Cod & Peas

388. Cod & Peas

Kids chapter. Quick meal. You cook peas in butter and a bit of liquid (water & lemon juice, or white wine, or vermouth), then add bite-sized cubes of fish (Nigella says cod or trout; I chose trout) and let it cook for a couple more minutes. That's it.


Trout & Peas

It was really easy and quick to make, so if you expect that your kids will like this kind of stuff, then you should definitely give it a go. Personally, I was nonplussed - I thought it was pretty bland, but chacun à son goût, as the French say.

Cooking on a Tuesday Night

As of 6:15pm tonight, I officially finished classes for the semester! Yay!

When I came home, I just ate what my mum had cooked - rice and stirfried veggies, and then got on with ploughing through more recipes.

372. Sauternes and Lemon Balm Jelly (Dinner)
373. Good, thick winter pea soup

The soup appears in both the Cooking in Advance chapter, and in the Weekend Lunch chapter. Basically what you have to do is save any stock you have from boiling a ham, and boil it with split peas, a potato and some leek to form a soup. I used a tub of frozen stock I had leftover from the ridiculously salty ham in cider, (watered down substantially) and let the whole thing bubble away as I got on with the jelly.

First step is to make a syrup with sugar and water, and steep some lemon balm (or lemongrass) in it.


syrup

Next, you strain the liquid into a jug, and add some Sauternes. Then you dissolve gelatine leaves in some extra, warmed, Sauternes, and pour that into the jug. Finally, you add lemon juice to make up the volume. I was almost worried that we wouldn't have any lemons (we renovated and expanded our kitchen 3 years ago at the expense of our lemon tree, and now I never remember to buy them), until I saw this...


do we have enough lemons?

My dad has a guitar student, "Reese", who has a grandmother, who has a very fertile lemon tree. She offloaded a whole bunch of them to my dad last week. How lovely and generous of her!

Nigella says to use a 2-pint ring mould, but I only made a half-quantity of the jelly, and decided to use the randomly sized mini-mould that my Aunty Anne gave me.


jelly in moulds

The jellies are now in the fridge; they need to set overnight. Check back tomorrow for the verdict!

And here's the thick pea soup. I basically let it keep cooking until it looked like the picture of the yellow split pea soup in the New Years chapter of Nigella's latest book, Feast. It smelled pretty good too. And I think some sliced frankfurters (proper German ones, from a deli) would be lovely in it.


a good thick winter soup

I tasted it, and it was nice, but still ridiculously salty. I probably should have poured some of the stock away at the beginning, rather than adding water and then letting it bubble back down to its original saltiness. Whoops. I watered the completed soup down, and put the whole thing in the fridge. So now the soup is not too salty, but it's watery, and not "good and thick". If I can be arsed tomorrow, I'll boil up some more split peas in water and then add that to the soup.

I think it defeats the purpose of this soup if it's not like one of those "wonderful grainy, tobacco-tinted purées eaten in Amsterdam - thick, puddingy... smelling of sausage". Although I don't remember ever seeing soup like this on my trip to Amsterdam. To be fair, however, I don't remember much of my trip to Amsterdam at all.

You'll be pleased to know that I also made both marinades for Nigella's low-fat char siu recipes. The pork loins are defrosting as we speak, and I shall cook them tomorrow.

Night night.

Arctic Summer Lunch for 4

How ironic, that my cooking of Nigella's INDIAN-SUMMER DINNER coincided with the first truly cold day of the year. With a maximum of 18C, bitingly cold Melbournian winds and patchy rain, I was freezing! But on the upside, I got to wear my new red duffel coat from Dangerfield when I went to Rendinas to buy our meat.

317. Pea and Lettuce Soup
318. Lamb with Chick Peas
319. Couscous Salad
320. Turkish Delight Figs
321. Pistachio Crescents

And what a beautiful piece of meat it was. In the recipe for her lamb with chick peas, Nigella specifies "lamb noisette", which you slice into individual rounds and arrange atop the chick peas. Lamb noisette is not a cut of meat commonly found in Australia. The last time I was supposed to use lamb noisette was for the Cinnamon-hot rack of lamb, and there I substituted rack of lamb. In this case, though, I thought I should have a go at finding some actual noisette. According to a random butchery website, noisette is a "rolled saddle of lamb, wrapped in a thin layer of fat".

