Nigella's aromatic ham

Like so many other people, I watched Nigella last week and thought how beautifully wintry she looked: her dark hair and eyes; her white and red and black clothes; her festive food and house. She wrote a book called Forever Summer but she herself suits winter far better and in fact her food seems to appeal more to me in the cold weather - even the summery foods that she concocts in Forever Summer. In a way, Feast, the book that followed Forever Summer, might be called Forever Festivals (OK so it might if Nigella had as bad a taste in titles as me...); most of the recipes seem suited to implicitly autumnal or winter occasions - Halloween, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, as well as Christmas. Anyway last Wednesday I curled up with Nigella in festive mode, and as always, she infected me with Yuletide spirit - me, who hasn't even taken the tree out of its box yet. Food is always guaranteed to draw me to occasions more than anything else and so it proved; I spent a good part of Saturday seeking gingerbread syrup to make Nigella's 'Christmas in a glass', but I didn't actually find any, despite trying three overcrowded branches of Starbucks, a shop I never, ever enter. See - even Scrooge wouldn't have resisted Nigella.

On Sunday I decided to try Nigella's aromatic spiced ham, the new version of the fully festive ham that appears in Feast and a relative of the ham in Coca Cola and ham in Cherry Coke that Nigella has become known for. I intended to try it with Jamie's creamy butternut squash, following the example of the lovely Gravy Queen who pops up here occasionally, but my newly bought squash was off and I had to abandon it. Instead I did mustard mash (with lovely lovely Yukon Gold potatoes), roast sweet potato and carrot, and sprouts to accompany the ham, letting loose my inner huffy child to mutter darkly about Tesco's shortcomings and wishing our farm shop had had some butternut squash to prevent me having to fall back on Tesco's over-travelled produce. Cooking the ham was delightfully simple: I boiled it in a mix of water, red wine, fennel, onion, star anise, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, and garlic, until cooked. Then I peeled off the rind and some of the fat, cut a diamond pattern into the remaining fat and studded each intersection of the diamonds with a clove. Meanwhile I simmered redcurrant jelly, cinnamon, paprika and red wine vinegar until it became a syrup and then glazed the ham with it, before replacing the ham (sitting on foil on a baking tray to avoid mess) in the oven at 230 degrees for 15 minutes.


The picture should speak for itself - this ham is sublime. I love Nigella's ham in cherry Coke but this is just as good, definitely. I haven't tried the fully festive ham from Feast, so I can't compare it, but this was absolutely delicious. And it worked well with my improvised veggie side dishes.


Mmm - this was a very nice dinner, and very easy. I am sure my squash recipe would have gone well with it to, but it wasn't to be (see how calm I can be when I want to be). I can vouch for the deliciousness of the ham as leftovers in sandwiches too, with some lovely red onion confit from Rick Stein's that my brother and sister-in-law brought us for our wedding. Gourmet sandwiches indeed - and barely any effort, which is a bonus.

Kylie Kwong's Chinese Feast

In our house, Friday night is very often Curry Night - it's as though I have a physical need of spicy food to mark the beginning of the weekend; I have no idea why. Often, I cook the curry myself - making curry is incredibly easy - but many curries taste better after sitting for a while or after a spell in some sort of marinade, so ideally I need to be a bit organized and sometimes I frankly am not. Anyway, last week we had an Indian takeaway, trying out a new takeaway that our friends rated very highly - and we were given the wrong curry: a hideously hot chilli masala instead of the medium garlic we had ordered. This week I wanted to cook and decided to make use of my (yes, another) new book, Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking, which had come highly recommended.

I decided to make sung choi bao of pork (basically - spiced-up pork mince in lettuce leaves) to start, then chicken and cashew stir-fry with steamed rice. The pork mince was stir-fried with ginger, garlic, red onion, shao hsing wine, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and sesame oil, then tossed with julienned carrot and spring onions (I was also meant to use celery and beansprouts but didn't have any of the latter and forgot to include the former).

This was served in iceberg lettuce leaves that had been soaked in cold water, crunchy little boats to hold the spicy filling

I have made various sorts of mince-in-iceberg starters (my favourite being Nigella's Korean beef from Forever Summer) but this one had better texture than previous versions I have tried; the mix of raw and stirfried veg and mince worked really well, and the flavours were good too.

To follow I made a simple chicken and cashew stirfry from the same book - very simple indeed, since it contained only chicken thigh fillet, garlic, shao hsing wine, cashews, cucumber and salt. The chicken was marinaded for 30 minutes in shao hsing wine, cornflour, cold water and sea salt, and then stirfried with the other ingredients, adding chopped spring onion to garnish.

This dish was incredibly disappointing. It wasn't nasty, it was quite nice, but it lacked oomph. I can see why in retrospect: it could have done with some soy or oyster sauce, or some other flavouring as well as the Chinese cooking wine; ginger, for instance, would have helped. It was okay; it just wasn't fantastic, which was a shame after the very tasty pork. I am not going to give up on Kylie, but I think the next dish I try will have more ingredients (beef in oyster sauce looks delicious, as does Mongolian beef and the pork with honey and ginger; the prawn dishes look divine too). Perhaps I should be wary of too-flavoursome starters, that build up expectations in the taste buds of treasures to come, and lead to disappointment when the main course arrives.

Friday night off - curry night!

This post is something of an aside, since I didn't cook anything from Jamie's book... but it has some relevance, because I am becoming very familiar with the contents of Jamie's book and I feel that he has missed out something vital - a curry section. Chicken tikka masala, as we all know, was invented in Britain and is practically the nation's favourite dish. But how many people actually cook their Friday night curry? I ask this not to blame anyone for ordering a takeaway - I write as someone who actually gets cravings for takeaway curry. But I also love cooking and curry is easy and rewarding to cook - you can be lazy about measuring precise quantities, you can make it almost from the store-cupboard, it tastes fantastic. So. In the last few months I have been experimenting with curries. I love Jamie's herby, fresh Thai green curry from The Naked Chef; it might be inauthentic but it has such amazingly vibrant flavours. I also love Gordon Ramsay's Malaysian curry from The F Word. I love Pete's lamb curry from Jamie's second book; I love a selection of choices from Vicky Bhogal, Madhur Jaffrey, and so on. But the last few curry nights have seen me repeatedly cook from Tom Norrington-Davies' brilliant book Cupboard Love, which the lovely Ilana is cooking her way through. Ilana is a star because she isn't afraid to admit when she doesn't like the kinds of food we are all supposed to like if we want to be taken seriously as foodies (Stilton, red wine, pancetta, that sort of thing). She has a funny, compellingly honest style of writing that uncannily echoes that of Tom N-D in Cupboard Love. Anyway, I had read about Ilana's curry nights and they made my mouth water. So I tried Tom's chicken tikka, with masala sauce - the sauce is to die for and I am sure it is what has made me cook chicken tikka masala three times now, despite being someone who would never order chicken tikka masala in an Indian restaurant. Man could live by that sauce alone. But it does go well with the chicken. This time, after seeing a stunning pic on Ilana's blog, I also made Tom's aloo gobi, albeit with more gobi (cauliflower) than aloo (potatoes) because I had cauli to use up. And it was very nice indeed.

Thank you Ilana for introducing me to Cupboard Love Curry Night!