Roast Lamb with Ruby Salad and Tabbouleh

I’ve made a post about French style roast lamb before but this is my summer roasted lamb and accompaniments. If I had a barbecue, the lamb would probably be barbecued instead of roasted but alas I’ll have be content with my oven.

I was having a discussion the other about why deli counters serve sliced roast beef, roast ham, roast turkey and roast chicken at the counters, but there’s never any roast lamb or other type of lamb products. I know it’s a fatty meat and not many people like it because of this, but pork also has a high fat content and yet there are endless cylinders of pork based sausages at the deli counter. Lamb is consumed by a lot of people around the world, unlike beef and pork it is not frowned upon in religious beliefs, so why is it missing at the deli counter?

So here’s my attempt at a warm thinly sliced lamb summer dish. Spiced lamb cut thinly and served with classic tabbouleh, and my favourite ruby salad. I love beetroot. I don’t care that it turns everything it touches pink and completely destroys my white shirts. Beetroot is a vegetable of Gods! Now that it is in season I am going to go searching at the farmer’s markets for golden beetroot... delicious!

My ruby salad is simple, radishes, cooked beets, pomegranate to provide acidity in the dressing and feta cheese for the salty creaminess. The beets provide the earthy flavour, the radishes provide the crunch and when you shake it all together it looks one dimensional, but in your mouth it’s a taste sensation in pink and red. And you know it goes surprisingly well with lamb, subtly so the lamb retains its sweet flavours. Perfect for the summer :)

Ingredients
2 Beetroot, boiled until tender, skinned then sliced
7 Radishes, washed, trimmed and sliced
1 Pomegranate, pods removed
50g Feta cheese, crumbled
Olive Oil
¼ cup Bulgar wheat, cooked
Large handful of Parsley, finely chopped
2 Tomatoes
1 small red Onion
½ Lemon, juice only
Salt & Pepper
About 200g of cooked lamb

Recipe
For the tabbouleh, chop tomatoes, onions, fresh parsley and mint until fine. Prepare bulgar wheat to packet instructions and mix together. The dressing is made with olive oil, half a lemon and salt and pepper. Mix well with a spoon .

For the ruby salad, mix beets, radish, pomegranate, and feta together with a dressing made with reserved pomegranate liquid, salt and a small amount of olive oil.

Thinly slice cooked lamb. I used a whole piece of lamb fillet, which I spiced and roasted flat in the oven as opposed to stuffing and rolling it. This resulted in a quicker cooking time suitable for barbecuing, while it renders the fat on the outside leaving the middle pinkish. I also find it easier to cut this way.

Arrange salads in bowls and sliced lamb on a platter and let people help themselves.

Chinese Spiced Crispy Pork Belly

The only thing that stops me when I think about going on a diet or eating healthy is a nice slab of pork belly with crispy skin and rendered fat and moist meat. The temptation is that at the end of the month when the money is tight, I know I can turn to a belly of pork for its cheapness to get a delicious satisfying meal out of it. Even the organic pork belly comes to about £2.99 for a slab double the size of the one in the picture. If you’re calorie conscious, this £2.99 will feed four people, or two greedy adults.

I think rich crispy pork cooked this way is best served with plain cooked white rice, or egg fried rice if you’re feeling feisty. Add a bowl of chilli sauce on the side and you’ve got yourself a delicious dipper. It’s such a simple meal and yet it tastes so so good.

The only trick is to get the skin cooked properly. If you don’t have crispy skin, you’ve got nothing but plain meat and plain sides. I’ve seen people using hair dryers on the skin to get it crispy, and the chefs tend to take the skin off to cook it separately to ensure crispiness. But I personally don’t think you need to go through all that hassle, as once you have perfected the technique with kitchen towel and a hot oven, you will never look back.

The other thing is to be selective about your cut of pork belly. You want an even amount of meat to fat to skin ratio to get a good balance of flavours. It will look like a good slab of bacon, with consistent meat to fat ratio the whole way through. If it’s uneven your cooking time gets confusing as you’re trying to render the fat whilst keeping the meat moist.

That’s enough talk from me, here’s the recipe.

Ingredients
1 piece flat Pork belly, skin scored
1 tsp Schezuan pepper
1 tsp black Pepper
2 tsp Salt
1 tbsp Chilli sauce, to serve
Handful cabbage or spinach, washed
½ cup Rice, cooked

Recipe
Pre heat oven to 220 degrees. Take your scored pork belly and place it on a tray. Pour boiling water over it, this will make the skin loosen and open up. Remove any boiling water sat on the tray and get a kitchen towel to dry off the skin. Salt the skin and leave for 10 minutes.