The fab butchers at Rendinas didn't know what noisette was, but were happy to improvise. Sadly, they were out of loin to make a noisette roll, so they got a lamb leg for me, tunnelboned it, and gave me a spiffy cloth-netting thing in which to cook the lamb. This was to prevent it from unfurling during cooking. How wonderfully helpful of them!


lamb!

Just before I start to describe the cooking process, let me just say - I only had 5 hours sleep the previous night, so I was kinda walking around the kitchen in a goofy daze, creating a huge disorganised mess as I went. So forgive me if this post follows the same pattern.

To start, I boiled my pre-soaked chick peas in water, to which I'd added an onion, and some garlic cloves. I then marinated the lamb in a mixture of chilli, garlic, and a finely chopped red onion.

The next stage was to make the pistachio crescents, because I wanted them to be out of the oven before the lamb went in. (Because I was cooking a lamb leg, and not noisettes, I figured that I'd just have to cook it for as long as a normal roast - about 1 hour for that amount of meat). The pistachio crescents are just like those fabulous almond shortbread biscuits that my mum's Greek friend makes, which are delightfully crumbly and blanketed in icing sugar. To make the pistachio crescents, you beat butter with a wooden spoon until very very soft, and then add sifted icing sugar, flour and ground pistachios (which I ground in the processor). Then you shape them into crescent moons, and bake for about 25 minutes. You're supposed to get 12 out of the mixture, but I could only manage 8.


crescents

So, I baked the cookies...


baked crescents

And once they came out, I turned up the heat and put the lamb in. Placing the stocking on the lamb was a 2-woman job - one to hold the stocking open, one to put the meat into said stocking.


stocking'd lamb

It was during all that baking time that I got on with the side dishes. The pea and lettuce soup contains oil, peas, spring onions, peas (duh), iceberg lettuce and stock, cooked until soft, then puréed in a blender. It's meant to be served chilled, so I just stashed it in the fridge.

Next was the couscous salad - soak couscous in boiling water, add olive oil and vinegar, and then stir through finely chopped cucumber, tomato, red onion and parsley.

It's advisable to prepare the figs before you eat the main course, because this gives them time to cool to room temperature before youe at them. To make them, you make a syrup out of sugar, water, rosewater and orange flower water, and pour the hot syrup over the figs.

From here, all I had to do was finish off the chickpeas and slice the lamb. Once they're cooked and drained, you turn the chickpeas in oil and dried chilli pepper until oil-slicked and warmed through. At the end, you stir in some blanched, peeled, seeded and diced tomatoes.


cooked stringed lamb

And finally (after what seemed like an age for me), lunch was ready.


table


chick peas on plate


couscous salad


lamb on chickpeas


pea & lettuce soup

Dad really loved the pea and lettuce soup, which surprised me, as he is not usually a fan of cold soups. The rest of the meal was lovely as well - the flavours and textures of all the different dishes meld very well together to create a satisfying but not too heavy lunch.

And onto dessert...

Mum has, in recent times, become a huge fan of figs (especially the baked figs of the Fast Food chapter), and she was very excited to try these ones. And they were very, very nice.


crescents and figs

But even better were these amazing pistachio crescents! They were light, crumbly and full of pistachio-flavour. These were, without a doubt, the highlight of the meal. And definitely a recipe worthy of frequent repeats.


on plate

Mum: You only made 8?!?!?!

Who loves bunnies?

I don’t mean to put you off your own dinner (or maybe I do), but thanks to some dodgy newspaper articles about a man in Sydney who loved rabbits a little too much, the theme of “rabbits” has become a bit of a running joke amongst my friends and I.

So my mates were pissing themselves laughing when I told them what I was planning for dinner.

158. Peter Rabbit in Mr. McGregor’s Salad (One & Two)
159. Pea Soup (Fast Food)

I bought the rabbit yesterday at Prahran Market (it's not available in supermarkets), and marinated the pieces this morning, in a mixture of yogurt, oil, vinegar, thyme and mustard. I cooked them in the evening when I came home from work. You have to brown them in a pan, and then cook them in a 200C oven for 25 minutes.

The salad is mixed lettuce, radish and baby carrots and the warm rabbit portions, tossed through an emulsified dressing of vinegar, oil and mustard.


Emulsified Dressing

While the rabbit was in the oven, I washed and sliced the vegetables, made the dressing, and made a pea soup.

The pea soup is simple as anything – 450g frozen peas in 500ml stock, simmered until tender and then blended.


