Herby puy lentil salad

Eating lentils feels a very healthy and sensible thing to do, and with 3 weeks to go until I’m in my bikini in Ibiza I’m being as healthy as possible – no white bread or pasta, no potatoes and lots of veg.

So I bought some ready cooked puy lentils, put the whole packet in a big mixing bowl and added freshly chopped parsley, mint and coriander. Then I added some chopped veg – a red pepper, plum tomatoes, cucumber, sun dried tomatoes and olives. I added chopped feta for a bit of protein (is there protein in lentils anyway?) and seasoned with salt, pepper, a sprinkle of dried chilli flakes and mixed all together with a drop of olive oil.

The fresh herbs in this make it really tasty – especially the mint. I had the puy lentil salad for lunch at work with a handful of rocket.

Mushroom bruschetta

I’m usually an advocate of using whatever you’ve got, but chestnut mushrooms make a big difference for this bruschetta.

Fry a finely chopped small onion or shallot and bacon in butter

Smoked haddock chowder

Summer weather (now that we’re experiencing 2 days of sunshine in England) makes me want to eat lots of seafood – so after my morning class and waiting in a stupidly long queue to pick up a letter from the post office (V festival tickets – yay!) I stopped off at the fish stall.

One of the things I got was some Scottish smoked haddock and set out making this chowder as soon as I got home. (arguably, chowder is a better dish to warm you up when it’s cold outside but I’ll stick to my original premise is summer and seafood going hand in hand)

If you’d like to make this chowder you will (for 2):
– 2 rashers streaky bacon, chopped
– a small chopped onion
– 300 ml cream
– 100 ml milk
– 2 potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes
– 100 ml water or fish stock
– 1 bay leaf, shredded
– a handful of chopped fresh parsley
– a squeeze of lemon

And here’s the method:

– Fry the bacon and onion in a little butter
– Put your potato cubes into the microwave in a bowl with a splash I water and loosely covered with cling film for 5 minutes, this will save you time later
– Once the onion is soft add the cream, milk, stock or water, potatoes and bay leaf to the pan. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 5 minutes
– flake in the haddock and warm through
– add a squeeze of lemon, and some lemon zest if you’ve got it, season (with the bacon and smoked haddock it will be quite salty already) and throw in the parsley

Serve with crusty bread and enjoy

Roast potatoes

I think I’ve managed to crack getting consistently good potatoes – fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside – I’m going to share my trick with you.

Peel, cut and wash the potatoes, put them in a pan of cold water and on the hob on a high heat. In the meantime put the oven on – up to 200 degrees – and put in your roasting pan with olive oil in to heat up (I judge how much oil by putting a good covering of all of the bottom of the pan).

Back to the potatoes, once the water has started to boil, let them boil for about 5 minutes, then drain in a colander and shake around to fluff them up. Take the oil out of the oven and pour the potatoes in – they should make a satisfying sizzle.

Salt and pepper the potatoes, coat in the oil, put the tray back into the oven and – here’s the trick – leave them. Just close the oven door and don’t turn over, move around or shake the potatoes for at least the next 40 minutes.

After 40 minutes check how they’re doing – you should find that the side in the oil is golden and crispy. Now you can toss the potatoes around a bit to get the other sides in the oil and put back into the oven for 20-30 minutes until crispy all over.

After the 40 minute mark is when you should anything you’d like for extra flavouring, maybe some cloves of crushed garlic, a sprinkling of thyme or rosemary, chilli flakes, or a little lemon zest for a bit of zing.

Extra large misshapen mixed chocolate cookies

Adapting Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything recipe for butter cookies, I made these chocolate chunk cookies yesterday. I’m not sure if there’s anything I can do to stop them merging into each other while cooking (except get a bigger baking tray) so I’ve just come to accept that my biscuit baking will never be professional but is very home made.

Here’s what I did to make 10 cookies.

Ingredients:

115g unsalted butter, softened
150g sugar
1 egg
125g plain flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
Seeds from inside 1 vanilla pod (we went to India and I bought loads, otherwise I would’ve used 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)
Chocolate cut into chunks – I used a selection from our sweet cupboard, including white chocolate buttons, aero and dairy milk.

Steps:

– Heat the oven to 190°C (375°F).
– Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the egg and beat until well blended.
– Mix in the flour, baking soda and pinch of salt
– Stir in the vanilla and chocolate
– Put tablespoon-sized mounds of dough on a grease proof papered tray (Mark Bittman says 8cm apart, but my tray wasn’t big enough for that)
– Bake until lightly browned (about 10 minutes.)

Grilled octopus

These are the 2 octopi (we all know it’s not octopuses) I got from the fish stall in Chelmsford’s Saturday market.

Octopus is a tough animal, you can’t just stick it on the grill, you need to tenderise it first. So after cleaning it by turning the head inside out and carefully removing the inside sacs (it’s quite stinky if you burst the wrong one) I simmered the octopi in salted water for an hour and a bit.

I then transferred it to a pan, generously glugged olive oil over the octopus, along with the juice of half a lemon, 5 cloves of crushed garlic, salt, pepper and a little crushed chilli.

