September 28th - a first recipe
"We are not here for long. So, let's at least make ourselves something good to eat." Nigel Slater
Sorry - Nigel again. But he's next on my first recipe trawl through the bookcase with volume three of his Kitchen Diaries which he called A Year of Good Eating. And September 28th is obviously not the first recipe - but it has a kind of relevance - mostly because that's today's date and as usual in my investigations here I have rambled into three or four different areas.
First and possibly the most important thing about this particular first recipe choice is the fact that this is the book that started me on the whole writing a blog thing. It was published in 2015 and I think may have been a birthday present in 2016 from my daughter-in-law. Thank you so much Dionne for changing my life in a way and giving me something to exercise my brain with in my old age.
It was such a simple concept. Write something about food every day. Nigel of course was presenting a series of recipes. Which is not me, but of course, also being Nigel, he wrote about a whole lot of other stuff. Each entry was not just a recipe. There was always some thought about all manner of things.
He begins the entire book with the quote at the head of this page - which is also above my blog's index page. It's a sentiment with which I heartily agree - except perhaps the word 'good'. In the light of my piece on probability not possibility I now think that 'good' is perhaps too much to aim for, for the ordinary or reluctant cook. Nigel is into the excitement of possibilites - the word crops up a few times in his introduction and is occasionally a bit precious - as we shall see - and certainly is one of those who bang on about the quality of the produce you by. So a tiny bit élitist. Nevertheless he also worries that:
"the competitive element currently prevalent in food and cooking is scaring people, particularly new cooks, away from getting stuck in. There is, I believe, too much pressure on us to 'perform', to reach for perfection, instead of simply treating the art of making something to eat as the lifelong joy, it should be."
So much for the ethos - on to the first recipe - January 1st - Rising - New Year's Day. The depths of winter in the UK of course.
"The year starts gently in this kitchen, just as it always has, with baking and a pan of soup on the stove. The kitchen table is unusually tidy. A pot of mistletoe. A single candle burning in a glass jar that once held goose fat. A tiny cup of coffee. Toast crumbs."
As I said, a tiny bit precious and elite. Who has goose fat, or mistletoe or soup cooking on the stove at 5.00am? But nevertheless it draws you in. And what does he decide to cook today?
"instead of a loaf, I decide to make a pile of crispbread, thin and freckled with flour ... I will celebrate the first day of the New Year with the rustle of a new and better crispbread" and he is aiming for "Sheets of bread finer than vellum that shattered over the table as you snapped them. Sheets of crispbread speckled with blue poppy seeds and black nigella, rough with flax or linseed or gently puckered with dots and ridges, like Braille on a medicine bottle. Bread so fragile it shattered like sheets of ice."
What he is aspiring to here with that trademark prose, teetering on the edge of twee, but just managing not to, is some crispbread that he ate in Gothenburg, Sweden. Alas there is no picture of his Poppy seed crispbread - but the recipe can be found on the NDTV website. Maybe this picture of some Swedish crispbread is a near enough representation.
Nigel also has other crispbread recipes - some with yeast, some without. The simplest, and plainest is for Rye crispbread the recipe for which can be found in The Guardian, and also on the website Honey on a Razor Blade, which I include here, because the author gets almost OCD, by his own admission, as he makes his own version of Nigel's recipe for Rye crispbread He also confirms the actual ingredients - The Guardian's recipe just has quantities! Same recipe -quite different appearance.
With this recipe we begin to see Nigel's love of pairing crispbreads with fish, particularly smoked fish in some form or other - either as a pâté, or a creamy kind of mix. It reminded me of my own love for such things. If only I could find some smoked trout or mackerel in the supermarkets, although I do have some frozen kippers in the freezer. So maybe next time we invite friends or family round to eat with us, I'll make a kipper paste and some of those crispbreads - plain ones I think.
But before I leave crispbread here are Nigel's other two examples - one served with fish - the other with beetroot - Whipped cod's roe, seeded crispbread; Beetroot and mackerel with pumpkin seed crispbreads - both from The Guardian
I suppose I should have stopped there, but partly inspired by today's beautiful weather, I decided to look and see what he had eaten on a similar spring day - March of course rather than September which is autumn over there. And the answer is Gammon, celeriac and parsley pie which didn't sound particularly springlike to me, but then this is Melbourne and that is London - where in 2015 it was "a damp misty morning followed by a dark evening" which brought on "a sudden need for crisp pastry soaked on one side with sauce or gravy from a pie." Gammon is not something we find here, but he does say it can be 'smoked or not' so I guess an ordinary chunk of ham would do. It's actually not a pie but a deep tart - maybe the fact that it is deep enables him to call it a pie. Fill with your creamy, ham and parsley mixture, grate the celeriac over the top and cook. Interesting.
Last bit of straying from the concept of the first recipe - I thought to check what I was writing about September 28th last year and what a coincidence - I was writing about the idea of the first recipe to solve writer's block - From an old writer's block to a new one. Which wasn't really about the block itself but the way to solve it, having found another blogger who picked a specific page number instead of a first page with various tactics to work around the repetitive nature of always choosing the same page.
So here I go with:
YEARS GONE BY
September 28th on years gone by
2023 - Nothing - well Nigel missed days here and there too
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2017 - Nothing - perhaps on these days we are doing something more worthwhile
2016 - How hard can it be?
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