Greek salad; baked and dressed courgettes

Greek salad inevitably reminds me of a restaurant we used to go to as students, a ridiculously cheap Greek place with an alarmingly long menu, which we liked just because it was cheap, really, and set up like a real restaurant, unlike the other cheap places. We often went for people's birthdays and before I went on my year abroad, my friends (who mainly weren't going abroad) took me to dinner there and there was a big cake with good luck inscribed on it in colourful icing. Anyway, whatever you ordered, they always plonked a huge Greek salad on the table as well and I always used to steal the torn pieces of oregano-infused feta cheese from the top. I should admit now that I don't eat raw tomatoes, which apparently makes me something of a pariah; it wasn't a great position to defend when I lived in the south of France, where they seemed to be almost compulsory. This is the last salad in the book apart from the green salad, that I promise I have made but didnt take a picture of because, well, it looked like green salad and as someone who doesn't eat tomatoes, I have eaten an awful lot of green salads. I put off the Greek salad purely on account of tomatoes; I have trouble seeing tomatoes in salads as a good thing. I finally decided to make it, though, to go with lamb chops and baked courgettes and pretend summer was coming, which is obviously unlikely in rainy February.

The salad is easy - mix plum tomatoes, roughly cut up, with wedges of avocado, black olives, chopped shallot, oregano, splashes of red wine vinegar and olive oil, salt and pepper. Add cos lettuce leaves (the larger leaves torn) and dress with lemon oil (ratio 1: 3 lemon juice: oil) and transfer to a bowl; crumble feta cheese over and drizzle with olive oil and more oregano.


With the salad, I made lamb chops and simple baked and dressed courgettes, also from Jamie. You should use small courgettes. wash and dry them, then toss in olive oil, salt and pepper and then bake for 15 minutes. Dress with red wine vinegar, chopped parsley and mint; balance with extra virgin olive oil and more seasoning if needed.

The salad was good; I approve of the addition of avocado, but then I'm a fully paid-up avocado fan. The courgettes looked simple but tasted surprisingly nice and, given how easy they are, they are definitely to be repeated. The lamb worked well with the courgettes and salad.


It doesn't look beautiful but nice dinners frequently don't, well, not unless some food stylist comes along and changes everything. Speaking of food stylists, am I the only one to be irritated when in a cookbook a photo bears no resemblance to the recipe cited, and you can very well see that the recipe has been altered slightly (presumably to improve the photo)? That was a rhetorical question as I know it has exercised the mind of Julian Barnes, the wonderful Pedant in the Kitchen. Jamie is less guilty than some (Donna Hay springs to mind, and I do like her recipes, but... ) because his books take care to appear less orchestrated (but we all know that the natural look takes time to achieve). Simon is our resident photographer; when I get hold of the camera our dinners all look muddy.

Anyway since the salad section is complete, time to take stock. One recipe stood out: the Fifteen Christmas salad. I loved that and it is really versatile. I also loved the homemade coleslaw- what a revelation. Other highlights for me: potato and horseradish salad with fine herbs and bresaola and warm salad of crispy smoked bacon and Jerusalem artichokes, as well as the all-day breakfast salad and the warm grilled peach salad. I think that might be too many favourites, but I am only a blogger and not a professional constrained by hierarchies. I am now a convert to warm salads. I can't believe another section is finished. At one point I felt as though the book would go on forever; now I can see the end and I don't want to, because there has been something exciting about the whole project (I can't explain why) that makes me not want it to end. I guess Jamie needs to write another book soon...

Warm salad of crispy smoked bacon and Jerusalem artichokes

This weekend we went to London, so that I could attend a day-long work meeting and Simon could meet some friends. The good part was we got to stay with my brother, Stuart, and his wife, Lisa, and their menagerie - by which I mean a dog and a cat. Their personalities are dramatically different (the dog as opposed to the cat, not Stu and Lisa): the cat is like a very cool teenage girl, who expects to be waited on and betrays little sign of neediness, whilst the dog - a cocker spaniel - is like an eager toddler, thirsting for human attention. I'm not an animal person (and that is an understatement) but I have a particular soft spot for that little dog. She sits and gazes imploring at you while you eat, beseeching you to hand some food over to her; she likes to have her tummy tickled. I've asked Stu to send me a photo of the animals so that they can make a guest blog appearance; I don't know if he will oblige. Anyway, animals aside, it was a good trip; the trains were a bit late both ways, and pretty late on the return leg of the journey, but it was nice to see my brother and sister-in-law and I managed to read two novels on the train (one each way): School's Out by Christophe Dufosse and The Girls by Lori Lansens, both of which are compelling in completely different ways. The former is a sort of French answer to Donna Tartt's The Secret History; it is menacing and intelligent and suspenseful, with the usual dose of French weirdness. The latter I expected to hate, but didn't, because the girls of the title - craniopagus twins, which means joined at the head - are portrayed very convincingly.

