Nigella Bites (12 page)

This is the chick pea recipe I return to again and again, with some variation in herbs used; here I’ve added thyme for aromatic balance with the fish, above. If it helps, replace the fresh thyme with dried thyme (as long as it isn’t stale and years old) and the fresh red chilli with a dried hot chilli pepper.

There are three things I feel you should know about chick peas. The first is that they need longer soaking than anyone tells you (24 hours for preference); the second is that they take longer to cook than anyone tells you (1½–2 hours is what you should be reckoning on); and the third is that they will be more buttery, velvety and nuttily tender than you could ever imagine if you make up Anna del Conte’s paste of flour, bicarb and salt and add it to the soaking water.

I know long soaking and long cooking make these chick peas seem a bit of a palaver, but nothing’s hard, in the first place, and what I find makes life generally easier is that you can cook them in advance. This means that all you really need to do on the night is make the tomato salad, heat up the chick peas, or turn them in the chilli and so forth, quickly fry the fish and you’re away. So in fact, despite lengthy (but not tricky) preparation, this makes for a swiftly and easily assembled drop-dead dinner.

500g chick peas

2 tablespoons flour

2 tablespoons salt

2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

1 onion, halved (don’t bother to peel it)

6 or so sprigs of thyme

60ml olive oil (not extra-virgin)

Maldon salt

1 red chilli pepper

1 onion

2 fat cloves garlic

leaves from 4–5 sprigs of thyme

60ml olive oil (not extra-virgin)

Maldon salt

good slug extra-virgin olive oil

Soak the chick peas in enough cold water to cover generously and make a paste up with the flour, salt and bicarb and a little more cold water. Add this to the soaking chick peas (I just dunk in the bowl I’ve mixed it up in). Leave for 24 hours.

Drain and thoroughly rinse the chick peas in a colander under running cold water in the sink. Tip them into a large saucepan, cover abundantly with cold water and add the halved onion, sprigs of thyme and olive oil. Do not salt: at this stage it would make the skins tough. Put on a lid, bring to the boil and let bubble away for an hour and a half. At this stage only may you take off the lid to see how cooked the chick peas are; you may also now add salt. If they’re cooked, you should lower in a measuring jug to remove about 500ml of the cooking water; otherwise keep going until they’re ready.

Once you’ve reserved your chick-pea cooking liquid, drain the chick peas and remove – with tongs for ease – the bits of onion and thyme. This doesn’t have to be ruthlessly carried out, but just get rid of any obvious bits. Once cold you can Tupperware the chick peas, tossing them first in olive oil to prevent drying, until you need them; or else cook them through to the final stage, let them cool and refrigerate them in a covered container or clingfilmed bowl.

Roughly seed and chop the red chilli pepper, peel and chunk the onion, press on the garlic cloves to loosen, then remove the skins, bung everything, along with the thyme leaves, into the processor and blitz to a pulp. In a large, deep frying pan or casserole – whatever suits – pour the oil and, when warm, tip in the pulp from the processor. Sprinkle with salt and cook gently, stirring occasionally, for 5–10 minutes or until soft. Add the chick peas and turn to coat, then pour in about half the chick-pea cooking liquid and bring to a bubble. Put on a lid and let cook gently till the chick peas are hot and soft; you will probably need to remove the lid at the end of cooking to let excess water evaporate. If, however, you run out of liquid before the chick peas are tender and soused enough, simply add more of the reserved water.

When the chick peas are ready, turn into a large bowl, or keep in the pan in which you’ve cooked them, and add extra-virgin olive oil: drizzle then stir and keep going until the chick peas are glossy but not too thickly slicked. Sprinkle over Maldon salt and some thyme leaves if you feel like it (and happen to have some scattered anyway over the worksurface – you might well at this stage) or leave them simply oiled and salted.

EGYPTIAN TOMATO SALAD

I found this salad in a lovely little book – ‘a memoir with recipes’ – called Apricots on the Nile, by Colette Rossant. And although it sounds a lot of bother blanching and peeling the tomatoes, all in fact it involves is leaving the tomatoes for a few minutes in a bowlful of just-boiled water, after which their skins will come off without any trouble. It is worth doing this: the tomatoes will be more seductively tender and the nubbly dressing then permeates them better.

