Looking Out To Sea

I’ve just been reading through the blog from the Kamikaze Cookery people and I’m pretty disappointed to be honest. They don’t apparently seem to like food. Rice apparently “tastes okay”; peas, likewise, “taste okay”. And all the recipes from various books that they do seem to turn out really badly. Why is it we never have these problems?

I’d like to think that a food blog would be a tad more excited about food than this. I know Helen is a lot more enthusiastic than that, and I’m pretty sure it comes across in her writing.

On Sunday I went out to hunt for a spice mixture and found nothing in the end. I did learn that the new Jenners food hall is a travesty of absurd proportions, which apparently only sells whisky and shortbread. And you know how hard they are to buy in Edinburgh. But no Ras el Hanout in the shops nearest the flat. Which is really annoying, because I saw some in Lupe Pintos on Saturday afternoon but thought we already had some…

On the way home after my failure of a shopping trip, I hid from the rain in Waterstones and picked up a copy of Crust, the sequel to Dough by Richard Bertinet. Bread porn!

Last night I sat down to watch the included DVD, which has a guide to making a sourdough ferment, a sourdough bread, and brioche. Brioche! Ah, how incredibly fat I could get eating brioche… there has got to be some reason I can invent for me to make a batch of brioche. They looked like a lot of work but were rather beautiful in the end, so I’ll have to come up with an excuse, however tenuous.

(In a related situation, I haven’t yet made the doughnuts from Dough. I need some hearty appetites to feed and a way to heat oil to the right temperature. We don’t have a chip fryer and when we made fried goujons and later calamari we were a bit hit-and-miss with the temperature of the oil. We don’t have a thermometer that would cope with that kind of heat.)

There are still many recipes from Dough that I want to try, so I certainly won’t be abandoning it. Crust instead has more unusual breads — like the afrementioned brioche, as well as bagels and pretzels — rather than the everyday stuff. There are also more tips that help to clarify a lot of what was written in the first book, and presumably teaching tips he’s learned since opening his school in Bath. Crust seems to be a very good complement to Dough in that regard: more focus on technique, theory and longer, more complicated recipes. You can feel free to learn what you can from the “difficult” book but apply that to the more straightforward recipes in the other.

The temperature this morning was colder than I would have wanted. At some point I think Christmas might happen. And there are a selection of heartier loaves that I’ve been leaving off until the weather begins to get this way. I even owe Nick a loaf of something that I can’t recall. It was brown with interesting things in it — shallots may have been one of the ingredients. (But then again he owes us about a million cooked meals by now so I probably shouldn’t feel too guilty.) Time to buy in another load of flour and crank up the oven…

Last night we all went out to A Room In Leith, which was called The Waterfront when I visited with my work early last year. Food was good, though they’d run out of potato wedges by 8 o’clock so all the steak eaters got asparagus instead. Most of my table had some kind of steak, apart from Emma’s swordfish and my coley. I’d never heard of coley before but it was really tasty on its bed of scallops.

The restaurant is just one room, and the rest of the building is a nice pub with the appalling name of Teuchter’s Landing. It has a dizzying, indeed terrifying, selection of whiskies for sale. Which goes some way to explaining why I didn’t get my ciabatta started until about 10.30 this morning. Pounding dough on the work surface, Bertinet-style, is a lot less relaxing with a drink-induced headache. Thankfully the bread came out really tasty and soft, though not as pretty as I’d hoped. I have trouble with the shaping of my loaves but it’s not something that’s cheap to practise — there’s a lot of preparation involved before you get to the shaping stage.

I’ll let Helen tell you about the rest of the food when she’s good and ready. At the moment we’re both feeling sluggish and brainless with cold symptoms. There probably would have been nothing better than watching more Battlestar Galactica this evening. I’m becoming more desperate and thus more tempted by the Seasons 1-4 + Mini-series + Razor boxed set.

Ciabatta di Como
©

After last week’s unfortunate and not well-received brunch we need to make amends. The first thing to do is to make some nice bread to compensate for the Nigella bread which was quite nice but chock full of allergens. Nuts, as they say.

So I was up a wee bit earlier than usual to start a biga for the bread. A biga is a stiff mixture of flour, water and yeast which you let sit for a day in its bowl. By the end of this the yeast has created a light, bubbly mixture that’s a bit like dough. You can then build up a proper dough around this base for bubbly breads like ciabatta, which is what I’ll be making with it tomorrow morning.

