Rocket Salad, Poached Egg, Toasted Pearled Barley, Grilled Seville Orange and Bacon

So

I saw a recipe online for spinach salad, feta, toasted farro, grilled onions and calabrian chillies and I wanted it. Even with a title as long and ridiculous as that, I thought it sounded seriously edible and properly substantial even for a wet night in February. I think it was the idea of toasting the farro presumably to make it rich in flavour and to give some overall warmth to balance the slightly bitter metallic flavour of the spinach. And, you know I don't use feta enough and I am totally thoroughly in love with blackened onions, hot or cold but best of all just below warm.

But

I didn't have any farro, and the lovely posh Italian shop at Mercato Metropolitano only had it as a mix for soup. Didn't have feta either or, for that matter, any spinach. The salad bowl was looking potentially bleak.

However

I did have some pearled barley, and half a bag of wild rocket that needed using, eggs because I always have eggs and an airtight tub of toasted pumpkin seeds. Plus there were a couple of pointy peppers that might add a sweet note and a fab flash of colour. To counterbalance the peppers I decided to grill slices of seville orange for a bitter caramel note. And I  thought of bacon - because everything tastes better with bacon.

And

Of course I had no onions but the shop round the corner had bright bunches of spring onions. It was far too cold/dark/bleak/generallyFebruary to cook outside so I dragged the ridged cast iron pan from the bottom of the drawer and thereby set about making an entirely different dinner.

Barley, Rocket and Grilled Orange Salad

Serves 2 for dinner with enough over for lunches next day

250g pearled barley
1 bay leaf
2 pointy red peppers
1 Seville orange
6 spring onions
3 rashers of bacon
A couple of generous handfuls of rocket
A tablespoon of toasted pumpkin seeds
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
2 eggs

Spread the barley out across a flat oven tray and toast in the oven at 180C/350F/Gas 4 for about ten minutes till the grain colours lightly and smells a bit toasty. I have to say I'm not convinced it had any noticeable contribution to the flavour of the barley so feel free to skip this step if it seems like a faff.

Tip the (toasted or not) barley into a saucepan, add water to cover by a couple of inches, drop in the bayleaf and cook over a medium heat until it comes to the boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook the barely until fairly tender but still with a bit of resistance. This will take about 30 minutes - add a generous teaspoon of salt halfway through. Drain and set aside.

While the barley cooks, roast the peppers whole in the oven at 200C/400F/Gas 5 for 20 minutes or so, turning occasionally, until the skins are blackened and blistered. Put them into a small bowl and cover tightly with clingfilm. The steam will loosen the skins further making them easy to peel. When they are cool enough to handle, strip the skin away and discard it along with the seeds. Cut the flesh into finger sized strips and tip into a large salad bowl.

Heat the grill pan over a high flame. Cut slices across the orange, about the thickness of a thick pound coin, including the skin saving as much of the juice as you can in a small bowl. Discard the many seeds. Brush each slice with olive oil and lay them out in the hot pan to sear, turning them after a couple of minutes to caramelise the other side. Put the cooked slices into the salad bowl till they're cool enough to handle, then cut them into 1 centimetre squares and return to the bowl with the peppers.

Cut the base and scraggy tops off the spring onions and cut each one in half from top to bottom, brush the cut sides with olive oil and put them into the hot pan. Griddle till they start to blacken, turn

them over and cook the other side. Drop them into the bowl with  the peppers and orange.

Next cook the bacon rashers in the hot griddle pan till they crisp as much as you like. Leave them to cool in the salad bowl, then cut into 1 centimetre strips and return to the bowl.

Add the cooked, drained barley and the rocket to the salad bowl. Whisk the olive oil and sherry vinegar into the orange juice you saved earlier (you did remember that, didn't you 😌) and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Toss the salad with the dressing - taste and adjust the

seasoning if necessary.

Poach the eggs till the whites are just set and the yolk remains runny. Serve the salad into 2 bowls and top each with a poached egg and a sprinkle of toasted pumpkin seeds.

Dinner is done.

If you go for leftovers for lunch next day - and I would recommend it - it's very good topped with a sliced boiled egg.

Confit Garlic

Garlic is one of the things that makes my life complete. I eat it practically daily in one form or another, crushed raw into salads and small plate type things, cooked gently into the base of braises and stews, tossed with abandon into roasting trays with meat and all kinds of vegetables, beaten to a paste with salt to stir into fresh mayonnaise, slivers crisped to golden for an unexpected crunch in salads, flipped through noodles and stir fries, mashed into butter and cream cheese for garlic bread. You get the idea - the list goes on....

