155: Orange jelly with lemon and cardamom, p106

The pudding for tonight's dinner party of errors... non-vegan* unfortunately, but another one ticked off in the book... I didn't have quite enough oranges for just under a litre of juice so I added some orange juice from a carton to the mix as well, and it seemed to work still. I thought it was going to be incredibly acidic and sour as there is no sugar or anything sweet in the ingredients, but amazingly it wasn't, once it was set (another worry, but it did actually set - hurray, and phew!) it was a really nice zingy finish to the meal, and the cardamom was subtle and not too strong at all. Sometimes I find cardamom a bit overpowering but it wasn't too much at all in this, especially with such a strong citrus flavour to counter.

*The new vegan friend seemed happy with a bowl of peach slices and a jug of cream-substitute made out of oats. Which we all swiped as well - rather nice, and agreed is much better than soya cream-substitute :)

154: Courgette and lancashire cheese crumble, p378

I'd not been looking forward to making this one... T was planning to be out for it, no matter what, so I needed to find some folk who like veggie food upon whom I could inflict it. It turned into a bit of a comedy of errors after I invited a group of friends round for dinner including one of the friend's new housemate who was moving in that day (Saturday).

We had hardly any food in at all and I stupidly thought, at least one of the three little grocery shops up the road will definitely have courgettes and Lancashire cheese. Everywhere has courgettes at the moment, you can't get away from the damn things. And I'd got Lancashire cheese confused with Leicestershire. Rats. Silly me. No courgettes and no cheese anywhere to be found, and I stupidly had left it too late to get to any more useful shops and manage to get the flat in order enough for the four visitors who were en route. Massive fail. Phoned one of the guests, who has a car, to see if he could pop to Tescos quickly for me, only to find out he had left his car at work, and was rather... hungover... Anyway, the darling man hopped on his bicycle and wove his wobbly way to Tescos.

Meanwhile, a phonecall from one of the other guests revealed that the new housemate is vegan! And I'm halfway through making a main course with lots of cheese in it and a pudding which uses (pork) gelatine. Aargh. If I'd had a bit longer I'd have definitely made something vegan for everyone, hate making anyone feel 'different' and not as welcome as the others, but had a minor meltdown. But she was ever so sweet and adamant that she didn't want to be a problem and had a big pot of chilli beany stew which they could bring, which was fabulous. And we sent the Tescos-rescue friend a message asking him to try to find a vegan pudding :)

The others all arrived, but the Tescos-rescue friend was nowhere to be seen, until he called to say he'd gotten all the way through the supermarket, through the checkout, and... found he'd forgotten his wallet. Argh! At which point I told him to give up and just come on over - bean stew for all! But he managed to persuade one of the others to hop in her car and come and rescue him, and quarter of an hour later they made it back, with the rather fundamental courgettes and cheese. Phew! Quick finish off of the recipe, popped in the oven, and we could have nibbly bits and some lovely garlicky tear-and-share bread the others brought with them for a starter.

And the result? It was pretty good! A miracle - I was firmly convinced it was going to be horrid, especially after the farce of the rest of the evening... but it wasn't at all. The potatoes had turned to mush (not sure if that was how it should have been, but the extended delay mid-cooking might have made them squishier than they should have been) but the courgettes were al dente and the stock and cheese mixed in was scrummy. Not as much cheese in the recipe as I'd have put in, could definitely have been cheesier and I'm not sure it really needed to be Lancashire cheese rather than cheddar or something else, but the crumble on top really worked - added a completely different texture to go with the mushy crunchy veg underneath, and the walnutty-ness and rosemary came through really nicely. Definitely a goodie, and one to repeat in the future for veggie friends :) Not the vegan ones though. Although missing out the cheese completely would probably be good too.

Served with a very simple salad, rice, and (vegan) chilli beany stew :) 

Phew.

153: Roast fillet of lamb with anchovy and mint, p90

Not a fillet, made this with a boneless rolled shoulder joint (been sitting in the freezer since Tesco's delivered a near random selection of cuts of lamb which weren't the ones I'd ordered... So I didn't follow the timings given in this recipe, for a much smaller piece of meat. Worked well though - I gave the c.900g shoulder c.65mins in the oven at 180degC (fan oven) and then let it rest for a good 15mins before serving - with the marinade on the outside not burning to a crisp and the meat itself very moist and deliciously light pink inside. Lovely jubbly.

T (who keeps rolling his eyes at yet another lamb recipe, as he doesn't really like lamb very much) actually declared this the best lamb he'd ever had, so it definitely passed muster with him!

