You know that warm, fuzzy, happy, tight feeling you get in your chest when something is just really lovely? We call that Bursting Capsules and it's a feeling we're both fond of.
After the not-a-good-choice lammington I had some skinny spears with lemon juice, butter and parmesan. I ate it with my fingers, while watching An Education in my track pants and wishing I could have a sixties makeover like Carey Mulligan. And Sezza, you are SO right about Nigel. Pictures from here.
grilled lamb cutlets with mint, feta and thyme, it was simply the best and the fat rocked my world (I like fat, OK? I'm not sorry, it tastes too good)/ciabatta with hummus and fresh orange juice for breakfast all week, because I have heard that hummus is the healthiest spread for toast/scones made by mum with lots of butter and cream/vegetarian eggs benedict with a huge slice of avocado and parsley pesto (by far the best eggs benedict I've ever had, perfectly balanced and not at all sickening). You can get it from a cafe near the Parnell rose gardens/chicken livers with red onion. I liked the flavour but not the texture/a lammington from the Fridge - a hungover choice I lived to regret/countless pepperoni rolls from sals, the pepperoni fat crystallises at the bottom of the roll, making it a perfect cheesy juicy meaty scone-like treat and they're only $3 or two for $5/lemon pasta, this time without cream. You whisk olive oil, lemon juice and parmesan together, then mix it through the pasta with a huge pile of fresh basil/about 7 bubblegum flavoured iceblocks from the asian supermarket on K Road dipped in vodka/pork chops with thyme butter made with feta, thyme and a squeeze of lemon juice, melted in the pan with the pork juices, eaten with more ciabatta and a pile of rocket to make me feel less guilty/strawberry oreos(gross yet oddly compelling)/a hamburgini from Burger Fuel, which is a teensy burger (not quite a monkey fist) that has aioli, melted cheese, bread and butter pickles and tomato sauce, and is basically the most moreish thing you can eat for $4.95/avocado and feta with pesto on toast for an after dinner snack/sour lollies/rocket and cheddar scone at the art gallery with a short black and trashy mag/oh and last night I went to a bbq for my friend Max's birthday and the boys surprised everyone by getting all the meat from the organic butcher in West Lynn, so I ate a fairly rare steak and it was incredible.
Most things I cooked were taken from The Kitchen Diaries, which I bought last week, which takes my Nigel Slater recipe book tally up to three, which is possibly too many? Or NOT ENOUGH. <3 u Nigel.
Okay, Lou. This is a soup which my flat and I have made a few times now. It's based on a Nigel Slater recipe from Tender (surprise!)and is the perfect accompaniment for rainy nights spent watching the Wesley Snipes episodes of 30 Rock. I don't know if this qualifies as being "healthy" but it is totally vegetarian and requires the most mundane of ingredients (although I don't consider cauliflower and cabbage to be mundane at all).
So you get a head of cauliflower, chop it into wee florets and pop it in a pot with about 750mls of boiling water. Salt the water a bit, too. You want the cauliflower to get nice and soft (soft enough for a stick blender to decimate it). You could also add some slices of cabbage, which I enjoy because I think cabbage looks pretty while being boiled, kind of like the ghost of vegetables past.
While the veges are boiling away, chop up whatever onion-y things you feel like adding. As we are slaves to our vege-box, I tend to use whatever is in there, whether it be leeks, shallots, onions or garlic. I trust that you will trust your own tastes enough to figure out quantities. Pop them in a heavy bottomed, deep pot which has some butter and olive oil fizzing gently inside. Cook them til they are nice and translucent. Add a bay leaf or two at some point.
Once the cauliflower and onions are cooked to your liking, pour the cauliflower and its water into the onion mix. Bring to the boil, then cover, and simmer gently for about 15-20 minutes.
Remove the bay leaves, and get a stick blender out (or a masher...friends left their stick blender at our house after a dinner party so I can now attest to the blender working better)and gently puree the soup until it is a texture that appeals to you. I like to leave it a little chunky.
Now you get to pour in some cream and some grated cheese. I use Parmesan because it works well with the nutty flavours of the cauliflower. Nigel Slater would suggest a "hardy British cheddar". You could also add a spoonful of french mustard. Season it with salt and pepper, perhaps some nutmeg if you're so inclined, and some fresh herbs.
Serve the soup with some toasted crusty bread which has been lovingly slathered in butter.
END.
PS. The picture is from The Department Store's blog.Its called a "skyplanter" and I want one.
We get a vege box delivered, usually from here. We are thinking of trying this one, mostly because the website is so pretty and you can have things like fresh herbs and organic meats delivered too. I enjoy the idea of having all kitchen, nay, all household needs delivered to me.
I love the way a vege box forces you to eat things you wouldn't usually or try exciting new recipes. This has been greatly aided by my Nigel Slater vegetable cookbook, Tender, which you should definitely look at if you are interested in vegetables. One problem with vege boxes is that sometimes they give you way too much of one vegetable. We have three huge pumpkins at the moment. I've made pumpkin scones (wierd), pumpkin pie (wierd), pumpkin soup (good), roast pumpkin (duh), mashed pumpkin with bacon (moreish), pumpkin curries and pumpkin couscous...its all getting a bit much.
Last night, my flatmate and I were talking about the classic "if you had to choose, would you go without food or sex for the rest of your life?" question (assuming, of course, that you could survive on sex and not need to consume food). Neither of us hesitated when we chose the former. I could, I think, quite easily live without sex if I had a wide selection of creamy blue cheeses to eat and lots of asparagus. And prosciutto.
Perhaps that's because I've mostly lived with people who really appreciate nice food. I've lived with kitchen hands and stoner chefs in training, people whose parents instilled in them the desire to put delicious things in their faces. We'd cook epic meals together, have weekly roasts, make trips to Mediterranean, Indian, South African food warehouses to find new things (mostly cheeses...). We'd have long and obsessive g-chats about what to cook for dinner. * We'd pick blackberries from the abandoned council land up the road to make pies with. It all sounds rather twee but they're some of the least twee people I know.
In my current flat, we buy cookbooks and plan fancy-ish meals. We're getting an organic vege box delivered to us every week (it winds up being really cheap! And they're seasonal, la di da la la). That's not to say that we're amazing cooks, because we're really not. We eat an inordinate amount of pasta and cheese.
One of my favourite chefs in Nigel Slater. He's a cook after my own heart: everything is made from scratch, there's lots of butter, cheese and cream and not too much fluffing about with fancy things. He has writes casually but is clearly passionate. Comfort food is embraced, which is good, 'cos that's all I make.
When I found his column in the Guardian online it destroyed my workday. I went through about 500 pages of recipes, and then the "Ask Nigel" section. I also want his book about vegetables, called Tender.
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