homecooking

Cookbook Challenge Part 4: Nigella Express

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This Saturday we were busy visiting the University of Bolton. It’s hard to believe my eldest son is looking at universities already! We didn’t get home until 5pm, so I had already planned a quick menu.

I decided to make “Curry in a Hurry” which certainly sounded appropriate. I actually wanted to make a prawn and mango curry – I’ve had it before and it’s delicious, however my sons have an irrational dislike of sweet potato and butternut squash which are key ingredients in that recipe, so I tried this one instead.

This is a Thai green curry and is supposed to use chicken. I don’t eat chicken, so I replaced some of it with Quorn chunks, which are OK and at least everyone in the family will eat them. I also used another meat replacement: jackfruit – often used as a vegan alternative to pulled pork. You can’t buy it fresh here, it comes in a tin like this:

I used forks to shred the pieces of fruit and it did vaguely resemble shredded chicken. It doesn’t taste meaty at all, just slightly acidic and salty from the brine it’s canned in, but it soaks up flavours from whatever sauce it’s cooked in.

Apart from the extra task of shredding jackfruit that I gave myself, this recipe is really easy as it uses bought curry paste and frozen vegetables. It’s more of a suggestion than a recipe in fact, but it is still useful to have reminders of shortcuts like using chopped spring onions instead of peeling and chopping a big onion and using wok oil to add extra flavour with no effort.

It was very tasty and the coconut milk made it rich and filling. It went down well and the jackfruit was quite successful with no complaints about the unusual bits in the curry.

Curry in a hurry served with basmati rice
And Riesling which is supposed to pair well with Thai food

Dessert was a cherry clafoutis. I’ve had clafoutis before in restaurants, but never made it myself. It usually takes quite a long time to cook, but this is a shortcut version with a short ingredients list and short cooking time.

All I had to do was mix up a quick batter in the Kenwood Chef and stir in some ready prepared cherries. I added Kirsch as suggested, mainly because I’ve never used it before. Let me know if you have any suggestions for using up the rest of the bottle! It was worth using though, it soaked into the cherries and made the whole dessert taste a bit more luxurious,

I overbaked this a bit. I keep forgetting that I should reduce the temperature for my fan oven and I forgot to check on it while I was cooking the curry. Still, you live and learn, which was one of the aims of this challenge and it tasted good anyway. We had it with single cream, although actually I think creme fraiche would have been better.

(Update: we had the cold leftovers with cream the next day and that tasted even better.)

Not a bad meal at all considering it only took about an hour to make.

Nigella Express

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Not the best photo as the cover is quite battered!

This weekend we’ll be busy, so I’m turning to an old favourite from Nigella Lawson. Nigella will feature several times in this challenge, but this seems like the right time for Nigella Express.

The book was published in 2007 when I had two small children and a fairly demanding job, so anything with the subtitle “Good Food Fast” was always going to be appealing. There was a TV series too of course, with Nigella dashing home and showing us all kinds of short cuts to host a quick dinner party on a Wednesday night. I’m sure there was an episode which involved her doing some meal preparation with her coat on because she couldn’t even be bothered to take it off. That may sound silly, but I really have come home after working and picking up the children and by the time I’d got them inside, helped them get their coats and shoes off and got them a drink or whatever, then actually taking off my own coat and hanging it up really did seem a step too far. Anyway, I loved watching this on TV, especially the section at the end which involved Nigella coming down to the fridge in her dressing gown to finish up some leftovers.

I don’t think I ever did host a Wednesday night dinner party, but I know there were several recipes in here that saved us from yet another dish of stir fry or pasta in sauce. I’m looking forward to revisiting this.

Ottolenghi: Simple

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Cookbook Challenge Part 3

This week the book was chosen for me, as explained in my previous post https://bexknits.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/a-new-book-for-the-challenge/

It’s an interesting book to look through, with some unusual ingredients and combinations. There are lots of things I would like to try, but the son who chose the book also chose the recipes. He’s not a fan of aubergines or courgettes, ruling out a few things that I may try another time when I’m just cooking for my husband.

He picked a pasta dish for the main course – with pecorino and pistachios. This is basically a pesto recipe, but with chopped pistachios to add a bit of texture and a slightly sweeter flavour. The dish includes mangetout so there is a fresh vegetable in addition to the pesto sauce and another different texture. Mangetout is usually one of the easiest possible vegetables to use, however in this case you need to finely slice them all into diagonal strips – not difficult but not exactly simple either!

It was really good – plenty of sharp pecorino cheese, fresh mangetout and lemon zest and the crunchy nuts. I couldn’t get dried trofie pasta, so this is gemelli.

I made a side dish with this: tomatoes with sumac onions. It’s not the right season, so it’s not possible to get a variety of juicy heritage tomatoes like the ones in the picture, but I was able to get some reasonably ripe ones which I left on the windowsill to get as tasty as possible. I just wanted something red to contrast with the green pesto and also wanted to use the sumac as it’s one of the key ingredients in the book.

The sumac onions were delicious and really were simple and easy. I would make those again to put on other salads.

I like the red and green together on the plate. Both recipes contained basil and nuts, but the flavours were very different and a good contrast. My family loved this, including the salad.

Here’s the wine we drank with it. I wanted something Italian and I had read that Grillo should go well with pesto. It had a slight mineral taste which worked well.

Dessert was this honey and yoghurt cheesecake. When I bought my new Kenwood Chef I asked my sons what I should make and “cheesecake” was their first suggestion. It’s very easy to make the filling in the mixer and you can also crush the biscuits for the base in the food processor if you like, but I just bashed them with a rolling pin. That doesn’t make the crumbs as fine but is more fun.

The recipe said to strain the yoghurt in a clean tea towel. My pot said it was strained already, but I followed the instructions and more liquid did come out, leaving me with the quantity the recipe said I should have. It also left me with a tea towel covered in yoghurt. I think if I did this again, I would just tip the extra liquid out of the pot and avoid the mess.

Here is the finished cheesecake. The white chocolate helps it to set, although it was still quite soft and very creamy. The green leaves are thyme, which goes in the base and in the honey drizzle. I’ve never tried using thyme in a sweet recipe before, but it worked well with the Greek yoghurt and honey and no-one complained about having leafy bits in their dessert. I served it with apricots poached with Cointreau and cinnamon. For some reason I always think dessert should involve fruit.

Everyone thought this cheesecake was lovely. It was so smooth and rich without being too sweet. It definitely needs the lemon zest; even though it’s just one teaspoon it makes a big difference.

I did enjoy making this, although it took me a bit longer than expected (too much slicing mangetout!). It was a lot simpler than last week’s complicated pie and not too much effort to make something quite impressive that went down well with the family.