I realize I am off-topic, but then that isn't anything new. Yesterday I was too tired to embark on the usual Sunday marathon bake session but I did want to try something new for lunch - hence the warm salad with crispy bacon and Jerusalem artichokes (I am a fan of Jerusalem artichokes. I know many people are not). I like warm salads - they manage to make you feel you're eating healthily (the green parts) but they aren't rabbit food either; they are substantial enough to keep you going. This salad involved scrubbing the artichokes and boiling them until tender; then cooling, halving and setting them aside. Meanwhile I washed and sliced radicchio and little gem lettuce and placed in a bowl with chopped flat-leaf parsley. I sliced the bacon and fried it in a little olive oil, adding the arichokes and sliced red onion when the bacon was golden, and continuing until the artichokes were crispy. I then divided half that pan between our plates, before adding balsamic vinegar and olive oil to the pan, mixing, and tossing the pan's contents over the salad leaves in the bowl, before transferring it all to the plates.


The salad was delicious, in the way that warm salads with bacon inevitably are; calling it a salad is probably a bit of a con, since it seems somewhere between salad and fry-up, but that has to be a good thing. Jamie suggests varying it with sausage instead of bacon - I can imagine it working well with garlicky Toulouse sausages and new potatoes replacing the artichokes. I might feel compelled to experiment.

Unbelievable root veg salad

I'm starting to get irritated by the adjectives and superlatives in the recipe titles in this book - unbelievable, the best, the ultimate. It occurs to me that this can't go on for too long in Jamie recipeland because the next version of a dish will have to become the ultimate, and the recipes will end up cancelling each other out. I am a bit of a pedant secretly and that sort of thing can start to get to me. Having said that, I'd never made a root vegetable salad before; the idea wouldn't have entered my head, to be honest. I am a lazy salad-preparer; I tend to make a mustardy French dressing for green leaves (I cannot abide those mixed salads that people used to serve up, with cucumber and watery tomatoes) or, if it's just me, I just mix balsamic vinegar with olive oil or else (in my laziest moments) I squeeze lemon juice over rocket leaves and call it a salad (try it - it isn't that bad). Anyway, I liked the look of this root veg salad, not least because it was pretty colourful - and also because it uses seasonal vegetables, which I can buy from the farm shop and thus allow me to sleep at night without worrying that Hugh F-W will come and attack me for unethical purchasing. I got round to this salad yesterday - it seemed like a good idea for lunch, with some more baked Italian cheese; I was working on the (erroneous?) assumption that all those vegetables would cancel out the effects of the cheese, plus the chocolate tart I made later on.

The salad can, basically, involve any mixture of seasonal vegetables you like; the suggested range for autumn/winter is celery, carrots, beetroot, radicchio, radishes, fennel. (For anyone interested, baby asparagus, broad beans or baby courgettes are suggested for spring and summer). Slice or shave beetroot and carrots (I used a speed peeler), slice celery heart and leaves, radishes, radicchio and fennel. Toss in a grilled chilli dressing (grill red chillies, peel and deseed, toss with extra virgin olive oil, mint, lemon juice and seasoning) and serve sprinkled with fennel tops.



It's a pretty tasty salad, with interesting textures and the possibility for variation according to taste. It is both light and yet substantial; it feels superhealthy but the flavour is better than 'superhealthy' implies. Definitely a salad that suits the season and should be repeated!

Warmed grilled peach and frisee salad with goat's cheese dressing

When I was an undergraduate finishing my degree, I remember a PhD student in maths met his wife-to-be on the Internet. He was an odd sort of character, not just in terms of appearance -long, greasy hair scraped back into a shaggy ponytail, receding hairline, egg-shaped face - but mainly in terms of behaviour; he used to stay up all night playing Doom and other computer games and talking to strangers on line. We had barely heard of the Internet then and the news that this character had 'met' an American woman on the net and planned to marry her even though they had never clapped eyes on each other in real life (although admittedly they spoke to each other on the telephone, too) was a source of passing entertainment. We all wondered what this woman would make of him when they finally met, but we never found out because he finished his degree and departed and none of us liked him sufficiently as to stay in touch and discover what came of it. In any case we all assumed that the only people who might want to meet others on the Internet would be the sort of people we didn't really want to know. I tell this apparently irrelevant story mainly to indicate the prejudices that have underpinned my attitude towards the net; for years, my only cyber communication was e-mail with people I knew already. Then Simon set up his own music internet forum and got to know a few people on-line; two turned out to be veering on the psychopathic, but one has become a very close friend, was a witness at our wedding, and - although she purports not to like cooking, makes the most divine chocolate tart ever. It became clear that the Internet is pretty much like the world that invented it, that is, it harbours a huge variety of people, not all of whom you will get on with, some of whom might be dangerous but most of whom are just people like you. It is the last part of this sentence that makes the Internet a fertile source of new friends: that is, you are more likely to find like-minded people because you meet them via blogs and forums that reflect your interests. I am a member of a couple of cooking forums and through them have 'met' (none in real life, so to speak) a range of people who get what I mean when I am delirious over my new Kitchenaid (whereas my friends think I need my head checking) and can swap recipes and - even - food. I have come across some oddballs and some people passing themselves off as other people, but I don't let them spill over into my real life and can just ignore them in cyber space (it's the real beauty of cyberspace for polite British people like me, who tend to find it difficult to ignore people in real life) and carry on. Them aside, I have also encountered some intensely generous and fascinating people that I'd never have come across without the Internet. I have also, recently, experienced that generosity crossing over into my real life. I've swapped food parcels with people all over the world in the last few months, and these cyber cyphers have turned out to be very generous people off their keyboards as well as on them. Recently I taped Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, which was on television in Britain but not elsewhere, onto DVD for Internet friends all over the world - OK, well in Europe, the US and Japan! - and since then these recipients have sent lovely gifts back in return. I've had lots of chocolate from Norway and Finland (you won't believe how good Scandinavian chocolate is, but it really is!), saffron from Spain (very fitting), chopsticks and tea and cookies from Japan, magazines and chocolate from France, lots of spices from the US, including stuff from Dean and Deluca (fab packaging) and Tex Mex spices (Mmm), and most bravely cheese, hams and pancetta from Italy. Yesterday I also received a loaf of olive bread from Freya as part of a cake swap we decided to do (yes, she turned it into a bread/cake swap, well spotted). With my non-Internet friends, I can't imagine a cake swap, or any kind of food swap at all, really, and so I find all this quite exciting.