Soup in blender


Pea Soup – served with pecorino cheese (we’re out of parmesan) and olive oil


Peter Rabbit in Mr MacGregor's Garden

As we were eating the pea soup, we were convinced that I’d made it before. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t, as it wasn’t crossed off on my list… but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d already eaten it. So after dinner I had a flip through my blog, and I indeed, have made a pea soup before, but not this pea soup. The previous soup I’d made was a Nigella-suggestion, not a recipe, of leftover mushy peas thinned out with stock to make a soup.

The salad was fabulous; I loved the way the flavour of the marinade really soaked into the rabbit. And with all the vegetables in the meal, we felt super-healthy and virtuous. I loved the salad so much that I would definitely make it again soon, and repeatedly, but perhaps with chicken instead of rabbit. It's not that I didn’t like the rabbit, (like I said, I loved it... a lot), but it’s just a lot of bother to go out and score it all the time.

Who loves bunnies? I love bunnies!

Scaled-Down, Tarted-Up Homey Dinner for 4

Today at about 4:30pm I realized that we’d all be home for dinner together, and wanted to make something special. I decided to do a scaled down version of the “Tarted up Homey Dinner for 6”, from the Dinner chapter.

The menu in its entirety includes a chicory salad, a ham, a pea orzotto with roast leeks and poached apricots as pudding. But that sounded like way too much work (and food) for us. Tonight we had the orzotto, the leeks and the apricots. I’ll make the chicory salad as a starter when I finally get around to making one of Nigella’s many hams. (There isn’t a particular ham recipe provided for this menu; she says to do another of her ham recipes in the book).

138. Pea Orzotto
139. Roast Leeks
140. Poached Pistachio-sprinkled apricots stuffed with crème fraiche

Dad and I went to the supermarket at about 5 to get the ingredients - MISTAKE. Safeway at 5:00pm on a Sunday afternoon is chock-a-block full of people. Screaming kids, oldies, teens, the whole gamut. It's rather stressful, especially when you're supertired and still have the shadow of a hangover upon you. I'm so sticking to weekday shopping from now on!

On the way home, I realised that the apricots weren't exactly appropriate for a quickly put-together dinner - they need to be soaked overnight and then baked. D'oh! But at the risk of becoming a Rachel Ray (or as I might have called her when I was a high-schooler, "Rachel GAY"), I decided to speed up the preparation of the apricots. See, I'm now working five days a week, and I've got no idea when the next time we'll all be together for a meal. Instead of soaking them overnight, I simmered them in water for about five minutes, then made the syrup (poaching liquid, cardamom, sugar, lemon juice) and baked them as per the recipe.



After baking, you're supposed to let them cool in syrup and then chill well. To speed up the chilling, I decanted the whole lot into a cold container and thence into the fridge. By the time dinner was cooked and eaten, the apricots were at a perfect eating temperature.

Whilst they were in the oven, I got on with the orzotto.

The orzotto is just like a risotto, except with pearl barley in place of the rice. It takes a bit longer to cook than rice, (Nigella says 45 minutes) but given that my risotti always seem to take that long anyway, I was prepared to stir. I put Blur’s 13 album on and read the latest issues of delicious and Australian Gourmet Traveller whilst stirring. Luckily, the whole stirring-and-adding-stock process only took 45 minutes. I also did the leeks whilst cooking the barley. They're super-easy, just slice into logs, and cook in the oven with a bit of oil and salt.

Once the barley is cooked, you add cooked peas (some whole, some mushed), crème fraiche (I am sooo over double cream right now) and cheese (all I had was pecorino). Then let it sit for five minutes and dig in.


Peas and Orzotto


Pea Orzotto


Roast Leeks

I really liked the orzotto, as did my mother, but I don't think my dad and brother were too keen - they were suspiciously quiet throughout the whole meal. It was a bit salty, which I blame on the stock - Massel Chicken Style stock. Next time I use it, I think I'll have to dilute it quite a bit. I loved the texture of the orzotto, and as Nigella suggests, would love to make up my own flavours.

Mum: Ooh, can I take a leek?
Me: Sure, if you have to.

After we ate dinner, I organised the apricots - retrieving the now cool apricots from the fridge, and stuffing half of them with Greek yogurt. (I didn't think we'd be able to finish them all). Nigella says you can use crème fraiche or yogurt, and there really is only so much cholesterol a girl can handle in one meal. To finish them off, you pour some syrup over and then sprinkle with crushed pistachios, which is just beautiful.


