What do you say? Chef’s salad

Chef's salad

Today has just been a bit surreal and I’m feeling a little weirded out. Today I walked past the amazing Molly Wizenberg of Orangette fame! It’s not often you happen to pop out for a walk and a baguette and bump into someone you totally admire/kinda want to be on a side street a mere two minutes from your home. It was very exciting but all I could muster was a smile and crimson cheeks. No words would come out but in a way I’m glad. I don’t think I would have been able to talk much sense. The boyfriend who was completely oblivious as to who had just pasted us thought I had experienced a small stroke due to my ever-reddening face. He proceeded to tease my blushing throughout the day. Charming.

I’m not entirely sure why I felt such a strong reaction. I think it may have been because I had just walked passed a person who’s blog posts have touched and moved me, who’s photos have inspired me and who’s humanity has humbled me. The amazing thing was she looked so down to earth and friendly. We were almost in matching outfits for Pete’s sake. We were just two girls, out with friends, taking a walk in the New Town. I guess, maybe in that moment, I felt my aspirations were more achievable. Maybe given enough time I could try to be as creative as her? Maybe given enough effort.

On a completely unrelated note I’ve wanted to share this recipe for chef’s salad for a week or two now. I had it as a starter for our anniversary meal and it was perfectly balanced, wonderfully simple and relied on awesome ingredients. It is a recipe just up my street, just like Molly!

Chef’s Salad – serves 2

1 echalion shallot – very finely cut

50ml vegetable oil

1tsp salt

300g new potatoes

100g smoked bacon lardons

100g comte – cut into 2cm by 1cm (ish) cubes

One head of little gem – cut into 2-3cm slices

50g mixed salad leaves – herby, flavourful leaves work best

2 eggs at room temperature

5 dsp extra virgin olive oil

1 dsp white wine vinegar

1 dsp dijon mustard

salt and pepper

oil for frying

Add the shallot to the vegetable oil with 1tsp of salt, stir firmly and leave to stand.

Add the potatoes to a pan of salted, boiling water and leave to cook over a moderately high heat.

Fry off the lardons over a high heat until very crispy. Set aside on kitchen towel until later.

Add the eggs to a pan of warm water and bring up to the boil, cook for 6 minutes, drain and leave to stand in cold water until later.

Slice the cooked new potatoes and add them to the pan used to cook the lardons, season well and cook until the edges are crispy then set aside.

In a jam jar, add the extra virgin olive oil, white wine vinegar, dijon mustard and seasoning to taste, shake well.

Remove the shallots from the vegetable oil and add them to a large bowl with the sliced little gem, salad leaves, lardons, comte and fried potato slices.

Add the salad dressing to this bowl and mix though.

Peel the eggs and arrange on top.

Enjoy.

Home cured salmon with beetroot

beetroot home cured salmon with rye bread, cream cheese and dill

Sometimes I get an idea in my head, it sticks and no matter what I do, it is hard to shake it out of there. These ideas are almost entirely about food; my brain is a fatty. This recipe is one such example, I’ve been waiting months for the beetroot to appear again on the market stalls. Despite the long wait it didn’t disappoint.  The report card would say, “exceeds expectations”.

salmon with beetroot and vodka (russian porn)

Being shallow, this is an incredibly pretty little dish; deeply pink tinged fringes of the salmon, cut so thin it is almost translucent. The taste was also pretty special; slick, fatty salmon with a hint of umami from the curing liquor. Yummy (even if I do say so myself).

side of salmon with some of the beetroot curing liquor

I served it with rye bread, cream cheese, a smattering of dill fronds and a squeeze of lemon. It was a wonderful simple lunch.

Home cured salmon with beetroot

A side of sashimi grade salmon 500 – 600g

75g sea salt

75g caster sugar

200g grated beetroot

6dsp vodka

Ensure the salmon is clean and remove any remaining bones with tweezers.

Mix all the ingredients, except the salmon, together.

Put half of the beetroot mixture into a glass or ceramic container big enough for the fish.

Add the fish flesh side up and add the remaining beetroot mixture on top.

Cover with cling film and pop in the fridge.

After 24 hours turn the salmon over and cover with the mixture.

Leave the salmon for another 24 – 48 hours.

When you are ready to eat, remove the salmon and rinse it under cold running water briefly just to remove some of the salt.

Pat dry with kitchen towel.

Cut on a diagonal and serve.

Enjoy.

Unexpected pleasures – beluga lentil salad

Beluga lentil salad

I am ashamed to admit it but I am probably a creature of habit. I guess I am just less spontaneous than I once was. Get up, work, walk, diner, shower, sleep. Last week my usual program of events was altered by a train derailment and my evening was all the better for it.

