nigella comforts

today's dinner cookout with wingtai is all about nigella's comfort foods: mashed potato, salmon fishcakes, and ice cream cake with warm butterscotch sauce.

mashed potatoes! we cooked a hell lot of it, and thank goodness we did. a hefty portion of it was used for the salmon fishcakes. excess also means second helpings, and it can't hurt to know that you always have some leftover mashed potato waiting for you to heat it up to eat, just when you're tired and not able to cook a decent meal.
i actually took to what nigella does: bag up 300ml portions of this potato water - water in which peeled potatoes have been boiled - to freeze for usage in making (her) breads.
then we mashed the cooked potatoes and beat in the milk and cream. the end result is a fluffy mashed potato, which is quite tasteless; you need to season with salt, pepper and, as instructed - though i really dislike it - nutmeg.

the salmon fishcakes are the pièces de résistance of this dinner! i cannot tell you how nice it is to cook, and eat, this piece of thing that is so much more divinely better than the salmon patty we get at the cookhouse. you have to cook it yourself to know what i mean. (which is why i'm giving the recipe along with the photos. you/i know you'll want it.)
you need 350g cold mashed potato (which we took from the fresh batch we just made), 400g tinned salmon, grated zest of half a lemon (this is really crucial here; the sharp taste gives that unexpected oomph), salt, pepper and 1 egg. our salmon was not tinned, but baked from raw. then we forked the flesh out into the waiting bowl. we also added in four sundried tomatoes snipped into small bits - not a rule, just a suggestion, and also because i happened to have some.
what you do to the whole bunch of fishcake ingredients is: mash! mash to mix all the ingredients evenly. after you mash everything, form into fat, palm-sized patties and place them on a clingfilm-lined baking sheet. let them firm up in the refrigerator for about twenty minutes.
next, set up your worktop to prepare the fishcakes for frying. you need to get organised here and place your equipment in a logical manner so that you can drench the fishcakes in beaten eggs (recipe calls for two), dip them into breadcrumbs - about 100g - to coat, and lay them to await frying - all in one fluid motion. (i learnt this from the culinary institute of america, though they were talking about setting up for dipping truffles in melted chocolate.)
when you're ready, heat two tablespoons of vegetable oil and 50g unsalted butter in a frying pan. when it fizzles, fry the fishcakes on each side until the crusts are golden.
i was toying with the idea of frying the salmon skin left over from baking the fish and using it as a garnish to this otherwise plain plating of mashed potato and salmon fishcakes. but no, it was stuck to the foil in which the fish was baked.

dessert, or, as nigella would call it, pudding time. the ice cream cake with butterscotch sauce is easy enough, if you follow nigella's recipe here.
this is the bashed up biscuit/nuts/honeycomb mixture. nothing more satisfying than using a rolling pin to repeatedly bang on the stuff.
we bought cheap magnolia vanilla ice cream, which i think melts very easily. the recipe says to whirr everything in the mixer, but what i found was that my mixer bashed the biscuit crumbs further to the point that i couldn't see them anymore, so maybe you might want to just mix them in with a spoon. then we spooned them into individual moulds, because i didn't want to make one big cake, and have left over slices in the freezer. it is much better to have leftover cups of them. besides, i think it's aesthetically cute when you unmould the mound of ice cream onto the plate.

and on with the butterscotch sauce.
i found this golden syrup at great world's cold storage. ntuc just doesn't stock it. the can looks really pretty, and i know someone who just might want it. the syrup is like a thick, fluid 麦芽糖.
bubbling. i'm really scared of this kind of hot sizzling sugar mixtures. make sure the cream you add is warm, or at least room temperature, or you'll get a lot more sputtering.
the thin sauce does thicken upon cooling, and then you can pour it over the unmoulded cakes with unchecked greed, letting it ooze down the sides.
tooth-achingly sweet. no more talking; just eat.

if rihanna ever sang a song called 'cinderella', i imagine at some point there must be this line:
cinderella, ella, ella, ay, ay, ay.

p.s. the sourdough starter is growing well, and i've moved on to the sponge stage. by tomorrow i'll be able to bake the sourdough, and hopefully everything goes well. photos to come soon!