Last night, to go with Jamie's grilled peach and frisee salad, I used ham and cheese from Italy and Freya's bread.

The salad first, since it is in the title of the post: make a goat's cheese dressing by mixing goats cheese with olive oil, lemon juice, then Parmesan and walnut oil. The instructions read oddly here. Jamie explicitly instructs you to use a pestle and mortar, but keeps saying 'whiz the mixture up' - the word whiz doesn't go with a pestle and mortar in my mind. Bash it up, maybe, but whiz it up means a food processor to me, so I dithered a bit and then used the small bowl of the Magimix to whiz up the goat's cheese with the olive oil and lemon, then stirred in the walnut oil and Parmesan. I then grilled the peaches, drizzled over a little olive oil and seasoned lightly. To make the salad, use the inner leaves of a frisee or endive lettuce, and toss in the goat's cheese dressing, grate over a little Parmesan and then serve. Scatter with baby mint leaves.

The salad is very good. This is one of those dishes I wouldn't have bothered with if I wasn't doing the project - and I would have missed out! The peach goes so well with the crunchy lettuce and the creamy dressing.

The Italian cheese I was sent this week is called tomali, from Piedmont, and has to be cooked. The sender, Claudia, suggested wrapping it in parma ham and putting it in a very hot oven, so I did - it was delicious, the sort of thing it is dangerous to start eating because you might never stop. Below, the salad and the cheese wrapped in parma ham:


I served this with Freya's olive bread, which was dense and chewy and really good. I'm sure she will write how she made it in her blog - well, I hope so, so that I can have a go myself! It would definitely be worth repeating.




The whole dinner worked beautifully, and half of it was food I had been sent, which made it taste even better. It is true that the supermarkets sell foods from all over the world now; we can get pomegranate molasses and za'atar and miso paste, for instance, and I tend to take that facility for granted. But receiving food gifts from other parts of the world, from real people, is a world apart from standing in the 'exotic' aisle in Tesco buying the ingredients for a recipe derived from a cookbook. It is about finding out what real people eat, it's about cultural exchange of a real sort (as opposed to the abstract nonsense talked by most politicians) and it's about making connections, comparisons, and opening up your mind as well as your taste buds.

My mother-in-law remains highly suspicious of Internet-founded friendships; if she knew we'd been eating food sent by apparent strangers, she would probably warn us off in fear that we were being poisoned by Internet-dwelling serial killers (since she assumes that anyone who uses the net is a potential psychopath). I am sure that the Internet has its share of undesirables, but it's not so difficult to spot and steer clear of them - and in any case, I am more likely to be poisoned by the deep-frying fetishists who cater for all work events round here (the company who cater for us at work make turkey twizzlers. Go figure..). To all these disembodied Internet people who've made January into a second Christmas for me - thank you very much; you've enriched this dark, cold and most miserable month of the year immeasurably.

Return of the egg salad

I don't think I used to eat the much-scorned egg salad of my childhood. I don't remember avoiding it, but I am sure I must have been side-stepping it skilfully, because it is definitely the sort of thing I wouldn't have eaten. I preferred boiled eggs and soldiers, in those days, out of my Noddy egg cup (I gather that Noddy and Big Ears are un-PC these days. What a shame. I loved Enid Blyton and I am sure she inspired my passion for reading, even if her female characters all stayed in the house and helped Mother while the boys helped Father in the garden - remember the Faraway Tree?). I decided on this dish because we bought very fresh eggs this morning at the farm shop and the photo caught my eye, but I was resigned to not liking it that much before I began; I presumed it would probably be a bit too eggy for me. We were going into town this afternoon, to shop (which for me means meandering from bookshop to bookshop, punctuated by the odd clothes shop, Lakeland, and the kitchenware department of Fenwicks) and didn't have much time to prepare lunch, which was fine because this egg salad was as fast as can be.