At the point, you could eat your octopus like this, or mix it into some spaghetti for a lovely octopus pasta, or turn it into a stew.

I put the octopus under grill until crispy (at the point I was wishing we had a BBQ, it would be so tasty grilled over coal) and served with chopped parsley, lots more lemon and crusty bread.

Lemon meringue

This is my mum’s signature recipe- she’s been making it for as long as I can remember and whoever she makes it for always loves it. It turns out that it’s a recipe she got in a little book with her kenwood mixer (some time in the late 70s or early 80s, I assume).

The recipe calls for a 7 or 8 inch flan case. My mum uses sponge cake and cut in into thin slices and put it in the bottom of the dish. Another variation
is to use a cheesecake base, with crushed biscuits. You could miss out the base completely and just make the curd and put the meringue on top (saves on the calories). I made short crust pastry and blind baked a case.

So here’s the instructions for the full shabang.

Short crust pastry:
175g flour
75g cold cubed butter
50g caster sugar
1 egg

Put the flour and cubes of butter in a bowl, mix with your fingers until its the consistency of breadcrumbs.
Mix in the sugar
Add the egg and until it all comes together as a pastry, you might need to add a little water to help it along
With short crust pastry you ideally put it into the oven for an hour to chill, then roll out and put in a greased and floured baking tin.
Bake in an oven on 180deg for around 20minutes or until a light brown.

In the meantime make the Filling :
(as this is an 80s recipe measurements are in ounces, I’ve done a conversion to grams)
1 lemon, quartered
4 oz sugar (113g)
2 eggs, separated
1 oz cornflour (28g)
Half pint water
1 oz butter (28g)

You need a liquidiser or hand blender for the filling.
Place the lemon, sugar, egg yolks cornflour and water in your liquidiser or hand blender container.
Switch on maximum speed and blend for ten seconds.
Pour through a sieve into a pan, pressing well with a spoon to extract all the liquid.
Add the butter and cook over a medium heat, stirring all the time, until the mixture thickens.
Continue cooking for 2-3 minutes, then remove from heat and allow to cool.
When cool fill the flan case.

Topping:
Egg whites from earlier
3oz castor sugar (84g)

Place the egg whites in a bowl and whisk n maximum speed until thick.
Sprinkle in half the sugar and continue mixing until the mixture is quite stiff.
Switch off, remove bowl from machine and fold in the remaining sugar using the whisk in one hand.
Pile the meringue on top of the filling, making sure that it comes right to the edge.
Dust lightly with granulated sugar.
Place the pie in a moderately hot oven(200C/400F) for 5-10 minutes until meringue is golden.

Eat.

Plaice with samphire and buerre noisette

I used to work for a company called Samphire productions, so when I saw samphire while doing my weekly shop I thought I had to give it a go.

I can’t ever remember eating samphire before and I’ve definitely never cooked with it. All it needs to blanching in boiling water for 30secs-1min and a squeeze of lemon over it once you take it out.

I boiled it in salted water which may or may not have contributed to the samphire’s salty flavour – its like having a bite of the sea – and an excellent accompaniment to the fillet if plaice which fried skin side down until the flesh was white (about 5 mins) and turned over for 1-2 mins just to finish.

Giving the pan a quick wipe I put in a knob of butter and put the pan back on the heat, stirring until the butter turned brown and smells nutty, then taking it off the heat and adding in a squeeze of lemon and a handful of chopped parsley. This buerre noisette, as the name suggests, has a nutty buttery tastes with a little zing from the lemon cutting through and is a really quick and tasty sauce for white fish (my fish is swimming in it).

Summer salmon salad

Making lunch just for myself it’s really tempting to do some beans on toast, as it was Saturday I made this take on a nicoise (my favourite salad) in that it’s got fish and eggs in it. It’s really quick – the part that took me the longest was boiling the egg, so here’s how to make this in 10 minutes:

– put the egg on to boil (a hard boiled egg takes 10 minutes)
– season the salmon and place it skin side down in a hot pan – turn around when the skin easily comes away from the pan, this took 2-3 minutes
– in the meantime, put a handful of rocket leaves on a plate and add some olives, tomato, cucumber and a couple of sun dried tomatoes (I heart sun dried tomatoes)
– check the salmon, once you turn it over turn the heat to low, it should only need to cook for another 5mins or so
– make a dressing with 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp white wine vinegar, 1 tsp Dijon mustard, 1 tsp wholegrain mustard and a little dried tarragon
– once the egg is ready, peel and cut it into 6 segments and combine all ingredients

Healthy and tasty 🙂

Bruschetta

This is one of our favourite Mediterranean snacks, and this is my version.

Make a mix of chopped tomatoes, a small onion, 1 clove of garlic (grated or through a garlic crusher), a pinch of chilli flakes, salt, pepper, 3 or 4 leaves of fresh mint or basil (chopped) and a glug of olive oil.

Spoon onto slices of Maltese bread (the most delicious bread in the world – although ciabatta and sourdough make a good substitute). We add some chopped bacon on top of our bruschetta for a bit of extra saltiness and put under a grill for a few minutes until the bacon is crispy.

Drizzle some more olive oil on the top once you take the bruschetta out and serve with an olive oil and balsamic vinegar mix.