If a shallot is beyond you, use the white parts of two or three spring onions.

1 shallot, peeled

1 clove of garlic, peeled

3–4 tablespoons olive oil

salt and pepper

5 medium-sized vine tomatoes (approx. 750g altogether)

good squeeze of lemon juice

Maldon salt

handful freshly chopped chervil

Chop the shallot and garlic as finely as is humanly possible – or just blitz to a pulp in a processor – and put in a small bowl with the oil, a pinch of salt and a grinding of pepper, and leave to steep while you blanche the tomatoes: that’s to say, put them in a large bowl then pour boiling water over them so that they are hotly submerged. Leave for 5 minutes then tip into a colander and run under cold water. Using a sharp knife, peel off the skins (which is now easy), then cut these fuzzy spheres into slices, as thick or as thin as you like (I like them somewhere in the middle). Arrange the tomatoes in a dish and pour over the dressing, using your fingers to mix well. I find it easier to use one bowl for steeping purposes and another one, later, for serving. You can let the tomatoes sit like this for a good couple of hours. Yes, some liquid will collect, but the flavours will deepen wonderfully.

When you’re ready to eat, either leave the dressed tomatoes in the bowl or decant to a new one, but either way, using your hands, turn them to coat, squeeze over some lemon juice, and sprinkle with Maldon salt and a tablespoon or so of freshly chopped chervil. Use another herb if you like, but there is one inflexible rule governing this salad: it must be served at room temperature. Leave it in the fridge until the last minute and all will be lost.

CHOCOLATE POTS

Despite my antipathy for the ramekin-bound and single-portioned, I make no apology for these. Partly, I suppose, it’s nostalgia: when I was a child, these dense, dark, just-solid offerings, known more familiarly then by the French tag, petits pots aux chocolats, were the dernier cri in bistro chic. Then they were served, as they still are in France, in small white amphora-shaped vessels, small urns with their curved handles, in relief, tilting upwards towards the expectant eater. There’s nothing to stop you using them now; I would if I weren’t so sold on the Polystyrene cups recast in porcelain that you see below. The silky chocolate mixture contained within them is just mousse without the whisked egg whites, easier to make and somehow less vulgar, for all the daintiness of their presentation.

The method used to make them is ludicrously simply and done, necessarily, in advance. You just process the lot, pour them into small containers (coffee cups would be fine: there’s no need to make a production out of it) and sit them in the fridge to set. I stumbled across this method in one of Nick Nairn’s books. He, in turn, got it from Hilaire Walden. I’ve tinkered somewhat with the traditional flavours, adding spices to bring to this the aromatic richness of Mexican hot chocolate (or so I, in my unfounded fantasy, like to think) which tempers the uncompromising richness of the confection without losing its seductive intensity.

This makes 500ml altogether: enough to fill 8 little pots of approximately 60ml. But if you’ve got only bigger cups, just augment quantities.

175g best quality dark chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa solids

150ml double cream

100ml full-fat milk

½ teaspoon real vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon allspice

1 egg

8 x 60ml pots

Crush the chocolate to smithereens in the food processor. Heat the cream and milk until just about boiling, add the vanilla and allspice and pour through the funnel over the chocolate. Let stand for 30 seconds. Process for 30 seconds, then crack the egg down the funnel and process for 45 seconds.

Pour into whatever little cups you’re serving in, and sit them in the fridge for 6 hours or overnight. But remember to take them out of the fridge a good 20 minutes before you want them to be eaten; the chill interferes with their luscious, silky richness.

KITCHEN SUPPER FOR 6 – 8

Aromatic lamb-shank stew with couscous

Crème brûlée

The specification that this is a kitchen supper holds only notional weight: along with most people in the country, I have no dining room. The gracious option is one, then, not open to me. So what I mean here is a dinner party that concentrates on getting friends round the table and feeding them well. There’s no starter, the main course is a vast bowlful of unkempt stew; pudding, however elegant, comes in one big dish, to be plonked down and dug into unceremoniously.

AROMATIC LAMB-SHANK STEW

Don’t let the word stew put you off. Yes, I know it’s crippled with connotations of school-dinner gristle and gluey-gravied mess, but the lamb shanks here are anything but that. Of course, you could use shoulder, cut into greed-satisfying chunks, and it still wouldn’t be compromise, but the bone in the shank gives such rounded richness of flavour and there’s something so unpretentiously satisfying about the great meaty hunkiness of it on the plate. Since supermarkets now routinely stock (or will order in) lamb shanks, and since they’re both meaty and cheap, it makes sense to seek them out for this.