Pistachio Sprinkled Poached Apricots

Again, Mum and I absolutely loved these, whilst my dad and brother weren't so impressed. My dad just doesn't like yogurt, whereas I adore it. I also loved the perfumed syrup, which was intense but not soap-like. (Sometimes the desserts you get at Indian restaurants have a distinct soap-like whiff to them). I've got half the apricots (unstuffed) left over, with accompanying syrup, so I think I'll make them into a fruit salad for my breakfast tomorrow.

Japanese Essay? What Japanese Essay?

Before I get to decribing tonight's dinner, I'll just tell you what happened today.

Right now we're on a two-week break from classes - time which I should be spending writing my 1100-character Japanese essay, due this Friday, or perhaps my 2000 word essay in Agricultural Economics, due next week. So, as you might have expected me to do, today I got up at 11:30, watched some TV and just generally lazed around for a bit. And how crap - my brother ate my lunch! He ate my bloody lunch. I'd planned to eat our leftover rigatoni-with-random-sauce-from-a-bottle from last night's dinner, but my brother had beaten me too it. GRRRR. Anyway, I microwaved some frozen beef braised in beer, and cooked basmati rice for my own lunch. And Daniel and I both decided that he owes me a meal.

Well, after that "ordeal" I was obviously in no state to study, so I went with my dad to Box Hill to buy some ingredients, went to the gym, then came home, and cooked. And still no progress on either essay was made... oh well...

127. Tomato and Rice Soup (Fast Food)
128. Pea Soufflé (One & Two)

Now, the pea soufflé is "intended to be supper in its entirety" for two people, so for three of us, I didn't boost quantities, but served prosciutto alongside, and added a first course of soup.

The soufflé is a bit fiddly to make, in that there are a few stages. Firstly, cook some peas in butter and puree them with gruyère cheese. Then, make a white sauce. Then, whip up some eggwhites. Combine the white sauce, egg yolks and pea puree, before folding in the egg whites and baking them in a dish which has been greased and dusted with grated cheese.


Peas + White Sauce

I chose to do them in individual ramekins - simply because I don't own a "dish of about 600ml capacity", and to make it easier to serve. In fact, I don't seem to own a lot of these dishes that Nigella keeps using for this type of food - 600ml soufflé dishes, 1 litre china bowls and so on. Hmm... I dunno if I should bother investing in some, because I quite like the dinky individual ramekin thing.

So, while the soufflés were soufflé-ing, I made the soup. This one, from Fast Food is just a bottle of tomato sauce with a handful of basmati rice thrown in. I wasn't exactly sure what type of "tomato sauce" Nigella meant, because in Australia and in Malaysia, "tomato sauce" can mean tomato ketchup, it can mean that stuff that's used on pizzas, in pasta, or any number of things. I ended up using a bottle of cheap-ass, low rent "Dolmio Tomato Onion and Basil Chunky Bolognese Style Sauce". And it was fantastic.


Tomato Soup

And after 26 minutes of cooking - out came my puffy little Teenange-Mutant-Ninja-Turtle-green soufflés!


Soufflés

My mum actually bothered to tip hers out and wrapped prosciutto around it...


She still loves that restauranty presentation!

But my dad and I just dug straight in...

Mine!

This soufflé rocks. I love the fresh taste of peas, and the gruyère cheese tastes and smells divine. The proscuitto is a perfect accompaniment, but if you choose to forgo the piggy accompaniment (and up to about a month ago, I would have), then you'll need more salt.

I'm not sure about you, but from the way it tastes and smells, I think of this dish more as rustic home cooking than fancy restaurant food. Think grandmère in the French countryside rather than Phillipe Mouchel.

My 100th Recipe!

When I invited my friends Adri, Bernard and An over for dinner last night, I knew there would be a few requirements...

No onions, no fried onions, no western-style pork, no lamb, no beef, no "meat that smells", no coriander, no capsicum, no spring onions, no shallots, no "weird Middle-Eastern food", nothing "strange or fancy"

...what on earth was I going to cook for them?

I spent a couple of days reading through my How to Eat, and finally chose the most normal, simple, unadventurous menu I could find.


SPRING-SCENTED LUNCH FOR 8

Tarragon French roast chicken
German leeks and wine, rice, peas and mangetouts
Lemon Pie

I did make a few small adjustments to the menu, mainly because of ingredient sourcing issues... and also scaled everything down (apart from the pie) for 6 people.


