Greek salad now ready to eat!
You know how they say you grow to look like your spouse? Well, I do not look much like Paul, apart from the fact that we are both very fair-skinned. He is slim and does not have much hair; I am not slim and have lots of hair! However, in terms of our taste in food we embrace many of the same likes and dislikes. Even when I met him, we both expressed a preference for fresh, black coffee; we both like breakfast tea in the morning and earl grey in the afternoon (the only difference being that I like my tea with a ridiculously small amount of milk in). He had to come to like my way of eating, as otherwise he’d have to offer to help in the kitchen. It is good that he is happy to let me get on with it, as I am very particular about how I cook food, and also love to have Radio 4 on most of the time whilst preparing meals. Naturally there are a few types of food that I do not like – mainly dried vine fruit,glace cherries, candied peel, pickled onions and green peppers. Paul is not keen on squashes, although I can get away with them in soup.
One issue that we agree on is that raw onion is vile, an abomination! Onions have to be cooked until they are sweet and melting. I never put raw onion in a salad (not even a little bit finely chopped my mother would ask?!) and am amazed at how popular it is both in recipes and in restaurants. Luckily Paul dislikes them as much as I do, and it is the only time that I come across as Mrs Picky; I will happily sit in a restaurant fishing pieces of the devillish food out of my salad. The pile that you see in the photograph above grew to about 6 times that size by the end of our activity! It is one reason why I really prefer to make my own salad. Having said that, the salads in Croatia have been really good and imaginative; there are options for just having salad for lunch, whereas in some restaurants in Spain and Italy I have come across, you would feel rather hungry just eating salad.
Anyway, enough of this negativity! Our holiday apartment is really beautiful and well-equipped, but I had not taken in that the cooking facilities would be quite basic; my own fault really for not checking more thoroughly beforehand. We have two electric rings, a kettle and a microwave. There is also a barbecue outside, which anyone in the 3 letting apartments is free to use. Our host family also uses it I believe. It seeems to work out fine. We have in fact only used it once so far, as the weather has been too hot for cooking outside even in the evening. Happily the temperature dropped from the mid 90s to the mid 80s a few days ago! The barbecue is built in with a chimney, and the fuel provided is paper and olive wood – both kindling and logs. I managed to get a roaring fire going and cook some chicken thighs (marinated in honey, mustard, olive oil and rosemary) and squid – marinated in chilli, rosemary and olive oil. I did cheat with the squid and just plonk a frying pan on the barbecue. See the pictures below of our small scale barbecue:
To go back to the subject of salads, I love them in all shapes and forms, whether they be for a side dish or a light lunch. I am rather sceptical of people who say that they do not like salad. There are so many thousands of variations and recipes that I really doubt that anyone could dislike every single one. My own daughter is not a salad lover, but I can devise a salad that she will eat – it is just a question of picking ingredients that she likes, and steering clear of raw salad leaves, tomatoes and cucumber! I have made various salads in our apartment including the Italian bread salad in the picture above. I have actually made it slightly Greek too, by adding some chunks of feta. The salad is otherwise a simple mixture of stale bread broken into chunks and sauteed in olive oil (you could bake it if you have an oven!), fresh tomatoes in big pieces, rocket and fennel dressed with good olive oil and balsamic vinegar. If you have time to leave it to soak for a bit and for the bread to take up the tomato juices and the dressing, it will taste even better. Whatever you do, don’t put it in the fridge as it will not taste good when chilled! For this reason I always advise making this salad and indeed any salad containing tomatoes, soon before you are going to eat it; you don’t want to risk your salad festering in the warm weather! It is also therefore logical not to make a mountain of salad that you are not going to eat all in one go. Of course you may have to refrigerate the left-overs, or you can do as I sometimes do, and turn left-over salad into summer soup!
I am quite flexible when it comes to adapting and changing recipes and embrace new flavours. There are lots of different toppings you can add to a pizza, some of them more successful and tasty than others of course. However, a dish that has a name that means something should, I feel, stick more ridgidly to the original recipe. For instance, I have a huge problem with the way that Caesar salad is presented in restaurants, but I’ll leave that for another time… (mainly because I don’t have the equipment for making the dressing in Croatia).
Another salad that I like to keep traditional is a nicoise. I think that the basic recipe should be along the lines of: new potatoes, green beans, lettuce. boiled eggs, tomatoes, olives, canned tuna and anchovies. I am not doing a huge amount of research into this, and there may well be slight variations, but for me the above ingredients work well. The above dish of salad is lacking in green beans. Should it traditionally have onions in it?! I have no idea, but it goes without saying that I’d leave them out anyway!
Other dishes that I have made in our apartment have been blackberry spoom (a great recipe I found in the Waitrose magazine for the month of August). It is a sorbet with added beaten egg whites. I used that for making some ice-cream sundaes, by layering the sorbet with bought vanilla ice-cream (too difficult to get the ingredients for that and I could also have done with a whisk!), fresh strawberries and blackberry liquer. See the picture below:
For lunch today I made a Spanish omelette and some Italian bread soup – another great way of using stale bread. I cooked fresh tomatoes, red onion, fennel, canned tomatoes, dijon mustard, fresh basil and rosemary and some chunks of stale bread. I added some water by filling up the tomato can a few times. When cooked I bashed it about in the pan with whatever implement I could find in the drawer. I served it warm, as there was no room in the fridge to chill soup. I think that warm soup is really pleasant on a summer’s day. The trick with limited cooking facilities is not to get carried away, and only aim to cook two different dishes for a meal. I am not used to using a microwave, but I have used it for cooking apricots and plums quite successfully. I have also heated up Paul’s morning pastries in it, although not entirely successfully. I did try heating them in a frying pan, but that seemed to be a rather slow process!
See the pictures below for the soup.
