Purple Rain

I did a lot of cooking last night. I made a half coq-au-vin, some beetroot soup and chargrilled some oil-free red peppers for fatless future snacking. I was up ‘til 2 am last night, and was absolutely buggered today. Mind you, I didn’t study at all last night, I was just cooking. I… am an idiot.

105. Beetroot Soup
106. Half Coq-au-vin

Both the beetroot soup and the stew are designed to be made in advance, and reheated as desired. I actually just made these recipes for the sake of it, without any concrete idea as to when we’d eat them. But when I opened the stew pot and saw the purple shade, I just knew that we had to eat it as soon as possible, with the (also purple) beetroot soup I’d just made.

To make the beetroot soup, you have to boil some beetroot in lots of water for a couple of hours until tender, then drain them. Once they’ve cooled a bit, you then peel off the skins and blend them with Dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar, adding enough of the (now deep, deep red) cooking water to make it soupy. I had to add quite a bit of water to get a decent texture.


Beet soup in blender

The half coq-au-vin, (which I presume is called “half” because it’s reduced fat) is just an ordinary stew, and now that I’ve made a few stews, I’ve got into the swing of it. In general, it seems that you make stews by browning some meat, cooking up onions, carrots and/or celery, with herbs and spices, before re-adding the browned meat and some liquid. Then it’s just a matter of letting it cook slowly for an hour or more.

This one is actually very similar in flavour to the braised pheasant I made recently – they both contain red wine, bacon, onions, mushrooms and onions – but the half-coq au vin is heaps nicer! The liquid in question is a mixture of chicken stock and some reduced red wine (boiled up with various herbs), which gives an insanely purple shade to the chicken.


Purple Coq 1

Once it’s had its hour on the stove, Nigella says to heat some brandy in a ladle over a flame, let it ignite, and stir it into the stew. How fun! I love doing this kind of stuff. Once upon a time I would have found this step intimidating, but not anymore. I used to do this all the time at my old (crap) job, when I was a crepe flambeuse extraordinaire. I've left that job, but the pyromania hasn't left me.

And I’m not ashamed to admit (although perhaps I should be) that last night, when I opened the pot, the first words that popped out of my mouth were, “Oh my God! Look at that purple coq!”

This, of course, opened the floodgates for an onslaught of jokes. For example... today at uni with my mates…

“Hey, guess what I’m eating tonight!”
“Mmm… can’t wait to eat that purple coq.”
“I hope the coq tastes alright.”

… and so on. Well, I thought it was funny. And the stew gets more purple as it sits.


How purple!

So tonight when I came home, I didn’t really have to do any cooking at all. I just put some rice in the rice cooker, put the pots on the stove, and sat back to watch Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge.

The stew was good – salty and winey and, as Nigella says, “proper and comforting and old-fashioned”.

We weren’t super-crazy about the soup. I thought it was alright, but not spectacular. It did have a smooth texture and nicely mild beetroot taste, but I think we just don’t like beetroot. There are three beetroot recipes in the Low Fat chapter, and none of them have been fab. They were ok, but they’re definitely on the list of must-repeat-soon-recipes.


Beetroot soup - served with o% fat yogurt


Coq on plate

Pink things

Tonight I tried yet another of Nigella’s three beetroot recipes from the Low Fat chapter. Given that we had a decent amount of last night’s shredded beetroot salad left over, we ate that as well. And seeing that both items were pink, I thought we should have a pink dessert as well (the rhubarb ice-cream that I made ten days ago). Who cares about the fat content? This meal was all about the aesthetic, and when it comes to bright colours, for me, too much is never enough.

97. Beet greens with buckwheat noodles

This dish is undemanding and stress-free – you cook up some chopped beet greens (which look just like rhubarb) in a pan, and toss in boiled soba noodles with bottled sukiyaki sauce. The noodles turn a fantastic shade of magenta.


Beet greens with buckwheat noodles

We’d never tried beet greens before, and now that we have, I can’t say we’re mad about them. The leaves are ok, but the stems (even the little, thin ones) have this really weird salty taste and feral woodsy texture. In fact, we ended up just picking out all the noodles and leaving most of the beet greens on our plates.

Onto dessert – remember when I made the rhubarb ice-cream? I loved the mixture so much I had a good ten minutes of serious, concentrated licking – no bowl, utensil or beater was safe. But I think something went wrong in the churning process, as the final result was slightly icy. Tasty, but icily hard. Perhaps a 40 minute period of ripening in the fridge would have helped, but there was no way we were going to wait that long. I served it with some leftover chocolate sauce (from the recipe for Poires Belle Hélène), which I made to go with homemade vanilla ice-cream seven weeks ago. And just to let you know, it was still good. So if you ever make this chocolate sauce, and for some reason, don’t finish it immediately, an extended stint in the fridge will do it no harm at all.


Ice cream

Birds and Beets

I got the key items for tonight’s dinner from local merchants –the organic grocer around the corner supplied the beetroot, whilst Rendinas’ Butchery supplied the birds. They had no “poussin”, so I got the only other mini-birds they had, “spatchcocks”. I suspect they’re the same thing, actually. A poussin by any other name…

95. Shredded Beetroot Salad with Yogurt (Low Fat)
96. Roast Poussin with Garlic and Shallots (Feeding Babies and Small Children)

The star of this meal is the beetroot salad – Nigella suggests it to go with any roasted little bird, a recipe for which I found in the Feeding Babies and Small Children chapter. I adapted the recipe to be low-fat friendly by simply leaving out the oil and butter. Nigella includes a poussin recipe in the kids’ chapter, because she says they’re the perfect size for a child to eat by him or herself – this must mean that poussins are smaller than spatchcocks, or her children have large appetites. Either way, we were happy with the quantities!

This is a surprisingly elegant supper, given how simple it is to prepare. When I came home from yoga, I shoved the little spatchcocks in the oven with some unpeeled garlic and shallots. Whilst they were roasting, I did the salad. The salad is simply mint and coriander, chopped in a processor, mixed with peeled and grated beetroot (also done in the processor), and lemon juice. To serve, you place the large mound of beetroot on a plate, make a well in the centre and pour some fat-free yogurt in. Delicious. I wore rubber gloves to deal with the beetroot, so my hands were quite well protected from unsightly red stains. However, it was a different story for the benches, my utensils, the taps, the kitchen drawers…


Roast Spatchcock with garlic and shallots, Beet salad on the side


Shredded Beetroot Salad with Yogurt - what gorgeous, vibrant colours!

A note on quantities – I found that one 500 gram spatchcock per person was just right. The salad, on the other hand, makes an incredibly vast quantity (not necessarily a bad thing, I love its fresh and tangy crunchiness). The recipe says 725 grams of beet serves two people, with leftovers. I used about 800 grams, and the three of us only got halfway through it! Ah, the crazy quantities that exist in Nigella-land...