Arriba!

This morning my parents and I went to Prahran Market and spent a bomb on exotic ingredients – bratwurst, frankfurters, duck breasts, venison fillet, smoked ham knuckles, puy lentils and so on. The market is closed every day of Easter except Saturday, so I had to get in while the getting was good.

We got back at around midday, and I started on lunch.

331. Guacamole with paprika-toasted potato skins (Dinner)
332. Cod wrapped in ham (Dinner)
333. Sage and onion lentils (Dinner)
334. Digestive biscuits (Feeding Babies and Small Children)
335. Lemon ice-cream (Weekend Lunch)
336. Lemon meringue ice-cream (Weekend Lunch)

Now, I know that looks like a lot of recipes, but I only made the first 4 today. The 2 lemon ice-creams were made last week when I had some free time, and I felt like pulling them out today.

The plain lemon ice-cream is simply lemon juice and zest, icing sugar and whipped double cream. All you do is stir it together, put it into a shallow container and chuck it in the freezer.

As for the lemon meringue ice-cream, you whip some cream, add yoghurt, lemon curd, lemon juice and zest, and some crumbled meringue nests. You fold it all together into a big billowing pile of deliciousness.


lemon meringue ice-cream

In fact, at this point it was hard to put it in the freezer – it tasted so good, I could have eaten most of it right then and there!

Anyway, that was Tuesday. Today, Saturday, I made the meal that preceded the ice-cream.

This menu is basically Nigella’s EARLY-AUTUMN LUNCH FOR 6, with ice-cream and biscuits in place of the hazelnut cake she suggests for dessert. I halved all ingredients to feed my parents and I.

I started by putting the potatoes for the potato skins in the oven. Next were the lentils. They need to be simmered for 45 minutes with an onion, some sage and a couple of garlic cloves.

While the potatoes were baking and the lentils were simmering, I made the digestive biscuits, which were very easy. In fact, the most difficult thing about the recipe is sourcing the main ingredient – spelt flour. This has been my main obstacle in making this recipe for the past 10 months. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find a packet of organic wholemeal spelt flour at the market in the morning. Score!

So to make the biscuits, you put the spelt flour in the bowl of a KitchenAid, with sugar, baking powder and oatmeal, and then rub in butter and shortening. Then you bind it with a bit of milk, and roll it out.


rolling out

They take about 15 minutes to bake.

The fish fillets are simply brushed with melted butter, wrapped in Parma ham, and brushed with butter again. I couldn’t find cod at the market, so I used rockling fillets. You can prepare the fillets in advance and bake them at the last minute.


fish on tray

Ok, so once the potatoes are baked, you cut them in half, scoop out the fluffy middles, sprinkle the skins with salt and paprika, and bake them until crisp. Nigella says to mash the scooped-out potato flesh to make another side dish.

By this stage, the lentils were cooked, so I finished them off by turning them in a pan with some oil, softened and chopped onion, and sage leaves.


lenticche in a pan

The guacamole has to be made at the last minute, to prevent brownage. All you need to do is mash up some avocado with lime juice, salt, spring onions, green chilli and coriander.


potato skins and guacamole

This was the first course. I put the fish in the oven whilst we were eating this.

I loved the potato skins! I haven’t eaten potato skins since I was a small, potato-obsessed child. And because they don’t need to be eaten hot, they’d be great made a few hours in advance for a cocktail or dinner party.

And onto the second course…


fish on lentils


lunch plate

The ham was quite salty, but it went well with the bland fish, mashed potatoes and mealy lentils. They also looked extremely impressive, which was a bonus.

Here is our dessert. It's lemon meringue ice-cream in the metal container, and the plain lemon ice-cream in the tupperware container.


ice-cream and biscuits

Surprisingly, I much preferred the plain lemon ice-cream - it had a much better texture and flavour. The lemon meringue ice-cream was ok, but it had a lot of ice-crystals in it, and was very, very sour. It must have become more sour as it froze, because it was perfect before I froze it. Even though Nigella says "it needs an edge to it", I think that adding a bit of extra sugar wouldn't hurt. Or if not adding extra sugar, definitely take Nigella's sugestion of serving it drizzled with honey or extra lemon curd.


ice-cream and biscuit

Delighfully refreshing!

