52 Cookbooks #23: White bean and artichoke salad

June 15, 2014

This week my recipe comes from Hugh's River Cottage Veg Everyday, and I must say the front cover features a very smart and neatly barbered Mr F-W. I'm a big HFW fan but I think the longer-haired version is more in keeping with his character!

This is a lovely summery salad. It could be a main, but I chose to serve it as a side dish alongside BBQ-ed sausages and it worked a treat.

The recipe calls for artichokes in oil, but I tend to buy them tinned as they last longer in our cupboard that way, and are a useful thing to have in your store cupboard as they're quite at home on a handmade pizza.

So they had some colour I fried them ahead of softening the garlic in oil and they ended up with some lovely chargrilled bits. Yum.

This is a bit of a tin openers dream recipe but that also means it's quick and easy to do and therefore I'm likely to do it again!

So after you've softened the garlic in oil for a few minutes, add the white beans - I used butter beans but cannellini beans would also be good. Heat those for a few minutes and then add the artichokes.

When everything's warm add the juice of half a lemon and some seasoning. Add it to ready

prepared salad leaves on a plate and top with chopped parsley and some Parmesan (or goats cheese would also work if you were having this as a main meal).

Then tuck in!

BTW the sausages I used were chicken & herb chipolatas from my local butchers (G G Sparkes on Old Dover Road - a fantastic place!) and I untwisted two of them and squeezed the meat along to even it out before rolling into a Catherine Wheel and securing with a skewer before adding them to the BBQ.

The verdict:

Easy to do and yummy to eat - what's not to like?!

This week Mary has made

Halloumi Tabbouleh

52 Cookbooks #22: Yogurt and blueberry ice cream

June 10, 2014

Well we're back from Portugal and back to warmer weather too, which is a nice surprise. So with little time to make something this week before the Linky closes I've opted to make ice cream.

So it's pretty handy the weather's good! I'm sure we'll still manage to taste some though even if it rains!

This recipe comes from an old and sun-faded Bill Granger book titled Holiday, somehow it just seemed an appropriate book to browse through this week.

The recipe actually uses raspberries but I had some blueberries so I've used those instead. I say a recipe, there's only three ingredients: caster sugar, Greek yogurt and the fruit, so it does feel like a bit of a cheat.

Although the purpose of this challenge was to use more of my cookbooks so as it's still meeting that requirement I'll continue...

One thing I'm struck by though is how often I find myself saying I already had an ingredient (or a similar one) when writing these posts so it seems this challenge is really pushing me to use the ingredients I have in ways I perhaps wouldn't usually. I'm pretty sure that's a good thing, so thank you Mary.

All you do for this yogurt ice cream is whisk 100g of caster sugar with 500g of Greek yogurt and then add 115g of fruit. Yes, it's really that simple. I decided to add some chopped mint too, though afterwards I thought perhaps lemon verbena might have been a better match with the blueberries. Oh well, it's mint this time round.

Next it was into the ice cream maker. That's where I deviated again as my ice cream maker bowl wasn't frozen in preparation so I'm using the more manual churn method of stirring every so often to prevent crystals appearing while it freezes. I'm expecting it to take a bit longer and it is more disruptive but with the kitchen timer set every 20-30 minutes, I'm hoping it'll work.

All ready to go into the freezer

It took longer than I expected, but here's the finished ice cream:

In the book Bill says that "home-made ice creams are always best when they're freshly churned" while I tend to agree with him I'm not sure I fancy whipping up some ice cream for two people on a regular basis.

There's also a warning that this ice cream can become fairly solid in the freezer, so to take it out 20 minutes before serving. Right, got that.

The verdict:

It was easy to do, and I could easily make more ice cream rather than buying it.
I added a couple of sprigs of chopped mint, I think I could have added more without getting to mint overload.
It was a pretty colour, I kept the fruit whole but it would be worth trying with some of the fruit mashed or puréed.

This week Mary has made

Chicken(ish) Caesar salad

52 Cookbooks #21: Paella de esparragos y queso manchego

June 3, 2014

Yes exactly. That's paella with asparagus and manchego cheese. Well it seems rude not to make the most of the asparagus season while it's here, I think this is probably the last we'll see this year (unfortunately).

This meal was nominally chosen by MOH. We were in Sainsburys having one of those "there's-nothing-for-tea-so-we-should-get-something-but-I've-no-idea-what" type of conversations and MOH piped up paella.

Quite an inspired suggestion I thought...

Now we just needed enough of the ingredients to fit a recipe. And we needed to do it from memory. We did quite well with this one, it was supposed to have chicken but we'd bought prawns but that's not such a bad swap. Other than that we were set.

The book I've used this week is likely to be less well known than others I've used and is "Spanish Bar & Restaurant Cooking" by Maria and Natalia Solis Ballinger. It was a birthday present many years ago to MOH after a trip to Spain, most likely Barcelona (which we love - because it's mad there!).

The recipe says it serves six, so we cooked two-thirds of it planning to have some left over. However it didn't quite work out that way as it was so nice we both had seconds, and then it wasn't really worth saving what was left... so we ate that too!

I can't claim this is an authentic paella but it was tasty and didn't hang around for long. It needed more stirring than I expected which meant it didn't get the baked-on rice bottom, which is a yummy side product of paella, but that didn't prevent either of us hoovering this up!

But all in all a good recipe, and an alternate way to use asparagus.