Nigella’s Sweet Corn Pudding

The theme for IHCC this week is the monthly Potluck.  The club will be having a Potluck once a month where you can prepare any dish to “share.”  I love potluck dinners.  It’s so much fun to see and enjoy other people’s creations.  Plus, you generally end up with some new ideas or recipes.  I chose to make Nigella’s Sweet Corn Pudding.  I’m a big fan of corn pudding (or spoonbread as it’s sometimes called) and have posted a favorite recipe I’ve made here.  I saw Nigella’s version and thought it would be a perfect dish to bring to a potluck.  The texture was almost soufflé-like….very light and sort of airy.  I added just a bit of cheddar cheese, which wasn’t part of her original recipe.  I thought it was really good.  My husband?  Not so much so.  He thought it tasted too “eggy” and didn’t care for the texture.  Sigh.  I guess not every recipe is a winner.  While I enjoyed it, it’ll probably be a while before I make it again.  I ended up having to eat the majority of it myself as leftovers (which weren’t bad). 🙂

Nigella’s Sweet Corn Pudding (Adapted from Nigella and Food Network)

Ingredients

• 5 eggs
• 18 ounces or 2 1/2 cups canned sweet corn, drained
• 14 ounces, or 1 3/4 cups canned creamed corn
• 1 1/3 c milk
• 1 1/3 c heavy cream
• Generous 1/3 c all-purpose flour
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 c shredded cheese

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Butter a glass 12 by 10-inch baking dish and set aside
3. In a large bowl, whisk eggs together. Using a spoon, stir in sweet corn, creamed corn, milk, cream, flour, baking powder, salt and cheese. Pour mixture into buttered baking dish. Cook for 1 hour until it is golden brown and slightly puffed up on the top. Serve immediately.

Nigella’s Bread and Milk

This week’s I Heart Cooking Clubs theme is “Midnight Sneaks.”  What qualifies as a Midnight Sneak?  Any dish that would make you tiptoe to the kitchen in the middle of the night to chow down.  Some people enjoy savory-type snacks at midnight, but I go for the sugary, carb-coma inducing foods.  My favorite midnight snack is cereal eaten straight out of the box along with a glass of milk.  I destroy boxes of cereal regularly in this fashion.  When I first saw Nigella’s recipe for Bread and Milk, I thought it sounded kinda funky.  However, since it’s essentially a variation on my favorite midnight snack, I decided to give it a shot.  It was actually quite delicious!  I used my oatmeal bread instead of white bread and added some cinnamon.  This made a pretty good “Midnight Sneak!”

Nigella’s Bread and Milk (Adapted from Nigella’s recipe on Food Network)

Ingredients

• 2 thick slices good white bread (I used toasted oatmeal bread.)
• 2 teaspoons sugar or vanilla sugar
• Sprinkle of cinnamon or to taste
• 1 cup milk

Directions

1. Tear the bread into rough chunks, and sprinkle with the sugar and cinnamon.
2. Warm the milk and pour over the bread and sugar and cinnamon to serve.

Nigella’s Quick Chili

This week’s I Heart Cooking Clubs theme is One Pot Wonders.  What a perfect time to have such a theme given I had to work all weekend (hence the lateness of my post).  I bought Nigella Express recently, which is great cookbook.  We’ve been having some very unseasonably cool weather here in Kansas, so I decided to make Nigella’s Quick Chili from Nigella Express.  I love making chili when the weather is cool.  Her version was a bit different than I’m used to.  It didn’t contain any chili powder, but it did contain several spices, including cinnamon and cardamom, which I’ve never used in chili.  I did deviate from her recipe a bit by adding an onion and garlic, which I think are essential components of chili.  I made it last night, refrigerated it, and had my husband heat it up while I was at work.  It was delicious!  It was great to come home from work to an already prepared meal.

Quick Chili (Courtesy of Nigella Express)

Ingredients

• 5 oz chorizo sausage (not the hard salami sort of sausage), halved lengthwise and cut into 1/4-inch half-moons (I used ground chorizo, as it was all I had access to at the time.)
• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 t ground cumin
• 1/2 t ground coriander
• 1/2 t ground cinnamon
• 3 cardamom pods, bruised (I used about 1/2 t ground cardamom instead.)
• 2 c good-quality tomato and chunky vegetable sauce for pasta (I used diced tomatoes.)
• 1 14-oz can mixed spicy beans
• 1/4 c sweet chile sauce
• 1/4 t chile flakes, optional

Directions

1. Put the chorizo into a hot pan and cook over medium heat until the sausage crisps a little and gives up its orange-red oil.
2. Add the ground beef and cook for about 5 minutes, breaking it up with a wooden fork to help it brown (at this point, I added the chopped onion and garlic and cooked until opaque).
3. Stir in the spices and then add the tomato-vegetable pasta sauce, beans, and chile sauce.  Also add the chile flakes if you need more heat.
4. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes and eat with rice or just as it is.  If you’re not adding any rice, you might consider dolloping with a blob of sour cream and sprinkling some grated cheese and chopped cilantro.  I can’t think of any way of eating this that isn’t good.

Nigella’s Mother-in-Law’s Madeira Cake

This week’s I Heart Cooking Club’s theme is Baker’s Delight.  I was very excited when I saw this week’s theme given my crack-like addiction to sugar.  I knew I could easily find a delicious Nigella creation to make.  This is definitely one of those “sleeper” recipes……deceptively easy to make but absolutely delicious.  After preparing this, I know for a fact I need to invest in a kitchen scale.  I sat here with a calculator and pencil doing the conversions and started praying for the best after closing the oven door.  It’s nowhere near as beautiful as Nigella’s, and that may be partially due to my “calculations.”  Therefore, I’m going to post the recipe as it was written by Nigella.  It was still good, though.  I served it with sliced strawberries, cause that’s my hubby’s fave.

