Friday, June 09, 2006
Salad Weather
The past few days the weather has been glorious again. Lofty and I are ecstatic about this sudden burst of summer, we soooo missed the sun. And what's
more, we really miss South Africa. In many ways Dublin reminds me of it. I can't really explain how and why, because the two places are quite different. It's not really any one thing, it's occasional impressions, brief instances that bring back memories. The look of a building, the smell of a restaurant or take-out, the atmosphere of a street... The Ilac Centre looks very much like some of the shopping centres in Cape Town and Jo'burg, a small fast food joint I frequently cycle past on the way to work smells very much like a place I stopped into when we were staying with our friends in Fish Hoek, and now, finally, the sun is shining on Dublin like it is on the Cape.So Lofty and I are finally back to eating summer foods like we did in Cape Town:
A lot of salad, cold fish dishes, sandwiches or some other form of bread with cold accompaniments. Yesterday afternoon I finally got my computer fixed - after a total of 10 hours of scanning, uninstalling, reinstalling, resetting, undoing and recreating, so that evening I took the lazy option and made salad with smoked mackerel. Lots of Jenny's vegetables, some fresh sweetcorn (the first of the season) and huge chunks of smoked fish. It was great to have something fresh and crunchy again for a change.I kept the general theme up today, but we still had a packet of Marks & Spencer crumpets laying about that really needed to go. So I dug up the goose rillettes that had been sitting in the back of the fridge for weeks waiting for a good occasion to be eaten, sliced some cheese and served the crumpets alongside a warm salad of spinach, potatoes, baby tomatoes and mushrooms.
8 to 10 baby potatoes
2 tsp butter
½ onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 handful of mushrooms, sliced (I used only button mushrooms for a change, but if you have wild ones, all the better)
8 to 10 cherry tomatoes
100g young spinach, washed
olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper to taste
Boil the potatoes in a small saucepan with just enough water to cover, and cook until tender, about 15 minutes. Drain and set aside to cool slightly.
In the meantime melt the butter in a large frying pan over medium low heat. Gently fry the onions until translucent, about 5 to 8 minutes. Add the garlic and fry for another minute. Do not brown. Now increase the heat and add the mushrooms. Fry until they have released most of their liquid. Remove the pan from the heat.
Cut the bigger potatoes in half, and add them to the mushrooms. Toss the mixture with the tomatoes and spinach, until it is starting to wilt. Dress with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper - in that order; the oil wants to go on after the vinegar in order to prevent it from sticking to the salad and causing the vinegar to roll off and puddle at the bottom of the plate. Alternatively, premix the dressing and pour it all on at once.
Christine at 10:29 pm
