Rocket Salad, Poached Egg, Toasted Pearled Barley, Grilled Seville Orange and Bacon

So

I saw a recipe online for spinach salad, feta, toasted farro, grilled onions and calabrian chillies and I wanted it. Even with a title as long and ridiculous as that, I thought it sounded seriously edible and properly substantial even for a wet night in February. I think it was the idea of toasting the farro presumably to make it rich in flavour and to give some overall warmth to balance the slightly bitter metallic flavour of the spinach. And, you know I don't use feta enough and I am totally thoroughly in love with blackened onions, hot or cold but best of all just below warm.

But

I didn't have any farro, and the lovely posh Italian shop at Mercato Metropolitano only had it as a mix for soup. Didn't have feta either or, for that matter, any spinach. The salad bowl was looking potentially bleak.

However

I did have some pearled barley, and half a bag of wild rocket that needed using, eggs because I always have eggs and an airtight tub of toasted pumpkin seeds. Plus there were a couple of pointy peppers that might add a sweet note and a fab flash of colour. To counterbalance the peppers I decided to grill slices of seville orange for a bitter caramel note. And I  thought of bacon - because everything tastes better with bacon.

And

Of course I had no onions but the shop round the corner had bright bunches of spring onions. It was far too cold/dark/bleak/generallyFebruary to cook outside so I dragged the ridged cast iron pan from the bottom of the drawer and thereby set about making an entirely different dinner.

Barley, Rocket and Grilled Orange Salad

Serves 2 for dinner with enough over for lunches next day

250g pearled barley
1 bay leaf
2 pointy red peppers
1 Seville orange
6 spring onions
3 rashers of bacon
A couple of generous handfuls of rocket
A tablespoon of toasted pumpkin seeds
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
2 eggs

Spread the barley out across a flat oven tray and toast in the oven at 180C/350F/Gas 4 for about ten minutes till the grain colours lightly and smells a bit toasty. I have to say I'm not convinced it had any noticeable contribution to the flavour of the barley so feel free to skip this step if it seems like a faff.

Tip the (toasted or not) barley into a saucepan, add water to cover by a couple of inches, drop in the bayleaf and cook over a medium heat until it comes to the boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook the barely until fairly tender but still with a bit of resistance. This will take about 30 minutes - add a generous teaspoon of salt halfway through. Drain and set aside.

While the barley cooks, roast the peppers whole in the oven at 200C/400F/Gas 5 for 20 minutes or so, turning occasionally, until the skins are blackened and blistered. Put them into a small bowl and cover tightly with clingfilm. The steam will loosen the skins further making them easy to peel. When they are cool enough to handle, strip the skin away and discard it along with the seeds. Cut the flesh into finger sized strips and tip into a large salad bowl.

Heat the grill pan over a high flame. Cut slices across the orange, about the thickness of a thick pound coin, including the skin saving as much of the juice as you can in a small bowl. Discard the many seeds. Brush each slice with olive oil and lay them out in the hot pan to sear, turning them after a couple of minutes to caramelise the other side. Put the cooked slices into the salad bowl till they're cool enough to handle, then cut them into 1 centimetre squares and return to the bowl with the peppers.

Cut the base and scraggy tops off the spring onions and cut each one in half from top to bottom, brush the cut sides with olive oil and put them into the hot pan. Griddle till they start to blacken, turn

them over and cook the other side. Drop them into the bowl with  the peppers and orange.

Next cook the bacon rashers in the hot griddle pan till they crisp as much as you like. Leave them to cool in the salad bowl, then cut into 1 centimetre strips and return to the bowl.

Add the cooked, drained barley and the rocket to the salad bowl. Whisk the olive oil and sherry vinegar into the orange juice you saved earlier (you did remember that, didn't you 😌) and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Toss the salad with the dressing - taste and adjust the

seasoning if necessary.

Poach the eggs till the whites are just set and the yolk remains runny. Serve the salad into 2 bowls and top each with a poached egg and a sprinkle of toasted pumpkin seeds.

Dinner is done.

If you go for leftovers for lunch next day - and I would recommend it - it's very good topped with a sliced boiled egg.