Nigella’s Mother-in-Law’s Madeira Cake

Ingredients

• 240g softened unsalted butter
• 200g caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling (I didn’t have any superfine sugar, so I buzzed regular sugar in my food processor for a bit.)
• grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
• 3 large eggs
• 210g self-raising flour
• 90g plain flour
• 23 x 13 x 7cm loaf tin, buttered and lined

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 170ºC/gas mark 3.
2. Cream the butter and sugar, and add the lemon zest. Add the eggs one at a time with a tablespoon of the flour for each. Then gently mix in the rest of the flour and, finally, the lemon juice. Sprinkle with caster sugar (about 2 tablespoons should do it) as it goes into the oven, and bake for 1 hour or until a cake-tester comes out clean. Remove to a wire rack, and let cool in the tin before turning out.

Nigella’s One-Pan Chicken

This week’s I Heart Cooking Clubs theme is Family Favorites a la Nigella Lawson.  My husband and I love roasted chicken and potatoes, so as soon as I spied her recipe for One-Pan Chicken on the Food Network website, I knew I had to try it.  This was delicious!  I love how the juices from the chicken flavors the vegetables below.  I added herbs de Provence for a little extra flavor, but I’m sure it would be delicious without.  I can guarantee this dish has become a family favorite in this house.

Nigella’s One-Pan Chicken (Courtesy of Nigella and Food Network)

Ingredients

• Olive oil
• 1 (3 1/2 pound) chicken, cut into 8 pieces
• 2 1/4 pounds new potatoes cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 3 medium red onions, cut into segments
• 16 garlic cloves, unpeeled
• 3 red peppers, seeded and quartered
• Coarse sea salt
• 1/2 c chopped parsley leaves (I left this out, but I’m sure it would be great with it added.)
• Herbs de Provence

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
2. Get 2 baking dishes and pour in some olive oil to coat. Arrange the pieces of chicken, the potatoes, onions, garlic cloves, and peppers on them. (If you want to use 3 dishes and have got the room, do; the less packed everything is, the crispier the potatoes will be.)  Sprinkle both dishes with herbs de Provence.  Then drizzle some more oil over, making sure everything’s glossy and well slicked (but not dripping), sprinkle with the salt, and bake for about 45 minutes.
3. When done (and test all the component parts), strew over the parsley and – I always do this – serve straight from the baking dishes.

Pigs in Blankets

I Heart Cooking Clubs is the creation of three of my favorite food bloggers:  Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies, Deb of Kahakai Kitchen, and Heather of girlichef.  These ladies make some totally awesome creations…visit their blogs to bask in the deliciousness.  The premise of the club is to make a chef or cook’s recipe according to a weekly theme.  The club is currently cooking the creations of the Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson, and the current theme is Party Treats.  I love Nigella!  She makes such homey, delicious food that’s easily accessible to everyone.  Now, there are tons of fun, original treats you can make for parties.  However, given my unrefined tastes and after seeing Nigella’s recipe on the Food Network website for Pigs in Blankets, I was all over them.  Nigella’s dough was a little different than what I’m used to when making pigs in the blanket…it was sort of biscuit-like.  It was a bit sticky, so I had to add a little more flour than the recipe called for.  Also, I didn’t have whole milk, so I used some fat free half and half, and I added a bit more cheese to the dough.  They were delicious!  I look forward to next week’s theme!

Pigs in Blankets (Courtesy of Nigella Lawson)

Ingredients

• 2 cups plus 5+ tablespoons self-rising flour (depending on the texture of your dough, you may need a bit more)
• 1 heaping teaspoon salt
• 4 tablespoons grated sharp Cheddar
• 1 cup fat free half and half
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 package of cocktail sausages (I used Lit’l Smokies)

For glazing:

• 1 egg, mixed with a splash milk and 1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions (Taken directly from the Food Network website…don’t you love how she describes the whole process?)

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
2. Measure 2 cups of flour into a bowl, add the salt and grated cheese and mix lightly with a fork. Pour the milk into a measuring cup to come up to 1-cup mark and then crack in the egg and add the oil. Beat to combine, then pour into the dry ingredients, forking to mix as you go. You may, at the end, feel the dough’s either too dry or too damp: add either more milk or more flour and fork together again until you’ve got a soft dough that’s not too sticky to be rolled out.
3. Break the dough into 2 pieces and roll 1 piece on a lightly floured surface. Scone dough is a dream to work with; in fact, I find it deeply pleasurable. Just roll as clumsily and heavy handedly as you like: no harm will come to it. You want a thin, but not exaggeratedly so, rectangle. A square wouldn’t be the end of the world either, so don’t start getting out the geometry set: this is the roughest of instructions.
4. Cut the dough into approximately 1 3/4-inch strips, and then cut each strip at approximately 2 1/2-inch intervals so that you end up with a collection of small, raggedy oblongs (I just cut each strip as I go, but it’s probably more efficient to do the whole batch of dough at 1 time).
5. Take a cocktail sausage and put it at 1 end of an oblong at a slight diagonal and then roll up, pressing on the infinitely compliant dough to squeeze it shut, and then place on a nonstick baking sheet, or 1 lined with parchment. Carry on until you’ve finished all your strips and then get to work with the remaining dough. Three baking sheets should do it.
6. Now, dip a pastry brush into the beaten egg mixture and paint on the pastry for a golden glaze. Put in the oven and cook for 12 to 15 minutes, by which time they should be puffy and burnished. Remove from the oven and let cool a little before giving them to the children.