Salt, Salt, Salt

304. Ham cooked in cider with leeks, carrots and potatoes (Weekend Lunch)
305. Yoghurt, honey, passion fruit and cream (Weekend Lunch)

I have recently discovered that you can buy pickled pork at Box Hill! I can't believe I never noticed it before. Last time I made a ham, I went out all the way to Blackburn to get the meat. Box Hill is much closer, and is the place I always do my grocery shopping. But it was only last week that I noticed that Meat Inn had a huge sign, reading "PICKLED PORK $6.99 a kilo!" hanging near their store. Whoops!

Before cooking the ham, you have to remove the salt. I used Nigella's method of covering it in cold water, bringing it to the boil and then discarding the water. It worked for the ham in coke, so I thought it would work this time.


magnificent piece of meat

To make a ham in cider, you boil it in cider with some aromatic vegetables.


pot

Towards the end of cooking time, you remove the vegetables and add new carrots and sliced leeks. And here is what it looks like once cooked.


cooked

I thought it looked quite impressive, all sliced up.


sliced - with locally produced "Henry of Harcourt" cider in the background

However, upon eating it, I realised that the de-salting method had been completely ineffective! The ham was still so salty, to the point of inedibility and we couldn't eat more than a slice. Gross.
Luckily, the dessert more than made up for it. This dessert is simply Greek yogurt, honey, passionfruit and cream layered in a glass. And it's delicious. We ate it with Hobnobs and Chocolate-coated teddy bear biscuits.


Dessert

My 300th Recipe!!!

Wow! I can't believe I made my 300th recipe tonight. That's 300 recipes I've made. In 284 days. Out of the one book. Depending on how you look at it, it's either a big achievement... or concrete evidence of insanity. I think we all know which way I'm looking at it.

For your interest, here is what my 100th and 200th recipes were:

100. Lemon Pie
200. Watercress & Raw Mushroom Salad

300. Baked Veal and Ham Pasta

This recipe is undoubtedly one of the obscure ones. It's tucked away in the Cooking in Advance chapter, between the soups and the stews. And the long list of ingredients and instructions make it look a lot more complicated than it really is. That is to say, I probably wouldn't have thought to make it if I weren't undertaking this project.

I'm actually curious as to whether anyone else has made this, because I can't recall anyone talking about it or posting photos of it on blogs or photo-sharing sites. Anyone who's made this please let me know!

But in reality, making this recipe isn't hard at all. There are 3 components to it:

a mixture of finely chopped vegetables cooked with marsala, pancetta and minced veal

500g of cooked penne

a large quantity of white sauce with parmesan added

So, you make these 3 things, and then stir them together, reserving some white sauce to pour over at the end. Nigella suggests mixing them in the baking tray itself, but there wasn't nearly enough room. I stirred them together in the pot.


big pot

At this stage it smells pretty damn good. And it tasted good too. In fact, you could eat it straight out of the pot and not bother with baking it at all. After my little taste test, I was severely tempted to immediately polish off the rest... but restrained myself.

Once it's all mixed up, you pour it into a buttered baking dish, and then pour the reserved white sauce over. Then you put some dots of butter and more grated parmesan on top before baking it. As you can see, I didn't reserve enough white sauce, so it's sparsely dotted over, rather than blanketing the pasta.


dishes

Actually, once the mixture is all prepared and put in the dish, you can let it cool, cover it and leave it in the fridge for a few days until you want to bake it. (Hence its position in the Cooking in Advance chapter). But I wanted to eat it straight away, so it went directly into the oven.


baked

Yum! Mum and I ate this for supper, late on Saturday night, with a glass of red wine, watching Only Fools and Horses on TV. It was fantastic comfort food - all that carb and cheese and meat. It's like a grown-up macaroni and cheese, but not one of those pretentiously elegant grown-up versions, containing 5 different expensive cheeses and super-spesh dry-cured bacon air-freighted from a tiny Italian village. All the ingredients were available at Coles. And most importantly, it just tasted good.


2 plates

Lucky lucky, you're so lucky!

***Don't forget to post any questions you may have for me regarding the project here***

Nigella loves meatballs. That's a fact. Her meatball obsession didn't end with How to Eat (which includes four meatball recipes!), but has endured to the present day. There's the recipe for pasta and meatballs in Nigella Bites, and even in the most recent issue of Delicious magazine, Nigella's kiddie-friendly menu includes "Summer Meatballs".

