I’ve been doing a lot of travelling this past month. Three countries and another state within Australia. On trip was so close that I had one day at home before leaving for another. So in between trips I cooked at home and given the richness of the dishes I was eating while travelling I was determined to make something delicious but also healthy. Enter the lentil bolognese in between frantic packing and swearing.
Mr NQN chose to watch from a distance, wary that at any moment I would envelop him in my hurricane of activity and sweep him up and deposit him somewhere that he didn’t want-in the middle of housework most likely.
“Are you ok? I love you, you know that, right?” he said trying to calm me down.
I stopped my activity and looked at him. What did he mean by that I wondered?
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| November 18th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
“I gave her the recipe” the woman sitting in front me at the movies said to her friend.
“You shared your recipe? I’ve been asking you for the recipe for over a year!” the other woman exclaimed, hand to her décolletage in an outraged and offended manner.
“Well I had to, she was the Graham’s boss’s wife” she said grudgingly and then sniffed and turned away. She turned back to her friend a few seconds later and said “but I left out two of the most important ingredients!” They both giggled conspiratorially and I hid a little smile.
Many protect their recipes like they were precious secrets-I understand the instinct to protect them but doing what I do, I’m always one to share a recipe, after all what would the blog be if I had left out the secret ingredients that turn a pale recipe into a blockbuster? And I’m always so delighted when I meet people that are generous with a recipe or a secret cooking tip too. When I met Mrs Kim through her daughter in law Rochelle who is engaged to one of Mr NQN’s friends, Mrs Kim’s son Kevin (long story) I asked Mrs Kim if she had a recipe for bulgogi beef. My entire family, and including my “Cantonese only food” father love the perfectly seasoned, umami flavours of the bulgogi beef marinade and the tender beef and had only seen marinade mixes in bottles at the store.
“Oh that’s easy!” Mrs Kim said to me laughing and I took out my notebook and a pencil and happily took down her recipe. It was fabulously easy and could not wait to go to the store to buy the ingredients. As my parents are newly converted lovers to bulgogi beef traipsing off to the south western suburbs to buy the meat and cook it at home, my mother was curious to see what it was like.
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| November 2nd, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
A few years ago when I was first getting to know Mr NQN’s family, B.B. (Before Blog) I was always the cake maker for family birthdays. I still am at times, although because of the amount that I travel I can’t promise that I can make a cake. And one time I made a cake, it was an absolute disaster.
I was trying to make a good impression on the Elliotts. I wanted to show them that city folk weren’t all Type A personalities (but by trying to prove this I was actually being quite Type A). Mr NQN’s brother the Assman was having a birthday and I promised that I would bring a cake. For an indication of how new I was to the fold I decided to make a pavlova which meant that I had no idea about the no egg rule for his mother which I would later learn in resounding detail. I decided to make Nigella’s chocolate pavlova with raspberries because it was delicious and easy too.
That afternoon I diligently cleaned the beaters and bowl even running a cut lemon over them to ensure that there was no trace of fat on them )this was of course years ago and I now fly by the seat of my pants and just hope that there is no fat on the beaters!). I borrowed my mother’s Tupperware cake transporter and sat the pavlova inside it, added the cream onto it along with the raspberries and chocolate shavings. We took the cake box along with us in the car (and why are there so many speed bumps?). The birthday dinner was at an Indian restaurant and the staff placed it in the fridge until dessert time.
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| October 13th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
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Sometimes I’m not a very good wife. Sometimes I do things that I want and drag Mr NQN along as a somewhat unwilling participant. The restaurant visits, well they’re fine as he gets fed but the shopping and the movies, now that tests his patience. There was the time I took him to see a movie called “Bright Star”. I didn’t actually tell him what it was about on purpose (a movie about the last three years of poet John Keats’s life). He turned to me a few minutes into the film looking alarmed and searching for the exit. “Where on earth have you taken me?” he asked panicked. I mean this was a chick film and then some.
He fell asleep during it head leaning back against the headrest in his loudest posture of protest possible. I had to make it up to him and that was to do something or make something that he likes. And every time I ask him to come and do something that he doesn’t want to with me, I am only too happy to make him something to make up for it.
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| September 29th, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
“Turn left!!” I tell my father from the back seat watching in horror as he turns right into the cross city tunnel taking us in the opposite direction that we want to. We are running late for our date with Chef Kumar the chef and owner of Aki’s and Abhi’s Indian restaurants. He is going to show my mother and I how to make a curry paste from scratch-or so we thought…
Escaping the tunnel and arriving at Aki’s breathless and panting we meet Kumar. “Cooking has to come from here (points to heart) and not here (points to his head)” says Kumar Mahadevan, chef and owner. Aki’s has just been given its first chef’s hat in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Awards and is the only hatted Indian restaurant in Australia while Abhi’s, well that remains a perennial Inner West favourite packed every night including Monday nights.
I must admit that I don’t often make Indian food at home as I want to stay away from using bottled pastes and sauces as much as possible and yet I don’t often have the recipes to make my spice pastes from scratch. I invited my mother along as she is a keen curry maker so I knew that she would be interested in this.
Which brings me to my next point “I don’t believe in spice pastes” Kumar says. I look around. Hmm okay, I have come for a lesson on how to make my own Indian spice pastes and he doesn’t believe in them? He explains further that most spice pastes are meant for convenience but at his two restaurants, each sauce is made from scratch using different flavour combinations. Unlike say French cuisine where there are five master sauces, Indian cuisine has a multitude of different sauces and even within a huge country such as India, people find themselves as strangers to the cuisine from another area.
South Indian cuisine tends to be lighter, more watery and spicier whereas North Indian cuisine tends to be richer, creamier with more cream, butter and nut sauces. He explains the origin of the very popular butter chicken. It originated 60-70 years ago in Delhi where a chef had some leftover Tandoori chicken. He made a tomato, butter, cream and garlic sauce and that’s how we find ourselves with butter chicken. And check out this vat of butter chicken sauce being made. That’s a lot of butter (or buttah!). And Kumar tells us that the best results are achieved with a tandoor oven as that imparts a smokiness to the chicken that is hard to replicate at home.
A pot of butter chicken sauce-now that’s a lot of butter!
But now onto the recipes. Today we are making my favourite curry a palak paneer. How long will it take? Once the mise en place is prepared, just 15 minutes. Palak Paneer is a delicious and very healthy curry made up of a spinach puree with cubes of Indian cottage cheese.
The spice drawer
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| September 23rd, 2011 by Not Quite Nigella
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