Chicken Under a Brick - a Random Recipe

Yes, you read it right.

Chicken Under a Brick. Not in it. Definitely under it. Actually, it was 2 poussin, if we're being strictly accurate.

Using Dom's random recipe number generator for this month's Random Recipe challenge, book 26 turned out to be Nigellisima, page 90 was Chicken Under a Brick.


I was really pleased that Nigellisima was the chosen book - despite receiving it at Christmas, I have done little more than salivate my way through it. I wasn't going to use the random number generator to choose the page too, but it fell open far too conveniently at the olive oil chocolate cake which I have been considering for some time now, so in order to enter into the true spirit of the challenge, I went the whole hog, put the number of pages in the generator, and ended up with poussin.

I've never cooked poussin before. Little birds remind me of a time in France when many pigeons were served up on a platter in front of me. All those little bodies. My 17 yr old self was unable to contemplate it.


My nearly 41 yr old self was far happier with the idea, and a quick conversation with my butcher secured me 2 little bodies. Just right for my almost 41st birthday dinner.

The brick bit is quite interesting - you have to spatchcock the birds (easily done with some heavy duty kitchen scissors) and marinade them in lemon zest and juice, thyme, chilli, garlic and oil, and the brick (covered in foil) then holds them flat in the pan when you cook them, first on the hob and then in the oven. It also, apparently, gets the skin crispy. The recipe isn't on line anywhere but if you google Nigella's chicken under a brick, you'll get a good idea of what's involved!

I also got to use my rather smart neon pink tongs for removing the birds from the marinade, turning them half way through cooking, and for general poking about in the pan. It's the little things, you know...

To go with, I decided to have a Nigella blow out. We had a butternut squash in the veg box, and Express has a rather tasty affair involving blue cheese and pecans with roasted squash.  

On the plate together, a tasty and colourful dinner:

The poussin were absolutely delicious. I followed the recipe to the letter, with no variations apart from not marinading it for as long as Nigella suggests (because I had overlooked that part of the recipe) but 2 hours was fine. The only thing I'd do differently next time is leave out the salt from the marinade, but otherwise, the meat was just beautifully tender, with loads of lovely juices. This would be perfect on a BBQ as well.

I have to say that had I not randomly chosen this recipe, I would have looked at it and mentally filed it as too involved - simply because of wrapping a brick in foil, it would seem. I did also have a residual concern about the strength of the shelves in my oven. Having now cooked it, I will definitely do it again - so what do I know? Matthew Fort reviewed Nigellissima for the Guardian's Word of Mouth blog last September commented that recipes in the book that 'tempt the most are the most straightforward' and he cites this one as an example of that. He's right. 

I don't often stack up my blog challenge entries but as well as Dom's challenge, I can't resist adding this to the current Forever Nigella challenge with the theme of 'colourful', hosted by Elizabeth at A Girl in her Kitchen for Sarah at Maison Cupcake

and also to Karen's Herbs on Saturday, hosted by Karen herself this month, because both the poussin and the butternut squash recipes (which are admittedly Nigella's and not my own) have thyme in them, adding to the flavours.

Raspberry Polenta Cake - Forever Nigella 25

The sun! What a glorious thing it is to cast off the tyranny of winter. This seems to have happened all of a sudden too - one minute damp, gloomy, miserableness and then all of a sudden SUNSHINE. The bats are back in the garden at dusk and I heard a cuckoo while I was out walking the dog in the early morning. I want to cast caution to the wind, shave my legs, paint my toenails and swish about in a dress and flipflops for the next 6 months. I might even add a sunhat, just for good measure.

Can you tell I'm in a good mood?

So anyway, one of the things that happens round here when the sun comes out is that everyone gets more sociable than usual, and our plans for a quiet Saturday evening were thrown out of the window with an invite for a general get together with some friends.

Beer, a fire pit, marshmallows. What could be better? 

