and Date salad consists of peeled and sliced oranges (I peeled them after slicing, much easier), halved dates, slivered almonds, drizzled with a syrup. The syrup itself is made of water, sugar, orange juice and orange alcohol (I used cointreau). Nigella concedes that the alcohol content makes it very un-Moroccan, but seeing as I already chose to have chorizo cooked in red wine, I'd already lost hope of having a properly Moroccan meal. And I believe that if you're getting wet, you may as well go swimming. So, in my brazen un-Moroccan-ness, I defiantly stuck George Michael's Greatest Hits CD into the player, and turned it up with pride.

The salad is surprisingly fabulous. It doesn't seem like much on the page, but there seems to be some sort of wonderful synergy between the ingredients - the supersweet dates against the refreshing orange slices, sprinkled with toasted slivered almonds (not "slithered", as the typo in my book says) and covered with the light syrup, which itself makes the dates glisten invitingly. It looks beautiful (well, I do love kitsch), and more importantly, tastes brilliant. I used 1 and a half oranges to start with, but we loved it so much that we sliced up an extra orange to soak up all the remaining syrup.

This was a great lunch. The two dishes aren't suggested in the same menu, but they did complement each other very well, the salad, light and fragrant, is a wonderful finish to a fiery meal.

Daniel was working during the day so did not eat with us, but he tried some when he came home.

Daniel: Hey. That sauce... pointing to the harissa... is fucking awesome.

Update on the chorizo situation

I have a sneaking suspicion that the "chorizo" I acquired yesterday from Rendinas Butchery are the very "tight-fleshed, too lean and unyielding, so-called 'Spanish-style' chorizo" that Nigella warns against.

See, I was flicking through Nigella Bites this morning, and in her recipe for Chicken with Chorizo and Cannellini, there's a picture of proper chorizo - loops of dark red sausages, dense and firm in appearance - like the ones I've seen in restaurants.

Even when I bought them yesterday I didn't think they looked totally authentic, but when you're desperate for a sausage...

The ones I had yesterday were nice sausages, but I don't think they were proper chorizo. I've got to make a trip down to Casa Iberica in Collingwood soon to get my hands on proper big spicy Spanish sausages.

Spanish Stew

I remember seeing the lovely Nigella making this stew on Nigel Slater’s Real Food program some years ago. Back then she was just a wisp of a woman, with long flat hair, larger eyebrows and a seemingly timid persona. Flash forward about half a decade, and how things have changed. She’s had four series of TV shows, four more books, and a fab homeware range. And she’s just such a stunning and confidant woman, with bouncy hair, nicely shaped eyebrows and a cool wardrobe. When she was a guest on Nigella’s ITV talk show, Jo Brand said that everything she does in the kitchen just oozes sex. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that one, but I do know that she looks hot when she cooks. (I aspire to this ideal whilst I cook with greasy hair, Kylie Kwong-style glasses, feral floured Supré trackies and an old t-shirt).

Ok, the Nigella rant is out of the way. Now let’s talk about lunch!

118. Spanish Stew (Dinner)

This morning, I walked up to Rendinas butcher to get my chorizo, and nearly had a panic-attack when I couldn’t see any in the window. What else would we eat? Could I substitute other sausages? Should I give up and order a pizza? Luckily for me though, when I asked about it, they told me they had some chorizo out the back. Thank God.


Chorizo

You have to start the stew off on the stove, cooking some onions and garlic with a bay leaf, sherry, chorizo and some sliced potatoes. Then you cover it with boiled water and shunt it in the oven for forty minutes.

I bought this funky dish at The Essential Ingredient along with my stem ginger, violane nano rice, juniper berries and so on. I loved it because it looked well wicked, and has the advantage of being able to go from stove to oven! Because there were only three of us eating, and because the dimensions of the dish demanded it, I only used 3 (instead of 4) sausages, and a lot less potatoes. I wrapped and froze the extra sausage for a future dinner when I’m home alone.


Stew – before oven


Post-oven, Pre-coriander

It didn’t turn out quite as red as I had hoped (perhaps because the sausages weren’t super-red??), so I sprinkled some paprika over before adding chopped coriander.

We had it with a baguette, and some iceberg lettuce cut into wedges and sprinkled with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. I stole this idea from The Brasserie, where we went for my Dad's birthday lunch this year.

Mum: It was a good idea to cut the lettuce like this. It makes me actually want to eat it.


Spanish lunch – finally the weather’s warm enough to eat lunch on our new outdoor furniture!

It's a fabulous combination. It's warm and spicy and sour all at the same time. I think, though, that my mum would have preferred more sausage in there. However, I thought that the sausage to potato ratio (3 sausages to 600grams potato) was just right.