It has got me thinking about how I would like to be more open to the possibilities that are out there every day. Maybe there is so much more I could do? Am I really making the most of my time on this “pale blue dot”? All very scary and metaphysical questions but for me the scariest thought in the world is lying on my death bed wishing I had spent more time being creative, being with friends, seeing the world… instead of watching sh*t TV. Maybe I’m worrying prematurely, I am only 24 after all. Fingers crossed I’ve got a few years left in me yet.

Due to the derailment I had to get off the train a stop early and instead of catching a bus or walking the shortest route back I made the most of the late summer sun by walking along the riverbank. Here are a few photos I took with my phone. I don’t think they really capture the peace and sense of age of the landscape. It has this lovely, forgotten and ancient atmosphere, all very romantic.

Tired feet

I would describe both my walk along the riverbank and this beluga lentil salad as an unexpected pleasure. I’ve always had a rather nonchalant attitude towards lentils, a bit too rough and earthy maybe, but these beluga ones are richer and creamier but still more delicate than their dhal making counterparts. The creaminess is cut through with the vinaigrette and spring onions and the earthy hint is lifted by the freshness of the parsley. Good ol’ Nigel Slater, that boy never puts a foot wrong in my opinion.

Beluga lentil salad served with grilled courgettes and iberico ham - just as Mr Slater suggested

Beluga lentil salad – adapted from Nigel Slater’s Tender Volume 1 (highly recommended)

Serves 4 as part of a lunch

For the lentils

200 g of beluga lentils

600 ml chicken or vegetable stock – ideally homemade as commercial stocks will have more salt which can toughen the skin on the lentils

For the dressing

4-5 spring onions – finely chopped

a clove of garlic – crushed

a large handful of flat leaf parsley – roughly chopped

6 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp white wine vinegar

salt and pepper

Have a quick look and rummage through the lentils, sometimes there can be debris in the packet.

Pop the lentils into a sieve and run under cold water for a minute or two until the water is clear.

Add the lentils to a pan of simmering chicken stock.

In the meantime make the vinaigrette by adding the dressing ingredients together and mixing.

Taste the lentils after 10 minutes but they may require up to 15-20 minutes cooking.

The lentils should be tender but still with a little bite when they are ready.

Drain using a sieve and run under cold water for a minute or two.

Put the lentils in a bowl and pour in the dressing and give it a gentle mix until all the lentil are coated.

Season to taste.

Enjoy.

Courgette and feta fritters (summer loving)

Courgette and feta fritters

“The twice bitten” has been going for a few months now. It has had a couple of thousand hits and has been read in almost 30 counties. I am in shock. Despite this I sometimes feel a bit awkward about the writing bit. It's not something I've done a lot of before. I'm finding it hard putting myself out there.

Coming up with the recipes and making the dishes is the easy part; I have been doing it everyday for the last 15 years. The photography isn’t too thorny an issue due to a 50 mm camera lens. It is the writing part I find tricky.

Round courgette, lemon and mint

Looking through the blogs I follow (Orangette, Michelle Humes and The Wednesday Chef et al) is wonderful but also a little tough. It is hard knowing that I'm not at their level, not yet able to convey so eloquently the thoughts and emotions that are so integral to their blogs. Not to mention their wit…I guess it is my perfectionist tendencies slipping through although I do realise it is unrealistic to expect to be as awesome as these guys after a few months considering they have been doing it for years.

Eventually I’ll remember that this blog was only meant to be a self indulgent journey. A process that might be fun and I would hopefully learn some new skills along the way. It would give me a chance to collect and develop new recipes; a catalogue of all the things we like to eat.

So here is the easy bit. This recipe embodies summer eating - tasty, simple and perfect with a wee glass of something chilled. Salty feta, creamy courgette and fresh lemon zest and mint.

Courgette mix

Courgette and feta fritters  - serves 2

Adapted from the Jojo Tulloh  for the Telegraph 

2 medium courgettes, grated

100g of crumbled feta

2 spring onions, finely chopped

zest of 1 lemon

8-12 mint leaves to taste

1-2 cloves of garlic, smeared to a paste

8 gently rounded dsp of plain flour

1 beaten egg

seasoning to taste

oil for frying

Salt (about 1 tsp) the grated courgette and leave for at least 15 minutes.

Pat the courgette dry with kitchen towel, maybe give it a gentle squeeze.

Add it the feta, lemon zest, spring onions and mint, stir.

Add in the beaten egg and flour, stir.

Season to taste.

The mixture will be relatively loose don’t worry.

Put a large frying pan onto a moderately high heat with a few tablespoons of oil.

Once the pan is hot add a heaped spoonful of the mixture to the pan and flatten gently to make a fat pancake shape.

Leave to cook for a few minutes until golden brown, flip over and fry the other side.

