Week 29: Lamb, Olive and Caramelised Onion Tagine

The book: Nigella Express 

The recipe: p114, "Lamb, Olive and Caramelised Onion Tagine"

On a freelance translation job on the outskirts of Frankfurt several years ago, I worked with an American fella called Bruce. One lunchtime, Bruce offered to make us all quesadillas. "Well," he immediately added, "they're not authentic as such - I don't have any cheese or beans so I'm just using fried vegetables. Oh yeah, and I couldn't find tortillas so I've got pitta bread instead."

My reaction then is remarkably similar to how I feel on reading this week's Random Kitchen recipe, because Nigella, too, is full of provisos from the get-go. First and foremost, this tagine isn't actually a tagine. "In Morocco, most tagines are made in pressure cookers," she says by way of explanation - then promptly tells us she prefers not to use a pressure cooker either, recommending a standard casserole dish instead. Meanwhile, the one relatively out-there ingredient (caramelised onions from a jar) is immediately compromised by Nigella's concession that home-made ones are better if you can be bothered to make them.

All very promising, I'm sure. Still, one of the guiding principles of Nigella Express is to minimise effort even at the expense of authenticity. It's our third time dipping into the book and the great lady has been reasonably kind to us so far, so let's see if she can hit the nail smack on the head this time.

The prep: Not content with making me spend more on food than I usually do (though I'm never sad to shell out for good lamb), the Random Kitchen project is seriously upping my spend on kitchenware. To my shame, I don't possess a good, heavy lidded casserole dish, and frankly it's about time that changed, so I allow myself the low-level indulgence of a solid-looking thing from the Sainsbury's Collection. Should last a good few years, anyway.

Most of the ingredients need buying, actually, from the titular olives to the onion that I'm going to caramelise (because caramelised onions - not chutney - in a jar are the kind of thing that only exist at Waitrose, on the delicatessen shelves and in Nigella's happiest dreams). I find the remains of a jar of ground ginger at the back of the cupboard with a best before date of December 2009, so probably best to buy some more of that, and the one bottle of red wine we've got in the house is far too good to waste on cooking.

Basically it's a massively expensive trip to the supermarket all round, but the end result ought to be pretty decent, since the recipe basically involves lumping together a bunch of nice ingredients in a pot for two hours.

The making: Oops, I just gave away the method, didn't I? And indeed, once the onions are caramelised, they're put in the casserole along with the diced lamb, a drained jar of black olives, a drained jar of capers, a bulb's-worth of garlic cloves (left whole), and some ground cumin and ginger. Then the stock is added... wait, there is no stock. Instead, a whole bottle of red wine is added, and that's all the liquid we're using. Nigella, indulgent? Never!

The mixture is brought to the boil on the hob, the lid goes onto the dish, the dish goes into the oven for two hours or "until the lamb is tender", and that's it. I mean, honestly, the recipe's available online but there seems little point in sharing it here considering how straightforward it is. Still, by all means Google away if you want.

On inspection near the end of the cooking time, it becomes clear that the casserole's contents are still suspiciously on the liquid-y side, but it'd probably take another two hours in the oven for that issue to resolve itself (and the photo in the book does suggest that the lamb may be practising for its 50m swimming certificate). Instead, I prepare Nigella's proposed accompaniment - "a bowl of couscous studded with a can or two of chickpeas" - and the not-actually-a-tagine (can we call it a "fauxgine"?) is ready to serve.

Mmm, fat globules

The eating: The thing about cooking meat in wine and very little else is that it tends to leave the meat susceptible to, well, discolouration. Now, I've had some unusual experiences with eating lamb in my time...

Malmö, don't ever change

...but even I've yet to encounter a recipe seemingly designed to turn the meat the purply-pink colour of liver. That's what happens here, and it isn't a great start.

Once that aesthetic hurdle is overcome, however, the lamb itself is perfectly cooked and falls apart at the merest touch of the fork. Top marks on the tenderness front. Elsewhere, the olives and capers add an unusual tang to the dish that sets this aside from your average Sunday stew, although I'm not convinced that they and the uncrushed garlic really blend together or infuse the liquid with much of their flavour in the process - this is less a cohesive dish, more a collection of nice things floating in a vat of wine.

