Читать книгу The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater - Страница 97

There have been three restaurant meals this week, including sensationally good plates of hot salt cod fritters at Moro in Exmouth Market and a wonderfully elegant dish of kidneys with lentils and potato purée at Locanda Locatelli in the West End. Add to that a bowl of fried oysters in a clear broth at the ‘cheap-as-chips’ Japan Centre in Piccadilly Circus and I have barely had to cook at home at all. I don’t think the kitchen has ever stayed tidy for that long in its entire life. Eating out remains an absolute treat for me; especially so this year, when for one reason or another I have spent so much time at home. Even if I could eat out every night, I wouldn’t. Although I will admit to occasionally getting a bit ‘cooked out’, I cannot pretend I don’t enjoy putting something I have made for someone on the table. To this day, it still sends tingles down my spine.

I have a theory that I love cooking for people after all these years because I rarely attempt too much. Many is the time supper is little more than a bowl of soup and a salad, or perhaps some chicken pieces roasted with butter and served with a handful of green leaves. It is the way I prefer to eat, but it also happens to be a lot less trouble than roast chicken with gravy, spuds and vegetables, followed by pudding and custard. I like to think of it as a love of simplicity, but it could also be a mixture of greed tinged with laziness.

We eat roast chicken, mashed butternut squash and the juices from the roasting tin mixed with a little white vermouth and a shot of lemon juice. Dessert is sliced mangoes and whole rambutans that look like diminutive pan-scrubbers.