Day 102: salty squeakiness
This week I’m going less for the “let’s try something new” influenced options and more for the “I need ease, speed and flavour” choices, so my picks over the coming days may well not be considered that adventurous but I know they’ll bring great reward. And this is all that matters to me. As Nigella says: “life is complicated - cooking doesn’t have to be”.
All that being said about not trying something new, I did make homemade sweet chilli sauce for the first time today - or a speedy version thereof - in Nigella’s Halloumi with Quick Sweet Chilli Sauce.
My posts may (we know what it’s like once I start blabbing) be shorter than normal - this is not laziness, or me running out of steam: this is me cramming in work while ensuring I have time for the cookalong - and writing - in advance of going away for a few days this weekend.
When I think of halloumi I am immediately teleported back to sunny summer days in Plymouth, which is where I studied. Now, you probably thought I was going to say Cyprus or Greece, or somewhere hot and in the Mediterranean - which would make more sense given the origin of the cheese - but the memories evoked are of the first house my friends and I lived in during our second year of study. My only logical conclusion, therefore, is that this must have been where I tried it for the first time; if I recall correctly my housemate, and also one of my best friends to this day, loved halloumi. Suddenly my mind is a gush with happy memories of days at the beach ‘revising’ for exams; with impromptu pitstops at some of the local bars on the walk back home, before then stopping in the shops for beer, sausages, burgers, and salads, for an unplanned barbecue in our little courtyard.
On a side note: oh how I pine for a dip in the azure blue shimmer of the Mediterranean right now! Funnily enough, I did spend six weeks in Cyprus mapping parts of the Troodos ophiolite for my undergraduate thesis and I don’t think I had halloumi once! Shame on me.
Halloumi with Quick Sweet Chilli Sauce
There is absolutely nothing complicated or time-consuming about this - it makes the perfect work-from-home lunch when you really want something a little more uplifting than another sandwich (despite the high regard I hold for that wondrous creation) - but that is the mantra of Simply Nigella: feel good food with minimum fuss and maximum pleasure; its concepts and treasures a gift for busy days and languished moods.
We’ve covered this before: I am a sauce man, so I boosted the quantities of chilli, honey and lemon to make sure there was enough to double up as a dressing for our choice of designer salad leaves.
Flavour musings
I enjoy bottled sweet chilli sauce, but I do find its sour-sweet-spice can pack quite the overpowering punch; whereas Nigella’s speedy version of honey, lime and chillis, practices a more delicate, tantalising tickle.
Salty slabs bejewelled with ruby heat: Nigella’s Halloumi with Quick Sweet Chilli Sauce is the epitome of ease and flavour, and the perfect pick-me-up for languished moods and busy days.