We boiled the eggs in slightly salted water, refreshed them in cold water, drained, peeled and halved them, before drizzling over some lemon-spiked mayonnaise. We served with toast and rashers of pancetta.


A couple of our eggs were a bit over-boiled; others were just right. I tucked in with a smidgen of wariness, but they were nice - the lemony mayo really worked with the eggs.

This experience made me think about the extent to which fashion prevails in terms of what we eat. I suppose this might mean we miss out on a lot of dishes that people loved in the past, but in practice it probably doesn't because fashions in food as in clothes have a habit of returning, slightly modified, but in more or less familiar form. Fashions arise partly because we are fickle, grow tired of the familiar and want to branch into something more exciting, but then it would seem that we miss the past, or we miss its familiarity, and thus we embrace the once-forgotten foodstuff on its second or third time around. I think the important thing for me is to be open-minded, because I greet these retro foods with a degree of suspicion. I can eat sushi and seaweed with the best of them, but I am still repulsed by rice pudding (memories of school and the skin that formed on top). I am not afraid of the new or the foreign, but I am terrified of the old foods that made me retch during school lunchtimes and that made me hide behind the settee refusing to go to school until I was allowed to take packed lunches. I wonder what would have happened if Jamie had come to my school - I suspect I would have staged a hunger strike. All that said, I have now eaten egg salad and am proud of it; I will probably, even, eat it again.

Middle Eastern duck salad

I wrote yesterday that I used one roast duck as the basis for two recipes (I am still mentally patting myself on the back for thriftiness and for avoiding leftovers to clutter up our already space-challenged freezer). I should, however, have remembered that although the duck was the alleged star of this salad, its place was somewhat usurped by a pomegranate. I know pomegranates are uber-trendy, thanks at least partially to Nigella's championing of them; I know that I am probably the last person to jump onto the pomegranate wagon. I don't know why I haven't bought pomegranates before, because the seeds are like little jewels, and I can't resist beautiful food. All I can say is that I brought 2 pomegranates home, one of which was going towards this salad; the other I bought because it worked out cheaper to buy two, and because I had a sense that pomegranates were going to become my new craze. Anything bright and shiny - with the bonus of unquestioned status as a superfood - is always likely to hold my attention (I am irresistibly drawn to shiny red patent leather shoes, although I would never buy any). I cut the pomegranate in half and smacked it with a wooden spoon cut-side down; the seeds mainly tumbled as they were supposed to into the bowl I'd placed beneath, but some of the juices squirted sideways and one jet sprayed my pale blue cardigan. That will teach me not to wear an apron. Nigella has a pomegranate recipe called 'massacre in a snowstorm' - I can see where that name came from. Leanne Kitchen helpfully tells us that pomegranate juice is so indelible that it is still used as a dye in the manufacture of Persian carpets. Perfect. Anyway, to move onto the next step of the recipe, I processed 1/3 of the pomegranate seeds with the juice of two tangerine halves and the insides of some preserved lemons, sieved this and added olive oil to make a dressing. I then mixed parsley and mint leaves with toasted flaked almonds, chopped pistachios, sour dried cherries, the skins of the preserved lemons alluded to above, the remaining pomegranate seeds and the lamb's lettuce and tossed in the dressing, adding the duck meat (shredded from the bone).


This was one of those meals that looks colourful and tastes equally vibrant; the nuts, greens and dried fruit, plus the superfood pomegranate, make it FEEL healthy, but it is incredibly tasty, like the most deliciously sinful treat. Jamie suggests it for a lazy summer lunch, but here I refuse to accept that I am being unseasonal because pomegranates are in season now. Mmm. I loved this salad; it had real zing and energy, and it gave me a bit too, which is miraculous in mid January.

One nitpicking point. Jamie says in the preamble that this is a salad with rocket. There's no rocket in the ingredients though - he suggests lamb's lettuce. Not that it matters, but I just wanted to point it out. In so doing, of course, I have revealed my secret anal side, reflected in my obsessively neat little handwriting and my precision in maths and planning - but belied by the part of me that likes to lie around reading novels and won't read the instruction manual on my new mobile phone, even though that means I don't know what all the functions are.

Amazing potato and horseradish salad with fine herbs and bresaola

If I sound a little odd, it's because I just did my first day's work of 2007 and, coupled with ongoing tooth infection, it has drained me completely. I had forgotten that life was about more than curling up with a novel and hitting the shops; I had also underestimated the extent to which my antibiotics are tiring me out. Moan over, but do understand if I don't quite make sense here; I am trying.

I made the most of yesterday and made no less than three dishes from Jamie's book; I am far too dopey to blog them all now, so I will start with the first I made, for lunch, partly because I wanted to use the bresaola I bought in Edinburgh the other day. Bresaola, as most people will know, is air-dried and aged salted beef fillet; supermarkets tend to sell ropey versions of it packaged up with salami and prosciutto in their delicatessen sections. I bought this in Edinburgh and had been agitating to try it; I also had some Pink Fir Apple potatoes, bought from our farm shop but originating from Carroll's Heritage potatoes which are based in the north-east, a specialist potato grower which also sells lovely Yukon Gold, Salad Blue, and so on. I like the colour and nobbliness of Pink Fir Apple, which is a waxy potato, ideal for salads; although Jamie's recipe probably implied Jersey Royals, I knew these would substitute beautifully. Fortuitously I also had some creme fraiche to use up, so this recipe was effectively a store-cupboard lunch.

