Food 15: feeding guests

with minimal hassle

It was not sunny and we did not eat outside. It was so bleak and rainy that I considered making a stew and lighting the fire. Photo by Luwadlin Bosman on Unsplash

Long post! If it’s looking weird on email, it will display properly on the website or app.

We’ve had different people to stay every night for the past ten days, and I thought it might be useful to write about some of the things I fed them. I wanted the dinners to be nice, obviously, but also low effort, to save me from going into kitchen martyr mode. So, more than cheese on toast in front of the telly, but less than anything fiddly. Also, having just rudely dissed cheese on toast, if you used good bread, good Cheddar, added a layer of green harissa and presented the whole thing nicely, with a tomato salad on the side, I don’t think you’d get many complaints (it’s a perfect Sunday night supper, in fact).

The thing that I made that I liked best was this recipe for roast cauliflower shawarma with green tahini . It is AMAZING - by far the best use of roast cauliflower I have come across, and I have come across many, to the point of becoming slightly tired of the roast cauliflower concept. But I am tired no more! Please make it. Don’t be put off by the long list of ingredients - it’s really easy and most of them are spices. I doubled the recipe and wished I’d tripled it. We ate it as is, but you could stuff it in pita bread for a more shawarma-like experience. It’s from the little blue and red Good Things book, which I use all the time.

I will love this recipe forever.

My default in these lots of people situations, as I’ve written before and will write again because it’s unimprovable, is two chickens roasted together with half a lemon inside each cavity, ditto a few sprigs of tarragon, olive oil drizzled over, salt and pepper, glass of white wine in the tin if you have it, vermouth if you don’t, or even just water, and in at 200c for about 1.5 hours, assuming the chickens are big.

Then you put your fat, burnished chickens on a serving dish, cover them loosely with foil if you want, and leave them to sit. The sitting is essential if you want your chicken to be tender. Or turn the oven off and let them sit in there, in which case leave the door ajar because otherwise the skin will go soggy and wrinkly (this applies to anything you leave to rest in the oven - it’s warm and humid in there from the cooking process, which ruins anything crisp. Opening the door a little fixes it).

While that’s happening, pour all the juices from the tin out into a see-through jug and wait a few minutes for the fat to rise to the top. Then pour said fat away (not down the sink unless you want fatbergs - I pour it into a zipped plastic bag and freeze it until bin day). Return the now mostly fatless juices to the tin.

Near the end of chicken sitting time - which can be from 15 minutes to half an hour if you’re harassed and trying to do something else at the same time - warm up the juice tin on medium heat, add a palmful of fresh tarragon leaves and a little double cream or creme fraiche, wait for it to bubble and thicken slightly, and serve the chickens with that. Make sure everyone is seated because the chicken will be warm, meaning the sauce should be hot.

It’s nice with a salad and mash, which isn’t very summery, but neither is the bloody weather. Oven fries would do it, too, and take advantage of your hot oven. Plain buttered orzo. Good crusty bread, at a push. Or, if it’s warm where you are, do a tarragon mayonnaise instead of a creamy sauce and serve everything at room temperature.

Or carve up the chicken and take it on a picnic, with the mayo in a jam jar, to stuff into crusty baguettes. I feel the baguette, often overlooked in favour of more modish breads, is due a resurgence. Aside from its goodness any time of day, a filled baguette is the perfect portable picnic food. Split it in half horizontally and fill the whole thing then cling film it and slice it in situ, it’s much faster than making and wrapping individual sandwiches.

Nice, but better with a baguette. Photo by Diana Thoresen on Unsplash

Or you could get a round crusty loaf and make pan bagnat, for which you slice the loaf once horizontally near the top to make a lid (like slicing the top off a boiled egg), take out most of the crumb to make a hollow space, drizzle with a little olive oil and then fill with salade Niçoise in layers (so, layers of tomato, basil, hard-boiled egg, black olives, anchovies, tuna plus whatever heretical additions you like in your salade Niçoise. Once on holiday near Aix-en-Provence my father and stepmother had a screaming row because she had put heinous green pepper in the Niçoise, which appalled him to his core. He wouldn’t have approved of my green beans, either).