The excess liquid that I was concerned about is soaked up by the couscous...

(well, mostly)

...but there's no denying that the red wine is the dominant flavour here, and that's a bit of a problem. Maybe it's because I'm a non-drinker these days - Sam has far fewer objections on this front - but it's all a little overpowering. It almost reminds me of red wine fondue in that respect, where you cook chunks of meat in a mini-saucepan of wine-heavy broth right there on the table in front of you - although the key word there is broth, i.e. not just wine.

My conclusion is that Nigella should have followed the lead of Monty Python's viking-plagued café owner and called this "Wine, Wine, Wine, Wine, Lamb and Wine Tagine" for greater accuracy.

Still, don't get me wrong: this is a pretty enjoyable eat that absolutely can't be faulted for its simplicity, and I'm very fond of lots of the things involved. In fact, I'd gladly make it again, going 50-50 on wine and lamb stock this time (and slightly cutting down the volume of liquid overall), and see how that turns out. Seems like a good excuse to get some more use out of that new dish, if nothing else...

One-word verdict: Hic!

Week 28: Saffron Haddock with Crushed Potatoes and Asparagus

The book: Masterclass (James Martin)

The recipe: p48, "Saffron Haddock with Crushed Potatoes and Asparagus"

Sam's mum is in town for the weekend, and while I wouldn't normally subject a guest to the Random Kitchen experience, both mother and son seem keen to take the plunge. Still, I'm secretly relieved when random.org selects something relatively sensible (in terms of both book and recipe).

I wondered whether last week's post about Swedish Cakes and Cookies would miraculously conjure up something from those pages this time round, but apparently it's the invocation of saffron that does the trick. It's not something I've used in cooking for the longest time, but I'm curious to see how it matches with a flavour sponge like white fish.

The prep: I need to buy pretty much everything for this dish, but it's all fairly standard stuff. My only concern, given the past issues I've had with sourcing things in Lewisham on a Sunday, is the saffron - but no, there it is in Sainsbury's, more expensive than gold (and frankly far more relevant to my life).

I've already resolved to significantly up the quantity of potatoes - it seems the more ambitious the cookbook, the more measly the portion sizes, largely since they seem to expect you to be serving up the dish in question as part of a three-course meal. We've bought a cheesecake for afters but that's as far as it goes, so a bit more bulk wouldn't go amiss.

The making: The fish for this week's selection is to be poached in saffron-infused milk. I might expect this to happen in a pan, but James Martin requires me to use a heavy-bottomed roasting tin on the hob top instead. Well, if you say so...

Whether pan or roaster, it turns out that the main challenge throughout this process is to stop the milk from bubbling up to the point where it gets an icky skin, while making sure it's still hot enough to actually do something.

In any case, "two good pinches" of saffron slowly start their work of turning the milk a warm yellow colour...

That's about half of it, my pinches aren't that puny

...and once that goal is achieved, the haddock fillets are added and cooked "for 3-4 minutes" before being removed from the heat and left to sit in the saffron milk until being reheated shortly before serving. I opt to extend that "3-4 minutes" because it's quite evident that the fish has barely really started cooking at this point, and I have no great desire to poison the mother-in-law.

Next, "400g" (lol) of new potatoes are boiled, drained, and crushed together with some double cream and chopped chives and dill "without mashing them". James recommends that I do this using a fork, but I want to serve this up before Week 29, and the gentle deployment of a masher turns out to be absolutely fine for achieving the desired consistency.

Then (and I dispute this order of events - surely it should have been "meanwhile"?) another pot of salted water is brought to the boil and some asparagus spears are cooked "for 2 minutes or until tender". So for 4-5 minutes, then. James Martin seems intent on making me serve up underdone food today, but it's no use, mister - I can see right through your ruse.