WINTER PRE-GOING-OUT-DANCING DINNER FOR 6

French Roast Chicken
German Leeks and Noilly Prat
Rice
Sugar Snaps and Peas
Lemon Pie

100. Lemon Pie

I made the pastry for this the night before, and let it sit, glad wrapped in the fridge until Saturday afternoon. The lemon filling also has to be started in advance - zest and slice some lemons, mix with sugar, and leave it in the fridge overnight. When you're ready to bake (and it can be eaten "hot, warm or cold"), you just have to roll out the pastry, add some eggs to the lemons, assemble the pie and shove it in the oven.


Pie filling

You know, this pastry was an absolute nightmare to roll out - it kept cracking on me, and I had to scrunch it up and start again, like, a million times. Maybe it was just too cold. But I persevered, rolled it out as best I could, and roughly mended the few cracks with the excess. During baking, some of the sugary-lemon filling overflowed and dripped down the sides. Luckily I'd anticipated this and had chucked a tray in the oven as well to catch the (rapidly bubbling and blackening) drips.


Lemon Pie - My 100th Recipe, "Well, I'm going for the rustic look, aren't I?"

About the chickens - I went to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon (before baking the pie), only to find that there's no bloody tarragon in the shops!! The grocer said it's been too cold to grow it. But I'd already bought the chickens and everything else! I thought, "Oh fuck it, we'll have the chicken anyway", and brazenly cooked the chickens as stated in the recipe, but without the tarragon. So, you smear a mixture of butter, sherry and pepper onto the breasts of the chickens (this is where you'd add the tarragon), and roast them over stock. As Nigella says, "Pour... stock into the bottom half of a roasting pan which has a grid that fits over, on which you can sit the chickens".


"French Roast Chicken", not "Tarragon French Roast Chicken". (And I'm going to make it again, properly, once I can get my hands on some bloody tarragon).

Now, the side dishes.

101. Foolproof Rice

I know I don't really need a recipe for rice, as I've got a rice cooker. But, a recipe is a recipe, so I was obliged to try rice the Nigella way. Her method's really weird - she says to turn the rice in some melted butter in a pan first, then to add the same volume of water to rice (normally I'd go double), and cook it on a super-low heat for, like, 30 minutes. It turned out fine, but strange. It was that bizzare Western-style rice which is really dry and separate, as opposed to being soft and clumpy, like normal. Anyway, I'm sticking to the rice cooker from now on.

102. German Leeks and Wine

The leeks are easy - you slice them into logs, and turn in butter in a pan. Then you pour some wine over (I used Noilly Prat because I didn't want to break into Dad's wine collection), and simmer until tender.

Nigella also suggests mangetouts and peas, but mangetouts were $12 a kilo. Yeah right!! I used sugar snaps instead, and just boiled them briefly with the ordinary peas.

My friends were running a bit late, so I just started the leeks and peas when they arrived. Everything else was ready, and able to sit around without going bad.


Foolproof rice, peas, German Leeks and Wine

I can't carve, and normally I get Mum to do it, but she was watching Midsummer Murders or something like that, so I had to try it myself. Chicken cooked this way is, in fact, so tender, that it is very easy to clumsily pull apart with a kitchen knife and tongs. And it tastes great! So juicy and tender, with the butter giving a wonderfully crisp skin.


My attempt at carving


An loves chicken fat

So yes, a fab dinner. All the elements (peas, leeks, chicken, rice) go together wonderfully, and are satisfying, but not bloating (which is a danger of menus in Nigella quantities).

And dessert...


Ta Da!

This is a gooooooood pie. The pastry is both crunchy and cakey (which I love!) and the filling is strongly lemony (which Adri loves). It was very sharp, and after taking a bite, we realised we desperately needed cream to go with. I didn't have any, so pulled a carton of Streets Blue Ribbon Vanilla Ice-cream out of the freezer, and dessert was saved. As Nigella says, it is a bit of a mess to cut up and serve, but it's so worth it! It's a damn tasty pie.

Everyone (apart from An, who's not into this sort of thing) had second helpings of my pie. Yay!


Adri & Bernard enjoying Pie


Pie

Wednesday Night Dinner – A Seville Orange Orgy

Yes, the Seville oranges are now in season. And I’m excited. Maybe a little too excited. I saw them for the first time last week at Victoria Market and snapped up 2.5 kilos, ready for Seville orange action.

