Winter Salad Inspiration

For a crisp, sunny winter's day.

Ingredients:
1/2 of a medium roasted butternut, peeled
1/3 wheel of feta
A few salad leaves
Some watercress
1 tsp sunflower seeds
1/4 tsp linseed
1 tbsp lemon juice
3 tbsp olive oil
Salt
Pepper

Method:
Lay out the salad leaves on a plate and lay the roughly chopped butternut on top.
Next, break up the feta over the butternut. 
Mix together oil and lemon juice, adding salt & pepper to taste. 
Then gently pour this dressing over the feta and the butternut and top it off with the seeds.You can even roast the sunflower seeds in a dry pan beforehand if you would like them to have a more toasty flavour.

Gourmet it: 
Add in squares of roasted beetroot, chopped pieces of fresh orange and maybe even some ripe avocado.
Perhaps a touch of chilli and a teaspoon of Bulgarian yoghurt in the dressing will go down well too.

Mediterranean Couscous Salad

Great for a hot summer's day.

Ingredients:

A punnet of baby tomatoes

A big aubergine / egg plant / brinjal sliced & chopped

A yellow pepper, sliced

Half a cup of dry couscous

3 leaves of sage

5 leaves of mint

3 leaves of rocket

Olive oil

Flax Seeds

Greek yoghurt

Salt

Pepper

Method:

Get out a nice big roasting pan and put all your veggies in there. Sprinkle over the herbs (chopped), a bit of salt and pepper. And coat with olive oil (stir it up).

Roast this on 180 degress Celcius for 45 minutes.

While that is roasting, just cover your couscous with water and let it soak it up. You can also lightly salt it.

Add flax seeds to your couscous.

Serve the hot veggies around the couscous and top with Greek yoghurt and garnish with a spring of mint.

Roasted Shallots

Purple, raw shallots

This is the first time we've eaten shallots. We don't get them around here so often. So, when I saw them, I just got them (for my husband).

He cooked them. He said they're supposed to taste a bit like garlic, but they were mostly just like really tasty onions.

He used red wine vinegar and sugar instead of balsamic. He also used butter. This recipe says olive oil so I'm not sure if it's exactly the same one, but here it is anyway.

Golden shallots, yum.

 Black and white shallots.

Gazpacho

I haven't tried adding bread to gaspacho before, but onions I have, and I can tell you: it didn't taste good. Both are more or less traditional ingredients for this chilled, refreshing Spanish soup. These days I just include generally green salad ingredients.

Ingredients:

6 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped

1/2 cucumber, chopped

1 tsp crushed garlic

1 red bell pepper, chopped

1/4 cup olive oil

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

Salt & pepper to taste

Method:

Get your blender out. Blend. Serve chilled with parsley leaves and a good bread. Enjoy thoroughly and pretend you are in a Spanish landscape painting.

Get some insight:

Apparently gaspacho, the food of shepards and peasant of old, even goes back to Roman times in a very basic form: bread, water, vinegar, oil and salt. That sounds more like a sauce. Today there are quite a few variations from that root. When we were in Spain we bought some of the red variety, which is more well known, in a one liter carton and drank it just like that for lunch. We should have kept an eye out for the cousins: green and white.

While the red variety is tomato based, white ones can contain nuts and dried fruits and the green ones are basically the same as the white but contain spices that make them colourful. Something new to try! Nuts in a soup!

Sweet Potato Chips

Or if you want to be, like, American, just call them "fries". But I refuse (I'm not American).

If you haven't made vegetable chips before, now's a good time to start. It's quite simple and not too time consuming. It's worth the bit of effort, definitely. You can flavour them however you want which means that each time you make them, you can add a new twist. My ingredient list is completely variable, except for the potatoes, salt, pepper and the oil.

Ingredients:
2 medium / small sweet potatoes
Olive oil to coat
1 tsp pepper
A sprinkle of salt
1 tsp dhania / coriander powdered
1 tsp jeera / cumin whole or powdered
1/2 tsp chilli flakes

Method:
Chop the sweet potatoes into any size from 1/2 - 1 cm wide with a depth of up to 2cm - depending on how crunchy you want them. Leave the skin on for a more chewy effect, but wash them well if you are leaving the skin on - perhaps with a vegetable brush if you have one.

Toss all the ingredients with your chopped vegetables and coat with olive oil. Lay out your pieces on a baking tray without them touching if possible - if they touch don't worry, but they probably won't be as crunchy.

Bake at 200'C for 15 minutes, then check them, turn them if required and keep an eye on them until lightly browned.

Tip: The more even the width of your potatoes are, the less they taper at the ends of the slices, the less likely the tips will be to burn.

For supper tonight, I just made vegetable chips with carrots (I flavoured them with chilli, garlic and pepper - yum).

Root Mash

This is a really simple and delicious side to a roast, or whatever you would normally eat mashed potatoes with, but much more exciting and healthy.


Serves 4 as a side dish


Ingredients:
5 medium potatoes
3 medium carrots
1 stalk of celery
1 medium onion
2 turnips
2 cloves of garlic, halved
2 tsp Dijon mustard
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp pepper
1 handful of finely chopped fresh parsley


Method:
If you feel like being fancy, you could make a rough mirepoix* by chopping your carrots into rondels** and slicing up the celery and frying that with the onion quartered. When the onion is translucent, add with the the potato, garlic and turnip to salted boiling water in a pot. Leave to simmer for 30 minutes until the vegetables are cooked. (Otherwise, you could just chop all the vegetables roughly and boil them all at once, altogether).


Drain the vegetables and then add the mustard, olive oil, pepper and fresh parley and mash it together until creamy.


Easy, healthy and delicious.


*mirepoix (pronounced "meerpwah"): the name for carrot, celery and onion chopped and used together for a base of a wide range of dishes.
*rondels: When you slice carrots at 90 degrees, they end up in little round circles, the word if from Old French, and also apparently Middle English. It's a very descriptive word. I like it.