260. Ham & Turkey Meatballs (Feeding Babies & Small Children)

Prior to this recipe, I had made 2 out of the 4 meatball recipes from How to Eat and been suitably impressed with both of them. (The similar meatballs from Nigella Bites are also delicious, incidentally). So, I was quite sure we'd enjoy these ones.

Of the ham and turkey meatballs, Nigella writes that they "were too moussey for adults, but... the children (and their friends) were very keen". They are a reformulation of Christmas dinner - leftover turkey and ham minced up and bound with sausage meat.

After Christmas, I carefully bagged up and froze the leftover turkey meat, and did the same with the ham in coca cola. Today, I bought some proper pork sausages from my butcher, and I was in business.


ham turkey sausages

I used the meat from one sausage, and also added some white bread, soaked in water and squeezed out, to make sure the mixture combined properly.


minced

I got 40 balls out of this mixture, although the quantity you get will depend (obviously) on the amounts of leftover meats you have, and on the dimensions of your balls.


balls

Then I cooked them in a tomato-based sauce, which had been simmering gently while I'd been forming the balls. (Yes, we all know the Nigella tomato sauce by now - finely chopped onion, garlic and carrot, cooked until soft, with tinned tomato added and simmered) .


pasta

And voilà! A delicious, climate-appropriate meal, which was not too moussy for the adults. Quite the opposite, we all loved it. I don't know what kids like to eat, but I suspect they would like this very much. And it would give them the energy to get through their busy kiddie days. I know this because this pasta gave me the energy I needed to go to the (totally rocking) Franz Ferdinand concert later that night. Wooh!

Big Hunks o' Ham and Sweet Cherry Pie

***Don't forget to post any questions you may have for me regarding the project here***

It happened! 8 months into the project and I’ve finally done my first ham. One of the main reasons (apart from my now almost forgotten pork-aversion) was the incredible difficulty in sourcing raw ham.

I got weird looks from the butchers at Rendinas when I asked for a raw ham, or gammon – “No love, you don’t need to cook it, we’ve already done it for you”, and no-one else had any idea what I was talking about. Imagine my delight then, when I heard recently that a fellow Melbournian on the Nigella.com forum had made this dish herself! So I immediately started posting messages asking what cut of meat she’d bought, where she’d bought it, how she’d cooked it and so on. What I needed to buy was a “pickled pork leg”, which was available at a butcher not 25 minutes away from my house! SCORE.

I called up the day before to ensure the availability of the pickled pork, and headed down there this morning, expecting it to be some expensive continental butchery. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was a very cheap Vietnamese butcher with very helpful staff! It was only about $13. I got my “jus’ unda 2 kilos” boneless pickled pork leg, and as he was wrapping it up, he asked me “hey, dis one u, know how to cook it?”, to which mum replied to him in Cantonese. I don’t speak Cantonese, but I picked up a couple of things she said.

Mum: DON’T WORRY… something something…INTERNET…something something… FRIEND… something something… RECIPE!

We got home at about 11am, and I started cooking lunch.

WHITE TRASH LUNCH FOR 6

254. Ham in Coca Cola
255. Cherry Pie

Served with: Sweetcorn Pudding from Nigella Bites

Ham in Coca Cola may be one of Nigella’s most famous recipes, but I had never, ever been tempted to make it. Even after 253 recipes from How to Eat, and a new-found understanding of flavours and meat cooking, I had no idea how the mixture of coke and raw ham (or better yet, pickled pork) could possibly be remotely palatable. Sorry to ruin the surprise, but I was so wrong. This ham ended up being one of the best things I have eaten in a long time. OINK!


Pickled pork

First step is to cover the ham in cold water, bring it to the boil and drain it. This removes the excess saltiness. Here is what it looks like when boiled.


boiled pork

Then you put it back in the pot, with a halved and peeled onion, pour a couple of bottles of coca cola over it, and let it boil for 2.5 hours. Needless to say, you have to use proper coke, not diet. Think about it, you want the sugar to infuse in the ham… and would boiling up a distinctly suspect (yet undeniably delicious and drinkable) combination of chemical sweeteners really produce anything edible?


ham in coke

It smells absolutely brilliant while it's cooking, just like Vietnamese soup noodles. (I'm not sure if proper gammon would smell the same though). While it was boiling, I made the corn pudding and the cherry pie.


corn pudding

The corn pudding is a mixture of tinned sweetcorn, creamed corn (oh how divine!), cream, milk, eggs, flour, baking powder and salt. It’s supposed to serve 8; I halved the quantities of all the ingredients except for the corn. Mmm, delicious corn.

