Spring bean salad

This is one of my favourite salads. I make it, or a version of it, on a regular basis as a side with fish or chicken dishes or as part of an Ottolenghi-style spread that I like to do for BBQs and big dinner parties. 

Since I started working at Natoora I have played around with the ingredients a bit. I used to always make it with green beans and mange tout, which are great and easy to source. However, Natoora focuses on seasonal ingredients so I have swapped out the mange tout for white and green piattoni (Italian runner beans). They are sweet and tender and they look gorgeous.

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Silvena Rowe's Smoked Aubergine Salad with Hibiscus Salt

I first tried this recipe when holidaying in Spain. Our very dear family friends Gayle and Gilpin have a lovely house in the arid, mountainous region of the Alicante province. I was lucky enough to be invited along to the 2012 congregation of the Lippy Witches Cauldron – an annual celebration of three of my favourite things: cooking, eating and drinking good wine.

On our first evening we were on the food and wine appreciation committee (no cooking, just consuming). Lippy witch Jools and husband Trev cooked up a range of delicious salads, exactly what I felt like after a typically unpleasant Ryan air flight and a stuffy car ride full of wrong turns and familial bickering. My favourite was this salad from Silvena Rowe’s Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume.

Trev wasn’t so sure. Rowe writes in her introduction to the recipe that “The smell of charred aubergines – nutty, smoky and caramelised – is seductive, and that’s what makes this salad what it is.” Trev lost this element because he roasted the aubergines rather than charring them on an open flame. Still, it was a huge success with all the judges and delicious enough to inspire me to make it again – this time with charred aubergines, which did take it to another level.

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Dad's best-ever chocolate brownies

  

Since I am currently experimenting with an entirely new way of cooking (see my last post, measuring up), it may take a little longer to get my own recipes into a workable state, so I thought I would start with someone else's.  

The Flour Power City Bakery, which has stalls at all the major London farmer's market and some further a field, claims that their ultra chocolate brownies are 'Absolutely the best in town!'; a claim which I seek to challenge. Notwithstanding the fact that I think my Dad's brownies are the best-ever, I think many a brownie I have tried has beaten them by a mile. What the Flour Power brownie is lacking is that essential rich, chewy, fudgy quality which makes a brownie a brownie and distinguishes it from a slice of chocolate cake. And the secret? A sticky tar-like concoction made from butter, brown sugar and lots of it! 

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