Taboon - one kind of flat bread

Have just been in Oz visiting family with the bonus of basking in a little sunshine in the midst of this bleak winter. My parents live in relaxed beachside suburbia on the coast south of Sydney close enough to the surf to hear the waves pounding sand and high enough up to whale watch from the kitchen window whenever the pods migrate. To add to the idyl they are both keen and experienced gardeners and despite (because of?) the salt air they have a beautiful collection of many hued roses at the front and a most magnificent herb garden in a raised bed at the back. As someone who can kill rosemary just by looking at it, I am seriously jealous.

My mother recently planted out half a dozen aubergine seedlings - needless to say they all grow strong and healthy and within a few weeks have set dozens of flowers and the first beautiful glossy fruit is ready. Realising she is about to have a potential glut of what she calls eggplants she requested a sharing of all interesting recipes, whatever the source. Serendipity perhaps but the weekend of my return The Guardian Joudie Kalla's Cook Residency was the story of  rummaniyeh,* a Palestinian dish for aubergine and pomegranate. It earned me double brownie points when I passed it on, having convinced my mother to buy some pomegranate molasses without offering a lot of ideas to use it.

I loved the idea of silky peeled cubes of aubergine melting into the lentil stew, spiked with the visual beauty and sour surprise of pomegranate. The dish tasted as good as it read. I was intrigued to try taboon, too, as the ubiquity of flat breads in the Middle East convinced me they would bring something to the overall dish. I searched about for a recipe and came up with this. I will be honest - I was absolutely seduced by the idea of making my own teeny tiny taboon - the stone ovens traditionally used to cook this bread - I have a garden covered in pebbles.

Taboon - a Palestinian flat bread

1 teaspoon sugar
150ml warm water
15g dried active yeast
250g strong plain white flour
75g strong plain wholemeal wheat flour
Big pinch salt

Dissolve the sugar in the warm water then add the yeast, stir briefly and leave for about five minutes till it starts to foam.

Mix the flours and salt in a large bowl, make a well in the centre and add the yeast liquid. Stir to bring it together, adding a little more warm water if needed to make a pliable dough. Knead the dough on a lightly floured bench for about ten minutes till it is smooth and elastic.

Put the dough into a lightly oiled bowl, cover with a clean cloth and leave somewhere warm for about an hour till the dough has doubled in size. Punch it down, split the dough into four and knead each piece for another minute.

If you want to go the taboon route, heat your oven to its hottest setting. Cover a flat baking tray with pebbles - I washed mine in boiling water first to rid them of their 'gardenness' - and put them into the oven while it heats.

Just with your fingers pull each ball of dough out into a vague approximation of a circle, fairly thin but not too much, you want to end up with nice chewy bread rather than pita style puffs. Put 2 circles of dough straight onto the tray of stones and return to the very hot oven. 

They will cook in a couple of minutes, puffing slightly, picking up a bit of colour. Take the cooked breads out and add the next two. Repeat the process. 

Voila! Done.

The bread was great - the little bit of wholemeal flour added a lovely texture and chewiness. We ate a couple with dinner with the rest in the freezer. They will be perfect with big bowls of soup in the not too distant future.

* A note about the lentil and aubergine recipe - the quantities for the pomegranate molasses are seriously out - there's far too much. I added less than half the 150ml and it made the lentils decidedly sour. A quick google reveals that the 150ml should be pomegranate juice or substitute 2 tablespoons of molasses and the juice of 2 lemons, which I think will make a much better dish.

Salmon and Fennel Salade Composé

Only just March but a blog about salad? Seriously not madness.

I've been away for a few weeks, in part to celebrate my delightful nieces' 21st birthday in Australia, and have loved the sunshine and abundance of light in the other hemisphere. February days of 28 degrees and blue skies is the definition of bliss after a January of 10 degrees and drizzle. The man was busy busy at work and unable to join me, so I left the freezer full of lovely things in handy tubs and flew out late one Saturday night. I came back this week to a much depleted freezer and a man offering salad as the number one suggestion for what he'd most like to eat. So happy to oblige.

In every cafe and every brasserie in every village and every town in France the menu includes a  -usually a list of - salade composé. Best known is probably salade nicoise, the lovely laying out of crisp lettuce leaves to be topped with a spoonful of tuna in the centre surrounded by tomato slices, a tangle of limpid green beans, delicate slices of hard boiled egg and a scattering of salty black olives, all of it generously drizzled with vinaigrette. Add a chunk of crusty bread and you have a really fine meal, a fabulous array of colours, flavours and textures that are a thing of beauty. The sum greater than its individual parts - a really satisfying dinner any time of year, simple, healthy and filling (but not fattening). I am a fan.

