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.

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.

A lighter Lunch

    

I am a bit lazy about lunch. I often tend to skip breakfast. Yes, I know is healthy living violation number one, but I am just not a breakfast person. Two big cups of decaf coffee is all I can stomach first thing in the morning. But often I have to work through lunch as well and then just as my blood sugar hits an all time low, I usually opt for a much larger bowl than necessary of granola, packed with nuts and seeds. Unfortunately, as we all know, Granola is also packed with sugar. The second ingredient on my Simply Nut Granola by Dorset Cereals, is golden syrup. Not exactly an ingredient I would associate with health, although Tate and Lyle had other ideas. 

 Isn’t it amazing how perceptions have changed. Can you imagine a child after a daily dose of Golden Syrup particularly after the recommended bedtime snack as well, of even more golden syrup stirred into a glass of milk? The advice in this book reminds me of some of the other suggestions in vintage cookbooks, extolling the virtues of cigarettes and opium. It does make you wonder what guidance given out now, will be scoffed at in the future.

Anyway, this weeks recipe makes a really quick and easy lunch and is one of those when you manage to somehow conjure up a delicious meal from almost nowhere. All I had left in the fridge was a lettuce, some carrots and a cucumber and a left over piece of fillet steak. 

We can learn a lot from Asian recipes as they have long understood that meat and fish are costly and they know how to make expensive ingredients go along way, padded out with plenty of cheaper and healthier vegetables.  Although the list of ingredients often looks long and complicated, it really is store cupboard stuff and it really could not be quicker and easier to make and a whole lot less calories than Granola.

Vietnamese Lettuce and Beef Wraps
You can make the dipping sauce and marinade the meat the day before.

For the marinade
1 fillet steak
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp fish sauce (Nam Pla)
1 tsp caster sugar
1-1½ tsp toasted sesame oil, to taste

For the dipping sauce
1 tbsp. rice vinegar, to taste
1 tsp. golden caster sugar, to taste
1 tbsp. Fish sauce (Nam Pla)
1 stick lemongrass
1 lime, juice only
1 fresh red chilli

For the wraps
1 carrot, cut into fine julienne strips or grated
½ cucumber
3 sprigs mint, leaves picked and chopped
½ small bunch coriander, leaves and stalks roughly chopped
1 lettuce such as Batavia or baby gem

Lime wedges, to serve

For the marinade, put the steak into a large bowl, add the remaining ingredients and mix until coated evenly. Cover the bowl with cling film and leave to marinate in the fridge for at least two hours, or overnight if possible.

Meanwhile make the dipping sauce. Mix the rice vinegar, sugar, fish sauce and lime juice together. Finely chop the red chilli. If you like it hot then leave the seeds in, if not remove them. Remove any tough outer leaves from the lemongrass and trim the bottom. Grate using a microplaner starting at the bottom and grating until nearly three quarters of the way up. (If you do not have a microplaner, chop very finely). Add with the chilli to your dipping sauce and taste. Adjust the flavours as necessary – adding a little more sugar if it’s too sour, or more rice vinegar or lime juice if too sweet.

Next peel and grate your carrots and cut your cucumber into julienne. A mandolin is good for this. Separate and wash the salad leaves and leave to drain. Pick the leaves off the herbs.

In a large heavy-based frying pan, heat a dash of oil. Shake off any excess marinade from the steaks and cook for 2-3 minutes on either side – depending on their thickness and how rare you like your steak. Tip over the marinade and remove and rest on a plate for five minutes.

To serve, arrange the lettuce leaves on a serving plate. Fill the lettuce leaves with carrot and cucumber. Add a small handful of herbs. Slice the rested steak, and top each leaf with a slice or two of steak, tipping any resting juices over the top. Serve with the dipping sauce and lime wedges on the side.