Not so experimental Saturday 23rd May: Duck Ragu with Pangritata

Often my experimental impulses fail me, and I desert my vow to cook new, different dishes at the weekend in favour of the comfort and joy of cooking something awesome that I’ve mastered many times before. This is what happened yesterday, post-seven-mile-walk, surrounded by cookbooks each boasting mouth-watering untried dishes, there were just too many choices and feeling a bit overwhelmed I crumbled and opted instead for one of my recent favourites. Fresh from our Italian honeymoon last summer, my husband whipped up this dish for me after a tough week at work – it hit all the right spots and instantly transported me back to the Chianti region, supping thick tuscan pasta with a beautifully sun-soaked glass of red wine.

The Recipe: Duck Ragu & Homemade Pici Pasta

This is a really authentic Tuscan dish that I fell in love with when I tried it in Pienza at one of my favourite restaurants La Bandita Townhouse and which has been recreated by Jamie Oliver as part of his TV series with fellow foodie Jimmy Doherty, Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast. I think Jamie’s recipe reimagines this dish beautifully, encompassing all the warmth, richness and intensity of the flavours as I remember them. The recipe can be found here. As always with a Jamie Oliver recipe the instructions are very well-explained and easy to follow, and whilst it does take a bit of time to pull this dish together there’s lots of oven-cooking and simmering time involved, leaving plenty of opportunities to relax with a glass of wine or two whilst your dinner bubbles away. We didn’t stick to the recipe totally, we made a few simple amendments:

1. We used a duck crown rather than an entire duck because a) it takes half of the cooking time and b) it’s a lot cheaper and we’re not made of money!

2. We omit the raisins from the recipe – they add a slight sweetness, and I think the dish tastes better without them.

3. Embarrassingly we haven’t ever made the pasta that goes with this dish – instead we use high quality shop bought tagliatelle. Having eaten pici Pasta in Italy I can vouch for how tasty it is, but its also very thick and glutinous spaghetti which is incredibly filling, so for the sake of ease and preference we opt for something slightly less intense (taste-wise and time-wise)!

The Results: I really love this dish! It’s a recipe made up of strong, vibrant ingredients, but nothing seems to overpower anything else, instead in each mouthful you can detect the bold tomatoes, the rich duck, the smoothness of the wine, and the salty kick of the rosemary, each element playing its crucial part. But, for me, the real crowning glory is the pangritata – a little breadcrumb dressing fried with crispy duck skin, thyme and garlic, it adds a lovely crunchy texture to the meal, which makes it feel truly decadent and special. Yum yum yum – I can’t wait for leftovers tonight!

Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan

A superbly odd little novel that you can easily whizz through on a quiet Sunday afternoon. I read “Sombrero Fallout” after hearing my boss describe it to a customer, it sounded bizarre and entertaining and it turned out to be exactly that!

The plot exists in three strands: the narrative of a devastated American humour writer who has been dumped by his Japanese girlfriend, the short chapters that describe the sleeping ex-girlfriend and the abandoned story that the writer begins and then discards in the waste paper basket, but which carries on without him, a tour-de-force of a story about a frozen sombrero that falls from the sky!

I loved the simplicity, strangeness and humour that erupts from the writer’s abandoned story. It begins so quietly:

“A sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the Main Street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen”

But as both the mayor’s cousin and the out-of-work person struggle with the pressure to respond to the mysterious hat a full-on revolution results, the entire town become involved and chaos ensues! It’s a marvellously dramatic story made all the more entertaining by the fact that its happening in the bin and is juxtaposed with the comparatively motionless stories of the moping writer and his sleeping former girlfriend. Yet neither the writer nor the girlfriend’s stories lack their own forms of drama. The American humorist is frustrated to have lost his girlfriend, obsessed with her beautiful hair and taunted by imagining her future sex life which does not involve him! Whilst the ex-girlfriend swears that she’ll never date a writer again, recalls how high-maintenance her relationship with the American humorist was, and declares that she’d rather go out with a broom! There’s also an underlying tension in the sleeping chapters, as readers, we feel uneasy watching this woman sleep; uninvited voyeurs who could be caught out should this stranger awake.

The prose is really perfect, sparse and poetic at once – “Yukiko turned like a fantastic page in her sleep and her hair turned also like a dark page” – and refreshingly matter-of-fact in its humour: “Some people thought he was very charming and others thought that he was a total asshole. The truth lay somewhere in between and was very close to the halfway mark”. And the concept, whilst unusual never even edges towards pretension, instead it’s simple to follow and wonderfully unaffected in style and premise/ This is a truly original and highly enjoyable read, I’m a big fan.

Experimental Saturday 2nd May: Chilli Beef Rendang

Whenever I make a proper curry from absolute scratch I vow never again to use a jar of sauce or even cheat just a little with a curry paste (inevitably time and busyness always end up off-roading my good intentions). Homemade curries are awesome – the flavours are always much bolder, the aftertaste is less salty, the sauce is less oily and all that effort allows you to feel incredibly virtuous even though you’re eating something as naughty and delicious as a curry!

The Book: Home Comforts by James Martin

I pilfered a damaged copy of this cookbook from work after flicking through it earlier in the week. I can’t profess to being a big James Martin fan – I rarely watch Saturday Kitchen (morning TV makes me cranky) and on the rare occasion when I have tuned in there’s been nothing in particular about Mr Martin’s cooking that’s particularly inspired me Despite this, on first inspection I thought that this book looked rather good. It’s a mix of traditional and more flouncy chef-like fare with some really tempting dishes at its core (I’ll definitely be going back and trying out the madeleines with winter-spiced caramel at some point soon).