To prepare the salad: scrub and boil new (or waxy) potatoes until cooked; drain and cool for 5 minutes while you get on with the rest of the salad. This means mixing lemon juice withsalt, pepper, celery, parsley and grated horseradish (um, here I cheated - didn't have any fresh horseradish to hand so used jarred horseradish sauce... oops) and mix in creme fraiche. While they are still hot, halve or quarter the potatoes and add to the bowl, toss together, taste, season if necessary.

Arrange slices of bresaola in a circle on each plate, pile the salad in the middle and then draw up the edges of the meat into the middle; sprinkle over tarragon and celery leaves, drizzle with olive oil and serve. Except that I left the meat in its retro circle because I liked how it looked - I know, sad!


This was a fantastically flavoursome lunch and definitely one to make again (Jamie suggests you can also use cold roast beef... yum). It was surprisingly delicate for such a butch-sounding salad and I will definitely make it again; it's one you could serve people staying with you too, because it is relaxed but lovely and the sort of thing most people would dive into happily. Well, we did anyway!

Like the vegetables, the salads in this book have been a revelation - brilliant recipes to keep and come back to. I would make this potato salad even without the beef - I am not very keen on potatoes swimming in mayonnaise but this horseradish cream is delicious indeed, and it does match beautifully with the potatoes and the beef, in a sort of salady remake of roast beef with horseradish sauce and roast potatoes.

Crunchy raw beetroot salad with feta and pear

I have only begun cooking with beets in the last couple of years - I suspect that my previous lack of enthusiasm was caused by my dad's penchant (or passion, even) for jarred beetroot in vinegar and in truth I only really embraced the beetroot as vegetable when, just over a year ago, we used to get an organic vegetable bag delivered every 2 weeks. The scheme folded and we now go to a local farm shop for meat and veg, but at the time they kept putting beetroot in the bag and I was forced to learn how to cook it. I tried Nigella's beetroot puree, which is surprisingly good; I tried boiling it and roasting it, but I never tried eating it raw in salad until yesterday, when I came upon Jamie's beetroot salad with feta and pear and found it inexplicably beautiful, and therefore decided to try it. After all, beetroot is beginning to be cited almost as often as blueberries and broccoli as a superfood (have you noticed that superfoods tend to begin with B, whereas the stuff we aren't meant to eat - chips and cookies and chocolate - tend to begin with C?) and it is certainly cheap, and locally grown, and it is a very -ahem - lurid colour. So, yesterday I made this salad for lunch, since we are off work this week, which changes everything in terms of what we can eat.

To prepare the salad, scrub and peel 4 beetroot (for 4 people) then slice it into matchsticks (see my earlier posts on my lamentable knife skills, but I find matchsticking vegetables oddly relaxing); peel, core and matchstick some pears (3, for 4 people). Toss these all together, season, then toss in lemon oil dressing (lemon juice and oil in a 1:3 ratio), test, add more lemon if you want, then divide the salad between plates, crumble over some feta cheese and sprinkle over baby mint leaves and, if desired, some sunflower seeds.


This is a simple and surprisingly nice-tasting salad (as you can see from the pic, I forgot the mint leaves until after the photo had been taken). It is somehow light and filling all at once - I suppose the lemony oil and the pear make it seem refreshing, whilst the earthier beetroot and the feta seem pretty substantial. We had this with bread and it made a lovely and quite different lunch.

Today, meanwhile, we have been to Edinburgh for the day and I paid a visit to a foodie heaven: Valvona and Crolla, about which more, tomorrow. For now, it is perhaps enough to say that for anyone thinking of making this salad, beware: the beetroot bled its purpley pink hues into my palms yesterday in a sinister way, so that I went out looking as though I had blood on my hands, if blood were pinky-purple, in any case. I felt like a criminal as I wandered around Tesco replenishing my baking stock (I had run out of plain flour, self-raising, vanilla extract, etc, and I get antsy when I don't have the wherewithall to whip up a tasty baked goodie at a moment's notice) and trying to keep my hands covered up. If you don't mind pink hands, I can heartily recommend crunchy raw beetroot salad with feta and pear - healthy,refreshing, filling, lurid - what more can you ask?

Fifteen Christmas Salad, Perfectly Cooked Crispy Duck, Asian style

It is now 2007, the beginning of a new year and as usual I haven't made any resolutions; if I had, I wouldn't tell anyone them anyway, because I would be bound to break them. Last night we had a quiet meal at home, our first New Year's Eve with just us, in the house, and for the first time I was able to cook on New Year's Eve. I took my culinary responsibility seriously, mainly because I had to get the food right or I would be asleep by 10 pm - I am not very good at staying up late and I hate feeling stuffed like a force-fed French goose. I always knew that the starter would be Jamie's Fifteen Christmas salad, but I didn't decide on the main until I saw a nice-looking organic duck; dessert I only planned yesterday.

