Nigella Bites (4 page)

LEMON RISOTTO

This is comfort food on so many levels. For one, risotto has to be one of the most comforting things to eat ever. What’s more, although everyone goes on about the finicketiness and crucial fine-tuning involved, I find risotto immensely comforting to make: in times of strain, mindless repetitive activity – in this case, 20 minutes of stirring – can really help. What you don’t want to do is make risotto for large numbers of people, which is why I’ve indicated that this serves two (as supper in its entirety); if you want to call it into service as a starter, then reckon on its feeding four.

There is a more personal reason why this is comforting for me. The recipe comes from Anna del Conte (from her Secrets of an Italian Kitchen to be exact) and she, beyond any doubt the best Italian foodwriter around, is the person I turn to for bolstering and solace. Just reading her books provides instant, essential nourishment.

Serves 2.

2 shallots

1 stick of celery

60g unsalted butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

300g risotto rice, preferably Vialone Nano

1 litre vegetable stock (I use Marigold stock powder)

zest and juice of ½ unwaxed lemon

needles from 2 small sprigs of fresh rosemary, finely chopped

1 egg yolk

60ml (4 tablespoons) grated parmesan, plus more to sprinkle

60ml (4 tablespoons) double cream

Maldon salt to taste

good grating pepper, preferably white

Put the shallots and celery into a Magimix and blitz until they are a finely chopped mush. Heat half the butter, the oil and the shallot and celery mixture in a wide saucepan, and cook to soften the mixture for about 5 minutes, making sure it doesn’t catch. Mix in the rice, stirring to give it a good coating of oil and butter. Meanwhile, heat the stock in another saucepan and keep it at simmering point.

Pour a ladleful of the stock into the rice and keep stirring until the stock is absorbed. Then add another ladleful and stir again. Continue doing this until the rice is al dente. You may not need all of the stock, equally, you may need to add hot water from the kettle.

Mix the lemon zest and the rosemary into the risotto, and in a small bowl beat the egg yolk, lemon juice, parmesan, cream and pepper.

When the risotto is ready – when the rice is no longer chalky, but still has some bite – take it off the heat and add the bowl of eggy, lemony mixture, and the remaining butter and salt to taste. Serve with more grated parmesan if you wish, check the seasoning and dive in.

STOVETOP RICE PUDDING FOR EMERGENCIES

For those days when you just can’t wait the three hours for a proper, old-fashioned rice pudding, this is what you need. In fact, it’s just a sweet risotto, with warm milk substituted for the stock. This does mean that the rice takes longer to cook – and what’s more, you want it rather less al dente than is usually desirable – but it’s the best I can offer. Anyway, you can’t, on eating this, resent one moment of your stoveside-stirring captivity.

Serves 1.

700ml full-fat milk

1 heaped tablespoon unsalted butter

2–3 tablespoons caster sugar or vanilla sugar

60g (about 4 tablespoons) risotto rice, preferably Vialone Nano

½ teaspoon good vanilla extract (if not using vanilla sugar)

2–3 tablespoons double cream, the thicker and fattier the better

Heat the milk in a pan that preferably has a lip, which will make pouring easier (or give it a couple of minutes in a plastic jug in the microwave). When it’s about to boil (but don’t let it) turn off the flame. Melt the butter and a tablespoonful of the sugar in a heavy-based pan. When hissing away in a glorious pale caramelly pool, add the rice and stir to coat stickily. Gradually add the milk, stirring the rice all the time, and letting each swoosh of milk get absorbed into the consequently swelling rice before adding the next bit. To see when it’s ready, start tasting at 20 minutes, but be prepared to go on for 35. You may want to add more milk, too (and if the rice tastes cooked before all the milk’s absorbed, don’t use all of it).

When the rice feels as it should, thick and sticky and creamy, take it off the heat, and beat in another tablespoonful of sugar (taste and see if you want yet more), the vanilla, if using, and as much of the cream as you like. Think of this as the mantecatura: the final addition to a risotto, to thicken and add fat-globular volume, normally of butter and grated parmesan; indeed just add butter if you haven’t got any cream in the house.

