Weekend Catch up– 5-6/07/2016

We apologise for the lack of pictures in this one, they may appear in some updates.

Technical difficulties.

I welcomed Dan home with a delicious salad.  A delicious salad using an allotment ingredient!

It was actually supposed to use two allotment ingredients, but the lamb’s lettuce died an early death.  That, sadly, is the way of home grown.

It was a Grape, Parma Ham, Blue Cheese and Walnut Salad.

We combined a bag of lamb’s lettuce and a bunch of baby chard (home grown #smugmode), with 12 torn slices of Parma ham, a good couple handfuls of halved black grapes, 100g of Dolcelatte (although other mild blues would work) and a small handful of walnuts.

We then dressed it with a reduced grape juice, balsamic, walnut oil and wholegrain mustard vinaigrette.

For those that care; it was about 100ml of red grape juice reduced by half, a tbsp. of balsamic, 4 tbsp. of walnut oil and a tsp of mustard.

The idea was that the sweetness of the lambs lettuce, grapes and walnuts would contrast nicely with the saltiness of the blue cheese and  Parma ham.  Which it did.

Flavour wise it was brilliant.

What we hadn’t counted on was the Dolcelatte having its own personal gravitational field that caused it to either clump together like the formation of a small cheese based star, or wrap it’s self in layers of Parma ham.

Either way, even distribution of cheese was not achieved.

Friday evening we were joined Mama Lowe and the Bratling for some Spa based madness the following day.  But clearly we had to feed them first.

We went for a dinner of Sesame Sweet and Sour Aubergine  followed by Strawberry and Mascarpone Ice Cream.  Both continue to be marvellous and our guests were pleasantly surprised by the texture from the aubergine.

While we were at the spa Dan did some sterling cooking work and we had Beef Croquettes for dinner.

They worked just as well the second (or third) time, but we were slightly put out by the expression on our guests faces when we said we were serving them with a slaw.

Fortunately it just turned out they had a very narrow concept of slaw.

We need to remember that in Britain slaw is generally that horrible white and orange soggy stuff, bought from the supermarket.  It is an abomination.

Bizarrely the Americans do slaw so much better than us. That’s right.  We are being beaten by the US on vegetables!

They do delicious crunchy slaws, many of which don’t even contain mayonnaise, many are merely dressed with vinaigrette.

Even the traditional carrot, cabbage and mayo coleslaw is a totally different beast if made fresh and with decent mayonnaise.

We think we may have marginally re-educated them, although we think we might have made a bigger impact on the Bratling than Mama Lowe.

Finally we finish with a Lemon Meringue Ice Cream.  It was …interesting.

It’s a weird egg free little recipe that uses whole blended lemons.  This leant it a distinctly marmalade-like flavour.  It was almost too much.

It was marginally redeemed by the suggested accompaniments of a Crisp almond Crumble (a sort of almond based crunchy shortbread) and crumbled meringue.

Still.  We think it’s more likely we’ll sit in front of the TV easting the toppings that the icecream.

Not our best work.