ANYWAY: when the bread is filled, douse everything generously in more olive oil, season, also generously, and replace the bread lid. Wrap it up tightly to keep the lid in place during transportation. The oil and juices from the tomato seep into the bread and it’s so nice to eat. Note: you can use this model for anything you like - just make sure the things inside the loaf have enough juiciness to leach into the bread, because that’s what makes it good - tomato and olive oil are your friends here. Moisture is key. Or just toss your chosen ingredients with a vinaigrette and stuff that in. Cut into it like you would a cake.

Having written all that, I am seized with doubt - I’ve just done an image search and Google says that pan bagnat involves a roll. But whatever. It’s even nicer in a loaf. So portable! PS I like these picnic glasses from M&S.

The other thing I made was this summery savoury pie, which is shop-bought (obviously) filo pastry, whatever soft greens you have to hand/in the garden, herbs and feta cheese. Speaking of which and to get super-local for a moment, the brilliant local outpost of the magnificent Fen Farm Dairy stocks this British feta-like cheese that’s made in Somerset and is absolutely delicious. (The Fen Farm shop is amazing - it is housed in a 20 foot shipping container and yet somehow stocks 200 different lines).

The pie is from Sarah Raven’s much-consulted Garden Cookbook and the recipe is also here. I spend half my life on that website, caught up in frenetic seed and plant shopping/daydreaming, but I hadn’t ever noticed the recipe section. Anyway: do make it - it’s easy, pleasing to look at and extremely delicious.

I wouldn’t make it to have after the pie, too much stodge, but the website also has Sarah Raven’s recipe for summer pudding, a fruit-and-soggy-bread dish that baffles non-Brits and which I do see sounds a bit ew on paper. But done well, it’s lovely. Here it is made with brioche. Heed her wise words about blackcurrants and their overly insistent flavour, and also do make it the night before, for safety - summer pudding dished up before the bread/brioche has had a chance to absorb the juices properly is not good.

I also made this extremely useful, more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts, infinitely adaptable recipe three times in two weeks and everyone I served it to loved it. I found in Blanche' Vaughan’s excellent book, which I bought recently. Happily, it’s also on her website, so you can read the recipe for yourselves (though I STRONGLY recommend that book, which I am using on repeat).

Basically you cook some brown rice (or white rice, or a grain, but I’m really into brown rice, which tastes nicely nutty), and that’s the end of the cooking. You add some hot-smoked salmon and flake it, slice some avocados and spring onions and make the lovely dressing. Rice aside, it literally takes two minutes to assemble, looks nice on a handsome platter and is delicious to eat. One one of the nights I wilted some spinach with ginger and garlic and dded that to the plate. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, I suspect it might also be good with smoked tofu that you have made crispy and golden by tossing slices in cornflour and frying them (like this, but without the paprika and garlic powder, or like this if you’d rather do it in the oven).

Another recipe from that book that I’ve been making on repeat, since we are in leek season, is this one for leeks with caramelised butter, yogurt, chilli flakes and dill ↓.

Other things I cooked:

• Egg curry, by request from the children - I don’t know where the old-school recipe in my head comes from (my mother? my granny?) but this recipe comes very close, except I don’t use fenugreek. There’s a good, more modern one here, too, using coconut milk. And here’s a very simple, drier version with potatoes.

• Also by request, Meera Sodha’s super-easy pea and aubergine curry plus frozen parathas.

• The best cheese biscuits in the world, to have with drinks. These are Last Meal cheese biscuits.

• Black pepper tofu and rice (that’s three mentions in one post - I swear I am not in the pocket of Big Ottolenghi). This is a years-old staple for me. Sometimes I wake up craving it. It’s also a useful recipe to have up your sleeve if the people arriving in half an hour became vegetarian last week but forgot to say.

• Pudding was either ice cream from Harris & James or Debora Robertson’s trusty, almost grotesquely easy fruit tart, in this instance made with apricots because I was so delighted to see them at the greengrocer, though you can use pretty much any summer fruit. Up the almonds a bit if using frozen berries. She calls it ‘the easiest fruit tart known to humanity,’ and she’s not wrong - it is the keeper of keepers if you are a person who isn’t very into making puddings. I would have also made Alison Roman’s creme patissiere in a cup, but we had custard-haters in our midst.

  

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