It may be hard to tell, but we’re doing a metric crapload of cooking at the moment. I know, you would never have guessed. The real trouble with cooking (apart from the time, and the expense and the motivation and…) is finding people who want to eat food! Hard to believe, but people apparently have lives and obligations which take precedence over free food. Can’t understand it, myself.

Luckily Nick had no life excuse and came round to help us with a Thai curry this evening. We had a good laugh and great food, which you can read about on Helen’s blog right now.

That means we’ve done at least one recipe every day this week, in case you were having trouble with the numbers. Obviously that might not seem odd — doesn’t everyone eat several times a day? — but let me tell you it’s fraught with difficulty. Getting someone round for a relaxing evening and still getting through a recipe was quite gratifying. We often end up very stressed when there are lots of people coming for a meal, which probably makes everything seem all the more awkward.

I guess that’s the perils of entertaining.

Had a fun time this evening making bread, making plans and hacking on the Nigella Express challenge evaluator gizmo to print us a list of pending recipes. These are the results. Still quite a few, eh?

Everyday Easy

Roast Poussin and Sweet Potatoes Workday Winners

Prawns with Maryam Zaira Sauce

Saké Sea Bass and Wilted Greens

Caribbean Creams

Retro Rapido

Mouclade

Cheese Fondue

Crêpes Suzette

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Get Up and Go

Chocolate Croissants

Frittata Party!

Quick Quick Slow

Lamb, Olive and Caramelised Onion Tagine

Lamb Shanks with Beans

Coq au Riesling

Swedish Salmon

Sweet and Sour Cucumber Salad

Warm Potato Salad

Gravlax Sashimi

Lazy Loaf

Against The Clock

Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge Sundae

Instant Calmer

Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie

Grilled Cheese and Slaw, and

Sandwich Slaw

Butterfly Cakes

Doughnut French Toast

Razzle Dazzle

Green Apple Martini

Ginger Pom

Potato Cakes with Smoked Salmon

The Instant Canapé: Quick Crostini with Avocado and Green Pea Hummus

Tuna and Crab & Avocado Wraps

Scallops-on-the-Shell

Griddled Venison with Pink Gin Apple Sauce and Roast Pencil Leeks

Tarte Fine Aux Pommes

Glitzy Chocolate Puddings

Blackberries in Muscat Jelly

Ginger Passionfruit Trifle

Speedy Gonzales

Mexican Chicken Salad with Tomato and Black Bean Salsa

Chopped Ceviche and Mexicola

Flan

Margarita Ice Cream

Buñuelos

On The Run

Lunchbox Treats

Mini Meatloaves

Buttermilk Roast Chicken

New Orleans Coleslaw

Cloudy Lemonade for a Sunny Day

Hey Presto

Pappardelle with Escarole

Lamb Cutlets with Chilli and Black Olives

Liver with Bacon and Charred Onions

Marsala Honey Pears with Gorgonzola

Peaches in Muscat

Amaretto Syllabub

Holiday Snaps

Snowball

Christmas in a Glass

Pomegranate Bellini

Rouge Limonade

Martini Olives

Maple Pepper Pecans

Cocktail Sausages

Festive Fusilli

Seafood Pot

Broccoli and Stilton Soup

Butternut Squash with Pecans and Blue Cheese

Turkey Tonnato

Spiced Peaches

Chocolate Pistachio Fudge

Quickly Scaled Mont Blanc

Mincemeat Parcels with Bourbon Butter

Holiday Hot Cake with Eggnog Cream

Steeped Christmas Fruits

Seasonal Fruit Salad

Hot Toddy

Storecupboard SOS

Golden Honey Mustard Dressing

Wasabi Lime Dressing

Merguez with Halloumi and Flame-Roasted Peppers

Curry in a Hurry

Nutella Pancakes

Clafoutis

Vanilla Apples with Sweetheart Croûtes

Hey folks, sorry for the radio silence. We’ve been busy laying on the adipose tissue for winter and haven’t had much spare blogging time. We’ve been doing at least one Nigella recipe every day this past week. In proper Hobbit style we had two breakfasts this morning. Put that Longbottom leaf in your pipe and smoke it!

We have still more to come this weekend. Tomorrow we will be cooking an outlandish lunch for 6 or 7 people. I hope it all goes well. I have to put together some flatbreads this time. They seem to be a bit like focaccia but without the height — you know, flatter. The problem of course is that I don’t have a big enough oven or enough baking trays to handle even the quantities mentioned in the recipe.

