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.

6 hour slow roast shoulder of pork with dauphinoise potatoes - comfort food personified

6 hour slow roast shoulder of pork

Every lazy weekend deserves a lazy roast dinner – this week 6 hour slow roast shoulder of pork with dauphinoise potatoes and green beans. This is possibly the ultimate lazy roast, a beginner’s roast if you will. The reason it makes such a good beginners roast is due to the fact that there are only 3 components to get right and I can vouch that the slow cooking method is very forgiving with the timings. This was particularly helpful when I ended up having an impromptu mid afternoon nap. Ma bad. Again.

I am aware that a roast dinner isn’t very seasonal for Saturday in mid June but when the weather is behaving like a day in mid January (dreich and cold but with none of the excitement of a yet to come Christmas) it seemed appropriate. We ended up huddled around the open fire with the Saturday papers and in that moment I wanted to eat dauphinoise potatoes more than any other food in the whole world. Oh creamy, carby, garlicky wonderfulness…

One good looking piece of meat

One dauphinoise looking a little burnt

6 hour roast pork - the final product

6 hour slow roast shoulder of pork with dauphinoise potatoes and green beans

6 hour slow roast shoulder of pork

Serves 4 plus leftovers

Oven 200 degrees celsius

1.5kg – 2kg shoulder of pork (skin scored)

1dsp sea salt

Pour boiling water over the pork skin, and then pat dry with kitchen towel.

This helps to open up the scores, which makes for wonderful crackling.

Rub salt into the scores.

Pop in the oven for 30 minutes until the skin has all browned and puffed up.

Put a double layer of tinfoil over the top of the roast and then turn the oven down to 160 degrees.

Cook for 5 and half hours.

It does help it if you baste it with the rendered fat every so often, maybe every hour or so.

Depending how fatty your joint is you may want to take the crackling off the joint about 30 minutes before the end of cooking; roasting it separately fatty side up allows it to get really crispy.

When it is ready the pork should be able to be pulled apart, all succulent and lovely.

No need to rest this joint, which is just as well as it hard to resist.

Dauphinoise potatoes

serves 4-6

700g floury potatoes, peeled and cut into slices 2-3mm think (get yer ruler out - jokes)

400-500g of double cream

4 cloves of garlic, grated or finely chopped

2 bay leaves
a few strokes of nutmeg

a couple of pinches of sea salt

good pinch of black pepper

Arrange the potatoes in an ovenproof dish

Mix all the other ingredients in a mixing jug and pour over the potatoes.

Cook in the oven at about 160 degrees celsius for 1hr and 15 minutes.

Mine were in for an hour and a half a got a little burnt.

Check the potatoes after 15 minutes, if the oven is too hot the cream can split, adjust the temperature as necessary.

After an hour check it isn't looking too burnt, it may need a tinfoil hat.

Enjoy.

Goat's cheese, honey and thyme flower feuille de brick parcel (an ode to N.)

I think it is time I wrote about N.. I’m sure I have alluded to her in previous posts but she is long overdue her own dedicated post (if not several). I met N. almost 7 years ago through a mutual friend when we were at university. We were “set up” so to speak. From my end I would say it was love at first sight, we hit it off straight away. We mainly bonded over our vehement foodie tendencies and a true love of twee Glasgow indie bands (B and S, Camera Obscura and such like). I think for us everything we love in life is covered in a blanket of fluffy sentimentality.

I am deviating here. I want to tell you about the feuille de brick pastry or just “brick” if you are proper French. (I’m a certified Francophile but not French so it is feuille de brick to me.) It originated in North Africa but was adopted by the French when they colonised Tunisia in the 1880s. It is incredibly versatile, in Tunisia it can be used to make a pastilla, a richly aromatic meat pie. In France it is often stuffed with ham and cheese to make a simple family super. Come Autumn I’ll use it as a dessert, maybe stuffed with spiced caramelised plums.

Feuille de brick with goat's cheese, honeycomb and thyme

N. made this for me the first lunch I had in her officially “bijou” studio apartment in Bordeaux that she shared with C.. I remember over looking the rooftops with the warmth of the sun coming through the window.  It was the lightest, crispest pastry I had ever eaten and with the creamy/sharp dichotomy of the goat’s cheese it was pretty magic.

Normally my attitude to pastry is a take-it-or-leave-it-kind-of-one but after this I was sold. When I spotted the packet in the chilled section at Waitrose I was transported back to that November afternoon in Bordeaux with N. and C.. I knew I had to get it. I’ll admit the thyme flowers maybe sounds a little pretentious but their lighter, more delicate flavour is more appropriate than thick sprigs  for this summery dish, plus they are very, very pretty.

Feuille de brick parcel

Goat’s cheese, honey and thyme flower feuille de brick parcel

Serves 1 – yep I’m cooking for 1 tonight.

2 sheets feuille de brick pastry

½ log of goat’s cheese

1dsp honey (I used honeycomb but acacia could be nice)

a wee sprinkle of thyme flowers - maybe 1/2 a teaspoons worth

oil for frying

Carefully take the pastry off the separating sheets.

Put the ingredients in the centre of one of the sheets and fold the edges over.

Put the edges side of the pastry in the centre of the other sheet face down and fold the edges of the second pastry sheet over.

Put the edges side down in a frying pan with some oil over a medium heat.

Fry for a few minutes on each side till golden brown and wonderfully gooey inside.

Enjoy.