Sauce #64

Hangover chicken, hangover hummus

I started writing this newsletter for Sundays like this one.

Sun shining. Kids in good fettle. A manageable level of dustiness behind the eyes. Not much to do beyond the occasional bellyflop into the pond and knuckling down with cooking lunch.

My health data suggests I managed just over 25,000 steps on Saturday which feels, if anything, lowballed. In the morning I ran the five-or-so miles from home to where I’d left my car the previous evening (for you haven’t lived until you’ve had a night out in Ripon on a Friday). Then we walked the stretch of river from Mickley to the excellent Bruce Arms in West Tanfield and had a good lunch in the sunshine. The pathway was overgrown so we took what I thought was a more straightforward route back and found ourselves truly in the weeds, savaged by horseflies and pretty fed up, eventually having to trample over a crop of oilseed rape to reach anything approaching a clear path. Real action man stuff.

We spent the afternoon swimming, tennising, and belatedly teaching Nora to ride a bike. All pretty family friendly, Blytonish fare.

Then in the evening we dumped the kids and went to friends’ in the neighbouring village for a party that, if it couldn’t quite be said got out of hand, certainly didn’t feel entirely in the realms of being within anyone’s firm grip by 10pm. Which is exactly how all good parties should be. Rosie and I set off home on foot across the fields around midnight, a bluetooth speaker energising us and disturbing the cattle, ill-advisedly attempting gate vaults and possibly falling over once or twice.

It’s not clear what time my sister and brother-in-law got in (we were all staying at my parents’ for childcare purposes), but while I awoke feeling relatively clear-headed and refreshed, they spent the morning taking it in turns to nap. Amidst lunch preparations I sliced up a cucumber and put some hummus out for the kids to have alongside their pasta, then headed outside to light the barbecue. On my return I found the cucumber demolished and the hummus half-eaten. “Brilliant,” I thought, “at least they’ve had something sort-of healthy.”

A few moments later Mary appeared in the kitchen. “I don’t know what you’ve got going on in here,” she said, dunking a finger in the hummus, “but it’s amazing.”

“That’s hummus from the Co-op,” I said. “Was it you who ate all that cucumber?”

“Ah. Yeah.”

I sent her off on a mission to find saffron, as you do. I had a bee in my bonnet about saffron aioli for some reason. It felt like a strong move with the new potatoes I was roasting with a sort of ‘nduja adjacent sausage from M&S. They’re very good sausages. I’m inclined to half-agree with my old buddy Sam who thinks ‘nduja is a scam (“too spicy, nonsense”) but at the same time largely believe there is no such thing as a bad ingredient, just bad cooks (tripe is the exception to the rule, being foul for obvious reasons). Either way, these snags sit somewhere between ‘nduja and chorizo and ought to find their way onto your barbecue this summer. Or into your potatoes.

They probably needed half the roasting time that the potatoes underwent and were a little on the crispy side by the time we came to eat, not that anyone minds a crispy sausage. Alongside simply marinated and barbecued chicken, a rocket-heavy green sauce, cavolo nero with anchovies and garlic, and the aforementioned saffron aioli, they did the job of, as my friend Dave put it to my mother the first time he met her, “kicking the hangover in the balls”.