Dry the skin again with kitchen towel then add ground schezuan and black pepper. Make sure you get the peppers into the scored lines of the skin so that they penetrate the meat underneath. Place on a baking tray and put in the hot oven for 10 minutes. Add a cupful of water to the bottom of the tray, and reduce the heat to 190 degrees and continue cooking for 30 minutes depending on the size of your meat.

While the meat is cooking, blanch your greens and then toss in a bit of oil and salt and pepper. When the meat is cooked, take it out of the oven and leave it to rest uncovered for 5 minutes. Tap the skin to see if it has crisped up all over. If it hasn’t you can set it under a hot grill for 5 minutes, other cut in half and serve with cooked rice and chilli sauce.

Mushroom Pie and Mash

After the record breaking heat-wave we’ve had, it’s only right to expect the rain we thought had forgotten about the UK to start pouring down. And on a rainy day, what is better than Pie and Mash? I’ll tell you what is better- a clumsily put together but deliciously home made (apart from the pastry) pie and mash!

So I didn’t make the pastry myself and that was a stupid thing of me to do, because;

1.  Short crust is ridiculously easy to make even for a person who doesn't have a mixer!
2.  I didn’t really have enough pastry…

The pastry came from leftovers from a rhubarb pie I had made for my boyfriend’s family. I didn’t make the pastry because I left it to the very last minute to make (the morning of the supper) to assemble the pie and realised I didn’t have the right kind of flour, or anywhere near the amount of butter required. And there’s no pictures, because like the pecan pie from Christmas, we scoffed it all before I had a chance to photograph it. Which only means that I have to make both the pecan pie and the rhubarb pie again in order to photograph it. Maybe, I’ll do that for Pie day.

I went for a mushroom filling because I wanted to cook something vegetarian and I knew that if I made mushrooms the pie would be tasty as hell but wouldn’t take very long to cook. I did for a split second think of making a beef and ale pie but that takes hours of cooking time, forward planning and is far too wintery even on this rainy day.

I put rocket in the picture to remind me that it is June, and also to provide pepperiness which compliments the garlic, meaty mushrooms. Like steak, mushrooms and pepper go hand in hand, dancing around on your palate. In terms of types of mushrooms I went for a mixed bag using oyster, chestnut, Portobello and your regular button mushrooms. Chopped up roughly and fried until they become succulent in garlic, butter and freshly chopped parsley. I put quite a bit of butter in mostly because I wanted to get a lovely sauce out of the mushrooms so the insides of the pie would not be too dry.

Mushrooms naturally have high levels of glutamate (of MSG fame) which is what gives it a strong umami flavour. So when you fill a pie to the brim with mushrooms and top it with gravy, you can convince even the most stubborn carnivore to eat, and even enjoy this veggie dish. Give it a go!

Ingredients
3 punnets of mixed Mushrooms (about 750g), chopped into large chunks
1 block ready-made or home-made short crust Pastry
2 cloves Garlic, crushed
1 small bunch Parsley, torn
500g Potatoes, peeled and boiled
½ bottle of your favourite dark Ale
handful of Rocket
Milk
Stock (veggie, beef, or mushroom juices if using dried mushrooms)
Flour, for dusting and thickening
cooking Oil
Butter
Salt & Pepper

Recipe
Pre heat oven to 180 degrees. Take two large ramekins or a pie dish, and butter the insides. Flour a clean surface and roll out your pastry until it’s about 1.5 cm thick. Cut out shapes to fit our moulds and cut a top that’s slightly bigger than the top of the dish. I can’t find pictures on the internet of how I cut my pastry, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it my way unless you’re in the same position as me and don’t have enough pastry, in which case drop me an email, and I will draw a picture. Blind bake the pastry in the ramekins, but leave out the top.

Now for the mushrooms- heat your largest frying pan with a generous amount of oil, and start adding the mushrooms. Once they’ve soaked up the oil and then started to go brown, add the crushed garlic and give the pan a shake. You want the garlic to flavour the mushrooms but you don’t want them to burn, so keep an eye on them. Then add a knob or so of butter to and shake the pan again, now the butter will take on a garlic flavour, which is good. When the mushrooms are about done, add the torn parsley and mix that around.

