kitchen pleasures pt. 1
one week of food joy: an ongoing series
Saturday
Boquerones, garlic butter king prawns, caesar salad, sourdough, goats cheese curd, leftover green tabbouleh, cucumber, mint, cherry and goats cheese salad. Fizzy negronis, a pet nat, a sauvignon blanc. An M&S tiramisu.
I have been known to go overboard when feeding other people. The days of eight-dish Indian feasts with home made vegan (!) gulab jamun are not long behind me. I am trying to channel something different these days: the mediterranean way of focusing on the quality of ingredients and small dishes in combo.
A friend comes to stay for the night and we talk for hours. I do not want to spend all evening cooking. The goat’s cheese curd is from my local cheese shop, made from milk from cows in Blairgowrie, an hour and a half away. I serve it with sourdough from the shop down the road and a drizzle of honey, and we scoop as we chat. The boquerones are from the fishmonger across the road from the cheese shop, as are the butter prawns; the drinks are from the place just a few doors down. Caesar salad, I’ve realised in the last year, is one of the most exquisite things you can make: the anchovy mayonnaise, made from scratch with the orange-yolk eggs that cost a fortune and thick streams of oil, cures me of my lifelong hatred of anything that dares call itself mayo. The tiramisu is brought by our guest, and does not require any effort from me, so is perfect.
Sunday
Kimchi and curd toasts. Rollmop and potato salad
When our pal leaves, my partner makes kimchi. We go through kimchi like you wouldn’t believe; scrambled eggs, kimchi and tinned fish is becoming one of my go-to breakfasts. It feels like it’s fixing my only recently-recovered guts. Making kimchi is a simple process if you have access to gochujang, chinese cabbage, daikon (which we do, thanks to the Asian groceries in Shawlands); I don’t feel right now unless we’ve got a huge jar of it in the fridge, becoming ever more tart, spicy, sour. I have sourdough toast with goats curd and kimchi to use up the last of the curd and the previous batch of kimchi; a public service, if you will.
I have come to rollmops only of late. Over a decade of veganism will put you out of the way of fish products, and rollmops weren’t a thing in my house growing up, or at uni, or in Canada, where I was living when I stopped eating fish. Rollmops are herring fillets, pickled and rolled around a filling of onions and maybe, if you’re lucky, a gherkin; I imagine that Scandinavian people eat them while standing in snow. It’s hard to eat anything with them, given the strong taste, but I’ve found that leaning into the German/Scandinavian vibe just works: steamed or boiled potatoes, capers, gherkins, mustard, crème fraîche, vinegar, dill.
There’s a tie between rollmops and an ongoing writing project. Perhaps the more I eat, the better the writing will be. A working theory.
Monday
Mushroom bourguignon
For dinner we have Nigel Slater’s mushroom bourguignon, a recipe that I’m sure must annoy the French, but which is an excellent one if you’ve been avoiding the use of the mushrooms that come with your veg box, as I have. Like all good recipes, it’s got a fuck ton of wine in it.
Tuesday
A takeaway
Deep in the weeds of novel editing, arguing with myself over ages of small children and what season it is at specific points in the narrative, I order something in, a rare occurrence. This isn’t due to some sort of moralising; I eat out all the time, at the same places I would order from. It’s just that I often can’t be bothered to wait for 30-90 minutes when I can whip up my own dinner in 20 mins or less. When there’s a deadline afoot, though, once my brain is in the thick of it, taking it out is a risk. It takes me a good while—and often, hours of prevaricating—to really get into the zone of writing or rewriting, so once I manage it, I like to stay there, ending up working late into the night, and even when I go to bed my brain is going so much I then can’t sleep. But this is how it is.
Admitting to myself that I’m not going to cook, and with my partner working late, I take the opportunity to try Non Viet, a highly popular Vietnamese place in the West End, and the tofu curry and veggie spring rolls (I couldn’t rustle up a more interesting order) are just what I need as I am asking myself are there really too many instances of this specific vegetable in this novel?