It is used in most cuisines around the world with the exception of subgroups like Jains who don't do garlic or onion, carrot or potato either - which would leave me thoroughly discombobulated. It is surprisingly complex in flavour depending on the cooking methods, just adding to its brilliant versatility.

I thought I'd tried pretty much every permutation until I came across the idea of garlic confit. Mostly I tend to associate confit with duck and leave it at that but it is a much broader and well loved method of preserving that can also be used with fruit and vegetables and, though I've not tried this at home, is apparently just a fabulous way to cook any kind of animal tongue, larks included presumably.

Confit duck warmed in the oven to serve

This makes sense because to confit you submerge the ingredient in oil - or sugar syrup for fruits - and slow cook it making for a very tender result with no appreciable loss of moisture or flavour. It is a really seductive way to prep your duck legs for the winter as the longer they sit untouched on the pantry shelf the more tender the flesh becomes till it really does just melt in your mouth.

The same is true of garlic, I'm pleased to say. I bought a LOT of garlic and cooked it down and have spent the last few weeks adding garlic oil to everything, mashing confit cloves into salad dressings and, undoubtedly my absolute favourite, toasting ciabatta and topping it with confit and salt crystals for the most decadently fabulous garlic bread ever invented. Melt a little cheese on top for variation. Try it - you'll thank me!

Confit Garlic

3 or 4 juicy heads of garlic
Olive oil to cover

Break the garlic into individual cloves, peel them and drop them into a small saucepan. This looks like a pretty daunting task before you start but is remarkably quick once you begin.

A bit of a mess!

Pour over just enough olive oil to cover the cloves and put the pan over a low heat. Bring to a simmer, turn the heat as low as it will go, and cook for 45 minutes.

Take the pan off the heat and, using a slotted spoon transfer the softened garlic cloves to a clean jar then pour over the oil. When the contents are cool, seal the jar and keep it in the fridge.

Use it with everything from a sauce for steamed vegetables to a base layer for pizza and slathered onto warm naan bread as a snack - it's definitely all good.

Six Recipes for Parsnips!

Star vegetable of the week is creamy sweet parsnips, the pale and interesting cousin of the carrot family with a delicate nutty flavour and a lovely smell as they cook. Though Spring is definitely on the way, the market is not yet bursting with new season produce, and it's the brilliance of the last of the winter veg that will see us happily through the 'hungry gap'. I could happily eat asparagus and baby broad beans on a daily basis after the long winter of hearty dishes but so early in the season it would quickly send me broke. Time to look to the stalwarts for just a little bit more.

Parsnips have been around since at least the time of the Romans, a ubiquitous staple long before potatoes and still a firm favourite tucked in alongside a Sunday roast. The name was borrowed into Middle English from the French word pasnaie, which was derived from the Latin pastinaca and pastinaca  goes back to pastinum, which means a small gardening tool for making holes in the ground for planting (possibly parsnips!).

There is a fabulous, if slightly gnomic saying - fine words will butter no parsnips. Obviously - but um, really? Before potatoes were one of the two veg to go with meat there were lots of root vegetables, often mashed and always improved if they were 'buttered up' with lashings of the the golden stuff - flattery, innit! But fine words count for nothing if there's no action to back them up and, speaking as someone who enjoys a little toast to go with her butter, mash without butter is just plain wrong. This source offers an interesting snippet - the English were known for their habit of layering on butter to all manner of foods, much to the disgust of the Japanese who referred to Europeans in general and the English in particular as 'butter-stinkers'. A new term of abuse...

The incredible versatility of the parsnip is a bonus as Spring tentatively replaces the winter. These winter roots are a very unfussy vegetable to use, requiring neither precision timing nor complex prep. Late in the season, as we are now, they are usually fairly big with a woody core that can be cut away if it is too substantial as the rest of the flesh is tender.

When the day dawns gloriously sunny simply peel and grate and eat them raw or try this delightful Lebanese salad with dates and yoghurt. For cooler nights try the more substantial Curried Parsnip and Lentil Salad - parsnips seriously love spice.

  

Parsnips are a thing of joy when steamed and pureed with cream,  or gussied up a little with spring onion and cooked as individual ramekins and a surprisingly delicate ingredient in cakes - a brilliant way to your five a day.