The spicing, the muddy softening of the lentils within, owe something to Moroccan cooking, but only obliquely. I’ve used the seasonings – Marsala, soy – I have regularly to hand (unlike restaurant chefs, I don’t re-kit my non-existent pantry for each new recipe) to bring to it the mellow depth I want to find.

As with all stews, this is even better made in advance and reheated; for me, this only makes things easier. The couscous, however, needs to be made last minute. If you don’t own a couscoussier (and there’s no reason why you should) just steam these grains above boiling water in an ordinary vegetable steamer. Of course it’s possible to cook couscous just by steeping it in boiling water (and check packet instructions for directions) but I can’t honestly tell you it will make them as fluffily light.

Otherwise, with this aromatic, sauce-rich stew, just serve plain rice – or a bowlful of buttery mash, of half potatoes, half parsnips, well seasoned and spiced with mace.

Serves 6.

6 tablespoons groundnut or vegetable oil

8 lamb shanks

2 onions

4 cloves of garlic

sprinkling of salt

1 tablespoon turmeric

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 dried red chilli pepper, crumbled, or ¼ teaspoon dried chilli flakes

2 teaspoons cinnamon

¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

black pepper

3 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon soy sauce

3 tablespoons Marsala

6 tablespoons red lentils

to serve:

3 tablespoons chopped pistachios, chopped blanched almonds or a mixture of both

Put 3 tablespoons of the oil into a very large, wide, heavy-bottomed pan and warm over medium heat. Brown the lamb shanks, in batches, in the pan and then remove to a roasting tin or whatever else you’ve got to hand to sit them in.

Peel the onions and garlic and process in a food processor or chop them finely by hand. Add the remaining oil to the pan, and fry the onion-garlic mush until soft, sprinkling salt over to stop it catching.

Stir in the turmeric, ground ginger, chilli, cinnamon and nutmeg, and season with some freshly ground pepper. Stir again, adding the honey, soy sauce and Marsala. Put the shanks back in the pan, add cold water almost to cover, bring to the boil then put a lid on the pan, lower the heat and simmer very gently for 1–1½ hours or until the meat is tender.

Add the red lentils and cook for about 20 minutes longer without the lid, until the lentils have softened into the sauce, and the juices have reduced and thickened slightly. Check for seasoning.

Toast the nuts by heating them for a few minutes in a dry frying pan, and sprinkle onto the lamb as you serve it.

COUSCOUS

The lamb shanks can be cooked in advance: this, as I’ve said, needs to be done at the last minute. But relax, it’s a low-effort undertaking.

500g couscous

2 teaspoons salt

4 cardamom pods

approx. 25g unsalted butter in two slices

25g flaked almonds

50g pine nuts

25g pistachios

Fill the bottom of a steamer, or base of a couscoussier should you possess one, with water and bring to the boil. When it looks like it’s almost ready to boil, fill the kettle and put it on, then empty the couscous into a glass bowl, add the salt, crush in the cardamom and mix with your fingers, then pour over a litre of boiling water from the kettle and place a plate on top of the bowl. Leave to stand for 5 minutes, then drain and empty into the steamer or couscoussier top and sit this on top of the boiling water beneath. Add the slices of butter on top of the couscous then clamp on the lid and let steam for 7–10 minutes, by which time the couscous should be tenderly cooked and the butter melting. (You can do this a simpler way if you prefer, by just steeping the couscous in the boiling water for 10–15 minutes, but the grains will be more dense and more likely to clump. It’s not disastrous, however, and you must decide what you’re prepared to do.)

Meanwhile, toast the almonds by frying them in a dry pan till fragrant and golden, remove them to a plate, then do the same to the pine nuts. Chop the pistachios. Once the couscous is cooked, tip into a bowl, fork through (and always use a fork for mixing or fluffing up couscous; a spoon will crush it and turn it stodgy), sprinkling in the almonds and pine nuts as you do so (and taste for seasoning at the same time, too). Now fork in most of the pistachios, and sprinkle those that remain lightly on top.