CHOCOLATE FUDGE CAKE

I have a bad Amazon habit. You know the ‘when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping’ line? Well, the not-so-tough get their retail therapy online. Or I do: when I can’t sleep I start ordering books. And I comfort myself twice over by telling myself how useful they are, how they really help my work. I offer this recipe, adapted from a book that in itself soothes, Tish Boyle’s Diner Desserts, bought at about 3am one unravellingly wakeful night, as proof.

This is the sort of cake you’d want to eat the whole of when you’d been chucked. But even the sight of it, proud and tall and thickly iced on its stand, comforts.

Serves 10. Or 1 with a broken heart.

for the cake:

400g plain flour

250g golden caster sugar

100g light muscovado sugar

50g best quality cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

½ teaspoon salt

3 eggs

142ml/small tub sour cream

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

175g unsalted butter, melted and cooled

125ml corn oil

300ml chilled water

for the fudge icing:

175g dark chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa solids

250g unsalted butter, softened

275g icing sugar, sifted

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.

Butter and line the bottom of two 20cm sandwich tins.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugars, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb and salt. In another bowl or wide-necked measuring jug whisk together the eggs, sour cream and vanilla until blended. Using a freestanding or handheld electric mixer, beat together the melted butter and corn oil until just blended (you’ll need another large bowl for this if using the hand whisk; the freestanding mixer comes with its own bowl), then beat in the water. Add the dry ingredients all at once and mix together on a slow speed. Add the egg mixture, and mix again until everything is blended and then pour into the prepared tins. And actually, you could easily do this manually; I just like my toys and find the KitchenAid a comforting presence in itself.

Bake the cakes for 50–55 minutes, or until a cake-tester comes out clean. Cool the cakes in their tins on a wire rack for 15 minutes, and then turn the cakes out onto the rack to cool completely.

To make the icing, melt the chocolate in the microwave – 2–3 minutes on medium should do it – or in a bowl sitting over a pan of simmering water, and let cool slightly.

In another bowl beat the butter until it’s soft and creamy (again, I use the KitchenAid here) and then add the sieved icing sugar and beat again until everything’s light and fluffy. I know sieving is a pain, the one job in the kitchen I really hate, but you have to do it or the icing will be unsoothingly lumpy. Then gently add the vanilla and chocolate and mix together until everything is glossy and smooth.

Sandwich the middle of the cake with about a quarter of the icing, and then ice the top and sides too, spreading and smoothing with a rubber spatula.

Even if you like cooking, at the end of a long day you don’t necessarily have much time or energy for it. Of course you can always phone for a pizza, but I find that a bit of stoveside pottering helps me unwind. What I’m talking about here is the food you can cook on those days when you just have to hit the kitchen running…

Mozzarella in Carrozza

Chicken with Chorizo and Cannellini

Linguine with Garlic Oil and Pancetta

Salt and Pepper Squid

Thai Yellow Pumpkin and Seafood Curry

Bitter Orange Ice Cream

MOZZARELLA IN CARROZZA

This is Italian food before Tuscan rustic chic. The ‘in carrozza’ bit means ‘in a carriage’ and doesn’t really explain what this golden-crusted fried mozzarella sandwich is about, just gives an indication that the milky cheese is somehow contained. What you should know if you’ve never tried it (apart from the fact that it is one of the easiest, most gratifying laptop dinners imaginable) is that it is somewhere between eggy bread, cheese on toast and fried slice. For children (and do bear this in mind for a quick, hot filler when they get back from school) it is desirably like pizza sandwich, and could be made more so with tomato sauce smeared within the bread’s tender interior.

It works, as well, served with a tomato or, for adults, chilli sauce alongside, into which you can dip the corners of the oozing sandwich as you eat. And, unorthodox though this is, I love it with a fierce sprinkling of chopped fresh red chilli in with, and to counter, the gorgeously melting blandness of the mozzarella.

I can’t pretend this version is absolutely authentic: it wasn’t invented using plastic white bread. But white sliced is just fine, and, frankly, what I use. For one thing, if you have children it’s what you tend to have in the house. Just be sure to use the lightest hand when dunking it in the milk; more than a moment and the bread will have dissolved into unredeemable mushiness. But don’t be cautious about this: it’s quick and easy to make, and requires very little in the way of shopping. Speaking of which, it is not worth buying the better, and more expensive, buffalo mozzarella here. The milky dampness of that cheese is not required; it is anyway too liquid and, besides, ordinary cow’s-milk mozzarella produces just the right fleshy goo, oozing out of the cut sandwich into stringy, chewy ribbons.

