Tag: Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater arrives in France

He’s here now.  Not in person of course.  But his books, nearly all of them, arrived with the removal van that brought much of our stuff over from England.

I love Nigel Slater. As a cook, I mean.  He takes such pleasure in all the messier aspects of making and eating food, as I do. Greasy fingers from extracting those last little bits of chicken flesh from an already picked-clean carcass.  Sticky hands from rhythmically kneading and transforming dough from a tacky, gluey lump into barrel-shaped silken responsive mass.  Spoons and fingers to lick after a cake and biscuit-making session.  Weirdly, I even enjoy, if it’s not TOO bad, the burning eyes I get when I absent-mindedly rub them after I’ve been chopping chillies.

During this kind of cooking session, Malcolm and I look at each other with mutual incomprehension.  ‘Want to lick the bowl?’  I ask.  ‘Ergh, no. Shall I get you some rubber gloves so you can keep your hands clean?’  He thinks I’m facing up with commendable fortitude to jobs on a par with sorting out a couple of messy toddlers after a glue-and-paint session. I think he’s missing out.

In the end though, it’s Nigel’s recipes I come back to.  He rarely worries about precise quantities, tasting and adjusting as he goes till the dish seems right. But he does celebrate ingredients in their season.  Here’s what I made the other evening from the remnants of one of Is@’s chickens, and a bag full of the spinach included in our panier of vegetables:  I found the recipe in Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch, Volume 1

Chicken Spinach and Pasta Pie.

Nigel reckons it serves 4.  I reckon 6 wouldn’t go hungry if they sat down to this lot.

spaghetti – 350g
cooked chicken – 500g (boned weight), roughly shredded
mushrooms – 300g
butter – a thick slice
olive oil – 3 tbs
double cream – 450ml
white wine – 2 glasses
spinach – 200g
parmesan – 140g + 50g

Cook the spaghetti in deep, generously salted boiling water. Drain and set aside. (A little olive oil will stop it sticking together.) Set the oven at 180C/gas 4.

Cut the mushrooms into quarters. Warm the oil and butter in a deep pan and add the mushrooms, letting them colour nicely here and there. Add the cooked chicken meat and then pour in the wine.

Bring to the boil, scraping away at the sticky remains at the bottom of the pan: they will add much flavour to the sauce.

Pour the cream into the pan, bring back to the boil and turn off the heat. Wash the spinach and put it, still wet from rinsing, into a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Let the spinach cook for a minute or 2 in its own steam, then drain it, squeeze it to remove excess water and chop it roughly.

Fold the cooked spaghetti, mushroom and chicken sauce and spinach together then stir in two-thirds of the grated parmesan and tip into a large baking dish. Scatter the remaining cheese on top and bake for 35 minutes until the top is crisp and golden.

An English Interlude

We were back in England for a while, getting our house ready to market.  Those TV makeover shows have got a lot to answer for.  It’s no longer enough to do a bit of casual dusting.  We de-cluttered surfaces, touched up paint, knocked the garden into shape, and even gave one room a total makeover (‘People are so thick’, advised one chap who’d come round to give us an estimate for removal. ’Just because you’ve got that room organised as a study, they won’t be able to see it as the house second bedroom.  If you can, get rid of all those books, and set it up as a bedroom’). So we did.  We boxed up several hundred books and put them in the garage, then covered the dark green walls in restrained buttermilk paint, and popped in a spare double bed we just happen to have, a chest of drawers, a bedside light or two.  Add an artificial orchid from Habitat, et….voilà…one genuine bedroom makeover.  And then we had to live in, and keep up with, all the unaccustomed tidiness.  We hated it.

But we did love being in England.  At least I did.  Here are my 13 reasons for happiness.  Definitely NOT in rank order