The starter, first: Jamie calls it his favourite salad ever and suggests serving it in December when clementines are at their best. This little salad has some lovely ingredients: buffalo mozzarella; fridge-cold clementines; rocket; treviso; speck (smoked prosciutto); lemon oil and zest, mint, and balsamic. My version was a tad different because I couldn't find treviso or radicchio whole anywhere, so I used rocket with a little bit of cos lettuce to boost it a bit (I know it's not the same, but it's what I had). To make it, I tore a ball of mozzarella per person over each small serving plate, seasoned and scattered with lemon zest. I sliced the clementines into thick discs and arranged them over the cheese (again, one per person). Then I tossed the salad leaves and most of the mint with lemon oil and wrapped these in speck to make a bundle for each of us, adding that little package to the plate. Finally I shaved over some Parmesan, added mint leaves and drizzled over the quality balsamic vinegar that Simon bought for me last month.


I can see why this salad would be Jamie's favourite. It immediately became mine, too -it is absolutely divine. The flavours work together magically and every mouthful is an intense pleasure. Jamie suggests making this at other times of the year too, with blood oranges, peaches, pears or figs; I will have to, because I will have to eat this salad again. As starters and salads go, it is perfect: refreshing, sweet, bitter, salty, creamy and peppery.

The Christmas salad was a tough act to follow. I returned to Jamie's perfectly cooked crispy duck recipe, which has an alternative cooking suggestion: instead of rubbing it in sage salt, he suggests giving it an Asian vibe and rubbing it in five spice and shoving ginger, rather than sage leaves, in the cavity. I decided to go with that vibe and take it further, serving the duck with Chinese pancakes and matchsticks of carrot, spring onion, cucumber and coriander (and hoisin sauce). I did this because I figured it would be less filling than a traditional main (this sort of Chinese crispy duck is usually eaten as a starter) and would leave space for dessert. I was right, except that this sort of food is incredibly moreish and you have to stop yourself from picking up just another pancake. This course nearly went wrong because Tesco have apparently stopped selling the little Chinese pancakes (yes I know you can make them, and no, I wasn't about to try) so we had to go into town to the little Asian supermarket, which, thankfully, if unsurprisingly, did. It didn't go wrong, and involved no last-minute cooking; Simon shredded the duck and I chopped the vegetables, and then we ate it.


It was as yummy as Chinese duck and pancakes always are; I don't really need to say any more, except that there is lots left for lunch today (hurrah) and I am looking forward to it already.

For dessert, I made a chocolate and ginger cake from the Green and Black's cookbook. It was basically a simple cake mixture (eggs, sugar, flour, butter) plus some cocoa powder, chopped stem ginger and stem ginger syrup, baked, then topped with chocolate and chopped crystallized ginger. Except I cheated and used Green and Black's ginger chocolate, which has pieces of crystallized ginger in anyway.


You can see the spikes of ginger in the icing, which really gave it a kick. This is a lovely cake: light and vibrant, it would be as good for afternoon tea as it would for dessert, and it is delightfully simple. Below I've added an extra pic to show off my new cake stand, which my parents bought me for Christmas - it looks white but is pale blue, another Nigella Living Kitchen accessory. I love it and am shamelessly parading it now on its first outing.


So: a new year has begun, swept in quite literally here by terrifying gusts of wind that blew down our hanging baskets and threw a learner plate into our back garden. Happy new year, to anyone who has overcome a hangover in time to read me; may it bring health, contentment, and many more Jamie recipes like the duck and the divine salad!

Grandad Ken's crispy grilled trout with parsley and lemon

It is New Year's Eve - the end of another calendar year, which as usual means little to me because I've always lived by the academic year rather than the calendar year, so that the year seems to end in July rather than December. Last year we spent a few days over the New Year period with my parents-in-law in Devon and saw the new year in with champagne and a trio of fish that apparently constitute Prince Charles's breakfast; what I remember most is that on New Year's morning, foggy from the late night and still tasting mackerel, I was absorbed in a gripping thriller and found it almost impossible to wrench myself away and make polite conversation. Memo to self: do not go to visit relatives with a good book - always take a boring, worthy tome that will a) make me look erudite and b) not distract me from the duty of socializing. Ulysses is clearly next time's book of choice, since I have never managed to get past page one. This year, though, we are at home over the New Year period and I have a reassuring stack of novels to usher me into 2007, not to mention the pile of cookbooks I've already mentioned.