The new potatoes were good too - and ended up covered in deliciously crispy tasty bits of the marinade, left after the meat. Yum!

40 recipes to go! Will I make it by the end of December?? We're moving house middle of next week, so I might blitz a few more this weekend before another quiet chunk when I might not be able to do too much in the way of cooking. Only 11 done so far this month - must do more! Planning a couple of dinner parties/soirees once we're into the new place, which will let me tick off quite a few... fingers crossed!

152: Lemon amaretti pots, p162

An easy peasy, quick pudding to make - a good one for future dinner parties when there's not much time... and anything with lemon curd in it has to be a winner! I don't particularly like crumbled biscuits/cake mixed in with softer ingredients, find it an odd texture, especially when they get soft themselves - ick, so I think if I did this again I would put a layer of crumbled amaretti biscuits on the bottom of the glasses/ramekins and/or on the top of the cream/yoghurt/lemon curd mixture. And swirl the lemon curd in last, so you get streaks of lemon curd throughout the creamy mixture - think that would look prettier too.

151: Blackberry and apple pie, p343

Rats. I can't make pastry. This is a well documented fact. Here. And here. And here. And many other places, no doubt. But I keep trying. This time it was all going well, until I retrieved the pastry from the fridge and found it had turned into a rock solid, dry lump. It was not going to become malleable in time to be able to bake the pie and leave to get to my parents' in time for lunch, so I cheated and used the emergency jus rol. The shame. No, I don't care. Pastry and me are not meant to be. It's a good thing really, if I could make the stuff, I'd eat it all the time...

Good pie though! Unusually for a Nigel pud, I didn't find this overly sweet, which was nice, even though some of the apples I used were quite sweet already. Of course my sister thought it wasn't quite sweet enough - but ho hum, I liked it. Not rocket science, no real deviations from the basics of such a pie, so an easy one to tick off, pastry-making excluded...

150: Plum crisp, p286

Another day, another crumble. Of sorts :)

Godda cold. Needed comfort food. Crumble. What more does one need? It's a bit of a half hearted crumble - maybe I should have used a smaller dish as the plums were kinda spaced out, with the crumble sprinkled over, but it looked rather rustic and thrown together in a haphazard sort of way. And it tasted pretty good... still got the cold though :(

149: An almond and greengage crumble, p282

Where am I going to find greengages? Hmm, poss a farmers' market, but I always get up too late... or I don't get up too late because I'm off somewhere but by the time whatever I'm off to is done, it's too late. And sod's law, everytime I actually would make it, they wouldn't have greengages, and the once a year when they do, I'd definitely be fast asleep... Anyway, the recipe says 'or plums' - so plums it was. Plus I was at a friend's, after a long day trapsing around the enormity of the craft fair that is The Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace, and with serious headaches, and feet and credit cards burning, we needed some blood-sugar-raising asap, and only CostCutters was open. And it sold plums! No greengages though. Unsurprisingly.

Thus, this was made in someone else's kitchen, without the aid of a food processor - argh! Luckily there was a willing friend who inexplicably DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO RUB BUTTER INTO FLOUR. Madness. But she seemed keen to learn, and since I loathe rubbing butter into flour and have done since being forced to make scones at school week after week in the 80s (bizarrely in lovely lovely Mason and Cash mixing bowls - which I adore and have coveted ever since, which is why I now own four of them all in different sizes) I quickly showed her how and delegated the task to my new (temporary) kitchen slave. Hurrah!

Otherwise, easy peasy, throw it all in, bung in the oven and then yummy crumble 40mins later. Very slightly blackened on top, because we kinda forgot about it whilst we were eating dinner and it prob got a bit longer than 40mins, and the oven may have been a bit hot still, but not overly cremated at all. Perhaps a little oversweet - less sugar for plums vs. greengages, maybe? But lovely crumbly powdery topping, and fabulous with friend K's amazing homemade custard - wow, who knew it was so easy to make amazing homemade custard?!

147: Slow-roast lamb with chickpea mash, p62, and 148: Cheese-smothered potatoes, p17

Tescos delivered lamb shanks instead of another leg of lamb (as the recipe says) the other day, but the shank is part of the arm of the shoulder, and includes part of the leg, so that's not that far from being a leg of lamb, right?

Three and a half hours of roasting and I was worried they were going to be wrecked, as they'd got rather crispy on the outside inspite of the hourly basting with the juices - the juices were starting to disappear in the ether so there wasn't that much to baste with towards the end. But luckily it was just the outside, the layer of fat over the meat and the spice rub over it, and the meat underneath was  perfectly tender and the cartilage and connective tissue had melted away just as it should - much better than the last time I cooked lamb shanks...

