Insalata Di Caprese, and Then Some!

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

I was thinking to post about my chocolate mousse for the dubious occasion of Valentine’s Day, until I realized that 1. the mousse post would be late anyway, as it would be ready to photograph too late for anyone who’d want to make it for this specific Valentine’s day (I am not one of those food bloggers who makes food just to take pictures of it!), and that 2. the mousse is a fantastic recipe to post anytime, and not just when the entire internet is drowned in chocolate recipes for Valentine’s day.

So therefore, you get chocolate mousse with bourbon later, and today there is a post about another one of my favorite-ever things to eat: Insalata Di Caprese.

Insalata Di Caprese, at its most basic, is a ripe tomato, a good ball of mozzarella sliced thickly, and basil leaves, all dressed in a simple extra-virgin olive oil.  The marriage of textures and flavors is perfect, and the way tomato and fresh greens infuse into the trembling softness of mozzarella is… well, there is a reason why the salad is famous the world over.  It is not actually known if the recipe originated on Capri, but when something tastes so amazing, do we really care?  I certainly do not!  Nor am I one of those snooty purists who say that adding anything at all other than the above ruins the salad.  I never believed that some fresh garlic, black pepper, bacon or parsley did it any harm, and I love it with the peppery bitterness of arugula in particular.  Since arugula, tomatoes, mozzarella and good bacon are all fridge staples in our home, this makes arranging the lunch that much simpler – and yes, we do eat endless variations of it on a fairly regular basis.

The testament to how great this is, is that for all we eat it often, it is still enough of a favorite that I turned to it without a second thought when it came to figuring out what to do for a light and festive Valentine’s Day lunch for T and I.  And, going by the adage that bacon makes everything better, I decided to add some crisped slices of really good smoked local bacon – and the celestial pigs sang hallelujah, for we ate it and it was very, very good!  The smokey and not-too-salty crunch of the pork set off the tart sweetness of the tomatoes and the milky mozzarella di bufala campagna, and made for a salad that was both, fresh, savory and satifying – a perfect lunch to precede the likely indulgence of the evening meal.

Oh what, you need a recipe for this?!  Fine, then!  This will serve two.

• A few handfuls of arugula with a few optional basil leaves mixed in.
• A ball of good-quality mozzarella (buffalo mozzarella being the luxury for today), sliced gently.
• 10 thin slices off a piece of dry, warm-smoked bacon (or any bacon of your choice), fried slowly on low heat to render the fat until they are crisp.  I found that scooping the fat out of the pan as it renders, makes these crisp a lot faster and better.
• 1-2 ripe tomatoes, sliced.
• A drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, a sprinkle of flaked salt, and some dried lavender or black pepper to taste.

Toss the greens into wide salad bowls, arrange the sliced mozzarella on the greens, and the tomato on the mozzarella.  Sprinkle with salt and spices and drizzle with olive oil.  Top with crisped bacon.  Serve.  If the boyfriend hadn’t had to work in the afternoon, a bit of sparkling wine would have gone amazing with this!

The Food, Imagined – Sprouts, Bacon, Radicchio, and Goats’ Cheese

The temperatures have plunged below zero, and the days are now dark.

I mean it – it is 3pm and the sun has already set.  We barely get 6 hours of daylight now, and it is going to get to less than that before the Winter Solstice.

I’m not complaining, mind you – this is the weather to celebrate, to light candles, and to eat gorgeous winter foods, even if it’s just the two of us having a midweek dinner.  Why?  Well, because it’s dark out, it’s now winter, and generally – why the heck not?  Just because.

So the other evening I went foraging in the fridge and came up with various festive-food odds and ends that have been languishing there from having been bought to be used elsewhere and subsequently not used, or left over like a few lonely fingerling potatoes left behind after I roasted most of the bag a few days ago, an apple that has spent at least a month in the back of the crisper, an opened log of chevre and a plastic-wrapped and still-gorgeous radicchio that I didn’t remember buying or even what I’d originally wanted it for.

I looked at it all and a light went on in my head – a quick search of the meat drawer revealed a pack of streaky bacon (I usually keep that around), and the back of the crisper held not one but two bags of lemons.  One with just the one lemon remaining, meaning the older of the two.  A quick text to T on his way back from work later, and I had a bag of sprouts arrive at home alongside the daily milk.