There are many variations of this lovely dish, to some extent limited only by imagination and available ingredients. The defining characteristic is that the salad is composed - assembled from a variety of mini salads for the diners delectation rather than all tossed together making every bite uniform. With salade composé every bite is different as the various tasty elements come together in each mouthful making it a joy to eat. Try bitter chicory with sharp and creamy blue cheese and sweet slices of pear or oak leaf topped with beetroot and rare slices of pigeon breast and a scattering of toasted walnuts. One of my French café favourites is salade chèvre chaud - light greens topped with oozing warm goat's cheese, raisins and a light honey dressing. Add a hunk of crusty bread to achieve perfection.

My salad of choice this week was ready in ten minutes. After minimal peeling and chopping, no cooking at all and just the one tin to open, I presented a delightful assembly of baby gem topped with crisp fennel, cucumber and mixed sprouts, a burst of colour from crunchy slices of red pepper finished with a generous portion of tinned salmon and a drizzle of classic vinaigrette - seasoned olive oil and lemon juice mixed 3:1. Don't forget the bread!

Fish Fingers

Press play for a quick demo

I have loved fish fingers ever since I was a kid, my mum always had a packet or five in the freezer for a quick and easy tea - fish fingers, mountain of mash and lots of peas (also from the freezer). Squish the lot onto a fork for a seriously great mouthful. Sometimes mum would add lemon juice to the mash - a great trick for accompaniments to fishy dishes - but that was pretty much the only fussing about that happened. Then about the time I was around ten or eleven there was a few weeks until we moved from the way out west town of Bourke back to the balmy seaside of Wollongong and so there was a mission to empty the freezer and pantry and eat the lot before leaving. I have no recollection of anything else we ate in those few weeks but I swear we ate fish fingers daily for a month. Sometimes for lunch, more often for dinner it was fish fingers, mash and peas. Fish fingers, lemon mash and peas once or twice then back to the original. The freezer had turned into the black hole of the kitchen and it was somehow filled with one hundred times its actual volume with fish fingers and peas - and we were not leaving till every single finger and every single pea had been consumed. Somehow we made it through, boarded our flights out and left that house behind along with Cliffy our lovely galah, over which many tears were shed. My dad followed us a week later, driving the car back across the 500 miles and, softy that he can be, brought Cliffy along for company. Jubilation!

It was a very long time till I ate another fish finger, about the time I left home and had to fend for myself while a student. I soon revisited the comforting charms of fish fingers, mash and peas - great food ready in no time. It soon became apparent that fish fingers alone was even quicker, or else stuffed into a sandwich the melted butter adding extra delight, and far less washing up overall.

The last packet I bought, a few years ago, weren't great. More crumb than fish, and fish that had an awful lot of reforming inflicted upon it. I gave them up for a while then recently wanted them again. Went to Borough Friday and told Paul, who runs Sussex Fish, that I was planning to make fish fingers for dinner. Good on you madam, he said, had some a couple of weeks ago myself and it was brilliant. He picked up a lovely piece of cod fillet I'll give you that thick section there, be easy to cut that into nice fat fingers. And so it was.

Fish Fingers

400g piece of cod fillet, check there's no bones at all
2 tablespoons plain flour, seasoned with a bit of salt
1 egg, beaten
About 50g breadcrumbs, Panko work well
Oil for shallow frying

Cut the fish into 4 even pieces -these are your fingers. Dip each one first into the flour, coat it well and shake off any excess. Next dip the finger into the beaten egg and coat well. Finally dredge the fish through the breadcrumbs so that it's covered on all sides. Put each completed fish finger onto a clean plate, and when they're all done cover with cling film and refrigerate for 20 minutes or so.

Heat the oil in a heavy based pan over a medium flame, when it's hot add the fish fingers and fry for a few minutes till the underside is golden. Flip them over carefully and fry the other side till they are crisp all over.

You can serve with mash and peas but, making the most of it being summer I tossed a green salad  and added a spritz of fresh lemon. Big hunk of bread in case sandwiches were needed...

Even better than I remember!