My contribution was a hastily rustled up cake, loosely based on Nigella's rhubarb cornmeal cake from Domestic Goddess. Based on the fact that I had no rhubarb, but plenty of rasperries in the freezer, I adapted heavily: used the raspberries pretty well frozen, replaced cinammon with the zest of a lemon (I happen to know for a fact that the Goddess would approve of the rasp/lemon combo), used self raising flour rather than plain (none in the cupboard) 0% fat Greek yoghurt rather than bio yoghurt. I also used a rather unconventional cake making method, having mixed up all the dry ingredients including the sugar together in a bowl as a result of recipe-blindness, leaving me nothing to cream my butter with. Not that I'd necessarily recommend it as a method, but there doesn't appear to have been any harm done.

And the colours - well gorgeous - a rich yellow batter partly from the cornmeal, and partly from the eggs that the chickens obligingly produced, studded with the deep ruby raspberries, and that was just before it was cooked... 

Just right for this month's Forever Nigella, hosted by Elizabeth at A Girl in Her Kitchen for Sarah at Maison Cupcake, with the theme 'colourful'.

Raspberry Polenta Cake



500g frozen raspberries
300g caster sugar
150g self raising flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
zest of a lemon, finely grated
155g fine polenta
2 large eggs
1tsp vanilla extract
75g soft unsalted butter and 50g Stork margarine 
250g 0% fat Greek yoghurt

23cm Springform cake tin, buttered and lined

Pre-heat the oven to 180C



Mix together the dry ingredients (sugar, flour, bicarb, salt, lemon zest and polenta). Whisk together the eggs and the vanilla. Beat together the butter and marg till soft and fluffy then add in the egg mixture a little at a time, After each addition, add a little of the dry ingredient mix to prevent the egg curdling. Once the eggs are added, alternate between yoghurt and the rest of the dry ingredients mix until everything is just mixed. Fold in the raspberries (still frozen) and bake. This is quite a long process - Nigella's original cake is supposed to take 1hr in total, but I remember it taking longer when I followed the recipe. My version, well, I checked after 40 minutes and covered the tin with foil to stop the cake catching, then checked again at an hour. I gave it another 20 minutes, then an additional 15 minutes. And then 10 minutes more...

The resulting cake had quite a crisp outside layer as a result of the lengthy cooking, but a lemony cake inside with a lovely raspberry layer at the bottom.

The general consensus was that the crispy outside was a pretty good contrast with the inside of the cake, and all in all pretty good.

And with a good dollop of cream it was really rather good.

And after chilli, and cake, we lit a bonfire, let the kids rampage around the fields next door to the garden and watched the moon. Perfect.

Forever Nigella - Easter: Lemon - no, Passionfruit - Meringue Cake

Feast is probably my favourite Nigella tome. I love How to be a Domestic Goddess (for the cinammon bun recipe alone), but there's something about Feast that really gets me. It's all about spending a little time creating really special food, and it has never disappointed. The curry feast has stood me in good stead on a couple of raucous dinner party occasions - particularly good for the cook ahead nature of the whole thing, but on its own, the Mughlai chicken recipe is one that the kids are very keen on. True, I have never been tempted to cook the sweet potato with marshmallow topping, but there's a whole section on chocolate cakes from the bog standard old fashioned chocolate cake to the more sophisticated Rococoa Cake - and of course a Chocolate Malteser cake long before later pretenders to the  Domestic Goddess throne.


I love that the book covers different food cultures and meals for different occasions in those cultures. If I refer to a book during Christmas preparations it is almost always to Feast that I turn, and she has revolutionised my Yorkshire pudding. 

And if I haven't convinced you enough that this would be the one Nigella volume to take to your desert island and torture yourself with while you survived on all that fish you would spear (just think sashimi, Dahling), and coconuts, let me tell you that you must have the sake steak at least once before you die. Honestly - it is divine.

So naturally, as the theme for the Forever Nigella challenge this month is Easter, Feast was the volume I turned to. We were going to a  lunch party on Palm Sunday, and I offered pudding (of course I did - Palm Sunday wasn't a fast day!). I dithered over what to make, but in the end, it had to be the Lemon Meringue Cake. Happily for everyone concerned, it's on her website, so you can find the recipe here if you want to have a go yourself.

It's classic Nigella, with lots of little asides and comment littered about the recipe. This is why I love Nigella so much: "Divide the mixture between the prepared tins. You will think you don't even have enough to cover the bottom of the tins but don't panic. Spread calmly with a rubber spatula until smooth."

calmly spread...