And this, essentially, all it took to put together this meal, which frankly, was the best one I’d eaten in a while (and that’s me talking – I aspire to eat gorgeously every day!), and it’s a wonderful example of how random leftover vegetables, fruit and odds and ends can become something beautiful.

Best of all, this dinner is nearly effortless.  And when I, queen of lazy food say so, I really do mean it.  What follows is not so much a recipe as a guideline, to be modified based on what you have at home and what you like – prefer oranges to lemons?  It may well turn out better with one!  Have eggs or ham instead of bacon?  Toss the ham in towards the end of the roasting, and poach the egg to be served oozingly over the potatoes and the sprouts!  This is not a lesson in cooking, but in imagination – which, I believe, is the most important ingredient of them all.

What I used – Feel free to modify!  Feeds 2 very hungry people.

• 500g brussel sprouts, washed, bottoms trimmed if necessary
• 3 fingerling potatoes, washed, cut up
• 125g pack of smoked streaky bacon (feel free to use what you have on hand in any permutation – back bacon, salt pork, gammon, ham, or even eggs – see suggestion above).  Or even a few pieces of halloumi cheese, cut up and tossed on top of the vegetables towards the end of roasting process.
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 1/2 of a 2-girly-fist-(or one-man-fist)-sized radicchio
• A little olive oil to dress the salad and add to pan if needed
• 1 green apple (partially eaten while cooking…)
• About 100g slice of chevre, rind trimmed off.  Feta may work just as well, to be honest.
• zest and juice of 1/2 lemon – feel free to sub citrus of your choice!

What I did (and you can certainly repeat!):

• Cut up and fry the bacon gently in a large oven-safe pan.  I did not use any added oil.  Tip:  if you start with a fairly cool pan and use fatty streaky bacon, the bacon will melt enough to not stick anyway.  If using back bacon or such, add a tablespoon of oil to the pan first.
• In meantime, cut and tear radicchio into a bowl.  Zest and juice your 1/2 lemon.
• Cut, core and chop the apple.  I think I ate about half of it before it made into the salad.  Add to the salad bowl.
• Crumble goat’s cheese into the salad, dress with lemon juice and olive oil and stick in the refrigerator till the rest is done.
• When bacon is ready, remove it to a paper-towel lined plate, and set aside.  Add sprouts and potatoes to the pan, and roll them in the bacon fat.  Season with salt and pepper and pop into the 225°C oven for about 20 minutes.  This will depend on your oven, sprout and potato chunk size – roast until tender, and the outer leaves of the sprouts just begin to turn a little brown.
• If using ham or halloumi, add this to the vegetables about 15 minutes into the cooking process, and allow to brown lightly.  Otherwise, add the bacon when ready, and allow to stand in turned-off oven for 2 minutes to heat it up.
• Stir the remaining lemon juice into the roasted vegetables, and plate them out.  Remove your salad from fridge, give it a toss, and add on the side of each plate.   Done.

And there it is – beautiful, delicious, and easy – and I’ve used up my random leftovers in it to boot, leaving me more fridge to fill with new pretty and yummy things to cook!

Happy Holidays!

My Guest Post at Ping’s Pickings – Topinambour and Mushroom Salad

Earlier this week, I’ve done a guest post at the blog of the Illustrious Ping, queen of making tiny gorgeous fiddly things that I stare at with envy.  Often.  So of course I was terribly excited when she invited me to write a guest post, and put up one of my recent and very successful (according to T) recipes, a salad of topinambours and mushrooms and quinoa.

Where am I going with this?  Not very far.  You should visit Ping’s blog (link below!), make and eat my salad (unless you hate mushrooms and then it’s your loss!), and then look around at all the pretty and adorable and totally yummy things she makes.  Who knows, you may get stuck on reading her stuff too, the way I did!

*waves to Ping*

ping’s pickings: Guest Post: Eat The Roses.

Avocado!

Finally!

Perfect, butter-smooth and utterly spoonable!

Yesterday, upon walking into a supermarket, I came face-to-vegetable with the fact that avocadoes are in season again!

Said fact is a cause for much celebration for me, as miserable, small, hard-as-rock or gone-rotten-mushy avocadoes have plagued the supermarkets for a few months now, until this reprieve.  I have immediatelly stuffed three huge avocadoes into a bag and resolutely dragged them to the checkout.  There was no way I was leaving them behind!