Serves 2.

6 slices white bread, crusts removed

1 ball mozzarella, cut into approx. half-centimetre slices, then strips

125ml full-fat milk

3 heaped tablespoons plain (or better still Italian 00) flour

1 egg

salt and pepper

olive oil (not extra-virgin) for frying

Make sandwiches out of the bread and mozzarella, leaving a little margin around the edges unfilled with cheese, and press the edges together with your fingers to help seal. (One of the advantages of plastic bread is that it is easily wodged together.) Pour the milk into one soup bowl, the flour into another, and beat the egg with salt and pepper in another. Warm the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat. Dunk the sandwiches briefly, one by one, in the milk, then dredge in the flour, then dip in the beaten egg. Fry in hot oil on each side till crisp and gold and remove to kitchen towel. Cut in half and apply to face.

CHICKEN WITH CHORIZO AND CANNELLINI

This may sound a kind of fancy thing to be making at the end of a working day, but it is fabulously easy, fabulously quick and everything can be bought at a quick supermarket stop in your lunch hour. Yes, chicken stock is itemised, but I use 500ml of boiling water to which I’ve added a tablespoonful or so of Benedicta Touch of Taste Concentrated Chicken Bouillon – one of my storecupboard standbys. If you can’t find proper chorizo sausages – the kind that are sold in 200g loops (though I get it from my local Sainsbury’s with no difficulty) – then buy 100g of slicing chorizo (the salame kind) in one chunk, and then chop it up into small chunks yourself. And don’t worry in the slightest if instead of sprinkling over sweet, smoked paprika at the end, you just use the ordinary kind.

And don’t agonize over the chicken cut either. I like to use a supreme (a skinless breast portion with the peg-bone still attached) but a regular breast portion would do just fine. Any firm white fish (just replace the chicken stock with fish stock) would be wonderful here too instead of the chicken and – as further speed-conscious inducement – would need only about 3 minutes’ poaching. Finally, the chorizo and cannellini beans, without any further adornment, are pretty damn good, too. Worth bearing in mind as a way of sprucing up any leftover cold cuts that otherwise stare reproachfully out at you from their fridge-bound, clingfilmed confinement.

Serves 1.

500ml chicken stock (see above)

1 free-range chicken supreme (or skinless breast portion)

approx. 125g trimmed kale (sold in 250g packets)

1–2 teaspoons olive oil (not extra-virgin)

100g chorizo, sliced then chopped

410g tin cannellini beans, drained

smoked sweet paprika for sprinkling

In a saucepan, bring the stock to a gentle boil, lower in the chicken portion and cook, still gently, for 10 minutes or until all trace of pink has disappeared. Pierce with the point of a knife to check.

Meanwhile, cook the kale, which you’ve roughly torn into pieces, in boiling salted water for about 5 minutes (if it’s tough) and drain. Then heat the oil in a frying pan, throw in the chopped chorizo, add the drained cannellini and, stirring, warm everything through, moistening with a couple of tablespoons or so of the chicken stock – or more if you want this soupier.

Tip the beans and chorizo into a shallow bowl or lipped plate, roughly arrange the kale on top (drizzling with a little extra-virgin olive oil if you like) and then lift the cooked chicken out of the stock with a spatula or fish slice and sit this on top of the kale ruff. Sprinkle the pale chicken breast with the paprika and gaze at your Spanish still life of a supper before eating it.

LINGUINE WITH GARLIC OIL AND PANCETTA

Three ingredients: one great supper. I like this greedily mounded in a bowl and taken up to bed to be eaten, or rather shovelled in, in front of the television. But that’s not obligatory.

Good pancetta is not found everywhere (check out butcher’s and delicatessen’s) so it makes sense, when you buy it, to get a few 250g blocks. Freeze them separately then just take each one out of the deep-freeze in the morning and return after work to have this fat-striped slab of Italian bacon ready and at your disposal in the evening. Otherwise, you could buy a packet of lardons – those diced bacon cubes – from the supermarket or even use ordinary bacon, snipped into straggly bits. Just bear in mind that cut-up bacon will not need more than about 5 minutes in the hot, aromatic fat to cook.