 

There was also a suggestion about swapping the lemon curd filling for passion fruit. Given that it was Palm Sunday and all that, I decided to go with it.

So the day before Palm Sunday we had friends for dinner which turned into a rather more riotous session than anticipated and our guests left at just after 2 in the morning. I can't remember the last time I was voluntarily up at 2 a.m. It was great fun but faced with operation clear up and then cake baking before lunch, I almost cracked. I think if I hadn't already made the curd, I might have done. In the end,  I managed to pull myself together, and actually it's a fairly straightforward recipe. You make a lemon sponge and smooth that into 2 tins (see above), then cover the sponge batter with meringue (one smoothed, one 'peaked' with the back of a spoon) before baking.

smoothed....                                peaked

I wasn't concentrating completely, and I slightly overcooked them so that the top of the peaked meringue caught slightly, but sandwiched together (flat meringue down, peaked meringue on top) with the passion fruit curd and some whipped cream, it was a reasonable offering to take along to our lunch,

Jen at Blue Kitchen Bakes is hosting Forever Nigella this month for Sarah at Maison Cupcake .

Passion Fruit Curd

It's getting close to Easter and close to the end of the deadline for this month's Forever Nigella.

Although I have my 'main event' in mind for this, I'm getting twitchy that I won't get it blogged in time (let's face it, I haven't even baked it yet at the time when I'm writing this post), but never fear. As a teaser, a sneaky peak, I can bring you one of the component parts, made on Friday evening, in readiness for said main event. I'm not going to give the game away entirely, but I'm sure you can guess what I might end up doing with this gorgeous jar of passion fruit curd.

Now before I go any further, given that it's Palm Sunday when the final product of my labours are to be eaten, and it's for this reason that I made passion fruit curd rather than lemon curd for the purpose for which it is intended, I thought I would explain that the passion fruit comes from the passion flower (no really!) and is so called because it was used by Spanish missionaries when they were trying to explain the crucifixion of Jesus - also known as the passion of Christ - to the indigenous population. The success of this is not so well documented, but in case you were interested, the missionaries likened the stigmas of the passion flower to the nails in Jesus' hands and feet, the threads of the passion flower were like the Crown of Thorns, the vine's tendrils were likened to the whips used to beat Jesus, the five anthers represented the wounds he sufferes and the ten petals and sepals resemble the Apostles (excluding Judas and Peter). Whether you subscribe to that or not, it's a beautiful flower

But I'm digressing. So Passion Fruit Curd from How to be a Domestic Goddess and also in Feast can also be found on Nigella.com so if you are so inspired you can find the recipe there. It uses 11 passion fruit and I suppose you could extend the metaphor to suggest that Nigella was thinking of the 11 faithful apostles when she dreamed this up, although I suspect she was more likely thinking about cake...

There's a very fiddly bit which is sort of glossed over which is the bit where you have to sieve the pulp and juice from 10 passion fruit to separate it away from the seeds, but if you whizz it all in a food processor briefly, this can help.

Once you've done that, it's pretty straightforward as far as making curd is concerned. You just need the time to stir it all constantly over a very low heat and it can take a bit of time. believe me, I have been that person with a pan of lemon flavoured scrambled egg before (obviously, when I was making lemon curd that time). Don't be tempted to put the heat up or stop stirring, even for a second - it will come good in the end. Fortunately, Nigella doesn't promise that it will all be done and dusted in 10 minutes (unlike others I could mention, and naming no names, Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall). I was a little concerned that she made no indication whatsoever of how long it might take, but in the end it was about 35 minutes to get the orangey curd thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. 

After that, it was but a moment to whisk in the contents of an 11th passion fruit before putting into a jar (unless you have an immediate use for it...)

This month's Forever Nigella is hosted by Jen at Blue Kitchen Bake on behalf of Sarah at Maison Cupcake

Forever Nigella #23 Nostalgia & Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Forever Nigella... my favourite blogging event, not that I need an excuse to don my silky dressing gown, open one of the Goddess's tomes, and whip up something delicious (well, maybe I lied about the silky dressing gown...)