I actually attempted making Seville Orange Marmalade the other day, but it didn’t work out. Stay tuned for a post on that disaster.

Tonight’s dinner, however, was the “Seville Orange Orgy” (so named by DG), and it was much more successful than the marmalade.

58. Scallops with Bitter Oranges (Basics etc.)
59. Canard à l'Orange (Basics etc.)
60. Petits Pois à la Francaise (Cooking in Advance)
61. Seville Orange Curd Tart (Weekend Lunch)
62. Shortcrust Pastry (Basics etc.)

My brother and I went to Box Hill today to pick up all the supplies, and I started cooking at around 4:30. Yes, that’s right, I started making pastry at 4:30, and the curd at 5:00pm… cutting it very very fine time-wise. Eeek.

The scallops and ducks come from the Basics etc. chapter, and are basically suggestions on how to use the seasonal Seville oranges.

For the scallops, you fry them in some butter for a minute on each side, then the corals, then deglaze the pan with Seville orange juice. Nigella says to serve them with watercress, but as watercress isn’t in the shops at the moment, I used some mixed lettuces.


Scallops with Bitter Oranges

Mmm… this was so delicious! Scallops are my favourite seafood, and I managed to find fresh ones on the half-shell today, which are so much better than frozen.

For the duck (I made two so we could have leftovers), you shove half a Seville orange in the cavity, and brush with a mixture of Seville orange juice and honey. Now, about the ducks themselves – Nigella says to use a mallard, and in fact DG warned me that I had to use the right species of duck.

“Don’t use the Peking duck duck as it’s too fatty and won’t crisp up.”

However, I don’t think our Australian butchers are quite as illustrious as the English ones, and the only ducks I could find at the poultry shop, without ordering them specially, were generic roasting ducks, species unspecified. (And I think that the ones I got were the “too fatty Peking duck” ducks). See, Nigella says 40 minutes at 210c for a duck, whereas the duck packet said something like 30 minutes per kilo plus an hour at 180c. I ended up using Nigella’s times and temperatures, but got worried about them burning before being properly cooked, and turned the heat down about halfway through. They cooked through, but weren’t very crispy.

There’s also a recipe for Petits Pois à la Francaise in Feast, which I’ve made heaps of times and absolutely love. The only problem with those peas (cooked in stock), is the resultant unpleasant “stock-breath”. However, How to Eat's Petits Pois are made stock-free. Fab! Even though you can make them a few days in advance (thus reducing the workload on the night of your dinner), I didn’t plan very well, and just made them tonight for tonight.

The ducks were really tasty, and we hacked at them hungrily with hands and knives (none of us are brilliant carvers).

Dad: ripping out a duck leg and putting it on his plate... F*#&! This is hot!

I prefer the How To Eat peas to the Feast ones. Yum. I’m so obsessed with peas right now.


Double Duck (what am I supposed to do with the neck? Do I cut it off or tuck it under?) + Petits Pois à la Francaise


Ducks from the rear

Dessert was the Seville Orange Curd Tart. FYI, for the pastry, I used half vegetable fat, half butter, because we had some vegetable fat sitting in the fridge. The pastry was flaky and light. Nigella suggests either shortcrust or sweet pastry, and I opted for the plain shortcrust. I think, though, that I'd prefer a sweeter, more biscuity pastry for this type of pie. The pastry-making process was, again, no drama. The only problem is that my flan tins are too large for Nigella’s recipes, so I’ve ended up with very thin tarts that can’t support their filling. I’ve got to go shopping for a new one, as there are quite a few tarts in How to Eat.

Making the curd is quite similar to making custard, which made me panic a little, but it wasn’t too difficult. It’s a mixture of eggs, extra yolks, sugar, Seville orange juice and zest, and butter, which you stir over a medium heat until it thickens and boils. I was being too timorous to let it boil properly, (didn’t want it to curdle) and just stopped when it got thicker. I then poured it into the pastry case, but I was worried the curd wouldn’t set, so I stashed it in the fridge until dessert time. Also, because of the thinness of the tart, I’ve got quite a bit of filling leftover, like a small bowlful… I might make a Victoria sponge or something to use up the rest.

