Sumptuous but light
This was my challenge of the day - to cook something sumptuous but light for David's weekly special dinner cooked from an actual recipe. His words. I have no quote to head the post but I do think Botticelli's painting of a wedding feast is appropriate. For here you have a sumptuous wedding feast, no doubt hugely expensive (see below), surrounded by light with the servers being somehow light as air. Even the pillars look as if they might float away. The very definition of 'sumptuous but light' made manifest.
I looked up sumptuous in the dictionary - or rather dictionaries and this is what I found:
Cambridge Dictionary - luxurious and showing that you are rich
(American English) - of high quality and often expensive
Oxford Dictionary - splendid and expensive looking
Macquarie Dictionary - 1. entailing great expense, as from fine workmanship, choice materials, etc.; costly 2. luxuriously fine; splendid or superb
All of which came as a bit of a surprise to me. Well the emphasis on the expensive that is, although the Oxford seemed to think it only needed to be expensive looking, not actually expensive. I think I had thought of it more like the way that Bill Bryson uses it in this lovely passage about Autumn. (Irrelevant to the topic in hand I guess, but sort of not and an apt follow-on from yesterday's gloom)
"It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange." Bill Bryson
And incidentally today is just as he describes - even in Australia where most of our trees are evergreen (well more evergreeny/grey). it is such a lovely day that I went for a long and slightly different walk luxuriating in the beauty of it all. And my spirits were definitely lifted. We even have a few autumnal deciduous on our mostly purely native block of land.
Rich but not necessarily expensive. I think David was using it that way too and probably just meant delicious and/or special.
What he is getting is certainly not expensive - Nigel Slater's Grilled Mustard and Herb Chicken. (The original 'authentic' version does not appear to be online, but this website (The Little Bean) republishes it exactly as is in my book (Real Food), with a few comments as well. It's also another one of those dedicated people working their way through a favourite cook's recipes. I started to do that once with Robert Carrier - not from page 1 to the end - dipping in here and there - but I really didn't get very far.)
But back to expense and sumptuous. I guess there is an element of costly, and expensive in the word - lavish springs to mind - but I really don't think it has to be expensive - rich, luscious, delicious are other adjectives that might define it for me, with respect to food anyway.
Light on the other hand is defined by not being its opposite - heavy. Airy seems to be the only other word they use. And with respect to food, the closest I came to a light food definition was from the Oxford Dictionary people:
"not containing much fat or not having a strong flavour and therefore easy for the stomach to digest"
Of course there are lots of technical definitions of light (or lite) with respect to things that contain fat, but that's another thing altogether and not really what David meant. That Oxford Dictionary definition is interesting too - 'not having a strong flavour' - not sure about that. Can't food have a strong flavour - salmon say - and still be light?
What David means is something like these two examples from the queen of 'light' - Donna Hay.
Funny how light food is almost always heavily green isn't it? I guess he really means he would like a salad but knows I'm not a huge salad fan and it's winter anyway.
But having decided on the chicken I then thought I would try and replicate his warm lemon and honey chicken salad from Melissa's - perhaps with home-made pita bread, as in the Khobz post I did a short time ago but I think I'll see how I'm feeling later this afternoon on that. A herby salad anyway, with the warm chicken. The salad being the 'light' component. And he is a bit of a salad freak. He is making his own bread today so perhaps we'll just have that.
Going back to the lemon and honey - I couldn't find an actual recipe although, again, Nigel Slater came close with an orange and honey recipe (The Little Bean lady again). It was my second choice. And as this is supposed to be an opportunity for me to follow an actual recipe for a change, I didn't think I should improvise. Yes I'm improvising a bit by adding the chicken to a salad, and using breasts rather than thighs, but the marinade and cooking bit will be followed exactly.
There were indeed lots of lemon and honey recipes but they were mostly of the Chinese kind and involved deep frying. I'm sure they would have been nice but not really what I was looking for. Beverley Sutherland Smith has a lovely recipe for Nonya Lemon Chicken which I have made before, but it doesn't have the honey component. Other runners up were Claudia Roden and Greg Malouf of course but Claudia Roden's recipe was just too simple by half (just lemon, olive oil and mint) - and Greg Malouf's a tiny bit more complicated. So in the end I went for lazy.
Hope it's approved of.
POSTSCRIPT: Indeed it was approved and it was really quite delicious and so quick and easy to do. I varied it a tiny bit, but using chicken breasts and cutting them into strips but otherwise it was exactly the same. The dried tarragon gave it an interestingly different taste I think, but might try it with fresh tarragon some time just to see the difference. It's going into my list of things to cook every now and again.
