More Amazing Salads

I have always been looking for a good salad recipe to use up left over chicken. This Thai Chicken, Coconut and Coriander Salad with Crispy Shallots is the best one I have found yet. If you don’t have any left over chicken, poach the chicken in the dressing as in the recipe., Coconut and Coriander Salad with Crispy Shallots

Thai Chicken, Coconut and Coriander Salad
1 x 400ml can coconut milk
Fresh or frozen lime leaves
2 Thai birds eye chillis, lightly bashed
Small bunch coriander
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon palm sugar, or brown sugar
2 chicken breasts, trimmed
40g toasted coconut chips (try Ocado)
½ a cucumber
3 carrots, peeled
1 red pepper, cut into very thin rings
1 lime
3 shallots, peeled
Sunflower oil
Sea salt

Place the coconut milk, fish sauce, the stalks of the coriander (saving the leaves for the salad), the chillis, the sugar, a teaspoon of salt and the lime leaves in a saucepan. Add the chicken breast and bring to the boil. Gently simmer to poach the chicken for 12–15 minutes or until cooked through. Remove chicken from the pan and rest. Turn up the heat on coconut milk and reduce until a few tablespoons remain. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Strain and add the juice of the lime. Taste and adjust seasoning. It should be fragrant, spicy, sour and sweet.

Meanwhile, shave the cucumber and carrots, leaving just the cores, with a peeler. Put in a large bowl with the coconut chips, the red pepper and coriander leaves. When cool enough to handle, shred the chicken.

Slice the shallots as thinly as possible. You can use a mandolin or food processor. Place in a small saucepan and just cover with oil. Over a high heat, stir the shallots frequently until they are golden brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain well on kitchen paper. Spread out thinly and allow to cook. Lightly season with salt and fluff up so that the shallots go crispy.

Celery Salad with Dates, Almonds, and Parmesan

When you get to my age and you have been cooking as long as I have, it is really hard to find recipes that are fresh, exciting or different but this simple celery salad is really exciting. I’m not even that keen on fruit or nuts in savoury dishes but the celery, lemon and the chilli really balance out the sweetness. It made a very tasty lunch!

Celery Salad with Dates, Almonds, and Parmesan
Serves 2
½ cup/large handful raw almonds with skins8 celery stalks, thinly sliced on a diagonal, use leaves too
6 dates, pitted, coarsely chopped
Zest of one lemon plus 2 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
Chunk of Parmesan, shaved
4 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
Very small pinch of crushed red pepper flakes

Toss almonds, celery, celery leaves, lemon zest and dates in a medium bowl; season with salt and pepper. Mix the lemon juice and olive oil together well. Add a small pinch of chilli flakes and mix through the salad. Serve with shavings of parmesan.Add the chicken to the bowl with the vegetables and then dress with the dressing (you may not need all of it.) Pile onto plates and top with the crispy shallots.

Warm Salad of Avocado, Baby Spinach and Bacon, Poached Egg

Salad Tiede was all the rage about 10 years ago. Literally translated as “warm salad” it is one of those culinary terms which just sound so much more exciting in French than it does in English. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have to taste exciting. Super quick and simple it relies on really great ingredients to transform it into something really special, so use the best bacon, avocados and eggs that you can find.

Warm Salad of Avocado, Baby Spinach and Bacon, Poached Egg
Serves 2
8 rashers of smoked streaky bacon, cut into lardons
2 organic, free-range eggs
Large handful or two of baby spinach leaves
2 ripe avocadoes, cut into large chunks
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Splash white wine vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper
Extra virgin olive oil

Put a small pan of water onto boil. Fry the bacon in a little olive oil until really golden and crispy in a heavy bottomed frying pan. Remove the pan from the heat from the heat. Put the spinach leaves into a large bowl with the avocado chunks. Add the red wine vinegar to the pan with the bacon and allow to bubble away. Add a dash of white wine vinegar to the pan of boiling water, turn down the heat and carefully crack in the eggs. Poach until the whites have totally cooked but the yolks are still runny. Remove with a slotted spoon onto some kitchen paper to drain. Stir the mustard into the pan with the bacon. I should have cooled a bit by now. You want the mustard to amalgamate with the bacon fat and the vinegar, not cook. Season and pour the bacon and dressing over the spinach and avocado. Toss well and tip into bowls. Top with the eggs and a good grind of black pepper. Serve straight away.

Baked Blueberry and Vanilla Cheesecake

I like to have one or two definitive recipes for each seasonal fruit. Ones that I know will always work and when the season for that fruit comes around again I get excited and start salivating about making again. But up until now, I have never had one such recipe for blueberries. So, I set about rectifying the situation and the first thing that sprang to mind was Blueberry Cheesecake.

I am always a little apprehensive about making cheesecake. I think I have just had so many horrid ones, over sweet, gelatinous and gloopy! When I was a kid in the 70’s I even remember making one from a packet which was pretty disgusting. But then I went to New York and I will never forget the wondrous baked cheesecakes, topped with sour cream. Slightly grainy at the edges, totally wobbling creaminess in the middle. Mind-blowing. So, I was a little nervous of trying to recreate what I had reminisced. I scoured through hundreds of recipes to find one that sounded right, and never imagined that the first one I tried was going to turn out such perfection.