The colour of the curd is fabulous…


Colour - very intensely orange


Tart – quite thin, and not terribly even


Gooey pie with double cream

I loved the vibrant, intense taste of the tart, but it was actually very, very sour. Perhaps my oranges were exceptionally sour or juicy. However, the tartness was offset easily, with a spoonful of double cream. I knew that double cream would be just right, because the mini lemon tarts that we serve at work have a quenelle of cream on top, and extensive taste-testing on my part has shown me that the sharpness of the filling is wonderful against the bland fatty cream.

Tonight's dinner was lovely, but definitely not something that can be whipped up for quick midweek meal. Thank goodness it's holidays now. I'm actually very tired now - 4 straight days of work, and very little sleep on Monday or Tuesday nights. After preparing that huge meal, I'm quite ready to pass out under the kitchen table.

Goodnight!

Happy Birthday Mum!

SARAH'S MOTHER'S BIRTHDAY DINNER FOR 11

Pea and Garlic Crostini
Roast Pepper with Green Olive Paste Crostini
Onion Tart with Green Salad and Sourdough Baguette
Roast Rockling, Pumpkin Purée and Mixed Mushrooms
A Moorish Cake

This is the birthday dinner I made for my mum. I spread out the workload over two days. Yesterday I made the cake, prepared the pastry and onions for the tart, roasted the pumpkin, and roasted the garlic for the pea crostini. And today, I did the rest!

48. Onion Tart
49. Rich Shortcrust (Basics etc.)

The first thing I did for this was make the pastry, following Nigella’s method in the Basics etc. chapter for rich shortcrust pastry. There’s really not that much to say about the pastry-making process, except that Nigella’s method is really stress free. (Although to be perfectly honest, sorry, I’ve never found making pastry to be intimidating, and I’m not exactly sure what all the fuss is about. Maybe I’ve just been very lucky and always come across very well written recipes, with clearly set-out instructions.) Ooh, but I did cut my finger opening the plastic crème fraiche tub.

Now, the onions. They’re sliced very finely and cooked to a fine brown mush. When you pour some Marsala over and let it bubble away, the smell is amazing.


Delicious Tangle of Onions

So, if you do this the night before, on the day itself, all you have to do is blind bake the case, add the onions, pour over a mixture of eggs and crème fraiche, and bake again. Easy! For blind-baking, I used an old packet of lentils which I bought a few years ago and never used.

50. Pumpkin Purée

The recipe says to wrap each piece of pumpkin, buttered, in foil and bake them. I had wrapped about half my pumpkin pieces when I ran out of foil. Disaster! But luckily we had some plastic Glad Oven Bags, so I put the rest of the pumpkin in them. I’d never used those bags before, but it says they’re ovenproof on the packet. They were fine, better than the foil, in fact.


Pumpkin in Glad Oven Bag. (Actually, it's butternut squash, because I'm too uncoordinated to chop up a large pumpkin.)

Once they’re cooked, you scrape the flesh out and beat it with a wooden spoon. I cooked the pumpkin last night, puréed it this morning, and re-heated it just before we ate it.

51. Mixed mushrooms

I cooked these this morning, and reheated just before serving. It’s a mixture of porcini, button, Swiss brown, shitake and field mushrooms, cooked in butter, with garlic, shallots and sherry. (I have no idea where to find chanterelles or trompettes de mort, despite a lengthy Google-search last week!)


Look at this enormous field mushroom in my hand!

After cooking it, it looked like an intensely-flavoured ugly black sludge, which was quite worrying, as I wasn’t sure how fussy my parents’ friends were. Or if they even liked mushrooms for that matter. Breathe, Sarah, breathe!

52. Pea and Garlic Crostini

All the crostini recipes (there are eight) involve thinly sliced, oiled-dabbed slices of baguette, which are toasted in the oven and then covered with a topping. My bread of choice was sourdough baguette from Laurent (bought yesterday), which I transformed into crostini at about 6pm (guests arriving at 7:30pm).

This filling is sorta like the upmarket mushy peas. But this one has oven-roasted garlic (done last night, with the pumpkin) in it. How I love peas!


Pea & Garlic Crostini – how very GREEN... it's a Miss Sixty shirt in crostini-form

53. Roast Pepper with Green Olive Paste Crostini

I chose this because my mum loves roast capsicum (aka peppers). And it’s supposed to be easy.(Nigella says to use store-bought roasted peppers and olive paste). However, I enjoy roasting peppers, so I did them myself. Furthermore, I couldn’t find any olive paste at Coles! I’ve since learnt that you can get it at Harrods, in London. Useful. It is my dream one day to be have the means to do all my food shopping at the Harrods Food Hall. But for now, I’ve got Coles Box Hill to deal with. What I could find, however, were these tins of green olives stuffed with anchovies, made by Carbonell. So I bought a couple of them, drained them and whizzed them up with a few teaspoons of crème fraiche (thus undercutting the sharp saltiness), to approximate what I imagine to be green olive paste. It looked khaki, and tasted fabulous.