The asparagus spears are drained, returned to the pan and nicely buttered up. At this point, I'm supposed to put them on the plate already then reheat the haddock, but again, that seems a bit illogical timing-wise unless your plates are pre-heated to the point of being molten. Anyway, I've done the reheating in the meantime, so the components are duly ready to be assembled simultaneously - and the whole thing ends up being a remarkably close approximation of the picture in the book and everything. Yay!

The eating: I've been a little sceptical about the saffron's presence throughout, and indeed I'm not convinced it adds a huge amount to the fish flavour-wise - it's quite a subtle taste anyway, I suppose, but I don't see how the poaching process is meant to infuse much of that in the haddock, and indeed it doesn't really. Still, the occasional blast from a clinging saffron strand does provide some welcome variety.

It would have made more sense if, instead of using double cream, the potatoes had been smashed together with the saffron-infused milk. Sure, the whole dish might have become overwhelmingly yellow as a result, but it seems a waste to have simply discarded all that saffrony goodness. Oh well - the potatoes are still excellent, the chives and dill giving them a perfectly summery flavour on the weekend when the British weather finally turned for the good.

And the asparagus is, well, asparagus.

It's literally only now, writing this, that I realise I was supposed to buy smoked haddock. D'oh! No wonder it looked a bit more yellow in the book. Although I suspect the smokiness would have minimised the saffron's contribution to the flavour experience even further.

Anyway, heck, we still enjoyed it. Random Kitchen has taken on board a willing victim participant and passed this particular test with flying colours. My reservations about the curious methods and timings employed by James Martin notwithstanding, this is a fine meal to serve up on a sunny July evening, and we are all most satisfied.

It's going to be back to something like "Vegetables For One" next week, isn't it?

One-word verdict: Summery.

The books: Swedish Cakes and Cookies (Sju sorters kakor)

More than halfway through the Random Kitchen project, and we're still waiting for a few of the 22 participating cookbooks to come out of the random number generator.

Everyday Novelli remains conspicuous by its absence (to my relief but some readers' frustration!), while two of my three "snipped out of newspapers and printed off the internet" folders remain as yet untapped.

The greatest source of sadness for me, though, is that we haven't yet had an encounter with Swedish Cakes and Cookies.

The original-language version of the book, Sju sorters kakor, is a classic that belongs in every Swedish home. It takes its name from the tradition that every good hostess of a coffee afternoon should serve up at least seven different types of biscuit, cake or cookie to accompany the black stuff.

And if you know anything about Swedes, you'll know they take their fika or coffee culture very seriously indeed.

Malmö, 2013: Even the Eurovision press centre enjoys a good fika

I'm half-Swedish on my mother's side, and there was (still is) a big community of Anglo-Scandinavian families in the north-east of England - so there was no shortage of opportunities to flex those nascent baking skills and get busy in the kitchen when I was a young 'un.

My eager hands (and sweet tooth) were only too happy to get involved in mixing and making everything from saffron buns for the annual Lucia celebrations to what would become known in subsequent editions of Sju sorters kakor as the - shall we say - slightly more politically correct "chocolate balls".

Oops

The English version of Sju sorters kakor, which I picked up a few years ago, is really not bad. As the title suggests, it's geared firmly towards a US audience - the back cover even proudly boasts "Sweden's classic guide comes to America" - although the quantities used in the recipes remain pleasingly Scandinavian (flour and sugar are measured in decilitres - of course!).

In any case, for all I do have a certain understanding of Swedish, it's a lot safer not to have to translate things on the hop while attempting to navigate my way through a recipe, so the English-language versions are a godsend in that respect. Some of the names of the various goodies are translated a little idiosyncratically - I probably wouldn't have thought of my favourite havreflarn as "syrup lace cookies", for instance - but most are accompanied by some kind of illustration so it's easy enough to work out what item from the IKEA café/shop they're meant to be replicating.

And really, everything you'd want is in here, from arrak/punsch rolls (also known as "vacuum cleaners", apparently - why wouldn't they be?) and the delightfully evocative dreams, through to that recent Bake-Off favourite, the mighty princess torte. (My birthday cake several times when I was young. And they say only children are spoilt...)

