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Authors: Nigella Lawson

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BOOK: Nigella Bites
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In a heavy-based pan, fry the garlic in the oil until it is warm but not catching. Add the sliced mushrooms together with the choi sum stalks, stirring everything together for a bare minute or so. Cover the pan and cook for about 5 minutes, remove the lid and add the roughly chopped choi sum leaves, soy sauce and sesame oil, then let it cook for another 2–3 minutes until the leaves have wilted.

Pile the mushrooms and greens on the plates with the salmon and, pleasurably, eat. I sometimes make a little sauce to go with, by mixing Colman’s mustard powder into a smooth paste with a little cold water, adding a few drops of soy sauce and (a Microplane grater makes easy work of this) a scant, pulpy purée of fresh ginger.

GINGERY-HOT DUCK SALAD

I don’t buy into this anti-meat drive. Indeed, I am vehemently pro-protein. Nor am I fat-phobic, so I tend to leave the fatty layer of skin on the duck breast before I griddle (or fry) it, but remove it before cooking by all means if you have succumbed to the lure of the lean. And if that’s the case, you’ll be pleased to learn that not one drop of oil need go into the dressing. However, I often sprinkle a little toasted sesame oil over at the end, which is why I’ve still listed it in the ingredients. Your call.

The salad itself is a slight reworking of a Cambodian beef salad I often make; here the lime juice in the steeping mixture (which turns into the dressing) is supplemented with orange juice (Asian evocations of duck à l’orange and all that), but in season, around January, use instead of this combination the fragrantly acerbic juice of one Seville orange.

Serves 2.

1 duck breast

2 tablespoons fish sauce

juice of ½ lime and juice of ½ orange, or of 1 Seville orange

1 cayenne chilli, finely chopped

1cm ginger, grated

few drops sesame oil (optional)

50g baby spinach, watercress, lambs lettuce or a mixture

Grill or fry the duck breast – fat-side down if not removed – until it’s cooked to juicy pinkness.

Let it rest on a board while you mix the fish sauce, lime and orange juice (or just Seville-orange juice), chilli, ginger and optional sesame oil together in a bowl.

Pour any juices that the duck has made into the bowl, and then carve the meat on the diagonal into thin slices. Toss the sliced duck into the bowl and stir everything well. Turn it out onto a serving plate covered with the salad leaves.

HOT AND SOUR SOUP

I know that for some people nothing feels more restoring than something warm and unchallengingly bland, but when it’s succour and sustenance I need, it’s spice that I want. This soup, tom yam – the culinary equivalent of Friar’s Balsam – clears the tubes and brings fire to the jaded soul. And there’s nothing like a bit of searing heat to push away any hungover seediness. It’s good for those days when you’re thick with cold, too.

It’s easy to throw together: the chicken stock I make out of boiling water and bouillon concentrate, and the tom yam paste is sold now at most supermarkets, along with the other ingredients, too.

Serves 4–6.

1½ litres chicken stock

1 heaped tablespoon tom yam paste

4 kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped

1 stick lemongrass, tender inner part only, roughly chopped

juice of 1 lime

4 tablespoons fish sauce

3 small fresh red or green chillies, finely chopped

1 teaspoon sugar

150g straw or button mushrooms, halved or quartered according to size

500g peeled raw prawns, thawed if frozen

5 small spring onions, cut into short lengths and then into strips

small bunch coriander, chopped

Heat the stock and tom yam paste in a decent sized saucepan with the lime leaves, lemongrass, lime juice, fish sauce, chillies and sugar. Bring to the boil, add the mushrooms and simmer for a couple of minutes, then add the prawns and spring onions and cook for a further 2–3 minutes, or until the prawns are cooked but still tender. Sprinkle with a little coriander and put more on the table for people to add themselves as they want.

