Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger

Midnight Chicken by Ella Risbridger

Author:Ella Risbridger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408867778
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-06-21T16:00:00+00:00


Chop your garlic very finely. In a big frying pan (not a saucepan, unless you only have a shallow frying pan), heat the olive oil. It will seem like a lot, but this seems to be the trick to good tomato sauce – use more oil than you think can possibly be necessary, and keep your nerve. Once your oil is hot, add the garlic. Burnt garlic is nobody’s friend, so keep an eye on it and, if you think it’s going to catch, quickly dump in your squished tomatoes to bring down the temperature. If you manage to keep the burn at bay, put in the tomatoes once the garlic is starting to go golden. Turn the heat down a bit to avoid spitting, and turn back to your tomato tins.

The aim of the game here is to get all the tomato juice out of the tins with minimal faff and without diluting the sauce. I like doing this with red wine, which would be going in anyway and might as well work for its keep. Slosh about a third of a tin’s worth into one of the tomato tins, sluice it around as thoroughly as possible, then pour the tomato-and-wine goop into another tin. Repeat the sloshing and sluicing with the third tin, adding a bit more wine if you fancy, then pour the tomato-y wine into your sauce and you’re done. You’ll probably end up with about 250ml of wine in the sauce.

Add the anchovies and chilli flakes, along with a good grind of black pepper. The anchovies will break down, so pop them in whole and just have a bit of a stir. Sit a basil sprig on top of the sauce while you get it simmering.

About 20 minutes later, the basil will have sunk and the sauce should be coming together nicely. Give it a stir, taste and add salt (unless the anchovies have made it salty enough for you), then apply to your carbohydrate base of choice. Fish out the wilted basil sprig as you serve and, if you’re feeling fancy, replace it with a couple of fresh leaves.

Carbonara, for Caroline

Nigella, in How to Eat, says that she makes carbonara for her lovers, like in the movies, and takes it back to bed. I make mine for my best friend, when we’re up late, when the men are away; when we’re watching bad films at midnight, and the shops are shut, and we need something savoury and salty and good.

Caroline says men don’t eat carbonara, which is not true, but is true enough that it makes us both laugh, quietly, in the kitchen, with the bright white light of the streetlamp shining down on the Parmesan and the garlic and the linguine on the laminate. I’m beating eggs, and turning the garlic cloves over and over in the pan. Caroline is grating the Parmesan, and I am pretending not to notice that more is going into her mouth than in the bowl.

It is the



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