One last idea, from the brilliant Heston Blumenthal, parsnip cereal with parsnip milk. I was lucky to go to dinner at the Fat Duck a few years ago and one of the many magical things we ate was this cereal.

So ppppick up a parsnip today!

A version of this post first appeared in the Local Greens newsletter

Roasted Blood Orange, Fennel and Shallot Salad

The weather is slowly meandering towards spring, some days at least, but the new season produce is sadly still quite some way behind. I am definitely hankering for brighter, sharper, lighter than slow cooked casseroles ladled onto clouds of mash, rich soups thickened with cream or pasta swimming contentedly in pools of cheesy sauce - and like as not a glistening tranche of garlic bread on the side. Apart from anything else I seem to be growing an arse the size of the world. I'm calling it my end of season look.

The trick to sliding gracefully into spring in early March is to look for new and better salad combinations using the last of the winter veg and supplementing it with some of the tasty produce of nearby sunnier climes. Citrus, particularly Italian, is a lovely thing at this time of  year and much of the best of it comes from Sicily which has the optimum  winter temperature range of around 13-29 C, perfect for growing blood oranges. Now blood oranges are a strange fruit, not one I knew at all as a kid and a complete surprise the first time I came across one. They are much the same size as a usual orange, with the same lightly pitted skin. Although it is orange in colour is also has a delicate reddish tinge, like raw sunburn on fair skin. But this is still indisputably an orange. Then when you cut it open, particularly late in the season, the flesh is red - anything from a few traces running through the segments to fully deeply carmine as though the heart of the fruit has suffered unbelievable trauma and bled all the way out to the skin. They are a thing of extraordinary beauty with a sweet taste with a faintly bitter edge and, apparently, three times as much vitamin C as ordinary oranges, at least if you believe what I read on the internet.

This has become my current favourite salad for lots of reasons - it is easy, it is quick, it smells lovely, it tastes amazing, is pretty as a picture, it's not expensive, it's great warm or cold and is a treat in lunch boxes for a day or two. It has contrasting flavours and textures which makes every mouthful different. The first time I made it I served it with a Persian herbed omelette and another salad of aubergine, yoghurt and walnuts and the next time with crisp skinned rare fleshed duck breast and soy and citrus dressed noodles. Both meals were definite highlights of the week.

Roasted Blood Orange, Fennel and Shallot Salad

Serves 4 as a side dish

1 large, nicely rounded fennel bulb or 2 smaller ones
6 banana shallots
2 blood oranges - or ordinary navel oranges if you can't find any
2 tablespoons olive oil

Line a heavy baking sheet with parchment. Cut the base and the 'fingers' away from the fennel then cut the bulb in half from top to bottom. Cut out the core, then cut each half in two again from top to bottom. Turn the pieces onto their side and slice thinly into pieces about half a centimetre thick. Scatter on the tray.

Peel the banana shallots and cut them into half centimetre rings and add to the baking tray.

Cut the oranges in half, reserving one half for later, then cut a very thin slice off the bottom of the three remaining halves. Put one half flesh side down onto the chopping board and cut into quarters then cut each quarter, flesh and skin, into half centimetre slices and add to the baking tray. Repeat with the remaining two halves.

Drizzle with olive oil, season lightly with salt and freshly ground black pepper, and toss everything together. Put into the oven at 200C/400F and roast for about  40-50 minutes, stirring the mixture every 15 minutes or so, until the edges are nicely caramelised.

Remove the tray from the oven and squeeze over about half the juice from the reserved  orange. Tip it all into a pretty bowl, mix gently and taste. Add more orange juice, salt and pepper till you have your perfect balance. Serve while still warm  or at room temperature.

Salmon and Fennel Salade Composé

Only just March but a blog about salad? Seriously not madness.

I've been away for a few weeks, in part to celebrate my delightful nieces' 21st birthday in Australia, and have loved the sunshine and abundance of light in the other hemisphere. February days of 28 degrees and blue skies is the definition of bliss after a January of 10 degrees and drizzle. The man was busy busy at work and unable to join me, so I left the freezer full of lovely things in handy tubs and flew out late one Saturday night. I came back this week to a much depleted freezer and a man offering salad as the number one suggestion for what he'd most like to eat. So happy to oblige.