Continue this process, frying a few at a time till the mixture is used up.

Rest the fritters on some kitchen towel.

I served it with a simple green salad and some lemon wedges.

Enjoy.

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino sardo salad

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino salad

The weather hasn’t even been remotely summery today but I'm keen to make the most of all the amazing produce that is available currently. Eating seasonally means that in the winter months our diet consists of lots of leeks and brassicas. Enjoyable, but after a few months the novelty can begin to wear off and the excitement of the summer vegetable cousins coming to stay starts to settle in. Oh yummy asparagus, broad beans, peas, courgette flowers….

Broad beans 

Broad beans remind me so much of summer. My grandpa had a small vegetable patch at the bottom of his garden. Tomatoes, little gem lettuce and raspberries were the main staples but he would often dabble in a season of this and that. Runner beans one year, broad beans the next. Walking barefoot on the hot, rough slabs down to the bottom of his garden then eating his home grown delights straight off the bushes is one of my earliest and most enduring memories. The year was punctuated by different crops and I think it is this that has given me an appreciation of nature and seasonality.

Broad beans

Eating by the seasons wasn’t something my grandparents and their generation thought about, it was just the way things were. They weren’t eating broad beans in June because it was a trendy, middle class thing to do. They did it because that was option available. Today, in our world of readily available non native food such as bananas, broad beans can be quite tricky to get hold of in their short 8 week window. Some supermarkets stock them but your best bet is greengrocers or farmers markets. I got some today and was determined to make the most of them.

Broad beans, pecorino sardo and crusty bread - hello lunch

I’ll always remember my Grandma telling me about her first taste of bananas. Transatlantic shipping recommenced after the Second World War and it was then that my Grandma had her first taste of banana. She would have been about 15. Today 95% of British household buy them on a weekly basis. They are available all year round in every supermarket. Not exotic. Not exotic at all. The Oxford dictionary defines exotic as ‘‘strikingly unusual”. I guess you could perhaps now argue that the broad bean is more exotic than the banana?  Even if you disagree, it is difficult to class a banana as exotic despite the average 5106 food miles it has traveled to arrive on our plates.

Anyways rant over.

Broad bean, pea shoot and pecorino sardo salad

Serves 2

300g of broad bean pods

2 handfuls of pea shoots

50g pecorino sardo shards

juice of 1 lemon

good glug of olive oil, nice and grassy ideally

salt and pepper to taste

Remove the broad beans from their thick pods and boil in salted water for 3 minutes.

Personally I tend to then remove the beans from their inner casing mainly because I find it too bitter. I will not judge you for leaving it on. It is your diner, not mine, after all.

Mix all the other ingredients together.

I served the salad on top of some crusty bread brushed with more olive oil and then griddled on a high heat till crisp.

Enjoy.

Tip top saturday lunch - duck egg, asparagus and brown shrimp

Asparagus, duck eggs and brown shrimp

This week has been one for first time adventures. 

1 - I went to the wonderful Turkish restaurant Empires, for Z's birthday. I've been meaning to go for about 3 years. I’m always tardy.

2 - I've had my cooking filmed (just weird).

3 - I cracked my duck egg virginity. Pardon the pun, genuinely sorry, couldn’t resist. 

Duck egg with asparagus and brown shrimp

The filming was for a friend of a friend so I was happy to help out but gees was it weird. I’m so used to just being an idiot in the kitchen, dancing around, singing badly, somehow I didn’t feelcomfortable doing that with someone I had just met for the first time. I wonder if that is how Delia feels when the film crew is in her home? Does she also dance to 80s tunes in her bare feet? 

On to the duck eggs. Yep I've never had one before today. It took me 3 Stockbridge deli's before Mr Bower the butcher came up trumps with the eggy gold.  If you have never had them before, they really were lovely. The egg white was meant to be denser but to be honest I never noticed any difference. My only observations were that it is slightly larger than a large hen's egg, and the yolk was more rich and buttery. Yolk was all that was needed to dress this dish. Who needs a hollandaise when you have a runny duck egg yolk?

Fried duck eggs

Duck egg with asparagus and brown shrimp - serves 2 as a light lunch

The recipe was based on a dish in Mark Hix's "British Seasonal Food"

2 duck eggs

140g asparagus spears

60g cooked brown shrimp or potted shrimp

veg oil

seasoning

Boil the asparagus in a pan of salted water for 2-3 minutes depending on the thickness. 

In the mean time heat a frying pan on a medium to low heat with a little oil and add the eggs. 

Spoon over any excess oil over the eggs, to cook the top of them.

Add the shrimp to the eggs.

Drain the asparagus and add to the eggs.

Season.

Serve and enjoy.

Tip top saturday lunch - asparagus, duck egg and brown shrimp