Served with the cheese-smothered potatoes, which were easy peasy, and must have been virtually calorie free... not... and the chickpea mash, which T described as 'revolting', and refused to eat after trying a teeny bit. I kinda had to agree with him on that, it wasn't very nice... glad I divided the recipe in half so we didn't have enough for six... :)

145: A simple flatbread, p77, and 146: Taramasalata - the real thing, p77

Oooooh, this was a revelation for both of us! Me, because I hadn't realised how easy taramasalata is to make and love recipes where something curious happens to the ingredients and they change into something completely unexpected, and T because he never knew taramasalata was a fishy pate-type of gloop. How? Who knows... but he'd always apparently regarded it as a suspicious pink relative of hummous or tzatziki.

The flatbreads were great. We make all our bread in our breadmaker so I wasn't really looking forward to making these by hand, but it was easy and didn't need too much kneading at all. It more than quadrupled in size after being left for an hour, but started to deflate pretty quickly when being divided up into pieces. The main problem was that it was still pretty sticky and difficult to handle - so I had to use a lot of flour to manhandle it into pieces to bake, let alone form them into 'slipper' shapes. They puffed up like footballs in the oven, so I squished them down onto the baking tray to flatten them out a bit but they weren't very 'flat' flatbreads... I thought flatbreads weren't supposed to use yeast, hence the 'flat', but hey. And they were yummy - I love different types of breads, especially doughy ones like these with very little salt or sugar in them.

Located a lump of cod's roe in the wonderful Sandy's - it wasn't as expensive as Nigel seems to suggest in the book (but the red mullet made up for that...) - rather revolting looking solid sausagey type brownish lump with a hard, plasticky skin which the recipe states to peel off. Yum! Blitzed with the rest of the ingredients it curiously changed from the brownish colour and turned pale pink like the bought taramasalata. Bizarre! Then with the gradual addition of the olive oil it suddenly changed from a fishy slurry into a thick cream - like mayonnaise, as it says in the book. T loved it.

144: Strawberry mascarpone tart, p207

 

Om nom nom! Another  scrummy low-cal (ha!) pud from the book... and easy too, no pastry (hurray!) but a base made from crushed up oatmeal biscuits and butter. Wasn't sure it would set hard enough to hold together out of the tin, but it did after half an hour or so in the fridge. The mascarpone mixture was a bit of a faff, comprising a cheese and egg yolk mixture and whipped egg white - the egg white deflated quite a lot on folding into the cheese mixture but it didn't seem to affect the final result, which filled the biscuit case nicely. I made a bit of a mistake in not pushing the biscuit base up the sides of the tin a bit, and it was too late when I realised so I wasn't sure it would come out of my springform tin without splodging everywhere, but after another half an hour or so in the fridge it had firmed up enough that it was fine and I didn't have a biscuit base with a lake of squishy filling flooding out all over the place. Phew!

And the result was delicious - really light filling and not too sweet. Would make a very nice pud for a summer BBQ... even if the rain was lashing down on Saturday night after a gloomy grey day, when we had this :)

143: Red mullet with lemon and rosemary, p217

Ooooh red mullet's expensive... but with four red mullet recipes in the book, thank goodness for the wonderful Sandy's, down the road in Twickenham, so at least I can get hold of it... Easy peasy one this, although the recipe is a bit vague on timings so I was worried I'd over/under cook it so I watched it like a hawk. Maybe 10mins on each side, and it was perhaps a tad overdone - but not by much. T approved. Red mullet is a nice chunky, meaty fish - not too many fine bones to trip me up...

Served with sauteed potatoes, mangetout and tomato with balsamic.

142: Roast lamb rolls with oregano and garlic, p219

Mmmm, super garlicky yumminess! I ordered a small leg of lamb from Tescos (busy week, no time to go shopping) and of course they sent a whopping great big 'Finest' one, with matching price tag. Ho hum. But what a nice bit of Finest Welsh Mountain Lamb it was.

Mush up garlic, anchovies, oregano and oil, massage it into the meat, and leave for 30mins or so, that's got to be a good start... The cooking time was perfect to result in nice pink, perfectly meltingly tender meat. The lumps of garlic in the marinade burnt a bit on the outside but not too badly and the meat carved beautifully. Baked some of those part-baked rolls and popped the meat inside, drizzled them with the juices from the roasting dish, and we tucked in. Lovely jubbly, especially with the juices soaking into the bread, but surprisingly filling - two small rolls defeated me, but T polished his off fine. Would definitely do this again as an easy roast dinner, but probably not in the rolls - less of an informal, lunchy meal.