3 More Delightful Dishes From Nigella Lawson! 🌞 [View all]

SPARE RIBS

Until I made these, I thought they were best eaten in Chinese restaurants.
But there is just something about having a huge pile of these at home that
has made me rethink entirely. Sticky with honey, but salty sharp with soy
and rice wine vinegar, aromatically resonant with ginger, cinnamon, star
anise and five-spice powder and eaten with a fresh and spiky scattering of
chilli and spring onions, these are fabulous to pick at languorously and
messily, the supreme reward for unchecked greed. They are also wonderful
made with shop-bought Chinese sweet chilli sauce (I use about 6
tablespoons of the stuff) in the place of the fresh chopped chilli and honey.
You can often find sheets of spare ribs at the supermarket, or ask your
butcher to cut them for you.

16 pork spare ribs

for the marinade:

4 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 red chillies, roughly chopped
5cm (2 in) piece fresh ginger, peeled and cut into thin slices
2 tablespoons runny honey
2 star anise
1 stick cinnamon, broken into pieces
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons groundnut oil
4 spring onions, roughly chopped

to cook:

2 teaspoons five-spice powder
2 tablespoons runny honey

to serve:

2 red or green chillies, deseeded or not to taste, finely chopped
2 spring onions, finely chopped, or a small bunch of coriander, chopped

Put the ribs into a large plastic bag and add all the marinade ingredients, tie
a knot and squidge everything around well. Ideally leave in a fridge
overnight, or for at least a couple of hours in a cool place somewhere in the
kitchen.

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. (400° F)

Let the marinated ribs come to room temperature, and pour the whole
contents of the bag into a roasting tin. Cover tightly with foil and put the tin
in the oven for 1 hour.

Take the foil off the roasting tin and sprinkle over the five-spice powder
and spoon over the amber honey. Put the ribs back in the oven for another
30 minutes, take them out half way through and turn them over before
returning them to become stickily glazed on the underside. Watch that they
don’t catch: they may only need another 10 minutes to become crispy and
glossily brown.

Take them out of their tin, arrange on a large plate and scatter over the
chopped chilli and spring onion or coriander.

Serves 4–5.

From "Forever Summer"
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39543.Forever_Summer


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LOMO DE ORZA

Lomo is pork loin and the orza is the terracotta dish in which it’s
traditionally marinated. I found this recipe in Penelope Casas’ Tapas: The
Little Dishes of Spain, and I can’t tell you how bowled over I was by it. You
need to start it the day before you want to eat it, but in a way that makes it
easier. But believe me, even if it were harder to make it would be worth it.
The marinade it’s steeped in, after it’s fried, makes it meltingly tender and
flavoursome without being heavy scented. I get the butcher to slice the pork
loin leaving the fat on, as that’s what gives this its wonderful flavour, but if
you’re buying the meat from the supermarket just get any piece of loin you
can find and slice it thickly yourself. Simply served with a salad and some
baked potatoes, it makes a wonderful low-key, evocatively sunny Saturday
lunch at any time of the year.

625g (1lb 6oz) boneless pork loin, cut into 2.5cm (1 in) slices
Maldon salt and black pepper
250ml (~8oz)plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
juice of half a lemon
quarter of a teaspoon dried thyme
3–4 sprigs fresh rosemary, needles finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

Season the pork with salt and pepper, and brown in a pan with the 2
tablespoons of oil. Lower the heat once the meat has a good colour and
cook for a further 15 minutes or until the pork is cooked through but still
juicy.

Put the meat into a shallow dish – preferably earthenware – big enough
to hold the pork all in one layer, and pour over the remaining olive oil,
along with the juices from the pan. Add the remaining ingredients and make
sure the meat is immersed in the marinade. Cover with foil and leave
overnight at room temperature. If it’s very hot, though, it might be better off
in the fridge.

When you are ready to eat, cut the meat at a diagonal (and if it’s been in
the fridge take it out a good 20 minutes beforehand so it isn’t unyieldingly
cold). Arrange the slices on a large plate and spoon over some of the oily
marinade. Fabulous.

Serves 4–6.

From "Forever Summer"
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39543.Forever_Summer


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Jackson Pollock

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t help myself. And while my little joke doesn’t
work should you use other firm white fish, the recipe does, so please use
whatever fish you prefer. But there have been huge efforts to encourage us
in Britain to eat our local pollock over recent years, though for some reason
the name was seen to put people off. For a while, comic though this sounds,
a supermarket rebranded pollock as “colin”, though I can’t believe that it
helped matters much, and is slightly confusing given that colin, when not
the man’s name, is the French for hake (north of the Loire, that is; they call
it merlu in the south). The chargrilled peppers in oil that I mention here
(and elsewhere in this book) are the chopped, oil-steeped ones from Saclà.

SERVES 2

2 skinless pollock fillets (250–300g total)
250g (9 oz) spinach
¾ cup (about 15g) parsley leaves
1½ teaspoons sea salt flakes
zest and juice of ½ unwaxed lemon
3 × 15ml tablespoons sunflower oil
1 × 15ml tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons cold water (if needed)
1 × 290g (10 oz) jar chargrilled peppers in oil
1 clove garlic, peeled and finely grated or minced

Preheat the oven to 200ºC/gas mark 6. (400° F) Take the fish fillets out of the
fridge. Tip the spinach leaves into a colander and rinse under the cold
tap to clean, then shake the colander in the sink, pushing down on the
spinach, to get rid of excess water.

Start by making the green sauce. You can use either a bowl and a stick
blender, or the small bowl of a food processor. Blitz a cup and a half
(about 45g) of the spinach with the parsley, ½ a teaspoon of sea salt
flakes, the finely grated lemon zest and juice and the sunflower oil
until you start to have an emulsified sauce. Add the extra-virgin olive
oil, and blitz again, then taste for seasoning and add the cold water if
the sauce needs thinning: it needs to have a certain amount of
runniness for the artistic effect we have planned.

Tip the chargrilled peppers, and their oil, into a small oven tin – I use a
shallow one measuring 23 × 30cm with a lip of 4cm. Add the grated
garlic and sprinkle with ½ a teaspoon of sea salt flakes and stir to mix.

Sit the pollock fillets on top and bake in the oven for 5–7 minutes,
until the fish is cooked through.

While the fish is in the oven, heat up a wok or large saucepan (with a
lid), and add the rest of the spinach along with the remaining salt, put
on the lid and let the spinach wilt; this shouldn’t take more than 2
minutes.

Check the fish is cooked and, when it is, take the tin out of the oven.
Get out a large plate, and add the wilted spinach in dollops, using a
slotted spoon, so that you’re not making everything too watery. Now
add the fish fillets, cutting each in half first, and – again using a slotted
spoon – the peppers, arranging them around the fish and spinach,
letting some chunks land on top, then dribble a little of the peppers’
orange oil over the fish.

Spoon and streak the green sauce over as you wish; by all means,
consult the picture here – or indeed an art book – for guidance.

From "Simply Nigella"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25937378-simply-nigella


Yummy! Enjoy!