The weather outside now — as I look up the street from my sofa, along Leith Walk to Calton Hill — is dreich. The column at the top of Calton Hill is just disappearing in the haar. I’m sitting in here listening to Debussy and thinking about another cup of tea. I learned the other day that we have no drinking chocolate left. This seems like an oversight. I’m pretty sure it will become very appropriate as the weather veers towards the permanently wintry.

Squared circle tea cup
© Ben Haldenby

We were invited out by a friend for “a cup of tea” last night. The cup was actually made of glass and the tea of the Sauvignon blanc variety from Chile. A bit bold for a Tuesday night but there you go.

After the second “cup of tea” I moved onto actual tea, and a slice of lemon, basil and poppy-seed cake. I’d never tasted a cake with basil in it before. Really good stuff. When I get a free moment maybe I should make some more cake.

In fact, Nick mentioned the other night that The Breadwinner are doing classes in cake, pastry and breadmaking. So maybe I’ll just get Nick to make all the cakes instead. How’s that sound, Nick?

I need to concentrate on the breadmaking anyway. I had intended to do some last night, but found I was short on flour and had the above invitation, so put it off. I did bake two more pains de mie on Sunday night, which make good sandwiches for lunch.

Finally, on the subject of food and cooking, this is how the Nigella challenge looks at the moment:

Recipes to go      103
Days to go         126

We’re not quite at the one-a-day stage yet but we can’t afford to start slacking. We are 46% through the book and 66% through the year. We got through two recipes last night and there will be at least another one tonight. At this stage we have to start planning things with a bit more precision. It would be very easy to end up with some very awkward banquet dishes to work through in the last few days of the year.

We will probably be calling on volunteers. If you think you’re up to the challenge, of course.

At the weekend I expanded my bread experience a bit more, with some ciabatta. They’re a long time in the making — twenty-fours for the ferment and a few more to actually make the bread — but they’re definitely worth it to start the week in style. The recipe makes four loaves, which is quite enough for us. Any more and I would have run out of space in the bowl and on the baking tray.

Lunch today was a half ciabatta with tomato, basil and mozzarella. This evening we had more ciabatta, drizzled in olive oil and covered in tomato and bacon. Helen’s brother was supposed to pop round to take one home after a hard night’s playing, but he never turned up. We can only suppose he forgot and went out to the pub. He doesn’t know what he’s missing!

For tomorrow I am going to make some mint-infused milk, for an orange and mint loaf that I’ve had my eye on for some time. I must remember to buy some oranges on the way home from work tomorrow.

We finally got our act together and saw some stuff at the festival on Wednesday.

• Aeneas Faversham Forever by The Penny Dreadfuls

  These guys have been steadily building quite a name for themselves, mining the rich seam of Victorian-era comedy. In previous years the show has been sketch-based, but this time there was a reasonably neat plot holding it all together. Lots of opportunity to play up conventions of Victorian melodrama, sinister cults, Holmes detective stories and such. Also, pant-splittingly funny.

• The Rat Pack, Live! (I can’t find a link for these guys anywhere… or at least, not a definitive one. Everyone seems to do these Sinatra et al tribute shows.)

  A reasonably short show, with three guys playing the parts of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr and three gals as the Berelli sisters. It was one of the harder tribute acts I’ve seen, because the three guys looked so incredibly young. When “Dean Martin” came out drunk and dishevelled halfway through the show he looked more like a rebel schoolboy than a Vegas superstar. Music was still helluva fun though.

Between the shows we went to a restaurant, but ran out of time for a final course. Thankfully the jazz show was quite short and there was still time to nip out for pudding later:

• Black Bo’s is a vegetarian restaurant on Blackfriar Street that doesn’t get the popular acclaim of David Bann’s on the next street along. Bann’s is not my kind of place — too cold and severe, I think. Black Bo’s is more relaxed and casual.

  I had a bit of problem deciding which of many dishes to have. (Helen went for two starters in the end, if I recall correctly.) Eventually I trumped for the “baby corn balls” because I couldn’t work out what that meant. It turned out to be breadcrumbed balls of brie with lumps of baby sweetcorn inside. Incredibly good.

• We visited The Outsider after the second show. I had the chocolate brownie with strawberry shortcake ice cream. It was really good. I wish there had been more of it, and more space in my stomach too! Service was a bit sleepy but so was I. A magic portal back to my bed would have been ideal after all that.