Plus there are some useful tips for rolling tricky pastry, getting your bun dough to rise properly, decorating with chocolate - basically all the techniques that any self-respecting Swedish chef should know.

The original in situ, price tag and all

Now, to be perfectly honest: if the ultimate purpose of the Random Kitchen is to get more use out of my cookbooks, I can't claim that Swedish Cakes and Cookies is exactly gathering dust.

But it does contain nearly 300 (!) recipes for all kinds of sweet pieces of my heritage, so even now I've barely really made a dent, sticking to my old favourites and not venturing too far from the beaten track. (Plus I'm about to start training for a half-marathon, so I can cope with a few more calories in my diet...)

Here's hoping, then, that there'll be - if not seven - then at least one type of Swedish goodie coming my way before the random year is out.

Week 27: 'Arriba' Speedy Gonzales Tortillas

The book: Ainsley Harriott's Meals In Minutes

The recipe: p64, "'Arriba' Speedy Gonzales Tortillas"

Be honest, with a recipe name like that I didn't even need to tell you it was Ainsley, did I? Twee and punny he may be, but Meals In Minutes is a bit of a classic and is among my most well-thumbed cookbooks, with everything from the Mexican tortilla "cheesecake" to an inauthentic but quick take on paella getting reasonably frequent kitchen airtime.

So will this week's random choice transcend its frankly awful name and prove to be another winner from the Ainsley stable?

Who nose?

The prep: There are always kidney beans in the cupboard, because you never know when you might need to make an emergency vat of chilli. Indeed, the shopping list for this one turns out to be a modest one, mainly encompassing tortillas (I go for Tesco's seeded tortilla wraps, largely because they look quite funky) and store-bought guacamole, which I am excited to discover now comes in a squeezy bottle - though I'm a little sceptical about the extent to which the properties of "chunky" and "squeezy" will reconcile.

Meanwhile, the recipe wants me to use Red Leicester (this doesn't feel entirely authentic) but cheddar's what I've already got in, so cheddar it is - I'm not made of money.

The making: An onion, some garlic and cumin are fried up then the kidney beans are stirred through and the mixture is "roughly crushed". We're talking refried beans here, basically - never a bad thing. It's only at this point in proceedings that I properly register the fact that the recipe is a vegetarian one, which tends to make things quicker and easier on the cooking front, I suppose.

Anyway, next the tortillas are briefly heated to make them easier to handle, then the assembly phase begins. The guacamole (perfectly squeezy, as it transpires) is spread over the tortillas, some shredded lettuce and seeded, diced tomatoes are scattered on top, then the bean mix is dolloped on top of that. Last but certainly not least, the grated cheese joins the party, and we're ready to roll! I MEAN LITERALLY.

Once the tortillas are rolled, Ainsley requires me to slice them in half diagonally. This seems like a terrible idea - surely everything will just fall straight out of them? - but I'm keen to stick to the recipe instead of doing something more sensible and intuitive, so what the heck.

There's no particularly elegant way of arranging them on the plate, and the slicing process requires some judicious use of toothpicks to hold the tortillas together, so the overall aesthetic effect could be rather more pleasing. Though it obviously doesn't help that at least one of my diagonal cuts was somewhat rubbish too. Still, there's the finished product in all its glory:

Unevenly done

The eating: As predicted, the things are hard to handle and basically fall apart the moment you look at them, but they're damn tasty. Of course they are, we're talking about refried beans and guacamole and cheese and other good stuff!

It's a simple recipe (heck, it's barely even a recipe really - you could at least have required the guacamole to be home-made, Ainsley), but I don't miss the meat at all; if anything, the fat from it would have made the tortillas even more liable to disintegrate.

And as always seems to be the case with anything (pseudo-)Mexican, what initially looks like a lot of food ends up slipping down very easily.

I am really very full afterwards. But there must be something to be said for it, because the Friday night feast fuels me to a new parkrun PB the next morning. Speedy Gonzales indeed...