VIETNAMESE CHICKEN AND MINT SALAD

This is what I make when a temple-mooded girlfriend or two are coming over not so much for dinner as to talk or moan, as one does, during those chapter meetings of the martyred sisterhood. It’s very quick as long as you’ve got a food processor (and not that time-consuming without) and ideal for picking at with an outstretched fork over a drawn-out evening. The dressing needs to steep for half an hour, but you don’t need to do anything to it while it’s going on.

This recipe is adapted from The Best of Nicole Routhier and is, or so she explains, the Vietnamese equivalent of coleslaw, but this doesn’t quite sum up its fresh appeal and ability to spruce up a girl’s flagging spirits. This is a real reviver.

Since it’s easy to buy chicken breast ready-cooked, that’s what I generally use, but obviously if you’ve got a leftover chicken in the fridge I suggest you use that. Likewise, consider using the baby cabbages you see around these days: they are exactly the size you need and easier than hacking away at a big bruiser. All the less familiar ingredients can, as ever, be bought at a supermarket. And by all means leave out the oil in the dressing if including it would make you feel less than virtuous.

This makes a lot, but I find it’s very easy to get through – and it stays in the fridge for a day or two to provide instant midnight pickings of a not-too-injurious sort.

Serves 2–4.

1 chilli, preferably a hot Thai one, seeded and minced

1 fat garlic clove, peeled and minced

1 tablespoon sugar

1½ teaspoons rice vinegar

1½ tablespoons lime juice

1½ tablespoons Vietnamese or Thai fish sauce (nuoc nam or nam pla)

1½ tablespoons vegetable oil

half a medium onion, finely sliced

black pepper

200g white cabbage, shredded

1 medium carrot, shredded, julienned or grated

200g cooked chicken breast, shredded or cut into fine strips

fat bunch of mint, about 40g stemmed weight

In a bowl, combine the chilli, garlic, sugar, vinegar, lime juice, fish sauce, oil, onion and black pepper to taste. Put to one side for half an hour. Then in a big plate or bowl, mix the cabbage, carrot, chicken and mint. Pour over the onion-soused, chilli-flecked dressing and toss very well – slowly and patiently – so that everything is combined and covered thinly. Taste to see if you need salt or pepper. Serve on a flat plate with maybe a bit more mint chopped on top.

PEACHES AND BLUEBERRIES

Pudding is hardly a feature of the templefood way but, as a girlfriend said to me once, you need to know there’s something to stave off that moment of desolation that threatens to settle when eating’s done for the day. Hence this: which is frankly not so much a recipe as a suggestion. The colours themselves induce great good mood and, allegedly, blueberries aid memory, though I forget now where I read this.

Mostly I eat this cold, the peaches sliced, the blueberries tumbled over them and a few drops of orangeflower water sprinkled on top, but you can – and this is excellent for breakfast, or when you desperately need the comfort of something hot – just dollop some Greek yoghurt (0% fat or otherwise) over the roughly assembled fruit, sprinkled the sparsest bit of demerara sugar on top and then cook in a hottish oven for about 20 minutes – until the fruit’s softened and the sugar faintly caramelised. It makes sense particularly to go for the hot option with the leftovers of the first, fresh fruit salad.

These amounts should fill an ovenproof dish measuring approximately 30 x 20cm.

6 peaches

3 punnets blueberries

1–2 teaspoons orangeflower water

It’s difficult to say how many this would serve: it would do 8 definitely, but if it helps to have a stash of ready-made cut-up fruit to hand, then don’t feel you need to cut down on quantities for even two of you.

For those days when a yielding peach is hard to find – and there are many of them – my other standby is a pawpaw halved avocado-style, the seeds removed, a tumble of raspberries tossed into the now-empty cavity and a reviving, flavour-sprucing shot of lime juice squeezed on top.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ebook ISBN: 9781448114610
First published in 2001

26 27 28 29 30

Text © Nigella Lawson 2001

Photographs © Francesca Yorke 2001

Nigella Lawson has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by Chatto & Windus Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9780701172879

Design and Art Direction: Caz Hildebrand

Cookery Assistant: Hettie Potter

Stylist: Helen Trent

BOOK: Nigella Bites
11.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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