A hideous cliche, but New Year's Eve is a time to remember as well as to anticipate and it is only too fitting that I should find myself blogging this particular dish (which we ate yesterday) at this moment in time. Jamie calls it Granddad Ken's crispy grilled trout with parsley and lemon and affectionately recalls going fishing with his granddad as a small child. I associate whole fish with my grandma, who died a few years ago and who was an inspiration in many ways. Grandma had eclectic tastes; she liked Chinese takeaway and lasagne as well as roast dinners and fish. When my brother and I were little, we used to go on holiday to France every summer with our parents and grandparents; after my grandpa died when I was nine, Grandma kept coming, even when confined to a wheelchair, and even though she couldn't speak French. For reasons I can't recall, my parents always seemed to befriend people who went fishing and would bring live fish to our caravan for our dinner. Stuart and I naturally behaved the way two picky English children would when faced with live fish as a prospect for dinner: we squeaked and squawked and refused to go near it, and exclaimed in disgust when the others tried to. Grandma was the only one who wasn't honestly freaked out by the fish and so she was in charge of gutting them and preparing them to be eaten, which she did stoically, ignoring the high-pitched protests coming from the direction of my brother and me and the more muted but equally intense revulsion coming from my parents, who didn't really want the fish either. Once, my parents put a fish back in the water; we never knew if it survived. I tell all this because whole fish still makes me think of Grandma, who, before she died, suffered a lot of pain and never, ever complained; the stoic expression she wore as she gutted fish was emblematic of her attitude to life. It wasn't just that she never complained: she was a naturally optimistic and happy person who saw the best in everything, not in an infuriating Pollyanna way, but in a funny way. I wish she was still here and I could have given her some of Granddad Ken's crispy grilled trout: my parents wouldn't thank you for it, but Grandma would have loved seeing me eat it.

Anyway, back to Jamie's recipe: first, you slash each trout about ten times on each side with a sharp knife, which should be simple but in fact wasn't, for me. My knife skills are on a par with those of a clumsy ten year old; either that or we have blunt knives, which seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the sous-chef also struggled when drafted in to help. That done, I rubbed the fish in olive oil, seasoned them, and stuffed them with chopped parsley and lemon slices, before placing them on a baking tray and scattering lemon zest over. I halved another lemon and put the two halves on the baking tray, dabbed the fish with butter, and then grilled, 6 minutes each side, until crispy and golden.


It was okay. I don't hate whole fish anymore, in fact I'd love a nice seabass, but I remain unconvinced by the merits of trout, which seems to me to be a pretty boring fish. The lemon and parsley gave it a good flavour, but it just didn't blow me away. I suppose it is a decent midweek meal, a nice midweek meal even, but nothing special. I ate it with Jamie's simple crunchy side salad which was, however, absolutely fantastic. It doesn't need its own post, I don't think: it is just torn little gem and cos lettuce, with thinly sliced carrot and cucumber, celery heart, and a handful of blanched fine green beans, plus flat leaf parsley and a choice of dressing (balsamic, lemon or creamy French). I went for balsamic, which is simply balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil in a ratio of 1:3. It was delicious.


Finally, I was given a silicone loaf tin for Christmas, cunningly in the same pale blue as all my Nigella Living Kitchen accessories, and I made Bill Granger's coconut bread for breakfast today. It was very good and incredibly easy for something so lovely - you slice and toast it with icing sugar drizzled over, and slices will freeze easily too - definitely worth a try.



Anyway the Old Year is drawing to a close, and I need to get on with preparing dinner (and my last 'Jamie project' recipe for 2006!). I'll be back next year.

Mayonnaise and my favourite coleslaw

Mayonnaise... I am sure that every proper foodie person whips up mayo with no effort in between baking a few hand-made loaves and a variety of cakes with intricate layers. In my mind real foodies fit into two handy stereotypes. One is the apple-cheeked woman with the house in the country and the inevitable Aga, with beautiful, Boden-clad children, and animals aplenty, who makes everything from scratch (even filo pastry) without turning a hair. The other is a townie, sharply dressed, time-poor and money-rich, who frequents chic Italian delis and survives on artichoke hearts and real Parma ham. I am neither of these images of foodie perfection: I live in a three-bed terrace in a suburb, can't abide dirt, don't really like the country, would love an Aga but couldn't fit one into my kitchen. I can't afford, or more importantly, find, deli-chic in central Newcastle; I don't wear suits and my mobile is three years old, so no chance of me becoming a smart foodie. Instead, I am a true amateur and as such almost everything has the potential to go wrong, although touching a lot of wood it rarely seems to. Today, however, it went spectacularly wrong.

Mayo. I have made it before - the first time I made it, I ruined it; I still don't know why. After that though, I have had success, which meant that when I read Jamie's mayonnaise recipe I was a bit over-confident as I launched into it. It didn't work. I was using my Magimix, the mini-bowl, and I think in my defence that my machine couldn't cope with just one egg (hitherto I have used two...). Jamie's recipe seems odd to me: a survey of my impressive library of cookbooks suggests that most people use 2 egg yolks with 300 ml olive oil; Jamie's recipe is one egg yolk but 565 ml olive oil. Mine curdled way before I had added all the oil (mercifully); I blamed it on the fact that the processor blades weren't picking up the one egg. In something of a huff, I started again, my way (i.e. using 2 eggs). This time it worked. I will have to try Jamie's recipe again, but I was too bruised to do so immediately and I am still puzzled as to why it is so different from the usual recipes and what makes it work. If anyone has tried it and succeeded, please tell me - in any case I will try again.