One-word verdict: 'Arriba'.

Week 26: Spare Ribs in White Wine

The book: The Silver Spoon

The recipe: p896, "Spare Ribs in White Wine"

As we reach the halfway point of the Random Kitchen project, it's time for a confession. When a recipe looks like it's going to be problematic in terms of ingredients or equipment, I try my best to compromise and find a workaround. There is, though, the possibility of a veto if the choice is just too outlandish. And that's where we find ourselves with this week's first selection from The Silver Spoon, the innocuously named Genoese Salad (as it transpires, an unjustifiably weak translation of "cappon magro").

The Silver Spoon version of this particular concoction takes up an entire page, with a laundry list of ingredients including tuna mosciame (?), scorzonera (??), 1.5kg of scorpion fish (!!!) and - best of all - "one large live spiny lobster".

Uh-huh. Let me think for a moment...

So the random.org wheel is spun again, and we end up with the significantly less challenging Spare Ribs in White Wine instead. In fact, if anything this seems distinctly underwhelming (seriously, Silver Spoon, I've blogged about you this many times already and still no pasta?!), plus we've been to a barbecue the previous day so we're not exactly craving meat - but hey, it beats grappling with a live lobster, so let's roll with it.

The prep: For some reason I expect the local supermarkets to only have ribs pre-marinating in all kinds of Chinese and BBQ sauces, but procuring the unsullied variant turns out to be dead easy. I end up having to substitute fresh sage leaves for dried, tweaking the quantities accordingly, while the white wine component of the recipe corresponds neatly to the contents of one of those handy "I fancy a wee tipple on the train home" bottles. Fun-size sauvignon blanc, if you will.

The making: Not that I cook a lot of meat that isn't chicken (though the Random Kitchen project is changing that - hurrah!), but spare ribs are something I associate with marinades and slow, slooooow cooking in the oven. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that this is a stove-top recipe requiring nothing more complex than a geet big saucepan.

Olive oil, butter and the sage are heated in the aforementioned pan, then the ribs are added and cooked over a high heat for a few minutes until browned a little on all sides. The heat is reduced to pretty low (the recipe doesn't actually specify, but I decide to assume that "burnt to a cinder" isn't the desired outcome) and the ribs are cooked for 20 minutes before being seasoned with salt and pepper. Then they're cooked for a further 40 minutes while being "sprinkled with the wine", more wine being added each time the last sprinkle has been absorbed/evaporated.

Essentially this is a risotto but with meat instead of rice.

And, erm, that's it! The ribs are cooked and ready to be demolished.

The eating: My main concern when I realised this wasn't an oven-based dish was that the ribs would end up being overcooked or not particularly tender - I expect rib meat to basically fall off the bone, whereas here I was anticipating something chewier.

I was wrong, though: the braising process (since that's essentially what it is) still leaves the meat moist and tender, and if anything the fatty parts of the ribs are less gloopy and awkward in terms of mouthfeel than they can be when you've gradually introduced them to the idea of heat for five days solid and you only have to look at them for them to disintegrate into their constituent parts.

That robustness means they pair well with actual side dishes on an actual dinner plate, thus ably demonstrating that spare ribs can be more than just an accompaniment to televised sports and "light" "beer".

The problem (and there is one) lies with the flavour: all that butter, sage and wine actually produces very little in the way of an end result. The ribs taste of pork, sure, and perfectly nice pork at that, but considering this approach demands near-constant attention lest the ribs stick to the bottom of the pan and risk burning and/or falling apart, all that effort seems a little excessive when you could just leave them to get on with it in the oven for what I assume would be a decidedly similar outcome.

Plus you do feel a bit daft eating "posh" ribs - since they're obviously aiming to be a bit classier than your standard face-smeared-with-BBQ-sauce affair - like this when there's so relatively little to recommend them over their country bumpkin cousin.

Still, it's a damn sight quicker than slow-cooking if you do need a rib fix of an evening, so I suppose there's that. Otherwise: not really feeling it.

One-word verdict: Ribbed.