Wednesday
Tinned mackerel, kimchi, one scrambled egg
Does eating spicy or highly fermented foods for breakfast kickstart your body and mind? This is a theory I am working on, of course not grounded in anything approaching science, but instead on my own experience. Some of my favourite breakfast foods include: roti with a really hot peanut curry; upma, the south Indian dish made (at least in the versions I’ve had) with cracked wheat and chillies, served with milk solids/curd and a really hot lime or mango pickle; anything with kimchi in or on or next to it.
I’m a big believer in breakfast, not least because I think it’s worth feeding your stomach something good when it’s just had 8-12 hours of emptying. By ‘good’, I don’t mean in a sense that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods; I think a croissant is a great choice (butter, health for both the soul and the brain), as is a smoothie, as is bacon and beans if that’s what you want. What I mean by ‘good’ is something that feeds a need: perhaps you need tons of grease and bread to soak up a previous night’s drinking. Perhaps you’re feeling a big bloated and period-sore and want to keep it light. Perhaps you want a single perfect macaron with an espresso because you’re leaning into the Parisian vibe. What I mean by ‘good’ is something that you think about, rather than just a sad bowl of cereal because that’s just what’s in, or a thin plate of austerity because you think it’s morally bad to start your day off with pleasure.
For me, these days, what I want is not to feel miserable in my body. For about three years I felt terrible most days, constantly bloated and exhausted and malnourished because I didn’t really want to eat, being swollen on the inside, and when I did my body couldn’t take fats and proteins and carbs and fat-soluble vitamins out of a meal. Ironically it was a bout of pretty serious food poisoning, plus a change of diet, that put me on the road to fixing it. These days breakfast is how I set myself up for continuing to feel better, and I want it to be packed full of stuff: fats and protein and vitamins and spice and ferments. And a cursory google tells me that probiotics—such as those found in kimchi—helps recovery from what I had. Perfect breakfast food it is, then.
Thursday
A classic smoked salmon bagel
At my local cafe they absolutely slather these in cream cheese. We’re talking half an inch thick before you even get to the salmon. Incredible.
Friday
Stanley Tucci’s favourite pasta
This year I’ve discovered audiobooks, and I knew I would make this recipe the moment I heard Stanley Tucci describe how he got angry at an old Italian woman because the courgette pasta she gave him—which she swore was basically only courgette and cheese—was the best thing he’d ever eaten (how could it be so?).
Let me tell you right now that if you haven’t ever made pasta, but you want to, you can. It’s actually incredibly easy. The most basic recipe is 1 egg and 100g of white flour per person. Yes, you can use 00; some would even say that you should. But you can just use your most basic plain white flour and a medium sized egg and just knead, then rest, then cut, then cook; in fact, my partner throws a little wholewheat into the mix and I think it makes it even better. Once you start, you will never go back.
The key to this particular recipe is, I think, in two things: a) don’t be shy on the deep frying front. This isn’t a health club. b) NOT doing the frying the day that you’re cooking. The recipe linked above instructs you to fry then carry on; this is not the way that either Stanley or his old Italian cook intended. Rather, you should deep fry the courgette the night before, then pat them dry, then pack them in a Tupperware with a sprinkle of good salt and leave them overnight. I am almost certain that this is what lets the flavours develop. This, and making sure you use good Parmesan or Pecorino, or a combination of both.
It says spaghetti, but any long thin pasta works; I served it with linguine, and it was divine. In fact, I would go as far as to say I am fundamentally anti-spaghetti. Don’t use spaghetti with this, because it is a shit pasta. The worst pasta. Instead, make any other long, thin pasta, from scratch, with your lover or a friend. This, to me, is what Friday nights are for: kneading fresh dough over your counter tops with music in the background; serving a steaming bowl of simple but sublime food to someone you love, with maybe a glass of wine as well. The week’s been hard. You deserve it.
Hard agree about spaghetti
Scrambled eggs doused in hot sauce is the only way I ever have mine! With a side of kimchi / red onion pickle - pretty sure pickles were made for breakfast! X