In every cafe and every brasserie in every village and every town in France the menu includes a  -usually a list of - salade composé. Best known is probably salade nicoise, the lovely laying out of crisp lettuce leaves to be topped with a spoonful of tuna in the centre surrounded by tomato slices, a tangle of limpid green beans, delicate slices of hard boiled egg and a scattering of salty black olives, all of it generously drizzled with vinaigrette. Add a chunk of crusty bread and you have a really fine meal, a fabulous array of colours, flavours and textures that are a thing of beauty. The sum greater than its individual parts - a really satisfying dinner any time of year, simple, healthy and filling (but not fattening). I am a fan.

There are many variations of this lovely dish, to some extent limited only by imagination and available ingredients. The defining characteristic is that the salad is composed - assembled from a variety of mini salads for the diners delectation rather than all tossed together making every bite uniform. With salade composé every bite is different as the various tasty elements come together in each mouthful making it a joy to eat. Try bitter chicory with sharp and creamy blue cheese and sweet slices of pear or oak leaf topped with beetroot and rare slices of pigeon breast and a scattering of toasted walnuts. One of my French café favourites is salade chèvre chaud - light greens topped with oozing warm goat's cheese, raisins and a light honey dressing. Add a hunk of crusty bread to achieve perfection.

My salad of choice this week was ready in ten minutes. After minimal peeling and chopping, no cooking at all and just the one tin to open, I presented a delightful assembly of baby gem topped with crisp fennel, cucumber and mixed sprouts, a burst of colour from crunchy slices of red pepper finished with a generous portion of tinned salmon and a drizzle of classic vinaigrette - seasoned olive oil and lemon juice mixed 3:1. Don't forget the bread!

Blackened Corn Salad

Picture this - a day in September, sunshine, blue skies, balmy breeze - where are you? I have all that and I'm still in London - and definitely surprised. Have decided to send it off with a bang, this glorious summer, in the hope it will come again to spread delight. The forecast is for summer at least till the end of the week so I am having barbecue daily - and that's not something you hear said much in Blighty. Tonight there will be an experiment - a vegetarian version of the usual meat fest. I'm planning skewers of halloumi, cherry tomatoes, half moons of courgette and a chunk of red onion. To go with there will be home grown cucumber with yoghurt and my new favourite blackened corn salad.

Have eaten the corn salad a few times over the summer. For the longest time I only ever ate corn on the cob boiled till tender then slathered in butter. Loved it. But all other corn requirements were met by tins or bags from the freezer. I had always assumed that to get the niblets off the core required some sort of special skill and that doing it myself would definitely result in disaster, or mush. No idea where that came from. Then recently I had some corn in my weekly veg bag and, as bbq was on the agenda, had a sudden urge to see what would happen if I cooked them first then cut the corn off. OMG it was so easy and so fabulous and I have been kicking myself - hard - for not trying it years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

Blackened Corn Salad

Serves 4 as a side dish

2 or 3 cobs of corn, fresh as you like
2 tablespoons olive oil
Juice of a lime
1 finely chopped chilli, deseeded first if you don't want it too spicy
2 tablespoon chopped coriander leaves
Salt and pepper to taste

While your bbq heats shuck the corn, discarding the leaves and all the silky threads then brush the bare cobs with a little bit of olive oil. Put the corn over the flames and let them blacken a bit then turn to blacken the next bit till it's cooked all around. This only takes a few minutes.

Take the corn back inside and stand the pointy bit into a salad bowl while holding the stalk end - you'll probably need an oven glove - and use a sharp knife to cut all the niblets off. While the corn is still warm add the rest of the olive oil, the lime juice, chilli and coriander and mix well. Taste and add seasoning if it needs it.

Gorgeous with zesty chicken and barbecued pork chops too.

Tomorrow it's Friday so there will be steak, medium rare, with sides of roasted onion & green bean salad and beetroot with walnuts and radish tops. Saturday always seems a better day to do a little faffing, so I'm planning to simmer some belly pork strips with ginger and garlic then skewer cubes of the meat to cook again over fire to serve Viet style with bun noodles, salad, crushed peanuts and that favourite sauce of a sauce loving people, nuoc cham.

Tomato Jam

Yes really, jam! They are a fruit, really, though most often used in a savoury fashion that it's easy to forget they may have other possibilities. I love them raw and cooked at this time of year, and the lovely summer we're (still?) having has produced a juicy well flavoured crop, piled in abundance in all the shops and street markets round me. I had a few too many last week so made a big pot of this lovely jam, originally from a recipe by Jose Pizarro. I made and bottled a couple of kilos but you can make a small quantity for a single jar - which I did last year - and it still tastes just great. It's a bit like a marmalade rather than a very sweet jam.