The theme this month is 'Nostalgia' and although I entered a rather cobbled together cheesecake that was loosely based on one of La Lawson's earlier in the month, I have been hankering for making the Pineapple Upside Down cake from Express for some time now, and it seemed to fit with the theme for this month.




I don't have any nostalgic memories of Pineapple Upside Down cake myself - my pudding memories (for this, surely, is a 'pudding' type of cake) centre around milk puddings, both warm (in the form of rice pudding, sago, semolina), and cold (mainly blancmange). But the fact that I don't have any memories of it doesn't mean that it doesn't conjure up retro thoughts in my mind - perhaps I'm wishing that my childhood had featured such a delight. Also, a lot of the nostalgia I have connected to Nigella's recipes relate to the time when I was cooking my way out of the funk I got myself in when Blue was so ill. This month saw the anniversary of his diagnosis, and I've already dwelled on it (not on here - I wouldn't put you through any more of that than I do already!) enough, so this is about creating nostalgic memories for my children, rather than looking back myself.

I decided to make it for pudding last night as it was my turn to host the Monday night hordes for tea. A particularly scrummy Good Food ham and pea pesto pasta from March 2013's issue (which I wholeheartedly commend) followed by this beauty of a cake.

I have a quick turnaround on a Monday evening if I'm hosting - we don't get home till just before 5 and have to be out again at 6.15 for Cubs. And yesterday, due to a work meeting and a surprise after school 'open day' (well, everyone else knew about it - it was just a a surprise to me!) I had no chance to get any prep done beforehand. I thought wicked (and possibly more sensible) thoughts about the emergency fishfingers in the freezer, but no. The meal plan said pasta and cake, pasta and cake it was going to be.

Fortunately, the cake lived up to the 'Express' moniker (the pasta did too, but more about that another time). I only had a springform cake tin, but I disregarded the stern instruction NOT to use spring form, and simply lined my tin with greasproof. Job done.

Apart from faffing around with greaseproof paper to make up for my inadequately stocked cake tin cupboard (I feel a virtual trip to Lakeland coming on), it was dead, dead easy - you line the tin first with a sprinkling of sugar, than with your pineapple and cherries. The batter is a quick whizz in a food processor, smooth it over the fruit, whack it in the oven and bingo:

It was a big hit too - so maybe, just as Nigella fondly recalls the pineapple upside down cake she ate at the home of a friend of her grandmother's, may be my children, and their friends who were with us for tea, will recall this in years to come...


This month's Forever Nigella event is hosted by The Botanical Baker on behalf of Sarah from Maison Cupcake

Forever Nigella 22 - Food to Cherish Your Loved Ones - the Round Up

Well, I knew hosting a Forever Nigella would be a great way to start 2013 for me, and I wasn't wrong. I've been introduced to some lovely blogs that hadn't read before, and some of my old favourites have also contributed.

First up, Caroline Makes... included this delicious Tiramisu from Nigelissima as part of a special New Year's Eve meal for her boyfriend. Like Caroline, I also received Nigelissima for Christmas but I'm yet to make anything from it. It won't be long...

Next, the lovely Annie from one of my favourite food blogs Scrummy Suppers and Quirky Cakes entered the Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake from Nigella.com. Annie has made this cake on a number of occasions and it's never let her down - her cakes look pretty amazing, so I can see why she goes back to the recipe when she needs a cake to make someone feel special.

The great Miss Flash at Food Glorious Food  went down the bread route, taking inspiration from my favourite Nigella tome, How to be a Domestic Goddess. Based on a maple syrup and pecan loaf, Miss Flash made maple Syrup and pistachio loaf and mighty good it looks too.

Louise at Crumbs and Corkscrews, a blog I hadn't come across before cooked the most amazing looking flourless brownies from Nigella Express. She substituted white chocolate chunks and cherries for the nuts, and used Baileys in the chocolate sauce instead of camp coffee. Sounded like pretty good substitutions to me, and just the thing to cheer someone up after, say, completing the dreaded tax return....