The mushrooms should have shrunk now from their original size, so take the ramekins out of the oven and fill them with the mushrooms. Push the mushrooms down with a spoon so it’s all compacted and you can fit them all in. Top with the buttery garlic sauce, then lay the last bit of pastry on the top. Pinch the edges in so it’s snuggly fit, and poke a hole in the top to let the steam out. Cook in the oven for about 15-20 minutes or until the top of the pastry is lightly browned.

Make your gravy by reducing the ale and the stock together, adding a roux to thicken after 10 minutes of reduction. You can add any dried herbs you want to the gravy, I put some dried thyme and parsley. Mash your potatoes with a bit of cream, butter and salt and pepper.

Finally, when the pies are ready, carefully remove them from the ramekins, spoon some mash on a plate, top with gravy and serve rocket on the side.

Pomegranate and Halloumi Salad

Last autumn, my boyfriend and I visited Western Cyprus for the first time. I remember quite clearly on the first night we were there we went to a taverna in the nearest town of Polis and ordered some mezze. There were two outstanding dishes I had during that feast, one was the local stew Stifado, which is basically the same as the Greek version but made with beef and pork. 

The other knockout was earlier on in the mezze and that was the halloumi. They served simply on a bed of tomatoes and drizzled with local olive oil, but it was beautiful. It still had that rubbery texture you get with the cheese, but it was oozing salty minty juices in your mouth and it was that flavour that I was craving when I made this dish.

So off I went to Waitrose to buy myself a packet of halloumi to griddle for a warm salad. I served it on top of dressed rocket and mint leaves and scattered pomegranate seeds , walnuts and parsley around the cheese. So there’s really hardly any cooking involved and what you end up with is a dish so colourful and immensely satisfying to eat. The rubbery saltiness of the cheese is overset by the acidic bursts of the pomegranate seeds and the walnuts are there to give the dish the crunch it’s missing.

Ingredients
Block of Halloumi
1 Pomegranate
1 Lemon
small bunch of fresh Mint, torn
small bunch of fresh Parsley, torn
handful of Rocket
1 spring Onion, finely sliced
olive Oil
small handful of Walnuts, crushed

Recipe

Heat and griddle pan. Take your halloumi block and cut it into four equal slices. When the griddle pan is hot, add your halloumi and grill on each side for a couple of minutes until the edges start to crisp and turn brown. Remove from the heat and set to one side to cool down.

In a small bowl, cut your pomegranate in half and then bash the skin side of the fruit with a wooden spoon so that the seeds fall into the bowl. I’d say you need about 5 or 6 good bashes to get all the seeds out. Discard any hard white bits that may have fallen out and the remaining skin. Add parsley, spring onion, salt, pepper, about a tablespoon of oil and the juice of ¼ lemon.

In a separate bowl, toss the rocket and torn mint leaves in a dressing made from lemon juice and olive oil. Finally assemble your dish by placing the rocket and mint in the centre, top with the cheese and surround with red pomegranate jewels. Enjoy.

Super Healthy Sprouty Salad

When I’m feeling like a lean healthy lunch at work or at home, I tend to turn to organic mixed sprouts. Their crunch lends itself perfectly to salads providing them with fresh nuttiness. This time, I got some inspiration from Aine Carlin’s blog Pea Soup Eats and her Rawish Stew which reminded me how much I do actually love fresh crunchy vegetables. Salad’s don’t always have to be based from a huge handful of lettuce. You could mix almost any vegetables together and make a salad as long as the dressing is right.

So here is my raw salad, I started with mixed sprouts and bulgar wheat, then mixed them with grated carrots, chopped tomatoes, rocket, some herbs I had lying around, spring onion and a few capers. It’s a vegan dish today with a dressing made from a small amount of oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper.

You wouldn’t think so much flavour could come out of a thrown together salad, but it does. The carrots offer sweetness; the rockets give the pepper, the capers the salty bursts of flavour, nuttiness from the sprouts and a savoury bite from the spring onion. If anything it’s the tomatoes that don’t belong in there but I love tomatoes so I had to include them!

What surprised me though was not the flavour, but how this dish filled me up. Honestly I couldn’t even finish the massive mound I photographed on the plate. More importantly is that while it did fill me up, I wasn’t stuffed to death but I was immensely satisfied with my meal. In fact I made the same thing again to take to work the next day and while my colleagues jeered at me for being super healthy, I was loving the flavour sensation in my mouth.