Why?  Because I adore them, and because they are not just rich, satiating and wonderfully delicious – they are oh, so good for your hair and skin, but that’s not all – one of their crowning glories is that they are … ready.  To eat.  You can just cut them apart, and scoop the flesh out onto some greens, or if you are too lazy, they make for a lunch all on their own, cut in half and with some lemon spritzed into the cavity, salt, pepper… you need nothing more.  Spoon away!

Well, ok, maybe some freshly-baked bread for the large viking-type friend who isn’t avoiding carbohydrates just now is called for.  But I, I need nothing else.

Part-wholegrain Wheat Bread

So today, after a session of teaching/baking bread with my friend (which went lovely by the way, with very very pretty and tasty results!), I’ve made lunch for the two of us using just one of those monstrous vegetables fruit (that’s what they are, technically).  Yes, that pile you see on my plate is just half of one!  I tossed them on a bed of some arugula (my ever-favorite greens), fried some bacon to crispness, sliced a ball of mozzarella, and salted and peppered it all, and finished with a bit of olive oil.

I wouldn’t call it cooking, really (well, ok, the bacon got cooked), but rather assembly – which, if you think about it, a lot of rather fancy catering is all about.  Ina Garten even gives a whole chapter in her Barefoot Contessa cookbook to assembling food for parties, rather than cooking – and I can’t help but agree that it’s a wonderful (and oh so very agreeable to my lazy self) idea.  Some of the best ingredients aren’t about cooking, they are about putting them out there with some other things that go along with them, and letting them be their wonderfully appetizing selves.

And, if it works for parties and catering, why shouldn’t or wouldn’t it work for lunch?

Like this.

To be perfectly honest, if I did not have a guest here, I would be perfectly happy to take it just like that, sliced on a plate, to the sofa, and eat it there, without any mention of a table knife or napkin.  But since I was making lunch for more than just myself, I did dress them up a little with salt and pepper and olive oil.

Like this.

So, next time you see a good avocado at the greengrocer or in the supermarket, you don’t need to think of it as a vegetable that you ‘could do something with‘ – unless you actually want to fuss in the kitchen, that sort of thought is entirely unnecessary here.  Just think of it as ‘this thing I want to eat‘, buy it, take it home, and do just that.  Then spend the half hour or hour-and-a-half you would have spent cooking on doing something else.  Like reading.  Or writing.  Or just being lazy – which is, after all, its own reward.

Comfort Food For A Rainy Day – Simple Potato Salad

Some days simply call for comfort food.

Potato salad with bacon, marinated red onion and olive oil

This morning dawned already damp and proceeded to rain, and rained all through lunch, at which point the weather improved all the way up to damp and grey sans the pouring rain.  To add insult to injury, it is Monday and one of my best friends has just gone back to England after a weekend visit here.  Gloomy.  The fridge is having post-party blues:  it is filled with fancy sauce, plastic boxes of leftover cake, a piece of brie and half a bunch of good grapes – i.e., nothing to eat.  Even gloomier.

Luckily, I found half a bag of baby new potatoes left over from making soup for the party Saturday, and a more thorough search of the fridge has turned up a pack of bacon and a red onion.  Bingo!  It’s all I really need for a very good, very very comforting and easy to make (this isn’t the sort of day when I want to do a kitchen marathon or any other Olympics, either) potato salad.

For the adherents of the mayonnaise-smothered gloopy cold stuff that passes for potato salads in many supermarkets and among many caterers, I am sorry but I am of a different persuasion (as if the photo hasn’t told you that).  I believe in the tangy and slightly al dente potato salad with a bite and a lot of flavor, and it has got to be warm.  Or even hot if I hurry up with eating it or bother to preheat the plate.

Ok, so all you really need  to feed one hungry person on a gloomy day is:

• Enough potatoes for said person to not be hungry (hey, that really varies from person to person!)
• 1/2 pack (about 75g) bacon rashers or half a box of lardons (cubed bacon).  I prefer rashers for this because cut up into short strips crosswise, they fry to a lovely crispness
• 1/2 medium-sized red onion
• A splash of white or red-wine or balsamic vinegar (I used balsamic, it’s what I had on hand)
• Sea salt
• Chili flakes and black pepper to taste
• Olive oil (2-3 tablespoons won’t hurt in my opinion)

What do you do?