Another droolsome chocolate cake next: Devils Food Cake from Nigella.com from another blog new to me: Garden, Tea, Cakes and Me. Doesn't it look wondeful? I know my family and friends would feel cherished if I served up something like that.

Another cherry & white chocolate combo (which happens to be a favourite of mine), this time in the shape of lovely Banana, Cherry and White Choc Chip Muffins made by Katharine who writes the beautiful Leeks & Limoni blog. Her muffins look totally scrummy, and I  embrace her philosophy for January which is "A little bit of what you fancy", rather than total denial, to get through the post-Christmas blues.

Choclette who writes the fantastic Chocolate Log Blog entered Parmesan Shortbreads which she made for a Christmas lunch which took place on 19th January as the result of a quirky family tradition.

Another savoury recipe, this time a gorgeous looking chicken tagine made by Jen at Blue Kitchen Bakes. She made this delicious looking dinner for her boyfriend. Lucky boyfriend, is what I say.

I couldn't host this event and not enter these myself. back to How to be a Domestic Goddess then, for the Norwegian Cinammon Buns. These are what I bake for the Husband, kids and any other family members or friends that need cherishing...

Stacy at Food Lust People Love made another Nigelissima soon to be classic - the Meatzza . I certainly remember Nigella making this in the TV series and thinking I would have to try it myself. Well if Stacy's version is anything to go by, this is going into my meal plan sooner rather than later.

Another Nigelissima recipe - this time a delicious looking chocolate mousse entered by the founder of Forever Nigella, Sarah over at Maison Cupcake. It looks totally rich and decadent - just the sort of thing to make a loved one feel cherished.

Finally, Sam at The Yorkshire Bakery entered some delicious chocolate cherry cupcakes from How to be a Domestic Goddess.

So there we have them - I think you'll agree all fantastic offerings to cherish your loved ones with - but then, that's one of the things Nigella does best, in my view...

The next Forever Nigella will be Nigella Nostalgia to be hosted by Urvashi at  The Botanical Baker

Forever Nigella 22 - Norwegian Cinammon Buns

Well, I couldn't host Forever Nigella, and not enter myself, could I? 

The subject of challenge (which I chose) is food to cherish your loved ones with and really, the reason I chose this was for these cinammon buns.

Warm, fragrant, oozing cinammony sweet butter. What better way to cherish your loved ones (foodwise, that is) than to knock up a batch of these beauties for that most important of meals, breakfast. I'm not saying I make this sort of thing every morning, but every now and again, well, I think you know what I'm saying.

I have a Swedish friend who I don't see nearly enough. She and I 'raspberry leaf tea'd and long brisk walked' our way through the final weeks of our first pregnancies. We were due 10 days  apart and ended up giving birth to our sons within 12 hours of each other, albeit in different hospitals. She coped with it all much better than I, birth, breastfeeding, the whole babyness of babies, and within weeks she was my Scandi saviour, bringing down to earth common sense to my hormonal, slightly post-natal slump, and Swedish cinammon buns.

It was she who was our saviour a couple of years' later, the chaotic day, 3 months in to Blue's treatment for leukaemia, that Pink arrived and Blue was very poorly following some chemo. When, later on in Blue's illness I turned to How to be a Domestic Goddess in an attempt to cook my way out of the frustration and anger that had built up inside me, I saw this recipe and immediately thought of her. This was one of the first things I made from that tome, and it has stayed firmly in my repertoire ever since. 

I do not know anyone who would not happily eat 2 or 3 (or, ahem, more, she said, red-faced) of these beauties. They have become the birthday breakfast of choice here and they are well worth it. The first few times I made them, I got terribly het up about the wetness of the dough, and also with the timings - because I never quite read the recipe through properly and they ended up taking me longer than anticipated. However, with my new found bread-making confidence, when I served them up this morning I was feeling calm and serene - very Domestic Goddess (although without the knowing pout or the slinky dressing gown).

When I made the dough up, I was careful with the addition of the liquid, and I stopped short of using it all, reserving what was left (a milky buttery eggy mixture) to glaze the buns on the final prove. I also made the dough up the night before and gave it the first rise in the fridge, so that in the morning, I just had to get it out of the fridge and let it come to temperature before forming the buns, giving it a second prove, and baking.

