Food – Page 5 – The Walrus Blog

Slut’s spaghetti

ingredients This was a dish I had been wanting to make for a while, although I was told I had done it before. Well, I’m allowed to forget things sometimes. As you can see, I’m using a Nigella recipe. It’s all over the internet, along with the scene from “A Series of Unfortunate Events” in which the children serve it. The recipe is everywhere, too, and is very simple.

Lamb Tagine

Lamb Tagine needs harissa, and I didn’t have any in the fridge, so I made a batch. This is the red pepper being roasted so that it can be skinned. You just keep it in the flame, twisting and turning, until its skin is blackened in most places, before putting it in a plastic bag to cool. It will take ages to cool, and if you try to do anything with it before it has done, it will injure you with the steam from inside.

Here’s the pepper, waiting to scald the careless cook. Once it is cool, it has to be peeled, or you can look at it as scraping the cooked flesh off the burnt skin. The resulting chunks of cooked red pepper flesh should be chopped up. I didn’t chop this one, and discovered that the big chunks can somehow avoid the blades of the blender completely. I ended up having to fish them out and chop them.

Here are the coriander, cumin and caraway seeds, being toasted. Since I’m not giving you the full recipe, you can look at it here. There’s also chilli, garlic, lemon juice, and tomato paste in the harissa.

For some reason, no fresh chillis had grown in the garden, or appeared in the fridge, so I used dried ones, revitalised with some boiling water.

The tagine recipe is very similar to this Nigel Slater one. He must have a lot of money, to be able to put saffron in something that will totally obscure the flavour and colour, I think. My secret ingredient, that he doesn’t use, is preserved lemons, which you can see in the jar, here. They are wonderfully lemony, and you can taste them in the finished dish. They are also rather salty, so no extra salt is needed in the dish.

Dinner time! Cheers!

The cous cous is a good accompaniment for the tagine, but everyone seems to know their own way to make it. This one had our first broad beans in it, and a couple of runner beans.

Yes, thank you, I did enjoy it!

Italian Sausages and Polenta with a Chilli Tomato Sauce

I was supposed to be following a Nigella Lawson recipe when I made this. It’s supposed to be “Italian Sausages and Polenta with a Chilli Tomato Sauce”.

Well, we had no Italian Sausages, so I took some Tesco 97% pork sausages, and attempted to shorten the links by twisting them, so they were about the same length as the ones in Nigella’s book. They’re supposed to be fried in chilli oil for five minutes, to darken the skins, which was fun. Watching them untwist themselves back into normal links was fascinating.

As well as the Italian sausages, I didn’t have two jars of “high end” ready made tomato and chilli sauce. Some red onion, olive oil, two tins of chopped tomatoes, and some chilli sauce sorted that out. Another thing that wasn’t in the larder was Marsala. Cheap Spanish red wine and brown sugar went in instead.

Polenta. I chose not to use the “instant” ready made stuff, which had to be cooked for 15 minutes, and made it myself, which involved stirring more or less continuously for 45 minutes, and dodging the lumps of molten lava that were thrown out of the pan when the huge bubbles burst.

I think I’ll make normal bangers and mash, next time, with ketchup…

Salad days!

A little hard to see, perhaps, but along with the iceberg lettuce from the shop are homegrown mint, parsley, rocket and spinach. The feta cheese is the good stuff, but the olives are disappointing ones from a jar I was intending to use for olive bread. The greens were spritzed with Cretan balsamic vinegar, and drizzled with Greek extra virgin olive oil.

A cucumber and tomato salad, with cider vinegar, more Greek olive oil, and a dusting of Cretan oregano. The celery was at the side because I thought somebody didn’t like it.

Tuna and mayonnaise, with more sweet smoked paprika than I meant to use. I was told I could have used more mayonnaise, though I think less, with more tuna, would have been better.

Today’s bread…

Today’s bread was rather amusing, to start with. I began making it yesterday, a yeasted wholemeal loaf, and put it in the fridge overnight. When I got it out this morning, it had obviously carried on rising, and it seemed to me that the easiest way to get it out of the bowl was to flour the worksurface, and let gravity do the work. Then, I forgot it was there, and when I came back an hour or two later, I found it was now lifting the bowl up off the worksurface. At this point, I must say, I thought it must have finished rising, and would cook into a tasty brick. I shaped it anyway, and put it in a tin to see if it would rise any more.

Much to my relief, it hadn’t finished rising, and went from the state you see here to being at least an inch above the top of the tin by the time the oven was hot enough. So, I made the usual slash in the top to allow for oven spring, and banged it in the oven.

Here you go! Look at that stretched area on the side! There’s an enormous amount of oven spring! I will be very surprised if this doesn’t have a vast cave in its middle, but we shall see in due course…

Pulled Pork with Beans and Focaccia

Well, I hadn’t made it before, so it was really rather overdue. By this time, after all, it is no longer even trendy, and supermarkets are flogging it ready made.

Here is a mighty lump of pork, which has been marinating for about a day, in a mixture of spices. I could mess around and say it was a secret mix, but it was mainly mustard powder, smoked paprika, salt, and a few other spices that seemed like a good idea, but have now been forgotten. I suppose that makes it a bit secret…

Between that picture, and the next, you need to imagine the meat being sploshed with a mix of vinegar, water, and more spices, before being wrapped in foil, and put in a warm (about 100°C) oven for ages and ages. It must have been more than 8 hours…

While that was happening, I made a nice loaf of focaccia, as I didn’t really fancy the faff of making bread rolls.

And I made some beans in a tomato sauce. Those little Tetrapaks of cooked beans in your friendly Tesco are very useful for this sort of thing, although soaking dried beans overnight would have been more authentic. If only I had thought of that when I was marinating the meat!

The gravy boat contains the juices from the foil containment, with some added sriracha. It was a bit too runny to use in the meaty sandwiches, though. Next time I will boil it ferociously until it thickens.

It’s obvious I didn’t make a nice, green salad to go with it all, and it’s not just out of excessive carnivorousness. I just don’t think we would have been able to eat it. That’s a lot of food there, and I have since had to work out tasty uses for leftovers. No, dear reader, I cannot email them to you…

Pizza time

It was indeed time for some pizza. I made the dough rise faster than usual, by using a tad more dried yeast. On the left, you can see half of it, with tomato paste, pesto, anchovies, chorizo, and green and black olives. The mozarella is waiting patiently at the side.

Confession time. The dough recipe was for three or even four pizzas. Failing to read the recipe properly, I used half of it. So, it was natural I would be surprised by how much the dough had risen in its twelve minutes in the oven, on top of a hot stone.

This was my half, and I managed to eat almost all of it. I like the way the hot stone bakes the dough so evenly; there’s no sign of the soggy middle that can happen. In the next post, a dessert!