Nigella comes to stay

Annie bought Martin a copy of Nigella Lawson's Feast last week, in part because it was only a fiver (remaindered from £25). Martin wasn't unequivocal in his enthusiasm at first, but on exploring the book he rather warmed to Mrs. Saatchi's work. There's some daft stuff in there, it's true (left-over spuds fried up with bacon, eggs, cheese and frozen peas on return from the pub is not a recipe, it's an accident) but there are some very good ideas in there too. So far he's done:
- Crispy pork chops beaten out thin and coated in breadrumbs mixed with Parmesan (not so much a recipe as sense, but good).
- Green beans cooked with lots of butter, black pepper and lemon (ditto, but she does suggest chopping and using the whole peeled fruit rather than messing with just the juice or zest, which is both bold and very good, although not to my taste as a cat).
- Beef marinated in Worcestershire sauce, mustard and soy, grilled, sliced and served with a sauce made with more Worcestershire, mustard and soy, plus fish sauce and sake (lovely).
- Basmati rice with cadomoms (good, but doesn't work that well with the sake beef as she suggests).
She has an excellent way of cooking steak that entails giving it two minutes on a very hot grill pan, then wrapping it in two thicknesses of aluminium foil and leaving it on a pile of newspaper for insulation for ten minutes before carving. This produced perfect rare-but-not-too-bloody, still-warm meat, though M did use quite thick medallions and thought that with ordinary sirloin, half that time would do.
Personally I think M is a bit sniffy about Nigella. She seems like just the sort of glamorous, bosomy, posh lady I rather like, and if she came round to our house in person rather than in book form, she'd get plenty of head-buts and purrs from me. I would like to know if she's named after the tiny black seeds used in Indian cooking, or if they just put an extra 'l' and an 'a' on the end of her Dad's name (which would seem a bit unimaginative). What do you think?