Norwegian Cinammon Buns

(makes 10-12)

Dough:

300g strong white flour
50g sugar
pinch of salt
11/2 sachets (about 10g) dried yeast
50g unsalted butter
200ml milk
1 large egg

Filling:

75g soft unsalted butter
75g soft brown sugar
1 tsp cinammon

(possibly an extra egg to glaze) 

You will need a lined baking/roasting tin - the one I use is 20 x 25cm.

Make the dough. Melt the butter and set aside to cool a little. Combine the flour, sugar, salt and yeast in a large bowl, then whisk together the melted butter, milk and the egg.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients gradually, stirring to combine. You want a reasonably wet dough, but not so wet that it becomes unreasonable to manage, so if you don't use all the liquid don't worry - I had around 30ml left over. When you have a rough dough, turn out and knead to a smooth, springy ball of dough. You can do this in a mixer with a dough hook just as well as by hand - it won't take as long. If you don't use all the liquid, reserve the left over for glazing

At this stage put the dough back in the bowl and cover with clingfilm. You can leave the dough to rise for 25 minutes or so on the work top, or overnight in the fridge (which is what I did - if you do this, just get it out and let it come to room temperature before continuing with the next stage).

Preheat the oven to 230C. Make the filling by mashing and mixing together the butter, sugar and cinammon.

Take 1/3 of the dough and on a lightly floured surface, roll and stretch it out to fit the bottom of the tin. You then need to roll out the rest of the dough to make a rectangle. I completely failed to measure how big, but probably about 30-40 cm long by 15-20 wide. Certainly longer and wider than your tin, Not very helpful is it? Nigella herself makes a double quantity and rolls her dough to 50x25 cm.

Spread the filling all over the rectangle of dough 

and then roll up along the long side. When you have a big old roll of dough in front of you. slice it up into 2 cm slices, placing the little rounds into the tin swirl side up. They won't fit together snugly at this stage, but wait till they have puffed up and risen during the second rise and in the oven...

Glaze the buns with either the left over liquid from the dough, or with a beaten egg, and leave to prove under a tea towel for 15-20 minutes, then bung in the oven for 20-25 minutes, turning half way through.

It's going to be hard but try and wait for them to cool down a little before tearing apart and devouring with a cup of coffee and the satisfied sighs of delight from your loved ones. "Mummy, this is such a TREAT!". May be I'll make them more often...

Forever Nigella is the monthly blogging event organised by Sarah at Maison Cupcake, I'm hosting it this month and the announcement post where you will find all the rules and the linky is here.

Forever Nigella 22 - Food to cherish your loved ones

Well, what a great way to start 2013 - as far as I'm concerned, anyway: hosting Forever Nigella on behalf of Sarah at Maison Cupcake.

My fondness for Nigella is not  a secret, and choosing a theme was a source of much internal wrangling. In the end, I have chosen "Food to Cherish your Loved Ones". This is not necessarily comfort food, but food which makes people feel extra special - be they your partner, your children, your friends. It's not necessarily dinner party food, but the stuff that really hits the button. 

Nigella has some great recipes for this - my personal favourites are the Sake Steak in Feast and the Norwegian Cinammon Buns from Domestic Goddess. They are very different dishes: the Steak is a sophisticated grown up treat which the Husband utterly loves, simple and quick to make, but melt-in-the-mouth gorgeous. The Buns are admittedly more in the comfort food vein, but they have established themselves in the Recipe Junkie household as the birthday breakfast of choice for my children. My brother will also consider whether to visit or not based on whether these are likely to be on the menu, and this event gives me the perfect reason to make them again soon, so I'll add my own post to the linky soon!



 So here's the beautiful badge for you to download and add to your own posts - the rules and everything else including the linky is, I hope, all set up and ready to go at the foot of this post. What are you waiting for? What do you cook from Nigella's repertoire to make them feel extra cherished? I can't wait to see! 