  1. Harrogate in crocus and daffodil season must be one of the loveliest urban sights in Europe.  The Stray, that splendid open parkland which girdles the southern part of the town, was all but submerged in a sea of purple white and orange crocus, gradually opening to reveal saffron coloured stamens as the sun teased the flower petals apart towards midday.  The crocus fade away to be replaced by an equally extensive display of daffodils. They were only just reaching their best as we left town, but we did at least see them.
  2. Radio 4. I had it on constantly. From Our Own Correspondent, Paul Merton on Just a Minute, Daniel Corbett’s animated and informative weather forecasts, Gardeners’ Question Time….. all to help the day go by as we scrubbed and polished
  3. Spending time with those fantastic twin boys, the grandchildren, as they discovered the new adventure playground in Harrogate’s Valley Gardens.
  4. Nidderdale LETS. What a great bunch of friends.  We’d organised a Task Force of willing members to tackle the overgrown jungle that was our garden. Naturally it rained on the day.  So everyone turned to in the house.  They scrubbed paintwork, wrapped ornaments, painted the above-mentioned bedroom, hoovered…And we all had fun, and lunch together.  How do people manage without LETS, or SEL as it’s called in France?
  5. Friends. We had little enough time to socialise, but those hours spent sharing time at our house, in Ripon, in Huby, and in various spots in and around Harrogate were all very special
  6. Charity shops. Whenever I’m in England, I spend time combing through the stock of books in all our local charity shops. With everything from the latest Man Booker winner to little-heard-of classics all going for anything from 30p. to a pound, why wouldn’t I want to stock up?  And this time, we off-loaded quite a few things too
  7. Freecycle. The amount of stuff that Harrogate Freecycle keeps out of landfill must be quite phenomenal these days.  And its members seem to be amongst the nicest people in town.  So we were glad to pass on some stuff to various happy recipients.
  8. Pontefract cakes. Nothing else quite hits the spot.  Oh, except perhaps luxury-end crunchy hand-cooked crisps from Marks and Spencer or Waitrose.  Chilli flavour.
  9. Power walking in the Valley Gardens, 8.30 a.m. Sunday morning, with Angela and Chris.  Best start to the week.  Not sure we really ought to call it power walking any longer though.  Power chatting maybe.
  10. Hot cross buns. When I was younger, Good Friday was the day of the year when we ate hot cross buns.  Maybe for a day or two after as well, but no more than that.  Freshly toasted and dripping with butter, the sugary cinnammon smells wafting through the kitchen, they were one of the food highlights of the year.  Now they’re available all the time, they don’t seem half so special.  But during this last English fortnight, Good Friday or no Good Friday, Malcolm and I made sure we got quite a few hot cross buns under our belts.
  11. Indian take-away. After hard days spent painting and cleaning, few things are more reviving than a good Indian take-away.  Hot, pungent, spicey, sour, the vivid flavours cheered us up and brightened our mood.  The French don’t know what they’re missing!
  12. Guardian and Observer. I know I could read Polly Toynbee, Nigel Slater et al on line.  But it’s really not the same, is it?
  13. Talking in English. The sheer relief of being able to chat, chunter, chew the fat, confide, discuss, digress, argue, amplify, explain, entertain, without pausing to consider whether I’ve chosen the right gender, the right word, the right ending.  Yes, perhaps this really is so precious it really needs to go right up to the top of the list at number 1.

The Broccoli Blog

There are two things I especially love about early spring.  Daffodils.  Purple sprouting broccoli.  The French don’t really do either.

Well, that’s not fair.  In the woods near here, in a few weeks, there’ll be swathes of delicate, rather pale and lovely daffodils blooming.  At weekends, people will go and pick enormous basketsful of them.  They’ll take them home and stick the flowers in vases, where they’ll last only a day or two before wilting in the indoor heat.  But the civic displays which for me are one of the glories of the UK simply hardly exist here.  No dual carriageways are planted with unreasonable quantities of brilliant yellow daffs announcing to every passing motorist ‘Spring is here!’  There are no newspaper headlines ‘Daffodils on the Stray’, featuring a couple of four year olds gambolling among the flowers.  No florists or supermarkets here have buckets of blooms ‘3 bunches for £1’.  I probably won’t buy any here if I can find them, as they’ll already be open and the joy of watching them unfurl won’t be an option.

Purple sprouting broccoli’s even more unknown.  I haven’t even found an exact translation.  Like other English here, if I want to eat it, I have to grow it myself, with seed brought over from England. For 9 months of the year, the large ungainly plants occupy more than their fair share of the vegetable plot, and really, half the time I wonder whether it’s worth it.  Well,  it is.  Today, I picked the very first handful of tightly closed purple heads, enclosed in a collar of dark frilly leaves.  And now I know that there’ll be enough and to spare for several weeks to come.

Such a special vegetable deserves to be more than a bit part, one of two veg. playing second fiddle to a plate of meat. This is the meal we cooked this evening, thanks to Nigel Slater and his newest book ‘Tender’ (Read it, even if you don’t cook much.  It’s as good as a bedtime story, though it WILL make you greedily hungry)

Pasta with Sprouting Broccoli & Cream

250g. sprouting broccoli

250 g. orechiette or fusilli

30g. butter

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

4 chopped anchovy fillets

250 g. crème fraîche

170 g. crumbled gorgonzola (well, we used Roquefort – you would round here)

Put 2 pans of boiling salted water on the stove.  Drop the pasta into one, and the trimmed broccoli into the other.  As soon as the broccoli’s tender – 3 or 4 minutes- drain it, wipe the pan, and return it to the heat with the butter, garlic and anchovies.  Let them cook slowly for a minute or two before adding the crème fraîche and cheese.  Bring to the boil and turn down the heat.  Add the broccoli, season with black pepper, and then add the drained pasta.

Cheap, quick, delicious, and a real celebration of early spring