Baked Blueberry and Vanilla Cheesecake

150g digestive biscuits, smashed

20g caster sugar

70g butter, melted

Filling

800g Philadelphia cream cheese

150g creme fraiche

175g caster sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla bean paste, or essence

4 eggs

30g flour

50ml milk

200g blueberries

100g creme fraiche

200g blueberries to decorate

Preheat oven to 170 C / Gas mark 4. Lightly oil a 25cm cake tin. I lined mine with grease-proof as I was frightened that otherwise it would leak.

Mix the biscuits, sugar and butter together and press evenly into the bottom of the tin to form a base. I used a potato masher.

   

Mix the creme fraiche, cream cheese, sugar and vanilla using an electric mixer. Add the eggs one after another and always mix well in between. Add the milk and flour and mix as well. Stir in the blueberries and pour into the tin. Bake for about 1 hour in the oven. The cake should be well risen, golden brown on top and just very slightly wobbly in the middle. Take out and allow to cool. After cooling spread the cake with 100g of creme fraiche and let it cool in the fridge for at least 3 hours. I couldn’t wait and ate mine after about an hour. Decorate with blueberries.

Glazed Turnips

When I see turnips, I think of working at Chez Panisse. For the first month, I was on the veg section and it was my job to cook to order each and every glazed spring vegetables which accompanied the main course. The selection of baby spring vegetables was a thing for beauty. We did not ever get to see vegetables that came anywhere close to these ones in California. Baby beetroot in a rainbow of colours, tiny fresh peas and beans, purple and yellow baby carrots, deep red spring onions and these pretty pink topped turnips. It was my job to prep all these vegetables with utmost care and cook them to perfection. Each vegetable was added at a different time to the pan, to allow for different cooking times. It did all seem a bit of a fuss, but I have to admit, they were absolutely delicious. So, I was a little apprehensive about cooking the beautiful purple tinged turnips that turned up in my veg box this week. Did I still have the touch – 25 years later, to cook a perfect turnip?

Glazed Turnips

Bunch of smallish turnips

Large pinch of salt

Large pinch of sugar

Large knob of butter.

To prep the turnips, trim the stalks short but leave attached. With a small paring knife, scrape around the leaves to remove any dirt or grit. Rinse. Peel the turnip downwards to the bottom, from where the purple tinging ends and gives way to white. Cut into even sized pieces through the stalk – either halves, quarters, sixths or eights depending on size. Place in a heavy bottomed saucepan which allows them to roughly just cover the bottom of the pan. Nearly cover with water and add the salt and sugar. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat so that they boil away gently for about 5-10 minutes, depending on their size. A sharp knife should just insert easily. By this time to water should have nearly boiled away. Add the butter and reduce to a glaze. This should take about a minute. Taste and check for seasoning. Eat straight away. 

Swiss chard and herb tart with young cheese

We all get a bit stuck in our comfort zone and when scanning through new recipes, I must admit I have a tendency to stick to the familiar, so I nearly bypassed this Ottolenghi recipe I found when looking for a new way of using up chard. For a start it was called Swiss Chard and Herb Tart with Young Cheese, and I knew for sure that I did not have any “young cheese” lying around in my fridge, nor was I very likely to be able to get hold of any very easily in the culinary void of Wimbledon. 

Secondly, I wasn’t sure about the mint. I am always a little wary of cooking mint. A little too much and it can e
nd up tasting like toothpaste. I wasn’t sure about the quantities of the ingredients (follow the net weights not the descriptions). 8 large chard leaves turned out to be a whole bag of chard from Riverford. And finally I didn’t have any courgette flowers – too early in the year for my allotment. But I decided to make it anyway and I am really pleased that I did. It is absolutely delicious, even without the courgette flowers. For the young cheese, I used a Abergavenny goat’s cheese that I found in Sainsbury’s.

Swiss chard and herb tart with young cheese
Adapted from Yotem Ottolenghi. Serves four as a main course.
½ small red onion, thinly sliced (85g net)
3 celery stalks and leaves, thinly sliced (220g net)
8 large chard leaves, roughly chopped, white stalks discarded (175g net)
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 tbsp torn mint leaves
2 tbsp chopped parsley
2 tsp chopped sage
2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
75g feta, crumbled
50g pecorino, finely grated
15g pine nuts, lightly toasted
Grated zest of 1 lemon
350g all-butter puff pastry, I used ready rolled
100g brocciu cheese (fresh cheese) or ricotta or fresh goat’s cheese
6 Courgette flowers, cut in half length-ways (optional)
1 egg, lightly beaten
Salt and black pepper

Place a large frying pan on medium-high heat and sauté the onion, celery, chard, garlic, mint, parsley and sage in the olive oil. Cook, stirring continuously, for 15 minutes or until the greens are wilted and the celery has softened completely. Remove from the heat and stir through the feta, pecorino, pine nuts, lemon zest, ¼ teaspoon of salt and a hearty grind of black pepper. Leave aside to cool.
Preheat the oven to 200C.
Roll the pastry, if necessary to a 3mm thick sheet and cut it into a circle, approximately 30cm in diameter. Place on an oven tray lined with baking paper. Spread the filling out on the pastry leaving a 3 centimetre edge all the way around. Dot the filling with large chunks of brocciu, ricotta or fresh goat's cheese.  Top with courgette flowers, if using. Bring the pastry up around the sides of the filling and pinch the edges together firmly to form a secure, decorative lip over the edge of the tart. Alternatively press with the end of a fork. Brush the pastry with egg and refrigerate for 10 minutes.
Bake the tart in the oven for 30 minutes until the pastry is golden and cooked on the base. Remove from the oven and brush with a little olive oil. Serve warm or at room temperature.