The Recipe: Chilli Beef Rendang (pg. 131)

I was instantly salivating at the thought of this Asian style curry it combines so many of my favourite curry ingredients (lemongrass, coriander, kaffir lime, chillies) many of which remind me of my visit to Thailand and the curries that I ate there. In fact this is an Indonesian/Malaysian inspired dish, and it’s much, much richer than a Thai curry. The recipe can be found here. We made a few notable amendments:

• Firstly, we halved the amount of beef used to feed two rather than four, but then (due to a breakdown in communication) didn’t halve any of the other ingredients;
• We skipped the dried chillies because we couldn’t get hold of them on the day;
• We added about 100g of fresh spinach five minutes before the dish was done (because I love some veg in my curry);
• And we forgot to add the lime juice at the end (because we’re greedy and we started stuffing our faces with curry before realising).

This isn’t a speedy dish to put together, there’s lots of elements involved: curry paste making, marinating the meat, crushing and toasting herbs and spices and a lengthy cooking time, but we found that ultimately this is a curry worth waiting for

The Results: I’ve never eaten a rendang curry before so I can’t comment on how this might compare to the real deal, but what I will say is that our version of James Martin’s curry tasted nothing like any curry I’ve ever tasted before. Don’t get me wrong – it was really delicious, but there’s a couple of elements that surprised me. From a visual point of view, this dish isn’t as colourful as your average curry, in fact it’s a really luscious almost chocolatey coloured sauce, probably mostly as a result of the intense hue of the tamarind paste. And secondly, the most overwhelming taste of the entire recipe was the beef, it was beautifully flavoured by all of those gorgeous nutty, fragrant herbs and spices, and admittedly you could detect little pangs of these on the edge of your tongue or the back of your throat, but the meat and the stock were the most powerful taste. In retrospect, I wonder whether that squeeze of lime juice would have lifted the intensity of the whole thing and given it a little burst of freshness. I sound a little negative, and that’s unfair, because whilst the dish wasn’t quite what I expected, Neil and I made yummy noises through the entire dinner – Neil even headed back to the kitchen in search of the pan to scoop up any leftovers with a piece of naan bread (what a heathen)!

Holiday Reading #2: The Giraffe’s Neck by Judith Schalansky

I had been intrigued by this beautifully presented German translation for a few weeks and then when I realised that it was on the Long-list for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize I felt compelled to investigate further. And so my second holiday read was “The Giraffe’s Neck” by Judith Schalansky – a novel-come-biology-lesson about Frau Inge Lohmark – a scathing teacher who ardently subscribes to the survival of the fittest principle.

Much of the novel takes the form of Frau Lohmark’s disdainful observational monologue as she laments the stupidity of her class and her fellow teachers. In short, matter-of-fact sentences she studies the behaviours, personalities and actions of her community. It’s a strange narrative perspective, as the novel is written in the third person, but is quite obviously directly communicates Inge’s viewpoint, the result is a seemingly omniscient view into Frau Lohmark’s brain. The effect of this detached style is an extra layer of buffering between the reader and the “narrator” that intensifies the already quite apparent impression that Frau Lohmark is an extremely impersonal person.

It’s a monologue that I found hard to stomach at times – partly because some of the scientific concepts became a bit overwhelming in places – but mostly because Inge’s observations are so bitingly cool and detached. It’s an intense style to endure, and despite considering myself the kind of reader that enjoys dark stories with unlikeable characters, at times I did long for some small signs of warmth or humanity in the central character. Perhaps, what makes such a bleak narrative much more bearable is the very distinctive humour of Inge’s primate-like description of her pupils, there’s also something poetic about the precision of her scientific language. I particularly liked the seating plan diagram, which follows the name of each child in the class with a scornful observation of their physical and/or mental state:

“Ferdinand Friendly but erratic creature. Hollow eyes. Whorly as an Abyssinian guinea pig. Sent to school too young. Decidedly late maturing.”

“Tom Disagreeably ponderous bodily presence. Tiny eyes in obese face. Vacuous expression: still thoroughly stunned by nocturnal emission. An olm would be more attractive. Little hope that unfortunate proportions can be corrected by further growth.”

Whilst we, the readers, never truly encounter any softening in Inge’s character, there are glimpses of fragility, frustration and emotion in the episodes that relate her recollections of her own daughter Claudia – a childless 35 year-old woman who has moved to America. These short excerpts provide an insight into who Frau Lohmark might be beyond her scientific facade, but any sense of humanity conveyed here is brutally dismissed by the end.

The plot of “The Giraffe’s Neck” is also particularly interesting. On the surface, it’s a novel in which nothing much seems to happen, whilst we are absorbed in Frau Lohmark’s directionless observations and scientific asides there is very little by way of plot development. But if we glimpse into the background of Inge’s monologue, we can detect two pressing issues that require her urgent attention: the school’s future is in jeopardy and a girl in her class is being badly bullied. Inge notes the existence of both of these crises, but fails to react to them. Her view that what thrives will survive means she can remove herself from the responsibility of getting involved in either issue, leaving control up to natural selection. But ironically, for a teacher who preaches the importance of adaptation, Inge shows no signs or willingness to adapt herself, and this will prove, ultimately, to be her downfall.

‘The Giraffe’s Neck” isn’t an easy read, but there is much to praise. This is a truly original novel, in its style, its storytelling and in the absolutely stunning illustrations that accompany this strange, but powerful narrative.