Red veg

I love going to Parliament Hill Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings and picking up some interesting veg for the weekend. Last weekend I bought a purple cauliflower and a bunch of beetroot.

Pete cooked a beetroot risotto - quickly becoming a staple in our house. Unsurprisingly, it turns out looking like a garish reddy-purple maggot slime. But it has a delicious sweet, root-y celery-like taste that you don't get from beetroot when you prepare it any other way. With added mascarpone, this is a perfectly lovely, rich, warming dish for a cooler end of summer evening.



We use the Times recipe, but with a little less parmesan.



The purple cauliflower went to good use in one of my favourite Ottolenghi salads: Chargrilled cauliflower with dill, capers and cherry tomatoes. The cauliflowers are very lightly parboiled - about three minutes - then flung into a smokin' hot griddle pan until they are nicely charred.



The dressing helps the magic of this dish - 2 parts olive oil to one part cider vinegar, finely chop some capers, add some crushed garlic, salt'n'pepa, some wholegrain mustard. There you have a very tangy jus for your salad.

Combine the charred cauliflower with baby spinach leaves and cherry tomatoes and pour over the dressing. Chop up a generous handful of dill and drop it in. Enjoy with toasted pitta bread. We served with lemon-y turkey breasts. Yum.

Ottolenghi love

A large part of the time I spend thinking about food is spent thinking about Ottolenghi food. For those of you who don't know, Ottolenghi is a small collection of restaurant/delis in London. Their food is albout amazing fresh flavours, ingenious combinations, using plenty of great quality ingredients, copius scatterings of fresh herbs. They published a cookbook, which has since become a bible for me and my friends.

I try and cook at least one Ottolenghi recipe a week, whether it's from the book or Ottolenghi's weekly column 'the new vegetarian' in the Guardian's Saturday magazine. Last night I cooked roast chicken with saffron, hazelnuts and honey. It was amazing burst flavours and smells from the souk, gently exotic and luxurious with its saffron, rosewater, cinammon, honey, lemon and ginger. The roasted hazelnuts gave the dish a velvety earthiness, and combined with the honey, cinammon and rosewater, it was like a semi-savoury baklava.

A quick google revealed that Gourmet Worrier had cooked it fairly recently and adapted the recipe a bigger meal, so I shall re-driect you there for the recipe. I used thighs rather than drumsticks though. I do love the thighs!

My partner is also mad keen on Ottolenghi and cooked last week's new vegetarian recipe, beetroot, yogurt and preserved lemon relish. I am absolutely wild about beetroot, especially when combined with plentiful heaps of fresh dill and creme fraiche or yoghurt. With the addition of preserved lemons (or in my case lots of lemon rind, not ever being able to find them in my local middle eastern shops and being too lazy thus far to preserve lemons myself) this was the zingiest, freshest meal I've had in a while. Here's a photo:


That's enough Ottolenghi for now. Don't worry, though, plenty more to come!