Dukkah

Occasionally, when doing one of my new obsessive Sunday afternoon tidy ups, I come across scraps of paper on which I have jotted something which was going to become a life changing social commentary or possibly even a blog post. These were tucked into the back of the plastic folder which my MA certificate came in (thanks for framing that, parents):

23 March

Day uneventful, just tidying up loose ends prior to the long weekend. Went out for a lovely meal with the ex-housemates at 11 Park Walk. Decided to have spaghetti with bottarga as I always see Giles Coren writing about it and have never tried it. Delicious – more granular than I had expected (was maybe thinking of caviar due to the fact it’s roe too?) but tasted exactly of the sea. As I bent to pick up my handbag, I was nearly blinded by a halogen bulb that had been implanted into the floor. Why? God knows. I ended up putting my bag on top of it and burning the leather. That aside, amazing food and lovely to see the girls.

24 March

Woke up late, packed in 10 mins, ran (taxi) to Kings Cross, ran on to the train and my MA graduation weekend had officially begun. C and I met as planned at the station (Emotional Train Station Reunions being ‘our thing’ ever since she moved to the Continent). Particularly emotional this time; an awkward wave and a back pat. We wandered around for some time, drinking Pimms. Later on we met J and Y for dinner. Nice food. Tried something new called dukkah. Appears to be seeds.

And there you have it, a little snapshot of my life back in March. Presumably I didn’t continue this charming vignette because the next four days of entries would have been ‘Drunk. Hateful people everywhere. Unhappy’.  It wasn’t a classic weekend.

Of course, the food related purpose to all of this is dukkah (or dukka/duqqa). It’s an Egyptian side dish or dip that is a mixture of herbs, nuts and spices. Everyone is going to think I only found out about it because  someone made dukkah bread on the Great British Bake Off the other week, but I PROMISE I knew about it in March. I seem to remember the one I had being used effectively as a kind of crunchy topping for a cheese platter.

Basically, get a whole load of nuts and spices of your choice, in whatever proportion you think will be nice (choose things that go together, obviously – hazelnuts, sesame seeds, cumin, peppercorns, coriander and fennel seeds, salt…) toast all the components, crush them up, and dip bread and olive oil into the resulting crunchy mess. Looks impressive, as mentioned earlier, on the side of a cheese board (and you get the pleasure of saying ‘oh, that? it’s just dukkah darling. Have you never heard of it?’) but make sure the cheeses you’ve chosen can stand up to the strong flavours.

Birdfood?