• Wash your potatoes (I don’t bother peeling), cut up if they are large or just use whole if they are little, and stick them into a pot of cold, salted water to boil.
• While the potatoes boil, preheat a non-stick frying pan with a teaspoon or two of oil to medium-high heat (I use setting 6 out of 9), and toss the cut-up rashers or bacon cubes into it.  Allow to fry slowly, so that the fat melts (I drain that off and keep in a ceramic jar in the fridge for future use when roasting vegetables).
• While the bacon is frying and potatoes are boiling (you can cover them with a lid and reduce heat somewhat once they come to a boil), peel and cut your onion.  Stash half in the fridge in a plastic bag and slice the other one thinly into half-moons or quarter-moons (as you like).
• Put the onion in a bowl, splash with vinegar (enough to wet all of it), and sprinkle with salt.  Now test your potatoes – they should be getting close to ready.  I take them off heat as soon as they are no longer crunchy and pierce easily with a fork.
• Drain your potatoes and put them into the bowl with onions, season with chili flakes, and use a fork to fork them into smaller, bite-sized pieces.  Let stand until bacon is ready.  Note: if bacon is ready before the potatoes, take it off the heat but don’t add to the bowl until potatoes are ready.
• Mix the potatoes and onions again.  Splash the salad with olive oil and then mix in the bacon (this allows it to stay crispier), taste and season with salt and pepper as much as you like.  Pour salad onto a plate or eat right out of the bowl if you like.

I plated mine.  And photographed it and ate it – and now the sky is clearing up and the day does not look nearly so gloomy anymore.  In fact, it looks much, much better!

Mediterranean Aubergine Salad

Aubergine – also known as Eggplant – is a gorgeous vegetable.

Now, I am most likely biased, because I love all things purple, and aubergines are an amazing deep dark shade of it, but you have got to agree that the deep color and gloss make them stand out among vegetables like a silk evening dress among T-shirts and jeans.

Of course, if color was the only thing going for it, it’d never have become one of my favorite things to eat, regardless of what is said about how people eat with their eyes.  It’s not true – we don’t eat with our eyes.  We taste with them and decide to take the next step, true – but eating is done with the mouth (and a good thing, too).

In any case, other than its beautiful color and surface, aubergines have the benefits of being wonderfully delicious, good for low-GI diets, and very filling.  The above, along with its wonderful eating quality, fiber content and how well it takes dry preparation, all make it rather perfect for use in any generic LCHF diet.

The problem – not insurmountable one, mind you – is that if cooked improperly, aubergines (like many other vegetables) turn to awful mush and can sometimes have a bitter aftertaste.  The up side is that this undesirable result is very easy to avoid.

The preparation routine for aubergine, whether you plan to grill it, fry it, or bake it into gratin, must start 30-60 min before you actually do the hot part of the cooking.  What you do is wash and dry the aubergine, slice it crosswise or lengthwise (whatever your recipe calls for), rub or sprinkle it with a small amount of salt and rest on a plate to drain the excess water for about an hour, but at minimum 30 minutes.  Before frying or grilling or assembling the gratin, take a bit of kitchen paper towel and wipe or blot each slice on both sides, then pop the aubergines into pan, oven or onto grill pan, and there you go.  The draining of juice and subsequent wiping not only makes the aubergine crisper and lighter, but also eliminates any possible bitter aftertaste from it, like magic.

One of my favorite ways to eat aubergine is as a lunch salad, the way I’ve had it many many times back in Israel.  The recipe for it is more a set of loose instructions than a recipe, but here it is – such as it is.

Serves 2 hungry people for lunch (or for dinner with a protein portion of some sort).

For dressing:

• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 2-4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper – to taste
• 1-3 cloves of garlic

For salad itself:

•  1 medium aubergine – sliced crosswise, salted, drained for an hour and patted dry with paper towel
• 2 large handfuls of arugula (rucola)
• 1 red or orange or yellow bell pepper (paprika), deseeded and sliced into bite-sized pieces or thin slivers
• 1-2 ripe tomatoes, chopped
• 10cm of cucumber, sliced
• 3 tablespoons of finely grated parmesan, or other hard cheese
• Some chopped parsley or fresh thyme

What to do:

• Place arugula in the salad bowl.
• Add chopped and sliced vegetables.
• Preheat a non-stick frying pan and add a little bit of canola or peanut oil.
• Fry the aubergine in batches, in a single layer without crowding the pan, flipping once or twice throughout the process, until a little colored on both sides.  Place cooked aubergines into the salad bowl as you go.
• When aubergines are all done, mix the dressing.  If you are not worried about smell of garlic, press the garlic fresh into the lemon juice, add salt, pepper and olive oil, and whisk to mix, then pour over the salad and toss to combine.
• If you do not want to smell of garlic so much, slice the garlic cloves thinly and heat up the olive oil in the pan which you cooked the aubergines in.  Fry the garlic in the olive oil on medium heat until fragrant and just beginning to color at the edges, then add the hot oil with garlic to the salad bowl, pour the lemon juice over it, season with salt and pepper, and toss to combine.
• Sprinkle with chopped parsley or thyme and cheese, and you are ready.

Serve with a slice of crusty bread or a warmed up pitta bread – or on its own for a light and low-GI lunch.

Dry-Cured Ham And Cantaloupe Salad

I haven’t yet met anyone who didn’t like dried ham.

- for dinner, or lunch, or whenever you feel like it!

In its many permutations – Prosciutto di Parma, Jamón Serrano and Jamón ibérico, or any variety of Speck – dried ham is probably the most favoured cured pork product around.  And if I am wrong, then feel free to correct me, but it certainly is one of my and my friends’ favorites (a good pancetta does come close as well), which is what matters here.

Dried ham in all of its permutations is generally reputed to be delicious, and is frequently expensive, but the sad misconception (courtesy fat-is-bad brigade, grrr!) about it is that it is ruinous to one’s health, and should be avoided by anyone eating healthy.

This, frankly speaking, is bull.  Unless you are on a no-salt diet for kidney failure or similar reasons, or are sensitive to nitrates and nitrites (curing salts), or pork itself, dried ham is a fantastic addition to your food repertoire.  Yes, it is not light in either calories or fat, but if you feel you want to concern yourself with those, consider the fact that it has a lot of flavor packed into paper-thin slices, and that despite it being calorific and salty per 100g, the amount of culinary bliss per those 100g is above and beyond most other meat-based foods in such a small quantity.  And (unless you are like me and don’t concern yourself with fat or calories, watching sugar instead) you don’t actually need to pile a huge amount of said ham on – one or two slices brighten up a salad like literally nothing else.  Though, as you can see in above photo, I myself am very dried ham-happy and just pile it on.  But the point is that such amount of it is not necessary to use if you want it as an accent and flavor.

No one who likes their food (and doesn’t eschew pork on religious grounds) would stick their nose up at this salad – and the  best part is that the hardest bit of preparation is pulling the ham out of its package and chopping the melon.  And considering the speed and ease of preparation, this essentially amounts to fast food.  Compare it to most typical junk people eat in a hurry, and you’ll see the light.  Or the ham.  Same thing, really!

Ingredients (for 2 large plates):

• Several large handfuls of arugula (rocket, rucola, etc.), watercress or other strong-flavored baby greens
• 10 – 15cm of cucumber, washed and sliced
• 1/2 of a cantaloupe melon, cored, taken off peel and chopped – I like mine ripe enough to be aromatic and sweet but still crisp rather than mushy, but any stage of ripeness would do if you prefer it otherwise
• 6 – 8 slices of dried ham of your choice (the one in the salad in the picture was some sort of generic Spanish variety which was found lurking in the back of the fridge during a routine sensor sweep – have I mentioned that, unopened, dried ham keeps in the fridge for ages?)
• Pinch chili flakes and dried oregano each – or if you have fresh herbs, feel free to substitute 2 teaspoons of fresh chopped oregano or thyme for the dried
• Flaked sea salt
• Good quality extra virgin olive oil to drizzle

How to:

• Place your greens onto plates and fluff them up
• Spread cucumber slices on top
• Pull apart the ham and drape it over the cucumber
• Pile cantaloupe pieces on top of the ham in the centre of the plate
• Sprinkle with chili flakes and oregano (dried or fresh or thyme if using.)
• Drizzle with olive oil
• Sprinkle with sea salt flakes – and it is ready to eat, though it certainly won’t hurt it to stand for about 5 minutes to let the melon drip juice all over the ham.

Lovely, healthy and oh-so-drool-inducingly gorgeous!