Friday 27 May - Salade Nicoise

The weather is gorgeous at the moment, so summer food is called for (although we haven't actually eaten outside yet)

I was surprised to find fresh tuna steaks in Aldi, to make things easier their cheap vegetables this week included green beans and Jersey Royals - so Nicoise seemed the obvious thing to make.

I don't follow a recipe for this, as they seem to differ so much. One thing I don't do is add garlic to the dressing, as if I eat raw garlic it keeps me up all night!

The dressing was a mustardy vinaigrette, but I used olive oil and added some chopped chives at the end

I took great pleasure in popping out to the bottom of the garden to find some lettuce to add.

The tuna was fried until pink in the centre, and then broken up, and dressed while still warm.

The potatoes were also dressed while they were still warm.

I then built up layers of lettuce, tomatoes, the potatoes and beans, some marinated artichokes, olives and the tuna. Although anchovies are traditional I added some salted capers.

The layers were then tossed together.

Finally, when it was served it was finished of with boiled eggs

I'm looking forwards to making this again in a couple of months when we have potatoes, beans and tomatoes from our allotment!

Wednesday 18 May - Spaghetti with Tomato, Capers and Mint

This is from a Rick Stein book, and on first reading I thought it sounded very strange - tomato and mint aren't always the first things I think of putting together with pasta. Had to be worth a try though, and this is actually the second time I've made it in a week!

Fresh tomatoes are the thing to use  here, and the first stage is rather tedious, skinning and deseeding - the recipe called for cherry tomatoes, but I use big vine ones, chopped up.

Once chopped, I always lightly salt them, and leave to drain to remove excess liquid

The sauce starts with infusing olive oil with whole garlic - I did a bit extra to use the oil to brush over the bread I made to go with the dish.

Then in go some dried chilli flakes and the tomatoes, followed by salted capers and chopped mint.

Add to Spaghetti, and toss

Quick, and very delicious - can't wait for our tomatoes to be ready now!

Saturday30 April - John Torode Cookathon

Our Facebook food group had a cookathon this weekend - you could chose to cook recipes from either John Torode or Rachel Khoo. The final results are going to be tweeted to the chefs.

I chose John Torode, and although these recipes were simpler than the ones I would normally chose to cook on a Saturday night, I actually found it quite stressful as I followed the recipes without adding things as I would normally do. I even weighed and measured most of the ingredients which I never do.

First course was a simple prawn cocktail - I used up the leftover whole prawns from our Tapas last week, and added some raw shelled tiger prawns to bulk it out. These were cooked for a few minutes in boiling water with lemon juice and malt vinegar added, then quickly shelled.

The sauce was mixture of mayonnaise, tomato ketchup and various flavourings - all mixed together and then onto the prawns and shredded little jem lettuce.

To serve with this a found a recipe for Soda Bread, which was made with wholemeal and white flour, and buttermilk.

For main course I chose to make a leek and mushroom pithiviers, this was made with frozen puff pastry.

The filling was a mixture of cooked leeks, and musrooms with creme  fraice added.

This filling was layers onto the pastry, with cubes of gruyere

Then the top was added, and glazed and it was baked

To serve with it, we bought some of the first Asparagus of the season, to make asparagus with capers and black butter - the lightly cooked spears were reheated in smoking hot butter, with tiny capers and a squeeze of lemon

Finally, a really simple pannacotta for dessert, along with some rhubarb from our allotment.
Milk and cream were heated with vanilla and sugar, and then the soaked gelatine added, and into the fridge to set

The rhubarb was gently oven baked with some sugar and a vanilla pod

Once it was tender we left it to cool, before turning out the pannacotta and serving this on the side

We enjoyed all three courses - and for once managed to eat all of them too!