Roast Pepper with Green Olive Paste

So, people arrived around 7:15-7:40, and were standing up, talking and munching on crostini until about 8:15.

Uncle Eric: You know ah, I don't like this green thing... peas. And I don't like capsicum.

Er, thanks Uncle Eric.

Uncle Richard: Aiya, you should try it. You don't know what you're missing. These are nice... munch... I like the capsicum, I like the peas.

Aw... let's invite Uncle Richard over more often!

Then, it was time to eat the pie. I stuck the eight grown-ups in the dining room, whilst the “children” – my brother (23 years old), our friend Tim (22) and I (21), were a bit more laid back in the kitchen. Stashing the guests in the dining room instead of the kitchen (which is where we usually eat) also meant that I could prepare the main course without being under the watchful eyes of my parents’ friends.

Aunty Ee-Ling: Sarah, you cooked all of this yourself? Wow, we should introduce you to my sister-in-law's sons, quite cute you know.


Dining room table set for grownups (8 of them) – baguette & bread rolls, onion tart, salad with basic dressing


Onion Tart close up

The onion tart is nice. The pastry is quite light and flaky, if a bit floury (my fault, probably), and the onion flavour is lovely. Also, because there were eleven of us, we only got small pieces – which I think was a good move, as I think it could get a bit rich in larger quantities. Mum absolutely loved it though - success!

Anyway, whilst everyone was eating my pie, I got started on the main course.

54. Roast Monkfish (I used rockling fillets)

According to the recipe, you fry the fish on either side before chucking it in the oven. I tried frying the first couple of pieces, and after two minutes of painful oil splatters and my fish not getting brown at all (so what’s the use in frying?), I gave up and just bunged all the pieces straight in the oven.


Removing fish from oven... check out my shoes

OK, so huge apologies to everyone… I was so frazzled (moi, frazzled?) but I didn’t get a picture of the whole table with the fish, pumpkin and mushrooms on it. And it did look lovely. Imagine me, graciously placing down the plate of white fish, the dish of orange pumpkin and the dish of black mushrooms on the table, smiling, saying “Enjoy your meal!”, and teetering delicately back into the kitchen in my high heels…

…then picture me, thirty seconds later, running from the other end of the kitchen, bursting into the dining room, exclaiming, “OH SHIT! I FORGOT TO TAKE A PHOTO! Mum, quick! Your plate still looks good! Give it here!”, and yanking it from her to quickly snap a pic.


Fish with parsley, mushrooms, and pumpkin puree


One plate - love the colour combo

Fish good. Pumpkin good. Mushrooms… incredible! It’s all about the porcini flavour. Despite my earlier doubts about our guests’ possible reactions to the mushrooms, they were the most popular thing all night. Everyone went back for seconds, and the dish was cleared. The clearing of a plate is always a good sign, and it’s even better when Nigella-quantities are finished!

Ooh, and don’t forget when you make this yourself, to use bread to mop up the black and delicious mushroomy juices. Preferably do this alone, straight from the pan once you’ve transferred the mushrooms to a serving dish – cook’s treat.

Dad: Oh that fish was fantastic. But you know what was really good? Those mushrooms! You know me and mushrooms, I can either take it or leave it… but those were good!

Aw, shucks Dad!

So after eating, everyone just sat around, talking, drinking and laughing. And then it was time for cake. The cake was very moist, and absolutely delicious! I actually think it's better than the Clementine Cake. And that blood orange syrup is absolutely insane...


Look at that red, red syrup


Mmmmmm – how I love that syrup.

My brother was unusually quiet all night. Well, he was up til 4:30 last night playing Tekken 5(tsk tsk), and had to get up early this morning for our tradition of birthday breakfast noodles, and then had an eight-hour shift during the day. But when he ate that cake...

Daniel: AWWWWWESOME cake. Well done.

So, despite all the "adventures" of trying to get all our supplies for the night, it was a fun and relaxed dinner! Phew!


Mum & I – Happy Birthday Mum!