Some of my mayo - it is such a lurid colour because my Dijon mustard smelt odd so I used English mustard, a suspiciously bright yellow colour...

With the mayo, I had planned to make Jamie's favourite coleslaw. The mayo had, however, thanks to the first flop, taken considerably longer than planned; lunchtime was not only looming but passing us by (and we needed the coleslaw for lunch). Somewhat stressed, I fed a quarter of cabbage through the slicer attachment on my Magimix before realizing that it didn't look much like Jamie's cabbage in the picture; the phone rang and Simon was talking to my mum, who obviously wanted me, and I was hungry... so I took the lid of the processor to inspect the cabbage at closer hand and sliced my thumb on the slicer. It bled impressively, as Magimix-induced cuts tend to, but it doesn't seem too bad (two plasters are more or less keeping the flow under control...); that said, I was quite jolted (I hadn't anticipated losing my thumb in the quest to cook with Jamie). Simon was luckily on hand to finish the coleslaw, while I oversaw his efforts in slicing carrot, red onion and apple, and probably annoyed him to death. In any case, it was utterly delicious - completely unlike bought coleslaw, because it isn't at all mushy, and the individual flavours remain quite distinct; it is so much less heavy, and so much more like a salad.

Homemade coleslaw is so much nicer than the bought stuff, even the decent bought stuff, that I feel that this could become a habit. I really will, however, have to learn not to huff in the company of my Magimix and try to become a more sanguine foodie, someone who genuinely just knocks up a batch of homemade mayo and coleslaw without half slicing off her thumb in the process.

Proper tomato salad

When I told my brother that I was going to cook my way through Jamie's new book, his reaction was, perhaps predictably, 'are you really going to cook everything?' 'what about the food you don't like?' This sort of project is probably best not undertaken by fussy eaters; nonetheless, there are always going to be types of food that you like better than others and food that you don't much like at all, not to mention the food that almost makes you retch. I am not keen on bananas, flavoured yoghurts (I love natural and Greek yoghurt, but it has to be plain) or pineapple on pizza, or some desserts (meringues, for instance), but I eat all of those if necessary. The only food that makes me retch and thus the only food that I really, really don't like is raw tomato. I can eat tomatoes cooked, in fact I love cooked tomatoes; I love tomato-based sauces, but I detest raw tomatoes to the point that eating them makes me retch. I can eat them, if accompanied by a huge hunk of bread and if they are ripe (those watery orange British tomatoes are the worst; I can manage cherry tomatoes, just about). Jamie's book has a few recipes which contain raw tomatoes: a Greek feta salad, which I will make (and I will just not eat the tomatoes...) , a red mullet dish with raw tomatoes which I might manage to eat and finally a 'proper tomato salad', which I couldn't face.

I went out last night for cocktails and pizza (had a Misty Cooler, with melon and white wine and soda, and then the usual boring but lovely Cosmopolitan) and Simon was home alone, cranking up the stereo as he does when I'm not there to protest, watching yet another football match (is it me or does having Sky sports mean that there is a match every night?) and - yes - making Jamie's tomato salad to have with his (bought-in) pizza! By rights this post should have been written by the self-designated sous-chef who became chef for the evening yesterday. Although I hate tomatoes, I think he did a great job.

The salad is simple: the tomatoes are cut irregularly and drizzled with salt to draw out their watery juices, then served with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, chopped chilli and garlic and then basil leaves. It looks delicious. I want to like raw tomatoes; I really do, but I just can't. Simon, however, really enjoyed his unusual opportunity to feast on tomatoes like this and to promote himself from sous-chef to chef. He also, in my absence, turned the mattress, changed the sheets and made a loaf of bread (albeit in the bread machine). What a domestic god...

All-day Breakfast Salad

An all-day breakfast salad doesn’t sound particularly inviting, to me anyway. I think it is the title – ‘all-day breakfast’ implies a greasy spoon café serving flabby sausages; watery, undercooked bacon and cold, damp toast; eggs swimming in fat. My husband is however a devoted fan of the English fry-up and frequently complains about not being 'allowed' to indulge as often as he would like. In truth, I definitely wouldn't stop him - and I am not really one to stop myself - but I don't find fry-ups very appealing.

That said, the picture of the all-day breakfast salad in Jamie's book and the combination of ingredients did appeal. So today, I made Jamie's breakfast salad for lunch. I tossed fried bacon slices, black pudding and chunks of bread with watercress and baby spinach (as opposed to his suggested endive and cress) in a dressing made with English mustard, white wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil. Then I added two poached eggs, which Simon had poached because he is the household egg-cook. Usually he uses a poaching pan but today he was brave and just broke the eggs into simmering water; it worked, more or less, but was less aesthetically pleasing than Jamie's, which made him mutter but I thought he did a great job.

The salad was delicious - the flavours really work together, with the egg yolk running into the salad leaves and the dressing off-setting the bacon and black pudding. Another keeper. Simon, never one to miss an opportunity to grumble that I deprive him of a good fry-up, ate his with relish and pronounced it delicious, adding, gleefully, that is is a sneaky way that he can get a fry-up in the guise of a salad...