To make the cherry pie, you start off making some pastry (this one includes two egg yolks, so would be described as a very rich shortcrust). Then you use it to line a pie tin, and fill the pie with morello cherries, and a paste made of the cherry syrup, sugar, melted butter and flour. My excessive love of pie, in all its forms, is no secret, (check out my pie section in my index for proof). However, this was my first time making a cherry pie, and I was having some issues with it. The pastry kept breaking on me and I basically had to end up wodging it in to the dish rather than neatly rolling it. And for the filling, I went by eye because I was too lazy to measure it, so I was afraid that my finished pie would taste weird.


Open cherry pie

One more thing, you have to roll out more pastry and cover up the pie – I forgot to “moisten the edges” of my pie, as Nigella instructs, and there was some embarrassing leakage out of the sides of the tin as it was baking. Whoops.

I cooked the pudding and the pie at the same time, and let them stand whilst I finished off the ham.


At the end of boiling.

Once it’s cooked, you need to remove the outer layers of fat, and press on a mixture of breadcrumbs, dark muscovado sugar, mustard and coke.


defatted ham

The strip of fat on this particular piece of meat was very narrow, but thick. After I pressed the crumb mixture onto it, I realized there wasn’t enough, so I got some of the bits of fat that I’d removed, pressed them back onto the ham, and then more crumb mixture. And how strange, 6 months ago I was a girl who could barely stomach looking at pig, and today I was gleefully and greedily adding more pig fat to my enormous ham. What can I say? Nigella has really turned me around.


re-fatted ham

Then it needs a 15 minute blitz in a hot oven and voilà! You have ham. (During this time I stirfried some leftover cabbage so that we'd have a proper vegetable too).


ham with sweetcorn pudding in the background


slices of ham

Me: while slicing... Nigella says that any leftovers are good in sandwiches...
Mum: I don't think there are going to be any leftovers!


plate - My dad and brother bizzarely had orange juice; I chose coke.

Hello Ham! It was absolutely, undeniably brilliant. Salty, tender, sweet and crunchy. It's no wonder Nigella republished the recipe in Nigella Bites, and that everyone raves about it. The whole family loved it. And the sweetcorn pudding is the perfect accompaniment. In How to Eat Nigella suggests potatoes as an accompaniment, but the sweetcorn pudding is better. The bland richness of the pudding is the perfect complement for the salty, salty ham. In fact, my dad loved the pudding a lot and suggested that it would be suitable for dessert, served with ice-cream. (Sweetcorn ice-cream is a very popular flavour in Malaysia). I agree with him.


sweet... cherry pie

Check out my pie! Despite the leakage, it still thought it looked very inviting, even if I do say so myself.

As for serving up the pie, Nigella makes two suggestions – “à la mode… or show Euro-cool by dolloping on some good and edgy and far more grown-up crème fraîche”. I had vanilla ice-cream in the freezer (correction: I ALWAYS have vanilla ice-cream in the freezer), and happened to have a tub of crème fraîche leftover from the green goddess dressing, so I put both on the table and let people choose.

As I said above, I was a bit worried about how my pie would taste (what with leakages, botchy pastry jobs and unmeasured filling), but I need not have worried - so far, every Nigella pie has been incredibly good, and this one was no exception. While I was still cutting and serving up the pie, my brother had already started on his and exclaimed, "Hey this is fantastic!". Phew.

Dan: Cherry Pie? This is a really American lunch!

As per usual, I was unable to decide on one accompaniment, (is it my indecisiveness, my desire for variety, my seemingly insatiable need to try everything...?), and I had my pie both ways.


Two-way pie

I have to say, even though I expected the ice-cream to be better, the crème fraîche was the superior choice. The ice-cream, was firm and sweet, but I much preferred the tangy softness of the crème fraîche.

My pie was ecstatically received! Mum thought that the pastry in particular was fabulous (thank-you Nigella!), and we all had seconds. The pie was a bit soggy at the bottom, but no-one apart from me seemed to notice.

This lunch totally rocked. Nigella has 4 ham recipes in How to Eat, and I was actually planning on only making 2 (two are just variations), but now I want to make them all. And soon! Yee-hah.