Those of you who have entered this before will know the rules, but you can find them on Maison Cupcake here and for ease, here they are:

Forever Nigella Rules

Event themes are announced on host’s blogs near 1st of the month and their rounds ups roughly 1st of the next month. Entries must have been published since 1st of that month. Archived posts need to be re-published afresh if you wish to submit an old favourite.
Blog checking lines:
Forever Nigella #[number] is hosted by [name] of [blog]. This month’s challenge is to blog any Nigella recipe [describe theme]. Forever Nigella is organised by Sarah at Maison Cupcake.
1. Blog your entry by the deadline including:
a) the current Forever Nigella badge
b) a link to this month’s announcement post
c) a link to the Forever Nigella page at Maison Cupcake: http://blog.maisoncupcake.com/forever-nigella-faq (NB this is a new URL from Jan 13)
2. Remember copyright.
You must NOT reproduce Nigella’s recipes verbatim. Tell us which book it is from and/or link to it online. If you adapted it in some way i.e. changed at least two ingredients or amended the method then it’s ok to publish the a recipe in your post but you MUST write directions in your own words.
3. Submit your post
Use the linky tool at the bottom of this post, or email the (that's me! recipejunkie27@gmail.com) cc’ed to sarah@maisoncupcake.com.
Tweet your post using  #forevernigella - if you tweet me @recipejunkie27 I will retweet any that I see.

Nigella resources
If you don’t have any Nigella books check out these resources online:
Nigella’s official site: http://www.nigella.com/
BBC Food: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/chefs/nigella_lawson
Channel 4 Food: http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes/popular-chefs/nigella-lawson-recipes
UKTV Good Food Channel: http://uktv.co.uk/food/chef/aid/530864/
Food Network: http://www.foodnetwork.com/nigella-lawson/index.html
Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Nigella+Lawson

You are next!

Bubble & Squeak, Nigella style

Yes, yes, I know I implied that I wasn't going to post for the next few days, but I just can't stop myself. I hope you've all had a lovely time.

The brilliant thing about hosting Christmas Day is that I usually hang up my apron around 2 in the afternoon to rapturous applause (well, perhaps not quite, but some fairly gratifying noises of satisfaction as the table groans under the weight of all that has been laid upon it) and a glass of something, and then I don't have to do more than whip out leftovers in various guises (or soup from the freezer) for about 3 more days. 

This year has been no exception. We had a really great Christmas Day, nothing out of the ordinary food-wise (the usual turkey etc) but it was all utterly delicious, and although I say so myself, I probably managed to make the best gravy I have EVER made, borne out by the fact that there wasn't much left to have on Boxing Day with the Bubble & Squeak.

I'd opened Feast at the appropriate page just to remind myself generally how Nigella does B&S. My Father in Law saw it and remarked that he wouldn't have imagined that people would have a recipe for it, it was just a question of bunging all the left over veg in a frying pan... To an extent (although it pains me to admit it), he is right, but since reading how Nigella does it a few years ago, I have always taken this approach to B&S. It still doesn't fall into the category of 'cooking' in my book, although to be fair, it does involve slightly more than getting everything out of the fridge. But the oven was on anyway to warm up the mince pies, and this really does work better than just bunging it all into a frying pan.

So basically you take all your leftover cooked veg - yesterday there were about 12 chantenay carrots, a good couple of handfuls of sprouts, and about 4 baby leeks - all of which had been steamed, and then from the left over roasties, a good load of celeriac and parsnip and a few potatoes. I had to save some of the roast potatoes to be straight up fried in a pan.

Put all your veg in a food processor with an egg and whizz up to a chunky puree.




 Heat some oil in a large-ish frying pan that you can put in the oven and pre-heat the oven to about 180-200C. Make sure the oil has covered the base of the pan to prevent sticking, then scrape the veg puree in and spread it out. 

Fry for a few minutes, then bung it in the oven for about 20 mins till it has browned on the top.

Remove the pan from the oven (remember that the handle will probably be hot so you will need an oven glove. You don't need to ask why I'm reminding you of that) and invert over a plate so the cake hopefully comes out in a beautiful whole, ready to be sliced and served with the leftover gravy - which may or may not be warmed, according to taste!

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I am linking up to Maison Cupcake's Forever Nigella event, hosted this month by Laura on her blog lauralovescakes . Enjoy!