Cooking with Katy

Regular readers will be aware that I am plodding my way through Nigella’s Kitchen recipe book with varying degrees of success.  I have done a fair bit since my last progress report. I wrote it all down to tell you, and then carefully lost the piece of paper I wrote it all down on.

I am ticking the pages in the book as I go through them, but I cannot remember which ones I ticked when, so you must take it from me that I had mostly successes pre Christmas.  I took Christmas off, and in the week after New Year, the children were begging me to go back to the recipe book, even though they hardly like any of the things I cook from it. They were as bored as I was with the repetitious nature of the half dozen standard recipes I can cook with my eyes shut (that suit them).

I think that’s some kind of progress.  I have bored them into submission.

Yesterday I started again with something Tilly has wanted to try for a long time.  I had to take her for a bra fitting, which she really didn’t want to go to, so as a reward, after we had done our duty, we sloped off and got a drink and a bun in a place of her choice, and then went to the supermarket so she could get the ingredients she wanted.

I cooked, on her behalf: pan seared scallops with Thai scented pea puree.  It was an absolute doddle. It took about ten minutes start to finish, and it tasted fabulous. Sadly she didn’t like it at all and ended up having toast, but I had a wonderful lunch.

Jason had requested a curry for dinner.  Nigella is not the world’s most enthusiastic curry recipe provider and I had done all the obvious ones.  In the end I found a recipe for something called ‘Patara Lamb Shanks’.  I decided that this would do.

I will now illustrate to you my patented method of cooking.  Another reason, along with the swearing, why I will not be invited to Masterchef any time soon.

I noted down the ingredients I needed to get.  The recipe quantities were immense. It has to be said that Nigella is a fan of hearty portions, even by my gluttonous standards.

I needed lamb shanks and some thing called Panang curry paste.  I had everything else (which fact I had a small preen about).

In the supermarket, Tilly and I searched high and low for Panang curry paste. I could only find Rendang.  In the end I decided it was near enough and hoiked it into the trolley.

I know I was only fooling myself, but I do live in the East Midlands.  It is not the most metropolitan of places and although Leicester has some of the finest curry houses in the UK, Panang paste is Thai, not Indian.

Things are better than they used to be when sourcing unusual ingredients. I remember about six years ago, trying to trace some Pecorino cheese to make a Nigel Slater dish.  When I asked for it in the local supermarket the woman looked at me as if I had asked her to hold an old lady still while I robbed her blind.

Still, Rendang. Panang.  Potayto. Potahto.  It sounds close enough.

Then onto the lamb.  Nigella is a huge fan of lamb recipes.  Lamb and chicken recipes make up the bulk of her meaty offerings.  The problems with lamb in our house are: a) it is bloody expensive and she stipulates huge quantities (like half a sheep at a go) and there are five of us. One meal can end up costing me £50 if I’m not careful, especially the ones where she also stipulates booze. We do not drink much so all booze has to be bought in, and she favours expensive tipples to cook with, like Sake, and Port for example, b) nobody really likes lamb much, which makes it rather wasteful to cook.

I have established that the leaner it is, the happier they (and me) are to eat it.

Consequently, by the time I had totted up the cost of six lamb shanks as stipulated in the recipe against lean lamb steaks that I knew people would eat, I abandoned the lamb shanks and bought steaks. The children don’t eat much meat so I can make one steak suffice for two, or sometimes three of them.

So basically the recipe was now totally different from anything Nigella wanted except that it had some kind of lamb, and some kind of curry paste.

When I got home, I read the recipe.

Let me advise you.  If you are trying something new, it’s probably best to read the recipe in the morning, hours before you have to cook it.  The number of times I have been caught out by the ‘marinade for twenty four hours’ thing. Or in this case, ‘cook for two and a half hours, leave to rest, cook for a further hour, fanny about for another half an hour’, instruction half way down the page.

This was just as Jason had said: ‘I’m starving. How long will the curry take?’

Ummm….

Luckily, because I wasn’t cooking half a sheep, and I had steaks and not shanks, which need less cooking time, I was able to revise my cooking times a little.

Or a lot.

I set about the recipe.  She advised browning the meat on the hob and then popping it in a casserole dish with just coconut milk to braise for two hours.  Then you add the rest of the ingredients after you have removed the meat and fiddle about porting the meat here, there and everywhere.

I got cross with this.  I did not have time to do the lamb hokey cokey. I had a slavering husband to appease.

I also got insane about the fact that there were no onions in the recipe.  I have said it before, and I’ll say it again.  A savoury recipe is unnatural if it doesn’t have onions in it.  Particularly a curry.  I know they usually put them in the curry paste, but still. It is just wrong. OK?

At this point I went even more off piste.

I chopped onions and garlic, and sweated them down on the hob, before adding and browning the meat.

Then I added all the rest of the ingredients and slammed it into the oven on a low heat for an hour and a half.

Fin.

When it had finished cooking I was so utterly sick of the whole thing I didn’t want to eat it.

Jason tell me it was very nice, and the meat was cooked to perfection. It just fell apart and was beautifully tender. The Rendang sauce, added to the coconut milk effectively removed any spiciness and it was more like a perfumed stew, which made him a bit sad.

God knows what it would have tasted like with Panang paste.  I may never know.

Despite the fact that I have technically not cooked Patara Lamb Shanks, I am ticking it off in the book.  I feel I have been true to the spirit of the recipe.

Sort of.