Tomato Jam

Makes approximately 300ml

1kg ripe, well flavoured tomatoes
125g caster sugar
125g demerara sugar
1 small cinnamon stick
peel of 1/2 lemon
peel of 1/2 orange - tie the two lots of peel together with string to make it easy to remove

Use a sharp knife to make a cross in the skin on the base of each tomato.

Bring a saucepan of water to the boil, add the tomatoes and simmer for 3 minutes.

Use a slotted spoon to remove the tomatoes from the pan and plunge them into iced water. Remove the stems and the skins - they will slip off really easily. Chop the tomatoes into 4 or 5 rough slices, making sure to catch the juice as you do.

Place the tomatoes and juice in a  saucepan and leave to reduce over a low heat for 20 - 30 minutes till most of the water has evaporated. Now add the sugars, cinnamon and peels and give everything a good stir. Don't break up the cinnamon.

Slowly cook the tomatoes for at about an hour - longer if you're making a bigger batch - stirring regularly. The end result should be a sticky, firm jam that is a shiny brown red colour.

When cooked remove the cinnamon stick and the citrus peel and pour into a warm sterilised jar.

Keeps well in the fridge.

This is gorgeous slathered on hot toast for breakfast, as a side with cheeses or cold roast pork or ham. And on twitter Joanne from joanne-eatswellwithothers.com suggested having with grilled cheese on toast - definitely on my list of weekend treats to try.

My weekly veg bag

Have been getting a veg bag each week for a couple of months now and have settled well into using it as the starting point  for the week. This week I got a lovely shiny black aubergine, some courgettes, broad  beans - the man loves broad beans, a mix of little tomatoes, a big bag of chard and a bag of really tasty mixed salad leaves. The weather continues to be balmy - I am loving that - and we have cleaned up our baby Weber to make bbq treats.

Tonight, Thursday, we are out. Going to the Cinema Museum to see Charlie Ward then on for dinner at Pizarro.

I have some really special smoked salmon in the fridge so Friday night treat will be that with a big green salad, some sourdough bread on the side and grapes and cheese after. Simple but brilliant and next to no cleaning up. Actually it was forecast to rain Saturday so we decided to bbq Friday night instead - made up the lamb skewers and some gorgeous salads, plenty of mess and plenty of pleasure.

Saturday I think lamb skewers on the barbie to go with aubergine and walnuts, courgette and broad beans with basil oil and a roasted sweet potato salad with pumpkin seeds - all easy to prep in advance and plenty to have leftovers Sunday night. So then of course it didn't rain Saturday - and we had plenty of salads leftover and sausages in the freezer - had to be bbq again!

We had a delightful walk up the river Sunday morning after underestimating just how busy the boats to Greenwich would be with tourists and finished up near Blackfriars and this incredibly brilliant recreation of a dazzle ship.

The smoked salmon on toast with salad and a fried egg was a thoroughly brilliant Sunday supper after a fine lunch with lots of garlic and chillies and dumplings and noodles at the Baozoi Inn.

Monday I'd like chilli salt crusted tofu with wilted greens We're starting on the 5:2 diet this week as we're both getting fat and need to do something about it. Breakfast will be vegetable juice and black coffee and lunch will be a mug of miso soup. The second day will be Thursday. Made kuku instead to use up the dill and the spinach with the last of the sweet potatoes and some cucumber.

I made a passionfruit buttermilk cake that I have been hankering after for a while but had been unable to get passionfruit. Was as gorgeous as I'd hoped.





Tuesday I'm thinking roasted red onion and green beans - have onions in the fruit bowl and beans growing in the garden - to go with barbecued sausages and potato salad - proper old school summer dinner! Was the broccoli soup with some homemade soda bread after crackers with rillette.

Wednesday I am out to lunch with friends so the simplest kind of dinner is to defrost a tub a broccoli, ginger and white bean soup from the freezer and serve with some nice bread with cheese and olives before, perhaps. The man had a whinge on, wanting steak on the barbecue so rump it is with the red onion salad and a green salad from the garden with cucumber and radish leaves - for some reason I fail miserably growing radish but the tops thrive...

The man was, of course, right!